Another beginner’s revelation.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published two articles about Marian McPartland. She hosts a radio show on NPR called “Piano Jazz”, which itself has been running for thirty years, where she interviews and plays with most (if not all) of the greatest jazz musicians of our time. She turns 90 years old tomorrow, March 20, and there’s going to be a big tribute concert or something in New York City. She was married to a famous jazz musician and has been playing jazz professionally for more than 60 years. Many of the best episodes of her “Piano Jazz” programs have been turned into CD’s. (I noticed for example the Bill Evans episode is #4,300 or so on amazon.com today, no doubt due to The Wall Street Journal articles and the buying power of its readers. I think I’ll wait until some of those readers sell theirs before I buy it.) And if you, like me, are truly new to jazz and you’ve never heard of her, you too will be surprised to learn how prolific she was. Something tells me the CD’s of her radio show are really worth pursuing. A sampling of interviewees: Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Oscar Peterson, Bruce Hornsby, Keith Jarrett, Teddy Wilson, Ray Charles. (Not all are available on CD. Recent episodes can be listened to, and maybe even downloaded (I’m not sure), at )

When I was traveling recently, my rent-a-car had satellite radio, and I was tuned into a jazz channel, and as I faced a longish ride to the airport, I was perturbed when there was, not music, but some guy interviewing another guy, a drummer no less, of whom I knew very little. I don’t know who the interviewer was, but the interviewee was Max Roach. For lack of attractive alternatives, I listened to the interview. I found it completely fascinating. I was sort of shocked by how much I enjoyed the program. One thing I took away from that program was that drummers, or as Max said, “good” drummers, don’t tune their set to a song – they know how to hit the drum so that it sounds in key. I thought that was pretty interesting, and it certainly was something I’d never thought about. It made me understand that jazz musicians achieve the sound or effect they want through various different ways, and I’d never considered that before. It made me think about my music, about achieving a certain sound, or certain effect, or certain feeling (call it) by ways other than just hitting notes (like playing ahead of the beat, or behind the beat, or softening some phrases and accenting others, or any number of things). There were other, less noteworthy points I took away from the interview; please don’t think I was enamored of the jazz interview just because of that one nugget. If nothing else, I learned who Max Roach is and that he is famous.

The point is: interviews of jazz musicians are a valuable resource to learning jazz, so I believe that an octogenarian or nonagenarian who’s been playing jazz for sixty years conducting an interview of a famous, respected jazz musician probably has a “plus alpha” factor to its value for a beginning jazz musician like myself. And, to find out that there really is a 90-year old woman, still performing, still doing a radio show after 30 years, still considered by many to be a living legacy of 20th century jazz piano virtuosity, who meets with, performs with, interviews, and is esteemed by, virtually every major jazz musician of the last 50 years, and I had never even heard of her… well…

I still have a long way to go.