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Owen McNally writes about jazz and other music events in Connecticut's Jazz Corridor, stretching from the tip of Fairfield County, right through New Haven and Hartford, and on up beyond the state into the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Keep up with the best our area has to offer in music.

Willie Ruff Uses Cinema Skills to Intro Pianist Aaron Diehl’s Trio Set at Yale

A French horn player, Willie Ruff promotes and preserves jazz history.

Relaxing in a cozy recliner back home in Columbus, Ohio, the nonagenarian trombonist Arthur Baskerville can, through the miracle of live streaming, sit back on Friday night and watch his brilliant, young grandson, the phenomenal pianist Aaron Diehl, perform with his trio in New Haven, more than 600 miles away, at Yale’s prestigious Ellington Jazz Series.

This mix of high-tech delivery and comfortable domesticity is made possible by the ingenious Willie Ruff, the founder and director of Yale’s Ellington Fellowship program.

An eminent historian, memoirist, ethnomusicologist, linguist, double bassist, and French horn player, Ruff loves to promote and preserve jazz history through his legerdemain with the cinematic and digital material he employs in lectures and talks in Yale classrooms, museums, other college campuses, and varied venues around the country.

In the polymath professor’s latest use of technology, he has woven together a compelling, ten-minute cinematic memoir that opens the concert at 7:30 pm on Friday, March 6, serving as a highly original intro for the program entitled, “The American Jazz Century: The Tuskegee Airmen, Yardbird Parker, and the Blues.”

Featuring a series of vintage stills and clips of live footage, Ruff’s piece unwinds sequentially with illustrated highlights of his life, touching on the influence of everyone from W.C. Handy to Charlie Parker.

It leads right up to the moment when all the archival images fade to black and Diehl, in-the-flesh, and his two sidemen kick into the opening bars of their set. A virtuosic master of the jazz piano tradition, Diehl will be ready to hit at Yale’s Sprague Hall when Ruff’s jazz and history-drenched film finishes its zoom over eight decades of our cultural history.

Credit Vincent Oneppo / Willieruff.com
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Willieruff.com
Willie Ruff (right) with friend and duet member Dwike Mitchell (left).

At one key point, the film focuses on young Ruff’s life-shaping experience in his mid-teens after World War II as a member of the elite corps of musicians who served in the military band in the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black air force unit, which was stationed at Lockbourne Air Force Base, just outside of Columbus, Ohio. This was in the mid-40s when the US military was racially segregated, still saluting the Jim Crow laws that made African-Americans -- even war heroes -- third-class citizens at best.

Credit National Museum of the US Airforce / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
Members of the Tuskegee Airmen.

Despite the legal sanctions of racism at that time, everything about Lockbourne was first class, Ruff said. Especially its rich, diverse talent pool of the best and the brightest, an inspiring display of brain power that taught the ninth-grade dropout about the value of learning all you can about everything.

Among Ruff’s fellow band members and close friends at Lockbourne were Dwike Mitchell (years later his co-partner pianist in the famous, globetrotting Mitchell/Ruff Duo); drummer Elvin Jones, and a then fiercely playing young trombonist and pianist named Arthur Baskerville, the future grandfather and earliest mentor for pianist Aaron Diehl, the acclaimed headliner for Friday night’s concert.

Credit John Abbott / Aarondiehl.com
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Aarondiehl.com
Aaron Diehl.

“My friend from army days, Arthur Baskerville, has for years kept me posted through emails on the progress of his brilliant, piano playing grandson, Aaron Diehl,” Ruff said of his old Army buddy.

With Baskerville’s long-running electronic updates on his wunderkind grandson’s progress and the fact that the 30-year-old pianist is today already a grandmaster of the jazz keyboard tradition, it’s little surprise that Ruff, who has literally brought a legion of jazz giants to the Yale campus, is presenting the rapidly emerging, red-hot pianist to play in the Ellington series.

What’s different about this concert, however, is that Ruff, a pioneer in using rare archival film and his own invaluable oral history interviews in his classes at Yale, goes high-tech here with his intro to the concert and, in an extra heartfelt tech touch, streams the concert directly to his Army comrade and Diehl’s loving mentor and proud grandfather.

Smoothly edited, Ruff’s anecdote-packed, mini tour de force focuses from time to time on a massive photograph of all the personnel at Lockbourne, a central reference point throughout the piece.

Credit YouTube
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YouTube
Aaron Diehl brings a colorful musical lineage to his contemporary sound.

“This is one of the most crowded photographs you’ve ever seen. There are more than a thousand people there, and everybody there is black, from the colonel to the cook,” Ruff said of this extraordinary gathering of talent gathered on this remarkable, all black air base.

“Out of 1,000 people, there were more than 100 musicians in the Tuskegee Airmen’s band, which was outstanding. The musicians were all black specialists in the Air Force, serving right along with the pilots, navigators, doctors, lawyers and engineers. Ph.D.s were as common as a head cold,” he said of this dazzling world of mind and spirit that this ninth-grade dropout found himself in while only in his mid-teens.

Using his editing skills as he mixes sound and image, Ruff recounts in the film how this incredible learning experience in this highly charged, intellectually stimulating atmosphere at Lockbourne inspired him to go to Yale after his hitch was over, and later to succeed as a musician, scholar, educator, and award-winning author.

Ruff uses the mass photograph of the Lockbourne personnel as a source of close-ups of himself, Mitchell, Jones, and Baskerville. These youthful tight shots from back then morph into future incarnations with, for example, the Elvin Jones of Lockbourne days transforming into dramatic footage of the drumming great years later performing with John Coltrane.

Near the film’s finale, Baskerville’s youthful image emerges from the Lockbourne crowd, melding into footage of his grandson Aaron Diehl wailing away on a bravura performance of Fats Waller’s “Viper’s Drag.” Diehl’s image, in turn, dissolves, leading right up to the real Diehl himself ensconced at the piano on the Sprague stage, ready to swing at that moment in real time, in any groove -- stride, blues, Tatumesque torrents or modern jazz, whatever best suits the young musical maven.

Meanwhile, Diehl’s grandfather gets to view the whole performance in New Haven from the comfort of his home in Columbus, not far from his old stomping grounds at the air field that inspired Ruff, a poor boy from Alabama with absolutely no education and even fewer prospects, to become an Ivy League renaissance man.

The program features Ruff as narrator; Diehl, piano; Paul Sikivie, bass, and Lawrence Leathers, drums. Also featured: violinist Michael Jamanis and poet-performer Amanda Kemp presenting The Chaconne Emancipated, Jamanis' dramatic setting of Bach's Chaconne to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Tickets: $12.00, general admission; $6.00, students. Information: (203) 432-4158.

Krall Blooms on Wallflower

An ultra-hip jazz singer, a genuinely swinging pianist, and smart, literate entertainer with movie star looks and a savvy, totally at ease stage presence, Diana Krall is, obviously, anything but a wallflower. But Wallflower is the name of her new CD on Verve Records, and the Diana Krall Wallflower World Tour is the title of her ambitious album promo tour that swoops down at 8:00 pm on Friday, March 6, at Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford.

Credit Diana Krall
Krall continues to defy critics but enliven her music with her non-traditional vocal choices.

Another strong sign that Krall, a five-time Grammy Award winner and a jazz singer who has sold millions of recordings, is the absolute antithesis of a wilting wallflower is her steel magnolia-like determination not to be intimidated by politically correct jazz critics. If only, the nattering Greek chorus of critics perpetually warns and laments, Krall, a reigning jazz vocal goddess, would stick to making pure jazz recordings, donning only vestal virgin musical material unpolluted by pop elements and untainted by songs outside the canon of the Great American Songbook.

Wallflower, with its all pop repertoire, is a classic case in point of Krall asserting her inalienable right to make her own artistic choices rather than tailoring her style to fit the fashion that omniscient critics deem to be the proper mode for her to adhere to.

Much to the chagrin of some reviewers, Krall has made an unabashedly pop recording in league with the famous mega-hit maker David Foster. A 16-time Grammy winning producer, Foster is renowned for his Midas touch, as on Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” and Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” among many other Billboard blockbusters he has helped foster.

Krall handpicked the tunes for Wallflower based on a variety of personal associations with each song. Some fond connections can be traced back to her childhood days in Nanaimo, British Columbia, when she loved listening to pop songs on vinyl and on the radio.

Back then, being a normal kid, Krall’s musical life was not totally devoted to listening to only Oscar Peterson, Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and the wealth of classics in her beloved father’s well-stocked jazz record collection. Pop music, a universal force, also had its irresistible pull on her during her formative tween and teen years.

One of her favorites from back then, which re-blooms on Wallflower, is, for example, the Eagles’ “Desperado.” It’s brought affectionately into the album’s fold because of Krall’s love back then for Linda Ronstadt’s indelible, moving rendition of the song.

Krall’s selection of the title tune, a minor Bob Dylan number, also comes wrapped in sweet memory. It first seized her imagination, she has said, while she was driving around in the car with her twin sons on an idyllic summer’s day in British Columbia, listening to Dylan sing the song. It just struck her as having a beautiful and universal message.

So, in a most unlike wallflower manner, she went all pop on this disc, defying the collective wisdom of her critics. To paraphrase Liberace, Krall can laugh (or cry) all the way to the bank. Tickets for Krall’s Wallflower World Tour performance are $65.00 to $95.00. Information: (203) 265-1501.

Kat’s Technicolor World

Riding a wave of rave reviews and laudatory comparisons to Billie Holiday, the young, rapidly rising singer/songwriter Kat Edmonson displays her cherubic yet worldly wise voice as she performs at 8:00 pm on Saturday, March 7, at The Ridgefield Playhouse, in Ridgefield.

With her unique sound, the 31-year-old, self-taught stylist can make even the most retro songs sound in the moment as she dips into her new, acclaimed album, The Big Picture on Sony Music Masterworks.

A Texas native who grew up in Houston and started her career by singing in local clubs and coffeehouses in Austin, Edmonson taught herself how to sing as a child by immersing herself in her mother’s extensive record collection, and by watching and imitating musical performers on TV and DVDs.

Classic Hollywood, Technicolor musicals, in particular, opened a whole new world of the imagination for the music-hungry Kat who lapped up Tinsel Town soundtracks like mother’s milk. Instead of the sort of rock superheroes that her peers revered, her childhood idols were venerable Technicolor titans like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Bing Crosby. By nine, she was writing original pieces, mini-hosannas to Hollywood musical magic.

Think of a blend of Blossom Dearie and Madeleine Peyroux and you get some hint of Edmonson’s seductive sound that has made jazz critics ecstatic. It can ring with the deceptively childlike aura of Dearie, or transform into a world-weary spirit as rueful sounding as Peyroux.

Exuding sweetness and light in its happy middle-range, her voice can morph into wispy, even raspy phrasing in its higher register, reminiscent of Lady Day’s late, melancholic Verve sessions. At times, Edmonson, who likes to play against expectations, adds a downhome country flavor to spice up her saucy vocal mix, a soulful taste perhaps emanating from deep in the heart of Texas.

Edmonson’s special guest for the Playhouse show is Milton, a single-named, New York-based singer/songwriter/bandleader and musician who was formerly known as Marc Rosenthal. Tickets: $25.00. Information: ridgefieldplayhouse.org and (203) 438-5795.

DeChamplain’s Grand Explorations

Credit Matt DeChamplain
Matt Dechamplain is a worthy addition to the beloved Baby Grand Series at the Hartford Public Library.

Baby Grand Jazz, the Hartford Public Library’s popular, admission-free Sunday jazz matinee series, likes to book top-shelf Connecticut-based talent along with tapping into the pool of regional instrumentalists and vocalists.

In line with that tradition, Baby Grand Jazz features the esteemed, Connecticut-based pianistMatt DeChamplain performing on the series’ iconic baby grand at 3:00 pm on Sunday, March 8, collaborating with the noted trombonist Steve Davis and bassist Adam Cote. The pianist will also be joined by his wife and frequent collaborator, vocalist Atla DeChamplain, a jazz duo that has built up its own fan base with its quality performances throughout the area. Information:hplct.org and (860) 695-6300.

Israeli Bass Maestro at the Buttonwood

Israeli-born double bass sensationEhud Ettun leads his trio in a celebration of its recent CD, Raw Gestures, at 8:00 pm on Friday, March 6, at the Buttonwood Tree, Middletown. Ettun’s attuned trio mates are pianist Daniel Schwarzwald and drummer NathanBlankett, both born and raised in Jerusalem.

Raw Gestures was rated number one in the jazz category on the iTunes chart in Israel, a cause for celebration for the trio on its promo tour covering New York, New England, Canada, and Europe. Admission: $10.00. Information: (860) 347-4957.

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.

Owen McNally writes the weekly Jazz Corridor column for WNPR.org as well as periodic freelance pieces for The Hartford Courant and other publications.

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