Keeping in Touch With Their Roots
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The old-time New Orleans clarinetist Percy Humphrey, who was active in the Crescent City music scene from the 1910s until his death in 1990, once told me, “It seemed like all the people who loved our music were either Jewish or Italian.”
Indeed, though jazz evolved out of African-American traditions, Italians and Jews have been there from the start. The first jazz group to make a record, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was led by an Italian-American cornet player, Nick Larocca. Meanwhile, a young Louis Armstrong was so touched by the support of the Karnovskys, a family of New Orleans Jewish merchants, that he wore a star of David for most of his life. And during the big band era, after jazz had migrated to Chicago and then New York, there were entire orchestras consisting of paisanos and landsmen.
The ethnic origins of white jazzmen today are certainly more diverse than in Humphrey’s heyday, but recent CDs by the tenor saxophonists Paul Shapiro and Jerry Vivino show that Jewish- and Italian-Americans continue to play important roles in the contemporary jazz scene.
Mr. Shapiro is heavily influenced by John Zorn, the factotum of the downtown Jewish jazz scene. “It’s in the Twilight” is his second album on Tzadik, the label Mr. Zorn formed to support performers and composers creating what he calls “radical Jewish culture.”
Mr. Shapiro’s new project uses the same sextet format he used on his previous Tzadik album, “Midnight Minyan”: two saxophones, Mr. Shapiro and Peter Apfelbaum (another prominent downtown tenor); Steven Bernstein on both slide trumpet and the standard valve instrument; plus a rhythm section of drummer Tony Lewis, bassist Booker King, and pianist Brian Mitchell. But where “Minyan” was mostly adapted from the liturgical music heard at services on Saturday morning, “Twilight” is made up mostly of original compositions that convey the luxuriously restful moods that define the start of the Sabbath on Friday night. For instance, Mr. Shapiro has come up with a jazz setting of the Kiddush, the prayer associated with the drinking of wine.
Mr. Shapiro’s compositions and his playing are gloriously sensual, making use of minor keys that sound more erotic than melancholy. “Children of Abraham,” which Mr. Shapiro has intended to illustrate what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have in common, opens with a long sustained note and uses an insistent drum pattern, both of which are reminiscent of “Caravan,” Duke Ellington’s most famous trip to the Middle East.
“Lecha Dodi Twilight” is a funky line with the backbeat of a New Orleans brass band, climaxing in a twotenor tango and ending in a band chant of the title, in English, “It’s in the Twilight,” in a way that seems to refer to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” The album’s most ecstatic piece, which Mr. Shapiro wrote for his Jewish blues band Ribs and Brisket Revue, is “Oy Veys Mir,” a jumping slice of 1930s-style small-group swing along the lines of “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Flying Home.” The only really sad song here is “One Must Leave So Another May Come,” a Jewish-sounding equivalent of the theme song from “The Godfather.”
Mr. Vivino might be the young Italian saxophonist best equipped to do for his ethnic tradition what Mr. Shapiro has done for his. Whereas Mr. Shapiro takes inspiration from the Jewish jazz tradition passed down through Mr. Zorn, Mr. Vivino nods toward great Italian-American jazzmen of the past and present, including Louis Prima, Sam Butera, and Joe Lovano.
Born in New Orleans, Prima was the first Italian-American jazz superstar and the first player to blend jazz with the tarantella, a traditional Neapolitan dance form. The tenor saxophonist in Prima’s celebrated big band, Sam Butera, epitomized the bravura, operatic sound adopted by most of the best postwar Italian-American tenors – among them Vido Musso, Charlie Ventura, and Flip Phillips – and largely inherited from Coleman Hawkins. (On a side note, it would appear that Jewish tenor stars, most famously Stan Getz and Al Cohn, preferred the more intimate, soul-searching style pioneered by Lester Young.)
Mr. Vivino regularly appears with one of Prima’s most famous partners, the singer Keely Smith, who has obviously chosen him because he has the big, bearlike sound and the warmth, humor, and swing it takes to fill Mr. Butera’s shoes in her act. And like Mr. Lovano, who has recorded two landmark albums honoring the greatest Italian-American musical icons (“Viva Caruso” and “Celebrating Sinatra”), Mr.Vivino finds ongoing inspiration both in Italian musical traditions and in the playing of Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, his most important disciple.
Mr. Vivino’s new album, “Walkin’ With the Wazmo” (Zoho), contains standout songs that display his potential, notably the opening track, a joyous treatment of Mr. Rollins’s jazz standard “Pent Up House.” Unfortunately, much of the album consists of comparatively uninteresting Latinjazz flute playing; he also sings a mediocre original ballad and often sounds like just another journeyman reed player.
There is, however, an exceptionally pretty original, “Bellisima,” a Brazilian-style bossanova with something of an Italianate feel. And the album includes a fine treatment of “Knock Me a Kiss,” a onetime hit for Louis Jordan.
The title track is a catchy novelty of the kind that Prima would have embraced, in which Mr. Vivino also sings, plays guitar, and is joined by the venerated trumpeter Lew Soloff and Brian Charrette on jazz organ. At his best, Mr.Vivino shows what he can achieve when all his stars – Butera, Prima, Rollins – are in the right places and he’s got his Wazmo workin’ for him.
