The Butterfly Lightning Music Reviews ...

Ira Sullivan Meets Marian McPartland

While the Butterfly Lightning readings went on in another part of our fair city, a bunch of us lucky contributors to WLRN were at Gusman Concert Hall at the UM watching and listening spellbound as Marian McPartland taped a show with local jazz legend Ira Sullivan. You'll get to hear it sometime in April. Till then, you'll have to be content with this little overview.

Marian may be starting to walk a little like an elderly person (she's said to be eighty or even eighty-something) but she sure doesn't play like one. We also found that she has the ability to communicate with facial expressions and the smallest gestures to a whole room full of people so they become willing slaves. More than once she exhibited that astonishing musical memory of hers, as when Ira mentioned an obscure song starting with the letter Z and she immediately played the first two bars and attributed it to Noel Coward. Sheesh!

I've been following Ira, who's only seventy-something, for many years now, and he just keeps on getting better. He was wearing (you won't see this on the radio) baggy white pants, a saggy blue nylon jacket, and a flat cap, looking every bit the old bebop hipster -- especially when he leaned back, pushed his hips forward, shut his eyes and blew the horn. Which horn, you may ask? As usual, he traded off between several of them -- both tenor and soprano saxes, and muted trumpet. That leaves only the flute and flugelhorn that we didn't get to hear him play. (I've seen him sit down at the piano and drums, too, but he doesn't claim them as his own.)

As you probably know, Piano Jazz is part interview, and here Ira showed off his gift with words. Apropos of "Blue Dolphin Street," for example, he reminded us how important it is to have a porpoise in life. He described the generation that grew up with "bebop poison," the belief that things would never be better than in that era when they were in their twenties. He also unearthed the old gag where someone asks the rehearsing musicians, "Do you know there's a lady trying to sleep upstairs?" To which they reply, "No, but if you sing a few bars, we can fake it."

But my favorite bit verged on poetry. He was talking about learning tunes -- how many there are, and the way he tells students to learn one a day so that even with weekends off they pick up a couple of hundred per year. He mentioned the "golden one hundred," a collection of standards written as long ago as the 1920's, which have been played and recorded by virtually every jazz artist to come along since. Waxing lyrical, he spread his hands and said that by this point in his life they were all becoming the same, "the one big song that God gave us, and if you're lucky you get to where you can put it all together."

And on that note ...

- Steve Donachie,
December, 2000