Suga' In My Bowl's memorial broadcast for pianist Connie Crothers is now archived online. Sadly, Connie left us August 13. She graces the cover of my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz.
The broadcast incorporates a recording of the interview I did with Connie back in April 2013 for my book, as well as remembrances from her fellow musicians, including trumpeter Lewis 'Flip' Barnes, drummer Warren Smith, and dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker.
Suga' In My Bowl host Joyce Jones did an amazing job putting this show together in a very short amount of time. I'm pleased to have contributed in some way to Connie's memory.
This Sunday, 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET, tune in to Suga' in My Bowl on WBAI 99.5 FM for a memorial tribute to pianist Connie Crothers. You can listen to the show online at wbai.org. Crothers passed away last Saturday after a brave battle with cancer. The broadcast will include a recording of my interview with Crothers which appears in my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. Trying to capture the "voice" of an interviewee in print is very challenging. Needless to say, hearing Connie's actual voice and her descriptions of her first attempt at improvising, her studies with Lennie Tristano, and the pervasive sexism that existed in the jazz world before the women's movement is a special experience. I hope you can tune in. Here's a little more information about the broadcast: "Connie Crothers expressed her musical life as performer, recording artist and teacher releasing feeling–her source–through spontaneous improvisation. This edition is a memorial broadcast in honor of Connie Crothers by guest contributor Chris Becker, who provides an interview he recorded for his book released earlier this year titled Freedom of Expression: Interviews with Women in Jazz. Additional remembrances will be provided by Arts for Arts/Vision Festival organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker, percussionist/drummer Warren Smith and trumpeter Lewis "Flip" Barnes. "This program is engineered, produced, hosted and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our "On the Bandstand" segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with associate producer Hank Williams."
Pianist Connie Crothers, one of the giants of jazz, passed away
in the early hours of August 13, 2016 after a brave battle with cancer. She was 75. As one of jazz music's great virtuosos, Crothers was a bridge between strains
of seemingly disparate musical camps, especially so-called standard-tunes players and free
improvisers. Like her mentor pianist Lennie Tristano, her approach to free (or “spontaneous”)
improvisation was founded in a deep knowledge of and appreciation for the earliest practitioners of
jazz (e.g. Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday). But while she saw herself as part of a lineage, she considered
jazz to be an evolving art form, and believed the music was in fact “heading into
something incredible.”
It is Crothers who graces the front cover of my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women
In Jazz. (She is one of 37 musicians interviewed.) This powerful image of Crothers at the piano, all ten fingers on the
keys, her head tilted back, perfectly captures the feeling of transcendence that comes from
playing music, as well as the sacrifices necessary to achieve such a state of
grace. Not surprisingly, the image has resonated with many women, as it conveys the
struggles and triumphs uniquely experienced by women in jazz.
Photo of Connie Crothers by Peter Gannushkin
The cover’s gold, rose, and turquoise colors were inspired
by the stained glass windows of artist Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire de
Vence. For many of us, music is our religion; dogma doesn’t work when your
craft requires you to be open and receptive to influences and inspiration from
the past and the present, and to play in response to what’s in your heart, not in your head. That's a pretty good description of the kind of
spontaneous and freely improvised music Crothers played so masterfully, both as
a soloist, and in collaboration with some of the great improvisers of our
time.
Crothers began studying classical (or “European”) piano at
age 9 and went on to major in composition at the University of California at
Berkeley. At Berkeley, her teachers emphasized “procedure and structure” and
“compositional rigor” over emotional expression, which didn’t sit well with
Crothers. She began listening to jazz, and upon hearing Tristano's recording “Requiem,” had a shamanistic vision that inspired her to leave school and travel to New
York to study and master a completely different musical language:
“ . . . during the length of the track ["Requiem"], I had an amazing
experience where I saw my future. . . . I knew nothing about New York City; I
knew nothing about improvising or about jazz, but I knew that that’s what was
going to happen. It was almost as if it had already happened.”
Tristano, who was blind, told Crothers singing along with
records was an important key to developing an ear for improvisation. In her own
teaching, Crothers emphasized the importance of learning and internalizing a tune's melody,
not its chords, in in order to improvise more freely and creatively:
“What I try to get to instead with [my students] is have them play
the strict melody of a tune with no ornamentation whatsoever. . . . like how
they would sing it, just very simply. And then, instead of trying to think
chords, just hear the melody, and let the melodic line get released . . . I
like to say the melody has everything in it. It has the harmonic sound, so
you’re getting the harmony from your ear, rather than thinking ‘C7’.”
For those of you scratching your head and wondering how this
concept is applied practically in a performance setting, it can be helpful to
understand free improvisation does not necessarily begin with common-practice
musical building blocks, such as chord progressions, Western European song forms, or
clearly stated time signatures. Bassist William Parker, who has described
Crothers at the piano as “a queen at her throne,” describes instead an alternate
“periphery” of sounds that musicians tap into when playing free. The resulting
sounds are limited only by a musician’s imagination and technique. (And Crothers' imagination and technique were formidable!) Crothers
believed playing free is one of the most challenging things for a musician to
attempt:
“. . . if you have that understanding of music, you’re never
going to be able to fake it. You can’t. You have to tap into that deep well of
understanding every time you express your music. . . . With no parameters to
guide you, it’s on you to create music that’s beautiful and has an inner logic.
I find this extremely intriguing and really exciting — thrilling in fact!”
This is music that is the opposite of walls, borders,
paranoia, prejudice, and hate. In fact, Crothers equated freedom with truth
plus beauty plus love, with love being an ever-present and wholly accessible source for musical and spiritual inspiration.
(Henry Grimes and Connie Crothers in performance, April 26, 2016.)
When Crothers and I first spoke, she told me
how pleased she was to be asked to be included in a project that focused on and
celebrated the contributions of women to jazz. She named several pioneering
jazz women, including pianist and bandleader Lillian Hardin Armstrong,
saxophonist Vi Redd, and guitarist Mary Osborne, who each made major
contributions to the development of this music. For Crothers, New York in the years before the women’s
movement was a place where men a generation ahead of her and her peers still
thought women were inferior and not be taken seriously:
“When I first came to New York City in 1962 . . . when I
went to a club, it was like walking a gauntlet. It was just understood that if
there was a woman on the premises, the men were gonna hit on her. . . . A lot
of women in those days were kicked off of bandstands and out of the recording
dates because of the prevailing notion, which was very strong then, that men
were better, that women were not as good as men.”
I mention this to make it clear that Crothers was both an activist and a
feminist. She was also a strong advocate for independent artists. In 1982,
Crothers and drummer Max Roach co-founded the label New Artists Records when no
label expressed interested in releasing an album of their duets. New Artists Records would later become a cooperative, with each artist contributing to its
operating expenses and receiving 100 percent of their album sales. It is an
excellent place to sample and purchase some incredible recordings by Crothers,
including the aforementioned album of duets with Max Roach titled Swish and her epic live solo piano
recording Concert in Paris.
What remains to be seen is where a new generation of
musicians go with the music. Like Duke Ellington, Crothers was an optimist, and
she made her feelings about the future of jazz plain to me:
“For many years, the jazz world was sort of divided into
groups. . . . there was a kind of division between the free improvisers and the
jazz musicians who played tunes, as well as other divisions based on other
considerations. But now we’re moving into a new era. I feel that is already underway
. . . I call it a jazz renaissance.
“But the thing that I think has to happen . . . is that all
the groups need to open up and find out about each other, because there are so
many valuable musicians in each group. And if they find out about each other,
the art form will just blossom! I look forward to that. I hope to be a part of
that.”
And I’ll just leave it at that for now. Connie, we love you madly.
