This is New England Public Radio's Jazz Beat. I'm Tom Rini with a podcast edition of Bon Jazz Vlog, which you can find at n E P R dot net. For this episode of Jazz Beat, I'm sharing with you another podcast, open source with Christopher Leiden. This longtime friend and radio host covers a lot of topics on his podcast.
In this time around, he included me for a special edition of Desert Island Disks in which I chose eight essential recordings that I would take to a desert island. Enjoy. I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source.
Desert Island Disks is a radio game of self-revelation by music. You are the sounds you couldn't live without. Jazz disc jockey, Tom Rini, is our castaway this hour. 40 years now on Public Radio, he was supposed to inherit the family's civil engineering business until he found his life in the basement joints of Worcester, Massachusetts, and in blues music at large, the sounds that unlock Tom Rini at hometown names like Boots Musouli, Jackie Byard, Ben Muddy Waters, and Aretha Franklin, and Duke Ellington, the great orchestrator of the blues, stepped in playing at a hospital fundraiser near Worcester who was no going back.
The rules of desert out of discs from the BBC and London during World War II have not changed. Tom Rini arrived with eight tracks of the sounds to sustain him on a beach in the traffic, plus one book and one luxury of it, a history unfolds. The Rini's were a big family growing up, immigrant stock from the west of Ireland, father in other Broadway show tunes, and father sang them. You took me to see my fair lady at the Exeter Street Theatre when Rex Harrison was still in the touring company.
Wow. Mid 60s. Came to the old spiritual assembly on Exeter Street? Yes, sir.
Why were I now? Why do I take it that it was a noisy household in Worcester? There were seven of us. And four or five driven verbalists among the seven, and it was just a big family.
My father owned a surveying and civil engineering company in Worcester. He and his brother Joe, said a lot of stories from the day's work. In Worcester? In Boston, we always wanted to...
Are we a little New York or a big Worcester? What was Worcester like? Although it was in the shadow of Boston. I could tell you that much, certainly in our household.
My parents were both Boston-oriented people, and we were brought here oftentimes for dinners out at Socks Games, of course. How many speak your own notes on a live in music? Starting out in Worcester, you're reminding us of regional jazz and small city jazz, but when did the light go on for you? And the light went on for me watching the Ed Sullivan show as a kid, and seeing two figures in particular, Lewis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson.
I was really captivated by them both. And I think that Armstrong, even more than Mahalia, but probably Mahalia too, puzzled me almost in the combination of joy and sorrow that seemed to be just presence in virtually every note. And the Armstrong that really outsized a figure of Lewis Armstrong, I didn't really know what to make of him as a kid, but the music was very powerful. And it was an early kind of marker for me because my parents had the ambassador's satch album that Columbia had brought out in the 50s, and I was really captivated by the cover photo of Armstrong on that jacket.
So wearing the cutaway and carrying a suitcase on one hand and the trumpet and the other, and looking so sweet and kind of a funcular in that image. And among the records that my parents had, which were mostly Broadway and classical albums and a smallish collection, they rested on the carpet in front of the family stereo, and I always brought the Armstrong album back out to the front. Whenever I rippled through those, I placed it back on the front. I'm talking probably at the age of seven, eight or so.
But Mahalia Jackson really captivated me too as a singer. And I go back that far because I think that what really impressed me very early in life was the mass, was the Catholic mass and the music and the grandeur and the Latin. The whole aura of the mass, I think, was the first experience of what I would call awe. And it was duplicated by Armstrong and Mahalia and other figures like that.
So interesting sorrow and transcendence in the same note, the same moment. Something so powerful and I ultimately I think you'd say triumphant. And what Lewis and Mahalia were exhibiting. But what does it take to hear that?
Soul, pain. Long yearning, long yearning. Go to your first tune, Tom. The first tune is Cheaps Blues, a blues by Johnny Hodges and Duke Ellington.
First recorded in the late 30s with Hodges playing sopranosax fun at the time. But here it's at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, which was a triumphant moment for Duke Ellington and one of the great milestones in jazz history. And this followed the performance of D'Amineo Endo and Blue and Crescendo and Blue that ignited that Newport audience that evening. A performance that featured another Massachusetts-born musician, the saxophoneist Paul Gonzales.
But with a little time left on the clock, Ellington sort of brought the audience back down to Earth as it were. Yeah, they were going nuts. Yeah, oh yeah. No, it ignited a frenzy in that audience that was rarely seen in the jazz world, really not probably since the late 30s with Benny Goodman at the Paramount with some of Frank Sinatra's shows in the 40s.
But the audience reaction was frenzied. And Ellington kind of brought it all back down to Earth with Johnny Hodges playing. I got it bad and that ain't good, the great ballad and then Jeeps lose. And here it is.
Speaking of Duke, Duke, edit your life in a big way. I grew up at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was in the news and it was discussed around the family table at times. My mother's cousin, Owen Murphy, was the editor of the Diosus and News favor, the Catholic Free Press. And he wrote, it was a weekly publication.
He wrote editorials every week and was in favor of the Civil Rights Movement, so integration. And it was also an early opponent of the War in Vietnam. So politics in the Civil Rights Movement were prominent at the time. And so in the world that I grew up in was an element of racism.
It was a kind of constant element of my background in the neighborhood I grew up in in Worcester. You know, virulent racism. And so Duke Ellington and Mahalian Lewis, Homestrung, and many others, but Ellington was extremely powerful. Contradiction to so much of what I heard said about Black Americans.
And the Ellington performance, I mean, the Newport performance in 56 is so powerful. I mean, it's the ultimate in Johnny Hodges preaching the blues. And he could preach. And on other occasions, in some of them are on records, you'll hear Ellington exhorting him verbally, tell them what happened.
Tell them what happened. The whole kind of storytelling element that helped me understand why I was so drawn to instrumental jazz early on, because we're accustomed to vocal music. It's what we hear on the radio. It's what we sing around the house and everything.
But there was something about the Ellington players, especially, and Hodges, and the brass players, the Tricky Sam Nanton, and Cootie Williams, and others who had such a remarkably expressive equality, and almost verbal quality to what they were saying on their horns. And so that when I heard Ellington say something like, tell them what happened. It made sense. But this guy was telling a story.
Your second turn, Tom. Well, this is Louis Armstrong's Stardust, recorded in 1931. It's one of two magnificent takes that he made on Hokey Carmichael's great song in Chicago in 1931. And I'm not the only Louis Armstrong fanatic who goes to Stardust as his number one.
It's not that uncommon. It's just so perfect. Oh, 19 days there's this very, very, very long. The rooster.
I dream this in my heart. In my heart. In my heart, in my heart, in my heart. My soul of love.
All that tension, all that release, right there, epitomized in their performance. And so, intrinsic to jazz, the tension that release qualities that keep us hanging on. He pulls you right in with one note. Louis Armstrong's power.
What was your experience with Louis Armstrong? My appreciation for Armstrong grew somewhat more gradually. And I was standing my early allegiance to Duke Ellington. But I really jumped into, with a modernist, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, figures like that.
And Armstrong was, you know, by the late 60s, early 70s, the maligning of him as an Uncle Tom, the discrediting of him as a kind of moldy fig or a musician who had not caught up at the times as it were as a player who had expressed some disagreement with what the B-Boppers were doing, all made him somewhat not an easy figure to leap into the arms of as it were. But I did, once I heard the historic Louis Armstrong, it was instantaneous love and passion for his music. They were calling him a Tom. George Raich recorded Billy Holiday, no less saying, he toms from the heart.
Right. And that was the end of the argument, really. Or as Ralph Ellison said to Albert Murray, he dons a mask, but it's the mask of a major lyric poet. Oh my god.
I would say too of Armstrong, almost more than anyone else in jazz, and especially of an artist whose great work is, you know, in the 12 and 32 bar forms, the blues, the popular song forms. In other words, players whose solos were relatively brief, that the emotional intensity of everything Armstrong played was so great that I often found it exhausting to listen to more than a few pieces by him at a time. I will mention that to others, and they kind of readily agree that, yeah, if you're really paying attention to what Louis Armstrong is playing and singing, it's an intense experience. Coming up, the human voice that affected Tom Rini like none other, also, there's Bach in Tom Rini's bag, as it is in jazz too.
This is open source. Mil towns in New England, like Tom Rini's Worcester, have often been known for their exceptional characters who go to A and some who didn't, like Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts, or the operatic soprano Eileen Farrell from Winsocket, Rhode Island, or the actor composer John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, also from Worcester. Musicians in Tom Rini's growing up were passionate artists who knew they were fated to work day jobs to stay alive. Glamour and stardom were something else, to be glimpsed at the El Morocco in Worcester, where performers like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Bette Midler would come out from Boston for dinner.
Late night dinner, very late night dinner. It was in somebody's house. Well, it was in the Aboody family's home, which was a three-decker with a full basement, so essentially a four-story Worcester, you know, three-decker, and the restaurant was in the basement. So you went through a beaded curtain upstairs and down-of-light of stairs into the basement for Shishkabab primarily, and Rice Pilaf, a foyer that was loaded with photographs of just about every Hollywood and Broadway star imaginable.
It was amazing to visit and see it for the first time. You know, it was a Worcester, right, that all of these major figures and iconic faces have been in town. Introduce number three, Tom. My next election is Muddy Waters' long-distance call, a blues that he composed, first recorded around 1951.
This is from 1969, a concert performance in Chicago that was released in the album, Fathers and Sons. The album brought together Muddy and the great blues pianist, Notice Van, who had been working with Muddy at that point for about 15 years, was some of the young acolytes who had been mentored by Muddy Waters, principally Paul Butterfield, the harmonica player, and Michael Bloomfield, the guitarist, both of them were Chicagoans. It was the Paul Butterfield blues band in the mid-60s that really alerted a new audience, essentially to this largely hidden music. Music, it was really out of view of the American mainstream, of the white middle class, of the college, and high school, aged audiences, up until that time.
Butterfield grew up in Chicago right around the corner, essentially, in Hyde Park, around the corner from the south side. Black community where Muddy Waters held forth as the king of Chicago blues and played various clubs and taverns and barrooms in that millure, and Butterfield was a daring teenage white kid with a passion for the music, and with skill as a harmonica player who started hanging out in that world, and had enough on the ball and enough promise that figures like Muddy Waters would invite him up to sit in and play with him in the late 50s, early 60s. Anyway, Butterfield put together a band with his brilliant guitarist, Michael Bloomfield, and they played the Newport Folk Festival in 65, where they probably inspired Bob Dylan to go electric that summer, and they came to Cambridge and to New York, and they spread the blues like wildfire, and Jothmull Tower was a Cambridge folky, and a blues aficionado set of the Butterfield band's impact for the day after their appearance at Newport, a hundred thousand blues band sprouted up, a cringarages across America. Well, Butterfield always credited Muddy Waters and Little Walter and other of the Chicago blues greats as the players that really needed to be attended to, and he spread that gospel and helped to open doors for the Black originators of this music, and Muddy Waters was foremost among them, and he and Butterfield maintained a connection until the Muddy died in 1983.
They recorded occasionally, and they played this magnificent concert in Chicago in 1969, called Fathers and Sons, and here's this modern adaptation of Muddy's sort of Mississippi Delta style blues called Long Distance Call. Yeah, here I'm born ringing, sound along different cars. I know you hear my funky ringing. Yeah, I know it sound like a long different car.
Muddy Waters had brought the blues from Mississippi through Chicago in the early 40s. He left the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi in 1943, and he essentially electrified the basic acoustic style Delta blues and playing the Chicago bars and taverns, and Muddy's amplification of this music, plugging in his guitar, made that band the prototype for modern blues bands, and the spinoff from that is rock and roll, the rolling stones, and so many groups of that kind modeled themselves after Muddy Waters essentially. Tom, you're evoking a time not so long ago, but in this incredibly powerful music. Unsubsidized is almost non-commercial, you could say.
It served locally more than network television, and it's incredibly good. It's now all available at a keystroke, un-swatter-fi, and yet something of that local thing is missing. Certainly, yeah. Not to mention I would add the pilgrimage element to just buying records, you know, to seeking this stuff out and finding this stuff.
I mean, this is what one devoted a lot of time to, in my youth, you know, in our Worcester days and our mid to late teens, we were coming to Boston four or five nights a week, and some of them were just to go to the record stores, and moreover, all of the work of these artists was not available. A lot of this stuff was by, you know, you've got a tip, it was on the grapevine, you saw it out, people who were record collectors, or collectors who sold records out of their basements. We had a guy in Worcester still at it, named Victor Perlin, who's one of the most consulted record collectors in the world when it comes to blues and jump music, and so we had access to people like that, and the records stores in Boston and Cambridge. And then of course, we had Muddy Waters and James Cotton and B.B.
King. I saw B.B. King somewhere between 50 and 60 times in my life. I saw Muddy Waters probably a couple of dozen times, and I met the man.
First time I got a showroom, I got to shake his hand. So not only were figures like this around in performing a lot, but they were accessible to an audience, seeing B.B. King over Harvard Stadium, and he's greeting, you know, a massive people after this concert handing out guitar picks, something so courtly, so kindly about these figures. It was also a wonderfully menacing quality to this scene as well.
What was the jointiest joint you ever heard Muddy Waters in? For Muddy, that would have been Sir Morgan's Cove in Worcester, which was a bar, now renowned because the Rolling Stones played a one-nighter there. This was more like 1972. It was a joint, and it was a bar, and it was a place where you were within, you know, striking distance, within slapping palms of the guys on the bandstand.
Two tables away. Very, very intimate spaces. And I should add too, that Muddy wasn't there for a night. He was there for a week.
It's six nights to see these cats. And of course they played week-long engagements at Paul's Mall, and Lenny's on the turnpike, and Speakeasy Peats over in Cambridge, and Joe's plays would book great Chicago blues for multiple nights. It was such a sense too of kind of a driving element to this whole narrative is a sense of justice, of why has this stuff been kept secret? Why has it been kept in the dark, so to speak, for so long?
Why is it just emerging? And why is it that bands that are covering Muddy Waters, say the Rolling Stones, are world-renowned, famous, and getting really rich? And these guys are still working really hard for, you know, a tenth or a hundredth of what the headline rock bands were making. So we grounds down to this with a passion for justice, as well as the love for the music and the culture.
Tell me, are cast away on a desert island? Take us into number four on your song list. Number four is Aretha Franklin. I never loved a man the way I love you.
Chris, when I was conceptualizing this list of just eight songs for a desert island, I initially thought Billy Holiday, and Lester Young, and my god, I wouldn't want to be without them for five minutes. But given the confines of a list, this small and narrow, I went with the voice that has moved me more than any other in my lifetime. Certainly the female voice that's moved me the most, and that is Aretha Franklin without a question. I got to listen to Aretha in the moments because her records were contemporary with my youth, with my life, and I got to see Aretha in person.
They were all magnificent. My god, they were spine-tingling experiences. And then I saw Aretha run 2003 at the Bushnell in Hartford. And that was one of the concerts that stands as beyond my wildest expectations.
She was so much more than I anticipated she would be at that point in her career. It was amazing. She was Lady Sol from Start to Finish that night. She had a big orchestra.
Strings from the Hartford Symphony Orchestra would deploy for Aretha for part of that concert. And then she really sang, and she got down, and that audience was with her, and it was magnificent. And so when she died in August of 2018, it just came back to me how just significant she had been, just that voice. I drove to the Cape on Wednesday night of that.
We can listen to Aretha the whole ride with my wife, and we cried together. Man, I was overwhelmed. I'm getting overwhelmed right now just recalling it, but, well, so powerful and significant. And it's like church music on the radio, in the top 10.
It was so gospel-rich, gospel-infused, it had all the intensity of the church right there in the top 10. But her first single for Atlantic, the first thing she cut for the label is my Desert Island choice, which is again, it's a bluesy kind of secular tune, but it's got all the power and passion of a gospel song. And it's enhanced by the early appearance on record of the Fender Rhodes piano. They're adding a little funk to Aretha's performance of I Never Love the Man the Way I Love You.
Who's to say it's not the greatest voice? Oh, I haven't walked the fan in. No. My God.
Takes you a fifth tune, Tom, which sounds like roots music. The fifth tune is the Italian concerta by J.S. Bach. And the recording I have is by Glenn Gould.
But my first real experience with this work was by Rudolph Serkin in a concert at Symphony Hall in Boston, again, 1971. Talk about a transcendent experience from, I think, maybe the front row, no less that evening. It was a December concert that night, and Serkin played works by Beethoven and Schubert, and the Italian concerta by Bach. I'd heard classical music all my life at that point, and I'd seen symphony orchestras here and there, Symphony Hall and Wall Street or Tanglewood.
But there was something about Serkin's solo piano that was a real signal moment. What did that tell you? Well, I would call it soul music in a similar way. Classical music was not prominent in my early life, and it was very secondary in the years that I was having this formative experience of jazz, rhythm and blues and such.
But I had friends who played the music and some who almost chose it in opposition to, say, jazz or blues. There was something of a contest almost around it for a while as to whether or not it was too middle class, too upper middle class, too elite, too much driven by patrons and all of that and European high culture. And hearing Serkin that night just melted all of that stuff away for me in an instant. And I recognized that music resonates with the soul.
It's not just jazz or just blues or just a bent note here or there, but J.S. Bach even resonated with my soul. Much as the music of the church did when I was a kid and continued to actually, well, it's my adulthood. But I began to listen more openly and engagingly with classical music from there on.
That breakthrough from worrying that it's too old, too white, too elite, too symphony hall, we all go through that. But punctured the doubt for you. Seeing the concert by Rudolph Serkin in person, there in 1971, I was 17 or 18 in the thrall of the music and the man and there was a lot of quality to box music that pulled me right in and that surprised me in a way. And I think it opened the door for me not only to hear, to listen, to seek out classical music, but also music that we associate with the American song book and the beautiful melodies of those songs that first and foremost components of tunes, whether it's Bach or Mozart or Harold Arlen, Ellington, Gershwin, Jimmy Van Housen that pulls us in.
And that before the transforming power of the jazz artist is brought to bear on those tunes, they are beautiful works in and of themselves. So just the kind of coming alive to melody that Bach represented in Mozart, certainly also extended to an opening up that I experienced toward the American song book. You could go many examples of that. Of Jewish tin canale tunes from Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Gershwin, others that came to life in a totally different way.
When Charlie Parker plays The Daily Beloved by Jerome Kern or Coltrane adopts my favorite things from Richard Rodgers as his theme song. I always remember I remember Gershwin saying, he outlived George obviously, and he heard Ella Fitzgerald sing that songs. He said, we didn't know how good they were until we heard Ella sing them. There is some sort of meaning, exalted meaning of these two great migrations, the Black Migration out of Jim Crow and the Jewish Migration out of Eastern Europe.
That's what we're celebrating in a lot of cases. Certainly, the foundations of the truest American culture and identity are right there in that nexus of Jewish and Black and the American song book and the enhanced life that those songs were given by jazz artists. But the integrity of those tunes is there to begin with. I mean, Coleman Hawkins may not play the melody in soul, but he's playing body in soul.
You don't need to be a musician to know what that tune is instantly when you hear Coleman Hawkins' famous recording of it. He's familiar with Sonny Rollins and Train and Charlie Parker. Coming up, Tommy needs biggest mistake on the radio and how we get away with it. This is open source.
A disc jockey and his music three turns to go and Tom Rini's tell all trip through his desert island discs. There were mistakes along the way. Jelly Roll Morton sat down with Allen Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1939 and talked for hours, multiple days, and recorded one of the great documents of American music and folk culture. Deep New Orleans background, deep into the origins of jazz out of ragtime.
And he played any number of tunes. And about 25 years ago, some of those Library of Congress recordings were released. And one night, I played Morton's Wine and Boy Blues from the Library of Congress. And I lowered the monitor and I went into the music library directly across the hall.
This was near the end of the show. And I had the monitor off. So I'm getting together a couple of things for the following night's show. And I came back in and the Morton comes to an end and I concluded the back announced it.
And about two days later, I run into a friend downtown and she says, hey, thanks a lot for playing Jelly Roll Morton the other night. And I talk, well, it's not that unusual for me to play something like that. I wasn't sure why she made such a to do of it. And then a couple of weeks later, I listened to it.
And I was shocked at how obscene this performance of Wine and Boy Blues was. Just shocked. So good. You stepped out of the studio, John.
Yeah, right on. Yeah. Your family says, we don't think of it as a distraction. We think of it as a teacher, a preacher, an educator in the true art of America.
How do you feel it? How does it work? Well, I had a passion for the music. And I was a proselytizer from early on.
I was on the corner. I was shouting about this from the rooftops. You didn't spend much time with me without sort of a deep engagement with whatever my latest item was off the turntable. So I suppose becoming a radio host was a natural evolution.
Tell me, talk your transition into what we think is modern jazz kind of old now, but something new. Post-Ellington, big bands. And take us into your sixth disc. When I became aware of Charles Mingus, it coincided with Mingus's re-emergence, reappearance on the scene as a recording artist and a traveling musician.
He had taken a break in the late 60s. And there was big news with the reappearance of Mingus around 1970 and 71. I got to see him at the jazz workshop when he made his first appearance back in Boston at that time. And that was an absolutely profound experience.
Being within, say, 10 feet of Charles Mingus in that intimate space with those perfect acoustics and hearing his quintet that evening. But it was one of those pure Mingus moments when the pianist showed up late. And obviously annoyed Mingus, vacated the piano bench. And this man sat down and Mingus just sort of bugged him for the rest of the set about the chords that he wanted played and what have you.
Mingus was sort of notorious for that. But to see that, the first time he ever saw the man was really something. And the music was incredibly dynamic and powerful. It was a three-horn front line of trumpet, alto, and tenor.
And Mingus, they were on a stool playing double bass. And his music was so multifaceted. But my early exposure to it was his albums, Mingus Oum and Blues and Roots, both 1959, both masterpieces. Blues and Roots was more deliberately a kind of blues and gospel album.
It was at the direction of the suggestion of Atlantic Records that he make a record devoted basically to blues and gospel. And Mingus's own youth in Los Angeles included experiences and what he called the holiness churches, the Pentecostal churches with the Wednesday night prayer meetings in addition to Saturdays and Sundays. And so he called on all of that in this work that he called Wednesday night prayer meeting. And it's wonderfully complex.
Mingus, there are different time signatures through the piece, some going on simultaneously. Great tension between the rhythm section and the pianist. And then on top of it all is this tenor saxophone break by Booker Irvin, a wonderfully expressive and powerful Texas-born tenor saxophone player. And in this work, especially, is to me, the greatest example that we have on jazz records of a kind of speaking in tongues.
And the break that Booker Irvin plays is accompanied only by some hand clapping by the band. So this is Charles Mingus's Wednesday night prayer meeting. Around the time that Mingus reemerged, he also published a memoir, an autobiography called The Neat the Underdog, which got a lot of attention at the time. I read it.
I was there to buy it at the day. It appeared in the Ben Franklin bookstore in Worcester. And it's an amazingly powerful read with Mingus beginning with a comparison himself with the Trinity. And it's all from there.
It's an amazingly frank, unsparing narrative about his struggles as a man, as a black man, as a son, and as a lover, as a thinker in this crazy and complex and racist world. Tell me to come back to some of the New England, maybe Worcester, musicians that you grew up with or that you knew in a close way and identified with. You know, to me, the experience that I've had with music has been almost from the start in connection with people I knew. So there are these iconic figures, the great geniuses of jazz and other music that have been part and parcel of the whole experience.
And I think I was guided and inspired by a connection to local players, kids I grew up with, the babe and Kenny Pino, the Worcester jazz community had a number of African-American players, especially who were a generation or more older than we were. But around 1970, a club in the city called the Kitty Cat Lounge was established. It was a black owned establishment owned by two musicians, Bunny Price and Reggie Wally. And they had soul music on weeknights.
It was kind of a chitlin circuit club. But on Thursday evenings and Sunday, they had jazz jam sessions. And they invited some of my friends, babe and Kenny Pino, were among them onto the bandstand on Sundays to play, good down home jazz and blues. And those were really formative experiences of seeing the music before a largely black audience and the kind of informal call and response ritual element that was very evident virtually all of those jam sessions that I attended at the Kitty Cat.
Take us to your number seven. On the Worcester scene, there was the jazz scene at the Kitty Cat. And then there were a bunch of younger guys, my contemporaries, men and women who were playing blues basically and soul music. And Dennis Brennan was one of those.
He came into town to spell babe Pino for a while. And Dennis made an immediate impact as an outstanding singer, a really gifted vocalist, still in his teens. I've known Dennis now for a long time and followed his career. And he's been based in Boston for probably 40 years or more.
And he's done everything from New Wave and punk to a country to blues and rock and roll. A very gifted songwriter. And singer Terry Grozedd, him as her guest on Fresh Air at least 20 to 25 years ago as kind of the exemplar of the Boston scene. And Dennis is still out of the place, the lizard lounge in Cambridge regularly.
And he's got a dynamite band that Peter Wolf adopts when Peter goes on the road. And it's a band that has two brilliant guitar players, Kevin Barry and a kid from Worcester, Duke Levine. Blues is so prominent in the rock and roll mix. But so is gospel music.
And here's a great example of it in a song that Charlie Rich composed in the Dennis Brennan sings, I feel like going home. Lord, I feel I tried and I feel like tired and weary. Everything did was wrong. And I feel like, oh, no.
Part of what I've been moved by in the experience of knowing musicians, rock and roll, blues, jazz, classical, how hard the work is, and how total the dedication has got to be. Phil Woods said, if you're thinking about a career in jazz, you've got to know it. It's got to be the fire in the belly. It can't be a passing thought.
You've got to be totally committed to this. And that's what I've experienced knowing Dennis and other musicians that they're in it for the long run. And it's a hard road. Most of the guys I know who are great musicians have day jobs.
I mean, even that pantheon of Worcester jazz men, they work day jobs too. They eschewed the road. Most of these guys stuck around town to raise families. And they had day jobs, and they worked in night shift.
They were night creatures when the work was available. And Dave McKenna even was a telling example in a way of that too to see this guy playing his trade primarily at those Cape Cod roadhouses and raising his family down there in Dennis. McKenna is, of course, renowned in the jazz world as one of the greatest pianists and in the estimation of many of the greatest solo pianists of his era, at least. Music has such an aura of glitz.
And most of the people I know who have applied the trade have, I don't even ask them how they manage to make ends meet. It's like, you know, the economics of a career in music puzzling. It's part of what has motivated and guided my work just to show as much respect as I can for the artists themselves in the way I present the music on the radio. But that's really what guided me into radio.
It's just that desire to share the joy and the truth and the message of all too often largely unknown or under recognized geniuses. Bring it home, Tom, really, in your own terms with the great Coltrane. John Coltrane, another of the musicians that I encountered almost instantly in my jazz exploration and was drawn to through the work that I knew by Coltrane with Miles Davis. And Coltrane's great to work for prestige and Blue Note, his album, Blue Train, among others in the 50s.
And then some of his work in the 60s was very challenging for me early on. And Coltrane, I heard something that was uniquely and differently spiritual, something so powerful and direct to the soul as the experience I've had listening to John Coltrane over the years. And I find him indispensable. I have a collection of Coltrane's music that I probably turn to more than any other sort of specialized, you know, reenie playlist nature that I listen to around the house from the car.
Train just cuts deep to what matters. And I love Coltrane ballads. I love a love supreme, the great spiritual work, the great expression of thanks to God. His album, Crescent, is a masterpiece from that same year as the love supreme.
But there's a Coltrane energy that I'm especially drawn to. And here it's epitomized in this work, impressions which Coltrane played at the Village Vanguard in the early 60s when he was working out, you know, a band of his own, as it were, after leaving Miles in 1960. Train was experimenting with different players and working with different players and coming to form that quartet that would be together for about five years. But here at the Vanguard, it's Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, McCoy Tiner, piano, and near the very end of this long piece is Eric Dolfi playing bass clarinet.
For the most part, Tiner lays out in its train and Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. And you know, we began with Ellington and Johnny Hodges. And we think of those tandems that are common in jazz, Max Roach and Charlie Parker being another good example of it and really none more so than Coltrane and Elvin Jones. And here they are at their peak playing impressions.
There's an expressive power and depth to Coltrane that is constant. John was there 100% and that's putting up mildly really from start to finish. There are no weak moments with Coltrane. He's all in.
I mean, they say the train had trouble taking the horn out of his mouth. He was so, had a compulsion perhaps to play it. On a bandstand and off, you know, at home. Train was, he had a lot to express and a lot of energy with which to do it.
John Coltrane has a power and intensity that is similar to the music of the church. The train is the church and modern jazz combined. It's not apparent that Coltrane's playing gospel music, but he's playing with that kind of spiritual fervor that would have been nurtured in the church. And I think the sense of free expression that Coltrane employed somewhat controversially, certainly groundbreakingly in the 60s had its roots in the church.
Two more goodies, Tamri, before we can leave you to your desert island. A book and a lecture at him. What do you have? Ulysses.
With the Guide by Harry Blameires. The Essential Guide to Ulysses by Harry Blameires. And finally, if you're only picking one of those eight, Tom, what are you gonna be? Probably Louis Armstrong.
Stardust. Tamri, it's been such a privilege to listen to you so long, three hours a night, Monday through Friday. It's a joy to hang with you. I'm glad you're on the right track.
Yeah, man, I've been listening to you for a long time. So failing is mutual, Chris. Tom Riddie's addictive jazz a la mode radio show is broadcast on New England public radio, N-E-P-R, Live Weeknights, 8 to 11 PM, and online at nepr.net. You can find Tom Riddie's Desert Island playlist on our website, radio opensource.org.
I will post my own eight tune all time playlist. If you'll send us yours, sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to the podcast, and think of leading something in the tip jar for the hardest working team in radio. Special thanks to the BBC for the very idea of Desert Island Discs in 1942. Our show this week was produced by Conigales, Adam Coleman, and the artist, Susan Coing.
George Hicks is our engineer. Mary McGrath is our island queen. I'm Christopher Weisen. Join us next time for Open Source.