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| AT ALBRIGHT, THE ART OF STRIDE PIANO By GARAUD MacTAGGART, News Contributing Reviewer The Buffalo News, 5/8/2006 |
CONCERT REVIEW - Judy Carmichael with Michael Hashim Stride piano, according to Judy Carmichael, has been at the heart of all jazz piano playing since the 1920s. Her Sunday afternoon appearance in Albright-Knox Art Gallery was a reminder of how vital and invigorating the form can be. With left-hand leaps providing the chords from which the right hand takes off in flights of fancy, stride piano was the base upon which Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Earl Hines built their careers. It is also the musical love of Carmichael's life, a fact that she communicated to the delight of the audience.
Along with saxophonist Michael Hashim, a crafty and inventive instrumentalist in his own right, Carmichael ran through a catalog of standards that included a pair of George Gershwin chestnuts, "I Got Rhythm" and "Lady Be Good," Waller's "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," Benny Goodman's "If Dreams Come True" and Harry Warren's "Lulu's Back in Town."
Their interplay, musically and in between-song banter, was a joy to hear and see.
Carmichael is not only a top-notch pianist but proved to be a gifted raconteur, telling tales of the road that got her audience chuckling. This gift may be why her show on National Public Radio's Sirius Satellite Channel ("Jazz Inspired") is so much fun.
After regaling her listeners with how often she had been asked about her relationship to Hoagy Carmichael, the pianist sat down at the keyboard to play a slow, well-paced rendition of Hoagy's "Lazy River," which featured some intriguing voicings. A similar thing happened with "I Ain't Got Nobody," a song Waller didn't write but was known for playing, where a funny story led into an extended, moving performance that showcased how to be inventive with old, familiar material.
Throughout the concert, that is what Carmichael did. What some tonier musicians might consider a dead idiom came alive under her hands and by her wit. By the end of the concert, the Albright-Knox patrons were in the palm of her hand. The standing ovations that bracketed her encore (Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose") were heartfelt and well-deserved.
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| How to Advance Jazz Radio: Judy Carmichael Has the Knack Posted: 2006-06-11 on www.allaboutjazz.com By Norman Weinstein |
As someone who was educated by jazz radio as a teenager, and a tip of the hat to Joel Dorn's programming on Philly's WHAT-FM is in order here, I've had a special appreciation of how enlightening jazz radio programming can be. Yet my appreciation of jazz radio from the 60s has often turned to disappointment in the ensuing decades. This is not to belittle the efforts of talented jazz musicians and educators on the order of Billy Taylor and Marian McPartland, but their charms seemed limited, in terms of show format, to preaching to the converted, catering to the middle-brow culture mavens who might hear jazz programming (interviews seasoned with small instrumental interludes) as a mild diversion from "the classics."
Last night I spent hours hearing just how intellectually and artistically challenging jazz radio can be. I stumbled across on the Internet the radio show "Jazz Inspired" by jazz pianist/educator Judy Carmichael, and I finally heard the promise of jazz radio I intuited decades ago, but had been waiting to hear realized. Rather than the usual jazz radio format of interviewing the already recognized musician, Carmichael has boldly gone where no jazz radio programmer has gone before. She uses the overarching theme of jazz in general, and improvisation in particular, as a root metaphor for the creative process in any artistic endeavor. The results are often astonishing.
She interviews Robert Redford and we discover how Gerry Mulligan's and Chet Baker's music have informed both his acting and directing careers, how Redford moved from their rhythms to cinematic ones. Comedian Chevy Chase discloses his friendship with the pianist Bill Evans and its impact on trying to learn how to play jazz piano now. Even more telling is Chase's informative discussion of the links between timing in comedy and jazz. Film Animation Director Tim Johnson talks about how the narrative aspect of soundtrack music by Miles Davis impacts how he directs animation. And who knew that Walt Disney was reputed to have said "Every animator is a frustrated musician"?
When Carmichael interviews musicians who have crossed over from classical or pop to jazz, she treats them less like converts to her church than like intelligently broad musicians with open ears. She has a gentle touch as an interviewer, but isn't cowed by the likes of stars like Redford when they get off the track somewhat. While being a highly accomplished stride pianist, Carmichael doesn't let her ego get in the way when she interviews non-jazz celebrities who do music on the side. She's consistently warm and sharply focused on the various ways improvisation is bigger than jazz itself.
Some might argue that by interviewing actors, animators, architects, and TV newsmen about how jazz has inspired them, and by playing generous selections from her guests' record collections, that this isn't "pure" jazz radio. I think that she's returning jazz to its historic roots as an art form that was intimately interconnected with all of the arts. For this, she deserves our thanks and support. Listen to "Jazz Inspired" on 170 NPR stations, or from audio files on the Judy Carmichael "Jazz Inspired" website. See if you don't agree that she has translated the intellectual sinew of a book like Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz into a 21st century mass entertainment of the highest order.
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| Taking Judy Carmichael n Stride Wednesday, November 23, 2005 - The Independent, by Joan Baym |
Although the term “stride piano” goes back to the fabled James P. Johnson (who may have called it “shout”), “Fats” Waller and Willie “The Lion” Smith, Judy Carmichael gave this distinctive way of playing jazz piano her own signature touch when she was barely out of her teens, and, to judge from appearances, that was only yesterday.
Vivacious and full of bubbly enthusiasm, especially for “Jazz Inspired,” her weekly show on public radio, Carmichael surely must still turn heads when she enters concert halls and schools to perform and talk about stride piano, jazz history, music, and creativity. A slim woman with an infectious smile and a cascade of shoulder-length blonde ringlets that bob slightly as she — what else — strides down Main Street in Sag Harbor, Carmichael is at the top of her form as a pianist and entertainer, but she is particularly proud of being told she’s also a good ambassador for art and an inspiring teacher.
She particularly loves talking not just about jazz but about the joys of being creative, a theme she pursues wherever she performs. In schools she suits programs to grade and focuses on making connections: “know your audience, involve them.” Feeling her way with each class, she may begin with a reference to a teen music video or tell stories about her early experiences — taking lessons from a piano teacher who actually discouraged her; priming to be an actress by way of entering beauty contests in her native California; doing professional gigs at Disneyland “five years, seven hours a day” for little money; majoring in German in college and thinking of a career in the Foreign Service; trying to make it in L.A. clubs where she was seen as a “cute blonde chick, who had a gimmick, playing piano”; making the move from ragtime to stride, and from memorized pieces to joyous improvisation.
She also likes to note her good fortune in meeting big names who cheered her on — Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan. And no, she will say when she’s occasionally asked, she is not related to Hoagy.
Heard her recently? Maybe yes, maybe no, since Jazz Inspired on The East End runs on Sundays at 10 p.m. — “drive-back-to-the-city time in the summer,” she laughs — but she hopes that folks who miss the show will tune in to her website, which has streaming audio. She’s the show’s sole producer: “The bad news is that I have to do everything, the good news is that no one can tell me what to do.”
She’s no sideman. Rare among musicians with their own programs (itself a rarity) Carmichael’s impassioned determination is to present jazz in a “broad” sense, to have guest artists discuss how jazz has inspired them and how jazz can make for a “better life” and sense of community.
A recent guest, Renee Fleming, talked about her first musical love, which was not opera but jazz, when she sang in a group in college (a recent CD features her doing jazz, pop, and arias). Another guest, the award-winning 75-year old architect Frank Gehry, whom Carmichael says she has always thought of as a “jazz architect,” wound up riffing on the need for architects to have “vision” and to orchestrate, in a sense, those who work in their architectural offices.
Ironically, Carmichael’s most receptive audience these days turns out to be the under 30s set, young people who wander into her concerts, knowing little about jazz, even disliking it, who then come up to her at the end and say they love what she does. That first-step conversion means a lot because jazz, she points out, has had bad press, some of it generated by the performers themselves — Miles Davis, for example, bop-straining to be difficult, turning his back on his audience, refusing to comment on what he does. Drug associations also haven’t helped. But most of all, Carmichael suggests, there has been that off-putting mystique, according to which only the so-called precious, discerning get it.
Carmichael is out to “demythologize” such insular impressions and, not incidentally, help open up opportunities for jazz musicians, 99.9% of whom, she says, have a hard time getting decently paying gigs or hearing their music on commercial radio. Meanwhile, the important point to note is that Carmichael’s back in town and getting ready for a spectacular fundraiser for Jazz Inspired at Steinway Hall on January 23, 2005. For information write to info@judycarmichael.
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| As an Ambassador for Stride Piano, She's Spreading Rhythm Around Sunday, August 14, 2005 - The New York Times, by Brian Wise |
"When I came to New York, everybody talked about the fact that I was a young middle-class blonde from California playing stride piano," said Ms. Carmichael, who was born in a Southern California suburb and came to New York in the early 1980s and settled in Sag Harbor in 1992. "Now hardly anyone mentions that." In addition to performing, Ms. Carmichael has written two books on stride piano, produced a documentary film on stride, recorded player-piano rolls and authored numerous articles on jazz history and style. She has toured for the United States Information Agency in India, Portugal, Brazil, and Singapore, and in 1992 she became the first jazz musician sponsored by the United States government to tour China.
She also is the host of the public-radio program "Jazz Inspired," broadcast on more than 130 stations in North America, including WLIU in Southampton and WCWP in Brookville.
Ms. Carmichael has seen stride gain acceptance among younger pianists. "A lot of younger musicians are familiarizing themselves with the stride vocabulary, and they feel that it's part of being a complete pianist," she said. Among the younger generation who have incorporated stride into their playing are Peter Cincotti, Jason Moran and Michael Kaeshammer. All are under 30.
Dick Hyman is a jazz pianist and director of the 92nd Street Y's Jazz Piano at the Y series in New York City. "Stride is a very virtuosic style that's never been that popular," he said. "But Judy has a devotion to get at the roots of stride piano, and she's always been very persistent with it."
Ms. Carmichael's career growth paralleled that of early jazz itself. Studying classical piano in her youth, she developed an interest in ragtime when her grandfather offered $50 to the first of his grandchildren to master "Maple Leaf Rag." One of her first professional jobs was at Disneyland, where she played ragtime for five summers starting in her mid-20s at a restaurant serving hot dogs. There, she met Count Basie, who encouraged her to look deeper into jazz history and take up stride, with its vigorous technical demands.
"There is no other style that is so demanding with the left hand," Ms. Carmichael said. "A lot of people can practice a lot and get that down. But to make it swing and integrate all of those polyrhythms, that's really difficult. You have to have that knack for it."
There were other hurdles, too. To learn from the best musicians, Ms. Carmichael frequented jazz clubs, male-dominated preserves that were often in Los Angeles's tougher neighborhoods. "When I started it was very intimidating to go to a jazz club by yourself as a woman," she said. "I didn't feel embraced by the jazz community in that it was not a real friendly, welcoming place."
Basie advised her to go to New York. She did, and found the jazz clubs there more welcoming. "You could meet a musician - I could walk up to a Roy Eldridge, who was one of my heroes – and introduce yourself," she said.
Since moving to the East End, Ms. Carmichael has become increasingly active in the local arts community. This year she helped raise $35,000 to buy a Steinway piano for Pierson High School in Sag Harbor. She will soon begin overseeing music education activities for the Port Jeff Education and Arts Conservancy, a new community center in Port Jefferson, starting September 17 with a concert at the Sail Loft at Harbor Front Park.
The next day she will perform in a fundraising concert at the Sag Harbor American Hotel for Jazz Inspired, Inc., the educational arm of her radio show, which she makes available to colleges across the country.
"Jazz Inspired" is another step in Ms. Carmichael's quest to make jazz more accessible by drawing connections between creativity and everyday life. "This show uses jazz as my metaphor, so I get disparate creative people to talk about their creative process," she said. "Maybe listeners don't know that jazz has this broad influence, and if they hear Robert Redford saying he consciously used a jazz model to create the Sundance Film Festival, they get all excited."
In addition to Mr. Redford, guests on her program have included the soprano Renee Fleming, discussing the connections between jazz and opera, and the architect Frank Gehry talking about how jazz has influenced his designs. Still, Ms. Carmichael said she thought that the jazz field had not been welcoming enough to those who are not aficionados.
"I pride myself in making my concerts user-friendly," she said. "I want to make the concert seem like I'm playing in their living room. I don't think welcoming means a smoky club atmosphere with dishes crashing in the background.
"I'm fortunate because my audiences are generally happy people. They want to come to have fun. They don't want to come for melancholy. It's a lot more fun to play for happy people than it is to play for melancholy people."
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Count Basie is said to have called her “Stride” for her command of this incredibly difficult technique of fast left-hand syncopated jumps that beat out rhythms against right-hand melodies. 
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