YEAR IN REVIEW 1993 : JAZZ : A Golden Feather for the White House Reed Man

When the first “Golden Feather Awards” column appeared here in December, 1965, several of this year’s winners were not yet born. Many giants of 1965, all Golden Feather or Down Beat award winners--Paul Desmond, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Rahsaan Roland Kirk--have long since left us.

Where Joe Henderson recently won a triple victory in Down Beat’s poll (musician of the year, No. 1 tenor sax and record of the year), John Coltrane in 1965 was a quadruple winner: tenor sax, record of the year (“A Love Supreme”), Hall of Fame entrant and jazzman of the year. (Coltrane would live to win once more before his death in July, 1967.)

Over the decades since then, jazz has advanced immeasurably on every level: the number of schools and colleges teaching the music has multiplied a hundredfold, as have the number of companies producing jazz recordings and the audiences listening to them. The foreign market and the interest at youth level are also booming, spawned mainly since the early 1980s by the rise of Wynton Marsalis and a host of others of his generation. Whereas in those days a few dozen LPs would be issued each month, today well over 100 jazz CDs can be counted on to enter the stores.

Of the 12 Golden Feather recipients in 1965, only Joe Williams is still prominently present; a few others remain active but are nowhere near center stage. This year there is an unprecedentedly wide range of choices, among whom the following seem logical candidates for honors:

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MAN OF THE YEAR: William Jefferson Clinton. Best known, of course, as the first tenor saxophonist born after World War II to occupy the White House. His good words (“Jazz is America’s classical music, created in struggle but played in celebration”) were matched by his good deeds (a White House concert in June celebrating both the Thelonious Monk Institute and the 40th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival, which ended with the President borrowing a saxophone and playing a very respectable blues solo).

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HOT PROPERTY OF THE YEAR: Joshua Redman. If he wasn’t a literal overnight sensation, his rise is as close as it gets; in 1991 he was still planning to enter Yale Law School, but after he won the Thelonious Monk saxophone competition everything changed. Today, at 24, he has an album, “Wish” (his second, for Warner Bros.), that recently was No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Time to practice? He says he barely has time to sleep, such are the demands on his services.

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YOUNG MAN OF THE YEAR: Christian McBride. The Juilliard-trained bassist was a pro at 13, toured Europe with Benny Golson at 18; today, at 21, he is one of the most sought-after bassists in New York. Redman, with whom he has been featured recently, has praised the “fire, intensity and unbridled passion” of his playing.

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PIANISTS OF THE YEAR: A tie between Jacky Terrasson and Eric Reed. Berlin-born, Paris-trained Terrasson is 27, an eclectic whose impact in the United States was helped when he won this year’s Monk competition. Terrasson can be heard as a sideman on “Wailin’ at the Village Vanguard” by Arthur Taylor’s Wailers (Verve). Reed, at 23, knows his way around from Dizzy and Bird back to Gershwin and Porter; he has displayed his versatility in the Wynton Marsalis group and with his own trio. Reed has his own CD, “It’s All Right to Swing,” on the MoJazz label.

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SINGER OF THE YEAR: Nnenna Freelon. Having shaken off the Sarah Vaughan image, she is moving toward an individual sound that may be better captured in her next album for CBS-Sony.

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JAZZ MASTERS OF THE YEAR: Carmen McRae, Louie Bellson, Ahmad Jamal. They are this year’s National Endowment for the Arts honorees; their victories will be celebrated next month in Boston at the International Assn. of Jazz Educators’ convention. McRae’s honor is singularly appropriate, as she has been totally sidelined by illness since the spring of 1991 and no doubt can put the $20,000 honorarium to good use.

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COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: Annie Ross. Decades after her massive impact as part of the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross trio, she floated in and out, singing here, acting there, until Robert Altman provided her with a splendid chance to display both talents in the film “Short Cuts.”

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RECORDS OF THE YEAR: Not even the most diligent listener can claim to have heard more than a small proportion of the year’s 1,000-plus jazz releases, but among those reviewed, a few stand out: the Randy Weston/Melba Liston “Volcano Blues” (Verve), a strongly blues-oriented set with Liston’s arrangements of Weston’s compositions; Flip Phillips’ “Try a Little Tenderness” (Chiaroscuro), with Dick Hyman’s charts backing Phillips’ pleading tenor sax; Ryan Kisor’s “In the One,” in which the 20-year-old trumpeter displays a rare maturity; “The 87 Years of Doc Cheatham” (Columbia), revealing the trumpeter still in prime form, and, of course, Redman’s “Wish” (Warner Bros.).

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OUTSTANDING REISSUES: “The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books” (Verve), combining her songbook sets into a 16-CD box, and “Swing Time--The Fabulous Big Band Era 1925-1955” (Columbia). In general, it was an exceptional year for multiple-reissue packages on Rhino, Mosaic, Atlantic, Decca, etc.

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BLUE NOTES OF THE YEAR: One waits in vain for these annual lists to grow shorter, but the losses were no lighter than usual: Mario Bauza, Albert Collins, Bob Cooper, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Adelaide Hall, Art Hodes, Clifford Jordan, Rich Matteson, Sun Ra, George Wallington, Frank Zappa--ave atque vale.