By far the worst news I had this last week was the death of the great guitarist Russell Malone from a massive heart attack after a characteristically terrific concert in Tokyo. He was just sixty, and a very boyish sixty at that, which is far too early to take his leave.
Russell was kind enough to lend his spectacular talents to The Mark Steyn Show on multiple occasions over the years, and everyone loved working with him. The performance above is from four years ago, with another musical friend Carol Welsman and a song that was celebrating its centenary in 2020. There aren't many standards whose story ties Al Jolson to Vladimir Putin and Giacomo Puccini, but this one does, as I explain in my introduction, after which Carol, Russell and the band take off and have a ball. Click below to watch:
"Avalon", music and lyrics by Al Jolson and Vincent Rose
Carol Welsman, piano and vocals
Russell Malone, guitar
with Michel Berthiaume, drums; Jon Geary, guitar; Mathieu McConnell-Enright, bass; Bill Mahar, trumpet; and Jean-Pierre Zanella, saxophone.
On Wednesday's Q&A, Allison Coates, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, asked me to say a few words about Russell, which you can hear by clicking above. Here's how I answered Allison:
Allison Coates says, 'I hope you'll say a few words about the great Russell Malone, who died suddenly in Japan just after a performance on August 23rd. I very much enjoyed his appearances on The Mark Steyn Show.
Indeed, Allison. Russell was one of the greatest jazz guitarists of our time. He was playing a gig in Tokyo on Friday night. It was a triumph, as it usually is, with Russell, and then he went back to his hotel and died from a massive heart attack... I loved having him on the show. I first got to know him must be almost twenty years ago now. My friend Dorothée Berryman, whom you've seen on our show over the years... Dorothée was in New York while I happened to be there for Fox News. And Dorothée was there for some Quebec Christmas Tree promotion with Quebec tree farmers in wherever it was, Times Square or Fifth Avenue, doing her bit with them. So after Fox - I'd been doing Hannity or something - I wanted to go and see something.
So she said, 'Oh, there's this guitarist I love, Russell Malone', and he was playing in a club called Smoke way up in Harlem. And he came out and he he started noodling away at something. And I enjoyed the noodle. And about two minutes into the noodle, I realised, wait a minute, this is 'Lollipops and Roses' - a hideous saccharine song I've always loathed, and yet he managed to turn it into the coolest thing. But anyway, at the end of the evening, he came around the tables, and we stood out because we obviously weren't from Harlem. So he came over to talk to Dorothée and me, and he sat down and had a couple of drinks with us ...and we just got on, and he came and did several Steyn shows.
He was in demand. He was a great guitarist. He was in demand by a lot of vocalists - Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr, Andy Williams... We had a long conversation about Andy: he loved Andy Williams' voice, and he just got a call saying, 'Can you come and play with Andy?' And he played. He was kind enough to accompany me a few times, but it was always very nerve-wracking, because, you know, the regular guys in the band, or Monique Fauteaux when she's accompanying me on the piano, know that just before I come in, just before the vocal, you have to give me a nice clean note so I know to hit my right note. And Russell always had things where, if he'd do the intro, we'd always send him the arrangement - and he'd never play what was in the little guitar intro. He'd just do like sixteen bars of something that would catch his fancy in the harmony somewhere. And he'd just do his little sixteen bars and end with something that gave me no clue what note I was supposed to be on to start the vocals. I wound up staying up all night practicing in the mirror the right note over and over.
But he was just a complete joy, incredibly generous. The last time he was on our Christmas show, at the end I thanked everyone... 'Rocking Around the Christmas Tree', I think, was the big finale. Everyone did, whatever it was, four bars or eight bars of it. And I threw to him to play his four bars or whatever, of 'Rocking Around the Christmas Tree', which I'm sure wasn't the greatest thrill of his life, but he was terrific at it. And then we all sort of walked down the steps off the stage and in among the crowd to at the end of the show. But Russell stayed on stage to play my arrangement of 'Marshmallow World' as our exit music - and the band were just thrilled by that. Because he was a big shot, and he didn't need to do that. And you know, is 'Marshmallow World' the kind of thing that's most important to him? But Jon Geary, our guitarist, was absolutely thrilled by that - that Russell just stayed on as if he was one of the boys in the band and played that 'Marshmallow World' exit music.
He was just an incredibly generous guy like that. And I'm devastated that he's dead because he was so easy to work with. It didn't matter what was going on. It didn't matter whether it was something he was into or something he was indifferent to. He would just do it justice. And I'm so glad that the last time I saw him - I was sort of a bit sentimental, as I have been in recent years - but I gave him, you know, I hugged him. Because I adored him. I adored his playing. I adored the way he always turned up looking great: he was always immaculately dressed. I adored the way sometimes he would know whatever piece we'd asked him for, and sometimes he wouldn't, but either way he would always find some corner of it that that nobody had done before. He was a great guy, and I'm devastated to think that he will be...You know, I've felt a lot of doors closing the last couple of years, closing permanently, and it saddens me that Russell's presence on the Mark Steyn show is one of those doors too.
That's the least of what he did. Check out his version of 'There Will Never Be Another You'. Or - what is it? Not 'For All We kKnow' ... I've forgotten the title. It's just a little pop song that he does just beautifully. He did everything beautifully. I'm very upset about the news from Tokyo.
As I mention above, on that first night I met Russell, he did two minutes of noodling before he let the song reveal itself. That's the opposite of what many jazz players do: The standard format is to state the tune and then depart from it more and more in successive improvisations. But Russell generally picked songs because he was (in the title of one of his albums) All About Melody, and we talked one time rather seriously about how, if he felt the melody was pretty great, he liked just to let it kind of emerge.
Here he is playing my very favourite composer, Jerome Kern, and a favourite song of mine, "Remind Me":
He had worked with so many people over the years that he had connections with almost everyone. And he loved to swap takes on vocalists and band leaders and soloists. I was talking with my daughter about something or other and she replied, "C'mon, dad, everyone knows the best version of that song is by Al Hirt" - and Russell laughed at the idea that someone my daughter's age would even be aware of Al Hirt, and then chipped in with the actual best version of whatever it was, plus a couple of tracks where Al had come pretty close to the best version. Sometimes, if we were chatting and he was tickled by some observation of mine about whatever title had come up, he'd pick up his guitar and see if there was anything to it. I shall miss those moments.
After my remarks on our Q&A, our musical maven Gary Alexander wrote:
Thank you for mentioning your personal encounters with Russell Malone. You mentioned his solo on the Harry Warren song, 'There Will Never Be Another You,' so I looked it up, and it was a master class in improvising and swing, as led by Dr. Billy Taylor and his trio (Chip Jackson, bass and Winard Harper, drums):
Actually, Gary, I was thinking of an entirely different ballad treatment I heard him do once. But the above is pretty great. And that's Russell.
Rest in peace, dear friend.