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Review Continuation
In Pursut of moments of musical happiness By Megan Bennett / Journal North Reporter
SANTA FE, N.M. — Bert Dalton says he’s just a guy from Chicago who likes to swing. Bert is receiving the
Platinum Music Award from the New Mexico Music Commission next weekend.
And over the past 30 years, that’s been more than enough for him to become a fixture in New Mexico’s music
community, both as a performer and an educator.
The 67-year-old Santa Fe resident, who is also the longtime music director for the state’s National Dance Institute
and co-founder of the New Mexico School for the Arts’ jazz program, is one of this year’s recipients of the lifetime
achievement award from the New Mexico Music Commission. The 2019 Platinum Music Awards ceremony will be
held Friday night at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.
“It’s very humbling and unexpected,” Dalton said during a recent interview in the music offices at NDI’s Dance
Barns in Santa Fe. “It’s also very validating, having been involved in musical activities on many different levels in
New Mexico for all this time.”
Others receiving the 2019 awards are northern New Mexico traditional music icon Cipriano Vigil; Taos Pueblo
musician Robert Mirabal; mariachi show producer Noberta Fresquez; educator, violist and promoter Jim Bonnell;
and Santa Fe’s Candyman Strings and Things music store. Awardees are selected by a jury of music experts
following an open-call nomination process.
“Each (recipient) is really a hero in their own genre,” said David Schwartz, president of the Music Commission’s
foundation, which organizes the awards.
As for Dalton, Schwartz described him as “at the top of the heap,” both as a player who has led several different
musical outfits over the decades – opening for major acts like Tito Puente and the Count Basie Orchestra – and in
his role working with students.
“It’s really people like that, who have been operating under the radar for many years, that we have an opportunity to
showcase and show people what they’ve done,” Schwartz said.
Bert Dalton performs with his trio, which includes John Bartlit and Milo
Jaramillo. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)
Dalton, a Villa Park, Illinois, native, grew up in a musical family and took up piano at the age of
8 because he liked the harmonies and different chords he could produce on the keys.
But it wasn’t until his junior year of high school that he fell in love with jazz. It started after
he attended an intercollegiate jazz festival at nearby Elmhurst College.
“And I just loved the sound, those horns and the rhythm section,” he remembered. “All my friends
were into Dave Clark Five and I was out buying Buddy Rich records. I thought there was something
wrong with me.”
“There probably is,” he joked.
Dalton attended Northern Illinois University for its jazz program and studied for three years
before deciding in 1973 to take a semester off to play professionally. He never went back.
“It’s been a long sabbatical,” he said.
After a few years on the Chicago music scene, he formed his first major group, the Chicago Jazz
Exchange. The trio and vocalist combo recorded and toured across the country and internationally
for nearly a decade, including in New Mexico. When the group disbanded in the late ’80s, Dalton
decided that Santa Fe – where his group had noticed an eager audience for their sound – could be a
good place to go and play some jazz.
“And it’s been 30 years; still trying to play some jazz in Santa Fe,” he said.
Santa Fe jazz pianist Bert Dalton (left) with members of his Afro-Cuban salsa group Yoboso are seen
after opening for Latin jazz icon Tito Puente (center) in the mid-90s. Dalton is one of the
recipients of a Platinum Music lifetime achievement award from
the New Mexico Music Commission.
(Courtesy of Bert Dalton)
His first group in Santa Fe, Yoboso, was a “Latin/Afro-Cuban-based salsa” jazz quartet. The group
was active from 1992 to 2000 and toured the country, as well as overseas in such countries as
Australia and New Zealand. With both Yoboso and his subsequent Bert Dalton Trio, he’s been a
regular at the La Fonda Bar.
The trio still plays gigs locally and backs up other ensembles occasionally, among them the Santa
Fe Desert Chorale.
In recent years, Dalton also has explored his affinity for Brazilian-style jazz with The Brazil
Project, an expanded sion of the trio. Its most recent CD release was an homage to the work of
German-Brazilian pianist Manfredo
Fest.
Milo Jaramillo, a bassist from Isleta Pueblo who has played with Dalton for 20 years, starting with
Yoboso, called his bandmate a “maestro,” well-versed in all kinds of genres. Though the central
focus is jazz, Jaramillo has seen Dalton play different styles like Broadway tunes or pop charts
with ease.
And as a group, the trio members say, they’ll do everything from blues – a nod to Dalton’s Windy
City roots – to standards from Duke Ellington and Count Basie, to songs that fall within the Latin
dance genres, such as samba, rumba, merengue or calypso. And Dalton arranges most of their
repertoire, Jaramillo explained.
“There’s nothing he hasn’t touched or can’t touch; he’s not afraid of it,” he said.
That versatility comes in handy in Dalton’s other line of work; his day job as the music director
as NDI-New Mexico. He stumbled across the organization in 1996 when he received a call from a
friend asking him if he wanted to play for a dance class at an elementary school.
“I said, ‘Well, I guess. What do I play?’ ” Dalton recalled. “And he said ‘You’ll know what to do.’
And that was my training.”
He doesn’t remember which elementary school it was, but does distinctly recall its out-of-tune
piano and the cafeteria’s school lunch smell. Still, he kept working with dance students and in
1998 became NDI’s music director. Today, he’s also the organization’s longest-serving staff member.
Dalton said his job during school hours has allowed him to sustain his performing career at night.
But what has kept him with NDI for so long, he said, is its mission of using music and dance to
help inspire kids.
“In some cases, it changes lives,” he said. “And to be able to do that through the arts is really
interesting. I’ve learned to use music as a tool, not only to support the (dance) instructor, but
also to engage and motivate the children through music.”
As the music director, he trains incoming musicians and other staffers, and collaborates within the
dance institute’s artistic side, arranging compositions for dancing and organizing ensembles for
themed shows.
But his main job, he said, is still accompanying classes. He plays for dancing kids five days a
week, where he’s able to pull from his roots in jazz, particularly as an improviser. In the class
setting, he has to be able to follow the instructor on the fly.
“I’ll take a jazz musician over a ballet pianist any day, because they can adapt,” he said. “They
can go, ‘Oh I can make something up. What does this step sound like?’ To create something on the
spot. That’s always appealed to my jazz creative side, having to be in the moment and create
something in the moment.”
Over the past decade, Dalton also helped start the School for the Arts’ jazz program in partnership
with Santa Fe drummer John Trentacosta.
The two approached the school with hopes of expanding its music program beyond a classical
curriculum. They started teaching students on alternating mornings before school, Dalton said,
bringing in charts and going over the basics of improv. Two years ago, the program evolved from an
extracurricular activity into a class during the school day. Music students are also now able to
select a “jazz track” for their studies in their junior and senior years, Dalton said.
Dalton is “thrilled” about the growth of the School for the Arts program and his role in getting
local kids interested in jazz. He said he’s not only happy that the teens are picking up on the
traditions and roots of jazz, but also that they use what they learn for self-expression.
“To become a jazz musician, you have to learn how to become yourself,” Dalton said. He explained
that, to be successful, a musician has to be fully in touch with who they are, so their expression
is authentic.
“In other words, you can’t just be a copycat,” he said. “You draw from the great musicians, you
listen to the great musicians, you study them, but in the end you incorporate that into what you
are as an individual.”
Does he feel he’s attained that in his own work?
“At times,” Dalton said. “There’s times where everything i
you and the band is hot,
and there’s those moments where the music comes to you.
“It’s very elusive,” he added. “We’re always in pursuit of those moments of musical happiness.”
Continuation of Midnight Coffee Review from All About Jazz
That you visited this site allows us to comfortably draw certain inferences: as you were being born, your parents instructed the Delivery Room staff, ”Lay some Jimmy Smith on the speakers. If it's a boy, switch to Maynard; if it's a girl, Carmen.”
Your ears started off on the right foot.
We may further conclude that, as a teenager, you didn't have much truck with those candy-ass jocks. You knew that A 440 referred, not to a canter around the cinders,
but to the frequency to which the oboist should aspire at tune-up time. When you talked about sharpening your axe, it had nothing to do with a Boy Scout Field Trip.
That when you used words like "burn" and "chops", you weren't referring to the disaster du jour from Kitchen Arts. When your conversation included the stand-alone syllable "Gee," you were talking about the note above the staff; not the string.
You had, in other words, a perfect, normal childhood.
Therefore, we confidently commend to you a kindred spirit, premier jazz pianist Bert Dalton. You need to become aware of Dalton because he is already an old friend of yours.
Our first mesmerizing exposure to Bert Dalton came in the early '80s in that fabled hotbed; that storied cauldron of mainstream jazz: El Paso, Texas. He was working a dimly-lit outhouse of a joint that reeked of fresh smoke and stale beer.
Mammaratudinously-advantaged ladies with teased-up hair sloshed watered-down booze onto tables smaller than a ten-gallon hat.
It was, in other words, a perfect jazz venue.
During the coming years Dalton would co-lead the Chicago Jazz Exchange, tour the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand and record on the CBS label. His quartet, Yoboso, would garner Latin Jazz Album of the Year honors,
and he would become a rostered artist with the New Mexico Arts Division and the Arizona Council on the Arts.
Bert Dalton has, with Uber-Sidemen John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton, brewed Midnight Coffee under the Trialog Records marque. The date starts with a cooker: the Dave Frishberg/Johnny Mandel classic, "El Cajon," and moves through the remaining nine tracks
tastefully and logically. Four of the tunes are Dalton originals including our personal favorite: the haunting, mystical "Into Your Spell." It could keep you up nights.
The sole standard on the date is Duke Ellington's laid-back blues, "Things Ain't What They Used To Be," and it is joyous. As un-cool as it might have been, I fully expected to hear the guys laughing out loud. At only 6:29, I wish that it had clocked longer.
Compliments to Dalton for including Jimmy Rowles' "The Peacocks." Too often overlooked, it's a welcome addition to this lustrous first outing.
With the release of Midnight Coffee, Dalton has established himself as a natural addition to that hallowed and pristine alcove in the Jazz Pianists Hall Of Fame that includes Jimmy Rowles, Alan Broadbent, and Ross Tompkins.
He has ear-bending, astounding technique, be he producing single-note icicle-like riffs or nudging, pounding, slathering, patting ten- and twelve-note chords into place. His musicianship is flawless in its conception and delivery. His selection of tunes is impeccable.
Midnight Coffee (Trialog Records), a tour de force collaboration by three giants of jazz with one voice, is of Grammy Award-winning calibre.
~ Richard Hague
Continuation of Midnight Coffee Review from Paul Weideman
The trio recorded the album one February day in Los Angeles using 2-inch analog tape and vintage Neumann microphones. Dalton’s aim was to recreate the warm quality of recordings made during the 1960s.
One eight-hour session sufficed to capture the 10 tracks, and there were no overdubs and no second chances at solos.
“There are things in my own playing I debated changing and fixing but John’s comment to me was, ‘If you make it perfect, I won’t buy it,’” Dalton writes.
Midnight Coffee includes both jazz standards and Dalton original tunes. The moods vary from up-tempo swing to ballads – this is straight-ahead piano jazz with plenty of inventiveness.
“I come from a bag where I love to swing and I love interesting harmonies,” Dalton said in an interview.
Dalton’s main influences are Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and Ahmad Jamal, he said. His title track on the new CD is a song other pianists will love, a swinging piece on which Dalton demonstrates a varied musical language.
The bassist and drummer, as expected from their credentials, do better than merely supporting the material. Clayton, playing arco, opens and closes the trio’s version of the beautiful Jimmy Rowles piece “Peacocks.” For contrast listen
to the lively dialog between Hamilton and Clayton (pizzicato here) on “Indeed.”
The album’s tunes include Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” and Dalton’s lovely, breezy “Where Sea Meets Sky,” the latter an interesting variation in tone color from the version on Yoboso’s 1998 CD Off The Menu.
The trio does a fine job on “Into Your Spell,” creating a ravishing ballad out of a song Dalton wrote 15 years ago and promptly stuck in a drawer.
Dalton has contributed to more than two dozen recordings as keyboard player, composer, arranger, producer or engineer but Midnight Coffee is his first effort as leader.
It’s appropriate that this benchmark comes in the trio format, which he has preferred since his early days of gigging in Chicago’s Rush Street and Lincoln Avenue jazz scenes.
“That’s where I cut my teeth,” he said. “The musical standard in Chicago in those days, the 1970s, was exceptionally high: You had to know lots of standards and be able to improvise.
“I used to work five days a week from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. in the clubs. I played in a place called The Back Room. You’d go about 100 yards down an alley to this smoky little club, and they piped the music out to the street, so you’d better be cooking.”
It was a competitive atmosphere for young jazz players.
“That was good, because it kept the musical standard high,” Dalton said. “It was an encouraging kind of competition but if you didn’t know a tune you’d better go home and learn it if you wanted to get back into a club.”
Dalton went on to play with saxophonists Bud Shank and Frank Morgan, flutist Herbie Mann, singer Anita O’Day, violinist Regina Carter and guitarist Howard Alden, among others.
He is co-founder of the Latin-jazz quartet Yoboso’, which won the 1996 Jazz Discovery Competition sponsored by Black Entertainment Television. The group’s first CD, Ya Llego!, won the New Mexico “Mic” Award for recording excellence and climbed into the top 20 in Latin music airplay in San Francisco and Miami.
Dalton, who also serves as music director of the National Dance Institute of New Mexico, has toured throughout the United States and in Australia and New Zealand, recently headlining the Manly International Jazz Festival, Australia’s largest.
“That was my third tour of Australasia,” he said. “The quality of the musicianship there is world-standard. We had the opportunity to play with saxophonist Sir Don Burrows, an icon of Australian jazz and he’ll take a group out to a little town
and do a clinic in a sheep-shearing shed. It was quite an honor to play with him.”
Clayton is a protégé of Ray Brown, with whom he has recorded. The bassist’s other collaborations have included work with Milt Jackson, Quincy Jones and George Benson.
Clayton is artistic director of jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl. He has co-led the Clayton Brothers with his younger brother, alto saxophonist Jeff Clayton, off and on since 1977,
and in 1985 put together the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra with his brother and drummer Hamilton.
Dalton’s triomates on Midnight Coffee worked with jazz singers Natalie Cole and Diana Krall.
One of Hamilton’s early breaks was the chance to play with the New Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in 1974. He then joined Lionel Hampton’s Band until 1975 when he joined Clayton in the Monty Alexander Trio.
Hamilton’s resume includes work with the Count Basie Orchestra and singer Rosemary Clooney.
“I’ve been fortunate to be in successful ensembles but I’ve never put out an album as a statement of what I do at the piano,” Dalton said. “First and foremost I’m a jazz piano player, so I wanted to do that in a setting with some recognized names and I’m very happy with what we were able to come up with.
“I love the interaction in a good jazz trio and John and Jeff swing like mad.”
Dalton will celebrate the release of Midnight Coffee on Saturday evening at Vanessie of Santa Fe. He will play jazz with drummer Dave Bryant and bassist Rob “Milo” Jaramillo. The Dalton-Bryant-Jaramillo trio performs Monday and Tuesday evenings at La Fonda.
Continuation of Got Jazz Review
The songlist includes Henry Mancini’s “ Pink Panther” theme and similarly fun and well-known music from The Jungle Book, Sesame Street, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
“Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” from The Aristocats is a standout. It begins nice and easy, with some very fluid bass work by Jaramillo.
Then Bartlit sparks up the tempo, Jaramillo switches to a fast walk, and Dalton takes off. The song easily holds interest by virtue of the fact that it shifts gears four or five times,
ending with a vocal part by children Megan Ewy, Zoe Mannick, Christopher McArthur, Dakota Vigil, and Sofia Franklin; they have a bigger role on the Dalton composition “Got Jazz.”
The album was recorded earlier this year at the National Dance Institute of New Mexico. “ Got Jazz” was the title and theme of this year’s annual springtime NDI event,
which saw participation by about 1,000 area children. This trio has performed intact for five years, and their perfect chemistry shows on "Got Jazz".
A CD-release party is set for 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, July 16, at Vanessie of Santa Fe (982-9966). — Paul Weideman
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