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BY JAMES McQUILLEN
17a,
A Memorial Concert
Long before I met Richard Burdell, his sister Cindy introduced him to me in the form of a videotape made at the Mount Hood Jazz Festival in the early 1980s. Recorded in grainy footage and distorted sound was the quick-witted, high-spirited improvisation of an athletic, charming trumpeter and a leader in the Portland jazz scene. Watching him on screen a decade ago was an unsettling experience; two years earlier he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease) and told he had two years to live. This June, at dusk on the summer solstice, he died after requesting that his life support be disconnected. One of his last wishes was for his friends to give a concert to help educate people about ALS, and this week some of them--including Obo Addy, Mel Brown, Robert Cray, Tom Grant, Thara Memory, Ron Steen and Ben Wolfe--will honor him and his wish with a memorial at the Washington Park Zoo. Illness often strikes with cruel irony. Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease progressively robbed choreographer George Balanchine of coordination before killing him, and H.L. Mencken spent the last years of his life unable to speak. As a trumpeter, Burdell made music with his breath and punctuated it with his tongue; in 1988 he could no longer breathe on his own, and he would depend on a ventilator for the next decade. It was in his tongue that ALS first manifested itself in the summer of 1984, and the progression of symptoms was captured on tape. Burdell was playing keyboard at the time, not trumpet, but in technical asides on a series of pre-production recordings, one can hear an increasing inability to make certain sounds over the course of a year. "You end up crying at the end," says Cindy, much of whose life since then has been devoted to caring for him. "You realize what was happening." In addition to the speech problems, he developed a halting gait, and that's when, mistaken for a drunk, he started getting kicked out of bars. Soon he would be virtually paralysed. Before ALS, Burdell was an influential figure in Portland jazz. Once a student of Woody Shaw, he played with a variety of wildly popular bands, including Kukrudu and Cruise Control, a jazz-fusion ensemble with heavy funk and soul influences. He was a teacher of jazz improvisation at Mount Hood Community College, and by all regards a gifted one. Underage musicians would regularly sneak into clubs to hear him; one such listener was Ben Wolfe, a bassist who later studied improv with him and then went on to play with Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis (both of whom called Richard the day he died to say goodbye). As he lay immobile for years, enduring acute discomfort and countless operations to maintain his withering body, his spirit continued to infuse the people around him. He was inspiring in the truest sense: Friends and acquaintances were visibly energized when they talked about him, and people who never knew him were amazed by this man who for 14 years lived with a disease that was supposed to kill him in two. He even continued to enliven the music scene, as his friends played regular benefit concerts--as they will again, at least one more time.
originally published September 9, 1998 |
