Mr. JON ALTERMAN (Center for Strategic and International Studies): I've seen peacekeeping forces work.
Mr. Alterman says it was the music of Mr. Person that first made him fall in love with jazz.
One of Mr. Alterman's two compositions in the set, "The First Night Home, " is a ballad for the ages.
Mr. Alterman's continually evolving presence on the jazz scene surely makes people smile and, if the room is right, dance.
Al-Jaabari controlled the militias with an iron grip, as Jon Alterman, for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out.
And in 2011, four years after Mr. Alterman came here from Atlanta to study music at New York University, the two men finally met.
The director of the Middle East program there, Jon Alterman, is far more skeptical about an international stabilization force as long as Hezbollah remains an armed militia.
Mr. Person was giving a master class, and after hearing Mr. Alterman play some of the American songbook classics, the older jazzman had found someone to mentor.
Observers such as Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, say a wider Mideast conflict could be avoided.
But Alterman also fears that an Iraq left without U.S. support could turn into a center for international terrorism and a proxy battlefield for regional powers like Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
But he moves memorably inside his listeners, as evidenced in his current CD, "Joe Alterman: Give Me the Simple Life" (mileshighrecords.com) with bassist James Crammach, drummer Herlin Riley and, of course, Mr. Person.
And as Mr. Alterman began to record his own sessions, Mr. Person, when he had the time, became one of his sidemen also helping him find the right keys and teaching him the business side of jazz.
In this city during the past few years, I've enjoyed witnessing the deepening jazz-family relationship between pianist-composer Joe Alterman, 24, and tenor saxophonist Houston Person, 78, a musician whom I'd profiled in the Journal in 2010.
"Joe has a great sense of what is most meaningful in the history and tradition of our music, and a real solid musical vision of where to take it, " says Mr. Person in a note in Mr. Alterman's archives.
At one point in our conversations, since he is as articulate and often surprising off the piano as on, I asked Mr. Alterman to describe his inner musical odyssey from boyhood in Atlanta to growing recognition in New York and by the jazz community.
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