Jazz: Body and Soul - The Photography of Bob Willoughby with a Foreword by Dave Brubeck

August 10, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Harry Carney and Gerry Mulligan: Two of A Kind

The West Coast in the 1950s: a time of youth, exuberance and change. Nowhere was this more evident than in the music emanating from the California jazz scene.

We have been fortunate to have many great photographers such as William Claxton, Ray Avery and Bob Willoughby chronicling Jazz on the West Coast at many of the concert halls and clubs where the music was performed from 1945-1960..

BOB WILLOUGHBY is best known as the master chronicler of Hollywood in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. He shot for all the major studios and his work was carried extensively in magazines such as Look, Life and Harper's Bazaar. Willoughby’s iconic images continue to be avidly collected and are included in museums the world over, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery.

Before he became known as the great chronicler of Hollywood stars, photographer Bob Willoughby had produced an astonishing series on these pivotal jazz musicians. Working at night in his garage darkroom to avoid light leaks, the radio blasting, Willoughby heard all the greats from that golden era of jazz. If he heard a live broadcast from a local venue, he'd drop everything and rush down there with his cameras to shoot. Willoughby had a huge appreciation of jazz, both in its technical aspects and its ability to raise the roof in performance. He had a masterful feel for the character of the artists, and was able to convey it even in the most difficult lighting conditions of recording studios and stage.

Many of Bob’s images have been collected in Jazz: Body & Soul - Bob Willoughby Photographs and Recollections.

In Jazz: Body and Soul you'll find unrivaled images of the most famous artists of the time — Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Billie Holiday — and never-before published photographs of inspired performances and backstage jitters. Accompanied by Willoughby's intimate recollections, this is a unique first-hand view of what it was like to be there, as part of what Dave Brubeck's son Darius proclaimed "the beginning of the beyond."

Fittingly, pianist Dave Brubeck wrote the following Foreword to this compilation.

“San Francisco, 1950s. I think of this period as the most exciting period in my life. It was a time of youth, exuberance, hope, and change. The arts reflected the movements shaping a post-war society. Life in San Francisco was vibrant. Radio stations still played live music. My first radio broadcasts reached audiences throughout the Western states, as far as Honolulu, out into the Pacific, and into a garage photo lab where a very young Bob Willoughby listened to the new sounds.

Improvisation was the operative word then, spilling over (literally) on to the artists' canvases, and poets' and authors' pages, and stand-up comics' routines. San Francisco nightclubs spawned satirical humorists Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce; Sunday afternoon sessions of Jazz & Poetry with the two Kenneths, Patchen and Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg and others; while a whole generation went On the Road with Jack Kerouac. Improvisation, along with something Paul Desmond called ESP, was key to the music that Paul and created together. Someone later dubbed it "cool" (which it was not) and gave the new movement in jazz a geographic designation, West Coast (which was also misleading, as a similar movement was afoot in New York). Whatever it was called, the music had an immediacy that spoke to the young audiences of that period.

By 1951 the trio that had broadcast on NBC had become a quartet with the addition of Paul Desmond on alto saxophone. We were making our first West Coast appearances away from home ground, San Francisco, when we met Bob Willoughby. It was a big deal. We got into our cars (mine was a Kaiser Vagabond) and drove to Los Angeles to play at a club called The Haig, a converted bungalow situated across the street from the Ambassador Hotel. Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and I had made a trade. They would play at the Black Hawk, our San Francisco headquarters, while we took over their regular spot at The Haig. During that initial engagement Bob Willoughby took some spectacular photos of our group. When Fantasy Records was about to release our first recording with Paul Desmond, I recommended that Sol and Max Weiss contact Bob to obtain those pictures. The dramatic black and white photograph that became the cover of the first Quartet LP may have also been the first of such covers that subsequently became almost de rigueur in communicating that "cool jazz" was inside the record sleeve.

Fantasy Records, Bob Willoughby and the Dave Brubeck Quartet were all struggling at this time to launch fledgling careers. I understand that Sol and Max made a deal to pay Bob "in kind." Instead of the new jazz records he expected, he was given a stash of Chinese Opera recordings, the lucrative side of Fantasy's business at that time. Later, of course, as our careers advanced, and Bob became quite famous for his stills in the movie industry, he photographed the Quartet for Columbia Records and I trust he received just compensation.

Paul and I always felt at ease with Bob behind the camera. He not only had a good eye, he had a keen ear, and seemed to know when to snap at an inspired moment. Thank you, Bob, for your superb document of a wonderful period in jazz; a golden era that my son, Darius, a jazz educator, writing of the fifties, described as "the beginning of the beyond."

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Harry Carney and Gerry Mulligan: Two of A Kind

August 11, 2015, 10:00 am

≫ Next: J.J. Johnson's "Lament"

≪ Previous: Jazz: Body and Soul - The Photography of Bob Willoughby with a Foreword by Dave Brubeck

Is it significant, I wonder, that neither Harry Carney nor Gerry Mulligan could identify any of the baritone saxophone players in the following Blindfold Test which was conducted by Leonard Feather and published in the Nov. 18, 1965 edition of Downbeat magazine?

No matter, when those two got together, it was like listening in to a mutual admiration society.

Come to think of it, it was and deservedly so.

“The Battle of the Baritones came about purely by chance. Harry Carney [HC] was in town; I had never conducted a Blindfold Test with him and made a solo appointment. Then Gerry Mulligan [GM], who has visited this page three times before (but not in the last five years), became available on the same day.

As any student of the saxophone should know, Carney is to the baritone what Coleman Hawkins is to the tenor. In addition to his role as founding father, he has the unique distinction of being the side-man of longest duration in any jazz group now extant, having recently started his 40th year as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Mulligan, though only 38, may seem to younger jazz fans like a senior citizen, almost two decades having passed since he went to New York from Philadelphia and joined Gene Krupa's big band.

1. Donald Byrd. "6 M's" (from Royal Flush, Blue Note). Byrd, trumpet, composer; Pepper Adams, baritone saxophone.

H.C.: They all got in a very good blues mood there. It had a nice feeling all the way. I don't know who the baritone player was, but he got a good, big sound.

G.M.: It was interesting to me in that this is essentially a very basic, three-chord blues thing, and under these circumstances, sometimes it's difficult for a soloist to keep his conception on a very elementary level harmonically. It seems to me that the trumpet player did this more completely than the baritone, who tended to become little more complicated.

H.C.: I'd say it's worth four stars.

G.M.: I'll go along with that.

2. Woody Herman. "I Remember Duke" (from Road Band, Capitol). Herman, clarinet, composer; Nat Pierce, piano; Jack Nimitz, baritone saxophone. Recorded in 1955.

G.M.: Yeah! Woody!

H.C.: Right—you can't mistake that sound. It was a hard-swinging band, too. There was a little Ellington touch when they used the plungers in that first chorus... . I liked the stride piano effect, but he didn't keep it going.

G.M.: I'm trying to figure out which Herman band this is. It could be from the early period. There was one passage that sounded like an awkward splice, but I wonder whether it wasn't made before they started using tape. Anyhow, the solo work was good. The baritone was effective toward the end, but he used some questionable changes. As far as his sound is concerned, he sounded like me; from the period this comes from, and the uncertainty about changes, it could be Serge Chaloff.

H.C.: I liked it three-and-a-half stars' worth. Baritone was nice on the whole.

G.M.: I'd say about three.

3. John Coltrane. "Chim Chim Cheree" (from John Coltrane Plays..., Impulse). Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.

H.C.: The tune itself is all right; we played it in the Ellington album of Mary Poppins tunes. I liked the part in front where they played the melody. Then it started going into those Eastern sounds, almost like an Oriental-type instrument, instead of a saxophone. I've heard things like that played in the Middle East. It gets kind of monotonous after a while. The rhythm section was good. I'd give it maybe two to three stars.

G.M.: You're right, it did get to sound like a double-reed instrument. It wasn't exactly my favorite record. I'd agree with your rating.

4. Maynard Ferguson. "The Lady's in Love with You" (from Color Him Wild, Mainstream). Ferguson, trumpet; Ronnie Cuber, baritone saxophone; Don Rader, arranger.

H.C.: There seemed to be some difference between the balance on the saxophone passages and the sound on the rest of it—it didn't match. But the trumpet player was good, and the arrangement built up well enough.

G.M.: The baritone player sounded like he had a hell of a lot to say, but...

H.C.: But he was trying to say it all at once.

G.M.: Right. And between the big sound and everything he was blowing, it got to be a bit overpowering. You can get a sound like that just by getting right on top of the microphone. He eased up a little later in the solo. I'd say three stars.

H.C.: Make mine three and a half.

5. Elvin Jones. "Elvin Elpus" (from And Then Again, Atlantic). Charles Davis, baritone saxophone; Jones, drums; Melba Liston, composer.

G.M.: Boy, that just had to be a date where the drummer was the leader. There was no mistaking that. There sure was an awful lot going on, but it didn't jell too well. It just wouldn't be fair to judge the baritone player by what he does here.

H.C.: I think that what they were attempting here had some possibilities, but perhaps they should have devoted more time to it. Three stars.

G.M.: He gives it three stars because he's nicer than I am. I'll give it two. Incidentally, they didn't do very well with the 5/4 meter; it sounded more like an un-swinging job of 3/4.

6. Gerry Mulligan and Ben Webster.

"Chelsea Bridge" (from Mulligan Meets Webster, Verve). Webster, tenor saxophone; Mulligan, baritone saxophone; Billy Strayhorn, composer.

G.M.: Ten stars! Anything Benjie plays on automatically gets 10.

H.C.: Of course, Ben can do no wrong, and here he's playing this beautiful opening solo; yet you're forced also to listen to Gerry's obbligato. This commands immediate attention right at the beginning of the record, and all the way through there's something to keep listening for and you always know it's going to come off. Gerry does just about everything good that can be done on the baritone; in terms of mood, quality, taste, control, ideas, it was perfect; and the tune itself, of course, is beautiful.

G.M.: God, I love to play with Ben.

H.C.: I'm sure, by the same token, he had a ball.

G.M.: It's very hard for me to select one album as the best of all I ever made, but this really does rate as my favorite.

H.C.: I'll go the limit on that one. Five and then five more!

7. Duke Ellington. "Rhapsody in Blue" (from Will Big Bands Ever Come Back?, Reprise). Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet; Paul Gonsalves, tenor saxophone; Harry Carney, baritone saxophone; Sam Woodyard, drums; George Gershwin, composer; Billy Strayhorn, arranger.

G.M.: What a wonderful opening. I'll give it five stars on its own and another five for Harry. I also love the beautiful, gentle tenor solo that Paul plays. Jimmy Hamilton's solo was fine, and the arrangement was great.

The only passage I wasn't too crazy about was where it got into the use of the kettle-drum effects, making it a very percussive thing. It was a little in the style of the way Whiteman played it when Ferde Grofe orchestrated it. I know what the intent was, but it's a really haunting melody, and I prefer not to hear that done to it. I never did like the Whiteman version.

On second thought, I don't even mind that part; I like the whole arrangement. Nothing associated with the Ellington sound ever needs any justification.

H.C.: The arranger was beautiful.

The arranger is beautiful. And, of course, it comes out in this.

G.M.: That Swee'pea?

H.C.: Yes.

G.M.: It was gorgeous.

Afterthoughts by H.C., G.M.

G.M.: Baritone players tend to have an inconsistency of sound between different parts of their register. Some baritone men can't work up a consistent sound because they use it as a secondary instrument.

H.C.: This session has been most enlightening and enjoyable. I've heard some fine baritone players.

G.M.: Yes, I heard some interesting things and some wonderful playing, but I still have only one favorite baritone player— even if he does happen to be sitting here.

H.C.: You must be getting into ESP— you just beat me to the punch, vice versa!

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J.J. Johnson's "Lament"

August 12, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Victor Feldman Plays Everything In Sight

≪ Previous: Harry Carney and Gerry Mulligan: Two of A Kind

I found everything about the Columbia LP Miles Ahead or Miles Davis + 19 Davis fascinating as Gil Evans’ arrangements opened up a whole new world of sonorities for me.

Sometimes referred to as the Fourth Element or Atom after melody, harmony and rhythm, sonorities or textures refer to the way the music collectively sounds to the ear.

“Texture” is the word that is used to refer to the actual sound of the music. This encompasses the instruments with which it is played; its tonal colors; its dynamics; its sparseness or its complexity.

Texture involves anything to do with the sound experience and it is the word that is used to describe the overall impression that a piece of music creates in our emotional imagination.

Often our first and most lasting impression of a composition is usually based on that work’s texture, even though we are not aware of it. Generally, we receive strong musical impressions from the physical sound of any music and these then determine our emotional reaction to the work.

On Miles Ahead, Lament by J.J. Johnson really grabbed my attention because I’d never heard it before.

Trombonist J.J. Johnson’s Lament really sounded as the word implied - sad but in a beautiful sort of way.

I think that what makes the texture or sonority of J.J.’s Lament so interesting is that its melody centers around half notes and whole notes; sustained notes that bring out the lush, deep, melancholy tones of trombone. [One of the few instruments on which Jazz is played in bass clef.].

Ted Gioia offers more insights into both J.J. Johnson’s significance and Lament in these excerpts from his masterful The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire:

“No one did more to legitimize the trombone as a modern jazz instrument than J. J. Johnson. Not every horn survived the transition from swing to bop during the middle years of the twentieth century — the clarinet, for example, has never come close to recapturing the leading role it played in many jazz bands during the late 19308 and early 19405. Over the years, other instruments — the C-melody saxophone, the banjo, the cornet — have also struggled to retain their place in the jazz world. The trombone might easily have become another casualty, relegated to Dixieland ensembles or big band horn sections, had Johnson not shown at a decisive juncture that the big 'bone could adapt to the fleet and flashy stylings of the new idiom.

Yet as early as his high school years, Johnson also focused on writing and arranging. … Johnson's best-known composition today is a 32-bar ballad named "Lament."

Johnson's debut recording from 1954 testifies to the emotional pungency of the piece, and despite this trombonist's reputation for virtuosity, his approach here is understated with no wasted gestures or showy theatrics. Even so, it took another horn player to establish "Lament" as a jazz standard. Three years later, Miles Davis featured "Lament" on his high-profile collaboration with Gil Evans, Miks Ahead, a project that even today remains one of the biggest-selling jazz albums in the Columbia archive (now owned by Sony). Davis and Evans returned to the song for their 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, also released on LP by the Columbia label.

Most later versions emulate Davis's treatment, offering up "Lament" as a slow, wistful ballad. Few have tried to update or reconfigure this song—a wise choice, since this composition needs to be underplayed for best effect. I consider it more a test of a performer's emotional commitment rather than a vehicle for ingenuity or pyrotechnics.”

The following video features J.J.’s Lament as performed by drummer Dick Berk’s Jazz Adoption Agency which in addition to Dick on drums, Tad Weed on piano [Tad also wrote the arrangement] and Ken Filiano on bass fittingly features two trombonists: Andy Martin on slide trombone and Mike Fahn on valve trombone. The video’s imagery is by Kura Shomali who refers to himself as an “Artiste Plasticien” and who lives in Kinshasa, République démocratique du Congo.

“Artiste Plasticien” can be loosely translated as “visual artist” one who emphasizes the abstract properties of painting especially colors, lines, and contrast.

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Victor Feldman Plays Everything In Sight

August 13, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Roger Kellaway - STRIDE!

≪ Previous: J.J. Johnson's "Lament"

Many multi-instrumentalists had fun with over-dubbing and or multi-tracking when the long-playing record and audio tape first became a part of the Jazz scene in the 1950’s. I mean, why not try to coordinate recording all the instruments you can play even if what’s fun for you was an audio nightmare for the engineers in the pre-digital age?

Pianist like Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans were early experimenters with multi-tracking as was pianist Victor Feldman.

And then, of course, there was Rashaan Roland Kirk who played three reed instruments at the same time thereby obviating the need for multi-tracking entirely!

Because of Victor Feldman’s proficiency on vibes, drums and a host of other percussion instruments, it was only a matter of time before Victor took multi-tracking to another level by “playing everything in sight.”

More details about Victor’s career and his multi-tracking project can be found in Arnold Shaw’s liner notes to Victor Feldman Plays Everything In Sight [Pacific Jazz - PJ-10121].

Victor Feldman without a musical instrument is like an elephant without tusks, a lion without a roar, a fish without fins. Master of so many instruments it is difficult to keep track, he undertakes the more difficult feat in this debut LP on World Pacific by playing many of them simultaneously. Marvel at the musicianship of this one-man band, but savor with delight the feast of swinging and ear-tingling sounds he produces.

Born in London in April 1934, Feldman played drums on the concert stage at the age of six — they called him Kid Krupa — performed at London's Rhythm Club at seven, guested with Glenn Miller's AEF band at nine, and became Britain's #1 vibe man while he was still in his teens. For five successive years, he won Musical Express' top award. Migrating to the United States in 1955, he worked with Woody Herman for a year, was a member of the Lighthouse All Stars from '57 to '59, gigged with Cannonball Adderley's Quintet for a year and accompanied Peggy Lee on her first European tour. When Benny Goodman brought jazz to Russia at the request of the State Department, Feldman was invited along a.s featured player both with the sextet as well as the King of Swing's big band. Just before he embarked off the one-man musical journey incorporated in this LP, Feldman wrote and recorded an album with Miles Davis, Seven Steps to Heaven.

In Hollywood, where he settled shortly after his marriage to the former Marilyn McGrath —they live in Woodland Hills with their three sons and two rabbits named Peter add Bartok—Feldman functions as one of the busiest of studio musicians. He records regularly with such artists as Frank Sinatra, Hank Mancini, Bobby Darin — you name them — playing timpani, celeste, marimba and xylophone. Albums bearing his own signature are to be heard on many labels and include a jazz version of the score of the Broadway hit Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and a recent LP, The World's First Album of Soviet Jazz Themes.

Although this is not Feldman's first recording as a one-man band — he made an LP for Esquire while he was still a British musician — it is his first release in the genre here. In response to questions regarding the mechanics of playing all the instruments himself, he explained: "I start out by recording either the piano or drum track first. I work from a sketch arrangement, adding other instruments as I go along. Once the melodic and harmonic designs are clearly established, I bring in the Fender bass piano, which is so important to the rhythm. I introduce my third major instrument toward the end. (I started out playing drums as a kid, studied piano, and vibes came third.) Afterward, I put in the decorative touches — like a punctuating triangle in Have a Heart. It takes a minimum of four demanding hours in the studio to complete a tune. The toughest , part is getting back into the swing of a number each time around, not merely the problem of timekeeping - but the more vita! matters of pulse and beat. And don't overlook the engineering problems involved. Dick Bock, who produced this LP, as well as his engineers, did a masterful job of balancing the various instruments and keeping.the sound fresh and vibrant through the. various"stages of recording."

In the course of the ten songs comprising this LP, Feldman plays virtually every percussive and rhythm instrument available, and plays them all with a virtuosity and vigor that are overwhelming. His mastery of both keyboard instruments (piano and electric piano) is evident in Do the Jake, a gospel spellbinder, and in By Myself, which combines impressive multi-fingered chording and attractive one-finger jazz styling. Vibe improvisation peaks in Sure As You're Born [Johnny Mandel theme for the movie Harper which starred Paul Newman]. His superb handling of Fender bass piano contributes mightily to the jazz waltz Have A Heart and the swinging hit of the Glenn Miller years, In the Mood. His drumming throughout is of such a high order as to make this, a solid dance album. Considering his finger dexterity in playing various keyboard instruments, it is startling that he handles the bongos and conga drums, which tend to toughen one's hands, with such force—listen to Geronimo. What counts in any album, a part from an artist's display of virtuosity, is the musical content. To put it simply, regardless of the number of instruments Feldman plays, this is an instrumental LP for repeat listening.”

The following video features Victor’s piano and vibes playing at its swinging best on By Myself as set to images and drawing of the Angels Flight funicular in Los Angeles, CA.

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Roger Kellaway - STRIDE!

August 14, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Victor Feldman Plays Everything In Sight

Bill Crow - bassist, author and all-round good guy, has a rule-to-live-by, one which he stresses over-and-over again, and it is that - “Jazz is supposed to be fun.”

To my ears, no one better exemplifies this approach to Jazz than does pianist Roger Kellaway.

But please don’t misunderstand this to mean that Roger isn’t serious about his music or that he is in any way belittling Jazz.

Roger’s music is full of joy, happiness and unexpected adventure and, as such, is full of the fun of finding new wonders in Jazz. Listening to Roger play is like being let into the funhouse at the amusement park. For Roger, as for Bill Crow, Jazz is fun. That’s the point of the whole thing.

The first time I heard Roger Kellaway with Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer’s quintet [talk about two guys who knew how to have fun with Jazz], I burst out laughing. It was the laughter of delight based on the thrill and disbelief of what I’d just heard him play.

Whenever Roger soloed during this first hearing, it was the musical equivalent of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” - Walt Disney’s famous cartoon adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind and The Willows.

Roger was all over the place: dense bop lines followed by stride piano licks; dissonance followed by melodically beautiful phrases; propulsive rumbling out of the lower register that led to cat-running-along-the-piano-keys tinkling in the high notes.

Not surprisingly, given his predisposition to stride, Roger made an LP for World Pacific Jazz … wait for it … Stride! [WP-1861].

John William Hardy wrote these informative liner notes for the recording.

“When pianist Roger Kellaway made his playing debut on records about three years ago [1963 A Jazz Portrait of Roger Kellway, Regina Records reissued as Fresh Sound CD 147] , it was, to say the least, an awe-inspiring event. For like no artist in the history of jazz, this man Kellaway had a deep and personally abiding ability to play, not only in a uniquely modern way, but in a driving two-handed stride piano style. Beyond that, he showed a familiarity with the compositional roots of traditional and modern jazz that allowed him on the same album to invoke the stride and in an obscure Sidney Bechet ditty called Broken Windmill, to deal out a gang of highly original originals in the beyond Bill Evans bag. It is completely safe to say that the world had never before encountered a pianist like Roger Kellaway. He is one of a handful of the most original modern improvisors, and he is one of the best stride pianists in the history of that interesting and difficult style. This album is built around Roger's love for the older facets of his musical personality, and for the kind of happy, carefree melody that seems to lay best with the striding medium-tempo feel. To top things off, the album offers us Kellaway's debut as a conductor and arranger. He has provided simple, uncluttered, but highly effective arrangements to augment the sound of the piano, bass and drums.

The music, as you will hear, has historical importance and contemporary value that should be assessed. So, like, what is stride piano and where does it fit in the history of jazz? Stride piano grew out of ragtime. Jelly Roll Morton was a ragtimer but only occasionally showed evidences of stride methods. Some of the later ragtime pianists, who had been largely followers of Morton in their earlier formative years, became the most prominent stride players.

Contrasting stride to ragtime, one may note the greater independence of the rhythmic left hand and the largely melodic right hand (ragtime found the two hands working in unison both rhythmic and melodic). Also, stride, as contrasted to ragtime, revealed greater rhythmic flexibility and a tendency for linear improvisation in the right hand while the left hand maintained the rhythmic drive playing a single note on the first and third beats and a chord on the second and fourth. While this is the basic form of the style, no stride pianist worth his salt ever held rigidly in that pattern but found infinite variation of the roles of his hands and the general feel of the music. Friends, I'd be more than happy to tell you that Roger Kellaway was a natural outgrowth of his vast experience with all the old striders... if it were true. "We could," says Kellaway, "get all involved in historical data that would nicely lead to such a conclusion, but it would be a pack of lies. I play stride piano because I want to play all of the piano and because this is a way of exploring the instrument that no other pianistic form will allow. Actually, in developing my abilities in stride, I began with listening to only a smattering of old Waller records to get the basic idea of it. Since then, I've relied totally upon my personal development of the style — plus my love for and interest in older forms of jazz in the most general way. Specifically, I like looking for older compositions of worth and beauty to which I can address myself in the older stride style, tunes like Lazysippi Steamer Going Home."

Kellaway continues: "Stride piano is happy piano and that feeling, plus the method itself, was the original basis for this album. We've tried to retain the feeling but we've diverged somewhat in the end result in the method. Stride still pervades most of my playing and when I do diverge from it as In Your Own Sweet Way, or a couple of other places. I still try to keep the same feeling and simple charm of the playing

I like contrasts in my playing —in fact, you can say that in any performance I give-any tune —I hope there'll be at least two quite diametrically opposed feelings involved. But in transition from one to the other, even within a few minutes as in these tunes, I've tried to remain as graceful and natural as possible. Eclecticism is fine, but when an eclectic such as I chooses to incorporate various styles from many eras into his work, he can truly speak of developing an original style from these parts only if he is successful in achieving the blend.”

As for the selections: Side One begins with the top 40's Sunny. That, in itself," says Roger, "was not the reason for playing it. It's a beautiful song. I've really looked forward to recording it for some time. Just like I fell for a couple of Beatle tunes that I've recorded. Hurry, It's Lovely Up Here! is from "On A Clear Day," the Broadway musical. Again a song I've wanted to do for some time. In fact, I recorded the original demo records of it for Lerner and Burton in New York. Lazysippi Steamer is an old Louis Armstrong tune that is one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. I never play it without getting a great feeling inside, and I try to play it on every gig. It's become one of my most requested tunes. I never fail to announce its origin. It's beautiful, but I'm afraid a little puzzling to some people to know that you can find such great material in the jazz archives that is just aching to be played now. Porkette, My Love is light-hearted, but sad. Porkette was —darn it —a pet Guinea Pig that died. This is In Memoriam. Cherry is the Dizzy tune that Mulligan and Chet Baker did earlier on Pacific Jazz. This one illustrates what I meant about two moods, in the things I do.

Side Two begins with Cabaret from the musical of the same name. This is a... a fun tune. I superimposed the stride over the strings in the first chorus. The second chorus gets more sophisticated and then we move to a humorous ending. Ain't Misbehavin' is pure stride material of course, and one of Waller's favorites. This is one of the first tunes I ever played professionally— 13 years ago. Shows you how long I've been into this thing. In Your Own Sweet Way is probably Dave Brubeck's most famous composition and one that is performed by almost all jazz players. This is our most serious divergence from the general feel of the album. Dick Bock [owner of World Pacific Records] suggested it abruptly just to see what I would do with it in a spontaneous situation. To My Way Of Thinking incorporates more than one mood again, but in a more complex interrelationship. It incorporates the prepared piano and uses the time signatures of 3/4, 5/4 and 4/4. It is the most sophisticated and important piece in the album, from the standpoint of my own development."

Throughout all of this album, Roger Kellaway plays like a long lost legend of the stride piano, composes and arranges and even conducts like the fresh and markedly humorous young artist, with an understanding and respect for the past, that he is. He provides us with a musical sum total that won't let our minds wander or our feet keep still. Surely, that is what most of this music is supposed to be about.”

You can sample Roger’s stride stylings on the following video which features him playing Pops’ Lazysippi Steamer Going Home.

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The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience [From the Archives]

August 15, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Westcoasting

≪ Previous: Roger Kellaway - STRIDE!

We put this feature together essentially to pay homage to the venerable tradition of the jam session.

As defined by Gunther Schuller in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the jam session is:

“An informal gathering of jazz musicians playing for their own pleasure. Jam sessions originated as spontaneous diversions when musicians were free from the constraints of professional engagements; they also served the function of training young players in a musical tradition that was not formally taught and accepted in music schools and academic institutions until the 1960s.

In the late 1930s jam sessions came to be organized by entrepreneurs for audiences; this undermined their original purpose, and by the 1950s true jam sessions were becoming increasingly rare.

However, in the 1970s and 1980s the concept of "sessions" has made a comeback among younger jazz musicians, especially those trained in conservatories. An "open" session is one in which anyone who is more or less competent may take part. The so-called loft scene of the late 1970s in New York may also be seen as a quasi-commercial offshoot of the jam session. (B. Cameron: "Sociological Notes on the Jam Session," Social Forces, xxxiii (1954), 177) - GUNTHER SCHULLER “

And Paul F. Berliner, in his wonderfully informative, Thinking in Jazz, The Infinite Art of Improvisation, offers these observations about the jam session:

“As essential to students as technical information and counsel is the understanding of Jazz acquired directly through performance. In part they gain experience by participating in one of the most venerable of the community's institutions, the jam session. At these informal musical get-togethers, improvisers are free of the constraints that commercial engagements place upon repertory, length of performance, and the freedom to take artistic risks. Ronald Shannon Jackson's grade school band leader allowed students to conduct daily lunch-hour jam sessions in the band room. "During those years, I never saw the inside of the school's official lunch room."

Ultimately, sessions bring together artists from different bands to play with a diverse cross section of the jazz community. "New Yorkers had a way of learning from each other just as we did in Detroit," Tommy Flanagan says. "From what I heard from Arthur Taylor, Jackie McLean, and Sonny Rollins, they all used to learn from just jamming together with Bud Powell and Monk and Bird. Even though Bird wasn't a New Yorker, he lived here a long time and got an awful lot from it."

Some sessions arise spontaneously when musicians informally drop in on one another and perform together at professional practice studios. Improvisers also arrange invitational practice sessions at one another's homes. Extended events at private house parties in Seattle "lasted a few days at a time," Patti Brown remembers, and they held such popularity that club owners temporarily closed their own establishments to avoid competing for the same audience. Guests at the parties "cooked food and ate, [then] sat down and played," Brown continues. Musicians "could really develop there. Sometimes they would really get a thing going, and they would keep on exploring an idea. You would go home and come back later, and it was still going on.... [Improvisers] sometimes played a single tune for hours." Other sessions were similarly very relaxed: "Everybody was in the process of learning. Some guys were better than others, but it was always swinging, and the guys went on and on playing. We played maybe one number for an hour, but nobody ever got bored with it.”

Jazz organizations such as the Bebop Society in Indianapolis and the New Music Society at the World Stage in Detroit, where Kenny Burrell served as president and concert manager, promoted more formally organized sessions. Others took place in nightclubs, especially during weekend afternoons or in the early hours of the morning after the clientele had gone. In Los Angeles, according to Art Farmer, opportunities abounded for young people. "During the day you would go to somebody's house and play. At night there were after-hours clubs where they would hire maybe one horn and a rhythm section, and then anybody who wanted to play was free to come up and play. Then these clubs would have a Sunday matinee session. We used to just walk the streets at night and go from one place to another."

Musicians distinguish some sessions in terms of the skills of participants. The New Music Society would have a group "the caliber of Elvin Jones, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Burrell," and then they would have "the next crew of guys" like Lonnie Hillyer and his schoolmates, who rehearsed a couple of weeks in advance to prepare for their own session. The youngsters "wouldn't interfere" with those involving "the guys of high caliber." At times, the arrival of musicians from out of town intensified session activities—artists like Hampton Hawes and John Coltrane "who'd be working in some band and had that night off. It was a hell of a playing atmosphere going on there.”

Likewise in Chicago, musicians knew that the session "at a certain club down the corner was for the very heavy cats and would not dare to participate until they knew that they were ready," Rufus Reid recalls. As a matter of respect, "you didn't even think about playing unless you knew that you could cut the mustard. You didn't even take your horn out of your case unless you knew the repertoire." At the same time, naive learners did periodically perform with artists who were a league apart from them. David Baker used to go to sessions including Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray "when they came to Indianapolis." He adds with amusement, "I didn't have the sense not to play with them."

Although initially performing at sessions in their hometowns, musicians from different parts of the country eventually participate in an extensive network of events in New York City, "mixing in with players from everywhere." In the late forties and fifties, they made their way each day through a variety of apartments, lofts, and nightclubs, where they sampled performances by impromptu groups and joined them as guests during particular pieces, a practice known as sitting in. In addition to having pedagogical value, the sessions served as essential showcases. As Kenny Barron points out, "That's how your name got around." Count Basie's club in particular "was like a meeting ground" during Monday evening sessions, as was the renowned club Birdland, although the latter was difficult "to break into without knowing somebody.” There were also well-documented sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem.

Tommy Turrentine's fondest memories of the mid-forties concern Small's Paradise Club "in Harlem.... Everybody used to come there." Spanning four musical generations, the artists included trumpeters Red Allen, Hot Lips Page, Idres Sulieman, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown; saxophonists Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, and Stan Getz; pianists Bud Powell, Walter Bishop Jr., Walter Davis, and Mal Waldron. The house band was led by Big Nick Nicholas, who knew "every tune that's ever been written." Nicholas was, in fact, an important teacher of the community for his role in challenging players to expand their repertories by constantly choosing unfamiliar compositions on the bandstand. Within the context of such a rich and varied repertory, the improvised interplay, night after night, served as inspiring learning sessions for Turrentine and his friends. "That was Paradise University. You would hear so much good music each night that, when you went to lay down, your head would be swimming!"

Rivalry among the participants added spark to an already charged atmosphere. "During that time, there was somewhat of a mutual respect among the musicians, and they had cutting sessions. They would say, “I am going to blow so and so out.' It wasn't with malice. It was no put-down; it was just friendly competition." Turrentine goes on to describe actual events. "Maybe two tenor players would get up; maybe there would be about seven horn players on the bandstand. Everybody had the sense to know that saxophones was going to hang up there tonight — they was going to be blowing at each other — so we all got off the bandstand and let them have it. Maybe the next night, two trumpet players would be getting up there at each other; then there would be drummers. I have seen it many times. It was healthy really, just keeping everybody on their toes."

Interaction with an increasing number of musicians in these settings provided aspiring artists with stimulus for their own growth as improvisers. Don Sickler speculates that one renowned trumpeter "became so great" because he was aware of the competition around him: "Booker Little was born just a few months before him, and Lee Morgan was just a little younger. He really had to work hard to keep up with that level of competition."

Of course, any instrument was generally welcomed in a jam session, but somehow, to my ears, at least, the tradition of the jam session is best exemplified by the sound of “battling” or “dueling” tenor saxophones.

Over the years, there have been many such pairings including Lester Young and Herschel Evans; Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster; Illinois Jacquet and “Flip” Phillips; Don Byas and Buddy Tate; Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray; Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt; Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott; Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin; Frank Foster and Frank Wess; Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh.

The title of this piece gets its name from two Dutch tenor saxophonists – Simon Rigter and Sjoerd Dijkhuizen – who along with guitarist Martijn van Iterson, organist Carlo de Wijs and drummer Joost Patocka – revived the jam session tradition with their appearance on August 18, 2006 at the Pure Jazzfest which was held at De Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague, The Netherlands.

For their performance at the Pure Jazzfest, the group adopted the name - The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience – and I have absolutely no idea what the “organic” in the title is in reference to – sign of the times, maybe?.

By way of background, Simon and Sjoerd enjoy a major presence on the Dutch Jazz scene as both perform with The Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw and with the Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra. Sjoerd can also be heard regularly as a member of drummer Eric Ineke’s JazzXpress.

Martijn van Iterson has his own quartet and often wroks with The Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam. Carlo has also performed with The Metropole Orchestra, Lucas van Merwijk’s Cubop City Big Band and alto saxophonist Benjamin Herman’s group to which drummer Joost Patocka also belongs.

Both in their late thirties, Sjoerd Dijkhuizen and Simon Rigter formed their own quintet as an outgrowth from their appearance together with the late Dutch pianist Cees Slinger on his "Two Tenor Case" recording. In addition to their work in The Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw,” they are also a part of a group called "The Reeds,” a sax ensemble and rhythm section.

As far as I can determine, Simon and Sjoerd in combination with Carlo, Martijn and Joost made only one public appearance together and that was at the 2006 Pure Jazzfest.

You can view images of all the members of The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience in the following video montage which is set to the group’s performance of Dexter Gordon’s Sticky Wicket.

As we’ve noted before, straight-ahead Jazz is alive and well – in Holland!

↧

Westcoasting

August 16, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: An Afternoon with Benjamin Francis Webster

≪ Previous: The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience [From the Archives]

Shelly Manne liked to introduce his band members in this ironic manner: 'On tenor—Richie Kamuca from Philadelphia, PA; on trumpet — Joe Gordon from Boston, Mass.; on bass—Monty Budwig from Pender, Nebraska; our pianist is Victor Feldman from London, England; I'm Shelly Manne from New York City—WE PLAY WEST COAST JAZZ!'

In 1992, Chronicle Books published a coffee table sized book entitled California Cool: West Coast Jazz of the 1950s and 1960s. Edited by Graham Marsh, it is essentially a compilation of the album cover art from the period nicely reproduced in color on thick paper.

The following essays by photographer William Claxton who had a great deal to do with creating the most prominent album cover art “look” of this period, Jazz author and essayist Leonard Feather who was the Jazz Critic for the Los Angeles Times newspaper for many years and Brian Case provide an excellent short summary of the main characteristics of Jazz on the West Coast or - “West Coast Jazz.”

Reasonably priced used and new copies of the book can still be sourced through online booksellers.

At the conclusion of these excerpts you’ll find a newly updated West Coast Jazz video playlist that features 17 different musical groups and selections.

Foreword

- William Claxton

“The jazz scene on the West Coast of the USA, notably California, in the 1950s was indeed a real and prolific musical happening. Early in 1955 a book of my photographs was published, called Jazz West Coast. It was accompanied by two 12-inch LPs with the same title, and served to sum up what was happening musically at that time. This book was a success, and the media picked up the title and made a great deal of this 'school' of jazz from the West Coast.

The question of geographic limitations and origins of any art form can best be left to the historians and, in this case, the musicologists. In the 30s, 40s and early 50s, jazz compatriots from the East Coast—the Apple, Philly, the Windy City and other points west—had always strayed to the Pacific shores long enough to play a few gigs and to have their pictures taken. In the early 50s a group of young, healthy (well, mostly healthy) arrangers and writers — such as Shorty Rogers, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman, Marty Paich, Lennie Niehaus, Jack Montrose and Jimmy Giuffre — and young players — such as Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Bud Shank, Jack Sheldon, Shelly Manne and Bob Brookmeyer— were, indeed, in the right place at the right time. They were musically sophisticated, educated, and sought new ways for jazz expression. Some jazz journalists have implied that this was largely a white musician's movement when, in fact, during this period the black players, who had long been an important force in the Los Angeles jazz scene, were treated as new stars and were now gracing the covers of their own albums. Important names like Benny Carter, Harry 'Sweets' Edison, Chico Hamilton, Gerald Wilson, Buddy Collette, Dexter Gordon, Red Callender, Ray Brown, Hampton Hawes, Wardell Grey and Harold Land were to be seen and heard everywhere during this prolific period.

On the New York scene the photographers and designers were producing album covers with a hard-edged, gutsy look (sweaty musicians in smoke-filled clubs); while out in California, we — myself, along with others, such as the brilliant Bob Guidi of Tri-Arts—were creating album covers with a different look . . . covers that reflected this new, laid-back West Coast sound. We worked for all the major record companies, but the majority of the most amusing covers were for Richard Bock's Pacific Jazz Records, Les Koenig's Contemporary and Good Time Jazz labels, and the Weiss brothers' Fantasy Record sin San Francisco, plus a dozen other neophyte labels that sprang up overnight.

This early 50s recording phenomenon came about for various reasons: the advent of the 33 ⅓ rpm long-playing record, for one thing, which gave us, the graphic designers and photographers of that time, a generous 12x12" format to use as a billboard to display our art and to sell the recording artist. This engineering and commercial event happily coincided with renewed interest in jazz.

By 1955, the rush to produce jazz LPs and their cover art became so frantic (recording day and night), that we had constantly to invent new ways to sell these jazz artists visually.

The sheer volume of work produced created a problem of just what to do next with any one of these blossoming young jazz musicians. I would shoot Shorty Rogers in a space helmet, then the following week i'd shoot him up high in his kid's tree house; then atop the windy Hollywood hills with his quintet, when the title of the album became Wherever the Five Winds Blow. Indeed, the photograph of a group would often determine the title of the album: Chet Baker and his quartet perched on a beautiful yacht became Chet Baker and Crew; visiting Easterner, Sonny Rollins, wanted to wear a cowboy hat on his cover, so I took him to the Mojave Desert, added a six-shooter and created Sonny Rollins Way Out West; I put Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars on the Santa Monica Beach, piano and all; for a Jazz West Coast anthology for Pacific Jazz, I had a diver in his black wetsuit clutching a bright, shiny trumpet as he sprang from the salty, foaming Pacific Ocean; for The Poll Winners Ride Again I put Barney Kessel, Shelly Manne and Ray Brown on a merry-go-round. The ideas went on and on ... new juxtapositions of palm trees, sunshine and sandy beaches with jazzmen. All in all we had fun while creating a cool look . . . California Cool.”

CLICKIN' WITH CLAX

- Leonard Feather

“The term 'the art of jazz photography' is a misnomer; a better phrase would be 'photography devoted to jazz musicians, by photographers who love and understand jazz'. That, of course, is one of several ways in which one can characterize the work of William Claxton.

Born in Southern California, with a mother who was a semi-professional singer and an elder brother who played boogie-woogie piano, William was seven when, fascinated by a musical short featuring Cab Calloway and Lena Home, he assembled a scrapbook devoted to them. While in his early teens, he was exposed to live jazz on a memorable scale, hearing Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Art Tatum and Fats Waller in a single matinee at the Streets of Paris in Hollywood.

Later idols were Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy and Bird, Bud Powell, and the name bands of the 1940s. Meanwhile, a teenage neighbourhood friend, Richard Lang, had turned him on to photography.

While photographing the Gerry Mulligan Quartet at the Haig club on Wilshire Boulevard, Claxton met Richard Bock of the newly formed Pacific Jazz Records. His photographs on the record covers became almost as important as the music inside. Claxton became an integral part of that organization and was soon shooting for almost every important record company in the country. His record cover art has won many awards. His ubiquitous appearance at recording sessions and his easy rapport with the musicians led Shorty Rogers to dedicate a tune to him, 'Clickin' With Clax'.

Over the years, Claxton's work expanded beyond jazz. On an assignment for a major magazine he met a young actress, Peggy Moffitt. He suggested that she became a fashion model. She did, indeed, become a very successful model and also became Mrs William Claxton. She went to work for fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, and Claxton photographed most of his collections on Peggy, including the notorious Topless Swimsuit. Rudi, Peggy and Clax became a formidable threesome and produced some memorable work in the 60s and 70s.

For a while, Claxton was largely removed from jazz; instead of musicians, his close friends and subjects were film stars. He worked mainly doing special photography on motion picture sets for the major magazines and continued his fashion photography with Peggy and Rudi Gernreich. The latter part of the 6Os was spent living in Paris and London.

By that time, though, he had accumulated a veritable gold mine of jazz photographs, representing every era from New Orleans origins (shot on location) to post-bebop days.

During his early years as a jazz photographologist, Claxton had some memorable encounters. 'In June of 1952,' he recalls, 'I was still very green and naive; I was shooting with a big old 4x5 Speed Graphic with film plates and flash bulbs — I hadn't yet discovered the technique of available light. At this time I had a chance to shoot Bird at the Tiffany Club on Seventh Street. I hung out with him till the place closed,then brought him and his young fans to my parents' home in Pasadena. Bird was delightful; he entertained us and played for us. I improvised a studio in my bedroom and posed him with his fans in a formal portrait. It's pretty good for a kid photographer. I've never seen Bird look happier.'

Like a very few other jazz experts, Claxton has an eye for more than the obvious picture presented by his subjects. Often, along with the settings in which he showed them, they became metaphors for the Zeitgeist, for a whole era of musical evolution.”

West Coasting

- Brian Case

“Listening to veteran tenorman Teddy Edwards' reminiscences of the West Coast can make your mouth water. 'Everybody was in town because the war was in the Pacific. Soldiers, sailors, whole families had moved to the West. Los Angeles was a 24-hour town during that period. I'm sure that the 40s was the most productive period in American history in the arts and everything else. Everything was in full production, employment was at its highest peak, everything was in motion -and money was almost running down the street to meet you. Nobody thought about the war hitting America. The whole thing was alive and in motion.' In the war years the population of LA quadrupled, and Central Avenue became the Harlem of the West Coast, with clubs like Jack's Basket, Cafe Society, Casablanca and the Jungle Room, in the words of Hampton Hawes, 'jumping in to the sunrise'.

In 1945 Diz and Bird made the scene at Billy Berg's, bringing Bebop to the Coast. Few jazzmen linked with the region were born there. Out-of-town big band musicians on Blue Goose buses saw the palm trees and failed to climb back aboard. Teddy Edwards had been with the Ernie Fields Orchestra. 'We played there and then went on. The bus broke down above Cheyenne, Wyoming, and all you could see was snow. I thought, you can have all this stuff. I'm going back to California.' Tenorman Brew Moore made it in a go!-man-go! trip that allegedly inspired Jack Kerouac's On the Road. 'Billy Faier had a 1949 Buick and somebody wanted him to drive it out to California so he rode through Washington Square shouting, "Anyone for the Coast?" And I was just sitting there on a bench and there wasn't shit shaking in New York so I said, Hell, yes.' But the migrant who put the West Coast Sound on the map travelled by thumb, packing a baritone saxophone and a case full of arrangements.

Crew-cut Gerry Mulligan was responsible for some of the arrangements on the highly influential 'Birth of the Cool' album by Miles Davis, and when he formed his pianoless quartet with Chet Baker in 1952, the music shared that velvet melancholy elegance at low decibel levels. Weatherless, neatly contrapuntal, the sounds from The Haig were afar cry from the blowing sessions and cutting contests between Dexter Gordon and Wardell Cray on Central Avenue. A Time magazine article on the group set the seal upon the white West Coast sound, encouraging a rash of topographicality among record producers, after which many blazing black musicians suddenly experienced 'the LA slows'. The greatest musician in California, Art Pepper, was white and didn't feel right: 'I wanted to be a black because I felt such an affinity for the music.' Shorty Rogers, along with Mulligan, the linchpin in the West Coast movement, viewed his band, The Giants, as an update on Count Basie and the Kansas City Seven. But the copy-writers had taken over and a half-truth was born: West Coast cool, East Coast hot.

If California had the weather, it also had the film studios which provided steady work for schooled ex-big band players tired of the road. Some, like the talented Lennie Niehaus, quit the scene and wound up working for Clint Eastwood, but for many jazzmen, playing film scores by Henry Mancini or Elmer Bernstein didn't burst the spirit's slumber. Bud Shank, whose flute was always in demand for deathbed scenes, teamed with Laurindo Almeida off the lot to experiment with bossa nova. 'Was I on "The Last Detail"?' said the late Shelly Manne. 'I can't remember. Probably was. I was doing two or three a week, and I didn't always see the title. Often it hadn't got one.' He lived for the after-hours gigs, for blowing at Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse and the Blackhawk, and finally founded his own club, Shelly's Manne Hole.

Contemporary and Pacific album covers emphasized fun and sunshine in primary colours. The West Coast looked like a theme park. Visiting Brooklynite Sonny Rollins, kitted out as a gunslinger in a stetson and posing by a cactus for Contemporary's 'Way Out West', was embarrassed for decades about it until he learned that the sight of a black cowboy so influenced Courtney Pine, then a black Londoner at school, that he took up the tenor.

The long-playing record fed an expanding market, and sales techniques came up with stereotypical images for the hi-fi. Finally, the whole West Coast thing was oversold, and a reaction set in which was unfair too. Good music was playing on both coasts, often, since travel is an economic necessity, by the same cats. Dexter Gordon, born there, played everywhere. The West had its legends: Pepper, Mister Chet, the preternaturally on-it drummer, Frank Butler, Sonny Criss, who gave Bird a run for his money, and not forgetting the forever tantalizing promise of trumpet player Dupree Bolton, jailed forever. Ironically enough, it was Contemporary which first put Ornette Coleman, a Texan revolutionary whose music split both coasts, on to the market.”

↧

An Afternoon with Benjamin Francis Webster

August 17, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Gary Giddins - "Rhythm-a-ning" [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Westcoasting

“Look at those two heavyweights!.”

The speaker was Jack Marshall a guitarist who was perhaps best known as a composer-arranger in Hollywood recording circles. He composed TV series themes and wrote the arrangement for Peggy Lee’s big hit Fever which featured drummer Shelly Manne, one of Jack’s closest friends.

The “two heavyweights” in question were drummer Stan Levey and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

The venue for this two-brute-sighting was The Manne Hole, Shelly’s Hollywood Jazz club, which also happened to serve great soup for lunch. [“Brute was one of Ben’s nicknames.]

Just about every studio musician in the greater Hollywood area - which extended north into the eastern San Fernando Valley to include both Warner Brothers [Burbank] and Universal Studios [North Hollywood] - tried to stop by Shelly’s for lunch during their breaks from recording.

It was our way of “throwing some business his way” as we all knew the kind of stress and sacrifice Shelly went through to keep his club open for 12 years in order to give local Jazz musicians a place to play, including many studio musicians who relished the opportunity to play Jazz whenever it presented itself.

I recorded with Jack as a drummer and/or percussionist on a few occasions and we had just finished a TV commercial that morning when Jack suggested we “go up to Shelly’s for some soup.”

By way of background, I gather that one of Stan Levey’s first gigs as a drummer was working with Ben Webster’s quartet which “Frog” [another of Ben’s nicknames] had formed shortly after leaving Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in the early 1940s. They instantly took a liking to one another and became lifelong friends. Each of them were “big men” and they formed an imposing sight when they stood together.

Now here they were a little over twenty years later talking to Shelly and Rudy Onderwyzer, the manager of The Manne Hole, about Ben’s quartet playing a gig at the club for a long weekend with a local rhythm section to be led by Stan. [If my memory serves me right, not always the case these days, Jimmy Rowles was going to be the pianist.]

Scheduling conflicts at Shelly’s were compounded by the fact that Stan Levey was still traveling often as a member of Peggy Lee’s trio, so the two-big-men-of-Jazz reunion gig never happened and Ben went back to New York and eventually formed the quartet that Stanley Dance described in this essay/interview about Benjamin Francis Webster (March 27, 1909 – September 20, 1973) which appeared in the May 21, 1964 edition of Downbeat magazine.

“Stride piano, the left hand fast and precise, filled the telephone receiver.

"Hello."

"Ben?"

"Yeah. Wait till I turn my waking-up music off."

The sound of James P. Johnson's piano was abruptly diminished.

"You downstairs? Come on up."

One of tenor saxophonist Ben Webster's afternoon musicales was in progress. A tape on which the Lion, the Lamb, James P., Fats Waller and Art Tatum strove mightily together — his waking-up music — was still on the Wollensak [tape recorder], but an album by Tatum was now placed on the phonograph. A facet of that pianist's genius was about to be demonstrated to Duke Ellington's bassist, Ernie Shepard, and drummer Sam Woodyard — who occupied nearby hotel rooms and had come in to discuss the previous night's activities.

Webster had sat in for a set with the Ellington band at its Basin Street East opening, and he was happy about the experience. Chuck Connors' arrival having been delayed that night, Webster had taken Connors' seat in the trombone section and been duly introduced to the audience by Ellington as an expert on claves in cha-cha-cha. When the saxophonist came down front later, Ellington had suggested he play "Cottontail," Webster's best-known recorded performance during his principal stay with Ellington, 1939-'43. The performance ended with a chase between Webster and Ellington's regular tenor saxophonist, Paul Gonsalves. It had been a kick.

"If Duke likes you," Webster said, "you're home free." There were bottles of beer sitting on the windowsill outside, cold and ready to drink, and ale on the dressing table, but the main business this afternoon was music and reminiscence. A tape of a 1940 Ellington performance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, N.D., was produced.

"It was so cold there that night," Webster remembered, "we played in our overcoats, and some of the guys kept their gloves on!"

The music coming from the tape had an exciting kind of abandon — the abandon, perhaps, of desperation.

"Sometimes," he added, "when you've traveled all day in the bus, and had no sleep and are dead tired — that's when you get the best playing out of a band. It just happens. And sometimes the opposite."

The material was inspiring. After "The Mooche" came "Ko-Ko,""Pussy Willow"...

"I learned a lot from Rab [Johnny Hodges], but you know what his only advice to me was when I came in the band? 'Learn your parts.'"

The tape continued rolling. "Chatterbox,""Harlem Airshaft,""Jack the Bear,""Rumpus in Richmond,""Sidewalks of New York,""The Flaming Sword,""Never No Lament"...

"That's why Duke leaves his mark on you, forever," Webster said.

"Clarinet Lament,""Slap Happy,""Sepia Panorama,""Rockin' in Rhythm,""Cottontail"...

"Sonny Greer, and he's swinging!" Webster exclaimed in admiration of the drummer who worked with Ellington from the '20s to the '50s.

"Conga Brava,""Stardust,""Rose of the Rio Grande" and "Boy Meets Horn" preceded the finale, an uproarious version of "St. Louis Blues," on which trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton took over from Webster and carried through to the coda.

"We were drinking buddies," the saxophonist said, and laughed, "but you heard how he tore right in on me there."

After a few jokes, the conversation came back to piano, steered by the host, and the striding hands of yesterday stretched out again on tape and vinyl. Often they belonged to Fats Waller.

All that fun but never a wrong note," Webster remarked. "If only he could have lived until TV!"

Contemporaries were considered and Ralph Sutton commended as "a wonderful cat." Earl Hines, too: "Earl swings his head off."

A memory of the Beetle [stride pianist Stephen Henderson] intervened, the diffident-seeming Beetle who took part in the piano battles uptown and seldom played anything less than an easy, rocking, medium tempo but who triumphed nevertheless. Another memory returned, of the Lamb — Donald Lambert — who came to the battlefield once or twice a year, astounded everyone, and then retired to New Jersey again. From that point, it required little urging to get Webster to tell of his first experience with the Harlem piano school.

"I shall never forget the time when I met Count Basie," he began. "It was while he was in Kansas City with Gonzel White, and he used to stop the show. I always did like Basic, and I always did want to play the piano. He bore with me for a long time, and he told me that in the event I ever got to New York, I was to be sure to find the Lion—Willie Smith. He had already told me that the bosses were James P. Johnson and the Lion, and that then came Duke, Fats and Willie Gant. I don't remember all the names, but there was a gang of great piano players in those days.

"Clyde Hart and I managed to get with Blanche Galloway. Clyde was a friend of mine, a piano player, and Edgar Battle sent for us in Kansas City We played the Pearl Theater in Philly, at 22nd and Ridge, I think it was, and Clyde and I got on the train the first day we had off and came to New York.

"Basie had briefed me. 'Go to the Rhythm Club,' he said, 'and that's where you'll find the Lion. He knows all the piano players and all the good musicians. They hang out there, and the Lion will introduce you right. Naturally, I wanted to hear people like Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges and Coleman Hawkins too. Basie had also told us how to approach the Lion so that he would bear with us. Basie said he liked a little taste every now and then, that he loved cigars, and that maybe he would play a little for us.

"So we walked up to the Rhythm Club on 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, and we met the Lion. There was a cigar store right on the corner, and in those days they had great big El Productos, three for a half-dollar.

'"Mr. Lion,' we said, 'would you care to have some cigars?'

"The Lion rounded on us and said, 'Say, you are pretty nice kids. Yes, I'll have a cigar or two.'

So we walked with him to the corner and asked him how many could he smoke.

"'Oh, maybe two.'

"So we bought him half a dozen, and then he smiled and said,' You kids are really nice kids!'

"Then we asked him, 'Would you care for a little drink, Mr. Lion?'

"'Yeah,'he said.

"Then we told him we would like to hear him play, and at that time there was a place right across from the Rhythm Club, and he took us over there, and he got in the mood with his cigar and a little taste in between.

"It was one of the greatest experiences of my life to hear a man play like this. Though I had heard James P. Johnson around 1925 in Kansas City, that was a little early, and I think I could understand more of what I was listening to when I got to the Lion.

"He played for us for three or four hours, and we kept buying him a little taste, and he kept saying we were nice kids. I had a beautiful day and I never will forget it."

Until about a year ago, Webster had resided for several years in Los Angeles, taking care of his mother and grandmother, but when they both died within a year's time, he had no family reason to stay in California, and he moved to New York City.

He has brought back to the ingrowing New York scene the good humor and expansive generosity of spirit that have been dwindling for some time among its hard-pressed musicians. Webster is big physically — broad-shouldered and

straight-backed — and he is bigger than the rat race. One is soon aware that music occupies his mind far more than money— music as, above all, a means to enjoyment.

Ellington's wasn't the only band he sat in with during the winter. Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band found it had an impulsive new pianist one night in Bird-land, and at the Metropole on another occasion, Webster took Marty Napoleon's place at the keyboard for a set.

The appearances with his own quartet at the Shalimar, Birdland and the Half Note have proved popular. His material, consisting mostly of the better standards and well-known Ellington numbers, is strong on melodic content. Just as he did 20 years ago, with men like pianists Marlowe Morris and Johnny Guarnieri and drummer Sid Catlett, he likes to open and close a performance with a statement of the theme. Good melody, well phrased, communicates as strongly in the jazz idiom as in any other, and there are distinct advantages from the audience's viewpoint to having the melody established in the mind when following the variations. Webster recognizes this, plus the importance of good tempos.

Stylistically, he illustrates the evolutionary process always at work within the music.

The jazz audience was probably first made aware of him in 1932 on the several explosive records that indicated the musical ferment in Kansas City—those made by Bennie Moten with Basic, trumpeter Oran (Hot Lips) Page, trombonist Eddie Durham and reed man Eddie Barefield, in addition to Webster — "Moten Swing,""Lafayette," etc.

In his subsequent recordings, there was uninterrupted development, but up until the time he joined Ellington, listeners generally recognized the influence of Coleman Hawkins rather than the personality of Ben Webster. Yet, as Hugues Panassie perceptively noted, "The grace of his melodic line makes one think of Benny Carter." In fact, it is Carter whom Webster names first among saxophonists—then Hawkins, then Johnny Hodges ("the most feeling") and then Hilton Jefferson ("the prettiest").

Established stylistically in 1940, Webster himself became an important influence. Prominent among those to acknowledge it was Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, at one time known as Little Ben.

When Paul Gonsalves took the tenor chair with Ellington, his ability to play solos in Webster's style profoundly surprised the leader, but in the 14 years that have followed, Gonsalves' musical personality has developed on strongly individual lines, a fact evident when he and his early mentor played "Cottontail" at Basin Street East. It was even more evident in a jam session at Count Basie's bar in Harlem, when Webster, Gonsalves and fellow tenor man Harold Ashby were together on the stand. Ashby is a close friend of Webster's who proudly proclaims his friend's influence, but all three were individually and instantly identifiable by tone and phrasing.

"He's improved so much he scares me," Webster said of Ashby's playing, using his most admiring epithet.

Gonsalves, too, he esteems highly. One of the records often played on his phonograph is "I've Just Seen Her," from Ellington's All American album, a Gonsalves performance that never fails to impress saxophone players.

At Webster's musicale, Gonsalves reminisced about the first time he heard Tatum. He had gone to a club with Webster, Basic and trumpeter Harry Edison to hear Tatum, but the master didn't feel like playing that night. So Webster sat down at the piano and played awhile. Then Edison played, and finally Basic. With that, Tatum decided to play—"Get Happy" at a very fast tempo. What astonished him, Webster said, was the way Tatum's left hand took care of business while the right reached for a drink.

Perhaps this anecdote passed through Webster's mind at the jam session at Basie's club. He called "Get Happy" They took off, lightning fast, and Gonsalves went into a furious and fantastically devised solo.

"Paul's getting so hot," Webster exclaimed with mock alarm, "I don't think I should have called this tune!"

Another afternoon visitor was tenorist Budd Johnson, who had first shown Webster the scale on saxophone and how to play "Singin' the Blues." Webster had been taught violin, but had not liked the instrument. There were two pianos in the Webster house, his mother's and his cousin's ("I ruined my cousin's piano playing blues"), and when he should have been practicing violin, he was usually busy on one or the other of them. Pete Johnson, who lived across the street, taught him how to play the blues.

"If you lay the violin down a week, you're in trouble," Webster said, "but you can lay a horn down a year and be OK." So when he switched to piano, it was the end of the violin phase.

He was playing piano in a silent-movie house in Amarillo, Texas, when Gene Coy's band came to town, and he met Budd Johnson and his brother, trombonist Keg. The saxophone fascinated Webster, and in 1929, when he was 20, he heard that the Young family band needed another saxophone player; he went to see Lester's father.

"I can't read," he said.

Mr. Young was amused.

"I haven't got a horn," he added.

Mr. Young was then even more amused, but he provided Webster with an alto saxophone and taught him to read.

"Lester's father mostly played trumpet, but he could play anything, and, what's more, he was a master teacher," Webster recalled.

Lester played tenor, and Webster insists he was playing wonderfully even then. Lee Young and his sister, Irma, were also members of the band and played saxophones at that time, too.

The group went to Albuquerque, N.M., for some months, and it was there that Webster, a strong swimmer, helped save the lives of both Lester and Lee. Lester got into difficulties in the Rio Grande and was carried away, tumbling over and over in the water until Webster and guitarist Ted Brinson rescued him. On another occasion, Lee stepped off the bank into a deep sand hole, and Webster managed to haul him out.

"Lee dived right in again," Webster remembered, "but Lester didn't want to think about swimming for a long time after that."

Some months later, after Budd and Keg Johnson had left it, Webster got a call to join Gene Coy's band ("about nine or 10 pieces") in which Harold Coleman was playing tenor. That was really the beginning of the professional career as a saxophonist that brought him, experienced and mature, into New York City, 1964.

“I think I’m playing better than ever right now,” he said. Then he repeated, “I think.”

Ben performs "When I Fall in Love" on the following video along with guitarist Mundell Lowe, pianist Jimmy Jones, Bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Dave Bailey.

↧

Gary Giddins - "Rhythm-a-ning" [From the Archives]

August 18, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Martin Williams Gettin’ Together with Art Pepper in Jazz Changes From the Archives]

≪ Previous: An Afternoon with Benjamin Francis Webster

“The most stimulating young Jazz journalist to surface in years. Giddins combines and exhilarating style with rare insight, standing nearly alone in relating Jazz to allied fields of pop and rock. Highly recommended.”

-Grover Sales commenting on Gary’s Riding on a Blue Note

I was reared on the Jazz of what was then referred to as the “modern era” - the music as played from about 1945-1965 - so it was not easy for me to transition to the Jazz of the 1980’s.

It didn’t help that I was otherwise preoccupied and essentially away from the music for much of the intervening decade-and-a-half [1970-1985].

What helped me get “caught up,” so to speak, was a beat-up edition of Gary Giddins’ Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation [1986 Oxford University Press] which has since been replaced by a new Da Capo paperback version of the book [2000].

Gary’s many chapters on the musicians he saw in performance, primarily in the early 1980s and reviewed for his column in the Village Voice, retrospectively guided my way back into the music. His work along with the then burgeoning CD reissue industry afforded me an opportunity to fill-in-the-blanks and to move forward with some newfound favorites.

His stated purpose in writing Rhythm-a-ning can be found on page 279:

“Critics should be chroniclers and not prophets. It's not our business to predict trends and scout rookies, praising or damning them in an instant, and taking sides on the future as though art were a sport, and arts critics a breed of scoop-crazed journalists. When I assembled the essays in Rhythm-a-ning, my intention was to make the diversity of subjects illustrate what seemed to me the central phenomenon of jazz in the past decade or so: a neoclassical groping for form that rejected the romantic expressionism of the 1960s, raised the composer to at least a level of parity with the improvisor, and sparked a degree of receptiveness to the music of previous generations that had no precedent in jazz's short history.”

With Gary’s writings, one is always going to school about Jazz. He takes this stuff seriously and gives it much thought before he writes about it.

And how well he writes about it is evident in what his colleagues have to say about him and the book:

“A brilliant collection …. With refreshing insight, wit and a readable style much too rare in this field, Giddins has assembled delightful and instructive pieces that can be returned to again and again.” [Grover Sales, The Los Angeles Times]

“Giddins is the John Updike of Jazz criticism, a writer whose descriptions are so precise and evocative that he enables you to hear the music as you read about it.” [Ken Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer]

“Giddins writes about Jazz as music, and he gives everyone who loves music a little pang in the interior of the belly which can only be interpreted as a hunger for Jazz.” [Evan Eisenberg, The Nation]

Gary not only hears Jazz in a very discerning manner, he has the ability to convey in writing what he hears in such a way so as to enhance your appreciation of it. The music is ephemeral but the written impressions that Gary forms about it are enduring.

And then there is the snap-your-head-around wit which adds a touch of spice to his reflections and helps keep them from becoming pedantic and lifeless.

Jazz is about excitement and emotion and so are Gary’s observations about the music. They are full of juice and passion - just like the best Jazz.

"Where other critics see deadness in jazz, Giddins sees the youthful spirit of revision and revolution. Giddins is a minutely sensitive listener, and brings to his analysis of new jazz a sweeping sense of historical recall matched by a gift for making imaginative leaps in rhythmically charged prose." [Norman Weinstein, Idaho Statesman]

"[Giddins] is thoroughly at home with virtually the entire jazz tradition. His writing is lively, sophisticated, opinionated yet generous, without eccentricity and with a minimum of nostalgia. . . Rhythm-a-ning is a most stimulating book." [John Litweiler, Down Beat]

"Gary Giddins is the best Jazz critic now at work. . . Giddins's loving, encyclopedic knowledge of the past makes one trust him: …. I read him to correct my ignorance and for his prose. He's an elegant enthusiast." [Walter Clemons, Newsweek]

"Whether describing a concert, defining a style, or tracing an artist's evolution over several decades, his essays are as pithy as a blues by Thelonious Monk, and every bit as persuasive." [Dean Robbins, Isthmus]

"Rhythm-a-ning has verbal wit and vision and, while deadly serious, it is also infinitely entertaining. . . The reader is enhanced." Roberta Metz Swann, The North American Review]

The following introduction to the book which Garry entitles Jazz Turns Neoclassical was particularly helpful as a point of departure from which to view what Jazz had become in the decade of the 1980s.

“We hear frequent talk of a renaissance in jazz. Musically, the signs are unmistakable; nevertheless, jazz remains nearly subterranean, a thing apart, a private cultural zone. Its state of alienation is frequently blamed on the Hydra that is variously known as the avant-garde, the new thing, the new wave, and free jazz—that is, the contemporary post-modernist jazz of the past twenty-five years. Avant-gardists are depicted, not always inappropriately, as musical Jackson Pollocks spewing sounds into the air without benefit of formal or narrative guidelines. Their music is considered esoteric when it isn't impenetrable, and erstwhile jazz fans, now repulsed by the gladiatorial anarchy that used to attract them, ask accusatory questions: where's the beat, the melody, the beauty? Musicians and critics continue to wonder when free jazz (allowing the supposition that free jazz is jazz—the debate here is unceasing) will be assimilated into the mainstream. In other words, when will Joyce become Dickens, and Bartok Mozart?

As I see it, the avant-garde has been studiously aligning itself with mainstream jazz for some time. The resurgence of jazz means in large measure the resurgence of swing, melody, and beauty, as well as other vintage jazz qualities such as virtuosity, wit, and structure — not that they've ever been entirely absent. If jazz, like other fine arts, had to be relearned in a period of avant-garde extremism, it has long since—and with a vengeance—turned neoclassical. Musicians weaned on the free jazz of the '60s now sift '20s’ classicism, '30s' swing, '40s’ bop, and '50s’ soul for repertoire and expressive wisdom. They are, in effect, going home again.

From 1960 to 1975, adventurous jazz often meant indulgences on the order of 20-minute solos, or freely improvised polyphony, or endlessly repeated ostinatos layered over a single scale. Though the great figures of that period — John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and a few others — could bring off the most demanding improvisational conceits, at least as far as the knowing, sympathetic, and determined listener was concerned, they spawned imitators who mistook freedom for license and justified excess with apocalyptic rhetoric. A backlash was inevitable. Not only were many listeners yearning for restraint but a younger generation of jazz musicians, many of them trained in conservatories, expressed horror that formalism appeared to be vanishing. Jazz has always been a dialectic between improviser and composer: when the improviser gets out of hand, the composer emerges with new guidelines, sometimes borrowed from the distant past.

A couple of years ago, while teaching at a university, I found— for the first time—a way to kindle students' interest in the new jazz players (they need only exposure to appreciate classic players). The course began with a survey of such jazz precursors as spirituals, marches, blues, and ragtime; I simply provided symmetry by concluding the course with treatments of those precursors by avant-garde musicians, including Arthur Blythe's version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," Anthony Braxton's march from Creative Orchestra Music 1976, "Blues," by Leroy Jenkins and Muhal Richard Abrams, and Air's arrangement of Scott Joplin's "Weeping Willow Rag." Nor was it necessary to stop there. Having traced the evolution of jazz from the beginnings to the present, I might have retraced it with modernistic but idiomatically satisfying interpretations — all recorded since 1975 — of nearly every school and style. Indeed, I might have brought the course full circle by playing the Art Ensemble of Chicago's avant-garde parodies of the avant-garde. Jazz is so eclectic these days that you can find in it almost anything you please.

Jazz modernists rarely investigated the music's past before the avant-garde blew the old jazz truths out of the water. The composers and players of the era immediately following World War II ignored the traditional repertory, and when they did pay homage to the ancients (ragtimers and New Orleans-style players), whatever regard they may have felt was often soured by condescension. Modernism, after all, was a rallying point, and a political movement — a transformation of mere entertainment into art. The genius-leaders of the movement — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—knew better, of course; the traditions live in even their most volatile experiments, whereas their disciples, more obsessed with the propaganda of the new, were inclined to dismiss as pass£ the sweetness of Johnny Hodges or the showboating of Louis Armstrong. Still, what both the geniuses and their disciples propagated was new. By comparison, the neoclassicists of the '80s may seem to be offering, at worst, nothing more than half-baked historicism or, at best, an inventive reappraisal of the jazz repertory. In this regard, it's useful to remember that one saving grace of neoclassicism is its impatience with nostalgia. Whereas a modernist of 30 years ago might have used a plunger mute to demonstrate bemused affection for an outmoded style, a neoclassicist of today uses the mute because he knows that it can convey singular and immediate passions.

When all the post-modernist styles—expressionist and neoclassicist alike—are considered "avant-garde" (as, rightly or wrongly, they often are), they constitute an enduring sub-genre in jazz, one that dates back over 25 years. It has its own thesis ("the new wave") and antithesis ("the jazz tradition"). The distinction was made frustratingly clear to me by my students, who were enchanted by the contemporary restatements of classic styles, but resisted the unsettling innovations (works by Taylor, Coleman, etc.) of the '60s. I'm almost resigned to this response. Maybe only in a period of national tumult are people willing to listen to music for the pleasure of being battered and tested. The avant-garde, by definition, has no right to an audience larger than its true believers. Besides, the violent expressionism of the '60s made the current wave of neoclassicism possible; it freed the present generation to look on the jazz tradition with agnostic curiosity. And this generation—virtuosic, ambitious, and disarmingly unpretentious—has no axes to grind about the claims of art over entertainment or of freedom over form, except for the conviction, apparently widespread, that the future of jazz lies in a rapprochement between those putative opposites.

Still, when we talk about a renaissance in jazz, we are talking about a wealth of interesting music, not a broad-scaled awakening of interest in that music. Most of the neoclassical ventures discussed in this book are unknown outside the small enclave of New York clubs and European festivals. For, as all but the most provincial fans know, American jazz musicians are largely invisible in their own country. Few educated Americans can name even five jazz musicians under the age of forty. Jazz is virtually banished from television and commercial radio, and is usually conflated with pop in the press, when acknowledged at all—Time runs a Christmas music wrap-up that lists the best in classical and rock, as though jazz didn't exist. In four decades of prize-giving, the Pulitzer Committee has never recognized a jazz composer (the jurors who voted unanimously to award Ellington, in 1965, were overruled by the Advisory Committee). Booking agencies and record companies no longer scout for serious young jazz musicians. Even colleges, which once provided a network of concert halls for the Modern Jazz Quartet or Gerry Mulligan, now house lab bands that perform standard orchestrations but fail to book active innovators. Most significant jazz recordings of recent years were made abroad for labels like Black Saint in Italy, Hat Hut in Switzerland, Trio in Japan, Enja in Germany, SteepleChase in Denmark, and BVHAAST in Holland, or by tiny American labels, some of them little more than vanities; they are distributed in only a few American cities.

Yet, despite what amounts to a media blackout, jazz somehow manages to replenish its audience and its musicians with every generation. Jazz festivals proliferate, at least in Europe, and so do independent labels and reissue series. Mail-order companies, from the Smithsonian Collection to Time/Life, have found a bonanza in jazz. The music may be in exile, but it isn't fading away. I intend to help spread the news of the increasing accessibility of swing and melody and beauty in the jazz of the '80s, but I'm fully aware that the bounding line between jazz and the mainstream of American life is a tradition unto itself. In 1965, Dwight Macdonald wrote an account of an arts festival at Lyndon Johnson's White House that unwittingly embodied the problem. Macdonald, who was rarely unwitting about anything, complained that "no composers of any note were present." Several paragraphs later, he observed parenthetically that the "best thing at the festival" and "the only really happy-looking people, in fact, were Duke Ellington and his bandsmen." That's the way it is now, only more so. Nobody here but us happy-looking jazzmen, boss.”

In addition to an Introduction and an Afterword, Rhythm-a-ning is made up of fifty-eight [58] chapters and six subchapters. I read it episodically and usually with the music of the artist under discussion playing on my CD changer.

While doing so, I tried to keep the following thoughts as drawn from Gary’s introduction in mind so as to let them serve as guiding principles in helping to move my ears in new directions:

[1] “The resurgence of jazz means in large measure the resurgence of swing, melody, and beauty, as well as other vintage jazz qualities such as virtuosity, wit, and structure — not that they've ever been entirely absent. If jazz, like other fine arts, had to be relearned in a period of avant-garde extremism, it has long since—and with a vengeance—turned neoclassical. Musicians weaned on the free jazz of the '60s now sift '20s’ classicism, '30s' swing, '40s’ bop, and '50s’ soul for repertoire and expressive wisdom. They are, in effect, going home again.”

[2] “Jazz is so eclectic these days that you can find in it almost anything you please.”

[3] “ … the violent expressionism of the '60s made the current wave of neoclassicism possible; it freed the present generation to look on the jazz tradition with agnostic curiosity. And this generation—virtuosic, ambitious, and disarmingly unpretentious—has no axes to grind about the claims of art over entertainment or of freedom over form, except for the conviction, apparently widespread, that the future of jazz lies in a rapprochement between those putative opposites.

I hope these beacon points serve you as well as they served me in pointing the way to Jazz as it had become in the 1980s and beyond.

When Gary Giddins is giving them and the subject is Jazz, the “directions” are usually sound and accurate.

↧

Martin Williams Gettin’ Together with Art Pepper in Jazz Changes From the Archives]

August 19, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Freddie Redd - The Thespian

≪ Previous: Gary Giddins - "Rhythm-a-ning" [From the Archives]

"Martin Williams is perhaps the greatest living jazz critic."

- Gunther Schuller

"Martin Williams is one of the few truly distinguished commentators on jazz and one whose writing on the subject is acknowledged as a model of reflective, informed, and meaningful criticism."

- Choice

"One of the most distinguished critics (of anything) this country has produced."

- Gary Giddins, The Village Voice

"Read anything of Williams you can getyour hands on....His knowledge of jazz is all but unmatched."

- Washington Review

"His is a distinctively colorful style, a cogent blend of history, criticism, and personal opinion."

- Library Journal

"Williams is the most lucid writer on American jazz traditions, able in the shortest pieces to encapsulate major thoughts and present them, in comprehensible form to the general reader."

- Kirkus Reviews

"Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism."

- Nat Hentoff

"The most distinguished critic

America

has produced."

-Dan Morgenstern

Whenever possible, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles tries to celebrate the work of its mentors [in the broader, more informal sense of that word] – those writers and critics who taught us all so much about Jazz and its makers over the years.

In this regard, Martin Williams has been absent from these pages far too long.

So we thought we’d rectify this omission by bringing up Martin’s thoughts about one of our favorite Art Pepper recordings by – Getting’ Together [Contemporary 7573/Original Jazz Classics CD 169-2] – on which the alto saxophonist is joined by trumpeter Conte Candoli and Miles Davis’ rhythm section at that time: Wynton Kelly, piano, Paul Chambers, bass and Jimmy Cobb, drums.

Martin wrote the original liner notes for the recording in 1960 and then re-worked them as printed below when they were published as a sub-chapter in Jazz Changes [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]. As the notes below explain, Contemporary M/C 3573 paired Art Pepper with the Miles Davis rhythm section of early 1960.

“The square's question about jazz may not be such a bad question if you think about it. I mean the one that goes, "Where's the melody?" or "Why don't they play the melody?" We could borrow the famous mountain climber George Mallory's answer, "Because it's there." But a more helpful one might be, the melody is whatever they are playing, or to put it more directly, they don't play it because they can make up better ones. And if I wanted to introduce the square to that fact, one of the people whose work I could use to show it would be Art Pepper.

Getting’ Together [Contemporary 7573/Original Jazz Classics CD 169-2] is a sort of sequel to the earlier Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (Contemporary C3532, stereo S7018), a set I would call one of the best in the Contemporary catalog.

That one was made in 1957 and the rhythm section of the title was the very special one of the Miles Davis quintet of the time: Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums. This one is made with the (again special) Miles Davis rhythm section of February 1960. Paul Chambers is still there, Wynton Kelly is on piano, Jimmie Cobb is on drums. That former session was made under pressure, for not only was the section available only briefly, Pepper himself had not played for two weeks before the night it was done. For this one, the Davis group was again in town only briefly, and again, there was only one recording session. In fact, the last track, Gettin Together, made because Art wanted to record a blues on tenor, is just Pepper, Kelly, and the rest playing ad lib while the tape was kept rolling.

All of which obviously does not mean that either session was made with the kind of haste that makes waste.

I began by saying that I could use Art Pepper's playing to convince our square friend that jazzmen can make up better melodies than the ones they start with. (There are many others I could use, but let's stick to the subject here, Art Pepper.) And I could well begin with an Art Pepper record like Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise, for Pepper states that theme with none of its usual melodramatics and proceeds to make up melodic lines spontaneously that are superior to those he began with. And I might also use it as an example of the emotional range he can develop within a solo from a very limited point of departure, and without eccentricity or crowding.

Pepper is a lyric or melodic player (those words are vague but when you have heard him, you know what they mean). Very good test pieces for such qualities are slow ballads—and many a jazzman of Pepper's generation wanders aimlessly and apologetically through such tests. There are two ballads here. Why Are We Afraid? is a piece Art Pepper plays in the movie The Subterraneans. Diane is named for Art Pepper's wife; he has recorded it before but he prefers this version. So do I. It especially seems to me an emotionally sustained piece of improvised impressionism, and Kelly also captures and elaborates its mood both in his accompaniment and solo. Unlike many comparable players of his generation in jazz, Art is not so preoccupied with making a melody that is "pretty" that he falls into lushness or weakness in his melodic line. What saves him is a kind of rhythmic fibre and strength that some lyric and "cool" players decidedly lack. (Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise is again a very good example.) For that reason, it should surprise no one to hear him, particularly on the tracks where he plays tenor here, absorbing some rhythmic ideas from the better players in the current Eastern "hard" school. And to show how well they fit and are assimilated, that ad lib blues, Getting Together, is prime evidence. Surely one of the things that makes jazz so unsentimental and fluent an art is the jazzman's rhythmic flexibility, and that is something Art Pepper has always been on to.

The events of Art Pepper's biography include the fact that he took his first music lessons at nine, but had been passionately interested in music even before that. In his teens he was fully committed to jazz and playing nightly on Central Avenue in Los Angeles with Dexter Gordon, Charlie Mingus, Gerald Wiggins, Zoot Sims, and at eighteen he was a regular member of Lester Young's brother Lee's group. Subsequently he was with Benny Carter and achieved his widest recognition when he joined Stan Kenton on alto for the second time, from 1946 through 1951. When these tracks were made he was, with Conte Candoli, one of Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars at Hermosa Beach. If Bijou the Poodle (Pepper's dog, by the way) and Thelonious Monk's Rhythm-A-Ning have a somewhat more prepared air to them than the other tracks, it is because Pepper and Candoli (whose past includes trumpet chairs with Woody Herman and Kenton) were playing them regularly at Rumsey's club.

As I said, Chambers (who is surely as innately a jazz musician as any man ever was) has been with the Miles Davis groups since 1955. Wynton Kelly's past is illustrious enough to have included work with the other major trumpeter in the modern idiom, Dizzy Gillespie; he has also accompanied Dinah Washington and Lester Young, among others. Jimmie Cobb was brought into the Davis group at the suggestion of Cannonball Adderley in 1959.

It should come as no surprise that Art finds playing with a rhythm section picked by Miles Davis such a pleasure and stimulation. It is true that those two horn-men "use the time" (as musicians put it) differently; Pepper is closer to the beat in his phrasing for one thing. But Miles Davis is a unique combination of surface lyricism, concentrated emotion, and has a decided, but not always obvious rhythmic flexibility. (He has been called a man walking on eggshells; a man with his kind of inner emotional terseness would surely crush eggshells to powder.) The sections he picks for himself might therefore be ideal for Art Pepper, for, although I don't think they convey emotion in the same way, they have many qualities in common. Miles' rhythm sections have been accused of playing "too loud" by some people. I am not sure what that means exactly, but I am sure that they are never heavy and always swing at any dynamic level they happen to be using, and that is a very rare quality. Their swing always has the secret kind of forward movement that is so important to jazz. (A handy explanation of "swing" might be "any two successive notes played by Paul Chambers.")

There are several other things on this record that gave me pleasure that I would recommend you listen for. One of the first is the unity of Pepper's solo on Whims of Chambers and the way it builds. (You cannot make a good solo just by stringing phrases together to fit the chord changes—but nobody admits how many players don't try to do much more than that.) The unity is subtle, but it is not obscure, and once grasped it becomes a delightful part of experiencing the solo. For instance, if you keep the phrase he opens with in mind, then notice how much of the solo is melodically related to that phrase. And also how much of it is related to Chambers' theme. Such unity is never monotonous because Art Pepper gets inside of these melodic ideas, finds their meaning, and develops them musically—he is never just playing their notes or playing notes mechanically related to their notes.

The curve of the solo is also a delight. In a very logical way, more complex lines of shorter notes begin in Art's third chorus (that is the one where Kelly re-enters behind him). They reach a peak of dexterity in the fourth, tapering to a more lyric simplicity at its end. There is a very effective echo of those more complex melodies at the end of the fifth chorus, as the solo is gradually returning to the simpler lines it began with. (There is nothing really difficult or forbidding about following these things; if you can follow a "tune" you can follow these melodic structures, although they are far more subtle and artful than a "tune" is. And following them gives the kind of pleasure that digging deeper always does.)

Thelonious Monk's Rhythm-A-Ning may sound like only a visit to that "other" jazz standard (other than the blues, that is) which its title indicates. It isn't just that. And the best part is the "middle" or "bridge." Most popular songs are written with two melodies and if we give each a letter to identify it, the form of them comes out to be AABA. That B part of Rhythm-A-Ning is an integral part of the piece because its melody is a development of one of the ideas in the A part. The other thing is the way it is harmonized. You can easily hear that it is unusual when they play it the first time. Hearing what they do with it in the solos I leave to you to enjoy. I was also intrigued with the idea that Monk would get a smile out of Pepper's writing on Bijou.

A musician friend who had recently returned from California and was answering my questions about Art Pepper said, "I think maybe Art knows now that he plays not to win polls or be famous or any of that, but just because he has it in him to play and he just needs to."

If a man has come to that insight, I think you can hear it in the way he plays. I think I hear it here. (1960)”

The following video montage offers many images of Art Pepper and Conte Candoli as set to Whims of Chambers from Getting’ Together.

The esteemed writer Ray Bradbury once said: “You make your way as you go.”

Thanks to Martin Williams many insights and observations, our travels in the World of Jazz a far richer one.

↧

Freddie Redd - The Thespian

August 20, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Cal Tjader: "A Certain, Smooth Elegance" [La Onda Va Bien] [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Martin Williams Gettin’ Together with Art Pepper in Jazz Changes From the Archives]

“Freddie Redd has an endless imagination for melody.”

- Mabel Fraser, Jazz author

“Freddie Redd is a real master of melody. He has a lot more to say than many composers. He hears music in longer forms. All his compositions are long."

- Don Sickler, Jazz musician

“Unlike most professional jazzmen, Freddie didn't take up an instrument until quite late in his teens. Around 1946, when he was in me Army, Freddie began to pick up me piano on his own. After being discharged, he ... heard Bud Powell [on 52nd Street in NYC]. ‘Bud really got me started. I'd never heard a pianist play quite like that—the remarkably fluent single lines and the pretty chords. In time, Thelonious Monk got to me too. Actually, however, I've been influenced by many things I've heard on a lot of instruments. What I do is try to piece together what stimulates me into my own way of feeling things musically.’"

- Nat Hentoff

In his insert notes to Shades of Redd [Blue Note 21738], Nat Hentoff further explains that “... since his emergence as composer of the score for Jack Gelber's harrowingly exact play, The Connection (Blue Note 4027), Freddie Redd has finally been gaining some of the recognition that has eluded him for much of his playing career. Freddie also plays the taciturn pianist in the play with convincing effect. Although he hopes to work again in the theatre, Freddie remains essentially a jazz player-writer, and this album underlines his growth as a composer of vigorously expressive jazz originals. … Freddie's long association with the play had led to his being dubbed "The Thespian" by Joe Termini, the owner of The Jazz Gallery and The Five Spot in New York, and Freddie chose the nickname for the title of the opening tune.”

Hence, too, the title of this piece.

The Mask of Janus, the two faced Roman God is often associated with theatrical performances. Janus is the God of beginnings and transitions, and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. The Romans named the month of January after him in their calendar.

The structure of Freddie Redd’s The Thespian seems to fit perfectly into the easy duality represented by the Mask of Janus. It sounds like it’s two tunes, but it is really only one which is played at a faster tempo when it is repeated. The solos and the closing refrain stay in the faster tempo. It almost as though the musicians are practicing the tune at the slower tempo to figure out the fingerings on their respective instruments, how to phrase the melody and how the chords lay, before bringing the tune up to the meter it is supposed to be played in.

It takes a lot of skill to write something that sounds well when the phrasing is exaggerated and also when played in an up tempo.

Freddie once remarked: “I like pieces that I can elongate."The Thespian is certainly that - a stretched out composition.

When I think of Freddie, the image that comes to mind is that of a skillful composer who plays okay piano; kind of like Tadd Dameron, who has been featured in a number of postings on these pages, recently. For as Richard Cook and Brian note about Freddie’s piano playing in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.: “Redd is a player who hasn't been able to fall back on an absolutely secure playing technique.”

One would think that having made three albums for Blue Note - The Connection, Shades of Redd, and Redd’s Blues [4037] - would merit more than a passing reference in Richard Cook’s “history” of the label, but that’s all you’ll find on page 137.

Mabel Fraser gives this more detailed overview of Freddie’s career and his approach to music in these insert notes from his 1985 Uptown recording entitled Lonely City [UPCD 2730]:

"Music is like oral history. It's all born out of an inspired feeling." Freddie Redd's inspiration synthesizes Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron and John Coltrane. His music, however, has its own special resonance, its own mystique, its own creativity. He never thinks about who influenced him, although he acknowledges teachers and artists who inspired him "always leave something with you. You try and find yourself. They just point the way."

Somewhat like alchemy. Redd can transform a few notes into musical touchstones. "I hear a little phrase which gives me the feeling of someone. Dameron, for example. I just hear it. And I write what I hear. I like pieces that I can elongate."

A lot of his music is like that. The cohesion among the notes sometimes gives an impression of intricacy, yet later we find ourselves humming the tune quite easily. The long melodic lines, the formats of the tunes, the memorable lyric evoke a musical combination of art and poetry. He is such a rich composer.

And yet commercial success has eluded him. "I never went after it. My motivation was the music. It took me wherever it was going to take me."

Freddie Redd himself is hard to categorize. He's a maverick, of sorts. Born in New York City on May 29, 1928, Redd grew up in Harlem. A late starter, he only began playing the piano at 18. He "sat down and played things by ear. Then I learned about chords and how they were connected." He also taught himself music notation. His "first job ever" was with Papa Jo Jones, the former Count Basie drummer, in New York in early '49, Later that year he played with Oscar Pettiford. During those days in New York, "you got to know everyone pretty well. Monk, Bird, Powell." He met Charlie Parker at the studio of an artist-Friend. Redd had fallen asleep by the fire and "woke up and there was Bird, looking down, laughing." He also met Bud Powell. Both were sporting similar hairstyles. Redd "hated barbers I wouldn't cut my hair, so I had the first Afro in the Village."

In the early 50's, he played with Cootie Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Joe Roland, The Art Farmer-Gigi Gryce Quintet, and in '54, Art Blakey. His first recording was for Prestige in '55 and in '56 he toured and recorded in Sweden with Tommy Potter, Joe Harris, Benny Bailey and Rolf Ericson. The tour had been arranged for some Swedish and American All Stars by a Swedish radio broadcaster working in New York. "A mutual friend, knowing a replacement was needed, asked me. I was available. The very next day I had my passport."

When Redd returned to the US, he settled in San Francisco, where he composed a "series of impressions of that city," recorded as San Francisco Suite (Riverside) in '57.

Redd's reputation as a jazz composer grew when he wrote the original score for the 1959 off-Broadway hit "The Connection.""I was living on First and Bowery in a loft. The Five Spot, later a famous jazz club, was a few blocks away Gary Goodrow, o tenor sax, and I sessioned there together. He became involved in acting and told me that Jack Gelber, the author of the play, was looking for o musician-writer. We met, I wrote the music in a short space of time and Gelber liked it." The play, about the misery of junkies waiting For the 'connection,' owed part of its success to the avant-garde use of the musicians. Freddie Redd, Jackie McLean, Michael Mattos and Larry Ritchie actually took part in the play as actors and musicians. The Connection, the jazz event of 1959-60, was later made into a movie, using the same musicians. Redd recorded two LPs of The Connection, one on Blue Note and one using the alias 'I Ching' on Felsted.

Throughout most of the 60's and 70's, Redd lived in Europe, "because of the environment over there. We were considered artists. There was employment opportunities." He stayed in London for two years with The Connection, then moved through France and Germany. Although he played "everywhere," he only recorded a trio session Under Paris Skies (Future) in 1971.

In the late 70's, Redd returned to the US, and while living in Los Angeles he recorded Straight Ahead in '77 (Interplay Records), picked by Swing Journal in Japan as one of the best jazz records of the year. Although he continued playing, his main interest was composing. "As a professional, you have to make records and a presentation of yourself. But I never bothered. I wanted to create." The need to survive led him to many odd jobs, for "there is very little subsidy for artists in the US." He moved to Jackson, Mississippi as "an artist in residence" for a musical project that never materialized.

Redd then turned up in Washington DC in '84. He "was booking talent and playing at Woody's on the Hill near Howard University, with Philly Joe Jones, Bill Hardman, and Junior Cook." Redd contacted producer Bob Sunenblick at Jeff Barr's suggestion. Barr, a noted jazz record dealer and writer for Jazz Times, had earlier brought up Redd's name as a musician deserving contemporary recognition. Bob agreed and by mid-84, when Redd was in Washington DC where Barr lived, the three cooperated in renting a piano and setting up rehearsal space. Redd then began working on the music for Lonely City.

In New York, Bob contacted Don Sickler, arranger of many Uptown record sessions and trumpeter-arranger for Philly Joe Jones' band, Dameronia. Redd composed the tunes and Sickler wrote the arrangements. Sickler considers Redd a "real master of melody. He has a lot more to say than many composers. He hears music in longer forms. All his compositions are long." Redd stayed at Sickler's house in New York and they spent many hours playing together while Redd worked out the music. Consequently, he developed a great feeling for Don’s musicianship. …

The history of jazz is full of valid musicians who proved to be as ephemeral as their music. Freddie Redd should not be in that category. With his simple melodies and lilting poetic tones, Redd's talent radiates on this record. His concepts, his sound, have an exciting touch and a haunting quality. He should be considered one of the great living masters.”

Freddie Redd is still going strong today at the age of eighty-six [86].

You can hear Freddie’s original version of The Thespian with Jackie McLean, alto saxophone, Junior Cook, tenor saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass and Louis Hayes on drums on the following video montage which features images of Japanese Kabuki actors done in the woodblock print style known as “yakusha-e.”

↧

Cal Tjader: "A Certain, Smooth Elegance" [La Onda Va Bien] [From the Archives]

August 21, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Vince Guaraldi at the Piano by Derrick Bang [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Freddie Redd - The Thespian

“The vibraphone invites overplaying almost by its very nature. … Unlike a horn player, the vibraphonist is unable to sustain notes for very long, even with the help of vibrato and pedal. The vibes invite overplaying to compensate for such limitations. Added to these difficulties is the fact that … [they are played with] a hitting motion powered by the wrists. With the mastery of a steady drum roll, the aspiring vibraphonist is already capable of flinging out a flurry of notes and, given the repetitive motions used to build up drum technique, the vibes player is tempted to lock into a ‘steady stream’… [of notes].

Tjader’s playing, however, was nothing like this. Although he was a drummer and percussionist by background, he seemed to draw on the instincts of a horn player in shaping his improvised lines. They did breathe.”

“The disparate strains in his playing [influences ranging from Lionel Hampton to Milt Jackson; one a banger the other a bopper] came out most clearly in his Jazz work. Where Tjader melded them into a melodic, often introspective style that was very much his own. Even when playing more high-energy Latin numbers Tjader kept a low-key demeanor, building off the intensity of the rhythm section rather than trying to supplant it. For the most part, he came across as an introvert on an instrument meant for extroverts.”

- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960, pp.103-104].

"No matter how extensive the ear's training or experience,"… "there is in Tjader's art a kind of hypnotic sophistication rare in any music. For those who can experience it, he is 'Tjader le Grand.'

- Heuwell Tircuit, Music Critic, 1973

“Cal was a very sophisticated musician, a real jazz player. He had a lot of feeling. There are a lot of vibe players out there that aren't really playing on that level. There are very few of them that can play a ballad the way that Cal did. By the time I met Cal, there were certainly [lots] of guys who could do unheard of things with the instrument technically. But there were not very many people that were interested in just expressing themselves in an artistic fashion."

- Scott Hamilton, Jazz tenor saxophonist

"[Cal had] a wonderful sense of rhythm, harmony and time.... He was 100 percent into the music.... His musical ideas flowed so effortlessly.... [Following the early pioneers], Cal set the standard by which all vibe players would be measured.... He was a great teacher, but not of the classroom type. He taught by example and I think that's probably the greatest way to teach.... I believe I would have been much the greater musician if I had worked more with Cal."

- Hank Jones, Jazz pianist

If you have ever wondered about what goes into the life of a working Jazz musician, then S. Duncan Reid’s biography of vibraphonist, drummer and bandleader Cal Tjader is for you.

Cal Tjader: The Life of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz [Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publication, 2013] contains annotations about almost every gig, recording and band that Cal was associated with during the three, plus decades of his career [he died in 1982 at the age of 56].

Additionally, Mr. Reid includes excerpts from interviews he conducted with many of the musicians who performed with Cal, as well as, the full text of interviews with Cal’s son and daughter, a Glossary of Musical Terms, which is especially helpful for those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of Latin Jazz , a 53-page Discography compiled by Michael Weil and a host of rare photographs of Cal and his various bands.

This excerpt from the Foreword by the distinguished Jazz author and critic Doug Ramsey sets the tone for Mr. Reid’s biography of Cal:

“Cal had a marvelous way of placing current jazz trends in the context of the music’s history and culture. … In his years of extensive research, interviews and writing, S. Duncan Reid has produced a biography that brings back with its clarity my good times with Cal. More importantly, his book gives all of us a thorough portrait of Tjader the man and the musician, and an understanding of the extent of his contribution to the music.”

The book is divided into the following five chapters, each one centered around a pivotal development in Cal’s career:

1. Tap Dancing with Bojangles to Playing with Brubeck

2. Tjader Plays Mambo and Tjazz

3. Reaching for the Skye

4. Last Bolero in Berkeley

5. Flying with Concord

Here are some excerpts from each chapter to help give you an idea of how Mr. Reid writes about the many highlights in Tjader’s career.

1. Tap Dancing with Bojangles to Playing with Brubeck

- “The fact that his many legions of fans came from every racial and cultural background is a testament to the universality of his music. And Tjader was revered internationally; his tours took him to France, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Nonetheless, he has not received enough recognition from American jazz historians and critics. To start with, he was a vibraphone virtuoso. More importantly, he was an artistic genius and great innovator who took Latin jazz further than his highly accomplished predecessors.” [Preface, p. 3]

- "We [pianist Dave Brubeck’s trio] had to get seven or eight new tunes every week for [Lyons' half-hour show]," said [bassist Ron Cotty]. "So we did a lot of rehearsing. Then we'd play those tunes at the Burma Lounge. We went through numerous standards and had built up a repertoire rather quickly. Everything happened pretty fast over that period, the popularity and then the recordings.... Cal was a great natural musician.... He played mostly drums early on. He was a great rhythmic guy. Good time, great ideas and great energy [smiles and chuckles slightly]. Dave wrote about 50 percent of the [arrangements] for the tunes in his style and [the other half] were Gal's arrangements, which were more bebop oriented.... I remember the charts that used vibes were lines that he wrote.... He'd jump up from the drums and go back and forth between the vibes and drums.... At the time, [we] were considered a new group, part of the avant-garde." [p. 27]

- “Brubeck returned to Sound Recorders sometime in June [1950] with a new and improved Tjader. On "'S Wonderful,""Sweet Georgia Brown,""Undecided" and "September Song," Cal's technique is more refined and his harmonic sense is beginning to take shape. This is due in part to the influence of Milt "Bags" Jackson. Tjader was attracted to Jackson's laid back approach, harmony and bluesy, bebop sensibility. Furthermore, he liked the fact that Bags, a nickname given to Jackson by a bassist in Detroit because of his habit of staying up all-night and carrying his collapsing vibraphone in a bag on his back, used two mallets instead of three or four. Lastly, Jackson enhanced his sound by setting the vibraharp's resonators to a slower speed, thereby bringing in a delicate vibrato and or tremolo. [p. 34]

2. Tjader Plays Mambo and Tjazz

- “I’m not an innovator, I’m not a pathfinder. I am a participator.” [p. 38, from a 1953 liner note in which Cal is quoted by Ralph J. Gleason].

- "Whenever we played the tunes, I had no arguments with Cal.... Every now and then when we would play a club, Cal would say, 'Let me sit in on drums.' So it would be Vince Guaraldi, myself and Cal on drums for a few tunes. Cal could play those drums. But the nice part about him was he had that feeling, boy, that nice soul feeling. I don't care what they say.... That's the beautiful thing about music. It isn't just how well you play.... It's what you have to say on the instrument and Cal had a lot to say.... Cal Tjader was one of a kind and we will always miss him, his heart and soul. God bless his gift to the world. It was great to have known another king." [p. 78, bassist Gene Wright who along with pianist Vince Guaraldi and drummer Al Torre was a member of one of Cal’s earliest groups]

- “[Flute and sax player] Paul Horn offered his perspective on Tjader and small bands in general. "Cal was a [fine] bandleader [and] just really a likable guy. I never saw him get upset or lose his temper.... Musically, he really had a handle on the blend of jazz and Afro-Cuban.... Cal could put [the drinks] away, but ... he always performed up to his standard of professionalism, even if his face was a little flushed after intermission.” [p. 94]

3. Reaching for the Skye

- “Dick Hadlock covered the event [Cal’s last gig at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, CA in July, 1963] for The San Francisco Examiner. He loved everything he heard that night, from the bossa nova tunes to a laid back set of blues and ballads. Hadlock observed that Tjader was technically adept but chose to emphasize form, melodic balance and understatement. Moreover, there was the superb sense of time. "Ballad playing requires a more highly developed feeling for time than does the mere recitation of chord patterns on a fast tune. Tjader's ability to place the right melody notes —HIS melody notes, not necessarily the songwriter's — in all the right places is a gift only the most eloquent jazzmen possess."” [p. 126]

- “Among the many gifts of Tjader was one for musical understatement. Not surprising for a man whose subtle touch was as developed as his ear for harmony. "Cal Tjader has certainly been one of the most underestimated jazz artists currently recording," wrote Mike Davenport of the Van Nuys newspaper Valley News and Green Sheet,"and [Warm Wave] easily demonstrates the warmth and beauty of his playing." This LP, issued in September of 1964, remained a personal favorite of Tjader's. "Cal used Warm Wave as his template [for all-ballad albums]," said Herb Wong. "He would say, 'Let's do another Warm Wave!"” [p. 131]

- “By the time … Chick Corea played on Cal’s Soul Burst [1966], the composer/pianist was only 24. "I brought a few of my compositions to the recording," he recalled, "especially one I ... titled 'Modbo Mambo.'" It was an attempt to put some of the Miles/Coltrane-like harmonies I was so interested in with the Latin rhythm section that I also was growing to love more and more.... The thrill was to hear my own composition so well recorded and performed. Cal was obviously wonderful ... as he allowed an unknown guy like me to bring in an original composition to a date with such well-known and wonderful musicians on it. I thank him to this day for that break and his good will and wonderful playing."” [p. 137].

- “Tjader was tremendously talented.” [An iconic Latin Jazz pianist composer-arranger Eddie Palmieri who would make a number of Latin Jazz recordings with Cal in the 1960’s.] [P. 138]

- “Cal always populated his combos with superb sidemen.” [p. 147]

- “The following are opinions of Tjader the jazz musician. Gary Burton, who recorded the tribute CD For Hamp, Red, Bags, and Cal (2001), had this to say: "Tjader's jazz style was pretty much derivative of Milt Jackson's style. But, where he excelled and left his legacy was in the [Latin jazz] he pioneered. So, I think I would say that Cal is important, not for his vibraphone playing as such, but for his bandleading and originality in that skill." Ted Gioia presents a different point of view in his book West Coast Jazz. "These disparate strains [Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson] in his playing came out most clearly in his jazz work, where Tjader melded them into a melodic, often introspective style that was very much his own." [Guitarist] Eddie Duran concurred. "One of the things most people probably don't realize is that he was a great jazz player.... Cal had not just his own style but his own sound and own approach to it. When you hear Milt Jackson, you know it's Milt. When you hear Cal Tjader, you know it's Cal."” [p. 154]

- “For two decades, Tjader had repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny knack for taking great compositions written by others, such as "Guarachi Guaro,""Cubano Chant" and "Sigmund Stern Groove," and making them his own.” [p. 156]

4. Last Bolero in Berkeley

- “Tjader was well aware that changes in personnel could either be rewarding or disastrous and was proud of the fact that he had made excellent choices up to this point. Each sideman had his own forte(s) and Tjader's repertoire would reflect the different moods. For example, Lonnie Hewitt leaned toward the blues and Al McKibbon toward the Cuban. Nonetheless, the ensemble would maintain Tjader's musical identity.3 He knew how to balance the leanings of his musicians with the overall sound he wanted for the band: "You should play with people who are sympathetic towards your approach."” [p. 160]

- "Now that I look back on it with a sympathetic eye, I get what it's all about. In the jazz world, and Cal was not like this at all, musicians [exaggerate or underestimate their contributions].... Whenever jazz players liked something they heard, they'd run over to the piano and show Cal. They were very involved in developing the art.... As I listen now to jazz artists, people discovered things.... Everybody had something to contribute. It's not that they were discovering the nature of the universe.... But the egos that got involved in it were really not appropriate. Cal was above all that.... He used to tell me, for instance, 'If you play at a club and come up with one new riff, that's a good night.' He was very humble about the whole thing." [Ed Bogas, Cal's producer, p. 166]

- "Cal Tjader's sound on vibes is gentle and flowing, lyrical and swinging," wrote Jon Hendricks in The San Francisco Chronicle. "He plays the instrument with real passion, always a pleasure to hear and see.” [p. 172]

- “... , in a conversation with [Jazz critic] Russ Wilson, Tjader had pointed out that he'd been asked on several occasions why he wouldn't stick to one format. "I cant," he explained: "I have too many musical interests. My ideal is to make our tunes empathetic or authentic, be it Basic, a mambo, or a Beatle number; to play them with taste and a feeling for the idea they had, but without copying and with our own ideas and interpretation."” [p. 174]

- “[Guitarist] Eddie Duran described what the working atmosphere was like during the making of Tjader Plays Tjazz, Cal Tjader/Stan Getz Sextet, San Francisco Moods and Last Night When We Were Young, his final Tjader LP. "Cal was a very nice cat... He was very loose and wasn't dictatorial.... When we would record in a small group setting, he wanted me to [complement] behind him. He would say, T want you to feed me.' Occasionally, we'd have piano but sometimes the piano would lay out and Cal wanted just a guitar comp behind him on his solo. I would lay down some chords behind him and then the piano would come in. The music was so together and we all harmonized personally with each other.... His harmonic sense was so beautiful. On some of the music, he would say, 'Let's use this change or this harmony instead of that.' We'd be changing harmonies within the tune itself. We would sit down and discuss it.... [Whether Cal was interpreting standards or creating his own material], there were different intros and segues into a tune......He would start the tune and then when it came to his solo, he'd like a modulation into a different key."” [p. 182; emphasis mine]

5. Flying with Concord

- “[Bassist] Howard Rumsey and Tjader had a friendly working relationship for over twenty years. Tjader would raise his price periodically but Rumsey was always happy to give it to him. "Tjader had the most dedicated fans. [Each concert] was almost like a religious event. The women especially revered Cal and his music." [p. 235. Howard was in charge of the music at The Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, CA and later at his own club, Concerts By The Sea in Redondo Beach, CA.]

- “Tjader was indeed a unique animal. In an industry rife with ruthless competition, phoniness and self-aggrandizement, he was generous (both musically and with his time), honest and modest to a fault. In 1975, he told Max Salazar that his early groups were a "little bit out in front" because they played jazz tunes, not just montunos all night. This was as close to a boast as he ever came. Tjader's eagerness to deflect attention away from himself has hurt his legacy. It started with the "I'm not an innovator" remark early on and continued throughout his career. [p. 238]

- “ among [San Francisco Examiner columnist] Phil Elwood's fondest memories of the Concord period, were the small after-concert parties that Carl Jefferson would put on at his spread in Clayton, a town six miles southeast of Concord. Tjader would impress the crowd with his rarely heard piano voicings. "Cal always thought that the younger [musicians] had given him so much. It was kind of peculiar. I think that Cal never quite understood that he really was a major figure. He never acted like that." [p. 238

- “The many nights he spent at El Matador [San Francisco, CA] revealed to Herb Wong [Jazz writer, educator, record producer] what a clever bandleader Tjader was. "He paced his sets very intelligently, with taste and understanding of how an audience may move from one context to another and still have logic in the set of music that he was presenting." Tjader was able to express his musical ideas to a broader audience because he could please both straight and Latin jazz purists and ballad lovers during the same performance. "That's not an ad hoc skill," continued Wong. "[It's] something that matures.... The feeling that he would maximize his contribution to the music while ... also contributing to the audience's pleasure, and hopefully, growth."” [p. 238]

"Cal definitely had a knack and feel for picking the right tunes to play and at the right time," added [Latin Jazz percussionist] Poncho Sanchez. "What tunes to start off with and to play at the end of the night. Whether we should hit em hard or start mellow. As a young man, I absorbed all this. Now I do that today." And there are two other qualities that made Tjader a top-flight bandleader. First, according to [drummer] Vince Lateano, he was both a good director and could make things happen spontaneously. Second, according to [bassist] Robb Fisher, he instinctively elicited the best out of his musicians. "When you play with a musician of [Cal's] caliber, it is a lot easier than when you play with other people. He made it easier."” [p. 238]

- “Tjader's legacy extends beyond his musicianship and bandleading. He introduced Latin Jazz to mainstream America.” [pp. 238-39]

What emerges after a reading of Mr. Reid's biography is a detailed and clear picture of Cal Tjader’s career in Jazz and what a remarkable musician he was.

Cal had his demons - he struggled with alcohol addiction for most of his adult life - and while Jazz clubs are not the best place to overcome such bad habits, Mr. Reid doesn't sensationalize Cal’s personal struggle with this dependency.

Instead, he focuses on Cal’s music and helps the reader understand what elements, personalities and factors made it so distinctive and, ultimately, significant.

During the times I caught his groups at Concerts By The Sea in Redondo Beach, CA.

I was always impressed by how thoughtfully Cal probed melodies for nuance and subtlety. To me, he was the quintessential Jazz musician; always looking for ways to make interesting improvisations that swung with intensity.

Thankfully, the legacy of this special musician has been captured in Mr. Reid’s biography.

I can’t think of Jazz another musician more deserving of such recognition.

Order information is available at www.mcfarlandpub.com. McFarland titles are also available from all major ebook providers, including consumer/retail suppliers [e.g., Google Play and Amazon Kindle] and library suppliers [e.g., Overdrive, ebrary]. For a complete list of ebook providers, see www.mcfarlandpub.com/customers/ebooks.

Vibraphonist Cal Tjader performing John Mosher's "S.S. Groove" at the Sunset Cultural Center, Carmel, CA, April, 1959 with Lonnie Hewitt on piano, Al McKibbon on bass and drummer Willie Bobo.

Vince Guaraldi's "Ginza Samba" as performed by vibraphonist Cal Tjader, tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, Eddie Duran on guitar, Vince on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass and Billy Higgins on drums.

↧

Vince Guaraldi at the Piano by Derrick Bang [From the Archives]

August 22, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: John Williams - Rollicking, Rolling and Rumbling

≪ Previous: Cal Tjader: "A Certain, Smooth Elegance" [La Onda Va Bien] [From the Archives]

"When I met him, he immediately liked the feeling I had, even though I wasn't experienced. So I would go to his house for lessons, whenever he was available: once a week or so. We would listen to music, and then talk about it, and then he'd show me things: harmonies of tunes, and changes.

"A lesson would take place at the keyboard: He would improvise and play single lines, like bebop lines. I would listen, and then I would ask about chords and stuff. Vince didn't have a system of different exercises; he just did it by playing for me.

"The other part of a lesson — the important part — was listening to records by the great players: Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Art Tatum and Lester Young ... always the masters. We'd listen and then talk about the music. One time he played an album by Los Angeles bebop pianist Hampton Hawes, and Vince said, 'You and I have this feeling, and a lot of players don't get it.'

-Larry Vuckovich, Vince Guaraldi’s former student and Jazz pianist [Emphasis mine]

"Vince was a very positive player. I don't know if that can be analyzed. The rhythmic component obviously is part of it, and the fact that he created melodies that tended to be sunny, not neutral or morose. But also, you can sense a musician's personality and attitude when they're playing,and anybody who hears most of Vince's music will sense a positive quality. He was a good, solid musician. Anybody who listens to his music 50 years from now will appreciate it for the same things we appreciate it for today. He wanted to be a success, in a very profound way, and to be remembered for the happy quality of his music. He succeeded."

- Doug Ramsey, Jazz author, essayist and blogger

"I enjoyed everything we ever played; it felt great every night. I dug Vince's playing; he was a swinging piano player, and he made it feel really good. I could hear a little Bud Powell influence, and a little Red Garland influence, but Vince had his own style. If somebody put one of his records on, I could always tell it was Vince. He had a distinct style, that's for sure; it was the way he'd do the phrasing and the chord changes on his solos. He was very rhythmic, and he swung so hard.”

- Colin Bailey, Jazz drummer

In the span of a few months, two of my favorite Jazz musicians who have been gone from the Jazz scene for many years suddenly “reappeared” in my life.

Both were based in San Francisco, CA but each developed national recognition through their concerts club appearances and recordings. Some of their earliest success in the music came while working together.

The first to make their “presence” felt again was vibraphonist, percussionist and bandleader, Cal Tjader, in S. Duncan Reid’s excellent biography: Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz. Duncan’s work is published by McFarland and Company. Here’s a link to my review of the book.

And now, along comes Derrick Bang’s Vince Guaraldi at the Piano, also published by McFarland. Order information about Derrick’s book can be located via this link.

A professional writer and editor for many years, Derrick has specialized in writing about the work of Charles Schultz, the late cartoonist who created the Peanuts strip.

In talking with Derrick by phone, I gathered that like many others, he was adversely affected by the employment meltdown that followed the Great Recession of 2008. I closed my consultancy as a consequence of it and retired.

But thank goodness for Jazz fans everywhere that Derrick didn’t retire from writing. Instead, he used the “free time” to pour his considerable talents as a writer into producing one of the best researched and well-written biography of a Jazz musician that I have ever read. And all this excellence in service of a Jazz musician whose professional career actually spans little more than two decades [Vince Guaraldi died on February 6, 1976 at the age of 48].

Vince Guaraldi at the Piano takes the reader through the formative years of Vince’s career with Cal Tjader, Woody Herman and the Lighthouse All-Stars, the many manifestations of Vince’s own trios with his early success thanks to the hit recording of his original composition, Cast Your Fate to the Wind and the writing and staging of his Jazz Mass at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, and though to the banner years associated with the original music that Guaraldi composed for many of the TV specials based on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips centered around the forlorn Charlie Brown.

In many ways, the work can be seen as essentially a two part treatise on Vince’s professional career: [1] BC = Before Charlie Brown and [2] AC = After Charlie Brown.

Prior to the detailed documentation that Derrick’s biography provides about every aspect of Vince’s career, this dualistic “before and after Peanuts” view was the impression many of us had about Guaraldi’s accomplishments in music.

But after reading the Prologue, 15 Chapters, Epilogue and three [3] Appendices which contain remembrances of Vince by the musicians who worked with him, a discography and a filmography, the reader comes away with a fuller appreciation of a very complicated and complete musician who expressed his art in a style that was simple, direct, and yet, at the same time, powerfully rhythmic and emotionally charged.

Because of his small statute, relatively quiet and easy-going demeanor and physical limitations [he had small hands and was a poor reader of music], Vince was easy to overlook or take for granted.

But as Derrick’s book irrefutably proves, Vince was a force of nature and one to ultimately be reckoned with in whatever the musical circumstance.

Irrespective of the musical setting, Vince Guaraldi prevailed.

I had the opportunity the observe this quality about Vince first-hand after he joined the Lighthouse Cafe All-Stars [LHAS] in late summer of 1959.

During that time, I frequented the Hermosa Beach, CA club on a weekly basis and when Vince first arrived, the long-standing quintet featuring Frank Rosolino on trombone, Bob Cooper on tenor sax, Victor Feldman on piano and vibes and Stan Levey on drums was in the process of disbanding.

They had been together for almost three years and their breakup left something of a void in the routine of the regular patrons of this beach haunt.

Over the years, bassist Howard Rumsey, who also served as the Musical Director of the LHAS [in other words, it was Howard’s gig] had put together an impressive book of complicated and intriguing compositions written by the likes of Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank, Sonny Clark, Bob Cooper, Bill Holman, and Victor Feldman, among many other West Coast Jazz notables, all of whom had passed through the band at one time or another.

It was a complicated book as the West Coast style of Jazz tended to be an arranger’s music which placed a heavy premium on a musician’s ability to read music.

Enter Vince Guaraldi, a notoriously poor reader, who pretty much had a deep-set, look of confusion on his face during his first month or so on the Lighthouse gig as he tried to find his way through this mirage of notes and chords.

No problem, for not only did the LHAS undergo a personel change - Conte Candoli returned on trumpet, Art Pepper came aboard on alto and Nick Martinis on drums completed the rhythm section changes along with Vince on piano - but the music this group performed change, too, to music that was largely influenced by … wait for it … Vince Guaraldi!

Did I mention that Vince prevailed?

Instead of the finger-poppin’, complicated arrangements that previously made-up the LHAS “book”, the tunes became more simple melodies played at medium tempos, many of which were blues-inflected when they weren’t composed as outright 12-bar or 16-bar blues by Vince or Vince in conjunction with Conte Candoli or tenor saxophonist Bob Cooper [who rejoined the band due to Pepper’s frequent absences].

You can hear this format on Little Band, Big Jazz [Crown LP-5162; Fresh Sound CD FSR1629]. Although the record is under the nominal leadership of trumpeter Conte Candoli and he is listed as the composer of four of the six tunes on the album and co-composer on the remaining two with Vince, I heard this music come together at the Lighthouse over a six-month period of time prior to its recording in February, 1960 and there is little doubt in my mind that Vince was responsible for all of it!

It’s just too Vince-sounding and Conte was not known for his interest in writing original compositions. Of the 40 tunes on four of Conte’s signature LP’s from this period in his career - Powerhouse Trumpet, The Conte Candoli Quartet on Mode, Mucho Color and West Coasting - Conte only wrote three original compositions, two of which are based on mambo’s riffs and one is an adaptation of Dizzy Gillespie’s Groovin’ High.

From the detailed information provided by Derrick throughout his book, the reader learns that Vince performed with just about everybody of significance on the West Coast Jazz scene from about 1950-1965. The list is staggering.

But what Derrick also makes clear in his book is that Vince was most comfortable when he was performing his own music, especially in the classic piano-bass-drums Jazz trio setting that he preferred and continued with throughout his career despite numerous changes in bassists and drummers.

Like many self-taught musicians, Vince didn’t know what he couldn’t do. He didn’t know the “right way” or “the wrong way” or that “you can’t do that” or “that’s not the legitimate way to get that sound” or whatever.

Vince heard it in his head and felt it in his heart and somehow got it out of his hands.

Whatever the technical limitations about his musicianship, Vince was driven to bring out his own style in his music. In this sense, as Derrick underscores time and again, Vince was a true original and this is why his music has stood the test of time.

Derrick frames his biography of Vince with his own insights and those of the people and musicians associated with Vince whom he interviewed and both of these help to bring out key characteristics of Guaraldi’s personality and style.

- “Vince had “the urge,.’the desire to really make something of himself in the music business. He was persistent, and he had the chops.” [Tom Hart, saxophonist, p. 22]

- “Vince had a unique style, unlike any other: pure Jazz. His sense of rhythm was flawless. He was always fun to play with, too, because he knew how to back up a soloist.” [Hart, p. 23]

- In the beginning, Vince was so excited in his playing, it was like trying to hold back a colt or a stallion. … He had a tendency to play too much behind me sometimes [but] eventually he became aware of the fact that you don’t play every tune like a bebop express running 120 miles an hour.” [Cal Tjader, p. 25]

“He fingers [the piano] all wrong when he makes runs and plays chords. All wrong that is, from the standpoint of efficiency and ‘piano technique.’ … But I've noticed over the years in Jazz that almost all the good ones do it all wrong, because it is the sound that matters - and the sound with Vince, is beautiful and moving.” [Ralph Gleason, columnist, p. 37]

“He was known as Dr. Funk … because he played with such an earthy feeling.” [Doug Ramsey, Jazz historian, p. 43]

“One time he played an album by Los Angeles bebop pianist Hampton Hawes, and Vince said: ‘You and I have this feeling, and a lot of other players don’t get it.’” [Larry Vuckovich, Vince’s student and Jazz pianist, p. 44].

- “Guaraldi reading of Django [on The Vince Guaraldi Trio LP, 1956] marked the dawning of the classic ‘Guaraldi sound,’ demonstrating his ability to paint an impressive musical portrait with a deceptively simple arrangement of notes and chords.” [author, p. 50]

- "Vince is more than an interesting pianist. He is not ridden by an unconscionable demon to prove something; he just loves music and loves playing and swinging. This uncomplicated approach allows him to poke fun at himself (‘I’m just a reformed boogie woogie pianist'), which is refreshing; it enables him to play simple, emotionally pure piano, as on the ballads, and to get pixieish, funky and hard-swinging, as on [his] original and some of the standards." [Ralph J. Gleason, p. 56]

- "Guaraldi reveals himself as one of the most astonishingly lyrical pianists in the field: as delicately sensitive as John Lewis. Much the same can be said of Eddie Duran ... who emerges here as certainly the co-star of the album. The truth is that here is one of the really great lyric jazz combinations: great as the Brubeck-Desmond combination is great, in the sense that the whole is equal to twice as much as the sum of its parts." [C.H. Garrigues, columnist, p. 71]

- “Guaraldi looks like a pixie … but has the muscles of a giant.” [Russ Wilson, columnist, p. 85]

- “He swung his ass off; he reminded me of Red Garland. And working as the house rhythm section [Outside at the Inside, Palo Alto, CA] with Vince’s band was one of my favorite Jazz gigs of all time.” [Benny Barth, drummer]

- "What Vince has got in his playing is feeling. This is a quality that money can't buy, practice cannot make perfect and technique tends to defeat rather than enhance. Vince sings when he plays. I don't mean he grunts or hums or even makes a noise at all. I mean his fingers sing, the music sings, and he writhes and twists on the piano stool like a balancing act in the circus.” [Ralph, J. Gleason, p. 113]

- "It's easy to throw art — music — in front of the public, but then the artist has no control over how the work will be taken in. But I've always thought that Vince knew precisely how he wanted the public to 'hear' his music, and he performed it in such a way to maximize that response." [drummer Jerry Granelli, p. 134]

- “... [Theme to Grace] became vibrant proof of Guaraldi’s long-standing ability to weave a lovely new melody into an improv session.” [Reverend Charles Gompertz who worked closely with Vince to create the Jazz Mass that was performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in May, 1965, p. 155]

- “There was no logical progression with Vince, …. He was a very spontaneous person; he didn’t approach things in a linear, methodical, systematic kind of way. It was like getting caught up in a zeitgeist.” [Reverend Charles Gompertz, p. 149]

“In a sense, I met a saloon player ... and, during the time we knew each other, he I became a nationally and internationally known celebrity. I played a part in all that, which is humbling. It's an extraordinary story: how one person can have an idea that involves you, and then can pursue that idea, and help put together what needs to take place, to bring the idea to fruition, and then push it beyond that, into a whole different category of existence. It's a magical kind of thing." [Reverend Charles Gompertz, p. 157].

"Vince had this joyous drive, and remarkable melodic improvisation. You heard it in his tunes. He was a rare and wonderful combination of melody, power and jazz swing. His 'time feeling' was just wonderful; he was like a freight train. You just had to climb aboard, hold on and hope for the best. It was really scintillating, playing for him." [Fritz Kasten, drummer, p. 227]

"It was always fun to play with Vince. He always had such a great feel, immediately; it was never like getting into the music gradually. It was just bap, we had it.” [Colin Bailey, drummer, p.249]

The second half of Derrick biography of Vince details the many manifestations of Vince’s music in the Peanuts television specials that are based on the characters created by cartoonist Charles Schulz.

Producer Lee Mendelson chose Vince for this career-changing endeavor. Why? Derrick offers this background on how it all came to pass.

“But how did Mendelson settle on Guaraldi?

Mendelson knew that he wanted a jazz score —"’I had always loved jazz, going back to Art Tatum’—but he needed a composer.

‘I first called Dave Brubeck, who's an old friend, but he was busy. He suggested I call Cal Tjader, with whom I went to high school, but he was busy. Years later, they both said they wished they hadn't been busy!’

The important part of the saga came next, and it'll sound familiar to those who remember, from the previous chapter, how the Rev. Charles Gompertz came to select Guaraldi for his high-reaching idea [the May, 1965 Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass].

‘I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge,’ Mendelson recalled, ‘and I had the jazz station on —KSFO —and it was a show hosted by Al 'Jazzbo' Collins. He'd play Vince's stuff a lot, and right then, he played [Vince’s] Cast Your Fate to the Wind. It was melodic and open,and came in like a breeze off the bay. And it struck me that this might be the kind of music I was looking for.

‘I found out that Vince lived in San Francisco, so I got in touch with Max Weiss, at Fantasy Records, and we put the deal together.’

Mendelson and Guaraldi got together shortly thereafter.

‘We met at a restaurant called Original Joe's, in San Francisco,’ Mendelson continued. ‘He had a great smile and a great laugh, and we hit it off right away. I was struck by his very short, stubby fingers, and I remember wondering how he played the piano with hands like that.

‘He told me he loved the Peanuts strip, and that he never missed it.

‘I didn't have a lot of money at the time; my company was brand new, and didn't have huge budgets. It was a mutual trust thing, and we worked out an arrangement.’

If Mendelson had any doubts about Guaraldi's suitability for the assignment, they vanished after what happened next ... particularly because it happened so quickly.

‘About two weeks later, Vince called me on the phone,’ Mendelson continued. ‘He told me, “I gotta play something for you; it just came into my head.” I said, 'I don't want to hear it on the phone, because you don't hear the highs and lows; let me come down to the studio.' And he said, “I gotta play it for you, before I forget it, so at least you'll remember it.” So I said, 'Okay, fine; play it.'

"And that was the first time I ever heard Linus and Lucy.

‘It just blew me away. It was so right, and so perfect, for Charlie Brown and the other characters. Something deep inside me said, This is gonna make the whole thing work. Vince's music was the one missing ingredient that would make everything happen.’

Looking back on that electrifying moment, decades later, Mendelson insists that he knew —really knew— that Guaraldi had been the right choice.

‘I have no idea why, but I knew that song would affect my entire life. There was a sense, even before it was put to animation, that there was something very, very special about that music.

‘There's no doubt in my mind, that if we hadn't had that Guaraldi score, we wouldn't have had the franchise we later enjoyed.’” [p. 161]

Although, Vince’s association with the various iterations of the Peanuts television specials would ultimately provide him with a degree of financial security accorded to few Jazz musicians, he continued to work gigs for the remainder of his life.

Indeed, he died of a heart attack while working one - Butterfield’s - a club/restaurant located in Menlo Park, CA. Vince was only forty-eight.

Vince Guaraldi at the Piano is a fascinating reading experience, not only because of the wealth of detailed information it contains about Vince Guaraldi and his music, but also because of the very skillful way in which it is written.

Derrick Bang writes clean and compelling prose. There is a clarity and a warmth to his style that are the hallmarks of all great writers.

What stands out about Derrick Bang’s writing is that while experiencing it, one quickly appreciates that one is in the presence of an artist.

Here’s a video montage featuring images of Vince on which he performs his original composition Little David along with Conte Candoli on trumpet, Buddy Collette on tenor saxophone, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Stan Levey on drums.

↧

John Williams - Rollicking, Rolling and Rumbling

August 23, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Buddy DeFranco Interview with Steve Voce [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Vince Guaraldi at the Piano by Derrick Bang [From the Archives]

Onomatopoeia - words that sound like the sound they are describing, words like rumbling, roaring, booming, drumming, thumping, et al.

I picked this particular set of onomatopoetic words to help describe the sounds I hear when listening to pianist John Williams. No, not that “John Williams.”

The musician I am referring to is John Thomas Williams, the pianist who worked with Stan Getz, Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Cannonball Adderley in the ’50s not the John Towner Williams, who had a brief career as a jazz pianist and went on to write the music for Star Wars, a bunch of Steven Spielberg films and to also assume the resident directorship of the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Like Russ Freeman, Eddie Costa, and Horace Silver, John Williams often used the thumb and the ring finger of the left hand to play bass clef intervals instead of full chords and when you wiggle the wrist while doing this you can get a trembling, rumbling sound going reminiscent of the boogie woogie pianists but without the repetitiveness.

Because of the drum-like patterns and punctuations he constantly inserts in the bass notes of the instrument with his left hand, John adds a very percussive and propulsive dimension to the improvisations he creates with his right hand.

His piano playing sounds as though it moves from side-to-side and creates images of a music that is rocking, rolling and rumbling along. Not surprisingly, one of John’s original composition is entitled Railroad Jack. OK, I’ll stop here and not push the metaphors too far.

Although he was only on the Jazz scene for seven or so years [circa 1953-1960] John’s style of playing made a powerful [there I go again] impression on a lot of Jazz fans, including me.

I did not know a great deal about John’s time in the World of Jazz, but I reached out to some friends who did so I could do a proper job of remembering him on these pages.

The following overview and interview with John by Alun Morgan appeared in the October, 1962 edition of Jazz Monthly. I plan to follow it with a two, separate postings of an interview that Steve Voce conducted with John in 1988. Steve is a British journalist and music critic who contributed regularly to The Independent and to Jazz Journal for over 40 years.

John Williams: The Pianist from Vermont

by Alun Morgan

October 1962, Jazz Monthly

“THE REPUTATIONS OF JAZZ musicians would be ephemeral indeed were it not for the gramophone record. (The legend of Buddy Bolden is something of an exception for it dates from an essentially romantic period of jazz's history.) Pianist John Williams is a case in point, for although he was prominent in New York jazz circles during the middle nineteen-fifties I have heard no news of his whereabouts for some four or five years. Coinciding almost exactly with Williams's withdrawal from the spotlight came the appearance of another John Williams, also a pianist, who is still very active in Los Angeles as the leader of orchestras for film, television and recording studio work. The two are not, as far as I know, related in any way and to avoid confusion during the brief period when both pianists were making records the Los Angeles-based musician called himself both John Towner Williams and John Towner.

The subject of this article and the ensuing discography is a New Englander, born in the little town of Windsor in the Green Mountain state on January 28, 1929. Vermont is a small state which relies largely on its agriculture for economic stability but there is a long-established quarrying industry too. Although Vermont claims to have the purest racial stock in America the quarrying of slate brought in settlers from the slate quarry areas of Wales and it is possible that Williams is of Welsh descent. Be that as it may he gained his earliest musical experience during the four years he spent as a church organist.

From this beginning he moved into local dance band work until 1945 when he crossed the state line into Massachusetts to join Mal Hallett's last band in Boston. With Hallett at the time were trumpeter Don Fagerquist and tenor saxist Buddy Wise and it was this band which gave Williams his first taste of New York. By 1948 he was with Johnny Bothwell’s band (the drummer with Bothwell was Frank Isola who was later to work with Williams on many occasions) and had begun to play sessions with another New Englander, bass player Teddy Kotick. In January 1951 Williams was called up for Army service and played baritone horn at Fort Devens with an army band, later moving on to Korea with another service orchestra.

Demobilised at the beginning of 1953 John played piano for Charlie Barnet during February of that year then the following month became a regular member of the Stan Getz quintet and remained for six months until an incident caused the temporary disbandment of the Getz group. During the following year he spent six months at the Manhattan School of Music and worked with various New York based groups including that of Don Elliott. When Getz reformed his quintet in October, 1954, Williams returned to the piano stool and remained with the tenor saxist for another eight months. Getz, a strict disciplinarian so far as rhythm sections are concerned, was hard put to find a suitable replacement for Williams and asked John to stay on for a time when an arrangement with Lou Levy failed to work out to everyone's advantage. By the early summer of 1955 Williams was leading his own trio at the New York Clubs and was recording as a sideman with bands of all sizes, from Larry Sonn's big studio orchestra to the Phil Woods quartet.

Up until the end of 1956 he was prominently represented on record but since that time I have learned little or nothing of his career. He cropped up on a record made in Miami under the leadership of trombonist Lon Norman but I have no note of the recording date of the LP (Criteria LP2, 'Gold Coast Jazz Volume 2'). If any reader of this article has any news of Williams's whereabouts of late I would be grateful for the information.

Stylistically Williams is easily identifiable and his work is, in many ways, more typical of an older jazz era than of the post-Bud Powell pianists. He has been criticised for having a heavy touch and an unsympathetic approach as an accompanist. Both charges are unfair and untrue and may be refuted easily by reference to almost any of his records. Stan Getz is not a man to suffer fools gladly and it is quite unlikely that the tenor saxist—who has worked and recorded with Al Haig; Hank Jones, Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Duke Jordan, etc.—would have employed Williams for over a year had he not measured up to the demanded high standard. Williams admires Silver, Powell and Hank Jones and was quoted on the sleeve of his second trio LP (EmArcy MG 36061) as saying "I admire Hank Jones because he gets a flying flow into his phrasing and yet is still playing the crowded quaver type of solo; I don't know how he does it but it's beautiful to hear".

At this period in his career—1955—he was asked about his own playing style: "I have been feeling lately as if I must want to be a Zoot Sims— Al Cohn piano player, to do on the piano what they do with their horns. I find, in my rare good moments, that my rhythmic freedom will allow me to open up and widen out and damn near soar, as they do so easily". Swinging is something which seems to come easily and naturally to Williams whose basic style is founded on a see-sawing, syncopated use of both hands. This is hardly a "modern" approach but it is extremely effective as a foil to the long, sinuously swinging lines of men such as Getz and Zoot Sims.

Without a great deal of adaptation Williams's normal method of expression can be turned into a kind of boogie style, which is just what happens on the deliberately funny Getz record of Roundup lime. On ballads John sometimes uses the Bud Powell grand manner (albeit a little less florid) with spread chords and long runs between phrases but on other occasions he adapts his medium tempo style to give a highly individual sound. Typical of this is the quite charming half chorus he plays on the Bill De Arango LP version of These Foolish Things. The general concept is stealthy, with the left hand sneaking in to play sparse chords punctuating the right hand line. Like many other intelligent pianists he is very conscious of his instrument's limitations and has tried to overcome them.

He has found it hard to achieve the soaring, free-swinging style of the tenor saxophone at the keyboard "because of the piano's percussive-type action and the difficulty in sustaining notes or bending them. Emotion is, of course, harder to get out of just hands alone than out of mouth and hands. But sometimes 1 have an encouraging measure of success; even find myself using the sustaining pedal in a queer way in spots. Also, finally discovering the helpfulness of dynamics". He is represented as a composer on record by a handful of tunes all of which are interesting, each one being a natural outgrowth of his solo style. I’ll Take the Lo Road and Blue Mirror are both blues although the latter has eight bar interludes between the choruses. (Owners of the "Getz at the Shrine" set of LPs might be interested to know that the “warming-up" by Williams at the beginning of the first side, immediately preceding the Duke Ellington announcement, is a short and unscheduled version of I’ll Take the Lo Road.) Purple cow. a thirty-two bar AABA composition recorded by a quintet under Zoot Sims's leadership, could only have been written by Williams, for even though trumpet and tenor play the thematic middle-eight the sound is definitely pianistic. Williams Tell and Shiloh use the same form, viz. a thirty-two bar chorus split into two sixteen bar sections, while Okefenokee Holiday has a fifty-six bar chorus made up 16-16-8-16.

Although John Williams's style is very individual he seems to have had little influence on others and the occasional similarities between his work and that of both Russ Freeman and George Wallington are probably coincidental. His continued absence from record is regretted and I hope this short appreciation will draw some attention to a man whose work is in danger of being overlooked.”

John can be heard performing his original composition "Okefenokee Holiday" with Bill Anthony, bass and Frank Isola, drums on the following video.

↧

Buddy DeFranco Interview with Steve Voce [From the Archives]

August 24, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: West Coast Jazz Box

≪ Previous: John Williams - Rollicking, Rolling and Rumbling

“Woody [Herman] has no encouraging words about the status or future of the clarinet in jazz. He says there are no new players who have impressed him.

‘I had the good fortune last summer of doing a Canadian tour with Buddy DeFranco and his quartet. He's still the only guy who's coming up with anything new as far as that instrument is concerned. It's a very difficult instrument to play well. It's not the sort of thing you can just pick up and start making your own thoughts on, and I think that's one reason there aren't too many kids interested. And then, too, it lost its place as a voice in jazz because it's connected in most younger people's minds with Dixieland.’”

- Doug Ramsey, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers

“Admired for his mastery of the clarinet in his early career as a swing band musician, DeFranco came to full prominence in the late 1940s and early '50s. Although the clarinet had been a stellar swing-era instrument in the hands of bandleaders such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Woody Herman, it did not initially find a visible role when bebop arrived in the '40s.

"I was the first clarinetist to play bebop on the instrument," DeFranco told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch in 1993. "It turns out that was the beginning of a dry spell for the clarinet in jazz. It was a very difficult instrument on which to play bop."

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz described the task in even broader strokes, noting that the clarinet is "incompatible with bebop."

But DeFranco disagreed. ‘I wouldn't say incompatible,’ he told the Dispatch. ‘It's simply harder to play bop on clarinet than any other instrument.’

DeFranco nonetheless took on the challenge. By the late '40s he had thoroughly established himself as the principal bebop clarinetist. And he would remain so for decades, exploring and mastering other new jazz ideas as they arrived. His influence persisted on generations of clarinetists, reaching across a diverse array of players, from Jimmy Giuffre to Eddie Daniels, Ken Peplowski, Anat Cohen and dozens of others.”

- Don Heckman, writing in The Los Angeles Times

“DeFranco was the first to apply the vocabulary of bebop to the clarinet, which nevertheless remains a neglected instrument in modern jazz. He developed a smooth, flawless technique on a horn far less forgiving of embouchure and fingering errors than the saxophone. DeFranco can play quite lyrically, but many critics contend that his virtuosity comes at the expense of emotional intensity and expressiveness.”

- Len Lyons and Don Perlo, Jazz Portraits: The Lives and Music of the Jazz Masters

“Nobody has seriously challenged DeFranco's status as the greatest post-swing clarinettist, although the instrument's desertion by reed players has tended to disenfranchise its few exponents (and Tony Scott might have a say in the argument too). DeFranco's incredibly smooth phrasing and seemingly effortless command are unfailingly impressive on all his records. But the challenge of translating this virtuosity into a relevant post-bop environment hasn't been easy, and he has relatively few records to account for literally decades of fine work. He's also had to contend with the usual dismissals of coldness, lack of feeling etc.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, 6th Ed.

Buddy DeFranco passed away on Christmas Eve [December 24, 2014] in Panama City, Florida. He was 91 years old.

Steve Voce, one of the premier writers on the subject of Jazz and its makers conducted the following interview with Buddy DeFranco in Nice in July 1981. It subsequently appeared in JazzJournal in 1982. You can locate more information about JazzJournal by going here.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember Buddy DeFranco on these pages by reprinting the text of Steve’s visit with him. Steve Voce has very kindly granted our request to do so.

Among its many sterling qualities, Steve’s interview contains Buddy’s detailed explanation of why it is so difficult to play bebop on the clarinet; a subject that I’ve long wondered about.

Buddy De Franco has the melancholy distinction of sharing the title of most overlooked jazz great with such as Lucky Thompson and Oscar Pettiford. Persistently neglected by jazz writers, it is fortunate indeed that jazz listeners turn the same kind of deaf ear to the critics that the critics have pointed at De Franco.

Boniface Ferdinand Leonardo De Franco was born in Camden, New Jersey on

February 17, 1923. His father was a piano tuner.

"No one taught me to play jazz clarinet, but I was taught `legitimate' (I hate that term, but we're stuck with it). I began studying with a teacher in Philadelphia when I was about nine. I went to a music school that had a free programme for poor kids. We were very poor in those days, and my teacher taught me for three years and never took any money. Then, when I began to make some money, three dollars, whatever, he charged me a dollar a lesson.

When I was 14, I heard my dad playing records by the Hot Club Of France Quintet and by Art Tatum, and I was completely overwhelmed by the music, and from that time jazz became the most important thing to me. Then I began to listen to Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The first jazz clarinettist I ever worked with was Johnny Mince in theDorsey band, and he really caught my ear.

I was enthralled with Benny, and he really made me take the decision to be a jazz player. Then I heard Artie Shaw and over a period of years began to develop more of an appreciation for Artie. I thought he was more modern, more harmonically developed than Benny, although Benny had more swing.

My teacher worked in the pit orchestra at the Earl Theatre in Philadelphia. When I was 14 there was a nation-wide Tommy Dorsey contest to find the best young amateur swing player. It was sponsored by a cigarette company and broadcast nationally and each week they would pick one player from each city. I entered and made the finals, where there were four kids left. My teacher, who was a very clever guy, told me `you're gonna win, because you're gonna wear short pants' (which I

hated) `and you're gonna play Honeysuckle Rose, and at the end you'll hold up the clarinet with one hand and you'll hold out the other hand so that the people will see you're playing the clarinet with only one hand, and hang on one note, see. That'll get 'em. Nobody'll follow that.' And I did. That's how I won.

I heard a disc of that performance and it was lousy, really horrible. But I won by default. This little kid, wearing shorts and playing clarinet with one hand, the other kids never had a chance.

After my performance Tommy Dorsey said `Stick around, you'll play in my

band some day.' Years later when I joined his band he said `I told you you would.'

He was a frightening guy to work for, very strict and allowing no room at all for error. If you displeased him too many times you just got fired. He wanted set solos on certain songs that were hit records. For instance, Opus One was the first solo I recorded with the band in California and he said `You'll keep that solo.' Well, I didn't like it, so I changed it a couple of times. He came to me and, preceding it with a favourite phrase of his which I won't repeat, he said `'I told you not to change that solo.' I said `But it's not creative to play the same solo every night.' He snarled `Well, you want to be Count Basie or Art Tatum or someone, go and be creative in someone else's time. You're finished!' I was, he fired me. But I went back later, joined again.

He had fines for everything. If you weren't there half an hour before the show it was a 10 dollar fine. If you missed the show it was a 25 dollar tine. At one time he didn't like too much giggling on the stand or smiling, so he had a no laughing or smiling on the stage law for about two months. If you smiled on the stage you got fined five dollars. Boomie Richmond and I would get giddy - it's hard to hide laughing, and the rule made you want to do it, but we didn't get caught.

When Dodo Marmarosa was pianist with the band we roomed together. There

was a time when we were in Louisville and the train that the band was supposed to be catching left at 8 am. We had left a wake-up call and set an alarm for 6.30. I heard the alarm and shut it off and went back to sleep. We either got the wake-up call and I didn't hear it or we didn't get one, I'm not sure. We woke up about 10 or 11 and missed the train from Louisville to St Louis, a trip of about 800 miles. So we had to try to find a way to get to St Louis in time for the job, where we had two concerts to do. We called the Greyhound and all the different bus companies, we called all the train stations, but we couldn't get anything. We couldn't even get there by commercial airlines, and they weren't great in the forties anyhow. The only thing we could do was to call the Civil Air Patrol. They got us a pilot, so we decided to rent this plane, which was about 350 dollars in those days. We had about a hundred dollars between us, so we talked the pilot into taking that on the basis of getting the other 250 when we got to St Louis. We loaded the bags into the little plane, and he started at about one in the afternoon. We felt we could make it on time, so off we went, flying all afternoon. As it got to be evening he turned to us in the cab and said `I don't know how to tell you guys this, but we're lost.' We couldn't understand that, because you just had to follow the Mississippi River right up, and there's St Louis, but he managed it. Then he said `And I hate to tell you this, but we're running out of fuel', adding `I'm gonna dip down and lower the altitude and see if you can see a sign of something, anything we might recognise, a landmark or something.' Dodo said `Why don't you stop and I'll ask a cop?'.

We finally wound up in Springfield, Illinois, which is 110 miles from St Louis, at seven in the evening. When we discovered where we were, the pilot got tough and wouldn't let us have our bags until he got his 250 dollars, and they had two security guards at the airport who backed him up. We had to go into this small airport at Springfield and call the band manager, Louis Zito, in St Louis. This was at about 8.30 or 9.00 pm. They already did their first concert without us and were getting ready for the second. We finally got hold of Louis and we wanted to talk him into wiring us money. I said `Louis, we gotta have 300 dollars to bail ourselves out.' Louis said, and I remember his words exactly, `Get on the train going the other way, because if you come in this direction, it's death. Tommy's furious. He's so angry that he left the stage and went to his dressing room and nobody can talk to him, and Ziggy is leading the band. So don't come.' We pleaded and pleaded and finally talked him into wiring the money. We had to wait there an hour and a half or so, to get the wire, change it into cash and pay this guy his 250 dollars to get our bags and find a train to St Louis.

We got into St Louis at about one o'clock in the morning. They had some sort of transportation strike, so there was nothing available to get us to the hotel where the band was staying, so we hitched a ride with a truck driver. He took us to the hotel, and when we got there there were no rooms. There was a train the band had to catch at nine o'clock the next morning. We hadn't seen anyone in the band, so the hotel guy let us sleep in the mezzanine on a couch. We took turns sleeping because we were frightened of missing the train again. We'd wake each other up and take turns to go to the restroom and splash cold water on our faces to stay awake another hour. Finally we headed to the station at eight o'clock and we saw Louis Zito.

He said `I don't know what's gonna happen with the Old Man, because he was beside himself. You'll probably get fired, four days in the electric chair, or whatever. But, since you're here, you might as well come along.'

We passed a little bar on the way to the station and went in and had maybe five beers in the space of five minutes. Ridiculous! And neither of us was really a drinker at all. We got on the train which, needless to say, was very crowded with soldiers and people, so we had to sit in the aisle on our luggage and try to sleep against the side of the seat. We both got sick from the beer, but then later in the afternoon we felt that we had to eat, so we made our way to the dining car where we managed to grab two seats. We ordered some food and I looked across the aisle and there was Tommy sitting there, hadn't seen us yet. Finally he got up from his seat and suddenly he saw us. It seemed like a full two minutes we watched him, and he went through all the phases of emotion in that time. I grabbed a ketchup bottle, because `Step outside' was one of his frequent ideas. The veins stood out on his forehead, his face got red, he was flexing his muscles, grunting and groaning, and he came over and glared at us for a long while. Then he suddenly started to laugh. `You guys are ridiculous,' he said. `You remind me of me when I was a kid. I can't get mad at you. You tried to get there, you hired a plane. Stick around, I'll give you both a raise.'

We never expected that in a million years, but that was Dorsey, you never knew from one hour to the next what his attitude was going to be.Charlie Shavers was in the band. He was a great musician, but he was also a sleeper. So much so that people thought he was a junkie, but he wasn't. He had a legitimate sleeping sickness, and once in a while Tommy would have to squirt him with a water pistol on stage to wake him. He could go to sleep sitting next to Louis Bellson's drum solo. In fact Louis used to hit him with a stick to wake him up occasionally. Eight bars before he was due to solo Louis would give him a whack. I heard that Tommy wired his chair to the mains once. Another time they were in a recording studio when Charlie fell asleep and started snoring. Tommy had all the mikes turned on and the recording machines started. Then he asked Charlie some terrible, rotten, ridiculous raunchy questions, and Charlie answered with a snore. It was one of the funniest tapes I ever heard. I'd love a copy of that.

Once in a theatre, when Tommy squirted Charlie with the water pistol to wake him up, Charlie came back with his own water pistol and squirted Tommy. Then Tommy got giddy, once in a while he'd get giddy instead of angry, and started squirting the whole band. This was on stage, don't forget. So then the whole band went out and bought water pistols and we had a water fight on stage, which is absurd when you think about it. The audience had no idea what was going on or why. Then it got to be a contest in a way. Tommy went out to look for the best water pistol, and finally came back with a huge thing that looked like a tommy gun.

In those days you had to give eight weeks' notice if you wanted to leave. I gave him notice in California because I had promises of lots of jobs. Andre Previn had movie work and he wanted me to teach Keenan Wynn to play the clarinet for a film, and I ran into a contractor out there who had lots of work for me if I left. I felt I could make a good living out there.

Imagine my chagrin when the weeks went by and I didn't get any work. Andre didn't know why, but the film work fell through and with the contractor it was `Buddy who ...?'. I think I worked one Sunday afternoon job with Corky Corcoran in a nine-month period. Then Tommy called. And his favourite line was a variation on `You got enough wrinkles in your belly? You want to come back?' I did come back and I later learned from Ziggy Elman that Tommy had engineered the whole thing. He blackballed me in California so I'd have to rejoin him.

I was with Tommy three times in a period of five or six years, and between one of those times I worked with Boyd Raeburn's band. It was a marvellous band with great players in it. In fact I met Pete Candoli the other day and we were reminiscing about our time with the band.

My first records under my own name weren't released at the time. I had a band for Capitol with Lee Konitz and Bernie Glow in the line-up. We did George Russell's A Bird in Igor's Yard, but Capitol refused to release it. I got a letter from one of their top executives saying get in the studio immediately with a small group like George Shearing's and let's make money. Well, four or five years ago they did release that record and it just happens to be a milestone in the jazz picture. I've often thought I'd like to record that piece again, too.

We also recorded my arrangement of This Time The Dream's On Me, which was by accident. It was part of what I regarded as the band's dance library, and not suitable for recording. But we needed the number. Gerry Mulligan was scheduled to write one chart for the session. He wasn't feeling too well and he came to the date and handed me the score, it was too late. So I dug out The Dream's On Me.

The first big band I had travelling on the road recorded for MGM. That was before the quartets and Buddy's Blues and those things. We had Charlie Walp, Bernie Glow, Gene Quill and Buddy Arnold.

I don't remember being intimidated musically by many musicians but certainly Art Tatum, Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson where three. In fact Oscar sat in with Terry Gibbs and me at Fat Tuesday's in New York recently, and Terry mentioned the fast tempos that Oscar and I had used in earlier years, and of course Terry's no slouch! But in those days we played with Ray Brown, Louis Bellson or Buddy Rich with Oscar, and if you were going to jump in there, you'd better have some technique or you'd be totally lost in the shuffle. So I'd make darned sure I was on my toes.

It was the same in that session for Norman Granz with Art Tatum. It was frightening in a way. I felt that I didn't do as good a job as I wanted to, because there were so many pressures during the session. We were both very ill, for instance. Art wasn't feeling at all well, and it wasn't long after that he died. I had a terrible virus, Which is why I am seen sitting down on the cover picture, because I couldn't stand up to play. I did it because I figured it would be my only chance to play with Art, and now I'm very glad I did. We enjoyed it anyway. That's the funny thing about music, it helps you feel better. I know that many times when I'm not well and I begin playing I forget that I'm ill.

I played many sessions in New York with Charlie Parker, and again up in Connecticut and along the East Coast. One summer I had an engagement on 52nd Street at the Spotlight or the Three Deuces, I forget which. We always worked those two clubs and Charlie was at the other club. He liked my rhythm section. At that time I had Bud Powell, Tommy Potter or Curly Russell and Max Roach. So he brought his alto in and played with my group. He was the most fascinating player of all time. I don't think there's anyone playing modern jazz that hasn't been influenced by him. We're all offshoots of Bird and 75 per cent of the young players today aren't aware of it.

Playing bebop on the clarinet seemed to come easily to me. Playing with Bird as many times as I did and also gravitating towards pianists - I always listened to what pianists were doing harmonically - let me know what to do. The only deliberate changes I made were with the mouthpiece and reed. The clarinet is of course much harder to play than the saxophone. The instrument is built to overblow in twelfths, whereas a sax is an octave instrument. If you push the octave key on the sax you get one octave higher, so therefore the fingerings are identical for both registers.

With the clarinet you have three separate fingerings, three separate registers and three separate timbres. The overtones are totally different as a result of that, plus the fact that you have a smaller mouthpiece and smaller reed, so you have to make a considerable adjustment to get the strength and force that you need. The clarinet is not as flexible as an alto, so you must make it flexible in order to play jazz. Then you have the problem of covering the holes on the clarinet. You must cover those holes with your fingers, and a fraction of an inch off will mean that the note won't come out or that it'll squeak. On the sax the pads do the covering. You can hit your finger on any part of the pad top and it'll cover the note for you. So the clarinet is absolutely more difficult, like playing jazz on a bassoon or something.

The quartet I had with Art Blakey came about at Birdland. I was hired to play there with a house rhythm section. It left for some reason or other and they got the new house section of Art, Kenny Drew and either Curly Russell or Tommy Potter - I get those two confused, but we did work with both. After the first night it jelled so well that Art and I decided to make it a career and go out together. We got hold of Eugene Wright and he came along with us on bass and Kenny on piano and we went out on the road. Stayed out for three years, and it was tremendous. It was a really

hot group. The funny thing is it was billed as the Buddy de Franco Quartet, but during the last few years people have come up to me and said they remember me when I was with Art Blakey's group.

I was never in Art's group. Years later in the sixties I played bass clarinet on just one recording session in California and since Art was in town we called him in. It was one of the few times I ever got five stars for an album. It was Leonard Feather's idea for me to play bass clarinet. He suggested that it might draw more attention to me as a creative jazz player. I don't have to tell you that the criticism for years has been that I was not creative or that I was cold or that I played too many notes. Even the brochure from the last North Sea Festival said `Buddy de Franco has faded into obscurity for many years.' That's typical of critics. Somehow I was never the critics' choice, except for Leonard.

The record made some musicians and critics listen, but commercially it died, it was terrible. I used the bass clarinet in clubs. I'd carry this confounded instrument from place to place and worry about the reeds and things. I'd get up and have people staring at me - like it was the Nuremburg trials or something. So I finally gave it up in despair, although I'm proud of that album.

Art had a big influence on me when I toured with him and the quartet, as indeed did Basie a few years later. I had been working around New York at the end of the forties and I was being booked by Willard Alexander. He discovered Basie and was largely responsible for Basie's big band through the years. I'd known him for many years, and when he was putting together a small group for Basie in 1950 he thought of me. Willard had the idea to put us together for two reasons. Firstly he knew we would be compatible, and secondly Count and I were friends, and he happened to like my playing. Willard thought it would be a good springboard for me, because my career was just floundering at the time. I was well known but not doing a lot, because with all the adverse criticism of my playing some promoters would read it and decide, well who needs him?

Anyway it was a fine octet with Clark Terry, Charlie Rouse who was later replaced by Wardell Gray, Serge Chaloff and Count's rhythm section. I learned a hell of a lot about dynamics from Basie. He can assemble any group of competent musicians, and within one hour they will sound like the Count Basie Band. It's all from him and Freddie Green. Until I worked for him I hadn't realised how dynamic he is. He doesn't say very much, doesn't play much, but it's all at the heart of everything. Amazing.

Willard was the guy who got me the job of leading the Glenn Miller Orchestra. There again it was a wise move. He also told me another time not to get a big band because he could book me with a small group. That's one time I didn't listen to him when I really should have.

Oddly enough Basie and I were never in the Metronome All Stars together,

although we both made several appearances. My first was when I substituted for Benny Goodman. Goodman had won and I was second. He couldn't make it so I came in. Tommy Dorsey, Bill Harris, Johnny Hodges, Duke, Billy Strayhorn, Harry Carney, Cootie and Rex, Sonny Berman, Pete Candoli, Flip, Chubby, Billy Bauer, Red Norvo - that was a heavy band.

Duke was supposed to write an arrangement, but instead he composed Metronome All Out on the spot. He just told the saxes and brass what to play and the rhythm what the chord changes were and it made a really great arrangement. For Look Out, which was the other title, Tommy [Dorsey] had got a llttle sketch from Sy Oliver, and when it came to the place where it said `jazz trombone' he insisted on Bill taking it. `With a player like Bill Harris around I'm not going to embarrass myself,' he said. That was something for Tommy, because he was not considered the most humble person. But he was still the finest trombone player that I can remember hearing, technically speaking. He had a way with a melody, a marvellous approach to playing melody. The second time, I worked with Bill Harris, Nat Cole, Dizzy and the Stan Kenton band a year later in 1947. We did those in California. Pete Rugolo wrote Metronome Riff and Flip Phillips did Leap Here (the record sleeve gives Nat Cole as composer of Leap Here - SV).

Billie Holiday came to Europe in 1954 and I came with her. She was fighting her problems and had a considerate husband who was trying his best to keep her in line. He did a good job, but every once in a while Billie's friends would find her and she'd go off. She got a very bad review on our opening night in Stockholm, and then the following night she'd straightened up and was marvellous. It was very hard for her. She was tantamount to Bird, having a terrible emotional struggle with dope and other problems. Once again I was glad I made that tour, because it was once in a lifetime. I can say that I worked with Billie Holiday who to me was one of the most creative of all singers and she, like Bird, came through remarkably well in spite of all her problems. For instance, Bird played great in spite of the fact that he was hung up, and unfortunately he never really played at his best on a record. I've heard him unbelievably dazzling, but of course circumstances on record dates were against him. Either he didn't have his own horn because he'd sold it, or some unscrupulous record exec would give him a fix to do a session and he'd be half stoned.

Talking of recordings, I'm always very proud of `The Cross Country Suite' that Nelson Riddle wrote for me. It was never issued in England. Nelson and I had been in Tommy Dorsey's band together, where Nelson was a trombonist. But eventually he began writing virtually full time for the band. He followed Bill Finegan, whom he idolised. Bill and Eddie Sauter were the daddies of modern band orchestration.

Nelson and I roomed together and became great friends. He had a great deal to contribute and of course still does. He's one of the most prolific writers. I've always loved the way he could write behind vocalists and instrumentalists. He always knew exactly what to do.I had begun doing these music clinics for LeBlanc in the fifties - now I do them for Yamaha - and I wanted some music to play there. I felt it should be a combination of big band, of jazz and orchestral, so I got hold of Nelson in California in 1958 and asked him to write for me. He was working for Nat Cole at the time and was really very busy, but he accepted the assignment, and I'm glad he did, because `The Cross Country Suite' turned out to be one of the best things he ever wrote and it won him a Grammy award. There were 11 compositions in it, and each was composed for a certain area in the United States. It was my plan to play the appropriate composition wherever I happened to be doing a clinic. It turned out so well that it was one of the most rewarding albums for me, too, and I hope sometime we'll be able to play it again. It didn't sell well, unfortunately, but that's a typical story, as you know.It was premiered with a Nat Cole show that he did at the Hollywood Bowl. Nelson had written all the charts for the show and Nat had us in for the suite and it was a tremendous success with the audience. The reaction was so good that we were sure the reviews would be good too, but I should have known. They were so bad they were less than negative. One reviewer said it was Nelson Riddle's pathetic attempt at a Ferde Grofe composition played by a clarinettist. An obvious put-away.

Another controversial thing was the albums I made with accordionists. I'm not so much fond of the accordion as of the player. The instrument is like a clarinet or a violin to me, perhaps not my favourite instruments, but dependent on the player. For example take the harmonica. You hear Toots Thielemans play it and you change your mind about harmonica. When I first heard Art Van Damme and Ernie Felice and guys like that, Joe Mooney and so on, I was impressed. Then I heard Tommy Gumina in California more or less by accident and I began working with him. It was just amazing how he played. He also developed his own accordion. He totally changed the left system of the instrument.

Tommy was one of the most proficient in terms of polytonal jazz and when I go through schools in the US we find that many band directors are using the recordings I did with Tommy as an example of modern polytonal harmonic development in jazz. I was very pleased with those albums and also the later one with the Canadian accordionist Gordy Fleming. There's always something new to develop with such a combination of instruments.

My own playing is developing all the time. It's endless. It's the strangest thing about playing extemporaneous music that it seems like the more you accomplish the more you realise there's so much you haven't done. That's not false modesty, it's just a fact of life. The old adage is you get old too fast and smart too late, and it's very true! When you're young and you play pretty good you think it's great, and if somebody compliments you your ego's apt to get way out of bounds. That's as far as you go until you begin to realise there's a big world out there in terms of music and development. Then you also realise that if you do progress the way you should, then you leave something for the next guy.

I took over from Benny in a sense. I brain-picked Benny, Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker, and then did something on the clarinet that happened to be me. Nowadays, when you hear me playing my style is different from the others and recognisably me: That's how it should be.The next clarinet players will do the same thing, maybe incorporate some of my playing. So you never stop trying to develop. Never."'

↧

West Coast Jazz Box

August 25, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Ted Gioia – The Jazz Standards – A Review [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Buddy DeFranco Interview with Steve Voce [From the Archives]

“There was something special about the West Coast jazz scene of the Fifties and early Sixties. Those of us privileged enough to have lived through that era — to have heard favorite musicians holding forth at the Lighthouse, the Haig, the Black Hawk, or Zardi's (or later, at places like the Jazz Workshop, the Renaissance, or Shelly's Manne-Hole) — tend to smile broadly whenever someone's comments or a snatch of music conjures up that scene.”

- Bob Gordon, author Jazz on the West Coast

Because I was “there” and had a professional involvement with it as a musician, I often get asked about what recordings to buy that feature the West Coast style of Jazz which existed mainly in California from 1945-1965.

My recommendation is pretty straightforward - West Coast Jazz Box: An Anthology of California Jazz - a 4 CD collection that was issued by Fantasy in 1998 [4CCD-4425-2].

The musical selections in the set are a comprehensive representation of all facets of the styles of West Coast Jazz that were played during this twenty year period and the following booklet annotations about the music by Bob Gordon, author of the definitive Jazz on the West Coast, and by the boxed set’s producers Ralph Kaffel and Eric Miller are unsurpassed in providing a brief synopsis of this “moment in time” in the history of Jazz.

Bob Gordon

“I may as well own up to this at the beginning: there is no general agreement upon the definition of the term "West Coast Jazz." The phrase has been bandied around for over four decades now, but as with many a catch phrase, it seems to mean pretty much what a given speaker wants it to mean. Like the word "jazz" itself, most everybody has a vague idea of what the term encompasses, but when it gets down to particulars, the arguments begin. So if you've already glanced at the listings for this album and decided that a particular performance doesn't fit your idea of West Coast Jazz, not to worry: you'll probably enjoy it anyway, whether or not you believe it's truly West Coast Jazz.

My personal preference for such a definition has always been: "That music produced by jazz musicians residing at the time on the West Coast."This seems to me the only definition inclusive enough to include the entire scene, from Dexter and Warden's Central Avenue duels, to musicians like Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Shorty Rogers, to the experiments of Ornette Coleman.

As to the origins of the term, nobody — to my knowledge, anyway — has ever taken credit (or accepted blame) for coining the phrase. When it first came into general use, the vocal wars between the boppers and moldy figs were beginning to wind down, and it's possible the trade journals felt the need for a new cause celebre to boost circulations. This cynical view, however, fails to acknowledge that in the first half of the Fifties, at least, there did seem to be certain stylistic differences between much of the jazz being produced in California and much of the jazz emanating from the East Coast. (I've emphasized "much" in both cases because many musicians from both coasts stubbornly refused to fit into their assigned pigeonhole.)

Basically, the differences were these: many of the West Coast musicians took their inspiration from such "cool" influences (there's another one of those damned terms) as Lennie Tristano and the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool band, while the mainstream of jazz in New York City could easily be recognized as a direct descent of bebop. As long as one remembers that such generalizations are generalizations — that there was cool jazz being played in New York and fire-breathing bebop being performed in Hollywood — the distinction can be useful. In any case, by the end of the decade, such differences became ever less apparent.

The musicians, of course, were loath to be so pigeonholed. Shelly Manne can be heard on a "live" recording introducing the members of his working band—one of the hottest units on either coast at the time—as a "West Coast Group." Shelly then goes on (in a native New Yorker's accent that he was never quite able to shake) to list the hometowns of his musicians: Joe Gordon (Boston, Massachusetts), Richie Kamuca (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and Monty Budwig (Nyack, New York), gleefully saving Victor Feldman (London, England) for last. Rarely has a musician's disdain for such labels been as forcefully, if tactfully, expressed.

And yet, and yet...

There was something special about the West Coast jazz scene of the Fifties and early Sixties. Those of us privileged enough to have lived through that era—to have heard favorite musicians holding forth at the Lighthouse, the Haig, the Black Hawk, or Zardi's (or later, at places like the Jazz Workshop, the Renaissance, or Shelly's Manne-Hole)—tend to smile broadly whenever someone's comments or a snatch of music conjures up that scene. This set should bring back fond memories for those already familiar with West Coast jazz, and perhaps it will provide some feeling for the ambiance of the period for those to whom the term is just a phrase remembered from the jazz histories.”

Ralph Kaffel 1998

I've wanted to assemble this compilation of West Coast jazz classics for many years now, but something always came up to dislodge it from its place on the year's release schedule.

The publication of Robert Gordon's Jazz West Coast (1986) and Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz (1992) served as pointed reminders to quit procrastinating and get down to business. This year, we did.

Eric Miller and I finally decided that nothing would keep us from making this long rumored project a reality. Eric, Bob Gordon, and I — each with our own personal favorites — were responsible for selecting the contents. My own criteria were simple: to pick the tracks which not only had made a musical impact, but were solid sellers that enjoyed substantial radio play. For example, I still remember vividly the excited anticipation of initial releases by artists like the Chico Hamilton Quintet and Hampton Hawes, or the latest from the Lighthouse All-Stars, following their previews on KNOB-FM (the "Jazz KNOB" in Long Beach).

At this point I must confess to more than a little "partisanship" with respect to this music. My first job in the record business, circa 1956, was as a salesman for California Record Distributors in Los Angeles, a wholesale distributor owned, as it happened, by Contemporary Record's owner Lester Koenig. Richard Bock's Pacific Jazz Records was one of the distributor's most important labels. I always looked forward to attending the recording sessions at Contemporary's Studios (actually, the warehouse) on Melrose Place and at Pacific Jazz Studios on Third Street.

Koenig and Bock were very different personalities with unique approaches to recording and running their businesses, but I had the same great admiration for both of them and for the music they were producing.

Acquiring the Contemporary catalog in 1984, therefore — and keeping it in print, for the most part — was a major thrill for me on a personal level, as was the ability to work with Dick Bock on a few projects in the 1980’s, an association unfortunately brought to a halt by his untimely passing.

I'm sure that Lester and Dick would have enjoyed The West Coast Jazz Box, made possible to a large extent by their passion for the music.”

Eric Miller 1998

“Los Angeles had a vibrant jazz scene in the 1950s and '60s. I hung out a lot at Sam's Record Shop (the Birdland of jazz stores) at 5162 West Adams Boulevard, and Sleepy Stein did his KNOB-FM jazz show from just behind Sam's storefront windows.

Within 20 blocks of this store (and my house) were located some two dozen jazz clubs, where many of the artists in this collection played. The clubs included the It Club, the Zebra Lounge, the Parisian Room, and the Intermission Room.

Norman Granz presented his Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts twice a year in L.A. His artists included Ella, Oscar, Hawk, Pres, and Art Tatum, to name just a few. Sundays were my days for the Lighthouse, in Hermosa Beach, when I could borrow the car.

The bustling Hollywood club scene included Shelly's Manne-Hole, the Renaissance, Donte's, and Gene Norman's Crescendo and the Interlude.

Beside Contemporary and Pacific Jazz, great jazz was produced and recorded by the fledgling Hifijazz label under the direction of David Axelrod; Nocturne Records, co-owned by musicians Harry Babasin and Roy Harte; the aforementioned Normans, Granz and Gene; and the Tampa, Andex, and Mode labels.

Some 400 miles to the north, jazz was just as active in San Francisco, with its pioneering Fantasy Records — whose roster included Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Cal Tjader, and Vince Guaraldi — as well as live jazz at the Black Hawk, the El Matador, the Jazz Workshop, and many more.

All things considered, I appreciate those years more and more with the passage of time, and see them as the "52nd Street days" of West Coast Jazz.”

The following video includes images and graphics from West Coast Jazz Box: An Anthology of California Jazz [Fantasy 4CCD-4425-2] as set to the track from the boxed set by pianist Hampton Hawes performing All The Things You Are with Red Mitchell, bass and Chuck Thompson, drums.

↧

Ted Gioia – The Jazz Standards – A Review [From the Archives]

August 26, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Art Van Damme - The Accordion in Jazz [From the Archives with Revisions]

≪ Previous: West Coast Jazz Box

“THE JAZZ STANDARDS will be indispensable for any fan who wants to know more about a jazz song heard at the club, or on the radio. Musicians who play these songs night after night will now have a handy tome, outlining their history and significance which tells how pieces have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. And students learning about jazz standards now have a reference work to these cornerstones of the jazz repertoire.”

- Christian Purdy, The Oxford University Press

“In his latest book - The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire – Ted Gioia talks about Jazz from the singular perspective of the music and not from the more accustomed standpoint of the musicians who made it.”

- the editorial staff at JazzProfiles

“lf you look up just one title in The Jazz Standards, before you realize it you will have spent an intriguing hour or two learning fascinating and new things about old songs that you have known most of your life."

—Dave Brubeck

I look forward to Ted Gioia’s next book about Jazz with the same excitement and anticipation that greets the arrival of the next recording by one of my favorite Jazz artists.

The guy can flat-out write, he’s a magnificent story-teller and he has a depth and a breath of knowledge about Jazz which rivals that of any writer on the subject.

I know his next book is always going to be good so I grudgingly allow him the necessary time to research it and write it because I can’t wait to read it.

In this regard, Ted’s The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire - forthcoming from Oxford University Press in July/2012 – doesn’t disappoint.

In his writing, Ted has a “conversation” with the reader.

His style is never polemical or didactic like those academic treatises that only twelve other people on the planet can read, let alone, understand.

Be it specifically about Jazz on the West Coast from 1945–1960 or more generally about the entire history of Jazz, Ted’s writing is personal and he teaches you stuff about Jazz.

His approach is reminiscent of your favorite high school teachers; you really wanted to learn from them because they knew what they were talking about and they made the subject fun and interesting.

This is no less the case with Ted’s latest book - The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire – in which he talks about Jazz from the singular perspective of the music and not from the more accustomed standpoint of the musicians who made it.

If you’ve ever wished for a “road map” through recorded Jazz tunes, this book is it. It offers “… an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal Jazz compositions …, “recommendations for more than 2,000 recordings with a list of suggested tracks for each song, [each accompanied by] “… colorful and expert commentary.”

The reasons for how and why this book came together are clearly explained by Ted in the following excerpts from his Introduction.

“When I was learning how to play jazz during my teenage years, I kept encountering songs that the older musicians expected me to know. I eventually realized that there were around 200 or 300 of these compositions, and that they served as the cornerstone of the jazz repertoire. A jazz performer needed to learn these songs the same way a classical musician studied the works of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.

In fact, I soon learned that knowledge of the repertoire was even more important to a jazz musician than to a classical artist. The classical performer at least knows what compositions will be played before the concert begins. This is not always the case with jazz. I recall the lament of a friend who was enlisted to back up a poll-winning horn player at a jazz festival—only to discover that he wouldn't be told what songs would be played until the musicians were already on stage in front of 6,000 people.

Such instances are not unusual in the jazz world, a quirk of a subculture that prizes both spontaneity and macho bravado. Another buddy, a quite talented pianist, encountered an even more uncooperative bandleader—a famous saxophonist who wouldn't identify the names of the songs even after the musicians were on the bandstand. The leader would simply play a short introduction on the tenor, than stamp off the beat with his foot... and my friend was expected to figure out the song and key from those meager clues. For better or worse, such is our art form.

I had my own embarrassing situations with unfamiliar standards during my youth—but fortunately never with thousands of people on hand to watch. I soon realized what countless other jazz musicians have no doubt also learned: in-depth study of the jazz repertoire is hardly a quaint historical sideline, but essential for survival. Not learning these songs puts a jazz player on a quick path to unemployment.

But no one gave you a list. Nor would a typical youngster of my (or a later) generation encounter many of these songs outside the jazz world—most of them had been composed before I was born, and even the more recent entries in the repertoire weren't part of the fare you typically heard on TV or mainstream radio. Some of these tunes came from Broadway, but not always from the hit productions—many first appeared in obscure or failed shows, or revues by relatively unknown songwriters. Others made their debut in movies, or came from big bands, or were introduced by pop singers from outside the jazz world. A few—such as "Autumn Leaves" or "Desafinado"—originated far away from jazz's land of origin. And, of course, many were written by jazz musicians themselves, serving as part of the legacy of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and other seminal artists.

My own education in this music was happenstance and hard earned. Eventually "fake books" appeared on the scene to clear up some of the mystery, but I never saw one of these (usually illegal) compilations until I was almost 20 years old. When I first encountered The Real Book—the underground collection of jazz lead sheets that began circulating in the 19705—even the table of contents served as a revelation to me. And, I'm sure, to others as well. Aspiring musicians today can hardly imagine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attended had a jazz program or even offered a single course on jazz. Most of the method books were worthless, and the peculiar culture of the art form tended to foster an aura of secrecy and competitiveness. Just knowing the names of the songs one needed to learn represented a major step forward; getting a lead sheet was an unwonted luxury.

A few years later, when I started teaching jazz piano students, I put together a brief guide to the repertoire, listing the songs my pupils needed to learn and the keys in which they were normally played—a rudimentary forerunner to the work you now have in your hands. Still later, as I began writing about jazz, I continued to study these same songs, but from a different perspective. I now tried to unravel the evolution of these compositions over time, understand how different jazz artists had played them, and what changes had taken place in performance practices.

Over the years, I often wished I had a handbook to this body of music, a single volume that would guide me through the jazz repertoire and point me in the direction of the classic recordings. A few books were helpful in my early education into the nuances of this body of music, especially Alec Wilder's American Popular Song (1972), but even the best of these books invariably focused on only a small part of the repertoire—mainly Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songs— and dealt very little with this music as it related to jazz. The book I needed didn't exist when I was coming up, and still doesn't. I wanted to delve into these songs as sources of inspiration for great jazz performances—a perspective that often took one far a field from what the composer might have originally intended. I wanted a guide to these works as building blocks of the jazz art form, as a springboard to improvisation, as an invitation to creative reinterpretation.

This book aims to be that type of survey, the kind of overview of the standard repertoire that I wished someone had given me back in the day—a guide that would have helped me as a musician, as a critic, as a historian, and simply as a fan and lover of the jazz idiom. To some degree, this work represents the fruition of all my experiences with these great songs over a period of decades. The compositions that were once mysterious and even foreboding have now become familiar friends, the companions of countless hours, and I have relished the opportunity to write about these songs and discuss my favorite recordings. Certainly those readers familiar with my other books will note a more personal tone here, a more informal approach—one that felt natural to me as I delved into a body of work that has become, by now, such a vital part of my life….”

The Jazz Standards is a resource guide and a browser's companion to more than 250 of the most popular Jazz songs and includes a listening guide to more than 2 000 recordings. For each of these tunes, Ted “… explains their role in the art form, compares different performance practices, and serves as a tour guide to the historic recordings that define how these works are played today.”

To give you the “flavor” of the book’s contents, here are three examples drawn from Ted’s annotations about songs reviewed in The Jazz Standards that have always been among my favorite to play on.

Airegin [Sonny Rollins, composer]:

“The song first came to prominence via the 1954 Miles Davis project Bags' Groove, an album that is far less well known than the trumpeter's work from later in the decade. The album presented several songs destined to become standards, including three of Rollins's best compositions: "Airegin,""Doxy," and "Oleo."

"Airegin" offers the most interesting conception of the batch, with an opening that hints at a minor blues at the outset, then morphs into a lopsided 36-bar form—an oddity, with 20 bars elapsing before the repeat, but then running only 16 bars before coming back to the top of the form—all packed with plenty of harmonic movement to keep things interesting for the soloists.

The opening chords look back to "Opus V," a piece by J. J. Johnson that Rollins had recorded back in 1949, while the second eight bars are reminiscent of the bridge to Billy Strayhorn's "Day Dream." But the whole as constructed by Rollins is distinctive and the work ranks among the most intricate of the saxophonist's better known pieces. Certainly "Airegin" showed that in an era when other jazz players were expanding their audience by moving toward either a cool melodicism or an earthy funkiness, Rollins was intent on writing songs that would appeal to other horn players rather than patrons at the jukebox.

"Airegin" did just that. Two years later, Davis resurrected the song for another Prestige session, and this time featured John Coltrane, Rollins's leading rival as reigning tenor titan of modern jazz. Davis made a surprising choice to substitute an 8-bar vamp over an F minor chord for Rollins's original chord changes during the second A theme; by doing so, he anticipated the modal approach that would come to the fore in his music later in the decade. The tempo is faster here, and the mood much more aggressive, with Trane serving notice that he could play this composition just as well as the composer.

Other prominent soloists followed suit. Phil Woods recorded "Airegin" on his 1957 session with Gene Quill, and periodically returned to the song in various settings over the years. Art Pepper tackled it on his Art Pepper Plus Eleven….

The song has kept its place in the standard repertoire …. For two invigorating [and more recent examples], check out the treatments by Chris Potter and Michael Brecker, both from 1993.”

Love for Sale [Cole Porter, composer and lyricist]:

“Many songs have overcome nonmusical obstacles in gaining acceptance and popularity, but few tunes faced a stiffer challenge than "Love for Sale." For decades, radio stations refused to allow its lyrics on the air. The song, which made its debut in the 1930 Broadway musical The New Yorkers, is sung from the perspective of a Prohibition-era prostitute, and composer Cole Porter did not mince his words in presenting "appetizing young love for sale." Charles Darnton, the reviewer for the Evening World, accused the song of being "in the worst possible taste." The Herald Tribune called it "filthy."

Porter, perhaps in a mood of defensiveness, claimed that it was his favorite among the songs he had composed. "I can't understand it," he griped. "You can write a novel about a harlot, paint a picture of a harlot, but you can't write a song about a harlot." Perhaps most revealing: audience outrage subsided after the Broadway production shifted the setting of the song to Harlem, in front of the Cotton Club, and assigned the number to African-American vocalist Elizabeth Welch instead of Kathryn Crawford, a white singer.

“… jazz artists seldom turned to "Love for Sale" until the late 1940s and early 1950s. Billie Holiday recorded a definitive version, and her persona as a troubled diva who, by her own account, was working as a prostitute when this song first came out, gave her a kind of credibility that few singers would want to match. Despite her advocacy, singers long avoided this song. During this period a jazz fan was more likely to encounter the Porter tune in instrumental arrangements by Erroll Garner, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, or even Charlie Parker, who recorded it as part of a Cole Porter tribute project for the Verve label shortly before his death. …

Cannonball Adderley recorded a well-known version for his 1958 project Somethin' Else—a rare date that found Miles Davis working as a sideman. …

By the 1960s, the taboo associated with "Love for Sale" had faded, and it became entrenched in the repertoires of jazz players. And for good reason. The opening theme is suitable for vamps of all stamps, from Latin to funky, and the release offers effective contrast both rhythmically and harmonically. A tension in tonality is evident from the outset: this song in a minor key nonetheless starts on a major chord, and seems ready to go in either direction during the course of Porter's extended form. A composition of this sort presents many possibilities, and can work either as a loose jam or bear the weight of elaborate arrangement.”

Poinciana [Nat Simon, composer, Buddy Bernier, lyricist]

“In the jazz world, “Poinciana” is inextricably linked with Ahmad Jamal, whose successful reading of the composition from 1958 helped keep his album Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not for Me on the Billboard chart for more than two years. But the song long predates Jamal's interpretation, and was composed back in 1936. Glenn Miller performed it in the late 1930s, Benny Carter enjoyed a modest hit with "Poinciana" in February 1944, and Bing Crosby did the same the following month. Carter's version is especially interesting, with its strange groove, half Latin and half-R&B—a stark contrast to the pop-oriented approach Miller had adopted in his treatment.

Around this time, a number of name bandleaders embraced "Poinciana" and it shows up on live broadcasts by Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, and other jazz stars of the era. … Other recordings that predate Jamal's success include versions by Erroll Garner, Lennie Niehaus, Red Callender, and George Shearing.

But Jamal eclipsed these precedents with a vamp-based arrangement that superimposed the pianist's unhurried phrasing over an insistent, appealing beat—so appealing that his "Poinciana" earned repeated jukebox plays and dance-floor loyalty at a time when modern jazz had largely abandoned these public platforms for crossover success.

Even after Jamal redefined "Poinciana," the song enjoyed a surprisingly varied career. It has been popular with vocal groups, as demonstrated in recordings by the Four Freshman and the Manhattan Transfer. It has appeared on albums devoted to musical exotica, getting the full Les Baxter "bring-the-Third-World-to-your-bachelor-pad" treatment, and has also been adapted for big bands, Afro-Cuban ensembles, and easy listening orchestras. But I am still under Jamal's sway, and feel "Poinciana" is best served by small combo versions that avoid the mood music baggage and let the song swing. For three striking examples, check out Shelly Manne's fast romp in straight 4/4 walking time from his 1959 performance at the Black Hawk, Sonny Rollins's hot work on soprano sax backed by George Cables's electric piano from 1972, and Keith Jarrett’ s convivial trio rendition from 1999.”

Aside from just devouring the book from cover-to-cover, as I did, you can approach The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire in any number of ways.

You can select one tune, read what Ted has to say about it and then immerse yourself in the example recordings the he lists in the accompanying discography.

You can take Ted annotations for one or more of the Jazz standards and add your own thoughts and list of favorites versions to it.

Or you can create playlists from Ted’s track suggestions and upload them to you favorite media player

Perhaps you might wish to get together with some of your Jazz buddies at a Jazz standards party in which you read and discuss Ted’s take on a tune and play your preferred versions.

I doubt that you will ever come across a book on Jazz that will give you more pleasurable reading while, at the same time, affording you an such interactive platform in which to experience its contents.

However, you approach it, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire is sure to become a constant companion to your Jazz listening.

Ted has his own website and you can find out more about him by visiting it via this link.

The nice folks at The Oxford University Press who are responsible for publishing the book can be reached here.

↧

Art Van Damme - The Accordion in Jazz [From the Archives with Revisions]

August 27, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Part 1 - The John Williams Interview with Steve Voce

≪ Previous: Ted Gioia – The Jazz Standards – A Review [From the Archives]

“Art Van Damme, in his prime years, played so many gigs in clubs, hotels and concert stages across the

USA

and Europe that it is said that he never needed to do any practice. He was constantly in action, developing and honing his skills and repertoire, pioneering the use of the accordion as a jazz lead instrument.

So influential was Art’s playing style that he has influenced most of the western world’s jazz accordionists. One musicologist made the following neat comment: ‘The hippest cat ever to swing an accordion, Art Van Damme dared go where no man had gone before: jazz accordion.’”

- Rob Howard

The accordion seemed to be everywhere present during our growing up years in an Italian-American household in Providence, RI.

The world-class accordionist Angelo DiPippo, a LaSalle HS graduate in the near-by Elmhurst section of Providence, often gave performances in various local venues.

Also available courtesy of my Dad’s record collection were the Capitol recordings that accordionist Ernie Felice made with Benny Goodman’s small groups.

And every so often, Art Van Damme would make an “appearance” at our house in the form of NBC radio programs, television shows hosted by Dave Garroway and Dinah Shore and long-playing records on the Columbia label.

The Columbia LP’s featured Art’s quintet which, because of his use of vibes and guitar and the way many of the groups arrangements were “voiced,” reminded me of pianist George Shearing’s combo. A few of these albums also featured guest artists such as vocalist Jo Stafford or legendary Jazz guitarist, Johnny Smith.

Whatever the setting, Art’s music was always very melodic and featured arrangements that were very hip and swung like mad. Lasting little more than three minutes in most cases, each tune was a musical gem: the epitome of taste and perfection.

As was the case with Shearing’s quintet, nobody took long solos, but when Chuck Calzaretta played one on vibes, or Fred Rundquist took one on guitar or Art improvised on accordion, one knew immediately that they were good players who knew what they were doing on their respective instruments.

Because I was so accustomed to hearing accordion and, more importantly, to hearing it played well, I could never understand why the instrument became the object of so many jokes that unmercifully ridiculed it.

That is until I started gigging on a regular basis and ran into so many terrible accordionists which only served to make me appreciate the like of an Art Van Damme even more.

However, even among those who held most accordionists in contempt, the mere mention of Art’s name brought a grudging approval that he was “… a class act although I can’t stand the sound of the thing.”

Although you would be hard-pressed to find anything about him in any of the manuals about Jazz, in a conversation that I once had about him with pianist and composer Mel Powell at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, Mel referred to Art as “one of the most-talented musicians I’ve ever heard – regardless of the instrument.”

Not surprisingly, there’s plenty of information about Art in publications, blogs and websites that cater to accordion. In such circles, he has rightfully assumed legendary status as one of the instrument’s greatest performers.

It was to one such publication that we went in search of the following overview of Art’s career. It also contains particular reference to many of Art’s recordings. A number of these are available should you wish to seek them out.

At the conclusion of Steven Solomon’s article on Art, you’ll find a video tribute to him as developed by the ace graphics teams at CerraJazz LTD. The audio track is Art’s quintet with guitarist Jimmy Smith performing “Gone With the Wind.”

ART VAN DAMME

Written by: Steven H. Solomon
Publication: Accord Magazine,

USA

. Reprinted courtesy of owner/editor Faithe Deffner. Back copies available.
Date written: Spring 1983

"At first glance, Art Van Damme seems like countless other successful West Coast residents. He is married, has three children and six grandchildren, and heads for the golf course every chance he gets. What makes his career unusual, however, is that he earns his living by playing the accordion.

Hold on a minute, you say. Since the accordion was invented about 150 years ago, thousands of musicians have put bread on the table by playing professionally. What is it that makes Van Damme so special?

It's simple. Van Damme is among an elite group of only about a half-dozen virtuosos who have been able to find just the right blend of technical and creative ability needed to be successful on the international level. This is what places Art Van Damme in a league all by himself.

Instead of playing just local clubs and whatever casual work is available, Van Damme routinely jets overseas for concert tours that draw thousands of fans. For those not lucky enough to get a seat at one of his sold out performances, he can be heard on European television and radio.

"Most of my work now is in doing concerts and clinics," Van Damme said recently when asked about his gigs. "This I enjoy more than doing club work, because the audience is more attentive and listens more intensely."

Van Damme prefers to be in front of the crowds, especially large ones, rather than while away his time in small clubs or in front of cameras and microphones. He believes that it all boils down to creativity.

"For recordings to be played on the radio, time is a very big factor. It is preferred that recordings be in the two or three minute category," Van Damme explained. "So when I do a concert I get a chance to stretch out, as they say. I get a chance to play quite at length."

To see a list of the countries Van Damme has visited with his accordion, you would think he was some kind of career diplomat making the rounds. He has toured in

Germany

Sweden

Denmark

Finland

Norway

Canada

England

New Zealand

Australia

France

Belgium

and

Switzerland

, in addition to his considerable work in the

United States

.

Asked about his appearances in 1982, Van Damme replied, "I did the Grand Prix in

France

, a concert seminar and a radio show in Geneva, two concerts in Colorado and a month long tour back in

Sweden

. This included concerts, television and another album called "And Live at Tivoli with Quintet". By the way, that was my 20th tour and trip to Europe!"

Not bad for someone who was nine years old before he heard an accordion for the first time, on his parent's Victrola. He asked for and received lessons on an instrument not nearly as flashy as the ones played by his idols Ray Brown, Buddy Rich and Benny Goodman.

At an age when most boys like to play nothing but ball, Van Damme liked to play nothing but the accordion, up to four or five hours a day. He landed his first paying job, a not-too-prestigious booking at his home town theatre (but nothing to be ashamed of either), when he was a seasoned 10 year old pro!

"When going to high school I started a trio with accordion, guitar and bass, and worked with this group in night clubs for a couple of years and then added a fourth man," Van Damme said. "We did many things with two accordions but I preferred the sound of accordion, vibes, bass and guitar, so I discontinued using the two accordions and added drums a short time later. I felt this was the sound to go with."

His group covered the Midwest for several years when they were booked into the Sherman Hotel in Chicago for what turned into a six month job. NBC must have recognized a sure thing when they heard it, because the quintet landed a contract for radio and TV that was to be the start of a long term relationship.

"Besides doing our own shows, we worked with many top name entertainers of the time on programs like the Dave Garroway Show, Ransom Sherman Show, Bob and Day Show to name but a few," Van Damme said.

"And besides doing solo spots, we did a lot of background playing for top singers and instrumentalists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Dizzy Gillespie and Buddy DeFranco."

It was during this time that Van Damme had a record contract with Capitol Records, releasing "Cocktail Capers" and "More Cocktail Capers". Columbia Records signed Van Damme from 1952 to 1965, releasing no less than a dozen albums, among which were "The Van Damme Sound", "Martini Time" and "The Art of Van Damme".

"I left NBC in Chicago in 1960 after working for them for 15 years," Van Damme said. "Live TV and radio had been on the downgrade or downward trend. Sure, I've done TV and radio shows since then, but only on a guest artist appearance basis."

Van Damme opened a music studio and store in suburban Chicago after he left NBC, and appeared with the quintet as guests on the Today Show, Tonight Show, Mike Douglas Show and Lawrence Welk Show. It was at this point that Van Damme realised he no longer wanted the headaches of leading a band.

"I personally don't care to have the responsibility of having a regular group anymore. Original men from the quintet are all still situated in Chicago and I do work with them on occasions when in that territory," Van Damme said. "But as of now, I am not carrying a regular quintet. My work takes me all over and I use local men who I am familiar with."

In 1965 Van Damme signed with MPS Records of Germany and has recorded 16 albums during that time. He has been voted top jazz accordionist for ten consecutive years in the annual Downbeat poll and for four consecutive years in the annual Contemporary Keyboard poll. His radio and TV appearances, seminars, tours and clinics in the

United States

and Europe since then number in the hundreds.

What this rich background means is that Van Damme is today considered a top jazz accordionist. Some of his feelings on the subject provides much food for thought. For example, he thinks the accordion is not the ideal jazz instrument.

"The fact that we have two separate keyboards, as such, controlled by one force, is a problem. I refer to the bellows, which is the source for both sides, and should be used in the same vein as a trumpet player or sax man as a breathing device," Van Damme explained. "A pianist is free to use either hand as he pleases, but not the accordionist. This naturally only scratches the surface, but I feel this is a basic problem in playing jazz."

Van Damme is equally outspoken when it comes to assessing his field. He is not afraid to name names. "(

Leon

) Sash, Mat Mathews, Pete Jolly, (Ernie) Felice, (Tommy) Gumina, they are all good friends of mine I'm happy to say and each in his own style is great. They all have something to say on their instruments, helping to take the polka sound out of the accordion," Van Damme said.

"Unfortunately, there are not too many really good jazz accordionists, but I do feel we are progressing."

For the future, Van Damme seems likely to be just as busy as ever. He recently completed a pilot for a one hour live radio show with quintet and Roberta Sherwood on vocals that he expects to be syndicated. Plans call for a guest vocalist each week.

"After 38 years I'm going back to radio, which shows that if you live long enough, anything can happen," Van Damme said."

↧

Part 1 - The John Williams Interview with Steve Voce

August 28, 2015, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Part 2 - The John Williams Interview with Steve Voce

≪ Previous: Art Van Damme - The Accordion in Jazz [From the Archives with Revisions]

I will keep this introduction brief so as not to interfere too much with the tone and tenor of Steve Voce’s marvelous interview with pianist John Williams, the first-part of which is featured below.

After reading it, I was reminded of the late drummer Joe Dodge, a musician who was a prominent member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet during the mid-1950’s and who like John Williams left Jazz and went on to a career in banking services.

Joe, much like John Williams, was very self-deprecating about his abilities as a Jazz musician.

I served on a San Francisco chamber of commerce committee with Joe in the 1990’s and during one of these get-togethers I screwed up enough courage to ask him why he left Brubeck’s Quartet and the West Coast Jazz scene. [Joe was still playing as a hobby and was the drummer in a combo called The Swingmasters.]

His answer went something like this: “I had my fun and I had my fill, but it was time to go. As [the actor/director] Clint Eastwood says in one of his Dirty Harry movies: ‘A man has got to know his limitations.’ I knew where Dave wanted to go with his music and rhythmically I couldn’t take him there. My chops [technique] were basic and mostly home grown [self taught]. I was pretty much a time keeper who traded fours on occasion[four bar breaks with another instrument]. It was exhausting being on the road all the time and I wanted the security and stability of a day gig [a professional career] and the world of banking and finance offered that. It was a pretty simple trade off, really.”

As you read Steve's interview with pianist John Williams perhaps John, like Joe Dodge, had had his time in the [Jazz] sun and decided to take his life in another direction? The reasons for John's decision are explained in more detailed in Part 2 which will post to the blog tomorrow [8/27/2015].

By way of background, Steve is a British journalist and music critic who contributed regularly to The Independent and to Jazz Journal for over 40 years.

I am very grateful to Steve for allowing me to feature his work on my blog.

“After galvanising the rhythm sections of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Charlie Barnet and others with his distinctive comping style, pianist John Williams dropped from sight in the late fifties. Now rediscovered, he talks about his heyday to STEVE VOCE.

THERE is a school of thought which holds that the fifties was the most productive decade in jazz history. It was not a time for revolution-all that had happened in the forties and was to begin again with the sixties, but the jazz which was recorded in the fifties remains by and large undated and fresh and frequently much better than its exponents were to record in later years. Buck Clayton, Mulligan, Davis, Getz, Ellington-a glance at the CBS or Verve catalogues for the decade testifies to the quality of the music.

It was John Williams's decade. His piano playing sparkled with original and inspired ideas and he swung his rhythm sections with a dedication and sense of time which few could match. In the conversation which follows (from which I have removed my questions) he frequently denigrates his own work, as he often does in general conversation. His friends have learned to ignore him when this happens, for he was one of the most satisfying and effective players of his time.

Of his time indeed, for at the end of the fifties he mysteriously vanished from the jazz scene, and it wasn't until 30 years later, when Spike Robinson stumbled across him by accident, that the puzzle was solved.

Some time later I wrote a piece in this magazine praising John's work [“Time Remembered,” JazzJournal - June/July 1994] and someone in Florida showed it to him. Eventually we got in touch with each other and John and his wife Mary visited me and my wife when they came on a holiday to England.

I learned then where he had been since the fifties. Although his love of jazz remained undimmed, he had been disillusioned by the wasteful predations of the then contemporary jazz scene-a number of his friends had died from self-neglect and drug overdoses-and by the hard life of the touring musician. He decided to leave New York for Florida, where he has lived ever since.

At first John worked regularly in clubs in Florida but then turned to a new career which eventually led to him becoming an executive with the Home Savings Bank in Hollywood. Much involved in local politics, he was elected City Commissioner for five four-year terms, and involved himself in conservation work with such distinction that the John Williams Park in Hollywood is named after him to recognise his achievements. Until recently he worked with the annual Hollywood Jazz Festival, both as organiser and pianist, playing there with musicians as diverse as Bob Brookmeyer, Buddy de Franco, Terry Gibbs and Scott Hamilton. Shortly before Getz's death, John tried to reassemble the Stan Getz Quintet with Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Isola and John on piano to play at the festival. Stan's poor health intervened but Brookmeyer and John did play the festival together, and the reunion, charged by some of Bob's most recent compositions, struck sparks from both men, although Williams typically deprecates his own part.

On December 31, 1986 John was driving home through The Everglades from a gig and listening on the car radio to the traditional New Year's Eve jazz broadcast which took music from each of the different time zones throughout the night. It was midnight in Denver when he was knocked out by a quartet broadcasting from there featuring a wonderful tenor sax player. John was delighted when he heard the tenor player announce that they'd had trouble getting their drummer Gus Johnson into the place because he was under 21 (Gus is an old friend and working colleague of John Williams's and at the time of the broadcast was 73).

The next day John, in search of Gus, called the club in Denver where the group was playing and managed to speak to the tenor player, who turned out to be Spike Robinson. John congratulated Spike on the band, and Spike reminded him that when John had played in Denver with a Norman Granz concert tour in 1954 Spike had sat in with John at a jam session after the concert. Happy to have spoken to Spike, John thought no more about it.

Eight months later, when Spike was approached to play a gig in Clearwater, Florida, he suggested to the promoter that since John lived in the area he should be hired to play piano. It was the tapes of that concert that revealed to the rest of us that John was not only still alive, but playing as well as ever.

Unfortunately John Williams doesn't get the chance to play regularly, although he seems to sit in at a local club each Friday. On taped evidence his playing is as rhythmically turbulent and unpredictable as it always was and is now if anything more creative than before. He should certainly record again, and would be ideal for an album in Concord's Maybeck series.

`I began like most kids of my age, listening to jazz on the radio. My brother and I used to listen under the covers because we were supposed to be sound asleep. These broadcasts started at 11.30 at night. Those were great days for big band music. Unfortunately I didn't learn piano at all well technically. I took lessons as a youngster from the time I was eight and then by the time I was 12 1 was a freshman in high school and I got a chance to play with a local band whose members were considerably older than I was. My so-called street education started there, but that's all the formal training I've ever had with the exception of six months at the Manhattan School of Music many years later. I've obviously regretted all my life not having had more.

`I was a junior in high school in 1945. The war was on. Most of all the good players had been drafted into the service. There was a very good band called the Mal Hallett Orchestra, which was booked out of Boston and which played the eastern half of the United States. One of the members was from Vermont and he was home during a break. They needed a piano player. He knew me. knew the band that I was playing with, and he came to the job one night and asked if I would like to go on the road with what was then a big name band. Of course it took much persuading of my parents to convince them that if they let me go for the six-month period-it was from March 1945 until September or October, that I would come back and finish school in the fall. I was 16 at the time.

`There were other 16 or 17-year-old players on the band-Sonny Rich was one of the trumpet players. Sonny had a record player and all the Parker-Gillespie records - Hothouse, Groovin' High and all those. He used to sit with me and teach me all the changes and make me listen-it didn't take much persuasion, and that's really what turned me on so terrifically in 1945.

`A couple of good players from that band who went on to be well recognised included Buddy Wise from Topeka, Kansas. He was 17. Later on he was with Woody and he ended up being another of many many victims of drug abuse when he was 27. There was also the trumpeter Don Fagerquist, who went on to play with Les Brown and the trombone player Dick Taylor who was on Gene Krupa's Disc Jockey Jump. Those were players who taught me a lot when I was 16. Mal Hallett had a sweet big band during the thirties, but during the war years he had good arrangements by Dick Taylor and a fellow called Mo Cooper. It was a cooking big band, like so many others from that era.

`I celebrated VJ-Day with that band by playing at the Steel Pier, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. That was some experience for a 16-year-old. But then I did go back home as I had promised and graduated from high school in 1946.

`The joy that I had playing, being paid for it and the thrill of it all meant that there was never any question in my mind about staying in the profession. That was a pretty poor decision at the time. So much had happened with the end of the war. First of all the big bands started to disappear into the woodwork faster than one could count. It wasn't more than a couple of years after that that television appeared on the scene so there were no more big band opportunities for someone with my relative inexperience and limited skill at my age. Nevertheless music was the thing, and I kept playing local clubs around Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and ended up in Lowell, Mass., playing with a nice little bebop group in 1947, and from there got a chance to go with the alto player Johnny Bothwell's big band in 1948.

`The business was so bad that we used to end up wondering if we were going to be paid that week, and some weeks we weren't. That was another good experience as far as meeting and playing with exceptional musicians was concerned. That probably lasted four or five months. It was in the Bothwell band that I first met Frank Isola, one of my very favourite drummers of all time, and the trombone player Dick Kenney. Again, Sonny Rich was there and there was a lot of bebop being played in that band.

`I'll never forget the time that we played a club up in Harlem and Frank and I went to the bar in the intermission, and who should be at the bar but Bud Powell. That blew our minds! We bought him a few drinks and got him to sit in. That was a real high spot. Naturally he was my favourite piano player at the time, and I guess he still is.

`I've always felt myself not as capable as I'd like to be in many areas of my playing, but my joy and the one true talent that I can feel strong about and not deny is the fact that I have a good sense of time. I'm a good time player, and that's where the thrill and the pleasure come from. In my view it's really where the joy in jazz comes from anyway. I'm really totally dismayed that so much has happened to jazz where that part of it has been sacrificed and when I hear some of that kind of music being played today I wonder how can they be having any fun? That was what brought me the pleasure. Sitting in the rhythm section and being part of the rhythm section more than being a soloist was what it was all about as far as I was concerned. That's what made the world go round. I recognise that people identified me as having a different rhythmic comping style. I don't think I imitated anyone to get it. It just evolved naturally.

`But if I was influenced in my comping, the one person that really did it dramatically in those years was Horace Silver. When Horace was playing with a group he really pumped that rhythm section. He put the air in it and made it buoyant. Nobody was going to sit down on their can on the time when Horace was working that rhythm section.

`That's where the exhilaration comes from. One of the things that distresses me today is that there are some incredibly skillful young players out there, but no one seems to be teaching them that if you have a three-man rhythm section the piano is one-third of that rhythm section. It should be played that way, but a lot of the time it doesn't happen.

`I was working one of my very first jobs with Stan Getz at the Hi-Hat in Boston. Bill Crow was the bassist and Al Levitt the drummer. I think it was a quartet in that first week before Brookmeyer came on. Al Levitt said to me "John, how do you do that? That's terrific, that comping thing that you're doing with your left hand". I specifically remember that I was very pleased, but I couldn't answer. All I could say was "I don't know, but I'm glad you like it". That was a big boost for me, because I was very insecure and knew where my failings were and to have someone say that my comping was a strength was very helpful.

'In regard to time in the forties and fifties, any 14 or 15-year-old player on the way up, if he was going to play with a local band or something, he was going to be influenced by Count Basie. Perhaps the first jazz solo anybody learned was Basie's on One O'Clock Jump. The stock arrangement copies off Count Basie's first 12 bars in the key of F, the blues. The problem was the youngster had to play two 12-bar choruses and they only wrote out the first one. Once he learned the first one then it was where do I go from here? He'd find something, probably eventually play the second chorus the same way all the time too, but once he'd got that first chorus down he knew what the time was, because Basie played it so good. And of course that little band that you played with when you were 13 or 14 played all of the Basie stocks-the one I was with did, anyway. Every Tub, Jumpin' At The Woodside, all of them. You can't miss the time there.

`I was late going into the army. All my friends were wiser than I. When we graduated from high school in 1946 with all the demobilisation and the troops coming home from the war they had to refill the ranks quickly. They left all those wondrous GI benefits in place as an inducement, and nobody had to go and get shot at. You could go in the service and didn't even have to stay in the full two years. I had just come off the road. I thought I knew what real wonderful life was like. Would I go in the services? Of course not. It was a dreadful mistake. I should have done it and I would have come out like my friends did and I would have had those benefits and I would have gone to school and hopefully would have bettered myself. But I thought that there was nothing like playing music. I wasn't going in the army. But of course I ended up there anyway. When the Korean war came they were looking for fresh bodies and I was drafted because I hadn't done my service before.

`So, I worked New Year's Eve with Charlie Parker and went into the army three weeks later. My only paid job with Bird was New Year's Eve 1950. I've still got the poster for the gig on my wall at home because I took it down from the wall where we played at the Rollaway Ballroom in Revere Beach near Boston. My dad had it on the wall of his garage until he died in 1980, and I've had it ever since!

`I had been in New York. After I left the Bothwell band I went to New York either in late '48 or '49 and worked out my 802 card. I decided I'd had three years of total economic hardship and finally my young brain decided that I had to find a way to make a living. I had an electronic background, because I'd worked for my dad who was an electrical contractor back in Vermont. TV was just becoming the in thing and it seemed like a practical thing to do which would give me a way of making a living and let me play jazz on the side. So I worked nights and I went to a TV technicians' school for eight months and worked out my 802 union card at the same time.

`I fell right back in with some wonderful players that I had known earlier like Frank Isola and Don Lanphere. I made a demo record with Babs Gonzales and Don Lanphere. We never got paid for it, but that was my first record date. Those were magic days when I began to get the chances to play with everybody. There were places to play all over the city. You may know an album called Apartment Jazz (Spotlite SPJ 146) which was an assemblage of old wire recordings that Jimmy Knepper had made. Jimmy and Joe Maini had a sub-basement on Upper Broadway-we called it the underground pad. They talk about it in the liner to the album, and I'm glad about that, because otherwise I wouldn't have remembered where it was. It was just one big room with an upright piano. I was there one time in the daytime and the only light that came in was through some glass blocks. It was only then that I realised that the apartment extended out under the sidewalk.

`Bird came by there many times to turn on. There was a lot of that. Somehow, I don't know how, I managed to avoid the heroin thing even though it was all around me. Whether it was because I was afraid of the needle or because I had too many friends that I'd lost, or maybe something to do with my upbringing, but whatever, thank God! So that was mainly why Bird would come by there, but also of course we would play. All the good players came by. It says on the album "John Williams, piano", and it was. I've always been thrilled about that.

`But I decided I had to make something of myself apart from playing jazz, so, in the spring of 1950, I went back to Massachusetts and put my new found skills as a TV repair man to work. I played nights around the Boston area. I had been set to be drafted into the army on January 21, 1951 when Charlie Parker had someone call me. He had a New Year's Eve gig in Boston at Revere Beach and wanted to know could I work with him. Could I work with him! I was thrilled to pieces. I arranged to meet him at the Hi Hat, and he was just as gracious as could be. We walked and talked and rode up to Revere Beach together. Of course I was worried sick, but he made it like velvet. So I did get to work with and be paid for one job with Bird.

`Immediately afterwards I was drafted and went into an army band at Fort Devens. I had met Al Cohn in New York, although at that stage I didn't know him well. He had lost his eye. His uncle owned a textile mill in an old mill town right near the section of Massachusetts where I was serving in the army. Chuck Andrus, a bass player friend of mine, was serving with me. We'd drive over to where Al was two or three times in the course of a month and we'd meet the trumpeter Sonny Rich, who lived nearby and we'd all play together with a local drummer.

`I got to know Al pretty well at this time. His father had wanted him to get out of music and learn about the textile business. Thank the Lord that didn't stick because Al went back to New York and became such a musical giant.

`When I got out of the army I went back to New York. Within a week I had joined Charlie Barnet's band. It was terrific, another dream come true, and Al Cohn, Ray Turner and Johnny Mandel were on the band. Johnny took me over to his home and played me all these tapes that he had made of the Elliot Lawrence band with Tiny Kahn on drums. That was one of those dream bands. I'll never forget that.

`All of a sudden out of a clear blue sky my old buddy Frank Isola called me up and told me that Stan Getz was looking for a piano player, and that I was to come down to Nola's, a set of studios at Broadway and 51st, to audition. I played at Nola's many many times. We used to chip in a few bucks each to hire the place and have sessions there. Anyway, I went there to audition and I got to go with Stan. Two long stints first began in January 1953 and the second in 1954. The first one had Al Levitt on drums for a while and Bill Crow on bass. Johnny Mandel played the first week or two on trombone with the band while we waited for Bobby Brookmeyer to work out his notice. He was playing piano with the Tex Beneke Orchestra. How about that! Johnny Mandel wrote Pot Luck at that time-the quintet recorded it later. The reason that there were two separate stints was that Stan disbanded to do a concert tour on his own in the fall of 1953. The photographs which I've sent you come from that period. They're poor quality because I had them made from existing prints that I had. Originally I had them done for Stan about four years ago at a time when we talked a lot over the 'phone when he was at his home in Malibu.

`Three of the pictures were taken on the trip we made by road between Washington DC and LA. I had only been with Stan about four months, so it would have been about May, 1953. We were on the road and as I remember the girls were very pretty along the way.

`We were working at The Blue Mirror in Washington DC which then was the jazz club in the city. It was a great jazz city in the early fifties. Every time you played Washington the good players came out of the wall. They were all over the place Earl Swope, Rob Swope, Bill Potts. Bill put together and wrote for that wonderful local band which worked under Willis Conover's name. Charlie Byrd used to work in an after hours club in the city. We got through at two o'clock and then there were all these private clubs all over the city where you could go and play until eight in the morning. We went to the place that Charlie was working with his trio and sat in almost every night that we were there.

`We closed on Sunday night at the Blue Mirror and we were supposed to open at the Tiffany Club in Los Angeles on Friday night. Bobby Brookmeyer was going home to Kansas City and was going to fly out and meet us in LA. We left Al Levitt in Washington. I think that was his last week with the band. Frank was going to join later, and somebody from LA subbed until he did. I'm sorry to say I can't remember at this time just who it was.

`Anyway, it left three of us to go from Washington to Los Angeles in Stan's old stretch De Soto, longer than the usual car and with room for instruments and stuff.

So there was bassist Teddy Kotick, Stan and I. But Teddy didn't have a licence and didn't know how to drive. So Stan and I had to drive these three thousand miles between us. Now I wasn't too orderly in those days, but there were times when I felt a lot more orderly than some of the people I was working with and I'd assumed that we ought to leave Monday if we were going to open Friday three thousand miles away. But Stan, as always, had better things to do on Monday, namely some lovely young lady. That happened with him in every city we played. So he called Teddy and me at our hotel and told us that we couldn't leave until Tuesday. It was about five o'clock on Tuesday that we finally pulled out of Washington.

`Thankfully there was a friendly little druggist in Washington who was a real jazz enthusiast-he particularly loved Louis Armstrong as I recall-and with the help of his amphetamines we made it to LA in about 60 hours of driving time!

`Teddy was relegated to the front seat because he was a non-driver. Stan and I would take turns to drive eight hours, then wake the other guy up and he would drive eight hours. Of course, when you finished driving after eight hours you took a big swig of whiskey and lay down in the back seat while the other guy drove. We did so good that we even stopped in Kansas City for about six hours. Stan and I crashed out in a hotel while Teddy went to see his estranged wife Peggy (they got back together later). As you can see from the photo of the stop at Salt River Canyon, Arizona (we probably just stopped to relieve ourselves), with Stan and Teddy cheek to cheek, it was kind of a cuckoo ride. But not only did we make it to the gig, we pulled into Santa Monica at the Pacific Ocean about 10 o'clock on Friday morning. We stopped at Red Norvo's place. By pre-arrangement his wife had gotten us some rooms at a motel on the beach. I went down to the beach and fell asleep and ended up with one of the worst sunburns I've ever had in my life. I had to play that night and subsequent nights in real misery.

`We were at the Tiffany Club in LA at the same time as Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Carson Smith and Larry Bunker were at The Haig. That was the origin of the Gerry Mulligan pianoless saga. The Tiffany Club and The Haig were only about 10 or 12 blocks apart, so every intermission we'd run out to the car, and head for The Haig and hope that we would hit it while they were playing. We'd listen to the band for 20 minutes or so and then back to The Tiffany. Chet and Gerry would do the same thing in reverse. It was during that period when I got to know Chet pretty well. We went to Chet's house one afternoon and jammed, and on another day Chet took Teddy and me down to Balboa Bay and took us sailing in his yacht as you can see from the photo.

`I think we were at Tiffany's for three or four weeks and then Frank Isola came out and joined the group. We went into a place called Zardi's at Hollywood and Vine and we stayed there all summer, for about three months. We all lived at the Elaine Apartments on Vine Street. There was a pool, and the picture that you see of the rhythm section was of us sitting round that pool at the Elaine. It takes me back, because on my feet are the rubber shoes that I had brought home from Korea five or six months before. The final picture is of Frank Isola warming up before the concert at the Milwaukee Auditorium. [Both of these pictures were published on page 10 of the December 1993 issue-S.V.] That was on the concert tour when Stan Getz At The Shrine was recorded. We went right across the country and played every major city and concert hall. We had Art Mardigan on drums with Stan's group. Frank was on the tour but he was then with Gerry Mulligan's Quartet. The others on the tour were the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

`Right after that Frank came back to the Getz group. There was some confusion amongst record collectors because the day after The Shrine concert recordings were made; we made some more in the studios with Frank, who of course was still with Gerry, playing in our quintet instead of Art Mardigan.'

[There was some friction and rivalry between Getz and Mulligan. Bob Brookmeyer had already given Mulligan his notice in June 1954 when the famous Mulligan quartet concerts were recorded at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Mulligan wasn't pleased when Frank recorded with Stan's group before he'd actually left Mulligan. When Frank did leave Gerry to join Stan's group, Mulligan drove off with Frank's drum kit in his car, and for a few days Getz had to hire drums for Frank. S.V.]

`I never understood why Norman Granz had left that fragment of my solo piano at the beginning of the Stan Getz At The Shrine album, sitting there all by itself before Duke Ellington introduces the band. I can't remember playing the piece, which I suspect is a blues I wrote called I'll Take The Lo Road. The chances for a pianist to warm up on that tour were so rare that whenever I saw a piano I'd rush to it. I must have been doing that before the concert when the sound engineers were coincidentally testing for level and recorded me. It was a real problem for a pianist out on a seven-week tour like that. I was called on to play maybe 45 minutes a day at each concert. You can't keep your hands in shape that way. So wherever we were, whenever anyone invited us to jam after the concerts I always accepted. And there was nearly always somebody in every town who asked us. Consequently I'd be up all night playing my heart out and then spend the next day travelling. It was a hard way to live!'

...To Be Continued in Part 2

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Part 2 - The John Williams Interview with Steve Voce

August 29, 2015, 7:00 am

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Here’s Part 2 of Steve Voce’s extended 1998 interview with pianist John Williams. As noted in Part 1, Steve is a British journalist and music critic who contributed regularly to The Independent and to Jazz Journal for over 40 years.

In this segment of Steve’s brilliant interview, John is extremely candid about why he left the Jazz scene in the early 1960s and I daresay that many Jazz fans from that era can relate to his reasons for doing so. The music changed dramatically and not necessarily for the better.

Without going into a lot of technical detail, both Parts 1 and 2 of the original manuscript had to be modified to fit [work on] the blogging platform. It took a bit of doing and I think I corrected most of the errors caused by the transition, but should you find any mistakes the fault lies with me.

“'WHEN Stan disbanded in the fall of 1953, I went back to New York. I decided

to study at the Manhattan School of Music and worked there for six months. I

joined in the second semester but realised that I had gone in over my head.

Also they were still teaching heavy classical courses which didn't interest

me and I didn't really have the ears for it. After I got out of the school I

went back with Getz and I was with him for about a year.

' Stan was tough to work for because of his own problems. I usually felt

like I was the mediator on the band. God knows I had my own psychosis, but

not anything compared to what Stan had. I'd find myself saying to other

players on the band "When Stan said what he said to you he didn't really mean it. He said it because ...--Remember the old one-liner about the guy who says "Hey

man, how're you doing?" and the other guy says "What do you mean by that?"?

That was the Stan Getz group. It was then that I realised that you've got to

take people as they present themselves, and you mustn't keep looking for the real reasons as to why they are what they are. You can't keep looking for the excuses. Stan was tough to work for, but I was of course thrilled to be a part of the group. When we came back to New York and the band broke up a second time, I went through yet another personal fiasco.

' I have always had an intense interest in American history, and I thought

I'd get myself an education under the GI Bill Of Rights, which I was

entitled to do after my service in Korea. I went down to New York University

and I signed up with the intention of taking a major in American history and

a minor in music. That way I could take the music courses that I wanted to but I could also get something that really interested me for my future and to give me some stability. I'd gotten everything signed, sealed and accepted, when I discovered that if you interrupted your schooling for more than I2 months, all your benefits were cancelled. Since I had left the Manhattan School Of Music a year and three months earlier this applied to me. I really fouled up because right there I

cancelled all opportunities to get the higher education that I really needed and wanted to have. I've regretted it all my life.

'I stayed in New York, played some wonderful sessions, made a lot of records

and went out on the road a lot with Zoot Sims, which was the high point for

me musically. Zoot was always my favourite and, any of these records that

I'm on, if I had any good moments-and they're very rare and very few-that I

feel were OK, I can take you back to a few of the Zoot Sims records, because

that was the only time that I really felt that I began to open up and play with some potential. Zoot wouldn't have it any other way with his playing. Because of his incredible time, the whole thing in playing with him was to your wings out, get up there and soar. I loved Zoot Sims.

'But of course, the need to earn a living meant that I had to play music other than jazz. A lot of good musicians would from time to time get a chance to go on the Vincent Lopez Orchestra which worked at the Taft Grill for 25 years. It was in the Hotel Taft, a block from Charlie's Tavern. You played two hours at lunch time and another two hours at dinner time.

‘The salary was terrific and at both lunch a dinner there was a radio remote

which gave you extra money. But playing second piano to Vincent Lopez was

not terrific, but I stuck it out for three months from Christmas to spring. It was great because you'd get out of there by 8.30 so if you had a bebop gig you could do it afterwards. Also you could make the union floor in between your day and your evening shots.

'Vincent Lopez used to leave the stand to talk to the diners. We'd play all

this bad stuff, dance things that would have made Sammy Kaye sound good by

comparison There were two Baldwin grands on different levels, one for me in the rhythm section and one for him to play his solos on If he was talking to the people and didn't get over there I played the solo. Lots of times he'd let me do so whether he whether there or not. I remember one time when we were playing The Man I Love Vincent was late running over to the piano, sat down and came in two beats out of place. I just kept playing louder and louder at the right spot in the time until he shifted. From that moment on I was on his list!

'I was always the last one on stage. I'd run out of that subway station and run that block, into the building and onto the stage. Of course everyone else had had to be there to get their instruments out, and I used to try to arrive at the last minute.

'St Patrick's Day came and I came running in almost late as usual. The band was up on the bandstand wearing green hat,, green boots and green bow ties. I couldn't handle that. I got up on the bandstand and Vincent said "Go get your suit". I said " don't think I wanna do that and of course I got fired on the spot.'

'While I was working that gig I'd go on and play all the jazz I could. One night I had been out drinking and playing, and I'd been in bed probably an hour and a half when, at about four in the morning, Hank Jones called. My wife answered, woke me up and handed me the phone. "Al and Zoot are doing , recording gig down at Webster Hall tomorrow," said Hank. "I just got a chance to go out of town and I can't make it. Will you do it for me?" I said "Sure, Hank, of course. What time?"

'I got up the next morning with no recollection of this whatsoever. It hadn't registered at all. My wife remembered, but she didn't say anything to me. I went to the lunchtime gig at the Taft Grill and was given a message by the Maitre D. to call this number. I called in and it was the A & R man.

"Where the hell are you? You're supposed to be here!"

‘Where?’ I asked.

"Here! You're supposed to be doing this record date with Zoot and Al'

'I said "For Christsakes, I'm working at the Taft Grill! Don't you think that . . ."

“Hank Jones said that he'd called you and YOU were going to sub for him.”

‘Don't you think that if I had been given a chance to play for Zoot and AI I'd be there?’

"You mean he didn't call you'?"

‘No, he didn't call me.--’"

'The next day I'm sitting playing piano for Vincent Lopez and all of a sudden I looked down and saw Hank Jones and his big brother Elvin sat at a table near the stand. They're mad.

'I said "Hi. Hank."-

'He growled some extremely uncomplimentary things and said "What're you trying to do, set me up?"

'I couldn't believe what he was telling me. Before he and Elvin left he knew that I was innocent. He believed that I had no recollection. My wife said "Yeah, of course he called you.---I was mortified that I would screw up so badly, but most important, I missed a date with Al and Zoot together. It all resolved nicely and Hank and I got on speaking terms again. I guess he knew how much I would not have missed that date!

'I tried to book Hank for the Hollywood Festival a couple of years ago. When I got him on the phone I said "Is this Hank Jones?" He said "Yeah," and I said "Hank, this is the piano player that you and Elvin were going to beat the hell out of at the Taft Grill---. He remembered the whole thing and fell out laughing.

'I was on a 1956 album of AI Cohn's called The Saxophone Section (Epic

LN3278). The tracks were intermingled with me on some and Hank on the rest.

I had what I thought were for me two or three good spots, but Hank was fabulous.

'There was a loft down in West Broadway owned by a guy who had a decent grand piano there. In those days everyone wanted to play. The loft was a great place. It wasn't a drug hangout. It was just a guy's apartment. We'd be sitting round in Charlie's Tavern on 7th Avenue at four o'clock in the morning. You could call him up at four o'clock in the morning from Charlie's and ask "Can we come down and play?" and he'd say "Sure." We'd go down there and play for four or five hours and walk out at eight or nine in the morning.

'You know me well enough now to know the insecurities I felt at that time (and still do) about my playing. But when I played with those guys, particularly Zoot and Al, the doors would get opened. I can remember walking out in the morning sunlight and thinking ---”My God. That was O.K!" Of course there was always some serious drinking involved and maybe some other minor vices from time to time, but there were no serious drugs down there, which was important. I'd go home feeling like I was on top of the world. It always felt like it had been the best fun I'd ever had and seven or eight hours later I'd wake up and say "Boy, that was terrific last night!" Then I'd start with the doubts and say "Well, I think it was. I had a little to drink . . ." and the old insecurities would come rushing back!

'I've always envied the artists who paint. An artist who sits up all night and paints something on canvas can see what he's done the next morning. And of course today the kids have all this marvellous recording equipment. Back then, if anyone had a wire recorder like Jimmy Knepper had, he was really something unique. So the next time we were down there at the loft three or four days later I'd do the same thing again and open that door and this door, and have the same good time. But I never had any verification when I needed to have my mental pump primed the next day.

'I made at least three quartet albums with Zoot, and I did one with Brookmeyer and Zoot [The Modern Art Of Jazz, under Zoot's name and currently available on Fresh Sound FSR-CI3 25] and I wrote a tune on that called Down At The Loft. I called it that because you used to go down to the Village to go up to the loft. Didn't turn out too badly.

'And I loved Al Cohn. And I loved the two of them together. The sun shined when I played with Stan, too. The difference between those two and Stan was that with Stan you were always on stage making an appearance, and that always helped me self-destruct a little bit extra. I don't want to sound unfair to Stan, but I think a lot of his contemporaries would say the same. Even with all his skills and his incredible ear, he was showbiz too much of the time. He would inflict that on himself. He had the same problem "I've got to impress, I've got to perform," night in, night out. The best times with Stan were like so many times with Al and Zoot. If you got Stan in a corner and were playing with him in a non-performing environment, the meat and potatoes would come out. He was a most wonderful player, but again I think Stan's

minor paranoia, as with so many players, hindered him a lot.

'You suggest that I influenced Bob Brookmeyer's piano playing? I would say it was vice versa! Bobby was such an excellent piano player and, as I've said, he went out on the road as Tex Beneke's piano player. I think a lot of his skills as an arranger and a writer stem from his ability to express himself on the piano. Time and time again when we were on the road if there was ever a piano available where we were with Stan, we'd sit down and play four-handed piano. I learned a lot from Bobby right there. I was always in awe of Bobby. His ear and his harmonic ability. He is an exceptional musician and in the bleak era in the sixties when my kind of jazz disappeared into the woodwork, Bob went through a rough time for I0 years when he nearly killed himself because he apparently couldn't get a handle on his genius. But he got over that and came back to New York from the West Coast and look what happened! Nobody in my view has ever written better swinging and modern big band arrangements than Bobby wrote for the Mel Lewis band.

'I'm not a member of the Flat Earth Society that you've referred to in some of your articles, but I have great difficulty when jazz leaves the time. Bobby is at the point now where his mind is so full of sound and music and harmony, that he's experimenting in ways that are worlds apart from true jazz, and I have to say that I felt personal disappointment when he started to write these things where time is no longer a major factor. But oh, those things that he wrote for that Village Vanguard band of Mel's in the mid-eighties! Anyone who wants to listen to those and tell me that those pieces aren't an advanced form of pure true jazz when the time is doing what it's doing and all of the things that he's written in there are doing what they're doing - that was a real peak in jazz to me. I have no doubt that he's one of the major figures in jazz today. And I know what a personal loss it was for Bobby when Al Cohn died. I know they had the highest regard and respect for each other and enjoyed each other's music as much as they did each other's friendship.

'I made two trio albums for Mercury, one with Bill Anthony on bass and Frank

Isola on drums was done in September 1954, a month or so before the Shrine

concert, and the other was done in two sessions in June 1955 with Bill and Dick Edie on one and Chuck Andrus and Frank or the other.

'Bobby Shad hired Leonard Feather to write the album notes. I waited to Leonard to call me or whatever, and he never did. Finally I got through the mail from him a questionnaire. It was almost like a government form. I didn't like it because he was finding things out about me but not really asking me anything to do with my opinions about music or anything about playing. I filled out my name address and social security number, whatever it was he was asking, and then I wrote something about my feeling for him to review, not to put in quotes and put on the back of the album cover.

'I was badly embarrassed when the album came out and all he had done was to

take what I had said and print it verbatim. If I were going to write my own notes, I wouldn't have said what I'd written in notes for him. I was trying to tell him how thrilled I felt about the time, particularly about playing with Zoot and Al. They epitomised what I felt and wanted to play like They were my heroes. When he printed those remarks I felt, who am I to say these things and have them on the album cover Of course they keep being quoted from time to time and each time it embarrasses me anew!'

'I never recorded with him, but I was the only pianist the Gerry Mulligan Sextet ever had! I was at a session in a New York apartment with Gerry one time and we were standing out on a rooftop drinking and talking. Finally I'd had enough to drink so that I could tell Gerry what I thought of rhythm sections without pianos in them. I really harangued him. "Everything sounds so flat without a piano. Go ahead with all your harmonic creativity, but for Pete's sake give me a rhythm section!"

'He had just expanded from a quartet to a sextet and was going out on a package tour. With himself he had Jon Eardley, Zoot and Bob Brookmeyer as his front line. Those are four incredible players. They had a lot of things written but they also had a lot of genuine creativity and they'd often have four intertwining lines going. But again, a two-piece rhythm section. Very flat. It didn't do anything for me.

'A few days later on a Friday Gerry called me and said "John, you wanna join the group? I've got a concert tour with Carmen McRae and others and we're opening in Columbus on Monday then on to Ann Arbor and so on".

'I said "Gerry, I'd love that, but this is Friday and you're going out on Monday". Besides that I was booked that Monday night at Birdland and another gig which was to be recorded, and also I had a booking to record with the Larry Sonn big band. I made the decision that I should go with Gerry, especially after having shot my mouth off to Gerry about the piano. So I cancelled all three.

"OK." he said, "You'll ride with Bobby and we'll meet in Columbus."

"But Gerry," I said. "This is a concert tour. I need something to work with.

You got any charts?"

"No," he said. "We'll work it out at the time."

'Well, it became very obvious that the minute Gerry had decided to add a piano he'd actually changed his own mind again.

'I got in the car with Bobby and we rode to Columbus. "Bobby," I said, "the guy's given me no charts, no lead sheets and no indication of what we're going to play. He hasn't used a piano before and as far as I can see he's made no preparation for one. What the hell's going on?"

'Bobby drove and from New York to Columbus he did his damnedest to try to sketch out the formats of some of the sextet's more famous numbers while I wrote them down. When we got to the concert I hit on Gerry again. "Don't worry about it," he said, and it was obvious that he was already regretting that he had taken me on.

'We got on the concert stage and, thanks to Bobby, I had some idea of what was going on. You know the word “stroll"? It means when the piano player lays out and lets the rest of the rhythm section carry on. We'd play something and I'd just begin to feel it was going to be all right, to begin to cook and feel that this was working when Gerry would turn round and say "Stroll!" and I'd have to drop out. Then he'd turn around and say "Come back!"

'You can't do that! You cannot build the time element of the machine, you can't put the wings up and put the buoyancy in the time and then let it all go phhhh! And then come back in and rise again from ground zero. It bothered me tremendously because I just was not prepared. And Gerry was apparently determined that I be not prepared.

'The next night was at Ann Arbor in the University Of Michigan where we had a massive big audience, then we went to Cincinnati. On the fourth night we were back in Philadelphia at the Academy Of Music and Gerry came to me and he said "John, I don't think I want to continue with the piano". So he paid me and sent me back to New York.

'Of course I was greatly relieved because, other than Bobby, I was getting zero help as to what was supposed to be happening. And I couldn't handle that stroll, come back in, stroll, come back in. That is no way to run a rhythm section! So I was Gerry Mulligan's only piano player. Besides that, don't ever forget this - Gerry Mulligan wants to be his own piano player. He doesn't want anyone else to play the piano anyway! He used to do that at sessions and frankly none of us ever cared too much for it because he wasn't working in the rhythm section, he was creating.

'My disappointment about piano players in rhythm sections goes back to the sixties. When I left New York and went to Miami I only turned around twice and all of a sudden Miles and those guys are going into this free thing. I'm sitting in Miami and I'm working with a nice group when we get to the bass solo and the bass player just drops the time altogether and starts to play a solo, totally out of left field. It was madness from my point of view! Why would you build this castle in the air and then just demolish it and forget it? To me that, and when, further down the road, they got into fusion and all that, call it what you will but don't call it jazz.

'We all evolved as jazz did. You can go back and listen to ragtime and it's happy music, right? Dixieland! Is there anything more joyful and happy than that? It's joy.

Zoot Sims, John Williams and Frank Isola in the loft joyful because the time is happy. The big bands, bebop, just the same. You can take a Charlie Parker solo and dissect it and everything in it is a gorgeous beat beautiful melody all worked right around the time. Nowadays, it seems to me, many of the players are playing meaningless "exercises" and sounding very angry. What happened to the fun?

'However, I am very relieved to see so many brilliant young players coming along now. Perhaps it's because of the schools. But whatever, some kind of return to reality has taken place and the young players today at least seem to be reaching back and trying to establish these roots before they do their things. There was none of that in the sixties and seventies. Then it was like taking Bach and Beethoven and saying "Forget that, that's nothing".

'I read an article, was it by one of the Harper Brothers or some young player where he asked "Who says that we should try and play our own music until we can understand Charlie Parker's music?" To me that was very eloquent. You listen to Bird today and nobody has been able to do what he had done. So much has beer wasted. And I have a personal animosity that I might as well tell you about. It's what seems to have happened to all the tenor players as a result of John Coltrane. They don't seem to go back to early John Coltrane when he was less involved with exercises, I will call them disrespectfully! In the big bands run by the young players many of the trumpets and trombones are superb, a lot of the piano players are outstanding-maybe I'm generalising, but all the tenor players coming out of the schools, they're all John Coltrane tenor players. You don't hear the Prez roots, the Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Stan Getz roots that I think tell a much better story than

John Coltrane did, at least in his flamboyant playing.

'When I left New York in the late fifties to go to Florida it was because I was unhappy in my personal life. I had friends in Florida and when I got there I thought I was in heaven. I played Miami Beach with a jazz trio and a good singer. There was jazz all around and I played everywhere. Joe Mooney had a beautiful quartet there

'All the tenor players coming out of the schools, they're all John Coltrane tenor players. You don't bear the Prez roots, the Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Stan Getz roots that I think tell a much better story than John Coltrane did, at least in his flamboyant playing.

'There were good players and clubs all over the place. But then came Elvis and the Beatles and jazz in Miami just did not survive. For me then music

had strictly become a way to make a living, and there's no poorer way to

make a living. I had one of the ---better---jobs in Miami Beach because I

worked at a night club that stayed open a] I the year round, not just during

the winter season. I played shows and a little dance music and was just

about ready to blow my brains out! If you can't have that intense pleasure

that jazz brings you, what the hell are you in that business for?

‘I've always had an intense interest in American history and politics, and

as a result of this I became involved with my city's political life and I

ran for office in I97 I. I was urged and pushed to do it. Nobody thought I

could win, least of all myself. Who's going to vote for a piano player

working in a club in Miami? But they did, I don't know why. After that I was

on the Commission three or four years-it was a part-time job, you know. I

was satisfied that I was able to do things which I felt had some lasting

importance.

'I took the opportunity to go to work for an advertising agency for two

years and then I went to work for the Home Savings Bank, where I've been

since I978. I can't tell you how fortunate I am. I love the people I work

with. I like what I'm doing and I'm happy that I feel like I'm contributing

and I'm making a good living.

'I suppose I was the environmentalist on the commission, very much an

advocate of controlled growth. I fought like the dickens to save some major

tracts of pristine land before they could be built on. It was a good major

accomplishment. It'll be there long after I've gone.

'Over the years I was much involved with the Hollywood Jazz Festival, both

organising and playing and indeed played with Bobby Brookmeyer, Buddy de

Franco, Terry Gibbs and Scott Hamilton at various concerts. In I989 I tried

to reassemble the original Stan Getz Quintet to play there-minus Teddy

Kotick, of course, who had died. Stan was keen to do it and I talked to him

many times on the phone to his home in Malibu to try to arrange it. Bobby

wanted to do it too, and I planned to bring Frank Isola down from Detroit.

'By then Stan had the quartet with Kenny Barron, Victor Lewis and Rufus

Reid. Phenomenal!

‘Kenny was wonderful on that Anniversary album with Stan (EmArcy 838 769 2).

On Stella By Starlight he's superb. There's a lot of Stan on there which is great too, but there an also a lot of times when he's throwing away stuff. So many times you hear Stan playing just for effect.

'I did my best to get Stan to the festival but he was already ill and he'd decided that he couldn't go anywhere without a big entourage - a Japanese cook, his manager, his acupuncturist and his lady friend, and it kept on building in cost.

Of course our budget was limited and I finally just had to tell him that we couldn't do it. So Bobby and I played with the quartet that year very enjoyable. I was sad about the quintet, but I felt good that I had come back, I really did.'

The recording career of John Williams resumes in October 1994 when he leads

a quartet date to be recorded in Hollywood for Mitsui Johfu. Apart from John

the lineup will include his old friends Spike Robinson on tenor and Frank

Isola on drums.”

(Note on July 28, 1998: John has retired and lives happily with his wife Mary in Sebring, Florida. He visits Europe in October with Bill Crow and Frank Isola to play a tour with tenorist Spike Robinson.The group will record for the BBC and, it is hoped, make an album. The musicians will also be interviewed for the BBC by Alyn Shipton).

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