Paul Desmond - The Complete RCA Victor Recordings featuring Jim Hall [From the Archives]

September 10, 2016, 7:00 am

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Paul Desmond and Doug Ramsey were pals.

All of us should be so lucky to have a friend like, Doug.

In honor of his late, buddy’s accomplishments, Doug has written Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, a work that has to rank as one of the best biographies of a Jazz artist ever written. Parkside published it in a lovely folio edition and should you wish to order a copy, you can do so by going here.

Doug has kindly given the editorial staff at JazzProfiles permission to offer his informative and insightful insert notes to the booklet that accompanies Paul Desmond - The Complete RCA Victor Recordings featuring Jim Hall.

We were in an elevator in the Portland Hilton, waiting for the doors to close when the car jerked and dropped slightly, and a bell sounded.

"What was that?" a startled woman asked.

"E-flat," Paul Desmond and I said simultaneously.

I think that's when he decided we could become friends.

We had been acquaintances since a decade earlier when the Brubeck Quartet was playing a concert at the University of Washington in 1955, and I was writing about music for the UW Daily. During intermission, Desmond and I discussed cameras and books. We picked up the conversation later that night at a party for the band, and it continued until toward the end of May 1977. He told me then that the doctors had decided to discontinue radiology and chemotherapy, that the treatments had become worse than the disease, and the disease was pretty bad. His liver, however, was still perfect.

The liver thing had become a running gag. Desmond and good Scotch were, shall we say, not strangers. It amused him that after a physical examination in early 1976 turned up a spot on his lung, his liver was given a clean bill of health. He enjoyed the irony.

"Pristine," he said, "perfect." One of the great livers of our time. Awash in Dewars and full of health."

I think he was even amused by the circumstances of the discovery of his nemesis. He had gone to the doctor about foot trouble, and they found the cancer. The swelling of the feet turned out to be temporary and unimportant.

His mother was Irish and literate, his father German and musical, so it was probably inevitable that Paul Breitenfeld's verbal and musical selves would be witty, warm and ironic. Until near the end of his life, according to Gene Lees, Desmond thought his father was Jewish, but a relative said he wasn't. The name Desmond came from a phone book.

"Breitenfeld sounded too Irish," he told me.

Among those who knew him, his wordplay was as celebrated as his solos. He was quiet, quick and subtle, and some of his remarks have become widely published, like the one about his wanting to sound like a dry martini. One night at closing time at Bradley's, Jimmy Rowles was packing his fake books, and Bradley Cunningham remarked that if Peter Duchin could have access to all of those chords, his prayers would be answered.

"Unfortunately for Peter Duchin," Desmond said, "all of his prayers have already been answered.”

Hanging on our dining room wall was Barbara Jones' large oil painting of four cats stalking a mouse. Seeing it for the first time, Paul said, "Ah, the perfect album cover for when I record with the Modern Jazz Quartet."

"You'll notice that the mouse is mechanical," I pointed out.

"In that case," he said, "Cannonball will have to make the record."

Like all true lovers of language and humor, Desmond knew that the only good pun was a bad pun. He and Jim Hall conspired to conceive a sort of Jazz Goes to

Ireland

album with outrageous song titles like "Fitzhugh or No One,""The Tralee Song,""Mahoney a Bird in a Gilded Cage" and "Lovely Hoolihan."

Paul loved to visit our house in Bronxville, a half-hour north of Manhattan. The place was on a hill with huge rocks, a pond, pine trees and a stone verandah that looked down on the street and a wooded lot where children played. "The real estate deal of the century," he called it, never failing to marvel that such rural-seeming territory existed so close to "ground zero," his neighborhood at 55th Street and 6th Avenue.

After dinner, we sat on the verandah and talked, often for hours but never non-stop. There were long, comfortable silences.

In the years following the dissolution of the Brubeck Quartet, Desmond was semi-retired, playing only when he was presented the opportunity to work with musicians he admired or, in at least one case, to help someone. He was one of the first to play the Half Note when it moved from among the warehouses and garages of lower Manhattan to the expensive mid-town real estate that was to prove the club's undoing. Desmond maintained he was accepting the gig only because it was around the corner from his apartment and he could pop out of bed and into the club. He never admitted that he wanted to help the Canterino family launch the new joint successfully; to do so would have been to admit that he had the drawing power of a star. (Never has there been a star less eager for the role.)

He appeared fairly often with the Two Generations of Brubeck troupe, hit the road with the old quartet in the 25th anniversary reunion tour in the winter of 1976, and traveled to Toronto now and then to work at Bourbon Street with Ed Bickert, Don Thompson, Jerry Fuller and, sometimes, Terry Clarke. In 1969, Paul was in the all-star band assembled by Willis Conover for Duke Ellington's 70th birthday part at the White House, the only domestic affairs high point of the Nixon administration. That night, as I have recounted elsewhere, Paul did an impression of Johnny Hodges that was so accurate that it caused Ellington to sit bolt upright in astonishment, an effect that gave Desmond great pleasure when I described it to him.

At the New Orleans Jazz Festival the same year, there was a memorable recreation of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Desmond as the other horn, Milt Hinton on bass and Alan Dawson the drummer. In New Orleans, Paul and I hung out virtually non-stop for four days, closing the French Quarter every morning shortly before sunrise. We avoided the strip joints and pseudo-jazz clubs and concentrated on little bars known to tourists only if they stumbled in. And we listened to all the music we could absorb at that remarkable festival, still remembered by musicians and audiences alike as the finest jazz festival ever, and described by Desmond one night on a television program I was conducting as "the most civilized I have ever attended."

Taking in one incredible jam session in the ballroom of the Royal Orleans Hotel, we witnessed Roland Kirk surpassing himself in one of the most inspired soprano sax solos either of us had ever heard. In a fast blues, Kirk used Alphonse Picou's traditional chorus from High Society for the basis of a fantastic series of variations that went on for chorus after chorus. We were spellbound by the intensity and humor of it, and Paul announced that henceforth he would be an unreserved Roland Kirk fan, even unto gongs and whistles. In the same session, Jaki Byard rose from the piano bench, picked up someone's alto saxophone and began playing beautifully.

"I wish he'd mind his own business," Desmond said.

About his own playing, he was modest, even deprecatory. "The world's slowest alto player," he called himself, "the John P. Marquand of the alto sax," and he claimed to

have won a special award for quietness. He was reluctant to listen to his recordings, although once after dinner when we'd had enough Dewars he agreed to hear a Brubeck concert I had on a tape never issued commercially. I intrigued him into listening by insisting that his solo on Pennies from Heaven was among his best work. In my opinion, Paul's solos tend* ed to be too short, but on this piece he stretched out for ten choruses of some of his most architectonic playing, full of inventive figures, sly rhythmic twists and ingenious quotes.

He nodded along with himself, laughed a couple of times (in the right places, obviously) and when it was over said, "I agree." That's the closest I ever heard

Desmond come to approval of his own playing.

During those final nine years, he was allegedly working on a book about his life and times in music. It was to called, How Many of You Are There in the Quartet, after a question asked by airline stewardesses around the world. There were periodic negotiations with agents and publishers, even an advance, but little of the book actually made it onto paper. The only chapter in print was in Punch, the British humor magazine. In an account of the Brubeck group's engagement at a county fair in New Jersey, Desmond melded a horse show, volunteer firemen's' demonstrations, Brubeck's only known appearance on electric organ, and a marathon Joe Morello drum solo into a montage worthy of S.J. Perelman. The book, he now and then claimed, was mainly an excuse that allowed him to hang out with the writers at Elaine's. That two-page cadenza, his liner notes, and a few letters remind us of Paul's literary ability. He was a creative writing major at San Francisco State College in the '40s, but he got sidetracked.

We talked by phone fairly often in the last years of his life, when I was living in San Antonio. When the calls came, they invariably began with his cheerful greeting, "Hi, it's me, Desmond." The last time, we found the conversation tapering off into an uncomfortable succession of commonplaces, a sort of shadow boxing that grew out of what he knew and I guessed. We should both get mildly bombed the following Friday night, he suggested, and he would call me from Elaine's.

His housekeeper found him dead on Monday.

Paul Desmond's original liner notes for TAKE TEN (RCA LSP 2569):

TAKETEN: further reflections on "Black Orpheus" and other timely topics...

This space is usually occupied, as most hardened collectors know, by the prose stylings of George Avakian. I'm taking his place this time partly because he's up to his jaded ears in Newport tapes and partly because this way we'll have room on the back for pictures. This brings us instantly to the first problem, which is that George frequently starts out by saying all manner of nice things about me which I can't say about myself without blushing, and it's ridiculous to walk around blushing when you are twenty-two years old. Nevertheless I should explain who I am and all, especially for those among you who may have picked up the album because of the cover under the impression that you were getting the score from a Vincent Price movie.

Briefly, then, I'm this saxophone player from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with which I've been associated since shortly after the Crimean War. You can tell which one is me because when I'm not playing, which is surprisingly often, I'm leaning against the piano. I also have less of a smile than the other fellows. (This is because of the embouchure, or the shape of your mouth, while playing, and is very deceptive. You didn't really think Benny Goodman was all that happy, did you? Nobody's that happy.) I have won several prizes as the world's slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness.

My compatriot in this venture is Jim Hall, about whom it's difficult to say anything complimentary enough. He's a beautiful musician-the favorite guitar-picker of many people who agree on little else in music, and he goes to his left very well. Some years ago he was the leading character, by proxy, in a movie starring Tony Curtis (SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS), a mark of distinction achieved only recently by such other notables as Hugh Hefner and Genghis Khan. He's a sort of combination Pablo Casals and W.C. Fields and hilariously easy to work with except he complains once in a while when I lean on the guitar.

Gene Cherico, who's becoming a thoroughly fantastic bass player, has only been playing bass for the last eight years. (Before that he was a drummer, but a tree fell on him. No kidding, that's the kind of life he leads.) On TAKE TEN he was replaced by my sturdy buoy and hard-driving friend Eugene Wright.

Connie Kay is, of course, the superb drummer from the Modern Jazz Quartet, and if a tree ever falls on him I may just shoot myself. He's like unique.

About the tunes: TAKE TEN is another excursion into 5/4 or 10/8, whichever you prefer. Since writing TAKE FIVE a few years back, a number of other possibilities in the 5 & 10 bag have come to mind from time to time. TAKE TEN is one of them. THEME FROM 'BLACK ORPHEUS' and SAMBA DE ORFEU, along with EMBARCADERO and EL PRINCE; are in a rhythm which by now I suppose should be called bossa antigua. (It's too bad the bossa nova became such a hula-hoop promotion. The original feeling was really a wild, subtle, delicate thing but it got lost there for a while in the avalanche. It's much too musical to be just a fad; it should be a permanent part of the scene. One more color for the long winter night, and all.)

ALONE TOGETHER, NANCY and THE ONE I LOVE are old standards I've always liked. They were arranged, more or less, while we were milling about drinking coffee and all. This approach, while making for a comfortable looseness, usually leads to general apprehension towards the end of the take and frequent disasters, but occasionally you get a fringe benefit. At the end of ALONE TOGETHER, Connie hit the big cymbal a good whang there and it sailed off the drum set and crashed on the floor. After the hysterical laughter subsided we were getting set to tear through it one more time but we listened to it anyway, out of curiosity, and it sounded kind of nice so we left it in. That's one of the few advantages this group has over the MJQ-if Connie's cymbal hits the floor on an MJQ record date, you by God know it, but with this group you can't really be sure.

George Avakian was benevolently present at all stages of getting this record together, and Bob Prince, doubtless overwhelmed at having a song named after him, appeared frequently with advice and counsel which was totally disregarded.

I would also like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

PAUL DESMOND

Paul Desmond's original liner notes for BOSSA ANTIGUA (LSP 3320):

DELINEATIONS BY DESMOND

It's me, Paul Desmond, rapidly aging sax player with the Brubeck Quartet, sometimes called the John P. Marquand of the alto, and again playing hookey from the mother lode with the same group of sturdy compatriots that made TAKE TEN such a Joy to record. On bass is the Jovial presence of Eugene Wright, without whom the entire Brubeck operation would grind to a halt in a matter of hours. On drums, the master time-keeper of the Modem Jazz Quartet, Connie Kay -who, if he didn't exist, would be much too perfect ever to be imagined by anyone. And on guitar, the redoubtable (that means the first time you hear it you don't believe it, and when you hear it again later you still don't believe it) Jim Hall.

The term bossa antigua (it means, or at least it should, "old thing," as opposed to "new thing") began as a slightly rueful play on words, because by the time I got around to doing a few bossa nova tunes on TAKE TEN it was several years after the first flash from Brazil and couldn't property be called a new thing any more. This album carries the term a step further, in that the rhythm on several tracks is a sort of skeletal bossa nova with various old-timey flavors added. ALIANCA, for instance, has Jim Hall functioning as the only accredited Brazilian delegate, accompanied by routinely impeccable Connie Kay shtick and a nice comfortable New York 2 from Eugene Wright. A SHIP WITHOUT A SAIL and THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES contain other variations, ranging from Early Calumet City Strip to a subliminal fraelich. (If any of you feel creative out there, you could get together some rainy night and figure out an Old Thing dance to go along.)

The tunes, except for SHIP and NIGHT, are mostly originals. O GATO was written by Jim Hall's friend Jane Herbert, and it's as charming as she is, which is saying a lot. The others are tunes I wrote. One is based on a minor adaptation of a melody indigenous to early American coffee houses, a few are extensions of themes that have been wandering through my head recently, and the one called CURASAO DOLOROSO is a sort of three-stage operation.

Originally I'd wanted to do HEARTACHES, because it seemed so incongruous and because the original record of it had something of the same Neolithic connection to bossa nova as early marching bands had to Gerry Mulligan. I wrote a different set of changes for it and we tried it, and it was so horrible that George Avakian emerged from the control room in the middle of the first take, waving his arms and shuddering. (This is a musical milestone of sorts, since George usually smiles serenely thru the most disastrous takes imaginable, hoping that something good will somehow happen and he'll be able to splice it in later. I think the only other time he walked out in the middle of a take, the studio was on fire.)

So, on a later date we used the chords and avoided the melody, which is what you're supposed to do in jazz anyhow, come to think of it, and it worked out nicely. (Since it's a different melody and a different set of chords, the writers of HEARTACHES won't be around looking for royalties - but if they ever feel like dropping by for a drink, I'm usually home between 4 and 6.)

As always, George Avakian masterminded the entire operation effortlessly, even with a telephone more or less permanently installed in one ear. (There was one point, I must admit, when the only way I could get his attention was to go out to the phone booth and call him.) I don't know how the phone calls worked out, but I love the album.

PAUL DESMOND

PAUL DESMOND WITH JIM HALL

Until his series of RCA Victor dates in the 1960s, Paul Desmond did little recording as a leader, most unusual for a star soloist. In 1954 he had two Fantasy sessions, one with trumpeter Dick Collins and tenor saxophonist Dave Van Kriedt, colleagues from the Brubeck Octet; the other with guitarist Barney Kessel and the Bill Bates singers. The entire output of those encounters fit on a 10-inch LP made of green vinyl (everything done by Max and Sol Weiss, Fantasy's founders, was colorful). In the notes for it, Paul wrote, "My name is Paul Desmond and here I am 30 years old and this my first album in which I am not breathing down somebody else's neck...." In 1956, Desmond put together a quartet for another Fantasy album (red vinyl) with Don Elliott on mellophone and trumpet and elephants rampant on the cover. Desmond and Gerry Mulligan shared leadership of a 1957 session for Verve. He and guitarist Jim Hall linked up for a quartet date for Warner Bros, in 1959.

CD1

DESMOND BLUE

For four years beginning in mid-1961, Desmond was in Webster Hall or RCA's famous Studio A 19 times for sessions that produced five albums with Hall. The first to be released was Desmond Blue (later re-released on CD as Late Lament, with the addition of the previously unissued Advise and Consent, Autumn Leaves and Imagination). The arrangements for strings and horns were by Bob Prince, who had established his reputation as the composer of a staple of the modern ballet repertoire, New York Export: Op. Jazz. "I'd always wanted to hear Desmond with strings," Prince told Will Thornbury. "It was a dream come true."

Prince's recollection of Paul's modus operandi at the strings dates reminds us of Desmond's dedication to spontaneity.

"He was a wonderful musician," Prince told Thornbury, "one of the few to transform the saxophone and shape it into a new sound. I've never known anyone with such a pure tone - one that I'd never heard before and won't again. When it came to playing with strings and woodwinds, he wanted the experience of going into the studio and having a new toy to play with. It really came down to that, because in many cases I was going to show him what I'd done and he'd say, 'No, no, that's all right—just go ahead and do it.' He didn't really want me to come over and show it to him on the piano or even look at it on the score, because he liked that, just like he liked going in with Jim and the rhythm section and being surprised by them. I was amazed by what he did. In all of the album there's one chord—one point—where I stuck in an augmented eleventh, and had I known he was not going to augment the eleventh, I'd have thought twice about putting in the upper functions. That's the only exception, and it only happened for about a quarter of a bar. I'm not telling where that is."

The empathy between Paul and Jim Hall is introduced in My Funny Valentine following the neo-baroque introduction written by Prince. It is more fully disclosed in I've Got You Under My Skin when the strings lay out. Desmond plays a chorus with only Milt Hinton's bass and Robert Thomas's drums behind him, then Hall begins a pattern of gently prodding chords and moves the intensity up so that by the time the strings re-enter on a key change, the swing has reached its highest level of the piece.

CD2

TAKE TEN

Take Ten was Desmond's follow-up composition to Take Five, for the Brubeck Quartet a hit record and for Paul a dependable annuity that is still producing considerable income for his estate. The bassist for the title tune of Desmond's second RCA album is Eugene Wright, fellow Brubeckian and shaman of 5/4 time who, in the early sixties when 5/4 was Sanskrit to most jazz musicians, would hold little counting seminars backstage: "1,2,3/1,2," he would instruct the locals, "that's the only way you can keep track of it until it becomes natural.” In Take Ten, it is obviously natural to Gene. Desmond is misterioso, Near-Eastern and bluesy.

Hall was one of the first American musicians to return from

Brazil

with news of bossa nova, that felicitous melding of samba and harmonies from the French impressionists and jazz. Desmond saw deeply into its beautiful possibilities. His El Prince is heard in two versions, with drummer Connie Kay in a complex samba pattern. The second take, which languished in a tape box for two decades until it was issued on a Mosaic LP collection, is a tad slower and has forceful Desmond, a buoyant solo by Hall and intriguing bass lines by Gene Cherico.

At least one hearing of Alone Together can profitably be spent concentrating on Connie's snare accents and cymbal work, little kicks of encouragement. Paul, at a fairly good clip, marries relaxation and irresistible swing, especially in his second solo. Jim quotes Dizzy Gillespie's Anthropology and in the bridge of his second solo chorus has the kind of chord fiesta that makes grown men weep, if they are guitarists.

The structure of this song is a normal AABA, but the first two A sections are 14 bars instead of the usual eight. The composition hangs together so well, the eccentricity is not obvious.

The originally issued take of Embarcadero has nifty counterpoint in the first 16 bars following the guitar solo. One of several original Desmond bossa novas, the tune could be named after the Embarcadero in his native San Francisco or the one in Rio, or both. Antonio Carlos Jobim's gorgeous theme from the film Black Orpheus brings us to Kay laying down the basic bossa nova pattern, Hall and Cherico in rhythmic cahoots and Paul soaring. The tag is played as written, then the piece is taken out on a vamp ending.

Nancy sounds as if Paul, like Lester Young, thought of a ballad's lyrics as he played it. Hall's introduction is among his finest. Samba de Orfeu is one of the most famous pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Desmond regretted the hype and hoopla surrounding the bossa nova phenomenon, but this marvelous music insinuated itself quickly into American jazz. As he hoped, it has become a permanent element.

The One I Love gets a fluid performance with no quotes and no clichés. In his solo, Hall alternates legato and punchy passages to great effect. Out of Nowhere has interesting Desmond modulations in the opening chorus. Hall's comping is exemplary, and Kay negotiates a classic bop ride cymbal pattern throughout. Following Jim's two-chorus solo, he and Desmond trade twos, then Paul and the rhythm section do a chorus of stop-time.

CD3

GLAD TO BE UNHAPPY

Desmond's singing quality predominates Glad to be Unhappy, one of the best Rodgers and Hart ballads and one of their most unusual, with its ABA form. Paul's solo is improvisation reduced to essence; there's not a superfluous note. He conjures up a minor felling in the final bars of his first solo. We get a vamp ending. With echo, yet.

Strolling is what Roy Eldridge was the first to call the practice of a horn soloist playing with only bass and drums. Desmond strolls nicely in the second chorus of Poor Butterfly. Hall's solo has fascinating chords and great intensity. Counterpoint raises its lovely head, and we have the closest thing to a Dixieland ending that you're likely to hear from this band.

Mel Torme's Stranger in Town offers a good example of why Desmond kept describing Eugene Wright with such adjectives as sturdy, dependable and buoyant. It is also, for alto saxophonists, a case study in tonal quality. In A Taste of Honey, Paul offers a small portion of the melody as written, then the piece becomes abstraction, employing that high, pure alto sound so many think of as Desmond. He loved waltz time and he loved minor keys, and this is the best of both worlds.

For Any Other Time, a Desmond original, Kay's drumming is smooth, the kind of rolling timekeeping a soloist loves to have behind him. Paul's hurdy gurdy lines reflect the joy expressed by Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo in the motion picture Lili. There is no way of knowing, but, given his admiration of elegant women (fortunately, for him, it also worked the other way), it may be that he was picturing Leslie Caron. It is well known that his Audrey from the mid-'50s was Hepburn. Speaking of women, which Desmond did with respect and some frequency, he made it a point to—ahem—know the beautiful models RCA hired to decorate most of his album covers. He once told me that using his picture on the Take Ten album not only probably frightened away record customers but left a gap in his social life.

Desmond is piping and plaintive in Angel Eyes; what an ear for subtle harmonic possibilities. Jim goes into one of his billowing chords routines, then Paul floats back in, melodic and, yes, lyrical. By the River Sainte Marie, written in 1931, may seem an unlikely jazz vehicle, but it works for Desmond, Hall and company in this amiable performance.

Jim Hall's All Across the City was first recorded in a classic session for Mainstream Records which featured him and fellow guitarist Jimmy Raney with tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims. The initial melody is reminiscent of Gershwin's Prelude in F. It might have been made to order for Desmond. Jim spreads composerly chords for Paul when the alto re-enters following the guitar solo, a splendid moment. Connie creates another with his cymbals suspension before the final statement.

All Through the Night must have been on Paul's mind because it was included in Brubeck's Cole Porter album, Anything Goes (for Columbia), which was recorded around the same time. Desmond sparkles and soars through Cole Porter's interesting harmonies. Jim indulges himself in one of those billows of chords that are the despair of lesser guitarists. There is a minor stumble at the beginning of Paul's final appearance on the track, but that was no reason for the performance to stay under wraps. (It was in hiding in the RCA vaults for more than 20 years.) On the tag ending, Jim comps to a fare-thee-well.

CD4

BOSSA ANTIGUA

The Bossa Antigua album is another celebration of Desmond's favorite import, not taking Dewars into account. The title tune and Samba Cepeda (Orlando, the great first bassman?) are the same melody. Cepeda is issued here for the first time on CD. Of the two takes of The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, the one originally issued is given a less overt bossa nova treatment than the alternate (track 9). The original issued take of O Gato, recorded on August 20,1964, is relaxed over Kay's sizzling bossa nova rhythm. The alternate take was the sole successful effort in a session on July 30,1964. Samba Cantina could be the "minor adaptation of a melody indigenous to early American coffee houses" slyly referred to by Desmond in his notes for the Bossa Antigua LP. Curacao Dolorosa may commemorate a painful experience on an island in the Netherlands Antilles or a hangover from a liqueur. Its genealogy, as Paul explained it in his notes, involves, more or less, the song Heartaches.

The fetching melody of A Ship Without a Sail is lovingly played by Desmond. Hall, making the difficult sound easy, turns in one of his best solos. Kay successfully uses the unconventional device of accenting the second beat of each bar. Alianca is another of Paul's attractive originals. His The Girl from East 9th Street is highlighted by lovely descending thirds that begin in the ninth bar.

CD5

EASY LIVING

The Easy Living album begins with When Joanna Loves Me, a little-known love song that is seldom recorded. The tempo is medium, with Wright playing in two for the first chorus, then blossoming into a gently walking 4/4 for Desmond Hall's beautifully played, slight sad and regretful improvisations. Kay's drumming here is typical of his unique combination of lightness and firmness.

Desmond lilts along through the melody of That Old Feeling, then shifts up for a cruise through three increasingly momentous choruses. Hall's invitation to dance is concealed in an oblique reference to Benny Goodman. Polka Dots and Moonbeams is given a faster tempo than is usually applied to this famous ballad, providing sprightly impetus to the solos but draining none of the interest from Jimmy Van Heusen's intriguing chord changes.

Another of Van Heusen's treasured harmonic patterns is contained in Here's That Rainy Day, in which Desmond makes allusions to Man With a Horn, Tadd Dameron's Hot House, I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues and Time After Time. Hall leaves the hiding of clues for tune detectives to his partner and settles into his work with a section of low-register reflections that blooms into one of the guitarist's celebrated gardens of chords.

There were problems with takes of two pieces recorded by Desmond, Hall, Wright and Kay on September 9, 1964. They were rejected and had to be redone later in the month. But on Easy Living, everything worked. Desmond follows Hall's quiet introduction with a piping reading of the seductive Ralph Rainger melody, then provides a classic example of his legato ballad style—seamless lyricism and the creation of pure melody.

Percy Heath's authority and mastery of the beat married to the assurance and easy ride of Kay's cymbals buoy Paul's delighted exposition of Lerner and Loewe's centerpiece from My Fair Lady, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, please don't miss Desmond's modulations in the second chorus or Jim's logic in the development of ideas in his wonderfully linear solo. The same team, virtually the same tempo, and the same relaxation, passion and inventiveness in the art of improvisation are hallmarks (so to speak) of Bewitched. The song is one of the finest works of Rodgers and Hart, who could be considered the Lerner and Loewe of their time. Or is it the other way

In Blues for Fun, the fun begins with a chorus of walking bass by Gene Cherico, an unsung hero of the instrument. Among other things, on this piece Desmond proves that the world's slowest alto player had no problem with fast tempos, that he and the blues understood each other and, in his unaccompanied chorus, that he knew Lester Young inside out. Hall's solo and his riff behind Desmond's out-chorus are the work of a master architect of the blues.

Keeping company with All Through the Night in tape purgatory was Gene Wright's Rude Old Man, an invaluable addition to the accumulated evidence of the blues prowess of Desmond and Hall. The first chorus lays down Gene's urgent little riff. The second features Paul and Jim in contrapuntal call-and-response. The balance of the piece is devoted to expressing the profundities that the best players can elicit in a thoroughgoing exploration of the limitless possibilities of the good old basic, unadorned blues in B-flat. Toward the end of his solo, Jim gets, as they have been known to say in parts of Mississippi, "real country." He winds up the festivities and the album with an altered chord that is real city.

Paul, who always had a sense of occasion, died on Memorial Day, 1977. He was 52 years old. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Brubeck clan gathers each Memorial Day at the big Connecticut house Desmond called the Wilton Hilton. Dave and Iola are surrounded by their many musician sons, their daughter, other family members and friends. Always, much of the conversation will be about Paul, and there will be considerable laughter and head-shaking as puns, witticisms and plays on words are passed around. Eyes will moisten. Someone will say that Desmond manages to be a part of every day's thoughts. That someone is likely to be Dave.

"I think about Paul all the time," Brubeck told me. "We were together for so many years that I find myself remembering how Paul would have reacted to music and seeing our friends through his eyes. And around here we're always saying, "Paul would have loved that," or "I wonder what Paul would have said about that." Mort Saul and I got together the other night after a concert. We swapped Desmond stories for an hour and could have gone on all night. Paul's always with us. He's a presence."

Once, when we were talking about something else, Brubeck stopped, looked into the distance for a moment and said, "Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond."

I couldn't say it better.

Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.

-DOUG RAMSEY

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The Couriers of Jazz - "England's Greatest Jazz Combo" - by Ralph J. Gleason

September 12, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Wayne Shorter's "Wayning Moments" by Don Gold

≪ Previous: Paul Desmond - The Complete RCA Victor Recordings featuring Jim Hall [From the Archives]

In his review of the recent publication of Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews by Yale University for the September 2016 edition of Downbeat, Peter Margasak comments that:

“Although the Internet has wrought dramatic changes in journalism, there are still more people than ever writing non-classical music criticism. It's easy to forget—or to never realize—that once upon a time there was a serious dearth of serious jazz criticism.

Few figures helped change that situation as much as Ralph J. Gleason, who was arguably the first writer to cover jazz and pop music for a mainstream daily newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning in the early 1950s. He had tastes that extended beyond mainstream jazz—he interviewed Frank Sinatra and Fats Domino, and he was one of the first critics to recognize the genius of Lenny Bruce. He composed dozens of jazz album liner notes and he co-founded the Monterey Jazz Festival. He was also an associated editor and critic for DownBeat.

Gleason had a deep love and understanding of jazz, bringing a scholarly rigor to his work. Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews (Yale University Press) collects fourteen in-depth interviews with legendary musicians he conducted from his home in Berkeley, California, between 1959 and '61—with the exception of his talk with Duke Ellington, which occurred as part of a TV broadcast.”

And Ted Gioia in his Foreword to the book offers these observations:

“DID RALPH GLEASON REALLY leave us forty years ago? It certainly doesn't feel that way. Even today, you will find Gleason's name on the masthead of each issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine he helped launch back in 1967. His trademark trench coat hangs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, almost as if Gleason just stopped by a moment ago to check out the scene. The Monterey Jazz Festival, a bright idea Gleason had back in 1958, continues to thrive even as other music events and venues come and go. Every day, a music fan somewhere reads his liner notes to some classic album, whether Miles Davis's Bitches Brew or Frank Sinatra's No One Cares or Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

I know that a car company has already usurped the motto "Built to Last" to sell pickup trucks, but I insist that Ralph Gleason has a better claim to the phrase. He might have earned a living writing for a daily newspaper [San Francisco Chronicle], but he disdained the ephemeral and championed the timeless. And Gleason's knack for tapping into the Zeitgeist went far beyond the jazz world. Even today, anyone probing the great causes and upheavals of the mid-twentieth century—the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, Summer of Love happenings, beatniks, censorship trials, Altamont, you name it—will eventually encounter his name and legacy. In many instances, Gleason not only reported on the scene, but helped shape it.

Yet Ralph Gleason will always be remembered, first and foremost, as a Jazz writer. Jazz was always his first love and like many early attachments, remained the most passionate. And that sense of intimate attachment comes across again and again on these pages.”

Not only did Ralph J. Gleason write liner notes for internationally famous musicians with throngs of adoring fans, he also wrote them for home-grown European musicians, little known beyond their native countries who were just making their way in local Jazz circles.

And it was in this context - the obscure and the unknown - that thanks to RJG I came to appreciate and understand the significance of The Couriers of Jazz - “England’s Greatest Jazz Combo” through the liner notes that he wrote for this exciting LP.

The Couriers of Jazz was recorded in 1958 as a Carlton Stereo LP and was issued in 1989 on CD by Fresh Sound Records.

It featured a two tenor saxophone front-line of Ronnie Scott and Edward “Tubby” Hayes with a rhythm section made up of Terry Shannon, piano, Jeff Clyne, bass and Bill Eyden, drums.

It’s a terrific album that features three originals by Tubby and four standards and a tune entitled In Salah by Mose Allison that a group I worked with loved to play on because of the way the changes [chords] fell.

RJG’s insights about The Couriers of Jazz helped place the group in a context that helped me appreciate what they represented on the English Jazz scene at the time this recordings was released and his notes also provided me with helpful information about the background of each musician as well as the music on the album.

“Every year it becomes more and more obvious that jazz musicians outside the United States are getting closer and closer to the feeling of real jazz in their playing.

Twenty, even ten years ago, it was obvious when it was a band from Europe. Frequently today one cannot tell.

George Shearing, the blind British jazz pianist, recently remarked: "When I went back to England in 1955 and turned on the B.B.C., I was surprised by the strides that had been made over there and the fact that they're now coming so much closer to the American.conception. I suppose it's because of proximity. American records are once more available in England, British musicians work on the boats and get to New York and the union is opening up on exchange so that there are American groups playing in England."

There is no better example of the effect of this on the jazz scene than this album by THE COURIERS OF JAZZ.

Ronnie Scott, the dark-haired, taciturn co-leader of the group, who would just as soon talk about auto racing as music, has been in the U. S. several times. He brought his own group over once on an exchange deal; on two other occasions he worked his way across on the big ocean liners to dig jazz in New York—on the Big Apple. On one of his visits Scott even took a bus trip out to California, stopping off on the way to visit his old friend, vibraphonist Victor Feldman, then playing with Woody Herman's band at Lake Tahoe. Scott sat in with the Herman group that summer and was immediately offered a saxophone chair in the Herman band. Scott, however, wanted to return to England and reform his own group.

This, of course, he did and later joined forces with Tubby Hayes, also a tenor man, in THE COURIERS OF JAZZ, since the sensation of British jazz — the first British modern jazz group to be voted into top place in the Melody Maker poll.

England's musical taste is apparently changing — at least in jazz. Not too long ago the favorite British jazz units were all traditional. It is no small tribute to the talent of Scott and Hayes that THE COURIERS OF JAZZ were the first to break the ice for modern jazz with a two-tenor combo, by no means an easy unit to work with. There has been but one other such successful two- tenor unit in recent years, that of tenors Al Cohn and Zoot Sims which excited jazz fans during its brief existence.

THE COURIERS OF JAZZ not only boasts of two of the top solo horn players in Europe in Scott and Hayes, but have the advantage of Hayes' ability to double on vibes, plus a swinging rhythm section. European horn players have long been ahead of their rhythm section teammates in jazz capability. European rhythm men tend to be stiff. Not so THE COURIERS. They cook along as though Piccadilly Circus was only a block and a half from Birdland or just down the block from the Bohemia.

In listening to this album, it is intriguing to watch the ways in which the tenor saxophone playing of Scott and Hayes are similar and the ways in which they are different as they follow one another on the same tune. It is also fascinating to hear their approach to ballad interpretation, as on "Star Eyes" and "My Funny Valentine."

"The Monk," by the way, is an original composition by Tubby Hayes and a tribute to Thelonious Monk, two of whose favorite sequences are utilized and which recalls his moody presence throughout. Hayes, incidentally, did all the arrangements except "In Salah," Mose Allison's tune which was arranged by bassist Jeff Clyne, and "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!" written and arranged by Scott. Hayes also contributed the originals, "Mirage,""After Tea" and "The Monk."

A word about the musicians: Ronnie Scott was bom in London, January 28, 1927, switched from soprano to tenor when he was 15 and has played with Ted Heath, Ambrose, Vic Lewis, Jack Parnell and has led several bands of his own. He was one of the early leaders of the modern jazz movement in England, once was one of the organizers of a musicians-manager club [Of course, Ronnie would go on to own and operate “Ronnie Scott’s,” the world famous Jazz club still going strong in London]. His main influences include Charlie Ventura, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins.

Tubby Hayes was born in London, January 30, 1935, the son of a violinist who started him on that instrument. He switched to tenor when he was 12, began playing in jazz clubs when he was 14. He also played with Ambrose, Vic Lewis, Jack Parnell and Kenny Baker. He doubles on vibes, baritone and flute and his influences include Parker, Stitt, Getz, Rollins and Hank Mobley.

Terry Shannon was born in London, November 5, 1929, began playing piano in 1955 and has been appearing in British jazz clubs ever since. He likes Horace Silver, John Lewis and Tommy Flanagan. Jeff Clyne, born in London on January 29, 1937, has worked with numerous British jazz groups and has visited New York to hear jazz at its source. His influences include Oscar Pettiford, Doug Watkins, Paul Chambers and Ray Brown. Bill Eyden, born in London on May 4,1930, joined Tubby Hayes band in 1955 after a career as a drummer with several big bands. His favorites are Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Kenny Clarke, Art Taylor and Max Roach.

Ralph J. Gleason

Produced by Tony Hall and Mannie Greenfield”

The following video features the group on In Salah.

↧

Wayne Shorter's "Wayning Moments" by Don Gold

September 13, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Shirley Horn: Live at The Four Queens

≪ Previous: The Couriers of Jazz - "England's Greatest Jazz Combo" - by Ralph J. Gleason

As the masthead states - “JazzProfiles is dedicated to “focused profiles on Jazz and its makers while also featuring the work of guest writers on Jazz.”

Don Gold was hired by Jack Tracy in 1956 to become his Associate Editor at Down Beat magazine and when Jack left to join Mercury Records in March 1958, Don succeeded him as editor.

Since the magazine was based in Chicago and staffed with writers who appreciated and understood the music, musicians and record labels with a presence in the “Windy City” often turned to the magazine for authors to compose liner notes for their LP’s.

Here’s an example of Don’s excellent writing from the annotations he wrote for one of tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s earliest recordings as a leader before he joined Blue Note Records.

The LP was recorded in Chicago in 1962 and issued as Wayne Shorter: Wayning Moments on the VeeJay label [SR 3029]. It was subsequently released on CD by Fresh Sound Records.

In all he does within the world of jazz, Wayne Shorter selects his companions with great care and discrimination. In his first Vee Jay LP - Introducing Wayne Shorter (Vee Jay LP-3006) - he was joined by such first-rate jazzmen as trumpeter Lee Morgan and the rhythm section from Miles Davis' elite unit: pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.

In this follow-up to that worthwhile set, the tenor man is joined by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, one of the most respected of young horn men in current circulation, and a solid rhythm section of pianist Eddie Higgins, bassist James Merritt and drummer Marshall Thompson.

Shorter does not succumb to whim. A serious and sincere musician, he makes his moves judiciously. For this reason, he has turned down more jobs than he's accepted; in fact, for several periods during his career he's taken jobs outside of music rather than work with inferior musicians or play music he couldn't endorse.

After spending several years both in and out of jazz, diligently striving to find the Vight' slot for himself in music, Wayne landed with Art Blakey's Messengers. The experience, in a setting guaranteed by Blakey to promote individuality, proved to be one of the most rewarding in Wayne's service to jazz. Since he took advantage, eagerly, of the offer to become a Messenger, he's become a firmly authoritative spokesman for the straightforward, uncluttered, basic kind of jazz his playing personifies.

Although his playing bears certain similarities to that of John Coltrane, Wayne's roots extend far beyond Coltrane into the vast mainstream tradition of tenor players. His imagination enables him to create intriguing originals, tailor-made for improvisation, and to select comparably appealing material by other composers. In this outing, four of the tunes are by Wayne: "Devil's Island", "Dead End", "Powder Keg" and "Callaway Went That-A-Way". One, "Wayning Moments", is by pianist Higgins. "Black Orpheus" is from the score for the film of that name, by Antonio Carlos Jobin and Luis Bonfa; the superb film, by the way, was a 1959 Grand Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival. "Moon of Manakoora" was written by Frank Loesser and Alfred Newman for the 1937 movie, The Hurricane. "All Or Nothing At All", composed by Jack Lawrence and Arthur Altman in 1940, was one of the young Frank Sinatra's notable hits.

The performances given these tunes by Shorter and cohorts are not intended to shock the listener through the use of assorted avant garde techniques. This is not experimental jazz. It is as divorced from the Third Stream as the Nile is from the Mississippi. These performances are the work of jazzmen more concerned with improvisation - with freewheeling and unimpeded blowing - than creating impressive intellectual structures. Theirs is the world of the soloist. It inspires admiration only in terms of the accomplishments of the men on hand, their musicianship and their skill in transforming ideas into sound.

From the exotic view of "Black Orpheus" to the swinging gallop of "Callaway Went That-A-Way", with sizzling and balladic stops between, they tell you the way they were feeling and some of the thoughts they had the day they recorded this music. It is unadorned, but fervently probing, jazz. And in its freedom from gimmickry, it is as honest and as direct as jazz can get. As a key to the growth of the individualist in jazz, it is at the very heart of jazz.”

— DON GOLD

The following video features the Devil’s Island track from the LP.

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Shirley Horn: Live at The Four Queens

September 14, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Saxophone and Jazz

≪ Previous: Wayne Shorter's "Wayning Moments" by Don Gold

Vocalist Shirley Horn’s singing style has been described as reflective, compelling, sparsely evocative, sweetly sensuous - a mood singer par excellence.

In their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed., Richard Cook and Brian Morton note that: “The inevitable complaint is that Horn goes on making the same record …. Yet nobody grumbled much about the sameness of Ella, Billie or Sarah, in their various careers. Shirley’s difficulty is that her preference for achingly slow tempos and sung-spoken lyrics doesn’t chime very easily with the modern attention span.”

They go on to observe that the patented Horn gallop which, if you are new to her, is a whisker above dead slow, often provokes shivers of pleasure given her amazing ability to emotional frame a lyric.

Shirley Horn in performance was an event and further proof of that assertion can be found in this press release from Resonance Records.

Resonance Records Presents

SHIRLEY HORN LIVE A T THE 4 QUEENS

Deluxe CD Package & Digital Edition Available September 16, 2016 The first previously unreleased recordings by Shirley Horn in nearly a decade!

Recorded Live at Las Vegas's 4 Queens Hotel on May 2, 1988 with Shirley Horn's Trio of over 20 Years, Bassist Charles Ables & Drummer Steve Williams

52-Minute Set of Never-Before-Released Material Originally Recorded by

KNPR Las Vegas for the Syndicated Weekly Radio Program

"Monday Night Jazz at the Four Queens"

Includes a 56-Page Book of Rare, Previously Unpublished Archival Photos,

Essays & Interviews with Producer Zev Feldman, Journalist and Author James Gavin,

Vocalist Sheila Jordan with journalist Ted Panken, Trio Drummer Steve Williams

Washington, D.C. Radio DJ Rusty Hassan,

Original KNPR Broadcast Engineer, Brian Sanders,

Plus jazz record veterans and Shirley Horn producers,

Jean-Philippe Allard and Richard Seidel

Los Angeles, August 2016 - Resonance Records is pleased to announce the release of SHIRLEY HORN LIVE AT THE 4 QUEENS, a previously unissued live recording by legendary singer/pianist Shirley Horn accompanied by her rhythm section of over 20 years, the late bassist Charles Abes and drummer Steve Williams, recorded by Las Vegas NPR affiliate KNPR on May 2, 1988 at what noted author James Gavin describes as "Las Vegas's hip little oasis for jazz lovers, the jazz club inside the 4 Queens Hotel."

Resonance will release this album in a deluxe CD package and a digital edition on Friday, September 16, 2016.

Live at the 4 Queens was recorded only one year after her 1987 "comeback album" on Verve Records, I Thought About You, which reignited her international touring career after a nearly 20-year hiatus during which she had restricted her musical activities to her home town of Washington, D.C. so she could devote herself to raising her daughter.

The album includes a comprehensive 56-page book dedicated to documenting the life and career of Shirley Horn featuring essays and interviews with Resonance Records producer Zev Feldman, journalist and author James Gavin, jazz record veterans and Shirley Horn producers Jean-Philippe Allard and Richard Seidel, long-time Shirley Horn drummer Steve Williams (in conversation with Library of Congress jazz specialist, journalist and radio host Larry Appelbaum), Horn's friend and colleague, singer Sheila Jordan (in conversation with noted jazz journalist Ted Panken), Washington, D.C. jazz radio veteran Rusty Hassan, KNPR engineer Brian Sanders, manager Sheila Mathis and finally, Rainy Smith, Horn's daughter.

Featuring nine tracks and over 50 minutes of music, Live at the 4 Queens features Shirley Horn's interpretations of popular songs including "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" by Cole Porter, "The Boy from Ipanema" (the female version of "The Girl from Ipanema") by Antonio Carlos Jobim, "Isn't It Romantic" by Rodgers and Hart, "Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?) by Jimmy Davis, Roger ("Ram") Ramirez, and James Sherman and many others.

Long a favorite of Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, who both championed her early in her career, Shirley Horn was a unique jazz presence. As a performer, Shirley Horn was immediately recognizable for the mood she created, her swinging, harmonically sophisticated piano playing and her evocative, velvety voice. As a pianist, she was so gifted that Miles Davis once said "If she don't play, I ain't gonna play..." in reference to a gig at the Village Vanguard, and would have her perform as a sub for Wynton Kelly at various club performances. As a singer, she never failed to cast a spell on a room. She inevitably transported her listeners with her moodiness and her uncanny ability to maintain a compelling sense of musical motion even at the slowest possible tempos, which became a hallmark of her style.

When producer Richard Seidel signed Shirley Horn to Verve in the mid-1980s, her career was relaunched, and this time she became celebrated internationally as well as in the United States. A series of enormously successful albums followed. Most featured just her regular trio with bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams, while others had rhythm section colleagues like Ron Carter and Billy Hart, along with special guests such as Miles Davis, Toots Thielemans, Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis. And as a stylistic departure, Horn recorded the memorable album, Here's to Life (recorded in 1991 and released in 1992), in which Horn is showcased with a large ensemble arranged and conducted by Johnny Mandel (who received a Grammy® award for his work on the album).

Shirley Horn's return to prominence had her performing in all the major festivals around the world, plus iconic American venues like Carnegie Hall, prestigious concert halls throughout Europe and Asia, and even in the White House. Horn continued touring and recording at a torrid pace for nearly a decade until health problems forced her to pare back her performing and recording activities in the early 2000s. Nominated nine times for Grammys®, Horn finally won one for Best Jazz Vocal Performance in 1999 for her album, I Remember Miles, produced by Richard Seidel.

This album, Shirley Horn Live at 4 Four Queens, captures her at her creative peak. As Seidel observes, "This record is very much in the vein of Shirley's first album on Verve [ I Thought AboutYou] and is an excellent example of her work in an intimate club atmosphere."

When producer Zev Feldman became aware of the recordings that make up this album, he was thrilled. Shirley Horn was a very special artist for him. Feldman, like Horn, is a Washington, D.C. native. Now 43, Feldman came of age while Horn was still only playing in and around Washington at jazz clubs like the Pigfoot and the One Step Down. Right at the time Feldman started working in the record business for PolyGram, which became Universal Music Group, from the mid-1990's to the mid-2000's, Shirley was one of the biggest stars of the label and Feldman was a Verve representative promoting her steady stream of new albums being released during that period. Feldman saw Horn often in those days, even drove to her house on more than one occasion to have her sign CD booklets, and attended many concerts as a part of his job arranging venue sales for record retail. "Being the local Verve representative, I got to see her play everywhere from The Kennedy Center and Bohemian Caverns in DC, to the Village Vanguard in New York and Zanzibar Blue in Philadelphia." But beyond his role as a label rep, he developed a friendship with Horn and on numerous occasions was invited after gigs to join in her inner circle with manager Sheila Mathis and drummer Steve Williams. So when the opportunity arose for Resonance to pursue the release of the material, Feldman jumped at the chance.

Since Feldman knew what an important artist Shirley Horn was (and because inexplicably no books have been written about her), he was determined to make this album package the most authoritative and comprehensive compendium of materials possible with an extensive 56 page book of analytical, scholarly essays; first-person accounts by musicians and producers who worked with Horn; remembrances by her friends, colleagues and her daughter; plus a number of previously unpublished photographs from the Shirley Horn archives at the Library of Congress. Feldman says, "We want this release and album book to remind us why she was great, why she mattered."

Live at the 4 Queens was captured the day after Horn's 54th birthday, and you can hear what a good time she's having celebrating the occasion in Las Vegas on this recording. The CD kicks off with a spirited instrumental version of the 1950's classic "Hi-Fly" by Randy Weston, and also includes Rainy Smith's (Horn's daughter) favorite song that her mother would play, "Meditation," which she humorously says she never knew the name of all these years until now. The hallmarks of any Shirley Horn album are of course the ballads, and this album delivers two powerful ones — "Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?)" and "Just For A Thrill," which James Gavin writes "builds slowly; then her bristling chords build up so much tension that the energy explodes in a big crescendo. Horn lets it subside like a cloud of smoke.""The Boy from Ipanema" is a playful take on the bossa nova classic, which Horn actually got to perform once at Antonio Carlos Jobim's birthday party in Rio de Janeiro. And one of Horn's rollicking blues staples, "Blues for Big Scotia," closes the set in rousing form.

As Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times on November 10, 1988, "Songs are lucky when Shirley Horn chooses them. She honors melodies just by singing them unadorned, in a voice of honey and smoke; she enunciates every word, shaping small and large peaks with just a slight pause or a lingering vowel. . . And when the time comes to improvise, the song's emotion guides her; she drapes lyrics in bluesy curves and finds epiphanies in tender phrases."

Shirley Horn left an indelible mark on the jazz scene with her catalog of recordings. And one can't deny her influence on other musicians — her contemporaries, as the great Sheila Jordan suggests in her interview from the liner notes, and as those who came after her, such as the gifted singer/pianist Diana Krall. This package is a tribute to Shirley Horn's memory and Resonance Records is thrilled to celebrate and contribute to her legacy with this release. The recordings illuminate her genius and represent her creative peak. Live at the 4 Queens reminds us of what an extraordinary artist she is.

Resonance Records is delighted to release Shirley Horn Live at the 4 Queens with the participation of KNPR Las Vegas. Produced by for release by Zev Feldman along with executive producer George Klabin. Sound restoration is by George Klabin and Fran Gala. The beautifully designed package is the creation of long-time Resonance designer, Burton Yount.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hi-Fly (6:20)

2. You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To (3:59)

3. Meditation (9:05)

4. The Boy from Ipanema (5:19)

5. Isn't It Romantic (10:08)

6. Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?) (5:25)

7. Something Happens to Me (3:12)

8. Just for a Thrill (5:08)

9. Blues for Big Scotia (3:16)

Resonance Records continues to bring archival recordings to light. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, CA, Resonance Records is a division of Rising Jazz Stars, Inc. a California 501 (c) (3) non-profit corporation created to discover the next jazz stars and advance the cause of jazz. Current Resonance Artists include Richard Galliano, Polly Gibbons, Tamir Hendelman, Christian Howes and Donald Vega. www.ResonanceRecords.org

↧

The Saxophone and Jazz

September 15, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Pops - A Remembrance of Louis Armstrong by Milton Hinton

≪ Previous: Shirley Horn: Live at The Four Queens

Written from the standpoint of the early 1980’s and published in one of the earliest editions of Gene Lees Jazzletter, Mike Zwerin’s concluding statement evolved over the next 30 years with the likes of saxophonists such as Michael Brecker, David Sanborn, and Bob Berg, continuing the liaison between Jazz and other forms of popular music.

Along with drums, electric guitar, bass and keyboards, the saxophone remains an instrument of choice for many 21st century musicians, as well.

“After Adolphe Sax patented his saxophone in 1846, Berlioz wrote: "Its principal merit is the beautiful variety of its accent; deep and calm, passionate, dreamy, melancholic, like an echo of an echo... To my knowledge, no existing musical instrument possesses that curious sonority perched on the limit of silence."

In his autobiography, Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy — who claimed to have been the first to use a saxophone in an American orchestra, in 1909 — describes the instrument as "moaning like a sinner on revival day." For Arnold Bennett, the saxophone was "the embodiment of the spirit of beer."

It combines the speed of woodwinds with the carrying power of brass and at the beginning Sax intended the seven instruments in his new family for marching bands, replacing clarinets, oboes and bassoons. It was an easy instrument to learn. Each village could now have its own band. You can produce a tone in an hour, learn a simple tune in a day. Brass players, faced with embouchure problems, may take weeks to reach the same point; violinists even longer. Fingering is much less demanding than on older reed instruments.

An exhibition on Sax and the saxophone, presented two years ago at the Centre Culturel de la Communaute Francaise de Belgique, offered a fascinating collection of documents, vintage instruments and audio-visual illustrations about the inventor and his invention. The displays included Sax's other inventions: families of brass instruments called saxhorns, saxotrombas and saxtubas; that enormous organ powered and pushed by a steam locomotive for public events; a design for an egg-shaped concert hall; an air purifier for sufferers of respiratory diseases — forty-six patents in all. But he is of course principally remembered for the saxophone family, which in range, homogeneity, speed and subtlety, became the wind instrument equivalent of the violin family, and the musical voice of the Twentieth century.

Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium, November 6, 1814, the son of Charles-Joseph Sax, whose factory employing two hundred workers was the largest wind-instrument producer in Europe. At the age of twelve, Adolphe was an apprentice there. He studied flute at the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music and won a prize playing the revolutionary fingering system devised by Theobald Boehm.

His first patent was for a bass clarinet, redesigned to give it more flexibility and power. He demonstrated his first saxophone in 1840, behind a curtain because it was not yet patented. It caught the attention of the government of King Louis-Philippe of France, which ordered its military officials to equip their bands with Sax's new instruments. There were articles in the newspapers, pro and con. His competitors used their influence and filed lawsuits against him. A battle of the bands — one conducted by Sax, the other using traditional instruments — on the Champ de Mars in Paris resulted in a jury prize for Sax. The press was almost unanimously favorable. He won large contracts.

Sax moved to Paris. The revolution of 1848 installed a republic and ended the monarchy, including its support of Sax, who filed for bankruptcy in 1852. But the Second Empire followed shortly and in 1854 Napoleon III granted Sax a subsidy. As political fortunes changed, he went bankrupt again, continuing his manufacturing business on a smaller scale. By the time of his death in 1894, he was in reduced circumstances and few people would have bet on the future of the saxophone.

The saxophone was never seriously integrated into classical music, aside from isolated works of Berlioz, Stravinsky, Milhaud and some others. Then came jazz. At the beginning, the dominant jazz instruments were trumpets and cornets. Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and Louis Armstrong were kings.

After that the saxophone began to move in. In 1918, a clarinet player named Sidney Bechet was seduced by a soprano saxophone in a London shop window. In his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, Bechet comments, "This was a piece of good luck for me because i wasn't long after this before people started saying they didn't want clarinets in their bands no more."

The saxophone began to be described as "throbbing" or "wailing" as soloists such as Bechet, Adrian Rollini and Johnny Hodges rediscovered it in the '20s. Its melodic capabilities were explored by Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young in the '30s. Saxophone sections were the real stars of the dance bands. Charlie Parker played the instrument harder and faster in the '40s. Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond cooled it out in the '50s. Serge Chaloff, Gerry Mulligan and Pepper Adams picked up from Ellingtonian Harry Carney and explored the underexposed baritone sax. Steve Lacy rediscovered the soprano, which had been neglected since Bechet.

Louis Jordan, King Curtis and Junior Walker introduced the saxophone to rhythm and blues as combos gradually replaced big bands in popular music. John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy stretched the physical and emotional range of the saxophone in the '60 while Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and Anthony Braxton invented sounds never before heard.

With rock and roll, the instrument went into eclipse along with jazz itself. The electric guitar took over. But to approach the subtlety and variety of saxophones, guitarists had to employ auxiliary equipment such as wah-wah pedals, phasers and flangers. The synthesizer, the first important new instrument invented since the saxophone, served cold 1970’s technopop well, but people need warmth too and the saxophone combines human breath with the speed of a guitar or a keyboard.

In the mid-1970’s Andy McKay with Roxy Music and David Payne with Ian Drury introduced the saxophone to rock. Saxophones became integral to young groups such as the Q-Tips and Dexy's Midnight Runners. Clarence demons' tenor is essential to the power of Bruce Springsteen's material. Phil Woods' alto has been featured prominently on Billy Joel's hits. Steely Dan would not be quite what it is without Wayne Shorter's tenor.

So those among us who never knew it had left will be pleased to learn that the saxophone has been making a comeback. Its continuing contemporary appeal is illustrated by a sixteen-year-old music student who switched from guitar to tenor sax, giving as his reason: "I want to play an instrument I can kiss." -MZ

April 15, 1983

Jazzletter, Vol. 2, No. 9

↧

Pops - A Remembrance of Louis Armstrong by Milton Hinton

September 16, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Montgomery Brothers and George Shearing: An Intriguing Musical Collaboration [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: The Saxophone and Jazz

I’ve been around the Jazz world for 60 years.

In that time and in that world, no one has been more revered than Louis Armstrong.

The following story by the superb bassist Milt Hinton may help to explain why Pops was lionized by musicians and fans alike from all over the world.

It is excerpted from Milt’s autobiography, Bass Line (1988; with David G. Berger).

“On our next to last night at the Bandbox with Basie, I got an offer to go out on the road with Louis Armstrong. Joe Glaser, who handled Louis, sent one of his people—a guy named Frenchy Tallerie — down to the club to ask if I wanted the job. It was as simple as that.

I was really taken by surprise. I told Frenchy I needed time to talk about it with my wife and that I'd call Joe in a couple of days.

In the old days around Chicago, Joe Glaser had a reputation for being a real tough guy. From what I heard, he came from a middle-class family but he was the black sheep. I think his mother owned the building on the South-side which the Sunset Cafe was in. That's the place a lot of famous entertainers, including Cab, got their start. Evidently, at one point after Joe had gotten in some kind of serious trouble with the law, she'd helped him become an agent and manager.

Louis and Glaser got together in 1935. As the story goes, for years there was never a written contract between them. They shook hands one time and that was it. For some reason, right from the start, they hit it off. Joe had the connections and got the bookings. Louis had that wonderful, friendly personality and, of course, the musicianship. Their careers just took off together.

Louis's name was well known around Chicago when I was growing up. Along with Eddie South, he was one of my two boyhood idols. As a kid I'd seen him perform in theaters, but as I got older and more involved playing music, I was around guys who knew him personally. In fact, I remember watching him rehearse and I can recall many times when I'd run into him talking with a group of guys on a street corner or in a bar. And later, when I worked with Zutty, Louis's close friend, I really got an opportunity to spend some time with him.

Deciding whether or not to go with Louis was very difficult. My month-long commitment to Basie was over, but I was getting good freelance jobs. And even though I couldn't be sure how much I'd be making from week to week, the pay was getting better. When I left Cab, I said I'd never go back on the road for any length of time, but the thought of playing with a legend like Louis made the idea of traveling more acceptable.

I knew I wanted to go, but with my family to support, money became a real issue. Mona and I figured I might earn a little less with Louis than freelancing, but it would be a steady salary. Besides, if I got paid expenses on the road, I'd be able to save much more. We decided if the money was right, I'd take the job.

Everyone knew Pops didn't discuss money. Joe dealt with those kinds of things. But before I called him, I figured I should try and get an idea about what other guys in the band were making.

I got ahold of Cozy, who'd been with Pops for a while. He told me he'd just given notice and was planning to form his own band. Of course, I was disappointed. We were close back in the Cab Galloway days and I'd been looking forward to spending time with him again. He filled me in on the personalities in the band and Joe's people. Then we talked about money.

When Frenchy had approached me at the Bandbox, he'd told me the pay would be seventy-five a night. But when I mentioned that figure to Cozy he said, "That may sound good to you, but I'm makin' one twenty-five and I don't see why you can't get that too."

A couple of days later, I sat down with Joe and Frenchy to talk about money. Joe was a thin, dapper-looking guy with pretty sharp features, who walked pigeon-toed. Frenchy was just the opposite. He was sloppy and fat. He didn't like anyone and you couldn't believe a word he said. Everyone knew he hated Louis and Louis couldn't stand him. In fact, some people said that's why Joe made him road manager. He knew if Louis did something wrong, Frenchy would report him, and if Frenchy tried to steal, Louis would do exactly the same thing.

For some reason, just before the conversation began, Louis walked in. I started out real bold. "Look, I gotta have one twenty-five a night." At that point I wanted the job and I was hoping they wouldn't say no when I gave them my price.

"Get the hell out of here!" Joe screamed, "We don't even know your work."

I kept cool. "Louis's known me for years. He can tell you how I play," I said.

"I don't pay one twenty-five to nobody just startin' out. I'll give you a hundred. If you work out, I'll give you more," Joe answered.

I stood my ground. "No," I said. "I gotta get one twenty-five."

Joe shook his head, which was his way of saying, "Forget it."

There was dead silence for a couple of seconds and then Louis spoke. "I know this boy, give it to him." It was settled, as simple as that.

A week later I went out with the band and for a while we mostly did one-nighters. Cozy was still there along with Trummy Young playing trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, and Marty Napoleon on piano. We also had Velma Middleton as a vocalist.

At one of those early gigs something incredible happened.

It was at an outdoor concert in Washington, D.C., near one of the big malls, right on the Potomac. The stage and dressing rooms were set up on a big barge which was docked at the edge of the river, and the audience sat on the long, wide grass bank in front of it. I remember we had to walk down a ramp to get on the barge so we could change clothes and get set up. But the facilities were very comfortable.

In addition to us, Lionel Hampton and Illinois Jacquet's bands were on the program. Jacquet was scheduled to play first, from six to seven, and Hamp was to follow from seven to eight. Then, after an intermission, Louis would come out and do the finale.

We had worked in New Jersey the night before and drove down from there in a private bus. We arrived at five-thirty, a half hour before show time. There was about a thousand people in the audience, but no sign of Jacquet's band.

We unloaded our suitcases and instruments and moved everything over to the barge. By the time we'd changed into our tuxedos, it was six-thirty. Jacquet should have gone on at six, but he still hadn't arrived. To make matters worse, Hamp hadn't either.

Standing backstage, we could sense the audience was getting restless. Every couple of minutes they'd start applauding and chanting, "Start the show," and "We want music."

About fifteen minutes later one of the producers went to Frenchy and asked if Louis would go on first. Louis was a star, but he didn't care about billing or protocol. He was usually understanding and cooperative.

So we went out and started playing. After waiting so long the audience gave us an unbelievable reception. They applauded every solo and when we finished a tune they'd stand and cheer for a couple of minutes.

We played about an hour and then took our bows. But the people wouldn't let us off the stage. They screamed for encores and we kept doing them. Louis knew there was no act to follow us. And he was content to stay out there and keep everyone happy until help arrived.

Finally, during our fifth or sixth encore, we saw a bus pull up and unload. As soon as Louis knew it was Jacquet's band, he told us, "This time when we end, walk off and stay off."

As soon as we finished, we headed for the dressing rooms and changed. Then we packed up our instruments and hung around backstage talking to some of the guys from Jacquet's band.

Trying to follow a performer like Louis really put Jacquet in a difficult position. To make matters worse, the audience knew he'd been scheduled to play first and had kept them waiting. So when he came out on stage, he got a lukewarm reception.

Jacquet had eight or nine good musicians with him. They started with a couple of standards, but there was no response. They even featured the drummer, but that didn't seem to rouse the audience either. Then Jacquet must've figured he had nothing to lose, so he called "Flying Home," the tune he'd made famous with Hamp's band.

It took a couple of minutes before the audience recognized the tune and started to react. By then Jacquet was soloing and he gave it everything he had, building, honking, screaming, and dancing. All the moves, chorus after chorus. By the time he finished, he had the audience in the palm of his hand, the same way Louis had them an hour before.

The audience screamed for an encore and Jacquet did another couple of choruses of "Flying Home." But right in the middle, Hamp's bus pulled up. Hearing someone else play a tune he was known for and seeing the fantastic audience reaction must've made him furious. Everyone backstage saw what was going on and knew Hamp would want to somehow outdo Jacquet. Louis was watching and he got interested too. I remember we were set to get on the bus, but Louis turned to a couple of us and said, "Wait, we have to see this."

Jacquet finished and after the stage got set up, Hamp came out. He began with "Midnight Sun," one of his famous ballads. But after Louis's performance and Jacquet's finale, the audience was in no mood for it. He did "Hamp's Boogie Woogie," and a couple more numbers. He even played drums and sang, but he still didn't get much of a reaction.

I was standing in the wings with Louis and a couple of other guys and we could see how hard he was working. But time was running out. He looked frustrated and desperate and he finally called "Flying Home."

The band started playing but there wasn't much response from the audience. Hamp wouldn't give up. He put everything he had into his solo, starting out soft, then building to a crescendo. When he finished, sweat was dripping off every part of him, and a handful of people cheered.

I guess Hamp sensed he was making some headway with the crowd. So while the band continued, he went back to Monk Montgomery, who was playing Fender bass, and told him, "Gates, you jump in the river on the next chorus, I'll give you an extra ten."

Monk must've agreed because when the band got to the next crescendo and Hamp raised his mallets, Monk jumped over the railing. The audience went crazy.

The band kept playing and a few minutes later Monk came out on stage

soaking wet. Hamp walked over to him and said, "Another ten if you do it again."

Monk made it back to his bass and played another chorus. Then when the band came to the same crescendo and Hamp raised his hands, he went over the side again.

By this time the people were in a frenzy and Hamp knew he'd accomplished what he'd set out to do.

Louis turned to us and said, "Start up the bus. We can go now."”

↧

The Montgomery Brothers and George Shearing: An Intriguing Musical Collaboration [From the Archives]

September 17, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Kandinsky and Kenton: An Artistic Accord [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Pops - A Remembrance of Louis Armstrong by Milton Hinton

One of the aspects of Jazz that I have always been intrigued with is its many styles.

If, as Louis Armstrong states – “Jazz is who you are” – then it stands to reason that different people will create Jazz that sounds singular and distinct.

Put another way: “We are all different with regard to those things we have in common.” – Aristotle.

The Modern Jazz Quartet’s pardon-me-while-I-swing approach to Jazz is quite a contrast to the assertive, loud, take-no-prisoners hard bop of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but equally as enjoyable.

Bill Evans played piano in an introspective way while Oscar Peterson played it aggressively; Bobby Hackett played trumpet in a lyrically romantic manner while Lee Morgan seemed to attack the instrument and breathe fire through its bell; Tal Farlow never left a note un-played during his finger-poppin’ displays on guitar while Jim Hall might play less than a dozen notes on guitar in an entire blues chorus.

And yet, depending on my mood, the music of Bill, OP, Bobby, Lee, Tal and Jim all find their way into my disc changer at one time or another.

Musicians who play a certain way gravitate toward one another: pianist Alan Broadbent and alto saxophonist Gary Foster are pulled together by a deep and abiding interest in Lennie Tristano’s music; Warne Marsh and Pete Christlieb were naturals in a dueling tenor saxophone setting carrying on the tradition set by Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon, as were Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt and Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis; a mutual love of the songs from the Great American Songbook were no doubt responsible for the pairings of cornetist Ruby Braff and pianist Roger Kellaway, or the many recordings that Roger made with bassist Red Mitchell or the duo albums that bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis produced together over the years.

Jazz is very egalitarian and ecumenical; it brings people together, especially those who have a stylistic affinity for certain approaches to the music.

Such was the case when The Montgomery Brothers – guitarist Wes, vibraphonist Buddy and bassist Monk – got together with pianist George Shearing.

Although they never worked as a formal group, The Montgomery Brothers and George did jam together on a few occasions and thankfully produced one album of music for Jazzland Records that features a rich blend of sound between piano, guitar and vibes all firmly supported by Monk Montgomery’s formidable bass work and Walter Perkins’ solid drumming.

The album, which is entitled George Shearing and The Montgomery Brothers, features a number of standards, some original compositions written expressly for the recording date and Latin Jazz tracks on which percussionists Armando Peraza and and Ricardo Chimelis were added. It has been re-issued on CD and is available as OJCCD-040-2.

Here is a portion of producer Orrin Keepnews’ insert notes which touch on the smooth-flowing togetherness that characterizes the music of George Shearing and The Montgomery Brothers and our opening theme of how Jazz musicians seem to find their musical soul mates.

Following Orrin’s notes is a video tribute that features the crackerjack graphics developed by the folks at CerraJazz LTD with an audio track comprised of The Montgomery Brothers, George and Walter performing George Shearing’s original composition – And Then I Wrote.

Jazz at its beautiful, best.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of jazz is the almost infinite number of rewarding combinations of men and styles that are possible. And particularly since some listeners, and critics, tend to get hard-headed about setting up rigidly separate categories and "schools," it is always especially intriguing when chance and circumstance bring together supposedly divergent artists like these. Night club audiences in California, and then in New York, were the first to get unscheduled glimpses of the present amalgamation late in 1960 when Shearing discovered for himself the magnetic appeal of the Montgomery’s and began sitting in with them whenever the opportunity presented itself. He found it particularly stimulating and challenging to work with the remarkable guitarist Wes Montgomery — whose truly incredible efforts have been startling the jazz world ever since the issuance of his first Riverside album at the end of '59.

From their enjoyment of their informal encounters grew a mutual musical respect and affection that eventually and inevitably led to this album. Shearing, although in clubs he has continued to work primarily in a small-group framework, has in recent years done most of his recording with large brass-choir and lush-strings backgrounds. He made no secret of the fact that he was drawn to this date by the prospect of playing in a looser and more free jazz setting than he has been able to mix with for quite some time.

I was able to watch the mutual unity of feeling grow ever stronger during a series of informal rehearsals and get-togethers during the week preceding the recording, and then had the pleasure of seeing it come to a peak in the studio. There is of course nothing surprising about the fact that the three Montgomery’s mesh together perfectly. They began playing as a unit when they were all 'teen-agers back in Indianapolis, although they were apart for a time while Buddy and Monk were gaining considerable success as the nucleus of "The Mastersounds."

Therefore the big news lies in the way they adapt themselves to Shearing and he to them, to produce a joyously swinging — although unfortunately only quite temporary — team.”

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Kandinsky and Kenton: An Artistic Accord [From the Archives]

September 18, 2016, 10:14 am

≫ Next: Tadd Dameron - Fontainebleau - Max Harrison [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: The Montgomery Brothers and George Shearing: An Intriguing Musical Collaboration [From the Archives]

“Beginning in the mid-1940’s, Kenton found an enthusiastic, ever-growing, devoted audience. His music seemingly spoke to the postwar young and veterans of World War II. The enveloping, orgasmic sound of the orchestra had a hypnotic quality. The general feeling was that Kenton was hip. And though many critics disagreed vehemently, supporters of the orchestra would have none of that. They loved with a passion this vivid, often stirring, immoderately loud music that made them feel good and seemed to promise something for the future.”

- Burt Korall, Jazz author and critic

There’s a tremendous bond between Jazz musicians.

They know how hard it is to play this music; harder still to create it.

As a result, Jazz musicians have a ready respect for others who demonstrate a facility in navigating the music’s many challenges.

The knowing look; the smile of appreciation; the nodding of the head in approval are all subtle signs accorded to a musician who can make it happen in Jazz.

Jazz doesn’t exist; it has to be brought into existence by the improvising skills of the musician, individually and in combination.

Of course, the melodies, chord structures and blues frameworks that these improvisations are based on are, for the most part, written compositions.

But this notated music only serves as a point of departure.

Jazz is almost impossible to teach, but it can be learned.

In Jazz, one of the sincerest forms of flattery is indeed imitation; copying the work of others in order to get the “feel” of how Jazz is done and to develop one’s own sensibilities for making it.

It’s like trying on our elders’ clothes until one is able to “dress” oneself with originality, assurance and style.

When it all comes together and one finds one’s own voice in Jazz, there’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction and power in what the author Arthur Koestler once described as “The Act of Creation.”

Although I am not at all practiced in other, creative arts, I am told by many who are that artists share a similar affinity with the work of each other be they painters or poets or photographers; essayists or writers or biographers; playwrights or actors or movie directors.

Sometimes these artistic accords cross lines and combine well with one another.

Imagine viewing motion pictures with film scores by Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith or Ennio Morricone, or listening to Leonard Bernstein or Sting read the narrative to Tchaikovsky’s Peter and The Wolf while the symphony orchestra plays out the sounds of each of the characters or any of the multitude of multi-media experiences that we create for ourselves like viewing photographs or reading a novel while listening to music.

The arts blend and form a concurrence with one another because each in their own way takes us through perception into the world of imagination, emotion and atmospheric mood.

Artistic expression also satisfies our need to shape our own world; our individualism, as it were.

Part of growing up is rejecting the world of our parents [without, of course, rejecting them] and seeking out our own interests and world view. Artists help us to do this by replacing the powerful ambiguity of imitation with the thrilling assurance of finding our own preferences.

Artists often pave the way for the new. In Jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives were followed by the big bands of The Swing Era and they, in turn, were followed by Bebop and various forms of progressive or modern Jazz.

In painting, Greek and Roman art was followed by that of Medieval Times, and then the Renaissance, Mannerism, The Baroque and the various schools of Modern Art including, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impression and the many schools of Twentieth Century painting and sculpture.

Two examples of artists that strike me as constantly searching and probing for new directions while having an artistic unity based in iconoclasm are the painter Wassily Kandinsky [1866-1944] and the composer-arranger-bandleader Stan Kenton [1911-1979].

Put into a simpler form: I like listening to Kenton’s music while viewing Kandinsky’s art. Both are known for their daring.

Kandinsky died in 1944, a few years after Kenton formed his first big band in 1941. As a Russian living in

Germany

, Kandinsky’s art reflected the chaos of German culture before and between the two, world wars.

A leading member of a group of Munich artists known as “Der Blaue Reiter” [The Blue Horsemen], Kandinsky abandoned representational art altogether.

Using a rainbow of colors and a free, dynamic brushwork, Kandinsky created a completely non-objective style.

Whatever traces of representation his work contains are quite unintentional – his aim was to charge form and color with a purely spiritual meaning [as he put it] by eliminating all resemblance to the physical world.

Not to push the analogy between art and music too closely, but Stan Kenton in his music, as did Kandinsky in his painting, eventually eschewed representational forms of the Jazz while pursuing more abstract forms of the music.

He didn’t want his band to swing or his music to be danced to, he wanted it to be modern, contemporary, and progressive.

But most of all he wanted his music to be listened to, to have an impact, to be felt!

Big, brassy and bombastic, Kenton’s musical conception was orchestral bordering on the grandiose. His music wasn’t mainstream, if anything, it was characterized by a concerted effort to attack established Jazz “traditions.”

Can you imagine standing in front of the Kenton band when it unleashed the power and majesty of its music?

Trumpets screaming, French Horns heralding, trombones blatting, and tuba’s bellowing bass notes – what a rush!

I feel the same flash of excitement when I view Kandinsky’s paintings with their bold, bright colors, non-objective configurations and juxtaposition of shapes and patterns.

Both Kandinsky and Kenton were spurred on by the artistic urge to find their own style; to do it their way.

“Kandinsky's—or any artist's [Kenton?]—ideas are not important to us unless we are convinced of the importance of his pictures. Did he create a viable style? Admittedly, his work demands an intuitive response that may be hard for some of us, yet the painting here reproduced has density and vitality, and a radiant freshness of feeling that impresses us even though we are uncertain what exactly the artist has expressed.” [H.W. Janson, History of Art].

↧

Tadd Dameron - Fontainebleau - Max Harrison [From the Archives]

September 19, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Terry Gibbs Dream Band - One More Time

≪ Previous: Kandinsky and Kenton: An Artistic Accord [From the Archives]

Fontainebleau originates from Tadd Dameron’s last full year of freedom [1956] before the term of imprisonment that more of less ended his career [he was released from prison in 1962 and died of cancer in 1965].

It is a fine set with no clutter in the horns. The title piece if entirely written-out with no scope for improvisation.

Here is Jazz critic Max Harrison’s of it from the February, 1960 edition of the Jazz Review.

“Dameron should have been one of the most prominent jazz composers, arrangers and bandleaders in the immediate postwar years for he was certainly among the most gifted. He lacked technical slickness, and that was surely a disadvantage in the busy world of the record makers, but nearly everything he wrote was modestly yet firmly individual. The melodic style, warm but fresh, was the most distinctive single aspect of Dameron's work, yet his orchestration for small and medium-sized groups was instantly recognisable, too. Confining himself mainly to conventional instrumentations, and never seeking really unusual sounds, his textures are almost always striking.

The concise inventiveness of many of his themes, such as Ladybird, Cool breeze, Stay on it, Jahbero, Our delight, The Squirrel, Half step down, please, Symphonette, Hothouse and Good Bait, won them classic status in the jazz of the 19408, and they gave rise to remarkable improvisations by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and others. Navarro was, indeed, the finest interpreter the composer ever found, and they recorded together often during those years. Following the great trumpeter's premature death in 1950, Dameron's career appeared to lose its impetus, and from then until his own demise in 1965 little was salvaged except bits and pieces. Malcolm Lowry (Dark as the Grave, London,1969) compares an artist to a fireman rescuing valuables from a burning house, that house being the work of art, unscathed, intact in the mind which conceived it, but which the artist has had to set on fire before he can exteriorise it. What he finishes with—the 'completed work'—is a small heap of salvaged objects. This will scarcely serve for the greatest works of art, but it would be hard to better as an image of the last decade and a half of Dameron's life.

He had the more gifted jazzman's usual ambition to break out of the straitjacket of repeating twelve- and thirty-two-bar choruses, and wrote an extended piece called Soulphony for Gillespie to play at Carnegie Hall. This has sunk without a trace, but he made further attempts, and the most convincing is Fontainebleau, which he first recorded in 1956 (American Prestige D7842). It tries to suggest, rather than directly portray, the palace of that name (described in the sleeve note of the original American issue as "where the Bourbons used to cavourt"!) and the surrounding forest.

According to Dameron, the quite simple formal plan has three parts. The first, Leforet, opens with a brooding introductory theme that is heard first on the string bass, then on bass doubled with baritone saxophone, then on the remaining horns—trumpet, trombone, alto and tenor saxophones. This leads to the main theme of the section, and of the whole work, stated by Kinny Dorham's trumpet. It is a flowing, lyrical melody characteristic of the composer, and, though perhaps unsuitable for large-scale development, is entirely suitable for its limited use here. This theme is extended in a written-out (not improvised) alto saxophone solo played most expressively by Sahib Shihab, and by the ensemble. A transitional piano solo from Dameron himself leads to Les cygnes.

This opens with a brief ensemble that manages to suggest the main Foret theme without direct statement, and then a baritone saxophone ostinato bridges to the Cygnes theme, the other principal idea of Fon-tainebleau. It is announced on baritone saxophone and trombone accompanied from above with another ostinato by alto and tenor saxophones. As this is developed, trumpet and alto interject motives derived from the main Foret theme.

Transition from Les cygnes to L'adieu is ill-defined and the third section introduces no fresh material. It begins with another ensemble suggesting the chief Foret theme, followed by the baritone saxophone ostinato that earlier appeared at the be ginning of Les cygnes. Over this a modification of the Cygnes theme itself is given out by alto and tenor saxophones, and it resolves, still supported with the baritone ostinato, to the introductory Foret theme on alto, then on both alto and tenor. This, too, is in modified form—almost jaunty compared with its sombre initial appearance. Restatements of this motive, by trumpet, then by alto and tenor saxophones, alternate with two further ensembles, the last of which brings Fontainebleau to a close.

It is typical of Dameron to proceed by suggestion rather than direct statement, but his thematic cross-references from one section to another help to produce a satisfyingly tight structure. And the listener's interest is sustained by real melodic invention. As usual, the orchestration is effective, and recalls a comment by Dexter Gordon (Quoted in Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the 40s, New York, 1966), made after playing some Dameron scores, that every line—all the subsidiary parts—had melodic significance, not just the top one. In fact variety is achieved here with diversified themes and the melodic extensions arising from them, by line, that is, not colour. Colour and texture have their place, however, and the composer gets a notable effect by introducing two of his themes— the Foret introduction and Les cygnes—in low register and then transposing them to high on their reappearances. Similarly, the baritone saxophone ostinato is succeeded by an alto and tenor one in Les cygnes.

These changes, allied to the slowly quickening tempo, produce a feeling of increasing brightness as the work moves from its brooding start to an affirmative conclusion. The weaknesses, as noted, are the vague demarcation between Les cygnes and L'adieu, and the fact that the latter, because it introduces no material of its own, does not constitute a truly independent third section: another theme was needed, and it is hard to believe that Dameron would have found it difficult to think of one.

Fontainebleau leaves no room for improvisation, but this performance is considerably aided by Dorham's trumpeting, by Sahib Shihab's alto and Cecil Payne's baritone saxophone, and by Shadow Wilson's drumming. The ensemble playing is scarcely in the highest class, yet a more cleanly executed reading by a larger group which the composer recorded in 1962 (American Riverside RLP419]) has a rather unpleasant routine-session glibness which robs the piece of some of its character. Dameron often complained about the poor quality of the performances his work received, and insisted that he was poorly represented on records, but Dorham & Co. showed a proper understanding of his pithy yet relaxed music ….”

Jazz Review, February 1960

↧

Terry Gibbs Dream Band - One More Time

September 20, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Cinema Italia

≪ Previous: Tadd Dameron - Fontainebleau - Max Harrison [From the Archives]

During the twenty-five years or so of its existence, West Coast Jazz was derided and chided as bloodless, boring and banal by musicians, critics and fans who, for the most part, never experienced it first hand.

I did, experience it in person - indeed, was a part of it for a short time - and I loved every minute of what I always thought was a grand experiment in Jazz music-making.

West Coast Jazz was disparate and constantly being made so through countless differentiations in its style. It’s true that not all of it was exciting and enthralling Jazz, but if you sampled enough of it, it could be deeply satisfying music.

You could always tell as West Coast Jazz musician by his swagger. These guys could read and write music as well as improvise. They knew how good they were and they were proud of their abilities.

A tight-knit camaraderie was a mainstay in West Coast Jazz circles as many of these musicians had a long association with one another through service in the armed forces together; after the second world war many of them linked up again as part of the Stan Kenton, Charlie Barnet and/or Woody Herman bands and migrated westward to the Golden State [aka California].

In those days, California offered affordable housing, was a relatively inexpensive place to raise a family with good schools, plenty of parks and recreational facilities and it also had a viable freeway network that made it easy to get around in automobiles fueled by .19 cent a gallon gasoline prices.

At night, West Coast Jazz musicians worked a vibrant Jazz club scene in Hollywood and along the beach communities stretching from Santa Monica to Long Beach to Hermosa Beach; by day they were at Radio Records on Santa Monica Blvd, or Western Recorders, NBC or RCA studios on Sunset Blvd, or at Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures just across the Barham pass from Hollywood in the eastern San Fernando Valley.

There, they recorded the music for movie scores, TV commercials and weekly TV series, and radio jingles. At these “studio gigs” they earned enough money to feed their families, pay their mortgages and subsidize the $25-50 buck-a-night Jazz gigs that they sought out with relish and vigor to the point where you almost thought they would play these gigs for nothing just to be able to play Jazz.

Some of them were also fortunate enough to have recording contracts with labels based in Hollywood such as Pacific Jazz and Contemporary.

On the weekends, they enjoyed the California sunshine with family and friends at the beach or at the desert or at home with backyard barbecues.

They were, by-and-large, a happy and contented lot so much so that the drug scourge that was rampant elsewhere in the Jazz World reared its ugly head only on occasion on the “Left Coast.”

I always thought that the “other guys” were just jealous.

One of the most stunning example of exciting and enthralling West Coast Jazz can be heard in the music of the Terry Gibbs big band which was in existence from about 1959-1962.

The band usually worked on Mondays - the “off night” - at one of three Hollywood clubs: The Summit, The Seville or The Sundown.

In some ways, what came to be known as The Dream Band was the forerunner of the Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, the Thad Jones Mel Lewis Orchestra, Mel Lewis and The Jazz Orchestra, the Village Vanguard Orchestra and the current iteration of all of these predecessors - the Vanguard Orchestra.

The line of continuity runs through drummer Mel Lewis who along with bassist Buddy Clark and trumpeter Conte Candoli joined Jeru’s CJB in 1962; lead trumpeter Al Porcino would also become a member of the CJB at a later date.

It’s hard to imagine the Terry Gibbs Dream Band without Mel Lewis in the drum chair, and although Buddy, Conte and Al returned to the West Coast, Mel would move to New York the following year and, in so doing, effectively put an end to the original version of Terry’s big band.

Fortunately, during the band’s existence, it recorded enough music for the release of 5 CD’s.

And as a result of an unfortunate occurrence, a sixth CD was added in 2002 as is explained below in Terry’s insert notes to One More Time [Contemporary CCD - 7658-2].

“ANYONE who's heard the Dream Band — either on CD or in our occasional concerts — always asks me the same question: "When are you going to record the Dream Band again?"

My answer is always the same: "Never." The current Dream Band still has a few of the original musicians (although we keep losing some every year), but the personnel on the CDs recorded in 1959 and 1961 comprised a one-of-a-kind band.

All bands go through personnel changes, of course, but even though the music may seem to be the same, the chemistry of each band makes it just a little different. All of Benny Goodman's bands, for instance, sounded great, but the one he had with Gene Krupa, Harry James, Ziggy Elman, Lionel Hampton, and Teddy Wilson was considered to be one of the greatest bands of all time.

A leader is lucky to have a single band in his whole career that clicks that way. The Dream Band was it for me.

I meant it when I said I'll never record this band again, but I did luck out in a strange way with the album at hand, One More Time.

In 1994, in the Northridge earthquake, our house got hit pretty bad and we had to move out for a period of eight months. In the disruption of moving, everything we owned was put in different places, and eight months later, when we moved back into our house, all our belongings ended up in different places yet again. One day last August, while looking for something on the top shelf of a closet, I came across about 25 boxes of reel-to-reel tape.

In looking over this stash, I was amazed to find 11 boxes marked "Big Band Sundown, Seville 1959." I immediately called my friend Rod Nicas; he's not only the Dream Band's number one fan, but engineered some albums I produced years ago for a now-defunct label of mine. Rod took all the tapes home and burned CDs for me so I could hear what we had. I flipped out because there was enough music to put out another original Dream Band CD.

I selected the best performances and sent a tape to Ralph Kaffel, the president of Fantasy Records. (It was actually Ralph who named my band the Dream Band when the first CD came out in 1986.) He immediately said, "Yes, let's put those out," so here's One More Time.

What I like about this CD is that, since most of the takes I chose came from the last sets of the night, the band was real relaxed. I had opened up these arrangements for the guys to solo. Though the Dream Band was known for its strong ensemble work, people sometimes forget that we always had excellent soloists in the band, too.

The Fuzz. Conte Candoli delivers a superb solo, and Joe Maini, known mostly for his alto work, plays a hard-swinging tenor solo here. And don't forget Mel Lewis swinging the band all the way through.

The Subtle Sermon. While the people were dancing to this groove tempo, the band offered up some relaxed solos courtesy of Lou Levy, Charlie Kennedy, Lee Katzman, Bobby Burgess, Bill Perkins, and me.

Opus One shows off two of the best alto saxophonists I ever played with. They play a few choruses each, then a lot of eight bars each — fours, then twos and ones. On the ones you can hear the guys yelling their names: "Joe, Charlie, Joe, Charlie!" It got so loose that Joe and Charlie became anything but Joe and Charlie. Luckily the names the band was yelling weren't entirely audible or we would have gone the route of Lenny Bruce.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes features Conte and the five saxes as a background. Years ago I recorded an album called Vibes on Velvet with the vibes backed up with five saxes. When the Dream Band first started we didn't have enough arrangements to do three shows, so I pulled out this old Manny Albam arrangement of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." We had never played it or even rehearsed it before. I was going to play it, because the arrangement had been written for me. But I remember I was tired, so I turned around and asked Conte if he knew the song. "What key is it in?" he asked. I told him the key, and that's the only time we ever played "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." In retrospect, it's the smartest thing I ever did: since Conte passed away last year, I'm happy to have one of his best solos on record.

Slittin' Sam was written by one of my close friends from New York, Al Epstein. The song is actually called "Slittin' Sam (The Shaychet Man)," a Shaychet being the guy who cuts the chicken's head off to make it kosher. (I wish I had enough space to include the lyrics here; they're the funniest.) This is a straightahead arrangement by Manny Albam, with Med Flory, Benny Aronov, and me playing the solos.

Prelude to a Kiss is a feature for me with a beautiful arrangement by Al Cohn.

Flying Home gives a lot of the soloists a chance to blow, starting with two strong choruses by Lou Levy (unfortunately we lost him last year too), me, trumpeters Lee Katzman, Stu Williamson, and Conte Candoli, then some eight bars each for a few choruses by Bill Perkins, Med Flory, Joe Maini, and Charlie Kennedy on saxophones. I play again—it felt so good I had to have another taste—then we take the ensemble on out, with Mel Lewis once again kicking the band.

I Remember You is another terrific solo by Conte Candoli. I think that Conte and the band only played this arrangement three times in the whole time the band was in existence.

The Fat Man is a little blues song I wrote and still play today with my quartet. Conte and I play the solos on this one. A reviewer once heard us play "The Fat Man" in person and said, "If you can't tap your foot to this band, then you're dead."

Just Plain Meyer was the first song the Dream Band ever played when we first got together at the Seville in 1959. It was our good-luck song and we opened with it every night we were at that club. I started out a lot of the arrangements with just the rhythm section playing up front so the band would get the tempo in their heads and it would set up the introduction to the arrangement. Pete Jolly plays the first chorus before the actual arrangement starts. Med Flory and I solo on this one.

Sometimes I'm Happy / Moonlight in Vermont / Lover, Come Backto Me. Back in 1959, whenever I got a job with my quartet that called for a vocalist, I would always call Irene Kral. Nobody knew her at that time, but whoever heard her knew she could sing. One night when she was in the audience, I asked her to sit in with us. It was really like a jam session: she called out a song and told us her key, and we jumped right into it. On "Sometimes I'm Happy" Benny Aronov just made up an intro and Buddy Clark and Mel Lewis jumped right in; I waited a while, then started playing behind her, and we jammed out the ending. Irene was ready to get off the bandstand but we wouldn't let her leave, she sounded too good.

Jumpin' at the Woodside. After the melody and interlude I play the first three choruses, then we have the battle of the tenor saxes, with Med Flory and Bill Holman doing the same thing Joe Maini and Charlie Kennedy did on "Opus One"—two choruses each, then eight bars each, then fours and twos. Then comes the ensemble, which includes the saxes playing Lester Young's chorus from the original Count Basie record. Mel Lewis plays eight bars to get to the final ensemble, we go to a tag and repeat the Lester Young chorus (I'm playing two-fingered piano), and it's back to the last chorus, with Mel Lewis once again bringing us in for the final ensemble.

One More Time is dedicated to Mel Lewis, Conte Candoli, and Wally Heider, three of the most important people who contributed to the success of the Dream Band. I think that Mel and Buddy Rich, though they had completely different styles, were the two greatest big band drummers of all time. Mel, whom I nicknamed the Tailor, certainly played a big part in the Dream Band in many areas: his time, his fills on the ensemble work, and the sound he got out of his drums—Mel Lewis had it all. Conte Candoli and Dizzy Gillespie were my two favorite trumpet players. Conte was not only a great trumpet player, but one of my closest friends; we were like brothers. He will always be with me because I can listen to all the amazing solos he played on the Dream Band CDs.

Wally Heider was way ahead of his time as a recording engineer. He made the Dream Band music recorded in 1959 sound like it was recorded yesterday. The band just jumped out at you. He captured the feeling of a bunch of fun-loving musicians with the exact sound we got in the club. Five stars for Wally Heider.

Thanks guys, wherever you are.”

—TERRY GIBBS

(Sherman Oaks, CA; January 2002)

The following video features the band on Jumpin’ at the Woodside:

↧

Cinema Italia

September 21, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Barney, Ray and Shelly [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Terry Gibbs Dream Band - One More Time

Matteo Pagano at Via Veneto Jazz and his associates at Jando Music are releasing Cinema Italia [VVJ 110] on October 28, 2016, It will be available as an audio CD through Forced Exposure via this link and from Amazon as a pre-order.

Cinema Italia features Rosario Giuliani | alto & soprano sax, Luciano Biondini | accordion, Enzo Pietropaoli | doublebass, Michele Rabbia drums on drums, percussions, and electronics.

While themes from movies are quite common as platforms for Jazz recordings, groups fronted by woodwinds and accordion are an unusual combination in the music.

I think this may be due to the fact that the sound of the accordion has never caught on with Jazz fans, although some marvelous musicians have played the instrument over the years including Art van Damme, Mat Mathews, Ernie Felice, Angelo DiPippo, Frank Marocco, Leon Sash, Joe Mooney, Russ Messina, among many others. Of course, today, Richard Galliano and Gary Versace are two masterful players on an instrument that I think deserves a greater appreciation.

For a full listing with annotations of Jazz accordionist please use this link.

Aside from Art van Damme whom I first heard fronting his George Shearing-like quintet on NBC radio in the 1950’s, the Jazz accordionist who made the greatest impression on me was Tommy Gumina.

My first introduction to Tommy’s imposing accordion playing was while watching an episode of The Stars of Jazz television which was syndicated on the ABC network in the late 1950’s.

Actually, I tuned in to view clarinetist “Buddy DeFranco’s Quartet” not realizing at the time that he was sharing a co-billing as “The Buddy DeFranco Tommy Gumina” Quartet.” The artistry of DeFranco in combination with Tommy Gumina just knocked me out and I became an instant fan of both the group and of Gumina’s work on the accordion. Tommy gave the instrument sonorities that were rarely heard in Jazz until much later with the development and use of synthesizers in the music.

From 1961-1964, my good friend, the late Jack Tracy, produced four LP’s for Mercury Records featuring Buddy and Tommy’s group and they have remained among my favorite recordings through the years, especially when I wish to listen to the rarely heard musical textures produced by a combination of [Buddy’s] clarinet and [Tommy’s] accordion.

Imagine my surprise then when Matteo Pagano sent me a preview copy of Cinema Italia [VVJ 110] featuring a woodwind player, in this instance, soprano and alto saxophone player Rosario Giuliani and accordionist Luciano Biondini exquisitely linked through their beautiful renditions of some of the most famous musical themes in Italian Cinema.

Put another way, the music of Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone has never been so sensitively rendered in a Jazz environment. While we were not fortunate to hear DeFranco and Gumina perform Hank Mancini and Carmine Coppola, we can listen to Giuliani and Biondini interpret Morricone’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso Rota’s haunting Theme from La Dolce Vita along with seven other tracks ably supported by Enzo Pietropaoli on bass and Michele Rabbia on drums, percussion and special effects.

Here’s more about the forthcoming CD from the press release that accompanied the preview copy of Cinema Italia [VVJ 110].

“What would film be without music?

Music conveys all that which images cannot.

The importance of a soundtrack can sometimes even transcend that of images and stories, and great directors often build the entire structure of their masterpiece around a score - the themes in this Cinema Italia are evidence of the viability of this approach.

There have been numerous masterpieces in Italian cinema that have influenced filmmakers around the world and Italy continues to distinguish itself in this art.

The Cinema Italia project is a tribute to the greatness of Italian cinema and its tradition of excellence has contributed to raising global awareness of Italy’s culture.

Equally distinct is the cast of musicians in this album: Rosario Giuliani on sax, Luciano Biondini on the accordion, Enzo Pietropaoli on the double bass and Michele Rabbia on acoustic and electronic drums.

This quartet employs a contemporary music point-of-view in rendering these cinematic refrains, but one which never betrays the melodies of these unforgettable themes.

Giuliani, Biondini, Pietropaoli and Rabbia strive to give these cinematic themes a new force and vitality, demonstrating their immortality while constantly surprising the listener with fresh, innovative versions.

Unforgettable themes from unforgettable movies, as well as, two original tracks by Rosario Giuliani and Luciano Biondini (Bianco e Nero and What is there what is, all combine to confirm the narrative force of these two, incredible composers and four, masterful musicians.

Tracklist:

01 - La Strada (Nino Rota)

02 – Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Ennio Morricone)

03 - 8 e 1/2 (Nino Rota)

04 - Deborah's Theme (Ennio Morricone)

05 - Bianco e Nero (Rosario Giuliani)

06 - Impro-Romeo e Giulietta (L.Biondini – R.Giuliani/N. Rota)

07 - What is There What is Not (Luciano Biondini)

08 - La Dolce Vita (Nino Rota)

09 - C'era una Volta il West (Ennio Morricone)

You can sample the music on this forthcoming CD through the following audio-only version of Maestro Morricone’s theme from Nuovo Cinema Paradiso [Cinema Italia VVJ 110].

↧

Barney, Ray and Shelly [From the Archives]

September 22, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Willis Conover - 1920-1996 - Jazz's Voice to the World [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Cinema Italia

Guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne helped me to come of age in Jazz.

Initially through the series of “Poll Winners” recordings they made under the auspices of Les Koenig at Contemporary Records and later through professional associations and personal friendships, Barney, Ray and Shelly made endearing and enduring impressions on me and on my life.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to revisit their work, so along with the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra, it put together the following video tribute featuring Barney, Ray and Shelly working out on Barney's original - Minor Mood.

Here are some thoughts about what made Barney, Ray and Shelly such special players and people as excerpted from Nat Hentoff’s insert notes to The Poll Winners [Contemporary S-7535; OJCCD-156-2].

The reason for the alfresco exuberance of the Maypole wielders on the cover of this album is that all three won all three of the major American jazz popularity polls for 1956 — Down Beat, Metronome and Playboy.

While the election to these non-posthumous Valhalla’s is evidently quite gratifying, I expect that these three musicians are also deeply heartened by the sure knowledge that this respect and appreciation for their skills and souls is shared by the most exacting of all jazz audiences, their fellow jazzmen. Barney, Shelly and Ray cut through the lines of style, age and temperament. They are dug by jazzmen of all persuasions, because they in turn have not limited themselves to any one county of jazz. They're in place almost anywhere in the whole pleasure dome. …

Barney's strength, blues-blood, and sensitivity to others' musical needs as well as his own. Shelly's command of the drum as a thorough instrument, not just as a time-keeping device; his presence when needed as a third voice and the unobtrusiveness of his presence when that quality too is required. Ray for the fullness, firmness and tightness of his voice; his power, which propels when it's only suggested; and the flame, like his colleagues', of the perennial ‘amateur de jazz.’

The music in this set is primarily conversational, and it is conversation between three spirits with much in common in terms of life-view and way of living as well as music.

It is a conversation between experts whose knowledge has gone so far that they can never now regard themselves as experts, knowing not what they'll discover next time they talk.

And it's a conversation essentially for kicks, the kicks that come best and most frequently when you talk with your peers and are thereby in no need to worry whether your quick allusion will be picked up or whether you'll goof a spiral reference. It's not often that we amateurs, literally as well as French-figuratively, have a chance to hear this much of this kind of talk.”

↧

Willis Conover - 1920-1996 - Jazz's Voice to the World [From the Archives]

September 23, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Dexter Gordon - To Lester from Dexter with ... Cheese Cake

≪ Previous: Barney, Ray and Shelly [From the Archives]

“The collective broadcasts of Willis Conover are an American national treasure of inconceivable value.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author, editor and publisher

For many years I always thought of Willis Conover primarily as the announcer or master of ceremonies of the Newport Jazz Festival, which he was for its first decade or so. His voice was resonant, clear and very forceful. It’s deep baritone timbre immediately quieted the audiences at Freebody Park where the NSF took place and, upon hearing it, a hush would quickly followed as people rushed to take their seats in order to hear another of his detailed announcements about the musicians and the music that they were about to perform.

I also knew of Willis Conover from passing references to his role as a Jazz disc jockey on the Voice of America, but I had never heard one of his broadcasts for reasons that are explained later in this feature. For the most part, there the matter rested.

Recently, I came across two recordings that are nominally attributed to his leadership - Willis Conover’s House of Sounds [Brunswick BL 54003] and Jazz Committee for Latin American Affairs FM 303]. The former is available as a pricey audio CD import; I don’t know if the latter has ever been made available digitally.

Listening to these recordings and reading their sleeve notes, both of which were written by Willis, prompted me to do a bit of digging into Willis’ career.

This research took me well beyond my initial impressions of Willis and introduced me to the "Willis Conover" who was one of the greatest ambassador’s that Jazz ever had.

I thought you'd like to retake this journey with me and in so doing, meet the man who for many years was Jazz's Voice to the World.

My investigation began with the following obituary.

“The New York Times, May 19, 1996

Willis Conover Is Dead at 75; Aimed Jazz at the Soviet Bloc

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

“Willis Conover, the Voice of America disk jockey who fought the cold war with cool music, capturing the hearts and liberating the spirits of millions of listeners trapped behind the Iron Curtain, died on Friday at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. He was 75 and lived in Washington.

Colleagues said the cause was lung cancer.

In the long struggle between the forces of Communism and democracy, Mr. Conover, who went on the air in 1955 and continued broadcasting until a few months ago, proved more effective than a fleet of B-29's.

No wonder. Six nights a week he would take the A Train straight into the Communist heartland.

As the appealing rumble of the familiar theme rolled over the airwaves, from East Berlin to Vladivostok, millions of hands would fine tune their radio dials knowing what was coming next: a sugary, slow-talking baritone announcing, "This is Willis Conover in Washington, D.C., with the Voice of America Jazz Hour."

For the next two hours Mr. Conover would bombard Budapest with Billy Taylor and drop John Coltrane on Moscow.

To Americans who listened to jazz routinely, or disliked it, the wide popularity of the music in lands where it was officially labeled as decadent might seem incomprehensible.

It was, as Mr. Conover liked to say, "the music of freedom," and to those who had no freedom it became such a symbol of hope that at the peak of the cold war it was estimated that Mr. Conover had 30 million regular listeners in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and as many as 100 million worldwide.

He was known as the most famous American virtually no American had ever heard of. By law the Voice of America broadcasts that made him a household name in Europe, Asia and Latin America could not be beamed to the United States, where Mr. Conover was known mainly to dedicated jazz fans.

Among other things, he announced the Newport Jazz Festival for 15 years and was chairman of the jazz panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Conover, a tall, angular man with black-rimmed glasses who combed his jet-black hair straight back, came to his career through a series of accidents.

An Army brat, he was born in Buffalo and attended two dozen schools. Mr. Conover was a college freshman in Salisbury, Md., when a guest appearance on a local radio station led to an eight-week job.

Wanting to become a radio announcer, he won an amateur contest that led to a job in Cumberland, Md., where he made the discovery of his life. He heard a recording of Charlie Barnet's "Cherokee" and was so enchanted that he went to a record store looking for similar music.

The store owner, seeing his selections, said, "You really like that jazz, don't you?" and Mr. Conover replied, "What's jazz?"

By the time he was drafted into the Army in 1942 and started hanging out at a U.S.O. canteen near the White House, he knew enough to know that the syrupy strings the society volunteers were playing on the record player were no music to dance to.

When Mr. Conover rummaged through the stack of records and came up with some Dorseys and Artie Shaw, one of the hostesses was so impressed with the clientele's reaction to the music that she introduced Mr. Conover to her husband, a radio station manager. Within a few years Mr. Conover was a popular local disk jockey with the only jazz program in the city.

He also arranged concerts and almost off-handedly brought about the desegregation of Washington's nightclubs.

When Duke Ellington made his famous tour of the Soviet Union in 1954 and Voice of America officials decided to start a jazz program, Mr. Conover was the natural choice.

There were immediate grumblings in Congress about wasting taxpayers' money by broadcasting frivolous music, but Mr. Conover, a scholar who discussed music and interviewed musicians but never mentioned politics, won the day. In 1993 the House of Representatives honored him with a resolution praising the man who had been called one of the country's greatest foreign policy tools.

An independent-minded man, Mr. Conover had his share of run-ins with Voice of America officials but never backed down. As an independent contractor, he had full control over his programming choices, and besides, he had listened to too much jazz to do things any way but his own.

Mr. Conover, who was divorced, is survived by a brother, Walter, and a sister, Elizabeth Davison.”

My investigation next led me to a biography by Terrance Ripmaster entitled Willis Conover: Broadcasting Jazz To The World about which amazon.com offers this annotation:

“Willis Clark Conover Jr. was born on December 18, 1920. Known around the world for his Voice of America radio programs, he also traveled the world as a jazz ambassador. Willis Conover: Broadcasting Jazz To The World recounts the story of his talented life.In America, Conover helped break down racial barriers related to jazz, participating in the famous Newport Jazz Festivals as well as serving on the National Endowment for the Arts to gain funding for jazz events. As a personal friend of Duke Ellington and many other jazz greats, Conover promoted their music over radio stations and at White House jazz concerts. His tenure at Voice of America lasted from 1955 until his death in 1996. Unfortunately, because of Congressional restrictions, his programs were not heard in the United States. The Voice of America, an arm of the Office of War Information, was a federal agency banned from broadcasting in America. Many of the world's best jazz musicians credit Conover with helping them learn more about jazz. This biography details his professional accomplishments in the world of jazz, including the profound impact he had on the Soviet Union and Eastern European Communist nations.”

And then I remembered this wonderful piece by Gene Lees which is far and away the best essay ever written about Willis Conover [1920-1996] and his significance to Jazz.

In Memoriam: Willis Conover

“I wrote about Willis Conover twice in the 1990s. Now he has been gone for seven years, and I think it is time to take a longer look at his life and his immense contribution to his country and to music. If some of what follows in part repeats what I wrote earlier, my apologies. But it all needs to be said.

I gave this idea a good deal of thought before I began to bounce it off a few friends and colleagues for reaction. I first considered how many presidents had come and gone since the end of World War II: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton. And I thought of all the famous Cold Warriors, McNamara, Dulles, MacArthur, Westmoreland. Which American did the most to break the Soviet Union? Truman with his Korean War? Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon with their Viet Nam War? Reagan with his corny actor's reading of "Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev"?

None of the above. The man who did the most to bring down the Soviet Union was one of the unsung heroes, a handsome and beautifully-spoken broadcaster named Willis Conover, whose name was known in every country in the world but his own. Willis Conover was far and away the best-known American on this planet, and the most loved, except in his own country. That's because, unless you listened to shortwave radio, you couldn't receive his programs in the United States. Conover was heard on the Voice of America, a government-funded service whose mandate forbids its broadcasting to the land of its origin, and thus Americans could not hear Conover's marvelous music shows, even though they paid for them. Since he taped the first VOA broadcast in December 1954, and it was aired in January 1955, Conover was on the air longer than any jazz broadcaster in the world: 42 years.

The Voice of America was born during World War II as a counter-force to Nazi propaganda, a little like the BBC overseas service. After the war, as the adversarial relationship of the United States shifted from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, the VOA stayed on the air. It employed broadcasters speaking the languages of the countries who had fallen under the control of the USSR and whose own broadcasting systems were merely propaganda facilities of their governments. The VOA remained comparatively objective and accurate in its news reporting, though men in successive administrations eyed it hungrily. It is hard to know how much political interference it endured at various times. But I have the impression that wiser heads on the whole prevailed, realizing that the BBC maintained its immense credibility around the world precisely because its news was believed when the propaganda disseminated by dictatorships was not. I think that the VOA on the whole did its job honorably; it certainly did it well.

But whether you are telling the truth or lies, it matters little if no one is listening, and since you cannot force people in faraway lands to tune in, you must induce them to do so. During World War II, Allied troops in Europe listened to Lord Ha-Ha from Germany and those in the South Pacific to Tokyo Rose. They took the American music they were broadcasting and ignored the lies.

Even if the VOA was trying to disseminate truth, what was there to attract listeners in the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries?

A program called Music USA. Host: Willis Conover. He played the very best of American popular music and jazz, presenting it with a quiet authority. That authority was founded on unfailing taste and a knowledge of jazz that was

encyclopedic, as was his knowledge of the men and women who create it. In the old days of Jim and Andy's in New York, a bar much favored by musicians, Conover was a regular, and there wasn't a major jazz musician, nor many minor ones for that matter, whom Willis didn't know. He interviewed them year after year, editing the tapes into broadcasts. The collective broadcasts of Willis Conover are an American national treasure of inconceivable value.

Willis Clark Conover Jr. was born on December 18, 1920, in Buffalo, New York, the son, he said, of an army officer. This meant he grew up in various parts of the country. I gained the impression that his relations with his father were not good. His father wanted him to attend the Citadel, but Willis was adamant in refusing a military career. Early in his life he became enchanted by the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, as, too, did I. I have never understood the fad for the poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe, which I find mannered, affected, and hollow. But Lovecraft's stories truly gave me the creeps, and so they did Willis. In his early teens he wrote Lovecraft a fan letter, which the author answered.This led to a correspondence that continued until Lovecraft's death, and in 1975 Willis published these letters in a book titled Lovecraft at Last.

Willis began his broadcasting career at the age of nineteen. He once described his first job at a radio station in the Washington, D.C., area. He painted a vivid picture of a steaming summer night, so hot that the windows of the station had to be left open, which allowed a vast variety of mosquitoes, moths, and other flying things to whirr around his head while he had to keep the turntable on which he was playing records from breaking down by holding something or other with both hands. He said it was horrible.

In the early 1940s, he acted to desegregate Washington. His part in this effort was to present musicians in nightclubs, insisting that blacks be admitted. He also produced a series of Saturday midnight concerts at the Howard Theater. His opposition to racism was lifelong, and deeply felt.

In a curious way, Conover — the name is Anglicized from something German, and one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence — combined a vast cultural cosmopolitanism with a deep American patriotism. This made him the perfect spokesman for a country he loved to peoples he loved but whose governments he did not.

Whatever the incidental political effects his VGA broadcasts had, the musical influence of this man was awesome. Conover did more than any other human being to make jazz an international musical language. He modeled his speech, he

told me, on that of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "fireside chats". Speaking slowly so that those with little English could follow him, he introduced the music to people everywhere, inspiring countless musicians to learn to play it and laymen to appreciate it. If there is a vast audience for jazz abroad, it was to a large extent created by Conover. He turned people on to jazz all over the planet. He was the only non-musician to have that kind of influence, and his work showed just how powerful an educational medium broadcasting, in its proper use, can be Time and time again, when you ask a jazz player from the erstwhile Iron Curtain countries how he became interested in jazz, you'll hear a variant on "Well, I heard Willis Conover's program and ..."

Willis was heard eight times a week by an estimated 100 million persons. During the darkest days of the Cold War, many found some strange consolation in his broadcasts. One young Russian wrote him a poignant letter saying, "You are a source of strength when I am overwhelmed by pessimism, my dear idol." Willis treasured such letters.

People listened to his broadcasts even when they were forbidden to do so. They learned English from him. This opened worlds for them. The Butman brothers, Igor and Oleg, living in New York, told me that just about every announcer of jazz concerts in Russia affected Conover's slow, sonorous manner of speech.

He traveled to more than forty countries. He could not visit Poland without being mobbed. In 1982, he accompanied a group of jazz musicians to Moscow. Though there was no advance notice of the concert, 500 fans crowded a 400-seat auditorium to hear them. Willis stepped up to a microphone. He got no further than "Good evening" when the crowd, recognizing the voice, roared. One young man kissed his hand, saying, "If there is a god of jazz, it is you."

Willis remained apolitical throughout this career. He declined to join either Democratic or Republican clubs, a judicious course in a town where the payoff in jobs is one of its most iniquitous practices. This permitted him to survive in a position that was more important to the country than partisan appointments. Whenever some foreign dignitary was afforded a state dinner, and the current president needed entertainment for him — jazz, as often as not — Willis was called on to organize it. He did this I know not how many times. In 1969 he produced and narrated the White House concert in tribute to Duke Ellington's seventieth birthday. He was responsible for more than thirty concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as concerts at Town Hall in New York, Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and the Whitney Museum. In 1969, he produced and narrated the New Orleans International Jazz Festival. He established and chaired the jazz panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and served on the State Department Cultural Presentations subcommittee for jazz. Nor was this all that he did.

I remember an incident that occurred during the Kennedy administration. Willis was at the White House, organizing some event. He was in the oval office with Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary. A phone call came through for him. It was his bank in New York. Willis was behind on taxes, and the Internal Revenue Service had frozen his account. He had a moment of panic. Lincoln told him to phone the IRS office in New York. And, she said, use this phone. Willis picked up the telephone and spoke to the girl at the switchboard. The head of the IRS in New York got a phone call from the White House on the president's personal line. The freeze on the bank account was lifted within minutes. That is the only occasion on which I can remember Willis using his not-inconsiderable clout.

Most significantly, he kept politics out of his broadcasts. He said some years ago, "I am not trying to overthrow governments. I am just sending out something wonderfully creative and human. If it makes people living under repressive regimes stand up a little straighter, so be it."

He generated around the world a mood of receptivity toward the United States. Music does that. My interest in France and the United States in part grew from interest in their music. Music is the language beyond language. And jazz is different from most musics.

I long ago realized that it is the analogy of democracy: freedom within a framework, a set of disciplines within which each participant is permitted to make his own idiosyncratic statement without impeding the utterances of his colleagues. Small wonder that dictators always hate it. If all the world could model itself on jazz, the horrors we keep living through would cease. That message of tolerance and understanding was always implicit in jazz. It certainly was not lost on the musicians of these other countries; and I doubt that it was lost on lay listeners, either. "Jazz is about freedom," Willis said constantly.

One of the careers Willis inspired is that of the pianist Adam Makowicz (pronounced ma-KO-vitch), born in Gnojnik, Czechoslovakia, August 18, 1940, of Polish parents. The town is near the Polish border, and things during the war were not as hard in Czechoslovakia as they were in Poland. The family stayed there until 1946, then returned to Poland. Adam grew up near Katowice, the capital of Silesia. He started studying music at the age of nine, and was headed for a career as a concert pianist. Enter Willis Conover. Adam said:

"Nobody knew about jazz at that time. Besides it was banned from public life. It was illegal music under the Nazis and under Stalin. My friends from music school told me about Music USA, which you could get on short-wave radio. I had a friend with a short-wave radio, and I found the program. It was Willis Conover, from Voice of America. It was the only source to learn about jazz."

Adam's parents were horrified that he wanted to abandon a concert-piano career, and such was the friction that he ran away from home and school, lived a desperate nomadic existence for two years before finding an underground club in Krakow where he could play jazz. "I played, practiced, or thought about jazz twenty-four hours a day," he said. And he kept an ear to the radio, absorbing from Willis Conover the music of Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner, and new-found idol Art Tatum. "I was about eighteen when I started to play jazz in student clubs and friends' homes," he said.

"Art Tatum was, musically speaking, like my father. When I heard his music for the first time, and each time was like the first time, he really excited me."

Needless to say, when Adam eventually was able to move to the United States, Willis became one of his champions.

I first met Willis at the Newport Jazz Festival on the Fourth of July weekend in 1959. He had been its master of ceremonies since 1951, and continued in that role for more than a decade. I encountered a handsome man with dark-rimmed glasses and a magnificently rich voice. Like his fans in other countries, I was always struck by the beauty of his voice. I had only recently become editor of Down Beat, while Willis had an enormous reputation within the music profession, unknown though he was to the American public. He took an immediate liking to me, and I to him. In the next two or three years I became aware of the scope of his influence — and the scope of his decency. He was one of the most honorable men I ever met.

Toward the end of 1961, I left Down Beat. After a detour through Latin America, I moved to New York in July, 1962. My friend Art Farmer introduced me to that tavern of beloved memory on West 48th Street, Jim and Andy's. And there a casual acquaintanceship with Willis Conover grew into a deep friendship. I had translated some of the first of the Antonio Carlos Jobim songs from Portuguese into English, including Quiet Nights. Jobim arrived in New York that autumn. We needed a demo on that tune. Willis at that time was broadcasting for CBS as well as VOA. (He had an apartment in New York and a house in Arlington, Virginia.) He set up a studio for us, and we made the demo. The guitarist was Jobim, the pianist was Bill Evans, and I was the singer. Willis for all practical purposes produced that session. I lost that tape in a fire early in the 1970s, and now Willis, Jobim, and Bill are gone.

That first year in New York was one of the most difficult of my life. I couldn't, as they say, get arrested. I couldn't sell my prose, I couldn't sell my songs. At any given moment I was ready to quit, scale back my dreams to the size of the apparent opportunities, leave New York and find some anonymous job somewhere.

No one encouraged me to persist more than Willis, in conversations at the bar or in those back booths on the east wall next to the two telephone booths in Jim and Andy's. Willis believed in me, even if I didn't. And he kept slipping me money to hang on with. Ten dollars here, twenty dollars there. I kept notes on those loans but Willis, I believe, thought of them as gifts and simply forgot them.

The time between the summer of 1962 and that of 1963 was one of the worst of my life. I was constantly desperate. Then things turned around for me. My first book was published. Tony Bennett and Mark Murphy became the first of many singers to record my songs. And I was seeing advances from them. One day I realized I had some money in the bank.

And Willis called. By then I could read his mood from the sound of his voice. I said, "What's the matter?"

Willis was married five times. I knew two of his wives, one an Arab princess whom he met at the Brussels World's Fair at a time when the United States still found it expedient to show him off, the other a publicist named Shirley Clarke. They lived a few blocks from me at the corner of Central Park West and, I think, West 82nd Street.

I do not know which of his several divorces he was going through when he made that melancholy phone call to me. And when I asked him what was wrong, he said that his wife's lawyer had said that if he didn't come up with a certain sum by Thursday — I think it was around twenty-five hundred dollars, and that of course was in 1963 money — he was going to take Willis's house in Arlington.

I said, as casually as I could, "Why don't you meet me at Jim and Andy's and we'll talk about it?"

On the way there I went by Chemical Bank and made a withdrawal in hundred-dollar bills. Willis and I sat down in the booth and ordered drinks. When they arrived I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cash. Vague memory says the amount was about $3,000. With a grand flourish I dropped it on the table.

"What is that!” Willis said.

"That's the money you lent me," I said. I will never forget the relief on his face.

I never paid a debt with more pleasure.

There was a small circle of close friends that included Willis, Alec Wilder, Helen Keane, me, Gerry Mulligan, and Judy Holliday. Once Willis showed me a card trick. He shuffled a deck of cards, put it on the table face down, and told me to separate the cards into the red and black suits by the feel of my fingertips. I did it, perfectly, and said in astonishment, "Is this some sort of demonstration of extrasensory perception or is it a trick?"

He said, "It's a trick." When I pressed him to show me how it was done, he said he couldn't. When he was in the army, one of his buddies, a professional magician, got drunk and showed him how to do it. In the sobriety of the following morning, he made Willis promise never to show it to anyone. And this is the measure of Willis: he never did.

He said to me that day, "Do you know how smart Judy Holliday really is? She hadn't gone five or ten cards down into the deck before she said, 'Oh, I see how it's done.' And she did."

When Judy died after a protracted struggle against cancer, we were all devastated, but no one of course as much as Mulligan. We were all worried about him. Willis organized a vigil. Throughout his waking hours, Gerry was in the company of Willis, the novelist Joseph Heller, or me. We never let him be alone.

Willis and Gerry were in Junior's, another of the musicians' bars in midtown Manhattan, having a quiet drink when the jukebox emitted The Party's Over. It was Judy's song from Bells Are Ringing. Gerry, Willis told me later, said, "Oh God, that's all I needed," and put his head down on his arms on the bar.

I'm glad Willis was with him at that moment. And that vigil, again, tells you the kind of man Willis was.

After Shirley and Willis were divorced, her daughter Bunny, of whom Willis was immensely fond, died of a lingering respiratory disease. Then one of those manic bicycle delivery men, riding on a sidewalk, knocked Shirley down. Her head hit the side of a building, or maybe the curb, and she slipped into a coma. She died a few days later. Needless to say, the man who killed her was never even identified.

On June 14, 1993, the House of Representatives paid tribute to Willis. At that point he had been presenting his Music USA program for thirty-eight years.

Lee Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, and Robert Michel, Republican of Illinois, took part in the commendation, a review of the Conover career and a reading into the Congressional Record of a 1985 Readers Digest article that called Willis The World's Favorite American. The resolution was passed unanimously. But it was not enough.

Not long after the inauguration of Bill Clinton, the White House held a dinner honoring George Wein on the 40th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival. It was really only the 39th anniversary of the festival. Thus the festival and Music USA are almost the same age, and of course Clinton did not hold a dinner honoring Willis Conover for Music USA.

The affair was a sort of junior jazz festival, held on the south lawn of the White House. Clinton, you will recall, purported to be a jazz fan, and demonstrated his devotion by (occasionally) playing some of the world's worst tenor on television. Indeed, he played a solo at his own inauguration, which people taped. A young tenor player at North Texas State University (as it was then) transcribed it, sending it to his friends with a note saying, "I can read it but I can't play it." The "dinner" at this White House affair was held under a vast tent, and the food was barbecue. The soggy Washington heat was almost unbearable. I ran into a lot of old friends and acquaintances, including Nat Hentoff and Whitney Balliett. Stanley Dance and his wife were also there. Indeed, it seemed that everyone in the country who had ever written about or done anything about jazz was in attendance, largely, I suppose, out of curiosity. The music was disorganized. Wynton Marsalis and his group played one his compositions, which with his customary humility he described as a tone poem. It was essentially Three Blind Mice without the first variation. It was pretty sad. Clark Terry and Red Rodney got up with flugelhorns and carved him up badly. Joe Williams went onstage and pulled the whole thing back from the cluttered disaster it was threatening to become. The event was later edited into a broadcast on PBS.

But that is not what I remember most about that afternoon. Before the music began, I was talking to Nat Hentoff when someone came to our table and told me, "Willis Conover wants to see you." And I lit up. "Where is he?" I said eagerly. The man pointed past the rope line that had been set up to keep the press and local peasants away from us Important People. I think I recognized his dark-rimmed glasses first, for this wraith of a man was not the Willis Conover I knew. I knew he'd had bouts of cancer, but my handsome friend had become withered and terribly old. As I hurried toward him, I suddenly wondered why he was not one of the honored guests — the most honored guest. My God, aside from the VOA broadcasts, the White House had used him repeatedly over the years. Every event that involved jazz at the White House had been organized at the behest of each administration by Willis! What's more, since the event was in honor of the anniversary of the Newport Festival, why wasn't Willis, its original emcee, among these guests?

There were several guards on that rope line. Even before I spoke to Willis, I demanded to know why this man was being kept out. They didn't even know who he was. I said, "You're gonna let him in, or there are quite a few of us here who are going to raise more hell than you can imagine, and it will be loud." They let him in, finally, and we got a chair for him and he sat at our table.

I was dismayed to find Willis so fragile. I had not seen him in many years, though we talked from time to time on the telephone. And as I shook my old friend's hand, I thought, "Other than the musicians who created it, this man has done as much for jazz as anyone who ever lived."

I would be fascinated to see a dollar figure on what the Cold War cost the nations of the world, if anyone could ever compile one. In the end I wonder if it was all worth it; whether the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway of its own inefficiency and the sheer weariness of its people with its long and tawdry tyranny.

I was musing on all this, after the White House party and after seeing Willis. The next day, I had a reunion with some of my old journalist friends from our Louisville Times days, one of whom was David Binder of the New York Times.

I decided to throw out my seemingly outrageous generality to see which of my realistic colleagues would shoot it down. I figured the one who would take issue with it would be Binder, who was then bureau chief in Washington for the Times, and had been the paper's correspondent in Germany. David speaks fluent German (among other languages), has a rich knowledge of the erstwhile Soviet bloc, and had just returned from Yugoslavia. David plays clarinet and knows about jazz. I made the remark:

"I think Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet Empire than all the Cold War presidents put together."

And David, who has always prided himself on a cynical realism, to my amazement said, "I think you're probably right."

The next day I took Willis to lunch. He was so weak, and ate little. I could only think of all he had done for me in my first days in New York. At the end of our lunch, I put him in a taxi. I had to help him get into it. I thought of a rainy night when he waited for me in the doorway of his apartment building in New York and paid for the taxi I couldn't afford so that I could sleep on his sofa. I had nowhere else to go.

I watched his taxi pull away.

I would never see him again.

Willis continued producing his shows for VOA until the end. He was with VOA from 1954 to 1996, forty-two years.

Under the first President Bush, there had been a move to get Willis the Medal of Freedom. Bush ignored it.

Now, under Clinton, several of us, including the noted lawyer (and, long ago, musician) Leonard Garment, who had been Richard Nixon's White House Counsel, mounted a fresh campaign to gain it for him before it was too late. We mustered considerable support, and mounted a letter campaign to Clinton. Clinton ignored it.

It turned out that Willis had no health insurance: he was never on staff at VOA but did his broadcasts as a contract supplier.

He died May 17, 1996, in a hospital in Arlington, Virginia.

I am haunted by the refusal of his nation to give him his due. Why? Why and again why? I can make a few guesses. His fourth wife, Shirley, accompanied him on a tour of Poland and Russia some time around 1970. When they returned, Shirley told me how he had been mobbed everywhere. A huge crowd greeted them at the Moscow airport. And, she said, wherever they went, they had the feeling that the CIA was shadowing them. The KGB could be taken for granted. But the CIA? Yes, why not? Did some paranoid spook wonder what was his magical connection to the Russian people? And is there somewhere in some CIA or FBI file a notation questioning his loyalty? That's all it takes, just one of those little zingers; and we have been made increasingly aware in recent times of the corruption of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. And one can only imagine the file Hoover started on the young man who began the desegregation of nightclub entertainment in Washington. Somewhere there is a hidden factor. It's just too strange that Willis was turned down for the Medal of Freedom not once but twice.

His nation's ingratitude continued after his death. The Voice of America tried to claim that his broadcasts were their property. Leonard Garment took action, precisely on the grounds that Willis was never an employee of VGA, and proved that they did not. And so his personal papers, including books and photographs, are at North Texas University while his countless broadcasts are safely on deposit in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. A retired history professor and jazz lover named Terrence Ripmaster is writing a biography.

If his own country won't recognize Willis's monumental work, the Russians are doing so. Last summer, they began a Willis Conover Jazz Festival in Moscow. Its public relations director, a jazz-concert producer named Michael Grin, wrote to Terry Ripmaster:

"It was a really great festival during two summer days — 5 and 6 July — in one of the best concert halls, the Central House of Cinematographers. Every day more than a thousand jazz fans came there to pay a tribute to Willis Conover. In our jazz circles, he is a legend, as Coltrane or Ellington, because a lot of Russians began to listen jazz thanks to his Jazz Hours. The specially designed posters with the Willis Conover's foto was hanged all over the city. On July 5 in the first part played our jazz stars as Alexei Kozlov, Igor Bril, David Golschein y Alexander Oseichuk with their groups, in the second part played the Michael Brecker Quartet (Joey Calderazzo, Chris Minh Doky, and Jeff Watts).

"The second evening played the American students and professors of the Georgia State University (GSU Jazztet) and Russian young musicians and in the second part Michael Brecker played solo, then he played in duo with Joey Calderazzo and the culmination of the concert was when Brecker invited two our young musicians from the Alexander Oseichuk group to play with him. (Sergei Vasilyev, bass, Pavel Timofeev, drums).

"These concerts were very successful and had a good press. Three months later one of our central TV channels transmitted a one-hour version of this festival."

And I'll just bet it was a lot better than the PBS broadcast of that clumsy Bill Clinton "jazz party" at the White House.

Willis was cremated and his ashes buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not for the honor and service his life's work had done for his country, for music, and for the world, but because he once served in the army.”

↧

Dexter Gordon - To Lester from Dexter with ... Cheese Cake

September 24, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: William Claxton: Eye on Cool [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Willis Conover - 1920-1996 - Jazz's Voice to the World [From the Archives]

I could listen to Dexter Gordon play the tenor saxophone all night.

There was a time in my life when I often did.

Dexter made a batch of LP’s for Alfred Lion’s Blue Note label in the 1960s and his playing on them was a revelation.

His solos on these recordings were exciting and explosive, his time hard-driving and impeccable and his sound was big and wide-open.

Dexter’s ideas and inventions flowed so effusively that I couldn’t keep up with them; I couldn’t absorb them.

Anything that came into his mind came out of his horn; effortlessly.

Cascade after cascade of the hippest phrases simply flowed and flowed and flowed.

Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane received more public notice, awards and accolades, but Dexter was right up there with all of them.

When Jazz went to Europe to live, so did Dexter, performing and hanging out in Paris and Copenhagen for most of the last two decades of his life.

By the time of his triumphant return visits to the Village Vanguard in NYC and Keystone Korner in San Francisco in the late 1970s, he had become a different player; more laid back, lyrical and laconic, but still a force to be reckoned with.

Here are a few thoughts and observation about Dexter from Garry Giddins’ marvelous five-page essay on him in Visions of Jazz: The First Century [pp.330–335]:

“The King of Quoters, Dexter Gordon, was himself eminently quotable. In a day not unlike our own, when purists issue fiats about what is or isn't valid in jazz, Gordon declared flatly, ‘jazz is an octopus’—it will assimilate anything it can use. Drawing closer to home, he spoke of his musical lineage: Coleman Hawkins "was going out farther on the chords, but Lester [Young] leaned to the pretty notes. He had a way of telling a story with everything he played/' Young's story was sure, intrepid, daring, erotic, cryptic. A generation of saxophonists found itself in his music, as an earlier generation had found itself in Hawkins's rococo virtuosity. …

Gordon's appeal was to be found not only in his Promethean sound and nonstop invention, his impregnable authority combined with a steady and knowing wit, but also in a spirit born in the crucible of jam sessions. He was the most formidable of battlers, undefeated in numerous contests, and never more engaging than in his kindred flare-ups with the princely Wardell Gray, a perfect Lestorian foil, gently lyrical but no less swinging and sure. …

Gordon was an honest and genuinely original artist of deep and abiding humor and of tremendous personal charm. He imparted his personal characteristics to his music—size, radiance, kindness, a genius for discontinuous logic. Consider his trademark musical quotations—snippets from other songs woven into the songs he is playing. Some, surely, were calculated. But not all and probably not many, for they are too subtle and too supple. They fold into his solos like spectral glimpses of an alternative universe in which all of Tin Pan Alley is one infinite song. That so many of the quotations seem verbally relevant I attribute to Gordon's reflexive stream-of-consciousness and prodigious memory for lyrics. I cannot imagine him planning apposite quotations.”

Bruce Lundvall and Michael Cuscuna collected all of the albums that Dexter made for Blue Note into a six compact disc, boxed set that includes some omitted tracks along with photographs by Francis Wolff and selected commentary.

It’s great to have all of this music by Dexter in a digital format and it provides a convenient means to sample the music of this Jazz giant if you are not as yet familiar with it.

In line with Gary Giddins’ characterization of Dexter as “The King of the Quoters,” Dexter composed an homage to Lester Young by making a few minor [literally] chord alterations to “Tickle Toe,” an original composition that Lester made famous while performing with Count Basie’s Orchestra.

Dexter entitled his piece “Cheese Cake” and you can listen to his performance of it on the audio track to the following video on which he is joined by Sonny Clark on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums.

To experience the sheer joy and delight of a brilliant Jazz tenor saxophonist “at work,” you can’t do much better than Dexter’s solos on “Cheese Cake.”

↧

William Claxton: Eye on Cool [From the Archives]

September 26, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: BILL EVANS - SOME OTHER TIME: THE LOST SESSION FROM THE BLACK FOREST

≪ Previous: Dexter Gordon - To Lester from Dexter with ... Cheese Cake

© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There’s a lot of young guys shooting pictures, but I can’t think of anyone who really stands out like Claxton,” says Ray Avery, the founder of the Jazz Photography Association’s L.A. branch and a longtime friend and admirer. “I think a lot of us are photographers, but he’s an artist.”

“Claxton’s image of Chet Baker was very important in creating the mystique of West Coast jazz,” says Ted Gioia, the school’s leading chronicler. “There’s no parallel in East Coast jazz. … “He did as much as the musicians to create the image of West Coast jazz. “

“Claxton did more than shoot striking photographs of great musicians. He created the visual reality of West Coast jazz, a whole new way to picture the art. Even people who have little musical knowledge of “cool jazz”....”

“He was an exceedingly young man of 24 when he helped found the seminal Pacific Jazz label in 1952; because he’s lived clean and avoided hard drugs, he’s remained in good health while the boys in the band have dropped off. As a result, he’s one of the last survivors of the great West Coast scene. And the last year or so has seen a revival of interest in Claxton’s work and in the era he chronicled.”

- Scott Timberg [Emphasis mine]

When Claxton began shooting, there was already an established school of jazz photography, dominated by photos of New York musicians in darkened studios or clubs, brooding behind cigarette smoke. Claxton was familiar with the work of such Gotham shooters as William Gottlieb and Herman Leonard, who had memorialized the great New York musicians, aloof in the shadows or hard at work.

“The musicians were always perspiring,” Claxton says with a gentle laugh. “I said to myself, ‘It’s not like that out here.’ “ It was a jazz subculture, after all, as different from the East Coast jazz scene as L.A.’s sprawl was from New York’s skyline. “They played at the beach. They wore Hawaiian shirts, there was sunlight everywhere.”

- Scott Timberg

“Those who lived in L.A. in the ‘50s often feel a powerful nostalgia for a less crowded, less commercial, less self-conscious city. Jazz fans who remember the music’s great era often have a similar difficulty regarding the present with the same degree of fondness as the past. … Claxton’s style represents a high point ….”

- Scott Timberg

I can’t imagine the world of what Ted Gioia describes in his book title as West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960 without the photography of William Claxton.

Clax’s photography was on display everywhere from LP covers, to portraits of the Jazz artists that adorned the walls of Jazz clubs to articles that appeared in many of the major periodicals that covered the music during what author Bob Gordon refers to in his book as Jazz On The West Coast.

“Eye on Cool” was one of the earliest blog features and it was not included in the archives after it first appeared because I was still so new to blogging that I didn’t know how use the archiving feature Thankfully, Blogger.com has since made it an automatic process.

The article that this featured is based on first appeared in The New Times Times on February 4, 1999 and in The Los Angeles Times on February 10, 1999.

Sadly, “Cool” is no longer what it was when William Claxton was doing his primary work in relation to West Coast Jazz. Some of the reasons for this change are explained in the later portions of this interview with Clax.

For more on that story, you might want to check out another of Ted Gioia’s fine books - The Birth [and Death] of the Cool - and our review of it which you can locate by going here.

Lastly, the images that populate this posting have been added and were not part of the original review.

William Claxton: Eye on Cool

by Scott Timberg

“47 years ago [62 as of this re-posting] L.A. Photographer William Claxton gave the jazz world a new vision. Today, he’s revered, influential – and busier than ever.” [Clax died in October, 2008]

One of the most powerful photographs in the annals of jazz depicts the charismatic alto saxophonist Art Pepper trudging up a long, lonely hill near his house in Echo Park, cradling his saxophone under his arm and holding a lit cigarette. Pepper’s saxophone playing was a thing of beauty, but it was a delicate and precarious beauty, scarred with the pain that would at times send the man himself into tailspins of drugs and thievery. Looking back, four decades later, the picture almost has the quality of prophecy: Pepper, for all his early success and his many heartbreaking solos, never really reached the top of that hill, never stopped laboring, Sisyphus-like, to outrun his own inner demons.

William Claxton, the tall, mild-mannered man who shot the image, remembers his meeting with Pepper on that day in 1956; the saxophonist had gotten out of jail the day before and was waiting for his connection. “He looked very healthy, but he was kind of shaky,” the photographer recalls. “He cut his hand opening a can of soup or something.” The shot, Claxton says, was simply common sense.

“I saw this steep hill, and he’d been telling me how hard his life was. He was a very sweet, ‘ingenuous guy. He seemed very naive, like his life had been all uphill.”

The photograph has become the definitive shot of the sensitive and lyrical Pepper and a key image for the glamorous and tragic world of West Coast jazz. But Claxton, unimpressed with his own artistry, never used it as an album jacket or publicity photo. Only years later, ‘in fact, did anyone but Claxton see it. “The one of him walking up the hill I never showed to anybody—that was for me.”

Claxton tells the story sitting in his home on a foggy afternoon. From the high windows of his Spanish bungalow, the cantilevered houses and rough, patchy flora of Benedict Canyon dissolves into a mist below, as if he were musing above the clouds. Staring from the walls, bathed in the room’s natural light, are many of his photographs—depicting such jazz artists as Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Gerry Mulligan, and Chet Baker.

But Claxton did more than shoot striking photographs of great musicians. He created the visual reality of West Coast jazz, a whole new way to picture the art. Even people who have little musical knowledge of “cool jazz”—the mostly white, often mellow toned scene that flourished in California in the 1950s—know what it looked like: Blond, high cheek-boned singer/trumpeter Chet Baker in undershirts and Hawaiian prints. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s sharp suits and redheaded crew-cut. Dave Brubeck’s round horn-rimmed glasses and nerdy smile. And Claxton placed these players and their peers in previously unthinkable settings. Instead of laboring in a studio, shrouded in shadow and hidden beneath coiling cigarette smoke, the musicians relaxed outside, blowing saxophones by the beach, riffing on ships, joking in garden groves.

“Claxton’s image of Chet Baker was very important in creating the mystique of West Coast jazz,” says Ted Gioia, the school’s leading chronicler. “There’s no parallel in East Coast jazz.” James Gavin, who’s nearing completion of a book on Baker, calls these photos “as important a chronicle of the music as the music itself.”

As the ‘50s waned, the luster of West Coast jazz began to fade and, in an unfortunate consonance, Claxton went on to other things—television directing, Hollywood, fashion, even ads for The Gap that replicated the simple, white-background style he made famous.

But he never gave up music photography completely, and now he’s nearing the end of five full decades with a camera. He was an exceedingly young man of 24 when he helped found the seminal Pacific Jazz label in 1952; because he’s lived clean and avoided hard drugs, he’s remained in good health while the boys in the band have dropped off. As a result, he’s one of the last survivors of the great West Coast scene. And the last year or so has seen a revival of interest in Claxton’s work and in the era he chronicled.

In 1998, Blue Note—which owns the Pacific Jazz catalog—reissued 16 titles by artists like Baker, Mulligan, Jack Sheldon, and Bud Shank, most with suitably cool covers by Claxton. The University of California has reissued Ted Gioia’s crucial history of the era, West Coast Jazz, with a section of Claxton photos. In a sign of the photographer’s ability to reach beyond the insular and often backward-looking world of jazz enthusiasts, he’s been increasingly enlisted by rock artists—among them Elvis Costello, who recently asked Claxton to shoot the cover for his celebrated Burt Bacharach collaboration , Painted From Memory. And the Fahey/Klein Gallery on La Brea will host a show of Claxton’s work next month, timed to precede the publication of Jazz Seen—Claxton’s collected jazz shots—by the German publisher Taschen.

The result is that Claxton’s profile is suddenly as high as it’s been since the height of Pacific Jazz. Or at least his public profile—despite his fame, little is known about Claxton the man, even by jazz die-hards.

Gregarious, warm, slightly absentminded, and sometimes politely mischievous, Claxton projects both rumpled ease and a slightly formal Old World politeness. He calls himself “a hippie, relaxed type,” though he’s using the term hippie in its short-haired 1950s and not its ‘60s psychedelic sense.

While Claxton has made a living shooting some of the most beautiful and meticulously dressed people on the planet, he carries himself casually and unselfconsciously; he favors heavy work shirts with square pockets, as if he were a village electrician. He projects little ego; some describe him as the kind of artist who “disappears into his work.” And so, as wide as he’s ranged—from photojournalism to fashion to movie sets—Claxton knows exactly how he’ll be remembered: “I think I’m so deeply rooted in jazz,” he says in his slightly hoarse voice that recalls worn leather, “that it’ll say on my tombstone that I was a jazz photographer.”

Pacific Jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon, who Claxton captured in the glare of a car’s headlight in the 1950s, is more succinct: “To me, he’s just like one of the cats.”

As a kid, Claxton loved listening to swing—Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. He dreamed of opening an art deco club—all checkerboard and palm fronds in black and white, with the people providing the only color. And he loved photography; not only the gritty journalistic dispatches of Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith but the clean, airy fashion photography of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon that he found in his sister’s copies of Harper’s Bazaar.

Claxton’s first in person experience with jazz was as a teenager, driving from La Canada to clubs on Glendale’s Brand Avenue. By the time he began college, still living at home, he would borrow his father’s Packard and drive with a girlfriend from his leafy, white neighborhood in the hills above Pasadena to the jazz clubs that lined L.A.’s Central Avenue. Claxton was so tall that bouncers assumed he was of age, and he would slip into Jack’s Basket, Brother’s, the California Club and the other clubs on Central—many of them “homes, behind the stores on Central Avenue”—that offered camaraderie, jazz dancing, and, of course, music. They opened after midnight and served booze in coffee cups. Despite the mostly male performers, he remembers the scene as a matriarchy, with church-bred women, many of them transplanted Southerners,, running the show. Claxton, in fact, was struck by Central’s formality. “I was treated very well, even when I was the only white in the place,” he recalls. “Everybody wore ties and jackets, no matter what they did, and everyone was taught to be courteous. No one was revolutionary; there weren’t any Farrakhans around. But I also noticed that the big hotels would not let the black musicians in. The racism was quiet.”

Claxton went there to hear what he calls “my heroes”; one night, when his parents were gone for the weekend, he invited the great Charlie Parker to his house in La Canada after a show. (“Did you give him something to eat?” his mother asked when told of the visit.) This was not the behavior of your typical San Gabriel Valley teenager; it was hard even to get word of the jazz scene out there. The Los Angeles Times and other mainstream papers chronicled Central sporadically or not at all, and the black papers were little better. When the Times turned its attention to Central, it often described the district’s happenings with both enthusiasm and condescension.

“It was a kind of daring thing to do that nobody else was doing,” Claxton recalls. “We were really out of place.” The only other whites he saw were musicians and movie stars, and his friends knew little about his nocturnal excursions. “We didn’t really brag about it,” he says. “It was our own private, little world.”

Thanks to a neighborhood friend who had introduced him to photography, Claxton’s visits to hear Dexter Gordon, Billy Strayhorn, Slim Gaillard, and Benny Carter on Central often became impromptu photo sessions. “I liked the way the musicians looked, their body language; the instruments were beautiful, the way they caught the light ... I thought it was a great combination of sound and visuals.”

Not long after Claxton began attending, though, Central started to fade. According to Central Avenue Sounds, last year’s informative oral history, the loss of defense jobs after World War II put much of the audience out of work; police harassed and arrested interracial couples and white women; and R&B supplanted jazz as the music of choice for black Angelenos. As with Harlem, one reason for Central’s demise was a relaxing of the strict segregation and redlining that had made Central a high concentration black neighborhood; many blacks started settling along Western or Crenshaw.

But as Central’s audience dispersed with the dawn of the 1950s, a new chapter of L.A. jazz began, one that resembled Central only vaguely. Made up mostly of white musicians too excited by the flashes of bebop and modernism to remain in big bands, this gang collected around clubs like the Haig, a bungalow near Wilshire’s Ambassador Hotel, and the Lighthouse Café, a boisterous, Polynesian-decorated place not far from the Hermosa Beach surf. Though these clubs were mostly white, Claxton often saw the black celebrities of the day—Lena Home, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Cab Calloway—checking out the new sound.

While Central’s musicians were dedicated to modernity—which by the late‘40s meant manic, harmonically knotty, small-group bebop—many of these white players were more melodic, emulating the pleading tones and smooth lines of tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Some players came out of the New Orleans revival that had thrived among white Angelenos during Central’s heyday. Others had been involved in a strange experiment led by an East Coaster: Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and alto saxist Lee Konitz had taken part in Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool chamber jazz sessions in 1949, in which French horns, tubas, and saxophones strove for a kind of smooth, introspective pan-European harmony. Still others, like trumpeter Chet Baker, an Okie who had recently gone AWOL from the army and settled in the South Bay, had played with Charlie Parker, the greatest of all modernists, during Bird’s rare West Coast appearance.

And it was this world that Bill Claxton walked into one night in 1952, now a kid striving to close out a degree at UCLA. Claxton had tried all kinds of things that hadn’t worked out. He’d spent a summer working in a Kodak lab, an experience he compares to Charlie Chaplin struggling with the conveyor belt in Modern Times. His academic work in psychology was supposed to lead him to the source of creativity and the artistic temperament, but never did he think he’d ever make a living as a photographer.

Claxton went to hear Mulligan’s controversial “piano-less quartet” and got the musician’s permission to photograph. Claxton was drawn to this group for the same reasons as many Southland music fans: By dropping the piano out of the band, Mulligan had created a new kind of harmonic freedom, and his soulful, almost drowsy baritone playing made him the instrument’s undisputed leader. While he was shooting, a young man named Richard Bock approached him and said he’d just started a new record company called Pacific Jazz. Bock wanted to know if he could use Claxton’s photos for an album cover. The label had at this point released exactly zero records.

As Claxton developed his prints a day or two later, it was Mulligan’s trumpeter, Chet Baker, that kept drawing his eye. Face to face, Baker had seemed distinctive looking but comical, too: “A ‘50s pompadour, pale white skin, a tooth missing—he looked like an angelic prizefighter. A sweet, pretty, rough guy.” In pictures, though, he had a power over the camera that Claxton couldn’t have predicted on first meeting. Baker, he says, taught him what the word “photogenic” really meant.

“As a photographer I meet a lot of good looking guys, and great-looking girls, and take pictures of them. And the pictures are not very good. It has nothing to do with how beautiful you are. A lot of it has to do with how you project emotionally. I know it sounds mysterious, but it’s true.”

The recording of that show was soon put together as a Pacific Jazz record called The Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Baker and Mulligan’s melodic, open, airy, delicately arranged sound—miles away from the bluesy, often thunderous bebop that was thriving in New York—helped define an emerging West Coast sound, and Pacific Jazz soon became synonymous with it. And since this batch of musicians toured less frequently than their New York peers—some of the best West Coast players never even graced New York’s clubs during cool’s heyday—and since jazz rarely got much exposure on television, it was Claxton’s photos that spread the word to the rest of the country. As Ted Gioia puts it, “He did as much as the musicians to create the image of West Coast jazz. “

Among other things, it was a jazz world that drew far less critical attention

and praise than the East Coast’s and, perhaps because of this, was less self-serious. It was a world in which, as Claxton delights in pointing out, “even the junkies were into health food.” So instead of entombing them in the studio, Claxton put players in boats, on beaches, on streets, on cable cars. He wondered, “’Wouldn’t it be great to see musicians in totally different, incongruous settings? And the musicians loved it ... I shot them up in trees, in the backs of convertibles.”

“His pictures are just like the sounds of cool,” says author Gavin. “The music is about order, but also about beauty; soft sounds and round comers, and Bill’s aesthetic is all about people looking cool and beautiful.”

The clubs ‘in those days were filled with great, innovative players, among them horn player Jimmy Giuffre, pianist Hampton Hawes, drummer Shelly Manne. To the general public, the best known was Baker, who was as popular for his winsome singing voice as his crisp, detached trumpet playing. Though Claxton has created the image by which the world knows the trumpeter, he feels little warmth for the man himself, judging him “a tough person to get along with.” Though his most distinguishing characteristic was his sullen, passive withdrawal, Baker was also, according to Claxton, “absolutely spoiled rotten. He was the only child of poor dust-bowl parents, but they gave him everything he wanted.” The two would sometimes, in Claxton’s phrase, “smoke grass” and talk records. Both loved fast cars; Claxton fancied sports cars, Baker went for Lincolns and Cadillacs.

“I think our closest bond was that we both liked pretty songs, and I introduced him to a lot of standards by Rogers and Hart or Gershwin that he didn’t know.” Baker, of course, was hungry for this kind of cultural education; his Okie parents had offered him little exposure to the genteel, necktie-wearing world of Tin Pan Alley pop. (“Oklahoma is a cultural wasteland,” Baker recounted in a 1988 interview. “I mean those people listen to the most terrible kind of music in the world—hillbilly, rockabilly, and all that crap.”) Among the tunes to which Claxton introduced the trumpeter was “Deep in a Dream,” which a wrinkled Baker recites to the camera in the aptly titled documentary Let’s Get Lost.

“With guys,” Claxton says, “his relationships were pretty passive—except when he turned around to do exactly what he wanted.”

Whatever his personality flaws, Baker’s playing skills—when he wasn’t strung out and had all his teeth—are rarely disputed. Yet despite such talented players, the new West Coast cool was greeted with condescension from critics, most of them headquartered then, as now, in New York or Chicago. New York jazz writers often characterized the scene as driven by gimmicks, not bluesy enough, not black enough (ironic, since nearly all these critics were white), a conspiracy of Hollywood marketing, and generally too soft or “cool.” The historian Joe Goldberg, for instance, in his otherwise exemplary Jazz Masters of the Fifties refers to “the West Coast jazz fiasco” and assumes the reader shares his assessment of the music’s “sterility.” But it may have been the success of Claxton’s covers in creating the music’s image that caused West Coast jazz to be taken less seriously.

“On the basis of record covers, one might wonder whether these musicians ever saw the inside of a studio,” Gioia writes in West Coast Jazz. “If the New York critics wanted to prove that West Coast jazz was all image and no substance, certainly these flighty jackets played right into their hands.”

But while Claxton’s shots documented a life of ease and were often marked by a sense of humor, he rarely delved into the truly cheesy side of cool jazz. He maintained a sophisticated and playful relationship to his subject matter—which was really the mystique of West Coast jazz itself.

“He knew when to parody it, when to play it up, when to play it down,” Gioia says, speaking specifically about a shot in which The Lighthouse All-Stars riff improbably on the Hermosa Beach strand. “When [his shooting] does become hokey, it does so consciously, and there’s an element of selfparody.”

Claxton has shot a few silly or cleverly sexy covers—the Art Pepper/Chet Baker collaboration Playboys, for instance, on which a busty, topless blonde wears puppets on her fists and holds her arms crossed at chest level, or the Jazz West Coast Vol. 3 jacket, which shows a deep-sea diver emerging from the ocean with a trident in one hand a trumpet in the other. But he’s not responsible for the most egregious examples of the form, like the Art Pepper and Friends Surf Ride LP, which shows a shapely, bikiniclad babe balancing atop a surfboard. Even when Claxton did shoot cheesecake,, he had the integrity to credit it to his imaginary alter ego Lou McGilla.

And corny iconography aside, California jazz didn’t deserve the smugness it was greeted with from East Coast critics, who were so unrelenting on their assaults on cool or West Coast jazz that even the musicians who’d helped forge the style were afraid of the label. Sometime Californian Stan Getz, for instance, made a record called East of the Sun, which made his alliances clear. In researching West Coast Jazz, Gioia found that the stigma still cut, even 40 years later. “In interviews for this book,” he writes in the preface, “any inquiry about ‘West Coast jazz’ inevitably resulted in a perceptible rise in tension in the interviewee, followed by vehement denials of any connection with that music, almost to the point of pulling out birth certificates to show out-of-state origins.”

Consider the dissing an earlier and more genteel version of later rivalries in hiphop. But those who looked down their noses at this music missed some of the most fluent and probing sounds of the decade. And some musicians are even willing to admit as much.

“When I moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1957, I quickly realized the East Coast was extremely conservative,” woodwind player Paul Horn wrote in his autobiography. “California was wide open—an experimental, innovative and exceptionally creative environment. People felt free to try new ideas, anything at all. If it was new and interesting, they went for it.”

Good, bad, or ugly, the heyday of cool jazz didn’t outlast the decade. “It seemed like the scene was folding up,” Claxton says. “What they seemed to be doing, from my point of view, was refining the bop era,” and making “a really cerebral kind of music ... Nothing really new was happening.”

What was happening—free jazz, ushered in by saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s recordings with Don Cherry—was occurring elsewhere. Coleman had spent most of the ‘50s in L.A. as an obscure and at times controversial presence, and made his first recordings in the city. But by the time he asked Claxton to shoot the cover for the epochal The Shape of Jazz to Come, he was on his way to New York, where his reputation took off with the dawning of the 1960s. Indeed, many of the important and innovative black players of the era—Coleman, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus—had left California for New York to build national reputations. The best players of the cool scene, instead of leaving the coast, went into internal exile, losing themselves in drugs and crime. Perhaps even worse, some were lost in the no man's land of faceless film and TV studio work. As for Claxton, he toured New Orleans and the Deep South, then left for New York himself.

[In 2005, Taschen published a massive collection of Clax’s photographs from this trip in JazzLife which is also available in a paperback format].

Once in New York, Claxton slowly moved away from jazz, and then photography itself He made a second career as a fashion photographer for German designer Rudi Gernreich. (Claxton’s best-known photo, oddly enough, is not of a jazz player but of Modera model Peggy Moffitt—now the photographer’s wife—in Gernreich’s once scandalous “Topless Swimsuit,” from 1964.) He would eventually return to Los Angeles, and—though he has to be coaxed into such curmudgeonly moments—has since been frustrated with the slow, downhill slide of the city he helped mythologize ‘in the 1950s.

“The taste—the restaurants, the art, the way people dress. I think it’s really ugly,” he says, apologizing for his bitterness. “And the personalities seem to be really aggressive.”

Claxton got a front row seat to L.A.’s decline, in fact, when he and his wife returned to L.A. in 1969 to check on the hillside bungalow they’d bought a few years before. Claxton and Moffitt arrived at the airport just as the corpses at Sharon Tate’s mansion were being discovered.

“And it was like one of those corny scenes in a movie where you turn on the radio and it says, ‘and more about the murders in Benedict Canyon.’ “ Unfazed, they moved back permanently in 1971, and a son arrived in ‘73. “After living in New York and Paris and London, we couldn’t stand living here. Things moved so slowly, you could only make one appointment a day, and you spent all your time in your car.”

By the early 1970s, Claxton had little to do with jazz, less to do with jazz photography. The photographer found work documenting the making of Hollywood films. He would direct commercials, “lots of terrible sitcoms,” and episodes of the ‘70s show Love American Style. As far as jazz was concerned, there was little left to chronicle, especially in L.A.; as Gioia jokes, nearly all of the West Coast players went to the studios, to prison, or to New York. The players who’d once seemed the most promising as musicians and the most beautiful as photography subjects seemed the hardest hit: In 1968, Chet Baker’s teeth had been knocked out by a vengeful drug dealer; by the ‘70s, the wrinkled, often strung-out trumpeter was pumping gas.

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper—whose dashing looks, romantic temperament, and bouts of meanness were similar to Baker’s—went through a similar downward spiral. In the ‘50s, Pepper had managed to move in and out of prison and heroin convictions with his playing unblemished, cutting historic recording sessions during breaks from San Quentin. Nothing seemed to break his stride. Back then, Claxton was amazed when he was discussing prison with Pepper, and the saxophonist described his life there with nostalgia and fondness. “He said, ‘It was a small, confined world, and everything was provided for me. Anything I wanted I got.’ “ And Pepper, the leading white interpreter of what was considered a black man’s art, was a hero to many of the black prisoners.

Years later, though, with race relations in the country far different, and an acrid racism coloring Pepper’s worldview, Claxton bumped into Pepper again, and asked him if he still enjoyed Quentin. Now seeming worn with the years and weary from maintaining his tightrope dance, Pepper “looked at me like I was crazy ... He said, ‘The whole world has changed. They don’t know my records. They don’t know who I am.’ He had no reputation in prison.” It didn’t help that Pepper had recorded only sporadically since his great run in the ‘50s. “What had happened,” says Claxton, “was that the whole world had passed him by.” A few years later, Pepper was considering a career in bookkeeping. (He eventually cleaned up and regained his virtuosity.)

It was during the ‘70s, a time so hard on many of his old peers, that Claxton—tired of working on crummy TV shows—decided to get back to what made him. “I just cooled it, stayed at home and played with my son, and thought about photography for a while, which is really where my roots were.” He eventually returned to photography, but not to jazz. Like much of the music’s former audience, he was turned off by where jazz was going—or not going. “Charlie Parker had changed the sound of jazz so much that you couldn’t find a saxophone player who didn’t play like him,” Claxton says with a bitterness that’s uncharacteristic. “That was boring to me the ‘70s.”

By the ‘80s, when Claxton got back into shooting musicians after two decades in movies, fashion, and photojournalism, much had changed. First, there was a blow to Claxton’s creativity. It’s not just Indie rockers and old-school audiophiles who lament the shift from vinyl to compact disc. CDs literally shrunk the space Claxton had to work with. He describes the shift with a characteristic easygoing demeanor—the words “my canvas has been diminished” and a self-deprecating smile—but one look at the typical new jazz, rock, or pop cover and it’s clear how the record cover has declined as a forum for good shooting.

Even worse, shooting a musician had grown to include countless faxes and meetings and a glut of lawyers, art directors, accountants, agents, and various record company weasels.

“I think it was due to the rock guys that made such a huge amount of money,” he says. “There were so many people you had to go through before shooting the picture. They became enormous productions. I say it’s so many people just justifying their jobs. It became hard for me to recreate the spontaneity I used to have—now the person is rolled out onto the stage looking too perfect. And these people standing in the background saying, ‘Can I fix your hair, can I change your shirt?’ “

Lost, too, was Claxton’s ability to spend time with a musician before shooting, to establish his essential rapport. The only time he can work at the same creative level as the old days, he says, is with an unknown or up-and-coming artist. He saw just how deadening the once pleasing process had become while shooting an album for Bruce Springsteen in the early ‘90s. After dealing with “every legal hanger-oner, every record company hanger-oner—it just drove you nuts,” he showed up for the shoot in Hollywood.

“I had to go through two security clearances and a lawyer,” he recalls. “I had to sign an agreement saying I wouldn’t shoot him in the red jacket, only in the blue jacket, something like that.” After a hard day of shooting, Claxton felt good about several “moody, emotional, candid” shots. But the Boss’ lady friend had done a few Polaroid’s and Springsteen chose to use them instead.

Claxton knows the historical reason for this shift but still finds it frustrating. Much of it, he says, goes back to Sinatra, who broke famously with Capitol Records in the early ‘60s, forming Reprise and launching the era of musician-run labels. Musicians began to talk about “complete creative control.” While the phrase sounds high-minded, what it often really means, Claxton says, is that “his three-year-old may pick the cover.”

Claxton’s response, he says, is to shoot what he thinks is good, keep the best of the shots for himself, and let the labels and execs take what they want. “I try to shoot for myself, to trust my own visual instincts,” Claxton says. “So I got some great pictures, and I don’t care if they don’t use them.”

Though he’s associated with the cool school, Claxton’s body of work goes beyond lighthearted shots of California boys in Hawaiian shirts. His most evocative photos peek into a musician’s soul: A photograph of Baker staring down into a piano—a shot that captures his reflection in the instrument’s polished top—conveys the trumpeter’s sullen beauty as well as his unrelieved narcissism. Other shots hint at the distinctive music of a player or singer. Claxton shows hard-bop pianist Horace Silver, muscles tensed, delighting in his own playing in a way that makes his own rhythmically adroit musicianship almost audible.

An overhead closeup of Dizzy Gillespie blowing furiously into his famously bent trumpet reminds us of the slashing angles, wild curves, and cramped musical space that characterize Dizzy’s breed of bebop.

Sometimes Claxton’s photos reveal more than their subjects intended, like his shot of Baker with his girlfriend Lili, in Hollywood in 1955. With Lili engaging the camera in a protective, maternal gaze and Baker averting his eyes boyishly, it deepens our understanding of the trumpeter’s almost pathetic dependence on women to help him through a reckless life.

Claxton’s tools were unusual. He often used a Rolleiflex, a large-format camera that captures more information than a normal 35 mm, and has both a square field the shape of a record jacket—and a very quiet shutter, which doesn’t interrupt a musician’s playing. And after he met Richard Avedon during a New York trip in the late ‘40s, Claxton also relied on natural light whenever possible. But as sophisticated as Claxton’s artistry, much of his success comes from such simple virtues as the power of persuasion. When trying to get Thelonious Monk to pose on a cable car for the 1959 Alone in San Francisco session, Claxton had to convince the notoriously individualistic pianist that the shot wouldn’t look corny.

“I don’t want to have some postcard record cover,” he recalls Monk saying. Claxton told Monk that he knew a bar in North Beach that served “champagne cocktails.” (“I didn’t even know what they were,” admits Claxton. “It sounded exotic.”)

The two ducked into the first bar they came to in North Beach, and after a few champagne cocktails, Monk was happy to pose wherever Claxton wanted. On the way back from the bar, they passed an abandoned Elk’s Lodge with antique chandeliers and a battered old piano; Claxton got a shot of Monk with both.

Many of Claxton’s most legendary shots were taken in this sort of casual, spontaneous manner. His celebrated cover for Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West LP plays on the incongruity of Rollins as the ultimate New Yorker, adrift in the sunbaked West. Accordmig to Claxton, the creative negotiations with Rollins, arguably the leading jazz saxophonist at the time, were slightly less complicated than deciding where to stop for lunch: “Sonny said, ‘I’ve never been to the West before, so let’s do something Western.’ And I said, ‘Do you want to wear a cowboy hat?’ So I went to a place called Western Costumers on Melrose, and rented him a 10-gallon hat and a holster and gun, and a steer’s skull.” The ensuing cover shows Rollins in the Mohave desert, grinning sardonically and leaning back like a gunslinger.

Claxton tries to see a player perform so he can “listen with his eyes”—and to see how a player moves, gestures, catches the light.[Emphasis mine.]

“My technique is no secret—I try to spend as much time as possible with a person before I shoot them. I usually get to know their fears. Some people are afraid of being photographed.” It’s also important to allow people to get accustomed to his physical presence. “I’m such an awful tall guy that if they didn’t get used to me I’d be a terrible annoyance. I kind of blend into the background. They think I’m another mike stand.”

Unlike a lot of photographers, says veteran cool jazz saxophonist Bud Shank, Claxton understands musicians and their rhythms. “What we’re doing takes enormous concentration, and anything that breaks that concentration is bad.” Shank and Claxton’s connection goes back to the 1950s, when both drove Jaguars; the former still uses Claxton as his photographer whenever possible, including the shots for a recent record on a Japanese label. “These Japanese photographers were all over the place—they made me nervous! They didn’t know when to shoot and when to stay away. But I’m very relaxed around Claxton. You don’t even know he’s there—and the guy’s six-foot-six.”

“Bill has a real flair for putting people at ease,” says Gavin. “You can tell that when you sit with him for five minutes.”

“I got a reputation for taking really difficult people and getting along with them,” Claxton says. “Nobody wanted to shoot Sinatra because he was a headache. Nobody wanted to shoot Streisand because she was a headache. People trust me, because they know I won’t do them in. I think it was because of my personality. Some people said it was too sweet or too gentle.” He laughs. “But for me it works.”

Perhaps now more than ever. Those who lived in L.A. in the ‘50s often feel a powerful nostalgia for a less crowded, less commercial, less self-conscious city. Jazz fans who remember the music’s great era often have a similar difficulty regarding the present with the same degree of fondness as the past. Perhaps because Claxton’s style represents a high point from which jazz photography has fallen, and because even those not young enough to remember the time and place respond to its crisp, simple style, Claxton has more work than he can handle these days. (“I’m sort of enjoying a renaissance in the last couple years,” he says.) He’s begun to shoot jazz again, too. His upcoming book of jazz photographs falls off steeply at 1960, but picks up in the last few years with young players like Jacky Terrasson and Stephen Scott.

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BILL EVANS - SOME OTHER TIME: THE LOST SESSION FROM THE BLACK FOREST

September 27, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Thomas "Fats" Waller - 1904-1943 [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: William Claxton: Eye on Cool [From the Archives]

40-page CD booklet features interviews with Bill Evans Trio members Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette and essays by celebrated author and critic Marc Myers, producer Zev Feldman and MPS Studios engineer and studio manager and German jazz authority Friedhelm Schulz, along with extraordinary rare and previously unpublished photographs by David Redfern, Giuseppe Pino, Jan Persson and Hans Harzheim, including two images by German Hasenfratz taken at the June 20, 1968 session.

These recordings were only recently discovered in the Brunner-Schwer family archives.

On April 22, 2016 Resonance Records released a deluxe two-CD set a of Bill Evans Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest, a previously unknown and extremely rare studio album by the Bill Evans Trio recorded on June 20, 1968 by legendary German jazz producers Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer and Joachim-Ernst Berendt.

Zev Feldman of Resonance Records may just be the world's greatest jazz detective. He is quickly developing a reputation as the Indiana Jones of jazz. His uncanny ability to unearth hidden treasures recordings no one has heard; indeed, recordings that no one imagined existed is unmatched today. Once again, Feldman's dogged determination in the pursuit of great jazz recordings combined with label head George Klabin's unstinting support and guidance has borne fruit in the discovery and release of this remarkable new Bill Evans album, Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest.

Resonance Records is thrilled to bring this important addition to Bill Evans's legacy to the world, a recording that constitutes the only extant studio recording of the Bill Evans Trio in the iteration that featured drummer Jack DeJohnette together with bassist Eddie Gomez, a version of Evans's trio that only existed for six months in 1968.

Feldman discovered this previously unknown recording by chance. In April, 2013 in Bremen, Germany at the JazzAhead trade conference, he happened to meet a son of late great German jazz producer, Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer (familiarly known as HGBS), the founder of the legendary jazz label, MPS. While comparing notes with the younger Mr. Brunner-Schwer, Feldman discovered that HGBS's family had in its archive an unreleased studio album by the Bill Evans Trio featuring Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette.

After hearing one track on a car stereo in the parking lot outside the convention hall, Feldman was bound and determined to acquire the album for Resonance. He was convinced the world had to hear this music, which represents an under-documented chapter in Bill Evans's creative journey. Bill Evans studio albums are rare in themselves and this particular make-up of the Evans trio, which was only together for six months, had never recorded in the studio; the only recording of this particular group that's been available is a live concert recording made at the Montreux Jazz Festival five days earlier that was released on Verve.

This album sat virtually unnoticed for nearly fifty years in part because of the way it came into existence in the first place. It had been recorded on the spur of the moment. Noted German Jazz producer and writer Joachim-Ernst Berendt had heard the Evans Trio's performance at the Montreux Festival and was so impressed, he urged both HGBS and Bill Evans's manager, Helen Keane, to bring the trio to HGBS's MPS studio in Villingen in the Black Forest to record between tour stops during June of 1968. The hastily thrown-together recording agreement provided that no release could be made without certain approvals. After all, Bill Evans was under contract to another label. As time passed, contractually, no one seemed to have picked up the ball, so nothing happened. So the tapes sat. And they sat out-of-sight, out-of-mind in an archive in the Black Forest, a location far from Bill Evans' and Helen Keane's normal ambit. After some years with the tapes all but forgotten, the principals all died. Evans, Helen Keane and Berendt were all gone by 2000, and HGBS passed away in 2004. By then, the album had become, in effect, a forgotten historical relic.

Fast forward to 2013 and enter premier jazz detective Zev Feldman, who never loses an opportunity to explore what unknown recordings may exist when he meets someone with a connection to jazz. He met a member of the Brunner-Schwer family and with a little digging and a lot of determination, he found himself on the trail of another historically significant unknown jazz recording begging to be released.

It wasn't a simple matter to bring this music to the public, but once Feldman knew this album existed, he was unflagging in his determination to make it happen. When he finally heard the entire album, he describes the experience as revelatory: "It blew my mind to hear it. THIS was why George [Klabin] sent me half way around the world to Germany: to search out rare recordings like THIS." After several trips to Europe to shepherd the project forward, in 2015, deals were finally struck with all the necessary parties and Resonance was able to move forward with the release.

Bill Evans is one of the most influential pianists in the history of jazz. In his essay for the album package, journalist, author and jazz historian Marc Myers describes Evans's career as comprising four distinct periods or stylistic phases. The first of these Myers describes as Evans's "jazz apprentice years," a period that extended from 1953 to 1961, during which time, he performed often as a sideman, but also began recording as a leader. The second period, which Myers styles Evans's "swinging romantic" period spanned from 1961 through 1966, where he began to come into his own as a force in jazz. This was followed by a period Myers calls Evans's "percussive poet" phase, which Myers maintains was propelled by the introduction of bassist Eddie Gomez into Evans's musical milieu. The percussive poet period lasted until 1978. Myers refers to Evans's artistic phase during the last four years of his life from 1978 to 1982 as his "lost soul" years.

This album captures Bill Evans at an important, yet relatively under-recorded time in his career. Myers describes it as an important document that sheds light on Evanss transition from swinging romantic to percussive poet.

And although Eddie Gomez was to remain a colleague of Bill Evans's for many years and a collaborator with him on numerous recordings, because of the discovery of this album featuring the Evans trio with the addition of Jack DeJohnette, Myers believes that there is now a much more solid basis for considering this brief association as an important chapter in the Evans saga. Myers writes:

The material also brings into relief Evans’ all-too-brief encounter with Mr. DeJohnette, a member of Evans's trio for just six months in 1968. During that time, his tender, kinetic drumming style caught Evans’ ear, educating him on the interplay possible when percussive figures are feathery and challenging.

[Up until now, the only commercially available recordings of Evans and DeJohnette have been scarce]; hardly enough to evaluate Mr. DeJohnette's contribution to the trio or his influence.

With the addition of The Lost Session From the Black Forest, we have a more complete picture of Mr. DeJohnettes impact. During the musical discourse between Mr. DeJohnette and Evans, we hear clearly the sound that Evans wanted on drums going forward. In short, Mr. DeJohnette's swarm of gentle, abstract snare figures and pesky cymbal rustlings created a dramatic and provocative backdrop without encroaching on Evanss lyrical narrative.

In his essay included in the album package, Friedhelm Schulz, the current managing director of HGBS Studios, makes some observations regarding the significance of Bill Evans recording in MPS's Villingen studio with HGBS. Schulz writes:

In 1968 Bill Evans already had the delicate, sophisticated, searching approach that was his trademark and which established his reputation as an exceptional pianist and a star on the piano jazz horizon. No pianist before him had such expressive power and such varied moods and feelings as Evans. Perfectly and appropriately complementing his sensitivity were bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Now Evans was in the Black Forest, where beginning in the early 60s, Oscar Peterson played regularly in the living room of producer Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, a man who had a reputation for innovative recording techniques. Even Duke Ellington had come there and was persuaded to record a spontaneous session in 1965 in the same living room.

Bill Evans Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest, was produced by Zev Feldman along with executive producer George Klabin. Sound restoration is by Fran Gala and Klabin. The exceptional package was designed by Burton Yount.

On behalf of the Resonance Records family, Producer Zev Feldman adds, "We at Resonance are thrilled to be able to share this important new document with the world, one that sheds light on a previously little-known phase in Bill Evans's career. That it was recorded at the historic MPS studio by the great Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer makes it all the more special for me, because I've been a big fan of MPS and HGBS for as long as I've been collecting records. And I want to thank everyone who made it happen the Bill Evans Estate, the Brunner-Schwer family, Friedhelm Schulz, Eddie Gomez, Jack DeJohnette, Marc Myers, all the photographers and their representatives, Burton Yount, everyone at Universal Music Group and JazzInstitut Darmstadt, everyone at Resonance Records who helped shape this release, and finally above all, I want to thank George Klabin who made it all possible."

The most recent Bill Evans release from Resonance, 2012's Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top of the Gate, (CD: HCD-2012; LP: HLP-9012) has sold over 30,000 copies worldwide.

TRACK LISTING

Disc One:

You Go To My Head (4:58)
Very Early (5:12)
What Kind of Fool Am I? (5:21)
Ill Remember April (4:08)
My Funny Valentine (6:58)
Baubles, Bangles & Beads [Duo] (4:38)
Turn Out The Stars (4:56)
It Could Happen To You (3:58)
In A Sentimental Mood (4:18)
These Foolish Things (4:14)
Some Other Time (5:28)

Disc Two:

Youre Gonna Hear From Me (3:32)
Walkin Up (4:10)
Baubles, Bangles & Beads [Trio] (4:51)
Its Alright With Me [Incomplete] (3:45)
What Kind Of Fool Am I? (2:51)
How About You (3:59)
On Green Dolphin Street (4:33)
Wonder Why (4:13)
Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) (3:49)
Youre Gonna Hear From Me [Alternate Take] (3:24)

↧

Thomas "Fats" Waller - 1904-1943 [From the Archives]

September 28, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Diana Krall: The Price of Making It [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: BILL EVANS - SOME OTHER TIME: THE LOST SESSION FROM THE BLACK FOREST

"My father [Fats Waller] had a unique system to reward inventiveness in improvisation. Pop kept two bottles of gin on a table during the rehearsals. One bottle was for himself... The other bottle was the 'encourager,' as he called it. When one of the band excelled in an improvisational section, Dad would stop the rehearsal, pour him a healthy shot of gin, and the two of them would toast each other."

- Maurice Waller

“Both Fats Waller and his principal tutor, James P. Johnson, lived lives of aching frustration. Johnson ached openly because he could find no audience for his serious compositions, but Waller's desire to find acceptance as a serious musician was buried under a heavy coating of pervasive geniality. And while Johnson plodded steadily downhill in puzzled despair, Waller's blithely ironical attitude carried him up and up and up in the material world — eventually to a level that even his enormous energy could not cope with.

He was one of the most massively talented men who has ever turned up in the world of popular music — an inimitable entertainer whose charm has, if anything, grown in the nostalgic decade and a half since his death; the writer of some of the great evergreen songs in the popular repertoire ("Honeysuckle Rose,""Ain't Misbehavin'"); a jazz pianist whose playing was a landmark in the development of that instrument and whose influence on pre-bop pianists was surpassed only by that of Earl Hines; and a section man who could swing an entire band as no one else could.

All of these gifts were his and yet, like the inevitable clown who wants to play Hamlet, he had a consuming desire to bring to the public his love of classical music and of the organ. His need to offer this gift and have it accepted was almost childlike and, childlike, the hurt when it was rejected was deep and long.”

- John S. Wilson, Jazz author and critic, New York Times

I never knew what to make of Fats Waller. His music happened way before my time and I could not seem to reconcile the views some held of him of him as little more than a musical buffoon with those that labeled him a keyboard stylist and composer of the first order.

In attempting to make up my own mind about his music, part of the problem was that most of what I had access to was derivative, in other words, what other Jazz musicians had to say on Fats’ Ain’t Misbehavin’, Honeysuckle Rose [upon which Charlie Parker’s Scrapple from the Apple is based], Squeeze Me, The Jitterbug Waltz and Black and Blue.

It really wasn’t until the reissue mania associated with the advent of the compact disc in the 1980’s that I had the opportunity to sit down and listen to the collected works of Fats which helped me finally understand what the fuss had been all about concerning his playing and his music.

One of the great joys of recorded Jazz is being able to go back in time and listen to the music of the Jazzmasters of yesteryear.

This synopsis of the career of Thomas “Fats” Waller from The Chronicle of Jazz reveals his contribution to Jazz as well as the factors that brought about his early demise; characteristics of personality and behavior that also felled many, other Jazz musicians over the years.

THE HARMFUL LTTLE ARMFUL

“Fats Waller's death in December 1943, accelerated by his habitual overindulgence, was a worldly exit fully in keeping with his flamboyant lifestyle. His clowning and infectious capers disguised a top-ranking musical genius whose importance lay in two distinct areas: the development of the STRIDE style of piano playing to its limits of virtuosity, and the promotion of jazz as a medium for refined popular entertainment.

Waller's early keyboard training was as a church organist, an experience that enabled him as a teenager to gain employment playing in the cinemas and theaters of New York. (In later life he shocked the musical establishment by playing jazz on the organ of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.) His skills as a pianist were fostered by James P. Johnson, whose own piano concerto Yamekraw Waller performed at Carnegie Hall in 1928. Waller's astonishing keyboard facility and compositional fluency resulted in a steady succession of fine works for solo piano characterized by a combination of dazzling virtuosity and harmonic ingenuity, including Smashing Thirds, Alligator Crawl, and Handful of Keys. Among his admirers was Al Capone, who allegedly had Waller kidnapped at gunpoint in

Chicago in the mid-1920s, just to get him to play at the gangster's birthday party.

Waller's incomparable aptitude for songwriting was developed in collaboration with lyricist Andy Razaf. Many of their numerous hits began life in stage shows, including Ain't Misbehavin. popularized by the vocal talents of Louis Armstrong, on whose gravelly tone Waller partly modeled his own singing voice.The peak of Waller's achievements came after 1934 in a series of recordings on the Victor label, made with a versatile combo billed as "Fats Waller and His Rhythm." In this context he found full expression for his remarkable comic talents, interpreting his own songs with infectious wit and a strong dose of satire. Among the most celebrated numbers in his vast repertoire was Honeysuckle Rose, which became an indispensable standard for later jazz musicians, not only in its original form, but as a harmonic skeleton on which other compositions were based.

As a keyboard technician, Waller formed an essential link between the first generation of STRIDE performers and the innovative work of later pianists such as Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk.”

The broader view of Fats’ importance to Jazz is contained in the following excerpts from Gary Giddins’ Vision of Jazz: The First Century while a deeper examination of his historical significance can be had through a reading of the selections from Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz that follow it.

FATS WALLER (COMEDY TONIGHT) - Gary Giddins

“Fats Waller, one of the most enduringly popular figures in American music, is a state of mind. Jazz has always claimed him (what idiom wouldn't claim him?) and yet he spent most of his abbreviated career cavorting through, and contributing to, the Tin Pan Alley canon—applying a determined jazz accent, perhaps, but with the sui generis detachment of a free-floating institution. He wasn't witty, if that word is taken to imply a kind of humor too subtle to engender belly laughs— he was funny. He was also bigger than life, Rabelaisian in intake, energy, and output. His greatest joy was playing Bach on the organ, but he buttered his bread as a clown, complete with a mask as fixed as that of Bert Williams or Spike Jones. It consisted of a rakishly tilted derby, one size too small, an Edwardian mustache that fringed his upper lip, eyebrows as thick as paint and pliable as curtains, flirtatious eyes, a mouth alternately pursed or widened in a dimpled smile, and immense girth, draped in the expensive suits and ties of a dandy.

A ripe sense of humor is indigenous in jazz. It's a music quick to enlist whatever barbs can best deflate pomposity and artificiality. But jazz has not always been rich in humorists, though one can point to a few in any given period. Those in the postwar era include Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, James Moody, Jon Hendricks, Jaki Byard, Lester Bowie, Willem Breuker, the Jazz Passengers, and Waller's druggy disciple, Harry "The Hipster" Gibson. Humor was more extensive in the '20s and '30s, when Prohibition, the Depression, and the insularity of a new and predominantly black music conspired to create an undercurrent of protective irreverence. Accustomed to a place on the outside looking in, jazz took pleasure in skewering anything that made the mainstream feel safe and smug. It was a time when Fats Waller could count on a laugh by interrupting a particularly suave solo with the rumination, "Hmm, I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight."

Musicians, singers, and other entertainers created countless songs about bathtub gin, drugs, sex (of every variety), and other subjects unsuitable for Judge Hardy and his family, and invented slang—a new kind of signifying—to get it over….

Waller's primary influence was James P. Johnson, the songwriter and grandmaster of the Harlem school of stride piano. The term "stride" is descriptive and refers to the movement of the pianist's left hand, which upholds the rhythm while swinging side to side, from distant bass notes, played on the first and third beats of the measure, to close chords in the octave below middle C, played on the second and fourth beats. Stride was a social music, powerful enough to surmount the din of a rent party and vigorous enough to encourage dancing. It was also a competitive music, a specialist's art. The best players were fine composers, but stride was malleable: they could stride pop songs or classical themes, just as an earlier generation of pianists could rag them. Stride per se never had a large audience. It was bypassed during the boogie-woogie rage and overlooked by all but a few in the years of bop. Of its key practitioners, only Waller achieved real commercial success, and then only because of his wisecracks. Had he done nothing but pursue his art as a pianist, he might be no better known than Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Donald Lambert, Willie Gant, or other Harlem-based keyboard professors, who took themselves pretty seriously. The complaint aimed at Waller is that he didn't take himself seriously enough.”

HARLEM: THE TWO HARLEMS - THOMAS “FATS” WALLER - Ted Gioia

“ … Thomas "Fats" Waller did more than any of these players to bring the Harlem style to the attention of the broader American public. Born in Harlem on May 21, 1904, Waller honed his skills by drawing on the full range of opportunities that New York City could provide. His teachers included two great local institutions, Juilliard and James P. Johnson, as well as much in between. His early performance venues were equally diverse, reflecting Waller's aplomb in a gamut of settings, from the sacred to the profane. He was heard at religious services (where his father, a Baptist lay preacher, presided); at Harlem's Lincoln Theater, where he accompanied silent movies on the pipe organ; at rent parties and cabarets; literally everywhere and anywhere a keyboard might be at hand. His pristine piano tone and and technical assurance could well have distinguished him even in symphonic settings. Yet these considerable skills as an instrumentalist were eventually overshadowed by Waller's other talents. While still in his teens, Waller initiated his career as a songwriter, and over the next two decades he would produce a number of successful positions, many of which remain jazz standards, including "Ain't Misbehavin'," |Honeysuckle Rose,""Black and Blue,""Squeeze Me," and "Jitterbug Waltz" among others. In time, Waller's comedic abilities and engaging stage persona would add further momentum to his career, pointing to a range of further opportunities, only '"me of which he lived to realize.

Waller's reputation in the jazz world rests primarily on his many boisterous performances and recordings—the latter comprising around six hundred releases over a twenty-year period. With unflagging exuberance, Waller talked, sang, joked, exhorted band members, and, almost as an afterthought, played the piano on these memorable sides. At times, they sound more like a party veering out of control than a recording session. Indeed, this was party music for those who had come of age under Prohibition — a time when the most festive soirees were, by definition, illicit. Waller was skilled at playing Falstaff to this generation, hinting at speakeasy enticements with a wink of the eye, a telling quip, or other intimations of immorality. True, a cavalier aesthetic has always dominated jazz, celebrating the eternal in the most intense aspects of the here and now — do we expect anything less from an art form built on improvisation? — but few artists pushed this approach to the extremes that Waller did. And audiences loved it. With a winning, warm demeanor, Waller made them feel like they were honored guests at his party, drinking from the best bottle in the house, privy to the wittiest asides, and seated front-row center to hear the band.

Although Waller's small-combo work captured the public's imagination, his solo keyboard performances, documented on a handful of recordings and player piano rolls, remain his most complete statements as a jazz musician. The quintessential stride piano trademarks — an oom-pah left hand coupled with syncopated right-hand figures — are the building blocks of his playing, but Waller leavens them with a compositional ingenuity that raises them above the work of his peers. Waller's solo work revealed his omnivorous musical appetite, drawing on the blues (hear the majestic slow blues in "Numb Fumblin'"), classical music (evoked, for instance, in the high register figures of "African Ripples"), boogie-woogie (note its ingenious interpolation in the opening phrase of "Alligator Crawl"), as well as the ragtime roots of the music (as in "Handful of Keys" and "Smashing Thirds"). On "Viper's Drag," Waller toys with the contrast between an ominous dark opening theme in a minor key and a swinging major mode section — a device Ellington used frequently during this same period in crafting his own version of Harlem jazz. Combining his talents as a pianist and his sense of compositional balance, Waller's solo works stand out as the most fully developed musical documents of the Harlem stride tradition.

While most other jazz musicians of his generation gravitated toward the big bands in the 1930s and 1940s, Waller cultivated other ambitions. His activities took him anywhere and everywhere the entertainment industry flourished, from the theaters of Broadway to the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Even when he confined his attentions to music, Waller's restless seeking after new challenges was ever apparent. In a half-dozen areas — as pianist, organist, vocalist, songwriter, bandleader, and sideman — he made a mark that is still felt in the worlds of jazz and popular music.”

↧

Diana Krall: The Price of Making It [From the Archives]

September 29, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Erroll Garner - "Ready Take One"

≪ Previous: Thomas "Fats" Waller - 1904-1943 [From the Archives]

“Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success.

Singing is closer to the actor's art than the musician's. The real trick of the ballad is not to make the song happen but to let it happen — to get out of its way.

Someone once wrote in the New Yorker that when Mel Torme sang A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, you heard the singer. When Frank Sinatra sang it you heard the song. When Nat Cole sang it, you heard the nightingale.”

- Gene Lees

The following piece by the eminent Jazz author Gene Lees comes after one on the subject of Diana Krall by Jazz scholar Alyn Shipton that posted to the blog earlier in the week.

My Krall Quest was inspired by a friend hipping me to guitarist Anthony Wilson’s solo that begins at 1:47 into the All Or Nothing At All video taken from the 2001 “Live in Paris” Concert which you’ll find at the conclusion of this piece and which is NOT ON the subsequently released CD. [Mercifully, it is included on the DVD.]

Anthony’s brilliant solo just knocked me out, which led me to a viewing of the entire concert and then to do a bit more research on Diana’s early years in Jazz by way of the Alyn Shipton essay and the below piece by Gene Lees.

Of course, since the Shipton and Lees interviews were conducted in 1999, Diana has gone on to become a huge star and I couldn’t be happier for her because as revealed in these earlier conversations she seems like quite a nice person in addition to being an exceptional musician and vocalist.

The Price of Making It

Jazzletter May, 1999

Gene Lees

“Few things illustrate the tensions in the career of Diana Krall as clearly as the letter from Eve Short and Alyn Shipton's article. Their polarity expresses the conditions of our time.

Alyn Shipton is a musician by training — a bassist — and the jazz critic of The Times of London as well as a broadcaster on jazz for the BBC. He is the author of Groovin' High, the biography of Dizzy Gillespie to which I made reference in the previous three issues. He is also a project editor for the British publisher Cassell, and he is my editor on the newest collection of Jazzletter essays, devoted to composers and arrangers, among them Gil Evans, Robert Farnon, Marion Evans, Mel Powell, Roger Kellaway, Gerry Mulligan, and Kenny Wheeler, due out in November.

Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success. The first press run on her new album with charts by Johnny Mandel was, reportedly, a million copies. She can fill concert halls around the world, and no one in jazz or even quality popular music, to coin an awkward term, has had anything like the promotional and publicity buildup that she has. It is usually reserved for rock stars.

Her blonde image has been on the cover of seemingly every publication except The Watchtower. Her career has been advanced by such mentors as Ray Brown and John Clayton, and she has studied with outstanding teachers, including Mike Renzi, Alan Broadbent, and, most extensively, the late Jimmy Rowles.

You'd think most jazz fans and critics would be delighted. But she has been the subject of a fair amount of attack. That was to be expected, since many admirers of jazz really do not want it to be popular. It would deny them their claim to special taste. Someone fresh comes along, is acclaimed by press and the fan corps, becomes immensely popular, then suddenly is on the anathema list as having "sold out". It happened to Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley (accused or producing "homogenized funk"), George Shearing. It happened, to a degree, to Dizzy Gillespie. To some extent it even happened to Miles Davis.

It's happening now to Diana Krall. And this raises certain significant issues.

Mel Torme said once that "the trouble with this business is that it's all bottom and top. There's no middle." And whatever middle there ever was has been eroding, along with the middle class of America, as showbiz looks for the blockbuster movie hit, the overnight payoff, seventy-million-dollars the opening weekend.

I once said to Gerry Mulligan, "The trouble with people like you and me, Mulligan, is that we want world fame and total anonymity at the same time."

The truth behind that quip is that without a Name, the corporations are not interested in your work, no matter how meritorious. You are not "bankable," as they say in Hollywood. And nowadays, few are the executives who will invest the time and effort and grooming in a talent that new careers really require. RCA producer Joe Rene told me at least thirty years ago that whereas he had once been allowed five years to build the career of a new singer, now the accountants and lawyers invading and controlling the record industry wanted to see the payoff in one year. Singers like Terri Thornton and Ethel Ennis and Marge Dodson and Marilyn Maye, magnificent talents, got dropped. The business was no longer about music, it was about selling pieces of plastic.

The point of my comment to Mulligan is that you accept the necessity of publicity and the building of a Name, but the very process makes you want to run and hide from it.

Until a few months ago, I had never heard Diana Krall. Terry Teachout had been importuning me about her for two years, and friends among the musicians of Toronto had talked about her.

Then one day Johnny Mandel and I went to pay a visit to Red Norvo in a small hospital in Santa Monica. We both sensed, as we left his room after about an hour, that we would never see him again, and we never did.

When we reached the street, Johnny told me he intended to do an album with Diana Krall. He was astounded that I'd never heard her, and had me drive from one Santa Monica record shop to another until he found the album he wanted to be my introduction to her, All for You, subtitled "a dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio." I was charmed by it. I liked her piano work, and I liked her singing. We listened to it all the way back to his home in Malibu.

By coincidence, Jazz Times magazine asked me to write a profile on her. I was about to spend some time in New York, and thought I might interview her there. But she was doing a gig in Philadelphia at that time. I agreed to see her there.

Before I went, however, I read the thick sheaf of articles about her supplied to me by Rogers and Cowan, the public relations agency that is handling Krall. The redundancy of questions in the interviews was notable. Everyone subject to the pressures of a publicity campaign has been through it. Eventually the process becomes numbing. You begin to recite your answers to the predictable questions.

Mandel said that part of his enthusiasm lay in his delight in encountering a singer under fifty who knew the classic song repertoire. But realistically, she's not all that young. She's thirty-three, Ella Fitzgerald first recorded at seventeen, Frank Sinatra recorded All or Nothing at All with Harry James when he was twenty-four and by twenty-seven was the biggest singer the business had ever seen, Nat Cole was twenty-six when he recorded Straighten up and Fly Right, Gerry Mulligan wrote Disc Jockey Jump for Gene Krupa when he was twenty, Victor Feldman was an established professional at twelve, Woody Herman was twenty-two when he became leader of the Band that Plays the Blues, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz before they were thirty, Mendelssohn was seventeen when he launched the Bach revival and died at thirty-eight, while Bizet and Mozart died when they were only a couple of years older than Krall is now. Krall is, in fact, something of a late bloomer, and her work is still evolving.

The question frequently thrown at her — why isn't she writing songs? — is odd. Our best writers have not been singers, Johnny Mercer being the spectacular exception. Al Jolson would seem to be another exception, but in fact his name is on all sorts of songs to which contributed nothing whatsoever: it got there by coercion exerted on the songwriters in a process known in those days as the cut-in. Ella Fitzgerald never wrote a song in her life. Nor did Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Julius LaRosa, or Matt Monro. Frank Sinatra contributed a line or so to a couple of songs, but built his career on the classic repertoire. Frankie Laine wrote the superb lyric to Carl Fischer's We'll Be Together Again. Peggy Lee wrote a few quite excellent songs but nonetheless built her career on the work of others. A few of the good songwriters sing or sang well though not for a living, Alan Bergman, Alan J. Lerner, and Harold Arlen among them, but most sang badly if at all, and to hear some of them demonstrate their wares could be excruciating. Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Rossini, and Bizet didn't sing; or if they did, they didn't do it publicly. Years ago the two professions were considered mutually exclusive. Rock-and-roll changed that perception, and we have now had forty years of double-threat people who can't sing and can't write.

As for Krall's comment about operatic voice, it misses the point. Back when I was singing a lot in Canada, particularly on television, I did a CBC special that starred myself and the great contralto Maureen Forrester. I was reluctant to do it at all, figuring that with her pipes she'd blow me away. In fact she was enormously supportive, because she understood blending. I learned a lot of tricks from her in the downtime between camera shots, and she made a remark I do not forget: "I can sing opera and bounce a note off the back of a concert hall without a microphone, but I cannot sing Cole Porter without one." Maureen began as a band singer, and knew as few opera singers do the difference between the two kinds of voice production.

The late Jeri Southern once told me that each of us has two voices. I disputed this. Then she pointed out to me that Sarah Vaughan had a high, thin, intimidated speaking voice, almost that of a little girl, but a singing instrument of incredible power, darkness, and range. As for herself, Jeri said, she had been classically trained and she belted out a few phrases in an operatic voice sufficient to shatter goblets. She had become a success, she said, when she abandoned that voice and began singing in her speaking voice. It was a revelation to me, and I remembered that my early vocal influences had been Kenny Baker, Nelson Eddy, and John Charles Thomas; then I heard Sinatra. I once could produce a powerful operatic baritone; now I am not in touch with those muscles, and in any event, I don't like the sound. It is not appropriate to songs.

The most important thing operatic singing does have in common with "pop" singing is the breathing, the support.

It's unfortunate that Diana didn't, during her Los Angeles years, take some lessons from Jeri Southern, who taught a lot of people, including some established professionals.

Having read all the material, I went to Philadelphia. Beth Katz, the cordial and effective agent from Rogers and Cowan, had made a dinner reservation for Diana and me. I was there a little early. Diana came in, said hello, a little out of breath from hurrying, sat down, and began the conversation as if we knew each other, which in a sense, through mutual friends, we did. I took an immediate liking to her.

She was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Vancouver Island lies off the coast of British Columbia. Nanaimo (it's a Coast Indian name, pronounced Na-NY-mo) is a small city on the east coast of the island, facing toward the mainland. I went to high school for a year in Victoria, the capital of the province, a few miles south of it; Paul Horn lives in Victoria now. The island is one of the world's great beauty spots, mountainous and covered with Douglas firs, though how long they will last in the face of clear-cutting, the land's ongoing rape by the lumber companies, in both Canada and the United States, is questionable.

She mentioned Wigan, in Lancashire, England. I said immediately, "George Formby."

"How did you know?" she said.

"I not only grew up loving his movies and his records," I said, "but when I was a young reporter, I actually interviewed him." Formby was a Lancashire music-hall man and movie star, who played what he called a banjolele and sang comic songs. Peter Sellers was the ultimate Formby freak. But how did she, at her age, know Formby? Through her father, she said. Her father and mother loved that era of show business, and had recordings of the great radio shows, such as those of Jack Benny. It is not the influence of Jimmy Rowles that made her "look over her shoulder" at the older material. It was her family.

Her father is a chartered public accountant, her mother a teacher with a master's degree in educational administration. Her sister is bylaws officer of Nanaimo. When the two girls were young, they loved swimming and skiing. Diana had a dream of being an astronaut.

"I couldn't have had more supportive parents," Diana said. "The most important thing for me is my family. I'm close to my family. The hardest thing is living far away. I go home once a month."

"That often?" It's a few thousand miles from New York City, where she now lives, to Nanaimo.

"Yeah. I try to."

"And the singing?"

"I sang with my grandmother. I sound like her, a lot like her. My father's mother. She was a real character She was the last person to go to bed Christmas Eve. She'd still be up singing Hard-Hearted Hannah. Knew every tune. I went over to her house every day after school. We'd play the piano and sing. I just sang there, never at home. I didn't think I had a good enough voice. Then I started getting piano-bar gigs. I sang as little as I possibly could. Typical story. You get more gigs if you sing."

A considerable number of women singers began as pianists: Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Meredith d'Ambrosio, Audrey Morris, Jeri Southern, Shirley Horn among them.

She said, "I met Jeff Hamilton when I was nineteen, at the Bud Shank Port Townsend Music Camp. I listened to Rosemary Clooney when I was a kid, and he was on most of her records. And John Clayton, and Monty Alexander. Jeff encouraged me to come to Los Angeles and study, and said they'd make sure I was okay and got a good teacher.

"The next month, I think it was, the L.A. Four came up to Nanaimo. It was Jeff, and [guitarist] Ron Eschete, and Bud, and John. My mom and dad had them over for dinner. There was a jazz club in Nanaimo called Tio's. I heard Dave McKenna there, and Monty Alexander I met Ray Brown in Nanaimo, and since then they've all been very important to me.

"I got a Canada Arts Council grant and went to L. A. to study. I stayed four years. I studied with Alan Broadbent first. I'd like to study with him some more. And then I studied with Jimmy Rowles. Ray said, 'I don't think he teaches.' I talked to John Clayton, who said, 'Here's his phone number.' I called him up and went over to his house and I ended up spending most of my time at his house.'

"What were the lessons like?" I asked. "I can't imagine Jimmy giving formal lessons, saying ‘Do this, do that.'"

"I wish he were still here. I'd like to go over and ask more questions. He'd say, 'Sit down on the couch and talk and ask questions.' We'd talk. He'd tell stories about Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. I just did a tour with Ray. I'd sing about three tunes a night and play piano. It was just as important to me to hang out and listen to stories as it was to practice and play. With Jimmy and with Ray Brown. And still is. A lot of the time with Jimmy was spent just talking. Jimmy wrote out Poor Butterfly for me. It's one of my favorite recordings he's done. I'd come over and we'd talk and there was a piece of music there on the piano, and I knew it was waiting. And he'd say, 'Go take a look at that.' And it always had my name in the corner, Diana. And he'd have things written out for me."

"What was it like? Voicings and such?"

"Yeah. He'd play for me, and then I'd play for him. But most of the time was spent with me listening to him play. And we'd listen to records. We'd listen to Ben Webster, to Duke Ellington. He'd say, 'This was recorded 19-whatever' I admire those guys who know the history, Kenny Washington. The jazzmaniac! He is amazing. We're going to do some dates with him. One thing I couldn't do was play or record Jimmy's tunes. Two weeks before he died, I called him and told him, 'I can't play your tunes. They're so personal to your style that I would have to imitate you to play them.' I thought that way at the time. I don't feel that way now. I'd like to do a lot of his music. I thought, 'Why bother?' He recorded The Peacocks, Bill Evans recorded The Peacocks beautifully. I thought, 'What am I gonna do with that?' He'd swear and growl and say, 'Forget that! Play them!'

"There's a time to emulate, and then you have to do your own thing. There's so much to Jimmy Rowles. It's about attitude. I think the most important thing he ever taught me was about beauty. And I think I was too young even to grasp that. You want to play fast. That's all I wanted to do. He put on Daphnis and Chloe and we'd sit and listen to that. Ansermet's version. That was the recording I had to listen to. And he'd give me the scores. I learned a lot of stuff."

"I hear Rowles in your playing," I said. "But without the quirkiness. Jimmy would do eccentric things just for the fun of it."

"Oh, I do that too, sometimes," she said.

"What else did you listen to?"

"Art Tatum, which I found overwhelming at that age." She gasped aloud.

"I started singing in L.A. I did a lot of piano bar stuff, 'cause that's how I could survive. I moved back to Toronto after L.A. That was '87 to '90."

I said, "I noticed how many Canadians hit the Grammies this year."

"Canadian women," she said. "Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan."

"I'm sorry Shirley Eikhard's album got so little attention. It's a hell of an album. Blue Note just seemed to toss it out the window and did nothing with it."

"Well I'm really lucky," she said, "to have a record company that's been supportive. A record company that has not tossed me aside, but has allowed me to grow and change as an artist publicly, and given me support. I've had tremendous support from Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmidt." They are her producer and recording engineer respectively. "I've worked so hard to be a musician and play what I really want to play."

"Let's get back to this criticism that you don't write your own stuff. When I was growing up and listening to Frank Sinatra, he was doing stuff that was already old, like Night and Day"

"Oh yeahl" she said, with real surprise.

"Sure! Night and Day is from 1934. So was Try a Little Tenderness. A lot of it came out originally before I was born. All that stuff Sinatra did in the 1940s was at least ten years old and a lot of it twenty years old. Sinatra's whole career was largely built on older tunes. So is Tony Bennett's. Peggy Lee and Nat Cole too. All built on classic repertoire."

She said, "I've been misquoted on this point, including this criticism that I don't write my own material. There's this pressure in interviews: 'Do you consider yourself a jazz musician? Are you a jazz singer?' Because I'm not improvising and scat singing, does that make me a pop singer? But I play piano and I improvise in my trio and quartet. So it confuses people. I don't think about whether Shirley Horn is a jazz singer or not."

"No. And Sarah, with whom I worked, and who was my friend, hated the term 'jazz singer' and didn't want to be called one."

"Well, I don't want to be labelled. 'You don't fit, you're not a jazz singer like such and such.' Or 'You don't write your own tunes.' There's a lot to do. I'm writing my own arrangements, I'm playing piano, I'm leading my own band. I'm inspired by Ahmad Jamal and the way he took standards and did them his own way. I find that creatively fulfilling. Songwriters are songwriters. I think of Ahmad Jamal as a great jazz pianist, not as a songwriter."

I pointed out to her that most accomplished songwriters, and many jazz musicians, do not like scooby-dooing "jazz singers. "No one was ever as well equipped to do it as Nat Cole, and he didn't do it. On the contrary, in his singing, he was scrupulously faithful to the melody. The best scat singers have been instrumentalists — Clark Terry, Richard Boone, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Rosolino — and they would always do it in the abstract, not destroy songs by tortured melismatic meanderings.

Diana said, "Can you imagine someone saying to Nat Cole, 'Why don't you write your own songs?'"

"Well," I said, "he wrote a couple of light novelty songs, such as Straighten Up and Fly Right. No ballads that I know of. Donald Byrd once told me he'd concluded that the hardest thing to do was play straight melody and get some feeling into it. I've seen Nat Cole referred to as a cocktail pianist. Bill Evans too."

"There's that fine line. People will say, 'All you're doing is cocktail piano.' I don't listen to that. I don't obsess about it. Things that sound simple . . . it's not the easiest thing. Charlie Parker, Miles, Ahmad Jamal, they were playing standards."

"Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, all the great ones. And John Lewis argues that jazz was built in a kind of symbiotic relationship with popular music during its classic period."

"It's not something I feel I have to defend," she said. "I get that question, like, almost every interview. It's always, 'Why don't you write your own material?'"

Bill Evans once told me that his very unfavorite question in interviews was, "How did you start playing the piano?" Some years later, I was interviewing him for a radio program. I reminded him of what he'd said. "It is my unfavorite question," he affirmed.

"All right," I said. "Then how did you start playing the piano?"

He chuckled and did about twenty illuminating minutes on musical pedagogy.

I had learned from the interviews that Diana was tired of questions about the onset of fame. A boy in a master class asked her what it was like to be famous. She said she hated the question.

I told her I thought the question was legitimate. I have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of power. Why didn't somebody just knock Hitler off? What keeps a killer in power, a Stalin or Pol Pot or Milosevich? Intimidation? What allowed John Foster Dulles to send thousands of Guatemalans to their deaths just to protect his family's interests in the United Fruit Company?

And fame is power. How can one expect a Frank Sinatra to be "normal"? Once at a recording session I heard him make a mild joke and all the executives and minions of Reprise records in the control booth fell about in roaring laughter as if it were a brilliant witticism. And in that I glimpsed his dilemma and the nature of power. Did anyone ever say to him, "Frank, you're full of crap"? I doubt it. Someone who knew him well said to me recently, "Frank was an asshole." But how could he be anything else? Sir Robert Walpole said, "Gratitude, in my experience, is usually the lively expectation of future favors." And those who sucked up to Frank expected future favors.

Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And fame is, usually, money, and money is power, and all the sycophancy that accompany it. The endless, servile flattery distorts reality. And beyond that, there is the erosion of privacy that fame brings, which can be frightening. Or merely annoying. Once, at a crowded but supposedly private party at Woody Herman's house, I watched Rosemary Clooney having a pleasant chat with friends. And then someone asked for her autograph. She left.

I told Diana "I've seen fame destroy people. Some survive it."

"Is it worse for men or for women?" she asked.

I thought for a long moment, particularly of a singer I have known for many years, a wonderfully funny and down-to-earth person when she was little known and an affectedly phony diva after fame hit her. "Women," I said. "For one thing it puts them in the position of commanding men, and men resent it. You've got to be feeling it. What's it doing to you?"

"Well, I'm embarrassed. I feel like that when I walk out on stage and everybody claps. When we finish a show, as we did night before last in Pittsburgh, and people give me a standing ovation, I feel like saying, 'No, it's okay, sit down, don't bother.' I'm not comfortable with it. I love to make people happy but I'm not comfortable with that. Sometimes because of that embarrassment, it comes out in, I've been told, people saying that I'm aloof."

"Do you think it's a Canadian characteristic?" I said. "Kenny Wheeler's that way. Kenny and I went to high school together."

"Maybe," she said. "I think I put a lot of pressure on myself where it isn't necessary I'm trying to handle it. I'm happy for my success, and I'm trying to enjoy it. Not to be so worried about things. The pressure is learning, learning how to answer questions that may not be directly pertinent. I've got to get used to it."

We got into Canadian stories. I told her a joke: Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle.

There is so much about her that is Canadian. The main element of any singer's style is enunciation, particularly the shape of the vowels. I had a bilingual French Canadian journalist friend who used to say that the Canadian accent, in both French and English, with the tight, closed vowels, develops "because our jaws are frozen half the year." One of the elements of Frank Sinatra's "style" is his New York-area Italian dentalized t's and d's and half-swallowed r's, coupled with almost Oxonian vowels. Krall's "style" is a Canadian accent with excellent time and a voice that is inherently lovely. It has a slight croak in it. So did Sinatra's, though his probably came from smoking.

In several of the interviews I'd read, she'd made the comment that she was shy, which I believe is true. But many performers and public figures are shy, no one more so than the late Woody Herman. "Even me," Steve Allen said, when we were discussing this phenomenon one day.

Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie both told me they were nervous before going onstage. "And it gets worse as I get older," Miles added. Peggy Lee, in her performing days, used to get sick before going on. One of the shyest persons I ever knew was Ella Fitzgerald, and believe it or not, off-stage Sarah Vaughan was quite shy. And Jeri Southern was so shy that she quit singing entirely, devoting her later years to teaching. She refused offers of big money to do just one performance in Las Vegas. I suspect that people become performers not in spite of but because of shyness: it is better to embrace the problem, rather than sitting frightened in a corner, and do something that will garner by indirection the attention one is too timid to seek directly. But it crippled Jeri.

Looking at it another way: an ability to perform is not necessarily accompanied by a taste for it.

The next evening I went to Diana's concert in the Zellerbach Theater at the University of Pennsylvania. She is particularly impressive in person.

I am underwhelmed by the coy salacity of Popsicle Toes. It recalls those yuck-yuck — get it? — elbow-in-the-ribs songs of Belle Earth, and of such 1940s sniggering sophomoric silliness as She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor and Gertrude Niesen singing I Wanna Get Married ("I wanna sleep in pajama tops," oh wow!). Actually, Popsicle Toes would work better if Diana sang it naively, as if she didn't get it; or better yet, dead-pan, as Virginia O'Brien used to sing in movies.

As for When I Look in Your Eyes, the title song of her album with Mandel, I am not enchanted by it. To begin with, the title is grammatically wrong. It should be "when I look into your eyes." But directionality in pronouns is fading fast, as in "I'm really into that." A yearning for structural niceties is a lost cause in the age of lyric-writing theories such as those that disturb Steve Allen (and, I might add, Alan Bergman) and the ubiquity of hopefully, thankfully, upscale, bottom line, the loss of the distinction between fewer and less, and the spread, like the 'flu, of that hideously misused venue. The English language itself is under assault.

Andrew Fletcher wrote in the seventeenth century that he knew "a very wise man" who "believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Or who should make its grammar.

Her concert impressed me considerably, even more so than the records. Afterwards we went back to the same restaurant and talked until late. Now it was conversation, not interview.

"After we had dinner last night, I was thinking about it," I said. "It's your legacy now. I knew Arthur Schwartz, I knew Harry Warren, I met Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer was my friend. Just as you sought out your heroes, so did I. Mercer and I would talk about songwriting by the hour."

She said, "I guess I'm very focussed on what I want to hear, what I want to do, and what I like. I made some mistakes along the way. Still makin''em. I would have chosen something different now.

"Original music is obviously important. It's like," she said, laughing, "I'm neither for nor against apathy. I'm not against writing my own tunes — if I felt I had something to say. When I do, I will. Now what I'm focussing on is the art of interpretation. It's funny how a lyric can be changed by a tempo, the meaning of the song. I'm studying this art. I've Got You Under My Skin at this tempo — " she snapped her fingers at a Basie-like medium tempo — "tells one story, and if you slow it up to a ballad tempo, it becomes bittersweet. The same words. Tempo is my biggest thing right now. It's splitting hairs, it's lint-picking. I'm learning how to count off the right tempo, knowing where it is in my head. Benny Goodman used to snap his fingers for no matter how long until he got the right tempo. Ray Brown and I talked about Basie, how they would play it until it settled in, and they got it where they wanted it. Tempo changes everything."

"Sure," I said. "It changes your phrasing, for one thing. At a fast tempo, you can breath more words in a phrase. If you do it very slowly, it breaks the line at completely different points, and that changes the meaning."

She said, "Yes! I'm still trying to get the tempo right on Under My Skin. If you get nerves on stage, you'll sing it faster. And things will sound a little nervous. I try to relax so that I'm not rushing, rushing, rushing."

"I'm sure you've noticed that when musicians do a song over the years, the tempo will creep up. I suppose as they get a tune more under control. I don't know whether it's done consciously or not."

"Sure. We do it too."

"I imagine you're careful about keys. Singers have to be."

"Sure. Although sometimes I'll get lazy and instead of doing something in A I'll do it in B-flat or A-flat. Instead of doing Over the Rainbow in B, I'll do it in B-flat. Jimmy Rowles told me that Ben Webster used to do Over the Rainbow in E. It changes the feel of a tune."

"And Fletcher Henderson," I said, "wrote a lot of charts for his band in sharp keys and drove the saxophone players crazy."

"Guitar players and bass players love sharp keys. "There's nothing like a blues in G. That's my favorite key to put a blues in."

"Bill Evans used to run through a new tune in all the keys until he found the one he liked."

"The master. I'm embarrassed to say that I should do that. Geoff Keezer does that. His mind!"

"Warren Bernhardt practiced My Bells through every key, as an exercise in voicings. Don Thompson claims that because of the character of the sonorities, that tune works only in Bill's original key."

Singing is closer to the actor's art than the musician's. The real trick of the ballad is not to make the song happen but to let it happen — to get out of its way. Someone once wrote in the New Yorker that when Mel Torme sang A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, you heard the singer. When Frank Sinatra sang it you heard the song. When Nat Cole sang it, you heard the nightingale.

The packaging of Diana Krall doesn't bother me. Without it, she wouldn't get all this chance to grow. She would be sentenced to a life in piano bars, perhaps in Nanaimo.

Fancy gowns didn't hurt Peggy Lee. As for publicity, I'd far rather see the money spent on Diana than some junked-out rock-and-roller. Indeed, among the encouraging signs in music in recent years are the successes of Shirley Horn, Natalie Cole, and Diana Krall.

To tell Diana Krall that she should be writing songs is a legacy of rock-and-roll. It's a little like telling the late Glenn Gould that he should be composing rather than bringing us brilliant interpretations of Bach and Scriabin. We need excellent interpreters of classic song, and Diana is evolving into exactly that.

I wrote my piece about her for JazzTimes. They put her picture on the cover.

She still hasn't made The Watchtower.”

The following video feature Diana’s November/2001 performance in Paris of All or Nothing at All with Anthony Wilson, guitar, John Clayton, bass and Jeff Hamilton, drums.

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Erroll Garner - "Ready Take One"

September 30, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Buddy Rich - "The Monster" - At Rest

≪ Previous: Diana Krall: The Price of Making It [From the Archives]

It’s always great to have news of a new release of music by Erroll Garner, one of our all-time favorite Jazz pianists.

Ready Take One is being issued today.

Here’s Will Friedwald’s “take” on it as it appeared in the September 27, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal under the heading of “Dancing on the Keys Once Again.”

There’s a live recording from 1958 featuring a legendary jazz pianist who introduces his band, one member at a time, saving himself for last: “and my name is Erroll Garner.” He then proceeds to play “On the Street Where You Live” with all of Garner’s trademark stylistic devices: the rollicking melody, the rococo embellishments, the sense of adventure and swing, the startling thumps to the bass with the left elbow. It’s classic Garner, but it isn’t Garner at all — it’s George Shearing.

Most imitations of this sort are a deliberate parody, as when Sammy Davis Jr. impersonated Nat King Cole, but Shearing’s is a highly respectful homage in which he reveals how Garner’s style is so effervescent, so full of life and energy, that one doesn’t even have to actually be Erroll Garner to participate in it.

Garner himself died at age 55 in 1977, which was hardly enough time for him to fully explore all the implications of the piano style that he created. Though his recorded catalog is huge (143 sessions are listed in Tom Lord’s online “Jazz Discography”), every new release of previously unheard Garner material is cause for celebration.

“Ready Take One,” being issued by Legacy Recordings and Octave Music on Friday, is especially valuable: Six of this collection’s 14 studio performances from 1967-71 are original Garner compositions not heard since he played them live. “High Wire” is particularly catchy, with Garner stating the melody in the treble against a funky groove laid down by the bass and bongos, while “Wild Music” opens with the pianist heightening the suspense by starting with a grandly Tchaikovsky-like intro, before he lunges into the tune with an exuberance that’s remarkable even for him.

But Garner’s interpretations of standards were, if anything, even more compelling. Being familiar with the actual melodies allows us to look more closely at what Garner does with them — and often there’s a sense of duality, between tension and release, control and abandon. The most basic visual metaphor for Garner’s playing is the act of dancing. Yet in the standards, in particular, one gets a sense of two figures moving, and not necessarily in a social/partner kind of dance —rather, one can always sense the melody and, at the same time, another figure dancing around it. Garner isn’t merely a solo dancer, he’s a whole dance team all by himself.

In Garner’s hands, “Night and Day” and “Sunny” trade places with each other. Cole Porter’s 1932 classic becomes a bluesy riff that suddenly sounds completely contemporary, while Bobby Hebb’s 1966 pop hit is treated with the respect usually reserved for the upper echelon of the Great American Songbook. Garner imbues “Sunny” with a significance it never had before and, indeed, renders it worthy to stand besides the work of Porter and of Duke Ellington (who’s represented here with highly original treatments of “Caravan” and “Satin Doll”).

The set ends with “Misty,” Garner’s most famous original. Johnny Burke’s lyric to the contrary, Garner’s rendition is more shiny than anything. He makes his own tune glitter and gleam as if it were sewn together out of sequins— and the piano itself even seems to glow with a kind of inner radiance.”

Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.

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Buddy Rich - "The Monster" - At Rest

October 1, 2016, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Strange Enchantment - JAR Paris- The Jewelry of Joel Arthur Rosenthal - Music by George Albert Shearing

≪ Previous: Erroll Garner - "Ready Take One"

BUDDY RICH «The Monster »

« II a toujours porté un monstre en lui durant sa carrière longue, colorée, explosive et controversée ». C'est en ces termes que Harvey Sidero évoque Buddy Rich dans le texte de présentation du disque Buddy Rich, The Monster CDU. Lorsque Ton ouvre la pochette de ce double album, on est saisi par la photo du batteur, prise de dos. Épaules basses, dos légèrement voûté, la main droite sur la cymbale, Buddy, assis assez haut, est installé à sa batterie les pieds posés sur les pédales tels les racines d'un tronc d'arbre. Sa tête tournée vers la droite atteste un regard attentif et une mâchoire brutale. Le « monstre » s'apprête à déverser un flot ininterrompu d'accents fff sur la caisse claire à J = ± 168, pendant que la grosse caisse marque tous les temps avec acharnement.”

-Georges Paczynski, Une Histoire de la Batterie de Jazz, Volume 1

BUDDY RICH

"The Monster"

"He has always had a monster in him during his long career, colorful, explosive and controversial.” These terms are used by Harvey Siders to describe Buddy Rich in his liner notes to the Verve Records double LP set The Monster[‎– 2-V6S-8824 1973]. When one opens the cover of this double album [gatefold], one is struck by the photo of the drummer, shooting [glaring]back. Low shoulders slightly hunched, his right hand on the cymbal, Buddy, sitting high enough on the drums so that the feet on the pedals look like the roots of a tree trunk. His head turned to the right features a stern look and a sharp jaw. The "monster" is about to release a steady stream of very loud accents … while the bass drum fiercely marks the time.”

“This is the story of an extraordinary artist who, for a brief time, wanted to be a good though unexceptional entertainer. But the public wouldn't permit it. In a remarkable and uncommon display of collective wisdom and astuteness, the public for once was right, proving that greatness is sometimes the least trustworthy custodian of its own gifts.”

- John McDonough

If you are a drummer, watching Buddy Rich play can be a frightening experience. Joe Morello once said: “Give him a long drum solo and he’ll just blow the place up.”

The first time I saw Buddy in action, I wanted to go home and burn my drumsticks.

Mercifully, one day, you come to the realization that, as Mel Lewis, put it: “Buddy Rich has something that no other drummer had, or will ever have. I don’t know how it came about and I don’t think he does either. It doesn’t matter.”

Once you get into the spirit of what Mel is saying, you go about your business as a drummer and do the best you can to play yourself, which is really the point of the whole thing.

As Louis Armstrong said: “Jazz is who you are.”

But if watching Buddy in action is a frightening experience, writing about him is complicated, too.

Which Buddy do you write about?

The Swing Era phenomenon who played with Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey?

Or the big band he led following the close of World War II in 1945, an era which would also see the demise of big bands?

Or the 1950’s drummer who played with the Harry James Big Band and again with Tommy Dorsey’s?

Or the Jazz at the Philharmonic drummer who also went on to accompany myriad iconic Jazz masters on the recordings produced by impresario Norman Granz for his Verve and related labels?

Or the Buddy Rich who led his own powerhouse big band from 1967 until his death in 1987 at the age of 69?

I mean, the manwasa monstrous talent.

Actually, what I would prefer to write about is the period from about 1955-1960 when Buddy led a succession of small groups that reflected what fellow drummer Stan Levey once described this way: “Buddy matured, musically.”

During this period, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs noted: “Buddy became a better and better drummer — greater than he ever was — because he opened his mind to what other drummers were doing. At one time, he turned away from the new people. That was in the bebop days. But once he let the contemporary music into his system, he just grew and grew.”

To put it another way, my reasons for preferring Buddy’s drumming during “his small group period” is that it was one in which I found him to be both a superb drummer but, even more importantly, one in which he had become a total musician.

It was this period that gave the piece its title - “The Monster At Rest”

During these years, Buddy played for the other musicians; to help them and the music sound better. The music was not just a platform to demonstrate Buddy’s flashy technique, it was an end in itself and led to great sounding small group Jazz.

I didn’t know this at the time I was listening to Buddy’s small group sessions on Argo, Emarcy and Verve, but after reading John McDonough’s insert notes to the Mosaic Records CD reissue of these recordings [MD7-232], ironically Buddy wasn’t really interested in drumming during this part of his career!

The reasons behind Buddy’s disinterest are expertly explained by John in the following excerpts from his notes to the Mosaic set which John and Michael Cuscuna have graciously granted us permission to reprint.

Years later in the first week of January 1972, years after Rich had secured the fame he desired as a bandleader, Johnny Carson hosted two of his idols on the same Tonight Show couch. For the first and only time on national television Artie Shaw and Buddy Rich sat alongside each other, reminiscing, carping, quipping and cajoling. It made for much good conversation, both sharp and sentimental. Then Rich unexpectedly changed the subject. He turned to Shaw, gave him one of those point-blank looks of his, and began to scold him — that's not too strong a word — for abandoning his music. He was custodian of an extraordinary and unique musical gift, Rich told him, and he had a duty to treat such a gift with care and respect. Shaw, who had become an old hand at handling this kind of talk, barely blinked before delivering a variation of his standard reply.

The irony was that the usually quick-thinking Shaw might have turned the same question back on Rich. You are custodian of a great and unique gift too. What about your duty to that talent? You wanted to be a singer.

For those with still fresh memories of the cocky and confident Buddy Rich who reigned as the supreme drummer in jazz, led one of the great big bands in America from the '60s through the '80s, and spawned more than a few disciples who even caught something of his physical presence and bulldozer grin (Butch Miles, Les DeMerle, Donny Osborne, et al.), it may come as a surprise that in the 1950s Rich nearly followed Shaw's example — up to a point, at least — and abandoned the drums.

During the period of the recordings in this collection, Buddy Rich grew tired of who he was and struggled mightily to become a singer and dancer. It seemed the only way for him to break into the levels of money and fame he believed his skills entitled him. Rich had come of age at a time when jazz was a full partner in the glamour of big-time show business and all that went with it — movies, radio, records, theaters. That all began to change in the 1950s. Jazz withdrew to the sidelines, carrying Rich with it, along with the money and fame that show business offered. "Buddy Rich Quits Drums to Be Song and Dancer," proclaimed Down Beat early in 1956. At the time, he didn't seem to be kidding. He would make several albums as a singer and even join the cast of a TV sitcom produced by Jack Benny and starring Marge and Gower Champion — about which more shortly.

It was perhaps, in Norman Corwin's words, not so wild a dream. He sang well enough. As for dancing, all drummers are dancers, in a manner of speaking, because drumming itself is a kind of choreography. To be a drummer is to be a master of movement and coordination in a way that a pianist or clarinetist can never be. Like a dancer, the drummer visualizes the abstractions of music and imparts to its dynamics the byproduct of a coherent physical beauty that intrigues the eye. When the two are in perfect register, it becomes a fascinating art onto itself. The best drummers are aware of the visual factor in their performances. They not only are aware of how they look; they attend to it with care and at least an instinctive sense of design. This is why the long drum solo can be so compelling in person, but is inclined to wear thin on record. It is also why drummers and dancers often find their skills interchangeable. When Fred Astaire took Ed Murrow on a tour of his home on TV's Person to Person in the 1950s, it was why a full drum set sat in his studio. When Murrow asked for a demonstration, it was why Astaire could put on a record of Benny Goodman's RACHEL'S DREAM, and play a dazzling accompaniment that any jazz fan would admire. Buddy Rich sought to perfect the skills that in other drummers typically lie dormant. But in the mid-1950s this was of small comfort. The public wasn't interested in a singing, dancing drummer.

Perhaps the lesson is that even the greatest and most unique gifts can become burdensome to those whose lives have been privileged by their entitlements but confined by their rigor. In the 1950s Rich was facing up to the limitations of the fame he had earned as the kingpin drummer of the big band era. Slowly the reputation that had brought him so much was beginning to call in its debt by becoming a roadblock to broader show business ambitions beyond the jazz world. He had seen Nat Cole move from a career as a much admired but little known jazz pianist to a major show business star with an audience in the millions as a singer. Could Rich do the same? Artie Shaw would often describe fame as a pact with the devil in which the devil always wins; and Shaw's solution [to leave the music business] was certainly more radical than Rich's. But in the late '50s, Rich was wrestling with the same issue. Maybe he had forgotten all this by the time he admonished Shaw on The Tonight Show. By then he had revived his career and achieved the breakout and stardom he had been looking for in the '50s. He had become a show business star and a household name — rare for a jazz musician — with a star's persona. But he had done it without sacrificing his most basic gift to singing or dancing. He found his way to that tiny place where serious jazz and popular entertainment come together — a place occupied by Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and precious few others.

Rich's gift seemed to obey most of the laws that generally govern the life of an authentic prodigy. By all accounts his history with the drums began in infancy, far ahead of any capacity he might have developed to actually remember any formative incidents. He was born September 30, 1917, into a family of vaudevillians and promptly showed unusually precocious motor skills. He walked and talked before most kids crawled. Then during a rehearsal in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in 1919, young Rich grabbed a pair of drumsticks and accurately began tapping out patterns of tempo on the floor of the stage. Onlookers were astonished. He was 18 months old. Encouraged by musicians in the house band and the theater manager, Rich's father, Robert, immediately made a tentative place for him in the act. Later the same day, Buddy Rich toddled out on stage, sat down at a snare, and brought down the house with a sensational performance. Somehow his mind had absorbed and processed the rudiments of rhythm and time; and at less than two years old, his body was acquiring the necessary coordination to physically express them.

Early published reviews of "Traps, the Drum Wonder," as Rich was soon known, seem to confirm what might otherwise be unbelievable. "Traps, the tiny drummer of the fourth act," said the Baltimore News, "runs away from the other acts on the bill. He was worth the price of admission alone." Another account from Wilmington, Delaware, reported him getting "more curtain calls than any other performer..." Rich wasn't yet three. Variety reported in 1922 that "the little chap plunged into the task in the most unconcerned manner and alternately grinned and chewed gum while he tapped the drums...with the ability of a veteran jazz drummer." That was when he was five, appearing on Broadway in The Greenwich Village Follies. Rich became something of a child star functioning purely as an entertainer.

All this is undocumented in any viewable form, of course, and thus subject to the elasticity of legend. (A seven-minute short made by Warner Bros, in 1929, Buddy Traps in Sound Effects, is presumed lost except for the sound track.) But it may help account for the duality of Rich's ambitions in the '50s. One of the glories of the swing era was that it largely put musicians, not entertainers, in control of the agenda, and distinguished between the two in a way that was rare in show business. It erected something of a wall between the two, separating art from artifice, notwithstanding the occasional flourish of section choreography, a spinning bass, or twirling clarinet. The music was so compelling and popular on its own merits that it relieved its best performers of any obligation to play the clown. Swing's most important figures — Shaw, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington — all had backgrounds in music, not show business. It was enough. But Buddy Rich had come from vaudeville and the Broadway stage. He saw himself as an entertainer with a specialty skill. As he entered his teens and the infant-virtuoso novelty faded, he tried to shore up the loss with dancing, singing and stage patter. It was not enough. Finally as an adult he turned back to that specialty skill.

It must have been like being born again; one can only imagine. "Traps the Drum Wonder" was forgotten, and a scrapbook full of child star clippings was not negotiable tender in the adult world of Fifty-Second Street. Rich arrived in New York late in 1937 with no name recognition or reputation to precede him. A mutual friend prevailed upon clarinetist Joe Marsala to let Rich sit in with his small band at the Hickory House. Twice Rich came by, and twice Marsala forgot to bring him on. Finally, during a third visit he got his chance in a late evening, after-hours encore. Marsala called a fast riff piece, JIM JAM JUMP. Rich apparently fired off a stunning performance, putting childhood memories behind him and setting off a minor buzz of rumor about a "new" drummer in town. Marsala hired him immediately. The next day Rich joined the Musicians Union.

This is where legend ends and the recorded documentation begins. Rich made his record debut late in 1937 at Decca in a pickup unit backing the Andrews Sisters, then marked time playing swing/Dixieland with Marsala at the Hickory House for six months. Despite several record dates, he felt buried. Late that winter, history might have been made, but it wasn't. Gene Krupa left Benny Goodman in March 1938, opening up the most famous drum chair in jazz at the time. According to trumpeter Chris Griffin, Goodman auditioned Rich. "We were down in Atlantic Beach for a week," Griffin told writer Ross Firestone, "and this kid came in one night and sounded exactly like what Benny had just gotten rid of and didn't want. He listened to him for about two numbers and said, 'Okay, kid,' and that was the end of it. He didn't want anybody as flashy as Gene." What might have happened if Rich had succeeded Krupa with Goodman as drummer is a matter for the imagination. But the Slingerland Drum Company, which recognized a star when it saw one — and wasted no time in signing up Rich as an endorser — took note in a full-page ad in the May Down Beat. "Krupa & Goodman Split!" the headline announced, "But SLINGERLAND Stays on with Davey Tough!" It was all true enough, but in the lower quarter of the ad, there was also this: "Buddy Rich, the New Sensation with Joe Marsala...After first performance autograph hounds mobbed him."

Employers did not mob him, though. After departing Marsala in June and a summer lull, he joined Bunny Berigan around September and found himself in his first important swing band. Rich recorded 24 sides with Berigan in five Victor sessions. There is an added brightness to the rhythm section on some of the better sounding discs, but for whatever reason — the nature of the charts or the band's declining fortunes — his imprint is not particularly evident or palpable on the records. All that changed in late December when Rich joined Artie Shaw and made his breakthrough to the big time.

If the Berigan orchestra was afflicted by declining fortunes, the Shaw band was at its peek and rising. Tenor saxophonist Georgie Auld had left Berigan for Shaw in mid-December, and 10 days later Rich followed. Suddenly everything moved to a new level. The recordings, both in the studio and over the air, are unmistakable. Rich became a one-man insurgency, constantly challenging, pressing and literally cheering the band on, sometimes with a wildly delightful lack of restraint. Shaw's Bluebird disc of TRAFFIC JAM sounds more like a live broadcast with its audible shouts of encouragement from Rich — extraordinary for an ostensibly formal studio performance. Many of the band's broadcast performances have become classics, largely because of Rich's galvanizing impact. Nowhere is there a better example of how to drive a band harder at a medium slow tempo than EVERYTHING'S JUMPIN', which Rich pushes with a driving metallic snap and caps with a wonderfully imaginative procession of rolls.

"The beauty of such playing," wrote Mel Torme in his 1991 bio-memoir of Rich (Traps the Drum Wonder: The Life and Times of Buddy Rich), "was that it did not intrude on the featured player. Rich used deep-cut 11-inch Zildjian cymbals on his hi-hat stand, and he devised a unique way of playing them — barely spread apart, with his left hand guiding the angle of the cymbals while his right hand manipulated the drumstick in a manner that produced a thicker, fuller sound from the 'chocked' hi-hats, rather than the 'tip-ta-tip, tip-ta-tip' response that most drummers elicited from their sock cymbals."

As with any drummer, fast tempos gave Rich his most spectacular showcases. He would rip off terse breaks, sometimes in a blur of machine-gun fire, other times with the most unexpected twist of time or phrase. In a two-bar break near the end of a Cafe Rouge performance of DIGA DIGA DO in November, he dashed off a brief riff of rim shots, then seemed to scoop up the entire band in a dramatic, rallying roll. Shaw may have complained that Rich lacked discipline and rushed the tempo.

But he also recognized a kindred temperament whose confidence was exceeded only by his brilliance and his lack of respect for authority. Shaw understood such men well because he understood himself. So he gave him space to grow, which was precisely the kind of authority that Rich did respect.

There is another DIGA DIGA DO from a Melody and Madness program of May 7 in which Shaw opens up the brief chart for a dazzling 32-bar Rich solo. In another program from the same series (March 12), Shaw turns him loose at full-battle speed for seven minutes on THE CHANT, a piece roughly modeled on the Goodman-Krupa masterpiece SING SING SING.

By the time Shaw gave up his great 1939 band, Rich had not only logged enormous record and radio exposure with the country's top orchestra, but valuable screen time as well in MGM's Dancing Co-ed plus two short theatrical features. He was famous. And the Down Beat Reader's Poll of January 1940 reflected his impact. After one year with Shaw, he has gone from complete anonymity to fifth place

among drummers — though he still trailed Krupa by more than 4,200 votes. A year later he pulled to within nearly 200 votes of the top position.

By then Rich had taken deep root in the Tommy Dorsey organization, which he joined directly from Shaw in November 1939. Rich became an even bigger star with Dorsey, whose bandwagon of soloists and singers constituted a full-scale, self-contained variety show. Rich had no trouble competing with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Ziggy Elman, Joe Bushkin and, even briefly, his old boss Bunny Berigan. Refereeing this cauldron of talent and temperament was Tommy Dorsey, whose ego yielded to no one.

Rich made the switch to Dorsey at an interesting time. The music of many of the key bands of the time seemed to be changing sharply during the six months or so that bridged 1939—40. The relatively simple stylistic models of the 1930s were wearing thin. The best bands were moving forward and looking for fresher, more challenging paths. It was a transition that brought Eddie Sauter to Goodman, Strayhorn to Ellington, and strings to Artie Shaw. But perhaps no band's fundamental architecture changed more dramatically than Tommy Dorsey's. Rich joined in the last days of Dorsey's two-beat, Paul Weston, Clambake Seven period and just before the arrival of arranger Sy Oliver, whose tight, often brassy and percussive charts such as DEEP RIVER would give Rich something big enough to punch back at. It was a whole new musical context in a band of multiple personalities determined to offer something for everybody. The large repertoire of romantic ballads built around Frank Sinatra may have made Rich restless and inclined to pranks. But Dorsey knew Rich's value and didn't deny him his share of the spotlight. QUIET PLEASE and its sequel, NOT SO QUIET PLEASE, were little more than brief fanfares for a long drum solo. HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT from the '30s was reworked as a Rich showcase with a spectacular duet sequence with Ziggy Elman. And WELL, GIT IT was the kind of wild hard-driving ride that Rich was born to play. The last two numbers were filmed by MGM and featured in Ship Ahoy (1942) and Du Barry Was a Lady (1943) respectively. In the former film, Rich briefly became the dancing partner of Eleanor Powell in I'LL TAKE TALLULAH. The prominence Rich achieved with Dorsey made him among the most famous drummers in the world. In January 1942, Down Beat's annual Reader's Poll finally voted him number one by nearly two to one over the nearest competition, a margin that would grow even larger by early 1943. (Krupa had become a bandleader by then and was not eligible in DB's instrument categories. But as far as the public was concerned he was still the Man. After his incarceration on a trumped-up marijuana charge in 1943, he spent the last several months of the year with Goodman, making him briefly eligible as a sideman again. When the DB poll came out in January 1944, Krupa was back on top. After he resumed his career as a leader later that year, Rich was restored to the top position in 1945.)

Rich left Dorsey early in 1943 and spent most of that year and part of the next in the Marines. In June 1944 he was discharged and resumed his place with Dorsey. Late that year they were all back at MGM for Thrill of a Romance, in which Rich got almost as much screen time in a two-chorus I GOT RHYTHM solo than the Dorsey band received in the entire film. By the summer of 1945 there were constant rumors that Rich was going to leave, and by November he did, not to return for nearly a decade.

In life, it's been said, there is a time for everything. In December 1945 Rich, who had been famous for more than five years but had never made a commercial record under his own name, decided it was time that he should take command with a big band of his own. He had no way of knowing that the time for such things was over. Nor did Frank Sinatra, who backed him with $25,000 in financial support. Nobody knew that Woody Herman and Stan Kenton had already become the last leaders to establish the kind of enduring fame and reputation strong enough to sustain them for life. By the end of World War II, the proverbial window of opportunity for new bands in popular music was effectively shut for good. Not even the experts in the trade knew it in December 1945 when Rich formed the first of his contemporary post-war big bands. They would work consistently through the end of the decade, but record little save for a dozen sides for Mercury in 1946. Rich emphasized fast tempos and big hard-driving ensembles in the manner of Woody Herman's First Herd. Eddie Finckle, Neal Hefti and Tadd Dameron built him the kind of musical ballast that could match his power. Allen Eager and Earle Swope were among the soloists.

It was the singers who seemed to be selling the records after the war, though. And if that was the reality of the music business, Rich was ready. In April, on the second of his three Mercury sessions, Buddy Rich the singer emerged for the first time. As leader of a band now, he knew he would have to get out in front and relate to audiences in ways that hadn't been necessary as a sideman. Stanley Kay, who would later become his manager, served as backup drummer while Rich was at the mike. As a singer he favored medium-tempo rhythm tunes, never ballads. What performances of the band that survive are mostly from broadcasts, not commercial discs. It is easy to see why. Rich was swimming upstream as other bands were going over the falls. His second band lasted the longest, from the spring of 1947 to late winter 1949 and was more in the mold of a dance band. Yet, its impact never took root. At no time in its four-year history did the Rich orchestra ever even come close to breaking into Down Beat's annual top ten list of bands.

Rich was only 30, barely older than most of his sidemen. And if changing tastes weren't enough of a burden, Rich also found himself up against something he had rarely encountered with Shaw and Dorsey. "Unfortunately, those were the junkie days and the band was terrible," says vibist Terry Gibbs, who was with Rich during 1947—48. "Out of about 17 guys, 12 were junkies and three were alcoholics. But Buddy didn't know it, 'cause he was absolutely straight with the exception of a little pot. He was not really aware of the dope scene." The band broke up in April 1949.

Though a full-time bandleader after the war, Rich still found time for moonlighting when the bait was sufficient to draw him out. The bait was enticing indeed in the spring of 1946 when a young producer prevailed upon him to join pianist Nat Cole on Lester Young's first record session since his discharge from the Army. It was Rich's first professional encounter with Norman Granz. A few weeks later, while leading his big band at the Palladium, he joined Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic lineup as a "surprise guest" for a Monday night concert at the Embassy Auditorium. It became his recorded JATP debut.

Through Granz, there was hardly an important figure of the period with whom Rich would not work or record over the next decade: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Count Basic, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and countless others. He joined the fall JATP tour in 1949. The famous DRUM BATTLE with Gene Krupa from the 1952 JATP tour cemented Rich's fame alongside that of Krupa's in the public mind. Without a band to anchor him and siphon off money, Rich enjoyed the sort of freedom that came with the knowledge that his talent alone would always be easily redeemable for the kind of ready cash appropriate to his appetites. For the most part, his could choose where and when to work. When he found that he missed the power of a big band around him, he accepted a long-standing offer from Harry James in April 1953 that would bring him more than $75,000 based on a 52-week year.

He apparently made the move during one of his periodic falling outs with Granz, saying at the time, "I don't want any part of Granz or his Jazz at the Philharmonic.... [He] talks about doing so much for jazz. What has he done? He takes top stars — Flip and Bird — and makes them play loud junk." Granz was more circumspect in his response, saluting his "genius" but saying Rich would never work for him again. But Granz had him under contract; so once past the heat of the moment, reality quickly settled in. Also, because James confined the band's travel as much as possible to California, Rich was still free and available to continue his recording with Granz's growing Clef and Norgran labels. By August 1953 he had done nearly 20 sessions for Granz as a sideman (beginning with the Lester Young date in 1945), and that didn't include the many live JATP concerts over the years. Finally on August 21, his tiff with Granz patched up for the moment, he cut his first sides for Norgran under his own name.

Years later in 1973 Gene Krupa dropped by to see Rich's big band at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago. After the first set, they reminisced about many things in Rich's dressing room — including recording for Norman Granz.

"Those statements I'd get from Granz!" Krupa exclaimed. "They say, 'Now all you owe me is $48,000.'"

"I used to get called to dates when he had Bird," Rich said, "and we'd never talk money. I also never got any money. He'd just say he'd take care of me. I'd said you've been taking care of me for years now, and I don't have any money."

He stayed with James into the summer of 1954, after which he went to Australia for concerts with Artie Shaw, led his second Norgran session, and toured with the 1954 fall JATP unit. There was brief talk about Rich forming another big band, financed by his friend, comedian Jerry Lewis. But the mid-November 1954 target opening came and went without a big band. Then the middle of November he surprised everyone by jumping to Tommy Dorsey, who had reunited with his brother Jimmy in May 1953. The band opened at the Cafe Rouge in the Statler in New York December 3.

Dorsey reportedly agreed to give Rich substantial advances against his salary so that he could pay off a number of accumulated debts. By the time he joined, the band was comfortably ensconced in the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Statler and had just completed a summer run of Stage Show, a Jackie Gleason-produced variety hour for CBS television. The band (with Rich) would occasionally substitute for Gleason during the 1954—55 season, then resume on a weekly basis in October 1955. By then, however, Rich was gone. He stalked out in mid-April after a major clash with Dorsey in Fort Hood, Texas. During a dance engagement, the two began arguing on stage, at which point Rich threw down his sticks and summarily walked off the stand. Dorsey sought sanctions against Rich from the AFM, claiming among other things that he had not worked off his advances. Rich was angry in a way that only Rich can be. He did not hold back. "I was the one embarrassed by all this," he said, "for having to work for such a man as Dorsey. I should never have gone back to work for him.... I'm going to be my own leader from now on, even if I have to wind up playing in a burlesque pit with two men." The two men never reconciled. Rich was in Australia when Dorsey unexpectedly choked to death in November 1956. According to his friend, producer Jack Tracy, a reporter there asked him for a quote. "He was a prick when he was alive," said an unforgiving Rich. "And as far as I'm concerned he's still a prick." In a Down Beat memorial issue in January, Rich was conspicuously absent from a long list of tribute givers that included Sinatra, Gleason and Paul Whiteman.

Rich did better than a burlesque pit, post Dorsey. He put together a small combo for three weeks at Barney Josephson's Cafe Society in New York, during which, according to reviews, he demonstrated his gift for sardonic wit as an emcee. He found being on his own in front of an audience stimulating. Perhaps it further awakened the childhood vaudevillian in him and the desire to reach audiences as an entertainer. Whatever the reason, he became even more seriously interested in developing his career as a singer. While still with Dorsey, he had turned to Norman Granz, who agreed to record him solely as a vocalist in January 1955. Granz backed him with the Oscar Peterson Trio supplemented by Lee Castle on trumpet, Louis Bellson on drums, and a small string section conducted by Howard Gibeling. "I had never recorded vocals as I wanted," he told Down Beat shortly after the session. "This was the first time I got the feeling I wanted.... I'm very happy with the sides just for my own edification. But if the reaction...is anything like I hope it will be, and if the disc jockeys give it a break, it may mean that a whole new career will open up for me. I hope so because you express more and reach more people by singing than by playing drums." In another interview, he said, "This isn't like a whim. I've had this singing thing in the back of my mind since — oh, since the days I was working in the same band with Frank Sinatra. You know the band I mean." (The one whose name dare not be spoken!)

With Rich under contract it was in Granz's interest to feature him more as a leader. Rich marked time at Cafe Society, then in August and September led another Norgran session with Harry Edison (BUDDY AND SWEETS) before setting off on the 16th on their annual JATP tour. Meanwhile, the January vocal session, supplemented by some Rich instrumental small group pieces made in August, came out in October (SING AND SWING WITH BUDDY RICH). Down Beat gave it four stars. "A much better than average pop vocalist with fine beat, sensitivity to lyrics, and jazz-imbued phrasing," said a review. "...Part like a cousin of Frank Sinatra with a touch of Fred Astaire...he certainly cuts the Tony Bennetts and Eddie Fishers..."

Perhaps the words went to his head. Early in 1956 he announced in Hollywood that he was quitting the drums to do a cabaret act as a singer. With MCA behind him, the "new" Buddy Rich planned to open in Las Vegas as a song and dance man at what was said to be $4,000 a week. He was indeed serious. Norman Granz, meanwhile, was consolidating his Clef, Norgran and Down Home labels under the new brand called Verve, which intended to broaden into popular music. While he expected Rich to continue recording as a jazz player, he now had the resources and incentive to indulge his other ambitions as well. Granz delegated the pop side of Verve to Buddy Bregman, a bright young musician and arranger who had recently broken through as producer/conductor of THE WAYWARD WIND, a huge pop hit for Gogi Grant. Bregman joined Granz around late November 1955. BUDDY RICH SINGS JOHNNY MERCER would be his second project for the new Verve label, right after Anita O'Day and just before conducting the legendary Ella Fitzgerald Cole Porter album. "I was already friends with Buddy," says Bregman, "and the sessions were very relaxed. He was totally cooperative and pretty much let me pick the tunes. He didn't hear the full charts until we actually recorded. I remember he was particularly delighted that Alvin Stoller was the drummer. Buddy was a nice singer with a kind of light voice. I just took care that the charts didn't roll over him. Norman wasn't involved in the session."

But before the Rich-Mercer album was issued, all the grandly announced plans to pursue singing went kaput. The Las Vegas date was postponed so Rich could join a JATP European swing. Then before that announcement was cold, Rich canceled JATP and turned up in San Diego with Harry James, who had been trying to lure him back for a year. In February 1956 the unpredictable Rich signed with James. For the next six months he was totally out of the studios. August found him back at Verve for a busy month that included an album of Basie tunes under his leadership and the famous initial teaming of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong for Verve. Singing seemed for the moment a distant memory, long behind him. In September he played the "show bar lounge" at the Sands in Las Vegas with a small band (Frank Sinatra was in the main room) without once taking a vocal chorus.

Early the next year, 1957, Rich took another pass at singing. BUDDY JUST SINGS was his most informal and laid-back vocal effort, backed by a blue ribbon small group that included Harry Edison, Ben Webster and Paul Smith. "I was happily surprised," Smith recalled recently. "He was very musical, of course. I called him the Tatum of the drums. Singing was sort of a throw-away for him, I assumed. I didn't know he was as serious about it as he was."

Sometime during the spring of 1957 Rich traveled to Florida and recorded IN MIAMI for Verve with Flip Phillips — his last work for Verve under the Granz regime. About the same time, Rich entered into one of his most unusual show business side trips. He became a character actor on a CBS television sitcom called The Marge and Gower Champion Show. The Champions had become famous as a specialty dance team during the climactic years of the MGM musical in the early 1950s. In a program created by Jack Benny's production company to share his Sunday evening time period, a format was created very much in the image of Benny's own show in which the Champions played themselves, a show business dancing act. Rich was brought in to play Cozy, Gower's wisecracking best friend and accompanist. Peg La Centra, who had sung with the Artie Shaw band in 1937-38, was Marge's confident. Six episodes were telecast on alternate Sundays between March 31 and June 9, the first live, the others on film.

"We had a fabulous time on the show and we loved working with Buddy," Marge Champion recalled recently. "I believe it was Gower who wanted him. We wanted to have a best friend that played an instrument. Show business is not very big business, you know. You get to know everybody, whether they're in your little niche or not. Gower thought Buddy was the best drummer he had ever seen, and he had heard that at that particular time he wanted some kind of movie or singing career. That became very clear as we worked with him. It was no secret. And he was wonderful. He definitely could have developed along that line, too, as Oscar Levant had. There were certain people like Levant who had a specialty talent and also a personality that could be used in films and TV in supporting roles as best friend types. Levant was one; Buddy Ebsen was another. With that New York street kid attitude, Buddy Rich probably could have taken that route if film musicals had gone on another few years. But he was wonderful with us — patient, polite, totally professional. And a darling with me."

Alas, CBS canceled the Champion show after six episodes, canceling Rich's potential career as another Oscar Levant — although ironically Rich would later gain his most widespread fame conversing with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in much the same way that Levant had with Jack Paar on the same program in the late '50s and early '60s.

Rich worked with the James band at its home base, the Hollywood Palladium, through the run of the TV show, and recorded James' WILD ABOUT HARRY album during that period — though under the name Buddy Poor, as his Verve contract was still in effect. He made relatively little news for the next two years, content to be the featured star with James. He toured Europe with the band in October 1957, and upon his return appeared on CBS'The Big Record of November 13, knocking out a brazen, toe-to-toe duet with James on FLASH. His Verve contract continued, but produced no further records. It finally expired early in 1959.

In the late 1950s there was not a lot of competition among record companies to sign up Buddy Rich. So in 1958 when his friend and former Down Beat editor Jack Tracy joined Mercury Records in Chicago and offered him the chance to record, Rich was eager. "In 1950s dollars," says Tracy, "it wouldn't sound like much today. As I recall he got something like $2,500 or $3,000 per album against future royalties. In today's money it might be 10 times that much." Tracy's first project in April 1959 was to bring Rich together with Mercury's most celebrated house drummer, Max Roach. The same week Rich also recorded an album of Ernie Wilkins charts with a handpicked big band of New York veterans.

"I never experienced the kind of behavior and temper some associate with him," Tracy recalled recently. "I saw some of that behavior at work a couple of times, but it was never directed at me. If he dug you, he would not be anything but kind and loving to you. And generous. He was just neat to be with. He related better to peers his own age, I think. With Sweets and quality musicians who could play and had paid their dues, he was a cinch to get along with. When he recorded with Max there were no conflicts, although afterward Max was a little distraught because he felt he had been outplayed. He never believed it would happen. I only once saw him get nasty to a musician. It was a big band album. There were two sessions and on the second day a different trombone player came in. The contractor had gotten a replacement because the first player couldn't make both days. Buddy looked out from the control booth and saw the new guy and asked me 'what's he doing here?' His face turned dark. And later something happened and he started in on the player. The other guys were experienced New York players who knew Buddy — Emmet Berry, Phil Woods, and so on. They'd seen it before."

Rich was still eager to pursue the singing route again and began making new preparations for an act, this despite the fact that there seemed to be little interest in booking him as a vocalist. In October, Tracy brought him back into the Mercury studios for what would become his final album as a singer — THE VOICE is RICH. A few weeks later, to everyone's shock, it nearly became the final album of his career.

Rich had been feeling an unfamiliar stiffness in his fingers during an engagement in New Orleans in December. Before the end of the two-week date it had spread up his left arm. One night on his way back to the hotel, a sudden chest pain struck and he broke out in a sweat. The next day he flew to Atlanta, where he had two days off before his quintet went to work at the Top o' the Pole. Several hours before his opening he excused himself from a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and asked for a doctor. It was just in time. A few minutes later in the doctor's office, he was told at the age of 42 that he had suffered a heart attack and went straight to St. Joseph's Hospital. Shortly before Christmas he was discharged and headed back to New York, where he experienced further discomfort and spent the next five weeks in the hospital.

"When he had that heart attack," Tracy recalled recently, "Buddy was a very frightened man. He was afraid he was never going to play drums again. Buddy never lacked for self-confidence, but he was one scared guy for a while. He thought the drums might be gone, and he was not an old man. So singing suddenly became even more important to him than ever. It might have to be his only livelihood, he thought — that and comedy. With the decline of all but a few big bands, he knew he would never get the financing for anything like that. But Buddy still wanted to be the headliner, a star — and singing seemed to be the only way for an ambitious guy with a vaudeville background to become a star."

Back in New York, Rich talked to reporters about relaunching his forever stalled singing career. "I wanted to sing more than I ever wanted anything," he told Down Beat. But words are cheap and, in Rich's case, always subject to change. In fact, there were few buyers for his singing on the club scene. During January and early February he took things easy, but announced plans for a big band engagement in Birdland in March — with the medical caveat that he would share instrumental duties with a relief drummer. Like many such announcements, nothing came of it. But among his first public forays back into public playing was an unannounced appearance sitting in with his beloved Basie band at Birdland in March. After another drop-in with Max Roach and Allen Eager, in which Rich took the stand and broke up the house, he and Mel Torme were walking back to his apartment at 2 a.m. After a long silence, Torme later wrote, Rich turned to him. "Fuck singing," he said. "I'm a drummer."

With that epiphany, the artist achieved finally defeated the entertainer for the soul of Buddy Rich.

With his energy and enthusiasm returning to normal, and after a brief singing stand in The Living Room, he formed a septet in April that included Seldon Powell and Dave McKenna and broke it in at Birdland. It was during this period that young Mike Mainieri entered the scene on vibes. "We had a mutual friend named Pete Voulo," Mainieri says, "who was a drummer and a very close friend of Buddy's. Pete kept bugging Buddy about my playing. Buddy always told him that the last thing he wanted was another vibes player because Terry Gibbs drove him nuts. Right after his heart attack Buddy was playing at the Village Gate. The place was packed and everyone was wondering whether he'd drop dead on the stand, because he never held back when he soloed. That's where I auditioned one night on the final tune. He made a very caustic introduction — 'We got this kid from the Bronx who looks like he's wearing his father's suit and says he can play the vibes.' He then kicks off something incredibly fast like CHEROKEE; I play 30 choruses, and he hires me on the spot." Rich next went to Pep's Jazz Room in Philadelphia in May, and from there to the Blue Note in Chicago, where, according to Down Beat, he "tore into his drums like a man possessed on a 15-minute solo on THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR THE SUNRISE, which featured every drum stroke known to man — and some new ones." There was no singing, no dancing. When a fan in the audience requested a couple of vocals, Rich shot back, "Buy my album."

In 1960 Jack Tracy left Mercury for Argo, a jazz subsidiary of the Chicago pop/blues label, Chess, and brought Rich with him. By now the septet was down to a quintet. Rich had hired Sam Most to replace Powell on tenor, but it quickly became clear that Most was a brilliant flutist. Johnny Morris came in on piano. "That was a pretty hot band," Morris says today. "There was a lot of demand.""Buddy was probably making pretty good money then," says Mainieri. "He was only paying four guys, and I was only making $100 a week. It probably helped him get out of debt." In October there would be one Argo album, PLAYTIME, and another session in January that sat unreleased until now. Later that year Rich returned to Verve, now owned by MGM with Creed Taylor in charge of production, for his last small group date for the label. Two days after the Verve session in August, the group headed off on a long cultural exchange tour of the Middle East sponsored by the State Department. Rich was an unofficial good will ambassador. Joey Adams was hired to put a troop together that included the four Step Brothers, a balloon-blowing act, Chaz Chase who would eat flowers and cigars (a "geek" in circus lingo), and a "magic" lady who produced doves from every part of her body. Adams would do his comedy routines in the

middle of the desert before 200,000 Afghans who didn't understand a word he was saying. "The only hip people on the tour were the Step Brothers," says Mainieri. "Buddy would always do a tap routine with them." The company traveled to many places one would go to today only in uniform — Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Iran, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.

The local American Embassies would brief the performers when they arrived and advise them on where and whom they should avoid. "There was real danger," says Morris. "In Jakarta there was some guy named Due King who kidnapped Americans and sold them to the communists or extorted ransom. We were at a cocktail party one night and met this charming Asian man. And he was the guy — Due King! It was wild. We did a jam session with the King of Thailand at the palace. They would set up concerts and we would perform for the kings and dignitaries and top military people. Then we would do shows in large theaters for very small admissions, all of which would be donated back to the countries for useful social programs, supposedly. I remember India — what a cesspool that was then."

"At one of these shows," Morris told Buddy Rich discographer Lou Perry, "gun-toting Afghans from the desert appeared in a thunderous roar of horses and a cloud of dust to listen to the sextet's performance...Then [they] showed their appreciation by firing their rifles in the air all at once. Many of the show jumps included small plane flights to out-of-the-way places, and then bus transport to hotels and concerts. The flight and accommodations were not first class."

The musicians became sick from dysentery. "We had the Kabul trots," says Mainieri. "We were shitting for months." Rich hated India, where the band was to close the tour by doing a month of appearances in Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi and Madras. "He was fighting with Joey Adams all the time," says Morris, "and he finally just bugged out and left the tour early. He couldn't stand the country." Mainieri played drums for the balance of the dates. Rich cleared out so fast he left his cymbals, drums and cameras behind with Mainieri. "I was so pissed off," he says, "I sold off his cameras and gave away most of his cymbals. He wanted to kill me."

When the band came to New York just before Christmas it was supposed to go back to work. But the men soon were hit with an unpleasant surprise. During the tour, portions of their salaries were sent back to the United States and put in escrow. But when Buddy came back early, according to Morris, he fired his accountant and took the money. Rich owed his musicians significant back wages. He wanted the band to continue, but the men put their foot down and said he would have to pay up something. "I didn't know he owed me money until I got home," says Mainieri. "I was up to about $350 a week by then, and half of it was gone. And we were all sick, too. I wouldn't even take his phone calls."

"Everyone got very ticked off at him," says Morris, who claims he was owed about $6,000. "We weren't demanding every penny, but he had to show some kind of intent. Buddy was a big spender. He had three cars repossessed while I was working for him. At one point I had to take my own car on the road to supply transportation for some of the guys in the band. Buddy told me to keep track of everything, but he never reimbursed me. The fact was he just didn't have it. He always spent more than he made; that was his problem." It was not as if Rich was always broke, says Mainieri. "He just didn't have control. His wife Marie spent money like it was going out of style. He had a house in Vegas, a house in L.A., an apartment in New York and a house in Miami. I'll never forget playing the Daily News concert at the old Madison Square Garden. He owed us five weeks pay, but drove into the arena in a Mercedes 300SL. And I don't think he ever paid for that. He wore handmade suites, stayed in great hotels and was always throwing money around. We hung with Sinatra, Torme, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Lewis. We had a ball. But try to get a raise out of him? Talk to his manager."

The government was on him for taxes as well. Money had been withheld from his musicians' salaries but was not sent to the government. This came to light when Morris and Mainieri were audited after claiming withholding taxes that turned out never to have been paid. After the Asian tour the band never got back together. Buddy went back with Harry James, but his money problems didn't end. When the withholding irregularities turned up, the IRS came after him and finally arrested him in Vegas, according to Mainieri. And based on the evidence collected by the IRS, the union eventually stepped in and put a lien on his salary on behalf of the musicians. Over the next few years they would receive small checks for odd amounts of $19 or $26. Eventually they collected about half their money.

"It was funny," says Morris. "Years later I ran into him and he treated me like a long-lost brother. It was the closest he could come to saying ‘I’m sorry.' We were good to him. We were young and eager to learn and very loyal. I think he felt badly about the financial problems." After the group broke up, Rich moved in and out of the Harry James orchestra over the next five years, confining almost all his recording activity to the band's albums for MGM and later Dot.

In the end, Rich was a uniquely lucky man in the world of jazz and show business. His third act would be his best, and the one that finally brought him the headliner stardom (and perhaps the financial security) he had always sought. Best of all, he did it the way the public had always insisted — as an artist, not an entertainer. He left James for the last time in April 1966, leaving his place, first, to Louis Bellson, then to Sonny Payne of Basie fame; and finally to Les DeMerle, whose cocky flash and confidence, not to mention virtuosity, seemed to directly channel his famous predecessor. For the next 20 years Rich would become a regular presence on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and more importantly, lead the last modern big band to attract a large general audience while still inspiring admiration from jazz musicians and critics for its consistent innovation and power. He died at 69 on April 1, 1987, of cardiac complications and a brain tumor. He remained at the top of his form to within four months of his death.”

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