Chuck Stewart, 1927-2017 - Jazz Photographer

February 1, 2017, 7:00 am

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“Chuck Stewart, one of the most prolific and admired photographers in jazz — an intimate chronicler of many of its icons and milestones, including the historic recording session for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme — died on Jan. 20, 2017 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Kim Stewart, who has handled the licensing of his images in recent years.

Over a distinguished career that spanned more than 70 years, Stewart shot countless artists in profile and at work, capturing resonant and unguarded images that also tell the story of the music. By his estimate, he shot the cover images for more than 2,000 albums, including a large portion of the Impulse! catalog. He also contributed photographs to a range of publications, including Esquire and the New York Times.

“In my portraits and improvisational shots, I’ve tried to unveil the soul of the artists I photographed and communicate the essence of their craft,” Stewart wrote in his official bio. “That’s why they trusted me: James Brown, John Coltrane, Candido, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Quincy Jones, Machito, Max Roach, Frank Sinatra, and many more. You know their names, but few people have known and photographed them as I have.”

Charles Hugh Stewart was born in Henrietta, Tx. and raised in Tuscon, Az., where he received a Box Brownie camera as a gift on his 13th birthday. It wasn’t long before he put it to professional use, photographing the great opera singer Marian Anderson during her visit to his school. He sold prints to teachers and his fellow students for two dollars apiece.

He attended Ohio University, one of the only colleges in the country to offer a fine arts degree in photography. It was there that he met the older photographer Herman Leonard, who fast became a mentor and friend.

Stewart served in the Army after graduation, working as a combat photographer; he was the only African-American to shoot the postwar atomic bomb tests in 1952. After his service, he accepted an invitation from Leonard to work in his New York studio: “I did a lot of the grunt work, where I learned to set up a shot, and understand what the photographer tries to translate to an audience.”

Eventually Stewart inherited the studio, carrying on Leonard’s legacy in his own language. His images often incorporate darkness as a backdrop, setting up the subject in dramatic relief. Last spring a gallery exhibition of his work ran at WBGO, and he spoke with Doug Doyle about his life and career.

He has also exhibited at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and published a collection called Chuck Stewart’s Jazz Files, on Da Capo Press. Among the honors he has received are the Milt Hinton Award For Excellence in Jazz Photography.

He is survived by a daughter, Marsha Stewart; two sons, David and Christopher; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.” - Nat Chinen - Obituary for WBGO

Some of Chuck Stewart's most famous photos of jazz musicians are now on display in the WBGO hallways. Stewart, born in 1927, is best known for his portraits of jazz singers and musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis, as well as artists in the R&B and salsa genres.

Stewart's photographs have graced more than 2,000 album covers. Stewart, who lives in Teaneck, NJ, talked about the process of shooting a star musician:

“When you went to a recording studio, you could take pictures on two occasions. One, when they rehearsed everything before they made a take. And after the take, when they were listening to the playback to determine if whether they were satisfied or if they had to do it again.”

But his photographs were not just about music, he captured the images of great athletes as well as historic moments.

Chuck Stewart

When asked how taking photos has changed since his heyday:

“The digital thing would have put people like me out of business, because I had to know every aspect of what I was doing. My eyes said there is the picture the picture is here. Once I take the picture, how do I improve upon it if I have the time? Then I go into the dark room and improve some more. The final result is a picture I want people to see.”

Stewart takes great pride in his technique and his legacy:

“I wanted all of them (photos) to say that’s Chuck Stewart. Because in the first place, if you were to say Count Basie, there must have been a thousand photographers that have photographed him. Well I wanted my photo to say, this is a picture Chuck Stewart took of Count Basie.”

Doug Doyle’s in-depth interview with Chuck on WBGO can be heard here.

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Henry Mancini – “Making Yourself As You Go” [From the Archives]

February 2, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Joyriding with Stanley, Oliver and Herbie

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“If modern jazz becomes indelibly linked with manslaughter, murder, mayhem, wisecracking private eyes and droll policemen, the brunt of the responsibility must be borne by composer Henry Mancini. Because of him the point is rapidly being reached where no self-respecting killer would consider pulling the trigger without a suitable jazz background.

Seriously, Henry Mancini has become a pacesetter. Immediately after the first episode of the TV series "Peter Gunn," Mancini's modern jazz background score became a topic of general conversation. The Music from Peter Gunn, his first RCA Victor album (LPM/LSP-1956), rocketed into the nation's number one best-selling spot with the muzzle velocity of a police positive. Various recordings of the main theme music became top single records.

With all this excitement, it was inevitable that others should follow Mancini's lead. TV detectives now swash, buckle and make love to the strains of modern jazz.”

- Bill Olofson, liner notes to More Music From Peter Gunn [RCA LPM-2040]

Had it not been for a chance meeting with producer-director Blake Edwards, I daresay that Henry Mancini may not have had the opportunity to fulfill his lifelong dream of writing music for the movies.

There was no television when the dream first took shape in Henry’s mind after his father took him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s movie version of The Crusades.

The year was 1935. Henry was eleven-years old.

In the 23-years between that fateful day at the Lowe’s Penn Theater in Pittsburg, PA and bumping into Blake as he was coming out of the Universal Studios barber shop in North Hollywood, CA, Henry Mancini had become a masterful composer-arranger. He did so with a minimum of formal education; essentially by learning through doing.

As the late, writer Ray Bradbury once put it: “You make yourself as you go.”

After serving as a rifleman in World War II, Mancini married and, at his wife Ginny’s suggestion, he relocated to southern California to pursue his dream. Once there, he landed a job in the music department at Universal Pictures.

Henry did every job imaginable at Universal’s music room from copying scores to writing incidental music to even writing scores for forgettable-at-the-time-later-to-become-cult-classic-“B”-films like The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Henry, too, might have been forgotten if he hadn’t been for the advent of television as a popular form of entertainment in the 1950s.

And, a rendezvous with obscurity might have loomed even larger for Henry had he not run into Blake Edwards, an old acquaintance, that fateful day in 1958 on the Universal back lot.

What’s the old adage: “I’d rather be lucky than good[?]”

Henry Mancini was a couple of years younger than Blake at the time of there chance meeting [36 and 38, respectively].

The studio system that maintained staff orchestras and staff composer-arrangers was coming to an end and Mancini has just lost his job. He had a wife and three children to support.

As they were parting company, Blake asked Henry if he would be interested in doing a TV show with him.

“Sure,” said Mancini, “what’s the name of it?”

Edwards said “It’s called Peter Gunn.”

Mancini asked: “What is it, a Western?”

Edwards, replied: “You’ll see.”

The rest is history.

Starring Craig Stevens as the stylish private-eye, Peter Gunn was to become one of the most successful series in that genre.

Thanks to Mancini’s genius, it would also lead to major changes in how music was written for television and the movies.

For Peter Gunn, Henry Mancini wrote the first full score in television history.

Both Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini went on to have illustrious television and movie careers that resulted in fame and fortune, distinction and awards, and the comforts of a satisfying and stylish life.

But for me, the epitome Henry Mancini’s composing and arranging always began and ended with his exciting and energetic work on the music for Peter Gunn.

The Jazz pulse with which he infused the music for that TV series has influenced and informed my Jazz consciousness for over fifty years.

One of my great treats in life is to return to this music and savor its timeless brilliance.

Much of the music that Mancini wrote for Peter Gunn features small group Jazz, but Blue Steel, which is from the second album – More Music for Peter Gunn – is composed for a full big band, one that certainly roars on this track.

Led by a trumpet section of Conrad Gozzo [lead], Pete Candoli [soloist], Frank Beach and Graham Young – can you imagine?! – and an orchestra that also includes five trombones, four French Horns, four woodwinds and four rhythm, Blue Steel is a veritable explosion in sound.

Hank’s music always seems to bubble with enthusiasm and humor; its bright, bouncy and bops along.

Blue Steel is only 3:39 minutes in length and yet it is brimming over with compositional devices – vamps, interludes and riffs that launch the soloists; half-step modulations and dynamics that are constantly building in the background until Hank rushes the band effervescently to the foreground; glissandos that probe and punctuate the arrangement; a throbbing walking bass that starts and stops to heighten suspense; vibes-guitar-piano playing mice-running-along-the-piano-keys figures to create a furtive sonority; flute “choirs” interspersed with vibes and then with a piano solo; a trumpet solo that soars over bass trombone pedal tones and ascending, and then, descending French Horns [see if you can catch Pete Candoli’s reference to Your Getting to Be a Habit With Me in his solo].

And just when you think the band is going to explode, Hank brings in a fanfare played by the orchestra in unison with Conrad Gozzo screaming out three, high note blasts to close the piece with a rush of orchestral adrenalin.

This is the music of a master orchestrator at work. Few arrangers have ever called upon a greater palette of colors in their arrangements. Mancini music always seem to have a mysterious gift of melody to it which provides him with a strong, inner core to build his scores upon.

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Joyriding with Stanley, Oliver and Herbie

February 3, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 2

≪ Previous: Henry Mancini – “Making Yourself As You Go” [From the Archives]

“The late tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine (1934-2000) was a tough musician to pin down stylistically. His playing had a timeless quality when he first established himself as a recording artist in 1960, and that timelessness marked every note he played in the ensuing four decades. Harmonically and rhythmically he was clearly of his era; yet the size of his sound and the passionate directness of his ideas were identified with the more classic tenor stylists who established themselves before bebop took hold. The end result was a personal concept that combined swagger and sultriness, and left Turrentine captive to no particular school.”

- Bob Blumenthal, Jazz writer, critic and Grammy Winner

“Turrentine’s bluesy soul-Jazz enjoyed considerable commercial success in the 1960’s and after. His forte was a mid-tempo blues, often in minor keys, played with a vibrato as big as his grin.”

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

Joyride [Blue Note CDP 7 46100 2]marked an auspicious turning point in the career of Stanley Turrentine: his first record date backed by a fine, funky, swinging big band propitiously arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson.

Nelson’s writing is so skillful that the big band texture of the music never loses any of the relaxed spontaneity made possible by the intimacy of Turrentine’s usual small group settings.

Oliver is a master of scoring a canonic interplay between brass and reeds that serves, along with a sterling rhythm section made up of Kenny Burrell on guitar, Herbie Hancock on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Grady Tate on drums, to boot Stanley’s solos along while generating an atmosphere of gaiety and lightness. Listening to the music does make you feel like you are at a party, one that’s full of frivolity and glee. The title of the album is reflected in the sound of the music on it.

At the time of this recording, drummer Grady Tate was rapidly becoming one of the best all-round drummers on the New York scene. He has a supple, swinging beat, good taste, superior craftsmanship, and excellent ears, and he knows what the situation requires — be it trio or big-band work, he plays for the group.

And Herbie Hancock was making studio dates as a sideman on a large number of recording dates during this period. Be it for Jean “Toots” Thielemans, Paul Desmond or for Stanley, he seemed to be everywhere before launching a career that would make him an icon of Jazz-Rock fusion. Checkout his masterful solo on the Kettle of Fish track on the video montage at the close of this piece.

Here’s what the distinguished Jazz author and critic Leonard Feather had to say about the LP in the liner notes to the recording.

“Not too many years had passed — five, to be exact — since we heard the first of what turned out to be a long and rewarding series of small-combo albums under Turrentine's leadership. But in the interim he has acquired so many more devoted followers that the impact of that original session was comparatively small. In view of this, perhaps a brief recapitulation of the basic facts of Stanley's career is called for.

He was born April 5, 1934. in Pittsburgh. His first music teacher was another saxophonist by the name of Turrentine, first name Thomas. This of course was Stanley's father, who in the late 1930s played for a while with the Savoy Sultans, the same band that featured as its bassist the father of Grachan Moncur III.

As some traits of his current performances might lead you to suspect. Stanley has had some gutty rhythm and blues training; in fact, in his first professional job he played alongside Ray Charles in the Lowell Fulson band. This was in 1951. when Stanley was fresh out of high school.

His other credits include a stint with the late Tadd Dameron in Cleveland in 1953-4 (with brother Tommy Turrentine Jr. on trumpet); Earl Bostic's band; Uncle Sam's All Stars (more specifically, the 158th Army Band); and then, soon after his return to civilian life, the gig that proved decisive in launching him on the jazz scene: a year with the Max Roach combo, which took him on to New York, record dates, and the present status level of respect and admiration in which he is held by fellow musicians.

In his years with Blue Note, Stanley has been heard in a rich variety of settings: with the Three Sounds, with Les McCann, with Mrs. Turrentine (Shirley Scott) at the organ, and with a fine rhythm section (Horace Parlan, George Tucker and Al Harewood) that provided his backing on several of the early albums.

The big band context, it seems to me, was the next logical move. Glance through the pages of jazz history and you will find that sooner or later (more often sooner) all the truly important tenor men used a large ensemble as the resilient cushion for their horns. Coleman Hawkins came out of the Fletcher Henderson band, Lester Young out of Count Basie's; Ben Webster and Don Byas, traces of whom can still be discerned in the Turrentine style, had years of big band experience to their credit.

The use of a big accompanying group, far from burying the artist on center stage or inhibiting the chances for swinging, tends to provide him with a stimulus because of the richer range of tone color, the contrasts in volume and the diversity of moods that can be achieved. And to give these qualities the broadest possible dimensions there could hardly have been a more suitable candidate for the position of arranger-conductor than Oliver Nelson.

"Oliver was a wonderful choice to work on this album with me," says Stanley. "I've known him personally for just a couple of years, but I knew of him by reputation, and from his records, for quite a while before that.

"What makes him valuable, among other things, is his consistency. He does a lot of recording, but whoever he happens to be dealing with, you can tell that he has figured out each individual's personal groove, and has written accordingly.

That s what he did for me, and I couldn't have been happier with the arrangements. He did a superb job."

A few background details may be in order at this point. Nelson is about the same age as Stanley and, like him. is both a saxophonist and a composer. Born in St. Louis June 4, 1932, of a musical family, he began studying the saxophone at the age of eleven after five years of piano. He started out professionally very young, playing in the Jeter Pillars band at 15 and the George Hudson band at 16.

He was in New York in 1950 as a member of the big band led for a while by

Louis Jordan, and it was then that I recall first meeting him, though there was to be a very long gap until the next encounter. After a couple of years in the Marines with the Third Division band, he studied extensively in the areas of classical music, composition and theory at Washington University from 1954-7 and Lincoln U. from 1957-8.

Nelson's background is extraordinary. In addition to working with the bands listed above, and with others led by Erskine Hawkins, Louis Bellson et al., he has held a number of jobs outside music. When things weren't quite as active as they are today, he ran a street car and drove a bus in St. Louis. If they ever get tough again, he can take a job in the fields of taxidermy and embalming, in both of which he is reported to be an expert; but somehow, especially after listening to these sides, I doubt seriously that the necessity will ever arise.

In recent years, though still playing saxophone from time to time. Nelson has earned a reputation in New York as a skilled creator of polychromatic settings for a number of leading soloists and singers.

One important point should be stressed in an evaluation of the setting that Nelson provided here for Stanley Turrentine. It is not a "pick-up band" in the accepted sense of the term. Nelson has worked so much with a big band in the past year or two — in the recording studios and occasionally in person—that he has a regular group of men on whom he calls for all his dates. Most of the brass and reed men, as well as the rhythm section members, have worked together in previous Nelson-conducted albums. (It is interesting to note that coincidentally almost all the brass men worked with the Basie band at one time or another, and almost all the saxophonists are Benny Goodman alumni.)

In writing his charts for this orchestra, Nelson did an attractive and sensitive job of carrying out Blue Note's objective — namely, to provide Turrentine with a basically simple and funky background, neither too "commercial" nor too self-consciously sophisticated.”

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Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 2

February 4, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Art of Jazz Baritone Saxophone - Ronnie Cuber - "Tin Tin Deo"

≪ Previous: Joyriding with Stanley, Oliver and Herbie

Milt Hinton died on December 19, 2000, nearly six months after his 90th birthday on June 24th. Gene published the 3rd and last part of his interview with Milt in the June 2000 issue of the Jazzletter. It will follow this posting at a later date to form part three of the “Milt Hinton - We Are Like Atlas” feature.

“I was young when I first realized that music involves more than just playing an instrument. It’s really about cohesiveness and sharing. All my life, I’ve felt obliged to try and teach anyone who would listen. I’ve always truly believe that you don’t know something yourself until you can take if from your mind and put it in someone else’s. I also know that the only way we continue to live on this earth is by giving our talents to future generations.” - Milt Hinton

Jazzletter

Gene Lees, Editor

May 2000

At the end of his grade school days, Milt became a student at Wendell Phillips High School. Wendell Phillips — named after the famous Boston abolitionist — had an exceptional music department, headed Dr. Mildred Bryant Jones. She was conductor of the school's symphony orchestra. During his time there, Milt was soloist in the Mendelssohn violin concerto. The school also had a brass band, headed by Major N. Clarke Smith.

Milt said, "One of the most popular and famous black newspapers was the Chicago Defender. They had an editor named Abbott. He was very much interested in youth. A picnic for young people was organized every year by the Chicago Defender.

"When the black people moved into Chicago en masse to those big mansions, as I said, the white people moved out. The first people black people to make big money were women who made hair straighteners, because black women were using this stuff to process their hair.These women who produced this stuff got rich. This was before even black men began to use it.

"Madame Walker, out of Indianapolis, Indiana, made a fortune making this stuff. There was another lady named Addie Malone, out of St. Louis. They still have an Addie Malone Day in St. Louis.

"This lady had a product called Poro. My wife Mona was one of her secretaries as a young girl. This woman was a very Christian woman and a very enterprising lady. She opened up a school for black girls in St. Louis to teach cosmetology and hairdressing.

"Now these women, with the money they amassed, began to buy these mansions on Grand Boulevard. Addie Malone bought two. She bought one for a school for her girls. And when Mr. Abbott wanted to organize a youth band for black kids so they could learn to play and go around the country and perform, Mrs. Malone loaned the Chicago Defender the other mansion for the rehearsals for these black youths.

"Major N. Clarke Smith was in charge. That's where Lionel Hampton, and yours truly, and Hayes Alvis, and Nat Cole, and Scoops Carry, went for band rehearsals. Because

we were in his high-school band at Wendell Phillips. Every Saturday he would have rehearsals. Lionel was a year or two older than I. He got in the band on drums. He wanted to keep me out because I was in short pants! But I could always read good. I wanted to get in the band because I wanted the chance to learn the bass horn. And when Nat Cole wanted to get into the band, because he wanted to play the lyre, and Nat was younger than I, I tried to keep him out!

"My mother loved Nat Cole. He would play piano for her church socials. Even after he was dead, she called him 'dear Nathaniel.'

"Major N. Clarke Smith was a very great disciplinarian. A very military person. He wore a uniform all the time. And for reasons not known to me, he had a deep connection with Lyon and Healey, who had a big music store in Chicago. He was commissioned by Lyon and Healey to go around the world and write music about black people and to come back to Chicago and perform it. He did. I still have some of the music. He had us play it. Pineapple Lament. He went down into the Caribbean. He was not a jazzman! He was interested in the more academic world, like Sousa or something. And this is the kind of band we grew up in.

"I remember at Wendell Phillips High we had no idea what great influence he had. I remember one day he said to us in class, 'I don't think any of you kids ever heard a symphony orchestra.

"He said, 'I think I'll call up Fred Stock.....'

"We sort of giggled. He's going to call up Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony!

"He said, “I think I'll call up Fred Stock and have him bring the orchestra out here.'

"And we giggled some more. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's going to come out to our school at 39th and Prairie Avenue! And in a week or two, they did, and played for us. I remember they played Haydn. The Surprise Symphony.

"I was coming along pretty good. I'm playing violin, I'm president of the symphony orchestra at school, and I'm director of the jazz orchestra. First Major N. Clarke Smith put me on peckhorn. I always had a fascination for big things. So he gave me a bass saxophone. I liked that. There were only two bass horns in school, and there we had two players, and I had to wait for one of them to graduate. Finally one of the guys graduated, Quinn Wilson, and I got a chance at the bass horn. Nat Cole's older brother Eddie played tuba, and then he graduated.

"Major Smith said to me one day, 'Go down to Lyon and Healey's and tell them I said to give you a sarrusaphone.' It's built like a double bassoon, but it's brass. It's five foot tall. And you can't break it down like a bassoon. And it had a big wide double reed on it. I went down to Lyon and Healey, and they gave me one. I had to bring this thing back on the bus in this huge long case. My mother said, 'What in God's name are you going to do with that thing?' It has a very deep bass sound. It buzzes like a bassoon, and it's fingered like a saxophone. Adolph Sax made it.

"Major Smith was a marvelous conductor. He left Wendell Phillips to teach at Sumner High School, a black high school in St. Louis. And Captain Walter Dyett replaced him.

"I was supposed to graduate in 1930 but I graduated in the 1929 class. And they hadn't even finished building Dusable High. Captain Dyett came to Wendell Phillips and he went on to Dusable. He's the one who had Johnny Griffin and Richard Davis and Johnny Hartman. It was really a continuation, the next generation after us. I left Nat Cole in school, I left Ray Nance in school. John Levy was also at Wendell Phillips. I gave him my Sam Browne belt when I graduated. I was a lieutenant in the band by the time I graduated.

"Ed Fox had the Grand Terrace Cafe, and he had Percy Venable, a choreographer from Pittsburgh. Al Capone decided to open up a Cotton Club in Cicero, copied after the one in New York City. Black dancers, black musicians, white audiences. He gave a lot of work to guys. This was about the time I was ready to play. I was doing very well on violin. Every theater in every neighborhood had a violin player, a piano player, and a drummer to play for the screen.

"And that was when Al Jolson was in the first sound movie. When they showed that they didn't need orchestras in the theater, violinists lost their jobs, and here I am, just about ready to enter that business. Things got a little thin. And when Al Capone opened that Cotton Club in Cicero, and used all these black musicians, it was like manna from heaven. All the kids that I went to school with began to get jobs. One of my friends tried to get me to change from violin to trombone, because there weren't any violins in the band. They were using trumpets and saxophones. But I never learned how to play trombone. I was still delivering newspapers. The guys would come by and see me delivering newspapers for nine dollars a week and they were making 75 dollars a week in Al Capone's Cotton Club. And they'd say, 'Sporty,' which was my nickname, 'get a horn.' And I was totally embarrassed. Which is why I switched to bass.

"Capone didn't frequent the South Side, except to pay off. But he was in that Cotton Club in Cicero a lot. The guy who produced the show was Lucky Millinder. That's how he got started. His uncle, Percy Venable, was the choreographer for the Grand Terrace. He came from Pittsburgh. And his nephew was Lucky Venable. That was Lucky Millinder's name. When Capone opened his Cotton Club, he wanted to get Percy Venable to produce his shows. And Ed Fox, who owned the Grand Terrace, wouldn't let him go. Percy said, 'Take my nephew.' So Capone took Lucky Venable who changed his name to Lucky Millinder. And that's how he got his start as a bandleader. He was never a musician. But he knew choreography. I was in the band there for a while. There were no arrangements. He'd get the girls together and say, 'Two choruses and a half, take the last eight, tag four,' and that's the way we went out."

"Dizzy said he was a good bandleader."

"He was. He was not a musician. He exploited the same sort of thing that Cab Calloway had. Have a good flashy guy in front of the band. And Lucky was flashy. The gangsters put Cab in front of the Missourians. Missourians was a corporate band, owned by the musicians. It was a great band. They were all from Missouri. When they got ready to come east to New York, they needed somebody in front of 'em. Cab's sister Blanche Calloway was working in a club in Chicago owned by Joe Glaser's mother."

Joe Glaser was later known as Louis Armstrong's manager and president of the Associated Booking Corporation, which booked, among other bands, that of Duke Ellington. There were always rumors in the jazz world of Glaser's shady connections, but for that matter anyone in the nightclub world of Chicago in the 1920s had connections of some sort with Al Capone: he actually ran the city. In his biography of Capone, Larry Bergreen wrote:

"In an earlier incarnation Glaser was an influential fight promoter in Chicago. From his two-room office in the Loop, Glaser ran his boxing empire and zealously protected his turf. When a gambler and part-time journalist named Eddie Borden denounced Glaser in print as a front for the Capone organization, Glaser had him run out of town and swiftly returned to business as usual. Glaser's power to fix fights earned him a reputation as the sage of boxing .. . ."

In those days, Milt said, Cab Calloway " was a young kid, a basketball player, who'd come around to see his sister Blanche. She wanted to get him into the club, so she taught him how to sing, and he'd come in and play the drums."

Blanche Calloway was five years Cab's senior. She began singing in Baltimore clubs — she and her brother were both born in Maryland — in the 1920s, recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1925, worked with Andy Kirk, and for a time had her own band. Thus she was Cab's entree to show business. The mob people were impressed by the dashing young man.

"So the gangsters," Milt continued, "said to the Missourians, Put this kid in front of the band.' And they were a great success. They played the Savoy Ballroom and were doing great. When Duke Ellington was getting ready to leave the Cotton Club in New York, they said, 'Give him the band.' They told the Missourians, 'It's Cab's band now.' The bass player was the leader, so he was naturally fired. They told the guys in the band, 'You can stay, but Cab Calloway is the bandleader, and you're going into the Cotton Club.' And they stayed. I can tell you who they were. Lamarr Wright, Walter Thomas, Andy Brown, Doc Cheatham. They stayed and it was a tremendous success.

"Cab was made by radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club two or three times a week. Network radio was starting and people all over the country could hear you.

"When they got Capone on income tax, he said, 'If you think all of these people that I'm hiring, who are making three or four hundred dollars a week when everybody else that works a week long in the stockyards and different places is making 25 and 30 dollars, are going to go back to taking jobs at 15 or 20 dollars a week, you're crazy.'

"And that's when chaos broke loose. They broke up all that alcohol-selling, and those people were not going to go back to those jobs. And they started robbing and killing and breaking into places. It changed the whole complexion of the town. The happiness all left, the clubs all closed, and it was pretty drab there for a long time after that."

"The first band I ever played in, really," Milt said, "was not a jazz band. It was a sweet band at the Jeffrey Tavern, a white tavern. It was like Lester Lanin. The bass player got sick or something, and somebody recommended me for just one night. I got 19 dollars. That's the first time I made any money playing bass. I was still delivering newspapers, 200 papers every morning, Chicago Herald-Examiner, for $9.75 a week, and going to Northwestern University. That's how I gradually got into the gigs, when I got this one job for $19, and I worked late, and I had to deliver my morning papers. Then somebody else got sick in a band, and I got a call again. My mother said, 'You can't do both things. You've got to make a decision.' I had no dreams it would be possible to make a living in music. That was the toughest decision of my life, to give up my paper route.

"I had to wait for some of the older players to get drunk or get sick. We didn't have too many clubs to go to. There was a guy named Charlie Levy. He wrote arrangements and played violin in old road houses. He had a car. This is summertime. He'd put me in a car and we'd go out to some tavern. There was no juke boxes in those days. We'd go in and start playing, and they'd give us nickels and dimes and quarters, and we'd come home with $10 a piece.

"I came out of Northwestern University, because I was sleeping in the history classes, and Dr. Jones, who had studied with Coleridge Taylor, asked me what was I doing. Why was I so tired? I explained I was working and I had to help support my mother. He encouraged me not to kill myself just to get a degree, but to continue my studies in music, because I seemed to be talented along those lines.

"Consequently I started working with bands around Chicago. I got to work with Erksine Tate. The Savoy Ballroom got to be very popular. All those bands came through Chicago from the west and from the east. Andy Kirk and Duke Ellington. They all played the Savoy Ballroom. And we had a union there, so they had to have a relief band. So I got the job in the relief band, playing the intermission. I got the chance to hear and see Mary Lou Williams and her husband, John Williams, who was a saxophone player. Ben Webster was in the band at that time. Duke Ellington came through and I got the chance to stand there and watch Wellman Braud, and hope he'd just drop his rosin, so I could hand it to him or something like that. The contribution to me was to be around those wonderful people, and see it.

"In 1929, Eddie South came back from Europe. He had a manager named Sam Skolnick. He was an agent. Eddie had been so successful in Europe, Skolnick had convinced some people they should put him into some of the great white hotels downtown in Chicago, with violins, a society type of band. This guy organized the band while Eddie was still in Europe. He got some great musicians. They got me to play bass in this band. It rehearsed for maybe four or five in the afternoon upstairs in a Chinese restaurant called Chu Chin Chow near the Savoy Ballroom. We rehearsed music like Dancing on the Ceiling and that kind of beautiful stuff. Eddie was supposed to come in with his quartet from Europe and be augmented by this band. We had the rehearsal, and the powers that be decided they couldn't have a black band in this hotel downtown.

"The agent had signed everybody up to contracts, $75 a week, guaranteeing us 30 weeks a year. And then the bubble burst. And Eddie had to buy the contracts back from the musicians. He paid $300 a piece. It probably depleted what he had earned in Europe. They paid everybody off. And when they got to me, this guy said to Eddie, 'Now wait, we can get you a job in one of the small clubs. You don't have a bass player. So don't give this kid $300. Give him a job.'

"That's how I got the job with Eddie South. We worked for Al Capone. He owned the Club Rubaiyat, a small club on the North Side that seated less than a hundred. That's where I began to meet most of the white musicians, because everybody knew about Eddie South. We had a small band, with a piano player named Anthony Joe Spalding, from Louisville, Kentucky. A very great piano player. He played all kinds of music, things like Rhapsody in Blue, all of the French music. This guy played it well. Eddie had Stanley Wilson on guitar, and a drummer named Lester Moreira, from Cuba, who later played for Cugat. And he hired me for bass. And we played these wonderful things. I learned to play all the classical things that Eddie played. And all of the musicians from Ben Pollack's band used to come over to hear Eddie South. Benny Goodman was in that band, and Jack Teagarden. This is where we got to meet all these wonderful musicians and exchange ideas. And later they'd go out and jam together. It was that kind of a thing.

"We stayed in this little club until 1933. That was the year they had the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the Congress Hotel. The Congress was a fabulous hotel. And they decided then, we couldn't play in the big ballroom, but they put us in the lobby, by the fountain. We were playing music with the water dripping, and that's where I got to see all those congressmen. I saw Al Smith and John Nance Garner, speaker of the house, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That was the convention that nominated Roosevelt for president.

"We got to do a recording session for RCA. One of the big tunes was Old Man Harlem at that time. Then we went to California. We went to a beautiful club on Hollywood Boulevard, the Club Ballyhoo. We had a trio, Eddie South, Everett Barksdale on guitar, and I'm playing bass. We were really tight. All strings. We played from hot jazz to classical music. Everett Barksdale was the first black guitarist I ever worked with that really read music and played single-string stuff. He was out of Detroit. He was absolutely fantastic. There was no amplification, of course. All they had for entertainment besides Eddie South was a dance trio, a woman and two men. We had to play tango for them. The woman was Carmen Miranda and one of the men was Cesar Romero.

"Now all of the great writers and the good musicians in the studios had heard of Eddie South. That was 1933. We stayed in California. Eddie's career grew. We came to Chicago after that

"Joe Venuti had always loved Eddie South. He was a great benefactor of Eddie's. You hear all the crazy stories about all the jokes that Joe Venuti did. And of course he did that. He was a raucous guy. I never saw one instance of his having any racial feelings at all. He told me that he and Eddie Lang used to cork their faces and go up to Harlem to jam with black musicians, so that nobody would give them any flak about it. When he was with Paul Whiteman at the College Inn, Eddie South was at the Vendome Theater, Whiteman had a great singer with him named Bea Palmer.

"She was used to being accompanied by Joe Venuti on violin. He played beautifully behind her. Joe was leaving with a group of his own playing country clubs. And this lady was distraught because she didn't have Joe to play jazz behind her. She said, 'What am I going to do?' And Joe Venuti said, 'Get Eddie South.' But of course, you couldn't get a black violin player to play in Whiteman's band then.

They put her on the stage and put a screen behind her and Eddie South stood behind it and played for her.

"Joe Venuti was so wonderful. When he went on tour with his trio, people asked him, 'Who can we get to follow you in here?' Joe always recommended Eddie South. We began to get these wonderful jobs, playing in these exclusive country clubs. When we got there, there was always a very funny note left on the piano for us from Joe Venuti. He made it possible for Eddie to make a very good living.

"Years later I got the chance to work with Joe Venuti. After working with Eddie South, I loved violin, and it was my first instrument. About a third of my record collection is violin players, from Heifetz on down. So I finally got a chance to work with Joe in New York City. He appreciated me because I understood the violin. We could play contrapuntal things. And I could bow. I had one of the most exciting times of my life with him. I was playing with him at Michael's Pub when he got very sick and died — his last engagement

"I've always been a sideman. I've never had a band. I've worked once or twice in a little trio. I always decided I wanted to be such a good bass player that people would want me to work for them. I could always work. That's what happened to me with Eddie South. Work slowed down for violin players, but I could get gigs around Chicago. I'm not expensive, I'm a side man. I'm getting scale, but I can survive on scale. A violinist of Eddie's stature can't work for scale."

"And," I interjected, "a jazz violinist can't work as a sideman."

"No, that's right," Milt said. "And if you've got any kind of reputation, you can't step into somebody else's band. I'm working around with Erskine Tate and Johnny Long and Joe Williams, we're working on the South Side. Eddie South had to sit at home. And he's my master. And I'm ending up with a hundred dollars at the end of the week. I had to loan him twenty, because he didn't have the money. He always paid me back when he got a gig. But it was very sad. That's how I really got established, working with Eddie South. In 1934, we got on the RKO circuit with a comedian, and Lee Sims, the pianist, and Olive May Bailey, all through theaters in Ohio, and wound up at the Palace Theater in New York City for one week. I made 75 bucks.

"I didn't want to go back home. That's just like I'd get back in school or something. So I stayed around New York. For five dollars a week, I got a room in the 135th Street YMCA. I starved, but I didn't care. I could get a fish sandwich with four slices of bread and a whole fish laid across it for 20 cents up in Harlem. I'd cut that sucker in half, put a little hot sauce on it, wrap the other half up and put it in my pocket for later. You could get a big soda for three cents. And I'm trying to get a gig. I go by the Apollo Theater and listen to the rehearsal. I had no dreams: John Kirby was a jazz bass player, Beverly Peer was with Chick Webb. I had no way to survive. I finally had to go back to Chicago.

"In the early 1930s, there was only one big band, besides Les Kincaid's, in Chicago, and that was Earl Hines' band. So there weren't a lot of jobs for bass players. I couldn't get into Earl Hines' band, because he had Quinn Wilson, who graduated ahead of me, and he had Hayes Alvis, a great bass player that used to be a drummer. When the Grand Terrace closed for the summer, the band split up. Some guys would take one half of the band, and some guys would take the other and go to small clubs. I worked my way up to be the second bass player.

"The first time there was ever a coast-to-coast network was when the Lindbergh baby was kidnaped. That night Earl Hines was on the air from midnight at the Grand Terrace. They kept him on the air all night, and they would patch in from Oak Park, Illinois, to Gary, Indiana, to Indianapolis, to relay that message about that baby's kidnaping. It was the first band to ever play coast-to-coast network, a network of stations thirty or forty miles apart.

"Then, in 1935, Zutty Singleton from New Orleans really established me. He was even more respected than Louis Armstrong. He worked with Louis in the Hot Five. And now he's got the job at the Three Deuces down at State and Lake. And he hired me as his bass player. Cozy Cole's brother, Lee Cole, was on piano, Lee Collins was playing trumpet, Everett Barksdale was playing guitar, and Zutty Singleton was playing drums. These guys were New Orleans seniors, and they hired me. There were not too many string bass players around. Zutty was a giant, and when he hired me, that was my stamp of approval into the New Orleans society. Art Tatum was the relief piano player.

"And it was my sad duty, at the end of the night, closing up his set, I had to go play with him. I never caught him yet. He was playing those fantastic changes that I never knew, and I stood there in amazement, trying to catch him all the time. But he was always so nice. We played pinochle together, so the rout wasn't that complete. He'd hold the cards right up to his eye, with the light behind him. A unique man. He would make the waiters set up the room the way it was going to be that night. He knew how to maneuver through the tables without falling or stumbling to the piano.

"I played there with Zutty in 1935. That's when Cab was going out to California to do The Singing Kid with Al Jolson. Cab had Al Morgan, this fabulous bass player from New Orleans. Photogenic. Big, tall, looked he was chiseled out of ebony. Handsome man, exotic clothes, and the ladies loved him. A great shower, and of course he was the biggest showman of the time, and they're making this movie with Al Jolson. And in one of the scenes, Cab Calloway is dancing and shaking his hair, and he looked up. He thought the camera was on him and it was on the bass player, Al Morgan. And of course that didn't sit too good.

"Then Al Morgan beat Cab out of a couple of ladies, and so they weren't too tight together. And then one of the directors told Al Morgan, 'If you're out here in California and we've got a jazz movie, the way you went over, you've got the job.' And so with this altercation between the two of them, Al Morgan quit and stayed out in California and joined Les Kite's band. Lionel Hampton was in that band, Lawrence Brown, quite a few guys.

"Cab had to come back east without a bass player for his one-nighters. Well my friend Keg Johnson, Budd Johnson's brother, who had gotten in Cab Calloway's band, said, 'Well going through Chicago, check out Milt Hinton. He's down at the Three Deuces with Zutty.' Cab Calloway stopped in at the Three Deuces in his coon-skin coat on a cold winter night, and he came in the door and everybody saw it was Cab Calloway, and they were making over him. And he never said a word to me. He came up to Zutty Singleton and said, 'I hear that kid's pretty good. How is he?' Zutty said, 'He's fine. He's a good kid. He plays good.'

"And Cab said, 'Well, can I have him?'

"And Zutty said, 'Yeah.' He didn't ask me anything. He just gave me away, like a baseball player. Zutty came upstairs, and I was playing cards with Art Tatum, and Zutty said, 'Well kid, you're gone.'

"I said, 'I'm gone where!'

"'Well Cab just asked me for you,' he said with that New Orleans talk.

"I said, 'Zutty, do I have to give you notice or anything?'

"He said, 'Get your ass out of here tonight.'

"We went back and played another set and Cab Hi-de-hoed a couple of choruses with us, and all he said to me, he turned around to me and said, 'The train leaves from the South Street Station at 9 o'clock in the morning. Be there.' And he walked out.

"I had to call home and tell my Mama — and that was one o'clock in the morning, and we played till four — I've got this job with Cab Calloway, and tell her to pack up whatever I have. I only had one suit. She packed up a canvass bag with a change of underwear and a clean shirt. I got on this train in South Street Station, and I'd never been in a Pullman in life. And you know I didn't come from Mississippi in a Pullman. I got in this train, and all these giants were there. There was Doc Cheatham, Mouse Randolph, Claude Jones — Tommy Dorsey's buddy, great trombone player — Keg Johnson, my friend. And Cab Calloway and Ben Webster had been out in the night in town and got drunk, and missed the train.

"But if you missed the train downtown, you could get on at the 63rd Street station. Keg Johnson is introducing me to the guys. I musta looked terrible. The train stopped at the 63rd Street station, and Cab Calloway and Ben Webster fall in drunk.

"Ben Webster looked at me, and said, 'What is that?'

"And Cab said, 'That's the new bass player.'

"And Ben Webster said, 'That is what? I must have weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. I swore I would never like this man. And he turned out to be one of my dearest friends."

I found myself laughing out loud, having often stood beside Ben, in all his gloomy majesty, talking at the bar of Jim and Andy's in New York. I said, "I think everybody had experiences with Ben. When he was drunk, get out of the way."

"That's right,' Milt said. "But he was beautiful. He was good to me.

"I was in the band three months on the road, playing one nighters, before we hit New York. Cab said, 'We've got a lot of one-nighters. I'll keep you till I get to New York and get me a good bass player.'

"And I stayed with his band 16 years.

"When we got on the road, the guys liked me. Al Morgan hadn't been much of a good reader, because he was from New Orleans. But he was a handsome bass player, and he knew the book. There was no book when I got there!

"But I knew changes, and all of that stuff. Benny Payne, the pianist, was calling changes off to me. And I was doing so well. But the funny part, I've got to tell you .... Cab turns to the guys — the guys all seemed to be satisfied with me — and said, 'Let's give him a blood test.' He called this hard number that Al Morgan was featured in. It was called Reefer Man. I had no music. I said to Benny Payne, 'What's that?' He said, 'It features the bass. You start out playing anything you wanna play, and the band’ll come in. And it's blues changes when the band comes in.'

"So I started this in F, man, and I played a chromatic deal. I played the F scale upside down and sideways. I squared F, I cubed F. I did every conceivable thing. And when finally the band came in with this big chord, I wanted to drop my bass and go out. Benny Payne says, 'Keep on playing.' Now the band's playing the blues, about ten choruses. And all of a sudden the band stops, and Benny says, 'You got it.'

"That's when I started slapping the bass, and playing all kinds of hip scales and everything. I used to wear my hair in a pompadour, long in front and you plastered it down to your head with grease to make it smooth, and I got hot and the perspiration was running offa me. And the grease ran off and my hair stood straight up!" he said, laughing. "And the musicians in the band were rolling! They were laughing, they could hardly play their horns, and Cab was out of his skull. He was falling out. And they let me go for about ten minutes by myself and I said to Benny Payne, 'What the hell do I do now?' And Benny said, 'When you get thinking about time, just fall back like you're fainting and I'll catch you.'And that's the way it ended. And the audience cracked up.

"Ben Webster was very kind to me now. He'd take me around with him. We'd get to a town and he'd want to go jamming. He taught me how to approach things, how to lead into a chorus, and all that sort of stuff. I'm making a hundred dollars a week now, after the $351 was making with Zutty, and by the time we get to New York, I've saved up about four, five hundred dollars. That was good bread! That was the Depression. You could get a good meal for 35 cents. A suit cost twenty-two-fifty.

"And I looked so bad, Ben don't want me to come into New York and hangin' with him, and he's was always dressed impeccably. So Ben and Keg Johnson take me right down to Billy Taub's, one of the clothing stores. He put things up in front of me. And they're dressing me like your Mom would. 'How does this look on him?' And they picked up a nice green suit, and I put this suit on, and they bought me shirts with my money. So by the time I got to Harlem, I was pretty cool, I was sharp.

"Now this is 1936. I'm in the band, I'm established, everybody loves me, and I'm playing my ass off. Everything's going right. The Cotton Club is opening downtown where the Latin Quarter was, used to be Palais Royal where Paul Whiteman used to play. Now they made it the Cotton Club, Owney Madden is closing the one in Harlem and moving it to 48th and Broadway. The first show is Cab Calloway and Bill Robinson, the Berry Brothers, Fred Coots, and a host of others, including Will Vodery. Nobody mentions Will Vodery any more. It's just terrible."

Vodery was an arranger and orchestrator for Florenz Ziegfeld. He worked for Jerome Kern, orchestrated Show Boat, and he was the first black composer and arranger to penetrate the film industry. Milt was astonished that I'd heard of him.

"He orchestrated the very first Cotton Club show downtown. And he was so damn sure of himself, he scored in ink. I had never seen a man like Vodery. A dignified man. A brown-skinned man. He had trouble with hearing in one of his ears. He lived up in Harlem, but he had a place in Saratoga too. He rehearsed us. J. Fred Coots was writing tunes."

Among Coots' tunes were For All We Know, Love Letters in the Sand, and You Go to My Head.

"Harold Arlen did some of the tunes later," Milt said. "Vodery rehearsed us. Nobody's heard of some of these people."

To be continued ...

↧

The Art of Jazz Baritone Saxophone - Ronnie Cuber - "Tin Tin Deo"

February 5, 2017, 11:41 am

≫ Next: Mingus: A Critical Biography - Brian Priestley

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↧

Mingus: A Critical Biography - Brian Priestley

February 6, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: My Man George, Wettling ... that is: A Tribute [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: The Art of Jazz Baritone Saxophone - Ronnie Cuber - "Tin Tin Deo"

Charles Mingus died in 1979.

Brian Priestley, who at the time of its writing was described on the book’s dust jacket as “a Jazz pianist and critic who also presents a weekly jazz program for the BBC in London where he now lives,” published Mingus: A Critical Biography three years later in 1982.

Some might argue that this was too soon after Charles’ death to allow for an objective assessment of Mingus’ work and his significance to the World of Jazz.

But Brian’s Mingus bio is not some hagiographic epistle, filled with dross and drivel.

It is - as the title states - a critical biography, not in the negative sense of the word, rather, with an emphasis on the word’s definition that means discernment, evaluation and analysis.

It would be no exaggeration to call Charles Mingus the greatest bass player in the history of jazz; indeed, some might even regard it as understatement, for the hurricane power of his work as a composer, teacher, band leader, and iconoclast reached far beyond jazz while remaining true to its heritage in the music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk.

In his biography Brian presents a masterly study of Mingus's dynamic career from the early years in Swing, to the escapades of the Bebop era, through his musical maturity in the '50s when he directed a band that redefined collective improvisation in jazz.

Woven in with exacting assessments of Mingus's artistic legacy is the story of his volatile, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous personality. The book views Mingus as a black artist increasingly politicized by his situation, but also unreliable as a witness to his own persecution. Capturing him in all his furious contradictions — passionate, cool, revolutionary but with a keen sense of tradition—Brian Priestley has produced what can be called, again without exaggeration, the best biography of a jazz musician we have ever seen.

Brian sets the stage for how he approached writing his Mingus biography in the following “Introduction” to the book.

“As a representative of a racial and cultural minority of the society into which he was born, Charles Mingus took some beating. At least in part, this was because - whatever the therapeutic potential of his musical endeavours - he reacted to his own situation in a manner that was often self-defeating, and certainly revealing to the outside observer. This in turn was symptomatic of the generation which came to maturity during and immediately after World War II, and which was no longer content to adopt either the seeming subservience of a Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated scorn of a Duke Ellington.

For black Americans, the hopes and fears of that decade of indecision, 1945-55, were expressed in markedly different ways. The two artistic archetypes of their generation, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, reflected a deep polarization of attitudes: the alienated yet hypercreative Parker sacrificed himself, fully conscious, on the rocks of prejudice and cultural ignorance; while Gillespie, heeding that awful warning, waited until he reached the shores of economic and creative security before even obliquely criticizing American society. Mingus (five years younger than Dizzy, less than two years younger than Bird) was temperamentally drawn to follow both these directions. In both, he nearly succeeded, and he constantly lived out the tension between such mutually exclusive approaches. It is small wonder, then, that his artistic development did not follow a smooth graph of continuously evolving achievement and - if this is not being too cynical - small wonder that his tragic death came just as he was entering the Dizzy Gillespie 'elder statesman' class.

Unlike primitive cultures which feed and clothe their musicians, and venerate them almost in the same way as religious leaders, Western societies now leave them to fend for themselves within the market system. It is this system which encourages the increased fame of an artist immediately after his decease, and it is the Western criteria for posthumous evaluation which emphasize such factors as innovation and influence on others. Measured against these criteria, Mingus comes out extremely well. His redefinition of collective improvisation in jazz and his introduction of episodic structures were as important historically as his incorporation of modal materials and other exotica such as repeating bass-figures. Similarly, his insistence on featuring his own compositions from the mid-1950s onwards set an example for other musicians, as did his tenacity in running the longest-lived of the early attempts at creating a specialist record company owned by musicians themselves.

As well as seeking to alter the mechanics of reaching the jazz audience, Mingus also wished to improve the musicians' relationship with the audience and, although by no means the first jazzman to be interested in painting and literature, his attempts to co-opt the descriptive virtues of these arts were only part of a wider (and, for the time, untypical) concern to force otherwise passive listeners into an involvement with the very act of creating music.

Compared to innovation and influence, Western society has less enthusiasm these days for the continuity of tradition which was the hallmark of pre-technological cultures; and it has not yet understood the concept of asserting individuality as an expression of that tradition - doing your own thing in order to be human just like the rest of us - which is essentially an Afro-American concept. Nevertheless, it is by this standard that Mingus's music will eventually be assessed. Its utter uniqueness of tone and accent (even when stylistically derivative) is what will guarantee his place in the jazz pantheon, rather than innovations which have already been absorbed, in some cases unconsciously. For, unlike the enormous influence of Mingus's bass-playing, directly traceable although often overlooked except by other bassists, the influence of anyone who succeeds as the 'composer' of a music which nevertheless remains 'improvised' is difficult to grasp, for practitioners as well as observers. In fact, Mingus's efforts to involve his audience in what was going down on the bandstand can also be seen as an attempt to dramatize the role of the composer in jazz.

Duke Ellington in his best work had set such an impossibly high standard of cannibalizing his musicians' very souls, as if by some beneficent form of osmosis, that only a handful of bandleaders have ever tried to emulate him (as opposed to copying his stylistic features). No one, until Mingus, had taken what Ellington achieved with New Orleans and swing-style musicians and tried to apply it to the more rigid and complex language of bebop, and to the more insistent virtuosity of its players. That Mingus often made it work should not blind us to the enormity of his self-imposed task.

Of Mingus's extramusical efforts to dramatize his own personality, some mention must also be made here. If these are largely subordinated in the following pages to the description and assessment of his musical career, this is partly because of the existence of his autobiographical work Beneath the Underdog. One of the subsidiary aims of my initial research was to provide a context and a counterweight for Mingus's book, and it is hoped that, whether the reader is baffled, infuriated or impressed by Beneath the Underdog, the present book will render it somewhat more tangible. Although the events Mingus covers are almost exclusively confined to the first three decades of his life, and therefore to my first two chapters, they all contain at least a symbolic truth. Careful verification can also relate many of them to objective reality, but their purpose as narrated by Mingus is clearly to explain to his audience the pressures on a sensitive and self-aware artist in his position. And Mingus was nothing if not self-aware. Before his final illness was correctly diagnosed, he offered his own tongue-in-cheek diagnosis: 'I think I have an extremely aggravated case of paranoia.'

But his book is also symbolic in another way. For, although Mingus was self-aware, he also (like many creative artists) had a self-image which was slightly removed from reality. His musical companion for so many years, Dannie Richmond, makes the comment: 'I still feel that a lot of Mingus's writing was fantasy, [not only in Beneath the Underdog but] throughout his life.' If this applies to his writing of words, how much more true must it have been of his composing? And, however liberating this free-flowing fantasy was for the act of composition, how problematic must it be to conceive music which - whether actually notated on paper or (as Mingus later found preferable) not written down at all - can after all only be brought into being through the sympathetic collaboration of others? Put another way, is it better to be a composer who makes impossible demands on his collaborators, or one who writes what musicians can easily play in their sleep and whose music is then played by musicians who actually are asleep?

Some of the musical details included in the following book, which show exactly why musicians could not afford to sleep while playing with Mingus, may possibly have the opposite effect on readers. And sadly, because of the relative perfection of the technological approach to music in the West, it is easier to be specific about structural and to some extent metrical complexities than it is to describe the rhythmic subtlety within a single bar of jazz, let alone the enormous flexibility of tonal expressivity which even players not especially noted for this gift demonstrate.

So far, we do not possess the vocabulary to discuss these particular factors, which are so significant in the impact of jazz and related Afro-American music. If there are gaps then in describing the minutiae of a specific piece, there are equally gaps in our ability to quantify the patterns of tension and release which determine the effectiveness of a whole performance, or its emotional ambiguities, so that the writer is reduced to encouraging the reader to listen for him- or herself.

As to the musical data which can be quantified, the responsibility of a biographer, especially the author of the first biography of a major artist, is surely to get it all down - just as much as the names and the places, and the inevitably conflicting opinions. Naturally, there is still an element of selection and emphasis involved here, as in any 'impartial' documentary film, but my aim has been to present as much material as possible for the would-be 'interpreters' of Mingus to pick over at their leisure. Clearly, though, anyone who seeks a simple, one-sided interpretation of such a complex figure is asking for trouble. So it can hardly be surprising that there are few conclusions here, but rather an expression of the conviction that Charles Mingus was one of the most important musicians to have transcended his origin in the America of the twentieth century.”

Brian Priestley March 1982

This is a not-to-be-missed book for in addition to a comprehensively critical look at Charles Mingus’ life and music, it includes invaluable appendices that contain musical examples of Charles’ playing, the non-standards chorus structures in many of his compositions and in-depth analysis of The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady - one of Charles’ more intricate compositions, as well as, a nearly forty page discography.

Mingus’ immense role in the development of modern Jazz from approximately 1945-1975 was deserving of a fair, detailed and critical biography.

Now he has one thanks to the efforts of Brian Priestley.

↧

My Man George, Wettling ... that is: A Tribute [From the Archives]

February 7, 2017, 7:00 am

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"George Wettling had great enthusiasm for life and for music. And, undoubtedly, he was the most important drummer in the Chicago style of jazz."

—JEFF ATTERTON

"A good band is based on good drums and good piano. Give me a good piano and George Wettling and I'll give you a good band any

time."

—EDDIE CONDON

“George Wettling had his own way of doing things. But his roots were quite apparent. Like a number of his contemporaries, he was genuinely inspired by the music of the New Orleans jazz pioneers. His love for jazz in general — the New Orleans style and its Chicago offshoot in particular — was so intense that he built a life around them. Even in his last days, the fire burned brightly. ‘Some guys get old and tired and get out of Jazz,’ he noted. ‘I'll never do that. Hell, man, Jazz's been my whole life.’

His favorite drummers were Baby Dodds, the classically inventive New Orleanian who also influenced Gene Krupa and Dave Tough; Zutty Singleton, another marvelous New Orleans drummer; and others, including Harlem's George Stafford, Benny Washington (who played with Earl Hines), Tubby Hall, Ben Pollack, Chick Webb, and Krupa. But Dodds was his man; you could hear it in his playing.

Wettling began in the manner of most drummers — he heard the drums and was captivated. ...

Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as the time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble. …

Because he was a fine reader of music, a very flexible drummer, and an excellent tympanist, Wettling held a variety of jobs, including several in radio and TV. For approximately ten years, 1943-1952, he was a staff man at ABC Radio. But he devoted the major portion of his time to bringing fire and intensity to small bands, most of which were traditional.”

-BURT KORALL, Drummin’Men

“De même que Dave Tough était un amoureux de la littérature, George, lui, se passionnera pour la peinture - d'où sa grande ouverture d'esprit. Il est, en effet, très important pour un artiste de pratiquer d'autres modes d'expression que le sien afin d'élargir le champ de ses connaissances et d'affiner sa sensibilité. Cette culture à maintes facettes est nécessaire pour alimenter et approfondir l'art dans lequel on est spécialisé.

“As Dave Tough was a lover of literature, George Wettling was enthralled with painting - hence his open mind. It is indeed very important for an artist to practice other forms of expression than his own in order to expand the scope of his knowledge and sharpen his sensitivity. This culture of many facets [i.e.: a broad background in arts and letters] is required to power and deepen the art in which one specializes.”

- Georges Paczynski, Une Historie De La Batterie De Jazz

I owe drummer George Wettling [1907-1968] a huge debt of gratitude, which may sound like an odd compliment from someone who was essentially steeped in modern Jazz drumming.

But if it hadn’t been for George’s tutelage, which I came by indirectly through countless hours of listening to his classic Jazz recordings, I would have missed out on one of the happiest gigs of my life.

George was one of the young white Chicagoans [many of whom attended Austin High School on Chicago’s West Side] who fell in love with Jazz as a result of hearing King Oliver's band (with Louis Armstrong on second cornet) at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in the early 1920s. Oliver's drummer, Baby Dodds, made a particular and lasting impression upon Wettling.

Wettling went on to work with the big bands of Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and even Harpo Marx: but he was at his best on (and will be best remembered for) his work in small 'hot' bands led by Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and himself. In these small bands, Wettling was able to demonstrate the arts of dynamics and responding to a particular soloist that he had learned from Baby Dodds.

Wettling was a member of some of Condon's classic line-ups, which included, among others, Wild Bill Davison, Billy Butterfield, Edmond Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroeder, Ralph Sutton, and Walter Page.

Listening to George's playing, and to other “Chicago-style” drummers like Gene Krupa and Dave Tough, I realized that what they were doing was essentially phrasing 2-beat New Orleans or Dixieland Jazz with the 4/4 time feeling that came of age in the Swing Era. The music was so alive and I just really enjoyed everything about it.

So when the opportunity arose to join a Traditional Jazz Band at a club in Glendale, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, I jumped at it.

As Grover Sales explains in his seminal Jazz: America’s Classical Music, provides the historical context for the evolution of Traditional Jazz:

“Five years before the arrival of bebop, a New Orleans revival was afoot, fueled by the mounting resentment of purist white critics and fans against the heretical sophistication of Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, and similar modernists who they believed had tainted the purity of jazz by injecting European antibodies into what had been an incorruptible native folk art. Since history assures us that jazz from its earliest beginnings was a mixture of every cultural transplant to the New World, European as well as African, such notions seem quaint today. But these notions were cherished as articles of faith by keepers of the flame like French critic Hugues Panassie, who insisted that bebop was "degenerate noise" and a short lived fad that lay wholly outside the "true" jazz tradition. This position found its fullest expression in The Heart of Jazz, by William L. Grossman and Jack W. Farrell:

Much of Dizzy Gillespie's bop ... is characterized by a nonsensicality of content, an end result Armstrong never intended but which came from an almost inevitable consequence of the departure . . . from traditional values and meanings. Ellington . . . might help find a way to perpetuate the eternal values in New Orleans jazz while expanding the idiom, but his musical imagination turns to the theatrical. He is, indeed a sort of jazz Wagner. He has the same sort of dramatic feelings about Negroes that Wagner had about Germans.

The New Orleans revival got off to a modest start in 1940 when collector Heywood Hale Broun issued recordings of veteran New Orleans blacks in quavering versions of blues and parade music of their youth around the turn of the century. The following year saw the beginning of white revival bands in San Francisco, when Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band copied the instrumentation, the tunes, and as far as they were able, the style of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recordings made twenty years earlier. By the time bebop was in full bloom dozens of white revival bands were thriving throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and in England where a fever for "trad" (traditional) was rampant among the youth, including some of the founders-to-be of British rock.

The revival brought elderly blacks out of retirement—Bunk Johnson, George Lewis—and provided work for young whites — Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, and England's Chris Barber. It also forced modernists like Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden, and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell reluctantly into the dixieland camp during a doctrinaire era that split the jazz world into two warring factions. It is significant that, without a single exception, no young blacks could be found participating in the revival movement either as players or as listeners. They would as soon be seen chomping a watermelon on the front steps of city hall as partaking in what they scorned as "old-time slave, Uncle Tom, minstrel-man jive." Tempers ran high as lifelong friends and colleagues Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay stopped speaking because of bebop. Fistfights broke out in Parisian cabarets where Dizzy Gillespie performed, punctuated with cries of, "You dare to call this music!" The jazz press abounded with hate-ridden jeremiads about the "modernist degenerates of bebop" and the "moldy-fig reactionary revivalists," reminiscent of the doctrinal fury of sixteenth century Catholics and Protestants.

In retrospect, the revival produced foolish rhetoric but much also of lasting value, as did the ragtime revival three decades later; it rescued from obscurity a long-neglected style of collective improvisation and an imposing repertoire of excellent tunes. The best of these revival bands, Wilbur de Paris's New New Orleans Jazz (Atlantic 1219), exudes a vitality that bears repeated hearings today, but the same cannot be said for most revival players venerated to sainthood by their white idolaters, some of whom launched a serious campaign to run Bunk Johnson for the presidency. What seems most remarkable about the revival movement is the emotional heat and religious fervor it unloosed—and why.”

I didn’t know anything about any of these Camps or Schools or Schisms, all I knew was that for three nights every week from 9:00 PM until 2:00 AM, I got to play classic New Orleans tunes like That’s A Plenty, Muscrat Ramble, St. James Infirmary and some later adaptations of this style in tunes like China Boy, Hindustan, and Wolverine Blues in a hot Chicago-style or Traditional or whatever Jazz band made up of trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass and drums [aka Me!] and it was a blast.

At first I was greeted with some hesitation by the older guys mainly along the lines of “He’s too young to know much about this music;” He’s probably a Bebopper;” “He doesn’t know any of the tunes.”

But thanks to George Wettling, I more than held my own.

With few extended solos, most of the tunes lasted only 3-4 minutes so that meant that we played a bunch of songs each set, sometimes as many as 15 a set totaling around 60 a night. I had a ball. Loved every minute of it.

My chops loved it, too; as my hands got stronger, my wrists were able to relax thus increasing my speed and power.

I added some heat and sizzle to the the usual four-bar drum breaks or “kickers” that help serve as tags to take most tunes out, but I made sure that I kept my bass drum doing four-beats to the bar so that the “old timers” could count when to come back in.[Grins].

And I owe it all to George Wettling.

Mention his name today and all you get are blank stares; very few drummers have ever heard this style of Jazz drumming. But in fairness, when they are introduced to it they light up like the proverbial Christmas tree and make comments like: “Listen to what that Dude is doing with accents off a press roll;” “His time is so bouncy - he makes the music come alive!;” “What a snap and pop he brings to his back beats.”

Here’s more about George from Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

“George Wettling had been (with Tough and Krupa) part of the original Chicago circle and, like them, spent most of the '30s playing in big bands. His were the brushes backing Bunny Berigan's vocal on the best-selling "I Can't Get Started," his the steady but non-intrusive beat that lifted the bands of Artie Shaw, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and others. A well-schooled musician, he'd worked regularly in radio and commercial recording studios.

But Wettling seemed happiest by far in the small, unfettered jam groups which were Eddie Condon's specialty. Overshadowed to some degree by Krupa's flamboyance and Tough's sheer brilliance, Wettling more than matched them in his ability to unify and steer a rhythm section. Like Krupa, he'd learned by listening to Baby Dodds, Ben Pollack, and other pioneers and had retained the flavor, the ability to blend into an ensemble. Wettling's small-group work, with Condon and countless others, is remarkably subtle in its sense of mood and pace, its control of a finely calibrated sense of abandon. In Burt Korall's authoritative words:

"His time was firm; it bubbled and danced. His breaks had an inner life and logic. His solos were well-crafted bursts of energy. Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as a time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble.”

His propulsive drumming enlivens hundreds, even thousands, of records, and those with Condon are among the best. It's Wettling's accented press roll, a Baby Dodds legacy, that carries Bud Freeman to the very edge of anarchy on the Commodore "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," Wettling's drive that sends the normally demure Bobby Hackett careering through the final ensemble of the uptempo blues "Carnegie Jump," Wettling's and Jess Stacy's quiet prodding that gets Pee Wee Russell rocking happily on "Rose of Washington Square."

Wettling was a master — some would contend the master — of that overused and frequently misunderstood hallmark of so many "dixieland" performances: the four-bar end-of-performance drum break. Following a final tutti, especially at faster tempos, it's a kind of eight-bar melody reprise, the drummer taking the first four bars and the band returning, all pistons firing, to finish out the cadence. In some bands it becomes a sixteen-bar reprise, drummer and ensemble taking eight apiece.

Done right, it functions as both tension release and "kicker" in the journalistic sense: the punchy last line that leaves the reader's senses sharpened, tingling. Some drummers — Cliff Leeman, Nick Fatool, Ray McKinley — have understood this and done it with masterly finesse. Depending on the player, that means either a display of technique, a witty or imaginative "four" in the bebop sense, or even (Fatool is outstanding at this) a melodic paraphrase.

But in George Wettling's hands this modest device became a small-scale work of art. Again and again he'd seem to hurtle out of an ensemble and into the break with a force, an irresistible momentum, that swept the band right along with it. There was no sense of an ensemble stopping for the drummer to do some little trick before the horns returned: a Wettling break was part of the action—in a way it was the action.

Examples, a few among dozens: "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" (from Brother Matthew, ABC-Paramount), "I've Found a New Baby" (Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz, Columbia), "Runnin' Wild" (Dixieland in Hi-Fi, Columbia /Harmony)—which also offers a nimble full-chorus Wettling solo; "China Boy" (The Roaring Twenties, Columbia).

Perhaps the definitive example of Wettling's ability to energize a band is on a ten-inch LP issued by Columbia in 1951 under his own name. It's a Condon unit, of course, with "Wild Bill" Davison, Edmond Hall, and other regulars. Each of the eight titles works steadily, inexorably, to a climax of drive and almost demonic energy. Wettling's four-bar break at the end of a swaggering "Memphis Blues" employs a kettledrum to great and humorous effect. "Collier's Clambake" (basically the chord sequence of "St. James Infirmary" at a medium-bright tempo) starts at a high intensity level, Davison punching out the kind of virile, aggressive lead that earned him his nickname. Even by the standards of Condon groups, "After You've Gone" is extraordinary. Like "Clambake," it opens hot: "They sound as if they've been playing the number for five minutes, heating up to this pitch, before turning on the microphones," pianist Dick Hyman has remarked. That's largely Wettling's doing. He hits it hard and keeps cranking things up, through solos by Sullivan, Hall, and trombonist Jimmy Archey (Condon's guitar strong and audible behind them), to a stomping final ensemble.

This is no random collection of seven men playing together: it's a bond, a team, component parts fused into a splendid performance engine fueled by Wettling and cornetist Davison; bars 13-16, for example, are a furious ensemble explosion, Davison tearing up to his high E-sharp and cascading down over four bars, to be deftly caught by Wettling's bass drum "thwack" on the last beat of bar 16.

(Among Wettling's fans was the great American abstract painter Stuart Davis, whose brand of modernism was as stubbornly individualistic as the styles of the jazzmen he liked to hear. The two men struck up a friendship, and before long the drummer, a gifted amateur painter, had become a Davis student. By 1950 he'd mastered a style which, though strongly influenced by his teacher, was skilled and vigorous on its own, winning him several well-received exhibitions _ in the '50s. Adorning the Columbia album cover was a photograph of the band, superimposed on a Wettling painting representing the same scene. It's good work, strongly in the spirit of such jazz-influenced Davis canvases as "The Mellow Pad,"'Rapt at Rappaport's," and "Something on the Eight Ball," from the same period. Though Pee Wee Russell's paintings later attracted more publicity, it is Wettling who is the superior craftsman.)

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Ramsey Lewis "Soul Survivor" - The Barbara Gardner Interview

February 8, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Mel Torme, Marty Paich and Vo-Cool-izing

≪ Previous: My Man George, Wettling ... that is: A Tribute [From the Archives]

Signifyin’ and testifyin’ and other ritualistic elements of the Sanctified Church are important elements in helping Black people cultivate and interpret themselves as a collective community. They also enable the search for a deeper spiritual meaning and power in relation to the troubles, sorrows and pain of Black life.

Testifyin’ and signifyin’ sometimes are expressed in the music that’s played and sung in the Sanctified Church [an association of holiness Christian churches headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The members and clergy of the churches are predominantly African-American. The official name of the body is The Original Church of God or Sanctified Church, General Body].

The music itself was given the casual name of “Soul Music,” and not surprisingly, it found its way into Jazz in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s with Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver and a host of other “soul groups” emphasizing this influence because Soul Music’s pronounced rhythmic nature and straight-forward melodies were appealing to a broader audience.

However, many Jazz critics and Jazz purists dismissed Soul-inflected Jazz, in part, because of this wider appeal, or, if you will, due to its “commercialism” - a dreaded word in Sanctified Jazz World.

This background perhaps lends some clarity to the full title of this feature - “Soul Survivor: Ramsey Lewis Discusses Soul, Funk, Critics, Jazz As A Business, And Success with Barbara Gardner” - which appeared in the May 6, 1965 edition of Downbeat.

“To the embarrassment of Jazz's critical hierarchy, Ramsey Lewis will not close his piano top and go away. Seven years ago, he was typewritered and dismissed as a flash in the pan.

Today that flash glows steadily, and he has achieved some remarkable things as a jazz artist. He is the pivotal member of a tightly knit unit that has remained together since its inception. The group works steadily to expanding audiences, and its record sales run into five figures annually.

Ironically, the pianist — who is sometimes praised, sometimes damned as a purveyor of "soul"— has his roots deep in the European classical tradition. In 1941, when he was 6 and shooting up with the tall weeds on Chicago's west side, his older sister began studying piano, and Ramsey Emmanuel Jr. cried to go along.

Convinced it was a childish whim, the elder Lewis permitted his son to begin. Six months later his sister dropped out. Ramsey continued studying classical piano with the same teacher until he was 11. After high school, he attended Chicago Musical College and later studied music at DePaul University.

Lewis wanted to be a concert pianist then, and he never seriously considered popular music as a career even after he had begun playing dance dates on the city's west side with a seven-piece group called the Clefs. Eldee Young played bass and Isaac (Red) Holt was the group's drummer. Beyond the world of the west side, the Korean conflict was heating up, and by 1952 Uncle Sam had raided the Clefs and tapped three members, including Holt. The rest of the band drifted off. Lewis, at the time, was in his second year of college and clinging to his aspirations to "concertize and tour the world," as he jokingly remembers.

But first, he married.

"Now, I figured you get married . . . two people can live as cheaply as one and all that, right?," he laughed as he recalled this. "Are you with me? I could finish college.”

The wife would work full time, and I could work part time. You know . . . have my cake and eat it too! But I forgot about old Mother Nature. Jerrie got pregnant, and I had to get out of school and get a job."

He went to work as manager of the record department of Hudson-Ross music store. In addition, he and two other musicians went into rehearsal, and he began moonlighting as a part-time entertainer. This arrangement was soon altered.

"Eventually," he recalled, "my nighttime work overcame my daytime work. ... I couldn't get up to go to work."

End of management career in record department.

The original Ramsey Lewis Trio included bassist Young of the Clefs and Butch McCann on drums. Their major jazz-circuit debut was made as featured attraction with vocalist Bill Henderson at Chicago's Sutherland Lounge. Holt returned from the Army and became the trio's drummer. The group continued working clubs in the Midwest, attracting among their following a Chicago policeman (whose name Lewis has forgot) who was instrumental in securing the group a record contract. The first disc was cut and promptly shelved for months. A Chicago disc jockey, Daddy-O Daylie, heard them and finally persuaded the record company to release the record.

This first album was pompously packaged . . . the three men were tuxedoed in the cover photo. . . and titled Gentlemen of Swing. With plugs from Chicago disc jockeys, the trio gained a substantial following. They were booked into Chicago's SRO Room for six months. There followed two years in the city's Cloister Inn, interrupted once by a two-week engagement at New York's Birdland.

The most indelible memory Lewis has regarding New York is pragmatic; before Birdland, the group was enjoyed though officially unheralded at the Cloister, but after two weeks at the "jazz corner of the world," the trio returned to a blazing marquee announcement of that fact and a doubled salary.

New York still has not officially dealt with the Ramsey Lewis Trio. The three young, intelligent, healthy musicians went to the city not to prove themselves but to perform, not to seek acceptance but to entertain, not to apologize for their Second City origin but to meld naturally into the mainstream of professional jazz. This is an attitude New York has seldom dealt with graciously, even though in his case Lewis remembers that, individually, members of the New York jazz establishment were warm and very helpful.

Another characteristic the trio took to New York was a definitive solidarity, allowing little room for technical alteration and no place at all for any tampering with its style and approach. A prominent jazz saxophonist who had liked and lauded the trio in Chicago was frustrated when the unit went to New York.

"For me, it was kind of a drag, really," he said. "I dug him so much in Chicago, and his thing sounded exactly right then. So I went around telling all the cats, 'Man, look out for this group from Chicago.' But I don't know. When he came to the Apple, somehow it was different. It was still altogether, but it wasn't 'New York'."

Lewis still isn't New York, and, further, he does not consider such identification and acceptance essential. He has no idea of ever living there unless forced to do so because of musical demands. He summarized his view of the city: "There's a lot of good cats there — but New York is just another stop on the circuit to me."

ONE OF THE SIMPLEST METHODS of assessing the unknown is to relate it to a well-known. This technique was employed with the new Lewis trio. It often was tagged a copy or an offshoot of the other major Chicago trio, that of Ahmad Jamal.

"In a way, I was flattered because Ahmad is one of my favorite musicians," Lewis recalled. "I could understand how the comparison might come up. First, we're both piano trios, and then, in expressing our own ideas, we might have crossed tracks one way or another. .. not on the same track mind you. Ahmad loves to be lyrical and beautiful with his melodies, not too much embellishment. So do I.

"Still, nowhere can you sit down and listen to one of our records and say, This is like Ahmad.' Ahmad has a completely different concept about music. Often he will be light and suggestive where I like to lay it out and play with all the depth I can muster.

"Then, of course, our books are very different. I could never do his tunes, and he would probably not be comfortable with some of mine."

Lewis has gone through a wide range of influences. The pianist's father was a jazz enthusiast and tried to saturate his son with the sounds of Art Tatum.

"At first I didn't understand Art Tatum," Ramsey explained. "He was playing too much piano. Then I grew older, studied a little more, and grew to love Art Tatum — probably even more than my father."

The tall, lean musician sat back, stretched his legs and his memory to pull together all the early influences.

"Oscar Peterson was tremendously influential on me at the beginning," he said. "Then I went through a stage where John Lewis could do no wrong. Then Erroll Garner came into my picture and then Bud Powell. I guess all pianists go through a phase when Bud Powell is God. After that I started widening my scope and listening to everything. I fell in love with Horace Silver and so many of the really good current musicians. But I would say John Lewis and Oscar Peterson were my most lasting influences."

Perhaps it is the technical mastery and effective use of classical references that most attract Lewis to these particular artists. Often his own approach incorporates the hint of Old World dynamics and progression to a climax. Still, underlying all is the consistent fusing of powerful, contrasting dynamics, and earthy, straightforward projection. This is the quality that marks a performance as distinctively Ramsey Lewis Trio. And, loosely applied, this quality has earned the trio a reputation as a "soul group."

Surely the most recurring criticism leveled against the pianist is that there is something pretentious about his playing. One critic, within the space of 50 words, termed Lewis' contribution as "pop jazz . . . semiclassical schmaltz and stylized funk." Lewis' customary defense against such attack is to cite the evidence of his increasing night-club and record audience. This time, however, he minced no words in his assessment of critics.

"There may be a couple — not more — who really know what jazz is all about," he said. "Either the others know music pretty well and have no idea of how to give good criticism, or they know how to write a good critique but don't know anything about jazz. What really gets my goat is their arrogant stamp of finality . . . their this-is-it attitude. They could express their views, then leave it up to other people to do the same, you know."

When asked to give an objective appraisal of his work in connection with such criticism, Lewis differentiates between what he is trying to do and superficial commercialism.

"To me 'soul' represents depth and great feeling," he explained. "I know some pianists today where everything they play comes out, not with depth and feeling exactly, but downright funky. Now, when everything you do comes out funky, that's trying. . . that isn't really soulful."

He thought further and then continued, "I don't try to play funky all the time, but there's a certain depth and feeling I try to portray no matter what I'm playing."

Lewis rejects the idea that his group can be defined strictly as a soul group, explaining, "To me, Ray Charles is a soulful musician ... all the time. Not the piano playing so much, but his singing. He makes me feel the story he's telling. And he does it in a simple form ... all the time. Now, that's real soul."

Again Lewis paused cautiously in an effort to achieve the impossible — absolute clarity not subject to misinterpretation.

"I want to have the depth and feeling there always," he went on. "There's a certain amount of it that I got from playing in the church for years, and I can never get it out of my system. Still, in some tunes, I try to alter the character of the tune, project another mood other than outright funk . . . another kind of soulfulness that comes from way down inside. You see, often funk becomes a vehicle . . . just a combination of blue notes certain musicians learn and keep using to carry their ideas in ... to try and create soul. Well, if it's really soulful, it's there in the depth of everything you do — you don't need so much help to get it across."

FORTUNATELY, LEWIS FOUND two musicians with similar musical concepts. Young and Holt are more than fellow workers. They are major contributors to the unit's success.

"Our trio is a partnership," Lewis said. "Everything is literally split up in thirds. Salaries, expenses, organization responsibilities are divided equally. The trio uses my name only because when we first started, the guy who set up some things for us thought a person's name would be better than a group title.

"Musically, we're different from most trios because the pianist does not monopolize the music. We try to distribute the musical duties equally. In one given arrangement, I might have a melody, Eldee may have a countermelody, and Red will have a definite drum pattern designed to emphasize each segment. He's not just back there keeping time. He's there for a reason, to build the whole thing to a certain point.

"After you listen to a couple of our sets, you know that everybody is featured about equally. You don't go away with the feeling that the pianist is all right and maybe the bassist or the drummer would be if you could hear more of them. Everybody gets a chance to stretch out." He laughed. "In fact, the best proof I can give of that is that Eldee has come closer to winning many more polls than I have."

This complementary relationship has been building constantly since the inception of the trio and has yielded a solid bond of musical awareness of individual and group potential. It has precluded the possibility of group expansion, according to Lewis.

"Certain fellows have sat in, and it's just too hard for a fourth musician to feel what's happening," the pianist said. "The three of us really have a thing, and it's pretty tight. I don't think we could make another notch there."

The exception was the late vibraharpist Lem Winchester.

"Now Lem came close to fitting right into this groove," Lewis said. "He's about the only musician I can think of who seemed to be able to anticipate along with us, fill that little slot. Vocalists? That's another thing altogether."

The trio has recorded with other artists, more often with vocalists than instrumentalists. Argo, the company for which it records, has a penchant for tagging the group onto fledgling, waning, or one-shot performers on the label, perhaps hoping to infuse the material with a sales-booster shot.

The Lewis trio has worked in person with many outstanding vocalists. More than one have offered the group steady employment and the chance to team up as a vocal-instrumental unit. The offers do not appeal even slightly to the pianist.

"No good," he said. "There're only a couple I dig playing for under any circumstances, and I don't think I could make it as regular accompanist for anybody. So many singers are just not together with their music. Things like arrangements, keys, pace — these things just don't seem to mean that much to a lot of them. They just expect to walk right in and have everything fall into place. Well, it usually doesn't happen like that."

The implied need for attention to technique and training is most explicit in the preoccupation with rehearsals and study in the unit. They have recorded 16 albums for Argo, utilizing more than 100 compositions, many of which are originals. Most of these are by Lewis though Young and Holt are free to offer for rehearsal and possible recording any original material they feel is good for the trio.

"We try to consolidate our ideas for the group," the leader said. "But there's still room for individual expression outside the unit. Each man has his own record date in which he can do anything he wants to do. Eldee, for example, has many, many ideas of his own beyond the group. Eventually, we get everything worked out so everybody has had his say."

There is plenty of time for experimentation, for this is a relatively young group. In spite of its impressive track record, the average age of the trio members is less than 33. On May 27 Lewis will be 30.

There is a mundane solidarity in the lives of these three musicians who earn their livelihood in the razzle-dazzle of night life. Each man is married to a high-school or childhood sweetheart, and, aside from the extended tours, the performers continue to participate in community activities and civic affairs throughout Chicago.

Jazz is a business to Lewis, not a way of life. Currently his business is making possible a most agreeable way of life for his family.

"I admire Armstrong and Duke and Basie," he said thoughtfully. "But I can't see staying out on the road all my life. I want to get to the place where financially I can afford to stay home. I think I know my failings and my abilities. I wouldn't say that I'm so different from every other pianist and I know I'll make it; but I like to believe I have sort of an original style and a good chance."

Humility is admirable, but cold fact must tell the man that he has become an important, bread-and-butter commodity in at least two of the shops that guide the trio.

While Argo hedges a direct answer, the most casual survey of the company's recording activity in recent years reveals that the consistently selling trio is prime, valuable stock in the jazz department of a record company primarily and profitably pop and rhythm-and-blues based.

The group's personal manager, John Levy, molder of many stars, is currently struggling through a phase, unfortunately all too familiar in entertainment — artistic disenchantment resulting in the explosive or unexpected exodus from his fold of the money-makers. Ironically, while the time period between obscurity and stardom can be considerably shortened by a knowledgeable personal manager, frequently, the artist's mental grasp and business acumen develop by leaps and bounds. Once there, the artist finds he has "outgrown" the need for the same personal manager. Lewis has declined to join the stampede.

"You just don't forget," he stated. "On our second trip to New York, John Levy stepped into the picture, and I learned how important a real manager can be. And for us, John was the best. All we had to do was go to work. Before I saw the room, I knew it was all right. I knew the piano was right. He saw to it that that was part of the contract. . . . All the details, he handled. So now, we just can't walk out."

A rare loyalty in the music business.

The trio works continuously now, which indicates a growing audience and an entry into broader markets than those offered by jazz. They are on the road approximately 42 weeks a year, play Chicago four, and vacation the rest. That's a good year.

Ultimately though, the pianist has other ambitions.

"Ideally," he explained, "I would like to work six months a year, take a break for a couple of months, then seriously woodshed three or four months. I try not to draw only from jazz, maybe because I studied classics — but there's so much meat there and in folk music and naturally the old masters. I'd like to experiment with these ideas a while."

Until this is achieved, he travels, listens to records whenever he gets a chance, steals time from music for recreation with his family, and very occasionally plays tennis. Though the grind is tough, he said he still prefers the hubbub of night clubs to concert work because "usually concerts have so many artists or you're allotted only a certain amount of time. You go on cold. Now, it's a cinch you have to warm up. Before you know it, your time is shot and you often haven't done your best. So I guess I'd rather work night clubs until the right kinds of concerts come along."

This, too, is in the offing. Things could hardly be better now. . . . Well, yes they could. Take away the stings of the typewriters, and Ramsey Lewis will be a happier man.”

↧

Mel Torme, Marty Paich and Vo-Cool-izing

February 9, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Fasching, The Bimhuis and a Blue Note

≪ Previous: Ramsey Lewis "Soul Survivor" - The Barbara Gardner Interview

If you are a hip, slick and cool Jazzer, you know that experiencing Mel Torme’s vocals are a real treat and that nobody ever wrote better Jazz arrangements than Marty Paich.

You also know that encountering Mel and Marty together is an ineffable musical happenstance.

And if you are in the mood to thank the Jazz Gods for leaving us the legacy of four - FOUR!!!! - albums that they made together from about 1955-1960, please be my guest.

Any thank them, too, for showcasing their talents ably aided and abetted by Jack Sheldon on trumpet, Frank Rosolino on trombone, Art Pepper on alto sax, Jack Montrose, tenor sax, Victor Feldman, vibes, Barney Kessel, guitar, Joe Mondragon, bass, Mel Lewis on drums and a host of other West Coast Jazz musicians in their prime.

The music on the four recordings that Mel and Marty made together is a national treasure.

If you haven’t heard it, buy ‘em all and treat yourself to one of the most glorious listening experiences available in recorded Jazz.

Because Mel Torme was born 1925 [in Chicago], he missed the height of the band era, getting in only at its tail end. Like his colleagues Mickey Rooney Buddy Rich, and Sammy Davis, Jr., he began as a child performer who grew up into a high-energy performance dynamo.

Ben Pollack, the impresario-bandleader who was to Chicago whites what Fletcher Henderson was to New York blacks, put Torme in Chico Marx's all-juvenile orchestra when the pianist-comic fronted a dance band to pay off some gambling debts (and also toyed with the idea of building a similar kid band arour.: Torme).

Not long after Torme broke into pictures (he had previously played child parts on radio soaps) and a few month before his enlistment, he put together his first edition of the Mel-Tones and recorded with them on Jewell and Decca.

After the war, Torme rejoined the group, got them on Musicraft Records, where they made a series of sessions with and without Artie Shaw and brought the vocal group into modern jazz.

After "giving up the ghost" (Mel's term) with the Mel-Tones, Torme for a time seemed destined to become a "big-time bobby-socks idol" (Look magazine's term), when Carlos Gastel — who had helped make stars of Nat Cole and Peggy Lee, and put Stan Kenton and Anita O'Day together —moved him up to Capitol Records and MGM Pictures. He had hits, which incurred the resentment rather than the respect of the older showbiz communly (prior to the baby-boom young adults rarely became singing stars) at his ill-planned New York debut at the Copacabana.

If anything, Torme's records for Musicraft and the much bigger Capitol Records were too successful: They led his managers and A&R men to think Torme could be converted, like so many other talented artists, into a mere cog in the hit-making machinery. But he had, in William Blake's words, learned what was enough by first learning what was more than enough.

After a few years of bobby-sox idolatry, Torme decided to stick with smaller labels and classier music. His first long-playing record had also been the first Capitol LP, his own most spectacular stab at an extended composition, The California Suite (on Discovery DS-900), a thirty-five-plus-minute work that extols the virtues of the Sunshine State in eleven parts, all being songs but none fitting traditional thirty-two-bar AABA patterns.

Torme made his first conventional album, Musical Sounds Are the Best Songs [1954, Coral], in which he says goodbye to the big-band era in a set of nonsensical but very hard-swinging rhythm numbers. He followed Musical Sounds with lush ones on It's a Blue World [1955, Bethlehem], which shows how much better his ballad singing had gotten since the Musicrafts and Capitols.

The vo-cool era, then, begins at its highest point, Mel Torme and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette, which leads to four other Torme-Paich collaborations, the second also on Bethlehem, Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire (1956), and the others on Verve: Torme 1958), a flawless collection of unlush ballads with a small string section; Back in Town (1959), the Mel-Tones' reunion album; and the climax, not only of the Torme-Paich relationship but of the whole cool genre, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley (1960).

Torme today dislikes the sound of his voice on these records, and, in fact, once offered to remake them for the current corporate owners of the Bethlehem catalog. But even though his voice is a finer-tuned instrument in the late eighties, I doubt that anything could improve these records, especially the first and the last. The original Dek-Tette recording set the greatest diversity of tempo and on more adventurous works such as "The Blues" [which is an excerpt from Duke Ellington’s extended suite Black, Brown and Beige] in which he translates the multileveled Ellingtonian sound into multileveled Torme-Paich sound.

On "Lullaby of Birdland," Torme gradually flies farther and farther out, not by Ella-vating himself off the nearest chord progression but by building a scaffold of scat (and voice-horn interplay with the Dek-Tette) that he can climb as high as he wants.

All twelve songs on Shubert Alley, by contrast, come from the same source, the book-shows of post-Oklahoma! Broadway, and Torme and Paich reconfigure them all into the same medium-bright tempo. All have been thoroughly re-composed so that the familiar patterns of vocal-band-vocal and band-vocal-band are exceptions rather than rules, and only the closing chart, "Lonely Town" (the one track on Shubert Alley to use a piano), could have been sung by any other singer on any other album.

On two numbers, Torme and Paich postulate on the possibility of blues devices in other kinds of material, as when Torme gathers momentum by repeating the penultimate six notes of "Just in Time," over and over without the final tonic, until it assumes the shape of a Count Basie-Joe Williams blues, and when in "Too Darn Hot" they have trombonist Frank Rosolino and altoist Art Pepper not wait for the "instrumental" second chorus to solo but instead take their eight-bar turns after each of Torme's opening A sections—in other words, shaping a standard as if it were Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow."

Interpolations, of the kind that will eventually become a Torme perennial, figure on almost ever track, though they're not usually made by the singer but by the band behind him, as on the second chorus of "Once in Love With Amy," where Torme sings the first A and the Dek-Tette play "Makin' Whoopee," switching to "Easy Living" for the second A and also when Torme sings the Latinate "Whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets" and Paich and crew pay homage to Gerry Mulligan by way of "Bernie's Tune."

Its virtues could be extolled ad infinitum but the point is that the strength of the album does not lie in and of its individual elements, nor do certain tracks stand out above the others. Instead, from start to finish, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley is a masterpiece. Neither the vo-cool specifically nor vocalizing in general got any better than this, though a few contenders have come along in the interim.”

Sources:

Joseph Laredo insert notes to Mel Torme with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 75732

Joseph Loredo insert notes to Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 79847]

Mel Torme original liner notes to Back in Town: Mel Torme with the Meltones [Jazz Heritage CD 515088L]

Lawrence D. Stewart insert notes to Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley with The Marty Paich Orchestra [Verve CD 821-581-2]

Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond.

↧

Fasching, The Bimhuis and a Blue Note

February 10, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 3

≪ Previous: Mel Torme, Marty Paich and Vo-Cool-izing

Over the years, Jazz has primarily had three performance venues - night clubs, concert halls and festivals. All three are alive and well both in the USA and internationally.

The February 2017 edition of Downbeat contains a listing of 195 worldwide Jazz venues and later in the year, the magazine devotes and entire edition to Jazz festivals globally.

Three such club/concert hall venues - two old and one new [and blue!] - caught our attention because each was published with an extended annotation and we thought we’d combine this information about them and share it with you in this JazzProfiles feature.

FASCHING FOSTERS CREATIVITY - John Ephland

Sweden's renowned Fasching—a perennial DownBeat pick for one of the world's top jazz clubs—will be celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2017. But its home, a downtown building in Stockholm, dates back much earlier, having been constructed in 1906.

The events that took place between 1906 and the opening of the venue (on May 2,1977) could make for a novel of sorts, filled with many intriguing twists and colorful personalities.

"From the start, it was a restaurant/cafe for Oscar's Theatre next door," said Eric Birah, Fasching's CEO. "Back then, there was a staircase from the inside of Oscar's into Fasching. There's always been a restaurant/bar/club of some sort here since 1906."

The name of the venue translates to "festival," which is appropriate these days, as Fasching has served as the headquarters for the Stockholm Jazz Festival since 2009.

As for the roots of Fasching, according to Bengt Hammar, who served as managing director, programmer and head of marketing from 1982 until 2001, "The jazz musician's community of traditional modernists [Forenignen Sveriges Jazzmusiker, or FSJ] had been looking for many years for a permanent stage. They'd been moving around from place to place, getting temporary gigs at museums, clubs and restaurants. Eventually, in 1975, they found the discotheque Fasching, and began renting Mondays through Thursdays for concerts in the club. The interior decor was in a Tyrolean style, and painted grey and pink.

"In 1977," he continues, "FSJ took over the lease with the financial help of a joint action from the mayor's office and the government. Since then, the club has been owned by the musicians. And, by the way, we repainted the interior black."

Magnus Palmquist, who eventually succeeded Hammar as artistic director at Fasching (in addition to programming the Stockholm Jazz Festival), notes, "Fasching was founded by and for musicians as a counter-movement to the entertainment-based jazz venues that dominated Stockholm at the time. Fasching became the breeding ground for music that lived, breathed and evolved within itself and without any commercial pressure — music that couldn't then or can't now easily be categorized just as 'jazz.'"

Palmquist, who came onboard in 2008, said that the club provides an important forum: "I feel that a quite new and strong movement in jazz and improvisational music is taking form, where jazz is officially allowed to influence many other musical styles and genres in a perhaps more dominant way than ever before. I definitely want that expressive flow to show in the Fasching program."

He added, "Most artists who have passed through Fasching's walls have been the leaders of their musical movement of that specific era."

As for the 40th anniversary, the folks at Fasching are busy making plans, while remodeling has continued apace. "The inside has looked different over the years," said Birah. "At one point many years ago, the stage was on the short side of the room. The balcony used to go over the big bar. Now we have built a bar in the entrance in the main hall and are taking the facade back to its original look from 1906. And we are getting new glass, doors and a new sign."

Securing the intentions of everyone who had a dream that started in 1977, former Fasching CEO (from 2007 to 2015) Lena Aberg Frisk aptly states, "Fasching has become a vibrant place, where musicians and listeners from different parts of the world, from different generations and from different genres, meet."

Artists who have graced the stage include legends such as Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley, Chet Baker and Sun Ra. It has also hosted younger stars from the States, such as Joshua Redman, Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, as well as artists from around the world, including Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Maria Faust, the Goran Kajfes Subtropic Arkestra and Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo.

The Brazilian-born Pascoal has played the club multiple times. "Fasching was our home in Sweden," he says. "We always looked forward to spending a few days performing at this great venue. We had some unforgettable parties there—onstage, and offstage as well!"

—John Ephland

BIMHUIS ESCHEWS TRENDS - Peter Margasak

Last October, 22 of Europe's most diverse and exciting improvisers aged 35 and wl-W* under converged in Amsterdam to participate in the third iteration of a project called the October Meeting. The last time the collaborative summit took place was back in 1991, and the venue that hosted both events is the legendary Bimhuis. The venue opened in 1974, filling a gaping hole in Amsterdam-one of the most progressive jazz cities in all of Europe—left by a number of canceled series in the year prior.

Several years earlier, a number of musicians — including drummer Han Bennink and saxophonist Willem Breuker — had led something of a putsch to expand the purview of the Dutch jazz organization SJIN, or Stichting Jazz. This led to the formation of a splinter group that championed improvised music: Beroepsvereniging voor Improviserende Musici (BIM). [Which translates to something like “Professional Association of Improvising Musicians.”]

Thanks to city funding, plans for a venue dedicated to the new music - from the Netherlands, around Europe and the United States - were realized. The Bimhuis finally opened in an old furniture showroom on Oude Schans, just blocks from the Red Light District. The rest, as they say, is history. Few venues on either side of the pond have carved out such an illustrious history, maintaining inexorable ties to jazz tradition while boldly embracing endless forward-looking iterations.

Naturally, the Bim became ground zero for the vibrant jazz and improvised music scene in Amsterdam, with countless performances by Bennink, pianist Misha Mengelberg and their ICP Orchestra; Breuker's free-wheeling Kollektief; Maarten Altena's Octet; and groups led by musicians like Guus Janssen, Sean Bergin and Nedly Elstak. But it also presented new talent from the United States along with storied vets like Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker and Von Freeman, as well as the cream of crop of European improvisers: Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. It also functioned as a vibrant meeting place where new formations were born, musicians checked out new talent, and conflicts were born and (occasionally) solved.

Maintaining a cutting-edge performance space for 42 years is no Cakewalk, and almost from the beginning the direction and programming of the Bimhuis has benefitted from the vision of Huub van Riel, who came onboard in 1976. As the years passed, he rigorously kept plugged in to developments, yet his impeccable taste eschewed facile trends. Van Riel's track record is exemplary: While the programming has made space for blues and world music over the years—as well as avant-garde rock with deep affinities and associations for improvised music—there has never been any doubt that Bimhuis is first and foremost a jazz venue. The original location underwent various renovations during its history, including a major overhaul in 1984 to create an amphitheater feel. But the most tumultuous change came in 2005 when Bimhuis moved into new digs, high in the sky as a black box space literally protruding from the new waterfront Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, an institution devoted primarily to contemporary classical music.

The high-tech space couldn't help but lose the gritty ambience of the original location, but the amenities, sightlines and sound of the current space are superb. "The main thing was keeping everything that worked the same — not to transform it into another venue, but improve the old one, to keep the old audience while adding new listeners," van Kiel said. "The essential elements are the informality, [the] relaxedness, combined with total concentration on the stage. In terms of programming, we got new possibilities: cooperation with Muziekgebouw to use each other's spaces. We do some big-name concerts there [where the capacity is double the Bim's 375], and we cooperate in lots of projects. Starting in 2017 we'll do an adventurous music festival that will make use of the entire building."

Many of the concerts at Bimhuis are broadcast live and archived through its own Bimhuis Radio http:// www.bimhuis.nl/bimhuisradio

The original October Meeting took place in 1987, with the second happening four years later. Such endeavors have been important to keeping the Bim viable. "I consider these projects and a variety of 'lab' series essential to what I consider the main role for the Bimhuis," van Riel said. "I feel that the place should be looked at, by musicians and audiences alike, as a tool much more than a goal in itself — to be functional for the development of the music. Facilitating a landscape in which adventure and risk-taking will be encouraged and can be rewarded."

—Peter Margasak

BLUE NOTE TAKES ROOT IN NAPA - Yoshio Kato

“On opening night of Blue Note Napa in late October, a fashionable and excited crowd queued on the Main Street sidewalk for the Chris Botti band's late set. The outdoor hanging banners looked familiar to those who had visited other Blue Note locations, and the indoor decor of the ground floor venue had many of the flagship Greenwich Village location's visual trademarks.

The trumpeter's group seemed especially energized on Oct. 25. Violinist Lucia Micarelli, who portrayed Annie in the HBO series Treme, was back with the band for its three-night run at the new club. And Taylor Eigsti, a Bay Area native who platoons the piano chair with Geoffrey Keezer, was on hand to make his Northern California debut with Botti's hearty road warriors.

"It has a lot of the same sort of charm and flavor of the New York club," Botti observed. "Even the chairs are all in the same place." Rectangular tables are lined up by the bandstand, as is the case in New York, in front of a series of booths and two rows of bar seating.

"We work with the licensees on everything in terms of the design and the sound and the lights," explained Steve Bensusan, Blue Note Entertainment Group president. "There are certain elements that are pretty consistent in terms of the tables and the table medallions and how we like to have the curtain and the sign right behind the artists' heads."

Blue Note Napa joins a roster that also includes three locations in Japan (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya), as well as clubs in Hawaii, Beijing and Milan. Situated in picturesque downtown Napa, the 150-capacity room is part of the 137-year-old Napa Valley Opera House.

The idea of opening a jazz space in Northern California's famed wine country came to Blue Note Napa Managing Director Ken Tesler about five years ago. The East Coast native had regularly been visiting his brother, who moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area a decade-and-a-half ago, and would take advantage of the proximity to Napa's signature wineries.

"During one of those numerous wine-tasting trips, it came to me that a Blue Note would do wonderfully out here," Tesler said. "And I'd love to move out here and run it.

"I've been doing business with the Bensusans — the family that owns the Blue Note brand — going on 10 years and was very familiar with the brand," he continued. Tesler was producer and promoter for the popular All Points West Music & Arts Festival, which ran from 2008 through 2009, and was also hired to produce the Rock the Bells hip-hop festival and the Governor's Ball Music Festival.

When City Winery terminated its occupancy of the Napa Valley Opera House at the end of 2015, Tesler was able to secure his ideal location. Tesler moved West the following April and started ramping up staffing. He also began booking touring acts and local musicians, which is done through the central New York office. By spring, he plans to have 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. sets Tuesday through Sunday nights, with brunch shows Saturday and Sunday.

The food and beverage offerings on opening night were appropriately noteworthy for the setting. "The food blows away any jazz club I've ever been to," Botti opined. "Napa's a 'foodie' city, so most of those tourists have a very refined taste for wine and food."

Blue Note Napa has dates booked as far out as June, with the Pat Martino Trio playing in mid-March and Delfeayo Marsalis' quartet performing in late May.

Bensusan revealed that the Blue Note franchise plans to open a Denver location in mid-2018. "We're really trying to fill in the gaps with Blue Notes in places where it would make sense to route artists," he said. "We are ... putting out the word that we are looking for local partners.

-Yoshio Kato

↧

Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 3

February 11, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "The Excitable Roy Eldridge" by Gary Giddins [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Fasching, The Bimhuis and a Blue Note

“Milt Hinton’s impressive sound and his sense of time were linked with a consummate feeling for harmony. These attributes gained him a strong reputation for playing many styles of music, including work with popular singers. His harmonic experience in the 1940’s with Dizzy Gillespie made him a forerunner of modern Jazz bass players.”

- John Chilton, Barry Kernfeld, Ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

"Dizzy was harmonically miles ahead of me, and everybody else at that time. He'd show me things. At intermission, instead of hanging around and getting drunk, we'd go up on the roof of the Cotton Club and jam. Every night, Dizzy and I would be on the roof, just he and I. There was an old fire escape, winding stairs. He'd help me get my bass up there, and we'd rehearse on the roof. Dizzy would show me some new changes. The flatted fifth, which nobody was using in 1938, altered tenths and thirteenths. We'd rehearse until it was time for the show to go on, and we'd come back down.

- Milt Hinton, Jazz bassist

"Why do you think," Milt said, "that Antonin Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony?

"When he came here from Czechoslovakia to teach, he had a black singer in his class named Harry T. Burleigh. Nobody's heard of him either. Dvorak asked him to sing some of the spirituals. And that's when Dvorak wrote the New World Symphony, based on Going Home. Harry T. Burleigh became a great singer and sang in the big white churches in New York City. He was a big name. Now nobody mentions him."

I'd heard Burleigh's name but knew little about him. I asked my friend Dr. Dominique de Lerma at Lawrence University — one of the great scholars of black music, including all that which preceded jazz — about Burleigh, telling him what Milt had said. Dominique wrote me a letter:

"Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) was a voice student at the National Conservatory of Music, there on a scholarship encouraged by the mother of Edward MacDowell (who had been registrar). She had met him at a winter evening musicale being given at a fancy-ass home in Erie where Rafael Joseffy was performing. Burleigh was outside in the snow, trying to listen through the window. The hostess saw him, called him inside, and supposedly gave him some servant's clothes as a disguise.

"My sources say that Burleigh studied with Dvorak. He did not. He was a voice major. But Dvorak got him often to his residence — way up on something iike 15th'Street in New York! — to sing all the spirituals Burleigh knew. When in that year, 1893, Dvorak wrote his final symphony to show Americans what (he thought) American music was like, he gave the Second Movement's initial theme to the English horn because, he is said to have remarked, it was most like the sound of Burleigh's voice. Today he might have given the solo to the tenor sax.

"Dvorak encouraged his students to write American music, not pseudo-German music, and as you well know, Will Marion Cook was one of his students. So was William Amis Fischer (1861-1948). Fischer later became associated with Oliver Ditson (1897-1937) in Boston. It was there Fischer set Dvorak's melody to a so-called spiritual text, Goin' Home. That was in 1924. The tune is in ballad form, AABA, like Over the Rainbow, Take the 'A' Train, and Swanee River. I know no spiritual in that form.

"Goin' Home was often thought to be a real spiritual from the start, but it isn't. Dvorak quoted no spiritual in any work of his.

"Burleigh, a real dicty dude, taught at the school for a bit, even tried his hand at a minstrel show — which I'm sure disgusted him. He became baritone soloist at New York's all-white St. George's Church, high Episcopal, because J.P, Morgan said so. He remained there for a half century, even after Morgan's death, as requested in Morgan's will.

"Since he was free on Saturdays, he was also soloist at Temple Emanu-El from 1900 to 1930, doing such things as singing Deep River in Hebrew. I'm on the trail of a recording of Burleigh. Those I've known who actually heard him raved about his voice.

"By 1913, he was editor for Ricordi, in which capacity he published also his own settings of the spirituals, giving the Harlem Renaissance some important literature."

Little wonder, then, that Milt Hinton doesn't want Burleigh forgotten.

Milt said, "I got married in 1939. Mona was in my mother's choir.

" I was in the Cotton Club. The World's Fair was going on. The Trilon and Perisphere. I got a call that my grandmother had died, 103 years old. I left my bass right on the bandstand and I got to Chicago, and all these Mississippi folks had a wake. There was chicken and whisky and talkin' and consoling the family. The house was loaded. And I'm a star. I come in sharp. There were a lot of young girls there, pretty chicks. And my mother gave me hell. She said, 'You come to Mama's funeral and you're looking these girls over. Leave these girls alone!'

"And I saw Mona over there and I hit on Mona. I said, 'Look, I'll be back later. Let's keep in contact.'

"A few weeks later, we were coming back to Indianapolis, Indiana. 1 called up Mona on the phone. I said, 'Look, I'm going to be in Indianapolis for a week, at the Circle Theater. Why don't you come down on the weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and hang out with me, and then go on back to Chicago.' She said, 'Okay.' I told her to come backstage at the theater and when you see my bass trunk, tell them you're waiting for me. So she did.

"Now my mother had some friends in Indianapolis. She decided since I'm playing there, she'd come down and see her friends. She walked backstage, and there was Mona sitting on my bass trunk. She raised hell. She said,' What are you doing here? Get back on the train, and go back to Chicago.'

"And when I come off stage, she says, 'She's gone back to Chicago.' As if that would stop it. We've been married ever since."

1939 was a major year in Milt's life. Another major figure came into it. Dizzy Gillespie joined the Cab Calloway band.

"Dizzy came into the band while we were at the Cotton Club. Doc Cheatham got sick, and Dizzy took his place. Dizzy had just got back from Europe with Teddy Hill. Dizzy and I got to be very tight. I was young, and he was younger than I."

He was in fact seven years younger than Milt.

"He had a mouthpiece that was so damn brass it was eating through his lip. I gave him five dollars to go and get it plated.

"We would go to Minton's and jam every night. A lot of kids would come in, because they know the name guys are gonna be there. These kids got their horns out, they want to get up on the bandstand and jam. There was no room for us to get up there and do our thing. So Dizzy said, 'Okay, we're gonna change these changes all around.' The kids are all standing around, and they say, 'Whatchall gonna play?' We say, I Got Rhythm,'and we'd play these other changes, then they'd have to get off the bandstand. Black kids and white kids both. They just didn't want no beginners up there.

"When Benny Goodman started the quartet with Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson, Cab tried to follow suit. He named his quartet the Cab Jivers. He got the four biggest names in his band, Chu Berry, Cozy Cole, Danny Barker, and myself.

"The drummer in the band had been Leroy Maxey. He'd been with the band since it was the Missourians. When Gene Krupa started playing all them drum solos. Cab wanted drum solos. Maxey was a great show drummer, but he didn't know how to take drum solos. Cab got him to take a solo one night, and he got so hung up in it. he stood up and sang the rest of it. Cab fired him, and got Cozy Cole, who was with Stuff Smith and was a hot drummer around New York.

"So now we're doing this thing as the Cab Jivers. Slam Stewart was very big now. Slim and Slim had Flat Foot Floogie going.

"We had a piece to play, Girl of My Dreams. Dizzy said, 'Let me show you a solo on that. Play it like Slam, use the bow.' Dizzy sang it to me, and played it on his horn, and I used my bow. It goes to a flatted fifth. And I couldn't hear that damn thing. Every night I would play it on the air, and I would look back at Dizzy. If I would get it right, he'd nod, and if I missed it, he'd say, 'Jesus Christ, you stink.'

"This went on and on.

"Dizzy's chops weren't right yet, not like they got to be later. He would start things he couldn't finish. In the band, we didn't mind that he was even attempting it." Milt sang a typical Gillespie line and screwed it up. "We'd say, 'That was a great try.'

Cab would turn around and say, 'What the hell you got to play that damn Chinese music for?' He was always on Dizzy. And Dizzy would do all kinds of crazy things.

"Cab would be singing a ballad." Milt sang: I've got you under my skin .... "Dizzy would look out at the audience like he saw someone he knew, and wave. And the people would start laughing. Cab would turn around to see what's happening, and Dizzy sat there like he was in church.

"Tyree Glenn came into the band. And Cab would be singing a beautiful ballad, and Dizzy would act like he was throwing a football. And Tyree would act like he caught it. Just as he'd catch it, Cozy Cole would hit the bass drum, doom! And the people in the audience were falling out. It drove Cab crazy. And he keeps trying to find out who in the hell is doing it.

"We get to Hartford, Connecticut. Sunday afternoon. The band is all set to play. And then comes the spot for the Cab Jivers. We go out front. They drop the lights down on the band. Cab introduces us and goes off in his white suit. He's got two pretty ladies in the wings, waiting for him back there. It's my turn to play the solo on Girl of My Dreams and I missed it a mile. I look back at Diz and Diz says, 'You stink!'

And Cab is in the wings and sees this. Just then somebody threw a wad of paper up in the air and it landed on the stage in the spotlight, right beside me.

"When the curtain closed, the show was over, the band walked off, I got to put my bass back up on the stand. Cab walks away from these two chicks, and walks over to Diz and says, 'You stupid son of a bitch, these men are out there entertaining the people, and you're playing like you're a kid in school throwing spitballs!'

"For the first time in life, Dizzy hadn't done anything. The guys called Cab Fess. Dizzy said, 'Fess, I didn't do that.' Cab savs. 'You're a damn liar. I'm looking right at you. '

Now Dizzy gets kind of mad about this, because he's right this time. He says, 'You're another liar, I didn't do it'

"Now Cab can't have the youngest cat in the band talking to him like that when he's got these fine chicks standing over there on the side. He's the leader. Cab said, 'Get away from me, or I'll slap the hell out of you.' And Dizzy said, 'I didn't do nothin'.

"Cab turned around and slapped his hand upside his face.

"I'm ambidextrous. We used to play with knives when we were kids , like cap guns. Not switchblades, case knives that you throw. J taught Dizzy to do this either hand. If you know how to do it, the blade opens right up. And Dizzy came up with this knife and went right for Cab's stomach. If I hadn't been standing there, Cab would have been dead twice.

"Dizzy was always biggcr'n me, and strong. I just hit his hand and deflected the knife. Cab grabbed Dizzy. Cab was a strong guy, and a street fighter, a tough dude. He was one of those Baltimore alley cats. He grabbed Dizzy's wrist, and they had this big scuffle. The musicians were in the band room, and they hear the scuffling, and they rush back out. Chu Berry and Benny Payne, two big guys, pull them apart and push Cab into his dressing room. Dizzy went to the band room. By the time Cab gets into the dressing room, his white suit is red, all the way down his leg. The knife went into his leg when I deflected it.

"Dizzy was scratched on the wrist from the scuffle. Cab walked into the dressing room. Mona was there and Dizzy's wife, Lorraine, was there. Cab said, 'I guess you cats know, this cat cut me.' And he said to Dizzy, 'Get your horn and get out of here.' Dizzy packed up his horn. Lorraine was standing in the door. And they left. And it was quiet.

"The guy who did the spitball did not mention it. That was the sad part about it. It was Jonah Jones.

"We finished the engagement that night and went back to New York. The bus always went to the Theresa Hotel at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. That was home base in New York. Cab always had the first seat on the bus.

"When we get to the curb. Cab stepped off the bus. Dizzy was waiting. He said,

'Fess, I didn't do that.' Cab just hit him on the hand and walked away. The newspapers and Down Beat made it up like it was a big fight.

"It made 'em both famous."

"Did they ever get over it?" I asked.

"Absolutely. When there was a big reunion of the Cab Calloway band, everybody was there. Tyree Glenn, Budd Johnson, Illinois Jacquet. Dizzy was there. Dizzy started some of his antics, and one of the guys said, 'Don't start!' Dizzy went out and played his solo and turned around to the band and said, "Who threw the spitball?" And the whole band yelled, 'Not me!' And Cab grabbed Dizzy and hugged him and said, 'I know you didn't do it'.

"Later, we were all in Nice, France, and Cab pulled his pants down and pulled Dizzy over and said, 'Feel here,' and put Dizzy's hand on his leg. The scar was still there."

"Dizzy always sent Cab a Christmas card. He loved Cab. Cab was one of our greatest leaders. He was kind to us, he paid us more money. He even paid more money than Duke paid. He was born on Christmas Day. We stopped work December 23. Wherever we stopped work, he gave us our salary and a hundred dollars for Christmas, a ticket home to wherever you lived, and a ticket back to Chicago. We had a contract for years to play New Year's Eve at the College Inn.

"He paid for the pre-natal care for my daughter. He said, 'Have this one on me.' It's never been told what kind of man this was, except by people like Dizzy and me. We kept that band together after it broke up, like family. Anybody got broke, got sick, was out of money, we always chipped in. When Benny Payne died in California, we got some money together. It's still that way, those of us who are left."

A year after Mona and Milt were married, another figure came into his life: his father.

"He came back to the United States. He was an educated man. His field was agriculture, like Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. After slavery, we weren't trying to get brain surgeons. We were trying to get people who knew how to be servants, porters, cooks. That's why Tuskegee was built. This was right after slavery. People knew nothin'.

"My father was well-versed in cotton. When he went back to Africa, Firestone found you could grow rubber trees there in the same conditions you did in South America, and they built the great rubber plantations in Monrovia, and he worked there. But he didn't get on too well with them. From what I hear, he wasn't a very easy man to get along with, and he didn't take anything from anybody. And he got in trouble there, and he came back to the United States — to Memphis, Tennessee. He got to be a cotton sampler, and that was the best job a black man could have in the South. Every cotton buyer would have a cotton sampler, a black man who knew cotton, Grade A, Grade B. And he would buy according to that man's opinion.

"We were playing Memphis. Benny Payne, the piano player, says, 'I hear your father's in town. Have you seen him yet?' I said, 'No.' I'd just played a bass solo. Benny said, 'He's standing over there.' And he was. He was standing backstage. I looked just like the guy. I didn't know what to say to this man. But he said the right words. He looked at me, and he said, 'Your mother's done a wonderful job.' And when he said that, I hugged him. And I said, 'Let's go have a drink.' And Cozy Cole, Cab Calloway, Chu Berry, and my father and I went to the nearest bar and got stoned.

"I went to the telephone and called my mother in Chicago, and I handed him the phone. His voice was the same as mine, with the half hoarseness, half harshness, and she said, 'Baby, have you got a cold?' And he said, 'No,' and she knew, and she said, "Put my son on the phone!' She never saw him.

"He stayed in Tennessee. When they started building the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they grabbed everybody who knew about cotton, because cotton acetate is the basis for explosives.

"I don't know what he did there, but they gave everybody who worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a citation, because if the thing had gone up. everybody would have been gone. He died when he was 66 years old. The only thing I have of my father's is that citation from Oak Ridge and his razor."

Many musicians have taken up photography as a hobby, and some have become highly proficient. Stan Levey even turned professional, giving up music as a career. Les McCann is a superb photographer, and a fine painter as well. Milt is one of the best of them. In 1988, Temple University Press published a coffee-table book of his pictures supported by a text in which he recounts his life and times. It's titled Bass Line.

"How did the photography start, Milt?"

"Somebody bought me a camera for my birthday in the late '30s. Traveling with Cab, I just wanted to take pictures of the musicians. I wanted to record what I did, and the places that I'd been and the people in my surroundings. And I found that I can do what photographers can't do because I'm a musician. Because I'm going to take a picture, the guy doesn't tie his tie or get his horn. If he does that, I don't take the picture, because that's not what I'm into. I took a picture of Dizzy sleeping in a bus. I just want to catch a guy in a restaurant, eating a sandwich. I got Chu Berry down in Texas, where it was hot as hell, with a big piece of watermelon and he's enjoying it, and he's soaking wet. Places we've been. I've tried to show the stupidity of prejudice. Like a picture in Atlanta, Georgia, of a railway station, 1939. It says Colored Entrance. Cab Calloway's whole band. I said, 'Before you go through, guys, let me get this picture.' Fifty years later, you had a black man running for governor there. It shows you the progress that has been made. There's not nearly enough, but we've come a long ways. I took a picture of a sign in Florida that said No Jews and Dogs Allowed. Forget me!

"Ray Brown — he was married to Ella Fitzgerald at the time — and I used to stand out on the corner. He was working in one club and Cab Calloway was playing another club. During the day, we walked down Second Avenue, that's the black neighborhood. The club where he worked at night, there was no one there in the afternoon. There was a bass in the back. We'd get a half pint of whisky and take a little sip and he'd play something and show me, and I'd play something and show him.

One day I remember the bar was open in front but in the back it's dark. And we heard some cats rehearsing back there. We couldn't see who it was. We listened to the bass player. You couldn't hear much tone out of it. But Ray Brown said, 'That cat sure is keeping good time, man. We're gonna hear more about him.' And the guitar player was playing! And the trumpet player was out of sight. Years later that bass player took Ray's place with Oscar Peterson. It was Sam Jones. The trumpet player was Blue Mitchell. The guitar player killed a woman and went to jail. The saxophone player, the chicks just ruined him and he never made it."

"This brings us to another point," I said. "Milt," I said, "how do you see the line of development of the bass from about the 1920s on?"

"Oh!" he said in a long sigh. "Bass has made more progress than any other instrument in the last fifty years. Listen to Lynn Seaton, or Ron Carter, or Richard Davis. And John Clayton. Fantastic. The epitome of players! The instrument hasn't changed bodily, but the balance of strings has changed, the teaching has changed.

"I heard Jimmy Blanton with Jeter-Pillars down in St. Louis. Bass horn was still the style down in St. Louis. Anybody that played bass fiddle had to emulate bass horn. We played two beats, boom boom, boom boom, budoom-budoom boom boom. That's the way we were taught play. That's what the musicians wanted to hear. And nobody wanted to hear a bass player taking a solo. Pops Foster got a chance now and then to do a little something.

"The word bass means bottom. It means support. That's the prime requisite of a bass player, support. Architecturally, it has to be the lowest part of the building, and it has to be strong, or the building will not stand. Musically, it is the lowest human voice. It is the lowest musical voice in the orchestra. It's identifying. If it's a B-flat major chord, I have to play B-flat, or you won't know it's a B-flat major chord. We are like Atlas, standing in support. Now what we're doing today in most instances is not really supporting. We're bypassing that, doing other things as well as supporting. Which is possible to do. Bridges don't need to have columns, we have suspension bridges with cables coming from them. And we're doing the same thing musically with the bass."

I said, "You made the adjustment, through all those styles of the'30s and'40s."

"Right," he said. "Very few guys did."

"And you play in contemporary styles."

"I try. But I'm still using some of the old things that I heard. Like the slap bass, which f got from those guys. Steve Brown was one of my idols. He was fabulous. I listened to his records. He was a better slap bass-player than even Pops Foster, and more exposed because he was with Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. He was a big man. I never met him, but I always loved him. He was on Rhapsody and Blue and all those things with Whiteman. and you had to be a proficient bass player for that music. He was the best slap-bass player I ever heard in my life, amazing. The best in the world. I try to double that, like these young people who double what Blanton did, and all that sort of stuff. Now they're coming to me to find out about this slap bass thing.

"But I'm amazed at them, and I'm still trying to find out and continue. Education will make you do that, that you don't shut your mind to any one thing. Not to be facetious about it, all the bass players in all of the big bands down through the years, you don't remember who they were. All they did was that one thing and they didn't keep abreast of the other things. Nobody remembers who was Jimmie Lunceford's bass player. All he had to do was play that two beats, and he never got past that. His name was Mose Allen.

"And that goes for all the other bands. So when the complexion of the dance orchestra changed, Blanton was one of the innovators. He was also a violin player. Blanton's innovation was the violin, improvising. The academic knowledge, having the dexterity, the knowledge of the instrument harmonically. I have some records of him before Ellington, the Jeter-Pillars band out of St. Louis, and the guys in the band didn't like him, because he was playing all that stuff, and that was not what they wanted out of a bass player. But he was modern, and he wasn't very successful. He was improvising and doing little things in between. They weren't accustomed to that. It was because of Ivie Anderson, who was a very modern lady singer with Duke Ellington, they went down to St. Louis and heard him, and thought it was marvelous. She introduced him to Duke Ellington. And Duke Ellington was always looking for the new.

"And they started with those duos. Pitter Panther Patter. I've got the write-ups from when that came out. They panned Duke like hell for that. They said, 'What docs Duke mean doing this kind of thing, duets?' I call them bass booets. And then the musicians heard it, and could see a vision of what he was about, and they fell in love with it. And other bass players began to emulate it, and as they got more advanced began to do it.

"I was in Cab Calloway's band, and when I heard him, I thought I'd hang up my bass and leave. There was nothing else for us to do. Billy Taylor was with Duke. Duke never fired anybody — he just added Jimmy Blanton. And Billy Taylor couldn't take that, standing there every night and hearing all that wonderful playing. He just quit.

"You have to keep on top of things, keep abreast, keep listening and find out what you can do, and how it works, and appreciating it. And these kids appreciate me, they're coming to me and saying, 'Milt, how do you do that slap-bass thing?' And I'm only too happy to try to show them. But it's gonna take practice to do it."

Yet another bassist who began as a violinist was Milt's friend George Duvivier. He studied at the Conservatory of Music and Art and became concert master of the Central Manhattan Symphony when he was sixteen. When Duvivier died in 1985, Ray Brown wrote a piece in his memory to be played by seven bassists, himself, Bob Haggart, John Clayton, Major Holly, Carson Smith, Milt, and John Heard. John Heard said, "We all played our solos. And then came Milt's turn. He did his animal number. He played slapped bass, he did everything, and he wiped everybody out! It was great."

It would seem, then, that all Milt's life, after the flight from Vicksburg, has been sunny. Not so. He and Mona had one daughter and adopted another, whose son Milt considered his own grandson.

"He was nineteen years old. He was going to be a lawyer. He was to graduate from the New York Police Academy. My grandson was a big guy. Just wonderful. He didn't like to argue with anybody. If he had an argument, he'd walk away. He could move a building over if he wanted to. This kid he knew, who was eighteen, started an argument. He walked away. The kid picked up a cinder block and hit him on the head and killed him and put his body in the trunk of his car.

"I had two condominiums for my daughters where the Jamaica race track used to be. St. Albans. They had keys to our house and we had keys to their places. My adopted daughter was working for the Board of Education. She went to work in the car pool every morning.

After this kid put my grandson in the trunk, a meter maid came along. She started to write a parking ticket and she saw blood. She called the police, and then she left. The police were a long time getting there, and the kid came back and got the car. And he had the keys to our daughter's house. He knew that she went to work, and he decided to go and rob their condominium.

"But my daughter hadn't gone to work yet. When the kid put the key in the door, she thought it was her son. He opened the door and this kid jumped in. She screamed. They had a big fight, and he killed her. He took his clothes off and put on my grandson's clothes and sat down in the house.

"When my daughter didn't show up at work, the people at the Board of Education called. He answered the phone. They think it's my grandson. He says, 'No, I'm waiting for Tommy.' They said, 'Elizabeth didn't get to work.'

"He said, 'Well, she thought of coming later.' And she's in the kitchen dead.

"The police had traced the car to the parking lot. They're watching it. They find out where she lives. They go over to the other condominium, and my real daughter says, 'I've got keys to her place.' Meantime, this kid is going back to the car, and they catch him. My daughter and the police go to my adopted daughter's place and open the door. When she saw what happened she went berserk. We almost lost her, too. She was put in the hospital, and we thought she was going to die.

"It was a dark day in our life.

"They sent the guy to jail."

Somehow Milt and Mona survived even that. I suspect that his passion for teaching is one of the things that sustains him.

"Clark Terry and I have gone to black universities, like Morgan State, and the faculty teaching don't know about people like Harry T. Burleigh, and we tell them these things, the black kids particularly, to give them some impetus about their heritage, some inspiration. Kids have to have role models. There's a book by a man named James M. Trotter called Musical People of Color. It goes back to 1845 and tells about the time of slavery, when free blacks became great singers and great writers and opera singers. Joseph White, a great violin player, went to Cuba and France and won medals and was a friend of Rossini's. And our black kids don't know about these things. James Holland, whose music for guitar is on the market to this very day. And Blind Tom. This book has got the reviews he got from all over the world. This is a wonderful book. We need this to give the kids something to aspire to.

"In the Jewish religion, the kids learn about the Maccabees and Eliazar, the great priests who held up the faith, and defied kings. Jewish children can read about these things. And we don't have that kind of thing in our race, and it's important.

"I love doing clinics. Sharing my expertise. And not teaching but advising, encouraging, setting a role model. Telling the kids from where we've come, where it is now, and where you 've got to go, because these young ones have got to do better. If you don't do better than what's happening now, you haven't made any progress. I try to tell them how you should carry yourself, and what's required of a professional musician.

"This music came up on the North American continent. That includes Canada, because it is part of this continent. Everybody's contributed to this music, whether Indian, Canadian, black, white. We have to use the academics that people get and put it together with the creativity of other people, and we form something that is truly American.

"It's like plastics. I took a course in plastics. Plastics can be made from waste material, and under heat and pressure it becomes another substance with none of the properties of what it came from. If you wanted to make plastics in Iowa, you would use corn cobs, the parts you throw away, and under heat and pressure you make a plastic sheet material that has none of the properties of corn.

"This is what was done in music in America. All of this has been under the heat and pressure of ihe North American continent, and we concocted music that has European and African and Asiatic background, and it becomes America's classical music. And it is constantly changing, according to what waste materials we use.

"I'm a descendant of slave Africans and black Africans, but it's African. Other people come from the intermarriage of American Indians and black people. Because they were on the low part of the totem pole, they kind of hooked up together there.

"But what we really want to do is be Americans. We're all on this American continent together, man."

Milt continued to perform well into his eighties, producing that big, gorgeous tone and powerful beat, but time slowed him at last, and he eventually gave it up. For years he was a regular on the jazz cruises of the S.S. Norway, and it was on one of these that I was able to interview him over a period of several days.

The night of his 90th birthday tribute at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College arrived, June 13, 2000. Forty musicians played. According to the New York Times no concert ever went more smoothly. Produced by David Berger, it was directed by John Clayton. Mitt and Mona —-who is as much loved in the business as Milt — were in the audience with his friend Jack Lesberg, now 80 years old.

The players included Russell Malone, Benny Green, Howard Alden, Art Baron, Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Joe Bushkin, James Williams, Renee Rosnes, George Wein, Dick Hyman, Randy Sandke, Jon Faddis, Kenny Davern, Dennis Mackrell, Jackie Williams, Warren Vache, and more paid their loving tribute. At one point there were 18 bassists on stage, including Bill Crow, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Jay Leonhart, Brian Torff, Kyle Eastwood, and Richard Davis. All the musicians were chosen by Milt.

"We all had a wonderful time," Bill Crow said. "Everybody had a chance to play something for Milt and Mona. And the packed house seemed enchanted."

The Times story, by Ben Ratlif, noted that Milt made his first receding in 1930 with Tiny Parham.

"Mrs. Hinton," Ratliff reported, "stood up and asked the crowd not to leave without stopping by to say hello. The concert's proceeds benefited Mr. Hinton's scholarship fund. Concertgoers were given bags of M&M's as they left — for Milt and Mona. It was a charmed night."

Atlas, indeed. They don’t make ‘em like Milt Hinton, anymore.

Jazzletter

Gene Lees, Editor

June 2000

↧

"The Excitable Roy Eldridge" by Gary Giddins [From the Archives]

February 13, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Bill on Bill: Dobbins on Holman [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Milt Hinton: We Are Like Atlas - Part 3

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wouldn’t dream of denying Gary Giddins his “Challah and butter,” but we hope he won’t mind too much if we use the following excerpts from Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation to fulfill a long-standing wish to feature something about trumpeter Roy Eldridge on these pages.

If you haven’t cozied up to Gary’s storytellings, you might want to start with a copy of Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation.

You can locate more information about this book and others that Gary has written by visiting him at www.garygiddins.com.

Thankfully, many of the recordings that Roy recorded over the span of his career for Norman Granz at Mercury and later for Norman’s own labels - Clef, Norgran and Verve - are still available as commercial CD’s and Mp3 download. You can locate a comprehensive listing of his output by going here.

The Excitable Roy Eldridge

“Through much of its history, jazz made avid converts with the simple promise of undying excitement, whether maximized by throbbing rhythms, blood-curdling high notes, violent polyphony, layered riffs, hyperbolic virtuosity, fevered exchanges, or carnal funk. Yet excitement often gets a bum rap from those converts who, having mined the music's deeper recesses, suspect all crowd-pleasing gestures of vulgarity. At bottom, the distinction between the two is subtle but clear: if you like it, it's exciting; if not, it's vulgar. As Sidney Bechet noted, "You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It's that way with music too." If you're cold to a musician's impassioned yowling, that passion will seem awfully dim if not aimless, and since crowds more than individuals thrive on excitement, your response to musical rabble-rousing may depend on your willingness to get lost in a crowd.

The showiest expressions of passion frequently border on outright pandering, but immoderation of that sort is a healthy symptom — it tends to proliferate in a milieu where authentic excitement also flourishes. Over the past decade, excitement has been scarce to a degree that not even the spaciest '50s cool-jazz hipster could have anticipated, while vulgarity continues unabated in its new garb, substituting pretentious meditation for caterwauling. Still, that part of the audience that hasn't been rendered insensible by ECM-styled stabiles of sound, in which slowness indicates profundity, hungers for le jazz hot, as witness the gratitude with which it greets the appended swing theme that, in so many contemporary performances, caps an hour's worth of esoteric clamor. …

[Roy] Eldridge ... [one of the most] … electrifying of jazz trumpeters first came to prominence in the '30's with a flashy, passionate, many-noted style that rampaged freely through three octaves, rich with harmonic ideas and impervious to the fastest tempos. In part, his secret was to transfer ideas patented on the more facile tenor saxophone to the trumpet; his ability to play Coleman Hawkins's solo on Fletcher Henderson's 1926 "Stampede" got him his first job, and more than a decade later, when Hawkins, lording it in Europe, heard the first Eldridge recordings, he vowed to work with the younger man when he returned to the States ….

The decade preceding the emergence of bop was rife with frantic, exhilarating trumpeters. After the war, the tenor sax would assume that role of crowd pleaser, honking and moaning like a Baptist who'd just heard the word. But in the '30s and early '40s Louis Armstrong's instrument was still king, and while many of its best practitioners pursued the course of lyrical composure (among them Buck Clayton, Bobby Hackett, Bill Coleman, Harry Edison, and Doc Cheatham), others—Eldridge, Red Allen, Bobby Stark, Hot Lips Page, Charlie Shavers, Shad Collins, Rex Stewart—strove for an agitated, coruscating approach as thrilling as anything heard in American music. If they were more likely to overstep the bounds of good taste, there was a payback — they took the most expressive risks. Eldridge was the most emotionally compelling, versatile, rugged, and far-reaching. His ballads were complicated but stirringly lucid, and his bravura numbers were played with such bracing authority that they dwarfed the competition. To a young Dizzy Gillespie, "He was the Messiah of our generation."

In one way or another, Armstrong fathered all the trumpeters mentioned above. Eldridge started listening to him in 1931, at twenty, taking cues from his dramatic storytelling intensity, his logic, his gleaming high-note flourishes. ...

Nor were Eldridge's high notes rounded like Armstrong's. Instead, shaded by a rapid shake, they seemed a spontaneous, un-containable explosion of feeling. …. His high notes were never merely high; and rather than concluding performances, they tended to prefigure fiery parabolas of melody. Orson Welles once explained that the screaming white cockatoo in Citizen Kane was inserted to keep the audience alert. Eldridge's expressive cries and banshee whistles serve the same purpose, telegraphing his own excitement…”

If you have never seen a 78 rpm [revolutions per minute] record in action, then you are sure to enjoy the following video which features Roy’s very exciting original 78 rpm version of After You’ve Gone as played on a Victrola.

↧

Bill on Bill: Dobbins on Holman [From the Archives]

February 14, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Impeccable Teddy Wilson [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: "The Excitable Roy Eldridge" by Gary Giddins [From the Archives]

“I consider Bill Holman to be one of the most important jazz arrangers and composers after Duke Ellington's generation …. Willis has certainly made his own imprint. His music continues to evolve, while always embodying the essence of jazz.”

- Bill Dobbins

The Note magazine is published twice a year by the Al Cohn Memorial Jazz Collection, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, as part of its educational outreach program.

The editor is Matt Vashlishan, D.M.A., and you can locate more information about the Al Cohn Memorial Collection, The Note magazine, and how to make a donation in support of the ACMJC by visiting this website: www.esu.edu/alcohncollection.

The current edition of The Note magazine - Vol 26 - No. 1 - Issue 65, Fall/Winter 2016 features a well-written and informative essay by composer-arranger-educator Bill Dobbins on composer-arranger Bill Holman, whom many of us believe is a national treasure for the original portfolio of Jazz compositions and arrangements that he has created over the past 60 years.

Here are some excerpts from Bill Dobbins’ insightful essay:

Bill Holman: A Master of Jazz Arranging and Composing

Bill Dobbins

The Note magazine - Vol 26 - No. 1 - Issue 65, Fall/Winter 2016

“My first encounter with Bill Holman's arranging occurred a couple of years before I even recognized the name. While in high school, my awareness of big bands was limited mainly to Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans (including the collaborations with Miles Davis) and Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band [Verve].

The Mulligan recording, which was the debut album of the band, didn't credit the arrangers for the individual tunes. I really loved all of the arrangements, but I was especially drawn toward Out Of This World and I'm Gonna' Go Fishin'. I was intrigued by the contrapuntal writing, the incorporation of bluesy elements in the melodic content and the way everything swung so powerfully. Many years later I learned that these arrangements were written by Bill Holman. …

Some of my most rewarding and gratifying experiences have been the opportunities I have had to get to know and collaborate with my musical heroes. I first got to know Bill Holman in 1985 at a jazz workshop in Tubingen, Germany, which was organized by Hans and Veronika Gruber and Advance Music. The workshop included well over a hundred students and about twenty of the world's leading jazz musicians as the faculty, including Louis Smith, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Bobby Watson, Sal Nistico, Richie Beirach, ….”

“It was interesting for me to learn that Bill Holman was primarily self-taught, although he did take a few courses at Westlake College of Music, where he studied commercial writing with Russ Garcia. It was also refreshing to hear him talk about his arrangements, compositions and the creative process of writing in a simple, easy to follow manner that never got bogged down with technical complexity or pretentious academic jargon. Before the workshop was over I also found out that he was a friendly, no nonsense type of person with a dry and ever alert sense of humor. ….”

The further I got in my transcription and musical analysis, the more amazed I became at Holman's absolute mastery of the basic techniques of thematic development, counterpoint, reharmonization, orchestration and formal design. Moreover, it eventually became clear that the content of the entire piece was developed from just four simple thematic motives and/or rhythms. And many of the techniques were the same I had become familiar with in the greatest classical composers from Bach to Shostakovich

There were two overarching aspects, however, that really drove home Holman's mastery of his craft. The first was that the two uptempo movements, the first and third, began with the same 30 measures as part of an extended introduction that introduced all four of the principal motives.

However, from the 31st measure onward, Holman developed two organically related but completely different pieces of music. The second aspect was that, having begun the outer movements with extended introductions, he balanced the whole suite near its conclusion, with a coda of more than a hundred measures. Furthermore, the coda brought back the most important thematic motives of all three movements, and each motive was transformed by a final brilliant and unexpected twist or turn that left me in a state of complete exhilaration every time I listened to whole piece without interruption….”

“ … Following a concert during which which Bill conducted the Eastman Studio Orchestra [Bill Dobbins is the resident musical director at Eastman which is located in Rochester, NY] in 2011, I asked Holman if anyone had ever gotten together with him for a number of consecutive days to record conversations about his life in the music and his ideas about writing. When he said that no one had made such a request up to that time, I immediately got his permission to request some travel money from the school, and I set up a week during the following August to go out to Los Angeles and record a series of conversations about Holman's early years, his musical career and his thoughts on composing, arranging, musical cohorts and the creative process.

While I was in L.A., I got together with an old college friend, saxophonist Rusty Higgins, who had subbed from time to time in the Bill Holman Band since moving there in the early 70s. It was during our dinner conversation that I first learned that all of Holman's friends call him Willis. By the end of that week I got used to calling him Willis, too. I'll always have fond memories of the graciousness with which he and his wife, Nancy, opened up their home to me for those conversation sessions.

I consider Bill Holman to be one of the most important jazz arrangers and composers after Duke Ellington's generation. Throughout his career, his personal evolution has always maintained a connection to the music that first took root in him, that of Count Basie, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Mel Lewis, Zoot Sims and other jazz giants who have made an indelible imprint on the music. Willis has certainly made his own imprint. His music continues to evolve, while always embodying the essence of jazz.”

You can checkout Bill Holman’s arrangement of Out of This World as performed by the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band on the following video.

As an interesting aside, in the early 1950’s, Gerry wrote some arrangements for the Stan Kenton Orchestra. At the time, Bill Holman was playing tenor sax in Stan’s band. A couple of years later, Bill began arranging for Stan and when asked what model he followed when arranging and orchestrating, he named Gerry Mulligan as his chief inspiration!

↧

The Impeccable Teddy Wilson [From the Archives]

February 15, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Frank Isola - "Le Scrupuleux": The Gordon Jack Essay [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Bill on Bill: Dobbins on Holman [From the Archives]

At time time of its publication in the January 22, 1959 edition of Down Beat magazine, Tom Scanlan, was 34 and best known for his column Jazz Music, a weekly feature that he had contributed for six years to the Army Times, the international newspaper for the army. After three years in the army during World War II, he attended George Washington University where he received his master's degree in English literature in 1951. He had been associate editor of the Army Times for seven years. He plays guitar "as a hobby."

Tom Scanlan’s interview with Teddy Wilson not only underscores Teddy’s importance in the pantheon of Jazz Piano Gods along with Earl “Fatha” Hines, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Art Tatum, but it also serves to highlight Teddy’s honesty and integrity both as a musician and as a person of character.

For example, Teddy doesn’t hesitate to politely dismiss vocalist Billie Holiday’s autobiography - Lady Sings The Blues - as little more than a charade, nor is he willing to overlook the technical limitations in the “current” crop of pianists.

Interestingly, pianist Bill Evans had not become an influential force in early 1959; Teddy makes no reference to him during the interview, although he would contribute a track to the double LP Tribute to Bill Evans that Palo Alto Records compiled the year after Bill’s death in 1980.

Teddy was also a keen observer of what made certain Jazz musicians so special as is attested to by his opinions about what made Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman so great.

A quiet and humble man who rarely called attention to his own talents or contributions, this piece by Tom Scanlan is an important document about one of the greatest Jazz pianists in the history of the music.

In my opinion, Teddy’s only “failing” was that he made it all sound too easy.

“Hundreds of pianists have tried to create something new and worthwhile in jazz piano improvisation, but only a handful have succeeded. One who has is Teddy Wilson.

Surely, if a responsible list of the half-dozen or so most creative and most influential pianists in jazz history were to be made, Wilson would be included. He is one of the giants of jazz piano; the number of pianists he has influenced, directly or indirectly, is beyond estimation.

It often has been said that Wilson's distinctive and highly original manner of playing was influenced primarily by Earl Hines, but Wilson himself will disagree. "Art Tatum," Teddy said.

In 1929, 17-year-old Teddy Wilson, son of James Wilson, head of the English department at Tuskegee institute, left home to become a professional musician in Detroit. That year Teddy heard 19-year-old Art Tatum in a Detroit club, sitting in. From that time on, Tatum was the jazz pianist to Teddy Wilson.

"Yes, I liked Hines and Waller." said Teddy, "but compared to Tatum, it seemed as though they were in a different field of activity."

Wilson, a soft-spoken and extremely articulate man, continued:

"Tatum was head and shoulders over all other jazz pianists and most classical pianists. He had the exceptional gift, the kind of ability that is very rare in people. He was almost like a man who could hit a home run every time at bat. He was a phenomenon. He brought an almost unbelievable degree of intense concentration to the piano, and he had a keyboard command that I have heard with no other jazz pianist and with very few classical pianists— possibly Walter Gieseking — and it went much further than that, much further than being a great technician. Art was uncanny. He certainly impressed me more than any pianist I have ever heard."

What about James P. Johnson?

"I never heard James P. in his heyday," said Wilson, "and I'm sorry I didn't. When I heard him, he was rough. But while listening to John Hammond's record collection one night, I heard some piano rolls James P. made in 1922, and they were amazing. Some of his ideas in 1922 would be appropriate with many of the present Basie orchestrations."

Speaking generally of the stride piano style, Wilson — who is not a stride pianist — said, "I don't think it should be lost. It is certainly valid . . . Fats perfected the stride style. He developed the fine points. He had more finesse than any stride piano player I ever heard."

Wilson began studying piano while in grade school. He switched to violin "in the sixth or seventh grade" and played violin through high school, where he also played oboe and E-flat clarinet in the school's military brass band.

During his last two years in high school, he took up piano again because the band needed a pianist. "I could read the bass clef, and they taught me to read stock orchestrations," Wilson explained.

While in high school, Teddy said he began to listen to jazz closely for the first time, adding, "My father liked vocal music: Caruso, John McCormack, and also blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, and Trixie Smith. I often heard these records in the house, but I would never play my father's records voluntarily because my major interest was instrumental music.

"The first records of importance to me were Singin’ the Blues by Beiderbecke and Trumbauer and King Oliver's Snag It featuring the famous Oliver break. Later, with Tuskegee students, I heard West End Blues by the Armstrong Hot Five, with Earl Hines on piano, and Fats Waller's Handful of Keys.

"In 1928, during summer vacation, I went to Chicago and heard professional jazz in public for the first time: McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Fletcher Henderson and Horace Henderson. Benny Carter was with Horace when I first heard him. Also Rex Stewart. And Horace was very good, too. Hawk, Buster Bailey, Jimmy Harrison, and Joe Smith were with Fletcher."

Harrison, who died in 1931, is one of the all-time greats of jazz so far as Wilson is concerned. "Jimmy had a real swinging style," Teddy said. "Now swing is not an objective word, but my conditioning of the swing feeling was the way Armstrong and Hines played on the Hot Five records — not the others, just Armstrong and Hines. And Harrison had my conception of swing. Another trombonist who has it is Jack Teagarden."

After hearing live "professional jazz" in Chicago, Teddy was determined to be a jazz musician, but his mother, Pearl, who like his father taught at Tuskegee, thought that Teddy should give college a chance.

She suggested that he go to college for a year and then if he still wanted to be a musician, to go ahead "and be a good one." So Teddy went to Talladega college, 60 miles from Birmingham, Ala. For one year. "After that, I still wanted to be a musician so I quit college, according to our agreement, and went to Detroit to become a professional musician."

Teddy got his union card in Detroit, worked club dates off and on for a few months and eventually joined a road band working out of Peru, Ind., led by drummer Speed Webb. The band included Roy Eldridge, Vic Dickenson, Teddy's brother Augustus on trombone, and all of the Bill Warfield band except for the pianist. They wanted Teddy.

"The Warfield group was very unusual," Wilson said. "These fellows, from memory, specialized in playing the Red Nichols repertoire. They could play the Nichols records all night from memory. Not just the ensemble but the solos, too." Trumpeter Reunald Jones, later with Ellington, was one of the Warfield band members.

Wilson worked with Webb from December, 1929, until mid-1931. He left the band to join Milt Senior in Toledo, Ohio.

The pianist he replaced in the Senior band was Tatum. Tatum left to concentrate upon solo work, primarily in radio. Wilson was with Senior, best known to jazz historians as the lead alto man with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, until the fall of 1931, when he went to work in the Gold Coast club in Chicago.

"This was quite a club," Teddy recalled. "A membership cost $250, and each member got a solid gold card . . . Al Capone would come in regularly after hours and bring in a party of 10 or 20 people. He'd always have a wad of bills, and everyone who worked in the place got something. Every member of the band got $20."

When the Gold Coast club closed because of a newspaper story concerning the gambling in the club, most of the band returned to Toledo, but Teddy remained in Chicago, jobbing around before joining Erskine Tate and later Francois' Louisianans. Then he went on the road for a few months with Louis Armstrong, with whom he made a dozen records.

"The main thing about the Armstrong band," according to Wilson, "was the way Louis could play so beautifully with such a bad band behind him. We had a few good musicians — Budd Johnson on tenor and his brother, Keg Johnson, on trombone — but it was not a good band."

Teddy paused to reflect for a moment and then chose his words with deliberation in summing up his feelings about Armstrong:

"I think Louis is the greatest jazz musician that's ever been. He had a combination of all the factors that make a good musician. He had balance . . . this most of all. Tone. Harmonic sense. Excitement. Technical skill. Originality. Every musician, no matter how good, usually has something out of balance, be it tone, too much imitativeness, or whatever. But in Armstrong everything was in balance. He had no weak point. Of course, I am speaking in terms of the general idiom of his day. Trumpet playing is quite different today than it was then.

"I don't think there has been a musician since Armstrong who has had all the factors in balance, all the factors equally developed. Such a balance was the essential thing about Beethoven, I think, and Armstrong, like Beethoven, had this high development of balance. Lyricism. Delicacy. Emotional outburst. Rhythm. Complete mastery of his horn."

After his tour with Armstrong, Wilson returned to Chicago and worked with Jimmy Noone and Eddie Mallory. ''Noone had a beautiful low register and was very melodious," Teddy said. "His playing was characterized by smooth legato playing."

In 1933 Wilson went to New York to join Benny Carter after the latter had gone to Chicago to hear Teddy with Noone on the recommendation of John Hammond.

The Carter band broke up after playing two jobs — the Empire ballroom and the Harlem club — and Wilson joined Willie Bryant's new band. Bryant was not a musician, but a showman, and bookers had the idea that he could make it like Cab Calloway. It didn't quite work out that way, but Wilson was with Bryant until 1935.

After that, Teddy had two jobs: backing the Charioteers quintet on radio and as intermission pianist at the Famous Door on 52nd St.

In '35, Teddy also began making his famous series of records featuring singer Billie Holiday and many great jazz musicians.

These records date from '35 to '40, and any list of the most influential and most stimulating jazz records of all time would have to include some of these sides, as good today as they were then. How many musicians became jazz musicians because of Lester Young's solos or Roy Eldridge's solos or Wilson's solos on these records? No one can tell. But it probably is a long list containing some distinguished names.

Has Wilson read Miss Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues?

He has. Quickly.

"And I don't think much of it," he said. 'It's full of distorted emphasis and sheer fabrication. I don't see how anyone could write a book like that."

The pianist's evaluation of some of the musicians of that period, particularly those he played with on the memorable Holiday records, include the following regarding Young:

"I think Lester is one of the great landmarks in jazz. When Hawk was the yardstick of tenor playing, Lester came along with something different and valuable, based on great originality and skill."

Teddy said he considers Young as one of the three most influential musicians in jazz, the others being Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.

"I certainly think Lester belongs in there somewhere," Wilson said. "But he has never seemed quite the same since the war . . . On the record I made with him in '56, I thought he had some of his prewar sparkle, but this was made when he had

just been released from the hospital and had not been drinking." (Teddy refers to Giants of Jazz '56, Norgran 1056, reissued recently as Jazz Giants, American Recording Society G 444.)

Parenthetically, Wilson added, "Guys who think they play better when they are loaded, are out of their minds. When you are drinking, the sparkle is gone. A musician who has been drinking might feel like he's playing better, but he's not. You'd think some musicians who drink would listen to the records they've made while they've been drinking and realize this, but they don't."

It was also in 1935 that Wilson jammed with Benny Goodman at a party given by singer Mildred Bailey. The results of this trio session (the drummer was "Mildred's cousin, a test pilot, an amateur drummer") helped to shape the course of jazz and bring Wilson international fame with Goodman.

Because of the exciting way Teddy and Benny improvised together, John Hammond wanted to record them, and he decided to use Gene Krupa on drums. At that time, Krupa was with Mal Hallett's band. Hammond arranged the record date with RCA Victor and the justly famous Goodman trio was born.

Wilson's first non-recording job with Goodman was at the Congress hotel in Chicago on Easter Sunday, 1936. Hammond drummed up the idea of Sunday afternoon jazz concerts at the hotel with outside musicians as guest stars, and Wilson was one of the first to be featured. He was such a hit that he was asked to join the band as a steady member.

As the first Negro featured with a nationally known white band, did Wilson have much trouble with racial prejudice while working with Goodman?

"Only in regards to hotels . . . sleeping accommodations and hotel restaurants," Wilson remembered.

Only in the South?

"Oh, no, North and South. And there was another thing, too. The first movie we did — I think it was called The Big Broadcast of 1937, something like that — the movie people wanted me to play the sound track but wouldn't allow me to be photographed. I didn't agree to that, and I wasn't in the movie."

Speaking generally of the swing era, Wilson said, "It was a very exciting period. The Goodman band was the first jazz to become a nationally popular thing, and it took us all by surprise. No one expected it. And in those years, the audience would even applaud a good figuration. You never see that now!

"Of course, a big part of the audience was sensitive to showmanship — the drum solos, for example — but a good many people in the audience were obviously musically sensitive. In contrast, the audience today is so jaded. They have to be entertained. It's a problem that young musicians must face.

"Music is something like baseball, movies, or any other entertainment medium in that respect. It isn't easy, and it sometimes calls for values that are not musical. Today, music is not the thing, as it was then. I imagine it's discouraging for a good young musician today when he sees how successful a mediocre musician can be."

Teddy said he believes that a major reason why the Goodman band was able to become the first nationally popular jazz band is because Benny kept music at danceable tempos. He elaborated:

"Goodman would sometimes stand in front of the band, tapping his foot for as long as a minute, almost as if feeling the pulse of the dancers, to assure the proper time." Wilson added that the band had "a good sound, one of the great clarinet players, good intonation in the reed section, first-rate trumpet work, and other musical values, and it was playing within the dance tradition."

Wilson said jazz has lost the mass audience partly because it came to ignore dancers. "And so rock 'n' roll, as bad as it is, is filling the vacuum. "Ellington, of course, has always had high musical standards, as well as a good dance band, too. He's done an amazing job over the years to keep his band in touch with the public while doing other things in music, too."

Wilson left Goodman in 1939 to form his own big band. The band lasted about a year and was not a commercial success although it won high praise from musicians and critics. Of this band, Wilson said: "The band simply didn't have much mass appeal. We didn't have enough show pieces. We played good dance music, but we needed 10 to 20 good stomp head arrangements to add the excitement that was missing. The mistake I made was in concentrating too much on written arrangements."

From 1940 to 1944, Wilson fronted highly praised all-star sextets at the two Cafes Society, Uptown and Downtown, and in 1945 he rejoined Goodman, working with Red Norvo and Slam Stewart in the Goodman sextet.

During the next decade, Teddy was in studio work most of the time, as a staff musician at New York's WNEW and later at CBS. He also taught annual summer classes on jazz piano improvisation at Juilliard. Since the 1956 Goodman movie, Teddy has made more club appearances, notably at the New York City Embers. Currently, he is using Bert Dahlander, the Swedish drummer, and bass man Arvell Shaw in his trio.

Although he has not taught for some time, Wilson remembers and is typically quick to praise some of his former students, particularly John Ferrincieli, who ''played stride piano against a modern type of right hand," and William Nalle, now in studio work. "I had some other very talented students, too, and I am talking about real piano players,” he said.

As might be expected from a two-handed pianist who understands that a piano is not a drum, a pianist whose work has been distinguished by superb finger control, a keen sense of dynamics, master legato playing, originality, love of melody, a compelling and resilient beat and a complete absence of gimmicks, Wilson does not think much of most contemporary jazz pianists.

"With few exceptions, what they play is a caricature of the piano," Teddy said. 'A caricature simply because of the way the piano is made. And pianists today all sound so much alike."

But Wilson, the schooled pianist, does not include Erroll Garner, who cannot read music, among the caricaturists. Teddy explained:

"Garner brought a great deal of originality to jazz piano, working with his time lag. His phrases come through with such conviction because they are his own. On the other hand, when you imitate another musician's way of playing and are too derivative, your phrases are not too clear, are just a shade vague, and they lack real conviction."

Wilson, also a critic of modern rhythm sections, said, "Drummers today play a continuous solo, from 9 'till 4. And I always thought a saxophonist like Parker would sound much better with a conventional rhythm section than with a hipster rhythm section. To my mind, if the background gets too complex, it kills the solo. I guess Dizzy and others like that kind of drummer and that kind of rhythm section, but I don't. To me, the Parker-like soloists would sound much better if they had simpler harmonic backgrounds; then their own harmonic thinking would come over far better."

Wilson said he believes the rhythm section deteriorated partly because of economic reasons. To obtain attention in a club and to make more money, a musician "wants to be in the foreground because that's where the money is," explained Teddy.

Wilson also said he feels that the development of records, ironically, has helped what he terms the "conformity" in jazz today.

"When I came up, there was a good deal of local influence," he said. "We would travel 30 miles or so to hear another musician who had his own way of playing. Musicians developed different approaches to music in different cities. But today the same jazz records are available and popular all over. They influence young musicians in New York, Atlanta, Paris, or Tuskegee, at the same time. All this tends for conformity."

Teddy and his attractive wife have two boys, Theodore, 12, and a chubby 9-monther, Steven. In his New York City apartment none of the many Down Beat, Esquire, and Metronome trophies Wilson has won as best pianist in past years is in evidence. He said he has no hobbies to speak of, although he collects piano records, mostly classical, and has a casual interest in sports cars (he reads Speed Age).

Teddy Wilson is a man quick to praise worthwhile innovations in music; originality is an essential part of jazz creation to him. Typically, he will praise Gillespie and Parker for their originality and at the same time say of Ruby Braff: "I admire Ruby for staying on his own, for not being swept up with Dizzy's style." Perhaps Wilson's point of view concerning jazz today is best summed up with this offhand remark:

"You have creative people and you have imitative people, and in a period of conformity, as today, there are more imitative people."

In late January, Wilson plans to take a six-piece group with a girl singer to England. Teddy finds the jazz audience in England and Scandinavia, where he has toured in the past, "very appreciative."

What does he think generally of the music business today?

"I do feel that music has got to come back," he said.”

↧

Frank Isola - "Le Scrupuleux": The Gordon Jack Essay [From the Archives]

February 16, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Jazz in Italy: Dado Moroni [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: The Impeccable Teddy Wilson [From the Archives]

“Efficient, flexible and energetic, Frank’s playing emphasizes rhythmic stability and employs phrasing similar to that of Kenny Clarke and other, early bop drummers.”

- Georges Paczynski

In his comprehensive Une Histoire de la Batterie de Jazz, Georges Paczynski refers to drummer Frank Isola as Le Scrupuleux - The Scrupulous One.

Mr. Paczynski goes on to explain that this reference is intended to characterize Isola as a drummer who is diligent, thorough and extremely attentive to details. Elsewhere in his brief treatment of Frank, he describes his approach to drumming as “careful,” “meticulous,” “rigorous,” “particular” and “strict.”

Having been in attendance at the June 1954 concert at the Salle Pleyel with Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet featuring Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone and Red Mitchell on bass, Mr. Paczynski’s observes of Frank’s role as the drummer in Jeru’s quartet:

“Frank knows he was preceded by two remarkable drummers: Chico Hamilton and Larry Bunker. It is never easy to succeed talented artists.”

He goes on to say that “ … when Frank trades four-bar breaks with Mulligan and Brookmeyer, that what he plays displays the paradox of a style of drumming based on the influence of Gene Krupa, but one that is played in a very modern, musical context.”

It is a very astute observation because Krupa himself was never comfortable in the more subdued drumming environment of modern Jazz where showmanship had to give way to making musical statements.

Ultimately, what Mr. Paczynski is implying involves a question of Frank Isola building on strengths - the punctilious attention to the details of time-keeping - while offsetting a “weakness” by keeping the flashy elements of Swing era drumming to a minimum during his soloing; a soloing that rarely involved extended choruses.

Frank Isola’s unobtrusive drumming always kept the focus on developing a hard-driving sense of swing in the music. He was the perfect example of the Drummer as The Engine Room of a Jazz combo [of any era].

And given the complexities of keeping an engine humming, perhaps it’s a very good thing, indeed, to pay scrupulous attention to the details?

Thanks to Gordon Jack, Frank Isola’s talents did not go unrecognized beyond their brief “moment in the sun” in the 1950’s as he has immortalized them in the following chapter from his singular work - Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective.

Gordon’s essay on Frank Isola first appeared in the December 1993 edition of JazzJournal. You can locate more information aboutthe magazine by going here.

“For a time during the early and middle fifties, Frank Isola's subtly understated approach to the drums was very much in demand from a variety of high-profile leaders. He worked and recorded with Stan Getz off and on from 1952 to 1957 and spent the whole of 1954 with Gerry Mulligan, which included a visit to the Paris Jazz Fair in June of that year. He played with Bob Brookmeyer and John Williams and appeared on Mose Allison's famous Back Country Suite in 1957, but after that it seemed as though Frank disappeared from the jazz scene entirely. It wasn't until 1992 that I was able to find out what had happened to him, when his good friend pianist John Williams was staying at the Hilton Hotel in London. John told me that although he had worked with Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Mel Lewis, and Gus Johnson, Frank Isola was his favorite drummer. Over the course of the next two years, as a result of several long, long-distance telephone calls to Frank and numerous letters from John, I was able to find out more about Frank's career in the fifties, a period that could be called jazz music's last golden age.

Frank Isola, who was the youngest of seven children, was born on February 20, 1925, in Detroit. He was eleven years old when he was taken to the Fox Theater to see Gene Krupa play with Benny Goodman. After the show, he went home and told his parents that he wanted to be a drummer. Mr. and Mrs. Isola had both immigrated from Italy, and his father certainly preferred opera to American popular music, but they were obviously understanding people because, quite soon, Frank was catching the trolley car every Saturday for his drum lesson in the old Wurlitzer Building in downtown Detroit.

He played in his high school band, and his first success occurred in 1942, when he won the Detroit section of a national Gene Krupa contest. Many of the major cities in the United States had a competition to send the best young drummer to the final, which was held in New York, and one of the tasks was to play along to Krupa's famous recording of "Drum Boogie." Unfortunately, the thrill of winning was swiftly followed by the disappointment of disqualification on a technicality. Frank had joined the union just before taking part, which was enough for the judges to decide that he was a professional and therefore ineligible. The runner-up was sent to New York, where the national contest was won by a youngster called Louie Bellson.

During World War II, Frank served in the Army Air Force as a musician, doing his basic training with Louie Bellson, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. He was stationed initially at Columbus, Georgia, transferring later to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and on discharge in February 1946 he traveled to California. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he enrolled at the Los Angeles Conservatory, but after two semesters transferred to the more modern music college at Westlake, where Dick Kenny and Conrad Gozzo were fellow students. In January 1947 he took time off to go home to Detroit to marry his high school sweetheart, Pat Sheahan. Later that year, having now left college, he went on the road with the Earle Spencer big band touring the West, and it was during an engagement in Kansas City with the band that Frank first met the nineteen-year-old Bob Brookmeyer. Big bands were finding it hard to survive in the late 1940s, and faced with limited bookings, Spencer disbanded after a gig in Dallas.

By 1948, after an invitation from Dick Kenny, Frank had joined Johnny Bothwell's big band, which had John Williams on piano. Many other fine jazzmen played with Bothwell in the forties, and Don Lanphere, Jimmy Knepper, Allen Eager, Teddy Kotick, and Joe Maini were all with the band at various times. The leader had played alto with Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, and Boyd Raeburn, but unfortunately his band didn't fare any better than Earle Spencer's. Business became so bad that, towards the end of 1948, Frank, Joe Maini, and John Williams left the band in Ohio and drove to New York, determined to secure a change of fortune.

It is difficult to put all of Frank's activities into strict chronological order in the years from 1949 to 1952, when he first played with Stan Getz, but there are some events that can be determined with accuracy during this period. In January 1949, along with Don Lanphere, John Williams, and Teddy Kotick, he accompanied Babs Gonzales in an audition for Capitol Records. The audition was successful, because Babs got his contract, but a different instrumental group was used when the singer came to record. Don Lanphere told writer Alun Morgan that, at about the same time, he recorded several unreleased octet sides, possibly for a company called Motif, with, among others, Tony Fruscella, Milt Gold, Herb and Lorraine Geller, and Frank Isola. In June 1950 Frank was recorded at a private session with Charlie Parker, and on March 19, 1952, he made his first studio recording with Eddie Bert on the trombonist's debut as a leader.

The story behind the Parker recording is quite fascinating. It took place at an apartment rented by Joe Maini, Jimmy Knepper, and a tenor player named Gerson Yowell. Regular jam sessions took place there, and the list of musicians who attended reads like a "who's who" of the new music. Charlie Parker, Herb Geller, Gene Quill, Joe Albany, Dave Lambert, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Jon Eardley, and John Williams all came to visit and sat in at various times. Comedian Lenny Bruce was often there, socializing with the musicians. Frank Isola was one of the regulars, and he was recorded on four separate occasions as part of the rhythm section with John Williams and Buddy Jones that backed Charlie Parker. Don Lanphere made the recordings, and the tapes, which had circulated among musicians for years, were finally released commercially in 1977. In an interview with A. C. Stone for The Mississippi Rag, Frank said, "Warming up before a session, I asked Bird what tempo he wanted for a number we were recording. He just looked at me and said, 'Whoosh,' and made a motion with his hand like a jet taking off." One of the titles was a super-fast "Donna Lee," which of course is based on "Indiana." Gerson Yowell's sleevenote for the album says: "The ensemble went into 'Indiana' by bus, while Bird flew!"

It is impossible to be quite as specific about Frank's other activities at this time, but these were certainly busy years, as he worked mostly in and around New York City. A few random examples, though, will give an indication of the musical company he was keeping between 1949 and 1952. He did a few months in Atlantic City with Gene Quill, and John Williams remembers taking a bus to State College, Pennsylvania, with Jon Eardley, Buddy Jones, and Frank for a jazz gig after a big football game there. He played with Louis Prima's big band in New Jersey and was often involved in jam sessions at a studio called Don Jose's, which was situated on West 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and was a favorite venue for Lester Young, Zoot Sims, and Gerry Mulligan. Frank also did a short tour from New York to Chicago in 1951 with a trio backing Peggy Lee. He is quite sure of the year because on October 3,1951, Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run for the New York Giants in the final game of the National League Pennant against the Brooklyn Dodgers. This became known as "The Shot Heard Round the World," and the two events have remained connected in his memory ever since. In explaining to a non-American the significance of that phrase, writer Jerome Klinkowitz told me that it came from "the American Revolution, pertaining to the gunfire from the militiamen ('minute men' available for duty at a minute's notice) at Lexington, Massachusetts, that started the fray. Journalists transposed it to sports for the Thomson's hit."

For ten months from 1951 to 1952, Frank worked with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, and some of the sidemen who played with him at various times included Dick Sherman, Sonny Rich, Gene Quill, Phil Sunkel, and Bob Brookmeyer. Thanks to Bill Crow's book Jazz Anecdotes, we know that there was definitely one leader Frank did not work for during this period, and that was Tommy Dorsey, "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing." Dorsey's manager apparently telephoned Frank and asked him to come to the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York, because Tommy was auditioning drummers and wanted to hear him play. Knowing that Dorsey would only be happy with another Buddy Rich, Frank thought for a minute and said, "Aaah, thanks but tell Tommy I'm not in a sentimental mood." He has always regretted not playing with Tommy Dorsey, because he really admired the band. Bill Crow, who played with Frank at this period, has told me: "I met Frank at jam sessions in New York in 1950 and had the pleasure of working with him when we were both with Stan Getz, as well as on a few casual gigs. He played quietly but with a wonderful swing, and sometimes his hi-hat closing on the afterbeat was the loudest part of his playing."

In 1952 Stan Getz had the problem of replacing the great Tiny Kahn, who was leaving the quintet, so Frank's friend Teddy Kotick arranged for him to play with Stan at an engagement at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Al Haig and Jimmy Raney were in the group, and Joe Newman and Kai Winding also sat in that night. At the end of the set, Getz was so impressed with his playing he simply said, "Step into my office," and Frank remained with the tenor-man off and on for the next five years.

In Arne Astrup's revised Stan Getz discography, he lists Frank on a broadcast at the Tiffany club in Los Angeles on September 14,1952, but Frank told me that he did not play on this date. He thought that Stan probably used a West Coast rhythm section, with possibly Donn Trenner on piano. Frank's first booking as a member of the group was at a club in Providence, Rhode Island, and Teddy Kotick and Jimmy Raney were still there, but Jerry Kaminsky had taken Al Haig's place. Frank remembers that the club had a policy of booking guest stars at weekends, and on one such occasion he had the pleasure of playing with Billie Holiday. On November 14, 1952, the Stan Getz Quintet, with Frank on drums, appeared at Carnegie Hall as part of a musical celebration to mark Duke Ellington's twenty-fifth anniversary as a bandleader. Also on the bill that night were Charlie Parker with Strings, Billie Holiday, Ahmad Jamal, Dizzy Gillespie, and Frank's good friend Louie Bellson, who was on drums with Ellington.

In December, Isola made his first studio recordings with Stan Getz, which have been reissued with a fine sleevenote by Bill Crow. It was while this album was being recorded that Jimmy Raney decided to leave the quintet and

gave Stan his notice. Frank recommended Bob Brookmeyer as a replacement, because they had been playing in jam sessions around New York together and he knew the trombonist would fit in perfectly. In a recent letter, Bob said he considered Frank one of his favorite drummers, and that from 1952 to 1954, he was his first choice for recording and club work. Brookmeyer was not immediately available to join Stan Getz, but he did manage to play one engagement with the group at the Hi-Hat in Boston, although there is some confusion over the date and the drummer. Bob remembers playing at the Hi-Hat in December 1952 with Getz and Frank Isola, but Fresh Sound Records have issued two CDs from this booking, quoting March 8, 1953, with Al Levitt on drums. Astrup's discography goes for December 8, 1953, and says that the drummer is Roy Haynes. The exact date may never be known, although December 1952 may be the most likely, but when I sent Frank a copy of the CD, he confirmed that he was playing the drums, not Levitt or Haynes.

Bill Crow's notes for the Getz and Jimmy Raney recordings are enlightening about the apparent "revolving-door" policy the tenor-man applied to his drummers at this time. "We had come back to New York in January for a week off after a week in Boston, then Stan called and said that he had filled in the open week at Birdland. When I got to work on Tuesday, I found Kenny Clarke setting up his drums. I didn't know what had happened to Frank but assumed he had already booked another gig. Tuesdays at Birdland included a live broadcast of an early set to help publicize the attraction of the week. During the second set, Frank Isola walked in and sat listening beside the bandstand. When we finished playing, I went down to say hello and asked what had happened. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I turned on the radio and discovered I was fired.'"

In May 1953, Teddy Kotick, John Williams, and Stan Getz drove across country from Washington, D.C., to spend the summer playing in Los Angeles. Bob Brookmeyer, who was now with the quintet on a permanent basis, joined them from Kansas City, and Frank flew out a few weeks later. Their first engagement was at the Tiffany club, where Stan used local drummer Richie Frost, who was a friend of Brookmeyer's. After a week's break, the group, this time with Frank Isola, took up residency at Zardi's, where they remained for the next four months. Zardi's was situated on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street and was the premier jazz club in Los Angeles at the time. During that summer the quintet visited the Hollywood studios on three occasions to record fourteen titles for Norman Granz, but in September, Getz disbanded to go on the road with a package tour called "A Festival of Modern American Music," with Erroll Garner, June Christy, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra.

The rest of the group went back to New York to freelance, and around Christmas 1953, Brookmeyer received a telephone call from Gerry Mulligan, inviting him to join the quartet he was reforming in Los Angeles. As he intended to go back to the East to work, Mulligan did not want California-based players, so he asked Bob to bring a New York rhythm section to Los Angeles with him. Frank and Bill Anthony were selected, and while the new quartet was rehearsing in January, they played a concert as part of Gerry's tentet at the Embassy Theater, Los Angeles. This had been a short-lived project of Mulligan's, but luckily the tentet had made one album for posterity, recorded the year before, in 1953.

Initial rehearsals over, the new Gerry Mulligan Quartet made its debut at the Blackhawk, San Francisco, late in January 1954. Their next engagement was at the Storyville club in Boston, so Mulligan bought two cars for the long trip back East. Bill Anthony and Frank traveled together, while Brookmeyer and Mulligan were in the second car with Gerry's wife Arlyne, who was also his personal manager. After Boston, they went to Toronto and then New York, arriving there in April, where they appeared at Basin Street opposite Frank's original inspiration, Gene Krupa, who was there with Eddie Shu and Dave McKenna. By this time, a significant change had occurred in the rhythm section, as the superb Red Mitchell had taken over from Bill Anthony on bass.

It was during a booking at the Blue Note in Philadelphia that Henri Renaud invited Mulligan's group to appear at the Third Salon du Jazz in Paris, France, where they were a huge success. Luckily, Vogue Records was on hand to record the concerts, and thirty-one titles were eventually released, representing a fine example of Frank's stay with Mulligan. He follows the tradition established by Chico Hamilton and Larry Bunker in playing brushes almost exclusively with the quartet, and one might be forgiven for thinking this was at the request of the leader. Frank told me, though, that this decision had been his. In fact, when Gerry originally hired him, he said that he particularly liked his stick work. Compere Charles Delauney, whose introductions are on the L.P. (but not on the CD), has said, "Contrary to many modern musicians, whose attitude seems to be one of utter boredom, the members of the Mulligan quartet showed their evident pleasure in what they were playing." During the group's weeklong stay in Paris, where they were featured at five concerts, the drummer became very friendly with Thelonious Monk, who was also appearing at the festival. They had sat next to each other on the flight from America, and in the evenings they walked back to the hotel together after the concerts. When they returned to America, Mulligan had the problem of replacing Brookmeyer, who had decided to leave the group. He selected Tony Fruscella, who had established a reputation in New York circles as a sensitive and lyrical trumpeter.

On July 17, 1954, the Mulligan quartet with Fruscella, Mitchell, and Isola played at the first ever Jazz Festival at Newport, Rhode Island. They followed the Oscar Peterson Trio onstage and were introduced to an enthusiastic audience by Stan Kenton, who was the master of ceremonies that year. Kenton called Frank "A veteran of a number of outstanding jazz units and a percussionist of skill, control, and imagination." As for Tony Fruscella, a tape exists of part of the program the group played that day, and his approach sounds extremely tentative and lacking in confidence. John Williams has said that in the right setting, and the Newport Jazz Festival was probably anything but the right setting, Fruscella's lyrical creativity was unsurpassed. Almost immediately after Newport, Mulligan decided to replace him, and at Frank's suggestion he chose Jon Eardley. Apparently Jon was playing at the Open Door in Greenwich Village with Fruscella and Don Joseph, and Frank was in the rhythm section. Gerry and Arlyne Mulligan were in the audience, and it was Arlyne who made the introductions, when she asked Eardley how many white shirts he had. On being told that he had three or four, she took him over to Gerry's table, where Gerry said, "Would you like to come and work for me?" The new quartet opened in Baltimore three days later, and Jon's ebullient sound and striking ideas were to remain a feature of Mulligan's groups for the next two years. It is a source of regret that the group with Eardley, Mitchell, and Isola never recorded. The only permanent memento that seems to exist is a photograph in Time Magazine dated November 8, 1954, the issue that had Dave Brubeck on the cover.

In September 1954, John Williams made his first album as a leader with Bill Anthony and Frank Isola, and towards the end of the year, they were all involved in a seven-week nationwide tour organized by Norman Granz. John and Bill Anthony were part of the Stan Getz Quintet with Bob Brookmeyer, and Frank was still with Mulligan. The Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Duke Ellington Orchestra were also featured, and the tour started in New York's Carnegie Hall, moving on to Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit (where Frank's family, including his sixty-year-old mother, sat in the front seats of the Lafayette Theater), Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, and San Francisco before concluding at the Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles. This represented the end of Frank's career with Gerry Mulligan. The day after the Shrine concert, Stan Getz recorded six titles for Norman Granz, using Frank instead of Art Mardigan, who had been his drummer on the tour. Frank told me that "Jeru could be pretty stubborn and was upset that I had made the LP with Stan. He said it was unfair to Art Mardigan." The baritonist still had commitments on the West Coast, so Frank, who was anxious to return to his family in New York, took the opportunity of rejoining Stan Getz. After their argument, Gerry had driven off with Frank's drums in his station wagon, which necessitated Getz hiring drum kits for Frank while they worked their way back East. Bob Brookmeyer also stayed in California for a while, so Stan added Tony Fruscella to the group for a Birdland engagement, although by March 1955 Brookmeyer was back again.

Isola continued to freelance around New York, and in 1956 he recorded with Dick Garcia in a group that included Gene Quill, and Terry Pollard. He played with the German pianist Jutta Hipp in a trio with Jack Six at Basin Street East, and he worked in Cleveland for a while with Helen Merrill. During this time his wife, Pat, was contributing to the family income by holding down a job as a receptionist/secretary at the William Morris Booking Agency. He also played in jam sessions with Al Cohn, and at one such session in a loft on 34th Street, he met Mose Allison. By early 1957, the pianist had joined Frank in the Stan Getz Quartet, and it was around that time that he was rehearsing his famous Back Country Suite. When it was recorded, the drummer showed himself to be perfectly able to adapt to Allison's charming and idiosyncratic compositions. The Suite was Mose Allison's first recording, and it proved to be Frank's last for thirty-seven years.

In the 1959 Metronome yearbook, Frank, together with six other leading drummers, was asked to select some of his favorite artists. His selections make interesting reading, because he chose Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Red Norvo, David Allyn, Milt Jackson, Ray Charles, Gerry Mulligan, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie with Joe Williams. By the time this entry appeared, Frank and his family had returned to Detroit, and his days of playing with major jazz figures were over. The sixties was not a good decade for Frank, or for jazz in general, although the music survived, unlike Frank's career, which never recovered the high profile that it enjoyed in New York during the fifties.

In 1961 he played in a trio that opened Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club in Chicago, but for most of that decade and into the seventies, he stayed close to home, playing casuals with local musicians. He did return to New York in the mid seventies, working with tenor player Victor Lesser at the West End. But jazz gigs were still very scarce in the city, so he went back to Detroit, where to some extent his life has come around full circle. Until 1992 he lived downtown in an apartment at the Lenox Madison Hotel, close to the old Wurlitzer Building, where he used to have his weekly drum lesson. As a result of the Urban Renewal Program, the Lenox Madison has been demolished, so Frank has moved to another apartment, near to the Fox Theater, which of course is where he was inspired to become a drummer at a Gene Krupa performance. He was recently a victim of what has become a regular feature of inner-city life; his car was stolen, and worse, his drum kit was inside. Somehow, Louie Bellson heard of Frank's loss, and he immediately arranged for his old friend to receive a new kit.

In October 1994 he was reunited with John Williams when they recorded a quartet CD down in North Miami, Florida. Also involved were Spike Robinson and Jeff Grubbs, a bass player from the Florida Symphony. Earlier that year, he was heard with Franz Jackson and Marcus Belgrave at a Jazz Festival in Windsor, Ontario, where a live recording was produced, and in November 1994, at the same venue, he was the guest of honor at a concert billed as "A Tribute to Legendary Detroit Drummer Frank Isola."

Other than Bark for Barksdale with the Mulligan quartet in Paris, there are no recorded examples of Frank taking extended drum solos, but his four-and eight-bar breaks are models of taste and restraint, with no over-elaborate displays of technique. Within the ensemble, he never imposed himself in the way that perhaps Art Blakey might have done. Excellent though Art's more aggressive and dynamic approach was, Frank Isola's relaxed and gently swinging style was just as valid for the contexts in which he worked.”

Frank’s playing can be heard on the following performance of Bernie’s Tune which was recorded by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in 1954 at Storyville in Boston MA with Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone and Bill Anthony on bass. Frank takes an 8-bar solo on the bridge of the closing chorus.

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Jazz in Italy: Dado Moroni [From the Archives]

February 17, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Gene Krupa: 1909-1973 - A Tribute with Testimonials [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Frank Isola - "Le Scrupuleux": The Gordon Jack Essay [From the Archives]

Every Jazz fan knows the experience. You're listening to some artist for the first time. All at once, you hear something in the choice of notes, the phrasing or the attack which catches your attention. You begin to listen more closely and a new passion is born. The artist has spoken to you through the music. You've become a fan.

Such was the case for me with the music of Dado Moroni. My first contact with Dado's wonderful approach to Jazz piano came in 1995 while listening to Ray Brown’s Some of My Best Friends Are … The Piano Players [Telarc CD-83373] that features a number of prominent Jazz pianists, all of whom I was familiar with except Dado. The cut from the disc which really got my attention was Dado's rendition of Coltrane's Giant Steps. I was hooked; I wanted to hear more of Dado's recordings with their intriguing concepts and hard-driving style.

But where to find them? [remember this was in the mid-1990’s before Amazon.com really set sail] Having a friend who owned a CD store in San Francisco immediately got me access to a computer database with the quick result that there were no discs catalogued for a "Dado Moroni." While continuing my search, an edition of the Jazz Times magazine arrived which contained, of all things, a very favorable review of a new disc by none other than the Dado Moroni Trio, entitled Insights. Mercifully, the review listed the disc as JFCDO07 on the Jazz Focus as well as the contact information for the label which was located in Calgary, Alberta.

Jazz Focus president, Philip Barker kindly sent along instructions for ordering a copy of Insights and also informed me that Dado was featured on Tribute, another Jazz Focus disc under the leadership of George Robert (JFCD004) [and which contains a terrific version of Kenny Barron’s splendid tune – Voyage]. After receiving and listening to both recordings, I was even more convinced that Dado was a very special talent and one deserving of more exposure in this country. I wanted to know more about this creative Jazz pianist who opens his Jazz Focus Insights disc with a beautiful and haunting rendition of Blossom Dearie's rarely heard Inside a Silent Tear instead of the usual burner, plays Stompin' at the Savoy as a solo piano slow ballad, and gives Old Saint Nick the image of a swinging hipster with his version of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

Through an initial telephone introduction formed by Philip Barker and as a result of a series of follow-up conversations, Dado was a very willing participant in a running dialogue aimed at affording me some background about his Jazz growth and development. Fortunately, we did not have to rely on my spotty Italian as Dado speaks excellent English.

When asked the usual question about when his interest in Jazz began, Dado shared that his earliest memories of Jazz are while bouncing to its rhythms suspended in a baby jumper hanging from a door jamb. Dado's father developed a liking for Jazz from the Allied servicemen stationed in Italy after World War II and would bring home copies of V-discs and play them on the family phonograph. Dado was captivated by the sounds of Jazz he heard as a child and at the age of three he would ask his father to put on records by Earl "Fatha" Hines, Erroll Garner and Thomas "Fats" Waller.

There was a piano in the house which his parents had brought in for Dado's sister, Monica. Dado would climb up on the piano bench and, curling the last two fingers under each hand, pick out the melodies and phrases he had heard on these recordings.

Dado recalls: "The Fats Waller record was called Smashing Thirds. I had no idea how to play thirds. I just heard happy sounds which I mimicked with major triads in my left hand and sad sounds which I represented with minor triads in my left hand. I just tried to copy by ear the sounds I heard on the records. Of course," laughs Dado, "by copying Garner's style with its four beats to the bar in the left hand, I had no need for a rhythm section!"

As he grew older and became more serious about Jazz, Dado commented that his parents "didn't want to force me but at the same time continued to encourage me." His father would take him out to hear the music being played in local Jazz clubs in Genoa and Milan. It was during one of these excursions when Dado was about eleven that he met a Jazz pianist in a local Genoa club who agreed to give him lessons.

"He recognized that I had evolved a very unorthodox technique by being largely self-taught and decided not to try and change it." Instead, he worked ideas and information into Dado's intuitive understanding of the music and like every good teacher answered his student's questions, realizing that this was where the real learning was taking place.

Dado recalls that "at this time I was having trouble learning the bass clef. My teacher suggested that I buy a bass. By learning Ray Brown bass lines from records and playing them on the bass, I was able to teach myself bass clef." He further extended his bass clef technique by listening to piano masters like Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Another instrumental influence is evident in Dado's style of playing which is very hard-driving and full of rhythmic accents in the bass line. When I asked him about this he noted that "I've always had an interest in jazz drumming; maybe that's where this feeling comes from."

During high school, his father continued his Jazz lessons with frequent trips to clubs in Milan where he was able to sit in. "My father gave me a lot of freedom to explore my interest in the music. He said, "do whatever you want - as long as you finish high school."

High school was followed by two years of law school where one day Dado realized that "I was either going to be a terrible, frustrated lawyer or a happy Jazz musician." When I asked Dado what he thought was the most important element in creating Jazz he said: "you've always got to be honest." His decision to leave law school and to pursue a career in jazz is certainly a reflection of that ethos.

Since that fateful day, Dado has over the years been found in the company of Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Ray Brown, George Robert, Tom Harrell, Al Grey, Bill Goodwin, Jon Faddis and Lee Konitz.

When I asked him about Jazz pianists he admired on the current scene, he shared that he had "great respect for the work of McCoy Tyner because of his integrity over the years. I also enjoy listening to Kenny Barron, Steve Kuhn and Herbie Hancock."

Compositionally, "we have so much to choose from - such a rich heritage," commented Dado. His selections on the Jazz Focus Insights disc are certainly reflective of this treasure chest, ranging as they do from standards like If I Should Lose You, through some Ellington/Strayhorn compositions, and Jamal an original piece Dado wrote as a tribute to one of the giants of Jazz piano.

Dado Moroni is an example of learning the Jazz tradition by intuition and by training the ear to benefit from the contributions of those who have gone before. It is the way most of the early Jazz masters learned their craft. Judging by the manner in which he has matured as a Jazz pianist since I first heard him almost 15 years ago, it would seem that Dado has matriculated rather well though his courses in jazz education.”

Before moving on to specific reviews of Dado’s recordings, Philip Barker, owner of Jazz Focus and with whom I would co-produce Dado’s next CD – Out of the Night [Jazz Focus JFCD032] - had a similar epiphany upon first hearing Moroni as he recounts in his insert notes to Insights.

“It is June 25th, 1994 and the 15 Calgary International Jazz Festival is in full swing. The George Robert Quintet arrives to play a concert. I knew of their Italian pianist, Dado Moroni, but I wasn't prepared for what I heard when he played. The performance of the quintet was outstanding but Moroni stood out even among the wonderfully talented musicians with whom he was teamed.

Fast forward to Montreal and Sunday, July 3rd, 1994. The Robert Quintet is in the studio recording material for a JAZZ FOCUS CD. Once again the playing of the pianist is amazing. Here, clearly, is a major talent, yet one who is not yet widely known in North America. So I ask him if he is willing to record his own CD for JAZZ FOCUS. He says he is, and you have the result right here.

Dado is no newcomer to the recording studio. Over the last 15 years he has appeared on at least 24 albums/CDs in company with such musicians as Jon Faddis, Clark Terry, Lee Konitz, Al Grey, Ron Carter, Ray Brown, Lewis Nash, Peter Washington and, of course Tom Harrell and George Robert with whom he has both toured and recorded widely. The list of jazz musicians he has played and recorded with is much longer than this and includes many of the foremost American and European jazz artists.

Unfortunately for us in North America, most of the recordings on which he has appeared have been on European labels that have not had wide distribution in North America. The time was ripe for him to lead his own group on an internationally distributed North American label.

It has been said that you can tell a musician by the company he keeps. By that standard, Dado Moroni would seem to be one of the best. Jimmy Cobb is surely one of the greatest of all jazz drummers; he underpinned such classic recordings as Miles Davis'"Kind of Blue" and John Coltrane's "Coltrane Jazz". JAZZ FOCUS is honored, and also rather humbled, to have him on one of its releases.

Compared to Jimmy, Peter Washington is a relative newcomer to the jazz scene but he has established himself as one of the best bass players around, much in demand and widely recorded. Indeed his many recording credits include one with Dado - a 1994 date on which both were members of the Jessie Davis Sextet.

On one track of the present CD, the trio is joined by singer Adrienne West, who recorded a duo album with Dado in 1987. Among many other accomplishments, she has toured Africa for the U.S. State Department and starred in the "Fats" Waller musical "Ain't Misbehavin"'.

The program on this CD consists mainly of standards, though Moroni contributes one original composition. It starts gently with a little heard but attractive Blossom Dearie piece Inside A Silent Tear. The tempo picks up with a sprightly version of Billy Strayhorn's All Day Long. This leads, logically enough, to the Duke's Come Sunday. On Stompin' At The Savoy Dado plays solo; Stompin' is usually performed as an up-tempo swinger, but Moroni gives it a slow, thoughtful treatment which explores every aspect of the venerable piece. The next track is a piano-and-bass duet, Moroni's tribute to another great pianist, Ahmad Jamal. Jimmy Cobb returns for another nod to the Duke. and there follows a gorgeous version of If I Should Lose You. The trio is then joined by Adrienne West who provides a flawless reading of the lovely but too seldom heard Kenny Dorham tune Fair Weather.

The Milt Jackson standard Bluesology is a real swinger, illustrating well Moroni's complete command of the piano keyboard, with able support and solos from Washington and Cobb. Next up is Santa Claus. This was recorded with a view to its inclusion in the Christmas CD JAZZ FOCUS plans to release in 1996 but Dado was so pleased with it that he asked that it be included on this CD also. Santa has seldom swung like this! (But don't worry, another "take" is safely stored in the JAZZ FOCUS vaults ready for the Christmas CD when it is put together!) The program ends with two more trio pieces, the reflective Demoiselle and Ray Noble's classic Cherokee, which - despite the myriad times it has been performed - Dado and his colleagues have no difficulty making into something new, even while playing at breakneck speed. A rousing finish to a varied program!

Listening to the master tape, I am delighted with the outcome of this session. I hope and believe you will be too.

Philip Barker.”

In an effort to make more of Dado’s music more readily available in North America, Philip Barker and I joined forces and co-produced the aforementioned Out of the Night which was recorded for Jazz Focus in March, 1998.

As I wrote in my insert notes to the recording:

“The context for this second Dado Moroni disc on Jazz Focus Records was a day-long, Monday recording session in Seattle, WA that followed a weekend Jazz Party held in the Pacific Northwest. The New York-based trumpet and flugelhorn player, Joe Magnarelli, joined Dado, bassist Ira Coleman and drummer Bill Goodwin for the prior weekend’s festivities, and it was with much anticipation that we welcome this group into the recording studio fresh from the exhilaration and energy of recently playing together.”

Before moving on to a description of other recordings by Dado, in order to address what I find so appealing in Dado’s approach to Jazz pianist, here is a descriptive excerpt from these same insert notes:

“Dado has brought together a style which is both personal and unique and, at the same time, indebted to the piano giants who have gone before him. It is an approach that is very much reflective of his nature and his personality: passionate, intense, hard-driving and, above all, always swinging in the sense that it is marked by a pronounced feeling of rhythmic forward motion.”
Here’s Ken Dryden’s review of Out of the Night from http://www.allaboutjazz.com/:

“Italian pianist Dado Moroni is better known to European jazz fans because most of his work has been recorded and distributed on the continent, but this second disc for the Canadian label Jazz Focus should help to expose him to American audiences. This wide-ranging 1998 session, with trumpeter and flügelhornist Joe Magnarelli, bassist Ira Coleman, and drummer Bill Goodwin, finds Moroni exploring music from several decades, including standards (two takes of "Embraceable You"), classic jazz works from the 1930s and 1940s (Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin'" and Duke Ellington's "Black Beauty"), and more recent fare like the high-energy "Seven Steps to Heaven" and Joe Henderson's strutting "Out of the Night." Moroni's compositions are also a delight. His funky "Ne-Ne" is easily the most intense selection of the date. His blues tribute to Count Basie, affectionately called "Basie-Cally," is a swinger that features a choice muted trumpet solo by Magnarelli. The horn player's bossa nova "Bella Carolina" showcases his rich flügelhorn. Highly recommended.”
And to tack back for a moment about what was initially so appealing and engaging about Dado’s two cuts from the Ray Brown tribute album to pianists he admires, here’s Donald Elfman description of Dado’s performance:

“Italian pianist Dado Moroni, who is in the process of settling in New York [Dado lives in Genoa, Italy and maintains an apartment in New York], provides one of the album’s truly unusual delights. For his first recording with Ray Brown, the pianist does an all-out impersonation/tribute to Erroll Garner, complete with grunt. Compounding the wackiness is the fact that it’s a Garner take on John Coltrane’s Giant Steps! Ray starts with a slow statement of the theme on bowed bass with Moroni commenting quietly behind. Then, from out of a delirious nowhere, comes the Garner stuff which, after several loopy minutes, shifts gears into an up-tempo excursion more in keeping with the original tone of the piece. But with another shift, we’re back to Garner and Ray’s Arco bass. Moroni is clearly not awed by tradition new or old, and he and Ray just smile all the way through. The trio is up and cooking for My Romance, which demonstrates that the romance still has sparks.”
While Benny Green would be the pianist in Ray Brown’s trio during most of the decade of the 1990’s, shortly after this recording was made, Ray would use Dado on piano whenever his trio played in Europe.

Although the point has been made that much of Dado’s discography, especially his earlier recordings, were produced on European labels that have limited or no distribution in North America, he does have a rather substantial body of work from the past 15 years or so that is readily obtainable.

These CDs breakdown into three categories: [1] his recordings made as a sideman with Jesse Davis, George Robert, Tom Harrell, Mark Nightingale and Clark Terry, much of this from the late 1980s and early 1990s, [2] his piano trio works, then and now, and [3] his more recent performances as a “ranking elder statesman” as a member of Jazz groups based in Europe, particularly Italy.

I have selected a few examples from each of these categorizes to describe in an effort to reveal more about the developing technical and expanding creative qualities in Dado’s playing.

Beginning with Dado’s early sideman dates, and concentrating on the ones he made as a member of the quintet co-led by George Robert – Tom Harrell, these are among some of the best Jazz recordings made in the 1980s. This point is re-emphasized by Dan Morgenstern, the well-respected Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, and the writer of the insert notes to all of the groups recordings beginning in 1987 with Sun Dance [Contemporary CCD-14037-2]:

"At this moment in time, nothing is more important to jazz than the presence of gifted young players who know and love the true language of the music and ire committed to its continuation. The list of such musicians, happily, has been growing of late, and on the evidence of this splendid record, we can safely add to it the name of George Robert.
What this young man has put together here is a band - not just a bunch of guys who met in a studio and went through the motions, but a musical collective made up of players who think and feel together, listen to each other and make their own music.

A finely matched blend of seasoned veterans and young comers is what we have here, and there may be something symbolic in the fact that the former are Americans and the latter Europeans - though the time when you could tell most European jazzmen by their accent is long since past, they still take their inspiration from this side of the pond.
Yet, for Swiss-born George Robert, jazz is something that came quite naturally, from his home environment.. His American-born mother's love for jazz was shared by his father, five brothers and two sisters; the boys all played instruments, and formed a family band. George started piano at 8, took up clarinet at 10, and studied with Luc Hoffmann at a distinguished conservatory in his native Geneva.

'I would always hear jazz records at home," he said, "and I feel that my ears got a solid foundation from that, at a very early stage. Later on, I met a lot of American musicians passing through Geneva and played sessions with them at my home. Among them, Jimmy Woode, Sam Woodyard, and Billy Hart really encouraged me when I was just 13 or 14. And studying classical clarinet gave me discipline, control and technique that were most helpful when I picked up the saxophone.”

Among the alto players who influenced young George were Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, and Cannonball Adderley. 'They all had an influence,' he recalled, "but when I was about 14, a Phil Woods album, Alive & Well in Paris, really caught my ear - his gorgeous sound was the first thing that attracted me.”…

The group heard here was formed in the Spring of 1987 and toured in Switzerland and France; the album was recorded in Lausanne during the tour.
[Of the musicians in the band, George commented]: 'I've always admired Tom, both as a player and a composer, to have him next to me is a great inspiration', the leader said. The two horns get a beautiful blend, and have a very special way of interacting, notably in the interludes of collective improvisation that are a feature of the band. "Jimmy Woode introduced me to Dado in 1985, and since then, I've always worked with him. He's a wonderful pianist. His touch is just superb, and the way he comps is a rare gift." This young man moved to Amsterdam in 1986, and I've not the slightest doubt that we'll hear much from and about him. Bassist Reggie Johnson, with whom George had worked before, was the perfect choice. 'Reggie is an exceptional musician and the ideal bassist for us - we love him. And Bill has been a friend for a long time. I think he's one of the most musical drummers around." Goodwin's outstanding solo on the title cut proves that statement, and his experience as a record producer came in handy as well.
In a varied program of uniformly excellent originals by Robert and Harrell, the band strikes a happy balance between ensemble and solo strength. The leader gets a fine, full sound from both his alto and soprano (he handles the latter with a fluency that reflects his clarinet training) and tells a story when he plays. So does Harrell, surely one of the most underrated and under-publicized trumpeters of our time (and quite a flugelhorn player, too). The rhythm section is a delight, with a real feeling for not only time but also dynamics, and works hand-in-glove with the multihued horns. …
When you sound as good as these five guys, there's no need for artifice. This music speaks for itself, it swings and sings and it's always alive. We look forward to hearing more from George Robert and company - a new branch on the tree of jazz with exceptionally solid roots.”

Two years later in 1989, the Robert-Harrell group was back with Lonely Eyes this time on GRP [1002]. Dan Morgenstern offered these insights about the band on this recording:

“This is the second album by what is unquestionably one of the best groups on the contemporary jazz scene. This is music that radiates togetherness and reflects George Robert's statement that the quintet, together since the spring of 1987, "is like a family; everybody loves working with one another.. the chemistry is there".

Indeed it is, and the music here surpasses the excellence of the quintet's impressive debut on records (Sun Dance: Contemporary C- 14037), which received critical acclaim from all comers of the jazz spectrum.

As on that first record, the quintet here presents its own music. All the compositions are originals from within the group-five by Robert, three by Harrell, and one by the band's youngest member, pianist Dado Moroni-and they are not just sketches on blues or "Rhythm" changes, but genuine pieces of music with an impressive variety of moods and textures. The quintet achieves its own identity and freshness, but it does so without artifice or self-conscious striving for novelty or effect. Clearly, there is a shared language among all its members, a language solidly rooted but never mired in the jazz tradition. The music flows with a natural ease that is a pleasure to hear.
The horns of the co-leaders are splendidly matched, both in ensemble and solo roles. Doubling and skillfully varied writing allow for a textural variety quite amazing for a small group. Harrell, who finally seems to be getting some of the credit long due him as one of the most original and consistently excellent creative improvisers of our time, plays trumpet and flugelhorn and gets his own sound, at once warm and brilliant, from both. Robert's main born is the alto sax, from which he gets a strong, personal sound, but he also has mastered the soprano and the clarinet (the latter his first horn after starting music on the piano, and heard here with the quintet for the first time on record). These two have marvelous rapport; truly together in ensemble unison, harmony or interplay, and feeding off each other in solo excursions.

The rhythm section is always finely attuned to its supporting tasks, which are far from routine this group deals with subtle rhythmic as well as harmonic demands-but it seems inaccurate to describe this dynamic triumvirate as a mere "rhythm section". The greatly gifted Moroni is not only a wonderfully sensitive and alert accompanist, but adds solo strength (his modal ballad Adrienne reveals talent as a composer as well). Reggie Johnson's impeccable intonation and rhythmic strength would be enough, but he also steps out as a soloist, and when he does, it's not in the obligatory manner of giving the bassist some, but with lucidly musical (and never over-long) statements. Master percussionist Bill Goodwin is always there, adding colors and textures to the quintet's overall sonic meld and providing the kind of absolute rhythmic security that allows everyone to relax and play without fear of falling off the wire.”
And just so the impression isn’t formed that the Robert-Harrell quintet was the only group that featured Dado as a sideman during these relatively “early years” in his career, in 1994, he teamed up with Ray Brown on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums to form a rhythm section for the young English trombonist Mark Nightingale on his recording entitled What I Wanted to Say [Mons 874 763].

And with the album’s title in mind, here’s what Johnny Dankworth wanted to say about Dado as contained in the CD’s insert notes:

“Dado Moroni contributes both brilliant support playing and solo moments; he has an incredibly facile technique which he utilizes with admirable restraint.” [paraphrase]

Dado’s solo on Alone Together will swing you into next week and he provides the album with so much forceful energy and excitement with his excellent comping, throughout.

As we approach the second [2] category of Dado’s recordings – his trio work – it is interesting to observe that while he made his recording debut in 1979, he did not make his first trio Jazz recording until 1992. The occasion was the release of What’s New? on Splasc(h) records [CDH 378.2], and Italian based label. Interestingly, as of this writing, the recording was still available through Amazon.
Carl Baugher finished his insert notes to the CD with the following, telling conclusions:

“Dado Moroni is clearly a musician with a wealth of talent. His improvising prowess is convincingly displayed on What’s New? and there is no reason not to expect further development from this still youthful artist. Stylistically, he offers a blend of new and old that’s irresistible. His polished technique, taste and solid musicality serve him well. The disc you hold in your hand provides an irrefutable answer to the question, ‘What’s New?’ The answer is an emphatic: Dado Moroni!”
And Thom Jurek offered the following review in http://www.allaboutjazz.com/:

“As a pianist and composer, Dado Moroni is an elegant stylist whose post-Ahmad Jamal voicings and Gil Evans-styled arrangements — even for small ensembles — are singular in their subtle, suave grace and their quiet musical expertise. This trio date with a young rhythm section (Rosario Bonaccorso on bass and Gianni Cazzola on drums) is an amalgam of the familiar and ambitious for Moroni. His own compositions, which make up half the album, tend toward the inherently melodic side of his nature: There's the charming ostinato aplomb in "The Duck and the Duchess" and the multi-faceted chromatic gracefulness of "African Suite," which loops three different strains of rhythms around a complex harmonic structure that examines all the tones between B and D. And then there's the adventurous improviser who tackles the outrageously difficult melodic line in Ornette Coleman's "When Will the Blues Leave," which extrapolates a 12-bar blues and pours it into a fugue-like structure of flatted ninths. To temper the two poles, there are readings of Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark"— done as an exercise in intervallic interplay and mode-shifting melodic exchange — and a solid post-bop reading of Robin & Rainger’s "Easy Living." This is piano trio jazz at its lyrical, exciting best.”
In 1995 with Heart of the Swing [Music Corner MPJ 1000 CD], Dado initiated what was to become a series of trio recordings with Massimo Moriconi on bass and Stefano Bagnoli on drums. On their respective instruments, Moriconi and Bagnoli are two of the most technically gifted musicians in Italy, and in combination with Dado, these three ultimately formed what has become known as the Super Star Triok, an album that was released in 2003 on [abeat AB JZ 015].

Heart of the Swing is swing personified as it abounds with delightful arrangements of standards such as Just in Time, There is No Greater Love and Charlie Parker originals such as Anthropology and Barbados which provide the listener with ample opportunity to hear Dado’s finger-popping inventions, Moriconi’s huge, booming bass sound and Bagnoli crisp and lighting fast technique. Moroni-Moriconi-Bagnoli play a repertoire that is exciting and engaging while producing an album of swinging piano trio Jazz.

There’s more of the same by this exquisitely matched, powerhouse trio on Super Star Triok with a burning up-tempo version of What is This Thing Called Love, as well as, interesting treatments of standards including You’ve Changed and Love for Sale along with well-crafted versions of Jazz classics such as So What, Oleo and Ray Brown’s FSR [“For Sonny Rollins”]. There is even the tasteful introduction of Fender Rhodes electric piano and electric bass on a couple of tracks, a reflection of the interest in bringing different sounds into the music by the current generation of Jazz musicians.

Let’s begin the third category of this piece with its focus on Dado’s more recent recordings as both leader and sideman, most of these occurring in his native Italy, by focusing on Ken Dryden’s review of three of them in http://www.allaboutjazz.com/ :

“Pianist Dado Moroni is essentially a self-taught player who learned by listening to a variety of artists and styles. His discography as a leader is still fairly small, though he has recorded extensively as a sideman on European CDs in addition to appearances with Americans like trumpeters Tom Harrelll and Clark Terry and alto saxophonists Lee Konitz and Jesse Davis. Below are three examples of his work, including a live duo piano concert and two sessions as a sideman with up-and-coming European players.
Saxophonist Rosario Giuliani is a fast-rising star in European jazz. For his fourth Dreyfus CD Anything Else [Dreyfus Jazz FDM 46050 366982], he composed 9 of the 12 songs and is accompanied by Moroni, trumpeter/flugelhornist Flavio Boltro, bassist Remi Vignolo and drummer Benjamin Henocq. "Blow Out" is a percolating uptempo blues line showcasing the leader's fiery alto and Moroni's intense McCoy Tyner-like solo, followed by the relaxing samba "Danae.""Backfire" is reminiscent of the Phil Woods Quintet with Tom Harrelll because of its energy, though this propulsive bop vehicle has a soulful edge in spots. Giuliani's constantly shifting solo is driven by Moroni and the rhythm section's high-octane accompaniment. The ballad "A Winter Day" opens with Moroni's dreamy piano solo, then Giuliani and Boltro (on flugelhorn) trade choruses in this engaging, nostalgic theme. Giuliani switches to soprano sax for his lively AfroCuban-flavored "Conversation" and the sentimental ballad "My Angel." The two horn players breeze through Ornette's challenging "Invisible," though Moroni's fiendish "Three Angels" is almost as demanding. The pianist also contributed the lyrical "Hagi Mystery," another piece with a Caribbean flavor, featuring Boltro's rich flugelhorn and Giuliani's impassioned alto sax.
Moroni and Enrico Pieranunzi are two of Italy's top keyboardists, so a duo concert like Live Conversations [abeat AB JZ 039] makes sense. Both men have tremendous technique, yet also have big ears, able to complement each other's improvised lines while avoiding the train wrecks that often occur when there's a personality mismatch. Their interpretation of Miles'"Solar" is unusual, incorporating a bit of stride and a long closing vamp to spice up this bop favorite. There's a brief bit of confusion as Sonny Rollins'"St. Thomas" is introduced with a bit of the standard "Someday My Prince Will Come" and their wild romp through this calypso favorite has a decidedly humorous air. The aforementioned Disney tune is up next, transformed from a quiet waltz into a turbulent blend of dissonant harmonies and Stravinsky-like chords topped by a surprise ending.
A dazzling duo improvisation gradually leads into a stunning, somewhat ominous setting of "All the Things You Are," which segues into a more conventional version of "What is This Thing Called Love." The final track is a bit misleading: "Autumn Leaves" (the only tune listed), gradually unfolds from a dark improvisation into a bright performance with hints of Bill Evans. But this selection is actually a medley that detours into a dramatic workout of "Caravan" (yet also adding a brief, light-hearted lick from "Sweet Georgia Brown"), returning to the first theme and then engaging in an extended fast blues before gliding to a finish with a sly chorus of "Blue Monk."

Magone [Dreyfus Jazz FDM 46050 369112] marks the debut recording as a leader for Belgian trumpeter/flugelhornist Bert Joris, a veteran member of the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. His potent rhythm section includes Moroni (who provides intuitive support for the leader in addition to his top drawer solos), bassist Philippe Aerts and drummer Dre Pallemaerts. Joris primarily focuses on his originals, delving into many moods. The brooding title track (an abbreviation of "Mother is Gone") is an emotional work; the trumpeter's solo is backed by dark, sparse piano and a rock-steady rhythm like someone pacing the floor, though Moroni's free- flowing bluesy solo steals the spotlight. Joris adds his mute for "Triple," a snappy, playful vehicle dedicated to his cat. The soft, lush ballad "Anna" (named for a young girl Joris once met) showcases his rich-toned flugelhorn. The perky bop line "King Kombo" evolved from two separate commissioned works. Moroni is heard on electric piano on two numbers, including his mellow "The Mighty Bobcat" and Joris' perky "Mr. Dodo." Joris is back on flugelhorn for the gut-wrenching interpretation of "I Fall in Love Too Easily." The last selection, "Benoit," comes from a 2005 concert, a Latin number showcasing the leader's muted trumpet.”
Dado has also been a long standing member of drummer Roberto Gatto’s quintet as is reflected by his appearance on two albums: Deep [CamJazz7760-2] and Roberto Gatto jazzitaliano 2006 [Palaexpo 03].

In addition to more of Dado’s sparkling improvisations, these albums under Gatto’s leadership find him in the company of some of Italy’s best musicians both old and new for as Ira Gitler, the notable and senior Jazz critic has commented: “Italian jazz musicians are the best in Europe and are world-class players.”
On Deep, the younger generation is represented by the brilliant soprano and baritone sax of Javier Girotto, who just made a solo performance with the famed Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam while the seasoned veterans are well represented by Gianluca Petrella on trombone and the rhythm section of Dado, Rosario Bonaccorso on bass and the irrepressible Gatto on drums, all of whom are engaged in nine original compositions penned by Roberto.

And listening to Roberto Gatto Quintet’s Jazzitaliano live 2006: Tribute to Miles Davis ’64-’68 [Paraexpo 03] with Flavio Boltro [trumpet], Daniele Scannapieco [tenor sax and the “newcomer” on this CD], Dado Moroni [piano], Rosario Bonaccorso [bass] and Roberto Gatto play a repertoire of tunes from the pre-electric Miles period of the 1960’s will leave little doubt in your mind about the quality of Jazz on exhibit in Italy, nor about the validity of Mr. Gitler’s view of it.

As I wrote in an earlier review of this album:

“The tunes on this recording are from Miles’ Seven Steps to Heaven Columbia album and from the period referred to by Jack Chambers in his wonderful book, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis as the “Circle, 1964-8.” Included in this period are such recordings as E.S.P, Miles Davis Quintet in Berlin, and Miles Davis Quintet at the Plugged Nickel multiple disc set.

The track selections on the Gatto quintet’s tribute CD are: [1] Joshua [2] There is No Greater Love [3] Footprints [4] Stella by Starlight [5] All Blues [6] Basin Street Blues [7] All of You and [8] Seven Steps to Heaven.

It’s obvious that these Italian Jazz musicians have been influenced by the Miles-Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams group from the Circle period. Boltro acknowledges Miles’ phrasing, Scannapieco Shorter’s tone, Moroni is indebted to Feldman’s percussive approach to the piano, Bonaccorso’s big sound comes from Carter-by-way-of-Chambers, and Gatto’s approach to keeping time on drums is done in the interrupted and inflected style as first played by Tony Williams [by way of Elvin Jones].

Daniele Scannpieco is another surprising treat on this recording. His tone may be reminiscent of Shorter, but his phrasing is like no other tenor player that I’ve ever heard before. He takes so many chances and while he escapes from some of his improvisational adventures, he also crashes by placing himself in situations from which there is no extraction other than by taking a deep breath and going on to build the next sequence. What fun!

But these Italian Jazz musicians all put their own “footprint” on this music [apologies to Wayne] by making their own contributions to this portion of the Miles canon.”
Reluctantly it is time to end this review of Dado Moroni, one of the premier Jazz pianists in the world, and his recordings both old and new, heading his own trio or as a sideman, but not before we pay a visit to a duo masterpiece that he recorded in Milan on April 6, 2007 with his long-time friend, trumpet and flugelhorn player, Tom Harrell.

The album is entitled Humanity [#2 abeat Signature Series AB JZ 051].

Comprised entirely of six, exquisitely interpreted standards – The Nearness of You, Lover, I Hear a Rhapsody, Darn That Dream, Poinciana – and the title track original by Dado, Humanity is a "formidable disc which gives the listener an hour of music that is rich in intensity, lyricism and pathos.” [paraphrase of Maurizio Zerbo’s review of the disc in http://www.italia.allaboutjazz.com/].

The pure music that Dado and Tom create on this recording is beautiful articulated in the following statement by pianist Enrico Pieranunzi who requested “the privilege” of being able to write the insert notes for this recording:

“I like the title of this CD very much.

It is a declaration, a good omen, a hope.

And it is wonderful that the title refers to a Jazz CD There is really no music that is more ‘human’ than jazz, of this expression of the body and imagination that speaks to life as it is happening by improvising with sounds.

Tom Harrell and Dodo Moroni tell their stories simply, authentically.

They sing their innermost being using so-called ‘mainstream’ language … but in the end this is not important.

What counts is the profound rapport there is between the two musicians, a silent and deeply felt understanding that spans the entire CD.

What counts are the thrills provided by tunes such as ‘Humanity’ or ‘The Nearness of You,’ as well as the other tracks, revealing a touching chance of beauty.

It is in cases like this that jazz reaches the point of being the most human of all expressions of art.”
If you have been a stranger to the music of Dado Moroni, I hope this review about him will convince you to remedy that unfamiliarity with a visit to his music. I promise you that you will come away from the experience justly rewarded.

↧

Gene Krupa: 1909-1973 - A Tribute with Testimonials [From the Archives]

February 18, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Sonny and Jim [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Jazz in Italy: Dado Moroni [From the Archives]

“Gene Krupa -Premier Virtuose et première “Star” de la Batterie.”

- Georges Paczynski

"Gene Krupa was so full of life. And he sure loved to swing."

— Roy Eldridge

"Gene was the epitome of what you expect in a drummer. The guy was beautiful-looking. . . . And when he played solos in his own particular, easily identifiable style, people would come out of the woodwork. He had something. I guess you call it charisma….

As far as I'm concerned, Gene had more talent than anyone including Buddy Rich. He was fantastic but frustrated. He had so much to say but couldn't get it out. I don't think he used his muscles properly. I didn't like the way he moved. Too much unnecessary motion.

Let me explain something. You have guys like Buddy, Louie

Bellson. These guys are like good wine. The older they become, the better they play. If a drummer moves correctly, he keeps improving. If your machine works right, you keep playing well. Simple as that.

Make no mistake, Gene was no slouch. But his talent required more than he had. Sure, his solos were phenomenal; his taste and the things he did were great. But he was capable of more. He just didn't have the chops to do them.”

— Henry Adler

“The nights and years of playing in cellars and saloons and ballrooms, of practicing separately and together, of listening to Louis and Joe Oliver and Jimmy Noone and Leon Rappolo, of losing sleep and breathing bad air and drinking licorice gin, paid off. We were together and apart at the same time, tying up a package with six different strings. Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.”

- Eddie Condon

Everything that Gene played he meant. He was committed to what he played. The acting, the motion, were a part of him. Even when he played the simplest thing, it was dramatic and had a particular sound. The man was a theatrical player. Emotion and theatricality were linked in his case. Without showmanship, it didn't have the same intensity. Even with your eyes closed you could tell if he was performing with feeling or if the whole thing was done deadpan.

- Jim Chapin

"He had a sense of the dramatic that was absolutely unprecedented

in jazz. … He was a showman"

— John Hammond

"Krupa the drummer is difficult to isolate from Krupa the showman."

— Whitney Balliett

“But it went beyond showmanship and even chemistry. Simply, Krupa was the right man for the job. He had developed a style that was consonant with the Goodman style. Both were focused on pulsation, swing. Having smoothed out the pulse to a fluid four, tapped out vigorously on the bass drum, he used that as a basis and addressed the arrangements—by Deane Kincaide, Jimmy Mundy, Fletcher Henderson, etc.—in a manner that strikingly merged drum rudiments and jazz syncopation, and academic and more informal techniques. He made a strong case for swinging and intensive, continuing study.

Krupa struck a balance between instinct, the roots of jazz, and a scientific approach to drumming. The language came directly from Chick Webb. But Krupa formalized, simplified, and clarified it. Krupa thrust the drum set into the foreground, making it not only a source of rhythm but of musicality and color as well. Before Krupa, only the great black drummers had so powerfully mingled these key elements.

And yes, Krupa knew how to sell. He looked terrific as he moved around the set, twirling sticks and acting out his solos with bodily and facial expressions. He built his playing on a musical foundation, but made sure that he and the music made an impression. He became an undeniable glamour figure in a sweat-drenched formal suit, the handsome "deb's delight"—as Life once tabbed him—who often transcended his leader in popularity. To a nation coming out of a Depression, Gene Krupa was new and exciting. To the musical community, he was a flamboyant figure, perhaps not as subtle as he might have been, but a musician, indeed….”

“Krupa’s Influence even extended to equipment. He established a basic drum and cymbal set-up that many drummers adopted:

snare drum, bass drum, tom-tom mounted on the left side of the bass drum, and a larger tom-tom on the floor, at the drummer's right; ten-to twelve-inch high hats, thirteen-inch crash cymbal on the left on a stand, an eight-inch splash and fourteen-inch time/crash cymbal (both mounted on the bass drum), and a sixteen-inch crash on a stand, at the drummer's right. Krupa had a lot to do with the development and popularization of tom-toms tuneable on both sides. He also was responsible for the introduction of pearl finishes on drums (most sets had been painted black or white duco).

Still another innovation was a heraldic shield on the front of the bass drum (on the left) with his initials inside; the band leader's initials were used on the right side of the bass drum in bold, large lettering. The trend to initials and lettering rapidly displaced funny painted scenes on the front of bass drums….”

- Burt Korall

“Gene ... so conscientious and so concerned. He got mad at me if the band didn't play well. Whatever we played, and I didn't care what it was he did, sounded pretty good to me, then (and still sounds good) now. I still listen to those records, and if you can find fault with them you're a better man than I am. Not me, I love them. Gene had excitement. If he gained a little speed, so what? Better than sitting on your ass just getting by.”

- Benny Goodman

Krupa's snare drum sound was central to the character of his work. Crisp, clean, with a suggestion of echo, it enhanced the excitement of his performances. While playing "time" or patterns across the set, Krupa also established engaging relationships between the bass drum and the other drums, and between the cymbals and the drums. He used rudiments in a natural, swinging, often original way.”

- Burt Korall

Krupa's was a very special sound and it didn't occur by chance. He would strike the drum head and rim in such a way that the stick carried the impact from the rim down to the tip of the stick and transmitted it to the head, which then acted like an amplifier. Then—and this is the key—he would get the stick away from the head immediately so that it didn't kill the vibrations. Leave the stick on the drum an instant too long, he used to say, and you lose that echo that lingers after that shot and gives it its musical quality.

- John McDonough

“Krupa viewed drums differently than his younger colleagues. Drummers of the bop generation were endeavoring to free the instrument, make it more contributory, the equal of the melody instruments in the small and big band. They focused on the beat and color values; they played more, filling openings during a performance with "bombs" or comments. Krupa didn't feel natural doing these things.

Nor did he favor moving the center of pulsation from the snare drum, bass drum, and high-hat to the ride cymbals, using the bass drum in a sparing manner. Krupa didn't quite know when and how to play accents or bombs on the bass drum. He had difficulty bringing a sense of the melodic to his playing, which was just one of the things modernists such as Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Stan Levey, Art Blakey, and Shelly Manne, among others, were doing. For Krupa, drums were strictly a rhythm instrument, and making changes in the character of drums was not easy for him. In short, he and his performances revealed an ambivalence concerning the modern style.

A swing drummer essentially wedded to the snare drum, Krupa was most comfortable in a swing groove, playing as many a swing drummer would, using the snare and bass drums and the high-hat as his basic tools….

Krupa did try to move ahead. Records he cut over the next few years, extending into the 1950s, make a case for his awareness and use of contemporary ideas. They also strongly suggest that he could not get away from his roots as a musician and completely alter his drumming style to fit in with the younger players; too much of his musical development and musical life occurred before bop.”

-Burt Korall

“ I watched him change in 1945 and '46 when he was trying to play bebop. At first he didn't seem to really know what to do. But he soon caught on. His bass drumming became lighter—not a hell of a lot, but a little. He started playing time on ride cymbals and dropping bombs, usually on the beat. But on the right beats. On "4" and "3"; not on "1" so much. He'd listen. That was the important thing.

He reached a midpoint between swing and bebop and made what he did work. When you think about how good he sounded playing light press rolls over 4/4 rhythm behind a bebopper like Charlie Kennedy, you realize that, my God, he brought two worlds together at a point where it wasn't obnoxious. It didn't sound dumb; it still was okay. And the guys in the band loved him for it; they forgave him for some of the old-time tricks he was laying on them and accepted him.

Gene met the young guys more than half way. He had the band's book written modern. He went out to listen to young drummers. Gene was not one of those guys who said only what he did was right. Sure he believed in himself, but the man wasn't an egomaniac.

Musically, Gene was open. He always was trying to learn. As far as I'm concerned, that's wonderful. He didn't sit around talking about the old days all the time. He wanted to go out and play and see what was happening, now.”

- Mel Lewis

“He had a unique feel, a groove, a hell of a groove when he played.”

- Steve Gadd

“Things wouldn’t be the way they are if he hadn’t been around.”

– Buddy Rich

Buddy Rich’s comment says so much about Gene Krupa’s contributions to the development of Jazz, in particular, what Burt Korall refers to as “the heartbeat of Jazz.”

For many years, I thought that Gene Krupa was what Jazz drumming was all about. Period. He was the be-all, end-all; the best; my hero.

I’m sure I’m not alone in holding this impression and making this assessment.

For a lot of us who grew up banging the kitchen pots and pans to death, he was the quintessential Jazz drummer.

In writing a tribute feature about Gene Krupa it is difficult to know where to stop. The accolades and kudos come from everywhere and everyone. One gets the feeling that there isn’t a Jazz musician, let alone, a Jazz drummer, who doesn’t have some degree of appreciation for what Gene contributed to this music.

Some of these testimonials to Gene and his significance to Jazz form the introduction to this piece.

As drawn from a variety of sources including Burt’s Drummin’ Men: The Swing Years and Volume 1 of Georges Paczynski’s Une Histoire de la Batterie de Jazz: Des Origines dux Annes Swing, here is a basic overview of the highlights of Gene’s career as a way of remembering how it was for one of the earlier makers of the music while also recalling his many contributions to Jazz during the first half century or so of its existence.

Gene Krupa was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 15, 1909 and was the the youngest of Bartley and Ann Krupa's nine children. His father died when Gene was very young and his mother worked as a milliner to support the family. All of the children had to start working while young, Gene at age eleven. His brother Pete worked at "Brown Music Company", and got Gene a job as chore boy. Gene started out playing sax in grade school but took up drums at age 11 since they were the cheapest item in the music store where he and his brother worked. "I used to look in their wholesale catalog for a musical instrument - piano, trombone, cornet - I didn't care what it was as long as it was an instrument. The cheapest item was the drums, 16 beans, I think, for a set of Japanese drums; a great high, wide bass drum, with a brass cymbal on it, a wood block and a snare drum."

His parents were very religious and had groomed Gene for the priesthood. He spent his grammar school days at various parochial schools and upon graduation went to St. Joseph's College for a brief year. Gene's drive to drum was too strong and he gave up the idea of becoming a priest. In 1921, while still in grammar school, Gene joined his first band "The Frivolians." He obtained the drumming seat as a fluke when the regular drummer was sick. The band played during summers in Madison, Wisconsin. Upon entering high school in 1923, Gene became buddies with the "Austin High Gang", which included many musicians which would be on Gene's first recording session; Jimmy McPartland, Jimmy Lannigan, Bud Freeman and Frank Teschemacher.

In 1925, Gene began his percussion studies with Roy Knapp, Al Silverman & Ed Straight. Under advice from others, he decided to join the musicians union. "The guy said, 'Make a roll. That's it. Give us 50 bucks. You're In.'" Krupa started his first "legit" playing with Joe Kayser, Thelma Terry and the Benson Orchestra among other commercial bands. A popular hangout for musicians was "The Three Deuces." All of the guys playing in mickey mouse bands would gravitate here after hours and jam till early in the morning. Gene was able to hone and develop his style playing with other jazz players such as Mezz Mezzrow, Tommy Dorsey, Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman in these local dives. Krupa's big influences during this time were Tubby Hall and Zutty Singleton. The drummer who probably had the greatest influence on Gene in this period was the great Baby Dodds. Dodds' use of press rolls was highly reflected in Gene's playing, especially during his tenure with Gene has often been considered to be the first drum "soloist." Drummers usually had been strictly time-keepers or noisemakers, but

Krupa interacted with the other musicians and introduced the extended drum solo into jazz. His goal was to support the other musicians while creating his own role within the group. Gene is also considered the father of the modern drumset since he convinced H.H. Slingerland, of Slingerland Drums, to make tuneable tom-toms. Tom-toms up to that point had "tacked" heads, which left little ability to change the sound. The new drum design was introduced in 1936 and was termed "Seperate Tension Tunable Tom-Toms." Gene was a loyal endorser of Slingerland Drums from 1936 until his death. Krupa was called on by Avedis Zildjian to help with developing the modern hi-hat cymbals. The original hi-hat was called a "low-boy" which was a floor level cymbal setup which was played with the foot. This arrangement made it nearly impossible for stick playing.

Gene's first recording session was a historical one. It occurred in December of 1927 when he is noted to be the first drummer to record with a bass drum. Krupa, along with rest of the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans were scheduled to record at OKeh Records in Chicago. OKeh's Tommy Rockwell was apprehensive to record Gene's drums but gave in. Rockwell said "All right, but I'm afraid the bass drum and those tom-toms will knock the needle off the wax and into the street."

Gene moved to New York in 1929 and was recruited by Red Nichols. He, along with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, performed in the pit band of the new George Gershwin play "Strike Up the Band." Gene had never learned to read music and "faked" his parts during rehearsals. Glenn Miller assisted him by humming the drum parts until Gene got them down. After "Strike Up the Band" completed in January 1930, Hoagy Carmichael gathered several great musicians together for many historical sessions. Gene played on some legendary "jazz" recordings with Bix Beiderbecke, Adrian Rollini and Joe Venuti. Krupa played in one more pit band with Red Nichols for Gershwin's "Girl Crazy." He then joined Russ Columbo's band in which indirectly led to his joining Benny Goodman's group.

Benny Goodman urged Gene to join his band with the promise that it would be a real jazz band. After joining, Benny soon became discouraged with the idea of having a successful jazz group. The band was relegated to playing dance music and Benny was considering packing it in. Upon the band's engagement at the Palomar, Benny decided to go for broke and play their own arrangements. The audience went wild and the band took off. The Goodman group featured Gene prominently in the full orchestra and with the groundbreaking Goodman Trio and Quartet. The Trio is possibly the first working small group which featured black and white musicians.

On January 16, 1938, the band was the first "jazz" act to play New York's Carnegie Hall. Gene's classic performance on "Sing Sing Sing" has been heralded as the first extended drum solo in jazz. After the Carnegie Hall performance, tension began to surface between Gene and Benny. Audiences were demanding that Gene be featured in every number and Benny didn't want to lose the spotlight to a sideman.

Gene departed on March 3, 1938 and less than 2 months later formed his own orchestra. His band was an instant success upon its opening at the Marine Ballroom on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City during April of 1938. His band went through several incarnations during it's existence and at one point even featured a string section with 30 to 40 members. During this time Krupa authored his own book titled "The Gene Krupa Drum Method"(1938) and began an annual Drum Contest (1941). The contest attracted thousands of contestants each year and saw drum legend Louie Bellson as the first year's winner. Gene appeared in several motion pictures including "Some Like it Hot"& "Beat the Band", becoming a sort of matinee idol. His noted likeness to Tyrone Power and musical fame was a magical combination in the eyes of Hollywood.

In the summer of 1943, Krupa was arrested in San Francisco in a bogus drug bust. He was charged with possession of marijuana and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Gene was sentenced to 90 days, of which 84 were served. He was later cleared of the latter charges. During this time, Roy Eldridge led Gene's band and eventually had to break up the group. After Gene got out of jail, he briefly joined up with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey before re-forming his own band. Krupa's groups of the early 1940's were often criticized as being too commercial but Gene's big band was one of the first in the mid-forties to introduce Bop arrangements with the help of Gerry Mulligan and the playing of trumpeter Red Rodney. Gene managed to keep the full band together until December of 1950, when most big bands had already fallen apart. He kept a smaller version of the big band together through 1951.

After breaking up his big band, Gene wasn't sure which direction to take. He had led small groups within his big band during the 40's, this was a logical choice with the growing popularity of be-bop. The Gene Krupa Trio was one of the first acts recruited by Norman Granz for his "Jazz At The Philharmonic" concerts(due to contractual reasons, Gene was first billed as "The Chicago Flash."). The JATP dates introduced the famous "Drum Battles" with Buddy Rich in October of 1952 and the subsequent studio recordings on the Lp "Krupa and Rich" in 1955. Some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time were the result of the "All-Star" jams at JATP.

The alumni of these dates included Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Shavers, Ray Brown, Lionel Hampton, Buddy Rich and of course, Gene. Along with Cozy Cole, Gene formed the Krupa-Cole Drum School in March of 1954. He also began studying tympani with the New York Philharmonic's Saul Goodman(1951). In 1959, actor Sal Mineo portrayed Gene in the motion picture "The Gene Krupa Story." The film was very loose in the facts of Gene's career but did feature an excellent soundtrack recorded by Krupa himself. Gene's huge resurgence in popularity eventually led to his departing the teaching role he had at the Drum School.

By the late fifties Krupa was prompted to slow down due to increasing back problems. He had a heart attack in 1960 which forced him into a retirement for many months. After recuperating, the ever-changing Quartet continued to perform, record and regularly appeared at New York's Metropole. The Goodman Quartet reunited and played several live dates. Gene led a hectic schedule with the Quartet through the early and mid-sixties, performing throughout the US and abroad. His health once again became a problem and his second marriage fell apart. He retired in 1967 proclaiming that "I feel too lousy to play and I know I must sound lousy."

During his hiatus, Krupa practiced and coached his baseball team. In 1969, Gene began a series of anti-drug lectures and clinics for Slingerland Drums. He officially came out of retirement in the spring of 1970, re-formed the Quartet and was featured at Hotel Plaza in New York. Gene's last commercial recording was in November of 1972, titled "Jazz At the New School" with Eddie Condon and Wild Bill Davison. Gene's final public performance was with a reunion of the old Goodman Quartet on August 18, 1973.

His soloing ability was greatly diminished but his overall playing had become more modern sounding than ever. Gene died October 16, 1973 of a heart attack. He had also been plagued by leukemia and emphysema. He was laid to rest at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City, Illinois.

Gene Krupa will forever be known as the man who made drums a solo instrument. He single-handedly made the Slingerland Drum Company a success and inspired millions to become drummers. He also demonstrated a level of showmanship which has not been equaled. Buddy Rich once said that Gene was the "beginning and the end of all jazz drummers." Louie Bellson said of Gene, "He was a wonderful, kind man and a great player. He brought drums to the foreground. He is still a household name."

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Sonny and Jim [From the Archives]

February 20, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "The Man I Love" - Composed by Gershwin Performed by Feldman

≪ Previous: Gene Krupa: 1909-1973 - A Tribute with Testimonials [From the Archives]

“When I went to the bridge, I wanted to learn how to arrange and improve my musicianship …. That kind of self-initiative was very important to me.”

- Sonny Rollins as told to David Yaffe in 1995 and quoted in Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz [p. 416]

“... no matter the context - hard bop or free jazz - and however much he adjusted his timbre, he never abandoned a few enduring principles: a style of improvisation that combines thematic development with melodic paraphrase; a large and ever-changing book of standard songs complemented by distinctive originals; and a dedication to stout rhythms verging on dance.

Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz [p. 418]

“Like Sarah Vaughan, … [Sonny] established a loyal concert following apart from the record-buying public.”

Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz [p. 419]

Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, [p. 312]

When I listen to the music of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, I sense a brooding melancholy but also a broad humor. He is a fearless improvisor. But for a player with so much assurance, he also exhibits so much doubt when away from the music; so much energy yet so much turmoil when involved with the music.

Throughout his distinguished career, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins has periodically taken time away from it.

When he first started doing this, the Jazz media would issue broadsides asking - “Where’s Sonny?”

Being the New York neighborhood cat that he was, it wouldn’t take long for a Sonny Sighting to occur usually involving some quixotic behavior on his part like practicing under the Williamsburg Bridge.

Back in the day, if you were not working the club scene and recording on a regular basis, especially if you were such a large talent like Sonny, people questioned your sanity.

These days with concert performances more the norm than club dates, when Sonny takes a few weeks or months off it’s not quite as big a deal.

However, as an example of Sonny’s tendencies to wander off the scene, prior to the 1962 issuing of one of my favorite Rollins recordings, “the saxophonist disappeared for two years, before returning to the studio with a new contract from RCA. The Bridge [LP 2527; CD 0902 668518-2]started him off. [Guitarist Jim] Hall is an unexpectedly fine partner throughout, moving between rhythm and front line duties with great aplomb and actually finding ways to communicate with the most lofty of soloists. It is an often compelling record as a result.” [Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. p. 1266]

“Unexpectedly” is a nice way to characterize the pairing of Sonny Rollins with guitarist Jim Hall, but the result is an excellent example of the ‘sound of surprise” a phrase created by the late, writer Whitney Balliett to describe one of the remarkable qualities of Jazz.

[I’ve yet to find an observation in the Jazz literature linking the title of Sonny’s album - The Bridge - with his two year hiatus from the music prior to its recording, some of which found him practicing under the Williamsburg Bridge [!]. Too obvious, perhaps?

Gary Giddins offers these views of The Bridge and the pairing of Sonny and Jim on The Bridge in these excerpts from his always insightful Visions of Jazz:

“He exhibited a more rugged, direct timbre when he returned, with a lucrative RCA contract and The Bridge. (In the '50s, he had recorded exclusively for small independent labels, including Prestige, Contemporary, Blue Note, MGM, and Riverside.) Rollins sloughed off comparisons to his earlier work and upset critical preconceptions by constantly tinkering with his sound, while sampling in his uniquely jocular (many said sardonic) way the avant-garde and the new Latin wave. Some people were offended by his humor, some by his implacable authority. Others presumed a rivalry between Rollins and Coltrane that must have been galling to both men. Of the six controversial albums that emerged from his association with RCA, The Bridge was initially the most widely admired, probably because it was the most conventional—the most like his '50s LPs. Although the album presents his quartet, with Jim Hall on guitar, Rollins's solos are usually backed by bass and drums, so there is a connection to the trio albums. Yet the jazz world had changed in his absence: the new music surfaced and Rollins was intrigued.” [p. 416]

And writing in his seminal The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia put The Bridge in the following context:

“Rollins … went into seclusion for over two years, practicing, refining his craft, reading, thinking. His return was eagerly anticipated by jazz fans—especially given the superheated atmosphere of the jazz world circa 1960. New sounds were in the air. At no time in the history of jazz music had the mandate to progress been felt so pervasively by the leading players. At times it seemed as if progressivism were the only aesthetic measure that really counted, for many critics and some fans, at this juncture in the music's evolution. Rollins felt these pressures yet he ultimately reacted with ambivalence. When he returned, Rollins may have been a changed man — during his sabbatical he had become a Rosicrucian, studied philosophy, exercised, practiced — but his music was strikingly unchanged, disappointing those who felt that Rollins, like Coltrane and Coleman, would create a totally different sound. His comeback album, The Bridge, was a solid effort, but found Rollins again playing jazz standards with a fairly traditional combo. The main change here was the addition of guitarist Jim Hall, a subtle accompanist and inspired soloist, but hardly the "new thing" in jazz.

Post-1960, Rollins's career tended to display tentative forays into the latest trend, followed inevitably by a return to more familiar ground….

Rollins's various retirements, reclusions, and reconsiderations could stand as symbolic of the whole era. Jazz was in a period of transition, of fragmentation into different schools, of reassessment. The music's modernist tradition, which Rollins epitomized, could no longer simply be taken for granted. Its assumptions—about harmony, melody, rhythm, song structure, instrumentation, and perhaps even more about the social role of jazz music — were constantly being questioned and increasingly found wanting by the more revolutionary musicians of the younger generation. Rollins's self-doubts were in many ways the same anxieties felt by his whole generation as it struggled to clear a path through this seeming pandemonium. Some looked for even more, for a transfiguring movement, the next new thing, that would draw these fragments back together into a new coherence. Others, less sanguine, felt that there would be no more towering figures, titans of the caliber of Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, or Parker, who could define a whole age, give impetus to an entire generation. Instead jazz, it seemed, was condemned to — or was it blessed by? — a pluralism, in which "next new things" would come and go with amazing alacrity.” [pp. 312-313]

You can checkout Sonny and Jim together with Bob Cranshaw on bass and Ben Riley on drums as they perform Without A Song on the following video.

Whatever its limitations or representations, the pairing of Sonny and Jim was - to these ears - sublime.

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"The Man I Love" - Composed by Gershwin Performed by Feldman

February 21, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Jerry Coker - "How To Listen To Jazz"

≪ Previous: Sonny and Jim [From the Archives]

As Victor Feldman recounted to John Tynan in a 1963 interview for Downbeat, “I was newly married and Cannonball had called me about a month before I went back to England in 1960 to introduce my wife to my family and friends. He called me to make a record with Ray Brown, Wes Montgomery, Louis Hayes and himself. [Cannonball Adderley and the Poll Winners Riverside S-9355; LandmarkLCD-1304-2].”

While we were in England, I got a cable from him with a definite offer as a pianist-vibist with his group.”

In my 1999 interview with Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records when we were both residing in San Francisco, I asked him about how Victor Feldman came to be on Cannonball’s “Poll Winners” in May, 1960.

According to Orrin, he and Cannonball had decided to use guitarist Wes Montgomery and bassist Ray Brown on the album and this led them to think further about “unusual instrumentation.” Although there was some talk about Les McCann, the feeling was that he was primarily blues player, but more importantly, Cannonball just didn’t want to use a piano player.The rest of the conversation went as described by Orrin in the album’s liner notes:

“With all the established musicians (including the regular Adderley drummer, Louis Hayes) living fully up to expectations, the surprise element was provided by the then-unknown Victor Feldman.

In view of the unconventional feeling of guitar and bass, Cannon had wanted something less routine than just a piano player. West Coast friends recommended a highly skilled young L.A. studio vibraphonist, recently arrived from England; figuring that we only need him for coloration, we took a chance and invited him up [to San Francisco where the album was being recorded by Wally Heider at Fugazi Hall near North Beach].

At rehearsal, Victor sat down at the piano to demonstrate a couple of his compositions. I can still clearly visualize all of us standing there, open-mouthed and thunderstruck, as we listened to a totally unexpected swinging and funky playing of this very white young Britisher.

Finally one of us, struck by an apparent facial resemblance, expressed our mutual amazement. “How can the same man,” I asked, “look like Leonard Feather and sound like Wynton Kelly?”

“The Man I Love” by George and Ira Gershwin tune has always been among my favorite Great American Songbook standards, especially the version by Victor Feldman which accompanies the video tribute to the Gershwins that concludes this feature.

It would appear that the tune is also a favorite of many Jazz musicians as there are over 80 versions of it in my LP, tape and CD collection.

While with Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet and living in New York, Victor had the opportunity to record his own album on Riverside, Merry Olde Soul [Riverside RLP-9366; OJCCD-402-2] which was recorded in December, 1960 and January, 1961.

As Orrin Keepnews, the co-owner and producer for Riverside Records recalled: “There was no question of using Sam Jones and Louis Hayes on it as by now they had formed quite a rhythm section in Cannonball’s quintet; I think I was the one who suggested Hank Jones on piano for one session to free up Vic to play vibes on three tracks.”

Ira Gitler was selected to provide the liner notes to Merry Olde Soul and he had this to say about some aspects of the recording:

“There are not many albums where all the tracks deserve some comment. Here, each one has something to offer and bears mention. Various influences on Feldman’s style are in evidence, yet because of his own strong personality, he does not emerge as a mere eclectic. There is a great difference between intelligent absorption and imitation.”

Although all of the nine tracks are the album show off various aspects of Victor’s developing style and technique, here are Ira’s comments about four of the tunes. I would only add that Victor’s vibes solo on The Man I Love is one for the ages – an absolute marvel of building tension and release brought about by a musician with an incredible sense of syncopated rhythm, a well-developed feeling for melody and an ever deepening knowledge of harmony.

“Victor opens on piano with ‘For Dancers Only,” a happy, swinging interpretation of the Sy Oliver tune immortalized by the old Jimmie Lunceford band. His chording seems to show a Red Garland influence. Sam Jones has a strong solo and the integration of the trio is perfect: they literally dance. ‘Lisa’ is a collaboration between Feldman and Torrie Zito; its minor changes cast a reflective but Victor’s touch here on vibes still swings. …

‘Bloke’s Blues’ is a rolling line that I find somewhat reminiscent of Hampton Hawes. There is an easy natural swing and much rhythmic variety in Feldman’s single line. His feeling is never forced.”

“In this album, his first for ‘Riverside’ as a leader, the spotlight is really on Victor. His piano and vibes are both given wide exposure, and there is a substantial taste of his talents as a composer (of blues and ballads in particular). He proves more than equal to the task of filling a large amount of space with music that consistently sustains interest.”

On ‘The Man I Love’ (the only no-piano vibes number), Feldman starts out with a light touch similar to his work on ‘Lisa.’ Then he intensifies into a more percussive attack that wails along Jacksonian lines, in a spirit that may put you in mind of Milt’s solo on Miles Davis’ famous version of the tune, but without copying Jackson. He builds and builds into highly-charged exchanges with Hayes before sliding into a lyrical tag.

As to the song itself, here’s some background about its evolution and information about notable recorded versions by Ted Gioia from his The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012].

“This song had a long, troubled history before becoming a hit. "The Man I Love" initially appeared in the 1924 musical Lady Be Good, where it served as a feature for Adele Astaire — but only lasted a week before getting yanked from the show. The tune was recycled in 1927 for Strike Up the Band, but that production never made it to New York, and when the musical was retooled and revived in 1930 the song was no longer part of it. "The Man I Love" was next assigned to the 1928 Flo Ziegfeld show Rosalie but was cut before opening night (and, if Ira Gershwin can be believed, wasn't even heard in rehearsals before getting axed). At this point, the Gershwins' publisher Max Dreyfus, in a desperate gesture, convinced the composers to take a one-third reduction in their royalty rate as an incentive for bandleaders to release "The Man I Love" on record.

This last-gasp strategy worked, and four different recordings of "The Man I Love"— by Marion Harris, Sophie Tucker, Fred Rich, and Paul Whiteman — were top 20 hits in 1928. The latter version features a dramatic arrangement by Ferde Grofe and includes a sax interlude by Frankie Trumbauer, best known for his collaborations with Bix Beiderbecke but here delivering one of his better solos from his stint with the Whiteman orchestra. The composition also became closely associated with torch singer Helen Morgan, and Gershwin himself gave her much of the credit for its eventual popularity; but, strange to say, she made no commercial recording of this signature song.

Benny Goodman brought the piece back into the limelight almost a decade later, enjoying a hit with his 1937 quartet recording of "The Man I Love." Goodman continued to feature the work in a variety of settings — with a combo at Carnegie Hall in 1938, in an Eddie Sauter big band arrangement from 1940, with his bop-oriented band from the late 1940’s, with symphony orchestra in the 1950’s, with various pick-up bands in later decades — for the rest of his career. But equally influential in jazz circles was Coleman Hawkins's 1943 recording, which finds the tenorist constructing a harmonically expansive solo that ranks among the finest sax improvisations of the era. Over the next 18 months, more than two dozen cover versions of "The Man I Love" were recorded — more than in the entire decade leading up to Hawk's session.

This song's popularity has never waned in later years. The hand-me-down that couldn't find a home in a Broadway show eventually became one of Gershwin's most beloved and recorded compositions. British composer and musicologist Wilfrid Mellers would extol "The Man I Love" as the "most moving pop song of our time." Others have been equally lavish in their praise. "This is the music of America," proclaimed Gershwin's friend and patron Otto Kahn. "It will live as long as a Schubert lieder."

In truth, the melodic material employed here is quite simple — many of the phrases merely move up and down a half or full step before concluding up a minor third. Gershwin employs this device no fewer than 15 times during the course of a 32-bar song. Yet the repetition of this motif contrasts most markedly with the constant movement in the song's harmonies. The contrast gives added emphasis to Gershwin's repeated use of the flat seven in the vocal line, an intrinsically bluesy choice that transforms what might otherwise sound like a folkish 19th-century melody into a consummate Jazz Age lament.”

RECOMMENDED VERSIONS

Paul Whiteman (with Frank Trumbauer), New York, May 16,1928

Benny Goodman (with Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa), live at Carnegie Hall, New York, January 16,1938

Billie Holiday (with Lester Young), New York, December 13,1939

Coleman Hawkins, New York, December 23,1943

Lester Young (with Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich), Los Angeles, March-April 1946

Art Tatum, live at the Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, April 2,1949

Miles Davis (with Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson), from Miles Davis and the

Modern Jazz Giants, Hackensack, New Jersey, December 24,1954

Art Pepper (with Red Garland), from Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Los Angeles, January 19,1957

Mary Lou Williams, from Live at the Cookery, live at the Cookery, New York, November 1975

Fred Hersch, from Heartsongs, New York, December 4-5,1989

Herbie Hancock (with Joni Mitchell and Wayne Shorter), from Gershwin's World, New York (March-April 1998) and Los Angeles (June 1998)

↧

Jerry Coker - "How To Listen To Jazz"

February 22, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "Criticism" - by Martin Williams

≪ Previous: "The Man I Love" - Composed by Gershwin Performed by Feldman

“Since 1900, when jazz - a uniquely American music form - began to evolve, much of its allure and artistic growth has depended on the creative freedom and expressive force that improvisation allows its performers.

Jerry Coker himself a teacher composer/arranger and noted saxophonist, has written How To Listen To Jazz to fill the need for a layman's guide to understanding improvisation and its importance in the development of this artistically rich yet complex music form Without relying on overly technical language or terms, Jerry Coker Shows how you can become a knowledgeable jazz listener-whether you are an aspiring musician, student, jazz aficionado, or new listener. In addition to looking at the structure of jazz and explaining what qualities to look for in a piece, the author provides a complete chronology of the growth of jazz, from its beginnings in the rags of Scott Joplin. the New Orleans style of the 1920s made famous by Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, the Swing Era with Benny Goodman, and Art Tatum Be-Bop, post Be-Bop, to the greats of Modern Jazz, including Miles Davis. Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Wes Montgomery.

Also including a list of suggested recordings, a section on the improvised solo, and a complete glossary of jazz terms, How To Listen To Jazz offers you a complete introduction to the entire jazz experience ... the music and those who make it.”

- Back cover annotation to the paperback edition of Jerry Coker, How To Listen To Jazz

2016 saw the publication of Ted Gioia’s masterful How To Listen To Jazz [Basic Books] about which we posted two reviews: one was written by the editorial staff at JazzProfiles and the other was featured in The Economist magazine.

While revisiting both of these recently, I was reminded of a pioneering work on the subject of How To Listen To Jazz: Revised Edition that was compiled about twenty-five years earlier by Jerry Coker [New Albany, Indiana: Jamey Aebersold Jazz, 1990] which, incidentally, is still in print. [Actually, the initial version was first published in 1978].

Like Ted [piano], Jerry is also a musician [tenor sax], an educator and a frequent publisher of books about Jazz.

Here’s an overview of Jerry’s career at the time of his writing of How To Listen To Jazz:

JERRY COKER is an educator of wide experience. He has developed studio music and jazz programs for Indiana University, Sam Houston State University, the University of Miami, and the University of Tennessee, where he is a Professor of Music.

He has taught and directed in locations around the world for National Stage Band Camps, Tanglewood Camp of the New England Conservatory, Jerry Coker Summer Camps, and Jamey Aebersold's Summer Jazz Workshops. Jerry is also well known as a professional musician, composer, and author. He has been featured soloist with Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Clare Fischer, Frank Sinatra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Jerry's books include Improvising Jazz, Listening to Jazz, Patterns for Jazz, The Complete Method for Improvisation, Jazz Keyboard, and Coker Figure Reading (Studio PR-Columbia Pictures Publications). His most recent book is titled The Teaching of Jazz (Advance Music).”

Jerry explains the purpose of his book in the following excerpt from its Preface:

This book was written in the belief that jazz music, when approached with understanding and an absence of prejudice, appeals to virtually anyone and everyone. Reaching an understanding of the music, though, can be difficult for the average listener. A number of fine books written to aid the growing jazz musician are often too technical in language and approach to serve the reader who simply wants to know what is transpiring in the average jazz performance. Other books that are directed to the jazz listener fail to give the reader understanding of the music. A chronological approach to jazz history doesn't quite work. The reader ends up with a "who's who" knowledge of jazz, laced with a lot of unnecessary facts and a gross absence of information that would enable the reader to perceive jazz performances in the same manner as the performers themselves.

This, then, is not a book about the great bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, nor about the commercial successes of the Benny Goodman or Stan Kenton bands or the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Nor is it a book about great singers, such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughn, although all those performers have contributed considerably to the field. The real crux of the matter lies in achieving an understanding of improvisation, the creative source for all jazz.

The main thrust of this book is, then, to help the reader understand the objectives and accomplishments of the best of the jazz improvisers with a bare minimum of technical language.

As the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, edited and annotated by Martin Williams is, in my estimation, by far the best collection of jazz recordings ever assembled, I have referred the reader to selections from that collection whenever possible. The Smithsonian Collection includes a choice of LPs, Cassettes or CDs and an excellent guide to using the collection, written by Martin Williams, along with many explanatory notes about the music. The package may be ordered from Smithsonian.

Appendices are provided in this book to help the reader retain a clear focus on names, dates, and terms. Appendix A is a chronology of players, Appendix B is a condensed overview of jazz history, and Appendix C is a glossary of terms used in the book.

It is my sincerest hope that every reader will come to understand and feel the universal appeal of jazz music and that this book will bring the listener closer, in spirit, to the attitudes, conceptions, and expressions of the extraordinary musicians discussed in these pages.

[Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, the Smithsonian no longer issues new copies of its collection of Classic Jazz but used copies of LP’s and CD’s both as boxed sets and individual CD’s can be found through online retailers.]

The following excerpt from the first chapter of Jerry’s book will give you a sense of how informed his writing on the subject is and the clarity and simplicity of his explanations.

HOW TO LISTEN TO JAZZ

Music is an art form that combines pitches with rhythms. [Vibrational frequencies of sound, or simply what we call "notes" in music.]

Although it can be prepared on paper in a notated fashion, a musical composition does not become music until the moment of performance, when it becomes sound. Music is an aural art. After the performance, when the sounds have ceased, the music ends, even though the written score, the instruments of performance, and the performers still exist. Only in the memory does the music continue to exist in the minds of musicians and their audience.

The aural memory, however, is not to be dismissed lightly. In fact, it may be the most powerful agent contributing to the success of the phenomenon we call music. It is the memory which enables us to hear music inwardly, replaying endlessly the sound sensations heard in prior listening experiences. Only a repeat of the aural experience itself can improve upon the impression made by the version that is

replayed in the memory. Hence it is largely the memory that enables us, by transforming repetition into familiarity, to develop a longing to repeat and enlarge the aural experience through recordings and live performance).

Dr. Joseph Murphy states that "Man is what he thinks all day."#2 [see below]

Concurrently, religious and philosophical disciplines and goals are often achieved through repetitive affirmations. And so it is in music: We are what we hear all day, including live or recorded performances as well as what we hear inwardly through memory. There will be significant differences among individuals exposed to the same diet of listening, in that their attitudes, understanding, and personal involvement with music will vary. Their memory replays will vary with respect to selectivity, according to personal tastes and reactions. Our musical personalities can best be understood in terms of what we have heard in performance and what our memory chooses to replay inwardly.#3 [see below]

There are many musical styles to hear, each having given rise to great performances and each possessing stylistic validity. Stylistic snobbery in music is entirely unnecessary. It may, in some cases, be necessary for a musician to focus on a particular style for a lifetime, in order to achieve mastery or success in that style. But he must not, in the process, become negative toward other styles. A great performer in any style will have certain standards in common with others of his kind:

1. Craftsmanship

a. understanding of musical fundamentals

b. instrumental/vocal techniques

c. well-developed ear

2. Awareness (from listening to others in field)

3. Creativity

4. Spirit (emotional drive, appropriateness)

Frequently the listener is confronted with a reputedly great performance he cannot understand or evaluate, usually because his memory bank of aural experiences does not encompass what he is now hearing. Perhaps the style is unfamiliar or the techniques too complex or too different from what he's heard previously. Chances are that if the listener had gathered, stored, and replayed the aural experiences that were in the minds of the performers, awareness and familiarity would have urged him onto a path of patient acceptance, understanding, and perhaps even approval and enjoyment. The gulf sometimes created between the performer and his audience is often directly related to the differences in their listening habits and choices. A performer tires of being held back, and his audience tires of feeling ignorant. The solution lies in the performer's desire to communicate and the audience's desire to understand.

#2 Dr. Joseph Murphy, The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963.

#3 For a more complete discussion of the potential of the ear for development, see pp. 145-150 of The Teaching of Jazz, Coker, Advance Music, Rottenburg, Germany, 1989.

The remainder of the book is made up of chapters on: What Is Jazz?, Formal Structures in Jazz, The Rhythm Section, The Improvised Solo, and The Improvisers’ Hall of Fame.

These are followed by an Appendix of Jazz Greats, an Appendix of Jazz History by Periods and a Glossary of Terms.

In future blog postings, I plan to bring up additional features about the instructional aspects of Jerry’s book along with more insights and observations from Ted Gioia’s in the hopes of helping visitors to these pages listen to Jazz in a more discerning manner and get more out of the music.

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