Willis “Bill” Holman – Living International Treasure

June 2, 2017, 7:00 am

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Bill Holman recently celebrated his 90th brithday and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it would be fun to celebrate such an auspicious occasion with this posting including the three videos that conclude it with music taken from a concert that Bill conducted with The Metropole Orchestra at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on October 14, 2000.

In Japan, a select few of those who maintain the country’s artistic traditions or make a unique contribution to them are accorded the respect of the nation by being designated as a Living National Treasure [a considerable amount of schimolies also come with the title each year].

When it comes to composing and arranging for Jazz big bands, no one is more deserving of such consideration than Willis “Bill” Holman.

However, because this country does not have such an award, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has decided to step up on behalf of grateful Jazz fans everywhere and to bestow upon Bill the distinction of being a Living International Treasure.

Pianist Christian Jacob is hugely busy heading up his on trio, working with vocalist Tierney Sutton and performing in a number of Southern California based bands such as those led by trumpeter Carl Saunders as well as Phil Norman’s Tentet. But Christian also makes it a point to appear regularly with Bill Holman’s big band.

Christian is a friend of the family so when I asked him about working with Bill despite his choc-a-block schedule he candidly responded: “It’s an honor and a privilege.”

The last guy in the world to use such superlatives about himself would be Bill Holman.

Yet, I’ve have never known a musician who doesn’t have the utmost respect for Bill and who wouldn’t feel the same way as Christian about the chance to work with him.

Mention Bill’s name and Jazz musicians and Jazz fans just smile – knowingly!

And speaking of “knowingly,” when we decided to do a feature on Bill and his music, we turned to Doug Ramsey to request permission to use some of his many writings about Bill and his music which appear as insert notes in a number of Bill’s CD’s.

Doug, whose marvelous writing skills are on exhibit daily in his Rifftides blog graciously gave his approval to do so.

After you’ve read these, we think you will agree that no one writes with more insight about Bill’s music.

But before turning to Doug’s writing and in order to put Bill Holman’s career in an earlier perspective, let’s start with some comments from Andre Previn who at the time he wrote these liner notes to Bill Holman in a Jazz Orbit [Andex A 3004/V.S.O.P. #25CD] was a pianist and a fledgling conductor-composer of Hollywood film scores.

Each in their own way, both Andre and Doug are also “Living International Treasures,” but those are other JazzProfiles storiesfor another time.

“Bill Holman's compositions and arrangements are both experimental and basic at the same time; they never for one moment cease swinging, and yet their rhythmic complexities are brilliant. His harmonic sense is quite daring at times, and still his changes are comfortable and logical to play on. All his pieces have form and definite orderliness; they have strength and an underlying feeling of 'There's something left in reserve, this isn't the climax yet."

His voices are for the most part linear and his sections play a good deal in unison; however, the interweaving of the lines is so assured and musically sophisticated as to create a bigger harmonic sound than the thickest of chordal arranging. He builds his arrangements carefully and soundly and rarely succumbs to the screaming flag-waver ending so popular with many big bands.

He has limited himself to the orthodox jazz instrumentation; trumpets, trombones, saxes and rhythm, but his knowledge of their possibilities is enormous. Being a highly talented instrumentalist himself, his arrangements are relatively easy to play. Everything lies well on the horns, a fact for which Bill is looked upon with gratitude by the playing musicians.

He is very fond of the use of canonic imitation in his writing, and uses it to great advantage throughout this album. From a composer-arranger's point of view, he has already arrived at an enviable position: namely that his style is totally distinctive, recognizable, 'and personal; it is possible to say "That's Bill Holman" after listening to 8 bars of his music, and that is a very major accomplishment for a creative musician.

Bill was born in Olive, California in 1927. He played clarinet and tenor before first attempting to write. He worked with Ike Carpenter, Charlie Barnet, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne, the Lighthouse All-Stars and Shorty Rogers, and is currently the co-leader of a Quintet with Mel Lewis. Needless to say, he has written for all the above-mentioned as well as for countless other libraries.

In this album, which is comprised of four originals and five standards, Bill has attempted to integrate the light rhythm section sound and time feel of a small group with the orchestral possibilities of a big band. The personnel of this recording band is remarkable, and the soloists (including Bill) contribute some wonderful moments. Special mention should be made of the rhythm section (Mel Lewis, Vic Feldman, Buddy Clark) for so brilliantly accomplishing what Bill set out to do.

I think it best to forego descriptions of the individual tracks; however, one more facet of the writing should be mentioned. In the 5 standards, Bill has a knack of turning the tunes into completely personal compositions as soon as the theme has been stated. His counter lines and extensions, both melodically and harmonically, are such that were he to leave out the first sixteen bars of the published melody, he could very easily pass each arrangement off as a highly respectable original.

Bill Holman most assuredly is a first-rate saxophonist, but his true instrument is the orchestra, and he plays it with musicianship, honesty and brilliance.”

ANDRE PREVIN August 12, 1958

"At last, we have a new Bill Holman album, cause to celebrate. It is the second by the band Holman has led since 1975 and only the seventh by a big band under his name. In a 45-year career, his average is one album every seven-and-a-half years.

Averages can be deceiving. Four of the seven Holman big band albums were recorded in the mid-to-late 1950s. From Capitol's Bill Holman's Great Big Band in 1960 to JVC's Bill Holman Band in 1988, there was nothing.

The fact that he wasn't recording with his own band doesn't mean that Bill was sitting around. Holman is one of the most influential and admired arrangers in modern American music. He is also one of the busiest. He is acclaimed for his writing for Charlie Barnet, Stan Kenton, Count Basic, Maynard Ferguson, Gerry Mulligan, Louis Bellson, Woody Herman, Terry Gibbs, Shelly Manne, the Lighthouse All Stars, Charlie Shoemake and Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show Orchestra. His arrangements for Carmen McRae, The Fifth Dimension, Peggy Lee, Natalie Cole and other singers gleam like jewels in the jumble and dreariness of contemporary popular music. He is commissioned by colleges, universities and music festivals in this country. He is frequently called to Europe to write for and conduct orchestras in Germany, Holland and England.

The naturalness and humanity underlying the mastery in Holman's music make his work an object of admiration and inspiration to other composers and arrangers, including those at the highest levels. He discussed the basics of his approach in a 1987 interview in the magazine Crescendo International:

"I could describe my ideals in jazz writing as: continuity and flow, combined with swing and vitality, with a fairly traditional base. It's got more involved as time's gone by, but basically those are my guiding principles."

My father was not a musician. But he knew a thing or two about how to assess quality, and he disliked hyperbole. When I was in the early stages of teenagery, I once used a collection of superlatives to tell him about a pianist I'd heard.

"Oh, really," my dad replied, "and what do other piano players think of him?"

Aha.

The Art Ramsey peer review method of analysis is the equivalent of the carpenter's level, a useful way to keep ignorance, excessive enthusiasm and rampant opinion from destroying balance.

What do other arrangers and composers think of Bill Holman? A survey of elite jazz writers of several generations will give you an idea.

MIKE ABENE: "I first heard Bill Holman when I was 14 years old and just getting into arranging. I thought then and think now that he is one of the most original and challenging writers in jazz. Given his stature, he's not as appreciated or recognized as some other writers, and that's a mystery of the business. He turns a standard song inside out and creates his own piece of music out of it, 'Tennessee Waltz,' for instance, or 'Moon of Manakoora.' In that regard, he's like Gil Evans, a real original. And he's writing better than ever. "

MANNY ALBAM: "The guy is one of my heroes and has been ever since I first heard one of his charts. He's just off-center enough to make everything interesting. He puts together beautiful stuff. In 'Make My Day,' which I heard around the time he first did it for a band in Germany, he took another step into the unknown with those twists and turns in the trombones."

BOB BROOKMEYER:"Of all the other peoples' music I've played in my life, I'd rather play Bill Holman's. He makes it such a delight. It's so naturally well crafted that it speaks when you play it. For all of us who are composers, he's been a role model in multi-voice writing and experimenting with longer forms. He was one of the first to do that and is still one of the most successful."

RALPH BURNS:"I love Bill's writing, always have. It's pure jazz, but he writes everything very classically. It’s linear and simple and clear.”

BENNY CARTER: “I like Bill’s work. Everything he’s done that I’ve heard, I’ve enjoyed very much.”

JOHN CLAYTON: “For my money, Bill Holman is the king of linear composing and arranging. I am really fond of the things he did with Mel Lewis and later with Jeff Hamilton on drums. He always seems to have drummers and rhythm section people who understand how they are to fit into his linear concepts."

QUINCY JONES: "I've been a fan of Bill Holman's since I was in knee pants. He stands for all the good stuff in music that God sends down when you believe. Nadia Boulanger said it takes feeling, sensation, believing, attachment and knowledge. Bill has known this for a long time. I'm his friend and loyal fan. Check him out."

BILL KIRCHNER: "Bill Holman is 'Mr. Line.' His linear concepts are among the most important innovations ever used in a jazz orchestra. His chart on 'What's New' on the Contemporary Concepts album for Kenton is a masterpiece."

DENNIS MACKREL: "As an arranger listening to Bill's music, you come across devices and lines that are part of your writing, which means that he has become part of you. He does more with two lines than most arrangers can do with twenty. He runs a simple idea through all the ensembles and makes everything sound amazingly full. Five bars, and you know it's him. I was part of a project Bill did for a German radio orchestra in Kiln. He wrote a suite that involved full

strings and the big band. Being inside that incredible sound was an experience I'll never forget."

JOHNNY MANDEL: "An immensely talented guy. His music is ageless. It's easy to play. It flows. And there's always a sense of humor. The things he wrote in the fifties sound as if they were written yesterday. Nobody can write counterpoint and make it sound improvised and have it swing like Bill does. You can tell an arrangement of Holman's the minute you hear it. He is a total original. "

BOB MINTZER: "To me, Bill is the consummate big band arranger and composer. He has influenced most of the contemporary big band writing of the past twenty years in one way or another. I'm very fond of the way he uses certain kinds of contrapuntal techniques. He's a very colorful arranger, interesting and intelligent. He uses the big band instrumentation thoughtfully and thoroughly. I'm a big fan. People say they hear his influence in my writing and I'm sure that's true."

GERRY MULLIGAN: "Along with his other more obvious qualities as a writer, Bill possesses a great sense of humor; his music is fun to play, and that's something I admire very much."

MARIA SCHNEIDER: "Bill Holman has a sound, a beautiful and personal sound. I'll never forget the impact his wonderful arrangement of 'Just Friends' had on me. It's so daring, so simple, and so uniquely and perfectly him. It has just the bare ingredients, but through it comes his sound. It's impossible for him not to be him. That's the definition of a true artist."

DON SEBESKY: "Bill Holman is the single most important influence in my musical life. I listen to his music, literally, every day, including his stuff from 40 years ago. I hear nothing, past or present, that comes close to it because he combines the objective and subjective parts of music into a seamless whole. By that I mean that the music is always swinging loosely, yet underlying the loose swinging is a tight musical structure created by an able musical mind. It sounds improvised but there's real control at the heart of it."

ARTIE SHAW: "Bill's a great arranger. He's one of the guys out there who's extending the medium, illuminating the material. His work is extremely interesting. He's writing great American music. It's nice to do what you do so well that knowledgeable people buy it. You don't get rich that way; he's never going to cruise the Aegean like Rod Stewart does. But who wants to listen to Rod Stewart? Bill is what an artist ought to be."

GERALD WILSON: "Bill is one of the best writers that we have today. He's a fine scorer with his own way of doing things and making them sound great. I listen for the overall sound of a band. I'm always impressed with his."

Following evaluations by artists of the stature of those quoted above, it would superfluous to add detailed analysis of the music in A View From The Side. The compositions, arrangements and performances speak eloquently for themselves. The soloists are identified in an adjoining exhibit. Bill says that the titles of his compositions here have no significance beyond the obvious. He has short explanatory comments on three of the pieces.

"The second half of the opening phrase of Petaluma Lu' came to me when I was practicing the tenor saxophone," he says. "Then I had to devise a first half to go with it. The form of 'I Didn't Ask' is like that of Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question,' with the trumpet statement and all of those busy voices. 'The Peacocks' has been in the book for a while, but I wasn't happy with it until we switched from trumpets to flugelhorns. Then it came together." I will offer one observation that a listener may find useful: For all its humor, swing and accessibility, Mr. Holman's music has depths, layers and complexities. Enjoyable as the surfaces of his pieces may be, beneath them are satisfactions that reveal themselves only when they receive full attention in repeated hearings. Such is the nature of serious music that is full of fun, whether it is by Mozart, Ives, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker or Bill Holman."

-DOUG RAMSEY (May 1995)

Author, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers (University of Arkansas Press); contributor, Jazz Times; contributing editor, Texas Monthly.

"Except for '"Round Midnight," Thelonious Monk the composer is all but absent from the repertoires of big bands. Hall Overton's celebrated arrangements for Monk and large ensembles were essentially orchestrated transcriptions of Monk piano solos. They were beautifully made and well recorded in the late 1950s on the Riverside label and early 1960s on Columbia. They inspired masterly solos from Phil Woods, Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Steve Lacy and Monk himself. They were reflections of Monk's compositional and improvisational genius, not vehicles for the art of the arranger.

Another big band project involving Monk blew its potential. Oliver Nelson, a brilliant arranger, wrote a 1968 album called Monk's Blues, but it turned out to be a collection of routine settings for Monk solos. The arrangements neither probed the uniqueness of Monk's compositions nor demonstrated Nelson's talent as an orchestrator. It may have been the only dud of Nelson's career. Until now, oddly, no other major arranger has applied himself to a collection of Monk's works.

Willis Leonard Holman, known as Bill, called Willis by his friends, is universally considered a towering figure among jazz writers. He has been a Monk fan since he first heard the celebrated 1958 live recordings Monk made at New York's Five Spot with Johnny Griffin, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes.

"Before that, I had known "Round Midnight,' and had played 'Well, You Needn't' and other pieces of his in jam sessions as early as 195O," Holman says. "In the fifties, Monk was a hard sell. You know what they said: 'He can't play. His tunes are so weird. He doesn't follow the cycle of fifths like you're supposed to.' Piano players really used to hate him. I suppose some still do. His technique was so far removed from what everybody was doing. But, little by little, people have come around. You have to spend a lot of time to get Monk inside."

Holman internalized Monk long ago. He has had Monk pieces in his band's book since the 1970s and included "I Mean You" in his 1988 JVC album Bill Holman Band. In preparing for this compact disc, he sought out Monk's recordings to identify the pieces he wanted to arrange, but once those decisions were made, he cut off contact with Monk."

"I wanted to do it my way," Holman says, "so I decided to leave the area."

Holman says that his writing for the Monk pieces is more like the work he has been doing the past few years for orchestras in Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.

"I'd always had that American big band thing in the back of my head when I was writing for my band," he says. "I didn't feel that the traffic in this country would bear too much 'out' stuff, that Americans like big bands to sound like big bands. This has abrupt changes in texture and mood, operating outside of the typical dance band vocabulary."

In recent years, Holman has been applying lessons from 20th Century classical composers. Those writers include Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Witold Lutoslawksi, Gyorgy Ligeti and, most powerfully, Bela Bartok. The attentive listener can detect their touches -some specific, some atmospheric - in Holman pieces like "Further Adventures" for the Metropole Orchestra in Holland and "City of Angles" for the WDR Orchestra of Cologne. The classical influences are present in this collection of Monk compositions. While it may be helpful to know that they exist, they are simply colors in Holman's highly individual palette, not keys to the nature of his work.

"It's great to do things like that because jazz bands were locked into that four-part harmony for so many decades that to get away from it completely is freedom. Some of the guys in the band are still trying to figure out how these things fit into the harmonic scheme. Well, a lot of times, there isn't any harmonic scheme."

Having understood and accepted that harmony can be background but not a strict guide, in "Friday the 13th" trumpeter Ron Stout divorces himself from the idea of harmonic changes and improvises on the same four bars repeatedly and brilliantly. His solo is so unified that the listener untutored in harmony is likely to simply think of it as one hell of a trumpet chorus, which it is. Bill Perkins, who at the age of 72 keeps renewing himself, demonstrates the same spirit and boldness in this piece and, for that matter, in his alto and soprano saxophone solos throughout the album.

As another example of his expanded thinking, Holman offers the introduction to "Brilliant Corners," which is far removed from most definitions of the big band sound. He mentions allowing more freedom in the development of melodic lines so that they don't always conform to the underlying harmony. He talks about getting away from the stereotype of the riff-style big band shout chorus, although he says, "I did it in 'Thelonious.' It was the only way I could go with that one."

Other times, as in "Bye Ya," he alludes to the tradition, with the saxes riffing and the brass shouting on top. "That's really going back," he says. It's not that serious. It's kind of humorous. It says, 'let's get down and swing.'" Like the Charles Ives lick in the ensemble of "Brilliant Corners," it is another manifestation of Holman's craftsmanship and his humor.

"It's kind of corny, in a way, but Ives did it and I've always wanted to work it in. With my band full of introverts," says Holman, who himself is hardly Type A, "I really had to work on them to give it a little brio."

Following a live performance of many of the Monk charts in the spring of 1997 at the Moonlight Tango, a Los Angeles club, Holman allowed that he was pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic audience reception. Perhaps American listeners are changing their thinking.

The change in his own thinking was stimulated in the late 1970s when Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombonist and fellow arranger-composer, commissioned Holman to write an album. Brookmeyer planted the seed of freedom when Holman asked him what he wanted.

"What Brookmeyer said boiled down to, 'use your imagination,'" Holman remembers. "That sounds simple, but the more I thought about it, I realized that it meant not being locked in to the traditional big band format."

Holman had hardly been a captive of conventional musical thought. From his first works for Stan Kenton, he had the gift of investing complex music with the appearance of simplicity. His arrangements were accessible to lay ears, yet satisfying to musicians. His charts were rich in harmonic sophistication, rhythmic challenges and interwoven lines, but they could be heard as swinging big band performances, even as music for dancing. He had that dual ability in common with Eddie Sauter, Gil Evans, Thad Jones, Gerry Mulligan and very few other modern arrangers. All of them, it must be said, were inspired by Duke Ellington. …

Monk should have stayed around for this one.”

“This is the first album since 1997 by The Bill Holman Band. Why there was so long an interregnum between recordings by an essential cultural institution requires a discussion of conditions in the music industry and the society at large. You will not find that discussion here. Let us simply shout hooray, and praise impresario Ken Poston for including the band in one of his periodic jazz events, and Graham Carter of Jazzed Media for capturing the performance. The occasion was "Stratospheric," a four-day tribute to Maynard Ferguson, who for more than half a century has used his trumpet to explore even beyond the stratosphere.

Ferguson was present and his spirit in the air through all the festivities of the long weekend. His connections with Holman s concert were the lineage they share as alumni of the Stan Kenton Orchestra and the many arrangements Holman wrote for Ferguson's Los Angeles band in 1956 and '57. Holman played tenor saxophone for Kenton in the band's glory days of the early 1950s when Ferguson was in the brass section. Beginning to apply what he had learned when he studied counterpoint at WestlakeCollege in Los Angeles, Holman offered Kenton his "Invention for Guitar and Trumpet." The 1952 recording of "Invention" featured Sal Salvador and Ferguson. Kenton was pleased, and the piece became the first of dozens that Willis Leonard Holman contributed to the Kenton book over nearly three decades until shortly before the band leader died in 1979. Among those arrangements were several that are studied to this day for their craftsmanship and ingenuity. Perhaps foremost among them is his treatment of "Stompin' at the Savoy," a masterpiece of contrapuntal intricacy so cunningly made that to the casual ear it seems straightforward. Holman s gift for complexity wrapped in accessible, swinging, packages became his stock in trade.

Once he got underway as a writer, Willis quickly developed to a degree that put him on a level with Gerry Mulligan, who had been an inspiration to him, and with other master arrangers of his generation — Bob Brookmeyer, Thad Jones, Al Cohn, Johnny Mandel, Manny Albam. He wrote not only for Kenton, but also for Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band, Maynard Ferguson, Terry Gibbs, the Tonight Show Orchestra, Louie Bellson, Shelly Manne and Buddy Rich. Singers yearn to have him arrange for them. Among the lucky ones have been Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Natalie Cole and Delia Reese.

Typical of how a slightly older generation of arrangers regards Holman is something the late Ralph Burns told me about Willis's writing: "It's pure jazz, but he writes everything very classically. It's linear and simple and clear." From one younger arranger, Bill Kirchner: "His linear concepts are among the most important innovations ever used in a jazz orchestra," and another, Don Sebesky: "I hear nothing, past or present, that comes close to (his writing) because he combines the objective and subjective parts of music into a seamless whole." From a contemporary, Bob Brookmeyer: "Of all the other peoples' music I've played in my life, I'd rather play Bill Holman s. He makes it such a delight. It's so naturally well crafted that it speaks when you play it."

Ken Poston s extravaganzas attract enthusiasts from several continents. A few are wallowers in nostalgia, but most are discerning listeners who keep up with musical developments and are acutely attuned to the content of what they're hearing. Being of sound mind and aware of his patrons' preferences, Poston frequently features Holman. The "Stratospheric" Holman recital was doubly auspicious because Willis brought from his storehouse several new pieces for the band that he has led since 1975. He rehearses every Thursday morning at the American Federation of Musicians Local 47 union hall in Hollywood. It is one big band rehearsal for which it is never difficult to get enough players. The subs stand in line, hoping to get in on the challenge and fun of playing Willis's charts.

Some of the members of the 2004 edition of the band are new since Holman's last recording, but the musicianship and camaraderie are on the same high plane. In the course of the concert recording, Willis introduces the band and identifies the soloists. To shanghai the nearest applicable cliché, the music speaks for itself, but permit me to point out a couple of delights if only because it is fun to attempt to peg some of Holman's gamesmanship.

In "Woodrow," leading up to Christian Jacob's piano solo, Willis has the trumpets and the trombones play catch with a triplet figure. The reeds expand on the figure in ascent and Jacob echoes it as he begins his solo. Midway through Ray Herrmann's tenor sax solo, triplet figures emerge again, this time tossed back and forth between the trumpets and the reeds, but only momentarily. The triplets make a final appearance in the ascending lines the sections play to end the piece. It is one of the threads that holds the arrangement together. Another, recalling the trombone section's opening notes, is Bob Efford s baritone sax combination of punchy off-beat quarter notes, and long tones. The baritone provides underscoring as the brass and reeds intermingle phrases that add up to the sort of thing Brookmeyer was talking about when he said that Holman's arrangements speak. This is musical conversation of the highest order.

"Donna Lee" gets a straight exposition of the famous melody. Well, a relatively straight reading; during the unfolding of the line, don't miss the slight dissonances, and the subtle jabs by the horns. As Bob Enevoldsen begins the second chorus of his valve trombone solo, a Holman countermelody slides beneath him. Keep it in mind. You'll meet parts of it again in a variation in the band passage that comes next. Holman reels out one of his written choruses that has swing so natural, ideas so flowing and logical, that it sounds like a transcription of a solo by some undiscovered master improviser. Eight bars into the next chorus, the band soli transmutes into a passage with strands of melody from groups of horns interwoven so intricately that the term counterpoint seems inadequate to describe what happens. Then, with his gift for dynamics, Holman continues the intensity while shading down the volume

and suspending all but Jacob's piano, making the beginning of Doug Webb's superb tenor solo seem a whispered promise that a mystery is about to be revealed. After Webb, comes the closest thing in the arrangement to a traditional big band shout chorus, then twenty decidedly nontraditional bars of collective noodling that might have been inspired by Alan Hovahness, Gyorgy Ligeti or one of the other Twentieth Century composers Holman reveres. A final chorus of melody leads to an ending that elicits shouts of surprise from the audience and, no doubt, a grin from Holman.

A fellow saxophonist once asked Lester Young for advice about mouthpieces. Young told him, "I can tell you about my mouthpiece in my mouth. I can't tell you about your mouthpiece in your mouth." I have told you a little about how my brain receives some of Holman's work through my ears. One of the gratifying things about serious music of this quality is that it will reward different listeners differently. Because Bill Holman's music has layers of complexity and depth, and an unlimited shelf life, it will further reward each of us each time we hear it.”

Doug Ramsey’s latest book is Take Five: The Public and Private Lived of Paul Desmond Parkside, http://www.parksidepublications.com/

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La Rosa and Sinatra: The Storytellers

June 3, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Dave Holland Big Band - Something Special This Way Comes

≪ Previous: Willis “Bill” Holman – Living International Treasure

“He said for the boys what they wanted to say. He said to the girls what they wanted to hear. The body of excellent songs that had come into existence in the

United States

at last found a singer worthy of them. He was the best singer we had ever heard. He was one of the best singers in history. And he knew it. He was our poet laureate.”

- Gene Lees

“Look, I know you have a lot of Italian friends. But you don’t know Italians the way Italians know Italians. Italians tend to break down into two kinds of people: Lucky Luciano and Michelangelo. Frank’s an exception. He’s both.”

- anonymous anecdote by an Italian-American musician

“Frank Sinatra was, in his prime, to put the matter quite simply, the best popular singer of them all.”

- Steve Allen

“I know that it sounds like something out of a B movie, but it’s true; before he’d sung four bars, we knew. We knew he was going to become a great star.”

- Vocalist, Jo Stafford, commenting about Frank Sinatra’s first performance with The Pied Pipers and Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra in 1940

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights

There was a time when “Dean Martin,” “Vic Damone,” “Jerry Vale” and “Perry Como” were literally household names, especially if your family circle happened to be a post-World War II one of Italian-American descent, based in the New England – Atlantic Coast states area.

My favorite was Julius La Rosa whose unassuming personality, ready smile and enthusiastic way with a song appealed to my youthful sensibilities.

And then, of course, there was “Sinatra,” or “Frank” to those among his legions of admirers who could lay claim to having seen “The Voice” in person once in a supper club, floor show.

I’m not certain of the exact date, but a few years after Gene Lees left the editorship of Down Beat magazine in the early 1960s, he wrote a detailed account in High Fidelity magazine of the unique aspects of Sinatra’s phrasing of a song’s lyrics replete with anatomical references as to why Italo-American male singers from New York/New Jersey sounded different than African-American males from the Southern States, et al.

It was one of the most instructive essays about singing that I ever read and darn if I didn’t lose track of this issue of the magazine as a result of constantly loaning it to friends.

Although I never thought of him as a Jazz singer, per se, Sinatra was to me, the epitome of “being hip:” he was sew-wave [suave], chick, [chic] and dee-boner [debonair].

I loved his choice of big band arrangers including Billy May, Nelson Riddle and Neal Hefti and – thanks to the awareness created by having read the Lees’ High Fidelity article - his use of diction, enunciation and, most of all, phrasing, to lift song styling to a whole new dimension of power, persuasion and passion.

Over the years, it has been great fun re-acquainting myself with Dino, Vic and “Frank” [I saw him perform in person in Las Vegas so I guess this entitles me to call him by his first name] as their music was reissued in various CD compilations.

Along the way, I was also fortunate to be able to discerningly re-visit the subject of Frank Sinatra’s phrasing in the form of the following essay by none other than - Julius La Rosa.

Not surprisingly, I would also find in editions of Gene Lees’ Jazzletter,which was published from 1981 until Gene’s passing in 2010,a two-part essay on Julius La Rosa and one that expanded on Lees’ original treatment of Frank Sinatra uniqueness as a vocalist, both of which have been published in Gene’s book: Singers and The Song II [New York: Oxford, 1998].

© -Julius La Rosa, copyright protected; all rights

“In the beginning he was called The Voice, and what a voice it was. But he never let it get in the way of the message. It set him apart, and he established a standard for interpreting lyrics, giving life to the words on the lead sheet in a way never before considered. Songs were no longer melodies to be danced to. They were stories to be listened to.

Before Sinatra, the lyrics were given at most a casual attention. Why did we start listening? The newspapers wrote about him as if only the girls loved what he was doing. I was one of those who loved what he was doing, and I wasn't a girl. They wrote about us as if we were crazy. We weren't crazy. Whether or not we could put into words what he was doing, we sensed it.

What made us stop dancing and crowd up close to the bandstand to listen? He was making sense of the words. He was telling a story, honoring the American songbook in a way that had never been done, the poems-to-music of Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Sammy Cahn, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, Johnny Burke, and other giants. …

Jolson was dynamic, his personality and showmanship foremost. But I don't think anyone ever got drunk listening to him. Bing Crosby, who was to Sinatra what Sinatra was to me, was relaxed, casual, the everyman of singers. But he never projected the emotional values of the lyric, never gave us a sense of what the words meant to him.

Along came Sinatra, the new boy with the Harry James band, and soon after that with Tommy Dorsey. And despite the restrictions of tempo — the people had to dance, didn't they? — he told the story, and we stopped dancing to listen, and Dorsey noticed this. He was phrasing. Until Sinatra, the song was sung: "I've gaaaaht yoooo unDER my skin." The song is written that way, with the accent on the second syllable of under. (You could look it up!) Sinatra (I refer to his later career) chopped it into its component pieces and sang: "I've got. . . you ..." Brief pause. "UN-der my skin." And that's the way everyone has sung that song ever since.

Cole Porter is said to have wired Sinatra: "If you don't like my songs the way I write them, don't sing them." Sinatra, reportedly, wired back, "If you don't like the royalties, send them back." The story may be apocryphal but it sounds very much in character for both of them.

Porter's mistake lay in not accepting the style of singing Sinatra introduced. An argument could be made, of course, that Porter was concerned for the musical values of the song. But Sinatra went after the lyrical content. As a rule, Sinatra was true to a songwriter's intentions in the first chorus, taking his liberties in the second chorus — and he took considerable liberties in the later years.

Toscanini, too, apparently was not enamored by the liberties taken by soloists, vocal or instrumental. Yet he was big enough to recognize a performer's contribution to interpretation of a master's work. During a rehearsal, a trumpet player took a liberty with the phrasing of a solo in some symphonic work or other. The other musicians waited for the maestro to explode, and his temper was famous. To everyone's surprise, he didn't. After the rehearsal, Toscanini encountered the trumpet player at the elevator. He said, ''If you promise to play it that way again, I will conduct it that way." He recognized the contribution.

In the Dorsey days, Sinatra was constrained by dance tempos. But he turned them to his advantage. It must have been about this time that Sinatra became friendly with Alec Wilder. His recording of Wilder's I’ll Be Around is the definitive version. In 1945, by which time Sinatra had left Dorsey and become what we now call a superstar (star was good enough in the old days), he picked up a baton to conduct a suite of Wilder's orchestral pieces. Since Sinatra was known to be unable to read music, Gene Lees once asked Alec Wilder if Sinatra really had conducted those pieces. (You can get them now on CD.) "Yes," Wilder said, "and he did them better than anyone else has ever done them, because he understood something most conductors don't: dance tempos."

And within the restrictions of those tempos, even back in the Dorsey days, Sinatra could shift the accents in a song to get the story out. This Love of Mine was actually in my arms, but we stopped dancing to elbow our way close to the bandstand to gaze up at the skinny guy holding onto the mike stand. He hadn't yet decided what to do with his hands. Oh! how many singers know that problem. We looked up and listened to the story. Hell, it was my story. It was "our" story. Mine and Sue's. Or was it Marianne?

And he told the stories in the same voice he spoke with, a natural quality few singers achieve. It made us all think we could do that too. The technical term for that is placement. Whether in his high or low register, the voice was the same. All the way up. It is far more remarkable than is generally realized. There was no "break" in his voice. Listen some time to the way an opera singer who has come down from Olympus to honor us with a pop song comes to the high note and goes from chest tone to head tone, which is why it's called, justifiably, falsetto. It's an artificial sound. The only time I ever heard Sinatra go into falsetto was on the last note of his Bluebird recording (with Axel Stordahl) of The Song Is You, one of the first four sides he made as a soloist. One night early in my own career, I did a falsetto, eliciting from my accompanist: "Who do you think you are? Deanna Durbin?"

Well Sinatra didn't use artificial sounds, except on that one note of The Song Is You. Why did he do it? Maybe it was to show some people something, that he could do that trick. One is reminded of a story told about Segovia. After a performance, so the story goes, someone asked him why he'd played a certain piece so fast. "Because I can,"Segovia replied. Well Sinatra could sing those falsetto tones. He didn't choose to, and in all the recordings from then until his death, I never heard him do it again.

Sinatra was also experimenting with enunciation. Even in the Harry James days, he always sang so that you could hear the words. But there is something a little affected about it. By the Dorsey days, he was finding a clear but natural kind of enunciation.

One of my high-school English teachers suggested that we listen to Sinatra for his enunciation. Later, after he had achieved world renown, Sinatra began revealing, if not actually flaunting, his Hoboken, New Jersey, beginnings. I think it was a not too subtle assertion of his genesis.

With Harry James, and soon after that with Dorsey, the simplicity of Sinatra's singing was deceptive. It seemed so effortless. His intonation was almost flawless. Curiously, where most good singers will sometimes sing flat, Sinatra would be sharp. This has been attributed to Dorsey's influence on him. For reasons beyond my knowledge of instruments, trombone players are more likely to be sharp than flat.

During those Dorsey days, and then those four Bluebird sides and finally the brilliant body of work for Columbia with exquisitely lush Axel Stordahl arrangements, the emphasis in Sinatra's career was on ballads, for the obvious reason that he did them as no one ever had before. Some of us still remember his first "album", four 78 rpm records in four sleeves bound with a hard cover, and in that collection, the songs began to seem very much like art music. They were Sinatra's definitive interpretations of I Concentrate on You, These Foolish Things, Ghost of a Chance, Try a Little Tenderness, You Go to My Head, She's Funny That Way, and Someone to Watch Over Me.

Back then Sinatra sang a lot like the way Dorsey played trombone, long lines often carried past the end of an eight bar phrase. You can really hear it in his recording with Dorsey of Without a Song. At the end of the release, Sinatra hits the word "soul" quite big, and without a breath sails diminuendo into the start of the next eight, "I'll never know . . . . " Anyone who doubts Dorsey's influence on him should give that record a listen, not that anyone does.

In a time when most performers didn't publicize aspects of their personal lives, Sinatra sang a sweet song about Nancy, his daughter. We all heard those "mission bells ringing" and got "the very same glow".

I remember his performances at the first spectacular and historic Paramount Theater appearance. Yes, I was there, one of those thousands of "crazy" kids waiting in a line along

West 43rd Street

. At last we got in, and there he was. One of the lines in Nancy is: "Sorry for you, she has no sister." But in that performance he sang: "Just give me time, she'll have a sister." And the bobby-soxers really did go a little crazy. The screaming was deafening.

Nor was Sinatra politically passive. In 1943, when it was considered unwise for an entertainer to voice preferences, he came out for Roosevelt's unprecedented run for a third term. And in 1945, he recorded The House I Live In and made a film short about racial tolerance that was built around it. It earned him a special Academy Award. The song expressed his feelings about

America

With Dorsey, however, Sinatra's rhythmic sense had never been fully explored. Yes, he did several medium "up" tunes such as Snooty Little Cutie, Oh Look at Me Now (remember "Jack, I'm ready!"?), I’ll Take Tallulah among them, but Dorsey used him mostly for ballads.

Sinatra's work on Columbia— there are 72 songs in the four-CD boxed set — is a remarkable celebration of the American song. But the experience there went sour when a-and-r head Mitch Miller forced on Sinatra some dreadful songs, including a monstrosity called Mama Will Bark and a duet with of all people the now-forgotten Dagmar. It still seems to some of those who were close to the situation that Mitch Miller was out to destroy Sinatra. And for a time he did seem destroyed. It was known in the business that he was having serious throat problems. We can never know whether they were caused by nervous tension. And finally, Columbia dropped him. The Columbia period had lasted from 1943 to 1952.

He said that he entered a period of despair when the phone no longer rang. He was desperately short of money, and his career seemed ended.

I don't know this with certainty, but I suspect that Johnny Mercer was the force in the restoration of Sinatra's career. In addition to being a great lyricist — some think he was our greatest of all — Mercer was an astute gentleman. He was also president of Capitol records, which he had founded with fellow songwriter Buddy De Sylva. Mercer was one record-company head who really knew what he was hearing.

And I think Mercer recognized Sinatra's as-yet untapped . . . genius. I don't think the word is an exaggeration. What John Gielgud was to Shakespeare, Sinatra was to the American song. We discovered him with Dorsey, he proved we were right about him at Columbia, and from his very first recordings for Capitol we realized, if we hadn't done so already, that we had a giant on our hands. Nelson Riddle recognized it. Songs for Young Lovers is still my favorite album. Riddle is credited rightly for recognizing the depth of Sinatra's musical instincts. He appreciated Sinatra's intelligence and, I guess, understood his temperament. His arrangements for those early Capitol albums are masterpieces, one after another. And the mature Sinatra was revealed. The ballads are touching, heartbreaking even, and the sense of identification is incomparable. In the reprise of My Funny Valentine when he sings "But donnnnn't change a hair for me ..." oh, the pain. And rhythm songs now were fun. "I get a kick . . . mmmm, you give me a boot!" Cole Porter may not (I would assume) have liked the interpolation, but everyone else did.

By now we knew what he was: a performing poet. And by now he had influenced a whole generation of singers, Vic Damone and me (both of us from Brooklyn) among them. But he created a dilemma for us, too. If you phrased the way he did, you were bound to sound at least a little like him. But on the other hand, as Gene Lees wrote, "Once you had heard him do it, what was a singer to do? Not phrase for the meaning of the lyrics?"

Anthony Quinn said, "Until I speak them, they are just words on a piece of paper." Sinatra could have said, "Until I sing them, nobody knows what they mean." Mr. Quinn once came to see me in Las Vegas. After my performance he came back to say hello. And he said, "Boy! You sound like Frank Sinatra." I had an urge to say, "And you remind of me of Paul Muni." I suppressed it.

But it was true though that until Sinatra sang, "You may not know it, but buddy, I'm a kind of poet," you didn't realize to just what an extent Johnny Mercer really was a poet. Sinatra put blood into the words of that and countless other songs.

When others sang what used to be called torch songs, one could shrug and say, "Who cares? I've got problems of my own." But when Sinatra sang (in another Mercer song) "A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the Blues in the Night," you were likely to stare into your drink and think, "I know how the poor son of a bitch feels."

A long-time friend of mine, the great arranger Marion Evans, has a wonderful expression. When someone records a definitive version of a song, Marion says, "It's been fixed." Sinatra fixed scores of songs. Remember his performance of (another Mercer lyric) Come Rain or Come Shine with that marvelous Don Costa chart and those insisting French horns? And tell me about the low E in What Is This Thing Called Love. I've always suspected that he'd been out late and recorded it early in the morning. He was awake, but his voice was still asleep. A low E indeed! How dare he! And that high G on All of Me. His range, for all its seeming naturalness, was over two octaves. No one should ever underestimate Sinatra's chops.

Though the catalogue of his best work is just this side of unending and it is hard to pick a favorite, I have a great liking for an underplayed album called Watertown on Reprise. I would refer you to particular cuts, Elizabeth and What a Funny Girl (You Used to Be). Enchanting. Sinatra at his most conscientious. He wanted these to be good, and they are.

William Gibson, author of Two for the Seasaw, commenting on Anne Bancroft's portrayal of Gittle Mosca, the character he created, said she "transcended the lines with a humor and poignancy I had not suspected in them." Sinatra endowed lyrics with the same sense of truth.

He once said, "Don't get mad, get even." All the sycophants who loved him when he was up took a hike when he was down, and did he get even! From that time on, there is a visible toughness in him, an incredible assurance. Most of the adjectives applied to him were accurate to some degree. If you liked him, he was being true to himself. If you didn't, he was a bastard. Why not? He had "all the elements so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say to all the world, 'This was a man.'"

I fell in love with songs because of him. I fell in love with the way he sang them. Very timidly, I thought, 4Hey, I think I could do that." So I joined a choir. And I tried.

I wonder what would have happened to me if Francis Albert Sinatra had not been born. Maybe I'd have stayed in the Navy. Or maybe I'd have left the Navy to go into my father's radio-repair business in Brooklyn. I would be retired by now. But it didn't work out that way. Because of Frank Sinatra I've had a hell of a life.

And to me he'll always be

. . . shining, shining, shining . . .

everywhere."

— Julius La Rosa

↧

The Dave Holland Big Band - Something Special This Way Comes

June 4, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950 [Swiss Radio Days Vol. 43]

≪ Previous: La Rosa and Sinatra: The Storytellers

Whoosh!

It was in incredible.

My first experience listening to the Dave Holland Big Band involved a track that lasted 17.26 minutes, and yet, it felt like it was over in a flash.

What happened?

How can something with a duration of nearly one-third of an hour seemingly elapse so quickly?

After listening to this selection - What Goes Around – the title track from the band’s first CD on ECM [#1026] - I was instantly and completely absorbed in the music of this big band.

In case you are not familiar with Dave Holland, he is a bassist who assumes a very dominant and propulsive role in the band’s music.

How can you swing a big band with from the bass chair?

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening in this band’s music – the bass player is the driving force behind it – both figuratively and literally.

Dave Holland has impeccable credentials as a bass player dating back to the late 1960s and his tenure with Miles Davis. Over the years, Dave has been the mainstay, a force, if you will, in a number of small groups where his huge tone, superb note selection and excellent sense of time have contributed greatly to the overall quality of the music.

But, bringing all of these skills to bear in a big band is quite a different matter as, more-often-than-not, the sound of the bass is lost in such surroundings.

In addition to Dave’s bass and the sterling musicianship of the other players, it is the nature and quality of the big band’s arrangements that distinguish its music.

Traditionally, big band arrangements have been tightly configured vehicles ruled by the constrictions of time and structure. Initially, one reason for this was to take commercial benefit of the earliest records, which along with radio broadcasts, supper club and ballroom appearances, served to generate audiences for the big bands.

The big band tradition came into existence at a time when 7-10” 78 rpm recordings were the mainstay, thus allowing for approximately 2:00 – 3:30 minutes of music to be captured on them.

The temporal and spatial restraints of these early 78’s curtailed the time available for the playing out of a big band arrangement and related solos.

Typically, the earliest big band arrangements, particularly from their high point in The Swing Era, 1930 – 1945, involved a statement of the melody and the release [bridge], brief solos by one or two instrumentalists and then a slightly altered restatement of the theme to close things out.

The advent of the long-playing album in the 1950s made possible longer recorded performances which resulted in more time for featured soloists and the interspersing of riffs, interludes and “shout choruses” [fanfare-type choruses that preceded the closing restatement of the theme], thus extending the typical big band arrangement to approximately 4-6 minutes.

Of course, there were exceptions to this format and these usually occurred when a big band was recorded in performance at a club or Jazz Festival. One of the more notable examples of such an extended, recorded performance was the classic 20+ choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves on the 14.37 minutes of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue on the Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival Columbia LP.

But here again, the structure of the arrangement is largely patterned after the more traditional big band arranging format which is altered to allow Gonsalves time to spin his saxophone magic and enchant the crowd at Newport, Rhode Island’s Freebody Park on July 7, 1956.

There were also exceptions to this generalization by arrangers who emphasized concert or orchestral approaches such as those associated Stan Kenton, as well as, big bands scored for by Gil Evans and Gerald Wilson, and, of course Duke Ellington’s extended suites.

Due to copyright restrictions, the crackerjack graphics theme at CerraJazz LTD was unable to use the music from the “first impression” What Goes Around recording on its video tribute to the Dave Holland Big Band, but we were able to put together an audio only Soundcloud music file which you'll find at the conclusion of this piece which uses the band's performance of What Goes Around from the 2003 Saalfelden Jazz Festival [Austria].

For the closing video turned to a live performance of Dave’s tune The Razor’s Edge from the band’s appearance at the 2005 North Sea Jazz Festival which contains smashing solos by Alex "Sasha" Sipiagin on trumpet, Steve Nelson on vibes and Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone.

In Dave’s arrangement of the tune, you can hear all of the ingredients that make the band so engaging, engrossing and enthralling such as:

- collective improvisation by one, two instruments or even the entire band as an element in the arrangement and/or a background for the soloists to improvise over

- stop time

- the rhythm section “laying out” [stops playing to create a sudden background of quiet]

- restating the theme between solos

- rhythmic riffs played behind soloists and between solos

- alternating such riffs between sections [i.e.: brass and reeds] to give them contrasts

- counter melodies played between sections

- multiple shout choruses as a prelude to the closing theme

Basically, the arrangement is being elongated to allow the soloists to expand their solos, a format which is more characteristic of Jazz in a small group rather than a big band setting.

And, by variegating these orchestral backgrounds, it serves to energize the soloists who now have many more stimuli to chose from as a springboard for their improvisations.

The implementation of all of these arranging, orchestrating and scoring devices provides for a landscape of continually changing sonorities that keeps the music interesting for both the musicians and the listener.

Amazingly, given the variety of the devices employed, they always seem to occur in exactly the right place in the charts for Dave’s band.

With all this going on in the music, is it any wonder that time seems to standstill while listening to it?

If you are looking for something “new and different” in your big band fare, why not give the music of the Dave Holland Big Band a try.

Don’t be surprised if you lose track of time while doing so.

↧

Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950 [Swiss Radio Days Vol. 43]

June 5, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Billy Strayhorn: Singular Unsung Genius by John Edward Hasse

≪ Previous: The Dave Holland Big Band - Something Special This Way Comes

If you are a Jazz fan, I mean c’mon how could you not love Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950 [Swiss Radio Days Vol. 43, Montreux Jazz Label TCB 02432] for as the press release from Michael Bloom’s Media Relations states:

“Straighten Up and Fly Right... to Zurich 1950!

To discover an unreleased concert is a priceless gift. All the more so, as the recording of this 1950 performance given at the Kongresshaus in Zurich recreates faithfully what was played that evening, in a quality worthy of praise for the sound engineer.

In 1950 Nat King Cole presented a brilliant trio, using the formula tried and approved by him consisting of guitar, piano and double bass. It is the impeccable Irving Ashby [guitar] and Joe Comfort [bass] who share the stage with him. along with a recent discovery, percussionist Jack Costanzo, aka Mr. Bongo.

The arrangements, stuffed with tasty and rhythmically impeccable morsels, are a constant treat for today's listeners!

Consisting of 15 tracks of never before released material, the album contains standards by Vincent Youmans, Richard Whiting, Johnny Mercer, George and Ira Gershwin and Bobby Troup, among other, as well as, the trio’s own hits. Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950 [Swiss Radio Days Vol. 43, Montreux Jazz Label TCB 02432].

Yvan Ischer, a consultant for the Swiss Radio Days Jazz Series and a Journalist-Producer for Radio Television Suisse in Lausanne provided this essay entitled Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950: Nat King Cole, Or The Consecration of A Voice which Tony Lewis translated to form the insert notes to the CD that is scheduled to be released 6/9/2017.

“Nat - King - Cole! Try and pronounce these three syllables in different ways: alternate versions quick, lively, slow, sweet, forceful... staccato shots or languorously drawn-out, then finishing up in perfectly regular triplets, say, in medium tempo; Nat... King... Cole! sounding like the traditional opening signal of three strokes of the baton before the rising of the curtain...

"Everything is in everything", as has been said... and indeed, everything is in these three short words, sounding notes so different from one another, just as the multifaceted talent and the changing and moving moods that have traversed the career of one of the true musical Kings: Nathaniel Adams Coles, alias Nat King Cole!

Get Me to the Church on Time!

Born on March 17, 1917, St. Patrick's Day, the very young Nat, encouraged and stimulated by his mother Perlina, studied formal piano as well as obtaining the best schooling possible. He also furnished organ accompaniment for the choir his mother directed at the Truetight Spiritual Temple in South Chicago, where his father Edward also provided his talents, as preacher. His beginnings couldn't be more auspicious, and we know that the young Nat, bathed in music from all sides, wasted no time harvesting everything he could in his adopted home Chicago, and it was a place and time of abundance!

While classical music was an important part of the curriculum at the Wendell Phillips High School, it was during this time that he founded his first band, Nat Coles and his Rogues of Rhythm, in which his brother Eddie played bass after a stint with Noble Sissle's orchestra. Like many great "Chicagoans", young Cole was exposed to the remarkable teaching of "Captain" Walter Dyett of DuSable High School from where over decades would corne top names such as Gene Ammons, Richard Davis, Sonny Cohn, Dorothy Donegan, Von Freeman, Johnny Griffin, Eddie Harris, Johnny Hartman. Wilbur Ware and even Dinah Washington... and this list is far from exhaustive. But even if he was diligent in his music studies, we know that the young pianist gladly pulled off semi-authorized escapades to clubs around town to eagerly devour the music, and to discover and meet his heroes, the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Noone and Earl Hines...

And as The Windy City has always had a number of powerful and inventive instrumentalists, it was common to witness furious contests between bands who would fight it out at clubs with two stages, in battles that could last until dawn... it is said that the first title of nobility bestowed on Nat was thanks to the victory won by his Rogues over the band of Eari "Fatha" Hines himself, one of the idols of his youth, as part of a "Battle of the Bands" held at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. He was awarded the promising title of "Prince of the Ivories"! It was just a short climb from then on, to mount resolutely to the throne...

What a Difference a Voice Makes...

A throne that would be tongue-in-cheeked into existence by Bob Lewis, the director of the Swanee Inn in Hollywood, after hiring a young pianist whom he had heard solo at the Century Club, and who had just finished a gig with the musical Shuffle Along(which had brought him to California in the first place). After insisting that he perform in trio, Lewis then suggested that Nathaniel Cole wear a crown during the two-week engagement, thus baptizing him inevitably Nat "King" Cole! The gig lasted... six months, and although the crown didn't survive the absurdity of the situation, the nickname unexpectedly stuck, although undeniably, few voices were as royal as this King's!

Having been asked to feature his singing, Nat seems at first very reluctant to "betray" his piano playing... Given that our piano virtuoso has chops way beyond common and with no trouble at all would be considered a top instrumentalist, it's just that in a time and place with an overabundance of pianists, each one more remarkable than the other, sometimes it takes a little "nothing" to make an historic difference. And like back in his church choir beginnings, he was able to familiarize himself with all imaginable voices and even add his own to the maternal chorus... he could certainly go a little out of his way to satisfy his employer.

In fact, with his inimitable voice (except in the case of Oscar Peterson, who paid tribute to his idol in a striking manner in With Respect to Nat), he opened up simultaneously the hearts of his female fans, and the gates of glory! Thanks to this voice of Sucrier Velours (a song title borrowed from a Duke, that of Ellington), he could embellish his trio sets with a few vocal numbers, with a grace and relaxation that made him one of the most adulated crooners of his time. All the more so since the first trio he formed in 1937 with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince was already bursting with swing and inventiveness. And if the color of his skin had not been the inevitable social brake to even more recognition in an era when one did not joke with this often crippling circumstance (any resemblance to a time a bit closer to us.-, etc... etc...), how far would that King have made it?

It should also be said that very early on, Nat had the presentiment that success would only happen through the media of radio, and later television. After making highly regarded debuts on NBC and CBS, he spent liberally (especially his own money) producing programs in which he himself assumed the risk. Then in 1943, the trio signed with Capitol Records, a record company that would soon be rubbing its hands in glee at this very fruitful collaboration. The contract would force him to make a few small patronymic pirouettes, since Cole kept a desire to acquiesce to the solicitations of friends who wanted to include his talent on one session or another. For example, it was under the discrete and powerfully original pseudonym of "Aye Guy" that he was the third member of the album released under the name The Lester Young/Buddy Rich Trio! And when the first records of Jazz at the Philharmonic appeared on... Mercury, the pianist took the alias "Shorty Nadine", based on his wife's first name... In what remains today of the video images of Nat, fortunately more filmed than many of his contemporaries also deserving of TV coverage, demonstrates beyond a doubt that the man certainly had not only an incredible talent, but also a class and a kind of effortlessness that seemed truly to have fallen from heaven. As for his miraculously placed phrasing (decidedly, for Nat, Heaven couldn't wait…), whether vocal or on piano, it is the absolute epitome of swing!

Straighten Up and Fly Right... to Zurich 1950!

So now... To discover an unreleased concert - aside from the few radio broadcasts over the decades and the inevitable low-quality bootlegs making occasional appearances - is a priceless gift. All the more so, as the recording of this 1950 performance given at the Korigresshaus in Zurich recreates faithfully what was played that evening, in a quality worthy of praise for the sound engineer. We have chosen to use the original magnetic tapes in order to preserve the entirety of its "presence", and its truth! At the risk of understatement, the music presented here is uniquely deserving of all these attentions.

In 1950 Nat presented a brilliant trio, beautifully road-tested, using the formula tried and approved by him consisting of guitar, piano and double bass. It is the impeccable Irving Ashby and Joe Comfort who share the stage with him, along with a recent discovery. Some time earlier, Nat had the opportunity to perform on a shared billing with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, at which he discovered and was very much impressed with the percussionist Jack Costanzo, aka Mr. Bongo. Less "invasive" than a drummer for the intimate music that he had in mind, while still spectacular and vibrant, it seems that he considered Jack's enhancement to the trio for part of the set to be indispensable. No sooner said than done, or almost... as Jack Costanzo himself tells us, in a telephone interview he gave us in December 2016!

The three musicians plus one are thick as thieves on the Zurich stage, alternating between standards and the trio's hits with a verve and a good humor which are pure pleasure to listen to. Nat isn't too concerned about delivering perfection, and lets himself go here and there with little "slips" and nicely risky flights, ideas flowing in uninterrupted improvisation, giving these interpretations a unique flavor and freshness. The arrangements, stuffed with tasty and rhythmically impeccable morsels, are a constant treat for today's listeners and should serve as a reminder to those who have had the luck to have lived a moment like that, either on stage or off, of what a privilege it was. One could even see it as a Royal privilege!

Isn't that right, Mr. Bongo?

Yvan lscher

January 2017

Jack Costanzo, alias Mr. Bongo

Jack Costanzo is a legend... and still a living one, born September 24,1919! While preparing this release of the 1950 Zurich concert of the Hat King Cole Trio and knowing that on occasion he still showed up here and there at concerts of his friends to play bongos on a few numbers, we decided to make him aware of the recording - by telephone! We spoke to him at his Lakeside, California home, his head overflowing with fond memories and ever enthusiastic, remembering this blessed period of his life as a busy and well-known musician. Naturally, Jack completely charmed us...

Telephone interview with Jack Costanzo, alias Mr. Bongo, December of 2016;

"Hellooooo!!""Mr. Bongo?""That's my name!"

"Man, it's so great getting to talk to you. i fell on some review telling that you were still playing from time to time, bringing your bongos to sit in with buddies... And I said to myself... I've got to talk to this guy!"

"Well! Here I am!"

"So, you keep on playing from time to time?"

"Well... once in a while... you know, I'm 97 now! What can you do at 97.,,?"

'To get in the mood, let me play something for you from Zurich in 1950..."

"OK!" (Bop Kick suddenly bursts into the telephone, at a breakneck tempo... and after a few seconds...) "I don't remember that... Oh yes! Is that Bop Kick? I do remember!"

"Jack, how did you meet Nat Cole for the first time?"

"I was in Stan Kenton's band. We were doing a job in a theater and Nat was in town. We eventually got together I can't remember if we were on the same program, but it's where I met Nat."

"What kind of man was he to you?"

"Oh! I loved Nat Cole... I thought he was a marvelous man."

"How did you work with the trio?"

"I didn't play on the ballads. I decided that I didn't want to play on the ballads because I couldn't do anything. And that was the main thing I did when I joined the trio. And Nat agreed with me. He said: just move your hands as though you are playing and then they won't know..." (Enormous explosion of laughter) "I was up there and on all the ballads, I'd move my hands and people wouldn't hear anything... but they thought probably that I was just not playing loud..."

"I read in some column that at first Nat hired someone whom he thought to be you! How's that possible?"

"Yes! It's very simple! I'll tell you how it happened. A person that said that he was me had joined Stan Kenton two months before that playing conga drums, and not bongos. And when Nat put the ad in the paper saying that he wanted to talk with the bongo player with the Kenton Band, he answered the ad! Stan had just broken the band up and I was in Florida for a vacation. So I didn't know that Nat was looking for me. And he thought he got me when the guy told him he was the bongo player with the Kenton band, which he was not..- He was the conga drummer! And Nat was working at this club in Chicago, that's where we are all from. Now... my brother had talked with me on the phone and asked me if I knew about that bongo thing. And I said I didn't know anything about that. So he went to see Nat at the gig and told him: do you really want to get the guy who played the bongos with the Kenton band? And Nat said to him: sure, and I've got him! So my brother showed him my picture and told him: if this is the guy you wanted, it's my brother and... well, you don't have him!" (Laughing,,.)

"How come you fell in love with bongos?"

"I guess I just liked rhythm. I was a dancer. I was working a ballroom in Chicago where we were doing jitterbug and all these swinging dances. And one day they brought a band from Puerto Rico. They came in for two weeks, something we never did there. So... I heard the band, and the drummer on one number came up front and played the bongos. I just went crazy.., he was probably not even a good player but at that time how would I know?... But I decided right away I was going to be a bongo player. And so my brother helped me build my own bongos and I played! In those days, Latin music was not very much known. There were no bongo players around."

"And you went three times to Havana, right?"

"Yes, I went there three times in the fifties, in 1951, '53 and '55. And though I did not work there, naturally, I sat in with local players. And they were amazed that an American played their instrument. And number two played it well..." (Laughs)

"What kind of relation did you have with drummers at the time, since it could get uneasy sometimes, trying to get the same pulse feeling?"

"Well... the drummer in the band was learning how to play Latin music with me. For example, with Shelly Manne... we were dear friends... friends 'till the end of the world-.- And I did show him different things about Latin music."

"When you were playing in the trio, was Nat close to you guys or was he sort of the star that he would become a little bit later?"

"He didn't change his attitude at all. Never! When I joined the band, they made some little fuss because I had a pretty good name by then. But outside of that, no! Nat and I turned to be very buddy-buddy. He was a classy guy but he never ever made us feel low. He always had the band feel important. And that's true that we were important!" (Laughing...)

The following video features Nat and the the trio on Bobby Troup’s Route 66, which along with How High The Moon and Sweet Lorraine would have a close association with Nat during the trio years of his career.

↧

Billy Strayhorn: Singular Unsung Genius by John Edward Hasse

June 6, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich

≪ Previous: Nat King Cole Trio - Zurich 1950 [Swiss Radio Days Vol. 43]

“They were like two aspects of a single complex self. Where Duke Ellington was immodest, priapic and thumpingly egocentric, his longtime writing and arranging partner, Billy Strayhorn, was shy, gay and self-effacing. It's now very difficult, given the closeness of their relationship and their inevitable tendency to draw on aspects of the other's style and method, to separate which elements of an

'Ellington-Strayhorn' composition belong to each; but there is no doubt that Swee' Pea, as Ellington called him, made an immense impact on his boss's music. Even if he had done no more than write 'Lush Life' and 'Take The "A" Train', Strayhorn would still have been guaranteed a place in jazz history.

The ground-rules have shifted a little since the publication of David Hajdu's 1997 biography of Strayhorn, a book which intends no disrespect to the genius of Duke Ellington but which relocates some significant emphases and suggests that Strayhorn may have had a greater part in creating the Ellington sound than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, it may be that association with Ellington significantly redirected aspects of Strayhorn's own talent; whether to his benefit or loss remains ambiguous.”

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

The following piece by John Edward Hasse appeared in the May 30, 2017 edition of The Wall Street Journal and it, too, helps redress the general lack of awareness of Billy’s immense contribution to the Ellington compositional oeuvre.

“Duke Ellington led the greatest jazz orchestra for 50 years, and for 27 of them Billy Strayhorn was his indispensable musical partner. Strayhorn composed its exuberant theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” co-authored the perennial “Satin Doll,” and wrote more than 100 other works. Theirs was a different-drummer collaboration, one of the most unusual in musical history. Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, it’s time to give Billy his due.

They worked together in three ways. Some pieces, like “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” were wholly written by Strayhorn. As if handing arias to his favorite soprano, Strayhorn wrote a number of ballads to feature Ellington’s star alto saxophonist, Johnny Hodges, including the haunting “Passion Flower” and the ravishing “Isfahan.”

Sometimes working over the phone, the two composers wrote pieces such as “C Jam Blues.”

And in suites such as “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Far East Suite,” the individual movements had separate authors. The collaborative composing of Strayhorn with Ellington is extremely rare, if not downright unprecedented in orchestral music.

So crucial was Strayhorn to the building of Ellington’s repertoire that many of the original compositions are yin-yangs, the result of two contrasting creative forces coming together. Unlike Ellington, Strayhorn was well-trained in European classical music and brought his own sensibility and style, as in his impressionistic tone poem, “ Chelsea Bridge ” (1941). Ellington’s sound was rooted more deeply in the African-American vernacular of ragtime and blues—for example in his well-disguised minor-key blues, “Ko-Ko” (1940).

Yet, even 50 years after his passing, Strayhorn’s name is, I would guess, not even one-tenth as familiar as Ellington’s to people other than jazz aficionados.

In their personal lives, the two were opposites. While the handsome, charismatic, 6-foot-1-inch Ellington moved through life with dash and theatricality, charming women and manipulating people, the cherubic Strayhorn was 16 years younger, 10 inches shorter, soft-spoken, modest and gay. Despite these differences, they formed an exceedingly close musical relationship that ended only with Strayhorn’s death, at age 51.

That relationship was complicated. Strayhorn seemed to need a father figure—that was the domineering Ellington who loved and accepted him and provided a home base for his enormous creativity. But Strayhorn wanted credit for his creativity and eventually grew angry with Ellington’s stinginess with attribution. At a crucial dinner in 1956, Billy demanded equal billing—and Duke agreed.

Why was Strayhorn a shadow figure in the Ellington story for so long? Ellington, with his large ego and controlling personality, was, at best, careless at assigning composer credit and royalties to Strayhorn. Shy and retiring, Strayhorn avoided the limelight. Ellington’s late-career publicist Joe Morgen was antigay and diligently kept Strayhorn’s name out of the press. Prejudice prevailed. Some record producers preferred the simplicity of a single name on an album.

A lack of primary sources had long hindered scholarly assessment. But in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution began cataloging and making available the Duke Ellington Collection, a treasure newly acquired from Duke’s son, Mercer, of some hundred thousand pages of unpublished scores and parts written by Ellington and Strayhorn and a few other collaborators. This sparked an Ellington renaissance, opened up access to Strayhorn’s handwritten manuscripts, and enabled authoritative insight into the contrast in their styles and who wrote what.

In 1990-93, when I was writing my biography of Ellington, the basic research on Strayhorn hadn’t been done. Since then, three works have appeared that have considerably raised his critical standing: David Hajdu’s pioneering “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” (1996), Walter van de Leur’s scholarly “Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn” (2002), and Robert Levi’s revealing PBS documentary “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” (2007).

And work on Strayhorn goes on. The Strayhorn family repository of original manuscripts has helped unveil heretofore unknown compositions. In the year 2000 alone, Strayhorn Songs copyrighted 200 newly discovered titles.

Beyond his output for Ellington, Strayhorn moved in other intriguing orbits. Before joining Ellington, Strayhorn composed classical-sounding pieces and a successful musical revue, “Fantastic Rhythm.” In the 1940s, he became the soul mate of singer Lena Horne and worked with her in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. And he composed a number of pieces totally independent of Ellington, most notably the arresting, world-weary ballad “Lush Life”—one of America’s premier popular songs—written when he was a teenager.

Ellington deeply loved, admired and depended on Strayhorn. Three months after his passing, the Ellington orchestra began recording a sorrowful, sometimes angry, tribute album made up almost entirely of Strayhorn compositions, “…And His Mother Called Him Bill”—one of the band’s finest works. It’s well worth a listen. Let’s finally give Billy his due.”

— Mr. Hasse is Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian and author of “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.”

↧

Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich

June 7, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Rhythmstick

≪ Previous: Billy Strayhorn: Singular Unsung Genius by John Edward Hasse

Mr recent posting about the newly released Nat King Cole Trio’s 1950 performance in Zurich brought to mind Nat’s work on another of my favorite recording - Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich - which was recorded in 1946 by Norman Granz for his Clef Records label and released on CD as Verve 314 521 650-2.

Because Nat had been under contract with Capitol since 1943 he surreptitiously made these recordings using the pseudonym “Aye Guy.”

Granz and Cole had a close friendship dating back to the early 1940s when Norman used to hang out at the Swanee Inn in Hollywood where Nat’s trio was featured, but his career as a concert impresario and record producer didn’t really kick off until the close of WWII in 1945.

Nat would be the headliner for Norman’s second Jazz at the Philharmonic concert which took place on July 30, 1945 at Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles at which Buddy Rich also performed.

Recorded in April, 1946 and initially issued on Mercury Records, Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich would ultimately be among the first recordings that Norman re-released as 78 rpms on Clef Records upon its founding in June, 1947.

Lester’s association with Norman dates back to the early 1940’s when he co-led a band with his brother, drummer Lee Young, that Norman often listen to in the clubs on Central Avenue in Los Angeles when he was a student at UCLA. This early relationship with Lester was to culminate in photographer/director Gijon Mili’s cult film “Jammin’ the Blues” which was released in theaters in December 1944 and for which Norman hired the musicians and served as recording supervisor and producer.

As explained in Bill Kirchner’s insert notes to the Verve CD reissue of Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich, the bond between Lester and Norman would become even closer when Young signed a personal management contract with Granz in 1946.

Bill is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Jazz, an excellent saxophonist who heads up his own notet and a distinguished music educator. Over the years, he has also been extremely kind to these pages in allowing his work to be featured on them.

To put things in perspective, during the formative years of his association with Jazz, Norman Granz, essentially hung out with the three musicians that recorded the music for Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich.

With the early guidance and friendship of these Grand Jazz Masters, is it any wonder that Norman later went on to do great things in the music?

Reissuing Lester Young Trio

“In the spring of 1946, a lot of things were changing.

World War II had ended, and amid vast alterations in the world's political landscape, the US was returning to a peacetime economy — though one that was quite different from its Depression-era counterpart. Americans were drawn to new forms of entertainment: network television was in its infancy.

And Lester Young was out of the Army.

Much has been written about the traumatic effects of Young's fourteen months of military service: his arrest, court-martial, and conviction for possession of marijuana and barbiturates: his ten months in the detention barracks at Fort Gordon, Georgia: and then his dishonorable discharge on December 1, 1945. Some of his associates have said that the effects of these events were deep and lasting. And a number of commentators have made the case that, whatever the merits of his postwar playing, he was seldom if ever the joyous Lester Young of his early recordings.

One thing is clear, though: On a single, undetermined date in late March or early April of 1946 (not December 1945 as was previously thought). Lester Young played some music that ranks with his finest recordings. You'll find it in this package.

Hearing Young at the peak of his powers is a pivotal experience in jazz listening. If Louis Armstrong’s rhythmic innovations in the 1920’s made the Swing Era possible, then Lester Young more than any other musician changed the focus of that era. His buoyant, airy sound, his lyricism and unorthodox phrasing, and his comparatively even eighth-note feel fit perfectly with the innovative Count Basie rhythm section.

He made further rhythmic developments by Charlie Christian. Kenny Clarke. Dizzy Gillespie. Charlie Parker, and others not only possible but necessary. (Even in the late Thirties, though. Lester's innovations didn't stand alone. Listen to Django Reinhardt’s 1937 solo on "Japanese Sandman with Dicky Wells, and you'll hear an even eighth-note conception worthy of Wayne Shorter.)

So for hosts of players, including the fledgling Charlie Parker (and later Miles

Davis and Dexter Gordon), Lester Young became an idol whose recorded solos were eagerly memorized. And it wasn't just the instrumentalists who were entranced. Composer-arrangers such as Eddie Finckel. Jimmy Giuffre. and Johnny Mandel incorporated Young's innovations in their scoring. As Finckel. who wrote for the Gene Krupa. Boyd Raeburn and Buddy Rich bands, told historian Jack McKinney. his goal was "orchestrated Lester.” And as Mandel said recently: "Lester was the first to play the saxophone like a percussion instrument. Probably because lie started as a drummer.”

In 1946, Young was perhaps at the height of his influence in jazz. He had just signed a personal management contract with impresario Norman Granz, an association that continued almost until Young's death in 1959. Signing with Granz provided Young with considerable recording opportunities plus lucrative tours with Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP). (Some complained, though, that the often extroverted jam-session formal of JATP was a less than ideal setting for the sensitive Lester.)

The Young-Cole-Rich date was thus a Norman Granz production, though it is unclear whether the idea to record without bass player was Granz's or the musicians'. Whatever, it was an inspired choice.

“These recordings," says Frank Ichmann-Moller in his Lester Young biography, You Just Fight for Your Life, Praeger, New York, 1990),

"are now classics. Every number has a high quality and its own beauty. Lester and Cole really listen to each other all the way through, and Lester is marvelous throughout. When necessary he is very romantic, poetic, dreaming, urgent, melancholy, humorous, cheerful, aggressive, or showing great drive. Because there is no bass player he is also forced away from lying behind the beat, playing much in the same way as he did in his earlier recordings."

Like Lester Young, Nat "King" Cole was a musicians' favorite but he was, more so than Young, a figure of wide popularity. “Straighten Up and Fly Right" had been a hit for the King Cole Trio in 1944, and the group, featuring the leader's piano and vocals and a soon-to-be widely copied piano-guitar-bass format, recorded prolificacy.

Moreover, Cole was one of the most important jazz pianists of the day, with a "crystalline sound'* (as Gene Lees has written), advanced harmonic concept, and impeccable swing. It is not surprising that most of the major jazz pianists who emerged in the next decade and a half — including such disparate stylists as Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Hank Jones, Wynton Kelly, Oscar Peterson, and Bud Powell — were influenced by Cole. (For a sampling of this influence, listen to the opening chorus of “I Want to Be Happy"; such technique was surely not lost on Powell.)

From his beginning as an enfant terrible who sparked the Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey bands. Buddy Rich had become one of the most in-demand drummers of the era. (In 1944, reports Doug Meriwether. Jr. in his bio-discography of Buddy Rich, Count Basie presented Rich with a blank check after Rich filled in for two weeks with the Basie band. Rich graciously declined it.) At the time of these recordings. Rich was appearing in Los Angeles at the helm of his own big band and was thus available for these recordings.

Those who regard Buddy Rich as a flamboyant but not particularly sensitive virtuoso may well be surprised by this session. For one thing, Rich remains almost entirely on brushes, which is perfect for the needs of this group, especially on "I Want to Be Happy". (On “Peg o' My Heart,” he is absent entirely, having gone to get something to eat; Lester was merely fooling around with the Fisher-Bryan chestnut when Nat started filling in behind him. Norman decided to record it and another gem was cut.)

There is no need for a play-by-play description of this music, but it should be pointed out that the most adventurous interplay comes on the two fastest tracks, “I've Found a New Baby” and “I Want to Be Happy.”Lester is exquisite — totally relaxed and in complete control of all registers of his horn. Nat is propulsive yet sensitive — listen to the touches of Earl Hines (an early influence) and Art Tatum that crop up in his playing. Buddy Rich sounds like he's having a ball — you can hear his vocal exhortations.

In fact, all three sound like they're having fun; the prevailing mood is serious yet playful. (Don't miss Lester's quotes from "March of the Toy Soldiers" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" on "I Want to Be Happy".)

In 1950, down beat gave a release of four of these selections its highest rating, saying: "Four magnificent sides, made four years ago, with Lester most often at his fluent best. 'Baby', in addition to some wonderful tenor, has some deft and humorous kidding between Cole's piano and Rich's drumming."

Over four decades later, that review — and this music — still rings true.”

Bill Kirchner, 1993

One of the first tunes I ever played Jazz on was I Found A New Baby [doesn’t everybody?] It’s one of the reasons I selected it as the soundtrack for the following video montage.

↧

Rhythmstick

June 8, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Peter Bernstein - The Bill Milkowski Interview

≪ Previous: Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich

“The young revolutionary of long ago, with the horn-rimmed glasses and the beret and the goatee and the impish smile, had lived to be the elder statesman, the master, the sage of this music, and gathered about him were all these gifted players who were, directly or indirectly, his musical descendants.”"Dizzy changed the way of the world," Phil Woods said. "That music means so much to so many people everywhere."

“The music resumed. Tito Puente and Airto began to cook, Latin rhythm swirled around John Birks Gillespie. He took up his Rhythmstick, and tapped it on the floor, and shook it in the air, this remarkable man who can make music on a stick.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author, critic and editor

Wynton Marsalis, the trumpet playing leader of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, has been quoted as saying: “Change the rhythm and you change the music.”

Such profundity from such an apparently simple statement.

But when the subject is rhythm in Jazz there’s nothing simple about it and the fact that Jazz can readily incorporate so many different rhythms is one of the features that keeps it vibrant; full of the energy that is so much a part of the music’s initial and continuing appeal.

No one in the history of Jazz ever brought more different forms of rhythm to it than John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie.

Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, Samba, Bossa Nova, Tango, Portuguese Fado, and Middle Eastern rhythms are just some of the patterns which are everywhere apparent in Dizzy’s music.

And to top it all off, there’s his Rhythmstick, a gift from a friend and one of the great joys of the latter years of his life.

Rhythmstick [CTI R2 79477] is also the name of one of my favorite albums which was produced by the legendary Creed Taylor in 1990 and features Dizzy along with the “CTI All-Stars.”

Here are Gene Lees’ informative and instructive insert notes to the recording.

“The spirit of Dizzy Gillespie is throughout this album.

It isn't only a matter of his beautiful solos, it is in the influence he has had on the generations of players heard on this recording.

Dizzy was born on October 21,1917; Phil Woods on November 2,1931, when Dizzy was fourteen years old. Dizzy and his partner-in-change, Charlie Parker, would have a profound influence on Phil, and Phil in turn would have a deep influence on younger players. Charlie Haden, born August 6,1937, remembers slipping into an older brother's room to listen to Parker and Gillespie records during the 1940's, when Diz and Bird were expanding the vocabulary of jazz in a music that, for better or worse, became known as bebop.

Benny Golson said of Dizzy, "He was always didactic. Really. He was a teacher without even intending to be."

Yet John Birks Gillespie is unbelievably self-effacing about, his enormous pedagogic effect in jazz. As he arrived for this recording, I told Dizzy, "Everybody I've talked to, Phil Woods, Benny Golson, Art Farmer, said you have always been a great teacher. I remember Nat Adderley said once, “Dizzy's the greatest teacher in the world if you don't let him know he's doing it.”

"Is it true? I don't know about that," he said, and there was a shy embarrassment about him. This was no affectation of modesty; this was genuine humility. "But what little I do know, I'll give it, any time. So I guess it's not actually someone with a whole lot of knowledge giving it out to people. But anything I learned, I'll tell somebody else. That's what they mean by that. I will tell anything that I've learned."

Phil Woods said, "I met Dizzy-in 1956, when we did a State Department tour, first stop Abadan, Iran; next stops Aleppo and Damascus, Syria; then Beirut, Lebanon. All the trouble spots, all the places that are now on fire, the State Department sent Dizzy. I think if they'd sent him one more time, he could have cooled it out.”

"They loved the music. They didn't understand the jazz part, but Dizzy has such an important thing — the rhythm. That grabs people immediately. Dizzy is such a master of rhythm, the Afro, the South American. He was the first cat to fuse the jazz and Cuban and the South American. Dizzy is the cat who discovered that, the first cat who used conga drums and all that, with Chano Pozo. That's a real big contribution of Diz, which is sometimes overlooked — not by musicians, of course. A lot of people know about the bebop part, but not the rhythm. He loves to play drums."

"That stick he carries — did you ever see that, that thing he made out of a stick and Coca-Cola bottle-caps?"

I had indeed. There's no name for this instrument of Dizzy's invention. It is a pole, like a piece of broomstick, with pop-bottle caps, hammered flat, mounted on nails along its length, like little stacks of finger cymbals. He can bounce it on the floor and kick it with his toe and stomp a beat with his foot or shake that stick in the air, setting up the damnedest swing you ever heard. I just call it Dizzy's Rhythmstick.

Phil said, "I once flew back with him on the Concorde. When you travel with Dizzy, it's -incredible. .He was carrying that stick, right through the metal detector at the airport. The detector flipped out with a hundred Coca-Cola caps rattling. And all the control people cheered and applauded: here comes Dizzy with that silly stick. He plays it all the way through the airport; you can hear him a mile away."

Phil's view of Dizzy's rhythmic influence was echoed by Flora Purim, who, with her husband Airto, had just returned from a European tour with Dizzy. Flora said, "It was great working with Dizzy. Dizzy is one of the greatest teachers. He shows you ways of handling life. When he goes onstage, and the music changes, it's so easy, so humorous. Everything is a laugh, it's fun, and if it's not fun, he doesn't want to do it. He's been a big inspiration to us lately. During the past year we've been touring with him."

Romero Lubambo, an excellent young guitarist from Brazil, talked of Dizzy's influence on his country's music. He said, "The whole time I was in Brazil, I liked to listen to American musicians to learn how to improvise, how to play jazz. Now I am playing with the greatest musicians in the world, I. think. For me, it is fantastic. We used a lot of the American know-how of jazz improvising. For me, American jazz and Brazilian music are sympatico."

When Dizzy arrived at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, the music that was in rehearsal stopped so that all the musicians could greet him. There was an aura about him. It wasn't exactly a matter of people lining up to pay tribute: jazz musicians are too democratic, the music itself is -too democratic, for obeissance. But it certainly was an "homage," in the way the French use that word. The young revolutionary of long ago, with the horn-rimmed glasses and the beret and the goatee and the impish smile, had lived to be the elder statesman, the master, the sage of this music, and gathered about him were all these gifted players who were, directly or indirectly, his musical descendants.

"Dizzy changed the way of the world," Phil Woods said. "That music means so much to so many people everywhere."-

The music resumed. Tito Puente and Airto began to cook, Latin rhythm swirled around John Birks Gillespie. He took up his Rhythmstick, and tapped it on (he floor, and shook it in the air, this remarkable man who can make music on a stick.

1. Caribe, a composition by Michel Camilo, opens with a -piano solo by Hilton Ruiz and Brazilian forest sounds. Actually they are coming from the collection of percussion instruments used, and in some cases invented, by Airto.'Then Dizzy shows how at home he is in the complexities of Latin rhythms. The burning tenor solo is by Bob Berg.

2. Friday Night at the Cadillac Club is a piece Bob Berg wrote to recall a rough-and-ready New Jersey nightclub where he used to work. He plays the tenor solo, which is followed by a hot but pretty trumpet solo by Art Farmer, then some typically all-out alto by Phil Woods, earthy guitar from Robben Ford, and a steaming organ solo by Jim Beard.

3. Quilombo. It is more than twenty-five years since the bossa nova movement burst on the United States and we became familiar with the propulsive character of Brazilian guitar and percussion. That sound is still there, but a good many younger songwriters and singers have come up, one of the most exciting being Gilberto Gil. This is his song. The guitar is that of Romero Lubambo, the voices are led by Flora Purim. Phil Woods plays eight bars leading into a duet with Bob Berg. Airto shouts encouragement from behind his percussion instruments, and then Art Farmer comes in again. As Dizzy said, "Art Farmer plays so pretty,"

4. Barbados. This is a blues by Charlie Parker and, appropriately, Phil Woods, one of his most brilliant successors, leads it off. The bassist is the wonderful Charlie Haden, another of the universalists who have grown up in jazz.

5. Waiting for Angela is an exquisite ballad by Toninho Horta, with lyrics by Flora Purim. Bob Berg plays the soprano saxophone obligate and solo. The lovely synthesizer work is that of Jim Beard.

6. Nana is by the outstanding Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and composer Moacir Santos. One of the things Santos has done is to draw such American influences as bugaloo into the music of Brazil. This is an example of this land of alloy. Bob Berg and Phil Woods are featured. Jim Beard plays the funk-filled piano solo.

7. Softly as in a Morning Sunrise is from the 1928 musical The New Moon. Creed Taylor drily commented, as Art Farmer and Romero Lubambo began it, "You know, Sigmund Romberg didn't write this as a samba," But it works beautifully that way. This track occurred utterly impromptu at the session. Art plays flugelhorn, his usual instrument in recent years.

8. Colo de Rio is by Enio Flavio Mol and Marcelo Ferreira. The amazing thing is the facility and intonation with which Flora negotiates the high-speed syllables. Phil Woods, Art Fanner, Bob Berg, and Romero Lubambo are soloists, with lovely synthesizer effects from Jim Beard.

9. Palisades in Blue is by Benny Golson, the widely admired—and widely played—jazz composer who co-led the celebrated Jazztet with Art Farmer. After many years as a film and television composer, Benny—who arranged this album—has returned full-time to the jazz world. This tune somewhat recalls his earlier and hugely successful -Killer Joe. The soloists are Phil Woods, Art Farmer, Bob Berg, Robben Ford, and Jimmy McGriff.

10. Wamba was written by the African composer Salif Keita. The opening time signature is six:eight, but the song is, in fact, polyrhythmic. Bob Berg, Airto, Flora Purim, Tito Puente, Phil Woods, and Dizzy are featured. Airto and Tito play a percussion duet, followed by Dizzy's Rhythmstick exchanges with Tito's timbales. Dizzy is in the center channel; you can hear him tapping the stick on the floor as the synthesizer comes in. Dizzy picks up his famous trumpet and becomes the center of it all; he has been for more than forty years, this American national treasure.”

The following video feature my favorite track from Rhythmstick [CTI R2 79477], Bob Berg’s Friday Night at the Cadillac Club with Bernard Purdie’s pulsating backbeats powering everyone to exciting flights of solo fancy.

↧

Peter Bernstein - The Bill Milkowski Interview

June 9, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "To The Ladies" - Annie Ross

≪ Previous: Rhythmstick

Guitarist Peter Bernstein and author, writer and critic Bill Milkowski are two of my favorite Jazz people.

Imagine my delight, then, when I came across the following interview that Bill conducted with Peter for the June 2016 edition of Downbeat..

What was particularly appealing to me is that in their talk, Bill addresses many of the aspects of Pete’s playing and approach to Jazz that have been of interest to me for some time and which I attempted to treat in a previous feature on Pete that appeared on these pages way back when “the Blog was young.”

Drummer Bill Stewart’s comment about Peter’s use of space; Brad Meldhau’s view that what Peter plays never sounds arbitrary; Jimmy Cobb’s impression of Pete sounding like Grant Green; Milkowski’s description of Peter’s “warm, inviting and pure tone;” Peter’s own thoughts about what it takes to play in a solo setting: all of these comments resonated with me because I had long thought that these and other qualities are what made Pete’s style of playing so remarkable.

This is one of the most articulate interviews with a Jazz musician that I ever read which is a credit both to Bill for asking “all the right questions” and to Peter’s ability to articulate answers to them.

Peter Bernstein: The Craftsman - Bill Milkowski

“THERE IS AN UNCOMMON COMMUNION THAT HAPPENS WHEN Peter Bernstein takes his gorgeous-toned Zeidler guitar on stage. No matter what the setting—whether it's in the longstanding trio with organist Larry Goldings and drummer Bill Stewart, leading his own quartet, playing in Cobb's Mob (led by the irrepressibly swinging drummer Jimmy Cobb), playing solo or performing in guitar duos — Bernstein gracefully gets inside a tune and finds a different path through it

every night.

"Peter's playing has a lot of space and vowels in it," said Stewart, who appears on Bernstein's new album, Let Loose (Smoke Sessions), alongside pianist Gerald Clayton and bassist Doug Weiss. "It's easy to get things swinging or grooving with Pete. He doesn't just float over a rhythm section — he gets in the center of it all, time-wise. That makes things really fun for me. The way he plays melodies is a key part of the chemistry of our trio with Larry Goldings."

Another longtime colleague, pianist Brad Mehldau — who appeared on a string of Bernstein's Criss Cross Jazz albums in the mid-'90s and is a charter member of Cobb's Mob — described Bernstein's singular approach in his liner notes to the guitarist's 2003 album, Heart's Content: "Whenever I hear Pete play a standard, it never sounds arbitrary. He always seems to create a definitive version of a tune, one that intersects gracefully between an unapologetic affectation for the original song and his own personal musical choices for his arrangement."

Bernstein's playing is devoid of affectation and artifice. There are no six-string cliches dredged up while navigating his way through the Great American Songbook. Instead, he lets each tune speak for itself, treating the melody lovingly while sustaining a unique brand of relaxed rhythmic authority, a clarity of ideas, cleanliness of execution and remarkable sense of pacing.

"I liked Pete right away, when I first met him over 25 years ago when I was teaching at the New School," Cobb recalled. "Pete sounded like a guitar player I was particularly fond of, Grant Green. We eventually started doing little gigs around town and Pete was the one who suggested that we call the group Cobb's Mob. We worked a few gigs to start, and it's been 20 years or more now, man. We're very comfortable playing together. When I'm on the bandstand with Pete, it's all good."

George Coleman — who enlisted Bernstein for his recent album, A Master Speaks (Smoke Sessions) — concurred with Cobb's assessment of the 48-year-old guitarist's abilities on the bandstand: "The thing that is so great about Pete is his flexibility. He can play anything — blues, Latin, bebop, whatever you want. And he does some of those old songs that people his age shouldn't know, but he knows 'em."

Bernstein's sonic aesthetic — he plays with a warm, inviting, pure tone with his guitar plugged straight into the amp, sans effects — along with his irrepressible swing factor and his encyclopedic knowledge of just about every tune Thelonious Monk ever wrote (check his brilliant 2009 Monk tribute album on the Xanadu label), has made him in-demand among contemporaries like keyboardist Mike LeDonne, tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander and trumpeter Jim Rotondi. And a younger generation of guitarists, including Rale Micic and Rotem Sivan, is all too eager to engage in duets with someone they regard as a revered elder statesman, just as Bernstein once regarded his own mentor, Jim Hall.

DownBeat caught up with Bernstein a couple of days after he returned home to New York following a tour with Goldings and Stewart in Europe, where they had recorded a follow-up to 2014's Ramshackle Serenade for the Pirouet label.

A COMMON THREAD IN YOUR EXPANSIVE DISCOGRAPHY IS YOUR BEAUTIFUL SOUND. OBVIOUSLY, IT'S SOMETHING THAT'S VERY IMPORTANT TO YOU.

To me, that's what attracts people to all the great players in jazz. Their sound is like their personality. You hear Bird, you hear Lester Young, you hear their sounds, it's their character come to life. You hear masters like Jim Hall, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell... and everything is wrapped up in their tone. Tone is a broad term; it includes the sound of one note but also the sound of their phrasing and also their thought process.

YOU HAVE A VERY WARM TONE, BUT IT PROJECTS WITH A LOT OF CLARITY. THE ARTICULATION IS VERY CLEAN.

I'm working on it. I'm glad I listen to a lot of trumpet players and saxophone players because you try to approximate their articulation, which you can't really do because it's a whole different process for making the sound. But if you have something in your head, maybe the technique can be more about what you're trying to play than about upstrokes or downstrokes or technical things like that. But it's really wrapped up in your flow of ideas. And listening to guys like Miles, they seem to play from their sound, where each note is a color, which allows for more abstraction in the music. Then there are guys who play really literal and just harmonically perfect. And you try to combine the two— you want to play with the abstract, where you're all about the sound, and yet you want to be able to express an idea very clearly, harmonically and rhythmically.

WHO ARE SOME OF THE MASTERS WHO EMBODY THIS QUALITY?

I got to play with Bobby Hutcherson at Dizzy's a few years ago, which ended up on a CD [2012's Somewhere In The Night on Kind of Blue Records]. I was four feet away from him, thinking, "How is this man just hitting metal bars with wooden sticks with cotton on the end and making such an expressive statement?" The instrument is just like ... it's him! He's imbuing it with his thoughts and feelings. That's a miraculous thing. The instrument itself disappears when you're talking about a master on that level.

Jimmy Cobb is another, for sure. He was 60 years old when I first met him and now he's 86, and he's still cooking! To be able to grow up as a musician — learning about time, how to phrase, how to swing — in the presence of this master. I mean, how lucky am I?

YOU TOURED WITH SONNY ROLLINS IN 2012 AND APPEAR ON HIS RECENT ALBUM, ROAD SHOWS VOL. 4: HOLDING THE STAGE. WHAT WAS THAT EXPERIENCE LIKE?

Getting to play with him and just be around him was a blessing. He's one of the originators of the language. Sonny taught us how to interpret tunes, how to stretch out ... all these things. Being on the bandstand with him, you can hear him thinking, you can hear that he's playing with an idea. That's so thrilling to me.

YOU STUDIED WITH JIM HALL. WHAT WAS HIS APPROACH TO TEACHING?

He was teaching a class at the New School when I went there. He had a bunch of guitar players in class and he would play with us, comp for us, and make us sound way better than we actually did. But it was incredible to be around him and see him make that sound, see how he can listen. And now when I teach I find myself saying stuff that he told me. Jim would say things like, "Playing music is its own reward; don't expect anything from music." Or he'd say, "You can put sounds out in the world and they can be from a positive place or they can be from another place."

Just being around him was inspiring... such a great human being. And he had a genuine interest in what his students were doing. If someone played something that interested him, Jim would stop the class and say, "Show us what you did there." That was kind of cool, He showed us that being a teacher is about being curious and learning as much as you can.

The best teachers I had made me think about choices I was making. They don't have to tell me the right way—they just have to make me figure out a better way. It's like they're telling me, "You know enough already to figure out the better way; don't be lazy and not take the time to figure it out," Jim was like that.

His approach was a very different approach from Ted Dunbar, who I studied with at Rutgers in the fall of'85. While Jim's approach was more abstract — he taught me, just by example, about the connection between musicianship and humanity—Ted's approach was much more methodical. He had books on the fingerboard, books on harmony. He has every chord you can play on the guitar in a book. He'd tell me, "Don't just be a guitar player that's in the world of guitarists. You gotta listen to the horn players and singers to learn about phrasing and listen to the piano players and arrangers to learn about harmony, and hang out with drummers and bass players to learn about rhythm."

Ted was very important to me in terms of showing me that every tune has something to teach you about music, something to teach you about the guitar. I only stayed at Rutgers for one year, but I got something from him that stuck with me for a long time.

TALK ABOUT YOUR AFFINITY FOR MONK'S MUSIC.

I love piano players in general but Monk always really spoke to me. For me, as a guitarist, it was about learning the intricacies of the music, learning what you can play and what you can't play. But I find with Monk, he was about not playing every note in the chord but finding which notes intervallically he wanted to bring out. And you have to reduce on the guitar. You can't play the Bill Evans type lush voicings with the cluster and then the triad; you can't grab all those notes, so you have to think about what to leave out. And that automatically puts you in that Monk zone, in a way, because he was conscious about not only what notes to leave out but how to play each note in a voicing. He would phrase each note in a chord, where he would bring out a certain note in a certain way, which is technique on a different level than just velocity and speed but more about control of the sound.

Ultimately, I found that a lot of Monk's stuff laid better on the guitar than you would've thought. Even in the original flat keys. Because the open strings give you those dissonant notes, which work so well with his music. I think if Monk had played guitar he would've loved open strings. He would've definitely made something of that.

YOUR ALBUM S0L0 GUITAR: LIVE AT SMALLS WAS A TRIUMPH. HOW DID THAT PROJECT COME ABOUT?

For me, playing solo is a brief excursion into the terrifying void of "Oh my god! It's just me out here." Which makes me appreciate the company even more when I get to play with people again. When you play solo, that's really about choices. How do you express the idea? For me, it's about what to leave out without leaving out the important stuff. ... I played solo at Smalls for the early set on Mondays, just trying to tackle my fears of playing solo. So [in October 2012] Spike [Wilner, the owner of Smalls] just decided to record it because he already had set up the mics for recording the set after me, which was Rodney Green's group. So my solo recording wasn't ever intended to be [an album] at all.

DO YOU HAVE A FEAR OF MAKING MISTAKES IN A SOLO SETTING?

It's not so much mistakes — it's just about trying to finish your thoughts and present something that has some shape, that's not just a guy playing some notes and chords. Playing solo really taught me a lot about trying to get inside the song, because if you just resort to blowing licks on the chords, it doesn't make any sense because there's no context for it.

It really made me approach that idea of, "Man, I gotta keep playing the song." Maybe I have one little chorus semi-worked out with some voicings I want to do to interpret the tune. Because once you start to get away from the song you really lose the focus. And with solo it's also about trying to control the flow — when you go into time, when you play rubato, having the courage of your convictions to go in a different direction with authority.

It's hard to do that by yourself. Every decision is on you. You can't react; you have to be proactive in a solo setting. So it's exhausting but it's a challenge that I enjoy.

YOU MENTIONED THAT YOU STILL SET ASIDE TIME TO PRACTICE. YOU'RE ON SUCH A HIGH LEVEL, WHAT IS THERE FOR YOU TO PRACTICE AT THIS POINT?

Anything and everything — from F blues to "Happy Birthday" in every key, to whatever comes to mind. It doesn't matter because, to me, when you're dealing with improvising there's always the challenge of finding new ways to express your thoughts. If you're on tour and you're playing some of the same tunes every night, if it was good last night, the idea is to not play it like that tonight. That's not acceptable. You can't just play the same notes as you did yesterday and pass it off like it's spontaneous — because it's not. You have to get into a place where you play a phrase and you build from that. You're telling a story. What's it about? The topic is the form of the tune, the harmony of the tune, where it moves and where it goes. But you're required every time to be off-the-cuff with it, not relying on some hip shit that worked for you last night.

The challenge is making up a new story every night, together with your bandmates. It's like a game of cards and we keep changing the rules of the game. But it's still the same deck of cards; it's still the same 12 notes. You're trying to express a thought and continue it, and that's a continuous challenge. So you keep practicing because you keep wanting to learn new forms, new material. Because it's just a deck of cards. You keep coming up with new games. And your knowledge of cards or music, your instrument, enables you to keep playing the game.”

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"To The Ladies" - Annie Ross

June 10, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Jazz Drumming - Whitney Balliett

≪ Previous: Peter Bernstein - The Bill Milkowski Interview

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has had a feature on vocalist Annie Ross of Lambert-Hendricks-Ross fame in the works for some time now, but the discovery of the October 1998 issue of Gene Lees’ JazzLetter and his anecdote about girl-singer jokes pushed the project front-and-center at this time.

At the conclusion of this piece, you will find a video with Annie performing her famous version of tenor saxophone Wardell Gray’s Twisted on a 1959 TV show accompanied by the Count Basie Septet. She is joined later by Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks in a stirring version of Everyday I Have The Blues, a tune long-associated with then-Basie vocalist Joe Williams who also makes a brief appearance in the video.

TO THE LADIES

“Here is the latest girl-singer joke.

Pianist calls for a rehearsal. Says to the girl singer, "I want to go over Autumn Leaves. We'll start in G-minor. At bar five, we'll modulate to B-flat major. You'll do three bars in five-four time, and the next bar we'll go to D-major." He continues these complex instructions until the girl protests:

"But you can't expect me to do all that!"

"Why not?" he says. "You did it last night."

Girl-singer jokes are like Polish jokes, Brazilian jokes about the Portuguese, and Canadian jokes about the Newfies. Sample:

"How many girl singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

Answer: "Just one. She'll get the piano player to do it anyway."

Another: "Why does the girl singer knock at her own door?"

Answer: "She can't find her key."

I laugh at these jokes, like everyone else. But the discomfitting truth is that they reflect a deep hostility in the jazz world toward singers, and particularly from pianists, who often resent playing for singers. (This is because pianists are Great Artists and should not be forced into the subservient role of accompanist.) I call it the war between the singers and the pianists, and every singer knows what I mean. Among the exceptions: Mike Renzi, Eddie Higgins, and Lou Levy love to accompany good singers.

There's the rub. Why does every amateur sitting-in girl singer feel constrained to do Lush Life?Only a master should essay it. But the amateurs do it, to show off, I suppose, how good they are, or think they are. And then there are the Sarah Vaughan wannabes who deconstruct My Funny Valentine. Florence Foster Jenkins lived. So did Mrs. Miller.

The amateurs aside, the condescension to girl singers derives in part from an anomaly of the English language.

The terms "boy singer" and "girl singer" derive from the days of the big bands when, during ensemble and instrumental solo passages, the two would sit demurely on chairs in front the sax section, looking, I always thought, an uncomfortable cross between superfluous and hapless.

Because English has limited structural resources for identifying gender — mostly the -ess suffix to which the extreme element of the women's movement has taken umbrage — we don't know what else to call male and female singers. The French word for "sing" is chanter, and a singer is a chanteur or a chanteuse. There was for a time a gossip-column grafting into English of the word chanteuse, but it had about it a faint condescension and sarcasm, ending in the deliberate mispronunciation shon-too-zee. Nowadays actresses want to be called actors, and that seems reasonable. We do not refer to doctresses, after all. But the French aren't confronted by this problem. In French, all things have gender: the world is masculine, the sea is feminine. You never refer to anything as it but as he or she. French has no neuter pronouns.

We were stuck with boy singer and girl singer because we couldn't say singer and singess. The term boy singer has vanished; girl singer has not.

But the girl-singer jokes simply do not fit the reality. Not all of it, anyway. The good "girl singers" are very solidly skilled, and often highly trained.

Once America was blessed with any number of small nightclubs that featured excellent singers singing excellent songs, and even the big record companies were interested in recording them. Some of the best singers played piano ranging from the competent to — Blossom Dearie, for example — the excellent. Most of them were women, and there was a glamour about them, superb singers such as Betty Bennett, Irene Krai, Ethel Ennis, Marge Dodson, Lurlean Hunter, and "regional" singers such as Kiz Harp of Dallas. Many of them are forgotten; Shirley Home has enjoyed a resurgence; in Chicago Audrey Morris is still singing subtly to her own lovely piano accompaniment; New York has Anita Gravine and Nancy Marano (who you might catch writing her scat solos in taxis), and Washington D.C. has Ronnie Wells.

These people were sometimes called jazz singers, although they were no such thing, or torch singers, a term I found demeaning, not to mention inaccurate. Male singers were with equal condescension from an ignorant lay press called crooners.

The songs they sang were drawn from that classic repertoire that grew up in the United States between roughly 1920 and the 1950s, and had any of us been equipped with foresight, we'd have known that the era was ending, doomed by How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? and Papa Loves Mambo and Music Music Music even before the rise of rock.

For a number of reasons, I have been thinking of late how many of those "girl singers" have been friends of mine over the years, and how skillful — aside from gifted— they have been. …

ANNIE

“Another "girl singer" friend is Annie Ross, who in 1957 — forty-one years ago; are you ready for that? —joined Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks to form Lambert-Hendricks-Ross, one of the best vocal groups in jazz history, and the most adventurous.

Annie was born in Mitcham, England, on July 25, 1930, but spent her childhood in Los Angeles with her aunt and foster mother, the Scottish-born singer Ella Logan. Logan had toured Europe, performed in Broadway musicals (including Finian’s Rainbow) and film, and recorded with Adrian Rollini and other bands. In California, Annie was a child movie actress. She moved to Europe in 1947 and sang all over the continent, returning to the United States in 1950. She wrote words to Wardell Gray's Twisted and recorded it, causing a sensation in jazz circles.

The pioneer of bop vocals was Dave Lambert, born in Boston on June 19, 1917. With Buddy Stewart, born in New Hampshire in 1922, he recorded What's This? with the Gene Krupa band in 1945 — the first recorded bebop vocal. (Stewart was also a superb ballad singer. I have always thought that if Clifford Brown had lived, Miles Davis would have had some serious competition for pre-eminence, and so too would Frank Sinatra, had Buddy Stewart lived. Like Clifford Brown, Buddy Stewart was killed in an automobile crash.)

Jon Hendricks was born in Newark, Ohio, on September 15, 1952. When he was fourteen he would sometimes sing with fellow Ohioan Art Tatum. He played drums while he was in college, studying literature and law, but was encouraged by Charlie Parker to make music his profession and moved to New York, where he met Dave Lambert, who became his room-mate. He and Lambert began planning an album that would eventually be called Sing a Song of Basie, to be recorded using ten top New York City studio singers.

They were introduced to Annie at record producer Bob Bach's apartment, and, because of her jazz background, particularly her recording of Twisted (and Farmers Market), they asked her to come to their rehearsals and coach the singers for phrasing. She tried, but the singers just couldn't get the Basie feel, and producer Creed Taylor was growing frustrated. "Frankly," Annie said, "I was a little miffed that they hadn't asked me to do it in the first place." She would get her chance. It was evidently Creed Taylor's idea that they let the vocal group go, and that Jon and Dave, with Annie, overdub their voices up to the full orchestrations.

The album was a smash. It was followed by The Swingers (1959), The Hottest New Group in Jazz (1959), Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross Sing Ellington (1960), and High Flying (1961).

In 1962, Annie returned to England. She was replaced by Yolanda Bavanne. And in 1964, Dave Lambert left the group. He was replaced for a time by Don Chastain, and sometimes in later years Jon worked with his children.

None of it was quite the same. Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross struck magical sparks, and anyone who never saw them in a club or on a stage such as that of the Monterey Jazz Festival has no idea how much excitement the three of them could generate, singing difficult ensemble passages or complex lyrics set to (by Annie and, even more, by Jon) famous jazz solos.

One night in October, 1966, Dave was returning to New York from a gig in Cape Cod. "He was always a good Samaritan," Jon said. "If anyone was in trouble on the road, he'd always stop and help." Near Westport, Connecticut, Dave saw a motorist with a flat tire. Dave pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. According to Jon, Dave was working on the lugs of the man's wheel when a big semi went roaring by. Jon said Dave was pulled under its wheels. Whatever the details, that was the end of any hope of reconstituting Lambert-Hendricks-Ross.

I would see Annie occasionally in London. She married actor Sean Lynch, whom I found to be a delightfully warm and friendly man. I remember meeting the late Marty Feldman at a party at their apartment. And I remember a letter Annie had received from a farm woman in Devon. Annie had sung my lyrics to Bill Evans'Waltz for Debby on her television show. The woman had written to tell her how touched she had been by that lyric, which expressed her feelings about her little girl, and asked for a copy of it, which Annie sent her. I don't even know the woman's name; but she gave me the best review I ever received.

Annie had her own nightclub, called Annie's room. It was a very pleasant club, in a basement, and I beat its slot machine all one evening. Annie had that club from October 1964 until the fall of 1965, and so when we talked recently I said, "My God, Annie, we haven't spoken in more than thirty years."

Jon and I were talking about Annie, and Sean's name came up. "He was such a lovely person," Jon said.

"I said, 'What do you mean, was?"

"Didn't anyone tell you?" Jon said. "He was killed in an automobile accident."

Another one.

In 1985, Annie returned to the U.S. and, like Jon Hendricks, lives in New York City. She can sing anything: the L-H-R years have left an impression that bop vocals are all she can do, but she is also an excellent ballad singer. So, by the way, is Jon Hendricks, although few people realize it.

It was inevitable that she and Jon would start thinking about reviving the L-H-R repertoire, and a few months ago they went into rehearsals. "It wasn't really that hard," Annie said, "although at the very beginning, I thought, 'Oh my God!'

"Then it became a matter of, 'Which of Dave's lines do I sing, which ones does Jon sing?'

"But then, after we got over the nervousness, the energy and the excitement were still there. It works, and it swings, and my voice is getting stronger. It's back to that hard swing. It's a workout, but it's worth it. Oh, it feels incredible!"

Jon said, "It's the first time we've sung together in thirty-six years. Well, we did, once in that time, but this is a real reunion. The audiences are incredible. People who heard us in the old days are having tears of joy, and their children are jumping."

Much has been made of the space trip at seventy-seven of John Glenn, as an inspiration to older people. Try this one on: Jon Hendricks is also seventy-seven. And Annie is sixty-nine. And they are out there swinging.”

Jon Hendricks was born in 1921 which now makes him 93 as of 2014; Annie Ross was born in 1930 was now makes her 84 as of 2014.

↧

Jazz Drumming - Whitney Balliett

June 11, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Contemporary Concepts - Bill Holman and Stan Kenton

≪ Previous: "To The Ladies" - Annie Ross

Whitney Balliett was the Jazz critic for The New Yorker magazine from 1957 - 2001 and during that time no one wrote about the music in a more literary and elegant manner.

He wasn’t a musician, but his skills with narrative prose were put to good use in finding just the right descriptive phrases to bring out the essence of the music and its makers.

He was, however, an amateur drummer and he wrote the following succinct description of the evolution of Jazz drumming in which he brings to bear the advantage of that background.

“Jazz drumming grew out of military drumming. The pioneer jazz drummers picked up syncopation from ragtime and translated it into after-beats and offbeats and press rolls, most of them carried out on the snare drum and tomtoms. By the thirties, the center of jazz drumming had shifted to the cymbals and the snare-drum rims, although the snare and tomtoms were still heavily used in solos.

The bebop drummers moved the center again. They transferred timekeeping from the bass drum to a "ride" cymbal, using the bass drum only for offbeats, or "bombs." In the twenties, drum sets, or traps (which were invented when drummers began to play sitting down), consisted of a tall, fat bass drum, often decorated with a painting of a bucolic scene and lit from within by an electric bulb, which also kept dampness at bay; a wooden-sided snare drum that resembled a parade drum; an Indian tomtom, its skins fastened on with brass studs; and a cymbal attached upside down to the wooden top of the bass drum.

By the late twenties, the snare drum had become sensitive enough to be used with wire brushes—sprays of steel wire fastened to metal or wooden handles. There were several tomtoms and several cymbals, which were hung over the bass drum on goosenecked or straight rods. Two more cymbals, called a high-hat, appeared at the drummer's left elbow on a three-foot metal stand, and were opened and closed by a foot pedal to produce a marvellous variety of whispers, shushes, splashes, and whaps. Drummers had begun to pay attention to the sound of their instrument; they tuned their snare drums and tomtoms and bass drums, and they spent long reverberating hours selecting their cymbals at the Zildjian factory, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The bebop drummers did disturbing things to the drum set in the forties. Their snare drums grew thinner and thinner, and emitted a high nervous chatter; the bass drums shrank, and their sound grew sharp and elbowy; and the cymbals became larger and larger, and gave out a heavy, high hum.

The drum sets now used by many rock and "fusion" drummers are works of fantasy. The drums, which are frequently made of translucent plastic, seem to multiply before one's eyes, and may include a couple of bass drums and snare drums, and at least four tomtoms. A dozen giant, steeply canted cymbals form a reflecting shield around this assemblage, which is lit from below, so that it produces an aurora-borealis effect, with the drummer at its brilliant, frenzied center.”

Whitney Balliett, American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz, [Oxford].

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Contemporary Concepts - Bill Holman and Stan Kenton

June 12, 2017, 7:30 am

≫ Next: Re: Tom Harrell/Tommy by Gene Lees and Phil Woods

≪ Previous: Jazz Drumming - Whitney Balliett

In this, his 90th birthday year, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles is doing its best to help the Bill Holman celebration along by posting a number of features about Willis on these pages.

And it’s no coincidence that when it comes to big bands, he is the composer and/or arranger for a number of our favorite big band albums which not only feature his own big band but also include the writing he did for the likes of the Terry Gibbs Dream Band, the Buddy Rich “Killer Force” Band and, of course, his orchestrations for the Stan Kenton Orchestra which is where my introduction to the music of Willis “Bill” Holman began.

Specifically, my wannabe Jazz chums and I literally devoured every note of Stan Kenton Contemporary Concepts Capitol LP when it was first issued. We could sing Charlie Mariano and Bill Perkins’ spectacular solos on Stella by Starlight and Yesterdays, respectively, note for note, and often did in the beat-up, old buggies we drove in on our way to The Gigs.

Bill Holman explains how this album all came about - and he also explains how, for a time, why it almost never came about - in the following excerpts from his insert notes to Mosaic Records Stan Kenton: The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Holman and Russo Charts [MD4-136]

HOLMAN ON KENTON

"My God, this is what Stan is looking for!"

These words, feverishly expressed by Gene Roland one night in late 1951, led to a meeting and an ensuing twenty-five year relationship with Stan Kenton.

In the course of some intense hanging out, I had played a recording of a 12-tone blues that I'd written (doesn't everybody?) while studying at the Westlake College of Music in Hollywood. According to Gene, who had been writing for Kenton for some time (JUMP FOR JOY, AIN'T NO MISERY IN ME, OPUS IN CHARTREUSE), Stan had been talking about a more contrapuntal, linear type of music, and Gene felt that my piece lay in the direction that Stan was considering.

While I was away on a short trip with Charlie Barnet, Gene took the recording to Kenton, and when I returned, Stan called. We met, talked, and he asked me to write a couple of pieces for the band. Being young and ambitious, I reached too far in the writing and exceeded my limits - the charts were disasters and never heard of again - but Stan gamely suggested that I do another. By this time I'd heard some of the things that Gerry Mulligan was bringing in, and with a slightly better idea of what was going on, managed to come back down to Earth and brought in a better effort, though it, too, was never heard of again.

Gerry wrote eight to ten scores for the band (early 1952, just before he formed the famous Quartet) and, while YOUNG BLOOD, the most linear of these, was the only one to really thrill Stan, the players (by this time I was playing tenor in the band) loved to play and hear all of them. For me particularly, being only about ten charts out of music school and with no real jazz conception of my own, Gerry's music played a great part in my finding my own voice.

For the first few months in the band, with the pressures of being on the road and trying to play well, along with an indecision as to what I would write for this band, I didn't write anything at all, although Stan was constantly encouraging me. Finally, he gave me an assignment - a piece to feature Maynard Ferguson and Sal Salvador, to be, and to be called an INVENTION FOR GUITAR AND TRUMPET. Never one of my favorites, it's probably the best known by the public of all my Kenton charts. Anyway, the drought was over. I next volunteered an arrangement of STAR EYES, which was so packed with relentless eighth-note counterpoint that Stan said it "sounded like a merry-go-round". Also never heard of again. However, I was over the hump and began writing regularly.

I must mention the high point of my two years with the band, which was Zoot joining us; what a joy to be able to hear and hang out with him everyday. And when Stan asked me to write a piece for Zoot, to actually hear him play it was heaven! This is not to minimize the contributions of the other jazz players in the band. An overall musical conception (I call it musicality) is as much a requisite for a music writer as all the mechanics of writing that we study. One of the ways to develop musicality in the jazz field is to listen to creative soloists, and I think that my association with Candoli, Konitz, Rosolino and Kamuca as well as Zoot had a positive effect on my musical conception.

Stan continued to encourage the writing, paying me for everything I turned in, and occasionally offering suggestions as to what music the band needed, or which soloist should have a feature piece. Nothing very oppressive. We had a friendly relationship, not very close, but I was always impressed by his willingness to commission and perform music that was so unlike what the band had been known for. Even so, I was shocked in 1954 when he called to say that he intended to record an album of my music, although I had left the band earlier after a lusty discussion between him and me about the band's shortcomings.

When Stan re-formed the band in 1955 with Mel Lewis, Al Porcino et al., he asked me to write as much as I could: originals, feature pieces, dance charts and vocals. I had a ball with this, writing a couple of charts a week and still learning; doing the more functional charts was a nice change too, as I'd done mostly originals to this point. In addition, I knew the band was sounding good; with Porcino and Lewis setting the phrasing and rhythmic feel. I think it was the "jazziest" of all the Kenton bands. I feel very fortunate to have had CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTS recorded by these guys.

After a time, however, Stan had a change of heart and musical direction, and my reign as Chief Arranger was over. It was a lot of fun. I learned a few things and had made a little reputation (some people only know of my work from this period in spite of my dogged efforts in the thirty years since), but there were other things I wanted to do too, so this was okay. Though not closely associated with Stan or the band after this period, I wrote occasionally for them until 1977.

In sum, it was a pretty high level for an "earn-as-you-learn" case such as mine, but, ill-equipped as I was, Stan's patience and encouragement and the help of a lot of great players enabled me to make a start in a long and rewarding career. I'll always be grateful for this, but, what the hell, we both got something out of it.”

—Bill Holman, Los Angeles November, 1990

↧

Re: Tom Harrell/Tommy by Gene Lees and Phil Woods

June 13, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Thelonious Monk’s Little-Known ‘Liaisons’

≪ Previous: Contemporary Concepts - Bill Holman and Stan Kenton

"The [schizophrenia] disorder is such that Tommy's mind can deal with only one thing at a time, be it answering a question, playing a solo, or something as simple as pouring a glass of water.

Tom is perfectly aware of his own condition, and is quite droll about it. He is well read, gentle, highly perceptive. And he is held in enormous affection and respect by other musicians.

Phil's evaluation: 'Tom Harrell is the best musician I ever worked with.’

Tom's art remains a thing of beauty, his life an act of courage.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author

Tommy’s sense of melodic development is astounding — pure genius.

- Phil Woods, alto saxophonist, composer and bandleader

RE: TOMHARRELL

“I must confess that I was reluctant to meet Tom Harrell. Yet he has emerged as so important a player that I felt he really belonged in the book of photos of jazz people that I am preparing with photographer John Reeves [Jazz Lives: 100 Portraits in Jazz, 1992].

By now you have surely heard about Harrell. and I hope you have heard him. He is a spectacularly creative trumpeter, with a big tone — he can get low notes that in ensemble passages sound like trombone - wonderfully compositional thinking, and a fluent technique that is, however, always held in restraint and put to the service of a very lyrical style. Since leaving Phil Woods, he has been traveling in various ensembles, sometimes with the excellent Swiss-born alto saxophonist George Robert.

Harrell was born June 16, 1946. in Urbana, Illinois, which makes him forty-five. He grew up in San Francisco, and became known in jazz through his work with Woody Herman, Horace Silver, and Phil Woods, whom he joined in 1983.

But he became known almost as much for his behavior as for his playing. He had, I was told, a way of standing on the bandstand in an almost catatonic stillness, head hung forward, horn dangling from his hand. When it came time for him to solo, he would shuffle to the mike on small steps, burn the room down, and then retreat into that strange motionless silence. He suffered from some severe emotional disorder whose nature nobody seemed able to tell me. Had he been totally non-functional he would have been unremarkable. But this man is an amazingly fine jazz musician.

Furthermore, he is a witty, funny man. and the very strangeness is manifest in his awareness of his own condition. And, I found, telling Tom Harrell stories is almost a cottage industry among musicians forty-five and under in New York. These stories are always told with affection and admiration. And always the narrators quote him in his stuttering low monotone, which of course I cannot commit to paper. I believe this story is true; nobody could have invented it.

Harrell played a trumpet clinic for Jamey Aebersol. After a brilliant performance, he cracked a note badly toward the end. Aebersol asked him why it had happened. Harrell said, in that slow low unsmiling way of his, ‘Lack of sleep. Lack of motivation. Lack of practice. And I’m an alcoholic.’

In order to photograph Harrell, I sought the intercession of two of his friends, the very capable arranger and saxophonist Bill Kirchner and trumpeter John McNeil, one of Harrell’s closest friends and an outstanding player himself: they have recorded together.

John and I met them at Harrell’s small apartment on the upper West Side. He met us graciously, dressed in a black shirt and black slacks. His face from time to time was contorted by some terrible emotional pain, the deep uncertainty that dogs him. The room was curtained and dimly lit. Glancing over his book-shelves. I noticed that Tom Harrell goes in for some very heavy reading.

I let McNeil do the talking. Harrell laughed at all the jokes, caught all the nuances of the conversation, seated on his haunches, back against the wall. He stayed in that position so long I thought his legs must hurt. I can't remember the context, but Kirchner said, "Did you ever get cut?"

"Well," Tom said, "only by other musicians."

John got our pictures, making the discovery that when Tom relaxes and his face goes into repose, its expression is almost angelic. And make no mistake about his intelligence. It is acute. When we left, I was perhaps even more baffled than when we arrived.

Nobody. I suppose, knows Tom Harrell better than Phil Woods. And so I present you with Phil's essay on Tom. Other than letters, this is Phil's first appearance in the Jazzletter. He promises me that it won't be the last.

Meantime, if you haven't heard Tom Harrell, you're in for a lovely discovery.”

TOMMY by Phil Woods

“It was Tom Harrell’s last gig with my quintet. After six years Tommy felt it was time to move on and form his own band.

We were on our way to the Edmonton Jazz Festival and then the Saskatoon Festival. Edmonton has always had one of the best events in the world. A very friendly town with music and educational events and exhibits all over the nice-sized city. The concert was us and Helen Merrill with the Mike Nock Trio, and the music was first class.

We retired right after the gig in order to make the 7 a.m. flight to Saskatoon, the only direct flight of the day. There were three bands on the flight, and it was a treat to see the Air Canada ground staff deal with the three full-sized basses.

Why do people find a man lugging a huge instrument around the world so amusing? Don't they realize he has dedicated himself to playing quarter notes for the rest of his life? His fingers will always resemble ground chuck and he is forced to stow the leviathan in a huge box called a coffin, for obvious reasons. This is not a person to be taken lightly.

Back when the airlines required you to buy a seat for a bass (only coffins are allowed nowadays), a woman traveler watching Red Mitchell wrestle his bass aboard a flight said to him, ‘I do hope when you finally get to where you are going, they are going to ask you to play!’

Once, when I had the European Rhythm Machine, we did what the Air France people told us to do: we locked the bass in one of the two lavatories on a Caravelle. A man in a white linen suit soiled himself while waiting for the facility to be vacated and left a trail as he squished back to his seat. Quel odor. Quel dummy.

A businessman in South America somewhere refused to sit next to the bass. Claimed it was dangerous. Sir, it's only dangerous on the bandstand and is one of the best seat mates ever devised. It neither smokes nor drinks and doesn't talk much and if you keep your cool you can wangle the meal that goes with the seat, two sets of slippers, and two travel kits.

Why, the bass is your oyster if you are in on the game!

I find the bass to be helpful when I'm a little down and need a laugh. I go to the boarding area before the other cats and groove to the reactions of our fellow travelers when they see Steve Gilmore and his full-size axe.

‘Why don't you get a piccolo?’ wins hands down as the most abused bass cliché, closely followed by, ‘That won't fit under your seat, son.’ And ‘My, that sure is a big cello.’

So, considering the three basses on our flight to Saskatoon, everything went smoothly at check-in, and we were at the gate, boarding passes in hand with time to spare. We were looking forward to breakfast and more sleep after the short flight. As the three bands took coffee and chatted, we happened to look out a window and there goes Tommy, out for a walk five minutes to boarding time. And we watch as he disappears into the rolling hills surrounding the airport, his three cabin bags clutched firmly in hand.

I asked him at one point what he had in his cabin bag that made it weigh a ton. ‘The Real Book in every key.’ he responded quickly and clearly.

Steve Gilmore once got a peek inside the other two and said they were full of Dippety-Doo and other aerosol-dispensed notions, along with the largest pharmaceutical kit since Serge Chaloff. Hal Galper named Tommy ‘Dwayne’ in honor of Duane Reed, one of the biggest east-coast pharmacy chains.

Sure enough. Tommy missed the flight and spent the day inching his way to Saskatoon by way of Calgary. Vancouver, and Nova Scotia. The jazz folks in all the*e places responded to his problem and at all stops he was met and aided. He got to the hotel in Saskatoon just in time for one of our infrequent sound checks. He does it the hard way, but he always makes it. In six years with my band he did not miss a gig.

When Tommy first joined the band, people would invariably ask, ‘What's wrong with your trumpet player?’ I would try to be diplomatic and reply with a question myself, ‘What's wrong with your ears?’

Tommy is a disabled person. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1961 after the first of several nervous breakdowns. He has been taking stelazine, a powerful psychotropic drug, ever since. He has also suffered from a series of collapsed lung incidents and alcoholism. He no longer drinks.

Schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by loss of contact with one's environment, a deterioration in the ability to function in everyday life, and a disintegration of personality.

The medications that Tommy has to take to control the chemical imbalance that triggers this disorder have side effects that include muscular weakness and his lethargic appearance.

The disorder is such that Tommy's mind can deal with only one thing at a time, be it answering a question, playing a solo, or something as simple as pouring a glass of water.

When Tommy first joined my band and we would play the head, he would solo first. As he finished, and I was starting my solo, I could see all eyes following Tommy as he shuffled off to stage left. I felt like yelling, "Hey, it's my turn! Look at me! I'm playing my little sax!"

When we played a huge sports palace in Madrid, where bicycle races were a big draw, Tommy suggested we open with In a Velo Drome.

Somebody came up to Hal Galper and me at the bar before a gig and asked if Tommy had a speech problem. Without a rehearsal Galper and I replied, in unison, ‘W-w-w-well I-I-I-I d-d-d-don't th-th-th-think s-s-so.’

While doing a solo gig in

Canada

, Tommy was late to the opening night first set. He announced to the politely waiting crowd, ‘I'm sorry I'm late and I would like to apologize for my lack of charisma.’

This of course was a charismatic thing to do and he received a standing ovation.

Chet [Baker] loved Tommy. So do Dizzy, Clark Terry, Nat Adderley, and most of the older guys. And some of the younger trumpet players exhibit a bit of insecurity when Tommy’s name is mentioned.

I once said in a Down Beat profile on Tommy that he was the best improviser on his instrument I had ever heard. One trumpet player I loved called me on it. He said it wasn't about being the best. The hell it ain't. It's all very well for the O.K. players to prop each other up. I know. I'm an O.K. player but I ain't no Tommy Harrell, and if you can't tell the difference your ears are on crooked. His sense of melodic development is astounding — pure genius.

When he first joined the band, he told my wife he was sorry and didn't want to tarnish my reputation. He would come off the bandstand and start his weird stuff: ‘I’m not worthy to be in the band. Everybody hates me and my life is a joke. I have to talk to you about this. Phil!’

I finally blew up and told him the next time he was unworthy and had to quit, I wanted it in writing. I didn't want to hear any of this, especially after he had just got through carving my ass into hamburger helper.

While traveling through Holland by bus, Tommy bought what he thought was a bar of maple syrup candy. He bit into it with gusto to find out it was soap. He was foaming, and sick to his stomach, and we made an emergency stop. But we were hysterical with laughter and puns like ‘cleanest trumpet man in the biz.,’ ‘Lava back up to me,’ and other really funny mature stuff like that.

There was a trumpet summit in Scandinavia under Clark Terry's general direction. When Tommy arrived, Clark told him it had been decided that each of them should sing a number. He asked Tommy what tune he wanted to sing. Tommy said, ‘W-w-w-welL it'll have to be The Impossible Dream.'Clarkis still telling the story.

Tommy said he was going to join Amnesiacs Anonymous as soon as he could remember where the meetings were.

When it came time for Tommy to make his move, he handed me a ratty piece of manuscript paper as he struggled down the aisle of a crowded 727 with his three bags of Dippety-Doo and stuff. It read:

To Whom it May Concern:

I have to quit the band. I am sorry.

Tom Harrell

My new name for the next few weeks was Towhom Dubois.

We love and miss Tommy very much.

His new group and recordings are knocking everyone's socks off, as I knew they would.

Bravo Front Line!

- PW”

You can hear Tommy with Phil Woods' quintet on the following video:

↧

Thelonious Monk’s Little-Known ‘Liaisons’

June 14, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "These Rooms" - Jim Hall Trio Featuring Tom Harrell

≪ Previous: Re: Tom Harrell/Tommy by Gene Lees and Phil Woods

The following piece by Larry Blumenfeld appeared in the June 10, 2017 edition of the Wall Street Journal. More of Monk’s recorded music is always a treat, but I was particularly excited about the release of this music because it features Monk’s short-lived association with the rhythm section of Sam Jones on bass and Art Taylor on drums. Given the space that Monk gives to a rhythm section, it’s always interesting to listen to how they do their thing in terms of laying down a pulse for Monk Music.

Earlier that year, Sam and Art had participated in the February 28, 1959 NYC Town Hall performance of Monk’s music as scored for a larger group by Hal Overton.

I was also intrigued by Paris-based tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen’s appearance on some tracks along with Charlie Rouse who was on the front-end of a 10-year association with Monk in the tenor sax chair of Thelonious’ quartet.

“Pianist Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 10, 1917. The centenary of this moment will likely inspire a wave of celebratory concerts and recordings. Since Monk’s death, in 1982, the influence of his compact body of compositions has grown with each passing decade; once considered radical, they are now as elemental to modern jazz as are Bach’s to classical music. The characteristics of his piano playing — jarring rhythmic displacements, clotted chords, flat-fingered runs and spiky dissonances — still sound distinct even as they shape our ideas of contemporary music’s possibilities.

The first commemoration of Monk’s centenary comes early, a posthumous gift from the master himself. Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (Sam Records/Saga), available as a deluxe double-CD or LP set, contains Monk’s studio recordings for the soundtrack of Roger Vadim’s French film of the same name. This music has never been available outside the context of the film. The master tapes of Monk’s soundtrack were discovered in 2014, in the archives of Marcel Romano, the French promoter who introduced Vadim to Monk’s music. Romano, who had brought Miles Davis to director Louis Malle to score “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud,” also managed French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, who here joined Monk’s quartet for several takes.

Vadim’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel embraced a story of bourgeois infidelity and seduction as transposed to 20th-century France, with a jazz soundtrack. (Cocktail-party scenes featured Duke Jordan’s tunes played by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, later released on the Fontana label.) Though commercially successful in France, the film is memorable now mostly for its nudity and risqué tone. Monk’s music—recorded in Manhattan, in the summer of 1959—is, however, timeless musical expression that documents a significant moment.

The list of classics recorded in 1959—as transformative a year as jazz has known—includes Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” It was also a heady time in Monk’s career. Months earlier, he had played a landmark large-ensemble concert at Town Hall. His working quartet had just recorded a fine album with cornetist Thad Jones and, shortly before this soundtrack session, had played the Newport Jazz Festival to rave reviews. This quartet, excellent though short-lived, included bassist Sam Jones, drummer Art Taylor and tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who had just begun a decade-long association with Monk.

Yet as Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley observes in an insightful liner note, Vadim had “approached Monk at the absolute worst time.” A dizzying professional schedule along with some setbacks, especially the loss of his cabaret card following an unjust arrest, had left Monk in the grip of severe emotional instability. He was, as Mr. Kelley writes, “overcommitted, tired, and ill.” Thus, Monk wrote no new compositions or arrangements; these tracks seem more the stuff of a jazz-club performance or record date than a movie score.

Still, Mr. Kelley writes, “Monk chose the repertoire based on his understanding of the story, and played around with the tempos in order to capture the character’s emotional state or circumstance.” Indeed, the always-inventive Monk here emphasizes the emotional content of his music. A version of “Crepuscule With Nellie,” used for opening credits, contains noticeably pregnant pauses. Four versions of “Pannonica,” two as solo piano, reveal subtly shifting shades of feeling. For a scene in which the innocent Marianne and her seducer, Valmont, meet in a church, Monk, perhaps as irony, played a straightforward version of the Rev. Charles A. Tindley’s hymn “By and By (We’ll Understand It Better By and By),” which he likely learned as a teenager while playing for a traveling Pentecostal preacher.

Nothing sounds revolutionary in these tracks, yet they reveal Monk during a dynamic year, in the midst of turmoil, seeming relaxed, playful and at the top of his game. His version of “Well, You Needn’t” bristles with the particular energy afforded by this brief rhythm-section alliance with Jones and Taylor. “Rhythm-a-Ning” is notable for Monk’s differing interplay with each saxophonist. An improvised blues, originally untitled, listed here as “Six in One,” sounds like a sketch of what Monk recorded three months later as “Round Lights.” Here also is the only known studio recording of Monk’s “Light Blue” (two versions, in fact). On the second, a 14-minute version credited as “Light Blue (Making Of),” Monk implores Taylor, against his protestations, to “keep on doing what you’re doing”—to extend a three-beat pattern that forms a countermelody. Whether Monk was thinking about advancing Vadim’s cinematic tale or simply telling his own story is anyone’s guess."

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal. He also blogs at http:// www.blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes.

↧

"These Rooms" - Jim Hall Trio Featuring Tom Harrell

June 15, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Stan Kenton: An Introduction

≪ Previous: Thelonious Monk’s Little-Known ‘Liaisons’

It seems like Herb Wong, the late Jazz author, education, record and concert producer and all-around good friend of Jazz was everywhere in the 1980, and it’s a good thing, too, as Jazz and it makers were having their fair share of troubles surviving during a time when fewer resources were supporting the music.

In an earlier piece, we described Herb’s role with the Stanford University Jazz Artist in Residence program in Palo Alto, CA and Blackhawk Records which was based in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s.

During the decade of the 1980’s, Herb was also active as a producer for DENON - Nippon Columbia for which he along with Executive Producer Tastunori “Tats” Konno developed one of my favorite recording by guitarist Jim Hall with his trio made up of Steve LaSpina on bass and Joey Baron on drums. Tom Harrell is featured on trumpet and flugelhorn.

Issued in 1988 as These Rooms: Jim Hall Trio Featuring Tom Harrell [Denon CY-30002], it is an exquisite. Here are Herb’s instructive and insightful insert notes about the musicians on the date, which was recorded live to 2-track on February 9-10, 1988 at Sorcerer Sound in NYC with Tom Lazarus serving as recording engineer, and the ten tracks featured on the CD.

Just to be clear, here, had it not been for Dr. Herb hearing these musicians play together in his head, this record wouldn’t exist. His Jazz soul made this album happen.

“Among jazz guitarists, Jim Hall exceeds comparison. Unarguably he stands alone and is the one guitarist who can be spoken in the same breath as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. The mere mention of Jim sparks lively responses of praise. For several decades he has earned this top position of respect, but more important is his body of brilliant recordings, as what guards the unanimity of success is his conspicuous artistic integrity and finery. He is a superlative who embraces unique sound and design of his notes; every note selected is a needed choice fitting perfectly in the ultimate sculpture of his music.

His exceptional technique combined with confidence to use or not to use this or that in creating a mood is central to the lull resonant quality his guitar achieves, showing deep devotion and acute alertness to sound.

In producing this recording I was impressed once again by Jim's ability to minimize the use of amplification, sounding nearly like an acoustic instrument. In 1977 my interview with Jim elicited comments germane to this issue: "It's easy to overplay the amplifiers so we play really softly compared to the general dynamic level prevailing today. We begin very softly so we have someplace to go. And then it can sound like it's loud when we're just playing with moderate volume. You can draw the sound out of the instruments a lot better and not push the amps."

Jim's music is drawn from the heart core of the guitar and the heart of his own inner soul, unveiling the truth about their capacity. His horn-inspired solos are lyrical, impassioned and swinging — reflecting a fertile sense of composition. Moreover, his phrases develop in a natural flow from one to the next, his melodically and harmonically resourceful ideas are delivered with taste and logic, and rhythmically his sense of balance is without deflection.

Jim was born on December 4, 1930 in Buffalo. N.Y. and spent his childhood in New York, Columbus and finally in Cleveland. At 10 his Mother, a pianist, gifted Jim with a guitar and quickly at 13 he became a precocious pro in Cleveland. The great innovator Charlie Christian was introduced to him via hearing his famous solos with Benny Goodman. Subsequently, Jim became acquainted with the legendary Django Reinhardt's playing. "After high school I attended The Cleveland Institute of Music where I became seriously interested in classical composition. However, my desire to become a guitarist was so compelling. I had to check it out for fear of long term regrets." explains Jim. So he dropped out of a master's degree program to "pursue my fantasy". Thus began the long, distinguished odyssey of performing and recording. His associates stretch from Chico Hamilton (some 33 years ago). Bob Brookmeyer, Jimmy Giuffre. Ben Webster, Hampton Hawes. and Stan Getz to Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Zoot Sims, Lee Konitz, Ron Carter. Herbie Hancock, Red Mitchell and Wayne Shorter plus so many more.

Prior to this recording, a musician Jim had not had an open opportunity to include in his own recordings is Tom Harrell. I had ruminated over the sumptuous thought of Jim and Tom together — hearing their consonant blends and solos on guitar and flugelhorn in my head, with assuredness that a record of their respective and compatible geniuses should be produced in order that their absorbing subtleties and plentiful imagination could be shared. Both spin their own musical tales. In fact, including Steve LaSpina and Joey Baron, all four musicians on the project are fascinating story tellers who speak fluently thru their instruments.

My esteem for Tom's playing stems from his young teenage years in the San Francisco Bay Area playing in campus bands, jamming in many, many clubs and at the famed Jazz Workshop in S.F. with many name musicians. Born on June 16, 1946 in Urbana, Illinois, he was reared in the S.F. area from age 5 and started trumpet at 8. His gigs began at age 13. Early on, he modeled himself mainly after his inspiration — Clifford Brown and remains a torch bearer of the tradition and spirit of Brown but does tip his hat also to the likes of Blue Mitchell, Kenny Dorham. Lee Morgan, Dizzy Gillespie. Clark Terry and Woody Shaw. Tom notes, "Clifford was such a strong force and expressed so much warmth and joy." Today, Tom is one of the most sought musicians and has been climbing the rungs of jazz polls steadily. After 6 years on the road with Woody Herman and Horace Silver, he settled in NYC for the last decade recording on more than 70 records and is a main stay in the Phil Woods Quintet.

Phil has said to me, "Tom is the most complete musician in my experience. I continue to be impressed with his total harmonic recall, his knowledge of tunes of the past and his compositions reflecting the future." Tom indeed has perfect ears and an uncanny sense of time. He tries not to think when he solos, allowing "my playing to go beyond conscious thoughts". Like Jim, Tom places a premium on Ihe linkage between feelings and sounds — the fundamental pay off. On several previous recordings, I have invited Tom to participate: I simply value his ability to erupt without notice adding an enigmatical, special dimension.

There is unanimity on Tom's impact on any group. At one point in the studio Joey Baron said admiringly: "Tom, how in the world do you play trumpet like that?"

Bassist Steve LaSpina first played with Tom in the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra 10 years ago. “When Tom picked up his trumpet and blew his first notes, I couldn't believe it. I had never heard anything like it and I've enjoyed playing with him since, and he is just marvelous on this date."

Steve was born on March 24, 1954 in Wichita Falls, Texas and raised in Chicago. "My Father Jack, also a bassist, started me on his bass when I graduated from high school and he also taught me the electric bass." Steve was involved with rock and roll, yet his Dad tried to turn him on to jazz by playing records by Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown. Noi until age 13 when Steve heard Fred Alwood at a music camp at the University of Illinois did he catch the jazz fever.

He came to New York in 1979 and "playing with Jim Hall is like a fantasy corne true. Seems like it's always right... I can feel what he's going to play." Just a partial roster of people Steve has played with verifies his gourmet taste — saxophonists Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and David Liebman; pianists Jimmy Rowles. Marian McPartland and Steve Kuhn; vocalists Joe Williams, Mark Murphy, Morgana King and Helen Merrill. Steve obviously listens to many horn players. As for bassists, the key influences of Charles Mingus. Paul Chambers and Scott LaFaro stick out. Just listen to his story-telling on this recording.

"I love the way Steve sounds," Jim says with glee, "and we've worked together off and on for nearly 4 years. I sit in the car a lot in New York and I listen to jazz on WBGO radio and notice lots ol terrific bassists are being recorded, but I'm not pleased with the bass hitting you right in the face, whereas Steve's warm bass sounds like there is more room and depth being used. Steve recently put gut strings (G & D) in place of steel strings. He's definitely a virtuoso bassist." Take note Steve had acquired a more than 100 year-old French bass with great gut strings on the day of rehearsal and he was ecstatic over it. Its timely availability for the recording was a boost to the quality of sound.

"I look for guys who listen well and react well together, similar to what Jimmy Giuffre has drawn as an analogy between a 'mobile sculpture' and his trio (Giuffre-Brookmeyer-Hall) as not being uni-dimensional I've always kept that philosophy — meaning we should not sound like a guitar with a rhythm section!"

Joey Baron is a very in-demand drummer performing with Jim and Steve close to 2 years on a fairly regular basis. This is the first record of his membership in the trio. "Joey was recommended to me by numerous musicians coast to coast." The consensus is not surprising as Joey's long list of associations in the last 13 years is replete with unique voices of jazz; e.g., Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper, John Scofield, Toots Thielemans, Randy Brecker. Blue Mitchell, Pat Martino, Lou Rawls. Carmen McRae, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Red Rodney, Stan Getz, Bill Frisell, Al Jarreau and so many others.

Regarding Jim, Joey pours emotively: "He's a great musician — not so much the instrument itself, but that he plays the music! And I'm attracted to those who do. In Jim's case, you can pick him out of 1000 players every time. In playing with him, his concept of time is a model to emulate. I hope to approach Jim's level some day. He lets you relax and you don't have to baby sit... he opens the ground up for trust in an unspoken way. Lots of things happen between us that way. Jim's sound is the way he pulls people into him."

"I feel I can talk to Joey while he's playing.standing right in front of his cymbals, explains Jim. "Joey gets inlo high intensity without being loud in volume. He has perfect touch."

There's truly something distinctive about guitar and drums — a guitarist can't play 8-note chords all the time like many pianists who fill up the room and leave little space for the drummer. "Jim plays but a few notes, leaving space for conversations with me." Joey emphasizes, "and the way he accompanies, the way he puts intervals in — like he could just hit 2 notes over a chord and it pushes a different sound out of the chord, in contrast to someone who plays a straight chord."

The Music In This Collection

From the very first notes of Jim Hall's guitar on the 1929 Rodgers and Hart WITH A SONG IN MY HEART, you just know he's special. Then enters Joey Baron's melodic brushes and Jim counterpoints. The first rate solos by Jim, Steve and Tom are unpredictable in construction and have gorgeous sounds spilling out. It's plain all four are like vocalists singing their stories on the uplifting 6/8 waltz version — its format matching the spirit of the tune. Jim arranged a half step up modulation in the middle when Tom comes in on the first chorus, giving it more of rising feel. The tune moves along at a good pace but the chords are stretched out and move more slowly.

CROSS COURT — an appealing 24-bar blues is the first of several Jim Hall originals. It's a key of G blues but moves up a half step in the last 4 bars. It's not the routine "let's just play some blues, guys" type of piece, but an architectural piece. The title of ihe tune comes from Jim's love for tennis. "I took my first tennis lessons from the great Don Budge who's a big jazz fan, from Lester Young to Bill Evans." His specialty was a back hand cross court — therein lies the inspiration for the name. "The line of the tune in the beginning — the unison or octaves with bass and guitar is extremely hard to play on the bass and the guitar. It's supposed to sound easy but I keep writing these things because Steve can play them!

"I love the rhythm section feeling. Joey has a grin on his face most of the time which got me to write the last chorus — the jolly sound with the little breaks with Joey." And dig the trace of Stravinsky in the out chorus, spiking the music with quasi-humor.

A flugelhorn/guitar duet carries the unstrained conversation ol the hauntingly charming ballad SOMETHING TELLS ME composed by Jim's wife, Jane. Beginning with E-flat major it wanders thru different keys, finally settling on B-flat "I added a coda at the end," says Jim. "I wrote it specifically for Tom and I love the way Tom plays it." The two of them capture the beautiful mood and possibly the true mood of the tune.

When Jim performed and recorded with pianist Michel Petrucciani and Wayne Shorter at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1986, he wrote BIMINI on commission — a bright calypso similar to what he did with Sonny Rollins. The light, loping Caribbean line has nice “islandic” flavors. Joey is like a gang of percussionists rolled into one!

Ben Webster was a consummate master of improvising jazz ballads. ALL TOO SOON is one of these soothing Ellington compositions recorded in 1940 featuring Ben's suave tenor saxophone, "I first met Ben at one of the once a month concerts sponsored by my friend Dr. Lorin Stephens, an orthopedic surgeon in Arcadia, California during the early days. Red Mitchell and Hampton Hawes played with us frequently, too." Jim certainly narrows his concentration with intense sensitivity on his magnificent solo guitar essay. I felt an unaccompanied interpretation would bring out further colors to add to the whole.

"After turning on to the enticing concept about recording with Tom for the first time, I was inspired to catch Tom's sound," Jim recounts his process in designing THESE ROOMS — the title selection in three sections. "I jotted a little motif with low register for Tom's horn ... examining some intervals — little groups of 2 notes. It gradually took shape with Steve coming on with his counterpoint. Bartok influenced my linear writing: he was my hero. I tied it with the guitar section, including a whole chordal phase before Tom and Steve check in, just ahead of the start of the last section." Jim wrote the third section with some exciting surprises — a gospel. New Orleans street band sound with Joey's authentic marching drums heralding Tom's hip swinging. It gets a little more abstract and ends with the beginning motif. It leaves everyone with a good up feeling.

A segue to the durable 1939 ballad DARN THAT DREAM ushers in another ring of colors by way of a delicate development between Jim and Steve. Both converse with telepathic manifestation of melodic motifs. Steve's close link to Scott LaFaro's highly vocal quality is apparent. And Jim ... well, every note he plays sounds larger than life. Originally planned for the trio to play, it just felt intriguing for a duo, adding a different miniature theater.

MY FUNNY VALENTINE is the one track featuring the working Jim Hall Trio. The tasteful swing powers vitality into individual statements while they merge as three. Remember how people were knocked out by the superb ad hoc interpretation by Bill Evans and Jim on Bill's 1962 "Undercurrent" album!

WHERE OH WHEN is partly dedicated to Freddie Green who passed away in 1987. "Freddie was truly a big hero of mine," Jim says with deep sincerity. The format is fashioned to give generous opportunities for the group to express lyricism with ease.

Tom Harrell's own FROM NOW ON winds things up with chops and finesse. "This was inspired by the collaborations of Jim and Bill Evans," relates Tom, "and also by Dizzy's writing of his "Con Alma" and a little of the way Benny Golson uses certain sounds. It's a good vehicle for Jim's beautiful, sensitive playing". Indeed its harmonic movement is reminiscent of what Jim and Bill did on their iwo duo albums, especially the kinds of motion and colors — sort of a mood of sadness, but something positive rising out of dejection. The ABA structure of the tune finds its way thru different tonal centers. A nice ride to close the recording.

"This project brought Tom into my consciousness as I had never truly played with him, I was in my room writing almost everyday or at least thinking about it for two solid months. And I think it really paid off." Jim continues "I wanted tunes that represent variety not only between tunes but within the tunes to keep the interest burning. So for me, it was a lot of preparation — tons of paper! I just dug in there and I'm grateful for the motivating idea behind it. I'm thoroughly delighted!"

In the final analysis, it really matters little how Jim does it. At times he's like a Japanese brush painter's unfettered improvisations. Jim surprises often and disrupts prediction. His music always sound fresh. Perhaps his jazz life has been a quest for quality fulfillment. Jim Hall surely picks the choicest notes in the world.”

— DR. HERB WONG

↧

Stan Kenton: An Introduction

June 16, 2017, 7:00 am

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“The emerging consensus … is that the Kenton output was, as a whole, neither as terrible as its critics insisted nor as celestial as its devotees pretended. At times, of course, it could be either of the extremes, but the plain truth about the Kenton orchestra was that it was so much else as well. One should speak of the ‘Kenton sound’ only with trepidation; it is better to refer to the Kenton ‘sounds.’ …
The band’s range of expression was, in fact, nothing short of awe-inspiring. There may have been better big bands, certainly there were more consistently excellent big bands, but for sheer expressiveness, none could match the Kenton ensemble of the postwar years.”

- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-60 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 144-45; paragraphing modified]:

In spite of the controversy that has always surrounded the man and his music and perhaps sometimes because of it, Stan Kenton has been of interest to me from the first time I heard his magnificent 1946 version of Concerto to End all Concertos.

The actual occasion of my first hearing of this piece wouldn’t be until about 10 years later when while helping a friend clean out a closet, we found a batch of 12” 78 rpm’s that had belonged to his father [whom he had lost as a casualty of the Korean War].

Given my very nascent interest in Jazz at this time, I had a faint recollection of having heard Kenton’s name mentioned as someone who was prominent in the music.

With permission to borrow the recordings having been granted by the friend’s Mother, I trudged home during a New England snowstorm with these oversized, and very heavy, Capitol 78’s tucked under my aching arm.

When I put them on the record player, all heck broke loose as the majesty and the power of Kenton’s music presented itself. I was hooked then and have been hooked ever since. What grand stuff this is!

The music seemed to possess me, both emotionally and intellectually. It was as though the music came alive and brought me into a new dimension along with it.

Ever since that first encounter with his music, I’ve listened to the various iterations of Stan’s orchestras and the constant transformations in his music.

In doing so, I’ve come to appreciate the following, succinctly-stated observations about Stan and his music as drawn from the WorldRecords.com website:

“For all the power, beauty, and majesty of his music, Stan Kenton remains an enigma. That may be a little dramatic but it's the kind of drama that Kenton himself would have appreciated.

Certainly much of his oeuvre encompasses a long series of contradictions: he put together a series of the hardest swinging big bands in the history of American music, but he often seemed be on an impossible dream kind of quest for a new jazz art music hybrid in which swing was not necessarily the thing.

He was one of the first white bandleaders to regularly hire black musicians, but in an infamous moment around 1956, he complained that white jazzmen were under appreciated.

He was constantly looking for ways to push the boundaries of the music into the future he was the first musician to popularize the term "progressive jazz" yet he also constantly carried the torch for the great early players like Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines.

Taken philosophically, Kenton would seem to add up to a series of unresolved chords, but musically, Kenton was among the most consistently inspired of American Musical icons. For nearly 40 years, he led one great band after another, which were marked not only by the ambitiousness of the leader's musical vision, but by the quality of musicians and arrangers whom he unfailingly surrounded himself with.

Every unit he led in front of the public or in a recording studio had something to recommend it, and even if his ideas could occasionally be pretentious, the point is that his music was constantly driven by new ideas.

Over the course of his long career the thing that Kenton feared most wasn't failure but the idea of repeating himself. He was a spiritual kinsman to both Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis, two other musical icons who, at every stage of their development, refused to stop evolving and who could never stomach the idea of doing something that they had done before.”

So how best to spend some time with this fascinating man on JazzProfiles?

Since Lillian Arganian has kindly granted the editorial staff permission to use The Introduction to her work, Stan Kenton: The Man and His Music, we thought that this would be an excellent place to begin a multi-part profile on Stan.

“BalboaBeach. June 14, 1982, 9:35 p.m. Site of the Rendezvous Ballroom.

A more perfect setting could not be imagined for what happened here 41 years ago. Dramatic and colorful, it's a stage set for the launching of something of great moment.

A pier runs to the left of the site into the incredible green sea, now darkened. From its edge lovers could turn to face the expanse of miniature gold city lights in the distance to the right, the exotic silhouette of romantic palms to the left. Walking back, they would hear the roaring Pacific, crashing to shore in giant bursts of white foam, hissing away in huge swirls.

And, roaring back, the bold, brash new music of Stanley Newcomb Kenton and his Orchestra, a scant 300 yards away in the Rendezvous Ballroom on Ocean Front Boulevard.

They began here, the five musical decades of Kenton's life, as he progressed from playing in other people's bands in the mid-1930s to putting together his first orchestra at the end of 1940. A booking on Memorial Day, 1941, and through the summer of that year gave his young band the solid footing it needed before heading East. It was to be an international career before it ended with his death on August 25,1979, and though he stipulated in his will that there be no "ghost band" there is Kenton music being heard everywhere in the world today, through the quicksilver scattering of his ideas that have danced into so many corridors of music they can never again be contained.

Stan Kenton the Man was a figure of complexity and simplicity; of contradiction and straight-ahead logic; of enormous psychic awareness and sensitivity; of characteristics at war with each other but at home within the same person, a seeker of the farthest frontiers of music and imagination. If he had to be summed up in one word, the word would be: Innovator.

Stan the Man's music was daring and brilliant. Exquisitely tender and pensive. Quick-paced. Exotic. Lush. Sensual. New. Different. Polytonal. Atonal. Massive. Emotional. Unleashed. If it had to be summed up in one word, the word would be: Exciting.

Stan Kenton was his music.

No phase of it was left untouched by the man, from playing piano, composing and arranging to leading the band, expanding its horizons, stretching and nurturing his musicians, promoting his concerts and records, making his own records and organizing his own direct-mail organization, speaking for jazz, entering the world of education and fostering the art form in an extensive clinic program in colleges and universities that lasted twenty years.

Married and divorced three times, Stan fathered three children and at one time owned a beautiful home in Beverly Hills. But his calling was his music and his true home was the road. And so it has not been the intention of this book to present the life of Stan Kenton in biographical or chronological form, but rather to touch upon key ideas of his musical thoughts and to ask questions—some of which will remain unanswered—as to his aims, directions, and ultimate achievements as a twentieth-century American musician. And to see what his life and music were all about by discussing their facets with some of those most closely involved—his musicians—and their interactions with him.

Whether sidemen, arrangers, composers, vocalists, educators, a combination of two or more of these, or related through kinship of idea or admiration, all were part of the Kenton orbit and understood its sphere of influence. From the early meeting in 1934 with Bob Gioga, who played on the first Stan Kenton Orchestra, through Dick Shearer and Mike Suter, who played on the last, they cover the entire span of his career. A strict chronology was not followed because many of the characters came in and out of Kenton's life in more than one period, but the book should be seen to have its own logic of presentation as the story unfolds.

It may be helpful to keep in mind certain key times in Kenton's career as a guide in tracing the progression of the several phases of his innovations and developments. While most big band leaders were content to settle into a specific style and trademark, Kenton explored. For Kenton the adventure could not be too extreme. Many will remember the revolutionary City of Glass from the late forties-early fifties period. Written by Bob Graettinger, this unusual concert work would not have been touched by any other band leader of the time, nor probably any symphonic conductor. The author has seen some of the Graettinger charts in the Kenton Archives at North Texas State University, courtesy of Leon Breeden, and the courage it took to take on one of those—graphs, for graphs are what they are—is unimaginable. That Kenton championed this music alone guarantees him a place in modern American musical history. But that was but a single episode in a highly episodic life.

Kenton's birth, long considered to be February 19,1912, in Wichita, Kansas, was established as December 15,1911 by Dr. William F. Lee in his book, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm (Creative Press, 1980). Both dates continue to be observed in celebrations and tributes. Kenton spent his early youth in Colorado and moved with his family to California, where after a time they settled in Bell.

Kenton has said he became addicted to music at the age of fourteen, following a visit to his home of his cousins, Billy and Arthur, who impressed him with their playing of jazz. Even before that, he'd had piano lessons and used to fall asleep at night with radio headphones over his ears. Young Stanley formed a combo in high school, called the Belltones, who played dances and parties.

For several years he played in territory bands and in speakeasies, working his way up from fifty cents a night to forty dollars a week. Meeting Everett Hoaglund in 1934 seems to have been a turning point; perhaps because he learned from the man's professionalism, or perhaps because some of the musicians he met at this time later went with him.

By the autumn of 1940 Kenton had made the decision to go off on his own. He formed a rehearsal band, wrote his theme song, composed original charts and arrangements of standard tunes, cut several dubs, lined up his own bookings, premiered at a Huntington Beach ballroom, just north of Balboa. Kenton and his men substituted one night at the Rendezvous in Balboa for the Johnny Richards band, and through a mysterious set of circumstances inherited the summer job there when the owner cancelled Richards' band and hired his.

At some point in the early forties the band picked up the name "Artistry in Rhythm." It was an active band, changing personnel with the coming and going of its sidemen into the armed services. In the autumn of 1947 the "Progressive Jazz" Orchestra was formed, centering on the music of Pete Rugolo, with its many striking influences of classical composers such as Bartok, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and Milhaud.

Stan's highly creative "Innovations" Orchestra was put together at the end of 1949 and premiered in 1950, going on tour in 1950 and '51. It was the most unusual idea of its time, and probably comes closest to what Stan was striving for all his life, continuing in the experimental vein that predated it in the Progressive Jazz concept and that went on after it. Long before he had one he'd dreamed of a band that played concerts instead of dances. Sprinkled throughout this book is a quote in his words made at the time of the premiere of this new phase of his music. Though the time frame of its formal existence was relatively short, the idea was a lasting one.

Jazz greats were the stars on the famous "swing" bands of the early- to mid-fifties, when performers such as Lee Konitz, Lennie Niehaus, Frank Rosolino, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Mariano, Maynard Ferguson and many others seared into the consciousness of impressionable young musicians who knew they "had to" join the Kenton band one day. For the Kenton band was always its own catalyst for attracting future musicians to it, just as it made the reputations of those who were associated with it. Known as "New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm," the band took Europe by storm in the first of Kenton's many trips abroad in 1953. In 1959 Kenton first became involved with jazz clinics at the universities, an involvement that developed into a passionate commitment that endured all the rest of his life. Many feel it was his most important achievement.

Two widely differing musical ideas and a brainstorm found their conception in the sixties: the "Mellophonium" Band, or "New Era in Modern American Music" Orchestra, of 1960-63, which recorded such fabulous discs as West Side Story and Adventures in Time, both written by Johnny Richards, was one. The "Neophonic" Orchestra, which premiered at the Los AngelesMusicCenter in 1965 presenting some of the most original music ever written for an American band, was the other.

The brainstorm was the creation of Creative World, a Kenton organization that started as a promotional vehicle and later developed to pressing and distributing its own records. Its importance in keeping interest in both Kenton and jazz alive cannot be overestimated, for the sixties saw the rise of rock to dominating proportions on the popular music scene.

Rock crashed head-on into Kenton in the seventies and lost, in that Kenton simply superimposed "the Kenton sound" onto it, through such records as 7.5 on the Richter Scale. Kenton also became entranced with the time revolution of the seventies, instigated by Don Ellis and carried on by Hank Levy, bringing on a whole new but still very much Kentonesque sound.

Stan Kenton's amalgam of twentieth-century European classical influences with jazz in his own original compositions, such as "Shelly Manne" and "June Christy," produced works of startling quality and interest. Many of his works have never been recorded, perhaps never heard. He could be maddeningly modest at times.

Madcap humor was as much a part of his life as were the clashing of chords and brass choirs. A classic favorite was his disappearing act. Stan would mysteriously vanish while leading the band, as stealthily as a fox. Moments later he would reappear—through the parted fronds of a stage palm!

The Kenton band of nearly forty years hurtled through the night in one gigantic card game. Only the players changed, while Kenton stayed on. A remarkable rendering of the Kenton philosophy turned up on the back of some score sheets, dated Dec. 1966, during Leon Breeden's researches at NTSU, which he very kindly shared with the author. In Stan's own writing were these words:

A bus is many things to a band over and above transporting it from engagement to engagement and place to place.

It is serenity - - belongs to the musicians and they belong to it. It carries not only the musician, but their (sic) necessary personal items such as clothing and other objects contributing to his being in addition to the most important reason for his very existance (sic) and his justification for living, his musical instrument which is his identity.

A bus is more important than a hotel room. A hotel room is temporary. The bus is permanent. A visit to a restaurant is a fleeting intermission.

A musician's seat on the bus becomes his personal area both above and below & is so private that no one infringe(s) by placing any thing foreign to him in his retreat.

A bus is refuge and escape from the outside world.

A bus is a symbol of a musician's dreams and aspirations. It can become a sanctuary of elation and satisfaction or a den of despair and disappointment all determined by how and in what manner he and his horn have performed. A bus can be any thing from a horror chamber from which there seems no escape to a vehicle taking him to the highest level of exalted achievement.

A bus is sometimes a dressing room a warm up room a library a place of meditation, on it dreams of the future take shape and foundations are lain to help them become realities.

A bus is a recreation center a rumpus room a private meeting place in which no one is admitted unless their interests are common.

Talk and conversation is in almost every case is (sic) dominated by discussions revolving around music. Occasionally talk drifts away to other things but only for a moment then back to music.

'I feel this way'

'I dig that'

'I find that'

'My taste tells me'

'He thinks'

'They thought'

What do you do

What are your feelings

etc. etc. —One nighters—

Constant movement.

Travel—eat—play music—travel eat sleep travel et (sic) play music and the cycle continues.

No one remembers where they played last night or where they play tomorrow. It is only today that counts. The day of

the week and the date of the month is forgotten, sometimes even the month itself.

—Hit & run—/Goody box/ Water jug/ Rules/ Root /Beer Coolers/Tire checks/Day sheets/Laundry/A. C. & Heat/Iron lung/Coffin/Chops/Axe & horn/Misfits/Numbers/

Anticipation of the job &/Crowd raport. (sic)

Kenton's legacy reaches far beyond the glossary of supertalents who spent time with him and went on to great success in their own careers, people like Art Pepper and Mel Lewis and Conte Candoli and Stan Getz and Laurindo Almeida and the whole encyclopedia of them. To borrow a quote from Hank Levy in his own chapter, that's "just touching the top."

The Kenton Wall of Brass is thriving in the hundreds of international drum corps who pour onto the fields every summer playing richly orchestrated arrangements with full colorations of brass and percussion. "Kenton music lends itself to our art form," Scott Stewart explains. Stewart is director of the Madison Scouts, who favor a decidedly Kenton style in their jazzistic approach, balanced horn line and warmth of interpretation. Madison drives people crazy whenever it performs "Malaguena," won an international championship with "MacArthurPark," and has played other Kenton favorites. The Blue Devils of Concord, California, a consistent international finalist, has ripped into "Pegasus"; the Garfield Cadets of New Jersey have done a medley from Adventures in Time, Les Eclipses of Canada has done music from Cuban Fire; the Grossmen from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and others have done "Artistry in Rhythm"; the Freelancers, of Sacramento, California, and others have performed "Malaga." But whatever the work being played, a Kentonesque concert of brass comes right at the wildly cheering throngs of appreciative fans at every show, in dauntless presentations of fire and talent highlighted by intrepid soloists.

Coincidentally, these young people also ride on the bus, do one-nighters, and live on the road, at least during the summers.

Kenton's legacy of new American music and his propensity to experimentation is somewhat more difficult to trace, though interesting ideas have been attempted by The Orchestra in Los Angeles, whose name was later changed to The New American Orchestra, following the departure of co-founder Allyn Ferguson. Some of the problems and concepts of such a venture are discussed in the chapters on Ferguson and Jack Elliott, present director of the orchestra. Some similarities with Kenton's Neophonic exist, however, such as writers Russ Garcia, Bill Russo, John Williams, Morty Stevens, Dave Grusin, Dick Grove, Oliver Nelson, Lalo Schifrin, Bill Holman, Gerry Mulligan and Ferguson. Also Claus Ogerman, who wrote an arrangement for the Neophonic, Manny Albam, who wrote for Stan at the time of his Innovations Orchestra, and Don Sebesky, who played trombone with Kenton. Musicians common to both orchestras are George Roberts, Bud Shank, Bill Perkins, Vince DeRosa, Art Maebe, Richard Perissi, Lloyd Ulyate, John Audino, Henry Sigismonti, Chuck Domanico, Gene Cipriano, John Lowe, Virginia Majewski, Gerald Vinci, and Shelly Manne (as a guest soloist).

Many people feel that a decided Kenton influence exists in the far more sophisticated kinds of music being written for films and TV. Academy-award winning composer John Williams, for just one example (E. T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Superman, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the music for the L. A. Olympics), was one of Stan's Neophonic writers.

Even more exciting is the direction being taken by people such as Bud Shank and Bill Russo, now Director of the Contemporary American Music Program at ColumbiaCollege in Chicago, Illinois, in erasing the dividing lines between jazz and classical music in brand-new creative ways. Both were with Kenton during his Innovations period and learned from the experience. Where this direction will ultimately lead is a fascinating question for our times.

Stan Kenton willed all his music, that is, the scores and charts, to NorthTexasStateUniversity, in Denton, Texas. Why he chose to do so will be seen in the chapters on Leon Breeden, Gene Hall and Bobby Knight, as the background and structure of their fine jazz program are explored in some depth. Gene Hall, one of the principal originators of the jazz clinics in 1959, founded the NTSU program in 1947, the first of its kind in the country. Leon Breeden continued its development from 1959 to 1981, bringing great honors to it and earning prestige and recognition for his efforts. North Texas'1 O'Clock Jazz Lab Band was chosen by Kenton to appear with the Los Angeles Neophonic in 1966, was the first university band ever to appear at the White House, in 1967, and was the official big band at the Montreux International Jazz Festival in

Switzerland

in 1970, among other honors. Breeden has his own extraordinary story to tell concerning his relationship with Kenton and the future of the music at NTSU, a heartening one for all Kenton fans.

Bob Gioga was a close friend of Kenton's, tracing their friendship back to the Hoaglund band in 1934. He played baritone sax and was band manager for 12 years, from 1941-1953. George Faye joined for a year and a half in 1942 and played tenor trombone. Buddy Childers came on as trumpet player in January of 1943 and was with Kenton over a span of 11V2 years. Pete Rugolo, composer and arranger and closely identified with Kenton's "Progressive Jazz" period, joined the band in 1945. June Christy was vocalist in April, 1945 for two years and also made several tours and recordings. Shelly Manne was Kenton's drummer starting in February, 1946, off and on until 1952; Milt Bernhart played trombone in the band off and on from 1946 to 1952; both came back for the Neophonic. Bill Russo was trombonist and composer-arranger off and on from January, 1950, through October, 1953, returning to write for and conduct the Neophonic in 1966.

Shorty Rogers was trumpet player and composer-arranger on the band in 1950, stayed for a year and a half and continued to write for Kenton afterwards, including a ballet for the Neophonic. Jim Amlotte joined as trombonist in 1956 and was band manager from 1959-69; Dalton Smith was lead trumpet player off and on from 1959-1970; both were involved with the Kenton clinics and the Neophonic. Bud Shank came on in late 1949 for two and one half years, played in the Neophonic, taught in the clinics and was involved with the Collegiate Neophonic in 1967.

Mike Suter was bass trombonist in 1963 and again from 1973-75 and in 1978. He was both a student and a teacher in the clinics and is a close friend of Dick Shearer's. Shearer was band manager and trombonist for the last 13 years of the band, though he left on August 21, 1977. (The band broke up on August 20, 1978.) A joint chapter on Shearer and Suter in addition to individual ones has been included, since they triggered each other's memories in many details.

Hank Levy, Director of Jazz Studies at TowsonStateUniversity in Towson, Maryland, composed for Kenton chiefly in the seventies, though he was on the band for six months in 1953. George Roberts was bass trombonist on the Kenton band from 1951-53 and again later on; he had his group of forty trombones play for the dedication of the Kenton Memorial in Balboa in September, 1981. Ken Hanna, composer-arranger-trumpet player, began his long association with Kenton in 1942, writing some of the band's finest charts in the seventies. Ross Barbour sang with the Four Freshmen, a group that made several appearances, tours and recordings with Kenton. The Freshmen, still concertizing, though without Barbour, proudly claim to have owed their style to the Kenton sound. What is surprising is the number of groups who imitate the Freshmen—and who therefore are perpetuating the Kenton sound as well.

Big bands are enjoying a resurgence in popularity, which assures a future to the new ones being formed, some of which have a Kentonish verve and brightness about them. Kenton records are being played on radio both by deejays on the new shows and by long-time advocates of his music. Perhaps none can equal the devotion of Randy Taylor, big band host on MiamiUniversity public radio station WMUB in Oxford, Ohio, who plays a special 4-hour all-Kenton show every Friday night from 7 to 11. Taylor, former Kenton archivist, began the practice as a memorial tribute in August, 1982, and has continued it in response to public demand.

Memorial concerts testify to the enduring values of Kenton's music and the loyalty felt to him by his fans. At ClarencevilleHigh School in Livonia, Michigan (affectionately dubbed "Montreux North" by host Dick Purtan) one of the first such concerts was held on February 19, 1982, with Dick Shearer fronting the band.

By 7:30 p.m. the lobby was jammed for a performance scheduled to begin at 8. By 7:35, after the auditorium doors were opened, almost all seats were taken. Guests sat back and surveyed the scene: Blue seats, aqua carpeting. Orchid lighting on the stage, set up to show a piano at left, where Kenton would have sat, congas nearby and percussion at back left. Rows of aqua-and-tan chairs poised like sentinels. Saxophones parked, slightly aslant, trombones "face down" behind them. A pleasing, sensual avant-garde look about it all. The audience, mostly dressed in sharp, youthful, sporty attire, looks alert and intelligent.

Opening remarks, and then Shearer whips the band into a crescendo that threatens to tear the walls down, leading into Willie Maiden's "A Little Minor Booze." In a rainbow of colors and moods, he takes them through "Here's That Rainy Day,""Minor Riff,""Two Moods for Baritone,""Opus in Chartreuse,""Body and Soul,""Roy's Blues,""Street of Dreams,""Intermission Riff,""Send in the Clowns,""Stompin' at the Savoy,""Yesterdays,""Opus in Pastels" and "Peanut Vendor." The second half of the program goes quickly, and suddenly it's time for The Theme. Pianist Chuck Robinette does it proud: weaving Kenton music in and out as he spins the haunting threads of Artistry. Everyone anticipates what's coming and tries to prepare for it, but with the electrifying entrance of the saxes a universal chill slips through the audience like a single emotion: "Baa-baa ... ba-ba-ba-ba baa-baaa ..." Before it is over there are few if any dry eyes either on stage or anywhere in the room. And the realization dawns that "Artistry in Rhythm," like its creator, has become immortal.

In his own ways and by avenues that will perhaps not be felt for some time in all their scope, Stan Kenton was the greatest force in twentieth-century American music.

His sweeping sense of music favored extremes in dynamics and tonal expanse, tormenting crescendos to ear-splitting highs, tension and release. It became its own genre, consuming the categories of "concert jazz" and "classical jazz" and adding enough character of its own to be labeled unto itself.

No one can measure the effects of the priceless gift he bestowed upon people and how it contributed both to their own flourishing and to new forms of American music: the gift of listening. It was a selfless, most generous form of encouragement. In the total freedom allowed his composers and arrangers to create, his band became a vehicle for their creativity; but by a curious reciprocity everything that passed through it somehow became "Stan Kenton music." Kenton was influenced by the musicians who came to him, but none left his band untouched by the Kenton experience.

Stan the Man had the integrity of his own conviction and would gladly have dispensed with the need for money and sacrificed all his time to artistic endeavor. He was not satisfied to cater to the public taste of his time, but insisted on going in his own direction, whoever listened or did not.

Stan Kenton's music was the headiest combination of love, emotion, intellect, form, freedom, boldness and fire ever known.

It still burns, its sparks igniting life wherever they touch down.”

↧

Jazz in Italy: Gianluigi Trovesi - "One of Another Kind"

June 17, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Stan Getz: A Blueprint for Perfection

≪ Previous: Stan Kenton: An Introduction

“Passion” comes in many forms in Italian Jazz and no artist is more passionate about his music than Gianluigi Trovesi

When the editorial staff at JazzProfiles first posted this feature in September, 2008 it did not include the concluding video tribute to Gianluigi Trovesi.

The video tribute to Gianluigi, which was one of our earliest efforts [second, in fact], uses as its audio track Rina a Vigilio, a cut from Trovesi’s 2007 Jazz Italiano Live album.

Recorded in performance at Rome’s Casa Del Jazz [House of Jazz], the track features a beautiful trumpet solo by Trovesi’s long-time, front-line mate, Enrico Rava, followed by solos by Gianluigi on alto and Roberto Cecchetto on guitar, respectively.

You can also find the “articolo” and more information about this outstanding alto saxophonist and clarinetist by visiting his website at http://www.gianluigitrovesi.com/

“One of Another Kind” is a tune by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Perhaps he meant the title as a play on words with the phrase - “One of A Kind.” Either phrase is an apt description of the music of Gianluigi Trovesi – one of another kind, or, if you will, one of a kind. The implied meaning in both of these phrases is that something is “different” and this is another suitable word for Trovesi’s music.

In attempting to describe the music of Gianluigi Trovesi, the Hindu parable of the three blind men and the elephant is called to mind in which one blind man’s description is based on touching the trunk; another’s on touching the ears and the tusks; the third reflects his coming into contact with the body of the huge animal. Which is it? What is a description of an elephant? Obviously, it is a combination of all three and so it is with any attempt to explain Gianluigi Trovesi’s body of music – it must be discussed in combination because no particular or linear description of it can reveal the breadth and depth that it entails.

However, the following categorization by Francesco Martinelli [Trovesi’s official biographer] may serve as a starting point:

“Gianluigi Trovesi has accomplished that most difficult of feats, not only for a jazzman, or a musician even, but for any artist. He managed to create a musical world that is instantly recognizable and completely original at the same time. Drawing upon an unlikely and personal combination of sources and, having undergone a growth process in which the usual steps in the development of a musical career were reversed, Trovesi bloomed relatively late as an artist. Yet today his voice as a composer and improviser ranks among those who created the notion of a "European Jazz" inspired by the American tradition, but not an imitation of it.”

As an instrumentalist, Gianluigi Trovesi is a clarinetist whose sound and technique on the instrument is the equal of Artie Shaw and Buddy DeFranco [with some minimalist Jimmy Giuffre thrown in on occasion, by way of contrast, but with an upper register!]. He also is a bass clarinetist whose sound and tone is more mature and stable than that of Eric Dolphy and an alto saxophonist with a clear, clean, crisp tone that is very reminiscent of Cannonball Adderley, Oliver Nelson or Phil Woods.

“He was born in 1944 into a working-class family in Nembro, a small village in an Alpine valley not far from Bergamo in northern Italy, the young Trovesi found music around him. It was played in the common spaces of his neighborhood: the chorus for traditional mountain singing or the church choir, the guitar-accordion-clarinet trio that accompanied dances, and later the rare record and the communal listening to opera and light classical music on the first radio sets. Music was so intertwined with everyday life Trovesi didn't realize it could be a separate profession.” [Martinelli].

One day, much to the young Gianluigi’s surprise, a music teacher told him about the long-established Bergamo Conservatory in near-by Donizetti where people could go and learn and play music all day!

Trovesi graduated with a diploma in clarinet from Bergamo in 1966 having also studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with the renown Maestro Vittorio Fellegara.

At the same time, his musical curiosity led him play in bands performing in the local dance halls where he first came into contact with the swing era arrangements of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.

Very soon thereafter, his seemingly inherent musical inquisitiveness let him to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s bebop, the cool school of Konitz and Mulligan and Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy’s earliest recordings.

"The young musician was indeed listening avidly to the "new thing" coming from the USA. Especially relevant was the chance to listen live to Mingus' group with Eric Dolphy at the Milano festival in 1964. Dolphy's alto phrasing was rooted into bebop but his point of arrival was completely different, and the way he used the bass clarinet was another world if compared to what was studied in the Conservatory for classical and contemporary music." [Martinelli]
After initial taking up employment as a music teacher in the local school system, thanks to his eclectic musical interests and to his widely acknowledged talent, including the fact that in 1978 he won the first prize in the national competition for saxophone and clarinet, Trovesi landed a permanent job in the Milan Radio Big band as first alto and first clarinet.

Another factor that helped advance Trovesi’s career was that around this time, he began to work in a sextet that was co-led by with guitarist Franco Cerri and pianist Giorgio Gaslini. Cerri and Gaslini were both also influential in the politically and culturally heated atmosphere of 1970s Milan. This immersion in Milan’s musical milieu brought Gianluigi into contact with Michel Portal, Misha Mengelberg, Evan Parker and John Surman – all of whom broaden the range of modern music in Europe in the last two decades of the 20th century.

In 1978 Trovesi began teaching saxophone and clarinet at the conservatory in Milan. In that same year, he won the first prize in the RAI TV national competition for saxophone and clarinet which helped in landing him a permanent job in the Milan RAI TV big band (he stayed until 1993).

1978 continued to be a seminal year for Gianluigi as following a concert in Bergamo with Giorgio Gaslini's Sextet, the influential European producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt called Trovesi for his Clarinet Summit production, an all-star group with clarinet soloists, John Carter, Perry Robinson, Theo Jörgensmann and Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky.

Martinelli recounts what Berendt heard at the concert that so impressed him with Trovesi’s playing:

"Confronted in one of these occasions with the problem of playing a solo after Evan Parker, Trovesi reached back in his memories of learned classical musician, of dance hall player and jazz improvisor, coming up with the idea to play a "saltarello" from the Florentine Renaissance school of Ars Nova [new art], developing it into an improvisation inspired at the same time by serial techniques and open Dolphy-esque harmonies."

The saltarello was a lively, merry dance first mentioned in Naples during the 13th century. The music survives, but no early instructions for the actual dance are known. It was played in a fast triple meter and is named for its peculiar leaping step, after the Italian verb saltare ("to jump").

The concert was a great success and at the same time a major turning point in his career Trovesi was experimenting with basing his Jazz, not purely on American influences and schools, and free jazz, per se, but also on the Italian classic tradition, the contemporary music of the 20th Century, the brass bands, dance and night-club tunes, and the folk music of his valley in and around Nembro.

At the same time:

"To work in the Milan Radio Big Band meant also the chance to experience first-hand the extraordinary concert season of the orchestra, which is in turn lead by musicians like John Lewis, Kenny Clarke and Francy Boland, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Smith - who obviously features Trovesi as soloist, Kai Winding, Manfred Schoof, with a very wide range of styles and approaches. Adriano Mazzoletti who heads the Milan orchestra also presents Trovesi in concert with his trio, and then sends him as a Italy's representative for the European Radio Big Band at St. Gerold: there his solo on the blues, reinterpreted along the lesson of Eric Dolphy, is one of the highlights of the evening. Producers for Radio France begin to invite Trovesi's trio to perform broadcasts and on one occasion while in Paris, his group plays opposite the Anthony Braxton Quartet."[Martinelli]

Around this same time, Trovesi began his recording career and he received the Critics' National Prize for Baghet, his first LP. Martinelli offers the following details about this recording:

"His first record as a leader, "Baghét", is in trio, and is published in 1978, with Paolo Damiani on bass and Gianni Cazzola on drums. In it the learned classical and contemporary music, from Ars Nova to serialism, meet the Italian folk, from the Sardinian launeddas to the "baghet", a bagpipe from the Bergamo area, in a context of jazz improvisation. The record is extremely well received, and the Italian Critics Associations votes it Best Record of the Year."

During the 1980’s and 90’s, Trovesi compiled a resume of distinguished academic, professional and creative accomplishments.

Over these years, Trovesi toured extensively and performed at festivals and venues across Europe, the Middle East, India and North America with the Giorgio Gaslini Quintet, his own octet and the Italian Instabile Orchestra. He has also received many prestigious awards, such as Best Italian Musician in Musica Jazz's 1988 and 1992 competitions and Best Italian Group, awarded to his Octet in 1992 and 1996.

Several of his albums were voted Best Italian Disc, including Dances (1985), From G to G (1992), an album which also garnered Down Beat magazine's highest rating of five stars, and Les Hommes Armés (1996). He has toured, recorded, and performed with countless renowned improvisers, jazz musicians, and musical experimenters, including Anthony Braxton, Misha Mengelberg, Steve Lacy, John Carter, Han Bennink, Mark Dresser, Tony Oxley, Günter Sommer, Horace Tapscott, Evan Parker, and Kenny Wheeler.

Here is a select discography with annotations of Trovesi’s recordings over the past twenty-five years or so to help provide a road map to the many facets of his work should the reader like to listen to his music directly.
Dances [Red 181]

As noted previously, this recording won the Music Jazz poll as the best Jazz record of 1985. Here is a review by Steve Loewy from www.allmusic.com:

“Since recording this award-winning album, Gianluigi Trovesi has gone on to develop a body of work as strong as any on the Italian scene. Here, he performs on a range of reeds (alto and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, and piccolo), backed by Paolo Damiani on bass and Ettore Fioravanti on percussion. As with his later work, he shows a propensity for folk and Eastern European melodies. For a largely noncommercial player identified with the avant-garde school of Italian jazz, this is a surprisingly accessible outing (although, in all fairness to Trovesi, he has always skirted between conventional and postmodern music). Damiani is given ample solo space, which he uses to great advantage, further strengthening his position as one of Europe's leading bass players. Fioravanti, too, shows some marvelous chops.”

Les Boites a Musique [Music Boxes] [Splasc(h) H 152]

Trovesi, with the help of Luciano Mirto on what can only be described as “electronics “ [“computer operator”?] and Tiziano Tononi on percussion is still finding his way, but what is important about this recording is that it helped to further establish Gianluigi as a “…key figure in Italy’s new jazz, as performer, composer and organizer [who] continued to explore the relationship of jazz with indigenous Mediterranean culture. That issue has been largely taken up since by the splendid efforts of Peppo Spagnoli’s Splasc(h) label to document the Italian scene in all its variety, and it’s appropriate that the session in question appears on the label’s ‘Italian Jazz Classics’ series.’” Richard Cook & Brian Morton The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [p.1467].

From G to G [Soul Note 121231-2]

By 1992, Trovesi began to put less emphasis on deconstructivist, free jazz interests and his music began to move into what Martinelli refers to as his “mature period.” He forms a piano-less octet with Pino Minafra on trumpet, Rudy Migliardi on trombone, Marco Remondini who doubles on saxes and cello, the double bass team of Roberto Bonati and Marco Micheli, Vittorio Marinoni on drums on Fulvio Maras on percussion. The rhythm section of Micheli and Marinoni [a superb drummer] along with Maras on percussion would continue with Trovesi right up to his present-day group.

“From G to G is a small classic. Without sacrificing any of his intensities, Trovesi has created a colorful, unpredictable, brilliant marshalling of devices drawn from jazz and beyond. While there are hints of Italian folk music and remote echoes of ancient masters of Italian composition, the synthesis leads inexorably to real Italian jazz. ‘Herbop’ uses two theme which are split and reshaped throughout 18 minutes of music, soloists and ensemble set in perfect balance. ‘Now I Can’ and ‘Herbop’ are satirical without being heavy-handed and without losing an underlying severity which Trovesi uses to pare off any fat in the music. But the finest piece is probably ‘From G to G’ itself, a long, serenely effective dirge in memory of a friend, and with a memorable solo from Minafra. The brass player turns in some of his most lucid work here. Migliardi is rumbustious on tuba and urgently expressive on trombone; but it is Trovesi himself who leads from the front, his alto solos elegantly moving forward from Dolphy to Coltrane into a sonority that again suggests the tradition of Italian song. Very fine indeed." Richard Cook & Brian Morton The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [p.1467].

“Reedman and composer Gianluigi Trovesi is one of the leading lights on the Italian avant-jazz scene (a scene still little known in the U.S.), and From G to G is one of his finest recordings. Leading an octet that includes the masterful and zany trumpeter Pino Minafra, Trovesi put together a series of compositions and performances that could hold their own against similarly sized American ensembles of the same time like those led by David Murray or Henry Threadgill. The delightfully dancing melody that enters midway through the opener, "Herbalk," gives some indication of the uniquely Italian spin imparted by Trovesi as he makes free use of material with roots in the Italian folk tradition, melding it artfully with the dissonant strains of post- Coltrane jazz. "Now I Can" opens with a wonderfully wacky tuba and penny whistle duo; settles into an infectious, bumptious theme; and just when you think they're prepared to ride the groove out, a series of even more playful percussion breaks emerges. And when you think, "That's got to be enough," Minafra commandeers the megaphone for some inspired and loony vocalizing (he reprises this lunacy on the closing cut). Trovesi always keeps the listener on his/her toes, and his own playing is very tasty, his alto summoning echoes of Arthur Blythe, his bass clarinet in a realm all his own. The title track is yet another delicate melody, but with enough strength to provide a solid underpinning for fine, creamy solos by Minafra and trombonist Migliardi, among others. There's always a strong sense of ensemble here, with underlying riffs, calls and responses, and a subtle but expansive array of instrumental colors at play throughout. From G to G is, aside from being a highlight of Trovesi's career, a superb introduction to the unfortunately insular but extremely rich world of Italian contemporary jazz. Highly recommended. – Brian Olewnick writing in www.allmusic.com

In a duo with accordionist Gianni Coscia, Trovesi moved to the other end of the musical spectrum in 1995 with Radici [Egea SCA-050],

and with its sequel in 1999 In Cerca di Cibo [ECM 543034-2].

And yet, this must the hippest clarinet – accordion duo on the planet with its plethora of bebop phrases harmoniously infused into traditional Italian folk music.

“A gently harmonious collaboration, Trovesi sticking to clarinet, with Coscia’s accordion creating a lovely harmonic undertow and rippling breakers of arpeggios that counterpoint all the reed player’s lines. Some of it is café society, some classical rigor, some folk-tune, some dance. ‘Antica Mazurka’ is a little of all of that, sonorously spread across eight minutes.
The sequel appeared on ECM and may even be finer. ‘Djano,’ one of the great melodies in jazz, starts in muted respect and eventually takes an almost bowderlized turn. ‘Lucignolo’ is a marvelous dance for the two instruments, and ‘Celebre Mazurka Alterata’ is a simply gorgeous piece of music.” Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [p.1467].

In 1996, Les Hommes Armés, the second major recording by Trovesi’s newly formed octet is released on Soul Note [121311-2].

“For all its ingenuities, this is just a degree less welcoming and appealing than its predecessor [From G to G]. Much of it revolves around the ancient European melody L’Hommes Armé, out of which came pieces by numerous composers …. Five tunes – ‘Tango,’ ‘Tengo,’ ‘Tingo,’ ‘Tongo,’ and ‘T’Ungo’ – are used to interlude the big pieces, which are themselves broken up into diverse fragments; and then there’s a crackpot version of ‘Mood Indigo’ and a tribute to Eric Dolphy based on a re-harmonization of ‘Miss Ann.’ Trovesi’s team play with their usual aplomb but, as delightful as it often is from moment to moment, the record never quite coheres or compels the was From G to G did." Richard Cook & Brian Morton The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [p.1467].

As Martinelli explains, “in 1998, the strength of Trovesi’s roots in his hometown are showcased in the Soul Note CD – Around Small Fairy Tales [121341-2].

Inspired from a reference in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the ‘Bergamasque’ dance [a reference that also inspired Bach and Frescobaldi, among others], Trovesi created a suite using a nontet based around three trios: [1] a “Jazz’ trio with sax, bass and drums; [2] a classical string trio; [3] a folk trio using accordions and ‘tamburello’ [and Italian frame drum somewhat like a tambourine]. He encapsulates all of this into the Nembro String orchestra under the leadership of Bruno Tommaso.

“Italian music, even of the pop variety, often references the country's rich orchestral and operatic tradition. Rarely do you find such a fusion as effective and grand as in this "chamber jazz" concoction of Italy's small town saxophonist and clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi. Every jazz bar follows with an allusion to Baroque or Renaissance forms before returning to something "trad." The effect is wondrous and magical. The prevalence of vibraphone maintains this air of a symphonic spell. Symphonic it is, because while the album is a collection of separate pieces, conductor Bruno Tommaso scores the entire opus for conceptual continuity. A prevalence of strings and a beautifully understated participation from the jazz percussion (a knockdown exception is royal rhythms of "Dance for a King") give Tales an airy, free, and lighthearted feel. Nembro is the name of that small town that Trovesi is from, and his daughter and son-in-law play in its Chamber Orchestra, chosen for use on this recording. The 18-member ensemble is bolstered by Trovesi himself, vibes, a very subtle electric bass, drums, and percussion for jazz flavoring of this exquisitely arranged meeting of Western Society's two most intellectual musics. Liner notes to this album are in Italian and English.” - Tom Schulte, www.allmusic.com

“Wonderfully vivid and colorful music, informed by jazz but just as much in debt to the strains he associates with his birthplace of Nembro, this is fashioned somewhat as a suite, the eight pieces arranged by Bruno Tommaso to feature the orchestra alongside the rhythm section and Trovesi’s own solos. Swooningly romantic is places, but usually with a hint of tartness underneath via Trovesi’s own parts, this is enjoyable as soundtrack escapism or as an intelligent and highly crafted blending of consonant ingredients.” Richard Cook & Brian Morton The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [p.1467].

Ever curious about music in different settings, in 1991 Trovesi was able to satisfy another of his interests when he was commissioned to develop big band arrangements for the WDR Big Band in Koln [Cologne]. The result of Gianluigi’s efforts for this project can be heard on Dedalo [Enja 9419].

"There's a dazzling studio sound, Markus Stockhausen on hand to put in some fine trumpet solos, and outstanding rhythms from Rainey and Maras. But this is one of Trovesi's finest hours. Some of these themes - 'From G to G,''Dance for a King' - will be familiar from earlier records, but the invincible skills of the WDR Big Band are a great boon to such a situation: there not mavericks like the Vienna Art Orchestra, or regimentally drilled in the manner of many American big bands, but a supremely accomplished ensemble that know European music. Maybe they are less completely simpatico than the group on Around Small Fairy Tales, but this is a different kind of record. Energizing, surprising, impolite and completely entertaining."Richard Cook & Brain Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [pp. 1467-68].

One aspect of Jazz not always present in the music of Trovesi is its roots in the blues. This may be because Gianluigi did not grow up listening to the music evolve in a blues context. In an effort to incorporate elements of the blues in his music, in 2003 Trovesi embarked on a “Blues in the West” project that was dedicated to Louis Armstrong. This music eventually found its way onto the ECM recording – Fugace [ECM 84902]. Thom Jurek’s reviewed the recording in www.allmusic.com

“Italian composer and clarinet master Gianluigi Trovesi has realized his own dream. For over a decade his recordings have included bits and pieces of the American jazz and blues he heard as a child and led him down the path from Bergamo to the world's jazz stages. But Fugace is different. Here, Trovesi and his octet create a veritable soundtrack to a film from the composer's imagination.

They pay a great tribute to early American jazz, the kind found rolling down the streets of New Orleans in the teens and early '20s by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and W.C. Handy. But this is no New Orleans tribute album in the usual sense.

Trovesi has incorporated, like his countryman Nino Rota, the traditional folk song and dance forms of Italian music and allowed them to engage early American jazz on their own terms.

Tarantellas and blues make great companions (or at least they do here), from the funeral marches evoked in "African Triptych" to the places where "Ramble" and "Blues and West" evoke Armstrong's "West End Blues" in a myriad of contrapuntal exchanges between horns and the rhythm section — particularly the Trovesi clarinet and the double bass of Roberto Bonati, where long, restrained folk forms grace the 12 bars and free them.

There's also the elegant, minimal, slippery swing of "Clumsy Dancing of the Fat Cat Bird," where electronics, cello, guitar, and trumpet vie for the center of a mix that gives way to a hard bop read of certain passages in "St. James Infirmary."

In fact, based on this track, the title, and "Canto Di Lavorno," one can feel the influence of movie directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini on Trovesi, utilizing music to create the space something will take place in rather than describe the action.

From restrained to rollicking to nearly classical and reverent, Fugace is a special recording. It is the most forward-thinking and easily fully realized of Trovesi's distinguished body of work.”
One of the more recent recordings by Gianluigi Trovesi took place in 2007 at Rome’s Casa del Jazz as was issued by Palaexpo as part of its jazzitaliano live 2007 series [02].

On this recording, Gianluigi is once again joined by his rhythm section stalwarts Marco Micheli on bass, Vittorio Marinoni on drums and Fulvio Maras on percussion and synthesizers. He is also engagingly reunited with his old friend, trumpeter Enrico Rava, who manages to add “another voice” on some of the tracks.

Yet, what makes this recording so interesting is that the ever-searching Trovesi manages to completely change the sound of his music with the addition of guitarist Roberto Cecchetto who adds fresh layers of resonance to the music through the use [and, not, the overuse] of a Pat Metheny type of guitar synthesizer.

This is a concert full of variety: from the easy flowing opening Canzoncina; to the bass clarinet –trumpet duet that Trovesi & Rava play on Django to the accompaniment of Micheli’s bass and Cecchetto’s chorded guitar; or the Reggae-beat of Campanello Cammellato; the dual drumming poly-rhythms that Marinoni and Maras lay down behind a call-and-response duet between Trovesi’s alto and Cecchetto’s guitar on Disparietto/Siparietto; the church music, pipe organ overtones of Ricercar Vaghezza; or the Sub-Saharan 6/8 rhythms that Marinoni lays down behind Trovesi’s bass clarinet on Gargantella; or the blisteringly fast Noparietto which combines elements of both Ornette Coleman and Charlie Mingus’ music and culminates in an awesome display of drumming by Marinoni.

Trovesi’s Jazzitaliano live 2007 is in many respects a perfect example of Martinelli’s assertion that “He manage[s] to create a musical world that is instantly recognizable and completely original at the same time.”
If you haven’t visited Gianluigi Trovesi’s singular musical world – “one of another kind” - hopefully this piece about one of the premier musical minds of our time will encourage you to do so.

↧

Stan Getz: A Blueprint for Perfection

June 18, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Harry Bäcklund: 1936 - 1978 - "I Remember You"

≪ Previous: Jazz in Italy: Gianluigi Trovesi - "One of Another Kind"

“As for Getz's playing, his style is instantly identifiable and internationally influential one for a decade even though he's only 30—was once noted primarily for its soft, flowing lyricism. in recent years, he has added increasing virility. And the singing naturalness but individuality of line; the quick, certain ear for harmonic patterns; and the supple time, remain. …

Stan is in the tradition of the players. He has not contributed a body of music—either written or unit-deep—as have John Lewis, on the one hand, and Gerry Mulligan, on the other.

He has contributed a style and can nearly always be depended on to stimulate a listener's imagination (…) with a demonstration that the art of improvisation still flares and challenges and excites.”

- Nat Hentoff, Jazz author and critic

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz had it all – a beautiful, immediately recognizable sound, ideas as an improviser that flowed forth like water from a Bernini fountain and the seeming ability to execute on the instrument, anything that came to his mind.

Stan Getz was a blueprint for perfection.

So prolific are his recordings that you could spend a lifetime listening to his music and not absorb it all.

Getz seemed to have a proclivity for finding hit songs whether it was Early Autumn in 1948 with Woody Herman’s Band, or Moonlight in Vermont with guitarist Johnny Smith in 1952 and, of course, his 1962 recording of Jobim’s Desifinado and the related Jazz Samba album.

I am particularly fond of the many fine recordings he made for Verve in the 1950s with his own groups, including his West Coast quintet featuring Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone and those featuring guitarist Jimmy Raney.

Also during this decade, Getz made a series of excellent collaboration recordings with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, trombonist J.J. Johnson and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. The latter featured the usually “cool” Getz in some take-no-prisoners exchanges with Sonny Stitt that found Stan holding his own in a more assertive “East Coast” Jazz setting.

Ironically, at the height of his powers as a player in the 1950’s, Getz left it all behind to take up residence in Stockholm for most of the second half of the decade. He latter resettled in Copenhagen from around 1961-62 before returning to the Unites States.

Ted Gioiasurmises some of the reasons why Stan left it all behind in the following excerpt from his seminal The History of Jazz [p.286]:

“Despite the quality and quantity of his 1950s work, Getz became an increasingly isolated figure on the jazz scene as the decade progressed. There were many contributing factors to his fall from grace: a much-publicized arrest for attempting a drugstore robbery to support his substance-abuse habit; his decision to relocate overseas; his often changeable personality—but, at bottom, it came mostly from factors beyond Getz's control. Jazz tenor sax playing in these years was moving farther and farther away from Getz's cool stylings. Harder edged players, such as Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, were establishing a new model for how the tenor should sound. Getz, who was always a reluctant modernist—his embrace of bop mannerisms had never obscured the more traditional roots in his playing—seemed in danger of sounding old fashioned before his thirty-fifth birthday.

But in the early 1960s, Getz mounted a major comeback that encompassed both critical success [i.e.: his 1961 Focusalbum which featured Eddie Sauter’s string arrangements] and immense popular acclaim [his bossa nova recordings of the music of Jobim and Gilberto].”

Stan became financially comfortable thanks to the commercial success of the boys and girl from Ipanema Beach in Rio De Janeiro such that, before his passing in 1991, he went on to lead some superb Jazz quartets with pianists Kenny Barron, JoAnne Brackeen, Chick Corea, Albert Dailey, Andy Laverne and Jim McNeely. For a time, he toured with a quartet that included Gary Burton on vibes and Larry Bunker on drums and late in his career, he did a number of guest recordings which included one with pianist Bill Evans and one with the vocalist Diane Schuur.

Did I mention that you could spend a lifetime just listening to recordings by Stan?

Of all the recordings by Stan, to my ears, Stan Getz in Stockholm which he recorded for Verve in 1955, remains my favorite.

Ironically, in many ways, it is one of his most unassuming recorded efforts and one which is often overlooked to the point of exclusion as it doesn’t garner a mention in Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^thEd.

Consisting of 8 tracks each about 4 minutes in length, Stan’s playing throughout is an audio example of what I previously termed – a blueprint for perfection.

A large part of the artistic perfection of the music on this album is due to the work of an all-Swedish rhythmic section made up of Bengt Hallberg on piano, Gunnar Johnson on bass and Anders Burman on drums.

In a reserved and understated manner, they just swing like mad, stay out of his way and propel Stan forward thereby enabling him to engage in some of the most engaging solos he ever recorded.

After listening to how well bassist Johnson and drummer Burman lock-in behind Getz, it is surprising to find that both are rarely heard on the considerable number of modern Jazz recordings that were made in

Sweden

from around 1945-1965.

At the time that Stan Getz in Stockholm was recorded in December, 1955, Anders Burman was known primarily as a Dixieland Jazz drummer. He made the date with only a hi-hat, and snare drum – no ride cymbal, tom-toms or bass drum – and he only uses sticks on one track.

To call pianist Bengt Hallberg a reluctant modernist would be an understatement for as Getz told Nat Hentoff, who wrote the liner notes to the recording:

"There are times when I feel Bengt borders on genius. … He has ambivalent feelings about jazz though. He doesn't like the uncertainty of it, and thinks it's a limited form. The thing is he doesn't permit himself to get excited when he plays jazz. He's afraid of letting himself go that much; he's afraid he'll get hurt. And yet I know he could Bud-Powell it-up if he wanted to.” [Actually, I think that Bengt’s playing on this recording sounds like a combination of pianist Teddy Wilson and Bud Powell].

Perhaps, another factor leading to the great restraint of the Swedish-born rhythm section on Stan Getz in Stockholm is that they may have been in awe of Getz who had received so much notoriety as an “American Jazz star” before he relocated to Stockholm.

Whatever the reasons, the moderation and self-discipline that Hallberg, Johnson and Burman bring to their backing of Getz on this album sets him free to soar. They just set up some incredible grooves and stay the heck out of Getz’s way.

The eight tracks that make up the album are all standards: Indiana, With A Song, I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You, I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love With Me, Everything Happens to Me, Over the Rainbow, Get Happy and Jeepers Creepers.

The format for each track is pretty straight-forward with Getz stating the melody, improvising for two or three choruses with Hallberg following and doing the same; Getz comes back in for a closing chorus of improvisation before the group takes the tune out.

Hallberg accompanies Getz beautifully, Johnson lays down singing bass lines and Burman hardly plays an accent while quietly swinging throughout; nothing flashy but all of which are done in the service of some of the most beautifully tenor sax playing ever created.

The music is so clear, beautifully accomplished and swinging that I return to this recording often and with a sense of anticipation because it epitomizes Jazz: the music seems to come out of nowhere, stay a fleeting moment and then disappear leaving a warm feeling in one’s heart and a little springiness in one’s step.

You can sample the music from Stan Getz in Stockholm on the following video tribute to Stan which features as its audio track Get Happy. It’s the only one that Anders Burman uses sticks on and he does so by playing them on the hi-hat in the manner of Papa Jo Jones and Davey Tough. You can’t use sticks on a cymbal any more quietly than this and yet the tune swings like mad.

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Harry Bäcklund: 1936 - 1978 - "I Remember You"

June 19, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Fabio Zeppetella - Chansons! [e Canzoni] - Via Veneto Jazz and Jando Music

≪ Previous: Stan Getz: A Blueprint for Perfection

West Coast Jazz or Jazz on the West Coast, the style of Jazz that existed primarily in California from about 1945 - 1965, and the majority of whose recordings were purported to be little more than “... bloodless museum pieces” by one Jazz critic, had an influence well beyond the confines of the Golden State during this same time period.

Most of the Jazz musicians in Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Norway were influenced by it as were the Italians led by Oscar Valdambrini on trumpet and Gianni Basso on tenor saxophone and the French led by the tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen.

The cool wave of the bossa nova broke under the West Coast Jazz spell, too, with Jobim and Gilberto riding the crest of this music’s worldwide popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Sweden, the cool school banner was initially carried by baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin, which was somewhat appropriate in that one of the characteristic sounds of West Coast Jazz owed so much to the piano-less quartet led by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker featured on trumpet.

Another distinguishing feature of Jazz West Coast was the dominant influence of Lester Young on the tenor saxophone sound of many of players such as Zoot Sims, Jimmy Giuffre, Bill Perkins, Bob Cooper, Richie Kamuca and, of course, Stan Getz.

When beginning research on some extended future blog postings about the Swedish “cool school of Jazz” in general and the music of Lars Gullin in particular, I came across the tenor saxophone playing of Harry Bäcklund [1936 - 1978] on some of Lars’ recordings and it completely knocked me out. So I decided to find out more about Harry Bäcklund.

Well, to use a current phrase - “Good luck with that.” There was almost nothing to research about Harry Bäcklund, at least, not that I could find in English.

I was able to locate this background information on www.orkesterjournalen.com:

"Harry Bäcklundwas a brilliant musician who played in the style of Sonny Stitt and Stan Get and who is unjustly overlooked today" writes Gunnar Lindqvist in his book about the Golden Circle Gyllene Cirkeln. [Besides managing the Golden Circle Jazz Club in Stockholm for a number of years Lindqvist was also a tenor saxophone and flute player was responsible for the launch of the then EMI-owned hi-fi firm Bang & Olufsen and also produced many Jazz recordings featuring Swedish Jazz musicians including baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin, trombonist Eje Thelin and vocalist Monica Zetterlund].

Harry Bäcklund was born in Mora where he began his musical career by playing with pianist Nils Lindberg, before serving in the military as a musician stationed Östersund and Falun. He began his professional career in 1950.

He settled shortly afterwards in Stockholm and played with several orchestras, including a longer time with Putte Wickman and again with Nils Lindberg. In the late 1950s, he also worked as a role of rock n' roll-saxophonist with various bands and artists.

After some time in Copenhagen, he returned to Stockholm and worked a lot with Lars Gullin, including in the quintet format on tours and at several gigs at the Golden Circle. In 1965 he received Swedish Jazz Clubs scholarship. During his last years he was not active as a musician as a consequence of a disease [which is unstated].”

That’s it!

The only other reference I could locate was in these insert notes that accompanied Lars Gullin: Alma Mater Featuring Harry Bäcklund [Anagram Records ANACD 10] by David Reid:

“When the Long Playing record Columbia SSX 1010 Portrait of my Pals was released in 1964 the accompanying press release written by -- described Lars Gullin's music as "a climate, an atmosphere that bids you to step inside to experience and absorb it. What you feel is the sound", it is hard to imagine any better description.

1964 was a vintage year for Lars Guilin, which he spent mainly in Stockholm, although he performed in concert all over Sweden. Recordings were limited to the classic Portrait of my Pals and the session from the Modern Museum partly released by Sonet and with two further tracks on Anagram CD 7, Rolf Billberg Altosupremo.

On the present CD all the tracks are from live concerts. One played at the Golden Circle in Stockholm but otherwise at gigs played at student gatherings, which explains the wonky piano, or the occasional bottle clink, if you listen hard enough, but then you might miss the genius of the music.

The range of Gullin's consummate skillful playing is demonstrated superbly, from his free and easy style, to the dark sensitive tones where you can almost feel the pain.

"I've seen" is pure drama and "What's New" contains a magic, rarely on display in the studio or for that matter from few musicians.

The presence of his alter ego Harry Bäcklund brings the perfect partnership together, interacting and coaxing before he takes off on his own flights of fancy. [Emphasis mine.]

The present CD was made very much as part of a set of three the Rolf Billberg already mentioned and Anagram CD 8 Harry Bäcklund "Rembering Harry". These soulmates where a phenomena of Swedish jazz which was under recorded but should never be forgotten. [Emphasis mine.]

David Reid

Now if I could only find a copy of the obscure Anagram CD 8 "Harry Bäcklund Rembering Harry".

In the meantime, please enjoy a sampling of Harry Bäcklund’s marvelous tenor playing on the I Remember You cut from Lars Gullin: Alma Mater Featuring Harry Bäcklund which forms the soundtrack to the following video tribute to Swedish Jazz in the 1950s.

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Fabio Zeppetella - Chansons! [e Canzoni] - Via Veneto Jazz and Jando Music

June 20, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: What Coltrane Wanted by Edward Strickland - The Atlantic Monthly, 1987

≪ Previous: Harry Bäcklund: 1936 - 1978 - "I Remember You"

The editorial offices of JazzProfiles has recently received a number of new and forthcoming recordings and we’d like to share some information with you about certain of these that we have found particularly appealing.

The Italian word for songs is “Canzoni” and it seems fitting that it so closely resembles that of the French word for songs - “Chansons!” because of the geographical proximity of Italy and France and because the two countries share a quest for beauty in all aspects of Arts and Letters in the broadest sense of those terms.

This French-Italian cultural and artistic affinity is on display in Chansons! Guitarist Fabio Zeppetella’s latest CD for Via Veneto Jazz and Jando music [VVJ 113] on which he is joined by his countryman Roberto Gatto on drums and two, excellent French Jazz musicians: Emmanuel Bex on organ and voice and Géraldine Laurent alto sax.

There is a further meshing of en Francais and Italiano in the eleven song selections that make up this album as six are by Italian composers while the remaining five feature tunes penned by French songwriters.

The press release that accompanied Chansons! It as “a musical conception similar to a diplomatic treaty or melodious embrace between cousins. Essentially, it’s an innovative exchange between two neighboring worlds that have always eyed and inspired one other with reciprocal curiosity. Italy and France unite as allies on the musical front, gathering on the field four extraordinary talents: Fabio Zeppetella, Roberto Gatto, Géraldine Laurent and Emmanuel Bex.

The group employs a variety of musical devices to keep the music based on these familiar melodies interesting. For example:

This original quartet uniquely interprets eleven songs that best reflect the musical tradition of singer-songwriters belonging to these two countries. Starting from the highly popular jazz composer Bruno Martino, passing through the ever-present De André and De Gregori and arriving to Pino Daniele, another milestone; on the French scene are idols such as Jacques Brel, Leo Ferré, Yves Montand and Joe Dassin.”

The quartet’s interpretation is extraordinary and the songs in “Chansons!” enchant from beginning to end. While the harmonious complicity of Gatto, Bex and Zeppetella is a well-known fact, the musical fluency added by the involvement of Laurent is unexpected, further enriching this innovative project.”

The music on Chansons! [VVJ 113] is Jazz but played in a manner that compliments a basic facet of the music historically: its receptiveness to a variety of influences. In this case, Zeppetella and company infuse Jazz with a variety of French and Italian popular tunes which they alter melodically, harmonically and rhythmically.

For example, on Track one - E la chiamano estate - opens as a slow tempo rhumba with a rock ‘n roll backbeat which is understated because of Roberto Gatto’s uses of brushes to establish this pulse.

Bocca di rosa Gatto plays a 6/8 triplet figure behind Géraldine Laurent’s improvised introduction before she states the melody in unison with Zeppetella which launches a magnificent Bex organ solo.

Fabio switches to acoustic guitar to frame the chords for Buonanotte fiorellino overwhich Géraldine plays a beautiful one chorus statement of the melody to create the ultimate lullaby.

With its Jazz-Rock fusion beatA me me piace o’ blues hits the ultimate groove that really locks the musicians into some inspired soloing.

This is followed by the startling contrast created by a church-like choir introduction to Napule è which is formed by a Bex voice-over organ effect that creates a sonority underpinning improvised statements by Laurent and Zeppetella.

My favorite is a Latin Jazz version of Luna Rossa which you can check out on the video that closes this review along with an audiofile only version of Bocca di rosa.

Chansons!

(VVJ 113– barcode 8013358201137)

Fabio Zeppetella | guitar

Emmanuel Bex | organ and voice

Géraldine Laurent | sax alto

Roberto Gatto | drums

The full track list is as follows:

01 - E la chiamano estate (Bruno Martino)

02 - Bocca di rosa (Fabrizio De André)

03 - Buonanotte fiorellino (Francesco De Gregori)

04 - A me me piace o’ blues (Pino Daniele)

05 - Napule è (Pino Daniele)

06 - Luna Rossa (V. De Crescenzo-A. Vian)

07 - Avec le temp (Leo Ferré)

08 - C’est si bon (Henri Betti-André Hornez)

09 - L’été indien (Joe Dassin)

10 - Les temps des cerises (J.B. Clément-A. Renard)

11 - Le bon dieu (Jacques Brel)

Chansons! (VVJ 113) is available through www.viavenetojazz.it, Amazon.com or www.forcedexpsoure.com

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What Coltrane Wanted by Edward Strickland - The Atlantic Monthly, 1987

June 21, 2017, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Tom Harrell, Like Night and Day by Jonathan Eig, Esquire, December 1998

≪ Previous: Fabio Zeppetella - Chansons! [e Canzoni] - Via Veneto Jazz and Jando Music

“Coltrane never found the one line. Nor was he ever to achieve the "more beautiful … more lyrical" sound he aspired to. He complicated rather than simplified his art, making it more visceral, raw, and wild. And even to his greatest fans it was anything but easily understood. In this failure, however, Coltrane contributed far more than he could have in success, for above all, his legacy to his followers is the abiding sense of search, of the musical quest as its own fulfillment.”

- Edward Strickland

This is one of the most interesting pieces on John Coltrane that I have ever come across, both from the standpoint of the quality of the writing, which is superb, and the uniqueness of the analysis, which reveals what Mr. Strickland thought Coltrane wanted to achieve from his musical quest.

The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy

by Edward Strickland as originally published in The Atlantic Monthly December 1987

“JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.

The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.

Asked by a Swedish disc jockey in 1960 if he was trying to "play what you hear," he said that he was working off set harmonic devices while experimenting with others of which he was not yet certain. Although he was trying to "get the one essential... the one single line," he felt forced to play everything, for he was unable to "work what I know down into a more lyrical line" that would be "easily understood."

Coltrane never found the one line. Nor was he ever to achieve the "more beautiful … more lyrical" sound he aspired to. He complicated rather than simplified his art, making it more visceral, raw, and wild. And even to his greatest fans it was anything but easily understood. In this failure, however, Coltrane contributed far more than he could have in success, for above all, his legacy to his followers is the abiding sense of search, of the musical quest as its own fulfillment.

BORN and raised in North Carolina, Coltrane studied in Philadelphia and after working as a clarinetist in Navy marching and dance bands in 1945-1946 he began a decade of playing with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges, and also such undistinguished rhythm-and-blues artists as King Kolax, Bull Moose Jackson, and Daisy Mae and the Hepcats. He came to wide notice in 1955 in the now legendary Miles Davis Quintet and was immediately acknowledged as an original--or an oddity. Critics who in Coltrane's last years all but waved banners to show their devotion to him were among those casting stones for much of his career.

At first many urged Davis to fire the weird tenor, but when, in April of 1957, after a year and a half with the quintet, Coltrane left or was dropped (the truth remains unclear), the reason seems to have been indulgence not in stylistic extremism but in heroin and alcohol, problems he conquered that same year. The controversy had to do not only with his harmonic experimentation, on which Dexter Gordon was initially the chief influence, but with the speed (to some, purely chaotic) of his playing and the jaggedness (to some, unmusical) of his phrasing.

All three characteristics were intensified in 1957 during several months with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, after which he rejoined Davis, who was now experimenting with sparer chord changes, and became fully involved in what Ira Gitler, in Down Beat, called the "sheets of sound" approach. This technique of runs so rapid as to make the notes virtually indistinguishable seems itself to have been a by-product of Coltrane's harmonic exploration. Coltrane spoke of playing the same chord three or four different ways within a measure or overlapping chords before the change, advancing further the investigation of upper harmonic intervals begun by Charlie Parker and the boppers. Attempting to articulate so many harmonic variants before the change, Coltrane was necessarily led to preternatural velocity and occasionally to asymmetrical subdivision of the beat. Despite Davis's suggestion that Coltrane could trim his twenty-seven or twenty-eight choruses if he tried taking the saxophone out of his mouth, Coltrane's attempt "to explore all the avenues" made him the perfect stylistic complement to Davis, with his cooler style, which featured sustained blue notes and brief cascades of sixteenths almost willfully retreating into silence, and also Monk, with his spare and unpredictable chords and clusters. Davis, characteristically, paid the tersest homage, when, on being told that his music was so complex that it required five saxophonists, he replied that he'd once had Coltrane.

Although in the late fifties Coltrane released a number of sessions for Prestige (and, more notably, Blue Train and Giant Steps for Blue Note and Atlantic respectively) in which he was the nominal bandleader, it was really after leaving Davis for the second time, in 1960, shortly after a European tour, that he came into his own as a creative as well as an interpretive force. His first recording session as leader after the break, on October 21, 1960, produced "My Favorite Things," an astonishing fourteen-minute reinterpretation, or overhaul, of the saccharine show tune, which thrilled jazz fans with its Oriental modalism and Atlantic executives with its unexpected commercial success. In it Coltrane revived the straight soprano sax (whose only previous master in jazz had been Sidney Bechet), and in so doing led a generation of young musicians, from Wayne Shorter to Keith Jarrett to Jon Gibson, to explore the instrument. The work remained Coltrane's signature piece until his death (of liver disease) despite bizarre stylistic metamorphoses in the next five and a half years.

Coltrane signed with Impulse Records in April of 1961 and the next month began rehearsing and playing the long studio sessions for Africa/Brass, a large-band experiment with arrangements by his close friend Eric Dolphy. This was in part an extension of the modal experimentation in which he had been involved with Davis in the late fifties, notably on the landmark Kind of Blue. The modal style replaced chordal progressions as the basis for improvisation, with a slower harmonic rhythm and patterns of intervals corresponding only vaguely to traditional major and minor scales. The modal approach proved to be the modulation from bop to free jazz, as is clear in Coltrane's revolutionary use of a single mode throughout "Africa," the piece that takes up all of side one of the album. Just as his prolonged modal solos were emulated by rock guitarists (the Grateful Dead, the Byrds of "Eight Miles High," the unlamented Iron Butterfly, and others), so the astonishing variety Coltrane superimposed on that single F was, according to the composer Steve Reich, a significant, if ostensibly an unlikely, influence on the development of minimalism. The originator of minimalism, La Monte Young, acknowledges the influence of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" on his use of rapid permutations and combinations of pitches on sopranino sax to simulate chords as sustained tones.

From the start, and especially from the opening notes of Coltrane's solo, which bursts forth like a tribal summons, "Africa" is the aural equivalent of a journey upriver. The elemental force of this polyrhythmic modalism was unknown in the popular music that came before it. Coltrane experimented with two bassists--a hint of wilder things to come, as he sought progressively to submerge himself in rhythm. He was later to employ congas, bata, various other Latin and African percussion instruments, and, incredibly, two drummers--incredibly insofar as Coltrane already had, in Elvin Jones, the most overpowering drummer in jazz. The addition of Rashied Ali to the drum corps, in November of 1965, made for a short-lived collaboration or, rather, competition between Jones and Ali; a disgruntled Jones left the Coltrane band in March of 1966 to join Duke Ellington's.

But it was the culmination of Coltrane's search for the rhythmic equivalent of the oceanic feeling of visionary experience. Having employed the gifted accompanists McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison during the years of the "classic quartet" (late 1961 to mid-1965), Coltrane tended to subordinate them, preferring that his accompanists play spare wide-interval chords and a solid rather than showy bass, which would permit him a maximum of flexibility as a soloist. Coltrane would often take long solos accompanied only by his drummer, and in his penultimate recording session, which produced the posthumous Interstellar Space, he is supported only by Ali. Solo sax against drums (against may be all too accurate a word to describe Coltrane's concert duets with the almost maniacal Jones) was Coltrane's conception of naked music, the lone voice crying not in the wilderness but from some primordial chaos. His music evokes not only the jungle but all that existed before the jungle.

COLTRANE'S spiritual concerns led him to a study of Indian music, some elements of which are present in the album Africa/Brass and more of which are in the cut from the album Impressions titled "India," which was recorded in November of 1961. The same month saw the birth of "Spiritual," featuring exotic and otherworldly solos by Coltrane on soprano sax and Dolphy on bass clarinet. Recorded at the Village Vanguard, the piece made clear, if any doubts remained, that Coltrane was attempting to raise jazz from the saloons to the heavens. No jazzman had attempted so overtly to offer his work as a form of religious expression. If Ornette Coleman was, as some have argued, the seminal stylistic force in sixties avant-garde jazz, Coltrane's Eastern imports were the main influence on the East-West "fusion" in the jazz and rock of the late sixties and afterward. In his use of jazz as prayer and meditation Coltrane was beyond all doubt the principal spiritual force in music.

This is further evident in "Alabama," a riveting elegy for the victims of the infamous Sunday-morning church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. Here, as in the early version of his most famous ballad, "Naima," Coltrane is as spare in phrasing as he is bleak in tone. That tone, criticized by many as hard-edged and emotionally impoverished, is inseparable from Coltrane's achievement, conveying as it does a sense of absolute purity through the abnegation of sentimentality. Sonny Rollins, the contemporary tenor most admired by Coltrane, always had a richer tone, and Coltrane himself said of the mellifluous Stan Getz, "Let's face it--we'd all sound like that if we could." Despite these frequent and generous tributes, Coltrane's aim was different, as is clear in his revival of the soprano sax. Rather than lushness he sought clarity and incisiveness. As with pre-nineteenth-century string players, the rare vibrato was dramatic ornamentation.

Coltrane's religious dedication, which as much as his music made him a role model, especially but by no means exclusively among young blacks, is clearest of all in the album titled A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964 with Tyner, Jones, and Garrison. The album appeared in early 1965 to great popular and critical acclaim and remains generally acknowledged as Coltrane's masterpiece. In a sense, though, it is stylistically as much a summation as a new direction, for its modalism and incantatory style recall "Spiritual,""India," and the world-weary lyricism of his preceding and still underrated album, Crescent. Within months Coltrane was to shift his emphasis from incantation to the freer-form glossolalia of his last period--a transition evident in a European concert performance of A Love Supreme in mid-1965.

Meditations, recorded a year after A Love Supreme, is the finest creation of the late Coltrane, and possibly of any Coltrane. It may never be as accessible as A Love Supreme, but it is the more revolutionary and compelling work. While some of the creations of Coltrane's last two years are all but amorphous, Meditations succeeds not only for the transcendental force it shares with A Love Supreme but by virtue of the contrasts among the shamanistic frenzy of Coltrane and fellow tenor Pharoah Sanders in the opening movement "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" and elsewhere, the sense of stoic resignation and perseverance in the solos of Garrison and Tyner, and the repeated, spiraling phrases of yearning in Coltrane's "Love" and the concluding "Serenity." This unity, encompassing radical stylistic and affective diversity, is the unique feature of Meditations, even in relation to its Ur-version for quartet, which has an additional and quite obtrusive movement. Nothing that came after Meditations approached it in structural complexity and subtlety.

These may be the missing ingredients in the music of Coltrane's final period. The drummer Elvin Jones said, "Only poets can understand it," though maybe only mystics could, for until his final album Coltrane seemingly forsook lyricism for an unfettered quest for ecstasy. The results remain virtually indescribable, and they forestall criticism with the furious directness of their energy. Yet their effect depends more on the abandonment of rationality, which most listeners achieve only intermittently if at all. In fact, it may be the listener himself who is abandoned, for it seems clear that Coltrane is no longer primarily concerned with a human audience. His final recording of "My Favorite Things" and "Naima," at the Village Vanguard in 1966, uses the musical texts as springboards to visionary rhapsody--almost, in fact, as pretexts. All songs become virtually interchangeable, and there is really no point any longer in requests. The only favorite thing he is playing about now is salvation. Coltrane's second wife, Alice, who had by then replaced Tyner as the group's pianist, has remarked, "Some of his latest works aren't musical compositions." This may be their glory and their limitation, the latter progressively more evident in the uninspired emulation by the so-called "Coltrane machines" who followed the last footsteps of the master, and also in the current dismissal of free jazz as a dead end by both jazz mainstreamers and the experimental composer Anthony Davis (who nonetheless recently used Coltrane as a model in the "Mecca" section of his opera X).

The last album that Coltrane recorded was Expression, in February and March of 1967. The album has an aura of twilight, of limbo, particularly in the piece "To Be," in which Coltrane and Sanders play spectral flute and piccolo respectively. The sixteen ametrical minutes of "To Be," which could readily have added to its title the second part of Hamlet's question, are as eerie as any in music.

The most striking characteristic of the album is its sense of consummation, which is clear in the abandonment of developmental structure and often bar divisions, and in the phantasmal rather than propulsive lines that pervade the work. There had always been in Coltrane a profound tension between the pure virtuosity of his elongated phrases and the high sustained cries or eloquent rests that followed. The cries, wails, and shrieks remain in Expression but they are subsumed by the hard-won simplicity that predominates in the album--the lyricism not of "the one essential" line he had sought seven years earlier and never found but one born of courageous resignation. Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music. Coltrane seems to suggest here that music in turn aspires to the condition of silence.

Those who criticize Coltrane's virtuosic profusion are of the same party as those who found Van Gogh's canvases "too full of paint"--a criticism Henry Miller once compared to the dismissal of a mystic as "too full of God." In Coltrane, sound--often discordant, chaotic, almost unbearable--became the spiritual form of the man, an identification perhaps possible only with a wind instrument, with which the player is of necessity fused more intimately than with strings or percussion. This physical intimacy was all the more intense for his characteristically tight embouchure, the preternatural duration and complexity of his phrases, and his increasing use of overblowing techniques. The whole spectrum of Coltrane's music--the world-weary melancholy and transcendental yearning that ultimately recall Bach more than Parker, the jungle calls and glossolalic shrieks, the whirlwind runs and spare elegies for murdered children and a murderous planet--is at root merely a suffering man's breath. The quality of that music reminds us that the root of the word inspiration is "breathing upon." This country has not produced a greater musician.

The Atlantic Monthly; December 1987; "What Coltrane Wanted"; Volume 260, No. 6; pages 100-102.

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