Bill Crow - bassist, author and all-round good guy, has a rule-to-live-by, one which he stresses over-and-over again, and it is that - “Jazz is supposed to be fun.”
To my ears, no one better exemplifies this approach to Jazz than does pianist Roger Kellaway.
But please don’t misunderstand this to mean that Roger isn’t serious about his music or that he is in any way belittling Jazz.
Roger’s music is full of joy, happiness and unexpected adventure and, as such, is full of the fun of finding new wonders in Jazz. Listening to Roger play is like being let into the funhouse at the amusement park. For Roger, as for Bill Crow, Jazz is fun. That’s the point of the whole thing.
The first time I heard Roger Kellaway with Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer’s quintet [talk about two guys who knew how to have fun with Jazz], I burst out laughing. It was the laughter of delight based on the thrill and disbelief of what I’d just heard him play.
Whenever Roger soloed during this first hearing, it was the musical equivalent of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” - Walt Disney’s famous cartoon adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind and The Willows.
Roger was all over the place: dense bop lines followed by stride piano licks; dissonance followed by melodically beautiful phrases; propulsive rumbling out of the lower register that led to cat-running-along-the-piano-keys tinkling in the high notes.
Not surprisingly, given his predisposition to stride, Roger made an LP for World Pacific Jazz … wait for it … Stride! [WP-1861].
John William Hardy wrote these informative liner notes for the recording.
“When pianist Roger Kellaway made his playing debut on records about three years ago [1963 A Jazz Portrait of Roger Kellway, Regina Records reissued as Fresh Sound CD 147] , it was, to say the least, an awe-inspiring event. For like no artist in the history of jazz, this man Kellaway had a deep and personally abiding ability to play, not only in a uniquely modern way, but in a driving two-handed stride piano style. Beyond that, he showed a familiarity with the compositional roots of traditional and modern jazz that allowed him on the same album to invoke the stride and in an obscure Sidney Bechet ditty called Broken Windmill, to deal out a gang of highly original originals in the beyond Bill Evans bag. It is completely safe to say that the world had never before encountered a pianist like Roger Kellaway. He is one of a handful of the most original modern improvisors, and he is one of the best stride pianists in the history of that interesting and difficult style. This album is built around Roger's love for the older facets of his musical personality, and for the kind of happy, carefree melody that seems to lay best with the striding medium-tempo feel. To top things off, the album offers us Kellaway's debut as a conductor and arranger. He has provided simple, uncluttered, but highly effective arrangements to augment the sound of the piano, bass and drums.
The music, as you will hear, has historical importance and contemporary value that should be assessed. So, like, what is stride piano and where does it fit in the history of jazz? Stride piano grew out of ragtime. Jelly Roll Morton was a ragtimer but only occasionally showed evidences of stride methods. Some of the later ragtime pianists, who had been largely followers of Morton in their earlier formative years, became the most prominent stride players.
Contrasting stride to ragtime, one may note the greater independence of the rhythmic left hand and the largely melodic right hand (ragtime found the two hands working in unison both rhythmic and melodic). Also, stride, as contrasted to ragtime, revealed greater rhythmic flexibility and a tendency for linear improvisation in the right hand while the left hand maintained the rhythmic drive playing a single note on the first and third beats and a chord on the second and fourth. While this is the basic form of the style, no stride pianist worth his salt ever held rigidly in that pattern but found infinite variation of the roles of his hands and the general feel of the music. Friends, I'd be more than happy to tell you that Roger Kellaway was a natural outgrowth of his vast experience with all the old striders... if it were true. "We could," says Kellaway, "get all involved in historical data that would nicely lead to such a conclusion, but it would be a pack of lies. I play stride piano because I want to play all of the piano and because this is a way of exploring the instrument that no other pianistic form will allow. Actually, in developing my abilities in stride, I began with listening to only a smattering of old Waller records to get the basic idea of it. Since then, I've relied totally upon my personal development of the style — plus my love for and interest in older forms of jazz in the most general way. Specifically, I like looking for older compositions of worth and beauty to which I can address myself in the older stride style, tunes like Lazysippi Steamer Going Home."
Kellaway continues: "Stride piano is happy piano and that feeling, plus the method itself, was the original basis for this album. We've tried to retain the feeling but we've diverged somewhat in the end result in the method. Stride still pervades most of my playing and when I do diverge from it as In Your Own Sweet Way, or a couple of other places. I still try to keep the same feeling and simple charm of the playing
I like contrasts in my playing —in fact, you can say that in any performance I give-any tune —I hope there'll be at least two quite diametrically opposed feelings involved. But in transition from one to the other, even within a few minutes as in these tunes, I've tried to remain as graceful and natural as possible. Eclecticism is fine, but when an eclectic such as I chooses to incorporate various styles from many eras into his work, he can truly speak of developing an original style from these parts only if he is successful in achieving the blend.”
As for the selections: Side One begins with the top 40's Sunny. That, in itself," says Roger, "was not the reason for playing it. It's a beautiful song. I've really looked forward to recording it for some time. Just like I fell for a couple of Beatle tunes that I've recorded. Hurry, It's Lovely Up Here! is from "On A Clear Day," the Broadway musical. Again a song I've wanted to do for some time. In fact, I recorded the original demo records of it for Lerner and Burton in New York. Lazysippi Steamer is an old Louis Armstrong tune that is one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. I never play it without getting a great feeling inside, and I try to play it on every gig. It's become one of my most requested tunes. I never fail to announce its origin. It's beautiful, but I'm afraid a little puzzling to some people to know that you can find such great material in the jazz archives that is just aching to be played now. Porkette, My Love is light-hearted, but sad. Porkette was —darn it —a pet Guinea Pig that died. This is In Memoriam. Cherry is the Dizzy tune that Mulligan and Chet Baker did earlier on Pacific Jazz. This one illustrates what I meant about two moods, in the things I do.
Side Two begins with Cabaret from the musical of the same name. This is a... a fun tune. I superimposed the stride over the strings in the first chorus. The second chorus gets more sophisticated and then we move to a humorous ending. Ain't Misbehavin' is pure stride material of course, and one of Waller's favorites. This is one of the first tunes I ever played professionally— 13 years ago. Shows you how long I've been into this thing. In Your Own Sweet Way is probably Dave Brubeck's most famous composition and one that is performed by almost all jazz players. This is our most serious divergence from the general feel of the album. Dick Bock [owner of World Pacific Records] suggested it abruptly just to see what I would do with it in a spontaneous situation. To My Way Of Thinking incorporates more than one mood again, but in a more complex interrelationship. It incorporates the prepared piano and uses the time signatures of 3/4, 5/4 and 4/4. It is the most sophisticated and important piece in the album, from the standpoint of my own development."
Throughout all of this album, Roger Kellaway plays like a long lost legend of the stride piano, composes and arranges and even conducts like the fresh and markedly humorous young artist, with an understanding and respect for the past, that he is. He provides us with a musical sum total that won't let our minds wander or our feet keep still. Surely, that is what most of this music is supposed to be about.”
You can sample Roger’s stride stylings on the following video which features him playing Pops’ Lazysippi Steamer Going Home.
“Redman was an outstanding jazz arranger and the first master of jazz orchestration; several of his innovations have since become standard features of jazz arranging.”
- Robert Kenselaar from Barry Kernfeld, editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.
Have you ever wondered about the dynamics of a big band?
How does it work?
A bunch of musicians with assorted brass, reed and percussion instruments assemble on a stage, organize themselves in various sections seated behind bandstands, a conductor or some band member snaps their fingers to set a tempo and a wall of sound erupts.
Where did the Jazz big band paradigm come from?
Early Jazz bands were made up of single instrumentation: a trumpet; a trombone; a clarinet or perhaps a saxophone.
Jazz bands that featured multiples of these instruments usually featured them playing a melody in combination - kind of like a marching band set to dance rhythms.
Written arrangements which served to introduce musical sounds that interlaced melody with harmony and apportioned these sounds into Jazz bands made up of brass sections, reed sections and rhythm sections began to make their presence felt in the 1920.
One of the first to do this was the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in the 1920’s. Henderson’s greatest claim to fame would come as the arranger for many of the early Swing era classic songs associated with the Benny Goodman Orchestra in the mid-1930’s.
But Henderson was not the arranger who first brought his own orchestra to prominence in the 1920s. That distinction goes to Don Redman.
As explained by James T. Maher and Jeffrey Sultanof in Bill Kirchner, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz
“Henderson's band during the 1920s was a veritable all-star unit; at one time or another, trumpeters Armstrong and Rex Stewart, trombonist Jimmy Harrison, and reedmen Don Redman, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Buster Bailey were members. It became a house band at Roseland, and Henderson was cited in Variety as the "Ivy League prom king."
Redman was Henderson's first important arranger, and such recordings as "Copenhagen,""Shanghai Shuffle,""TNT," and "Henderson Stomp" (all Columbia) show off his vision of jazz orchestra styling: an interplay of brass and reeds, often in a call-and-response manner.
He also further developed the idea of backgrounds behind soloists, either chordal or riff-based lines that were jazz-oriented in contrast to Ferde Grofé "harmony chorus" figures [soft harmonic reed voicings under a solo saxophone or trumpet melody line].”
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember Don Redman on these pages with the following overview of his career by Robert Kenselaar from Barry Kernfeld, editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.
“Donald Mathew Redman was born in Piedmont, West Virginia on 29 July 1900 and died in New York on 30 Nov 1964. Composer, arranger, bandleader, and alto saxophonist.
He was a child prodigy from a musical family, and learned to play most conventional instruments. By the end of his years in high school he had already begun writing arrangements. At the age of 20 he graduated from Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, with a degree in music.
After working professionally for about a year in Piedmont he joined Billy Paige's Broadway Syncopators, a band based in Pittsburgh. Here he played clarinet and saxophones, and also wrote some arrangements. While on tour with Paige's band Redman met FLETCHER HENDERSON in New York, and joined him in several recording sessions. When Henderson formed an orchestra shortly afterwards Redman was one of the members; besides writing the band's arrangements he played clarinet, saxophones, and occasionally other instruments.
The addition of Louis Armstrong in 1924—5 as jazz specialist had a deep impact on all the players and also on Redman's arrangements; the band turned increasingly from dance music to jazz, and by the mid-1920s it was the most prominent black jazz orchestra in the country.
Redman left Henderson in 1927 to become music director of MCKINNEY'S COTTON PICKERS, and in a few months he transformed this group from a little-known novelty ensemble into one of the major jazz orchestras of the period. The Cotton Pickers focused less attention on its soloists than Henderson's band had done and concentrated more on Redman's arrangements, which were played with precision and control.
Redman's writing became more elaborate, especially in harmony and rhythm; his new sophistication is apparent in his outstanding arrangement of Rocky Road. Besides playing as a soloist (principally on alto saxophone) and in the reed section, Redman began to appear as a singer, performing in a high pitched, half-spoken style. He also composed his best-known popular songs with the Cotton Pickers: Cherry and Gee, ain't I good to you?.
In October 1931 Redman formed his own band with Benny Morton, Harlan Lattimore, and others. In that year he composed Chant of the Weed, perhaps his most masterly work. Although the success of his band waned in later years, it broadcast regularly on radio and made numerous recordings for Brunswick, Victor, and other labels before breaking up in 1940.
Redman spent most of the 1940s composing and writing arrangements for radio, television, and many big bands, including those of Count Basie and Jimmy Dorsey. He organized a big band to tour Europe shortly after World War II, and in 1951 became music director for Pearl Bailey, an association which lasted throughout the 1950s. At the end of the decade he once again issued a few jazz recordings. He seldom performed during his final years, but spent his time writing several extended works (which have never been performed in public).
Redman was an outstanding jazz arranger and the first master of jazz orchestration; several of his innovations have since become standard features of jazz arranging. His influence was at its greatest during his early years as chief arranger for Henderson. His early arrangements integrated solo improvisations with passages for ensemble in the style of improvised jazz, and he also incorporated certain aspects of collectively improvised jazz, such as breaks, chases, and call-and-response patterns, into his scores. His versions of Copenhagen, Sugar Foot Stomp, Go 'long mule, and Shanghai Shuffle for Henderson are important landmarks in the evolution of ensemble jazz.”
Additional source: Obituary - January 14, 1965 Down Beat
You can checkout Don Redman’s arrangement of Shanghai Shuffle for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra on the following video. Redman can be heard on oboe and Louis Armstrong takes the muted trumpet solo.
Matteo Pagano ‘s Via Veneto Jazz in conjunction with Jando Music recently released a new CD - Blue Moka Featuring Fabrizio Bosso [VVJ 122 CD] - and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to participate in the celebration by bringing the music on this new recording to your attention.
Blue Moka is the debut album of a new quartet composed of Alberto Gurrisi (Hammond B-Organ), Emiliano Vernizzi (sax), Michele Bianchi (guitar), and Michele Morari (drums). The more widely-known and highly respected Fabrizio Bosso joins the group as its featured artist on trumpet.
The label sent along the following media release which we have taken the liberty of modifying in order to provide you with a description of what’s on offer in Blue Moka Featuring Fabrizio Bosso [VVJ 122 CD]
The album collects eight original songs that combine blues moods with funky rhythms and R&B, and what the group refers to as the New York “nu-jazz sound.”
To these pieces are added standards by Wayne Shorter ("Footprints") and Michel Petrucciani ("Brazilian Like") and a tribute to Lucio Dalla ("Futura"), a musician very dear to the band who died in 2012. Dalla was an Italian singer-songwriter, musician and actor who also played clarinet and keyboards. Dalla was the composer of "Caruso" (1986), a song dedicated to Italian opera tenor Enrico Caruso.
“Blue Moka takes up the colors of the American jazz tradition but experiments with the chromatic textures, creating a new shade of blue: a blue moka.”
Another way of describing “blue moka” is that it is a synergy formed by the interaction of a variety of musical styles that produces a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
In addition to being derived from musical styles, the cooperative interaction of the band is also formed from the numerous artists who influenced and informed the members of the quartet including: Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Wynton Marsalis, Brian Blade, Pat Metheny, Robert Glasper, Roy Hargrove, and Larry Goldings.
Simply put, Blue Moka is a band that could only happen today. It is the sound of Jazz - NOW.
The music on this CD reflects how young Jazz musicians hear the music from a contemporary perspective and although there are many influences from the Jazz tradition evident in their playing, their musicianship is very advanced and sophisticated - melodically, harmonically and rhythmically - which in turn is reflective of their training, background and experience in a more modern environment.
The music on Blue Moka is full of energy; it is intense when it needs to be but also sensitive when the music requires this texture.
The foundation for the group is the classic Hammond Organ, guitar, drums format made famous by Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Lonnie Liston Smith, Shirley Scott augmented by the advanced harmonic sensibilities of Larry Young, Mel Rhyne, Joey DeFrancesco, Mike LeDonne, Eddie Louiss, John Medeski and Barbara Dennerlein.
Add to this solid rhythm section is the classic trumpet and tenor saxophone “powerhouse” front line which then gives the music ofBlue Moka a variety of sonorities.
The following video features Blue Moka’s version of Wayne Shorter’s Jazz standard Footprints which we hope will serve as an audio introduction to the exciting music of this new band.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has plans to include more about tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine in a future feature about “the Texas Tenor style.”
“The Texas Tenor style” is defined by Ted Gioia in The History of Jazz as:
“A blues-drenched tenor sax style … characterized by honking’, shoutin’, riffin’, riding high on a single note or barking out a guttural howl.” [p. 341]
In fairness to Stanley, his allegiance to this style of playing tenor saxophone is a much more subtle one and has more to do with tone and phrasing than with the specific characteristics of the style as contained in Ted’s description of it.
No bar walkin’ or jumpin’ in the air and coming down doing the splits for Stanley.
Orrin Keepnews in his insert notes to James Clay’s Double Dose of Soul [Riverside RLP-9349/OJCCD-1790-2]states it this way:
“For Clay becomes the most recent addition to a long tradition of outstanding tenormen from the big state (among them: Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Budd Johnson, most of whom seem to share the same compelling Texas ‘moan’ in their tone).”
[For the record, although Stanley was born in Pittsburgh, PA, I still think of him as a “Texas” Tenorman and include him in this style of playing. His first influence on the horn was Illinois Jacquet].
Jerry Atkins in his magnificent treatment on the subject for The International Association of Jazz Record Collector’s IAJRC Journal [Vol. 33, No.2, Spring 2000] puts it more succinctly when he states:
“What is a TexasTenor? In the world of Jazz, it’s a saxophonist born in or near the LoneStarStateand playing with uniqueness in sound and ideas that many have tried to describe.”
Jerry includes in his essay on Texas Tenormen, Herschel Evans, Buddy Tate, Budd Johnson, Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Don Wilkerson, Booker Ervin, John Hardee, James Clay, David ‘Fathead” Newman and Michael Ivery.
I first encountered Stanley Turrentine’s work on Blue Hour [Blue Note 24586/7243 5 24586 2 2] on which he is paired with The 3 Sounds [Gene Harris, piano, Andy Simpkins, bass and Bill Dowdy, drums].
We requested copyright permission from Ira Gitler, who prepared the original liner notes for the album when it was released in 1960 and from Michael Cuscuna who prepared its release on CD in 1999.
Following their annotations, you will find a video which contains a an audio track from this classic album.
If the one of the ideals of Jazz artists is the creation of an instantly identifiable sound, than one need to look no farther than Stanley Turrentine as the embodiment of this signature quality.
“DO you remember Longfellow's Children's Hour? Well, this is the blue hour and it's not for children. The blue hour is that early morning time when you "reach across the pillow where your baby used to lay" (part of an accurate blues lyric once sung by Rubberlegs Williams) and fail to find her (or him) there. It is when the lonely automobile sounds from the street below, the reflection of the neons and the elongated shadows on the wall, all serve as reminders of the solitary state.
If there is one thing that simultaneously reiterates the painful facts and serves as balm for your bruised soul, it is music. Specifically, the blues are about the most powerful combination of purgative and emollient that there is.
Blues are like the people who create them, products of their environment. The blues in Blue Hour are not the raw, urgent, rural blues. Nevertheless, they are genuinely bluesy even if not cast in the usual 12-bar mold. They are representative of what is commonly known as the "blues ballad," blues or blues-inflected songs with a bridge.
This genre grew popular in the '40s, especially around the large cities. You heard it both in the repertoires of the big bands and the small combos.
Although the blues ballad has mainly been the property of vocalists, many of the melodies are so attractive that our modern jazzmen began to play them during the '50s. The best of this type of song has always contained the warmth of the blues coupled with romantic elements from the "popular" tune. Buddy Johnson's "Since I Fell For You" (sister Ella Johnson made this one especially convincing) is an excellent example.
"Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You" goes back to the 40s when some memorable versions of this Don Redman tune were done by Lips Page and Nat Cole. Old Count Basic fans will remember Jimmy Rushing's original vocal plea of "I Want A Little Girl."
While never thought of as a blues ballad, "Willow Weep For Me," qualifies by its strong blues feeling, even though it approaches the category from another direction than, say, the "Don't Cry Baby" that Jimmy Mitchelle did in the '40s with Erskine Hawkins.
The only 12-bar blues of the set is "Blue Riff" by Gene Harris. The tempo is a bit faster than any of the other slow-grooved selections but it is in the same relaxed mood.
No detailed explanation is needed to tell you about the treatment of these songs here. The simple act of listening will be self-explanatory.
The horn that fills Blue Hour with minutes of azure, cobalt, cerulean, navy, sky and Baby; Baby, is the tenor saxophone of Stanley Turrentine. Although only in his late 20s, Turrentine has a warmth of style associated with the players of an earlier period. His first inspirations were Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas and it is obvious that he learned some valuable lessons from them.
Stan's full-bodied tenor is ideally suited to the material here. Presently with organist Shirley Scott's group, he is perhaps best-known for his work with the Max Roach Quintet during 1959-60. It should be known, however, that he played with Ray Charles in 1952 and Earl Bostic in 1953. Jobs like these were actually long-range preparation for a date such as Blue Hour.
Since Turrentine's first Blue Note LP as a leader (Look Out! BN 4039) and his numerous appearances as a sideman on this label with Horace Parian, Arthur Taylor, etc., he has drawn nothing but high praise from a variety of critics. His direct, honestly emotional playing, embodying elements of the old and the new, pleases a wide scope of listening taste.
The fly, funky threesome known as The Three Sounds is very familiar to Blue Note listeners. In essence, this trio is an export of Benton Harbor, Michigan and a product of Indiana. Pianist Gene Harris and drummer Bill Dowdy were born in the Michigan city. Bassist Andy Simpkins was born in Richmond, Indiana, the state where the group was formed in South Bend in 1956. In addition to their own albums on Blue Note, the Sounds also did a set backing Lou Donaldson.
The wedding of Turrentine and The Three Sounds is the work of an astute matchmaker. Their insinuating, down stylings are a perfect complement to Stan's tenor. If he is the hands of the clock which tells us the blue hour, the Sounds are the inner works with Harris the sweep second hand.
This album has to make you feel good even when you are really brought down. You don't have to shake well before using. Use it freely; its healing powers won't diminish. And if your baby happens to come back and you're feeling all right again, it won't hurt to enjoy Blue Hour together, even at twelve noon.
“STANLEY TURRENTINE was a member of Max Roach's quintet and had just made an album of his own for Time Records when he made his first Blue Note appearance on a Dizzy Reece session in April 1960.
Although that session was not issued until 1999 (Dizzy Reece's Comin' On), he clearly made an incredible impression on Blue Note's Alfred Lion, Francis Wolff and Ike Quebec. Three weeks later, he was in the studio with Jimmy Smith making the amazing Midnight Special and Back At The Chicken Shack albums. Two months later, he made the first of many albums of his own for the label (Look Out! with the Horace Parian trio), followed by his first session with The Three Sounds (tracks 4-8 on this CD). That summer, he returned for Blue Note sessions with Horace Parian, Dizzy Reece, Duke Jordan and Art Taylor. The year 1960 closed with a second session with The Three Sounds, which produced the original Blue Hour (Blue Note 84057).
Clearly Turrentine's juicy, soulful tone, rhythmically hip phrasing and wonderful melodic ideas were what Blue Note was all about. And for the next nine years, he
recorded a succession of wonderful dates for the label as a leader and as a sideman. (He would also return when the label was reactivated in 1985.)
Gene Harris, Andrew Simpkins and Bill Dowdy first came together as The Four Sounds (with a succession of tenor saxophonists) in South Bend, Indiana in 1956. Paring down to a trio, they worked around Ohio playing as a trio and supporting traveling artists, toured with Sonny Stitt and then settled in Washington, D.C. where they began to make a name for themselves as a trio.
Horace Silver was among the first to sing their praises and bring them to Blue Note's attention. In September 1958, they came to New York to open for the volcanic Stuff Smith at the Offbeat Club. Impressed by their ability to find and lock in on a groove, Alfred Lion immediately signed them to Blue Note and brought them into the studio to make their first album Introducing The Three Sounds. Nat Adderley also used them that month as the rhythm section on his Branching Out album with Johnny Griffin.
When they returned to town in the next February to make their second album Bottoms Up, Alfred Lion also paired them up with Lou Donaldson for the superb LD + 3 album. When Stanley Turrentine came into the fold in 1960, he became an ideal candidate for the same concept. He had the same range and soul that made The Three Sounds one of the most popular trios of its day.
So on June 29, 1960 the day after the trio cut "Moods" and "Feelin' Good," they returned to the studio to record with Turrentine. According to his session notes, Alfred Lion was worried that Stanley Turrentine sounded better than the trio that day. The date ended after five tunes with a notation that they would use the then-untitled blues, "Where Or When" and "There Is No Greater Love" and finish the album later.
Two days after the trio recorded "Here We Go" and "It Just Got To Be," on December 16, 1960 they reconvened with Stanley. This time, once they hit a groove, the session sailed by effortlessly and yielded more than enough material for an album.
Oscar Pettiford's "Blues In The Closet,'"Just In Time" and a strong alternate take of"Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You" were left in the can.
The album Blue Hour was released and became an instant classic in the canon of both Turrentine and The Three Sounds. The extra material from that session and the first session are what make up the previously unissued second CD on this set.
Although the prolific Three Sounds stayed with Blue Note until June 1962, they had no more encounters with special guests except for a single track with Ike Quebec on which Gene Harris switches to organ (recently issued for the first time on The Lost Sessions). In October of that year, they made two albums for Verve, one of which, oddly enough, was a collaboration with Anita O'Day. In December, the trio began a series of albums for Mercury/Limelight, some of which included orchestral accompaniment.
When they returned to Blue Note in 1966, the drum chair was occupied by Kalil Madi (followed by Donald Bailey, then Carl Burnett). Andy Simpkins left in 1968 and his chair was filled by Henry Franklin. While they continued to add orchestral backing for studio albums, that funky, hard-driving trio sound remained at the core of the group's identity and appeal. Some of their most rewarding sessions in those years were live recordings at the London House (Limelight), the Lighthouse and the It Club (Blue Note).
It would have been great to hear The Three Sounds with Stitt or Gene Ammons or any number of like-minded saxophonists. But at least we have their collaborations with Lou Donaldson and Stanley Turrentine to enjoy and now we have twice as much music from their meetings with Stanley.
“This albummarks the inauguration of what may become an important alliance in modem music. Though individually known for years to wide but disparate audiences, Tommy Gumina and Buddy De Franco might have seemed, to the average observer, a most improbable pair of subjects for the kind of close musical cooperation that can be observed in these sides. Actually their teaming was the result of a lucky accident, combined with one very important factor: the decision of Decca's Sonny Burke that Gumina and De Franco ought to be heard together on an LP
"The way I met Tommy," Buddy recalls, "you would never have dreamed that we'd have wound up with a group of our own. What happened was that one day I needed a piano player for a gig. I had Frank DeVito booked on drums and he asked me whether I could use an accordion player instead. My immediate reaction was: 'Not on your life!'. But when Frank explained that this was not just another accordion player— this was something else. And it didn't take me long to find out how right he was.
"After recording my composition King Philip with Les Brown for Decca, I had talked to sonny Burke about doing a date of my own. He already had Tommy under contract, so the suggestion that we do something together was very logical from his point of view. By that time there was a real musical marriage between Tommy and me. We got a job together at Ben Pollack's on Sunset, more or less as a place to break in some of the material we wanted to work out together for the album. What you hear on these sides is largely what we were working out on that job."
- Leonard Feather, original liner notes to the Decca Album Pacific Standard (Swingin’) Time, [DL 74031 Stereo]
I met Jack Tracy, the esteemed former editor of Downbeat Magazine and long-time Jazz record producer very late in life and quite by accident.
Initially, my contact with him was through an internet chat group that focused on the West Coast Style of Jazz that predominated in California from about 1945-65.
We later met in person at a number of the biannual 4-day Jazz festivals sponsored by the Los Angeles Jazz Institute.
He was a great supporter of this blog and an earlier contributor to it as a guest writer.
Jack was from the Minneapolis St-Paul area and moved to Chicago during his tenure as Downbeat’s editor in the 1950s. He started producing Jazz records for the Chess label based in the Windy City before Mercury Records, at the urging of Quincy Jones, convinced him to relocate to Hollywood, CA in 1961 to become their resident producer of Jazz recordings on the West Coast. Artists he worked with included Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Del Close, Harry Nilsson, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Terry Gibbs
Jack always maintained that one of the greatest results from “that move West was getting to produce a number of albums by the Buddy DeFranco - Tommy Gumina Quartet. I just loved that group. The musicianship was something else.”
We recently ran across some memorabilia associated with Jack that reminded us of about the DeFranco-Gumina Quartet recordings and we thought it might be fun to develop this feature about them for the blog.
Prior to the association with Mercury, the group recorded one LP for Decca Records - Pacific Standard (Swinging’!) Time: The Buddy DeFranco Tommy Gumina Quartet [DL 740331] and Jordi Pujol provided these insert notes for its reissue as a Fresh Sound CD along with the first Mercury LP - Presenting the Buddy DeFranco Tommy Gumina Quartet [MG 20685].
“Buddy De Franco won his first Down Beat poll in 1945 as the foremost clarinetist in jazz, and his last one was awarded by the International Jazz Critics poll m 1960. During this 15-year span, his career changed direction often and was accompanied by frustration. Known mainly as a sideman for Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie, among others, until 1950, he led a big band after that for a while, but spent most of the '50s touring with a quartet and recording with different instrumental combinations.
His co-leader on this CD, accordionist Tommy Gumina, remains a relatively unknown name for most of jazz fans. Born in Milwaukee, Wis. in 1931. where he began studying music, Gumina had been pushing hard on his chosen instrument since the age of eleven. After two years of study there he began taking lessons in Chicago from Andy Rizzo, according to him, "the greatest accordion teacher who ever lived. A fantastic teacher. He taught 'em all—Leon Sash and all the rest." Before starting with Rizzo, Gumina already had played his first solo concert when he was 12. At 15 he gave his first major concert, a recital consisting of works by Bach, Paganini, Chopin, and DeFalla.
Graduating from Milwaukee's Don Bosco High School in 1949. he made a successful appearance in New York City on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts radio program.
"That's where I first began digging jazz," he recalled, "in New York. George Shearing was highly popular in |azz then. He'd always been an idol of mine. Also, I was close to Bud Powell."
Following his New York period, Gumina returned to Milwaukee and worked in clubs there "as an act in the Contino field." In those days Dick Contino was the most popular accordion player, and he was billed as "The World's Greatest Accordionist." But, Tommy noted, "I stick with jazz and always wanted to make the instrument a jazz instrument.”
It was while working a Milwaukee night club in 1951 that Gumina was heard by Harry James. "Harry dug what I was doing and asked me to join the band as a featured performer. The following year, I did,"
"At that time," he recalled. "I thought I was playing pretty good. But my bebop conception conflicted with the Harry James style, so I had to compromise. So far as playing real jazz was concerned, this put me back five years. But Harry was real great to me. For five years I was his shadow."
He left the James band following "18 weeks of one-nighters and locations." He shuddered at the memory. "That trip did it. I went back to doing a single act in Las Vegas, Reno — that circuit."
Forsaking the night-club circuit in 1957. he returned to Milwaukee, where he started a record label called Continental and cut a couple of singles that made a little noise. The same year saw Gumina and his family pack up and head west They settled in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, where Gumina gigged around town. Then he was signed to a Decca contract and got a king-size reputation as a competent and talented journeyman on his instrument. In 1958 he struck musician's gold — job security: a staff job at the American Broadcasting Co.rs Hollywood television studios.
Early in 1960, Buddy de Franco and Tommy Gumina joined forces to form a new quartet with Ralph Pena (soon replaced by Bob Stone) on bass and Frank DeVito on drums.
This new alliance with Gumina, was as rewarding and exciting musically for the clarinetist as it was bookable. In March the group debuted for four weeks at the "Pick-a-Rib"—a nightclub and restaurant at 8250 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, owned by drummer Ben Pollack — playing assertive, driving, modern jazz and sharing the spot with Barney Bigard’s Dixieland combo. When he began playing with DeFranco, Gumina left ABC to work with the quartet full time.
As was the case with the Joe Mooney (ace) and Andy Fitzgerald (cl) partnership of 1945, the clarinet-accordion blend was fully exploited m the new group. The basic difference here, however, is that, while the Mooney quartet concentrated on achieving intimate and, for the time, experimental tonal effects, DeFranco and Gumina were intent on getting an ensemble sound suggesting the blast and drive of a big band.
But this overall shouting effect so successfully achieved by the group on the up tempo swingers is by no means the definitive mark of this versatile quartet. DeFranco is the shining light in solo work, and when he blows freely on swingers like How High the Moon, the tension and exhilaration reach coruscating heights.
That spring young San Diego drummer John Guerin replaced DeVito, and with bassist Don Greif the quartet made its first foray away to play a date at a club called Cure's in Milwaukee. Then, in June, they played a successful engagement at the Crescendo in Hollywood and a Sunday appearance at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach.
In this new setting. Buddy's fleet, fluid clarinet gained a new perspective. Gumina's accordion gave the DeFranco clarinet the tonal rapport it needed. Besides the enhanced over-all sound, the use ol appealing arrangements written by both of them added strong listener interest. The relationship was one of outlook, of emphasis on melody and rhythm. on lyricism and stimulation. Gumina was the key man in the group. He disciplined the accordion to a lean, crisp line of attack, and he phrases very much in the airy, impressionistic manner ot fellow accordionist Joe Mooney. The quality of airiness, of lightness, floats through all the pieces, abetted by lovely voicings in the ensembles and spurred by the quartet's weapons-grade propulsion.
On the first two albums recorded by the quartet, "Pacific Standard (Swingin't) Time," and "Presenting..." De Franco is not only warmed by Gumina's (ire but is also driven along by the accordionist's strongly swinging attack and by the sturdy rhythm support of bassists Bob Stone and Bill Plummer, and drummers Frank De Vito and John Guerin. This is straightforward, thoughtfully conceived but unpretentious small-group jazz with a character all its own.” -Jordi Pujol
I realize that the accordion has a rather contentious history in Jazz mainly to do with objections about the sound quality [or lack of it] of the instrument. But I think that if you spend any time listening to the exceptional improvisations that Tommy develops on the Decca and four Mercury albums, you’ll come away with a totally different perception of the instrument’s worth in the music.
"I'm just a composer, and I use jazz musicians because they're better. They play better, they're smarter, and they can save your ass in a bad situation. If their music falls off the stands, they can make it up. A classical musician, a folk musician, or a rock & roll musician is pretty limited in what they can do to help out the leader. I need all the help I can get."
- Carla Bley
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been listening to Carla Bley’s music for almost 35 years!
It’s as full of surprises today as it was three-and-a-half decades ago when I walked into the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, CA and was confronted by an onslaught from her band's powerful and unexpected sounds.
Her use of instrumentations in unusual combinations reminded me almost immediately of the late Gil Evans’ style of orchestrating.
Carla Bley celebrates The Sound of Surprise in ways that bring new sonorities to the ear and a wry smile to the face.
Sometimes I think she’s sarcastic, if music can ever be said to have such a quality. But I always know that her music is serious and sincere.
There’s no one quite like Carla Bley.
Here’s a great interview/conversation/essay with and about Carla that Don Palmer put together for the August/1984 issue of Down Beat magazine.
My Dinner with Carla
by Don Palmer
"To paraphrase filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, here are two or three things you may want to know about her — Carla Bley that is. Her favorite color is green, even though she says that she doesn't look good in it. She doesn't like official holidays. "When I finish a piece of music, I have a holiday — well, not a holiday, but a celebration." She doesn't like bright, noisy restaurants with Muzak. She felt apprehensive about her first Japanese tour in late May. Her music is facing new assimilationist pressures, and from within no less.
Most of this is the sort of trivia one might expect to get over a dinner with Carla, especially from a rambling conversation at an ill-lit but comfortable Italian restaurant on New York City's Lower East Side. But this last bit of information about Bley's music taking a turn towards the mainstream is surprising. Could Carla Bley, the queen of the avant-garde composers, actually consider compromise after all these years as one of the few contemporary musicians whose work was unique, fresh and funny, and whose compositions helped jazz players add to the vocabulary of improvisation?
From the time she quit school at the age of 15 and took a job in a music store selling sheet music, Carla Bley has blended irreverence with innocence. Her religious family in Oakland did little to stunt that development, but her involvement in the church did leave Bley with a working knowledge of religious and spiritual music. She also claims that a job in her aunt's flower shop in Carmichael, Calif., where she made and placed sprays on caskets, provided some inspiration for her funereal music of later years.
When she left California for New York City in the early '60s, Bley had no problem working as a cigarette girl in jazz clubs before integrating herself into the full-time jazz scene. From 1964 on, Bley was a prime force in the formation and growth of the Jazz Composers Guild, its orchestra and eventually the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, a nonprofit foundation to support the orchestra and commission new works. JCOA spawned another even more ambitious project, the New Music Distribution Service, which was Bley's attempt to provide an outlet and distribution network for new or noncommercial records without depriving musicians of the ownership and control of their music.
Although her current involvement at NMDS is limited to publishing a newspaper every two and a half years, Bley still gets "incredible satisfaction out of it. When we and Mike Mantler started JCOA, we only wanted to write for big orchestras. We never had any gigs, so we had plenty of time left over to tend to business. I did all the stamp licking and envelope stuffing, but now I don't have time to sneeze. When you have so many irons in the fire"— Bley pauses to check the cliche — "Is that the word? You've got to delegate responsibility among people who you hire."
Since the mid-'60s Bley has enjoyed a slow but inexorable climb to the heights of success, especially if measured in jazz terms. She estimates she has written 300 songs and SO scores for her 10-piece band. Bley has performed on dozens of albums, and her own recordings have received far more acclaim than scorn. In addition, Bley's recent albums are distributed by ECM via the Warner Bros, conglomerate, and all her work is available by mail from the Mighty Mouse of alternative music, NMDS. Nonetheless, Bley seems torn by the notoriety and the good fortune that homage through transfiguration is not only hip but acceptable and popular. So maybe the new musical direction is Bley's typical iconoclastic, nose-thumbing response to the times having caught up with her. Or maybe, as Bley states, her new release, Heavy Heart, is about springtime and love.
Either answer coming from Bley the prankster could be a half-truth, but it is unquestionable that Heavy Heart tends toward the sentimental excesses of the New York studio scene rather than a bluesy, quirky reply to love, fulfilled or not. This is not to say that Heavy Heart is as unctuous as David Sancious or as vapidly, technically soulful as David Sanborn, but most of the indelible Bley trademarks have been skillfully manicured or excised. The tunes are still Bley-like, hip and exquisite; the harmonies elongated under the fluid, piping alto of Steve Slagle and the snorting, muscular trombone of Gary Valente (on "Ending It"); the solos and arrangements always take an unusual turn a phrase or two before becoming predictable; and Bley's ethnic sensibility takes the form of Latin lilts and tempo-altering shuffles. In short, Heavy Heart is a light, breezy album without being formulaic, and one which fabricates jazz-pop from evocations of the revived electric bands of Miles and Gil, Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear," and assorted sultry, sensuous tunes.
Yet fans of the eccentric Bley, the keyboardist/composer whose work can be rich and zany like Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," shouldn't despair, because her soundtrack for the French film Mortelle Randonnee is less soundtrack and more Bley recording than Heavy Heart. Randonnee finds the imagistic Bley calliope in full swing. Drunken melodies, staggered ensemble passages that are part cacophony, part call-and-response and doleful, even dissonant harmonies abound in a melange of tangos, dirges and mock marches. Like Musique Mecanique and European Tour 1977, Randonnee is energetic, brassy and full of weird twists that'll make you perk up and even cackle.
On the eve of her first Japanese tour, Carla Bley was in a good mood because she "just had a burst of self-confidence about it. The apprehension I feel about Japan could be what I'd feel about anything new, so it might be just fine afterwards."
Bley went on to explain, "In the last year I've become shy of getting on the stage. And, if you figure I've had a band for eight years and for seven of those years I didn't know whether I was onstage or off, it just means I've been made to feel self-conscious recently."
By whom? The audience? Well, have you ever been pelted?
"Oh yeah, I've been pelted. In France it was tomatoes; in Italy it's cans and apricot pits or half-eaten peaches. That doesn't bother me. I had played the Italian national anthem and was just being irreverent in general. It took people seven years to get used to that, and now they don't throw things."
Alto saxophonist Steve Slagle laughed and added, "Beer cans in Germany, but for no good reason." Bley continues, "And full of beer. I stopped the concert and said, 'I want the guy who threw that up onstage.' The audience ran after him, but he went over a fence. I wouldn't continue until I could pour a can of beer over somebody because that beer had splashed all over us. The promoter offered himself, and I poured an entire can of beer on his head. I love audience participation."
Getting back to the point, Bley blamed the press for making her self-conscious. "They ask me things that I don't even want to mention. They ask me questions that make me wonder why I am doing this, am I strange, do I look funny, am I not qualified?"
Certainly Carla Bley's propensity to stray from the facts, to spin tales, and her willful innocence work at cross purposes for her and the press. She's also said that critics are more interested in personalities than music, which she amended. "I should say that humans like personalities more than music. I'm that way. When a person plays, I don't listen to their notes; I listen to who they are. That's what I mean by personality.
"I think I'm getting to be well known in a wider circle, so that people aren't really music lovers. I think a lot of people who might come to a concert now are sensation seekers, and I can't provide that. I can only provide the music."
As Slagle later explained, Bley's concern over the presentation of her music was not just due to fear. The additional preparation for her Japanese tour had become necessary because Bley and the band discovered that a two-hour set was more powerful and effective than two one-hour sets, and the build-up, tension, and subsequent release, which Bley's music strongly generates for the audience, was dissipated during the intermission. But, in order to play for two hours nonstop, the band has to be "really tight."
Although Bley eschews the notion that she is motivated by a desire to appease her newer and larger audience, she has produced an album that is simpler, more streamlined and accessible than much of her previous work. Heavy Heart should certainly get some radio airplay and attract more listeners, which in turn could make Carla Bley a tad wealthier and even more self-conscious.
Her response? "I didn't know I was gonna make that record.
About a year after Live, I took the band into the studio, and we made a follow-up album with the pieces I'd written. The recording wasn't good, and I knew it the next day when I listened to it. I think what was wrong was that the live album had worked, and we tried to reproduce it but in a studio with no overdubs. We missed the audience — that's all it could be. I'm not talking about applause,
I'm talking about the breathing that an audience puts into a piece of music.
"If you record in the studio, you have to use a different process; it's a different art form. I'm always thinking, 'I know this,' so I said to myself, 'I know this,' and decided to make a studio album without using the guys in my band. I was going to follow the procedures and start with just the rhythm section and add the other tracks later."
Bley intended to use all studio musicians, but she ended up with her own rhythm section plus percussionist Manolo Badrena and guitarist Hiram Bullock as the add-ons. She also knew that her love for the saxophone dictated that at least one horn had to appear on the album. Her choice was Slagle because he's a "romantic kind of guy." Bley had Slagle come to the session to play the melodies for the rhythm section, but he wanted to play in the main studio with the band instead of being isolated in his booth. The result was that Slagle's guide tracks remained on the recording although initially they were to be erased, with new horn parts dubbed in. Later Bley added more horns, but not before deciding to use her guys "because of sentiment, and they play better." Now she calls her attempt at a studio album half-successful and a "mongrel."
Bley says that she wants to do another studio record, and she even talks about disbanding her group so that she can put more time into the effort. Surprisingly she stated, "I might quit my band in August for financial reasons. The band has been an obsession of mine. I put all my copyright royalties into it, but the band does not make money. It is a losing proposition — any big band is."
Whether from fatigue, momentary disillusionment, or the desire to see if we’ll miss her when she's gone, Bley says that she's even soured some on leading a band. "You should have a band and see what it's like. If you're not an extrovert, it's really hard, particularly if you're not a virtuoso musician. If I could take one brilliant solo or something, and the audience would scream with delight, my presence onstage would mean something. I wrote the music, but why am I even there? I do a couple of hand waving things which I don't do very well, and I play an organ solo that has maybe two or three notes over a period of five minutes. I feel like I should be in a cage with a sign on me that says, 'She wrote the music.'"
Bley seems undaunted by Slagle's boast that she's a great leader because she gives musicians the freedom to express themselves within a framework. Like the great bandleaders such as Mingus, Ellington, and Basie, Bley knows how to write for and elicit strong performances from her soloists. But she'll accept no comparison between her playing and that of the other great minimalists of the keyboards.
"Ellington always had some little thing he played on the piano that was startling and wonderful. I really should try to figure out a cameo in the middle of the night, where I play something that I prepared in advance and was real flashy. I would love to be flashy, but I hate to prepare in advance. I couldn't repeat myself two nights in a row because I have an aversion to saying the same thing or playing the same thing. But next month I'll play the same set every night. I don't know if it'll happen, but I'm planning to do that."
Though Bley is obviously no Cecil Taylor or Oscar Peterson chops-wise, nor is her economical playing as skillful as Monk, Basie or Ellington, her brief and infrequent solos are expressive. On the late Clifford Thornton's The Gardens of Harlem, Bley plays the introduction to "Gospel Ballade," and her halting style conjures a lumber camp/whorehouse pianist playing the blues for the sanctified.
Bley claims that she has no direct influences on her writing or playing. "I just hear something and it sticks. Anything I like or hate comes out in the music. I've never studied any kind of music, and even if I were to attempt to duplicate something, I'd fail horribly." She pauses, gives an aw-schucks laugh and concedes, "Okay, fail beautifully."
She continues by describing her technique. "When I do a solo and when it's good, there's a word for every note I play. I speak the solos while I play. I played an organ solo on 'Heavy Heart' [the title tune], and there's a word for every note. They're all silly words, ordinary words, corny words, so I'd never tell you what they were.
"I'm just a composer, and I use jazz musicians because they're better. They play better, they're smarter, and they can save your ass in a bad situation. If their music falls off the stands, they can make it up. A classical musician, a folk musician, or a rock & roll musician is pretty limited in what they can do to help out the leader. I need all the help I can get."
Not only does Bley think jazz musicians are better, but she finds classical musicians are snobby, because they think there's only one way to play. Nonetheless, she had nothing but praise for the radio orchestra in Koln, Germany, where she had just performed with fellow composers Michael Mantler and Mike Gibbs. "It's a good orchestra, and the string players aren't snobby. They played right on the beat. You usually put your hand down, and they come in a few minutes later, so I was trying to match the time of the orchestra by playing real late. At the end they were matching me."
How long does it take you to finish a piece for jazz musicians? "Two months. First I write a lot of material, then I start gettin' rid of all of it. Then I've got a rough copy, and I start working on a score. That takes a lot of time, and then I have to copy the parts.
"I just wrote a new piece, and the way it happened is interesting. Five days before Marvin Gaye died, I wrote this piece that sounded just like Marvin Gaye, but I didn't want a piece like that. It was great, but it was in a field I wanted to leave behind me since I had done the Heavy Heart album. It's a bass solo first, for Steve Swallow because he's always raving about Marvin Gaye and says that's where he learned his phrasing. It's for the 10-piece band, but the bass has the melody and the solo. There are no other soloists, which means that I get to play the bass line all the way through on my synthesizer. That's more fun than I've ever had. I think I want to be a bass player."”
Recorded in performance at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam in 2009, the following video features Mike Abene's arrangement of Carl Bley's "Syndrome" as performed by the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw.
“Her time is so sure, so flowing, that it’s as natural to her as breathing. So is her warmth - of tone and conception. Emily’s a natural story-teller, keeping the narrative line alive with an exact sense of dynamics and color.”
- Nat Hentoff, Jazz critic and writer
“Emily was equally adept at playing with or without a pick in such diverse styles as bop, jazz-rock, and Latin music; her playing incorporates fluid eighth-note passages, doublings at the octave in the manner of Wes Montgomery and blues phrasing.”
- Jim Ferguson, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
“Remler's senseless early death (from heart failure while on tour in Australia) deprived us of a talent that seemed on the point of breakthrough. While her early role-models were conservative ones in terms of her instrument - Christian and Montgomery, specifically - her tough-minded improvising and affinity with hard-hitting rhythm sections let her push a mainstream style to its logical limits.”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
I never knew the circumstances of guitarist Emily Remler’s death until I read about them in the following essay and interview written and conducted by Gene Lees.
One moment she seemed to be a fixture on the Jazz scene of the 1980’s and the next thing I heard was that she didn’t make it out of the first year of the next decade.
She died on May 14, 1990 from heart failure that may have been caused by her addiction to opiates. She was thirty-two years old.
There’s too much talk these days about confronting demons, promoting self-help and good health through a variety of commercial means and developing greater self-awareness by a variety of consciousness-raising techniques.
Whatever the reasons for Emily’s self-destructive behavior and notwithstanding the many suggestions of what she could have done about them, I thought she was one heckuva Jazz guitarist and I’m sorry her voice has gone silent.
Not many musicians are good at playing Jazz. Emily was one who could play the music at a very high level and it was a tragedy to lose those talents at such a young age. Dying should be reserved for the old.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember Emily on these pages with Gene’s essay serving as a form of tribute.
“Sometimes she wore a jump suit on the bandstand, playing with her eyes shut, rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, the guitar slung on a shoulder strap, her faced tilted up as if she were imploring a god unknown to send her ideas. Other times she sat on a chair with her legs crossed tailor-fashion, seeming to embrace the instrument, like a little girl cuddling a doll. She was improbable: white, middle class, a product of the affluent Englewood Cliffs area of New Jersey, and she was, before she turned thirty, one of the finest jazz musicians of her generation.
If you know her work only from her Concord albums, excellent as it is, you have not encountered the scope of her playing. The albums are moderately conservative, middle-of-the-road jazz. I was impressed by them as they came onto the market in the course of the last seven years. Then, on November 14, 1987, in Pittsburgh, I noted that she was working in a club there and went to hear her. I was unprepared for the sheer strength of her playing. She was an extraordinarily daring player, edging close to the avant-garde, and she swung ferociously. There was also a deeply lyrical quality to her playing. I returned to hear her on two more nights.
The jazz world is a very small one, and there were rumors about her. The story was out that Emily Remler had fallen victim to what has often seemed—from a time before Charlie Parker—like the endemic curse of the jazz profession. Heroin. People who had never even met Emily Remler were troubled by the stories about her. But she seemed now to be on the rather long list of jazz musicians who had beaten the problem.
A three-year marriage to the brilliant Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander ended in 1985. He had tried to help her break her habit, but in the end it was too much for him to handle. They remained close.
That's what she was doing in Pittsburgh, working it out it away from the familiar haunts, working on the fears and self-doubts that had given rise to the problem. She was studying composition at the University of Pittsburgh with Bob Brookmeyer and, after that, with avant-garde composer David Stock.
She was born in Manhattan on, she said, September 18, 1957, the youngest of three children, her father a meat broker, her mother a psychological social worker, both born in Brooklyn. Her sister became a lawyer and her brother entered the U.S. diplomatic service. Emily never knew financial insecurity. The legend of the poor boy forging his way to the top in jazz is not entirely without foundation, and Louis Armstrong was its classic exemplar. But the majority of jazz musicians, black and white alike, have come from the comfortable middle class. So that part of her story is not as strange as it might seem.
She got interested in music through the folk movement, and then rock. What was atypical is that she had gone on to discover jazz, and then not only entered a field that has severely discriminated against women even while its practitioners have been in the forefront of the demand for racial equality, but became one of its most masterful young players.
In her book American Women in Jazz, Sally Placksin documents the cases of women of genuine ability who have been driven out of the profession, or at least pressed to pursue it only as a sort of hobby. There have been a number of excellent women jazz players, including Melba Listen, Carol Britto, Patty Bown, Mary Lou Williams, Margie Hyams, Billie Rogers, Patrice Rushen, and others whose names are forgotten because they succumbed to the pressures put on them by the men around them and simply quit, Lester Young's sister among them. The guitarist Mary Osborne told me that she had never felt that she has suffered from discrimination, but she is the only woman jazz player I ever heard say that. The fine alto saxophonist Vi Redd said she has suffered far more discrimination as a woman than she has as a black. Anne Patterson, who plays all the woodwinds from oboe on down, sometimes plays baritone saxophone in the Nat Pierce-Frank Capp Juggernaut band, and leads the all-woman band called Maiden Voyage, can tell you endless tales of discrimination. Marian McPartland says that when she has hired a woman, such as drummer Dottie Dodgion, for her trio, male musicians would ask not "How does she play?" but "What does she look like?"
Some years ago, Stan Getz played Donte's in North Hollywood. Playing piano in his group was Joanne Brackeen. She was at the top of her form that night. For some reason the place was full of piano players. Her playing was powerful, propulsive, wildly inventive — anything but the deferential and delicate music women jazz players are assumed to produce. And every one of those pianists was seriously upset by her, genuinely disturbed, including some highly accomplished musicians. So this phenomenon is real,
A few months after the Pittsburgh engagement, Emily played a job in Los Angeles. I spent an afternoon with her. Her room was on the second floor of the motel. Below it was the usual motel swimming pool overhung by the usual California palms, and the laughter of children rose in the usual California sunlight. There were bottles of Evian water on the dresser. Emily was wearing black slacks and a white blouse. She sat cross-legged on the bed. She was not small and, as she pointed out, she had large hands. The backs of them bore tracks — the scars left by needles, those wrinkled lines looking like tiny railroad tracks that I knew all too well from seeing them on Bill Evans. I suppose they bothered me more because I had never seen them on a woman. She had a rather large nose and she wasn't conventionally pretty, but there was something attractive about her. And something that made me feel protective toward her. She seemed so eager that day, looking to her future.
"You're one of those players who don't hold back," I said. "Jazz is not a holding-back music. Paul Desmond may have played delicately, but he didn't hold back. Bill Evans may have played with great sensitivity, but sensitivity is not an exclusively female quality."
Emily, who had a musical voice slightly colored by a New York City accent with softly dentalized d's and t's, said, "That's a point I was going to make. Music is sexless. I think everyone has something that is feminine, something that is masculine. I'm very confused about that as it is, now that I have opened myself up to having women as friends for a change, after hanging out with the guys my whole life and wanting to be one of the guys. I'm finding out how incredible women really are. When I see a woman that is good at what she does and is confident and does things with conviction — I guess 'confidence' is the key word here —I just admire her so much. Women inhibit themselves as a product of society, or what their mothers taught them, or whatever it was when you're coming up. Women get the message that they're supposed to get married, have children, that's their function, and that's it. My mother never gave me that message. It was always: Achieve. Do well. Maybe a little too much of that, which I drive myself crazy about. I grew up with this thought that anything I applied myself to, I could do."
Life expectancy at birth in nineteenth-century America was about thirty-five, not much different from what it had been during the Roman Empire. I pointed out to Emily that when a husband and wife had to have ten children in order that two or three might live to the adult years, there may have been some reason for the division of labor along sexual lines. But that has changed, and given the advancing destruction of our fragile environment by the effluvia of our own excessive population, women are gradually being allowed to do something other than breed.
"I'm not into sitting and crying about it," Emily said. "I'm into doing. I never was real bitter about the fact that there are so many bandleaders who have told me face to face that they couldn't hire me because I was a woman, or that there have been so many instances where I wasn't trusted musically, and drummers handled me with kid gloves because they figured my time wasn't strong,"
"Yeah, but Emily," I said, "realistically, a lot of guitar players have got flakey time."
Emily said, "It just so happens that I don't. That's something I'd like to talk about — the holding back thing that you mentioned. It seems that a lot of women don't get into the time, really hit it. That's a very big psychological trick. You have to be confident to be into the time like that. You have to know where it is. Herb Ellis said to me once, 'If you don't know, you don't know.' He meant someone who doesn't know that they're off, and that they don't know that they don't swing. And that's a huge subject. There are some people I play with that you can't not swing, it's so wonderful.
"You have to have your innate sense of the time, and you have to believe in yourself that your sense is correct. Especially when there's some big burly guy at the other side of the stage who doesn't like the fact that you're there anyway. And he's not going to give you an inch, he's not going to acknowledge that you're correct. You have to believe in yourself. In some ways I have a lot of belief in myself. I just know that women are going to come out more and more with this conviction, as soon as they work on themselves properly. Women can do anything, anyone can do anything. It never did occur to me to stay in one place and bitch about this, about how I wasn't given a chance. I think it gives me more merit — to get really good, so good that it doesn't matter. Okay, it sucks, being in this position. But: get so good that you surpass it.
"It's not going to hurt you to be a great player. That's what I wanted to be anyway. If that's part of the motivation, fine. But it's not part of the motivation any more. It was when I first started at Berklee. I'll show these guys!"
And she did. Emily was graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1975. She said that she still played very badly at that time. "I had a boyfriend, a guitarist from New Orleans. The plan was that I would move down to New Orleans. On my way to New Orleans, I stopped in Long Beach Island on the shore in New Jersey, and rented a room, and proceeded to quit smoking cigarettes, and learn to play. In that two months, I lost twenty-five pounds. I was just on a discipline trip. I could have been a Spartan! I want to do that again! I know I'm capable of it. Will power is not the question. I have a tremendous amount of will power.
"After that I went down to New Orleans. I still wasn't very good, but I had a lot of ideas. The boyfriend, Steve Masakowski, was an incredible guitarist, and still is, and still lives in New Orleans. He's a monster. The competitive atmosphere was still there, because I'd hear him practicing through the wall. I started to play all the shows at the Blue Room of the Fairmont Hotel, all the Vegas acts, Joel Grey, Ben Vereen, Robert Goulet, Nancy Wilson. I got a gig with her. Besides that, I was doing bebop gigs, Dixieland, and traditional New Orleans stuff. I had this thing, which I still have, to do it right. Don't sit and put this type of music down until you can do it as good as the best person who does it. For instance, I can't play country music like Roy Clark. Not that I would want to. But I have no right to say that that is invalid music. I like bluegrass a lot. And I'm into the Irish music that it comes from. I'm not, thank God, one of these snobby jazz musicians who put down everything except jazz.
"The reason I am so eclectic is that I get such satisfaction out of doing different types of music that sometimes I'm not sure what my true stuff is. I have confidence that the more I work on myself as a person, the more that the music is going to open up. I'll notice progress in sounding like my own voice and in my satisfaction in music by doing other things than practicing or playing. By figuring out things that have been bothering me for years, that clutter me up and make me have limits, and make me worried. Clearing me out of all sorts of things. For example, when you have a resentment against someone, let's say in the band, it clouds your ability to be creative, to be happy that evening. Sometimes you can turn it into so much anger that you can get into a weird I-don't-care stage, and sometimes you play good then. But if you work on those things, you can clear them out to get to your own voice. It's occurred to me in the last few years, it's not even the notes and the chords so much any more, it's the person. I never said more than two words to Bill Evans, I talked to him once, but I know what he was like. I know it. I'm positive. I never met Wes Montgomery, but I knew what he was like before I asked every person who ever knew him. I knew what Joe Pass was like. He is exactly like he plays. Things come out in the playing. If the person has intelligence, and humor, and creativity, or is introverted."
"I know an outstanding exception, though," I said, and Emily said, "If you mean . . . " And she named a man the beauty of whose playing and the perversity of whose personality have always presented an irresoluble contradiction to other musicians. We both laughed hugely. "Actually," she said, "I've watched him over the years, and he's changed. There's a lot of good inside."
"The relationship of personality to playing is very strong in jazz," I said. "Jazz musicians, generally, even talk the way they play. They sing like they play."
"Yeah, I can see that, that they play the way they talk." Then she said, "What was Coltrane like?"
"Soft and gentle. A very sweet man. I liked him a lot. Tell me, how did you get from folk music to jazz, from Englewood Cliffs to Berklee in Boston?"
"During the Black Panther movement, we were bussed to the Englewood high school instead of the nearest one. We grew up with Italian and Jewish kids. I hadn't been exposed to black people, I was already listening to a lot of blues music. I just wanted to be friends. They didn't want to be friends with us. They beat us up, they stole our money, they burned white girls' hair—I had very long hair. It was very frightening. For that and a few other reasons, I cut school constantly. I just wasn't into it. I was into having parties and being a hippy, a very young hippy. So I was sent away to boarding school, but it was a hippy boarding school, an experimental school where you could do anything you wanted. It closed after the year I was there.
"During boarding school, I played folk music. I listened to rock music, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. I was about fifteen years old when I came to dream that I wanted to be a blues player, so I listened to B.B. King and Johnny Winter and all these people. I played my brother's Gibson ES 330, which I still play today. I have a few other guitars, but I keep coming back to that one. I played with my fingers, I did all sorts of strange things, but now I realize I was always working on my music. I was always singing along with things. I would sing along with Ravi Shankar's music for Bangla Desh, this whole raga piece, I could sing it from beginning to end. Weird stuff that my friends couldn't do. I had a weird ear. There was something different between the way they listened to music and the way I did. I remember we were listening to the Rolling Stones, which I loved. I was singing the saxophone solos and the guitar solos, I wasn't with the lyrics. I started playing some of the guitar things, the very repetitive rock things where they stay on three chords forever. I'd get off on that. I'd sit in my room, discovering that that was a way of leaving the planet. I loved that. Until this day, I've found that that's the best way for me to practice-—-just jamming. I realized when I was about twenty-one that I knew how to get better. There are a lot of people who study who don't feel they know how to get better. I was just out of Berklee, and it came to, 'Why don't I practice what I'm going to play?' From then on, I'd tape myself playing some backgrounds for the songs I was going to record. I put the metronome on to make sure I'm right. And then play over it. I still do it to this day. I'm getting a four-track for my bedroom.
"Schubert supposedly used to play guitar in bed," I said.
"I do that!" she said. "I used to sleep with my guitar. I'll just sit in my room and play a phrase over and over until I feel comfortable. And if I can't do something, I stop the tape and do it twenty times until I am comfortable."
"If you started out playing folk and rock things, when did you get beyond the phase of the grips and begin to see scales across the fingerboard?"
"That didn't happen till I was at Berklee."
"I've watched the way your hands work," I said. "You think a little as if you were playing a keyboard instrument."
"That really makes me happy that you can hear that. I think like a keyboard so much that sometimes I think it's bad. With me, I don't know about anybody else, if I can't hear the phrase, I won't be able to execute for anything. I play everything that I can sing or can hear, and I always was that way, and always will be. There are many people who play by rote. I don't look at the neck because I don't relate to patterns. I hear, I hear. I've tried to do guitaristic licks, and I screw them up. Even ones that I could get easily. Because I don't hear them right there in the music. George Benson said to me, 'You're great when you're playing what you believe in.' I cannot force myself to do what other people want me to do. It's very confusing, it's the way we're taught as we're growing up — that you do things the way that's acceptable to do, in some many aspects of life. You don't jump on cafe tables and yell. And all of a sudden, with what we've chosen to do in the arts, you're supposed to do what you really feel like doing. You live in a double life. You still don't jump on cafe tables and yell, but in your work you are supposed to do what you feel. So it's very common for musicians to be eccentric, and not conform. Because they can't just all of a sudden change. If I were to conform to the masses, I would have been a rock-and-roll guitarist, wearing silver suits." She laughed at herself. "Instead of red jumpsuits. I could have been very successful and rich doing that.
"In New Orleans, I learned to play. By the time I got back to New York, I was pretty good. I met Herb Ellis in New Orleans, and he recommended me for the Concord Festival, where I got to play with Ray Brown. I was twenty. Carl Jefferson told me that he was going to sign me [to the Concord Jazz label], I thought, 'This is it, my future is set.'
"They wanted me to be straight ahead. Since I want to do everything well, I decided that I would write tunes that were more like standards, learn a lot of standards, learn how to play within the limitations of jazz tonal progressions, get my chops up in bebop.
I needed a guide. And the people that I liked in those limits, straight-ahead mainstream bebop, were Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass and people like that. I pretty much copied them. I learned a new Wes Montgomery tune every day. I copied his phrasing. Above all, I copied his timing. He was unbelievable. But I didn't hear from Concord for a while, and I proceeded to move to New York, and I got a gig with Nancy Wilson. I also worked with Astrud Gilberto, and in Washington D.C., I ran into Herb Ellis again. I was a better player by then, and I got a contract with Concord."
"Back to that position of the transition from playing in that folk way, how did you do that? Through a teacher?"
"I never took a guitar lesson in my life, not really. I noticed that people who do things well do them with a minimum of effort. I learned basic scales and melody patterns so that I could vary in that vertical way. I decided, 'Why move up and down?' I've watched people, I watched myself in the mirror, I did scales and arpeggios, but I started right away doing melodies and finding the ways that other guitar players did them. You can, if you get good at transcribing, find from the timbre which string they're using. So I copied Pat Martino's way of doing things. He's a master of the instrument, his technique is astounding, you can count on him doing everything in the most logical way. And maybe I copied some of his fingerings, due to transcription.
There's a lot of illogical stuff that I do, though. I have to play everything that I hear, and there sometimes isn't time to work it out, and there's a lot of reaching for stuff in ridiculous positions that, I realize if I review it later, I could have done some other way. But I just have to get it somehow, and my will to get it is stronger than my knowledge of the guitar.
"For instance, I play solo guitar and try to back myself up with chords, like Lenny Breau did. But I do not have Lenny Breau's knowledge of the guitar."
"You do know," I said, "that Lenny was a totally intuitive player. He played entirely by ear, he'd had no formal training, and no knowledge of formal theory."
"We're talking about two different kinds of knowledge."
"Of course. His knowledge of the instrument itself was enormous."
"I agree. And I don't know the instrument the way he did. The thing I do best is ..." She laughed. "I'm resourceful. I'm a good hustler on the guitar. I'll hustle the phrase that I want, I'll work until I get it. It's the same thing I use to win at pool and pingpong without being the greatest pool or pingpong player. When I call on myself to put extra energy into a tune or a phrase, it's from the thing that makes me win at pingpong. It's just a will to do something."
"Now. We're onto a characteristic that is not generally considered feminine. Overt will. And throughout history, women's will has been suppressed and thus driven underground. Sometimes, when it isn't destroyed, it becomes devious. In order to get around men, many women will lie if necessary to get their way. Women are supposed to be submissive, but they have as much will as any man. They just hide it."
"You're right! I like that. It's something I am admiring more and more in women: will. I don't know. All I know is that the more I be like I'm supposed to be, the more I be like me, the better I get at music, I believe I have a tremendously strong will. I don't know what masculine or feminine is. I can tell you that I like the way dresses look, but I can't wear them onstage because I can't sit with my legs crossed all night. I don't deny that I'm a woman. And people say stuff about this, and have been doing it for years. Why don't you wear something more feminine, something flowing? It's just that I don't want a dress swaying when I move. The rest of the time, I like to be stylish, I like a lot of modern things. I'm split between two things. I love flowing, very sophisticated, very simple dresses. I don't like flowery or lacy things. I love dresses. But I love baggy pants too. It's strictly a matter of comfort. I don't identify masculine or feminine by what you wear. But people do. And how can you change millions of people?"
"I think it already is changing. Ever since Marlene Dietrich wore a pair of slacks in a movie. Look at the Scottish kilt, and the traditional old battle dress of Greek soldiers. Now, about this self-destructive business ..."
"We've noticed," she said, "how people of great creative talent often have a dark side that wants to destroy it and themselves. I'd say that the biggest fear for an artist is that if they stop destroying themselves, they won't have that other, good side. It's very easy to see the good side when you're doing bad. It's the one pure light that you have. You get to be afraid of a balance, of mediocrity, you get to be afraid that you won't get these brainstorms. How much more precious is it to succeed coming out of the gutter than it is to be comfortable and balanced and healthy. It's the misconception, but I have a feeling that a lot of musicians have problems with this — a feeling that they will not be able to create unless there's havoc and chaos."
"Well, a friend of mine said, 'Confronted with order, the artist will create disorder. Confronted with disorder, he will create order.' All creative people are perpetually trying to shake up the pick-up sticks: Let me create chaos so that I can create something out of it. Let's see if I can do that trick again."
Emily laughed. "So then, maybe I really should clean my apartment! Maybe if it was totally orderly, I could write better."
"No. That's not the point. When I am writing heavily, the room becomes a disaster area. And when I am through, I have to clean it up, because I can't go into the next phase of disorder without having cleared away the disorder from before. The artist needs raw clay to make the statue. If the only piece of clay I have is the statue I just made, which already bores me, then I will tear it apart to have the clay to make the next one. The process interests the artist more than the result, though he has to sell the result to make a living."
"So what's you're saying," Emily said, "is that this is totally normal. That's something to think about. I've been trying to get rid of it, and it hadn't occurred to me that maybe it's needed."
"Well there's a balance to be found, to be sure. I do know that many artists consider their neuroses are part of their talent, and cling to them. And sometimes they may be right. I know that depression goes with the creative process, and most psychiatrists know it too, and there assuredly is a manic quality about the compulsion to create art."
"What my therapist says is, Why am I creating this guilt and pain to create?"
"Nobody wants unhappiness. If you can get rid of it, get rid of it. On the other hand, if you get a good tune out of your guilt, play it. The artist is just that selfish and just that ruthless. It's like William Faulkner's comment in his Nobel acceptance speech, which shocked everybody. He said that the Ode on a Grecian Urn was worth any number of little old ladies."
Emily giggled. "It's unbelievable, isn't? After Monty and I were divorced I played great for a while on that pain. I really did. I also tried to destroy myself as fast as I could.
"You know, I had a strange experience in Michigan about ten years ago. As you might imagine, I've had a lot of requests to play with all-female groups. And when I was twenty-one, some very good musicians had this band and asked me to do a gig in Michigan, good money and just one set. I was going to get out of New York for a couple of days and be in the Michigan lake country. It was a very enlightening experience. It was eight thousand gay women. They have a different language to desex the language. Woman, singular, is womon. Women, plural, is womyn, for example.
"It's one thing to accept that sort of thing, but it is quite another to be in the severe minority. I felt weird. But there were some things I really loved about it. There was no bullshitting. There was no manipulating with charm. It didn't matter what you wore, whether you combed your hair even. People were taken for what they were, not what they looked like. And the view on beauty was a lot different than Hugh Hefner's standard.
"I was with one of the girls in the band. A woman we would consider fat walked by and I heard a girl say, 'Isn't she beautiful?' Look, I personally know women who stick their fingers down their throats to try to lose ten pounds. And there are a hell of a lot of schoolgirls developing complexes about being thin. I had that problem.
"There is a psychiatrist here in Pittsburgh who says that the people with the lowest self-esteem are the ones with the most gifts. This psychiatrist says that 99 percent of the problems he deals with, even to psychosis, are based on distorted self-perception, low self-esteem. I was raised to think that if I was thin, people would like me more. And the truth is that I'm not built that way. My body has a tendency to be a certain weight, but I have not accepted it my whole life. To me, I seem overweight. It was very interesting at that gay thing in Michigan to see that they don't have that perception, they canned all that. I'll tell you something else: there are a lot of women in this world who are using drugs to stay thin. They're killing themselves, their bodies, their souls, their minds, to be fifteen pounds lighter and please American society."
"What else has it done to you, being a woman in the jazz world, and a nonconformist in a conformist society?"
"Well, some musicians didn't trust me to be able to comp, which I love to do, and I feel I'm very good at it. If they want to play up the woman thing, women are trained to nurture people, make people feel good. I comp well. I can put my ego aside, as opposed to some other people who comp so loud and pushy, 'Look-at-me.' I know how to comp to make someone else sound good. I love to do it. It gets me out of myself. But I've ended up being a leader, more than a side man. Even at nineteen years old, the minute I could play a blues, they used to push me out front, because of the novelty. So I feel a little deprived. I wish someone would take me under their wing and teach me further, because that's how I get better, playing with great musicians. At this point now, I am ready to be a leader."
"You may be in the position," I said, "of having no choice but to be a quote star. I think Bill Evans passed beyond the possibility of being a side man."
"Yeah, but he was a side man with Miles. Do you think Miles would hire me?
"I wouldn't be surprised if he would."
"If I played with Miles, I would have to play some rock-and-roll and I wouldn't want to. But that's a matter of taste.
"I hear a lot of music that fuses rock and jazz together. And I find myself listening to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. I'd rather hear the traditional rock-and-roll.
"The thing that makes me play with conviction is the same thing that makes me swim extra laps in the pool. It's from your gut. But I don't play from I'll show this guy. I notice that anybody who wants to cut anybody is not playing in the creative vein, and is not going to reach the peaks I want to reach. It's about letting go of yourself and becoming a channel — of love and God. That's what I believe. You can't do that by saying 'I'm going to show them this or that.' If I want to become a channel for God, which you can consider to be a lot of different things, you have to get rid of stuff, and be free."
I said, "I have to go and do my work in a cave, silently."
"That happens to me. I tune out as a protection. I tuned out for years as a protection."
"Well, look at Bix Beiderbecke, at Charlie Parker, there are all sorts of people who put up a chemical shield."
"Sure, because that makes you not care if the guy in the front row doesn't like you. That's why anger sometimes works, you can play better because you don't care. But it all comes down — I'm hoping this will take care of it — to feeling okay about yourself, that you deserve to be there, that you have something valid to say, that you have a lot of love to give, and you have a gift, and you have a right to be up there, and if somebody doesn't like it, that's his loss. That's the attitude I want. This guy can't make me or break me, this musician telling me to play this or that is not valid — it's what I feel. If I could get to that, I'd like to achieve it. I'm getting a little of it now.
"I was with a group in Europe last summer. Some drummers lack a little subtlety or they just prefer music that's loud and raucous. The feeling of aggression and speed is more what they're interested in. This isn't all drummers. This drummer said to me and what a lot of drummers have said to me, and that I bought and accepted, 'You gotta play louder, I can't hear you, you've gotta play harder. My favorite guitarists are Hendrix and McLaughlin, you oughta play more like them.' And I thought, 'Okay, I'll turn up my amp tonight and I'll play more rock and roll.' And then I stopped and said to myself, 'I can't believe I'm buying this package for the thousandth time.' And you see it's easier for him to tell me what to do because I'm a woman, and more important, it's easier for me to take it. And for the first time, I said back to him, 'Why don't you start listening to where I'm at? Why don't you come up to my level? Why don't you learn how to be romantic and subtle a little bit.'
"I couldn't believe I stood up for myself like that. So it's getting better, and the better it gets the better I'll be as a musician and the better I'll feel about that guy who doesn't like me.
"You should be a woman for a while and then you'd see. It's a hell of a lot different than you think."
Some time in the course of those days in Pittsburgh I asked Emily if she planned to stay there. No, she said. When she felt she was ready, she planned to move back to New York.
A month or so ago a pianist friend called me. He mentioned in the course of the conversation that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous. "I never knew you had a problem with that," I said.
"It was mostly on the job," he said.
Somehow Emily Remler's name came up. He had never met her, and yet he said, in a voice soft with concern, "How is she doing?" And you knew exactly what he meant.
So I called her number in Pittsburgh. I was given a referral number, the area code being that of Brooklyn. I called it. After a year and a half in Pittsburgh, she was back in home terrain, living near Sheepshead Bay.
She had just completed a new album for Concord with Hank Jones. She was full of plans and the enthusiasm in her voice told me the answer to the question before I asked it. "How are you doing?" I said.
"I'm doing just fine," she said.
I was pulling for her. I wanted her to make it. Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan and Hal Gaylor and many more I know made it.
In May of 1990, I got a call from a friend who told me Emily had been found dead in her hotel room in Sydney, Australia. Whatever the proximate cause of her death, I could not help feeling there were other and underlying factors. Perhaps she died of being a woman in a profession dominated by men. Perhaps she died of the contradictions she lived with, her confusion about her own femininity. The sensitivity that makes it possible to produce good art makes life painful for those who possess it. Chemicals may not enhance the creativity, but they dull the pain, or seem to, for a little while. In the end they add to it.
Emily Remler was a superb musician, and on her way to being a great one. I will always see her sitting cross-legged on the bed, reaching out for life and looking like a little girl. She didn't make it.”
The following video features the title tune from Emily’s East to Wes Concord CD [4356] with Hank Jones on piano, Buster Williams on bass and Marvin “Smitty” Smith on drums.
“Of all the musicians in Dizzy Gillespie's life - and the list of those he discovered and nurtured and mentored is interminable - the longest association was that with saxophonist James Moody. Probably the second longest was that with pianist Mike Longo. The three of them were devoted friends.
Moody first worked for Dizzy in 1946, and their association continued until Dizzy's death on January 6, 1993. He was in the hospital room when Dizzy drew his last painful breath.
Moody is too often taken for granted. He has been such a presence for so long, so reliable a performer, that it is too easily overlooked that his best work is brilliant. Mike Longo says he is "a stone genius of the blues, and my dearest friend in life. In fact he's my brother. I learned so much just from playing with him and hanging out with him. He's been a big influence on me musically. Just comping behind him I learned so much."
Moody was born in Savannah, Georgia, on February 26, 1925, but he grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Newark, N.J. An uncle gave him his first saxophone, an alto, when he was sixteen, but he soon took up the tenor. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1943 to 1946, playing in a military band.
His first influence on saxophone was Jimmy Dorsey, then Charlie Barnett or, as he put it, "anybody that had a horn, because, you know, I just wanted to play saxophone. I just liked the way it looked. And around the corner from where we lived, in Newark, there was a music store called Dorn and Kirchner, where I saw all the saxophones in the window when I was little, and also, on First Street, there were two theaters across the street from each other, the Savoy and the Essex.
"In the Savoy Theater, we couldn't sit on the first floor. We had to sit in the balcony because of racism. Nine miles from New York!" He laughed.
"I would always go to the Adams Theater in Newark. Count Basie's band came and I went to that, hoping to see Lester Young. But when I got there, it was Don Byas, instead of Lester. And Buddy Tate was there. As I learned more, I grew to understand that Don Byas was playing his butt off.
One of his close friends in the Newark years was the trumpeter, and later composer and educator, David Burns.
"Then I was drafted into the air force," Moody said. "I didn't know I was going to be playing music. I went to Greensboro, North Carolina, and it was segregated. Three quarters of the base was Caucasian and one quarter was Negro. They said they wanted to have a Negro band. They said, 'Has anybody got a horn? I said I had one. They said, 'Send for it.' They didn't ask if I could play it. So I sent for the horn and that's how I really started playing.
"Dave Burns was in the band.
"I was eighteen years old and a so-called American, an American Air Force serviceman. The German prisoners of war would come in with the military police on the truck. They would have P.O.W. printed on their backs. And they would go into the restaurants to eat. I couldn't go in and eat.
"So when I stop and think how great this country is supposed to be, and things that they've done, it makes you say,'Well?'
"There was a place on the base called 'The Big Top.' It was a big tent, and Dizzy came to play with his big band. That's when I met him. We had maybe three more months, and then we were going to be discharged. So Diz said that he was going to disband when he got back to New York and get another band. He said, 'If you want, come try out for the band.' And so that's what we did, Dave Burns and myself." Both of them passed muster.
"I joined Dizzy at the Spotlight on 52nd Street. Thelonious Monk was the piano player, Kenny Clarke was the drummer, Ray Brown, bass, and Milt Jackson, vibes. We had a seventeen-piece band. We had Cecil Payne, baritone, Ernie Henry, reeds, John Brown, alto sax, Howard Johnson, alto. Miles was even in the band for a hot minute. It was really interesting.
"I didn't go to school for music. So consequently, I wouldn't be looking for the same things as a person who knew music. I think I was just on the move, and knowing that I didn't know musically what I thought I ought to know. But I was just trying to get better. You know, when you don't know something, you don't know what it is you don't know. You can't very well explain that to anyone.
"That was the first time I went anywhere in the country. We went on a tour with Ella Fitzgerald. We went down south. There's where I got my thing, again, about the signs. Colored - White. It's funny, how we went from Colored to Black. What color is this watchband?"
It was black.
"What color am I?"
The answer of course was brown.
Moody said, "I really object to it. People that say, 'Oh well, he's a black guy.' My uncle over there, he's black?" His uncle Louis, who had given him his first saxophone, was sitting at the far side of Moody's family room, lighter than a lot of white people. It was a subject Moody would return to.
The band toured all over the south. "You know," he said, "the Chitlin' circuit. The Apollo Theater, the Howard Theater in Washington D.C., the Royal Theater in Baltimore. If you could make it in those places, you could make it anywhere in the world."
More formally, the Chitlin' Circuit was the T.O.B.A. It stood for Theater Owners Bookers Association. The owners were white, but they booked only Negro acts to Negro theaters, from the vaudeville days into the big-band era. The money was inferior to that paid on the white circuits, and the conditions were sometimes appalling, so much so that its performers said T.O.B.A. stood for Tough On Black Asses.
Moody, who has always been disarmingly frank about it, said, "I had an alcohol problem. I went to Europe. I went to visit my uncle in Paris, to stay for two weeks. I stayed three years.
"When I went over there I had a complex. I thought something was wrong with me, you know? Because that's the way things were and the vibes that I got. When I got to France, to Paris, after about two or three weeks, something happened. And I said, 'Wait a minute! It's not me. It's them— speaking of this government, here.
"And so right away I got another feeling. My wife will tell you, I always say this: 'Nobody in the world's better than I. I don't give a darn who they are.' And by the same token, I'm not better than anyone else. But I really felt bad. It's because of the way people here are taught. Babies aren't born to hate. They are taught.
"I was playing in Club St. Germain in Paris. We were jamming down there, and this young man, Anders Berman, who was a drummer, came up to me. I didn't know who he was. He said, 'Would you like to come to Sweden and make twelve sides?' I said, 'Yeah.' So he said, I’ll send you a plane ticket.''I don't want to fly,' I said. 'I want to go on a boat — a train and a boat to Sweden.' And that's what I did.
"The funny thing is that Moody's Mood for Love was the twelfth song on the date." Needing another song for the session, the producer asked Moody for a suggestion, and he proffered I'm in the Mood for Love.
"But they didn't have an arrangement for it. So Gusta Theselius, who was the arranger, stepped out and went to the John, and sketched out the notes. I borrowed Per-Arne Croona's alto saxophone and we did it in one take. You wouldn't play someone else's horn nowadays. You just don't do it. But in those days it was cool. There wasn't any AIDS. Man hadn't made that disease yet.
"I can't think of the piano player's name now. It may have been Thor Swanerud. [It was.] And Yngve Akerberg was on the bass. Anders Burman was on drums. Arne Domnerus was on alto. It was on Metronome Records. When it came over here, it made Prestige Records." It certainly did: it was a huge hit for the company. Singer Eddie Jefferson put words to Moody's solo, and the solo took on a new life as vocal material.
The session took place on October 12, 1949. Moody confined his European work from that point on to Paris, where he was part of an illustrious expatriate group. "I played with Kenny Clarke, Miles Davis, and Nat Peck the trombonist. Annie Ross was there. Then Coleman Hawkins came over to live for a while. Don Byas was there. Roy Eldridge came and lived for a while. Bill Coleman was there too. Soon after I left, Dexter Gordon came."
For a time, Moody — like many another jazz musician, such as the late Carl Fontana — worked in Las Vegas in orchestras backing Liberace, Elvis Presley, Ann Margret, and other favorites of the tourist and gambling crowd. Most of them didn't and don't like these jobs, but they pay well and one can live in one place.
Mike Longo said, "From Vegas, he'd call me every day, and I said, 'Moody, you remind of Picasso painting houses.'
"In fact, I got him out of Vegas. I got him booked at Sweet Basil in New York. A lady was doing some booking at Sweet Basil. She hired me and she said, 'If only I could get a headliner.' I said, 'I know a headliner.' I called him. I said, 'Moody, are you ready to get out of Vegas?' He said, 'I don't have a group.' I said, 'You can use my trio.'
"So Moody played Sweet Basil, and there were lines around the block for all three shows, all week. That got him out of Vegas, and he kept going with a jazz career."
Though he hasn't had a drink for years, Moody keeps a well-stocked bar for his friends. Unlike so many "recovering alcoholics," as they tend to call themselves, he makes no issue of his non-drinking. That's one of the things you learn about him — and the fact that he likes to be called "Moody," nothing else. Even his wife calls him Moody.
Our conversation occurred during an extraordinarily pleasant afternoon of mixed sun and rain at Moody's home in San Diego, California. You had to be conscious of the changing weather, since his big family room has a wall of uninterrupted glass that looks out past his swimming pool and garden into a deep valley in which nestles a golf course, and a steep mountain beyond. The occasion was the videotaping of Moody's reflections for an oral history project at Claremont McKenna College. I have taken part in several of these occasions, and I find them rewarding and stimulating, especially this one with Moody, partly because of our shared love for Dizzy Gillespie. Moody's wife had asked me when he and I first met, and I could only venture that it was in 1959 or '60, when Moody did some recording in Chicago for the Chess brothers and their independent label Argo, later renamed Cadet Records. I suppose Dizzy introduced us.
Another thing you learn is that Moody doesn't like to be called black. "I say Negro, even though that means black in Spanish," he said. "I prefer that to being called black, because I am not black.
"You know what, Gene? I don't know any black people. I don't know any white people either — unless they're dead." He laughed: "And the blood has run out of them."
I said, "I remember the Reverend Elijah Mohammed talking about 'the so-called Negro' and insisting that the term 'black' be used, and the newspapers immediately surrendered to it. I said to myself at the time, 'It's just Spanish for black. So what's the difference?'"
Moody said, "I prefer to be called colored, because that really gets it."
"Well, that's the term Dizzy used."
Moody said to his wife, Linda, "Honey, come here and explain this. That book you read."
Linda Moody — his third wife, a successful San Diego real estate agent — said, "Well, actually it was a PBS show on DNA. Most of the people on the show were celebrities. The narrator, Louis (Skip) Gates, was a professor and writer, from Harvard University. Anyway, the main genetic results upset many so-called black people when they discovered they did not descend from Africa, or Africans. They didn't come from African royalty, I guess that's what it was. Oprah Winfrey found out that she had a lot of native American Indian ancestors."
I mentioned a number of jazz musicians who've told me they had Indian ancestry, among them Art and Addison Farmer and Dave Brubeck. Miles Davis was another. I said, "I was fascinated in reading the Miles Davis autobiography by how much Paris changed him." I mentioned that, like Moody, he had experienced an epiphany in Paris, and Kenny Clarke wanted him to stay there. Kenny did stay. But Miles returned to the United States.
Moody said, "After a couple of weeks in Paris, I said, 'Oh oh. I see what it is. It's not me. It's them.' My wife is white, blond hair with green eyes. We have the same blood. They talk about, 'If you've got just one drop of Negro blood, you are this.' And if you just look at blood, you couldn't tell the difference between a Negro and a Caucasian."
I mentioned that even the term African-American bothers me. I said, "I'll tell you why. I know a white woman from South Africa who is a racist. She is an American citizen. She is an African-American. And what do you call Oscar Peterson? An African-Canadian? What about Monty Alexander Alexander? He's from Jamaica."
Moody said, "Look at my Uncle Louis here. His grandmother was an Irish woman. She had a farm, and her husband died. A Negro helped her. And what happened was, they had intimate relations and my grandfather came. She said, 'I'm not going to let my child go to school with those black kids.' And his father said, 'Well I'm not going to let my son go to school with those white kids.' So my grandfather never got an education. But he still learned how to read blueprints and build houses, and he knew how to cook. He was my Uncle Louis's father."
I said, "You must know that Milton Hinton's father was from Africa. He came over here and married Milt's mother, then went back to Africa. Tiger Woods refuses to let anyone classify him as black or white. He says because of the mixture in his parents that he's a Cablanasian."
"Remember Chano Pozo?" Moody said. "His passport said 'White', Maybe it was because he didn't speak much English."
"You know,"I said, "I've talked to any number of guys, including Ray Brown and Junior Mance, about what they learned from Dizzy. Ray told me that he was with Dizzy three or four months and Dizzy didn't say anything to him. He started to get nervous, and finally said to Dizzy, 'How'm I doing?' Dizzy said, 'Fine. Except you're playing a lot of wrong notes.' And he sat down with him at the piano and told him what he wanted in the base line. And Junior Mance told me that he would be playing a rhythmic figure he thought was right, then Dizzy would tell him it wasn't quite right, and he would go to the piano and show him. Everybody I ever talked to who worked with him learned something. Miles said, 'If you ever worked for Dizzy, and did not learn, you didn't have it in the first place."
"He's right about that."
"Guys said that working for Dizzy was like going to school."
"It's like a broken record. I hear this over and over again. Every time I do an interview, people ask what did I learn from Dizzy? And I'll tell them, 'I'm still learning.' I'll go on playing and later on I'll say, 'Ah, that's what he meant.' This has been going on for years. Because you see, the effect that everyone has on you, it doesn't all come at once. When you start to think about it, like when you think of your uncle or aunt or wife, you think of something over a span of a week or a day, a month or a year, or five years. You know what I'm saying?"
"Yeah, I do. Bill Evans taught me some things in harmony and the meaning of it kept going off in my head for a long time. When I asked him why a flat ninth always seemed to work on a dominant chord, so long as it wasn't in conflict with the melody note, he said it had more to do with the principles of counterpoint than harmony. Eventually I got it."
Moody said, "Same way with me — with the minor seventh flat-five chord. Dizzy said that he got that from Monk." Moody hummed an example.
I said, "Monk called it half diminished. These things go on working themselves out in your head for years."
"When you say for years, it's as long as you live. Nicholas Slonimsky, have you read his book of scales?"
"You mean his Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns? I've looked at it, but I can hardly say that I've read it. Coltrane studied it."
Moody said "He wrote his book for composition on the chromatic scale. And that's just twelve notes. The more you learn, the more you find out what you don't. With just four notes, what is it, 24 or 16 ways to play them? It would take 25 or 30 thousand years to get that down. Then you say, 'Damn — boy! But you try. That's why jazz is so hip."
"Having grown up on both classical music and jazz, I began saying when I was very young that jazz is the greatest musical art form of the twentieth century."
Moody said, "I say that too. A woman looked at me and she said, 'Mr. Moody, are you a musician?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'm a jazz musician.' Then she said, 'Oh, that's nice, but I like classical music.' I said, 'Well that's okay. A whole note still gets four beats.'" We both laughed. "But, check this out, in jazz, if you play a composition, you play it in all keys. Suppose we were to take all the classical sonatas and things and put them through all the keys. Imagine what that would be."
I said, "Bill Evans used to play a new tune through all the keys to decide which one he liked."
"Yeah. Just because a song is in a certain key, that doesn't mean that's the way you want to play it. Some things sound better in certain keys."
The subject turned back to Dizzy. Moody said, "Dizzy was, like ... he was hardheaded. I would tell him not to eat certain things because he was diabetic. Then again, when you look back, all diabetics are hard-headed, you know? But Diz was like ... a very tender man. Nice. He looked at me one time and said, 'Moody, you're a real nice person.' He said, 'I've got a little larceny in my heart, but you are too kind.' And now I'm saying to myself, 'Damn. Why would he say that to me?' And then as the years went by, I'm thinking, 'I see what he means. He means 'Don't trust everybody.' But I got that from my mother. You trust everybody until they show you wrong. You have to watch it."
"It took me a long time to learn that," I said. "But I still don't want to go around distrusting everybody."
"I know. It can make you sick. And then, Dizzy was very funny too. Like the funny things that he did, but I can't say here. He was funny, and like a father, like a brother. He was a wonderful guy and a good man. The first time I went anywhere in Europe, I went with Dizzy. After he passed, when I would go to these same places and festivals, it would be kind of depressing for me — because he wasn't there. I had been to Sweden and places like that with my quartet. I would get a phone call, and he'd get on and say in a feminine voice, 'Hello? Is this Moody? I love you so much.' I would say, 'Oh Diz!' and he would say, 'How did you know it was me?'"
I said, "You know, when Sahib Shihab was dying, I was there at the hospital a lot of afternoons. And I called Dizzy and asked if he knew that Sahib was in the hospital, and told him it wasn't looking good. And, Sahib told me on one of my visits, Dizzy called him every day from then on. That continued until Sahib died. Dizzy was like that."
I mentioned to Moody an occasion when I was driving in South Carolina and saw a road sign pointing to Cheraw.
"Cheraw," Moody said. "That's where he was born."
"And where his father beat him up pretty good."
"I didn't know about that."
"Yeah, his father was very rough on him. It's in a couple of biographies, and anyway he told me about it himself, a long time ago. There is a book of my essays in which I wrote about musicians who had every right to hate white people and didn't — Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, Nat Cole, Dizzy."
"That situation is similar to mine. My wife, she tells me ‘Honey, I don't see why you don't have a chip on your shoulder.' I would be walking to school and they'd yell, 'Hey, snowball.' A kid. It shows how stupid people can be. They think that they can be of one color and say that one color is better than another color. Have you ever been to Japan?"
"Never."
"The cities in Japan make the cities in America look like slums, and it makes you say, 'I wonder who won the war.' They have beautiful buildings, you can leave things wherever, your wife could walk anywhere downtown at whatever hour at night, by herself, and nobody will bother her. I mean, America is ... ." He raised his arms, at a loss for words. "People say to look at the Constitution. Well when it was written, Negroes were slaves. So it wasn't written for them, All men are created equal."
"All white men are created equal," I said. "Even that's not true. If you were born with a lot of money, you could go to any school you wanted, and it's still true."
"I never heard my mother say anything derogatory about the so-called white race. I say 'so-called' because there is no such thing as a white race in the first place. But she never said that. And for me, I would never say, 'Oh that guy is a so-and-so.' I'd just say that guy's a jive-ass cat. Because all people are basically the same. You know, if you cry tears, if you have saliva in your mouth, and if you do doo-doo and pee-pee, you're the same. And you know something else? Like they say, 'Mate unto your own kind.' It's written in the Bible. And some people think that means to go with this color or that color. But what it means is to leave the dogs and cows alone."
"My father said they wouldn't have written these prohibitions unless somebody was doing these things." And we laughed. Moody continued:
"Our own daughter-in-law is Japanese. I'll have to show you a picture of our new grandson. That's why Linda was in Japan three weeks ago." He got out of his chair and retrieved a photo of his grandson, and then several other family photos.
"My father was a trumpet player. The reason I was born in Savannah, Georgia, is because he was playing in a circus band. And he didn't come home. My mother went down to Savannah looking for him. While she was there I was born. After she recuperated, we went back to Reading, Pennsylvania, where we were living.
"My wife fell in love with Savannah. Did you know I was in that movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil! Did you see the guy walking the dog? That's me. I was about forty pounds heavier there.
"We met a gentleman by the name of W.W. Law. He was a historian, Negro gentleman. Linda made some inquiries as to who could show us Savannah. A woman told us to get W.W. Law. So we got Mr. Law and he took us on all of these different walking tours. But I want Linda to tell you the one about the sidewalk."
Linda said, "Mr. Law became very close to Moody and me. He was a wonderful friend. And every time we went to Savannah we would spend as much time with him as we possibly could. We would invite him to all our meals because we loved to listen to him talk, tell stories. He was the one who orchestrated the first lunch-counter sit-in in Savannah. They practiced for two years to be nonviolent. They would have people spit in their faces, hit them, and club them, do all these things. They practiced not hitting back or retaliating. It all had to be done in secret. For two years.
"One of the times we were walking with him after lunch, it was really hot, and I was dying. I said, 'Mr. Law, would you mind if we walked on the other side of the street — in the shade?'
"And he said, 'Mrs. Moody, I will only do it for you. Because we were required to walk on this certain side of the street all our lives, until not too long ago. When that stopped, I said I was never going to walk on that side of the street again. But for you, I will do it.' And he was wonderful.
"He took us to a home where a white woman for twenty years taught little black children in a secret room in the attic of her home. When people got wind of it, they would check on her. She had a special place for these children, through a secret door. They were totally quiet, and never said a thing. That went on for twenty years, and nobody ever found out."
I said, "Did you ever read William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner?"
Linda said, "A long time ago."
"The effect is harrowing, the thoughts of a self-educated slave interspersed with the shuffling way of speech to whites he doesn't dare let know he can read. I used the technique in my Oscar Peterson biography, contrasting the dialogue that was written for him in radio, such as, 'Say, boy, how many hands you got?' contrasted with the way he actually thought and spoke."
Oscar's father and his sister, I pointed out, exposed him to music and taught him.
Did Moody's father teach him?
"No, I didn't meet my father until I was twenty-one years old. I met him in Indianapolis. He came up to me and said, 'Is your father James Moody?'
"'Yeah.'
'"Is your mother Ruby Hann?'
"'Yeah.'
"'Well, I'm your father.'
"And I said, 'What know, Pops?'
"Actually, I had no relationship with him. I didn't have any feelings for him at all. My mother played piano in church in Reading, Pennsylvania. When I was a kid she would take me to church with her. And I would be sitting in the front row when she would play. And then she would look at me and do this . . . ." He made a gesture of dismissal. "That meant I could go outside. Because the damned minister would talk." Moody demonstrated the screams of an impassioned preacher. "It would frighten me."
"Hellfire preaching."
"Yeah, it's stupid, man."
"How did you come to live in Newark?"
"Well, they wanted to put me in a school for retarded children, because I was partially deaf. I was born that way. They didn't know it. So my mother moved to Newark and told the teacher in my Newark school that I couldn't hear. And the teacher just put me up front. I skipped a couple of grades, and then I was doing okay. The doctor came by and looked at my eyes, ears, and throat and he told me, 'You are going to go deaf.’ So they sent me to Bruce Street School for the Deaf in Newark. I graduated from there and I wanted to learn music. So I went to Art High School. They put me in a solfege class."
"Moveable doh?"
"No, fixed doh." He turned to his wife: "What he means is that a tenor clef or an alto clef, that is doh, and can move to a different range. But a regular treble doh, that's fixed." He resumed: "I would be called on to find notes with my voice and I would be cut off. 'Sit down!' That is the only F grade that I got in school. And it was a big red one too. Then I went to East Side High School in New York. After that I was drafted into the Air Force. That's when they asked 'Does anybody have a horn?' I had one, but I couldn't play it, I mean for real. That's how I started playing."
"Which air base was that?"
"ETC Number 10 — Basic Training Center Number 10, Greensboro, North Carolina. I did overseas placement."
"Because so many guys studied music in the service," I said, "they called it the Khaki Conservatory. Al Grey was at that Great Lakes Naval Air Training Station."
"Was it segregated when he went in?"
"You bet."
"So Frank Foster and Clark Terry and Ernie Wilkins — all those guys. You know, I don't understand it. But then again, I guess it has to do with the slavery thing. All I know is that it's stupid. When it comes to the arts, America is the land of mediocrity."
" Dizzy said to me once, 'Jazz is too good for America.'"
"That's right. He said that. I've got a book called People's History of America. [By Howard Zinn.] You take people like Columbus and Cortez. They think these people were wonderful."
"Well, they slaughtered the Indians, and destroyed the Aztec culture."
"Oh yeah. When you look at it, you say to yourself, 'When is it going to get better?' Never! And you know why? Because of the Illuminati, the New World Order. All those things. Just wait. All hell is going to break loose.
"We have twins who travel all over the world. When we get the news from them, it's the opposite of what it is here, because here they lie. The people here in power, they own the newspapers and everything and write crap. But over there, the Americans are getting their butts kicked. Well, then they wonder. No country, none, likes America."
"They did once. It was the most admired nation on earth."
"Once. And they were being fooled then, because this country has never helped anybody."
I said, "When I was much younger, in the 1950s, and living in France, this country was held in the most immense respect. In 1984, I was in Italy, writing the lyrics for an album by Sarah Vaughan based on poems by the Pope. My wife came over to join me. She went to get her hair done. Some wealthy woman sent out for a bunch of exquisite pastries for her, and said in her hesitant English, 'Thank you for saving us.' That was the attitude and sentiment in Europe for a long time. But it's gone now. And it's tragic. When I was covering the French negotiations to get out of Viet Nam, I studied a lot of Vietnamese history. And Ho Chi Minh, who began as very pro-American, turned. And he said, 'Democracy is something that no nation exports.'"
"I know that," Moody said. "Saddam Hussein and Ossama Bin Laden, the Americans made them. And it's the same thing with Noriega in Panama that they put in jail, because they said he was making drug money. But you know who the biggest drug runners are? The CIA. The worst. And the people don't want to believe that.
"If they would only apologize for slavery. But the people are saying, 'Oh, but I wasn't here when it happened.' I say, 'Yeah, but you got the advantage of everything.' The slaves would work but it was the slave owner who got the money. And the slaves always owed him, because you went to the grocery store and you never could pay anything off."
I said, "They are trying to reduce America back to that condition now. If they can reduce the income level of the American working class far enough, they have got something like a form of slavery again. When you see people working two or three jobs to survive, we are getting close to it."
"But you know what? They can do that, but they can't make the music a drag."
"America's greatest presentation to the world." I said.
"The American Century to me was music. Not just jazz, the American popular song, Cole Porter, Arthur Schwartz, all the others. John Lewis always said that jazz grew up in tandem with great popular music."
"Yeah, it did. Look at George Shearing's Lullaby of Birdland and Love Me or Leave Me." Moody sang lines from both songs; the latter of course is based on the former. "Just like Dizzy did." He sang some of Whispering, then eight bars of Groovin' High. Many of the great bebop tunes were based on standards."
"Was Gil Fuller writing for the band when you joined it?"
"Yeah. He was the one, when I tried out for the band, who told me I didn't play loud enough. And about a month later I got a telegram from Dave Burns saying, 'You start with us tonight at the Spotlight.' Later I said, 'Am I playing loud enough?' And he said, 'Oh I was just trying to pull your coat and stuff I made a couple of albums for him."
"Was Tadd Dameron writing?"
"Yeah. I remember Gerald Wilson was writing for the band. He and Erroll Garner's older brother, Linton Garner. He was in the service with Dave Burns and me. A piano player. He could read and everything. The opposite of his brother."(Other writers for the band during the late 1950s included Ernie Wilkins, Pete Anson, Gigi Gryce, and Benny Golson.)
"I worked with Dizzy for about 43 years."
"Did you do any of those 1992 concerts, To Dizzy with Love! at the Blue Note in New York? When he had guests coming in from his old groups?"
"Oh yeah!" He showed me a photo from that engagement. The walls of his family room, as well as the foyer, are covered with posters and photos and memorabilia of Dizzy, one of them from the To Dizzy with Love concerts. On successive nights, various musicians who had been close to Dizzy came in to play with him.
Moody said, "I'm going to play my next gig in Philadelphia at the Kimmel Center with the Dizzy Gillespie big band."
"Who's conducting? Jon Faddis?"
"No. He's conducting in Chicago. Slide Hampton is conducting. Roy Hargrove is in the trumpet section."
Jon Faddis, I learned later, is artistic director of the big band the late Bill Russo established in Chicago.
We took a break, and when we resumed I said, "Comparatively late in life, Dizzy changed his embouchure."
"The reason he did was because he had a hole in his lip as big as a lollipop. I don't know where that thing came from. But you could see it. It was a round hole."
"A lot of guys get scarred lips playing trumpet."
"Yeah, but this was different."
"It seemed to change his tone, made it fatter."
"Well, any time you change embouchure it does something. It either makes it better or ... But Diz always had a unique sound. Like, nobody sounded like that."
"Yeah. Two notes and you knew who it was. What do you think the scope of his influence is?"
Moody said, "Not as much as it should be. And I don't mean to take anything away from Miles, because it was two different things. Miles couldn't do what Diz did, and I could say that Diz couldn't do some of the things that Miles did. But Miles was learning from Diz."
"Miles told me that himself."
"Yeah, and Miles deserves all the recognition that he gets. But they don't give Diz enough recognition. I think they short-change him."
"Miles told me, 'I got it all from Dizzy.' That's not quite true, because he got some of it, he told me, from Bobby Hackett and some it from Freddy Webster. But most of it, he said, came from Dizzy. He didn't sound like Dizzy because he didn't have Dizzy's chops."
"You know, some of the stuff you cannot finger. Dizzy had some unorthodox fingering. The only person that can do it is Jon Faddis."
"He is the one guy who can come close, close, close to Dizzy. Mind you, Miles had more chops than he got credit for. You know, when I was working with Charles Aznavour, translating some of his songs into English, he told me something I never forgot. He said, 'We don't build our style on our abilities. We build it on our limitations.'"
"Mmmmm, that's good. You hear that, honey?" He repeated it to Linda.
I said, "I've heard certain singers, as they grow older and can't breathe and can't do what they once did, start spacing the phrasing. And it works."
Moody said, "Oh yeah. I have done that a few times when, like, my chops weren't right up there. You know, you play, and stop and smile for a minute. Not because you want to do it, but because you have to do it." He laughed.
"Clark Terry told me that a lot of the old trumpet players sang to rest their chops. Let the blood flow back into your lips. I noticed that Dizzy sang more and more as he grew older. He'd sing two or three tunes in a row, then plant his feet and take up the horn and scare you to death. He'd save it."
"You know, the more you play the stronger your lip gets. And the less you play .... Like, if you don't practice — I have to practice — your lip gets weak. When you're young, it doesn't go away that fast. When you're older, it goes faster.
"Like I said before, man, Dizzy does not get the recognition that he should get. Dizzy felt like Bird was the man. He said when he heard Charlie Parker, he said, 'Now that's the way the music is supposed to go.'"
I said, "He was a very modest man. I said to him once that everybody talked about what a generous teacher he was."
"Oh yeah. If he was doing something, he would show you. 'Look at that, look ...'
And if you were trying something, he would say, 'Why don't you try it this way?'"
"He said to me once, 'I don't know that I know very much, but whatever I know, I am willing to share.' And of course he knew plenty."
"Do you know Jon Faddis?"
"Sure. It went around that Dizzy died peacefully with Jon Faddis in the room and that CD Dizzy's Diamonds playing."
"There was no music there that night,"Moody said. "The night before, Mike Longo and I went to see Dizzy. He was in bed. They had just given him a bath. And Dizzy looked at us. I said, 'Hey Diz.' He said . . . ." Moody imitated Dizzy putting one finger to his lips and puffing his cheeks slightly. "You know, he tried to make like his jaws would go. We said, 'Oo-bop-a-dah' and he just went . . . ." He imitated Dizzy trying to blow. "You know, he tried to do his boppin'. So we said, 'We better go.' I said, 'I'm coming back tomorrow and stay with him as long as I can."
"So that ends that legend about him listening to Dizzy's Diamonds." That is the name of a Verve album in which a lot of Dizzy's finest tracks are collected. Thinking back on it now, I realize that that story always made me uneasy. I have never known a jazz musician who listened much to his own records, and I had trouble imagining Dizzy doing it.
Moody said, "Jon Faddis and I and Jacques Muyal, a record producer from Switzerland and his son, and John Motley, a choral director and an old friend of Dizzy's, were with him when he passed. And I told Jon, 'Mark my words, in ten years, or five, from now, there are going to be thirty-five or forty people in the room with Dizzy when he passed.' And it will be like Dizzy's dying . . ." And Moody mimed Dizzy playing trumpet. "It wasn't like that. Diz was sitting in a chair trying to breathe." Moody demonstrated the slumped posture. "He never opened his eyes. He went like this." And Moody demonstrated a last breath with eyes closed and a slight smile, letting his chin slump to his chest. "I said, 'Diz, Diz, Diz.'" Moody reached out as if to touch someone. "And then I said, 'Donna, Donna!' She was his nurse, Donna Pace. She listened. Then she went and got the doctor. He came and he listened. He said, 'That's it.'" Moody made a baseball umpire's safe gesture.
"He was gone, and he didn't weigh a hundred pounds.
Donna took him and wrapped him up like a mummy." I daresay I believed the Dizzy's Diamonds story because I wanted to.
Within months, Dizzy's beloved Lorraine, the great stabilizer of his life, too was gone.
We had talked well into the afternoon. Moody wanted us to stay for chile dogs. He claimed to make the world's best chile dogs. So we sat on stools at the bar that separates the family room from the open kitchen, and Moody went about his magic. He had not exaggerated the quality of his chile dogs. He served them with salads, and when we were done — stuffed is a better word — it came time to us to leave. We went out through the garage. And there, with another car of Moody's, was Benny Carter's Rolls Royce.
When Benny was in his final days in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Linda Moody called him almost every day. He told her, "I'll never leave this hospital. I'm checking out." He said, "Do you still want that car?" She said they did. Benny said, "Call Hilma, and tell her what you want to pay for it and write her a check."
Linda said, "I drove to Los Angeles right after he died and wrote Hilma a check immediately." Benny died July 12, 2003. Linda requested and got the California license plate Bennys. Linda said, It will always be his car as far as we're concerned."
Doug Ramsey, another of Moody's friends — and their number is inestimable — tells a story about Moody and cars:
"One night my wife and I met him at his house in New Jersey for a drink before his gig at — I think — the Half Note. We had another couple with us. It may have been Al Belletto and his girl when Al was visiting from New Orleans. Moody and his wife, Margena, got in his Cadillac. The four of us piled into our ancient Volvo and followed. At the turnpike toll both, I pulled up after Moody went through. He had paid for our car as well as his.
“And Gerry Mulligan lived through almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should be understood.”
- Gene Lees
The title of this feature involves somewhat of a play on words.
I’ve always found the career of composer-arranger and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan amazing both in terms of its scope and its content. Everything he did in Jazz in whatever the setting was done to the highest musical standards. His artistry was sheer genius.
But what is even more amazing to me is that with the exception of Jerome Klinkowitz's Listen-Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative [Schirmer Books, 1991] which is written primarily from the author's take on Gerry's recordings, I know of no definitive, book length treatment on the subject of Gerry and his music, this despite the fact Jazz studies programs, institutes, and repositories dot the landscape of colleges and universities throughout the country and, increasingly, the world.
How sad.
More Mulligan, indeed.
In an effort to redress this tragic omission, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has cobbled together its previous blog postings on Gerry and collected them into this feature so that they may be easier to locate in the archives should someone with more energy and discipline be interested in using them to write a comprehensive biography on Gerry Mulligan.
While by means an exhaustive “research of the literature,” what follows does contain writings about Gerry and his music by such distinguished Jazz authors as Bill Crow, Nat Hentoff, Gene Lees, Gordon Jack, Doug Ramsey, Ted Gioia, Bill Kirchner, Ira Gitler, Bob Gordon, Gunther Schuller, Burt Korall, George T. Simon, Michael Cuscuna, Gary Giddins, Leonard Feather Fred M. Hall, Whitney Balliett, Martin Williams, Jeff Sultanof, Jerome Klinkowitz, and Charles Fox [BBC].
This is for you, Jeru, until something better comes along.
“In his short story, Entropy, the novelist Thomas Pynchon takes Mulligan’s early-1950’s piano-less quartets with Chet Baker as a crux of post modernism, improvisation without the safety net of predictable chords.
The revisionist argument was that Mulligan attempted the experiment simply because he had to work in a club with no piano.
The true version is that there was a piano, albeit an inadequate one, but he was already experimenting with a much more arranged sound for small groups (to which the baritone saxophone was particularly adaptable) and the absence of a decent keyboard was merely an additional spur. …
Mulligan’s piano-less quartet is one of the epochal jazz groups, even if it had no such aspirations, formed for nothing more than a regular gig at The Haig….
In retrospect, it’s the simplest pleasures which have made the music endure: the uncomplicated swing of the various rhythm sections, the piquant contrast of amiably gruff baritone saxophone and shyly melodious trumpet ….
Cool but hot, slick but never too clever, these are some of the most pleasurable records of their time.”
Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD [6th Ed.: p. 1082; paragraphing modified].
In order to assist with our expanded portrayal of one of the Giants of Jazz, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has secured copyright permission from authors Bill Crow, Nat Hentoff, Gene Lees and Gordon Jack to use chapters about Gerry from their books. These will appear in subsequent sections of this piece on Gerry.
I liked Gerry Mulligan’s music from the first time I heard it. It made me feel content then and it still makes me feel content now whenever I play any of his records.
Mulligan’s music makes me feel happy, joyous and free, whatever the musical context, be it the arrangements he wrote for the Gene Krupa, Claude Thornhill, and Elliot Lawrence big bands; his involvement with Gil Evans in the Birth of the Cool sessions issued under Miles Davis’ name in the late 1940’s; his early 1950’s piano-less quartet with Chet Baker; the Kenton arrangements such as Youngblood, Swing House and Walking Shoes around the same time; the sextet he formed in the mid-1950s with Jon Eardley [tp], Bob Brookmeyer [vtb] and Zoot Sims [ts]; the re-formed quartets first with Bob Brookmeyer and later with Art Farmer [tp]; the marvelous and all-too-short-lived early 1960s version of the Concert Jazz Band; his association with Dave Brubeck’s Quartet after the latter’s classic quartet with Paul Desmond disbanded in 1967; the 1974 Carnegie Hall reunion with Chet Baker; the re-constituted editions of the Concert Jazz Band in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s; his quartet during the later years of his life which included either Bill Charlap or Ted Rosenthal [p], Dean Johnson [b] and Ron Vincent [d].
And lest we forget, there are the many “Gerry Mulligan Plays with …” albums that this peripatetic baritone saxophonist made with the likes of Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Lee Konitz , Paul Desmond, Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster.
Nat Hentoff fondly refers to Gerry as the “Huck Finn” or the “Johnny Appleseed” of Jazz and Doug Ramsey also portrays Gerry’s wandering minstrel tendency in a most praiseworthy fashion when he explains:
“Some musicians, once they move past their salad days and establish careers as identifiable stylists, rarely leave the confines of their own groups or, if they do, seldom mingle in performances with players outside their own styles or eras. There are many sensible, even laudatory, reasons for such isolation. Some are purely artistic. Some are commercial. Others have to do with preservation of image, which is usually another manifestation of salability. Still others concern sheer preservation of physical and psychic energy.
But there have always been in jazz a few artists at the pinnacle of their profession, admired by their peers, flexible in outlook, quickly adaptable to a variety of circumstances, who love to play in virtually any musical setting of quality … [and] among major jazz artists, it may be that no one has sat in more often with bands playing a greater range of styles than has Gerry Mulligan.
Mulligan, master baritone saxophonist, small group innovator, one of the premier arrangers, is at home in every jazz idiom with the possible exception of the most outré elements of avant-garde.” [Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1989, p. 229].
Given the magnitude of the footprint that he left upon the music, it is almost as impossible to assess Gerry Mulligan’s role in the development of modern Jazz in the second half of the Twentieth Century as it is to underestimate it.
The following excerpt by Ted Gioia from his Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz in The Oxford Companion to Jazz as edited by Bill Kirchner [New York, Oxford University Press, 2000] might serve as one starting point for Gerry contributions to Jazz’s evolution during this period:
“Gerry Mulligan’s stint in California in the early 1950s proved decisive for the emerging West Coast sound. Modern jazz in Los Angeles in the late 1940s was as hot as the asphalt under which the city was then being covered. It took as its primary model the bebop styles of the East Coast.
Mulligan’s L.A. quartet [with trumpeter Chet Baker] changed all of that, questioning the conventional wisdom about jazz music’s rhythmic essence, its melodic impulses, its approach to composition, even its assumptions about instrumentation.
Mulligan’s finely etched baritone sax lines entered into a ruminative counterpoint dialogue with Baker’s trumpet phrases. … Never before had the softer extremes of the dynamic spectrum been so finely explored by a jazz band …. [Accompanied by only bass and drums] no piano or guitar cluttered the pristine harmonic textures of the band, and this imparted even great clarity to the interlocking horn lines. [paragraphing modified: p. 336].
And yet, Mulligan seems to have disavowed the importance of his time on the West Coast claiming later in his career:
My bands would have been successful anywhere. [Mulligan, a native New Yorker, went on to assert] I didn’t live in California. I went to California, scuffled around for a while, wrote some charts for Stan Kenton to survive, and started my group – I had very little contact with anything going on out there – and then left.” [Bob Rusch, Gerry Mulligan Interview, Cadence, October 1977, p. 7, asquoted in Gioia, West Coast Jazz, p. 175].
As this excerpt from Ira Gitler’s Swing to Bop demonstrates, Gerry’s criticism of his time on the West Coast involving Stan Kenton was particularly vitriolic:
… part of the thing that really depressed me and I always hated being called West Coast jazz because to me the influences out of the West Coast in jazz were personified by Stan Kenton's band. And Stan's band to me was some kind of way symbolic of the end of the bands as I loved them. It had gotten too big and too pompous. You know, it took itself so seriously. Like just something terribly Wagnerian about it all.
Well, I once said, thinking I was being humorous, that Stan is the "Wagner of jazz" and then realized afterwards-because he had done a thing with the transcriptions of the Wagner pieces, and tried to conduct them-that he really saw himself that way and didn't see any humor in it at all. But I hated what that band stood for because it was like the final evolution of wrongly taken points. The way the band kept growing.
And the absolute maximum for any kind of use was the five saxes and the three or four bones and the four trumpets. The main reason . . . there's one you can do with four trumpets you can't do any other way, and that's four-part harmony, which only four trumpets together sound . . . OK. The only function for the fifth trumpet is an alternate player. But Stan's band kept getting bigger and bigger - to five trombones. Now five trombones is the most asinine.” [Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940’s, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 247].
But as Bob Gordon points out in his effort at an even-handed assessment of Gerry’s tenure on the West Coast, while it may have been brief, it also brought him his initial fame and helped to give a wider public recognition to many southern California musicians and their music:
“When Gerry Mulligan returned to New York at the close of 1954, …, the catchphrase West Coast Jazz was being bandied about in the Jazz press and, much to his irritation, Gerry’s name was often linked to the music. Gerry was quite right in rejecting this linkage; his quartet was sui generis and belonged to no school save that of Mulligan himself. At the same time, though, the national popularity of the quartet did much to draw attention to Jazz in southern California and helped smooth the way for other musicians who were trying to be heard. …, Pacific Jazz [Records] owed its very existence to the Mulligan quartet, and that label and other independent companies that sprang up in its wake were largely responsible for launching the careers of many southland musicians who had been anonymous before Gerry arrived. Gerry Mulligan’s help may have been inadvertent, but it was indispensable nevertheless." [Jazz West Coast, London: Quartet Books, 1986, p. 85].
Before Gerry’s time on the West Coast, there were four, distinctive associations during the formative years of his career: [1] his time with drummer Gene Krupa’s post World War II orchestra; [2] his work with the Claude Thornhill orchestra beginning in 1947 which led to his meeting the arranger composer Gil Evans, [3] his work as a composer-arranger for the Philadelphia-based Elliot Lawrence band that began in 1949 and continued into the mid-1950s; [4] also in 1949, the landmark Birth of the Cool sessions issued under trumpeter Miles Davis’ name.
As Gunther Schuller points out:
“[In addition to Eddie Finckel], “… George Williams, and Gerry Mulligan, were even more instrumental in bringing the Krupa band into the modern era….
[And yet], Krupa did not record Gerry Mulligan’s early work (1946-47) until a dozen years later with a star-studded specially assembled band for Norman Granz’s Verve label. Krupa may simply have considered Mulligan’s [early] work too risky commercially – he did take a chance on two of his more “conservative” scores, Disc Jockey Jump (1947) and How High the Moon (1946) – notwithstanding his genuine commitment to the newer jazz styles, which he staunchly maintained into the early 1950s and beyond that. Indeed by 1949, the year the bop movement finally achieved wider public recognition, Krupa’s orchestra had developed into a full-fledged modern ensemble.” [The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945, New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1989, p. 727].
Gerry’s contributions to Gene Krupa’s big band are richly detailed in the following un-attributed insert notes to the Verve CD – Gene Krupa Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements,as well as, those that follow which Pete Clayton wrote for the initial LP release of this music for the World Record Club[TP 351]:
“Gerry Mulligan joined the Gene Krupa band in February, 1946, and remained about a year. He arranged for the band all that time, played alto for a couple of months and tenor for about two more. The arrangements he did during that year - when he was 19 - are both interesting in themselves and illuminating in the context of the way his writing has developed since. He did about 24 altogether.
At the age of 17, Mulligan had already started arranging professionally - for Johnny Warrington's band at the Philadelphia radio station, WCAU; for Tommy Tucker on Gerry's first road trip; and then for Elliot Lawrence, who had taken over the WCAU orchestra.
"The Krupa band, however," Mulligan recalls, "was the most professional band I'd ever written for. They were so professional they sometimes scared the hell out of me. They had no trouble playing anything I wrote. Having that skilled a unit to write for was a new and a challenging experience."
Before he heard these versions of the arrangements he'd done for Krupa, Mulligan had feared that twelve years would make them sound much too dated for comfort, but he was hearteningly surprised to hear that they still stand up. "There were a lot of things," he said, "I thought I hadn't tried until I started writing for Claude Thornhill, but now I hear that I'd already been doing them with Gene's band."
In these arrangements can be heard Mulligan's characteristic concern for linear clarity and his overall functional approach to writing. In the years after, Mulligan - through his arranging for big bands and his own quartet - did a great deal to let more air into contemporary jazz scoring. He did not allow himself to be impressed with sound effects - however massed and screaming - for their own sake, but preferred instead to make a large band flow and swing lightly but firmly with plenty of space for the men, in sections as well as in solo, to breathe.
In some places here, you may be reminded of elements of the Jimmie Lunceford book, not only the rhythmic feel at times, but also the humor. Wit, sometimes sardonic, is another characteristic of Mulligan and it also was one of the invigorating assets of the Lunceford band.
"Actually," Mulligan explains, "guys at that time asked me if I'd heard Lunceford, and I hadn't. But I had heard several of the white bands who had been influenced by Lunceford."
Bird House is thus called because it's based on several Charlie Parker ideas, but it's also not unconnected with Neal Hefti's The Good Earth for inspiration. Gerry had left Mulligan Stew untitled, and the title it finally received made him vow that would be the last time he wouldn't title a song of his himself. Gerry wrote The Way of All Flesh after reading the novel, but doesn't think there are any correspondences between Samuel Butler's plot and the score.
Disc Jockey Jump, which turned out to be a Krupa hit, was written by Mulligan in the early months of his association with the band, but it wasn't put into the books until Gerry had left. Mulligan's only retrospective comment on the number is, "It came before Four Brothers."
Mulligan feels he learned a great deal from his year with Krupa, not only about writing and playing, but about people. The band traveled throughout the country, and the experience broadened Gerry considerably. He was also fond of Gene personally, and appreciated the fact that Gene let him write as much as he did and used most of it. Krupa, in turn, liked Mulligan because he always stood up for what he believed, and knew what he wanted to do.
Adding this album to your Mulligan-Krupa collection should prove to be an instructive pleasure. It gives - in high fidelity - a cross-section of an important year in Mulligan's history; and it also indicates that Krupa had the prescience to keep the 19-year-old with the band, and - up to a point - give him his head.
World Club Record" TP 351
" Those who saw much of Gerry Mulligan during his 1963 visit to Britain found him looking robust, substantial and outrageously English as he loped affably about London smoking his pipe. And anyone who could, almost automatically contrasted this new Mulligan with the skeletally thin figure, with his sandy hair pruned down to little more than a ginger lawn, whose shortness of temper and air of almost perpetual irritability had made him such a prickly individual during his previous visit six years earlier. But if, in the matter of mere physical appearance and disposition, he has altered somewhat over the years, musically there is a consistency about him that runs right through his career; and this record, although made in 1958, takes us almost as far back as we can go in Mulligan's work in jazz. Nowadays a constant pollwinner on baritone sax, he made his first big impression as an arranger, and we have here twelve of the two dozen arrangements he did for Gene Krupa's band, of which he was a member, during 1946. He was then only nineteen.
Already he was thinking in terms of that articulate airiness that he later brought to exquisite perfection in the Quartet. At that early age he could have been excused had he succumbed to the temptation to wallow in the opulent sounds possible with a big band. But he didn't. That ambling boneyness, which is his by physique, had already got into his writing. You will notice that apart from Disc jockey jump, which was one of the Krupa band's big successes at the time, the tempos are nearly all relaxed, almost casual. And If you were the only girl in the world not only demonstrates his ability to sustain interest at a really slow tempo, but points also to his flair for working wonders with what appears at first sight to be unlikely material. The tune had been written right back in 1916 by Nat Ayer for a famous London musical show, "The Bing Boys are Here', and although a good strong one, it had always seemed to me to have rather an excess of that maudlin quality that goes down so well in pubs. But if there has to be a highspot on the record, for me it is this number.
Mulligan's own Bird house and Birds of a feather, and Yardbird suite by Parker himself, are Gerry's ample tribute to Charlie Parker. How high the moon, a number written by Morgan Lewis and Nancy Hamilton in 1940, had an uncanny fascination for the early modernists, who made it their own much as the jam sessioneers had once appropriated Honeysuckle rose and the revivalists were to latch onto The Saints. Margie by Con Conrad and J. Russell Robinson. is a standard dating from 1920. Mulligan stew is Gerry's tune but somebody else's title; he is said to have vowed thereafter never again to leave the choice of a name to another. Begin the beguine is Cole Porter's classic from the 1935 show 'Jubilee'. The way of all flesh was simply adopted as a title at about the time Mulligan was reading Samuel Butler's novel. Sometimes I'm happy V is one of the incredibly simple but highly effective numbers that came so readily to VincentYoumans. It was in a 1927 musical called `Hit the Deck'.
When this record was played back, Mulligan was reported as being pleasantly surprised to hear how well this early work of his had stood the test of time. But he writes in a timeless way and, except when he's setting fashions for others to follow, has a sweeping disregard for such temporary things as musical fashions. What other modernist (if that term is not itself too restrictive) would dare to call himself a Dixieland musician, or admit that he'd been influenced by Red Nichols' Five Pennies? Come to that, how many jazzmen could have written with both originality and maturity while still in their teens and not only please a bandleader of an earlier musical generation altogether, but make him think it worth while rerecording those same arrangements a dozen years later still ?
Gene Krupa, who began his recording career a few months after Gerry Mulligan was born, was one of the first drummers whose technique was up to the demands of the swing era. Beginning as a Chicagoan, both geographically and musically, he went into big commercial dancebands in the early thirties, and by the time he joined Benny Goodman in 1935 he was not only a very able drummer but a first rate showman as well. He continued to propel the Goodman band in spectacular fashion until he left to form a band of his own in 1938. With a gap in the mid forties, when in the space of a few months he returned to Goodman and did a spell with Tommy Dorsey, he led a band continuously until 1951, when he first became part of Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic Empire.
One of the most striking things about jazz development in recent years has been the steady change in rhythm sections; by current standards Krupa is practically old-fashioned. But he's a great driver, a propulsive force whose powers of getting a big band off the ground are as full as ever. If he has changed at all it is in the matter of restraint. My memory seems to tell me that he had an over fondness for the bass drum in the swing days, a tendency to make a lot of noise out of sheer exuberance But here he plays with a light crispness and an almost unbelievable accuracy, steering an eager band through the spacious framework of a dozen arrangements provided by the almost unknown young arranger he'd had the farseeing good sense to employ all those years earlier."
PETER CLAYTON
Gene said of his time with Mulligan:
“I was attracted by the new jazz. After listening to Dizzy [Gillespie] and Bird [Charlie Parker] for a while, I began to hear music differently. It wasn’t too long before I made a commitment to this music. I hired Gerry Mulligan. An original arranger who was deeply involved with what was happening, be brought us “Disc Jockey Jump,” which was not only well-received, but established the fact that we were serious about going in another direction. My other arrangers [were] George Williams, Neal Hefti and Eddie Finckel …. These were exciting up-to-date guys. I let them go; only occasionally did I edit their scores or shelve what I felt wouldn’t work.” [Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz, New York: Macmillan, 1990, p. 80].
And Gerry had this to say of his time with Krupa:
“I was young when I worked for him. And he was very good to me. You know, he introduced me to the music of Maurice Ravel. He always liked to take a record player with him on the road. He loved Ravel and Delius, too.
For reasons that are detailed in Nat Hentoff’s The White Mainstreamer chapter from his work Jazz Is and which will be included in its entirety later in Part 3 of this feature, Mulligan was fired off the Krupa band and next began arranging for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, occasionally sitting in as a member of the reed section.
Thornhill's arranging staff included Gil Evans, whom Mulligan had met while working with the Krupa band. Mulligan eventually began living with Evans, at the time that Evans' apartment on West 55th Street became a regular hangout for a number of jazz musicians working on creating a new jazz idiom.
"In 1947-48, when Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan wrote arrangements for the Claude Thornhill band, the jazz-oriented instrumentals swung without shouting, and hinted at a bebop equivalent of early Count Basle and Lester Young, and It was those arrangements that inspired Miles Davis to have Evans and Mulligan create a nine-piece version of the same sound, known retrospectively as the 'Birth of the Cool' band. But Thornhill was not just historically significant, the original performances of his band stand up In their own right and are still as fresh as the day they were recorded."- BRIAN PRIESTLEY
Unfortunately, the 1948 recording ban imposed by the James Petrillo, President of the American Federation of Musicians, prevented Columbia from recording most of the arrangements that Gerry wrote for the Thornhill band.
Gerry had this to say about his experience with Claude:
“There was always a sense of the mystical about that band and its aura, and all that came from Claude. The idea of the whole ambience of the sound, the kind of voicings that were more orchestral than band-like, that was all Claude’s doing. It was a natural and willing adaptation that Gil underwent to write for the band; his way of using it was to apply his own unique talent to that instrumentation. It turned out to be the same thing for me, it gave me the opportunity to write for a band that was totally unlike the others that I had written for.”
When asked to compare Claude Thornhill to Stan Kenton, Gerry observed:
“They were probably exact opposites. Thornhill was an introvert, his music was very artistically oriented. His whole attitude was music as an expression of the spirit, and he was much drawn to the Impressionists and the music of that period. Kenton, on the other hand, was an extrovert, and his music was very extroverted and his musical heroes would be more like Wagner. They were polar opposites. The sense of how to produce the sound: the Kenton band was very muscular and physical; the Thornhill band was much more spiritual and cerebral and sensitive.” [Both of these Mulligan quotes are drawn from Will Friedwald’s insert notes to Claude Thornhill – Best of the Big Bands Columbia CK 46152].
As is explained in the following excerpt from the insert notes to Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements by George T. Simon, around 1949, Gerry began producing arrangements for Elliot Lawrence’s band which:
came out of Philadelphia and radio station WCAU to become a nationally known organization in the late Forties and Fifties. One of the band's sometime tenor saxophonists eventually became a major contributor to the band's book. His talent as an instrumentalist emerged on the baritone saxophone and his writing skills were in evidence in several big bands.
Gerry Mulligan had already done "Disc Jockey Jump" for Gene Krupa when Lawrence recorded his "Elevation" and arrangement of "Between the Devil and the DeepBlueSea" in 1949. Later Mulligan did some important charts for Stan Kenton, and finally, for his own Concert Jazz Band.
These 1955 dates yielded 12 Mulligan arrangements, including seven originals and "Mr. President," a scoring of Lester Young's solo from his 1939 recording with Count Basie. A full listing of the tracks on this album includes:
The Rocker
Bye Bye Blackbird
Happy Hooligan
Mullenium
My Silent Love
Bweebida Bwobbida
Strike Up the Band
Apple Core
Elegy for Two Clarinets
The Swinging Door
But Not For Me
Mr. President
The Lawrence band interprets the Mulligan scores with style and bite, giving ample solo space to Al Cohn's tenor saxophone, Eddie Bert's trombone, Hal McKusick's alto sax, and the trumpets of Nick Travis and Dick Sherman [as well as the lead trumpet of Bernie Glow].
These Mulligan's scores are marked by [his] warmth and taste ... The section work is wonderfully firm and precise and swings crisply...”
Around the same time that Mulligan began arranging for Elliot Lawrence, as Doug Ramsey explains in his essay Big Bands, Jazz Composing, Arranging After WW II in The Oxford Companion to Jazz:
“Mulligan was one of a group of young writers and players who in the late 1940s assembled in the Manhattan basement room of Gil Evans, their guru, to exchange ideas. Like Miles Davis, Mulligan was enchanted with Evans's work for Claude Thornhill. Evans and Mulligan wrote for Davis's nine-piece group, as did John Lewis and Johnny Carisi, with the Thornhill sound as their basic model. The band's 1949 and 1950 records, later collected as The Birth of the Cool (Capitol), became one of the most influential bodies of music in jazz. Their concepts led to the Evans-Davis collaborations that resulted in Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain (Columbia), Mulligan's 1953 Tentette (Capitol), and his Concert Jazz Band (Verve, EuroJazz).” [p. 413].
In his incisive insert notes to the CD reissue of Birth of the Cool, Pete Welding offers these thoughtful and thought-provoking comments about this seminal recording and its significance:
“In jazz, as in other music, some things are of their time, some ahead of it, while others simply know no time at all. The music produced by the Miles Davis Nonet, whose entire recorded output is contained in this album, is all of these and more. Not only was it the product of a specific time and place -and the special grouping of musicians involved in its creation-but it was demonstrably ahead of its time, having influenced a number of jazz developments that followed and took their lead from it. Then too, as listening will make immediately apparent, it's timeless as well, as most perfect things are.
Many things flowed from this seminal source-subsequent developments in Davis' own music and in those of various of its participants, notably Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans and John Lewis; much small group jazz of the '50s and '60s which drew upon various of its elements as well as its underlying philosophy; the whole West Coast jazz movement, and so on. All of which is even more remarkable when one considers how little the Nonet recorded or, more important, performed in public. (The latter generally is the best indication of how musical advances are perceived and received by the listening public.)
Still, while jazz audiences of the late 1940s may have been indifferent to the music of the Nonet, at least to the extent of supporting its New York club dates, jazz players of the time evinced no such resistance but, rather, were quick to recognize the beauty and creative audacity of its music, the quietly revolutionary character of its approach to the small jazz ensemble, and the potential for further development implicit in it. Musicians in fact were the first to respond to what was signaled in the Nonet's recordings, and they did so almost immediately. Within two years of the group's final recording session Gerry Mulligan had incorporated various of the Nonet's musical precepts in the formation of his celebrated pianoless quartet with Chet Baker and was enjoying great success. Trumpeter-arranger Shorty Rogers assimilated its lessons, first into the arrangements he was doing for the Stan Kenton Orchestra and, from 1951 on, even more fully for his small group The Giants from which so much that was viable in the then emerging West Coast jazz idiom took its lead. John Lewis, another Nonet member, had formed and set the musical direction for the Modern Jazz Quartet based largely on his experiences with the Davis group.
Throughout jazz, in fact, the most forward-looking younger musicians studied the Nonet's recordings with the closest interest and translated whatever they could to their own music. Nor did its influence end with these and like activities of the '50s, but in the four decades that have elapsed since the Nonet made its first recordings has colored the very fabric of small group and, through the further collaborations of Davis and Evans which grew from their work for the Nonet, orchestral jazz as well. Hindsight has shown, and only too clearly, that these are among the landmark recordings of modern jazz, the implications of which continue to resonate in ways large and small through the music even today.
While it would be stretching the truth to say that the Davis Nonet came about through happenstance, there was a certain amount of the fortuitous to it. And like many things labeled revolutionary after the fact, the Nonet's music actually evolved gradually, through a steady process of development and experimentation in which its approach was defined, refined and given final shape. …
In its music the Nonet sought to realize a number of interlocking goals. Foremost of these was the development of an approach to ensemble writing that would retain the freshness and immediacy of improvised music and in which would be fused elements from bop, and Parker's music in particular, with a number of jazz practices such as a light, vibrato-less tonality and a more subtle approach to rhythm that the boppers largely had eschewed, as well as an attempt at achieving the broadened coloristic and textural palette of the large orchestra while using a relatively small number of instruments. A corollary goal was the production of a balanced, more seamless integration between the music's written and improvised elements than was characteristic of bop, the arrangement in effect leading and anchoring the soloist who was, in turn, expected to return his improvisation and resolve it in reference to the written segment that followed. …
Let's reaffirm something here: catchy album title notwithstanding, the music of the Miles Davis Nonet was, is anything but cool. Controlled, lucid, tightly focused, succinct -yes. It's all these and more. but cool in the sense of being dispassionate or otherwise lacking in the fundamental emotional character one always associates with the best jazz, no! As anyone familiar with the Nonet's music can attest, it possesses an abundance of focused emotional power all the more effective for being so low-keyed, so apparently subdued in character."…”
And fortunately, in 1971 Gerry Mulligan himself was able to add his own reflections about the making of Birth of the Cool and many of the musicians who performed with him on these recordings:
“I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time to be part of Miles' band. I'd been on the road a couple of years with various band by that time, but with Gil's encouragement I decided to stay in New York. With all the great bands that were around then, big and little, it was an exciting time musically. And everybody seemed to gravitate to Gil's place. Everybody influenced everybody and Bird was no. I influence on us all.
Gil lived in a room in a basement on 55th Street, near 5th Avenue. Actually it was behind a Chinese laundry and had all the pipes for the building as well as a sink, a bed, a piano, a hot-plate, and no heat. Some of the more-or-less regulars at Gil's I remember:
John Carisi, almost as hot-headed in an argument as I am. Anyone who writes a piece like "Israel" can't be all bad, right?
John Lewis, our resident classicist. George Russell, our resident innovator. (Wrote a couple of fine, interesting charts for Claude Thornhill's band that I suppose there's no trace of now.) John Benson Brooks, our dreamer of impossible dreams. Dave Lambert, our itinerant practical yankee.
Billy Exiner, drummer with Thornhill and our home philosopher, with his beautiful attitude toward life and music.
Joe Shulman, bassist with Thornhill; he believed Count Basie had the only rhythm section.
Barry Galbraith, the Freddy Greene of the Thornhill rhythm section and an altogether beautiful musician.
Specs Goldberg, blithe spirit. A fantastic intuitive musician who had a tough time trying to channel his free-wheeling imagination.
Sylvia Goldberg (no relation), piano student and whirlwind.
Blossom Dearie, blossom is blossom.
And Miles, the bandleader. He took the initiative and put the theories to work. He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and generally cracked the whip
Max Roach, genius. I can't say enough about his playing with the band. His melodic approach to my charts was a revelation to me. He was fantastic and for me the perfect drummer for the band. (No small statement in view of the fact that Miles brought in Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke on the later dates.)
Lee Konitz, genius. Lee had joined Claude's band in Chicago and knocked us all out (including Bird) with his originality.
For the rest of the band, J.J. and Kai alternated on trombone. It wasn't too easy to find French horn players who were trying to play jazz phraseology but among those at our rehearsals were Sandy Siegelstein (from Thornhill), Junior Collins (who could play some good blues) and probably Jim Buffington. And Bill Barber on tuba. He used to transcribe Lester Young tenor choruses and play them on tuba. What a great player. As I recall, Gil and I also wanted Danny Polo on clarinet but he was out with Claude's band all the time and there was nobody to take his Place. Not long before Danny died we had some jam sessions at which he played the best modern clarinet jazz I've ever heard.
As I said at the beginning, I consider myself fortunate to be there and I thank whatever lucky stars responsible for placing me there. There's a kind of perfection about those recordings and I'm pleased that all the material is finally being released on one set. And without electronic "stereo." To paraphrase an American innovator, Gertrude Stein: a band is a band is a great band.
-GERRY MULLIGAN May 1971.”
To be continued in Part 2 with Bill Crow.
"Gerry Mulligan, whose career spanned five decades, worked gracefully in many styles and with many artists, defying the categories that so often narrow our vision of a creative spirit.
"Gerry Mulligan would not, could not, be categorized, and he flourished through changing times, in many cultures, and with many musical voices ranging from the baritone saxophone that was his principal instrument, to the full orchestra."
- James H. Billington in opening remarks at the inauguration of the Gerry Mulligan Library of Congress Exhibition, April 6, 1999
Did I mention that I like listening to Gerry Mulligan’s music?
At times, I think of his music as something of a throwback. It reminds me of an earlier time in Jazz when the principal point of the whole thing was making music that was fun to play and fun to listen to.
While there are highlights in abundance from Gerry Mulligan’s later musical career, the small combo recordings that he made with various groups during the decade of the 1950s hold a special place in modern Jazz lore. The reasons for this have as much to do with serendipity as they are to do with Mulligan’s talent, highly developed musical skills, and dogged determination to succeed in Jazz on his own terms.
To put a slightly different spin on the well-known adage – “I’d rather be lucky than good” – in Mulligan’s case, this became – I’d rather be lucky and good - which he was, hence luck and competence became the main reasons for his enduring success.
As has already been demonstrated in Part 1 with the review of his accomplishments before coming to California in 1952, Gerry Mulligan was a very proficient composer-arranger. While he would continue to refine these music writing skills, during the decade of the 1950's, he also became one of the premier baritone saxophonists in Jazz.
As Larry Bunker, who replaced Chico Hamilton on drums, with the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet from January – June, 1953 recalls:
“Gerry was enormously knowledgeable and skilled in harmonic structure and chord changes - all of that. He could solo in a very linear fashion as well, but he may have wanted to play in a more vertical way because we didn't have a piano. He played the piano sometimes himself, and although he wasn't a great pianist, he knew what he wanted to do on the instrument. On baritone he was amazing, but sometimes it was a little hard to play with him, especially on a double-time thing where he would blow so many notes that he would get behind the time. I would be scuffling along, trying to drag him with me, but that was because of that big, awkward horn he was playing. Unlike an alto or tenor, it takes a long time for the air to get through. I have great respect for him both as a writer and a player.
I remember he did something really wild when we recorded those tentet things. We rehearsed one of the pieces, and after we made a take on it, we listened to the playback. Gerry flopped down on the floor in the middle of the studio, concentrating in a really dramatic, Christ-like pose, with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed. When the recording was finished, he got up off the floor and said, "O.K., guys -pencils." He then proceeded to dictate a new road map for the chart, which completely rearranged it, and when he counted us in, it was like a brand new piece of music. His writing had a magical quality, and he probably influenced both Bill Holman and Bob Brookmeyer, because he was a fantastic arranger.” [As recounted to Gordon Jack, Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004, p. 149].
As to the serendipity-in- combination-with-skill part of the-Mulligan-equation-for-success-in-Jazz, Ted Gioia offers these observations:
"Certainly Mulligan had hardly been in California long enough to get a suntan when he teamed with Baker to form one of the most creative combos ever to grace a Los Angeles bandstand. This was an unlikely turn of events for the pair. Only a short while before, Baker had been laboring in obscurity with a local Dixieland band at Sea] Beach-the leader had hired him because Baker's playing reminded him of Bix Beiderbecke.
Mulligan’s profile was so low that he had traveled to California by hitchhiking, rather than purchase costly train or plane tickets. But now this duo was poised to legitimize and publicize West Coast jazz to a greater extent than anyone had done before. The Mulligan Quartet's distinctive approach-open, clean, smooth, lyrical with a dose of the cerebral-would come, for many, to define the West Coast sound. …
…, the public image of the Mulligan-Baker quartet was that of a well-oiled machine. There was no wasted energy or empty emoting in their music. Each note struck the mark. Seldom had a jazz combo played more effectively together. And not since the days of Jelly Roll Morton had a band shown such a knack for creating a collective sound, a perfectly balanced give-and-take between all members.
The simplest ingredients underscored this success: active listening; an acute sensitivity to instrumental textures; a studied avoidance of the easy licks and empty clichés of bop and swing; in their place, fresh, uncluttered lines, cleanly played. Above all, the band overcame the jazz musician's greatest fear: the fear of silence.
Emerging on the scene during the sturm und drang of the bop era-a time when musicians seemed to be paid piece rate by the note-these players clearly served a different muse, judiciously balancing sound and quiet, happily understanding the poet's dictum about the sweetness of unheard melodies."[insert notes, from West Coast Classics - Gerry Mulligan: The Original Quartet with Chet Baker, Pacific Jazz, CDP 94407, paragraphing modified].
Michael Cuscuna comments as taken from the insert notes to The Best of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker [Pacific Jazz CDP 95481] may help to put all that happen on that magic carpet ride that was the 1952-53 Gerry Mulligan Quartet featuring Chet Baker in a more temporal context:
“It seems hard to imagine that such an influential group, still revered in nostalgic and historic circles, lasted a mere 11 months.
Through their appearances at The Haig and their singles for Pacific jazz (the first of which was recorded in August of'52), the group developed an ever-spreading and deserved following.
The interplay between Mulligan and Baker was empathetic and uncanny. Freed of the piano's conventional role and its domination in the scheme of arranging, the group developed ingenious charts which emphasized melodic elements over the harmonic and encouraged interplay among the horns and freer thought in solo flights.
The limitation of two voices (and sometimes a third with the bass) seemed to ignite Mulligan's already, fertile mind. Whether remodeling a standard or introducing an original, Mulligan stretched his limits and came upon a sound that was not only new and stimulating, but also incredibly fascinating and accessible to the general public.
Four months after their first recordings for a then eight-week-old label, they were stars beyond the jazz world with full page features in magazines like Time and choice engagements around the country. Through records, their popularity spread with immediacy into England and Europe.
Thanks to Dick Bock, a healthy slice of that innovative and Popular quartet's life was documented.” [paragraphing modified]
Ironically, as the Los Angeles Jazz scene was growing and expanding during the decade of the 1950s, Gerry Mulligan, one of the main causes for this growth, was returning to the East Coast where we pick up the story of more of the development of his various groups through these excerpts from bassist Bill Crow’s From Birdland to Broadway: Scenes from a Jazz Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992] Should you like to order a copy of Bill’s work, you can do so by Going Here.
As has been pointed out on a number of previous occasions, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles makes a concerted effort to feature great writers on the subject of Jazz and Bill Crow is one of the best of these practitioners. His musings are always filled with anecdotes, asides and reminiscences that provide additional human dimensions to the subject at hand, in this case, his time with Gerry.
“Stan Getz’s quintet broke up in California not long after I left him. Bob Brookmeyer stayed in Los Angeles for a while, sometimes playing with Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan, who had both moved out there. Bob eventually became a regular member of Gerry’s Quartet. The, on one job, Gerry added Zoot and Jon Eardley, and the Gerry Mulligan Sextet was born.
Gerry, Zoot, and Brookmeyer moved back to New York, and Gerry formed a new sextet with ldrees Sulieman on trumpet. Through Idrees' recommendation, Peck Morrison became the bass player, and Peck brought in Dave Bailey as the drummer. Idrees never recorded with the sextet; when he left in 1955, Jon Eardley came east and took his place.
That winter, Peck left the group and Gerry asked me to replace him. I was happy with Marian's trio, but I loved Gerry's music, and I couldn't turn down the chance to play regularly with Zoot and Bob. I gave Marian my notice and began rehearsing with Gerry in December 1955. The sextet, like Gerry's quartet, used no piano, even though he and Brookmeyer both played that instrument. Gerry built his arrangements for the four horns on just the bass line and the drums.
Marian's lovely harmonic sense and her penchant for playing tunes in unusual keys had drawn me into improving my playing technique, and she had given me room to develop as a soloist. But as soon as I joined Gerry's group I discovered I was in technical trouble. The fingering system I had invented for myself worked fine in the lower register of the bass, but I hadn't figured out how to be accurate in the upper register. I could play high notes if I worked my way up to them, but I couldn't be sure I had my finger on exactly the right spot on the fingerboard if I had to begin a passage on a high note.
I found some of Gerry's bass parts hard to play. I made pencil marks on my fingerboard to help me find troublesome notes, but I saw that it was time that I learned some of the things that other bass players seemed to know. The only time I'd ever heard anyone mention a bass teacher was when Marian's trio had played on a CBS radio show; staff bassist Trigger Alpert had told me that he was studying with Fred Zimmerman. I called Trigger and got Fred's number.
I couldn't have found a better teacher. Fred, the principal bassist with the New York Philharmonic at the time, taught with skill and imagination. At my first lesson I explained that I was self-taught and didn't know the right way to do anything. Fred said, "So, we'll just start you at the very beginning, as if you'd never played before. That way, we won't miss anything, and when we come to things you already know, it will go quickly."
It was discouraging to discover how much I didn't know. For the next several years, I took lessons from Fred whenever I was in New York. He showed me the standard fingering system and encouraged me in my struggle with bow control. His empathy and interest were most helpful.
"I studied with a man who used to hit my hands with a stick when I made a mistake," Fred told me. "I swore then that if I ever became a teacher I would never add any pain to the learning process. The physical problems of playing the bass are already painful enough."
I would always go early for my lesson. Fred's apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street was filled with art treasures that I loved looking at. He had a collection of pre-Colombian gold weights, delightful little figurines. On his walls were Pechsteins, Kirschners, Klees, and several of Fred's own oils. His bookshelves were filled with what looked like a complete collection of the Skira art reproduction books.
When I made progress with the bass, Fred was always enthusiastic. Once he ran into the kitchen, got his wife, and had me replay a passage for her. Fred said, "Isn't that beautiful? And he isn't even serious about music!"
Fred may have felt that a vocation in jazz was frivolous, but he was open-minded. One day he had me play a few bars of dotted eighth notes he had copied out. I think it was from a Hindemith piece the Philharmonic was rehearsing. It looked like a swing figure to me, so I phrased it that way. Fred said, "That's not the way it's written."
"No, but that's the way any jazz musician would play it. We play most things that are written in four-four as if they were written in twelve-eight. It's swing phrasing."
"Aha!" said Fred. "I knew the way we were playing it sounded corny, but I didn't know why."
Fred told me excitedly one day that Charles Mingus had called him to do a record date with him. He knew Mingus' reputation as an innovator in jazz, and was eager to play his music. When I saw him the following week, I asked him how the recording had gone.
"It was a fiasco!" said Fred angrily. "Everything on my part was written at the very top of the range of the bass! It was almost impossible to play, and it sounded ridiculous. I told Mr. Mingus if he wanted to write cello parts, he should have hired a cello player! He kept saying it sounded fine. I was never so uncomfortable in my life!"
My first work with Mulligan's sextet was in nightclubs around the Northeast. We squeezed in a record date in January 1956 for a Mercury album that Gerry had begun while Peck Morrison was with him. Then in February we began a European tour. The promoter brought us to Italy on the Andrea Doria, the beautiful ship of the Italian Lines that sank the following year after a collision with a freighter. Gerry's wife, Arlene, came with us as our road manager, and Brookmeyer brought his wife, Phyllis. We rehearsed a couple of times on the ship, but I spent most of the trip playing ping-pong on deck with Zoot.
We played concerts in Naples, Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Bologna. It was Gerry's first European tour, and we were made very welcome. At a restaurant in Bologna our local guides said we should ask for a special Bolognese delicacy called "pompini." The waitress blushed deeply when we asked for some, and we realized we had been set up. "Pompini" turned out to be a local slang word for oral sex.
After the Bologna concert we were taken to a restaurant to meet the members of the local jazz club. We were each seated in a separate booth with several young Italians who were doing their best to discuss jazz with us in English. A commotion broke out at the bar, and the fans I was sitting with hurried me outside. They said some Communist students were trying to create a disturbance, and we would be safer out in the street.
I searched the throng that had rushed out of the restaurant with us, but I couldn't locate any of the rest of the sextet, or the Italian promoters who had brought us on the train to Bologna from Milan. just as I was wondering how I would get back to Milan if I couldn't find them, a young man stepped over to me and said, "Say, man, didn't I meet you in New Jersey at a jam session with Phil Urso?"
He was an American exchange student and a jazz musician. He helped me find the rest of my party, who had gone out a different exit onto a side street.
When we arrived to play at one Italian opera house, we saw a huge banner hanging across the front of the building that read:
"Stasera, il sestetto GERRY MULLIGAN, con ARLENE MULLIGAN, ROBERT BROOKMEYER, PHYLLIS BROOKMEYER, WILLIAM 0. CROW, e SAMMY DAVIS, JR."
Someone had evidently taken the names from our official papers. They had transformed Dave Bailey into Sammy Davis, Jr., by misreading Dave's full name: Samuel David Bailey, Jr.
Since Zoot's name had been omitted, he kept trying to hand his tenor to Arlene as we went on stage.
"You're the one they came to see," he said.
As we sat in a backstage greenroom during intermission, an Italian jazz fan who had begged or bribed his way past the house security men appeared with record albums for Gerry and Zoot to sign. He said to Jon, "And you are Jon Eardley, from Altoona, Pennsylvania, whose father played trumpet with Paul Whiteman and Isham Jones and now works for a finance company?" Jon looked stunned.
"Man, nobody knows that!"
I was thrilled about visiting Italy, and I wanted to see everything. I got up at dawn every day and, armed with my Berlitz phrase book and a camera, walked all over every city we visited. When I returned to play the concert each evening, I'd report on the day's discoveries to the rest of the group. Zoot usually didn't venture too far from the hotel, but he seemed interested in hearing about what was out there. On the way to our first concert in Milan, Zoot saw something he liked in the window of a shoe store as we drove by. He asked me, "Do you know how to get back here?"
I did, and offered to accompany him the following day. I was a little surprised that Zoot was taking an interest in Italian shoes; he usually wore casual clothes: corduroy trousers, sweaters, and sneakers.
The next morning, when I tapped at his door, I found Zoot dressed and ready to go. We walked back to the neighborhood where he had seen the shoes he wanted. They turned out to be heavy brown canvas hiking shoes with thick rubber soles and high tops that laced up with hook eyelets. When Zoot tried on a pair his eyes lit up with pleasure.
"Yeah! These are my shoes!"
He wore them constantly for the rest of the trip.
When our Italian concerts were finished, the promoters put us on a stiffly sprung little Mercedes-Benz bus with seats as hard and straight as church pews. We slowly chugged across the French border and up to Paris via some very narrow roads. The ride was bumpy, but the scenery was great.
In Paris, we were installed in a pension near the stage entrance to the Olympia Theater, where we were to appear for a three-week run as one of the acts on a variety bill. The show opened with jugglers and comedians. We went on just before the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, who closed the first half of the show with their famous tap dancing routine. After an intermission there was a dog act, a dancing violin duo, another comedian, and then the headliner, Jacqueline Fran4;ois, the popular French Canadian singer.
When our turn came, the pretty young lady who was the emcee would step in front of the curtain and announce, "Et maintenant, Zhe-REE MOOli-GAHN et son sextette!"
The curtains would part and we would play about three tunes, and that was it for that show. With only two or three short appearances scheduled every day and all of Paris to explore in our spare time, it was inevitable that sometimes, when the curtain opened, someone would be missing. Jon slept through the first show one day, and on another afternoon Zoot stood at the stage door chatting with a friend for so long that our part of the show was over by the time he finally came inside the theater. The emcee would announce, "Et maintenant, ZheREE M00li-GAHN et son . . ." and then she would pause, peer behind the curtain and count heads, and then continue, son sextette!" or. . . quartette!" or whatever the number was at the moment. A lecture from Gerry brought us back up to full strength for the remaining shows.
The musicians in Paris made us very welcome. Henri Renaud and his wife Ny introduced us to many of them, and Henri took us to jazz clubs on the Left Bank where we could sit in after our last show. Zoot and Dave and I were jamming one night with Henri and some other musicians in a Left Bank sub-basement. Zoot's admirers had been toasting him liberally, and he was feeling no pain. He was too stoned to stand up, but he still felt like dancing, Slumped in his chair, eyes closed, he blew energetically into his tenor, playing chorus after chorus of his own special brand of whoopee.
On the last couple of choruses Zoot gave up trying to articulate anything intricate. He just swung the same simple riff harder and harder. He finally surrendered to exhaustion and relinquished the tune to the next soloist. Falling back in his chair, he looked over his shoulder and gave me a snaggle-toothed grin.
"You know," he said, "you can have a lot of fun with these musical instruments!" [pp. 133-38]
“In July 1958 1 got a call from Gerry Mulligan to rejoin his quartet. Joe Benjamin had replaced me when I left, and then Henry Grimes had replaced him. Now Henry was leaving to go with Sonny Rollins. Dave Bailey was still Gerry's drummer, and Art Farmer had just joined him on trumpet. I liked Art and admired his playing tremendously. We just had time for one rehearsal before our first appearance at Newport.
That was the year Bert Stern and Al Avakian came to film the Newport jazz Festival. They got good shots of the performers on stage, but after the sun went down, they couldn't photograph the audience in the dark.
While editing the film, Al found a problem with the lack of close-ups of the nighttime audience's reaction to the music. He solved it by throwing a party in New York, at which he showed rough footage of the movie. He filmed the reactions of the partygoers as they watched, and intercut those close-ups with the footage from Newport. Aileen and several of our friends who weren't at the festival attended that party and can be seen in the audience shots of the movie, Jazz on a Summer's Day….
On our first afternoon at Newport that year, Dave Bailey and I were sitting by the swimming pool at the Viking Hotel when Sonny Rollins arrived. Sonny was in bathing trunks and sandals, but he kept a white sailor hat pulled down around his ears all afternoon. The reason became evident at the concert that night. He came on stage with his trio (Roy Haynes and Henry Grimes) to reveal for the first time that he had shaved his hair into a Mohawk war-lock. He kept that hairstyle for quite a while.
A couple of years later, when Dave and I were playing at the Half Note with Bob Brookmeyer and Clark Terry, Rollins walked in and sat down at the bar. He was wearing a complete working cowboy's outfit: faded jeans, Levi jacket, sweat-stained Stetson hat, and cowboy boots. With a twinkle in his eye, Dave leaned over to me and whispered, "I guess Sonny found out that the Indians didn't win."
Mulligan had been thinking about band uniforms for the quartet. When Brookmeyer had been with us, we wore sport jackets from the Andover Shop in Boston. For the new group, Gerry sent us to Breidbart's on Sixth Avenue, a men's store favored by stylish dancers like Geoffrey Holder and Sammy Davis, Jr. The gray suits we bought there were sharp, but proved to be too warm for outdoor summer concerts. Gerry decided we needed something lighter and less formal. He took us back to Breidbart's and chose some royal blue linen trousers and short-sleeved gingham shirts with half-inch vertical red and white stripes. He added a touch of formality with black shoestring ties.
Dave and Art both had a little more meat on their bones than Gerry and I did, and their pants fit them very snugly. This was before macho pop singers made tight pants commonplace. When we showed up at the Great South Bay Festival on Long Island wearing our new outfits, Dizzy Gillespie discovered us backstage. He lifted his eyebrows dramatically.
"Will you look at these fools!" he cried, walking all around us to get a better view. He told Dave and Art, "You better not turn your backs when you get out on stage. You'll freak those little girls in the audience. You cats got some buns back there!"
I think Art and Dave were glad when the summer season ended, and we went back to wearing our gray suits. ...
Though it had been years since Gerry and Chet Baker had worked together, many fans of Gerry's early quartet records still expected to see Chet when they came to hear us. While we were playing at Storyville in Boston, two college boys came up to the bandstand. One of them asked Art Farmer for his autograph and Art obliged, but when the guy read his signature, he said, "Oh, aren't you Chet Baker?"
He started to rip up the slip of paper.
"Don't tear it up!" exclaimed his friend, "He may be somebody too, someday!"
In late 1958, we began recording an album for Columbia Records. Gerry complained that he couldn't write anything at home because the telephone and the doorbell were always ringing. I gave him the key to my Cornelia Street apartment and told him, "There's a piano there, and nobody will bother you. I'll be over at Aileen's place tonight. Go write something."
He did, and came to the last session with a lovely treatment of "What Is There to Say?" which became the title song of the album. Gerry had asked the rest of us to bring in tunes, so Art and I each wrote one. Art's was an untitled blues. Since Newport had been our first job together, Gerry suggested the title "Blueport."
Art had told me that "Buckethead" had been his childhood nickname, so I wrote that at the top of my tune, another blues, in three quarter time. When Art looked at the trumpet part I handed him, he laughed and said, "Oh, no, please don't call it that!"
"How about 'News from Blueport?'" Gerry offered- a spoonerism on "Blues from Newport." That became the title. The liner notes erroneously listed Gerry as the composer of both tunes, but Art and I receive the royalties. ... [pp. 164-167].
“… [In late spring, 1960], I got a call from Gerry Mulligan. He had put together a big band and taken it to Europe for a three week tour. After the tour, two of the three West Coast members of the band, Conte Candoli and Buddy Clark, had gone home to California. The third, Mel Lewis, decided to stay in New York. Clark Terry was taking Conte's chair, and Gerry asked me to replace Buddy, starting the following Tuesday night at the Village Vanguard. I sent in a sub to finish out Greenwich Village, U.S.A., and took my bass over to the Vanguard to rehearse.
To make it clear that we weren't a dance band, Gerry called us the Concert jazz Band, and put together a book of arrangements designed primarily for listening. It was a great band: Gene Quill, Bobby Donovan, Jim Reider, and Gene Allen in the reed section; Willie Dennis, Bob Brookmeyer, and Alan Raph on trombones; Nick Travis, Don Ferrara, and Clark on trumpets, and Mel on drums.
The money Gerry had earned in the movies had made it possible for him to pay for arrangements and equipment to get the band started. By the time Clark and I joined, Norman Granz had become involved as a backer. I'm not sure what sort of deal he and Gerry had made, but with Granz's support, it looked like we would be working steady for a while. The music was first-class, and we were all excited at the prospect. Our esprit de corps was very high; nobody sent in subs unless they were dying.
Besides having good soloists, one of that band's assets was having a good riff-maker in each section: Gerry, Clark, and Bob. On most arrangements, we didn't go to the next written section after someone's solo unless Gerry gave the signal. Gerry would improvise a background riff on a soloist's second or third chorus and the reeds would join him, in unison or in harmony. Bob or Clark would make up counter-riffs in the brass section, and soon we'd have developed something strong and new to lead into the next written section.
Gerry's music library included arrangements by Bill Holman, John Mandel, Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, Thad Jones, and Wayne Shorter, as well as his own charts. Gary McFarland, new in town, showed up at a rehearsal one day with a couple of compositions that had a strong flavor of Duke Ellington's writing. Gerry made a number of excisions and repositionings to make them more Mulliganesque. Gary saw what Gerry wanted and came in with several new pieces that were just right. We recorded them all. Gary's exposure with our band launched him into a successful arranging career in New York.
Gerry did another kind of editing when Al Cohn brought in an original he had titled "Mother's Day." Gerry retitled it "Lady Chatterley's Mother." After rehearsing it a couple of times, Gerry said, "Al, it's a wonderful chart, but I wish there was more of it. It just gets rolling and it's over. Could you add a few more choruses?"
Al nodded and gathered up the parts, and at the next rehearsal he passed them out again. The ending had been turned into a lead-in to another solo chorus for Gerry, and then Al's great shout chorus began. The first time we played it, the whole band cheered. If Gerry hadn't asked for more, we'd have had a good Al Cohn chart, but without that wonderful climax.
One Sunday afternoon at the Vanguard, Nick Travis brought in a movie projector, set it up in the kitchen, and showed us a reel of 8mm film that he had taken on the band's tour of Europe. Zoot had gone along as guest soloist. While the musicians were waiting on a railroad platform somewhere in Germany, Nick had started his camera rolling, and Zoot and Gerry had begun to do a soft-shoe dance. Zoot's dad was a vaudeville hoofer and had taught his sons the steps. As soon as Gerry realized that Zoot really knew how to dance, he stepped aside and let Zoot go by himself.
While Zoot continued a lovely, funny solo dance, the camera also recorded the approach behind him of a stolid German couple wearing very stern expressions. As they loomed directly behind Zoot, he did a spin that brought him face to face with them. Zoot registered their disapproving looks for a split second and then simply continued his spin for another quarter turn and stopped, facing Gerry, where he managed to look as if he'd been standing there talking all the while. Chaplin couldn't have done it better.
After a weekend in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, concerts at Freedomland in the Bronx, a week at Birdland, and another week at the Vanguard, Gerry broke the sad news. He and Norman Granz had terminated their business arrangement. When Norman sold his record label, Verve, to MGM Records, Gerry's recording contract, along with all the other Verve artists', was part of the deal. With no more Granz-sponsored European tours for the band, Gerry couldn't afford to keep us together. He had only one concert in Boston booked for the rest of the summer. He canceled that engagement, broke up the band, and told us he'd call us if he found anything in the fall.
The band re-formed now and then during the next three years for record dates and an occasional week at Birdland, but the spirit wasn't the same. We weren't the family we had been; we had lost the continuity and the feeling of commitment. Gigs with the Concert jazz Band were still fun, but the band wasn't the center of our lives any more.
Gerry continued to work with his quartet: Brookmeyer, Mel Lewis, and me. We appeared on Mike Wallace's television show during the time that Wallace was in the process of building a reputation as an investigative reporter. Wallace's TV interviews were popular partly because of his prosecutorial style.
At the rehearsal Wallace was courteous and low-key. He asked questions that had been prepared by his staff, and Gerry answered frankly about his career, his experiences with drugs and the law, and other aspects of his life. On the air, Wallace's tone became more contentious, and instead of asking the questions he had asked at rehearsal, he said accusingly, "I understand that you were involved with drugs, and did some time because of it!"
This left Gerry with little more to say than "yes." Though Wallace was using the information Gerry had given him at the rehearsal, he gave his audience the impression that he was confronting Gerry with the results of his own private investigations. Gerry managed to field Wallace's questions with his usual aplomb, but he found himself at a loss when Wallace asked him, "I notice there are no black musicians in your group. Is this accidental, or by design?"
Actually, it was the first time in many years that, by happenstance, there were no black musicians in Gerry's quartet, but any short answer to that question would have sounded lame. As Gerry considered how best to respond, Bob Brookmeyer glared at Wallace, jerked a thumb at Mel Lewis, and said frostily, "We've got a Jewish drummer. Will that help?"
Wallace dropped the subject.” [pp. 182-184]
To my mind, the Concert Jazz Band [CJB] has to rank as one of Gerry Mulligan’s very special musical achievements – right up there with the 1952 quartet with Chet Baker - and, as such, the CJB will be covered in greater detail in Gene Lees’ essay on Gerry which features in Part 4.
As Bill Crow explained and Gary Giddins underscores in the following quotation, the focus of the Concert Jazz Band was its music:
“A purely musical big band-no dancers, no singers, no hits, no nostalgia-was a risky proposition, despite a large and growing number of innovative jazz composers, among them Gil Evans, George Russell, Thad Jones, Bill Holman, Chico O'Farrill, Ernie Wilkins, Frank Foster, Manny Albam, Bob Brookmeyer, Neal Hefti, Johnny Mandel, Gerald Wilson, Oliver Nelson, Gary McFarland, and Mulligan himself. If anyone could make a go of organizing such an orchestra, Mulligan was the man. A bona fide jazz star steeped in big bands since his teens, he had the autocratic temperament to enforce discipline in the ranks and the easygoing charm to allay suspicion in the audience. He also had, at least in the beginning, the financial backing of Norman Granz and Verve Records. In case anyone doubted his intentions, Mulligan called his ensemble the Concert jazz Band. It debuted to critical acclaim in 1960 and lasted long enough to issue five recordings and spur a big band restoration.” [Visions of Jazz: The First Century, New York: Oxford, 1998, p. 361].
As to how he wanted the band to sound and why, Gerry offer the following explanation to Burt Korall in a magazine interview which Dom Ceruli included in his CD insert notes to Gerry Mulligan Presents A Concert in Jazz [Verve 2332; Japanese Verve POCJ 2686]:
"The band is the product of seven years of thinking and trying," he said "Typical instrumentation - seven brass, five reads. four rhythm - didn't work out; the sound was too heavy and full. The flexibility I had been so happy with in the small band was missing. We finally came up with our current set up six brass, five reeds, drums, and bass which allows for variety of tone color, and the flexibility and clarity of a small band.
We actually consider the brass as five brass - three trumpets and two trombones and a bass trombone. Five is a lighter feeling section for ensemble sound. And the reeds actually break down to an ensemble of a clarinet, alto sax, tenor, and baritone."
Gerry went of to say of this third LP by the CJB:
“We wanted this to be more a writer's album than what we had done before. The first album was cut in the studio with staples out of our book. It wasn't particularly concert material The second album was of the band in person, with the feeling you get at a live date. Here we have concert material, some of it pretty extended, and we have a band playing it that is a band rather than a good gathering of musicians.
I think that this band feels so much like a band now that we can play pieces like these for ourselves and feel how they would build for an audience"
And Dom Cerulli offered this excellent description of the textual qualities that Gerry was looking for when he organized the CJB when he offered this concluding statement to his notes:
“More than anything, this album proves that the band has achieved that lightness and flexibility so valued by Gerry, and that it has arrived at the point where it can tackle intricate and extended works without sacrificing the sensitive qualities which have been the hallmark of Mulligan 's style over the years.”
Throughout a career that spanned 50 years, the Concert Jazz Band may have been the ultimate stylistic expression of Gerry Mulligan and his music.
To be continued in Part 3 with Nat Hentoff.
“… when you get a guy like Gerry around a band, all the other arrangers start writing a little better.” – Miles Davis
“It took me a while to learn [that what to leave out of an arrangement is often more important than knowing what to put in] …, and it wasn’t until my writing for the Miles Davis sessions on Capitol that the ability to use space began to take shape in my work. You’ve just got to have space in jazz writing. – Gerry Mulligan
‘[Un]like Gerry and Gil Evans and Duke, some guys try to fill it all up.” – Miles Davis
“[Gerry’s writing influence] has become so general [i.e.: pervasive], they won’t know to give him credit in the next generation.” – John Lewis
“Gerry had a lot to do with reminding modern writers and players that humor in jazz was not a cardinal sin.” – Nat Hentoff
“[Gerry’s writing] … contained a lyric quality and a strong feeling for the ‘good times’ spirit of the older, less organized forms in early jazz band writing and group improvising.” – Bill Crow
“[Gerry] seems to have understood that the principal objective of the arranger should be to respect the personality of each performer while at the same time giving the group a feeling of unity.” – Andre’ Hodier
One would have thought that it was time for Gerry Mulligan to rest after 20 years of combining his big band writing accomplishments from the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the formation of his piano-less quartet in the early 1950’s, the quartets and sextets he created throughout the remainder of the 1950s and the development of the original Concert Jazz Band with its [unfortunately] brief existence during the first few years of the 1960’s.
But perhaps, as is the case with never getting enough of anything that we do well, as the next step in his already considerable career, Gerry Mulligan amazingly began a 5-year association with Dave Brubeck after the latter disbanded his 17-year-old classic quartet with Paul Desmond in 1967.
All things considered, it was an amazing pairing of two of the greatest creative forces in the history of modern Jazz, and yet, given their joint accomplishments, the pairing of these Jazz Giants almost went unnoticed.
Perhaps this was because as Leonard Feather observed, Dave and Gerry’s quartet with Jack Six on bass and Alan Dawson on drums jelled so easily and so quickly:
“Before the group was two weeks old, a substantial repertoire had been assembled, composed of originals by Brubeck and Mulligan …. The public reaction to the new combo was consistently enthusiastic. The addition of Mulligan, and the curiosity value of hearing Dave in a new context, reinforced an already fervent interest.”
There was an precedent for Dave’s and Gerry’s later involvement with one another for they had formed a mutual admiration that dated back to the earliest days of their respective careers.
As Fred M. Hall, Dave Brubeck’s biographer, explains:
“In the early 1950s, Dave had worked the Blackhawk in San Francisco, and Gerry worked at the Haig in Los Angeles, and they would exchange locations – fellow musical pioneers, passing in the night. Both had, of course, heard and admired each other. ….
Mulligan was impressed by Dave’s playing, early on. ‘He always plays percussively and orchestrally. He gets top marks as both a musician and as a human being. Dave has always been a close friend, and from the very start, I’ve always thought there was a relationship there that probably started in a previous life.’” [It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1996, p. 119].
Dave may have also had a hand in Gerry’s quartet recordings for that label in the early 1950s. In his 1995 reply to a letter Jim Harrod had written him about his research into the history of the Pacific Jazz label, Dave Brubeck did confirm his endorsement of Mulligan to record for Fantasy:
"I do recall that I pushed for them [Max and Sol Weiss, the owners of Fantasy] to record Gerry because at that time I thought I was part owner of Fantasy and I wanted to build a roster for the label filled with top drawer artists."
And Dave certainly returned the compliment when he expressed the following about Gerry to Nat Hentoff:
“When you listen to Gerry, you feel as if you were listening to the past, present, and future of jazz, all in one tune, and yet it’s done with such taste and respect that you’re not ever aware of a change in idiom. Mulligan gets the old New Orleans two-beat going with a harmonic awareness of advanced jazz, and you feel not that the tradition is being broken, but rather that it being pushed forward.” [Jazz Is, New York: Limelight Editions, 1991, p. 106; full-text of the chapter printed below].
Notwithstanding their long-standing affection and respect for one another, in a way, it is not surprising that Mulligan should step in to Paul Desmond’s role because, like Paul, as a soloist, Gerry was a superior maker of melodies.
Or as Whitney Balliett more poetically expressed this skill:
“Mulligan is a fresh and convincing melodist. Writing a pure and ingratiating melody is like putting together a sentence that by virtue of its perfectly chosen and arranged parts, has grace, rhythm and meaning. A rare talent in any sort of composed music, it is woefully rare among modern jazz musicians.
As a melodist, Mulligan then became a perfect compliment to Brubeck’s percussive, sometimes bombastic, but always pulsating solos.
But in addition to complimenting one another, Mulligan and Brubeck also shared some common musical tendencies for according to Mr. Balliett:
“…Mulligan believes in counter lines and organ chords … and he also feels that humor … has a definite place in jazz, which he grants is a happy music.” [Both of these quotations are paraphrased from Mr. Balliett’s liner notes to the Pacific Jazz LP The Gerry Mulligan Quartet [PJ-1207].
“When the redoubtable Charles Mingus brought a large orchestra to New York's Philharmonic Hall one winter evening in the early 1970's, there was a rustle of excitement in the audience as the musicians walked onstage because one of the sidemen- unadvertised -had once been an extraordinarily popular leader of a jazz combo, a world-wide phenomenon.
"How the hell is Gerry Mulligan going to fit in with Mingus?" asked a young woman?
"Mulligan can fit in with just about anybody," her companion said. "You never know any more where or when he's going to turn up, but when he does he lights up the place."
Indeed, during that evening the angularly tall, bearded, relaxed, alert baritone saxophonist with red-gold hair not only played with wit, charm, and exuberance but also, when not soloing or involved in the ensemble, was manifestly enjoying the proceedings as a spectator at least as much as anyone in the audience. He grinned approvingly during others' solos, particularly those of Gene Ammons, and all in all did light up the place.
A few weeks later, appearing with Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at Carnegie Hall, Mulligan-this time sharing the top billing-was just as persistently enlivening. As John S. Wilson observed in the New York Times, this "perennial guest . . . gave the evening its high point."
Through more than a quarter of a century, Mulligan's presence on the jazz scene has been singularly stimulating, and his history tells a great deal about certain key periods of jazz history-notably the "Birth of the Cool" gestalt of the late 1940's - as well as about what can be called the "white mainstreamer." There are other white mainstreamers - Zoot Sims and drummer Mel Lewis, among them - but Mulligan has a special ecumenical role in jazz history, a role all the more worth exploring in the 1970's when his significance tends to be overlooked.
In a way, Gerry Mulligan is the Huck Finn of jazz, sometimes exuberant, sometimes wistful, a perpetual wanderer.
In 1959, when Mulligan had become internationally renowned as the leader of a piano-less quartet, Dave Brubeck said, "When you listen to Gerry, you feel as if you were listening to the past, present, and future of jazz, all in one tune, and yet it's done with such taste and respect that you're not ever aware of a change in idiom. Mulligan gets the old New Orleans two-beat going with a harmonic awareness of advanced jazz, and you feel not that tradition is being broken, but rather that it's being pushed forward."
That encomium was largely true then; but, in the years since, "advanced jazz" has taken on much more far-reaching and turbulent characteristics, so that it can no longer accurately be said that Mulligan's work, by any means, encompasses the full scope of the music. What does remain true (and it is a considerable accomplishment) is Paul Desmond's analysis of Mulligan: "In probably no other jazz instrumentalist can you find such a clear progression from Dixieland through swing and into and out of bebop, all on the same record, if not in the same solo."
Or, as George Russell, an advanced jazz composer then and now, said in the late 1950's: "Mulligan is Mr. Mainstream."
Another musician much impressed by Mulligan was Coleman Hawkins, a man it was quite hard to impress. "Gerry," Hawkins told me some years ago with magisterial solemnity, "is full of the spirit."
What may well have particularly intrigued and pleased such older jazzmen as Coleman Hawkins and Rex Stewart was that Mulligan, as long as it was possible, directed his formidable spirit to the preservation of the jam session. For decades those informal, unpredictable, and often interminable meetings of jazz musicians-usually but not exclusively after hours-were not only a source of pleasure but also a testing ground. The jam session was a strenuous prep school for young jazzmen as well as an arena where the established postgraduates could keep themselves in musical condition to withstand the thrust of the continual lines of new challengers. Sometimes a venerable champion was toppled at one of these jousts, and the startling news spread swiftly through the jazz underground. Sessions, of course, were also places where ideas were shared. "Carving" and "cutting" were not always the hot order of business.
However, the hagiology of the jam session nearly always focused on the victors rather than the sharers. When I was thirteen or fourteen, for example, I used to listen to itinerant jazzmen of considerable proficiency but no special fame tell and retell bardic sagas of jazz wars. In those years the odyssey of Coleman Hawkins was most often recounted: how he had invented the jazz tenor in the twenties; how, at each stop on the road with Fletcher Henderson's band, he would be challenged by the leading local horn-slingers; and how, invariably, he would beat them by sheer fertility of imagination, blinding technique, robustness of tone, and all-around power. And how, one night in Kansas City, the swaggering Hawkins found waiting for him a pride of young tenor saxophonists, among them the still only regionally known Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, and Lester Young.
The tournament lasted through the night and into the middle of the afternoon of the next day. At its close, Hawkins had been defeated by Lester Young, who had prevailed even though his tone was lighter than Hawkins's and even though he preferred floating spareness to fiery technical virtuosity. Lester had triumphed because during that joust he had more to say, more that was fresh to say, more that was his own to say. Those jam sessions were no place for imitators, for hornmen whose next phrase or next chorus could be predicted. No sensible player competed-though many jumped in with no sense at all and were cut down-unless he felt he had come far enough along on his horn to be able to surprise the established gladiators. To be able to throw them off balance with a way of running changes, or phrasing, or playing with the beat-or all three-that made the reigning musicians suddenly fear that their ideas had gone stale, that these challengers somehow knew something they didn't know, something that had never been conceived before.
The very best of the established musicians survived their occasional defeats, accepting the notice that they had to woodshed more, practice more, dare more. And they, like Hawkins, would come back and reestablish, for a time anyway, their hegemony. Nearly always at these sessions, standing on the edge of the combat, would be the very young players, listening intently, trying to figure out when they ought to make their move, fantasizing the overwhelming victory. And at times those fantasies came swingingly true.
Hardly anyone would have predicted that this dramatic institution would ever fall into disuse, but starting in the 1950's most of the younger musicians, having separated themselves into tight, intensely rehearsed units, began to neglect the old joys and hazards of jamming. Meanwhile, as more of the jazz elders found it difficult to retain secure places in the jazz scene - because the newer audiences were focusing on "modern jazz" - they lost some of their own zest for jamming and, besides, the sessions were harder to find as fewer of their peers were working regularly.
Gerry Mulligan, however, had, by the late 1950's become the Johnny Appleseed of jam sessions, using any playing opportunity he could find to get a session going. At one of the Newport jazz Festival evenings, for instance, he was scheduled to play only once, but he ended up playing half a dozen times, onstage and later at jam sessions and parties, including one given by impressario Norman Granz, that produced the most spontaneous jazz of the Festival. On that occasion Mulligan was, as he often is, the first horn to play. As the earliest arrivals sized up the resources of the bar, the pianist Nat Pierce began noodling around and almost at once Mulligan, who had turned up wearing a red sweater and a red checked shirt, sat down near him and joined in softly. Soon other hornmen were playing, too, and Mulligan stood up and went into his characteristic rocking motion, his long back acting as a vibrantly tensile seesaw. In his devoted, rhythmic swaying Mulligan resembles an orthodox Jew at his prayers.
It was Mulligan, too, who presently organized the horns to back up the soloists with complementary figures. As had happened at many another jam session, Mulligan inexorably took over and in the course of the next few hours he demonstrated clearly that he had the strength to stand up with venerable volcanoes like Hawkins and Eldridge. The same sort of thing had occurred some months earlier, at a jam session that was staged after hours at Eddie Condon's club, then in Greenwich Village. Francoise Sagan was the guest of honor, and some Collier's photographers came, too, to catch her in the process of enjoying native American musique engage’. An observer, the magazine writer Richard Gehman, recalled, "It was an unlikely concoction. There were some of Eddie's Dixieland guys, including Wild Bill Davison on trumpet, and there was Zutty Singleton, the New Orleans drummer, and then, representing modern, there were Mulligan and his trombonist, Bob Brookmeyer. Before anyone knew quite what was happening, Mulligan was in charge. Even Wild Bill was following him."
Aside from the force of his personality, probably the chief reason Mulligan almost invariably becomes the director of any group, organized or casual, that he is playing with is that he doesn't have to waste time checking his bearings. He has a thorough knowledge and understanding of almost all the idioms in the language of jazz up to and including the Charlie Parker era but ending at the point of John Coltrane.
Jazz has been succinctly defined by its once-preeminent don, the late Marshall Stearns, as "a semi-improvisational American music distinguished by an immediacy of communication, an expressiveness characteristic of the free use of the human voice, and a complex flowing rhythm." Unlike the classical musicians of the time, with their "legitimate" tone and ("proper" fingering, the early horn players of New Orleans and other points of jazz orientation used their instruments very much in their own way, ignoring traditional restraints and incorporating the slurs, glissandi, and personal vibrato of speech. Most jazz combinations were small, and the emphasis was on improvisation - often multilinear collective improvisation. Pulsating beneath, through, and over everything else was the beat, polyrhythmic but inclined, at any rate in the rhythm sections, to be heavy and jagged.
Later on, in the twenties and thirties, emphasis on collective improvisation waned, and the soloists, with Louis Armstrong leading the way, dominated the jazz scene. Large bands emerged, which gave space to the improvising soloist but enclosed him in section work. Meanwhile, the rhythms of jazz were gradually smoothed as some bands, particularly Count Basie's, in the words of one critic, "put wheels on all four beats in the bar."
By the start of the forties, in the view of the restive young jazz musician, the whole situation had become firmly stabilized; nothing new seemed to be happening and there were stirrings of rebellion. Among the rebels were Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. What they and others did was to widen the harmonic base for jazz improvisation more challengingly than ever before and to make the play of rhythms over the steady meter that is jazz more intricate and subtle than ever before. So challenging and intricate was their work that for a time it took a thoroughly oriented ear to appreciate, or even to follow, the involuted contours of the music's melodic content. The new music was given a variety of names, but the one that has survived most persistently is "modern jazz."
There was one feature of the older jazz that the insurgents did not dispense with-the tradition of the solo. The best of the influential modern Jazzmen were so intent on testing and developing their own voices in this new idiom that they preferred to function mainly as soloists whom other musicians played for, rather than with. Inevitably, a counterrevolution set in, and this was symbolized, and to a large extent touched off by, a series of recordings made by Miles Davis in 1949 and 1950 with an ensemble of nine instruments.
These records were comparable in their impact on a new generation of jazz musicians to the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven records of the 1920's, some of the Duke Ellington and Basie records of the thirties, and the records made by Parker and his associates in the early and middle forties. The counterrevolutionary aspect of the Davis discs was that they again put the stress on ensemble playing.
The soloist was still permitted to improvise, but he did so within a cohesive framework of relatively complex, freshly written ensemble material. The rhythmic and harmonic innovations of Parker, Gillespie, and the rest were retained by the new men, but they aimed for a lighter and more flowing rhythmic pulse than had emerged from the guerrilla warfare that had sometimes existed in the early modern-jazz rhythm sections, and a considerably more sensitive and varied dynamic range. Some of the leaping cry and slashing spontaneity of the beginnings of modern jazz were lost, but the records established a standard for coping once again with the problem-solved by the early New Orleans bands for their time, and by Ellington and Basie for theirs - of maintaining each player's individuality and at the same time emphasizing the organized expression of the group.
The Davis records were an arrangers' triumph, and one of the chief arrangers-and the baritone saxophonist - was Gerry Mulligan. In the following years, without in the slightest losing his interest in the jam session, he had continued to concentrate on organized expression. Beginning with a quartet in 1952, he has had a succession of small groups, each of them strongly integrated by means of arrangements and rehearsals but each permitting the soloists to improvise within an airy, if carefully built, structure.
At Newport, the night after Mulligan himself had roared through the free-style jam session at Norman Granz's party, at which soloing was all, or nearly all, one of his quartets - a particularly fine example, at the time, of a modern-jazz group that had chosen the collective approach as the path of its development - performed before an outdoor audience of twelve thousand. Mulligan and Bob Brookmeyer, playing the valve trombone, engaged in loosely contrapuntal conversations, with bass and drums providing the foundation. The colloquy usually began either with both voices stating a theme or with one lining out the melody while the other interpolated comments. As each then soloed, the other continued, but more softly, to contribute supporting, flowing melodic figures that were linked with warm logic to the foreground assertion.
The large, tawny, lunging voice of Mulligan's horn contrasted but did not clash with the more burnished, more gently burred singing of Brookmeyer's. Visually, Mulligan was the more commanding of the two. With the bulky baritone saxophone coming down to his knees, seemingly annealed to him, he rocked through each number, sometimes bending halfway over backward in his ardor, while Brookmeyer, also lean and long and slightly hunched over, stood with legs spread apart. The work of the quartet, individually and collectively, was subtle but strong, each voice remaining sensitive to the others not only in the spontaneous interplay of ideas but also in the constantly changing dynamics-from swelling waves of yea-saying to diminuendos so gently whispered that the bass became the loudest voice. The playing was organized with such clarity that all four instruments could be continually followed, and with such balance that, although there had been plenty of opportunity for each horn to release his own feelings, at the close of a number there were no loose ends.
Gerry Mulligan was born on April 6, 1927, in QueensVillage, Long Island, the youngest of four brothers. He is three-quarters Irish and a quarter German, and this has led John Lewis, who feels that there have been too few musicians of Irish descent among the major jazz figures, to welcome him into that category with special warmth. Racial references of any kind, however, greatly annoy Mulligan. Some years ago, shortly after an earnest jazz-magazine editor had suggested that most of the best jazz musicians have been blacks, Jews, and Italians, in that order, Mulligan ran into him in a night club and told him fiercely, "The really impressive thing about jazz, and the important musicians like Bird and Miles and me, is that it and we are so individualistic." Mulligan went on to warn the editor not to bring "everything down to some kind of common denominator."
Mulligan grew up in what he feels was a narrow, conventional, and authoritarian Irish Catholic home. He had a driving interest in music before he entered kindergarten, and in the course of a highly peripatetic childhood (his father, a management engineer, was obliged to move about the East Coast and the Middle West) he learned, with almost no formal help, to play the clarinet and various saxophones, as well as to arrange and compose. (Later he also picked up piano, trumpet, and flugelhorn.)
Breaking away from his family in 1944, at the age of seventeen, Mulligan left high school in Philadelphia to take a brief traveling job as an arranger with the Tommy Tucker band. He then had a series of jobs as an arranger or a saxophonist, or both, with various small and large bands, including Claude Thornhill's and Gene Krupa's. However, being sharp-tongued, willful, and intolerant of bad playing, Mulligan had one calamitous run-in after another with his employers.
On one such occasion, while Mulligan was with Gene Krupa, the band had been working and traveling frenetically, and its playing in Mulligan's opinion had become shoddy. One night, at the end of a set, Mulligan rose and, in plain hearing of the audience, upbraided the band in general and then Krupa in particular for his inability or unwillingness to set higher standards. "I told them all to go to hell," Mulligan recalls. At a meeting of the band next day, Krupa lit into the band first, and then into Mulligan for inexcusable behavior in public. Krupa proceeded to fire Mulligan, but he did not hold a grudge against his former employee. "I had to admire that guy," Krupa said a few years later. "You get too much obsequiousness in this business. There was no obsequiousness in him, which I dug."
Meanwhile, along with his lack of obsequiousness, Mulligan was moving ahead rapidly as a musician, mastering the old and new idioms of jazz, and in 1947 - in a move that turned out to be vital to his own development and enabled him to become a significant part of jazz history-Mulligan settled down for a time in New York, joining a group of similarly explorative instrumentalists and arrangers in the experiments that led to the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool jazz recordings.
In the mid-1940's there were not many places in the United States where modern jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie could find any sort of encouragement: some night clubs on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem, and a few scattered pockets of rebellion in the black sections of other Eastern cities. The rest of the country, in the modern jazzman's view, was a vast, square desert. Not long after an engagement in California, for example, Parker had fled to New York. "Nobody understands our kind of music out on the Coast," he told the critic Leonard Feather, "They hated it, Leonard. I can't tell you how I yearned for New York. . . . As I left the Coast, they had a band at Billy Berg's with somebody playing a bass sax and a drummer playing on the temple blocks and ching ching-ching cymbals ... and the people liked it! That was the kind of thing that helped to crack my wig." Even New York was far from perfect, offering little steady work, but it did promise companionship. A musician who was unable to make much of an impression on the outside world could at least tell his story to an audience of his peers, and there were marathon jam sessions, sometimes lasting two or three days, in any apartment that happened to be available, or in a hall when the jazzmen could scrape together the money to hire one. "There was a spirit then," the pianist George Wallington recalls. "We were engrossed in what we were finding out, and we were inspired by each other. Everybody just loved to play. Most of the time we didn't sleep. We'd fall out for an hour or so and go back to playing. It's nothing like that today. Everybody's going out on his own, trying to make a success."
And so it was that Mulligan was drawn to settle in New York. He supported himself largely by writing arrangements for Claude Thornhill's big band and, as he says, he "aced" himself into any jam session he could find. At the sessions there were heads of court who decided whether a newcomer would be admitted or barred, and Mulligan passed all crucial inspections. As an arranger, too, he was making substantial progress, partly because he renewed what had been a slight acquaintance with Gil Evans, the head arranger of the Thornhill band. Evans, then about thirty-five and a stubborn, self-taught pragmatist, had evolved an intricate, richly tapestried personal style, and this had an important influence on Mulligan, among other young musicians.
In 1947 Evans was living in a one-room basement apartment on West 55th Street, behind a Chinese laundry, and that room became the birthplace of at least one major development in modern jazz. Arrangers and instrumentalists went there to play records and talk, and some of the discussions are now regarded as historic. The room and something of what it meant to Mulligan and the others have been described the composer George Russell: "A very big bed took up a lot of the place; there was one big lamp, and a cat named Becky - The linoleum was battered, and there was a little court outside. Inside, it was always very dark. The feeling of the room was timelessness. Whenever you went there, you wouldn't care about conditions outside. You couldn't tell whether it was day or night, summer or winter, and it didn't matter. At all hours, the place was loaded with people who came in and out. Mulligan, though, was there all the time. He was very clever, witty, and saucy, the way he is now. I remember his talking about a musician who was getting a lot of attention by copying another. 'A Sammy Kaye is bad enough,' Gerry said. 'A bastard Sammy Kaye is too much.' Gerry had a chip on his shoulder.
He had more or less the same difficulties that made us all bitter and hostile. He was immensely talented, and he didn't have enough of an opportunity to exercise his talent. Gil's influence had a softening effect on him and on all of us. Gil, who loved musical companionship, was the mother hen-the haven in the storm. He was gentle, wise, profound, and extremely perceptive, and he always seemed to have a comforting answer for any kind of problem. He appeared to have no bitterness. As for Gil's musical influence on Gerry, I think that Gerry, with his talent, would have emerged as a major force in jazz anyway. His talent would have surmounted his lack of formal education. But Gil helped. Gil was, and is, one of the strong personalities in written jazz, and I'm sure he influenced all of us. Gerry, however, was better able than any of the rest of us to channel Gil's influences-including the modern classical writers, whose records Gil played-into mainstream jazz.
Gerry was always interested in the way each of us felt about music, but he was impatient with anything that moved too far away from the mainstream."
Out of the turbulence in the Evans apartment grew some extraordinary projects. Evans himself was strongly stimulated by Alban Berg, among other classical composers, and several times he and his friends, each carrying a score, trooped uptown to the JuilliardSchool of Music to attend rehearsals of Berg compositions. And-what was of far more moment from a jazz point of view-the discussions in the apartment eventually led to the Miles Davis Capitol recordings of 1949-50, which launched what was known throughout the world for years afterward as "cool" jazz. These records stemmed in part from the experience that Evans and Mulligan had had in writing for the Thornhill band, which made use of a wider and more varied range of instrumental colors-French horns and a tuba among them-than any other jazz orchestra of the time. The records also stemmed in part from the daring conceptions of players like Parker, Monk, Gillespie, and the pianist Bud Powell-frontiersmen who had done a good deal of work in small ensembles that relied on improvisation and whose playing was aggressive, challenging, hot, frequently hard, and at tempos that were inclined to be unnerving.
Now Mulligan and Evans felt that they could retain the searching spirit of the frontiersmen but make the music more subtle, more variously colored, and better organized. Discussions began in the apartment about the smallest number of instruments that could express the harmonic range achieved by the Thornhill band. Evans and Mulligan, recruiting other arrangers and instrumentalists as they went along-among them Miles Davis-proceeded to work out the problems involved. Eventually, they decided that the instrumentation should consist of trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. Next the players were recruited, and Davis, whose organizational abilities were vital to the whole project, was installed as the leader. Late in the summer of 1948, after some weeks of rehearsals in hired halls, the new ensemble opened a three-week engagement at the Royal Roost, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. Davis insisted that a sign be placed in front of the club reading, "Arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, and John Lewis" - the first time that any experimental arrangers in jazz, except for Duke Ellington, had ever received billboard credit. At that time the Royal Roost was probably the only night club in the country that would have taken a chance with this new and forbidding type of jazz, and even it failed to extend the Davis group's stay after the first three weeks. The Davis outfit never again appeared in public as a unit, but a few months after the engagement at the Royal Roost the players reassembled at the studios of Capitol Records to make the first of what turned out to be a series of single records that almost immediately intrigued young jazz musicians throughout the country, although most of the critics took longer to catch up, as usual.
In addition to giving currency to a lighter, more flowing beat and a more diversified and subtle dynamic range than had been characteristic of the earlier, more fiery modern Jazz, these sessions, in reemphasizing the importance of collective interplay, had an influence which in quite diversified ways has lasted into the 1970's. The music's least fruitful influence was on the largely arid, mechanical, almost entirely white "West Coast jazz" of the 1950's (an exception, in terms of musical value, being Mulligan's own quartets of that period). What the West Coast players did not comprehend was that beneath the surface "cool" of the Miles Davis sessions was a great deal of concentrated intensity. At its disciplined core this too was "hot jazz."
By the late 1950's, in direct, angry reaction to the sterile "West Coast jazz" and to the considerable income those white players were receiving from their bowdlerization of authentic jazz, black players in the East began to emphasize "funk," or "soul jazz," a counterthrust most strongly represented by the blues-and-gospel-rooted shouts of combos led by Horace Silver and Art Blakey.
As "soul jazz" took hold and was followed in the 1960's and 1970's by the much more complex but nonetheless aggressively emotional music of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, et al., it appeared in retrospect as if all aspects of "cool jazz" had been transient divagations, the merest footnotes, in jazz history. Actually, this was true of white "West Coast jazz," but not of the Miles Davis Capitol recordings, both with regard to the staying power of that particular music itself, and also in terms of its long-range impact.
Miles Davis, for instance, though he grew much beyond those recordings in subsequent years, was strongly influenced by that search for unprecedentedly variegated combinations of instruments in a small group, by the keen attention to dynamics, and by the need for each player to continually add to the linear and textural designs with more than just accompaniment. So too was the future of John Lewis's (and the Modern Jazz Quartet's) music shaped in part by those sessions. In fact, no one deeply involved-from Max Roach to Lee Konitz-was the same again musically; and each of them in different ways went on to carry what was learned from this experience to other musicians with whom they worked. At its core that experience was a return to-and an expansion of-the concept of jazz as collective improvisation. Solos were vital, but in a rich, resonant configuration.
After New York, Mulligan went on to California, wrestled hard and eventually successfully with a heroin habit he had brought west with him, and started the series of softly swinging, contrapuntally improvising quartets which made his international reputation. During those quartet years Mulligan made another significant contribution to jazz-one that is going to return, I expect, with different textures and newer designs. And that is the natural development of contrapuntal swinging. Dave Brubeck had also worked this vein, and while his alto saxophonist Paul Desmond was exceptionally skilled and imaginative in this kind of improvisation, Brubeck too often was plodding. It was Mulligan who made the breakthrough.
As Gunther Schuller noted, when Mulligan's pianoless quartet was a pervasive phenomenon on the jazz scene, "Gerry brought back the contrapuntal way of playing jazz into naked clarity. He has taken away the harmonic background of the piano, which usually veiled multilinear writing for horns in jazz, and he hasn't fallen into the obvious snare of writing classic fugues-of using the classical forms of counterpoint as a basis for his originals and arrangements. His is simply clear linear writing in jazz terms; he has shown that contrapuntal designs can swing. Previous attempts in modern jazz to emphasize polyphonic writing and playing had bogged down, because of the self-conscious stiffness of the players. Where others went out of the jazz field to take forms from classical music and then returned to try to put them into jazz, he has eliminated that step, and thereby eliminated stiffness in multilinear jazz playing. He has also brought humor back into modern jazz. jazz, which had been so happy a music in the thirties, had become quite serious, and even at times sickly, during the development of the modern idioms. Mulligan has brought back a happy, relaxed feeling, because he is able to relax completely while playing. Sometimes he relaxes too much. But it is this ability to relax that permits him to play with all kinds of groups, in almost any jazz context, and that makes him the big catalyst that he is."
To which Martin Williams added: "The Mulligan groups play together, listen to each other, work as a group. . . . Also they get a complexity and density of texture out of their instruments."
There was another kind of impetus Mulligan gave to jazz in the late 1950's and early 1960's and may well-since he is so resilient-contribute again. "Gerry," says Bob Brookmeyer, "has a positive life attitude, in contrast to the suicidal perspective - the Charlie Parker complex -that was prevalent among many post-World War II musicians. Parker was so impressive musically and personally that he set some standards he hadn't meant to. Gerry came as a life-giving current of air to young musicians who had been stifled emotionally and intellectually by the idea of death. And in his music he proved that a whisper at times can be more effective and piercing than a shout."
In the 1960's Mulligan also proved his extraordinary capacities as a big-band leader. His orchestra was supple, resourceful, the soloists an integral, organic part of the arrangements. The band had drive, wit, lyricism, ingenuity-like its leader. But the economics of the jazz scene made it impossible for Mulligan to maintain the band. And so he has continued playing both as incandescent guest and increasingly again as leader. Meanwhile, as more of the older jazz players disappear, Mulligan remains a particularly important and attractive figure in jazz history for the affection and respect he has shown jazz elders during long years when few other younger players did.
One of the remarkable things about the remarkable form of expression known as jazz, which in the past seventy-five years has become familiar in the remotest regions of the globe, is that its collective history has been made by thousands of fiercely individualistic players. This history has consequently been a full one, marked by skirmish after skirmish on constantly shifting terrain, yet because it has been so brief, we still have in our midst survivors of every one of the campaigns. The eldest of these veterans, who started out working by day as longshoremen, cigar makers, and the like, and playing jazz by night-as much for pleasure as for money-are seldom heard from nowadays, however, except at such invaluable refuges as Preservation Hall in New Orleans. And the succeeding generation-professionals from the start, more sophisticated and more resourceful but no less fiery-have had hard going in recent decades. In the 1930's most of the best of them played in large jazz bands of a sort that has almost ceased to exist, and some of their triumphs are recorded in those hagiological listings called discographies.
Quite a few of these musicians were sweepingly proficient soloists, able to express through improvisation a range of ideas and emotions that made many a music student eye his textbook and teacher with skepticism, and in general they showed that an organization of perhaps fifteen men could swing with a drive exhilarating to players and listeners alike.
In the course of time, though, these musicians gave way to the first phalanx of what are known as "modern jazzmen" -somewhat more self-conscious musicians who worked at expanding or renewing the harmonic and rhythmic language of jazz, and in doing so tended for a time to drop melody into third place. Inevitably, the Jacobins-men like Parker, Gillespie, and Bud Powell - were themselves followed by a generation with even newer ideas. This second phalanx of modern jazzmen, while admiring the sometimes craggy advances of their immediate predecessors and doing their best to consolidate them, felt that it was possible, and agreeable as well, to concentrate on melodic lyricism again, and some of them are still profitably working along that line, though they too have been increasingly challenged by newer, more clangorously venturesome forces.
All these groups, and others, coexist, though their fortunes vary. It is as if Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Debussy, and Webern were alive at the same time. Many young jazz musicians, however, derive no satisfaction from this extraordinary state of affairs; far from honoring their elders, some of the young in jazz know little about them and care less.
How little they cared was evident one Saturday evening in the summer in 1959 in a large tent at the Timber Grove Club, on Great South Bay, Long Island, when, in the course of a jazz festival, a group of aging musicians met to put on a special kind of revival meeting. The musical director of the festival was Rex Stewart, then middle-aged and performing with Eddie Condon's outfit. He had reassembled as many members of the Fletcher Henderson unit of the 1920's-one of the world's first large jazz bands-as he could, filling the remaining positions with jazzmen of the same era, or a slightly later one. The musicians looked forward to playing together again, especially since the world of jazz had been treating them badly; as a rule, night-club owners, bookers, and record company executives felt that there was no public for jazz musicians in their forties and fifties, and some members of the reconstituted band were reduced to routine day jobs that had nothing to do with music. Others had jobs with minor rhythm-and-blues bands. A very few-like Coleman Hawkins-had done better, but even they had remained in jazz under less than optimum conditions, artistic or financial.
If a reunion of a great classical group-the Thibaud-Cortot-Casals trio, say-had ever been held at Great South Bay, or anywhere else, young classical musicians would have arrived in swarms. For the Great South Bay Festival, which brought together such eminent jazz musicians as Hawkins, the trombonist J. C. Higginbotham, and the alto saxophonist Hilton Jefferson for the first time in years, only one prominent young jazzman made the two-hour trip out from New York-Gerry Mulligan. Then thirty, Mulligan had already played a decisive part in one of the most recent waves of jazz reform-the wave that had led to a reemphasis on melody and, with it, multilinear collective improvisation. Yet even though he was in the forefront of the innovators at that time, he had continued to listen to and to learn from the older traditionalists. Modern jazz in his view was not a revolution against an ancien regime that would be better off buried. He saw it as a natural evolution of the old jazz language, and he had great respect for his musical ancestors.
That Saturday morning Mulligan left his midtown New York apartment and drove out to Great South Bay. He went to listen, but, since he always hopes to find a jam session, he took his saxophone along. When he arrived at the tent a loosely swinging band, led jointly by bassist Bob Haggart and trumpeter Yank Lawson, was performing in a style that might be called swing-era Dixieland. For a moment Mulligan stood listening, and then was visited by a compulsion to play. He picked up his horn and moved up to the bandstand, to the evident satisfaction of the other players. This was the first time Mulligan had ever played with either Lawson or Haggart, but he sounded as if he had rehearsed with their unit for weeks. Meanwhile, Rex Stewart was basking on the beach, resting up for the Fletcher Henderson revival meeting in the evening. Somehow, word reached him that Mulligan had come and was playing, and Stewart, who felt for Mulligan a wholeness of devotion that he extended to few other young jazzmen, hurriedly changed his clothes, ran for his horn, and moved onto the stand. He and Mulligan had never played together, and this was an experience Stewart had been looking forward to for months. The instantaneous, hot rapport between the pair fired all the musicians on the stand into a booting ensemble rideout.
That evening, during the Henderson reunion, there was an extra baritone saxophone in the band. Mulligan had bought a ticket and had filed into the big tent with the rest of the customers. Then he had slipped into the shadows alongside the bandstand, and when the concert of the patriarchs got under way he began playing softly. At a wave from Rex Stewart, Mulligan moved onto the stand, took up a position between Hawkins and J. C. Higginbotham, and played a strong solo. The old-timers seemed pleased to have him there and he was pleased to be there. The last the audience saw of Mulligan, much later that night, he was walking out of the tent into the darkness, still playing.
Around the time of that transgenerational evening at the Great South Bay jazz Festival, Gerry Mulligan, in an article he had written for Down Beat, described a project that had long appealed to him: "I think it would be a good idea to organize a unit composed of some of the older jazzmen and those of the younger musicians who can do it. . . . But first I'd want the group to work out for some time. Then if something of musical value results, we could record it. But I don't like the idea of doing something just to record it. It has to work first."
Except for a few age-mixed bands in New Orleans through the years (usually a fusion of perpetual jazz students from Europe with the native musical aristocracy), there has yet to be a project of the order envisioned by Mulligan. Jazz remains more segregated by age than by any other factor, and that is a great pity and a great loss-to listeners and musicians alike. Nonetheless, the achievement of trans generational maturity among younger musicians is not beyond possibility-, and should such an orchestra finally appear, spanning the decades of jazz, Mulligan is still one of its most likely and logical leaders.
Together with his insistence on paying attention to the whole jazz tradition, Mulligan is also one of the prototypical jazz romantics. He describes, for instance, a small event with large consequences which took place in a small Ohio town when he was in the third grade there. And this brief tale also reflects the boyhood dreams of just about everyone, in any country, who later jumped into the jazz life.
"I was on my way to school," Mulligan recalls, "when I saw the Red Nichols bus sitting in front of a hotel. That moment was probably when I first wanted to become a band musician and go on the road. It was a small old Greyhound bus with a canopied observation platform, and on the bus was printed, 'RED NICHOLS AND HIS FIVE PENNIES.' It all symbolized travel and adventure. I was never the same after that."”
To be continued in Part 4 with Gene Lees.
“… Gerry Mulligan lived through almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should be understood.” – Gene Lees
“An orchestrator of ingenuity, wit and originality, Gerry Mulligan was a welcome antidote to the brassy blasts and relentless drive generated by the majority of competitors. Mulligan achieved excitement through color, shading and dynamics.” – Stuart Nicholson
“He knows exactly what he wants. He wants a quiet band. He can swing at about 15 decibels lower than any other band.” – Bill Crow
“My band offers a unique opportunity of learning and development for young players …. What I do with my band is use dynamics – dynamics of attack as well as volume. As a consequence, I think players get a particular joy out of playing that requires them to do things out of a wide range of possibilities.” – Gerry Mulligan in an interview with Charles Fox for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 4, May 1989
In his May 1989 BBC interview with Charles Fox, Mulligan further explained that his writing for big bands always stresses “ … a combination of low dynamics, light swing and meticulous attention to inner harmonic movement,” a style which he first put into practice with the 1949 ‘Birth of the Cool recordings’ and one which has been evolving ever since.
When asked about his 14-piece, Concert Jazz Band which experienced a resurgence in the 1970s after Gerry stopped working with Dave Brubeck that continued throughout the 1980s [mostly in Europe], Gerry stated: “From its inception, the Concert Jazz Band was based around the quartet. The orchestration, planning, everything about it was geared around Bob Brookmeyer and me; the valve trombone, the baritone sax and a piano-less rhythm section. And that was the basis for most of the arrangements. In my writing, I always like things more horizontal, evolved into lines with counterpoint.”
Charles Fox explains that “the horizontal style of writing big band arrangements tries to create different layers of melody all driving forward rather than it all being specified by the harmony which is vertical and based on a chord. So you go from chord to chord rather than trying to keep a melody flowing as in horizontal writing. Of course, bits of each technique cross-over, but the horizontal technique was something that Gerry Mulligan was particularly fond of.”
More details about Gerry Mulligan’s approach to arranging and composition can also be found in a series of articles that first appeared in the eminent Jazz writer Gene Lees’ Jazzletter.
Because of their close and long-standing relationship, not to mention his considerable skills as a writer, many Jazz fans have long thought it logical that Gene Lees is the very best choice to author a biography of Gerry Mulligan. However, a closer inspector of the following essay on Gerry might yield the impression that he has already done so, albeit an encapsulated one.
Rich in detail and conversational repartee, as well as, comprehensive in its overview, there is no finer retrospective of Gerry Mulligan and his music than the following chapter from Gene’s Arranging the Score: Portraits of the Great Arrangers [New York: Cassell. 2000].
As Jeffrey Sultanof expressed in his Foreword to the book:
"… [Gene] knew the people he wrote about – Bill Evans and Gerry Mulligan, for example, were among his closet friends – and they trusted him with information that they would not share with any other writer, because they knew he would use what they said respectfully and accurately.
… He is an American treasure, finding the facts, celebrating the best that popular music and jazz has to offer, and helping us continue to explore their riches.”
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is very grateful to the late Gene Lees for allowing it permission to feature his work.
“When I became editor of Down Beat in May 1959, I telephoned one of my predecessors, Jack Tracy, by then a producer for Mercury Records. I asked him who, of the various musicians I would soon have to deal with, might give me a problem.
"Three guys," Jack said. "Buddy Rich, Miles Davis, and Gerry Mulligan." He added that, personally, he liked all three, but all three had prickly temperaments, and you had to accept them as they were; none of them more so than Buddy Rich. Perhaps because Jack had forewarned me, I had trouble with none of them, and indeed became very fond of all three.
Two of them - Miles Dewey Davis and Gerry Mulligan - were alumni of the Gil Evans "seminars" on West 55th Street, and of the Birth of the Cool records.
Among the bands I particularly liked in my late adolescence were those of Claude Thornhill, Elliot Lawrence, and Gene Krupa. Mulligan wrote for all three.
Gerry said,” I met Gil probably when I was arranging for the Krupa band. I knew about his writing before that. I used to visit Gil with Claude's band when I was working for other bands. One time I came back to New York after leaving one of the bands; it might have been when I left Tommy Tucker. And I stayed at the Edison Hotel. My room was on an air shaft on the west side of the building. And every morning about 10 o'clock, the band started to rehearse, because Claude was just back from the service and they were reorganizing. I would sit hanging out the window, listening to the rehearsals. A friend of mine, a guitar player from Texas, would come by, and we'd listen to the rehearsals.
I went back to Philadelphia, to write for Elliot Lawrence's band. And I lived there for a while. I got a postcard from Gil saying, 'What are you doing living in Philadelphia? Everything's happening in New York. Come back.' So I did. I stayed in a succession of rooms. Finally Gil said, 'Stay here."'
One of the records by the Krupa band that I liked was "Disc Jockey Jump," and I had bothered to note who wrote it: Gerry Mulligan. That was probably the first time I heard his name. I would soon hear it again: in the writing and playing credits on the so-called Birth of the Cool album.
Thirty-three years later, in early 1992, Mulligan would re-create that album for the GRP label, with John Lewis again on piano but Wallace Roney replacing Miles Davis, and Phil Woods replacing Lee Konitz.
Mulligan's interest in the format of those sessions continued beyond the Birth of the Cool sessions, and in January 1953, in Los Angeles, he recorded an LP made up almost entirely of his own compositions, including "Westwood Walk,""Simbah,""Walking Shoes,""Rocker,""A Ballad,""Flash," and "Ontet." I was becoming very, very conscious of this Gerry Mulligan, thinking he was one of the most important composers in jazz - though who was I to judge? I not only loved Mulligan's writing - I soon knew all those charts by memory, and still do - I loved his work as a soloist. He played a sort of rollicking, charming, unpretentious kind of piano, and he produced lovely solos on an instrument usually considered unsuitable for solos: the baritone saxophone, which he played with a light and highly individual tone that is now imitated all over the world.
That ten-inch Mulligan LP was part of the sound-track of my life at that time. By then I knew from pictures what Mulligan looked like: a tall young man with a brush-cut and a body almost cadaverously thin.
By then Mulligan had a quartet featuring Chet Baker on trumpet, which played Monday nights at a club called the Haig. The group had made its first recording for Dick Bock’s Pacific jazz label in August of 1952, a little over four months before the tentet record. The group startled critics because it used trumpet, baritone, bass, and drums, but no piano, always considered essential to communicating the harmony of a tune. Much was made of this "odd" instrumentation. It lay not in arcane musical philosophy, however: the Haig's owner could not afford more than four men. Red Norvo had played there with only vibes, guitar, and bass. Mulligan also got along without piano.
The rapport between Baker and Mulligan was remarkable. The emphasis was on counterline, and it seemed to free both horn players for ever more imaginative flights. Michael Cuscuna wrote in the notes for a CD reissue called The Best of Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker.
‘The limitation of two voices (and sometimes a third with the bass) seemed to ignite Mulligan's already fertile mind.
Whether remodeling a standard or introducing an original, Mulligan stretched his limits and came upon a sound that was not only new and stimulating, but also incredibly fascinating and accessible to the general public. Four months after their first recordings for a then eight-week-old label, they were stars beyond the jazz world with full-page features in magazines like Time and choice engagements around the country.’
Mulligan was then 25.
So much legend has grown up around Chet Baker that his musical brilliance is often overlooked. Baker was a heroin addict: so was Mulligan. Mulligan would eventually break free of it, but Baker would not, leading a strange, bohemian, itinerant existence, hocking his horn from time to time, sometimes without clothes, sometimes even without shoes, surrounded by people who seemed fascinated by the morbidity of his existence. He got his teeth knocked out by dope-pushers for failing to pay what he owed them. He spent time in a jail in Italy. A story went around that when he met pianist Romano Mussolini, son of the murdered dictator, he said, "Hey, man, sorry to hear about your old man." I thought the story surely was apocryphal, but I asked Caterina Valente about it, and she said, "It's not only true, I was there. It was at the start of a tour."
Time ravaged Chet Baker. I encountered him only once, when he came into Jim and Andy's bar in New York to beg money, which the musicians willingly gave him. He looked bad. By the end, that clean-cut all-American boy face was a barren desert landscape of deep lines and gullies. He died from a fall from a hotel in Holland. It is widely believed that he was thrown from the roof by elements of the Dutch underworld, among the roughest in the world, for not paying a dope bill.
Whatever the cause of the death, the legend obscures the talent, and part of that legend is that he was just a natural who couldn't even read music. Mulligan was adamant in rejecting this.
Much of the music that quartet played was Mulligan's own. Only a few leaders, among them Dave Brubeck, Horace Silver, John Lewis, and Duke Ellington, have devoted their recording careers so extensively to their own compositions. What Baker was called on to do was very complex.
Mulligan told me: "People love to say Chet couldn't read: he could read. It's not a question of whether he couldn't read chords or anything like that. it's that he didn't care. He had one of the quickest connections between mind, hand, and chops that I have ever encountered. He really played by ear, and he could play intricate progressions."
"I presume that in blowing, you're playing by ear too," I said.
"Well at my best I'm playing by ear! But I often am saddled with thinking chords, until I learn a tune. And I have to learn a tune some kind of way. And, really, my connection between my ears and my hands is not that quick. Sure, when I've got a tune firmly under hand - which is different from having it firmly in mind - I'm playing by ear. It's taken me a long time to connect up."
"You said he could do that fast?"
"Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah."
"You'd run a tune by him and he'd get it?"
"Oh yeah. And in any key. He had incredible facility. Remarkable. So it's obvious that at some point in his life, Chet Baker practiced a lot. It's all well and good to be able to do that. You're not born able to do that. You're maybe born with a facility to learn quickly. It's like Charlie Parker. Everybody thinks Charlie came along full-blown, there he was. But as a kid, he was a heavy practicer. And Chet must have been too."
In view of its importance in jazz history, it is surprising to realize that the quartet with Chet Baker lasted only a year. Mulligan was arrested on a narcotics charge and sent to a California honor farm for three months, after which he returned to New York, where he established a new quartet with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer instead of Baker. With Jon Eardley on trumpet and Zoot Sims on tenor, the group recorded for Mercury as the Gerry Mulligan Sextet. But the quartet continued, growing constantly better, and it lost none of its momentum when Art Farmer succeeded Brookmeyer. The group (with Bill Crow on bass and Dave Bailey on drums) can be seen at Newport in the pioneering film Jazz on a Summer's Day.
And meanwhile, Mulligan made a series of albums for Norman Granz according to a formula Granz found appealing: mixing and matching various pairs of musicians. Mulligan recorded with Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, Ben Webster (one of his early heroes), Johnny Hodges, and Paul Desmond, a particularly close friend.
When I joined Down Beat, I was well aware of the extent of the heroin epidemic in jazz: yet the subject was kept hushed. I did a good deal of research on the problem, asking many of the former addicts I was coming to know how and why they had quit. Al Cohn told me that an infection from a dirty needle settled into his eye, resulting finally in its surgical incision. "Losing your eye will make you quit," Al said in his sardonic fashion. Zoot Sims told me that he got into a car with a girl he was going with, left New York, and went through withdrawal in motel rooms as he made his way home to California.
And, later, when I knew Mulligan well enough, I asked him too how he quit. Gerry, not entirely surprisingly, took an intellectual approach to the problem. He met a New York psychiatrist who was interested in the problem of addiction. The psychiatrist said he could lose his license for what he was about to do. He said that he was going to supply Gerry with good syringes and medical morphine to replace the dirty heroin of the street. At minimum it would remove the danger and dark glamour from the practice. Morphine isn't as strong as heroin, but it's pretty good, as you know if you've ever had it in a hospital.
Gerry was playing a gig in Detroit. At intermission he went into the men's room, and he was inserting his nice clean medical syringe into his nice clean bottle of morphine when he stopped, thinking, "What am I doing to myself?"
He telephoned Joe Glaser, his booking agent, in New York, and told him to get him out of the job on grounds that he was sick. "And I'm going to be," he said. And he simply quit, going through the sweats and shudders and nausea of withdrawal. I always thought this was a remarkable act of courage. But Gerry said, "What else could I do? It was destroying the thing that means the most in the world to me, my music. I had a reason to quit. Had I been some poor kid in a Harlem doorway with nothing to look forward to even if he does quit, I don't think I could have done it."
I saw Gerry in person for the first time at the Newport Jazz Festival on the Fourth of July weekend of 1960. He had just organized what he called the Concert jazz Band. In a flurry of publicity, it was to make its debut at Newport. The big-band era was ended. Nobody - well, almost nobody tried to launch big bands any more. The ballrooms and dance pavilions were gone, or no longer booked bands. There's a dance pavilion in the rain, all shuttered down, Johnny Mercer wrote in the lyric he set to Ralph Burns'"Early Autumn." A new big band?
But I wanted to hear it: anything Mulligan did seemed likely to be innovative, as indeed that band was. I was backstage in a tent, talking with Dizzy Gillespie, when the first sounds of the band came to us. It was raining torrents. At stage left, the United States Information Agency had set up a shelter, a sloping canvas roof, to protect their television and recording equipment. They were recording the whole festival. The stage was chin high.
The band began to perform Bob Brookmeyer's lyrical arrangement of Django Reinhardt's ballad "Manoir de mes reves." In front of the stage, rain danced on a garden of black umbrellas. An imaginative cameraman panned across this audience in the rain, then across the stage, coming to rest on a great puddle, in which an upside-down Mulligan was playing an exquisite obbligato to the chart, leading into his solo. I was watching both the image and the reality. It was one of the unforgettable musical moments of my life.
I returned to Chicago, where Down Beat was headquartered. The Mulligan band was booked into the lounge in the Sutherland Hotel on the South Side. It had a largely black audience and booked the finest performers in jazz, black and white alike. Its disadvantage to performers was that they had to play on a high stage in the middle of the racetrack-shaped bar, and a band of thirteen had little room to move.
The group was startlingly fresh. Later Gerry told me he didn't think it was really a concert jazz band; it was a first-rate dance band. But he underestimated it. It was a gorgeous small orchestra, with a sound unlike any other. Gerry told me that he had previously tried to make small groups, such as the sextet, sound like big bands; now he wanted a big band to play with the fleet levity and light textures of a small group. Unfortunately, its book contained little of Mulligan's own writing. He found himself so busy running and booking the band that he didn't have time to write. Much of the burden of the composition and arranging fell on Brookmeyer, himself one of the most brilliant writers in jazz.
Something was going on during that Sutherland gig that none of us knew about, except, I think, Brookmeyer.
Gerry was going with and for some time had been in love with actress Judy Holliday, a gentle woman and one of the most gifted comediennes in American theater. She had just undergone a mastectomy. Gerry was playing the Sutherland in the evenings, then catching a red-eye flight to New York, sitting at her bedside as much of the day as he could, then getting an afternoon flight back to Chicago to work. He must have done all of his sleeping on the plane, and if he was drained and short-tempered at the time, it is hardly a wonder.
Some time during that week, I went upstairs with Bob Brookmeyer for a drink in the "band room," a suite of two or three rooms assigned by the hotel. Mulligan was in a bedroom with bassist Buddy Clark, whom I also knew by then, and they were in the midst of a heated exchange. Buddy shouted, "I'm getting sick of it! I'm tired of pulling this whole goddamn band by myself!" And Mulligan told him he wasn't pulling it by himself; he was getting plenty of help, and who the hell did he think he was? "I felt badly about that," Gerry told me some time later. "I didn't know Buddy was sick." Neither did anyone else, including Buddy. He had a rectal problem for which he later underwent surgery, and, he told me, his discomfort had made him short-tempered. He regretted the incident as much as Gerry did.
Mulligan, whose hair in those days was reddish-blond, came out of the bedroom and stopped in his tracks seeing me, a stranger, in the band's midst.
"Who are you?" he said harshly.
I told him.
"Oh God," he said, "that's all I need: press."
"You don't think I'd write anything about this, do you?" I said. And I never did, until now.
Mulligan stormed out, and the band played its next set.
I do not recall where next I encountered him, but by then everyone in the profession was crossing my path. By the time I moved to New York in July 1962, I knew him fairly well.
His influence, and through him that of Claude Thornhill and Gil Evans, had spread around the world. He had been a considerable influence on the
development of the bossa nova movement in Brazil, for example, and that is aside from all the baritone players on the planet whose sound resembled his.
There is no questioning this influence of Mulligan on Brazilian music. I had just returned from a tour of South America, and in Rio de Janeiro had met Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim, both virtually unknown in North America, except to a few musicians such as Bob Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, and particularly Dizzy Gillespie, always aware of developments in Latin American music. It was said that the album made by Bud Shank and Laurindo Almeida called Brazilliance had also exerted an influence, but American critics tended to deny this, probably on the politically correct grounds that West Coast jazz was unimportant, and even Bud Shank said to me once, "The Brazilians didn't need me." But Bud (who incidentally played alto on the Mulligan tentet album) was wrong. Claudio Roditi, the superb Brazilian trumpeter, told me that in the period of bossa nova's gestation, almost the only jazz records available in Brazil were those on Dick Bock's Pacific Jazz label. The Shank-Almeida album, he said, was indeed an influence. But the major influence, according to Gilberto and Jobim, was Mulligan, and the influence on Gilberto's singing was that of a French Caribbean singer - from Martinique - named Henri Salvador, whose work I knew and loved.
Jobim told me that part of the ideal of the bossa nova movement was to achieve acoustical rather than electronic balances in the music, one of the keys to Mulligan's thinking. Jobim told me at the time, "The authentic Negro samba is very primitive. They use maybe ten percussion instruments and the music is very hot and wonderful. But bossa nova is cool and contained. It tells the story, trying to be simple and serious and lyrical. Joao and I felt that Brazilian music until now had been too much a storm on the sea, and we wanted to calm it down for the recording studio. You could call bossa nova a clean, washed samba, without loss of the momentum. We don't want to lose important things. We have the problem of how to write and not lose the swing."
Jobim came to New York that autumn for a Carnegie Hall concert of Brazilian musicians and, backstage, Gerry became one of the first American musicians I introduced him to. We were often together after that. Jobim's song "0 Insensatez" begins with the chord changes of the Chopin E-minor Prelude and, as a send-up of Jobim, Mulligan recorded the prelude as a samba. Jobim and Mulligan remained friends to the end of their days, and Gerry would see him whenever he went to Rio de Janeiro.
Gerry was not, as everyone seemed to think, living with Judy Holliday. She lived in the Dakota, on West 72nd Street at Central Park West, and he lived a block away.
I saw more of Gerry after Judy's death of cancer, which devastated him.We both lived on the West Side, and, aside from Jim and Andy's downtown, we had two or three favorite restaurants in the area of Broadway and the West 70s and 80s, halfway between his apartment and mine, which was on West 86th. A lot of my lyrics, including those written for Jobim tunes, had been recorded by then.
Gerry loved theater, and we thought we should try to write a show together. We looked for an appropriate subject, and one of us came up with the idea of the relationship between Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell. I learned that Brady's house had stood approximately across the street from my apartment on West 86th a few doors in from Central Park. It had long since been replaced by an apartment building.
One of my happier memories is of that period when Gerry and I ran around to libraries and pored over books, absorbing the life of Diamond Jim, getting inside his mind, acquiring a feel for the New York of his time. We sketched out a script, and I think it was a good one. We wrote some songs. Gerry arranged a meeting with Hal Prince. The receptionist said, "Are you the Gerry Mulligan?"
And Gerry said, "I'm the only one I know."
She showed us in to see Hal Prince. And Hal Prince told us that a Diamond Jim Brady project was already under way, with Jackie Gleason set to play Brady and Lucille Ball as Lillian Russell.
We left Hal Prince's office feeling crushed, and no doubt stopped somewhere for a drink. Gleason and Ball would be perfect casting. All our excitement had been killed in an instant, and I suppose Gerry thought, as I did, of all our work being left to molder in a drawer. This would be the second disappointment of that kind for him. He and Judy Holliday, who was a gifted lyricist, had written a musical based on the Anita Loos play Happy Birthday. And although the songs were superb, Gerry had never been able to get anyone interested. One producer told him it could not succeed because the setting was an Irish bar. And, he said, "The Irish go to bars. Jews go to theater."
Gerry and I abandoned our Diamond Jim project. The show with Gleason and Ball was never made; it vanished into that limbo of unfulfilled Broadway projects.
One night Gerry and I went to see Stephen Sondheim's Company. Later we went to the Ginger Man for drinks and a late dinner. "I hate him," Gerry said. I said, "Me too." For Sondheim had done both music and lyrics, and both were brilliant. Long after, Gerry laughed when I recalled that night and said, "I've been trying to hate him for years and can't. He's too good."
One night in Jim and Andy's bar, Gerry said he had tickets for a new play and asked if I wanted to go with him. We ran down48th Street to get to the theater by curtain time. We saw Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns. The co-star was a young actress named Sandy Dennis. She and Gerry would be together for years, and then separate. Sandy is now dead, like Judy, of cancer. And like Gerry.
Being of English origin, I had for some time been noticing the scarcity of WASP English influence or even presence in American music, particularly jazz. Once, over dinner, I said, "Mulligan, you and I must be the only WASPs in the music business."
And, laughing, he said, "Speak for yourself, I'm an Irish Catholic."
Because he was not actively so, I asked him if he felt himself to be Catholic. He thought for a minute and said, "No. But I do feel Irish."
All this led to a series of observations on the ethnic origins of the Europeans in American jazz and popular music. Irish, Scottish, Welsh, yes; Polish, German, Jewish, Russian, just about any nationality you could mention. But very few English. Even those who bore "English" names, such as Joe Farrell, Louis Bellson, Eddie Lang, Will Bradley, and Glen Gray, had changed them to escape the prejudices of America.
It was during one such discussion that Gerry and I discovered we had arrived independently at the same conclusion: white American jazz musicians tend to reflect their ethnic origins in the style of their playing. And although this is not a universal verity, it often will be found to be true. Gerry told me that once, when he and Judy were listening to Zoot Sims, who was Irish, she said, "There he goes again - playing that Barry Fitzgerald tenor." And she imitated Fitzgerald's laughter, Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha, on a falling melodic line. It is a remarkably perceptive insight. But, even more to the point, listening to Gerry on a taped interview, I once heard him say something with the exact, momentarily falsetto, inflection of Barry Fitzgerald. And one part of Gerry's family came to America nearly a 150 years ago.
But speech patterns persist for long, long periods, and the accent of Normandy still echoes the speech of the Viking conquerors who settled there 1,000 years ago, and is in turn the source of the French Canadian accent. Perhaps the speech of Marseille descends from the Phoenicians. You will hear subtly Swedish inflections in Minnesota, even in those whose people have been there a long time.
I hear, I am certain, an Irish quality in Mulligan's playing and writing. It couples whimsy with melancholy, sadness with exuberance, it is at once lyrical and witty, and it is above all eloquent. I find that all very Irish.
In his last years Gerry led a quartet with piano. He continued to write for all manner of formations, including full symphony orchestra. An album on the Par label called Symphonic Dreams was recorded in 1987 by the Houston Symphony under Erich Kunzel. One of my favorite of Gerry's albums is The Age of Steam on the A&M label. Like the late Glenn Gould, Gerry had a fascination with trains. His Christmas cards usually showed one of the big old steam trains, often in a winter setting.
Proust points out somewhere in Swann's Way that fictional characters are transparent while the persons we know in life are opaque. Even those we know well are mysteries. We are mysteries even to ourselves.
So who was Gerry Mulligan? Where did he come from? Why did he love the old trains?
After 1969, Gerry and I never lived in the same city. I moved to Toronto for a few years, then to California. Once he came up to Toronto for a few days, and we did a television show together. We always stayed in touch. On my way to Paris, with a stopover at Kennedy airport, I called him from a phone booth. The conversation lasted an hour; it was mostly about Irish history.
An aristocratic Italian photojournalist named FrancaRota was assigned to cover him on a 1972 recording date in Milan: that's where they met. After their marriage, they lived in a house in Connecticut and an apartment in Milan, not far from the great cathedral and from the castle of the Sforzas, now a museum. I had lunch with them in Milan in 1984. By now Gerry did not smoke or drink. He never was a heavy eater, but his diet had become disciplined to the point of the Spartan. He told me I shouldn't use salt.
In the spring of 1994, we found ourselves on a jazz cruise of the Caribbean, with time for conversation, a little as in the Jim and Andy's days of memory. I asked him about things we had never discussed, in particular his family. I was aware that his relations with his father had been somewhat uncomfortable. It will usually be found that a gifted musician was encouraged by a parent or both parents, but not Gerry.
He was the youngest of four boys, in order: George, Phil, Ron, Gerry. All three of his brothers became, like their father, engineers, and Gerry's father wanted him to be one.
"Don't you think that's affected your work?" I said, thinking of the sense of design in all Gerry's writing and playing.
"Some of the attitude of the builder, the constructor, I suppose," he said.
"What did he do exactly? I asked.
Gerry said, "By the time my father was mature, they had started to use engineering to improve efficiency and practices in factories. It was the beginning of the time-study period. The pejorative term for what my father did was 'efficiency expert'. Of course, the companies hated to see people like that coming because they knew they were going to have to work hard. And it meant that a lot of people were going to lose their jobs because they streamlined the procedures. So he was schooled in all sorts of engineering.
"I remember when I was in high school in Detroit, he put himself through night school in aeronautical engineering, just to increase his own abilities. But he had his peculiarities. He had this image of having an engineering business with his sons. Dynasty time. My brothers fought that battle pretty well. My oldest brother didn't want to go to engineering school, and my father was only going to send him to school if he studied engineering. And I think he finally knuckled under and went and was very unhappy in engineering. The brother after him liked it, so it was all right.
"My father had a kind of strange attitude. I have realized in recent years, he was kind of anti-education and anti-intellectual. It was too bad, because he missed a lot of things. At the point where I started to be in contact with other musicians, especially the people with education, which I didn't have have never had - I heard Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe. My father's response was, 'Ravel only ever wrote one piece, and that was the Bolero.' Well you realize you can't have much conversation with people who think like that."
"There's a similarity here," I said. "My father had the same anti-intellectual attitude. He once said, 'An intellectual is like a man in a white suit who can't change a tire."'
Gerry mused on that for a moment, then laughed - he liked to laugh, often a short sardonic chuckle, and there was a kind of effervescence in his voice and said, "If I'd been smarter when I was young, and my father had come right out and said that to me, I'd have said, 'Yeah, well I want to be the man in the white suit. Let somebody else change the tire!"' And he laughed again.
I remembered the Gerry Mulligan wind-up doll Bob Brookmeyer invented. You wind it up, put it on the table, and it sends for room service. Gerry later amended that, satirizing himself: "Hello, room service? Send up the concert."
"What was your father's name?" I asked. "And where did the family come from?"
"His name was George. His family was from Wilmington, Delaware. His family must have come over here from Ireland in, probably, the 1850s or thereabouts. My mother was half Irish. Her mother was born in Germany, and her father's family was Protestant Irish. So I came along with a built-in dichotomy.
"I was born in New York, but before I was 1, my father picked up the family and moved to Marion, Ohio, where he became an executive with a company called the Marion Steam Shovel Company: the biggest business in town, a big, big, big factory. To this day, you'll see older equipment with that name on it. And then he was with another company that made Hercules road rollers and stuff like that. So we were out there until I was 10 years old and in about fourth grade." Laughing, he added: "So I always say I did 1 to 10 in Ohio.
"After that he went with a big company, May Consulting Engineers, still one of the biggest, based in Chicago. He did a lot of jobs for them. And because all these jobs would take a year or two, we wound up going with him. From Ohio he went to a job in Puerto Rico for a winter.
"Meanwhile, my grandfather, who was a retired locomotive engineer from the Pennsylvania Railroad, had died. He and my grandmother lived in South Jersey. So we went there for a while.
"My father then went to Chicago. We were there for one school year. I started to go down the garden path, because what was available there was four theaters that had big bands playing. I was old enough to get on the El and go downtown. We lived at 4200 North, nearSheridan Road. Not far from the lake. I went to the grade school whose claim to fame is that Joyce Kilmer and Janet Gaynor went there. I spent my time learning how to run fast. I was the country bumpkin. I guess it was the beginning of various kinds of ethnic warfare. The kids were ganging up on other kids, and I guess I looked like a likely subject, because they'd chase me and beat the hell out of me if they could.
"Then my father went to a job in Kalamazoo, Michigan: we were there for about three years. That's where I first got some training on an instrument, barring the one semester in second grade in grade school that had piano lessons. At the recital, I would get halfway through a piece and forget it. About the second time I started over they came and took me offstage, like amateur night at the Apollo. And the nun told my mother, 'Just save your money. He will never play these things the way they were written! A nun had said it to my mother, therefore it must be the truth.
"In Kalamazoo, I wanted to take trumpet but I got side-tracked onto clarinet. I liked clarinet, because I liked Artie Shaw a lot, and I liked the Thornhill band, with Irving Fazola. I loved the sound of Irving Fazola, and one thing led to another. I wrote my first arrangement in Kalamazoo.
"I went to a public school the first year in Kalamazoo. There was a kid who lived across the street who could play trumpet. He could play things like "Carnival of Venice" and "Flight of the Bumble Bee." I was the most envious kid you ever saw. I admired him and we were best friends.
"The next year they sent me downtown to the Catholic school. The school was right next to the Michigan Central tracks. Every day I'd go out for the recess just as the Wolverine was going by. I used to see the people sitting in the dining car, with the white tablecloths and the silverware. The Wolverine was a very classy train on the New York Central. For a long time the Wolverine had the fastest schedule of any train in the country. Those were the Michigan Central tracks, but the Michigan Central was part of the New York Central. A great train, going by. And here I am in this filthy play-yard in the freezing cold. I was envious then, too."
"Does that explain your fascination with trains?" I asked.
"Well it runs in the family. My father's family had been with the B&O and the C&O, and on my mother's side, her father was a locomotive engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Irish built a lot of the railroads in this country. So I came by it naturally.
"The next year, they put up a new building and the school moved over there. They decided they were going to have their first school orchestra. They got a teacher and everything, and I learned the basics of the clarinet, and now we had an instrumentation not to be believed: probably a trumpet, a clarinet, two violins, and God knows what. An ungodly conglomeration. So I sat down and wrote an arrangement of "Lover," because I was fascinated by the chromatic progressions. I brought it in to play, and like a damn fool I put the title "Lover" on the top of it. The nun took one look at it and said, 'We can't play that.' So I never heard my first chart.
"But what's more interesting is what prompted me to write an arrangement in the first place. I don't know the answer: I just wanted to do it. I figured I could do it. I'd figured out how to make a transposition chart. I had one of those charts that you put behind the piano keys when you're a kid starting out. I guess I was in about the seventh grade at the time. A lot of us who were arrangers, there was always a kind of fraternity among arrangers, because of the recognition of the similarities. There are things that you know how to do and don't know how you know. I knew the basics of orchestration without having to be told."
"Could you, in grade seven, actually listen to a record and hear the chord content?"
"A lot of it, sure. The thing that I liked about the bands was the textures. I always was hooked on that. What you do with a single instrument is nice. What you do with a whole bunch of instruments becomes an interesting challenge to make it all add up to something cohesive. And to turn this thing that deals with a lot of mechanics into music is a miracle.
"If somebody had said, 'You can't do it, it might have stopped me. But nobody did."
"Let me get this straight," I said. "As a kid in grade seven, you could simply hear the contents of arrangements on records, hear the voices, without lessons?"
"Yeah.,,
"To me, that's weird. Henry Mancini was the same. He could just hear it. He told me, and Horace Silver did the same thing, that he'd play records at slow speeds until he could figure out what was in the chords."
"I wasn't that smart," Gerry said. "I did it the hard way."
"Your parents were not musical?"
"My mother and father were both born in the '90s. So they were in their twenties and thirties in the '20s and '30s of this century. And they both learned enough piano to be able to play.
"My father could read, but he read like an engineer. He could sit down and play a piece of music, but he'd miss all the accidentals, play lots of wrong notes, and just go happily along. But my mother played very nicely. She liked pretty music."
"Obviously you left Kalamazoo eventually," I said.
"We went from Kalamazoo to Detroit. There wasn't music proliferating in the schools. There was no such thing as jazz courses. And no such thing, really, as available lessons on an instrument. Music was a very separate and separated thing.
"But there was music around. Detroit is where I got totally hooked on boogie-woogie piano players. I loved Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson and Pinetop, that whole era. It was such a joyful, funny, dynamic music. In Detroit we had at least one thing: the Michigan Theater played bands. That's one of the days I can pinpoint accurately: I know where I was on the seventh December, 1941. It was Sunday and I was at the Michigan Theater to hear Erskine Hawkins. I loved that band.
"I didn't realize it then, but Erskine liked a very thin sound. And apparently he liked guys in the section to have that sound. As a consequence, when they played even reasonably high, it sounded exciting: it sounded piercing. A high C with a thin sound really sounds high. Then later on, I wrote things for bands with guys with incredible chops; they could play a high C that was so fat that it didn't sound high. They had to go up to an altissimo G or something before it really started to sound piercing. It finally dawned on me that a fat sound on trumpet somehow diminished the impact of the highness of the note. Took all the excitement away. Erskine's band had a crackling excitement, and mainly because the trumpet players had a thin sound: it was great.
"From Detroit we went to Reading, Pennsylvania. My father was working for a company that made an alloy of beryllium and copper. It was valuable because it's non-sparking and they can make tools for working around refineries or any place where sparks are dangerous. It's also unaffected by altitude or temperature. When I finally got a saxophone and clarinet, I wanted him to make me a set of springs, because that alloy never wears out, but he never did.
"I worked at that plant one summer as the mailboy. I saved my money and bought my first clarinet. I went to a teacher at the music store where I bought it and went through the exercises with the books. Sammy Correnti: a wonderful man. Sammy also transcribed a lot of the players he had known in the '20s and '30s.
"One day after I'd been taking lessons with Sammy for a while, he brought in an arrangement he had written in the early '30s on a piece called "Dark Eyes," written for three brass, three saxes, and three rhythm - two altos and a tenor, two trumpets and a bone. He said, 'Here, take this revoice it for four brass and four saxes.' I did. His attitude was, 'You can do this, so do it.' It wasn't 'You can't do it.'
"We had these things to learn, jazz choruses. I learned Artie Shaw's' Concerto for Clarinet' solo and his solo on 'Stardust."'
"Just about every reed player I ever met learned that 'Stardust' solo," I said. "Billy Mitchell told me he could still play it. Did you start working while you were in Reading?"
"Yeah. I started working professionally in Reading. I put together a quartet in high school. My brothers had a good time driving us around to our gigs, because all of us in my group were too young to drive. I was back there a few years ago. I went out to the church where we used to play for dances.
"But I wanted to have a big band. So I started collecting stock arrangements. Then they used to do manuscript charts of various bands. I had things from Les Brown's band, from this band and that band. We used to get gigs. I'd get these guys together and rehearse. Then it would be a mad thing. The band would be playing from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. in a gymnasium some place, and my brothers would be racing back and forth. This guy could make it from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., then they'd have to pick up his replacement.
"In Reading there was a piano player named Dave Stevens, who played with one of the studio bands in Philadelphia. I was a sophomore in high school, but I was playing with the professionals in town.
"Pennsylvania was a blue-law state, which meant that no entertainment was allowed on Sundays: no movies, no stage shows, no nothing. But it was all legal in private clubs, so private clubs proliferated all over Pennsylvania, which meant that there was work for musicians in Pennsylvania when work was dying out everywhere. I remember we played the Fifth Ward Democratic, the Third Ward Republican, the Polish American, the Irish American. Name it, all the ethnic groups in town, the labor unions, and they all had their own clubs and each one of them would hire a band, and a couple of them even had big bands. The Eagles had a thirteen- or fourteen-piece band. That was the most desirable one in town. I used to play in the band at the Orioles. These were good musicians I played with: I was very lucky."
I said, "Well this bears on what Bill Challis told me. He said that in the'20s, around Wilkes Barre, the musicians played dances in clubs. The coal barons had their clubs, the miners had their clubs, and the miners loved to dance. And when you think of all the musicians who came out of Pennsylvania, all the guys who came out of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the Dorsey brothers, Benny Golson, Henry Mancini, Billy Strayhorn, Red Rodney, it's a remarkable list."
"That may well have been a factor," Gerry said. "The blue laws and the clubs. Not only that, after the war, when work started to fall off for musicians, there still was that outlet in Pennsylvania for professional musicians."
I said, "Artie Shaw told me that in the heyday of the bands, you could play a solid month of one-nighters in Pennsylvania."
"Hmm. Well, those are all things that are impossible for people nowadays to understand. How many bands there were. There really was a lot of music available."
"What came after Reading?"
"From Reading, we moved to Philadelphia, and I found myself in WestPhiladelphiaCatholicHigh School for Boys. About 2,000 boys, and no girls. That was the first time I had encountered that, and I hated it. Especially because down the street two blocks was the girls' school, and they started rehearsing their symphony orchestra in October for a concert in April. Envy again. There was no music in the school I was in.
"Dave Stevens of Reading had told me to go down to see Johnny Warrington, who had the house band at radio station WCAU. I took myself down to WCAU and saw Johnny. Now I think what kind of bemusement it must have fostered in him, to have this junior high-school kid come in and say, 'I want to write for your band.'
"And sure enough, he assigned a piece to me and said, 'Make me an arrangement of this. It will be for our Saturday night show.' I took the piece and spent a couple of weeks writing the arrangement. I brought it back. He went over it with me and he said, 'Well, let's see, you could have done this, you could have done that. Why didn't you do that here? Take it back and rewrite it and bring it back.' So I'd lucked into a teacher, somebody who helped. And he bought it and played it and assigned me something else.
"But the way that I got it written was even wilder. I really hated the school. There were a couple of teachers I liked and a couple of subjects that were fascinating. I had looked forward to chemistry as being probably an interesting subject, because you had laboratory work and it would be fun doing experiments. I had a teacher who ruined it for me. He spoke in a monotone, and he was a very dull man, and I remembered nothing.
"The school was taught by Christian brothers. Brother Martin was in charge of the band. When I transferred into this school and talked to Brother Martin, he never even asked me or even suggested that I play with the marching band. He explained that the marching band was not very good. The guys only went out for the band to get a letter and go to the ball games free. He said, 'The facilities are here. Any time you want to use the band room, it's yours.'
"Because it was such a big school, we had staggered lunch breaks. There were four lunch breaks. I had one of my own and three others. I started a band out of what I could get out of this marching band. I would have one of them come to my class and say, 'Brother Martin wants Gerry Mulligan in the band room.' So I would spend three out of the four lunch breaks in the band room, writing my chart for WCAU."
I said, "People forget that aside from the radio networks, which not only used to broadcast the big bands but had symphony orchestras on staff, even local radio stations employed bands, and pianists, and small groups. They generated their own music. They didn't just play records, as they do now. Radio was a tremendous generative force for music."
"Oh yeah. And given the opportunity, bands in all kinds of work tried to do their best. That's not to say all bands were good. There were a lot of sloppy bands around. But the best of them, which was a lot of them, were always trying to make music better. We always felt we could learn something, try something. So it was a good time for bands, all through the '30s and '40s.
"This brings up one of the areas where musicians got into a wrongful kind of relationship to the rest of the society, because of the attitude of the musicians' union. The union started in Chicago, and it was very much like a gangster organization, the way it went about doing things. For instance, their attitude in a town like Philadelphia. They would go into a radio station like WCAU and say, 'How many musicians do you employ?' The station might say something like, 'We employ ten.' And the union would say, 'All right, from now on you employ thirteen. How much are you paying them?' And the station might say, 'We're paying 75 dollars a week.' And the union might say, 'From now on you're paying 100.' It was done without discussion, it was: This is the way it's going to be or we'll pull the music out altogether.
"You'd be surprised how many radio stations said, 'Well, screw it.' And they got rid of the musicians. Those kinds of practices, I think, did musicians a great disservice. It made an antagonistic relationship that was harmful and wrong. And of course Petrillo, who was very much a dictatorial type, arbitrarily, against the advice of many people in the union, including the bandleaders, pulled the recording ban. That was the coup de grace for the big bands. Of all the times when he pulled it, when the guys were coming back from the service and needed all the help they could get!"
"But you still had WCAU and Johnny Warrington," I said. "Were you still in high school?"
"Yeah. In fact, at the school, I decided to put a band together. There were a lot of clarinet players in the marching band. There was only one kid who had a saxophone. I went and bought an alto so I would have at least two saxophones. We had a bunch of trumpets and we had one kid who played decent trombone. I wrote arrangements for the band, using this instrumentation. It came out sounding like Glenn Miller, because it was heavy on the clarinets. But because of that, I made something happen in the school, and we became the heroes that year, playing at various schools, playing at their assemblies. We even went down and played at the girls' school. So I suppose the girls' school was envious that we had a dance band and they only had a symphony orchestra.
"I went into the senior year. Chemistry had been destroyed for me, and I was bored to tears by the rest of the school. In senior year they had physics. They had lecture classes: it was like college - you're a big kid now. I go into the lecture room for the first thing on physics, and who have I got? The same guy who ruined chemistry for me. My mind did a trick on me that day, and I realized it started this at other times and it frightened me. Have you ever forgotten how to do something automatic, like tying your shoes or tying your tie? I watched this man. His lips were moving but I forgot what words meant. I totally lost the connection with language. I got up at the end of the class and went down to the office of the school and said, 'I'm leaving school. I have my father's permission. I'm going on the road with a band.'
"I didn't have a job and I didn't have my father's permission. I went to see Brother Martin, who didn't try to talk me into staying. He's one of the people I wish I'd had sense enough to keep contact with. He must have been a remarkable man. He didn't do any of the judgmental things that all the other grown-ups I remember from childhood did. He really treated me like a human being with the intelligence to try find my own way and as someone determined to find my own way.
"I went home and told my family what I was doing. My father didn't put up a big argument because, I think, he had lost his taste for trying to direct us. And obviously I was so far removed from his ideal of engineer that I didn't even warrant consideration.
"I thought unkindly in later years that he was probably relieved: he wouldn't have to think about paying to send me to college of any kind.
"I really would have liked to go to music school, but I never even broached the subject with him. I knew it was out of the question. That's what I mean by anti-intellectualism. I don't understand having that kind of an attitude toward your own kid. I never was that way with my own son, and can't be that way with young people."
(Gerry had one child, Reed, a son by his first and brief marriage to Arlene Brown, daughter of Lew Brown, of the Henderson-Brown-DeSylva songwriting team.)
He said, "I like to help young people have whatever opportunities there are, in whatever ways I can, without pushing them, without telling them the way Sammy Correnti did with me.
"I was now out of school, with no job to go to. I had to get a job in a hurry so I didn't have to go back to school ignominiously.
"I had met an agent named Jimmy Tyson. He was the agent for Alex Bartha, who had been the bandleader on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City for maybe fifteen years. What I didn't know was that every year he had this desire to take the band on the road and be a name band. I was infected with that! He promised he was going to take me on the road with him. Great! This was the job I thought I had. So I went down to see the agent. Jimmy said, 'Alex has been saying that for years. He's not going to take a band on the road.'
"And I thought, Oh God. I parked myself in the office of Jimmy Tyson's agency and waited for somebody to call up. Every band that came through to play at the Earle Theater, somebody would call up and say, 'I need a trombone player,' or something. And I would hear Jimmy say, 'Do you need a tenor or alto player? I was playing tenor and alto then. And nobody ever did.
"Then Tommy Tucker came to the Earle. Same thing. He didn't need a saxophone player. So Jimmy said, 'Well do you need an arranger? And Tommy Tucker said, 'Send him around, let me talk to him.' So I met Tommy Tucker backstage at the theater. He gave me a try. He signed me to a contract, 100 dollars a week for two jump or three ballad arrangements. Ballads being fewer pages than the jump tunes. Copied: I had to do all the copying."
Mulligan's career detour through the Tommy Tucker band has occasionally raised eyebrows: it seems somewhat incongruous.
The band, whose radio broadcasts began with the signature announcement, "It's Tommy Tucker Time!", was in that group that drew votes in the Down Beat poll's King of Corn category, usually won by Guy Lombardo. To the hip fans of the bands, that is to say those who thought they were hip (or, in those days, hep) there was a sharp division between the "jazz" and "mickey" bands, the latter including such as Blue Barron, Freddy Martin, Sammy Kaye, Russ Morgan, Kay Kyser, Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm, Lawrence Welk, and Wayne King. But to the professionals, the demarcation was not that sharp. I know saxophone players who thought Freddy Martin was a fine tenor player, and Benny Carter told me that one of his favorite saxophone players was Wayne King, not because what King did was jazz but because it was excellent saxophone playing.
Mulligan too has this breadth of view, and I was always baffled by his stated admiration for the Guy Lombardo band, which he shared with Louis Armstrong. I was baffled, that is, until I actually saw the band in the 1970s and got to know Guy late in his life. I realized with a start, after only a tune or two from the band in person, that what I was hearing was a museum piece: an authentic, unchanged, perfectly preserved 1920s tuba-bass dance band. And it did what it did extremely well. It was, as Gerry had always insisted, a damned good band.
Many of the "mickey" - meaning Mickey Mouse - bands contained excellent musicians, and some of them, including the bands of Kay Kyser and Sammy Kaye, could play creditable swing on occasion. Some excellent arrangers cut their professional teeth in those bands. George Duning, for example, wrote for Kay Kyser. And for a short time, Gerry Mulligan wrote for Tommy Tucker.
Gerry said, "That was my first experience on the road with a name band as an arranger. That was 1945, I guess, and that would make me 17 going on 18. It was the last year of the war. We traveled by cars. When we hit a town, I would be out of the car like a shot and into the hotel. Is there a room with a piano? It was always a search for a piano. And I never managed to make the three ballads or two jumps a week. But I got pretty close, wrote a lot of music for Tommy. It was a three-month contract.
"We did a lot of one-nighters. We did a month or six weeks or something at a big hotel in Chicago. I was a pig in mud. All the bands were coming through. Billy Eckstine's band came to a downtown theater, with Dizzy playing trumpet with him. Earl Hines had a great band. Artie came through and Lena Horne was singing with him.
"My arrangements for Tommy started to get more and more wild, although I think Tommy liked what I did. There's one thing of mine on a Hindsight record, taken from an aircheck. It's called 'Brass Hats.' I used plungers and hats. Years later, when I heard this thing, I fell off my chair, because I had copied Erskine Hawkins' 'AfterHours.' I didn't mean to copy it, but it was very close.
"After the three months, Tommy said, 'It's been very nice, and you've done a lot of good things for the band, but I think you're ready to move on to another band because I think my band is a little too tame for you. I want you to know, Gerry, that if you ever want to go into business or anything like that, I really would be glad to help you - in anything except a band.'
"I never got to see Tommy after he retired, and then I found out a few years ago where he was, because a lot of friends went to Sarasota and saw him. I no sooner found out where he was than I read that he had died. I did call up his widow, a lovely woman. They were great people, and he was good to me.
"That's one thing I was lucky about. The men that I worked for were such nice people: Tommy Tucker, Gene Krupa, Claude Thornhill, Elliot Lawrence.
"After I left Tommy, I went back to Philadelphia. Johnny Warrington was no longer at WCAU. Elliot Lawrence had taken over. Elliot had been kind of a child star in Philadelphia. He had been the bandleader on the Horn and Hardart kiddies' hour. He kind of grew into the bandleader job."
And Mulligan began to write for Elliot Lawrence. In the 1950s, some of the writing he did for Lawrence was re-recorded in an album for Fantasy.
"It was all right," Gerry said of that album. "But it wasn't as good as some of the performances the band did at the time. Once, at a rehearsal, they played some of my music so perfectly that it made my hair stand on end. There was a unison trombone passage. The Swope brothers were in the trombone section. The section sounded like one trombone, the unison was so perfect."
Gerry was born on 6 April 1927. Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong had not yet made their pioneering records. The Duke Ellington band would not open at the Cotton Club for another eight months. Though the Paul Whiteman band was immensely popular, the so-called big-band era had not dawned. Benny Goodman was still with Ben Pollack. The Casa Loma Orchestra would not make its first recording for another two years. And network radio had just come into being. Some people still owned crystal radios.
Like Gerry, I grew up, ear to the radio, on the sounds of the big bands in the 1930s. Network radio was an incredible cultural force, presenting - live, not on records - music of immense cultural diversity, almost every kind of music that America produced, and making it popular. Network radio made Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman famous and, a little later, Glenn Miller. It made Arturo Toscaninii and James Melton household names. On Saturday afternoons, the broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera could be heard everywhere from the Mexican border to the northern reaches of Canada.
How long jazz has been with us depends on how you define jazz. If you refer to Buddy Bolden's music, which you have never heard (nor has anyone else) or Scott Joplin's rags, as jazz, then it begins early in the century. Others would call this earlier music proto-jazz. But jazz begins at least by the late teen years of the twentieth century. If you define it even more strictly as the art of the great, improvising soloist, then it begins in the 1920s, and its principal founding figure is Louis Armstrong. As Dizzy Gillespie said of Armstrong, "No him, no me."
So if you accept Armstrong as the defining figure, then jazz was, as Bud Freeman used to argue, born in Chicago in the 1920s. Gerry Mulligan was born with jazz, just before the big-band era.
The big-band era lasted roughly ten years, from 1936 to 1946, when the major orchestras began to disband. If you want to push it back to the 1920s, with Whiteman, Goldkette, and early Ellington, then it is longer. And its influence persists, with the fundamental format of trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and rhythm section still in use. The evolution of that instrumentation is like that of the string quartet or the symphony orchestra: it works, and will live on. But as a vital part of America's commercial entertainment, the era has long since ended.
It was an era, as Woody Herman used to say, when "jazz was the popular music of the land."
Many years ago, Gerry said to me that the wartime gasoline tax had helped kill the big bands. And a thought occurred to me: I said, "Wait a minute, Gerry, the kids who supported the bands didn't have cars, and since they weren't making them during the war, our fathers certainly were not inclined to lend theirs." And it was precisely during the war years that the bands were most successful, even though many of the best musicians were in the armed forces. The dance pavilions and ballrooms were packed during those years with teenagers and uniformed servicemen and their girlfriends.
How did we get to the ballrooms and dance pavilions? On street railways and the inter-urban trolleys. And the street railways and trolley lines were bought up and dismantled by business elements whose purpose was to drive the public into automobiles and buses: this helped kill the ballrooms.
And network radio was dying as the broadcasting industry discovered how awesomely lucrative television advertising could be, and to the purpose of attracting ever larger audiences began seeking the lowest common denominator of public taste.
When the big-band era ended and the musicians went into nightclubs to play in small groups, their admirers followed them, for they were now over 21 and could go to places where liquor was served. But a younger audience could not follow them. A few nightclubs tried to solve the problem. Birdland had a bleachers section where young people could sit without drinking liquor. But this was at best a Band-aid, if you'll pardon the pun, and knowing the names of the musicians was no longer an "in" thing for young people. They were turning at first to "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window" and "Tennessee Waltz," then to "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Hound Dog." The Beatles were coming.
The exposure of jazz to a new, young audience was restricted. Thus you will find that by far the largest part of its audience today comprises older people. There are some young admirers, to be sure, and they always give one hope. But the music is hard to find; they must seek it out. It is no longer common in the culture. It is not on the radio in most areas. And fewer and fewer radio stations are presenting jazz. When I met Gerry Mulligan in 1960, he was only 33 years old. I know lists are boring, but I would ask you to read this one: Pepper Adams, Nat and Cannonball Adderley, Gene Ammons, Benny Bailey, Dave Bailey, Chet Baker, Kenny Barron, Keter Betts, Ruby Braff, Bob Brookmeyer, Ray Brown, Ray Bryant, Monty Budwig, Larry Bunker, Kenny Burrell, Frank Butler, Donald Byrd, Conte Candoli, Frank Capp, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers, Sonny Clark, Jimmy Cleveland, Jimmy Cobb, Al Cohn, John Coltrane, junior Cook, Bob Cranshaw, Bill Crow, Kenny Davern, Arthur Davis, Miles Davis, Richard Davis, Alan Dawson, Willie Dennis, Gene DiNovi, Eric Dolphy, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Drew, Allen Eager, Jon Eardley, Don Ellis, Booker Ervin, Bill Evans, Art and Addison Farmer, Joe Farrell, Victor Feldman, Maynard Ferguson, Clare Fischer, Tommy Flanagan, Bob Florence, Chuck Flores, Med Flory, Carl Fontana, Vernel Fournier, Russ Freeman, Dave Frishberg, Curtis Fuller, Stan Getz, Benny Golson, Urbie Green, Gigi Gryce, Jim Hall, Slide Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Jake Hanna, Roland Hanna, Barry Harris, Hampton Hawes, Louis Hayes, Jimmy and Tootie Heath, Billy Higgins, Bill Holman, Paul Horn, Freddie Hubbard, Dick Hyman, Frank Isola, Chuck Israels, Ahmad Jamal, Clifford Jordan, Richie Kamuca, Connie Kay, Wynton Kelly, Charlie Kennedy, Jimmy Knepper, Lee Konitz, Teddy Kotick, Steve Kuhn, Steve Lacy, Scott LaFaro, Pete La Roca, Lou Levy, Mel Lewis, Melba Liston, Booker Little, Dave McKenna, Jackie McLean, Mike Mainieri, junior Mance, Johnny Mandel, Herbie Mann, Warne Marsh, Don Menza, Jymie Merritt, Billy Mitchell, Blue Mitchell, Dwike Mitchell, Grover Mitchell, Red Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Grachan Moncour, J. R. Monterose, Buddy Montgomery, Jack Montrose, Joe Morello, Lee Morgan, Sam Most, Paul Motian, Dick Nash, Oliver Nelson, Jack Nimitz, Sal Nistico, Marty Paich, Horace Parlan, Sonny Payne, Gary Peacock, Duke Pearson, Ralpha Pena, Art Pepper, Walter Perkins, Charlie Persip, Oscar Peterson, Nat Pierce, Al Porcino, Bill Potts, Benny Powell, Seldon Powell, Andr6 Previn, Joe Puma, Gene Quill, Jimmy Raney, Frank Rehak, Dannie Richmond, Larry Ridley, Ben Riley, Red Rodney, Mickey Roker, Sonny Rollins, Frank Rosolino, Roswell Rudd, Willie Ruff, Bill Russo, Don Sebesky, Bud Shank, Jack Sheldon, Sahib Shihab, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Andy Simpkins, Zoot Sims, Jack Six, Jimmy Smith, Victor Sproles, Alvin Stoller, Frank Strazzeri, Ira Sullivan, Grady Tate, Arthur Taylor, Toots Thielemans, Edmund Thigpen, Bobby Timmons, Cal Tjader, Ross Tompkins, Cy Touff, Nick Travis, Stanley Turrentine, McCoy Tyner, Leroy Vinnegar, Cedar Walton, Wilbur Ware, Randy Weston, Bob Wilber, Phil Wilson, Jimmy Woode, Phil Woods, Reggie Workman, Eugene Wright, and Leo Wright. What do they have in common? They were all actively performing in the United States in 1960, the year I met Gerry. And they were all under the age of 35. And that is by no means a complete list.
Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, Terry Gibbs, Sarah Vaughan, Paul Desmond, and Shorty Rogers were 36, and other major figures, such as Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, and John Lewis were under 40. Indeed, if you add to the list all those under 40 who were at the peak of their powers, factor in all those who were not well known to a national public, such as Gene Allen, Wayne Andre, and Phil Bodner, all the excellent jazz players of Chicago, such as Jodie Christian, Eddie Higgins, and Larry Novak, whose names have never made it into the encyclopedias, and then remember that almost all the pioneering and founding figures, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Don Redman, Benny Carter, and Earl Hines, as well as such lesser figures as Frank Signorelli, were alive, you see that the depth of jazz in the United States in that year was astounding. The problem is that we took it for granted, and looked on genius as a commonplace.
By comparison, the current jazz revival is very shallow indeed and merely imitative. This is not to say that there are no excellent young players. But none of these figures is original, and whereas the Ellington music was a constant adventure in innovation and the bands of the 1940s were ceaselessly pushing into the future, all that is now embalmed in jazz repertory programs that concentrate on the music and styles of the past. The jazz of the past has become, truly, a classical music, disinterred from its original context.
You start to wonder if jazz has at last run its creative course, as Oscar Peterson a few years ago predicted it soon would. Not that the new reconstituted food doesn't contain nourishment for a younger audience that is just now discovering jazz. But it hasn't much savor to those who grew up in its great age of innovation and remember its unmistakable individualists. And Gerry Mulligan lived through almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should be understood. [Emphasis, mine.]
To jazz musicians, of course, the question "Where is jazz going?" has always been anathema. But a new question arises: "Where has jazz gone?" I put it to Gerry. He replied: "Where jazz has gone relates to where the country has gone. It's pretty hard to separate the progress of one without taking the other into consideration.
"There are a number of things going on in our society that we wonder how they're going to turn out. We have no way of knowing what the effects are because we've become a society of guinea-pigs, trying out new technologies. We've had a whole century of it, and God knows where we are. A rather precarious psychic state. By that I mean the numbers of things that have changed, not just in the ways people live but in the ways their minds work.
"I've been conscious of it lately because, doing university level courses of jazz history, I've found it's very hard to get people to imagine the world that musicians inhabited in 1910 as compared to now. It's hard for people to imagine how different everyone's life was, how life must have been before there was artificial music being thrown at them from every side. All along the way, there were the good and bad accumulations of the various technologies and the industries that grew out of them and the effects that they've had. Many of the effects of the phonograph record and radio were the very elements that made jazz develop the way it did; they probably were responsible for making it into an art form and not just being forgotten as an offshoot of popular music, something of a passing character.
"There were, even early in the century, statements that jazz was immoral and would lead to the breakdown of society as we know it." He laughed. "Listen, with the outcome we see, the state of our popular music, they may well have been right.
"However, I make a big distinction between what jazz was and is and what's going on in popular music.
"At this end of the game, where big business is involved with exploiting
whatever available audiences there are - and you usually start with the kids now - they've affected people's thinking about what music is, what music should do, how music should be used, and what music sounds like. So, unless you take the one into consideration, you can't figure out the other.
"Sometimes, of course, I wonder if it's just the usual generational sour grapes. A young generation comes along and they tend to put down what you're doing. You look at 'em with a kind of jaundiced eye and say, 'Well, young whipper-snappers, in my day they said jazz was an immoral music and now they're saying it about rock.' After you examine that, one has to carry through to what has happened to the content and the intent of popular music. Two elements come to mind. One is the music itself, which, a great deal of the time, as you know if you ever see MTV, is calculated as a destructive force, breaking down the good old enemies, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, and all of those causes of all our troubles. It's a music that's based on raw emotion, or at least the illusion of raw emotion. This is very prevalent in that music, easy ecstasy. There's the matter of volume: if you do it loud enough it sounds like you're having fun. And distortion. The day that somebody discovered the intensity that happens to the sound of a guitar when you over amplify it, they created a new world of easy access to excitement. You don't have to work for it, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to develop a craft, man. It's there, it's built into the vacuum tubes and the transistors. The equipment.
"Then there is the actual content of the words. We see a couple of generations that have grown up on a dissatisfaction, a disaffection, with the society that produced them. You only have to watch sitcoms to realize that the parents are always bumbling idiots and the children are all smart-talking, wise-cracking little bastards. So we've got an odd view of what our culture is and should be. These forces don't give a damn. The people who are exploiting our kids don't care about the effect. In fact they'll fight to the death to prove to you that violence on television doesn't have anything to do with violence in the streets.
"If people are so busy convincing themselves of nonsense like that, how can you persuade them to assume responsibility for anything? This has become the key to our time. It's always: 'It's not my fault.' We have become a nation of victims. It's always somebody else's damn fault. This is what has led to all this political correctness crap. You mustn't hurt anybody's feelings! Bullshit, man. What has that got to do with the real world?"
"The television people," I said, "try to convince you that their commercials can alter public behavior by selling products, but the entertainment part of their programming can't. It's a contradiction in their position. It's nonsense."
"Well," Gerry said, "there's a lot of the texture of our social structure that is just as contradictory. This is why you can't say what is going to happen to jazz without observing the society that produces it.
"There are a couple of things that have come out of the educational things I have done. I've been very interested to learn how it appears to other people, usually younger than I am. People come to some of these college classes because they want to go to school or they're interested in the subject. But a lot of it has to do with students who are looking for an easy credit." He laughed.
"It's fascinating to see how people react to their own time, to see how aware they are that they're being ripped off, to see whether anything can be done about it, or to contemplate the future. There is a lot of questioning about where we're going. We see immense changes going on in the United States and don't know what to make of it all.
"One thing I do know: in the States, people are terribly insular. jazz musicians, a lot of us, travel around the world a lot, so we see a great deal more of the world than the average Statesider. We come home and realize that people have a very, very unrealistic view of the world. We're politically awfully naive, and we are being manipulated at all points by the press and various other special-interest groups. It's an oddity. I don't know whether to worry about the suppression and repression from the right or the left or whether just to accept them both as the enemy equally and try to protect my niche in the middle. Because I know that I am the enemy. Anyone who walks the middle ground is gonna have very strong enmity from both sides."
I mentioned that Nat Hentoff had written a new book whose subtitle is: "How the left and the right relentlessly censor each other."
Gerry said, "That's interesting that a writer like Nat should arrive at that, because when he was first writing, he was very much a writer of the left. My feeling was always: I don't care what color the uniform is and I don't care whether your ideology is leftist or rightist, man, when you come around and tell me what I can and can't do, it amounts to the same thing. I don't care if you're beating me up in the name of Lenin or Hitler, it hurts with the same kind of bruise."
I said, "I met someone to whom that actually happened, a Hungarian symphony conductor, I can't think of his name. He told me, 'I've had my nose broken twice, once by the Nazis and once by the Communists, and it felt exactly the same both times."'
"Perfect. I sometimes wonder if this is why Americans have dedicated themselves to such sloppy dress. Dress styles today have gotten to the point of grotesque. A lot of these things, it's very hard for me to get a grasp on. You read the expensive magazines and you see the advertisements of the expensive companies. Giorgio Armani, he's got these beautiful young men lying out on the beach - with torn jeans! Wait a minute, man? What are you trying to sell here?"
"Torn jeans," I said.
"Anything to be in!" Gerry said. "It's a peculiar time. But then I wonder what it must have been like to live through some of the strange transition periods of cities or countries. Germany in the '20s must have been an insane place to be. And then in the '30s, the insanity came out of the closet. There have been a lot of times like that, the idiocies. Look at Bosnia. What must it be like for intelligent people to live through this? Or Argentina under the colonels? We've had such insane things happen in the world. And I wonder why. Why? Why do people want to do that to each other?
"The Puritans of New England would meet strangers at the city limits, and if they were Quakers or Catholics, they'd grab them and put them to the stake, because they were heretics. And always with the admonition, 'I'm going to burn you at the stake, but understand, this is for your own good."'
I said, "You've got the same thing with the anti-abortion people on an overpopulated planet, what I call the kill-for-life crowd."
"Absolutely!" Gerry said. "It's taking on the kind of ridiculous stature that one would expect. This is why the whole movement for political correctness is a dangerous thing.
"It is the justification of the suppression of other people's rights and opinions in what appears to them to be a good cause. And I say, 'Whatever reason you burn me at the stake, I'm sorry, the cause is not good enough."'
I said, "We can't talk about jazz alone, I agree. We have to talk about the evolution of the big bands, the movie industry, network radio, which were all interlinked. Bands on radio, bands in the movies, playing songs from Broadway shows. Network radio, which young people today cannot grasp, was a major linking force in the American culture. . .
"Absolutely," Gerry said.
" . . . whereas later, disc jockey radio became a force of destruction."
"Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm talking about. The effect of radio in the early days, when it was still struggling to find its audience and find itself, was good. But the man who invented Top Forty radio. . .
"Todd Storz of New Orleans," I said.
"I'd rather not know his name," Gerry said. "I'd rather think of him as someone anonymous hanging by this thumbs somewhere."
"No, he's probably swinging in a penthouse. Or a mansion."
"It's rather remarkable," Gerry said. "He succeeded in destroying radio and music with one idea."
When I was at Down Beat, I met all the founding figures of jazz, most of whom were still alive. I had conversations with Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, and many more. But Gerry not only knew them all, he recorded with a great many of them. What Gerry and I know of early jazz history comes largely from the people who made it.
I said, "When our generation is gone, there will be no more direct oral links. Future writers will be getting it all from secondary sources, such as newspaper and magazine clippings and previous books, some of the material very unreliable and sometimes downright wrong."
Gerry said: "I remember John Lewis and I walking down55th Street one day. We'd just left Gil Evans' place. John said, 'Gerry, there's one thing you've got to understand. Jazz as you and I know it and love it will die with our generation.' And I of course reacted with indignation, saying, 'How can you say that, John?' He just smiled like the sphinx and said, 'Remember this. We grew up playing with these men. We've had the chance to sit and play with them as professionals, we traveled with them, we know them, and knew how they thought and arrived at it. After we're gone, it will all be hearsay and records."'
I said, "Bill Crow told me once that the older musicians told him that on record sessions in the 1920s, drummers had to back off, because if they played hard, it would jump the cutting needle. So we can't really know how those rhythm sections sounded live."
"Sure," Gerry said. "Because of these lectures I've been giving, I've been doing a lot of listening to old things, in some cases to records I'd never heard before. I've become very conscious of what those drummers were doing. A lot of those dates through the'20s were done with brushes, brushes on a telephone book, anything to make an illusion of propulsion without knocking the needle off track. You seldom could hear the bass, which is mostly, I think, why the guys used tuba or bass saxophone, 'cause they had to be heard."
"Rollini, for one."
"Rollini was already into something else. He was a line player. I didn't remember hearing him. I probably did when I was a kid, because I listened to all those bands on the radio every night, and Rollini played with a couple of bands I remember hearing. But later on I had a record of Red Nichols' band, with Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet, Miff Mole on trombone, Adrian Rollini on bass sax, Joe Sullivan on piano, and I think it was Davey Tough on drums. There were two sides of an old ten-inch that Ion Eardley gave me. He said his father had made a copy for me. And it was 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' The first side starts out as a slow thing, with Joe Sullivan playing it as a kind of a blues piece. And you turn it over and they take it up and make it into a swing piece. And Adrian Rollini plays an entrance to his chorus on it, which knocked me over, because it sounds so much like an entrance of Charlie Parker's on 'Blues for Norman,' recorded on one of the Granz tours." Gerry sang the Parker passage. "It was almost the same phrase that Adrian had played on that record."
"Do you think he might have heard it?"
"That could be, because Bird was all ears when he was a kid."
"He said he hired Chet Baker because his playing reminded him of Bix."
" I loved Louis's comment when he heard Bix. I have to paraphrase. He said they were aiming for the same thing. Which seemed very odd to people, because their styles were so totally different."
I said, "Everybody talks about how pretty Bix played. But he had a real sting on the edge of his tone."
"Oh yeah. But we can only have the impression we get from the records. This is something I was very conscious of, listening to the records he made with Frankie Trumbauer. Those were intricate arrangements. And they were intended to be - highly sophisticated music. And again, they suffered because they had to hold the rhythm section back. So it's likely that those things neither sounded nor felt quite the way they do on the records. Bix's sense of style and form alone were obviously unique. I would love to have heard his sound.
"You know, Bird had an incredible ability to sail through pretty complicated progressions, especially if the progressions were going somewhere not just a sequence of chords, but a true progression. I was listening to some Tatum records the other day and it suddenly dawned on me: I wonder how much time Bird spent listening to Tatum? Because Tatum could do that. He could do the damnedest transitions, and the damnedest alterations. It will make your hair stand on end! And even when he was doing it fast, it was such a remarkable sounding thing.
"Bird had a tremendous amount of facility in a lot of directions. He had so much facility, I've always thought he really didn't know what to do to survive. He didn't know how to be a beginner again. He needed to move on from where he was. It wasn't satisfying enough. And he became more and more frustrated. He loved a lot of different kinds of music. He loved things like Debussy's Children's Corner. Whenever he would come by Gil's place, he would want to listen to some parts of the Children's Corner."
"I was told he loved Prokofiev's Scythian Suite."
"Oh God yes! We were all hooked on the Scythian Suite. It was the Chicago Symphony, and it was a dynamite recording of it. It's a wonderful, dynamic piece. It was a youthful piece of Prokofiev's. There are a few pieces that different composers wrote around the time The Rite of Spring was written, but so much has been said about the outrage caused by The Rite of Spring, this supposedly chaotic music, that people didn't pay much attention to other pieces. And I think the Scythian Suite is one of those. But it's a piece that just swings relentlessly from beginning to end. It has a momentum, a forward propulsion to it, through all the movements, through tempo changes and everything. And that particular recording was very good. I've heard a lot of recordings of it since then, but it's impossible to get that one any more. Every time I see a recording of it, I buy it. But I'm always disappointed. I say,’ That’s the wrong tempo!' One man's opinion."
And he laughed at himself, as he was wont to do.
If some of those in the audience now in its forties, growing jaded with a rock and-roll that has now survived for 40 years - four times as long as the big band era - are discovering jazz and saying "Oh wow!" to young players whose every influence Mulligan and other older jazz musicians can instantly detect, that's all right. Imitative jazz will doubtless continue for some time.
But Gerry's generation lived through an era of innovators, Hines and Tatum and Wilson and Cole and Powell and Evans, Hawkins and Webster and Young, Armstrong and Berigan and James and Dizzy and Miles, Redman and Carter and Sauter and Evans, each with a thumbprint you could not miss. The experienced ear can detect Benny Carter in two bars; no one of the new generation has that kind of individuality.
I try to resist thinking about the 1960s, but sometimes I can't help it, and I remember all the friends Gerry and I have lost, including Zoot and Mel Lewis and Nick Travis and Willie Dennis, all of whom were in Gerry's Concert jazz Band.
When I wrote a piece about the end of the big-band era, which is in my book Singers and the Song, I used a phrase of Johnny Mercer's "Early Autumn" lyric. I called it "Pavilion in the Rain."
This essay, Gerry told me later, caused him to write a tune he called "I Heard theShadows Dancing." Then Nancy Marano told Gerry she wanted to record the tune. Gerry called and asked me to put a lyric on it. And so I did. I remembered seeing abandoned pavilions on beaches and in parks, where the Ferris wheels no longer turned. I used those images in it.
Gerry was even slimmer than in his youth, but he wore a beard, and the strawberry blond hair had gone as white as paper. Did he have regrets? Who doesn't? I daresay he regretted that he and Miles Davis never got to do the tour they had planned to perform the Birth of the Cool music. Miles got sick, precluding it, and Gerry toured without him.
Another regret, apparently, was our abandoned Diamond Jim Brady project. A few years ago I asked if he still had the music. He had lost it. The lyrics? I lost them. The script? Gone.
"We should have finished it," he said on the phone one day.
Other regrets?
"I wish I'd gone to music school."
Then, in early November 1995, Gerry's current quartet went on a jazz cruise of the Caribbean on the SS Norway. For months rumors had been circulating that his health was failing rapidly. I heard he was undergoing chemotherapy in Boston. Gerry would tell me it was for treatment of a liver condition consequent of a case of hepatitis years ago.
Phil Woods was on the cruise, performing in the same week as Gerry's group. Phil and Gerry had had their collisions, both of them being very crusty Irishmen. Gerry once hired and fired Phil on the same evening, and at one point he called Phil an Irish drunk, which infuriated Phil at the time. As Phil said to me on the ship, "Talk about the pot calling the kettle green!" (In recent years, neither of them drank anything at all.) They reconciled, of course, and Phil is on the 1992 Re-birth of the Cool album Gerry did. Phil also said on the ship: "I love Gerry."
Johnny Mandel came along as a passenger, just to hang with his friends, and the week developed into that, a hangout of Mandel, Phil, Gerry, and me. But Gerry was very weak. His skin now had a transparent look: the veins in his hands stood out quite blue. And he was in a wheelchair much of the time, using a cane the rest of it.
There is a theater on that ship that I don't particularly like. It gives me what Woody Herman used to call the clausters. But I could not miss Gerry's performance there. He hobbled on-stage and sat on a stool. And the quartet began to play. It was one of the finest groups Gerry ever led. And it was some of the finest and most inventive playing I ever heard from Gerry in the 36 years of our friendship, not to mention the years long before we met, when his Us were high on the list of my favorite records.
The rapport of the group was amazing, particularly Gerry's telepathic communication with the outstanding pianist Ted Rosenthal. I was in awe of what I heard. It had a compositional integrity beyond anything I have ever heard in jazz. From anyone. I do not know what was going on in Gerry's mind, perhaps the atmospheric awareness of his mortality. It is not that his playing was abandoned, although it certainly was free: it was as if he had a total control of it that he had been seeking all his life. There was one piece that he played in which the byplay with Rosenthal left me with my jaw hanging down. I don't even know its name; one of Gerry's pieces. For certainly he was one of the greatest composers in the history of jazz, as well as its primary baritone soloist. Yes, I have known other baritone players who soloed well; but none of them had Gerry's immense compositional knowledge and instinct. So exquisite was the structure of what he, and bassist Dean Johnson and drummer Ron Vincent did, that, afterwards, I told him, "Gerry, I am not sure that this should any longer be called jazz. It seems to be some kind of new end-of-the-century improvised classical music." Franca told me later that he quoted that with pleasure several times.
There were to be two performances by the group that evening. Leaving the theater, I ran into Phil Woods and Johnny Mandel. Both of them felt as I did: they couldn't endure a second performance. Such was the tearing of emotions in two directions: ecstasy at the level of Gerry's music and agony at the frailty of his health. Next day he asked us all to come by his room. And we went up to the top deck. Gerry was never enamored of the sun: with his blond, now white, eyelashes, its glare bothered him. But we went up, and I took a camera. Franca photographed the four of us. There were days in the 1960s when you could have found the four of us together in Jim and Andy's bar in New York, one of the favorite hangouts of jazz musicians in the 1960s. Mandel and Gerry had been friends since they were habitués of that Gil Evans pad on West 55th Street. As Franca took the pictures, I think we were thinking the same thing, that the four of us would never be together again.
On New Year's Eve, the last evening of 1995, he was cheerful and said he was feeling well and lectured me a little about taking care of my own health. Had I been fully alert, I would have realized that that call - warm and affectionate, more overtly so than was typical of Gerry - was a farewell. I later learned he had called Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel, and other friends about the same time.
On the morning of 20 January 1996, I received a telephone call from Franca. When I heard her voice, with its slight Italian accent, I asked, "How's Gerry?"
And Franca said quite softly, "Gerry's dead." She paused for a breath, then said, "He died a few hours ago." As she told me later, he slipped away between 10.45 p.m. and 11 p.m. on the night of 19 January.
I burst into tears at her words. Yes, yes, I should have known. He had been lying to all of us. Why didn't Gerry admit to his friends us that he had liver cancer? Perhaps he wanted no sympathy. When our close friend Paul Desmond was terminally ill with cancer, Gerry had kept me posted on his condition. It seems that all the highways to New York City's main airports run past cemeteries, and Paul left orders that he be cremated, saying with that sardonic wit of his that he didn't want to be a monument on the way to the airport. Perhaps Gerry didn't want to hear the hushed voice of solicitous inhibition in conversations with his friends. Whatever his reasons, he didn't reveal his true condition, and so I was at the same moment quite unsurprised and totally surprised by her news. Certainly I was shattered, and it was for more reasons than the loss of a friend. As you grow older, you get, if not inured, at least accustomed to such tidings.
But she had lost her husband, and I tried to control my feelings out of concern for her. Then she said, "Gerry always thought of you as his brother. He would say, 'I have to talk to Gene about this. He'll know what I mean."' And that only made matters worse; I cried quite helplessly after that. I wanted to get off the phone, but Franca wanted to talk, and the least I could do was listen.
She told me something Gerry had said to her that will remain with me as long as I live. He said, "A life without ethics is meaningless."
Gerry could be feisty; and he did not suffer fools gladly. But he was at heart a kind, warm man.
The best evaluation of Gerry that I saw in print after he died was a column by Robert Fulford in the Globe and Mail. He noted that Gerry's "boyish eagerness" made him always eager to participate in whatever kind of jazz was being played, and quoted Whitney Balliett's wonderful remark that Gerry would "sit in with a treeful of cicadas."
Fulford wrote of the first Mulligan quartet's "inventive charm and rueful humor." He said:
Over about seven years, the Mulligan quartets demonstrated that there were
more possibilities in jazz than anyone had imagined, not all of them necessarily momentous. His own tunes were amiably sophisticated essays, musical equivalents of James Thurber's stories or Ogden Nash's poems. The sounds Mulligan made colored their era. And when I heard the original records ... four days ago, they sounded as fresh as they did more than four decades ago.
Gerry Mulligan ... was a catalyst, a splendid performer who was also the cause
of splendid performances by others. John Lewis ... once remarked that Mulligan's influence was so vast and general that it became hard to spot. It melted into the music of the time, became part of the climate.
Yes. What began with Gil went out to the whole world. Including Brazil.
On that New Year's Eve 1995, Gerry told me how much he loved my lyric to "I Hear the Shadows Dancing.""It makes me cry," he said. The lyric is about the vanished big-band era that nurtured and shaped him.
On 12 February 1996, a memorial service was held in New York at Saint Peter's Church. It was titled A Celebration of the Life of Gerry Mulligan. Many of his old friends and musical associates, including Clark Terry, John Lewis, Chico Hamilton, Dave Grusin, Jackie and Roy Kral, Art Farmer, Bill Crow, Dave Bailey, Lee Konitz, and more, performed. George Shearing and Dave Brubeck, with whom Gerry had often toured, played piano solos. The speakers included George Wein, Herb Gardner, Elliot Lawrence, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
I couldn't be there. Franca arranged that the last song Gerry and I wrote be performed, the lyric he told me on New Year's Eve made him cry. It was sung by Annette Saunders, accompanied by Ted Rosenthal on piano. I realized later that I had written it on 13 February 1991, five years and one day earlier. The lyric goes:
“Gerry … was enormously knowledgeable and skilled in harmonic structure and chord changes — all of that. He could solo in a very linear fashion as well, but he may have wanted to play in a more vertical way because we didn't have a piano. He played the piano sometimes himself, and although he wasn't a great pianist, he knew what he wanted to do on the instrument. On baritone he was amazing, but sometimes it was a little hard to play with him, especially on a double-time thing where he would blow so many notes that he would get behind the time. I would be scuffling along, trying to drag him with me, but that was because of that big, awkward horn he was playing. Unlike an alto or tenor, it takes a long time for the air to get through. I have great respect for him both as a writer and a player.”
- drummer Larry Bunker as told to author Gordon Jack
“… it was Gerry's inimitable presence that drove and defined the character and flavor of the group, and I loved working with it. I couldn't wait to get to work each night, because it was great being out there, totally exposed to the challenge of inventing melodically interesting bass lines, strong enough to eliminate harmonic ambiguity and simple enough to swing. I thrived on that challenge!
Of course Gerry's abilities as an accompanist were phenomenal, and he had that vast pool of ideas to draw upon, from all those years as an arranger. His forte was building spontaneous arrangements, because he was something of an architect. It was really exciting to walk a bass line and discover him moving along a tenth above, totally enhancing the whole effect. He always had his ears open and expected the same from his cohorts. With all due respect to the other guys, without Gerry's accompaniment, there is no Gerry Mulligan Quartet.”
- bassist Bob Whitlock as told to author Gordon Jack
“Mulligan was one of the quintessential jazz musicians of his generation. As much as the silhouette of Dizzy and his upturned trumpet, the image of bone-thin Mulligan, tall enough to dominate the baritone, his hair country-boy red (before it turned great-prophet white) had an iconic familiarity. … No musician in the postbop era was more adept at crossing boundaries. Though a confirmed modernist credited with spreading the amorphous notion of cool jazz, he achieved some of his finest work in collaborations with his swing era idols Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges; he displayed a photograph of Jack Teagarden in his studio.
Mulligan fashioned a music in which all aspects of jazz commingle, from Dixieland two-beats and polyphony to foxtrot swing to modern harmonies, yet he remained something of an outsider, set apart by his devotion to certain not always fashionable musical principles, including lyricism and civility. By lyricism, I mean an allegiance to melody that, in his case, was as natural as walking. …
By civility, I mean his compositional focus on texture. Mulligan was chiefly celebrated as a baritone saxophonist, for good reason. He is the only musician in history to win a popular following on that instrument, the only one to successfully extend the timbre of Harry Carney and develop an improvisational style in the horn's upper range. … the baritone best expressed his warmth, humor, and unerring ear for sensuous fabrics of sounds. Yet he insisted he was less interested in playing solos than an ensemble music— even in the context of his quartet. He was, as he proved from the beginning of his career, a master of blending instruments.”
- Garry Giddins, Visions of Jazz
“Gerry Mulligan lived through almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should be understood.”
– Gene Lees
In compiling information from a number of highly regarded Jazz sources and configuring them into a five-part feature on Gerry Mulligan [you can locate the first, four pieces in the sidebar of the blog], it has been the intent of the editorial staff at JazzProfiles to create a broad outline for a comprehensive and critical [i.e.discerning] biography of Jeru and his music.
Over the span of this five-part feature, we have enlisted in the service of this cause, writings about Mulligan by such Jazz luminaries as [these are not listed in any particular order]: Gene Lees, Garry Giddins, Nat Hentoff, Bill Crow, Ted Gioia, Doug Ramsey, Bill Kirchner, Ira Gitler, Bob Gordon, Gunther Schuller, Pete Clayton, Burt Korall, Whitney Balliett, Michael Cuscuna, Dom Cerulli, Martin Williams and Alain Tercinet.
This listing is by no means exhaustive and no doubt excludes other important essays and articles about Gerry Mulligan.
Astoundingly and not withstanding the 100+ pages of manuscript contained in the five JazzProfiles Mulligan features and the fact that Gerry is the subject of a permanent exhibit at the Library of Congress, there remains no definitive book length treatment on the career and music of Gerry Mulligan!
Our thanks to Gordon Jack for allowing us to use his interview with Gerry in Part Five of our feature about one of the most influential figures in the history of Jazz.
Bill Crow, himself one of the subjects in Gordon Jack’s Fifties Jazz Talk, An Oral Perspective [Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004, refers to Gordon, as “… one of the jazz world’s most skillful interviewers. He asks all the right questions and then gets out of the way, letting his subjects reveal themselves.”
I’m sure you will agree with Bill’s assessment after reading Gordon’s interview with Gerry Mulligan, who reveals things about himself and his career that I never knew before reading their 1994 talk.
[We have refrained from populating Gordon’s piece with photos as none were interspersed in the original chapter.]
Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Perspective [Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004, pp. 143-153].
“Gerry Mulligan was born on April 6, 1927, in Queens, New York City. By the time he was seventeen, he was contributing arrangements to Johnny Warrington’s band for their broadcasts on WCAU, a local radio station in Philadelphia. Over the next few years his writing for Elliot Lawrence, Gene Krupa, Claude Thornhill, Miles Davis, and Stan Kenton showed him to be one of the best of the young postwar generation of arrangers. Although he played in all those bands except for Kenton’s, he was far better known as a writer than as an instrumentalist. It was not until his move to California in 1952 and the formation of his first quartet that he really started to develop as a baritone soloist. We met on two occasions at his suite in London’s Ritz Hotel in May 1994, and we concentrated on his career until the demise of the Concert Jazz Band in 1964. I hoped to continue our discussion at a later date, but Gerry died on January 20, 1996.
In the late forties I played in a group with Kai Winding, Brew Moore, and George Wallington, in clubs like BopCity in New York. We also recorded quite a lot, and we visited Kansas City in 1947, which is where I first met Bob Brookmeyer, when he sat in on valve trombone. At the same time I was playing and writing for Elliot Lawrence, and I was featured in a quintet from within the band, with Phil Urso on tenor. When I wrote “Elevation” for Elliot, he claimed a joint‑composer credit, which was the convention with bandleaders in those days, but it was my tune. A little later that band became very good when he had Charlie Walp on lead trumpet with Ollie Wilson and the Swope brothers on trombone. Those guys were known as the “Washington brass section,” and Herbie Steward was there, too, on lead alto. I remember walking into a rehearsal when they were playing one of my charts, with Tiny Kahn on drums, and it was the first time I heard a big band make my things sound really great. The first time that happened with a small group was Georgie Auld’s little band, with Serge Chaloff and Red Rodney.
For the Miles Davis nonet I actually arranged seven of the twelve numbers that were recorded, although I have seen most of them credited to somebody else over the years. There were two other titles not included on the Birth of the Cool album, “S’il Vous Plait” and “Why Do I Love You?” which were John Lewis arrangements. You may have heard that Miles wanted another trumpet to play lead so that he could concentrate on soloing, but that is quite untrue. He didn’t want to know about another trumpeter, and remember, if we had someone else on lead, they would have phrased the band into another area. Miles wanted to do it his way, and I wanted him to do it his way. If you were writing for him in that band, you knew exactly where you were, and I only wish I had written more for it.’
A lot of these things seem easy in retrospect, because in 1992 we went on the road with the “Rebirth of the Cool” band and worked with those charts. That’s really why I did it, because I finally wanted an insight into those pieces, to see where we might have taken them. Before the tour I thought a lot about the instrumentation, because I didn’t see any reason to be nailed to Miles’s nine-piece. The Tentet arrangements I had from California, for instance, had mo trumpets and two baritones, and I liked the idea of two baritones. You can have them playing unison in the ensemble, and it’s like a cello section, which is fun I really wanted a baritone doubling clarinet, but finding somebody to do both became a problem. Ken Peplowski was supposed to be with us, and he was a nice guy and a beautiful player, but I didn’t want to push him into switching from tenor to baritone. Unfortunately on the day of rehearsal, he telephoned ill say that he’d been running for a plane at a small airport somewhere when he slipped on the wet tarmac and broke his ankle. That’s when I got Mark Lopeman, who is a fine musician, and he had done a lot of the transcribing for me.
Getting back to Miles’s band, we originally wanted to have Danny Polo or clarinet, but he was on the road with Claude Thornhill all the time. During most of the years of Thornhill’s success, he had two clarinets, Irving Fazola and Danny Polo, and they both had this great wood sound because they played “Albert” system. This was not “Benny Goodman” clarinet you know: we’re talking about something much darker and richer, which were the timbres we were looking for. Anyway, Gil Evans and I decided not to me‑s,, around with the clarinet if we couldn’t have Danny. Miles liked the idea Av having a singer, so he had his friend Kenny Hagood sing a couple of number, one of which, “Dam That Dream,” was recorded. For the 1992 “Rebirth” tour I rewrote that arrangement, although what I actually did was to finish it. because I wrote it in too much of a hurry for Miles. The other ballad we featured on the tour was “Good‑bye John,” which I dedicated to Johnny Mercer.
Before I left the East Coast for California in 1951, I had already started experimenting with a piano-less rhythm section, using trumpeters like Don Joseph [tpt], Jerry Lloyd [tpt], or Don Ferrara [tpt], with Peter Ind on bass and Al Levitt on drums. It was actually Gail Madden who suggested the idea. She played piano and percussion, and as a matter of fact I’ve recently been trying to find out what happened to her. It was her experiments that helped me when I got to L.A., since I already had an idea of what would and wouldn’t work. The last record date I did before leaving New York was in September for Prestige, playing my compositions with Allen Eager [ts] and George Wallington [p], among others. Gail played maracas on some titles, but the atmosphere was spoilt by Jerry Lloyd, who couldn’t pass up the opportunity of making jokes about her boobs bouncing up and down when she played. Jerry was an old‑guard male chauvinist and couldn’t help it, but after a while, I sent the band home except for the saxes. I didn’t want to do that thing with just Allen and me, but I had to complete the album.’
I decided to leave New York because the drug scene was a little out of control and the work was rapidly drying up, so I sold my horns and Gail and I hitchhiked to California. I did a little work along the way, using borrowed horns, mostly tenors, and I remember playing in a cowboy band outside Albuquerque for a while. I was lucky, because I knew a guy who was teaching at the university there, and he helped us keep body and soul together. When we reached L.A., I sold some arrangements to Stan Kenton, thanks to Gail, who arranged the introduction through her friendship with Bob Graettinger. She was really responsible for Graettinger’s survival up to that point, because he was nearly “done for” with alcohol, but when I met him, he was absolutely straight. I liked him a lot, and he was in the thick of a reworked “City of Glass,” and he was also writing a cello and a horn concerto. As a matter of fact, I had heard the original “City of Glass” when they were rehearsing at the Paramount Theater in New York a couple of years before.
When I first got to L.A., I did some playing with Shorty Rogers at Balboa with Art Pepper, Wardell Gray, Coop, and June Christy. Shorty was very good and always used me whenever he could, and I remember Bob Gordon was around at that time, and I liked him a lot. I soon met Dick Bock, who was in charge of publicity at the Haig, and I started working there with Paul Smith, who was the leader on the off‑nights, when the main attraction had a night off. We worked opposite Erroll Garner’s trio, and when he left, they brought in Red Norvo with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus. That’s when I took over as leader on the off‑nights, using Jimmy Rowles until I got the quartet together with Chet Baker, Bob Whitlock, and Chico Hamilton. I had encountered Chet at jam sessions in the San Fernando Valley, so when it came time to put the group together, I wanted to see how he would work out. Gail had already told me about Chico, who was just finishing a gig with Charlie Barnet’s seven‑ or eight‑piece band at the Streets of Paris down on Hollywood Boulevard. Carson Smith took over from Bob later, and being an arranger, a lot of the good ideas in the early quartet were his. For instance the way we did “Funny Valentine,” with that moving bass line which really makes the arrangement, was Carson’s idea. Chico thought of doing some a cappella singing behind Chet on a couple of numbers, but Chet never sang solo with the quartet. We played opposite Red Norvo for a while, then went up to the Blackhawk in San Francisco for a few weeks before returning to the Haig, this time as the main attraction.
Bernie Miller wrote “Bernie’s Tune,” but I never knew him. As far as I know, he was a piano player from Washington, D.C., and I think he had died by the time I encountered any of his tunes. He had a melodic touch, and he wrote a couple of other pieces that musicians liked to play. The recording company wanted to put “Bernie’s Tune” in my name but I refused, because I always objected to bandleaders putting their names to something that wasn’t theirs, so I wasn’t going to do it to Bernie Miller whether I knew him or not I told them to find out if he had a family so that the money could go to his heirs. If he didn’t have one, I would have claimed it to stop it going into the public domain. A few years later Lieber and Stoller wrote a lyric for it, which I thought was a little presumptuous; I hated the damn thing. They were nice enough fellows, but I really resented them doing that.
Chico liked using brushes, because he was an admirer of the great brush artists like Jo Jones, who was incredible ‑ also Gus Johnson and Shadow Wilson. It would be a mistake, though, to think that the records are a total indication of what the group sounded like, because the drummer didn’t always use brushes, even though a lot of the pieces were recorded that way. You know, when you examine the recordings of the twenties, you find that Bessie Smith never used a drummer at all, but nobody ever comments on that. Until it was possible to isolate instruments through multi-tracking, a set of drums was hard to balance with the rest of the band. This was especially so with cymbals. A lot of recordings, even in the forties, had cymbals that tended to drown the main attraction, hence the beauty of brushes in recording. I remember when we first started rehearsing in Chet’s house down in Watts or somewhere in southeast L.A., Chico would just use a snare, standing tom‑tom, stand cymbal, and a hi‑hat, and that’s all, but when I looked in his trunk as he packed to go to the Haig for our first date, he had a whole set of drums. I said, “Where are you going with those?” and he said, “We’re going to work.” “Oh, no you’re not,” I said. “This is not what you rehearsed with. I don’t want to get to the club and find a surprise waiting for me.” So he came to work with the very minimum kit; then, as time went on, he figured out he could add to the set without changing the sound. It was always a kit geared to what we had rehearsed with and not a whole big band set of drums.
Very little of what we played was written, although my originals sometimes were. Chet and I often put the arrangements together driving to the Haig, which is how we did “Carioca,” for instance. He used to like singing the parts as we drove from his house, and we worked out that arrangement by singing t. A lot of movie people used to come and see us at the Haig, and one of the most regular was Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo), who often brought his buddy David Wayne. Mel Ferrer and Anne Baxter also used to come, and in fact, Anne had the quartet over to play at her birthday party.
Some months after our first records were released, Stan Getz showed up, playing at the Tiffany club with Bob Brookmeyer and John Williams, who was a good piano player. Stan used to sit in with us at the Haig, and I remember a jam session at somebody’s house, probably Chet’s, where Stan, Bob, Chet, and I were the front line, and we worked really well, improvising on ensemble things that were great. Stan decided that we should all go out together as a group, only he wanted it to be his group. Musically it was too bad that we couldn’t do it, but personality‑wise, I don’t think it would have worked. Stan was peculiar; if things were going along smoothly, he had to do something to louse them up, usually at someone else’s expense.
Early in 1953 we did the tentet album, and because I didn’t think Chet wanted to play lead, I brought in Pete Candoli so that he didn’t have that responsibility. In the event, Chet wound up playing most of the lead parts anyway, so I had Pete, who was a high‑note man, on second trumpet! Somehow this myth has grown that Chet couldn’t read music, but people love myths. It’s more fun that way. There are lots of myths about Chet and the gothic, romantic life he lived and died; it’s grist for that whole “Dark Prince” mode.
Both Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond had recommended Dick Collins as a good replacement for Chet when I was reforming the quartet at the end of 1953, but he wasn’t available. By this time I had become angry with L.A. anyway, so I telephoned Bob Brookmeyer in New York and asked him to come out to California for rehearsals, and bring some New York musicians with him. Bringing guys from the East was obviously expensive, but after rehearsals, we only had a couple of dates booked before going back to the East Coast to work. He arrived with Bill Anthony and Frank Isola, who had both been with Stan Getz. Before leaving town, we did our one and only engagement with the tentet at the Embassy Theater in downtown L.A., and that was quite an experience. When I looked through the curtains at 8 o’clock, it seemed as though we had bombed out, because there was hardly anyone in the house. We decided to get the show underway when someone came backstage very excitedly telling w to wait, because people were lined up around the block. Apparently, the newspaper advertisement for the concert quoted the wrong time. We wound up with a full house, and it really was quite an evening. It was so exciting that some fans stole a couple of the books, including mine, and it was at that point that we started to be more careful with the music.
I had a second baritone as well as the tuba in the tentet, because they do different things, although the baritone is used in today’s big band setup as if it were a tuba, but it’s not at all. However, I’ve finally realized that I don’t need a tuba, because laying in all those bottom notes gets in the bass player’s way. Later on, when I was organizing the Concert Jazz Band, I had intended to include a tuba, but at that point, there was nobody I could count on who could cut the book to go on the road with us. The third trombone was supposed to be a tuba, so Alan Raph came in on bass trombone. What I really wanted was Bob Brookmeyer, bass trombone, and tuba, which would have given me a complete scale and palette, starting at the bottom and going chromatically to the clarinet on top. I could have used flutes, but they depended on amplification to be heard in that kind of band, and I didn’t want to mess with that. I would have liked to have a couple of clarinets or possibly a soprano sax and maybe even C trumpets to sustain higher tones.
When the quartet reached New York early in 1954, I replaced Bill Anthony with Red Mitchell, who was one of the best bass players I’ve had. Frank Isola was with me for most of that year, and his thing really was to play time and keep out of the way, which worked out alright. Most of the drummers approached the quartet like that, which I accept. I hired guys because I liked the way they played, and Frank’s approach established a precedent for the bard, whether I wanted it or not. It’s not quite what I wanted, because I would rather have had a little more activity or aggression in the rhythm section.
I had become used to playing with drummers like Max Roach, and when we were in Kai Winding’s group, he was wonderfully considerate, thinking like an arranger by injecting melodic interest into what was going on. Very few drummers could do that. Most of them were aggressive but didn’t add musical things that a writer would appreciate, and as a soloist, I didn’t appreciate it either. Everyone should be working together, and if anything, soloist should dictate where the solo goes. If you were playing with Buddy Rich or Art Blakey, for instance, and they felt it was time for the soloist to be pushing and getting into something climatic, they’d start pushing, whether you were ready or not. Max didn’t do that because he listened to the soloist and that is the kind of player I would have really welcomed.
That was one of the reasons why I always had problems with drummers, I needed somebody who was walking a thin line between playing the non-aggressive smooth thing that, say, Lennie Tristano wanted, where the drummer just kept time without any comments, but on the other hand, not dropping bombs all over the place. Even Chico used to do that, which is one of the reasons I took his bass drum away from him. He did it in Charlie Barnet’s band and I said, “I’ll kill him if he does that to me!” You have to remember that we were a totally acoustic group, and getting a balance to include the bass in the overall sound meant coming pretty far down in volume. I always needed a drummer who thought in terms of the ensemble sound, which is why Dave Bailey and Gus Johnson played the way they did with the quartet. Now if a drummer has a way of doing that and being busy, like Mel Lewis, for instance, that’s fine. Mel never actually played with the quartet, which is a pity, because he carried on that chattering conversation underneath your playing which I always liked. There would be punctuations, and it would relate in a way that meant something in the construction. Gus Johnson’s feel with the group was a lot different, but I had remembered how polished he was from seeing him with Count Basie. He was fun, and he loved playing brushes. As time went on, I was after drummers to play louder and use more sticks, but I never really pressed the point.
Later on in 1954 I was between trumpets and trombones, since I needed a replacement for Bob Brookmeyer, and being in the East, I decided to try Tony Fruscella. Now Tony had that fuzzy, introverted tone that Chet had, although Chet’s was more outgoing while Tony’s was very inwardly directed. It sounded nice, but one concert at the Newport Jazz Festival was enough for me to realize that having Tony traveling with me and being onstage together night after night would have driven me crazy. He lived in a world of his own, and when someone is a real introvert, it can take all your strength just to survive. They seem to have a magnet sucking in your energy but nothing comes out, which is what shyness does to people. For the professional life of concerts in a band that works and travels, your energy has to be up for it, and you can’t live in a world of your own because you have to deal with the real world. Having a guy like Tony meant I had to deal for myself and him too. It was too bad it didn’t work out, because he was such a lovely player, but he just did that one concert with me.
It’s funny because Stan Kenton was the M.C. at Newport that year, and he always had the amazing ability of giving a speech that sounded so serious. You would be listening attentively, until you suddenly realized that he’s not saying anything! I don’t know how he did it, but it was all delivered with such oratorical sincerity that you felt it was your fault for missing the point. Towards the end of that year, I recorded some titles with John Graas and Don Fagerquist in California. I loved the way Don played, and he would have been an ideal trumpeter for the quartet, but he wasn’t available when I needed him. At the end of 1954 I disbanded the quartet to go home to New York and write some new music.
In 1955 I sometimes played as a guest in Chet Baker’s group, and I seem to remember a date in Detroit with him and Mose Allison. I also worked at Basin Street for a few weeks with Al Cohn, Gil Evans, George Duvivier, and Herb Wasserman. Now Stan Getz was around the comer at Birdland, and he drove Al crazy. Every time he was free and we were playing, he would come and watch Al from the Peanut Gallery, staring up at him and making him feel uncomfortable.’ What he really wanted was to take Al’s mouthpiece and have it copied over at Otto Link’s. Al kept refusing, but Stan pestered him for about ten nights until he finally gave in. They met during the day, and Stan had it copied so that he could get a sound like Al’s.
Later on that year I formed the sextet, and initially Idrees Sulieman was on trumpet, but he just did a couple of dates with us because we had a hard time getting together on a style for the ensemble. I think he was an interesting choice, and the group would have sounded a lot different, but we weren’t comfortable with each other, because our stylistic approach wasn’t compatible. I have often wondered what the sextet would have sounded like if we had aimed it in that direction. We ran the group for quite a while, although I don’t remember all the reasons for not continuing with it. Zoot Sims may have wanted to leave, because a soloist like that would have found it to be a strait-jacket after a while, and I certainly didn’t try to replace him; Zoot was Zoot.
After the sextet I was “between groups,” and “between everything” at this point. I was really at a low ebb, having had enough of being a bandleader for a while, because being the leader can be a pain in the neck. You have to lay out the focus of the thing, decide what to play, and arrange the transportation and hotels as well. There have been periods when I have been fed up and looked for somebody else’s band to play with, which happened much later when I worked with Dave Brubeck. I was just going to be a soloist on one date; then we played in Mexico. One thing led to another, and I became the saxophone player who came to dinner and didn’t leave for about seven years! In 1956 I did a little campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, who was the Democratic nominee for the presidency, when he ran unsuccessfully against Ike. The following year, I worked a little with Mose Allison, and I think that Chet and I took a group out together, although it was primarily his group. We a recorded a couple of albums, but there was never any talk of us getting together permanently. Over the next couple of years I did a lot of recording. I remember a session with Manny Albam, which was a nice L.P. with a good group musicians, and it was fun playing in the ensembles. [Jazz Greats of Our Time, Vol. 1, Coral CRL 57173].
I did a date with Stan Getz which Norman Granz wanted us to do [Stan Getz Meets Gerry Mulligan in Hi Fi, Verve 849 392 2]. He was recording Stan, but you can tell from the material that we really didn’t have anything prepared. The jam session idea is alright, but it has never been my bag, and it wasn’t my idea to switch horns on some numbers; Stan or Norman suggested it. I liked Zoot’s and Brew Moore’s mouthpieces, but I never liked Stan’s, and I didn’t like the sound I got on it. I did an album with Monk, and having Thelonious as an accompanist was a challenge [Gerry Mulligan Meets Thelonious Monk, OJCCD 20 310-2]. We only played together a couple of times, but I remember a jam session I finally dragged him to, where we played “Tea for Two” and one other tune all night. He was trying to get us to play “Tea for Two” the way Tatum played it, where the progression goes up and then down in semi‑tones, and we had to try and follow him. In the mid fifties we lived near each other in New York, hence my original “Good Neighbor Thelonious,” because he lived on 63rd and I was on 68th Street near Columbus.
I also recorded with Paul Desmond, who always wanted to do the piano-less quartet thing, with the alto playing lead instead of trumpet [Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet, Verve 519-850-2]. Dick Bock produced an album with me, Lee Konitz, Al, Zoot, and Allen Eager, which he called The Mulligan Songbook, Volume 1 [CDP 7243 8 33575 2 9] although I told him that title was a little optimistic. I used Freddie Green on guitar, because I was always messing around with the rhythm section, trying to find out what to do with it, and I loved the idea of playing with Freddie. The Annie Ross date was Dick’s idea, and although we hadn’t worked together before, I liked her and the album came out well. My favorite record from the “Mulligan Meets . . . “ series was the one with Ben Webster, Jimmy Rowles, Leroy Vinnegar, and Mel Lewis [The Complete Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster Sessions, Verve 539-055-2]. We played quite a lot with that group, including a feature on the Dinah Shore T.V. show, and everybody could be called a co‑arranger because they all made a contribution. Jimmy Rowles was wonderful, and what he does is so deceptively simple, fitting things in so that they become part of the whole. Unfortunately he is now very ill with emphysema.”
In 1957 I did a big band album which I didn’t complete, and consequently it wasn’t released until about twenty years later [Mullenium, Columbia CK 65678] I wasn’t pleased with the way things were going, because on the fast numbers I couldn’t get my rhythm section together. I had Dave Bailey on one set of dates and Gus Johnson on the other, and I realized that I had to write more for them, because there wasn’t time for them to get to know the pieces like they would in a small band. It created a problem which I couldn’t overcome, and George Avakian, who was the A and R man for CBS, said to postpone everything until later. He then left CBS, and it wouldn’t have come out at all if it hadn’t been for Henri Renaud. I remember Don Joseph played beautifully on “All the Things You Are.”
When I formed the Concert Jazz Band in 1960, Norman Granz’s financial input was pretty extensive. He paid for a tour in the States to prepare us for a European trip, but I paid for everything else, which is how I always ill‑spent any profit I was able to make; I’ve always been a sucker that way! Judy Holliday did an album with us, although she never sang live with the band [Judy Holiday with Gerry Mulligan DRG Records SLI 5191]. She should have done, because she would have been more comfortable when we got into the studio. Judy always joked, but it was only half‑a‑joke, that her way of going to work was to go to the theater, heave, and then start to get dressed. Recording for her was worse, but as she got to know the material, her sound would evolve, so it would have been good if she could have sung with the band at some point. Phil Woods didn’t record with us, but he was a regular in the band whenever we could get him. He was always pretty busy, but he played quite a lot with us at Birdland. Later on, in the seventies, I formed another big band, and although I never really dropped the name, the Concert Jazz Band was a particular band and instrumentation in my mind.
After the CJB I went back to the piano-less quartet with Bob Brookmeyer. until we finally disbanded the group in 1965. Later that year I played with Roy Eldridge and Earl Hines in Europe. I would have loved to play more with Roy, but they booked the tour in such a ridiculous way, I wound up getting flu or something and I gave the whole thing up. The sixties were turbulent years.
I have always played a Conn baritone, but in the early sixties I used a Selmer for about a year. Jerome Richardson was funny, because when I started playing the Selmer, he said, “You sound peculiar. Why don’t you get your Conn back and sound like you’re supposed to. That sounds awful! Eventually the Selmer got damaged, so I went back to the Conn, and Jerome came into the Vanguard one night and said, “Finally you’ve got your Conn and everything’s back to normal.” I never did like the Selmer anyway, because of the way it was balanced, with the short neck on it.
Coming right up to date, in January 1994 I was elected to the Down Beat “Hall of Fame.” Somebody said, “What took so long?” and it’s true, things do seem to happen slowly for me, but I guess I’m not considered to be a fashionable elder. Popularity polls can be strange, because I started out as at arranger and always think of myself as one, but I don’t show up in that category at all, which used to bug me. Have you noticed in the Down Beat polls that nobody ever votes for my present quartet? If I don’t have a piano-less quartet, it’s as though I don’t have a quartet at all. You know, these things are fun to talk about, but I’ll have to stop, or we’ll be here all night.”
In discussing the ‘Birth Of The Cool’ arrangements writer Bill Kirchner observed “Their influence has been compared to the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens and to other classics by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker. These recordings had an enormous influence on musicians and the jazz public. Principally, they have been credited – or blamed, depending on one’s point of view – for the subsequent popularity of ‘Cool’ or West Coast Jazz…….but their influence extended much further and writers like Gigi Gryce, Quincy Jones and Benny Golson produced recordings using this approach.”
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is working on some larger features which it plans to post in the coming days. In the meantime, we thought you might enjoy another visit with Gordon Jack on these pages.
Gordon is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004] and he has graciously granted the editorial staff at JazzProfiles permission to reprint his work on these pages.
This essay first appeared in the March 2002 issue of JazzJournal and it can also be found in the sleeve-note for Bud Shank’s CD After You, Jeru [Fresh Sound FSR 5026].
It is now 50 years since Gerry Mulligan created one of the most distinctive and arresting sounds in small group jazz by the simple expedient of removing the piano from his rhythm section. This pianoless ensemble focussed attention on his solo abilities even though he was far better known as an arranger, having begun his career some years before writing for Gene Krupa, Elliot Lawrence and Claude Thornhill. He did occasionally play with those bands and on a CBS album – The Arranger – there is a delightful photograph showing him aged nineteen playing second alto in Krupa’s sax section, but he was primarily employed for his skill with the pen rather than the saxophone. During his time with the drummer he wrote one of the band’s biggest hits – Disc Jockey Jump. In its first sixteen bars there is a resemblance to Jimmy Giuffre’s Four Brothers although it was recorded in January 1947, ten months before the Woody
Herman classic.
It was thanks to his involvement with the unique Claude Thornhill orchestra that he met Gil Evans, and as a result became one of the most important figures in what was eventually known as the Miles Davis ‘Birth Of The Cool’ nonet. Gene Lees once asked Mulligan how Davis had become the leader and Gerry replied, “He made the telephone calls for the rehearsals and made everybody get in and play.” Miles also obtained the band’s only booking - two weeks at the Royal Roost in 1948. In a recent JJI interview Lee Konitz said that the writing was the most important aspect of the band and because Gerry had written most of the charts, he considered him to be the guiding light. This has been confirmed by Johnny Carisi who contributed Israel to the project saying, “Gerry wrote more than anybody”. Only recently has it emerged that the baritonist arranged
seven of the twelve titles recorded by the ensemble and not five as was originally thought, proving his contribution to be even greater than was acknowledged at the time.
Just as an aside, the principal writers - Mulligan, Evans and John Lewis - did not get paid for the charts. In his book Arranging The Score, Lees quotes John Lewis saying to Miles “We wrote this stuff for ourselves. This was a rehearsal band and that was great. Now you’ve recorded we’re supposed to get paid”, but apparently they didn’t get a penny. In discussing the ‘Birth Of The Cool’ arrangements writer Bill Kirchner observed “Their influence has been compared to the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens and to other classics by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker. These recordings had an enormous influence on musicians and the jazz public. Principally, they have been credited – or blamed, depending on one’s point of view – for the subsequent popularity of ‘Cool’ or West Coast Jazz…….but their influence extended much further and writers like Gigi Gryce, Quincy Jones and Benny Golson produced recordings using this approach.” Artistic achievement alone seldom pays the rent and the work situation in New York became so difficult, that on more than one occasion Mulligan was forced to rehearse a band in Central Park because nobody had enough money to hire a studio.
Towards the end of 1951 he decided to sell his instruments and with his girl friend Gail Madden, hitchhiked to Los Angeles. Thanks to her former relationship with Bob Graettinger he was introduced to Stan Kenton, who was not too keen on Mulligan’s work at first thinking it too simple. Mulligan said “The first chart I took to a rehearsal was rejected by Stan, but the next day Bill Holman brought in an arrangement that sounded more like me than I did!” On another occasion, one of Gerry’s scores called for Shelly Manne to play brushes on cymbals. After listening for a while with obvious displeasure, Kenton shouted out “No! No! No! – we don’t use brushes on cymbals in this band - that’s faggot music!” However, long time Kenton arrangers like Holman and Lennie Niehaus have acknowledged Gerry’s influence in the way he thinned out the ensemble
lines allowing the band to swing more. His writing was highly popular with musicians and the public and numbers like Limelight, Swinghouse and Young Blood pointed the band towards a far more subtle approach. Talking about Kenton, Miles Davis once said “If you get a guy like Gerry around a band all the other arrangers start writing a little better. In jazz writing there has to be space. Gerry, Gil Evans and Duke know that but some guys try to fill it all up.” Years later when Mulligan was editing charts submitted by other writers for his Concert Jazz Band, Bob Brookmeyer would joke to the musicians “We’re having a rehearsal to-morrow – bring your erasers!”
Early in 1952 Mulligan obtained a regular Monday night booking at the Haig, a club with a capacity of 85 customers opposite the famous Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. It was while he was appearing at the club that Richard Nixon composed his famous ‘Checkers’ speech at the Ambassador, which saved his position on the Republican ticket as Dwight D.Eisenhower’s running mate. Albert Einstein once rang reception there to complain about room service and on another occasion, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald set fire to their room creeping out in the confusion without paying the bill! Sadly, the hotel achieved a different notoriety when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated there while campaigning for the Presidency in 1968. The Ambassador’s nightclub – The Cocoanut Grove – was the playroom for the elite of Hollywood society and Elizabeth Taylor, Howard Hughes, James Stewart, Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe all came to dine and dance to the music of Freddy Martin. Across the street at The Haig, owner John Bennett catered for an altogether hipper audience. With no cover charge but a two drink minimum, the fans could sit and listen to Gerry Mulligan on his Monday night jam sessions with guests like Art Pepper, Dave Pell, Ernie Royal, Jimmy Rowles and Howard Roberts. Bassist Bob Whitlock often played on these occasions and he recently told me how he had introduced Chet Baker to the baritonist. Whitlock and Baker had known each other since 1948 when they played in downtown Los Angeles with Ray Vasquez’s Latin Band and had become lifelong friends. At a Mulligan rehearsal at the Cottage Italia, a restaurant in North Hollywood, Bob recommended Baker when it became obvious that a certain trumpeter (whose name is now forgotten) was not working out. It was at this time that Gerry decided to stop using the piano because in Chet Baker he had found someone who was totally sympathetic to his aims. They were quite different personalities but musically they became one of the great partnerships in jazz and the Mulligan pianoless concept in one form or another, lasted for the next 14 years. One of the earliest titles recorded by the group for Richard Bock was Walkin’ Shoes, which was a reference to Mulligan and Gail Madden’s mode of travel from the east to the west coast. It was the outstanding success of the early quartet recordings that allowed Bock who had been in charge of publicity at The Haig, to launch his Pacific Jazz label.
With the pianoless quartet Gerry achieved a unique and pristine ensemble sound dominated by his quite outstanding ability as an accompanist on the baritone. His skill as one of the foremost jazz writers was matched by the way he could compose instant arrangements on the bandstand, finding perfect counter lines to whatever his playing partners conceived. It was this single quality that made his groups so distinctive for despite becoming a virtuoso soloist, Mulligan was essentially an ensemble player and the quartet was most definitely an ensemble – not just two soloists sharing a stage with a rhythm section. It should also be remembered that most of the group’s arrangements were improvised with very little being written. Bob Whitlock who was the original bass player in the quartet has confirmed that “Gerry’s abilities as an accompanist were phenomenal. He had that vast pool of ideas to draw upon from all those years as an arranger and he could tap into them on the spot. He always had his ears open and expected the same from his cohorts.” Trombonist Dave Glenn expressed similar sentiments to Steve Voce when Mulligan’s big band was touring the U.K. with Mel Torme in 1983. “Even after all these years Gerry continues to amaze me. He is the greatest cat I’ve ever heard in playing counter lines to a melody. When we were working with Mel, they would perform as a quartet with Mel taking Chet’s role. The counter lines were different every night and they were brilliant.” During the fifties many groups emphasised the importance of the soloist at the expense of any group interaction. Some leaders like Miles Davis actually left the stand when colleagues were featured but with his love of ensemble playing, Mulligan’s saxophone is hardly ever quiet on his recordings as he gently supports and encourages his associates. In its eleven months existence the Mulligan/Baker quartet proved to be sensationally popular, leading to a February 1953 profile in Time Magazine where it was described as “The hot music topic in Los Angeles………where they drew the biggest crowds in The Haig’s history.” The previous month Gerry had recorded with his tentette with Baker again as the featured soloist. The lead trumpeter on the date was Pete Candoli but on some titles Mulligan told me that it was Chet who actually played lead – thus disproving one of the great myths of jazz. Given a choice between myth or the truth the media will generally go for the former, which is why Chet Baker still has a reputation of being unable to read music and also being ignorant about chords. The truth as confirmed by contemporaries like Herb Geller and Bud Shank, is that he could read although in common with many jazzmen he was not a sight-reader and as Mulligan wittily observed, “Chet knew everything about chords, he just didn’t know their names!” A little known fact is that just after the tentette recordings Gerry eloped with Jeffie Lee Boyd who was a waitress at The Haig, prompting Baker to book Geller into playing with him in the quartet for three weeks until the baritonist returned from his honeymoon.
Gerry’s expertise as a composer of improvised arrangements was particularly evident in 1955 when he formed what many consider to be his best ever small group – the sextet. On recordings like Elevation which he had written for the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra, he is in his element as he takes on his customary role of a Pied Piper leading Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims and Don Ferrara through a series of extemporised riffs, hinting at a phrase here and a comment there which in turn is picked up by the other horns and developed into what could almost be a written arrangement. Towards the end of the decade he made a series of fine albums with a diverse range of star soloists including Paul Desmond, Johnny Hodges, Stan Getz, Ben Webster, Thelonious Monk, Annie Ross and Jimmy Witherspoon. His abilities as a supreme baritone soloist were at last fully recognised because as Bob Brookmeyer has observed , “When Gerry first arrived in Los Angeles in 1952 he was still considered to be primarily a writer.” As late as 1957 he had told Nat Hentoff that it had only been within the previous two years that he had been fully able to control the baritone, with a direct line between his imagination and his fingers.
It was in the late fifties that Leonard Feather commissioned a fascinating poll inviting leading jazzmen and women to nominate their personal favourites. It revealed that Mulligan had found total acceptance from a wide spectrum of players since Nat Cole, Miles Davis, Buddy De Franco, Erroll Garner, Urbie Green, Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, Bobby Hackett, Carmen McRae, Oscar Pettiford and Lester Young were just some of the instrumentalists who voted for him. In discussing Gerry Mulligan, Phil Woods once said “No one played the instrument like Gerry, because it was too hard.” His long time drummer Dave Bailey recently told me, “With his soft tone coupled with the masculinity of the baritone, he would sometimes blow your mind – especially on ballads.” As with his writing, there was an elegant lyricism about his approach that belied the apparent clumsiness of his chosen means of expression. This was partly because when soloing, he rarely ventured into the bottom fifth of the instrument preferring to construct his melodic lines in the middle and upper registers much as Lester Young – one of his inspirations – might have done had he played the baritone.
Duke Ellington usually composed with his own sidemen in mind but he made an exception in Mulligan’s case when he wrote Prima Bara Dubla, which was performed with that other baritone master Harry Carney at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Over the years Gerry often played with the Ellington band usually sitting in the section next to Johnny Hodges, improvising(!) a sixth saxophone part. Early in 1974 he took Carney’s place when the Ellington veteran was hospitalized prior to a concert in Miami. The end of the fifties saw him appearing and playing in a number of Hollywood films like I Want To Live, The Rat Race and The Subterraneans and if the latter, where he took the part of a horn playing preacher isn’t one of the worst films ever made, it will do until the real thing comes along! The music though, composed by Andre Previn was fine and Mulligan played in an all star line-up with Art Farmer, Art Pepper, Bill Perkins and Russ Freeman. He also had a non-playing acting role with the wonderful Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, handling his part with considerable aplomb. Although they never married they were what the gossip columnists refer to as an ‘item’ until her death in 1965. The decade ended with a two-part profile in the New Yorker by Nat Hentoff proving that his fame had now spread far beyond the narrow confines of jazz. Indeed as Jerome Klinkowitz points out in his fine book Listen: Gerry Mulligan , the writer Thomas Pynchon refers to the baritonist in his 1960 story Entropy. He was now recording for the Verve label and few eyebrows were raised when Norman Granz authorized an advertising campaign in the trade press simply stating, “1960 belongs to Gerry Mulligan”. Almost as a confirmation Metronome organised a reader’ poll in 1959 to find the most popular jazz musicians of all time where he finished third, behind Miles Davis and the winner Charlie Parker. The fact that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington finished no higher than sixth and 16th. respectively shows how ephemeral polls can be, but nevertheless it indicates how incredibly popular Mulligan was by now – a popularity he maintained throughout his career without in any way compromising his artistry.
Having made some money from his film making, he decided at the beginning of the sixties to return to his first love by forming a larger organization which he called The Concert Jazz Band. As a young man he had been an arranger and occasional sideman in other people’s bands but he was now the chief soloist, who unfortunately found little time to write. This ensemble was rightly called a big little-band, because his attention to detail ensured that the 13 pieces had the same clarity and transparency that characterized his small groups. As Bill Crow observed at the time, “He knows exactly what he wants, which is a quiet band. He can swing at about 15 decibals lower than any other band.” On the same subject Mulligan once told Harry Frost, “When you overblow, the tone quality goes. Our band shouts but it doesn’t scream.” It was not always just sweetness and light however and on numbers like The Red Door, I’m Gonna Go Fishin’, Lady Chatterley’s Mother and Blueport the band displays a relentless drive and passion that is totally infectious but which never gets completely out of hand – what George Simon has accurately called “Controlled Violence.” The CJB adopted the same free wheeling approach to ensemble playing that had been such a feature of his quartet and sextet. Bill Crow told me, “What was so good about the band was having someone in each section who was a good riff maker – Gerry in the saxes, Bobby Brookmeyer in the trombones and Clark Terry in the trumpets. Gerry would start to play backgrounds behind a soloist and by the second time around the rest of the saxes would be playing in unison or harmonising with him, then Brookmeyer or Terry would think of a counter line and the brass would join that. The band would stay behind the soloist for five or six choruses of improvised riffs and it would really get going until it reached a certain level, when Gerry would give the signal to go into the next written section.”
Unfortunately in spite of the band’s undoubted musical worth and Mulligan’s popularity, it was difficult keeping it on the road and he was often forced to revert to the quartet formula with Brookmeyer when bookings for the CJB became scarce. In an enthusiastic review of a Birdland performance Ira Gitler wrote in Down Beat, “If this band cannot work when it wants to, there is something very wrong with the state of music in the United States.” Clearly a prophetic statement, because within eight months the CJB was playing its final engagement at Birdland on New Years Eve 1964, which was also the night the club closed down for business. The personnel that so impressed Gitler included Thad Jones, Nick Travis, Clark Terry, Bob Brookmeyer, Willie Dennis, Phil Woods and Richie Kamuca. Al Cohn, Ben Webster, Benny Powell and Jimmy Owens had also sat in with the band.
Discussing his time with the CJB Clark Terry told writer Joe Goldberg, “Gerry’s a real leader. He respects all the guys and knows how much they contribute and you feel you’re part of things. He pays well too, unlike one leader I worked for who used to say ‘I want you to remember it’s me they are paying to see.”’ Many other sidemen have expressed similar sentiments. Bob Brookmeyer for instance had an offer from Duke Ellington in 1962 which he had to turn down because Duke could not match what he was earning with Mulligan. Bill Crow used to get increases without asking for them and Dave Bailey has confirmed that Mulligan preferred to pay his musicians generously, rather than give the money to the Federal Government. He would also whenever possible, fly the band first class. Apparently, the fringe benefits were so good that a number of famous drummers – among them Art Taylor and Osie Johnson – regularly telephoned Gerry trying to get him to fire Bailey so they could take over!
In retrospect, the closure of Birdland and the break up of the CJB seemed to indicate the end of an era, not only for jazz but for Gerry Mulligan too. The sixties was a time when the avant-garde were challenging former truths and persuading many that the removal of melody, harmony and rhythm was the way forward – an approach that helped turn jazz into even more of a minority interest. It was to be another seven years before Mulligan’s next major project, The Age Of Steam which was recorded in 1971. Harry Edison and Bud Shank were in the line-up and Brookmeyer was involved again along with some of the younger generation including the magnificent Roger Kellaway, Tom Scott and John Guerin. The album introduced Gerry’s exciting K4 Pacific which he often used as a concert finale in later years. Another highlight was Shank’s sensitive work on the slowly moving harmonies of Grand Tour, an intensely sad and poignant original by the leader. While Age Of Steam was being recorded Mulligan and Shank appeared on a Beaver And Krause L.P. playing Gerry’s By Your Grace, which ultimately became the much longer and grander Entente For Baritone Saxophone And Orchestra. This piece which was dedicated to Nancy and Zubin Mehta was a totally successful marriage of the jazz saxophone soloist with the symphony orchestra. Mulligan recorded it with the Houston Symphony under Erich Kunzel in 1987 and five months later it was performed in concert with Zubin Mehta. On the same evening, Itzhak Perlman sat in with Mulligan’s quartet to play a little jazz.
During the last sixteen years of his life Mulligan maintained a punishing schedule, touring worldwide with either his reformed big band or the quartet which now featured a piano in a conventional rhythm section. When I asked him about the reintroduction of a keyboard he said that he wanted to play the melody more, which of course is difficult in a pianoless context because of his role as an accompanist. He had just been inducted into the Down Beat Hall Of Fame and he told me, “Popularity polls can be strange because I started out as an arranger and I always think of myself as one, but I don’t show up in that category at all and that used to bug me. Have you noticed in Down Beat that nobody ever votes for my present quartet? If I don’t have a pianoless quartet it’s as though I don’t have a quartet at all!”
The period from 1980 was arguably his most creative as a songwriter yet Bud Shank recently said “Too few of us were aware of what he was doing then.” Critics, while acknowledging his outstanding abilities as a creative soloist seemed to ignore the very real beauty of his compositions. Lyrics have occasionally been added to his songs and Gene Lees who has called him one of the greatest composers in jazz, put words to I Heard The Shadows Dancing. Mel Torme recorded The Real Thing with his own lyric and this piece was performed by Carol Sloane at a Mulligan Memorial concert on February 12, 1996. The Brazilian singer Jane Duboc wrote words to a number of Mulligan originals on a charming 1993 CD entitled Paraiso –Jazz Brazil. Of course an earlier album that is always remembered with affection is his 1961 recording with Judy Holliday where they collaborated on What’s The Rush, Loving You, It Must Be Christmas and Summer’s Over. Just before she died in 1965 they were working on an Anita Loos play called Happy Birthday and Ms Loos was quoted as saying that the music for the show was “Brilliant”. Over the years a number of instrumental albums have been devoted to his music by people like Claude Williamson, Sal Salvador, Vic Lewis, Elliot Lawrence and Gene Krupa. Since his death though in 1996, it is as if his originals have been rediscovered since Bill Charlap with Ted Rosenthal – Brookmeyer with Lee Konitz and Randy Brecker – Kerry Strayer with Brecker again - Bud Shank and Ronnie Cuber have all recorded tribute albums. Cuber’s Three Baritone Sax Band Plays Mulligan with Nick Brignola and Gary Smulyan is particularly interesting, as it is Ronnie’s intention for the group to continue recording and touring, promoting Mulligan the songwriter.
In Gerry Mulligan’s hands the baritone saxophone, once considered an unwieldy section horn, became a vehicle for the most elegant and gracefully lyrical solo statements. He was also one of the music’s most creative arrangers and composers and his themes deserve to be as much a part of the jazz language as those by celebrated contemporaries like Benny Golson, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver."
Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journal and a very generous friend to these pages in his allowance of JazzProfiles re-publishings of his excellent writings. He is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospective and he developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horrick’s book Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.
The following article was first published in Jazz Journal March 2016..
“Gerry Mulligan formed a short-lived sextet in 1963 with Art Farmer, Bob Brookmeyer, Jim Hall, Bill Crow and Dave Bailey. They recorded a couple of albums now reissued on Lonehill LHJ 10222 and also appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival that year. It is an earlier version of the sextet that is remembered with most affection however - the one which worked pretty extensively from September 1955 until late 1956 featuring Zoot Sims, Bob Brookmeyer and Jon Eardley.
A trumpet, trombone, tenor and baritone ensemble is one Mulligan first worked with as a member of Kai Winding’s group in the late forties with his good friend Brew Moore along with trumpeter Jerry Lloyd (aka Hurwitz). A few years later in 1953 there was talk of Mulligan, Stan Getz, Chet Baker and Brookmeyer going on the road together but this never materialised because Stan and Gerry could never agree on who was to be the leader.
Although Mulligan’s sextet was officially launched in New York in 1955, west coast audiences were given a preview when Zoot and Brookmeyer appeared as guests with Gerry’s quartet at a San Diego concert in December 1954. Three tracks were recorded for the album titled California Concerts - Western Reunion, I Know Don’t Know How and The Red Door.Reunion is Gerry’s homage to Zoot Sims and is in fact a Bweebida Bobbida contrafact. I Know is a delightful ballad based on the bridge from Line For Lyons and Red Door is a joint effort by Sims and Mulligan (Gerry wrote the middle eight). It was named after a rehearsal studio on West 49th. Street between Broadway and 8th. Avenue. Mulligan, Sims, Lester Young, Frank Isola, Jerry Lloyd and their friends used to pay a rental of 25 cents each to play there around 1947/48. On one occasion when nobody had any money Gerry took a band that included Jimmy Ford, Brew Moore and Allen Eager to rehearse in Central Park.
The sextet’s first rhythm section was Peck Morrison and Dave Bailey who were both quite new to the Mulligan scene. Impressed by his writing for the Miles Davis nonet they visited Nola’s studio where he was rehearsing a tentet. It is worth pointing out once more that Mulligan’s contribution to what became known as The Birth Of The Cool was far greater than was acknowledged at the time - he arranged seven of the 12 titles recorded by the ensemble not five as was originally thought. John Carisi who wrote Israel for Miles confirmed this when he said, “Gerry wrote more than anybody” and in an interview for this magazine Lee Konitz told me that he considered Mulligan to be the guiding light for that particular project. Just as an aside the principal writers - Mulligan, Gil Evans and John Lewis – were apparently never paid for those hugely influential charts.
Oscar Pettiford and Osie Johnson were booked for the Nola rehearsal and when they didn’t appear Idrees Sulieman who was in the band introduced Morrison to Gerry. Peck mentioned that Bailey played the drums and that is how they joined the sextet which opened in Cleveland’s Loop Lounge the following week. A little later when the group became very popular Pettiford and Johnson wanted the gig back!
Dave told me that Mulligan was always generous and protective of his musicians and a good example of that occurred at a club in Baltimore. Bailey and Morrison arrived early to set up and then sat in the club lounge waiting for the rest of the group. The owner told them to wait in the kitchen because that is where musicians stayed when not performing. On Gerry’s arrival he found the policy only applied to black musicians so he told everyone to pack up - they were leaving. Dave said the venue was sold out because “Gerry was hotter than a firecracker at the time” and not surprisingly the policy immediately changed that night, allowing the musicians to sit where they liked. Peck didn’t stay too long with the sextet because of the demands on a bass player in a pianoless context and his wife was probably not too keen on all the touring he was doing with Mulligan. Bill Crow who had been working with Marian McPartland took his place.
Don Joseph another of Mulligan’s friends was an excellent player and he was the first choice on trumpet for the sextet. He had played with all the big bands that came to the Paramount Theatre in Times Square but his career went downhill for various reasons at the end of the forties. Bandleaders refused to hire him and he even found himself unwelcome at Charlie’s Tavern which was a musician’s hang-out. Charlie would have one of the bartenders throw him out if he tried to get in, prompting the trumpeter to once shout from the door, “It’s me - Don Joseph. I’m banned from bars and I’m barred from bands!”. He missed the rehearsals so Idrees Sulieman was selected for the first few bookings although he didn’t stay too long because he had other fish to fry.
After the Cleveland booking the sextet played Boston’s Storyville before recording their first album with Sulieman’s replacement, Jon Eardley on trumpet. The repertoire included a number of quartet staples like Bernie’s Tune, Nights At The Turntable and The Lady Is A Tramp as well as a hard swinging Broadway which has a real back-to-Basie feel. Incidentally Turntable has part of Chet Baker’s 1952 solo transcribed for Eardley and Brookmeyer to play as a background behind the leader’s statement.
For the next few months they remained pretty close to home often performing at New York’s Basin Street and radio broadcasts from the club have been released by RLR Records. They also did a short package tour with Dave Brubeck’s quartet and Carmen McRae which began with a midnight concert at Carnegie Hall. John Williams, one of the finest pianists of his generation was an interesting and surprising addition to the sextet for the tour. Things didn’t really work out and John returned to New York after engagements at Ann Arbor, Cincinnati and Philadelphia. On one occasion Carmen McRae sat in with the sextet and she was later to tell Leonard Feather that Mulligan’s group was her all-time favourite.
Just prior to a European tour that began in February 1956, the sextet was again in the recording studio performing Gil Evans’s chart on Debussy’s La Plus Que Lente and Mulligan’s Mainstream. Initially the guardians of the Debussy estate refused to permit an arrangement to be made of his work. Luckily they relented because La Plus is a sensitive ensemble reading with brilliantly observed dynamics and intonation. The cute Mainstream is a stimulating exercise in improvised counterpoint by two masters of the form, Sims and Mulligan. The melody is only eight bars long but they weave their way creatively through two choruses of a 32 bar sequence based on I Got Rhythm with the lead constantly switching between the tenor and the baritone.
The group sailed for Europe on the SS Andrea Doria which was the pride of the Italian navy at the time but it sank a few months later after a collision with a freighter off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. They were accompanied by Gerry’s wife Arlyne (songwriter Lew Brown’s daughter) who was there as his manager and Bob Brookmeyer’s wife Phyllis also came along. Concerts were performed in Naples, Rome, Milan, Genoa and Bologna followed by a three week engagement at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. They were one of the acts on a variety bill featuring jugglers, comedians, a dancing violin duo as well as the Nicholas Brothers and Jacqueline Francois who was the headliner. There was also an unsuccessful booking at the Palais d’Hiver in Lyon where the audience made it quite clear that if the music didn’t sound like Sidney Bechet it wasn’t jazz.
Talking to me about the tour a few years ago Bill Crow had this to say, “We ran into places where we followed Chet Baker whose group was leaving a trail of bad junky vibes around Europe. As a result we were not welcome in some hotels and we were searched quite seriously on the trains. Of course the authorities nearly always picked on Dave Bailey to be the one they searched and he is the straightest guy you can imagine.” Baker sat in with the sextet for eight numbers at the Air Force club in Landstuhl, Germany but if recorded these performances have never been released.
The Dutch Jazz Archive Series has recently issued the sextet’s entire concert from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw where the group was in fine, uninhibited form. There are also three tracks recorded in Milan on RLR Records.
Soon after their April return to the USA on the Queen Elizabeth Jon Eardley moved to Florida and Don Ferarra took his place for the sextet’s final recording on the 26th. September 1956. They rehearsed in the afternoon and after a meal break recorded six titles later that evening including Elevation which finds the group at its most spontaneous and free-wheeling. An up tempo blues it opens with the trombone and baritone in unison before the trumpet and tenor are added for a second chorus in harmony. The climax is a stimulating passage of extemporised polyphony with each horn submerging its identity resulting in a quite unique ensemble sound. In his role as resident Pied Piper Mulligan develops Don Ferrara’s closing phrase leading the group through a series of extemporised riffs and phrases, creating a form and structure worthy of a written arrangement.
Gerry wanted Ferrara to remain with the sextet but Don was working with Lee Konitz at the time so Dave Bailey recommended Oliver Beener who sight read the parts with ease. He remained with the group for several weeks including the sextet’s final booking at the upstairs room of the Preview Lounge in Chicago. By this time Zoot Sims had begun working with his own quartet and he told Gerry he would not accept any more sextet bookings. As Mulligan explained to me a few years before he died he readily understood, “A soloist like that would have found it to be a strait-jacket after a while and I certainly didn’t try to replace him – Zoot was Zoot”.
The sextet was the finest of all Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless small groups and everything it recorded is currently available – as far as I can tell.”
DISCOGRAPHY
The fabulous Gerry Mulligan Sextet (3 CD set) – Fresh Sound 417.
Gerry Mulligan Sextet/Quartet Rare And Unissued 1955-56 Broadcasts RLR Records 88660.
Gerry Mulligan Sextet Jazz At The Concertgebouw MCN0801.
On the following video, Gerry’s sextet is featured of Jon Eardley’s Demanton from the 1956 Concertgebouw concert in Amsterdam. While listening to Demanton, if you think that you are hearing the changes to Sweet Georgia Brown, you are!
"STAN AND GERRY - Occasional Collaborators" by Gordon Jack
As many of you know, Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journaland a very generous friend to these pages in his allowance ofJazzProfilesre-publishings of his excellent writings. He is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospectiveand he developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ bookGerry Mulligan’s Ark.
The following article was first published in Jazz Journal October 2017.
“Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan were two of the most original soloists to emerge during the fifties - a decade that has sometimes been called the last Golden Age of Jazz. They occasionally worked together but not always with the happiest of results.
Their first studio encounter took place in April 1949 on a date with Stan as the leader called The Brothers featuring Al Cohn, Allen Eager, Brew Moore and Zoot Sims. At this early stage of their careers the tenors sound very close to their original inspiration (Lester Young) but luckily the sleeve-note gives a solo break-down for ease of identification. Four titles were recorded and Mulligan who did not perform, contributed two originals – Five Brothers and Four And One Moore. He also loaned his baritone to Getz for the ensemble passages on Five Brothers (Classics F1126CD).A little later the musicians’ union became involved because Stan apparently refused to pay Gerry for the charts. On the day of the hearing the case was dismissed when it was found that Mulligan had temporarily allowed his union dues to lapse.
The following month they recorded together in a twelve-piece ensemble titled Gene Roland’s Boppers that included a Four Brothers-style saxophone section - Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Mulligan. Back in 1946 Roland had been experimenting with four tenors to create a light, airy sound very much influenced by Lester Young. This of course became a defining characteristic for Woody Herman’s Second and subsequent Herds when he replaced one of the tenors with a baritone. To put this session into perspective, it took place five months after Stan’s classic Early Autumn solo with Herman and three weeks after Gerry’s second recording date with the Miles Davis nonet. It is possible that the Roland tracks were merely rehearsals and not intended for release because they remained unissued until 2014 when they were included on a Chubby Jackson CD - Uptown UPCD27.75/27.76. One of the titles Sid’s SwingSymphony by Mulligan has an interesting provenance. A contrafact of Godchild it later became known as Ontet for Gerry’s 1953 tentette.
1949 was the year Stan’s genius was acknowledged by Metronome magazine which voted him the Top Tenor. Along with Lee Konitz he was also their “Musician of the Year”. He finally left Woody Herman that year and began freelancing successfully around New York. Early Autumn was constantly on the radio and his quartet recording with Al Haig of Long Island Sound (based on Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart) also became something of a hit thanks to extensive airplay from Symphony Sid (Original Jazz Classics JCCD 706-2). Fifteen months after the Roland date he was booked into the famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem with his own big band for a week opposite Charlie Parker with strings. The sax section featured Don Lanphere, Zoot and Mulligan and two badly recorded examples of the band’s performances (Four Brothers and Early Autumn) have survived on Zim-ZM1007. Sarah Vaughan was also included on the bill for the engagement. Ken Vail’s fascinating Bird’s Diary has a picture of Parker and Mulligan buying food from a street vendor during a break from rehearsals. Donald Maggin’s Getz biography has a shot of Stan outside the Apollo during a similar rest period.
Unlike Stan, these were difficult years for Mulligan. With his innovative writing for Gene Krupa, Elliot Lawrence and Miles Davis he was recognised by the cognoscenti as an arranger with fresh and original ideas but he was finding it difficult to get regular bookings as an instrumentalist. He occasionally worked and recorded around town in a Kai Winding group that included Brew Moore and George Wallington. He also arranged and played on a stimulating Chubby Jackson date featuring Howard McGhee, J.J. Johnson, Georgie Auld and Don Lamond among others (ProperboxPVCD119) but as he told me in a JJ interview (May/June 1995) “The work was rapidly drying up”. On more than one occasion he had to rehearse a band on the shore of the 72nd. Street lake in Central Park because nobody had enough money to hire a studio. Soon after his first album as a leader (Definitive DRCD 11227) he sold his horns and moved out to L.A. hoping for a change of luck. Flying, driving or catching a train was beyond his means so he hitchhiked there with his girl-friend Gail Maddon. His Walkin’ Shoes is a reference to their mode of travel from the east to the west coast and years later he called this trip, “Living Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – steerage class”. Through Gail’s previous relationship with Bob Graettinger he met Stan Kenton who soon purchased a number of his arrangements. He also started appearing at the Haig - a booking that assumed historical proportions when he formed his first pianoless quartet there with Chet Baker in 1952.
1952 was also the year Getz recorded Moonlight in Vermont with Johnny Smith. It proved to be hugely popular giving him yet another hit to rival Early Autumn. It also pushed his price to over $1000.00 a week and club owners insisted he perform it every night. The success of Vermont persuaded Norman Granz to offer him an exclusive contract with his Clef label. Bill Crow who was working with Getz at the time told me, “Johnny Mandel played trombone with us. He transcribed some of Gerry’s tunes like Walkin’ Shoes and Line For Lyons because Stan was so keen on the Mulligan quartet sound. Looking back, I don’t think there was any rivalry between Stan and Gerry because they were both in a ‘Star’ position in the jazz world. Getz of course was more difficult than Gerry and he was devious which Gerry never was”.
A little later after Bob Brookmeyer replaced Mandel, Stan took his quintet to California for residencies at the Tiffany and Zardi’s. After intermissions Stan and Bob used to go to the Haig to listen to Gerry’s group and sometimes after work they would all get together. This is how Mulligan explained it to me, “I remember a jam session at somebody’s house where Stan, Bob, Chet and I were the front line and we worked really well together improvising on ensemble things that were great. Stan decided that we should all go out together as a group, only he wanted it to be his group. Musically it was too bad that we couldn’t do it but personality-wise I don’t think it would have worked. Stan was peculiar – if things were going along smoothly he had to do something to louse them up, usually at someone else’s expense.”
Things came to a head when Stan told Down Beat, “I’m going out to the coast and when I return at the end of February, I intend to bring with me Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. With guys who can blow as much as Gerry, Chet and Bob the band should be the end. All three of them will write for the band.” This was news to Mulligan who replied in the next issue, “I don’t know what Stan has in mind here when he talks about adding me and Chet to his combo but it’s not for me. For years I stayed in the background and wrote arrangements for many bands. Now in the quartet I have something that is all mine. I can see no reason for sharing it with anyone.”
Their next little difficulty occurred in 1954 when they were part of a nation-wide tour with Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington organised by Norman Granz. For seven weeks beginning in New York’s Carnegie Hall the package performed in nine cities across the U.S. before concluding at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on November 8th. Getz’s part of the programme there was recorded on Verve 513 753-2 and Duke Ellington introduced him as “One of the leading exponents of the cool school”. His playing of course is anything but on a programme of standards and originals by Johnny Mandel, Al Cohn and Brookmeyer. Pianist John Williams adds considerably to the success of the CD demonstrating once again what an inspiring accompanist and hard swinging soloist he was.
Stan’s quintet over-ran their allotted time on stage so Granz recorded more titles the following night producing enough material for a double album. Instead of his own drummer (Art Mardigan) Getz decided to use Frank Isola who had been on the tour with Mulligan’s quartet which of course led to problems. Years later Frank told me, “Jeru could be pretty stubborn and was upset that I had made the recording with Stan. He said it was unfair to Art Mardigan”. Mulligan remained on the west coast
after the concert so Frank who was anxious to return to his family in New York took the opportunity of joining Stan. The tenor-man had to hire drum kits as they worked their way back east because Gerry had apparently driven off with Frank’s drums in his station wagon.
Just as an aside, Leonard Feather’s 1956 Encyclopaedia Yearbook of Jazz asked 120 leading musicians to name their favourite instrumentalists. Stan voted for Lester Young, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Sonny Stitt on tenor. Mulligan was his choice on baritone. Never guilty of false modesty Gerry voted for himself on baritone along with Harry Carney. Don Byas, Young, and Sims were his tenor choices.
Late in 1957 they recorded two fine albums together which for different reasons could have been great ones. The session with Harry Edison and the Oscar Peterson Trio was released as Jazz Giants 1958 and there are several outstanding solo contributions. However Norman Granz’s decision to produce a relatively undisciplined blowing session when he had one of the music’s finest arrangers on hand means the recording falls a little short. Mulligan could have created something far more meaningful for the all-star ensemble to perform than the rudimentary head arrangements heard on the CD (Verve 0602517621320).
Another missed opportunity occurred two months later in October 1957 when they were reunited for the (in)famous Stan Getz Meets Gerry Mulligan date (Verve 392-2). A bizarre decision was taken to have two of the greatest soloists on their respective instruments performing on unfamiliar horns. On three numbers Gerry plays tenor and Stan is on baritone. Granz’s sleeve-note hints that it was Mulligan’s suggestion but Gerry told me, “It wasn’t my idea to switch horns on some numbers – Stan or Norman suggested it. I liked Zoot’s and Brew Moore’s mouthpieces but I never liked Stan’s and I didn’t like the sound I got on it”.
It is impossible to identify them on their alternate horns as Ronnie Ross found when Leonard Feather played Anything Goes during a 1958 Blindfold Test in Down Beat, ”I didn’t know who the players were…I liked the tenor player very much and some of the baritone. It definitely swings. I’ll give it four stars”. The titles where they perform on their customary instruments contain some of their most extrovert, freewheeling work from the period and the extemporised, contrapuntal interplay that bookends That Old Feeling is an album highlight. A sympathetic producer like Dick Bank for instance might have created more suitable environments for them but this was to be their last studio recording together which is a pity.
By the end of the fifties they had become perennial poll winners and although such listings are of ephemeral interest it is worth recalling the 1959 Metronome All Time – All Star poll. The winner was Charlie Parker followed by Miles Davis; Gerry Mulligan; Lester Young; Louis Armstrong; Dizzy Gillespie; Stan Getz; Benny Goodman; Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck.
That Old Feeling
Listen: Gerry Mulligan - An Aural Narrative in Jazz
“Baritone saxophonist and composer Gerry Mulligan has been a central presence in six decades of jazz, from the dance band era to the present day. As a teenager in the 1940s he traveled with the Gene Krupa band, arranging and playing a sweet and unbounded bari sax. He was an important voice in the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions with Miles Davis, where his exquisite arrangements set the tone for progressive jazz in the 1950s. Always at the front of the new jazz aesthetic, always innovating, Mulligan and his quartets, sextets, and tentettes were the driving force of the be-bop and post-be-bop generations of jazz, while his Concert Jazz Band and subsequent orchestras have kept him in the forefront of music into the 1990s.
Mulligan has made music with such jazz giants as Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lionel Hampton, always challenging his own way of playing, never settling on one style. To hear Mulligan blowing side by side with other saxophonists, paired off with Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Ben Webster, or Johnny Hodges, confirms his brilliance as jazz's greatest bari.
Listen: Gerry Mulligan is a personal tour through the canon of Mulligan's music, a unique look at the artist as composer, musician, and cultural force. Here is a look at Mulligan's recorded output—on over one hundred albums—written by a sensitive and perceptive listener who has spent a lifetime with his music. From his parents' Crosley radio, where as a child he feasted on the big band music of the 1940s, to the present, Jerome Klinkowitz has amassed an aural history of Mulligan's development as a musical innovator and seismograph of American popular culture. Listen: Gerry Mulligan is a treasure for every jazz lover.”
- Dust jacket annotation for Listen: Gerry Mulligan
In previous postings on baritone saxophonist, composer-arranger and bandleader, Gerry Mulligan, some omnibus and some more specialized sketches, I have lamented the fact there there still remains no comprehensively researched work on Gerry and his music, this despite the fact that Mulligan was one of the seminal figures in the history of Jazz in the 20th century.
A few readers have shared that perhaps Jerome Klinkowitz’s Listen: Gerry Mulligan - An Aural Narrative in Jazz [New York: Schirmer Books, 1991] might suffice as such an effort.
Essentially based on Professor Klinkowitz’s impressions of Gerry’s recordings, it is by definition, a personal appreciation rather than an unbiased and objective study of Mulligan and his music. [N.B.: When this book was published in 1991, Professor Klinkowitz was a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa].
But it is a great place to start if you are unfamiliar with Gerry’s career, would like an overview of Gerry’s recordings, and/or wish to compare your thoughts about one of Gerry’s recordings with those of another Jazz fan.
In the opening paragraphs to his Conclusion: Composing a Life of Music, Professor Klinkowitz states:
“Gerry Mulligan's first recording dates from 1945 with the Elliot Lawrence band. His forty-five years' worth of albums are a remarkable archive, even more so when measured against the entire history of recorded jazz, which dates only from the February 1917 sessions of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band for Victor, with jazz itself existing as an identifiable musical form only for a few short years before that. Of the seventy-some years in the history of jazz records, Mulligan's four-and-a-half decades are the greatest part, missing only one epochal style, Dixieland, while including the swing era, in which he debuted, and all the various developments since.
Swing, bop, progressive, cool, fusion—Mulligan not only experiences them all but contributes to them as an innovator and draws on their new styles for his own playing and writing. He is one of the few important jazz musicians who can sound utterly contemporary in 1945, 1959, 1971, and in the present, and whose work has the feel of anticipating what's to come. His vast canon of LPs serves as an archive of a major part of jazz history, providing not just enjoyable listening but a culturally illustrative soundtrack reviewing all the ground covered over the past half-century, with special attention to all the formative steps along the way.
No one would suggest that in Mulligan's dance-band writing of 1945 can be heard the excitement of V-E Day and the tremors of atomic detonation over Japan. That's something for the movies, and though even a very good one—Martin Scorsese's New York, New York — dramatizes the emergence of bop out of just such excitement and moral disruption, the relation of jazz to American culture is an immensely more subtle matter. But the fact remains that Gerry Mulligan's evolving music was at the heart of changes in American jazz, changes that revolutionized the art form and brought it to its greatest period of confidence and maturity. And all this happened during the century's central decades that initiated an epoch with names of its own. Postwar, atomic, postmodern, contemporary — the specific terminology is still unsettled, but the period itself is a historically and culturally distinct one. The marvel is that in the 1990s one can look back and see so many changes within the lifetime of Americans just now in their prime. Because Gerry Mulligan's work went through the same range of development, comprising so much of the history of jazz, and yet is still with us in an eminently current way, his music makes the perfect aural backdrop to this half-century of transformation. “[pp. 208-209]
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles couldn’t agree more with Professor Klinkowitz’s assertions.
"There are interesting parallels in the careers of Benny Carter and Don Redman. Both are gifted, versatile musicians, multi-instrumentalists, composers, and arrangers. And both were bandleaders whose efforts were not rewarded with sustained success.
Both gave up their orchestral ambitions in the forties, turning primarily to writing—films and television in Carter's case. Here, however, the parallels stop, for, while Redman gradually retired from professional life in the fifties and early sixties. Carter has remained active to this day, both as a writer and a performer. Indeed, some of his finest playing can be found on recordings made since the forties and, as a celebrated elder statesman of jazz, on numerous Jazz at the Philharmonic tours and international jazz festivals.
Carter's career is difficult to assess, in part because it is marked by a zigzag course of activities, in turn prompted by his prodigious versatility. Moreover his career falls into two major periods, remarkably paralleling the two major chronological divisions of jazz: the classic and the modern—the dividing line poised on the fulcrum of the mid-1940s, The first period is characterized by Carter's peripatetic life as a performer, arranger and bandleader: the second by a more stationary life in California revolving primarily around composing, a great deal of it for television and other commercial ventures. His life—and his own public observations on it—do not reveal which of the many Benny Carters is the real one. Perhaps there is no single one. Perhaps the diverse elements of Carter's total talent are inseparable and mutually complementary.
At the same time it is this kaleidoscopic profusion of talent which explains why Carter never had the kind of popular success he and his musician colleagues and admirers hoped for. John Hammond, who helped Carter in a variety of ways in the early thirties, felt, in retrospect of that period, that he "was more interested in exhibiting his versatility than in making great music," and, Hammond continued, "this is one reason Benny never became a great band leader."'1 That may be too hard a personal judgment, but there is a kernel of truth in it. Two other alternatives suggest themselves. It is possible that Carter's talent, for all its awesome diversity, was not strong enough to assert itself in the public's mind, in the way that Ellington's, Armstrong's, and Galloway's did—and 1 have here purposely cited three quite different kinds of talents and temperaments. It can be that in our musical society anyone as richly and diversely talented as Carter is to some extent rejected because the public and the music business prefer a single, clearly identifiable marketable personality, not a many-sided marvel who resists being fitted into the standard predetermined professional slots. In the end, I would argue, Carter's problems derive a little from all three causes. ...
I've always felt that Carter is first and foremost a lyric player who feels happiest in a slow ballad, especially one in which he can exhibit his formidable talent for meaningful, tasteful ornamentation. This special gift, in which he is most consistent, can be savored throughout his career, from his own early Blue Prelude (193?) through Lullaby in Blue (1952) and Ellington's Prelude to a Kiss (1945) to Blue Star (1961). With the recording of Midnight Sun to guide us, we can let the music have the last word."
- Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945
One bright, sunny day “when the world was young,” a business luncheon found me in Pasadena, CA.
Located a few miles northeast of Los Angeles, CA., and because of this proximity, always considered a part of “old” California, the city is nestled in a valley just below the majestic San Gabriel Mountains.
The site for the meeting was The Athenaeum Club which is adjacent to the California Institute of Technology [Cal Tech] campus.
The Athenaeum is a members-only club that offers dining and lodging privileges to Cal Tech faculty, students and alumni, as well as, to employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at the Huntington Museum/Library, both of which are also in Pasadena.
I was early for the meeting and the maître d'hôtel welcomed me to visit the club’s inner courtyard and gardens while I waited for my party to arrive.
Upon entering these areas, I noticed a vaguely familiar face seated on a bench in a shaded alcove. He was hunched over with this hands on his knees looking at an LP cover.
At his feet was a bag with the distinctive logo of Poo Bah's a record store that for many years was situated in an old house in Pasadena at the corner of Wilson and Walnut.
As I walked in his direction, it dawned on me that the man starring so intently at album cover was saxophonist Bill Perkins.
I had met Bill many years earlier during the making of his Quietly There LP as Victor Feldman and Larry Bunker, both of whom I studied with, invited me to a few of its recording sessions in the fall of 1966.
Bill looked up as I approached where he was sitting, smiled and with a brief nod in my direction, went back to examining the album.
I caught enough of a look at the album cover to recognize it as Benny Carter’s Aspects [United Artists 4017/5017S].
My recognition of it startled me into saying to him: “I have that record and you are Bill Perkins.”
To which he smiled, nodded and ask me to sit down.
I had forgotten that Bill had an engineering degree from Cal Tech which granted him alumni privileges at The Athenaeum. If I remember correctly, he was there to attend some sort of forum on acoustics that was scheduled to take place in one of the club’s small conference rooms. Bill had a long-standing interest in recording music.
After exchanging a few brief pleasantries, Bill looked down at the LP that he was still holding in his hands and said: “I was supposed to play on this date, but couldn’t make it, so Buddy Collette took my place.”
During the course of our brief conversation, I was struck by the respect that Bill evidenced for Benny Carter. I had always known of “Perk’s” fondness for the playing of tenor saxophonist Lester Young, but his knowledge of Benny’s career and his appreciation for his gifts as a musician was something that I hadn’t expected from such a “modern” musician.
When I said as much, Bill commented that while Benny’s first arrangements dated back to those he did for the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in the late 1920s, the charts on the Aspects album prove that his writing was up-to-date and current. “You might think that you were listening to Hefti or Mancini.”
Bill also offered that much of what Benny wrote during his career went unnoticed because it wasn’t recorded under his own name or because he wrote it for others while not calling attention to himself. “The man was such a Pro: he just did his job and went on to the next one.” [I was almost tempted to say, “Just like you, Bill,” but had the good sense not to]
Bill then looked at me over his reading glasses and said: “Do you realize that Benny Carter has been around since the very beginning of Jazz?”
What neither of us realized when Bill made this statement was that Benny was to also be around for another twenty years! He lived from 1907-2003!!
My luncheon guests arrived and I said goodbye to Bill and thanked him for the nice chat.
When I came across the Aspects CD recently, I remembered this brief visit with Bill and the memory of it also served to remind me that I had been remiss about not honoring Benny Carter – one of the Founding Fathers of Jazz - and his eight-decade contributions to its development with a piece on JazzProfiles plus a tribute video.
What follows is the editorial staff at JazzProfiles efforts to remedy this oversight.
The audio track to this video is Benny Carter’s arrangement of June is Busting Out All Over which features solos by trumpeter Joe Gordon, Frank Rosolino on trombone, Benny on alto saxophone and Shelly Manne on drums.
And here are the insert notes that Ed Berger of the Institute of Jazz Studies at RutgersUniversity prepared for the CD release of this recording. Ed is also the author of Benny Carter: A Life in American Music.
“In a seven-decade recording career as notable for its sustained creativity as for its unprecedented longevity, Benny Carter has created masterpieces in several eras and many different genres. Yet even amidst this monumental body of work, Aspects is a landmark. Apart from its considerable intrinsic musical value. Aspects attests to Carter's continued mastery of a genre he helped pioneer: big band Jazz. Carter, of course, was a prime architect of the swing era through his prescient arrangements for Fletcher Henderson and others in the late 1920s and earlv 1930s. as well as for his own legendary orchestras beginning in 1933.
By 1958, when Aspects was recorded. Carter was deeply ensconced in the Hollywood studios as an arranger, composer, and player, dividing his time between many diverse film and television assignments and occasional Jazz recordings. The latter included several memorable small group sessions but, apart from a few isolated tracks. Aspects was the only big band recording by Carter as leader from 1946 (when he disbanded his last regular orchestra) to 1987 (the year of his epic encounter with the American Jazz Orchestra).
Despite this four-decade hiatus, Carter had by no means divorced himself from big band arranging and composing. In addition to jazz-influenced film and television scores, he wrote material for two Basie albums, Kansas City Suite (1960) and The Legend (1961), which became milestones of the "New Testament" Basie orchestra.
Carter's activities as arranger/conductor for many top vocalists yielded big band gems for Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, among others. But Aspects stands virtually alone as documentation of his unique orchestral approach during a transitional period for jazz in general and for Carter in particular.
The "jazz calendar" concept might at first glance seem a contrived and limiting marketing department gimmick. Indeed, when the album was repackaged only a couple of years after its release, its title was changed from Aspects to Jazz Calendar to further underscore the theme. But the idea yielded some fine material, and for those months for which no appropriate pieces existed Carter (and in one case Hal Schaefer) provided attractive originals.
The musicians Carter assembled for Aspects included many big band veterans who formed the pool of versatile Hollywood studio players. While not a working band, they played together on a daily basis in various combinations and permutations in the exacting world of studio work, often under Carter's baton. What the band may have lacked in individual character it more than made up for in precision and polish.
Furthermore. Carter's writing is so distinctive that any orchestra performing his work—from a college stage band to top-flight professionals such as these — immediately takes on some of the musical character of the arranger.
The reed section is the signature of any Carter-led orchestra, and Aspects is no exception. The saxes serve as a cushion for the soloists, provide melodic counterpoint to the brass, and leap to the fore in the patented solo passages for which Carter is famous. But here Carter achieves a balance among the sections which was not always present on his early arrangements. Although this orchestral symmetry is evident throughout, it is perhaps best demonstrated by the remarkable "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" where Carter ingeniously alternates melodic, harmonic, and even rhythmic roles among the saxes, trumpets, and trombones.
The unifying clement throughout is Carter's sublime alto. While Carter shines on every track, high points include his two quintessential choruses on his own "March Wind," the way he integrates his solo work into his arrangement on "June Is Bustin...", his brief melody statement and solo on -September Song," and his work on the two small group performances: "One Morning In May" and "August Moon." (Incidentally, some 35 years later Carter incorporated the latter's haunting theme into his Tales Of The Rising Sun suite.)
Among the other fine soloists, Frank Rosolino and the underrated Joe Gordon stand out. The spark supplied by Shelly Manne must also be noted. His swing, drive, and taste show why he was so in demand as a big band drummer before concentrating on small group settings.
The discovery that the mono and stereo issues of Aspects contain different takes for four tracks is a fascinating discographical anomaly. In the early days of stereo, separate recording setups were used for the stereo and mono versions. Apparently, during mastering, different takes were inadvertently used. Although the routines arc the same, there are slight differences in the performances. For example, the tempos are faster on the stereo versions of "June Is Bustin..." and "Swingin" In November." Another discographical oddity: Leonard Feather, who wrote the original liner notes, points out that it is Carter who plays the sleigh bells that open and close "Sleigh Ride In July"— yet another double for the multi-instrumentalist!
Almost forty years have passed since the recording of Aspects. By 1958, at age 51, Benny Carter was already being viewed as a historic figure if not an elder statesman of jazz. Incredibly, in 1996, as this album is being prepared for reissue, Carter has just completed two major commissions: one for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and one for the Library of Congress. Both involved extended works, with Carter himself as the featured soloist. With a constant flow of classic reissues such as Aspects and ambitious new recording projects, this is indeed a fortuitous time for Benny Carter fans.
- Ed Berger
Institute of Jazz Studies, RutgersUniversity (Co-author, Benny Carter: A Life in American Music)”
One minute I’m standing next to him at an Los Angles Jazz Institute event introducing myself for the first time and the next he’s agreeing to be interviewed via e-mail for the following JazzProfilesfeature.
This all speaks wonders for the modern age of communication, but even more importantly, it underscores John Altman’s agreeable and affable personality, not to mention the pace at which he conducts his life.
Before hearing his band perform at the LAJI event, I knew virtually nothing about him other than remembering his name as the music credits flashed by for the MissMarple TV series based on the books of Dame Agatha Christie and starring the actress Joan Hickson [my wife is a huge fan of the series].
With a diverse and wide-ranging involvement in many aspects of the music business, John is a “man in motion” and as a result he maintains residences in London and Sydney and a flat in Los Angeles.
Since my “road warrior days” are now long gone, it seemed that the easiest way to develop this feature about John would be to prepare a series of interview questions and e-mail them to him a few at a time.
This I did and while John was preparing he responses – quite speedily I might add which just goes to prove the maxim: if you want anything done, give it to a busy person – I was preparing this introduction by doing some research on John’s background.
Much to my surprise, this man whom I knew virtually nothing about, turns out to be an Arts & Letters equivalent of Da Vinci’s “Renaissance Man.”
Before moving on to the interview with him in which John very kindly [and patiently] expressed his views on a variety of subjects largely pertaining to music in general and Jazz in particular, let’s begin this feature with a quick overview of the biographical highlights of John’s accomplishments, of which, there are many.
John was born in London on December 5, 1949 and he is proficient as a saxophonist, composer, music arranger, orchestrator, and conductor.
He was introduced to the music of the 1930s Swing era and 1940s Bebop scene at an early age by an uncle who arranged music for big bands and conducted for Judy Garland, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, among others.
In view of his subsequent achievements, I was somewhat incredulous at learning that John’s only formal, musical training were piano lessons as a child.
While attending the University of Sussex, he became involved in session work and gigs with Fleetwood Mac and Nico. His later studies at Birkbeck College were interrupted when he left school to work for two years as the musical director with the group Hot Chocolate for a two year concert tour.
John has also played saxophone with rock and blues groups such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Van Morrison and served as arranger-conductor for Rod Stewart, George Michael and Tina Turner, among others.
He also did work for Monty Python as the arranger for their Rutles television special and their movie, The Life of Brian.
John has also been a frequent conductor with the Royal Philharmonia Orchestra, both independently and for film scores. His screen career began as the musical arranger and director for the 1978 film Just a Gigolo. He continued in this capacity for such films as The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball and numerous television productions including Shadowlands and adaptations of all of the dozen Agatha Christie novels featuring Miss Marple [starring Joan Hickson].
He served as the historical music advisor and arranged all the period music for Titanic and was the first Western European composer to score a Russian film – Tsareubiytsa – The Assassin of the Tsar.
John’s film score credits include Hear My Song, Funny Bones, Beautiful Thing, The Matchmaker, Little Voice, Legionnaire, Hope Springs, Shall We Dance?, Akasha Gopuram and Shoot on Sight.
John is a prolific writer of commercials having scored over 4,000 advertisements. In 2002, Campaign named him one of the 100 most influential figures in contemporary British advertising and one of the 5 top composers. His compositions for Levisand Renault ads won the Campaign award for Best Soundtracks in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
And to add even more legitimacy to his movie, television and commercial/jingles credentials, John won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries Movie or a Special for his work on RKO 281 and he was nominated in the same category for The RomanSpring of Mrs. Stone. He won the BAFTA Award for best Film Music for Hear My Song, the Television and Radio Industries Club Award for TV Theme Music of the Year in 1993 for Peak Practice, and the ASCAP Film Award for Shall We Dance? And RKO 281.
With this involvement in the broad spectrum of the music business, John’s career in many ways brings to mind that of Henry Mancini’s. And like Hank, John has also had a special place reserved for Jazz and has contributed to the genre in both small group and big band settings.
The very successful nature of John commercial undertakings certainly speak for themselves, but what of his interest in and involvement with Jazz? How did this come about? The majority of the questions that were developed for John as the basis of the interview were basically focused on finding answers to that question.
The format used was to send John a set of questions per correspondence which he sometimes answers individually and directly while at other times he combined his answers to one or more of the questions. At times he used the questions as a point of departure for taking his answers in a different direction.
What really impressed me throughout the process of “interviewing” him was the depth and breadth of his knowledge about Jazz, its many styles and its prominent stylists.
Other than making a few, minor changes in grammar and syntax, I have not altered John’s responses in any way.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles would like to offer a special thank you to Mr. Gordon Sapsed of Southampton, England for the use of the wonderful photographs of John and his big band that you will find interspersed throughout the interview.
Now let’s meet and learn more about an extremely capable and creative musician – John Altman.
- How and when did music first come into your life?
- What are your earliest recollections of Jazz?
- Who were the Jazz musicians who first impressed you and why?
“Here's a start:
- I first became aware of music around the time I became aware of my own existence! My mother's four brothers were all well known bandleaders in the UK and two of them developed international reputations - Sid Phillips as England's premier arranger for the Ambrose Orchestra and then as our leading jazz clarinetist, and Woolf Phillips as Britain's number one jazz trombonist, as a founder member and original arranger for the Ted Heath Band, and then as the bandleader at the London Palladium between 1947 and 1953 where he conducted for all the major artists including Sinatra, Nat Cole, Ellington, Ella, Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, Judy Garland and many, many more.
Frequent visitors to my home when I was young were Jack Benny, Sophie Tucker, Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters. I made my first stage appearance at the age of 3 with Judy Garland at the London Palladium when I was standing in the wings. I spotted my uncle conducting and ran out to take over the orchestra! Judy hoisted me onto her knee and sang Over The Rainbow to me.
Another of my uncles had been a quality control director for Decca Records so we had many test pressings of 78s as well as an extensive collection of jazz and dance records. My mother had been friends with Coleman Hawkins and Fats Waller so I guess I had no choice but to respond to jazz, anyway I was immediately drawn to the sounds.
By the age of 5, I had memorized Jack Teagarden solos and complete Basie and Ellington performances. One of my favorites was Texas Shuffle by the Basie band, which I took in to primary school when I was 7 to play to the class. What they must have thought of it is a mystery!!
I also loved a Charlie Barnet recording of I Don't Want Anybody At All - many years later I worked as an arranger for the song's composer, Jule Styne. When I told him this, he ran to the piano and played it, got stuck on the bridge so I sat beside him and we finished the song four handed - a treasured memory. Several years later I recorded the song with my big band and vocalist Joan Viskant.
I started learning piano at the age of 7 and began composing virtually immediately (One of the first pieces I wrote I later used in a commercial where they wanted something that sounded like it had been written by a 7 year old). I won a scholarship to one of the most prestigious British schools, City of London and as a reward my parents bought me a Dansette record player that played LPs and 45rpm records (this would be 1961).
The first two albums I bought were by Bix Beiderbecke and Charlie Parker. I guess I must have liked the covers since I can't imagine I knew much jazz history by the age of 11, but I joined the school Jazz Society, where 11 year olds were frowned on by the gang of 18 year olds who made up the membership. Nevertheless they soon realized I knew quite a bit about the music, helped no doubt by another present I had received, The Pictorial History of Jazz.
I bought a tenor sax for my 13th birthday, got it on the Friday and played a gig on the Saturday - it must have sounded awful! This was with a blues band whose entire repertoire was lifted from a Muddy Waters LP. Just 8 years later these same guys got together at my 21st birthday party and played virtually the same set - accompanying Muddy Waters who jammed at my party for the whole night! Who could have ever imagined it!
I attended my first jazz concert in 1963 - Duke Ellington at the Finsbury Park Astoria, and my first visit to a jazz club was in early 64 - Wes Montgomery at Ronnie Scott’s. From there on it was a continuous round of jazz clubs and concerts - Don Byas, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, who remembered my mother from pre war Holland and my uncle Woolf from the Jack Hylton Band where they had a small jazz group together, and early encounters with many of my jazz heroes, some of whom I wound up either working with or befriending.
At the age of 15 an amazing thing happened - I had become acquainted with a bass player named John Hart, who lived in the same street as some friends of mine. He was a wealthy scion of the Woolworth family and a very fine player (he would sadly die in a car crash several years later). For some extraordinary reason Philly Joe Jones arrived to live in his house, and he soon started organizing jam sessions.
I attended along with all the fine young (and not so young) horn players and anxiously awaited my turn. I became immediately aware that I couldn't play like any of the other guys - not just couldn't but didn't want to. They were all over their instruments, striving to impress, but it all sounded to me like text book exercises.
As I had my last music lesson at the age of 11, I had picked up my knowledge of the saxophone mainly by listening to other players I liked, and I had gravitated towards the melodic improvisers. So I began my solo with a carefully placed note, waited a few seconds, repeated the note, then added another and went from there. It was ostensibly a different method to everyone else, and it seemed to meet with Joe's approval, as he came up to me at the end and said 'you sound just like Joe Henderson!' - which I took to be a compliment (at least I hope it was!)
Shortly afterwards Hank Mobley arrived in the house. Not only did he not own a tenor, he had no mouthpiece, and I sort of regret passing on allowing him to borrow my horn, as most people assured me it would never be seen again! To have a horn played, or even pawned by Hank Mobley - now that would be something!”
-Could you describe your college years at U. of Sussex and Birkbeck C. as they relate to Jazz composing and arranging?
-Were you doing any combo playing during these college days?
-How would you describe your approach to writing for big bands?
-How would you describe your approach to small group writing?
-Melody, Harmony, Rhythm and Texture [the way the music sounds] have been described as the musical atoms upon which all composing is based; is there anything unique or different in how you deal with these, individually and collectively, in your writing?
When I started at SussexUniversity, doing a BA degree in English and American Literature, I still thought of myself primarily as a blues/rock saxophonist and folk flautist. My jazz seemed confined to some Dixieland clarinet gigs, but my listening continued to develop and I began to run the University Jazz Club which brought all of the great British jazz musicians down to perform over the three years (many of whom were later to wind up as members of my own bands in later years).
I continued to be involved with the Blues Society which existed side by side with the jazz club, and in addition to jamming with local talent such as Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, then an out and out blues band, I got to play with artists like Mississippi Fred MacDowall, Champion Jack Dupree and , on one memorable occasion, the legendary Son House, as well as managing to inveigle the entire Muddy Waters band to play at my 21st birthday party. I only recently discovered that they never got paid for that particular UK tour, but on that incredible night for me they stayed and jammed with my friends and me till 7am next morning! Ben Sidran was a contemporary of mine at the University (doing a Masters degree) but our paths were not to cross till much later.
When I returned to London in 1971 to pursue a Doctorate in Victorian Literature, I continued to play in a variety of settings, including 'subbing' occasionally in the pioneering Anglo/South African big band The Brotherhood of Breath, but it wasn't till 1974 that I really began to materialize on the London Jazz Scene. This coincided with my buying a secondhand baritone sax for 60 pounds, which I earned back the first night I played the horn! I'd always loved the sound of the baritone, particularly Gerry Mulligan and Harry Carney, and I started playing bebop gigs as well as lots of Dixieland and mainstream with people like Bud Freeman and Wild Bill Davison.
I co-formed the first salsa band in the UK with a nine piece horn section and began writing in earnest. As a self taught arranger I wish I could explain how my ability showed itself but like my uncles, also self taught arrangers, it was just something I could always do. I could listen to a classical or jazz recording and tell you exactly how each effect was achieved, what the violas were doing, how the saxes were voiced etc.
This became invaluable slightly later when it became apparent to TV companies and advertising people that I could transcribe existing pieces quickly and accurately, but as I started writing commercial pop charts and writing for performers like Van Morrison, I discovered that I had an aptitude for both orchestration and composing - neither of which I had ever formally studied or intended to pursue.
Luckily I had thoroughly absorbed (through listening)the writing of so many heroes in the jazz and orchestral world - from Don Redman, Benny Carter, Ellington and Strayhorn through Jimmy Mundy and Sy Oliver to Tadd Dameron and Gil Evans and beyond so when it came time to form my own big band I had a solid grounding in the vocabulary of big band writing.
In the late 70s and early 80s, after I gave up touring with Van Morrison to concentrate on composing and arranging, I also broadened my jazz playing even further and began working with the likes of Tony Scott, Jon Eardley, Chet Baker, Kenny Wheeler and for five memorable years Slim Gaillard. Van Morrison and I had often discussed Slim and wondered where he had vanished to, when he suddenly showed up at the Canteen in London. I went down to introduce myself, found myself co-opted into the band and wound up doing all his gigs when he spontaneously decided to relocate to London!
We became very close and I often found myself in his company for dinners with Dizzy, Johnny Griffin or Kenny Clarke. A very surreal experience occurred just after he passed away. I received a call stating that in his papers he had requested that I play at his memorial, and the concert had been fixed for a Friday afternoon at Ronnie Scotts. I was in the middle of recording a big movie score and was conducting a largish orchestra all day long - it was a wartime drama and very sombre and melancholic music. I worked out that if a car was sent for me at 1pm when we took our break, I would assemble my curved soprano sax -which I had begun specializing on in the early 80s - in the car, run straight on stage, play a set and rush back to resume conducting at 2. All went to plan, and I ran through a packed club to the bandstand - as I arrived on stage the rhythm section kicked off a mid tempo blues. It felt so good that I had to look round to see with whom I was playing - there on piano was Les McCann and on bass was Percy Heath! As I finished my first solo I looked over to the piano where Les was comping with his left hand and videotaping me with a camera held in the right! I played two tunes, hugged Percy, waved to Les, ran out of the door to the waiting car, packed my horn and five minutes later was conducting some sad dramatic scoring for low strings, thinking to myself 'Did that really happen?' More to follow”
Received 9.10.2009
THE BIG BAND
I formed my big band in the mid 1980s as a result of having a number 1 hit record on the pop charts. It was a cover of a Billie Holiday recording - That Ole Devil Called Love by a 19 year old British pop singer named Alison Moyet. This was her parents' favourite record and she wanted to do an updated version keeping the same feel and to a large extent the same orchestration. Two stories stand out from the making of the record. We worked in a studio I had never seen before or since, with an old Swedish piano that fell horribly out of tune barely 30 minutes after the piano tuner left. While we were wondering what to do next, up stepped Ms Moyet and opened a bag to reveal a piano tuning kit. 'Leave it to me' said the multi platinum pop star 'I trained as a piano tuner' and with that she proceeded to tune the piano perfectly - it held up through the whole session!!
The record was then released a few months later and immediately shot to number 1 in the charts. The pianist on the record, playing the Teddy Wilson style fills, was the wonderful Mick Pyne, who was in Stan Getz's group for a while and played for years with Tubby Hayes. Mick had sight read my chart of a song he had never actually heard before. On the night the pop charts were published he was playing solo piano at Kettners Restaurant in Soho, London. The owner Peter Boizot, an avid jazz fan, clapped his hands to silence the assembled diners and announced 'Ladies and gentlemen I am delighted to tell you that Mick Pyne, our pianist, is tonight Top of the Pops, and will now play his version of That Ole Devil Called Love.' As the only time he had encountered the song was as a chord chart three months previously, and had not even the vaguest idea of how it went, he proceeded to play a succession of rippling arpeggios and florid runs up and down the keyboard, much to the bafflement of the patrons!
However on the back of this success I was approached to undertake a concert tour with Ms Moyet and began writing charts at a furious pace, both for her and for the band to perform. We launched at my local jazz club in the summer of 1985 - the band included Ted Heath stalwart Ronnie Verrell (Animal in the Muppets!) on drums, great baritone saxist Ronnie Ross, ex Buddy Rich trombonist and Downbeat poll winner Malcolm Griffiths, former Maynard Ferguson tenorist Bob Sydor, and former Bill Holman and Louie Bellson saxophonist Andy Mackintosh plus the cream of British jazz talent.
The tour was a half success - the pop audiences were baffled by our music till we played the 'hit' and the jazz audience wanted more of the instrumental stuff. I received very favourable feedback from Oliver Jackson, Sweets Edison, Red Rodney, Tony Scott, Benny Carter, Slim Gaillard and Al Cohn, all of whom were very supportive of the band, and we guested with the likes of Warren Vache, Harold Nicholas, Martin Taylor, Adelaide Hall and many others over the next few years.
I kept the band busy playing on commercials and movie soundtracks including Little Voice, Shall We Dance, RKO 281 and many more over the next 24 years, and we made an album with Chicago born UK resident vocalist Joan Viskant (a cousin of Lennie Tristano) in the mid 90s.
We also had two further worldwide number 1 hit records with the Icelandic singer Bjork on a song entitled It's Oh so Quiet, and with George Michael on Kissing A Fool. However it has been a struggle to keep the band going - I joke that it's our 24th anniversary - 24 years and 24 gigs! Al Cohn, who used to stay with me in London when he toured there, took me to meet Woody Herman- 'This is John - he leads a big band in London' said Al. Woody looked me straight in the eyes, gripped my hand and said 'Why???" We recently played at the Ken Poston Swingin' Affair with the LA version of the band (there is also an Australian one too!) which includes Bob Efford, Pete Christlieb, Tom Ranier and many other West Coast giants, and had a resounding success and I will shortly record an album of my instrumental big band charts - hopefully half in the UK and half in LA.
Received 9-13-2009
Here’s the next round of questions under the broader rubric of “Influences:” to wit, can you talk about how the following may have influenced you writing?
-Duke Ellington– “My favourite arranger. He could make any combination of instruments sound amazing - but then he had Hodges, Gonsalves and Carney and Lawrence Brown and Ray Nance etc. Al Cohn once said to me while we were listening to Creole Love Call - 'if you or I brought that in to a session people would laugh at us - but doesn't it sound great!' Al was a huge influence as a player, writer and friend.”
-Pete Rugolo– “I enjoyed the bravura of his brass writing, and the humour (shades of Billy May too.)”
- CY Coleman– “An early mentor - more by his attitude and his perspective - he showed me how I could find myself a place in the music scene that I could feel comfortable with - an inspiration.”
-Johnny Mandel– “We share a hero worship of Al Cohn - Johnny's charts are an absolute delight to hear whether you are a musician or a fan - they are so well crafted.”
-Gil Evans– “Like Duke an alchemist! The later rock influenced stuff never excited me that much - I preferred to hear rock musicians play rock, and enjoy Out of the Cool, the Individualism of, Plus 10 and the Miles collaborations.”
-Gerry Mulligan– “A huge influence as a player and writer and I was delighted to find we shared the same passion for Adrian Rollini and Danny Polo.”
-Robert Farnon– “The Geraldo band had 3 staff arrangers in 1946 - Farnon, Angela Morley and my uncle Woolf Phillips - phenomenal writers who definitely influenced my conception of light music writing - a genre I adore.”
-Neal Hefti– “Neal defined the art of big band writing several times over - with Herman, and Basie and then the Clifford Brown with strings album is exemplary.”
- Tadd Dameron– “I loved the melodic beauty of his writing and always try to keep the internal parts 'singing' - I am not a big fan of convoluted writing that forces each player to bury their heads in their individual parts to the detriment of them hearing the whole picture.”
John added the following:
“Benny Carter - Major influence as a writer and a friend - his observations on music alone were priceless. The idea that I could teach him anything seems ridiculous but he rang me several times to ask my advice or to find out 'how I had done certain things in certain charts'. My feeling is he was boosting my confidence - if so I guess it sort of worked!
I have so many other favourites - Sy Oliver, George Duning, Skip Martin, Gary McFarland, Jimmy Mundy, Don Redman, Spud Murphy, Bill Holman - I hope I have synthesized them into a personal style of some sort.
Oh I need to add Horace Henderson to my arranger favorites list. He is so underappreciated but his charts make me exhilarated and envious. So much talent.”
Received 9.22.2009
- What do you look for in a rhythm section? Is this different for a small group as compared to a big band?
I love to play with a rhythm section that locks in and grooves - sounds obvious but isn't that easy to find. It's the same for the big band, though the techniques of locking in and grooving are definitely different. Some pianists, guitarists, bass players and drummers are great in small groups, not so great in big bands and vice versa. And some players switch effortlessly. I play consciously differently with the big band and always try to stay aware of the arrangement and its effectiveness, and I think that's what the best big band rhythm sections do too.
- What are the favorites instruments that you enjoy forming a front-line with in a small group?
I've really enjoyed doing the two soprano thing with Jim Galloway for the last few years at the Sweet and Hot Festival - I feel we play together intuitively. Now I'm back playing baritone again I enjoy playing with trumpet - it's harder to have a soprano/trumpet front line. Trombone fits nicely with both, and I enjoy playing with guitar and double bass as a trio with no drums - Jimmy Giuffre style.
- Do you have an interest in writing a thematic big band album? If so, what would be the favored theme for the album?
I enjoyed a project where I wrote originals in the style of all my favourite big bands and arrangers - Artie Shaw, Lunceford, Sy Oliver, Tadd Dameron, Jimmy Mundy, Ellington, Hefti etc. My thing has always been to write whatever takes my fancy, be it an original or a chart on a standard (jazz or pop) that I enjoy hearing.
- Who among today’s musicians is appealing to you and why?
Eric Alexander, Joe Lovano, Brian Lynch, John Allred, Pete Christlieb, Larry Goldings, Matt Wilson, Dena De Rose, Bill Cunliffe, Terell Stafford - the list is endless and really I am still a fan - I go to jazz clubs at least once a week and try to catch everyone who is creating new exciting music. Though my recorded listening still mainly focuses on the era from 1923 to 1970 and the work of the acknowledged and unacknowledged jazz masters.
Received 9.29.2009
Why is writing for strings such a challenge and why is it that so few composer-arrangers are able to do it?
Many arrangers fall into the trap of trying to make the strings 'swing' and thus overwrite. The best string writers - Farnon, Angela Morley, Riddle, Costa, Vince Mendoza, Mandel, Jeremy Lubbock know exactly how to make strings work in the context of a large ensemble. I have always loved the jazz with strings genre - particularly when the great jazz melodists - Hodges, Desmond, Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Charlie Shavers, Ben Webster - are put in that context with sympathetic string writing. I love Parker with strings - although the string writing is far from perfect it works a treat for me. Two underrated albums are Cannonball with strings and Benny Carter with strings - I think jazz players love the challenge of creating melodic jazz. I'd love to do a jazz with strings album sometime!
Please write the first thing that comes to mind or whatever you want to say about the following reed players:
Benny Carter - a great pal and a consummate musician. He had his own identity on every instrument he played - like Ray Nance he didn't play the same way on his doubles, and maintained the character of each instrument. A thinking musician, you can always hear the arranger's mentality but that doesn't mean he was a cold unfeeling player.
Johnny Hodges - the greatest! As Benny said, has there ever been a sound like that? I never tire of hearing him in any context.
Coleman Hawkins - as a family friend he was the first saxophonist I became aware of, at the age of about 5! He never stopped developing as a musician, and never looked back, although sometimes I wish he had.
Chu Berry - Along with Don Byas, the first to take Hawkins to another place (I hate the notion that jazz kept 'advancing' - it kept changing and becoming harmonically more sophisticated but its essence and quality were there from the start and to me Luis Russell is just as valid and contemporary as Maria Schneider. The vocabulary has changed but the spirit remains.). A direct influence on my favourite saxophonist, Lucky Thompson.
Lester Young - another great melodist, and I admire him even more because he seemed to have his whole style worked out from the get go. Like Adrian Rollini and Bechet they seemed to spring fully formed into the jazz world.
Charlie Parker - Benny Carter called him the greatest musician he ever met. I think we're still coming to terms with his innovations - certainly his rhythmic freedom is mind boggling.
Paul Desmond - one of my favourites - I admire his compositional mind and purity of sound, and inventive wit.
Gerry Mulligan - a hero as a player and a writer. When I got to spend time with him I was delighted to find that he shared my enthusiasm for Rollini and Danny Polo. I will never forget walking through Soho with his baritone in my left hand and him balanced precariously on my right shoulder after a few too many drinks!!
Bud Shank - a consummate professional and someone who never allowed himself to be pigeonholed - I admired his fierce dedication and 100% commitment.
Zoot Sims - genius!! And along with early Steve Lacy and Lucky Thompson one of my favourite soprano players.
Al Cohn - A great sax player, arranger, comedian and houseguest. Like Johnny Mandel, I learnt so much from listening to Al both in his playing and writing. Like another favourite saxophonist arranger Lars Gullin, his writing always seemed an extension of his playing - complete musicality.
Stan Getz - when he told me 'everything I play is Benny Goodman' a light went on. A great melodist and the consummate balladeer - Focus still takes my breath away. Seeing and hearing him play Blood Count at the Royal Festival Hall when he knew he was fatally ill is still one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life.
Tubby Hayes - Clark Terry used to carry copies of Tubbs In New York around to give to people who hadn't heard him. His opening cadenza on You For Me is breathtakingly brilliant. I'm proud that I could use him in my band in my early days in music - just to be able to say that Tubby or Kenny Clare or Ronnie Ross worked for me is still a major buzz as I am still a jazz fan primarily in my own mind.
John Coltrane - I appreciate what he does and how he does it but it doesn't move me I'm afraid - I enjoy him up to 1962 then it loses me - not because I don't get what he is doing but because it doesn't satisfy my musical needs. And his soprano playing leaves me pretty cold. A great player though.
Eric Dolphy - I've always loved his unpredictability and his humour. He is an exciting passionate alto player and a phenomenal bass clarinettist.
Could you please conclude this “interview” by talking a bit about what excites you as you look out over the current jazz scene in Great Britain in particular and Europe in general.
I hear more of the native folk elements in European jazz these days, particularly in Scandinavian and Scottish jazz, and of course the African and Caribbean influences in French and English jazz. They were always there in the music of Lars Gullin but now World Music has become more mainstream I'm delighted to hear all the elements thrown into the mix. I regret the demise of mainstream jazz - as Kenny Davern said to me on a gig - We're the dinosaurs. He also memorably said - jazz won't die, when you old people go there will be new old people! However I do see younger audiences for younger bands - the problem has always been that kids want to hear people their own age playing music - and any surviving 'modern' jazz players from the golden age are now in their 70s or 80s. Having played with James Moody a couple of weeks ago I can attest that the music itself is alive well and vibrant!
“[Although a Canadian who spent most of his professional career in Englandfollowing a posting there during WW II,] Robert Farnon’s influence as an arranger has been strongly felt in the USA. Quincy Jones, Johnny Mandel, Henry Mancini, Marian Evans, Marty Paich and Neal Hefti are some of the top writers who aren’t ashamed to admit occasionally having ‘borrowed’ some of his ideas.”
- David Aides, English writer and music critic
“… I had never heard anything like this. The harmony was exquisite, fresh and adventurous; and if I could not analyze the voice leading I could certainly hear it. It was startling stuff, and I got my hands on as much of it as I could. Forty and more years later, I still have the LondonLPs I acquired at that time.”
- Gene Lees, Jazz author and critic
“I wanted to enhance the popular song. When I do an arrangement of a popular song, I like to put some thought into it, not just dish it up in two choruses. Make it into a piece of music, a composition, tell a story.”
- Robert Farnon
"I look at Bob as a composer who is an arranger, His mastery of music is almost total. The lines that he writes! His music is extraordinarily linear. Gil Evans wrote that way. The individual parts are wonderful to play. They make incredible sense.
What really attracted me initially were the arrangements. All the arrangers love his harmony. But his harmony is derived from linear writing. The way he would realize these things for orchestra was just extraordinary. And of course we all know about the string writing. Everybody has commented on it.”
- Jeffrey Sultanof, Jazz composer-arranger, educator
As a young boy, I was a big fan of pirate movies.
My Dad was always taking me to see them at The Strand, The Majestic, The RKO Albee, The Loew’s State and other less, palatial theaters in Providence RI, where I grew up.
My all-time favorite buccaneer flick was The Crimson Pirate which starred the incredibly acrobatic, Burt Lancaster.
On more than one occasion, I almost killed myself trying to duplicate some of the Crimson Pirate’s stunts using the roof tops of three-storied, tenement buildings in place of the rigging on the three masts of a barkentine.
Another seafaring adventure film that made a indelible impression on me was Captain Horatio Hornblower, R.N. which starred Gregory Peck. The movie was set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century and Peck’s character was loosely based on Lord Nelson, who commanded the British fleet during a number of its epic battles against the navies of Napoleon and his allies.
But, what struck me most about this film was not the gymnastic gyrations of its hero [Peck was no Lancaster], but rather, the beauty and grandeur of the film’s music.
The film’s score contained music that was the aural counterpart of the many breathtakingly beautiful Technicolor images that made up the film.
The Technicolor Company’s movie film was so densely rich and bright in color that I always wished that I could put a spoon into it to see what would come out. It was the first time I ever felt that way about a film score, too.
I had no idea who composed the music to Captain Horatio Hornblower, R.N. until many years later.
Once I learned the film’s score was written by Robert Farnon, it seemed that whenever I encountered his name after that, it was always followed by expressions of deep and abiding admiration.
Gene Lees once observed about Farnon:
“The reverence in which Farnon is held by arrangers and other musicians, not to mention singers, is unlimited. They have long referred to him as the Governor, or just the Guv, and I heard one arranger say in a radio interview, "He is God."
When someone unfamiliar with Farnon's music asked Rob McConnell who he was, Rob said, ‘He is the greatest arranger in the world.’
Andre Previn long ago called Bob ‘the world's greatest string writer.’ Andre told me once that when John (then Johnny) Williams was a young studio pianist in Los Angeles, he asked a question about string writing. Andre gave him a Farnon album, telling him to take it home and listen to it. Late that night, Johnny called him back to ask what the hell Farnon was doing at such-and-such point in one of the tunes. Andre said, ‘I don't know, but if you figure it out, call me back.’”
Johnny Mandel, one of the most brilliant composers and arrangers jazz has produced, said:
"Most of what I know is based on having stolen everything I could from Farnon. I'll say that right off. I've listened to him and tried to approximate what I thought he was doing. He made strings sound like they always should have and never did. Everybody wrote them skinny. He knew how to write them so that it could wrench at you. I'd never heard anybody like him before and I've never heard anybody like him since. We're all pale imitations of him, those of us who are influenced by him."
Another great admirer of Robert Farnon’s work was Marion Evans, a highly regarded studio arranger who was particularly admired for his use of strings in albums by vocalists Steve Lawrence, Edie Gorme and Tony Bennett.
Marion was unapologetic in his admiration [and replication] of Farnon’s approach whose influence he further disseminated as explained in the following excerpt from by Gene Lees in his chapter on Farnon from his book entitled Arranging the Score: Portraits of the Great Arrangers:
“Further disseminating the Farnon influence, Marion founded an informal school for arrangers in his cluttered apartment on West 49th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
Marion denies that it was ever a school, and in any case he refused payment from his students. ‘I'd get drunk and we'd talk about music,’ he said. He imposed two strict disciplines on his students: they had to study thoroughly the composition and harmony books of Percy Goetschius and the records of Bob Farnon. Through that ‘school’ passed Patrick Williams, J.J. Johnson, Torrie Zito, Jack Cortner, and Nick Perito, and you can hear the Farnon influence in the writing of all of them.
Nor was Marion the only arranger to use the Farnon albums as teaching material. "We all used them for that purpose," [noted composer-arranger] Ralph Burns said.”
…
Marion's evaluation of Farnon: "He just simply is the best," he said.
‘He's a rare combination. Every once in a while, by some biological meeting, some cross-fertilization, we produce an Albert Einstein. We produce somebody who has the talent, the dedication, the training. Farnon had it all. And it was all in one place.
‘Plus, through no fault of his own, he found himself in an incredible position in London, where he was standing in front of a large orchestra every day and writing. You do that for a while and you learn. And that's doing it the hard way.
‘He had that rare combination of everything. He is exceptional by every standard.
I think it's not really kosher to analyze Bob in a highly technical manner. It doesn't begin to touch the depth of his talent. Bob has enormous technique, but his talent far exceeds his technique, and so did Mozart's. And that is precisely what you want. Anyone can learn as much technique as Bob Farnon has by going to music school. But they don't have that extra edge.
‘Mozart didn't write masterpieces all the time. He sat down and kept writing and let it flow. Bob has a lot of that in him. He's fast. He is one of the fastest writers I've ever known. He just does it, and that's it. He doesn't labor over it. When it's good, it's fantastic.’” [excerpts from pp. 63-64]
I guess there was a reason why I was so impressed with Robert Farnon’s music the first time I ever heard it.
And it looks like I was in good company.
To give you a sampling of what’s on offer with Robert Farnon, here is an audio track of his beautifully orchestra theme from the movie Laura.
I know I’ve shared this view before, but it bears repeating. Over the years, my enjoyment of Jazz has been considerably enhanced by the wise and thoughtful liner notes that graced the back of LPs or by the more recent insert notes that can be found in CD jewel cover booklets. Initially, these liner notes made up for the dearth of books as a source of knowledge on the subject of Jazz when I first began listening to the music in the 1950s. Holding the jacket cover in hand while listening to the album, my eyes poured over what Ira Gitler or Nat Hentoff or Leonard Feather, to name only a few of my early “mentors,” had to say about the music that was filling my ears and my heart with pleasure. Since I was also a student of the music for the purpose of wanting to become a Jazz musician myself during those early days, I was especially intrigued by writers that explained song structures, chord sequences and, especially, anything to do with rhythmic patterns or time signatures since these were particularly important to an aspiring, young Jazz drummer. It is safe to say that I owe an huge debt of gratitude to Leonard Feather, Ted Gioia, Bill Kirchner, Doug Ramsey, Whitney Balliett, Jack Tracy, Gary Giddins and others for helping me to learn and to appreciate more about the music that I have been in love with since I first heard it over 50 years ago. And because my appreciation of Jazz benefited so greatly from the information and knowledge that I gleaned from the writers of the annotations, comments and explanations that appear on album covers and CD booklets, I have decided to repay the favor with the inclusion of and reliance on these materials in many of the pieces that are prepared for Jazz Profiles. So when, to my immense delight, I found that the insert notes to the Grant Green: Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 57194 2 4] had not one, but three different sets of insert notes, and that these were by the likes of Ben Sidran, Michael Cuscuna and Bob Porter, the decision to prepare a piece using their remarks on this recording became axiomatic. As a point in passing, for reasons explained in these notes, Grant Green recorded so often and produced such an abundance of riches for Blue Note that these sides with Sonny Clark were not issued until 1979 – 1980, when most of the music on this 2 CD set was released as three, separate LP’s. First up are Ben Sidran’s notes to that portion of these tracks that comprised the 1980 Blue Note album Nigeria [LT 1032]. “TIME passes. What was fresh and important recedes under the collected weight of new fresh and important stuff. Enough time has passed since this collection was recorded that a lot of people reading these notes and hearing this music weren't even born on that winter day in 1962 when Grant Green went into the studio.
Back in 1962, Grant's guitar voice was one of the sparkling new additions to a musical universe that seemed to be expanding exponentially. It's hard to imagine-or even to remember- just how explosive the jazz scene was then, particularly in light of the mechanical music which has flourished these last ten years. One indication of the scene then might be the wealth of previously unreleased material, such as this record which is only now showing up in the stores. When Grant came to New York, he walked on to a stage crowded with stars. And he shone with the best of them.
He didn't blaze a trail to the city. He followed a more comfortable path, arriving to join Lou Donaldson's band in 1960. Some compared his hollow-bodied guitar style to that of the earliest pioneer, Charlie Christian. One also hears touches of that other great popularizer, Les Paul. For while Grant was not a radical player, he excelled at the basics and subtleties: he could swing like crazy and he played the prettiest phrases. Grant Green made esoteric music easy for the average listener to get to, just as jazz singers have done for years. Grant Green was a popularizer and a singer on his instrument.
Perhaps the greatest testament to his musical gift was that at a time when the guitar had fallen out of favor, suddenly, Grant Green could be heard everywhere, recording with several of the finest rhythm sections in New York. Within a year of his arrival in the city, he recorded three albums as a leader, featuring a rhythm section of Sonny Clark on piano. Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. Those albums, "Gooden's Corner,"'Oleo,” and "Born To be Blue," have only recently been released on Blue Note in Japan. This album, "Nigeria," falls in the middle of that period of time and has Art Blakey in place of Louis Hayes. It is the only time that Blakey and Green ever recorded together. Grant was a simple, elegant stylist. When he played a melody, with that kind of dressed-up strut, it was a reminder of just how classy bebop could sound. His interpretation of the title track "Airegin" (ingeniously encoded backwards to ward off the uninitiated) is no exception. It is interesting to note that in the early sixties, Grant performed and recorded an unusually large number of Sonny Rollins tunes, including "Solid '""Oleo ""Sonnymoon For Two," and, of course, "Airegin." After Grant states the head Sonny Clark hits one of his patented full keyboard slides and then strolls for a chorus while Blakey gets the groove settled Yawn. Sonny 's solo is a swinging compliment to Grant's, ignoring Green’s reference to 'When Lights Are Low" and turning the spotlight full up on the flowing snakes that were his specialty. Sonny, who had worked with both Rollins and singer Dinah Washington during the late fifties, is able to play both sides of the street here; he acts as the ideal accompanist to Grant's vocalized guitar work.
For my money, the highlight of the album is the stylized arrangement of "It Ain't Necessarily So." Blakey puts down a 12/8 Latin feel, and Grant plays the head in a totally unexpected series of phrases, altering the original melody to such an extent that he might well have called the song "So It Ain't Necessarily" and taken the publishing for himself. But it is the endlessly good groove that is the star of the cut. Interspersed with Blakey's press rolls, this fat-back groove - like those Art played on innumerable Jimmy Smith jam session dates - gets Grant all the way up on his toes. His tone is singing six different ways to Christmas, until he finally gets Blakey singing, for it is the drummer you hear shouting “whoa!” and grunting in response to Grant's precise preaching. By the time Sonny's solo arrives, Blakey is putting as much vocal into the overhead mikes as the cymbal. Clark seems to goad him on, and finally, when he’s taken is ninth chorus and seems read to turn it back to Grant, Blakey won’t let him go. You can hear Art laughing and shouting to Sonny, "No, go ahead, go ahead.” And go ahead he does, until Blakey finally turns him loose with an escalating series of strokes. As the song fades behind that Latin feel, I'm ready to do it all over. Side two sounds as if it will open with Miles Davis'"Four" but after the classic bebop introduction, the song abruptly half-steps into a very polite "I Concentrate On You." The tension between the tip-toe lounge groove and the powerhouse bebop minds that are playing it is never really resolved, and that is part of the charm of the piece. Grant is so sweet when he plays the melody, but his choruses become bittersweet fast, and soon, he's skipping down some dark memory lane, concentrating hard on some private "you." The song goes out with a vamp reminiscent of a neither the introduction nor the song itself; altogether, a very curious arrangement.
"The Things We Did Lost Summer" also opens with a rather bizarre waltz section, but then settles down into a very delicate ballad. The attitude Grant maintains playing the melody - particularly the little chromatic insertion he uses at the end of the first bridge - is a lovely balance of the benign and the mischievous. This is Grant's power, as a soloist or stating a theme, and it is something great jazz singers like Johnny Hartman are also known for: there is no better way to grab a listener than to lull him into bliss and then grab him by what Lord Buckley used to call 'your most delicate gear."
The record closes with a flag-waver, 'The Song Is You," in which we are reassured that straight ahead is the direction to go. Blakey is once again singing in his mikes, and Sam Jones, God bless him, is walking and shaking his head, There are few things in life more pleasant than walking along with Sam Jones shaking your head. Down home. Just folks. Kind of corny at times, but very hip. Grant Green was a perfect candidate for what today is called "cross-over hype," but back then was probably not called anything at all. Perhaps it was only natural that record companies would try to make Grant Green into a commercial product, a sow's ear out of a silk purse, as it were. I don't know how or why he turned from the hard, low life grooves he used to spark, towards the cocktail lounge which surely sealed his obscurity by the time he died in early 1979. Often, commercial pressures overwhelm players. After all, they are only musicians,, not lawyers and accountants that's why we buy records. If lawyers and accountants made records, nobody would buy them. At least, that used to be true, and it may be part of the reason why Grant didn't make a major mark on the music scene during the lost years of his life.
I, for one, kept looking for him around every corner, particularly as various guitar players, like Gabor Szabo, or George Benson, or even Eric Gale, would pop into prominence. I kept waiting for Grant to make his move. Unfortunately, his best recorded moves are those from more than fifteen years ago, when he truly was a fresh and important face on what may be the wildest contemporary jazz scene we'll ever know.”
-BEN SIDRAN 1980, original liner notes from "Nigeria” And here are Michael Cuscuna’s comments from the 1980 Japanese Blue Note release – Gooden’s Corner.
“THE tragedy of Grant Green's death in early 1979 was compounded by the fact that his recorded output for the last decade or more of his life was, for the most part, commercial, uncreative and lacking in individuality. He deserved better, but the economics of keeping a bond working and holding down a record contract forced him into situations far below his talent.
Fortunately, Blue Note thoroughly documented his artistry on a number of sessions under Grant's leadership in the early sixties. Moreover, he was the resident guitarist for Blue Note's stable of premier organists such as Jimmy Smith, John Patton and Larry Young and participated in dates by Lee Morgan, Horace Parlan, Don Wilkerson, Lou Donaldson and others.
Unknown outside of his hometown St. Louis except through his Delmark recordings with tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, Grant was brought to the label and to New York in 1960 by Lou Donaldson. Blue Note always operated on a family basis, developing an impressive, cross-fertilizing repertory group of musicians. Grant was quickly and fully instated in mid 1960.
Green represented not only a fresh, vibrant new voice on an instrument that had become rather sleepy in style in the fifties, but he was also a major link with the all too often neglected pioneer of the hollow body electric guitar in jazz, Charlie Christian. Grant executed bright, clean lines that never fully abandoned the melody, emphasized concise, linear, single note improvisations and possessed a unique rhythmic momentum that remains unmatched. He absorbed Christian, then bypassed such heroes of the day as Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery and moved directly to the formation of his own identity.
This album "Gooden's Corner", recorded on December 23, 1961, features a beautifully compatible quartet of Grant, pianist Sonny Clark', bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes. Ike Quebec joined the group for one tune 'Count Every Star", which was then extracted and used on Quebec's album “Blue And Sentimental” (Blue Note BST 94098). The rest of the session, previously unissued and without Quebec, is presented here in its entirety.
This particular quartet had a run of sessions for Blue Note under Grant's name, all they all remain unissued. On January 13, 1962, the band with Art Blakey subbing for Hayes recorded. On January 31 the quartet with Hayes back again recorded yet another album. And finally on March 1, 1962, the same group, this time with Quebec playing throughout the session, made yet another album's worth of material. Why these dates were never issued will never be known. Most likely, it is because Grant, like other Blue Note artists, recorded prolifically during these years, and there was just no way to get everything released. As this set bears out, the Green-Clark-Jones-Hayes combination is completely compatible and comfortable. Each man has an easy, natural sense of swinging that interlocks perfectly with his fellow musicians.
Sam Jones has been previously present on a handful of Blue Note dates, led for the most part by another guitarist Kenny Burrell. Louis Hayes was a familiar face at the label through his long term membership in Horace Silver's quintet and his frequent sideman appearances with Curtis Fuller and other Blue Note artists. From the fall of 1959 well into the mid sixties, Jones and Hayes were the pivot of Cannonball Adderley's successful band. They had been together in that capacity for more than two years when this album was recorded, and their empathy is clearly evident.
Although none of the Green dates with Sonny Clark at the piano have ever been issued, their pairing was a natural. Both men possessed the ability to swing hard in an effortless, instinctive manner. Clark is his usual brilliant self here, adding richly to the group texture and urging Grant on with some inspired comping. His solo work is typically two-handed, cooking and always interesting. It is a testament to Grant Green that he can breath such life into On Green Dolphin Street and What is This Thing Called Love as well as the overdone Henry Mancini hit of the day Moon River. He swings on What Is This Thing ... like no one else on his instrument could. And Moon River is a perfect example of his ability to construct a solo using the tune's melody as the substance of his variations. His rhythmic sense is best illustrated on Shadrack.
Grant contributes two originals, Gooden's Corner and Two For One. Gooden's Corner is a solid blues, given an irresistible performance by the entire group. Two For One, not to be confused with the Sonny Clark tune of the same name, is based on Miles Davis' modal So What, but after the theme, Grant breaks into some straight ahead playing.
This album is a lovely freeze frame in the career of one of the foremost guitarists of modern jazz, a man whom we lost to the commercial world in the late sixties and whom we lost forever in 1979.
-MICHAEL CUSCUNA 1979, original liner notes from "Gooden’s Corner" We close this piece with Bob Porter’s 1980 original liner notes from Oleo. “THE business of jazz is extremely difficult to describe to someone not involved in it. Most fans are aware of the qualities that make a great jazz musician: an individual sound; the ability to improvise melodically ("telling a story," in Lester Young's phrase); to swing, etc. There are any number of great jazz musicians who may be deficient in one of these areas, but generally they make up for it by doing one of the other things much better than other players. Yet in all this discussion, there has been no mention of playing melody. Name me a great jazzman who couldn't take a melody and make it uniquely his own.
Grant Green was widely known for his ability to play melodies. It didn't really matter what kind of melodies because Grant could do Latin tunes (see Blue Note 84111 - The Latin Bit); Gospel songs (Blue Note 84132 -Feelin' The Spirit); Western melodies (Blue Note 84310- Goin' West) as well as standards, blues, or jazz tunes. he had a great guitar sound and knew instinctively how to make melodies come alive.
Grant really arrived in 1961. He had made records in 1959 with his hometown friend, Jimmy Forrest, for Delmark and the following year he recorded with organist Sam Lazar, another St. Louis musician, for Argo. but when Lou Donaldson heard him playing in East St. Louis, he convinced Grant and clubowner Leo Gooden to come to New York and talk with Alfred Lion of Blue Note. From 1961 through 1965, Grant Green made more Blue Note lps as leader and sideman than anyone else. Clearly, he was a favorite, not only of Lion, but of Ike Quebec who did much of the A and R work for Blue Note until his death in 1963.
Considering Grant's versatility, it is not unusual that Blue Note used him in a variety of contexts: Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, John Patton, Lou Donaldson, Ike Quebec.
At a time when Down Beat was still giving New Star awards, Grant won in 1962. but critical raves have never helped in earning a living. Grant worked often with Jack McDuff during those early years, and was really scuffling for money. In addition to everything else, Grant had a narcotics habit. Now it may be hard to understand in the jazz world of 1979 when musicians, have generally learned to avoid the excesses of heroin and get their business together, but jazz players were very low in the economic strata of the early 60s, and one consistent source of revenue was the record company. It seems likely that Blue Note recorded Grant frequently during those years because he was always drawing money from Blue Note. Grant did at least six LP sessions under his won leadership for Blue Note in 1961. The furious recording pace continued right into 1965, and try as they might, Blue Note could never issue the LPs as fast as Grant could record them!
In a sense, Grant's situation and that of Sonny Clark were similar. They had the identical problems and each was a Blue Note favorite. The initial pairing of these two talents came just before Christmas, 1961, and resulted in the album, Gooden's Corner. Sam Jones and Louis Hayes were still members of Cannonball Adderley's band at the time, and their appearance together is another reminder of Blue Note's care in assembling rhythm sections. Alfred Lion's choice of bass and drums almost always reflected an ability to play together in support of the leader, rather than to demonstrate individual brilliance.
The tunes played here are not unusual for Grant, although it should be noted that he had an attraction for Sonny Rollins lines. He also recorded "Solid' and "Sonnymoon For Two" during this period. A later version of 'My Favorite Things" was issued on the Matador album.
Grant never does get the tricky theme of "Oleo" exactly right, but it doesn't deter him from fashioning a solo of lightening-like inventiveness. Sonny Clark has always been considered a disciple of Bud Powell and perhaps the chief reason for that is the dynamic flow of his ideas. When playing standards, he sometimes would adopt a lighter touch (reminding one of Hank Jones in his delicacy), but his work throughout this session is in the cooking Powell mode.
If Grant has problems with "Oleo", he has none with "Tune Up." The melody, introduced and long-credited to Miles Davis, was actually written by saxophonist-bluesman Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who gave the tune to Davis during a period when he – Vinson - was not recording. Virtually the some thing happened with another Vinson compositions, "Four."
Green was always at home with the blues and "Hip Funk" is his adoption of the classic form that was definitely hip (meaning fashionable) for 1962. Sonny Clark was also a blues master as his work ably demonstrates. Hearing the music on this album (and Gooden's Corner) makes one immediately interested in hearing more. Alas, there is no more by the quartet, but a bit more than a month later, these same four players joined forces with Ike Quebec for an album that will be forthcoming on Blue Note [Blue and Sentimental].
Between 1965 and 1968, Green was still active as a performer, but his recorded appearances were few. When he returned to Blue Note in 1969, he had rid himself of the narcotics problem, but had acquired a new attitude toward music. The huge success of Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, and George Benson was very much on his mind. He considered himself the musical equal of all of them, yet he was the only one not to have made a significant commercial breakthrough.
His repertoire tended more toward rhythm & blues during his late Blue Note period. He would use repetitive vamps rather than chord changes as harmonic underpinning and his attention to phrasing melodies (always an outstanding feature of his work) become even more pronounced. And the commercial break happened for him! From 1969 to mid-1974, his Blue Note LPs were consistent best sellers and he was a popular attraction at clubs across the USA. He split with Blue Note shortly thereafter and made an LP for Kudu and another for Versatile.
Grant spent much of 1978 in the hospital with a variety of ailments, and he was not a well man when released in December, 1978. His doctors advised him to rest, but there were expenses to meet, so he went back on the road almost immediately. He died of a heart attack on January 31, 1979 - seventeen years to the day of this recording.
During 1969 and 1970 when I was producing records for Prestige, I got to know Grant Green well. He played on albums with Rusty Bryant, Don Patterson, Charles Kynard, and Houston Person which I supervised. I used to marvel at the ease with which this man with enormous hands could make that guitar sing. At one session, during a break, he treated everyone to a solo rendition of "Oleo" which was stunning. After his death, I thought many times of how his career would be judged by historians, since so much of his later recordings were in a commercial vein. But with albums such as Matador, Gooden's Corner, and now Oleo, his stature is assured. Without question, Grant Green was one of the major artists on the guitar during his lifetime. His friend, Lou Donaldson, put it best when he said:
"All the top guitarists who came later - like George Benson and Pat Martino - they've got some of Grant's stuff."
The problem with Jazz as an art form is that it hasn’t always been considered so. For most of its existence, the music has had a limited appeal.
This and the fact that the music is created in real time and, unless it is saved through recordings, it is almost impossible to savor it again because as soon as it is created it is gone into the Ether or wherever once-played sounds go as a final resting place.
When you consider these two “problems” from the vantage point of the Early Jazz years, they become compounded by the fact that the general public had a poor opinion of “Jass” [“Jungle music”] and, as such, there were very limited opportunities to save music from this period on recordings, especially if the Jazz musicians were regional and not nationally known.
From its origins in New Orleans, the music made its way north to Chicago and then jumped to New York because these entrepots were commercially dynamic enough to make it possible for its merchants to develop the leisure time and money to support Jazz and the musicians who made it as a form of entertainment.
[Of course, gangsters selling prohibited booze in speakeasies that featured Jazz was part of this mercantile “dynamic,” while at the same time, further underscoring the larger public’s dim view of the music.]
In its early years, Jazz planted some roots in Kansas City, San Francisco and Los Angeles, but musicians from these areas soon set out for Chicago and New York where the opportunities to gain fame and fortune made them “the place to be.”
Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by Chris Estey of bigfreakmedia.com and xopublicity.com to gauge my interest in a vinyl recording of some Early Jazz made in SEATTLE!?
I have a very high regard for Chris and his public relations skills, but I have to say that although I lived in the Green Lake area of the city for a time and knew a bit about the modern Jazz scene in the Emerald City, the only connection I had with the city from a historical Jazz perspective was that I remembered reading somewhere that it was Quincy Jones’ hometown.
But trusting to Chris’s judgment, I said: “sure send it to me and I’ll check it out.”
I don’t make many, but this was one, smart move because in the door came Frank D. Waldron Seattle’s Syncopated Classic: Greg Ruby and The Rhythm Runners Play the Lost Work of 1920’s Seattle Jazz Musician.
But wait, it gets better because in addition to the vinyl recording the package also included the sheet music for each of the eleven Waldron compositions nicely tucked away in a folder plus a manuscript-sized bound booklet in which Greg in conjunction with the accomplished Jazz author, Paul de Barros provide a comprehensive history replete with many rare photographs of the background of Frank D. Waldron and the Seattle Jazz scene of the 1920’s. This booklet also includes copies of the sheet music for all of Waldron’s music on the recording.
So the Jazz fan can purchase the LP, and/or the sheet music and/or the historical overview of Waldron and the sheet music for the music on the LP!
Would that it were that the presentation of recorded Jazz was so well served all the time!
It have included links for order information for the LP and the book at the conclusion of this feature.
And in order to provide you with an accurate account of Syncopated Classic: The Previously Unrecorded Compositions of Frank D. Waldron, here are Paul de Barros’ liner notes to the recording.
“Frank D. Waldron is a name not even Seattle jazz aficionados will readily recognize, but these enchanting arrangements of his music by Seattle guitarist Greg Ruby should change that.
Waldron was the first published jazz composer in the Emerald City, one of the area’s first jazz players and the city’s go-to teacher for two generations of musicians, including Quincy Jones. Born in San Francisco in 1890 to a black father and a white mother who taught piano lessons,
Waldron learned to play saxophone and trumpet with such startling technical precision that his student Buddy Catlett speculated Waldron was “conservatory trained.” Wherever or however he learned to play, Waldron showed up in Seattle a year after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake,
and 10 years later was working a regular dance gig at Tacoma’s Olympus Hotel.
From 1918 to 1921, Waldron played a run of cruises on Hood Canal with the Wang Doodle Orchestra, a quintet featuring mandolins made by Port Townsend luthier Chris Knutsen. In 1920, Waldron could also be found in Vancouver, B.C., where New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton was with a band led by Oscar Holden, who would later move to Seattle.
This was heady company, but Waldron apparently preferred the settled life of teaching to the fast lane. In 1919, he hung out a shingle in front of Bessie Young’s Boarding House at 1242 South Jackson Street to announce the opening of the Waldron School of Saxophone and Trumpet. Seattle’s first jazz generation learned to play in that studio, including pianist Evelyn Bundy of the Garfield Ramblers, whose son, Charlie Taylor, also a Waldron student, recruited Garfield High School classmate Quincy Jones into his first band 20 years later.
In 1924, Waldron published a book of nine songs– etudes, really–titled “Syncopated Classic for C Melody and Alto Saxophone” that took students through various techniques like slap-tonguing and flutter-tonguing, as well as fundamental fingering challenges. The tunes in that book, along with Waldron’s “The Kaiser’s Got the Blues” and “Valse Queen Ann,” are rendered here with verve and élan by Ruby’s Prohibition Era dance band, The Rhythm Runners. The group features Ruby, a veteran of Seattle’s hot jazz scene; New York revivalists Dennis Lichtman (clarinet and mandolin) and Gordon Au (trumpet); and New Orleanians Charlie Halloran (trombone) and Cassidy Holden (bass). They are joined by Bellingham, Washington-based drummer Julian MacDonough.
For his arrangements, Ruby draws inspiration from Morton’s New Orleans style recordings, using trumpet lead, trombone answer-lines and filigree clarinet obbligatos driven by a rhythm section of drums, bass and guitar (or banjo). Waldron’s tunes usually include a dulcet “trio” component, which allows the arrangements extra opportunities for instrumental variety and contrast. On the opener, “Low Down,” for example, Au’s trumpet takes the A section, followed by Halloran’s looser trombone rendering, a B section on clarinet and a polyphonic return to the first melody. The trio is played first on trumpet, then on clarinet, then by the whole band for a rousing tutti. Ruby also opens up sections for solos, such as Au’s bluesy outing on “Climb Them Walls.”
Though Au often invokes the golden tone and gentle swagger of Bix Beiderbecke, his break on the fetching melody of “Go Get It” is pure Louis Armstrong. Ruby follows with a guitar break and a lively solo in the same spirit. On “It’s Easy,” the clarinet invokes a chirping bird with the repeated grace notes of the B section and Lichtman is also front and center on the lyrical “Valse Marguerite,” written by Waldron for his mother. “The Kaiser’s Got the Blues,” which features the collection’s only 12-bar blues segment, is formally an outlier, as is “Pretty Doll,” a 16-bar verse followed by 16-bar solo choruses, with Ruby’s guitar providing a witty obbligato under Lichtman’s clarinet. Doubling on mandolin, Lichtman weaves melodies with special guest and mandolin virtuoso Mike Marshall brings an extra sparkle to the exquisite sigh of “Valse Hawthorne” and to the more dramatic “Valse Queen Ann.” One can easily imagine dancers gliding over the wooden deck of a Hood Canal cruise ship as the mandolin trills of the Wang Doodle Orchestra wafted through the air.
After the Jazz Age slipped into the Great Depression, Waldron continued to play around town, notably at the Nanking Café, with the Odean Jazz Orchestra, the first African-American group to play in downtown Seattle. Though Waldron was briefly married, he never had children and when he died in 1955, he left little evidence of a career that, in retrospect, played a
significant role in shaping Seattle jazz. This music is a delightful sample of his legacy.”
Paul de Barros
April 2017
Paul de Barros has written for Down Beat magazine and the Seattle Times since 1982 and is the author of Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle and Shall We Play That One Together:The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland
If there’s anyone who was more beloved in Jazz big band circles in the second half of the 20th century than pianist, composer-arranger and band leader Nat Pierce [1925 - 1992], I’ve yet to meet them.
Nat seemed to have reached his majority as a fully formed big band disciple when he began working professionally in 1943, mainly with big bands in Boston, including one led by trumpeter, Shorty Sherock.
Following a stint with Larry Clinton’s big band in 1948, he commenced a long association with Woody Herman in 1951 as pianist, arranger and even road manager that lasted well into the 1960s.
During that same time, Nat directed his own big band which was based in Boston, co-led a group with trumpeter Dick Collins [1954] and worked as an arranger for Quincy Jones, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald.
Nat was the principal arranger for the landmark 1957 television show - The Sound of Jazz - and his own composition Open All Night served as the opening theme for the show and was performed by an all-star band under Count Basie’s direction.
Pierce moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and was active as an arranger for Earl Hines, Carmen McRae and Anita O’Day; took on a great deal of freelance work; tour and made recording with drummer Louie Bellson’s Orchestra; took part in Woody Herman big band reunions until Woody’s death in 1987.
In 1975, along with drummer Frankie Capp, Nat formed the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut Orchestra which he co-led until his death in 1992.
During the 1970s and 1980 he Nat was a regular fixture on Concord Jazz recordings as his ability to propel a rhythm section from the piano bench, a skill he learned from his idol, Count Basie, was much sought after by many of the horn players who recorded for the label during this period.
Because of his long and distinguished career in the company of many Jazz notables, Nat’s early days as a leader of his own big band is often overlooked.
This period is very well-covered in Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles: Faces, Places and Nightlife, 1937-1962 [Troy Street Publishing]. We wrote to Richard and asked his permission to share this segment of his unique book and he has graciously allowed us to do so with this blog feature.
The images that populate this piece and not part of the original publication.
Nathaniel Pierce Blish, known to the jazz world as Nat Pierce, was born in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1925. Pierce attended the New England Conservatory briefly and started playing piano professionally at 17. In the mid-1940s, he jammed in sessions at the Ken, worked at the Silver Dollar Bar with Nick Jerret, and played in a trio at Izzy Ort's with drummer Marquis Foster. Then he played and arranged for the Boston bands of Pete Chase and Carl Nappi, and did a turn with Shorty Sherock's big band, where he first met his longtime colleagues Mert Goodspeed and drummer Joe MacDonald.
In 1947 Pierce joined the Ray Borden Orchestra. Borden was a trumpeter who organized his first Boston band in 1941. That one fizzled, and Borden spent the next five years working for a string of big bands, including those of Bobby Sherwood and Jack Teagarden, but the most significant one from a musical development point of view was that of Stan Kenton, in 1942-1944. In 1946 he joined a band led by Whitney Cronin, a bassist and guitarist from Boston. Eventually Borden assumed leadership of the band, and Pierce came on as pianist and arranger. Over time they were joined by Charlie Mariano, trumpeters Gait Preddy and Nick Capezuto, and the aforementioned Goodspeed and MacDonald. The band recorded six sides for Manny Koppelman's Crystal-Tone Records in 1947, under the guidance of Reuben Moulds, who was either handling publicity for Borden or doing legwork for Koppelman, or both.
Borden's was a good band. Their Crystal-Tone sides wear well and have been reissued more than once. They were well rehearsed and well played, the soloists were first-rate (listen to Charlie Mariano on "What's New?"), and Pierce's up-tempo arrangements already showed the rhythmic drive that would mark his best work. But Borden was not cut out to be a bandleader. ("He was a screw-up" was the uncharitable opinion of one musician.) Personal differences were compounded by financial problems, and in July 1 948 the band members fired Borden and selected Pierce to replace him because, as Goodspeed recalled, Nat captured the spirit of the band. But Pierce couldn't find work, and he disbanded in November. In early 1949 Pierce and five band mates hit the road as members of the new Larry Clinton Orchestra.
Pierce regrouped for another try in the spring of 1949, and in April the band recorded its first sides for the new Motif label, "Autumn in New York" and "Goodbye Mr. Chops." The 1949 recording of "Autumn in New York" featured the alto saxophone of Charlie Mariano, whom Nat Hentoff called the best local man on that instrument since Johnny Hodges. The flip side was "Goodbye Mr. Chops," the recording debut of vocalist Teddi King, and a record she never particularly liked. Mariano, who had joined Ray Borden's band in 1947, was the best-known and most highly regarded member of the Pierce orchestra, and a real catalyst for the growth and acceptance of modern jazz in Boston.
The recordings of 1949 are still gems. Mariano was already playing with great feeling on his Hodges-influenced "What's New" with Borden, and again on "Autumn in New York" with Pierce. "King Edward the Flatted Fifth," recorded for Motif with a Ralph Burns/Serge Chaloff septet, and "Sheba," with his own sextet, show the Parker influence. These recordings marked Mariano as a special talent. He remained with the Pierce orchestra until its demise in 1951.
Brockton-born trombonist Mert Goodspeed entered a diploma program at Bentley College following his wartime army service, "but that's when I was really getting into music — in fact I missed my graduation ceremony because I had a gig that night." He worked with Johnny Bothwell and Shorty Sherock before joining the Ray Borden band, and he was one of the group who wanted Pierce to lead it. When Pierce disbanded in 1948, Goodspeed joined Pierce with Larry Clinton.
Goodspeed made the rounds in Boston, jamming at the Ken Club with Pee Wee Russell and Vic Dickenson, and playing in a group at Izzy Ort's with Charlie Hooks and Marquis Foster. He was accomplished enough to work with Sabby Lewis and Phil Edmunds. When Pierce reformed his band in 1949, Goodspeed and Sonny Truitt formed a dynamic duo in the trombone section, where Goodspeed remained until 1950.
Sumner "Sonny" Truitt arrived in Boston after his wartime navy service to study at Schillinger House, and in late 1947 he too was in the Borden band. Truitt was another multi-instrumentalists who could seemingly play anything. Primarily known as a trombonist, he also played piano, tenor sax, clarinet, and even bassoon. He composed and arranged, and despite the fact he was a stutterer, he was a fine singer as soon as he got on the bandstand.
Although Truitt stayed with Pierce until the band broke up in 1951, its frequent downtime gave him time for other projects. In 1949 he was a regular at the Hi-Hat as a pianist and trombonist, and while Pierce was on the road with Larry Clinton in 1949, Truitt joined another Boston contingent, which included trumpeter Don Stratton, trombonist Joe Ciavardone, and pianist Roy Frazee, on the road with Tommy Reynolds, who had rehearsed his New Sound band in Boston. Said Stratton of Sonny Truitt:
Sonny Truitt played everything well, and I never thought the trombone was his best instrument. With Reynolds he was playing a two-piano thing with Roy Frazee. I think he was getting an extra $5 a week for writing arrangements—and that was lousy money then, too. But he arranged the music we played between the juggler and the balloonist in the floor shows.
Metronome reviewed all the Pierce Motif recordings, but it was an octet date released under Mariano's name that drew the highest praise. "Babylon" earned a grade of B in May 1950: "Boston baked bop, clean and clever in a Miles Davis mold, with only a tuba missing to make Miles's sound really stick. The leaders alto, Mert Goodspeed’s trombone, Don Stratton's trumpet, and Nat Pierces piano deserve recognition; the ensemble is unusually precise for their kind of skipping line."
The Pierce band rehearsed before a live audience, albeit a motley one, at Philip Amaru's Mardi Gras, a bar at 863 Washington Street, in 1949-1950. Numerous young musicians would fall by for the late afternoon sessions to listen, but the regular daytime crowd was attracted by the 15-cent beers and couldn't have cared less about jazz.
Trumpeter Don Stratton remembered the scene at the Mardi Gras:
For us, the Mardi Gras was an important place. The Pierce band rehearsed there in the afternoons for close to two years. And the owner let us play there for nothing. Well, not quite nothing, he did ask us to play for his daughter’s wedding. An Italian guy. Imagine, here's this bunch of young guys with a bebop band playing for a traditional wedding in the North End!
When we started playing in the late afternoons at the Mardi Gras, there wouldn't be many customers, a few drunks at the bar, rhe regulars, and we'd start to play and they would get upset with it, didn't like it. And Nat, he went out and got an arrangement of a polka, the "Beer Barrel Polka" or something, and we'd play that and they would cheer us on. So that was Nat, playing something for the regulars.
They did have shows at the Mardi Gras, and they did have good jazz players at night there, like Bill Wellington playing saxophone and Danny Kent on piano. It was a gay bar, and the band was in there playing for the show, and the main attraction was a guy, Alan Vey, and he was up there in a wig and makeup. This was Boston and it was tame stuff compared to what I saw in New York working in gay bars a few years later.
Part-time jazz bar and full-time dive, the Mardi Gras was a key location for the Pierce band and the development of modern jazz in Boston, but it's been gone for 40 years. The building was demolished around 1970 to make way for the New England Medical Center.
Spring 1950 brought the group its most consistent work. Charlie Shribman hired the Pierce band to work two nights per week for 12 weeks at the Symphony Ballroom, the spot known as the Play-Mor back in the Ballroom District days. George Shearing heard the band and liked it. He hired Teddi King to sing with his celebrated Quintet, the only singer ever to do so. Basie heard the band and liked it. He turned his piano over to Nat Pierce for last set chores on his subsequent trips to Boston, and the two began a musical relationship that lasted more than 30 years, until Basie's death. Woody Herman heard the band and liked it. After the Pierce band’s 1951 breakup, he hired a half-dozen of its members, including Nat himself.
Pierce’s band earned an invitation to the Local 535 Musician's Ball in May 1950, at the Red Roof in Revere, where Eddy Petty in the Chronicle noted they acquitted themselves well:
Nat Pierce and his 15 piece band and girl singer opened their phase of the program with one of their own compositions, titled "Spirit of 1950" (which you will soon hear on record) and rocked the joint from top to bottom. Charlie Mariano, Mert Goodspeed and Joe MacDonald gave out with the good feature work. Ruth Mann, the vocalist with the band, gave a splendid rendition of Ellington's "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good." This band was definitely the greatest band to hit the stage that night, and their music was what the crowd begged to hear more of.
The mystery of this night is the band that failed to show. Jimmie Martin and his band were scheduled, and their vocalist for the evening, Barbara Jai, was backstage and waiting. But the Martin band didn't show, and it is possible that some of the band members did not want to share the stage with a white band at a function staged by the black local. Instead Pierce's band ruled the roost...but what a night it would have been for a battle of music!
Looking Back on the Pierce Orchestra
Working sporadically, the Pierce band grew in reputation but not in financial security. If there was one guy who had no illusions about the band, it was Pierce himself. Talking with Les Tompkins in 1966, Pierce played down his band's significance:
Most of the guys were all single, like I say, in those days. We didn't have a dime, we couldn't care about making money — as long as we had enough to exist on. So we had a very good thing going there. We had a certain amount of professionalism. I guess when I listen back to some of those records now, they sound kinda trite — with all the so-called bebop licks that we wrote into the arrangements. Double-time trumpet figures and everything — it was kinda patterned after Woody's band at the time.
We made one record date, to which a lot of the guys from Woody's band showed up — Lou Levy, Earl Swope, Zoot, Serge and so on. They all came around to help us on our way. It was nice. It was a very friendly situation up there in Boston at that time. So my direction was towards the Herman noise. It was a little cruder then, though. Some of the voicings were strange, and then we wrote too many notes. We did things that were completely uncomfortable to play. In fact, we couldn't even play 'em!
I don't think this band or any other could play some of the things we played up in Boston. We just killed ourselves, trying to get these things down, you know — for no reason at all. It was just a lot of flash. But we thought we were doing something that was good. Most young people do play many extra notes. It takes many years to learn what to leave out.
One of those kill-the-band numbers was among the last pieces the Pierce band recorded, an ambitious Ralph Burns composition, "Red Hills and Green Barns." Scored for two pianos, played by Burns and Pierce, it was recorded at an overnight session in the studios of WCOP radio in December 1950. Longtime band members MacDonald, Mariano, Stratton, and Truitt were present. The band broke up before a record could be made, and it was 25 years before "Red Hills and Green Barns" was finally released.
Lack of steady work doomed the Pierce Orchestra. Nat Hentoff reported in Down Beat in October 1951 that Nat Pierce, "leader of the city's most musically advanced and most thoroughly unemployed band, has left town to take over the piano chair with Woody Herman." (He took Dave McKenna's place.) A weary Hentoff closed his article with, "Unless you have a boom-chick beat and a 1924 mind, this is no town for a progressive local jazzman."
Pierce of course went on to a long, stellar career in jazz. He arranged and played piano for Woody Herman for five years, freelanced for five, then went back to Herman for five more. Pierce arranged the music for the landmark 1957 television program The Sound of Jazz, filled in for Count Basie on many occasions, recorded prolifically as leader and sideman, and finally formed another big band, Juggernaut, in 1975 with drummer Frank Capp. Although he experimented with bebop with his own Boston orchestra, over time he settled into a swing-oriented groove — but it was swing chipped off the same block as Basie's and Hermans. Nat Pierce died in Los Angeles in June 1992.
The Pierce band scattered to the wind, some going on to long careers in music and others leaving the field completely. Of the former, saxophonist and arranger Dave Figg must have set a road warrior record, as between 1950 and 1964 he was with the big bands of Louis Prima, Tony Pastor, Ray McKinley, Claude Thornhill, Hal Mclntyre, Thornhill again, Billy May, Sam Donahue, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Morrow, and Woody Herman.
Four other members of Pierce's 1951 band followed him to Herman's: saxophonist Art Pirie, trumpeters Roy Caton and Dud Harvey, and bassist Frank Gallagher.
Don Stratton went with Buddy Morrow, Claude Thornhill, Tony Pastor, and Elliot Lawrence before settling in New York, where he played jazz, Broadway shows, and modern classical music. Stratton was the only member of Pierce's Boston band to work with him again, in New York in 1956. George Green settled in New York as well, and became a sought-after copyist.
Sonny Truitt was bitten by the same modernist bug as Charlie Mariano. He was an early member of Mariano's bop groups at the Melody Lounge, and took part in Mariano's The New Sounds from Boston recording in 1951. Truitt, Mariano, and drummer Joe MacDonald toured with Bill Harris and recorded under Mariano's name on the West Coast. In New York, Truitt recorded with Miles Davis in 1953, and played in innumerable bands before forming The Six, a sextet with Bob Wilber, in 1956.
A few members of Pierces band returned to Boston. Nick Capezuto was with Harry James, Tex Beneke, and Louis Prima before returning to Boston and the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra. Dave Chapman entered the U.S. Air Force, and joined Capezuto with Pomeroy after his discharge. Joe MacDonald joined Woody Herman in 1954, but after less than a year returned to Boston, where he worked as an engineer and played music part-time, eventually becoming president of AFM Local 9. Trombonist Bob Carr worked with Manny Wise in the mid-1950s. Phil Viscuglia from the 1949 band taught at the New England Conservatory and played bass clarinet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Mert Goodspeed was one who left music. He remained with the Pierce band until 1950, when he went with Dean Hudson, a dance band working seven nights a week across the southeast. When that ended, he moved to New York and worked with Buddy DeFranco while he waited for his union card. In 1951, though, he left music and enrolled in business school. He faced the realities of the business: "Why did I quit? Six months of one-nighters, you get real tired of that. And guys like Urbie Green were getting all the studio work and I didn't see any way past that."
There were never any revivals or reunions. For all its importance to Boston's jazz scene, the Nat Pierce Orchestra was forgotten until Art Zimmerman collected its music for an LP he released in 1977. At the time. Pierce was surprised anybody was interested.”
The following YouTube features the Pierce band on The Ballad of Jazz Street. Stick around for the “shout” or “shout me out” chorus following the solos.
Oliver Nelson was a brilliant saxophonist, composer, arranger and orchestrator – a gift of Jazz – who was taken away from us much too soon.
Thanks to the Mosaic Records reissue of Oliver Nelson: The Argo, Verve and Impulse Big Band Sessions [MD6-233], we have the opportunity to once again sample Oliver in all his magnificence along with the marvelous studio musicians who made his brilliance shine with even more luster.
Saxophonist Kenny Berger assembled a wealth of information in preparation for an M.A. Thesis on Oliver at Rutgers University. He used a great deal of this accumulated information to write the wonderfully perceptive insert notes for the Mosaic release and the editorial staff at Jazzprofiles is delighted to be able to share the introductory portion of his essay as its homage to Oliver.
[C] Mosaic Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved. Used with permission. In his notes, Kenny provides insights into [1] what made Oliver’s Jazz writing so powerfully unique, [2] the technical skills required of a studio musician to be able to play and interpret Oliver’s work, [3] why it was especially important to have an improvising background in dealing with Oliver’s “charts” [arrangements], and [4] what the now “lost world” of a musician’s life was like in the Hollywood and New York studios during their heyday in the 1960s.
“Oliver Nelson was one of the most complete and multifaceted musicians in Jazz. In today's jazz world, the term ..multifaceted" more often than not tends to describe someone who dabbles in several different musical styles, stirring a little "world music" (ugh, what a horrible term), a little hip-hop, a little new age, etc., into a bland, boring stew. Oliver Nelson was a world-class jazz saxophonist and composer-arranger, as well as a distinguished composer of orchestral and chamber music in non-jazz idioms, and a prolific composer of scores for television and feature films. He operated at the top of the profession in all these fields and his work always bore his personal stamp. His personal and artistic integrity was reflected in everything he did and, as will be explained later, was a contributing factor in his tragic, premature death.
These notes are written from the perspective of a saxophonist and composer-arranger who was a teenaged aspiring musician during the time of the earliest recordings in this set, and a professional with one foot in the door to the jazz and studio recording scenes during the time of the later ones. I was also a student of Danny Bank, who played baritone saxophone and woodwinds on most of these sessions and since then, I have had the privilege of playing alongside roughly 80 percent of the musicians on these dates. During the late 1990s, as a middle-aged candidate for a Masters degree in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University, I chose Oliver Nelson as my thesis subject, accumulating a wealth of musical and personal information on him that I am pleased to finally share with the world.
Oliver Edward Nelson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 4, 1932, the youngest of four siblings in a musical family. His Portuguese maternal grandfather was an amateur musician who was adept on a variety of instruments; his older brother Eugene Nelson Jr. played alto saxophone with Cootie Williams' big band during the 1940s; and his sister Leontine was a professional pianist-vocalist in the St. Louis area. He entered the music profession as a teenager during the late 1940s, at a time when several of the best-known territory bands in the Midwest were on their last legs. The Jeter-Pillars, George Hudson and Nat Towles bands, all with sterling reputations dating back to the Swing Era, were based in or around St. Louis at the time and Nelson played with all three bands while still in his teens. He originally set out to be a lead alto saxophonist and his early idols were Willie Smith, Otto Hardwicke and Johnny Hodges. He made his recording debut at age 19 as lead altoist with Louis Jordan's short-lived big band in 1951. As a teenager he also played with Eddie Randall, a St. Louis trumpeter and bandleader who was instrumental in the development of many young local musicians including Miles Davis. Randall's family was also in the funeral home business, a fact that sheds some light on a mysterious bit of longstanding Nelson arcana. A brief article in Down Beat magazine early in Nelson's career made a passing reference to the fact that, in addition to his musical training. he had also studied taxidermy and embalming. No further explanation was given, and this bit of trivia, with its aspects Of BLUES AND THE ABSTRACT TRUTH meets Six Feet Under, seemed to take on a life of its own.
It turns out that Nelson was unsure about pursuing music as a career while a member of Randall's band, wound up learning mortuary science from him, and later worked at one of the Randall family's funeral homes, as well as for the Ellis funeral homes, a large local chain.
From March 1952 to March 1954 Nelson served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan and Korea as a member of the Third Division Band. His formal study of composition began later in 1954 at Washington University in St. Louis and continued at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Altoist Phil Woods, who was one of his closest friends and favorite sidemen, recalled that when he studied at Washington, Nelson chose to eat lunch in his car rather than deal with the school's segregated dining halls, and years later, in a stroke of supreme irony, returned to the campus as a guest lecturer. Nelson moved to New York in 1959. Some of his first gigs there were with big bands led by Erskine Hawkins and Louie Bellson and with a commercial Jazz group called Quartet Tres Bien. In the summer of that year, he played in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with organist Wild Bill Davis' trio, the third member of which was Grady Tate, who became Nelson's drummer of choice when both their recording careers took off. During 1959 and '60, he subbed for brief periods in both the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands, playing alto with Ellington, and tenor with Basle. The first recording to feature his big band writing was an Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis UP, TRANE WHISTLE, done for Prestige in 1960. This album also included the first recording of STOLEN MOMENTS, which a couple of years later would become Nelson's best-known composition. At this time he also served as staff arranger for the house band at the Apollo Theater. The band was lead by Reuben Phillips, a saxophonist who had been his section mate in the Louis Jordan band.
He continued to record for Prestige, doing several small group dates and in 1961, his first album of original big band music, AFRO-AMERICAN SKETCHES, a suite inspired by the black experience beginning in Africa and continuing through slavery and emancipation. Earlier in 1961 Nelson recorded the album that put him on the map, both as a player and a composer, BLUES AND THE ABSTRACT TRUTH for Impulse! It was an all-star date by a septet featuring Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes, with Nelson on tenor and alto, and George Barrow on baritone. This album featured the classic version of STOLEN MOMENTS and the cluster harmonies used in the arrangement became identified with Nelson from then on. It was also his first collaboration with producer Creed Taylor, who soon began employing him as a virtual house arranger for the Verve label. The point in time when the recordings in this set were made represent roughly the mid to late period of the last golden age of studio recording in New York. The top players would customarily do, on average, three record dates each day and could be called upon to play in almost any style at any time. Dates were booked in three-hour increments with, in many cases, a fourth "possible hour" in case some overtime was needed. Of course, due to the demands of the marketplace, a good deal of the music one would encounter during an average week of studio work would vary in quality and a good deal of it was pure commercial garbage. This tended to make opportunities to play quality music that much more of a relief, and the ratio of good music to bad got exponentially smaller as time went on. By the 1970s it seemed as though the main ingredients for success as a studio arranger or producer had become sartorial, rather than musical. As saxophonist-arranger-author Bill Kirchner has written, recordings like those heard here were products of a studio system that has largely disappeared, and if they were done today, they would had to have been paid for out of the artist's own pocket.
Despite the consistently high level of musicianship and the difficulty of much of the music, the bands on these sessions were not working bands in the sense of being on the road, or even playing a live gig once a week. Separate rehearsals were usually out of the question. Nelson's writing often made extraordinary demands on the players, so it was essential for him to have players he could rely on to meet those demands. His writing for the reed section in particular demanded wide-ranging versatility. He made more frequent and imaginative use of the clarinet section than most other jazz arrangers, which stemmed from his classical training, his love of Duke Ellington, and the fact that he was a good clarinetist himself. Albums such as FULL NELSON and PETER AND THE WOLF required a good deal of doubling on various flutes, and oboe and English horn, as well as clarinet and bass clarinet, while requiring the same players to comprise a first-rate sax section, often in the course of the same arrangement. The consistency of the personnel on Nelson's dates allowed him to utilize the Ellingtonian concept of conceiving both solos and ensemble parts with individual players in mind. The lynchpins of Oliver's reed sections were lead altoist Phil Woods and baritonist Danny Bank. Bill Kirchner has perceptively pointed out that Nelson employed Woods and Bank in the same way that Ellington employed Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney: both as section lead and anchor respectively, and as distinctive individual voices. Nelson was aware of the fact that even when no improvisation is required, a player who can improvise, even if not a world-class soloist, can always interpret a written part in the jazz idiom better than one who can't. Phil Bodner, Romeo Penque and Stan Webb were former big band saxophonists. all of whom played flute, oboe and clarinet on a level equal to that of top-drawer classical players, and Bodner was a first-rate jazz soloist as well. In the brass section, bass trombonist Tony Studd and tuba player Don Butterfield were, at the time, virtually the only players in the studio freelance pool on their respective horns who were jazz improvisers, which made them far superior to their peers at playing written parts with true jazz feeling, an advantage also enjoyed by lead trumpeters Ernie Royal and Snooky Young.
In addition to his status as an arranger and player of the first rank, Nelson became important in jazz education with the publication of several of his big band works and his influence on saxophonists became widespread due to popularity of his self-published book of saxophone exercises, Patterns for Saxophone. He wrote the book originally for his own use and the story of its origin falls under the heading of "You can't make this stuff up." During his stint with Wild Bill Davis in 1959, the group played a gig on a cruise ship. At one point in the voyage, rough seas and foul weather caused the ship's generators to go haywire, causing the electrical power levels onboard to fluctuate wildly. This in turn caused Davis' Hammond organ to change pitch uncontrollably and unpredictably, forcing Nelson to have to constantly transpose in order to stay in the right key. This experience made him aware that needed to improve his facility in all 12 keys, hence the book.
As his writing commitments usually left him virtually no practice time, he would practice out of his own book whenever he needed to get his chops into shape quickly. Most of the book's exercises take a particular melodic pattern and run it through all the keys. One example consists of a series of 12 tone rows in various transpositions and several others contain the melodies of tunes that appear on different recordings. Several passages and complete tunes in this set are derived from examples in this book and many of the patterns were, and still are, part of the vocabulary of many important players. Nelson's experience and status as a first-rate player who was often featured on other arrangers' projects as well as his own, made him an ideal choice to provide backing for jazz soloists of all stylistic persuasions. No one has a better idea of what works and what doesn't behind a jazz soloist than a writer who is a Jazz soloist.
The list of soloists for whom Nelson provided stimulating frameworks includes Cannonball Adderley, Johnny Hodges, Cal Tjader, Sonny Rollins, Kai Winding, Lee Morgan, Stanley Turrentine and vocalists such as Louis Armstrong (including the ubiquitous IT”S A WONDERFUL WORLD, Louis' last recording, with stowaway Ornette Coleman singing in the vocal choir), Carmen McRae, Etta Jones, Joe Williams and Nancy Wilson.
Nelson moved to Los Angeles in 1965 in order to break into TV and film scoring, maintaining a bicoastal lifestyle for awhile as he combined recording work in New York scoring work in L.A. His first steady scoring work was for the NBC-TV series Ironside in 1967. The show was produced by Universal Television, whose music supervisor, Stanley Wilson, was supportive of jazz musicians and had helped jumpstart the scoring careers of J.J. Johnson and Benny Golson. Nelson went on to score several other TV and soon fell into a dangerous and eventually fatal trap. He maintained a lavish home while sending his two sons through college and paying to support his older brother, who had developed physical and mental problems that required institutional care. This led him to take on a backbreaking workload, which was, ironically made worse by his own professional integrity. In those pre-digital days, TV and film scores were still performed by groups of human beings, requiring the creation of fully written scores from which individual parts were then extracted. It was standard practice for the composer, after having written the for an episode, to then direct the recording sessions.
The field was notorious for imposing insanely tight deadlines. Virtually every composer involved in this work wrote his scores in the form of a sketch and employed orchestrators who were familiar with the composer's style, to flesh them out into full scores. It was considered physically impossible to do otherwise, due to the dangerously long periods of sleep deprivation it would require, but Nelson insisted on writing every note himself and was unique in never employing the services of an orchestrator. In addition, Nelson's younger son, jazz flutist Oliver Nelson Jr., believes that his father contracted malaria on a tour of Africa in 1969, and that it may have permanently weakened his immune system. On October 27, 1975, Nelson was conducting a recording session for an episode of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, after working out the timing of the musical cues, composing and orchestrating every note and delivering the score to a copyist all within a span of 36 hours. At the end of the date, as pianist-composer Mike Melvoin, the keyboardist on the date, described it, "He went to the date, looked really bad ... needless to say, and I think it was Vince DeRosa, the French horn player, [who] said 'You don't look good, man. You should go home, or even go to the hospital, go to the emergency room, check in or whatever.” He said, No, No, I’m going home right now’ and I think he had his heart attack on the way home.”
Though all the press reports listed the cause of death as a heart attack, Oliver Nelson Jr. confirms the actual cause of death as pancreatitis, a breakdown of fatty acids in the liver, resulting in instantaneous shock and rapid death. According to Melvoin, Nelson’s tragic death served as a cautionary tale, causing more than a few overworked Hollywood composers to alter their work habits.”
Kenny Berger November 2005www.mosaicrecords.com Oliver Nelson: The Argo, Verve and Impulse Big Band Sessions [MD6-233]
I have long thought that had he not died so tragically young at the age of 43, Jazz saxophonist, arranger and composer Oliver Nelson may have produced a body or work to warrant consideration as “the Duke Ellington” of the second half of the 20th century.
Given his brief life, Oliver’s arranging and composition talents were prolific, by any standard of judgment. More importantly, his music is exciting and interesting and always fun to listen to, especially in a big band context.
And subsequently, when John Cobley contacted us and offered his permission to post the following interview with Oliver that he conducted three years before Nelson’s death in 1975, needless to say, we now had reason to become doubly pleased.
John lives in British Columbia. We’ve never met in person, only coming together via the Internet as a result of our common interest in Jazz.
He has had a successful career as a professional writer. In addition to Jazz, another of John’s interests is running. He used to work as a track and field writer. Not surprisingly, then, he is currently “… working on a ‘book’ on running, great runners, coaches and famous races.”
Here’s what John had to say as by way of background to his interview with Oliver:
“Going over it after all these years, I was surprised how well it went and how much Oliver Nelson [ON] opened up to me (a humble student). His frustrations with the "scene" come over quite strongly. I was quite moved by his comment about his black brothers. The first part is rather long (about jazz education),…. Still I think that overall the interview will give those interested in Nelson some useful insights.”
In the spring of 1972, Oliver Nelson visited Salt Lake City to work with the University of Utah jazz program. I attended one of his sessions with the university big band. At one point he got out his alto and began a solo; however, after a minute he stopped abruptly, apologizing that the thin air at 5,000 feet was too much for him. (In retrospect, this might well have been an indication of the heart condition that was to end his life three years later.)
After the session I approached Oliver Nelson for an interview. I introduced myself as a third-year student from BYU who had a weekly jazz program on KBYU-FM. He agreed to meet me later at his hotel. Arriving on time, he commented on some “weird looks” he got on the streets of Salt Lake City because of his color. After the interview, he talked to me personally and, giving me his home address, said he would welcome any ideas that I might have for projects he could work on.
Q: First of all, I’d like to ask you about jazz education. I believe you’ve been greatly involved in it for the last few years.
ON: The University of Utah jazz program is only three years old. In that three-year period, enrolment has gone up constantly, to the point that the jazz curriculum is one third in terms of student numbers. And the school felt that they should find some way to merge jazz and the regular music department. However, the regular music dept has nothing to do with the jazz department, and they are worlds apart in concept. Of course, jazz theory and harmony are quite different from European classical theory and harmony. NorthTexasState’s program is 25 years old and it has been successful for 25 years. But even there they are finding resistance to the jazz program.
Q: Could you define what you mean by successful?
ON: When I went to WashingtonUniversity in St Louis, we could not even mention the word jazz. So I got a very good classical background—in 16th century harmony. Then in 1966 they invited me back to start a jazz program. It’s as if they are finally seeing that jazz is an important art form. If you are going to teach it, you can’t just pull out an educator and say “Teach jazz.” You have to get people who have been professional musicians, who have traveled. I’ve played with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Quincey Jones, Louis Bellson, so they said that the logical person is a former student who has gone out and been very successful in the world. It was an honor for me.
Q: Do you think that this gulf between classical and jazz education is getting any narrower?
ON: Jazz programs are bringing a great deal of pressure upon music schools. For instance, emphasis is now on improvisation. As a student, I had a professor at WashingtonUniversity who said that any music that is improvised is not art. I raised my hand and said, “What about the troubadour songs with mandolins and lutes? Troubadours would go all around Europe singing and improvising. It’s codified in one large book. How do you account for this?” He just told me to see him after class. I got a D in that course. So communication is a big problem because all the heads of music departments have no real knowledge of jazz. Their only option is to bring in professional people to teach it. But professionals like Dizzy Gillespie have the experience but no degrees after their name. So the heads say, “Why should we pay someone like Dizzy Gillespie $25,000 a year to teach when he doesn’t have a Ph. D.?” Well, he doesn’t need one. So lines have to be clearly drawn.
Q: Would you say then that jazz programs have become embarrassingly popular?
ON: That’s right. And that makes it very difficult for the classical part music departments. In one of the reports concerning Dr. Fowler’s resignation here at the University of Utah, the words “domination by the Jazz Department” appeared. Well, that’s a strange word, domination. The University of Utah stage bands have been consistent winners in the festivals; that’s great publicity for the school. You’d think the school would be very happy about it, but somehow they feel very nervous and threatened.
Q: There has been some cross-fertilization between jazz and classical music—Stravinsky for example. Do you think that this cross-fertilization will develop into one musical form?
ON: I think so. Recently there was a review of a piece of mine that was premiered by the Eastman Orchestra at Rochester. It’s a 15-minute piece. And the reviewers didn’t know where it belongs. You can’t tell where the jazz stops and where the classical music begins. So that’s what I’ve been working for in my own career—to try to cross-fertilize. I find it’s happening more and more because of the exposure the jazz musicians are getting and the exposure to rock. They also have to take classical courses, and somehow it rubs off. It goes back and forth. I think it will be a natural thing. And it’s going to take years before we can really see the truth of it. But I hate this resistance that you get in a music department where the classical people don’t speak to the jazz people. It’s wrong, you know.
Q: There is an aloofness to any kind of exuberance in classical music.
ON: Oh, yea. One good example is this. Zubin Mehta of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They did a piece of mine maybe two years ago for full orchestra. Zubin was very concerned. He said, “Why is it that you don’t see any black faces at these concerts at the MusicCenter?” I said that I’d thought about it. So he said, “Why don’t we have the whole symphony orchestra play the high school in the so-called ghetto area of Watts?” And we did this piece of mine there. They also played the first part of The Rite of Spring. And the black kids loved it. So he said, if they won’t go to the MusicCenter, let’s take the music to them. He’s also changing his program, doing less say of Mozart and Bach. And he will have one concert featuring the music of Lalo Schifrin and Frank Zappa. He’s trying to reach a new audience.
Q: We had him here at Provo. In our interview he seemed concerned with the image of classical music. But most of those involved in classical music don’t seem concerned. They feel people have to rise up to their level. We feel that Mehta has almost been ostracized for his attitude.
ON: He comes down to the grass roots level and tries to reach the people. He says the programming of a normal symphony orchestra is usually bad. People aren’t coming out to hear things that they’ve heard before. So he’s putting on a great deal of new music, and they are giving him a hard time for that. He’s bringing jazz composers into the MusicCenter to do things with the orchestra; he’s getting problems with that. What’s happening in the universities is almost a parallel with what’s happening with symphony orchestras. Q: So what advice would you give to the heads of university music departments?
ON: To recognize that they will have to deal with it sooner or later. My son, Oliver Junior, who will be 17 soon, is asking where he should go to school and what he should take. I tell him, “You really do need a good classical background, beside what you are going to find out about jazz and everything else. You still need a good basis. I recommended he study classical harmony and theory. But he should also be free to elect to take jazz harmony courses and not have the feeling that the two are separate things. He’s content now to get a good education, one that will give him the best of both worlds.
At the Eastman School of Music, the students decided: they wanted jazz to be taught. And they started the program there two years ago. The students got the head of the music department to resign. The students will have a lot to do with the future. They know what they want. They’ve looked at the world their fathers have given them and said, “The world doesn’t work.” The students will decide that jazz will be taught in the music departments; they may even decide who will teach it. And I think this is a good thing—as long as they don’t burn the place down!
Q: I recently did a talk on the problem of soloing with a big band as opposed to soloing in a small group. Do you have any opinions on this?
ON: I personally prefer small groups. I’m using a synthesizer now and an electric piano. And maybe an electric bass, though I always feel the need for the upright bass. I find that with three good players I can make more music than with a 20-piece orchestra that’s hard to handle because you have to conduct and play at the same time. A large orchestra sort of hems you in. So when I work with a large group I always write places inside the piece where I can play with the rhythm section. And then at some point I’ll scream, “Let’er in” or something, and the orchestra will join me at that point. But I do prefer small groups.
Q: With college bands the ensemble sounds fine, but there is often a letdown when the solos start.
ON: They aren’t developing soloists like they should. They’re developing ensemble groups. This problem has been on my mind. I was at a festival where I heard 80 bands in three days, and I don’t think we heard one outstanding solo. It bothers me because this means that improvisation is not being taught the way it should be in the colleges.
Q: I’m wondering whether it might be better for big-band soloists to have some sort of solo worked out beforehand.
ON: No. Just let it come right off the top of your head.
Q: Even at the college level?
ON? Yeh. I think the blame falls mainly on the educators. The 80 bands were all white bands—very little integration. They had some Orientals and Spanish-speaking kids. But they were playing mostly rock not jazz. Since this was a jazz festival, this was very puzzling to me. When I talked with the band directors, their attitude was that they were trying to play the music of the kids’ generation. Improvisation is not part of their teaching process. So you hear ensemble after ensemble--but no outstanding soloists.
Q: Can you give any comments on the problems students have when they first start composing for jazz orchestra?
ON: First they need to know theory, instrumentation/orchestration. You need to know how to handle all the instruments because not all of them are transposing instruments. It puts a burden on the young composer just to copy the parts because the orchestra is so large. I would personally select smaller ensembles first and then work up to the larger groups.
Q: How did your own career develop?
ON: I started out with piano when I was four and with saxophone when I was 11. I was working professionally when I was 12, touring with a territory band when school was out. After that I went with Louis Jordan’s big band, and then I had to go in the Marine Corps for two years. Public Law 550 provided me the means to get an education so I went to WashingtonUniversity from 1954 to 1958 and then JeffersonUniversity in Lincoln City, Missouri. Then I got married and went to New York. My first success, I would say, was an album I did for ABC Paramount, Blues and the Abstract Truth. On the basis of that one record, I had created my own sound. It only worked for me. If other people used it, guys would say, “You sound just like Oliver Nelson!” And then I went on to do an album with Jimmy Smith, Walk on the Wild Side. That was a start. After that I was writing more than I was playing. I stayed in New York almost ten years, bought a house on Long Island and had to fight that traffic every day. Then I said, “I think I want more out of life than this. I think I’d like to write for films.” So we moved to California, where I’ve been writing for feature films: Death of a Gunfighter, Zigzag, Skullgduggery.
Q: How did you find satisfaction doing that? I hear that Quincy Jones is giving it up.
ON: He needs money. Well, he’s starting to go very commercial now. That’s what Hollywood can do. So now I’m involved in film writing I do music on a regular basis for Longstreet, for which I created the theme, and do underscores for Ironside and a show called Night Gallery. But I find that’s not enough. I get the feeling that this year is going to be critical because I’ve decided to make my own music available to schools and colleges. I think I am going to do less and less of the other and do more and more in education.
Q: On this album (Leon Thomas in Berlin) I noticed a change in your playing. It seemed to be cathartic, terribly powerful emotionally.
ON: (Laughs) I was having a wonderful time in Berlin, and I guess it shows up on that record. And I don’t play that often. When I do play I just take my saxophone right out of the bag and put it together and play it. I don’t live with it every day. The reason that I can pick up my saxophone and play it is that I am always thinking about it.
Q: We had Don Ellis here recently, and he was talking about Gary Burton, how he practices…
ON: In his head. Right. Same thing. But that album—you’re saying my playing is different. There was a period when my playing was one way and then my playing changed almost over night. I have a Japanese Yamaha saxophone that they gave me in Tokyo three years ago. And then I have a German mouthpiece which has an adjustable chamber inside. The Japanese instrument is so good that it enables me to go outside the well-tempered whatever. I can play as high as I want. My French Selmer saxophone wouldn’t allow me to do that because it was too good. It’s like owning a Rolls Royce, but you wouldn’t enter it in a race.
Q: But there’s a purity in your playing in that recording. I don’t know whether it’s a change in your style….
ON: I think it’s happened inside me.
Q: …as though you felt content within yourself and confident that you had no need to prove yourself. Could you make any comments on this album?
ON: Leon Thomas is also from St. Louis. He’s always talking about “Back to Africa.” And I’ve been to Africa, and I’m saying Africa is not where it is. He has never been there, and he’s talking about the Mother Country! The one thing that I found out about Africa is that it was not alien in the true sense. But there’s such a difference in the cultures that I said that the place to start thinking about making a living is in this country, America, although Africa was very nice to visit. Maybe that has something to do with my playing on this album too. It gave me a chance to focus on things I hadn’t thought about. As you can see I had on a dashiki for the occasion. But that’s not the normal way I play. It used to be suits and ties, but I can’t do that anymore.
Q: What do you think about this African movement in Jazz—Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane—although their music is perhaps more North African and Indian?
ON: Well, it’s the same thing I’ve mentioned earlier. They’ve never been there. I thought that in going to Africa we would find some black faces and we would be able to exchange things musically. But in the major portion of my tour there, in the capital cities, we didn’t find one person who could play any jazz. And then I started to think about it: was American slavery the catalyst that was needed in order to make this music? Why did it only happen her and nowhere else? It didn’t happen in the Virgin Islands. It didn’t happen with the Africans who went to South America. Why did jazz only happen here? Maybe slavery was the answer. The records of Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane are very commercial. And when I say commercial, it’s that people are now trying to identify with something. So Pharoah Sanders sells quite a few records. But I don’t know if that’s how he really feels about it.
Q: I have a theory which I’d like to put to you. I’ve read that rather hysterical book by Frank Kofsky (Nelson laughs, “Oh, Frank”) and the rather better one by Ben Sidran, Black Talk….
ON: I don’t know that one.
Q: …and it seems to me that through the history of jazz the black musician has created a style and the white man has come along and copied it.
ON: That’s true.
Q: And each time that has happened, the black musician, to keep his individuality, has to jump to something different.
ON: This is very true because one of the things I ask young players when I meet them is, “Have you ever heard of Charlie Parker?” They say no. Then I look at the band instructor and wonder how the hell he can teach jazz. Another man, who will remain nameless, if I would say Charlie Parker, he would say Lee Konitz. If I would say Duke Ellington, he would say Stan Kenton. If I would say John Coltrane, he would say Stan Getz. He didn’t realize that he was trying to have a complete division, saying this was white jazz, cool jazz. Of course, what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing, that was black jazz. And I hate to think of jazz being that kind of music. As long as politics can stay out of it, I think music in this country will be very, very healthy. If I were white composer, I would have been totally famous and a millionaire by now. But it takes me longer. I have to prove myself every time I write a film score. Every time I stand in front of an integrated orchestra, I’ve got to know what I’m doing. Whereas you can get other people—Chuck Mangione, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him--he’s a big success because of some album he did with the Eastman Rochester Orchestra. There’s no music there. But you hear Chuck’s name on the radio constantly, that he’s gonna be the man of the future. Someone said that everyone is still looking for the great white hope. I hate to think of music in those terms.
Q: In Europe we respect you for what you are.
ON: In Europe it’s different. Why do you think I go to Berlin and have such a wonderful time? Because of the music, first of all. I can write anything for a German audience. I know I can extend my thoughts and do this and that, and I don’t have to be commercial.
Q: Why is there a difference then?
ON: I don’t know. It’s a complete reverse in Europe. Phil Woods, he goes to Europe and he feels he is being discriminated against because they think of him as a good white saxophone player. He says all the black musicians over there get drunk and they can’t play, but everybody leaves them alone because of their contribution to music. Over here Phil Woods was sought after, but in Europe….especially in France…they said before he died Sidney Bechet would play so badly some nights because he was sick, but people loved him just the same. He didn’t have to prove himself; he’d done that years ago. But Europe is lovely. I haven’t been to London yet. I always stop there to change planes. I can’t work there because British musicians would have to go to the States. In a country like Finland they play very, very good and play jazz as close as they can play it. I’m going to Norway this summer. Music can speak in an international way to all people. But over here we have Shaft. Everybody’s saying that’s the way all movie scores should be written. I don’t agree. You have to write for the picture. Now the Shaft fad has taken Hollywood by storm. This country is very faddish. I somehow come through it all. I just go through the whole period, and I don’t change my style and I don’t change my ideals of what music should be. As a result I hear people say I’m one of the few who have not sold out yet. And they’re waiting for me, waiting for me to sell out.
Q: Do you feel bitter?
ON: No, I just feel that the music business in this country is geared to the lowest common denominator. Do you know what they call me, my black brothers? They call me a white musician. They call me a white composer. It’s because I’m always trying to do something. I couldn’t stay with Shaft just to prove how black I am. So I write all kinds of twelve-tone music. I write from my experiences through my education, and now I’m putting together my own thing. And if it goes outside their spectrum, they say, “You’re thinking white.” You should see my last score; I showed it to Gerald Wilson this morning. It’s Berlin Dialogue. He said it looks like a road map! I said exactly what it is. I just give players places to start and stop. Driving from here, you have to take directions and know what turn-off to take. This is the way I think about improvisation. I don’t want to tell a player what to play, but I give him certain road maps and signs, and he can do whatever he wants as long as he is does it during this period. And he says you’re giving him too much freedom, but I say that every time we play this piece it sounds pretty much the same. And that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want everybody just playing anything they wanted to play; I wanted to control it just a little—enough to have the same performance time and time again.
Q: At a certain point jazz suddenly became serious. I wondered if you knew why.
ON: They were trying to make it respectable. It started with John Lewis and the Third Stream. It was because most of the musicians were going back to school, and they were studying with people who were saying, “In order to make a good piece you have to go about it in this manner.” And it came out sounding serious. When jazz musicians write for a jazz orchestra—saxophones and trumpets-- they write one way, and when they have a chance to write for a symphony orchestra--strings--they write in a completely different style. And then you wonder why. Is it because respect for the symphony orchestra makes you write that kind of piece? My piece for Zubin was very rhythmic and I left a place inside the piece for me to improvise. The only thing I did was use the larger orchestra. When I write for a symphony orchestra, I think about the piece and what I want to do. But I only go about it in a bigger way. I don’t get serious about it. My music comes right off the top, you know.
Q: There is another kind of seriousness, which is almost a religious seriousness. Coltrane for example.
ON: John Coltrane approached his music from that standpoint. He was very serious about it, but serious in that sense doesn’t mean pretentious. Maybe he knew he was going to die. Towards the end he was getting more and more involved in thinking about life. And then he dies, and that was the end of it. Pharoah Sanders has this quality also—music as a religion. Eric Dolphy was like that too—always serious about his work. I understand what you mean by seriousness that takes on a spiritual quality.
Q: I wonder if it started earlier. Lester Young had his religious conscience nagging him.
ON: Listen. I have a religious conscience nagging me.
Q: But why didn’t it happen in the twenties?
ON: Well, everybody was having such a good time. It’s almost like if you go out and get drunk, the next day you feel like you’ve committed a sin—especially when your head hurts and you feel rotten. And you probably did commit a sin because you hurt your body. But John Coltrane was a very nice person, and he had a great deal of respect for other people’s work. Pharoah Sanders called me a couple of months ago to do an album for him. That’s one of the projects I hope to be working on soon. I don’t know what kind of project it will be. With him, his music is not ordered in a sense but is ordered, and with me working with a large a group over which I have to have some control, how do we put Pharoah Sanders in the middle and have it come out meaning something? It’ll be a project to work on.
Way back when, I never knew much about the comings-and-goings of Jazz artists on Jazz record labels.
What I did “know” was that pianist Oscar Peterson [OP] had always recorded for the various record companies owned by Norman Granz.
Which is why it came as something of a shock when I purchased Oscar’s Canadiana Suite a double-fold LP and found that it was issued in 1964 on Limelight as LM 82010. It was one the last recordings by Oscar’s trio featuring Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.
I learned much later that Norman Granz sold his Verve and associated labels to MGM in 1960, but Oscar had to remain with Verve for a few more years due to his contract commitments.
Norman would return to recording Jazz about a decade later when he formed the Pablo Records label and Oscar would return to working with him in this new setting, both with his own trio and quartet and as a guest on recordings headed-up by other Jazz artists.
Canadiana Suite has remained as one of my favorite OP recordings because his playing on the album is so understated. Oscar has phenomenal technique and is such an intense performer that I often feel overwhelmed when listening to his earlier recordings. They just take my breath away. On course, his musicianship is marvelous to behold, but sometimes I wish there wasn’t so much of it.
With his Canadiana Suite, my wish came true.
Here’s some background information on the recording which continues to be available both as a CD and as an Mp3 download.
“Oscar needs space; he perversely loves the cold of Canada. He is Canadian.”
- Gene Lees, Oscar Peterson: The Will To Swing
“Peterson's contract with Verve ran out in 1964 and he left the company. He signed with Limelight, a new subsidiary of Mercury that would prove to be desultory and ineffectual and eventually was closed down. The Limelight albums are not rated among his best, although one is notable as his first substantial venture as a composer. This was the Canadiana Suite. Oscar sent me a test pressing in New York and asked me to write the liner notes, which I did.”
- Gene Lees, Oscar Peterson: The Will To Swing
“The pieces that make up Oscar's Canadiana Suite, recorded first in 1964, proceed across Canada from east to west, which is the way the country thinks, in the precise sequence of the railway journey from the Adantic to the Pacific: Ballad to the East, Laurentides Waltz (les Laurentides is the French name for the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, and anyone born and raised in Quebec, like Oscar, tends to think of them that way), Place St. Henri, Hogtown Blues (Canadians traditionally dislike Toronto and have since time out of mind called it Hogtown), Blues of the Prairies, March Past, which refers to the Calgary Stampede parade, and Land of the Misty Giants (the Rocky Mountains). Those pieces are like views from a train window; or perhaps memories of a father's descriptions of the land when he would come home from his journeys and supervise his son's piano lessons.”
- Gene Lees, Oscar Peterson: The Will To Swing
“There are, I suppose, two reasons why I was asked to write the notes for Oscar Peterson's Canadiana Suite.
First, Oscar and I are old friends. While I was editor of Down Beat I would, whenever he and the trio appeared in Chicago, spend entire evenings listening to them. Afterwards, Oscar and I would often argue until dawn — about music, politics, women, anything. Oscar loves debate, and so do I.
The second reason is that Os and I are both Canadians. I met him 16 years ago; and knew about him long before that. Several of my friends went to high school with Oscar in Montreal. I know how deeply he feels about Canada.
It is difficult to sound pro-your own country without sounding anti-somebody else's. Os isn't anti-anything, except perhaps anti-nonsense. But he is deeply pro-Canadian, which is why Canada is perhaps the only subject on which we've never been able to work up a good argument. Oscar feels Canada, that vast and mostly empty place (empty in spite its great cities) whose very solitudes become a part of your aesthetics and your pride. There is reassurance in knowing, as you sit in some excellent restaurant in Toronto or Montreal and Vancouver turning a wine glass in your hand, that not very far away you can find empty land — land as yet unscarred by billboards and beer cans, Kleenex and Dixie cups. There is such ineffable dignity in the spreading emptiness that is never far away. I believe Canadians are a lonely people; and secretly proud of their loneliness. It was inevitable that Oscar would try to express some of this in music.
Canada has been celebrated in art in the past, but mostly by painters. Its actors and musicians and many of its writers, have always left, to find their fortune and expression in France or England or the United States. Oscar is one of the first of what I think of as a new breed of Canadian artists—as is the great concert pianist Glenn Gould. They are ones who stayed. They let their fame go out from Canada, instead of themselves going. This only heightens the respect I have for them on musical grounds. Oscar has always lived in Canada, and in recent years has helped redress the balance of Canadian artists lost to other countries by inducing his co-workers in the Trio—Ray Brown, indisputably the greatest of all jazz bassists, and the superb drummer Edmund Thigpen —to take residence in Toronto.
There is one minor question to be cleared up before we get on to the music. Isn't it odd to paint a portrait of Canada in jazz, an indigenous art of the United States? No. It is no more odd for Oscar to portray Canada in terms of jazz than it is for Aaron Copland to portray the Appalachian Mountains in terms of European classical music. Music is an international language, jazz included.
Oscar's suite is divided into eight parts, which take you on a journey from the Atlantic coast westwards to British Columbia, where the Rocky Mountains plunge into the Pacific. That's five days by train, by the way.
Ballad to the East is a sketch of the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Oscar visited there for the first time shortly after the suite was completed. Previously he knew it only from paintings and photographs. "I saw it in my mind in terms of the color blue,” he said.
Laurentides Waltz projects Oscar's impressions of the Laurentians, the pine-covered rolling mountain range of Quebec, which begins thirty miles or so north of Montreal. Laurentides is the French name for the range; Oscar was born and raised in French Canada. "I've been in the Laurentians mostly in the skiing season,” Oscar said, "and it's always been a happy, swinging kind of place, with a crisp effect. This is the most seasonal section of the suite—it is supposed to be a winter scene that you're facing." Curiously, I have visited the Laurentians mostly in summer, when the swimming in mountain lakes is marvelous, and I find Oscar's waltz equally apt in describing the mountains in that season. His brilliant piano runs may evoke the weaving line of a descending skier for some; I see in them the wings of spray from water skis.
As for Hogtown Blues-—well, a lot of Canadians dislike Toronto, as many Americans dislike New York, and for similar reasons. They say the city is all business and hustle, with no heart, and they call it "Hogtown.” "But I think of Toronto lovingly," Oscar said. "I tried to capture an impression of it by using an expansion type blues. It is fairly simply stated at the start. Using the harmonic content of the melodic line, I tried to give a feeling of the expansion this city is going through, and attempted to use the solos to typify the moods of the place at various times."
This selection brings us to the end of Side One— and the end of Eastern Canada. From here on, you're starting to get into the west, and the musical transition is made suddenly with Blues of the Prairie.
"Here, too, a blues form is used,” Oscar said. "But this obviously refers to the expansiveness I saw in the prairies. The lope is to give the impression of horses and cowboys. It is set at dusk. We tried to give a rolling feeling to the music, which doesn't have the dynamic peaks in the melody that you'll find in some of the other sections."
Wheatlands needs no textual explanation. You can see the shimmering of the wheat in the wind within a few bars of the opening. This is awesomely flat country where, they say, if you stand on a railway embankment six feet high, you can see 50 miles.
March Past describes the parade that precedes the Calgary Stampede, one of North America's biggest rodeo events. Oscar got the impressions that gave rise to it from watching the parade on television. "This is a happy time Canada feeling," he said.
There are more impressive mountain ranges in the world than the Canadian Rockies. The Andes are bigger; but the Andes are a cold and ruthless blue. No range in the world has as much color, and none is more beautiful, than the Rockies. Oscar has portrayed them in Land of the Misty Giants. "Here," he said, "the feeling of the music is somewhat like that of the Eastern provinces, except that the scene as you approach is much more imposing. Yet there is an almost ethereal quality to the Rockies. That's what I tried to show, and that's the reason for the title."
Oscar Peterson's Canadiana Suite was a year in preparation. He composed it on the road and at home in Toronto. "Obviously," he said, "it was conceived in personal terms. But it was left very loose, to permit the freedom of jazz in performance. I want to hear the different reactions and feelings that Ray and Ed and I get each time we do it."
The work was first performed on the Wayne and Shuster television show, which originates in Toronto. Its concert premiere was at the Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Centennial in the summer of 1964.”
—Gene Lees
Oscar, Ray and Ed perform Place St. Henri from the Canadiana Suite on the following video.
As I have often remarked, this blog is as much about shining what Howard Rumsey, the late bassist and bandleader, referred to as “the solo spotlight” on great Jazz writers as it is about “the music and its makers.”
Doug Ramsey has for many years contributed cogent and coherent “reflections on the music and its makers,” a phrase which forms the subtitle of his book - Jazz Matters. You can locate more information about Doug and his books by visiting him at www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/.
I wrote to Doug and requested his permission to reproduce his insert notes to Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. Doug’s explanation of what made Bill Evans so unique in the development of Jazz piano in particular and Jazz in general and his description of how Mike Harris surreptitiously went about preserving some of Bill’s distinctive “in performance” stylings combine to form one of the best “Jazz stories” that Doug has ever written.
I’ve always thought that Doug’s ability as a storyteller is one of the qualities that makes him such a special Jazz writer.
Doug’s notes are preceded by those of producer Orrin Keepnews, a man whose intercessions on his behalf did so much to keep Bill and his music alive - literally!
By way of introduction, Bill Evans forever changed the way that chords are voiced on the piano, and his frequently telepathic interplay with his sidemen in his trios remains a very influential force long after his 1980 death. Evans recorded frequently during his career, with many classic albums cut for Riverside and Fantasy (all of which have been made available on CD); but none of the music on this remarkable eight-CD set has been released before.
Recorded in secret by a devoted fan (Mike Harris) at the Village Vanguard and now put out in this magnificent box with the approval of the Evans estate, the 104 performances that make up Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions, Recorded at the Village Vanguard, 1966-1975 [Milestone 8MCD-1-121-1] feature Bill Evans at his very best, sounding both relaxed and explorative while playing before attentive audiences. With Eddie Gomez or Teddy Kotick on bass and such drummers as Arnie Wise, Joe Hunt, Philly Joe Jones, Jack DeJohnette, John Dentz, Marty Morell, and Eliot Zigmund, Evans is heard on 26 occasions during the 1966-75 period, mixing together fresh versions of familiar songs with some selections that he performed much less often.
The recording quality is quite good and the playing is consistently inspired and full of subtle surprises.
Producer’s Note
Orrin Keepnews
“Bill Evans and I were important elements in each other’s careers when we were both quite young. (Among the most celebrated of his early albums produced by me were the two that emerged from a full Sunday at the Village Vanguard in 1961.) Working closely with him back then, I soon came to realize that he was among those highly talented artists for whom recording does not come easily. Such people usually manage to overcome the self-consciousness of the studio, but it definitely adds to the stress of creativity. Recording “live” in a club or concert environment can be helpful - but if a Bill Evans (or similarly, a Sonny Rollins or a Wes Montgomery) could never cease to be very much aware of the presence of tape machines and microphones. When I first learned of a storehouse of secretly recorded Evans performances, I had a series of mixed feelings, but certainly my principal reaction was that it couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate guy!
It is a particularly intriguing concept if you keep in mind Bill's lifelong reluctance to go into the studio. I find myself inventing only mildly exaggerated advertising copy: Now you can possess permanently the kind of unselfconscious Evans performances that club audiences fleetingly held in their heads, but until now had been totally unavailable to mere record-buyers! Actually, you will find the reality slightly less melodramatic. Bill in the recording studio was not exactly a loser, and this material is not wildly different in nature. But there truly is a great deal here that none of us had previously encountered on records, a relaxation and spontaneity, an ability (indeed an eagerness) to improvise himself into and out of a variety of unrehearsed or unlooked-for situations in relation to his bass player (except for the very first night it is Eddie Gomez) and each of several drummers. And there is something wonderfully revealing about hearing, in several instances, the same repertoire under varied circumstances — the approach changing over the years, the familiar song sounding not at all the same with a different drummer.
The details of how an ardent fan turned himself into an unauthorized chronicler of Bill's performances over a decade and more are recounted in the accompanying essay by Doug Ramsey. When I first became aware of the tapes, Mike Harris was well into what turned out to be a lengthy process of making everything proper. The various parties who have an interest in this material (the Evans estate, the accompanying musicians, the club, record companies with whom Bill had contractual relationships at the time he was taped) have now been dealt with. In particular, retroactive thanks certainly seem due to the late Max Gordon, founder and longtime operator of the Vanguard, and current appreciation to his colleague, widow, and successor, Lorraine Gordon.
As for the artist himself, and how he might have felt about the release of these recordings, that's a matter on which we're obviously never going to have a first-hand opinion. But I can presume to say that we have the next best thing. It certainly counts for something that his family has approved. And there are also the two people who, over the years, were closest to Bill's musical output. The more important of the two by far was the late Helen Keane, who as Bill's manager guided his career from very early trio days and also served from the mid-1960s as his record producer. Helen's death, in the spring of 1996, came before she could have any active input in the preparation of this project. But she certainly knew quite thoroughly how he had sounded in this particular club during these years, and she had approved the concept in principle by agreeing, despite her long illness, to serve the project as a consultant.
Helen was going to be backing me up, and my own Bill Evans credentials as the second of the musical authorities are twofold: as already noted, I was Bill's first record producer, which was a seven-year association; after that, I was his friend and fan for the rest of his life. There is no way I could have refused the invitation to produce this compilation. It involves a responsibility that, following Helen's death, I suspect I have taken even more seriously — to select material and performances that would make the most of this unique opportunity.
Somewhat to my surprise, under the circumstances, recording quality was not actually a major problem. Obviously, what we have here is far from studio standards, but in fact the consistently high playing level keeps you, for the most part, from paying too much attention to that. Bill was very much a variable and fallible human being, but the ability to eventually rise to the occasion, which I had been strongly aware of in the recording studio, was apparently also a factor in his daily working life. The late 1960s was a frequently troubled period in his life, but you don't really find that reflected here. I'd sum up the matter of sound quality by shifting the burden back to the listener. You must appreciate the circumstances — in this case, it's necessary to give a little to get a lot, to tolerate a less than perfect balance between instruments and a piano sound that is not optimum in order to be able to eavesdrop on the amazing creativity of a truly great jazz artist.
Mike Harris, our secret benefactor, clearly had a pretty good idea of what he was doing. When a trio appeared in that room, even back in the Sixties, the piano (which clearly was kept in better condition than the average nightclub keyboard) invariably was placed at the very front of the raised bandstand. Accordingly, its bulk, interposed between the bass and the Harris equipment, helped create a reasonable balance. In this room, drums have almost always been set up in a small alcove at the rear and at the far right (from an audience perspective). This also had a suitably compensating effect, although obviously much would depend on the drummer himself. Bill's choice of percussionists was not consistent, ranging from quite light to extremely aggressive, but he was fully aware of that. So the nights with Philly Joe Jones on hand not only offer a much more present drum sound, they also tend to display a very different level of intensity from the leader.
Although a full decade is covered here, from 1966 to 75, the spread is not particularly even. There's a great deal more early material available, largely because Max Gordon was particularly fond of the pianist and during the mid and late Sixties brought him into the room with great frequency. And in those days, jazz clubs quite routinely booked a group for two and three weeks at a time. But before the end of that decade, rapidly growing public acceptance made Evans much less available to Gordon. Bill's being on tour or working other New York clubs meant that there were years when dedicated Mike Harris and his tape machine hardly got any shots at Bill in the Vanguard. (In addition, the company for whom he recorded during his last few years, having plans of its own for final sessions taped at the Vanguard, understandably declined to waive its control over material within its time frame.)
I have selected the repertoire for this compilation by keeping in mind both variety and what I think of as "continuity." Bill added a vast number of songs to his personal play list over the years, made you consider many of them his special property, and then eventually grew somewhat tired of them, which meant they were played more rarely, although usually not completely abandoned. Of course I haven't been able to include all of those, but I didn't miss too many, and there are quite a few deliberate encores. (Inevitably I was restricted by what actually was played on the taped evenings, and also by a quantity of mechanical problems, mishaps, and assorted recording gremlins that made it difficult or impossible to include some familiar numbers.) And wherever possible I have shamelessly used my position as producer to give preference to my personal Evans favorites — although, to my credit, there are only two performances of his Re: Person I Knew, the title of which is an anagram using all the letters in my name.
Several compositions remained important parts of his program on a regular basis over the years, so I considered it essential for there to be three and four performances, over the eight-disc span, of signature pieces like Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight," Anthony Newley's "Who Can I Turn To," Miles Davis's "Nardis," and "Blue in Green" (whose authorship has caused some controversy, but was probably jointly created by Bill and Miles), as well as such major Evans works as "Waltz for Debby,""Time Remembered,""Turn Out the Stars," and "Very Early"— although almost never with the same drummer playing a piece more than once.
On the important subject of drummers, there is one positive prejudice that Bill and I definitely shared. We both regarded Philly Joe Jones as one of the most charming and most difficult of human beings, and also one of the most talented. It was among the unexpected pleasures of working with this material for me to find that the very brief period in 1967 when Joe was for the first time part of Bill's trio had included substantial — and well documented — time at the Vanguard. The bulk of one disc in this set and all of another are given over to some of those performances and, with due respect to several other excellent drummers, including my good friend Jack DeJohnette, these are for me the strongest moments of a very strong compilation.
As a final point, one of the evenings with Philly Joe provides a striking example of the kind of decision-making that was an inevitable part of producing so unorthodox a compilation. May 28, 1967, was a high-energy night at the Vanguard; Evans and Jones were locked into a groove that seemed on a direct line from their adventures together, nine years earlier, as part of the rhythm section for the memorable Miles Davis sextet that included Coltrane and Cannonball. They were playing numbers that I can't recall otherwise ever hearing from Bill Evans: a Charlie Parker favorite, "Star Eyes," and Sonny Rollins's hard-driving "Airegin." But the tape itself was not on their wavelength. It was the only time Mike Harris was to discover after the fact that he had been using defective tape, that several of these burning performances had "dropouts" in the music—momentary but noticeable sound gaps. The faulty tape contained several other one-of-a-kind numbers, the only appearance on these discs of "Haunted Heart,""Little Lulu," and Bill's composition, "Peri's Scope." It is only proper to inform you of these flaws, but you'd probably spot them for yourself.
For the point is that they are there, that I didn't have to debate very long about whether musical merits and rarity warranted including them. (Clearly, one advantage of a situation that's imperfect to begin with is that you don't have to run away from an occasional more
“The evolution of jazz music as a distinct form of creative expression is contained in only eight decades of the 20th century. The maturing of the art of jazz piano improvisation is an index to the astonishing speed of that development. It took less than 40 years, and its main current ran from James P. Johnson through Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans, with Art Tatum standing apart as an unclassifiable phenomenon.
Evans, the last great jazz piano innovator, inherited and expanded the art transmitted through the fountainheads of piano style. He was only 37 years old when he recorded the first of the pieces in this collection. Hines, Wilson, and Powell were still alive in 1966. Indeed, at the age of 62 the protean Hines was rejuvenating and deepening his creativity. His artistic growth continued throughout his life, something he had in common with Evans.
After young Bill Evans got out of the Army in 1954, he became an indispensable sideman and soloist on the New York jazz scene. He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are with harmonies that Gil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest trio work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.
With the 1958 Davis sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and, initially, drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis's change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment, and imagination of the soloist.
Davis saw ways of using the pianist's approach to open up and simplify harmonies. By applying modal changes, the two men even transformed a twelve-bar blues, already the simplest traditional jazz form. By 1959, their work together helped lead to the landmark Davis sextet recording, Kind of Blue. (It is fair to say that of important players and writers whose styles were not set before 1960, most developed in the shadow of that album.) Their modal and scalar approach to improvisation profoundly influenced John Coltrane's turn toward fewer harmonic guideposts. Independently, at about the same time, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman was soloing on melodic lines, which he wrote without key centers, modes, or scales. Taken together, the two methods led to Free Jazz or The New Thing, the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s. The movement did attract a fair number of poseurs enchanted by the idea of playing music without having to know anything about it. Today, most of them are otherwise employed. But Free Jazz also had the beneficial effect of opening the minds of real musicians to new possibilities.
In addition to an overall influence on Davis's musical thinking, Evans also profoundly affected him as a player. In the autobiography, Miles (Touchstone, Simon and Schuster), there is this comment:
"Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. I had to change the way the band sounded again for Bill's style by playing different tunes, softer ones at first. Bill played underneath the rhythm and I liked that, the way he played scales with the band."
After leaving Davis, Evans invariably employed the trio format. His 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard in New York City, made with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, exemplified an early pinnacle of his conception of trio playing in which the three instruments often seemed to function as one. He opened improvisational possibilities that pianists have been exploring and developing for more than three decades. Unless a young pianist set out to recreate ragtime and stride or to play outside of harmonic guidelines, he or she is all but certain to work from the Evans legacy. More than just pianists are his inheritors. Players of virtually every melody instrument have absorbed the Bill Evans sensibility, and it can be argued that even drummers play differently because of his rhythmic influence.
Critics often defined Evans's music in terms of romanticism and introspection. This evaluation was reinforced by the sight of him at work, his forehead parallel to the keyboard, seemingly intent on melding with the piano as his spirit entered the instrument. He was the very image of a musician in the depths of concentration — withdrawn, intellectual, painfully lyrical. That is the cliche vision of Evans. It ignores an element as essential to his music as his melodic lyricism and his magical voicings. It ignores time, rhythm, swing.
In the mid-1950s, the muscle, drive, and fire in a pair of performances recorded by Evans had electrified the jazz community. Both were with George Russell. One was "Concerto for Billy the Kid," the other, "All About Rosie." They stand as two of the most intensely swinging statements ever recorded by a jazz pianist. Evans never lost the ability to galvanize audiences with his rhythmic force. In this collection you will hear the lyricist, the creator of deep pools of chords, the master of pointillistic shimmer, the harmonic genius concerned with his trio's performing as an entity — but you will also experience the drive and excitement of an avatar of rhythmic performance. In the master drummer Philly Joe Jones, his colleague from Miles Davis days, Evans had a soul mate in time. Their work together on two of these compact discs is a study in exhilaration and empathy.
The music heard here was captured in the club that had been the scene of Bill's triumphant 1961 recordings. "Captured" is exactly the right word. It was all recorded in secret at the Village Vanguard by Mike and Evelyn Harris — a man and his wife who were, and remain, devoted to the music of Bill Evans.
Born in Manhattan in 1935, Mike Harris was educated at Cornell University and became an optical physicist. In the early Sixties, after serving in the Navy, he moved to Connecticut to work at Perkin-Elmer, a firm specializing in exotic analytical optics. There he was part of the Apollo moon program. He also helped to develop the optical guidance system for the Hubble space telescope. "That was the part that worked," he says, not the notorious failed mirror. He often traveled to New Mexico in the 1970s on Perkin-Elmer projects for the Air Force. He retired in 1990.
Harris is an amateur pianist who started on the instrument at the age of six and as a child studied at the Diller-Quayle School of Music in Manhattan. As a young man, he was inspired by the Emil Gilels recording of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto and learned to play it. Then he went on to the Rachmaninoff Second. A nine-foot concert grand occupies his living room. He says that he did not have concert-level technique, but just kept working at the concertos until he had them down. For many years Harris has been a student of the playing of Bill Evans. He took a few lessons from John Mehegan, one of the first teachers of jazz improvisation to develop a discrete learning system. In one of the few brief conversations Harris had with Evans, the pianist had recommended Mehegan.
But until 1962, Harris had never heard of Evans. When he finally encountered him, he found an obsession. In a sense, his story typifies the experience of many people who discovered Evans in the early Sixties, although undoubtedly few others took the discovery quite so seriously.
"I liked jazz, but I had kind of gotten away from it. I had records by Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Terry Gibbs, but I was working diligently on classical music in those days. As far as piano goes, I had just never heard anything that convinced me it was the way jazz piano should be done. One afternoon, I was driving into New York on the Cross County Parkway and listening to Billy Taylor's program on WLIB-AM. He played 'Waltz for Debby’ and I said, 'What the hell is that?' I drove immediately to a record store and bought everything of Bill's I could find, which were his first four albums, New Jazz Conceptions, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Portrait in Jazz, and Explorations. I said, 'Okay, that's it. It's not going to get any better than that.'" The albums, it should be noted, were on Riverside and had been produced by Orrin Keepnews, the man who has assembled this compilation.
"He had it all, the lyricism, the fascinating harmonies, although at the time I had no idea what he was doing. Now I know he was dropping the root for the bass to handle and he was voicing his chords differently, using those principles he had extracted from Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin. But I didn't know that. All I knew was that he had the great harmonies, he had the melodies, the swing, the touch. That started a lifelong fascination with his music."
Mike and Evelyn Harris at once established a pattern that lasted until Bill died in 1980. For 18 years, whenever Evans was appearing at the Village Vanguard, they were there twice a week. Evelyn, a college teacher with a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University, was Mike's companion in the venture that eventually was to result in The Secret Sessions.
To begin with, however, the Harrises were just ordinary weekend listeners, choosing Friday nights and Sunday afternoons for their Evans expeditions into Manhattan because the audiences, particularly for the regrettably long-vanished tradition of the Sunday matinee, were apt to be smaller, more attentive, respectful. They had quickly decided that Saturday nights were impossible; the Vanguard, Harris recalls, was full of noisy couples on the make. Quiet soon became particularly important, because by 1966 Harris had decided not to let the Evans performances get away.
"If Beethoven or Mozart would suddenly be reincarnated and start playing concerts, someone would sure as hell record everything the guy did. Bill was being recorded once a year, if that, and this incredible music was just going up in the air 363 days out of 365."
Harris says he grew determined to record Evans in part so that he could transcribe the solos for practice, but primarily because he felt a calling to preserve the music. Posted on his wall is a quote from Evans that Harris says summarizes his motivation. It comes from an interview Evans gave in July, 1980, to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
"I want to communicate a qualitative thing, what I consider to be above the ordinary, outside of ordinary experience. I don't want to reflect all the frustrations or all the rottenness that surrounds us. I really want to capture something else, something very special, communicate that, prove that it exists and let that feeling have some important, maybe spiritual, quality. It has to do with a sense of beauty, but I think once somebody perceives a thing like that, it can change their lives, so that you can say, 'there's something real, and I might as well live with that.’"
Harris asked Max Gordon, the founder and longtime proprietor of the Vanguard, if it would be all right to bring in his Tandberg Model 64 reel-to-reel tape deck, a high-quality, full-sized home recorder that could not be concealed. According to Harris, Gordon shrugged, said he didn't care, didn't think the players would mind, but guessed that the musicians' union wouldn't be too happy about it. Harris recalls Gordon commenting that many people brought in small recorders. He took that observation "as license" and rented a Uher 4000 Report L, a small battery-operated machine used by journalists for interviews. He packed it in an oversized carpetbag and cut a hole for a rented RCA microphone. On a Friday night in the spring of 1966, he and Evelyn arrived at 9 p.m. for the 10 o'clock set and staked out a table in
front of the piano, where he could triangulate the microphone on the bass and the drums. Partly concealed under the table was the makeshift portable recording kit with the volume control preset.
When they listened to the tape later, they found it overloaded, distorted, and recorded at too slow a speed. Adjustments made, on the next try they got a good recording. The band during that engagement included Teddy Kotick, a favorite of Charlie Parker and George Wellington who in 1956 had been the bassist on the first Evans trio recording. Arnie Wise was the drummer. Bill had just returned from Florida, where he spent a few weeks after his father died.
"It was the only time I ever saw the guy look healthy," Harris says. "He'd been playing golf down there and had a tan. He was relaxed and his playing was fantastic."
Evans's health was a constant worry to his friends because it was governed by his drug addiction. There were several chapters to this story, beginning with a heroin habit dating back almost to the start of his career. In the mid-Sixties he finally took an active role in the rescue effort led by his longtime manager, Helen Keane, and with the help of the synthetic drug methadone accomplished a withdrawal from heroin. There was a period of recovery and "normalcy," but by the mid-Seventies the pianist was increasingly involved with cocaine, which Helen considered much more destructive for him. Adding to the tragedy was Bill's awareness of the consequences of his habit and his ability to be articulate about its effects. Without question, drugs led to his early death. Through his nightmarish experiences with pushers, debt collectors, the pain of trying to stop, fear of hassles with the law—the squalid facts of a junkie's existence — his musical ability never flagged, his growth never stopped. The veteran bassist Bill Crow has a story from Bill's Vanguard days of the 1960's.
"I lived in the neighborhood and haunted the place," Crow told me. "Bill's group was wonderful, in all of its incarnations. I saw him one Sunday when his right hand was paralyzed temporarily from a misguided needle. He would dangle the dead hand over the keyboard and drop his forefinger on the keys, using the weight of the hand to depress them. Everything else was played with the left hand, and if you looked away, you couldn't tell anything was wrong. Bill looked so wounded and sad in those days that I passed up a chance to be in the trio for a week in Pittsburgh. I wish he could have lasted longer … he opened up all our ears so much."
When Mike Harris first recorded the trio following the death of Harry L Evans and that Florida respite, Bill was in great shape. Even a piece rooted in his grief reflects that fact.
"Turn Out the Stars" is the second of three themes from a requiem for Harry Evans. Bill first performed it at a Town Hall concert in February of 1966, less than a month before this recording. The piece was loaded with his conflicted feelings about his father and remained one of the emotional high points of his repertoire for the rest of his life.
The results of that first successful evening encouraged Harris to buy his own Uher recorder and a Sennheiser microphone. His subrosa career as Evans's electronic Boswell was underway. He and Evelyn became fixtures at the club through the Sixties and Seventies.
Harris says he remembers saying to his wife on several of those nights, "You know, what we're about to hear is the very best thing happening in the whole world right now."
When he was working on an Air Force project in Albuquerque, Harris learned that Evans was booked into the Vanguard. He concocted a story about having to go home. He flew more than 2000 miles so that he and Evelyn could man their recording post at the table down front, then he went back to New Mexico on Monday morning.
The Village Vanguard is the last of the great old New York jazz places, surviving the Half Note, Eddie Condon's, Jimmy Ryan's, the Royal Roost, the original Birdland, Nick's, Minton's, the Jazz Gallery, Slug's, the Five Spot, and dozens of other clubs. The Vanguard is an underground wedge, a Greenwich Village basement below 178 Seventh Avenue South. It can accommodate about 300 people a night. It has acoustics of unusual purity, good sight lines, and a past that has moved many to suggest that it be declared a National Historical Site. In 1935, when he displaced a speakeasy known as the Golden Triangle, Max Gordon first presented poetry at the Vanguard.
"It was originally one of those real Bohemian hangouts," Gordon told Leonard Feather. "There wasn't much music for the first couple of years — just a piano player." Then, in 1938, he turned the Vanguard's little stage over to an ambitious group of talented young people who called themselves The Revuers. They included Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and Judy Holliday. Their piano accompanist was Leonard Bernstein.
"The Revuers stayed about a year," Gordon said, "and after that we had a lot of folk artists and we began to go in for jazz in the early 1940's."
The club's Monday night jam sessions attracted major players, among them Nat Cole, Earl Hines, Cootie Williams, Charlie Shavers, Vic Dickenson, and Dizzy Gillespie, a young trumpeter who also spent a good deal of time uptown helping to develop what came to be known as bebop. For much of the Forties, the house trio was Eddie Heywood, Zutty Singleton, and Jimmy Hamilton, playing for dancing and all those visiting musicians. Still, jazz took a secondary place to comedy, cabaret, folk, and popular music until the mid-1950's, when Gordon decided to "refresh the whole entertainment setup." By that, he meant bringing in the greatest players in modern jazz.
Through the rest of the century, the best jazz musicians in the world have performed regularly at the Village Vanguard. Because of the empathy, knowledge, and attentiveness of the audiences, Gordon's congeniality, and the club's friendly acoustics, it was an ideal place to record. Some of the finest performances of the era were put on tape there by dozens of musicians including Sonny Rollins, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie in a series of Sunday afternoon jam sessions — and Bill Evans with the trio that for many listeners defined his art.
With Scott LaFaro and Paul Motion, Evans achieved a unified musical thinking and singleness of purpose that in many respects was never matched by his subsequent groups, which in no way minimizes Bill's later efforts or the individual achievements of several trio members. LaFaro, who died in a car crash in July of 1961 (less than two weeks after the trio's classic Vanguard recordings), was taking the jazz bass in a new direction. Working on cues from the playing of Charles Mingus, he was making the instrument an interior voice, a commentator, a Greek chorus, and a full partner, not just a member of the rhythm section. He was moving into a realm beyond timekeeping and beyond the solo role created by Jimmy Blanton and continued by Ray Brown and Oscar Pettiford. He inspired a generation of bassists, and he perfectly fit what Evans had in mind. The pianist was devastated by his sudden death. "Musically everything seemed to stop," Bill told Martin Williams. "I didn't even play at home."
When he did start performing again, it was alone. Not until months later did he hire another bassist. Chuck Israels did not have LaFaro's meteoric technique, but his solid musicianship and aggressiveness fulfilled Evans's requirement for a bassist who could participate in the essential three-way conversation. After Israels, he worked temporarily with several bassists, including Teddy Kotick, before Eddie Gomez, who is on all but the first evening represented here, joined the trio in 1966. Eddie became the bassist who worked longest with Evans, and during his 11-year tenure, they developed a rapport that made the most of his abilities to solo and to merge into Bill's trio esthetic. Although Gomez once said it took him three years to feel comfortable working with a man he had idolized for years, his playing throughout this collection demonstrates his suitability for the most challenging bass assignment in jazz. These later trios may have lacked the synchromesh subtlety of the LaFaro-Evans-Motian group, but they had Gomez's strength, and a degree of communication between piano and bass that approached extrasensory perception.
Mike Harris is unsure whether Evans knew he was being recorded in the club. The two shy men talked, but not often and not long, and neither raised the subject. "I think in over 15 years he might have noticed," Harris says. "We were always toting this rather large, rather heavy hag, and I figured that at some point he would just look at us and say, 'I know what the hell you're doing/ but it didn't come up."
It did come up years later during negotiations with the Evans estate for the release of the Harris recordings. The respected music business lawyer Bill Traut served as Harris's representative in three years of dealings with the family, the attorney for the estate, and the several record companies to which Evans had been under contract during the Sixties and Seventies. Ultimately, Fantasy acquired the tapes under arrangements that respect the rights of everyone involved.
One late-arising problem came with the realization that only one set of tapes existed, with no duplicate safety reels. The material was in Connecticut; Fantasy is in California, and the company was understandably more than reluctant to entrust this cargo to any impersonal form of commercial shipping. The eventual solution came when Keepnews volunteered to fly from San Francisco to take possession of the tapes and serve as their courier. This included the ceremonial transfer of a tape-filled metal case in a New York hotel lobby, lacking only a set of handcuffs attaching the case to the producer's arm to pass as a scene from a Hollywood spy thriller. Back at the Fantasy studios, the combined job facing Keepnews and Fantasy engineer Joe Tarantino was formidable: listen to and evaluate countless hours of several editions of the Bill Evans trio; select eight Compact Discs worth of appropriate performances based on considerations of musical and technical quality, repertoire, personal preference, and instinct; and then apply digital technology to bring the amateur recordings up to the highest quality level possible under the circumstances. In his Producer's Note (...), Keepnews expands upon the challenges and choices involved in this arduous task and other aspects of the Secret Sessions project.
Nearly all of the songs Evans performs in this collection were staples of his repertoire. "Very Early,""Waltz for Debby,""Autumn Leaves,""Who Can I Turn To,""Come Rain or Come Shine,""'Round Midnight,""Turn Out the Stars,""Blue in Green,""Time Remembered," and the magnificent "Nardis" were core pieces. "Polka Dots and Moonbeams" came and went in the Evans book. There is a generous sampling of other songs he played more rarely. Bill seems to have accommodated some selections to his special relationship with Philly Joe Jones. "I'll Remember April" is in that category, along with "Star Eyes,""Airegin," and "You and the Night and the Music" (which was the lead track on the unique 1962 Evans quintet album, Interplay, with Philly Joe, Jim Hall, Freddie Hubbard, and Percy Heath). "Easy Living" was on his first Riverside LP, but he did not often play it. "Little Lulu" and "California Here I Come" may have been on Bill's mind in 1967 because he had just recorded them for Verve. Similarly, Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance" was a part of his 1974 MGM album Left to Right, recorded around the time of this rare live performance of the tune. "Sugar Plum" and "Mornin' Glory" were on 1971's The Bill Evans Album, his only trio LP for Columbia.
A few words about the sidemen, and their post-Evans activities:
Teddy Kotick was inactive through most of the 1960s and 70s, but worked and recorded with the tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose in the late Seventies. He died in 1986 at the age of 57.
After Eddie Gomez left Evans in 1977, he became a part of the group called Steps Ahead and worked with Jack DeJohnette, Hank Jones, JoAnne Brackeen, and others. He has also recorded under his own name, sometimes in projects emphasizing his virtuosity.
Philly Joe Jones worked again with Evans for a year in the late 1970s, toured with pianist Red Garland, and in the early Eighties led a band devoted to the music of his friend and associate, the arranger Tadd Dameron. He died in 1985.
Arnie Wise, Evans's drummer during 1966, was with the trio when Verve recorded the Town Hall concert. Later, he recorded with singer Helen Merrill and vibraharpist Dave Pike.
Drummer Joe Hunt, a veteran of George Russell's sextet, worked briefly with Evans and spent many years in New York before he moved back to his native Boston in the 1990s.
Jack DeJohnette, except for Jones the best known of the drummers here, followed a notable stint with Miles Davis by leading several versions of his own band, Special Edition, and more recently has served as a member, along with bassist Gary Peacock, of Keith Jarrett's celebrated all-star "Standards" trio.
John Dentz worked with Stan Getz and Mose Allison, recorded with Art Pepper, and was the drummer with Supersax as recently as 1986. He lost his hearing and is no longer active in music.
Earlier in his career, Marty Morell had played with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and recorded with Red Allen, Gary McFarland, and Steve Kuhn. He was Evans's regular drummer from 1968 to 1975. Based in Toronto since 1974, he works as a studio percussionist and has recorded with Rob McConnell's Boss Brass and with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler.
Eliot Zigmund was the trio's drummer during Evans's last two years with Fantasy Records and the beginning of his final Warner Bros, period. He has recorded in recent years with Michel Petrucciani, a leading pianist among the legions inspired by Evans. Zigmund devotes much of his time to teaching.
It is impossible to know whether Bill Evans would have agreed to release of the Harris tapes, but in that Canadian interview a few months before he died, he made three observations that addressed the general proposition of unauthorized taping and of the contrast between live club performances and studio recordings.
"You're never going to hear on record what you may hear live," he said. "Our best performance is gone into the atmosphere. We never have really gotten on record that special peak that happens fairly often. And there's just nothing like that physical contact [with an audience]."
Evans made it clear that he did not approve of recording musicians unawares, but he talked about one instance in which he was not entirely sorry that it had happened. The occasion was Columbia's taping in 1958 of the Miles Davis quintet in an afternoon performance at New York's Plaza Hotel during a party for Columbia executives.
"We had no idea that it was being recorded, and of course the sound was not at a high level. But I'm happy about it simply because it's the only Miles recording with me and Philly Joe. See, we had a particular thing going with Paul [Chambers] and Philly and me together as the rhythm section. I play differently with Philly. You can hear the rhythmic things that happened, the laid-back feeling and all; that I didn't get with Jimmy Cobb because he's a different kind of drummer. So, it's interesting from that standpoint."
Bill was asked if he was reluctant to do live broadcasts for fear of their being taped and released as bootleg recordings. His answer disclosed a degree of resignation.
"No, with little cassette recorders and all, there's no control. There are quite a few black market records out in Europe."
These CDs are not black market records. The man who taped the music has strong feelings about its release.
"I just refuse to feel guilty about it," Mike Harris says. "I know I perhaps should, but I think what i did was a public service. Michel Petrucciani put it well. He once said, 'Bill Evans was God on Earth,' and that's the way I felt. I'm glad this music will be heard."
The last time Mike and Evelyn Harris heard Evans at the Village Vanguard was in June of 1980, and something unusual happened. He came to their table and volunteered that he would play "Time Remembered," a particular favorite of theirs and a piece they had often requested.
"He was saying his goodbyes to a lot of people," Harris says. "He knew he had a short time."
Bill Evans died on September 15,1980. He was 51 years old.”
“The King of Quoters, Dexter Gordon, was himself eminently quotable. In a day not unlike our own, when purists issue fiats about what is or isn't valid in jazz, Gordon declared flatly, ‘jazz is an octopus’—it will assimilate anything it can use. Drawing closer to home, he spoke of his musical lineage: Coleman Hawkins "was going out farther on the chords, but Lester [Young] leaned to the pretty notes. He had a way of telling a story with everything he played/' Young's story was sure, intrepid, daring, erotic, cryptic. A generation of saxophonists found itself in his music, as an earlier generation had found itself in Hawkins's rococo virtuosity. …
Gordon's appeal was to be found not only in his Promethean sound and nonstop invention, his impregnable authority combined with a steady and knowing wit, but also in a spirit born in the crucible of jam sessions. He was the most formidable of battlers, undefeated in numerous contests, and never more engaging than in his kindred flare-ups with the princely Wardell Gray, a perfect Lestorian foil, gently lyrical but no less swinging and sure. …
Gordon was an honest and genuinely original artist of deep and abiding humor and of tremendous personal charm. He imparted his personal characteristics to his music—size, radiance, kindness, a genius for discontinuous logic. Consider his trademark musical quotations—snippets from other songs woven into the songs he is playing. Some, surely, were calculated. But not all and probably not many, for they are too subtle and too supple. They fold into his solos like spectral glimpses of an alternative universe in which all of Tin Pan Alley is one infinite song. That so many of the quotations seem verbally relevant I attribute to Gordon's reflexive stream-of-consciousness and prodigious memory for lyrics. I cannot imagine him planning apposite quotations.”
- Gary Giddins
“Chuck Berg: There's one thing that especially impressed Sonny Rollins and which has always intrigued me. That is the way you lay back on the melody or phrase just a bit behind the beat. Instead of being right on top of the beat with a metrical approach like Sonny Stitt and a lot of the great white tenor players, you just pull back. In the process there are interesting tensions that develop in your music. How did that come about?
Dexter Gordon: Yeah. I've been told that I do that. I'm not really that conscious of it. I think I more or less got it from Lester because I didn't play right on top. He was always a little back, I think. That's the way I felt it, you know, and so it just happened that way. These things are not really thought out. It's what you hear and the way you hear it.”
I’ve been listening to and playing Jazz for over fifty years and if there is a universal constant about this ever-changing music that I’ve heard in all that time, it is the love and admiration that every tenor saxophonist feels for Dexter Gordon.
I remember sitting around the musicians union hall one day back when the world was young with three, aspiring Jazz tenor saxophone players.
The inevitable “Who is your favorite tenor saxophone player” question was asked and one of the tenor saxophonist replied: “You mean, I can only have just one.” Then he turned toward the other, two tenor sax players and all three of them said at the same time: “Dexter Gordon.”
Granted that this anecdote happened at a time when tenor saxophonist John Coltrane was still in his ascendancy, but as another of the young saxophonists commented about Dexter: “What’s not to like? He’s got it all: technique, ideas, he swings like mad and that sound – so big, open and full of juice.”
Like the tune name after one of his main idols – Lester Young – Dexter left town.
As he explains in the following interview with Chuck Berg which appeared in the February 10, 1977 issue of Downbeat magazine, a variety of factors came together in the early 1960s which influenced him to leave the USA for Europe where Dexter ultimately took up residence in Copenhagen.
And like Jazz, Dexter quietly passed from the scene for the remainder of the 1960s and for much of the 1970s.
But Dexter Gordon’s return 15 years later was a triumphant one – and deservedly so!
Dexter Gordon was one of the greatest tenor saxophonists in the history of modern Jazz and I was delighted that he finally received the acclaim and the accolades he deserved during the last decade of his life.
“The October return of Dexter Gordon was one of the events of 1976. SRO crowds greeted him with thunderous applause at George Wein's Storyville. Music biz insiders packed an RCA studio control room to savor each passage as Dex and a cast of all-stars set down tracks for Don Schlitten's Xanadu label. Long lines of fans snaked up the stairs of Max Gordon's Village Vanguard waiting their chance to share Dexter's musical magic. The reaction to the master saxophonist's New York stopover was nothing short of phenomenal.
There was also an avalanche of newsprint, spearheaded by Gary Giddins' perceptive piece for the Village Voice and Bob Palmer's appreciative overview in the New York Times. More significant, perhaps, was the genuine enthusiasm in the street. The standard conversational opener was, "Have you seen Dex?" The reviews corroborated these ebullient responses and certified Dex's return as one of the great musical triumphs of recent times.
At 53 Dexter Gordon is one of the legitimate giants on the scene. His credits include tours of duty with Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Parker and a wide range of small groups under his own leadership. Influenced by Lester Young, Gordon in turn became an important model for tenor greats Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. Today, he stands as a beacon of musical integrity and excellence.
I met Dexter at his suite of rooms at the South GateTowers near MadisonSquareGarden. During our three-hour conversation, Dexter revealed the warmth, encyclopedic memory and playfulness that have emerged as major facets of his music. The recollections and stories, intoned by his smoky basso voice and punctuated with a broad spectrum of laughs, rolled out effortlessly over the coffee and cigarette smoke.
Berg: On your album The Apartment (Inner City 1025), you quote the opening phrase of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." Last night at the Village Vanguard there were more borrowings from "Santa Claus." Do you celebrate Christmas all around the year?
Gordon: Just call me Kris Kringle. You know, things like that just happen. But I dig the tune. It sits nice. Actually, when those quotes pop out I'm usually not thinking about them. Of course if it's Christmas time, I'm more apt to be thinking about something like that. Usually it's just something that happens. It's kind of built in, built into the subconscious.
Berg: Dex, how does it feel to be back in the Apple with the kind of reception that you've been getting?
Gordon: It's great to be back. Of course I've been going out to the West Coast for years, which has been very nice. But I had forgotten how fantastic and exciting New York is. There's no place like this in the world. This is it, you know. It's always been that way. This time, for me, it's been overwhelming because from the minute we got off the plane everything has been fantastic, unbelievable. I really wasn't prepared for this kind of a reaction, "the return of the conquering hero" and all that.
Berg: The crowds have been absolutely ecstatic. Last night, for example, there were a couple of phrases in "Wee Dot" where you started at the bottom of the horn. Then, as you went up and up, one could feel the audience going right up there with you to the high F and beyond. It was a collective sharing that was quite unusual.
Gordon: It's been like that from the first note. The opening night at the Vanguard on Tuesday was sold out. And when I walked into the room from the kitchen, working my way around to the bandstand, I got an ovation.
Berg: I noticed the same thing last night. It was beautiful.
Gordon: I hadn't played a note. I just walked into the room, you know, and they applauded.
Berg: Well, you are a commanding presence. And the people appreciate the opportunity to hear your music.
Gordon: It was really something.
Berg: Let me ask you about the recording for Don Schlitten's Xanadu label. I caught two hours of the session and it sounded great. Barry Harris, Sam Jones, Louis Hayes, Al Cohn, Blue Mitchell, Sam Noto and Dexter Gordon... that's quite a lineup.
Gordon: Yeah. That was an all-star date. It was all beautiful. All the cats, you know, are just beautiful.
Berg: When can we expect that on the street?
Gordon: I don't know. I haven't really talked to Don about it. But this week we'll probably have dinner or lunch and talk about it. He's an old friend of mine, you know. An old tenor freak.
Berg: He is?
Gordon: Yeah. For Don, bebop's the greatest. We've done a lot of things together. He was my man at Prestige when I signed.
Berg: Dex, let me ask you about a rumor that's been running around town involving you recording for Columbia. The story has it that a group of Columbia executives were so impressed by performance at Storyville last week that they've set up a record date with you, Woody Shaw, Louis Hayes, Ronnie Matthews and Stafford James. Is that correct?
Gordon: Apparently so.
Berg: Will it be a live date?
Gordon: Yeah. It should be something else. It will be the second week in December at the Village Vanguard. That's a good time because I'll have the first week of December free. I'll be able to get to a piano to work some things out so we can do something new, something fresh. We have a whole week at the Vanguard: The first couple of days we'll put it together, iron it out, and then the rest of the week we'll record.
Berg: Dexter Gordon with the Woody Shaw-Louis Hayes Band... that should be a landmark!... In view of the tremendous welcome you've received, have you had second thoughts about moving back to the States? Are you tempted to set up a base of operation here and commute between Copenhagen and, say, New York?
Gordon: Well, all those things have occurred to me. But basically Copenhagen is home. We have a nice house and a garden. It's ideal, really. Nothing special, but very comfortable. Of course, if I'm going to be commuting as much as it seems, maybe a place here is necessary. But, as I said, basically Copenhagen is home. So I don't visualize moving permanently to the States. Of course, you never know.
Berg: Let me ask a question for all the saxophone freaks out there. You play a Selmer Mark VI with an Otto Link metal mouthpiece. For all of us who have tried getting that big, full-bodied Dexter Gordon sound, what kind of setup do you use?
Gordon: A #8 facing and a #3 Rico reed.
Berg: I'll try it... There are a lot of younger musicians who don't know that much about your background. Therefore, I'd like to ask you about some of your early influences, who they were and what, specifically, you picked up from them.
Gordon: Well, I started listening at a very early age, before I even started playing, in my hometown, Los Angeles. We're talking about the '30s now because I was born in 1923. When I was nine and 10 years old I was listening the bands on the radio on my own. Prior to that my father used to take me to the theaters in town to dig the bands and the artists. He was a doctor and knew a lot of them: Duke, Lionel Hampton, Marshall Royal, Ethel Waters. They'd come by for dinner. And I'd go see them backstage, things like that. It was just part of my cultural upbringing. On the radio I was picking up the late night shots, air shots from the East: Chicago's Grand Terrace, Roseland Ballroom, you know, and people like "Fatha" Hines, Fletcher Henderson and Roy Eldridge. So when my father gave me a clarinet when I was 13,I had done a lot of listening.
Berg: Clarinet, then, was your first instrument.
Gordon: Oh, yeah. Benny Goodman, Buster Bailey, Barney Bigard... I used to dig them all. My first teacher was a clarinetist from New Orleans, John Sturdevant. He was one of the local guys in L.A. and a very nice cat who had that big fat clarinet sound like Bigard's. I remember asking him about that, which knocked him out I said, "How ya get that sound, man?" Almost all of those New Orleans clarinet players—Irving Fazola, Albert Nicholas, Bigard—have that.
When I started playing I had some kind of idea about music, about jazz, because I was into everybody. I used to make money cutting lawns in the neighborhood, which I spent on secondhand records from jukebox companies because a lot of the jazz things they'd never used. I'd get them for 15 cents. I had quite a nice collection when I was 12, 13 years old.
So I was listening to people like Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, who is one of my all-time favorites, and Scoops Carry, who played alto with Roy's little band. I also
like Pete Brown. Of course I heard ChuBerry, and Dick Wilson, who played tenor with Andy Kirk, and Ben Webster. I first heard Ben on a record he made with Duke called "Truckin'." He was shoutin' on that. But then I got my first Basic record and that was it. I fell in love with that band— Lester, Herschel Evans, the whole band. Duke was just fantastic, but the Basic band really hit me.
After a couple of years I got an alto and started playing it with the school band and in a dance band with a lot of the neighborhood kids. Before that, though, we had what you'd call a jug band where the kids had homemade instruments.
Berg: What were you playing then?
Gordon: Well, I was the only one with an instrument.
Berg: You were the legitimate player.
Gordon: Yeah. The other kids were all trying to play something. The guy playing drums had a drum made out of a washtub, and pie pans for cymbals and something else for a snare.
Berg: Did you guys ever record? That would be a treasure.
Gordon: I don't know about that, man. Some of the cats had kazoos. Someone even stuck a trumpet mouthpiece into a kazoo. We played some amateur shows around the neighborhood, but then when I got the alto I started playing with different young browns around town. I started gigging, too. Playing weekends in sailor joints for a dollar and a half a night and the kitty. So I started like that and kept going to better, more organized bands. Then when I was 17 I got the tenor.
Berg: When you got the tenor was it love at first sight, or rather love at first breath?
Gordon: Yeah.
Berg: Did you instinctively know that the tenor was it?
Gordon: It was really after hearing Lester that I knew. And Herschel Evans and, like I said, Dick Wilson. Wilson's playing with Andy Kirk was beautiful. He was lead tenorist with the Kirk band when Mary Lou Williams was there. Mary Lou used to write lead parts for Wilson. She was about the first one I ever heard using the tenor to lead the section. They had a big hit called "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" and Wilson played lead on that. Just beautiful.
I listened to everybody. There were also some cats around town who had a lot of influence on me. Another teacher, a man named Lloyd Reese, was a multi-instrumentalist who was best known for his trumpet playing. He used to work with Les Hite. He was very popular in the neighborhood, a very good teacher. Many of the cats studied with him: Mingus, Buddy Collette, me. We also had a rehearsal band that met on Sunday mornings at the old colored local, Local 767.
Berg: Was that something that Reese organized?
Gordon: Yeah, for his students, plus other cats who were just beginning to write charts.
In the high school I went to we had a swing band plus the regular orchestra and marching band. There were a lot of people that came out of that band: Chico Hamilton, Melba Liston, Bill Douglass, Jackie Kelso, a very fine clarinetist, Vernon Slater, Lammar Wright Jr., Vi Redd, Ernie Royal. At another school in the neighborhood there was Mingus and Buddy Collette. So there was a lot of activity. Then when I was just getting ready to finish school, I joined Hampton's band.
Berg: That must have been quite a transition.
Gordon: Yeah, it was. Hamp had just left Benny Goodman, which was one of the bands, you know. His association with the Goodman band, quartet and trio made him very popular. So he left Benny and formed his big band out on the coast.
Berg: That was the first big-time gig for you?
Gordon: Oh, yeah. That was really my first professional gig. The other things were just more or less on a school level. When I joined the band the musicians in town said: "Dexter who? Dexter Gordon? Who's that?" I used to go around all over the place and talk to all the cats, you know, but they didn't know who I was. I was just another young player.
I started making the rounds when I was 15 because I've been this tall since that time. I could usually get into places without anybody saying anything. I had a baby face, of course, but being so big, people didn't bother me. I also used to get into dances because I'd talk to the cats. There would always be somebody who would let me carry his instrument case in. So I'd walk in with the band. It was a funny thing because later on I'd let the young cats walk in with me, you know, people like Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins.
So anytime there was music in Los Angeles I was there. I even went by some of the places I couldn't go in. I'd just have to go stand outside and when the door would open I'd hear a little bit. There were some good musicians in Los Angeles, most of them from the Southwest.
I remember a good band led by Floyd Ray that was like a territory band. They had a lot of good young cats that I used to hang out with. One of the alto players, Shirley Green, used to show me some shit. They were good guys. But when I joined Hamp that was really a great leap forward.
Berg: How did the gig come about?
Gordon: Marshall Royal had called me one afternoon after school and said, "This is Marshall." I didn't believe him. I thought it was one of the cats playing a trick. Finally he made me believe him and he asked me about joining the band. I still don't know why he called me. I'll have to ask him next time we get together. Why the hell did he call me? I don't understand. Anyway, we went down to Hamp's house for a little session. There was Sir Charles Thompson, Irving Ashby on guitar, Lee Young on drums, Marshall and Hamp. We just jammed two or three tunes and Hamp said, "Would you like to come into the band?" I said yeah.
Berg: That was your audition.
Gordon: Right. So three days later we were on the bus. Before that, though, I went home and told Mom and she said, "Well, what about school?" I said, "Mom, I can do it later." She knew there was no point in saying no or trying to put up a barricade. So on December 23 during Christmas vacation we set out for our first date at Fort Worth, Texas, in a rickety old bus that was all right for California. When we got to New Mexico, though, the weather changed. It started getting winter and this was strictly a California bus.
Berg: A Southern California bus.
Gordon: Yeah, a Southern California bus. So by the time we got to El Paso there was a revolution on the bus: "We're not going no further!" We had one of those band managers who was cutting all the corners. But he straightened things out so that we got a real bus in El Paso. We finally got to the Fort Worth Hotel the day after Christmas. I'd had no rehearsal or anything. In fact I didn't even have a uniform. They gave me a jacket with sleeves that stopped at the elbows.
The first couple of gigs, I didn't play a right note all night because I wasn't ready or used to his arrangements. I expected him to send me home every night. Fortunately, about three days later in Dallas we had a rehearsal, my first. So I kinda got it together. It started happening then, you know. But I still felt the cats were going to send me home or something. But they stayed with me, so in a month or so it was all right. I was very lucky because the band was on its way to New York.
We then opened at the Grand Terrace in Chicago around the end of January. The band hit instantly. We went in there for two weeks and stayed six months. Hamp was with Joe Glaser and Joe was connected with the Chicago scene. I think this was the gangster scene, you know, Capone and all that shit. They had all the joints. The Grand Terrace was the home of Fletcher Henderson and Earl Hines. The club was in trouble, but when we came, bang, it happened. And we sat there for six months. I think we worked every night playing shows for acts, chorus lines, everything.
Berg: So you got a heavy dose of showbiz right from the start.
Gordon: Right, man. The whole thing. I don't know why, but my timing has been just fantastic at each stage of my career. I've been in the right place at the right time. I've been lucky. Anyway, the Grand Terrace was fantastic. In six months the band put it all together. We made a couple of replacements, Shadow Wilson on drums and Joe Newman on trumpet. Joe was going to school at AlabamaState and we heard him on the way to New York. I kept bugging Hamp, "Get that cat." So first chance we got, we sent for him. It was a fantastic band. All the first men were unbelievable — Marshall Royal playing lead alto, a cat named Fred Beckett playing lead trombone, who we called Black Dorsey, and a first trumpet player named Carl George, who later played with Kenton and who had a crystal-clear sound like Charlie Spivak. So the first chairs were all perfect. For saxophones we had Marshall Royal, Illinois Jacquet and Ray Perry on alto and electric violin. He played violin like Stuff Smith but never really got the recognition because he died too early. Ernie Royal, Joe Newman and Carl George were the trumpets. All the cats were great.
It was really my school. I learned so much. Marshall stayed on my ass all the time. He'd say, "Hold that note down, hold that note down." It was something else, you know, because we were holding phrases of four, five, six bars and breathing in specific places together. Marshall forced me to learn about crescendo, decrescendo, piano, forte and all those things I didn't know anything about when I was in high school.
Berg: So, Marshall was the section leader.
Gordon: Yeah. He thought he was the concert master for the band, too, but he was my immediate supervisor. I used to get so mad because it seemed like it would never be right, but later I told him thanks a mil. He taught me so much.
Unbelievable. And, yeah, I learned a lot of shit from Jacquet, too. He was also young, a few years older than me, but he was already playing, already a soloist, with his shit together. A lot of people don't seem to understand that Jacquet's a hell of a tenor player. We used to sit next to each other, which was great, and we used to do a two-tenor number called "Porkchops." It wasn't extensive, you know, but we played a few choruses together. I forget what the format was but it was nice.
Berg: Did you and Illinois ever sit down together and play or talk about improvisation?
Gordon: Constantly. Every day, man. On the bus, off the bus, in the hotel, on the stand. We talked about what we wanted to do, who we liked. And he showed me a lot of shit like altissimo fingerings, playing over the high F.
Berg: How long were you with Hamp?
Gordon: I was with him until 1943, about three years.
Berg: Where did you go from there?
Gordon: Back to L.A. to gig around town. I worked in a band that Lee Young had at a place called Club A La Grand. There was a place around the corner called the Ritz that was an after-hours joint where we used to jam. This was when I ran into Art Pepper. He used to come around and we used to jam together. I then got him a gig in Lee's band working at A La Grand. I also worked with Jessie Price, the drummer from Kansas City who had been with Basic. Oh yeah, Fletcher Henderson came out with a nucleus of a big band and picked up four or five cats in L.A. to fill it out. I worked with him for about a month.
Berg: How was that?
Gordon: Great, man. His brother Horace was with the band and we worked in a nightclub called The Plantation. There's even a record on it that we did for the Armed Forces Jubilee show that was originally recorded on one of those big V-discs. I'm featured in the band with Fletcher. Can you believe that? I grew up listening to those cats. Fletcher used to write in the sharp keys, you know, to give the band a more brilliant sound. But I don't really like playing in the sharp keys. I like flat keys. For instance, I've always dug D-flat because that's a beautiful key for tenor. It puts you in the key of E-flat and your 5th is on the bottom.
Berg: Speaking of the bottom of the horn, I noticed a couple of low A's last night
Gordon: Yeah. I grew up with this guy named James Nelson, and he lived right around the corner from me. He was a couple of years older, so naturally when he moved into the neighborhood I was right on him. His brother played the piano, so I was there all the time. Anyway, James is the one that showed me that low A with the knee covering the bell. He used to take me around a lot, too. When you speak of influences, there are so many people that I've been fortunate enough to learn from.
Berg: What came after Fletcher?
Gordon: All during this time Nat Cole had his trio out at a place called the 331 Club. It was very popular for quite some time. On Mondays, our off-nights, they'd have sessions, and the guy promoting the sessions was Norman Granz, who was a student at one of the city colleges. So I used to go out there and play with Nat. During this time we also made some records. We played "I Found a New Baby" and "Rosetta." I was very Lester-ish at the time.
Berg: In Jazz Masters of The Forties, Ira Gitler talks about your role as one of the first players to adapt Charlie Parker's innovations to the tenor saxophone. When did you start listening to Bird?
Gordon: Well, the first time I heard Bird was in 1941. When I was with Hamp's band, Parker was with Jay McShann. It was here in New York at the Savoy when they would have two or three bands. We played at the Savoy opposite Jay McShann. They had that Kansas City sound, and the alto player was playing his ass off. Beautiful. That's when I first met Bird. I had heard the recordings he made with McShann with Walter Brown singing "Moody Blues" and "Jumping the Blues." It was a rough band but the ingredients were there. Bird was just singing through all that shit. The other alto player was beautiful, too, a cat named John Jackson who I later worked with in Eckstine's band. Anyway, the next year Bird went with Earl Hines. Then when Eckstine left Earl's band he took half the guys with him, including Bird. So during that time I often ran into Bird in Boston or New York.
Bird and Lester both come from Kansas City, and Bird was very influenced by Lester. So the Lester influence is part of the natural evolution for him and for me. Because I heard him right away, there were similar feelings, you know. Also, Bird had other influences. There was a cat called Prof. Smith, an alto player around Kansas City who was important. Then Jimmy Dorsey. A lot of cats don't know that, but Bird loved Jimmy Dorsey. I loved him, too. He was a helluva saxophonist, a lot of feeling Bird dug Pete Brown, too. When Lester came out he played very melodic. Everything he played you could sing. He was always telling a story, and Bird did the same thing. That kind of musical philosophy is what I try to do because telling a story is, I think, where it's at.
In the '30s, cats were playing harmonically, basically straight tonic chords and 7th chords. Lester was the first one I heard that played 6th chords. He was playing the 6th and the 9th. He stretched it a little by using the some color tones used by Debussy and Ravel, those real soft tones. Lester was doing all that. Then Bird extended that to 11ths and l3ths, like Diz, and to altered notes like the fiat 5th and flat 9th. So this was harmonically some of what had happened.
Like I said, I was just lucky. I was already in that direction, so when I heard Bird it was just a natural evolution. Fortunately. I worked with him and we used to hang out together and jam together around New York. It just happened for me that it was the correct path.
Berg: What was your gig with Louis Armstrong like?
Gordon: I joined Louis in Los Angeles. I was working at the time with Jessie Price, and one night after the set somebody says to me. "Hey cat, sure like that tone you're getting" I looked up and it was Pops. The next night Teddy McRae, the tenor player who was the straw boss in Pop's band, came in. I had met Teddy before when he was with Chick Webb. Also, I think he took my chair in Hamp's band. Anyway, he asked me if I'd like to join the band. I'd been in Los Angeles long enough and I wanted to check Louis out. so I joined the band.
The band was part of several major feature films: Atlantic City (1944) and Pillow to Post(1945) with Ida Lupino. It was also nice because I was the major soloist in
the band then, other than Pops, I mean.
Berg. How was it working with Louis?
Gordon: Oh, great. Love, love, love. Just beautiful. Always beautiful. It was just a gas being with him. He let me play all the time. He dug me.
Berg: How long were you with Louis?
Gordon: About seven or eight months. Actually, it was a mediocre band. They were just playing Luis Russell arrangements from the '30s, "Ain't Misbehaving" all those things. So nothing was happening. When we got to Chicago I knew that Eckstine had formed a band. In fact, I had heard some of their records and it was happening, it was the new sound. So, anyway, when we got to Chicago at the Regal Theatre, Eckstine's good friend and buddy, a guy named Bob Redcross who Bird later named a tune for ("Redcross"), came backstage and said that Eckstine needed a tenor player. He had heard me on the air with Pops and wanted to know if I'd join the band. I said yeah. So two weeks later I joined the band. It was fantastic. It was a hell of a jump, the difference between night and day.
Berg: Who was in Eckstine's band at that time?
Gordon: They were all young and unknown at the time, but later it proved to be a million-dollar band. The arrangers were Jerry Valentine, a trombone player from Hines' band, and Tadd Dameron. Diz also had a couple of things in the book. For reeds we had John Jackson on lead, Sonny Stitt on third alto, Gene Amnions and myself on tenor and Leo Parker on baritone. The trombones were Jerry Valentine, Taswell Baird and Chips Outcalt. The trumpets were Dizzy, Shorty McConnel, Gail Brockman and Boonie Hazel. John Malachi played piano, Connie Wainwright, guitar, Tommy Potter, bass, and Art Blakey, drums. And our vocalist was Sarah Vaughan. Unbelievable, huh?
I joined the band in Washington, D.C., at the HowardTheatre in 1944, and was with the band for the next couple of years except for a couple of months off at one point. But it was a fantastic band in a fantastic period, you know. This is when I met Tadd, my favorite arranger and composer. I did some things with him later.
Berg: After Eckstine came New York and 52nd Street. What was that period like?
Gordon: Ahhhhh... every day there was something happening. This new music thing, bebop, was taking shape and becoming recognized, so it was a very exciting period. Every day there was something exciting, something ecstatic, something. And all the cats loved each other and practiced together at Tadd's house, Monk's house, at sessions. Then the street started opening up for the cats. So, it was happening. I worked on the street a lot with Bird and Miles. Miles was just coming up then. He was still eating jelly beans at that time. Do you believe that? Malted milks and jelly beans. I worked with Bird at a place called the Spotlight with my sextet, with Miles and Bird, Stan Levey, Bud Powell, Curly Russell and Baby Lawrence, the dancer. Lawrence was the show, but really he was part of the band.
Berg: How did playing with a dancer work out?
Gordon: Good. He danced bebop. The way those cats danced, man, was just like a drummer. He was doing everything that the other cats were doing and maybe more. Blowing eights, fours and trading off. He just answered to the music. There were several cats on that level, but he was the boss. Baby Lawrence. Fantastic. He used to do some unbelievable things.
Dancing in those days was a big part of the musical environment, you know. Everybody was dancing to the music, to whatever they wanted, different dances and everything. Just as music was growing, dancing was growing. Like I said, we used to play with all those shows, chorus lines and all that. To me it was great. I loved it.
Berg: That's quite interesting because I've gotten the feeling that musicians have generally resented backing up dancers, singers, whatever.
Gordon: No. I never have. Especially if it's good.
Berg: Many people have mentioned your influence on 'Trane. Did you know ‘TVane?
Gordon: Not really. I knew him, but not well. He was from Philly. He was younger, of course, but I had met him here and there. Philly Joe reminded me recently, a few months ago when we were on tour together in Europe, of the time that Miles' band came out to Hollywood. 'Trane was playing his shit, but it wasn't projecting, he didn't have the sound. So one day we were talking and I said, "Man, you play fantastic, but you have to develop that sound, get that projection." I gave him a mouthpiece I had that I wasn't using. I laid that on him and that was it. That made the difference.
Berg: That's incredible because there are many things in 'Trane's sound that are reminiscent of your sound.
Gordon: He was playing my mouthpiece, man! Again, it's the same line— Lester to Bird to Dexter to 'Trane. There was evolution, of course, but really the same line.
Berg: Let me ask you about Sonny Rollins. I talked to Sonny about a month ago and your name came up as an important influence. He speaks of you with great warmth. What was your relationship like?
Gordon: Well, Sonny and Jackie McLean were the young cats coming up in the late '40s, early '50s, you know. I wasn't really around them too much because as they were beginning to mature I was out on the coast. But again, it's the same story.
They came up in the same line. Of course, they have their own things, which is natural because we all learn and are influenced by different people and situations.
Berg: There's one thing that especially impressed Sonny and which has always intrigued me. That is the way you lay back on the melody or phrase just a bit behind the beat. Instead of being right on top of the beat with a metrical approach like Sonny Stitt and a lot of the great white tenor players, you just pull back. In the process there are interesting tensions that develop in your music. How did that come about?
Gordon: Yeah. I've been told that I do that. I'm not really that conscious of it. I think I more or less got it from Lester because I didn't play right on top. He was always a little back, I think. That's the way I felt it, you know, and so it just happened that way. These things are not really thought out. It's what you hear and the way you hear it.
Berg: What happened after 52nd Street? I know you moved to Denmark in 1962, but my knowledge of your activities during the '50s is sketchy.
Gordon: Well, during the '50s things got a little tough because like everybody else I had a habit. I was paying the dues. So my career was very spasmodic. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones who got pulled out and started putting it back together again. I did do a few things during that time but not a great amount of work. There were some nice recordings with Bethlehem. And in the early '50s Wardell Gray and I were doing our thing, you know, the chase with a quintet.
Berg: When you moved to Denmark, what was in your mind? Why did you make that decision?
Gordon: There wasn't any decision. In 1960 I started commuting to New York because I had signed with Blue Note. So I was coming here to record. Then, in 1962 I moved to New York and was here for six or seven months. I met Ronnie Scott at a musician's bar called Charlie's, and he introduced himself and asked if I'd come to London. I said, "Yeah, sure." So I gave him my address and he said he'd be in touch.
A couple of months later he offered me a month's work in his club and a couple weeks touring around England. He said maybe he could get me a few things on the Continent. So after I left London I went to Copenhagen to the Montmartre. It developed into a love affair and before I knew it I'd been over there a couple of years.
I was reading DownBeat one day back then, and Ira Gitler referred to me as an expatriate. That's true, you know, but at the time I hadn't really made up my mind to live there, so I came back here in 1965 for about six months, mostly out on the coast. But with all the political and social strife during that time and the Beatles thing, I didn't really dig it. So I went back and lived in Paris for a couple of years. But the last nine or 10 years I've lived steadily in Copenhagen.
Copenhagen's like my home base. So I more or less became Danish. I think it's been very good for me. I've learned a lot, of course. Another way of life, another culture, language. I enjoyed it. I still do. Of course, there was no racial discrimination or anything like that. And the fact that you're an artist in Europe means something. They treat you with a lot of respect. In America, you know, they say, "Do you make any money?" If you're in the dollars, you're OK, you're all right. But over there, it's an entirely different mentality.
Berg: What does the future hold for Dexter Gordon at this point?
Gordon: Well, it looks like I'm about to take a great leap forward.
Berg: Here, here!
Gordon: So, you know, it's moving. I'm very optimistic. About the future, and about music. These last five years, I think, have been good. All over Europe and here there has been a renaissance in music, and jazz in particular. And that's what we're talking about, jazz. I like the word "jazz." That word has been my whole life. I understand the cats when they take exception to the name, you know. But to me that's my life.
***
Fortunately, we will be able to hear more of Dex in 1977. On wax, there will be the all-star date on Xanadu. There will also be the live session at the Village Vanguard with Woody Shaw, Louis Hayes, Ronnie Matthews and Stafford James on Columbia. Dex with be returning for an extended tour of the States under the auspices of Ms. Management in New York. All this represents a new plateau in Dex’s career and, for us, the opportunity to share in the workings of one of the great hearts and minds in contemporary music.”
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“Oliver Nelson was one of the most complete and multifaceted musicians in Jazz. In today's jazz world, the term ..multifaceted" more often than not tends to describe someone who dabbles in several different musical styles, stirring a little "world music" (ugh, what a horrible term), a little hip-hop, a little new age, etc., into a bland, boring stew. Oliver Nelson was a world-class jazz saxophonist and composer-arranger, as well as a distinguished composer of orchestral and chamber music in non-jazz idioms, and a prolific composer of scores for television and feature films. He operated at the top of the profession in all these fields and his work always bore his personal stamp. His personal and artistic integrity was reflected in everything he did and, as will be explained later, was a contributing factor in his tragic, premature death.
Nelson moved to New York in 1959. Some of his first gigs there were with big bands led by Erskine Hawkins and Louie Bellson and with a commercial Jazz group called Quartet Tres Bien. In the summer of that year, he played in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with organist Wild Bill Davis' trio, the third member of which was Grady Tate, who became Nelson's drummer of choice when both their recording careers took off. During 1959 and '60, he subbed for brief periods in both the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands, playing alto with Ellington, and tenor with Basle. The first recording to feature his big band writing was an Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis UP, TRANE WHISTLE, done for Prestige in 1960. This album also included the first recording of STOLEN MOMENTS, which a couple of years later would become Nelson's best-known composition. At this time he also served as staff arranger for the house band at the Apollo Theater. The band was lead by Reuben Phillips, a saxophonist who had been his section mate in the Louis Jordan band.
The point in time when the recordings in this set were made represent roughly the mid to late period of the last golden age of studio recording in New York. The top players would customarily do, on average, three record dates each day and could be called upon to play in almost any style at any time. Dates were booked in three-hour increments with, in many cases, a fourth "possible hour" in case some overtime was needed. Of course, due to the demands of the marketplace, a good deal of the music one would encounter during an average week of studio work would vary in quality and a good deal of it was pure commercial garbage. This tended to make opportunities to play quality music that much more of a relief, and the ratio of good music to bad got exponentially smaller as time went on. By the 1970s it seemed as though the main ingredients for success as a studio arranger or producer had become sartorial, rather than musical. As saxophonist-arranger-author Bill Kirchner has written, recordings like those heard here were products of a studio system that has largely disappeared, and if they were done today, they would had to have been paid for out of the artist's own pocket.
The consistency of the personnel on Nelson's dates allowed him to utilize the Ellingtonian concept of conceiving both solos and ensemble parts with individual players in mind. The lynchpins of Oliver's reed sections were lead altoist Phil Woods and baritonist Danny Bank. Bill Kirchner has perceptively pointed out that Nelson employed Woods and Bank in the same way that Ellington employed Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney: both as section lead and anchor respectively, and as distinctive individual voices. Nelson was aware of the fact that even when no improvisation is required, a player who can improvise, even if not a world-class soloist, can always interpret a written part in the jazz idiom better than one who can't. Phil Bodner, Romeo Penque and Stan Webb were former big band saxophonists. all of whom played flute, oboe and clarinet on a level equal to that of top-drawer classical players, and Bodner was a first-rate jazz soloist as well. In the brass section, bass trombonist Tony Studd and tuba player Don Butterfield were, at the time, virtually the only players in the studio freelance pool on their respective horns who were jazz improvisers, which made them far superior to their peers at playing written parts with true jazz feeling, an advantage also enjoyed by lead trumpeters Ernie Royal and Snooky Young.
Nelson's experience and status as a first-rate player who was often featured on other arrangers' projects as well as his own, made him an ideal choice to provide backing for jazz soloists of all stylistic persuasions. No one has a better idea of what works and what doesn't behind a jazz soloist than a writer who is a Jazz soloist.
