JazzProfiles

Born in Wales in 1928, Alun Morgan became a Jazz fan as a teenage and was an early devotee of the bebop movement. In the 1950s he began contributing articles to Melody Maker, Jazz Journal, Jazz Monthly, and Gramophone and for twenty years, beginning in 1969, he wrote a regular column for a local newspaper in Kent. From 1954 onward he contributed to BBC programs on Jazz, authored and co-authored books on modern Jazz and Jazz in England and wrote over 2,500 liner notes for Jazz recordings.

"I probably don't need to tell you that Alun Morgan was one of the most gifted and knowledgeable of all jazz writers. He wrote the most beautiful English and what he had to say was communicated flawlessly to his readers. He was comprehensively generous to other writers, and it was at his instigation that I wrote my book on Woody Herman. Once I decided to write it, he shovelled to me the information that he had acquired for his own use on Woody at an amazing rate. Try to find anything he has written and you will be deeply rewarded if you succeed. His book on Modern Jazz was an early primer on the subject, and you'll find the one on Basie, despite its great age, is as relevant as it ever was." - Steve Voce

Chapter Five

“World War Two ended in August, 1945 at a time when Count Basie was ensconced on the West Coast, fulfilling engagements at the Casa Manana and Club Plantation as well as a number of theatres. The band came West at the beginning of July and did not return to New York until November when they once again rocked the Lincoln Hotel to its foundations. Clearly Basie was on the crest of a wave of popularity with all manner of audiences, from hotel patrons to service men. The band contained a couple of young men who were destined to go on to greater things. Jay Jay Johnson, then 21 years of age but already a veteran of the Benny Carter orchestra, was in the trombone section along with Dicky Wells, Eli Robinson and Ted Donnelly.

Illinois Jacquet, a year or so Johnson's senior, had taken Lucky Thompson's place on what had now become, traditionally, the solo tenor chair. Basie featured them strongly, using Johnson's arrangement of Rambo (which featured 16 bars of Jay Jay's solo trombone) and scores such as Mutton leg (a Harry Edison tune dedicated to Ted 'Mutton Leg' Donnelly), The king and Stay cool, all of which had solo choruses by Jacquet.

The trumpet section also had two important additions in Joe Newman and the sadly underrated Emmett Berry. By the summer of 1946 the All American Rhythm Section was together again; Jo Jones, out of the army, took over the drum stool from Shadow Wilson while Walter Page and Basie made up whatever differences had caused the rift nearly four years earlier. Records from the period indicate that Count was by no means unaware of the new direction jazz was taking and Henri Renaud, in his invaluable and exhaustive 20-LP compilation of Basie's recordings from the Columbia and Okeh files, discovered a previously unissued version of Tadd Dameron's Stay on it recorded by Count in July, 1946, a year before Dizzy Gillespie was to record the same score.

The contract with Columbia was running out and Basie made what may be considered another dubious decision. Let John Hammond, who was then working with the new Majestic company, tell the story: 'My major objective after I joined Majestic was to bring Basie with me and I persuaded Gene Treacy and Ben Selvin to offer him a very good contract. It guaranteed him twenty five thousand dollars a year for three years with a minimum of sixteen sides and albums included. It also contained the provision that if I should leave the company, the contract could be cancelled. Basie was still being booked by the William Morris Agency, although Willard Alexander had left. The agent who ran the office and called the shots for Basie was Sam Weisbord. Basie's personal manager was Milt Ebbins, a man with whom I did not get along too well because I never felt he had Basie's best interests at heart. To this day I have no idea what took place between Ebbins and Weisbord. All I know is that I went to California with the Majestic contract to meet with Weisbord and Basie. When I reached the William Morris office I found Basie had already signed with Victor. I knew RCA Victor would not promote him properly, that it was the end of the Basie band on records, and I said so. But whether Basie was in debt at the time, or Ebbins and Weisbord considered Majestic no place for him, I never discovered the reason for his refusal to sign our contract. The next night Basie and I were on a radio programme together. As we left the studio Basie turned to me and said "John, I've never been so ashamed of myself in my life". He was in tears, and because of the frustration I felt, so was I'.

The RCA contract commenced with a recording session in Los Angeles in January, 1947 and was to continue for three years. While there certainly are some excellent records from the period, including some fine small band titles, Jimmy Rushing vocals and a magnificent Shoutin' blues which gives some indication of the band's zest, in general Hammond's fears were realised. There are dire vocals and several unsuitable choices of tunes including lacklustre 'cover’ versions of other artiste's hits, such as Open the door Richard. But the fault was certainly not wholly Victor's. Basie himself seems to have lost his direction, musically speaking, and seemed to be casting around for a new identity. It is easy, with hindsight, to criticise him and to point out that he should have persevered with the style of big band jazz he had created. The fact of the matter is that by 1948 the dancing public had changed and the new clubs wanted the 'new music' of Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. Basie, who mixed more with his musicians than any other leader, was probably under a certain amount of pressure in the band coach from sidemen anxious to turn him the way they wanted to go. When Leonard Feather conducted a blindfold test on Basie in the summer of 1947 he found Count very enthusiastic about Gillespie's One bass hit ('Sounds like the boss, Dizzy. But Red Rodney plays terrific like that too. Arrangement very interesting - tells a story from start to finish. Four stars') and concluded with the remarks, 'I'm from the old school. I'll take the settled old swing with less notes, things that are really simple - but I like to listen to other types. The youngsters in my band support the modern part of the music. And I definitely approve of the way jazz is going. As far as bebop is concerned, it's real great if it's played right, and I think it's really taking effect. I have records that I play all the time, trying to understand. Diz and Parker and Jay Jay and Red Rodney - kids like that are really doing it'.

The 'youngsters' in his band at the time included Paul Gonsalves, who had taken over on tenor when Norman Granz made Illinois Jacquet an offer he could not afford to refuse in order to join the touring Jazz At The Philharmonic group. (Jacquet took Joe Newman with him when he left Basie.) By 1948 Count had more 'youngsters' in the ranks including trumpeters Clark Terry and Jimmy Nottingham, Shadow Wilson back on drums and Wardell Gray taking over the principal tenor chair from Buddy Tate.

The band was being booked into bop clubs such as the Royal Roost and Bop City rather than the Lincoln Hotel; Jimmy Rushing left to form a small band of his own and by the end of 1949 only a handful of Count's men had been with him for any length of time. Jack Tracy reviewed the band's appearance at Chicago's Blue Note during its December 5 to 11 booking (Downbeat, January 13, 1950) and headlined his column 'Basie best of what's left?'. He pointed out that both Woody Herman and Charlie Barnet had been forced to disband due to poor business leaving Basie 'as the best jazz band in the jazz purveying business'. He went on to say that 'the crew is an amalgamation of about every music style in the books. There are Kansas City men Basie, Freddie Green and Dicky Wells; swingsters (Emmett) Berry, Earl Warren, Jack Washington etc. and modernists (Wardell) Gray and drummer Butch Ballard. The rest fall somewhere in between. But this crew is doing quietly and without fanfare just what Dizzy Gillespie made a big issue of- giving the customers bop with a beat, music that is entirely danceable if you want to use it for that'.

But Tracy was too optimistic; four weeks after the Blue Note booking Basie broke up his big band and went back to work on February 10,1950 with a small group. Again the problem stemmed from management and booking; Count had been handled by General Artists Corporation throughout the whole of his RCA Victor contract period and succeeded in getting his release from GAC in January 1950 when he returned to Willard Alexander. It was Alexander who issued a statement saying 'Basie's big band has been badly handled in the last couple of years. It was destroyed as a box office attraction. The small group is a temporary expedient with the current conditions of the band business in mind. The combo might wind up as a permanent unit or, if conditions warrant it, he might go back to a big band. It just depends on what will make the most money for Basie'.

Vague talk of a possible European tour by the sextet in April, May or September (none of which actually took place) made it obvious that neither Alexander nor Basie had much of an idea of what the future held. The breakup of the big band had been due to nothing but failing business. Keeping such a large unit in being obviously caused many headaches and a combination of circumstances made it possible for Basie to pull a sextet together for a 'hand-to-mouth' run of bookmgs. The group came together because clarinettist Buddy De Franco was put into the unit by his new manager, Willard Alexander. Drummer Gus Johnson, from Chicago, had worked with Count several years before; Basie remembered hearing bass player Jimmy Lewis in Louisville and called him while Clark Terry, the only member of the sextet who had been with Basie's last big band, recommended tenor saxist Bob Graf from his hometown of St. Louis. When the group went into the Brass Rail in Chicago on February 10, the patrons, used to 'pantomime acts and cocktail trios' according to Down Beat magazine, were fascinated to see, in person, a major name from the worlds of records and films, albeit leading probably the smallest unit he had ever fronted.

The sextet became popular (although writers continued to comment on the somewhat strange mixture of styles) and a number of interesting saxophonists passed through the ranks. For a time both Bob Graf and baritone saxist Serge Chaloff worked in the band and each, at that time was undergoing his own personal problems. They literally leaned on Clark Terry as they flanked him in the front line and Clark remarked later that it was no wonder his shoulders developed a permanent slant! Basie brought in Wardell Gray on tenor when he flew out to California for some bookings and Buddy De Franco was 'Crow Jimmed' out of a film short the band made in August, 1950 when they appeared with Sugar Chile Robinson and Billie Holiday. (De Franco played on the film soundtrack but the coloured clarinettist seen miming on screen was Marshal Royal.) Freddie Green, who was not originally re-engaged after the break-up of the big band in January, joined the sextet one night much to Basie's surprise and pleasure. With the RCA contract at an end, Count went back to Columbia who recorded three sessions with the sextet. (Buddy Rich guested on drums on the first one while Charlie Rouse was the temporary replacement for Bob Graf who had left to join the new Woody Herman band.)

While the titles made by the small group are delightful, they lack the suppressed power and excitement of any previous Basie recordings and on Little white lies, which has one of the greatest of all Wardell Gray's ballad solos, Count comes on like Bill Snyder, a non-jazz pianist then enjoying considerable popularity with his piano-and-orchestra version of Bewitched. In January, 1951 De Franco left to form a band of his own and was replaced by Rudy Rutherford. Then, in April, Basie had the chance to put together a sixteen-piece band for a one week engagement at New York's Apollo Theatre. He rushed the band into the Columbia studios to record his first big band sides since August, 1949 including a splendid version of Little Pony. Neal Hefti, who shared much of the writing for the sextet with De Franco, provided the scores and the band contained outstanding lead musicians in Al Porcino (trumpet) and Marshall Royal (alto). But there were no other big band gigs in the offing and Count was forced to reduce to a small band again. In fact this became the pattern for the year; a week at Birdland in April with a septet containing guest trumpeter Buck Clayton, then a big band booking at the Strand Theatre the next month.

Basie took a big band to the Oasis Theatre in Los Angeles for two weeks in August then turned up at Chicago's Capitol Lounge in September with a septet. But in October he put together a big band for a week at the Savoy Ballroom and managed to weather the storm for never again did he have to reduce the size of his orchestra. The October, 1951 band contained Gus Johnson, Freddie Green and Jimmy Lewis from the last septet plus a trumpet section containing boppers Tommy Turrentine and Idrees Sulieman. The Lester Young doppelganger Paul Quinichette took most of the tenor solos and, thanks to a good humoured subterfuge by Clark Terry in his recommendation to Basie, Ernie Wilkins came into the band as an alto saxophonist. (Unknown to Basie at the time, Ernie had never played alto in his life; he was working around East St. Louis on tenor, his usual instrument, when he got the Count's call for him and his brother Jimmy to come to New York. Ernie's mother borrowed a silver lacquered alto from an amateur musician and Ernie came into the band with what the band called his 'grey ghost'!)

This was the band that Basie faced 1952 with, and a somewhat uncertain future it was for most big bands had already gone to the wall. The bright light was a new recording contract, signed with Norman Granz for a three year period (with options), and two sessions lined up in January. Trumpeter Joe Newman came back into the band and the strong trombone section comprised Henry Coker, Benny Powell and Jimmy Wilkins but perhaps the most important recruit was Marshall Royal on lead alto. Royal had been playing clarinet in the septet and did not expect to remain more than six months in Basie's employ. In fact he was promoted to the position of deputy leader and took many musical responsibilities off the Count's shoulders as well as shaping the saxophone section into one of the very finest teams jazz has ever known. The blend of the five men, their time keeping and their ability to play quietly has been a hallmark of the Basie band since the early Fifties and the major credit must go to Royal. Although he himself is a somewhat sweet-toned soloist he has always known how to get the very best from his colleagues.

With the formation of what soon became known as the 'new' Basie band, Royal's role became more exacting than that of any previous lead saxist under the Count's banner. The new band relied more on arrangements than earlier units, giving the section leaders the task of achieving technical perfection and a proper regard for dynamics. The very first titles recorded by Basie under his new contract with Granz called for supreme musicianship on the Neal Hefti arrangements of Sure thing, Why not? and Fancy meeting you plus Nat Pierce's masterly New Basie blues. The impact of those first Clef recordings on the jazz record scene was comparable with that of the first discs by the 'new' Duke Ellington band (Fancy Dan, The Hawk Talks, etc) a year or so before. It seemed that Count had found a place for himself in the hierarchy of the jazz orchestras and, fittingly, it was near the very top. All that was needed was a slight adjustment to the solo strength and that was soon to be achieved with the arrival, in May 1952, of the bustling tenor of Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis. Again Basie had a reed section with two contrasting tenors and a rhythm section as good as ever.”

To be continued ....

I don’t know all the circumstances of how these, three musicians of diverse national and ethnic backgrounds found each other, but one thing is for certain as you listen to the work of Ricardo Pinheiro [Portugal], Massimo Cavalli [Italy] and Eric Ineke [The Netherlands] on their new Triplicity CD is that the bonds of their musical camaraderie make for striking music.

The eight tracks that make up Triplicity [Challenge, Daybreak DBCHR 75227] range from Blues Just Because an original by Ricardo to three beautiful standards from the great American Songbook - If I Should Lose You, You’ve Changed, When You Wish Upon A Star - Jazz classics, Along Came Betty and Conception, a bossa nova - Retrato Em Branco E Prieto and finally a movie theme - Cinema Paradiso.

Each of these tunes is formed into an original arrangement that serves to showcasethe individual talentsand musicianship of guitarist Pinheiro, bassist Cavalli and drummer Ineke. In some cases, the melodies are played in a fairly straightforward manner - Cinema Paradiso, for example, while others such as When You Wish Upon A Star are virtually deconstructed and almost made to sound like new tunes.

But taken as a whole and played in sequence, the music forms a concert that brings forth the very essence of Jazz - the performance of a variety of themes that allow the musicians to demonstrate their skills as improvisors.

This was my second listening experience with Ricardo, Massimo and Eric; the first occurred when they formed the rhythm section on Is Seeing Believing? [Challenge, Daybreak DBCHR 75224] along with Dave Liebman on tenor and soprano sax and Mario Laginha on piano.

While moving from a supporting role to a featured one on Triplicity, I found it particularly helpful to listen to the work of the trio through the use of so many familiar melodies. It helped me to set my ears, so to speak. Instead of struggling to learn a host of new song structures, I could concentrate instead on what the musicians were “saying” through their melodic, harmonic and rhythmic creations.

And, not only do Ricardo, Massimo and Eric have a lot to say, stylistically, they say it very well; each is an accomplished and experienced musician and each puts forth a great deal of originality in both their group interactions and in their individual improvisations.

So while you can hear the guitar, bass and drum influences in Ricardo’s approach to the guitar, Massimo’s approach to the bass and Eric’s approach to the drums, I would venture to say that I’ve yet to hear another guitar-bass-drums trio that sounds so refreshingly different.

What I came away with was a unique listening experience centered around a textured mood; a string and percussion sonority.

As the principal melodic voice on the CD, guitarist Pinheiro brings off this role with a measured grace. In a setting made for overplaying, he never does. While explorative, his playing is restrained and selective.

Massimo frames the chords beautifully and provides a consistent “heartbeat” for the music which then allows Eric more freedom to rhythmically color it with the drum kit. But when a pulse is needed, the bass and drums “lock in” and provide a beat that drives the music [Blues Just Because], or makes it flow [Along Came Betty] or helps it to simmer [You’ve Changed].

Another quality that comes across to help create Jazz of the highest order is that Ricardo, Massimo and Eric are not just playing music, they are making it by listening to and interacting with one another. There are no egos here; this is, as the word “triplicity” would imply, a collective effort.

If you are looking for a perfectly balanced concert [an enjoyable 46.32 minutes from beginning to end] with a trio instrumentation that is acoustically understated with music played with virtuosity and originality, then you need look no farther than the Triplicity that is Pinheiro, Cavalli and Ineke.

Here’s a taste of what’s on offer in this wonderful CD.

On Music for This Swingin' Age, Bill Hitz's made his record debut with an orchestra spotted with driving West Coast soloists. All arrangements, by Hitz himself and Lyle (Spud) Murphy, use Murphy's 12-tone system, each building horizontally, full of incident and a fresh, satisfying approach. They deliver a rousing, brass-edged sound while Hitz's cool clarinet fits perfectly into the mood of the arrangements.

Greig McRitchie on his album Fighting Back aka Easy Jazz On A Fish Beat. certainly captured that swing era "feel", but he dressed it up with the distinctive rhythm and bass figures of Rock and Roll—piano, bass, guitar, drums and baritone, plus a rare, modern touch of harmonic color. His repeated use of vibes, alto, flute and guitar adds a refreshing perspective to a repertoire of easily identifiable tunes, all delivered by a powerful big band unit full of the cream of the crop of West Coast jazzmen.

Writing in 1986, Steve Voce in his fine book about the various Woody Herman Big Bands observed:

“Despite the never ending questions about the possibility of their return, the big bands never really went away. Admittedly they were crushed by heavy taxes and the advent of television in the second part of the forties, but the format proved resilient and there are probably more big bands today than there were during the golden era of big bands in the forties.” [p. 30; emphasis mine].

As if to corroborate Steve’s point, Jordi Pujol, the owner proprietor of Fresh Sound Records is currently issuing a series of Jazz and Swing Orchestra CDs while noting as a general introduction to the series:

“When the dust from the collapse of the Swing Era settled, there were few big bands left that had survived. Yet, because they loved the swinging drive of a full-on jazz orchestra, a series of adventurous and unsung bandleaders optimistically organize some fine, but short-lived, new orchestras that were packed with jazz and studio musicians, holding the flag of Swing high”

Jordi has place two Jazz and Swing Orchestras on each CD and further group these “rare and collectible albums by unsung bandleaders” as part of the West Coast Series and East Coast Series.

From the standpoint of the high quality of musicianship on display and the intriguing and well-written arrangements, these are “must have” CDs for anyone who is a serious collector of big band Jazz and you can locate more information about the series on the Fresh Sound website by going here.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles will highlight a number of these excellent recordings in a week long series beginning with Fresh Sound CD-959: Bill Hitz: Music for This Swinging Age … Greig McRitchie: Easy Jazz On A Fish Beat.

Original liner notes from the Decca album Music for This Swingin’ Age - Bill Hitz and His Orchestra (DL 8392)

“IT's become rather corny to talk about jazz as an art. People who talk and write about jazz have just about worn out the line while they were honestly trying to make a point with a preconceived notion that their listeners or readers were strictly square cut.

The trouble is that the "jazz is an art" pitch was being made much too early in the history of the form, for actually jazz is a cultural offspring, more a folk-music in origin, than it was an art.

Its development into an art form actually began with the advent of the first arranged jazz in the twenties with Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, but this product was hardly more than one dimensional. The actual evolution of jazz as a full-blown art form began in the early and mid-forties with the rise of the Gillespies and Parkers. These efforts opened the door for more expansive thought, for more extended study, and for a development of the form far removed from even the wildest dreams of the early New Orleans jazz pioneers. For in a matter of 60 or 70 years, jazz music made progressive steps which have just about brought it alongside and even moved beyond the progress of serious or classical music.

Even die-hard jazz purists, the Dixieland lovers, are conceding that arrangement and composition have become as integral a part of jazz as improvisation. And the strides taken in the forties and in recent years in

arrangement and composition have been lengthy and amazing, so much so that jazz has become as complex in structure and conception as the most challenging works of the classicists, with jazz still managing to retain that certain elastic quality which allows a freedom for improvisation.

Most of the progress made in this direction was made in the midst of the celluloid inferno called Hollywood, and the movement has been loosely labeled West Coast jazz, much in the manner that Dixieland is familiarly called New Orleans jazz, and there is Chicago jazz, Kansas City jazz, and New York jazz. The lure of the "big money" security of work in movie music-making drew some of the most talented jazz musicians, as well as arrangers. In the hours after the day's work, West Coast jazz was nurtured and developed by a combination of the sharp studio men's minds and the more aware young non-studio musicians who sought to study and learn from their elders.

With a working knowledge of jazz and all its previous elements, these men experimented with ideas which attempted to fuse jazz with the theories of modern classicists such as Hindemith, Berg, Stravinsky, Ravel, Delius, Shostakovich, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Milhaud. They even searched deeper to find a relationship between jazz and the Bach-Mozart period. The results have produced some of the most provocative of jazz sounds, with a greater variation of instrumental colors and a more stimulating flow of improvised ideas than has been heard since swing, the first successful arranged jazz, hit its peak in the later thirties.

This album is a prime example of the progressive movement. It's a product of the West Coast and it presents a vital student working with a teacher who can practice what he preaches. The student is leader Bill Hitz, who also is an arranger and clarinetist, and the teacher is Lyle "Spud" Murphy, an arranger-composer who is a veteran of the music scene, but who only recently has found his way into modern jazz.

The music they have produced on a collection of both standard songs and a number of their own compositions is based on Murphy's own theories and system, which he describes as his 12-tone system of equal intervals. The system still is comparatively young and barely tried, this album being the first collection of work fully developed from it. The arrangements, for the largest part, are written horizontally, and you will hear fugues, polytonality, fresh harmonies, new chord progressions — altogether a new vitality added to that basic form called jazz,

The Hitz-Murphy ideas and arrangements are played on this record by a group of other Murphy enthusiasts and students. The personnel of the band includes: Conrad Gozzo, Mickey Mangano, and Ray Linn—trumpets; Milt Bernhart and Dick Nash—trombones; Russ Cheevers, Buddy Collette, Bill Ulyate, and Chuck Gentry—saxes and winds; Gerald Wiggins—piano; Curtis Counce—bass; Larry Bunker—drums. And, of course, Bill Hitz on clarinet, and Hitz and Murphy, arrangers.

For special inspection, study Sampan, an original written in equal fourths, both melodically and harmonically, and containing several pure horizontally written (meaning the harmonies are the result of the moving lines played by the various instruments) passages featuring Hitz on clarinet; Something Blue, a polytonal blues featuring some wonderful Ray Linn trumpet and the amazing Buddy Collette on tenor sax; But Not for Me featuring some remarkable sax section passages and an interesting fugue development in the last chorus; Strike Up the Band blends jazz with a marching band flavor by employing the Murphy 12-tone system of writing and again features solos by Hitz and Collette, the latter both on alto and tenor sax.

Bill Hitz is a comparative stranger to the jazz field, and here makes his first entry as a recording artist. He has had a long string of credits as a sideman with some of the leading dance bands in the country including those led by Ralph Flanagan, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, and Charlie Barnet, and after this experience he sought out Murphy to merge this knowledge with a working knowledge of the most modern of jazz ideas. Murphy is a long-standing member of the music fraternity, having spent many years as an arranger for such bands as Jan Garber, Mal Hallett and Benny Goodman, and also was one of the most popular writers of music publisher stock orchestrations. He retired to the Coast some years ago and was hardly heard from while he developed his 12-tone system, and it was only in 1954-1955 that his name was heard from again when a number of Hollywood musicians "found" him and his ideas.

He has now become one of the key figures in the huge West Coast jazz movement.”

—Hal Webman

Original liner notes from the Cadet album The Greig McRitchie Band - Fighting Back aka Easy Jazz On A Fish Beat Bass (IPS 4058)

“Jazz has expanded at an alarming rate the past few years, but most of the influential sounds have come from small combos. "The big bands are dead" is a phrase that has been overworked since the mid-fifties. Greig McRitchie and company may just change a lot of minds. After listening to the first two cuts of this album, I was ready to roll back the rug and dance, and my mind began to wander back to those wonderful days when we would drive 200 miles a night just to stand in front of a band and listen. McRitchie has certainly captured that "feel" of the swing era, but he has dressed it up in a brand new bag. He has utilized all the basic elements of the swing era style of writing plus a modern touch of harmonic color that is as rare as a fine spice.

In addition to fronting a crew that is smooth, swinging and powerful, Greig has added another ingredient that is essential for today's jazz listener... great solo players. The rhythm section includes Shelly Manne (drums), Russ Freeman (piano), Joe Mondragon (bass), and Tony Rizzi (guitar). It's no wonder the band boots all the time. Buddy Collette's alto and flute work falls into an easy groove and Larry Bunker's vibes add a beautiful icing to a swinging cake.

There is no mistaking that McRitchie's writing has a personality and sound of its own that reflects the thoughtful goal he wants to achieve. His repeated use of vibes, alto, flute and guitar has a refreshing appeal that makes it a sound for sore ears.

If you combine all of the aforementioned elements with some of the best West Coast players and a group of easily identifiable tunes, you just can't miss. In the first thirty seconds of listening, you'll know that Greig McRitchie hasn't missed.

Opening side one with the rhythm and bass figures of a rock beat on Jeepers Creepers, the band paves the way for a swinging second chorus that provides ample blowing room for Buddy Collette. The brass swings, and Shelly gets a chance to add a few bars to wrap it all up.

McRitchie Doodle is a fine example of the flute-vibes-guitar sound I mentioned. You'll immediately recognize this as Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day— personally, I like McRitchie's version; Grandma never swung the tune like this. Russ Freeman has a little freedom and Buddy Collette adds a fluid alto chorus before the bones come in to close it.

Vincent Youmans evergreen, Sometimes I'm Happy, gets a gentle treatment from McRitchie. The ensemble sound of trombones and muted trumpets is reminiscent of Les Brown's renowned sound of the fifties. Solo spurts from Larry Bunker on vibes and Ray Linn on trumpet fill the middle before the band comes back in for the easy, two-beat finish. Dig Russ Freeman getting in the last word on the ending.

Runnin' Wild is "finger-snappin’ good". Marty Berman establishes the fooling on baritone and Larry Bunker provides the opening and closing themes. That retarded ending with the seventh chord gives it the old blues close.

What would jazz have been without the blues! Fishbeat Blues is really a vehicle for the soloists to stretch out a little bit. Russ Freeman, Buddy Collette, Tony Rizzi and Larry Bunker provide the single highlights. With Marty Berman laying down the "rock" foundation, the band swings in again for a closing chorus, with a key change thrown in for good measure.

Lonely Night is one of Greig's originals, a pretty tune that shows the fine flute work of Buddy Collette. Get a good hold on your chair when the brass section blows... you'll flip!

On side two, they should have titled the first tune Mammy's Little Baby Loves... Greig McRitchie [instead of Greig’s Bread].

Sally's Back is another McRitchie original that gives Buddy Collette and Russ Freeman the green light. Good, crisp brass work and a happy, danceable beat. It swings!

To Shuffle Off to Buffalo, McRitchie again relies on Marty Berman's baritone to establish the rhythmic pattern. The brass has a fat sound and Collette and Freeman do the solo honors.

Robbin's Nest is a nice revival of the great jazz item of the forties. The tune was penned by Sir Charles Thompson and Illinois Jacquet for New York disc jockey Freddie Robbins, and McRitchie's arrangement makes for easy digging.

Goodnight is a fitting close to the album. It opens like a down south camp meetin' before the band romps. Russ Freeman lays down a chorus and Buddy Collette turns on for one.

For digging or dancing, Greig McRitchie has found the secret sound. Stop reading and put the needle on... you're wasting some good moments if you don't hurry and listen to the Greig McRitchie Band "Fighting Back"!” —Jim Boten. KADI-FM, St. Louis

Original recordings produced by Charles "Bud" Dant and Geordie Hormel Produced for CD release by Jordi Pujol ©& ® 2018 by Fresh Sound Records.

The band on Shepard's Flock is an—almost—All-Star band. It was the

debut album of trombonist Tommy Shepard, who made a name for himself in the bands of Ben Bernie, Wayne King, Buddy Clark, and Stan Kenton, before joining the CBS staff orchestra.

The leader of these sessions is then, naturally, heavily featured on trombone, playing with the soft, velvety sound of Tommy Dorsey, his main influence. The memories of Dorsey's band frequently illuminate the scene, as the musicians load through familiar material and some originals. There is plenty of room for soloing by an authoritative Al Cohn, on tenor and bass clarinet, by Hal McKusick on clarinet and alto, and by the versatile Nick Travis on trumpet, all supported by a good rhythm section with Nat Pierce, piano; Barry Galbraith, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums, who keep the mainstream flowing to the end. The arrangements, which stress tight harmonic writing, are all by Manny Albam and Nat Pierce, except Darn That Dream and Stop! Look and Run which were worked out by Al Cohn, and keep in a rolling, relaxed groove.

Music She Digs the Most is a well-organized series of sessions arranged and con-dueled by pianist Richard Wess, and highlighted by some fluid soloing by tenor saxophonist Al Cohn. trombonist Frank Rehak. and trumpeter Nick Travis. Wess has Cabin in the Sky all to himself, and ho comes off as a flowing and sensitive player. Cohn. always blowing with taste and a handsome tone; Travis sounds great throughout, particularly on Lover Man, a moving and declarative solo vehicle for his horn. Rehak managed to express himself effectively, and Richard Wess' writing on the heads is neat and spare, and helps the group achieve a nice big band feel. —Jordi Pujol, Fresh Sound Records

“The great thing about these predominantly 1950s recordings is that many of them fall under the rubric of a "Day in the Life" of a West Coast or East Coast studio musician. You can hear the musicians and the arrangers literally learning their craft; making themselves as they go. These are essentially rehearsal bands that got a recording contract for a one-off album on minor labels like Corral, Cadet, Dot, et al, but much of the music is first-rate as is the musicianship.”

- The editorial staff at JazzProfiles

Writing in 1986, Steve Voce in his fine book about the various Woody Herman Big Bands observed:

Jordi has place two Jazz and Swing Orchestras on each CD and further group these “rare and collectible albums by unsung bandleaders” as part of the West Coast Series and East Coast Series.

The editorial staff at JazzProfileswill highlight a number of these excellent recordings in a week long series beginning with Fresh Sound CD-966 East Coast Series: Tommy Shepard, Shepard’s Flock and Richard Wess: Music She Digs The Most.

Original liner notes from the Coral album Shepard's Flock by Tommy Shepard and His Orchestra (CRL 57110)

“If you have a philosophic turn of mind, there is an unending source of wry amusement in the way that fate seems to keep the scales of humanity balanced. This extends from the rise and fall of nations, at one extreme, to — on a somewhat less momentous level — the development and succession of musicians and musical styles. Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum continues to draw something or someone to the center of the stage whenever it becomes vacant.

The point happens to be pertinent because you hold in your hand a record featuring a trombonist named Tommy Shepard. Chances are you've never heard of Tommy Shepard. But Tommy has been around for a long time (we'll take up his early history a little farther along) just as though fate had kept him standing in the wings waiting for the opportune moment to allow him to step on the stage.

You will find, as you play this record, that Tommy has a trombone technique that is very much like that of another trombone playing Tommy, the late Tommy Dorsey. In fact, it takes no very deep probing to realize that Tommy Shepard has steeped himself in the school and style of Tommy Dorsey. And this may account in part for the time that he has put in waiting in the wings. For when anyone has mastered his art as thoroughly and uniquely as Tommy Dorsey did, there is really no room for a road show version. Either it's the big show or nothing.

And now we come to the obscure moves of fate. The selections you hear on this record are not the product of a rush job following Tommy Dorsey's death when it might seem that the path was now open for a successor to his sweet, soaring style. These recordings were made six weeks before Dorsey died, at a time when there seemed no slight suggestion that he might be near the end of the road. They were made because Tommy Shepard was then deemed ready to move out onto the national scene on his own and it is only by one of life's strange, but frequent, coincidences that he is emerging on records just after his musical guide and model has left the scene.

Tommy Shepard has been playing trombone since his junior year in high school. The next year he won a national solo contest and by the time he was 19 he was on the road with Ben Bernie. After twelve months with the Old Maestro, he enlisted in the Army and played in a variety of Army bands, finally winding up with Wayne King's star-studded group at Fort Sheridan, IL, where he played for two years, making V-Discs, working bond rallies and generally supporting the nation's spirits.

Released from service in 1946, he settled down in Chicago where he has been most of the time since, working first at the Chez Paree, then on the National Broadcasting Company staff, the American Broadcasting Company staff and, currently, the Columbia Broadcasting System staff where he is under the musical aegis of Caesar Petrillo.

While he was at ABC, Shepard was granted six months leave of absence in 1953 to join Stan Kenton on first trombone (his section mates were Frank Rosolino and Bill Russo). The invitation to join Kenton was an outgrowth of a rehearsal band that Tommy had formed in 1948. It was a big swinging band which gave some of the top studio musicians in Chicago a chance to unbend and blow to their heart's' content once a week. All the arrangements were contributed and the men in the band pitched in and paid for the rent of the rehearsal hall. Tommy kept the band going until 1953 when he went with Kenton.

It is interesting, in view of this association with Kenton, to find that Tommy's trombone playing has no trace of the big, wide braying style of the Kenton trombones but, rather, reflects the influence of an earlier day in jazz when Tommy Dorsey's smooth, velvet attack was impressing young musicians. This influence carries over to the instrumental makeup of the band that he leads here which is closer to that of the old Dorsey Brothers band of the 1930s than most bands that are heard today. There is even a parallel — coincidental, as it happens — between the title of one of the Dorsey Brothers' big numbers, Stop, Look and Listen, and a tune Shepard has chosen for this set, Stop! Look and Run!

The band that Shepard appears with in his recording debut is just about as all-star as one could ask for. The leader, naturally, is on trombone. The lone trumpet man is the versatile Nick Travis. The saxophone section is led by Sam Marowitz on alto and includes Hal McKusick, doubling on alto and clarinet, Al Conn, doubling on tenor sax and bass clarinet, and Charlie O'Kane on baritone. In the rhythm section are Nat Pierce, piano; Barry Galbraith, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums.

The arrangements, which stress tight harmonic writing, are all by Manny Albam and Nat Pierce, except Darn That Dream and Stop! Look and Run! which were worked out by Al Cohn. Nat Pierce arranged Take Care, I'll Be Back for More, Misty and Here I Am In Love Again. The choice of tunes reflects a balanced blend of some of the special lovelies of the standard popular repertoire, a few new shots at "pop" perpetuity, and a pair of originals by the indefatigable Manny Albam, Walk With Me and See How You Are.”

-John S. Wilson

Original liner notes from the MGM album Music She Digs the Most by Richard Wess and His Orchestra (E-3491)

“Here's "Music She Digs the Most"— music the gal of your dreams will find "the living end"! It's music that really swings — light, relaxed with a jumping yet subtle beat. Here you'll find a brace of well-remembered show tunes and movie hits neatly mixed with a few numbers that will be new to your ears—"originals" from the pen of talented pianist Richard Wess. The performances themselves are sparked with Dick's striking solo flights on the piano. In the accompaniments, he draws the support of some of today's top jazz instrumentalists. There's imagination a-plenty about the arrangements the group utilizes — everything is fresh, breezy, neatly-delineated. So, we think that you'll find that you, too, dig the "MUSIC SHE DIGS THE MOST", because—well—it really is "the most".

About Dick Wess

Dick was still a high school student when he began carving out a career for himself in music. Before graduation, he was holding forth on a radio show in his native Long Island with a 17-piece band- The Navy claimed him subsequently, but, upon his return to New York, he plunged into serious musical studies with Elmer Bernstein, the noted composer who wrote the much-hailed background score for the film "The Man With The Golden Arm", with the famous pianist Lennie Tristano, and with a host of other musical notables.

Soon, Dick found himself in demand as arranger, conductor, pianist and as a writer of special material for innumerable singers, night club acts, stage performers and so on. Among those he worked with were Denise Lor of the Garry Moore Show, Sally Blair, Dolores Hawkins, Buddy Marino, Joey Bishop, Larry Best and Alan Drake. He has conducted recording sessions for such artists as Nona Massey and Dick Roman—and, apart from these activities, he has appeared as a jazz pianist. After a wide tour of a string of the country's most famous hotels and niteries as accompanist to Betty Riley, who is known as "The Irish Senorita", Dick returned to New York to pen production numbers for the world-famous Latin Quarter. Then, for a time he teamed as arranger-conductor-pianist with Lillian Roth, appearing and sharing billing with her throughout the country. At the present time, Dick is settled in New York and plans to concentrate upon appearances as a pianist with a jazz group of his own. In addition to piano, he plays trumpet and drums.

The personnel appearing with Dick Wess in these recordings includes Jerry Sanfino on alto and flute, Al Cohn on tenor, Frank Rehak on trombone, Nick Travis on trumpet and Osie Johnson on drums. Johnny Smith provides the guitar for Autumn Leaves, Somewhere, Honest Abe, and Blues for Someone. Mundell Lowe is the guitarist for Hey Now!, I Got It Bad, Why Shouldn't I?, and Lover Man. Tony Mottola is the guitarist for I Didn't Know What Time It Was, Give Me the Simple Life, Cabin in the Sky, and You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To. Aaron Bell is the bass on Autumn Leaves, Somewhere, Honest Abe, and Blues for Someone and Milt Hinton carries the bass chores on the remaining eight numbers.”

The following article, Randy Weston In Memoriamby Robert Ham which appeared in the November 2018 issue of DownBeat prompted the editorial staff at JazzProfiles to dig through the Jazz literature on Randy Weston at its disposal and to use the material that it found to create a compilation of writings about Randy that will appear on these pages in a series of subsequent postings. It’s our small way of attempting to do justice to Randy’s career in music, one that spanned almost 70 years. Not many artists are fortunate enough to be productive for almost three quarters of a century!

The following will be among the featured writings on Randy and his music:

“Randy Weston (Afrobeats)” and essay from Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz
“Randy Weston Interview,” in Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists
Liner Notes to the New Faces at Newport [1956] Metro Jazz LP [E1005]
Liner Notes to The Modern Art of Jazz Dawn LP [DLP-1116 reissued as Dawn CD-107 by Fresh Sound Records]
The insert notes from the booklet to the Mosaic Select Randy Weston 3 CD set [MS 004]
The relevant excerpts on Randy and his music from The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.; Oxford Companion to Jazz, Bill Kirchner, ed.; The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, ed.
“Randy Weston interview” in Art Taylor, Notes and Tones
Ira Gitler, “Randy Weston, Downbeat, xxxi/6, (1964), p. 16
Mark Gardner, “Randy Weston,” Jazz Monthly, xii/11 (1967)
Larry Birnbaum, “Randy Weston: African Rooted Rhythm,” Downbeat, xlvi/15, (1979)
Ted Panken, Randy Weston DownBeat Interview, August 2016.

As is our custom, once these postings have appeared on the blog, singularly or in combination, we will collect them and repost them in one comprehensive feature on Randy and his music.

Of course, now with the added advantage of so much music being available of YouTube, we will include as many musical examples of Randy’s oeuvre as possible in each of these features.

“IN 2016, WHEN PIANIST RANDY WESTON was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame, he said that he viewed his life's work as a kind of musical recipe.

"You take the black church, the calypso, the blues. Duke, Basie, Art Tatum, put them in a pot and stir them up, and add Africa: that's Randy Weston," he said in an article that initially ran in the August edition of the magazine that year.

It's a fairly apt summation of the elements that impacted the way Weston — who passed away on Sept. 1 at the age of 92 — approached his chosen instrument and the music to which he devoted his life. As with most mottos, though, it doesn't fully capture the depth of feeling and acuity in his playing, formed from years of study of the jazz and classical canon, as well as his longtime advocation of the African roots in all modern music.

Bassist Christian McBride, who recorded with Weston on the 1997 album Earth Birth, put it this way: "While many naively spoke of the connection between African and African-American heritage, he was someone who actually spent extensive time playing, studying and maintaining a business in Africa — experiencing many cultures there first-hand and bringing those experiences back to America to share with all of the musicians who learned from him. He was one of the only musicians many of us knew who could seamlessly thread the sounds of the Yorubas to bebop."

Weston's interest in both the music and history of Africa was ingrained in him at an early age. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, his parents — mom, a domestic worker; dad, a restaurateur originally from Panama — encouraged him to study his ancestral homeland at the same time he was taking piano lessons. And they supported him as he started his music career following high school and a stint in the Army.

Along the way, he found notable mentors, including his neighbor Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and jazz scholar Marshall Stearns. Through their friendship and teachings, Weston began to develop his singular playing style: a fluid, yet reserved, approach that built a percussive, angular flow off of a stride-blues foundation. He could swing with the best of them, but seemed most comfortable blending with the steady polyrhythms of the Gnawa music of Morocco or the spirited throb of highlife from Ghana.

His interest in blending the sounds of modern jazz with African rhythms began in earnest during the late '50s and flourished on early albums, like 1961's Uhuru Afrika, which included poetry from Langston Hughes, and 1963's Music From The New African Nations. Around that time, he also was conscripted to tour the western and northern parts of the African continent by the U.S. State Department. He often would return there during his life, including spending a few years living in Morocco, where he taught and helped run the African Rhythms Cultural Center.

"His association with African musicians and the time he spent traveling the continent gave him a wealth of information," remembered trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, who performed with Weston on and off during the past four decades. "A lot of other guys did similar kinds of things, but didn't seem to absorb it the same way. Randy would hear the balafon [a percussion instrument that originated in Mali] and understand that it was as much a piano as the piano was."

Weston kept up a steady output of recordings and performances throughout his long life, including his most recent work, The African Nubian Suite, a live large-ensemble album captured in 2012 at New York's Skirball Cultural Center that aimed to trace human evolution back to its African roots in the Nile River delta. He also was playing concerts until very recently, with his last appearance occurring in July in France.

In addition to his induction into DownBeat's Hall of Fame, Weston received other honors, including a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and honorary doctorates from the New England Conservatory of Music and Brooklyn College.

Above all else, according to Bridgewater, Weston will be remembered for being one of the most gregarious and kind artists in jazz.

"He treated everybody well — even the Gnawa musicians he got to know became family to him. Yesterday at Randy's funeral, somebody said, 'I never heard Randy say a bad thing about any musician or anybody,"' Bridgewater recalled after attending a Sept. 10 service at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. "That was his nature. He welcomed everybody."

—Robert Ham, NOVEMBER 2018, DOWNBEAT, p. 17.

Chapter Six

“The new Basie band was a musical success on and off records and did good business around New York but its nationwide tours were disappointing in terms of financial return. The breakthrough came in the summer of 1953 and it was probably coincidental that a change took place in the reed section around this time. Frank Wess joined the band on tenor as a replacement for Paul Quinichette then, a few weeks later on July 27, Frank Foster took over from Eddie Davis and stayed for exactly eleven years.

Metronome magazine published a very perceptive review of the band at this time: 'This is obviously the way a big band should sound; with an even attack, a brace of excellent soloists, a dedication to the beat and a library of arrangements that permit the soloists and the sections to keep the rhythm going always…. This is not the incubator of jazz of the future as the first Basie band was. It is unlikely that a Pres will emerge out of this group to shape a whole new era of jazz. This is rather a band that sums up, that shows how it is done and how it is played, what was good and what still is good in the jazz of twenty years ago and of today. In the other arts, it is always those who sum up, who demonstrate the enduring in the past and present, who make the great artists'.

The essential rightness of these opinions was to be proved time and again during the next three decades for no barrier-breaking soloist was to emerge from the Basie ranks, rather it was a band which became the curator of jazz big band tradition. During the years Basie spent under contract to Norman Granz the impresario tried to arrange a recording session at which Charlie Parker was to have been featured with the band. (Granz had both men under contract at the time.) Parker refused because, he said, Basie would never let him sit in back in Kansas City in 1936. Count, for his part, probably found the sixteen-year old Parker too wild and unschooled a musician in the Reno Club days; a pairing on record in 1953 or 1954 might well have resulted in some extremely interesting music.

The arrival of Frank Wess was to give the band an additional tone colour for, as well as playing excellent tenor, Frank was a flutist, a not too common 'double' in jazz at the time. In fact Basie was unaware of Wess's second instrument for some weeks. 'It wasn't until Frank had been in the band for some time before Don Redman said to me one night, "Frank played any flute for you yet?" I said I didn't know he played it. So a few nights later I said to Frank, "Why didn't you tell me you play flute?" and he said "you didn't ask me!" so I said, bring your flute tomorrow night'.

Thus began a long line of flute features including She’sjust my size, The midgets, Flute juice and Perdido. In Frank Foster, Basie had not only an excellent tenor soloist rooted in the Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt tradition, but also a most workmanlike arranger. In fact the quality of the scores produced by men within the band equalled that of the more experienced outside writers.

Neal Hefti, a man with a considerable reputation gained from his work for the Woody Herman Herd, had enhanced his reputation with his scoring for the septet and octet then followed it with more writing for the new big band. Johnny Mandel, who played bass trumpet with Basie from June until December, 1953, wrote about ten arrangements for the Count of which only Straight life seems to have been recorded. Manny Albam, Sy Oliver, Buster Harding, Don Redman and Nat Pierce were the most prominent of the 'outside' arrangers.

The band recorded material in 1953 which Granz put together as a ten-track album called Count Basie Dance Session; it was greeted so enthusiastically by critics and public alike that Count Basie Dance Session No.2 was soon in the shops. The albums were important in two respects, apart from their great musical value. Firstly, the titles showed the public that Basie still considered himself to be the leader of a band which played music for dancing and secondly, the very fact that the LPs were given titles was something of an innovation. Previous Basie albums tended to be made up of 78rpm titles simply programmed as ten-inch or twelve-inch discs. The Count's Dance Session LPs were referred to as such by critics and public both at the time and even years later when the discs were reissued. Subsequently the practice of giving albums generic titles was to become the norm and in Basie's case his best-known LPs, for example The Atomic Mister Basie. On My Way And Shoutin' Again etc., have become part of jazz history.

In March, 1954 Count made his first trip to Europe, touring Scandinavia, France, Switzerland etc. but missing out the United Kingdom due to the lingering dispute between the musicians' unions of the two countries. Back home business was good and the band was finding its feet, financially, but it needed just one extra effort to take it to the top. The missing ingredient was a singer with a commanding personality and on Christmas Day 1954, that singer arrived on stage with the big band for the first time, Joseph Goreed Williams, born in Cordele, Georgia, raised in Chicago, and just two weeks past his 36th birthday. Joe was an immediate success to the point where Granz rushed out his versions of The comeback and Everyday as a 45 rpm single suitable for the jukebox operators. This was followed by the band's Alright, okay you win and When the sun goes down-, with that rich voice well to the fore. At the recording session in May, 1955 when Williams's hits were taped (Frank Foster and Ernie Wilkins provided the scores) Basie recorded another best selling title, April in Paris. This was arranged by organist Wild Bill Davis and it was the original intention for Davis to record it with the band. Unfortunately Wild Bill's vehicle broke down on the way to the studio and what turned out to be a best-selling record was made without him. 'I sure fixed Bill's truck that day!' joked Basie years later.

The purists sneered at the Joe Williams vocals and the April in Paris record, with its 'one more time' ending and its Pop goes the weasel quotation in Thad Jones's trumpet solo but the fact remained that Basie, at long last, had financial stability. The payroll to keep sixteen men swinging got bigger each year and although the relationship between Count and his men was more cordial, relaxed and closer than that of any other band, it did not prevent the sidemen taking the leader to the union when they felt they had a case on matters such as overtime payments etc. As Nat Hentoff wrote in his revealing essay in his book The Jazz Life, 'Basie is quite conservative concerning money. He has to be pressured into giving a rise, and he deals with each man in the band individually in a divide-and-conquer technique that lessens the possibility of mass mutiny with regard to Basie pay. This absence of collective bargaining exists in many other bands. Basie was not always so close, but he has been mulcted outrageously in his years as leader'.

With his fortunes now on an upward trajectory, Basie made a change in the band which some of his men disagreed with; he sacked drummer Gus Johnson. 'I was in the band until December 22, 1954' Gus told Stanley Dance. 'On the 23rd, I was in hospital with appendicitis. I was there ten days or so when Basie wrote me to say he had got Sonny Payne and that he was doing a good job. Basie liked a lot of flash, and some of the fellows in the band though Sonny was better than me because he was more of a showman. Charlie Fowlkes told me later on that he (Charlie) fell and broke his kneecap and Basie didn't hire him back either. The same thing happened to Marshall Royal when he had to go into hospital. Moral: Don't get sick!'

Sonny Payne, who had worked with the Erskine Hawkins band and was the son of drummer Chris Columbus, was expert at juggling sticks and generally playing to the audience when the occasion demanded (and sometimes when it was not demanded). As Nat Hentoff described Payne, he was 'inclined to send up rockets when the music called for indirect lighting'. He also had a tendency to rush the beat and, for a time, Freddie Greene kept a long stick with which he poked Sonny when the time started to go awry. Gus Johnson was the very finest drummer Basie had, after the departure of Jo Jones, but the employment of a showman on the drum stool was part of the change which the band was experiencing.

More and more the bookings were for concerts and less for dancing. Audiences paid to see and hear the band as a band and Basie, who probably recalled those years in vaudeville, loved the reaction of a crowd to pure showmanship. This did not, of course, lower the band's musical abilities in any way, in fact some of the new scores called for a degree of musicianship which previous line-ups would have found too demanding. In 1956 Norman Granz released an album on which Basie and Joe Williams shared equal billing. It was clear thai Joe was now one of the band's biggest assets. Most critics damned Williams with faint praise, accusing him of not being a true blues singer and of using material which was weak, pallid and generally unsuited to the context. It is highly likely that Count smiled benignly at such criticisms as he turned to check the full list of bookings which the band was enjoying. To Count, Joe Williams was always 'my favourite son' and it is not difficult to see why he was held in such esteem for his addition to the band moved Basie into a new strata as far as fees for engagements were concerned.

In 1956 the band took off on another European tour (again missing out Britain; the inter-union problem had still to be finalised) and Granz recorded the band in concert at Gothenburg. The resultant LP came out misleadingly titled Count Basie In London but at least it gave us the opportunity of hearing how the band performed in front of an audience. Apart from the expected Joe Williams favourites, the programme also contained a new and attractive work by Frank Foster, Shiny stockings, which the band had first recorded in the studio at the beginning of the year. To be fair to Basie, he was also recording more challenging works including the extended Coast to coast suite by Ernie Wilkins.

In April, 1957 Count Basie paid his first visit to Britain and met with a most enthusiastic response wherever he played. So great was the demand for the band that arrangements were immediately put in hand to bring Basie back in the October of that year. In between the UK bookings, Count made a considerable impact on the 8,000 audience at the Newport Jazz Festival. The final concert was held on Sunday, July 7th and for the occasion John Hammond came on stage to effect the introductions. After the regular band had played its opening number a quartet of distinguished Old Boys made their appearance to be featured with the band. Lester Young, Jo Jones, Jimmy Rushing and Illinois Jacquet added their own special magic and excitement to the occasion and on the final One o'clock jump trumpeter Roy Eldridge also joined in. Granz taped almost the whole of the Newport Jazz Festival that year and the two albums on which Basie may be heard from this event were the last under his contract with Clef/Verve. In the autumn he signed with the comparatively new Roulette company and commenced his new affiliation with an album of Neal Hefti compositions which, rightly, has become a classic by any standards, The Atomic Mr. Basie.

A few days after completing the album the band flew to Britain where they performed a number of the new Hefti works including the slow and beautiful Li’l darlin and the hectic Whirly bird. So great was the response and so outspoken were British musicians in their claims that they had no chance to hear the band (as the concerts were held, naturally, while other musicians were working) that a special concert was arranged, commencing at midnight. The Roulette recording contract lasted for five years during which time Basie made some 20 albums for the label, the majority of which are excellent. Not only are they musically brilliant but the recording quality is outstanding, thanks to the experienced Teddy Reig who produced most of the LPs. While the Clef/Verve issues were acceptable some sessions, noticeably those which went into the making of the Dance Sessions albums, suffered from a slight muddiness. With The Atomic Mr Basie the music jumped from the speakers, even in mono, with a degree of separation and perspective which the Count had never previously enjoyed.

Before the European tour in the autumn of 1957 Basie made some changes, two of them to tighten discipline within the band. Bill Graham had been playing alto in the band since the early part of 1955 when he took Ernie Wilkins's place and his departure was not unexpected. As Nat Hentoff tells it 'Billy Graham, an extrovert and prankster, "played himself out of the band" as one of his fellow roisterers puts it. "Billy was not only too playful, but he used to get a little too familiar with the Chief himself. He'd even heckle Basie on the bandstand. As usually happens when a guy goes, Graham got the news during a layoff! When we came back, he just wasn't there"'.The other man to go about the same time was trumpeter Reunald Jones; born in 1910 he was older than anyone else in the band, apart from the Count himself Hentoff again: 'Seated at the extreme left end of the trumpet section, Jones was always one level higher than his colleagues. He played with one hand, as if in derision of the simplicity of the music. When the rest of the section would rise in unison, Jones invariably remained seated. His expression - no matter how much joking was going on among the men - was constantly sour. Jones's childish campaign of passive contempt was in protest at the fact that Basie never assigned him any solos. Jones was fired finally because, as a section mate says with satisfaction, 'he drank too much water'. Jones was a clubhouse lawyer, and occasionally complained to the musicians' union about overtime matters. He went to the union one time too often'. These two incidents give an insight to the extra-musical problems facing a band leader and although Basie tried to distance himself always from internal troubles, the final decision had to be his.

The other side of the coin was the excellence of the music which the band was placing on record for Roulette. Neal Hefti wrote the music for two albums, Quincy Jones another and Frank Foster was responsible for all the music on Easin' It. And Benny Carter, the master of orchestration, came up with two suites, -Kansas City Suite and The Legend; on the latter Benny sat in the reed section at the recording session. And the band was recorded 'live' to very good effect at Birdland (with Budd Johnson taking some virile tenor solos) and again down in Miami.”

To be continued

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles begins its retrospective on the musical career of pianist, composer and bandleader Randy Weston [1926 - 2018] with the following excerpt from Gary Giddins’ Vision of Jazz as it offers three important takeaways: [1] a concise analysis of the elements that make up Randy’s piano style, [2] a general overview of Weston’s recorded music and [3] a descriptive and informed view, by one of Jazz’s most distinguished critics, of the discography itself.

“In the educated European tradition, great composers mine their own ethnic backgrounds as a matter of course: Beethoven appropriates a drinking song, Liszt cavorts with gypsies, Bartok adapts the folk songs of Hungary and Ives those of America. And in the early decades of this century, many composers, including Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Milhaud, made a show of their demotic wit by borrowing from jazz. Copland opined that jazz's primary value was as source material, Paul Whiteman was praised for having made a lady of jazz by introducing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and Gershwin himself called jazz a "very powerful" American folk music. Now, however, jazz's favorite dictum is that it is American classical music — not an ethnic or folk foundation for art but the thing itself.

So the question arises: If jazz is so cultivated, how does it explore its own roots? One obvious answer is via the songwriting fellowship that sprang from Tin Pan Alley. The irony here — predominantly white songwriters viewed as a kind of folk source (if you can imagine Jerome Kern as folk) for black performers — is bizarre, given who gets the money. A more obvious answer is via the blues: the only musical form to develop in the United States, a product of the African American experience, an apparently bottomless reservoir of inspiration for jazz musicians.

Even so, blues in jazz is primarily structural, not emotive. Those occasions when jazz embraces its rural roots, from Louis Armstrong recording with country shouters to Hannibal Peterson interpolating rural blues into his symphonic pageant, are rare. And although gospel is embedded in jazz's call-and-response, rarer still is the use of other African American folk musics, from work songs to spirituals (whose novelty appeal is surely one reason Charlie Haden's and Hank Jones's Steal Away found a receptive audience). White musicians are more likely to explore black musical traditions than their own. A few Jewish players have milked their ethnic backgrounds, from Benny Goodman's "And the Angels Sing" to John Zorn's band Masada, but a black musician, Don Byron, fully explored klezmer in a jazz context. In recent years, Asian American jazz musicians have begun to recover their own. But have Italian or Irish jazz musicians ever thought to exploit or interpret opera or reels as jazz?

The most wide-ranging and influential alliance between jazz and another musical culture is the Afro-Cuban movement, pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie and others in the '40s. Yet Latin jazz is an alloy, and while Chico O'Farrill is undoubtedly correct in observing that jazz influenced Cuba more than the reverse, it remains something of a third stream, that is, Latin clave and percussion aren't tangential influences, but partners in the mix. Another example of ethnic borrowing was Stan Getz's bossa nova. In a similar way, the worldbeat movement of the past twenty years has flavored jazz with a vast array of international fillips. In the early '70s, Ellington wrote a piece about the didgeridoo; a few years later, Craig Harris was playing one. For a while, tablas were almost as popular as congas, and there was an invasion of flutes and whistles and gourds, as well as kalimbas and bandoneons and other instruments with exotic names.

Not surprisingly, Africa exerted the most appeal by far. Always a part of jazz in song titles and vague musical references, it became a genuine musical influence, especially after its own pop music was successfully exported. Africa provided numerous allusions for jazz in the '20s, when it was widely considered the adventurer's last playground and Marcus Garvey's last hope. In New York, Ellington's Jungle Band indulged in faux Africanisms with growly brasses and sexy dances; in Paris, Josephine Baker, nude but for a string of bananas, incarnated the fabled lure of primitive eros. If Gillespie looked to Africa by way of Cuba in the '40s, the following decade produced real interest in the mother continent. Folkways and other companies released field recordings, musicologists traced the African influence on blues, and Afrocentric pride was reasserted.

Randy Weston once observed that it was Thelonious Monk who alerted him to the link. But it was Weston who developed it. And though he didn't travel to Nigeria until 1961, he was premeditating an African American alliance much earlier, before he began recording. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, he witnessed firsthand the development of jazz's Afro-Cuban nexus, which jibed with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and melodies that flourished in his neighborhood and were part of his own heritage. In the mid-'40s, he forged lasting relationships with musicians who would appear on his recordings a decade later, including baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne, trumpeter Ray Copeland, and bassist Sam Gill, who made a serious study of African and Middle Eastern musics and, in the '50s, adopted the Muslim name Ahmed Abdul-Malik. In those apprenticeship years, Weston became fascinated with Monk, whom he heard with Coleman Hawkins. After he was discharged from the army in 1947, he visited Monk at his home and began to spend time with him, absorbing his spare and percussive attack and his devotion to the blues. Weston was the first pianist to craft a distinctive keyboard approach that derived from Monk.

He was also the first modern musician to record for Riverside Records. At his second Riverside session, in 1955, he debuted "Zulu," a percussive riff that might have been called "Thelonious," and in 1958, he followed with "Bantu Suite" and his breakthrough composition, "Little Niles," a piece actually written in 1952, in which an engaging jazz waltz is given a North African twist with an undulating figure that reappears in much of his music. Weston's '50s recordings for Riverside (expertly supported by Cecil Payne), Dawn, Jubilee, Metro, and United Artists are among the most charmingly anomalous in the postbop era. His penchant for triple time, pentatonic melodies, and a shrewdly rhythmic piano attack, heavy on bass, was established before he went to Africa and developed further during the course of two tours of Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961 and 1963, and a 1966 state department visit to fourteen African countries. By 1969, he had settled in Morocco, living in Rabat and Tangier, where he operated the African Rhythms Club. At the same time Weston's South African counterpart, Abdullah Ibrahim, was bringing Cape Town rhythms to the United States, Weston was bringing jazz to Africa.

Weston recorded sporadically after 1960, mostly for independent and obscure labels (when American musicians relocate abroad they become invisible no matter how widely acclaimed they were before the move); the theme of Africa remained resolute in his music. A couple of his pieces, "Hi-Fly" and "Little Niles," had become jazz standards, and Weston, who has always been community minded, performed in schools, libraries, and churches. A towering and congenial man, he offered workshops and musical lectures. But now he sought a larger musical canvas that combined jazz, poetry, African song, and rhythmic pageantry. The result, in 1960, was Uhuru Africa (Roulette), a collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, employing a griot-like narrator, trained concert singers, a big band, and an international percussion section including Olatunji, Candido, Max Roach, and others. The work feels dated now, its exuberance ersatz, its ambition didactic, except when the jazz elements take over (as in "Kucheza Blues"). It proved most significant in affirming Weston's flair for large ensembles and his musical bond with arranger and trombonist Melba Liston. Liston had previously arranged a sextet and trombone choir for Weston, but Uhuru Africa was the first of their many big band projects (they revived it at a 1998 concert in Brooklyn). A former writer for Gerald Wilson and Dizzy Gillespie, she was ideally suited to expand Weston's engaging themes for a full complement of brasses and reeds.

A second, less flamboyant big band album, Music from the African Nations (Colpix, 1963, reissued as Highlife on Roulette), received less attention but is the more rewarding work, and the more important compositionally: several pieces became standard in his repertory, including two by African composers (Bobby Benson's "Niger Mambo" and Guy Warren's "The Mystery of Love") and his own "Congolese Children" and "Blues to Africa." Liston's seductively dissonant arrangements are layered over buoyant rhythms that were way ahead of their time and sound surprisingly fashionable today. Weston's anchoring piano is well recorded, and the soloists, especially the great tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, are less forced and more forceful than those on Uhuru Africa. Still, it stirred little interest. A year later a frustrated Weston went into the studio on his own and self-produced an irresistible album, The Randy Weston Sextet; finding little interest in the industry, he created a mailorder label, Bakton, to release it. With excellent playing by Ray Copeland and the urgently distinctive Ervin, the band offers defining performances of two signature Weston themes, "Berkshire Blues" and "African Cookbook," and engendered enough enthusiasm for the Monterey Jazz Festival to book the sextet plus Cecil Payne in 1966.

Weston's career should have taken off; instead, he took off for Africa, a timely flight considering the dark days that lay ahead for jazz as the rock juggernaut flattened even its most celebrated musicians. During the next eight years, he recorded hardly at all: two 1965 sessions (solo and trio) were released by Arista Freedom in 1977; the 1966 Monterey set was not issued until Verve bought the tape in 1996. The occasional albums he recorded in Europe had titles like Afro-Blues and Randy Weston's African Rhythm, as did most of his new compositions. After six years, he returned to the United States and enjoyed an improbable hit with Blue Moses (CTI), a funky big band compromise, arranged by the meretricious Don Sebesky with Weston on electric piano. He returned to form in 1973 with Tanjah (Polydor), reuniting with Liston, resurrecting "Hi-Fly" and "Little Miles," and introducing notable new pieces, including "Tanjah" and "Sweet Meat," the latter featuring altoist Norris Turney. An Ellingtonian flavor is palpable not only in the specifics — Turney's appearance, Jon Faddis' high-strung, high-note trumpet, the undulating melodies — but in the broader achievement of tackling and extending what Ellington coyly described as the Afro-Eurasion eclipse.

Again his career should have taken off, but while Tanjah enjoyed respectable sales, Weston's big band projects were put on hold for the next fifteen years while he recorded almost exclusively as a piano soloist, mostly for exceedingly obscure labels (Cora, Arc), until 1987, when he and David Murray attained a meeting of minds on The Healers (Black Saint). Two years later he was signed by Antilles/Verve, and for the first time in two decades he came fully alive as a recording artist, making up for the lost time with one or more releases a year throughout the '90s. These records are among his best and they represent a remarkable accomplishment: the crafting of a Brooklyn-Moroccan connection that is now as natural as any idiom in contemporary jazz.

In 1989, he recorded three volumes of "portraits" with a quartet (piano, bass, two percussionists). The subjects are Ellington, Monk, and himself, and taken together they acknowledge his primary influences and illuminate what he has made of them; on the Monk especially, he manages to be radical and reverent at the same time, though there are passages where the extra percussion sounds more like a gratuitous overlay than an integral component. Two enormously satisfying albums with Melba Liston led to the brilliant small band, African Rhythms, which is a culmination of everything he has achieved. The Spirits of Our Ancestors (1991) introduces the musicians who would make African Rhythms one of the most exciting touring bands of the day: the seasoned trombonist Benny Powell and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and Weston's prize discoveries, alto saxophonist Talib Kibwe and bassist Alex Blake. Once again he recycles his repertory, salvaging "Blue Moses" from the fusion era and refashioning "The Healers,""African Cookbook," and others.

Weston never made a more blithely entertaining record than Volcano Blues (1993), on which he and Liston finally share equal billing. (Jazz arrangers, like Hollywood screenwriters, get only as much respect as they can wrangle. Benny Goodman's tributes to Fletcher Henderson were unusual in their day; Gil Evans never did split a marquee with Miles Davis until he was dead.) With a cast ranging from veteran Los Angeles tenor saxophonist and composer Teddy Edwards (who is masterful on a definitive trio performance of Guy Warren's "Mystery of Love") to urban blues singer and guitarist Johnny Copeland (on a revival of Basie's "Harvard Blues"), Weston presides over a chameleonic celebration of the twelve-bar sonnet that provokes and amuses and deepens with every hearing. But Volcano Blues could only exist as a record. Saga is an accurate reflection of the African Rhythms septet Weston debuted in New York in 1995.

Coming after its rousing predecessor, Saga may seem relatively staid, but its power emanates from the casualness of its virtuoso cultural blend. The balance between ensemble — arranged by musical director Talib Kibwe — and soloists is riveting and the rhythm section flawless, with guest Billy Higgins on drums, Neil Clarke on percussion, and the remarkable bassist Alex Blake, who pushes the beat with robust double-stops. Weston's piano is at the center, binding all the elements, and his playing is imbued with an unmistakable sense of delight. As usual, many of the compositions are old, reworked to suit this band and these rhythms.

Unlike a good many Afrocentric musicians, Weston never changed his name, and a similar lack of camouflage graces his musical borrowings. Some of his rhythms are so familiar one doesn't necessarily think of them as African, and that may be his point: a link exists, the family is more closely settled than previously thought. Nor does he fold in African instruments or chanting. In short, he hasn't gone native; he's taken what he can use to amplify his own music. That consists chiefly of African rhythms that lend a vivacious spark to jazz rhythms without overpowering them. On Saga, Weston plays in three, four, five, six, and eight — Africa accommodates him.

"Loose Wig" originated as a trio on the 1956 LP The Art of Modern Jazz (Dawn) and is given a ravishing face-lift in the 1995 septet version, with an extended bridge and unison scooped notes; its rhythms are heightened at every turn by Blake, who has developed a strumming/ slapping/plucking technique that rocks the ensemble, and Billy Harper plays with impregnable authority. The classic swinging poise of "Saucer Eyes," a better-known piece from the '50s, is now underpinned by carnival rhythms and unfolds as a saxophone battle. One of Weston's most attractive melodies, "Tangier Bay," was a memorable piano solo on Blues to Africa (Arista Freedom, 1974); with Kibwe playing the seductive forty-bar theme over a jubilant vamp, it is completely refurbished. Perhaps the most impressive revision of all is the piano treatment (he's recorded it at least twice before) of "Lagos," in which Weston works in and out of rubato with unswerving equilibrium, lending the piece a rare and stately enchantment. More recent pieces include "F.E.W. Blues," a piano-trombone dialogue with an introduction that leads you to expect an old-fashioned blues, though Benny Powell and Weston use altered changes and textural devices to circumvent every expectation, and "The Three Pyramids and the Sphinx," a piano-bass duet with a strong, piquant melody.

Not everything is equally successful, but Saga is a formidable addition to a canon that, after more than forty years, is still subject to neglect. At New York's Iridium, with slightly altered personnel, Weston played to a full and eager house, yet he often seems an outsider, showing up in clubs sporadically, whether he is domiciled in Brooklyn or Morocco. Perhaps his most distinctive quality also undermines his appeal and that is his temperance. Weston's powerful hands relish the ringing of overtones between notes. Like Monk, he plays rests. Saga is a beautiful example of his restraint. Colorful, melodic, rhythmic, it borrows merely the seasonings of ethnicity to define Randy Weston's own archetypes.”

Multiple Grammy Award Winning Jazz Guitarist John Scofield Returns with New Album: Combo 66! - Released on Verve Records on September 28th

We received the following from Crossover Media and thought we’d share it with you. John has always been one of my favorite, especially when Bill Stewart is in the drum chair, and we are curious to hear Gerald Clayton as the latest member of John’s group on keyboards as he has always knocked me out on piano with the Clayton Brothers band.

A YouTube track from the recording is featured at the end of the text.

“Grammy Award-winning jazz guitarist, band leader and composer, John Scofield is set to release his new album, Combo 66, marking his 66th birthday, on September 28 via Verve Records. The album, which features long-time drummer Bill Stewart, bassist Vincente Archer and pianist/organist Gerald Clayton, combines jazz with genre-defying elements, allowing Scofield to find new modes of expression.

Scofield has been on a serious roll since 2015, when his release, Past Present, earned a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. He followed the release with the 2016 album Country For Old Men, which earned him two Grammy Awards for both "Best Jazz Instrumental Album" and "Best Improvised Jazz Solo ("I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry")."

In 2017 Scofield joined forces with old pals Jack DeJohnette, Larry Grenadier and John Medeski for the rural New York jazz band of the ages, Hudson, the quartet romping the world from Boise to Berlin and back again.

John Scofield keeps his talent and his trusty Ibanez AS200 guitar burning brightly on Combo 66, which finds the New York native with a new quartet and fresh compositions in celebration of his 66th birthday.

"I wrote all new tunes for this record, Combo 66," Scofield notes from the road. "I called it that because I'm 66! And 66 is the coolest jazz number you can get because if you hit 66 you're doing ok. Remember all the great records from the 60s? Brasil 66. 'Route 66.' It hit me that it would be poetic to use that title."

Born of searing groove, soul-touching melody, and kinetic improvisation, Combo 66 swings effortlessly to the condor-like rhythms of drummer Bill Stewart, Scofield's percussionist since 1992s What We Do. Scofield chose upright bassist Vincente Archer of Robert Glasper's Trio when it came to bass rhapsodies and called upon 34-year-old organist/pianist Gerald Clayton, son of bassist John Clayton of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra for keys.

"Guitar and keyboard is not always the easiest match," Scofield says. "Because of its percussive nature, piano is very similar to the guitar. But Gerald has a beautiful touch and though he is quite modern, his touch reminds me of Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan. And that really is a beautiful legato sound that works well with guitar. Even though he's got super roots in traditional jazz, he can do everything. I'm just thrilled to play with Gerald."

The album begins with a track called "Can't Dance" - we're not talking the Sinatra standard, but a late afternoon swinger imbued with a sense of urban danger. "It just has this kind of groove quality and since I can't dance, really, I thought I would dedicate it to myself," Scofield laughs.

"Combo Theme" recalls the spooky grandeur of a great Henry Mancini soundtrack melody, balanced by Scofield's wry guitar solo, the equivalent of a Hollywood noir thriller, while the track "Icons at the Fair" plays on chords and progressions of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis.

"We really got some heat happening on this one," Scofield says of "Icons at the Fair.""Years ago, I did a record and a tour with Herbie Hancock, for his album, The New Standard. He had this arrangement of 'Scarborough Fair' and I really liked the chords. I used those chords and then wrote a melody which was reminiscent of a lick that Miles [Davis] used to play. So, between Herbie and Miles and Paul Simon's 'Scarborough Fair' I called this 'Icons at the Fair."

The conversational "Willa Jean" was titled for Scofield's granddaughter, followed by "Uncle Southern," a light-stepping ¾ dance which touches on his mother's Southern roots. "Dang Swing" is a swing tune with a bit country: a dab of the devil's music and "New Waltzo," melds waltz with rock.

Something he almost never does, "I'm Sleepin' In" is a ballad - a calming yet slightly mysterious number titled, as is most every track on Combo 66, by Scofield's wife, Susan Scofield.

"It's quiet and pensive, and I hope, sensitive," Scofield explains. "Susan's title seemed to reflect the feeling of the song. What's more sensitive than a human being when they're asleep?"

Combo 66 closes with the track "King of Belgium," dedicated to Belgian harmonica maestro, Toots Thielemans, a man of great humanity, and purportedly, a great sense of humor.

"If you can't have fun with the music, let's go home," Scofield says, alluding to his working credo. "I am so deadly serious about jazz, but the fact of the matter is jazz only works if you are relaxed and don't give a shit. If you try too hard it doesn't work. Humor really helps me to get to a better place with music."”

Julian mostra un tocco leggero e un fraseggio con note tratteggiate; è molto bravo nel dispiegare lunghe e liriche imitazioni. Il modo di suonare di Julian non è forzato, scorre. Lui sa dove vuole andare nei suoi assoli e lui arriva lì in un modo che è pieno di colpi di scena interessanti.

Julian è un abile musicista, ma non sta cercando di impressionarti con la sua tecnica, anzi, è più interessato a fare musica. Il suo tono e il tocco creano una chiarezza cristallina al suono che induce dal pianoforte.

La redazione di JazzProfiles.

When Matteo Pagano, the owner-operator of Via Veneto Jazz, sent me a preview copy of the latest CD by pianist Julian Oliver Mazzariello, I was somewhat baffled by its title - DEBUT (Jando Music/ Via Veneto VVJ 125 – 8013358201250).,

I mean, wasn’t this the same Julian O. Mazzariello that I’d heard on recordings by tenor saxophonist Daniele Scannapieco, trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, trombonist Enzo Pietropaoli and his Yatra band, soprano and alto saxophonist Stefano Di Battista, singer and songwriters Edoardo De Crescenzo and Fabio Concato and Jazz vocalist Maria Pia de Vito?

Much to my surprise, it turns out that the answer to the “Debut” riddle is that this is the first recording that Julian has made as a leader.

The Jando Music/Via Veneto Jazz media release approaches the puzzle and its resolution this way:

“How many albums do you have of Julian Oliver Mazzariello? Think about it. It’ll probably be difficult for you to answer. Perhaps you won’t be able to recall the precise number, but there’s definitely at least one in your music collection. What’s more, that elegant touch of his on the piano is unmistakable, instantly recognizable, not to mention his remarkable Anglo- Neapolitan name.

But the truth is you haven’t got any of Julian’s albums. That’s because, although Julian has performed in the bands of many of his colleagues, he remained undecided as to whether to step into the role of band leader until Debut.”

I for one am delighted that Julian Oliver Mazzariello decided to make this maiden voyage CD on which he is joined by André Ceccarelli Drums and Rémy Vignolo on Double Bass because I find it especially satisfying to hear more of his playing as the lead voice instead of his more accustomed role as an accompanist.

As the The Jando Music/Via Veneto Jazz media release expresses it:

“So, finally we have the chance and opportunity to listen to Mazzariello in all his creative flair and compositional dynamism: groove, swing, refined technique; along a path of differing styles which he approaches with heightened awareness.”

Julian displays a light touch and a dotted eighth note phrasing that is very reminiscent of Cedar Walton and, like Cedar, he is very good at unfolding long, lyrical lines. Julian’s playing is not forced - it flows. He knows where he wants to go in his solos and he gets there in a manner that’s full of interesting twists and turns.

Julian is a skilled player, but he’s not trying to impress you with his technique, rather, he is more interested in using his considerable “chops” to make music. His tone and touch create a crystal clarity to the sound he induces from the piano.

Julian’s improvisations reflect a taste, phrasing and use of his technique that brings to mind the styles of Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Barron from the modernist tradition and, more recently, the approaches of Alan Broadbent, David Hazeltine, and Kenny Drew, Jr.

As he displays on Funky Chunks, Julian can get down ala Bobby Timmons, Wynton Kelly, and Joe Zawinul and play a mean groove, and yet, he’s equally at home with the introspective harmonies of Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner as is reflected on Dream Cycling [to my ears, there’s also a bit of Michel Petrucciani’s phrasing to be heard in the “tag” on this piece].

The nine selections that make up the music on Debut also provide a look at the compositional side of Julian O. Mazzariello and it’s a very rewarding one at that as he turns out to be a writer of intriguing melodies.

As always, drummer André Ceccarelli is his “Old Soul” self throughout the recording, wisely knowing what to play to keep the heartbeat of the music full of energy while also knowing how not to overplay. And in bassist Rémy Vignolo, Julian has found a companion who beautifully frames the chords, plays unison lines flawlessly and solos with authority .

On this their first musical trip together, Julian, André and Rémy Vignolo masterfully guide the listener through a voyage of discovery.

One can only hope that such sojourns will continue beyond this remarkable Debut.

Debut will be released on 14 December 2018 and you can preorder it through Forced Exposure by going here.

“Of the five genius big band composers and arrangers who emerged in full bloom in die 1950s — Gil Evans, Shorty Rogers, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman and Johnny Richards — Richards is the forgotten one. When Richards is remembered, it is for his works for Stan Kenton and not for the recordings of his own bands. So it is hoped that the recordings at hand [Mosaic Select #17 - Johnny Richards] — the earliest of which were recorded 50 years ago — help to remedy this neglect. It is inconceivable that music so brilliant has been out of circulation for so long.”

- Todd Selbert, insert notes to Mosaic Select #17 - Johnny Richards

“From the first moment I played with Stan and what little I exchanged with him, I knew him as a true pioneer and champion of music making. The world knows of his innovations and popularity, but little of the man's true depth as a creator. In the development of art forms throughout history, there are various stages and periods of innovation. Kenton was a milestone. He can be counted as a pillar that helped support the arches of lesser lights.”

- George Gaber, timpanist [Dr. William Lee, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm, p. 219]

Unlike many big band leaders to whom arrangements were brought, played through with maybe some editing here and there and then assigned to the band’s book, Stan Kenton actually collaborated with the many arrangers who provided his band’s charts over the years.

Perhaps this is because, unlike many other big band leaders, he was his band’s first arranger. Stan was dissimilar to Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and a host of other outstanding leader-soloists, in that, while he was a capable instrumentalist as a pianist, Stan’s primary forte was always his skill as an arranger.

Not surprisingly, then, through its almost forty years of existence, the Kenton band was sometimes referred to through Stan’s interactive collaborations with Joe Coccia, Pete Rugolo, Bill Russo, Bill Holman, Bob Graettinger, Johnny Richards, Lennie Niehaus, Bill Mathieu, Dee Barton, Hank Levy, and many others.

I am especially fond of the Kenton-Richards collaborations and Cuban Fire! has remained a particular favorite of mine since I first heard it a year or so after it was issued.

By way of background, in the chapter entitled Fuego Cubano (1956) from his definitive biography Stan Kenton This Is An Orchestra! [Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2010], Michael Sparke writes:

“On March 4, 1956, the band with its full complement left New York aboard RMS Queen Elizabeth, bound for its second European tour. But this time the first destination was Britain, following successful negotiations with the Union for a reciprocal tour of America by Ted Heath and His Music. Kenton's debut concert on English soil was at 2 p.m. on March 11, in London's vast Royal Albert Hall, the atmosphere electric as the capacity crowd greeted Stan's first-ever appearance leading his orchestra before a British audience in their homeland.

The English jazz "establishment" was uniformly anti-Kenton, and everything he stood for, but individual writers and musicians could not disguise their excitement and admiration for the powerful precision and outstanding musicianship of this fine orchestra and its distinguished soloists.

The program consisted of a mixture of older "classics" and the more recent Holman charts, including a brand new "Royal Blue" named especially for the UK tour, and one very fresh composition by Johnny Richards which really set the audience roaring (and 1 was one of them!) called "El Congo Valiente." Of the soloists, highest praise went to Perkins, Niehaus, and Fontana.

Kent Larsen sums up Stan's second European tour with a spirited reminiscence: "England was cold and rainy, we did 60 concerts in 33 days, we ate ham sandwiches until they came out of our ears, and we had a complete ball: the audiences were super! The Continent was just as hectic as regard to schedules, but it was a joy meeting and playing with so many wonderful musicians. The five days each way on the Queen Elizabeth were a thrill, just like a paid vacation. By the time we got back to the States, I'd spent more money than I earned, we found that Elvis was the biggest thing on records, and the band spent a week in New York recording Cuban Fire."

What Kenton hadn't explained was that "El Congo Valiente" was just one of a number of extended compositions Johnny Richards had written featuring the Latin-American idiom.

What Kenton didn't know at the time was that the complete Cuban Fire collection was destined to become the most musically popular and iconic album of his whole career. Stan's concept had been simple enough. Despite his enthusiasm for Latin rhythms, he'd often been chastised by Cuban musicians for not being sufficiently authentic in their use. Johnny Richards (family name Cascales) was Mexican by birth and spoke fluent Spanish, so Kenton commissioned John to spend time in New York with the Latin players and learn how to combine their genuine rhythms with North American jazz. "And then," Stan told Johnny, "I want you to create a Suite, but I want you to abide by all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys have."

As painstakingly recorded for Capitol, Cuban Fire was an outstanding achievement of immense proportions. Not only did it kick-start Richards' career, leading to his becoming one of the most vital composers in modern jazz, the album also gave a significant boost to the Kenton orchestra, becoming that rare combination, a success in both artistic and commercial terms. Cuban Fire was music that reached a new stature and dimension. Highly dramatic—some would say grandiose—passages are tempered by periods of sheer beauty and repose: as on the opening "Fuego Cubano" which begins with a flurry of high-powered excitement and brooding menace, but soon relaxes under the calming influence of the main theme statement played by a Larsen-Noto duet.

Most memorable of the six dances is "El Congo Valiente," because of its distinctive theme, stated at the opening by French horns. The difficulties inherent in Richards' writing are well illustrated by "La Suerte de los Tontos," on which the horns have to start the piece "cold." There's a Wally Heider recording from the Macumba Club later in the year, on which the horns fluff the introduction four times, and don't get it right even on the last attempt. On another Macumba date Stan makes the horns repeat the intro because of clams, and ironically explains it's a difficult thing to play: "Because it's hard to understand the title—something about the Sweat of the Horns!" (Correct translation: "The Fortune of Fools.")

Richards makes liberal use of the band's complement of soloists on every movement of the Suite (which, incidentally, does not include "Tres Corazones," despite the liner notes to the CD release). All perform with vigor and passion, but my personal pick would go to Bill Perkins, despite stiff competition from Lucky Thompson, whom the band had picked up in Paris, and who would depart right after the recording. Perk's fine tone and ability to dovetail his ideas with John's music are beyond reproach. Throughout, Richards uses the soloists to develop his compositions rather than engage in free expression, and solo performers are compelled by the dynamics of the music to work within this controlled melodic framework. Doubtless many of the musicians would prefer the freedom of improvisation allowed by the Holman/Mulligan-type charts, but Richards had such command of the orchestra, and has composed melodies of such outstanding merit, he gained the respect and (sometimes grudging) admiration of everyone involved. Under Stan's leadership the band plays with great energy and flair: the battery of Latin percussion instruments added for the occasion complement but never overwhelm the orchestra, however crucial they are to the success of the Suite.

Mel Lewis explains: "Willie Rodriguez had organized a special rhythm section playing specific instruments that would go along with the South American rhythms that Johnny had researched before he wrote the music. Johnny had rehearsed them before we even got there, and now they had to learn to blend with a jazz drummer and tympani. Tremendous care and effort went into every aspect of the Cuban Fire recordings, which became one of the finest works of Johnny Richards with the Kenton band."[pp. 134-35; 138-39]

And in his notes to the Cuban Fire Capitol Jazz CD [CDP 7 96260 2], Ted Daryll offers this background to the evolution of “...the most musically popular and iconic album of … [Stan’s] whole career.”

“The band had set sail for New York from the port of Cherbourg, France on May 10th [1956]. The cruise home had allowed an exhausted group of musicians their first genuine opportunity to relax and re-charge since their opening concert on March 11th at London's Albert Hall. Now in Manhattan and beginning rehearsals for the Cuban Fire recordings, the bulk of the touring band remained intact. Inevitably, a few chairs would change but the rhythm section, key soloists, and the majority of the brass and reed players were still on board. That this group had had plenty of performance time in which to settle and age was indeed a welcomed element considering the anticipated challenges of the new Richards' scores that were awaiting it. One or two of the charts had actually been completed prior to the tour and were taken along and performed occasionally during it.

Kenton set up rehearsals in the ballroom of the since-deceased Riverside Hotel located on West 73rd Street. A room that boasted a Kenton prerequisite: resonant, natural wood acoustics. Richards had enlisted the aid of percussionist Willie Rodriguez and together they assembled and rehearsed a five-man Latin percussion unit (Rodriguez at the helm on bongos) to execute with authenticity the rhythms that Johnny had researched in South America. Mexico. Cuba and New York. Unknown to most, due to the guise of his professional surname, Johnny himself was of Latin heritage being born John Cascales in upstate New York on November 2. 1911. It is not difficult to speculate then that the Cuban Fire project may well have had a special and more personal significance than some of his earlier work. And indeed it did turn out to be the catalyst that would project Johnny Richards into prominence as both a gifted jazz orchestrator/ composer and soon-to-be bandleader.

On May 22, 1950 all factions were collected at the Capitol Records studios on West 46th Street where the first of seven titles, RECUERDOS, was recorded. The following day. FUEGO CUBANO. QUIEN SABE, and EL CONGO VALIENTE. LA SUERTE DE LOS TONTOS, LA QUERA BAILA and TRES CORAZONES (the little-known seventh dance from the suite that had been omitted from earlier issues due to time/space limitations) completed the sessions on May 24th. [Obviously, Ted has made the choice to include Tres Corazones in the Suite, so perhaps he was not aware of the Richards/Sparke/Venudor position on the matter when he wrote these notes.]

The success of the "Cuban Fire!" album can be gauged in part by the ascent of Johnny Richards' star immediately following its recording. Bethlehem Records, a leading independent jazz label of the period, suddenly offered Johnny an opportunity to record his first album as a leader. By August of the same year he had assembled a top shelf group of LA based musicians and was at Radio Recorders studios producing the memorable "Something Else" LP. (BCP 6011/6032 and reissued in 1984 by Discovery Records DS-895). Although only a "studio band," it became the archetype for a permanent working band that Johnny ultimately established in New York about late 1956/early 1957 and kept together on and off until as late as 1965...just three years prior to his untimely passing in 1968. The New York band can be heard on a minimum of three albums made during this period for Capitol. Roulette, and Coral Records.

In the almost 40 year history of the Kenton orchestra, an orchestra that had leaned long and heavy on things Latin, Cuban Fire! stands at the pinnacle of those many outings. It remains an extraordinary coupling of jazz orchestration/improvisation and the deeply felt rhythms of those near and distant cultures. Musicians aligned with the Latin jazz movement in this country continue to cite it as an influence and inspiration.

And in Stan Kenton: The Studio Sessions, Michael Sparke and Pete Venudor have this to say about the music on Cuban Fire “... which collectively by common consent are recognized as one of the most distinguished of the Kenton-Richards collaborations.”

Stan told us : "The reason we made CUBAN FIRE is interesting. We had recorded a lot of Afro-Cuban music, and a lot of the Latin guys around New York complained : 'It's wrong, you're not writing the music correctly.’ And I used to argue with them. I'd say : "Why do you have to have such rules about how you write Afro-Cuban music?” They'd say: 'Because there's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. Why don't you try to do something with good harmonic structures and good melodic lines and have it right rhythmically ?'

"So I told Johnny : 'I want you to go to New York and start hanging around with those guys, and study what it is that makes a thing authentic.' And I told Johnny : 'I want you to create a Suite, but I don't want you to write it unless you abide by all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys have.' And it was easy for Johnny, because he spoke Spanish. So he did, he went to New York and hung around with those guys for two or three months, and then he started writing music which conformed with all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys keep. It's different today, all that's been broken down, because the Latin guys have gotten into jazz, and the jazz guys have gotten into Latin, but CUBAN FIRE is completely authentic, the way it combines big-band jazz with genuine Latin-American rhythms."

The album was recorded a week after the band returned to the States from an exhausting two-month tour of Europe. EL CONGO VALIENTE had been performed to British audiences, and meanwhile Richards had been preparing in New York, as Mel Lewis explains : "We recorded CUBAN FIRE in the Ballroom of the Riverside Hotel in New York City on 73rd Street. Willie Rodriguez had organized with Johnny Richards a special rhythm section playing specific instruments that would go along with the South American rhythms that Johnny had researched before he wrote the music. Johnny had rehearsed with them before we even got there, and now they had to learn to blend with a jazz drummer, and we also used tympani. CUBAN FIRE turned out to be one of the finest works of Johnny Richards with the Kenton band."

A view echoed by Bill Perkins : "Tremendous care and effort was put into every aspect of the CUBAN FIRE recordings - perhaps the late Johnny Richards' crowning achievement. We spent many hours in the studio making sure everything was as perfect as we could possibly make it."

Though the discography lists six trumpets, only five play at any one time, with one man in reserve. Johnny Richards was present to help with direction, though Kenton conducted the orchestra during the sessions. Richards expert Jack Hartley says Johnny was adamant TRES CORAZONES (premiered on the "Music '55" TV show of August 9, 1955) was not intended as part of the Suite, though it has been included in the CD version. An unrecorded title, "Alma Pecadora", is headed "Cuban Fire Suite" according to the score held at North Texas University, and was presumably rejected as not up to the same standard as the other charts, which collectively by common consent are recognized as one of the most distinguished of the Kenton-Richards collaborations.”

In strictly Latin Jazz technical terms, the music on Cuban Fire! Breaks down this way:

FUEGO CUBANO (Cuban File) A commanding opening piece set against a bolero rhythm.

EL CONGO VALIENTE (Valiant Congo) An abierta, with exciting exchanges between the brass and rhythm.

RECUERDOS (Reminiscences) A slow, moody atmospheric creation, a guajira in rhythm.

QUIEN SABE (Who Knows) An attractive medium temp guaracha.

LA GUERA BAILA (The Fair One Dances) Afro rhythm, which Richards picked up observing dancers at weddings.

LA SUERTE DE LOS TONTOS (Fortune of Fools) This is a nanigo which continues the party atmosphere created in the previous title.

And in a fitting tribute to Stan Kenton’s always adventurous spirit, let’s close with this testimonial from George Gaber who played tympani on Cuban Fire! and who in 1960 went on to established the highly regarded percussion department at the University of Indiana School of Music:

“I played on Stan's Cuban Fire! album. Stan and I also met on campus when he had his jazz workshops back in the early '60s at Indiana University. It was at the jazz clinics that Johnny Richards suggested to Peter Erskine (later Stan's drummer) that he study with me. (Peter has gone on to the Maynard Ferguson band and to Weather Report.) Stan approved, and Peter followed me to summer clinics in Kentucky. Later, he came to study with me after he finished Interlochen High School.

From the first moment I played with Stan and what little I exchanged with him, I knew him as a true pioneer and champion of music making. The world knows of his innovations and popularity, but little of the man's true depth as a creator. In the development of art forms throughout history, there are various stages and periods of innovation. Kenton was a milestone. He can be counted as a pillar that helped support the arches of lesser lights.” [Dr. William Lee, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm, p. 219]

The following video montage features Johnny Richards "El Congo Valiente" as performed in concert by the Stan Kenton Orchestra, Balboa, CA, 9.2.1956 and set to the art of Wassily Kandinsky. Solos are by Lennie Niehaus, alto sax, Sam Noto, trumpet, Bill Perkins, tenor sax and Archie LeCoque, trombone.

“Armstrong was an artist who happened to be an entertainer, an entertainer who happened to be an artist—as much an original in one role as the other. He revolutionized music, but he also revolutionized expectations about what a performer could be. In the beginning, he was an inevitable spur for the ongoing American debate between high art and low. As his genius was accepted in classical circles around the world, a microcosm of the dispute took root in the jazz community, centered on his own behavior. Elitists who admired the musician capable of improvising solos of immortal splendor were embarrassed by the comic stage ham. …

To separate Armstrong the sublime trumpeter from Armstrong the irrepressible stage wag … underestimates the absurdist humor that informs his serious side. His ability to balance the emotional gravity of the artist with the communal good cheer of the entertainer helped enable him to demolish the Jim Crow/Zip Coon/Ol’ Dan Tucker stereotypes. In their place he installed the liberated black man, the pop performer as world-renowned artist who dressed stylishly, lived high, slapped palms with the Pope, and regularly passed through whites-only portals, leaving the doors open behind him. Americans loved Armstrong, and he counted on that love to do what only the greatest artists are prepared to do—show the world to itself in a new light. By the late 1940s, fashions changed and many blacks and not a few whites took offense at his clowning, equating it with racial servility. But an Uncle Tom, though he may stoop to conquer, consciously demeans himself. Armstrong would have considered ludicrous an attempt to equate his style of entertainment with self-abasement. He was as much himself rolling his eyes and mugging as he was playing the trumpet. His fans understood that, but intellectuals found the whole effect too damn complicated.”

- Gary Giddins, Satchmo, [pp. 32-34]

"You know you can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern.”

- Miles Davis

“The bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world?

We contributed Louis Armstrong.”

- Tony Bennett

“No him; no me.”

- Dizzy Gillespie

It’s been too long since there was a feature about Pops on these pages and when a friend shared the following piece with the editorial staff at JazzProfiles we thought we’d bring it to your attention as a way of remedying Louis’ absence from the blog.

The original essay contained many links which redirect the reader to more information about the points under discussion and we’ve kept these in the blog posting so you could have the benefit of them as well.

It’s nice to see the Armstrong Legacy being maintained by a current generation writer on the staff of one of the world's most distinguished newspapers.

But then, anytime you write about Louis you also make yourself look good.

Louis Armstrong’s Life in Letters, Music and Art: NYTimes 1.16.2018

By Giovanni Russonello

“Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era — the man whose earliest releases set the tune for America’s love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history’s most famous entertainers?

Those questions aren’t rhetorical. There’s actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them. For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of personal writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month, you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them. Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation— run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American — the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public.

Armstrong wrote hundreds of pages of memoir, commentary and jokes throughout his life, and sent thousands of letters. He made collages and scrapbooks by the score. Over the final two decades of his life, he recorded himself to reel-to-reel tapes constantly, capturing everything from casual conversations to the modern music he was listening to.

All told, Armstrong’s is not just one of the most well documented private lives of any American artist. It’s one of the most creatively documented lives, too.

“Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and make tapes and catalog everything,” said Ricky Riccardi, the director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and a noted Armstrong scholar. “He was just completely aware of his importance and wanting to be in control of his own story.”

And it wasn’t just posterity. The same things that drove him as a performer — faith in unfettered communication, an irreverent approach to the strictures of language, the desire to wrap all of American culture in his embrace — course through his writings, collages and home recordings.

Armstrong had been largely responsible for shaping jazz into the worldly, youth-driven music it became in the 1930s. He emerged as a symbol of racial pride, crossing Tin Pan Alley gentility with street patois, and sometimes singing directly about black frustrations. But as his career went on, his grinning stage persona — an expansion on the minstrel shows and New Orleans cabarets of his youth — fell out of step with most African-American listeners’ tastes. (“I loved the way Louis played trumpet, man, but I hated the way he had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks,” Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography.)

With jazz’s identity solidifying as an art music in the 1950s, Armstrong became especially unfashionable to the critical establishment. The autumnal hits he scored in the mid-1960s, “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World,” seemed only to confirm the media consensus that the times had passed him by.

But these archives contain the tools for a better understanding of Armstrong: as idiosyncratic an artist as any, one whose creative instincts only grew deeper and broader over time.

In part, we see a man attuned to race and politics, who took his role seriously as a global ambassador for American culture and kept a close eye on the achievements of fellow African-Americans. When he spoke out against school segregation in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, he surprised the nation. Some activists said it was too little, too late. The archive, however, shows that he considered it both a proud moment in his career and wholly of a piece with his life up to that point. In the collection is a telegram he wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower on the day Eisenhower announced he would be sending Army troops into Little Rock, urging him “to take those little Negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops.”

And as solicitous as he was, Armstrong was unwilling to let critical judgments define him. He kept a close eye on reviews, but he wrote acerbically about music critics and sometimes taped his interviews with them — perhaps for evidence, in case they misreported something. On one tape, from 1959, he barks at a journalist after being asked about changes afoot in jazz. “I just live what I play, and I can’t vouch for the other fellow. As long as I feel and hit the notes and I’ve got my own audience, then no critic in the world can tell me how I should play my horn,” he says.

Raised in New Orleans, Armstrong came to fame in his early 20s after joining King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago; his early recordings as a leader, with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, established jazz as a soloist’s music, and made him one of the first pop musicians of the radio era. By the 1940s and ’50s he was regularly included on lists of the most admired Americans.

Starting in his 20s, Armstrong frequently clipped newspaper articles about himself and bundled them into scrapbooks. The books began as a tool to convince club owners of his legitimacy, but they turned into a historical record. The dozens of scrapbook binders contained in the archive are a window into his self-image as a celebrity: Armstrong looking at us looking at him.

Armstrong began his career as an idol to many African-Americans. Watch the well-circulated video clip of him performing in Copenhagen in 1933— bountiful and aggressive as he scats over “Dinah,” then carves his way through “Tiger Rag” with a sweltering trumpet solo — and you’ll get why. But as time wore on, many younger people, particularly musicians of the bebop generation, expressed misgivings about his genuflecting stage persona.

Armstrong’s scrapbooks make it clear that he kept a close eye on how he was perceived, as an artist and as a black statesman. When he traveled to Baltimore in the winter of 1931, he donated 300 bags of coal to residents of a needy black neighborhood, and privately saved the news clipping from The Baltimore Afro-American. When his band was arrested in Arkansas simply for traveling in the same bus as its white manager, he saved the article reporting it.

And when a blatantly racist British critic referred to him as “Mr. Ugly” the following year (“He looks, and behaves, like an untrained gorilla,” the article read), Armstrong kept a copy of that too. Reading what arts journalism was like in the late ’20s and ’30s, it becomes obvious how narrow the berth was for a public figure like Armstrong to emerge onto the national stage.

Armstrong wrote constantly — mostly letters and short stories about his life, but also in the form of limericks and pages-long jokes. He wrote in a galloping, oddly punctuated style, treating literature almost as an outsider art. Commas turned into apostrophes; jive talk collided with standard English; words were underlined all over. His musical originality is matched on the page.

When Armstrong joined King Oliver’s famed band, he brought along a typewriter. By 1936, when he was in his mid-30s, he had already published an autobiography. Over the course of his career he wrote more than 10,000 letters to fans, hundreds of pages of personal memoirs and enough lengthy jokes to fill an entire book.

In 1969 and ’70, with his health failing, Armstrong set about writing a long essay about his relationship with the Karnofskys, a Jewish family in New Orleans. When he was 7, he worked as a servant in their house, and they recognized his musical talent early, advancing him a small amount of money to buy his first cornet.

In this essay, which stretches on for 77 pages, Armstrong enshrines a number of other elements of his personal mythology. He reports his birthday as July 4, 1900, an apocryphal but symbolic date he was fond of using. And he describes the importance of the Storyville neighborhood where he was raised, and where much of early jazz was developed.

Just months after he wrote this piece, he died in his sleep at age 69. This story would be collected in a posthumous book, “Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words,” that featured essays from across his career, many of which are included in the Armstrong archive in their original, handwritten form.

Armstrong’s creative hobbies outside writing were less easily wrangled for posterity or publication. One example: the hundreds of collages that he made over the course of his life, cutting out and combining photographs, illustrations and text.

Starting in the early 1950s, few pieces of paper were safe from the blade of Armstrong’s scissors: magazines, risqué photographs, even a Christmas card from Richard Nixon wound up cut and collaged. Most of the time, he taped his collages onto reel-to-reel tape boxes; they were purely decorative. Elsewhere, he turned larger pieces of paper into what amounted to a personal hall of fame.

In one such collage, he crammed a page with almost a dozen photos of Jackie Robinson. On another, Duke Ellington and Kermit Parker, the first black man to run for governor as a Democrat in Louisiana, gaze toward each other from across the page.

And on the collage above, a photograph of King Oliver is pasted inside an image of Armstrong’s head, as if to make clear how much Armstrong felt he owed to Oliver. To their left are two other trumpeters: Bix Beiderbecke, a prominent jazz star of the 1920s, and Bunny Berigan, who drew heavily from Armstrong’s influence, both as a trumpeter and a vocalist. Other musicians pictured include Duke Ellington, the R&B vocalist Ruth Brown, and Big Sid Catlett, an influential early drummer who played with Armstrong’s big band at the height of its popularity.

When Armstrong died in 1971, his wife, Lucille, ensured that the house they shared in Corona, Queens — the place where he recorded his tapes, made collages and wrote his manifold letters and notes — remained exactly as he had left it.

At first, Armstrong didn’t want the house. But Lucille bought it in 1943, the year after they married, while he was on a lengthy tour. He eventually fell in love with the narrow two-story brick home, and with the working-class block into which it was tucked. Armstrong — whose four marriages never resulted in a child — proudly became an avuncular presence on the block, and bragged in a 1971 manuscript that he had watched three generations grow up around him. Years later, when Lucille eventually wanted to upgrade, he insisted they stay. So she made improvements. The ornate, Fifth Avenue-rate bathroom is a prime example. And the “Throne,” as Armstrong called it in his writing, was of prime import.

Armstrong took health and diet very seriously, partly because of having been raised by a single mother who focused, for lack of a doctor, on keeping her children healthy with natural remedies. After Lucille introduced him to Swiss Kriss, an herbal laxative, he became a zealous proponent and offered his endorsement for free. The couple wrote a diet plan that called for regular consumption of Swiss Kriss, and they circulated it among friends and fans along with a comical photo of Armstrong seated on his decked-out Queens toilet, with his “Satchmo-Slogan” printed below: “Leave it All Behind Ya.”

Starting in December 1950, Armstrong used a tape recorder to capture casual conversations, ambient road hangouts, interviews with journalists, radio broadcasts he liked and more. Most often, though, he would simply record his shellac and vinyl discs to tape, consolidating the music and making it easier to carry. He kept careful documentation of the track lists, and together the tapes and their accompanying lists provide a revealing glimpse into his broad music tastes.

Ever the careful documenter, Armstrong wrote out a playlist anytime he recorded music to tape — whether it was a recording of his own concert, a dub of an entire album or a more piecemeal mixtape.

The range of his listening is striking. He was as likely to listen to the Beatles as he was to Rachmaninoff. On one playlist, the old vaudeville singer Al Jolson and Miles Davis butt up against each other. “The man was obsessed with all kinds of music,” Riccardi said. “Anywhere he’d go — if he’d go to South America, he’d bring back South-American records. If he went to Africa, he’d bring back African records. He’d go to record stores everywhere.”

On a disc marked “Reel 24,” he is listening mostly to the bebop musicians that had succeeded him in the jazz spotlight of the 1940s and ’50s. On the audio of the tape itself, you can hear him announcing the tunes like a radio D.J.

After that tape plays, Armstrong introduces another: a bootleg recording of a jam session at Minton’s, the venue where bebop was born. After he plays it, he expresses approval. “Cats jumpin’, man,” he says, apparently unperturbed by the beboppers’ sometimes-ambivalent relationship to his own legacy. Later on, he jumps to a track of his own, “Among My Souvenirs.” In the handwritten playlist, Armstrong closely notates each turn in the tape, including the moment when he pauses to mention the children playing outside.

These are the children that Armstrong said he was thinking of when he sang his most famous song, “What a Wonderful World.” Here we have their very voices, documented for all time.”

“Eddie Jefferson is a jazz singer — in the fullest sense of the words.

It is hoped that such an opening remark will not involve us in that age-old war waged over the question of exactly what is a jazz singer. It's an issue that gets writers endlessly tangled in definitions and explanations, with pitched battles involving the credentials of pop vocalists who on occasion are able to swing, the legitimacy of scat-singing, how many points are to be awarded for hitting a flatted fifth without sounding just plain flat, etc., etc. In this instance, however, then is no need for such carryings-on.

Eddie Jefferson is a jazz singer for the simple and conclusive reason that what he sings is jazz, firmly imbedded in modern music and fully equivalent to what a horn might seek to do with the same material.

Furthermore, although others (most notably Lambert, Hendricks and Ross) have in recent years done much with such things as the setting of lyrics to specific recorded jazz solos, all evidence indicates that Jefferson was the pioneer of the vocal technique he and others now employ.”

- Peter Drew, insert notes to Letter from Home: The Voice of Eddie Jefferson [Riverside RLP 9411, OJCCD 307-2]

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. Gordon 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 September 2018.

For more information and subscriptions please visit www.jazzjournal.co.uk

“Vocalese, not to be confused with scat singing is the art of adding words to the harmonic and rhythmic shifts of an improvised jazz solo and Eddie Jefferson was a pioneer of this particular musical form. We’re not talking Sondheim, Cole Porter or Oscar Hammerstein here but his hip, street-wise lyrics were perfect for the context in which he worked. He was born on the 3 August 1918 in Pittsburgh the hometown of Art Blakey, Earl Hines, Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal and Billy Eckstine among others. He played the tuba, guitar and drums but he made his show-business debut as a tap dancer at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. During the 30s in Pittsburgh he performed as a dancer and scat singer doing occasional Cab Calloway impressions with Art Blakey on piano. It was his friend Leo ‘Scat’ Watson - a big influence - who suggested the idea of adding words to instrumental solos. Eddie considered Watson to be “The greatest scat singer who ever lived” and Leonard Feather was similarly impressed calling him “The James Joyce of jazz”.

Count Basie’s Taxi War Dance was Eddie’s first attempt at vocalese but years later he told Feather, “I was a dancer in those days. I sang it for friends but nothing ever came of it and I don’t know what happened to the lyrics.” In 1939 he worked opposite Coleman Hawkins’ big band in Chicago after the great man’s return from Europe and Nat King Cole was the intermission pianist. During WW2 he played drums in the army band but little is known of his musical activities during the 40s although he did tour with Bob Crosby and the Bobcats and he appeared on the Sarah Vaughan radio show in 1950. It was not until 1952 that he really concentrated on singing.

It was his lyric for King Pleasure’s big hit Moody’s Mood For Love in 1952 which really put him on the map. James Moody had recorded the solo (based on the Dorothy Fields-Jimmy McHugh standard) in 1949 in Sweden using a borrowed alto from Lars Gullin. He turned in a gem of a performance in one take although it was his first recording on the instrument. Eddie loved the solo because in a little under three minutes “It told a story”. King Pleasure who was working as a waiter at the time heard him performing Moody’s Mood at the Cotton Club in Cincinnati where Eddie was appearing with Jack McDuff. On his return to New York Pleasure sang it at the Apollo Theatre Amateur Hour in 1951. He won the prize which led to his first recording and Moody’s Mood was named Record of the Year in 1953 by Down Beat magazine. He usually performed in clubs from a throne with a microphone attached but despite his initial success King Pleasure’s career was a brief one.

Years later Jefferson said, “He copped those lyrics but in a way it opened it up for me.” Talking about it in the New York Times Jon Hendricks said “It opened a whole new world for me. I was mesmerized…it was so hip”. Moody’s Mood For Love found favour with many non-jazz artists like Sheena Easton, Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah and Patti LaBelle who have all covered it over the years. The only time Pleasure, Jefferson and Hendricks recorded together was in 1954 when they performed Don’t Get Scared (aka Don’t Getz Scared) and I’m Gone.

Living in Cambria Heights in Queens he took a day job as a manager in a men’s clothing firm supplemented with occasional club dates. One night in 1953 when he was doing a dance act with Irv Taylor at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre he met James Moody. Babs Gonzales had been travelling with Moody as vocalist and band manager but he was leaving so the tenor-man offered the job to Jefferson. “I really dug what Eddie was doing” he said at the time. They stayed together until 1962 when Moody disbanded to join Dizzy Gillespie. In 1957 when they appeared at the Zebra Lounge in Los Angeles they worked there for a time with King Pleasure. The following year when Moody was briefly hospitalised in Overbrook, New Jersey, Jefferson sat in with Miles Davis at the Café Bohemia in New York. Miles was so impressed he apparently said to the club owner “Eddie’s gonna be part of the band. Put him on the payroll”.

In 1959 he recorded his celebrated Body And Soul with a lyric set to Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 masterpiece and the words make it clear just what Hawkins meant to him. During the 60s he and Moody often performed with Dinah Washington because they were all represented by the Billy Shaw Agency in New York. In a 1980 Coda interview Eddie said, “A couple of times our bass player was late and she would get on the bass and hold down the whole set. She also played piano and cello”. During his time with Moody the singer was featured on several albums performing Workshop, Disappointed, Birdland Story, Parker’s Mood, Summertime, Sister Sadie, Hey Herb! Where’s Alpert?, I Got The blues, I cover the Waterfront and Last Train From Overbrook. Each title is a fine example of his unique sound with its soulful and very earthy delivery.

Soon after James Moody went back to working with Dizzy In 1962 Eddie recorded with Johnny Griffin for Riverside but the 60s and the 70s were a difficult time for him and for jazz too. Moody’s decision to reform his group was celebrated with their well received 1968 Body And Soul album. Eddie featured some new material like Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, Psychedelic Sally (words by Horace Silver) and Filthy McNasty (words by Ira Gitler – which might be a first for him). He revisited Moody’s Mood For Love titled as There I Go, There I Go Again which is the first line of the lyric. Blossom Dearie performed the bridge on the King Pleasure hit but Eddie sings it in falsetto. So What features his lyric to Miles Davis’ famous Kind Of Blue solo which concerns itself with the trumpeter’s habit of leaving the stage when not performing. He also doffs his cap to Charlie Parker’s 1945 recording of Now’s The Time with lyrics to Parker’s three choruses and Miles’ two. It’s worth pointing out that the nineteen year old Miles Davis created an elegantly well-constructed statement that belied his tender years. In 1958 when Davis recorded Straight No Chaser with his sextet, Red Garland quoted this solo in its entirety during his turn at the solo mike. Lambert, Hendricks and Ross also recorded Now’s The Time with Hendricks’ lyrics and Annie Ross carried off Miles’ solo with remarkable aplomb.

He revisited Body And Soul on the album and when Manhattan Transfer recorded it in 1979 with Jefferson’s lyrics they added their own in the second chorus which became a tribute to Eddie who they said was “Twenty years ahead of his time” (Atlantic CD 7567-81565-2.) Just as an aside Manhattan Transfer’s 1985 Vocalese album which was a collaboration with Jon Hendricks is well worth tracking down. They bring their own special magic to numbers like Killer Joe, Airegin, Meet Benny Bailey, Night In Tunisia, Blee Blop Blues, Joy Spring and Move. The recording received an unprecedented twelve Grammy nominations with Dizzy Gillespie, Richie Cole and James Moody making guest appearances (Atlantic 7-81266-2).

In August 1970 he appeared at Chicago’s North Park Hotel at a Charlie Parker Memorial concert where he performed Now’s The Time and Parker’s Mood. Lee Konitz then joined him on Disappointed and Lady Be Good. A little later James Moody moved out to Las Vegas to work with the Hilton Hotel Orchestra and Eddie carried on working locally supplementing his income by driving a New York cab. In 1973 he and his wife Yvonne separated because of long-standing money problems although they remained on good terms. Around this time he joined forces with Billy Mitchell. The tenor-man had re-joined Count Basie in the late 60s and for a time had been musical director for Stevie Wonder. He told writer Leslie Gourse in her book (American Jazz Singers) that occasionally he repaired pool tables when work was scarce – “Eddie wasn’t depressed about driving a cab and I wasn’t depressed about pool tables but we weren’t jumping up and down about it. He was a very nice, quiet, upstanding man… he knew how hard it was to get a dollar and he was thrifty. We were going to start a band together the old fashioned way with uniforms.” One summer they taught a jazz course at Bennington College in Vermont and in 1974 they made their only album together with the optimistic title Things Are Getting Better. It included Thank You – an anthem to Eddie’s friends and influences like Hawkins, Moody, Herschel Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin and Gene Ammons. It also featured Joe Newman and the singer introduced some fresh material to his repertoire like Bitches Brew, Trane’s Blues and Freedom Jazz Dance.

A little late in the day he won the 1975 Downbeat Critics’ Poll as Talent Deserving Of Wider Recognition. That was also the year he sat in at a Greenwich Village club with the sensational, young bebop alto player Richie Cole. They were to have a long and productive relationship until Jefferson’s murder in 1979. They toured together and recorded no less than seven albums. One of the finest was their 1977 date – The Main Man – which also featured Charles Sullivan, Junior Cook, Hamiet Bluiett and Slide Hampton. The trombonist who wrote the arrangements told Leslie Gourse, “Instrumentalists generally liked to work with Eddie…he had the same kind of drive and rhythmic intensity”. Both those qualities are very much apparent on Jeannine and Night Train but the album highlight has to be Benny’s From Heaven which as the name implies is a hilarious send-up of Bing Crosby’s 1937 hit. A year earlier he had appeared on Chicago’s WTTW Public Television station on a celebration of Vocalese with Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross and Leon Thomas. The show was hosted by Ben Sidran and Eddie performed Freedom Jazz Dance and Moody’s Mood before joining Hendricks and Ross for Cloudburst.

In March 1979 he appeared with Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter at New York’s Carnegie Hall and with bookings lined up at the Monterey and Newport Jazz Festivals as well as some European summer concerts his career seemed to be on an upward trajectory at last. He was filmed along with Cole performing at Chicago’s Jazz Showcase on 6 May. The DVD – F for Films 2869003 - shows him commanding the stage in an exuberant set of staples like Night In Tunisia, I Got The Blues, How High The Moon and Summertime but it is yet to be released on CD. Three days later the group was booked into Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit and Eddie was shot and killed as he left the club around 1 a.m. The suspect who was known to him was arrested but later released. “The tragic part is that he was cut down when things were starting to happen for him” Bill Mitchell said at the time. Ironically Jefferson had been presented with the key to the city the previous year by Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor.

In 1980 Jon Henrdicks hosted a tribute to Eddie Jefferson at a packed Carnegie Hall titled There I Go, There I Go, There I Go which featured Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer, James Moody, Richie Cole, Dizzy Gillespie and the comedian Professor Irwin Corey.”

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

As leader

Eddie Jefferson: The Jazz Singer (Inner City 1016)

Eddie Jefferson: Body And Soul (Prestige OJCCD-396-2)

Eddie Jefferson: The Main Man (Inner City (IC 1033)

Eddie Jefferson: Letter from Home: The Voice of Eddie Jefferson[Riverside RLP 9411, OJCCD 307-2]

As Sideman

King Pleasure/Annie Ross Sings (Prestige OJCCD-217-2)

The Bebop Singers (Prestige (PRCD-224216-2)

James Moody: Hey! It’s James Moody (Lonehill Jazz LHJ 10195CD)

Richie Cole (Muse MCD 5207)

Chapter Seven

“The period when Basie was making records for Roulette found the band at its best. Just before the The Atomic Mr Basie album was made, Basie completed 13 weeks in the roof ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, another 'first,’ for his was the first big Negro band to play the Waldorf. And in November, 1957 he was chosen to play a Royal Command performance in London. It seemed that Basie was picking up honours in every direction and it is not surprising that his record company was anxious to use the band in some high-powered studio dates. Basie made LPs with Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett; (he made two with Bennett, due to a contractual arrangement between Roulette and Columbia, Bennett's record company). Pleasant though these pairings were, they tended to take the spotlight away from the band although one of the best, the first Frank Sinatra-Count Basie LP, was made immediately after the Roulette contract expired.

From October, 1962 up to May, 1966 Basie moved easily from the Reprise label to Verve and back again to Reprise. Norman Granz had sold his Verve catalogue to MGM in 1960 and therefore played no part in Basie's recordings during this period. The 'concept' album idea still prevailed with LPs being devoted to the work of individual arrangers or to tunes which had some other connexion. Neal Hefti wrote yet another album (On My Way And Shoutin' Again for Verve) and Quincy Jones wrote his second set for Basie Li’l Ol' Groovemaker... Basie also on Verve). There was also a preponderance of ephemeral or below standard LPs such as 'Basie's Beatles Bag’ and 'Basie Meets Bond' plus a number of albums based on the idea of popular hits played by the band. One curiosity on Verve, titled 'More Hits Of The 50's & 60’s’ and arranged by Billy Byers, comprised a dozen songs very closely associated with Frank Sinatra (in fact one of the tunes was co-authored by Sinatra) but with no reference to any relationship between the singer and the songs on the album sleeve. A frequent member of the brass section on record at this time was trombonist Urbie Green, although Green does not appear to have played other dates with the band.

Apart from the two Sinatra-Basie LPs for Reprise there were also Verve albums on which the band provided the accompaniment to singers Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis and Arthur Prysock. Compared with the Neal Hefti and Quincy Jones LPs from the period none of the Basie-plus-vocalists albums was particularly memorable. Away from the recording studio the band was to be found in settings previously denied to it. In his 'Encyclopedia Of Jazz In The Sixties' Leonard Feather noted that 'the band toured the British Isles and the European continent in '61 '62,'63 and '65 and enjoyed a triumphal tour of Japan in May-June, 1963. Basie made motion picture appearances in Sex and the Single Girl, Made in Paris and Cinderfella as well as TV guest shots with Fred Astaire, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Edie Adams, Garry Moore, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Ed Sullivan and the Bell Telephone Hour'. A number of Basie's most important sidemen and soloists had left the band to go their own way including Frank Wess (who had been switched to alto by Basie when Bill Graham was sacked), Thad Jones and Sonny Payne. On the plus side, Eric Dixon had come into the reed team playing a rich-toned, Lucky Thompson-like tenor plus excellent flute while Eddie Lockjaw Davis came and went a number of times. When he was in the band Eddie could always be relied upon to churn up the excitement without ever going too far into the realms of bad taste for Eddie was, and is, a master of brinkmanship.

Not surprisingly many critics express their dissatisfaction and concern about the band's music. Whitney Balliett called it Civil Service swing while John Hammond, who probably felt the change in direction more keenly than most, was obviously hurt by the turn of events.

But worse was to come. In 1966 Basie started recording on a nonexclusive or album-by-album basis and the results were often lacklustre, sometimes downright awful. MCA added a rock guitarist to the band, put pop singer Jackie Wilson in front and came up with an instantly forgettable album titled 'Two Much'. Around the same time the same company put out 'Basie's In The Bag’ which mixed current pop tunes (Hang on Sloopy, Green onions etc.) with titles such as Mercy, Mercy, Mercy and Let the good times roll. By comparison the 'concept' albums with self-explanatory names such as 'Broadway - Basie's Way' and 'Hollywood -Basie's Way' seemed to have deep musical significance. Singers of all types still seemed capable of getting Basie to agree to the making of an album, with the result that Kay Starr, the Mills Brothers, Teresa Brewer and the Alan Copeland Singers all appeared on LP with Count.

Some interesting soloists cropped up on record with the band at this time, and occasionally worked elsewhere with the band. Roy Eldridge, for example, was with the band from July to September, 1966 (long enough to play on some record dates) while Illinois Jacquet was added for the LP

of tunes from Half A Sixpence.

All was not gloom, although the mediocre outweighed the good. Dot, the company which had foisted the Mills Brothers onto Basie for two albums, had the good grace to produce two of Basie's best LPs from the second half of the Sixties and, in so doing, gave prominence to a previously unknown talent who was to play an important part on Basie's arranging staff for some years. This was Sammy Nestico, first cousin of Sal Nistico, the tenor saxist who played with Woody Herman and, later, Count Basie. Sammy Nestico was a trombonist and arranger who served a total of 20 years with the US Air Force and, later, the Marines. He had worked with the Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa bands before his friend Grover Mitchell, then working in Basie's trombone section, introduced him to the Count. Nestico started writing for Basie in 1968 and the Dot album Basie Straight Ahead was devoted entirely to new works all composed and arranged by Nestico. Sammy obviously grasped the band's strengths immediately and came up with scores which the men seemed to enjoy playing. Moreover, he had the ability to make the band sound the way that audiences identified with Basie. His writing was uncluttered and made equal use of the softer elements (including that million dollar reed section of Marshall Royal, Bobby Plater, Eric Dixon, Lockjaw Davis and Charlie Fowlkes) and the vital, hard-hitting brass.

On his first album Nestico came up with a number of very attractive originals, notably That warm feeling, cast in the same general mould as Hefti's Li'l darlin' and Quincy Jones's For Lena and Lennie. The fact that Basie used Nestico's works such as The magic flea, Straight ahead etc. in public was an obvious sign of the Count's approval. It was Dot which also sent producer Teddy Reig to Las Vegas in March, 1969 to record the band during their stay at the Tropicana Hotel. Again Reig, aided by engineer Wally Heider, captured the sound of the band to perfection, a band which had its solo strength bolstered by the presence of trumpeter Harry Edison heard here in fine form. The resultant LP, Standing Ovation, is one of the great Basie albums of the period and goes a long way towards making up for many previous ephemeral sets. Although there were, deliberately, no new works on the album, the band sounds as fresh as paint, charging through Broadway, Every tub, The Kid from Red Bank and Jumpin' at the Woodside as if to prove that the library never needed injections from stage musicals or films to make it sound new. As Leonard Feather wrote in his sleeve note: 'the lesson to be learned from a study of these sides is that Basie's hits of the '30s, '40s and '50s are as viable as ever as we near the end of the '60s. Playing for a hip and receptive audience (Buddy Rich and many of Splanky's old friends were on hand at the Tropicana), the band gave of itself as it always does when there is an occasion to rise to. Given the vast improvement in recording, the presence of such irresistible soloists as Sweets and Jaws, and the enthusiastic ambiance brought about by the situation in which these sides were taped, it is no wonder that Basie and his new legions have managed to prove here that Thomas Wolfe was wrong. Under the right conditions you can indeed go home again, and still have the time of your life'.

Two more albums from the period deserve mention. Bob Thiele produced an unusual LP, not wholly successful, but certainly worthy of any Basie collection. Titled Afrique it brought together the Count and arranger Oliver Nelson for a programme of new music, new to Basie that is. Apart from Hobo flats and Step right up, both of which Nelson had written originally for an LP by organist Jimmy Smith, there were tunes by avant garde saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders. Nelson, an outstanding alto and tenor soloist who made a number of records with Eric Dolphy before he turned to arranging in Hollywood, is the featured alto on Ayler's Love flower, a ballad of rare and compelling beauty. Hobo flats has Buddy Lucas added on harmonica making it a blues which is even earthier than Basie at his most Basie; other tracks have additional percussionists added and although the album, at first sight, may not appear too hopeful it is, nevertheless, an important album as an indication of what the band could achieve in a new direction.

Basie himself was pleased with the result although, with his natural modesty, he tried to place the credit elsewhere. He told John McDonough in Down Beat magazine: 'The idea was really Bob Thiele's. He thought we ought to do some of this stuff ‘cause we hadn't before. He worked the project out with Oliver Nelson. It was really Oliver's record, you know. But I liked it. He did some wonderful things which we still play. Wanted to do another LP along that line, but something happened. Sure it's different, but I'm perfectly comfortable with it. I like it. A lot of people like it. That's what's most important. Why do people hire me? For what I'm tagged for. But a little flavour of something else won't hurt. It's not ever going to dominate our programme, but it'll always be there to some extent'.

The other album to mention represents the opposite end of the spectrum and is generally disregarded by the critics. Have A Nice Day, made for the Daybreak label in the summer of 1971 comprises eleven compositions and arrangements by Sammy Nestico. 'Sammy' says Basie on the sleeve 'has a sensitivity, a feel, for our concept that few others have. The thing about him is his feel for the contemporary, the modern. Yet he gets that good, simple, understandable feel of our band as it was when we were first getting started and featuring things like Every tub, Doggin' around and Sent for you yesterday. An amazing guy!'

No barriers are broken here but it is a richly satisfying set which consolidates a lot of the previous work, especially the influences of Neal Hefti and Quincy Jones on the arranging staff. A further plus is the quite superlative recording quality which gives the instruments their correct separation; every strummed chord from Freddie Green comes across with clarity as do the vocalised plunger-muted solos from trombonist Al Grey, one of the most individual and important soloists over the years. And if you want to hear what set Basie's band apart from every other, listen to the superb timekeeping on Jamie., a performance which moves sedately along at a shade under eighteen bars per minute.

Away from the recording studios Basie literally embarked on a new venture at the beginning of 1970 when he started a number of annual cruises on the QE2 and also took part in a Caribbean cruise aboard the Rotterdam at the end of 1974. This took place shortly after his 70th birthday which was celebrated in style with a banquet at New York's Waldorf-Astoria.

At the end of 1973 he commenced recording again for Norman Granz, who was now running the Pablo label, and this arrangement was to continue until Count's death more than a decade later. Granz had little time for adding unsuitable vocalists or placing the band in a role which made them subservient to a 'concept' programme. He did, however, have an aversion to Freddie Green's rhythm guitar away from the big band setting and the very first dates for Pablo were jam sessions (at which Irving Ashby took Freddie's place) and a trio set with just Basie, Ray Brown and Louie Bellson. Called 'For The First Time' it was just that, for Basie had never previously recorded in a guitarless trio setting. "That was Norm's idea,’ Basie told John McDonough in 1975. 'You know it wasn't mine. But it was real fun. In fact we've just finished another trio session with my bass player, Norm Keenan, and Louie Bellson, but this time we added Zoot Sims. It's mostly blues and some other things. Norman Granz is a blues man you know. I guess he didn't want a guitar. For myself, Freddie Green definitely fills out a rhythm section. But there are times we want to play around a little and get loose. Fred keeps you in there, you know- pretty strict'. (Incidentally either Basie's memory was at fault or Granz's information is incorrect; the sleeve of the Pablo Count Basie/Zoot Sims LP lists John Heard as the bass player.)

Norman Granz certainly gave us more of Basie's own playing on record than any previous producer; somehow he found the key which unlocked the Count's aversion to featuring himself. On a number of occasions he teamed Basie with Oscar Peterson and, on the face of it, it would be difficult to imagine two more disparate keyboard players for Basie's style utilised only the notes that actually mattered while Peterson has the greatest command of the piano, in technical terms, since Art Tatum. Yet the duets are brilliant with neither getting in the other's way. Two-piano records are often disappointing but the Peterson-Basie duets are gems of a different kind.

Granz also assembled a number of small bands around Basie both in the studio and on the concert platform at various jazz festivals. Typical of the latter is the recording of the spontaneous Trio blues (with Ray Brown and drummer Jimmie Smith) at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival. This innocuous performance starts quietly then builds in intensity until the crowd is applauding in time with the music. As if to ensure that the musicians maintain the upper hand Count breaks into some excellent stride piano, full of syncopation, and the ragged attempts by the audience to join in drop away, much to everyone's amusement.

But after the end of 1976 every performance by Basie was a bonus for the jazz world. He suffered a heart attack in September and while Nat Pierce took over the keyboard and Clark Terry was brought in to front the band in Basie's absence, there were many who wondered if the Count would be seen again as part of the world's most swinging orchestra.”

Here’s another of our features based around favorite recordings, this time focusing on trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s Afro Cuban album for Blue Note which has been reissued on CD as CDP 7 46815 2.

Leonard Feather, the distinguished Jazz critic, producer and author of The Encyclopedia of Jazz, wrote the following insert notes Afro Cuban, Kenny’s first session for Blue Note as a leader

“THE contents of this LP provide a revealing dual portrait of Kenny Dorham. One side of him, the side with the Afro-Cuban leanings, can be observed in the first four tunes, featuring an eight-piece band, previously released on a 10" LP. The other side, both of Kenny and of the record, can be observed in the last three tunes, which were recorded with a quintet and have never previously been released.

It has taken McKinley Howard Dorham quite a few years to earn the recognition that should have been his during the middle 1940s. For a long time, during the halcyon era of the bop movement, Kenny was Mr, Available for every trumpet choir in every band and combo. If Dizzy wasn't around and Howard McGhee was out of town, there was always Kenny. And so it went from abou! 1945 to '51, always in the shadow of those who had been first to establish themselves in the vanguard of the new jazz.

Slowly, in the past few years, Kenny has emerged from behind this bop bushel to show the individual qualities (hot were ultimately to mark him for independent honors. Numerous chores as a sideman on record dates for various small companies led to his inclusion in the important Horace Silver Quintet dotes for Blue Note (BLP 1518), and, as a result of his fine work on these occasions, to the signing of a Blue Note contract and his first date for this label as a combo leader on his own.

If the Kenny Dorham Story were ever made into a movie (and the way things are going in Hollywood at the moment, don't let anything surprise you) it would begin on a ranch near Fairfield, Texas on August 30,1924. The actor playing Kenny as a child would be shown listening to his mother and sister playing the piano and his father strumming blues on the guitar.

Then there would be the high school scenes in Austin, Texas, with Kenny taking up piano and trumpet but spending much of his time on the school boxing team; and later the sojourn at Wiley College, where he played in the band with Wild Bill Davis as well as majoring in chemistry. In his spare time Kenny would be seen making his first stabs at composing and arranging.

After almost a year in the Army (during which his pugilistic prowess came to the fore on the Army boxing team) Kenny went back 1o Texas, joining Russell Jacquet's band in Houston late in 1943 and spending much of 1944 with the bond of Frank Humphries.

From 1945 to '48 Kenny was on the road with several big bands, including those of Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Lionel Hampton and Mercer Ellington in that order. Then he spent the best part of two years playing clubs as part of the Charlie Parker Quintet. Lurking on the edge of the limelight occupied by the immortal Bird, he began to lure a little individual attention as something more than the section man and occasional soloist he had been for so long. One of his important breaks was a trip to Paris with Bird in 1949 to take part in the Jazz Festival.

Settling permanently in New York, Kenny became a freelance musician whose services alongside such notabilities as Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams gradually impressed his name and style on jazz audiences.

During 1954-5 Kenny worked most frequently around the east with a combo that constitutes the nucleus of the outfit heard on these sides - Hank Mobley, Horace Silver and Art Blakey.

Mobley is an Eastman, Georgia product, born there in 1930 but raised in New Jersey. Making his start with Paul Gayten in 1950, he rose to prominence with Max Roach's combos off and on from 1951 -53 and with Dizzy in '54.

Mobley as well as Silver and Blakey are of course familiar figures at Blue Note, abundantly represented in the catalogue through their sessions with the Jazz Messengers (1507,1508,1518). Horace and Art are also on such other sessions as the Horace Silver trio (1520) and A Night At Birdland (1521,1522).

Jay Jay Johnson, whose eminence was saluted on 1505 and 1506, was recently elected the "Greatest Ever" by a jury of 100 of his peers in the Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz "Musicians' Musicians" poll.

Cecil McKenzie Payne, a baritone sax man with a long and distinguished record in modern jazz circles, is a 34-year-old Brooklynite whose career as a bopper began right after his release from the Army in 1946 and took him through the U.S. and Europe with Dizzy Gillespie until '49, when he began freelancing in New York with Tadd Dameron, James Moody and Illinois Jacquet.

Carlos "Potato" Valdes, the conga drummer; come over from Cuba a couple of years ago. It was Gillespie who first told Kenny Dorham about him and "Little Benny" Harris who dug him up and brought him to Kenny's rehearsal. "He gassed them all," recalls Alfred Lion succinctly.

Completing the octet, Oscar Pettiford provides the indomitable boss sound that won him the Esquire Gold Award in 1944 and '45 and the Down Seat Critics' poll in 1953.

For the four tunes with the Afro-Cuban rhythm motif, Kenny says, "I tried to write everything so that the rhythm would be useful throughout and would never get in the way." As a consequence, the Cuban touch sounds as if it is a part of the whole, rather than something that has been superimposed on a jazz scene, as is sometimes the case.

Afrodisia is a title that has been used before, but this is a new composition. The theme and interpretation recall somewhat the Gillespie approach to material of this type. Like the patriot who is plus royaliste que le roi, Kenny and his cohorts achieve a more interesting and more Cuban atmosphere here than you will hear on many performances emanating direct from Havana. The "Potato" is really cooking on this one.

Lotus Flower, after Horace's attractive intro, shows how the Cuban percussion idea can be applied effectively to a slow, pretty melody. Jay Jay's solo, though short, has a melancholy quality that compliments the mood set by Kenny's delicately phrased work here.

Minor's Holiday didn't get that title only because of its minor key; it was also named for Minor Robinson, a trumpet player in New Haven. A mood-setting rising phrase characterizes the opening chorus, leading into a loosely swinging, pinpoint-toned trumpet solo that shows, like all his work on this date, the high degree of individuality Kenny has achieved. Mobley and Jay Jay also have superior solos.

The session ends with an original commissioned by Kenny from Gigi Gryce, the talented ex-Hampton reedman. Basheer's Dream has a minor mood of singular intensity sustained by Kenny, Hank and Jay Jay, with Valdes and Blakey allied as a potent percussion team and Horace, the Connecticut Cuban, contributing some discreet punctuations.

The reverse side features four of the principal protagonists from the Afro-Cuban dale — Dorham, Mobley, Payne and Blakey - with Percy Heath of Modern Jazz Quartet fame replacing Pettiford. The session opens with K. D.'s Motion, a medium-paced blues, partly in unison and portly voiced. After an eight-measure bridge, Kenny dives into four choruses of fluent ab libbing. The blues being at once the lowest and highest common denominator of oil true jazzmen, Kenny is greatly at ease here, the solo offering a first-rate sample of his ideation and continuity. Payne, Mobley and Silver also cook freely before the theme returns at the end of this effective five-minute exploration of the 12-bar tradition.

The Villa, another Dorham original like all the music on these sides, is a melodic theme that could make a good pop song, though at this fast tempo it serves as a fine framework for trumpet, tenor and baritone solos, with Horace comping enthusiastically like a coach urging his team on from the sidelines. Kenny and Art trade fours for 24 measures before the ensemble returns.

Venita's Dance is a rhythmic yet somehow reflective and wistful theme, taken at a medium pace. Kenny's solo, constructed mostly in downward phrases, maintains the mood established in the opening chorus, after which Mobley's virile, assertive tone and style are in evidence, followed by excellent samples of Payne and Silver.

Whichever side of Kenny Dorham intrigues you most, whether you dig him particularly as composer or trumpeter, Afro-Cuban specialist or mainstream jazzman, most of what you will hear on this disc will offer a high protein diet of musical satisfaction.”

The CD’s producer Michael Cuscuna added this postscript about its two additional tracks:

“K.D’s Cob Ride was an unfitted composition that first came out in Japan in the early 80's in a boxed set anthology entitled The Other Side Of the 1500 Series. We titled it as such because Hank Mobley confirmed that it was a Kenny Dorham composition and was the sort of tune that he might write in the cab on the way to a record date. It has since come to light that Kenny had already titled this piece "Echo of Spring" The alternate take of "Minors Holiday" preceded the master take in recording order and was marked on the session logs as being equal to the master take.”

You can check out Afrodisia, the opening track ofAfro Cuban, on the following video montage.

Thanks to a Jazz mate in New Zealand, this second, rare article on Hank Mobley by Michael James from the short-lived Jazz Monthly magazine is now available as part of our ongoing series about Hank and his music.

Michael James wrote the annotation about Hank Mobley that appears in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, editor, in which he references in the bibliography two articles that he wrote about Hank for Jazz Monthly; one in 1961 and another in 1962.

Along with the recent published on the blog of Simon Spillett pieces -”Hank Mobley’s recordings with Miles Davis - UPDATED” and “Looking East: Hank Mobley in Europe 1968-1970,” the John Litweiler interview that appeared in Downbeat in 1973, Bob Blumenthal’s booklet notes to the Mosaic Records box set of Hank’s 1950s Blue Note recordings and Derek Ansell’s book Workout: The Music of Hank Mobley which was published by Northway in 2008, the two Jazz Monthly essays by James are the most extensive writings ever done about Hank’s career, especially its early years.

Of course, there’s a whole host of sleeve or insert notes to the 26 LPs that Hank recorded for Blue Note and we’ll be presenting separately from the body of article on Hank in the Jazz literature.

Yet, sadly, the James articles are virtually unknown [let alone virtually impossible to find].

For my taste, Michael’s style of writing is a bit too complicated and convoluted in places, but I doubt you’ll find a more thorough and exacting description of Hank Mobley’s style, both improvisationally and compositionally, in any other source on Hank [meager though they are].

Here is the second of Michael’s pieces on Hank which appeared in Jazz Monthly, viii/10, 1962. The paragraphing has been modified to make it easier to read in a blog format.

Only since, 1958 or thereabouts has Hank Mobley been a really consistent player. Before that he could not always be counted on to turn in performances of a high order. This weakness derived not so much from lack of imaginativeness as from an intermittent failure properly to translate into musical terms the intricacies of the ideas that entered his mind. It may be that the light tone he favoured at that time, a tone which reminds one of Ihe Stan Gelz of 1950 more readily than of any other saxophonist, aggravated the problem of executing rhythmically complex phrases with the necessary precision; and it is probably no coincidence that since 1958 the sound he has produced has been firmer texture than it usually was before. However, there are several albums from this earlier phase of his career that do contain some really brilliant tenor playing; and at least one wherein he maintains a musical level akin to that of his more recent work.

This record, entitled quite simply Hank Mobley, and released in the United States (though not, as yet, in Britain) as Blue Note BLP 1568 has further attractions in that it finds Mobley supported by a cast whose quality is as undeniable to this observer as its reputation amongst the more conservative critics wait, and in some cases still is highly dubious. For the purposes of the session, which was held on June 3rd, 1957. Mobley chose Art Blakey's current trumpeter, Bill Hardman. and Charles Mingus's alto and tenor saxophonist. Curtis Porter, now better known as Shafi Hadi, to complete the front line; whilst the rhythm section was made up of Sonny Clark on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and the ubiquitous Art Taylor ai the drums. The material was obviously selected with the same eye for variety comprising as it does three original themes, two from Porter's pen and one by the leader: an engaging but not overworked evergreen, Falling in Love With Love; and a virtual classic of the modern jazz repertoire. Milt Jackson's Bag’s Groove. It is a safe bet that not many record companies would have been prepared to chance their arm with so evidently uncommercial a choice of tunes and personnel, and a portion of the credit for the date's artistic success must go to the Blue Note directors themselves, whose sensitive handling of musicians —witness Max Harrison's recent remark apropos of a Bud Powell release - has paid rich dividends on other occasions.

Mighty Moe and Joe, the opening tune, was written by Porter. In his helpful sleeve note Ira Gitler explains that this composition is dedicated both to bassist Ollie Mohammed and to tenor player Joe Alexander, whose robust work was so agreeable a feature of Tadd Dameron's Fontainebleau album. The first and third eights are couched in question-and-answer form with the other two horns replying to Porter's urgent alto figures. The piece also composes an opening vamp played by the horns and an eight-bar bridge passage which leads into the first solo, taken by Porter. His alto playing is distinguished by a remarkable variety of melodic shapes, the attack of a whiplash, and a tonal command whose virtuosity very nearly rivals Dizzy Gillespie's. Some notes he invests with a fast, plaintive vibrato: others, with a hoarseness which in the context emerges as the very acme of ferocity; whilst others still he plays with a hard, clean sound as if to intensify the effect of those that are coloured or distorted in any way. His style, in fact, is an original one, though evolved, broadly speaking, within the Parker tradition.

Bill Hardman, who follows him, is an individualist of the same stamp. Having dealt with his work at some length in the December 1961 issue of this magazine, I shall not go into detail here, except to mention his liking for multi-noted phrases that often start with a flourish in the high register before cascading downward through the range; his obstinately asymmetrical approach: and his use of a thin, brassy tone which, supplemented by the slurs and inflections that also characterise his style, makes for an atmosphere of nervous violence.

Hank Mobley takes over from the trumpeter so confidently that one feels sure he will play well throughout the record, and this impression, I hasten to add. is fulfilled to the letter. His solo evokes in a more logical way than Hardman's, and is also a shade better constructed than Porter's. His melodies move across and over the beat with great freedom, yet never sound gauche or rhythmically spineless, and his tone and execution contrast effectively with Porter's clipped, astringent attack.

Sonny Clark, the next soloist, programmes his improvisation intelligently. Starting with fragmented phrases that suggest he may have been affected by Silver's conception at that time, he very soon resolves the tension thus created with a succession of longer figures more reminiscent of his present keyboard approach. As always, his solo here benefits from that unforced, seemingly natural swing that he has possessed ever since be made his first records. A bowed passage by Chambers leads back into the theme and the track closes with a repetition of the bridge section which preceded Porter's opening solo and of the vamp that served as an introduction. The fade-out ending, which seems to me unjustified, is fortunately the only instance of its kind in the album.

Not unnaturally with musicians of this calibre, the various soloists do not change their basic conceptions to any marked degree in the other pieces; so rather than subject each track to the same sort of examination as I have accorded Mighty Moe and Joe, I shall ask the reader to assume that, unless otherwise stated, the members of the group function in a similar way and at a similar level, and shall limit myself to picking out the highlights.

News, Porter's other contribution to the repertoire employed at this session, is certainly one of these. I think it its best described as a personal and very successful adaptation of Tadd Dameron's compositional method. Porter achieves the same sort of flexible melodic line m the main eights, a line that splits at times to give the piece a slight contrapuntal flavour, but which makes its impact chiefly through the richness of the trumpet-led voicings: and the release, too, recalls Dameron, comprising as it does a rhythmically contrasting section set over a Latin beat. Although this composition in less personal than the other one Porter contribute to the date, the craftsmanship of which it clearly speaks affords us a more exact notion of his potential as a writer. To leave News without mentioning Mobley's solo would be an injustice. His phrases grow more and more complex in shape until at the end of the first eight of the second chorus he resorts to some well-executed double-timing. At this point it seems that he is about to lose all sense of structural compactness, but he rescues the situation halfway through the release, and his last twelve bars, less prolix and tied more closely to the beat, imbue the whole improvisation with a unity of purpose that is paradoxically the more striking for its having tottered for a while, as it were, on the brink of incoherence. In this connexion credit must also be given to Art Taylor, whose accompaniment to the tenor solo connotes a deep understanding of Mobley's style.

In his written work Mobley has never been compromised by the uncertainty which marred certain of his earlier solos, and has often dealt in shapes that are sparer in outline if just as free of the beat. This is very much the case with Double Exposure, for each of its three main eight-bar constituents ends with a descending phrase comprising three groups of two notes each. Also of interest is the introduction, which comprises a written figure for the horns followed by a drum break, reversed, this introduction acts as a bridge between the theme statement and the solo sections, and minus the drum break is also pressed into service as a coda. Everyone except Paul Chambers is featured in this piece, even Art Taylor taking a solo chorus.

Particularly well worth noting is the two-chorus chase between the tenor players. It was a wise decision, I think, to have them share sections of eight bars rather than of the more customary four, because both like to indulge in fairly long runs. Mobley leads off this series of exchanges and to my mind emerges as slightly the more polished and inventive artist, though the emphasis is not so much on rivalry as on musical contrast. The third of his breaks, which consists of an intricate yet graceful molif that rises by degrees out of the lower register, is especially arresting.

Although Mighty Moe and Joe of is taken at a livelier pace than the other pieces so far dealt with, all three are set in a fairly bright tempo range. This is not the case with Bag’s Groove, even though the band's interpretation of it is faster than the original Miles Davis recording. My first impression on hearing this track was that the slight increase in tempo was an error of taste, but I have now come to accept this difference and feel that I was perhaps prejudiced by my great affection for the Davis version, and have also grown more partial to the piano figures with which Clark answers each of the three identical phrases that make up this simple yet highly evocative blues composition. The mood established by the soloists is less exuberant than in the three originals, and all, including Paul Chambers, who contributes two plucked choruses, reach a high creative standard in this most revealing of jazz forms. Particularly affecting is Hardman's exceptionally sober improvisation. Over the course of his three choruses he builds up the tension with extended phrases. that reveal a harmonic conception which is free but by no means wilfully eccentric, and then releases this tension at the close with a characteristically drawn-out motif. A curious point about this passage. and one that probably helps explain its insidious effect is that in contrast with conventional methods, the trumpeter plays more softly as it moves toward its climax.

Falling in Love With Love, which has Porter playing alto, as in the opening selection, is taken at the kind of ambling pace which best brings out its wistful charm. Hardman, working over the rhythm section's relaxed beat opens with a highly personal reading of the melody, similar to the treatment he was later to accord Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise in Lou Donaldson's Sunny Side Up album. Obviously inspired by the trumpeter's incisive statement of the theme. Mobley takes over from him to construct an essentially romantic variation on its melody, and then, after choruses by Porter and Clark, returns to like vein to bring the performance to its close. His work here, distinguished by acute melodic sensitivity and a tonal command that is all the more impressive in view of the leisurely tempo and the sustaining of notes it induces, seems to me the artistic peak of the album, and serves. incidentally, to remind us of the emotional breadth of Mobley's talent.

Any musician who can interpret a ballad with the finesse of a Stan Getz — and this is no casual comparison — and then, only three years or so later, delineate, in his solo in on Roll Call, a state of mind that can only be termed the epitome of aggressiveness, is clearly possessed of extraordinary potential. Bearing this in mind, it seems lively that although he has already matured as a consistently engaging player, his expressive powers will continue to broaden as the years go by. The thought that one is privileged meanwhile to follow the unfolding of such talent makes listening to records like this still more enjoyable.”

"'I don't think that a band can really swing on just a kick-off, you know; I think you've got to set the tempo first. If you can do it the other way, that's something else. Anyway, we do it our way; I set it with Freddie, sometimes for a couple of choruses. That's it, see. We fool with it and we know we've got it, like now'. The simplicity of the statement is typical of the Basie philosophy over the years but so many others have tried and failed; they have found that 'simple is difficult'. The creation of a floating beat, a four-man rhythm section which thinks, breathes and plays as one, is something which has eluded many, even the Basie band itself when Count was absent."

All good things come to an end and such is the case with this wonderful tour of Basieland from the pen of Alun Morgan whose treatment of his subject contains more than a modicum of reverence and respect.

Chapter Eight

The show must go on and show business people are endowed with supernatural powers at moments of crisis. Count Basie came back to work after his heart attack and although he may have slowed down, this was certainly not apparent to those who heard the band after Nat Pierce and Clark Terry relinquished the joint leadership role. In january, 1977, three months after the tragedy, Basie was back in the studio for the recording of the Prime Time album, another of Sammy Nestico's sets of arrangements. (Nat Pierce was on hand for the three dates which went into the making of the LP and Basie had him take over the piano bench on Ya gotta try. 'I feel very privileged to be Basie's Number One substitute pianist' Pierce told Stanley Dance. 'That's what he told me I was.’ Pierce played piano on a number of Basie recordings, usually uncredited; he remembers There are such things from the album with Sarah Vaughan and Tell me your troubles with Joe Williams.

In Las Vegas the following month Basie got together with Dizzy Gillespie on an album which found the two principals exploring a surprisingly large tract of common ground. And then there was the eternal round of the international jazz festivals with Count playing a very large part at Montreux, both with the full band and at jam sessions. The orchestra now had a new and driving drummer in Butch Miles and an eclectic but commanding tenor soloist in Jimmy Forrest. Forrest could bring an audience to its feet with his quote-filled version of Body and Soul. Metronome magazine was proved right; the Basie band never again spawned soloists of the calibre found at the Reno Club or the Roseland Ballroom. At the same time it had to be recognised that the band was playing an entirely different set of venues to audiences who were content simply to see a world famous leader and his well-drilled, efficient band in the flesh.

This was to become the pattern until the end with the difference that Basie's failing health kept him away from work more than at any time in the past. Yet he struggled manfully to take his place in the rhythm section as much as possible. As Chris Sheridan wrote in his uncredited obituary in Jazz Journal,'the band held together doggedly through Basie's latter-day periods of convalescence, even when, in the last few years, Basie himself was needing six weeks rest for every four on the road. He fought off a heart attack, pneumonia and, latterly arthritis to continue his musical life'. When he came to Britain for the last time, in September 1982, he came riding on stage in a motorised wheelchair equipped with a special hooter to announce his arrival.

He looked for, and found, the easy way much of the time but, thanks to Norman Granz, we have some exceptional examples of his piano playing both in solo and as an accompanist. On the Basie/Zoot Sims album, for example, there is an animated and two-handed solo on Honeysuckle rose following the tenor choruses, as if Count wanted to play his own personal tribute to composer Fats Waller. And in a Las Vegas recording studio on November 1,1981 Norman Granz put Basie at the keyboard with his so-called Kansas City Six to make music as blues-filled and as timeless as anything he had ever done before. With trumpeter Willie Cook, alto saxist Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson, guitarist Joe Pass, bass player Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen and drummer Louie Bellson the clock was wound back to the halcyon days for 40 minutes of superb music.

Basie was the last of the great piano-playing band leaders, outliving Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson, Claude Hopkins and the rest. He would probably not have put himself in that category for modesty was an omnipresent characteristic of this man. Yet he probably achieved more than any of the others as an influence. He showed what could be done with a big band in terms of keeping the dancers happy while still providing musical interest for the dedicated jazz lovers. His timekeeping was impeccable and the very mention of his name in a description of someone else's musical style immediately implants an accurate idea in the mind.

Some stock arrangements for big bands are still marked 'Basie style' or 'Basie tempo' as a guide to budding musicians anxious to learn the finer points of orchestral jazz. Some of his best performances were heard live, or at least as recordings of a concert event, for they enabled Basie the luxury of getting the tempo right over a series of opening choruses by just the rhythm section. A lasting favourite was I needs to be bee'd with written in 1958 by Quincy Jones for the Basie-One More Time album on Roulette. The original studio version opens with a brass shout before leading into one piano chorus which acts as a prelude to Al Grey's solo. A number of ‘live' versions, both on record and video, made over the ensuing years, open with as many as nine choruses of rhythm section only before the band makes its appearance. Bill Coss described the way Count eases the band into a performance: 'you'll often see and hear Freddie and the Count playing introductions which may be several choruses long, changing tempos, checking with each other, finding the groove which pleases them most, (Basie smiling with evident glee and Freddie nodding with sophisticated satisfaction when they reach that point), then the Count's right foot, which is most often wound around the chair until then, kicks out, there is a sound of command and the band is unleashed in all its fury'.

Basie himself was probably thinking of the time-restrictions of record-making when he spoke of getting started; 'I don't think that a band can really swing on just a kick-off, you know; I think you've got to set the tempo first. If you can do it the other way, that's something else. Anyway, we do it our way; I set it with Freddie, sometimes for a couple of choruses. That's it, see. We fool with it and we know we've got it, like now'. The simplicity of the statement is typical of the Basie philosophy over the years but so many others have tried and failed; they have found that 'simple is difficult'. The creation of a floating beat, a four-man rhythm section which thinks, breathes and plays as one, is something which has eluded many, even the Basie band itself when Count was absent.

Johnny Mandel tells the story about listening to the Basie band rehearse one afternoon while the Count wandered about the empty nightclub, paying no attention to his band or its playing. The musicians were obviously uncomfortable and they practically forced him to the piano. Suddenly the band smashed right and left as it had not done earlier. That was no reflection on the other three members of the rhythm section. The Basie magic was hard to explain.

Harder to explain was the Count himself for he allowed very few people ever to get close to him. 'No member of the jazz pantheon smiles so much and says so little as Count Basie' wrote Nat Hentoff in 1962. '"Except for Freddie Green nobody really knows Bill" says a veteran member of the band. "He keeps in most of what he feels, and the face he presents to the public is usually the one we see too. Once in a great while he'll explode or do something else that isn't in keeping with the usual picture of him, but he quickly picks up his customary role. And from time to time, we'll see Freddie Green lecturing him off to one side- never the other way around. But I don't know what those conversations are about"'. Basie as leader was unlike any of his contemporaries. For years he travelled in the band bus with everyone else, unlike Duke Ellington, who always travelled in Harry Carney's car or some bandleaders who drove their cars a mile or so behind the band bus to ensure there was no stopping en route. Count fostered the happy family atmosphere, a rare commodity in a touring band with all the pressures that that throws up.

When his fortunes improved Basie invested money in a 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue club named after him. He also bought a house in St. Albans, Long Island, which became home for his wife, Catherine, and their daughter Diane. On the few occasions he was at home he relaxed in front of the television set or operated his model railway layout down in the basement. In an obviously ghosted article in 1955 Down Beat he wrote 'Not too long ago there was a real "crazy" dog in our household with a pedigree a mile long and natch we called him "One O'Clock Jump". All house broken and lovable, he was a nice little fella, but we had to get rid of him because he just couldn't get used to the two-legged man of the house, namely me. You see, in the past so many years I just haven't been around home long enough for him to dig me. You know, that darn "mutt" wouldn't let me get past the first crack in the door. But don't get me wrong, I love the road. It may be a little tough on my wife and kid, never seeing their father and husband until Birdland time comes around, but it has and will remain a great thrill and challenge to me'. Like many others, Basie had been around so long that he could not envisage a time when he would fail to answer the band call.

His wife, Catherine, first met Bill Basie when he was touring with the Bennie Moten band. She was one of the dancing Whitman Sisters (although her maiden name was Morgan). They were married for more than forty years and her death, in April, 1983, was a severe blow at a time when Count's own health was at a low ebb. He looked for, and sometimes found, solace and companionship on the bandstand where the roar of the crowd provided a satisfaction equal to none.

We are fortunate that Basie left a huge legacy of recorded work and also enabled a large number of young musicians to develop their talents as soloists. Everyone played better when Basie was at the piano and no band has ever swung more. As an epitaph that sentence tells half of the story. The other half is that Bill Basie brought a warm feeling of happiness to millions.”

It’s always an event when’s there more newly discovered recorded music by Thelonious Monk to enjoy, whatever the period and whatever the context.

The composer of 70 tunes, many of which have become Jazz standards, when performing in night clubs and concerts, Monk was constantly reworking his repertoire and to some extent, even recomposing it.

And, of course, there’s also what the other members of the band brought to the music: Johnny Griffin, John Coltrane and Charlie Rouse [1924-1988], his long-time associate, on tenor saxophone and the bassists and drummers who made up his various rhythm sections over the years.

Unfortunately, the sound quality of potential reissues is often a challenge, but thankfully, the sound recreation techniques available today are often a remedy for audio distortion problems.

Thankfully, too, the quality of the audio on Monk in Copenhagen [Gearbox GB 1541 CD], a reissue ot the most recent discovery of one of Monk’s “live” performances, is first rate as is the playing of Charlie Rouse on tenor, John Ore [1933-2014] on bass and Frankie Dunlop 1928-2014] on drums.

Here’s more about this wonderful addition to the Monk discography from James Hale in an article that appears in the December 2018 edition of Downbeat.

“If the 1990s represented the golden age of the CD box set, we might be amid the Age of Found Sound. "Lost" recordings by John Coltrane have made a huge splash, and last year, jazz sleuth Zev Feldman unearthed a 1960 soundtrack by Thelonious Monk,

Now, Monk again is in the spotlight, thanks to the discovery of a March 5, 1963 Danish concert featuring the pianist alongside saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Released by London-based Gearbox Records on a number of media formats — including a deluxe, limited-edition LP — Monk captures the pianist's long-running quartet amid a triumphant European tour.

"That tour was a great success for Monk," said Robin Kelley, the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and author of 2009's Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original (Free Press)- "In 1962, he hadn't done that much, but suddenly things were happening for him. Personally, he was in a great place, and in terms of his career, he was a rising star."

Kelley pointed to the pianist's new contract with Columbia Records, the stability of his quartet and his pending cover story in Time magazine as signs that Monk never had found himself in a better situation.

"He was recording a lot, the band had been together for two years, and this return to Europe gave him the opportunity to really showcase his music," Kelley said. "The tour was pretty well documented, but this Copenhagen gig [at the 210-seat Odd Fellow Palwet] has never surfaced before."

The recording's journey to the consumer market is the stuff of audiophile's fantasy, and it began with the decision by a Danish producer to purchase almost 90 reels of tape about 20 years ago.

"He was going to use them for samples," said Gearbox's Darrel Sheinman. who helped master the recording. "He never got around to it, and he was going to give them to the Danish National Jazz Archive. I knew him through buying some rare jazz records in Copenhagen, so I bought the tapes from him about five years ago."

Sheinman said he began making his way through the tapes, discovering that most of them were "cracking titles procured by the Danish Debut label, which was Charles Mingus' franchise label," run by another Dane.

"It took us an age to review them all," he said. "Since they were mostly broadcast tapes, they were either quarter-track or halftrack recordings, made at either 3.75 or 7.5 inches per second. To save money, broadcasters often used both sides of the tapes."

Despite its age and provenance. Sheinman said the Monk recording was in great shape — probably the best of his purchase, making restoration remarkably easy.

"We simply did some high-frequency riding on EQ to deal with dropouts, but that was it. We were very lucky with this tape; it was recorded onto quarter-inch tape at 15 inches per second, then straight to all the formats, from vinyl to CD and digital."

Gearbox prides itself on using a completely analog signal chain to create its products, even when the final format is digital.

"We feel analog sound has a bigger soundstage and some gentle, natural compression, while keeping good dynamic range," Sheinman said. "It often depends on the equipment used. We like Studer machines, and their tube ones, in particular, are astonishing."

Sheinman admits that staying true to the analog commitment and refusing to go down the road of full digital restoration is always a challenge.

What Monk showcases is a particularly raucous concert, with the pianist and his bandmates digging deep into their standard repertoire, including "Bye-Ya,""Nutty,""Body And Soul" and "Monk's Dream."

Kelley said that while this was standard fare for the quartet, the music continued to yield new secrets.

"Monk was a composer," Kelley said, "and he tried to make these songs perfect. He played this music in so many different ways. Take "Body And Soul" as an example. He played it over and over, and it reveals him as this master piano player who has this deep knowledge of structure. He could turn it around so many different ways, yet keep returning to that melody."”

Bill Crow has had such a long, distinguished career, both as a bassist and writer, that it’s sometimes difficult to believe that he just didn’t appear fully formed on the Jazz scene.

And yet, as he nostalgically reminds us in the following piece, we all have beginnings in the music.

In describing how his own career evolved, the late author Ray Bradbury commented: “You Make Yourself as You Go.”

From his own pen, here’s how it was for Bill when he first arrived in New York in 1950 and how he made himself “go” [grow] during his first three years in the business.

“When I left Seattle to live in New York City in January of 1950, I got off the bus with 50 dollars in my pocket, carrying a suitcase and a valve trombone. My friend Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer, had convinced me that if I wanted to be a musician I had to be where the music was. In his estimation, New York was the only place to be.

I didn't see any reason not to believe him. When we arrived, Charlie Parker was playing with his quintet at Birdland, with Red Rodney, Bud Powell, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, and opposite him was a house band made up of Max Roach, Al Haig, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, Curley Russell and Sonny Stitt. The admission price was 95 cents, and you could listen to great music all night long without spending another dime.

After our first tough winter scuffling in New York, Buzzy wound up with a summer gig in the Adirondacks, at the Altamont Hotel in Tupper Lake, N.Y. It was originally Gene Roland's gig, but on opening night Gene had a fight with the boss's wife and walked off in a huff. Buzzy salvaged the job, and a week or two later he got me hired as a trombone player.

The boss wouldn't hire a bass player... he felt that piano and drums were enough rhythm. So Buzzy found a local kid who owned a Kay bass and paid him 20 bucks to rent it for the summer. Then he told me, "When you're not playing the trombone, you've got to try to play the bass. I can't stand playing without a bass player."

The other musicians sort of gaslighted me into staying with the bass... they didn't give me any positive feedback about my trombone playing, and constantly encouraged my bass playing. "Wow, on that last tune, you sounded just like Ray Brown!"

By the time I got back to the city, I had taught myself to play the bass well enough to accept gigs. I would rent a bass when I got work. It took a while to find one of my own.

As soon as I met a few New York musicians, I began to discover all the places where jam sessions might take place. Nola Studios, on Broadway in the 50s, was a main location. (Not to be confused with Nola Penthouse, the recording studio on 57th Street.) Nola's had a number of small rehearsal rooms, each with a piano, and one large room that could hold a big band. That was the room where jam sessions were often held, with a collection being taken up to pay the rental.

I found out about Nola's during a visit to New York City while I was still in the Army, stationed at Fort Meade, Md. I looked up a friend of a friend, who took me to a session there. About 20 people were in the big room, but only five or six were playing. A good rhythm section, a trumpet player, and Brew Moore on tenor. Brew had finished most of a gallon jug of Gallo wine, and was lying on his side on the floor, playing, with a lit cigarette tucked into his octave key. I was impressed with his ability to still swing when so far into the bag.

There were several private lofts and back rooms of bars where we could play, and on one nice afternoon when no one had any money for studio rental, Gerry Mulligan rehearsed some of his big band arrangements on the shore of the 72nd Street lake in Central Park. Until I got my own bass, I would hang out at sessions and rehearsals until the bass player got tired, and then would get a chance to play his bass. I played a lot on Teddy Kotick's bass, and on one owned by a Spanish bassist, Louis Barreiro.

Another great location was a room at 136th Street near Broadway. It was a basement that extended out under the street, so you could make noise all night without bothering anyone. A baritone player named Gershon Yowell found the place, and when he moved out, it was taken over by Joe Maini and Jimmy Knepper. We played there a lot. Sometimes Charlie Parker would drop by just to hang out, and he would occasionally play. 1 was too shy to play while he was around, but I enjoyed getting to know him. A very sweet, funny, intelligent and generous man, no matter what Miles Davis said about him in his book.

Whenever Bird played, Jimmy Knepper would turn on his tape recorder, and then, during the next day, he would listen to the tapes and write out Bird's solos. Those transcriptions became Jimmy's practice material.

A club date bass player in the Bronx let it be known that he had a bass for sale, and I heard about it at Charlie's Tavern. I went up to look at it, an old Kay that was in good shape, and he said he wanted $75 for it. I only had five dollars to give him, but he agreed to hold the bass for me until I got the rest of the money together.

I wasn't making much profit at the time... a club date might pay $15 or $20, and I had to pay five bucks to rent a bass for the weekend, and maybe another five to rent a tux. But I was also finding other work. Dave Lambert, who was also scuffling at the time, would come up with jobs we could do together, like moving somebody from one apartment to another, or painting someone's apartment, or babysitting, or doing minor carpentry jobs. I took a traveling job for a few months with Mike Riley's trio playing drums and singing, and even with the low pay I was getting, I managed to save a few bucks and send them to the bassist in the Bronx.

When I finally paid off the $75 and took possession of my bass, I quit my job with Riley and started working with Teddy Cohen's trio, with Don Roberts on guitar. After I'd been with Teddy for a couple of months, he told me one day that he was changing his name to Charles. "Charles Cohen," I said. "That sounds pretty good." He laughed, and said it was the Cohen he wanted to get rid of. He felt that the Jewish name was holding back his career.

He did all right with the new name, so maybe he was right. Other friends had already done the same thing: Donald Helfman became Don Elliott, Julius Gubenko was now Terry Gibbs, Herbert Solomon became Herbie Mann, and Anthony Sciacca became Tony Scott.

We rehearsed every day, and worked occasionally. Teddy taught me the right changes to all the bebop standards of the day, and playing with no drummer helped me develop a strong sense of time. I'd invented my own fingering system for the bass, which was a little awkward, but I didn't know any better. I improved it several years later when I began studying with Fred Zimmerman, of the New York Philharmonic.

Don Roberts got a better job and left us, and Jimmy Raney replaced him. Jimmy had been working with Stan Getz, but Stan had gone alone for some work on the west coast, and so Jimmy was available for a job we had on West 46th Street in the Iroquois Hotel, playing jazz and accompanying Amanda Sullivan, who was billed as "The Blonde Calypso."

At the end of that summer, Jimmy got a call from Getz. "I've got a week at the Hi-Hat in Boston. Roy Haynes is living up there, and says he'll do it. And I got Jerry Kaminsky on piano. So find a bass player and come on up." Jimmy asked me if I wanted to do it, and of course I did.

We got together at his apartment one afternoon and he taught me Stan's tunes, and then we took the train up to Boston.

I met Stan at the hotel where we were staying, and he said, "Do you mind if I check into your room with you? I'll split the bill with you, but I won't be staying there... I've got a chick in a room upstairs. This is just for the record." I agreed, and became Stan's roommate, on paper.

On opening night, we started the first tune and my D string broke during the first chorus. I tried to play around it, but was having a terrible time. There was another bass under the piano, which belonged to the house group that was playing opposite us. I decided to quickly switch basses, hoping the other guy wouldn't mind.

But when I began to play it, I discovered that it was set up for a left-handed player, with the strings in the opposite direction from mine. I fumbled through the tune, making many mistakes; and at the end Stan gave me a minute to put a new D string on my bass, and the worst was over.

By the second night I was pretty comfortable with the quintet, and the music went smoothly. But I was amazed at Stan's love life. In addition to the girl in the room upstairs, he was spending time during the day with another girl he had met at the club. And on the weekend, his wife came up for a surprise visit, and checked into the hotel. At the club that night all three women were sitting at a table in front of the bandstand, and each one was sure she was the one with Stan, and the other two were just friends.

When we got back to New York the next week, Stan called and said he had a week at Birdland. Jerry Kaminsky and Roy Haynes had stayed in Boston, so he hired Duke Jordan and Frank Isola. During that week we also played a concert at Carnegie Hall opposite Charlie Parker's quintet. Then Stan found us a week each in Baltimore and Washington, and we came back to New York for a week off.

That Tuesday, Stan called to say Birdland had a last minute opening for a week, so I went there and found Kenny Clarke setting up. I assumed Frank had already booked something and wasn't available. We began to play, and I got along with Kenny very well. We played the radio broadcast that was always done on the first set of opening night at Birdland each week.

When I got up for the second set that night, I looked over in the Peanut Gallery, the seating area beside the bandstand, and saw Frank Isola there. "What's up, Frank?" I asked. "I don't know," he grinned. "I turned on the radio and discovered I was fired!" Stan pretended not to notice him.

We did a recording session for Norman Granz and another for Teddy Reig, and then Jimmy Raney left us to take a steady gig at the Blue Angel with Jimmy Lyons. So we worked a couple of weeks as a quartet. Then Duke and Klook left to do something else, and Stan said, "Well, I guess I have to form a new quintet." So he hired Bob Brookmeyer, John Williams and Alan Levitt, and I stayed on bass.

That was an interesting group, but the rhythm section never really jelled. John wanted the time feeling to be up on top, and Alan wanted it more relaxed. I was too inexperienced to have a strong point of view, and Stan and Bob weren't comfortable with us. So Stan decided to go back to his original bass player, Teddy Kotick, and that was the end of my six month tour with Stan. Teddy had been doing one-nighters with Claude Thornhill's band, and I wound up taking that job for the next summer, and my musical education continued. I learned a lot from playing with Stan and with Claude, and had a lot of fun doing it.”

“Hank has also carried a liability around with him for a long time-a liability, that is, as far as commercialism is concerned: he is not easily classified. Everyone knows by now how writers on jazz like to trot out phrases like Hawkins-informed, Rollins-derived, Young-influenced and the like, and then, having formed their pigeon-hole, they proceed to drop the musician under discussion into it and fill the dirt over him. That is not easily done with Hank Mobley. He is, to be sure, associated with East coast musicians and material, but he has never had the so-called "hard bop" sound that is generally a standard part of the equipment of such tenormen.

At the same time, Charlie Parker was certainly a greater part of his playing than Lester Young, which is often enough to label a man a bopper, so what was Mobley doing? The answer is so simple as to be completely overlooked in a mass of theory, digging for influences, and the like: he was working out his own style.”

- Joe Goldberg, insert notes to Soul Station [emphasis, mine]

Continuing with my MobleyQuest [an effort to get anything of importance from the Jazz literature available on Hank posted to my blog], I am returning to individual Mobley album features, this time with a focus on Hank’s Soul Station Blue Note LP which was released on CD as 95343-2 for as Richard Cook and Brian Morton state so explicitly in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“Mobley fans are divided as to whether Soul Station or Roll Call is his masterpiece, but the Rudy Van Gelder Edition of the former is a welcome reminder of how creative a player Mobley was, here transcending his normal consistency and making a modest classic. Good as the other drummers on his records are, Art Blakey brings a degree more finesse, and their interplay on This I Dig Of You is superb. Hank seldom took ballads at a crawl, preferring a kind of lazy mid-tempo, and If I Should Lose You is one of his best. Dig Dis is a top example of how tough he could sound without falling into bluster. A virtually perfect example of a routine date made immortal by master craftsmen.” [Wynton Kelly on piano and Paul Chambers on bass round out the quartet on this date].

Cook and Morton also go on to address the two main issues that critics [in the negative sense] seemed to persistently underscore throughout Mobley’s career: his tone and his style of improvising:

“Mobley's music was documented to almost unreasonable length by Blue Note, with a whole raft of albums granted to him as a leader, and countless sideman appearances to go with them. … A collectors' favourite, his assertive and swinging delivery was undercut by a seemingly reticent tone: next to his peers in the hard-bop tenor gang, he could sound almost pallid. But it shouldn't detract from appreciating a thinker and a solidly reliable player. Despite frequent personal problems, Mobley rarely gave less than his best in front of the microphones.”

As a contemporary of blustery tenor sax players such as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Johnny Griffin, to cite only a few, Hank was wrongly condemned for using a lighter tone which allowed for a very fluid expression of ideas. Sometimes one wonders what these [negative] critics were listening to because there was so much original invention to be had in Hank’s solos.

In the following insert notes to Hank’s classic Soul Station LP, Joe Goldberg stresses another significant point that many of the critics may have missed in their all-too frequent critical assessment of his playing and that is - “He was working out his own style.”

I always thought that developing an individual voice, one that is instantly recognizable by the listener, is something that a Jazz musician strives to achieve and that Hank’s successful efforts in this regard were often overlooked.

Joe Goldberg elaborates on this point and other significant features [including how Hank’s style forms a parallel alliance with “the music of the dance”] of Hank’s playing in the following insert notes to Soul Station, Blue Note CD 95343-2.

“RECENTLY, it has become more and more incorrect to pass off a jazz record as a "blowing date" (a term, by the way, that has become at least semi-derogatory) simply Because there are only four or five musicians involved. The days of men coming into a studio and "just blowing" (a practice that only the very greatest jazzmen have ever been able to get away with) are apparently over, for the most part. At one time, you could safely assume that a forty-minute LP had taken, at most, an hour to put together. No more.

What has this to do with Hank Mobley? Quite a bit, to judge from this LP, Soul Station. On the surface, it contains all the elements of a blowing session - tenor sax and rhythm, a few originals, a couple of seldom-done standards, and a blues. But the difference is to be heard as soon as you begin to listen to the record. And let us take things in what might seem to be reverse order for a moment, and discuss the reasons for the difference before we even talk about the difference itself. Hank has always been a musician's musician - a designation that can easily become the kiss of death for the man who holds it. Fans and critics will reel off their list of tenor players, a list that is as easily changed by fashion as not, and then the musician over in the corner will say, "Yes, but have you heard Hank Mobley?" The musician saying that, in this particular case, might very well be a drummer. The groups Hank works with are often led by drummers - Art Blakey and Max Roach, to name two men who need, as they say, no introduction, and the first of whom contributes in a great degree to the success of this album.

One might suppose, considering this, that Hank is possessed or an unusual rhythmic sense, and one would be right. In a conversation I had with Art Blakey while preparing the notes for his two Blue Note LPs caned Holiday for Skins (BLP 4004-5), he was discussing the fact that while many songs are written in complex rhythms, the solos generally revert to a straight four. His reason for this was that most soloists probably could not play them any other way. "Hank Mobley could do it, though" he said. But even while possessing this definite asset, Hank has also carried a liability around with him for a long time-a liability, that is, as far as commercialism is concerned: he is not easily classified. Everyone knows by now how writers on jazz like to trot out phrases like Hawkins-informed, Rollins-derived, Young-influenced and the like, and then, having formed their pigeon-hole, they proceed to drop the musician under discussion into it and fill the dirt over him. That is not easily done with Hank Mobley. He is, to be sure, associated with East coast musicians and material, but he has never had the so-called "hard bop" sound that is generally a standard part of the equipment of such tenormen.

But - and here again, he suffers from a commercial liability - he did not do it in a spectacular way. He did not, in the manner of Sonny Rollins, in 1955 emerge from a long self-imposed retirement with a startling new approach. Nor did he, in the manner of John Coltrane, come almost completely unknown under the teaching influence of the great Miles Davis (for how many men has that recently been the key to success). Instead, he worked slowly and carefully, in the manner of a craftsman, building the foundations of a style, taking what he needed to take from whom he needed to take it (everyone does that, the difference between genius and hackwork is the manner in which it is done), and finally emerging, on this album, not with a disconnected series of tunes, but with a definite statement to make.

Evidence of that, to get back to the idea with which these comments began, is to be found in the care with which this set has been assembled. First of all, there are the sidemen-Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Art Blakey. To discuss Blakey again on each new record release is almost to insult him and his contribution to jazz, particularly since he says it himself very well, clearly, and with great authority in his solo on This I Dig Of You. But about Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers, for a moment. It is probably no accident that both of them are members of Miles Davis' group -I hesitate to call it a quintet or sextet, since that is so often in doubt. Miles has been famous for the superb quality of his rhythm sections as much as for any of his other contributions, and some of the ideas that started in his group or in his observance of Ahmad Jamal's group are to be found on this record. The basis of these ideas - pedal point, rhythmic suspensions, a general lightness of approach-all have their basis in one underlying idea - the best music is never very far from dance.

This concept can be found not only in Miles' work, but in the solo albums made by Coltrane, in those of Sonny Rollins, and even in the work of Thelonious Monk, who has taken to doing his own extremely expressive dance in front of his group. This is not to say that any of these men, or Hank Mobley either, "play for dancing" although whal they play is certainly more conducive to dancing than the music of Freddy Martin or Guy Lombardo but that the qualities that are essential to dance - a lightness, flow, and flexibility, all within the confines of a definite form and overall sense of a structure - are essential to their music.

The unusual sound of Mobley's tenor might very well come of this idea of dance. Jazz is rich in legends of unknown saxophonists, celebrated only in their immediate area, but having an enormous effect on men who went on to much wider acclaim. These men being small-town on-the-stand musicians, playing for dances, for the most part, have had, in all likelihood, a sound very much like the sound of Mobley's tenor, or like Coltrane's or Rollins' for that matter. And it would take a man with a knowledge of dance music to pick as fine and unlikely an old song as Irving Berlin's Remember to start his set with. (Monk, incidentally, also has a penchant for old Berlin tunes.)

I think also, that dance must be behind as charming, lightly swinging and immediately attractive a song (song is the right word here, not "tune" or "original") as Hank Mobley's composition This I Dig Of You, which brings out the best of all the musicians - Blakey's solo has been mentioned before, and I am particularly charmed by Wynton Kelly's solo, with its ever-present echoes of The Party's Over.

These ideas are present, but the four men involved are all excellent craftsmen, so the ideas do not intrude upon the music as sometimes happens with the sometimes over-self conscious Modern Jazz Quartet. You do not think of dance, or rhythmic shifts, or the changing approach to the tenor saxophone, or the old tunes, or the inevitable funky blues. You simply hear, at first, four men swinging lightly, powerfully, and with great assurance and authority. You relax, listen, and enjoy yourself. And then later, when you think about it, you realize just how much of an achievement this apparently casual LP represents. And you think with new admiration and respect about Hank Mobley, because you realize how much of that achievement he has been able to make his own.”

-JOE GOLDBERG

Buck Clayton: has there ever been a better name for a Jazz musician?

Trumpeter Wilbur Dorsey "Buck" Clayton, 1911-1991, became synonymous with two forces in Jazz: the Count Basie Band which he left in 1943 and the Jam Session which he participated in at home and abroad until the end of his life.

Listening to Buck's style reveals an easy affinity for that of Louis Armstrong's, but then, few trumpet players of Buck's generation escaped Pops' influence, nor did Jazz vocalists like Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, among others.

George Hoefer was one of two Associate Editors for Down Beat magazine when he developed the following biography of Buck in 1961.

It’s important to remember “the old guys” who pioneered during the early years of the music because it helps us keep alive an awareness of Jazz’s traditions.

Can you imagine working a Jazz gig in Shanghai for two years during the mid-1930’s China?!

“Watching and listening to trumpeter Buck Clayton gives the feeling of being in the presence of the Rock of Gibraltar in a jazz group.

Clayton is a tall, handsome man with sensitive green eyes. He is always neatly and modishly dressed, and his firm stance seems to dominate the stand and denote solidity. This Clayton-effect seems as true musically as physically, for his trumpet sound is authoritative whether he is soloing, leading the ensemble with an incisive, clean open horn, or furnishing an exciting muted drive behind a blues vocalist.

Clayton is one of those musicians no one worries about. He'll fit into any concert, record date, or band. He frequently is taken for granted, and because of this, he probably has not received as much attention as his playing warrants.

A jazzman, especially one like Clayton, who has grown up with the music, is a creative person whose artistry strives to express not only his own personal emotions but also the feelings of his environment. There are extremes in jazz, but Buck's voice strikes a balance. He is a solo stylist who came out of the swing period after service with one of the greatest jazz bands of the period, Count Basic's.

Like many other solo stars whose musical voice became established in name swing bands, Clayton would not return to band work, even if the bands were plentiful. These stars — Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, to name a few— would feel confined or submerged musically if they were forced to play within the web of arrangements again. To a man, they prefer the small group, where the improvised solo scope is wide and the challenge is open. Nor is the "togetherness" of the modern-jazz chamber group appealing to them.

Fortunately for these titans, the music has attained enough acceptance for them to play it the way, for the most part, they prefer—on recording dates, jazz concerts, tours, a little television, and personal appearances with outlander groups. Their only requisite is headquarters in New York City.

When Clayton was asked if it bothered him to play in out-of-town night clubs in front of local bands, which in many cases are comparatively amateurish, he said, "No. If it's too bad, I just don't listen. The most trouble I've had of that sort has been right here in New York, where there are some bass players who think of themselves as drummers."

The jazz world makes colorful newspaper and magazine copy, but too often the more sensational aspects of the musician's life are overemphasized. Clayton would not supply that sort of grist. He has his own home out in Jamaica, N. Y., where he lives with his wife, Patricia, and two young children, a boy and a girl. His hobbies include gardening, with emphasis on rose bushes, along with a deep interest in photography. He takes many color movies of his family and home-life activities. For the last five years he has filmed complete Christmas festivities involving his two children. He accepted a holiday job at George Wein's Storyville in Boston one year with the provision that he could be off Christmas eve to return to his home for a day.

Wilbur Clayton was born in Parsons, Kan., in 1911. His father, a minister, was also a musician and taught Buck piano. The father's instruments were trumpet and bass, but when Buck was high school age, he was given the family trumpet and told to play in the church orchestra. This permitted his father to concentrate on bass in the rhythm section, in which Mrs. Clayton played organ.

About 1927, the George E. Lee Orchestra from Kansas City, Mo., passed through Parsons on its way back from Oklahoma. This band had the late Julia Lee on piano and the great Kansas City drummer, Baby Lovett. Young Clayton, however, was fascinated by Bob Russell, who played five types of trumpet, ranging from a slide trumpet to a bugle. Russell talked to Buck and gave him pointers on the horn.

Buck and another youth left Parsons one day before they had finished high school and hoboed to California. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Buck's conscience began to bother him and he decided to return to Kansas and finish his schooling before settling down on the west coast. After he did, he soon was back in Los Angeles to start a music career.

He began playing in the Red Mill dance hall for taxi dances. Next he became a member of Earl Dancer's 14 Pieces from Harlem, a band made up of California musicians, none of whom ever had been in Harlem. When Dancer left one day, reportedly with the band's money, Clayton found himself with a 14-piece band of his own. They worked steadily on the coast from 1932 to 1934.

During 1932, Clayton had the opportunity to hear, for the first time, Louis Armstrong in front of Luis Russell's Band at Sebastian's Cotton club. Clayton recalls being especially taken with Armstrong's version of I'm Confessin'. He also was inspired by the late Joe Smith's horn when the latter turned up in California with McKinney's Cotton Pickers on a road tour.

When 1934 came, pianist and bandleader Teddy Weatherford, who had inspired Earl Hines back in Chicago, was in California to recruit a band for an engagement in Shanghai, China. He liked Clayton's group and offered them the job.

At that time, Buck was courting Gladys Henderson, an attractive chorus girl at the Cotton club. The chorus line was doubling in the movies, working with Duke Ellington's band in its first film, Check and Double Check. Gladys wanted to go with Clayton. They decided to marry.

Word got around at Paramount, and they stopped making the movie long enough to bring the romance to marriage. Buck, even so, was not so sure this was what he wanted and had not made a definite decision up to the scheduled hour of the marriage. He stood out in front, he recalls, leaning against a telephone pole, trying to decide. The ceremony was held up two hours before they could find Buck. When he was finally escorted inside, the Ellington band started the wedding march, and Clayton recalled the thrill of Cootie Williams' growling trumpet during the procession and the newsreel cameras turning. The Mills Brothers sang during the ceremony, and George Raft, who was featured in the movie, beamed. He had been partially responsible for setting it all up.

The Claytons went to China, where they spent 1934-36, except for 10 days in Japan, working with Weatherford at an English dance hall in Shanghai known as the Canidrome. It was good experience for Clayton, for the band was required to play for tea dances, nightly dancing, and some concert music such as Rhapsody in Blue.

When Clayton returned to the United States, the band broke up, along with his hasty marriage. Buck had been sending arrangements to Willie Bryant, who had the band at New York City's Ubangi club, and hoped to take his 14 pieces east with him to play under Bryant. The band refused to go so Clayton took off by himself. He got as far as Kansas City.

Oran (Hot Lips) Page wanted to leave the Basie crew, then playing the Reno club, so Clayton moved in to replace Page. The manager refused to pay when Clayton took over the trumpet spot. The rest of the band, some of whom were playing horns held together by rubber bands, pooled their money so Buck could get $2 a night for his efforts.

Shortly after Clayton became a regular member of the Basie group, jazz connoisseur John Hammond arrived in town, and the rest is Basie band history. Buck laughs now when he thinks of how Basie and the boys, including himself, dreamed of the days they would be making the stupendous sum of $100 a week a man. They had been making $18 a week, except for Buck, who got $14.

On their last night in Kansas City, the Basie band fought a battle of bands against Duke Ellington in the Paseo ballroom. Clayton remembers that Basie's men were cocky and their spirit won the battle, even though they played out of tune.

The Basie band's first engagement out of KC saw them follow the great Fletcher Henderson Band into Chicago's Grand Terrace. The band laid an egg there. But Buck and other Basie-ites had a chance to hear Roy Eldridge and Zutty Singleton's jam band in the Three Deuces. The next seven years held many kicks for Basie's bandsmen. They made many records (starting with their ill-fated arrangement with Decca that deprived them of royalties), including many small-group sessions, like the Teddy Wilson sides with Billie Holiday, on which Clayton's accompanying horn is outstanding.

On the Basie bandstand, after the Grand Terrace bomb, Clayton recalled the unique relationship between saxophonists Herschel Evans and Lester Young. Clayton said they admired each other's playing but were not particularly friendly. They sometimes traded choruses while sitting back to back on the stand, their styles miles apart. The night that Evans was taken to a hospital, the band was playing a battle of bands in Connecticut, and Herschel played wonderfully, Clayton said, as though he had a premonition that it would be his last chance. He was taken to New York in an ambulance after the session and never returned to the band. But the story that there was an empty chair on the bandstand for a long time after Evans' death is the product of some writer's imagination.

Clayton left Basie in 1943 to go into the army for three years. He never went back to a regular job with a big band after coming out of the service. After several seasons as a featured soloist with Jazz at the Philharmonic, he settled down in New York City and has operated on a freelance basis since.

He is in demand in many different corners of the jazz world. His work has included many Dixieland concerts, and he credits the New Orleans clarinetist, Tony Parenti, for teaching him Dixie techniques — as well as showing him how to make spaghetti sauce. Buck's favorite Dixieland trumpeters are Charlie Teagarden and Wild Bill Davison. For six months in the last year, Clayton was the featured horn at Eddie Condon's club in New York.

Clayton has made several tours in Europe. In France, he has been under the sponsorship of both Charles Delaunay and Hugues Panassie, who represent opposite poles of jazz tastes. They are good friends of Buck's, but dislike each other, which amuses Clayton. He was not amused, however, when on one concert date for Panassie, the followers of Delaunay cut the wires to the microphones from under the stage.

Trumpeter Clayton recorded for many years under an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, but recently has been making records with various companies as a freelancer. Early in the fall he was the featured horn man on a Kansas City-style date organized by Tom Gwaltney, a former Bobby Hackett and Billy Butterfield clarinetist. A record company executive remarked as he listened to Buck's horn solo on K.C. Ballad, “That Buck — he couldn't play badly if he tried."

The trumpet-playing Kansan is looking forward to a one-month tour of Switzerland, Germany, and France during January, 1961, for the Harold Davison booking office of London.

Clayton will take his favorite musicians on the trip: Emmett Berry, trumpet; Dickie Wells, trombone; Buddy Tate, tenor saxophone; Earl Warren, alto saxophone, and Gene Ramey, bass. He still has to locate a pianist and drummer and also is working on getting either Big Joe Turner or Jimmy Witherspoon to go along and sing the blues.”

Ah, the Jazz world in 1961.

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Buck Clayton: A Brief Biography by George Hoefer