Experiencing Jazz: A Listener's Companion by Michael Stephans

November 30, 2018, 7:00 am

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I suppose when you write a blog about Jazz, there is the presumption that you know something about what books to recommend that describe and explain how to listen to the music.

When asked for such recommendations, I usually respond with the following list:

- Jerry Coker, How To Listen to Jazz. Revised Edition. Jamey Aebersold Jazz Books.

- Scott Deveaux and Gary Giddins, Jazz. W.W. Norton and Co. which makes it available in both a commercial/trade and educational/interactive edition.

- Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz. Basic Books.

- Martin Williams, Where’s the Melody?, Minerva Press.

However, thanks to my recent acquisition of a used copy of Michael Stephans’ Experiencing Jazz: A Listener’s Companion, Scarecrow Press, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, I now have another excellent book to add to my How to Listen to Jazz Recommended Reading List.

The following excerpt will serve as an example as to what’s on offer in this informative and well-written book.

Improvising: The Heart of the Jazz Experience

“Suppose you've just emerged from the subway on 42nd Street in New York City. Suppose also that you have no particular destination in mind; so you decide to head east on 42nd and see where it takes you. You cross Broadway, and then 6th Avenue, enjoying the sights and sounds as you walk. The only guidelines you have are to have some lunch and head back to your hotel by dinnertime,

As you come to Madison Avenue, you make a split-second decision to turn right and head south. You have never been on this street before, and everything you see and hear is new to you. At this point you decide to find a restaurant for lunch. Your only guideline is your budget; so as a result, you discover a tiny Indian restaurant on 38th Street. The prices are reasonable, so you make the decision to have a meal there.

And so goes your afternoon. street after street, you move spontaneously and without an agenda. The only thing you come to expect is the unexpected itself.

Now, move the scenario from the streets of New York City into your kitchen. You're tired of the same old recipes, and you haven't made your weekly trek to the grocery store. So you decide to just throw something together. But what? You decide to make up a recipe on the spot, using whatever available ingredients you have at hand. So into the skillet go the sliced onion, the ground beef, a little chili powder, some sliced tomatoes, and a few black olives. You have no idea what you are preparing, but you do know that you will serve these prepared ingredients over a bed of white rice. If this experiment tastes good, you might try to prepare it again sometime. If not - well - you'll try to invent something else another time.

These two scenarios represent an important part of life and they are certainly at the very core of jazz music for both the performer and the listener. When the jazz musician is through playing the melody of a song, s/he then embarks upon an improvisational journey, not unlike an afternoon in New York City or an adventure in your kitchen. There are some guidelines, however; just as you know how to put one foot in front of the other when you walk down the street, the jazz musician knows how to play a musical instrument and understands the structure of a song, before s/he moves into unfamiliar territory, choosing this note or that, this musical phrase or that, just as you might instantaneously choose one city street over another in your travels, or one spice rather than another in your instant recipe.

This sense of spontaneity that provides the basis of improvisation is what is often known as being in the moment. As Buddhism and other spiritual philosophies often suggest, there is no past and no future; there is only the present moment in which we find ourselves - either as musicians or listeners. Buddhists call this state of attentiveness, samadhi. When we musicians improvise, we are often seated squarely in the present moment of spontaneous creation. That is not to say that we don't use the lessons of the past to create our improvisations. We bring certain fundamental tools to a performance; things like the knowledge of theory, harmony, and rhythm - as well as the full range of human emotions we feel at that time - in order to craft our improvisations in some way that brings deep personal meaning to us, and hopefully brings the listener into our world, if only for a little while.

As my friend and colleague, New York pianist Jim Ridl, points out, "Jazz is a complex medium of expression. It calls for both musical intelligence and passion. The musician draws on multiple sources: music of all kinds, personal life experience, current events, history, and culture, and something intangible within the self, whether it be called soul, inspiration, the Muse, or the Spirit" (Interview, 2011), Creating jazz, to paraphrase the legendary trombonist and composer Bob Brookmeyer, is the act of telling your story and mirroring the world at large - with all of its emotional ups and downs. In this sense, the jazz improviser says things through his or her instrument that all human beings are capable of feeling as a part of life. That is where the connection between musician and listener has the potential for creating a moving and memorable experience.

Focusing: Tumbling into Selflessness

When we go to the movies or the theater, we watch the production and listen to it simultaneously. This is a given; however, when a film or play has depth and is totally engrossing and engaging (think of your favorite movie, for example), something happens to us. We often move beyond the mere act of observation and into the realm of participation; that is, we empathize with one or more of the characters and laugh at his or her bumbling mishaps (in a comedy) or cry when he or she encounters tragedy (in a drama). We also revel when justice is served and evildoers get their comeuppance. In other words, we are able to experience a film or play, rather than passively watch and listen to the production.

The above analogy holds true for jazz as well, although the act of experiencing jazz can often be more subtif than experiencing comedy or tragedy. In other words, the whole range of human emotions is not as readily visible as it would be in a film or a play. As you experience a jazz performance, you must be open to whatever feelings you might be having at the very moment you are hearing the music. Since art often mirrors life, you may well experience a wide range of emotions, from pleasure and excitement, to sadness and contemplation, and all that falls in between.

Even as jazz musicians strive for a state of samadhi - that is, total immersion in the creative act - so too can listeners move into a state of absolute concentration. As a listener, you have only to be completely open to the music unfolding on the bandstand or on your iPod or CD player. As multimedia composer and violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch suggests in his book, Free Play, "For art to appear, we have to disappear." In other words, we essentially have to abandon conscious thought while listening to (or playing) music. We have to train ourselves to be present; to allow ourselves to focus upon what is going on at that very moment - much as a child focuses upon something as simple as the act of building a sandcastle. That means, in a sense, to become what we're doing. So when we hear jazz, we have to give ourselves over to the experience, without preconception, judgment, or distraction. In this sense, we are truly experiencing jazz, not merely listening to it.

Sounds easy, right? If my own students are any indication, experiencing jazz can be a real challenge. With our attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, due to the dynamic advancements in computer technology as entertainment, the idea of sitting through a jazz concert or listening to an entire John Coltrane recording in a college music library or at home may seem too much like work.

So how do we create a sense of focus if we want to be able to give our total concentration to a jazz performance? My jazz appreciation students, who over the years have been mostly non-music majors, have discovered

that such listening is a challenge, especially when they are exposed to music that is often under three-minutes in duration; and when they are overexposed to a hit song by a well known popular musician. For example, you might hear a new song by a good singer, and as a result, you download that artist's song or purchase her CD. After several months Df listening to her hit song on your iPod and on the radio, and hearing it as background music in boutiques, grocery stores, and elevators, you become understandably bored with it.

Jazz, on the other hand, is not a Commodity that can be canned and packaged into a three-minute recording. It is not an entertainment and has little "commercial potential." Musicians don't become jazz musicians because the music provides a lucrative means of making a living. As such, the first thing a new listener can do is to cast aside all previous notions of what jazz is, and accept it on its own terms. Before you decide whether you like a particular jazz performance, you must give your attention fully to it. This means openly embracing whatever you hear and avoiding comparisons with any other musical genre. It also means taking the time to learn about it from the men and women who create the music - for they and the music they play are inseparable. This is one of the keys to the samadhi of listening. A fellow musician once said to me that we [jazz musicians] are vessels through which the music of the universe passes; and this is what flows through us and into you, the listener, if you are open to what we have to say; our stories, our lives.”

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Jimmy Rowles Drawings - Chet Baker Sextet

November 30, 2018, 7:53 pm

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Count Basie - Famous Door - 1938 - Honeysuckle Rose

November 30, 2018, 7:53 pm

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Elegant People - "Triste" - Arranged by Mike Abene, Metropole Orchestra

November 30, 2018, 7:54 pm

≫ Next: New Directions Revisited – The Rich and Unique Legacy of Teddy Charles by Noal Cohen

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New Directions Revisited – The Rich and Unique Legacy of Teddy Charles by Noal Cohen

December 1, 2018, 7:00 am

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Noal Cohen maintains a Jazz history website replete with a number of discographies of important Jazz artists and he is also the co-author along with Michael Fitzgerald of Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce that is now available in a second edition.

You can locate more information about both via the following links:

http://www.attictoys.com

http://www.gigigrycebook.com

The following blog posting, which is as an adaptation from another format, is presented with the author's permission.

Noal is one of the preeminent Jazz biographer - discographer at work on today’s Jazz scene and it is a privilege to represent his work on these pages.

[Originally published in Coda Magazine, July/August, 2000 issue (No. 292), pp. 22-29]

Jazz has undergone substantial evolution in its first century, and a few true innovators have always been the required catalysts for change. By the early 1950s, with bebop in decline and big bands fading, many jazz musicians were in search of new approaches to revitalize their art form. While the somewhat earlier experiments of the Lennie Tristano and Miles Davis Birth of the Cool ensembles had attracted considerable attention, it was really the emergence of the West Coast school, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the groups led by Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck which strongly impacted the jazz scene during this period, resulting in commercial as well as artistic success in some cases. Because of its often restrained, carefully arranged and intellectual characteristics, this music was referred to (sometimes inaccurately) as “cool jazz” and would soon be overtaken and largely displaced by the genre known as “hard bop.”

“Along with Milt Jackson and Terry Gibbs, Teddy Charles had ushered the vibraphone into the modern era. He was also a significant contributor during this period through his innovative compositional approach to jazz performance. Issued between 1952 and 1956, Charles’s most important recordings were strikingly fresh, defying stylistic and geographic labels and were critically well-received. While his music has sometimes been portrayed as a precursor of both free jazz and the so-called “third stream,” it was his intent neither to jettison the conventional framework of jazz nor to create a fusion with classical music. For many years he was a mainstay in the New York clubs and studios and, gifted with organizational skills and the ability to recognize talent, would eventually move into the area of record production before leaving music for a long period to pursue his other passion in life, sailing.

Charles was born Theodore Charles Cohen in 1928, in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, to Jewish immigrant parents, and was the youngest of four siblings. Known as Teddy Cohen for the first five years of his professional career (he is so credited on many of his early recordings), he would change his name to Teddy Charles when he became a leader, at the urging of his manager who felt that the surname Cohen was too ethnic for widespread acceptance in the music business.

The family owned a piano and Teddy’s brother George was a self-taught pianist (and a fan of jazz giants including Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, and Chick Webb) who passed on some of his knowledge and an appreciation of good music to his younger sibling. This, coupled with his own doodling on the chronically out-of-tune instrument, afforded Teddy a valuable familiarity with the piano keyboard, which would later facilitate his mastering the vibraphone.

Charles’s early years do not evoke pleasant memories for him because of the anti-Semitic harassment he endured and the lack of good music programs in the local school system. By high school, he had begun drum lessons but detested marching bands and the poor level of music instruction. Soon he was playing gigs around Springfield in place of local musicians still in wartime military service, and had decided that music was the profession he wished to pursue. After high school graduation, he entered a summer extension program at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where it became apparent that he was in way over his head, competing with newly-discharged GIs who already had substantial musical training and professional experience. By working very hard on overcoming his deficiencies that summer, he survived an audition and was accepted at Juilliard as a full-time student and percussion major in the fall of 1946.

Although financial constraints forced him to abandon formal academic studies after two years, it was during this period that he forged a long-standing and highly productive relationship with the composer and pianist Hall Overton who was first a student and then an instructor at Juilliard. Fortunately, Charles was able to continue studies privately with Overton and others on the Juilliard faculty while sustaining himself with various professional opportunities as a drummer. Furthermore, having relocated to New York, he was now spending time on 52nd Street, listening to the new developments in music, even sitting in at times on drums and piano and interacting with other stars to be. There were also sessions at Nola Studios with people like pianists Joe Albany, Kenny Drew, and Billy Triglia, saxophonists Ray Turner, Brew Moore, and Zoot Sims, trumpeter Jerry Lloyd, and drummer Eddie Shaughnessy, among others. In Shaughnessy he would find another kindred spirit and frequent collaborator.

But Charles’s skills as a drummer were not overwhelming. His style, influenced by Gene Krupa, George Wettling, and Cozy Cole, was not suited to the bebop of the time. When he saw what great modern drummers like Shaughnessy and Max Roach were doing, he decided that perhaps the vibraphone, to which he had been re-exposed at Juilliard, was the instrument he should pursue. Given his facility as a drummer and a good working knowledge of the piano, the transition to vibes was an easy one and provided an opportunity for melodic and harmonic as well as rhythmic expression.

Besides gigs in New York City, Charles began to travel with some of the big bands including those of Bob Astor and Randy Brooks. Later, he would also work with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw but never recorded with them. Since parts were generally not written for vibes, Charles would serve to provide background and to fill in for vocalists, experience which would later come in handy in commercial studio work. He toured with Roy Eldridge in a band that also included Zoot Sims and worked occasionally with Oscar Pettiford’s early small groups. He once appeared with Charlie Parker and Art Blakey in a concert at the Audubon Ballroom.

While influenced by the masters Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo, Charles had, by the late 1940s, assimilated the vocabulary of Parker and Gillespie and established himself as one of a handful of bebop vibraphonists. Chubby Jackson afforded Charles his first recording opportunity with the bassist’s short-lived but exciting big band of 1949, whose other members included saxophonists Frank Socolow, Ray Turner, and Marty Flax, trumpeters Al Porcino and Charlie Walp, pianist Gene DiNovi, bassist Curley Russell, and drummers Tiny Kahn and Joe Harris. Four tracks were recorded for Columbia and Charles plays a fluent two-chorus solo on the breakneck “Father Knickerbopper” and has a very brief outing on “Godchild.”

Another significant collaboration around the same time involved the sextet of clarinetist Buddy DeFranco which recorded five tracks for Capitol in August of 1949. This ensemble included guitarist Jimmy Raney, who would become another long-time associate of Charles, as well as the master drummer Max Roach. Charles contributed an original composition to this session, “Aishie,” named for one of his sisters, and based on the chord progressions of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The music of this band, which has seen no reissue in the CD era, exhibits a smooth and liquid character because of the texture of the clarinet-vibes-guitar front line and offers an interesting contrast to the Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw sextets of similar instrumentation. The two standards, “Penthouse Serenade” and “Good for Nothin’ Joe,” are reminiscent of the George Shearing Quintet and suggest a commercial intent while other tracks are swinging bop with excellent but brief solos by DeFranco, Raney and Charles. The clarinetist and vibraphonist would interact again two years later, in DeFranco’s big band.

By 1950, Charles had become a fixture on the New York scene and worked frequently in a trio setting with guitarist/vocalist Jackie Paris. Charles’s first significant venture as a leader was known as the Teddy Cohen Trio, composed of vibes, guitar and bass, and obviously patterned after the Red Norvo Trio. Although Charles preferred working with a drummer, this format was successful and the group got consistent club work and even some TV spots. The guitarist was Don Roberts (later replaced by Jimmy Raney) and the bassist, Kenny O’Brien (later replaced by Bill Crow). In addition to their musical performances, the group was encouraged to do comedy routines in order to enhance their commercial appeal, but these usually fell flat with the musicians’ subtle, inside humor going over the heads of most audiences. The trio recorded in 1951 for Bob Weinstock’s Prestige label. Of the eight released tracks, seven are standards and one, “O’Brien’s Flyin’,” is an original blues. Charles’s arrangements make good use of the limited instrumentation and his solo on the up-tempo “Old Man River” is impressive, demonstrating great facility. But this was relatively bland stuff compared with what was to come.

A chance encounter in Toronto in which Charles’s trio was enlisted to back guitarist and vocalist Slim Gaillard resulted in a lasting change in his approach to the vibraphone. Astounded by the volume level at which Gaillard played his instrument, Charles found that in order to be heard, he had to respond by playing at levels and with an arm strength he had never previously attempted in most of the bebop settings he had participated in to that point. This valuable experience, coupled with his innate adaptability and musicianship, allowed him to become a versatile studio player. In the years following, he would be present on many New York rhythm and blues recording sessions led by major artists in that genre such as Sonny Terry, Earl Bostic, Chuck Willis, Bubber Johnson, Connelly King, and Little Jimmy Scott.

Between 1952 and 1955, Charles recorded a series of groundbreaking albums for the Prestige and New Jazz labels called New Directions, Vol. 1-5. With Hall Overton, he had developed a compositional approach to jazz performance that attempted to transcend the standard theme statement/solos/theme restatement format. Eschewing standards in favor of unfamiliar, original material, Charles’s concept was to fully integrate the written and improvised sections of a jazz performance so as to provide new contexts and challenges for the artist. Among the other musicians involved in these recordings were several who also had an interest in composition and broadening the boundaries of the art form including Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, Bob Brookmeyer, and Jimmy Raney. The Charles/Overton philosophy was cogently summarized in Ira Gitler’s liner notes to one of the reissues, Collaboration West:

“It is not a radical departure from what has become conventional jazz playing but is rather an evolution to a jazz style more controlled with regard to form, unity of materials and development while generating through this medium a greater freedom for solo and group improvisation. The restricting of materials to circumscribed limits permits a freedom impossible where all players pull in completely independent directions. Teddy believes by using materials unfamiliar to conventional jazz playing, using conventional materials in unfamiliar ways and using compositional techniques in treating these materials, a cohesive jazz environment is produced which at once liberate the soloist.”

The first New Directions session was recorded in New York at the end of 1952 and involved a quartet with Jimmy Raney, Ed Shaughnessy, and bassist Dick Nivison. Like most of the sessions in this series, it was pianoless (Charles and Bob Brookmeyer do appear on piano on two of the later sessions). Charles felt that most pianists, with the exception of Overton and later, Mal Waldron, interfered with the vibraphone and limited the directions in which he wanted both the solos and instrumental interactions to develop.

In January of 1953, the most avant-garde of the New Directions series was recorded with a trio comprised of Charles, Overton, and Shaughnessy. No bass player is present nor would one have been appropriate as this music does not pulsate with anything resembling the usual jazz rhythmic sense. Four pieces were recorded, three by Overton and one, “Metalizing,” by Charles. It is very difficult to determine which portions of this music are written and which are improvised and the music has the character of a contemporary percussion ensemble. But this should not be confused with the “free jazz” of the 1960s. Again, Ira Gitler’s excellent liner notes are instructive:

“Each piece has a definite shape, based on a preconceived structure just as head arrangements are. Each structure is divided into sections, and specific thematic material is devised for each section, but the final working out of this material depends on the most sensitive kind of rapport between the performers.”

The next month, a combination of personal and professional factors led Charles to temporarily relocate to Los Angeles where he quickly became a part of the burgeoning West Coast jazz scene and began to supervise recording sessions for the Prestige label. His first project involved a sextet made up of tenor saxophone giant Wardell Gray, alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, pianist Sonny Clark, drummer Lawrence Marable, bassist Dick Nivison, and Charles, which recorded four swinging tracks including two Charles originals, “So Long Broadway” and “Paul’s Cause.” This was the recording debut of both Clark and Morgan. Charles appeared frequently with the Lighthouse All-Stars and worked in various contexts, including his own groups with many of the Southern California jazz luminaries such as Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, and Bill Perkins, the performances usually being very well received.

In August of 1953, two recording sessions took place that represent the most successful examples of what Charles was striving for (New Directions Vols. 3 and 4). The participants were trumpeter Shorty Rogers, bassist Curtis Counce, and the incomparable Shelly Manne on drums. On the later session, Jimmy Giuffre was added on tenor and baritone saxophones and clarinet. Of the eight original compositions, five are by Charles, two by Rogers, and one by Giuffre. Hall Overton summarized the characteristics that distinguish this music from standard jazz formats: “1. longer forms than the usual 32 bar song form; 2. a much more varied type harmony (polytonality, 4th chords); 3. spontaneous counterpoint, whenever performers feel an extra melodic line fits; 4. fluctuating tonal centers.” Among many highlights, Charles’s “Variations on a Motive by Bud” is a fascinating, up-tempo reinvention of “Get Happy” based on a left-hand motif employed by the piano master Bud Powell, while the modal “Bobalob” clearly presages Miles Davis’s directions of a few years later. The rapport/interplay among the musicians is impressive and renders insignificant the East/West Coast and “cool” stereotypes that had become so entrenched. These sessions, like the Tentet recordings that followed, demonstrate that experimental and innovative jazz can also swing compellingly and need not abandon the fundamental characteristics of the idiom in order to achieve its goal.

Upon his return to New York, Charles began to tour the club and college circuit with a pianoless quartet which at various times included trumpeter Art Farmer, tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, drummers Jerry Segal, Rudy Nichols, and Elvin Jones, and Charles Mingus on bass. Charles’s relationship with the immensely talented but difficult Mingus would be a long-lasting and productive one, resulting in some memorable collaborations ranging from gigs as a vibes/bass duo to a performance of Mingus’s extended orchestral work, “Revelations” at Brandeis University in 1957, and the Mingus Dynasty recording session for Columbia in 1959. In 1960, he participated in the “protest” festival at Newport organized by Mingus and Max Roach in response to economic exploitation and racial injustice, performing in a sextet with trumpeter Kenny Dorham, tenor saxophonist Allen Eager, pianist Kenny Drew, bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Art Taylor. Charles had and continues to have the highest regard for Mingus’s music, describing its emotional impact as “raw power in action” while at the same time lamenting the bass player’s consistent and frustrating inability to notate his scores in a way that would produce the desired results.

In July of 1955, Charles played on, supervised, and wrote most of the arrangements for a Miles Davis session (Blue Moods) on Mingus’s Debut label. Charles had first met Davis when both were studying at Juilliard. This fascinating quintet (again forgoing piano) included Britt Woodman on trombone, drummer Elvin Jones, and Mingus, but personality conflicts and a copying error in Mingus’s arrangement of “Alone Together” led to tension and bickering which severely limited the session’s productivity. (Charles remembers this as one of the most difficult sessions in which he participated.) However, the resulting four tracks do show how genius can rise above adversity to yield memorable music. This low-key, sensitive, and emotional LP, dominated by Davis’s plaintiff trumpet, received a five-star rating in Down Beat magazine.

Charles was a participant in Mingus’s Jazz Composers Workshop which also included such major talents as George Russell, Gigi Gryce, Gil Evans, John LaPorta, Teo Macero, Mal Waldron, Wally Cirillo, Sam Most, Don Butterfield and many others with an interest in composition and experimentation. These associations facilitated the formation of the Teddy Charles Tentet, an unusual ensemble made up of three saxophones, trumpet, tuba, guitar, vibraphone and rhythm section. Recordings by this aggregation for the Atlantic label in 1956 have become classics and stand as the crowning achievement of Charles’s career and the culmination of the compositional approach which he and Hall Overton had formulated earlier. Blending breathtaking writing by Waldron, Russell, Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Brookmeyer and Charles himself with outstanding solos by the leader, Art Farmer, J.R. Monterose, and Gigi Gryce, this music, fortunately reissued on CD, remains a delight, fresh and full of surprises some forty-three years after its release. Waldron’s “Vibrations” has been included in the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies archive collection, The Greatest Jazz Recordings of All Time. Charles’s tribute to Charlie Parker, “Word from Bird,” an extended work which added trombone and French horn to the instrumentation, was conducted by composer David Broekman at the Newport Jazz Festival. The Tentet was also a mainstay of Broekman’s “Music In the Making” series at Cooper Union. Unfortunately, this ensemble had little commercial potential and Charles, characteristically, rebuffed the urgings of his manager to compromise by adding material that would have broadened its appeal. By 1957, the Tentet was history, only being revived occasionally in the years to come.

In Mal Waldron, Charles had found a piano player with whom he felt comfortable and who shared his interest in composition. Both were thematic improvisers who constructed solos thoughtfully and within the context of a piece rather than relying on clichés and inappropriate technical flights of fancy. Many collaborations followed including the Prestige Jazz Quartet, a collective ensemble patterned on the Modern Jazz Quartet, with Addison Farmer on bass and Jerry Segal on drums. Two LPs were recorded for Prestige, one featuring tenor saxophonist Teo Macero as a guest artist. Both Waldron and Charles contributed adventurous original music including the vibraphonist’s “Take Three Parts Jazz Suite.” The quartet added trumpeter Idrees Sulieman for recordings on the Elektra and New Jazz labels that were very much in the now firmly entrenched “hard bop” tradition. An outstanding Prestige session (Olio) in which Charles and Waldron participated, and which has finally been made available on CD, involved trumpeter Thad Jones, flutist/saxophonist Frank Wess, bassist Doug Watkins, and the irrepressible Elvin Jones on drums. What would normally have been a jam session format common to Bob Weinstock’s label at the time was enriched by the writing of Waldron and especially Charles, whose dark and exotic compositions, “Dakar” (later recorded by John Coltrane) and “Hello Frisco” (a response to the earlier “So Long Broadway”) create a fresh and stimulating atmosphere for this immensely talented ensemble.

Having recently celebrated Duke Ellington’s centennial, it would be remiss to omit mention of the long-forgotten Three For Duke session of 1957 for the Jubilee label, in which Charles was reunited with his friend and mentor Hall Overton in a trio rounded out by the master bassist Oscar Pettiford. Six Ellington compositions were recorded including a nine-minute exploration of “Sophisticated Lady,” taken at very slow tempo, but notably avoiding the common ballad crutch of doubling the tempo. Charles had some trepidation about doing this album without a drummer, but Pettiford’s strength and taste rendered such concerns unnecessary. With sketches by both Overton and Charles, the music is faithful to Ellington’s legacy and thoughtful and moving solos are provided by all three participants. The concepts of group rapport and contextual appropriateness so important to all of Charles’s work are ever present. This is an album that definitely merits reissue.

By the late 1950s, Charles was deeply involved in record production and A&R work. He produced or supervised numerous sessions for the Prestige, Warwick and Bethlehem labels and often contributed compositions and arrangements. The list of featured artists, both instrumentalists and vocalists, reads like a who’s-who of the period. He even joined forces with pianist and concert promoter George Wein to form a record production company known as Joydine Productions. Creating new contexts for artists both upcoming and established, and combining personnel in ways that might generate novel results was an ongoing challenge that he enjoyed. One notable example of his work, long out of print, is The Amazing Mr. Sam Most, recorded for the Bethlehem label in late 1957, in which the multi-reed artist is backed by a string quartet in the performance of six standards. Charles’s arrangements, of which he remains very proud, create intriguing interactions between the strings and Most’s flute, clarinet and tenor saxophone that on certain tracks prefigure the Focus collaboration between Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter of four years later.

Through his close friend Teo Macero, who was performing A&R duties for Columbia Records, Charles became involved in two interesting recording sessions in 1959 for that label. (Neither has been reissued on CD in its entirety.) Something New, Something Blue was designed as a vehicle for four arrangers, Charles, Macero, Bill Russo, and Manny Albam, who each contributed an original composition and a new version of a blues standard for a medium-size ensemble which included Donald Byrd, Bob Brookmeyer, Mal Waldron, Ed Shaughnessy, and others. Charles provided his own “Swinging Goatsherd Blues,” originally written for the Australian Jazz Quintet, and an effective update of “Blues in the Night,” which features a beautifully voiced introduction, a 12/8 feel, and fine solos by the arranger, Byrd, and Brookmeyer. The second project was a jazz version of the Broadway show, Guys and Dolls with Charles and Macero dividing the arranging duties for varying ensembles aptly called “The Manhattan Jazz All Stars.”

The trumpeter Booker Little was a favorite of Charles as both a player and writer and, in 1960, was featured on a Warwick album called The Soul of Jazz Percussion. Charles, as producer, enlisted his old friends Mal Waldron and Ed Shaughnessy to participate in this project and they, along with Little, Tom McIntosh, and Alonzo Levister, provided some very unusual scores for stellar ensembles including Donald Byrd, Marcus Belgrave, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Addison Farmer, Philly Joe Jones, Don Ellis, Pepper Adams, and Curtis Fuller. Little also joined Charles’s quartet and tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin for a memorable concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York which was first issued on the Warwick label, but later rather mysteriously reissued with the title Sounds of Inner City (TCB label) and most of Charles’s solos deleted.

An outstanding album of Charles Mingus’s music, performed by Pepper Adams, was produced by Charles in 1963 for the short-lived Workshop Jazz series of the Motown label with which he had become affiliated. He also adapted several themes of Russian classical composers for small jazz ensemble resulting in the United Artists LP, Russia Goes Jazz with an all-star cast of New York players (as always) and hilarious, satirical liner notes by Ira Gitler. But as the 1960s progressed and opportunities for jazz musicians began to dry up, Charles’s activities likewise diminished. His versatility and good sight-reading ability enabled him to secure lucrative commercial studio work (eg. Paul Simon, Dion and the Belmonts), but he abhorred and often could not even concentrate on music he found banal and uninteresting. His last recording for over twenty years was made in 1967.

Charles had a keen passion for and had been active in sailing and deep-sea diving all his life. (He even missed a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959 when he chose to make the trip from New York by boat and the winds died en route.) After finally making the difficult decision to abandon music, he relocated to the island of Martinique to begin a new life and successful career as a charter boat skipper, ferrying passengers and cargo around the Caribbean islands. This adventure in paradise lasted for several years until a chance encounter at a yacht club on Antigua rekindled his desire for music. While accompanying a local clarinetist on piano, Charles suddenly realized how much he really missed his earlier professional activities.

Shortly after his return to New York in 1980, Charles was introduced to the pianist Harold Danko with whom he found a musical kinship similar to those he had established with Hall Overton and Mal Waldron. The two worked together frequently over the next few years while Charles continued his sailing activities. The Soul Note label recorded Charles at the 1988 Verona Jazz Festival in a quartet setting with Danko, bassist Ray Drummond, and drummer Tony Reedus. Although this performance has its interesting moments, it lacks the group rapport and excitement that were so much a part of Charles’s earlier work. The next day, he and Max Roach appeared as a duo in the city of Rovigo, Italy, and tapes of this concert exist, according to Charles.

Charles currently resides in Greenport, New York, on the north fork of Long Island, where his boat, the Mary E, a 72-foot clipper schooner built in 1906, dominates the marina. His scenic cruises on Long Island Sound are quite popular during the summer and fall and a significant tourist attraction. At 71, “Captain Ted,” as he is known locally, is still vigorous, despite having undergone heart valve replacement surgery. He plays the vibraphone occasionally and is slated to perform some of the Tentet music September 18, 2000, in California, under the auspices of the American Jazz Institute.

The legacy of Teddy Charles is remarkably devoid of the mundane and defies easy classification. Nearly every project in which he participated, even those he only produced or supervised, provides some intriguing and novel aspect. While a technically gifted instrumentalist who could hold his own in any setting, his approach de-emphasized virtuosic solo excursions in favor of a collective musical goal. These factors, along with his relative inactivity during the last thirty years, have conspired to keep him in greater obscurity than he really deserves. Hopefully, the future will afford more opportunities for him, and perhaps some of the immensely talented young players of today, to re-explore his music.”

This article is based, in part, on interviews with Teddy Charles in April and July of 1999. Many thanks to Bill Damm, Mike Fitzgerald, Dan Skea and The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ.

Author’s Addendum – November 2018:

Teddy Charles passed away on April 16, 2012 in Riverhead, NY where he had relocated from Greenport. He had just turned 84. The interviews that I did with him and the above article that resulted led us to become friends, quite a coup for me since his recordings were a great influence and source of pleasure when I was just getting into this music in the early 1950s.

In 2007, Teddy indicated to me that he wanted to return to actively performing in New York City and asked me if I knew any musicians who might be interested in collaborating with him. I immediately thought of saxophonist/composer/arranger Chris Byars who was delighted to assist such an innovative and historically important figure. A meeting at Teddy’s Riverhead home got the ball rolling and during the last years of Teddy’s life, Byars resurrected the famous Tentet and made several recordings and appearances with the vibraphonist. The performance venues included Smalls, The Village Vanguard, Iridium, The Players Theater and Kitano. In addition, Teddy traveled to The Netherlands in November of 2008, touring with local musicians and performing his extended composition “Word from Bird” in Leiden.

In 2010, Teddy and a Tentet including saxophonist Kim Richmond and drummer Ed Shaughnessyappeared at the East Coast Sounds Festival under the auspices of the Los Angeles Jazz Institute and in collaboration with Washington, DC-based saxophonist Brad Linde, there was also a Tentet appearance at The Atlas Performing Arts Center in 2011.

Teddy’s recordings during this period are the following:

Teddy Charles, Dances with Bulls, Smalls Records SRCD-0038 (2009)

Teddy Charles and Walter Wolff, Teddy Charles and the Walter Wolff Trio Live, O.A.P. (Du.) OAPR 904 (2009)

Chris Byars, Bop-ography, SteepleChase (Dan.) SCCD 31686 (2009)

Although cut short by illness, Teddy’s late-career comeback was a significant and productive one and I am happy to have helped facilitate it.

Many of Teddy Charles’ papers and scores are archived at the Jazz Loft Museum in Stony Brook, NY.

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Miles Davis - 'Round About Midnight Revisited

December 2, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Two Critics: Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett

≪ Previous: New Directions Revisited – The Rich and Unique Legacy of Teddy Charles by Noal Cohen

One of the things I enjoy about periodically pouring over the Jazz Literature is spotting fresh ideas that often send me back to re-listen to some of my favorite recordings.

As a case in point, the following excerpts from Gary Giddins/Scott Deveaux - Jazz - [W.W. Norton: pp. 415-416] created a new found awareness about Miles Davis first LP on Columbia Records - ‘Round About Midnight [Columbia CL 949].

The “tempo change” that Gary and Scott describe in the Gil Evans arrangement for Miles of Monk’s ‘Round Midnight still knocks me out 60 years later!! [I always thought that Philly Joe Jones’ press roll was the equal of that of Art Blakey.]

“In the summer of 1955, Davis made a brief but much-acclaimed appearance at the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival, creating a stir with his version of Monk's "'Round Midnight." It was the first time most critics and fans had ever seen a Harmon mute. On the basis of this performance, Davis signed a contract with Columbia Records — a major career leap beyond independent jazz labels like Prestige that he had doggedly pursued. Davis, however, still owed Prestige three years under his existing contract, which he fulfilled by recording five albums of music at two marathon sessions. The proliferation of Davis albums in the late 1950s from both labels (the Prestiges were memorably titled with descriptive gerunds: Relaxin', Steamin’, Cookin’, Workin’] boosted his celebrity.

For the cover of his debut Columbia album,'Round About Midnight (1955), Davis was photographed through a red lens, wearing dark glasses, embracing his trumpet, unsmiling — an iconic image. That album also introduced his first great quintet, one of the most admired small bands in history, with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Miles's old friend Gil Evans crafted the arrangement of 'Round Midnight, adding a tempo change and making the quintet sound fuller than on the other selections. Davis revealed an unmistakably kinetic edginess on this album, even when revisiting his past, as in a ferocious version of Charlie Parker's contrapuntal Ah-Leu-Cha, which he had recorded with Parker in 1948.

Three aspects of this quintet were particularly noticeable. The contrast between Davis's sparing, poignant solos and Coltrane's more demonstrative virtuosity reversed a similar disparity between Parker and Davis, this time favoring Davis; the rhythm section boasted an assertive independence, thanks to Jones's insistent attack and Chambers's authoritative pulse and harmonic skill; and the diverse repertory combined original pieces with pop songs dating back to the 1920s or borrowed from current or recent Broadway shows. Garland, a living thesaurus of pop music, suggested many of the tunes that Davis recharged. In this regard, Davis was also influenced by Frank Sinatra, who was revitalizing his own career at the same time, often with old songs that were considered too dated or corny for modern jazz. By adapting such unlikely songs as Bye Bye Blackbird (from a 1926 revue), Diane (from the 1927 silent movie Seventh Heaven], The Surrey with the Fringe on Top (from the 1943 show Oklahoma!), and If I Were a Bell (from the 1950 show Guys and Dolls], Davis opened up jazz repertory and affirmed the old saw Taint What You Do."

↧

Two Critics: Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett

December 3, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Don Ferrara - The Gordon Jack Interview [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Miles Davis - 'Round About Midnight Revisited

“A critic has two functions: (1) to spread knowledge and appreciation of his subject among those who don't know but might learn about it; (2) to encourage those who are doing the work and tell them how it is "coming over," with as little bias and as much understanding as possible. And that is quite a task, requiring a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done; and just as steady a passion for learning how to explain this so that it will somehow mean something to the performer and his audience alike. The best people I have discovered to learn about music from are the musicians, who would not be found dead in the kind of talk generally used to describe their work. The task of describing and estimating their work is not impossible. The main trouble is, it isn't even being attempted.”

- Otis Ferguson

"Most Jazz critics would rather catch another Jazz critic in a minor mistake than bring Bix back from the dead."
- Grover Sales, Jazz author, critic and educator

I knew I had it somewhere; “it” being the best analysis I’d ever read of of what made Whitney Balliett an exceptional writer on the subject of Jazz.

But where?

I seemed to recall, too, that the essay in question reviewed another writer who wrote about Jazz and other topics, the obscure Otis Ferguson.

I had given up looking for it when it literally fell between my feet while I was moving some Jazz books to a new location at the editorial offices of JazzProfiles.

The source for both reviews was a 1983 edition of Gene Lees’ Jazzletter which I had folded and put between the books by Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett.

By the way, both the Ferguson and the Balliet books are available in inexpensive used editions from Amazon.com.

Jazzletter

Gene Lees

March 15, 1983

“In his new book, Jelly Roll Jabbo and Fats (Oxford University Press), Whitney Balliett considers the work of two jazz critics, both French, Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay. In the cause of symmetry, I would like to consider the work of two jazz critics, both American, Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett.

Panassie's Le jazz hot was published in 1934 in France. Its English translation was published in the United States in 1936 — the year Ferguson began writing about jazz for The New Republic. He had been writing about books for that publication for three years, and had reviewed a Gershwin concert for his college paper as far back as 1930. Panassie, however, is considered the pioneer of jazz criticism, the man who, as Balliett puts it, "put jazz on the map in Europe and in its own country."

There are probably two reasons for this. One is that Panassie was the first to get out a book — we are very impressed by books — of jazz criticism in the United States. Ferguson, who became a merchant seaman and was killed off the Salerno shore in a German bombing attack in 1943, never saw a book of his work. Indeed his writings on jazz have not been bound between two covers until the present volume, The Otis Ferguson Reader, published by December Press, 3090 Dato, Highland Park, Illinois, 60035. It contains as well his writing on many other subjects, including the sea. Since the same gang that controls the television, movie and record industries has now devoured book publishing and distribution, it would not have been published at all but for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The great corporations have effectually destroyed free enterprise in the arts.

The second reason Panassie had more impact than Ferguson is that he was a European and Americans were prone to abject genuflection toward the Old World. The cultural establishment still is, which is seen in the fact that only one or two important American symphony orchestras have American conductors. A resentment of the American need for European approval, now echoed in the Canadian need for American validation, is no doubt the inspiration for Eddie Condon's famous wisecrack about Panassie: "I don't see why we need a Frenchman to come over here and tell us how to play American music. I wouldn't think of going to France and telling him how to jump on a grape."

One of the values of Ferguson's work is that he was writing about the music when it was young and thus it is a record of the times. Born in 1907, he was coeval to Louis Armstrong (1900), Duke Ellington (1899), and Bix Beiderbecke (1904), about whom he wrote with insight, admiration, and passion. Ferguson entitled one of his articles about Beiderbecke Young Man with a Horn, a phrase that has retained a curiously haunting quality in jazz ever since. His girlfriend, Dorothy Baker, wrote the novel of that name "inspired by" Beiderbecke's music.

Ferguson was perceptive to the point of prescience. He saw the worth of Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and conveyed his admiration persuasively. He correctly took the measure of Jess Stacy, Teddy Wilson, Ziggy Elman. A portrait of John Hammond is etched in acid. Ferguson is to this day one of the few writers who has ever had the courage to question Hammond's legend, self-written with the assistance of power, family, money, and connections, though the number of musicians who question it is considerable. He writes:

‘Somewhere a long way back, probably — somewhere it wasn't done because he had the inside rail and the silver spoon and the velvet cushion — John Hammond should have been taken in hand and had his ears beaten down a little, and he should have been made to write out five thousand times over, for his eventual good, the sentence: CRITICS OUGHT TO LEARN HOW TO TAKE THEIR TIME.’

Ferguson goes overboard in his praise of Hammond's brother-in-law, Benny Goodman, whose band in the RCA days I found stiff, although it developed fluidity later on when Charlie Christian and Mel Powell were in it. But Goodman did open the door for other and better bands, and Ferguson understood Goodman's impact on the American culture.

Ferguson was not the writer Balliett is, though they take similar follow-your-man-and-listen approaches to character portraiture. The dust jacket of almost every book by Balliett (this is the eleventh) presents Alistair Cooke's statement that he is, "without a rival in sight, the most literate and knowledgeable living writer on jazz." One must of course raise an eyebrow at a man who sets himself up as a judge of literacy and then uses the word "knowledgeable". And Cooke hasn't read every living writer on jazz, assuredly including the Japanese. But Balliett is certainly one of the most graceful essayists in the English language on any subject, even if in this book he does slip into the use of one of those fad words ("arguably" and "thrust" are very popular these days) that sweep through journalism from time to time. In his case, the new word (watch for it; it's cropping up in criticism) is "layered" or "layering". He uses it twice. He also uses "into" at one point. But we must forgive him. These things are insidiously pervasive and insinuate themselves into one's thought; I almost said "hopefully" the other day. For the rest of the course, Balliett's language is fresh, his own, and always arresting in its imagery.

Balliett's pieces are peculiarly devoid of self. He is the invisible interviewer. I used to think he must use tape a lot. I was surprised to find that he simply takes notes, carefully and patiently. How he gets the subjects of his word pictures to be so self-revealing in the presence of a pencil is a bit of a mystery, for he is in person anything but invisible. Tall, almost white-haired, courtly, bespectacled, and notably handsome, he has presence. He would be intimidating were he not an apparently gentle man.

His essays are for the most part almost devoid of overt opinion. They have a cinema verite quality. He describes the music and the musicians so vividly that you can almost hear it and see its makers, even though much of the time you cannot tell what he actually thinks of either. Every once in a while, however, he hauls off and bangs you over the head with a baseball bat of opinion. One of the essays in this book begins, "Michael Moore is the best jazz bassist alive..." Well, okay. Maybe he is and maybe he isn't. He is one hell of a bass player, however, and after reading Balliett’s piece you will know a lot more than you did about both Moore and his playing. In another essay, Balliett says that after Sonny Greer left Duke Ellington, "the band never fully recovered.” A good many musicians would give him an argument on that point.

But that is neither here nor there. What Balliett is, more than a critic, and this makes him invaluable, is an enormously gifted chronicler of jazz, and one who seems to have listened to more music than any five of us put together.

Balliett is at his best describing drummers (he has been one). He says of Greer that he "showered everyone with cymbals." Of Freddie Moore, in a piece called New York Drummers,"You could build a house on his beat." Of Tommy Benford: "There is a metallic cast to him; if he were struck with one of his mallets, he would ring." He says Benford "surrounds his sentences with buffering silences, which give his speech a beneficent, upholstered air." He says that Sidney Bechet "used the chords of a song but also followed the melody, which kept reappearing, like sunlight on a forest floor.".His writing is full of such firefly phrases. But they are never merely cute and he knows enough not to overdo them. Writing that is too thick with imagery takes on an overripe quality, resembling fermenting peaches. His pacing is perfect and his ear unfailing — except for "layering" of course.

Ferguson's ear is not. He affects a hipness, and a common-man coarseness of language. "Terrific" is one of his pet adjectives for the admirable. Ferguson was a graduate — in English and history - of Clark University. He became known at The New Republic for his skepticism toward high art, his advocacy of popular art. His proletarian affectations produce such out-of-tune phrases as "because singing is music and music is such a wonderful thing..." Wow. At times one feels he has read too avidly Hemingway's mannered and all too imitable work. (Incidentally, at one point Ferguson uses the expression "where they're at." I was surprised to learn that this deliberate solecism was in circulation in the jazz world as far back as the mid-1930s.) Nonetheless, Ferguson's observations of the music and its makers and milieu are dead on. For example, he says of jazz critics, "The accepted way of writing about a jazz hero is to put in apocryphal details, such as he thought he heard Buddy Bolden play at the age of two and fell out of his crib at the same time; and the next thing he knew he was seven and one-half years old and really carving all the boys at funeral marches in New Orleans with a cornet he'd made out of the plumbing in a condemned WC in Storyville, after which he quickly went to Chicago to make one of the hottest records in the world, of which I own the only copy personally; and then he went to pieces and made some records even you can buy, only they're no good." In one essay he devastatingly satirizes the kind of language in which jazz was being discussed at Down Beat (or Dead Beat, as Don DeMicheal and I used to call it behind its back). And then elsewhere he commits hippy-dip sins of his own, referring to Jack Teagarden as "Big Gate" and "Mr. T.", and so forth.

But what is chiefly wrong with Ferguson's essays on jazz — and those on books and movies, too, which fill about half this volume — is not his fault. It is the fault of space restrictions in The New Republic. Most of those pieces are short, and though he sometimes treats the same subject in several essays, the effect is a fragmented one. No writer about jazz has ever had the luxury of space, excepting Balliett who, because of the character and editorial attitude of The New Yorker, seems able to explore a subject to whatever length it requires.

For all the skilled complexity (dare I say "layering"?) of Balliett's writing, his approach is essentially simple. He is an unseen emcee, reading an introduction to the act to give you a sense of its value. Then he falls silent and lets the artist speak in lengthy direct quotation, telling you about his work and himself. When you are through, you have grasped the artist's intent, which is crucial to any understanding of art. No one does this better than Balliett and too many writers don't do it at all. After reading Balliett's piece on Ornette Coleman, it is hard to tell whether he likes the music or not, but one certainly understands Coleman better --as one does Jelly Roll Morton, Jabbo Smith, Doc Cheatham, Fats Waller, Dick Wellstood, Vic Dickenson, Dave McKenna, and other subjects of these sixteen essays.

Ferguson annoys you at times by talking down to you. Balliett never talks down. He treats his subjects and the reader with respect and the implicit assumption that anyone who appreciates good music has the wherewithal to appreciate good writing. His tone is Brahminical, elegant, and unselfconsciously poetic. He writes the way Nathan Milstein plays fiddle, the way Benny Carter plays alto. He is the aristocrat unaware of it, who, showing you the beautifully furnished town house of his mind, assumes you are accustomed to drinking from Spode. And when he enters your terrain to interview you, he seems oblivious to the fact that your teacups are chipped. And that is possibly how he gets those interviews.

The good in Otis Ferguson's work far, far outweighs his lapses, and it is clear that the man deserves a monument of some kind, if only in our minds. And he left a sound definition of the function of criticism.

‘A critic has two functions: (1) to spread knowledge and appreciation of his subject among those who don't know but might learn about it; (2) to encourage those who are doing the work and tell them how it is "coming over," with as little bias and as much understanding as possible. And that is quite a task, requiring a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done; and just as steady a passion for learning how to explain this so that it will somehow mean something to the performer and his audience alike. The best people I have discovered to learn about music from are the musicians, who would not be found dead in the kind of talk generally used to describe their work. The task of describing and estimating their work is not impossible. The main trouble is, it isn't even being attempted.’

It is now. Whitney Balliett is the fulfillment of Otis Ferguson's prophecy.”

↧

Don Ferrara - The Gordon Jack Interview [From the Archives]

December 4, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Saxophone and Jazz

≪ Previous: Two Critics: Otis Ferguson and Whitney Balliett

"Don is a real improviser and a very complete player—sound, ideas, time. He possesses very cohesive intuition."… Don was a powerful player and one of the few trumpeters to have some of Roy Eldridge's heat."

- Lee Konitz, alto saxophone

Where I grew up, everyone’s last name ended in a vowel, or so it seemed for a very long time.

Names like “Ranucci,” “DiStefano,” and “Capaldi” - it was all so mellifluous to listen to the teachers call the attendance roll each day in the classroom.

“DeSantis” was the name above the entrance to the bakery, “DiPippo” owned the store where you went to buy musical instruments and took music lessons and “Ferrara and Ferrara” was really a law firm.

The son of one of the Ferrara attorneys was my best buddy through most of grade school and as a result of this boyhood friendship, I’ve always had a fondness for the last name of “Ferrara.”

And my fondness for that family name didn’t diminish once I heard the brilliant trumpet playing of Don Ferrara on recordings by the Gerry Mulligan Sextet and then later on LPs with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and Gerry’s Concert Jazz Band.

Don Ferrara’s beautiful sound on trumpet always brought to mind another of my favorite trumpet players who shares the same first name - Don Fagerquist [and the same initials!]. And what I wrote about Don Fagerquist in this excerpt from a previous blog posting also applies equally as well to Don Ferrara.

“One of the musicians on the Left Coast who always knocked me out was trumpeter Don Fagerquist.

He had one of the most beautiful sounds that I ever heard on trumpet; plus, he was one heckuva swinger, which always caught me by surprise. Here’s this lyrical, pretty tone, and the next thing you know the guy is poppin’ one terrific Jazz phrase after another.

The trumpet seemed to find him. His was one of the purest tones you will ever hear on the horn. In Don Fagerquist, the instrument found one of its clearest forms of expression.

Don never seemed to get outside of himself. He found big bands and combos to work in that both complimented and complemented the way he approached playing the trumpet.

His tone was what musicians referred to as “legit” [short for legitimate = the sound of an instrument often associated with its form in Classical music].

No squeezing notes through the horn, no half-valve fingering and no tricks or shortcuts. Even his erect posture in playing the instrument was textbook.

If you had a child who wished to play trumpet, Don would have been the perfect teacher for all facets of playing the instrument.

He was clear, he was clean and he was cool.

His sound had a presence to it that just snapped your head around when you heard it; it made you pay attention to it.

No shuckin’ or jiving’, just the majesty of the trumpeter’s clarion call . When the Angel Gabriel picked trumpet as his axe [Jazz talk for instrument], he must have had Don’s tone in mind.”

- the editorial staff at JazzProfiles

Regrettably, there is not much information about Don Ferrara in the Jazz Literature, a fact that has been somewhat remedied by the following interview that Don Ferrara gave to Gordon Jack and which first appeared in the June, 2000 edition of JazzJournal. It also forms Chapter 11 is Gordon’s invaluable Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective.

Gordon very graciously gave his consent to allow JazzProfiles to repost his Don Ferrara interview as a blog feature. I have retained the footnote numbering in the body of the text and you can find these sources at the end of Gordon’s interview along with a video that will give you an opportunity to sample Don’s trumpet playing.

[Gordon also advised regarding the photo that appears at the beginning of this feature: “One piece of information regarding the Ferrara, Travis, Candoli picture in my book was that they were all on stage with Mulligan's CJB in Paris at the time -1960.”]

What is really surprising about Don Ferrara, who worked with major figures like Georgie Auld, Woody Herman, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and Lennie Tristano, is that he is not mentioned in any of the standard jazz reference books. Tristano once said that Ferrara had ‘absolutely everything,' but in a long career, despite an earlier attempt by Leonard Feather, this is the first interview he has agreed to give. It took place in 1996, when he replied on cassette tape to my list of written questions.

“I was born on March 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York. I started playing the trumpet when I was ten years old, and I was the only professional musician in my family. The radio was filled with music every night, broadcasting from clubs and hotels all over the city, and I would listen to Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Duke, Basie, and Woody. I was hungry to hear as much as I could, and I was knocked out by how well the trumpeters played and how different they all sounded.

Jerry Wald had a good commercial band, and it was the first big band I played with for four months in 1945, but he was more of a businessman than a musician and he didn't make much contact with the guys. I left to join Georgie Auld, and along with Diz and Woody, he had one of the best big bands in the country. Al Porcino, who was a great lead trumpeter, was there along with Al Cohn and Serge Chaloff. Al Cohn wrote most of the book, which was very loose and musical, and Georgie was a friendly guy who would hang out with the band. He was a wonderful musician, not at all competitive, and I stayed with him until May 1946, when I was inducted into the Army. That is where I met Red Mitchell, because we were both in the same Army band, and Howie Mann was there too. Howie was a friend of mine from high school, and he was a good drummer who later worked with Elliot Lawrence.

I first met Warne Marsh at this time, and we spent a lot of time playing together and listening to records, which is when I found out about Lennie Tristano. As soon as I was discharged in April 1947,1 started studying with him, and right from the beginning he got me into chords, because I didn't know how any of that worked. It was thanks to Lennie that I was able to find my own direction, although I wasn't copying anyone's playing, so there wasn't anything to change. This was really when everything started for me, and I carried on studying with him for a total of fourteen years. 1947 was also the year I started teaching.

1950 was a very busy year for me because I was rehearsing with a band that Gene Roland put together for Charlie Parker. It was Al Porcino who recommended me to Gene, who was organizing an unusual big band with the idea of working and recording with Bird. A couple of weeks before rehearsals, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and I went to hear him at a club out in Queens, and we all ended up on the bandstand with Miles and J.J., who were working with him that night. I really enjoyed it. I had never played in a band as big as Gene Roland's—eight trumpets, five trombones, eight saxes, and four rhythm—and it was unbelievable to hear Bird playing in an eight-man sax section. He was so strong and beautiful, playing lead the way he played everything else, and the feeling and looseness were just wonderful. One of the tunes was "Limehouse Blues," and even though he had thirteen brass in cup mutes behind him, his line and sound cut through everything. I did about two weeks' rehearsals, but I couldn't make the recording with Bird because, once again thanks to Al Porcino, I was called for a record date with Chubby Jackson.1 Howard McGhee was in the trumpet section with Al and me, along with J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding in the trombones and a very hip sax section of Charlie Kennedy, Georgie Auld, Zoot Sims, and Gerry Mulligan, with Tony Aless on piano and Don Lamond on drums. There was talk of Chubby taking the band out to a new club in Texas, but I didn't go because Red Mitchell had recommended me to Woody Herman, so I started working with the Third Herd in April 1950.

Our first job was a month at Bop City in New York, and we had some wonderful soloists like Milt Jackson and Bill Harris that I really enjoyed listening to. The trumpet section was very strong, and Bernie Glow played most of the lead, although the way the book was written, some of the tunes had the lead split three ways. Being a "Four Brothers" type band, the saxes had most of the solos, but once in a while the trumpets got a chance. On "Route 66" for instance, Woody asked me to write a chorus for the section to play in unison in harmon mutes, which was followed by a solo for Doug Mettome. I arranged for Jeff Morton to take Sonny Igoe's place on the band for three weeks when Sonny got married, and the rhythm section sounded wonderful. Woody was nice to work for and I stayed with the band for fifty weeks, but eventually I left and went back home to Brooklyn to study with Lennie again, and I think that Don Fagerquist took my place.2

Over the next few years I was teaching and studying as well as playing at lots of jam sessions around town. Then, in 1955, Lee Konitz asked me to join his group with Sal Mosca, Peter Ind, and either Dick Scott, Ed Levisen, or Shadow Wilson on drums. Billy Bauer sometimes worked with us, and the repertoire consisted of originals by Lee and me, pieces by Lennie, together with some of Bird's lines. It was a great band. I loved the way Lee, Peter, and Sal played, and we had a wonderful time for a couple of years, playing at clubs like Birdland, Cafe Bohemia, and the Half Note.

The first time we worked opposite Mulligan and Brookmeyer, Gerry said he was so knocked out with my playing that he called me to record with his sextet. I rehearsed with the group in the afternoon of September 26,1956, and after we took a break and went out for something to eat, we recorded the album later that night.3 That was the only time I played with the sextet, but a few days later Bill Crow called and said that Gerry wanted me to join the band. I didn't because I was still working with Lee, although I really liked the sextet. The writing was very good, the blend and intonation of the four horns was perfect, and everyone could really blow. The following year I recorded again with Gerry, only this time in a big band, and just about everyone had a short solo.4 That same year Lee and I were in the studio for Norman Granz, and on "Billie's Bounce" we played Bird's four choruses from memory, because most of the people studying with Lennie were memorizing solos by Lester, Bird, and Roy Eldridge.5

One of my students was a good friend of Mulligan's, and Gerry told him to get me to call because he wanted me to join the Concert Jazz Band, which he was organizing. After three months of auditions and rehearsals we played our first gig in January 1960 at Basin Street East. The club was filled every night, and I couldn't believe how many musicians were coming to hear us, as well as film and stage people who were friends of Judy Holliday. I had already met her at the rehearsals, and she was there at the band's first night, sitting next to Dora, my wife, and they were having as much fun listening as we were playing. I remember one night later on at the Village Vanguard, someone was whistling loudly after solos and at the end of every tune, generally having one hell of a time. When we came off the stand I asked Dora who was making all the noise, and she said it was Judy!

Nick Travis played all the lead, and he had good chops and excellent time. He was a fine consistent player with a relaxed feeling, but when we were in Europe he had a loose tooth on the top, right under the mouthpiece. He really had a problem for the last part of the tour, but it wasn't apparent to anyone, and as you can hear on the records, he sounds as full and consistent as always. Gerry already had Brookmeyer, but he wanted another strong soloist in the trombone section, so a couple of months before we left for Europe, Willie Dennis joined us, and he was perfect. I had first met Willie when he was with Elliot Lawrence in 1948, and he was a very good friend of mine. When he left Elliot's band, he moved to New York and started studying with Lennie, and his playing was just beautiful. He had very good chops and great time, with a soft texture to his sound, and despite what you may think, he was not slurring all the time but tonguing very lightly. He was very spontaneous, immediately reacting to what was happening. He was also a very good cook, and if you ate at his house, you ate well. Unfortunately Willie was killed in a car accident in Central Park; Dora and I went to his funeral, which had a closed casket. His wife, Morgana King, told us that on the night of the accident, it had been raining, and the road turned but the driver didn't. He hit a tree, sending Willie through the windscreen.

Gene Quill was a great character, and one of his features in the band was "18 Carrots for Rabbit," which was nearly all alto followed by a short solo from Gerry. One night after Gene finished and Gerry took over, the audience exploded because Gene had played so well. He took an extravagant bow, turned round to the band, giving us a real dirty look, and kissed himself on the shoulder. We just broke up and couldn't play anything, missing a whole bunch of phrases to be played behind Gerry's solo. At the end of the piece, Gerry asked us what had happened. We told him what Gene had been doing and Gerry, shaking his head, said, "I don't want to play after him anymore. Who the hell can play after him!" Which is when we all started laughing again. It was great having Zoot Sims on tour with us because he was so musical. He had great time and a sound that projected a wonderful feeling every time he played. On the subject of sounds, Gerry had the best of any baritone player, and he was extremely melodic. Bob Brookmeyer, too, had a superb sound and time, and they both played piano very well.

It was very easy working with Gerry. He was definite and consistent, so you knew exactly how he wanted his things played, and he always listened intently to the soloists, letting them know how much he dug their playing. We were all friends, and it was a happy band, in fact the best big band I ever played with. Gerry also had a good sense of humor. I remember one night he became angry with some of the audience for keeping time with the band by tapping on their glasses. He walked to the mike and told them he didn't like it and it was costing everyone in the room a lot of money to hear us. Those people got up to leave, and Gerry announced that it would be a good time to play "Walkin' Shoes."

I started working with Lennie at the Half Note in November 1962, and it was the best time I ever had playing. For about a year and a half we did three weeks there every two or three months, and Lennie was just unbelievable; his surprises were endless. I had been listening to him for years at lessons and jam sessions, but to be on a gig with him was something else, because he totally followed through on everything he told his students. He had great time and he was the most melodic player I ever heard. His chords and lines were extremely rich and intense, and I couldn't believe what a great sound he got out of those terrible nightclub pianos. Lennie would ask what tune I wanted to play and at what tempo. He would tap off, and we would just start improvising.

In 1964 Dora and I were busy with the first home that we had bought in New Jersey, and for the rest of the sixties I carried on teaching and making sessions. In 1972 we moved to Pasadena, California, which is where Warne Marsh introduced me to Gary Foster. I started teaching at Gary's studio and did some playing with Gary, Alan Broadbent, and Putter Smith, who are all excellent musicians.

Lennie Tristano was very important to me, as well as being one of my best friends, and I kept in touch with him until he died in 1978. Jeff Morton was a great drummer, and we played together as often as we could until his death in 1996. We have now moved to southern California, just north of San Diego, and because I teach by cassette, we can live anywhere in the country and still keep all my students.

No interview with Don Ferrara would be complete without discussing Roy Eldridge, who had an enormous influence on his playing, and his comments in a 1956 series of articles he wrote for Metronome magazine are particularly succinct: "Every note Roy played had meaning and life . . . his feelings pushed the valves down, not his fingers." In a recent telephone conversation Don told me, "Roy was the most important trumpeter for me. His time and sound were great. His line was always melodic, and the feeling was always very intense. He had the best chops of all the trumpeters, sounding loose and strong, and it didn't matter what tempo or in what range he played; it was all meaningful."

I concluded the interview by asking Don to list some of his favorite instrumentalists, singers, arrangers, and bands. His selections are as follows:

Trumpet—Roy Eldridge. Trombone—Bob Brookmeyer, Willie Dennis, and Bill Harris. Alto—Lee Konitz and Charlie Parker. Tenor—Lester Young, Warne Marsh, and Zoot Sims. Baritone—Gerry Mulligan and Lars Gullin. Clarinet—Artie Shaw and Lester Young. Vibes—Milt Jackson. Piano— Lennie Tristano, Sal Mosca, and Bud Powell. Guitar—Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Billy Bauer. Bass—Peter Ind and Red Mitchell. Drums—Jeff Morton, Max Roach, and Roy Haynes. Singers—Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. Arrangers—Ralph Burns, Neal Hefti, Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, and Bill Holman. Big Band—Gerry Mulligan and Woody Herman. Small Group—Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker.

Don Ferrara's solo abilities are well represented on the albums he made with Mulligan's sextet and the CJB. In 2000 Peter Ind released previously unissued tapes of a 1957 Lee Konitz engagement at the Midway Lounge, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, containing four numbers featuring the trumpeter.6 A particularly good example of Don's work in a small group situation is the LP. he mentions in the interview, where he and Konitz play Parker's famous solo on "Billie's Bounce." The album allows him to stretch out and really develop his highly individual ideas, and it has the additional advantage of including two of his distinctive compositions, "Sunflower" based on "Yesterdays," and "Movin* Around" based on Tristano's "Pennies in Minor" It is a recording that is long overdue for reissue on CD.”

NOTES

1. Chubby Jackson Big Band. Fantasy OJCCD-711-2.

2. In Bill Clancy's book on Woody Herman, Chronicles of the Herds (Schirmer Books), a June 1950 photograph shows Don Ferrara playing with the band at the Capitol Theater in New York.

3. Gerry Mulligan Sextet. Emarcy Jap 826993-2.

4. Gerry Mulligan, Mullenium Columbia/Legacy CK 65678. In addition to some examples of Gene Krupa and Elliot Lawrence playing Mulligan charts from the late forties, this CD also features six titles recorded by a Mulligan big band in April 1957. It includes a restored Ferrara solo on "Thruway" that had been removed on the original L.P. The CD booklet has some excellent and previously unpublished photographs from the session.

5. Lee Konitz, Very Cool. MGV 8209. May 1957. Talking about Ferrara on the sleevenote to Nat Hentoff, Konitz says, "Don is a real improviser and a very complete player—sound, ideas, time. He possesses very cohesive intuition." More recently he told me: "Don was a powerful player and one of the few trumpeters to have some of Roy Eldridge's heat."

6. Peter Ind Presents Lee Konitz in Jazz from the Fifties. Wave CD 39. February 1957.

If you wish to spend a fun evening listening to recorded Jazz sometime, try playing back-to-back records by Bobby Hackett, Don Fagerquist and Don Ferrara see where that takes you.

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The Saxophone and Jazz

December 5, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Joe Magnarelli - Revisiting "Mags"

≪ Previous: Don Ferrara - The Gordon Jack Interview [From the Archives]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 15, 1983

Jazzletter, Vol. 2, No. 9

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Joe Magnarelli - Revisiting "Mags"

December 6, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Tough Tenor Saxophonist

≪ Previous: The Saxophone and Jazz

I first met Joe Magnarelli in March, 1998 in a Seattle recording studio where we were recording Italian Jazz pianist Dado Moroni’s Out of the Night CD which I co-produced with Philip Barker for his Jazz Focus Records.

In between takes, we chatted amiably and Joe’s warm personality seemed a perfect compliment to his mellow approach to the trumpet which he plays in a style very reminiscent of Kenny Dorham.

Aside from his work on the Moroni album, I had previously heard Joe on recordings he made for Gerry Teekens’ Holland-based Criss Cross Records, a label he continues to record for under his own name and in combination with Philadelphia-based trumpeter John Swana.

Persistence [RSR CD 194] is my first encounter with “Mags’” work on Mark Feldman’s Reservoir label and it is a thoroughly enjoyable one. On it, Joe is joined by Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone and a rhythm section that is one of the best on today’s Jazz scene: pianist David Hazeltine, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington.

Peter Aaron is the music editor of Chronogram magazine and a contributor to the Village Voice, the Boston Herald, All About Jazz.com, All Music Guide.com, and Jazz Improv and Roll magazines. Here are his insert notes to Persistence [Reservoir RSR CD 194].

“There are several indispensable qualities an artist must have if he or she is to survive as a jazz musician. Tone. Technique. Ears. Resourcefulness. Adaptability. Good communication skills. Patience. Confidence. Individuality. Taste. Drive. Soul.

But perhaps the most important quality a great jazz musician - or any great artist, really -must have is persistence. Lots of it. Because without it, none of the other qualities mentioned above can be attained; when we see them manifested these characteristics can seem like assets an artist has been born with, but the truth is they have to be nurtured, developed. Which takes persistence. And persistence itself is what keeps an artist's eves on the prize, a strength that will carry him or her through the lean times, the slings of the naysayer, the chatty, indifferent audiences, the jet lag, the bad road food, the near-empty clubs, the sleepless nights of self-doubt that all artists encounter. The ones who don't have that all-important stick-to-itiveness eventually give up the ghost and quit playing, at least professionally.

But Joe Magnarelli has persistence. Lots of it. Joe, or Mags, as the trumpeter is often called, has been playing his horn for nearly 40 years. And for more than half of those years he’s been doing it professionally, both as a leader and in the bands of Lionel Hampton, Brother Jack McDuff, Harry Connick, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, Jon Hendricks, and Ray Barretto, as well as in the Glenn Miller and Carnegie Hall jazz orchestras. Joe is also a teacher, serving as an adjunct professor at the New School of Social Research in Manhattan and New Jersey City.

University in Jersey City and conducting clinics and master classes outside of these schools. And, having been a stellar student himself under James Moody, Tommy Turrentine, and others, Joe certainly has a lot of knowledge and experience to pass on. But in addition to the notes-and-bars music theory material he covers, one lesson he imparts to his students is that of maintaining their resolve despite the tests and trials of learning and playing music-in other words, persistence. "Sometimes you do have to give the kids a pep talk," Joe says. "You know, that idea of 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."' And, indeed, all tenured musicians know the value of emotional strength, both on and off the bandstand.

Since 1994 Joe has been making acclaimed albums as a leader and co-leader, but this is his first for RESERVOIR MUSIC. (He played as a sideman on Gary Smulyan's exemplary 2003 RESERVOIR release, THE REAL DEAL.) "Being on Reservoir is a really good situation for me," says Joe. "Mark Feldman has the right sensitivity as a. producer. During the session he pretty much just let us do our thing, but when he did offer input it was right on the mark. And I’d already known [engineer] Jim Anderson from some big band and small combo dates I'd played on, so it was all very easy, very relaxed." It definitely comes across: One of the hallmarks of PERSISTENCE is its overall relaxed, free-flowing feel. It's not hard to believe him when Joe mentions that the tunes were "pretty much all done in one or two takes."

Of course, the absolutely killer band Joe put together for the session enters into the equation, too. Check this lineup, jazz fans, and just try not to salivate: Mags on trumpet, Gary Smulyan on baritone, David Hazeltine on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Kenny "The jazz Maniac" Washington on drums. A veritable all-star team of New York’s world-class straight-ahead scene. "They're some amazing cats, alright," beams Joe. "We'd all worked with each other separately before, so we were all familiar with each other. They could all sense what I wanted play, right from the first note."

Joe wrote Persist during his tenure with the late conga king Ray Barretto. "The tune was originally called 'Persist Until You Succeed' and had lyrics written by Sue Giles, and then I just started calling it Persist," Joe explains. "But Ray didn't like that title and renamed it ‘Mags,’ after me." As "Mags:' the piece was done in a Latin arrangement for Barretto” s Grammy-nominated 2005 release, TIME WAS - TIME IS. Reworked into a 4/4 swing-time adaptation, Persist opens this album and provides the inspiration for its title. The track kicks off with an ensemble flourish and a strong pronouncement by Kenny Washington, and features a wonderfully scrambled recurring horn vamp and colorful and blustery solos by the leader and Smulyan.

The Village, with its effortless, light bossa nova groove, recalls the music of Joe's time with Barretto as well as the lively culture of Greenwich Village, where the trumpeter was living when he composed the tune. Hazeltine takes a great, sparkling turn here, staying clear of any predictable Latin keyboard clichés, and Joe contributes a fine, bubbly solo.

The band next reprises the standard I Had the Craziest Dream, giving the Harry Warren/Mack Gordon chestnut a smooth and buoyant but relentlessly swinging treatment. While Joe delivers the tune's gorgeous melody with measurably heartfelt tenderness, it's the (non-related) Washington’s that almost steal the show here. "A trumpet player hardly ever gets to play a beautiful standard with a rhythm section like that," says Joe. "It was too much fun, playing that tune with those cats." Peter Washington's strutting bravado drives the performance, and the riveting breaks that he and Kenny Washington contribute are likewise highlights.

It's not hard to guess where the title of D Train Boogaloo came from. "I was on the D train heading downtown to a gig at Birdland when I wrote it," recalls Joe. "Before every record date I force myself to write one tune just for that particular session. The pressure helps me get focused for the date, and D Train Boogaloo is the one I wrote for this album."

PERSISTENCE also boasts a pair of ageless standards by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Joe picked up Haunted Heart just a few years ago, while he was playing with Barretto. "I didn't realize that Dietz and Schwartz had written the tune, but I'd always loved it," Joe says. "Barretto’s band had done an arrangement of it, and Barretto liked what I was playing on it. He said, 'Man, you should always play that tune.' I love it." And no doubt listeners will love this version, with -warm deep Smulyan solo, and the lyrical musings of the leader. You and the Night and the Music, on the other hand, was an unplanned inclusion. "That was the last tune we cut. There wasn't any arrangement, we just blew." And blow, they do, especially Smulyan and Kenny Washington during an early, fiery exchange that proves one of the set’s high points.

The ballad Barretto is an homage to Joe's former mentor, who died in 2006. "I started writing it pretty soon after he passed," says Joe. "I'd work on it every morning, adding to it little by little." It would seem the tunes namesake would've been deeply touched by the tender tribute, which is graced by the trumpeter's gorgeous lines and Smulyan's simpatico comping behind them, as well as a spare, exquisite passage by Hazeltine.

Joe had some fun with the tide of the last tune, Soul Sister. "It's basically 'Body and Soul' redone as a waltz:' he says. "I like to write on top of a standard once in a while. It's fun to do." The tracks, loping, easy, pendulum-like groove offers an excellent backdrop for the lithe intervals of Peter Washington and the leader's occasional Coltrane-esque trills. After such a satisfying ride, its the perfect performance to bring the album in for a smooth landing. And Mags and the band make it all sound so easy.

But of course it isn't easy. Oh, it gets easier as the years roll on. But only after the players have already poured years of dedication and sweat into their craft. Which is a fruitful and never-ending process for Joe Magnarelli. And one jazz lovers will never tire of listening to. If there's one lesson that this music illustrates, it's that persistence pays off.

“Life can be very demanding, but you can't let the tough times get you down," offers Joe. "Every day when you wake up it's a chance to start fresh.”

PETER AARON JANUARY 2008

I have always liked the tune – You and the Night and the Music – particularly after hearing pianist Bill Evans’ interpretation of it on the Interplay album which features a sparkling solo by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.

The version of the tune on Persistence does not disappoint, especially if you are a fan of straight-ahead Jazz.

As you can hear on the soundtrack to the following video, after Joe plays the line [melody] using a Harmon mute, baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan and drummer Kenny Washington launch into trading eights, fours and twos that are of such a high quality that they could serve as a model of how this form of – if you will – interplay between horn and drums is done.

Kenny’s exchanges with Gary begin at 1:09 minutes with the 8’s starting at 1:16 minutes; the 4’s at 2:01 minutes and the 2’s at 2:47 minutes.

And, if you are so inclined, listen to this audio a second time and just concentrate on the bass line that Peter Washington lays down behind Joe’s playing of the melody from 18 seconds to 1:08 minutes. All hyperbole aside, this is simply some of the most magnificent Jazz bass playing that you are ever likely to hear.

↧

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Tough Tenor Saxophonist

December 7, 2018, 12:40 pm

≫ Next: "What Is Jazz" - From Jazz Americana by Woody Woodward

≪ Previous: Joe Magnarelli - Revisiting "Mags"

“Davis straddles bop and swing in his phrasing; if anything, with his swallowed notes, sandpapery tone and sudden shrieks, he’s already a genre unto himself. … Davis was to become one of the most honest, no-nonsense soloist in the music. The knockout power of Davis’ blowing is thrilling.”

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

“Eddie Davis is what you would call a natural musician for he never took a lesson in his life; not one that he didn’t administer himself, anyway. When Eddie decided that he wanted to play the tenor saxophone, he bought one second-hand and with it an instruction book which he studied diligently for eight months. At the end of this period, he played his first job [1942] at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, one of the first bastions of modern Jazz.”

- Ira Gitler

“He talked the way he played. He was glib, and his silver-tongued, pleasantly confrontational style always elicited a great audience response.

There were players who were better known, more influential, whatever; but they weren’t any more confident or fearless than Jaws. He came to play, and if you were smart you didn’t mess with him. He brought a street-fighter’s instincts to the bandstand.”

- Joel Dorn

Okay, no shilly-shallying around: Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’ tenor saxophone playing just knocks me out.

“Jaws” constantly delivered a brand of intensity and excitement on the instrument which aptly earned him the reputation for being one, tough, tenor saxophonist.

Whatever the setting – soloist with the Count Basie Orchestra, in Hammond B-3 Organ trios with Shirley Scott or co-leading a quintet with fellow tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin – Eddie barreled through them all with a temerity and a boldness that would characterize his career.

“His sound was, on reflection, a surprisingly complex matter. Unlike many of the players working in the organ-combo format, where Jaws made his biggest impact, his phrasing had an elongated quality that he broke up only with his matter-of-fact brusqueness; as if he was masking emotion with a temperament that told him to get on with it.” [- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.]

Jaws was a blustery soloist who came to prominence in the world of Jazz at a time when had you had to “make your bones” by engaging in “cutting” sessions with other tenor saxophonists.

Such “duels” could include another tenor sax player or even a stage full of them; some were known to go on all night, ending in the wee small hours of the morning.

The creative sparks flew when tenor saxophones engaged in such battles, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis was often tested, but rarely bested in these competitions.

Whether he was playing the blues or a ballad, Jaws spun solos of flat-out exuberance and exhilaration. His sound was always inimitable and accomplished.

We found a nice overview of the salient features of Eddie’s career in the insert notes that Michael Cuscuna prepared for Eddie “Lockjaw” David: The Heavy Hitter [32 Jazz 32057].

“Eddie Lockjaw Davis, more commonly known these days as Jaws, is a thorough master of his instrument and his art. He is a warm, articulate, no-nonsense person who dispatches his business with a flair and a near perfection.

At the beginning of the session that produced this album, I made reference to the second night of recording. Jaws looked at me with surprise and said, "Second night! I'm only supposed to do one album. We'll do that now." As we had had no rehearsals and he had never played with the pianist or drummer before, I was skeptical, to say the very least.

But watching Jaws at work was an education. He was affable and encouraging with his sidemen, yet always in charge. He kept things moving without any trace of hurry or tension. Minutes after the rhythm section arrived, everyone was in his place and ready to go. Jaws would quickly talk out an arrangement, never allow a run through, saying, "Save it for the take. Don't give it away now." And every take was a first take with everyone sounding excellent and Jaws sounding nothing short of brilliant.

It is a testament to these musicians' abilities and professionalism and a miracle to me that such performances could come out of first takes without one sheet of music or one rehearsal. For the second tune of the night, Jaws turned to the rhythm section and said, "Okay 'Old Folks' and then we'll go into 'Out Of Nowhere.' Do you know the changes to these? I'll take a chorus and a half, the piano for the bridge and the last eight bars of that chorus. Then the bass and drums lay out and the piano has four bars to modulate up to C for 'Out Of Nowhere.' We play 'Old Folks' in F. I'll play this phrase. (He plays it.) Got it? Okay, let's take it."

Jaws' tone is big and rich. He is of that generation and school that makes every note meaningful and beautiful in and of itself. He can burn earnestly without working up a sweat, and he can seduce a ballad without resorting to sentimentality. His solos seem to flow casually out of a bottomless reservoir of creativity and feeling.

Although Lockjaw is chronologically in the age of bebop, his primary influences were Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Herschel Evans. Born in New York in 1921, he made his first mark in 1942 and '43 with Cootie Williams, Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk, Louis Armstrong and other band leaders. The bebop revolution was not one that passed him by as is evidenced by the lovely Fats Navarro date on Savoy in which he was featured. But his soul and spirit was and is firmly entrenched in the style and sound of the swing masters. During the postwar era, he recorded prolifically on a variety of labels. His first session as a leader was for Haven Records. The originals on the date were arbitrarily given the names of diseases. One tune, "Lockjaw," was a hit. It established Davis and gave him a nickname that remains to this day a part of his moniker.

In 1952, Lockjaw joined the Count Basie organization for the first time and quickly became an attraction as the band's cooking blues soloist. The excitement that he generated matched Illinois Jacquet's histrionics with Lionel Hampton in the forties, but Eddie was a thoughtful soloist who never relied solely on grandstanding. Lockjaw would slide in and out of Basie's band as tenor saxophonist and road manager through the years, his longest stint lasting from 1966 to 1973.

After that first go-round with Basie, Eddie led his own groups around New York, until 1955 when he assembled a permanent working band with organist Shirley Scott. That group lasted five years and pioneered the tenor-organ format in jazz. The group's life span is well documented on a string of soulful, intimate albums on Prestige, many of which included Lockjaw's longtime associate George Duvivier.

In 1960, Eddie joined forces with Johnny Griffin, tenor master with a more modern, bop-oriented bent. For the next two years, they battled it out on many recordings and bandstands in the great tradition of Stitt and Ammons or Dexter and Wardell.

When declining public and economics took their toll on jazz, Griff moved to Europe, Jaws was soon to make the startling announcement that he was giving up the saxophone and taking a position as a booking agent with Shaw Artists, one of the heaviest jazz agencies of the period. Thankfully, although successful in that capacity, Jaws ultimately found the horn too irresistible and returned to playing. His "comeback" was in full force by 1966 when he joined the Basie band in both business and musical capacities.

In 1973, Eddie left Basie again, played with Ella Fitzgerald for a time and then stepped out as a leader and a featured soloist in a variety of settings and circumstances around the planet.

In his later years, Lockjaw often recorded with Harry "Sweets" Edison and he remained a busy soloist up until his death in 1986.”

↧

"What Is Jazz" - From Jazz Americana by Woody Woodward

December 8, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Gordon Beck: From Two Perspectives – Solo & Duo

≪ Previous: Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Tough Tenor Saxophonist

“Frenchmen call it Le Jazz Hot. If you want a hot argument, just ask two

or more jazz enthusiasts to define it for you.”

“The jazz musician begins as such. He does not simply graduate to it as his taste dictates. Jazz is there from the beginning of his musical awareness.”

- Woody Woodward

The record label that was the California equivalent of Blue Note Records during the post world War II years was Pacific Jazz. It was established by Richard Bock in the early 1950s, initially to record the new Gerry Mulligan - Chet Baker Quartet

In the case of Pacific Jazz, Richard Bock was blessed at the outset to have the brilliant photographic work of William Claxton form the basis for most of his album cover art. Ray Avery, a contemporary, once said of Claxton work: “Some of us take photographs of Jazz musicians, but Bill does much more than that: he is an artist with a camera.”

In fairness, Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label gave Bill Claxton a place to learn and practice his art as a photographer so the creative purposes of each were well-served through their business relationship.

Acknowledgement should also be made of the skills of Woody Woodward, who designed many of the Pacific Jazz covers, and without whose logistical and technical contributions, Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz would have been even more disorganized, and of Dotty Woodward, the firm’s accountant and the person who managed the royalties for the musicians and composers.

Thanks to a close friend who is pretty much the unofficial historian of all things Pacific Jazz [and all things West Coast Jazz, too], I recently learned that Woody Woodward was also somewhat of a Jazz historian and the author of Jazz Americana: The Story of Jazz and All Time Jazz Greats from Basin Street to Carnegie Hall.

Jazz Americana was published in 1956 in a 6.5” x 9” magazine format by Trend Books and sold for 75 cents. Fortunately, I was able to track down a fairly serviceable copy at a reasonable price and I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts with you.

Let’s begin at the with Chapter 1 - What Is Jazz - which Woody subtitles: “Here It Is! The First Good Definition of Jazz”

Despite this imposing assertion, Woody put a great deal of thought into his definition of what Jazz is including, what it isn’t.

In many ways, it is one of the more coherent and cogent definitions of Jazz that I’ve ever come across, one that is especially helped by the clear and direct writing style in which it is presented.

In retrospect, given when it was written, Woody’s definition of Jazz stands the test of time and holds up very well.

See what you think.

“ I find myself confronted with the task of writing an entire book on a subject that hasn't even the advantage of an adequate definition. In 50 years, all the articulate and learned men whose opinions and observations have been placed before the public have failed collectively to produce a generally accepted definition for the common everyday word jazz. A more compatible relationship between jazz and its public might have been achieved sooner if it had been possible to offer the inquirer a useful definition. So little agreement has existed on informed levels that the question, "What is jazz?", too often remains unanswered. In its place comes a thin, superior smile and a condescending shrug — inferring, "... if you don't know what it is I can't tell you." Small wonder that the public has been so often confused, especially when one considers that there have been as many personal concepts as there are experts. As might be expected this leads to a great many misconceptions about jazz, made worse by the cliquish groups "in the know" who seemed quite satisfied to keep the whole business about jazz a mystery.

Time has shown us that the public has been a great deal more willing to accept jazz than they've been given credit for and jazz musicians considerably more interested in being accepted then they’ve been given credit for. The jazz musician wants very much to have his music understood and be respected as a professional. In the main, he believes this can be done without subverting his integrity. This has been made difficult for him since most of the media of mass communications - radio, television, motion pictures, and the written word -have consistently caricatured him as an inarticulate ne'er-do-well. A typical motion picture approach shows the jazzman, after years of struggling, at the heights of achievement when his jazz concerto is presented in Carnegie Hall. This is usually showcased by a hundred-piece symphony orchestra with the composer conducting, especially sobered for the occasion. Being allowed on the stage of a concert hall is symbolic of his emancipation from so coarse and useless an existence as being a jazz musician. The inference is, "See, jazz musicians aren't so bad after all. They even read music and wear formal clothes."

This is rather a negative approach and reveals almost nothing of the nature of jazz; however the movies are not alone in promoting the Big Fable. On highly dramatic New York television plays or Hollywood films, it is currently very fashionable to play jazz records behind any act of violence. The slick magazines' preoccupation with anthropology, antiquated jazz slang, and endless intellectual dissertations, while less damaging, add to the confusion. It is something of a testimony to the taste and good sense of the public that people are presently supporting jazz in the manner to which it is unaccustomed. Despite the difficulty of getting much in the way of intelligent information on jazz from the usual sources, the public and jazz are getting together. This is something of a testimony to the strength of the music and the men who make it. Not so long ago sentiments were so strong in camps of the cultists that none could condone the existence of the others. Each group imposed confining limitations on the jazz of its choice. Each maintained his jazz was the true jazz. Dixieland People scorned Swing People, Swing People fought verbal battles with Bebop People, and Beboppers depreciated both. In the past few years, jazz has begun to emerge from this fog of music prejudice. Visibility could be improved but the haze is lifting; today Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Dave Brubeck can stand side by side, offering their art to all whom will listen.

Be it Dixieland, Swing, or the embracing horns of the .Mulligan Quartet, to a steadily increasing hundreds of thousands, jazz is a new found source of pleasure, a multifaceted, infectious music as calm and organized as a Bach fugue, as extroverted and exciting as the Mardi Gras.

I mentioned the absence of an adequate definition of jazz. This is not to say that none has been attempted. A few have found their way into print, some of them rendered by knowledgeable men. However, nearly all that have come to my attention have been more in the way of a description. One of the best of these was written by Wilder Hobson for the 1956 ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. As it contains several thousand words, Hobson's offering is not useful in the normal dictionary limitation of perhaps 50 or 60 words. Be that as it may, I recommend it to all concerned with the subject.

A better example of what's available might be a typical dictionary definition. Webster's New School and Office Dictionary, ordinarily a source of accurate definitions, says:"JAZZ (jaz) noun—Negro term for syncopated music or ragtime played discordantly on various instruments: a boisterous dance to such." This definition is very misleading. It infers that jazz is played unharmoniously, and implies that it is the product of a number of instruments presumably played simultaneously. It further suggests that jazz is attended by dancing. While any or all of these conditions may be present in jazz, none are required.

Jazz is not exclusive to the Negro. Many other races have produced and supported it. Jazz does not have to be discordant . . . and rarely is. The playing of jazz need involve no more than one musician. He may be the soloist in a large orchestra which features no other jazz musicians, or a lone musician playing in an empty ballroom.

Barry Ulanov, former editor of Metronome, an excellent magazine with a strong dedication to jazz, has referred to "freshness, profundity and skill", as important requisites for good jazz. These are qualities that may separate the mediocre performance from the outstanding, but this phrase is not helpful in defining jazz, as all three qualities may be absent from a performance and yet be jazz.

One problem Is that jazz does not fall within the confines of definite form like the symphony which is traditionally presented in four movements, or the fugue which utilizes its moving melodic lines in a predetermined manner. Jazz is without movements and is not constructed like a fugue. Jazz. musicians may use these devices but they are not peculiar to the medium. The closest we come to this in jazz is in the case of the blues, where a 12 bar tune is involved, using a specific set of chord progressions. However this is not form in the strict sense. It is rather a framework on which to drape a series of improvisations. The elements of form, so far as classical music is concerned, involve the traditionally-accepted manner of presenting music in a particular way. While a jazz composer may avail himself of these forms, the use of them actually has nothing to do with jazz itself. It's simply another way of presenting and expanding jazz.

Another element that further complicates matters is the fact that the jazz musician is not required to produce what might be termed a standardized tone or sound from his instrument. In classical music, each instrumentalist strives to produce a standard or uniform sound; a trumpeter from Paris, France, will produce a quality of sound almost the same as a trumpeter from Indianapolis, Indiana, assuming that each has had the advantage of similar training. With slight exception, there is only one way to play the instrument correctly, by classical standards. The very nature of jazz encourages the individual to express himself differently, though the musician may have the technical background to play in the classically accepted manner.

If jazz is not dependent on definite form and uniform sound, as with classical music, in what manner are we able to detect its existence? How are we able to separate jazz from all other types of non-classical music? I should preface this by mentioning that very few qualified sources have ever agreed completely on the important elements of jazz. However there are several components arrived at more frequently than any others. These are: (1) improvisation, (2) a rhythmic conception exclusive to jazz, and (3) a range of sounds distinguished by individuality. The disagreement between the experts is not whether or not the above elements are important, but to what degree each should exist in relation to the others. Some feel that improvisation is the most important and that rhythm and sound are lesser things. Others believe that rhythm plays the dominant role, and so forth. At any rate, it's the balance of all three elements that constitutes the individual style of a jazzman. It is the existence of these three elements and the way in which they are combined that separates jazz from other music.

IMPROVISATION

Improvisation is the ability of a musician to "make up" a tune in a spontaneous fashion, or to play a series of variations on a melody without consulting written music, and without prearrangement. Generally a specific set of chord changes are agreed upon in advance by the participating musicians. This establishes a format and a sequence, but allows the freedom necessary for improvisation. Often several musicians improvise simultaneously, producing counterpoint, a second melody line sympathetic to the first.

This has been a common practice since the very beginning of jazz. Early New Orleans bands frequently utilized three improvisational lines at the same time; the trumpet played the melody, the clarinet played an obligato or second line, and the trombone punctuated rhythmically or produced a series of tones very close to the chords. The results were similar to the melodic styles of the barbershop quartets so far as the harmonics were concerned.

Because of this collective improvisation, a performance was produced that could never be completely duplicated even though a group of jazzmen might play the same tune many times during their association. This is also true today. Even at a recording session, where a piece of material is played six or eight times in a row in an effort to get the best performance, the collective improvisation produces a wide variety of renditions to choose from.

Improvisation is not limited to jazz. Almost any skilled musician is capable of making up a tune as he goes along. A knowledge of the chord progressions of a tune and familiarity with the melody is sufficient to enable a musician to embellish the composition. Improvisation to some degree exists in most popular musics. It is also employed in classical music occasionally, particularly when showcasing a soloist with an orchestra; certain parts of the orchestrated composition provide for this.

In the Seventeenth Century, improvisation was more common than in today's classical music. In Bach's and Mozart's time, it was quite frequently used in chamber music. The elements of improvisation can be taught but, for the most part, it is instinctive rather than learned. Since improvisation plays a major role in his music, the spontaneous improvisation of the jazz musician is quite unique and manifests itself differently; when two or more jazz musicians improvise together, a rapport can be established that finds a parallel nowhere else in the world of music.

THE RHYTHMIC CONCEPTION

The rhythmic conception in jazz is perhaps its most unusual feature. Generally, a syncopated beat is used in 4/4 time. Like improvisation, 4/4 time and syncopation are not limited to jazz; 4/4 time is common to most American and European music and syncopation is found in almost all musics to some extent. However, its occurrences outside jazz are in a more formal manner, occurring in a regular pattern and on the same beats of every bar. In jazz, the musician plays unexpected accents with great freedom, syncopating in an irregular manner. He often plays with no strict adherence to time value at all, other than tempo; some play right on the beat, some behind the beat, and some anticipate or play a little ahead of the beat. It's not uncommon to hear a soloist demonstrate all these rhythmic variations within the course of a single chorus. He may enter the chorus anticipating, then fall behind the beat or produce any other combination of time values. This particular ability seems to be the one element that can't be taught. It can be developed if the latent ability is present, but in its accepted usage it is a native talent. The musician either possesses the ability to generate this rhythmic force or he fails completely to play with a jazz pulse.

THE JAZZ SOUNDS

The sounds of jazz are the most difficult to describe and are perhaps the easiest of the three basic jazz elements for non-jazz musicians to affect. Jazz sound is distinguished by the absence of regulation. It is a broad unconfined sound that can be likened to the human voice; each voice possessing a timber not entirely like any other. Jazz sound is a personal utterance, carrying with it the peculiarities of the individual. Almost any sound an instrument is capable of producing, within the realm of good taste, is acceptable in jazz.

Despite this, a characteristic does exist; the general absence of a "legitimate" attack. The jazz musician tends not to hit a note right on pitch. He is inclined more to slur or slide up to a note then slide on to the next without much more than passing through the pitch. Of course, when the need to hold a note occurs, the jazz musician, like all other, holds to proper pitch.

As was mentioned before, a classical musician must produce a sound traditionally associated with his instrument. Most of the music he plays is written and orchestrated in such a way as to take advantage of the sound his instrument customarily produces. Any marked deviation from this is very undesirable. In jazz the same instrument seldom sounds the same. One musician might play with a light vibrato-less tone, another dynamically, with a robust strident tone. The myriad of sounds that lies between these two extremes are as numerous as the musicians playing jazz. Even with a large jazz orchestra of i5 or 20 men, where group compatibility is essential, it's the combined styles of the men involved that give each orchestra its characteristic sound. The same arrangements, under the direction of the same leader, will never sound quite the same if different musicians are involved.

A DEFINITION

Any attempt to define jazz must be arbitrary; the absolute is not found in this medium. It must be further realized that any useful definition of jazz must encompass all styles and concepts within that medium from the very beginning to the present, with the additional capacity to include and anticipate all that jazz may produce in the future. With this in mind, and the further knowledge that the definition I offer here, may fail to meet universal acceptance (as the many attempts that preceded it) I submit the following definition for jazz:

JAZZ (jaz) n. a native American music, a popular art form, begun by the negro, originally influenced by African and Caribbean rhythms and popular musics available to the negro around the turn of the twentieth century. A product of the instantaneous rather than the premeditated, characterized from the beginning to the present by three basic elements: Improvisation, a unique time conception, and a range of sounds distinguished by their individuality.

The 1956 jazz picture encompasses such a wide range of styles and means of presentation that it is far more difficult for the layman to recognize jazz than it was 20 or 30 years ago. In 1926, jazz meant pretty much the same thing to everyone; there were fewer styles then and these were closely related. Ten years later the Swing Era was well underway and big dance bands were gaining prominence. Still, the situation remained uncomplicated. Whatever jazz acceptance went with the dance bands was mostly for the soloists. To most people, jazz still meant Dixieland.

By the end of World War II the big bands had received recognition. They took their place alongside earlier jazz developments. At the same time, a number of brilliant young jazz musicians were busy shaping a whole new approach which came to be known as Bebop, Progressive, and several other confusing names. From the standpoint of jazz activity, this movement was to overshadow all but three or four of the most firmly entrenched big bands. The Swing Era had come to a close and in it's place there was a return to small groups and a re-emphasis on improvisation.

In 1956 we have access to the accumulation of more than 50 years of individuality. Today, it's possible for us to hear in concert, club, or on record, all the styles in the Dixieland Tradition from the turn of the century through the Twenties; the products of the Swing Era; and the multitude of jazz concepts that developed following the second World War.

It scarcely seems possible that these many jazz styles are more than slightly related — yet, they are. All result from steady and continual evolution. None could have developed without that which preceded it. Jazz draws always from its heritage. Honest and spirited mainstream jazz never loses its luster and appeal. Because jazz is so much a product of the moments during which it is played, it undergoes constant change as the moments pass into days and the days into years. This is why jazz of different decades seems so unrelated. Today's jazz is minutely different from last week's jazz. It is a reflection of the life and times contemporary with its performance. The past can never be completely recaptured, even by those who were among the molders of jazz past. Even men whose concepts have matured, whose styles have crystallized, arc subject to the changing times.

But how do we distinguish between that which is jazz and that which is not? At what point does a musician cross the threshold into jazz? The answer lies in this basic premise: if the musicians involved are jazz musicians and the material being performed does not require the participants to subvert their musical identity, then the product is jazz. This is in direct proportion to the number of jazz musicians participating. If five members of a 15-piece band are not jazz musicians, then the performance suffers to that degree.

The composition being played can be a waitz, mambo, foxtrot or anything else that allows the jazzmen to apply their art. Structurally, it can be a 12 bar blues, a popular tune or a fugue. In short, a jazz composition can be anything that does not require the jazzmen to sacrifice their individuality.

Because of the need to preserve the basic jazz elements, certain approaches to composing and arranging are more conducive to the medium than others. The material must be compatible with the musicians involved to be successful. This has led to a whole new field within jazz — that of composing and arranging material especially for jazz.

This began during the late Twenties when musicians realized a need for more challenging material and a larger framework for their improvisation. Then, too, the emergence of larger bands required more organization than the five- and six-piece groups that preceded them. The use of arrangements was the answer to these problems and grew from the same needs for individual expression that brought jazz forth. Composition and jazz could not be better suited. All jazz musicians are endowed with the ability to compose, though not all possess the technical knowledge to write their compositions. They compose whenever they improvise. The difference between those who actually write and those who are unable, is the ability to organize music on a more extensive scale — not the lack of compositional talent.

The one thing that remains unchanged is the fact that jazz musicians are required to play jazz. It cannot be produced by others.

This seems to be a rather obvious factor; however, a widespread misconception is that virtually any young musician associated witli a dance band is a jazz musician. Since jazz has become so much an integral part of American popular music, most popular musicians and singers display some jazz influence. Obviously, mere influence does not make a jazz musician. The jazz musician begins as such. He does not simply graduate to it as his taste dictates. Jazz is there from the beginning of his musical awareness.”

↧

Gordon Beck: From Two Perspectives – Solo & Duo

December 9, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions by Bob Blumenthal

≪ Previous: "What Is Jazz" - From Jazz Americana by Woody Woodward

“It concerns me that, now, at the time of his passing, he won't be accorded the place he's so clearly earned. The proof is there in the records. The literature exists. It's self evident.

… his music is all about color and light, shards of amazing brilliance, real earthy moving soulfulness and fire - and he did have that glorious and singing keyboard sound.

Gordon Beck was a musician apart, he was special and he was great.”

- Colm “Red” Sullivan, 01/09/2012

“There cannot be many jazz musicians who have simultaneously possessed a flying phobia and a pilot's license. That has long been a favorite anecdote about Gordon Beck, the lean, stonily impassive and technically awesome pianist, who has died aged 76.

Beck had the license because his first career was in aeronautical engineering, and the phobia because his complex personality mixed deep-seated anxieties with a fearless appetite for freefall adventures, evident in his jazz improvisations.”

- John Fordham – The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2011

“Gordon Beck can do it all!

- Phil Woods, alto saxophonist

By the late 1960s, Jazz was on a collision course with anonymity.

The Halcyon Days were waning, the music was slipping into obscurity and Jazz musicians were sliding into the recording studios to make TV commercials, radio jingles and “full orchestra” albums for rock stars. As the late alto saxophonist and flutist Bud Shank remarked about this transition from performing in clubs to on-call playing in the studios: “It was a matter of survival: you gotta eat and pay the rent.”

Clubs like Shelly’s Manne Hole and The Lighthouse had moved away from resident groups to book “big names” such as Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley in order to keep the clientele flowing and their doors open.

One such marquis appearance occurred at Shelly’s in the Fall of 1969 when alto saxophonist Phil Woods came to town for a week-long stint at the club.

I should say of Phil’s visit that is was more a triumphal return to the states with his European-based quartet as he had left the country a few years earlier to take up residence in Paris after becoming totally disgusted with what he saw as Jazz’s march into oblivion.

Phil named his quartet “The European Rhythm Machine” and I suspect that he may have chosen this appellation to quiet the critics who were always disparaging the quality of European rhythm sections. The Irishman in Phil never ran away from a good argument or failed to stand its ground to make a point.

“The European Rhythm Machine” was a quite exceptional rhythm section with George Gruntz on piano, Henri Texier on bass and Daniel Humair on drums. I couldn’t wait to hear it in person.

Except when I got to Shelly’s on opening night [along, it seems, with every alto saxophone player in the city], Phil introduced his pianist as “Gordon Beck” and his bassist as “Ron Mathewson.”

Changes in the personnel that make-up Jazz groups are very common, and Daniel Humair, one of my all-time favorite drummers was still a part of the group, so I just sat back with my glass of vino and waited for Phil and the group to let it happen.

And boy, did it happen, but not in the way I expected.

Phil called a blues to open the set, a not uncommon occurrence as playing on its simple structure is a typical method to get the group to relax and into the flow of things.

Making music isn’t like making anything else: you have to adopt a mind-set that follows its conventions but, most of all, you have to concentrate.

Phil took the first solo, but instead of Gordon Beck being up next, the solo order moved on to Ron Mathewson on bass and to trading 12-bar breaks with Daniel before Gordon took over.

And did he ever – take over!

The rhythm section laid-out and Gordon played a series of unaccompanied 12-bar choruses that were at once - riotous, rollicking and riveting – he totally knocked us out.

It was one of the most gripping performances I had ever heard by any musician, anywhere.

I may not have known who “Gordon Beck” was when I went into Shelly’s that night, but I never forgot who he was afterwards.

Gordon went on to make two recordings with Phil’s Group Phil Woods And His European Rhythm Machine [Inner City 1002] and Phil Woods And His European Rhythm Machine At The Frankfurt Jazz Festival [Embryo SD-530].

And in 1978, I came across Gordon’s The French Connection which Jean-Jacques Pussiau produced for Owl Records [#11], the same producer and label that was to issue some of the recordings involving Gordon’s famous collaboration with singer Helen Merrill.

It is a solo piano album and it contains many examples of the brilliance and originality that Gordon put on display that night at Shelly’s as a member of the Phil Woods European Rhythm Machine.

Almost twenty years later, I “met up” with Phil and Gordon again this time courtesy of their two CD “Complete Concert: Live at the Wigmore Hall in London” [JMS 18686-2] for which Phil wrote the following insert notes.

“I first met and played with Gordon Beck in April, 1968. Gordon led the house trio at Ronnie Scott’s London club that included Tony Oxley on drums and Jeff Clyne on bass. Ronnie’s was my first stop when I began my five-year expatriate existence.

The European Rhythm Machine was formed right after this gig and George Gruntz was the first pianist. When he left after the first year, Daniel Humair our drummer, and bassist Henri Texier, both agreed with me that Gordon was the perfect choice to replace George.

And he was the perfect choice!

Gordon and I have shared many musical and life adventures. We always dined with [tenor saxophonist] Ben Webster when we were in Ben’s neighborhood, we hung with Dizzy [Gillespie] and Dexter [Gordon], we triumphed at the Palermo Pop Festival, no mean feat in the early seventies.

We recorded with [vocalist] Lena Horne playing the arrangements of the master, Robert Farnon, and with Mel Torme playing the exquisite orchestrations of one of

England

’s best, Chris Gunning.

Gordon also played on three of my albums done in London with a large orchestra. Gordon can do it all!

We were together at the last riot-torn Newport Festival and most memorable to me, we hung with Shelly Manne when the European Rhythm Machine played his great club and I saw GB make his first dive in Shelly’s swimming pool, a perfect one and a half gainer that garnered a perfect 6.

If you don’t believe me call Ron Mathewson, he has the films to prove it. Yes Gordon and I have been around the block a few times.

Our friendship has withstood the test of time and, at last, we are able to realize one of our dreams, and dear listener, you hold the results of our warm encounter in your hands.

This concert is complete and unedited. What you hear is what happened. We did not “fix” anything.

Perhaps, a seam shows, but to these old ears, it sounds like two old friends [who have plied their craft for decades] getting together to share in one of life’s greatest pleasures, improvising music.

There are great moments on this CD. When I used to ask Dizzy how he was doing he would disarmingly reply: ‘Well, I don’t think I’m getting any worse.” I think the same could be said for Gordon and me.

Thank you Gordon. Thank you Jean- Marie [Salhani, the producer of the CD for JMS Records] for documenting our humble efforts and than you for buying this CD.

June 18, 1996

Phil Woods”

↧

The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions by Bob Blumenthal

December 10, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: A New Life of the Bebop Legend Dexter Gordon, Written by His Wife by David Hadju

≪ Previous: Gordon Beck: From Two Perspectives – Solo & Duo

“Possessed of both his own conception, which made Mobley's music readily identifiable, and the equally rare inspiration that also made listening to his work eminently satisfying, Mobley was perpetually eclipsed throughout his career by more extroverted and influential stylists. ...It has only been in the years since he stopped recording (...), and especially since his death in 1986, that the exceptional quality of his playing and writing has begun to receive a commensurate measure of respect.”

- Bob Blumenthal, Jazz author, columnist and critic

"The most lyrical saxophonist I've ever heard. He sang into his horn."

- Benny Golson, tenor saxophonist and composer

At this point, my ongoing Mobley Quest moves away from features that focus on one of Hank’s many recordings as a leader for Blue Note [There were 24 in all.] and reverts back to the larger studies on Hank, all of which have been posted on the blog to date including 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, Derek Ansell’s book Workout: The Music of Hank Mobley which was published by Northway in 2008 and the two Jazz Monthly essays by Michael James from 1961 and 1962, respectively.

The only extensive writing on Hank’s career which has not been presented so far in my MobleyQuest are the following booklet notes by Bob Blumenthal’s to the Mosaic Records box set of Hank’s 1950s Blue Note recordings.

An especially beneficial aspect of Bob’s Mobley essay is that it contains many references to MY GROOVE, YOUR MOVE, a limited-edition program compiled by Kimberly Ewing and Don Sickler for a concert of Hank Mobley's music presented in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 29, 1990.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: during the many years that he wrote about Jazz for The Boston Globe, CD Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Downbeat and numerous other publications, Grammy-Award winning author, columnist and critic Bob Blumenthal became one of my most consistent teachers about all-things-Jazz

For his long affiliation with it and studied application of it, Bob knows the music.

Equally important is his ability to communicate this knowledge and awareness in a writing style that is clear, cogent and concise.

Bob’s a mensch and a mentor and it’s always a privilege and a pleasure to represent his work on these pages.

“On the back cover of MY GROOVE, YOUR MOVE, a limited-edition program compiled by Kimberly Ewing and Don Sickler for a concert of Hank Mobley's music presented in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 29, 1990, the baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter is quoted about Mobley's aspirations. Most of the tenor saxophonist’s wishes have to do with the conditions performing jazz musicians seek yet find all too rarely — clubs with dressing rooms, good pianos and accommodating acoustics — but Mobley also was looking for an upgrade in listening attitudes. "Somewhere to play where people aren't just comparing you to someone else!" was the way Nica put it.

Few musicians had greater cause to seek such a forum for their playing than Hank Mobley, who could serve as Exhibit A when building a case against the poll-driven, King of the Hill approach to jazz appreciation. Possessed of both his own conception, which made Mobley's music readily identifiable, and the equally rare inspiration that also made listening to his work eminently satisfying, Mobley was perpetually eclipsed throughout his career by more extroverted and influential stylists. Throughout the period represented by the present collection, his work was often downgraded as a lesser version of Sonny Rollins; and in 1960 and '61, when he worked with Miles Davis and recorded what are his greatest sessions under his own name, he was dismissed for not measuring up to his predecessor in the Davis band, John Coltrane. When the avant-garde innovators dominated the attention of jazz critics a few years later, Mobley's playing was often dismissed as old hat and irrelevant. It has only been in the years since he stopped recording (his last session, co-led with Cedar Walton, took place in 1972), and especially since his death in 1986, that the exceptional quality of his playing and writing has begun to receive a commensurate measure of respect.

Mobley may have been doubly cursed. He was a great tenor saxophonist in an era that enjoyed an abundance of great tenor saxophonists, and his particular skills were not as attention-grabbing as those of several peers. Consider his friend John Coltrane, who recorded with Mobley on three occasions during the period covered by the present collection. Even at this stage of his career, when Coltrane's ideas were often partly formed and imperfectly executed, his fervor is often more immediately arresting than Mobley's more subtle approach to harmony and rhythm. Mobley's penchant for doing things his own way only reinforced the difference.

In the invaluable interview/article "The Integrity of the Artist — The Soul of the Man" that Down Beat published in 1973, Mobley told John Litweiler: "When I was about 18, [my uncle] Dave told me ‘if you're with somebody who plays loud, you play soft, if somebody plays fast, you play slow. If you try to play the same thing they're playing you're in trouble.' Contrast. If you play next to Johnny Griffin or Coltrane, that's hard work. You have to out-psych them. They'd say, 'Let's play CHEROKEE,' I'd go, 'Naw naw — ah, how about a little BYE BYE BLACKBIRD?' I put my heavy form on them, then I can double up and do everything I want to do."

This philosophy plus his talent should have won Mobley more respect in the 1950s; but, then again, it was a golden era for tenor players. Mobley recorded with several of the best — Coltrane and Griffin on the latter's Blue Note album A BLOWING SESSION and Zoot Sims and Al Cohn plus Coltrane on Prestige's TENOR CONCLAVE — not to mention perennial poll winner Stan Getz, the two Sonnys (Rollins and Stitt), Lucky Thompson and still-inspired patriarchs of the horn like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster.

Mobley found his own voice amidst these giants, notwithstanding the discernible influence of Rollins in the '50s and Coltrane a decade later. He had a sound on the horn which he himself identified as "round," a gorgeous, centered tone filled with soul and tenderness. "The most lyrical saxophonist I've ever heard," Benny Golson said. "He sang into his horn." Mobley's musical knowledge was highly refined, and emerged with particular clarity in his sophisticated harmonic approach. Horace Silver recalled that "He'd write some different, alternate changes, and they'd always be so inventive and so creative, so beautiful. A very musical mind, a harmonic mind."

As far as his rhythmic concept went, Al Grey captured the impact of Mobley's playing as well as his writing when he noted that "All of [Mobley's] tunes flow so freely, you can really swing with them — I mean really swing!" In addition, Mobley possessed organizational skills unusual in a musician who spent so much of his career as a sideman. He had a special knack for writing material for the blowing sessions of the period, often coming up with compositions in the studio on the spur of the moment. These pieces, frequently containing harmonic wrinkles that set them apart from mere rewrites of standards, were designed with the specific players on the date in mind, to the point that in conversations with Don Sickler, Mobley recalled melodies that Sickler would hum by naming musicians who had played on the original recordings.

He was also a master ensemble player, particularly skilled in blending with talented trumpet partners. This made him highly attractive to the independent jazz labels in the mid-50s, when both the new hard-bop style and the advent of the 12" long-playing album generated a recording boom; and it ultimately won Mobley the role, particularly during 1957, of de facto house tenor for Blue Note Records.

Recalling the busy days in Rudy Van Gelder's original Hackensack, New Jersey studio, Mobley told Litweiler that "Savoy recorded on Fridays, Prestige on Saturdays, Blue Note on Sundays, something like that. They'd buy the whiskey and brandy Saturday night and the food on Sunday — they'd set out salami, liverwurst, bologna, rye bread, the whole bit. Only Blue Note did it; the others were a little stiff. If we had a date Sunday, I'd rehearse the band Tuesday and Thursday in a New York studio.... We'd be making a tape, and sometimes my horn might squeak, and Frank Wolff would say, 'Hank Mobley! You squeaked! You squeaked!'— and the whole band would crack up, we couldn't get back to the tune. And old Alfred Lion would be walking around, (snap) 'Mmm!' (snap) — 'Ooh!' (snap) — 'Now vait a minute, it don't sving, it don't sving!' So we'd stop and laugh, then come back and slow it down just a bit. Then he'd say, (snap) (snap) — 'Fine, fine, dot really svings, ja!'"

Mobley's relationship with Lion, Wolff and Blue Note, which began shortly before the first music included here was recorded and continued through 1970, was as important to the saxophonist's career and his legacy as any hook-up with a fellow musician. During its active life, most people took the pairing of artist and label for granted. Today, when both the sound and the look of Blue Note albums has taken on iconic status, Mobley's music and his visage are at the center of the legend. He graces the cover of The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff (Rizzoli, 1995), and 13 additional images inside make him the dominant presence in the book.

Mobley loomed large in the recording studio as well, particularly in the incredible 15-month span of 1956-8 that dominates this collection. At the dawn of the 12" era, Lion and Wolff found (albeit in a more harmonically complex and less romantic concept) the focal point for a series of studio jam sessions that Prestige was employing so successfully with Gene Ammons.

Unfortunately, another factor led to the extensive documentation of players like Ammons and Mobley at the time. "I had the knowledge," Mobley confessed to Litweiler in 1973 regarding the heroin habit that frequently interrupted his career. "When I got strung out it was my own fault. A person getting strung out at age 18, that's a problem. He doesn't even have a chance to learn what life is about. By the time I got strung out, I had learned my instrument, I was making money." For great players like Ammons and Mobley, drug addiction left them more inclined than they otherwise might have been to record frequently, and the wealth of material generated allowed jazz labels to sustain the public presence of these musicians when problems physical and legal made them otherwise unavailable. It is tempting (yet hardly fair in the case of such respected producers from the period as Lion, Orrin Keepnews and Lester Koenig) to view this situation as one of record company exploitation; at the same time, the realities that faced musicians like Mohley in the 1950s must be kept in mind lest we ascribe periods of particular inspiration or lack thereof to when albums were recorded. In the present case, Mobley became a key player in the Blue Note orbit at a point when his particular skills and the emerging format for studio jazz recording were in a most complimentary zone.

This yielded music that has been doggedly sought out by many jazz fans and has eluded too many more through limited availability. Of the nine albums represented herein, two were never released and four others were never reissued domestically. Those fortunate enough to have tracked down all nine of the original albums (including the two that first appeared in Japan) will find nine alternate takes included (and programmed after the originally issued material, which makes for better casual listening and will not impede any comparison-minded student of the music willing to employ a CD player's program function). This is not all of the music Mobley made during his first recording phase and — given his talent, consistency and ubiquitous presence in so many important bands and on so many labels — it is not all of the best Mobley from the '50s. What we have here is a magnificent overview of the period, with some of the most memorable players of the day giving themselves to the indelible concepts of a musician who is finally getting his due as a magnificent tenor saxophonist and composer.

Hank Mobley was born on July 7, 1930 in Eastman, Georgia, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There was much music in his family, particularly piano music. The aforementioned uncle, Dave Mobley, played piano among other instruments, and his mother and grandmother also played keyboards (his grandmother was a church organist). Piano became Mobley's first instrument; then he picked up the tenor sax at age 16 and basically taught himself the horn. On his uncle's advice, he listened initially to Lester Young and then to Don Byas, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt. "Anyone who can swing and get a message across," as Mobley explained his influences to Leonard Feather in 1956.

By his late teens, Mobley was working as a professional musician. He was hired by Paul Gayten and worked the rhythm and blues circuit with him between 1949 and '51, having been recommended by Clifford Brown (who had not heard Mobley play at the time but was aware of his growing reputation). "Hank was beautiful, he played alto, tenor and baritone and did a lot of the writing," Gayten recalled. "He took care of business and I could leave things up to him." The Gayten band also included baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne and future Ellingtonians Clark Terry, Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard. Working with the last three no doubt eased the way for Mobley's two-week stint as Jimmy Hamilton's replacement in the Ellington Orchestra during 1953. ("I didn't play clarinet, but I played some of the clarinet parts on tenor," he later recalled). While the band recorded, the material did not feature Mobley as a soloist.

Mobley's jazz recording debut was the product of a job he held in the house band of a Newark nightclub after leaving Gayten in 1951. Another promising youngster and future Blue Note artist, pianist Walter Davis, Jr., was also a part of the group, and the opportunity to back visiting stars including Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Bud Powell and Lester Young was invaluable to their rapid development. Max Roach hired both Mobley and Davis after appearing at the Newark club, and brought them into rooms like the Apollo Bar before recording with them for Debut in March 1953. The session (now available on OJC) included both quartet and septet tracks and captures an already recognizable tenor stylist and composer. There were three melodically appealing Mobley originals, including the striking minor-key KISMET, while his imaginative chordal substitutions and fluent shifting of accents also enlivened the standard GLOW WORM and the Charlie Parker blues CHI CHI. Roach reportedly tried to summon both Mobley and Clifford Brown to California to form what would become the Brown/Roach quintet in the summer of 1953, but was only able to locate the trumpeter.

Back on the East Coast, Mohley gained further experience with Davis, Tadd Dameron, Milt Jackson and J.J. Johnson. For much of 1954 he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, and participated in four of the trumpeter's recording sessions. While among the lesser-known items in Gillespie's extensive discography, these tracks show Mobley to good advantage in a rare big-hand setting on Chico O'Farrill’s MANTECA SUITE (where Mobley plays the half-chorus solo on the THEME movement covered by Big Nick Nicholas on the original 1947 recording) and as a clearly formed stylist on the sextet titles RAILS and DEVIL AND THE FISH.

After leaving Gillespie in September 1954, Mobley joined pianist Horace Silver's quartet at Minton's Playhouse, a group completed by bassist Doug Watkins and drummer Arthur Edgehill. "On weekends Art Blakey and Kenny Dorham would come in to jam, 'cause they were right around the corner," Mobley recalled to Litweiler, which led to Silver's first quintet session for Blue Note with Dorham, Mobley, Watkins and Blakey in November 1954. The compositions were all Silver's; but the entire quintet was dazzling, with Mobley's solo catapulting off band breaks on ROOM 608, preaching at medium-slow tempo on CREEPIN' IN, flying against the seesaw momentum of STOP TIME and laying bare the saxophonist's soulful blues conception on DOOLIN’. The session was issued as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, working a variation on the Messengers name that Blakey had employed for a larger ensemble several years earlier; and the five musicians decided to work in a cooperative relationship whenever any one of them was offered work.

It did not take long for the Messengers's blues-and percussion-driven new strain of modern jazz to take hold, or for Mobley to establish himself as one of the music's primary new voices through additional appearances on Blue Note. He recorded in a Dorham sextet that also included Silver and Blakey in January 1955, and with Silver and the Messengers again in February on a session that included the funky hit THE PREACHER (where the audacious entry of the tenor sax is a highlight) and Mobley's own typically "heavy form" HANKERIIN'. In March, Mobley and Blakey participated in Julius Watkins's sextet session, nine days before Blue Note gave the tenor saxophonist his own first opportunity to appear on vinyl as a leader.

(A) MARCH 27, 1955

Mobley considered his debut session - The Hank Mobley Quartet [BLP 5066] to be his best early recording and indicated that significant preparation had preceded the actual visit to Van Gelder's studio. The date features his tenor sax with the Messengers rhythm section, and has been particularly hard to find since its 1955 release as Blue Note 10" LP 5066. United Artists reissued the session in a rare facsimile edition 20 years later and it was sold only in Japan and Europe. Otherwise, it has been available as one side of a Japanese 12" LP (sharing a disc with George Wallington's Blue Note session) and on a Japanese compact disc where the two alternate takes first appeared.

At this point in the insert booklet annotations, Bob launches into a detailed, track-by-track descriptions of the nine LPs [and three CD reissues] that form the Mosaic Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions [MD6-181] and concludes with this statement:

“When it came to music, Hank Mobley was extremely sure-footed in this period. If his drug problem created a less than steady personal life and slowed his recording activities significantly for much of 1958 and 1959, he was able to bounce back with Blue Note, when he entered a truly golden age on albums like Soul Station, Roll Call and Workout.”

↧

A New Life of the Bebop Legend Dexter Gordon, Written by His Wife by David Hadju

December 11, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Karriem Riggins - "Lester Leaps In" - Ray Brown Trio

≪ Previous: The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions by Bob Blumenthal

While the editorial staff at JazzProfiles completes a feature on the recently received preview copy of SOPHISTICATED GIANT: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon By Maxine Gordon, we thought you might enjoy reading the following take on the book as written by David Hadju for the New York Times.

Our copy was sent to us from the nice folks at EsoWon Books and you can visit them on the web at http:/www.esowonbookstore.com/

David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is currently at work on a "fictional work of nonfiction," a biography of a nonexistent songwriter, to be published by W. W. Norton. He is also collaborating with the artist John Carey on a book of graphic nonfiction about vaudeville, to be published by Columbia University Press.

Hajdu is the author of four books of nonfiction and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn(1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009), and Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (fall 2016).

SOPHISTICATED GIANT

The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon

By Maxine Gordon

Illustrated. 279 pp. University of California Press. $29.95.

A Review By David Hajdu

Nov. 28, 2018. A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 1, 2018, on Page 67 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Hot Sax. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

“Dexter Gordon, the lusty virtuoso of bebop saxophone probably best known now for his Oscar-nominated, starring performance in the movie “Round Midnight,” embodied no fewer than four jazz clichés. He made his reputation as the very image of the big, bold, tenor-sax man, blaring rattling solos from the depths of his 6-foot-5 frame. He seemed for years to be a stereotype of the jazz musician as self-destructive hedonist, arrested and imprisoned on narcotics charges and crimes related to drug use. He became a symbol of the black expat demimonde in mid-20th-century Europe, where musicians joined writers, painters and other African-American artists seeking refuge from maltreatment and underappreciation in their homeland. And he ended up an emblem of survival and redemption, weathered but still standing and still blowing, a veteran of a lifetime of battle with the world and himself.

That Gordon embodied those clichés because he invented or crystallized them in the public imagination is largely forgotten today, nearly 30 years after his death, at 67, in 1990, from kidney failure following treatment for cancer of the larynx. In his final years, Gordon set out to tell his own story, hoping to correct some misconceptions and complicate some simplifications about his life and music. He wrote notes and drafts of biographical vignettes in longhand on yellow legal pads, and for a time tried to collaborate with the novelist Wesley Brown, before deciding to work largely on his own with help from his wife and former manager, Maxine Gordon. When his health began to fail precipitately, he asked her to promise to complete the book if he died before finishing it. “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon” is the fulfillment of that promise.

Although fairly short passages from Dexter Gordon’s notepads appear here and there, the book is mainly Maxine Gordon’s, and that’s to its benefit. She learned about jazz from the inside herself, working in various back-room roles for the composer Gil Evans, the organist Shirley Scott and others before she met her future husband in France in 1975. She worked with him, overseeing his much ballyhooed return to America in 1976, with chief responsibility for the ballyhoo, and she was with him, living quietly (half the time in Mexico), during his late period of reflection, retired from music. It helps, too, that she went back to school after Dexter Gordon’s death, studied oral history for a summer at Columbia and got a master’s degree in Africana studies at N.Y.U. “Sophisticated Giant” is a work of considerable sophistication, the first-person testimony of its subject employed with affectionate discipline, smartly contextualized and augmented by material from interviews Maxine Gordon conducted with the tenor saxophone masters Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Heath, the record producers Bruce Lundvall and Michael Cuscuna, and others.

Born into a line of high-achieving African-Americans, Dexter Gordon took pride in being part of what, in his notes, he called an “Uncommon Family.” His maternal grandfather, an officer in the United States Cavalry, was awarded the Medal of Honor during the Spanish-American War. His paternal grandfather, a barber who may have included dentistry among his services, was called “Professor” for his air of erudition. Dexter Gordon’s own father was a physician in Los Angeles, among the first black doctors to practice in the city. Dexter Gordon himself was precociously creative. Mentored as a teenager by the same African-American music teacher who taught Frank Morgan, Art Farmer, Marshal Royal and Don Cherry, among others, he proved to be so gifted on the tenor saxophone that he was offered a chair in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while still in high school.

Gordon entered a world that, like many spheres of popular music in every era, was populated by scores of young artists entertaining other young people with work that spoke pointedly to their age and time. When he joined the Hampton group, at 17, Gordon began playing with Joe Newman and Ernie Royal, both nearly as young as he was. A few years later, he was honored to be hired by one of his lifelong idols, Louis Armstrong (whom he called “Pops”), but he grew restless playing the mainstream swing in the elder bandleader’s repertoire. He quit for an opportunity to join a radical group of young players in the Billy Eckstine Orchestra who were inventing a new music not yet called bebop. “Pops asked me if I wanted more money,” Gordon recalls in “Sophisticated Giant.” “I told him that wasn’t the problem. It was that we young guys wanted to play some new music.”

With Eckstine, surrounded by itchy, bursting, brilliant adventurers, all African-American and nearly all young — Gene Ammons, Leo Parker, Sonny Stitt, Sarah Vaughan, Fats Navarro — Gordon found his musical voice and broke out as a must-hear jazz phenomenon. He began to play in the style that would define him until his late years: saxophone jazz as a firestorm of melodic invention, harmonic surprise and charismatic energy.

Maxine Gordon astutely frames the fiery daring of Dexter Gordon’s generation of bebop innovators in the context of rising black consciousness and creative agency in midcentury America: “At the same time that the war was coming to an end, black culture exploded with unprecedented exuberance and innovation. For musicians like Dexter, that meant breaking out from the constraints of the traditional dance bands and allowing improvisations to extend into unknown places. Dexter said that the ‘Young Turks’ wanted to express a social statement through their music. They were developing their own lifestyles around the new music at a time when things were moving very fast for them and for the world.”

In addition to his autobiographical jottings, Dexter Gordon was working late in his life on a treatment for a screenplay about the rise of bebop in the 1940s. For the section of “Sophisticated Giant” dealing with this period, Maxine Gordon quotes his treatment notes at some length, and they read like a summing up of his views on jazz as an art form and a way of life. The setting is the band bus for the Eckstine Orchestra. “These boys become men at 17 or 18,” Dexter Gordon wrote. “They have a mission.” He explained that mission — his purpose, as he saw it — in a series of questions and declarations. Among them: “A life that improvises music cannot run by another’s rules. This may bring problems if based on an ordinary observer’s rules for behavior in a society that does not always understand what art is, or what an artist is or why there is nothing without music.

“How has this music survived?

“The artist is not self-destructive. …

“Even after a death of one of the members, they continue to speak of him in the present tense.”

After 14 years of semi-exile, living in Copenhagen and Paris with occasional visits to the United States for recording sessions, Gordon came home for good and signed with Columbia Records, which released an acclaimed album documenting his hot-ticket return to the New York jazz scene, “Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard.” Ten years later, when Gordon was 63 and not performing much, the French director Bertrand Tavernier cast him as the lead in “Round Midnight,” a drama with music about a fictional, aging, African-American jazz saxophonist struggling with addiction who settles in Paris, returns to New York and (spoiler alert) dies. Gordon was duly praised for his subtle, knowing portrayal of an elder whose spirit survives the ravages of time and bodily abuse.

Without data, I have to assume that most people who still picture Dexter Gordon imagine the fading shadow of a once-great artist that he portrayed in “Round Midnight.” With “Sophisticated Giant,” Maxine Gordon has produced a homecoming even more dramatic, and perhaps more important, than the one she helped arrange for him in 1976: She has brought back the restive teenage fireball who wanted only to play some new music.”

↧

Karriem Riggins - "Lester Leaps In" - Ray Brown Trio

December 11, 2018, 3:25 pm

≫ Next: Paul Motian: The Drummer As Musician

≪ Previous: A New Life of the Bebop Legend Dexter Gordon, Written by His Wife by David Hadju

↧

Paul Motian: The Drummer As Musician

December 12, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: "Count Your Change" - The Paul Horn Quintet [From the Archives]

≪ Previous: Karriem Riggins - "Lester Leaps In" - Ray Brown Trio

“One writer said, “Paul Motian can turn a set of drums into an orchestra without overshadowing his fellow players.” Another critic wrote, “To him, percussion is music at every level and he could never be accused of playing anything for superficial effect.””

- Quoted in Scott Kevin Fish, Modern Drummer, May 1980

“When all else fails, play the snare drum. That’s where you learned it all in the first place.”

- Paul Motian

Most of the drummers that I knew, didn’t like the way Paul Motian played drums with the classic Bill Evans Trio during his association with the group from 1959-1962.

The constant stop and starting in his playing drove them nuts: “Why doesn’t he just lay it down?” What did he do, drop a stick?” “Did his drum kit run out of batteries?” “Why doesn’t he just swing?”

In retrospect, everyone has nothing but praise for the way Paul made the drums “fit in to what Evans and LaFaro were doing,” but, during its short-lived, year-and-a-half existence, such criticisms of Paul’s halting approach to drums in pianist Bill Evans’ now-classic trio were more commonplace than most Jazz fans will admit.

Paul was aware of the criticisms of his work with Bill’s trio and remained very sensitive about the entire topic whenever he was asked about it.

He was especially disappointed about the fact that many musicians didn’t appreciate the interactive aspect of what Bill was trying to accomplish.

“It wasn’t about bass and drums accompanying the piano,” Paul said, “it was about all three instruments accompanying one another.”

He continued: “Listen to my playing on the New Conceptions album” [Bill’s first recording with Riverside Records with Teddy Kotick as the bassist]. We played the music in a straight-ahead manner and I swung my a** off on that record, but no one ever talks about that trio.”

Paul initially played in the style of the pioneering Bebop drum masters such as Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Art Blakey.

He played drums professionally for over 60 years. During that span of time, he moved away from the aggressive and accented-oriented playing so characteristic of modern Jazz drumming of the 1940’s and 1950’s and tried to achieve a style that fit in with the flow of the music rather than one that determined it.

In a conversation that I had with Paul in 1996 when he was appearing at the Village Vanguard in a collaborative trio with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell he said: “I essentially flattened things out and took a lot of the busyness out of my playing.”

Hoping to have it autographed, I had brought along a copy of a “Tribute to the Music of Bill Evans” CD that Paul had done a few years earlier with Joe and Bill along with bassist Marc Johnson, who was in Bill Evans last trio before his death in 1981.

The recording was produced in Germany by Stefan Winter in 1990 and when Paul saw it on my table as he was leaving the bandstand at the Vanguard, he smiled and said: “You must have one of the three copies that thing ever sold.”

After he attended to a few personal matters, he made his way back to my table and we spent some of his break together talking about music.

I mentioned that I was a drummer, too, and the conversation went in that direction, that is to say, we talked about drum heads, tuning drums, muffling [or not] bass drums, getting hi hat cymbals to be at exactly the right angle so they “bite” and about ride cymbals that produce a “clicking” sound when struck by a drumstick.

We talked about stuff that no one else in the world would be interested in except another drummer.

It was a conversation. I wasn’t interviewing him, just two guys with something in common – drums – hanging out for a few minutes between sets.

Paul said: “I want to be musical when I solo and not play a bunch of drumming exercises.”

I mentioned that I heard a number of pauses in his solos.

“Exactly,” he said. And then he looked at me and said: “It’s scary to.”

When I looked confused about these remarks he continued: “Because I’m trying to be a complete musician. I’m not just keeping the tune in my head while playing drum licks over it, I’m really trying to make up melodies to express on the drums. Sometimes it’s not always easy to hear what I want to say because all that drumming stuff comes into my mind, first.”

[As an aside, I mentioned to Paul that it took me a long time to “... just keep the tune in my head” while soloing. He grinned and said: “You know what I mean.”]

After a few minutes, Paul excused himself to greet some friends that had arrived for the next set. I gave him my business card and told him to give me a call the next time he was in San Francisco.

When I got back to my hotel room that evening, I realized that I didn’t have the CD that I’d brought along for Paul to autograph.

A few days after I returned to the Left Coast, a small package arrived at my San Francisco office.

In it was the Paul Motian/Bill Evans tribute CD and a handwritten note from Paul which said: “Enjoyed our talk. Don’t forget the pauses. Best, Paul.”

Paul died on November 22, 2011 and we wanted to remember him on these pages with some writings about his career.

Paul Motian: Has Found Thee Sweet Spot

“Give Paul Motian a break for deciding to cease touring in favor of occasional appearances in New York City. After all, the man has spent his adult life on the road, lending his cascading and earthy tones to the likes of Bill Evans, Paul Bley, George Russell, Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, The Electric Bebop Band, and so many others.

Motian doesn’t keep everyday time. Although he might lunge into the standard jazz ride rhythm, he’s more apt to suggest the pulse in other ways, breaking it up between his ancient Zildjian sizzle and his drum kit. Where others might fill, he’ll let one note linger. Although he’s clearly in no hurry to fill up space, his latest ECM release, Garden Of Eden, reveals that he can solo splendidly. He’s been refining his wizardry since he took up with Bill Evans forty-five years ago. As it turns out, Motian left the famous trio for fear it was becoming a cocktail act. “I felt as if I was playing on pillows,” he quips. “It was becoming that quiet.”

In March of this year, a week before his seventy-fifth birthday, Motian appeared live with pianist Bobo Stensen, with whom he recorded Goodbye (ECM). The lights at Birdland dimmed and Paul began poking at his old Paiste 602 Dark ride, sometimes extending his arm so that he could strike north of the bell. He’d find a sweet spot and caress it. Occasionally he’d let out a wide grin. Maybe he was delighted at discovering an elusive sound. Maybe he was happy at a direction Stensen had taken. He’s not telling.

“A lot of people,” Motian complains, “ask why I do something, as if there was a lot of forethought behind it. No, man, this shit is an accident. Kenny Clarke didn’t plan on being ‘the father of bebop drums.’ It just happened because the tempo was so fast that all he could do was play accents on the bass drum!”

Motian, who rarely works with charts, relishes happy accidents. They keep him young, nimble–and edgy.”

And here’s a wonderful mid-career interview that Paul gave to Scott Kevin Fish which appeared in the May, 1980 edition of Modern Drummer.

Paul Motian: Drawing From Tradition by Scott Kevin Fish

“In preparation for my interview with Paul Motian, I listened to recordings he has made, and read as much material as I could find about him. Throughout these record reviews, concert reviews, critiques and analyses, the accolades were many. One writer said, “Paul Motian can turn a set of drums into an orchestra without overshadowing his fellow players.” Another critic wrote, “To him, percussion is music at every level and he could never be accused of playing anything for superficial effect.”

Paul Motian’s professional career began around 1956 in New York. Since then, Mr. Motian has played and/or recorded with some of the greatest musicians in jazz including Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Oscar Pettiford, Art Farmer, Mose Allison, Thelonious Monk, Tony Scott, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Lennie Tristano. The Jazz Composers Orchestra, Charles Lloyd and Don Cherry.In 1972, Paul, as a leader, released his first album, Conception Vessel on ECM records. Two other albums have been released since. Tribute in 1975, and most recently Dance released in 1978.

I met Paul Motian at his apartment in Manhattan one afternoon. He answered the door dressed in army pants, Oriental shirt, and knitted cap. He is not a tall man, but Paul has a striking presence, especially in his dark brown eyes that have an observant quality.

The apartment was decorated with gongs, bells, maracas, plants, a piano, and a black five-piece drum set. “Almost everyone in the building is a musician,” Paul explained. The sound of a tenor sax seeped into the hallway. “Once I was in the elevator and a woman asked, ‘Is that you playing the drums?’ I said yes and told her if it was bothering her I’d try to keep it down. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I like it! It sounds very good.’

“I started playing when I was about 13, in Providence, Rhode Island,” he began, puffing on a cigarette. “I was born in Philadelphia, but I grew up in Rhode Island. There was a guy who played drums a few blocks away from my house. When he would play you could hear it in the street. I was fascinated with it. He played in a Gene Krupa bag. I use to go over there and listen to him every once in awhile. I started fooling around at home with some wooden sticks, and finally he gave me a couple of lessons.

“After that I studied reading and syncopation with Emilio Ragosta and George Gear in Providence. George Gear use to be friendly with George L. Stone from Boston. I played with the high school band. I might have played a couple of dances and clubs with musicians from that band.” Motian thought in response to a question I’d asked about how many gigs he played in his hometown. There weren’t any gigs to speak of, and Motian could only explain it by saying, “It just didn’t happen.”

“Most of my career just sort of happened,” he told me. “People ask, ‘You mean you always played the drums?’ That’s true. I’ve always played the drums. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. It’s always been there, as sort of a natural thing. I just never thought about it that much. It was just something that I did.

“I heard a lot of music when I was a kid. My parents were born in Turkey. They were Armenian and they used to play a lot of Turkish music and some Armenian music. I remember my mother telling me that when I was around two years old, I was always dancing to this music. My parents would say, ‘Gee. Maybe he’s going to get into music some way.’

When the Korean War broke out, Paul enlisted in the Navy. “All my friends were being drafted in the Army and coming back frostbitten. That’s why I went into the Navy. Somebody told me about the Navy School of Music so I thought I would do it that way. I was stationed in Brooklyn, living off the base. When I got out of the Navy, I moved into Manhattan. I studied with Billy Gladstone, and then I went to the Manhattan School of Music for awhile and studied timpani with Alfred Friese and Fred Albright.

“That’s when I started playing around,” Motian continued. “The professional part of my career didn’t start until I was 24 or 25 years old, around 1955 or ’56. I use to carry my drums all over the city, man. I use to take them everywhere.” By the time Paul Motian got on the New York scene, the musical mecca of the 52nd St. days had all but ended. Charlie Parker died in 1955 and it was symbolically the end of an era.

“I’m sorry I missed that,” Paul said. “One of my favorite drummers was Sid Catlett. I never saw him play. The person that I did see play a lot and who was a major influence on me was Kenny Clarke. He was in New York at that time. Max Roach was also an influence. I first heard his stuff when I was a teenager. I liked it a lot.

“I remember one time going to a place where Thelonious Monk was playing. The drummer hadn’t shown up and the promoter knew I played the drums. He said, ‘Hey man. Go get your drums and you can play with Thelonious!’ I ran as fast as I could all the way home, got the drums and played that night with Thelonious. That was a thrill for me. Later on, I worked with him for a week in Boston.

“One time I was playing with Monk and I think the tempo picked up a little bit. At the end of the set I went over to him and said I was sorry; that I might have rushed a little bit on that number. Monk said, ‘Well, if I hit you in the side of the head you won’t rush!’ Paul broke up laughing. “That’s great advice,” he said. “I’ve never rushed after that.”

Motian expressed sincere gratitude to the forces that be for the opportunities that he’s had in his musical career. Aside from Monk, there was a period when Paul Motian played drums with the Oscar Pettiford quintet and big band; and he has also been fortunate to have worked with several other premier jazz bassists including Scott LaFaro, Charlie Haden and Gary Peacock.

Paul sat back in an easy chair. He’d run out of filter cigarettes and sat smoking one of my non-filters through a cigarette holder. I asked him if he could recall any pertinent discussions he may have had with some of those bass players that would interest other drummers.

“I’m trying to think back about Scott LaFaro and Bill Evans,” he said. “I know that we always made suggestions to each other about different things. I know there were really musical questions and discussions. I remember talking with Bill one time, thinking of different things. What if you had to play a tune that could take five, ten or fifteen minutes, and you had to play every quarter note in that tune differently? It’s just a suggestion or an idea to make you aware of the music. If you’re thinking about things like that, think what could happen!

“Bill and I use to play gigs together and we lived in the same building. After Bill had been with Miles Davis, he had his own trio and was playing Midtown, I think at Basin St. His drummer couldn’t make it one night so Bill called me. Scott LaFaro was playing around the corner and he came by and sat in. It seemed like that was it! Bill liked it a lot and we just kept it together for about two years.”

I questioned Paul about one writer’s opinion that he and Scott LaFaro were responsible for the “freeing up” of Bill Evans.

“I think that might have been more mutual,” he answered. “Nobody was playing bass like Scott. Bass players played roots of chords all the time and this was the first time the bass was playing with the pianist. I guess that freed Bill. I played what I heard and tried to fit in with them. I never thought of playing that way,” Motian emphasized. “I’ve never pre-thought something. It seems like it’s always been something that’s happened through my involvement in the music and the musicians. I think it was something that just happened.

“I believe that ‘time’ is always there. I don’t mean a particular pulse, but the time itself. It’s all there somehow like a huge sign that’s up there and it says time. It’s there and you can play all around it. I guess playing with Bill Evans was a freeing up for me too.

“We had reached a really nice point just before Scott died. I remember the gig at the Village Vanguard after we made those recordings (Milestone 47002) and we were all real happy. It seemed that we had musically progressed to a really nice point and now we could really get going. A few weeks later, Scott was killed.”

Motian stayed with Bill Evans from 1964-65. “It got to a point where it didn’t seem like it was me anymore,” he said. “I didn’t seem part of it. I wanted to go in other directions because there was a lot of music happening in New York at that time.

“I played with Carla and Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and John Gilmore. It’s better now in New York, but I think that 1965 was one of the good periods in New York. That was around the time the Jazz Composers Guild was organized. I was playing a lot but I wasn’t making any money. I used to work for two dollars a night. That was it. That went on for a couple of years, but I managed.

“I took a couple of commercial gigs. I was working an Israeli club playing floor shows. Then I worked for awhile on the East side with a trio. I guess that’s how I survived. There are so many clubs now and so much happening. The loft scene and all that. At those times there were things happening in lofts but there was just no money in it. It wasn’t publicized as much, I think.

“Shortly after that, I got hooked up with Keith Jarrett. I met him at a gig he was playing with Tony Scott and he sounded great to me. He was about 19 or 20 then. Later on he called me and Charlie Haden and we did Keith’s first trio album. That was in 1967 and later on I played with Keith in Charles Lloyd’s band.

“We did a fantastic tour of Asia. That was a great experience. Then I went with Arlo Guthrie for awhile. Arlo’s bass player knew of me through my work with Bill Evans so he suggested me. Arlo had a hit record with Alice’s Restaurant and was about to start touring. I enjoyed that,” Paul said. “It wasn’t a big musical experience but it was fun. I can play country/western music: keep time with brushes and have fun. I did a couple of tours with Arlo and part of that would be the Woodstock Festival.

“Afterwards it was mostly Keith. A trio first and then Dewey Redman joined around 1972.” We spoke about some of the miscellaneous records that Paul had played on and two that he was most proud of were Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, (both Motian and Andrew Cyrille are credited with playing percussion instruments). When asked what he specifically played on that LP, Motian said he played on all of the tracks except “Circus ’68 “69” on which Andrew Cyrille is percussionist, and the monumental project Escalator Over the Hill by Carla Bley.

When Paul Motian started leading his own group, he ran into a few problems. He found that he had to have a knowledge of music “business” but more than that he became heavily involved with musical composition. “I’ve been studying piano and composition,” he told me. “I think that’s really important for drummers. All drummers should play a little bit of piano. If they’ve got something against the piano, then study vibraphone or xylophone or buy a wooden flute, man!

“My composition stuff is all recent. I never even dreamed that I could do that kind of thing,” Motian said with an air of pride. “When I got offered to do my first record for ECM, I put together some music and found out that I could do it. Plus, I had some good musicians to help. That’s what I’m working on now. I would like to get that together. That’s very important. I mean, it took me a year just to get a book together for my band!”

I was interested in knowing how Motian went from the initial composing of a piece to working it out with his band, to performing it. Paul explained, “I’ll work it out myself first. When it seems satisfactory, then I ‘ l l write out parts and rehearse it. Maybe I’ll get the saxophone to play the melody. If it doesn’t sound right, I may make a few changes. I’ll do the same thing with the bass, and then rehearse the trio. The song grows from there.

“I would really like to get away from the normal format of chart, solo, choruses and chart again. I don’t really like that,” Motian said. “But, once I’ve written a tune and worked it with the band I don’t play it on the piano after that. Right now, I have maybe seven or eight things that I’m working on that I’m not satisfied with. I may scrap it all, I don’t know.”

Motian was kind enough to oblige my request that he play the piano. The tune was reminiscent of his writing on the Byeablue Keith Jarrett album. “That’s it,” Paul said when he had finished. “I’ll give that to Keith and he’ll play the shit out of it.” I told him that one of the qualities I admired most in his compositions was his use of space. Other than the melody line it is often difficult to separate what is spontaneous and what is arranged.

“Last year a woman in Canada wrote me and said she liked my albums because she didn’t hear any aggression in them. I don’t know if that’s good, though,” Paul laughed. “I can remember being angry and playing. Usually, the melody and some harmonies are written. I like to keep it spontaneous so that I can make changes. So that I can play a piece of music one time and play it differently another time. The melody will be the same, but the playing part can change.”

Because of the time spent on composing and leading his band, Motian has no desire or time to teach. He has done clinics and formed definite ideas about how he would teach drums. “I always had a thing about that,” he said. “If I ever teach, I’m not going to teach on a practice pad. To me, that doesn’t really have too much to do with the drumset. The drumset is your instrument, not the practice pad!”

Motian recently toured Europe with his trio and told me about a couple of weeks he spent teaching at a school in Denmark. “I was there for two weeks with two, one hour classes a day. I took a private student everyday for a half hour lesson. I had to come up with something new each day and that was a challenge.

“The first day I had them tune the drums,” Paul remembered. “There was a set of drums there that sounded terrible. I got the idea to have each drummer tune them to whatever he heard. By the end of the two weeks that was the best sounding drum set in that school,” Paul beamed.

“Mostly, I talked about music and the musicality of the drumset. What is the sound? People will listen to drummers and sometimes they don’t listen to the right thing.” Motian leaned forward in his chair. What is the sound of that drummer? What kind of sound is he getting? Each drummer has his own sound.

“All musicians should check out the tradition of their instruments. There were so many really great drummers. I’d like to bring that heart of drum playing back. People now don’t know about Shadow Wilson, Denzil Best, Kenny Clarke, Dave Tough, Chick Webb, Jimmy Crawford! And Baby Dodds! Some great drummers. Drummers today don’t know about how or what they played,” Paul said, shaking his head.

Motian explained that the styles of the really great drummers would never be obsolete. “Their type of playing is connected with the way people are playing today. It really is. Whether it’s used or not is another story. But, I think there’s a certain art to playing the drums that is missing today.”

When asked what he felt his function in a group was, Motian stated simply. “Adding to the music I love to play time,” he elaborated. “It depends on what kind of music it is! I think that’s great. It’s a happy thing just to play time and having that feeling in your body, bringing it to other people.”

“I don’t know if that’s contradictory to what I said earlier about playing time. How can you listen to the Charlie Parker Quartet with Max Roach and say that’s not good or that’s not fun? That’s beautiful music!”

Would Motian agree that the best ‘free’ drummers were also exceptional timekeepers? “Well, that comes back to the tradition of drums. I don’t think a drummer or anyone else can just start playing what’s known as ‘free’. Somebody said that the only ‘free’ music is when you don’t get paid. You can’t just start playing that way. It comes from a tradition and there’s a lot involved there.

When asked whether he still practices, Motian replied, “I try to play a little bit each day. Sometimes I make a mental note and sometimes I’ll even write down: ‘Play at least ten minutes a day on the drum set.’ I have to really feel like I want to do it. I don’t force myself. When I sit down and try to think about working something out, I’m never really happy. If I sit down and play the drums, like I’m playing in front of people, I’ll get into it more. Then I can play for awhile.”

On the floor tom I noticed a piece of paper with triplet exercises written on it. Paul sat down at the kit, picked up the paper and started to play what was written. Then he stopped. “That sounded good this morning, but now it doesn’t sound so good.” He tossed the paper aside and went into a second solo to demonstrate the sound of his drums.

“This is an old Slingerland set,” Paul explained. “I’ve had it for years.”

The snare was an old chrome Slingerland, the tom-toms were 9X13 and 16X16. For a second mounted tom-tom, Motian had an old wood 5X14 Ludwig snare with the strainer and snares off.

“I have another snare drum that I like a lot,” Paul said. “It’s a deep wooden snare with ten lugs. I used that for a few years and then I switched to this metal one. I may go back to the wooden one.”

“People ask me about my cymbals,” Paul said as he tapped a sizzle cymbal. “That’s another thing that just sort of happened. Through the years you go through different cymbals until you get the sound that you like. I must have had my rivet cymbal for 20 years. It’s an old A. Zildjian.”

The second ride on the left was an old K. Zildjian. “I’ve got a Paiste ripple cymbal on the bottom of the hi-hat, and a K. Zildjian on top. I have a Paiste Chinese type cymbal that I use a lot. That’s what I use pretty regularly now.” Paul told me that this was the same set he’d used on his recordings and his pet drum seemed to be the 18″ bass.

“I think it’s deeper than most. This one gets a bigger sound than a normal 18”. I tune them until it’s satisfactory to my ear. I’ll tune them until it sounds good to me; until there’s some kind of interval between the drums and it sounds pleasant to my ears. But, I don’t say I have to tune a fourth here and a third there. I don’t get into that.

Sometimes I might as an ear training exercise, I’ll play the drums and then go over to the piano to see what it actually is. But it’s hard for me to find out because I like the overtones in the drums. They hate me in recording studios for that. There’s no mufflers on the drums.

Everything is wide open. It’s loud and there’s a lot of overtones. It’s hard to tune to specific notes because of that. Most of the time the studio engineer has me take off the head or put some damper on it, because it really raises havoc with their needles.

“I’m still not completely satisfied with recording,” Motian admitted. “ECM does a really fantastic job but I wonder if it’s possible to hear drums on a record the way I hear them when I’m sitting behind them? In a hall with bad acoustics I can’t play too loud or I’ll l wipe everybody else out.”

Does he consider himself a loud drummer? “No,” Motian said. “But I’ve had people tell me that I was too loud. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear other players in a bad hall. I learn a lot. Once I went to a concert where the drummer was playing well but you couldn’t hear the piano. I kept thinking, ‘I wish the drummer would just stop for two measures.’ He never did. He just played constantly and wiped out the piano. I don’t want people thinking that way about me.”

Remo Ambassador heads are on all of Motian’s drums except on the snare which was calfskin. It isn’t that he is so particular about a specific head as he is, again, about the sound. “On this last tour of Europe, Sonor Drums provided a set for me. I just took my trap case and cymbals. The drums seemed good but what I didn’t like about them was that they had clear plastic heads on them. That starts to mess with my sound. I changed a couple of heads and got a better sound.

“I don’t like heads when they’re real thick. I think plastic heads are made in three or four different thicknesses and each company is a little different. I like the heads that are on my drums now. It’s surprising that the calfskin head seems to stay in tune. It’s nice for brushes but the plastic heads are nice for brushes, too. Those clear ones aren’t very good though.”

Besides his regular drum kit, Motian plays some of the most inspiring percussion on various instruments. He is a master at using mallets in addition to brushes and sticks on the drum kit. “I’ve got a couple of boxes of percussion things I’ve collected over the years that I take around with me,” he said. “It’s just like colors to add to the music.

“I like the concept of Indian music,” Paul said. “Where you have an Indian playing an instrument like a violin or a sarot with the tamboura and drum. I think there’s a way of connecting that with what I’m doing. You have a melody instrument, the tamboura and a bass or a drum! You can do a lot in music with that.

“A lot of different music is coming together, which was inevitable. I had an idea to play all kinds of music. I don’t see why you have to be restricted. I’d like to play a piece by Charles Ives and then a standard. Then one of my compositions. Jazz fusion, music of the world like African, Indian, Asian, the Middle Eastern, rock & roll, country and western, rhythm & blues, bring it all together!”

Despite critical acclaim for performing and recording, the role of bandleader has been an uphill climb for Motian. In spite of the fact that he’s still on the ascent, there is much more than a spark of optimism in his soul.

“Managers can’t do anything with me because I don’t command $5,000 a performance and their commission isn’t going to be great. That’s the reality of it,” he said.

“My concerts have done very well. I’ve gotten very good reviews. It bothers me that I’m not playing as much as I would like to. I get calls for gigs with other people that I turn down. So far, it hasn’t been too bad. We’ve done two European tours, a few concerts in New York, and a couple of workshops and college concerts. Once I actually get to play,” he smiled, “it’s fantastic.””

This is the description of Paul on Bernhard Castiglioni’s website www.drummerworld.com

“A masterfully subtle drummer and a superb colorist, Paul Motian is also an advanced improviser and a bandleader with a taste for challenging post-bop. Born Stephen Paul Motian in Philadelphia on March 25, 1931, he grew up in Providence and began playing the drums at age 12, eventually touring New England in a swing band.

He moved to New York in 1955 and played with numerous musicians - including Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano, Coleman Hawkins, Tony Scott, and George Russell - before settling into a regular role as part of Bill Evans' most famous trio (with bassist Scott LaFaro), appearing on his classics Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby.

In 1963, Motian left Evans' group to join up with Paul Bley for a year or so, and began a long association with Keith Jarrett in 1966, appearing with the pianist's American-based quartet through 1977.

In addition, Motian freelanced for artists like Mose Allison, Charles Lloyd, Carla Bley, and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Ensemble, and turned down the chance to be John Coltrane's second drummer.

In 1972, Motian recorded his first session as a leader, Conception Vessel, for ECM; he followed in 1974 with Tribute.

He formed a regular working group in 1977 (which featured tenor Joe Lovano) and recorded several more dates for ECM, then revamped the ensemble to include guitarist Bill Frisell in 1980. Additional dates for ECM and Soul Note followed, and in 1988 Motian moved to JMT, where he recorded a long string of fine albums beginning with Monk in Motian.

During the '90s, he also led an ensemble called the Electric Bebop Band, which featured Joshua Redman. In 1998, Motian signed on with the Winter & Winter label, where he began recording another steady stream of albums, including 2000 + One in 1999, Europe in 2001, and Holiday for Strings in 2002. In 2005 Motian moved to the ECM label, releasing I Have the Room Above Her that same year, followed by Garden of Eden in 2006 and Time and Time Again in 2007.

Paul Motian died on November 22, 2011 in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder.”

The following video features the Turn Out The Stars track fromTribute to the Music ofBill Evans, an album by Paul Motian on the German JMT label. It was released in 1990 and features nine compositions by Motian's former employer Bill Evans performed by Motian with Bill Frisell, guitar, Joe Lovano, tenor sax and Marc Johnson on bass.

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"Count Your Change" - The Paul Horn Quintet [From the Archives]

December 13, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy by Peter Ind

≪ Previous: Paul Motian: The Drummer As Musician

I really enjoyed playing on the Paul Horn composition, Count Your Change. Because it transitioned so easily from 4/4 to 5/4 time, it helped me develop my 5/4 chops [“back in the day”]. The tune became so familiar to me that I was able to “dance around” the usual way of counting 5/4 - one bar of 3 plus one bar of 2 - and establish some interesting counter rhythms between my hands and feet on the drum kit.

Count Your Change was originally released in 1962 as part of the eight tunes that made up the Columbia LP - Profile of A Jazz Musician [Columbia 8722]. The album featured Paul on alto sax, clarinet and flute [including the rarely heard bass flute], Emil Richard on vibes, Paul Moer on piano, Jimmy Bonds on bass and Milt Turner on drums. [You can listen to the original recording on the video that serves as a lead-in to this piece.]

Count Your Change is basically blues for the first eight bars of the theme; then come six measures in 5/4 time, followed by two measures in 4/4. The same pattern is followed in each of the blowing choruses. If you think of it as though the 5/4 bars were an extension of the ninth and tenth measures of the regular 12-bar blues, the form will become clearer.

The composition was featured television film called The Story of a Jazz Musician, a half-hour program built around Paul and the group, for which he wrote the background score (featuring four cellos and flugelhorn) as well as supplying music by the quintet. "The story line," says Paul, "traces the evolution of a typical composition. It shows Emil and me kicking around some ideas at my home, then trying the piece out at Shelly's Manne Hole in Hollywood. There are scenes with the fellows talking, as well as some narration by me; scenes with my father, and Yvonne and our kids; a visit to the Down Beat office to see John Tynan. It's an unusual TV approach to jazz."

The Story of a Jazz Musician has been available on YouTube for some time in the three segments shown below. You won’t want to miss Part 3 as it features interior views of Shelly Manne’s famous Hollywood, CA Jazz club - The Manne Hole - and Paul’s group performing Count Your Change.

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Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy by Peter Ind

December 14, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: An Interview with Johnny Griffin by Dom DeMichael

≪ Previous: "Count Your Change" - The Paul Horn Quintet [From the Archives]

“Jazz Visions is a remarkable book which presents a fascinating double portrait of the subject and the author."

- John Chilton, professional Jazz trumpeter and writer on jazz

“This book is just what is needed to inform musicians, students, teachers, and historians around the world with an 'up close and personal' view of the genius of jazz pianist / composer / teacher, Lennie Tristano. Bassist Peter Ind describes vividly how exciting it was to be living in New York City as a creative musician. Peter's writing skills throughout will also enlighten and entertain the novice and non-musician as well. The best part for me is that it was written by a great player who was there right in the thick of it all. What can be a better source for the real truth? Bravo, Peter!"

- Rufus Reid, Jazz bassist

“The Lennie Tristano story has needed telling for a long time. Who better than Peter Ind, who knew Lennie and his music probably better than anyone?"

- Ira Gitler - doyen of New York jazz critics

With Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy [London: Equinox, 2005], Peter Ind joins fellow bassists Chuck Israels, and his writings on his time working with pianist Bill Evans’ Trio, and Bill Crow’s reflections on working in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Sextet and Concert Jazz Band in providing insights into the music of a major Jazz stylist from the 1945-1965 Modern Jazz era.

And, as is the case with the works of Chuck and Bill, Peter’s narrative is a primary source; an autobiographical documentation of the time and/or person that is being observed. Concerning the halcyon days of post WWII modern Jazz, such primary sources are becoming rarer with each passing year.

The bass provides an interesting vantage point for style analysis as no other instrument in a Jazz group interacts with the music from the vantage point of all the elements that comprise it: melody, harmony, rhythm and sonority [texture or the overall sound of the music].

Of course, it’s one thing to musically interact in this manner and quite another to be able to explain it cogently and coherently. All three of these bassist-authors draw high marks for their ability to put music into words.

While more subjective in its emphasis, along with Nat Hentoff’s comprehensive insert booklet notes to The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh [Mosaic Records MD6-174] and Eunmi Shim’s Lennie Tristano: His Life and Music [ Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007], Peter’s book is an invaluable guide to understanding Lennie and his music.

Peter explains how and why he approached his book on Lennie - whom he describes as “... one of the seminal influences in Jazz” - in the following excerpts from the Preface to his book:

“I would like to make it clear from the beginning that this book is not intended as an objective account of a man's life but, rather, an attempt to portray Lennie Tristano as I knew him and as I heard his music. Now, half a century later, the world is a very different place. It must be extremely difficult for today's student of jazz music to identify the various stages of his musical creativity, so I have tried to illuminate notjust his music in isolation, but in the context of life as it was in the fifties and sixties, paying particular attention to crucial political events that were taking place in the fifties, some of which have been ignored or apparently forgotten.

I find it ironic that in our present culture, recognition is seldom accorded for genuine effort and achievement; those most recognized are not always the most creative. I knew Lennie Tristano as a supreme example of a great creative musician, who never received the recognition he deserved. How can it be that, in such a sophisticated society as ours, with its ubiquitous media and instantaneous communications, such a person and his achievements remain known only to a few? Gradually I began to come to the conclusion that such sidelining of people of great merit is not restricted to the creative arts, but also obtains in other areas of achievement, especially in the realm of the sciences.

I hope that many people will enjoy this book, not only people who remember the New York jazz scene as it was in those days, but also those who are curious about Lennie Tristano and his place in the evolution of jazz since the late forties. Because different people may be interested in particular aspects, I have organized the book so that readers can dip into specific chapters for what they might seek. Those more interested in what was happening and what New York was like in the late forties through to the fifties will be more interested in Part I, Chapters 1-7. I have included in this section, in Chapter 6, a short summary of some of the lives of musicians associated with Lennie at the time. I have grouped together the more technical aspects of improvisation, in which musicians will be interested, in Part II. Chapters 8-10 focus on a discussion of jazz improvisation and Lennie's contribution in terms of playing, teaching and his understanding of the music. Part III focuses on a reconsideration first of all of Lennie's legacy (Chapters 11 and 12), the jazz scene as I see it (Chapter 13) and a final chapter (Chapter 14), which summarizes all the discussion. So, if you want a quick guide to the book, it is there.

This final chapter deals with the legacy of Lennie and lays to rest some of the misunderstandings that have arisen, particularly regarding Lennie's influence and work. It has been great to pull together all of these memories, to go back and talk to various people and look through old articles etc. …”

Although I am basically familiar with the highlights of Lennie’s career, chapters 1-7 in Peter’s treatment filled in many blanks and provided additional details about Lennie’s journey through the Jazz world, especially in terms of the nature of his influence on other musicians he worked with and who studied with him.

In this regard, Peter offers his own testimonial in Chapter 7 which is entitled - “A Reflection on Lennie as I Knew Him - The Man and The Musician.”

I was particularly taken with the second half of the book which Peter divides into seven chapters under the headings of Part II - Lennie: A More Technical Consideration of Jazz Improvisation and His Legacy and Part III - A Reconsideration of Lennie’s Legacy as they contain observations and insights which are unique to Peter’s perspective.

The chapter headings in Part II are [8] What Do We Mean By Jazz?, [9] Appreciating Jazz Improvisation and [10] The Technical Base of Jazz and Lennie’s Approach.

Part III contains chapters dealing with Mythmaking About Lennie, Lennie Tristano and The Enigma of Non-Recognition, Mythmaking and Prejudices in Jazz, and Reappraisal.

The great thing about many of the questions that Peter poses in these chapters is that they are universal and, as such, can be applied to a broad spectrum on inquiry about Jazz and its makers.

But equally important are the answers that he provides as they go a long way toward resolving many of the open-ended questions in the Jazz literature about Lennie and his music.

For example, when Richard Cook and Brian Morton make the following assertion in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. - “Tristano created a doctrinal school of thought which placed rigorous thought and construction ahead of mere emoting in jazz; once controversial, now a part of the language.” - Peter’s Lennie bio explains how this came to be.

Or when, J. Bradford Robinson states in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Barry Kernfeld, ed. - “Tristano's music stands apart from the main tradition of modern jazz, representing an alternative to bop which poses severe demands of ensemble precision, intellectual rigor, and instrumental virtuosity. Rather than the irregular cross-accents of bop, Tristano preferred an even rhythmic background against which to concentrate on line and focus his complex changes of time signature. Typically, his solos consisted of extraordinarily long, angular strings of almost even eighth-notes provided with subtle rhythmic deviations and abrasive polytonal effects. He was particularly adept in his use of different levels of double time and was a master of the block-chord style of George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, and others, carefully gauging the accumulation of dissonance.” - Peter’s work offers an analysis of how these components took root in Lennie’s style of playing.

Tristano’s experiments in multi track recording and overdubbing, free collective improvisation, most notably in Intuition and Digression (1949) which pointed the way to similar experiments by Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s and Tristano’s excellence as a teacher, demanding and receiving firm loyalty from his pupils, are also further illuminated by Peter in his masterful Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy.

Peter’s book on Lennie may have been a long time in coming, but it was well worth waiting for and the Jazz World owes a significant debt of gratitude to him for writing it and to Equinox for underwriting its publication.

In closing, I should like to point out that Valerie Hall, the Editorial and Marketing Manager at Equinox is kindly offering JazzProfiles readers a 25% discount using the code Jazz when ordering from the Equinox website.

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An Interview with Johnny Griffin by Dom DeMichael

December 15, 2018, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Joe Lovano Leaps In With Little Willie [From The Archives]

≪ Previous: Jazz Visions: Lennie Tristano and His Legacy by Peter Ind

"When Bird [alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker] was alive, I wouldn't go near him too much," he said. "The same thing goes for [tenor saxophonists] Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. They were very strong. I felt it wouldn't do my playing any good. I might start playing like them.

- Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophonist

“If saxophone playing had a Formula One division, Johnny Griffin would have pole position every start- or he would have had before he discovered a gentler and more lyrical side to his musical personality. Born in Chicago, the Little Giant was part of the first bebop generation, but he only really found his true voice in the '505, often in partnership with Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, with whom he duelled to often spectacular effect. Griffin spent some time in Europe in the '6os but has enjoyed a resurgence back home in more recent years.”

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

“Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.”

- Obituary By Ben Ratliff, published in the July 26, 2008 New York Times

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles welcomes back to these pages the writing of Don DeMichael with a piece on Johnny Griffin, a powerhouse tenor saxophonist whose fierce sound and finger-bustin’ technique were characteristic of his playing throughout a career that spanned six decades and two continents.

“So much controversy has been stirred up by "Third Stream" music, the back-to-the-land movement, the need for new forms in jazz composition, the importance of Mainstream jazz, the value of Traditional jazz, and

God-knows-what-else, that it's easy to lose sight of jazzmen who aren't trying to mold the shape of things to come — men who don't particularly care where jazz is heading or where it's been, musicians whose greatest desire is simply to play their instruments.

It's ironic that, throughout the history of jazz, such men have had the greatest impact on the direction of jazz and have been the ones to add to the legends and traditions of the music. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Lester Young were probably more concerned with what they were going to play when they were on stand than with how they might alter the course of jazz. It has been the blowers — and Louis, Bird, and Pres were at heart blowers—who have shown the way. Jazz evolves every night; there's no such thing as evolution by planned crusade.

All of which brings us to little Johnny Griffin, a blower of the first stripe. He is a man concerned with living and playing in the present.

The diminutive tenor man, currently co-leading a group with Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, said recently, "Jazz is self-expression. It's not what I recorded last year or what I played last night, but how I feel tonight that's important. I feel differently tonight than I did yesterday. If I feel bad, I'll play bad. But if I feel good, there'll be some feeling of hilarity in my playing."

Griffin believes in the inspiration of the moment, in giving in to circumstances. "Jazz to me is not arrangements," he said. "That's why I like to blow. I don't even want to know what I'm going to play. The individual solo, that's jazz. To say something...

"I'm what you might call a nervous person when I'm playing. I like to play fast. I get excited, and I have to sort of control myself, restrain myself. But when the rhythm section gets cooking, I want to explode. I like to play with

fire, and I like strong bassists and drummers. I've played with such fiery rhythm sections with drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, and Max Roach that there's little you can miss as far as fire is concerned.

"Some guys say, Why don't you cool it the first set — take it easy?' And I try for the first tune or so. But when I get into the music, I don't have anything to do with it. I can't help myself. Before you know it, things are wailing."

Griffin's career includes a two-year stay with Lionel Hampton. He joined Hamp a few days after graduating from high school in 1945. He tells amusing tales of the Hampton band's adventures. One concerns a theater engagement in New York City.

The theater management insisted on a tight time schedule — 53 minutes were

allotted the show, no more, no less. Griffin says Hampton would get carried away playing Flying Home, and many times during the engagement, as the elevated stage descended with the band blasting away, Hampton would be seen still marching through the audience with a blowing tenor man.

After leaving the Hampton band in 1947, Griffin spent 10 years with a variety of groups, including those of Joe Morris and Arnett Cobb, and an early edition of the Jazz Messengers. In 1958, he worked four months with Thelonious Monk, a period he says was "a wonderful experience."

"I don't think Monk changed me, though — not my way of playing," he said. "I've known Monk a long time. I worked with him in Chicago at the Beehive in '54 or '55. As strange as he may seem to the public, Monk is a well-read person. And if you can get close to him, he can carry on a very intelligent conversation.

"He's such a strong person when he's playing his own music. You have to modify your playing with him, especially when he's comping. You have to go Monk's way. Sometimes I'd ask him what change he had played on some tune. He'd tell me, but then he'd say, "But that's only relative. You've got to hear it.'"

The 32-year-old tenor man's respect for "strong" players is mirrored in his own muscular playing. But he feels that he is what he is today because he avoided listening too much to "strong" jazzmen.

"When Bird was alive, I wouldn't go near him too much," he said. "The same thing goes for Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. They were very strong. I felt it wouldn't do my playing any good. I might start playing like them.

"Yet everything I play comes from others. Everything I've ever heard comes out in what I play. You shouldn't get stuck on any one man, but listen to them all, then draw on them according to how you feel at any one time. I don't want anyone to influence me overly. It would suppress what I have to express. I wouldn't be giving myself to myself."

Even though he avoided overexposure to "strong" players, there were others whom Griffin listened to — Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie ("always"), Elmo Hope, Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, Ben Webster ("the ferociousness of Ben"), Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young ("He didn't play with fire, but he was so relaxed . . . the way he'd bend notes ... he just swung").

But even with his studied avoidance of strong players and the consequent emergence of his own style, Griffin is not content with his playing. "Somebody can tape something I play one night, and I can listen to it the next night and think it's okay. But later, I'll pick it to pieces. I've never been satisfied with anything I've done.

"I'm searching for something, and I don't have a clear idea what I'm looking for. The more I learn, the more there is that I know I don't know.”

Maturity comes when you realize your limitations as well as your strengths. Johnny Griffin today is a mature person. His search for a nebulous "something" could conceivably end with a large group of his own. His latest Riverside record, The Big Soul Band, and his plans for more big band recordings would indicate this. Whatever his "something" turns out to be, it will be vital, fiery music, firmly rooted in the present.

January 5, 1961

Down Beat

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