Jazz Profiles

Jazz Guitarists (playlist)

2013-06-03T09:40:00.001-07:00

"Hidden in Plain Hearing: The Roots of Cool Jazz in the Big Band of Claude Thornhill" – From The Archives

2013-06-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

“I wonder if the world will ever know how much it had in this beautiful man.”

- Duke Ellington

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles had occasion to revisit Claude Thornhill’s music this past weekend courtesy of a featured concert at the La Jazz Institute’s four-day festival entitled Swingin’ on a Riff which was held at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel from May 23-26, 2013.

It prompted us to repost this article about Claude and his band and to develop the video that you’ll find at the end of this piece which features Gil Evans’ arrangement for the band of Charlie Parker’s Anthropology.

“Sixty years ago, in the hot summer of 1948, a cadre of young arrangers and players worked in a basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry on West 55th Street in New York to craft music that would later be tagged "the birth of the cool" -- the first notable instance of a harmonically rich, emotionally subtle type of jazz that washed its gorgeous chords and subtle dynamics over a big chunk of the 1950s.

Trumpeter Miles Davis was the nominal leader of this ensemble, but it was the outfit's arrangers -- primarily Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan -- who were the real stars. The devices they drew on had been available for years, hidden in plain hearing within the big band of Claude Thornhill.

The shy, Indiana-born Thornhill had been on the swing and dance-band scene since the 1930s: a pianist, arranger and leader whose self-penned theme-song, Snowfall, was an ethereal tone-poem in which time almost seemed to stop. Thornhill favored slow tempi and lingering phrases. His band's instrumentation included two French horns, a sonorous tuba, and enough reed players to allow for passages with six or seven clarinets at a time. With a theme like Snowfall, the Thornhill band epitomized coolness from the moment it took the stage.

The Canadian-born Gil Evans, who joined that band in 1941, proved to be Thornhill's ideal arranger. When bebop emerged, Evans blended its busy lines and advanced progressions with Thornhill's meditative approach, writing engaging arrangements of bop standards such as altoist Charlie Parker's Anthropology and Yardbird Suite.

Evans also arranged Donna Lee, a tune by Parker's young sideman Miles Davis. Lee Konitz, then an equally young alto-sax player from Chicago whose dry-ice tone fit perfectly into Thornhill's low-vibrato outfit, remembers Davis coming to hear the band in 1947 at New York's Pennsylvania Hotel.

"It was basically a ballad band," Mr. Konitz (now 80 and still active as a player) said recently. "People loved dancing to it. Gil's beautiful writing was very danceable. . . . Miles liked the band." In 1950, Davis would describe Thornhill's orchestra to Down Beat magazine as "the greatest band of these modern times. . . . It was commercially good and musically good."

But Thornhill disbanded this orchestra in early 1948 for undisclosed reasons. "Thornhill was pretty removed from everything," says Mr. Konitz. "I don't think I ever said much more than 'hello' to him in 10 months."

Gil Evans's tiny apartment on West 55th -- a place Thornhill himself had lived in, back in 1940 -- then became a sort of workshop where Evans and Mulligan, encouraged by Davis and joined by John Lewis and John Carisi, attempted to re-create the Thornhill band's sound with as few instruments as possible. This proved to be nine: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto sax, baritone sax; and a rhythm section of piano, bass and drums.

Players for this nonet were chosen (including several Thornhill veterans). Rehearsals were held. Davis became the nascent band's leader, but the ensemble was no showcase for individual players, says Mr. Konitz (who became its alto saxophonist): "This was a chamber group -- compositional. Solos were kind of incidental."

The nonet was booked for a few weeks' work at the Royal Roost, a jazz venue on Broadway. In September 1948, "'Impressions in Modern Music,' with the new Miles Davis organization" made its debut, and some of its sets were heard by insomniac New Yorkers via remote wee-hours radio broadcasts.

The nonet attracted the attention of a Capitol Records executive who made sure it recorded a total of 12 numbers in 1949 and 1950 -- tracks that came out first on 78-rpm singles, then on a 10-inch long-playing disc, and, in 1957, on a 12-inch album at last titled Birth of the Cool. By then the Davis group had inspired or influenced a host of other cool-sounding nonets, octets, quartets and tentets -- the most successful of which was Gerry Mulligan's "piano-less" foursome with trumpeter Chet Baker, whose lyrical, minimal style was not unlike Miles Davis's.

The Complete Birth of the Cool, a 1998 Capitol CD including broadcast transcriptions from the Royal Roost, continues to sell. And the "Birth of the Cool" mystique grows: This February, jazz-drummer and writer Bill Moody published "Shades of Blue" (Poisoned Pen Press), a contemporary mystery novel turning on events surrounding the Davis nonet.

Mike Zwerin, the young trombonist in that '48 live-performance unit (but not on the records), reversed the career arc of several nonet members: After first working in Davis's group, he later played with the Claude Thornhill band -- albeit a much-diminished 1958 touring outfit. "[Claude] kept his dignity as his audience dwindled," wrote Mr. Zwerin, now a well-regarded music journalist and author. " . . . I marvel at how much control that must have involved, considering the skid he was on. He knew he had been something special." Thornhill died in 1965, at the age of 55, on the eve of another comeback.

Davis followed Birth of the Cool with a long and noteworthy career that saw several more collaborations with Evans, including their epochal LPs Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess.

And Evans made several albums of his own, including a 1961 platter titled (in acknowledgment of his musical genesis) "Out of the Cool." Perhaps the most ear-catching track on that disc was an Evans opus that became a sort of signature piece for the big band he'd lead in sporadic performance for 30 years; it was probably Evans's best-known composition.

Claude Thornhill's old protégé named this semi-theme song La Nevada -- Spanish for Snowfall.”

Mr. Nolan is editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen & Landru).

Female Jazz Vocalists: Then and Now (playlist)

2013-06-01T14:53:00.001-07:00

Mulgrew Miller: “Living in the Shadows of Giants”

2013-05-31T07:00:00.001-07:00

“Don’t cross a bridge to get home or to work:” I guess the expression contains more than a hint of caution and admonition, especially if you’ve lived some time in the San Francisco Bay area and seen the nightmarish traffic back-ups a closed bridge can cause on the local, television news.

Thankfully, I never experienced such a delay in all the years I lived and worked in San Francisco,

But I sure caught a taste of what such an experience would be like as I was headed north back to the Oakland, CA airport to catch a return flight to my relocated home in southern California following some business appointments in the Silicon Valley.

A major accident on the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland had caused a traffic back-up so serious that it extended south on US 880 to about 10 miles below the airport.

The was no alternative and plenty of later flights so I just relaxed and turned on the FM-Jazz station while I waited things out in the rental car that was crawling along at death-defying speed of 3 MPH.

The radio broadcast that I tuned into was an interview with pianist Mulgrew Miller who was appearing through the upcoming weekend with his trio at Yoshi’s Jazz Club located on a portion of the waterfront which the City of Oakland had reclaimed from surplus shipping docks and refurbished into a lovely commercial-cum-residential area.

I knew of Mulgrew’s work through recordings he had made during his long association with drummer Tony Williams’ quintet in the 1980s and 1990s, but I had never heard him play in person.

He sounded very warm and cordial during the radio interview and I thought, “Well, at the rate things are going with the crawling traffic, maybe I’ll just book into a local hotel and catch one of Mulgrew’s sets at Yoshi’s.”

Of all the remarks Mulgrew made during the exchange with the interviewer, one stayed with me: “It’s tough to get any recognition as a Jazz musician today because we are living in the shadow of Giants.”

This is not verbatim, but earlier in his talk, Mulgrew had said that many of the pianists during the bebop era, for example Al Haig, Joe Albany, Dodo Marmarosa, John Lewis, and even some pianists during the later hard bop era like Sonny Clark, Horace Silver and Walter Bishop, Jr., were not original stylists.

They basically played in the manner of Bud Powell and gained a certain measure of recognition and approval for being able to do so.

But musicians like himself, who continue in this bebop piano tradition and perhaps add some of the newer influences like Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner or Keith Jarrett to their approach get little respect because we are not “… the next Bud Powell or Art Tatum or Bill Evans.”

“Why? Not all of us can be giants like Bud and Art or Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. We are doing our part to keep the Jazz tradition alive and even move it forward a little, but we get little respect for what we do accomplish and put down for what we don’t.”

None of this was conveyed with animosity by Mulgrew, but you could certainly sense his disappointment and his displeasure.

The interview then trailed off and was replaced by the playing of one of Mulgrew’s recordings in its entirety.

By some miracle I was just pulling into the hired car parking lot when the interviewer returned so I did not get to hear the rest of Mulgrew’s talk.

The following year The Mulgrew Miller Trio Live at Yoshi’s was issued as a double CD on MaxJazz [[MXJ 212/208] and I picked up a copy along with the March 1, 2005 edition of Downbeat in which the following article about Mulgrew by Ted Panken appeared.

Mulgrew passed away on May 28, 2013 and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be nice to remember him on these pages with a reprint of his Downbeat interview and the Nat Chinen obituary that was published in The New York Times.

Mulgrew Miller: No Apologies

“Ironies abound in the world of Mulgrew Miller. On the one hand, the 49-year-old pianist is, as Eric Reed pointed out, "the most imitated pianist of the last 25 years." On the other, he finds it difficult to translate his exalted status into full-blown acceptance from the jazz business.

"It's a funny thing about my career," Miller said. "Promoters won't hire my band, but they'll book me as a sideman and make that the selling point of the gig. That boggles my mind."

Miller would seem to possess unsurpassed qualifications for leadership. As the 2004 trio release Live At Yoshi's (MaxJazz) makes evident, no pianist of Miller's generation brings such a wide stylistic palette to the table. A resolute modernist with an old-school attitude, he's assimilated the pentagonal contemporary canon of Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, as well as Woody Shaw's harmonic innovations, and created a fluid personal argot.

His concept draws on such piano-as-orchestra signposts as Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal and Erroll Garner, the "blowing piano" of Bud Powell, the disjunctive syncopations and voicings of Thelonious Monk, and the melodic ingenuity of gums like Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and Cedar Walton. With technique to burn, he finds ways to conjure beauty from pentatonics and odd intervals, infusing his lines with church and blues strains and propelling them with a joyous, incessant beat.

"I played with some of the greatest swinging people who ever played jazz, and I want to get the quality of feeling I heard with them," Miller said. "It's a sublime way to play music, and the most creative way to express myself. You can be both as intellectual and as soulful as you want, and the swing beat is powerful but subtle. I think you have to devote yourself to it exclusively to do it at that level."

Consequential apprenticeships with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, Betty Carter, Johnny Griffin and Shaw launched Miller's career. A 1983-'86 stint with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers put his name on the map, and he cemented his reputation during a long association with Tony Williams' great cuspof-the-'90s band, a sink-or-swim environment in which Miller thrived, playing, as pianist Anthony Wonsey recalls, "with fire but also the maturity of not rushing."

By the mid '80s, Miller was a fixture on New York's saloon scene. Later, he sidemanned extensively with Bobby Hutcherson, Benny Golson, James Moody and Joe Lovano, and from 1987 to 1996 he recorded nine trio and ensemble albums for Landmark and RCANovus.

Not long after his 40th birthday, Miller resolved to eschew club dates and one-offs, and to focus on his own original music. There followed a six-year recording hiatus, as companies snapped up young artists with tenuous ties to the legacy of hardcore jazz.

"I won't call any names," Miller says, "but a lot of people do what a friend of mine calls 'interview music.' You do something that's obviously different, and you get the interviews and a certain amount of attention. Jazz is part progressive art and part folk art, and I've observed it to be heavily critiqued by people who attribute progressivity to music that lacks a folk element. When Charlie Parker developed his great conception, the folk element was the same as Lester Young and the blues shouters before him. Even when Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane played their conceptions, the folk element was intact. But now, people almost get applauded if they don't include that in their expression. If I reflected a heavy involvement in Arnold Schoenberg or some other ultra-modern composers, then I would be viewed differently than I am. Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.

"A lot of today's musicians learn the rudiments of playing straight-ahead, think they've got it covered, become bored, and say, 'Let me try something else,'" Miller continued. "They develop a vision of expanding through different areas - reggae here, hip-hop there, blues here, soul there, classical music over here and being able to function at a certain level within all those styles. Rather than try to do a lot of things pretty good, I have a vision more of spiraling down to a core understanding of the essence of what music is."

This being said, Miller-who once wrote a lovely tune called "Farewell To Dogma" -continues to adhere to the principle that "there is no one way to play jazz piano and no one way that jazz is supposed to sound." He is not to be confused with the jazz police. His drummer, Karriem Riggins, has a second career as a hip-hop producer, and has at his fingertips a lexicon of up-to-the-second beats. When the urge strikes, bassist Derrick Hodge might deviate from a walking bass line to slap the bass Larry Graham style. It's an approach familiar to Miller, who grew up in Greenwood, Miss., playing the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Al Green in various Upper Delta cover bands.

"It still hits me where I live," he says. "It's Black music. That's my roots. When I go home, they all know me as the church organist from years ago, so it's nothing for me to walk up to the organ and fit right in. I once discussed my early involvement in music with Abdullah Ibrahim, and he described what I went through as a community-based experience. Before I became or wanted to become a jazz player, I played in church, in school plays, for dances and for cocktail parties. I was already improvising, and always on some level it was emotional or soul or whatever you want to call it. I was finding out how to connect with people through music.

"By now, I have played jazz twice as long as I played popular music, and although that style of playing is part of my basic musical being, I don't particularly feel that I need to express myself through it," he continued. "It's all blues. The folk element of the music doesn't change. The blues in 1995 and in 1925 is the same thing. The technology is different. But the chords are the same, the phrasing is the same, the language is the same-exact same. I grew up on that. It's a folk music. Folk music is not concerned with evolving."

For all his devotion to roots, Miller is adamant that expansion and evolution are key imperatives that drive his tonal personality. "I left my hometown to grow, and early on I intended to embrace as many styles and conceptions as I could," he said. "When I came to New York I had my favorites, but there was a less celebrated, also brilliant tier of pianists who played the duo rooms, and I tried to hear all of those guys and learn from them. The sound of my bands changes as the musicians expand in their own right. I'm open, and all things are open to interpretation. I trust my musicians-their musicianship, insights, judgments and taste-and they tend to bring things off in whatever direction they want to go. In the best groups I played with, spontaneity certainly was a strong element."

Quiet and laid-back, determined to follow his muse, Miller may never attain mass consumption. But he remains sanguine.

"I have moments, but I don't allow myself to stay discouraged for long," he said. "I worked hard to maintain a certain mental and emotional equilibrium. It's mostly due to my faith. I don't put all my eggs in that basket of being a rich and famous jazz guy. That allows me a certain amount of freedom, because I don't have to play music for money. I play music because I love it. I play the music I love with people I want to play with. I have a long career behind me. I don't have to apologize to anybody for any decisions I make." -Ted Panken”

Mulgrew Miller, Dynamic Jazz Pianist, Dies at 57

“Mulgrew Miller, a jazz pianist whose soulful erudition, clarity of touch and rhythmic aplomb made him a fixture in the postbop mainstream for more than 30 years, died on Wednesday in Allentown, Pa. He was 57.

The cause was a stroke, said his longtime manager, Mark Gurley. Mr. Miller had been hospitalized since Friday.

Mr. Miller developed his voice in the 1970s, combining the bright precision of bebop, as exemplified by Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson, with the clattering intrigue of modal jazz, especially as defined by McCoy Tyner. His balanced but assertive style was a model of fluency, lucidity and bounce, and it influenced more than a generation of younger pianists.

He was a widely respected bandleader, working either with a trio or with the group he called Wingspan, after the title of his second album. The blend of alto saxophone and vibraphone on that album, released on Landmark Records in 1987, appealed enough to Mr. Miller that he revived it in 2002 on “The Sequel” (MaxJazz), working in both cases with the vibraphonist Steve Nelson. Among Mr. Miller’s releases in the last decade were an impeccable solo piano album and four live albums featuring his dynamic trio.

Mr. Miller could seem physically imposing on the bandstand — he stood taller than six feet, with a sturdy build — but his temperament was warm and gentlemanly. He was a dedicated mentor: his bands over the last decade included musicians in their 20s, and since 2005 he had been the director of jazz studies at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

If his sideman credentials overshadowed his solo career, it wasn’t hard to see why: he played on hundreds of albums and worked in a series of celebrated bands. His most visible recent work had been with the bassist Ron Carter, whose chamberlike Golden Striker Trio featured Mr. Miller and the guitarist Russell Malone on equal footing; the group released a live album, “San Sebastian” (In+Out), this year.

Born in Greenwood, Miss., on Aug. 13, 1955, Mr. Miller grew up immersed in Delta blues and gospel music. After picking out hymns by ear at the family piano, he began taking lessons at age 8. He played the organ in church and worked in soul cover bands, but devoted himself to jazz after seeing Mr. Peterson on television, a moment he later described as pivotal.

At Memphis State University, he befriended two pianists, James Williams and Donald Brown, both of whom later preceded him in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Mr. Miller spent several years with that band, just as he did with the trumpeter Woody Shaw, the singer Betty Carter and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Ellington’s son, Mercer. Mr. Miller worked in an acclaimed quintet led by the drummer Tony Williams from the mid-1980s until shortly before Williams died in 1997.

Mr. Miller’s survivors include his wife, Tanya; his son, Darnell; his daughter, Leilani; and a grandson. He lived in Easton, Pa.

Though he harbored few resentments, Mr. Miller was clear about the limitations imposed on his career. “Jazz is part progressive art and part folk art,” he said in a 2005 interview with DownBeat magazine, differentiating his own unassuming style from the concept-laden, critically acclaimed fare that he described as “interview music.” He added, “Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.”

But Mr. Miller worked with so many celebrated peers, like the alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett and the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, that his reputation among musicians was ironclad. And his legacy includes a formative imprint on some leading players of the next wave, including the drummer Karriem Riggins and the bassist Derrick Hodge, who were in one of his trios. The pianist Robert Glasper once recorded an original ballad called “One for ’Grew,” paying homage to a primary influence. On Monday, another prominent pianist, Geoffrey Keezer, attested on Twitter that seeing Mr. Miller one evening in 1986 was “what made me want to be a piano player professionally.”

In the performance from the At Yoshi’s 2004 double CD that forms the sound track for this video tribute to him, Mulgrew has cleverly adopted Comes Love to the arrangement Ahmad Jamal used on Poinciana from his At The Pershing Room Argo LP, one of the most successful Jazz recordings ever issued.

The insistent rhythm is formed by Karriem Riggins use of mallets on the drum set’s tom toms and the insistent accent played by the high hat on the 2^nd and 4^th beat of each measure.

On the original version, instead of the usual “clicking” sound made by stepping on the high hat’s cymbals to close them, Ahmad’s drummer, Vernel Fournier, played the high hat cymbals open [barely touching them together] creating more of a “chinging” sound to simulate finger cymbals.

You can hear this effect in a more pronounced manner as played by Karriem at 4:21 minutes of Mulgrew’s version.

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Ed Shaughnessy and The Joys of Jazz Drumming

2013-05-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

"The superb engine that drove the Tonight Show Band for thirty years ... with spirit and immense skill."

- Doc Severinsen, Trumpeter & Director of The Tonight Show Band

In 1936, Irma Rombauer wrote a cook book entitled The Joy of Cooking [the book is so popular that it has never been out-of-print].

Over the years, I’ve never met anyone who enjoyed Jazz drumming more than Ed Shaughnessy. He could talk about it and demonstrate it for hours on end.

Once, while having lunch at the coffee shop on Vine Street just down from the offices of Musicians Union Local 47, I kidded Ed with the suggestion that, given his passion for Jazz drums, he should consider writing a book and call it The Joy of Jazz Drumming.

He laughed, pointed to my French fries and said: “Are you going to eat those?”

After we ate, we walked across the street to the Professional Drums Shop where Ed pretty much talked away the rest of the afternoon trading comments with the shop’s patrons on the subject of … wait for it … different sizes and shapes of drumsticks! In the process, I think Ed must have tried every drum stick in the store.

Watching him that afternoon at the Pro Drum Shop, you couldn’t keep the phrase - “Like a kid in a toy store” – from entering your mind.

Ed was fearless when it came to Jazz drumming. Nothing stopped him if he decided that there was something on the subject he wanted to know. I remember him being all-over Louie Bellson – one of the nicest people ever to inhabit the Jazz world – about the technique involved in using two, bass drums. Louie finally turned to Ed and said in his gentle and considerate way: “Just do it.” So Ed did and became one of the few Jazz drummers to master the technique of using two, bass drums.

Edwin T. Shaughnessy was born 29 January 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey. A self-taught drummer, Shaughnessy came to prominence, mainly in the New York area, in the late 1940’s working with George Shearing, Jack Teagarden, Georgie Auld and especially Charlie Ventura.

In the 1950’s he became more widely known owing to engagements with bands led by Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and he also worked with Johnny Richards. In the 60s he was with Count Basie and also worked extensively in New York studios, securing a long-term engagement with The Tonight Show band.

When the show moved to “beautiful downtown Burbank, CA” and became The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Ed decided to “relocate to The Left Coast.”

I lived in Burbank at the time and since the show taped at 5:00 PM PST, I would have dinner on occasion with Ed or meet him later for a drink at Donte’s, a popular Jazz club on Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood.

Although best known as a big band drummer, Shaughnessy's considerable skills spilled over into small group work with Gene Ammons, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, Mundell Lowe, Teo Macero, Charles Mingus, Shirley Scott, Jack Sheldon, Horace Silver and many others.

For several years Shaughnessy was a member of the house band at Birdland and other New York clubs. In the early 1970’s he was doing similar work in Los Angeles and is credited with discovering Diana Schuur, whom he introduced at the 1976 Monterey Jazz Festival.

In addition to his work on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Ed Shaughnessy has also played in an early incarnation of the "Sesame Street" orchestra along with percussionist Danny Epstein, reed player Wally Kane, and, on occasion, freelance guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli.

Ed Shaughnessy's consummate drumming skills enabled him to become a sought-after teacher, an activity which he pursued while simultaneously maintaining a busy recording and live performance schedule.

Last year[2012] Ed Shaughnessy published his long awaited book "Lucky Drummer - From NYC to Johnny Carson" with great personal stories from behind the scenes.

I still think he should have entitled it – The Joys of Drumming.

Ed passed away on May 24, 2013 and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be nice to remember him on these pages with the following excerpt from Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men The Heart Beat of Jazz: The Bebop Years [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002].

“He was the most visible drummer in

America

during the years he spent on NBC-TV's Tonight Show in New York and Los Angeles. Thoroughly capable, Ed Shaughnessy handled all kinds of situations, including appearing in tandem with Buddy Rich—a challenging matter at best. This affable, ambitious musician, however, is far more than a generalist on the instrument.

From the outset, Shaughnessy, a poor kid from New Jersey, had a deep, abiding love for jazz and drums. He went to great lengths to learn and be a part of the music. He studied with Bill West, a drum teacher in New York, though very hard put to pay for lessons.

Shaughnessy played and practiced day and night. Vibraharpist Teddy Charles, a longtime mutual friend, said: "We all did that; it was the only way to make it."

As a teenager, Shaughnessy spent almost every evening and early morning in Manhattan clubs, hotel entertainment rooms, and ballrooms, listening to and watching drummers. Those who made a point of keeping youngsters out of places where small and big bands played learned to tolerate ‘the crazy kid from New Jersey.’ They allowed him to stay, as long as he remained out of the way.

Finally Big Sid Catlett, the legendary drummer, noticed him and, as was his wont, approached the youngster, talked to him, and suggested he sit in; Ben Webster (tenor) and John Simmons (bass)—jazz royalty in the 1940’s—were in the group. When asked, Shaughnessy nearly fainted from fear, but he did well. Catlett became his mentor. Catlett, Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Buddy Rich were influences, great sources of inspiration.

Love often is rewarded. Shaughnessy played with some bands— Bobby Byrne and Randy Brooks— worked with Jack Teagarden, sat in with Bud Powell on 5ind Street, playing Cherokee for twenty-five minutes at an absolutely hysterically fast tempo. Powell was quietly impressed, and word spread that a young white guy could really do it. George Shearing was in the audience that night and hired the young drummer on the spot.

Shaughnessy's hunger to play, his need to master the instrument and be able to play any kind of music — was apparent to everyone who met him. Bassist Phil Leshin remembers: ‘Eddie and I were kids together and hung out on the New York scene, always looking for some place to play. We used to go to Verland Studios, over a firehouse on 47th or 48th Street. A lot of the guys involved in modern jazz showed up at the sessions — Allen Eager, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, pianists Harry Biss and Harvey Leonard, guitarist Charlie Byrd.’

Shaughnessy hooked up with the Charlie Ventura Bop for the People band in 1948 and became famous. Tenorist Ventura, Conte Candoli (trumpet), Bennie Green (trombone), Boots Mussulli (saxophone), Kenny O'Brien (bass), and pianist-singer Roy Kral and singer Jackie Cain, his wife, helped popularize modern jazz.

The Ventura group featured a provocative blend of the scat vocal unison style of Krai and Cain and the hip, accessible instrumental sound of the band. The players were good, and Shaughnessy took hold, playing well in a contemporary way. His facility, fire, and two-bass-drum set caught the attention of audiences and other drummers.

Shaughnessy was one of the first white drummers to deal with bebop in a strong and persuasive manner. His increasing ability and continuing intensity motivated Benny Goodman to hire him for a 1950 tour of Europe with a small band that included the influential trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Unlike most musicians, the drummer got on well with Goodman.

He replaced Buddy Rich in Tommy Dorsey's band and stayed for a while, building his reputation. He worked with Lucky Millinder's band in Harlem and for a short time with Ellington, sat in with Charlie Parker on several occasions, and got into experimental jazz with Charles Mingus, Teddy Charles, and Don Ellis. He was becoming an increasingly important New York jazz figure.

Shaughnessy began working on television in the 19508 on a daytime Steve Allen Show broadcast by CBS. One thing led to another. He did more studio and staff work. He recorded with Basie and played an increasing number of small and big band record dates featuring leading players and writers.

The drummer joined the Tonight Show in New York in 1964. He moved to Los Angeles with the program and remained with it until Johnny Carson called it a night.

He headed a big band and small group of his own in L.A., always attempting to stretch the envelope. Growth was very much on his mind.

Barry Ulanov got to the heart of it when we talked about the drummer: ‘Ed is one of the most accountable musicians I ever heard,’ the critic asserted. ‘You could depend on music coming out of the man. His hands are fast. His thinking is good. His ears are alive.’

Today, as in the past, Shaughnessy remains busy — teaching, touring with Doc Severinsen's band, studying, seeking new musical experiences.”

Here’s Ed with Buddy Rich with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show band. There aren’t that many drummers who’d be left on their drum stools after “dueling” with the great Buddy Rich.

[Click on the “X” to close out of the ads].

Los Angeles Jazz Institute, Day Four, 5.26.2013 - “Swingin’ On A Riff: Big Band Masters of the 21st Century.”

2013-05-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

The last Day of the current event opened with an hour-long film show, starting at 8.30, tracking the emergence of West Coast Jazz on film, with some rare clips. Ken Poston traced the music from Lester Young, Claude Thornhill, Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan with clips that also included Shorty Rogers, Marty Paich and others.

It was then time for the 'extra added attraction' - a new-style LAJI fundraiser event, lasting 3 & 3/4 hours, within the main event, offering brunch with the music (or not, if preferred) - "The Birth of the Cool and The Origins Of the West Coast Sound".

Composer/Arranger/ Bandleader Chris Walden then directed a 17-piece band re-creating Claude Thornhill's music complete with French horns and tuba and arrangements from Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, among others. As Chris said "This music could have been written 10 or 20 years ago, but dates from the 1940's ...

Charts played included Yardbird Suite, Anthropology, Donna Lee and Godchild as well as Thornhill icons such as Snowfall, Robbin's Nest and Rose of the Rio Grande.

Hearing this music live was a different experience from the surviving recordings - one enthusiast told me that he felt "It did not feel as light as I normally expect to hear it". I thought that the clarity distinguishing individual instruments seemed notable, although , as ever for my taste, the LAJI sound mixing was generally too loud.

Chuck Findley was next up leading a 'Miles Davis' Nonet through the Birth of the Cool charts. Again the tuba ( Bill Reichenbach) and French horn (Stephanie O'Keefe) parts were notable - this time being full members of the band , with solo space. Matt Harris, from California State Northridge had been brought in to add his familiarity with this music - in the John Lewis piano role in this set and as director for the following set. Ira Nepus on trombone and Chuck Berghofer on bass were among those brought in just for this Nonet set.

'Miles Ahead - the classic Miles Davis plus 19 collaboration with Bill Evans' was the third event for this special morning and featured Bobby Shew in the Miles Davis role.

The originally - released album was a mix of spliced sections, over-dubbing and reworking, none of which was available for this live performance. However, the result was outstandingly good as has been almost everything during this four days. The caliber of musicianship has delighted even the musicians themselves and congratulations between musicians and from their leaders has been frequent and well-deserved.

A characteristic of the weekend has been the emergence of a new generation of LA musicians - some familiar, some less so, but playing with phenomenal technique and, I thought, more personal involvement than might have been the case is earlier times.

Another observation for me was that, in earlier times, if I saw a new young face, I mentally 'wished him luck' when he was perhaps exposed by a solo opportunity.

This time round I found myself being relieved when a veteran musician pulled something off in the very challenging company of talented younger players and attracted nods or gasps from the youngsters!

The set-list for the Miles Ahead set was, essentially the album titles.

The hour long Composers Workshop, moderated by KJAZ's Helen Borgers, had Kim Richmond and Chris Walden participating, but lacked Bob Curnow who could not make the trip due to health issues.

The Workshop, I thought, was less interesting than the earlier ones, being bogged down in the perennial debate about the death of big band music ( strenuously denied) and audiences for Big Band music (less strenuously denied). There were some good words said about the overall impact of the work of Gordon Goodwin with younger people and its impact on the whole big band appreciation scene. Kim Richmond made some good points about the different skills evident among younger players and his own experience in dissolving and re-creating his own band.

Kim's 23-piece Concert Jazz Orchestra then gave an hour plus concert, with much of the material drawn from his newly-released tribute to Stan Kenton "Artistry". This music really had the audience on their feet and cheering long before the end. It is billed as 'orchestral jazz' and Kim acknowledges the inspiration of the Kenton Neophonic as a source, but with his own writer's twist.

Re-writes of Artistry in Rhythm, Intermission Riff and even a almost unrecognisable Peanut Vendor were part of it, but 'Poetry', 'Zippidy Altered' and the wonderful Neal Hefti theme 'Virna' were outstanding, with each bringing something totally unique.

I thought this an outstanding set and thoroughly recommend the album. A highlight of this Festival.

Hubert Laws guests on the album but Alex Budman did an outstanding job live - as did other soloists.

We then had 3 and a half hour gap to the final set billed as 'Bob Curnow LA Big Band Reunion'.

In Bob Curnow's absence Bobby Shew directed the band, which played the Pat Metheny music Bob Curnow arranged a couple of years ago for an album recorded in LA with Bobby and several other band members as part of that recorded line-up. The music was also, on that previous occasion, presented at an LAJI event.

The set list was 11 items from the Metheny/ Curnow collection and included pieces from other Metheny jazz outings such as an encounter with Chet Baker, entitled "Chet's Call". Especially notable was Bobby Shew's sole feature - a beautiful melody written by Pat Metheny and dedicated to his parents "Always and Forever".

As Bobby said, regarding the rest of the music, "I think Bob Curnow has some Wagnerian blood" and certainly this LAJI event went out with a huge BANG as the FFF's dominated - with high trumpet lovers especially excited.

Jack Bowers, who was at this event will be offering a more considered review of it all in his Big Band feature on All That Jazz in the weeks to come.

I apologise for the necessary haste in compiling these notes off the top of my head between sets and thank you for your comments off-line, encouraging me to continue.

The photos, with many many others are beginning to appear on my Gallery at www.gordonsapsed.com and will continue to do so when I get back to

Gordon Sapsed”

Los Angeles Jazz Institute, Day Three, 5.25.2013 - “Swingin’ On A Riff: Big Band Masters of the 21st Century.”

2013-05-26T18:26:00.001-07:00

“I must firstly apologise for my error yesterday in implying that the USC band had started their set late - whereas they were not even invited this year..... The honour of opening the Festival this time was with the Fullerton College Band - who turned up on time but minus their leader.

I'd have to say that Bruce Babad (their leader) has more than compensated since with his contributions to the Festival as well as joy he has brought me in the past with his playing. I was delighted to hear that he is planning to record a second Paul Desmond Tribute album later this year - no surprise really following the success of his earlier one.

Saturday morning's LAJI programme opened at 11 am with a film show - this time focused on jazz related clips from the 1950's . With arranger/composers as the theme, the first film clips showed Kenton's band of that period playing 'I Feel Pretty' and 'Maria' - from the Ed Sullivan show. Interesting was a glimpse of young Carl Saunders wrestling with a mellophonium.

Later clips showed Andre Previn playing with Bobby Darin, a Nat Cole rendering of a song written by Pete Rugolo and footage from Johnny Mandel's score for 'I Want to Live' plus the jazz club scenes. Woody's band was represented in several clips including a rendering of Bill Holman's arrangement of "After You've Gone ".

In the Workshop discussion later in the day Bill Holman said how it took him about two weeks to complete that arrangement as relevant 'crazy ideas' emerged daily to incorporate in the score. He was relieved and delighted that Woody liked it and , in retrospect, he feels it was something special in his career. Woody said 'Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the band'.

The Workshop/ Panel discussion, moderated by Kirk Silsbee was, I thought, very effective, concentrating as it did on HOW arrangers work. The 'Panelists' were Bill Mathieu, Bill Holman and Lou Rovner - each very different in their musical style, how they trained and how they tackle their work.

Before the panel started we had a chance to hear Lou Rovner's work - which many of us had never heard before - although every member of his 10 piece "Small Big Band" was a familiar face to LAJI audiences.

His music was, for me and for many others, a total revelation and an absolute delight! As they say - well worth the price of admission if we had to go home now....
His music, in retrospect, is perhaps best heard when you know a little about him - but don't bother to go to record shops. His only recordings are on his website - but downloadable free. (I haven't tried it yet) . The website is www.LouRovnermusic.com.

He grew up in Chicago, but left town at 17 and , among other things, spent a year at Berklee and also qualified to become a practising psychologist.

He claims to have no musical style of his own , but seeks to write things which are different to things he has written previously ... I can only say that every instrumentalist in the band plays a role in everything - often doubling. Each player gets features but none have a single role. The repertoire is totally mixed and this list gives you no idea how it sounds. Take, for example Neal Hefti's "L'il Darlin'". Lou decided to arrange that but use none of it and instead carry that mood into "It's Only a Paper Moon", or , strictly speaking, a series of short vignettes related to 'Paper Moon', with an overall mood of 'L'il Darlin'. - Still with me?

This really WAS a set where the musicians had fun, but maintained their competence whilst smiling and laughing.

Totally delightful music - with an impression that they made it all up as they went along - another of Lou's goals ...

The Lou Rovner set list was : Hi Fly, Body & Soul (at a fast tempo), Take Me Out To The Ballgame, 'It's Only a Paper Moon' - and 'Milestones'.

Interestingly, one theme of the Worksop/Panel discussion was 'writing so that it seems they are making it up'. All three panelists cited that as a worthwhile goal, although all three also found such a quality in some classical writing from Mozart and even Beethoven ...

All three also spoke of having in the past felt, on hearing something inspirational that 'I could write that' - but then, with pencil and paper in hand found that they couldn't!

Regarding personal style, Bill Mathieu told of years of studying other American composers, Europeans and even music from Eastern cultures, before realising - sometime after age 50 that he was writing stuff which was peculiarly his own. Bill Holman reported no such 'nirvana' or 'serendipity', but recalls , quite early in his career, being told that people could recognise his style.

Lou, as said above, seeks to 'not sound the same twice' ( despite having spent some years writing for shows and acts in Vegas).

Both Lou and Bill Holman spoke of a personal challenge, perhaps imagined, that they feel to keep their top-calibre players interested in coming to unpaid rehearsals !
Bill Holman also spoke of an almost unconscious goal, derived from his playing background to write things that are playable. Bill Mathieu said he tries to stay away from the piano as long as possible 'To not limit what I'm writing to the abilities I have as a pianist'. He recommends to students not to sit close to the piano. Instead 'you must get up to go and check things'.

A very worthwhile Workshop, I thought.

The afternoon closed with a romping set from Ton Kubis's Band - "excuse us rushing - some of these guys have real jobs tonight".

Several top LA players appeared for the first time this weekend in Tom's Band - Sal Lozano, Andy Martin, Wayne `Bergeron and such. Within the Festival's theme of composer/arranger bandleaders it was a typical Kubis set - a lot of swing, a lot of energy, a lot of laughing and great music. Herman sold out of the band's new CD afterwards and 'could have sold 50 more copies'.

If the titles matter (or are even correct ) : "Uptown Blues", "Hey Georgia" ( a Georgia Brown variant), In a Mellow Tone, "Hi 5's ('- and a good chance of Wayne ???), Alone Together, Some of these Days ( rendered for dancers in alternate styles), Triste (a feature for guitarist Mike Higgins), Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home.
Some audience members noted the band's upcoming monthly date in Huntington Beach on Monday - they can't get enough of this band ...

I'll bring you notes on the BIll Russo and Bill Holman concerts in a later post and some photos - it's a very full day here today with an 8.30 a.m. start .

Saturday evening brought 'The Music of Bill Russo' , with the 'Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra' ( an aggregation put together by LAJI), directed by Bill Mathieu. Bill had, in the Workshop discussion said how significant this concert was for him, bearing in mind his long association with Bill Russo, who had also been his tutor and mentor ('gaps in age get smaller as you get older').

The band once more introduced faces not seen earlier in this Festival - with the opening number 'Over The Rainbow' featuring one such, Eric Jorgensen on trombone. This was followed by Russo's arrangement of 'Autumn in New York' featuring Ron King and The former Frank Rosolino feature for the Kenton Orchestra 'Frank Speaking' , with George McMullen taking the solo part.

'Dusk' was followed by "Portrait of Conte Candoli", with Bob Summers in the Candoli role. There continued a mix of Russo compositions and arrangement for the Kenton Orchestra alternated with material issued under his own name in later years :

'I've Got You Under My Skin', Fascinating Rhythm', Sophisticated Lady' (featuring Bruce Babad on alto), and then something different. That was Bill Mathieu's own 'audition piece' for the Stan Kenton Library "Silhouette" - which had been played here a couple of years ago in Bill Mathieu's own concert but was chosen by Bill on this occasion to highlight his own dedication to the Russo arranging influence and style.

The remaining pieces were all Russo's work - 'You and the Night and the Music', Shadow Waltz ( a surprise for many) and perhaps the inevitable closer '23 degrees North 82 Degrees West'- which had bravely (and beautifully) been offered by the Fullerton College student band on the first morning, in Bob Curnow's Kenton Kollage.

For my personal taste Bill Russo's work, on this showing under Bill Mathieu's guidance, moved up in my estimation. I found it lighter and more 'swinging' than I remembered it. I think the presentation and success owed a lot to Bill Mathieu's fondness and care.

Top of the Bill for Saturday Night was Bill Holman's Band, which again brought new faces and revealed an absence of some faces formerly in that band. At one stage, in introducing the players Bill said "Yes - they really are old enough". -

Age was not really the issue - the audience were, I'm sure potentially more concerned about competence. But they needed to have no fears - the newcomers coped with everything in front of them perfectly and then added solos that were sometimes perhaps beyond the limits of their predecessors, both in technical skill and creativity.

As Kim Richmond said next day in the Workshop discussion -"There are really top class talented jazz players these days in every American City and here in LA about 20 for every top job on every instrument.”

Bill Holman's Band still had veterans like Billy Kerr, Bob Efford, Jack Redmond Carl Saunders , Ron Stout and Bob Summers but alongside them drummer Jake Reid, bassist Alex Frank and even piano player Christian Jacob were among new faces to many of the audience - at least in this band.

Some of the music was more familiar, but some also very new to the band book. They opened with 'No Joy in Mudville' - an opportunity for several newcomers to stretch out and then Woodrow, St Thomas and a feature for Carl Saunders 'Sweet Spot', "Zoot and Al" gave Doug Webb and Rickey Woodard a chance to extend themselves and Bruce Babad did a superb job with 'Lover Man". Bill Holman confessed to being fascinated by the notion of "Zamboni" ( as was Snoopy !) and used it to real workout the whole band - Bob Summers and Doug Webb excelling.

The encore was drawn from the Band's Thelonius Monk repertoire "Bemsha Swing".

My overall impression of the band this time was that it is a transition period with new players and new material 'bedding in'. Very enjoyable - but different and hinting at a lot to come ....

and so to tomorrow - our final day of this Festival.

Gordon Sapsed

Buddy Rich and ANIMAL: The Legendary Drum Battle on The Muppet Show 1980

2013-05-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Jazz Institute, Day Two, 5.24.2013 - “Swingin’ On A Riff: Big Band Masters of the 21st Century.”

2013-05-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

Visiting from Southampton,

England

, Gordon Sapsed continues his reporting on the Los Angeles Jazz Institute’s biannual, 4-day festival at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel. You can locate the full program for the Spring, 2013 Concerts by visiting www.lajazzinstitute.org/.

“The second day of the LA Jazz Institute's 'Swingin' on a Riff' events began with a Film show hour - "Central Avenue Breakdown".

As with the previous day's film show this attracted about 150 attendees ( my estimate) from the 200 plus that had attended the final session the previous day.

Comprising at least 20 separate clips the show principally had footage from the 1940's. Ken Poston, in his introduction said how Central Avenue was at that time a very lively area for jazz flavoured entertainment - although little was reported in the LA Times of the day. The jazz scene in the area had existed from the 1920's with performers such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Jelly Roll Morton , Kid Ory and others. Later developments had the Nat 'King' Cole Trio, Duke Ellington's band, visits from Louis Armstrong and others and local black bands - as shown previously. For this show, footage was of these artists but from non-LA sources in some cases. Early 'Modern' jazz players shown included Hampton Hawes, Buddy Collette and Lucky Thompson. There was also film of jazz players performing with Johnny Otis and T-Bone Walker from early TV shows.

First band up in the main room was the UCLA Jazz Orchestra who, like their rivals the Fullerton Jazz Orchestra the day previously, lacked a leader when show-time came and didn't get started until 15 minutes later when Charley Harrison appeared to conduct them.

Their 36 minute set comprised Kim Richmond's arrangement of 'Lady Bird', 'Lion and The Lamb' , Bob Mintzer's arrangement of 'Dolphin Dance', A beatiful piano feature built around 'Young and Foolish', and a very-professionally performed arrangement of Bill Russo's 23 degrees North 82 degrees West from the Kenton band book.

Everything the band played seemed faultless, with effective tone shadings and confident playing throughout. The solos offered were mostly outstanding - again showing a great deal of rehearsal and effort as well as high technical ability.

After lunch it was the turn of Steve Huffsteter's Big Band which included a further set of LA's finest - Kim Richmond , Doug Webb and Alex Budman among the saxes, Scott Whitfield and Jack Redmond among the trombones and Pete De Siena with Mark Lewis among the trumpets. Charlie Ferguson, a highly rated young star, was at the piano.

Steve Huffsteter, as he explained in the later panel discussion, has been writing music since he was about 12 years old and his band book is mostly his own compositions plus some arrangements of standards.

He told how a conversation with Dizzy Gillespie about the inappropriate use of the E natural note in a G7 chord inspired him to write "Dizz-Ception" , a piece dependent on that chord usage as an exception to the rule! He is having difficulty with the title for another piece temporarily named 'Nostalgia' - a name he thinks inappropriate.

Characterised by careful attention to detail and played with precision, Steve's work is that of a musical craftsman and was played by players happy to be part of it and enjoying the experience.

The whole flavour of this festival with bandleaders participating in presenting music which they have created and personally written down ( or typed) is very evident in the way it comes over. Steve's band was one such.

Other pieces played were 'Rizzle (?) - 'every big band has to have a Rhythm Changes chart - this one of the fast and furious variety and Steve's 'hit' "Night Walk" - which he said yielded over $40 in royalties .....

Alone Together was re-clad as "Joint Tenacy" - an opportunity for trumpet duetting with Mark Lewis and `Steve' - who acknowledges how difficult it is for trumpet soloists in a trumpet leader's band. In saying that he paid tribute to the recent Mike Vax tour, where Steve was a sideman.

A driving original 'Waltz and Battery' ended the set.

The 'Composers Workshop' Panel discussion involved the day's three leaders Steve, Gary Urwin and Alan Broadbent. The discussion was moderated by Ken Borgers. This hour was characterised by all three panelists being especially revelatory about their early musical influences and experiences. Gary Urwin told of his move from rock guitar to arranging and both Steve and Alan spoke of music from childhood out in the boon-docks to the later music scene in the centre of the action.

Gary Urwin, who, usefully, has a Law degree as well as his musical talents, has a 'business manager' (sitting in the front row) who helps him bring together the A-list talent for his big band, who took the stage late afternoon for an hour. With three albums already available and a fourth on the way the band can be heard on radio and recordings although they rarely appear live.

Featured soloists throughout the set were Pete Christlieb, Carl Saunders and pianist Christian Jacob, with Bill Watrous as a special guest - not playing in the trombone section.

Bill Watrous, prior to his contribution, took the unusual step of paying tribute to Charlie Loper, who WAS in the trombone section , saying ' Charlie may be embarrassed to hear this but I regard him as the greatest trombone player I have ever heard in my life'.

(Charlie, as predicted, was embarrassed while the band and audience applauded.)

Gary Urwin's charts, which mostly draw on The Great American Songbook or jazz standards, undoubtedly take a new approach, with ' a lot going on' and particular attention to the dynamics and multi-instrumental usage. He also draws widely for material (e.g. the Disney 'Beauty and the Beast') . Titles included My Foolish Heart, Joy Spring, Waltz for Debbie, and the bossa-nova Gentle Rain. An up-tempo, 'more PC', re-working of 'Girl Talk' as 'Women's Conversation' has apparently been an unexpected radio hit for the band.

I also enjoyed Carl Saunders' original tribute to Bob Florence "Dear Mr. Florence" and the bebop closer 'Shaw 'nuff'.

As previously the composer-writer's presence to get tempos exact and offer a nudge here and a twist there made a difference, but even these A class players, familiar with the charts, had to sit forward in their seats most of the time ....

The evening session brought two sets from "The Alan Broadbent Big Band' - an aggregation created for this Festival.

Alan opened by saying how he had not regularly written music for a big band since his days with Woody Herman in the late 1950's. He also said that his set of original compositions had grown at about 1 a year in the last 5 decades, but a dozen of them would feature tonight.

In recent times he had arranged his material for the Phil Norman Tentet and he had 'fattened up' those charts, and also added some charts originally written for Woody to build the two sets on offer.

The piano had been moved to centre stage to allow Alan to play as part of the band. For some numbers he played an unaccompanied intro - as he often does with his trio, whilst in others he had written parts within the score or occasional solos.

Based as he now is, on the East Coast, this was a coming-together for Alan with these players and new charts, although he had played with many of the players in earlier days. There was a lot of close attention, but also a lot of smiling and nodding and congratulation as the sets developed. They enjoyed being part of what felt like a very special occasion.

Alan was clearly delighted with this opportunity to , as he said, 'present my work to these guys - to add their personal touches and then share the whole thing with you - the audience'. The audience response both in applause, those standing ovations and the discussions afterwards was, as I heard it, all very favourable and in some instances almost awestruck ...

An abundance of impressive solos from the band- notably Doug Webb and Jerry Pinter on tenors, Bruce Babad on alto, Scott Whitfield and Alan Kaplan on trombones and Carl Saunders and Jeff Bunnell on trumpets as well as Alan's long-time associate Putter Smith on bass and Bernie Dressel at the drums. The other band members also soloed occasionally and played crucial parts in the detailed arrangement. Alan Broadbent charts often have bebop running through them and his fondness for that genre is mixed with a lot of emotion, be it happiness, grandeur or simply 'landscape'

One original 'A long white cloud' actually took us on a boat across the South Pacific in that Maori-inspired vision - broad grandeur, yet jazz flair.

Other Broadbent tunes included Sweet' Pea ( for Billy Strayhorn), 'Love in Silent Amber ( an original for Woody's book), Chris Craft (combining half a dozen Bird themes), and Woody 'n Me ( again for Woody)

In the second set Glen Berger was the key soloist for 'Don't Ask Why' ( Alan's memorial for Irene Kral), and the whole band excelled in 'America The Beautiful' ( Alan said ' every arranger has had a go at that') .

The closer was 'Sonny Step' with 'Journey Home' as an encore, both former trio offerings enlarged for this Big Band opportunity.

Altogether a memorable day, with an attendance, including musicians and musical associates, much closer to a full house.”

Los Angeles Jazz Institute, Day One, 5.23.2013 - “Swingin’ On A Riff: Big Band Masters of the 21st Century.”

2013-05-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

It’s that time of the year again when the Los Angeles Jazz Institute holds it biannual, 4-day festival at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel. You can locate the full program for the Spring, 2013 Concerts by visiting www.lajazzinstitute.org/.

Gordon Sapsed arrives from Southampton to attend these event. He generally does write-ups of each day’s activities and has been kind enough to allow the editorial staff at JazzProfiles to share them with visitors to the blog.

Our thanks to Gordon for his generosity in preparing and sharing these observations and comments about the LAJI Spring Festival and, in so doing, making it possible for us to take a bit of a “Spring Break.”

“On Wednesday this week a bus-load of enthusiasts took the 12 hour round trip from the Marriott Lax to Las Vegas to attend two concerts recalling jazz of yesteryear in 'Sin City'. Reports were that Carl Saunders and Bobby Shew were in fine form playing with a big band aggregation of jazzmen still currently based in Las Vegas.

Tommy Vig had also flown in from Europe to lead the group through some of the charts which established his name there in earlier times.

Thursday brought the first day of the Festival proper, but the opening half hour was not perhaps what Festival attendees expected.

All events this year are being held indoors so the usual music by the pool in the California sunshine was not available.

Starting time came and went, with an audience of about 100 looking at the Fullerton College Big Band who were assembled and ready to play in the Marquis Ballroom.

Then, in the absence of their leader and with no introduction, student singer Greg Fletcher took the initiative and the band struck up without a conductor. The Four Day Festival , subtitled 'Big Band Masters of the 21st Century' was underway!

The Festival's underlying design seeks to bring to the audience the sounds of Big Band leaders who compose and arrange their own music using bands under their own baton, with a sub-theme that notes LA-based music from before the swing era to the sounds of today.

Joined, after about 20 minutes, by their leader Bruce Babad, the Fullerton band demonstrated their familiarity with the whole gamut open to them. Bruce and singer Greg soon had the audience responding as they recalled Cab Calloway's 'Hi-Di-Hi-Di-Hi' and then, with some talented section work from everybody in this high class College Band carried jazz forward through the swing era , bebop and especially enjoying a new Kenton Medley titled Kenton Kollage. I also enjoyed their take on a big band version of Cherokee - their closer at Monterey where they recently won a major award. They had apparently learned from that previous experience - judge Jeff Hamilton having suggested that the tempo had been set ' a little too fast for the band members'. Not so on this occasion where almost any band leader would be ready to sign up the whole crew for a coast to coast tour. In summary, a fun set with a lot of smiling, hard rehearsal work evident and some real talent on show.

Age-wise. the next band up was at the other end of the spectrum but none the worse for that.

David Angel, who I mentioned here earlier this year when he appeared at the Lighthouse with his 'Saxtet', (photos on my Gallery at www.gorodnsapsed.com) brought his "Big Band" along - with an instrumentation unlike any Big Band that you might ordinarily envisage. The line-up has 5 reed players - each doubling on three instruments or more and a second line with a trombone, French horn, cornet, flugelhorn and tuba. A piano-less guitar-bass-drums rhythm section completes the ensemble.

David's arrangements, sometimes involving instrument doubling within the same phrase, are delightful.

David draws on themes from established composers of any era - with a special fondness for Ellington - as well as his own originals.

Some songs are arranged to allow a lot of solo space while others are built around features for the sound of one instrument.

I particularly enjoyed Stephanie O'Keefe's French horn feature on "A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing", a romping 'Rangoon Express' with solo space for several and "Wild Strawberries" recalling a drive when David felt inspired by an expanse of strawberries - you could almost taste them. Interesting brass combinations abounded in this music, as well as those Angel-saxes.

The leader joined in on tenor sax for the final solos-all-round 'Alright' .

A few words about this years sound. Miking of every instrument continues, with mixed results. As the day went on I thought things improved, while others said the sound was 'better further back'. The vocal mike was indistinct early in the day and there remains a problem of failing to identify soloists until mid-chorus. The huge 'stadium-rock' speakers have given way to smaller stacks but are still very loud for the front rows. There was quite a lot of sound technician activity - rushing about plugging and unplugging things for most of the day.

Sound in the Meridian Room for the panel discussion was a different issue.

There were three people on stage for 'Panel 1 - Jazz Composer's Workshop 1'. Larry Hathaway moderated - for the 27th year in LAJI's history of these events - with Mike Barone and Roger Neumann sharing their ideas. David Angel, I understand, had to leave for a flight to Europe, although scheduled to take part.

Mike and Roger both outlined their own histories in becoming arranger/composers and developing their own bands. They also shared their respective histories from early days in Iowa, or wherever, various musical experiences and forks in the road and both eventually settling in the LA area. They also both cited Bill Holman's work as an early inspiration in their arranging.

It was a pity that, despite six or more mikes arranged on the panel table , no mike was made available for audience contributions and dialogue with the audience was difficult. The panel discussion attracted almost a full house as did the following movie session.

Ken Poston had, as usual put together a collection of clips from the LAJI archives, this time with a theme " The Swing Era in Los Angeles". Most of the early clips involved variations of the Les Hite band - occasionally fronted by a young Lionel Hampton or Louis Armstrong in the 1920's and 1930's. There were also clips involving Spud Murphy as leader and later offerings showing Benny Carter and Bobby Sherwood in the 1940's. One clip showed the earliest Stan Kenton band - even pre- Howard Rumsey! Bobby Sherwood's nephew Carl Saunders, was among the audience.

Mike Barone's set gave opportunity to hear some examples of things he had mentioned earlier. His own trombone background shoed through in his arrangement of 'Birdland', also saxes doubling and flugelhorn doubling in other arrangements.

Mike's fondness for less common themes showed in his powerful version of 'his pal Rimsky's' Flight of the Bumblebee, and in a re-arrangement dedicated to Sweet Georgia Brown's sister - "Sour Sally". The set featured outstanding solos by several band members , with Bob Summers frequently popping up to surprise and delight. A new arrangement of "Sheik of Araby'", which appears on the band's latest (9th ?) album caught my ear among several others. The closer was the Limehouse-Blues-based 'Limes Away).

Top billing for the day - with two sets in the evening was "Roger Neumann's Rather Large Band". Dress for the night had been defined as 'bright colours' and Scott Whitfield was deemed to be 'best dressed'. Scott was one of several arranger/composer/ bandleaders in Roger's band who, but for the grace of Ken, might have also been on show with their bands - others included Alex Budman on tenor sax and Geoff Stradling on piano.

This aggregations of some of LA's finest was supplemented by two short sets of Madeline Vergari singing not only her husband's arrangements but some others from her repertoire. The band was also notable for having a female member in every section.

Roger's arranging/composing work history enabled him to draw on material written for Buddy Rich, Ray Charles, Ray Anthony and many others, as well as some contributed by earlier members of Roger's long-established (1974 ?) band.

There was a lot of creativity in the music - fancy A-Train in 6/4 ? - or a tuba/piccolo feature using Tadd Dameron's 'Good Bait' ?

The band had a great laid-back feel in several blues-based compositions such as EZ-chair from a former bass-player and current bass player Kirk Smith taking an extended bass walk to give the whole band solo opportunity ....

Charlie Parker would have been flattered to hear 'Au Prive' in a setting where all the saxes paid tribute as well as the brass sections.

Jamie Havorka was impressive leading the trumpets and Matt Witek, who I had not previously heard with a big band, drove everything strongly. The future of Big Band music is in good hands.

Altogether an entertaining set with Madeleine adding a lot of zest, fun and jazz feel in her contributions....”

Brass Shout

2013-05-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Mosiac Records boxed set - The Complete Argo/Mercury Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet Sessions [MD7-225] - brought me back in touch with one of my all-time favorite recordings - the Argo LP Meet The Jazztet [664].

The period from 1945-1965 were exciting days for Jazz when combos seemed to form and reform on a regular basis and the Jazztet was one of the best groups to come around in quite some time [at least as far as my ears were concerned].

The original Jazztet was made up of Art Farmer, trumpet, Curtis Fuller, trombone, Benny Golson, tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano, Addison Farmer, bass and Lex Humphries, drums.

What really appealed to me about the Jazztet was the writing and arranging skills of Benny Golson who has composed so many memorable tunes over the years, many of which have become Jazz standards [I Remember Clifford, Whisper Not, Along Came Betty, to name but a few].

On Meet The Jazztet Benny was at it again with intriguing original compositions including Killer Joe, Blues March, and Park Avenue Petite, the latter a lovely ballad favored by many Jazz trumpeters as a vehicle for demonstrating the richness of their tone on the instrument.

According to Lawrence Koch in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz: “The group made six albums, most of which included compositions and arrangements by Benny Golson and one which consisted of the John Lewis. Although the arranged sections of the music were important to the group’s style, there was ample opportunity for solo improvisations, and this dichotomy resulted in balanced, interesting performances. The group disbanded in 1962 ….”

Around the same time that I was “meeting” the Jazztet, a friend, who was a trumpet player and who really favored Art Farmer’s style, loaned me a United Artist vinyl entitled Art Farmer: Brass Shout [UAL 4047]. The cover art contained this striking Hugo Bell photography with a design rendered by the Stephen Haas Studios.

What was especially delightful to me was that all of the tunes on the album were arranged, orchestrated and conducted by Benny Golson, including his intriguing original composition Minor Vamp.

I say “intriguing” because I’ve always been especially attracted to Jazz when its played in a minor key. To paraphrase Ted Gioia: “Benny Golson’s best work manages to convey both elegance and a subtle funkiness.” [The Jazz Standards, p.459] Perhaps it easier for this funkiness to manifest itself in minor keyes?

The album was subtitled seven moods in brass and Blanchard King explained the conceptual background for the recording and how the personnel of “The Art Farmer Tentet” were employed on each track in these excerpts from the original liner notes.

“Through the years, music lovers have had ample opportunity to thrill to the sombrely paced beauty of a Gabrieli brass work; to the roaring coda of a Sousa march; or to the shocking effect of massed brass in the compositions of William Shumann and Shostakovich. But, the lover of good music is rarely exposed to the many moods which dynamic and imaginative arrangements can evince from the basic jazz brass ensemble augmented with so-called miscellaneous instruments (so far as jazz is concerned) such as French horn, tuba, and baritone horn.

The seven moods of this album range from the Latin feeling of Nica's Dream to an almost Sibelian aura on Stella By Starlight, each score filled with a varying degree of shouting brass intensity. Brass Shout represents a seemingly successful attempt to bring the listener a diversified presentation of eight great jazz brass instrumentalists bulwarked by one of the most formidable rhythm sections, a presentation manifesting careful arranging, orchestration, and discipline, but preserving the basic freedom and flair of an inspired jazz performance.

Utilizing the haunting, pale tones of the French horn and the deep voice of the tuba (as a melodic rather than rhythmic device), arranger Benny Golson was able to add a new dimension of sound and a new agility to the basic trumpet-trombone voicing usual in jazz works. Julius Watkins and Don Butterfield represent the top of the mark in jazz virtuosity on French horn and tuba, respectively; Watkins playing highly articulate solos on the most difficult brass instrument, and Butterfield supplying a loosely muscled bottom sound with none of the gusty, gravelly tone of other would-be tuba stars.

Each participating artist was chosen with great care and with a definite function in mind. The solemn, intense musicianship of Art Farmer looms large in this album, in fact Golson would not undertake the project until completely assured that Art was available and willing to appear on the date.

The maturity, profound conception, and artistry increasingly associated with Farmer's work is well documented herein by a lilting, building improvisation on Nica's Dream, a moody; austerely beautiful handling of April In Paris; and tightly muted drive on Golson's classic Five Spot After Dark. Ernie Royal and Lee Morgan complete a stellar trumpet section. Royal of course can do anything on the trumpet, considered by many to be the best lead man in the business. Although chosen to act as straight-man for the section, Ernie contributes a very "down," grooving solo on Autumn Leaves; as well as marvellous lead work throughout the album. Lee Morgan was chosen for his fire. A competitor for the laurels once worn by the late Clifford Brown, Morgan is today's greatest threat to established trumpet ranks. Possessing superlative range and technique, endowed with a vivid, even prankish imagination, able to perform with the stamina of a 1st chair trumpeter, Lee needs only further development of his ballad style to insure enshrinement as one of the all time great brassmen.

The trombone section is an ideal blend of strong technical and improvisational skills. Curtis Fuller, newly crowned winner of the 1959 Down Beat Critics Poll-New Star category, plays with warm humor, big tone, and rough hewn "soul".

Constantly increasing his musical abilities, gaining stature as a composer of merit, Curtis is more than fulfilling the great promise he showed as long ago as 1955. Curtis, a hard swinger in the East Coast tradition, can be heard to fullest advantage on his new United Artists Album, Sliding Easy (Catalogue No. UAL 4041-Monaural; UAS 5041-Stereo) along with Lee Morgan.

Jimmy Cleveland was a phenomenon when I heard him in Nashville, Tennessee in 1948, where he was attending Tennessee State College. Both Diz and Hamp were extending him offers to join their bands every time they played Nashville, but Cleve stayed on to finish college. Now he is one of New York's most sought after studio musicians due to consistently high solo quality, keynoted by extremely wide range and the ability to "cut" any "chart", no matter how difficult.

Wayne Andre, a young professional, highly recommended by the 'ace musicians' contractor Chet Amsterdam, is known for his flawless performances in ensemble or as a one man section. In order to broaden and deepen the sound of the trombone section and to create the most effective blend with French horn and tuba, Golson wrote in a part for baritone horn on several selections: Minor Vamp, Moanin', Five Spot After Dark, and April in Paris. James Haughton, coming to jazz from the marching band tradition, performs robustly on that horn.

The rhythm section includes Percy Heath, the much acclaimed bassist with the Modem Jazz Quartet, and a brace of fabulously articulate drummers: Philly Joe Jones and Elvin Jones. (Elvin is heard on Autumn Leaves, Stella By Starlight, and Nica's Dream). Also, pianist Bobby Timmons plays a rollicking solo on his composition, Moanin', the album's only track with piano.

Any survey of jazz history will reveal the extraordinary importance of brassmen, particularly trumpeters and cornetists, in the evolution of the music. …

Brass Shout is a further realization of the great arranging skill of Benny Golson, who is certainly the outstanding jazz arranger of 1959.

In jazz review columns, Golson's rising importance as a source of original tenor sax improvisations is being constantly discussed. It seems fitting that he should lend his mellow, sometimes searing, comfortably traditional yet dramatically modem, but always exciting stylings to these arrangements. Herein are heard all of the Golson trade marks: the use of wind instruments instead of piano to "comp" behind soloists; thick, meaty textures exploiting the middle and lower ranges of ensembles; smoky atmospheres from which improvisations emerge and take form; special quiet effects utilizing a variety of mutes; and a pervasive feeling of concealed, coiled power and earthiness.

In the words of the arranger: ‘I tried to get a round, full sound out of the horns, instead of the usual brassy blare, employing very close voicings for warmth and togetherness; and dissonances for brilliance and freshness.’ His seven scores fit the multiple talents of an outstanding brass ensemble like fine gloves.”

In the November 26, 1959 edition of Down Beat magazine, Ralph J. Gleason gave Brass Shout a rating of **** ½ stars.

“The only reason that this LP does not draw * * * * * is that this reviewer would like to make that classification a little harder to achieve. It is certainly a better album than many that have been given ***** on these pages; it has class, order, a high degree of musicianship, and thoroughly moving solos. It is an excellent example of good work that is only a slight degree removed from being a major effort.

Golson rapidly is assuming his place as one of the most dexterous composers in jazz today. He has a remarkable gift for ordering the talents of others into composite works of his own. His settings for the appearances of Farmer and the other soloists in this excursion into brass textures are deftly handled, yet are not superficial; Golson has his roots where roots ought to be all along. As a writer of jazz tunes, his compositions, such as Minor Vamp, are almost all touched with the quality that lasts.

As a trumpet soloist, Farmer is about the most consistently effective man of his generation. He has a highly developed sense of taste that makes him, in a way, a sort of Hank Jones of the trumpet. On records he is a trifle more inhibited than in person, and the overwhelming gravity of his appearance seems to creep through somehow.

The rhythm section consistently swings beautifully on this LP, and the ballad interpretations are absolutely lovely.

- Ralph J. Gleason”

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has been looking for a musical vehicle to pair with the art of Léon Samoilovitch Bakst [Лео́н Никола́евич Бакст 1866-1924] a Russian painter and scene, and costume designer. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes.

With the help of the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities at StudioCerra we thought that the merging of Minor Vamp with a video montage of Bakst’s work might achieve such a goal in a satisfactory manner.

See what you think.

The solos are by Curtis Fuller on trombone, James Haughton on baritone horn and Lee Morgan on trumpet. [Click on the “X” to close out of the ads.]

Bam Bam Bam !!! - From The Archives

2013-05-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

- Steven A. Cerra, [C] Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

This was one of the earliest features on the blog and it posted in three parts beginning on 9/27/2008. I recently made this video with "Bam Bam Bam !!!" as the audio track and thought it would be fun to bring it up on the blog along with all, three parts of the original piece.

While reflecting on this piece after it had finished researching and compiling it, the editorial staff at Jazzprofiles was amazed to note that although the three, different trios it looks at spanned approximately 30+ years [1969-2002], it did not include the dozen or so years Ray spent as the bassist in the Oscar Peterson Trio!

Discussing three decades of his career without even referencing his most renowned association is just one more indication of what a Jazz giant Ray Brown was.

When I asked Ray about this period of his career one evening in June, 1993 during a break at the old Yoshi’s in Berkeley, CA, he said [with a huge smile on his face]: “Not a bad way to spend the last 25 years, huh; the Ray Brown Trio featuring Phineas Newborn, Gene Harris or Benny Green - bam, bam, bam – !!! ”

Although there were some overlaps, in the main, Ray’s trio with Phineas Newborn, Jr. took place in the 1970s, his time together with Gene Harris occurred mainly in the 1980’s and his stint with Benny Green happened primarily in the 1990s.

Each of these trios will become the focus for one part of this piece, or, one “bam!”

The first of Ray’s trios was not a regularly constituted group, but rather one that Ray put together whenever he could bring Phineas Newborn into the studios to record for Contemporary Records. For as Scott Yanow comments in http://www.allmusic.com/, although Phineas was:

“One of the most technically skilled and brilliant pianists in jazz during his prime, Phineas Newborn remains a bit of a mystery. Plagued by mental and physical problems of unknown origin, Newborn faded from the scene in the mid-1960s, only to re-emerge at irregular intervals throughout his life. Newborn could be compared to Oscar Peterson in that his bop-based style was largely unclassifiable, his technique was phenomenal, and he was very capable of enthralling an audience playing a full song with just his left hand.”
As Scott goes on to point out, after taking New York by storm in the mid-1950s, Phineas [pronounced “Fine as” or, depending on one’s Southern accent, “Fine us”] was largely in danger of being forgotten by the Jazz world a decade later. This might have been the case had it not been for the fortuitous fact that upon moving to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Phineas received the patronage and support of Lester Koenig, who made three albums with Newborn for his Contemporary Records label from 1961 - 1964. In addition, Ray Brown’s ongoing concern for Phineas’ welfare resulted in three successful attempts to bring him back into studios between the years 1969 – 1976.

Frankly, had it not been for Koenig and Brown, the danger of being forgotten as intimated by Scott Yanow might have turned into a realized prophesy.

Of the four recordings that were produced during the 8-years they collaborated, Brown and Newborn would release three on Contemporary and one on Pablo.

The first Brown- Newborn session took place on February 12-13, 1969 and was to result in two albums that were released ten years apart: [1] Please Send Me Someone to Love [Contemporary S-7622; OJCCD-947-2] and [2] Harlem Blues [Contemporary S-7634; OJCCD-662-2]. Ray said that he had any easy time convincing drummer Elvin Jones to make the recording date because Elvin and Phineas had scuffled together when both first came to New York in the mid-1950s.
The tray plate notes for Please Send Me Someone to Love contained the following synopsis:

“The brilliant pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. (1931-89) found few occasions to enter a recording studio during his troubled life, though he made the most of what chances he got – especially on the half-dozen trio sessions he recorded for Contemporary between 1961-1976. This album and its companion Harlem Blues [Contemporary S-7634; OJCCD-662-2] document newborn’s initial encounter with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Elvin Jones, two players who brought a technical mastery and stylistic range to the date that matched the pianist’s.”

When he was “on” and particularly sympathetic to the artist in question, Leonard Feather could contribute comprehensive and insightful liner notes to help enhance the listener’s appreciation of the music that were second to none. This is certainly the case in what he had to say about Phineas, Ray and Elvin on their first recording together so we decided to present his comments in their entirety.

I think that this is one of the best and most empathetic reviews that Leonard ever wrote and it could not have come in the service of a more deserving artist. I also think that Ray Brown understood Phineas’ deservedness and this was the main reason that he continue to be an advocate of Phineas’ genius over the years, despite the latter’s health problems. He would just find the times when Phineas could push the demons away and play like only he could.
"For a little more than a half century, there was a series of evolutions in keyboard jazz, which originated in ragtime, then was marked by the successive advent of stride, with its volleying left hand; horn-style piano, characterized
mainly by a fusillade of octaves or long runs of single notes in the right hand; bebop piano, with its central concern for harmonic experiments and relatively limited left-hand punctuations; and a 1950s trend marked by a concern for rich, full chords and a more expansive left-hand concept.

The only pianist who succeeded in absorbing many characteristics of each of these phases, in fact the first authentic and complete virtuoso of jazz piano, was Art Tatum. His death in 1956 seemed to close the book; there was no room for development, no area to examine that he had not already explored.

Time has shown that there were indeed other directions. The atonal improvisations of Cecil Taylor were acclaimed by many observers as taking jazz forward into a freer, more abstract music. Bill Evans launched what I once characterized, in an essay on jazz piano for Show magazine (July 1963), as the Serenity School, creating new harmonic avenues, new voicings, swinging without hammering, asserting tersely yet subtly, rarely rising above a mezzo-forte. McCoy Tyner, armed with exceptional technical facility, moved along still another route with extensive use of modes as a departure from the traditional chordal basis.

All these changes during the late 1950s and throughout the '60s did nothing to demolish the theory that Art Tatum represented the ultimate. Coincidentally, it was during the year of Tatum's death that Phineas Newborn, Jr. first came to New York and emerged from Memphis obscurity (he was born Dec. 14, 1931 in Whiteville, Tenn.) to establish himself as the new pianistic pianist, in the Tatum tradition.
In the above-mentioned Show article, I wrote: "Most astonishing of the dexterous modernists is Phineas Newborn, Jr. As small, timid, and frail as Peterson is big and burly, Newborn belies his meek manner with a relentlessly aggressive style. His technique can handle any mechanical problem and he has, moreover, a quick, sensitive response to the interaction of melody and harmony." Commenting that most critics tended to be skeptical of technical perfection, I wrote of Newborn's A World of Piano album (Contemporary S-7600) that it was "the most stunning piano set since Tatum's salad days in the 1930s."
A year later, in 1964, I went out on a rare limb to declare unequivocally in Down Beat, "Newborn is the greatest living jazz pianist"

Five years later, while perfectly content to let that categorical statement remain on the record, I reflected on what esthetic, what ratiocination led me to this conclusion, Under the spell of a set by Peterson in top form I might have made a similar remark. In either case, my reaction would have been primarily emotional, but the emotions in evaluating a work of art are often guided, perhaps subliminally, by a consciousness of the craftsmanship required for its creation.
Despite the chattering of the anti-intellectuals, I cannot see how any possible advantage call be found in technical limitation. Clearly technique can be abused, or used without imagination; I can drink of a dozen popular pianists, some of them well-known via network television, who have made this point painfully clear. But a man like Newborn, who reached his present command of the instrument by practicing perhaps six or seven hours a day, automatically has an advantage over the simplistic artist, who resorts to simple figures and clichés only because that is as far as his fingers and mind will take him.
Phineas demonstrates all the virtues and none of the handicaps (if there are any) inherent in knowing how to use the piano. Taking him on his own terms, he's an involved, committed artist, for whom the instrument is virtually an extension of the man. This would not be possible if he were in any way hamstrung by not being able to execute whatever idea may cross his mind.

I won't deny that when he uses a personal device, such as the parallel lines in unison an octave apart, I am impressed by the ease with which he dashes off such passages; but even more meaningful to me is the originality and artistry of the melodic structure he has been able to build.

When Phineas plays the blues, as he does on at least three tracks in this album, it is not down-home, backwoods blues, but it's just as deep a shade of blue, and comes just as straight from the heart, as if he were a primitive trying to make something meaningful out of three chord changes and a couple of riffs. I hear in him all that is emotional, as well as all that is cerebral and virtuosic, about jazz piano in one of its most sophisticated forms.

Elvin Jones being in town, it was natural he would be sought out for this session. It has been said many times before, but is worth repeating, that as tremendously complex as Elvin can become, he is no less adept in adjusting himself to the much simpler requirements of supplying a steady pulse for a pianist. His work throughout this album, though energetic and stimulating, is a model of this kind of decorum. In order to provide Phineas with a rhythm section that would offer intuitive support to his unpredictable improvisations, it was necessary to find a bass player who would have instant empathy with the other two participants. This is an unnecessarily roundabout way of saying Ray Brown. if one can rate Phineas the greatest living jazz pianist, a similarly strong case could be made for Ray Brown as the greatest bassist, and for Elvin Jones as the greatest drummer. With three such players, things happened naturally and spontaneously, with just an occasional word of instruction or guidance from Phineas. it took very little time to make a trio of three musicians who had never before worked as a unit.
The material selected, with two exceptions ("Little Niles," and "Brentwood Blues"), all stemmed, by accident rather than design, from the 1940-50 period, when the 12- and 32- bar frameworks and the 4/4 meter still prevailed. it does not require a 7/4 or 9/8 beat, nor a theme 23 in measures long, for an improvising musician of Phineas's caliber to show that he has kept up to date.

"Please Send Me Someone to Love" offers a fine example of his ability to enrich what is, on paper, a very basic tune. The Percy Mayfield hit of 20 years ago, though 32 bars long, has much of the feeling of the blues, along with a certain intensity accentuated by the diminished chord on the fourth bar. Phineas shows immediately how effectively he can use his knowledge of the piano to convey an emotional rather than a purely intellectual message.

"Rough Ridin' " was a bop vehicle for Ella Fitzgerald, written in collaboration with her then pianist, Hank Jones, Elvin's brother. It's a simple, swinging melody used as a launching pad for Phineas's own flights. Notice the block chords ("locked hands") sequence, a style originally popularized by Milt Buckner and later mastered by George Shearing, Phineas, and others.

"Come Sunday," a religious theme from the extended Duke Ellington composition "Black, Brown and Beige," is played first unaccompanied, with a respectful, almost literal adherence to Duke's melody and harmonic pattern. As Ray and Elvin ease in for the second chorus, Newborn continues to bring out all the poignant beauty of this simple and exquisite song.

"Brentwood Blues," introduced by Ray, is an extemporized reminder that the 12-bar blues will never be out of style, in form or in feeling. I was impressed most of all by the majestic sound of the passages in chords, impeccably articulated and superbly recorded. This track brings out the points made above in the evaluation of Newborn, for while the swiftness of the hand delights the ear, so just as surely does the beauty of the thoughts.

"Real Gone Guy" could be part B of "Brentwood Blues," with the tempo doubled up, except that Nellie Lutcher's 1947 vocal line is used to open and close. Elvin, starting in a Latin groove and later taking over for a solo, is exceptionally important and prominent.
"Black Coffee," introduced by Sarah Vaughan in 1948, has since become a standard ballad, more often used vocally (with Paul Francis Webster's fine lyric) than instrumentally, though the Sonny Burke melody has an elegant, Gershwinesque quality that Phineas captures to perfection. Notice particularly his use of the left hand to fill gaps, and the dramatic impact of that A-flat 7 chord at bar 21 of the chorus.

“Little Niles" is a jazz waltz of the late 1950s, dedicated by pianist Randy Weston to his son. Noteworthy in Phineas's sensitive treatment is the group interplay. At times he seems to be playing in four against Elvin's three; the latter shows great sensitivity to changing moods and metric nuances, creating an effect not unlike that of an orchestral arrangement.

"Stay On It," though Count Basle is credited as co-composer with Tadd Dameron, was long associated with Dizzy Gillespie, for whom Tadd wrote it, and whose big band recorded it in 1947. The regular A-A-B-A tune involves a couple of typical bebop touches. For Phineas, Elvin, and Ray, it's a straight-ahead swinger all the way.

Every new Phineas Newborn album (and because there are precious few of them, these few are precious) brings with it a reminder that here we have more than a musician of outstanding talent. He is, as much as anyone around, a symbol of the importance of the piano in the evolution of modem jazz; and like jazz itself, Phineas has never stopped evolving."- LEONARD FEATHER October 8, 1969 These notes appeared on the original album liner.
As previously mentioned, the material that was eventually released ten years later as Harlem Blues [Contemporary S-7634; OJCCD-662-2] came from this same 1969 recording session. The reasons for the delay as well as a brief annotation about each of the tracks on the album are nicely capsulated in the following insert notes by John Koenig, the son of Les Koenig, the originator of Contemporary Records.

"It's often happened when an outstanding players has recorded that more great performances than could be programmed onto one album have become fixed on tape. This was exactly the case on the mornings and afternoons of February 12 and 13, 1969, when Phineas Newborn made one of his regrettably infrequent peregrinations into the recording studio to make his album, PLEASE SEND ME SOMEONE TO LOVE (Contemporary S-7622). When there is a great quantity of worthy material front which to choose, often one merely assembles performances that complement each other by juxtaposition. These decisions are generally arrived at taking into account such ephemeral qualities as character or intensity, or such mundane considerations as length. Even simple personal predilection sometimes is a factor; while one performance is not necessarily better than another, the producer feels it might fit more appropriately or easily in sequence with others already standing. The higher the quality of the material, the more difficult and the more arbitrary these decisions become. Thus, with the intervening span of ten years for reflection, it's not surprising that the performances embodied on this disc do not suffer at all by comparison to those previously released. In fact, they add dimension to the frequently proclaimed pinnacle of -Newborn's oeuvre.

In the year preceding the recording, Phineas, due to ill health, had been relatively inactive. My father, however, would periodically devise excuses to record him, and in this case, it was the presence in Los Angeles of Elvin Jones that provided the catalyst for bringing this intention to a reality. Ray Brown being one of jazz's reigning bassists was the logical choice to round out the group.Phineas had recorded with Ray (Teddy Edwards and Howard McGhee TOGETHER AGAIN, Contemporary S-7588), but hadn't recorded with Elvin. Ray hadn't either, but he had played with him a year or so earlier at the Monterey Jazz Festival, of which he was then the music director. The occasion was the formation of a Gil Evans band for the festival which, afterward, traveled to Los Angeles for a week long stay at Shelly's Mannehole, which was "wild" according to Ray.

The session was something of in event, both because of Phineas relative inactivity, and because it was the first session at Contemporary in almost a year and a half Despite the especial atmosphere surrounding the proceedings for some of us invoked in the project, it was, on the surface of it, a relatively unremarkable happening. When Raymond and Elvin had set up, (that is after Elvin's wife, Keiko, had assembled and tuned the drum set), Phineas quietly sat down, called off the tunes, played them through with the rhythm section once or twice, and recorded them. The results, as can be heard here, however, reveal that something remarkable actually did take place. Fifteen different tunes were recorded in the two days, and this release completes the public presentation of them all.
The session was conceived as a means to display Phineas as piano soloist with the bass and drums taking accompaniment roles, rather than as an integrated trio, where the three instruments interact on a more equal level. it underscores the genuine musicianship of Ray and Elvin in that they understood this, and despite their prodigious creative gifts, managed to contain their soloist inclinations while still maintaining he essential intimacy the musical context required. Still, neither was to be entirely denied, as is apparent when one listens to Elvin's fours on Ray's Idea, or Ray's stunning soliloquy at the beginning of Tenderly.
To be sure, Phineas was appreciative of the level of his company. I recall that after we dropped Elvin and Keiko off at their hotel on the evening of the first session, Phineas remarked to my father: "I have nothing hut the utmost respect for Elvin and Ray." Still, this was Phineas' show all the way, as is evidenced by Ray's expression of appreciation after the tape machines had stopped rolling after the first take of the first day, Sweet and Lovely, when he remarked with a certain amount of awe, "We'll dub in the applause."

The material was pretty much made up of things, as Ray Brown recalls, "Phineas kept in his back pocket that he pulls out from time to time."

Harlem Blues is a gospel oriented theme Phineas was fooling around with on the date and Ray and Elvin suggested he record it.

Sweet and Lovely was written by Gus Arnheim and introduced by him with his orchestra, which was well known as the house band at the Coconut Grove for several years. Later made famous by Bing Crosby, it hasn't often been played by jazz musicians as it has a rather complicated bridge.

Little Girl Blue, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, is from the Broadway show JUMBO starring Jimmy Durante, and with a book by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Interestingly, the tune, My Romance, which has often been adapted by jazz players comes from the same show.

Ray's Idea was written by Ray Brown and arranged by Gil Fuller for the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band in 1945 or '46. Phineas liked it - it was something he remembered from the be-bop days and so it was chosen to record.

Stella by Starlight is front the 1944 Paramount picture THE UNINVITED, directed by William Dieterle, starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, and introducing Gail Russell as Stella. The score is by Victor Young. Another Stella was later to be cinematically depicted by starlight, Stella Stevens, in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR with Jerry Lewis.

Since her earlier appearance, of course, Stella by Starlight has become a jazz standard, and one of the denizens of the aforementioned Newborn pocket.

Tenderly was suggested by my father as a vehicle for Ray Brown. Ray learned the tune when he was a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio, and worked occasionally at a now defunct club on the Sunset Strip called The Embers, where pianist, Walter Gross, who wrote the tune, worked as a single. According to Ray, he and Oscar would go into the lounge and ask Gross to play the tune between sets, and that's where he learned it. The song was introduced by Sarah Vaughan in the late '40s, when Gross, who then was music director of Musicraft Records, had her record it for the label.

Cookin' at the Continental, an early Horace Silver opus, was deemed an appropriate up-tempo number to display Phineas' dexterity, and chronologically it fit in well with the rest of the program.

Considering that with one or two brief exceptions, Phineas has remained inactive in the decade following the recording of this album, its release is all the more special to those of us who appreciate the art of piano playing, and it will remain as a document of three giants making music together in a way that, from the look of things in 1979, will stand as a milestone in the years to come."
by JOHN KOENIG, January 31,1979” -Notes reproduced from the original album liner.
....To Be Continued

What better way to segue into this second of Ray Brown’s last-quarter-of-the-20th-century trios than to use its pianist Gene Harris’ thoughts about his predecessor Phineas Newborn, Jr. as revealed in the Blindfold Test of the June 20, 1963 edition of Down Beat magazine:

“This is the greatest thing that ever happened to jazz – [Phineas is] the greatest pianist playing today. In every respect he’s tremendous. He is just beautiful. A wonderful jazz musician.”
As was the case with his efforts in not allowing Phineas Newborn, Jr. to pass into relative obscurity, we also have Ray Brown to thank for talking Gene Harris, who had settled in Idaho in the 1970s, out of a premature retirement in 1982.

As was the case with Ray’s long association with pianist Oscar Peterson in the decade of the 1950s, Gene Harris also had a similar, lengthy musical involvement during this same period as the pianist in the Three Sounds with Andrew Simpkins on bass and Bill Dowdy on drums. With its heavy emphasis on a gospel-influenced, blues sound, the group specialized in what some have referred to a “soul-jazz” and was well-documented through its many records on the Blue Note label.

The Three Sounds (in a variety of configurations) recorded and performed into the mid-1970s when Harris decided to quit [quite suddenly, according to some sources] the music business and transition into semi-retirement at his home in Boise, Idaho.

According to C. Michael Bailey writing in

www.allaboutjazz.com:

“In 1983, just when he thought he had been forgotten, bassist Ray Brown appealed to Harris to return to the studio and stage. Harris joined Brown's trio for a score of notable recordings before leading his own trios and small groups through the late 1980s, recording for the Bay Area-based Concord Jazz. At the close of that decade, Harris was approached by Andrew Whist, then president of the Phillip Morris Jazz Grant, to lead an all-star big band on a world tour. This resulted in two superb big band recordings that, added to his earlier Tribute to Count Basie mark Harris as a great large band arranger and leader.”

Strictly speaking, Gene’s first trio recording with Ray was The Red Hot Ray Brown Trio [Concord 4315] was not Gene’s first recording with Ray, but it was his first “trio” recording as a member of The Ray Brown Trio.

It is a set made up of standards such as Have You Met Miss Jones?, Street of Dreams, and That’s All, a lovely bossa nova treatment of Jobim’s Meditations and a wonderful romp through Brown’s blues original entitled Captain Bill, the trio offers polished arrangements largely based around vamps and riffs that serve to launch Harris into funk-inflected, solos escapes.

And Harris can really wind it up with huge locked-hands chordal passages, tremolos, and most importantly, his sensitive use of dynamics to build solos that attain house-rocking climaxes. The result is blues-oriented, Sunday-come-to-meetin’ soulful piano trio Jazz that has everyone in the audience at the Blue Note in New York testifyn’ its approval.

A few years after Harris joined Ray Brown to form what Leonard Feather has called – “… one of the most naturally compatible threesomes ever to go public with their creative impulses,” Ray acquired a business interest in THE LOA, a club located a few miles from the beach in Santa Monica, CA.

In 1988, not surprisingly, the trio recorded Summer Wind: The Ray Brown Trio – Live at the Loa [Concord Jazz CCD-4426]. Here’s a review of it by Ken Dryden that appeared in www.allmusic.com:

`”Ray Brown has many great contributions to jazz as a leader and a sideman, but one additional way in which he helped jazz was his encouraging Gene Harris to give up his early retirement and go back out on the road. The pianist was a part of Brown's groups for several years before he formed a working quartet and became a leader for good once again. This 1988 concert at a since-defunct Santa Monica night club (co-owned by Brown) finds the two, along with drummer Jeff Hamilton, at the top of their game. A phone ringing in the background distracts momentarily from Brown's opening solo in his composition "The Real Blues," during which Harris repeats a bluesy tremolo, which may be an inside joke about the early distraction. Harris take a blues-drenched approach to "Mona Lisa" before giving way to the leader's solo, while his lyrical approach to "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" is shimmering. Hamilton's soft brushes are prominent in "Little Darlin'," but his explosive playing provides a powerful pulse to the very unusual strutting take of "It Don't Mean a Thing." This extremely satisfying CD is warmly recommended.”
And Chip Deffaa had these observations to offer about Ray, Gene and Jeff in his liner notes to the original vinyl release of this recording:

“Brown’s colleagues are Gene Harris, who plays a lot of piano – rich, full-bodied, and not so overly-refined as to have the life squeezed out of it – and Jeff Hamilton, one of the stand-out drummers of the latter-day Woody Herman Herds. Brown doesn’t hold his sidemen back. Harris notes: ‘There’s a lot of musical respect between Ray and I, on the bandstand and off. What’s important is that each musician can put as much in the song as possible.’Hamilton says Brown ‘is one of the best leaders I’ve worked for; he lets you find your own way, like Woody did. A lot of leaders will not do that. When I joined the trio, he said, ‘OK, just play; I’ll let you know when it gets in the way.’ Hamilton recalls he initially tried playing safely, conservatively. ‘Ray said: “Go ahead and play the drums. That’s what I hired you for.” Most trios have a lighter touch. At first, I was trying to play lightly. I found out very quickly, it’s a little big band.’”What I found particularly engaging about the trio’s work on this album is contained in Jeff Hamilton’s observation: “… I found out very quickly, that it’s a little big band.” As is the case in a big band setting, each tune played by Ray’s trio is framed in a very accomplished arrangement which has interludes and other motifs to add contrasts and shading between the solos, shout choruses and well-scripted finales. A little big band, indeed.

Not to take anything away from Mickey Roker, and perhaps it is because of his big band drumming experience, but Jeff Hamilton adds so many additional dimensions to the trio’s performances.

His drums are tuned to a sound that is full and deep, with cymbals that match harmonically [blend in; don’t stand out or clash with the other instruments]. He instigates unique beats such as the rock-infused, marching drum figure that forms the introduction to Duke’s It Don’t Mean a Thing. These distinctive beats serves to give many of the more familiar tunes a new lift and spirit. With an understanding of piano, he plays musically and melodically. And he swings – consistently and constantly! Jeff Hamilton is Jazz drumming at its best.

Ed Berger, Curator of The Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, has characterized Gene Harris’s style as:

“a fascinating amalgam of varied influences. Having assimilated the two-handed blues and boogie of early idols Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Freddie Slack, he added the fluidity of Oscar Peterson, and seasoned the mixture with a hint of Erroll Garner’s timing and sly humor. Above all, Harris is a master of the blues, with the tools and imagination to weave endless variations on that timeless and universal pattern.”
Harris instills the blues into everything he plays whether it’s the use of a single note, quarter note triplet phrase that impels a full chorus of his solo on Milt Jackson’s Bluesology on the Summer Wind album or in a funky gospel interpretation that completes transformed the Gershwin evergreen – Summertime – on the Bam Bam Bam CD [Concord CCD-4375] which the trio recorded live at the 1988 Fujitsu-Concord Jazz festival in Japan.

In his www.allmusic.com overview of Gene Harris’s career, C. Michael Bailey is so impressed with Harris’ performance of Summertime that he advises the purchaser of this recording to:

“Skip directly to the seventh selection and listen to a definitive reading of the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” Harris explores all of the song's hidden treasures, breaking into a crowd-pleasing Albert Ammons boogie woogie.”
Aside from Gene’s sparkling rendition of Summertime, Bam Bam Bam also contains two very listenable [and quite remarkable] drum solos by Jeff Hamilton on Victor Feldman’s Rio and Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia. And Ray gets the solo spotlight with a lovely Arco treatment on If I Loved You.
Here are Leonard Feather’s discerning insert notes to what, in my opinion, ranks as the very best recording by the Gene Harris-version of The Ray Brown Trio:

“Ray Brown is a man of many images, a wearer of several hats. Though his primary identification remains that of a nonpareil bassist, he has also established himself as a composer (his "Gravy Waltz" won a Grammy award), an entrepreneur and a talent scout.

In this last capacity we owe him a special debt for his major role in bringing Gene Harris, surely one of the most exciting blues-oriented pianists around, out of semi-obscurity in Idaho. He had a steady job in Boise until Ray began luring him away for a series of jobs that culminated, in 1987, in his triumphant Tribute to Count Basie all star big band session (Concord Jazz CJ-337).

Carl Jefferson, of course, was the other key figure in the Brown-Harris alliance. Late in 1988 Ray, Gene and the redoubtable young drummer Jeff Hamilton were on tour in Japan, playing ten concerts of their own in addition to taking part in Jefferson's Concord Festival unit. During that time, this session took place before an audience that was exceptionally enthusiastic (needless to say, none of those applause sounds had to be amplified).

"The Kan-i Hoken Hall is a big auditorium:' Brown recalls, "around 2,000 people, and we really had them with us all the way. This was one of those nights when everything came together."
The Brown original now known as F.S.R. (For Sonny Rollins) began as a rehearsal of Rollins' own "Doxy" on a record date with Milt Jackson. "Then," Ray says, "I wrote this other theme as a sort of pre-out chorus for 'Doxy,' and it came off so well that I thought, why not make a separate tune out of it?" The basis is a 16 bar chord pattern that goes back decades before either Brown or Rollins.Put Your Little Foot Right Out is a simple piece based on just two chords (tonic and dominant), probably of traditional origin, but best known in jazz circles through Miles Davis's recording, then under the title "Fran-Dance." Note Gene's subtle behind-the-beat tactics, the perfect time and creative force of Ray's solo, and the agreeably subdued ending.

Rio is one of a group of songs sent to Brown by the late Victor Feldman. "I liked a lot of Victor's tunes," Ray says, "particularly one called 'The Haunted Ballroom' and this one, which was new to me." Rio moves from a bluesy vamp into a fast, samba-esque theme in F Minor, with Gene displaying mighty chops, Jeff and Ray trading ideas, and Jeff soloing with the discretion that has earmarked him as the most tasteful drummer of his generation (at 35, he has been in steady demand since the late 1970s, when he worked with Monty Alexander and Woody Herman).If I Loved You is a 1945 Richard Rodgers melody, serving here as an ideal vehicle for Ray Brown's Arco bass. The spotlight then switches to Gene Harris for a version of Summertime that was embellished with enough breaks, blues moments and other touches to assure that this would suggest a funky, humid summer.

Days of Wine and Roses finds the men playing this 1962 Mancini standard in what Ray aptly calls a scaled down big band style.

Dizzy Gillespie's imperishable Night in Tunisia undergoes a transmogrification here. I designed it:' Ray says, "mainly as a vehicle for Jeff, for a marvelous hand drumming exhibition. We kept going back and forth, around rather than on the melody."

Bam Bam Bam is a blues, with Jeff's introduction suggesting the title. Gene and Ray have long been masters of the blues; certainly neither of them can recall how many blues they have recorded over the years, but it may well average out at one to a session. Again you will be transported by the phenomenal togetherness of this unit; essentially it's three minds that think as one.

During the past two years it has been my good fortune to hear Brown, Harris and Hamilton, both as a trio and in various other configurations, at the Loa Club, a Santa Monica rendezvous in which Ray was an active partner. With the release of this album, observers around and beyond this country will be able to share the exultant joy conveyed by what must be one of the most naturally compatible threesomes ever to go public with their creative impulses.”

Judging from the audience reactions on these in-performance recordings by Ray’s trio with Gene Harris, it appears as though the following comments about Gene by Scottish guitarist Jim Mullen who later toured with him in the 1990s are spot on as to how this effervescent performer “went about his business” as “an old-school jazz entertainer:”

“Gene used to say that these people have come out to see us, and it’s out job to give them a fantastic time. He used to say at the end of the evening, ‘if you leave here with a smile on your face, remember that Gene Harris put it there.’ I’ve never seen anyone turn a room of strangers into family that way. We never rehearsed. He’d do this big rubato solo piano introduction with no clue as to what’s coming up. Then he’d just start playing and you had to be ready to jump in there. That’s how he wanted it.” [From Richard Cook, Blue Note Records: The Biography, London: Secker & Warburg, 2001, p. 234].
With the issuance of 3-Dimensional [Concord CCD-4520] in 1991, Gene Harris would make his last recording as part of the Ray Brown Trio [although Gene Harris would continue to record with Ray and for Concord in a variety of settings in the 1990s].

Richard Cook & Brian Morton in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Edition [p.207] had this to say about it:

“Vintage stuff from the very best of Brown’s groups. This line-up has the easy cohesion of Oscar Peterson’s trios, and Brown’s busy lines often suggest Peterson’s approach to a melody. Following on form from an Ellington melody, Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ … is a rare stab at a post-bop repertoire, and the group handles it comfortably.”Expanding on the tile of the disc, Fred Bouchard of Down Beat offered these apt, opening remarks in his insert notes:

“The sassy triumvirate of Jeff Hamilton, Gene Harris and Ray Brown has earned the stature, cultivated the variety, and accrued the experience that make every tune they play sound multi-dimensional.”The little big band that Jeff Hamilton spoke of is out in full force on this one with kicks and fills everywhere present on the medium cookers like Ja-da and You Are My Sunshine, more of Jeff’s unique beats, this time in the form of a Gumbo Hump’s New Orleans Processional Band drum cadence that should have your hips gyrating in no time, and on a rousing Cotton Tail finale to a seven minute Ellington medley with Ray’s huge, booming bass sound driving it all home.

That three virtuoso performers on their instruments could form such a tight-knit trio is a compliment to the musical integrity and greatness of Gene, Ray and Jeff, respectively. These guys listen to one another and find ways to urge the utmost creativity out of each another’s playing. The listener comes away enthralled and stimulated having heard piano-bass-drums trio Jazz at its best. What they have to put on display is beautifully encapsulated in the 3:45 minute version of Time After Time that closes this recording – perhaps we could call it a Jazz Time Capsule?

As previously noted Gene Harris left Ray’s trio and was replaced by the young pianist Benny Green, a protégé of Oscar Peterson [was this Ray’s way of coming full circle and ending his trio Jazz career where it began?]. Before we leave Gene, perhaps these thoughts about him by C. Michael Bailey might serve well as closing remarks:

“Throughout the 90s, Harris was given free reign to record how he wished. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD opined that Harris always ended up making the same record...but that was all right. Gene Harris' music always sounded as if it had a smile on its face as big as the one Harris himself wore while performing. That type of sunshine can never be dimmed. Gene Harris died on January 16, 2000 while awaiting a kidney transplant from his daughter. His beaming personality illuminates all through his recorded legacy.”

… To be continued

As we begin this last phase, or “bam,” perhaps we might add three “C’s” as being characteristic of this period in the history of The Ray Brown Trio - “change,” “consistency” and “creativity”:

[1] the “change” involved a move to the Telarc label from Concord Jazz, as well as, changes in personnel with Benny Green replacing Gene Harris on piano and the later change of Gregory Hutchinson replacing Jeff Hamilton on drums;
[2] the “consistency” is in the manner in which the trio was “mic-ed” and recorded by Telarc, as well as, the constancy in having Donald Elfman [himself, a musician] as the writer of the insert notes for just about all of these Telarc recordings;
[3] the [continued] “creativity” not only in the manner in which the selected repertoire is arranged and performed, but also, in the way which Ray expands the trio to accompany guest guitarists, horn players and vocalists.

During the decade of the 1990s, the first major change was Benny Green assumption of the piano chair from Gene Harris.
Fortunately for me, I lived in San Francisco for most of this period and I was able to hear this version of The Ray Brown Trio with its Bay area, native-son pianist many times when it performed at the Old Yoshi’s Jazz club in Berkeley, CA.

With Phineas Newborn, Jr. and again with Gene Harris, Ray had worked with pianists of his own generation. Benny Green was thirty years his junior when Ray turned to him to front this version of his trio; someone who was closer in age to Jeff Hamilton.

While the principal focus of this piece is Ray Brown’s trios, both Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Gene Harris were well known Jazz personalities before they joined Ray’s group. Benny Green, on the other hand, was just turning 30-years of age so it might prove informative at this point to turn to Stanley Crouch’s insert notes to Prelude, Benny’s first album for Criss Cross [CD 1036] made in 1985 in which he offers an interesting description of the evolution of a young Jazz musician in a contemporary American society that in no way prizes the music.
Green's interest in them music was natural and began very early. Born April 4,1963 in New York City but reared in Berkeley, California, he heard Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk records through his tenor saxophonist father. 'I didn't know that it was called jazz. It was just music which I loved from when I first heard it, 'he recalls. Green was envious of his sister who started getting piano lessons and he began improvising with determination at the age of six or so when an instrument was brought into his home. His parents decided that he should learn the piano correctly if the boy was so interested in playing, so he, too, took classical piano lessons. 'My family has always been behind me all the way about playing music,' Green says. The lessons went on for about three years.

Green was very fortunate when he went into the fourth grade because he came in contact with a jazz ensemble of student musicians directed by a man named Phil Hardymon. 'It was kind of unique because there aren't too many student jazz courses throughout the country. Though I had been inspired listening to the music around the house and hearing my father play, this was a different kind of inspiration because I was hearing my peers do it. That made it seem more possible to me.' That possibility was given more thorough grounding when Green's father told his son when he was twelve that if he was going to improvise, he should get serious and start studying the records around the house, start listening to jazz radio, and go out of his way to learn what the masters, whether living or dead, were doing.
'I began studying with a teacher named Carl Andrews, who was instructing me in jazz harmony. I studied with him for about two years. 'Green would try to get in jam sessions and play jazz whenever he could. 'l would go hear pianists Bill Bell and Ed Kelly, who taught me a lot at that time. Dick Whittington was also a big help and Smith Dobson gave me some important pointers. I was starting to understand the music much better and could see how much more is needed to learn.'
At about sixteen, Green was hired by a singer named Faye Carroll and began performing with her frequently. He learned a lot while with the singer because she gave him a lot of room to play, which is how jazz musicians really develop their skills. No matter how many classes they might take or how many improvisations they might memorize or techniques they might work out, unless those materials are brought to the level of performance function, they are largely academic. It is within the sweating demands of the moment, when everything is in motion and every decision has to count, that the jazz player must be able to create musical logic expressive of the emotional qualities that define the individual sensibility. Aware of that, Green would sit in with the best musicians he could, which he did with trumpeter Eddie Henderson after meeting him in San Francisco.
'I sat in with Eddie whenever it was possible, and a few months later he called me to work with him. He was working with a tenor player named Hadley Calliman. Both of them encouraged me a lot. I learned so much being around Eddie. He played me tapes of live gigs with Herbie Hancock that were fascinating to me because of the way the music moved through so many forms, and how one performance could slide through many colors. It was very inspirational and added to what I was already trying to learn. My father had turned me onto Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Monk. I was trying to get a scope of all the eras, so I was listening to a lot of musicians, particularly Red Garland, Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner'
By the time Green got out of high school, he was doing trio jobs of his own, which allowed him to work at making the things he was listening to and discovering function within his own improvisational efforts. He was listening to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers when they would come to town and he was noticing that there was something different going on in the music of the musicians who were from New York. He could hear a more powerful level of swinging, a deeper groove, a more substantial grasp of rhythmic components that fuel the phrasing of jazz. He knew he had to move east.' l had that on my mind for the last few months that I was in California, regardless of what I was doing. I worked for those months with a band led byt he bassist Chuck Israels, which was about twelve pieces. Then I got to play with Joe Henderson for one night before I left. I knew if I was going to be serious about this music, I had to go where the sound I was hearing from the musicians in New York was coming from. I knew I was missing a lot being in California. There was a focus to swinging I heard coming from New York, which was more definite, more disciplined. In the Bay Area, a lot of the musicians played with a very loose feeling. So I moved to New York when I was nineteen, in 1982'

Shortly after Green got to New York, he heard Walter Bishop with Junior Cook and Bill Hardman. He approached Bishop about studying with him and became a student of the older pianist, who helped him a great deal. 'He showed me a lot about comping because I was impressed by the big sound he got out of the instrument.' Bishop was the link to Bud Powell and he was willing to show Green how he voiced his chords. But, most importantly, Bishop encouraged Green to look for his own music, not just emulate somebody else. 'Walter said that there are three stages of development: imitation, emulation, innovation. Not to say that a musician gets to all three, but those are the logical stages of development. He got me to think about the extensions of the tradition of the piano that have come since Bud Powell'.

At that time Walter Davis and John Hicks also gave Green valuable instructions. Bishop introduced Green to alto saxophonist Bobby Watson, who eventually hired the pianist. While working with Watson, he met pianist James Williams, who also encouraged him to work on his music and stick with it. Williams' encouragement was in line with the assistance and inspiration the young pianist had received from Mulgrew Miller, whom he had heard with Woody Shaw just before leaving the Bay Area. Green was strongly impressed by the sense of tradition and the personal approach within Miller's piano work. Miller also pointed him in productive directions by giving him specific and useful advice. Johnny O'Neil was also very helpful. O'Neil had just joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and was willing to share his knowledge with Green.' I had heard Donald Brown with Art when the band recorded live in San Francisco. Hearing such a fresh voice was enlightening. I'm grateful to Donald, Mulgrew and James for being at once so inspirational and supportive.’
Green free-lanced around New York for about a year, then was called to audition for Betty Carter, who had heard him on a job on Long Island. Green started working with the singer in April of 1983 and remained in her group a few weeks short of four years. 'Betty is a great musician and you learn from her in every possible way. She is a master of pacing. She understands rhythm and tempo and how they fit with harmony and melody perfectly. And most of all Betty Carter swings! Her gig is very challenging because she has very precise things she wants to achieve but she is also very spontaneous. She also helps to heighten her musicians' awareness of their role within an ensemble. That was a very good job for me and it is a very good job for any young musician. Like Art Blakey because she's always finding young musicians, giving them work, teaching them a lot of music, and encouraging them to dedicate themselves. Betty Carter is a great musician and a great person.'

In April of 1987, Green left the singer's band for the Jazz Messengers. 'Playing with Art Blakey has been, by far, the greatest experience of my life. I never have before and I'm sure I never will again come in contact with a greater musical spirit. When Art comes on the bandstand, whatever else is going on in life is forgotten and the music takes over. Art truly practices what he preaches in washing away the dust of every day life with music. And this is certainly the musician's job. As I mature, I hope to come closer to being able to achieve this on my own.'”
The first album by Ray’s new trio, BassFace [Telarc CD-83340], was recorded live at the Kuumbawa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, CA on April 1-2, 1993 and it is an absolute corker!

One simply has to hand it to Ray. How in the world do you follow the likes of Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Gene Harris, why, with Benny Green, of course. And, as is in evidence on this album, this “kid” can play [not to mention the fact that he swings his backside off].

What is also in evidence on this recording is that Ray Brown is becoming quite a polished performer: whether it is in the form of introductions to or interacting with the audience or in the thought give to how the tunes are sequenced or in the imaginative way in which the music is arranged and played.

Another aspect of Ray’s approach to each set is to intersperse a showcase for each member of the trio and on BassFace this takes the form of solo spotlights for Ray on Kenny Burrell’s title track, for Benny Green it is Taking a Chance on Love [prefaced by Ray remarking to the a heartily approving audience – “I guess by now you’ve noticed that we have a new piano player!”] and for Jeff it’s a workout on the seemingly odd choice of Irving Berlin’s Remember [“odd” only until you hear what Jeff does with it].

The Kuumbwa set begins and ends with Milestones and Ray’s original Phineas Can Be, both of which are up-tempo cookers. Ray usually includes in each performance tunes by or associated with Duke Ellington and/or Dizzy Gillespie and in this instance the latter gets the nod with the trio’s version of Tin Tin Deo. And to finish off the typical Ray Brown Set Recipe, it most always includes a blues and a ballad with CRS – CRAFT [another Brown original] sufficing for the former and In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning taking the tempo down for the set.
Donald Elfman concludes his insert notes to BassFace with these observations:

“The piano trio format has always been a showcase for an almost theatrical approach to jazz, and the Ray Brown Trio is undeniably a performing group. But these three distinct musical personalities, each with innate ability and a beautiful desire to communicate, keep the music paramount. Here, they offer poetic and always inviting readings of standards from the jazz and popular music songbooks as well as Ray’s originals. Each player shines brightly, thanks in large part to the formidable example and presence of the one and only Ray Brown.”
Next up for this engaging and entertaining trio was the 1994 CD Don’t Get Sassy [Telarc CD-83368] and contrary to the admonition contained in its title, the trio gets very sassy indeed on this marvelous CD which was to be their last together as a unit.

Along with a striking rendition of Con Alma, the Dizzy acknowledgement on this CD is a blistering version of Mario Bauza’s Tanga that offers some dazzling two-handed, octaves apart piano work by Benny Green and enough Jeff Hamilton kicks and licks to once again demonstrate that “the little, big band” is back.

The Duke Ellington tribute is in the form of a three tune medley that concludes the set which includes Rain Check [whose melody is played as a waltz before moving into an fast tempo drum feature for Jeff], In A Sentimental Mood, and Squatty Roo. Ray also contributes When You Go, a beautiful, original ballad that deserves greater recognition as it would be interesting to hear other Jazz musicians “play on it.”
Here’s Donald Elfman’s “take” on the album:

“The spontaneity of a live jazz setting often, when we're lucky, viscerally and excitingly affects the immediacy of the artist's performance. It is a give-and-take affair in which the musicians communicate with the audience which, in turn, responds in such a way as to spur the artist to even greater heights. Telarc and Ray Brown have each done their share of live recordings, working together on this trio's debut for the label (Bassface) and other special recordings with Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn.

For this new album, the artist and the label have decided to alter the nature of the live recording so as to have the best of both worlds: to involve the audience in a creative and interactive fashion and to have more control over the recorded performance. The members of the trio invited guests for each night of recording, and the audience was made up of enthusiastic friends, relatives, and selected notables. Signet Studio in Hollywood became a jazz club, but one where the audience could often hear from the control room and from the "stage" elements of the process that make a recording. The give-and-take was thus transformed into a situation where three distinct groups participated; the experience was instructive and enjoyable for all involved.

The three members of the Ray Brown Trio and the production staff of Telarc are long-standing professionals who have been involved in the art of recording countless times before. This time they added the audience into the equation in a way that retained the vividness of classic live recordings skillfully blending control and freedom.

Under no circumstances, of course, could this trio give anything less than an electric, immediate performance. Ray, Benny, and Jeff combine extraordinary rich experience in many settings with breathtaking technique and an overwhelming desire to reach an audience. They transform the standards of this and other popular music and make it impossible not to share in the moment. Ray Brown has been doing that for over fifty years, and his partners here have learned his valuable lessons well.

The crowd quickly becomes part of the experience. They take audible delight in the magic the players work on tunes by some of Ray's old bosses, by giants of jazz and popular music and from the vast store of classic song.

You can hear Ray's special affection for the late Dizzy Gillespie in two compositions with an Afro-Latin influence - Con Alma and Tanga. The brilliant Ellington medley includes a moving Arco solo by Ray on the popular In a Sentimental Mood and some striking and varied tones and colors on the lesser known Rain Check and Squatty Roo.

Of special interest from the pop songbook is a gorgeous rendition of a tune that Tony Bennett popularized, The Good Life, with the great piano playing of Benny Green leading us. Great tunes, even ones that are played frequently, sound new every time when masters like these improvise on them.

In a collection of terrific performances, the reading of Thad Jones's Don't Get Sassy is a standout. Ray understands the essence of the late trumpeter-composer-bandleader's music and his continuing importance -particularly to jazz writing. The trio works out with abandon on this powerfully funky tune from the Jones repertoire.

From Ray's own pen comes a new blues entitled, appropriately, Brown's New Blues. Ray again shows how and why he's a master in every way - soloist, accompanist, composer, leader, showman.

It is a credit to the artistry involved here that many of the audience members returned for both nights. They understood that great jazz takes on new colors every time out - even if some of the songs remain the same. And they obviously are thrilled in being part of the team that helped to create the right environment for the level of invention that the Ray Brown Trio delivers.”Don’t Get Sassy was Jeff Hamilton’s last album with Ray before moving on to form his own trio.
Ray’s next Telarc release - Seven Steps to Heaven [CD-83364] - introduced Gregory Hutchinson as the group’s new drummer. Also making an appearance ois the fine Swedish guitarist Ulf Wakenius. A brief review of the musical resumes of both Hutchinson and Wakenius is contained in the following Don Elfman album insert notes along with are fine summary of the album’s highlights.
“Ray Brown is in the process of joining the pantheon of major jazz players who have also become great bandleaders. He has, like such illustrious predecessors as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Art Blakey, created groups that have forged distinctive signature sounds through the discovery of burgeoning talent with the spirit to both communicate as part of a group and develop an individual sound. What's particularly noteworthy about Ray is that for years, it seems he has been one of those soloists - first with the Modern Jazz Quartet in the late 1940s, then with the Oscar Peterson trios of the' 50s and '60s, and throughout in an unbelievable variety of ensembles and in a vast assortment of musical styles and types. After this expansive and extensive preparation, Ray Brown is, and has been, a leader.

For over ten years he has stood solidly at the helm of the Ray Brown Trio, a group which has lived and maintained the solid blues traditions of basic jazz and established environments where soloists can shine. In the piano chair, first Gene Harris (formerly of The Three Sounds) and now Benny Green have happily found the place where past and present meet, where dazzling virtuosity and an urgency to entertain join up with a solid sense of musical architecture and a need to communicate. And, as a matter of fact, drummers, Jeff Hamilton and now Gregory Hutchinson demonstrate the same mix of sensibilities. It's curious but no real surprise that Green and Hutchinson, both at first associated with the young lion new breed, have chosen to go into the roots and create new explosions in a much more traditional vein. These solid digs have taken place in the rich atmosphere - inventive and joyous - created by Ray Brown.

That brings us to the album at hand, a sparkling set of mostly old favorites and a couple of Ray's originals. All are done with the verve and spirit that have come to define any venture connected with Ray Brown, yet it's another tune still that points us to the sound picture that this set calls to mind. The Thumb is a soulful celebration of the unique talent that was its composer, Wes Montgomery. Here, and throughout the album, with the Wes-like playing of Swedish guitarist Ulf Wakenius, we are in the world of the classic Montgomery plus trio recordings. That Ray and his men should have feeling for Wes is perfectly fitting, since the late guitarist's recordings had the same beautiful blend of extraordinary invention and audience appeal that, no matter how broad, never compromised the scope of the invention or the depth of the feeling. And that, of course, is what we have here in this newest Ray Brown recording.
A word, first, is in order regarding Ulf Wakenius. It's no easy task to take on the role, even unspoken, of one of the greatest soloists in the history of the music. But Ulf seems undaunted by the challenge, primarily, its seems, because he does not take it as a challenge. With a steady assurance and bold confidence, he sends the music from his heart and head to his fingers and thus quietly, but most assertively, assumes the guitar chair by just playing. Working with players from Herbie Hancock and Jack DeJohnette to Niels-Henning Orstedt Pedersen ( in whose group he currently performs), he is what Jazz Journal called "a new breed of guitarist," combining "a formidable technique with a rare sense of dynamics, a multitude of influences with a precise, driving individualism." The aforementioned Montgomery tune shows right away all of the qualities that make a top-notch player incredible dexterity, a sense of what to include and when, and an exhilarating spirit that sends his playing and, in fact, the tune, soaring skyward.

The other "new" player here is drummer Gregory Hutchinson. He's sharpened his musical axe in the bands of Betty Carter, Joe Henderson (both of whom have done things original and new with the tradition) and alongside new stalwarts of rhythm Christian McBride, Geri Allen and Marc Cary, so he's made it clear that he knows the prevailing jazz currents. What's also clear is that he thinks about where this music has been, and he is now able to live those questions with Ray Brown, who has never stopped questioning. And there is the awesome, ever-growing Benny Green leading us to new worlds with his pianism.
What this album, then, is all about is a sense of "the groove." These players have certainly found it together and sound like a unit, even though this is the first time they've all recorded together. Each has his own voice and finds an individual groove without hogging the spotlight, but as a group these men find the place to lock together and stay there throughout. They make these old gems sparkle - even if you've heard In a Sentimental Mood or Stella By Starlight countless times, the mastery of this group, the power of Ray's arrangements and the vitality of the tunes help make this a new first time.

As always, Ray provides the solid rock from which the other players build. He seems both a father and a brother to these young players, offering a warm nesting place as well as an encouraging and instructive push. And what's finally amazing is that they give him lessons, too.”
As a point in passing, while at Telarc, Ray’s trio was used as the rhythm section for a number of CDs issued under the rubric “Some of My Best Friends Are ….” This phrased was completed with everything from “Piano Players” to “Sax Players” to “Vocalists,” all of which are outside the range of this piece [but well worth listening to hear more of Benny Green and the two pianists who followed him with Ray – Geoff Keezer and Larry Fuller – neither of whom is included in this feature].
Which brings us to the last of the Benny Green recordings – The Ray Brown Trio: Live at Scullers [Telarc CD-83405]. Recorded on location at the Boston club on April 17-18, 1996, Richard S. Ginell had this to say about the recording on www.allmusic.com:

“Staying young by working with the young, Ray Brown and cohorts Benny Green (piano) and Gregory Hutchinson (drums) laid down a set of jazz and pop standards at a club in a Boston Double Tree Hotel. Though Brown is the leader and anchor of the date, quite obviously the pianist is going to dominate the act — and Green definitely puts on a show, wiping everyone out with the pyrotechnics of "You're My Everything," engaging in a gentle stride opening to "But Not for Me," and coming logically to a bombastic climax. Hutchinson is capable, swinging, and occasionally volatile, and Brown mostly steps back and gives these guys a firm underpinning, with a sly solo now and then ("Bye, Bye Blackbird.") There are few surprises or deviations from the mainstream here, but a good time will be had by anyone who gives this a spin.”
And the ever-present and “consistent” Donald Elfman provided the following well-scripted and astute insert notes to the recording:

“One of the beautiful ways we as humans show maturity and growth is in how we stand in a spotlight. When we're young we desperately need attention at center stage, and if it means showboating or speaking louder or other garish displays, we do those things because they're necessary for our sense of self. But as we age and become more confident with just who we are and what we've accomplished, we can, hopefully, generously and with assurance give the room and space to others without any loss of our own individuality or distinct personality. It's truly revelatory to see this process in people, because it also shows us what we ourselves can become.

Musicians who choose the performing life act out this process before the public - in person or on record - and it is a quietly breathtaking experience for an audience to watch artists grow in this way. Since Louis Armstrong first made jazz a soloist's art, the individual's statement has tended to be more dazzling and exploratory, and thus the link to that spotlight must be harder to break. So it is even more amazing to see a modern jazz musician fully grow into the music, making all his personal expression an organic part of a larger whole.

As witness by the performance recorded here-and in fact by all he does-Ray Brown has magnificently mastered this maturation process and become a jazz Everyman who still says as much or more than anyone. Of course one might make the case that as a bass player Ray had to learn from the start to make his voice a more supportive and quiet one, and there's some truth to that. But Ray Brown was always a player with his own personality, backing some of the greatest names in music but always in such a way that you always knew he was there and you wanted to hear what he had to say. So it's a nice surprise to know that this master, after years of playing and leading his own groups, has managed to put everything he does at the service of greater communication.

The Ray Brown Trio has become one of the most emotionally rewarding and entertaining working groups in all of jazz. Mr. Brown is clearly the leader - and as a mentor, as a rock-solid foundation, and as the senior member of the group he has given his young partners focus, direction, and somehow even greater freedom. But in so doing he has ably presented an unselfish personality that means that he has earned the role of leader. And what he has given has helped his sidemen towards that greater development as mature players.

From his earliest days as Betty Carter's pianist, Benny Green demonstrated dazzling, showstopping virtuosity at the keyboard. Work with the Ray Brown Trio, however, has defined and directed his technique, rounding out and synthesizing the way he holds attention. On Bye Bye Blackbird, for example, it's certain he begins with a notion of the classic Red Garland performance from the Miles Davis days, but he transforms the bravura of that recording and even the knock-'em-dead approach of some of his own work into a more rich understanding of the song and how to tell its story with other players at your side.

Gregory Hutchinson began his musical career as one of the "young lions," next to such current raves as Christian McBride, and thus he was thrust into a spotlight in which his volcanic drumming was broadly evident. He's always seemed to have a full command of his instrument but his work in this splendid trio seems to have given birth to a more complete range of expressive capability. On the gently pulsing En Estate, his subtle presence says as much about the song and its feeling as can be expressed by any instrument. And in combination with the dark but vitally immediate sounds of the Brown bass, and the sensitive lyricism of the pianist, he is able to beautifully urge the music forward.

The Ray Brown Trio performances are a finely drawn mix of incisive and thoughtful improvising and crowd-pleasing virtuosity. As a member of the classic Oscar Peterson trios, Ray seems to have learned how best to affect that blend and really make it work. The choice of tunes and Ray's arrangements here are further evidence of Ray's unselfishness - he gives himself to the richness of the standard and jazz repertoire. Mr. Brown is a leader, but these are true group performances with each member helping to give them shape.”Mike Hennessey, a writer about Jazz whose work is often represented on Jazz Profiles has elsewhere posed the question as to “Where are the Gillespies, Parkers, Rollinses, Getzes, J.J. Johnsons and Miles Davieses of the new Jazz generation? [To which he answers] “There aren’t any.”

Hennessey goes on to explain that the insinuation of this question and answer is that it is “… intended to imply that the general level of [Jazz] artistry and creativity today is in a state of decline.”

To this charge, Hennessy offers two pertinent quotations, taken appropriately from members of today’s Jazz generation.

The first is from trumpeter Terence Blanchard: “The real problem is that people keep looking for new Dizzys, Birds and Tranes instead of judging the new generation of musicians on their own terms and evaluating their music objectively. Why should they be expected to be clones of other musicians?”

Alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, Blanchard’s partner at the time of this writing continues the sentiment by adding: “The general standard of playing among today’s young Jazz musicians is getting higher and higher all the time.”

Any doubt about the merit contained in these assertions by Blanchard and Harrison is further swept away by listening to the playing of current generation musicians like Benny Green and Gregory Hutchinson.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that many of the players from Jazz’s earlier generations were very limited in what they had to offer both technically and creatively. Which is another way of saying that they weren’t all giants, by any means.

From this standpoint, it is exasperating to listen to earlier generations of Jazz followers extol the work of obviously limited piano players who couldn’t play two notes with their right hand before slipping into the keyboard’s cracks over the precision, pianism and un-ending inventiveness of a Benny Green.

But for those listeners [from any generation] who are willing to open their ears and give youth its due - solely on the basis of creative merit - their patience and generosity will be amply rewarded with some great Jazz as played by some terrific young Jazz musicians who are every bit the equal of their idols and then some. To his credit, Ray Brown instinctively understood that if he wanted to continue to play with musicians of the highest ability, he had to do his part in cultivating their growth and development from among a younger crop of players.

In this regard, one can’t say enough about all that he did to help advance the cause of young Jazz musicians although his reasons for doing so weren’t entirely altruistic. For as he also said to me that night at Yoshi’s 15 years ago: “This is where and how I make my living and I want to make it as enjoyable as possible. Besides helping them mature keeps me young.”
Whatever his motivation, for we Jazz fans, there is the legacy of all the great trio Jazz music Ray left us through his loving devotion to Phineas Newborn, his urging and ultimately bringing Gene Harris out of retirement and his helping to further develop Benny Green’s career so he could carry the torch of Jazz in the current generation.

Meet Robb Cappelletto - !!!

2013-05-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles enjoys learning about new musicians who help move the music forward in the sense of adding new dimensions to it.

Such was the case recently when Chris DiGirolamo of TwoForTheShow Media sent us guitarist Robb Cappelleto’s debut CD entitled !!! along with the following press release.

“The Robb Cappelletto Group releases debut recording -!!!

!!! is the driving debut recording from Canadian Guitarist Robb Cappelletto and his group. The recording simply titled "!!!" shows the remarkable talent that Cappelletto poses as a guitarist and composer. Aside from Jobim's Corcovado and Cole Porter’s It's All Right With Me, the recording clearly shows off the compositional brilliance of this young guitar slinger. A unique tone, a fresh approach and pure emotion towards his playing make !!! one of the best guitar releases of 2013! Robb Cappelletto is the complete guitarist and this new release shows you why!

Robb Cappelletto - Guitars - Jon Maharaj - Bass - Amhed Mitchel - Drums

About Robb Cappelletto:

Robb Cappelletto is a guitarist who believes in aggressive rhythm and melodies that stick; he does not make music that sounds like math. His interests are jazz, polar bears and hot rods—in that order—and grew up listening to progressive metal as much as Wes Montgomery and Buddy Guy. He earned a Masters degree in composition from York University, and is on faculty there as an instructor today. Robb currently lives in Toronto with his wife and cat. !!! is the debut recording for the Robb Cappelletto Group.

Available on CD Baby and iTUNES”

Robb Cappelletto has a website – www.robbcappelletto.com/ - on which you can learn more about him, find out about forthcoming show dates, the gear he uses, as well as, order the debut CD.

The more you explore the music on this CD, the more it will move your ears in new directions.

Mr. Cappelletto’s music is an example of syncretism in that it attempts to reconcile and/or unite different and sometimes opposing elements into a new musical form. It has a warmth and a zest to it, both of which are made all the more compelling by the obvious commitment of the musicians who play it.

It takes a certain courage to seek out new, musical horizons, and this is what the musicians on this recording have done.

You have not heard Mr. Cappelletto’s music before.

What’s on offer in !!! is an exciting adventure – a new musical experience.

I certainly hope that it is just the beginning and that there will be more of Mr. Cappelletto’s music on offer in the future.

Here’s an audio-only example of the Robb Cappelletto Group at work. It will provide you with an idea of his unique approach to guitar and his style of contemporary music.

Pops – Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues”

2013-05-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

“The First Great Soloist”

“When on June 28, 1928, Louis Armstrong unleashed the spectacular cascading phrases of the introduction to West End Blues, he established the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come. Beyond that, this performance also made quite clear that jazz could never again revert to being solely an entertainment or folk music.

The clarion call of West End Blues served notice that jazz had the potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression. Though nurtured by the crass entertainment and night-club world of the Prohibition era, Armstrong's music transcended this context and its implications.

This was music for music's sake, not for the first time in jazz, to be sure, but never before in such a brilliant and unequivocal form. The beauties of this music were those of any great, compelling musical experience: expressive fervor, intense artistic commitment, and an intuitive sense for structural logic, combined with superior instrumental skill. By whatever definition of art -be it abstract, sophisticated, virtuosic, emotionally expressive, structurally perfect — Armstrong's music qualified.

Like any profoundly creative innovation, West End Blues summarized the past and predicted the future. But such moments in the history of music by their very brilliance also tend to push into the background the many preparatory steps that lead up to the masterpiece. Certainly, West End Blues was not without its antecedents. It did not suddenly spring full-blown from Armstrong's head. Its conception was assembled, bit by bit, over a period of four or five years, and it is extremely instructive to study the process by which Armstrong accumulated his personal style, his "bag" as the jazz musician would put it.

Armstrong’s recording activity in the years 1926-29 was so prolific that the jazz analyst's task is both easy and difficult. On the one hand, the recordings give an exhaustive, almost day-by-day documentation of Louis's progress. On the other hand, he recorded so much, under so many varying circumstances and pressures, recorded such a variety of material with the indiscriminate abandon in which only a genius can afford to indulge, that the task of gaining a comprehensive view, in purely statistical terms, is formidable. The wonder of it all is that Armstrong, irrespective of what or with whom he recorded, maintained an astonishingly high degree of inventiveness and musical integrity, at least until the early 19305, when he did succumb to the sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures.”

[Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, New York: Oxford University Press, paperback edition 1986, pp. 89-90; paragraphing modified].

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Ahmad Jamal on Mosaic Records - [From The Archives]

2013-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

Kenny Washington: “How did you come up with your concept of less-is-more?”

Ahmad Jamal: “… I think it has to do with philosophy and how I approach the disciplines. There’s a discipline in music. There’s an amount of showiness and showing off in front of musicians, which is always a mistake. So I kind of backed off sometimes and I think it’s part of the discipline that I’ve employed through the years. I still have that. Some people call it space, but I call it discipline.”

“These sides are glistening examples of the polished skill and remarkable interplay that are the hallmarks of the Jamal trio. Israel Crosby is on-hand to give imaginative and rock-steady support. Vernel Fournier is, as ever, fluid and quick as mercury. Jamal displays all the qualities that have elicited so much vociferous respect from fellow musicians, critics and records buyers ….”

- Jack Tracy/Original liner notes to Jamal at The Pershing, Vol. 2

“The mid fifties was a fertile time for Jazz; fresh, original ensembles were taking shape all over the country. The Modern Jazz Quartet, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, The Jazz Messengers and the Ahmad Jamal Trio immediately come to mind. Among musicians, each group had its imitators and its creative disciples who took its innovations one step further.

But no group in this era was as pervasive as the 1957 incarnation of Jamal’s trio with bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier. Like the Nat King Cole Trio of the previous decade, its influence penetrated so many different aspects of music.

Jamal is first and foremost a pianist with a natural gift for the instrument. His technique, dynamics and control are something to behold, but the mind that manipulates what comes out of the piano is extraordinary. Like only the greatest of improvising artists, Jamal is a master architect, realizing with his mind conceives with seeming ease.”

- Michael Cuscuna, Mosaic Records

At the time of its original posting in August, 2010, this feature did not include the tribute video to the late Nigerian artist, Ben Enwonwu [1921-1994] that uses Ahmad trio's performance of Taboo which the editorial staff at JazzProfiles subsequently developed with the assistance of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD.

You can now locate this video at the conclusion of this piece.

My feelings about the music contained in this nine-CD set [MD9-246] can be summed up with the expression on Ahmad’s face in the following photo:

Click on this link to Mosaic Records for more information about the set’s discography.

Around 1958, when I first heard pianist Ahmad Jamal on many of the trio LP recordings that make-up the Mosaic boxed set, I was immediately reminded of Erroll Garner.

I was vaguely aware that both Ahmad and Erroll were born and raised in Pittsburgh, but I didn’t know that Garner was his “biggest influence” [Jamal speaking to drummer Kenny Washington during a 2003 KBGO radio interview, a transcription of which is included in the insert notes to the Mosaic boxed set].

For those readers who are not familiar with Erroll Garner’s inimitable piano playing, perhaps the following description of it may prove helpful:

“Unique is an inadequate word to describe Erroll Garner. He was a musical phenomenon unlike any other. One of the most appealing performers in jazz history, he influenced almost every pianist who played in his era, and even beyond. Self-taught, he could not read music, yet he did things that trained pianists could not play, or even imagine. Garner was a one-man swing band, and indeed often acknowledged that his main inspiration was the big bands of the thirties—Duke, Basie, Lunceford, et al. He developed a self-sufficient, extremely full style that was characterized by a rock-steady left hand that often sounded like a strumming rhythm guitar. Juxtaposed against this was a river of chordal and single-note ideas, frequently stated in a lagging, behind-the-beat way that generated terrific swing.”

- Dick Katz, Pianists of the 1940’s and 1950’s in Bill Kirchner, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz [New York: Oxford, 2000, p. 365]

The point in comparison between Garner and Jamal styles had to do with this part of the above quotation: “rock-steady left hand that often sounded like a strumming rhythm guitar. Juxtaposed against this was a river of chordal and single-note ideas, frequently stated in a lagging, behind-the-beat way that generated terrific swing.”

You can listen Erroll’s distinctive approach in the following YouTube; be patient as his patented, left-handed comping doesn’t really kick-in until 2:55 minutes.

But why did this comparison between Ahmad and Erroll come to mind as Jamal does not do what Garner does with his left-hand?

The “…river of chordal and single-noted ideas, et al.” struck a responsive chord [bad pun intended] as both pianists seem to gush forth with improvisatory ideas, but only Garner emphasized the rhythmic pulse of a piece by playing four-beats to the bar with his left-hand.

And then it dawned on me!

Jamal had substituted bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier in place of Garner’s left-hand thus freeing up both hands so that he could dart in and out of the time and play over the time using astounding runs, arpeggios, quotations from other tunes, counter-melodies and even counter-rhythms.

What sets all of this off is Jamal calculated use of space, something that rarely enters into Garner’s style because Erroll is always playing – there is no space.

As you can hear in the audio track to the above video, Garner can’t wait to finish one improvised phrase before starting another while Jamal, on the other hand, might play an idea, let it linger, leaving a space in which the bassist and the drummer continue to play before coming back into the tune again and exploring how other ideas might work. Jamal now had both hands free to build Garner-like orchestral creations.

Put another way, no Erroll Garner no Ahmad Jamal: Ahmad replaced Erroll’s always driving left hand with the always driving Israel Crosby-Vernel Fournier rhythmic pulse that he darted in and out of or played Erroll like orchestral phrases over.

But this wasn’t just any rhythm section that Ahmad was abandoning responsibility for the time to. With bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier he had a well-oiled rhythm machine.

Crosby was a master of the walking bass which Gunther Schuller defines as: “In Jazz, a line played pizzicato on a double bass in regular crotchets in 4/4 meter, the notes usually moving stepwise or in intervallic patterns not necessarily restricted to the main pitches of the harmony. The style arose as the use of stride piano patterns declined, …, it has since become lingua franca for Jazz bass players, allowing them to contribute pulse, harmony and countermelody simultaneously.” – The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz [p. 1257].

John Voight describes Crosby as “… one of the earliest virtuoso double bass players, capable of improvising melodic solos, rhythmically exciting accompaniment and scalar walking bass lines.” – The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz [p. 257].

Although he was one of the busiest drummers in Chicago by the time he joined Ahmad in 1958, Vernel Fournier was born and raised in New Orleans and his drumming never lost some of the syncopated, cadence feeling associated with the famous marching bands of the Crescent City.

According to Jack Chambers in Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis:

“Despite his exposure in Ahmad’s trio, Fournier never received full credit and remains relatively unknown, but he is a percussionist of extraordinary delicacy. Jack DeJohnette, a much younger Chicago drummer says, ‘One day I heard Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing [a Chicago nightclub], and I heard Vernel Fournier on drums. His brushwork was so incredible – I mean just impeccable.’” [New York: William Morrow, 1960,p.202]

Vernel’s drumming has a bounce, a jauntiness and a swagger to it that seems so characteristic of New Orleans in its heyday.

His brush work has a big fat, meaty sound, his stick work is clean and crisp and his time is flawless.

Fournier is from a period in Jazz drumming when it was almost an inviolable rule that whatever rhythmic figures you played on the snare and bass drum, you had to intersperse them within the cymbal beat.

No matter what else you played as accents, you had to keep the insistent chang-a-dang, chang-a-dang, chang-a-dang going.

This was also true of licks, kicks and fills; you played these in such a way as to return the music as neatly to the cymbal beat as possible.

[When using brushes on the snare drum, the “cymbal beat” was replicated with by crossing the right brush over a swirling pattern being made by the left brush.]

Momentum, swing, metronomic time – whatever you want to call it – were all driven off of a cymbal beat, preferably one that was in lock step with a walking bass line.

No bassist and drummer in the history of Jazz ever locked-in better in a trio format than Israel Crosby and Vernel Fournier.

Vernel also feathers the bass drum, another technique that was very much a part of modern drumming before the advent of the Elvin Jones and Tony Williams freer or looser style.

Feathering involves using the bass drum petal and the beater ball to lightly tap the bass drum, four-beats to the bar. It is a vestige of the earliest time in the history of Jazz when drummers carried the beat on the bass drum in a more pronounced manner.

Beginning with the bebop era in the 1940s, especially with some of the more frenzied tempos associated with bop, drummers took carrying the beat off the base drum and brought it up to the ride cymbal, using the hi-hat or sock cymbal to heavily accent only the second and fourth beat of each bar.

In effect, this loosened up the sound and the feel of the rhythm so that it fit better within bebop’s melodic and harmonic framework.

It also helped prevent the poor drummer’s foot from falling off while trying to play the bass drum constantly during some of bebop’s wickedly fast tempos.

Some drummers got caught up in the changer-over from traditional Jazz and swing to bop with the result that while they could play the looser feeling time on the cymbal or with brushes, they never got away from playing four-beats-to-the-bar with the bass drum.

Instead, they toned-it-down, hence the advent of feathering.

Given how quietly it is played, the feathered bass drum generally went unnoticed particularly with the loudness of brass and reed instruments in a bop combo.

However, in a piano-bass-drum configuration, the net effect of the feathered bass drum was to give depth to the pulse of the beat, make it more insistent and drive it more.

I always thought that that the combination of Israel Crosby’s superb walking bass and Vernel’s fat sounding brush work gave Ahmad’s trio a driving propulsion and forceful swing that other trios rarely achieved.

But whether it was due to my wonky ears, the manner in which the original LPs were recorded, or my under-performing audio playback system, I missed actually “hearing” the added ingredient in the Jamal’s trio swing: Fournier’s feathered bass drum.

However, because of the improved sound quality made possible by Mosaic’s digital transfers, the feathered bass drum is no longer hidden and is revealed throughout these recordings.

For example, as the time switches from a “two” feeling to a straight "four," you can hear Vernel’s feathering of the bass drum beginning at 1:55 on Angel Eyes, the Matt Dennis tune from the Mosaic series which is used as the audio track for the following YouTube tribute to the classic Ahmad Jamal Trio of 1957-1962.

Here’s are Kenny Washington’s thoughts about the tune:

“The Matt Dennis song Angel Eyes is one of the great torch songs of all time. Ol' Blue Eyes owned this one. I especially love the last lyric "scuse me while I disappear." A year earlier, Gene Ammons had had a hit with this standard. This tune is usually done as a ballad, but Ahmad takes it at a nice medium tempo. Ahmad reshapes the form of this standard like a sculptor, to fit the needs of the trio playing a chorus and a half of the melody. He uses the intro as an interlude. For the first chorus of his improvisation, he switches to the regular A-A-B-A song form of the tune. He then goes directly to the bridge and last A section with the interlude. This form is repeated again (bridge, last A and interlude). Listen to how he changes his dynamics to a pianissimo and brings back the bridge melody. The Gershwin classic It Ain't Necessarily So is quoted for a second time at the last A before the intro is again stated for a powerful ending. This is another one of those performances where there's a lot happening. This marvelous arrangement sounds so natural and the trio pulls it off with such ease.”

Listening to the recordings on the Mosaic 9-disc set, it’s hard to understand why a number of critics rejected Ahmad and the trio’s music at the time of their original release. John Hammond put it more strongly when he stated that Ahmad’s music during the period from 1957-1962 was “scorned by the critics but worshipped by musicians and public alike ….”

Even the enormous appeal of his music to the likes of Miles Davis was derisively described by the noted Jazz critic, Gary Giddins, as an “… overbaked … fascination.”

Martin Williams, another Jazz literary luminary, went even further when he stated that:

“Pianist Ahmad Jamal is a success: he has several best-selling LP's, a supper-club following (which otherwise displays little interest in jazz), and several direct imitators. He has also received the deeper compliment of having admittedly affected the work of an important jazzman. His success should surprise no one, and his effect on Miles Davis should prove (if proof were needed) that good art can be influenced by bad.

Clearly, Davis responds to some of Jamal's interesting and very contemporary harmonic voicings and the very light, and impeccably accurate rhythmic pulse of Jamal's trio, particularly in the support he got from his bassist, the late Israel Crosby, and from his drummer, Vernel Fournier. Further, Jamal has the same interest in openness of melody, space, and fleeting silence that Davis does. But for the trumpeter these qualities can be aspects of haunting lyric economy. For Jamal they seem a kind of crowd-titillating stunt work. Indeed, in a recital like "Ahmad Jamal at the Blackhawk," recorded in a San Francisco night club, it appears that Jamal's real instrument is not the piano at all but his audience. On some numbers, he will virtually sit things out for a chorus, with only some carefully worked out rhapsodic harmonies by his left hand or coy tinklings by his right. After that, a few bombastic block chords by both hands, delivered forte, will absolutely lay them in the aisles. And unless you have heard Ahmad Jamal blatantly telegraph the climax of a piece, or beg applause en route with an obvious arpeggio run which he drops insinuatingly on the crowd after he has been coasting along on the graceful momentum of Crosby and Fournier, then you have missed a nearly definitive musical bombast. …” Jazz Changes [New York: Oxford, 1992, p. 281].

But while Giddins, Williams and others thought Jamal’s approach to be limited and limiting, drummer Jack DeJohnette observed:

"Ahmad's always been his own man - way ahead of his time in terms of using space and chord voicings, which is one of the reasons Miles liked him so much. Ahmad knew how to get the most out of his instrument, so that a piano trio sounded like a symphony orchestra. He's a great organizer, and his concept is so sophisticated and intelligent, yet so loose and funky." [Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, pp. 202-203]

And Jack Chambers offers these engaging explanations by Ahmad:

To his persistent critics, Jamal replies, "Sometimes people don't identify with purity - that's what my music was then and that's what it is now. I've endured some of the harsh statements, but for every harsh statement there have been 99 complimentary ones. What I've done and am still doing is a product of years of blood, sweat and tears, and as long as I am completely secure in the knowledge that what I am doing is valid, then eventually even the most stupid critic has to acknowledge the validity of my work."

Part of the problem critics have with his music, according to Jamal, is that it is understated. "Anybody can play loudly," he says. "It is more difficult to play softly while swinging at that same level of intensity you can get playing fortissimo. To swing hard while playing quietly is one of the signs of the true artist." Almost completely overlooked by the most negative critics is Jamal's flawless technique. It is a virtue that other musicians, especially piano players, talk about with reverence. Cedar Walton says, "I never heard Ahmad even come close to playing anything without a great deal of technique, taste and timing. When he goes across the piano, he just doesn't ever miss a note - there's never any question. For me, that's still a great thrill, just to hear somebody do that." Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, p. 203]

Summing up Jamal genius, his influence and the significance of the Mosaic set, Michael Cuscuna offered these observations:

“He certainly exercised a profound influence on pianists and his trio set a new standard for what the piano trio in jazz would aim for and achieve. His knack for finding obscure but viable material which lent itself to a jazz treatment was equal to that of Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Rowles. But when Ahmad put an overlooked tune into circulation, it often stayed in the jazz repertoire forever thereafter. And with songs like "Poinciana" and "Billy Boy," it was Jamal's unique and imaginative re-arrangement of the tune which would become the standard form with which to play the piece.

Much like Miles Davis (who incidentally was greatly influenced by him), his influence is felt in music that attempts to replicate his and in great music that sounds nothing like his. But unlike musicians of similar or even lesser impact, the music of the 1957-62 Ahmad Jamal Trio has been mysteriously and distressingly hard to come by, even in the "reissue everything" era of the Compact Disc.

Literally years in the making, this set introduces 23 previously unreleased gems approved by the artist himself. It was delayed by a fire on the Universal Studios lot in California which took much of the original Jamal trio LP masters with it and our search to reconstruct the music on the set from a variety of analog and digital sources sitting in vaults around the world.

It's been a hell of a long time coming and we hope you enjoy The Complete Ahmad Jamal Trio Argo Sessions.”

Metamorphosis

2013-05-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

The term "metamorphosis" can mean a striking alteration in appearance and that certainly occurred in the body of work of the late artist Jackson Pollock [1912-1956] when he developed his technique which involved throwing paint on a canvass placed on the floor.

Metamorphosis is also the title of a tune that guitarist Peter Bernstein wrote for his Earth Tones [Criss Cross 1151] CD with Larry Goldings on Hammond B-3 organ and Bill Stewart on drums.

Given the editorial staff at JazzProfiles penchant for viewing art while listening to Jazz, we thought the two would go very well together.

See what you think.

Art Tatum – Sheer Brilliance

2013-05-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

“Tatum is the greatest Jazz pianist of all time, the songs he chose the very finest of a much-maligned but nonetheless sublime repertoire. That is why these performances are immortal, because they show the best player interpreting the best material in the best conditions….”

“Art Tatum was one of the major American creative artists of his epoch, not just in the Jazz context but in the sense of the arts generally. The claim may still seem a shade bombastic to those unaccustomed to searching for the muses in saloon bars and nightclubs, but it is true for all that. The wise fool takes his art where he finds it, and when Tatum was around, he found it in any number of small rooms whose only significant item of furniture was a piano.”

- Benny Green, Jazz author, essayist and critic [emphasis, mine]

“The enormity of Tatum’s achievements makes approaching him a daunting proposition even now.”

= Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jaz on CD, 6^th Ed.

I know that it may be hard to believe, but I didn’t know who Art Tatum was.

He died in 1956, just about the time that I stumbled into the world of Jazz by listening to a bunch of 78 rpm records that my parents had stashed the away in the basement [called a “cellar” in new England].

The closest I unknowingly came to Art’s approach to piano was Teddy Wilson’s playing with the Benny Goodman trio.

I discovered Art Tatum through a Norman Granz Clef LP that I found in a record store discount bin. The record sleeve was in pretty bad condition which may have been why it was on sale for 25 cents, a hefty sum for me in those days as you could see a double feature at the local movie house for that price.

The David Stone Martin cover art of a bust of Art’s head was intriguing to me so I thought I’d give it a try. Perhaps, Art playing would help me “see out a little,” to use pianist Barry Harris apt expression for expanding one’s view of Jazz.

Despite the record store owner’s reassurances, the LP was in horrible condition.

Listening to it was the aural equivalent of eating Rice Krispies cereal when the milk first hits it – all “snap, crackle and pop.”

I could have cared less as what came through immediately was the magnificence of Art Tatum’s piano playing. I’d never heard anything like it [nor have I ever heard anything like it since].

The sheer brilliance of Art’s piano interpretation literally took my breath away.

His technical command of the instrument and his effervescent improvisations are astonishing, so much so that I can only take his playing in limited bursts.

I simply can’t absorb anymore. It’s an exhausting pleasure to listen to his work.

Fortunately, for all of us in the Jazz World, there is plenty of it to listen to because Norman Granz, who did so many important things for the music and its makers during his lifetime, brought Art Tatum into the recording studio in the early 1950’s.

The rest is history as described in Benny Green’s insert notes to the eight volumes of Solo Masterpieces that Art recorded for Norman’s Clef label and which have all subsequently been reissued to CD on the Verve.

“In 1954, Art Tatum (1910-1956) began recording a series of performances for Norman Granz's Verve label which were to occupy the rest of his life. This series included 121 piano solos,* all of which were committed to tape without rehearsal or preamble or reference to stopwatch; Tatum simply sat at the keyboard, the machines were switched on and the marathon began.

It was, of course, a marathon for which the artist had inadvertently been preparing all his life, for Tatum's repertoire was as stupefying as the art he brought to it. As there is no such thing as a specialized Jazz repertoire, the Jazz musician has been obliged to commandeer for his own purposes a quite alien repertoire, originally conceived for the musical comedy or vaudeville stage, the song-plugger's booth, the celluloid charade. For which reason Tatum's marathon was a watershed in the history of popular music, for it represents the confluence of the two great indigenous streams in American musical life, Jazz and the Art Song.

Tatum is the greatest Jazz pianist of all time, the songs he chose the very finest of a much-maligned but nonetheless sublime repertoire. That is why these performances are immortal, because they show the best player interpreting the best material in the best conditions. There is a greater preponderance on this disc than on some of the others in the series of what might be called conventional Jazz making, always remembering that in the context of a musician like Tatum, a word like conventional is no more than comparative. Sweet Lorraine and Sunny Side of the Street are fairly straightforward examples of improvisations on a standard 32-bar theme, without recourse to many orchestral effects like key-changing or switches of tempo, although in Sweet Lorraine a few of the quotes are facetious.

Obviously the same comments do not apply to the ballads and the more ambitiously-structured songs, one of whose most revealing passages comes in the bridge of I Won't Dance, where Tatum's baroque harmonic ingenuity is confronted by the equally baroque stratagems of Kern's creative patterns; the result is an exercise in subtlety, the beautifying of an already beautiful composition. The variations in These Foolish Things are of quite a different order. As the performance gathers creative momentum, it becomes clear that Tatum sees this song as one of those whose contours suggest not so much an improvisation as a fantasia based on the original.

As early as 1933 Tatum had recorded his famous version of Tea for Two, in which the innocent structures of Vincent Youmans were made to perform dizzying modulatory cartwheels; something similar occurs in the last eight-bar section of the first chorus of These Foolish Things; by the end of the track we are faced with a sort of series of variations on a theme. Some of the very best Jazz moments of all come in In a Sentimental Mood, one of Duke Ellington's most sumptuous ballads, and in the altogether more direct piece She's Funny That Way is so great a piece of out-and-out ja// playing that if anyone else but Tatum had been responsible for it we would all have been running round frothing with excitement. It is interesting that on this track Tatum, restricting himself more or less to only three of his effects, crotchet-triplet runs, occasional flurries of semiquavers, and the contrasting measured tread of Stride left hand, still produces a solo rich and complex.

And as the final cadences of the final chorus of the final number of the final track fade away, marking the end of the most ambitious undertaking by a major Jazz figure, something remains to be said of the musician who rose to the challenge so triumphantly.

Art Tatum was one of the major American creative artists of his epoch, not just in the Jazz context but in the sense of the arts generally. The claim may still seem a shade bombastic to those unaccustomed to searching for the muses in saloon bars and nightclubs, but it is true for all that. The wise fool takes his art where he finds it, and when Tatum was around, he found it in any number of small rooms whose only significant item of furniture was a piano.

Tatum's piano solos reappear at a moment in social history when the fortunes of popular music are problematic. The age of live performances would seem to be in eclipse; now is the winter of our discotheque. For that reason Tatum's art is more vital than ever it was before, because it is a living proof that the artist of genius laughs at the limitations of his environment and sometimes even takes a truculent delight in brushing them aside. Tatum is a jewel in store for posterity, which might sound a little unfair. After all, as a cynic once asked, what has posterity ever done for us? In the case of Tatum, posterity has much to do. It has to come to terms with the greatest baroque musical artist so far produced by American culture. Tatum's day of reckoning will come. In the meantime, there remains this set of superlative piano solos. They will unquestionably prove to have been the outriders to his belated recognition.”

—Benny Green

[*Four additional solo tracks were recorded by Tatum at an August 1956 Hollywood Bowl concert. The long available material is included in Volume Eight.]

Art Tatum in Retrospect:

Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz – The First Century

“… if Tatum was a product of jazz, he was by no means a conventional jazz pianist and disdained the tag. He was too prolix to be an effective accompanist, and he was diminished rather than emboldened by collaboration. Although best known to the public for his piano-guitar-bass trio, which was modeled after Nat King Cole and inclined toward unison riffs and jokey juxtapositions, he was — like Chopin or Scriabin — a creator of sui generis piano music.

Tatum has always mystified jazz fans. … Too many jazz lovers are seduced by and dependent on the beat, which Tatum withholds and reshapes. What is most astonishing in his music is not the digital control, but the shifting harmonies and rhythms that he modulates and controls as no other musician has. His unequaled knowledge of chords profoundly influenced Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Charles Mingus, among others, but he used it as only a pianist can: in contrary patterns that demand parity for both hands, in rapid key substitutions, in entering and exiting chords at oblique angles. Oscar Peterson has speed, but his arpeggios are harmonically dim and therefore predictable. Tatum is as a rainbow, his music glimmers and cascades.”

Whitney Balliett, American Musicians

“Tatum did not fit comfortably in jazz, for his playing, which was largely orchestral, both encompassed it and overflowed it. He occupied his own country. His playing was shaped primarily by his technique, which was prodigious, even virtuosic. Tatum had an angelic touch: no pianist has got a better sound out of the instrument. He was completely ambidextrous. And he could move his hands at bewildering speeds, whether through gargantuan arpeggios, oompah stride basses, on-the-beat tenths, or single-note melodic lines. No matter how fast he played or how intense and complex his harmonic inventions became, his attack kept its commanding clarity….

Tatum was a restless, compulsive player who abhorred silence. He used the piano's orchestral possibilities to the fullest, simultaneously maintaining a melodic voice, a harmonic voice, a variety of decorative voices, and a kind of whimsical voice, a laughing, look-Ma-no-hands voice. The effect was both confounding and exhilarating.

Tatum had two main modes—the flashy, kaleidoscopic style he used on the job, and the straight-ahead jazz style, which emerges in fragments from his few after-hours recordings and from some of the recordings made with his various trios (piano, guitar, and bass), which seemed to galvanize him. (Tatum did not have an easy time playing with other instruments; he tended to compete with them, then overrun them.) He offered the first style to the public, which accepted it with awe, and he used the second to delight himself and his peers.”

Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists

“From roughly 1935 until the early 1940's most jazz pianists worked with some combinations of the elements heard in the playing of Johnson, Waller, Hines, and Wilson. Although the basic approach to playing jazz on the piano had reached, at least temporarily, a point of definition, there were many pianists who created original and influential styles out of these basic building blocks.

By all accounts it was Art Tatum (1910-1956) who cast the longest shadow among them. There has been no more complete master of the instrument, and to no other pianist does the cliché ‘a legend in his own time’ apply more readily. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Tatum played in local clubs and on the radio until he went to New York in 1932 as the accompanist for singer Adelaide Hall. The cornerstones of his music were the harmonies of Hines, the driving left hand of Waller, and the flowing, legato melody and moving left-hand tenths that he heard in the playing of young Teddy Wilson.

The most obvious difference between Tatum and the other pianists was his conspicuous virtuosity. Despite his extremely limited vision in one eye (to the extent that he was judged legally blind), Tatum seemed to play everything twice as fast as his peers, while increasing the level of swing and harmonic variety. His influence on other pianists was profound, if not devastating. It is said that he intimidated many of them into taking up other instruments. But Tatumesque passages are evident in the music of many undaunted pianists who followed him, especially in the music of Bud Powell (in his ballads), Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, and Hank Jones, though these are only a few of the most obvious examples.

Tatum's repertoire was vast but not otherwise unusual. Some of the songs he played early in his career-such as Tea for Two, Tiger Rag, Someone to Watch over Me, dozens more standards, and a few light classics-he continued to record in the 1950's. Yet he rarely repeated himself in his treatment of the material. His harmonic variations were startling, especially when he soloed. Where another pianist might go directly from one chord to the next, Tatum's left hand would walk crablike through a cycle of four to six new chords between the original two. Meanwhile, his right hand would spin out a web of interconnecting lines of thirty-second notes. Tatum could keep up these magnificent circumlocutions for eight bars or more and never drop a beat. Jazz pianists idolized Art Tatum….

During the forties Tatum worked frequently with a trio that included Slam Stewart on bass and Tiny Grimes on guitar. The group was celebrated for the intuitive communication among the players as well as for Tatum's blistering speed, as they achieved a unity of sound that was rare at any tempo.

While Tatum was virtually without deficiency as a pianist, his improvising sometimes amounted to ornate, if not rococo, interpretations of his material. There was no doubt that those ornaments were gorgeous, but they were at times more decorative than creative. Most of Tatum's music, however, is genuine artistry amplified by awesome virtuosity. Moreover, those who knew him claim that he played best of all beyond the reach of recorded history and without the inhibiting presence of the public or recording microphones, at private, after-hours parties.”

It is impossible to have a favorite Art Tatum recording, but if, mind you IF, I had to chose just one, it would be the version of Sweet Lorraine that accompanies the following video montage.

Jazz Vocal Groups (playlist)

2013-05-15T09:00:00.001-07:00

JazzHaus III: Oscar Pettiford and Jutta Hipp

2013-05-14T07:00:00.001-07:00

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has written extensively about the previously released CD’s on the JazzHaus label, all of which you can locate to the left of this feature in the blog sidebar.

JazzHaus has recently continued it’s CD issuance of “Lost Tapes” with Oscar Pettiford: The Lost Tapes,

Germany

1958-1959 [#101719] and Jutta Hipp: The Lost Tapes, The German Recordings , 1952-1955 [#101723].

Both bassist Pettiford and pianist Hipp were somewhat tragic figures in modern jazz history, each for different reasons, as Oscar died in an automobile accident in 1960 at the age of forty-eight and Jutta mysteriously turned her back on the music and retired from the scene in 1958 at the age of forty-three.

In addition to having more of Oscar and Jutta’s music available, the latest JazzHaus CD’s also provide an introduction to the less familiar, but nonetheless excellent, local Jazz musicians who were making the German Jazz scene a happening place in the 1950’s such as trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, pianist Hans Hammerschmid, clarinetist Rolf Kuhn, tenor saxophonists Hans Koller and Joki Freund, guitarist Attila Zoller, bassist Franz “Shorty” Roeder and drummers Karl Sanner and Rudi Sehring.

Ulli Pfau produced both CD’s and wrote these insert notes after which you’ll find tribute video montages celebrating both Oscar and Jutta with audio tracks selected from these new CDs.

PIONEER OF THE BASS

“Oscar Pettiford first arrived in

Germany

in 1958 and could scarcely believe the enthusiasm with which his music was received. Not that he had ever been short of success - even before Charlie Parker's breakthrough he had been a bebop pioneer in his quintet with Dizzy Gillespie. This was the dawn of a new jazz era - one that heralded the bass as a solo instrument. In Stuttgart, Pettiford met up with Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who invited him to studio recordings and enlisted the finest soloists Europe had to offer at the time: Hans Koller and Attila Zoller; Dusko Goykovich, Hans Hammerschmid, Rolf Kuhn. Kenny Clarke and Lucky Thompson flew in from Paris. Everyone extolled his bold melodic ideas, the bounce and swing of his playing. Between autumn 1958 and the summer of 1959, the sessions resulted in historic recordings -standards, mostly, which gave the alternating ensembles a harmonic orientation.

Pettiford's brisk but elegiac duo with Goykovich in Gershwin's But Not For Me; gossamer-like, Lucky Thompson in Sophisticated Lady, followed by Koller with an uber-cool interpretation of The Nearness Of You and a bass solo; then Pettiford shows his cello skills in All The Things You Are.

O.P. moved to Baden-Baden, later Copenhagen, touring and playing frenetically - like a man possessed. He died following a car accident in September 1960. His colleagues played charity concerts for Pettiford's children, whose welfare had always been his primary concern - he himself had been one of fourteen brothers and sisters.”

[Bassist Oscar Pettiford performing his orignal composition "Blues in the Closet" with Hans Koller on tenor saxophone, Attila Zoller on guitar, Hans Hammerschmid on piano and drummer Kenny Clarke.]

DEAR JUTTA

“A woman from Leipzig. By the age of 13, Jutta Hipp had completed her classical piano studies. With the war in full flow she embarked on an art degree and got to know all the jazz greats of the day: Emil and Albert Mangelsdorff, Joki Freund, Hans Koller, whose admiration for Lester Young would wonderfully complement her own relaxed performance style. A redhead with striking good looks, hypersensitive and outrageously talented - she quickly became an object of attention in the early 1950s. The great Leonard Feather wrote ‘Dear Jutta’ and promised her a great career in the

USA

. So in late 1955 she left for New York. Alfred Lion signed her to Blue Note; three recordings in just eight months; an object of awe in the clubs - the "Frauleinwunder".

And then it was all over as quickly as it had started. She fell out with Feather, withdrew from the jazz scene altogether, ran into financial difficulties, turned to drink. In 1958 she found a job as a seamstress in Queens, took photographs, painted in her spare time. She retired in 1995, devoted herself to making traditional dolls. She died in 2OO3, aged 78, reclusive, alone. She had never been back to

Germany

Her volume of work is slender and erratic. The Koblenz recordings from November 1952 reveal a precocious talent: entirely at ease in the standards, creatively original with the tunes and headstrong in improvisation. Dieter Zimmerle's studio recordings with her quintet were made just before she left for the

USA

- and what a legacy it turned out to be! What Is This Thing Called Love? asks Cole Porter of all the great jazz soloists. Jutta Hipp had an answer. But she never told anyone.”

[Pianist Jutta Hipp performing "Daily Double" with Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Joki Freund on tenor saxophone, Franz "Shorty" Roeder on bass and Karl Sanner on drums.]

Jazz Drummers (playlist)

2013-05-12T11:35:00.001-07:00

Meet Ralph Bowen - From The Archives

2013-05-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

“In a way, the entire act of music is mind put into sound. It has to go through some sort of physical medium in order to be heard. I chose the saxophone, but the whole issue is to have such control over the instrument and over what you hear that the instrument physically doesn't get in the way of visualizing sound. Technique to me means dealing with an instrument in the most efficient manner possible so that it's no more than peripheral to expression." – Ralph Bowen

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The above quotation from Ralph Bowen says it all; I've never seen a more succinct explanation of what's involved in the process of making Jazz.

When this feature posted to the blog on February 15, 2010, it did so without a video "example" of Ralph's music.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles with the assistance of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra has since remedied that as you'll see when you come to the end of this feature.

In celebration, we thought we'd re-post the piece as a new way of "meeting" Ralph Bowen once again.

Twice a year, every year, Gerry Teekens, owner of Dutch-based Criss Cross Records, makes a spring and winter Jazz pilgrimage to New York City to record a handful of up-and- coming Jazz musicians.

For some of these musicians, the Criss Cross albums that ensue from these trips are the only recorded exposure they ever get under their own name.

For Jazz fans like me who are without easy access to the scene on the East Coast, these recordings have proved to be an invaluable introduction to the music of some fine, young players.

For example, without Gerry Teekens’ efforts, I may have missed hearing the likes of pianists David Hazeltine, trumpeter John Swana and guitarist Peter Bernstein; all of whom have been featured on JazzProfiles.

Criss Cross Records also helped acquaint me with the work of tenor saxophonist Ralph Bowen, who combines the sound that John Coltrane and Michael Brecker get on the horn, along with their approach to harmony, with a style of improvisation that is very smooth, sinuous and sonorous. He technical command of the instrument is such that his playing creates the sense that he is almost effortlessly gliding through the music.

Ralph appears on trumpeter Jim Rotondi’s latest Criss Cross disc entitled The Move [1323] and a full list of Ralph’s recordings on the label can be found by going here.

And Ralph has his own website.

The following insert notes by Ted Panken from Ralph’s Soul Proprietor Criss Cross [1216] may serve as a starting point for familiarizing JazzProfiles readers with Ralph Bowen and his music. Of particular interest in what follows may be Ralph’s interesting descriptions of what he finds special about each of his saxophones heroes. In addition to being a very fine Jazz musician, Ralph is very literate and articulate when it comes to talking about the music and describing how he goes about the process of making it.

“It's ironic that saxophonist Ralph Bowen, who lives in central New Jersey, a mere 40 minutes from New York City, is heard most often on Philadelphia bandstands. There he appears not infrequently with Shirley Scott and Trudy Pitts, veteran avatars of feel-good, toe-tapping organ jazz that transcends the grits-and-cheesesteak function. That's the way they've liked it in Philly since Jimmy Smith started spinning out his wild flights of fancy in the 1950s, inspiring other such distinguished homegrowns as Charles Earland, Don Patterson, and Joey DeFrancesco.

So, as Bowen puts it, "when Gerry Teekens asked me to do an organ date, it only made perfect sense." He interprets the enspiriting genre masterfully on Soul Proprietor, pairing up on the front line with Philadelphia trumpet-EWI king John Swana - a Criss Cross veteran and Bowen associate of long standing in various units led by local bass icon Charles Fambrough - and deploying the breathe-as-one rhythm section of organist Sam Yahel, guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Brian Blade, with four years behind them as a working New York unit. He draws upon the lingua franca forms of modernist jazz - a Rhythm variant [I Got Rhythm], a fast blues, a Coltrane form, a Songbook ballad, a Joe Henderson standard - and imparts to them his personal stamp, masking their genesis with clever reharmonizations and rhythmic manipulations that fire the creative juices of the intuitive young virtuosi, whose ability to spontaneously compose as a unit imparts to the music a fresh, orchestrated sound.

Bowen uses Bernstein as a third horn voice at several points on Soul Proprietor; they're old friends from Rutgers, where the guitarist studied with the late Ted Dunbar, but had never worked together. "Peter's sense of time and phrasing are great," Bowen says, "and I like his comping. But one thing that really strikes me is the way he arpeggiates extended vertical structures in an eighth-note type of line to make them feel linear in essence.

"Sam swings hard with his left hand, and the way he uses sustain on the organ, juxtaposed against the more percussive-rhythmic aspect of the comping, inspired me to play in specific ways that I wouldn't otherwise have done.

"As for Brian, I was thrilled that he wanted to make the date. Brian uses space exceptionally well, and I love the colors he gets out of the drums and cymbals. He interprets the various sections of the piece differently; he develops each piece as though it were through-composed."

Consider Bronislaw Kaper's Invitation, the set-opener. Bowen writes a subtle counter melody on the bridge, then spins a surging, rhythmically fluid solo over a dynamic straight-eighth pulse; after Swana's probing statement, the rhythm section morphs into insouciant 4/4 swing for an elegant Bernstein turn. Then hear the title track, a fast 8-bar blues predicated on the changes to John Coltrane's "Resolution." Bernstein kicks off with two choruses of fleet-but-never-rushed melodic invention over Blade's loping four, then tenor and trumpet state the theme as a brisk interlude. Bowen hurtles into a solo that traverses the horn's range on an enormous, buoyant cushion of sound. Yahel ingeniously deploys the aforementioned organ sustain on his immaculate, mercurial comp, then solos with guitaristic grit, eating up the advanced partials in the manner of his stylistic model - Larry Young. Swana takes a clarion final lap.

Only musicians with the entire tradition in their bones and sinews can pull off performances that tweak it so lucidly. As Bowen remarks, "I try not to have anything worked out beforehand when I play, and just let things happen. I've immersed myself in singling people out, studying them and trying to get to their essence - to find the one thing about them that embodies what and who they are and identify how it will help me become a better musician."

Then Bowen precisely describes the essences of his heroes. "When I think about playing the saxophone, I visualize Charlie Parker for his physical approach, which facilitated the content of everything he played," he says. "I think he had complete control of mind over matter. I love Cannonball Adderley's spirit, his uplifting joyfulness and bounce, his sense of time and freedom, his flexibility over the barline and in changing keys. Coltrane for me embodies the quality of horizontal air flow, imparting velocity to the line, being able to play a line from the bottom to the top of the horn with no drop-out, so that every note speaks. With Sonny Rollins it's his spontaneous interpretation of ballads, his augmentations and diminutions to stretch and pull and compress the rhythmic aspect of a melody. I look to Joe Henderson for establishing rhythmic points of departure and of cadence so that when you play over the bar-line, you don't need to think about hitting one - it's a gestural approach. The drummer Carl Burnett pointed that out to me when we were playing with Horace Silver years ago. I can't begin to describe how much I've learned from drummers over the years. I try to sit with them on the plane or the bus, and pick up as much as I can.

"In a way, the entire act of music is mind put into sound. It has to go through some sort of physical medium in order to be heard. I chose the saxophone, but the whole issue is to have such control over the instrument and over what you hear that the instrument physically doesn't get in the way of visualizing sound. Technique to me means dealing with an instrument in the most efficient manner possible so that it's no more than peripheral to expression."

On the ballad My Ideal, waxed indelibly by Coleman Hawkins in 1943, it's evident that Bowen - out of Guelph, Ontario, the early student of Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, Wardell Gray, and Stan Getz played this sort of Songbook material in regional dance bands from the age of 12 - is visualizing the plush timbres of old-school heart-on-the-sleeve tenor saxophony through a modernist Rollinsesque prism. His intensely flowing melodic variations inspire operatic declamations from Bernstein and Yahel.

Even the most jaded observer of hardcore jazz will take pleasure in Spikes, a cleverly disguised Rhythm changes form of the leader's construction. Bowen double-times Coltranesque intervals with the precision of Sonny Stitt, another early influence. "He's like a textbook for lines," Bowen remarks self -descriptively. "You could throw a dart near the end of the page and know he's going to land on one after four groups of 16th notes." Bowen's final chorus is a fierce unaccompanied duet with Swana that springboards the trumpeter into his solo.

"John and I have worked in various quintet situations for the past two years, and we do a lot of duo playing live," Bowen says. "From the first time we tried it, we seemed to hook up without any effort. I don't think twice about where he is in terms of the one or the form, because his internal rhythmic clock is so good; it's possible to play over the back side of the beat or over the barline, and not worry that he'll interpret it the wrong way."

Under A Cloud is an evocative Bowen-composed slow waltz; the lovely melody "states and restates itself a few times while the harmony is moving down; I was trying to make use of a minor VII-augmented V chord in a somewhat unconventional manner."

Bowen's trumpet-tenor line on The First Stone, a blues with a bridge based on a sequence of fourths, is the composer's homage to "Unity," a classic date led by Larry Young - who came up in Newark, a mere hour from Philly - with Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson. All members solo with panache and heat, particularly Yahel, whose slow-building solo reminds you of a bear coming to grips with fresh prey.

A pair of rearrangements of the canon follow. Joe Henderson's whirling Inner Urge is one of the tenor legend's numerous jazz standards. "I hadn't played it for quite some time, but came back to it recently," Bowen relates. "The arrangement, the introduction and the interlude come from the second part of the tune that I put into 3/4 and harmonized." Note Blade's inventive concluding solo. On Meltdown Bowen brings John Coltrane's "Countdown" down a whole step and punctuates the theme in 7/2 meter, morphing into 4/4 on the blowing sections. Blade's seamless beats and Yahel's insinuating bassline give the comp an organic feel, and Bowen, Swana and Bernstein create surging, joyful statements.

For a coda, Bowen offers a moving "a cappella" reading of Peace by Horace Silver, his employer from 1988 to 1991, while he was a member of O.T.B., the popular Blue Note-organized "young lion" band whose personnel included Bowen's close friend Ralph Peterson, saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Steve Wilson, and pianists Renee Rosnes and Kenny Drew, Jr. The lessons he learned in both outfits deeply inflect the sound of Soul Proprietor.

"From playing with Horace, I learned structure and form, and most importantly, how you can define the sound of a group in composition and arranging," says Bowen, who for several years has held the position of coordinator of the noted jazz studies program at Rutgers University . "Horace comps with a plan; it starts somewhere and ends somewhere. His tunes have an introduction, an interlude, with inner voices moving, and this gives them a character. I don't think I played a single tune with him that didn't have some sort of arrangement.

Keen attention to detail applied with a light touch is the hallmark of Soul Proprietor throughout, and it makes the album a signpost document in the Philadelphia-style organ-and-horns canon. In Bowen's able hands, the redoubtable function is equally as suitable for extending the parameters of the imagination as it is for finger-snapping and rump-rolling."

Ted Panken Downbeat, Jazziz, WKCR

The tune on the following video is entitled Soul Proprietor on which Ralph is joined by John Swana on trumpet, Peter Bernstein on guitar, Sam Yahel on Hammond B-3 Organ and Brian Blade on drums.

Birdlike Backwards

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The version on the following video of Freddie Hubbard’s Birdlike by drummer Tony Williams’ quintet does everything backwards from the regimen usually followed in a typical Jazz performance.

Instead of stating and then re-stating the 12-bar blues line [melody] of Birdlike and then going on to build solos on the tune by various members of the quintet, Tony’s adaptation puts everything in reverse order.

Played at a very crisp tempo, Birdlike begins when tenor saxophonist Billy Pierce literally jumps into the tune with a solo. But instead of completing his solo, he proceeds to trade 12-bar exchanges with trumpeter Wallace Roney until 0:58 minutes; then they switch to trading 4’s until 0:19; then 2’s with simultaneously soloing following at 1:38 minutes.

Bassist Ira Coleman begins his solo almost in the middle of the tune at 1:54 minutes.

After which pianist Mulgrew Miller comes in to solo until the horns return at 2:25 playing riffs behind him.

The band doesn’t play the melody until 2:41 minutes have elapsed and it takes but 30 seconds of so to state it in unison before Tony plays a closing tag solo beginning at 3:08.

3:32 seconds of churning powerful Jazz played in a most unusual format.

“The Sound of Surprise,” anyone?

Red Garland: Graceful and Bluesy

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It seemed to be over so fast for William “Red” Garland.

One minute he’s making all those great Prestige and Columbia records as the pianist with the classic Miles Davis quintet that also featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer “Philly” Joe Jones, but after 1959, he seemed somehow to become relegated to total obscurity.

Bill Evans and then Wynton Kelly replaced him with Miles and, with the advent of the 1960’s, Jazz clubs began to close calling for great adjustments by those who continued to work in the music.

Red was not one of the Jazz musicians who successfully navigated the sea of changes that swept over the Jazz World, returning instead to Dallas and choosing to live in his father’s home in a state of virtual retirement.

The recordings that “Red” made with Miles and under his own name for Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records during his brief period of ascendancy were my first introduction to what some referred to as an “East Coast Jazz rhythm section.”

Red along with Paul Chambers and “Philly” Joe Jones opened a whole new world for me of keeping time and playing behind horns in a style that was on top of the beat, hard driving and full of intensity.

The epitome of what Red, Paul and “Philly” Joe got going as a rhythm section was contained on their trio performance of Billy Boy on the Miles Davis Milestones LP. I practiced to it so often that I learned to play every accent, fill and solo that Philly Joe Jones plays on this track from memory.

Before he faded from the Jazz scene, Red also made a series of recordings for Prestige as a leader and as a sideman for John Coltrane that included, in addition to Chambers and Jones, bassists George Joyner, Sam Jones, Peck Morrison and Wendell Marshall, as well as, drummers Art Taylor, Specs Wright, Charlie Persip, Frank Gant and Larry Ridley.

But whether he was out front or just on the date, and irrespective of who joined him in the rhythm section, the “feel” and sound of Red’s approach to the piano remained essentially the same.

“Graceful yet unaffectedly bluesy, Red Garland's manner was flexible enough to accommodate the contrasting styles of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane in the Davis quintet of the mid-1950s. His many records as a leader, beginning at about the same period, display exactly the same qualities. His confessed influences of Tatum, Powell and Nat Cole seem less obvious than his debts to Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal, whose hit recording of Billy Boy from the early 1950’s seems to sum up everything that Garland would later go on to explore.

All of the listed trio sessions feature the same virtues: deftly fingered left-hand runs over bouncy rhythms, coupled with block-chord phrasing which colored melodies in such a way that Garland saw no need to depart from them. Medium-up-tempo treatments alternate with stately ballads, and Chambers and Taylor are unfailingly swinging, if often constrained, partners. The later sessions feature a slightly greater empathy, but we find it very hard to choose a favorite among these records.” [Richard Cook and Brian Morton, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed., p. 548].

In this excerpt from his interview with Len Lyons, “Red” described how it all began for him:

“When did you begin playing piano?

I didn't begin on piano. In fact, I never played the piano until I was in the army. You couldn't call me a child prodigy. I started on clarinet because my father wanted me to. It was his idea. He loved Benny Goodman, so he wanted me to play the clarinet. The truth is I've always wanted to play trumpet. At least I did then. At the dances we used to go to as kids, the brass section seemed to have the most fun. They'd sit there with the trumpets across their laps, clapping to the music.

I took up the piano when I ran across Lee Barnes, a pianist in the army band. He started teaching me how to play, and I soon grew to love it. He inspired me. Nobody had to tell me to practice because I was playing piano all day. Lee even wrote out exercises for me. When I left the army, I bought an exercise book by Theodore Presser, and that was a great help to me.

In 1945 I played my first gig on piano. It was with a tenor player, Bill Blocker, who had a quartet in Fort Worth, Texas. We played mostly in the dance halls. During those years I was listening to Count Basie. He was my first favorite. He didn't have a lot of technique, but I thought he was very tasty. I started to copy him for a while. Then I began to copy Nat "King" Cole, who was more of a pianist than most people know. He was tasty, too, and he didn't have a bad technique. Then [trumpeter Oran] Hot Lips Page came to town with his band. We used to call him just Lips. Anyway, his piano player got fired while the band was down in Texas. I think it might have been because of drunkenness. Then Buster Smith, the alto saxophonist, came to my house at four o'clock in the morning to tell me to hurry and get dressed because Lips wanted me to go with him. I told him, no, I wasn't ready. I wasn't good enough yet. But they talked me into it anyway, and we toured all the way across the country into New York City.

When I got to New York, I ran into the tenor player Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, and I asked him where all the good piano players were. He told me Bud Powell was about the baddest cat in town. ‘Who's Bud Powell?’ I asked him. ‘Don't worry, you're going to find out,’ he told me. Well, one night I was working at Minton's with Max Roach, and I looked over toward the door, and in walked Bud. I could hardly play because of everything I had heard about him. I froze. Bud came over and started forcing me off the bench. ‘Let me play,’ he kept saying to me. ‘Let me play.’ Max was yelling to me, ‘No! Get him away. Keep him away from the piano.’ Max was afraid he was crazy or something and was going to ruin the gig. I got up anyway. I figured if Bud wanted to play that bad, I wasn't going to stand in his way. Well, he sat down at the piano and scared me to death-he played so much piano! I told Max, ‘I quit! Give him the job!"’See, Bud took my cool.

But a few days later I went over to Bud's house, and he showed me some things. In fact, I came back day after day to learn from him, and we became buddies. He was really friendly to me and the greatest influence on me of any pianist, except for Art Tatum. I still don't believe Art Tatum was real.

There was a club named Luckey's [Rendezvous], owned by Luckey Roberts, and it was just for piano players - no bass or drums allowed. There's where we'd separate the men from the boys, when you can't lean on the bass or drums. Art Tatum was a frequent visitor there, and I'd stand over his shoulder to watch what he was doing. One night he stood behind me as I was playing. ‘You're forcing,’ he told me. ‘You're forcing. Don't play the piano. Let the piano play itself.’ I was tight, so he gave me that piece of advice, and I've always remembered it. He gave me some arpeggios to work on, too, and I'm still working on them.

Then I was working in a small club in Boston with Coleman Hawkins when Miles [Davis] came in to hear me. He told me during the intermission that he wanted to get a group together with me on piano, Philly Joe, Curly Russell on bass, and Sonny Rollins on tenor. Two weeks later I heard Sonny couldn't get released from his rehabilitation program, so I left town for Philadelphia. A while later I got a telegram from Miles asking me if I knew anyone in Philadelphia who could play tenor sax. I told him I knew a cat named John Coltrane, and Miles asked me, ‘Can he play?’ and I told him, ‘Sure he can.’ John and I met Miles in Baltimore. Meanwhile, Miles had found a kid out of Detroit, named Paul Chambers, and he played bass for us. Philly Joe was still on drums. We had never played together until the night of our first gig, so we got together about five in the afternoon and jammed. From the opening tune we clicked. We just clicked right away, and that was that. We stayed together from '55 to January 1959. I did a few trio gigs by myself and then went home, like I told you.” [The Great Jazz Pianists Speaking of Their Lives and Music, pp. 146-147].

With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles put together the following video tribute to Red with he along with Paul Chambers and “Philly Joe Jones” featured on their memorable performance of Billy Boy.

Deborah Latz – An Accomplished Artist

2013-05-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

"Deborah is a beautiful singer and a great talent. Fig Tree is wonderful. Really wonderful!"

— Sheila Jordan, 2012 NEA Jazz Master

"... few are in Deborah Latz's league..."

— Scott Yanow, L.A. Jazz Scene

"...a bold singer with a strong sense of her own musical identity."

— Suzanne Lorge, NYC Jazz Record

"She draws out the melodies, making each note count, and may be one of the finest balladeers in some time."

— Kyle O'Brien, Jazz Society of Oregon's Jazz Scene

I’m always hesitant to call anyone a “Jazz vocalist” these days because I think the connotation of what that implies is different now.

It’s almost as though the use of that reference consigns someone back to the days when Pops, Ella, Billie Holiday, Mel Torme, Peggy Lee and others vocalists of that ilk reigned supreme.

It’s an unfair comparison because the nature of the contemporary music scene is much broader and much more cosmopolitan and provides a Jazz-oriented vocalist with a more sweeping array of influences.

Today, there is no New Orleans scene, Chicago scene, New York scene, West Coast scene, et al. These local, cultural entrepôts have been replaced by a music scene that is international in scope and one that affords myriad, world music influences.

Today’s Jazz is more diffuse, more diverse.

But according to bassist and author Bill Crow, “Jazz is supposed to be fun,” and today’s young performers seem to be having a good time coloring Jazz with Acid Rock, South African chants, Indian Raga rhythms and a whole host of other, stylistic elements.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that today Jazz vocalist is going to come at the music with many new and different musical perspectives. Therein, lies the blessing or the curse of the interesting times in which they live [to paraphrase the Chinese proverb].

How do you find your own style as a Jazz vocalist today with all these competing influences?

Enter Deborah Latz!

Deborah’s latest CD – Fig Tree – is scheduled for release today, May 7, 2013 and it is an artistic feast for the senses, let alone, one’s Jazz sensibilities.

The artwork and graphics under the direction of Kristopher Pelletier and Todd Weinstein’s photographs of Deborah that populate the jewel case make the CD a joy to behold and to hold.

The recording and mixing of Michael Brorby, the mastering of Gene Paul and the attention to detail of co-producer Don Flagg has created a recorded sound so intimate you’d swear you were sitting in the middle of the music as it is being performed.

And the musicianship on display here is simply startling; it’s what differentiates the recording from so many of today’s self-produced efforts.

Deborah Latz has something to say and she has the talent and the ability to say it.

Deborah Latz is not putting on airs, she’s not aping or miming or imitating, she is an accomplished Jazz vocalist in her own right.

She is accomplished in the fullest meaning of the word: highly trained, skillful, finished, complete, polished, refined, realized.

Deborah’s Jazz vocals have a presence and once you’ve been in their presence your enraptured by it.

When she sings the following lyrics from the legendary Alberta Hunter’s I’m Having a Good Time she infuses them with such a strong mixture of sincerity and humor that you find yourself nodding with approval:

“I’m livin’ my life while I’m livin’

‘cause tomorrow I may die.

That’s why I’m havin’ a ball today,

And I ain’t passin’ nothin’ by.

Her voice is rich; her enunciation is clear; she has a great sense of time. And depending on the mood she is trying to evoke, Deborah’s voice has just the right amount of punch and pop or just enough gentleness and tenderness. She is in command because she knows what she is doing and she knows what she wants to do.

Deborah Latz is an accomplished artist and so are the musicians who work with her on Fig Tree: pianist Jon Davis, guitarist John Hart, bassist, Roy Parker, drummer Willard Dyson and guest stars Peter Apfelbaum on tenor sax and percussion and the voice of Abdoulaye Diabate.

All of them are interesting soloists and Deborah offers generous dollops of the solo spotlight to each of them throughout the CD’s fourteen tracks. In this regard, she reminds me of vocalist Tierney Sutton who maintains that “I make music with the guys in the band, not in spite of them.”

I’ve mentioned this previously in blog features - when I’m listening to a Jazz artist for the first time, I need some place to set my ears – something that gives me a known frame of reference in which to understand what the vocalist/musician is doing with and in the music.

There are a number of such reference points on Fig Tree.

But although you are familiar with Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies, or Randy Weston ‘s Hi-Fly with Jon Hendricks’ lyrics, or Jobim’s Corcovado [Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars] with Gene Lees’ lyrics, you’ve never heard them rendered like this before. This is where the diversity and diffused musical influences are brought to bear and they serve to help make Deborah a Jazz vocalist of her time.

You Are and She Was are lyrical love poems penned by Deborah and she also contributes another original as the title tune Fig Tree which as Scott Yanow describes in his insert notes “weaves a fantastical tale using offbeat phrasing, unusual syllables and unexpected sounds with swinging bass and drums. Deborah’s whimsical lyrics surprise and delight.”

Scott’s always masterful insert notes afford the following background information on Deborah and “the guys in the band.”

“Inventive, edgy, fearless, delicate, fun, a passion for music — these are some of the words Deborah Latz brings to mind. A consummate performer, Deborah gives us a range of expression extending from intimate to raucous to otherworldly, and all with a beautiful voice. Following her previously acclaimed discs, Toward Love and Lifeline, Fig Tree is a wide-ranging and ambitious project, backed by a remarkable set of players, that includes acid jazz, spellbinding ballads, songs in Portuguese and Greek, and three originals worthy of becoming new standards.

Latz attacks each genre with verve and style, demonstrating skills reminiscent of Mel Torme in her purity and pitch, but also of Joao Gilberto when she brings us to velvety intimate moments. Deborah has a distinctive sound that matches her broad musical interests — gentle pianissimo at times, and edgy and brassy when she is showing us a spark of fire. And, like Betty Carter, she can deconstruct a song to create a surprising new sound, uniquely her own.

In June 2011, Latz formed a group with pianist Jon Davis, guitarist John Hart, and bassist Ray Parker. Within a short time, they knew they needed to record the magic that they were creating. Deborah notes, ‘We found an organic place, where we all created in the moment. Taking our time, the ideas started to flow, and within just a few sessions we found our groove. I realized we had to capture it, while it was still fresh.’

Jon Davis, who played and recorded with the late, great bassist Jaco Pastorius, is a superbly skilled and exceptionally intuitive pianist. ‘I feel a musical telepathy with Jon,’ Latz said. ‘We challenge one another, and suddenly we're moving, dancing, down an unexpected and unknown path. It's exhilarating!’

John Hart, known for his long tenure with organ master Jack McDuff has also played guitar with trumpeter Randy Brecker and jazz singer Jon Hendricks, among other greats. ‘John is a connoisseur of the guitar. And he has a sly sense of humor — in a flash second he can send us off in an entirely new direction!’ Latz observes, ‘We always have a super great time!’

Bassist Ray Parker, who worked with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and vocalist Bobby McFerrin, has a distinctive sound and impressive versatility, highlighted here in some outstanding duets and solos. ‘Like when Ray gets behind the wheel and puts the pedal to the metal, he is always on the move,’ Latz explains. ‘Yet at times, when he takes on a slow ballad, he can create some of the most languid, sensitive lines.’

Willard Dyson, who joined the group on drums, has worked regularly with singers Michael Franks, Regina Belle, and Jimmy Scott. Dyson is both a powerful player and very sympathetic in his support of the lead voices. ‘Willard can funk it up! His rhythmic choices are inspired and unconventional, it's a thrill to play together!’

Avant garde jazz instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum and singer Abdoulaye Diabate are special guests on Fig Tree. ‘I heard Peter play with Omar Sosa at the Blue Note in May 2011 and I was blown away,’ remembers Deborah. ‘He played the flute, put it down, blew the tenor, put it down, and went on to various Brazilian and African percussion instruments. Every one of them amazing! I knew at that moment I'd like him to play on my CD.’ And later, Latz heard Diabate sing with Apfelbaum’s band, Hieroglyphics. ‘Abdoulaye is an extraordinarily gifted Griot (storyteller) singer from

Mali

, and I am so happy that he lent his soulful voice, and heart, to my original, She Was.'

Nancy Hudgins of Ann Braithewaite find team at Braithwaite & Katz sent along the following media relations information about Deborah’s forthcoming Fig Tree CD:

“From the opening selection, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" with an acid jazz feel, to Latz' offbeat and eccentric title track "Fig Tree," to a beautiful and haunting piano duet on Mercer and Mancini's, "Moon River," Deborah Latz' third CD, Fig Tree, is a breakout performance, proving her artistic mastery as vocalist, songwriter and arranger. The CD will be released on the June Moon Productions (JMP) label on May 7, 2013.

Latz' recording career began in 2004 with her debut CD, Toward Love featuring Jimmy Wormworth, which earned immediate praise: "Her voice rings with a fetching richness...I'm Bewitched." (Dan McClenaghan, AllAboutJazz.com,) "...one of the BEST new voices I've heard in a LONG time...." (Jan Jenson, Jazz Now). Her 2008 sophomore release Lifeline featuring Joel Frahm, received even wider critical acclaim: "’I Didn't Know’ hits glory strides a la Carla White." (Fred Bouchard, DownBeat). "I hadn't heard this lady until I played 'Lifeline,' but I'm now an ardent fan." (Steve Emerine, Arizona Daily Star), "...a sensibility that incites a lyric with her innate dramatic instincts..." (Alan Bargebuhr, Cadence). "Latz knows how to deliver the songs with a different slant... jazz vocal fans have a new star to celebrate."(Chris Spector, Midwest Record).

Latz comes to jazz after an award-winning career in dramatic and musical theater, where she garnered a Best Actress Award at the Jerzy Grotowski Theatre Festival in

Poland

for her one-woman performance of Juliet, and recorded the original song, "I'm Neurotic Over You" for the off-Broadway comedy, High Infidelity starring John Davidson and Morgan Fairchild. Latz received rave reviews in New York and Europe for Travels With Ma Own Self, the one-woman musical that she wrote, produced and performed. She studied theater at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford,

England

, and in New York City with Richard Edelman best known for his work with the Living Theater and the Neighborhood Playhouse.

With a creative take on both the Great American Songbook and contemporary jazz, Latz has recorded dynamic and unpredictable interpretations of standards on Fig Tree, and her original pieces are, indeed, worthy of becoming new standards.

On "Blue Skies" Latz shows her funk chops, and allows the lyrics to breath, while offering some signature scatting. John Hart sets up hip, clean guitar lines, while Ray Parker and Willard Dyson hold down the rhythm on bass and drums. Latz' original and title track, "Fig Tree" weaves a fantastical tale combining offbeat syllables and unexpected sounds with a swinging bass and drums. Latz' whimsical lyrics surprise and delight, and the solos alternate in and out of time with Latz, Davis and Hart clearly digging in and having a ball. "You Are" another Latz original, opens with the prodigious Peter Apfelbaum on tenor sax. Apfelbaum lays the groundwork for this indelible love poem told with Latz' fresh and poignant delivery intertwining with the tenor sax, while Willard Dyson's sparse percussion lends an otherworldly take. And on the breathtakingly beautiful duet, "Moon River," Jon Davis is a genius as he caresses the keys, while Latz answers with a devastatingly heartfelt delivery.

Fig Tree is richly shaped and supported by veteran jazz artists Jon Davis on piano, John Hart on guitars, Ray Parker on bass, Willard Dyson on drums, and special guests Peter Apfelbaum on saxes, flutes, percussion and Abdoulaye Diabate, guest voice on Latz' original "She Was." Collectively these jazz veterans have played and recorded with Sonny Fortune, Stan Getz, James Moody, Maria Schneider, Randy Brecker, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Cobb, Regina Belle, Michael Franks, Rosa Passes, Jon Hendricks, Jimmy Scott, Don Byron, Jaco Pastorious, and Omar Sosa, among many others.

Latz most recently played at CD Blues Cafe in Beijing,

China

and was invited to sing in duo with Beijing's celebrated jazz pianist, Liang Heping. In Paris, she has played with Alain Jean-Marie,

France

's jazz piano luminary, at Cafe Universel, Le Neuf Jazz Club, Sept Lezards and Atelier de la Main d'Or and will continue her collaboration with Jean-Marie in Fall 2013. On her 2011 West Coast tour she headlined in Seattle, Portland and Eureka, CA and in 2010 she played to packed houses in Kansas City at Jardine's Jazz Club.

Fig Tree is truly a major accomplishment. It is, in fact, Latz' breakout performance as vocalist, songwriter, and arranger. From the acid jazz interpretation of "Blue Skies," to the dead-on rendition of "S'Wonderful," to the delightful, funky rhythms of "Fig Tree," Deborah Latz demonstrates an outstanding range of technique and creative musicality that places her at the forefront of jazz today.”

Fig Tree is available through iTunes and Amazon.com and for those of you with ease of access to New York City, Deborah will be celebrating the CD’s release with a May 18th appearance at the Somethin’ Jazz Club.

Deborah has two websites: www.deborahlatz.com and www.sonicbirds.com/deborahlatz.

With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles, put together the following video which features Deborah singing Alberta Hunter’s I’m Having A Good Time with John Hart on guitar, Jon Davis on piano, Ray Parker on bass and Willard Dyson on drums.

Why not pick-up a copy of Fig Tree and join the party?

Jazz and Art (playlist)

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