Johnny Griffin - "Some of My Best Friends" by Orrin Keepnews

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

In a comparison with Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane - whom the Jazz press dubbed “heavyweight tenor saxophonists” - being described as “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone” was as expression that seemingly haunted Hank Mobley throughout his career.

One can only wonder why Orrin Keepnews’ description of tenor saxophonist John Griffin as a “B+ tenor saxophone” player didn’t do the same for him.

Perhaps it was because by the time it was written in 1973, there were too few Jazz fans around to even care.

“Down at the lower level of the evolutionary process, there are species of animal life that on occasion eat their own young. Some primitive human tribes leave their useless elderly folk out in the wilderness to die. But as far as I know it is only the American public that, with terrible and monotonous regularity, deliberately destroys its own full-grown, youthful, and genuinely talented artists and entertainers.

Actually, it's not the whole American public that does this. After all, a very large proportion wouldn't even recognize an artist enough to say "hello" or "excuse me" if they ran into one on the street. And since I'm talking now about deliberate destruction, not just through ignorance, I'm not referring to that great silent majority (to coin a phrase). I am instead talking about us, the sensitive minority — listeners, fans, club-goers, and record-buyers like you (and, I guess, writers and record producers like me). What we manage to do is set our sights so super critically high that we will not settle for anything much less than superstars. Anyone getting a grade below A-minus flunks our course.

This is not a passionate defense of the rights of the incompetent. The really awful painters, musicians, singers, and jugglers usually and quite properly fail (except for those that are so bad that they sometimes join the real geniuses in the ranks of the commercially successful). I'm not even campaigning for more work for mediocrities. What I am specifically bitching about is our refusal to give house room to the works of those who are merely good or very good, without being superb or trailblazers or true giants.

Obviously, these remarks are closely related to the fact that these are notes for a Johnny Griffin reissue package. Johnny is, unfortunately for him, a superb example — almost a prototype — of what I'm complaining about. The fact is that Johnny Griffin is no John Coltrane, no Sonny Rollins, no Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young or Ben Webster. But he is certainly the equal of. and more likely than not superior to, pretty nearly any other tenor player you might mention. Don't go running names in rebuttal: I have my favorites, and you have yours; and the fact that Johnny Griffin was a friend of mine is undoubtedly one of the reasons I'm prejudiced in his favor. And of course it's the fact that you, or I, might easily substitute many another name for Griffin's without tampering with the logic of what I'm claiming that makes me so vehement on this subject.

The point, then, is that Johnny Griffin is certainly a high B-plus tenorman, and that for about a decade he has lived and worked in Europe —

primarily because that was preferable to the two other alternatives: to keep on scuffling for gigs in the cultural center of the universe, or to give up music. When I say that he "was" a friend of mine, therefore, I'm not referring to any overt break between us, but simply to the fact that between 1958 and 1963 we worked together a lot, saw a good deal of each other, enjoyed each other's company — and haven't laid eyes on each other for the past decade.

The time in which I knew Johnny best was, of course, a relatively happy time for jazz. There was a reasonable amount of club work, and there were lots of independent record companies (very much including Riverside) willing to take a fairly inexpensive few chances on recording a batch of B-plus musicians. Of course some of those had already (to stick to tenor saxophone examples) turned into Sonny Rollins or were about to turn into Coltrane. But most of them just stayed themselves: capable of specific bursts, or full evenings, or even entire albums, of notable creativity and joy; but never finishing first in a poll, or causing lines to form outside clubs, or having best-selling records.

And, failing to scale those heights, all such artists get to be adjudged failures (or at least non-successes) in our society. But who was it that decreed that art is a win-or-lose proposition? Who? Why, it was us, the same folks who can tolerate, but just barely, a baseball team that finishes second for a couple of years, but then are most likely to stop going to the ballpark. You don't really have to be on the top end of the charts to be tolerable to a jazz record company. The economics of our specialized music world, particularly back in the late 1950s, enabled us to recoup our investment from an album that only sold a few thousand copies. Even a more ambitious project or two didn't hurt too much if they more or less bombed. And most jazz record companies of that era were owned and operated by fairly freaky, jazz-fan kinds of people; and we got very stubborn about continuing to record musicians we dug, and whose capabilities we enjoyed and believed in. (And when once in a while a young guitarist turned out to be Wes Montgomery and got straight-A grades, or an always-A-plus giant like Thelonious Monk broke through to salable recognition, that made it fiscally and emotionally possible for us to keep on being stubborn.)

But it was still a rather precarious life. A musician who doesn't sell enough records to earn additional royalties gets to feel pretty frustrated. He also doesn't get to work all that much in clubs or concerts, and when jazz begins to slide down the popularity scale, as it began to do in the early '60s, he is the first to feel the pinch. And when jazz really falls off a cliff, as it did in the mid-'60s, he either keeps on scuffling for gigs, or gives up music, or maybe leaves for Europe. (And after a while probably finds that Europe is part of our culture-laggard society, too, and maybe is being asked to absorb too many escapee musicians.)

Nobody starts out in any art form ever thinking about being B-plus or lower. Every member of every symphony orchestra violin section in the world believed as a child (or at least accepted Mama's belief) that he would be a famous concert artist. Nobody comes to his first big-band jazz job, or his first record date, doubting that the world will open up wide for him before long. To that extent, the artist usually begins as one of us, as a member of our victory-oriented culture, wanting to be the "best" tenor player in town.

But most of them quickly come to understand that, within the society of the "good" players, there is no need for any permanent, definitive "best." (In the legendary cutting contests of an earlier jazz era, not even Coleman Hawkins or Louis Armstrong or Art Tatum was expected to be a winner every night.)

One important aspect of the jazz musician's realization that creative art should not be a win-or-lose proposition can be the growth of a sense of real comradeship. Quite possibly the fact that the public usually thought of them as competitors helped to build their own quite opposite attitudes, at least during the late-'50s/early-'60s "relatively happy time" I was referring to. To return specifically to Griffin. I first heard of him in 1956 when Thelonious Monk, returning from a job in Chicago, sounded off about the local tenor player he had worked with there. Blue Note Records had grabbed him before we had a chance to act, but for a year or so Johnny worked his way into the large, shifting group I sometimes think of as the Riverside stock company.

Then and later he was a sideman on albums featuring Monk, Wes Montgomery, Nat Adderley, Blue Mitchell, Clark Terry, Philly Joe Jones, Chet Baker. By 1958 he had become established in New York, had reached the ripe old age of thirty, had served that almost inevitable apprenticeship as one of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (practically every trumpet and tenor worth his salt in the hard-bop idiom of the '50s seems to have done a valuable stretch with that band), and had succeeded Coltrane as the horn in Monk's Five Spot quartet.

By 1958 he was also newly signed to Riverside, and on his first albums as leader for us was able in turn to recruit comrades as sidemen: Philly Joe, Wilbur Ware, Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Blue Mitchell, Wynton Kelly.

Looking at my liner notes for his first albums, I am able to recall that he began his career in Lionel Hampton's big band, that his middle name is Arnold, that he was born and raised in Chicago, and that in high school he was primarily an alto player. Looking into my memory, I recall other facts —  that this mild-looking, slight young man could execute brilliantly on his horn at killingly fast tempos (not an un-valuable quality when working in front of Blakey), but that he came to be very annoyed at being described as things like "the fastest gun in the West."

There were many reasons other than speed for singling Johnny out from his contemporaries. He had a richly deep sound, and he had a lovely awareness of roots — he knew blues and gospel and, to quote myself, he was "not one of those modernists who think that a reference to an old-time jazzman probably means Charlie Parker."

I also found it unusual and valuable that Griffin almost always thought of his albums as related wholes, not just a string of tunes united only by having the same personnel. Today, the "concept" album is not only commonplace, it is just about a necessity; in the more loose-jointed period in which Johnny recorded for Riverside, it was pretty daring. It was also pretty daring for a musician to suggest to one of us less-than-wealthy labels that we try anything larger than a sextet date. Griff dared both: he wanted to do a date tied together by being entirely in a funky, "church blues" bag, and he wanted at least a moderately big-band sound behind him. He kept on wanting, and not getting, for quite a while. Then we struck a good lick: Cannonball Adderley's new band recorded an album in 1959 for Riverside that featured Bobby Timmons' church-y tune, "This Here"; it did a lot for Cannon and the label and for something that the world (or at least the record business) decided to call "soul music."

That music happened to be very close to what Johnny had been talking about, so we found it hard to keep resisting the idea. Whereupon, Griffin and a goodly number of his and our friends went into the studio and generated an album that made some little noise in its own time (including the fact that another arranger lifted the scoring of "Wade in the Water" and created a hit for another artist—but that's life, isn't it?). It also is an album that I find still makes a lot of sense today, which is no small tribute for a 1960 recording featuring a non-famous player. Its sense of blues-and-spirituals roots remains valid, and the full-flavored "preaching" tenor sound carries a very timeless emotional pull.

The following year Johnny had another idea for a concept album — it was again something that was quite fresh when he thought of it, but that others have made stale through overuse in the years since then. An instrumental tribute to Billie Holliday was a fine and offbeat idea back in 1961; Lady had died in the summer of 1959, and nobody had gotten around to eulogizing and canonizing her (it would of course be more than a decade before a movie biography, with Billie being imitated by a Motown star, would be a good commercial idea). Riverside had grown somewhat more affluent and self-assured in the period between the two albums; this time I even went for the luxurious touch of a few dark-sounding strings along with a sizable brass ensemble. All of which helped create an effectively mournful, soulful setting in which Griffin— without trying to imitate or even parallel Billie, but just being a musician who had known her and loved and understood her music—could do a remarkably fitting and creative job of "singing" some of her songs. (This is the sort of thing your B-plus musician can do, where an A type would possibly feel it was beneath him.)

These two albums are also pretty good working examples of that comradeship I was referring to: names like Nat Adderley and Clark Terry and Barry Harris and Ron Carter and Bob Cranshaw turn up here as they do on many Riverside sessions. (I recall Harry Lookofsky, one of the busiest studio violinists of that period, volunteering to round up the viola and cello players needed for the first day of the Holiday album, and then turning up himself to take one viola chair — just because, he said, the session sounded like fun and he wanted to be in on it.)

Neither these albums nor the many others that Griffin made in those years broke any sales records, but they were a very interesting lot: some straight-ahead, some experimental (like the one with two bassists and French horn Julius Watkins), and of course the series of Tough Tenor swingers made during the period when he was working side by side with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. Then came the leaner years and the departure for Europe, where he worked with pretty good regularity (including a long stretch with the formidable Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland big band), although, as I have noted, the European market has also become a declining one for expatriate American jazzmen.

My main point continues to be that it is a damn shame that the U.S. jazz scene has been unable to support and sustain, or in any way to directly or indirectly subsidize its Johnny Griffins, The only counterbalancing feature, in his specific case, is that the way things worked out in the very late '50s and very early '60s, it was possible for one of my favorite non-great Jazz musicians to set down some very strong examples of his very strong work.”