Bill Holman R.I.P. - Bill on Bill: Dobbins on Holman

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

“I consider Bill Holman to be one of the most important jazz arrangers and composers after Duke Ellington's generation …. Willis has certainly made his own imprint. His music continues to evolve, while always embodying the essence of jazz.”

- Bill Dobbins

Composer-arranger, bandleader and saxophonist Bill Holman died on May 6, 2024 at the age of 96. This is a brief remembrance taken from some material I had collected in The Note magazine.

The Note magazine is published twice a year by the Al Cohn Memorial Jazz Collection, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, as part of its educational outreach program. The editor is Matt Vashlishan, D.M.A., and you can locate more information about the Al Cohn Memorial Collection, The Note magazine, and how to make a donation in support of the ACMJC by visiting this website: www.esu.edu/alcohncollection.

The edition of The Note magazine - Vol 26 - No. 1 - Issue 65, Fall/Winter 2016 featured a well-written and informative essay by composer-arranger-educator Bill Dobbins on Bill Holman, whom many believe was a national treasure for the portfolio of Jazz compositions and arrangements he created over a period of 60 years.

Here are some excerpts from Bill Dobbins’ insightful essay:

Bill Holman: A Master of Jazz Arranging and Composing

Bill Dobbins

The Note magazine - Vol 26 - No. 1 - Issue 65, Fall/Winter 2016

“My first encounter with Bill Holman's arranging occurred a couple of years before I even recognized the name. While in high school, my awareness of big bands was limited mainly to Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans (including the collaborations with Miles Davis) and Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band [Verve].

The Mulligan recording, which was the debut album of the band, didn't credit the arrangers for the individual tunes. I really loved all of the arrangements, but I was especially drawn toward Out Of This World and I'm Gonna' Go Fishin'. I was intrigued by the contrapuntal writing, the incorporation of bluesy elements in the melodic content and the way everything swung so powerfully. Many years later I learned that these arrangements were written by Bill Holman. …

Some of my most rewarding and gratifying experiences have been the opportunities I have had to get to know and collaborate with my musical heroes. I first got to know Bill Holman in 1985 at a jazz workshop in Tubingen, Germany, which was organized by Hans and Veronika Gruber and Advance Music. The workshop included well over a hundred students and about twenty of the world's leading jazz musicians as the faculty, including Louis Smith, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Bobby Watson, Sal Nistico, Richie Beirach, ….”

“It was interesting for me to learn that Bill Holman was primarily self-taught, although he did take a few courses at Westlake College of Music, where he studied commercial writing with Russ Garcia. It was also refreshing to hear him talk about his arrangements, compositions and the creative process of writing in a simple, easy to follow manner that never got bogged down with technical complexity or pretentious academic jargon. Before the workshop was over I also found out that he was a friendly, no nonsense type of person with a dry and ever alert sense of humor. ….”

The further I got in my transcription and musical analysis, the more amazed I became at Holman's absolute mastery of the basic techniques of thematic development, counterpoint, reharmonization, orchestration and formal design. Moreover, it eventually became clear that the content of the entire piece was developed from just four simple thematic motives and/or rhythms. And many of the techniques were the same I had become familiar with in the greatest classical composers from Bach to Shostakovich

There were two overarching aspects, however, that really drove home Holman's mastery of his craft. The first was that the two up-tempo movements, the first and third, began with the same 30 measures as part of an extended introduction that introduced all four of the principal motives. 

However, from the 31st measure onward, Holman developed two organically related but completely different pieces of music. The second aspect was that, having begun the outer movements with extended introductions, he balanced the whole suite near its conclusion, with a coda of more than a hundred measures. Furthermore, the coda brought back the most important thematic motives of all three movements, and each motive was transformed by a final brilliant and unexpected twist or turn that left me in a state of complete exhilaration every time I listened to whole piece without interruption….”

“ … Following a concert during which which Bill conducted the Eastman Studio Orchestra [Bill Dobbins is the resident musical director at Eastman which is located in Rochester, NY] in 2011,  I asked Holman if anyone had ever gotten together with him for a number of consecutive days to record conversations about his life in the music and his ideas about writing. When he said that no one had made such a request up to that time, I immediately got his permission to request some travel money from the school, and I set up a week during the following August to go out to Los Angeles and record a series of conversations about Holman's early years, his musical career and his thoughts on composing, arranging, musical cohorts and the creative process.

While I was in L.A., I got together with an old college friend, saxophonist Rusty Higgins, who had subbed from time to time in the Bill Holman Band since moving there in the early 70s. It was during our dinner conversation that I first learned that all of Holman's friends call him Willis. By the end of that week I got used to calling him Willis, too. I'll always have fond memories of the graciousness with which he and his wife, Nancy, opened up their home to me for those conversation sessions.

I consider Bill Holman to be one of the most important jazz arrangers and composers after Duke Ellington's generation. Throughout his career, his personal evolution has always maintained a connection to the music that first took root in him, that of Count Basie, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Mel Lewis, Zoot Sims and other jazz giants who have made an indelible imprint on the music. Willis has certainly made his own imprint. His music continues to evolve, while always embodying the essence of jazz.”

You can checkout Bill Holman’s arrangement of Out of This World as performed by the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band on the following video.

As an interesting aside, in the early 1950’s, Gerry wrote some arrangements for the Stan Kenton Orchestra. At the time, Bill Holman was playing tenor sax in Stan’s band. A couple of years later, Bill began arranging for Stan and when asked what model he followed when arranging and orchestrating, he named Gerry Mulligan as his chief inspiration!

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"The Excitable Roy Eldridge" by Gary Giddins [From the Archives]

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

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wouldn’t dream of denying Gary Giddins his “Challah and butter,” but we hope he won’t mind too much if we use the following excerpts from Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation to fulfill a long-standing wish to feature something about trumpeter Roy Eldridge on these pages.

If you haven’t cozied up to Gary’s storytellings, you might want to start with a copy of Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation.

You can locate more information about this book and others that Gary has written by visiting him at www.garygiddins.com.

Thankfully, many of the recordings that Roy recorded over the span of his career for Norman Granz at Mercury and later for Norman’s own labels - Clef, Norgran and Verve - are still available as commercial CD’s and Mp3 download. You can locate a comprehensive listing of his output by going here.

The Excitable Roy Eldridge

“Through much of its history, jazz made avid converts with the simple promise of undying excitement, whether maximized by throbbing rhythms, blood-curdling high notes, violent polyphony, layered riffs, hyperbolic virtuosity, fevered exchanges, or carnal funk. Yet excitement often gets a bum rap from those converts who, having mined the music's deeper recesses, suspect all crowd-pleasing gestures of vulgarity. At bottom, the distinction between the two is subtle but clear: if you like it, it's exciting; if not, it's vulgar. As Sidney Bechet noted, "You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It's that way with music too." If you're cold to a musician's impassioned yowling, that passion will seem awfully dim if not aimless, and since crowds more than individuals thrive on excitement, your response to musical rabble-rousing may depend on your willingness to get lost in a crowd.

The showiest expressions of passion frequently border on outright pandering, but immoderation of that sort is a healthy symptom — it tends to proliferate in a milieu where authentic excitement also flourishes. Over the past decade, excitement has been scarce to a degree that not even the spaciest '50s cool-jazz hipster could have anticipated, while vulgarity continues unabated in its new garb, substituting pretentious meditation for caterwauling. Still, that part of the audience that hasn't been rendered insensible by ECM-styled stabiles of sound, in which slowness indicates profundity, hungers for le jazz hot, as witness the gratitude with which it greets the appended swing theme that, in so many contemporary performances, caps an hour's worth of esoteric clamor. …

[Roy] Eldridge ... [one of the most] … electrifying of jazz trumpeters first came to prominence in the '30's with a flashy, passionate, many-noted style that rampaged freely through three octaves, rich with harmonic ideas and impervious to the fastest tempos. In part, his secret was to transfer ideas patented on the more facile tenor saxophone to the trumpet; his ability to play Coleman Hawkins's solo on Fletcher Henderson's 1926 "Stampede" got him his first job, and more than a decade later, when Hawkins, lording it in Europe, heard the first Eldridge recordings, he vowed to work with the younger man when he returned to the States ….

The decade preceding the emergence of bop was rife with frantic, exhilarating trumpeters. After the war, the tenor sax would assume that role of crowd pleaser, honking and moaning like a Baptist who'd just heard the word. But in the '30s and early '40s Louis Armstrong's instrument was still king, and while many of its best practitioners pursued the course of lyrical composure (among them Buck Clayton, Bobby Hackett, Bill Coleman, Harry Edison, and Doc Cheatham), others—Eldridge, Red Allen, Bobby Stark, Hot Lips Page, Charlie Shavers, Shad Collins, Rex Stewart—strove for an agitated, coruscating approach as thrilling as anything heard in American music. If they were more likely to overstep the bounds of good taste, there was a payback — they took the most expressive risks. Eldridge was the most emotionally compelling, versatile, rugged, and far-reaching. His ballads were complicated but stirringly lucid, and his bravura numbers were played with such bracing authority that they dwarfed the competition. To a young Dizzy Gillespie, "He was the Messiah of our generation."

In one way or another, Armstrong fathered all the trumpeters mentioned above. Eldridge started listening to him in 1931, at twenty, taking cues from his dramatic storytelling intensity, his logic, his gleaming high-note flourishes. ...

Nor were Eldridge's high notes rounded like Armstrong's. Instead, shaded by a rapid shake, they seemed a spontaneous, un-containable explosion of feeling. …. His high notes were never merely high; and rather than concluding performances, they tended to prefigure fiery parabolas of melody. Orson Welles once explained that the screaming white cockatoo in Citizen Kane was inserted to keep the audience alert. Eldridge's expressive cries and banshee whistles serve the same purpose, telegraphing his own excitement…”

If you have never seen a 78 rpm [revolutions per minute] record in action, then you are sure to enjoy the following video which features Roy’s very exciting original 78 rpm version of After You’ve Gone as played on a Victrola.

Fasching, The Bimhuis and a Blue Note

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

Over the years, Jazz has primarily had three performance venues - night clubs, concert halls and festivals.  All three are alive and well both in the USA and internationally.

The February 2017 edition of Downbeat contains a listing of 195 worldwide Jazz venues and later in the year, the magazine devotes and entire edition to Jazz festivals globally.

Three such club/concert hall venues - two old and one new [and blue!] - caught our attention because each was published with an extended annotation and we thought we’d combine this information about them and share it with you in this JazzProfiles feature.

FASCHING FOSTERS CREATIVITY - John Ephland

Sweden's renowned Fasching—a perennial DownBeat pick for one of the world's top jazz clubs—will be celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2017. But its home, a downtown building in Stockholm, dates back much earlier, having been constructed in 1906.

The events that took place between 1906 and the opening of the venue (on May 2,1977) could make for a novel of sorts, filled with many intriguing twists and colorful personalities.

"From the start, it was a restaurant/cafe for Oscar's Theatre next door," said Eric Birah, Fasching's CEO. "Back then, there was a staircase from the inside of Oscar's into Fasching. There's always been a restaurant/bar/club of some sort here since 1906."

The name of the venue translates to "festival," which is appropriate these days, as Fasching has served as the headquarters for the Stockholm Jazz Festival since 2009.

As for the roots of Fasching, according to Bengt Hammar, who served as managing director, programmer and head of marketing from 1982 until 2001, "The jazz musician's community of traditional modernists [Forenignen Sveriges Jazzmusiker, or FSJ] had been looking for many years for a permanent stage. They'd been moving around from place to place, getting temporary gigs at museums, clubs and restaurants. Eventually, in 1975, they found the discotheque Fasching, and began renting Mondays through Thursdays for concerts in the club. The interior decor was in a Tyrolean style, and painted grey and pink.

"In 1977," he continues, "FSJ took over the lease with the financial help of a joint action from the mayor's office and the government. Since then, the club has been owned by the musicians. And, by the way, we repainted the interior black."

Magnus Palmquist, who eventually succeeded Hammar as artistic director at Fasching (in addition to programming the Stockholm Jazz Festival), notes, "Fasching was founded by and for musicians as a counter-movement to the entertainment-based jazz venues that dominated Stockholm at the time. Fasching became the breeding ground for music that lived, breathed and evolved within itself and without any commercial pressure — music that couldn't then or can't now easily be categorized just as 'jazz.'"

Palmquist, who came onboard in 2008, said that the club provides an important forum: "I feel that a quite new and strong movement in jazz and improvisational music is taking form, where jazz is officially allowed to influence many other musical styles and genres in a perhaps more dominant way than ever before. I definitely want that expressive flow to show in the Fasching program."

He added, "Most artists who have passed through Fasching's walls have been the leaders of their musical movement of that specific era."

As for the 40th anniversary, the folks at Fasching are busy making plans, while remodeling has continued apace. "The inside has looked different over the years," said Birah. "At one point many years ago, the stage was on the short side of the room. The balcony used to go over the big bar. Now we have built a bar in the entrance in the main hall and are taking the facade back to its original look from 1906. And we are getting new glass, doors and a new sign."

Securing the intentions of everyone who had a dream that started in 1977, former Fasching CEO (from 2007 to 2015) Lena Aberg Frisk aptly states, "Fasching has become a vibrant place, where musicians and listeners from different parts of the world, from different generations and from different genres, meet."

Artists who have graced the stage include legends such as Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley, Chet Baker and Sun Ra. It has also hosted younger stars from the States, such as Joshua Redman, Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, as well as artists from around the world, including Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Maria Faust, the Goran Kajfes Subtropic Arkestra and Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo.

The Brazilian-born Pascoal has played the club multiple times. "Fasching was our home in Sweden," he says. "We always looked forward to spending a few days performing at this great venue. We had some unforgettable parties there—onstage, and offstage as well!"

—John Ephland

BIMHUIS ESCHEWS TRENDS - Peter Margasak

Last October, 22 of Europe's most diverse and exciting improvisers aged 35 and wl-W* under converged in Amsterdam to participate in the third iteration of a project called the October Meeting. The last time the collaborative summit took place was back in 1991, and the venue that hosted both events is the legendary Bimhuis. The venue opened in 1974, filling a gaping hole in Amsterdam-one of the most progressive jazz cities in all of Europe—left by a number of canceled series in the year prior.

Several years earlier, a number of musicians — including drummer Han Bennink and saxophonist Willem Breuker — had led something of a putsch to expand the purview of the Dutch jazz organization SJIN, or Stichting Jazz. This led to the formation of a splinter group that championed improvised music: Beroepsvereniging voor Improviserende Musici (BIM). [Which translates to something like “Professional Association of Improvising Musicians.”]

Thanks to city funding, plans for a venue dedicated to the new music  - from the Netherlands, around Europe and the United States - were realized. The Bimhuis finally opened in an old furniture showroom on Oude Schans, just blocks from the Red Light District. The rest, as they say, is history. Few venues on either side of the pond have carved out such an illustrious history, maintaining inexorable ties to jazz tradition while boldly embracing endless forward-looking iterations.

Naturally, the Bim became ground zero for the vibrant jazz and improvised music scene in Amsterdam, with countless performances by Bennink, pianist Misha Mengelberg and their ICP Orchestra; Breuker's free-wheeling Kollektief; Maarten Altena's Octet; and groups led by musicians like Guus Janssen, Sean Bergin and Nedly Elstak. But it also presented new talent from the United States along with storied vets like Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker and Von Freeman, as well as the cream of crop of European improvisers: Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. It also functioned as a vibrant meeting place where new formations were born, musicians checked out new talent, and conflicts were born and (occasionally) solved.

Maintaining a cutting-edge performance space for 42 years is no Cakewalk, and almost from the beginning the direction and programming of the Bimhuis has benefitted from the vision of Huub van Riel, who came onboard in 1976. As the years passed, he rigorously kept plugged in to developments, yet his impeccable taste eschewed facile trends. Van Riel's track record is exemplary: While the programming has made space for blues and world music over the years—as well as avant-garde rock with deep affinities and associations for improvised music—there has never been any doubt that Bimhuis is first and foremost a jazz venue. The original location underwent various renovations during its history, including a major overhaul in 1984 to create an amphitheater feel. But the most tumultuous change came in 2005 when Bimhuis moved into new digs, high in the sky as a black box space literally protruding from the new waterfront Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, an institution devoted primarily to contemporary classical music.

The high-tech space couldn't help but lose the gritty ambience of the original location, but the amenities, sightlines and sound of the current space are superb. "The main thing was keeping everything that worked the same — not to transform it into another venue, but improve the old one, to keep the old audience while adding new listeners," van Kiel said. "The essential elements are the informality, [the] relaxedness, combined with total concentration on the stage. In terms of programming, we got new possibilities: cooperation with Muziekgebouw to use each other's spaces. We do some big-name concerts there [where the capacity is double the Bim's 375], and we cooperate in lots of projects. Starting in 2017 we'll do an adventurous music festival that will make use of the entire building."

Many of the concerts at Bimhuis are broadcast live and archived through its own Bimhuis Radio http:// www.bimhuis.nl/bimhuisradio

The original October Meeting took place in 1987, with the second happening four years later. Such endeavors have been important to keeping the Bim viable. "I consider these projects and a variety of 'lab' series essential to what I consider the main role for the Bimhuis," van Riel said. "I feel that the place should be looked at, by musicians and audiences alike, as a tool much more than a goal in itself — to be functional for the development of the music. Facilitating a landscape in which adventure and risk-taking will be encouraged and can be rewarded."                         

—Peter Margasak

BLUE NOTE TAKES ROOT IN NAPA - Yoshio Kato

“On opening night of Blue Note Napa in late October, a fashionable and excited crowd queued on the Main Street sidewalk for the Chris Botti band's late set. The outdoor hanging banners looked familiar to those who had visited other Blue Note locations, and the indoor decor of the ground floor venue had many of the flagship Greenwich Village location's visual trademarks.

The trumpeter's group seemed especially energized on Oct. 25. Violinist Lucia Micarelli, who portrayed Annie in the HBO series Treme, was back with the band for its three-night run at the new club. And Taylor Eigsti, a Bay Area native who platoons the piano chair with Geoffrey Keezer, was on hand to make his Northern California debut with Botti's hearty road warriors.

"It has a lot of the same sort of charm and flavor of the New York club," Botti observed. "Even the chairs are all in the same place." Rectangular tables are lined up by the bandstand, as is the case in New York, in front of a series of booths and two rows of bar seating.

"We work with the licensees on everything in terms of the design and the sound and the lights," explained Steve Bensusan, Blue Note Entertainment Group president. "There are certain elements that are pretty consistent in terms of the tables and the table medallions and how we like to have the curtain and the sign right behind the artists' heads."

Blue Note Napa joins a roster that also includes three locations in Japan (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya), as well as clubs in Hawaii, Beijing and Milan. Situated in picturesque downtown Napa, the 150-capacity room is part of the 137-year-old Napa Valley Opera House.

The idea of opening a jazz space in Northern California's famed wine country came to Blue Note Napa Managing Director Ken Tesler about five years ago. The East Coast native had regularly been visiting his brother, who moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area a decade-and-a-half ago, and would take advantage of the proximity to Napa's signature wineries.

"During one of those numerous wine-tasting trips, it came to me that a Blue Note would do wonderfully out here," Tesler said. "And I'd love to move out here and run it.

"I've been doing business with the Bensusans — the family that owns the Blue Note brand — going on 10 years and was very familiar with the brand," he continued. Tesler was producer and promoter for the popular All Points West Music & Arts Festival, which ran from 2008 through 2009, and was also hired to produce the Rock the Bells hip-hop festival and the Governor's Ball Music Festival.

When City Winery terminated its occupancy of the Napa Valley Opera House at the end of 2015, Tesler was able to secure his ideal location. Tesler moved West the following April and started ramping up staffing. He also began booking touring acts and local musicians, which is done through the central New York office. By spring, he plans to have 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. sets Tuesday through Sunday nights, with brunch shows Saturday and Sunday.

The food and beverage offerings on opening night were appropriately noteworthy for the setting. "The food blows away any jazz club I've ever been to," Botti opined. "Napa's a 'foodie' city, so most of those tourists have a very refined taste for wine and food."

Blue Note Napa has dates booked as far out as June, with the Pat Martino Trio playing in mid-March and Delfeayo Marsalis' quartet performing in late May.

Bensusan revealed that the Blue Note franchise plans to open a Denver location in mid-2018. "We're really trying to fill in the gaps with Blue Notes in places where it would make sense to route artists," he said. "We are ... putting out the word that we are looking for local partners.

- Yoshio Kato

Mel Torme, Marty Paich and Vo-Cool-izing

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

If you are a hip, slick and cool Jazzer, you know that experiencing Mel Torme’s vocals are a real treat and that nobody ever wrote better Jazz arrangements than Marty Paich.

You also know that encountering Mel and Marty together is an ineffable musical happenstance.

And if you are in the mood to thank the Jazz Gods for leaving us the legacy of four - FOUR!!!! - albums that they made together from about 1955-1960, please be my guest.

Any thank them, too, for showcasing their talents ably aided and abetted by Jack Sheldon on trumpet, Frank Rosolino on trombone, Art Pepper on alto sax, Jack Montrose, tenor sax, Victor Feldman, vibes, Barney Kessel, guitar, Joe Mondragon, bass, Mel Lewis on drums and a host of other West Coast Jazz musicians in their prime.

The music on the four recordings that Mel and Marty made together is a national treasure.

If you haven’t heard it, buy ‘em all and treat yourself to one of the most glorious listening experiences available in recorded Jazz.

Because Mel Torme was born 1925 [in Chicago], he missed the height of the band era, getting in only at its tail end. Like his colleagues Mickey Rooney Buddy Rich, and Sammy Davis, Jr., he began as a child performer who grew up into a high-energy performance dynamo.

Ben Pollack, the impresario-bandleader who was to Chicago whites what Fletcher Henderson was to New York blacks, put Torme in Chico Marx's all-juvenile orchestra when the pianist-comic fronted a dance band to pay off some gambling debts (and also toyed with the idea of building a similar kid band arour.: Torme).

Not long after Torme broke into pictures (he had previously played child parts on radio soaps) and a few month before his enlistment, he put together his first edition of the Mel-Tones and recorded with them on Jewell and Decca.

After the war, Torme rejoined the group, got them on Musicraft  Records, where they made a series of sessions with and without Artie Shaw and brought the vocal group into modern jazz.

After "giving up the ghost" (Mel's term) with the Mel-Tones, Torme for a time seemed destined to become a "big-time bobby-socks idol" (Look magazine's term), when Carlos Gastel — who had helped make stars of Nat Cole and Peggy Lee, and put Stan Kenton and Anita O'Day together —moved him up to Capitol Records and MGM Pictures. He had hits, which incurred the resentment rather than the respect of the older showbiz communly (prior to the baby-boom young adults rarely became singing stars) at his ill-planned New York debut at the Copacabana.

If anything, Torme's records for Musicraft and the much bigger Capitol Records were too successful: They led his managers and A&R men to think Torme could be converted, like so many other talented artists, into a mere cog in the hit-making machinery. But he had, in William Blake's words, learned what was enough by first learning what was more than enough.

After a few years of bobby-sox idolatry, Torme decided to stick with smaller labels and classier music. His first long-playing record had also been the first Capitol LP, his own most spectacular stab at an extended composition, The California Suite (on Discovery DS-900), a thirty-five-plus-minute work that extols the virtues of the Sunshine State in eleven parts, all being songs but none fitting traditional thirty-two-bar AABA patterns.

Torme made his first conventional album, Musical Sounds Are the Best Songs [1954, Coral], in which he says goodbye to the big-band era in a set of nonsensical but very hard-swinging rhythm numbers. He followed Musical Sounds with lush ones on It's a Blue World [1955, Bethlehem], which shows how much better his ballad singing had gotten since the Musicrafts and Capitols.

The vo-cool era, then, begins at its highest point, Mel Torme and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette, which leads to four other Torme-Paich collaborations, the second also on Bethlehem, Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire (1956), and the others on Verve: Torme 1958), a flawless collection of unlush ballads with a small string section; Back in Town (1959), the Mel-Tones' reunion album; and the climax, not only of the Torme-Paich relationship but of the whole cool genre, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley (1960).

Torme today dislikes the sound of his voice on these records, and, in fact, once offered to remake them for the current corporate owners of the Bethlehem catalog. But even though his voice is a finer-tuned instrument in the late eighties, I doubt that anything could improve these records, especially the first and the last. The original Dek-Tette recording set the greatest diversity of tempo and on more adventurous works such as "The Blues" [which is an excerpt from Duke Ellington’s extended suite Black, Brown and Beige] in which he translates the multileveled Ellingtonian sound into multileveled Torme-Paich sound.  

On "Lullaby of Birdland," Torme gradually flies farther and farther out, not by Ella-vating himself off the nearest chord progression but by building a scaffold of scat (and voice-horn interplay with the Dek-Tette) that he can climb as high as he wants.

All twelve songs on Shubert Alley, by contrast, come from the same source, the book-shows of post-Oklahoma! Broadway, and Torme and Paich reconfigure them all into the same medium-bright tempo. All have been thoroughly re-composed so that the familiar patterns of vocal-band-vocal and band-vocal-band are exceptions rather than rules, and only the closing chart, "Lonely Town" (the one track on Shubert Alley to use a piano), could have been sung by any other singer on any other album.

On two numbers, Torme and Paich postulate on the possibility of blues devices  in   other  kinds  of material,   as  when  Torme  gathers momentum by repeating the penultimate six notes of "Just in Time," over and over without the final tonic, until it assumes the shape of a Count Basie-Joe Williams blues, and when in "Too Darn Hot" they have trombonist Frank Rosolino and altoist Art Pepper not wait for the "instrumental" second chorus to solo but instead take their eight-bar turns after each of Torme's opening A sections—in other words, shaping a standard as if it were Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow."

Interpolations, of the kind that will eventually become a Torme perennial, figure on almost ever track, though they're not usually made by the singer but by the band behind him, as on the second chorus of "Once in Love With Amy," where Torme sings the first A and the Dek-Tette play "Makin' Whoopee," switching to "Easy Living" for the second A and also when Torme sings the Latinate "Whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets" and Paich and crew pay homage to Gerry Mulligan by way of "Bernie's Tune."

Its virtues could be extolled ad infinitum but the point is that the strength of the album does not lie in and of its individual elements, nor do certain tracks stand out above the others. Instead, from start to finish, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley is a masterpiece. Neither the vo-cool specifically nor vocalizing in general got any better than this, though a few contenders have come along in the interim.”

Sources:

Joseph Laredo insert notes to Mel Torme with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 75732

Joseph Loredo insert notes to Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 79847]

Mel Torme original liner notes to Back in Town: Mel Torme with the Meltones [Jazz Heritage CD 515088L]

Lawrence D. Stewart insert notes to Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley with The Marty Paich Orchestra [Verve CD 821-581-2]

Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond.