Jeroen de Valk's Biography of Chet Baker: Revised,Updated and Expanded

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

"As a touring artist you are constantly surrounded by people who want something from you. People ask you for everything imaginable, offer you things . . . Chet couldn't shut himself off, he was open to everything that happened around him.

"Yesterday, somebody came backstage and started insulting me. He thought I played badly and said so in a very unpleasant way. I said: 'This is the dressing room, what are you doing back here?' and told him to get lost. If you take drugs, you can't do that. At certain moments you get an enormous kick, but later you're even more susceptible to exactly those things you've escaped from. You don't even have control over yourself. You're always in the victim's role.

"I'm often in Europe on tour. On the stage, I have success, I communicate with the public. But when I leave the stage, I'm a mere mortal again, trying to get along in the world. No one knows me, only the jazz insiders, and I don't speak the languages. Everywhere there are people who try and cheat this 'Ugly American.' And I fight it: 'Hey, you're charging me too much, No, that's not right!' I don't like to have to act that way, but I have the alternative of either doing it or being cheated.

"Chet let all this affect him and then would suddenly get in a horrible mood in a completely uncontrolled way. Once, we were supposed to rehearse in a music school where I taught. The principal, who sat behind a desk below, didn't know Chet and asked him what he was doing there. When Chet heard that he began to abuse the guy. And he wouldn't let up. I think I lost the job because of that incident. He looked like a tramp and was treated accordingly.

"Anytime someone wants to tell me a story about Chet Baker, I say, 'Stop, let it alone,' because I already know it's going to be a sad story. Chet got in trouble all the time."

-Lee Konitz, alto saxophonist

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has recently received its copy of the revised, updated and expanded edition of Jeoren de Valk’s biography Chet Baker: His Life and Music and is pleased to inform you that it is now available from Aspekt Press and at Amazon.

Originally copyrighted in 1989 by Van Gennep, the book has been translated into English and available in a softbound edition since 2000 from Berkeley Hills Books.

Chet Baker was a star at 23 years old, winning the polls of America’s leading magazines. But much of his later life was overshadowed by his drug use and problems with the law. Chet Baker: His Life and Music was Baker’s first solidly researched biography, published a year after Baker’s passing in 1988. It was available in five languages.

Here is a Press Release about the forthcoming revised, updated and expanded edition of Mr. de Valk’s biography of Chet.

“Now finally, here is Jeroen de Valk’s thoroughly revised, updated and expanded edition. De Valk spoke to Baker himself, his friends and colleagues, the police inspector who investigated his death and many others. He read virtually every relevant word that was ever published about Chet and listened to every recording; issued or unissued.

The result of all this is a book which clears up quite a few misunderstandings. For Chet was not the ‘washed-up’ musician as portrayed in the ‘documentary’ Let’s Get Lost. He recorded his best concert ever less than a year before he died. His death was not thát mysterious.   

According to De Valk, Chet was first of all an incredible improviser; someone who could invent endless streams of melody. “He delivered these melodies with a highly individual, mellow sound. He turned his heart inside out, almost to the point of embarrassing his listeners.’’  

The film rights of this book have been sold to Kingsborough Pictures. The movie ‘Prince of the Cool’ is in the making. Furthermore, the author worked as an advisor for ‘My Foolish Heart’, a Dutch ‘neo-noir music film’ which will be released in cinemas in 2018. Earlier, De Valk contributed to the legendary documentary ‘The Last Days’.

The press about De Valk’s earlier edition:

Jazz Times: ”A solidly researched biography… a believable portrait of Baker… a number of enlightening interviews…’’  

Library Journal: “De Valk’s sympathetic yet gritty rendering of Baker’s life blends well with his account of Baker’s recording career. Somehow, the author manages to avoid the lurid and sensationalistic aspects that those having only a passing familiarity with the musician usually recount.’’

Cadence: “A classic of modern jazz biography. De Valk’s writing is so straightforward as to be stark, yet this is just what makes it so rich. His description of the events leading to the fall that took Baker’s life, for instance, has a quick, breathless suspense to it.’’

Jazzwise: “… it’s going to be definitive.’’

Jeroen de Valk (1958) is a Dutch musician, journalist and jazz historian. He has been writing about jazz since the late 70s and also authored an acclaimed biography about tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.”

And here is an excerpt from the Preface of the original edition of the book that sets the tone for how Mr. de Valk approached writing about Chet:

“CHET BAKER is the subject of many misunderstandings. Read anything about Chet Baker— an article in a magazine or a newspaper, for example —and it is likely you will be told that Chet was a pitiful character who started using drugs when his popularity dwindled and his piano player Dick Twardzik died. That he faded into obscurity after spectacular early success and was rescued from oblivion by filmmaker Bruce Weber, who also inspired his last recording, the soundtrack for Let's Get Lost. That he was killed in Amsterdam, where the police handled the case carelessly.

The truth, alas, is less sensational. Chet had his problems, but he was hardly that badly off. He started using drugs when he was at the height of his popularity and Twardzik was still alive. In the last ten years of his life, he was very popular in Europe, where he recorded and performed extensively. His trumpet playing was usually much stronger than it is in Weber's film. The soundtrack was certainly not his last recording; he made over a dozen records afterward, both live and in the studio. One of them — Chet Baker in Tokyo — contains his best work ever. And, finally, Chet was not killed. After thorough examination, the police concluded that he died because he fell out of his hotel room, after having taken heroin and cocaine. This may sound anti-climatic for a jazz hero, but there is nothing I can do about that.

I found out this - and other things - while talking to friends, colleagues, and a police sergeant, spending quite some time in libraries, reviewing paper clippings from all over the world, and collecting as many recordings as I could.”

Having now had the opportunity to read the revised and expanded edition of Jeoren de Valk's Chet Baker: His Life and Music, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles formed the following impressions about the work.

[1] It is a painstakingly accurate book that goes to great lengths to separate fact from fiction in Chet's life and in so doing, dispels many of the romanticized myths associated with what has become a Baker hagiography;

[2] It is chronologically detailed such that it offers the reader a full overview of each of the major periods in Chet's career beginning with the famous piano-less quartet he formed with Gerry Mulligan, continuing on with the quartet he formed with pianist Russ Freeman, to his own groups on the West Coast and earlier tours of Europe, and then to the remaining 25 years of his career spent mainly in Europe with occasional sojourns to the states;

[3] The work is full of primary source interviews largely centered around the musicians, record executives, club owners, concert impresarios and Jazz fans who were close to Chet and many of these are cross-referenced to give the clearest possible picture of Chet and his music;

[4] The book is full of fair and honest assessments of the quality of the music on Chet's many recordings in an effort to help the listener focus of the better ones;

[5] De Valk maintains that "Chet was first of all an endless improviser; someone who could invent endless streams of melody. He delivered these melodies with a highly individual, mellow sound. He turned his heart inside out, almost to the point of embarrassing his listeners:" there are numerous musician interviews whose aim it is to attempt to explain why Chet's approach to improvisation was so unique and special - in other words - what they fuss was all about in Chet's playing;

[6] Every facet of Chet's approach to music is touched on in de Valk's Chet bio from his choice of trumpets, to his technique in employing the valves of the instrument, his use of microphones, et. al. all of which is combined to provide the reader with rarely understood insights into the mechanical process of making Jazz;

[7] De Valk makes every effort at an honest appraisal of Chet's personal life and how it affected his music and this objectivity serves to prevent the extremes of hero-worship or warts-an-all-tell all that plagues many biographies of Jazz musicians noted for their drug addictions;

[8] De Valk introduces some little discussed factors that influenced Chet to spend his later career in Europe such as the reverse discrimination, Black Nationalism, and complete dismissal of Baker's "Cool School" style of Jazz as superficial by major American Jazz critics, all of which were very prevalent in the America of the 1970s when Chet was considering returning to the US;

[9] The frank and candid discography contains every major recording that Baker appeared on and helps guide the Jazz fan to Chet's better recorded efforts;

[10] The book does not contain a bibliography, but it closes with fully annotated footnotes for each chapter.

This book should serve as a model for how to write a biography about a Jazz musician because it is descriptively strong in its analysis of the music while, at the same time, providing accurate and abundant information about the musician's life, both personal and professional.

If a Jazz fan is looking for a guide to the evolution of Chet Baker's music as manifested through the major phases of his career, this is the book to get. Jazz musicians are their music and Jeroen de Valk's comprehensive biography proves to be another example of why this is so.

Miles Davis and Modal Jazz

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

“When Gil [Evans] wrote the arrangement of "I Loves You, Porgy," he only wrote a scale for me. No chords. And that... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things.

When you go this way, you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and you can do more with the [melody] line. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you can be. When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations.”

- Miles Davis

“In All Blues, instead of a chord sequence, the improvisations are based on a series of five scales, that is, five selections of notes from the twelve available. Davis constructed fragmentary tone-rows which replace harmony in giving the music coherence.”

- Max Harrison

“With regard to style, Miles Davis didn’t merely change with the times, but was largely – if not completely – responsible for most of the changes, particularly those disseminating the use of modal structure among Jazzmen.”

- Jerry Coker

So much has been written about Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue 1959 Columbia LP that I hesitated to do a blog feature about it

But while researching Ashley Kahn’s book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece [New York: Da Capo, 2000], I found that there were some aspects of the music on the recording that were of particular interest to me and which I wanted to emphasize in a posting about it.

One thing that immediately struck me when I first heard the music on Kind of Blue was its space; there was so much openness to it that the music seemed to hang in the air.

Of course, much of this room was due to the manner in which the music was constructed: modes or scales were used as the basis for the improvisations on the recording instead of chord progressions.

The excerpts from Ashley’s book that follow this introduction will address the technical aspects of what modal Jazz is in more detail.

But since modal Jazz was relatively new as the basis for Jazz improvisation when Kind of Blue was issued, Miles, Coltrane, Cannonball and pianist Bill Evans were literally finding their way through relatively unfamiliar territory when they constructed their solos around the album’s tunes.

The modes were less compressed that the usual chord progressions that were the basis for bop and hard bop Jazz recordings at the time and this allowed the solos based on them to unfold, gradually.

The comparative newness of the modes forced the soloist to explore, search in new directions and try different ways to build their solos [i.e.: alternate melodies], which was exactly what Miles Davis was trying to achieve on Kind of Blue.

Miles had been around bebop almost from its earliest beginnings and he was desperate to escape the frenetic running of the changes [chord progressions] that was so characteristic of the early work of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, both of whom were viewed as the co-founders of Bebop.

Miles didn’t have the flash and flair of Dizzy whose finger-poppin’ flights of fancy were difficult for most Jazz trumpet-players to duplicate. Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Conte Candoli and other trumpet players with more technical facility and range could play in this manner, but Miles, to put it succinctly, didn’t have those kinds of “chops” [musician speak for technical ability on an instrument].

Besides, fast and furious Bebop improvisations had all been done before; the twenty years or so of Bebop that preceded the issuance of Kind of Blue in 1959 were awash in a flurry of furiously played notes.

How does one catch one breath? How does a modern Jazz musician go in a different direction?  These were questions that were very much on Miles mind and his search for answers to them led to Kind of Blue.

Miles adapted a number of key concepts that, when applied to the themes on Kind of Blue, allowed for a different avenue of Jazz expression.

One of these conceptions was openness, a quality that Miles had been particularly taken with when he first heard pianist Ahmad Jamal darting in-and-out or hovering over the beautifully sustained time played by bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier.

Miles called this “playing the spaces” which, of course meant exactly the opposite – not playing to allow for spaces in the improvisations.

Tempos were another key ingredient: Miles simply slowed things down “… in order to think and not just react.”

All of the tempos on Kind of Blue are either slow or medium which provided for a more relaxed feeling; time to think; time to figure how where to insert space or inference.

Jimmy Cobb was the perfect drummer for the space Miles wanted to bring forth on Kind of Blue.

Philly Joe Jones, whom Cobb replaced in Miles’ quintet just prior to the issuance of the album, would have been too busy.  Philly used a lot of drum “chatter” to push the soloist forward.

By contrast, Jimmy Cobb employed a 22” K-Zildjan ride cymbal with huge overtones which allowed the music to float along almost as though it was being carried on a cloud.

Most of Jimmy licks and fills came down on the “ones” [first beat] of the next thematic phrase which helped the soloists’ orientation as they explored Kind of Blue’s modes. 

Miles was also finding his “voice” on the trumpet at this time, what Gil Evans refers to as “changing the sound of the trumpet.”

Never the pyrotechnic type and with a limited range on trumpet, Miles’s greatest strength was his sound: warm, mellow and lyrical.

He needed a medium to show off his sound and the modal Jazz format of the tunes on Kind of Blue were a perfect vehicle to show off Miles’ unique sonority on trumpet.

And then there was the use of the modes themselves that served as substitutions for the usual chord progressions.

Modes were the keys that unlocked “the secrets” that Miles was looking for in the music at that time.

Modal Jazz uses scales instead of chord progressions as the basis for its themes [melodies] and improvisations.

In Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, author Ashley Kahn further elaborates on these modes and other qualities in Miles music from this period.

© - Ashley Kahn, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“If there is one word that accurately describes the unique and defining feature of all jazz styles, it is improvisation. The spirit of jazz is spontaneous invention; the standard form is variations played off the melodies of well-known blues or songs. The melodies of tunes like "Wild Man Blues" would be interpreted, played with, and "jazzed" to the delight of the soloist and his or her audience. When pioneers like Louis Armstrong brought spirit and form together, the result was timeless jazz.

A melody is basically a line of notes, each a root to a matching chord, with the whole melodic line moving (in jazz, swinging) horizontally through time. This movement is referred to as "chord changes" or simply "changes." In the notes of these chords—the "chordal structure" that is often discussed in jazz theory—lies the harmony, or vertical component of jazz. In almost all jazz prior to 1960, harmony was the improvisers only compass. Without knowing which notes work with the chords being played, the soloist was lost. Then came bebop to make the harmony even more complex.

The genius of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie was to reinvent jazz's harmonic and rhythmic possibilities. Their solos broke through to new terri­tory in jazz harmony, locating new notes to play in the chordal structure. At full throttle, they blew through the changes with phrasing that had become more elastic, bending over and across bar measures with a flurry of sixteenth notes never heard before.

With the advent of Bird and Diz's pioneering daredevilry—richly expanding the number of notes available to play within any given chordal structure—there came the need for an even more accurate harmonic compass. In Cannonball Adderley's words: "Bebop's discipline means that you have to have information to play bebop."

Despite bebop's innovations, improvisation and chord changes remained inextricably linked. Various alumni of bebop—and of the cool school that followed it—had tired of the same changes defining the same well-trodden improvisatory paths. It wasn't the material itself; jazz composers were still creating new, exciting tunes and melodies. It was the too familiar structure of changes-after-changes that bred dissatisfaction. By the fifties, signs were pointing players off the chordal thruway, into a new jazz style: modal.

"Modal" (or its synonym "scalar") literally means "of scales." By this definition, all music, or any sonic system that follows a pattern with one, central "tonic" note, is modal. "Modal jazz," in a late fifties context, qualifies that denotation somewhat. Here's how Miles Davis laid it out for Nat Hentoff in October of 1958:

When Gil wrote the arrangement of "I Loves You, Porgy," he only wrote a scale for me. No chords. And that... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things.

When you go this way, you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and you can do more with the [melody] line. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you can be. When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations.

I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers—some of them—have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have.

When I want J.J. Johnson to hear something ... we just play the music over the phone. I did that the other day with some of [Aram] Khachaturian's Armenian scales; they're different from the usual Western scales. Then we got to talking about letting the melodies and scales carry the tune. J.J. told me, "I'm not going to write any more chords." And look at George Russell. His writing is mostly scales. After all, you can feel the changes.”

Call it The Modal Manifesto. Subtitle: You Can Feel the Changes. In one way, modal jazz was a step in re-simplifying the music, in that it created a structure over which to improvise that, unlike bebop, did not demand exten­sive knowledge of chords and harmonies. In another way, the use of modes implied a greater responsibility for the musician. Without an established chordal path, the soloist had to invent his own melodic pattern on the spot.

The idea of soloing extensively over one chord was not alien to jazz musi­cians. Jazz educator and pianist Dick Katz points out that since chords imply certain scales, and modal jazz is all about soloing on one scale for an extended period,

“it's like a structured cadenza, where at the end of a piece you take one chord and run with it. Or like in Latin music, a lot of Latin bands will stay on one chord and these virtuoso trumpet players would really do their thing. Or you know there's that Duke Ellington tune, "Caravan." It has twelve bars on one chord (sings) until you land on that F minor chord.”

Miles himself had touched upon modal ideas in the past. His "Swing Spring" from 1954 flirted with modal construction. In 1956, he approached a ubiquitous pop song modally as a made-to-order addition for Avakian, slowing down the rate of chord changes and quieting the harmonic activity of the song. Avakian recalls:

“Leonard Bernstein wanted me to give him a version of "Sweet Sue" done in cool jazz style for the album that we did together called What Is Jazz? Instead of using house musicians to see how it would sound if Miles Davis were doing it, I said, "Let's have Miles Davis play it." I had Miles do two versions and what he did when he performed "Sweet Sue"—a very familiar, trite song deliberately chosen by Bernstein—was a formal introduction before it goes into total improvisation, very free. It was a sudden departure in which he streamlined the chordal structure of the melody — it sort of lost the harmony of the song. That could well have been a spark for his going into the floating quality of what he did on Kind of Blue.”

Modal jazz was different because it was composed with that simpler approach as its primary goal. Relative to the complexities and intellectual heights jazz had attained, it was a step backward. It seemed to question the progress of jazz up to bebop and beyond. "Playing changes was the sign of elegance," commented keyboardist and jazz writer Ben Sidran. Miles himself had sought that elegance at one time. "When I asked him in the forties what music he was playing," recollected George Russell, "he said he wanted to learn all the changes. That sounded ridiculous to me. Miles knew how to play all the changes." Russell recognized in that comment the essence of the search that eventually led Davis to modes and modality.

“I felt that Miles was saying he wanted a new way to relate to chords, and the thought of how he might go about seeking this way was constantly dwelled on. Miles and I talked about modes in the late forties and I wondered what was taking him so long, but when I heard "So What" I knew he was using it.”

It is worth noting that the brand of modal jazz brought forth in the latter half of the fifties was not pure modal music. When faced with strict modal guidelines, music scholar Barry Kernfeld explains, many jazz soloists would play off a prescribed scale—hitting the same bluesy notes that were an inherent part of chordal jazz. Even musicians like Miles and Coltrane, who adhered more closely to the modal path, suggested chordal patterns in their solos.

There were two immediate effects—and recognizable characteristics—of late fifties modal jazz. The first was that, reflecting the esthetic espoused by Davis and other modal pioneers at the time, it brought the tempos down to a slower, more deliberate pace. As a means of comparison, author Lewis Porter noted that "in most jazz pieces, the chords and their associated scales change about once a measure. But Davis's new music would stay on the same scale for as long as sixteen measures at a time."

Jazz writer Barry Ulanov recognizes that the structure of modal jazz elicited a welcome relaxation of tempo, further emphasizing the "linear," melodic aspect of the music.

“I think that was a happy development in jazz. As in Baroque music and the classical tradition, when you move into long [melodic] lines, there's a softness and slower speed that follows because you're concentrating on what you're trying to say and not surrounding yourself with overwhelming sound.”

The second effect was that modal jazz compositions tended to extend the duration of solos. Loosed from the traditional thirty-two or twelve-bar song structure—the most common lengths of jazz compositions (ballads at thirty-two, blues at twelve)—the soloist was free to invent and reinvent as long as necessary to tell the story. In theory, with no chords to define a melody, the solo became the song and the improviser became the composer. The modal jazz soloist was indeed the master of the creative moment.

In the case of Miles's sextet, this elastic approach to solo length was particularly suited to Coltrane, whose penchant for long, tireless improvisa­tions had become legendary. And sometimes, as Gil Evans remembered, an occasion for sarcasm:

“One day when Miles came back from a tour I said "Miles, how was the job?" and he said "It's fine. Coltrane played fifty choruses, Cannonball played forty-six and I played two."”

Saxophonist Jimmy Heath, an old friend of Coltrane's from Philadelphia who would later sub for him in the sextet, recalls how the freedom offered by modal jazz pieces might have exacerbated Coltrane's long-windedness.

“Coltrane said the reason he played so long on [modal runes like "So What"] was that he couldn't find nothing good to stop on. That statement really holds true, too. Because if you haven't played in the modal concept, you're looking for some final cadence to stop. I know musicians had the same problem I did, a lot of them because of the absence of the final cadence of II-V-I[the typical ending of a chorus] or some of the cadences that music, heretofore, had been affording.”

It should be added that Heath may well be speaking more of his own trouble with modal structures than Coltrane's, since ‘Trane's recordings from the late fifties and sixties certainly reveal other factors that motivated his verbosity, including an ability to hear and play extended statements and phrases.

What of the modes that gave modal jazz its name? Jazzmen of the fifties—in the spirit typified by Miles's music library visits—sought out new and unusual modal patterns beyond the usual major and minor scales. Those who attended music school could study the twelve modes of the Western musical tradition. All permutations of the basic major scale, the twelve scales were originally defined in the Middle Ages, some to classify Gregorian chants, and were arbitrarily named after ancient Greek cities and regions. Some, like the Ionian and Aeolian modes, are basically modern major and minor scales, respectively. Other modes correspond to folk music scales of various countries. For example, the Phrygian can be exploited to exude a Spanish sonority, as on Sketches of Spain. The Dorian mode— favored by classical composers like Ravel and Rachmaninoff—works well as a blues scale and was employed by Miles on "Milestones" off the album of the same name.

New scales would also be found in musical exercise books. "A lot of the scalar material Coltrane was playing was Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns," keyboardist Joe Zawinul remembers, and he adds: "Most of the reed and trumpet players played out of different violin books, and also scale books like [Carl] Czerny."

Other New York musicians discovered modal inspiration nearby, in local restaurants. David Amram recalls:

“I knew about some of those primary modes, because living in New York you could go to these belly-dancing restaurant-bars like the Egyptian Gardens and hear Egyptian, Lebanese and sometimes music from Morocco, all of which had in common a certain rhythmic pattern and a certain mode. Some of the jazz players were really into that. They'd say, "The baddest cats are Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and the guys playing in those belly-dancing clubs."”

During the fifties, exotic scales—particularly those of India and various Middle Eastern cultures—found their way into the jazz lexicon, and wound up under the "modal jazz" rubric as well. Miles writes of turning Dizzy on to the "Egyptian minor scales" he had learned at Juilliard. Coltrane shared his own fascination with foreign sounds when he wrote in 1960:

“I want [my solos] to cover as many forms of music as I can put into a jazz context and play on my instruments. I like Eastern music ... and Ornette Coleman sometimes plays music with a Spanish content as well as other exotic-flavored music. In these approaches there's something I can draw on and use in the way I like to play.”

The Austrian-born Zawinul, who would join forces with Miles in the late sixties, brought a native familiarity with ethnic modalities of eastern Europe when he arrived in New York in 1958.

“In the early fifties, we were doing modal stuff in Vienna, you know? We were getting into all these different scales from folk music. Where I come from there were all these different influences from Slavic music, Turkish, Rumanian and Hungarian. I was actually surprised when I came to the States that more people weren't doing this.”

By the late fifties, that would change.

Miles Davis – with Coltrane and the rest of the sextet – was at the vanguard of this new wave of experimentation that would lead to the prime statement of modal Jazz: Kind of Blue.”

Jim Snidero: Jazz Alto Saxophone Revisited

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

“For most of the last three decades, the tenor saxophone has dominated the forest of jazz woodwinds, its dark, obviously romantic shadow all but obscuring the once-prominent alto sax. In recent years, though, the alto saxophone's singular, sexy intensity has again gained fashion, re-establishing its vital niche in the jazz environment. You can thank guys like Jim Snidero for helping make it so.”

- Neil Tesser, Jazz writer/critic

“I want to be as creative as possible.  But I don’t think you ever can exhaust straight-ahead music. There are so many things that you can do just by changing a few notes, by changing phrasing, by changing octaves. I sense something missing in the shape of a line and the time feel of cats who haven’t gotten deeply into Bird and bebop. Basically, I want my music not to sound straight-ahead but still have that bebop attitude—a bit of abstraction and a bit of grease.”

- Jim Snidero

“he takes this music for quartet and quintet beyond the jam session mentality that assures so many small-group sessions of only momentary interest. In an area of music that is underused—in fact, largely undiscovered—by most jazz artists, he invests his work with dynamics” as well as “harmonic shape and texture.”

- Doug Ramsey, Jazz author, writer, critic

Whenever I listen to the music of alto saxophonist Jim Snidero, it always makes me wonder why I don’t do so more often.

It’s all there: the bop tradition of Bird, Cannonball and Stitt; some freer post bop influences; gobs of technique; impressive improvisation ideas; an irrepressible sense of swing.

What makes the music of Jim Snidero even more impressive is that he didn’t begin his career in Jazz until the early 1980s.

Given the relative paucity of the US Jazz scene at that time, it’s amazing that he found the music at all, let alone his own direction in it.

Here’s a quick synopsis of Jim’s background and credentials as excerpted from the Concord Music website:

“A teenage student of Phil Woods and a product of the jazz program at the University of North Texas in Denton, Snidero received postgraduate training with organist Jack McDuff in 1982-83. He side-manned from 1983 to 2003 with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band, played with Eddie Palmieri from 1994 to 1997 and with the Mingus Orchestra from 1999 to 2001, and has appeared as a sideman on albums by pianists David Hazeltine and Mike LeDonne [who also plays Hammond B-3 Organ], tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, and trumpeters Joe Magnarelli and Brian Lynch. Since the late Eighties, he’s led numerous ensembles featuring the top musicians of his peer group, and toured them extensively in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.”

Paralleling Jim education and work experience is the fact that Jim continues to grow and develop his own, personal vision and sound as a Jazz artist.

Or as Neil Tesser explains it:

“More to the point, Snidero has identified, studied, and even elaborated upon the classic virtues of his instrument. These include a fierce rhythmic authority, which dovetails with the instrument's natural bite (and without which the alto can sound gray and fallen), and the ability to really fill the horn: to "sing out," whether it be through a single note or a flurry of wildly complicated improvisation. But it all starts with the sound.

Perhaps no element in jazz strikes with the immediacy of sound; but in the case of the alto sax — the most "vocal" of saxophones, capable of an opera singer's proverbial "pear-shaped tones" — it takes on greater importance still. Such concerns are not lost on Snidero, who says that in the last few years, "I've been striving most to define my style and my sound. I think I do have my own sound, and I'm just trying to get closer to it; I want it to be more flexible, to have more colors, to be more characteristic, to make it both bigger and more focused. Sound has always been really important to me."

Another great feature of Jim Snidero’s music is that one gets to hear it against a backdrop of some of the best, young musicians on the New York City Jazz scene. Of the 16 recordings that he has issued to date under his own name, Jim is joined by the likes of trumpeters Tom Harrell, Brian Lynch and Joe Magnarelli, trombonist Conrad Herwig, alto saxophonist Mike DiRubbo, tenor saxophonists Eric Alexander and Walt Weiskopf, guitarist Paul Bollenback, pianists Andy LaVerne, Renee Rosnes, Benny Green, David Hazeltine, Marc Copeland, Mulgrew Miller, and Mike LeDonne [who also plays Hammond B-3 organ on one date], bassists Peter Washington, Dennis Irwin, Steve LaSpina and Paul Gill and drummers Jeff Hirshfield, Kenny Washington, Tony Reedus, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Jeff “Tain” Watts and McClenty Hunter.

What a showcase of talent. Is it any wonder that Jim Snidero makes such great music? As Jazz columnist Ted Panken has observed: “Music is a social medium, and the palpable ensemble feel, the sense of co-equal voices transmuting notes and tones into four-way conversation, is directly attributable to the musician­ship and interpersonal chemistry of Snidero's band mates,  "These guys can play bebop, but each one adds something that's fresh but still hip," Snidero says.

Snidero sums up his approach to music best in his interview with Ted when he says:

"I grew up listening to a standard of excellence, be it Coltrane. Rollins, Bird, Joe Henderson. Cannonball or even as a kid, Phil Woods and Dave Leibman. It's an incredible achievement to play an instrument like that, and the music itself is so warm and spiritual. When you hear their tone, it's perfected and compete—it isn't missing any colors or nuance, it's expressive, it has a human quality. I'm not saying my sound is on that level, but I value those things. My goal, whether I'm playing inside or outside, slow or fast, Latin or swing, is to have those qualities in my playing, especially when I'm playing my own music. If it has a spiritual quality and it's very refined, then I think people get into it no matter what."

All of these qualities are on exhibit in the following video tribute to Jim. The tune is his original composition Enforcement which is based on the chord progression to Kurt Weill's Speak Low. Joining him are Brian Lynch, trumpet, Benny Green, piano, Peter Washington, bass and Marvin "Smitty" Smith on drums.

Brian Lynch - Peer Pressure [From the Archives]

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

In his incisive and informative insert notes for Brian Lynch's Peer Pressure, a Criss Cross recording [1029 CD], Mike Hennessy offers up the following rhetorical question – “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.”

Hennessy goes on to explain that the implication of this question and answer 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 the musicians that trumpeter Brian Lynch has assembled on Peer Pressure

After stints with the Horace Silver Quintet, the Mel Lewis big band and the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, Peer Pressure was the first album that trumpeter Brian recorded under his own name.  On it, he is ably assisted by tenor saxophonist Ralph Moore, his front-line mate with Horace’s quintet, and alto saxophonist Jim Snidero, also a member of Toshiko’s big band.

The cookin’ rhythm section is made-up of Kirk Lightsey on piano, Jay Anderson on bass and Victor Lewis on drums who was to spend most of the decade of the 1980s as Stan Getz’s drummer.

In evidence throughout the seven tracks on this album are the general high standards which Harrison uses to characterize the players on today’s Jazz scene.

A great deal of thought and care has gone into this recording from the standpoint of the selection of tunes and their sequence, the seeking out of Rudy van Gelder to engineer the recording in his inimitable style which makes the listener feel enveloped by the sound of the music, and especially, the high quality that went into the crafting of the solos.

Every one is listening to everyone else; adding something to what the soloist is saying through the use of background riffs and dynamics, pulsating bass lines, piano “comping” that’s just right and just enough, with the whole thing encapsulated by Lewis’ beautiful time-keeping and wonderful “kicks” and “licks.”

All of these qualities are discernible in the opening track of the CD; the rarely heard Thomasville, a looping blues by the trumpeter Tommy Turrentine that gives everyone a chance to get loose at a relaxed tempo that includes all three horn players trading four’s with Victor before Victor takes his own 12-bar solo.

This is followed by Park Avenue Petite another rarely heard tune, although this one is by Benny Golson one of modern Jazz’s prolific composers, and it becomes a beautifully played ballad feature for Lynch.

Sandwiched in between Peer Pressure and Change of Plan, two originals by Lynch, is a superb version of Horace Silver’s The Outlaw.

This composition is vintage Horace with its twists and turns containing all sorts of surprises due to its unusual structural form.  Like Ecaroh, it employs both 4/4 straight-ahead and Latin-inflected rhythmic passages, but The Outlaw does so within an asymmetric construction that employs two sections of thirteen [13] bars divided into seven [7] measures of straight-ahead 4/4 and six [6] of Latin rhythms, a ten [10] bar 4/4 section which acts as a bridge followed by a sixteen [16] bar Latin vamp [or Latin pedal] with a two [2] break that leads into the next solo.

It’s a masterpiece whose seemingly disparate parts generate a powerful “tension and release” effect that will leave you wanting to listen to this sprightly bit of musical magic over and over again.

While we all miss the great musicians who created modern Jazz, the music on this recording is an example that their legacy of excellence in musicianship, creativity and improvisation lives on and that the music is in good hands.

Treat yourself – these guys can PLAY!

Paul Horn's Jazz Impressions of CLEOPATRA [From The Archives]

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

Recent research has revealed that Antony and Cleopatra - one of history's most romantic couples - were not the great beauties that Hollywood would have us believe.

A study of a 2,000-year-old silver coin found the Egyptian queen, famously portrayed by a sultry Elizabeth Taylor, had a shallow forehead, pointed chin, thin lips and sharp nose.

On the other side, her Roman lover, played in the 1963 movie by Richard Burton, Taylor's husband at the time, had bulging eyes, a hook nose and a thick neck.

History has depicted Cleopatra as a great beauty, befitting a woman who as Queen of Egypt seduced Julius Caesar, and then his rival Mark Antony.

But the coin, which goes on show on Wednesday at Newcastle University for Valentine's Day, after years lying in a bank, is much less flattering about both famous faces.

The 32 BC artifact was in a collection belonging to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, which is being researched in preparation for the opening of the new Great North Museum.

Clare Pickersgill, the university's assistant director of archaeological museums, said: "The popular image we have of Cleopatra is that of a beautiful queen who was adored by Roman politicians and generals. The relationship between Mark Antony and Cleopatra has long been romanticized by writers, artists and film-makers.

"Shakespeare wrote his tragedy Antony and Cleopatra in 1608, while the Orientalist artists of the 19th century and the modern Hollywood depictions, such as that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the 1963 film, have added to the idea that Cleopatra was a great beauty. Recent research would seem to disagree with this portrayal, however."

The university's director of archaeological museums, Lindsay Allason-Jones, said: "The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

"Roman writers tell us that Cleopatra was intelligent and charismatic, and that she had a seductive voice but, tellingly, they do not mention her beauty. The image of Cleopatra as a beautiful seductress is a more recent image."

While the editorial staff at JazzProfiles is saddened to learn that Hollywood didn’t get it right, again, we were delighted when producers at Columbia Records commissioned Paul Horn to make a “Jazz Impressions” LP of composer Alex North’s fine score to Cleopatra [he is also the composer of the film score for the movie Spartacus].

In a way, the Paul’s Jazz Impressions of Cleopatra turned out to be a family affair as both of my drum teachers, Victor Feldman and Larry Bunker played piano and percussion, respectively, on the album. In addition to Paul [who plays flute exclusively], Victor and Larry, the LP features the talents of Emil Richards on vibes and Chuck Israels on bass.

The following video features the Paul Horn Quintet performing  Grant Me an Honorable Way to Die from the Columbia LP Cleopatra [CL 2050] as the audio track.