Doug Ramsey on Gene Lees

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

Pavilion in the Rain

“On warm summer nights, in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, and over the lake-or the river, or the sea. Sometimes Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

The sound of the saxophones, a sweet and often insipid yellow when only four of them were used, turned to a woody umber when, later, the baritone was added. The sound of three trombones in harmony had a regal grandeur. Four trumpets could sound like flame, yet in ballads could be damped by harmon mutes to a citric distant loneliness. Collectively, these elements made up the sound of a big band.

It is one that will not go away. The recordings made then are constantly reissued and purchased in great quantities. Time-Life re-creates in stereo the arrangements of that vanished era, while the Reader's Digest and the Book of the Month Club continue to reissue many of the originals. Throughout the United States and Canada, college and high school students gather themselves into that basic formation—now expanded to five trumpets, four trombones, five saxes doubling woodwinds, piano, bass, drums, and maybe guitar and French horns too-to make their own music in that style. By some estimates there are as many as 30,000 of these bands. The sound has gone around the world, and you will hear it on variety shows of Moscow television—a little clumsy, to be sure, but informed with earnest intention.

Why? Why does this sound haunt our culture?”

- Gene Lees

Although their primary purpose was to serve as the Foreword to the 1998 re-publication of Gene Lees’ Singers and the Song, Doug Ramsey’s introductory remarks also served another purpose, that of giving us considerable insight into Gene Lees himself and his significance to Jazz.

As the page header for this blog states, it is as much about Jazz writers as it is about Jazz and Jazz musicians and occasionally the editorial staff at JazzProfiles likes to turn its attention to essays about those scribes and critics whose descriptive and analytical skills do so much to enhance our appreciation of the music.

For fifty years [Gene died in 2010] as the editor of Downbeat, contributor to music magazines, writer of liner and insert notes author of many books about all aspects of Jazz and its makers and editor of the Jazzletter, no one has ever rated higher in the pantheon of Jazz authors than Gene Lees.

“Singers and the Song explores an art that originated in a time when to say "good popular music" was not to utter an oxymoron. It is one of two books that are indispensable to a deep appreciation of the vocal music that America has contributed to the world's fund of lasting cultural achievements.

In American Popular Song, published in 1972, Alec Wilder used his formidable learning, analytical ability, wit, and strong opinions to treat his subject with a seriousness it had never before received. At once scholarly and entertaining, Wilder scrutinized the work of songwriters from Jerome Kern to Frank Loesser. He discussed more than 900 songs and provided annotated analyses of 384 of them. Erudite and acerbic, a wonderful songwriter himself, Wilder imposed a minimum level of acceptable quality. He explained his criteria with clarity and elegance, lashed the best writers for mediocrity, and praised brilliance in genius and journeymen alike. His book, it is safe to say, is on the shelf of every songwriter, singer, and critic who reveres the popular song tradition.

Next to it, or nearby, is almost certain to be Gene Lees' Singers and the Song, first published in 1987, now polished and expanded into an even more valuable volume. Wilder achieved insight through his composer's formal knowledge and craftsman's sense as one of the last great songwriters of the classic period that ended in the mid-1950s. Lees brings to his consideration of popular song a creator's involvement, a performing artist's knowledge of what works, and a journalist's clear-eyed powers of observation.

Gene Lees the singer has performed and recorded with some of the best jazz artists of our time. He has a compendious knowledge of singing and songwriting, among a staggering variety of other subjects. He is a perpetual student with an omnivorous need to know why and how people do what they do. He wrote an unorthodox rhyming dictionary patterned after not English but French rhyming dictionaries. An important lyricist, he fashioned English words for several of the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim. This Happy Madness is one of the finest sets of lyrics to grace a Jobim song in any language. Lees' words to Corcovado are a part of the cultural atmosphere of the second half of the century. His work has been recorded by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, and indeed just about every important singer of recent decades.

Most writing about jazz and popular music, as sophisticated readers recognize with a wince, is done by fans who have become writers. Most are cheerleaders, press agents without portfolio who leave in their printed wakes evaluations and pronouncements supported by raw opinion and nerve endings. Some go to the trouble of learning about the music beyond personalities and trends. The best of them transcend their star worship and their proclivities to promotion and advocacy.

A few gain critical skills and faculties that allow them to produce work helpful to listeners who want a better understanding of the music. The late Willis Conover, titan of the Voice of America, often described himself as a "professional fan" and was the best of that breed, but he transformed himself into a superb writer about jazz and a respected critic, although he would have shrunk in horror from that denomination.

Gene Lees brings to jazz writing the skills of a trained and experienced journalist. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and grew up forty miles from there in St. Catharines on the Lake Ontario shore, near where Canada and the United States share Niagara Falls. He and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler were high school friends. His first job at a newspaper was on the Hamilton Spectator, covering city hall, school-board meetings, ribbon cuttings, political speeches, crime and fires and accidents. At the Toronto Telegram, he reported on the courts. He was beaten into the shape of a newspaperman by tough editors who demanded accuracy and clear storytelling. At the Montreal Star, he covered labor, then became an assistant city editor and a correspondent in Europe. The Louisville Times lured him to Kentucky and made him music and drama editor. He thought he should have a better understanding of what he was writing about, joined a drama group, and resumed the formal study of music, a pursuit he continues today. Awarded a John Ogden Reid Fellowship of $5000, a substantial windfall for a newspaperman in 1958, he returned to Europe and spent a year studying music, film, and drama festivals and arts funding.

Lees had long been captivated by jazz and insisted, in his writing for the Times, in treating it with the same respect that he applied to his writings about classical music. In his youth, the big bands were years away from foundering. He absorbed their music and was permanently affected by the bands, their musicians, and the culture that swirled around them.

Throughout Singers and the Song, he melds with his thoroughgoing research the sense of wonder and pleasure that grew in the boy listening to good bands that stopped near St. Catharines and played by the lake.

The beginning of the second piece in this book, the remarkable Pavilion in the Rain, is a masterpiece of writing that is evocative without succumbing to sentiment. The first two paragraphs capture a time and a thousand places that shared a cultural mood. Pavilion in the Rain goes on to defy the conventional thought about why an era passed. It makes a case so sound that the reader wonders why it took thirty years to emerge. It is Lees at the top of his game, which is illumination.

When in 1959 the opportunity came for Lees to become editor of Down Beat, he was mature in journalism and music. He brought to Down Beat a professionalism in coverage, editing, and style that elevated it significantly above its decades as a fan magazine. In his own writing, he honed his ability to find the center of a performance, a trend, a style, a person, as in his 1962 article about Brazilian musicians who found themselves culturally stranded and bewildered in New York during the first wave of the bossa nova phenomenon. It was one of the best things ever to appear in Down Beat, and Lees wonderfully expands its essence in Urn Abraco No Tom, his essay on Jobim.

Lees founded his Jazzletter in 1981. He has written, edited, and published it with the rigor of an old-fashioned managing editor who enforces high standards of accuracy, clarity, and fairness - he once threw out one of his own pieces at press time on grounds of lack of objectivity - and with the passion of an editorial page editor who cares about his community. Lees' community may seem to be that of jazz musicians, but the 1500 or so subscribers to the Jazzletter include a sophisticated mix of players, composers, arrangers, prominent writers about the arts, and a fair percentage of listeners who are physicians, lawyers, computer professionals, airline pilots, professors, and actors. Like all good editors, he knows his readers and the community they comprise. He knows that his community is part of the world, and he knows how the two interact.

When he devotes an issue to a topic that seems apart from music and subscribers complain, he refunds their money and sends them on their way. That happened when a few readers grumbled about his examination of U.S. health care reform and the Canadian health system. Lees thought that musicians and jazz listeners would be concerned about one of the most pressing economic and social issues of the 1990s. They were; his mail responding to the essay was heavy and largely positive. The letters he printed reflected a wide and intelligent range of thought about a troubling societal problem.

When writing about music and musicians, Lees is not reluctant to move out of the tight little categories on which so many jazz devotees insist. The pieces on Julius La Rosa and Edith Piaf may have seemed out of context to some Jazzletter readers, but they illuminate (there's that essential word again) the condition of the artist, indeed the human condition. I showed the La Rosa story to a friend of mine who is an anesthesiologist. He is from a close Italian family that gave him support and encouragement, a family quite unlike La Rosa's. Reading the piece, he recognized his life and his family, and the difference, and wept.

In the foreword to the first edition of Singers and the Song, Grover Sales wrote that only I.F. Stone's Weekly compared to Gene Lees' Jazzletter. Izzy Stone's meticulously researched hell-raising is gone. Lees comes from the tradition that produced Stone. He applies its values to a division of the arts that gets little of the loving, stern, journalistic attention it needs. The Jazzletter has been his demanding taskmaster for nearly two decades. From time to time he tells his readers that he is thinking about giving it up. Let us hope that they continue to dissuade him, because the Jazzletter is the source of books like Singers and the Song.”

— Doug Ramsey

Doug Ramsey has a distinguished history as a newspaper reporter in Seattle and television reporter and anchorman in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. He has been writing about music for forty years. He is the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers and Take Five: The Public and Privates Lives of Paul Desmond.

You can visit him at his blog by going here.

Mr. Satch and Mr. Cros - Will Friedwald on Jazz Singing

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

Mention Jazz singing in the context of books on the subject and the name “Will Friedwald” immediately springs up, no doubt because many Jazz fans consider him to be the ranking authority on the subject.

Whether it's Bessie, Bailey or Billie; Teagarden, Turner or Torme; Will is the “go to” guy for information on all aspects of Jazz Singing - not to mention - his definitive writings on Frank Sinatra.

If you think about it, it’s kind of tragic that the two men largely responsible for much of the vocal direction in American Popular Music in the 20th century are largely forgotten these days.

With Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby in mind, I went to Will's seminal Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond, and found these thoughts by him on the significance of Pops and Der Bingle.

“Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, the two most important figures in jazz-derived popular singing, both went to their graves without the world knowing when they were born. Only in a 1988 Village Voice article did Gary Giddins, author of Satchmo (New York: Dolphin, Doubleday, 1989), the finest study of Armstrong yet, reveal that the date of Armstrong's birth was August 4, 1901, and only in the eighties did Ken Twiss, president of the Bing Crosby Historical Society, prove beyond all doubt that Crosby was born on May 3, 1903 (baptismal certificates held the answer in both instances).

We know also that both came from poor families— Armstrong's hardly a family at all. In the late forties, when Crosby was seen as the ultimate American everyman, the writers of his broadcasts and his press releases tried to create a middle-class background for him. Ironically, this was the one stratum to which he had never belonged. Raised at near-poverty level in Tacoma, Washington, he became one of the wealthiest men in show business before he was forty. Crosby's father, when he worked, held down a job in a brewery and was barely able to support his wife, seven children (of which Bing—originally Harry—was the fourth), and the various other relatives who lived with them. Crosby later admitted that while his father succeeded in feeding and sheltering them all, the children had to work for everything else, including clothes, shoes, and school-books. Armstrong's upbringing was even bleaker. He was raised in the most squalid, desolate area of New Orleans—it would make a contemporary black ghetto seem like Shangri-la by comparison—by a mother who was barely around. His father wasn't there at all.

Both men became attracted to music and entertainment early on and each grew up determined to make it his career. In New Orleans' Negro red light district, where Armstrong was born and raised and where diversions of every sort were the principal trade, even danger (to use Armstrong's metaphor) "was dancing all around you then." "Little Louis" sang in a vocal quartet in his early teens; no casual affair this, since there was money to be made by poor boys on the Storyville streets and almost no place else. Armstrong's group faced much competition and had to rehearse and make an informal study of harmony and part-singing. "He could sing real well, too," remembered Peter Davis, bandleader in the Colored Waif's Home where the teen-aged Armstrong learned to play cornet, "even though his voice was coarse."

From the beginning, Armstrong's interest in singing and songs equaled his enthusiasm for the cornet and instrumental jazz, the music he more than anyone else would turn into a international art form. Shortly after leaving the orphanage, in fact, Armstrong composed what would later become the popular standard "I Wish I Could Shimmy like My Sister Kate." Still, for the next dozen or so years of his life, singing took a backseat to the trumpet.

His rise to the top of the New Orleans music scene, though not overnight, occurred quickly, and over the next few years he played with virtually all the major bands in the city, including Fate Marable's riverboat groups and Kid Ory's. In 1922, Armstrong's mentor, King Oliver, invited him to work with his Creole Jazz Band in Chicago, and after playing and recording with Oliver for over a year, Armstrong moved into what, thanks largely to him, would become the most important early-jazz big band, Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. Armstrong had recorded dozens of discs as a sideman with Oliver, Henderson, Clarence Williams, and a dozen or so blues singers (including the greatest, Bessie Smith) by the time he began his most important series of records in 1925. Collectively known as the Hot Fives, a term that refers to all the small-group sessions under Armstrong's leadership between 1925 and 1928, these are by general consensus the most influential of Armstrong's accomplishments and quite likely the most significant body of work in all jazz.

Here he changes the face of jazz on every conceivable level: Rhythmically, he establishes the soon-to-be standard 4/4 "swing" tempo; structurally, he solidifies use of the theme-solos-theme format; conceptually, he defines the idea of jazz itself with the soloist at the center, from playing short, simple "breaks" of slight melodic embellishments to fully improvised chord-based solos of a whole chorus or longer. And in the strategy he describes as progressing from the melody to routine-ing the melody to routine-ing the routine, he sets down the basic model as well as the vocabulary most, if not all, jazz soloists would use from then on. Even before 1928, Armstrong's achievements begin to elevate from a purely musical plane to a social one, as he launches the shifts in the music that would enable it to become both a high-brow art form and an international pop entertainment. To use Lester Bowie's phrase, Louis Armstrong created "jazz as we know it."

How to top an act like that? For Armstrong, the logical next step after reinventing jazz was to reinvent popular music in his own image—to apply his discoveries as a jazz musician to mass-market pop. To speak diagrammatically, from 1929 onward Armstrong works just as hard at expanding outwardly as a performer as he had at growing upwardly from 1925 to 1928, the years of the Hot Fives. The opinion of some of his critics to the contrary, this expansion did nothing to lessen the internal content of Armstrong's art; it altered his music only in terms of its outward manifestations in three specific areas: On records especially, Armstrong now works almost exclusively with big dance bands as opposed to Hot Fives and Sevens; he concentrates more on popular songs instead of original compositions and material out of the jazz tradition; and he gives equal time to singing.

To be sure, Armstrong had sung quite a bit on his earlier small-band records, his vocals on these coming off more like a direct extension of his horn work than the other way around (as was actually the case). On "Hotter Than That" (1927) and "West End Blues" (1928), for example, Armstrong experiments with transposing the functions of the voice and the trumpet: He trades call-and-response phrases with another musician, but sings back his answers where you expect him to play them.

Armstrong also sings a trumpet-style obbligato behind Lillie Delk Christian, the main vocalist on "Too Busy" (1928). Many Hot Five sides also contain stop-time breaks sung instead of played, but the most revealing glimpses into the future occur on Armstrong's longer scat choruses. As we have seen, Cliff Edwards had been the first to apply scat to pop singing, and he had done as much as it was possible to do with the technique in the pre-Armstrong world. Armstrong not only brought scatting into his universe, he devised new contexts for it. "Heebie Jeebies" (1926), the most celebrated of his vocal improvisations, transliterated patterns Armstrong had conceived for instrumental music very directly into vocal terms, starting with lyrics, then modulating into scat phrases, and returning to the words at the conclusion, which all lends credence to the trumped-up tale of the record's scat sequence not being deliberate (as rehashed by Armstrong and Crosby in the broadcast excerpt at the beginning of this chapter). No one could make such a claim with Armstrong's two equally remarkable 1928 scat vocals, "Basin Street Blues" and "Squeeze Me"; so in place of an extra musical explanation, Armstrong "excuses" his scat episodes by having two other members of the band hum in harmony behind him—as if to somehow normalize them. In doing so, Armstrong unearths the folk origins of each tune, investigating what they might have sounded like before W. C, Handy and Clarence Williams codified them into song form.

Other indications of things to come can be found on his more or less conventional vocal refrains. There's the monumental sense of humor that produced the comic duet of Mr. and Mrs. Lil Armstrong (then also his pianist) on "That's When I'll Come Back to You," and the mastery of the blues in spirit and form on "I'm Not Rough" {both 1927), which contains the single most powerful blues ever sung by a man (or anyone besides Bessie Smith) in this period, authenticated by the presence of blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson, here serving as guest accompanist.

By 1929, Armstrong had all the elements necessary to become a great singer. The next move in the evolution of jazz-influenced popular singing would then be a matter of integration. Fortunately (as Armstrong once later said of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke), Bing Crosby happened to be "working on the same thing."

The story of Crosby giving up law school to play drums and sing in a jazz band ("I'd rather sing than eat," he reportedly told his disappointed parents) and the one about his trip from his native Washington to find big-time showbiz in Los Angeles in a beat-up old jalopy, are as much a part of the mythology of popular music as the tale of little Louis Armstrong firing a gun and winding up in the orphanage is to that of jazz.

A few months after Armstrong cut "Heebie Jeebies" in 1926, Paul Whiteman, who had been one of the first popular bandleaders to show an interest in jazz and, as we have seen, in vocalists, hired Crosby and his partner, Al Rinker, as the industry's first full-time recording band singers. The mere act of signing on someone who did nothing but sing seemed strange enough in those days, but the choice of Crosby proved to be nothing less than radical. Crosby did not fit into either of the two molds that had been established for non-classical singers by this point. He was not a noisy Jolson clone like Billy Murray or Irving Kaufman. Nor did he act like the equally affected zombies of the early post-microphone period, like Ruth Etting, Whispering Jack Smith, and Gene Austin, who overdid the understatements to such a degree that they were even farther away from jazz than the belters had been. Even his voice, a steadily deepening baritone with a husky rasp and an occasional trill, sounded as far removed from the popular tenors and falsettos of the time as Armstrong's vocal gravel pit.

The pop music world must have wondered what Whiteman saw in Crosby. My guess is that Whiteman realized that Crosby had the potential ability to accomplish one of the basic functions of an artist, one that was particularly germane to what Whiteman himself aspired to: to recognize what was valid in contemporary popular music, to preserve the best parts of it, and to integrate them all into a cohesive whole by filtering them through his own personality. Integration, in fact, represents the single most important element of Crosby's accomplishments. In this sense, integration means more than a union of African and American elements; it means art as a whole being, as a series of connections, of making seemingly disparate forms fit together in new ways. And in the traditional sense, integration signifies the single most crucial element of American music, the very basis of its existence.

In Crosby's earliest recordings, made with the Whiteman orchestra, Crosby puts together the various ingredients as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle; but in each case, what Crosby adds of his own is equally important. The classic blues singers, especially the phonetically correct but no less blue Ethel Waters (who, in turn, would learn a thing from both Armstrong and Crosby), had already adapted blues feeling to the harmonic practices of Western music, but not, as Crosby did, to the American pop song. Jolson and Marion Harris provided a model for energetic charisma and the concept of black imitation, but Crosby would firstly remove all traces of the minstrel show, fitting and Austin and the other early microphone singers demonstrated how the new electric recording technique could be used, but left it to Crosby to prove that subtlety didn't have to mean somnambulance.

Edwards had demonstrated the relevance of scatting to pop singing but never really developed it as Crosby and Armstrong would, simultaneously taking the technique forward into the new world of post-Armstrong rhythm. Most importantly, Crosby absorbed the new instrumental soloists, especially Armstrong and, to a lesser extent, Beiderbecke: their approach to melodic organization, their use of rhythm, and their concept and vocabulary of improvisation.

Crosby's greatest accomplishment—the result of all this alchemy—was the application of jazz to the music of Tin Pan Alley. The significance of "hot" music to ballads, in particular, had been a nut that no one had been able to crack, especially vocally. Certainly Crosby's assimilation of Armstrong's rhythmic advances gave him a major jump on the competition. On White-man's records of "I'm Afraid of You" (1928, Victor) and "T'aint So, Honey, T'aint So" (1928, Columbia), he introduces the device of holding notes at the end of phrases as a means of playing with the time. On "Make Believe" (1928, Victor), Crosby goes even farther, leaving his colleagues in the orchestra behind. To reduce the risk of the elephantine Whiteman entourage getting in his way, the strings and the horns lay out while Crosby takes his chorus with just the rhythm section. And not even all of them: The piano, banjo, and drums keep fairly quiet while Crosby performs what amounts to a duet with the band's New Orleanian string bassist, Steve Brown.  While the piano, banjo, drums, and Whiteman's other bass (tuba actually) churn out dated oom-pah chunks, Crosby and Brown genuinely swing and at times they even ease into surprisingly modern 4/4 time. (Brown later described this time signature as one of the cornerstone elements of "modern" jazz.)

The success of the other half of Crosby's achievement, his use of lower pitches, can't be explained in strictly musical terms. The twenties were great years for "naturalism," but their idea of natural differed drastically from any that has come since—and Crosby represents the line of demarcation. He was the one who came up with the kind of "natural" that worked: the warm B-flat baritone with a little hair on it, the perfect balance between conversational and purely musical singing, the personality and the character. Crosby was the first singer to truly glorify and exalt the American popular melody, and his deep, perfectly intone resonance gave American music the wherewithal at last to compete with (and, in my ears at least, surpass) opera and the European art-song tradition. It became the sound that defined generation after generation of pop singing, largely because of its jazz origins: The single most identifiable characteristic of Crosby's style, in fact, was as a jazz device, namely, the use of trills and what classical music crit Henry Pleasants describes as mordants or satellite notes, which serve as grace notes* or syncopes employed to break up the time.

This takes us ahead of our story but not by all that much. Once Crosby had conquered the new rhythm, all the other elements began to fall into place; after 1929, both he and Armstrong could finally perform jazz-ballads that meet all the requirements of both sides of the hyphen. While Crosby's earliest solo outings (outside dance-band refrains and vocal groups), such as "Till We Meet" (1929, Columbia), reveal a not-surprising apprehension about how he's going to fill all two hundred seconds by himself, his later vocal refrains, like "Oh! Miss Hannah," "Waiting at the End of the Road" (both with Whiteman [both 1929, Columbia]), and "It Must Be True" (with Gus Arnheim's Coconut Grove Orchestra [1930, Victor]) show considerable progress and characteristic confidence.

Simultaneously, Armstrong's 1929 recordings, especially "I Ain't Got Nobody" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" (Okeh), show that interpreting lyrics is gradually becoming as important to him as scarring, though at this early stage his vocals still serve as mere interludes between more crucial trumpet solos. Armstrong's 1930 "I'm Confessin' " (Okeh), selected by Gary Giddins as the Armstrong record that most strongly reflects Crosby's reciprocated influence, represents a milestone of the latest stages of the new art's development Armstrong gives out with as many Bing-ish trills and extended line-ending notes as he does his own devices, like roars, repeated phrases, and personal interjections, playing off the guitar accompaniment in the same manner that Crosby had done with his guitarist, Eddie Lang. (Armstrong's November 1931 "Star Dust" includes a line of "boo-boo-boo"-ing inspired by Crosby's May 1931 record of "Just One More Chance.")

The early thirties saw the Crosby and Armstrong styles at their most convergent, although their individual personalities were strong enough to pull them away before too long. Nevertheless, they would retain enough of their mutually developed bag of tricks to make their later performances together high points of both careers. More importantly, now that they had put all the pieces together, no man could tear them asunder, and hundreds and hundreds of singers, arrangers, and songwriters would use the vocabulary developed by Armstrong and Crosby in the late twenties and early thirties. The spread of the new language was hastened by the rising popularity of each man in two of the only cases in Western history where an artist's fame and fortune came to equal his talent. They were so perfectly a part of their time and culture. By the mid-1930s all of the problems had been solved. …”

"Dexter Gordon: Both Sides of Midnight" - Stretching Out and Saying Something

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

“Stretch out. To improvise for an extended period, sufficiently long to allow a thorough working out of the possibilities offered by a theme. The term implies an unexpectedly lengthy, inventive, even self-indulgent solo in a context in which a short improvisation would be normal, and presumably derives from the consequent "stretching out" or extension of the piece as a whole. A renowned example of such a solo is Paul Gonsalves's 27-chorus improvisation on Duke Ellington's Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 [the recording of which was issued on the album Ellington at Newport Columbia CL934.”

- Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

“When a musician successfully reaches a discerning audience, moves its members to applaud or shout praises, raises the energy to dramatic proportions, and leaves a sonorous memory that lingers long after, he or she has moved beyond technical competence, beyond the chord changes, and into the realm of "saying something." Since Saying something—or "sayin' something," as it's usually pronounced—requires soloists who can play, accompanists who can respond, and audiences who can hear within the context of the richly textured aural legacy of jazz ..., this verbal aesthetic image underscores the collaborative and communicative quality of improvisation.”

- Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction

“Stretching out” by playing multiple, improvised choruses became more of a feature of Jazz with the advent of the long-playing record in the 1950’s, but musicians like John Coltrane certainly expanded it to new levels in the 1960, especially in the context of “live” performances.

And to mix metaphors even further, “stretching out” takes the concept of “telling a story,” in some cases, to the point of writing a novel - or, at least, a novella - when some solos run over 45 minutes and can exceed an hour.

But take it from me as a former drummer who had to sit back there keeping time while these sonic odysseys were undertaken, soloists who can take extended solos while keeping it interesting to the point of “saying something,” are few and far between.  Running scales up-and-down a soprano saxophone for 30 minutes is not - saying something - it’s practicing.

If you want to listen a quintessential correlation between “stretching out” and “saying something,” them by all means get yourself a copy of the recently released Dexter Gordon Quartet Both Sides of Midnight and sit back and hear how it’s done on the four exquisite tracks that form this recording.

Both Sides of Midnight  - Black Lion Essential Reissue Series BLP 60103/Orgm-1062  - features iconic tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums on music that was recorded at the Montmartre Jazzhuis, Copenhagen, on July 20, 1967.

This music is from a time in Dexter’s career when he was back on the scene and had just culminated working on a series of six very successful LP’s for Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at Blue Note Records. Some of the music that appeared on these albums was from 1963 and 1964 recording sessions that took place in Paris [one of which included Drew and Orsted Pederson with Arthur Taylor on drums] as Dexter began to explore the European Jazz scene with an eye toward making it his permanent home later in that decade.

With the advent of the Beatles and the English rock groups plus the US-based, psychedelic rock bands, all of which captured the musical interests of younger listening audiences in the US [while, at the same time, the Free Jazz movement was turning off older, more established Jazz audiences], many Jazz musicians, as Mike Zwerin, the longtime International Herald Tribune Jazz columnist maintained, “moved to Europe to live,” Dexter among them.

Alun Morgan, the noted Jazz author and critic, who over the course of his long and distinguished career, contributed the liner notes to over 2,500 recordings, the following from Both Sides of Midnight among them:

“I am constantly surprised-although experience should have taught me otherwise-by the number of American jazz musicians who chose to live in Europe. A soloist previously known from his work on records turns up for a booking at Ronnie Scott's. Where did he come from. New York City? Very often the answer is no. lie has been living on the Continent for some time. When Blue Mole recorded Hank Mobley in Paris in the summer of 1969 five of the six men on the date - Mobley. Dizzy Reece. Philly Joe Jones. Slide Hampton and pianist Vince Benedetti - happened to be in France although they are better known for their American ties.

Since 1962 Dexter Gordon has been one of the most commanding and familiar figures in the jazz clubs and jazz festivals of London, Paris. Copenhagen. Stockholm. Lugano. Molde and anywhere else where jazz is appreciated. His attachment to Europe and Copenhagen-more so than any other city-is clearly defined. By coincidence he shares the same birthdate. February 27th with another great American tenor saxophonist once domiciled in Copenhagen, the late Ben Webster. (Ben was born in 1909. Dexter in 1923.) Both Gordon and Webster played many times at the Montmartre Jazzhuis and each chose to be accompanied by Kenny Drew and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson. Al Heath, brother of bass player Percy and saxophonist Jimmy, was not always available. In terms of European residency Al was the newcomer at the time of the Dexter Gordon Montmartre sessions. He left America in the summer of 1965 and elected to return home in October. 1968. ("I miss the scene" he said when he left. "I have lost all my fearss about the U.S. and I can understand the whole situation a little better now.")

Pianist Kenny Drew, who's playing on this and so many other European-recorded albums, is so essential to the group, was born in New York City in 1928. He left America in June, 1960 with the cast of the play The Connection. It was ostensibly, for a mere six weeks work but Drew knew when he left that he would not return to America. True to his beliefs he has lived and worked in Europe ever since, at first in Paris but latterly in Denmark where he married the daughter of the Danish band leader Leo Mathisen. The fourth member of the quartet is a European. Bass player Niels- Henning Orsted Pedersen was bom in Denmark in 1946 and was offered a job in the Count Basie band at the age of 17. Only a complication involving a work permit for one so young prevented him from taking up the offer. Dexter rates him very highly; indeed he thinks he is the best bass player in Europe.

This disc is the first in a series emanating from a highly productive engagement at the Montmartre Jazzhuis. Alan Bates arranged to record the quartet as it played a series of sets at the club. The four musicians gelled into a remarkably cohesive and consistently empathetic unit First out of the bag was "Devilette," akin to the throbbing, modal style of composition associated with Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue album. In this case it is a nine written by bassist Ben Tucker, a jazzman well known on the West Coast and a veteran of many recording sessions. Gordon likes to lace his sets , with ballads, sometimes throwing in a tear-jerker such as "Heartaches" but in this instance he turns in a beautiful and sensitive "For All We Know," making full use of that incredibly huge tone which has become so much an identifying part of his style.

Two of the tunes were written by Sonny Rollins, a tenor saxophonist who has an unabashed admiration for Dexter's own playing. "Doxy," first recorded at a Miles Davis session on which Rollins played tenor, is a contemporary treatment of what is often referred to as the "JaDa" sequence for the two tunes share the same structure and chord progression.

The lengthy "Sonnymoon For Two" is the first and last resort for the jazzman for it is a basic twelve-bar blues. Dexter is at his finest when he is allowed to stretch out on a number such as this. I remember talking to drummer Stan Levey about one of his record dates at which he was the leader; Dexter, Conte Candoli and Frank Rosolino comprised the front-line and during the course of the session Gordon told Levey he had a time which might be suitable for recording purposes. "How long is it?" asked Stan. Dexter said, "Oh, about this length", holding his hands some three feet apart. That tune turned out to be "Stanley The Steamer," a long but totally relaxed blues which was the highspot of that particular album.

Similarly "Sonnymoon For Two" is a seemingly endless, timeless examination of the blues. After two theme choruses Dexter plunges into no less than twenty-eight inspired and spontaneously improvised choruses, maintaining an incredibly high level of performance. Kenny Drew, who's playing adds so much to the success of the entire LP, embarks on some twenty choruses of his own (and note his two-fisted "stride" approach around chorus sixteen!). When Dexter returns after the bass solo he plays one chorus then indulges in a favourite whim, that of introducing a quotation into his solo. In this case his second chorus after the piano and bass interludes is prefaced with "You Won't Be Satisfied Until You Break My Heart," a mid "forties song forgotten by most who heard it at the time.”

The CD is available from Amazon, MusicDirect.com or from www.ORGMUSIC.com.

The following video is from the August 5, 1967 appearance by Dexter, Kenny, Niels Henning and “Tootie” at the Montmartre Jazzhuis, Copenhagen.