George Russell - The 1986 Jazz Journal International Interview

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

As regular readers of the blog may have noticed, mine is not an interactive blog. Or, to put it another way, I don’t place a lot of emphasis on communications with readers, not that I don’t appreciate each and every one of them.

I take this approach for a lot of reasons: [1] the blogging platform that I use is not conducive to exchanging messages; [2] I am not a Jazz “authority” per se and what I write about reflects my personal interests and is not intended to sway opinions or establish preferences; [3] it takes a great deal of effort to research and prepare these profiles which leaves me very little discretionary time for exchanging communications with readers.

However, occasionally messages do reach me such as the one that follows from Andy Wasserman and they serve as reminders that there is work to be done on my part in terms of further investigation to develop more in-depth profiles about the music in general and certain of its makers in particular.

In this case, the additional work in question concerns the arranger-composer and music theoretician George Russell whose pioneering work with modes as published in his Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organization amplified their use in Jazz and in popular music as an alternative to musical scales and chords.

Although The Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organization work has been available since 1953, sadly, as Andy points out in his correspondence, George’s methodology is still too little used as a cornerstone to Jazz education.

In the coming weeks the blog will feature interviews with and articles about George Russell that have appeared in Down Beat, Jazz Journal and Jazz Review as conducted or written by such eminent Jazz scholars as Dom Cerulli, Burt Korall, Phil Wilson, Bob Blumenthal and Stan Wooley. Hopefully, these posting will help contribute to a greater awareness and understanding of his work.

I have also re-posted to the blog’s sidebar, an earlier piece that I prepared on George and Jon Hendricks’ tone poem New York, New York which is the piece that Andy refers to in the following message.

“Dear Mr. Cerra, The article you wrote on George Russell and his "New York, N.Y." is the best article I've found on him and his music. I was his editorial assistant for 30 years, his substitute teacher at New England Conservatory from 1980-1982 when his Living Time Orchestra was on tour, had the honor of writing the foreword to the latest published edition (2001) of his "Lydian Chromatic Concept" and is one of only a handful of musicians he formally selected and certified to teach his work.

Everything you wrote is honest and true and much appreciated for its insight. I created a Tribute on my website to Mr. Russell that has recently been updated with the fact that I was first introduced to his music by a fellow Jazz musician who gave me the "New York, N.Y" album. Being a native New Yorker myself, I was changed from listening to that record. Out of respect for your copyright, I wanted to let you know that I put a credit to you and your Jazz Profiles site in a line of text on the page, with a link to your article on your Blog. Also wanted to make sure is OK with you that I also have a link within my site for the text only from your article copied/pasted into a PDF doc, with all copyright information intact. I did not alter a single word or make any edits. It appears alongside the link to your Blog for those people who might find that doc easier to read or more quick to access. If you feel that this additional version of your article is not in line with your copyright for this article, I'll remove it immediately.

Now that George Russell has been gone for almost 7 years, I'm still amazed at how little recognition he has received, and how almost every Jazz Department still ignores the importance of "The Concept." Your article is something I hope more people will read now that the links are on my site and it can help promote his legacy and your excellent writing. The link to the page I'm referring to is this: http://andywasserman.com/music-theory/george-russell-s-lydian-chromatic-concept Perhaps you and I can communicate further about George if you wish.

With respect, Andy Wasserman”

Let’s turn first to Stan Wooley’s JazzJournal International interview with George as it was written later in Russell’s career and contains a footnotes that cross-reference to his discography [JJI xxxix/10 (1986)].

You can locate more information about JazzJournal by going here.

“IT seems to me that the times now require going back. Much as how American music went back to discover its roots in gospel and country music, so too now, I feel, my music has to go back to the source. And Africa is that source.”

The speaker is George Russell who returned to the`source' in 1983 and wrote The African Game (1), a major work with which he made his Blue Note debut. The ambitious, nine-movement work also formed part of the concert programme on the composer's first ever UK tour earlier this year. The African Game is the latest work in a distinguished career which has spanned some four decades and extended the frontiers of modern jazz. An academic and theoretician, Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organisation in 1953, a work which pointed jazz in new directions and revolutionised the thinking of many important jazz musicians.

Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 23, 1923 and became aware of jazz by listening to the bands on the riverboats as they passed through his hometown. He began playing drums while in the boy scouts and by the age of 15 had become proficient enough to perform in public. But during his late teens and early twenties, he was dogged by poor health and at 19 was admitted to a sanatorium with TB. It was while he was thus confined that he began to study arranging and during that same year wrote several charts for the local A. B. Townsend Orchestra.

In 1944, Russell joined Benny Carter's band on drums, only to be replaced soon by Max Roach. Carter continued to make use of Russell's talents to rehearse the orchestra and also encouraged his writing. This was typical of Carter who, during the forties, furthered the careers of many musicians who later went on to greater things.

`One arrangement I did for Benny,' Russell recalled, 'was New World which took me a long time to write. I rehearsed it with the band at the Downtown Theatre in Chicago and they all liked it but thought it was too advanced at that time. Anyway, Benny bought it from me. It was a strong band and a good one to write for.'

It is interesting to note that during the forties the Benny Carter orchestra nurtured two future musical theoreticians in its ranks - Russell and the enigmatic Bob Graettinger. Graettinger joined Carter on alto saxophone in 1946 and went on to achieve somewhat controversial fame later that same decade with compositions for the Stan Kenton orchestra fashioned from a system of colours and graphs.

Russell also arranged for Earl Hines' band during the mid-forties. `He was a very nice man,' Russell said. `Very encouraging and he liked my music. I wrote the numbers for Earl's opening show at the Eldorado Cafe in Chicago for which I got very good reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times. Earl was incredibly youthful and always smiling, right up to his last years.'

Impressed by what he had heard of the New York jazz scene, particularly the music of Thelonious Monk, Russell headed for the Big Apple. He was engaged to play drums with the Charlie Parker quintet when he was admitted to St Joseph's Hospital in the Bronx with a recurrence of TB and spent the next 15 months there. It was an event which could easily have ended a promising career, but it brought forth an idea which was to radically alter the course of jazz. His health restored, Russell developed the idea into his Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organisation. He immediately began applying its principles to his compositions, the most important of which at that time was Cubana Be, Cubana Bop (2), premiered at Carnegie Hall in December 1947 by Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra.

The original composition did not include Latin percussionist Chano Pozo's now familiar contribution, as Russell explains: `I was on the bus with the band shortly after that New York concert and heard Chano Pozo doing these chants, so I suggested to Dizzy that we should feature Chano in the middle of the piece. Dizzy agreed and so we did it like that for the first time in Boston and then recorded it that way. Pozo was a very strong and forceful guy, and it was hard to get to know much about him. because he didn't, speak English all that well. He insisted on his royalties for Cubana Be, Cubana Bop and let you know you'd better come up with them too.  He was as very serious and a pretty heavy fellow who was later killed in a vendetta.'

The Gillespie orchestra recorded Cubana Be, Cubana Bop in New York on December 22, 1947. It remains to this day a remarkable piece of music, with its menacing intro leading into those glorious ensembles over which the leader's magnificent trumpet soars, eventually giving way to Pozo's electrifying chanting and drumming. `This was a great creative period in our history,' Dizzy Gillespie once said, .and Cubana Be, Cubana Bop was one of utmost adventurous pieces. It was just perfect and it's still right now.'

Russell's work was rather sporadic during the late forties - presumably perfecting his Lydian Chromatic Theory occupied most of his time. Then, in April 1949, clarinettist Buddy DeFranco fronted a studio orchestra which recorded Russell's A Bird in Igor's Yard (3). The juxtaposition of Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky in the tle is most apt because the composer has yawn from both these controversial musical pioneers. Whether Stravinsky ever borrowed from Russell is an interesting point for speculation but Parker regularly featured Russell's Ezz-Thetic when working with his string combo. The piece is better known as a result of the Lee Konitz sextet's recording of March, 1951, which has Miles Davis in the line-up (4), and Russell's own Smalltet version which he cut for Victor in March, 1956 (5).

In the early fifties, Russell dropped out of the scene in order to finish his theory. The work was eventually completed and published in 1953, when Russell was working as a sales assistant at Macy's department store in New York. Although the concept represents some 10 years of Russell's life, he never referred to it on stage during his UK concert tour.

‘Well, I don't like to brag,' he said. `I think it made contemporary music, and I don't mean just jazz, conscious of modes. It introduced modal consciousness in terms which no one was thinking about, certainly not jazz musicians nor, as far as I know, symphonic musicians. The Concept simply codified the modes and introduced chord-scale unity. In other words, for every chord there's a scale of unity and this gives the jazz musician greater resources.'

By the mid-fifties, many of the more progressively minded musicians became aware of the constraints that improvising within the chord sequence imposed upon them. The boppers had developed and extended this to the limit of its potential and further advances lay in other directions, one of which was the exciting new freedom and harmonic vistas opened up by Russell's theory.

`Miles (Davis) picked up on the idea first and he popularised it,' said Russell. ‘He used it on the piece called Milestones (6) which proved very successful and then came the Kind Of Blue (7) album which really established it.' Russell has great regard for Davis and concluded many of his UK concerts with a quite remarkable version of Davis' trumpet solo from So What (7) scored for the entire orchestra. `It pays Miles due respect for what he has contributed to me and other musicians,' Russell said.

The early sixties were a busy period for Russell but the majority of his activities centred around a sextet, presumably for economic reasons. `Yes, how did you guess?' he said. `It was impossible to have a big band at that time but this didn't bother me too much. The small group is always the laboratory out of which the big band concepts come, so all my big band albums were really written with a small band in mind.' During the three year period of its existence, the sextet's personnel included at various times such musical pioneers as Don Ellis, Eric Dolphy, David Baker, Steve Swallow and vocalist Sheila Jordan. Carla Bley, a student of Russell's during this period, contributed the occasional chart but in the main all the writing was done by the leader who also played piano with the group.

As a rule, record companies tend to shy away from bands with advanced or experimental ideas but this wasn't so with the Russell sextet. In all, six albums were released between 1960 and 1963: At The Five Spot (8), In Kansas City (9), Stratusphunk (10), Ezz-Thetics (11), Stratus Seekers (12) and The Outer View (13). Live concert performances, however, were few and far between during this time.

In 1963, Russell emigrated to Europe where he achieved considerable success and critical acclaim with a European version of his sextet. The group broadcast regularly on Scandinavian radio and even recorded a further two albums during this period: At Beethoven Hall (14) in 1965 with Don Cherry and Othello Ballet Suite/Electric Sonata No 1 (15) three years later with Downbeat according the latter a five-star rating.

Russell returned to the United States in 1969 and joined the staff of the New England Conservatory of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he now resides. In the mid-seventies he stopped composing to work on a second volume of his Lydian Chromatic Concept which he completed in 1978. In the past many of Russell's compositions have been linear in construction with two, Ezz-Thetic (5) and Knights Of The Steamtable (5) almost Tristano-like in their concept. But over the last 15 years Russell has formulated a complex theory of polyrhythmic organisation for which he has this explanation:

'I can't imagine any piece based on African music that didn't reflect vertical form because the Africans were the innovators of this idea,' he explained. `In an African drum choir, one drummer is the rhythmic gravity while the others gradually layer sophisticated rhythms on top of this tonal centre. The whole isn't really evolving in a horizontal way, it's evolving in complexity and density. It's vertical energy, getting higher and higher, compounding.'

Russell uses vertical form extensively in The African Game, which he wrote over a period of six months in 1983. The nine movement tone poem formed the centrepiece on his UK concert tour with a 13 piece band billed as George Russell's Anglo-American Orchestra. In deference to the presence of the excellent Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg. who was featured on the aforementioned So What, Euro-American might have been a more fitting title.

Originally commissioned by the Massachusetts Council On The Arts and the Swedish Broadcasting System, The African Game received its American debut on June 18, 1983 in Boston's Emmanuel Church by a 26-piece orchestra of local musicians and an African percussion ensemble called Olu Bata. It was this live performance that was recorded and now appears on Blue Note. The inspiration for the work is Africa where it is now generally accepted that the human race originated and evolved.

'Musically I think The African Game does reflect the earliest beginnings and might also project the ultimate outcome, as reflected in the rather dynamic crescendo at the end of the piece,' Russell said meaningfully. Like Cubana Be, Cubana Bop of some 40 years before, The African Game is a rhythmically strong work and, in addition to the five-man percussion ensemble, two bass players were also used on the date. Russell is particularly pleased with the outcome of the recording, too: `It was a live performance,' he said, `and it was flawless, absolutely flawless.'

Over the years, Russell's contribution to the development of 'jazz has never been fully recognised. During the forties and six¬ties he exerted great influence on the music and if The African Game is anything to go by, he looks like doing so again in the eighties and beyond.”

Discography:

(1) Blue Note BST 85103

(2) Dizzy Gillespie: Vol 2 RCA 731068

(3) Crosscurrents: Capitol Jazz Classics Vol 14 Capitol 5C052 80853

(4) Ezz-Thetics Lee Konitz Sextet Xtra 5004

(5) Ezz-Thetics George Russell Smalltet RCA PL 42187

(6) Milestones Miles Davis CBS 62308

(7) CBS 62066

(8) Decca DL 9220

(9) Decca DL 4183

(10) Riverside RLP 341

(11) Riverside RLP 375

(12) Riverside RLP 412

(13) Fontana 688 705ZL

(14) MPS MC 25125

(15) Soul Note 1014

No known recordings exist of New World or Ezz-Thetic by Charlie Parker with strings.

New Jazz Conceptions - When George Russell Met Bill Evans

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

Clarinetist Tony Scott provided Bill Evans with much late-fifties club work in New York. Scott had also landed a recording contract with RCA and Bill was part of a quartet the contributed four tracks to Tony’s showcase album, The Touch of Tony Scott.

On these quartet tracks, Evans delivered his most fully formed work to date, displaying several facets of his rapidly developing talent. 'Round About Midnight was notable for its reticence, Scott and Evans taking a refined view far removed from the rough-hewn original. Bill's classical training helped him layer the tone, the opening melody warmly projected, the accompanying chords touched in ever so lightly underneath.

On two other tracks he employed that artful, double-handed technique known as "locked hands," which he had been pursuing since his college days, each note of the melody played and harmonized by the right hand whilst simultaneously doubled at the octave below in the left.

In this manner all the harmony notes became sandwiched between two parallel lines an octave apart. Derived from close saxophone-section voicings, the technique was pioneered at the keyboard by Milt Buckner in the Lionel Hampton band and popularized by George Shearing in his quintet recordings.

However, on Aeolian Drinking Song, the last of the four quartet tracks, the aim was entirely different: to create single lines, either solo or in counterpoint, in the Aeolian mode — a scale from A to A on the white notes of the piano — based in this case on the note F. There was hardly a chord to be heard in the piece. In the first of several similar excursions in his early career, Evans met the challenge head-on. He was stark, deadly, and intellectually daunting.

This track belonged to a separate strand in the pianist's makeup and will be better understood in the light of a radical session that had taken place in the same venue some three months earlier. On that occasion, the seminal figure in charge was the composer and arranger George Russell.

The whole idea behind Aeolian Drinking Song was revolutionary and lay entirely outside the scope of the average swing musician. The one pianist on the scene in the summer of 1956 who was most likely to assimilate the idea and come through with flying colors in the execution was Bill Evans. His first recorded leap into that particular void had already occurred at the end of March, in a sextet led by the composer George Russell.

Down Beat magazine had announced that Russell, who had not been active in jazz since 1951 — when he had done "Ezz-thetic" and "Odjenar" for a cool Lee Konitz sextet nominally led by Miles Davis — was now writing for several forthcoming Victor jazz albums. Kenny Dorham was projected (prematurely, as it turned out) as the trumpeter, and Bill Evans was advertised as the pianist.

One hot day the previous summer, while recording The Singing Reed, Lucy Reed, who was an old friend of George Russell and his wife Juanita, called to say that she would love to visit with a friend called Bill. George suggested they all take a ride on the Staten Island ferry. His first impression of Lucy's friend was not encouraging — "plain looking fella, very quiet, very withdrawn" — and Russell felt that he was in for a tough time socially. This is going to be like pulling teeth all day, he thought.

Eventually they returned to the Russells' place at the Beechwood Hotel, where the stove, bed, ironing board, and piano were crammed together into one room. George was paying his dues working behind a lunch counter while working on his theoretical magnum opus, the Lydian Concept. As it happened, some of his arrangements had already come Bill's way in a concert with Lucy. The ironing board was moved onto the bed so that Evans could play, while Russell, expecting the worst, hovered at the door ready to make an excuse. Instead, "It was one of those magic moments in your life when you expect a horror story," he now recalls, "and the doors of heaven open up — I knew then and there he wasn't going to get away."

George Allan Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923. He remembers singing in the choir of his African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he grew up to the sounds of Fate Marable's Kentucky riverboat music. Art Tatum spent some time in the city, and Russell sometimes heard him practicing. As a teenager he was impressed by Tatum's sounds, but he was equally struck by his first experience of modern symphonic music, a record of Debussy's "Fetes" from the orchestral Nocturnes. He never let go of that sound, and the amalgamation of jazz with European forms was crucial to his musical philosophy. Like Tony Scott, he came under the influence of Stefan Wolpe for a while.

In 1941, after failing the draft because of spots on the lung, Russell entered the hospital for the first time with tuberculosis. It was during subsequent extended spells in the hospital, and between drumming with Benny Carter's band, that he formulated his theoretical work, fully entitled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (for all instruments).

The concept exposes an existing principle rather than inventing something new; Russell's revelation is based on the conviction that the Lydian scale on, for instance, C (C D E F-sharp G A B) is more compatible with the tonality of C major than is the familiar C major scale. The logic of this, as explained in the book, is irrefutable, and Russell's thesis convinces not only theoretically but in the compelling brilliance of his own creations. "George composes things which sound improvised," Evans said. "You have to be deeply involved in jazz and understand all the elements to be able to do that."

Evans became exposed to this world soon after he settled in New York in 1955, and he quickly absorbed its language. (Like the French genius, Olivier Messiaen, George Russell stakes out his own vernacular.) Evans's active participation began the following year, soon after RCA began a new series of recordings called Jazz Workshop. One of the recordings, led by the alto saxophonist Hal McKusick, included a piece by Russell. Encouraged by McKusick, Jack Lewis, the artists and repertory man for RCA Victor, offered the composer his own record date in the series. Russell already wanted Evans, and Hal McKusick recruited the other musicians, including trumpeter Art Farmer, guitarist Barry Galbraith, and bass player Milt Hinton.

Three recording dates were set up and a series of intensive Sunday rehearsals, usually at Hinton's house in Queens, took place before each session. The bassist played his part as written, but Art Farmer told me that the other musicians "took the parts home from the rehearsals and tried to come to terms with them. All George Russell's music was taken very seriously by the musicians. That Victor album took a year to do."

There was a calm and quiet confidence about George Russell that inspired trust in his players. RCA Victor sessions did not come easily, but Farmer remembers that the composer never panicked or raised his voice — and everyone knew there would be no overtime pay. Afterward Miles Davis told Farmer, "Man, that was very nice work. It can't have been easy." Called The Jazz Workshop, it was George Russell's first big-break album as leader, and for the first time he could swap a penurious lifestyle for the relative comfort of a small apartment on Bank Street in the Village. Russell and Evans became good friends, George and his wife nicknaming Bill "the minister," he looked so unlike a jazz musician.

The melodic and harmonic world created (or discovered) by Russell was hauntingly original. Hal McKusick, who sounded thoroughly at home in the sessions, nevertheless declared that it was like learning another language. The album should be assessed in terms of music history, for though undoubtedly a jazz record, it is also a twentieth-century classic, to be considered alongside the wind chamber works of Stravinsky or Varese.

At the first session at Webster Hall in March, Evans turned in some solid work, firm of tone and with a spring in the fingers. Russell's most-played piece at the time was Ezz-thetic, a tortuous bop line on the restructured chords of Love for Sale. Bill's solo on it here gleaned from Bud Powell and Horace Silver but had a direction and purpose all its own.

Evans was not blessed with natural self-assurance, but by the time of the second session in October he had just completed his first trio album, New Jazz Conceptions, and his confidence was boosted as well by the presence of Paul Motian on Round Johnny Rondo, Witch Hunt, and, most of all, Concerto for Billy the Kid. The "Concerto" was his real opportunity, designed especially by Russell "to supply a frame to match the vigor and vitality in the playing of pianist Bill Evans."

At the start, in the two-handed octave passage over bucking-bronco rhythm, Evans played from the written score, but soon stretched out, fully exposed, on the chords of I'll Remember April. The precision of the fingerwork controlled the backing band, abetted by the alert Russell on the podium. This was one of the pianist's early tours de force, on a par with the more notorious All About Rosie, composed by Russell about a year later.

The musicians knew that they had a sensational performance of "Concerto" in the can, but Art Farmer recalls that either Evans or Russell was dissatisfied with some element, and it was decided to have another crack at it during the final December session. On that take Evans incorporated a quote from Thelonious Monk's Well, You Needn't. He had come under the wing of Monk, staying at his place once, just when he needed friends and contacts in New York City. He had no doubts about the quality of that eccentric genius's playing, and his favorite recording was the Prestige album from the early 1950s, mostly Monk originals in definitive versions. Evans particularly liked the humor in the playing. Later, in the sleeve note to the 1964 Columbia album Monk, he wrote: "Monk approaches the piano and... music as well, from an 'angle' that, although unprecedented, is just the right 'angle' for him."

The Jazz Workshop was the first of a handful of stunning collaborations between Russell and Evans. The pieces were superbly structured, at once compositions and settings. Evans himself always stressed the importance of form and structure in his own work, whether it be the overall framework of a number or the shape of a solo. He was in his element participating, and one wonders what other pianist working in this context could have accomplished what Evans did: creating such assertive right-hand lines unaided by left-hand comping, integrating the invention stylistically, and reading the written parts with such skill.

Art Farmer said, "The more difficult the music was, the more he made of it. He could deal with the weirdest chord changes and really respond to a challenge.”

The work of the pianist Lennie Tristano, with his cool approach to a line, permeated Evans's contribution to this music.

The influence of the older pianist on the younger is clearly audible: Tristano, the sonic architect and ascetic, argued for soundness of construction but shied away from romantic inflection. Evans, the passionate romantic, nevertheless identified immediately with Tristano's logical approach. Thus a satisfying amalgam was achieved as Evans pursued Tristano's long, snaking, but rhythmically bland lines, injecting them with cross-rhythms and oblique accents of his own, the execution controlled with tightness and panache.

Evans needed good tone and independent fingers, among other qualities, to meet the challenge of his next group of engagements. In 1957 Brandeis University appointed the composer Gunther Schuller as artistic director to its Festival of the Arts. While lecturing there, Schuller coined the term "third-stream" for the fusion of the European musical tradition with jazz. In this context the university commissioned one composition from each of six composers, three from jazz (George Russell, Charles Mingus, and Jimmy Giuffre) and three from the classical world (Schuller, Harold Shapero, and Milton Babbitt). Bill Evans, as a well-rounded musician, was engaged as pianist for the event.

George Russell's contribution, a suite in three movements called All About Rosie, was previewed on NBC-TV's Tonight Show a week before the festival. For the core of his fourteen-piece lineup Russell drew on the talents of four musicians who had been at the heart of The Jazz Workshop LP: Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, and Barry Galbraith. The piece went well, Evans in particular rising to its considerable challenge; the power of television led to hallowed references in jazz circles to a "legendary" performance by an unknown pianist called Bill Evans.

All six works were played outdoors on the campus on June 6; Schuller conducted, and Nat Hentoff introduced the composers and their pieces. It was cold and damp, the audience was restless, and the performance of this demanding music reflected the inhospitable conditions. Listening closely was a twenty-year-old Brandeis student, Chuck Israels. Afterward he played bass in a trio at a reception; his colleagues were an even younger pianist, Steve Kuhn, and the drummer Arnold Wise. Evans liked what he heard from the trio and chatted with the players, little suspecting that both bassist and drummer would feature in his own group within the next few years.

The concert program was repeated more successfully indoors the following morning, and it was soon recorded as Brandeis Jazz Festival for Columbia. In the third movement of All About Rosie, Russell spotlighted the pianist as he had in Concerto for Billy the Kid: in both pieces tempo and feel were the same, "Rosie" taken perhaps a notch up from "Billy." Again the band dropped out on cue to leave Evans's coruscating right hand exposed in solo, his choice of notes uncanny, the rhythmic verve bracing, his fingerwork relentlessly muscular. 

Aside from the brilliance of the playing, the most notable element was the assured integration of improvised and written material, credit due in equal parts to composer and performer."

Source:

Peter Pettinger

Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings

JAZZ VIBES: Three Eras By DON DeMICHEAL

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

“The vibraphone invites overplaying almost by its very nature. … Unlike a horn player, the vibraphonist is unable to sustain notes for very long, even with the help of vibrato and pedal. The vibes invite overplaying to compensate for such limitations. Added to these difficulties is the fact that … [they are played with] a hitting motion powered by the wrists. With the mastery of a steady drum roll, the aspiring vibraphonist is already capable of flinging out a flurry of notes and, given the repetitive motions used to build up drum technique, the vibes player is tempted to lock into a ‘steady stream’… [of notes].

- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960].

Don DeMichael wrote about Jazz the way I like to write about it - by placing the theme or the focus of a piece into a historical context. I think that doing so helps the reader appreciate the topic under consideration from a variety of perspectives and also helps in gaining an understanding of how the music evolved dynamically.

Such is the case with the following essay by Don which provides an insightful retrospective of the first three decades of the Jazz vibes or vibraphone or vibraharp - take your pick.

The only exception I take with Don’s piece is its omission of the work of Larry Bunker, one of the instrument's most sublime and superlative players. But then, situated as he was in New York, Don didn’t have access to Larry’s playing which took place mostly in the clubs on the West Coast and on  legions of anonymous studios recordings [the exception being those he made with Hank Mancini for the Peter Gunn TV series].

Don’s article does give pianist George Shearing his due for his role in the development of vibes in a Jazz setting and it is also nice to see some commentary about a group of fine vibist who are rarely mentioned in discussions about the instrument including Teddy Charles, Buddy Montgomery, Don Elliott, Jack Brokensha and Tommy Vig.

Fortunately, today’s Jazz world is blessed with many fine vibes players including Joe Locke, Steve Nelson, , Mark Sherman, Jim Hart, Warren Wolff and Frits Landesbergen and Mike Freeman, whose latest CD, Blue Tjade was recently reviewed on these pages.

“THE INSTRUMENT that Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, and Terry Gibbs, among others, play is one without a name of its own. Is it a vibraphone? Vibraharp? Vibe? Vibes? Almost everybody knows what it is, but not many are sure what to call it.

The problem of what to call it began in the late 1920s when the vibraphone and vibraharp — both trade names — were introduced. The name confusion was later compounded as other versions of the same instrument appeared on the market.

Musicians who play today's instrument usually refer to it as a set of vibes or as a vibraharp, the oldest trade name still in use. The uninformed continue to be confused, however, and continue to irritate vibists by calling the instrument xylophone, marimba, "that thing," and, even, Hammond organ.

However it is referred to, the instrument made little impression on jazzmen at the time it was introduced. Used mostly for saccharine and ghostly effects, usually in the form of ringing arpeggios, it became another of the compleat drummer's doubles, along with tympani, bells, chimes, and other mallet instruments.

But the vibraharp was a "natural" jazz instrument — it could be played melodically and percussively. The instrument's duality allowed for at least two approaches, that of a drummer or that of a pianist.

The first time it was used on a jazz recording was in 1931.

Louis Armstrong, fronting Les Hite's band, heard the band's drummer experimenting with a set of vibes during a break in the recording date. Armstrong, partial at this time to sugary introductions for his records (he used steel guitar and celeste as well as Guy Lombardo-like saxes to add sugar to his spice), urged the drummer to play an introduction to Memories of You, one of the tunes to be recorded that day. The drummer complied, playing a short, simple solo.

It was prophetic that the percussionist was Lionel Hampton. Prophetic, because it was Hampton who was to establish the vibraharp as a jazz instrument in 1936, when he expanded the Benny Goodman Trio to a quartet. (It is true that Adrian Rollini was known as a vibes player earlier than Hampton, but Rollini's playing, while interesting technically, constituted more cocktail-lounge music than jazz.)

Hampton's background as a drummer is important. By the time he joined Goodman, his style of playing vibes was fully developed, though it was to undergo some tempering in later years. The manner in which Hampton played in the '30s, his most important period, was percussive; in effect, he drummed on the instrument, which engendered great excitement among his listeners as well as in himself.

Hampton's work with Goodman's quartet, and later his sextet, was explosive.

In several ways, the rhythmic characteristics of Hampton's playing were almost stereotypically those of the swing era. At slow and medium tempos, his choruses were mostly in a forms of 12/8, even in double-time passages; at the extremely fast tempos that the Goodman groups often used, his solos generally fell into an eighth-note pattern. His heavy accenting also was characteristic of the era. What was not characteristic was Hampton's use of long rests between phrases to heighten the dramatic effect.

What made — and makes — Hampton an excellent jazz musician is his zestful fire and drive. Guilty of abominable taste at times, Hampton nevertheless remains one of the most important vibes players jazz has produced. For every Fly ‘n Home there is a Memories of You, a Stardust, a Deep Purple.

IF HAMPTON represents the percussive side of the vibraharp, Red Norvo must be considered representative of the instrument's other face — the pianistic, or, in Norvo's case, the xylophonic — though it should be understood that no one vibes player is either completely one way or the other.

Norvo was well-known as a xylophonist by the time Hampton burst upon the jazz world. In fact, it was 1944 before Norvo switched to vibes. Disdaining a vibrato, he plays today more or less as he did when he started—in much the tasty and quiet way Teddy Wilson plays piano. The Wilson-Norvo empathy is seen in two of the latter's best xylophone solos on record, both in the company of Wilson: Blues in Eb under his own name, and Just a Mood, under Wilson's.

Norvo's years of xylophone playing prepared him with a technique and conception quite different from Hampton's. For example, to sustain a note on vibes, the player depresses the damper bar with his foot after the note is struck, allowing the note to ring; but to sustain a note on xylophone, the player must execute a single-stroke roll, a rapid alteration of the mallets. This rolling has been a characteristic of Norvo's vibes playing from the beginning. He often laces his work with delicately placed two-note chords, usually rolled fourths and fifths. He also employs many octave passages.

But a pianistic vibes approach includes more than tremolos and octaves, which are more personal Norvo characteristics than characteristics of the approach.

The approach involves an arpeggiated, vertical manner of improvising, usually taking an eighth-note form; a light touch but great speed; and a chordal way of thinking about the instrument, often times to the point of using four mallets in solo and accompaniment.

These are all qualities of Norvo's work, especially the four-mallet device, of which he is a master, and make him the most pianistic of vibraharpists, something most clearly discernable in the trio records he made in the '50s.

FROM 1936 to '46, Hampton and Norvo, and their different approaches, were the either-or of the instrument, though Hampton's approach proved the stronger of the two. In fact, there were few vibraharpists active during these years; Norvo and Hampton remained the only important ones until the emergence of Terry Gibbs and Milt Jackson in the mid-'40s.

Besides both being the same age and appearing on the jazz scene at approximately the same time, there are other parallels to be drawn between Gibbs and Jackson.

Both were closer to Hampton than to Norvo, though each was less percussive and more pianistic than Hampton. Each, in time, influenced the other: some of Jackson's early work, particularly his solo on Dizzy Gillespie's Victor version of Anthropology was Gibbslike, though it should be said that at the time (1946) Jackson had not fully developed his style and was often erratic, sometimes sounding more eclectic than original.

Gibbs, in turn, took on some of characteristics of the fully developed Jackson, as did most vibes men, including even Hampton.

Gibbs was the first of the two to gain popularity among jazz listeners and influence among vibists. His playing over the years, though it has mellowed and matured, has always been notable for a joie de vivre and a heat just a few degrees cooler than Hampton's. Possessed of an excellent technique, he often brought it to bear on ballads, doubling the tempo and spewing forth rapid cascades of notes, much in the manner of Hampton, though their concepts differed in the use of favorite intervals and scales.

But it was Jackson who became the most influential vibraharpist since Hampton. By the early '50s, his manner of playing had fully developed; it has not changed essentially since.

The surface characteristics of Jackson's playing have been widely imitated: a great use of blue notes (Jackson is one of the best blues players in jazz); single grace notes, turns, and mordants; and a pervading minor-key feeling.

Jackson is, however, much more than the sum of these easily imitated parts. Though many vibists caught his minor-key feeling, none has been able to create the feeling of sadness, sometimes bordering on world-weariness and despondency, that Jackson is capable of. And no one has reproduced an ingredient often present, even in his most serious playing — a subtle, dry humor.            ,

His time conception is unique on the instrument. Lazy sounding and relaxed, his playing nonetheless is marked by astute rhythmic awareness, the lope of his playing resulting from strong accenting and the mixing of duple and triple meters. Jackson also has the rare ability to create the tension-building effect of slowing the tempo without upsetting the rhythm section.

As in the years when the vibraharp was dominated by Hampton and Norvo, the acceptance of Jackson and Gibbs produced another period of two-man domination. And as before, one, Jackson, has proved the stronger. But unlike the time of the Hampton-Norvo ascendancy, the Gibbs-Jackson years saw an increase in the number of vibists.

The growth of the instrument's popularity, however, cannot be attributed wholly to the two chief practitioners. The popularity of the George Shearing Quintet did much to bring the instrument before a larger audience.

Shearing, often berated these days by dyed-in-the-wool jazz fans, always has had good sidemen, including excellent vibes players — Margie Hyams, now retired from music but with Shearing a tasty Norvoish player; Don Elliott, better known for his mellophone work but a vibraharpist of merit as well; Joe Roland, who replaced Elliott; Cal Tjader, originally a vibes-doubling drummer (with Dave Brubeck most notably) but one of the best of the Jackson-influenced vibraharpists; Johnnie Rae, usually under a Jackson spell but a soloist of more-than-casual interest; and Emil Richards, of whom more later.

One of the most interesting vibes players to develop during the Jackson-Gibbs dominance was Teddy Charles.

Slightly Baggish in concept, Charles experimented with the instrument more than did Jackson, especially in the use of four mallets. But Charles has made greater strides in composition than he has as a vibist; his New Directions albums on Prestige attest to this. Nonetheless, Charles is one of the vibists of distinction to appear since the '40s.

The formation of the Modern Jazz Quartet as a permanent group in 1954 and its ensuing popularity, though it has never gained the general-public acceptance of Shearing, also brought the instrument, and Jackson, to greater attention. By the mid-50s, Jackson dominated jazz vibes.

In the MJQ's wake sprang several like groups, two of which, the Master-sounds and the Australian Jazz Quintet, featured very good vibraharpists. Buddy Montgomery's playing with the Mastersounds was strongly Jacksonian, though lately, he has shown signs of becoming more his own man. Jack Brokensha, originally of the Australians, has become a powerful swinger in a Gibbsian vein.

The vibraharpist who was the most provocative of the Jacksonians and who seemed the one to extend and elaborate on the Jackson style was Lem Winchester.

Taking inspiration originally from Hampton as well as Jackson, Winchester in his early work combined the two. As he developed, however, Winchester began more and more to employ pianistic devices but of a different sort from those of Norvo or other pianistic vibists.

Winchester used two-note chords made up of intervals of minor and major thirds, fourths, flatted and perfect fifths, and sixths. The effect was that of blues piano. His death a year ago stilled what could have been a major voice.

[As of this writing in 1962] WE ARE STILL in the period of Jackson's domination, but there are several vibraharpists who have come to the fore in the last two years who, while having absorbed the practically inescapable influence of Jackson, show signs of collectively turning the direction of the jazz vibraharp, though no one dominates as yet and each follows his own path.

There are pianistic overtones in their playing generally, but it would seem that instead of depending, consciously or not, on the approach related to another instrument these men are exploring the possibilities of the vibraharp as an instrument unto itself.

Two of the men, Vic Feldman and Emil Richards, have been known and appreciated by the jazz public longer than the rest. In a way, they are transitional figures between the Jackson and new eras.

Feldman's ability as a pianist undoubtedly has had an effect on his vibes work, and though he reflects bits of Jackson, Norvo, and Gibbs, he must be counted with those who play vibraharpic—if there is such a word—a manner of playing that owes little discernible allegiance to the sound or spirit of any other instrument.

Seemingly unencumbered by any influences, Richards has evolved a quite personal, somewhat modish style. His early years of xylophone playing may account for his freshness.

Among the escape-from-Jackson group are four young musicians: Mike Mainieri, Dave Pike, Tommy Vig, and Gary Burton.

Mainieri is probably the fastest of all vibists. He is certainly the most pianistic since Norvo. His most outstanding work so far has been on ballads, on which he usually manipulates four mallets in such a manner that the two in his right hand seem completely independent of those in his left. He displays little or no traces of other vibists.

Pike seems to have taken at least some of his inspiration from pianist Bud Powell, his playing being quite boppish. A spirited and invigorating player, he has attempted to play unaccompanied, solo vibes. And though the solo venture as heard in his recent Riverside album did not quite come off, it is indicative of an ability that someday may bring the instrument to this point.

Buried in the exoticism of the Martin Denny Group, Vig is a jazz talent of no small proportions. His jazz work has the undulating, spiraling character of some of Bela Bartok's writing. Vig is an excellent technician, utilizing a clean attack and lightning speed. While his approach is vibraharpic, his speed, like Mainieri's, could be his own worst enemy, permitting playing of flash but not light.

At 18, Burton shows great promise not only as a vibraharpist but also as a writer. His vibes technique is ample, his use of four mallets especially deft, though he tends to overplay the instrument. His concept so far reflects no other vibist; his approach is that of a vibraharpist, not that of a pianist, drummer, or saxophonist. At his age, there is plenty of time to mature — the seed is there.

While no one man dominates the new vibists, one does stand out—Walt Dickerson. Of indeterminate age (he refuses to give his age, saying only that he is "ageless"), Dickerson is the most mature of the new group.

Possessed of a good technique, the technical does not dominate his work. Instead of solos made up of one related note following another, Dickerson often builds areas of sound, placing them one on the other, creating a total effect. His solos have an asymmetrical shape, much as do, say, John Coltrane's.

In his way, Dickerson can be thought of as a metallic Coltrane. The adjective "metallic" is the key, for Dickerson does not deny the instrument's metallic character in his playing, but, instead, utilizes it brazenly. It well could be that Dickerson is the most important vibra-harpist since Jackson.

As much as many of us respect and revere Jackson — and Gibbs and Hampton and Norvo — we are entering a new era of the jazz vibraharp.”               [

Source:

Down Beat Magazine

January 4, 1962