Remembering Eddie Costa [1930-1962] [From the Archives]

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

In 1962, the promising career of pianist Eddie Costa was cut short by a fatal car crash on the West Side Highway in New York City.

Jazz fans who knew his playing from the halcyon days of modern Jazz from 1945 to 1965 still talk about him, perhaps because of his singular style of playing piano which the noted Jazz critic and author Leonard Feather once described as “ … hard-driving, percussive and marked by an unusual octave-unison approach.”

Today’s Jazz fans who have discovered him in retrospect often express a keen interest in his work, perhaps because of the very uncommon way his piano improvisations are voiced and phrased. It is almost sounds as though Eddie attacks the piano while playing it.

Chris Sheridan, in his insert notes to the CD reissue of Eddie’s first LP, The Eddie Costa Vinnie Burke Trio [Jubilee LP-1025; Fresh Sound FS-129], further elaborates on Eddie’s distinctive manner: “Get Happy is a sharply-edged example of Costa’s predilection for driving inventions played almost below middle C; elsewhere the phrasing is stubbier, like necklaces of recast thematic fragments.”

Chris goes on to say that “Eddie’s style was in fact intriguing for its happy combination of swing-based rhythmic figures with a more ‘modern’ harmonic sense.”

Leonard Feather described Eddie style this way: “a modern approach to ‘barrelhouse piano in which Eddie Costa once more demonstrates the evocative power of the piano’s rumbling lower register.” [paraphrase, sleeve notes to Jazz Mission to Moscow Colpix CP-433]

Jazz author and columnist Burt Korall offered this impression of Eddie’s style in his insert notes to The Eddie Costa Quartet/Guys and Dolls Like Vibes [Coral CRL 57230; Universal Victor Japan MVCJ-19004]:

“An unassuming, quiet, even diffident person, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that there is an aggressive, apparently inexhaustible spilling forth of ideas whenever he plays. Rhythmic thrust nourishes melodic content as he creates long, striking lines that speak well for the organization of his resources, and his ability to remain integrated and flow inventively when soloing at length.”

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to revisit Eddie and his music by examining what has been written about him in the Jazz press, magazines and sleeves notes from his all-too-few recordings in order to post a profile of him on these pages.

Jazz critic and writer Bill Simon observed that “Eddie Costa is the first Jazz musician to win an important poll on two different instruments. The young, still relatively unknown Jazzman was voted New Star on both piano and vibes in the 1957 World’s Critics Poll, conducted by Down Beat. Eddie was born in 1930, joined violinist Joe Venuti at 18, spent two years in Service, and came to the critics’ attention when he clubbed with Tal Farlow in New York. He’s an unusually articulate Jazz voice, eminently resourceful, and he swings hard. Eddie is one of the new Jazz giants.” [insert notes to The Eddie Costa Trio With Rolf Kuhn and Dick Johnson, Mat Mathers and Don Elliot at Newport [Verve MGV-8237].

Also in 1957, and following on the heels of Bill Simon’s words of praise, was this introductory paragraph by Joe Quinn in the liner notes to The Eddie Costa/5 [Mode LP-118], one of the few recordings that Eddie made as a leader:

“The word ‘phenomenon’ as outlined in the dictionary, pertains to an exceptional person, thing or occurrence, and is frequently used in a banal attempt to give class and distinction to an otherwise colorless performer. Generally, the music trade is apathetic to such in accurate semantics, but once in a while they solemnly nod in agreement that some newcomer is fully deserving of such accolades. Eddie Costa, who recently captured the Down Beat International Jazz Critics poll on both vibes and piano, fits this select category.”

In his 1972 JazzJournal essay commemorating the10th anniversary of Eddie’s death, Don Nelson offers a perspective on Eddie significance with this quotation from the Jazz author, Stanley Dance:

“Stanley Dance has compared Eddie Costa to Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan, Dave Tough and Django Reinhardt in being one of the most talented of white musicians., viz: —

'They each had a genius, a flame, an in-born talent, and that kind of dedication which made them impatient of the ordinary way of living , .. Eddie Costa ought to be remembered as an original jazz musician who died before he was 32, much too soon'.”

In the 1992 insert notes to the V.S.O.P. CD version of the Mode LP, The Eddie Costa/5 [VSOP#7] James Rossi wrote:

EDDIE COSTA/5

“The preparation of these liner notes for one of Eddie Costa's few sessions as a leader consisted of research into old magazine articles and various reference books. As expected, not an abundance of printed material was to be found.Eddie Costa was just beginning to embark on a fruitful career as a multi-instrumentalist when his car careened off New York's West Side Highway on July 26, 1962, killing him at the age of 31. It was a loss felt by many, evidenced by the fact that the greatest wealth of information today concerning Costa comes from a steadfast group of individuals who continue to vehemently support him.

It seem that everyone with a cognizance of jazz dating from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s has attached him or herself to Eddie Costa's music. His truly individual approach to melody filled a void in his listeners which allowed them the luxury of experiencing certain emotions, whether poetic or rambunctious, that no other artist was capable of eliciting.

"Individual" is an oft misused, consistently overused word, however, 100% justifiable when describing Costa's relationship with jazz. Born in the rural coal mining town of Atlas, Pennsylvania, Costa's early musical background developed from his brother Bill's tutelage on piano, followed by lessons from a talented local woman of German extraction. First exposure to jazz came in the form of recordings by Jimmy Lunceford, Benny Goodman. Teddy Wilson, and Art Tatum.

Bill Costa was responsible for Eddie's first professional job in the band of guitarist Frank Victor, with whom Eddie stayed two years playing organ and vibes. When Victor received a call to join violinist Joe Venuti in Chicago, the eighteen year-old Costa was included on the engagement.

Two months later, Eddie rejoined his brother Bill in New York for a steady gig at the Hickory House, playing pop and standards, with a little ja// thrown in for good measure. In the October 31, 1957 issue of DOWNBEAT. Eddie Costa confided to Leonard Feather his feelings about jazz during this early period: "I enjoyed it without fully understanding it and never thought about being a jazz musician. Whether St. Louis won the pennant was more important to me than anything that happened in music." Again Bill Costa proved invaluable to Eddie's musical growth with on-the-job training in the use of harmonic variations to color standard chord changes.

It wasn't until Eddie was drafted in January of 1951 and sent to Japan (and later Korea), with the 40th Division band that he heard his first Bud Powell record. Taken at face value, this may not seem strange. But considering that Powell was already one of the most revered and well-known pianists, idolized by every musician who was fascinated by the bop idiom, it bring! into perspective the manner in which Costa was going about the business of learning jazz at his own pace and in his own manner.

In early 1953, Costa was back in New York, settling into an important job with guitarist Sal Salvador, that produced his first recorded sides on the KENTON PRESENTS series. The fact that he was equally proficient on piano and vibraphone led to an abundance of studio work (it often annoyed Costa that his fellow studio players were shocked that a jazz musician could read so well) and freelancing with Tal Farlow, Kai Winding, Woody Herman, Johnny Smith, the Bob Brookmeyer-Clark Terry Quintet, and with his own trio of bassist Vinnie Burke and drummer Nick Stabulas. At this time Jubilee recorded Costa’s trio and released two records, one with the addition of tenor Mike Cuozzo. Eddie Costa also recorded as a sideman on several important sessions of the day, playing vibes with Bill Evans on "Guys and Dolls Like Vibes" for Coral, and on "Jazz Mission To Moscow" for Colpix, and piano on "The House of Blue Lights" for Dot.

Eddie Costa has never mentioned in interviews who influenced his style. Many musicians were undoubtedly involved, but it is probable that Costa himself never consciously realized who was responsible for the many facets that are in evidence in his unusual approach. By the time of the Leonard Feather DOWNBEAT article and the recording date of the session on this album, Eddie Costa did not even have a record player in his New York apartment.

Mode's recording of the Eddie Costa Quintet, while exhibiting a true group effort, (if this all-star quintet had only had the opportunity to develop into a stable working group!) is indicative of the ceaseless imagination of Eddie Costa. Twisting lines of original melodic beauty, harmonically expansive, with meticulously placed accents that epitomize the evolving bop style were pan of Eddie Costa\s vocabulary. Dramatic use of the middle and lower range of the piano was the Costa trademark. His near refusal to cover the keyboard's upper two octaves shows his eccentricity, possibly a result of his extensive work on the narrower ranged vibraphone.

Writer Barry Ulanov summarized in the August 22, 1957 issue of DOWNBEAT: "[Eddie Costa] is a musician all by himself, a thorough individual, a meditative pianist with a splendidly deliberate style of his own.' One of Costa's unwavering fans relates some thirty-five years later, "You're destined to spend lots of time in used record stores or pouring over record auction lists. Good luck, Costa is worth it."

V.S.O.P’s release of Eddie Costa Quintet will surely prompt the reissue of the remainder of Costa's glorious recorded legacy, inspiring a new generation of listeners who will be touched by his endearing style.”

- JAMES ROZZI, 1992                       V.S.O.P#7CD

In the August 27, 1957 edition of Down Beat, the highly regarded Jazz writer and critic Barry Ulanov wrote of Eddie:

“This is a remarkable time for pianists, no doubt about it. Not since the dear, not so dead days of swing, have there been so many of quality around at once, alive and kicking. And never, in my memory or historical records at least, have there been so many fresh keyboard thinkers around at once, creating new patterns in jazz and developing them.

Particularly remarkable then among a remarkable lot of musicians is the pianist Eddie Costa. He has to be to stand out in such company.

But stand out he does—for me, anyway. And not just because he has the vitality or the intensity, the bravura technique or ready supply of ideas which, singly or as a whole, typify the best of the pianists of this jazz era. No, it's something more he has, on top of these skills, besides these attributes, which I find so absorbing to the ear, so provocative to the mind, and not at all easy to spell out. …

Jazzmen always have been distinguished for their unselfish desire to play with the best, rarely concerned about how much less than the best he might sound playing alongside best.

The "best" are stimulating musicians to blow with, dedicated to the advancement of themselves and their music; ….

It s in his unassuming manner—almost a diffident one—at the piano, in the lack of fuss which attends his playing, solo or in the background: no extravagant gesture, no rolling, writhing, or other means of calling attention to himself. And his music never depends on the obvious crowd-pleasing crowd-teasing devices: no brave, bold display of dynamics, no conspicuous conservatory consumption, although, clearly, he knows his instrument very well.

Costa is a quiet musician, a restrained one, though not a notably icy one of the cool school.

He put his lines together with a deliberateness which demands the listener's attention. One must follow step by step along his thinking way if one wants to hear what goes on in the mind and feelings of this remarkably resourceful musician. That deliberateness, that quiet attention of Eddie's to the music at hand, is what makes him such a pleasant colleague for other musicians ….

His two hands work out striking different patterns now, delicately contrasting textures and accents and volumes. The next step, the logical the inevitable one, will be different measures of time against each other 7/8 or 5/8 against 4/4, or whatever combination makes sense to Edi after sufficient meditation on the meter.

It's not easy to spell out this technique of Costa's, but two of the words I used do add up to something like a summation of his special achievements -  "meditative" and "deliberate." …

Eddie Costa is a musician who is thoroughly individual, a meditative pianist with a splendidly deliberate style of his own.”

A couple of months later in the October 31, 1957 edition of Down Beat, Leonard Feather wrote in article entitled Two Poll Winners: They’re Both Eddie Costa, Who’s Much Surprised By It:”

“It came as something of a shock to Edwin James Costa to learn, three months ago, that the voters in the Down Beat Jazz Critics' poll had elected him this year's new star both on piano and vibes. It was the first time anybody had won simultaneously in two categories.

What made it seem all the more remarkable to Costa himself was that the critics had not had much of a chance to hear him.

"I didn't think anybody had listened to me to that extent," he says, "I haven't made as many records as a lot of other guys. I have no agent, I'm not signed with any booking office, and I don't have a publicity man. I was very surprised, in fact, when I was invited to play at the Newport Jazz festival [1957]."

Sadly, only five years later, Don Nelsen filed this Elergy for Eddie in the September 13, 1962 issue of Down Beat.

“On July 28, a Saturday morning, at  2:45,   pianist-vibist   Eddie Costa was killed when his car overturned on New York’s West Side Highway. He was 31 years old.

Born in Adas, Pa., Costa studied piano but taught himself the vibraharp. His first professional job was with violinist Joe Venuti when he was 18. There followed many jobs with such as Sal Salvador, Tal Farlow, Kaii Winding. Don IElliott, and Woody Herman. His talents extended to nearly every kind of musical expression.

His listeners, however, could have no doubt that he was first and most a jazz musician.

Seldom was one man so well loved. The tears on musicians' faces during the buriall attested to that. The tears also were for the loss of an immense talent.

Following is a touching reminiscence of Costa hy his friend, writer Don Nelsen. If was written shortly after Costa's funeraL

I first realized there was something different about Eddie Costa one night about six years ago. He was playing with Tal Farlow and Vinnie Burke at the Composer, a fine trio room now extinct. I had reviewed the group very favorably a couple of times before, but now I was walking in after putting them down. It seemed to me that, on this particular gig, inspiration was licking. Their music had sounded diffident, as though they really didn't feel like playing.

I entered ill at case, expecting a blast, Prior to that time—and since—my re-

ird tor such critical insolence had been a contemptuous sneer, a sarcastic thank-you, or a threatened punch in the nose. So when I greeted Ed,  I mumbled some self-conscious foolishness about how I had lo call them as I heard them, etc., etc. He laughed and said:

‘Man, you have to write what you have to write, and I have to play what I have to play.’

Immediately, we sat down over a couple of drinks and proceeded to tear apart my review and his playing. There was no animosity. He just wanted to find out what my judgment had been based on, what qualifications I had to make it. His questions were sharp and to the point. I did not resent them. How could I when a man faced me honestly and simply asked why I had said what I had say?

After that, we began seeing each other outside of the clubs because we had things to talk about. We met from time to time and then more frequently to discuss music, sports, his family and mine, his doubts and fears and mine.

Eddie was a fierce sportsmen. He held a season ticket to the New York Giants football game and followed the sports pages constantly. When he could not be at a game, he saw it on television. He was not only a spectator. Softball, football, golf, stickball, bowling saloon shuffleboard - he was always ready to play. And he’d be out to skin you alive every time. He was an eager ball tosser and exchanger of sports notes with the 10-year-old boy next door. When he had some time off, which wasn’t often in the last year or two, he was out in his back yard in Queens throwing the ball around with his 2-year-old son, Robbie.  Once, when my 14-year-old son, Bob, and I dropped over on a Saturday morning with a football, the three of us dashed into the street in front of Eddie’s home.

‘Let’s tire your old man out,’ he yelled to Bob.

‘It won’t be hard,’ Bob yelled back.

And it wasn’t. I pooped out long before they did, but I tried to keep up appearances lest they both find me out. I was the first to quit.

There were wrangles, too, about baseball. Baseball, I once told him, is a bore. All you ever have is two guys playing and the other 16 just standing around or in the dugout.

‘What’re you talkin’ about?’ he asked. He pronounced ‘talkin’’ not ‘tawkin,’ like a native New Yorker, but ‘tockin,’ probably like the rest of his hometown in Atlas, PA.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘when I guy knows the game, the batting averages and the players, and what they can and cannot do, every game is interesting. You can judge what a player is doing against what he should be doing and shouldn’t. And what about the unexpected? There’s a thousand possibilities in each game.’

A couple of days after his death, Ed’s wife, Jeanne, suggested that a fund be established to sponsor a Little League team in his honor, or to buy season passes to football or baseball games for youngsters. It’s a great idea. Ed’s love for sports and children were inextricably combined.

Music, of course, was the force that made him live. I think at time he felt it even more important than his wife and children and, because he had a great love for both, felt very guilty about not spending more time with them or showing his love more.

These were tough times. After an initial flush of success, culminated by the only double new-star victory in Down Beat history (piano and vibes: 1957), he worked only now and then in clubs. He became somewhat embittered.

‘It looks,’ he said, ‘like a new-star award is a kiss of death.’

For the next couple of years, Eddie gigged on with his own trio, a fine but unappreciated group featuring drummer Paul Motian and  bassist Henry Grimes, and as a sideman with groups, Woody Herman's and Gigi Gryce’s among them. During this period he began to gel calls for studio and transcription work, More and more they came as his reputation as a vibraharpist got around.

Eddie's ability to read vibes parts became legend in the studios, where in the last two years his talents were in tremendous demand He used to laugh over this and say, ‘I’ve been reading piano scores since I was 5, To read just one line like this is nothing.’

It might have meant nothing to Ed, but not many musicians could make the changes he could with little or no preparation. One studio musician observed at the funeral parlor that Eddie could come into a date cold and read off the toughest things with ease.

‘Some of the other guys can make it pretty good on reading." he said. "but when it comes to something modern, they drop their sticks. Not Eddie.’

All during the last year. Ed worked extremely hard. He wasn’t at home much. Sometimes he'd work in the studios most of the day and night, getting but a few hours sleep. The price was an ulcer, but he kept on. Occasionally, alter a night date of his. we'd meet at the Hall Note club. Many of those times he was pretty whipped, and I'd tell him to stop pushing so much. '’Besides, you don't even dig the commercial work that much.’

‘Look,’ he'd say, "I've got Jeanne and four kids to support and a house to pay off. I can't quit now."

What he said was true, but it tore at him nonetheless. Ed passionately believed an artist should develop his talent to the full, and he certainly wasn't doing it in the studios.

Yet there uere signs in recent months that he was beginning to realize his great potential. His playing was getting better and better, more than fulfilling the promise of early years. He joined the Bob Brookmeyer-Clark Terry Quintet, and during his first gigs with them at the Half Note and Village Vanguard he really regained confidence in himself as a Jazz musician. Playing in clubs again with guys he respected, and who respected him, brought him out of the artistic doldrums and his critical reception at the First International Jazz Festival in Washington in June was perhaps more enthusiastic than that accorded any other artists.

One thing that has always bugged Ed was to have people think of him primarily as a vibes player rather than as a pianist. He knew he was good on vibes but considered it extremely limited in relation to the piano. The latter was his instrument. It had been ever since his older brother, Bill, another fine musician who Ed idolized, taught him to play when he was barely out of rompers. He believed that he could create infinitely more on piano, and his recent work bears that out.

His playing on the recent released Jazz Mission to Moscow, with some of the Benny Goodman Russian-tour band, is an outstanding example. It so impressed Jack Lewis and his superiors at Colpix Records that a week before the fatal July 28, Lewis asked Ed to do a date with a big band, the tunes to be chosen by Ed, the arrangements to be written by Al Cohn and Manny Albam.

Ed was reluctant at first. He had made too many sessions where the guys in charge told him was they wanted. Lewis offered him a free hand, and Ed, at the urging of Lewis and three of his fellow musicians - Moe Wechsler, Sol Grubin and Bernie Leighton - agreed.

He and Lewis were to get together to pick out the tunes right after Ed and Jeanne returned from a week in Bermuda. It was to be the honeymoon that they never had. What a damned ending.

In the last three months, we discussed a magazine article on the music business itself, on those agents, managers, club owners, artists and repertoire men, and other warm-hearted functionaries whose love for musicians and good music somehow never got in the way of the money. Ed had a lot to say. Because he made it at the studios, he could afford to step on some big toes. He didn’t have to depend on clubs or Jazz records for a living, and he could speak freely.

All that’s gone, along with the slight shrug of the right shoulder as he walked to the bandstand; the carelessly crossed legs as he played; the snort that traveled down through his nose whenever he took off his glasses. All gone, with a talent that could have ripened into greatness, gone with such sudden finality that one wonders whether justice does not consist of one huge universal laugh .

I suppose I will reread these lines in a month or two and tell myself what a sentimental slosh they are.

I don’t care.”

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.

Jazz Impressions of Dave Brubeck

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

Dave Brubeck had an immensely successful career as a Jazz musician, but it was never a certain thing.

He was based in San Francisco so he wasn’t a part of the West Coast Cool and the LA studios scene. And while he respected what was going down on the East Coast with Bird and Diz, he couldn’t play that way even if we wanted to. It just wasn’t his thing.

There was no blueprint to follow, he just made it up as he went along, thanks mainly to he and his wife Iola’s persistence, the huge musical talent that Dave and his close colleague Paul Desmond would ultimately bring to bear on their musical endeavors and his insistence on playing his own style of music which would reach its ultimate expression in the huge amount of original music that Brubeck wrote over his lengthy career.

The Brubecks were raising a young family and they couldn’t afford to fail. Dave’s music was all they had to fall back on, and despite his success as the years went along, he never got over the insecurity of making it.

When the Brubecks journeyed from their home in Connecticut to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, CA, they did it as part of a scheduled trip to Japan. They had gigs lined up in all the big cities on Japan’s main island of Honshu! They were in their seventies!!”

In many ways, Dave Brubeck is really a living example of the fictional Horatio Alger character who makes his way in the world through pluck and luck [aka “The American Dream”].

Dave’s initial base in northern California was not particularly propitious. His quartet became a fixture at San Francisco’s Blackhawk, with an occasional gig at the hungry i and other North Beach and Bay area clubs, but the work paid scale and was regularly irregular, to say the least.

He did have a recording contract with Fantasy Records, a label along with the Weiss Brothers that Dave helped bring into existence, but the label had limited, local distribution which did not provide the group with national recognition.

Other than those based in the greater San Francisco Bay area, those Jazz critics who did hear the group were scathing in their reviews of its music.

Ultimately, the saving grace for Dave Brubeck and his music turned out to be a selecting the right venues to perform it in and by chosing interesting compositional themes to form the basis for many of his recordings.

Thematic venues, both at home and abroad, would hold the initial key to Dave’s success. Appearances at Colleges -Festivals -European Tours; this was the stuff that cemented the success of Dave’s quartet

Had it not been for Iola’s idea to book the group as a college concert attraction, one wonders what the fate of the DBQ might have been?

And Dave’s success on college campuses brought him to the attention of George Avakian who signed him to a contract with Columbia Records [Sony Music Group] which helped his quartet achieve both national and international acclaim.

Not surprisingly then, a theme that predominated many of Dave’s earliest recordings was in performance recordings at college and junior college venues such as Oberlin, OH, College of the Pacific, CA, Fullerton, CA JC and Long Beach,CA JC, respectively, Jazz Festivals including those at Newport, RI and Monterey, CA and Jazz clubs including Storyville in Boston, MA and Basin Street in New York City.

Once ensconced at Columbia,  George Avakian’s supportive patronage [and later, Teo Macero’s] allowed Dave’s imagination to run wild and new compositional themes now took the form of albums based on the music from Walt Disney’s animated films, a Composers series with standards by Cole Porter and Matt Dennis, music closely associated with the American South, the newly arrived bossa nova melodies, and the scores from notable Broadway shows such as “West Side Story.”

Dave had always been intrigued with unusual time signatures and while at Columbia this interest would be manifested in thematic recordings such as Time Out, Time Further Out, and Time Changes [which included “Elementals,” Dave’s extended orchestral composition, the first of many as these elaborate orchestral pieces which were to become another device in Dave’s lexicon of themes].

Because of Columbia’s extensive distribution abroad, Dave’s music now found considerable acceptance internationally and this resulted in what were to become many of my favorite recordings in the vast Brubeckian discography. Included here are the many “Jazz Impressions of” LP’s which included those drawn from the Brubeck Quartet’s trips to Europe, Eurasia and Japan [there is also a Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. and a Jazz Impressions of New York just to keep things geographically ecumenical].

In the following liner notes to The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Jazz Impressions of Eurasia [Columbia/Legacy CK 48531], Dave explains how this theme developed into an album of six original compositions:

“In early February 1958, the Quartet and I boarded a Pan American Clipper for London. Our tour, which began in England, took us through the countries of Northern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain into Poland, through the Middle East (Turkey, Iran and Iraq) and on into India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Ceylon. When we returned to New York in the middle of May, we had traveled thousands of miles, had performed over 80 concerts in 14 different countries, and had collected a traveler's treasure of curios (see cover) and impressions (hear record) of Europe and Asia.

These sketches of Eurasia have been developed from random musical phrases I jotted down in my notebook as we chugged across the fields of Europe, or skimmed across the deserts of Asia, or walked in the winding alleyways of on ancient bazaar. I did not approach the writing of this album with the exactness of a musicologist. Instead, as the title indicates, I tried to create an impression of a particular locale by using some of the elements of their folk music within the jazz idiom.

The heart of any musical work, jazz or classical, is not the theme itself, but the treatment and development of that theme. And the heart and developmental section of these jazz pieces are the improvised choruses. Therefore, the challenge in composing these sketches was not in the selection of a theme characteristic of a locale, but in writing a piece with chord progressions that would lead the improviser into an exploration of the musical idiom I was trying to capture. At the same time, the piece must fulfill the requirements of a good jazz tune—that is, the chord progressions must flow so naturally that the soloist is free to create. Many melodies, which could have been developed into compositions if our music were completely written, have been discarded, because in these jazz impressions of Eurasia the improvisations by the soloists are comparable to the developmental section of a composed work.

How does one go about writing such themes? One way is to listen to the voices of the people. The music of a people is often a reflection of their language. I experimented with the words "thank you" as spoken in several languages, since that was the one phrase that I used most as performer and traveler.

It is evident that once the pieces for Jazz Impressions of Eurasia were composed, that the creation of the album was as much the work of Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Joe Benjamin as it was mine. In these jazz impressions they have proved themselves to be not only great jazz musicians, but improvisers with unique imagination and adaptability.”

When Jazz Impressions of Eurasia came out as a CD in 1991, Jazz author, critic and Jazz Journalists Association President, Howard Mandel visited with Dave and the result was the following interview which Howie has graciously allowed us to reprint on these pages.

© -  Howard Mandel, copyright protected, all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

1991 REVISIT WITH DAVE

“Dave Brubeck has some stories to tell about going where no other jazz artists had dared yet to tread.

At the beginning of 1958, Brubeck was the most popular progressive instrumentalist in America—so influential he'd established an oeuvre of meters far from the beaten 4/4 path, so confident he'd successfully challenged segregation by featuring his black bassist during an extensive tour of the American South. Brubeck was a hit on college campuses, drawing large crowds and substantial performance fees. Yet he leapt at the chance to take his wife, two children and quartet on a strenuous 120-day tour of "Eurasia" at the behest of the U.S. State Department, financed by the Eisenhower Fund.

From England to Copenhagen, into Germany and Poland, through Turkey into the remote Middle East, India and Pakistan, the then 38-year-old pianist led alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright on a mission officially meant to charm the Old World's cultures with thoroughly modern music. But the Brubeck Quartet's tour proved equally effective in bringing "foreign" influences into jazz—a music which, though a product of the American 20th century, will never be outdated and recognizes no geographic boundaries.

"The experiences were just fantastic—sometimes very frightening, but great," says Dave Brubeck, today on icon as eminent as the American Eagle — which he resembles in the glint of his piercing eyes, the deep cut of His strong features, and the full flow of his white crown. After decades of international travel and dozens of recording sessions, Brubeck's memory remains sharp — he recalls the exotic names and places, strange customs and arduous travails of the 1958 tour in detail.  "It is one of my favorite tours," he announces, "and this is the album that came out of it!"

Brubeck wrote the six tunes on Jazz Impressions Of Eurasia (plus "Blue Rondo A La Turk," an enduring theme unveiled on his subsequent Columbia album Time Out) while traveling, and recorded them almost immediately upon the band's return. The tour was repeatedly extended as the State Department continued to find odd spots for the Quartet to perform, but its end was necessitated by on iron-clad concert contract with Texas A&M and bassist Wright’s agreement to join Carmen McRae (so that Joe Benjamin replaced him in realizing Brubeck's musical journal of the road). By going into the studio so soon after the trip, Dave's impressions were captured in all their immediacy. And as is the desired case when vivid ideas are preserved by getting them down before their freshness fades, the spirit of the journey lives in the music — as though caught in amber — after 33 years time.

"'Nomad' was about the nomadic Turkish people," Brubeck recalls. "We were in Kabul, a city the dogs come into at night from the outlying districts, so you're not very safe on the streets. The dogs come in packs and they're out for whatever they can hunt or find. But the nomads ride through, and they string drums on either side of their camels as a signal of their arrival and to scare off the dogs. I heard them, and that's 'Nomad.'"

And here is the famous Dave Brubeck Quartet, on original, distinctive, interpretive ensemble. First there's Joe Morello's inspired tom-tom motif, sketching the scene in league with Joe Benjamin's nightshade bass. Then the glory of Paul Desmond's alto — a focused beam of moonlight glinting off the caravan's trappings. And finally, Brubeck's deft block chords forming a rhythmically assured accompaniment, framing the experience through a lens of delighted discovery.

"Brandenburg Gate" is somewhat more restrained in its exuberance, but partakes of similar enthusiasm for its sources: the baroqued legacy of Bach (in the clock-like regularity of its circle-of-fifths modulations through harmonic minors), the "imitative" antiphony of Brubeck's phrase; following Desmond's to suggest a fugue, the cantus firmus provided by Morello's subtle brush work and Benjamin's graceful walk — and the blue notes and gentle swing that color the air jazz.

The story behind "Brandenburg Gate" is too good to ignore. "This was before the Berlin Wall was built," Brubeck says. "The State Department thought the best way for us to go to Poland was through Eost Germany, but it was against the law for an American to go into East Germany. A German lady named Madame Gunderlock, a very ancient promoter everybody seemed to know, was one of the few people who could go into East Germany through the Brandenburg Gate. So they asked me to get into the trunk of her car.

"I refused," he laughs while retelling the tale. "Americans were going to jail for lesser things than that, and disappearing for six months to years. I said, I’ll get in the back seat. If they question me I'll tell them why I'm going, and hope I can explain it. I was going to meet somebody from Poland who had papers that would get me through East Germany to Poland. So Madame Gunderlock drove me to what looked like a police station: a huge room, cement floors, wooden benches, and nobody in there. I sat in there for hours, alone.

"After a long time a man came in, walked over and sat next to me, but didn't say a word. I thought, 'What does this mean?' Finally he said, 'Are you Mr. Koolu?' I said, 'No, my name is Brubeck.' He said, 'No, you Mr. Koolu.' I said 'No' and he got out a Polish newspaper. There's a picture of me, captioned 'Mizter Kulu' — Mr. Cool Jazz! Well, he had our papers. I had to return and get the band and two of my children and my wife on the west side back through Brandenburg Gate, with no one to help us in a country where everything was hard to do anyway, and I couldn't speak the language, and I remember almost getting on the wrong train track to the wrong place..."

But he wrote the right song. When Brubeck returned to West Berlin years later to play the first concert East Berliners were allowed to attend there and began "Brandenburg Gate," the entire audience in the 10,000 seat Sports Palace stood up. His work, like the Gate itself, had become a symbol of unity regarding The Wall.

Brubeck's relationship with his listeners throughout the Eurasian tour was mutually empathic. For one thing, he often based themes on one phrase that, when attempted in a native tongue, always endears travelers to their hosts: "Thank you." His theme for Turkey's Bosphorus Straits, "The Golden Horn," comes from the rhythm of "choktahsa-keraderam" and features Desmond's Sephardic wail after a piano introduction developed from a dissonant cluster against Morello's tattoo. The Turkish "thanks" is a tongue-twister, and Brubeck is not noted for a Bud Powell-like right hand, yet his fingers negotiate the close turns of the moral line with aplomb.

The Polish "Thank You," ("Dziekuje," pronounced something like "chenkuye") reflects the mixture of sorrow and hope with which Brubeck encountered the deterioration of one of his homelands (he claims German, Polish-Russian, English, and maybe Native American ancestry).

"When we got to Poland we traveled in a bus where the floorboards were out and you saw the road down through your feet — that's how beat up everything was, the country had been destroyed so thoroughly, terribly. We'd done 11 concerts in Poland when I visited the Chopin museum one day; we took a train to the next city to play that night. On the train I wrote 'Dziekuje.'

"I wanted to play it as a thanks to the great Polish audience. There was no time to rehearse it because we went right from the train to the concert hall. I just hummed it to the guys, and wrote out the basic chord changes, but we never actually sat down and rehearsed it. It was very Chopinesque, because I'd been so impressed seeing the cast of Chopin's hands and his piano in the museum. So I told the interpreter that I wanted to call it 'Dziekuje'. We performed it after the interpreter told the audience what it was. When we finished, there was an absolute, interminable silence in the hall, which was one of the most frightening moments of my life. And then suddenly, cheers from everybody — the place exploded with applause. For some reason it was like the concert had become a church or a tribute or something. I hadn't planned it that way."

"Marble Arch," near which free-style debaters gather in London's Hyde Park, brims with the insouciant curiosity of a tourist on a double-decker bus. Joe Benjamin's solo and Desmond's stop-time passages, Morello's dapper brush dance and Brubeck's concluding ascending chords summon the image of four such tourists trading anecdotes about their visits over ale at a pub.

"Calcutta Blues," perhaps this album's most deeply felt track, can't help but change a listener's mood. "Millions sleep in the street every night," Brubeck remembers. "There were three plagues going on in Calcutta, and the taxis were used for ambulances and hearses. You don't forget those kinds of things. Nothing can change you more than seeing the misery of this world, and the great good we could do." The only thing that comes close is attending to the expression of those who've witnessed such situations and relate the truth.

Dave Brubeck has many more travel stories — of recording an impromptu collaboration with Indian musicians while electric current fluctuated, resulting in tape distortion; of bejeweled, tropically-treated pianos being hoisted by 20 bearers through the streets for bis performance; of being shot at by shepherds while flying through the Khyber Pass; of being rich with useless zlotys upon leaving Poland; of leaving Baghdad hours before his hotel was attacked during a spasm of violence. Not did his adventures end in 1958. Eugene Wright returned to the group to perform in Moscow for Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev during the 1989 summit meeting. Brubeck had been detained because his papers were filled out too well. He'd been threatened with on-stage assassination

Yet the pianist prevails. He goes to Europe for five or six weeks every year. He's toured Australia nine times, Japan five times, "and on the way, you play places like Singapore, Hong Kong, maybe Jakarta."

"I think that's what keeps us going, the wonderful vitality that comes from performing. You get so much back from the audience," Dave Brubeck enthuses. "I've gone out there sick, and at the end of the concert come off feeling just great."

One needn't wonder how his audience felt. To know, simply listen to Jazz Impressions Of Eurasia.”                                     

-Howard Mandel