Often associated with the Detroit school of pianists which included Tommy Flanagan [1930-2001], Barry Harris [1929-2021] and Roland Hanna [1932-2002], Hank Jones [1918-2010] was a central piano figure on the world scene for well-over half a century.
As Leonard Feather comments in his notes to Hank Jones: Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume Sixteen [Concord CD-4502]: ”Hank, like most other pianists of the day, was strongly impressed by Bud Powell, but like Tommy Flanagan and others from the Detroit area, he transcended the bop idiom to become an eclectic interpreter of everything from time-proof ballads to swing and bop standards.”
The following appeared in the June 4, 2007 edition of The New Yorker. It will also be included in my forthcoming Jazz Piano A Reader Volume 2.
“Jones’s casual authority has an effect not unlike Fred Astaire’s dancing; he makes it look easy, not simple, and you want it to go on all night.”
“In mid-May, Hank Jones, slim and dapper, accepted a hand-up to the stage at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and approached the piano with regal but nimble bearing. His first chords, close and luminous, were reassuring, and, in the circumstances, this was welcome. Jones had initially been scheduled to play three nights of duets with the saxophonist Joe Lovano, but shortly before the event they announced that Jones would limit himself to half a set, with Lovano’s nonet rounding out the hour. Eleven weeks earlier, Jones had undergone a quadruple bypass after a massive heart attack. No big deal, according to Jones, who remarked, before going on, that performing helps him maintain muscular control in his hands and arms. In July, he will celebrate his eighty-ninth birthday.
Jones is perhaps the most venerated of contemporary jazz pianists, and not just because he has outlived so much of the competition. Jazz taste oscillates between decorum and expression, usually favoring the latter. In the years when jazz piano was dominated by obdurate, percussive modernists like Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, Jones was often perceived as a genteel professional, and admired more for the reliability of his technique than for his wit. In today’s more ecumenical musical climate, in which pianists like Bill Charlap and Jason Moran tend to mediate percussive dynamics with lyricism, Jones’s approach seems almost prophetic.
In truth, Jones’s playing isn’t all that genteel: mannerly, yes, but at the core resolute and spare. As his most intricate phrases skitter over the keyboard, he barely seems to depress the keys, yet each note is cleanly articulated. His touch has always been unmistakable, but it has never felt quite as personal as in recent years, and his sound has taken on a soft, steady glow, like a candle with a small wick. His variations burn with infallible confidence and precision, and he can afford to hold much of his technique in reserve. Although many sides that Jones cut with Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Ella Fitzgerald during the forties and fifties are rightly regarded as landmarks, his most bewitching performances have emerged during the past decade and a half.
Jones’s extraordinarily supple time — the rhythmic sensibility that generates swing and equilibrium — reflects his apprenticeship. He began performing near his home, in Pontiac, Michigan, at the age of thirteen, in 1931, a time when jazz piano was by no means a settled practice. In the twenties, ragtime habits had given way to the free-spirited, resilient rhythms of the Harlem stride masters, chiefly James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and their style was given further impetus by the improvisational bravura of Earl Hines. Jones chose Hines and Waller as models, and soon added the most adventurous pianists of the early thirties: Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Tatum, whose virtuosity galvanized a generation of musicians in and out of jazz, told Jones that everyone makes mistakes, but that quick resolutions cover them up. Jones didn’t believe that Tatum really made mistakes, and he doesn’t make many, either; the economy of his style, for all the polish and cunning, is too transparent to allow them.
In 1944, Jones came to New York. Within months, he was working with the jazz élite. He was also soaking up innovations of the new jazz, called bebop, pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Few established swing stars could make the leap into its harmonic complexity and rhythmic volatility, but Jones grasped it immediately. He didn’t trade in his old style but, rather, modified what he already knew. By the mid-fifties, he had developed an ingenuity that appealed to musicians but escaped the notice of many fans and critics. Its defining characteristic is an aversion to cliché. He is fond of transforming material usually neglected by jazz improvisers, from “We Shall Overcome” to one of his longtime signature pieces, a melancholy meditation on “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” When playing well-worn standards, like “My Funny Valentine,” he recharges them with substitute chords and melodic inversions. His improvisations start on familiar ground, flirt with the listener’s expectations, and then lead somewhere entirely unanticipated. In a recent recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” he undermines the expected Latin rhythm, ends the theme with a sudden discord, and, in the course of his improvisation, nods at other tunes —“Pretty Baby,” “Volga Boatmen,” “Hot House”— without quite acknowledging them. These are not the standard jazz quotations, jimmied into a solo, but ideas weighed, rejected, and alchemized.
From the late fifties into the seventies, Jones was on the staff of CBS, appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and many other programs. He made good money and was in the vanguard of integration at the networks, but, musically, he slipped from view. Then, in 1976, he started making up for lost time. Within two years, there were eight new albums, and the tide has yet to ebb. In 1978, he appeared on Broadway as the onstage pianist in the Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and he later recorded an album, “Handful of Keys,” that subjects Waller’s antic themes to ruminative treatments. Jones’s versatility has given rise to a fascinating spread of collaborations with other artists. He seems equally comfortable recording a hushed, prayerful album of hymns and spirituals with the bassist Charlie Haden (“Steal Away”) and playing alongside the West African musician Cheick-Tidiane Seck (“Sarala”), whose sound-world, rife with overblown flute and exotic percussion, spurs Jones to invent rhythmic aphorisms and so uncover another facet of his art. He has also recorded with his youngest brother, Elvin, who radicalized jazz percussion as a member of the John Coltrane Quartet and might therefore seem to be the opposite of his brother. But Jones negotiates Elvin’s pounding polyrhythms with equanimity, especially on the album “Upon Reflection: The Music of Thad Jones.” Thad, the middle brother, was a trumpet player, composer, and bandleader who revived big-band music in the nineteen-sixties. (Hank, the eldest, is the only survivor.) All in all, Hank Jones can be said to have had the most impressive second act in jazz history.
At Dizzy’s, Jones and Lovano opened with “Lady Luck,” written by Thad Jones and Frank Wess when they were members of Count Basie’s band. Based on the harmonies of “Taking a Chance on Love,” but with an initial melodic phrase that recalls “You Took Advantage of Me,” the piece goes its own way, as did this performance, motored by Jones’s plush stride and Lovano’s fuzzy,
Ben Webster-in-spired timbre. Jones’s casual authority has an effect not unlike Fred Astaire’s dancing; he makes it look easy, not simple, and you want it to go on all night. Lovano is an ideal match for him. At fifty-four, he has synthesized the music of his generation in an almost Jonesian way, combining big-band apprenticeship with avant-garde curiosity. Since he and Jones began playing together, in 2003, they’ve made three CDs. The first two are quartet albums: “I’m All for You,” in 2004, was widely acclaimed, but the follow-up, “Joyous Encounter,” in 2005, demonstrates a deeper symbiosis; its version of “Autumn in New York” has the spacious commitment of a weathered classic.
With the new duet album, “Kids,” the Jones-Lovano partnership ascends to a new level, and the record will surely make many of the year’s best-of lists. Shorn of the rhythmic support of bass and percussion — Jones is, in effect, the rhythm section — the piano and tenor take on a conversational immediacy. In Thelonious Monk’s “Four in One,” the speed and precision of the playing all but meld piano and saxophone into a single instrument, recalling some of Monk’s own collaborations. Other highlights include Lovano’s portrait of Charlie Parker (“Charlie Chan,” a pseudonym that Parker once used); Jones’s harmonically challenging “Lullaby”; a wistful “Lazy Afternoon”; and a sensational reprise of Jones’s solo-piano arrangement of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” At Dizzy’s, they also played Monk’s “Monk’s Mood”: Lovano pulled away from the final chorus of his solo after an intense and convoluted flurry of eighth notes. Jones, with impeccable protocol, looked up before starting his own solo to make certain Lovano was done. Lovano nodded, and Jones’s right hand instantly shot into an eloquent distillation of the chords, reshaping the melody. Lovano looked at him for a moment, and then admiringly shook his head.”
The tune is pianist Russ Freeman's beautiful- THE WIND. Charlie Mariano, alto sax Stu Williamson, trumpet and valve trombone Russ Freeman, piano Leroy Vinnegar, bass Shelly Manne, drums
Gordon Jack, author of Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective and a frequent contributor to JazzJournal “dropped by” the editorial offices of JazzProfiles recently with a generous offer to post his piece on trumpeter Don Fagerquist [1927-1974] to the blog.
Don was one of the musicians based on the Left Coast who always knocked me out.
He had one of the most beautiful sounds that I ever heard on trumpet; plus, he was one heckuva swinger, which always caught me by surprise. Here’s this lyrical, pretty tone, and the next thing you know the guy is poppin’ one terrific Jazz phrase after another.
The trumpet seemed to find him. His was one of the purest tones you will ever hear on the horn. In Don Fagerquist, the instrument had one of its clearest forms of expression.
Don never seemed to get outside of himself. He joined big bands and combos to work in that both complimented and complemented the way he approached playing the trumpet.
His tone was what musicians referred to as “legit” [short for legitimate = the sound of an instrument often associated with its form in Classical music].
No squeezing notes through the horn, no half-valve fingering and no tricks or shortcuts. Even his erect posture in playing the instrument was textbook.
If you had a child who wished to play trumpet, Don would have been the perfect teacher for all facets of playing the instrument.
He was clear, he was clean and he was cool.
His sound had a presence to it that just snapped your head around when you heard it; it made you pay attention to it.
No shuckin’ or jiving’, just the majesty of the trumpeter’s clarion call . When the Angel Gabriel picked trumpet as his axe [Jazz talk for instrument], he must have had Don’s tone in mind.
Here’s the full text of Gordon’s article which appeared in the July 2014 edition of JazzJournal. You can locate more information about JazzJournal by going here.
“Don Fagerquist’s distinctive trumpet sound graced the bands of Gene Krupa, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and Les Brown as soloist and section leader for a number of years from the mid-forties. Although a prolific recording artist (Tom Lord lists 364 sessions) he is almost unknown today and for that reason it is worth highlighting a few comments about him from former colleagues: “I loved Don’s playing” (Gerry Mulligan); “Marvellous. He was ahead of his time” (Herb Geller); “He was a genius – a class act” (Dave Pell); “A tremendous jazz player” (Arno Marsh); “He really is a player - he’s the best” (Les Brown) and “He was a great improviser…everyone liked him” (Phil Urso).
Carl Saunders one of the most in-demand trumpeters in Los Angeles has cited him as a primary influence along with Kenny Dorham and Freddie Hubbard. (Bill Perkins once told me that “Carl idolised him”). In 1956 when Leonard Feather conducted a poll exclusively for musicians, both George Shearing and Urbie Green listed Don as one of their favourite trumpeters. Despite these testimonials his name has rarely been included on a list of the music’s finest soloists except once in 1955 when he secured fifth place in Metronome magazine’s annual poll. Robert Gordon probably said it best in his book (Jazz West Coast) “Don Fagerquist (was) a much underrated soloist. No doubt he was largely ignored because he laboured so often in the commercial vineyards of the Dave Pell Octet.”
Don who came from a musical family was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on the 6th. February 1927. He joined the Mal Hallett orchestra in 1943 which was based in Boston, working along the eastern side of the United States. The band included Buddy Wise, Sonny Rich, Dick Taylor and John Williams and in an enthusiastic Metronome review in 1944 George Simon said, “17 year old Don Fagerquist plays most of the lead…and then lets loose with some impressive jazz.” Like many of his generation his primary influences at this time were Harry James and Roy Eldridge.
In 1944 he began a long association with Gene Krupa that lasted off and on until 1950. He recruited Buddy Wise and Dick Taylor from Hallet’s band for Gene and they can all be heard soloing on one of Krupa’s biggest hits, Disc Jockey Jump by the nineteen year old Gerry Mulligan. It has a standard AABA form with an A section resembling Four Brothers although as Gerry once ruefully pointed out it was recorded nearly a year before Jimmy Giuffre’s classic. Don was the featured trumpet soloist and he can be heard on numerous other titles with the band like Leave Us Leap, Up An Atom, Lover and Opus One which are all good examples of his work at that time. The latter featured Anita O’Day and Don took leave of absence from the band in 1949 to work with her small group for about six months. Tiny Kahn was on drums but unfortunately they were never recorded.
That same year Artie Shaw was having tax problems so he decided to return to the music business with a new big band to help pay his debt to the IRS. Don was recruited along with some of the very best of the young modernists like Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, Jimmy Raney and Dodo Marmarosa. The leader also commissioned writers like George Russell, Johnny Mandel and Tadd Dameron to contribute new material which was performed with his old hits like Frenesi, Begin the Beguine, I Cover the Waterfront and Stardust. Don was heard not only with the big band but also with a fresh edition of the Gramercy Five which successfully revisited numbers like Summit Ridge Drive, Grabtown Grapple and Cross Your Heart.
He left the Shaw band in 1950 to re-join Gene Krupa for a while and then early in 1951 he took Don Ferrara’s place with Woody Herman who was beginning a month’s residency at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. In July that year Charlie Parker was recorded with the band at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City performing staples like Lemon Drop, Four Brothers, Caldonia, The Goof and I and More Moon. After the concert Don and Doug Mettome played with Parker at a local club. Fagerquist split the lead book with Conte Candoli and didn’t get too many solos but he can be heard on Celestial Blues, Moten Stomp and Singing in the Rain from a July 1952 recording session that was notable for a Woody Herman vocal on Early Autumn. A few months later after a Hollywood recording date he left Herman to join Les Brown who had a residency on the Bob Hope Show. He is prominently featured with the ‘Band of Renown’ on a double CD recorded at the Hollywood Palladium in 1953 on numbers like Rain, Happy Hooligan, Jersey Bounce and From This Moment On. This was when he and his family relocated to Los Angeles, eventually settling in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley.
His instrument of choice was a Calicchio trumpet which he played throughout his career and by the time he joined Les Brown his mature lyrical style was in full bloom. Rather like Clifford Brown (another well- schooled musician) he had a thorough knowledge of harmony and he was able to negotiate every chord change in a sequence with an effortless flow of melodic creativity - unlike Chet Baker for instance who could read music but was an ‘ear’ player when it came to improvisation.
Early in 1953 Dave Pell formed an octet with sidemen from Les Brown’s band like Ray Sims, Ronny Lang and Fagerquist which proved to be very popular commercially leading some critics to accuse it of playing ‘Mortgage-paying jazz’. The public could not get enough of Pell’s octet and according to John Tynan writing in Downbeat it became, “The busiest small group in California”. The arrangements were by some of the finest Los Angeles-based writers like Shorty Rogers, Johnny Mandel, Andre Previn and Marty Paich and most of the charts had a guitar doubling the lead giving the group a bigger sound than might be expected from eight pieces. Don’s lyrical trumpet on lead or soloing was an essential ingredient in the success of the group. He made eleven albums with Pell who in an interview with Marc Myers once said, “He had chops to do anything he thought of…he would steal the album again and again”.
The mid-fifties until December 1969 was a period of intense recording activity for him and after years of being on the road, the security of regular studio work must have seemed particularly attractive. In 1956 he joined the staff at Paramount Studios where he eventually performed on 85 film sound–tracks. He also became a first-call trumpet for recording sessions with artists as diverse as Shelly Manne, Red Norvo, Mel Torme, Buddy DeFranco, Art Pepper, Georgie Auld, Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Junior Mance and numerous others. He was on several of Ella Fitzgerald’s celebrated Song Book albums and he did Sinatra dates after Harry Edison stopped making them. He can also be heard on Barbra Streisand’s hit On A Clear Day. He performed on Hoagy Sings Carmichael soloing on Skylark, Winter Moon, Rockin’ Chair and Ballad in Blue prompting sleeve-note writer George Frazier to claim that Don was a new name to him, which was a surprising admission for a former DownBeat contributor.
One particularly memorable session was the 1954 Jazz Studio 2 album with Herb Geller, Milt Bernhart and Jimmy Giuffre. It includes classic versions of two of the most sophisticated ballads in the repertoire (Laura and Darn That Dream) on a recording that would merit five stars except for the presence of John Graas on French horn. He was a fine instrumentalist who had been a member of the Cleveland Symphony but the horn has more than eleven feet of tubing making it unsuitable for swiftly articulated bebop choruses. It also happens to be the most difficult of the brass family with an unforgiving mouthpiece – smaller than a trumpet’s. The only performer who seemed able to overcome the horn’s inherent problems was Julius Watkins.
A year later Don and Charlie Mariano recorded with singer Helen Carr who began her short career with Charles Mingus in 1949. It is a particularly intimate date with interesting material like Not Mine, I Don’t Want To Cry Anymore and Moments Like This - numbers you don’t hear every day. It also includes Cole Porter’s delightful Down In The Depths Of The 90thFloor which is available on YouTube.
That same year he recorded four titles under his own name with a Four Brothers saxophone section including Zoot Sims, Dave Pell, Bill Holman and Bob Gordon. Jordi Pujol has released it on his Jazz City series as Portrait of a Great Jazz Artist - a title that does not overstate Fagerquist’s immense talent. Also included on the CD are performances with Russell Garcia, Heinie Beau and Les Brown.
Even better was his only other date as a leader in 1957 where he was able to stretch out on a selection of superior standards arranged by Marty Paich. As always he decorates his melodic lines with chromatic runs embellished with delicate grace notes revealing a soloist of rare originality and taste. His warm sound has echoes of the great Bobby Hackett who of course was one of Miles’s favourites.
Throughout the sixties he continued to be very much in demand with artists like Louie Bellson, Billy May, Jo Stafford, Sammy Davis Jr., Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, Sarah Vaughan and Neal Hefti. His last recording was in 1969 with Charlie Barnet’s big band playing a selection of current pop songs arranged by Billy May. There followed an unexplained gap in his activities until 1973 when along with Dave Pell, Jimmy Rowles, Ray Brown and Frank Capp he worked on a TV show hosted by Tom Kennedy for several months.
Don Fagerquist died in Los Angeles from a kidney complaint on January 24th. 1974
For more on this unsung giant go here to locate 26 of his solo transcriptions with Les Brown, Dave Pell, Marty Paich and Mel Torme.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
As Leader
Portrait of a Great Jazz Artist (Jazz City Series FSR 2212)
Eight by Eight (V.S.O.P. Records 4CD)
As Sideman
Gene Krupa: Drummin’ Man (Columbia 501647 2)
Artie Shaw: The Complete Thesaurus Transcriptions 1949 (Hep CD 89/90)
Les Brown: Live at the Hollywood Palladium (Jasmine JASCD 407)
Helen Carr (Bethlehem CDSOL-6085)
Jazz Studio 1/2: Complete Sessions (Lonehill Jazz LHJ 10145)
Dave Pell Octet: Jazz for Dancing and Listening (Jazz City Series FSR 2242)
“The Eisenhower years, so Miltown-ized on much of the home front, were turbulent times for jazz. The revolutionaries of the early 1950s were themselves ushered aside by a new avant-garde before the close of the decade. Jazz was like one of those newspaper chess problems: move from bop to free in ten moves. Change was the byword, and it proved to be a cruel taskmaster. Even jazz stars who had perfected wondrous styles—Miles and Coltrane serving as the preeminent examples here—soon felt compelled to throw them overboard in pursuit of the next (and in itself transitory) new thing.
Yet the personal lives of the jazz elite were often even more tumultuous than the music itself. Critics and historians have danced around the issue of jazz and substance abuse, whitewashing and demonizing by turns, but a simple perusal of the names and dates on the tombstones tells you that something was seriously wrong with the masters of the art form during this era. Not everyone was a casualty, but even those who survived, often paid a price in other ways: time in prison, broken families, potential unrealized, financial security traded for a string of fixes.
In the midst of this, it is easy to lose track of Richard Twardzik. This pianist, dead at age 24, never lived to see the release of his first leader date on the Pacific label. It was almost a miracle that this material was issued at all. Pacific only had 22 minutes of Twardzik's music on hand, and needed to package it with trio sides by pianist Russ Freeman in order to fill up an LP album. Over the years, other recordings of Twardzik's music have become available, usually featuring him in a sideman role; but none of these projects is well known outside an inner circle of jazz devotees.
It would thus be all too easy to forget Richard Twardzik. . . except that his music is anything but forgettable….
Now Jack Chambers, a jazz critic best known for his two-volume biography of Miles Davis, has written the first full-length biography of the pianist, Bouncin' With Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik, published by The Mercury Press. Chambers, who first heard Twardzik on record back as a high school student in 1956, has taken this mysterious figure from a bygone jazz era and brought him fully to life in the pages of this remarkable book.”
- Ted Gioia writing on www.Jazz.com
I’ve now studied with Jack Chambers on two, different occasions, which is no mean feat considering the fact that he is a Linguistics Professor at the University of Toronto and I live in Southern California.
Of course, in this era of online education, one could assume that the geographical gap between us could easily be bridged by the Internet.
But that would be an incorrect assumption as both of my tutorials with Professor Chambers involved reading books he has authored, one of which was written over thirty years ago.
Please let me explain.
After a long absence from Jazz due, in part, to the usual personal and professional reasons that find all of us otherwise preoccupied and away from the passions of our youth during “the middle years,” I reconnected with the music in a big way when the compact disc era that began in the 1980s provided easy access to much of the recorded history of Jazz.
At some point in this reawakening, I realized how little I knew about Miles Davis’ music before his now classic records on Columbia [Sony] such as Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess.
During one of my Saturday pilgrimages to the Borders Bookstore at the corner of Post and Powell Streets in San Francisco [just north of the St. Francis Hotel], I came across a copy of Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [New York: William Morrow, 1989].
Its author was Jack Chambers.
I had never heard of Jack, but after thumbing through the book, I gathered that the work had originally been published as two, separate books with 1960 as the dividing line, a year that would have roughly coincided to when I began to listen to Miles in earnest.
I bought a copy, found it so fascinatingly full of information on Miles that I couldn’t put it down.
I carried it with me everywhere including on my business travels of which there were many in those days. I’d make notes about Jack observations of Miles’ early recordings on labels such as Savoy, Prestige and Blue Note.
And then, upon returning home, I’d seek out the CD reissues of these Miles recordings at the Tower Records Store on Columbus in the Russian Hill section of San Francisco which had a room set-off from the rest of the store that was totally devoted to Jazz [Can you imagine?].
Armed with my newly acquired digital Miles treasures and Jack’s book on Miles, I would relate one to the other while listening to the music on my portable CD player during subsequent business flights and the accompanying [and seemingly interminable] hotel stays.
Jack became my mentor on everything-Miles before 1960 [and after 1960, too, when I read Part II of his definitive work].
Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis hasassumed an honored place on my Jazz books shelf.
Aside from the odd reference search every now and again, there the matter rested until I began to “study with” Jack almost 20 years later on a completely different Jazz topic.
Please let me further explain.
While doing some research for a blog feature on the music of Richard Twardzik, a rather obscure Jazz pianist who had an all-too-brief career in the early 1950s before succumbing to a heroin overdose in 1955, I came across an essay that Ted Gioia wrote for jazz.com.
At the time of its writing, Ted’s Twardzik essay was essentially based on a review of a new biography about the pianist entitled - Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik [Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2008].
The author of the Twardzik biography was - you guessed it - Jack Chambers!
I wrote to Ted concerning his Twardzik essay and he sent me Jack’s e-mail address and suggested that I get in touch with him.
In the meantime, I had written to a friend who is probably THE leading authority on all aspects of Pacific Jazz Records - the label that thankfully recorded Twardzik performing some of his music before his sudden death - and asked him if I could borrow his copy of Jack’s biography [I just assumed he’d have a copy because he has just about everything and anything ever written about Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label].
I was right, he did have the book and he offered to bring it along with him when we next met for one of our Jazz-and-coffee-get-togethers.
Since Jack’s book was forthcoming as a loan from my Jazz buddy, I never did get around to writing to Jack, per Ted’s suggestion.
I didn’t have to because he wrote to me!
It seems that my friend who is expert in all-things-Pacific-Jazz and Jack Chambers had been corresponding for quite some time.
As a result of their friendship, Jack sent along my very own copy of Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik and inscribed it with a personal greeting!
After reading Jack’s book, it soon became apparent to me that any blog posting that I might prepare on Richard Twardzik had to incorporate Jack’s knowledge and perspective on the subject.
So I wrote to him, thanked him for his generosity and asked:
“Jack:
As a starting point for my planned feature on Richard Twardzik and his music, I don't think I can do much better than the introductory chapter to Bouncin' with Bartok - A Crutch for the Crab.
May I have your permission to use it in its entirety? ...
Although the album in question would no doubt be different, I'm sure that many Jazz fans can relate to your anecdote about happening upon Twardzik's music, being intrigued by it and then going on a quest to find out more about it.
Thanks for considering this request.
Kind regards,
Steve”
Jack sent back the following reply:
“Steve— I am pleased to give permission for you to reprint Chap. 1 with the acknowledgments and links you list below. Yes, I am sure most music lovers have an experience like mine on first hearing a magnificent piece of music. After I put a note about it on my website, I discovered that many others had their experience with "A Crutch for the Crab."
One person wrote and said, ‘Until I read your article, I thought Richard Twardzik was a figment of my imagination.’
“I first heard a recording of Richard Twardzik playing piano in 1956, when I was a high-school student. The tune was called A Crutch for the Crab, and it was one of the tracks on a promotional LP put out by Pacific Jazz, a sampler called Assorted Flavors of Pacific Jazz (LIFS-1). It cost $1.98 brand-new; and that was the kind of bargain you couldn't pass up if you were a jazz-struck, underachieving, underage smoker with a pompadour and black horn-rims who made five dollars on Saturdays squeegeeing the windows of Welsh's Butcher Shop and three other stores on King Street in a town called Stoney Creek on the Canadian side of the Niagara border.
Side One of Assorted Flavors strung together a lot of excerpts from the Pacific Jazz catalogue while a man with a radio voice told a kind of company history of West Coast jazz, starting with Gerry Mulligan's piano-less quartet at the Haig in 1952.The radio man sounded like he gargled with Coppertone. His voice-over commentary obscured the beginning of A Crutch for the Crab, and the ending disintegrated in a fade-out. The excerpt, counting the commentary, was less than two minutes long. It was, you would have thought, the worst way to hear any kind of music.
In fact it was sensational. Twardzik's piano playing was fluent and eccentric and painfully beautiful. His tune—a composition, really, when we finally got to hear all of it—was full of jagged turns and crisp releases. Somehow it came out sounding exactly right for its wild title, crabbily fluid with sudden lurches. It was like nothing else in the world. It was a revelation.
What the narrator said, oozing cool, was also a revelation. He said:
'When Chet Baker went to Europe in September of 1955, he took with him a startling new pianist from Boston named Richard Twardzik. Twardzik died in Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his. Here's the late Richard Twardzik as he sounded in 1954 playing his own composition, A Crutch for the Crab.'
It was the only time I ever heard a news item on an LP.
I tracked down the source LP, partly fearing that I had been bamboozled—that Richard Twardzik would turn out to be an ordinary piano player who had been cleverly edited to make a few brilliant minutes on a promotional record. I had to wait a long time to find out. Twardzik's LP was a new release, copyright 1956, the same as the sampler. I had to order it at the record store, as an import. "It's gonna cost you, son," said the man at the record shop, "and it's gonna take six weeks at least."
The LP was called Trio (Pacific Jazz 1212). Just looking at it, holding it in my hand still swathed in its protective plastic sheath, took my breath away. The cover was the print of an oil painting in shades of brown, with three solid figures, guys built like cairns, tossing boulders around as if they were helium balloons. The credit line said "west coast artists series/Edmund Kohn" and the back cover carried a profile and a small picture of old Edmund, a round man with a handlebar mustache and a kerchief knotted around his neck, looking like the street musician with the dancing monkey you see in cartoons. It also told about Edmund's success as an illustrator and about the awards he had won at the Sacramento State Fair and other lesser places. Since then I have read testimonials by very serious people about how their lives were changed forever when they saw Picasso's Guernica or Botticelli's Primavera. For me, it will always be Edmund Kohn's unnamed cover painting for Trio.
The billing on the cover indicated that Twardzik shared the LP with another piano player, Russ Freeman. In fact, it gave Twardzik second billing on the cover, but on the actual disk the six tracks by Twardzik's trio filled the first side. The second side was given over to Freeman, and I already knew7 something about him. He was the dean of West Coast piano players by dint of appearing on nearly every jazz record that came from California.
The back cover was packed with information: besides the box about Edmund Kohn, there were six column inches about Russ Freeman, another six column inches by Freeman about Richard Twardzik, and two black & white 3.5" x 4" portraits. One of the portraits was of Freeman by the famous California photographer William Claxton showing Freeman with a pencil mustache and dark suit, looking more like a used car salesman than was surely intended. The other portrait was of "The Late Richard Twardzik" (as the caption portentously put it),and it showed Twardzik against a dark background, hollow-cheeked, staring into the distant gloom. It was (and is) brilliantly evocative, and for many years it was the only known portrait of Twardzik.
The liner credited the portrait to "Nick Dean, Boston," not a name that registered any recognition. Years later, I spoke to numerous Boston contemporaries of Richard Twardzik, and none could place Nick Dean, the photographer. But some 45 years later, I discovered more photographs by Nick Dean, as we shall see, some of them the equal of the back-cover portrait. His old business address is stamped on the back of one of the portraits: "Photograph by/ Nick Dean/41 Charles Street/Boston 14, Mass./CA 7-8440." And finally, with the help of Richard Twardzik's second cousin who was born long after Richard had died but came to maturity in the internet era, I would find Dean himself.
Freeman was credited as producer of Twardzik's recording session. In his liner notes about Twardzik's music. Freeman praises Twardzik's "really original concept," and tells how he came across him in Boston and was struck by his music, "fresh and very uninhibited, especially harmonically" Freeman said that the recordings by Twardzik came about because he phoned Richard Bock, the owner and producer of Pacific Jazz Records in Los Angeles, to tell him about this hot young player, and Bock gave him permission to record Twardzik for the label.
Freeman says the recording took place "late in 1954," but the exact date— 27 October 1954 —was only fixed 35 years later with the kind of sleuthing (as we will see later) that jazz discographers revel in. The recording was made in Rudy Van Gelder's parlor in Hackensack, New Jersey, the now-legendary recording studio that was just beginning to earn its reputation when Freeman took Twardzik and the other musicians there. Accompanying Twardzik were Carson Smith, Chet Baker's regular bassist, a Californian who was young, only 23, but already well known for playing in Mulligan's Quartet as well as Baker's, and a young, unknown Boston drummer, Peter Littman. (Complete details for these and all other recordings by Twardzik are listed in the discography at the end.)
Freeman's endorsement sounds like an understatement on the evidence of Twardzik's music. The original Pacific Jazz release included three standards, Bess You Is My Woman Now, 'Round About Midnight and I’ll Remember April, and three originals, Albuquerque Social Swim, Yellow Tango and, of course, A Crutch for the Crab.
The standards were fresher then than we can imagine today. Twardzik's recording of Bess You Is My Woman Now pre-dates by four full years the Porgy and Bess boom that came with its movie version in 1959 and brought with it jazz versions of its score by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Mundell Lowe, Bill Potts, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Gershwin's opera had been revived in 1952 for an international tour starring soprano Leontyne Price, but that was a more operatic version than the film would be, and it hardly caught the attention of jazz musicians, except for Twardzik. Although several George Gershwin songs ranked high in the standard jazz repertoire, the ones from Porgy and Bess were not common among them except for Summertime, and that by virtue not of the opera but of a seminal 1939 jazz recording by Sidney Bechet. When Twardzik recorded Bess You Is My Woman Now in 1954, it was completely unknown as a jazz vehicle.
More surprisingly, so was 'Round About Midnight. Thelonious Monk had made his original studio recording of his song in 1947 and, apart from an obscure solo recording he made of it in Paris in 1954, he did not record it again for a decade, until 1957. By then, it had been widely discovered as a jazz vehicle and Monk's interpretation of his own ballad was one of dozens, albeit primus inter pares. It was destined to become one of the two or three most recorded jazz compositions of all time. But Twardzik's pensive, almost introverted, take on it in 1954 caught it on its rise into the standard repertoire, and surely it was one that caught the ear of many other piano players.
Refreshing as the ballads were, Twardzik's original compositions were positively brilliant. Yellow Tango is a confection based on a mannerly Latin beat sustained by bass and drums while Twardzik teases the genre with high-note filigrees in the manner of then little-known Ahmad Jamal. Albuquerque Social Swim is tougher, its oblique melodies played staccato with sudden, unexpected stops. The improvised choruses burst into rock-steady 4/4 time, and after the stutters of the theme they come as a blessed relief. The device of inexplicable stops released into flowing melodies dominates Albuquerque Social Swim and animates it by creating knots of tension and unraveling them in flowing melody. In A Crutch for the Crab the stop-and-release is just one of several devices.
If Twardzik's side of the original LP had a flaw, it was in programming. A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim were set together at the beginning, as tracks one and two, where their similarities somehow tempered their stunning differences.
A Crutch for the Crab, heard in its entirety, is a 3-minute symphony. Its structure is ambiguous: the opening exposition takes 24 bars but the final reprise takes only 20, having lost the first four bars. Those first four bars open the piece as a kind of cadence; they might be a prelude. The second four bars are syncopated, with the piano playing on one and three while the drums accent two and four. The effect is unforgettable, and sets up a repeated figure in the 17th and 23rd bars where the piano fills the second and fourth accents with its own out-of-tempo syncopations. The same figure comes back at points in the improvisation, and so do references to other melodic figures, always modulated in some way. The performance is rich with nuance. It ends too soon from one vantage point, but from another it entices you to go back to it time and again, as real art always does.
In my mind's eye, the syncopation caught the crab's motion of the title with unimaginable perfection, seemingly lurching, almost awkward, but at the same time fluid and swift. Try to catch it and it darts through your hands. It is edgy and slightly frightening, and just when you think you have it cornered, it is gone.
Twardzik offered an alternate explanation for the title in the liner notes. It came, he said, "from watching the hands of the Polish pianist, Jan Smeterlin, as they scurried crab-like into the keys." But that came too late for me. By then, I had my own objective correlative for the title embedded in the music, and it could not be shaken. Besides, there was good reason for not taking Twardzik literally. Another explanation that he put forward was obviously intended to give the finger to the unwary. Yellow Tango, he said, "was written as incidental music for a Shake-dance." Oh sure.
The recordings by Richard Twardzik on the Trio LP last 21 minutes and 44 seconds. (A mistake on the timings printed on the cover made it seem even less by more than a minute, but Yellow Tango is over five minutes, not 4:18.) Of the six tracks, the three ballads arid three originals, all but Yellow Tango are around the three-minute mark, the industry standard length in the era of brittle old 78 rpm shellac records and one that was imprinted so forcibly onto the psyches of musicians and producers that it was still the industry standard length in 1954, two years after jazz recordings invariably came out on unbreakable vinyl at 33 rpm.
Twardzik's Trio recording was easy to miss, even for vigilant jazz fans. It was, after all, just half a record by an unknown piano player with too many consonants in his name. His music held up to repeated listenings, in fact endlessly, but there was still too little of it. You never got tired of it. You never got enough of it.
From the start I knew there was more recorded music by Richard Twardzik, because Russ Freeman, in his liner note, wrote, "He recorded with Serge [Chaloff] and Charlie Mariano," who I knew about as two Boston jazz musicians with national reputations. Freeman added, "He also had an original, TheFable of Mabel, recorded by Serge for Storyville Records."
Those were tantalizing clues, and they cost me many frustrating hours. The man at the record shop could find no listings for either Chaloff or Mariano as leaders, and nobody I knew with a jazz collection had ever heard of these particular records. Even Joe Rico, the jazz jockey on Buffalo radio who seemed, in my teenage pantheon, to know everything worth knowing not only about jazz but about life, when I finally got a friend of a friend's friend to make an inquiry, just shrugged.
In 1956, channels of communication were sluggish. It was years before I realized that those other records Twardzik had played on had had mainly local distribution around Boston, and that the Mariano record was out of print even before I had started making inquiries about it. Probably the Chaloff record was too. In 1963, when I found a discography of Richard Twardzik's recordings in an English jazz magazine called Jazz Monthly (Morgan 1963), I finally learned more of the details—labels, titles, recording dates, personnel, instruments, compositions. It turned out there were two Mariano records with Twardzik on them, and not only did Chaloff record Twardzik's composition The Fable of Mabel, but Twardzik played on it too. I wrote the titles of all three records on the list of collectibles I carry in my wallet. Over the years, dozens of items on that list came and went, but those Boston LPs took on a frustrating permanence. As jazz buffs do, I watched for the records to come up in delete bins and record auctions. As my travels broadened, first in my college days when I found myself across the river from Detroit and then as my professional pursuits took me to conferences all over North America and eventually Europe, I spent hours pawing through dusty stacks of vinyl in far-flung cities on two continents.
To this day, I have never found those records, any of them, in the LP format. I finally got to hear them when the commercial boom brought on by the new CD technology at the tail-end of the 1980s led record companies to sweep out their vaults.
Freeman's liner note also offered the news that Twardzik's "professional career began at the age of fourteen," and that "he worked with Tommy Reynolds, Charlie Barnet, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, Serge Chaloff, Charlie Mariano, Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker." With that background, somewhere there had to be live performances on acetate or tape reels, and, sure enough, a few years later a single track surfaced of Charlie Parker with a pick-up band in a Boston nightclub. Twardzik's piano was largely inaudible, but he was there, and the very existence of the performance held the promise of more, and over the decades more performances have slowly accumulated, never out of regard for Twardzik himself but usually triggered by lingering sentiments for the leaders of the bands he happened to be playing in—Parker, Chaloff, or Chet Baker. There is quite a bit more to come, I now know; and come it will if the growing sentiments for Twardzik, or at least curiosity about him, gather a little momentum.
With only the twenty-odd minutes of the trio recordings, it might have been impossible for me and for other jazz fans to sustain interest in the ill-fated piano player for the next half-century or so. But there was more. Pacific Jazz Records released a new recording with Twardzik on it the same year as the trio record, and the second recording was a small treasure of beguiling, open-minded, cool music that provided a whole new view of Twardzik's brilliance, and solidified his singular ability in case there were any doubts.
The records were made in a Paris studio by the Chet Baker Quartet in two sessions. The date of the second session was exactly one week before Twardzik died. The LP that was issued in North America was called Chet Baker in Europe (Pacific Jazz 1218), and it carried the grandiose subtitle A Jazz Tour of the NATO Countries. The tracks with Twardzik consisted of six pieces of extraordinary delicacy, almost like chamber music. Once again, they amounted to only half a record. They filled the second side, all 25 minutes of it. There were also five tracks on the first side, fillers in my mind, by Baker with European musicians recorded after Twardzik's death.
My copy of the Pacific Jazz LP has disappeared, as things tend to do in four decades or more. It was a rare one. It has never been reissued in the original format and I now realize that its rarity has nothing to do with the tastes of the company executives, about whom I harbored resentment for years, assuming they did not know they were hiding a masterpiece in their vaults. I now realize that the music never belonged to the American distributor, Pacific Jazz, but had to be leased by them from Barclay Records in Paris, the original producer and owner.
That explained why the LP came with strangely impersonal packaging, with a cover photo focusing on the tail of a Pan American airliner instead of the customary romantic pose of Chet Baker, who was not only the best-selling jazz musician of the moment but also a highly photogenic boyish hipster. I now know that Baker was still in Europe when Pacific Jazz leased this music and packaged it in an effort to keep alive the American fin interest in their hottest musician. The cover photo shows a young couple embracing in the shadow of the airliner, but it isn't even Baker, although the male figure obscured by the woman shows a Chet-like pompadour.
Baker's cover poses, except for this one, had a certain cachet. In fact, they have proven to have something close to the lasting power of art. Years later they were collected in coffee-table format in Young Chet (Claxton 1993). So at the time of its release, the cover of Chet Baker in Europe seemed a bit weird, with make-believe Chet hidden behind the young woman hugging him on his supposed return to American soil. Equally weird were all those strange foreign names of the musicians on the filler tracks. But come to think of it, they were no stranger than the names of what had been, until Twardzik's sudden death, Baker's working quartet.
Baker's young sidemen were so unknown beyond their own hometowns that advertising them by name would have stirred no expectations abroad and almost none at home.
What set Chet Baker in Europe apart was the music. The brilliance of the recordings Baker made in the Paris studio with Twardzik would turn out to be due in part to an invisible fifth member of the new quartet. Baker's group recorded nothing but original compositions in the Paris studio, a very unusual situation for Baker, whose reputation rested on ballads and jazz standards before this and, it would turn out, forever after. Of those original compositions, one was written by Twardzik, and the other five were written, according to the composer credit on the label, by "Bob Zieff." There were actually three more Zieff compositions recorded at these sessions but it would be several years before we knew that, except for the few fans who had access to the original French issue on Barclay Records.
Bob Zieff was another mystery man, arid the mystery was hardly solved by Baker's identification of him in the liner note (1956) as "the young Boston writer that Dick Twardzik, my pianist, brought to my attention." His music was mysterious too. There were no funny valentines, no lilting Mulliganesque ditties, no harmon-muted bleeding sentiments—in other words, none of the hallmarks on which Baker's popularity was based.
Baker was well aware of the differences. His liner note added, "The originality and freshness of Zieff’s line and chordal structure is going to please a lot of people, I think—at least musicians and other serious listeners." That statement seemed like an attempt at preparing Baker's regular fans for the kind of departure that Zieff's music represented. It was, above all, cerebral music. (You can dance to it, in the bop mockery of the hopelessly passe Swing Era, but only if you work out your steps very very carefully.) Each composition is an intricate little gem. Each note seems deliberately laid into its position in the composition. Each composition sounds more difficult to play than the last one, no matter what order you listen to them in, but the rewards of mastering their difficulties are obvious in the subtle swing and the melodic surprises.
Playing Zieff's compositions obviously requires discipline and control, the aspect that gives the pieces the chamber-like feel, but that should not imply that the quartet's performances of these pieces are subdued or in any way timid. Baker and Twardzik, the principal soloists, range freely through key changes and tempo shifts with what seems uncanny ease.
Baker was praised from the beginning of his career for his spontaneity He had a knack for inventing attractive phrases on the spot. In jazz, spontaneous invention is essential, and most jazz musicians rely on rote devices to relieve them of the burden of constant invention. Baker needed fewer of them than many others. When it came to spinning lines of disarmingly simple and lyrically attractive variations, he had few peers. All that was widely recognized, but in his career he received scant notice for the beauty of his tone or the fullness of his range on the trumpet, perhaps because he displayed them so infrequently, sticking almost exclusively to the middle register. There was no way he could do that in Zieff's music. It required him to move briskly over the scale, especially on the tunes called Rondette and Re-Search, and to play rapid exercise-like sequences in Mid-Forte and Piece Caprice, sometimes requiring octave leaps. Baker carried it off with total control. He made it sound easy. His technical skills were seldom so evident, before or after. And through it all his lyrical bent, the heart of his talent, never flagged for a second.
Zieff's music sets Baker into brooding moods on Sad Walk, Just Duo and Brash, and winsome melodies with minor drags on Rondette, Sad Walk and Pomp. The ingenious harmonies draw out Baker's sensitivity, seeming to extract it without pretense or posing as he traces fresh melodic lines over the layered harmonies. These recordings may represent the apogee of Baker's talents as a pure musician.
The only other composition recorded by the young quartet in Paris was composed by Twardzik himself, called The Girl from Greenland. If I had never heard A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim (and, eventually, The Fable of Mabel, Twardzik's other remarkable composition) it would be tempting to credit Zieff with it rather than Twardzik. The kindred feelings in the music of Twardzik and Zieff were no coincidence, I would discover 20 years later, when I accidentally sat down beside Robert L. Zieff at a conference in Oldham, Lancashire, on the music of Duke Ellington.
Twardzik's Girl from Greenland is a ballad (A A'B A') built on a lilting rhythm. Baker's statement of the ascending scale of the melody is countered by Twardzik's trills at the top of the piano. When Baker and Twardzik break free of the melody in their solo choruses, they sustain the contrasting moods of their melodic motifs. Baker emphasizes the minor mood, brooding over it quietly. Twardzik mocks the mood, teasing it by spreading four bars of melody over eight and inverting phrases. Baker is involved and Twardzik is aloof. Baker is romantic and Twardzik is cynical. It is an ingenious arrangement, perfectly executed. Both musicians play their parts brilliantly, but it is the interaction of the parts that raises the music to a higher level.
And when the last note of The Girl from Greenland faded, there would be no more music from Richard Twardzik. Or so it seemed. As the man with the Coppertone voice on the Pacific Jazz sampler said, "Twardzik died m Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his." Now, to add to that, we had the eyewitness testimony of Chet Baker. In his liner notes for Chet Baker in Europe (1956),Baker included this diary entry in his account of his tour of the NATO countries (with the elisions in the original):
‘OCT. 21 —Today here in Paris, alone in his room, Dick Twardzik died suddenly at 24, cheating all of us of his very real genius.... His conception was so completely original; the way he played with meter was uncanny, turning it around and around, never goofing, always there. He leaves behind far too fewer examples of the genius he possessed. My association with him has enriched my life greatly and I'm thankful for that. We are all deeply saddened.... a wonderful person and a brilliant musician.’
There did indeed seem to be too few examples of his genius. The Baker quartet tracks from Paris, on the Pacific Jazz release, amounted to 24 minutes and 29 seconds. Add to that the 21:44 of the piano trio recordings and you get the grand total: 46 minutes and 13 seconds. Enough to establish a reputation, but hardly enough to sustain it, by any reasonable standards. There would be, miraculously, another 15 minutes of Bob Zieff's music by Baker and Twardzik in Paris, and when it is added on it brings the grand total to 61:12, one hour and one minute and a few seconds. Eventually more music by Twardzik would be found, a fair amount really, considering the brevity of his life, some of it excellent, but the very best of it is here, in the hour from these two studio recordings.
Over the years, I have returned to this music often, and always with the fear that I would find its pleasures gone flat. As I left behind the horn-rimmed teenager I had been when I first heard Richard Twardzik playing A Crutch for the Crab, I feared that I might find out that my feelings for it were based on nothing more than adolescent brooding for a doomed young artist. I was afraid something inside me would say, Snap out of it, for god's sake.
It hasn't happened.” For the following video tribute to Richard Twardzik, I selected his interpretation of Bess, You Is My Woman Now because as Ted Gioia explains:
His interpretation of "Bess, You Is My Woman" is a case study in the jazz-ballad-as-art-song. This latter performance is worth hearing for the pedaling alone—and how often can you say that about a jazz track? But even more striking is his splashes of sound color—the term "voicings" hardly does justice to what Twardzik
