The Birth {and Death} of the Cool

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Regular readers of the blog may recall that the JazzProfiles editorial staff has a particular fondness and high regard for the writing and the writings of Ted Gioia.

In its estimation, Ted is right up there with Gene Lees, Doug Ramsey, Nat Hentoff and a host of others who have taught us so much about Jazz over the years and enriched our listening experience with their unique insights and knowledge about the music and its makers.

You can imagine our pleasure, then, when we received copyright permission from Ted and his publisher to feature on the site the following chapter from his latest book - THE BIRTH {And Death} OF THE COOL.

Although a portion of the title of Ted’s book refers to one of the most famous records in the history of Jazz – The Birth of the Cool - the work is not about the music of Jazz, per se.  Rather, both figuratively and literally, it is about an attitude or way of being that “Cool” came to signify in American culture and its subsequent demise.

As explained in the publisher’s leaflet:

“It’s hard to imagine that ‘the cool’ could ever go out of style. After all, cool is style. Isn’t it? And it may be harder to imagine a world where people no longer aspire to coolness. In this intriguing cultural history, nationally acclaimed author Ted Gioia shows why cool is not a timeless concept and how it has begun to lose its meaning and fade into history.

Gioia deftly argues that what began in the Jazz Age [Bix Beiderbecke] and became iconic in the 1950s with Miles Davis, James Dean, and others has been manipulated and stretched, and pushed to the breaking point – not just in our media, entertainment and fashion industries, but also by corporations, political leaders, and special institutions.

Tolling the death knell for the cool, this thought-provoking book reveals how and why a new cultural tone is emerging, one marked by sincerity, earnestness, and a quest for authenticity.”

© -Ted Gioia, reproduced with permission. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

CHAPTER 4 The Progenitor of Cool: Bix Beiderbecke

“Long before it had a name, a cool attitude thrived in the jazz world. But even here—or especially here—the paradox at the very core of cool made itself felt. When jazz first captivated the American public during the 1920s, the most common adjective used to describe this music was hot. Fans spoke of "hot jazz" or sometimes left out the jazz entirely and just called it "hot music." No matter, everybody knew what they were talking about. Louis Armstrong's most famous recording bands of the era were known as the Hot Five and the Hot Seven. Jelly Roll Morton called his band the Red Hot Peppers. Even overseas, when the first great European jazz band was formed by guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli, the group rose to fame as the Quintette du Hot Club de France.

How could something so hot also be so cool? This music seemed to exist on two levels. There was a surface level, all fire and energy, a sound and fury so direct and unapologetic, so in your face, that all other styles of musical performance of that era seemed restrained by comparison. Yet below this loomed a hidden level, an interior landscape, a reserve behind the hot that imparted an aura of mystery, of cool aloofness to the whole proceedings. This is signifying at its highest pitch— contrary meanings coexisting in the discourse of African American culture, even when put on the stage as commercial entertainment and polished art. As we shall see, paradox is always at the root of modern cool, and this particular one is the most important of all. It stands out as the alluring contradiction that set everything in motion.

From the start, the white commentators who tried to come to grips with jazz sensed—and were fascinated by—this duality, the cool behind the hot. As early as 1919, when few recordings of African American jazz had been released on the market, Swiss conductor Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet managed to hear London performances by the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which featured the great New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. Ansermet was awestruck by what he encountered, and in the article he wrote for La Revue Romande—the first attempt by a serious musical mind to write a real critical appreciation of jazz—he touched on precisely the enigma of this hidden dimension in the music.

This band's music represented, in Ansermet's words, a "mysterious new world," and though the conductor tried to analyze the songs played by the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, he was forced to admit that "it is not the material that makes Negro music, it is the spirit." He reached for a clumsy mixed metaphor combining the cool and the hot in his attempt to explicate meanings only partially glimpsed: "It seems as if a great wind is passing over a forest or as if a door is suddenly opened on a wild orgy." Yet Ansermet did not shy away from grand pronouncements. He proclaimed that Bechet was an "artist of genius," predicted that this music might be "the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow," and even offered high-flown comparisons to Mozart and Haydn.

Ansermet apparently tried to talk to Bechet to find out more about the hidden sources of this multifaceted music. What did he learn? Bechet was the prototype of what would later be called cool. On the surface, he was genial and conciliatory. He "is very glad one likes what he does," Ansermet explained, and the conductor noted, "What a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy." But when he tried to break through this surface cordiality, Ansermet got nowhere. He writes, in evident despair, that Bechet "can say nothing of his art" except that "he follows his ‘own way."'1

Just as white writers tried to probe the cool underbelly of jazz, white jazz musicians were especially interested in cultivating it. The term cool jazz would not become widely used in the jazz world until the fifties, but when later commentators tried to write its early history, they inevitably traced this music back to the most celebrated white jazz player of the twenties, cornetist Bix Beiderbecke who, more than anyone, deserves the title of founding father of cool jazz. In this fascinating figure from the Jazz Age, we encounter all the inner contradictions of cool personified.

Someday a great psychologist will write a study of the psyche of the white jazz musicians from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century; in many ways they are the forerunners of the personality type that became dominant among the baby boom generation in the late sixties. The white jazz player is the outsider among outsiders, but has voluntarily chosen this double exclusion, even takes satisfaction in its far remove from social norms and expectations. He roots for the underdog and the misunderstood, and he often sees himself in these terms, even if his own background marks him as a child of privilege. He likes the improvisatory aspects of his chosen art form and brings the same celebration of spontaneity to his life, which is often as experimental as his music. At least it is in his eyes— the more straitlaced would simply see his offstage behavior as wasted and debauched. But for the jazz player, the creative ferment on the bandstand inevitably carries over into day-to-day life, and his ways of dealing with circumstances and situations radiate an artistic quality that persists even amidst dissipation and squalor. He flouts the rules, which he sees as applying to others, not him. He values experiences the way a banker hordes capital. Even if he achieves great success— a rarity, but possible in the case of a few white jazz players such as Stan Getz or Chet Baker or Bill Evans—he still feels like an outcast beyond the scope of mainstream society.

Bix Beiderbecke was the first great white jazz player and the most fascinating case study of them all. During his lifetime, the newspapers almost completely ignored his artistry, but after his untimely death, a host of writers were drawn to his tragic tale. Little wonder it served as inspiration for a successful novel, Young Man with a Horn by Dorothy Baker, and later a movie, or that more than a half dozen biographies have been published focused on an artist whose whole recording career spanned a mere six years. He captivates our attention, not just for his artistry, but also because so much in Bix anticipates the future. Too many later jazz players would unconsciously follow the same path, a self-destructive rise and fall, not because they had studied Beiderbecke's life and times—far from it—but seemingly due to some inner momentum of the jazz lifestyle and the ways it intersects with surrounding social norms and institutions.

To those who knew him, Beiderbecke was larger than life. Yet so much of his story, as it is commonly told and mythologized, would have been commonplace in the late sixties. A youngster finds himself at odds with the values of his bourgeois family, his rebellion facilitated by their doting indulgence. He has run-ins with school authorities and sometimes with the law. Parents and grown-ups want him to pursue a stable career, but he prefers to find himself, to follow his own muse. He experiments with illegal substances, which eventually prove more harmful than he realizes. He shocks the older generation with his transgression of community mores. He embraces the most raucous and uninhibited music he can find, not just for how it sounds, but also as a symbol of his way of life. How much things change over a half century! Beiderbecke's friends saw him as one of a kind—Benny Goodman wondered which moon he came from,2 and Jimmy McPartland called him a mystery3—but he would have been a familiar type on a 1960s college campus.

Above all, Beiderbecke anticipated the later rise of the cool in the remarkable malleability of his life. As I suggested above, cool became a dominant social paradigm because it was a game everyone in America could play, at least to some degree. Whether they were rich or poor, black or white, young or old, cool offered a path—or at least a few steps—toward the sublime. Who better to prove this than Bix Beiderbecke? He was Everyman, but with a horn in hand.

Born in Davenport, Iowa—the heart of Middle America, only a few hundred miles from the geographical center of the continental United States—on March 10, 1903, Bix faced all the typical constraints that turn-of-the-century America imposed on its youth. He was the grandson of immigrants, surrounded by a social milieu full of middle-class rectitude and striving, but with little opportunity for individuality and self-expression. Grandfather Carl Beiderbecke had abandoned his plans to be a Lutheran minister in West Prussia and instead settled in Davenport, where he married Louisa Piper, another immigrant, newly arrived from Hamburg. Bix's parents, Bismark Herman Beiderbecke and Agatha Hilton, remained in Davenport, as did much of the extended family. Here Bix could easily have lived and died, following in the footsteps of his grandfather the grocer or his father, who dealt in wood and coal.

The young Beiderbecke's personal attributes were modest. His health was poor, his grades were worse, his work ethic almost nonexistent. His looks were anything but glamorous— the inevitable adjective one would apply to his appearance is baby faced. His one gift was for music, and he did almost everything possible to squander it. He never learned to read music with any skill or to even play the horn with proper fingerings. He would rather drink than practice. Not much opportunity for fame and fortune seemed in store given these predispositions, which might have predicted a nondescript life of insignificant proportions or out-and-out failure. And to become a legendary jazz musician would seem an impossible dream for this cherubic white boy surrounded by the cornfields of Iowa.

And yet...Beiderbecke broke through every one of these constraints and reinvented his life in stylish, sometimes outrageous ways on the largest stage imaginable. He not only transformed himself, but exerted a magnetic pull on those around him. The significant term that comes up in their accounts is idol. Describing his first encounter with Beiderbecke, a moment he calls "one of the great thrills of my life," saxophonist Bud Freeman exults, "Our eyes seemed to meet. Here I was facing this great genius I so idolized."4 "I worshipped the man," clarinetist Pee Wee Russell proclaimed.5 And Russell was no wide-eyed fan, but roomed with Beiderbecke, traveled with him, drank and performed with him. "Bix was a boyhood idol of mine," Ralph Berton has offered, "whom I had for one brief spring, summer and fall the privilege of worshipping at point blank range (somewhat to his vexation)."6

"Anecdote grew upon Bix like ivy on a wall," Berton continues. "His most ordinary words and acts often took on a fabulous, legendary quality.. .There was something about Bix that was enigmatic, edged, baffling—that made you want to do something about him, you couldn't say exactly what." Berton might have added the word cool to the list of adjectives he conjures up for the cornetist, but as we have seen, it didn't have the same meaning back in the Jazz Age as it does today. Yet Beiderbecke, more than anyone of his generation, would define the attitude and lifestyle that would become known as cool.

Various tales culled from the many Beiderbecke left behind define different aspects of the cool ethos in formation. Eddie Condon tells of Beiderbecke making dismissive comments on the need for schooling and education, and Condon responding by trying to point out the cornetist's ignorance: "’By the way,' I said, ‘Who is Proust?' He hit a chord, listened to it, and then said, casually, ‘A French writer who lived in a cork-lined room. His stuff is no good in translation.' I leaned over the piano. 'How the hell did you find that out?' I demanded. He gave me the seven veils look. ‘I get around,' he said."7 The nonchalance, the conveyed sense that much was going on below the surface under the tip of the oh-so-cool iceberg, Beiderbecke throwing off comments and chord voicings with equal disdain, his ambiguous boast that he gets around.. .We don't even need to be told that the complete English translation of Proust's masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu had not even been published in the United States at the time of Beiderbecke's death to appreciate the rich new character type, the cool cat, on display for Condon's edification.

The ultimate test of cool, of course, is the ability to maintain the pose even in the face of physical danger, and Beiderbecke had mastered this even before James Dean was born. Mezz Mezzrow offers an account of Beiderbecke almost being hit by a train while in pursuit of liquor buried near some railroad tracks. With Mezzrow and Russell in pursuit, Beiderbecke takes them on a wild journey through fields, over a barbed-wire fence, and finally to the buried treasure. Mezzrow continues:

Sure enough, he dug out a jug, handed it to Pee Wee, and started back. But as we were hopping the fence Pee Wee got stuck on the wire and just hung there, squealing for help and hugging the jug for dear life. If he let go of that crock he could have pulled him­self loose, but not Pee Wee—what's a guy's hide compared to a gallon of corn? By this time Bix, hav­ing staggered down to the railroad tracks, found he had a lot of sand between his toes, so he sat down on the rail and yanked his shoes off to empty them. Just then we saw a fast train coming round the bend. All of us began screaming at Bix to get the hell out of there, but he thought we were just kidding him and he threw stones at us. That train wasn't more than a hundred feet away when he finally woke up to what was happening. Then he just rolled off the track and tumbled down the bank head first, traveling so fast he didn't have time to snatch his shoes off the rail. Those funky Oxfords got clipped in half as neatly as if they'd been chopped with a meat-cleaver. "That just goes to show you," Bix told us, "it's dangerous for a man to take his shoes off. First time I took those things off in weeks and you see what the hell hap­pens. It just ain't safe to undress."8

So many stories have gathered around Beiderbecke over the years that they have almost obscured the real story: his music. A cornet solo may seem less cinematic than a looming train accident, but the horn is what allowed Beiderbecke to transform himself from Davenport ne'er-do-well to New York sophisticate. In account after account, those who knew this artist remarked that music was his overriding passion, the magnetic force around which his existence revolved. "Music was the one thing that really brought him to life," Mezzrow would later comment. "Not even whiskey could do it, and he gave it every chance." 9 Wingy Manone makes the same point: "He was always talking music, telling us, 'Let's play this chord/ or 'Let's figure out some three-way harmony for the trumpets after the job tonight/ It seemed to us he didn't want us to enjoy life."10 How odd that Bix Beiderbecke, the man who destroyed himself through his out-of-control lifestyle and the shaper of the cool attitude in the American psyche, should be recalled by those who knew him best as preventing others from having fun...because he was so fixated on his craft. The bad boy of jazz may not have had the patience to study music, he merely obsessed over it.

It is here, in his music, that Beiderbecke's role as progenitor of the cool is most assured. His friend Ralph Berton put it best: "Bix was one of the rarest artists our American culture ever produced: inventor of a new music sound, cool, lonely, inward-looking, as lonely as his own soul must have been in its solitary chamber...born far out of his time."11 Cool jazz could hardly be said to exist before Beiderbecke. The very phrase might even have seemed an oxymoron to the first generation of jazz fans, akin to "peaceful bare-fisted boxing" or "nonalcoholic moonshine." Jazz was the hottest style of music on the planet, and the great cornetist/trumpeter of the era, Louis Armstrong, was trying to make it even hotter. If you could measure Armstrong's fiery horn lines on the Scoville scale, they would rank somewhere north of the jalapeno and habanera. His solos, rich in syncopation and spiced with high notes and flashy phrases, would exert an influence over all later jazz. Yet this was more than just the personal magnetism of Armstrong's virtuosity—he also seemed to capture the very essence of the jazz art form, which has always tended toward explosiveness, intensity, and high drama.

Compare this with Beiderbecke, whose music was "like a girl saying yes," in the words of Condon. Rex Stewart, who was playing with the celebrated Fletcher Henderson Orchestra when it lost a legendary battle of the bands with Beiderbecke and Jean Goldkette's "Famous Fourteen," later recalled: "You know I worshipped Louis at that time, tried to walk like him, talk like him, even dress like him...Then, all of a sudden comes this white boy from out west, playin' stuff all his own. Didn't sound like Louis or anyone else. But just so pretty. And that tone he got knocked us all out."12 Again and again, we hear contemporaries of Beiderbecke talk about his tone, the distinctive sound quality he got from his horn.

The poor recording technology of the twenties did not do justice to Beiderbecke's artistry, so dependent as it was on aural nuances. Yet those seeking to understand the cool ethos need to seek out three performances, three short tracks that established the cool as a viable path for a creative mind operating in the midst of the hectic American Century. In "Singin' the Blues" from February 1927 and "I'm Coming Virginia" from May of that same year, Beiderbecke essentially invents the lyrical jazz ballad style, a new approach to improvisation that aims more to move the listener's heart than the dancer's feet. The cornet solo lines bob and weave and float over the rest of the band, which is struggling to move beyond the oompah 2/4 time of traditional jazz and embrace a more modern aesthetic. There is still an edgy jazz quality here, spiced by the syncopations and blues notes of the New Orleans and Chicago traditions, out of which Beiderbecke built his sound. But there is something else, a looser conception, more relaxed and tender, that breaks free of precedents and instead looks toward the future. And not just the future of jazz...the later evolution of popular music would change as a result of this intervention.

Sometimes this transformation would take place in response to an artist's direct contact with Beiderbecke—as one sees, for example in the work of Bing Crosby, who worked alongside Bix in the Paul Whiteman ensemble and adopted many of the cornetist's innovations in his own crafting of a new pop singing style. "The first thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States," Artie Shaw would later explain to Crosby's biographer Gary Giddins; much of this coolness—both in its musical and nonmusical dimensions—resulted from the personal influence of Beiderbecke.13 In other instances, Beiderbecke would impact the later course of American music through more indirect lines of influence, especially through the work of his frequent collaborator, saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, who would serve as a role model for Lester Young, the most important cool jazz player of the late thirties and forties.

The third Beiderbecke track that signals his break with the jazz tradition is one on which he, strangely, does not touch his horn. Beiderbecke would leave behind only one piano recording, and even that single testament of his keyboard work would never have come to us if his friend and bandmate Trumbauer had not prodded him to give it a try during a September 1927 session in New York. Even today, jazz critics still argue about "In a Mist," as this song was named. Some refuse to accept that this peculiar track has anything to do with jazz. Others hail it as a visionary musical landscape, a snapshot of a future jazz that might have been, if only...If only Beiderbecke had lived longer, if only he had applied himself to formal musical studies, if only other players had been advanced enough to follow up on his leads. But none of these might-have-beens came to pass. As a result, "In a Mist" is a one-of-a-kind performance, unlike any other jazz composition of its era.

Yet if we fast-forward several decades, we can see that Beiderbecke was exploring the same pathways that the cool jazz musicians of the fifties would later travel. Here are the same impressionist harmonies, reminiscent of Debussy's and Ravel's classical music, that jazz pianists and composers would adopt during the close of the Eisenhower years. Here is the attenuated sense of rhythm, more floating than driving, and with a less overt use of syncopation, that reminds us of so many jazz performances from the second half of the twentieth century. While other jazz keyboardists of the twenties hold on to the heavy stride beat they inherited from ragtime, Beiderbecke hears another way of integrating the left and right hands. Here he crafts a unique sound that has freed itself up from cliché, from the expectations of dancers, from the heavy anchor of the ground rhythm. The mood captures perfectly the paradox of cool, offering both an emotional immediacy yet also an impenetrable aloofness—a formula that defies precise formulation yet is so pervasive in later pop culture. The music invites us into the composer's inner sanctum, yet vigilantly defends a psychological border beyond which the listener is not allowed to pass. "In a Mist"—the title is apt. For instead of the clang and clash of typical 1920s jazz, we have something less clearly defined, seen through a glass darkly, yet cool and brisk, invigorating in its willingness to go against the crowd.

This should have been the start of Beiderbecke's great years. And, for the briefest of spells, it seemed as if his moment had arrived. A few weeks after this recording, the cornetist was invited to join the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the most popular commercial band of its day (that year alone, Whiteman had eighteen hit recordings). Yet this ensemble was not a full-fledged jazz outfit, and much of its reputation was built on intricate charts that flummoxed Beiderbecke, who was still a poor reader of music. The financial aspects of this relationship were no doubt more to his liking: Beiderbecke was now paid $200 per week. This might have been the middle of the band's pay scale, but a sizable salary at a time when the average American family made $1,300 per year. Even so, too much of Beiderbecke's earnings went to support his drinking habit.

Before the close of 1928, Beiderbecke found himself a patient at River Crest Sanitarium. He had passed out during a concert in Cleveland and was in such bad physical condition that he was unable to leave town with the Whiteman band. When Beiderbecke returned to New York, the bandleader insisted that his star soloist receive medical care and even arranged for his hospitalization. Beiderbecke may have been just twenty-five years old, but he was already a wreck. He suffered from fatigue, pneumonia, alcoholic polyneuritis, malnutrition, and delirium tremens. Soon after his release, Beiderbecke returned to Davenport for a month of rest and recuperation surrounded by family and friends in his hometown.

Beiderbecke returned to New York in March 1929, but his playing from this point on no longer showed the confident, carefree artistry that had characterized his finest earlier work. Just looking at him, people could tell something was wrong. He had pains in his lower limbs and started walking with a limp. In time, he would use a cane—an ominous sign for a young man in his twenties. He suffered from cramps as well as memory lapses, shortness of breath, shakes, and convulsive movements that disturbed his sleep. He looked pale and was chain-smoking; worst of all, he was drinking excessively again. By September, Beiderbecke was back in Davenport, trying once again to regain his lost health. He was institutionalized at the Keeley Institute in Dwight, Illinois—the Betty Ford clinic of its day—where he remained for five weeks.

While Beiderbecke was undergoing treatment, the rest of the country witnessed the stock market crash, the symbolic starting point of the Great Depression. Beiderbecke, who was in no shape to rejoin Paul Whiteman, saw his own earning power plummet. Even under the best of circumstances, these would be difficult years for jazz artists. But Beiderbecke was now entering his final tailspin, and earning a livelihood required him to leave Davenport behind and return to New York, where all his best intentions were soon overcome by easy access to alcohol. The official cause of his death, on August 6, 1931, was pneumonia. But more than a decade of heavy drinking and a lifestyle out of control were the real culprits. As a result, the father of cool jazz never lived long enough to see how his musical stylings would influence later jazz artists. And, even stranger, how his eccentric, out-of-this-world personality would be echoed in the experimentation and attitudes of the baby boomer generation.”

NOTES: Chapter 4 - The Progenitor of Cool: Bix Beiderbecke

1.    Ansermet, "Bechet & Jazz Visit Europe, 1919," 115-122.

2.    Sudhalter, Lost Chords, 29.

3.    Lion, Bix: The Definitive Biography, 29.

4.    Freeman and Wolf, Crazeology, 11.

5.    Hilbert, Pee Wee Russell, 44.

6.    This and below from Berton, Remembering Bix, xii.

7.    Condon, We Called It Music, 121.

8.    Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 79.

9.    Ibid., 79.

10.  Manone and Vandervoort, Trumpet on the Wing, 60.

11.  Berton, Remembering Bix, 401.

12.  Sudhalter, Evans, and Dean-Myatt, Bix: Man and Legend, 185.

13.  Giddins and Schoenberg, "Jazz Dialogue."

On The Way To The Sky by Michael Stephans - A Review by Gordon Jack

 © Introduction. Copyright ® Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.

“Brookmeyer grew up in Kansas City and worked mainly as a pianist with a number of big bands during the early 505. He returned to the valve-trombone, which he had studied in high school, and joined Stan Getz's group at the end of 1952. It was a good time to be in a starry 'West Coast' kind of group, and Brookmeyer went on to replace Chet Baker with Gerry Mulligan (1953-7) and play in Jimmy Giuffre's trio. In every context, his droll, deceptively drowsy playing was entirely apposite, a perfect foil for the energetic Getz and Mulligan and a clever counterpart to the rustic-sounding Giuffre. His occasional piano features here and elsewhere (he went on to cut a piano-duo record with Bill Evans in 1959) kept his hand in on that instrument, and he proceeded to write charts for Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band, while also working in a two-horn quintet with Clark Terry which lasted through the early 60s. On his own admission a heroic drinker - 'I pretty well had drunk myself out of New York' - he moved to the West Coast in 1968, shed his booze problem and left music alone for a while. But friends like Bill Holman urged him back, and he toured Europe with Stan Getz in 1978. He became MD for the Jones-Lewis big band before dividing his time between Cologne, Denmark and New York: his European alliances continue to this day, and he has done some magnificent work with the New Art Orchestra of Cologne. Brookmeyer has led a modestly tempestuous life but in his autumnal years, settled with a fourth wife, he enjoys a jazz reputation which, while remote from any wider 'stardom', is copper-bottomed. On both valve-trombone and piano - on which he has a percussive, oddball style - he is all but unique, and both his records and his arrangements make up a vivid, funny, ingenious body of work. The Dutch Challenge label has made a point of recording him regularly in recent years, a responsibility which the American industry has shamefully neglected.”

• Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia [2005]

Gordon Jack is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospective and he also developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ book Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.

The following article was published in the May 23, 2026 edition of Jazz Journal. Based in the UK Gordon uses English spelling.

For more information and subscriptions please visit www.jazzjournal.co.uk

“The rich tapestry of Bob Brookmeyer’s long and distinguished career as an instrumentalist, composer and arranger is revealed here by drummer Michael Stephans who was a close personal friend and musical colleague. Brookmeyer was one of the very few major jazz soloists to specialise on the somewhat unfashionable valve-trombone and he was also a pianist of considerable wit and flair. Stephans points out that “my early exposure to Brookmeyer’s music was the first inkling I had that something special was happening in my young life”. 

 

This is not a traditional biography so events do not necessarily occur chronologically. It is what the author describes as “a hybrid work - a sort of gumbo” which becomes a gentle stroll through  Brookmeyer’s multifaceted career revealing the scope of his musicality both as a performer and as a writer. It includes biographical information, interviews and descriptions of pivotal recordings together with anecdotes from Bob’s collaborators, family members and fans which help to give Stephans’ text a personal touch. Brookmeyer began on the clarinet and with the aid of Benny Goodman’s Hot Licks book he learned to sight-read very early.  Dental problems forced a change of instrument, first to the trumpet then to the slide trombone. Ultimately the valve-trombone became “his instrument of choice”. 

He was briefly with Claude Thornhill’s orchestra where he played slide trombone and relief piano because the leader liked to go home early! His first major-league exposure as a soloist was with the Stan Getz quintet from 1952 to 1954. “The quintet was an exceptional unit, due largely to the blending of the tenor-trombone sound and the wonderful interplay between them”. In 1957 he recorded Traditionalism Revisited with Jimmy Giuffre and Jim Hall – “a great, listening experience”. They were reunited a year later when Giuffre’s famous trio appeared at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Their memorable Train And The River has been preserved on the Jazz On A Summer’s Day film. In 1959 he held his own on a two-piano album with Bill Evans (The Ivory Hunters) – “a kind of jazz history was made that day”. In 1960 he recorded The Blues Hot And Cold –“one of his greatest early achievements as a soloist”. His reunion with Stan Getz in 1961 “continues to be one of the most revered small group recordings in all of Bob’s discography”. That was the year he recorded his “Pride and Joy” -  Gloomy Sunday and Other Bright Moments.  From 1962 to 1965 he co-led a quintet with Clark Terry at the Half-Note – “great jazz by a poll-winning group...the chemistry between them both on stage and off was borne out of a deep mutual admiration  for each other”.

Throughout the fifties and into the mid-sixties he was closely associated with Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, sextet and the Concert Jazz Band (CJB). “Bob ping-ponged in and out of the quartet and sextet for several years”. Then in 1960 Mulligan asked him to write some arrangements for the CJB’s appearance at Basin Street East. He became the chief arranger eventually contributing twenty-one  charts to the band’s repertoire and Stephans highlights two for special mention: the ethereal Django’s Castle and You Took Advantage Of Me “which swings joyously  from the first note to the last”. He was also the band’s straw-boss – the hirer and firer. The CJB disbanded after a Birdland booking in December 1964, prompting the witty Mr. Brookmeyer to say somewhat tongue in cheek “we closed the original Birdland in grand style - scotch, cocaine and Santa Claus!” From 1965 to 1967 Brookmeyer became one of the primary soloists and arrangers for the Thad Jones &  Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. Stephans considers his charts on Willow Tree, St. Louis Blues, Willow Weep For Me  and especially ABC Blues “to be all time classics of modern big band literature”

In 1968 Brookmeyer left New York for California where he spent a decade “moving farther and farther away from the jazz world  all the while struggling with what seemed to be a losing battle with alcohol addiction”. These difficulties are handled most sympathetically by the author. He eventually overcame his addiction ”thanks in part to a few of us (who)  offered our support when possible”. Synanon associate Frank Rehak together with Bill Holman and Stephans helped to get him playing again. The author’s friendship with Brookmeyer led to their first booking together at Donte’s Jazz Club in 1977  which represented his emergence from “a long hiatus from jazz, buried in the LA studios”. On his return to New York in 1978 he rejoined the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra as musical director after Thad Jones had left. 

 

From around 1980 Brookmeyer spent time in Europe working in radio stations in Cologne and Stockholm. He wanted to expand his creative abilities as a composer which he certainly did on his 1989 On The Way To The Sky album with the WDR Big Band. His colleague Jon Eardley from the mid-fifties Mulligan sextet was in the trumpet section. Bob said at the time “I am slowly entering the world of electronic music ...the sounds of synthesizers are becoming part of my language”. Until his death in 2011 he maintained a busy schedule organising his New Art Orchestra in Germany combined with his duties as chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band. He was also on the jazz faculty at the New England Conservatory from 1997 to 2007.

On The Way To The Sky has a Selected Videography, a Selected Discography and a Bibliography. There are thirty-eight photographs, many of them from the author’s private collection. Michael Stephans who is currently a faculty emeritus at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania is to be congratulated on a fascinating story, well told. If a full-length Bob Brookmeyer biography is ever written, this highly personalized tribute will be an essential source. 

On The Way To The Sky

By Michael Stephans.  Published by University of North Texas Press.

260pp. ISBN 9781574419696 (cloth), ISBN 9781574419771 (ebook).

Gordon Jack

Jazz Trumpet Reader Volume 2 Now Available as a Paperback and eBook Exclusively Through Amazon.

 This volume, which is the 19th in a series, is now available as a paperback and an eBook exclusively through Amazon.com. Just type my name in the search box under "Books."

Here's a look at the Table of Contents: 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Preface, pp. 8-13

Introduction, pp. 14-37

Chapter 1. Roy Eldridge - "Little Jazz" by Whitney Balliett, pp. 38-43

Chapter 2. Roy Eldridge “Little Jazz Goes a Long Way” by Dan Morgenstern, pp. 44-49

Chapter 3. Roy Eldridge (Jazz) by Gary Giddins, pp. 50-56

Chapter 4. Roy Eldridge - "Swingin on the Town" - Benny Green and Alun Morgan, pp. 57-61

Chapter 5. Dizzy Gillespie - The Immortal Joker - Part One, pp. 62-72

Chapter 6. Dizzy Gillespie - The Immortal Joker - Part Two, pp. 73-84

Chapter 7. Dizzy Gillespie - The Immortal Joker - Part Three, pp. 85-98

Chapter 8. Dizzy's Big Band by Gene Lees, pp. 99-102

Chapter 9. “Dizzy Gillespie - The Lion in Winter" - The Jazz Musician Interview with Chip Stern, pp. 103-110 

Chapter 10. Gillespiana: Grand, Glorious and Glistening by Steven A. Cerra, Editor, pp. 111-121

Chapter 11. Dizzy Gillespie And The Double Six Of Paris by Max Harrison, pp. 122-125  

Chapter 12. Theodore "Fats" Navarro: 1923-1950 - A Career Retrospective by Kenny Mathieson, pp. 126-134

Chapter 13. Fats Fats Fats Fats Fats by Bill Coss, pp. 135-137

Chapter 14. Sonny Berman by Gordon Jack, pp. 138-141

Chapter 15. The Miles Davis 1948/49 Group - from "Modern Jazz" by Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks, pp. 142-150

Chapter 16. Miles Davis - 'Round About Midnight Revisited - Gary Giddins, Scott DeVeaux, George Avakian and Bob Blumenthal, pp.151-157

Chapter 17. Miles Davis - Changes: The 1955 Sessions - Simon Spillett Notes [Acrobat ADDCD3148], pp. 158-171 

Chapter 18. EPITAPH: [A Review of Miles Ahead: Miles Davis + 19: Columbia LP CL 1041; CD CK 40784] by Whitney Balliett, pp.172-174 

Chapter 19. Milestones - The Music and Times of Miles Davis by Jack Chambers, pp. 175-180

Chapter 20. Quincy Jones's Morning Orange Juice - "Kind of Blue" by Ashley Kahn, pp. 181-188

Chapter 21. Rare interview with Bill Evans recounts the story of Miles Davis and Kind of Blue as told to Bill King, pp. 189-197

Chapter 22. Miles Davis Quintet Featuring John Coltrane - "All of You: The Last Tour 1960" by Simon Spillett, pp. 198-213

Chapter 23. The Enigma of Miles Davis - Barbara J. Gardner, pp. 214-219

Chapter 24: “Miles Davis: The Prince of Silence” by Mike Zwerin, pp. 220-225

Chapter 25. Clifford Brown Remembered by Gordon Jack, pp. 226-232

Chapter 26. Clifford Brown: The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings - Michael Cuscuna, pp. 233-240

Chapter 27. Clifford Brown - Max Roach: Alone Together - The Best of The Mercury Years - Rueben Jackson and Kenny Washington, pp. 241-245

Chapter 28. The Legacy of Clifford Brown by Barbara Gardner, pp. 246-254

Chapter 29. Benny [Golson] Remembers Clifford by Marc Crawford, pp. 255-257

Chapter 30. Clifford Brown's Trumpeter's Training by Hollie West, pp. 258-261
Chapter 31. Chet Baker by Bob Rosenblum, pp. 262-266
Chapter 32. Chet Baker - "The Jazz Musician Interview" by Jerome Reece, pp. 267-276
Chapter 33. Art Farmer in L.A. as told to Steve Iosardi, pp. 277-290
Chapter 34. Art Farmer, Benny Golson and The Jazztet by Bob Blumenthal, pp. 291-293
Chapter 35. Tony Fruscella: THE NAMES OF THE FORGOTTEN - John Dunton, pp. 294-298
Chapter 36. TONY FRUSCELLA by Gordon Jack, pp. 299-302
Chapter 37. Little Blue Byrd: [Booker Little, Blue Mitchell and Donald Byrd] by Kenny Mathieson, pp. 303-315
Chapter 38. Don Ferrara - The Gordon Jack Interview, pp. 316-321
Chapter 39. “Don Fagerquist - The Forgotten Ones" Series by Gordon Jack, pp. 322-325
Chapter 40. Don Joseph - Jazz Poet by Gordon Jack, pp. 326-330
Chapter 41. Maynard Ferguson - The Man who Broke The Band Barrier - George Hoefer and Gene Lees, pp. 331-337
Chapter 42. Maynard Ferguson - A New Appraisal by Ira Gitler, pp. 338-341
Chapter 43. M.F.'s Back in Town - Eve Berliner, pp. 342-346
Chapter 44. "M.F. - Rules the Road" by Herb Nolan, pp. 347-356
Chapter 45. “Maynard Ferguson Conquistador of the Double High C” by Arnold Jay Smith, pp. 357-363
Chapter 46. “Maynard Ferguson Rocky Road to Fame and Fortune” by Lee Underwood, pp. 364-370
Chapter 47. Maynard’s Changes by Zan Stewart, pp. 371-375

My Man George, Wettling ... that is: A Tribute [From the Archives]

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

Winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalist Association Special Citation for Historic Writings, Steven Cerra is a professional Jazz drummer and the author of anthologies on Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Shelly Manne, Jazz West Coast Readers Vols. 1-3, Profiles in Jazz, Vol.1, Jazz Drummers A Reader Vols. 1-2, Jazz Saxophonists A Reader, Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Piano A Reader, Vols. 1, 2 & 3 and Jazz Trumpet A Reader Vols. 1 and 2. He also hosts the jazzprofiles.blogspot and cerra.substack blogs.

"George Wettling had great enthusiasm for life and for music. And, undoubtedly, he was the most important drummer in the Chicago style of jazz."

—JEFF ATTERTON

"A good band is based on good drums and good piano. Give me a good piano and George Wettling and I'll give you a good band any

time."

—EDDIE CONDON

“George Wettling had his own way of doing things. But his roots were quite apparent. Like a number of his contemporaries, he was genuinely inspired by the music of the New Orleans jazz pioneers. His love for jazz in general — the New Orleans style and its Chicago offshoot in particular — was so intense that he built a life around them. Even in his last days, the fire burned brightly. ‘Some guys get old and tired and get out of Jazz,’ he noted. ‘I'll never do that. Hell, man, Jazz's been my whole life.’

His favorite drummers were Baby Dodds, the classically inventive New Orleanian who also influenced Gene Krupa and Dave Tough; Zutty Singleton, another marvelous New Orleans drummer; and others, including Harlem's George Stafford, Benny Washington (who played with Earl Hines), Tubby Hall, Ben Pollack, Chick Webb, and Krupa. But Dodds was his man; you could hear it in his playing.

Wettling began in the manner of most drummers — he heard the drums and was captivated. ...

Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as the time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble. …

Because he was a fine reader of music, a very flexible drummer, and an excellent tympanist, Wettling held a variety of jobs, including several in radio and TV. For approximately ten years, 1943-1952, he was a staff man at ABC Radio. But he devoted the major portion of his time to bringing fire and intensity to small bands, most of which were traditional.”

-BURT KORALL, Drummin’Men

“De même que Dave Tough était un amoureux de la littérature, George, lui, se passionnera pour la peinture - d'où sa grande ouverture d'esprit. Il est, en effet, très important pour un artiste de pratiquer d'autres modes d'expression que le sien afin d'élargir le champ de ses connaissances et d'affiner sa sensibilité. Cette culture à maintes facettes est nécessaire pour alimenter et approfondir l'art dans lequel on est spécialisé.

“As Dave Tough was a lover of literature, George Wettling was enthralled with painting - hence his open mind. It is indeed very important for an artist to practice other forms of expression than his own in order to expand the scope of his knowledge and sharpen his sensitivity. This culture of many facets [i.e.: a broad background in arts and letters] is required to power and deepen the art in which one specializes.”

- Georges Paczynski, Une Historie De La Batterie De Jazz

I owe drummer George Wettling [1907-1968] a huge debt of gratitude, which may sound like an odd compliment from someone who is essentially steeped in modern Jazz drumming.

But if it hadn’t been for George’s tutelage, which I came by indirectly through countless hours of listening to his classic Jazz recordings, I would have missed out on one of the happiest gigs of my life.

George was one of the young white Chicagoans [many of whom attended Austin High School on Chicago’s West Side] who fell in love with Jazz as a result of hearing King Oliver's band (with Louis Armstrong on second cornet) at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in the early 1920s. Oliver's drummer, Baby Dodds, made a particular and lasting impression upon Wettling.

Wettling went on to work with the big bands of Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and even Harpo Marx: but he was at his best on (and will be best remembered for) his work in small 'hot' bands led by Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and himself. In these small bands, Wettling was able to demonstrate the arts of dynamics and responding to a particular soloist that he had learned from Baby Dodds.

Wettling was a member of some of Condon's classic line-ups, which included, among others, Wild Bill Davison, Billy Butterfield, Edmond Hall, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, Cutty Cutshall, Gene Schroeder, Ralph Sutton, and Walter Page.

Listening to George's playing, and to other “Chicago-style” drummers like Gene Krupa and Dave Tough, I realized that what they were doing was essentially phrasing 2-beat New Orleans or Dixieland Jazz with the 4/4 time feeling that came of age in the Swing Era. The music was so alive and I just really enjoyed everything about it.

So when the opportunity arose to join a Traditional Jazz Band at a club in Glendale, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, I jumped at it.

As Grover Sales explains in his seminal Jazz: America’s Classical Music, provides the historical context for the evolution of Traditional Jazz:

“Five years before the arrival of bebop, a New Orleans revival was afoot, fueled by the mounting resentment of purist white critics and fans against the heretical sophistication of Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, and similar modernists who they believed had tainted the purity of jazz by injecting European antibodies into what had been an incorruptible native folk art. Since history assures us that jazz from its earliest beginnings was a mixture of every cultural transplant to the New World, European as well as African, such notions seem quaint today. But these notions were cherished as articles of faith by keepers of the flame like French critic Hugues Panassie, who insisted that bebop was "degenerate noise" and a short lived fad that lay wholly outside the "true" jazz tradition. This position found its fullest expression in The Heart of Jazz, by William L. Grossman and Jack W. Farrell:

Much of Dizzy Gillespie's bop ... is characterized by a nonsensicality of content, an end result Armstrong never intended but which came from an almost inevitable consequence of the departure . . . from traditional values and meanings. Ellington . . . might help find a way to perpetuate the eternal values in New Orleans jazz while expanding the idiom, but his musical imagination turns to the theatrical. He is, indeed a sort of jazz Wagner. He has the same sort of dramatic feelings about Negroes that Wagner had about Germans.

The New Orleans revival got off to a modest start in 1940 when collector Heywood Hale Broun issued recordings of veteran New Orleans blacks in quavering versions of blues and parade music of their youth around the turn of the century. The following year saw the beginning of white revival bands in San Francisco, when Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band copied the instrumentation, the tunes, and as far as they were able, the style of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recordings made twenty years earlier. By the time bebop was in full bloom dozens of white revival bands were thriving throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and in England where a fever for "trad" (traditional) was rampant among the youth, including some of the founders-to-be of British rock.

The revival brought elderly blacks out of retirement—Bunk Johnson, George Lewis—and provided work for young whites — Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, and England's Chris Barber. It also forced modernists like Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden, and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell reluctantly into the Dixieland camp during a doctrinaire era that split the jazz world into two warring factions. It is significant that, without a single exception, no young blacks could be found participating in the revival movement either as players or as listeners. They would as soon be seen chomping a watermelon on the front steps of city hall as partaking in what they scorned as "old-time slave, Uncle Tom, minstrel-man jive." Tempers ran high as lifelong friends and colleagues Hugues Panassie and Charles Delaunay stopped speaking because of bebop. Fistfights broke out in Parisian cabarets where Dizzy Gillespie performed, punctuated with cries of, "You dare to call this music!" The jazz press abounded with hate-ridden jeremiads about the "modernist degenerates of bebop" and the "moldy-fig reactionary revivalists," reminiscent of the doctrinal fury of sixteenth century Catholics and Protestants.

In retrospect, the revival produced foolish rhetoric but much also of lasting value, as did the ragtime revival three decades later; it rescued from obscurity a long-neglected style of collective improvisation and an imposing repertoire of excellent tunes. The best of these revival bands, Wilbur de Paris's New New Orleans Jazz (Atlantic 1219), exudes a vitality that bears repeated hearings today, but the same cannot be said for most revival players venerated to sainthood by their white idolaters, some of whom launched a serious campaign to run Bunk Johnson for the presidency. What seems most remarkable about the revival movement is the emotional heat and religious fervor it unloosed—and why.”

I didn’t know anything about any of these Camps or Schools or Schisms, all I knew was that for three nights every week from 9:00 PM until 2:00 AM, I got to play classic New Orleans tunes like That’s A Plenty, Muskrat Ramble, St. James Infirmary and some later adaptations of this style in tunes like China Boy, Hindustan, and Wolverine Blues in a hot Chicago-style or Traditional or whatever Jazz band made up of trumpet, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass and drums [aka Me!] and it was a blast.

At first I was greeted with some hesitation by the older guys mainly along the lines of “He’s too young to know much about this music;” He’s probably a Bebopper;” “He doesn’t know any of the tunes.”

But thanks to George Wettling, I more than held my own.

With few extended solos, most of the tunes lasted only 3-4 minutes so that meant that we played a bunch of songs each set, sometimes as many as 15 a set totaling around 60 a night. I had a ball. Loved every minute of it.

My chops loved it, too; as my hands got stronger, my wrists were able to relax thus increasing my speed and power.

I added some heat and sizzle to the the usual four-bar drum breaks or “kickers” that help serve as tags to take most tunes out, but I made sure that I kept my bass drum doing four-beats to the bar so that the “old timers” could count when to come back in.[Grins].

And I owe it all to George Wettling.

Mention his name today and all you get are blank stares; very few drummers have ever heard this style of Jazz drumming. But in fairness, when they are introduced to it they light up like the proverbial Christmas tree and make comments like: “Listen to what that Dude is doing with accents off a press roll;” “His time is so bouncy - he makes the music come alive!;” “What a snap and pop he brings to his back beats.”

Here’s more about George from Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

“George Wettling had been (with Tough and Krupa) part of the original Chicago circle and, like them, spent most of the '30s playing in big bands. His were the brushes backing Bunny Berigan's vocal on the best-selling "I Can't Get Started," his the steady but non-intrusive beat that lifted the bands of Artie Shaw, Red Norvo, Paul Whiteman, and others. A well-schooled musician, he'd worked regularly in radio and commercial recording studios.

But Wettling seemed happiest by far in the small, unfettered jam groups which were Eddie Condon's specialty. Overshadowed to some degree by Krupa's flamboyance and Tough's sheer brilliance, Wettling more than matched them in his ability to unify and steer a rhythm section. Like Krupa, he'd learned by listening to Baby Dodds, Ben Pollack, and other pioneers and had retained the flavor, the ability to blend into an ensemble. Wettling's small-group work, with Condon and countless others, is remarkably subtle in its sense of mood and pace, its control of a finely calibrated sense of abandon. In Burt Korall's authoritative words:

"His time was firm; it bubbled and danced. His breaks had an inner life and logic. His solos were well-crafted bursts of energy. Wettling had a fine touch, ample technique, and a distinctive sound on the snare drum. He was a good listener and responded inventively to ensembles and solos. He would change the background behind each soloist, adapting, giving and taking, building, serving as a time center and as another interesting voice in the ensemble.”

His propulsive drumming enlivens hundreds, even thousands, of records, and those with Condon are among the best. It's Wettling's accented press roll, a Baby Dodds legacy, that carries Bud Freeman to the very edge of anarchy on the Commodore "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," Wettling's drive that sends the normally demure Bobby Hackett careering through the final ensemble of the uptempo blues "Carnegie Jump," Wettling's and Jess Stacy's quiet prodding that gets Pee Wee Russell rocking happily on "Rose of Washington Square."

Wettling was a master — some would contend the master — of that overused and frequently misunderstood hallmark of so many "dixieland" performances: the four-bar end-of-performance drum break. Following a final tutti, especially at faster tempos, it's a kind of eight-bar melody reprise, the drummer taking the first four bars and the band returning, all pistons firing, to finish out the cadence. In some bands it becomes a sixteen-bar reprise, drummer and ensemble taking eight apiece.

Done right, it functions as both tension release and "kicker" in the journalistic sense: the punchy last line that leaves the reader's senses sharpened, tingling. Some drummers — Cliff Leeman, Nick Fatool, Ray McKinley — have understood this and done it with masterly finesse. Depending on the player, that means either a display of technique, a witty or imaginative "four" in the bebop sense, or even (Fatool is outstanding at this) a melodic paraphrase.

But in George Wettling's hands this modest device became a small-scale work of art. Again and again he'd seem to hurtle out of an ensemble and into the break with a force, an irresistible momentum, that swept the band right along with it. There was no sense of an ensemble stopping for the drummer to do some little trick before the horns returned: a Wettling break was part of the action—in a way it was the action.

Examples, a few among dozens: "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" (from Brother Matthew, ABC-Paramount), "I've Found a New Baby" (Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz, Columbia), "Runnin' Wild" (Dixieland in Hi-Fi, Columbia /Harmony)—which also offers a nimble full-chorus Wettling solo; "China Boy" (The Roaring Twenties, Columbia).

Perhaps the definitive example of Wettling's ability to energize a band is on a ten-inch LP issued by Columbia in 1951 under his own name. It's a Condon unit, of course, with "Wild Bill" Davison, Edmond Hall, and other regulars. Each of the eight titles works steadily, inexorably, to a climax of drive and almost demonic energy. Wettling's four-bar break at the end of a swaggering "Memphis Blues" employs a kettledrum to great and humorous effect. "Collier's Clambake" (basically the chord sequence of "St. James Infirmary" at a medium-bright tempo) starts at a high intensity level, Davison punching out the kind of virile, aggressive lead that earned him his nickname. Even by the standards of Condon groups, "After You've Gone" is extraordinary. Like "Clambake," it opens hot: "They sound as if they've been playing the number for five minutes, heating up to this pitch, before turning on the microphones," pianist Dick Hyman has remarked. That's largely Wettling's doing. He hits it hard and keeps cranking things up, through solos by Sullivan, Hall, and trombonist Jimmy Archey (Condon's guitar strong and audible behind them), to a stomping final ensemble.

This is no random collection of seven men playing together: it's a bond, a team, component parts fused into a splendid performance engine fueled by Wettling and cornetist Davison; bars 13-16, for example, are a furious ensemble explosion, Davison tearing up to his high E-sharp and cascading down over four bars, to be deftly caught by Wettling's bass drum "thwack" on the last beat of bar 16.

(Among Wettling's fans was the great American abstract painter Stuart Davis, whose brand of modernism was as stubbornly individualistic as the styles of the jazzmen he liked to hear. The two men struck up a friendship, and before long the drummer, a gifted amateur painter, had become a Davis student. By 1950 he'd mastered a style which, though strongly influenced by his teacher, was skilled and vigorous on its own, winning him several well-received exhibitions _ in the '50s. Adorning the Columbia album cover was a photograph of the band, superimposed on a Wettling painting representing the same scene. It's good work, strongly in the spirit of such jazz-influenced Davis canvases as "The Mellow Pad," 'Rapt at Rappaport's," and "Something on the Eight Ball," from the same period. Though Pee Wee Russell's paintings later attracted more publicity, it is Wettling who is the superior craftsman.)