"downbeat: How did you decide to record In Crowd? It isn’t exactly an obvious song.
Lewis: I was in Washington D.C. playing at the Bohemian Caverns. We had a record session coming up on the weekend. This was like on Tuesday. We were gonna do like nine tunes, and I think I had seven down. So one afternoon, I was having lunch in this place, and this waitress came over and she said, "What are you doing?" I was getting my notes together for the album, what I was gonna play. She said, "Why don’t you record The In Crowd?" The in what? She said, "It’s on the jukebox.” And she played it. So I said, maybe. I was kind of desperate at that moment. The session was three days away and I needed two more tunes. So I went by a record store, I bought the 45, took it back to my hotel, and played it, wrote out the changes, and we had rehearsal that day. And it felt good. But I said, well, at least it’ll fill the album out — because as far as I was concerned that was not one of the major tunes on the album. So we played it that night, and the people started reacting to it. So I said, maybe this will do good for the album. That following night, we recorded it, and the audience participation was out of sight. They were clapping and carrying on and, of course, it’s history now. " - Ramsey Lewis to Michael Bourne, downbeat 10.25.1977
I know I’ve shared this view before, but it bears repeating. Over the years, my enjoyment of Jazz has been considerably enhanced by the wise and thoughtful liner notes that graced the back of LPs or by the more recent insert notes that can be found in CD jewel cover booklets. Initially, these liner notes made up for the dearth of books as a source of knowledge on the subject of Jazz when I first began listening to the music in the 1950s. Holding the jacket cover in hand while listening to the album, my eyes poured over what Ira Gitler or Nat Hentoff or Leonard Feather, to name only a few of my early “mentors,” had to say about the music that was filling my ears and my heart with pleasure. Since I was also a student of the music for the purpose of wanting to become a Jazz musician myself during those early days, I was especially intrigued by writers that explained song structures, chord sequences and, especially, anything to do with rhythmic patterns or time signatures since these were particularly important to an aspiring, young Jazz drummer. It is safe to say that I owe an huge debt of gratitude to Leonard Feather, Ted Gioia, Bill Kirchner, Doug Ramsey, Whitney Balliett, Jack Tracy, Gary Giddins and others for helping me to learn and to appreciate more about the music that I have been in love with since I first heard it over 50 years ago. And because my appreciation of Jazz benefited so greatly from the information and knowledge that I gleaned from the writers of the annotations, comments and explanations that appear on album covers and CD booklets, I have decided to repay the favor with the inclusion of and reliance on these materials in many of the pieces that are prepared for Jazz Profiles. So when, to my immense delight, I found that the insert notes to the Grant Green: Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 57194 2 4] had not one, but three different sets of insert notes, and that these were by the likes of Ben Sidran, Michael Cuscuna and Bob Porter, the decision to prepare a piece using their remarks on this recording became axiomatic. As a point in passing, for reasons explained in these notes, Grant Green recorded so often and produced such an abundance of riches for Blue Note that these sides with Sonny Clark were not issued until 1979 – 1980, when most of the music on this 2 CD set was released as three, separate LP’s. First up are Ben Sidran’s notes to that portion of these tracks that comprised the 1980 Blue Note album Nigeria [LT 1032]. “TIME passes. What was fresh and important recedes under the collected weight of new fresh and important stuff. Enough time has passed since this collection was recorded that a lot of people reading these notes and hearing this music weren't even born on that winter day in 1962 when Grant Green went into the studio.
Back in 1962, Grant's guitar voice was one of the sparkling new additions to a musical universe that seemed to be expanding exponentially. It's hard to imagine-or even to remember- just how explosive the jazz scene was then, particularly in light of the mechanical music which has flourished these last ten years. One indication of the scene then might be the wealth of previously unreleased material, such as this record which is only now showing up in the stores. When Grant came to New York, he walked on to a stage crowded with stars. And he shone with the best of them.
He didn't blaze a trail to the city. He followed a more comfortable path, arriving to join Lou Donaldson's band in 1960. Some compared his hollow-bodied guitar style to that of the earliest pioneer, Charlie Christian. One also hears touches of that other great popularizer, Les Paul. For while Grant was not a radical player, he excelled at the basics and subtleties: he could swing like crazy and he played the prettiest phrases. Grant Green made esoteric music easy for the average listener to get to, just as jazz singers have done for years. Grant Green was a popularizer and a singer on his instrument.
Perhaps the greatest testament to his musical gift was that at a time when the guitar had fallen out of favor, suddenly, Grant Green could be heard everywhere, recording with several of the finest rhythm sections in New York. Within a year of his arrival in the city, he recorded three albums as a leader, featuring a rhythm section of Sonny Clark on piano. Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. Those albums, "Gooden's Corner," 'Oleo,” and "Born To be Blue," have only recently been released on Blue Note in Japan. This album, "Nigeria," falls in the middle of that period of time and has Art Blakey in place of Louis Hayes. It is the only time that Blakey and Green ever recorded together. Grant was a simple, elegant stylist. When he played a melody, with that kind of dressed-up strut, it was a reminder of just how classy bebop could sound. His interpretation of the title track "Airegin" (ingeniously encoded backwards to ward off the uninitiated) is no exception. It is interesting to note that in the early sixties, Grant performed and recorded an unusually large number of Sonny Rollins tunes, including "Solid ' " "Oleo " "Sonnymoon For Two," and, of course, "Airegin." After Grant states the head Sonny Clark hits one of his patented full keyboard slides and then strolls for a chorus while Blakey gets the groove settled Yawn. Sonny 's solo is a swinging compliment to Grant's, ignoring Green’s reference to 'When Lights Are Low" and turning the spotlight full up on the flowing snakes that were his specialty. Sonny, who had worked with both Rollins and singer Dinah Washington during the late fifties, is able to play both sides of the street here; he acts as the ideal accompanist to Grant's vocalized guitar work.
For my money, the highlight of the album is the stylized arrangement of "It Ain't Necessarily So." Blakey puts down a 12/8 Latin feel, and Grant plays the head in a totally unexpected series of phrases, altering the original melody to such an extent that he might well have called the song "So It Ain't Necessarily" and taken the publishing for himself. But it is the endlessly good groove that is the star of the cut. Interspersed with Blakey's press rolls, this fat-back groove - like those Art played on innumerable Jimmy Smith jam session dates - gets Grant all the way up on his toes. His tone is singing six different ways to Christmas, until he finally gets Blakey singing, for it is the drummer you hear shouting “whoa!” and grunting in response to Grant's precise preaching. By the time Sonny's solo arrives, Blakey is putting as much vocal into the overhead mikes as the cymbal. Clark seems to goad him on, and finally, when he’s taken is ninth chorus and seems read to turn it back to Grant, Blakey won’t let him go. You can hear Art laughing and shouting to Sonny, "No, go ahead, go ahead.” And go ahead he does, until Blakey finally turns him loose with an escalating series of strokes. As the song fades behind that Latin feel, I'm ready to do it all over. Side two sounds as if it will open with Miles Davis' "Four" but after the classic bebop introduction, the song abruptly half-steps into a very polite "I Concentrate On You." The tension between the tip-toe lounge groove and the powerhouse bebop minds that are playing it is never really resolved, and that is part of the charm of the piece. Grant is so sweet when he plays the melody, but his choruses become bittersweet fast, and soon, he's skipping down some dark memory lane, concentrating hard on some private "you." The song goes out with a vamp reminiscent of a neither the introduction nor the song itself; altogether, a very curious arrangement.
"The Things We Did Lost Summer" also opens with a rather bizarre waltz section, but then settles down into a very delicate ballad. The attitude Grant maintains playing the melody - particularly the little chromatic insertion he uses at the end of the first bridge - is a lovely balance of the benign and the mischievous. This is Grant's power, as a soloist or stating a theme, and it is something great jazz singers like Johnny Hartman are also known for: there is no better way to grab a listener than to lull him into bliss and then grab him by what Lord Buckley used to call 'your most delicate gear."
The record closes with a flag-waver, 'The Song Is You," in which we are reassured that straight ahead is the direction to go. Blakey is once again singing in his mikes, and Sam Jones, God bless him, is walking and shaking his head, There are few things in life more pleasant than walking along with Sam Jones shaking your head. Down home. Just folks. Kind of corny at times, but very hip. Grant Green was a perfect candidate for what today is called "cross-over hype," but back then was probably not called anything at all. Perhaps it was only natural that record companies would try to make Grant Green into a commercial product, a sow's ear out of a silk purse, as it were. I don't know how or why he turned from the hard, low life grooves he used to spark, towards the cocktail lounge which surely sealed his obscurity by the time he died in early 1979. Often, commercial pressures overwhelm players. After all, they are only musicians,, not lawyers and accountants that's why we buy records. If lawyers and accountants made records, nobody would buy them. At least, that used to be true, and it may be part of the reason why Grant didn't make a major mark on the music scene during the lost years of his life.
I, for one, kept looking for him around every corner, particularly as various guitar players, like Gabor Szabo, or George Benson, or even Eric Gale, would pop into prominence. I kept waiting for Grant to make his move. Unfortunately, his best recorded moves are those from more than fifteen years ago, when he truly was a fresh and important face on what may be the wildest contemporary jazz scene we'll ever know.”
-BEN SIDRAN 1980, original liner notes from "Nigeria” And here are Michael Cuscuna’s comments from the 1980 Japanese Blue Note release – Gooden’s Corner.
“THE tragedy of Grant Green's death in early 1979 was compounded by the fact that his recorded output for the last decade or more of his life was, for the most part, commercial, uncreative and lacking in individuality. He deserved better, but the economics of keeping a bond working and holding down a record contract forced him into situations far below his talent.
Fortunately, Blue Note thoroughly documented his artistry on a number of sessions under Grant's leadership in the early sixties. Moreover, he was the resident guitarist for Blue Note's stable of premier organists such as Jimmy Smith, John Patton and Larry Young and participated in dates by Lee Morgan, Horace Parlan, Don Wilkerson, Lou Donaldson and others.
Unknown outside of his hometown St. Louis except through his Delmark recordings with tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, Grant was brought to the label and to New York in 1960 by Lou Donaldson. Blue Note always operated on a family basis, developing an impressive, cross-fertilizing repertory group of musicians. Grant was quickly and fully instated in mid 1960.
Green represented not only a fresh, vibrant new voice on an instrument that had become rather sleepy in style in the fifties, but he was also a major link with the all too often neglected pioneer of the hollow body electric guitar in jazz, Charlie Christian. Grant executed bright, clean lines that never fully abandoned the melody, emphasized concise, linear, single note improvisations and possessed a unique rhythmic momentum that remains unmatched. He absorbed Christian, then bypassed such heroes of the day as Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery and moved directly to the formation of his own identity.
This album "Gooden's Corner", recorded on December 23, 1961, features a beautifully compatible quartet of Grant, pianist Sonny Clark', bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes. Ike Quebec joined the group for one tune 'Count Every Star", which was then extracted and used on Quebec's album “Blue And Sentimental” (Blue Note BST 94098). The rest of the session, previously unissued and without Quebec, is presented here in its entirety.
This particular quartet had a run of sessions for Blue Note under Grant's name, all they all remain unissued. On January 13, 1962, the band with Art Blakey subbing for Hayes recorded. On January 31 the quartet with Hayes back again recorded yet another album. And finally on March 1, 1962, the same group, this time with Quebec playing throughout the session, made yet another album's worth of material. Why these dates were never issued will never be known. Most likely, it is because Grant, like other Blue Note artists, recorded prolifically during these years, and there was just no way to get everything released. As this set bears out, the Green-Clark-Jones-Hayes combination is completely compatible and comfortable. Each man has an easy, natural sense of swinging that interlocks perfectly with his fellow musicians.
Sam Jones has been previously present on a handful of Blue Note dates, led for the most part by another guitarist Kenny Burrell. Louis Hayes was a familiar face at the label through his long term membership in Horace Silver's quintet and his frequent sideman appearances with Curtis Fuller and other Blue Note artists. From the fall of 1959 well into the mid sixties, Jones and Hayes were the pivot of Cannonball Adderley's successful band. They had been together in that capacity for more than two years when this album was recorded, and their empathy is clearly evident.
Although none of the Green dates with Sonny Clark at the piano have ever been issued, their pairing was a natural. Both men possessed the ability to swing hard in an effortless, instinctive manner. Clark is his usual brilliant self here, adding richly to the group texture and urging Grant on with some inspired comping. His solo work is typically two-handed, cooking and always interesting. It is a testament to Grant Green that he can breath such life into On Green Dolphin Street and What is This Thing Called Love as well as the overdone Henry Mancini hit of the day Moon River. He swings on What Is This Thing ... like no one else on his instrument could. And Moon River is a perfect example of his ability to construct a solo using the tune's melody as the substance of his variations. His rhythmic sense is best illustrated on Shadrack.
Grant contributes two originals, Gooden's Corner and Two For One. Gooden's Corner is a solid blues, given an irresistible performance by the entire group. Two For One, not to be confused with the Sonny Clark tune of the same name, is based on Miles Davis' modal So What, but after the theme, Grant breaks into some straight ahead playing.
This album is a lovely freeze frame in the career of one of the foremost guitarists of modern jazz, a man whom we lost to the commercial world in the late sixties and whom we lost forever in 1979.
-MICHAEL CUSCUNA 1979, original liner notes from "Gooden’s Corner" We close this piece with Bob Porter’s 1980 original liner notes from Oleo. “THE business of jazz is extremely difficult to describe to someone not involved in it. Most fans are aware of the qualities that make a great jazz musician: an individual sound; the ability to improvise melodically ("telling a story," in Lester Young's phrase); to swing, etc. There are any number of great jazz musicians who may be deficient in one of these areas, but generally they make up for it by doing one of the other things much better than other players. Yet in all this discussion, there has been no mention of playing melody. Name me a great jazzman who couldn't take a melody and make it uniquely his own.
Grant Green was widely known for his ability to play melodies. It didn't really matter what kind of melodies because Grant could do Latin tunes (see Blue Note 84111 - The Latin Bit); Gospel songs (Blue Note 84132 -Feelin' The Spirit); Western melodies (Blue Note 84310- Goin' West) as well as standards, blues, or jazz tunes. he had a great guitar sound and knew instinctively how to make melodies come alive.
Grant really arrived in 1961. He had made records in 1959 with his hometown friend, Jimmy Forrest, for Delmark and the following year he recorded with organist Sam Lazar, another St. Louis musician, for Argo. but when Lou Donaldson heard him playing in East St. Louis, he convinced Grant and clubowner Leo Gooden to come to New York and talk with Alfred Lion of Blue Note. From 1961 through 1965, Grant Green made more Blue Note lps as leader and sideman than anyone else. Clearly, he was a favorite, not only of Lion, but of Ike Quebec who did much of the A and R work for Blue Note until his death in 1963.
Considering Grant's versatility, it is not unusual that Blue Note used him in a variety of contexts: Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, John Patton, Lou Donaldson, Ike Quebec.
At a time when Down Beat was still giving New Star awards, Grant won in 1962. but critical raves have never helped in earning a living. Grant worked often with Jack McDuff during those early years, and was really scuffling for money. In addition to everything else, Grant had a narcotics habit. Now it may be hard to understand in the jazz world of 1979 when musicians, have generally learned to avoid the excesses of heroin and get their business together, but jazz players were very low in the economic strata of the early 60s, and one consistent source of revenue was the record company. It seems likely that Blue Note recorded Grant frequently during those years because he was always drawing money from Blue Note. Grant did at least six LP sessions under his won leadership for Blue Note in 1961. The furious recording pace continued right into 1965, and try as they might, Blue Note could never issue the LPs as fast as Grant could record them!
In a sense, Grant's situation and that of Sonny Clark were similar. They had the identical problems and each was a Blue Note favorite. The initial pairing of these two talents came just before Christmas, 1961, and resulted in the album, Gooden's Corner. Sam Jones and Louis Hayes were still members of Cannonball Adderley's band at the time, and their appearance together is another reminder of Blue Note's care in assembling rhythm sections. Alfred Lion's choice of bass and drums almost always reflected an ability to play together in support of the leader, rather than to demonstrate individual brilliance.
The tunes played here are not unusual for Grant, although it should be noted that he had an attraction for Sonny Rollins lines. He also recorded "Solid' and "Sonnymoon For Two" during this period. A later version of 'My Favorite Things" was issued on the Matador album.
Grant never does get the tricky theme of "Oleo" exactly right, but it doesn't deter him from fashioning a solo of lightening-like inventiveness. Sonny Clark has always been considered a disciple of Bud Powell and perhaps the chief reason for that is the dynamic flow of his ideas. When playing standards, he sometimes would adopt a lighter touch (reminding one of Hank Jones in his delicacy), but his work throughout this session is in the cooking Powell mode.
If Grant has problems with "Oleo", he has none with "Tune Up." The melody, introduced and long-credited to Miles Davis, was actually written by saxophonist-bluesman Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who gave the tune to Davis during a period when he – Vinson - was not recording. Virtually the some thing happened with another Vinson compositions, "Four."
Green was always at home with the blues and "Hip Funk" is his adoption of the classic form that was definitely hip (meaning fashionable) for 1962. Sonny Clark was also a blues master as his work ably demonstrates. Hearing the music on this album (and Gooden's Corner) makes one immediately interested in hearing more. Alas, there is no more by the quartet, but a bit more than a month later, these same four players joined forces with Ike Quebec for an album that will be forthcoming on Blue Note [Blue and Sentimental].
Between 1965 and 1968, Green was still active as a performer, but his recorded appearances were few. When he returned to Blue Note in 1969, he had rid himself of the narcotics problem, but had acquired a new attitude toward music. The huge success of Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, and George Benson was very much on his mind. He considered himself the musical equal of all of them, yet he was the only one not to have made a significant commercial breakthrough.
His repertoire tended more toward rhythm & blues during his late Blue Note period. He would use repetitive vamps rather than chord changes as harmonic underpinning and his attention to phrasing melodies (always an outstanding feature of his work) become even more pronounced. And the commercial break happened for him! From 1969 to mid-1974, his Blue Note LPs were consistent best sellers and he was a popular attraction at clubs across the USA. He split with Blue Note shortly thereafter and made an LP for Kudu and another for Versatile.
Grant spent much of 1978 in the hospital with a variety of ailments, and he was not a well man when released in December, 1978. His doctors advised him to rest, but there were expenses to meet, so he went back on the road almost immediately. He died of a heart attack on January 31, 1979 - seventeen years to the day of this recording.
During 1969 and 1970 when I was producing records for Prestige, I got to know Grant Green well. He played on albums with Rusty Bryant, Don Patterson, Charles Kynard, and Houston Person which I supervised. I used to marvel at the ease with which this man with enormous hands could make that guitar sing. At one session, during a break, he treated everyone to a solo rendition of "Oleo" which was stunning. After his death, I thought many times of how his career would be judged by historians, since so much of his later recordings were in a commercial vein. But with albums such as Matador, Gooden's Corner, and now Oleo, his stature is assured. Without question, Grant Green was one of the major artists on the guitar during his lifetime. His friend, Lou Donaldson, put it best when he said:
"All the top guitarists who came later - like George Benson and Pat Martino - they've got some of Grant's stuff."
"Red's version of "Billy Boy," with Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers on bass, is a classic illustration of the perfectly structured solo, the superb interplay of the trio, and Garland's powerful use of block chords."
It seemed to be over so fast for William “Red” Garland.
One minute he’s making all those great Prestige and Columbia records as the pianist with the classic Miles Davis quintet that also featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer “Philly” Joe Jones, but after 1959, he seemed somehow to become relegated to total obscurity.
Bill Evans and then Wynton Kelly replaced him with Miles and, with the advent of the 1960’s, Jazz clubs began to close calling for great adjustments by those who continued to work in the music.
Red was not one of the Jazz musicians who successfully navigated the sea of changes that swept over the Jazz World, returning instead to Dallas and choosing to live in his father’s home in a state of virtual retirement.
The recordings that “Red” made with Miles and under his own name for Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records during his brief period of ascendancy were my first introduction to what some referred to as an “East Coast Jazz rhythm section.”
Red along with Paul Chambers and “Philly” Joe Jones opened a whole new world for me of keeping time and playing behind horns in a style that was on top of the beat, hard driving and full of intensity.
The epitome of what Red, Paul and “Philly” Joe got going as a rhythm section was contained on their trio performance of Billy Boy on the Miles Davis Milestones LP. I practiced to it so often that I learned to play every accent, fill and solo that Philly Joe Jones plays on this track from memory.
Before he faded from the Jazz scene, Red also made a series of recordings for Prestige as a leader and as a sideman for John Coltrane that included, in addition to Chambers and Jones, bassists George Joyner, Sam Jones, Peck Morrison and Wendell Marshall, as well as, drummers Art Taylor, Specs Wright, Charlie Persip, Frank Gant and Larry Ridley.
But whether he was out front or just on the date, and irrespective of who joined him in the rhythm section, the “feel” and sound of Red’s approach to the piano remained essentially the same.
“Graceful yet unaffectedly bluesy, Red Garland's manner was flexible enough to accommodate the contrasting styles of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane in the Davis quintet of the mid-1950s. His many records as a leader, beginning at about the same period, display exactly the same qualities. His confessed influences of Tatum, Powell and Nat Cole seem less obvious than his debts to Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal, whose hit recording of Billy Boy from the early 1950’s seems to sum up everything that Garland would later go on to explore.
All of the listed trio sessions feature the same virtues: deftly fingered left-hand runs over bouncy rhythms, coupled with block-chord phrasing which colored melodies in such a way that Garland saw no need to depart from them. Medium-up-tempo treatments alternate with stately ballads, and Chambers and Taylor are unfailingly swinging, if often constrained, partners. The later sessions feature a slightly greater empathy, but we find it very hard to choose a favorite among these records.” [Richard Cook and Brian Morton, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed., p. 548].
In this excerpt from his interview with Len Lyons, “Red” described how it all began for him:
“When did you begin playing piano?
I didn't begin on piano. In fact, I never played the piano until I was in the army. You couldn't call me a child prodigy. I started on clarinet because my father wanted me to. It was his idea. He loved Benny Goodman, so he wanted me to play the clarinet. The truth is I've always wanted to play trumpet. At least I did then. At the dances we used to go to as kids, the brass section seemed to have the most fun. They'd sit there with the trumpets across their laps, clapping to the music.
I took up the piano when I ran across Lee Barnes, a pianist in the army band. He started teaching me how to play, and I soon grew to love it. He inspired me. Nobody had to tell me to practice because I was playing piano all day. Lee even wrote out exercises for me. When I left the army, I bought an exercise book by Theodore Presser, and that was a great help to me.
In 1945 I played my first gig on piano. It was with a tenor player, Bill Blocker, who had a quartet in Fort Worth, Texas. We played mostly in the dance halls. During those years I was listening to Count Basie. He was my first favorite. He didn't have a lot of technique, but I thought he was very tasty. I started to copy him for a while. Then I began to copy Nat "King" Cole, who was more of a pianist than most people know. He was tasty, too, and he didn't have a bad technique. Then [trumpeter Oran] Hot Lips Page came to town with his band. We used to call him just Lips. Anyway, his piano player got fired while the band was down in Texas. I think it might have been because of drunkenness. Then Buster Smith, the alto saxophonist, came to my house at four o'clock in the morning to tell me to hurry and get dressed because Lips wanted me to go with him. I told him, no, I wasn't ready. I wasn't good enough yet. But they talked me into it anyway, and we toured all the way across the country into New York City.
When I got to New York, I ran into the tenor player Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, and I asked him where all the good piano players were. He told me Bud Powell was about the baddest cat in town. ‘Who's Bud Powell?’ I asked him. ‘Don't worry, you're going to find out,’ he told me. Well, one night I was working at Minton's with Max Roach, and I looked over toward the door, and in walked Bud. I could hardly play because of everything I had heard about him. I froze. Bud came over and started forcing me off the bench. ‘Let me play,’ he kept saying to me. ‘Let me play.’ Max was yelling to me, ‘No! Get him away. Keep him away from the piano.’ Max was afraid he was crazy or something and was going to ruin the gig. I got up anyway. I figured if Bud wanted to play that bad, I wasn't going to stand in his way. Well, he sat down at the piano and scared me to death-he played so much piano! I told Max, ‘I quit! Give him the job!"’See, Bud took my cool.
But a few days later I went over to Bud's house, and he showed me some things. In fact, I came back day after day to learn from him, and we became buddies. He was really friendly to me and the greatest influence on me of any pianist, except for Art Tatum. I still don't believe Art Tatum was real.
There was a club named Luckey's [Rendezvous], owned by Luckey Roberts, and it was just for piano players - no bass or drums allowed. There's where we'd separate the men from the boys, when you can't lean on the bass or drums. Art Tatum was a frequent visitor there, and I'd stand over his shoulder to watch what he was doing. One night he stood behind me as I was playing. ‘You're forcing,’ he told me. ‘You're forcing. Don't play the piano. Let the piano play itself.’ I was tight, so he gave me that piece of advice, and I've always remembered it. He gave me some arpeggios to work on, too, and I'm still working on them.
Then I was working in a small club in Boston with Coleman Hawkins when Miles [Davis] came in to hear me. He told me during the intermission that he wanted to get a group together with me on piano, Philly Joe, Curly Russell on bass, and Sonny Rollins on tenor. Two weeks later I heard Sonny couldn't get released from his rehabilitation program, so I left town for Philadelphia. A while later I got a telegram from Miles asking me if I knew anyone in Philadelphia who could play tenor sax. I told him I knew a cat named John Coltrane, and Miles asked me, ‘Can he play?’ and I told him, ‘Sure he can.’ John and I met Miles in Baltimore. Meanwhile, Miles had found a kid out of Detroit, named Paul Chambers, and he played bass for us. Philly Joe was still on drums. We had never played together until the night of our first gig, so we got together about five in the afternoon and jammed. From the opening tune we clicked. We just clicked right away, and that was that. We stayed together from '55 to January 1959. I did a few trio gigs by myself and then went home, like I told you.” [The Great Jazz Pianists Speaking of Their Lives and Music, pp. 146-147].
With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles put together the following video tribute to Red with he along with Paul Chambers and “Philly Joe Jones” featured on their memorable performance of Billy Boy.
John Hasse.: Earlier you mentioned composing at the exact moment you're improvising. Could you elaborate a little?
Roland Hanna.: When you write the printed note on a page, that note is there. It is supposed to be there as long as the paper lasts, you know? It's supposed to be just so, just right. If you play a C7 chord on the piano, C E G B-flat, you hear the notes and they sound — ping. If a band plays a C7 chord, it's got to be voiced a certain way. If it's not voiced a certain way, it's not going to get a quality. And in order to learn what quality you want, you have to work a long time listening, trying to understand how the instruments play the notes, what kind of overtones they give, and how the notes work together. So it's the same thing when you're playing spontaneously at the moment, when you're actually performing; you have to hear in your mind the notes that you want to perform. You have to know exactly what sounds you want in a given structural composition or song. The notes develop—your mind is constantly working, thinking of how you want these notes to move—and the notes develop and you begin to hear things that actually create mental images or pictures or whatever. And if you have developed yourself to the point where you are playing everything you hear, then the music starts to flow and your playing makes logical sense to someone listening. The tradition I was talking about is that with Charlie Parker you sense and you hear and you know—after many repeated listenings, of course, because everyone who plays music doesn't hear it the same way but develop so that it all goes in the same direction—you hear in listening to someone like Charlie Parker that the sounds he makes have been well-coordinated in his mind before he's produced them. And having as many avenues of movement as he has through all the years of practicing and working and listening to himself, he's able to move through all the channels of music that he makes. This tradition, again, that I'm talking about is in the sense of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms— any of the great classical, romantic, baroque, impressionistic, or modern composers. It's in that tradition because the composer who sits down to write music has to hear in his mind before he puts it on the paper exactly what he wants. He has an advantage over the musician who's improvising because he has time to correct the notes if they aren't exactly what he hears in his mind. You see—he's got all the time in the world to put the notes down and then change them. If it's an F he hears, and then he reworks the chord or the sound of the whatever and the F isn't right for that instrument, he can change it to make it right. Whereas the improviser must be able to hear that right then and there, and strive to reach the same point that the composer or arranger or orchestrator is working for and has the time to work for.
J.H.: So it's a lot more than having a good ear; it's being able to hear it in your mind—hear it ahead of time. It's kind of a good ear in advance.
R.H.: Much more. It's like having a thought or an idea, having no words for the idea, and then taking your time and letting the thought come through, evolve, so that it comes through coherently.
Answer. Jazz, with a non-pulsating beat. The beat is implicit but not explicit; in other words, acknowledged but unsounded. The two horns are the dominant but not domineering voices. The bass usually functions somewhat like a baritone sax. The drums play an important but non-conflicting role.
Q. Why abandon the sounded beat?
A. For clarity and freedom. I’ve come to feel increasingly inhibited and frustrated by the insistent pounding of the rhythm section. With it, it’s impossible for the listener or the soloist to hear the horn’s true sound, I’ve come to believe, or fully concentrate on the solo line. An imbalance of advances has moved the rhythm from a supporting to a competitive role.
Q. But isn’t the sounded beat an integral part of jazz?
A The sounded beat once made playing easier, but now it’s become confining. And to the degree that the beat was there to guide dancers, it is, of course, no longer necessary to concert jazz. I think the essence of jazz is in the phrasing and notes, and these needn’t change when the beat is silent. Since the beat is implicit, this music retains traditional feeling; not having it explicit allows freer thinking.
– Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1969 [pp. 235-36, paragraphing modified]
“Despite Giuffre’s rhetoric, the pieces on Tangents in Jazz do swing. In many ways the listener is even more drawn to the rhythmic element of the music, by the way it moves from instrument to instrument, instead of resting solely with the “rhythm” section. On Tangents Giuffre was again joined by Pena, Sheldon, and Anton, and though none of them stretches out at length during the course of the album, each is very much put in the spotlight as Giuffre employs a wide range of compositional devices: call-and-response figures, two- and three-part counterpoint, unison and harmony lines, canonic devices. These take the place of solos in Giuffre’s new conception.
As a filmmaker conveys a sense of momentum through a sequence of rapidly shifting camera angles, Giuffre’s constant movement from one musical device to another achieves a similar effect. Part of the achievement of Tangents in Jazz is that, despite the leader’s stated disregard for a “propulsive” beat, these pieces are constantly propelled, if not by a metronomic beat, certainly by Giuffre’s constant changes in compositional focus. If anything, Giuffre overcompensates on Tangents, avoiding lengthy solos and shifting musical gears with abandon. The result is a highly concentrated music—which may be pleasing to the listener, but also makes severe demands on the attention.”
“Since leaving Ella Fitzgerald in 1978, Tommy Flanagan's playing seems to get better and better; he is currently many jazz fans' favorite pianist and can always be counted on to deliver a flawlessly swinging performance. "I've been seeking out a lot of songs that I haven't played before, particularly ones by Ellington, Strayhorn, Tadd Dameron and Tom Mclntosh (who is one of my favorite writers around today) along with many younger composers. There is a wealth of music out there that I hope to record in the future. I'd also like to feature my piano with a large orchestra sometime. I've very much enjoyed the past ten years, travelling the world playing with my trio. I can't hope for anything more than good health and good music. There is always more music to be played!"
— Scott Yanow, notes to Tommy Flanagan Let’s Play the Music of Thad Jones [Enja 8040-2]
“Once when I asked Tommy who his favorite pianists were, he responded with a seemingly never-ending list that included Fats Waller, An Tatum, Teddy Wilson. Bud Powell, Hank Jones, Barry Harris, Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, and Erroll Garner Within a portion of this list is a miniature evolution of jazz piano. Flanagan's style shows several of these men as influences. His idiom is Powellian but his keyboard attack is softer because his Powell has been tempered by Jones. Harris, a Detroit contemporary, is of similar bent and has been credited with having exercised a great deal of influence over musicians in his area including Tommy himself. The Flanagan touch is light but firm, his lines fluid and warm; his music, emotionally valid.”
- Ira Gitler, notes to Tommy Flanagan Trio Overseas [Prestige 7134]
“Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while—when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right—he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event.”
- Whitney Balliett
Copyright ® Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Poet
“A procession of lyrical, horn-like single-note pianists have come down from Earl Hines. They are, in Count Basie's words, "the poets of the piano." Mary Lou Williams may have been the first. After she had absorbed Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller and Hines and Art Tatum, she became a kind of bebop pianist, and a bebop teacher as well, who showered pianistics on young revolutionaries like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. Teddy Wilson was next. (Tatum came a few years earlier, but he was an orchestral pianist.) Wilson's calm, invincible, almost mathematical right-hand patterns transfixed a generation of pianists, among them Billy Kyle, Nat Cole, Hank Jones, Jimmy Rowles, and Lennie Tristano. Kyle's right-hand figures dashed, and he had an electric way of accenting the first note of crucial phrases.
By the early forties, Nat Cole had become the most beautiful pianist in jazz. Everything he did sparkled—his touch, his tight, surprising, effortless lines, his deft lyricism. Jones had a crystalline touch, too, and he softened and updated Wilson's right-hand figures. Rowles mixed Wilson and Tatum with his own witty, acerbic harmonic vision, developing single-note lines that suggested Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Tristano, working different sides of Wilson and Tatum, spun unbroken melodic lines that never breathed and that had a demonic urgency. John Lewis and Erroll Garner were the last and most eccentric of the Hines-Wilson generation. Lewis was a pointillist and Garner a primitive. Pianists had discovered that they could find almost anything in the abundant Hines.
In the mid-forties, Bud Powell, who came out of Kyle and Tatum, hypnotized a new generation of pianists. His single-note figures were nervous, hard, driven. They had, particularly at up-tempo, a coarse quick-wittedness. His admirers came in two groups: the early bebop pianists Dodo Marmarosa, Al Haig, Duke Jordan, Joe Albany, and George Wallington; and the younger and far more original Horace Silver, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and Bill Evans. (Two exceptional single-note pianists who arrived in the fifties but did not follow Powell were Dave McKenna and Eddie Costa. McKenna admired Tatum and Nat Cole, and Costa liked Tristano.)
Evans combined Silver and Tristano and Nat Cole with his own special introversions, and, in due course, became the most influential pianist since Bud Powell. Few pianists who have appeared since the mid-sixties have escaped him. Then two totally unrelated things happened: in 1978, Tommy Flanagan quit Ella Fitzgerald, whom he had accompanied for ten years, and in 1980 Evans died. Flanagan went out as a solo pianist (sometimes with bass and drums, or just bass), inching into the sun, and, the most diffident of men, has become Evans' successor.
Jimmy Rowles, the dean of single-note players, has said this about Flanagan: "Tommy is a magnificent pianist. I can't think of anything but accolades—as an accompanist and a soloist. We used to hang out a lot at Bradley's. We'd go through songs, talk shop. You'd be surprised at his repertoire. How many pianists around today know 'Down by the Sycamore Tree'? Tommy can be distant at times—loath to open up. But he's a funny man. Whenever I first see him, I always ask him how he is, and hell say, 'Doing the best I can with the tools I have.'"
And Bradley Cunningham himself has said: "Tommy is debonair and witty. I like his company. And I love the way he plays. I hired him about ten years ago, during one of the Newport festivals, when he had a little time off from Ella. I hired him with George Mraz. Nobody came the first night—none of my people. Being in the business, I know that these things happen, and all you can do is throw your hands in the air. Tommy and George kept looking around, then looking at one another. But they were together musically, and after the place closed that night they played some of the most inventive, swinging music I've ever heard. Piano players are supposed to make you laugh, then break your heart, and that's what Tommy does."
Flanagan is of medium height and heft, and he has a bald head with a skirt of grayish hair, and a thick balancing mustache. He wears glasses and has shy eyes. When he talks, he bends his head to the right and examines the left side of the room, or bends his head to the left and examines the right side of the room. He has a soft handshake and a soft voice—his words duck out. But much of this is disguise. He has a handsome, dimpled smile, and he laughs a lot. Flanagan lives with his wife, Diana, on the upper West Side. The living room of their apartment faces south and holds sun much of the day. There are lace curtains at the windows, and two royal-blue velvet sofas. Diana Flanagan's books line one wall, and include Malraux, June Jordan, Alec Wilder, Paul Robeson, James Agee, Duke Ellington, and May Sarton.
Flanagan sat in his living room one afternoon and talked about himself. He does so tentatively, as if he had just met the person he is talking about. Flanagan was born, in 1930, in Conant Gardens, the oldest intact black community in Detroit. An extraordinary musical eruption took place in Detroit in the forties and fifties—an oblique compensation for the vicious racial conditions in the city at the time. Flanagan had this effulgence on his mind: "There were older Detroit guys like Milt Jackson and Hank Jones and Lucky Thompson, who left early and came back to play gigs," he said. "And there were local guys like Willie Anderson, who never left. He had long, beautiful fingers, and he was self-taught and could also play bass, saxophone, and trumpet. Benny Goodman tried to hire him, but he never would go—maybe he was embarrassed at not being able to read.
And there was a whole bunch of us—some younger, some older—who didn't get away so fast: Roland Hanna, who went to school with me; Paul Chambers; Doug Watkins; Donald Byrd; Kenny Burrell (he loved Oscar Moore, and we put together a Nat Cole-type trio); Sonny Red Kyner; Barry Harris; Pepper Adams, who came from Rochester and played clarinet when I first knew him; Curtis Fuller; Billy Mitchell; Yusef Lateef; Tate Houston; Frank Gant; Frank Rosolino; Parky Groat; Thad Jones and Elvin Jones, who are Hank Jones' brothers and came from Pontiac, a little way out; Art Mardigan; Oliver Jackson; Doug Mettome; Frank Foster, who's from Cincinnati; Joe Henderson; J. R. Monterose; Roy Brooks; Louis Hayes; Julius Watkins; Terry Pollard; Bess Bonnier; Alice Coltrane; and the singers Betty Carter and Sheila Jordan.
We gave weekly concerts at a musicians' collective—the World Stage Theatre. We worked at clubs like the Blue Bird and Klein's Showbar and the Crystal and the Twenty Grand. We played in the Rouge Lounge, and at El Sino, where Charlie Parker worked. As teen-agers, we'd stand outside the screen door by the band-stand, looking in at Bird. All this lasted into the mid-fifties. Then people began to leave—Billy Mitchell ended up with Dizzy Gillespie, Thad Jones with Count Basie, Paul Chambers with Paul Quinichette, Doug Watkins with Art Blakey, Louis Hayes with Horace Silver. I stayed around until 1956, when Kenny Burrell and I left for New York.
"They still had jam sessions uptown then — Monday at the 125 Club, Tuesday at Count Basie's, Wednesday at Small's — and they were the best place to get exposure. Of course, if you were new in town you had to wait a long time to sit in. Sometimes I didn't get on the stand until three-thirty or four in the morning. But I made my first record after I'd been here only a few weeks. It was for Blue Note, and it was called 'Detroit—New York Junction’ - and Thad Jones and Billy Mitchell were on it, and so were Kenny Burrell and Oscar Pettiford and Shadow Wilson. Not long after that, I did a date with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. I met Coleman Hawkins through Miles, and I did a date with him. I had my first nightclub gig at Birdland, when they asked me to fill in for Bud Powell. I first appeared with Ella Fitzgerald that July at the Newport Festival. Then I joined J. J. Johnson, and I was with him for a year, and we travelled all over Europe. I stayed in New York after that, working around and recording. I married my first wife, Ann, in 1960. We were divorced in the early seventies. We had three children—Tommy, Jr., who lives in Arizona, and Rachel and Jennifer, who both have babies and live together in California. Ann was killed in an auto accident in 1980.
"I started the first of two long gigs with Ella in 1962, and I stayed with her until 1965. Then I spent a year with Tony Bennett. By this time, I had moved to the Coast. I did mostly casuals, which is what they call club dates. Things were sewed up out there—it was very cliquish. Ella was living in California, too, and in 1968 I got another call from her, and I stayed ten years as her musical director. She was great to work for after you got to know her, but it was rough in the beginning. I was insecure anyway, and when I'd make a mistake she would say something like 'If it's going to be like this, I'm getting out of the business.' So I'd say to myself, 'I've got to tighten up my act. After all, I'm the musical director, and I don't want to be responsible for her quitting.' But she never forgot our birthdays—things like that. Working for Ella was different from working for a lot of singers, because she had such high standards. Her intonation was perfect. Jim Hall once said that he could tune up to her voice. I finally left Ella because the travelling got to be too much for me and because in 1978 I had a heart attack."
The doorbell rang, and Flanagan let in his wife, who was loaded to the gunwales with groceries. "I'm sorry, Tommy," she said. "I couldn't get at my keys with all this stuff. I got some grapes and some cookies. I'll bring them out after I get things unpacked." She is a handsome, dark-haired woman. Her hair sets off her face, which is very pale and has an almost Victorian transparency. Her voice is louder than Flanagan's, and she moves twice as fast. Flanagan sat down again, and said, "My heart attack kept me in the hospital seventeen days, even though they kept telling me it was a mild one. I quit smoking and cut down on drinking and started getting some exercise, which is mostly walking. I walk all over the city. I work up to a good pace. Maybe I take after my father, who was a postman. My brothers and I figured out once that he walked at least ten miles on his mail route. Before he carried mail, he worked for the Packard motorcar company, but the government was a lot safer during the Depression.
He was born in 1891, near Marietta, Georgia. He served in the Army during the First World War, and after the war he came North. Before that, he had floated around in Florida and Tennessee. He was about the same height as me, and we looked alike—we both lost our hair early. He loved music, and sang with a quartet, which dressed in spats and all. I saw a picture of him once holding a guitar, but I never heard him play one. I was the youngest of six children, five of them boys. What with so many boys, he laid down the law. He kept us in check. He had a way of sending us to the basement, of taking privileges away. But he showed us all the things of how to be a good person. He had the kind of sense of humor where he'd start telling a joke and laugh so hard he never got to the punch line.
My mother, Ida Mae, was short and small and beautiful. She was from Wrens, Georgia. She was born in 1895, and she came North about the same time as my father. She had some Indian blood. They were married just before the twenties. She did a lot of church work—in fact, my parents started a church near where we lived. She loved music even more than my father did. She knew who people like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson were, and when I'd put on one of their records she'd say 'Is that Art Tatum?' or 'Is that Teddy Wilson?' and that made me feel good. She taught herself to read music. She was shy and easygoing, and very resourceful about things like cooking and sewing. She made a lot of our clothes, and she made beautiful patchwork quilts. It was rough going in the thirties, but she smoothed everything over and always made it seem like we had enough. She died in 1959, and my father died in 1977, at the age of eighty-six.
My oldest brother, Johnson Alexander, Jr., moved into my father's house to take care of him before he passed, and my brother and his wife still live there. My sister, Ida, worked for a doctor, but she's retired. She had seven children, the last two twins. My brother James Harvey passed a little while ago, and Douglas works in the Detroit school system. Luther lives in Lansing, and is with a community-service agency. My father's house has a front porch and a back porch, now enclosed, and four bedrooms, two up and two down. There's a milk door in the kitchen, where we used to put the empties for the milkman. When I was little, it still looked very country where we were. The streets were dirt and had deep gullies on both sides. They weren't paved until the late thirties. I walked a mile to my first school, and took two buses to high school, which was not in our area, and which my sister and brothers went to, too. The schools were mixed, but there was a lot of racism everywhere in Detroit. The result, of course, was the race riots of 1943.
"We always had a piano in our house, and I was fooling with it as soon as I could crawl up on the bench. On my sixth Christmas, we were all given musical instruments. I got a clarinet, and the others got a violin and drums and saxophones, and the like. Eventually, we had a little band, and we played some strange music. I didn't like the clarinet too much, because it was so hard to get a sound out of. But I did learn to read music on it. I sent away for a fingering chart to a Dr. Matty, who had a radio program, and I learned through listening to him and because they used the same chart in school. I could play some by the time I got to intermediate school, and in high school I could blend in with the band without sounding too terrible. I started piano lessons when I was ten or eleven, and built up to Bach and Chopin. I studied with Gladys Dillard. Her classes got so big that she opened her own school and had a staff of seven or eight teachers. I saw her recently in Detroit when I gave a solo concert, and she looked real good. All this time, I had been listening to Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum and to all the big bands. In high school, Bud Powell took hold, and so did Nat Cole. Nat Cole had that same thing as Teddy—a nice, clean technique, a bright attack. He could swing, he made his notes bounce.
"I didn't escape the Korean War. I got drafted near the end, and I spent two years in the Army. I did my basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, which was on the same latitude as South Korea, and even had a similar terrain. So the minute basic was finished they cut my orders to send me overseas. It was nightmare time. Then I discovered that they were holding auditions for a camp show. One of the skits had a pianist in it, and I tried out and got the part and stayed in Missouri. But I went over a year or so later. I had been trained as a motion-picture-projector operator, and I was sent to the port city of Kunsan. The war was still going. Late at night or very early in the morning, this North Korean plane would come over, flying under our radar, and drop a couple of bombs. We called him Bed-Check Charlie. The one good thing about my Army career was that I kept running into Pepper Adams."
Diana Flanagan brought in a plate of grapes and a plate of ginger cookies. Flanagan took two cookies and thanked her, and she went back to the kitchen. Flanagan finished his cookies and ate some grapes. He was silent for a while. Then he said, "The other night at the Vanguard, somebody asked me for the umpteenth time what pianists influenced me. The fact is, I try to play like a horn player, like I'm blowing into the piano. The sound of a piece—its over-all tonality—is what concerns me. If it's a blues in C, you play the whole thing like a circle. You have the sound of C in your head, your mind is clouded with the sound. The chords of a tune are not that important, and neither is the melody. But they are both there if you get lost. Hardly any of my material is new, although it may be new to me. When you add new songs, it gives your playing a lift. I particularly like Kern, Arlen and Gershwin. I also love Ellington and Strayhorn and Tadd Dameron. No matter what you play, though, it's hard work. After I do a week's gig, I like to rest, I like to heal."
Flanagan demands close listening. His single-note melodic lines move up and down, but, since he is also a percussive player, who likes to accent unlikely notes, his phrases tend to move constantly toward and away from the listener. The resulting dynamics are subtle and attractive. These horizontal-vertical melodic lines give the impression of being two lines, each of which Flanagan would like attention paid to. There are also interior movements within these lines: double-time runs; clusters of flatted notes, like pretend stumbles; backward-leaning half-time passages; dancing runs; and rests, which are both pauses and chambers for the preceding phrase to echo in. Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while—when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right—he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event.
Diana Flanagan came into the living room. Flanagan stood up and stretched and said it was time for his walk—that today he was going down toward Lincoln Center and back up through Central Park. He put on a tan cap and left. Diana Flanagan took a cookie and sat on the sofa. She said that the two best things she had ever done were to come to New York and to marry Flanagan. "I had come from Ames, Iowa, where my father finally settled," she said. "He was born in Russellville, Kentucky, and when I was growing up we lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and Goldsboro, North Carolina. My father sold insurance. He sold men's clothes. He worked for Frigidaire. He worked for National Cash Register. He was a quiet, subtle, sweet person, a courtly person. His name was William Kershner, and he was of Scottish, Irish, and German descent. Tommy, whose father spent time in Tennessee, and my father, who spent time there, too, used some of the same colloquialisms—like 'slipperspoon' for 'shoehorn.' My father died in 1971. My mother is almost ninety, and lives in a nursing home now. She was born in Philadelphia. Ruth Stetson. Her father was English, and her mother was French and Irish. She has always been interested in music and books. She's very witty, very emotional. I had a scholarship and studied music for two years at the University of Iowa. Then I came to New York. It was 1949. I had always thought New York was my destination. I was brought to the World's Fair in 1939, when I was nine or ten, and I never got over it. I went to Columbia, and took courses in drama. I had been a violinist, and I was also a singer. I used the professional name of Diana Hunter, which is pretty embarrassing. I sang around New York, and went on the road with Elliot Lawrence and Claude Thornhill. Thornhill was very kind to me. He still played beautifully—those dreaming single-note things, like 'Snowfall.' In 1956, I married a tenor saxophonist named Eddie Wasserman. He'd been to Juilliard, and he had worked for Chico O'Farrill and Charlie Barnet. And he was in the Gene Krupa quartet for a long time. I stopped singing professionally in 1962, and Eddie and I were divorced in 1965. I went to City College and graduated with a degree in English literature. Then I studied education at Bank Street. I taught music, English, and black studies for ten years—first in Bedford-Stuyvesant and then in the South Bronx. I quit just before Tommy and I were married, in 1976.
"We read to each other quite a bit. He's interested in everything I am, and I'm interested in everything he is—except sports. His gentleness and quietness are deceptive. He is a strong man, and he has a lot of spirit and funniness. He's lovely to live with. Everything he says has a kind of double meaning—an edge to it. We have a lot of play like that between us. We laugh all the time. He dances—little tap steps, little side shuffles—around here, but he won't do it in public. Once, when we went to hear Duke Ellington at the Rainbow Grill, he took me out on the dance floor and just stood in one spot, swaying from side to side. I still sing sometimes late at night, and he plays for me. We know a thousand songs nobody else knows anymore."”
