Gerry Mulligan: Born Again On the Little Bighorn by Brian Morton

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

“ … perhaps Mulligan’s most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that millstone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.

It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but it's focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.

“The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz.” ...

The recent European tour by his "Rebirth Of The Cool" tentette has put the spotlight firmly back on Gerry Mulligan. Critic Brian Morton assesses the career of the great baritone saxophonist.

- Brian Morton, Jazz on CD, 1992

“Ask almost any jazz horn player what attracted him to his instrument and chances are he'll make some reference to its proximity to the human voice. Since Bird and Trane, the notion of a “vocalised" tone has been closely bound up with that of the saxophonist as an impassioned shaman or a pentecostal adept, howling and crying and chanting in a language at several removes from everyday speech. Perhaps because he fails to fit the mould, Gerry Mulligan has been consistently undervalued as a saxophone improviser; perhaps because his language is so effortlessly logical, he has also been substantially discounted as a composer/ arranger.

If anyone's tone is vocalised, it is Mulligan's. He plays, as he speaks, in a deep, chesty burr, developing ideas logically (but not so logically that he can't indulge the odd non sequitur), punctuating his argument with unexpected gurgles of humour and outbreaks of quiet passion that sit uneasily athwart his allotted place in the ranks of the "Cool". The baritone saxophone, Mulligan's favoured instrument for over 40 years now, is one of the most thinly subscribed in the jazz orchestra. Harry Carney, in the Ellington band, was among the first to give it speech. Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams demonstrated that Carney's forceful, often dramatic approach was not just a one-off. Leo Parker played a brand of jovial bop on the big horn, trading on the same Eb tonality to create a deeper and inevitably slowed-up version of his namesake's dizzying flights. There was little more of substance until the ill-starred Serge Chaloff, who gave the baritone a dark, almost aggressive resonance.

Chaloff was Mulligan's first model, but tempered with the fleet, melodic scampers of Johnny Hodges and a hint of Hodges's aching ballad style. There is a story that Mulligan once walked into a studio where Chaloff was recording. Seeing his rival in the booth, Chaloff executed a perfect parody of the younger man's still awkward style and then tore it to shreds. Whatever impetus the experience gave him, Mulligan advanced by leaps and bounds and by the early fifties had become a soloist of astonishing poise and confidence. He has always denied hotly that the baritone is a cumbersome instrument, insisting that it has a physical balance and ease of execution that is missing on the lighter horns. Certainly, anyone who saw or heard Mulligan playing soprano saxophone during his brief flirtation with the straight horn may have heard "cumbersome" suggest itself as a paradoxically appropriate epithet. If he has made his name as an exponent of "cool" jazz, his work on soprano sounded merely frosty.

Labels, though, don't sit well on Mulligan. If you call him a radical only at your peril, it's equally unwise to dismiss him as a conservative. He has proved himself able to play in virtually any context, Dixieland, swing, be-bop, up to but significantly excluding free jazz. For Mulligan, there was no break in the continuity of jazz, in what it was possible to do with blues intervals and standard tunes, until in the 1960s (his "lost" decade) the scorched-earth campaign of the New Thing laid waste to much of what had gone before. (Mulligan was able to play comfortably not just with his mentor Johnny Hodges, but also with the supposedly maverick Thelonious Monk, whose own "modernism" was grounded on a strongly traditionalist view of jazz.) Mulligan believes that what Charlie Parker did was "logical" (which is still one step away of saying that it was predictable) and that there was nothing in any of his own so-called revolutionary work that wasn't already present in classic jazz and in the broad-brush arrangements of the swing era.

The fact remains, though, that just as Mulligan's crew-cut and Ray-Bans were once icons of West Coast "Cool", the sunny flipside of New York be-bop, so his music was once considered to be revolutionary, even "difficult". In his short story "Entropy", written in 1960 (and featuring a character bearing Monk's middle name, Sphere), the novelist Thomas Pynchon turns Mulligan's early 50s quartets with Chet Baker into the defining gesture of post-modernism, an accolade Mulligan would doubtless reject. The accepted version of the story is that when Mulligan and Baker turned up at the Haig Club in Los Angeles in June 1952, there was no piano available, and that the famous "pianoless" quartet was merely another instance of necessity mothering invention. Mulligan tells a slightly different version. There was, of course, a piano (what jazz club would be without one?) but it was no great shakes, and the saxophonist was already experimenting with small group, arrangements in which the baritone, already comfortably pitched for the task, took on much of the piano's role. Pynchon's version is more dramatic: improvisation without a safety net! No chords! Freedom! Uncertainty! The revisionist version is convincingly pragmatic: aren't most artistic revolutions a combination of inspiration and compromise? Mulligan's own account, though, is the most straightforward and the most illuminating. The relation between a be-bop solo and the informing chords had become ever more distant and uncertain and a growing understanding of modal or scalar improvisation - which abandoned the usual hierarchy of the harmonic sequence, allowing scales to be derived from any given note - was opening up the possibilities available to a jazz arranger in a way that suggests the experiment of a jazz group without harmony instrument was both '"logical" and, with a little hindsight, predictable, too.

Mulligan's gifts as an arranger were largely innate. While still in his teens, he was writing arrangements of popular material for Johnny Warrington's radio orchestra, but he first came to wider notice, after his recruitment to the sax section of the Gene Krupa band, with a hit arrangement of Disc Jockey Jump in 1947. He had an instinctive feel for the relationship of instrumental    voices and for the transpositions required to keep instruments with dramatically different stride-lengths in step. The two-part counterpoint he developed with Baker and later with valve-brass players like Art Farmer (who has been working with Mulligan again recently in the reformed Tentette) and Bob Brookmeyer had a robust logic that belied its deceptively understated delivery. The quartet with Baker was a resounding success and created a climate of expectation that afforded Mulligan enviable freedom of movement in an idiom that ran counter to commercial trends in jazz and popular music. He has long been insistent that there is still considerable public affection and demand for big band music and that the only reasons for its decline are economic. In 1960, Mulligan organised the legendary Concert Jazz Band, whose very title enshrined the importance he placed on big band jazz as music to be listened to, not just danced to. With rock and roll on the rise, the band folded and Mulligan's career as a leader was somewhat eclipsed. Though he continued to arrange and work as a sideman, opportunities to work on his own account were limited until the formation in 1972 of a new big band, named (in recognition of his passion for old locomotives) The Age of Steam. The new band saw Mulligan make a surprisingly comfortable accommodation to the rock idiom that had denied him work so long, and it set him back on a insistently successful course that has been maintained up to the present. The story, though, runs a little ahead of itself, which is appropriate, for Mulligan's career almost needs to be seen in reverse. keeping with a spirit of revisionism, of critical misunderstanding and ungenerosity that has stalked him at every stage it is clear that perhaps his most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that millstone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.

It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but it's focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.

The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz. The "Birth of the Cool" nonet made unprecedented use of French horn and tuba and divided its sound range in such a way that the middle register (where one might expect to hear a tenor saxophone) was significantly attenuated. The effect was a music of superficial simplicity that nonetheless afforded the arrangers (and also the soloists, it shouldn't be forgotten) the possibility of considerable complexity. Mulligan's contribution to the sessions as composer was highly significant. He wrote and set three pieces for the group, Godchild and the wonderful Jeru for the January 1949 sessions, Venus de Milo, which featured his best solo of the time, for the second batch, cut in April, and the bouncy Rocker, recorded almost a year later.

It's difficult in retrospect to evaluate accurately the impact of these sessions, but Max Harrison has persuasively suggested that jazz's inability or unwillingness to capitalise on and develop its own innovations is what has condemned it to the status of a minor art. The ensemble playing on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions is as sophisticated as anything being attempted at the time by "legitimate" or "straight" composers and yet within a couple of years, jazz in general (though commendably few of the original participants) was content to settle back into the four-square thump of theme-and-solo "improvisation" on popular tunes.

The only slightly sour note surrounding The Birth of the Cool (as a product, rather than a misnamed historical moment) was the fact that it seemed to have been hijacked in Miles Davis's name. The trumpeter's subsequent career cast him with some unlikely bedfellows and with an acrobatic self-conception that pitched him at the opposite extreme from the notably purist Mulligan. Not least of his affectations seemed to be the belief that at every stage of his progress he shed yet another stylistic skin. Even at the end of his life, though, when he was set against (some thought) unpromising electronic backgrounds, Miles was still exploring the ensemble effects and minimalist gestures with which he and Mulligan had experimented in 1948 and 1949.

In the jazz fan's wish-list of great might-have-beens, there are few potential reunions more piquant than one that was mooted one summer night a year ago in Rotterdam. Mulligan told Miles of his desire to play the "Birth" music again. Miles asked to be kept posted, a willingness that may have seemed astonishing by the diffident standards of the Sixties and Seventies but which can't quite be explained away by his ubiquitous "special guest star" status of the final few years; for Miles's resistance to "jazz" was very specifically a resistance to the endless rehearsal of be-bop egotism. Sadly, he was already stricken in health, and died before the projected reunion could be realised.

Mulligan, though, stuck to the original idea and assembled a band that more than passed muster. With Phil Woods in for the otherwise-committed Lee Konitz (who has nonetheless appeared since in the reformed Tentette), and the young trumpeter Wallace Roney in for Miles, the band had a freshness and bounce that more than matched the original conception. With digital recording, "Re-Birth of the Cool" (not to be confused with a similarly-titled compilation of hip-hop music, a fact that caused Mulligan some little pain) dissolves the intervening four decades and brings to life some of the most effective charts in modern jazz. Mulligan's own voice has matured over the same period, losing some of the slight infelicities of diction and awkward caesuras [interruptions; breaks; pauses] that marked his soloing in the early days. At 65, he sounds stronger and more committed than ever, but committed not to a narrow conception of jazz as a particular ideology that has broken free of its own historical moment ("Re-Birth of the Cool" is emphatically not an exercise in nostalgia) but to the widest possible conception of music. [The recording is another of] … Mulligan's increasingly important forays into formal orchestral writing and can't be seen as a rejection of jazz, but simply as a rejection of the view that jazz is the only road to the joyous freedoms it expresses and stern disciplines it imposes. When Mulligan hooks on the big baritone, the voice is unmistakable. It's a speaking voice, which doesn't disdain to sing when the song is worth the breath.”

CerraJazz on Substack - The June 1, 2023 Transition

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

After almost 15 years of posting features free of charge on jazzprofiles.blogspot, we will be transitioning to the Substack online publishing platform as CerraJazz beginning on June 1, 2023 and continuing over the next few months.

The transition will be gradual although more new features will appear on CerraJazz with archived posts becoming the mainstay of our offerings on JazzProfiles.

The reasons for this change are many but the primary one is the opportunity to generate revenue through paid subscriptions.

 

The revenue is needed to pay copyright fees to Downbeat, other magazines, book publishers and musicians’ estates in order to use copyright protected articles, essays and interviews as part of a planned Gerry Mulligan Reader which will be made up of 52 selected writings.

Bound copies of the Gerry Mulligan Reader will be available on January 1, 2024 and we will be offering it on a chapter-a-week basis for paid Substack subscriptions beginning on the first-of-the-year.

Anthologies of writings and interviews on pianists Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck are also in the planning stages as is one on composer, arranger and bandleader Stan Kenton and the often-forgotten composer and tenor saxophonist, Hank Mobley. These will also be on offer only to paid subscribers.

With this in mind, I hope you will consider a monthly, annual, or founding subscription by making a visit to cerra.substack.com/subscribe. The sums involved are modest. Of course, free subscriptions will continue to be offered for some features. 

JJ Johnson - Minor Mist

Happy Birthday to drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath.

Remembering Wardell Gray [1921-1955] - Part 4 - Alun Morgan Essay [From the Archives]

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

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles’ initial effort to help remember and commemorate Wardell Gray on these pages began with The Ira Gitler Prestige Notes [Part 1], followed by an essay on him from a rather rare publication: Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded [London: 1961] which constituted Part 2 and added Part 3 with an article by Herbie Butterfield that appeared in the October 1961 issue of Jazz Journal 9another rarity].

We now continue with Part 4 which is made up of the Alun Morgan article entitled Wardell Gray. It appeared in the January 1956 issue of the Jazz Monthly. It, too, is a rarity of sorts for while there are some fine pieces about Wardell in Jazz literature, getting a hold of a copy of them is not always easy.

“Nineteen fifty five will be remembered in the jazz world as a year which took a heavy toll of its musicians. During its course men of different styles, from Charlie Parker to Cow Cow Davenport, died leaving behind the memory of their work in the form of gramophone records, Parker, whose passing was one of the greatest single losses in the entire history of our music, died after a heart attack which came as a delayed-action culmination to a protracted period of ill health; pianist Dick Twardzick died in Paris as a result of an excessive self-administered shot of heroin. while baritone saxophonist Bob Gordon was killed in a California car accident as he was travelling to fulfil a concert engagement. Both these latter deaths serve as grim reminders of the internal and external hazards facing today's musicians.

On the 26th of May the most mysterious death came to light when tenor man Wardell Gray's body was discovered on some waste ground outside Las Vegas. He had died from a broken neck and injuries sustained to the head inflicted by an unidentified weapon. Dancer Teddy Hale was arrested and questioned on the subject of an alleged "drug party" the previous evening and confessed to moving Wardell's body after an "accident" at his flat. In Britain an EP record featuring Gray was released by Vogue, accidentally coinciding with his death and the subsequent review in the Gramophone magazine brought forth the astonishing information that "Gray was a known dope addict". 

Some thousands of miles nearer the scene of the tragedy. Gray's friends refuted all suggestions of the narcotics charge, white his employer at the time of his death, Benny Carter, was reported in Down Beat as saying: "Wardell Gray ordinarily was one of the most dependable musicians I have ever known. On this occasion he had been drinking, drinking too much, for him. We had been rehearsing or playing almost constantly for the past three days and nights. Warded had not been in the best of health recently. When he failed to make our last show on Wednesday night I thought he had gone to his room and collapsed. I still do", In a part of the world where the coloured man is often only suffered grudgingly by a white community it is not likely that the true cause of Gray's death will now be discovered.

During his lifetime Wardell achieved fame in a limited manner, although the amount of recognition he gained was disproportionate to his true musical worth. In the years immediately preceding his death he moved within the boundaries of the so-called West Coast circle without exciting the degree of interest accorded to newer and often lesser musicians. This was the price he paid for his consistency and dependability, Jazz enthusiasts are ever ready for new musical experiences and an artiste who attains the same high level for any length of time is likely to find himself cast aside upon the arrival of a less consistent but more sensational soloist.

Unlike some of his contemporaries Wardell's style changed little during his recording career. He achieved maturity early on and found no reason to alter his form of self expression. His playing took on a natural-sounding quality which suited his temperament, even if his younger listeners merely acknowledged his work and passed him by in their pilgrimages to heap praise upon men with more sophisticated and contrived methods of playing.

His earliest recorded solos were made as a member of the Earl Hines band in 1945. He joined Earl in 1943 as an alto saxist and sat in the reed section along-side tenor man Charlie Parker for a time. For the ARA label Hines recorded several sides, eight of which have been released here on the Vogue label. Wardeil may be heard on Throwin’ The Switch, Bamby, Let's Get Started and Blue Keys (EPV 1050) and Spook's Ball (EPV 1059). He plays with a broader tone than the one he used on his later recordings, but he is immediately identifiable as a musician with the potentiality of a true soloist.

Leaving Hines in 1945 Wardell settled in Los Angeles and worked there in small groups organised and led by such men as Benny Carter, Vernon Alley and Howard McGhee. When Billy Eckstine disbanded his big band and came west he signed on Wardeil for the sextet he used for his Hollywood dates. Nineteen forty seven proved to be something of a turning point in Wardell's career and certain events helped him to break away from the closed circuit of his Los Angeles activity.

On February 26th, 1947, he played on a historic session with Charlie Parker for the "Dial" label. Parker, Gray, Howard McGhee, Dodo Marmarosa, Barney Kessel, Red Caliender and Don Lamond reached a new peak of contemporary small-band jazz when they recorded Relaxin' At Camarillo. Cheers, Carvin’ The Bird and Stupendous. The following day. Wardell together with Kessel and Lamond played at a concert staged by promoter Gene Norman under the by-line "Just Jazz", In his time Norman has been responsible for organizing some outstanding gatherings of jazz musicians, occasionally adding one or two men of dubious virtue, but generally maintaining a very high standard of talent. On this occasion Wardell was teamed with tenor man Vido Musso from the Stan Kenton band, then visiting Hollywood and the "chase" passages on Just Bop (Vogue LDE101) form a most revealing comparison between two widely differing styles. Musso plays with the urgency and harsh tone which have invariably marked his work, while Gray's poise is perfect, his tone as smooth and as rounded as ever. His entries seem to be prefaced with a personal message to Vido, "Now this is how it should be played,"

At the beginning of May, Gene Norman presented a very impressive array of musicians at the Civic Auditorium in Pasadena. Wardell Gray, Red Norvo, Howard McGhee, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Vic Dickenson, Don Lamond, Jackie Mills, Dodo Marmarosa, Charlie Drayton, Harry Babasin, Red Callender, Irving Ashby and A! Hendrickson were on hand, while additional "name" guests included Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman. It was at this concert that Wardell played what was to become his best known solo, accompanied by a rhythm section led by Errol! Garner. The resultant Blue Lou (Vogue LAE12001) was above reproach, for it found the two main participants at their respective best form, Wardell builds chorus upon chorus with no repetitive phrases or clichés, while Erroll provides a stimulating background before launching into his own solo. One O’Clock Jump (Vogue LAE12QG1) from the same concert gave Wardell the chance to improvise at length on one of his favourite chord sequences, the blues in major key. By the common consent of his fellows he was the first soloist and took no less than eighteen choruses in. a row, verbally encouraged by the remaining frontliners.

On record it is possible to note certain aspects of the concerts in greater detail, with particular reference to Wardell Gray's own work. On the items with Garner he was given a rhythm section which played a straight, almost traditional 4/4 beat. On Groovin’ High, Hot House and Just Bop the more modern-sounding rhythm teams played with a fluid, undulating beat. Yet Wardell was also to assimilate both types of accompaniment without modifying the basic requirements of his style.

Further concerts followed, including the one issued on a marathon set of nineteen standard speed records on the "Bop" and "Savoy" labels. In June 1947 Ross Russell again used Wardell on a "Dial" session, this time pairing him with the similarly-styled Dexter Gordon for a six minute version of The Chase (Esquire 10-019). This was a friendly "carving" match between the two tenor men which had become a popular feature of jazz concerts in the area.

In the late-summer of 1947 Benny Goodman disbanded the radio band which he had been using and decided to form a regular sextet. He had been greatly impressed with the appearance of Wardell at the "Just Jazz" concert in May and offered him a job in the sextet which was later to contain clarinetist Ake Hasselgard. This was the beginning of a new chapter in Wardell’s life, for the Goodman engagement took him East at the end of the year. In December, just prior to the recording ban, Benny's sextet recorded a new version of Stealin’ Apples for Capitol on which both Wardell Gray and Fats Navarro were to be heard. Gray also played on a date under drummer J. C. Heard's name for the "Apollo" label with Joe Newman, Benny Green and Ai Haig.

In April !948 he recorded four sides “under cover" (due to the AFM ban on all recording then in force) for "Sittin' In With", a small company operated by Bobby Shad, Warden's exemplary sense of swing oversails the technical limitations of the recording equipment on Matter And Mind (a thinly veiled Idaho) and Stoned, a twelve bar. Light Gray (Fine and Dandy) and The Toup (virtually an alternative master of Stoned) from the same session have yet to be issued in Britain, although the former pair of titles will be found on Vogue EPV1064.

When Goodman gave up the Sextet in the summer of 1948 Wardell remained in New York and spent some weeks in the Count Basie band, playing the "Royal Roost" club booking and taking most of the tenor solos, while Bernie Peacock was featured on alto. On his evenings off he appeared with the Tadd Dameron Sextet at the same club and blew alongside Allen Eager and Fats Navarro, The beginning of the following year saw the relaxation of the record ban and the subsequent formation of a new big band by Benny Goodman. Wardell rejoined BG who immediately promoted him to the position of deputy leader, to front the band in the event of Goodman's absence. This feeling of admiration however was not mutual and in later years Wardell was reluctant to speak of his term of service with Benny.

The band recorded for "Capitol" although Wardell was not featured greatly. He did not solo on the studio recording of the band's best number, Undercurrent Blues, although a broadcast transcription of the number once used as a signature tune on AFN had three solo choruses of Gray's tenor. The twelve bar Hucklebuck a commercialized re-hash of Parker's Now's the Time, has a typically efficient chorus by Wardell, while the original coupling, Having A Wonderful Wish, has a dolorous vocal by Buddy Greco which is redeemed by eight bars of Warden's tenor in his best ballad style. Just prior to his visit to England to play at the London Palladium in the summer of 1949, Goodman recorded four titles with his sextet for "Capitol", three of which had fine solos by Wardell and trumpeter Doug Mettome. Mary Lou Williams' tune In The Land Of Oo-Bla-Dee has instrumental solos inset into the vocal choruses sung by Greco, while the choice of Blue Lou was probably activated by the success of Wardell’s previous record taken from the Gene Norman concert. Bedlam is a retitling of the blues which Gray recorded the year before as Stoned.

In April of 1949 pianist Al Haig made two sessions for American "Seeco", a label which, until then, had specialized in Latin American music. On four sides Haig chose Stan Getz as the featured tenor soloist, replacing him with Wardell Gray on the remainder. For two of the latter titles Goodman vocalist Terry Swope harmonised with the tenor man in the thematic choruses. In A Pinch utilizes the chorda! progression of All God's Children. Five Star is I Got Rhythm with a new middle-eight, while Sugar Hill Bop is a twelve bar with Wardell in fine form. The closing Talk Of The Town is a beautiful and sensitive interpretation of the ballad played with ail of Gray's warmth of feeling and respect for melody.

On severing his association with Goodman later in 1949 Wardell went back to the Basie fold and remained there until 1951. He played on the Columbia Basie sides dating from this period, notably Little White Lies, I’ll Remember April and his own tune Little Pony. He recorded two sessions for "Prestige", the first in New York with the combined Charlie Parker-Stan Getz rhythm section (Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes) which produced the aggressive but swinging Twisted and the smooth, slow Easy Living. He cut the second set of four titles in Detroit with a locally recruited rhythm section including Art Mardigan on drums. In Hollywood with Basie, he made some sides privately for Eddie Laguna which were released both here and in France by Vogue, but which have not, apparently, appeared in America. Of these the outstanding titles are the confidently played and well-titled Easy Swing (actually the Parker tune Steeplechase) and the perennial Gershwin ballad The Man I Love.

Although a native of Oklahoma City, Wardell made his new home in Los Angeles after leaving the Count.  The wheel had turned full circle from 1947 to 1951 and deposited Wardell back at his point of departure after a tour which had taken in many of the forty-eight States. West Coast concerts at which he appeared later were taped by Gene Norman (Chase and Steeplechase with Dexter Gordon and Conte Candoli on Brunswick LA8646) and by "Prestige" (Jazz On Sunset and Klddo with Clark Terry, Sonny Criss and Hampton Hawes). "Prestige" also recorded Gray at a not entirely successful session with his protégé Frank Morgan on alto and "Nu Di" expert Teddy Charles on vibes. 

A far better set of six titles was made for the same label in January 1952 using Gray's regular group which contained trumpeter Art Farmer, pianist Hampton Hawes and drummer Larry Marable. Four of the tunes have now appeared here on "Esquire' (EP 91) comprising two blues, Jackie and Farmers Market (both vocalized later by Annie Ross with suitable lyrics), April Skies based on the I’ll Remember April sequence and Bright Boy.

Gene Norman, the man who had recognized Gray's talents in 1947 and devoted so much record time to his work, organized an eight-title session built around a small Ellington group. Wardell was added to the Ducal line-up and was given a long solo feature on the Hodges stand-by The Jeep is Jumpin. On Billy Strayhorn's arrangement of Johnny Come Lately the tenor man blew one of the best solos of the day and was obviously very much at home in yet another set of musical surroundings.

Norman Granz picked Wardell for the large band he assembled in the "Clef" studio under the leadership of Louis Bellson and featured him strongly on Don Redman's For Europeans Only. Granz used Gray later in an all-star Jam Session with Stan Getz, Harry Edison, Buddy De Franco, Count Basie, etc. The last recordings before his death were made with a group under the leadership of Frank Morgan (to be released here by Vogue) and supervised by Gene Norman.

Wardell Gray achieved an excellent reputation amongst other musicians as a man of consistency, imagination, technique, unfailing good taste and, pervading all these other qualities, a sense of swing almost unrivalled in jazz. Due to his encouragement and help, younger men, notably Art Farmer, Frank Morgan, Frank Foster and Paul Quinichette, gained experience and a guiding hand along the difficult pathway to progress. Wardell was possessed of a likeable personality and an equable temperament which eschewed petty backstage bickerings. Through no fault of his own he lacked only one important quality, namely the respect and public recognition due to an artiste of his calibre.

Jazz is very much poorer by his passing.”

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen - born May 27 1946; died April 19 2005.

 “The double bass came a long way in jazz between the 1930s and the 1960s, from plodding marker of the beat and the chord change to fully-fledged countermelodic, and sometimes even frontline instrument. The career of the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, who has died aged 58, was a product of that evolution and a significant contribution to it. In jazz circles, he was usually referred to simply as NHOP. He was a bass virtuoso, who made his unwieldy instrument sound almost impossibly agile. Like a finger-style guitarist, he could pluck the heavy strings with all four fingers of his right hand, where most bassists relied on repeated leverage from one finger, or two at the most.The turn of speed this gave NHOP allowed jazz's classic "walking bassline" to be played at the most frenetic tempos, and over sustained periods behind soloists. Ørsted Pedersen was thus able to hold down one of the most demanding jobs in mainstream jazz, as regular bassist to Oscar Peterson, one of the fastest pianists in the business. This was a tough enough task even with other musicians around to help spread the load, but NHOP often kept Peterson company in that most unforgiving of improvising situations, the drummerless duo. When he took over the job with Peterson, his predecessor Ray Brown observed that the newcomer was the only bassist he could think of who would be quick enough to keep up with Peterson.Ørsted Pedersen was born at Osted, the son of a church organist. He initially studied piano, and, from the age of 13, the double bass. By his mid-teens, he was good enough to accompany leading musicians in nightclubs, working regularly at Copenhagen's Montmartre Jazzhus after his debut there on New Year's Eve 1961, when he was only 15.The Montmartre was a regular stop-off for touring American stars, and, in the house band there, the young NHOP performed with saxophone legends such as Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Stan Getz; and that poet of jazz piano, Bill Evans, with whom he toured in Europe in 1965.Ørsted Pedersen had all the crucial qualities of a jazz double bassist - a big, rich sound, an improviser's melodic imagination, dexterity, soul, the ability to listen - but he seemed to have them in more liberal quantities than most. And although he was most frequently associated with standard songs, trusted chord changes and swing, he was musical enough - and curious enough - to be effective in many contexts, even with those unorthodox exponents of free-jazz saxophone, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler.His dialogues with Shepp, on the album Lookin' At Bird (1980), sometimes even seemed to put the bassist in the ringside seat, helping direct Shepp toward the essence of the music. Between 1964 and 1982, the bassist was a member of the internationally admired Danish Radio Big Band; the showcase album Ambiance (1993), made with the orchestra, highlights the delicacy and subtlety of his sound.He was also a prolific studio musician, working on some 400 albums in the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. As well as working with Oscar Peterson, NHOP fruitfully partnered guitarist Joe Pass, notably on the startlingly virtuosic album Chops (1978). He also worked with the Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu; the power and eloquence of his bass-playing can be heard on four of their recordings in the mid-1970s, notably Catalonian Fire (1974).ØrstedPedersen was the bassist of choice for some of American jazz's best expatriates, including Dexter Gordon and pianist Kenny Drew, but, over the past two decades, he was increasingly active with European jazz musicians. He formed creative bands with Copenhagen trumpeters Palle Mikkelborg and Allan Botschinsky, and also worked with the freewheeling Portuguese singer Maria Joao, guitarists Philip Catherine and Ulf Wakenius, and pianists Michel Petrucciani and Kenneth Knudsen. He taught at the Rytmiske Musikkonservatorium in Copenhagen.

· Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, jazz bassist”

Source: Scott Yanow

Remembering Wardell Gray [1921-1955] - Part 3 - the Herbie Butterfield Essay

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

“The death of Wardell Gray has not been completely cleared up but it is not for us to attempt to solve any mysteries here. …. His life, rather than his death, is what concerns us.

Whatever he played swung, for primarily Wardell was a swinger. Moving along at up-tempo, he would still exhort the rhythm section to ‘bear down.’"

- Ira Gitler, Jazz author and critic

“We remember Wardell Gray, then, for his gaiety of temper and for his unremitting swing; above all his is a danceable sound. His sonority was more forthright and open than Lester Young's, although from this it should not be inferred that his tone had much in common with the weighty eloquence of the Hawkins school. There is never any suggestion of strain, no impression that he is heaving both his lungs into his instrument. Like Young, he withheld his attack, so that there is a basis of effortless ease and lightness in his tone, which is not discernible in Hawk's followers. But around this lightness he managed to create a final product of a more echoing and assertive sonority, an essentially outgoing sound, which differentiates him immediately from most other tenormen,....”

- Herbie Butterfield

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles’ initial effort to help remember and commemorate Wardell Gray on these pages began with The Ira Gitler Prestige Notes [Part 1] and followed with an essay on him from a rather rare publication: Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded [London: 1961] which constituted Part 2.

We now continue with Part 3 which is made up of the Herbie Butterfield article entitled Wardell Gray. It appeared in the October 1961 issue of the Jazz Journal. It could also be considered as a rarity of sorts for while there are some fine pieces about Wardell in Jazz literature, getting a hold of a copy of them is not always easy.

Fortunately, I belong to a Jazz chat group with a membership that is made up of many kind and caring people from all over the world who have come to my aid on many occasions.

One such Jazz buddy lives in New Zealand and sent along the following Herbie Butterfield essay on Wardell Gray appended to the message below. To add to this grand gesture, he even typed it out for me because the original is in a bound volume and therefore not easy to scan.

“Hi Steve,

I decided that you should have the 'missing' Jazz Journal article from October 1961, so here it is. 

I've changed the album catalogue reference for the most part to US issues, but the best "Blue Lou" versions are on European labels - the best of all being on French Master of Jazz MJCD171, which includes a rehearsal take, and the concert performance unedited at 9:43 (most other issues have shortened versions).

The JJ article is a bit weird (which is why I thought you should have it!) and I wonder why the author never mentions Stan Getz anywhere.

Cheers,

Your New Zealand Jazz Buddy”

Mr. Butterfield’s essay is not easy to read. One might even characterize it as “a bit weird,” but it deserves to be read because of the uniqueness of his views on Wardell and his music and because he has gone to great lengths to state his opinions accurately, with examples, but without apologies.

WARDELL GRAY    Jazz Journal   October 1961

"Music expresses absolutely nothing," said Stravinsky, thus relegating the compositions of most of his Romantic forebears to the status of glorious red herrings. Such an iconoclastic blast must have been pleasantly refreshing at the time of its pronouncement, when too many accepted too incuriously music's correlation with personal emotions. It needed saying that a musical phrase was a series of sounds arranged in a certain order before it was a statement of sadness. It will probably always need the saying, the reminding. 

Whether there is a fundamental connection between a specific musical figure and the emotional effect it is likely to produce in the listener, or how much such an effect can be explained in terms of a reflex action engendered by tradition, both private and communal, is a point of discussion to which I an entirely unequipped to contribute. I must leave it to the professional aesthetician, psychologist or neurologist.

Nevertheless, only the tiniest and most specialist minority do not refer music in some way to an emotional universe, and for the purposes of this essay I am presuming that certain phrases, tempi, accents do communicate certain emotional moods more effectively than others. On that basis we are back where we started before Stravinsky and (setting aside the Romantic composers, who intend in the very nature of their music that the job of emotive description shall be easy for us) can grant a deep sadness to the slow movement of a Vivaldi concerto, a loneliness to the Bartok of the late string quartets, and a gaiety to Mozart. And here at last, with the mention of gaiety, we are approaching the substance of my article- which is about jazz, believe it or not.

As a parentheses I will add that this preamble is intended as an apology for the fact that emotive descriptions, which have no pure musical authority, of musicians and tracks will often be crucial to my argument. I have attempted to justify the relative usefulness of such descriptions, and also to admit their final invalidity. As it is, in jazz, where the musician's instrument so frequently is intentionally the voice of his mood and temper, this lack of validity would seem less serious.

I have promised to enter my article on the note of 'gaiety,’ because this quality above all others seems to permeate the work of Wardcll Gray, and to be present in his music to a more infectious extent than in other recent jazz musicians.

Gaiety, let us distinguish it from the genial frivolity of many Dixieland groups, the extravagant high spirits of Lionel Hampton, the exuberance of various Basie units, the buoyancy of Mulligan, the sophisticated insolence of Charlie Mingus. Gaiety: extricated from the neon-lit strait-jacket of glamour and riches, it contains surely an idea of the celebration of being alive, or joy, unadulterated and not particularly formulated, in the act of living. It is not quite a religious joy, rather a joyfulness that retains essential contact with earth and social community. Yet this quality of gaiety, this generalized emotional attitude that I am seeking to define, is not insensitive to distant misery. It is underpinned by an awareness of the abundant deprivations and brutalities of living, by a latent melancholy. If all this adds up to 'gaiety,' then it was a communication of gaiety that was Wardell Gray's most precious contribution to his art and to us.

Born in 1921, in his prime during the late 40's and early 50's before his death in 1955, Gray belonged to a generation in which generally dissatisfaction, coherent anguish and sometimes incoherent despair were expressed. The supreme embodiment of these moods we find in the music of Charlie Parker, whose life-span was exactly contemporary. A comparison of opposites is not threatened. Charlie Parker was one of the two or three great innovators and revolutionaries of jazz, the prototype for countless excellent or inferior musicians. 

Wardell Gray affected the course of jazz not at all, gave only to one isolated musician here the example of his tone, to another there the example of his fluency. But his uniqueness, his almost greatness, lies in the fact that, while he was not the pioneer, he was the individual who could hear, mark, learn and inwardly digest, and eventually reappear with the manner duly improved, or at least changed, but the meaningful spirit intact. Thus, while he learnt extensively from Parker and Lester Young in particular, he did not imitate them. 

He heard Young, and learnt the rhythmic relaxation, the concealed situation of accent and the lyrical continuity; but did not exchange his own greater personal assurance for the reticence of Young's playing with Basie. He heard Parker, and adapted his own harmonic and phraseological concepts; but did not attempt to expropriate the Bird's private angst, since his sense of ease and joyfulness did not require it. The musical result of the integration of these lessons into a strong individuality was to make Wardell Gray the first completely satisfying modern tenorist - a modern saxophonist exceptional for his joie de vivre.

If historical categories are helpful, Gray was undoubtedly a modern jazz musician in both the structure and intonation of his solos. But in another respect he came near the end, rather than the beginning of a line- a line of steady and uncomplicated swingers. For, if we exclude the older generation of mainstreamers, from whom much fine jazz, but little new direction can now be expected, and the Desmond-Mulligan-Sims axis which seems temporarily disinclined to contribute anything to the extension of rhythmic conceptions, there are few young musicians who seek to same rhythmic continuity, the same type of constant rhythmic flow, that satisfied Wardell Gray. 

Rollins and Griffin indeed swing massively, but massive is the operative word. They shove or lunge their way into motive realms of swing where Gray rode over the top. The rhythmic concepts of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane are as different as their music is different. Miles Davis 'contains' a viable swing, like he contains practically everything else, but he does not announce it. And it is from three or four of these musicians that we listen for new developments in spontaneous small group jazz. I think only of Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stilt, and more delicately, Art Pepper, as having the same lissome, unfragmented and relatively conservative attitude to swing as had Wardell Gray. That in this one respect I find the consistent impetus of musicians like Gray and Clifford Brown more congenial than the rhythmical tugs-of-war of their living counterparts may, admittedly, be a sign that I've started out on the way to a new mouldy fig cry.

We remember Wardell Gray, then, for his gaiety of temper and for his unremitting swing; above all his is a danceable sound. His sonority was more forthright and open than Lester Young's, although from this it should not be inferred that his tone had much in common with the weighty eloquence of the Hawkins school. There is never any suggestion of strain, no impression that he is heaving both his lungs into his instrument. Like Young, he withheld his attack, so that there is a basis of effortless ease and lightness in his tone, which is not discernible in Hawk's followers. But around this lightness he managed to create a final product of a more echoing and assertive sonority, an essentially outgoing sound, which differentiates him immediately from most other tenormen, and which has found disciples in Frank Foster and Billy Root.

Harmonically he was not adventurous. The story of the development of his phrasing is the story of the gradual incorporation of Parker's harmonic expansions into his own playing. This process was as complete as it was ever to become by the late 40s, after which most of his best work was recorded. There is rarely a sense of harmonic drama and potential- the lucid fluency of his earlier melodic lines was not so easily banished. There is less phraseological contrast than in Parker and his immediate circle, and the dramatic nature of many of his solos accrues rather from the manipulation of accent and the accumulation of choruses towards a climax or anti-climax, predictable in comparison with Bird. Nevertheless, if he was not an innovator, Gray was in no way a musical hack, and his solos are always very stimulating and inventive. It is only in the historical context that he appears harmonically unenterprising, lacking the curiosity of Rollins or Coltrane.

I have said that the predominant emotional mood of Wardell Gray was one of gaiety, touched with melancholy. The presence of melancholy saved the joy from becoming mere boisterous exuberance, but it was never more than a presence, a recognition of the existence of unhappiness. The gaiety was always the official front, and this, over a concerted listening to Gray's music, makes for a lack of emotional variety and versatility, even a certain monotony. Monotony in individual records there is none, and indeed the complaint is only relative. But compare Gray's pensive polished and essentially unharassed Loverman with Parker's fumbling, disorganized and anguished rendering of the same number, and we are hearing a competent craftsman beside an inspired poet. This is a hard comparison, particularly as Gray was a medium- and up-tempo musician whose talents were not best displayed in the ballad, however many pleasant and restful ones he may have recorded. But when an artist's work is judged in toto, unless we are to applaud him for the supreme expression of a single mood, a limited emotional range must tend to constitute an aesthetic weakness.

As yet I have not mentioned specific Gray recordings, and the reason I have not found the need to do so is implied in the last paragraph. His regularity of emotional attitude and high musical craftsmanship result in turn in a commendable consistency of standard. He recorded no disasters, remarkable little interior work, and fewer really memorable pieces than others of his stature, more familiar with the off-night. Anyway, I am more concerned with persuading people to listen to a musician who deserves a larger audience, than with examining the internal structure of individual records.

As a sideman he plays chiefly with the bands of Carter, Goodman and Basie. His fine recordings with Goodman are unfortunately now deleted from the English catalogue, but he can be heard on several Basie big band and smaller group sessions at the turn of the 50s (e.g. Fontana TFL 5046). Inevitably he is heard to best advantage in the smaller combos, most conspicuously the vital and inspiring One O 'Clock Jump with Buddy DeFranco scraping piccolo heights on clarinet. He was also on form in a longer concert version of this same number in 1947- a session which produced in addition a magnificent Blue Lou (Vogue LAE 12001 - Gene Norman Presents, Boplicity CDBOP 014). At this time the Parker influence was slender, and his affinities with the ebullient poll-winners of the 40's more apparent. But he is perhaps heard at his most characteristic fronting his own groups, where his gaiety and fluency can dominate the proceedings. Many of these tracks have been included in his two Memorial albums (Prestige P7008 & 7009).

Move and Scrapple From The Apple (on Prestige P7009)) are from a live session in 1950. Move is taken at a furious tempo, but contains a weak pianist (Jimmy Bunn) and a drummer who is defeated by the speed (Chuck Thompson). Indeed, it is almost too much for Clark Terry and the versatile but slightly facile altoist Sonny Criss, but Gray and his tenor rival, Dexter Gordon, come out of it with evidence of technical virtuosity that would not have shamed a Bechet or a Gillespie. On Scrapple From The Apple Gray takes a dreamy, lilting solo, with long runs in the middle register aspiring towards lightly stressed notes in the higher octave. The reverse side of this album is a successful date with Art Farmer and Hampton Hawes. The formula, employed for all except the two ballads, for Farmer and Gray playing first and last chorus in unison, inclines towards monotony, but in between patience is rewarded by some forthright solo piano and contrasted fill-in chords in accompaniment from Hawes, and by beautifully agile and inventive solos from Gray on Jackie, Bright Boy and Farmer's Market. As I've said before, the ballads - Loverman is one of them- are pensive rather than poignant, a little stylised, a little pedestrian.

The other album (Prestige P 7008) contains a rather messy session with Teddy Charles, in which the vibraphonist tends to interrupt rather than illuminate the solos of his musicians, and the ensembles sound disarrayed. At this late stage of his life (1953) Gray seemed to be developing a greater acerbity of tone than previously, a more brazen sonority, as is apparent in The Man I Love, and in the opening bars of Paul's Cause. But in the main his elegance, perhaps a legacy of his years with the graceful Benny Carter, contrasts well with the hectic striving of altoist Frank Morgan. The other numbers on this album come from the best studio get-togethers that Gray ever attended. In 1949 he met Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes. Among others, they recorded Twisted and Southside, in which Gray, from an initial restraint, gradually unfolds and eventually blossoms into swinging and ranging solos. The other session was made, with an unexceptional but musicianly accompaniment, in Detroit in 1950. A Sinner Kissed An Angel ranks with Easy Living (Prestige P 7009) as the best ballad that Wardell recorded. Here, as rarely elsewhere, he shows affinities with Johnny Hodges, in his floating high notes and lyrical use of glissandi, crescendo and diminuendo. The uptempo blues Grayhound and Treadin' are superb examples of Gray's powerful accumulation and subtle modulation of phrases and whole choruses for dramatic purposes. I would recommend either of these intelligently supervised albums to anyone interested in hearing a representative selection of Wardell Gray's music.

Wardell Gray died when he was only 34. That he died so early does not leave us with quite the cheated feeling and scope for tantalizing speculation as do the deaths of artists who were leading their times, like Bix, Christian, Parker and Clifford Brown. Most probably he would have been playing in much the same vein today. But that does not lessen one's sense of loss, because I for one could well do with a new album from Wardel! Gray every so often. I think jazz could, too. While the innovators are forging new paths, jazz needs its work-a-day exponents. And that's what Wardell was - a great working jazz musician.”

Listen to him, for he's the stuff that jazz is made of - and I hope always will be, if it is to remain a dance music, a social music, as well as a developing art form.”

Herbie Butterfield