Jazz Matters: Appreciating Doug Ramsey, an Admired Colleague by JJA Editor

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Jazz matters: Appreciating Doug Ramsey, an admired colleague
by JJA Editor
May 26, 2026

by Harris Meyer

While he was far better known in jazz circles as a writer than a musician, Doug Ramsey loved playing trumpet and cornet with local musicians in his adopted hometown of Yakima, Washington. “I’ve never stopped playing, despite many requests,” he once said with his characteristic self-deprecating wit.

Doug Ramsey, photo © Chad Bremerman, YamikaHerald.com

On May 19, 2026, Doug died in Yakima at age 91, and the jazz journalism community is mourning his loss.

“Doug’s writings about jazz are so artfully done that opening an LP or CD and finding that the liner notes were written by him is like “finding a real diamond at the bottom of a box of Crackerjacks,” Steven Cerra wrote.

I first became aware of Doug and got to know him after I moved to Yakima in 2007 with my wife to take a newspaper editor job there. We were surprised and delighted to find there was a first-rate jazz concert series at a former Unitarian church with excellent acoustics that had become the Seasons Performance Hall.

In January 2009, we attended the Blue Note 50th Anniversary Tour show at The Seasons, featuring Bill Charlap, Nicholas Payton, Ravi Coltrane, and other stellar players. Between sets, a tall, handsome older man who looked and sounded like a TV news anchorman interviewed the musicians. They all seemed to know him and like him, and he drew out interesting and informative answers through his knowledgeable questions and careful listening. My wife and I asked each other, “Who is this guy?”

We soon discovered that we were privileged to have a nationally acclaimed jazz writer living in our small town, someone who had written a highly praised biography of saxophonist Paul Desmond, liner notes to hundreds of jazz recordings, and many articles about jazz for major newspapers and music magazines. Before the Desmond book, he had published a compilation of essays,

Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers. In 2008, Doug received the Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

We also learned that Doug actually was a veteran TV news anchorman, correspondent, and news executive, just as he appeared, having worked in major markets including New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and Cleveland. After his retirement, Doug and his wife Charlene moved back to her hometown of Yakima in 1997.

Indeed, it was Doug’s natural anchorman’s voice that got him his first broadcasting assignment, managing an Armed Forces Radio station in Japan and producing a show called the Far East Network Jazz Concert while serving as a U.S. Marine officer in the late 1950s.

While stationed in Japan, he played cornet at an off-base club in Iwakuni — illegally, he later said. Fortunately for him, the air wing’s commanding general also loved jazz and played the cornet. They struck up a friendship.

“We were on a first-name basis,” Doug said in an interview. “He called me Doug and I called him General.” One night, the general showed up at the club and sat in on a tune, “a bit shakily but with the right changes.”

Doug had fallen in love with jazz as a young teen, hanging out at the local record store in his hometown, Wenatchee, Washington. He started playing cornet in the junior high school band. He went on to study journalism at University of Washington in Seattle, and wrote about jazz for the school’s daily newspaper.

While covering a Dave Brubeck Quartet concert on campus in 1955, he met the group’s celebrated saxophonist Paul Desmond during intermission and picked up the conversation later that night at a party for the band. They eventually became close friends. Doug was one of the last people Desmond spoke to on the phone before his death in 1977 at age 52.

Knowing about Doug’s long friendship with Desmond, the owner of Parkside Publications, Malcolm Harris, himself a jazz musician and jazz author, asked him to write a biography of Desmond, Doug recalled in a 2013 interview. He interviewed scores of people who knew the intellectual, famously witty, but very private musician. They included Brubeck and other leading musicians, as well as some of the many women, such as Gloria Steinem, who were intimately involved with him.

Asked whether he was tempted to avoid material that could have cast his beloved friend in an unflattering light, Doug responded, “I am conditioned by a long life in journalism, and I put that into play… While I hope that our friendship and my admiration of him comes through in the writing, I believe I did a balanced job in presenting the whole man.”

The result was Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, published in 2005. Critic Gary

Giddins called it “an appreciation by a gifted critic for a great artist… The telling is lyrical, funny, nostalgic, provocative, and allusive – just like a Paul Desmond solo.” It received best book of the year honors from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2006.

There’s one story I love about Doug’s research for the book that showed his close listening to and encyclopedic knowledge of the music. While interviewing Brubeck, Doug mentioned to him that the bridge on Desmond’s monster hit tune Take Five is a chromatic reduction of the opening phrase of the 1943 Bing Crosby hit Sunday, Monday Or Always that Desmond frequently quoted on solos. “Brubeck sort of sat up and said, ‘My God, it is! You’re right!’ He had never thought of that,” Doug recalled.

While working as a TV newsman for 24 years, Doug visited jazz clubs across the county and got to know many musical greats, treasuring his conversations with them. In 1962, while working in Cleveland, he went to hear Dizzy Gillespie, who was in town guest hosting The Mike Douglas show and playing a club gig with a quintet that included James Moody and Kenny Barron. After they chatted at the club, Dizzy invited Doug to his hotel room to continue the conversation. “We shared a bottle of red wine, had a serious discussion about music, acted silly, and developed a warm acquaintance that lasted until he died,” Doug recalled.

While working in New Orleans, Doug said he helped plan the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970, during which he hung out “nonstop” with Desmond, touring jazz clubs with him for four days. He called it “the finest jazz festival ever.” While always courteous, Doug also was always a straight-talking critic. He lamented that the jazz festivals in New Orleans and other cities “have morphed into huge parties. You wonder how much they have to do with music.”

As chief correspondent for UPI Television News in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s and 1970s, he covered the Nixon administration, including the Watergate scandal. His first White House event was a party and star-studded jazz concert in 1969 honoring Duke Ellington on his 70th birthday party. Doug called it “the only domestic affairs high point of the Nixon administration.”

After 24 years in TV news, Doug became a journalism educator, taking a job as senior vice president at the Foundation for American Communication in San Diego, focusing on improving the skills, content knowledge, and ethical practices of journalists. He also lectured and conducted programs for journalists in Eastern Europe through the U.S Information Agency’s speaker program.

Throughout his busy journalism career, Doug continued to write jazz articles for major publications as well as hundreds of liner notes, and later started a jazz blog called Rifftides. One of his favorite writing outlets was the arts and leisure page of the Wall Street Journal, which was run by a talented but quirky editor. Doug suggested that I pitch a story idea (about trap shooting, not music) to this editor, and to my surprise he accepted it. After that, Doug and I commiserated about why the editor wouldn’t take our subsequent pitches, and we swapped ideas about how to hook him.

On his blog Rifftides, Doug maintained his usual high standards in reviewing new recordings. But he strove to be positive, says Jeff Chang, a jazz saxophonist and educator who lived in Yakima for several years and jammed with Doug’s group. “He told me, ‘If I don’t have anything nice to say, I won’t write about it. I won’t waste my time.’ I thought that was really cool, unlike some of the stereotypical critics,” Chang told me.

Another thing Doug avoided in his jazz writing was making lists or proclaiming favorites. “Why must we have favorites?” he lamented during an interview. “Why not evaluate every book, film, composition, solo, or painting on its merits, without ranking it?” He added that he distrusted critics’ polls because he had received too many emails from musicians and publicists pleading for his vote.

Asked why jazz continued to play a role in his life, Doug expressed his personal credo: “Because it goes to the core of what I value: individuality, freedom of expression, human interaction, beauty.”

Desmond died on Memorial Day 1977, and Doug would sometimes attend the Brubeck family’s Memorial Day gatherings in the years after that at their big Connecticut house. Dave Brubeck and other family members, Doug said, would talk a lot about Desmond, with laughing but tear-filled reminiscences about his witticisms and wordplay.

“I think about Paul all the time. He’s a presence,” Brubeck told Doug. “Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.” Adding a personal coda to that story, Doug said, “I couldn’t say it better. Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.”

I feel the same way about Doug Ramsey. My deep condolences to his wife Charlene and their son Paul.
by Bob Blumenthal

In the early years of my writing career, Doug Ramsey was in a subset of the jazz journalists I admired (Terry Martin was in there as well): someone whose “day job,” unrelated to the music industry, was what defined him to the wider world. Yet Doug’s jazz writing was not a hobby, since he took it as seriously as his responsibilities as a local news anchor. I was in the same boat, albeit in a far less glamorous career, and the quality of Doug’s work gave me hope.

I’m not sure when Doug and I met. It might have been when he was in Boston for a journalism conference and I got a call asking if I was free for dinner. Unlike many of my writing colleagues, who opt for dim sum when dining (breaking dumplings?) together, Doug wanted to go to Locke-Ober’s, then the last word in local fine dining. (There are benefits to being a TV news anchor.) We went, enjoyed steaks, wine and a lengthy conversation on jazz and life.

Our most constant exchanges took place over Doug’s great Rifftides blog. I would write him on the rare occasion when I spotted an error (we all do make the occasional mistakes), but more often to thank him for leading me to a recording he had discussed, or to suggest an alternate version of the same composition or solo by the same artist. We also had a similar sense of humor, and when Doug posted about such Russian standards as “Giant Steppes” and “Crimea River,” I was happy to add “Old MacDonald Had a Collective Farm.” Often the subject was Paul Desmond, who Doug loved as much for his humor as his music, and how could you not love a guy who began a themeless improvisation with a quote from “The Rite of Spring” and titled the track “Sacre Blues”? Every Desmond exchange on my end always bore the disclaimer “bear in mind that I’m a Jackie McLean guy,” a comment he always returned in kind.

Many people will remember Doug primarily for his monumental Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond; but Doug wrote about all kinds of jazz, and never failed to approach his subjects with historical knowledge, literary style and taste. Rest in peace, Doug, and to those who carry on in similar fashion, stay on it.
by Steve Cerra

In the early days of developing content for my blog, a number of esteemed musicians, writers and critics came to my aid by consenting to be interviewed- among them – Ted Gioia, Gary Giddins, Bill Kirchner.

Doug Ramsey was the very first who volunteered to take the time to answer my questions so that I might prepare them as a formal interview for my readers. Once my blog was up-and-running, he would give me a plug on his own blog – Rifftides – if I was running something on my page that interested him.

When I called to thank him, he couldn’t say enough nice things about my efforts. Needless to say, given the source, such encouragement meant the world to me.

Doug died in his sleep on May 19th at the age of 91. I am reposting this interview in memoriam. Douglas Arthur Ramsey 1934-2026 – Semper Fi, Marine. Read more at JazzProfiles

by Joe Maita
From the Interview Archive: Paul Desmond biographer Doug Ramsey

In a 2005 Jerry Jazz Musician interview, Paul Desmond biographer Doug Ramsey discusses his subject – a jazz artist who transcended genres to establish one of the most immediately recognizable sounds in all of music.
Doug’s own bio, from Riffides

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism.

He is the winner of two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, one for Take Five, another for an essay about Bill Evans in The Secret Sessions. He contributed to Jazz Times starting in 1975 and, before that, wrote regularly for Down Beat. He was a contributing editor of Texas Monthly for 25 years and wrote a jazz column for The Dallas Morning News.

His novel Poodie James was published in the summer of 2007. His articles, reviews and op-ed pieces on music and on free press and First Amendment issues have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian and Congressional Quarterly, among other publications.

Doug is the co-editor (With Dale Shaps) of Journalism Ethics: Why Change? Under the American Speakers program of the United States Information Agency (when there was a U.S.I.A.), he lectured in Germany and Eastern Europe on jazz and on the role of a free press in a democracy. As senior vice president of FACS (Foundation for American Communications), he educated hundreds of professional journalists about analytical coverage of issues. He describes himself as an avocational trumpeter who sometimes plays for money.


Tags:
Bob Blumenthal
Doug Ramsey
Harris Meyer
Jazz Matters
Jerry Jazz magazine
Joe Maita
Paul Desmond
Steve Cerra

Tierney Sutton "A Timeless Place" featuring Gary Foster

 Tierney Sutton's rendition of "A Timeless Place" [aka "The Peacocks" by Jimmy Rowles] featuring Gary Foster on flue [Gary's solo kicks in a 3:17]. With Christian Jacob on piano, Trey Henry on bass and Ray Brinker on drums.

Gary Foster: Revelations [From the Archives]

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

In an earlier life, when the World was young, I wrote woodwind and reed player extraordinaire Gary Foster a “fan letter.”

It was occasioned by my attendance at a rehearsal of a community college big band. Gary was the orchestra’s musical director and my letter commented on the considerate and courteous way in which Gary put the band through its paces.

During the practice, he took the time to help individual players and/or sections of the band who were struggling with various parts of an arrangement, made numerous suggestions to improve the band’s attack and dynamics, and did so many other, little things to bring out the best in the band’s performance.

Most importantly, especially with young minds and personalities, Gary went about his business with a demeanor that was the epitome of civility.

Don’t get me wrong, Gary challenged the students. He didn’t put up with sloppy phrasing, bad intonation or inattention to detail [Did I mention that these were “young” musicians?].

But when he did make corrections and adjustments in their playing, he did so with explanation, direction and instruction and not with ridicule or mocking and abrasive criticism.

As a result, boy did that band roar.

Here’s this mild-mannered, Father Christmas looking guy holding this tiger by the tail.

Any of us who ever played in a big band should have been so lucky as to have Gary for a director and teacher.

In yet another, even earlier life, which I’m sure he’s forgotten about along with the fan letter, I played a few gigs with Gary.

I had returned from a year long visit to Asia courtesy of the US government and was working fairly regularly in a quartet led by alto saxophonist and flutist Fred Selden. The group also included pianist Milcho Leviev.

Around this time, Fred and Milcho were quite busy with the Don Ellis Orchestra and it was becoming increasingly common for them to send substitutes to gigs when they were out-of-town with Don’s band.

I was very impressed with Gary’s tone the first time I heard him play as it sounded much like the sub-tone used by Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond and less like the Bud Shank or Art Pepper tones I was used to while working with “West Coast” musicians.

Desmond kiddingly once described his tone as having “the sound of a dry martini.”

Not surprisingly, given Konitz’s and Desmond’s penchant for working with harmonically-oriented pianists such as Lennie Tristano and Dave Brubeck, respectively, Gary would become great chums with similarly oriented pianists Clare Fischer and Alan Broadbent over the course of his career.

Ever since I started the JazzProfiles blog, I’ve had it in mind to do a feature on Gary, but I just could not find a starting point.

In talking with a friend about Gary’s performance on a new Mark Masters CD – Everything You Did - a tribute to the music of Steely Dan [about which more in a future review] over coffee recently, he said: “Of course, you must be familiar with Gary’s recordings on the Revelation label?”

I said: “John William Hardy’s old label; the one that was based in Glendale, CA?”

To which my friend replied: “Yup, the very same.”

Gary, it seems, made five LP’s for Hardy’s label including one with Warne Marsh [Ne Plus Ultra Revelations #12], one on which he shares the leadership with Warne and Clare Fischer [Report of the 1^st Annual Symposium on Relaxed Improvisation Revelation 17], and three under his own name: [1] Subconsciously [Revelation #5]; [2] Grand Cru Classe’ [Revelation #19]; Kansas City Connections [Revelation #48].

When I sheepishly admitted that I hadn’t heard any of Gary’s recordings for Revelation, my buddy offered to “… bring them to you the next time we get together for coffee.”

And so he did.

And in so doing, he finally unlocked a way that I was comfortable with for doing a feature on Gary and that is to take selected excerpts from John William Hardy’s liner notes to Gary’s Revelation recordings and to present them as a chronicle of highlights from Gary’s early career.

Let’s begin at the beginning with Subconsciously [Revelation #5]. Here are some are some of the things James William Hardy had to say about Gary work on this recording.

“GARY FOSTER, the 32 year old multi-instrumentalist whose work is the subject of this long-play recording, is not overdue as a jazz leader-soloist on record. Born in 1936 in Leavenworth. Kansas, his musical training and jazz experience have led him through a complex maze of developmental stages, esthetic re­organizations, and maturational crises. These might, in the past 10 years, have been recorded on phonograph disc to some discographical and musicological profit for the listener, but I think, having known and heard the artist through this period, that the present recording would have been the first one really worth owning and continuing to hear over a long period of time. Because Foster in the past few years has finally begun to stabilize his musical philos­ophy after a period of self-doubt and eclectic experimentation with sounds and forms not true to his innerself.

As a result, he now emerges as in important jazz voice, and one of only two saxo­phonists, the other being Jerry Coker, who has developed a thor­oughly personal expression that stems from the joint influences of Les Konitz, Warne Marsh (the Tristano School) and Clare Fischer. Like Coker, Fischer, and the Tristanoites, Foster is a thoroughly grounded classicist, as a clarinetist, whose jazz ex­perience dates from hit earliest musical activities and are an immutable part of the man's entire personality and art. Like them, he believes in a freedom of improvisational form that is under­pinned with discipline and a strong relationship to compositional structure. And tike them, he practices the production of a musk that is full of warmth, love, and grace, but that is simultaneously alive with a pulsing swing and the poignancy of a truly basic jazz feeling. There is economy in his work, but it often fairly bursts with ebullience in its multi-noted passages that does not in any way finished quality, a full, whole, confident character that belies its spontaneity.

I first met Gary Foster at the University of Kansas, where he transferred after two years at Central College, Fayette, Missouri. At Kansas Foster was enrolled in the music department, majoring in clarinet and in music education. I did not meet him in this capacity, but as a jazz musician who, along with tenorist Nathan Davis (now a popular ex-patriot musician in Germany), Carmell Jones, and pianist Jay Fisher (now a Chicago-based musician), was making the music scene in and around Lawrence a lively one indeed. That was in 1957. Graduated from Kansas, he had a year of teaching while attending graduate school, in which, in his second year he studied saxophone and clarinet while pursuing music his­tory studies. In 1961, Foster and family moved to the Los Angeles area during the short-lived rise in interest that jazz was to have there following the popular West Coast school reign in the fifties. The early 60"s were not the best years for a young white saxo­phonist to establish himself in an active jazz life.

Many people had just discovered Rollins and Trane. and the long overdue rise from obscurity for the L. A. negro jazz artist was in full progress. As justified as that was, it ironically sent to or kept many a promising white musician in the underground, unless he hustled himself into a harder form of playing that took advantage of the new interest in overt soul music and the extroverted proclamation of the blues. There was a short time when, without satisfactory employment. Gary experimented with "hardening" his approach. But as he and others knew, Foster was in no way suited to that style. Fortunately, he secured a position teaching music with Berry & Grassmueck Music Co. in Pasadena (where he now administrates the studios, conducts with Warne Marsh and others a subdivisional unit for jazz-oriented students, and teaches privately). And even more fortunately, he met, in 1962, pianist-composer Clare Fischer.

Shortly thereafter, he became a student of Fischer, who re-es­tablished the flagging confidence of his pupil in the validity of his approach to jazz and at the same time helped to formulate a more sensitive and intricate approach to improvisation which no previous influence had been able to accomplish. Fischer was an enthusiastic student and scholar of the Tristano saxophonists aforementioned, as well as a well-spring of compositional and executional theory that Gary soaked up like a sponge. Besides the student-teacher relationship, Fischer also occasionally offered Foster opportunities to record and play in public that he had been almost denied for his first year on the coast

The present record is not Foster's first, although it is the first to feature his extended jazz playing. Gary has been a mainstay of the reed sections on several Fischer big band recordings. For the discographer (almost he alone) Foster's very first appearance on LP was as a member of the college all-stars led by trumpeter Don Jacoby in I960 (MGM LP E3881— see Gary in the red sweater?) on which recording he plays all tenor solos. Gradually, in the mid-1960's Foster has become a sought after player in the studios and on Jazz and dance gigs alike, and, as these notes go to press, he spends important playing time in the quintet of Jimmy Rowles and a group led by Fischer.”

Next up for Gary on Revelation was an appearance with tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh on his LP entitled Warne Marsh [Ne Plus Ultra Revelations #12] about which John William Hardy had this to say.

“In the late 1940's. a couple of years after I had been run­ning through the stylistic influence of the late Bud Powell, I happened to be listening to a jazz program on radio. I had turned on the program in the middle of a recording and was completely taken aback by a cascading line of such utter complexity played by two saxophones that my jaw dropped in astonishment. This was Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, and what I heard represented to me a new level of development in jazz that I was soon to plunge into. It was a development that manifested a high degree of melodic construction and harmonic usage that seemed such a logical development of what had just proceeded it. Often the melodic involvement, with displaced accents, cross meters and the like, would be so complex that the idea of playing it in a strict sense of time would go out the window.

The average reaction of the Lick player at that point would be: ‘Well, — they play a lot of notes, but man, they don't swing!’ — Which might have been part of my reaction except for the fact that I loved the notes they were playing. (Nobody seems to get bugged with the opposite: ‘He sure swings, but he keeps playing the same licks or someone else's vocabulary.’)

About four years back. Warne Marsh moved back home to Los Angeles and shortly thereafter we started working to­gether in my band. Sometimes in the course of the evening our rhythm section would be roaring to the point that he would be forced to play over it. The Warne Marsh that came out then was something very different! In this album on Subconscious-lee I think you'll find him approaching this. You almost feel like accusing him of swinging. Heaven For­bid! If Warne is not listened to for the sheer sake of Warne, then relative judgment will get in your way and you'll miss the point.

Gary Foster joined all this as a second generation orienta­tion and as a result you will find his playing much more metrically oriented. Still, together the two have honed these lines, these fingerbusting lines, to the point that in many in­stances they are played at a faster tempo than the originals. I think the best examples of Gary's playing are contained in the free piece that follows Subconscious-Lee and on 317 E. 32nd (based on the chord changes of "Out of Nowhere").

Many might mutter, ‘His tone is Konitz oriented’ and con­sider that a criticism. I find that irrelevant considering how well he plays und that I've had to listen for over twenty years to dozens of alto saxophonists trying to sound like Charlie Parker. Few succeeded…..”

Gary’s third recording for Revelation was in essence a leaderless session entitled Warne Marsh, Clare Fischer and Gary Foster Report of the 1^st Annual Symposium on Relaxed Improvisation [Revelation 17]. In his notes, John William Hardy explains the title’s context this way:

“Here is a session—in the best sense of the word. What is occasionally known as ‘Live!’ is usually no liver-er than a studio. The program is preplanned and the formality of the hall (or studio) establishes a context to be conformed to. The situation on 9 May 1972, in Clare Fischer's living room in Van Nuys, was much different. The music was allowed to create its own context. There was no leader—only an agree­ment that all participants would arrive about 7:00 p.m. and enjoy themselves—eating, drinking, playing, talking and re­laxing. Pete Welding and I set up the little Stellavox Sp-7 recorder, distributed some microphones and set forth to moni­tor the musical proceedings as they occurred. We made only a general effort to turn on the tape when the music started and nobody worried whether we had or not or whether a selection would finish before the tape ran out. There were certainly no second takes—or takes at all in the accepted sense. Just players, playing. Sometimes selections were dis­cussed and sometimes somebody just started playing, the chords were spelled out obviously for those unfamiliar in the first chorus, and then the thing went forward.”

Mr. Hardy steps aside as the annotator for Gary’s fourth Revelations LP - Grand Cru Classe’ [Revelation #19]- in favor of Michael James who in 1973 was described on the liner notes as a “… distinguished British Jazz Critic and frequent contributor to The Jazz Monthly.

Of Gary’s music, Mr. James observed:

“… Foster, both in this collection and the one which preceded it, indicates certain cardinal features of his approach.  … Foster has evinced a strong commitment to ortho­dox if complex chordal structures, and, as J.W. Hardy notes, thinks chordally better than most wind instrumentalists.  … [One of] Foster's [preferred] methods of expres­sion is a type of melodic density that sets them in a class apart from hackneyed blues riffs or ostensible originals hasti­ly thrown together just for economic convenience. As an illustration of this quality can be found in Foster's own comments on Bill Evans's Tune for a Lyric. ‘Melodically and harmonically it appeals to me,’ he says, ‘in the way it seems to evolve in a “through” composed man­ner. The repeat scheme is not so purely geometric as it is in many jazz tunes and the end of the song keeps delaying its inevitability in a way I really find enticing.’

Foster, then, in his continuing affiliation to established methods of extemporization and in his enthusiasm for melodically intricate lines braced by harmonic structures of con­siderable substance, may be viewed as something of a musical conservative in an era which has seen numerous players dis­carding, sometimes, one feels, in too doctrinaire a manner, conventions that had governed jazz improvising, until 1960 or thereabouts, for upwards of three decades. Yet in so far as that description evokes a hidebound, unadventurous spirit rather than an artist who seeks to retain and build upon the distilled wisdom of earlier generations, it is hopelessly inac­curate in Foster's case.

Not only has this been made plain by his occasional involvement in group improvisations not guid­ed by the usual harmonic precepts, … , but, more to the point, it becomes transparently clear as soon as he embarks upon his first solo chorus in the opening item of the present set. His improvisation flows naturally out of the song, devel­oping impetus as it progresses, and building, without false artifice or even any marked increase in tonal emphasis, towards its logical conclusion.

In fact the solo's communica­tive power derives mainly from the controlled accumulation of melodic interest within a predetermined rhythmic and har­monic continuum, rather than from any sudden shifts in phrase patterns or tonal coloring. Such an amalgam of grace­fulness and steadily gathering music intensity proclaims Fos­ter's allegiance to what might loosely be termed the Lester Young aesthetic, a school of thought which embraces such diverse stylists as Zoot Sims and Lee Konitz, placing as it does greater emphasis on melodic resourcefulness and con­tinuity of line man upon the more visceral stratagems of abrupt changes in volume or tone.

Foster, I believe, owes something to all three of these players, but his work never­theless possesses a truly personal flavor, transmitting a sunlit lyricism which, whatever their other qualities, is not an at­tribute one would readily associate with any of the other musicians named. In drawing this distinction one is reminded of the very individual use which, in a rather different area, the pianist Barry Harris has made of Bud Powell's vocabulary. …

For his fifth album with Revelation, Gary took matters into his own hands [so to speak] and wrote these comments for the liner notes:

“Kansas City Connections [Revelation #48].

In 1951, as a junior high school student in Leavenworth, Kansas, 35 miles from Kansas City, I first heard improvised jazz music at the hands of Olin Parker, my school hand director and musical inspiration. Olin brought jazz records and magazines about jazz to the band room and organized a small school jazz hand that hooked me to the music forever. I soon learned that, geographically, Kansas City had its own important place in the history of jazz and that, long before my ears were opened to the music, Charlie Parker, Jay McShann, Lester Young and Count Basic had put Kansas City on the jazz map.

In the following years I lived and studied near Kansas City. In the middle and late 1950's, Bob Brookmeyer, Carmell Jones, Jimmy Lovelace, Charlie Kynard and Frank Smith were the names I mast associated with the continuing tradition of Kansas City jazz. In recent years I have been fortunate to teach at the University of Missouri — Kansas City and to play in the area many times, under various circumstances, most often with the musicians heard on this recording.

The playing of my colleagues here is proof that jazz in Kansas City is in good health today. Carmell Jones (back home again), Herman Bell, Arch Martin, Kim Park, Mike Ning and many others help to keep the music alive there.

This recording came about through the eagerness and encouragement of Jim Nirsch. Jim is a valued friend and Kansas City nerve ending for jazz musicians from all parts of the world. A Kansas City connection.

Roots, family, friends and music are all Kansas City connections. Not to mention Kansas City barbecue!

Gary Foster, 1985”

Although my view of him is informed largely from impressions, in general, I couldn’t agree more with his long-time friend, Dick Wright’s description of Gary when he writes:

“Over the years, I have seen and heard Gary grow from an outstanding young Stan Getz-influenced tenor saxophonist to, today, a consummate artist on alto, tenor and soprano saxes, as well as clarinet (his first instrument) and flute. He is truly a ‘musician's musician’ who is held in the highest regard by fellow musicians as well as jazz lovers and jazz students of all ages. Gary … is equally at home in the recording studios, the class room and on the concert stage. …”

Somewhat ironically, I didn’t select a track from any of Gary’s wonderful recordings on Revelation Records to feature on the accompanying video montage.

Perhaps when you listen to his spellbinding performance on I Concentrate on You from his Make Your Own Fun CD on Concord [CCD-4459] you’ll understand why.

In all the years that I have been listening to this music, I never heard it played more beautifully by anyone.

Gary Foster is a very special musician.

The Four Freshman "Day In, Day Out"

 

The Four Freshmen: A Vocal Quartet with Quarter Tones [From The Archives]

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

I received so many requests to bring this feature up again, so here goes.

What's especially fun about this essay is that it "unlocks" the secret of how The Four Freshmen created their unique sound.

In retrospect, it’s amazing to consider having ever taken The Four Freshmen for granted.

Yet for many years, that’s exactly what I did.

I mean, as a Jazz vocal group, they were still right up there with The Pied Pipers, The Hi-Lo’s, and Mel Torme’s Mel-tones, but I was spoiled back in the days when The Four Freshman made their first, recorded appearances in the early 1950s.

Good vocal Jazz was everywhere, so one had a tendency in those days to expect marvelous music from a newly arrived group on the scene.

But somehow, The Four Freshmen demanded a closer listening and I kept going back and back and doing just that – listening more closely to the point when it finally dawned on me that something very special was going on in their music.

But what?

Why were The Four Freshmen above-the-line; why did I eventually come to view them as virtually being in a class by themselves?

The reasons for their uniqueness is in The Four Freshmen’s use of quarter tones and the manner in which they “voice” their chords as explained in the following excerpt from the insert notes to The Complete Capitol Four Freshmen Fifties Session, a nine-disc set issued by Michael Cuscuna and his team at Mosaic Records [MD9-203].

At least I had enough of a discriminating sense to jump on a copy of this set when it first appeared. It was issued in a limited edition of 3,500 and my copy is numbered “0079.”

The Mosaic set notes were prepared by Ross Barbour, one of the Freshmen’s founding members. In them, Ross not only describes what gave the group its distinctive sound, but also how the group got its start with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, an association that would continue for almost three decades, and ultimately came to be recorded by Capitol Records.

Ross’s annotations and remembrances are followed with an article by William H. Smith that also touches on the roots of the group and the reasons why The Four Freshmen successfully carry on to this day.

© -  Ross Barbour/Mosaic Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Bob Flanigan and Don and Ross Barbour are cousins. Our mothers were sisters. My brother Don and I are from Columbus, Indiana. Bob Flanigan is from Greencastle, Indiana.

When we were just grade-schoolers, we would go to our mothers' family reunions and at noon the Fodreas would all stand and sing the Doxology before we ate. (Praise God from whom all blessings flow, etc.) In mother's family, there were 10 girls and two boys. They all sang in quartets, choirs and choruses. They sang harmony so right it made the rafters ring. It took our breath away.

The way they sang those notes made a different sound from playing those notes on a keyboard. I never understood why they were so different until I read an article in an old Barbershopper's newsletter. The harmonizer of September 1954, Paul Vandervoort of Hey wood, Illinois, wrote the article, and he got his information from The Outline of Knowledge Encyclopedia, and an article entitled "Sound Physics."

It seems that in about 1700, the musical scale was quite complicated. An octave had 20 or more notes in it. Between F and G, for instance, there was F sharp, G double flat and G flat. That was called the "perfect diatonic scale."

Johann Sebastian Bach came along and changed all this. He formed what is known as the "tempered scale" by choos­ing 12 of the 20-plus notes, and having his piano tuned that way. It was a lot simpler, but the beautiful quarter tones were left out. People's ears could still hear them and harmony singers knew how to use them to make what are called over­tones, but they were just not on a keyboard anymore.

Bob, Don and I were hearing those overtones or harmonics as kids, and we became addicted to them. We couldn't get enough. I sang in quartets in high school and in college, and I sang with the Four Freshmen for 29 years. I never got enough. I have been a Freshmen fan since I retired undefeated in 1977, and I still need to hear overtones.

In our early Four Freshmen days, we rehearsed without instruments. If a chord we sang couldn't stand up and say its name (I'm a D-ninth or I'm an F-seventh), we would change it until it did.

We used bass and guitar for our background, but they never played the exact notes we were singing. Our harmony could happen almost unfettered by the demand of a key­board — demand that would channel us back into Bach's 12 half-steps per octave.

If my note was a major seventh, I could sing it on top of the note — sing it sharp, you might say, so it and the tonic note became a little less than a half-step apart. That's what makes it buzz in your ear.

If we wanted a dominant seventh to ring, we'd sing it on the bottom of the pitch — especially if the voice leading was going down through that dominant seventh.

A major third should be sung brightly on top of the pitch, and a minor third should hang on the bottom.

We were singing those notes not because they were writ­ten and the piano said the pitch was "there." We sang them because they harmonized. They made overtones in our ears.

And we didn't discover some great breakthrough in har­mony. Good barbershop singers do it all the time; in fact singers have been doing it since at least the year 1700.

It may be that we were the first modern vocal group the world noticed who put the emphasis on harmony and over­tones, but we won't be the last. Other groups are bound to succeed in doing it because there is something in people's ears that needs harmony. That thing can make your hair stand up when a chord rings. It can make you shout right out loud!

That article about "Sound Physics" goes on to say that Handel, the great composer, "could not stand to hear music played in the tempered scale." He had an organ built that would play all the notes in the perfect diatonic scale. Boy! That would be a bear to play!

In 1947, Hal Kratzsch was 22, Bob 21, Don 20 and I was 18. We were all freshmen at Arthur Jordan Conservatory in Indianapolis. We'd all sung in vocal groups before and singing harmony parts came naturally to us.

Bob had been a member of a Greencastle vocal group that had a radio show in Indianapolis for a while. He went into the service out of high school, and played trombone through his army time in Germany, except when the dance band needed a bass player. He learned to play bass on the job. After the service he enrolled in A.J.C. in 1947.

Don played guitar through high school and a couple of years in Arabia with the Air Force. I had graduated from high school in the spring of 1947. Don and I came to college together that fall.

Hal, who was from Warsaw, Indiana, played trumpet in high school and in the Navy in the South Pacific. He came from the service to Indiana University for a year before trans­ferring to A.J.C.

Hal and I met in theory class. He had the idea of putting together a quartet. At that time, we thought a modern vocal group needed a girl to sing lead, so Hal, Don and I rehearsed with a girl named Marilyn for almost a month, before we found out that Marilyn's mom wouldn't let her go sing with three guys in late-night places.

When we got Bob in the group, our sound really started to take shape. Bob's lead voice has influenced generations... strong and clear.

Hal knew from instinct how to sing the bottom part, and he did it his way. He seldom sang the tonic, and often sang the ninth or passing tones through the chords. His pitch was so secure, we could stand our chords up on his note.

Don had such a wide range. We needed his upper regis­ter in his second part, and he came through with it so well and so strong. I was a natural baritone or third voice. It was more natural for me to sing harmonies than to sing melodies. It was up to us to fill in — to color — that large area between Bob and Hal.

With voices like these we could make rainbows of color chords, so we did. In the beginning we chose our own notes — made up our own individual parts, but we didn't do it straight through a song. On Poinciana, we would agree to sing "oh" in unison. Then "poin" was a chord to solve. After we had that one, then we went for "ci" and the notes had to flow from "poin" to "ci", then on to "ana." Okay, let's try it from the top. Are there any chords we can make stronger? Let's try making two chords out of "ci" — when I do this, you do that. Maybe a whole hour goes by and you haven't tried all the ideas. But you should keep trying because the next idea may just make all of you jump and shout.

We were trying to sound like Stan Kenton's vocal group, The Pastels. There were five of them and four of us, but that didn't stop us. Mel Torme had a five-part group with Artie Shaw's band called The Mel Tones. We tried to copy them, too. The way it turned out, we invented a sound by trying to get a five-part sound with four voices. (Other elements to our sound came about serendipitously. At a show in El Paso on December 8, 1951, Don broke a high E string on his guitar, and he didn't have a spare. Well, the show had go on, so Don replaced it with a third string and tuned it an octave lower. From that day on, Don's guitar didn't sound like other guitars. It was great for our sound. The lower string added a density to the range where we sang.)

We went on the road Sept. 20, 1948, working lounges (most of them dingy dives) around the Midwest for a year and a half, honing our music and our stage presentation.

In February 1950, we were working the Pla Bowl Lounge in Calumet City, Illinois. We'd work until 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. and then we would go to jam sessions. The 19th was a Sunday night — the end of our week. Mondays were off. We went to the High Note in Chicago for a session that began about 4:00 a.m. Monday. The place was full of the right people — Marian McPartland, Roy Kral and Jackie Cain, Jeri Southern, and one of our favorites, Mary Ann McCall. She was on stage singing with the Max Miller Trio. It was a song we knew so we got up there, too, and sang "dooooo" with her. It must have sounded pretty good because at the end of the song, Mary Ann said on the microphone, "Hey, Woody, we're ready to go." A guy at the bar stood up and said something back to her. We caught our breath. It was Woody Herman!

In the next few minutes, he and Mary Ann explained how Woody was going to put together a new band in a few months; he would call it "The Band That Plays the Music You Want to Dance To," or some such title. He wanted us four to play in the band, and sing as a quartet a half dozen tunes a night.

We loved the Herman Herds and the way Mary Ann sang. Oh! It seemed that life couldn't get any better. Just one month later, Stan Kenton had us reaching for the moon (our own record contract) and believing it was possible.

Stan heard us in the Esquire Lounge in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, March 21. He was on tour with the Innovations Orchestra and some disc jockey friends brought Stan to hear us after his show. He must have understood that we didn't usually tremble and sound short of breath when we sang. He knew we were overwhelmed by his presence. It could be that our worshipping his every move triggered some of his devotion to our quartet.

He could tell we didn't know what we were doing. I heard him say in an interview one time that we were doing things by ear that were way beyond our musical education, but we were making sounds he liked to hear.

That night he planned for us to go to New York and meet him and Pete Rugolo. He would see that we made some good audition tapes for Capitol's executives to hear. He would talk those executives into signing us to our own contract, and we would begin making records. Stan made it happen just that way.

He'd later say, "You guys have gotta succeed, you can't fail. You're part of my ego!" Let me pause here in the story to explain that Stan had his managers handle our career. They found us work, and helped us choose uniforms. We received mail at Stan's 941 N. LaCienega address for two or three years, and we couldn't get him to take a penny for it. He didn't even want us to give him Christmas presents. The prestige he added to this quartet by just saying, "Stan Kenton likes the Four Freshmen," was priceless. The help­ful care he gave us year after year kept good things coming our way. I have said it before and it always sounds like I am bragging, but Stan treated us like we were his own kids. We were part of his ego.

On April 10, we left Green Bay on the 7:10 train to Chicago. We caught the 2:40 p.m. train to New York and tried to sleep that night, but we were too keyed up. None of us slept. Our dreams were coming true before our very eyes.

My diary says: "Tried to sing in the dining caboose, almost got thrown in the caboose, Yippee Ky-0-Ky-A."

We arrived in New York at 10:30 a.m. on April 11, full of youthful steam. We slept for an hour and a half at the Dixie Hotel before we went to Pete Rugolo's dressing room at the Paramount Theater. He was conducting the orchestra for Billy Eckstine.

We waited in the dressing room while Pete did the show. We could hear the show from there. Does life get better than this? When Pete came back, we sang a couple of tunes for him. Pete was pleased but surprised we sang for him since that's what we were to do the next day in the studio. Later that night, we went to Bop City to hear Lionel Hampton and the George Shearing group with Denzil Best.

The next evening (Wednesday April 12), we ate at the Automat and went to Pete's dressing room again, where we met up with Stan Kenton and his manager, Bob Allison, who gave us $65. This was travel money and we thought, at the time, it was from Capitol records. Now we know that Capitol didn't pay groups to go to New York to record audition tapes. That money must have come from Stan himself, just to make sure that the cost of the trip didn't leave us broke.

We were in good hands, and we were on our way!”

  

© -  William H. Smith/The Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Four Freshman: A Vocal Group at the Top of Its Class

By WILLIAM H. SMITH August 20, 2008

The Wall Street Journal

“Widely known for basketball, the Indy 500, and a plethora of covered bridges, Indiana also proudly claims The Four Freshmen as its own. The legendary vocal/instrumental group will celebrate its 60th anniversary at a reunion, sponsored by The Four Freshmen Society, of band members past and present -- there have been 23 lineups to date -- at the Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre, Aug. 21 to 23. Commemorative concerts continue to air across the country during PBS fund-raising drives, and a highlight of 2008 will be the Freshmen's Oct. 25 performance before Russian fans at the prestigious Great Hall of the Moscow Performing Arts Center.

Although not the first successful vocal group, The Four Freshmen was, without question, the most innovative. Inspired by Artie Shaw's Mel-Tones with Mel Torme, as well as by The Pastels, a five-voice group with Stan Kenton, the Freshmen soon developed their own unique style of harmony -- singing a five-part sound with four voices and playing instruments as well. Every vocal group that followed -- except for those that sang with no or minimal chord structure -- was influenced by the Freshmen, including The Lettermen, Manhattan Transfer, Take Six, the Beatles and the Beach Boys. (At The Four Freshmen's Jan. 14 performance at Palm Desert, Calif.'s McCallum Theatre, I sat in the audience next to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson -- one of the Freshmen's most enthusiastic fans, who listened to their records as a teenager and wanted to emulate their unique sound in his arrangements.)

The close harmony of this unique quartet had its genesis at Butler University's Jordan Conservatory in Indianapolis, when Hal Kratzch, along with Don Barbour and his brother Ross, formed "Hal's Harmonizers." In an interview at his home in Simi Valley, Calif., Ross Barbour recalled that "we tried a few lead singers, but it was only after our cousin Bob Flanigan, with his strong high voice, joined the group that we started getting that Freshmen sound." The four went on the road in 1948 as The Toppers, but the name was soon changed to The Four Freshmen. (Both Ross Barbour and Bob Flanigan, the only survivors of that quartet, received honorary doctorates at Butler this May.)

Stan Kenton heard the Freshmen in March 1950 at the Esquire Lounge in Dayton, Ohio, and gave them their first big break by introducing the group to his own recording label, Capitol Records. The Freshmen had developed their trademark sound by structuring chords much like the trombone section of Kenton's own band, and Mr. Barbour maintains that the success of one of their biggest-selling albums, "Four Freshmen and Five Trombones," can in a large way be attributed to Pete Rugolo, the arranger the quartet and Kenton shared.

The Four Freshmen's signature tune is "It's a Blue World Without You," released in 1952, a song that continues to send chills up and down the spines of audiences as soon as the first a capella chords resound. But the Freshmen gained their first national exposure when they appeared on CBS's "Steve Allen Show" on Christmas Day in 1950, and their popularity lasted not only through the decade that later gave birth to rock 'n' roll but into the mid-1960s -- the era of Bob Dylan and the Beatles -- and beyond. Despite this generational change, the Freshmen continued playing universities around the country and, according to Mr. Barbour, "the multitude of college kids remained loyal fans."

Over their 60 years of performing throughout the U.S. and abroad, the Freshmen have recorded some 45 albums and 70 singles, and have received numerous honors, including six Grammy Awards. Down Beat magazine awarded the quartet the Best Jazz Vocal group honor in 1953 and again, 57 years later, in 2000, an example of the quartet's timeless appeal. The present lineup placed No. 1 in this same category in the 2007 JazzTimes Readers Poll.

"The Four Freshmen have endured for the simple reason that they are top in their class," said Charles Osgood, anchor of "CBS Sunday Morning," when a profile of the group aired in August 1994. Steven Cornelius of the Toledo Blade put it this way in April 2005: "There is no Dorian Gray youth potion at work, just a healthy retirement system." When a member leaves, he is replaced with an equally talented musician.

The present lineup of this multifaceted, ultra-talented quartet of vocalists and instrumentalists now comprises Vince Johnson, baritone, playing bass and guitar; Bob Ferreira, bass voice, playing drums; Brian Eichenberger, lead voice, playing guitar and bass; and Curtis Calderon, singing second part, and playing trumpet and flugelhorn. Although the other three Freshmen joke about it, Mr. Johnson accompanies his bass with some of the best whistling since Bing Crosby.

Bob Flanigan -- introducing the current quartet on their recent DVD, "The Four Freshmen Live From Las Vegas" -- vows that "this group is the best Four Freshmen of all time." On the DVD, Mr. Flanigan, reflecting on his 44 years with the Freshmen, remembers all the "Bad roads . . . Bad food . . . Good and Bad Hotels . . . and millions of air-miles in DC3s to 747s."

Long live The Four Freshmen. May they never graduate!

Mr. Smith writes about jazz and the big-band era for the Journal

For tour dates and venues, go to www.fourfreshmen.com.”