Marian McPartland: “The Key of D is Daffodil Yellow”

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

“I went into the Hickory House in nineteen fifty-two, and I was there most of the next eight years. The best trio I had was Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums. Sal Salvador introduced me to Joe one night. He was at the bar, a skinny bean pole in a raincoat, and he looked like a studious young chemist. I asked him to sit in, and I was flabbergasted. I'd never heard anyone play drums like that. When Mousie Alexander, who was with me then, left, Joe joined us, and I was so enamored of his play­ing that I let him play a lot of solos."

Marian McPartland looks up at the ceiling and laughs. "Whenever I think of Joe, I think of swinging. It was im­possible not to swing with him.”

There are two things I like best regarding the following essay.

The first is that it is about Marian McPartland, one of my all-time favorite Jazz pianists.

The second is that it was penned by Whitney Balliett, one of my all-time favorite writers.

Whitney’s essay was originally published in the early 1970’s in The New Yorker Magazine, a learned publication for which he wrote on the subject of Jazz for many years.

The piece antedates Marian’s Piano Jazz, an NPR program that would bring her well-deserved acclaim and more than likely a lot of enjoyment as her program consisted of interviews with just about every exponent of Jazz piano on the planet.

A marvelously talent Jazz pianist and often overlooked, I will always be grateful to Marian for bringing drummer Joe Morello into my life by way of her Marian McPartland at the Hickory House, a 10” Capitol LP [574] which was recorded in September 5, 1954.

In his piece, Whitney talks about New York and Jazz in New York as though they were the center of the civilized world. Of course, each was at the time.

This is a lengthy piece that for all intents and purposes reflects on a world gone by.

It’s a fascinating story about a singularly talented woman who has contributed so much to Jazz over the years.

Amazingly, at it’s conclusion, Marian would add another forty years to its telling!

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought you might like to share in a revisit with Whitney and Marian, chatting away in her cozy flat – one day, when the world was young.

© -Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Four scenes from the life of Marian McPartland, the unique and graceful English-born jazz pianist. The first scene takes place early in the spring.

She is seated at a small upright piano in a corner of an ele­mentary-school classroom on Long Island. She has the polished, easy, expectant air that she has when she is about to start a set in a nightclub. Her back is ruler-straight, she is smiling, and her hands rest lightly on the keyboard. And, as always, she is impeccably got up. Her blond hair, shaded by pale grays, is carefully arranged, and she is wearing a faultlessly tailored pants suit. Twenty or so six-year-olds, led into the classroom a few moments before by a pair of teachers, are seated at her feet in a semicircle. She looks at a list of kinds of weather the children have prepared. "All right, dears, what have we here?" she says in a musical English alto. "Did all of you do this?"

There is a gabble of "yes"es.

"Hail, snow, hurricane, cloudy day, rain, twister, fog, wind, the whole lot. Now, I'm going to pick one out and play some­thing, and I want you to tell me what kind of weather I'm play­ing about." She bends over the keyboard and, dropping her left hand into her lap, constructs floating, gentle, Debussy chords with her right hand. A girl with a budlike face and orange hair shoots a hand directly at her and says, "Rain, gentle rain."

"That's very good. It is rain, and gentle rain, too. Now what's this?" She crooks her arms and pads lazily up and down the keyboard on her forearms. She stops and smiles and gazes around the faces. There is a puzzled silence. A boy with porcupine hair and huge eyes raises a hand, falters, and pulls it down with his other hand. "Fog," says the little girl.

Marian McPartland laughs. "That's very close, dear, but it's not exactly right." She pads around on the keyboard again. "What's like a blanket on the ground, a big blanket that goes as far as you can see?" The large-eyed boy shoots his hand all the way up. "Snow! Snow! Snow!"

"Right! But what have we now?" Dropping her left hand again, she plays a quick, light, intricate melody in the upper registers. "Twister!" a pie-faced boy shouts. "No, hurricane," a boy next to him says.

"Could you play it again?" one of the teachers asks.

"Well, I'll try." She plays the melody, but it is not the same. It is a delightful improvisation. There are more notes this time, and she plays with greater intensity. "I think it's wind'' the orange-haired girl says.

"It is wind, and wind is what we get when we have one of these." She launches into loud, stabbing chords that rush up and down the keyboard and are broken by descending glissan-dos. She ends on a crash. "Twister! Twister!" the pie-faced boy cries again.

She shakes her head. "Now, listen, listen more closely." Again she improvises on her invention, and before she is finished there are shouts of "Thunder!" "Lightning!" "Twister!"

"I don't think I'd even know what a twister sounds like," she says, laughing. "But the rest of you are very close. Which is it —thunder or lightning?" She plays two flashing glisses. "Lightning!" a tiny, almond-eyed girl yells.

"Very, very good. Now this one is hard, but it's what we have a lot of in the summer." She plays groups of crystalline chords in a medium tempo. It is sunlight. A cloudy day and a breeze and a hurricane follow, and when the children's atten­tion begins to wane, she starts "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." The children get up and stand around the piano and sing, Two of them lean against her. She finishes one chorus and starts another, and at her behest the children clap in time. She gradually speeds up the tempo until the clapping is con­tinuous and the children, hopping around as if they were on pogo sticks, are roaring with laughter. She finishes with a loose, ringing tremolo. The teachers thank her and sweep the children out of the room. She takes a lipstick out of an enor­mous handbag and fixes her mouth. Then, in the empty room, she starts noodling a medium-tempo blues. But soon it is all

there: the long, tight, flowing single-note lines and the rich, sparring chords; the flawless time; the far-out, searching har­monies; the emotional content, passed so carefully from genera­tion to generation of jazz musicians; and the balancing, smooth­ing taste. She plays three or four minutes, and then, as a group of ten-year-olds comes billowing through the classroom door, she switches to the Beatles' "Hey Jude."

Marian McPartland lives in an apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street. It is on the seventeenth floor, and it faces south. From the windows of her compact living room, the Empire State and the Chrysler Building and New York Hospital are knee-deep in an endless wash of brownstones. There is a small terrace, with chairs and a couple of boxes of geraniums. A grand piano, which faces away from the view, dominates the living room. Paintings hang on two walls, and the third is covered with photographs, most of which she is in. The business end of the piano is covered with sheet music and musical manuscript, and there are careful stacks of records on the floor below the photographs. She is wearing a flowered top and pants and a big leather belt, and she looks mint-fresh. She makes tea and sits down facing the panorama. She is extremely handsome. Her face, with its long, well-shaped nose, high forehead, wide mouth, and full chin, is classically English. She smiles a great deal and keeps her chin pointed several degrees above the horizon. She has the figure of a well-proportioned twenty-year-old.

"I've been teaching four or five years," she says, crossing her legs and taking a sip of tea. "Clem De Rosa, a drummer and the musical director of the Cold Spring Harbor High School, got me going. I teach about six weeks out in that area every year. I started out doing assemblies with a quartet and then with a trio, but I didn't think we were getting across to the kids. Last year, I went into the classrooms with just a bass player, and this year I'm doing it by myself. I love to work with the little ones — especially the slower ones. I guess it has to do with listening. I'm trying to make them shed their fidgeting and their fears and make them listen. Very few of us ever learn how. I think I was first made conscious of it when I was in kindergarten in England and we had a teacher who used to take us on long walks in the woods and fields and make us listen to the birds and the wind and the water lapping in brooks. During the summer, I teach and play at college clinics, and it's terrific fun. Musicians like Clark Terry and Billy Taylor and Gary Burton do a lot of it, too, so there are always wonderful people to play with, to say nothing of the kids themselves. I wish there had been clinics and such when I was growing up. Becoming a jazz musician in those days, with my background and my sex, was like pulling teeth. It just 'wasn't done,' as my father used to say. I was born in Slough, near Windsor. But we moved to Woolwich a few months later, and then to Brom­ley, Kent, when I was about four. Bromley was much nicer than Woolwich, which resembled Astoria, New York.”

“My family was upper-middle-class and conservative. All my mother's side lived around Slough and Eton and Windsor. My great-uncle sang at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and my grandmother lived in The Cloisters, on the grounds. Queen Elizabeth knighted another great-uncle, and now he's Sir Cyril. He and Aunt Sylvia came over when I was working in New York at the original Hickory House in the fifties, and they were shocked and mystified by the whole scene. Uncle Cyril took me aside, between sets at the club, and said, 'Mar­garet' — I was born Margaret Marian Turner — 'Margaret, does your father know what you're doing?' My father was a civil engineer who was involved with machine tools. He was an avid gardener, and clever at everything he did. When I was quite little, he made a goldfish pond with all sorts of pretty rocks on the bottom. He let me help him, and it was a great source of pride. I was Daddy's girl, in spite of the fact that I think he would have liked me to be a boy. My mother always used to say to me when she was annoyed, 'You're just like your father, Margaret — pigheaded!' I think they did quite a lot of bickering and carrying on. My mother was rather a critical person, but I suppose it was her upbringing. It was forever 'Do this, do that, pick up behind you, don't be late.' I was harassed by it, and it took me years to grow out of it.”

“My schooling was of the times. I started in at a one-room school, where I drew pictures of little houses with snow falling. Then, for less than a year, I went to Avon Cliffe, a private school run by two well-meaning women. I was a frog in the school play, and I was not pleased by that. There was a nursing home, next to the school, where my grandmother spent her last days, and she'd wave to me out of the window every afternoon when I left. After that, I was sent to a convent school. My sister, Joyce — there were just the two of us — was always ailing with bronchitis, and I think my mother enjoyed hovering over her. But I was the strong, healthy ox. Even so, I was scared of some of the nuns. I was hopeless in some subjects, and they were always grabbing me by the neck and locking me in the laundry room. My mother said I'd have to go to boarding school if I didn't shape up. I didn't, so they put me in Stratford House, in a neighboring town. It was a nice school for nice girls from nice families. We had a matron with a starched headdress and we were told when it was our turn to take a bath and we were taught how to make a bed with hospital corners. I couldn't stand the school food or the smell of cooking, and I got sick headaches. But there were good things. I think I learned how to string letters and words and sentences together on paper. And I designed the school emblem — three sweet peas, en­twined. It was quite beautiful. And I wrote the school song. "

“I had started playing the piano when I was three or four. It was at my great-uncle Harry's, and the keyboard was all yellow. And I remember playing, sitting up high on a stool, at kindergarten with children all gathered around. My mother would make me play for her friends, and while I played they all talked. When I finished, she'd say, 'Oh, that was very nice, dear.' I was angry, but I wouldn't have dared pop out with 'You weren't listening!' I didn't realize that the pattern of my life was already set. I still play while people talk and then applaud. When I was nine, I asked my mother if I could take piano lessons. She said, 'Margaret, you already play the piano very well. I think you should take up the violin.' We went up to London and bought a violin, and I took lessons, but I never enjoyed the instrument.”

“I played in concerts and competitions, but then my teacher died, and that put an end to it. I was studying elocution with Miss Mackie, at Stratford House, around this time, and I had a crush on her. I used to ask my mother if she'd invite her over for tea or dinner. Mummy was a nervous hostess, but finally Miss Mackie came, and it was she who advised my parents to send me up to the Guildhall School of Music, in London. My parents were always saying, 'You better think of what you're going to do after school; we aren't going to keep you forever,' which made me feel like a bit of aging merchandise. I went up to London and played for Sir Landon Ronald, who was the head of the Guildhall, and I got in. I commuted every day from Bromley, and I really worked. I studied composition and theory and piano, and I won a scholarship in composition. I took up violin again, be­cause we students had to have a second instrument, and I studied singing with Carrie Tubb, a retired opera singer. The other day, I came across six pieces I wrote then. They have titles like Tas Seul' and 'Reverie,' and actually they are pretty well put together. But I'd never claim then that anything I'd done was good. The reaction would have been immediate: 'How can you be so immodest, Margaret!''

The telephone rings, and Marian McPartland talks for a minute. "That was Sam Goody's. They want more of my records. Some women buy fur coats; I have my own record company. It's called Halcyon, and I've put out four albums to date — three with myself and rhythm, and some duets with Teddy Wilson, which turned out surprisingly well. Sherman Fairchild helped me get it going. He died two years ago, and he was a great jazz buff and a friend for twenty years. Bill Weilbacher, who has his own label, Master Jazz Recordings, gives me advice, and a small packaging firm handles the dis­tribution and such. A printing of five thousand LPs costs around fifteen hundred dollars. Whatever I make I put right back into the next record. The big companies are impossible, and a lot of musicians have their own labels. Stan Kenton has his, George Shearing has his, Clark Terry has his, and Bobby Hackett has started one. I think this do-it-yourself movement is terribly important, particularly in the area of reissues. What with all the mergers among recording companies, I'm afraid of valuable records being lost. Not long ago, I wrote the company that recorded me at the Hickory House in the fifties and asked if they intended reissuing any of the albums. I think they'd have some value now. But I got the vaguest letter back. So they won't reissue the records, nor will they let me. It's not right. I think that musicians should get together catalogues of everything they've recorded and perhaps form some sort of cooperative for reissuing valuable stuff. Anyway . . ."

Marian McPartland laughs, and says she is going to make lunch.

She sets a small table and puts out pumpernickel and a fresh fruit salad. "I was listening to everything indiscriminately at the Guildhall, and I was beginning to learn all sorts of tunes. I have fantastic recall, but I don't know where half the music that is stored in my head has come from. I also started listen­ing to jazz — the Hot Club of France, Duke Ellington's 'Blue Goose,' Sidney Bechet, Teddy Wilson, Bob Zurke, Art Tatum, and the wonderful Alec Wilder octets. I was playing a sort of cocktail piano outside of the classroom, and once, when my piano professor at the Guildhall, a solemn little white-haired man named Orlando Morgan, heard me, he said, 'Don't let me catch you playing that rubbish again.' Well, he never got the chance. One day I sneaked over to the West End, where Billy Mayerl had a studio. He played a lot on the BBC, and he was like Frankie Carle or Eddy Duchin. I played 'Where Are You?' for him, and a little later he asked me to join a piano quartet he was putting together — Billy Mayerl and His Claviers. I was twenty, and I was tremendously excited. The family were horrified, but I said I'd go back to the Guildhall when the tour was over. My father charged up to London to see 'this Billy Mayerl/ He didn't want any daughter of his being preyed on, and he wanted to know what I'd be paid — ten pounds a week, it turned out. So my parents agreed. The quartet included Billy and George Myddelton and Dorothy Carless and myself. She and I were outfitted in glamorous gowns, and we played music-hall stuff. We played variety theaters — a week in each town. We lived in rented digs in somebody's house. If it was 'all in,' it included food. Some of the places were great, and they'd even bring you up a cup of tea in the morning. Mean­while, my family had moved to Eastbourne.”

“The tour with Billy lasted almost a year, and then I joined Carroll Levis's Discoveries, a vaudeville show, and I was with them until the early years of the war. By this time, my family had given up on me. But my father would catch me on his business trips, and he'd come backstage and wow all the girls in the cast. I was going around with the manager of the show. He was a come­dian, and he was also Jewish. My father would take us out to dinner and he would manfully try not to be patronizing. But it was beyond him. He would have liked me to work in a bank or be a teacher, and here I was playing popular music and going around with someone who was not 'top drawer.' I don't think it was real anti-Semitism; you just didn't go around with Jews and tradespeople. When I was five or six, and my mother found out that one of my friends was the daughter of a liquor-store owner, I wasn't allowed to see her anymore."

The phone rings again, and Marian McPartland talks with animation. "That was my dear friend Alec Wilder. He wanted to know if I'd done any writing today. He's incessant, but he's right. For a long time I procrastinated and procrastinated. I'd start things and let them sit around forever before finishing them. Alec gave me a set of notebooks, and I jot ideas down in them in cabs and at the hairdresser. Tony Bennett recorded my 'Twilight World,' which Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for, and it's just come out on Tony's new LP. Johnny is another great friend. One evening, he and Ginger, his wife, and his mother came up here, and Johnny sat right over there by the piano and sang about fifteen songs. It was a marvelous ex­perience." Marian McPartland clears the table, and sits down in the living room with a fresh cup of tea.

"In nineteen forty-three, I volunteered for ENSA, which was the English equivalent of the USO. I traveled all over England with the same sort of groups I'd been with, and then I switched to the USO, which paid better and which meant working with the Americans! Boy, the Americans! The fall of nineteen forty-four, we were sent to France. We were given fatigues and hel­mets and mess kits, and we lived in tents and ate in orchards and jumped into hedgerows when the Germans came over. At first I played accordion because there weren't any pianos around. I met Fred Astaire and Dinah Shore and Edward G. Robinson, and I worked with Astaire in a show that we gave for Eisenhower. We moved up through Caen, which was all rubble, and into Belgium, where I met Jimmy McPartland. A jam session was going on in a big tent, and I was playing, and in walked Jimmy and saw me — a female white English musician — and the my-God, what-could-be-worse expression on his face was clear right across the room. But it was a case of propinquity, and in the weeks to come it was Jimmy on cornet and me and a bass player and whatever drummer we could find. We'd go up near the front and play in tents or outside, and it was cold. He annoyed me at first because he almost always had this silly grin on his face, but I found out that it was be­cause he was drinking a great deal. Somewhere along the line he said, 'Let's get married.' I didn't believe him, so one morn­ing I went over to his place very early, when I knew he'd be hung over and close to reality, and asked him if he really meant it, and he said sure and took a drink of armagnac. I guess I was madly in love with him. We were married in February, in Aachen, and we played at our own wedding.

"When we got to New York, early in nineteen forty-six, we went straight to Eddie Condon's, in the Village. I was so ex­cited I couldn't stand it. Jimmy sat in and so did I, even though my left wrist, which I'd broken in a jeep in Germany, was still in a cast. We stayed for a while with Gene Krupa, then we went to Chicago to stay with Jimmy's family. A colonel with our outfit had given the news of my marriage to my parents when he was on leave in England. My father was stiff-upper-lip, but Mummy told me she cried a whole day. I guess my not telling them first was a rotten thing to do, but we were so isolated. You couldn't just pick up a phone at the front and tell them you were going to get married. But when Jimmy finally met them, he charmed them completely. My mother was really crippled with arthritis by then, and he made her laugh, and Jimmy took my father to the movies. They told me, 'He's not like an American. He's so polite/ In Chicago, I became greatest of friends with Jimmy's daughter, Dorothy, who was very beautiful and just fifteen. Jimmy had been married before, and Dorothy had been their only child. Jimmy had sent a lot of money back from Europe, and the first six months in Chicago were spent hanging out and treating people. All anybody seemed to do was drink, including Jimmy, and eventually it got to be one crisis after another. I left him a couple of times, and once I even booked passage on the Queen Elizabeth. But it was all done without much thought; I seemed such a brain­less person then. And I think I must have been quite awful to Jimmy. One of Mummy's dire predictions was If you become a musician, Margaret, you'll marry a musician and live in an attic.' And that's exactly what happened; our first place in Chicago was a furnished room in an attic. But there were a lot of nice times, too. Jimmy and I started working together, and Jimmy was always marvelous in that he was proud of me, he wanted to show me off. We worked with Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Anita O'Day, and I met Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And we'd go fishing up in Wisconsin and sit there by some lake and cook fish and eat them and watch the sun rise. I had learned all the good old Dixieland tunes from Jimmy, but I was also listening to the new sounds — Charlie Ventura and Lennie Tristano and Charlie Parker.

"Jimmy and I had split up, musically, by the early fifties, and my first gig all by myself in America was at the St. Charles Hotel, in St. Charles, Illinois, and not long after that I left for New York. I played solo piano at Condon's and then I went into the Embers, with Eddie Safranski on bass and Don Lamond on drums. Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge were brought in as guest stars, and we backed them. I was so nervous I had to write down what I was supposed to say at the close of each set. I played Storyville, in Boston, and then I went into the Hickory House in nineteen fifty-two, and I was there most of the next eight years. The best trio I had was Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums. Sal Salvador introduced me to Joe one night. He was at the bar, a skinny bean pole in a raincoat, and he looked like a studious young chemist. I asked him to sit in, and I was flabbergasted. I'd never heard anyone play drums like that. When Mousie Alexander, who was with me then, left, Joe joined us, and I was so enamored of his play­ing that I let him play a lot of solos."

Marian McPartland looks up at the ceiling and laughs. "Whenever I think of Joe, I think of swinging. It was im­possible not to swing with him. And whenever I think of swinging, I think metaphorically. Swinging is like being on a tightrope or a roller coaster. It's like walking in space. It's like a souffle: it rises and rises and rises. The fingers and the mind are welded together. But it's dangerous. You have to leave spaces in your playing. You can't go on like a typewriter. Sometimes I do, though, and I leave no note unplayed. It's hard to say what goes on in your head when you're swinging, when you're really improvising. I do know I see the different keys in colors — the key of D is daffodil yellow, B major is maroon, and B flat is blue. Different musicians spark you into different ideas, which is why I like to play with new people all the time. Especially the younger musicians. They're fearless. Joe used to play enormously complicated rhythmic patterns once in a while and confuse me, and I'd get mad. Now I'd just laugh. Playing with lots and lots of different people is like feeding the computer: what they teach you may not come out right away, but it will eventually. Unless you have a row with someone just before you play, your state of mind doesn't affect you. You can feel gloomy, and it will turn out a marvelous night. Or you can feel beautiful, and it will be a terrible night. When I started out, I had the wish, the need, to compete with men. If somebody said I sounded like a man, I was pleased. But I don't feel that way anymore. I take pride in being a woman. Of course, I have been a leader most of my career, and that helps. I don't feel I've ever been discriminated against job-wise. I have always been paid what I was worth as a musician. So I feel I've been practicing women's lib for years.”

"The Hickory House was a good period for Jimmy and me. He was on the wagon and we were both working, and we lived on the West Side. For the first time in my life, I began spend­ing all my waking hours doing things that had to do with just me, and one of them was a big romance that went on, or off and on, for years. But I wanted to keep things together with Jimmy, and we bought a little house out in Merrick, Long Island, and Jimmy's daughter came and lived with us. Joe Morello left in nineteen fifty-six to join Dave Brubeck, and it was terrible, but he had to move on. In nineteen sixty-three, after the Hickory House gig was over and I'd worked at the Strollers Club, in the old East Side music hall called The Establishment, I went with Benny Goodman. I thought I'd be perfect for Benny, because I had worked so long as a sideman with Jimmy, and of course Jimmy and Benny played together in Chicago as kids. But I had the feeling I wasn't fitting in. Bobby Hackett was in the band, and he'd tell me, 'Marian, don't play such far-out chords behind Benny,' and I'd say, 'Well, why doesn't Benny say something to me?' One night, Benny and I had a couple of drinks, and I told him I knew he wasn't happy with me and to get someone else. All he said was 'Oh really, you don't mind?' and he got John Bunch. So all of a sudden, nothing seemed right — my work, my marriage, my romance. When I got back to New York, I started going to a psychiatrist, and I stayed with him six years. He was tough but very good. He indirectly precipitated a lot of things. The romance finally broke up, and I cried for a week. Jimmy and I got divorced. I didn't really want to do it, and neither did he, but it turned out we were right. Jimmy hasn't had a drink in five years, and I'm twice as productive. We've never lost touch with each other. We still talk on the phone almost every day, and he stops by all the time. In fact, he said he'd come by today."

The doorbell rings, and Marian McPartland jumps up. "Speak­ing of the devil! That'll be the old man now." Jimmy McPart­land comes into the living room at ninety miles an hour, gives her a peck on the cheek, plumps a big attaché case down on the coffee table, takes off his blazer, and sits down. McPartland is sixty-five, but he doesn't look over fifty. His handsome Irish face glows, and he is salty and dapper. He is wearing a striped button-down shirt and a foulard tie and blue checked pants.

He carries his considerable girth the way Sydney Greenstreet did — as a badge rather than a burden. His credentials are all in order — the founder, along with Bud Freeman and Dave Tough and Eddie Condon, of the Chicago school of jazz; the first and foremost of Bix Beiderbecke's admirers ("I like you, kid," Beiderbecke told him. "You sound like me, but you don't copy me"); and a still lyrical and inventive cornetist — and he wears them well. He opens the attaché case. It has a cornet in it, and several hundred photographs. He puts the cornet be­side him on the sofa and dumps the pictures on the coffee table. "My God, will you look at these, Marian," he says, in a booming voice. "I found them the other day out at the house, and some of them go back thirty or forty years. There's your father, and there we are, with Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Shavers and Louis Bellson. And here we are on the ship coming over. Look at you in the GI togs and look at me. Thinsville."

She leans over his shoulder and giggles.

"Here we are playing in that pub in Eastbourne when we went to visit your family.

And here you are holding a fish we caught in Wisconsin."

"They should be put in a book, Jimmy. They'll just get lost." McPartland pulls a tape out of the attaché case.

"A guy gave me this on my South African trip, a couple of weeks ago. I'd never heard it before. We made it in England in nineteen forty-nine. You were on piano and you wrote the arrangements. It'll surprise you."

She puts the tape on a machine, and Bix Beiderbecke's "In a Mist" starts. A complex ensemble passage introduces a Jimmy McPartland solo. "Listen to that intro," she says. "How awful."

"It's not, it's not. The clarinet player is out of tune. You know, I don't sound bad. Not bad at all." The tape finishes, and McPartland opens his mouth and points at one of his upper front teeth. "Look at thiff," he says to her through his finger. "The damn toof if moving back. Walking right back into my mouf."

She stares at the tooth, frowns, and straightens up. "You should go to Dr. Whitehorn, Jimmy."

"I don't know. I think I'll have to move my embouchure. I've already started, and it's a bitch of a job — changing an embouchure youVe had almost fifty years." He walks over to the window and puts his cornet to his mouth. He makes a little sound halfway between a puff and a grunt, takes the mouth­piece away, makes the sound again, takes the mouthpiece away again, and so on for two or three minutes. The room is silent except for the mysterious little sounds, but suddenly three or four full notes come out. "There. That's better. But it's going to take a hell of a lot more work."

"Jimmy, are we still going out to dinner?"

"Sure, babe. That Brazilian place around the corner you like so much."

"I'll go get dressed."

McPartland goes through his embouchure priming process once more. Then he shuffles through the photographs. "Marian is amazing. There's no one I'd rather be with as a person, as an all-around human being. I have terrific respect for her as a musician and as a person. She's talent personified. Musically, she has that basic classical training, and she's meshed that and her jazz talent. She's just begun to do it really successfully in the past two or three years.   And she's a great accompanist.  She flows with horns and singers like a conversation. Marian didn't have good time when I first heard her.   Her enthusiasm was overwhelming, and she'd rush the beat. I'd tell her to go along with the rhythm, to take it easy. She sounded like Fats Waller, and, in fact, the first tune I ever heard her play was his 'Honeysuckle Rose.' It was in this tent in Belgium.   I go in and there's a girl playing piano and she looks English.  I thought, God, this is awful.   I wouldn't play with her until I'd had a couple of drinks.  I proposed after six or seven weeks. Real offhand. If it doesn't work out,' I'd say, 'you can just go back to England.'   She tried to act real GI, but I could see she was a fine, well-bred person and not a Chicago juvenile delinquent like me.”  

“My father was a boxer and a musician and a professional baseball player with Anson's Colts, which were the forerunners of the Chicago Cubs.   He didn't take a drink until he was twenty-one, and then he never stopped.  My brother Dick and I built a reputation as tough little punks, and we were almost sent to reform school, but my mother saved us.  She was a schoolteacher from Glasgow, and she knew German and worked as a translator in court for all the Jewish people.  We were hauled up before the judge, but he knew my mother and told her he'd let us off if she moved us to another neighborhood, and she did.   She was a wonderful woman, and she always treated me like King James himself. She had seven sisters, and her name was Jeanne Munn.   I'd go to her father's house every Sunday — his name was Dugald Munn, and he was an inventor — and I'd get fifteen cents for listening to him read from the Bible.  He had a wee bit of a brogue, and I couldn't understand a word he said. So visiting Marian's parents was like being in an English movie to me. They were mid-Victorian in style. Her mother was in a wheel­chair and very well-dressed and very particular. Everything at a certain time, everything regulated. Tea at four, dinner at eight. If I was late coming back from fishing or golf, Marian's mother would say, 'James, you're late. We've started our tea/ Her father, who was a great engineer, used to knock his brains out in his garden, and I'd help him until the pull of golf or fishing got too strong. He was a nice, conservative gent."

Marian McPartland has been standing for some moments in front of the sofa. She is in a Pucci-type dress and white boots, and she has a fur coat over one arm. "Daddy once slapped my hand for saying 'Blast it!''

McPartland digs a frayed envelope out from under the photo­graphs and pours out a lot of German currency. "We used to go into people's houses over there and rifle them. That's where all this came from. Some of it is inflation money from after the First War. It was a terrible thing to steal like that, but every­body did it."

"You used to appear with bagfuls of old cobwebby wine bottles."

"I was just well-organized. Once, you needed a piano for a special show, and the colonel gave me the name of this collabo­rator in the town. I got eight guys together and a truck, and we went to his house and there was a beautiful piano. Brand-new. I told him he'd get paid for it, and we brought it back to the theater."

"I was really impressed," she says. "You said you were going out to find me a new piano and you did. It was one of your finest moments. Let's go and eat, Jimmy."

It is Marian McPartland's opening night at the Cafe Carlyle. It is her fourth long nightclub gig of the past year, the three others having been at the Cookery, in the Village, and at the Rowntowner Motel, in Rochester. It is in some ways an odd engagement, and it suggests the country mouse's visit to the town mouse. The Cafe houses, for eight months of the year, the elegant and fashionable supper-club singer and pianist Bobby Short, and it is not the sort of room one associates with jazz; indeed, no out-and-out jazz group has ever played there. By nine-forty-five this evening, when the first set is scheduled to begin, the room is filled, largely with friends and well-wishers. There is a table of business acquaintances, most of whom are amateur musicians. Barney Josephson, the owner of the Cookery, is at ringside with his wife. At the back of the room are Alec Wilder and Jim Maher, the writer. Jimmy McPartland and Clark Terry are at another table, and nearby are Clem De Rosa and pastor John Gensel, of the Lutheran Church. Marian McPartland sits down at the piano, and she is a winsome sight. The room, with its fey, old-fashioned murals and rather dowdy trappings, is out of the late thirties, and she brings it brightly and instantly up to date. In the light, her hair is golden and bouffant, and she is wearing an ensemble that has clearly been thought out to the last fold: a close-fitting cranberry turtleneck, a gold belt, brocaded cranberry and gold palazzo pants, and a gold pocketbook, which she plunks down on the piano. She looks calm and collected, and, smiling slightly to herself, she goes immediately into a pleasant, warming-up ver­sion of "It's a Wonderful World." (Her accompanists are Rusty Gilder on bass and Joe Corsello on drums.) Despite her out­ward cool, she sounds jumpy. Her chords blare a little, an arpeggio stumbles, her time is a second or two off. In the next number, a long, medium-tempo "Gypsy in My Soul," which she introduces as a carry-over from the days at the Hickory House, she begins to relax, and the glories of her style come into full view. Marian McPartland came of age when pianistic giants roamed the earth — Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Bud Powell — and their footsteps still echo dimly in her work.

But in the past five years she has moved beyond adroit adula­tion into her own, special realm. It is, in the way of Johnny Hodges and Sidney Bechet and Tatum, an emotional, romantic, and highly inventive one. (Her sheer inventiveness is frighten­ing; her ceaseless ideas sometimes trample one another.) Her slow ballads suggest rain forests. The chords are massed and dark and overhanging, the harmonies thick and new and al­most impenetrable. And her slow blues are much the same: the tremolos are mountainous, the arpeggios cascades, the blue notes heavy and keening. But her slow blues also have a singular Celtic bagpipe quality. Her foliage is thinner at faster tempos. There are pauses between the stunning, whipping single-note melodic lines, and her chords, often played off beat, are used as recharging way stations. Her notes have room to breathe, and her chordal passages are copses rather than jungles. "Gypsy in My Soul" is sumptuous and crowded, and so is the theme from "Summer of '42." But then she moves lightly and swiftly through medium-fast renditions of "All the Things You Are," part of which is translated into contrapuntal, Bach-like lines, and "Stompin' at the Savoy," which is full of laughing, winding arpeggios. The room is swaying and rocking, and before it can subside she drops abruptly into a delicate, veiled ad-lib reading of "Little Girl Blue." It is a hymn, a lullaby, a crooning.

A bushy, luxuriant slow blues goes by, and then she pays Alec Wilder tribute with a gentle blending of his three best-known tunes — "I'll Be Around," "While We're Young," and "It's So Peaceful in the Country." They are fresh, mindful versions, and Wilder, listening intently, looks pleased. She closes the set with a rambunctious, homestretch "Royal Garden Blues," and after the applause, which is long and cheerful, she stops briefly at Wilder's table. He asks her how she feels. "I was flipping at first," she replies. "But then the marvelous vibes from all these dear people got to me, and it began to feel very good. Very, very good, in fact. I think it's going to be a nice date."

The closing video montage features Marian, Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums performing a 1954 version of “Tickle Toe,” Lester Young’s famous hit with the Count Basie Band.

Shelly Manne: His Life and Music by Steven A. Cerra Editor

 Hot off the press! The Shelly Manne biography is now available as a paperback and an eBook exclusively on Amazon. See the Table of Contents in the sidebar [right hand column] of the blog.

One Bedroom Blues by Michael Karn Quintet

Thinking about guitarist Peter Bernstein and pianist David Hazeltine today; two of my favorite cats on the NYC jazz scene. Tune is by Michael Karn who organized the date and who was new to me before this record. Not any more. Wonderful player who plays his backside off. Gregory Hutchinson booting things along in The Engine Room. Jazz musicians playing the Blues - what more could you ask for?

Kenny Dorham: Underrated, Unnoticed and Unseen [From the Archives]

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

“… Dorham’s solos are models of grace and tact, always giving an impression of careful construction and development, and an unfailing sense of texture.”

Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

“Kenny Dorham’s harmonic inventiveness influence trumpet players and sax players alike.”

-Randy Sandke, in Bill Kirchner, Ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz

“Kenny Dorham is firmly and flowingly himself. He has evolved into one of the most lyrical improvisers in Jazz, but that lyricism is also unusually incisive. There is a consistent clarity and definiteness in Kenny’s playing that makes his work tensile as well as sensitive.”

- Nat Hentoff, insert notes, Una Mas [verb tense changed]

“Dorham’s velvety tone and inventive, incisive solos make him among the most unique trumpeters and gifted melodic improvisers to emerge in the 1950s.”

- Len Lyons, Jazz Portraits” The Lives & Music of the Jazz Masters

“It seems that every time you read about Kenny Dorham, someone is referring to him as ‘a greatly underrated trumpeter.’ I’ve probably been guilty of this myself. I say guilty because if all the energy expended by Jazz writers and commentators in lamenting Kenny’s lack of proper recognition , was turned toward a more positive extolling of his many virtues, perhaps he would be much further ahead in his career. Certainly, he is one of the very best trumpeters in Jazz.”

- Ira Gitler, insert notes, Whistle Stop

“His peers and knowledgeable listeners never ignored Dorham’s accomplishments. Indeed trumpet players as diverse as Randy Brecker and Byron Stripling have acknowledged their debt to him. But until some of the young musicians of the [nineteen] nineties spread the word, his work had received little general attention for a couple of decades. If the emerging generation of players will use Kenny Dorham as a model not for imitation, but to inspire the hard work of making their own artistry blossom, his spirit will brighten the future of Jazz as it illuminated the past.”

- Doug Ramsey, insert notes, Savoy Jazz Original, Kenny Dorham, Blues in Bebop

While doing a bit of research recently on tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, the thought came to mind that his frequent front-line partner, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, was an often overlooked figure in Jazz circles, then and now.

Dorham was somehow considered a “second-tiered” trumpeter when compared to the life of Dizzy, Miles, Clifford Brown and other modern Jazz trumpet luminaries.

Kenny’s name is still rarely mentioned today which is surprising given the number of high profile groups that he performed with, the huge discography he was involved with both under his own name and with other significant Jazz musicians, and the fact that he created a style or sound on the trumpet that is as instantly recognizable as Diz’s, Miles’ or Brownie’s.

Rummaging around our collection of Jazz recordings and books only served to further heighten the question of why Kenny is so often ignored because when one looks for it, there is quite a bit of information available about Dorham’s career and his music.

I thought it might be fun to gather some of these writings about Kenny into a feature as a way of remembering him or, if you will, memorializing him.

© -Mark Lescovic/Jazz.com, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Kenny Dorham has been scandalously undervalued in the jazz trumpet lineage. His breathy tone was not the immediate warmth of Clifford Brown, and his airy attack was less piercing than Lee Morgan, but careful listeners will hear him to be one of the more gifted trumpeters of the bebop and hard bop eras.

Dorham possessed a rare, soft and vulnerable sound that is soothing and instantly identifiable. Eschewing the typical trumpeter's showmanship and flashiness, Dorham instead relied on his economical melodic logic in constructing poetic, lyrical improvisations with meaningful beginnings, middles, and ends.

His technique is also unique: Dorham chose to attack notes with his tongue, where most of his bebop contemporaries would slur for a more continuous flow. His clearly articulated lines had a singular running quality to them that fleetly pushed ahead of the time.

At mid-tempos, Dorham distinctly articulated an exaggerated staccato swing feel, greatly contrasting his double-timed legato phrases. On ballads, Dorham would not stray far from the melody, his minimalist approach exposing the innate beauty of each melody he touched. His idiosyncratic use of grace notes, varied attacks on single notes, such as scooping underneath or bending above the pitch, and stuttering repetitions of notes were some of the personal nuances that decorated his deceptively complex improvisations.

Paradoxically, the fact that Dorham was nearly always the first-call replacement in all-star groups, which should be a testament to his talents, has led to a perception that he was a second-tier trumpeter, when nothing is farther from the truth. Dorham replaced Fats Navarro in Billy Eckstine’s band in 1946, Miles Davis in Charlie Parker’s quintet in 1949, and Clifford Brown in Art Blakey and Horace Silver’s Jazz Messengers in 1954 and again in the Max Roach group in 1956.”

- Matt Leskovic, Jazz.com

© -Ian Carr, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Dorham started the piano at age seven and took up the trumpet in high school. From 1945-8 he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Lionel Hampton and Mercer Ellington. He replaced Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker quintet from 1948-50, playing with Parker at the Paris jazz festival in 1949. He freelanced in New York during the early 1950s, and in 1954 was a founder-member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Dorham was a star soloist on the great 1954 album which was the blueprint for the Messengers, Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers. From 1956-8 he replaced Clifford Brown in the Max Roach quintet, and played superlatively on another classic album of the 1950s, Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker. During the late 1950s and the 1960s he led various groups of his own, composed and played music for some films, worked with Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley, toured internationally and played major festivals. Dorham recorded with Parker, Coltrane, Monk, Oliver Nelson, Tadd Dameron, J.J. Johnson and Sonny Rollins, and some of his finest playing was done on other people's albums. He died of kidney failure in 1972.

Dorham was one of the first bebop trumpeters, and had something of the fleetness of Gillespie and the sonority of Miles Davis. By the beginning of the 1950s he had absorbed his influences and found his own individual voice on trumpet. He was a brilliant player who was never glib, and could project great lyricism even at fast tempos, producing astonishingly long lines of fluid triplets. He was also a magnificent blues play­er, because his fluidity of execution was accompanied by all the tonal inflexions of the vocal blues tradition. Dorham influenced and inspired countless trumpeters all over the world, but never himself broke through to a wider audience or got all the recognition he was due, because he was overshadowed by Davis and Fats Navarro in the 1940s and Clifford Brown and others in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a fine composer, and one of his pieces, "Blue Bossa", has become part of the general jazz repertoire.”

- Ian Carr, Jazz:  The Rough Guide [p. 176]

© -Kenny Mathieson, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Kenny Dorham was one of those musicians fated to be always the bridesmaid, never the bride when it came to handing out the trumpet honors. Throughout his career, he stood in the shadow of more mercurial talents like Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown or Lee Morgan, and, for that matter, less virtuoso but more popular masters like Miles Davis and Chet Baker - Kenny couldn't win either way. The extra luster reflected from these great horn men should not dazzle us into underestimating Dorham's own considerable capabilities. He was highly adept technically, had a fine sense of swing, and deep roots in a blues sensibility. His sound was generally dark and a little astringent, and he liked to develop his melodic ideas in a lucid, carefully structured, and often understated fashion (David Rosenthal calls it 'austere') which depended more on subtle nuances of tone and rhythmic accent than on pyrotechnics.

He was the perfect example of the musician's musician, and the high regard of his peers is reflected in his credits as a sideman. He cut his teeth with the seminal bebop big bands of Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie, recorded with Fats Navarro and Bud Powell for Savoy, and took Miles Davis's place in Charlie Parker's quintet in 1948 (he is heard on some of the saxophonist's live sessions from the Royal Roost - there is a good solo on the version of 'Hot House' from 15 January, 1949 - and the Verve studio set Swedish Schnapps among others).

The distinguished roster of leaders who gave Dorham a call also included Lionel Hampton, Art Blakey, J. J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Lou Donaldson, Tadd Dameron, Gil Melle, Phil Woods, Ernie Henry, Hank Mobley, Matthew Gee, Herb Geller, Benny Golson, Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Oliver Nelson, Harold Land, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill, Cedar Walton, and Barry Harris. He was a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and was part of Max Roach's group for two years. He worked frequently throughout his career with baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne. The baritone was an instrument which appealed to him, and he incorporated it frequently in his own groups. Space prevents consideration of his work as a sideman here, but no understanding of Dorham's music would be complete without hearing at least some of it.

He was born McKinley Howard Dorham in Fairfield, Texas, on 30 August 1924, into a musical family. He vacillated between music and boxing through high school and as a science student at Wiley College, Texas (where he played in the Wiley Collegians band which also included pianist Wild Bill Davis and drummer Roy Porter), but finally opted for a career in music in 1945. He moved to New York (where he was initially known as Kinny) after his military service, and took advantage of the GI Bill to study composition and arranging at Gotham School of Music in 1948. A useful compilation of Dorham's scattered contributions as a sideman in the late 1940s was issued as Blues in Bebop in 1998.

He began the 1950s as a freelance, and played on Thelonious Monk's classic Genius of Modern Music for Blue Note in 1952, then made his debut as a leader with a session cut on 15 December, 1953, for Debut, the label run by Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Kenny Dorham Quintet featured Jimmy Heath on tenor and baritone saxophones, Walter Bishop on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums. The trumpeter came up with some very pleasing arrangements on the six tunes, including his own uptempo swinger 'An Oscar For Oscar' (the dedicatee is Oscar Goodstein, the owner of Birdland) and tunes like Monk's 'Ruby, My Dear' and Osie Johnson's 'Osmosis'. A couple of previously unreleased blues outings were added to the CD issue.

Just over a year later, Dorham replaced Clifford Brown in the band which became The Jazz Messengers, and was still a Messenger when he cut his first Blue Note date. Afro-Cuban eventually featured material from two sessions, but was initially released as a 10-inch LP with four tunes featuring the Cuban percussionist Carlos 'Potato' Valdes, recorded on 29 March, 1955. The session featured the first studio recordings of three of Dorham's best compositions, 'Afrodisia', the lovely 'Lotus Flower', and 'Minor's Holiday', named for another trumpeter, Minor Robinson (an excellent alternate take is included on the CD issue), and a Gigi Gryce chart, 'Basheer's Dream'.

The trumpeter adopts unusually punchy single note lines, a strat­egy which led the Penguin Guide to note that 'Dorham never sounded more like Dizzy Gillespie than on Afro-Cuban', an impression enhanced by the rhythmic concept. The octet featured J. J. Johnson on trombone, fellow Messenger Hank Mobley on tenor and Cecil Payne on baritone saxophone, and a rhythm section of Horace Silver on piano, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. The remaining selections on the first 12-inch LP release, all by Dorham, came from a session on 30 January, featuring a sextet with Mobley, Payne, Silver, Blakey, and bassist Percy Heath. The CD issue now includes an additional track released as 'K.D.'s Cab Ride', but later discovered to have been given the somewhat more romantic title 'Echo of Spring' by the composer.

Dorham contributed to Tadd Dameron's classic Fontainebleau for Prestige in March, 1956, and was back in the studio as a leader on 4 April. He had decided to set up his own group along similar lines to The Messengers, to be known as Kenny Dorham and The Jazz Prophets, with J. R. Monterose on tenor, Dick Katz on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Arthur Edgehill on drums. He cut a session under that name for Chess, with the optimistic addition of Volume 1 to the title, a gambit which proved less than prophetic, since there was no follow-up. The Prophet' is the outstanding track of the five cut that day, a surging minor key workout which follows the initial statement of the catchy theme with a delicate staccato trading of thematic material between Dorham and tenor saxophonist J. R. Monterose, then opens out into expansive solos and a return to the theme.

'Tahitian Suite', also in the minor, shifts from the 6/8 of the theme to standard 4/4 for the solos, and is the first of several tunes inspired by distant places. Dorham adopted a mute on 'Blues Elegante' and 'Don't Explain', but succeeded in not sounding like Miles in the process, while 'DX', is an up-tempo workout.

Monterose, an interesting but relatively neglected saxophonist from Detroit who played with Charles Mingus on the classic Pith­ecanthropus Erectus (although it was not a happy experience for him), is in fine form on this session, apart from an intermittently squeaking reed, notably on 'Tahitian Suite'. His subsequent debut as leader for Blue Note, J. R. Monterose, recorded on 21 October, 1956, is worth seeking out.

A version of the Jazz Prophets band is featured on Dorham's 'Round About Midnight at The Café Bohemia, with Bobby Timmons replacing Katz on piano, and Kenny Burrell added on guitar. Recorded for Blue Note over a single long night on 31 May, 1956, it captures the band in fine fettle, while underlining the quality of his writing in two additions to his exotic travelogue, 'Monaco* and 'Mexico City', as well as the bop fundamentalism of 'The Prophet', 'Riffin" and 'K.D.'s Blues'. His original and engaging melodies and marked structural awareness have won him a fair amount of critical praise as a composer, but with the exception of the ubiquitous 'Blue Bossa', that admiration has not really been reflected in the take-up of his tunes by other players (Don Sickler's Music of Kenny Dorham on the Uptown label in 1983 was an obvious exception).

Dorham joined Max Roach's band as a replacement for Clifford Brown following the trumpeter's tragic death in June, 1956, and remained with the drummer for two years, avoiding the jinx which Roach feared afflicted his trumpet players in that era (both Brown and Booker Little suffered premature deaths). He cut several albums with Roach during that association, and also continued to record as a leader.

Jazz Contrasts, made for Riverside on 21 May, 1957, is one of his strongest statements on record. The contributions of harpist Betty Glamman on three carefully arranged ballads will not suit all tastes, although the instrument is effectively employed to complement the rhythm section of Hank Jones on piano, Oscar Pettiford on bass (Glamman was a member of his big band), and Max Roach on drums, with Sonny Rollins as the second horn. Dorham is a fine ballad player in any setting, and shines on Gigi Gryce's arrangements of 'My Old Flame' and Clifford Brown's 'Larue', a heartfelt tribute to the late trumpeter, as well as his own arrangement of 'But Beautiful'.

Both Dorham and Rollins are in fiery mood on the up-tempo material. Dorham negotiates the skittering eighth notes and flying triplets of a manic 'I'll Remember April' and his own equally energized 'La Villa' (a tune first recorded on Afro-Cuban) with real poise and command. His lines are clean, sharply articulated and accurately pitched even at these tempos, but the speed of execution does not deflect his attention from the unfolding shape of his solo. Their version of 'Falling In Love With Love' is taken at a more relaxed clip, and features a lovely melodic solo from Hank Jones, long the most unsung of the famous trio of Detroit siblings completed by his brothers Thad and Elvin. Like Tommy Flanagan, another Detroit native, Jones was equally at home in swing or bop settings, but both these great pianists only really made their mark as leaders later in their careers.

Dorham's next album for Riverside, cut on 13 November and 2 December, 1957, took a different tack. 2 Horns, 2 Rhythm dispensed with piano for a date which featured the ill-fated alto saxophonist Ernie Henry, with either Eddie Mathias (in the earlier session) or Wilbur Ware on bass, and G. T. Hogan on drums. Dorham had worked with Henry before, including the saxophonist's 1956 debut for Riverside, Presenting Ernie Henry, but this date was to be the saxophonist's last before his premature death on 29 December, 1957. He made only two other albums as a leader, Seven Standards and A Blues and the posthumously issued Last Chorus, both of which date from September, 1957. Henry also participated in the mammoth sessions for Monk's Brilliant Corners, although he often seemed out of his depth in that demanding music. His own records, and his contribution here, provide better evidence of his unfulfilled potential.

Dorham made good use of the spare instrumental textures. A piano less quartet was not a new innovation (Gerry Mulligan was enjoying great success with that format, and Dorham had been partly responsible for its adoption in Max Roach's group), but it was still fairly unusual, and posed special challenges to players used to a reassuring carpet of chords running beneath their work. The horn players revel in the extra space, with the trumpeter in excellent creative shape on five standards and three original compositions, including another 'Lotus Blossom' and an evocation of classical counterpoint in 'Jazz-Classic'. The standards included a very solemn version of Gershwin's 'Soon', with minimal piano interjections by Dorham, and an exhumation of 'Is It True What They Say About Dixie?', a selection which suggests some of Sonny Rollins's predilection for unlikely vehicles may have rubbed off on the trumpeter.

Although Dorham had doubled as a blues vocalist with Dizzy Gillespie's band, and claimed that he saw his singing as an integral aspect of his overall musical identity, he made only one record featuring his voice, and that at a time when Chet Baker was racking up big sales with his own combined efforts. His vocals are agreeable enough, but the lack of any sustained follow up makes the album, This Is The Moment, something of a curiosity in his output. It was recorded in July and August, 1958, for Riverside, and marked the recording debut of pianist Cedar Walton. …

Dorham taught at the jazz school organized by pianist John Lewis at Lenox, Massachusetts in 1958 and 1959. He contributed characteristically well focused trumpet playing to a famous but ultimately disappointing session featuring John Coltrane and pia­nist Cecil Taylor in October, 1958, although the disappointment stems largely from the very high expectations such a combination generates. It was originally Taylor's date, and appeared as Stereo Drive on United Artists, but was later reissued as Coltrane Time on Blue Note. Dorham's 'Shifting Down' and bassist Chuck Israels' 'Double Clutching' are more interesting than the two standards, neither of which quite catches fire.

His final Riverside date, Blue Spring, was recorded on 20 January and 18 February, 1959, and combined four of his own compositions on that theme ('Blue Spring', 'Poetic Spring', 'Spring Is Here', and 'Spring Cannon') with two tunes by Richard Rodgers, 'It Might As Well Be Spring' and 'Passion Spring'. In a reversal of the sparse textures he had chosen for his previous album, Dorham assembled a septet, with Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone alongside Cecil Payne on baritone and the more unusual timbre of David Amram's French horn, and a rhythm section of Cedar Walton on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and either Jimmy Cobb or Philly Joe Jones on drums. Dorham's solos are characteristically purposeful and inventive, while his deftly handled arrangements make expressive use of the contrasting sonority of the alto with the darker shadings of baritone and horn in another strong, thoughtful album.

Dorham's style was well set by the end of the decade, and he had developed a more refined approach to tone and sonority. He was soon recording again, this time for Prestige's New Jazz imprint. Quiet Kenny, recorded on 13 November, 1959, with a rhythm trio of Tommy Flanagan on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and drummer Art Taylor, is one of his most consistently achieved records. Despite the title, this is not primarily a ballad album, although it contains beautiful interpretations of 'My Ideal' and 'Old Folks', as well as another 'Lotus Blossom'. Rather, the title implies a measured deliberation. It was the first time he had recorded without another horn, and while he relished the freedom of that context, his statements are made sotto voce, and impress with their discipline, authority and sheer musicality rather than any more brash means of point-scoring. Flanagan is a perfect foil, and the whole disc is a polished gem.

Flanagan was present again on 10 January, 1960, with Charles Davis on baritone saxophone, Butch Warren on bass and Buddy Enlow on drums. The results have been issued under contrasting titles as Kenny Dorham Memorial Album on Zanadu and The Arrival of Kenny Dorham on Fresh Sounds. It included Tm An Old Cowhand', a tune forever associated with Sonny Rollins, and an elegant 'Stella By Starlight'. Davis's baritone was also promi­nently featured on a session on 11 February, 1960, released as Jazz Contemporary on the Time label, which included versions of 'Monk's Mood' and Dave Brubeck's ‘ln Your Own Sweet Way', as well as Dorham's 'Horn Salute'. Showboat, recorded for Time on 9 December, 1960, featured a quintet with Jimmy Heath on tenor saxophone and pianist Kenny Drew, and was devoted entirely to the music of Oscar Hammerstein. In between, he had taken part in the alternative Newport Rebels festival arranged by Charles Mingus and Max Roach as a protest against the commercialization of the Newport Jazz Festival, which ended in chaos that year.

Dorham rejoined the Blue Note stable, and cut Whistle Stop on 15 January, 1961. Although it would have been difficult to guess at the time, and impossible to deduce from the powerful trumpet playing and strong compositions on this excellent and still rather undervalued album, Dorham's career was now in its final phase. He would do little of any real significance after 1964, and some of the music which he did make in this three year period shows occasional signs of strain. Conversely, much of it is amongst the strongest work of his career, both on his own albums and as a sideman with two of the newer generation, saxophonist Joe Henderson and pianist Andrew Hill.

Whistle Stop reunited the trumpeter with an old front line partner, saxophonist Hank Mobley, as well as his favored rhythm twins, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Pianist Kenny Drew completed the quintet which laid down one of his most overtly straight-ahead sessions, led by the energized title track, and dipping into the familiar well-springs of the blues on 'Philly Twist' and funk on 'Buffalo', as well as more recent modal directions in 'Sunset'. 'Sunrise In Mexico' and 'Windmill' aimed at colorful musical evocations of their subjects, and swung furiously into the bargain. The album closed with 'Dorham's Epitaph', a brief melancholy theme which, according to Ira Gitler's sleeve note, the trumpeter had apparently worked up into a large scale orchestral piece, which to my knowledge has never been performed.

The inspiration behind Matador, made for Richard Bock's Pacific Jazz, was a tour of South America with Monte Kay's First American Jazz Festival in June, 1961. His response to Brazil and its music was swift and immediate. He was drawn to its emotional power (he described the tour as 'an exciting, wild, new, unforgettable experience' and the music as shattering), but also to its structural variety and time signatures. The album, and in particular his own 'El Matador', is a vivid response to the experience, and includes his arrangement of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos's 'Prelude'.

Matador was later combined on CD with his other Pacific Jazz release, the live set Inta Somethin,’ recorded at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in November, 1961, which included the title track of Dorham's next Blue Note disc, 'Una Mas'. Matador was recorded in New York on 15 April, 1962, and also featured an intense version of Jackie McLean's 'Melanie'. The saxophonist played alto on both sessions, with two entirely different rhythm sections, and has remained a prominent booster of the trumpeter's reputation. Dorham also recorded several sessions as a sideman in 1961, two of which were later reissued by Black Lion under his name as West 42nd Street and Osmosis, although they were really led by saxophonist Rocky Boyd and drummer Dave Bailey respectively.

His most significant musical relationship of the period was the one which developed with the up and coming young saxophonist Joe Henderson, newly signed to Blue Note in 1963. It spanned six albums in 1963-64, all for Blue Note: Dorham's Una Mas and Trompeta Toccata, Henderson's Page One (which featured the first recording of 'Blue Bossa'), Our Thing and In ‘n Out, and Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, a key record of the era. Both Henderson and Hill will be dealt with in the next book in this sequence, and space does not permit a detailed consideration of these albums here, but they are essential to a full picture of the trumpeter's music in the last decade of his career. He was clearly well aware of the new currents flowing through jazz, and adapts comfortably within the more progressive frameworks generated by musicians like Hill and Eric Dolphy on Point of Departure, and McCoy Tyner, Pete LaRoca and Elvin Jones on the Henderson albums.

The session for Una Mas on 1 April, 1963 was Joe Henderson's first ever record date. Dorham had taken the saxophonist under his wing,and Henderson remained a staunch admirer when I spoke to him about his big band album in 1996, a project which had its roots in a rehearsal band he co-led with Dorham three decades earlier. Henderson acknowledged the trumpeter's role in his own development, placing him alongside Horace Silver and Miles Davis in that regard, and added that Kenny was one of the most important creators around, and yet you hardly ever hear his name anymore'. The quintet also featured Herbie Hancock on piano, Butch Warren on bass, and drummer Tony Williams, in a solid session which contained three original tunes by Dorham, the Brazilian influenced 'Una Mas' and 'Sao Paulo' and the more boppish 'Straight Ahead', as well as a tender evocation of Lerner-Loewe's 'If Ever I Would Leave You'.

Short Story and Scandia Skies, made in Copenhagen for Steeple­chase in December, 1963, are less impressive, although the label gathered an interesting group of musicians for the dates, including the mercurial Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu and bassist Niels-Henning 0rsted Pedersen, as well as a second trumpet or flugelhorn (Allan Botschinsky on Short Story, Rolf Ericson on Scandia Skies) rather than saxophone. Dorham's playing often sounds routine, both in technical terms and degree of emotional commitment.

His final date for Blue Note, Trompeta Toccata, was made nine months later, on 4 September, 1964, with Henderson on tenor, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Richard Davis on bass, and Albert 'Tootie' Heath on drums. The long title track moves away from standard song form entirely, using a rubato introduction followed by a 20-bar structure in flowing 6/8 time, which the players treat freely in terms of phrase lengths. The music is also distant from hard bop, but reflects Dorham's interest in both classical and Latin music, as well as something of the new harmonic freedoms current in the jazz of the time, led by John Coltrane, whose approach is echoed in Henderson's solo. Both 'Night Watch' and 'The Fox' are framed in more conventional jazz structures, while Henderson supplied his infectious Latin groove tune 'Mamacita'. The album has some fine moments, but it is arguably the least compelling of his records for the label.

It is ironic that Leonard Feather's sleeve note concludes with Dorham saying that there is 'more and more I feel I can do. And these days, it strikes me that the sky's the limit.’ Despite that confident assertion, Trompeta Toccata was his last significant outing as a leader. Although he was only forty, the long anticipated major breakthrough had not arrived, and jazz fashions were set to change again as the decade progressed, leaving him swimming against the tide.

He co-led a rehearsal big band with Joe Henderson for a year or so from mid-1966, but his later work was mainly as a sideman, including dates with Cedar Walton and Detroit pianist Barry Harris for Prestige, and an intriguing session led by Cecil Payne in Decem­ber, 1968, issued as Zodiac: The Music of Cecil Payne on Strata East. Dorham's contributions to an excellent date dispel any notion that he was even remotely a spent force, and the prompting of a band which included pianist Wynton Kelly alongside Wilbur Ware on bass and Tootie Heath on drums drive the trumpeter to the most impressive playing on disc of his later years.

Dorham also did some reviewing for Down Beat, and, as he told Art Taylor in 1971, planned to concentrate his energies on education rather than performing. He died from kidney disease on 5 December, 1972, in New York. Art Blakey described him as the uncrowned king of modern jazz, and if not quite that, his best work is conclusive evidence of his right to be regarded as one of the finest players and composers of his era.”