Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Remembering Wardell Gray [1921-1955] - Part 3 - the Herbie Butterfield Essay [From the Archives]
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“The death of Wardell Gray has not been completely cleared up but it is not for us to attempt to solve any mysteries here. …. His life, rather than his death, is what concerns us.
Whatever he played swung, for primarily Wardell was a swinger. Moving along at up-tempo, he would still exhort the rhythm section to ‘bear down.’"
- Ira Gitler, Jazz author and critic
“We remember Wardell Gray, then, for his gaiety of temper and for his unremitting swing; above all his is a danceable sound. His sonority was more forthright and open than Lester Young's, although from this it should not be inferred that his tone had much in common with the weighty eloquence of the Hawkins school. There is never any suggestion of strain, no impression that he is heaving both his lungs into his instrument. Like Young, he withheld his attack, so that there is a basis of effortless ease and lightness in his tone, which is not discernible in Hawk's followers. But around this lightness he managed to create a final product of a more echoing and assertive sonority, an essentially outgoing sound, which differentiates him immediately from most other tenormen,....”
- Herbie Butterfield
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles’ initial effort to help remember and commemorate Wardell Gray on these pages began with The Ira Gitler Prestige Notes [Part 1] and followed with an essay on him from a rather rare publication: Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded [London: 1961] which constituted Part 2.
We now continue with Part 3 which is made up of the Herbie Butterfield article entitled Wardell Gray. It appeared in the October 1961 issue of the Jazz Journal. It could also be considered as a rarity of sorts for while there are some fine pieces about Wardell in Jazz literature, getting a hold of a copy of them is not always easy.
Fortunately, I belong to a Jazz chat group with a membership that is made up of many kind and caring people from all over the world who have come to my aid on many occasions.
One such Jazz buddy lives in New Zealand and sent along the following Herbie Butterfield essay on Wardell Gray appended to the message below. To add to this grand gesture, he even typed it out for me because the original is in a bound volume and therefore not easy to scan.
“Hi Steve,
I decided that you should have the 'missing' Jazz Journal article from October 1961, so here it is.
I've changed the album catalogue reference for the most part to US issues, but the best "Blue Lou" versions are on European labels - the best of all being on French Master of Jazz MJCD171, which includes a rehearsal take, and the concert performance unedited at 9:43 (most other issues have shortened versions).
The JJ article is a bit weird (which is why I thought you should have it!) and I wonder why the author never mentions Stan Getz anywhere.
Cheers,
Your New Zealand Jazz Buddy”
Mr. Butterfield’s essay is not easy to read. One might even characterize it as “a bit weird,” but it deserves to be read because of the uniqueness of his views on Wardell and his music and because he has gone to great lengths to state his opinions accurately, with examples, but without apologies.
WARDELL GRAY Jazz Journal October 1961
"Music expresses absolutely nothing," said Stravinsky, thus relegating the compositions of most of his Romantic forebears to the status of glorious red herrings. Such an iconoclastic blast must have been pleasantly refreshing at the time of its pronouncement, when too many accepted too incuriously music's correlation with personal emotions. It needed saying that a musical phrase was a series of sounds arranged in a certain order before it was a statement of sadness. It will probably always need the saying, the reminding.
Whether there is a fundamental connection between a specific musical figure and the emotional effect it is likely to produce in the listener, or how much such an effect can be explained in terms of a reflex action engendered by tradition, both private and communal, is a point of discussion to which I an entirely unequipped to contribute. I must leave it to the professional aesthetician, psychologist or neurologist.
Nevertheless, only the tiniest and most specialist minority do not refer music in some way to an emotional universe, and for the purposes of this essay I am presuming that certain phrases, tempi, accents do communicate certain emotional moods more effectively than others. On that basis we are back where we started before Stravinsky and (setting aside the Romantic composers, who intend in the very nature of their music that the job of emotive description shall be easy for us) can grant a deep sadness to the slow movement of a Vivaldi concerto, a loneliness to the Bartok of the late string quartets, and a gaiety to Mozart. And here at last, with the mention of gaiety, we are approaching the substance of my article- which is about jazz, believe it or not.
As a parentheses I will add that this preamble is intended as an apology for the fact that emotive descriptions, which have no pure musical authority, of musicians and tracks will often be crucial to my argument. I have attempted to justify the relative usefulness of such descriptions, and also to admit their final invalidity. As it is, in jazz, where the musician's instrument so frequently is intentionally the voice of his mood and temper, this lack of validity would seem less serious.
I have promised to enter my article on the note of 'gaiety,’ because this quality above all others seems to permeate the work of Wardell Gray, and to be present in his music to a more infectious extent than in other recent jazz musicians.
Gaiety, let us distinguish it from the genial frivolity of many Dixieland groups, the extravagant high spirits of Lionel Hampton, the exuberance of various Basie units, the buoyancy of Mulligan, the sophisticated insolence of Charlie Mingus. Gaiety: extricated from the neon-lit strait-jacket of glamour and riches, it contains surely an idea of the celebration of being alive, or joy, unadulterated and not particularly formulated, in the act of living. It is not quite a religious joy, rather a joyfulness that retains essential contact with earth and social community. Yet this quality of gaiety, this generalized emotional attitude that I am seeking to define, is not insensitive to distant misery. It is underpinned by an awareness of the abundant deprivations and brutalities of living, by a latent melancholy. If all this adds up to 'gaiety,' then it was a communication of gaiety that was Wardell Gray's most precious contribution to his art and to us.
Born in 1921, in his prime during the late 40's and early 50's before his death in 1955, Gray belonged to a generation in which generally dissatisfaction, coherent anguish and sometimes incoherent despair were expressed. The supreme embodiment of these moods we find in the music of Charlie Parker, whose life-span was exactly contemporary. A comparison of opposites is not threatened. Charlie Parker was one of the two or three great innovators and revolutionaries of jazz, the prototype for countless excellent or inferior musicians.
Wardell Gray affected the course of jazz not at all, gave only to one isolated musician here the example of his tone, to another there the example of his fluency. But his uniqueness, his almost greatness, lies in the fact that, while he was not the pioneer, he was the individual who could hear, mark, learn and inwardly digest, and eventually reappear with the manner duly improved, or at least changed, but the meaningful spirit intact. Thus, while he learnt extensively from Parker and Lester Young in particular, he did not imitate them.
He heard Young, and learnt the rhythmic relaxation, the concealed situation of accent and the lyrical continuity; but did not exchange his own greater personal assurance for the reticence of Young's playing with Basie. He heard Parker, and adapted his own harmonic and phraseological concepts; but did not attempt to expropriate the Bird's private angst, since his sense of ease and joyfulness did not require it. The musical result of the integration of these lessons into a strong individuality was to make Wardell Gray the first completely satisfying modern tenorist - a modern saxophonist exceptional for his joie de vivre.
If historical categories are helpful, Gray was undoubtedly a modern jazz musician in both the structure and intonation of his solos. But in another respect he came near the end, rather than the beginning of a line- a line of steady and uncomplicated swingers. For, if we exclude the older generation of mainstreamers, from whom much fine jazz, but little new direction can now be expected, and the Desmond-Mulligan-Sims axis which seems temporarily disinclined to contribute anything to the extension of rhythmic conceptions, there are few young musicians who seek to same rhythmic continuity, the same type of constant rhythmic flow, that satisfied Wardell Gray.
Rollins and Griffin indeed swing massively, but massive is the operative word. They shove or lunge their way into motive realms of swing where Gray rode over the top. The rhythmic concepts of Ornette Coleman and Coltrane are as different as their music is different. Miles Davis 'contains' a viable swing, like he contains practically everything else, but he does not announce it. And it is from three or four of these musicians that we listen for new developments in spontaneous small group jazz. I think only of Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stilt, and more delicately, Art Pepper, as having the same lissome, unfragmented and relatively conservative attitude to swing as had Wardell Gray. That in this one respect I find the consistent impetus of musicians like Gray and Clifford Brown more congenial than the rhythmical tugs-of-war of their living counterparts may, admittedly, be a sign that I've started out on the way to a new mouldy fig cry.
We remember Wardell Gray, then, for his gaiety of temper and for his unremitting swing; above all his is a danceable sound. His sonority was more forthright and open than Lester Young's, although from this it should not be inferred that his tone had much in common with the weighty eloquence of the Hawkins school. There is never any suggestion of strain, no impression that he is heaving both his lungs into his instrument. Like Young, he withheld his attack, so that there is a basis of effortless ease and lightness in his tone, which is not discernible in Hawk's followers. But around this lightness he managed to create a final product of a more echoing and assertive sonority, an essentially outgoing sound, which differentiates him immediately from most other tenormen, and which has found disciples in Frank Foster and Billy Root.
Harmonically he was not adventurous. The story of the development of his phrasing is the story of the gradual incorporation of Parker's harmonic expansions into his own playing. This process was as complete as it was ever to become by the late 40s, after which most of his best work was recorded. There is rarely a sense of harmonic drama and potential- the lucid fluency of his earlier melodic lines was not so easily banished. There is less phraseological contrast than in Parker and his immediate circle, and the dramatic nature of many of his solos accrues rather from the manipulation of accent and the accumulation of choruses towards a climax or anti-climax, predictable in comparison with Bird. Nevertheless, if he was not an innovator, Gray was in no way a musical hack, and his solos are always very stimulating and inventive. It is only in the historical context that he appears harmonically unenterprising, lacking the curiosity of Rollins or Coltrane.
I have said that the predominant emotional mood of Wardell Gray was one of gaiety, touched with melancholy. The presence of melancholy saved the joy from becoming mere boisterous exuberance, but it was never more than a presence, a recognition of the existence of unhappiness. The gaiety was always the official front, and this, over a concerted listening to Gray's music, makes for a lack of emotional variety and versatility, even a certain monotony. Monotony in individual records there is none, and indeed the complaint is only relative. But compare Gray's pensive polished and essentially unharassed Loverman with Parker's fumbling, disorganized and anguished rendering of the same number, and we are hearing a competent craftsman beside an inspired poet. This is a hard comparison, particularly as Gray was a medium- and up-tempo musician whose talents were not best displayed in the ballad, however many pleasant and restful ones he may have recorded. But when an artist's work is judged in toto, unless we are to applaud him for the supreme expression of a single mood, a limited emotional range must tend to constitute an aesthetic weakness.
As yet I have not mentioned specific Gray recordings, and the reason I have not found the need to do so is implied in the last paragraph. His regularity of emotional attitude and high musical craftsmanship result in turn in a commendable consistency of standard. He recorded no disasters, remarkable little interior work, and fewer really memorable pieces than others of his stature, more familiar with the off-night. Anyway, I am more concerned with persuading people to listen to a musician who deserves a larger audience, than with examining the internal structure of individual records.
As a sideman he plays chiefly with the bands of Carter, Goodman and Basie. His fine recordings with Goodman are unfortunately now deleted from the English catalogue, but he can be heard on several Basie big band and smaller group sessions at the turn of the 50s (e.g. Fontana TFL 5046). Inevitably he is heard to best advantage in the smaller combos, most conspicuously the vital and inspiring One O 'Clock Jump with Buddy DeFranco scraping piccolo heights on clarinet. He was also on form in a longer concert version of this same number in 1947- a session which produced in addition a magnificent Blue Lou (Vogue LAE 12001 - Gene Norman Presents, Boplicity CDBOP 014). At this time the Parker influence was slender, and his affinities with the ebullient poll-winners of the 40's more apparent. But he is perhaps heard at his most characteristic fronting his own groups, where his gaiety and fluency can dominate the proceedings. Many of these tracks have been included in his two Memorial albums (Prestige P7008 & 7009).
Move and Scrapple From The Apple (on Prestige P7009)) are from a live session in 1950. Move is taken at a furious tempo, but contains a weak pianist (Jimmy Bunn) and a drummer who is defeated by the speed (Chuck Thompson). Indeed, it is almost too much for Clark Terry and the versatile but slightly facile altoist Sonny Criss, but Gray and his tenor rival, Dexter Gordon, come out of it with evidence of technical virtuosity that would not have shamed a Bechet or a Gillespie. On Scrapple From The Apple Gray takes a dreamy, lilting solo, with long runs in the middle register aspiring towards lightly stressed notes in the higher octave. The reverse side of this album is a successful date with Art Farmer and Hampton Hawes. The formula, employed for all except the two ballads, for Farmer and Gray playing first and last chorus in unison, inclines towards monotony, but in between patience is rewarded by some forthright solo piano and contrasted fill-in chords in accompaniment from Hawes, and by beautifully agile and inventive solos from Gray on Jackie, Bright Boy and Farmer's Market. As I've said before, the ballads - Loverman is one of them- are pensive rather than poignant, a little stylised, a little pedestrian.
The other album (Prestige P 7008) contains a rather messy session with Teddy Charles, in which the vibraphonist tends to interrupt rather than illuminate the solos of his musicians, and the ensembles sound disarrayed. At this late stage of his life (1953) Gray seemed to be developing a greater acerbity of tone than previously, a more brazen sonority, as is apparent in The Man I Love, and in the opening bars of Paul's Cause. But in the main his elegance, perhaps a legacy of his years with the graceful Benny Carter, contrasts well with the hectic striving of altoist Frank Morgan. The other numbers on this album come from the best studio get-togethers that Gray ever attended. In 1949 he met Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes. Among others, they recorded Twisted and Southside, in which Gray, from an initial restraint, gradually unfolds and eventually blossoms into swinging and ranging solos. The other session was made, with an unexceptional but musicianly accompaniment, in Detroit in 1950. A Sinner Kissed An Angel ranks with Easy Living (Prestige P 7009) as the best ballad that Wardell recorded. Here, as rarely elsewhere, he shows affinities with Johnny Hodges, in his floating high notes and lyrical use of glissandi, crescendo and diminuendo. The uptempo blues Grayhound and Treadin' are superb examples of Gray's powerful accumulation and subtle modulation of phrases and whole choruses for dramatic purposes. I would recommend either of these intelligently supervised albums to anyone interested in hearing a representative selection of Wardell Gray's music.
Wardell Gray died when he was only 34. That he died so early does not leave us with quite the cheated feeling and scope for tantalizing speculation as do the deaths of artists who were leading their times, like Bix, Christian, Parker and Clifford Brown. Most probably he would have been playing in much the same vein today. But that does not lessen one's sense of loss, because I for one could well do with a new album from Wardel! Gray every so often. I think jazz could, too. While the innovators are forging new paths, jazz needs its work-a-day exponents. And that's what Wardell was - a great working jazz musician.”
Listen to him, for he's the stuff that jazz is made of - and I hope always will be, if it is to remain a dance music, a social music, as well as a developing art form.”
Herbie Butterfield
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Remembering Wardell Gray [1921-1955] - Part 2 -The Michael James Essay [From the Archives]
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“It is greatly to the credit of Michael James that he has managed, in the course of these essays, to avoid the pitfalls of facile theorizing and academicism in its less attractive aspect. While never being less than generous to the creative talents of the performers, he shows a concern with the social conditions in which they operate and is able to see that modern jazz artists have been considerably affected by the uncertainties of the society of which they are a part.
It would do Mr. James an injustice if one gave the impression that he was using jazz as a springboard to advance personal social theories, but it is refreshing to find a critic whose prime concern is with the content of a musician's work.
He has listened very attentively to records and, when possible, to public performances by the musicians about whom he writes and has probed deeply into their intentions and achievements. His method is not without its dangers, for, relying as it does on a mainly subjective approach, there is invariably the temptation to project one's own ideas onto the subjects of the essays. However, in the main he has been successful in avoiding this.”
- Albert J. McCarthy, FOREWORD
The Jazz writings of Michael James have graced these pages previously with two rare articles from the Jazz Monthly magazine on Hank Mobley which you can locate by going here and here.
Michael’s prose is from a time and training that emphasized “academic” grammar and syntax rather than a looser and more fluid “journalistic” approach.
It’s heavy reading and requires a slow-paced attention; Michael’s writing makes the reader stop and think in order to fully grasp and digest its meaning.
But if you make the effort, the reward is gaining the insights and observations from one who has thought long and hard about the music and its makers and has something very valuable to say about both of them.
This essay on Wardell Gray is from another rare publication: Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded [London: 1961].
In addition to a full description of Gray stylistic development from ca. 1945 until his death in 1955, this chapter affords the reader significant details about the often murky period in the evolution of Bebop in the years immediately following WWII.
“The question of influence in jazz is one that has drawn many writers in the past and will doubtless continue to do so in the future, since the expansion of the music in a geographical sense, with the consequent multiplication of soloists, will certainly afford even wider opportunities for comparison.
While this extension of jazz boundaries will most probably entail no increase in stature of the best artists, and while the amelioration of general standards will perhaps lessen the chances of a truly original talent appearing, the authority of the foremost men will obviously be greater than before, since there will be more embryo soloists to absorb their influence, and, as far as one can judge, a yet more thorough dissemination of style through the medium of the recording studio.
The contemporary jazz scene is marked by an often disproportionate reverence for the artists of a preceding generation: many altoists, for instance, seem mesmerized by Parker's genius, and the phrasing of Gillespie or Davis stamps the output of a considerable number of trumpeters. Desirable as this might well be in the light of the place these three hold in the main jazz tradition, there are too many cases where their teachings have not been properly digested, and where the disciple has preferred to copy the gestures of his master rather than attempt to grasp the essence of his work.
I have chosen these few remarks to preface this article, because I feel that the recorded work of Wardell Gray can serve in the present circumstances as an invaluable lesson. Several of the younger soloists do not appear to have the adventurous spirit which has distinguished their counterparts of previous decades. This may be due in part to the use many of them have made of the legacies of the bop era. A Dave Schildkraut or a Charlie Mariano may echo the phrases of the Bird, but such offerings are no more than the shadow cast by his greatness; and this ineptitude of theirs may be the upshot of an inability to comprehend the truth that art, to be alive, must be whole. Blinded by an understandable admiration, they have failed to perceive that in transposing his mannerisms they are achieving precisely nothing, because they have never got beyond the imitative stage, and therefore have never progressed to an integrated expression.
In other words, they have not yet realized that a model can be the means of fostering the strength of their own work. They have seen the brilliant exterior and been fascinated, but they have not succeeded in penetrating the stylistic surface to lay their hands upon the wealth that lies within. For them influence betrays its meaning. How great a difference there is between their mimicry and the intelligence displayed by Wardell Gray in his choice and exploitation of examples on which to pattern his style. Impressed in the first place by the polished assurance of Lester Young, later seduced by the fantastic invention of Charlie Parker, Gray consistently used these two models as a means to an end, the projection of his own personality through the improvised solo.
Several phrases may be singled out in Young's recorded solos with the Basie band of the late 'thirties which find their echoes throughout Gray's work, and are especially noticeable in the early part of his career as it is represented on record. The release in his chorus on Jumpin' at the Woodside is particularly to the point here, but in actual fact it is easy to discover details of similarity if not of identity in most of the elder tenorman's improvised contributions to these celebrated sides. On Exactly Like You and the earlier Roseland Shuffle, Young's ability to swing without recourse to the violence of most of his contemporaries set the pattern which was to shape Gray's rhythmic conception less than a decade later. It was this facet of his style rather than the even more revolutionary distribution of phrase on Swinging the Blues or One O'Clock Jump which was to have the greater hold over the younger man.
While Parker seems to have been primarily interested in the frequent freedom of Young's melodic line in relation to the basic beat, Gray appears to have been absorbed by his propensity for phrasing on the beat without indulging in the traditional stress of tone or volume which would have broken up the flow of his improvisation. In any case, it is this aspect of his work which is the more apparent in Gray's soloing on the Hines 1946 records. The tone, too, has been an important factor in his development, just as it was with Parker. Here again, though, there is a need to make an important reservation. Parker, in the most intense of his moods, developed the lightness of his predecessor's tone to the pitch of shrillness; Gray, although working along the same lines, sought to rival Young's mobility, but only very rarely gave vent to the piercing note that serves so often as the climax to the altoist's phrases.
The mere fact that Parker generally played alto while Gray played tenor is of no small significance here, but it is noticeable from the former's few records where he performs on the larger horn that the tonal influence of Young was quite different in his case. Both on the 1947 Savoy session and on the 1953 sides with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins the Bird's tone has the edginess latent in Young's early work with Basie, and, oddly enough, more to the fore in his recent recordings, an edginess which is never less than an eccentricity in the playing of Wardell Gray.
For the latter concentrated upon the soft rounded quality of sound which marked Young's tone in the middle and lower registers of his instrument, and strove over the years to retain this external polish, at the same time bringing a greater depth and consistency to each note. By the time he cut these solos with the Hines band he had already made considerable progress in this respect, and the numerous examples we have of his work in the following year suggest that by 1947 this especial trend had reached its fulfilment.
On the February session with a Parker small group and on the Gene Norman concert dates of the following months his tone is distinguished not only by its smoothness but by a consistency which is present irrespective of the duration or the pitch of the note played. This is one of the reasons why his music invariably transmits a feeling of relaxation and why his expression never has the nervous quality common to most of the young soloists of the same era; yet at the same time he is uninterested by the vehemence and unbridled ejaculation which is so great an asset to the dramatic force of Coleman Hawkins's or Herschel Evans's playing. In matters of phrasing and of tone he has been inspired by Lester Young, yet he has adapted these influences in close accord with his own personality to forge a new and original style.
Perhaps it was the presence of Parker on the West Coast in early 1947 which first impressed Gray to the extent of modifying his musical expression. Already, of course, he was aware of the importance of the Minton developments, and his playing showed his allegiance to the new trends; but there was as yet a definite gulf between the lazy but polished nonchalance of his melodic line and the more intricate invention of those musicians constituting the spearhead of the movement. As late as the spring of 1947, two months after the session which produced such excellent sides as Cheers, Stupendous, etc., his playing on the concert transcription of One O'clock Jump betrays no overt Parker influence. It was not until the following year that whole passages from the Parker vocabulary began to crop up in his improvisation. His solo on the poorly recorded Stoned, a quartet side made during the 1948 A.F.M. ban, has something of the altoist's searing attack, together with a manifest similarity of phrase.
Likewise, his contributions, restricted as they are, to the Goodman small group discs of the same period attest the derivative quality of much of his work. I use the adjective in no pejorative sense, however: in employing the same figures which constantly recur in slightly diverse form throughout Parker's solos, the tenorist used them with quite dissimilar effect. The difference is above all one of construction. Parker would string his phrases out with little respect for the traditional four- or eight-bar divisions, and with the lack of any simple kind of balance in the arrangement of a chorus, his playing more often than not gave the impression of instability and nervous anxiety. His predilection for rests, the stridency of his tone, and his licence with regard to the beat all tended to accentuate this effect. None of these features is shared by Gray; and it is typical of his taste that he adopts certain phrases in a way that conforms with the relative simplicity of his construction and the rounded compactness of his tone. In any of his choruses the borrowed figure is made to fit in with its immediate context, and is saturated with the general flavour of his musical personality.
Gray absorbed much of Parker in roughly the same fashion that an outstanding jazzman makes a popular melody his own, usurping the artistic rights of its composer, but it must be stressed that the transmutation in this case was a far harder one, since the average Parker phrase has infinitely more character than the vapid concoction of the commercial songwright. The first eight bars of Gray's third chorus on Matter and Mind, a performance from the same session as Stoned, shows just how complete this musical confiscation could be in practice, however obviously Parker-based the phrase employed. Gray was wise enough to take from the altoist only what had value as far as he personally was concerned. The actual melodic detail fell into this category, but the tone with which it was played and the place it held in the framework of the Parker solo did not.
It is a measure of his perspicacity that he was able to appreciate this distinction, for so many genuinely gifted improvisers have fallen into the trap of attempting to absorb all Parker's traits. Some excellent examples of his achievement in this respect are provided by the discs he made in Detroit with a local rhythm section on 25th April 1950. The blues — Treadin’ and Grayhound — must be classed with his finest work. The tremendous drive, fluency, and relaxation of his playing beggar description; no words can adequately convey the unremitting swing which seems actually to thrive on the complexity of the extemporized line. It is as if he rejoices in his power to make the most involved figures swing with the insistence of an unadorned riff played by the Basie ensemble.
To assert that these records contain his finest performances would be dogmatic, but the supreme confidence of his playing reveals the thoroughness with which he had assimilated his two major influences, and demonstrates the perfection of the synthesis — a synthesis made possible only by his powers of original invention. If he drew in turn upon elements of both these styles, the success of this appropriation was ensured solely by his ability to superimpose on any harmonic basis phrases fashioned and concerted in a way at once personal and absorbing. The greater number of his recorded solos, once heard, seem to possess the rare stamp of inevitability which marks out the original artist in any sphere. Without this necessary imaginative core, Gray could never have made use of his influences with any degree of success.
In any case the continuing evolution of his style was not necessarily accompanied by an increase in musical merit. There is no definite connexion between this expansion of phraseology and the standard of his work. Again, the impress of Parker is not evident on all his later recordings. There is very little trace of such an influence in his solos on the LP he made for Gene Norman with a group of Ellingtonians; nor is his improvisation on the jam session date organized by Granz in 1953 marked by any mannerisms of this kind. It is more than possible that the patterns laid down by the rhythm sections in both instances were responsible for his adherence to a rather less complicated line, though the continuity and length of his phrases tend to conceal the austere character of the support he receives. Bellson's failure to complement Clark Terry's trumpet work on The Jeep is Jumpin' is not calculated to give the effect of a musical entity, but the simplicity of his drumming is no drawback when the tenorist is playing. I do not wish to imply that the lack of rhythmic complexity was an adverse influence upon Gray's playing; in point of fact, his solos on the Gene Norman session are by and large superior to those he plays on the Clef date. It is merely that in both these cases his phrase selection appears to be guided by the immediate musical environment, an interesting feature which indicates the elasticity of his temperament, and also shows that the evolution over the years in his mode of expression was far from being a rigid one.
Just as the quality of his recorded performances varied only slightly over the last ten years of his life, the content of his work hardly changed at all. It seems likely that the stability of character which is evoked by the even temper of his improvisations ensured the consistently high standard of his playing. Gray is a pronounced exception to most of the major soloists who rose to prominence at the same time in so far as the body of his documented work suggests a state of well-being.
Whatever the implications in the playing of the other members of the modern school — and these, to put it mildly, are hardly governed by a spirit of optimism — Gray was untouched by the emotional aura of his period. Yet if he does not deal in sadness and anxiety, such a freedom from the gloomier preoccupations of the creative artist does not impugn his sense of reality. The gaiety of a Shorty Rogers is rendered suspect by its unfailing cheeriness, and bears too obvious an affinity to the happy ending of the Hollywood romance for us to accept it without serious reservation; the pulse of Wardell Gray's work is altogether a deeper one. There is nothing theatrical in the vigorous exhilaration of his playing: he is guided by an inner compulsion rather than by the character of the theme in hand. If I have cited relatively few of the sides he made, it is that his emotive range is a very restricted one; but the spirit which flows through his work is perhaps the most vital one of all, that of pure joy.
Granted, there were times when the acrid savour of discontent crept into his expression. The brashness of tone in Twisted and in certain other recordings of the same period hints at a possible exasperation with the very limited approval his efforts were then receiving. Yet even on these sides the sturdy decision of his playing betokens the force of character which never ceased to be the dynamic centre of his style. Not once did he deviate from the forthright mode which, typifying all Ms work, is as evident in a ballad interpretation after the manner of Easy Living as in an up-tempo blues such as Farmer's Market. His darkest moods, infrequent as they are, never undermine the air of conviction which pervades every solo he recorded.
Though, the equable climate of his art allows for only a limited scope as far as the emotions are concerned, and though his work is remarkable for the consistency of the feeling which runs through it, the actual imaginative faculty of this generously endowed musician was rivalled only by the ease of his execution. Blue Lou, the justly famed performance from one of the 1947 concerts, indicates how he was able to improvise at length with not the slightest embarrassment to his creative powers. There are certainly resemblances between his different choruses, but he rarely repeats a whole melodic figure, and never has recourse to the phrenetic note reiteration that is too often the resort of the lesser soloist in extended solos of this kind. An interesting point about his work In these conditions is that he hardly builds towards a climax in the way that Hawkins or Lucky Thompson will increase the atmosphere to a peak of intensity. He generally prefers to achieve a less spectacular but just as memorable effect by the simple expedient of adding chorus to chorus, each one conceived and played in as elegant yet decisive a manner as the last. This treatment is also given to the tunes recorded in the studio: even on the conventional three-minute recording, with far less time at his disposal, he seldom varies his approach. The tempo makes little or no difference. On A Sinner Kissed an Angel, a ballad from the 1950 Detroit session, the charm of the piece stems from the adroit manipulation of melody rather than from the slight increase in emphasis noticeable in the final eight bars of the performance.
So impressive is the fertility of his imagination that it is easier to choose from the catalogue of his work the few sides which do not measure up to the rest of his records than to single out any particular solos as the better examples of his artistry. Like J. J. Johnson, his instrumental command was so developed that he could hardly make a bad recording; but the sides privately recorded for Eddie Laguna in 1950 do not share the continuity of line that is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of his playing. One for Prez illustrates the chief weakness: it is not so much that he gropes for ideas, but the phrases he does play have not the same logical interrelation we find elsewhere in his recorded performances ; there are one or two striking phrases worthy of his best work — for instance those which he plays immediately after Red Calender's bass chorus — but his contributions as a whole lack the cohesion that was the hallmark of his style. Nonetheless, even on this session the precision and swing of his playing suggest the qualities of confidence and self-assurance which are apparent in every one of his records. If his phrases are a little disjointed, his invention not up to the usual standard, there is no doubting the forceful resilience of his personality as it comes through in the music.
When one considers how arduous are the working conditions of the jazzman, especially if he happens to be coloured, it seems all the more surprising that the warmth of Gray's playing did not diminish to any marked extent throughout his career. He played with a variety of groups, and travelled quite as extensively as the average top-flight jazzman. Until 1951, when he moved to the West Coast, the pattern of his existence was no less checkered than is usual, and his journeyings with Basie and Goodman groups, not to mention those he led himself, must have exposed him to both the fatigue and the insults that are the lot of the itinerant Negro artist.
Yet if his style became rather more aggressive, his tone a trifle harder and his lines less sinuous, there was no lessening of the humour which was always latent in his playing. The concert at Pasadena, California, recorded in February 1952 shows this well enough. If he never found the kind of public recognition he most certainly deserved, his music gives no indication that he was contemptuous of the society he lived in. Only the purist would fail to smile at the high spirits he displays in this musical duel with Dexter Gordon. Gray was always a master of the four-bar exchange, and only on one recording date — the February 1947 session with Parker and McGhee — was his brilliance overshadowed; the surprising thing is that he outshone his rivals by sheer musical invention, as witness the dextrous way he balances Vido Musso's rough-hewn phrases on the 1947 California Conquest. Yet his poise never degenerated into affectation, nor did he ever retreat behind the reassuring screen of musical virtuosity. His emotions are evident for all to see, and if he shared the urbanity of a Benny Carter, like this musician he was never infatuated by the attractions of elegance alone.
Given the unfailing confidence of his work, it is no wonder that he has few followers in the present jazz scene. Frank Foster has something of his phrasing, but seems uninterested in the relaxation that was undeniably his; Bill Holman, one of the Kenton alumni, has this same relaxation, but shows only a fraction of his élan and imagination. Twentieth-century society's chief distinguishing mark is its awareness of insecurity and the ephemeral nature of human endeavour, and it is natural, I suppose, that an art form which is in some ways more representative than any other of contemporary afflictions should be unattracted by his overt self-assurance. Yet when, in 1955, he met his death in the most mysterious of circumstances, the emotive gamut of modern jazz was appreciably lessened. Few other modernists had brought a comparable spirit of exultation to their music. The official verdict, with its assumption that Gray was addicted to heroin, finds no more confirmation in the vivacity of his work than it did with his employer and admirer Benny Carter, who denied knowledge of any addiction on the tenorist's part. It is ironic that a musician whose every solo speaks of the joy of living should have met such an end as his, but the manner of his death emphasizes once again the hectic strains imposed on the majority of practising jazz musicians and the drastic steps they too often take to escape them.
The history of jazz provides several instances of men who worked an original style out to its furthest limits with such thoroughness that no disciple could hope to add anything to their achievements. The true geniuses — Armstrong, Hawkins, Young, Parker — do not fall within this classification since their work in its range and variety points in numberless directions. In contrast, artists like Tommy Ladnier, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner, and Wardell Gray, though lacking the superabundant powers of the foregoing musicians, have carried a personal mode of expression to the pitch of completeness. Their example, to be beneficial, must be one of manner rather than of means. A young musician would be foolish to try consciously to assimilate the work of any one of them in its entirety, but there is much to be learned from their wisdom of approach, the insight they have shown in forging a style which is both different from what has gone before and integrated in its uniqueness. Though he made wide use of details which were not of his own devising, Gray's individuality cannot be questioned. When he died, the modern jazz scene lost a man whose powers of imagination and execution, impressive as they were, had always been at one with the infectious fervour of his art.”
Thursday, April 2, 2026
Remembering Wardell Gray [1921-1955] - Part 1 - The Ira Gitler Prestige Notes [From the Archives]
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
SIDEMAN BLUES
He played in Vegas. Then he died there--his body found at the edge of the desert with a broken neck and a bloodstream full of smack. Now, thirty-seven years later, Evan Horne is looking into the death of tenor sax player Wardell Gray, a sharp-dressing sideman who rubbed someone very wrong.
Moonlighting from his job playing piano at the Fashion Show Mall - -his first gig since a debilitating hand injury -- Horne was doing a favor for a scholar by asking questions about Wardell Gray. Then the heat, glitz, and payback of Vegas came down hard, bringing Horne up against a former dancer with a sizzling secret in her past, a mobster whose hobby is dollhouses, and the little-known history of a 1950s black jazz club--a disturbing truth that still has the power to swing, smoke, and kill....
Death of a Tenor Man, [Book 2 of 7] in Bill Moody’s Evan Horne Jazz mystery series
“Nineteen fifty five will be remembered in the jazz world as a year which took a heavy toll of its musicians. During its course men of different styles, from Charlie Parker to Cow Cow Davenport, died leaving behind the memory of their work in the form of gramophone records. Parker, whose passing was one of the greatest single losses in the entire history of our music, died after a heart attack which came as a delayed-action culmination to a protracted period of ill health; pianist Dick Twardzick died in Paris as a result of an excessive self-administered shot of heroin, white baritone saxist Bob Gordon was killed in a California car accident as he was travelling to fulfil a concert engagement. Both of these latter deaths serve as grim reminders of the internal and external hazards facing today's musicians.
On the 26th of May the most mysterious death came to light when tenor man Wardell Gray's body was discovered on some waste ground outside Las Vegas. He had died from a broken neck and injuries sustained to the head inflicted by an unidentified weapon.”
-Alun Morgan, Wardell Gray in Jazz Monthly, i/12, 1956
Sometimes Jazz musicians are as ethereal as the music itself - here one minute and gone the next.
The setting for the music - which was usually full of booze, gangsters and assorted vices - was hardly conducive to economic stability, good health and longevity.
Not surprisingly then, Jazz has more than its share of tragic falls from grace and one of the saddest of these stories is tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray who had the makings of a brilliant career when he suddenly disappeared into the Las Vegas desert and was found dead under circumstances that remain as mysterious as they are unsolved.
But as Ira Gitler reminds us in the following excerpts from his notes to the Prestige Records Memorial albums:
“The death of Wardell Gray has not been completely cleared up but it is not for us to attempt to solve any mysteries here. …. His life, rather than his death, is what concerns us.
Whatever he played swung, for primarily Wardell was a swinger. Moving along at up-tempo, he would still exhort the rhythm section to ‘bear down.’
Although one would imagine that there’s not much to write about in the life of a thirty-three year old Jazz musician, there are a number of fine pieces about him in Jazz literature.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has put together an initial effort to help remember and commemorate Wardell Gray on these pages. More pieces will follow in other blog features about him and the musical settings in which he performed.
To begin, here’s more from Ira’s notes to Wardell Gray Memorial Vols. 1 & 2 [Prestige LP 7008/7009; OJCCD -050-2; 051-2
Born in Oklahoma City in 1921, Wardell moved to Detroit where he studied music at Cass Tech High. After playing with the local bands of Jimmy Rachel and Benny Carew, he did his first name band work with Earl Hines, doubling on tenor and clarinet from 1943 to 1945. Then he was with Billy Eckstine's big band for a short spell before joining Benny Carter in 1946, Carter has always had great admiration for Wardell's playing and Benny is not lavish with praise for many of the modern jazzmen. With Carter, Wardell went out to the West Coast and decided to remain for a while, 1947 found him participating in many of the jazz concerts so popular there at that time. Through these appearances and recordings, he began to be more widely known.
The Lester Young style he had shown with Hines was still in evidence, a pure-toned driving style which underwent change in the following year. When Wardell came to New York in 1948 to become part of the Benny Goodman Sextet you could hear the shift to Charlie Parker's influence. Later that year he appeared at the Royal Roost with Tadd Dameron's group and Count Basie's band. In 1949 it was back to Goodman, this time the big band. By the time he had finished an engagement at the Orchid Club (the old Onyx) on 52nd Street with Sonny Stitt in early 1950, Wardell's style had changed completely over to the harder sound and crisper attack.
He returned to Detroit and spent several months there with his own quartet. When Count Basie formed a small band, Wardell answered his call. Until the end of 1951 when he settled in California, he played intermittently with Count in both small and large groups. We never saw him in the East after that. Outside of a few recording sessions (two of which are included in these volumes) he wasn't heard from. The West Coast may have been booming but not for all.”
Wardell is also referenced in Ira’s Jazz Masters of the 1940s in association with tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon:
“After playing in Hawaii with Cee Pee Johnson, Gordon settled in Los Angeles again. It was here that he and the late Wardell Gray became a team. It started at an after-hours place called Jack's Basket and at other weekly sessions. "There'd be a lot of cats on the stand, but by the end of the session, it would wind up with Wardell and myself," Gordon recalled. "The Chase grew out of this. Wardell was a very good saxophonist who knew his instrument very well. His playing was very fluid, very clean. Although his sound wasn't overwhelming, he always managed to make everything very interesting, very musical. I always enjoyed playing with him. He had a lot of drive and a profusion of ideas. He was stimulating to me."
Trumpeter Art Farmer has told me that at these sessions, Gordon and Gray would generate such excitement as they exchanged musical ideas that people would wind up standing on tables and chairs.”
In their chapter The Spreading Flame: New York and the West Coast in the Mid-Forties [Modern Jazz: A Survey of Development Since 1939 [Greenwood Press, 1956], Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks] offer this overview:
“Wardell had been a member of the Earl Hines band and had worked alongside Charlie Parker for a short time. After engagements with Billy Eckstine, Benny Carter and Vernon Alley he settled in Hollywood to play in small groups. He was a heavily featured soloist at the Gene Norman concerts and a very popular musician at any musical gathering. He played in the amalgamated Charlie Parker-Lester Young style with a superb and consistent tone.
He possessed an unruffled temperament which made him at home either in the recording studio or on the concert platform and he could never be accused of descending to the depths of crowd-rousing showmanship. So often the bugbear of the tenor and trumpet soloist is this playing to the gallery. Warden's sense of swing was literally unrivalled anywhere in the world of modern jazz, yet despite all these attributes he gained neither publicity nor the respect accorded to lesser musicians.
He played on Parker's Relaxin' at Camarillo date and recorded a tenor chase under the title The Chase with the somewhat similarly styled Dexter Gordon. He worked with the Benny Goodman band at the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949 and Benny was so impressed with his playing and sense of musicianship allied to his-high-grade jazz creation that he made him deputy leader. Wardell was more at home with Basie, whose band he joined after the Goodman engagement, and the Count featured him on his recording of Little Pony.
The spring of 1955 witnessed the tragic death of Wardell under somewhat mysterious circumstances.”
Wardell’s career and style of playing are a bit more fleshed out in the following insert notes to Wardell Gray Quintet: Live at The Haig 1952 [Fresh Sound FSRCD 157] by Mike Baille:
“Gray was born in Oklahoma City in 1921, but actually grew up in Detroit where he studied clarinet at the celebrated Cass Tech, switching later to the alto saxophone. It was as an alto man that he joined the band of Earl Mines in '43, but after a couple of years he was playing the tenor saxophone. Like many others, he'd come under the spell of Lester Young. From Earl Mines he moved on to the Billy Eckstine band, and by '46, now living in California, he found regular work with Benny Carter, Dexter Gordon, Erroll Garner and Gene Norman. The latter was a highly successful promoter of jazz concerts in the Los Angeles area in the late 40's, who frequently featured Wardell Gray as a front line soloist, and because of that Gray came to the attention of Benny Goodman. Thus the years '48-'51 saw Gray based in New York and continually moving back and forth between the bands of Goodman and Count Basie, both leaders frequently in competition for his services.
He returned to California in '51, where he was held in very high esteem by fellow musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes and Art Farmer, who considered the thin and bespectacled Gray something of an intellectual. (It was said he carried around with him the works of the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre.) Gray was also known to be against the use of drugs, yet he himself fell into the same abyss, his dead body being found in Las Vegas in very obscure circumstances.
Gray is perhaps the Missing Link between Swing and Bop, for in his early days he played very much like Young (all of whose solos he knew note for note, according to Dexter Gordon) — then, by following Charlie Parker's musical thinking, he found his own style. He was certainly no copyist, and, blessed with a superb technique plus a fertile imagination he cruised effortlessly through the changes with a logical ease, producing consistently melodic music with an incredible swing, allied to a lovely warm tone.
His solos were invariably beautifully rounded, moving inexorably from one climax to the next, and not necessarily with any change in volume — climaxes produced simply by the notes selected. He possessed a melodic conception second to none, an unrivalled sense of swing, plus there existed a certain kind of elegance in those long smooth swinging phrases.
He appeared serene, with a rare grace and beauty in his playing that only a master musician is capable of producing. During his time in New York he made a considerable impression on 52nd St playing with Sonny Stitt in 1950, then later with Miles Davis and Bud Powell. And, of course, some excellent recordings were made with the bands of Basie and Goodman.
But it was the West Coast where he became really prominent and universally known. There were some momentous concerts under the supervision of Gene Norman, in which his marathon tenor “battles” with Dexter Gordon became a talking point for both musicians and fans alike. These musical joustings with Dexter Gordon brought both tenor saxophonists national and international recognition, for each man would gleefully challenge the other in “combat”, and their recording of The Chase was a big seller.
The cream of the West Coast jazz scene of the time was certainly assembled one evening in September 1952 at The Haig, a small Los Angeles club run by John Bennet. And, thanks to Bob Andrews, who was there with his recording equipment, some of the music played that night has been preserved.
Bernie's tune swings at medium tempo and gets the album off to a fine start. Gray is at total ease with the changes, and Manne's brushwork really punctuates the proceedings, particularly behind Hawes' funky solo. Tadd Dameron's The Squirrel follows, with more smooth sailing from Gray, who builds a solo of compelling swing. Art Farmer is in something of a Milesian mode here, while Hawes brings a highly rhythmic and percussive colouring to his solo statement before a brilliant series of exchanges between the two horns closes the piece. Pennies from heaven and Taking a chance on love both feature Wardell Gray's tenor with just the rhythm section, and he floats gently through both numbers in a laid-back manner very reminiscent of Lester Young, enhancing each melody with his original variations.
In between the two standards is a furious version of Donna Lee where Gray demonstrates that he can play just as immaculately at fast tempo, as does Hampton Hawes in his very articulate solo. Manne's cymbals positively sizzle on this one. Jackie is a blues, with some fine trumpet playing by Art Farmer, and some surprising Shearing-like block chording from composer Hampton Hawes. Get happy is exactly that — optimistic and bright — with Wardell Gray quite superb and Hawes playing some pure bebop piano. Shelly Manne shines on brushes behind Gray on Keen and Peachy where the guitar of Howard Roberts is added, and Hawes is absolutely brilliant in his solo spot. Roberts is still there for the final number, another Dameron opus — Ladybird — and the unknown Amos Trice takes over the piano chair from Hawes. For Art Farmer these were formative times, and on all the tracks where he is featured one can see an emerging style, with plenty of his own ideas coming through in that economical and unforced way of his.
However, there is no doubt who is the dominant voice in these important live recordings — Wardell Gray. He seems very much the leader here, always taking the first solo on every track, and by doing so setting the feel and the tone for the other musicians who follow — yet he somehow manages to be both self-effacing and authoritative at one and the same time. It's poignant to consider what might have been had Gray not died in May 1955, at the early age of thirty-one. An untimely death, and a most terrible loss to the jazz world. It wasn't only Wardell Gray's luck that ran out that fateful day in Las Vegas.”
Wardell is also one of the subjects in Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded Work of Ten Modern Jazzmen [London: 1960]; Alun Morgan, Wardell; Gray in Jazz Monthly, i/12, 1956; H. Butterfield, Wardell Gray in Jazz Journal, xiv/10, 1961; Max Harrison, Backlog Ten: Wardell Gray in Jazz Monthly, viii/3 1962. He is also the focus of a discography by C. Schlouch published in Marseilles, France in 1983. These references are cited in Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz which also contains an overview of Wardell’s career, a list of selected recordings and a bibliography as compiled by Lawrence Koch.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is in the process of acquiring copies of these chapters, articles and reviews about Wardell and his music and will published them individually in future features on Wardell in order to establish a comprehensive online catalogue of materials about this extremely talented, but somewhat obscure, “Missing Link” between Swing Era and Bebop Era tenor saxophone styles.
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