© -
Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Moore was a terrific, but
star-crossed tenor player, at his best as good as Getz and Sims, but never able
to get a career together as they did. He left only a small number of records
behind him ….”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
If, as Louis
Armstrong’s states – “Jazz is only who you are” – then the inventiveness and
spontaneous nature of tenor saxophone Brew Moore’s music was certainly
reflective of his wandering and constantly searching lifestyle.
Mark Gardner, the
distinguished Jazz author offered these insights about Brew in the liner notes
to Brothers
and Other Mothers [Savoy Records SJL2210].
“Milton A. Moore
Jr. was a drifter, a born loser, a hero of the beat generation and a brilliant
saxophonist. Yes, he once remarked that any tenorman who did not play like Pres
was playing wrong-that was the extent of his admiration.
One day in the
'fifties Brew casually took off for California . As Moore told it, "Billy Faier had a 1949
Buick and somebody wanted him to drive it out to California and he rode through Washington Square shouting 'anyone for the Coast?' And I was
just sitting there on a bench and there wasn't s*** shaking in New York so I-said 'hell, yes,' and when we started
off there was Rambling Jack Elliot and Woody Guthrie." After Woody heard
Brew play at the roadside en route he refused to speak again to the
saxophonist.
Guthrie didn't dig
jazz. "But we were the only juice heads in the car so Woody would say to
Jack or Billy, 'Would you ask Brew if he'd like to split a bottle of port with
me, and I'd say, 'You tell Woody that's cool with me.' Then they let me off in L.A. and I took a bus up to San Francisco ."
Before that
fantastic journey. Brew had worked around with his buddy Tony Fruscella, a
beautiful trumpeter who was also over-fond of the juice. Allen Eager was also a
regular playing partner of Fruscella's. Brew stayed in Frisco for about five
years, played all over town, made a couple of albums under his own name, recorded
with Cal Tjader and drank a lot of wine. He was seriously ill in 1959 but
recovered and in 1961 moved to Europe
and for three years drifted around the Continent.
Twice in the
1960's he returned to the States but there was still no s*** shaking and nobody
bothered to record him properly (a date as a sideman with Ray Nance was the
only evidence of the final, unhappy return). His parents were very old and his
mother sick. Brew was far from well and didn't look after himself. Friends kept
an eye on him and tried to ensure that he ate regularly but Moore was almost past caring.
When he decided to
split back to Scandinavia via the Canary Islands where he played at Jimmy Gourley's Half
Note Club in Las Palmas , some of his admirers in New York produced a four-page newspaper called
"Brew Moore News," in which Brew wrote a touching little verse:
Love I feel, but longing much;
Thy face I see, but cannot touch.
Your presence in heart is good, I know,
but hand in hand-it's greater so.
Time was running
out for Brew. There was one more album - a great set made at a Stockholm club [Stampen] where Moore really grooved. Then came the news that he
had died after falling down a flight of steps in a restaurant.
The final irony: Brew,
who had scuffled and scraped for cash almost all his life, had just been left a
substantial sum of money, to give him genuine security, by a relative who had
died. It happened too late.”
“Scuffling” is
very much the byword when talking about Brew as one has to jump here and there
to find the few scraps of information and opinion that has been written about
him in that Jazz literature.
Jazz author and
critic, Ralph J, Gleason, had this to say about him in the insert notes to one
of Brew’s best recordings – The Brew Moore Quintet [Fantasy 3-2222
–OJCCD 100-2]:
Mainly main idea
is to get back to simplicity.' says Brew Moore of his work these days. "I
like a small group—such as the quintet we have on this album—where there is no
other front line and I can let myself go. The biggest kick to me in playing is
swinging-freedom and movement. And with a small group, I can do this more
easily.
"Music must
be a personal expression of one's own world and way of life. When everything
else gets to be a drag there is music for forgetfulness and also for memory and
or a reminder that there is more good than bad in most things. The idea of
playing for me is to compose a different, not always better I'm afraid, melody
on the tune and basis of the original song, rather than construct a series of
chord progressions around the original chords. I feel that in several spots in
this group of tunes we attain the rapport necessary for good jazz. I hope
so."
And when you
listen to these numbers, you will agree that Brew … has done what he set out to
do. These all swing and even Brew, who is most critical of his own work
("I guess I never have been happy with anything I did") had to say of
this album, "It swings. You can say that."
Brew has two
absolutely golden gifts. He swings like mad and he has soul. These are things
you cannot learn by wood-shedding [practicing], or in any conservatory. You
have to be born with them or learn them by living. Brew had them and he also
has a priceless gift for phrasing.
"Everything
he plays lays just right," one musician put it. It certainly does. … When Brew says it, he says it simply, but it
rings true. That's the best way there is.”
“After high school
Moore began a peripatetic career that brought
him little fame but gave him a heady taste for life on the move. …
By the time he
moved to San
Francisco [1954], Moore had achieved a reputation for excellence among Jazz insiders …. Jack
Kerouac depicts a Moore performance in Desolation Angels, where Brew (or
Brue, as Kerouac spells it) starts his solo with, the beat prosodist tells us,
"a perfect beautiful new idea that announces the glory of the future
world.”
This future glory
eluded Moore to the end. His quartet and quintet albums
on Fantasy, made during his California years, were his last commercial recordings
in the United States . These along with his sideman recordings
with Tjader, find the tenorist at absolutely top form, stretching out over
standards with an impressive melodic and rhythmic inventiveness. In 1961, he
moved to Europe , where, except for intermittent
appearances in the United States , he lived until his death in 1973 as the
result of a fall.”
To give you a
sampling of what’s on offer in Brew Moore’s music, with the help of the
crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD , we put together the following video
tribute to Brew on which he performs You
Stepped Out of a Dream with Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin [who also
did the arrangement], Bent Axen [p], Niels-Henning Orsted-Pedersen [b] and
William Schioppfe [d]. The music was recorded in Copenhagen in 1962.