© -
Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Columbia Records
released The Jazz Makers in 1957 as a vinyl LP [CL 1036] in conjunction
with a book of the same title which was edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff.
I don’t think the music on the album was ever issued in a digital format,
With the exception
of vocalist Bessie Smith, bandleader, composer-arranger, Fletcher Henderson and
guitarist Charlie Christian, all of the twenty-one seminal figures represented
on this tandem Jazz retrospective were still actively performing in 1957.
Here’s some
background on the evolution of this concept from the liner notes to the
LP.
“Early in 1957,
nine of America America
The tough part was
agreeing upon just twenty-one of the hundreds of musicians who had contributed
most to the development of jazz. The idea was to pool the extensive knowledge
and critical experience of the group in an attempt to produce fresh biographical
appraisals of the most important jazz figures of our time, utilizing all of the
new material that has come to light about jazzmen and jazz history in these
recent, fertile years of research, scholarship and analysis.
After much
discussion (and some liquid refreshment), during which studies of several
deserving musicians (because of space limitations) had to be omitted, the final
group was decided upon, writers assigned, and a book—and this record— were
born.
"The Jazz
Makers," which is being published by Rinehart and Company simultaneously
with the issuing of this recording, is edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
whose "oral history of jazz," Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, has achieved
the status of a minor classic on the subject. The contributors, aside from the
two Nats, also include such notable odd-balls and experts as George Avakian,
Leonard Feather, John S. Wilson, Orrin Keepnews, Charles Edward Smith, George
Hoefer, and Bill Simon. The twenty-one musicians chosen by this august
critics' circle were Jelly Roll Morton, Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Lester
Young, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
Parker, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian, Bix Beiderbecke,
Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Jack Teagarden, Pee Wee Russell, Fletcher
Henderson, Fats Waller and Earl Hines.
Since most, if not
all, of these great men and women of jazz have at some time been represented in
the vast Columbia
These are several
of the jazz makers. They are men and women for whom jazz became a natural way
of self-fulfillment, self-expression, and a totally engaged way of life. In
turn, in the impact of their own originality, they became part of the jazz
language itself, a form of immortality vouchsafed to very, very few.”
The audio track of
trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie performing I
Can’t Get Started on the following video tribute to The Jazz Makers
provides a sampling of the music on the recording about which the liner notes
observe:
“In the early days
of modern jazz, the guerrilla warfare period, it was not always noted by even
the appreciators of Dizzy Gillespie that he possessed a serious lyrical
temperament as well as the more familiar fiery daring and quixotic wit. A
record which surprised and delighted supporters and quondam Gillespie
detractors was this Gillespie interpretation of I Can't Get Started, recorded in 1945 with Dizzy Gillespie
(trumpet); Trummy Young (trombone); Don Byas (tenor sax); Clyde Hart (piano);
Oscar Pettiford (bass); and Shelley Manne (drums).”
