Friday, November 30, 2012

A Tribute to the Music of Gerald Wilson

We always enjoy it when Gerald Wilson "stops by" and brings along some of his music. The tune is Patterns and it features solos by pianist Jack Wilson, Carmell Jones on trumpet, Harold Land on tenor saxophone and Joe Pass on drums with Mel Lewis booting things along from the drum chair. You can locate our previous, two-part feature on Gerald in the blog sidebar.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Grant Geissman: Studio Jazz Guitarist


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


“Grant Geissman's latest CD looks like a five-inch homage to the album-cover artist Jim Flora, with a cartoon of the guitarist serenading a bikini-clad redhead on the cover, and a collage in the center spread crammed with beatnik musicians, cats, birds and a pink elephant. The disc itself is designed like a vinyl record, complete with fake grooves.

Musically, Geissman takes a step into the past too, abandoning his smooth-jazz track record in favor of rootsy sound based in soulful hard bop, with a little New Orleans and upbeat melodies that still go down smoothly without the gloss.

From the Horace Silver-influenced title track to "Theme From Two and a Half Men," which gives the guitarist and Brian Scanlon (on soprano sax) a chance to blow over the sitcom theme, Geissman proves himself to be no wallflower when he puts his mind to it. But often tracks like "Bossa," with wordless vocals by Tierney Sutton, or "Wes Is More," with an excessive section of traded fours and twos with organist Jim Cox, come off more like bossa nova and blues without the necessary roughness.”

- Mike Shanley Review of Grant Geissman’s Say That! CD in JazzTimes APRIL 2006

“Grant Geissman's third in a trilogy of wildly eclectic outings once again has the versatile guitarist indulging in more than a few of his favorite things. From loping funk to boogaloo to earthy blues shuffles, with a haunting ballad, a beautiful samba and an urgently swinging post-bop romp thrown into the mix —along with touches of classical, flamenco and zydeco — he covers all the bases with authority on “Bop! Bang! Boom!
'It's all stuff I'm interested in and like to play, so it just comes out," says the San Jose native who is well known for his improvised guitar solo on Chuck Mangione's 1978 pop crossover hit 'Feels So Good* and more recently for co-writing the theme for the hit CBS-TV sitcom Two and a Half Men ("Men, men, men, men, manly men!*] ‘I have eclectic tastes and the way I play and write follows that. And since this album is on my own label, I get to do what I want!’”
- Bill Milkowski, liner notes

“One of the reasons I created my own label, Futurism, was so that I could explore anything I wanted—which to me is what an artist is supposed to do.”
- Grant Geissman

Like his counterpart, guitarist Lee Ritenour, who is affectionately known as “Captain Fingers” for his legendary ability to play any style of guitar at a moment’s notice, Grant Geissman really knows his way around a recording studio.

Grant is a Pro’s Pro: he brings it; he lays it down; it’s perfect. No need for another take. It’s done. Let’s move on.

Given the amount of money that record producers have to spend to develop an album, Grant’s ability to make it happen and to make it happen right the first time is why he’s first call on most contractor’s lists.

Grant also understands the technical aspects of the studio; he's savvy about the processes involved with making a recording. Whether it’s the sound board, the mix, the use of electronics and synthesizers to create and enhance the music, Grant knows about this stuff.

More importantly, Grant knows enough about all of these elements of engineering sound so that he can make them subservient to the final product – good music.

Grant also surrounds himself with musicians who are at home creating Jazz in a studio environment.

In recent years, Grant has taken matters a step further with the formation of his own label - Futurism Records.

Beginning in 2006 with Say That! and following in 2009 with Cool Man Cool, Grant has offered eclectic Jazz stylings that appeal to a wide range on interests: some Smooth Jazz; some Latin Jazz; some straight-head Bebop – all infused with Grant’s sophisticated studio sensibilities.


Bop! Bang! Boom!, the latest CD in the series, was released by Grant on July 17, 2012

In addition to a whole host of special guest such as saxophonist Tom Scott, guitarist Larry Carlton and keyboard artist  Russell Ferrante who join Grant on selected tracks, there is the bonus of the artwork of Miles Thompson that graces these CDs and is very reminiscent of the classic LP cover art that Jim Flora developed for many RCA and Columbia classic Jazz LP’s in the 1950s.

Here’s what Michael Bloom Media Relations had to say about Bop! Bang! Boom!:

“[This CD] is the third album in a loosely fashioned trilogy that reflects Grant Geissman's shift to more traditional jazz expressions. The powerfully eclectic follow-up to Say That! and Cool Man Cool includes amped-up ventures into numerous genres that reflect Geissman's multitude of passions.

The key to making meaningful music for me is to not limit myself stylistically. I actually can't envision writing an album where every track sounds the same. One of the reasons I created my own label, Futurism, was so that I could explore anything I wanted—which to me is what an artist is supposed to do. I don't know what happens after Bop! Bang! Boom!, it might be completely different. But it's not about having a master plan, it's about writing and recording music that excites and inspires me.”

Geissman co-wrote the Emmy-nominated theme (and also co-writes the underscore) for the hit CBS-TV series Two and Q Half Men. He also co-writes the underscore for the hit series Mike & Molly (also on CBS). As a studio musician, he has recorded with such artists as Quincy Jones, Chuck Mangione (playing the now-classic guitar solo on the 1977 hit "Feels So Good77), Lorraine Feather, Cheryl Bentyne, Van Dyke Parks, Ringo Starr, Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band, Joanna Mewsom, Inara George, Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello.”

Here’s a taste of the music on Bop! Bang! Boom! The tune is Un Poco Español on which Grant plays his mellow-sounding 1972 Hernandis nylon string classical guitar with Russell Ferrante featured on piano.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Louis Stewart /Mundell Lowe. play Body and Soul. Duets#2

Put your feet up, grab a cup of coffee or tea and relax while listening to some exquisite guitar playing.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Curnow, Metheny and Mays


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


I was going to add the phrase - “not a law firm” – to the title of this piece, but then I realized that it was an unnecessary qualifier.

Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays are names even more widely known in musical circles outside of Jazz and Jazz cognoscenti have been aware of Bob Curnow’s contributions to the music for many years.

In all honesty, I was just looking for a vehicle to present Bobby Shew’s masterful trumpet work on Bob Curnow’s big band arrangement of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’ tune, Always and Forever.

As sometimes happens, I made the video using this track from Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band: The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays [MAMA Foundation MMF 1009] and then backed into this piece.

The following annotation details the evolution of Bob Curnow’s career as a composer and arranger for big bands, as well as, his current activities as the proprietor of Sierra Music. You can checkout more about the later at www.sierramusicstore.com. The site also includes a biography on Bob.

Its almost impossible to encapsulate the overarching musical careers of Pat Metheny and to a somewhat lesser extent that of Lyle Mays.

I first became aware of their music on a 1978 ECM LP entitled The Pat Metheny Group [1-1114].

Although I was never a big fan of the Jazz-Rock-Fusion genre, some aspects of it appealed to me because in the hands of capable musicians, aspects of it could offer new approaches to developing melodies and alternative harmonies. I also liked the looser feel to rhythm that some of this music conveyed.

Of course, the overall texture or sound of the genre was heavily influenced by the use of electronics, particularly synthesizers.

What attracted me to the music of The Pat Metheny Group was the fact that it was easy on the “Rock” while being heavy on the use of electronic instruments to advance beautiful themes and interesting new approaches to harmonies such as the use of different tonal centers and chromaticism.

Pat and Lyle created music that was lighter in sonority and that just seemed to float, rhythmically.

Their music evoked moods and was easy to “visualize.” It had a down home feel to it and contained some elements of blues, country-and-western and folk.


As described by Richard Cook and Brian Morton in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“Metheny seemed content to drop his playing into whatever con­text it might find. …. At this time Meth­eny favored a clean, open tone with just enough electronic damping to take the music out of 'classic’ jazz-guitar feeling, but he clearly owed a great debt to such urban pastoralists as Jim Hall and Jimmy Raney, even if he seldom moved back to bebop licks.

The Metheny Group albums settled the guitarist's music into the niche from which he is still basically working: light, easily digested settings that let him play long, meticulous solos which can as often as not work up a surprising intensity. Pat Metheny Group and American Garage each have their ration of thoughtful improvising which the guitarist settles inside a gently propulsive rhythm, more ruralized than the beefy urban beats of the con­temporary fusion bands.

That strain also colors the playing and composing of Mays, who has been Metheny's principal collabo­rator for 20 years. Scarcely a major voice in his own right - … - Mays is the perfect second banana. He feeds Metheny all kinds of tasteful orchestration without getting too much in his way.

New Chautauqua is a rare all-solo album in the Metheny canon. A pleasant, sweet-toned diversion, it hints at the multifarious-ness; with various electric and acoustic settings, including a i5-string harp-guitar, with which Metheny has grown fascinated in recent times.”

Given these descriptions of the form and format of the music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, imagine my surprise when in 1994 I stumbled upon a recording entitled Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band Plays The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays [MAMA Foundation MMF 1009].

I had a fledgling awareness of Bob Curnow as a budding arranger for some of the bands that the legendary Stan Kenton led in the 1970s before his passing in 1979 and I knew of his work with Stan in marketing and distributing the band’s music through Kenton’s Creative World enterprises.

But never in a million years would I have figured the Metheny/Mays musical canon fitting into the big bold sound of a Kenton-like orchestral setting.

If anyone had proposed it to me conceptually, I would have thought of it as a musical contradiction in terms.

And yet, I was holding the realized promise of such a union in my hand; all I had to do was buy it, take it home and play it.

Which is exactly what I did and much to my delight, the combination of Pat and Lyle’s music as orchestrated and arranged for big band by Bob worked extremely well together.

 As Bob Curnow alludes in his insert notes to the recording: the big band arrangements of Metheny and Mays music became one example of what Stan Kenton’s Orchestra might have sounded like in the 1980's and beyond.

Bob Blumenthal had this to say about the music on Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band Plays The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays.

© -Bob Blumenthal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.


Acoustic and electric. These are the categories most frequently employed to compartmentalize jazz these days.  Many diehards in each camp will tell you that never the twain shall meet. Obviously, they have not heard this incredible album.

Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band Plays The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays
is an amazingly successful translation to the idiom of jazz big band of music originally created in an electric context. The source material, a dozen compositions from the book of the Pat Metheny Group, was created by musicians who have never allowed simplistic categories to place restrictions on their imaginations.  It has been adapted by a kindred spirit who, while working from a more traditional base, has an equally open mind and the requisite big ears.

Bob Curnow's name is not as familiar as Pat Metheny's, yet he too has enjoyed a rich and diverse career. Curnow was a trombonist with The Stan Kenton Orchestra (which also performed his compositions and arrangements) and served as A&R Director, General Manager and Producer for Kenton's Creative World label.

His conducting career has brought him to the podium of symphony orchestras and jazz ensembles throughout the United States, and his extensive experience as an educator includes the presidency of the International Association of jazz Educators, teaching positions at California State Los Angeles, Michigan State and Case Western Reserve Universities, and an eight year directorship of the McDonald's Ail-American High School jazz Band during which he helped to discover and nurture many now-prominent jazz musicians.  Sierra Music Publications, his publishing company, carries charts from the likes of Bill Holman and Maynard Ferguson and Bob's own arrangements of the music of the Yellowjackets and others.   Finally, he is a long-standing fan of the Pat Metheny Group.

"The music inspired me from the first time I heard it," Curnow explains.  "I initially transcribed If I Could just to find out how the piece worked and exactly what Pat was doing." Curnow then went on to complete some 12 arrangements of compositions by Pat Metheny and/or Lyle Mays.  Working from source material heavily steeped in electronic and synthesized sound was no deterrent to Curnow's labors.  He was responding to the strengths of Metheny's music — to its heart, its sophistication and its ability to simultaneously communicate to a mass audience while still providing a musical challenge.

Further, Curnow recognized that the dynamic and coloristic range of the Metheny Group was not that far removed from the directions he had pursued with the Stan Kenton band.   "From my perspective," he says, "the earliest keyboards, going back to violin and flute stops on organs, were frequently trying to emulate acoustic sounds. When I hear Pat's group, I layer in acoustic sounds in my mind. To my ears, the possibility of presenting this music in a big band context has always been there."

Possibility is not realization, however, and Curnow has done a magnificent job of writing arrangements that preserve the integrity of the originals without deviating from the big band tradition he knows so well. In each case, Curnow's rendering retains the nucleus and builds logically upon it, using the larger palette of the jazz orchestra and its expanded timbral possibilities to transform these already sublime pieces. The result is nothing less than a series of masterworks for jazz ensemble. Fans of the Metheny Group who spend little or no time listening to big bands will feel immediately comfortable here, just as big band fans who may never have listened to Metheny could be forgiven for assuming that these pieces are simply original works of uncommon quality. It was all there in Metheny's music, and now it has been preserved in a new context by Curnow.


It takes more than a skilled arranger to bring off a project of this scope, which is where the talented ensemble that Curnow has assembled comes in.  "As exciting and challenging as it was to score these pieces for big band," Curnow states, "it was even more thrilling to hear them played by these magnificent musicians.   It was truly the culmination of a ten-year dream."

"These arrangements have gone through a real metamorphosis in preparation for the recording," Curnow adds.  "Several were altered to fit the players, and to create solo space for as many members of the band as possible."  The role of guitarist Paul Viapiano is indicative.  "There was originally very little guitar in these charts, but I loved the way Paul played and wanted him to be heard."  As his feature track See the World makes clear, Viapiano was creating very much in the spirit of respectful individuality that characterizes Curnow's arrangements.  The same can be said for the other musicians.  Examples abound, from Bobby Shew's heartfelt flugelhorn on Always and Forever and Danny House's alto sax on If I Could to Bob Sheppard's volatile soprano sax on The First Circle and the simple eloquence of Bill Cunliffe's piano throughout. …

And we could go on listing such treats (the liquid clarinets behind Lockart earlier in the piece, those brass shakes at the start of See the World ...) for pages. These are Curnow's gems, his way of honoring music that clearly means a great deal to him in its original form. A string of such gems has created one large triumph — an album which will be enjoyed alike by every Pat Metheny Group fan, big band fan and plain old music fan who hears it.”

The liner notes also contains these thoughts by Bob Curnow a about the project.

© -Bob Curnow, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

To many people, the words "big band" conjure up an image of music from the ‘30s and ‘4Os. But I have never felt that the big band should be limited by a style created long ago. While I have a deep and abiding respect for the older music, I also know that the music of the '70s, '80s and '90s works beautifully in this medium. To me, a "big band" is simply a band that's big — in this case big enough to include twenty of the best jazz musicians in the world.

There are two unmistakable and pervasive influences on this body of work. The first is, of course, Pat Metheny and his unique and timeless compositions — often created in collaboration with his partner Lyle Mays. The second is the arranging styles of those who wrote for the Stan Kenton Orchestra during its almost 40 years of existence. Whether it was Bill Holman, Pete Rugolo, Johnny Richards, Lennie Niehaus or Stan himself, my love of the big band comes from years of listening to, studying and playing the music created by these men for that great orchestra.  Kenton's composers were always on the cutting edge, using the entire dynamic range and colorful palette of the big band.  Stan would have it no other way.

The question has been asked: "What would the Kenton band sound like today?"  Perhaps a little like this CD.  In retrospect, I think I wrote these arrangements as though the Kenton band still existed. I certainly tried to use the hallmarks of that
band — the many colors, the powerful soloists, and the range of dynamics, from quiet and pensive to roaring ….”

The following video contains a track from Bob Curnow’s L.A. Big Band Plays The Music of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays in the form of “ …Bobby Shew's heartfelt flugelhorn on Always and Forever.”  Caution, Bobby’s gorgeous playing on Bob Curnow’s arrangement is guaranteed to make your heart skip a beat.

Perhaps after you’ve had a chance to listen to this music you’ll understand why I found it to be so impressive and enjoyable.



Thursday, November 15, 2012

The Expatriate Life of Stan Getz: Getz In Denmark


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


While the editorial staff at JazzProfiles puts the finishing touches on a piece about Stan Getz in Sweden, the Scandinavian country he moved to in 1955, we thought you might enjoy reading the following essay about Stan’s subsequent stay in Denmark.

Despite the fact that in the article, both the author and Stan revel in the qualities of European life circa 1960, Stan would return to the United States a few years later just in time to become involved in a series of widely popular bossa nova recordings that would ensure his future and his fortune.

Few Jazz musicians have ever been so fortunate.

© - Jack Lind, Down Beat, 4/14/1960, copyright protected; all rights reserved

“An American tourist who had picked up enough Danish to become aware of Danish radio’s predilection for lecture series on turnip growing, and similar heavy fare, was surprised, when he turned on his car radio not long ago, to hear a broadcast of live jazz.

To add to his bafflement, he thought he recognized one of the soloists with the big, swinging band. The tenor saxophonist sounded for all the world like Stan Getz. It can’t be, he muttered.

But it was. Getz, Joe Harris, Oscar Pettiford, and other American stalwarts were wailing over the staid Danish airwaves.

Getz, one of the most creative and influential of American jazzmen and a consistent favorite of the U.S. public, is today living in Copenhagen—or rather, in one of its suburbs. With his pretty Swedish wife, Monica, and his four children (three by a previous marriage), he occupies a palatial home in Lyngby, which he rents from a university professor. It is not far from the summer residence of the Danish Royal family.

The Getz family has sunk itself into the life of Denmark. His children, with the linguistic ease of the young, have come to speak fluent Danish, and one of them even appeared recently in a play at his school. For his wife, the language presents no problem, since Danish is quite close to Swedish (the Swedes traditionally wisecrack that Danish isn’t a language, it’s’ a throat disease). Getz himself speaks only a few words of Danish. It’s impossible to learn, he says. Besides, everybody in Denmark speaks English and everybody wants to practice his English on you.
All the evidence suggests that Stan Getz has found in his expatriate life more health and happiness than his career has ever before given him.

Nor has living and playing far from the roots of jazz led to stagnation for the young saxophonist (he is only 33). He has found, like many American jazzmen who have become voluntary expatriates, that in the European life he has more time to develop, to try out new ideas. There are those who think that Getz is playing better today than ever before. American critic Ira Gitler, reviewing a European-made Getz LP in Down Beat recently, observed: “Getz sounds as if he is enjoying his expatriate life…He has reaped the benefits of relaxed living without being complacent about his playing…”


The musician himself verifies this view.

”I’m tired of competition. I’m tired of tearing around making money,” says Getz who, until he settled in Denmark, was constantly on the go with concert tours, the nightclub circuit, and recording work, among many activities.

“There are other things in life than making money. Here, I have more time with my family. I dont make as much money as in the States, but it’s cheaper to live here.
And it’s unhurried. I enjoy the relaxed way of living in Europe. I wanted to find peace of mind. That’s hard to find in the States.”

Getz is by no means the only American jazzman to take this view of America and leave. Europe today has a large and growing colony of American jazzmen. Getz’s constant companion and best friend in Copenhagen has been bassist Oscar Pettiford, with whom he often works.

The first of the American jazz musicians to settle in Europe was, of course, Sidney Bechet, for whom France, where he died last year, had become home. Kenny Clarke moved to France; so did Bud Powell and Lucky Thompson. Trumpeter Bill Coleman lived abroad so long that he is virtually forgotten in America. Tenor saxophonist Don Byas chose Holland for a home, married a Dutch girl, and has been living abroad for 10 years.

Others chose Sweden, another country that is particularly hospitable to jazzmen and their talents. Former Dizzy Gillespie drummer Joe Harris hopped off during a tour and stayed, and is now married to a Swedish girl.

Quincy Jones has spent more time in Europe than in America in the past three or four years, working a great deal in Sweden. Trumpeter Benny Bailey, another Gillespie alumnus, had been living in Sweden for three years until he joined Quincy’s big band during its European tour recently.

Some of these expatriates are fugitives from the American scene—fleeing from personal problems, or from the American concept of the Age of Anxiety. A few are fugitives from more tangible things—high taxes, the racial situation, the disjointed family life that is so often forced on the American jazzman.

Getz and Pettiford evidently got tired of the pressures of life in America.


In Copenhagen, the two musicians are most likely to be heard in the Club Montmartre, a jazz room tucked away behind the facade of one of the ancient buildings that line a meandering street in the inner city. In many ways Europe’s most unique jazz spot, the Montmartre has no sign outside its door. Indeed, it has no other identifying mark than a giant photo of Count Basie that stares at you from the outside wall. Yet jazz fans and musicians have no trouble finding it. They gravitate toward it with the unerring instinct of a Sahara desert camel galloping toward an oasis for replenishment.

The Montmartre is run by Anders Dyrup, a tall, good-looking, blond Dane who first heard jazz 16 years ago when someone played him Artie Shaw’s recording of Traffic Jam. He was smitten on the spot, and long ago began making plans for a jazz club—plans that came to fruition last year with the Montmartre.

The Montmartre is dark and smoky, lit only by candles that cast long, moving shadows, like claws, across the walls. You have trouble discerning the grotesque puffed-up heads set in relief on the walls.

The hipsters who come to dig jazz sit on long benches at rough-hewn tables, sipping heady Danish beer. The girls wear tight skirts, low-cut blouses, Brigitte Bardot hairdos, and no makeup. The men wear beards and sweaters and Caesarean haircuts and smoke pipes. They look terribly earnest and sit in frozen postures while the musicians are blowing. The dance floor remains polished from lack of use, and the boor who dares to tap a finger to the rhythm is caught in the crossfire of a dozen icy stares.

Owner Dyrup and his pretty wife, Lotte, who is hostess, chef, and waitress in the place, have in the last year been hosts to such assorted dignitaries as Buck Clayton, Gerry Mulligan, Helen Merrill, Art Farmer, Mose Allison, Kenny Clarke, Kid Ory, Bengt Hallberg, Jimmy Rushing, Art Blakey, and sidemen from the bands of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie himself tried to get in during a recent visit to Copenhagen but gave up when he saw the waiting crowds.

The Montmartre also has a very good house band, the personnel of which has, at various times, included Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford, Benny Bailey, Joe Harris, Kenny Clarke, and Dan Jordan, a young bassist from Detroit. The leader of this group is Stan Getz.

Why, of all the places where Getz might have chosen to live in Europe, did he choose Denmark—which is better known for its Tuborg beer, atom-splitter Niels Bohr, pretty girls, and Hans Christian Anderson, than for jazz?

For one thing, there is the nature of the people The Danes never seem to fail to enchant foreigners. The screwball style of humor of Victor Borge, which seems so unique to an American, is not uniquely Borge; it is uniquely Danish—and it is commonplace here. The Danes have a remarkable flair for living, and have no hesitation in giving in to their inner desires and yearnings. We all remain children at heart, but only the Danes have been willing to admit to it. Only they could have built a remarkable establishment such as the Tivoli, the charming amusement park for adults as well as children that seems to give physical being to the fairy tales.
Then there is the Hans Christian Anderson mermaid of bronze that sits on a rock in Copenhagen harbor. What other people would build a statue not to the poet but to the product of his imagination?

Then, too, Denmark is an inexpensive place to live. And there is virtually no poverty in the country. There are no slums, there is no hunger.

On top of that, audiences here are remarkably receptive to jazzmen. “More people like good music here,” Getz says flatly.

Finally, Getz has encountered a particularly sympathetic audience in the Danish jazz critics, on whom it might be well to spend a few moments of consideration.
The Danish jazz critics have an amazing knowledge of what is going on both in Europe and (thanks largely to records) in America. If they have a fault, it is that they are analytical to the point of pedanticism. At times, their deadly seriousness becomes amusing.

Probably the most influential Danish jazz writer is Torben Uhlrich, a musician and tennis star. He is also by far the most ponderous and cantankerous of the critics, rarely missing a chance to take his fellow critics to task for their inferior judgment. In this way, he is not unlike some of the American members of the critical brotherhood.

In a recent column in Politiken, one of Denmark’s two largest papers, which has too weekly jazz columns, Uhlrich told me some of the things that pain him about Danish jazz. Danish musicians, he contended, tend to rush headlong into each new direction in jazz without a firm grasp of what they are doing. ”I’d like to see a bit more contemplation,” he chided the Danish jazzmen. “Slow down and give yourselves time to absorb.”

He told the story of a local musician, who after he had been listening to Getz, Zoot Sims, and Lee Konitz, then became aware of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. “He suddenly discovered that Rollins and Coltrane had been deeply hidden within him all along,” Uhlrich scoffed, and added: It’s precisely because Europeans are able to discard Sims, Getz, and Konitz so easily and so carelessly that one doubts that they are able to get something out of jazz which is closer to its roots.
In other words, the critical devotion to Getz in Copenhagen is great. “Getz has a fabulous technique,” another critic wrote. “Hearing him strengthens your belief that he may well be the best instrumentalist in jazz today.”


Actually, despite what Uhlrich’s criticism would seem to suggest, Getz is not taken for granted by the local jazzmen. If anything, they, like the public, tend to idolize him.

As yet, Denmark has not contributed to jazz any musicians of international stature, such as Sweden’s Arne Domnerus, Belgium’s Bobby Jaspar, France’s Martial Solal, Germany’s Rolf Kuhn. But the day will no doubt come, as Danish musicians come under the increasing influence and stimulation of their American colleagues—and particularly with men of the caliber of Getz and Pettiford living and working in their midst.

Among the top men on the jazz scene in Denmark are Max Bruel, a baritone saxophonist who is also a top Danish architect; Erik Moseholm, an accomplished bass player who doubles as a school teacher; and Louis Hjulmand, vibist, who is also a bank clerk. Bruel and Moseholm can be heard on an EmArcy disc, Cool Bruel. There is also Bent Axen, a gifted pianist who directs the Jazz Quintet - 60.

The trouble with most of the Danish jazz musicians, however, is that they are hobbyists—though very good ones—for whom it apparently doesn’t pay to play for a living. Perhaps as the interchange of jazzmen increases, the climate will be more propitious for careers in jazz. It is already getting better, as evidenced by the fact the daily press devotes a considerable amount of space to jazz columns and reviews. Denmark also has two regularly-publishing magazines devoted to jazz.

Two of the best jazzmen in Denmark are Jan Johansson, a lean young Swede with a beard and a modest manner, who has been influenced considerably by Horace Silver and Lenny Tristano; and William Schioppfe, a poll-winning drummer who has learned from the two Joneses—Jo and Philly Joe—and is the only Danish musician who makes a full-time living from jazz.

Both have played extensively with Getz, in the house group at the Club Montmartre.
Johansson recalled his first few nights of playing with Getz and Pettiford. “They were, of course, excellent,” he said. “I was terrible. American musicians like Stan and Oscar not only play better than most Europeans, but in many ways quite different from us. They have more nuances, they are more forceful, bolder. The rest of us are so busy trying to keep up with them that we rarely reach the great moments. European musicians spend a lot of time listening to American jazz on records; we seem to be less independent in our playing.”
Another young musician, Lars Blach, a Danish guitarist who occasionally sits in with Getz and Pettiford, speaks with even greater awe.

Of course, it’s wonderful to be allowed in with such company. At first you think it’s strange that they’ll have you sit in at all. There you sit — waiting for that knowing smile that tells you that you’ve failed. But suddenly you realize that the other guy gets something out of even your worst blunder! Then afterwards you rush home with your head full of new ideas and try them out.”
This, then, is the present world of Stan Getz: a favorable, relaxed atmosphere in which he is able to play without pressure, in which his work is able to grow and his influence take root among musicians who need the inspiration he and Pettiford can give. And make no mistake: he is making a real effort to grow as an artist.
He sat down to talk about it one night at the Montmartre.

As it happened, it was one of those wrong nights. The Montmartre was half empty (a rarity) and the first few sets by the group were undistinguished to the point of being restive. Getz had had a bad day. Yet suddenly he launched into a 12-minute version of I Can’t Get Started, during which he poured out his soul with extraordinary beauty and lyricism. The audience was transfixed.

Afterwards he seemed to feel better.


“My music gets better when I have time for meditation and working new things out,” he said. “I have been working a lot with my tone over here. I’ve been trying to set it more naturally. I’m trying to get away from too much vibrato. I started off the wrong way, learning the practical aspects first. It’s a blind alley.”
To achieve his ends, Getz plans to enroll at a Danish music conservatory to study theory, and learn to play piano. He has, believe it or not, never had a formal music lesson since he began playing professionally in New York at the age of 15.

This devotion to improvement is already paying off. As Gitler detected from the Getz recording, his playing has reached a new maturity. The style has become more lyrical, yet increasingly forceful. He doesn’t seem dry and intellectual as he used to, said one Danish jazz critic. He has soul in every note he plays.

Getz demonstrates that the modern school isn’t as bloodless as people have been thinking. He builds up his themes with unerring logic, and it is almost incredible that he can give his tone so much richness and fullness without vibrato & Getz has no intention of leaving Denmark at this time. Why should he?

He and Pettiford do considerable radio work, mostly with the intelligent planning of Borge Roger-Henrichson, a jazz pianist who is in charge of jazz programming for the Danish state radio. And there is recording work. Pettiford does some recordings with small European groups for Dyrup, the Montmartre proprietor, who also owns a record firm and distributes in Denmark American labels such as World Pacific, Savoy, and Roulette. Getz said that he plans to join Pettiford when his contract with Verve runs out.

Getz and Pettiford usually play four nights a week at Montmartre. During the weekends, they either play to one of the hundreds of jazz societies that have sprouted up all over this little country in recent years or they hop a flight to some other European city for a weekend gig.

And that is one of the main appeals of Copenhagen to Getz: it is so located that no major European city is more than a few hours away by air.

In point of fact, Getz at this time is away from Copenhagen, traveling the Continent with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe. With him are the Oscar Peterson Trio, Miles Davis—and Jan Johansson and William Schioppfe. The pianist and drummer, so modest in evaluating their roles in the present career of Stan Getz, so impressed Granz when he went to Montmartre to talk to Getz recently that he hired both of them to work with the saxophonist on the tour.

When they return from the tour, it will be time for Getz to start thinking about the summer. During the summer months, he and his family rent a large home facing Oresund, the sound that separates Denmark from Sweden.

It is an easy drive into town for Getz, who uses a small German car. He explained that he brought a large white Cadillac with him from America, but promptly traded it in.  “I didn’t want any notoriety,” he grinned.

But chances are that in the vicinity of his home, you’ll find Stan Getz using an even more modest mode of transportation. Adapting himself to the local atmosphere, Getz does what the Danes do: as often as not, he travels by bicycle.

“Yes, I like this life,” the quiet-spoken musician said.  “It’s a good life.””

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The Original Paul Horn Quintet Revisited


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


“The Paul Horn album, entitled Something Blue, was obviously influenced by the Miles Davis album, and indeed the Paul Horn group was one of the first fully to explore the new territory opened by Miles.

Paul Horn's 'Dun-Dunnee', for instance, is a forty-bar AABA tune with but one chord or scale for the eight-bar A sections. (It can be thought of as either one long G7 chord or a mixolydian scale; that is, a scale starting on G using the white keys of the piano.)”
- Bob Gordon, Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950’s

“Though the Paul Horn Quintet has a readily identifiable sound through the blending of the leader's alto saxophone or flute with Richards' vibraphone, it is the writing rather than the instrumentation that lends these performances their most personal quality. Paul and his sidemen alike, instead of relying on horizontal melodic values alone, tend to create compositional structures in which the harmonic setting, and often the metric variations, are striking characteristics that give these works much of their originality of color and mood.”
- Leonard Feather, The Sound of Paul Horn

“One final word: if you are not a musician and can't tell a bar from a saloon, don't let this deter you. As Paul cogently observed: ‘Any layman could listen to this music and tap his foot to it without knowing there is anything so different about our approach to time or meter.’ Then he thought a moment, smiled, and added a postscript: ‘Except, of course, the layman might wonder once in a while why his foot was out of step.’"
- Leonard Feather, Profile of a Jazz Musician

Some of this has been previously posted on these pages, but I just realized that this is a 50th anniversary year in my life and I wanted to revisit some of these memories on the blog.

Or to put it another way, my goodness, where have the last 50 years gone?!

In  April, 1962 during what was then called "Easter Week", I was the drummer in a quintet that won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival which was held annually at The Lighthouse Cafe located in Hermosa Beach, CA.

Much of the music that our quintet played was inspired by and/or derived from the Paul Horn Quintet. Although it was formed in 1959, our quintet didn't catch-up to Paul's group until 1961 when Paul started to make a regular mid-week gig at Shelly's Manne Hole in Hollywood. Once we heard Paul's group, its music was to have a huge and lasting impression on us.

The original group consisted of Paul Horn [alto sax/flute], Emil Richards [vibes], Paul Moer [piano], Jimmy Bond [bass] and Billy Higgins [drums], although by the time it made the gig at Shelly's, Billy Higgins was in New York making all of those wonderful Blue Note recordings and Milt Turner had replaced him as the drummer.

The quintet that I performed with at the 1962 Lighthouse Intercollegiate Jazz Festival had the same instrumentation as Paul Horn's quintet except that guitar replaced vibes.

By 1962, nearly every Jazz fan was familiar with the modal Jazz played by the Miles Davis Sextet in the Kind of Blue album,  and with "unusual" time signatures immortalized by the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out! album.

Modal Jazz uses scales instead of chord progressions as the basis for its themes [melodies] and improvisations. For “unusual time signatures” think the 5/4 of Paul Desmond’s Take Five or Dave Brubeck’s Blues Rondo a la Turk which is in 9/8 time but counted as 2-2-2-3 . In other words, those in other than the more standard 2/4 and 4/4 time.

What made the Paul Horn Quintet particularly appealing to our us was that it was playing modal Jazz in combination with unusual time signatures, just the thing to peak the musical interest of 5 young lads ranging in ages from 18-22.

So there we were for almost a year, spending our Wednesday nights [or was it Thursdays?] straddling chairs with their backs turned toward the stage, nursing Coca Colas for over four hours while we soaked in this wonderfully different music. On many nights, the five of us made up half the crowd at the opening set and the entire crowd by the closing set!

Of course, none of these tunes were available as published music so we had to memorize them and later notate them, correcting any flaws through subsequent listening at the club.
To their credit, both Paul and Emil, who composed all of the group's original music, were extremely helpful in correcting mistakes and explaining alternatives how their music worked.

And they couldn't have been nicer about stopping at our table when a set had concluded to answer any questions before going out for a smoke or to visit the den of metabolic transmigration.

Sometimes we had so many questions that they didn't get treated to a break between sets. I guess our enthusiasm and energy was contagious and they were pleased to be with others who shared their musical interests.

We listened to this music so often that thinking and playing modal Jazz in complex time signatures became almost second-nature to us.


By the time of our 1962 performances at the Lighthouse Intercollegiate Jazz Festival no one in our group needed to count the unusual time signatures - we just felt them!

We effortlessly breezed through Count Your Change, a blues in 4/4 time for the first 8 bars of the theme followed by six measures in 5/4 time concluding with two measures again in 4/4.  I mean, your basic 16 bar blues, right!?

Or how about Half and Half with its two introductions, the first centered around the piano and bass improvising on two chords and the second introduction consisting of a 12-bar section in 6/8 time with the tune breaking down into three phrases: [1] the first 12-bar phrase in 4/4 and is made up of 8 bars of ensemble or horn solo and 4 bars of drum solo, [2] an 8-bar phrase in 6/8 and [3] a final 8-bars in 4/4.

I particularly liked this one because as the drummer I got to finish the last four bars of every one's solo in the first 12-bar phrase. :)

By the time we started playing Paul Moer's Fun Time it was imperative that we "felt" the time instead of having to count it as the measures in the choruses run 3/4,3/4,/5/4 [repeated 4 times] followed by a chorus of 5/4,5/4,3/4,3/4.5/4!

I could continue with many more of these musical roller coaster rides contained in the quintet's musical repertoire, but I hope you get the idea from these brief descriptions about how intriguing and adventurous this music was and how proud we felt to be able to accomplish it.

I think perhaps the uniqueness of the music that our group featured at the 1962 Lighthouse Intercollegiate Jazz Festival may have played a major role in our wining the competition both as a group and on all of our individual instruments, respectively; another reason for us to be indebted to the Paul Horn Quintet.

Much of this wonderful and intriguing music is preserved on the Collectibles two-fer CD that includes the Columbia albums Profile of a Jazz Musician and The Sound of Paul Horn [Collectibles COL-CD-7531, Sony AZ 61328] and Something Blue [HiFijazz J-615 reissued on CD as OJCCD 1778-2].

The Paul Horn Quintet will always have a special place in my heart for making this musical journey possible in my life.



Saturday, November 10, 2012

Teddy Wilson: Elegant, Refined and Swinging


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


In her essay, Beauty By The Numbers [Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012], Dana MacKenzie argues that the essential requirements for mathematical beauty are simplicity, surprise and depth “ … in the sense that the best theorems contain many layers of meaning and reveal more as you learn about them.” [paraphrase]

Perhaps, the same can be said about the aesthetic beauty of the Jazz piano stylings of Teddy Wilson – he executes them in a simple, straightforward manner, he often astonishes by going to new places in his solos and the more you listen to him the more he reveals about the essence of a song’s structure [i.e.: it’s “theorem,’ if you will].

Teddy Wilson was – noticeably – the first Jazz pianist I ever heard.

I say “noticeably” because the big band recordings that gave me my first taste of Jazz had the occasional piano introduction by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, or Stan Kenton, but the piano in most Swing-era big band Jazz largely functioned as a part of the rhythm section.

Of course, there were some notable exceptions such as Jess Stacey’s extended solo from the Benny Goodman Band’s performance of Sing, Sing, Sing on the famous 1938 Carnegie Hall recording, but, for the most part, the piano player in these bands thumped out four-beats-to-the-bar along with the other members of “the engine house” that powered Swing music.

Listening to recordings of the trio and later the quartet performances that clarinetist Benny Goodman featured as “the-band-within-a-band” from around 1935-1938,  gave me my extended exposure to what author Len Lyons in his book The Great Jazz Pianists has termed “an instrument that has been central to the evolution of Jazz.”

Teddy Wilson was the pianist in Benny first trio and quartet and I was so taken with his approach to Jazz piano that I memorized his solos on Nice Work If You Can Get It, China Boy, Sweet Lelani, Moonglow, and Nagasaki.

Teddy is rarely discussed today with pianists such as Herbie Hancock. Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner and Brad Melhdau being more in vogue, but when he first came to prominence in the mid-1930s, Teddy was quite an innovator having developed his own style from influences derived from Earl “Fatha” Hines, Art Tatum and Thomas “Fats” Waller.

Teddy is often referenced by “modernists” such as Bud Powell, George Shearing, Nat King Cole and Bill Evans as someone who had a great influence on their playing and they in turn influenced those Jazz pianists who predominate today.

I love listening to all Jazz pianists because as a friend was fond of saying: “When you sit down at a piano, the entire range of music theory and harmony is in front of you in black and white,”

Or, to put it another way: “The piano is the most versatile and autonomous of all the musical instruments. No more perfect tool (…) for expressing music has ever been developed.” [Len Lyons, Ibid].

Fortunately, there has been much written about Teddy that analyzes and discusses his piano style including Loren Schoenberg’s essay for The Complete Verve Recordings of the Teddy Wilson Trio [Mosaic Records MD5-173, Gunther Schuller’s chapter on Teddy in the Swing Era [pp.502-12], an annotated description of his recordings in Richard Cook and Brian Moron, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed., and a marvelous interview that Len Lyons conducted with Teddy which is included in Len’s The Great Jazz Pianists [pp.60-74].

One of my favorite expositions about Teddy is by Dick Katz, the late Jazz pianist and educator, which he prepared as the liner notes to a recording that Columbia Records issued in 1977 entitled Teddy Wilson: Statements and Improvisations, 1934-42.

This double LP was produced in conjunction with The Smithsonian Institute when its Jazz Program was under the direction of the esteemed, Martin Williams.

Thanks to a Canadian internet friend, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles was able to obtain a copy of Dick’s excellent liner notes to Teddy Wilson: Statements and Improvisations, 1934-42 which are particular valuable because of his pellucid comments about Teddy Wilson’s significance in Jazz history and the salient characteristics of his Jazz piano style.

© -Dick Katz/The Smithsonian Institute, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Anyone who has involved him­self with that beguiling, consuming presence called "jazz piano," either as player or listener, probably has his own list of innovators and es­sential contributors. But it seems to me that Teddy Wilson should be .included on anyone's list as one of the most significant artists.

As a jazz pianist myself, and one who was fortunate enough to have been Teddy Wilson's pupil, my re­marks on his work are necessarily somewhat subjective. In any case, it will be best first to establish some historical reference points in order to gain some perspective on his sizable contribution.

We will not deal with the body of ragtime music developed by Scott Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb, and others, but begin with the great keyboard improvisers (rag­time was not an improvisational music). My list goes like this: James P. Johnson; Willie "The Lion" Smith; Fats Waller; Earl Hines; Art Tatum; Teddy Wilson; Count Basic; Duke Ellington; Nat "King" Cole; Erroll Garner; Thelonious Monk; Bud Powell; Bill Evans; McCoy Tyner.

Each of these men added new dimensions and they are the names I hear discussed most among other pianists as key influences.

Of course, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett are names mentioned today, but at this writing it is perhaps too early to assess their impact on the future. Oscar Peterson is also a favorite topic but the jury is still out on whether the content of his playing matches his technical prowess. And there are many other pianists, of course—Hank Jones, Al Haig, Horace Silver—who perform with excellence and have exerted a considerable influence.

Reducing this list to those whose innovations have proven essential, and to those, each of whom have created a whole "school" of play­ing, we get:
James P. Johnson, "the father of stride piano." Earl Hines, the father of horn-like piano concepts and the first true rhythmic virtuoso. Teddy Wilson, the father of elegant, subtly swinging, lyrical playing. Art Tatum, every pianist's father and mother, inasmuch as he covered it all. Count Basie, the father of modern "comping," who also showed us the importance of know­ing what not to play and how to use silence effectively, as did Thelonious Monk later. Bud Powell, the father of "bop" piano and pioneer of the long, across-the-bar-line, single-note melodic line on the piano. Bill Evans, who enriched the standard song with fresh har­monies and voicings and who helped add a new suppleness to the rhythmic line. McCoy Tyner, who seems at this date important be­cause he applied the modal con­cepts of John Coltrane to the piano successfully —i.e., a running, "sheets of sound" right-hand against an insistent, stabbing left-hand accompaniment, using chords often voiced in fourths.


The records in this collection offer examples of Teddy Wilson's work between 1934 and 1942. By 1934, Art Tatum had thoroughly shaken up every musician within earshot, including many outside jazz. Teddy, too, was forever smit­ten by Tatum's genius. Earl Hines, who was then probably the most famous jazz pianist, led a scintil­lating big band and was exerting his monumental influence on most pianists, including the young Teddy Wilson. Count Basie was still plain Bill Basie, and had not yet burst onto the national scene with his innovative rhythm section. Boogie woogie piano was all but unknown except to black patrons in rural and big city gin mills and rent parties and to a few white record collectors. Many were still under the spell of Fats Waller and the stride piano masters. Cecil Taylor was one year old. Herbie Hancock wasn't yet born.

Except for Duke Ellington's work (which, to use a phrase he never applied to himself, was always "beyond category"), piano accom­paniment in the jazz ensemble, large and small, usually took the form of rather relentless, stiff (to today's ears) left-hand-right-hand-left-hand-right-hand "oom-pah" thumping, regardless of tempo. This often resulted in an intense kind of rolling swing—but it be­came a rhythmic box, and was quite limiting to many horn players who were beginning to want a looser, more sensitive background for their improvisations.

String bass technique was (ex­cept for a small few players) far behind that of the other instru­ments in jazz and the bass had mainly a percussive, timekeeping function. It is interesting to con­template what direction the music might have taken if bassist Jimmy Blanton had arrived five or ten years earlier than 1939. For ex­amples of pre-Blanton rhythm sec­tions, listen to early records by the Fletcher Henderson orchestra or by Fats Waller's ebullient little band.

In such a milieu Teddy Wilson shaped a more sophisticated way both to accompany and to solo in the jazz ensemble.

Born in Austin, Texas, Wilson was raised from the age of six in Tuskegee, Alabama, where his father was head of the English De­partment at Tuskegee Institute and his mother, chief librarian. He dutifully studied both violin and piano and went on to major in music theory at Talladega College, also in Alabama. Early exposure to classic jazz recordings like Louis Armstrong's West End Blues, Fats Waller's Handful of Keys, and the Bix Beiderbecke-Frankie Trumbauer records had a great impact on him. After moving to Detroit in 1929 and hearing the touring bands there, he made his commitment to be a full-time jazz musician. Early experience with Milton Senior's band took him to Toledo, where he met and came under the awesome spell of Art Tatum about 1930. From 1931 to 1933 he worked in Chicago with several well-(continued inside) known bands, including Louis Armstrong's.

One night in 1933, John Ham­mond, that irrepressible jazz super-fan who became the music's first and most active patron and bene­factor, heard Wilson on a radio broadcast with Clarence Moore's band from the Grand Terrace in Chicago. Hammond knew that alto saxophonist and composer-arranger Benny Carter needed a pianist.

He secured Teddy the gig and facili­tated Wilson's subsequent move to New York. Hammond also super­vised an important recording ses­sion with the "Chocolate Dandies" (imagine an all-black jazz group with that name today!) that fea­tured both Carter and Wilson.

Once Teddy was in New York and was widely heard, opportuni­ties to play and record became plentiful. He made records with Red Norvo's group and records ac­companying singer Mildred Bailey, and these did much to attract a wider, well-deserved attention.

It was also Hammond who ar­ranged for Teddy to lead the all-star recording groups that featured Billie Holiday. By now it is almost superfluous to point out how mar­velous and timeless these records are. They used the very best players available, including Lester Young, Ben Webster, Jo Jones, Buck Clay­ton, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Hodges, Benny Goodman, and others. And on them, Wilson achieved a re­corded legacy that is indispensable to anyone who is serious about jazz. Two of these collaborations are happily included in this album— These Foolish Things and More Than You Know—and notice the dates, 1936 and 1939 respectively.

For the larger public, however, the real emergence of Teddy Wilson came with the birth and the impact of the Benny Goodman Trio, and later the Quartet when vibraphonist Lionel Hampton joined. The Trio was informally conceived at a party at Mildred Bailey's apartment in June, 1935, and it seems that fate fortuitously brought together two of the most technically adroit per­formers since Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines collaborated in 1928. Prodded by Gene Krupa's "hot" brushes, Goodman and Wilson took collective improvising to a new level of clarity and precision, and attracted listeners who had previ­ously thought of jazz (quite wrong­ly, to be sure) as a crude and even primitive musical idiom.

Aside from Goodman's obvious virtuosity and keen sense of the jazz pulse, what really made the Trio unique was Wilson's vitaliz­ing and strikingly original concept of contrapuntal harmonic move­ment. He revised the conventional stride left-hand by outlining the harmonic structure of a piece with an uncannily well-placed series of both consecutive and "walking" tenths. This produced many inter­esting voice leadings and meshed beautifully with the work of the soloists. Against this smooth, flow­ing left-hand constant, his right hand in his solos spun out stunning, metrically immaculate, and ex­ceedingly lyric melodies in single-note lines or feather-light octaves. All this with a mellow, pearly touch. As Earl Hines before him had successfully adapted much of Louis Armstrong to the keyboard, so did Teddy absorb the messages of major figures like Benny Carter, Ben Webster, and Roy Eldridge.


And whereas Hines was a musical tightrope walker, Wilson purred along like a finely tuned Rolls Royce with soul, imparting to the listener a sense of security and balance. He was the first authenti­cally cool and controlled—but deeply involved—solo and en­semble pianist. He proved, as did Lester Young, that understatement can swing. But when called upon, Wilson could also generate terrific heat, as his fast, florid, and flag-waving pieces vividly demonstrate.

It is evident that Teddy's interest in "classical" piano and his diligent study and practice of keyboard techniques were an essential part of his development. Like Waller and Tatum, he helped explode the myth that, to be authentic, jazz pianists had to sound self-taught and crude. That he was able to adapt something as foreign as the "pianoforte" methods of Tobias Matthay to jazz verifies Wilson's resourcefulness and dedication to self-improvement.

Teddy, like Art Tatum, brought about a natural amalgam of Euro­pean and Afro-American musical practices. In this regard, Benny Goodman said of playing with him, "What I got out of playing with Teddy was something, in a jazz way, like what I got from playing [Mozart] with the string quartet." Certainly Wilson expressed his ideas with a delicacy and a symme­try otherwise then unheard in jazz. He was years ahead in his skill in sustaining a flowing melodic and harmonic line that perfectly com­plemented the soloist both in en­semble and solo. True, Waller and Tatum (one can't get away from those two) performed with great control and polish. But they com­pletely dominated any situation in which they might have been found, primarily because they were solo­ists who usually sounded best when they played alone.

Teddy's style immediately caught on and captivated pianists every­where. Even Tatum, his idol, incor­porated some Wilson into his own work—for example, the running tenths and some of Teddy's right-hand octave passages —and Wilson is naturally very proud of that fact. Indeed, I believe that Art Tatum's medium-tempo conception and even his approach to ballads was also affected by Teddy's graceful way with the pulse, by his flowing sense of phrase and legato touch. Tatum was a self-contained, one-man orchestra. His impact was rather like the fallout from a huge musical explosion—no one could get close to the center, but every­one was touched. Teddy's methods were more accessible, so long as your left hand could negotiate tenths easily. Thus, Wilson's in­fluence is in some ways just as far-reaching as that of Hines or Tatum.

It is my opinion that the two pianists who came closest to sound­ing like Teddy, both in content and spirit, were the late Sonny White and the Mel Powell of the middle and late 1940s. Clyde Hart was also a pianist who creatively assimilated much of Wilson, particularly the left hand, and was on his way to becoming an important and original piano voice in the burgeoning bop movement at his untimely death. And I am certain that younger pianists like Hank Jones, Al Haig, and Tommy Flanagan, among many others —and, to be quite immodest, myself—owe so very much to the Wilson magic.

The eight years represented here, from 1934 to 1942, span most of the swing era. In 1934 Teddy was un­known except to a few perceptive musicians, and by 1942 he was probably second only to Tatum as the world's most esteemed jazz pianist. Only Count Basic (basically a traditional stride player) en­chanted the public anywhere near as much, mostly because of his deceptive simplicity and ability to imply, both of which he best ex­pressed within his rhythm section of Jo Jones, Walter Page, and Fred­die Greene.

It was only a few short years until Wilson's all-pervading influ­ence finally gave way to the revo­lutionary flights of Bud Powell and the "new" music.

I am fully aware that all styles overlap to some extent, but I believe that there was a strong link between Teddy Wilson and Bud Powell in Nat "King" Cole during his years as a jazz pianist.

[And because] … Cole was a major force in their own stylistic development. He managed to distill the substance of both Hines and Wilson … [in the styles of many contemporary pianists such as Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, George Shearing and Bill Evans] ….”