© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“A PROBLEM that frequently
confronts jazz musicians is the basic one of what to play. Jazz has always
consisted on what is, for the most part, a borrowed repertoire. The first jazz
bands played marches and quadrilles, and today you hear mostly popular and show
tunes. Fortunately, there are certain musicians with the gift for composition,
who are able to supply their own material, thereby making a musical statement completely
their own, rather than borrowing from a storehouse of music they might find
less suitable
.
Of course, every jazz
musician is a composer in a sense; in fact, some people define a jazz solo as
spontaneous composition. Some solos have been turned into compositions by other
hands — Lester Young and Charlie Parker have both received this tribute, and a
phrase of Dizzy Gillespie's, for instance, was reworked by Tadd Dameron into
the lovely If You Could See Me Now. And the world of jazz history is full of
so-called "originals," most of them vanishing with the same speed it
took to write them. Occasionally, though, one of these "originals"
achieves some degree of permanence, and some of them have passed into the basic
repertoire — Milt Jackson
But beyond this, there are a
few men who can rightly be called jazz composers, and, perhaps not so
surprisingly, four of the most important of them have been pianists: Jelly Roll
Morton, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and John Lewis. In speaking of any of
these men, you can always get a good argument going about which aspect of their
careers are most important — their music, their groups, or their piano playing.
To take this very brief
discussion right down to the present, what amounts to a new school of jazz
composition is to be found in the person of Horace Silver. The conjunction of
Silver and the Jazz Messengers, and the music Silver has written for that and
subsequent groups, is probably the single greatest impetus to the "funky"
school. Some examples of this work have achieved enormous popularity, such as Senor Blues on Blue Note 1539, and
other instances are scattered liberally throughout the Blue Note catalogue, but
the one record that may have been the start of it all is Blue Note 1518, which
includes such near-standards as The Preacher.
And here, on this album, is a
young man, another pianist, composing in the same tradition — Walter Davis Jr.
On his first Blue Note album, Jackie McLean's New Soil (BLP 4013) he contributed three tunes, notably the
bouncing, humorous Greasy. On this, his first album as a leader, he contributed
all the music. There is a difference between composition and the mere sketching
out of riffs, and Walter Davis Jr. has gone a long way toward achieving this
distinction. It is practically a parlor game in some circles to put the newest
"original" on the phonograph and then figure out what song it really
is — what standard has had its harmony lifted to provide the basis. This music
will afford little satisfaction to players of that game. They are truly
compositions, varied in mood, rhythm, and harmony.
One of the things that Walter
Davis Jr. has kept in mind on this album is one of the best lessons of the
great Duke Ellington, a lesson so simple it is often overlooked — write for the
men who are going to play your music. As I mentioned, Davis
Sam Jones and Art Taylor, on
bass and drums, are veterans of several Blue Note sessions, and provide here
their usual sympathetic support….”
- Joe Goldberg, insert notes to Davis
Cup [Blue Note B-232098]
Up the street from
the “old” Yoshi’s Jazz club and restaurant in Berkeley , CA
In typical Berkeley
After driving over
from San
Francisco
While browsing the
music on offer at the shop, I came across a solo piano CD by Walter Davis, Jr.
entitled In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade 56312] which I purchased with
the idea that it would “keep my company” on the drive back to the city.
When the doors to
the club opened, I was able to get a table close to Benny’s piano. I laid the
Walter Davis, Jr. Monk tribute disc on the table, took off my jacket and placed
an order with the cocktail waitress.
After playing a
magnificent first set with his trio consisting of Christian McBride on bass and
Kenny Washington on drums, Benny stepped down from the bandstand, noticed the In
Walked Thelonious CD and said to me: “Isn’t Walter Davis, Jr. a gas?”
The next thing I
know, Benny had seated himself at my table and began to regale me with stories
about how Walter Davis, Jr. and Walter Bishop, another pianist who played in
the style of Bud Powell, had helped him when he moved to New York [Benny grew
up in Berkeley] and how much he had learned from them over the years. He
couldn’t say enough nice things about these men.
Interestingly,
although it was many years apart, we both first experienced Walter Davis, Jr.
by listening to him on Jackie McLean’s New Soil Blue Note recording.
In addition to his
marvelous Bud Powell/Horace Silver-inflected piano solos and accompaniment,
Walter had contributed three, original contributions to New Soil [BLP 4013].
Alfred Lion of
Blue Note Records was so impressed with Walter that soon thereafter, he featured
him on his own LP entitled Davis
I must admit that
I hadn’t really followed Walter’s career that closely after those early Blue
Note recordings.
But I’d really
loved his writing and enjoyed his piano playing enough to pick up the
Mapleshade CD featuring his solo piano interpretations of Monk’s tunes.
Walter’s treatment
of Thelonious music was a revelation to me for as Pierre M. Sprey, the producer
of the CD put it: “… in listening to Walter play Monk, I learned more about the
inner workings of Monk’s music than in my previous thirty years of listening to
the original.”
Talk about the
serendipitous way that Life works: I had not heard Walter Davis, Jr. play for
almost three decades and here I was listening to him play what has to be
considered as one of the definitive solo piano treatments of Monk’s music ever
recorded.
Pierre M. Sprey’s
complete insert notes to In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade
56312] are as follows.
© -Pierre M. Sprey, copyright protected; all
rights reserved.
“Walter Davis, Jr.
had been thinking about a solo recording project ever since he left Dizzy
Gillespie's group in 1986. There was no question in Walter's mind as to what
the album would be. It would be dedicated entirely to the music of his mentor
and close friend, Thelonious Monk—a thank-you to the New York bebop giant who
had taken Walter, a gifted East Orange, New Jersey teenager, under his wing in
1949.
Until the day he
died in June, 1990, Walter did things the hard way. The Monk project was no
exception. Rather than picking eight or ten comfortable Monk standards and
rehearsing them for a few days, he immersed himself in fifty of Monk's toughest
compositions for two months, deliberately leaving the choice of which to record
until the moment he sat down at the studio Steinway. As though things weren't
difficult enough, he limited himself to three minutes pertune, saying, "I
just want to get in, say what I have to say, and get out—no endless b.s.
solos."
A week before the
long-planned first recording session, Walter, a deeply mystical man, called me
early one morning. Without saying hello, he said with a quiet intensity,
"Man, you won't believe what happened to me last night. I sat down to my electric
piano and Thelonious came into the room.
I played for three hours and never even
turned on the piano" For Walter, this was no vision or metaphor.
Thelonious Monk really was in his basement practicing room, giving him specific
technical lessons on how to play Monk, correcting Walter's tempo on one tune,
revamping his chord voicings on another, showing him how to put more
"stride" feeling into a third.
Still, I didn't
fully understand how deeply Walter felt that this recording was to be a
dialogue between himself and Monk until we got started. Most of the five days
we worked in the studio, it was just Walter at the beautiful old Steinway and
me at the tape recorder. But Walter was clearly playing for someone else. Every
time he'd pull off a tricky time change or voice a chord in some startling way,
he'd shoot a sly look of triumph sideways at the air—the kind of look you see
when jazz musicians play to impress each other.
At one point,
Walter was falling short of the strict standards he had set for himself. The
tune was "Gallop's Gallop," intricate and laden with pitfalls. Walter
had already tried eight takes, breaking off, deeply dissatisfied and
frustrated, in the middle of each one. When I couldn't bear it anymore, I
suggested he proceed to another tune, maybe return to this one later.
Walter replied
instantly, "You don't understand, Pierre
In those five days
of listening to Walter play Monk, I learned more about the inner workings of
Monk's music than in my previous thirty years of listening to the original.
Yetthis album presents neither a mere skillful imitation nor a Davis-style
reinterpretation of Monk (even though Walter could have performed either task
had he wanted). Instead, this album is a brilliant illumination of the elements
that made Monk unique and unforgettable: the little boy playfulness, the
devilish delight in startling harmonic or rhythmic twists, the teasing with
slightly changed quotations from familiar standards, the old-time
"stride" piano sound in the midst of modern harmonies, and the stark
emotion of those angular, unadorned ballad lines. Walter has somehow managed to
intensify each of these facets—in a way that sounds just like what Monk would
have played had he chosen to let us in on his secrets. Yet he has also fused
these elements into concise, polished gems quite different from Monk's own
constructions.
For sheer
playfulness, check out Walter's "Green Chimneys." For ballad lines of
austere beauty, listen to what he does with "Ruby, My Dear." In
"Criss Cross," Walter dissects Monk's devilish trickiness.
"Gallop's Gallop" becomes a swinging vehicle for clarifying the
stride roots in Monk's composition.
If you want to
come to grips with what has been achieved here, compare some of Walter's
versions side by side with Monk's. Pick something as overplayed as "'Round
Midnight ." If you listen first to Monk's solo
version (on Blue Note's Genius of Modem Music, Vol. 1), then
listen to either of Walter's versions, your immediate reaction will be surprise
at how much Walter's improvisation differs without violating any aspect of
Monk's spirit. Your second reaction will probably be to put the Monk solo back
on the turntable because Walter's clear exposition has suddenly made you aware
of the subtleties you missed the first time around.
Perhaps the most
spontaneous tribute to Walter's otherworldly achievement in these sessions
comes from Dwike Mitchell, the pianist in the Mitchell-Ruff duo. Several months
after these sessions, I happened to be playing the tapes for Dwike. I had told
him nothing about Walter's immersion in the Monk project or about Monk's
"visit" to Walter's basement. After two cuts, Dwike stopped the tape
and said, "I've been listening to Walter all my life and I know exactly
how he plays. What's on this tape is not Walter; it's Monk playing through Walter's hands."
Here’s a sampling
of what’s on offer in Walter Davis, Jr.’s In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade
56312]. The tune is Monk’s rarely heard Gallop’s
Gallop.
