© -Steven Cerra,
copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“As his playing
indicates, even if you have never met the man, Ben Webster is a large,
passionate jazz musician with great pride in his calling. Ben is capable of
many forms of intensity, including explosive anger, but he is particularly
prone to long bouts of extraordinary tenderness. Ben is accordingly a superior
player of ballads as this album demonstrates with especial consistency. Unlike
many of the younger jazzmen who seem afraid or embarrassed to reveal their more
vulnerable fantasies and memories, Webster personalizes ballads with as much
virility and power as he does the stompers. Ben, moreover, has lived and
traveled a good many years. He's paid a lot of dues, and is still paying. When
he plays a ballad, therefore, he gives the listener the distilled experience of
one of the last American frontiersmen, the itinerant jazzman.
Webster has a number
of vibrant virtues as a musician and they all coalesce with most effect on ballads.
There is his large, enormously warm tone. There is also his deeply flowing beat
which is as pulsatingly relaxed (but not flaccid) in the slowest numbers as in
the more rocking [numbers] …. A third characteristic is his
thoroughly individual style-phrasing as well as sound.
There is yet a
further reason for Ben Webster's mastery of ballads. Like the late Lester Young
(who was also able to make even the most familiar standard suddenly new) Ben
Webster has a great affection for and interest in the better singers. Several
of his ideas for repertory have come from a vocalist's interpretation of a
particular song. Like Young, Ben is also aware of lyrics and knows what the
intent and particular mood of each song is before he begins to improvise on it….”
- Nat Hentoff
Has there
ever been a more distinctive tenor saxophone sound than Ben Webster’s? One
breathy buzz before a note sounds and you know immediately that it’s him.
The
editorial staff at JazzProfiles can’t imagine why Big Ben hasn’t featured on these
pages sooner.
To
rectify matters, here are some excerpts from Whitney Baillett’s essay about Ben
as found in his collection of forty-six pieces on Jazz, The Sound of Surprise, [1959].
The
paragraphing has been modified from the original to fit the blog format.
“The
saxophone, an uneasy amalgam of the oboe, clarinet, and brass families
invented a century ago by a Belgian named Adolphe Sax, has always seemed an
unfinished instrument whose success depends wholly on the dexterity of its
users. In the most inept hands, the trumpet, say, is always recognizable, while
a beginner on the saxophone often produces an unearthly, unidentifiable braying.
Even good saxophonists are apt to produce squeaks, soughs, honks, or flat,
leathery tones.
Thus, the
few masters of the instrument—jazz musicians like Coleman Hawkins, Lester
Young, Harry Carney, Hilton Jefferson, and Ben Webster (classical saxophonists
usually play with a self-conscious sherbetlike tone)—deserve double praise. Ben
Webster, the forty-nine-year-old tenor saxophonist from Kansas City , has for almost twenty years
played with a subtle poignancy matched only by such men as Hawkins and Johnny
Hodges (from both of whom he learned a good deal), Lucky Thompson, Herschel
Evans, and Don Byas.
A heavy, sedate
man, with wide, boxlike shoulders, who holds his instrument stiffly in front of
him, as if it were a figurehead, Webster played in various big bands before the
four-year tour of duty with Duke Ellington that began in 1939. Since then, he
has worked with small units and his style, which was developed during his stay
with Ellington, has become increasingly purified and refined. Like the work of
many sensitive jazz musicians, it varies a good deal according to tempo. In a
slow ballad number, Webster's tone is soft and enormous, and he is apt to start
his phrases with whooshing smears that give one the impression of being
suddenly picked up by a breaker and carried smoothly to shore.
Whereas
Hawkins tends to reshape a ballad into endless, short, busy phrases, Webster
employs long, serene figures that often (particularly in the blues, which he
approaches much as he might a ballad) achieve a fluttering, keening quality—
his wide vibrato frequently dissolves into echoing, ghostlike breaths—not
unlike that of a cantor. His tone abruptly shrinks in middle tempos and, as if
it were too bulky to carry at such a pace, becomes an oblique yet urgent and
highly rhythmic whispering, like a steady breeze stirring leaves.
In fast
tempos a curious thing frequently happens. He will play one clean, rolling
chorus and then—whether from uneasiness, excitement, or an attempt to express
the inexpressible—adopt a sharp, growling tone that, used sparingly, can be
extremely effective, or, if sustained for several choruses, takes on a grumpy,
monotonous sound. At his best, though, Webster creates, out of an equal mixture
of embellishment and improvisation, loose poetic melodies that have a generous
air rare in jazz, which is capable of downright meanness.”
The
following tribute to Ben features him on When
I Fall in Love with Mundell Lowe, guitar, Jimmy Jones, piano, Milt Hinton,
bass and Dave Bailey, drums. It is from Ben’s 1958 Verve recording The
Soul of Ben Webster about which Benny Green of The Observer wrote in his liner notes:
“In a
way, the story of Ben Webster's career is the story of jazz music itself over
the past twenty years. For reasons best known to themselves, the jazz writers
who today fall over themselves to describe the richness of Webster's approach,
ignored Webster (among others) for years, concentrating all their energies on
younger, more modern players. It is always a fine thing to welcome young blood
and new approaches in any art form, but never at the expense of the great
practitioners who have gone before.
Ben
Webster's eclipse seemed so complete to one who was living three thousand miles
away from the action, that in the early 1950s his name was beginning to convey
nothing more than a faint feeling of nostalgia for the elegant structure of his
"What Am I "Here For", "Chloe", and "Just a
Settin' and a Rockin' " solos with the vintage Ellington of the early
1940s.
The very
healthy tendencies of modern jazz over the last few years, the return of the
earthiness which should never really be absent from the very finest jazz, the
inevitable slackening of stylistic barriers which follows in the wake of any
successful artistic revolutions, and the blessed ability of the musicians
themselves to ignore the tidy theorisms of the analysts, has meant comebacks
for Ben Webster's generation in no uncertain manner.”
I have always considered Ben Webster to be the first "hard bop" tenorman. Of the big three tenormen to come out of the swing era - Coleman Hawkins (who was five years older than Webster); Lester Young (who was actually 5 months younger), and Webster; Webster is the one who seemed to be playing something completely new. As great as they are, and I love them both, Hawkins is firmly rooted in swing musician, and Young keeps one toe on the swing side of the line. By the late 50's and early 1960, Ben has left all of his swing conventions behind, and is creating a new, modern, sound that still rings true today.
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