Tjader Jag - [Tjag ?] - The Fantasy Years, Part 1

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“Tjader is an important, catalytic figure, but exactly how important is difficult to quantify. ...  Two [four] decades after his death, most of his records are still in print, and his unassuming presence - ‘I’m not an innovator, I’m not a pathfinder, I’m a participant’ - still abides in the spread of Latin Jazz.”

- Richard’s Cook Jazz Encyclopedia 

“Cal's skill as a synthesiser of North American jazz with the music out of Cuba is by now well known. As an alumnus of the Shearing and the Brubeck groups of other years, and a long-time aficionado of afro-cuban, he comes honestly by his feel for both forms, having devoted a serious ear and an actively practicing hand to same over the past several years.”

- H. Claire Kolbe, Mambo with Tjader

People often ask me where I get the ideas for blog postings and I never know how to answer this question because the subjects for these features don’t seem to manifest themselves in any one way.

One source for them are the occasional jags I get on pertaining to a particular artist’s music. Recent examples of this wellspring approach have been the postings about composer-arranger Alec Wilder’s rather obscure instrumental octets and the music of the vocal team Jackie & Roy.

Lately, I’ve been on a Cal Tjader “jag” - [for those who may not be aware, the “T” is silent in his last name and it's pronounced “Jader”].

The dictionary definition of “jag” that I am referring to is “to be completely unrestrained” in the sense of listening to all the music I can lay my hands on regarding certain artists and checking the Jazz literature to see what I can find to form a piece about him/her that I can put up on my page - these include insert notes.

I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to find out that very few Jazz artists are the subject of full length biographies so invariably the liner notes for their LPs and the insert notes for their CDs are often the best source of detailed information about them.

Herein lies another problem when I’m mining for information on a Jazz musician using the information on their recordings as a primary source: I’m limited by what I have on hand in my collection.

So now I’m on a quest to fill in the gaps which brings me to an age old problem of availability and affordability. 

Music streaming subscription services which may include the ability to download the music may be a solution to the affordability question, but that puts me at the mercy of what the entities that provide such services want to make available. They usually do not include annotations and discographical information.

Which now means I’m searching for available and affordable original vinyl recordings or compact discs.

The good news is that “hard copies” of many, individual Tjader recordings from his years at the Fantasy, Verve and Concord record labels are still available, but the “bad news” is that because of streaming service, fewer are being sold making the remaining stock more expensive.

Enter re-sellers such as Collectibles, Enlightenment, Avid, and Fresh Sound that combine recordings into multiple album sets and offer them at reasonable prices.

Some, like Avid, even enhance the fidelity of the original recordings into new digital formats, provide a newly written annotation about the background of the Jazz musicians and the music and also include the original liner notes and complete discographical information.

So what follows is a compendium of information about my latest “jag” on the music of vibraphonist, percussionist and bandleader Cal Tjader [1925-1982] or should that read - Tjader Tjag?

And given the sheer volume of recordings issued under Cal’s leadership beginning in 1951 with some early 78’s on Galaxy [a Fantasy subsidiary] and closely followed in 1952 with Cal Tjader - Vibist [Savoy V-38] until his death in 1982, I thought it might be easier to confine my Tjader jag to the recordings that he made for the San Francisco based Fantasy label, especially since four of these are available on a double CD from Avid and eight of these have been combined on four CDs from Enlightenment [actually nine because they have slipped the 8 tracks from the 1952 Savoy recording into the set].

And there are more individual albums from this prolific period in Cal’s career that are not included on the Avid or the Enlightenment anthologies that complement the JazzProfiles Tjader Tjag including: Mambo with Tjader, Jazz at The Blackhawk and Cal Tjader Plays Harold Arlen and West Side Story. 

In addition to sleeve annotations by such eminent Jazz writers as Dick Hadlock, Ralph J. Gleason, and Philip Ellwood we’ve also managed to locate two Downbeat articles that comment on Cal’s music during this ten-year period and, unlike many other Jazz artists, Cal does have a biographer in S. Duncan Reid and we’ve drawn on his Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz [MacFarland] for additional information about these formative years in Cal’s recording career.

Other reasons for focusing our Tjader Jag on recordings from this ten year period are contained in the following excerpt from Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“Cal Tjader was a great popularizer whose musical mind ran rather deeper than some have allowed. As a vibes player, he was an able and not quite an outstanding soloist, but his interest in Latin rhythms and their potential for blending with West Coast jazz was a genuine one, and his best records have a jaunty and informed atmosphere which denigrates neither side of the fusion. He made a lot of records, and many of them have been awarded reissue, which makes it difficult to choose particular winners. Tjader helped to bring Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria to wider audiences, and the steps towards an almost pure salsa sound are documented on most of the records listed above [from 1952-1959].”

Perhaps a good place to start since it contains eight of Cal’s Fantasy EP’s and LP’s issued digitally along with the eight Savoy tracks are the booklet notes from Cal Tjader: The Classic Fantasy Collection, 1953-1962 are with these booklet notes from the collection:

“With a vibrant, eclectic career that spanned five decades, Cai Tjader was the most successful n on-indigenous Latin musician of all! time. Although working largely within the idioms of Latin American, Cuban and Caribbean music during his lifetime, he explored too many other jazz genres, and is often credited as influencing Latin rock and acid jazz. A multi - instrumentalist, Tjader was primarily known as a vibraphonist, but also excelled at piano, drums, bongos, congas and timpani. Having spent much of his early career as sideman to musicians from a variety of cultural backgrounds, Tjader's best work was displayed on albums on which he performed as bandleader and, of these, the records he made for Fantasy Records between 1953 and 1962 contain his finest work.

“Calien Radcliffe Tjader, Jr. was born on I6lh July 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri. The son of Swedish American vaudevillians, the Tjader family settled in San Mateo, California when Callen was two years old, where his parents opened a dance studio. Eager for their child to follow in their footsteps, Callen, Snr. taught him to tap dance while his mother gave him lessons in classical piano. Once proficient enough to perform, the young Cal toured the Bay Area of neighbouring San Francisco, earning himself a small part dancing alongside Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the film The White Of The Dark Cloud Of Joy. In his early teens, Ca! joined a Dixieland jazz band and white there began experimenting with other instruments, primarily drums. At the age of 16, he entered and won a drum contest organised by esteemed drummer Gene Krupa; he performed 'Drum Boogie', a piece written by Krupa himself with trumpeter Roy Eldridge.

Tjader served as an army medic between 1943 and 1946, going on to study at San Jose State College under the G.I. Bill, a 1944 act that offered educational benefits to veterans of World War Two. Intending to establish a career as a teacher, Tjader transferred to San Francisco State College. However when he met the young jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who invited Tjader to join his octet -  which also included among its members alto saxophonist Paul Desmond - he changed his plans. The group made a handful of recordings between 1946 and 1950 - not released in their entirety unlii the album Dave Brubeck Octet was issued in 1956 - but had difficulty finding work, and disbanded shortly after their final sessions were completed. Tjader and Brubeck went on to form a trio with bassist Ron Crotty in the hopes of turning their fortunes around and indeed found some success on the San Francisco scene. Il was while playing in this group that 

Tjader took up the vibraphone, switching between vibes and drums depending on the demands of the song. After Brubeck was severely injured in a diving accident in  1951, Tjader was forced back into working side to a number of other musicians, including Alvino Rey and George Shearing. While visiting New York, Shearing's bassist Al McKibbon took Tjader to see the bands of Afro-Cuban pioneers Machito and

Chico O'Farrill, and he was introduced to Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo, who were playing for Tito Puente at the time.

In 1953, Tjader released his first records as bandleader for Savoy, and then signed to Fantasy Records shortly afterwards, the label with whom he would record, on and off, for the rest of his life, and exclusively between 1953 and 1962. His various groups recorded a staggering number of albums throughout the 1950s, a demand for which was bought on by the booming mambo craze across the latter half of the decade. While many West Coast players emulated the Afro-Cuban sound, Tjader enlisted seasoned veterans of Latin music to play in his bands alongside some of the most talented jazz players around, including bassist Gene Wright, pianist Vince Guaraldi, percussionists Bayardo "Benny" Velarde and Luis Miranda as well as brothers Manuei and Carlos Duran on piano and bass respectively. Highlights from his early output include Ritmo Caliente! (1955), Tjader Plays Mambo (1956) and Latin Kick (1958). In 1958 too, Tjader teamed up with esteemed tenor saxophonist Stan Getz - who would find great fame in his own right working in the Latin idiom - on Cal Tjader-Stan Getz Sextet, fronting a band that would also include bassist Scott DeFaro, drummer Billy Higgins, and a third Duran brother, Eddie, on guitar. The following year, Tjader's band played the Monterey Jazz Festival. Having suffered financially when it made its debut in 1958, Tjader was credited with boosting ticket sales, helping save the fledgling festival, which today is close to celebrating its 60th anniversary.

By 1962, after releasing Latino Con Cal Tjader with Mongo Santamaria, Tjader signed for the more established Verve Records, where the bigger budgets afforded him made the 1960s his most successful era. His 1965 album Soul Sauce spawned a major radio hit with its title track, a Dizzy Giilespie number Tjader had been developing for over a decade, which sold over 100,000 copies. During this time he worked with a host of further esteemed musicians, including Donald Byrd, Lalo Schifrin, Anita O'Day, Willie Bobo, Armando Peraza, Chick Corea, Clare Fischer, Jimmy Heath and Kenny Burrell. 

He formed the short-lived Skye Records in 1968 wilh Gabor Szabo and Gary McFarland, on which he released Solar Heat (1968) and Tjader Plugs In (1969), both of which were credited as being precursors to acid jazz. He returned to Fantasy in the 1970s with the rise of the jazz fusion movement, a style that Tjader fully absorbed by adding electronic instruments and rock beats to his arrangements. 

Towards the end of the decade, Concord Records president Carl Jefferson founded Concord Jazz Picante solely to promote Tjader's later work, and it was with this label that he recorded La Onda Va Bien (1980), which earned him a Grammy for Best Latin Recording. A professional to the end, Cal Tjader died after suffering a heart attack while touring the Philippines in May 1982. He was 56.

This collection, spanning over five hours of music on four discs, collates nine of the finest records made by Cal Tjader during his initial stint wilh Fantasy Records. Faithfully remastered from the original recordings, this set will not only introduce a new generation to the musical skill and dexterity of Tjader, but will act too as a welcome reminder for those already familiar with the work of this legendary musician.”

…. To be continued in Part 2 of the Fantasy years with four classic albums on two CDs on Avid Jazz and Part 3 which is based on Downbeat articles from 1955 and 1966 featuring interviews with Cal.