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SIDEMAN BLUES
He played in Vegas. Then he died there--his body found at the edge of the desert with a broken neck and a bloodstream full of smack. Now, thirty-seven years later, Evan Horne is looking into the death of tenor sax player Wardell Gray, a sharp-dressing sideman who rubbed someone very wrong.
Moonlighting from his job playing piano at the Fashion Show Mall - -his first gig since a debilitating hand injury -- Horne was doing a favor for a scholar by asking questions about Wardell Gray. Then the heat, glitz, and payback of Vegas came down hard, bringing Horne up against a former dancer with a sizzling secret in her past, a mobster whose hobby is dollhouses, and the little-known history of a 1950s black jazz club--a disturbing truth that still has the power to swing, smoke, and kill....
Death of a Tenor Man, [Book 2 of 7] in Bill Moody’s Evan Horne Jazz mystery series
“Nineteen fifty five will be remembered in the jazz world as a year which took a heavy toll of its musicians. During its course men of different styles, from Charlie Parker to Cow Cow Davenport, died leaving behind the memory of their work in the form of gramophone records. Parker, whose passing was one of the greatest single losses in the entire history of our music, died after a heart attack which came as a delayed-action culmination to a protracted period of ill health; pianist Dick Twardzick died in Paris as a result of an excessive self-administered shot of heroin, white baritone saxist Bob Gordon was killed in a California car accident as he was travelling to fulfil a concert engagement. Both of these latter deaths serve as grim reminders of the internal and external hazards facing today's musicians.
On the 26th of May the most mysterious death came to light when tenor man Wardell Gray's body was discovered on some waste ground outside Las Vegas. He had died from a broken neck and injuries sustained to the head inflicted by an unidentified weapon.”
-Alun Morgan, Wardell Gray in Jazz Monthly, i/12, 1956
Sometimes Jazz musicians are as ethereal as the music itself - here one minute and gone the next.
The setting for the music - which was usually full of booze, gangsters and assorted vices - was hardly conducive to economic stability, good health and longevity.
Not surprisingly then, Jazz has more than its share of tragic falls from grace and one of the saddest of these stories is tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray who had the makings of a brilliant career when he suddenly disappeared into the Las Vegas desert and was found dead under circumstances that remain as mysterious as they are unsolved.
But as Ira Gitler reminds us in the following excerpts from his notes to the Prestige Records Memorial albums:
“The death of Wardell Gray has not been completely cleared up but it is not for us to attempt to solve any mysteries here. …. His life, rather than his death, is what concerns us.
Whatever he played swung, for primarily Wardell was a swinger. Moving along at up-tempo, he would still exhort the rhythm section to ‘bear down.’
Although one would imagine that there’s not much to write about in the life of a thirty-three year old Jazz musician, there are a number of fine pieces about him in Jazz literature.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has put together an initial effort to help remember and commemorate Wardell Gray on these pages. More pieces will follow in other blog features about him and the musical settings in which he performed.
To begin, here’s more from Ira’s notes to Wardell Gray Memorial Vols. 1 & 2 [Prestige LP 7008/7009; OJCCD -050-2; 051-2
Born in Oklahoma City in 1921, Wardell moved to Detroit where he studied music at Cass Tech High. After playing with the local bands of Jimmy Rachel and Benny Carew, he did his first name band work with Earl Hines, doubling on tenor and clarinet from 1943 to 1945. Then he was with Billy Eckstine's big band for a short spell before joining Benny Carter in 1946, Carter has always had great admiration for Wardell's playing and Benny is not lavish with praise for many of the modern jazzmen. With Carter, Wardell went out to the West Coast and decided to remain for a while, 1947 found him participating in many of the jazz concerts so popular there at that time. Through these appearances and recordings, he began to be more widely known.
The Lester Young style he had shown with Hines was still in evidence, a pure-toned driving style which underwent change in the following year. When Wardell came to New York in 1948 to become part of the Benny Goodman Sextet you could hear the shift to Charlie Parker's influence. Later that year he appeared at the Royal Roost with Tadd Dameron's group and Count Basie's band. In 1949 it was back to Goodman, this time the big band. By the time he had finished an engagement at the Orchid Club (the old Onyx) on 52nd Street with Sonny Stitt in early 1950, Wardell's style had changed completely over to the harder sound and crisper attack.
He returned to Detroit and spent several months there with his own quartet. When Count Basie formed a small band, Wardell answered his call. Until the end of 1951 when he settled in California, he played intermittently with Count in both small and large groups. We never saw him in the East after that. Outside of a few recording sessions (two of which are included in these volumes) he wasn't heard from. The West Coast may have been booming but not for all.”
Wardell is also referenced in Ira’s Jazz Masters of the 1940s in association with tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon:
“After playing in Hawaii with Cee Pee Johnson, Gordon settled in Los Angeles again. It was here that he and the late Wardell Gray became a team. It started at an after-hours place called Jack's Basket and at other weekly sessions. "There'd be a lot of cats on the stand, but by the end of the session, it would wind up with Wardell and myself," Gordon recalled. "The Chase grew out of this. Wardell was a very good saxophonist who knew his instrument very well. His playing was very fluid, very clean. Although his sound wasn't overwhelming, he always managed to make everything very interesting, very musical. I always enjoyed playing with him. He had a lot of drive and a profusion of ideas. He was stimulating to me."
Trumpeter Art Farmer has told me that at these sessions, Gordon and Gray would generate such excitement as they exchanged musical ideas that people would wind up standing on tables and chairs.”
In their chapter The Spreading Flame: New York and the West Coast in the Mid-Forties [Modern Jazz: A Survey of Development Since 1939 [Greenwood Press, 1956], Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks] offer this overview:
“Wardell had been a member of the Earl Hines band and had worked alongside Charlie Parker for a short time. After engagements with Billy Eckstine, Benny Carter and Vernon Alley he settled in Hollywood to play in small groups. He was a heavily featured soloist at the Gene Norman concerts and a very popular musician at any musical gathering. He played in the amalgamated Charlie Parker-Lester Young style with a superb and consistent tone.
He possessed an unruffled temperament which made him at home either in the recording studio or on the concert platform and he could never be accused of descending to the depths of crowd-rousing showmanship. So often the bugbear of the tenor and trumpet soloist is this playing to the gallery. Warden's sense of swing was literally unrivalled anywhere in the world of modern jazz, yet despite all these attributes he gained neither publicity nor the respect accorded to lesser musicians.
He played on Parker's Relaxin' at Camarillo date and recorded a tenor chase under the title The Chase with the somewhat similarly styled Dexter Gordon. He worked with the Benny Goodman band at the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949 and Benny was so impressed with his playing and sense of musicianship allied to his-high-grade jazz creation that he made him deputy leader. Wardell was more at home with Basie, whose band he joined after the Goodman engagement, and the Count featured him on his recording of Little Pony.
The spring of 1955 witnessed the tragic death of Wardell under somewhat mysterious circumstances.”
Wardell’s career and style of playing are a bit more fleshed out in the following insert notes to Wardell Gray Quintet: Live at The Haig 1952 [Fresh Sound FSRCD 157] by Mike Baille:
“Gray was born in Oklahoma City in 1921, but actually grew up in Detroit where he studied clarinet at the celebrated Cass Tech, switching later to the alto saxophone. It was as an alto man that he joined the band of Earl Mines in '43, but after a couple of years he was playing the tenor saxophone. Like many others, he'd come under the spell of Lester Young. From Earl Mines he moved on to the Billy Eckstine band, and by '46, now living in California, he found regular work with Benny Carter, Dexter Gordon, Erroll Garner and Gene Norman. The latter was a highly successful promoter of jazz concerts in the Los Angeles area in the late 40's, who frequently featured Wardell Gray as a front line soloist, and because of that Gray came to the attention of Benny Goodman. Thus the years '48-'51 saw Gray based in New York and continually moving back and forth between the bands of Goodman and Count Basie, both leaders frequently in competition for his services.
He returned to California in '51, where he was held in very high esteem by fellow musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes and Art Farmer, who considered the thin and bespectacled Gray something of an intellectual. (It was said he carried around with him the works of the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre.) Gray was also known to be against the use of drugs, yet he himself fell into the same abyss, his dead body being found in Las Vegas in very obscure circumstances.
Gray is perhaps the Missing Link between Swing and Bop, for in his early days he played very much like Young (all of whose solos he knew note for note, according to Dexter Gordon) — then, by following Charlie Parker's musical thinking, he found his own style. He was certainly no copyist, and, blessed with a superb technique plus a fertile imagination he cruised effortlessly through the changes with a logical ease, producing consistently melodic music with an incredible swing, allied to a lovely warm tone.
His solos were invariably beautifully rounded, moving inexorably from one climax to the next, and not necessarily with any change in volume — climaxes produced simply by the notes selected. He possessed a melodic conception second to none, an unrivalled sense of swing, plus there existed a certain kind of elegance in those long smooth swinging phrases.
He appeared serene, with a rare grace and beauty in his playing that only a master musician is capable of producing. During his time in New York he made a considerable impression on 52nd St playing with Sonny Stitt in 1950, then later with Miles Davis and Bud Powell. And, of course, some excellent recordings were made with the bands of Basie and Goodman.
But it was the West Coast where he became really prominent and universally known. There were some momentous concerts under the supervision of Gene Norman, in which his marathon tenor “battles” with Dexter Gordon became a talking point for both musicians and fans alike. These musical joustings with Dexter Gordon brought both tenor saxophonists national and international recognition, for each man would gleefully challenge the other in “combat”, and their recording of The Chase was a big seller.
The cream of the West Coast jazz scene of the time was certainly assembled one evening in September 1952 at The Haig, a small Los Angeles club run by John Bennet. And, thanks to Bob Andrews, who was there with his recording equipment, some of the music played that night has been preserved.
Bernie's tune swings at medium tempo and gets the album off to a fine start. Gray is at total ease with the changes, and Manne's brushwork really punctuates the proceedings, particularly behind Hawes' funky solo. Tadd Dameron's The Squirrel follows, with more smooth sailing from Gray, who builds a solo of compelling swing. Art Farmer is in something of a Milesian mode here, while Hawes brings a highly rhythmic and percussive colouring to his solo statement before a brilliant series of exchanges between the two horns closes the piece. Pennies from heaven and Taking a chance on love both feature Wardell Gray's tenor with just the rhythm section, and he floats gently through both numbers in a laid-back manner very reminiscent of Lester Young, enhancing each melody with his original variations.
In between the two standards is a furious version of Donna Lee where Gray demonstrates that he can play just as immaculately at fast tempo, as does Hampton Hawes in his very articulate solo. Manne's cymbals positively sizzle on this one. Jackie is a blues, with some fine trumpet playing by Art Farmer, and some surprising Shearing-like block chording from composer Hampton Hawes. Get happy is exactly that — optimistic and bright — with Wardell Gray quite superb and Hawes playing some pure bebop piano. Shelly Manne shines on brushes behind Gray on Keen and Peachy where the guitar of Howard Roberts is added, and Hawes is absolutely brilliant in his solo spot. Roberts is still there for the final number, another Dameron opus — Ladybird — and the unknown Amos Trice takes over the piano chair from Hawes. For Art Farmer these were formative times, and on all the tracks where he is featured one can see an emerging style, with plenty of his own ideas coming through in that economical and unforced way of his.
However, there is no doubt who is the dominant voice in these important live recordings — Wardell Gray. He seems very much the leader here, always taking the first solo on every track, and by doing so setting the feel and the tone for the other musicians who follow — yet he somehow manages to be both self-effacing and authoritative at one and the same time. It's poignant to consider what might have been had Gray not died in May 1955, at the early age of thirty-one. An untimely death, and a most terrible loss to the jazz world. It wasn't only Wardell Gray's luck that ran out that fateful day in Las Vegas.”
Wardell is also one of the subjects in Michael James, Ten Modern Jazzmen: An Appraisal of the Recorded Work of Ten Modern Jazzmen [London: 1960]; Alun Morgan, Wardell; Gray in Jazz Monthly, i/12, 1956; H. Butterfield, Wardell Gray in Jazz Journal, xiv/10, 1961; Max Harrison, Backlog Ten: Wardell Gray in Jazz Monthly, viii/3 1962. He is also the focus of a discography by C. Schlouch published in Marseilles, France in 1983. These references are cited in Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz which also contains an overview of Wardell’s career, a list of selected recordings and a bibliography as compiled by Lawrence Koch.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is in the process of acquiring copies of these chapters, articles and reviews about Wardell and his music and will published them individually in future features on Wardell in order to establish a comprehensive online catalogue of materials about this extremely talented, but somewhat obscure, “Missing Link” between Swing Era and Bebop Era tenor saxophone styles.
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