© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Reading Simon Spillett on the subject of Jazz tenor saxophone is the ice cream equivalent of two scoops with hot fudge - in other words - it’s always a treat.
Simon does a splendid job of getting the details right while writing in a style that’s easy to read and always framed as a sound narrative.
Based in the UK, he leads his own quartet and big band and is the biographer of the great tenor saxophonist, Tubby Hayes. You can locate more information about him by visiting his webpage.
© - Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.
John Coltrane – The Complete Ray Draper Quintet Sessions 1957-58 Acrobat ACMCD 4375
“He blows the hottest modern jazz tuba I’ve yet heard”
Nat Hentoff on Ray Draper, Down Beat, 1957
“Jazz music has passed through many periods of intense change in its century-long existence. Indeed, the overall story of the music’s advancement and refinement is one of near constant flux, but there is little doubt that the years immediately after World War Two were those during which the pace of change moved fastest. Bebop had been the first wave of what was to eventually to become known more generically as modern jazz and within a few short years the varied aspirations of these new jazz explorers resulted in the springing up of the Cool School, the Third Stream, Hard Bop, the Avant-Garde and other splintered factions of musical development. Unsurprisingly, as jazz broadened its harmonic palate, there were those who also sought to widen its instrumental scope, discontent to let the established triumvirate of trumpet, saxophone and piano set the hegemony any longer.
Some instruments, like the clarinet - which had long dominated jazz and had become the ultimate phallus of Swing - were immediate victims of this revolution, suddenly finding themselves out in the cold, whereas others at last found their niche after years in obscurity. During the 1950’s there was a fashionable flurry of interest in playing modern jazz on everything from the valve trombone to the flugelhorn and flute, instruments hitherto not considered front-runners but which have since become accepted parts of the jazz soundscape. There were other more exotic choices too: the harp, the oboe and the French horn could all now boast modern jazz exponents, taking the instruments from their previous roles as orchestral mainstays into the limelight as - admittedly not always convincing - solo voices.
Perhaps the most astonishing transformation was that made by the cumbersome tuba, an instrument that had been utilised in jazz since the very beginning but which, since the widespread adoption of the double bass in the 1930’s, had eventually fallen from the front rank. The pioneering work of the collaborative Miles Davis’ nonet of 1949-50 - the celebrated Birth of The Cool band - had given the horn new life as a flexible ensemble voice (in the capable hands of Bill Barber) and, as the decade progressed it would become a regular fixture in the scores of the more adventurous arrangers, from Gil Evans to Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers and others. However, the boldest departure of all was taken by a young student from New York’s High School of Performing Arts, Ray Draper, who emerged in the late 1950’s as the unlikely exponent of Hard Bop tuba.
Draper’s one-horse race achievement may initially have something of a comic ring to it. Of all the instruments on which to play modern jazz, a music which had technical virtuosity as a mandatory requirement, why pick something as awkward as the tuba? However, a cursory glance at his early CV reveals that here was a young man not only of remarkable faith but also of prodigal ability. Whilst still in his teens, Draper was part of The Jazz Disciples, a co-operative band featuring alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of the hottest new jazz talents around, and was playing gigs at clubs like New York’s Birdland. In 1958 he joined the quintet of drummer Max Roach, among the sharpest-eared talent scouts in jazz, touring the US with the group and recording three albums during a year-long stint. As with his work in McLean’s unit, Roach’s band placed Draper in a front-line with two of the most technically agile young jazzmen around in trumpeter Booker Little and tenor saxophonist George Coleman; recourse to any of the bands albums will show that by no means did he disgrace himself in such – literally – fast company.
By 1957 he was also recording as a leader in his own right, co-opting his fellow Jazz Disciple McLean to appear on the Prestige album Tuba Sounds (PRLP 7096), taped in March that year.
Despite his pedigree - and novel instrument choice aside - Draper wasn’t exactly a typical late-1950’s Prestige artist. The label had established both its catalogue and reputation from an almost jam-session like modus operandi, with ad-hoc groups of musicians often harnessed together on a single afternoon to record a hastily busked set of standards and blues heads, which might then be issued across several releases. Some musicians were ideally suited to this method (including Draper’s partner on this album, more of whom anon) but the tuba specialist required a more patient way of working, owing to his equal interest in composition and arrangement. He had contributed two themes to the Tuba Sounds sessions, Jackie’s Dolly and Mimi’s Interlude, and was by this point also composing in the classical field, writing Fugue for Brass Ensemble, a work debuted at New York University, and an untitled symphony which it appears may have never been completed or performed.
For his second album, recorded in December 1957, Draper contributed three further original compositions and three arrangements of other composers' work, thus giving a far better indication of his skills. However, Prestige were in no hurry to release the record (one can imagine that sales of Tuba Sounds weren’t exactly encouraging) and stockpiled the session for eventual release on its New Jazz subsidiary two years later. Indeed, the session may well have become something of a forgotten footnote in jazz history were it not for the fact that Draper had selected none other than John Coltrane to be his front-line partner.
Again, the idea of putting the leaders lumbering instrument up against arguably the most mercurial technician in all of modern jazz might seem like an exercise in comparative artistic suicide, but Draper and Coltrane had more in common than might initially be imagined. Realising this, however, requires a little revision of jazz folklore.
Nowadays, John Coltrane is viewed with reverential awe, with his career held up as an example of uncompromising, fearless jazz innovation. The barrier-breaking work he documented with his own quartet in the 1960’s not only changed the face of jazz, it took Coltrane on a spiritual journey that has subsequently altered many listeners’ perceptions of him. Extricating the saxophonist from all the posthumous ephemera isn’t always easy, and it might be now be viewed as little more than flagrant heresy to suggest that he was once anything less than a leading voice within the music, but at the time of these recordings with Ray Draper, the thirty-something Coltrane was still firmly a sideman. Indeed, during 1957 he had moved from the quintet of Miles Davis, with whom he’d had his “break” into jazz stardom two years earlier, onto the quartet of pianist Thelonious Monk. In many ways the gig with Monk was the making of him, but, like Draper’s role with Max Roach’s band, it was nevertheless still a sideman job – just one part of the never-ending game of musical chairs played out among the protagonists of New York’s Hard Bop jazz scene.
As a sideman on recording dates, Coltrane had participated in no fewer than seventeen sessions during 1957, many for the Prestige label, to whom he had also signed his first contract as a leader. As a regular at the studios of Rudy Van Gelder in Hackensack, New Jersey, where the majority of recordings for labels like Prestige and Blue Note were made, the saxophonist had proved himself to be remarkably adaptable, using the simple blow-and-go formats of sets with pianists Mal Waldron and Red Garland, fellow tenorist Paul Quinichette and others to further strengthen his already formidable gifts. During that same year, he had also undergone what he later recalled as a spiritual awakening, enabling him to finally kick his debilitating heroin habit. The results were immediately apparent in his music: where there had once been inconsistency there was now technical mastery and his tone, the searing calling card that would mark him out from all other tenor saxophonists, now sounded stronger than ever. Harmonically too, he was expanding, stacking chord progressions on top of one another to such an extent that critic Ira Gitler famously dubbed his solo technique “sheets of sound”, so rapid was its execution. Such attack made a piquant contrast to the other horn players Coltrane was recording alongside at this point, none more so than Ray Draper.
Coltrane recorded two albums under the tuba player’s leadership, taped roughly a year apart for two different labels. Amazingly, up until this Acrobat issue, no-one has seen fit to release them back-to-back, but this new release not only tidies up all the discographical niceties it also focuses new attention on some of the very few Coltrane recordings in danger of falling into limbo.
The period bracketed by The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane and its successor A Tuba Jazz, recorded in late 1958, found Coltrane breasting ahead of the competition to become one of the most controversial jazzmen of his day. To put these albums into context, other notable recorded triumphs between these dates included the seminal Miles Davis’ set Milestones (Columbia CL 1193) and Coltrane’s own Soul Trane LP (Prestige PRLP 7142): listeners new to these sessions with Draper will find the saxophonist’s playing here every bit as committed and thrilling as that on those better known sessions.
However, perhaps the biggest service this release affords is that in providing the all-but-forgotten Draper another moment in the spotlight. As captivating as Coltrane’s contributions undoubtedly are, these are definitely Draper’s sessions, and the brass man seizes his opportunity with genuine alacrity, contributing not only a string of spirited solos but a quartet of intriguing original themes. His choice of repertoire from other composers is also from the top drawer, with a couple of ingeniously redesigned arrangements of some unlikely material.
December 20th 1957: The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane
Coltrane’s first session under Draper’s leadership was recorded when the tuba player was just seventeen years of age. Had Draper been a trumpet player or a pianist recording at a similar juncture, he may well have attracted more attention for his precocious skills, but arguably the most striking aspect of the burgeoning talent on display is that of his composing and arranging. “Together, Draper and Coltrane produce some intriguing ensemble sounds, texturally different from anything you’ve heard before”, wrote Ira Gitler in his sleeve notes for the original New Jazz release, an assessment that still holds true. These “intriguing” sounds are as much a tribute to Draper’s writing as to his unusual instrumental preference. In fact, there is nothing in Coltrane’s canon – or for that matter in anyone else’s – that sounds remotely like these recordings.
Not alone in his “predilection for composing songs in minor keys”, as the original album text noted, Draper came up with three original themes that particularly suited his sideman. The tenorists solo on the opening Clifford’s Kappa - dedicated one imagines to the late Clifford Brown - is a virtual précis of his 1957 style: the spearing sound, the rippling double-time runs and the pet quote from While My Lady Sleeps are all definitive Coltrane, whilst the composer weighs in with an improvisation that at once proves how dedicated he was to trying to graft the mobility of the modern jazz vernacular onto a less than likely instrument. Indeed, pitch up the harmonic choices and phrasing of his improvisation on this and the following track, Filidia, a theme with an almost Brown/Roach/Dameron flavour to it, and one can imagine them being played by trombonist Curtis Fuller, a player certainly noted for his technical agility.
Draper’s final composition of the set, Two Sons, is the most complex, with a dark, stop-start, contrapuntal theme propelling Coltrane into a solo which finds his characteristically intricate lines broken by more lyrical interludes. “Some of his most emotionally exciting music is contained here”, wrote Ira Gitler in an honest summary of the saxophonists playing on this recording.
The session’s remaining three themes are arrangements by Draper: Paul’s Pal, a Sonny Rollins composition name-checking bassist Paul Chambers, dates to saxophonist’s famed Tenor Madness album for Prestige the previous year (PRLP 7047), on which Coltrane had guested. Draper’s version marked the only time that Coltrane would record the theme, and offers the kind of individual improvisation that now makes it impossible for listeners to envisage a time when he and Rollins were occasionally mistaken for one another.
Under Paris Skies is undoubtedly the album’s high spot. Although other jazz artists, including Chico Hamilton, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Haynes, recorded notable versions of the song, none came quite as close to reinventing the piece as Draper, whose episodic arrangement mixes a 6/8 Latin groove (not exactly what springs to mind with a Parisian song!), a written interlude with tongue-in-cheek classical allusions, and some rare low register work by Coltrane on the theme’s bridge. The leader has what is probably his best solo outing of the date, whilst the track is also noteworthy as a showcase for the little known Larry Ritchie on drums, a college of Draper’s from the Jazz Disciples who was to go on to work with pianist Freddie Redd in the controversial Jack Gelber play The Connection. Listen especially for his Philly Joe Jones-like brush work, again prominent on Draper’s feature track, I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You.
Taken at the sort of loping mid-tempo approach popularised by the Miles Davis quintet, and with Coltrane sitting out, this final track illustrates some of the limitations of Draper’s instrument in a jazz context and is largely saved by the piano accompaniment served by the little-known Gil Coggins, another Jazz Disciple and something of an underground figure in New York jazz circles, who had recorded with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins.
At the height of Coltrane’s fame, the Swedish record label Metronome released an EP of the material on The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane, edited to include only the saxophonists solos and called, appropriately, Concentrated Coltrane. Such opportunistic hijacking was not uncommon to Coltrane’s earlier sideman work: some of his Prestige sessions as co-leader were re-marketed in the Sixties as “Coltrane albums”, as was his only sideman appearance with pianist Cecil Taylor, although none of these US reissues had the blatant effrontery to edit out the original session leaders solos as the Swedes had done. Draper’s comments went unrecorded.
November 1958: A Tuba Jazz
Recorded for the Jubilee label [LP 1090], the second album featuring John Coltrane under Ray Draper’s leadership was released as A Tuba Jazz. The LP was also Draper’s second outing on Jubilee, having previously been featured on Jackie McLean’s Fat Jazz (Jubilee 1093) the previous November, a set which also included two of the themes recorded with Coltrane on New Jazz, Filide and Two Sons.
For his own Jubilee recording, Draper had reassembled the band he’s used on his previous LP, save for the enigmatic Coggins, who was replaced by the twenty-year old John Mayer, a friend of the leader from his student days.
In the intervening period since their previous recording, both Coltrane and Draper had been busy on the road and in the recording studios: the saxophonist was now a member of the Miles Davis sextet and besides setting down classic performances on LP’s like Milestones (Columbia CL 1193) and Jazz Track (Columbia CL 1268) had also recorded several albums worth of material (yet to be released) under his own Prestige contract. Draper in the meantime had been recruited to the Max Roach quintet, which that year had appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and recorded the album Deeds Not Words for the Riverside label (RLP 12-280).
For this encore outing, the emphasis was on arrangements of standards and compositions by other jazz composers, with a single Draper original, Essii’s Dance kicking off the album. Utilising a modal/changes structure similar to Night in Tunisia (and somewhat prefiguring Coltrane’s own composition Harmonique, taped the following year), the performance is a good place in which to gauge the progress both front-liners had made in the preceding eleven months. The leader’s articulation is cleaner and the tone of his instrument is captured far more clearly than before, while Coltrane’s sliding, serpentine improvisation is smack in the middle of his “sheets of sound” approach, again including his favourite While My Lady Sleeps quotation.
Two more Sonny Rollins compositions appear on this set: Doxy, Rollins’ funky contrafact on the harmonies of the old jazz theme Ja-Da, and Oleo, his variant of the ubiquitous [I’ve Got] “Rhythm” sequence. The former is ideally suited to the unusual front-line of tenor and tuba, and contains a Monk-like solo from John Mayer, a player whose enthusiastic accompaniment throughout this set occasionally sits at the front end of the beat.
Draper makes the sensible decision to leave the tricky theme of Oleo to Coltrane. In tempo and general arrangement, this version closely shadows Miles Davis 1954 original recording on Prestige (PRLP 187 Miles Davis Quintet) with Coltrane making the most of the “strolling” sections in which Mayer’s piano lays out. Indeed, the saxophonists solo is an absolute gem, ranking alongside such contemporary masterpieces as Good Bait (Prestige) and Straight, No Chaser (Columbia) and deserves to be far better known. Ex-Jazz Messengers bassist, the delightfully named Spanky De Brest, has a rare outing too.
I Talk To The Trees, taken from the 1951 (then stage) musical Paint Your Wagon receives a treatment similar to that given other Broadway show tunes by New York’s Hard Boppers of the day, mixing Latin and Swing rhythms, and contains another dyspeptic Curtis Fuller-like offering from Draper. Although the exact studio location of this session remains unidentified, as does the albums original engineer, the recording balance captures Coltrane’s sound a mite more closely than was the norm on other albums around this period, revealing just how lovely was the tone that many critics had decried as stringent and ugly.
The two remaining selections, Yesterdays and Angel Eyes are themes Coltrane did not record elsewhere. Both cast in minor keys, each provides a highly suitable vehicle for the saxophonist’s improvisational skills. Yesterdays, featuring Draper’s descending figure underpinning Coltrane’s reading of the theme, digs especially deep, with Larry Ritchie utilising fellow-drummer Philly Joe Jones’ patented “Philly lick” rim shots, whilst Angel Eyes, although principally a feature for the leader contains a solo from Coltrane demonstrating how well his eerie tone could be applied to ballads.
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As is all too sadly often the case within modern jazz, these sessions have a tragic aftermath. Nine years after he had recorded with Draper, and after a career as a leader which found him redefining both himself and the language of jazz, Coltrane died from liver disease, aged just 40. His passing was marked across the globe. Not only had he died a jazz hero, known and recognised throughout the world, he had passed on free of the mire of hard drug addiction that had blighted the lives of so many of his friends and colleagues. It was an affliction that had all but wrecked Ray Draper, whose life after the 1950’s reads like a tragedy.
His career after leaving Max Roach’s group in 1959 never capitalised on its early promise. During the late 1960’s he was imprisoned on drugs charges but made a brief comeback with the band Red Beans and Rice, a prototypical fusion outfit which worked opposite Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull and Gil Scott-Heron, among others, and which recorded a single album for Epic Records (Red Beans and Rice featuring Ray Draper, Epic BN 26461). Draper also appeared on sessions led by saxophonists Sonny Criss and Archie Shepp, and on Dr. John’s Atlantic album, The Sun, Moon and Herbs (Atco 40250) but throughout the 1970’s his career had the consistency of an air-locked tap. Finally free of addiction, Draper was gunned down in a New York street on November 1st 1982, aged just 42. Held-up by a group of teenaged muggers, he had handed over his cash, but was shot dead by the gang’s thirteen year old leader.
It would be a fallacy to suggest that the music on this album set the jazz scene alight, or that it could truly qualify as anything more profound than solid, largely journeyman-made examples of the kind of jazz heard around New York in the 1950’s. Indeed, without the presence of John Coltrane, it would probably have been forgotten altogether. Nevertheless, what the music heard here possesses in abundance is an honesty and sincerity that speaks volumes for the musicians who made it, famous or not. Unique is a word bandied around far too liberally in jazz history books, but, like his better known and far more celebrated sideman on this album, Ray Draper could boast that his contribution to the music was truly that. The hottest modern jazz tuba yet transpires to be the hottest still.”
Simon Spillett
January 2014
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Clifford’s Kappa (Draper) [9.14]
Filidia (Draper) [7.13]
Two Sons (Draper) [ 5.21]
Paul’s Pal (Rollins) [7.12]
Under Paris Skies (Giraud) [7.44]
I Hadn’t Anyone Till You (Noble) [3.04]
John Coltrane (tenor sax); Ray Draper (tuba); Gil Coggins (piano); Spanky De Brest (bass); Larry Ritchie (drums)
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, December 20th 1957
Originally issued on The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane, New Jazz NJ-8228
Edited takes of all but track 6 were also released on Concentrated Coltrane, Metronome MEP 9037
Essii’s Dance (Draper) [6.04]
Doxy (Rollins) [6.47]
Oleo (Rollins) [6.07]
I Talk To The Trees (Lerner, Lowe) [6.04]
Yesterdays (Kern, Harbach) [7.00]
Angel Eyes (Dennis, Brent) [4.48]
John Coltrane (tenor sax); Ray Draper (tuba); John Mayer (piano); Spanky De Brest (bass); Larry Ritchie (drums)
New York, November 1958
Originally issued on Ray Draper: A Tuba Jazz, Jubilee JLP 1090
Original sessions produced by Bob Weinstock (1-6) and unknown (7-12)
Engineers on the original sessions: Rudy Van Gelder (1-6) and unknown (7-12)
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