Oliver Nelson's Big Band - Live from Los Angeles

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In early June 1967, the buzz was going around the Musicians Union Local 47 on Vine Street in Hollywood, CA that something special was going on at a nightclub called Marty’s-on-the-Hill in the Baldwin Hills area of the city on Slauson near South La Brea Avenue.

I knew the club very well as I had once worked there with Hammond B-3 organist Henry Cain’s trio.

What everyone was talking [buzzing] about was Oliver Nelson’s big band which was made up of top tier Los Angeles studio players.

Oliver had made the move to The Left Coast from New York a year or so earlier to write for television and movie programs, but he also wanted to be able to continue writing for a big band, so he put together a band that rehearsed his arrangements at one of the practice rooms at the union.

Everybody in town wanted to be in Oliver’s big band and it wasn’t long before the word got around that something special was happening. The band landed an off-night gig at Marty’s.

Oliver, who was under contract to Impulse! Records convinced his producer Bob Thiele to make a live recording of the band under the supervision of recording engineer Wally Heider who was renowned for his work in on-site settings.

At the time, the front-line in drummer Shelly Manne’s quintet in 1967 was trumpet player Conte Candoli and alto saxophonist Frank Strozier - both were in the band. Stalwart Bill Perkins and young phenom Tom Scott made up the tenor sax section with Gabe Baltazar on lead alto and Jack Nimitz anchoring it on baritone sax.

Buddy Childers was on lead trumpet but the real surprise was that he was joined by not one but three of the most fiery trumpet soloists in the city in Bobby Bryant, Freddy Hill and Conte [Buddy can also assume the Jazz chair].

Billy Byers, Pete Myers, Lou Blackburn and Ernie Tack were the trombone unit and the rhythm section was made up of Frank Strazzeri on piano, Monty Budwig on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.

Wait a minute - what! Ed Thigpen who played in Oscar Peterson’s trio for six years in the drum chair - this I gotta hear.

That was it - I had to be there and I was for what turned out to be a jubilant occasion for all concerned.

To share some of the excitement I’ve scattered a few YouTubes around the posted feature and included Nat Hentoff’s liner notes below.

“You go into a studio with a big band," Oliver Nelson was saying, "and you try to get a live feeling—that electricity, that rapport between audience and musicians and you sometimes feel outside. But while you can come close to perfection in a studio in terms of sound, that quality of live enthusiasm is often elusive. That's why I wanted to do a really live album, in a club."

The location was Marty's on the Hill in Los Angeles, which Nelson describes as "the only place in town where something's always hap-

pening." The band rehearsed briefly before the engagement, and then spent six days at Marty's. These tracks were selected from the nights of June 2, 3, and 4, 1967.

Bob Thiele, who produced this album, notes: "I like 'live' recordings, not only because they're spontaneous but also because the musicians aren't under pressure. If one performance doesn't work out, you have so many others to choose from. What made this an unusually exciting occasion was that the band was composed of top players who fused with such spirit that they kept sending substitutes to their regular jobs so that they could be at Marty's every night for the sheer pleasure of playing." 

"That's it," Nelson added. "For these guys, with their jobs in the studios and at record dates, this engagement was a waste of time financially. But they enjoyed what was happening so much that they were willing to take that economic loss."

It is this sense of exuberant satisfaction which characterizes the whole album and makes it one of the more "alive" recordings in. some time. The opener. Miss Fine, is named after Oliver Nelson's sister. Or rather, it's the nickname of Leontyne Lacoste. The crisp trumpet solo is by Freddy Hill.

Milestones is regarded by Oliver Nelson as "one of the more important jazz tunes in the past ten years." It was written by Miles Davis, and as Nelson says, "Miles has a unique sense of everything, including form and harmony. When it was first released, it not only stood out from much of what was being done at the time but it also looked ahead."

The first surging horn is Frank Strozier’s alto, and then he is joined in a fascinatingly challenging duet by young Tom Scott on tenor. “There’s a lot of this simultaneous improvising  going on now," Nelson observes, "but you don't often get musicians involved in that who listen to each other as carefully as Frank and Tom do in this performance."

I told Nelson how impressive Strozier sounded to me both on this track and the subsequent I Remember Bird. "Frank finally is beginning to get some of the attention due him," said Nelson. "And he's also working in the studios now, but as you can hear, he's kept his jazz thing intact. His wife says he's a

tyrant about music because all he does is practice ail the time, and all he thinks about is music. At Marty's we heard him for six nights, and every night the whole band had to stop and listen to what he was doing. Tom Scott, though he's younger, has that kind of impact too. He's already ahead of his years in that he has such an individual sound and style. He's not yet twenty, but he's had such a thorough musical background that it's now paying off in terms of what he wants to do.”

The featured performer on Night Train and Oliver Nelson's Guitar Blues is guitarist Mel Brown. He's a discovery of Bob Thiele. "I heard him in a joint," Thiele recalls, "and he knocked me out. I used him on a T-Bone Walker date, and that led to his first album under his own name for Impulse, Chicken Fat. Then I told Oliver about Brown, and he said to send him over." "He broke it up at Marty's," Nelson adds. "It's partly visual because he's a great, big cat; and once he gets going, he and the guitar are moving all over the place. But musically what he has is this huge warmth, directness, and earthiness. I wrote Guitar Blues for him."

Down by the Riverside is a driving four-way exchange between trumpeters Bobby Bryant, Freddy Hill, Conte Candoli, and Buddy Childers. "It's such an absorbing performance," says Nelson, "because each of them is quite different from the other. And throughout the engagement, they made up a great section. You usually have a trumpet section with just one man —most often the guy in the third chair—who takes jazz solos. But I never had a section before in which each player could do everything — from playing lead to improvising jazz. For that matter, we had that kind of flexibility all through the band."

Ja-Da was the band's theme during its stay at Marty’s and includes intriguing voicings by Nelson. I commented on the wit of trombonist Lou Blackburn on this track, and Oliver said, "It reflects the whole experience during those six nights. We were having fun, man!" Fortunately the essence of those six nights won't be lost, as a result of this recording. Also, because of Bob Thiele's enthusiastic reaction to Tom Scott during the engagement, Scott was signed to an Impulse contract and has made his first album for the label.

As Thiele said. “That was a very productive trip to Los Angeles for me. It led to a lot of good music”

And it also reinforced, in this album, the belief of those, like myself, who prefer on-location recordings of Jazz. Of course, the mere fact that you do record “live” doesn’t automatically insure the full-bodied spontaneity of an optimum night in a club. 

But when the musicians are of high quality, the arrangements loose enough to give them room in which to stretch, and that ineffable collective fire starts building, then a “live” recording becomes a singularly satisfying event.”

- Nat Hentoff.

Impulse! A-9153 vinyl 1967

Impulse! A-9153 CD 2005

Oliver Nelson - arranger, conductor, soprano saxophone

Bobby Bryant, Conte Candoli, Buddy Childers, Freddy Hill - trumpets

Lou Blackburn, Billy Byers, Pete Myers, Ernie Tack - trombones

Gabe Baltazar, Frank Strozier, alto sax

Bill Perkins, Tom Scott - tenor sax

Jack Nimitz - baritone sax

Frank Strazzeri - piano

Monte Budwig - bass

Ed Thigpen - drums

Recorded June 2-4, 1967

Marty's on the Hill, Los Angeles, CA

There is a musician in the band on this album who is not credited. It’s the late Howard Johnson who plays tuba on it. He told me this himself in an email of June 27, 2010 (“I'm also playing tuba on all those Oliver Nelson live tracks from 1967. I'm not credited, but there is clearly tuba on every track"). It was confirmed by saxophonist Kenny Berger: "Check out the brass figures on the bridge of Milestones and the shout chorus on I Remember Bird and you'll hear it. Hint-don't listen for it to be reinforcing bass functions. A lot of the time the tuba doubles the lead trumpet two octaves down which puts the tuba in its upper register in which it projects very strongly.” (email July 6, 2010).

Noal Cohen