Part 3 - Shelly Manne: The Lighthouse and Shorty Rogers Giants Years

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

Over in the Hollywood film studios, the music contractors were starting to realize that they just might have struck upon something in using jazz musicians who were versatile and could read well. Laurindo Almeida was already doing film work, and this year he was asked if he could play the guitar for a film called The Rube. He could and he did. Shorty was contacted and contracted for another film called Private Hell 36. This was another Leith Stevens project, but this time the music would play a less important role in the film and very little of it is audible. Nevertheless, it was another notch in the jazz player's belt. They were trying to gel into the very lucrative studio scene. Making money playing jazz had never been easy. Bobby Heifer was the music contractor at Universal International Studios and knew Shelly and decided to take a chance. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window had been completed and was ready for the music. It was a fairly difficult session, in that there were quite a few complex drum parts. Most of the music was "source music," i.e., from "a radio across the courtyard," but there were some challenging percussion parts. Shelly did the session, won the confidence of Heifer, and, as usual, the friendship of many of the studio players. From that point on. Shelly was Heifer's drummer and it was the beginning of a long studio career for the jazz drummer.

Shelly had won the Down Beat poll five years in a row, the Metronome poll three years in a row, and Shorty and the Giants were playing Zardi's, The Haig, the Crescendo and a number of other L.A. area clubs. The transplanted East Coast drummer had made some movie soundtracks and it looked like there would be a lot more. He was able to make a good living in one place and still play the jazz he loved. The fans loved him and so did the press. He was constantly featured in the area papers, Down Beat regularly interviewed him; what more could a guy want? In the back of his mind, Shelly kept the idea for a jazz club, a place where musicians could play their own music unencumbered by worry about rude patrons, owners griping about what they wanted to hear and bad pianos. But that would have to wait. Shelly Manne was about to begin a period in his life when he couldn't possibly take all the playing opportunities offered him.

Rear Window and Private Hell 36 were released in early 1954. In January, the 33-year-old drummer recorded with the Russ Garcia Orchestra featuring a singer with a name that sounded like a 1950s TV show, Johnny Holiday.

On the 18th, Pete Rugolo used him on a June Christy session, and in the first week of February, Shorty's big band recorded Shorty Courts The Count. Basie had been everybody's idol. It was always the band they listened to and went to see when they could. This album was a way for everyone to say thanks to "the Count." For this album, they brought in Harry "Sweets'' Edison, the trumpet player who said it all so simply with such great taste. Zoot Sims was also used for his wonderful, earthy, swinging style. Rogers wrote three originals and the rest were Basie standards. On the date, of course, were Giuffre and Shelly, Coop and Marty Paich, Bob Enevoldsen and Bud Shank. These musicians, along with Shorty and tubaist Paul Sarmento, had been on Shelly's first Contemporary albums, and here they all were playing straight-ahead Basie! Yet, according to some critics, particularly on the East Coast, these guys had lost what jazz was all about — swinging. The album, recorded in three sessions over a four-week period, was a musical success and Shorty continued his good relationship with the RCA label.

Shelly's February recording schedule also included sessions for a Columbia album called Introducing Pete Rugolo. This was an obvious attempt at letting the general public know who Pete Rugolo was, even though he had written so much of the Kenton book in the late 40s and early 50s and was writing for the film industry. A small band, including Shelly, recorded some standards with vibraphonist Red Norvo on Valentines Day and less than a week later, Rogers, Manne, Freeman, Curtis Counce, and a young trumpet player by the name of Jack Sheldon recorded the first session of a Jimmy Giuffre album for Capitol. Shelly did two sessions with Maynard Ferguson, then finished Rugolo’s album. To finish out the month, he recorded 19 songs for Dan Terry in a three day marathon at Columbia. 

In March, the Courts The Count and Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. 2 final sessions were recorded. By the end of the month, Rogers was starting another album. This one was called Collaboration and featured the smaller "Giants" band. For this session, Shorty dropped the tuba and French horn, and used Al Hendrickson on guitar and a young Andre Previn on piano. Like the term or not, "West Coast Jazz" was hot and the albums were being churned out as fast as they could make them. It was as if the musicians were taking turns being the leader.

During a Giants' gig at The Haig, a very happy Bob Cooper came in to tell Shelly that he and June were the proud parents of a baby girl, and, as Coop remembered it — "I wound up getting plastered and on my way out of the parking lot I smashed into another car. Shelly asked if I was going to be able to get home alright... and I said I'd be careful. He said ‘I’ll leave a note on this guy's car.' I don't know if he did, but I never heard from the guy"

On April 3rd Bud Shank used Shelly on a Pacific Jazz recording of Bud Shank and Three Trombones. That same month they finished the Giuffre album and Shorty got together with a very popular Latin bandleader and pianist by the name of Perez Prado. The two came up with Voodoo Suite, an exotic extended work that incorporates the excitement of Latin music, which Shorty and Shelly understood very well, and big band jazz. Several percussionists were added and Shelly had the time of his life playing the music he loved so much and played so well. On April 28th and 29th, he began work on Rugolo's second album for Columbia, this time with an even larger orchestra and with an opportunity to play some timpani.

May and June included more Rugolo sessions, a Barney Kessel album for Contemporary, some Bob Cooper sessions, and the rest of the Shank Trombone and Rogers Collaboration sessions. July started with a Lennie Niehaus recording session that included bassist Monty Budwig. This young bass player had found his way to the West Coast after working with Woody Herman. He shared the bass duties with Red Mitchell on the afore-mentioned Kessel date, but now was hired to do the entire Niehaus album. Monty Budwig would work off and on with Shelly for the next 30 years. On July 8th and 9th, Shelly finished the Rugolo and Niehaus albums, respectively.

Down at the Lighthouse, Stan Levey was about to replace Max Roach. Levey had been a very successful driving force of the Kenton band in 1952 and '53 at a time when new writing had turned the band around. With Bill Holman's and Bill Russo's charts, the band had taken on a completely different sound. Holman's compositions were out and out swinging and Russo's offered very modern voicings and unusual approaches to big band writing. On this band,

Kenton rarely played piano. The rhythm section used the guitar as a "piano" voice, and with the very powerful drumming of Levey and the swinging solos of Zoot Sims, the band was capable of swinging (listen to "Zoot" from the Kenton Era album). Levey went through a lot of cymbals on that band, cracking them beyond use. Many of the former Kenton players wondered what the new band would have sounded like with Shelly on drums. Bernhart thought Levey was just fine for the band, but, according to Milt, one of the key sax players thought otherwise. Many critics feel that this was, with soloists Konitz, Rosolino, Zoot and Candoli, the ultimate Stan Kenton band. Now, in 1954, Levey had left Kenton during one of the band's breakups to stay on the coast and, when the band reformed, he was replaced by Mel Lewis. Levey had arrived at the Los Angeles airport, only to hear his name called with a message to pick up the red phone. He wondered, "What now?" It was Max Roach telling him that he (Max) needed to return to New York and could only get out of his Lighthouse contract if he found a suitable replacement. He told Levey, "Don't even go into town, just come down to Hermosa!" So Stan had a job waiting for him as he got off the plane. Hearing that Levey was leaving the Kenton band, the people at the Zildjian Cymbal Company sent him a letter congratulating him on his new gig and saying, "We're happy to hear you're into quieter work!" Mel Lewis had spent years on the road, playing one niters with Tex Beneke, then Ray Anthony. When he auditioned for the Kenton band, he was a little apprehensive, even got a little stoned before the tryout. Though he scuffled with some of the things, Kenton recognized his talent (Stan had the wonderful ability to do that) so Lewis was the new drummer on the latest Kenton band edition.

In August, Shelly recorded with the trumpet sensation Clifford Brown who was about to form a co-op group with Max Roach. "Brownie" assembled a group that included baritone saxophonist Bob Gordon, who was impressing the jazz scene himself, and the ever-swinging Zoot Sims. By the end of the month Manne was doing yet another Niehaus album with Monty Budwig on bass. On September 3rd, Leith Stevens recorded the tunes from Private Hell 36 — now fans could finally hear the music from the movie. September was a busy month. On the 9th, there was a Chet Baker session; on the 10th, Shelly, Giuffre and Rogers recorded a complete album for Contemporary called The Three, a piano-less, bass-less group that truly demonstrates the rapport these long-time associates had. While parts were written, improvisation played an important part of the interplay between these musical friends. The generally quiet format of the session allows the listener to really hear and understand Shelly's musical concept. The drums become a tonal voice, a pulse, a series of textural statements. Knuckles on cymbals, fingers on torn toms, an elbow pressing down on heads to raise the pitch, and combinations of sticks, brushes and mallets, are the tools of musical percussion on much of this album. Shelly plays a sixteen-bar solo on the ballad "Autumn In New York" using mallets — all the drums tuned for the key in which the other musicians played. Today the music still seems stark because of the absence of what the ear is used to, the rest of the rhythm section. Shelly's first recorded composition is heard on this session. "Flip," named after Shelly's wife, was worked out in the studio with Shelly explaining what he had in mind. They included, in the session, Charlie Parker's Steeplechase, a tune the entire band would play on jazz club gigs. Perhaps the most interesting track is "Abstract 1," a completely improvised take, where the engineer simply turned the tape on and signaled "Go!" The eyebrows of the critics went up again on this album. It was more "West Coast Experimental Jazz." On the same day, in a different studio (RCA), Shorty gathered another form of the Giants for four tunes, then the next day they added six musicians (including Zoot Sims) for Shorty Rogers and His Augmented Giants. The album was subtitled, "East Coast-West Coast Scene," a further enhancement of the so-called "war of the coasts."

On September 13th, Shelly recorded for Duane Tatro's avant-garde Jazz For Moderns. The next day he did two sessions. Shorty finished his "Collaboration" material and then Shelly and Russ Freeman recorded what would be a legendary album — The Two for Contemporary. Freeman had worked regularly with Shelly for about a year-and-a-half, first at the Lighthouse, then with the Giants. "Shelly and I had a special bond, both personally and musically. When we worked together at the Lighthouse and then even more so with Shorty, we were doing a lot of experimental kinds of things. Unfortunately it started to get the label of West Coast Jazz,  but we weren't trying to do something that was different from the East Coast, it was just something we wanted to do.

Part of that was experimental in certain ways. Sometimes, on the job, we would play something without a bass, fooling around with telling the bass player lo drop out. We found that we had certain freedoms that this created for us that didn't exist when there was a bass player playing. Remember that in those days, in the early fifties, it was pretty much ' boom, boom, boom, boom.' That's not a put-down of anybody — that's the way bassists played in those days. Nowadays bass players are much more fluid and rhythmically freer. We found that we had a lot of freedom when the bass player didn't play. I was able to play more two-handed piano, using the left hand more. We said, 'why don't we do an album with just piano and drums?’ So we did and it came out pretty well." Shelly would later comment — "That, without a doubt, was my favorite album of anything I've ever done. It was the freest record date I've ever been on. We locked the doors on that date and wouldn't let anybody in the studio. Russ and I had such a good feeling playing together, and still do, that it was fun to listen to each other and answer each other and construct these lines, everything improvised, that date was a revelation to me. Of course it was done on a 10" record just as 10" records were going off the market, so the album never really had a chance."

By the time The Two was recorded, Russ Freeman had left the Giants and joined the Chet Baker Quartet, both as pianist and business manager. Freeman, an absolute perfectionist, is a very rhythmic piano player, very conscious of the time feeling. On the Contemporary liner notes he states, "I think one reason Shelly enjoys working with me is that though I play what is commonly thought of as a melody instrument, I am very interested in using it percussively." Shelly commented during the same interview, "We have a lot of confidence in each other, particularly in each other's time." — and — "Russ has a way of inverting time, and it stimulates me. Instead of just playing constant lines of eighth or sixteenth notes, he plays long lines and breaks them in rhythmic patterns, without losing the melodic structure." So the sympathetic relationship between the unusually melodic drummer and the very percussive pianist was forever captured for the Contemporary label. 

Unlike The Three session, the bass is almost never missed as Russ and Shelly weave their jazz magic on the six songs they recorded that fall day of 1954. Shelly recalled how The Sound Effects Manne, one of the cuts in the album, came about. "This is the first tune that boobams (long bongo-like bamboo-shelled drums) were used on. I had bought them in the Bay area (San Francisco) from Bill Loughbrough who had built them for Harry Partch. Russ and I built the tune around the diatonic scale of the boobams. I also did things like switching what I played with on each chorus. I'd go from brushes to sticks to mallets and back again to brushes. I did that because there were only two of us, and I tried to get as many coloration changes as I could, so it wouldn't be boring to the listeners or the players." (The boobams became the fore-runners of what the Tama Drum Company called, twenty years later, Octobans.) Fortunately, the Shelly Manne-Russ Freeman sessions have been combined with The Three and are available on CD. The next day, Shelly and Russ completed the Chet Baker Sextet session and Shelly packed his bag to go on the road, traveling with Stan Kenton.

Kenton was at it again! Always grand in his wonderful presentations, he had put together another tour. This was the second of his "Festival Of Modern American Jazz" packages, and this time Shorty and Shelly and the Giants would travel from coast to coast with an entourage designed to please the jazz multitude. Kenton was out-presenting the master presenters, Gene Norman and Norman Granz. With one ticket, a fan could go to the concert hall and hear Charlie Ventura's group with Mary Ann McCall, conga artist Candido, the genius of Art Tatum within his Trio, guitarist Johnny Smith, the Kenton band, and the Giants. The tour began in San Diego on September 16th, and the busses would take their valuable musical cargos on 300 or 400 mile jumps without a night off until Thanksgiving. Thousands of jazz fans packed the theaters, armories and fieldhouses to finally see the famous Giants. After hearing and seeing them in the movies and on the many albums that had been pouring out of the L.A. studios, here was the chance to see them live, in person. On this tour Shelly was featured playing on Bud Powell's Latin vehicle, Un Poco Loco. The critics raved about this unusual drum solo played with just one brush and a bare hand on the drums. For the poor patron who had to witness this while sitting in the 8th balcony of the Civic Opera House in Chicago, it was almost too subtle to grasp. But for those fortunate enough to be within seeing and hearing distance, it was a marvel to behold.

Watching this amazing feat of percussion every night of the tour was Kenton's new drummer, Mel Lewis. Mel idolized Shelly, stated so in his Gretsch ads that appeared in Down Beat. Here was one very musical young drummer learning first-hand from the master. Lewis would later state, "The first time I heard Shelly play was back in his early days with Kenton. When I heard him with Kenton, I decided that I wanted to play in that band someday. Shelly was so musical! He was playing big band jazz, yet approaching it with the sensitivity of a percussionist. He was an innovator. His drums were precisely tuned. His torn toms sounded like timpani. When I joined the band, Shelly was with Shorty Rogers. We were traveling together and that's where I got to know Shelly. He helped me and offered suggestions to me so I could play better with Kenton. That's the kind of guy he was." Mel Lewis, of course, went on to become — in Shelly's own words, "One of the greatest big band drummers who ever lived."

Back in Los Angeles, after thousands of miles of one-niters, Shelly returned to Flip and their three horses and the little house on Parthenia Street in Northridge. The studio calls had been piling up; a Boots Mussuli session and a June Christy session with Rugolo before the end of the year. Lennie Niehaus put an octet together for another Contemporary album and called Shelly. By 1955, the record industry was in the process of switching from the 10" LP format to the full size 12" record. This allowed 12 songs of the average 3 or 4 minute duration instead of the 8 that the 10" disc allowed. This not only increased the number of songs on a record, but allowed jazz players to stretch out. Being used to playing extended solos in a live performance, many players felt very limited in what they "had to say" on recordings. For the most part, however, record producers felt that it was wise to offer the jazz consumer more songs on the longer formal Pete Rugolo's albums were no exception, and on February 11th, Shelly and twenty-one other musicians gathered in the studios for another long session. On the 15th, Niehaus' Octet 2 album was completed and Shorty was calling for an RCA date on March 8lh.

Shorty's The Swinging Mr. Rogers' album (not the "neighborhood Mr. Rogers'') started a series of "interplanetary" terms that would be the "hook" they would hang the theme of titles on Rogers' compositions. This first album had only two references to outer-space, a tune called Martians Go Home, and Solarization. Remember that during this period, flying saucer movies were beginning to be popular — and so were "sightings." On the Martian piece, Shelly — always fooling around with sounds — spins a silver dollar on a well-miced floor tom head and, while the loot is spinning, Shelly presses down on the head to gradually raise the pitch until the coin stops. Then a well-placed single bass drum hit ends the drum fill. Bui this was all done in time. Shelly never misses a beat. A simple, yet imaginative idea that one would think could only be effective in a recording studio, but one evening Stan Levey went to Zardi's to see his old friend Shelly, and he saw him do the coin trick and, as Stan says — 'That's a difficult thing to do.., to keep the audience's attention at that quiet a level." Shelly's fans expected him to do this in concerts, but it could not be heard even on the stage unless very well-miced. Critics, as usual, liked it or hated it. This album, recorded for Nesuhi Ertigan's new label Atlantic Records, was a very happy swinging affair that consisted of very few gimmicks and some straight-ahead jazz. The remainder of March saw Shelly doing a Lennie Niehaus With Strings album and three tunes with Barney Kessel for Contemporary.

Pete Jolly had, by now, joined the ranks of the short-list of jazz pianists the "in-players" would call. He had come from the East via club dates in Arizona, where — "I had worked with some terrible drummers. When I first sat in with Shorty's band at Zardi's and experienced playing with Shelly, it was unbelievable, absolutely wonderful." Jolly would become a fixture in Los Angeles, recording often with Shorty and Shelly.

April 1955 had Shelly recording with singer Claire Austin, a small Maynard Ferguson band, Jack Montrose's Quintet featuring the fabulous baritone saxist Bob Gordon, and more Niehaus tracks. In May, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, friends of Shelly's since the Charlie Ventura days, were now very popular in jazz circles. They had gained much fame with their bop vocal stylings after Buddy Stewart left Ventura and Roy joined to write, play piano and sing with the band. That 1949 band also included Conte Candoli on trumpet, Benny Green on trombone, Boots Mussulli on alto and baritone, Kenny O'Brien on bass and a very young Eddie Shaughnessy on drums. Now, six years later, they were on the Coast to do an album for Storyville. They selected Red Mitchell and Barney Kessel and Shelly to accompany them. 

Jackie recalls — "We were so naïve in those days. We asked the guys if they could rehearse all day for the record. Shelly was very busy in the studios, but he was such a giving person and we just didn't know any better. Julie London and Bobby Troup let us use their house for the rehearsal, and the guys spent the entire day going through the material for the album." Roy Krai comments on Shelly's playing — "He was extremely musical. He had delicacy, ferocity and did surprising things. He would make notes on the music to suggest to himself what changes needed to be made. He would use key chains on cymbals, or bash a cymbal or make waves with them. His feeling of time was fantastic! It was always lifting, full and round. If you imagine the time as a circle and the bottom of the circle was the beat, that's the way Shelly played. He caught everything to the 'nth’ degree and yet added things all around. When I played with him I couldn't stop smiling." 

Jackie adds her impressions of the drummer — "Long before I knew anything about Shelly raising horses, I thought he looked like a horse. He moved like a horse — head back, like a horse galloping. He was open for anything that came up — an open demeanor — immediate warmth. He was very social and down to earth."

On May 9th Shelly recorded with Christy and Rugolo and on the 15th, he did one tune with his old boss, Stan Kenton. The month of June saw a Jack Millman studio band session and then a live recording at Irvine Bowl in Laguna Beach. This was a "Lighthouse Concert" presented by another old boss, Howard Rumsey. While Shelly was still working with the Giants, he was now forming a quintet that he would call, naturally, Shelly Manne and His Men. Though he had used this name for his earlier recordings, this was to be an actual working band. The Giants, like the All-Stars with Chubby Jackson, was originally supposed to be a co-op group. With Jackson it was an ego thing that made him the "leader"; with Rogers it was Shorty's fairly rapid rise to prominence with film work and the success of the RCA albums. It ended up as Shorty Rogers and His Giants Featuring Shelly Manne. 

Now, in the summer of 1955, Shelly decided it was time to move on musically and professionally. He maintained his close friendship and musical relationship with Shorty, but now set out to establish his own group. He arranged a recording session for the new band for mid-September and started talking up the band for some local club dates. In early August, Stan Getz did an album for Norgran in an attempt to cash in on the so-called "West Coast Jazz" success story. Shelly recorded two 10" LP's with Getz; one, a quintet session with a new bass sensation LeRoy Vinnegar — then a Lionel Hampton-Stan Getz album with the same rhythm section.

The West Coast scene was getting so popular that the well respected commercial photographer, William Claxton, published a portfolio of photos of the great jazz musicians he had taken on occasion. The book of photos, titled Jazz West Coast, was an immediate hit, became a collectors item, and eventually went into another printing via a Japanese publisher. The twenty-five-year-old Claxton had been shooting album covers for the small jazz labels since the early '50s and knew almost all of the West Coast players personally. Soon, he was shooting covers for larger labels as well, classical and jazz. By the mid-fifties, Claxton had done perhaps more albums than any other photographer and was an important part of the success of many West Coast labels, especially Contemporary and Pacific Jazz.

On August 16th Shelly cut an album with Lyle Murphy, and then, on September 13th, another "Men" album was recorded. This session was with a bigger band than Shelly would eventually use in clubs, and featured Bob Enevoldsen on valve trombone, Bill Holman, Joe Maini, and Giuffre on saxes, Stu Williamson on trumpet, Russ Freeman on piano, and Ralph Pena on bass. The album was titled Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. I. While this indicated a fresh series by the new "Men" — since there had been previous albums using the "Men" — it was subtitled, The West Coast Sound. While Shelly was hardly fond of this labeling of his music, he and Contemporary obviously settled on using the term to enhance record sales. At any rate, it marked the beginning of a new era for Shelly, and a signal that he would eventually be leaving the Giants.

On the East Coast, Osie Johnson was becoming the first-call jazz studio drummer, Gerry Mulligan was rehearsing a sextet, new jazz clubs opened in Boston —Jazzorama and The Down Beat, and in New York — The Bohemia. Tony Scott's clarinet playing was hot at Minton's, trumpeter Donald Byrd came to New York from Detroit, and at Birdland and everywhere, the jazz world was still mourning the loss of Charlie Parker. Bird, thirty-five years old, had died in New York in March, 1955.

In early October, Shelly shared the drum chores on a Betty Bennett session. The other drummer was Irv Cottier, a long time friend from New York who was becoming Frank Sinatra's number #1 favorite drummer. On the 4th and 5th, Shelly recorded with pianist Mel Henke and the next week did a Lyle Murphy session. On October 26th, there was another Giants' recording including more "outer-space" titles. Martians Come Back, March Of The Martians, and Planetarium, were obvious tongue-in-cheek titles in this second Rogers Atlantic album. Two days later, on Friday, Shelly Manne and His Men opened at the Tiffany Club at West 8th Street & Normandy.