Shorty Rogers - The Art of Jazz - by Alyn Shipton

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

“It was William Claxton who set up the photo shoot for Shorty Rogers in this improvised spaceman's headgear plus formal suit jacket and tie. As Shorty told the author, "I don't normally wander around wearing a space helmet."”

"The original ten-inch LP version of Cool and Crazy is a prized collector's item . . . every performance is memorable. . . . Seldom have big bands swung so hard or produced such a joyous sound."

- Robert Gordon, Jazz West Coast (Quartet, 1986)

Periodically, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles enjoys searching out material that covers some aspect of  West Coast Jazz or the Cool School or Jazz on the West Coast and posting it to these pages as part of a recurring theme.

Jazz in California from 1945-1965 was our first exposure to the music and it’s always fun to find new and/or additional “takes” on this style of the music’s evolution.

The following is from Alyn Shipton’s The Art of Jazz: A Visual History [2020] and you can locate order information through its publisher by going here. The book is also available through online booksellers.

Not surprisingly, this excerpt about trumpeter, composer-arranger and bandleader Shorty Rogers is from the “Birth of the Cool and West Coast Jazz” chapter.

“In its issue dated November 4, 1953, Downbeat carried a full-page advertisement from RCA, mainly focused on the music of trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers. With the strapline "Modern Jazz by the Man and the Band Who Make It Best," it referred readers to two of Rogers's albums, Cool and Crazy and The Giants, plus an EP plugging the forthcoming Columbia movie Hot Blood (even though everything about it, from the cover image to the tune "Blues for Brando," shows that it was in fact hastily rebranded from an earlier tie-in to Marlon Brando's The Wild One, even down to the cast photograph!) There was also a puff for a compilation LP called Crazy and Cool, linked visually and by title to Rogers's album but featuring other contemporary players in RCA's stable.

Rogers was well known as a former trumpeter and arranger for Woody Herman and Stan Kenton, and had been based in Los Angeles for some time, writing for the Hollywood studios, arranging jazz where he could (including part of Chet Baker's album with strings), and leading his small band, the Giants. His small-band arranging took forward many of the ideas in the Miles Davis nonet; his big-band writing developed out of his time with Kenton. Yet as the 1950s went on, Rogers, with his impish grin and short beard, became the unlikely focus of the cool movement. This was due more than anything to the marketing department at RCA, which initially had no intention of signing him. He recalled that he was helped by a colleague who had worked on his earlier Capitol album Modern Sounds:

Jack Lewis went to RCA and told them they should record Shorty Rogers. They said, "Gee we don't know about that, but we have a title, and we'd love to get the album made. We don't know who to do it with."

He said, "What's the title?"

They said, "Cool and Crazy."

Jack spoke on my behalf and then it wound up being me.

[The cartoon that RCA's design department added to Cool and Crazy pepped up the zany image of the record title, and bore little relationship to the music— there is, for example, no guitar on the record, despite the character second from the right!]

This big-band album compounded the zaniness of its cartoon cover with enigmatic song titles (many of them dreamed up by trombonist Milt Bernhardt and drummer Shelly Manne) that emphasized the Cool and Crazy Idea, such as "Tales of an African Lobster," "Sweetheart of Sigmund Freud," "infinity Promenade," and "Coup de Graas" (named after the band's French horn player, John Graas). "We had fun with the titles," recalled Shorty, "and it became a fun thing to have the title say more than I'm a tune'!"

A residency for his small band led not only to one of the most famous of Rogers's tunes, but also to an album that gave his record labels plenty of visual ideas for marketing. Playing at a nightclub called Zardi's, where the band had a residency of several months, the graffiti "Martians Go Home '' had been written on the men's room wall. Shorty recalled:

“Someone told the girls who were waitresses about it, so it became a funny thing for the people that worked there. They'd say to one another, "Martians go home," and everyone would laugh. It became like a stone rolling down hill, and the thing was getting larger and larger, so we got on the bandstand one night, and I said, "Everyone listen, we have a new original we're going to play now for the first time, and it's entitled Martians Go Home."

The bartender fell down laughing, and all the people working there were laughing, too. And the audience was wondering what all these crazy people were laughing at. I told the rhythm section, "Just play a blues in F," and while they were playing, I sang a little riff to Jimmy Giuffre, and we played this simple little repetitive melody. We had our little joke, and we thought that was the end of it. But the next night, we got to work, and before we got up on the bandstand, people were saying, "Play that Martians Go Home thing." So it just became something associated with us.”

A Classic of Jim Flora's record-cover designs, this seems incredibly busy, yet the only two musicians actually depicted are Shorty with his trumpet on the left, and the central figure of Count Basie (whose music is interpreted on the album) at the whimsical piano.

On the French issue of the first album featuring the tune, there is a motif of a Martian spacecraft (looking suspiciously like a ride cymbal!! next to a boomerang (to symbolize the return homei. More Martian tunes followed by public request, and when the band moved from RCA to the Atlantic label, their first album was Martians Come Back. For this, Shorty posed in a transparent plastic space helmet. It fit the image of being both cool and slightly crazy, and even when Rogers was touring internationally in the nineties, with the Lighthouse All Stars, audiences still came up requesting the "Martian" tunes, at least in part prompted by memories of those original record sleeves.