The Case for Dave Pell - The Octets and Beyond

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

Of  the major books on West Coast Jazz, few have much to say about the Dave Pell Octet, a group that was active on a regular basis from 1952 - 1964 and intermittently thereafter until Dave’s death in 2017.

Ted Gioia gives Dave’s group a casual mention in the following statement from his West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960:

“If the later nonet, octets, and dectettes of Dave Pell, Marty Paich, Lennie Niehaus, and others have a West Coast progenitor, the sources must be looked for in [Shorty] Rogers and [Gerry] Mulligan,....

Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks in their chapter on West Coast Jazz in Modern Jazz offer this succinct statement: 

“Lastly, Dave Pell, a musician who has been heard most frequently as a member of the Les Brown band. Pell headed a most musicianly Octet for recording purposes using arrangements by Rogers, Marty Paich, Johnny Mandell and Wes Hensel and his smooth, sophisticated sound has been a pleasing addition to Hollywood's jazz scene.” 

But at least the references by Gioia, Morgan and Horricks have somewhat of a positive connotation of Dave and his music when compared to Robert Gordon in his Jazz West Coast  which refers to “... the commercial vineyards of the Dell Pell Octet” and goes on to quip elsewhere that “... the innocuous series of recordings by the Dave Pell Octet have little to offer the serious jazz listener. (Dave Pell himself once termed his music 'mortgage-paying jazz’.)”

Thankfully, Gordon is not as dismissive as this remark in Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia: “Some see West Coast Jazz of the 1950s as a trivialization of the ‘real thing,’ but Pell went one further and trivialized the idea of West Coast Jazz.” 

A bit harsh, methinks. 

Perhaps the most elaborate evaluation of Dave’s music can be found in Alain Tercinet’s West Coast Jazz as contained in the following excerpt from the chapter entitled Dave, Chico, Lennie, Marty and the others.

“Shorty and his Giants, Howard Rumsey and his All Stars, Shelly Manne and his Men would almost sum up Californian jazz. Almost, because the diversity of this music also comes from ensembles of the second generation who were part of the research carried out by the pioneers, favoring one or another of their aspects or rejecting it.

There are some whose work has only reached this side of the Atlantic in a small part. Like Dave Pell who, with unwavering Constancy, conducted an octet during the decade 1953-1963, a formation less negligible than the silence that surrounds me might lead one to believe. Of course, happy music has no history: the demons of ambition and frenetic pursuit have had no hold on a man whose pleasure consists in playing without a second thought. Dave Pell has chosen to express himself in the manner of the great white orchestras of the "Swing Era", in a friendly genre, easily identifiable, very pleasant to listen to, a superficial attitude for some. But why be choosy in the face of albums whose perfection of execution competes with the ease of the arrangements and the value of the soloists? [I’m grateful to Michael Palmer and Geoff Roach for their assistance in providing this translation].

To return to Ted Gioia for a moment, interestingly, after noting the Pell Octet’s indebtedness to Shorty and Jeru [Mulligan’s nickname], on the very next page he goes on to list the following musical “ingredients” which come together in Shorty’s music:

“This early leader date showed all the ingredients that would characterize Rogers's work throughout the decade: a continual emphasis on musical surprise coupled with a modest willingness to experiment with new approaches; a predilection for a relaxed, non bombastic sense of swing; a reliance on strong, melodic soloing by the finest improvisers available on the coast; an emphasis on carefully and creatively arranged settings, designed with these specific soloists in mind; and, in general, a unique musical style that remained modern without being abrasive or cold. Unlike [Jimmy] Giuffre, Rogers's willingness to experiment rarely found him straying too far afield from these foundations. He discovered the recipe that worked for him, and his goal from then on was to apply it in a way that kept it fresh, so that his winning formula never became formulaic.”

But I think the very same ingredients [and many of the same West Coast based Jazz musicians, too] shaped the music of the various iterations of the Dave Pell Octet with perhaps the principle difference being that Dave did want his music to be “formulaic” - what Tercinet refers to as “unwavering constancy.”

In terms of a musical “formula” [format?], Dave knew what he wanted and stuck to his plan. And that plan is encapsulated in the following excerpt from this statement in the insert notes to The Dave Pell Octet/Jazz Goes Dancing (Prom to Prom) [RCA 74321609822].

“This whole notion of jazz going dancing is nothing new. Except that it hasn't happened too often of late. But when Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard were rambling in New Orleans, and when King Oliver and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings were telling it in music to the big butter-and-egg men of Chicago, jazz was almost always danced to. Then things began to change. As jazz spread its influence across the country, it seemed to find a home more and more on the concert stage and in small nightclubs, where listening was the order of the night and you couldn't dance to the music if you had a mind to.

For the life of me I couldn't see why this should be, why jazz in a sense had to be so confined. Why couldn't jazz go dancing again? I decided that it could. Ever since I left the Les Brown band about a year ago, I have been successfully booking the Octet not only in jazz clubs, such as Zardi 's and Jazz City, but at more proms and big college dances than any other group in town.

I 'm sure that our success is due to the fact that the people buying our records realize they can dance to this music. It has opened a whole new concept for the schools of the West Coast. During the dance I usually ask the crowd to come up to the bandstand and we put on a small concert. I can then feature the instrumentalists that make the group interesting listening. After all, bands like Les Brown, Benny Goodman, Bob Crosby, and Tommy Dorsey have done this for years. When the show is over, after a short intermission, dance music is again the rhythm of the evening.

This first album of ours for RCA Victor is a direct result of the enthusiasm that has greeted the Octet wherever it has played. From prom to prom we've been asked for an album of our jazz that's strictly for dancing, and this is it. Barring my two originals about which only time can tell, the songs are all crackerjack, even though you may not have heard some of them since The Moon Came Over the Mountain, while together they seem to tell a kind of story. All were carefully chosen, for tempo, for melody, and for adaptability to both dancing and jazz.

Trite though it may sound, it is our fond wish that you'll enjoy this album for dancing, for listening, and for both.”

—DAVE PELL

And here’s another perspective on what Dave is trying to accomplish with The Octet and in his music - 

“Mine is not the approach of a jazz musician who goes into the recording studio to play 40 minutes of completely improvised jazz. Our projects are carefully planned. I feel that our music should be well designed, interesting yet easy to follow. We find it best to state the melody first, then come the spots for the blowing. But even behind a jazz chorus I want backgrounds going at the same time to give an overall big band sound. The restatement of the melody, in one form or another, in the closing completes the pattern."

• Dave Pell

If one uses the above template and “fills it in” with arrangements by the likes of Bill Holman, Shorty Rogers, Marty Paich, Johnny Mandel, Jack Montrose, Wes Hensel, Med Flory, Bob Florence, Johnny Williams, Harry Betts, based on the melodies of Rodgers & Hart, Irving Berlin, Harry Warren, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Julie Styne and the John Kirby Sextet as played by quality instrumentalists and soloists including Don Faguerquist, Jack Sheldon and Ray Linn on trumpet, Dave Pell, Bill Holman and Zoot Sims on tenor saxophones, Pepper Adams, Bob Gordon and Pepper Adams on baritone saxophone, Tommy Tedesco, Tony Rizzi, and Vernon Polk on guitar, Donn Trenner, Paul Smith and Paul Moer on piano, Buddy Clark, Rolly Bundock and Lyle Ritz on bass and Jack Sperling, Mel Lewis, Frankie Capp and Bill Richmond on drums, the music of the Dave Pell Octet certainly becomes formulaic all right - a formula for success.

[Is it appropriate at this point to say that I never got the “starving” part of the starving musician = artistic excellence equation? I always thought that musicians in general played better when the rent was paid and the belly was full.]

The group’s success is further underscored in this portion of Albert Marx’s liner notes to The Dave Pell Octet Plays Rogers and Hart [Fresh Sound CD 505; Kapp LP KL-1025].

“The success of the Dave Pell Octet is one of the fairy-tale stories of the music business today. The idea of getting together a group of musicians, who have been playing together night after night in the Les Brown band, has been a dream of many musicians. A small jazz group, consisting of the nucleus of a big band, is always a topic of conversation among the musicians after they have played the job or at the conclusion of a jam session. When musicians have played together for a great length of time, they get to know each other's personalities and characteristics so well that their music has the authority and the finesse that a quick get-together jazz session usually lacks.”

Aside from its danceable quality, Dave kept the length of each recorded track to around three or four minutes. He did this with an eye toward commercial airplay on AM radio stations and also because he understood that most Jazz fans really didn’t know how to listen to instrumental Jazz. Extended Jazz solos were an acquired taste and very few members of the listening public had mastered it.

At a time when Jazz was beginning to lose its audience, especially among young people, to the growing attractiveness of Rock ‘n Roll, Dave’s efforts to keep the music accessible to the general public should be recognized and applauded and not criticized for something it was never intended to be or attacked because it did not live up to some standard that it never intended to achieve in the first place.

Dave reiterates what he was trying to achieve in this excerpt from the sleeve notes to Dave Pell’s Jazz Octet: A Pell of a Time [RCA ND 74408].

“Most of the tunes we (the Octet) have played in the past were of relatively short duration. In other words, we never went into a studio, like some jazzmen, and deliberately wailed for forty minutes; that was not our kind of jazz. We have planned every album carefully, and I was always able to get the very top arrangers to create our sound. We had a different product to sell; ours was, as some critics have put it, "Gray Flannel Suit Jazz" and "Mortgage-Paying Jazz." Yes, we have been playing jazz that didn't exactly have that "down-home" type feeling. Ours was the sort that had to have the melody at the beginning and again at the end. We never let one particular soloist get going; sixteen bars, or a release here and there, were all I'd want, because our things in the past were contrived and designed to sound refined, or, if I have to say it, commercial. (Ed. note: No apology whatsoever is made for the Pell conception or the superb brand of Pell "Gray Flannel Suit Jazz." You will be hearing more of the same on his following album. It is very much admired.)

This was the formula, then, and by its very adoption it became necessary to hold down the soloists and to hold myself in check itself.”

Devra Hall in these excerpts from a later recording by the Octet - The Dave Pell Octet Plays Again - revisited this rationale:

“Their brand of jazz was very melodic and the tunes were mostly standards, a combination of ease and familiarity that was highly palatable to the public at large as well as the hard core jazz listeners. Some people would call it commercial jazz, others referred to it as ..soft swing, and once upon a time they called it Grey Flannel Suit Jazz. Whether this last description resulted from or led to Marty Paich's composition and arrangement of Grey Flannel is open to question. What is for sure is that the Dave Pell Octet could swing! And with arrangements by such great talents as Bob Florence, Bill Holman. Marty Paich, Shorty Rogers and Johnny Williams. In fact it is Paich and Rogers who Pell credits as helping to develop the distinctive style of the Octet. In addition to the recording and club dates, they were, by popular demand, requested to play all the dances and proms as well. A fact which undoubtedly led to Pell's own composition Prom To Prom.”

Here’s another perspective on the value of Dave Pell’s approach to Jazz drawn from George T. Simon’s insert notes to The Dave Pell Octet Play Irving Berlin [Fresh Sound CD 503, Kapp LP KL-1036].

“The kind of jazz the Dave Pell Octet plays is the definitive rebuttal to those who argue that modern jazz just doesn't swing. For here is a group that is modern in its harmonies, in its time, in its contrapuntal excursions, in its voicings and in its tones, and yet swings as handsomely and as freely as some of the most propulsive groups in the history of jazz.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the musicians in this group began playing jazz at a time when the swinging beat was still considered its most important asset. But unlike many of their contemporaries, they kept up with the times, assimilating the advances made in jazz and adding them to the basics which they had already adopted. These included, in addition to the beat, a thorough mastery of, rather than just a cursory acquaintance with, their instruments.

In addition, as members of the big Les Brown band, they had learned how to play together and for one another, while swinging all the time. This is especially noticeable here on the many ensemble passages, but it also comes through on the sympathetic, splendidly executed backgrounds for the soloists.”

The mission of Dave Pell’s Octet and the professionalism which was brought to bear to accomplish it are well-described and underscored in Bill Simon’s notes to one of Dave’s earliest recordings - Dave Pell Octet: Jazz & Romantic Places [1955 Atlantic LP 1216; Collectibles CD-6913].

“Dave Pell's music is as advanced in its idiom as most music which the layman claims he can't understand. But Dave's jazz is for a large audience because it has showmanship. I don't mean that the guys stand on their heads while they play, or wear funny hats, or anything like that... but this music itself is witty, urbane and swinging. It's entertaining to players and listeners alike. Those who tend to classify everything will classify the Pell players as members of the "cool" and "West Coast" schools. But unlike some of the stuff emanating today from that clement California clime, this jazz remains sanguine and fresh. The arrangers who write for the group extend themselves without fear, because they are aware that the members are among the most versatile, facile musicians playing jazz today.

Note, for example, the pulsant ease with which the lads toss off the intricate counterpoint... and the beautiful blend that may be achieved by men who are properly schooled on their horns, who play perfectly in tune, are considerate to timbre, and who are as outgoing as they are sensitive.

The Dave Pell Octet isn't a group you're likely to hear in your local jazz club. It's not a traveling unit, since these men long since have broken with the Greyhound circuit, except for a few weeks every year when the Les Brown band takes to the road to mop up what's left of the dance band business. For, with the exception of Bob Gordon and Tony Rizzi, these men are regular, featured members of the great Brown band...and Rizzi is a Brown (Les, that is) alumnus. The Brown organization is busy most of the year with the Bob Hope radio and TV shows, and has been similarly occupied for more than five years, which actually eliminates any need for one-niter hops, which keeps all hands happy and prosperous, and which gives them plenty of time to study and to experiment...which is how Dave happened to form his unusual ensemble.

I don't believe it's necessary to point out here the work of the individual men. The stimulating arrangements, by the cream of the West Coast jazz writers, allow ample solo space for all participants, and each comes through brilliantly, while enhancing the essence of the piece itself.” —BILL SIMON

About twenty years after the first Octet recordings, Dave offered this perspective on the integrity of the music and the musicianship of the group that’s been a part of its ethos since the beginning:

“Each and every member of today's Octet is a noted jazzman in his own right and many of them are leaders of their own hands. In addition to years of musical experience and finesse as soloists, each member brought with him a personal and musical camaraderie. Having known each other as friends and having worked together in various configurations over the years, it is not surprising that the music of this Octet displays a pleasing feeling of affinity and sympatico.” - Insert Notes to The Dave Pell Octet Plays Again [Fresh Sound Records FSR 5009].

With all this in mind, I think the music of the Dave Pell Octet is more than deserving of some respect.

Don’t you?