Don Ellis - Blindfold Test Parts 1 & 2

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

The blog archives contain an 8-part series on trumpeter and bandleader Don Ellis which was published individually and collectively on these pages and the following is intended to add to this repository of information about one of the most original musicians in Jazz History.

The esteemed author and critic Leonard Feather, who originated the Blindfold Test and made it exclusive to Downbeat, offered the following background information for these visits with Don which appeared in the January 9 and January 26, 1967 edition of the magazine.

“When Don Ellis first took the Blindfold Test (DB, Nov. 8 and 22, 1962), he was introduced as a leading figure in the New Wave.

After a few years of name-band sideman work, notably with Maynard Ferguson, he branched out on his own for a while with various groups and worked with George Russell.

Not until 1964, when he returned to his native Los Angeles, did a significant pattern emerge. It was then that he displayed the fruits of his studies with Indian percussionist Hari Har Rao, who played with him in the Hindustani Jazz Sextet. About the same time, Ellis' big band started as a workshop group, began playing one night a week publicly in a club, and established itself beyond cavil as the hit of the '66 Monterey and Pacific festivals.

In Ellis' latest Blindfold Test, as I expected, he was characteristically articulate.

[I would say that Don was “articulate” in the extreme in the following interviews. Don knew what he was talking about and could explain it cogently and coherently.]

1. STAN KENTON. Septuor from Antares (from Adventures in Time, Capitol). Marv Stamm, trumpet; Johnny Richards, composer.

Well, that was Stan Kenton and his mellophoniums, and it's from the album that he did where they were experimenting with different time pieces, this piece being 7/4. The 7/4 pattern, when you do it in 4 rather than 7/8, is much easier to feel, as far as being able to play a solo over it, but it is much harder to keep your place when you are soloing, because it's similar to two bars of 4/4.

That's why I noticed the trumpet soloist was mostly floating over the time, and would usually come out a beat late in his phrase. He would come out to end on 1 but would end on 2, because the measure was only seven beats long. I think it was probably Marv Stamm; he's a good player, but you could tell he wasn't exactly sure where 1 was.

I was talking to some of the guys that made this album, and they were saying how much they scuffled with it to learn these times [time signatures], because I don't think they had much of a chance when they made this album to go out on the road and play it; they just came in the studio and recorded it.

From experience, I know it has taken my band about a year to get comfortable in these different times. Now I can bring in any time signature, and once they learn the pattern, they've got it. They can sight-read it almost immediately.

I know at first when a guy comes into the band and tries to sit in with us, he has a terrible time. It shouldn't be that hard; we should be used to it, but the sad fact is that jazz has been boxed up in 4/4 and 3/4 time for so long that it just seems very unnatural.

In other cultures 7/4, 9/4, and 5/4, those are the basic patterns. There is nothing really intrinsically hard about this— it's just that learning it is a slightly different feeling. I think Stan is to be congratulated for being one of the first to really explore the time-signature thing in terms of big band.

I get sort of oppressed. I like — and I find it very exciting to have — heavy brass and screaming trumpets; I like that a lot, but when you hear it from beginning to end of the track, with no variation in dynamics particularly, it gets very oppressive.

That's one slight criticism I've always had for a lot of Stan's work. When you have a big band, especially with as many brass as there is on this record, it's very easy to get that oppressive heaviness going with the brass. It is much more of a challenge to get something light happening.

From playing in a section, I know when you have five trumpets and five trombones, and other horns, just to be heard, there's a tendency to play out as loud as you can and forget the dynamics.

All and all, I thought it was a step in the right direction. It rates four stars.

2. BOBBY HUTCHERSON. Juba Dance (from Component, Blue Note). Hutcherson, vibraharp, marimba; Joe Chambers, drums, composer; James Spaulding, flute.

The overall concept of this reminds me of a couple of very effective things I have heard recently, one by Yusef Lateef. I don't know what the name of it was; he had a very simple background and over a sort of a drone, and the rest of the group was playing very pointillistic things over it. It was very charming, very effective, and just recently I heard Charles Lloyd doing very much the same thing. They set up a sort of a drone and do all sorts of things above it. This seems to be the same type of conception.

In this case, I didn't have a feeling that the piece got anywhere. It didn't develop one particular mood to any great length. There was no real unity between the piece and the solos, aside from the background, which just kept on and on.

It reminds me of a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing; this is the analogue in music, and to me this is the least interesting type of jazz improvisation, because that is the easiest thing to do — just to sit up there and let your thoughts come out. The hardest thing to do is to sit there and organize your thoughts on the spur of the moment and come up with a beautifully constructed, well-organized solo or group improvisation.

It happens so rarely; only a handful of jazz masterpieces ever achieved this.

Also, the head, the form of the piece —  where everybody blows the head, then everybody solos and then you take the head out again — is ancient bebop. In this context, you would hope to hear something a little more imaginative than that.

All in all, I wasn't too impressed with it — it was fair. I kept thinking something was going to happen; it's too bad.

I won't hazard a guess who it was, because a lot of guys now are doing this type of thing. It's like when bebop got all its imitators, everybody sounded alike. Now all the guys that are doing this type of thing sound alike, with the exceptions of the ones that are really developing a personal style, like Charles Lloyd and John Handy and people like that.

3. GIL EVANS. El Toreador (from The Individualism of Gil Evans, Verve). Johnny Coles, trumpet; Evans, piano, composer.

Well, it was Gil and Johnny. I was talking with a well-known arranger about Gil a few months ago; he had been back in New York and had heard him, and he thought that Gil sounded like be was rewriting Sketches of Spain in as many different ways as possible and that what he heard was all these long, drawn-out sounds but not too much happening. I think that is what is going on in this particular track.

Gil is one of the great masters of jazz orchestration. But this particular period that he seems to be in right now is one of his least interesting from the standpoint of listening, because, well, I'm not particularly interested in hearing long, sustained sounds forever and ever.

My main interest in jazz and in any music is rhythmic interest, and, of course, there is practically none in tracks like this. The mood that it gets could be very effective as part of a larger piece. But even then I didn't feel that it had the intensity that it should have had.

It should have been much more dramatic, much more gripping than it was; it started to get into something, but it couldn't quite make it. I would like to hear Gil, instead of getting bogged down in all these drones and this particular thing that he is in now, get into more rhythmic things, using his beautiful sensitivities for orchestration but put it to a more exciting use than he has in the last few months — I guess ... I don't know how long this has been going on.

As far as rating goes, here again it was good—I would say three stars.

(Continued in next issue)

1. ANDREW HILL. Spectrum (from Point of Departure, Blue Note). Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Hill, piano, composer; Anthony Williams, drums.

One thing that Eric Dolphy always had was a sense of the dramatic, a sense of form. In the Blindfold Test we did three or four years back, I commented that I liked what Eric did, but I felt his choice of notes was sometimes open to question; he tends to repeat licks that you have heard him do a hundred times before. In this particular track he seemed to be very creative, and seemed to stay away from those.

One very valuable lesson that the avant-gardist can learn from Eric is that the sense of urgency — the sense of drama that he has in his playing, the violent contrast that he would sometimes use — this immediately gives it more direction.

The piece in itself was rather interesting, sort of a small suite.

I would like to comment on the drummer, who could have been Tony Williams. This particular style of drumming, breaking up the time into different fragments, can be very effective, but it also can be very deadly, particularly behind the piano solo, the first solo on the record — I felt that the time lost its intensity. The interest was there, the imagination was there, what he was doing was interesting, but he got into this sort of floating feeling, where the time is there, but it is not really played. This feeling is not one of which I am particularly fond, because I like to hear, for the most part, a very definite driving type of beat, and I don't like to hear just that — I like to hear all the variations and the imaginations.

The tendency for the younger drummers of today is to try and break things up, which is all well and good, very imaginative, but they lose the intensity of the great masters of jazz drums in the past.

That's a shame, because once you lose that you lose 90 percent of what jazz time is all about, and I think it is possible to break up the time and still keep the swinging feeling. In fact, one of the most effective devices — I've heard Tony do this at times with Miles — he'll break up the time so that you think it is gone, but all of a sudden come right in on 1, and really be cooking. This can really lift an audience right off their chairs if it is done right, but it wasn't that way in this track.

For me, the most interesting section was the 5/4 section that they got into. But just to repeat an abbreviated form of the beginning at the end was sort of a cop-out, compositionally. The piece, to be really effective, should have built someplace and should have gone to a climax or tied things together in some sort of way; it really didn't end successfully for me. There were some good moments, especially Eric's playing. I give it 3 1/2 stars.

2.  THAD JONES-MEL LEWIS. Don't Ever  Leave Me.(from The Jazz    Orchestra, Solid  State). Jones, fluegelhorn, composer, arranger; Joe Farrell, flute; Lewis, drums.

Play it once more. ... It is nice to hear a big band using all different kinds of colors. When I first heard it with the woodwinds and everything, I thought it was Gary McFarland, but then when I heard Thad Jones, I surmised that it might be the new band that he and Mel have. That being the case, I was rather surprised — I haven't heard the band yet — but from reading reviews, that wasn't what I expected to hear.

The piece was utterly charming, and Thad sounded gorgeous. Especially at the end, he played a couple of phrases that just knocked me out.

Although I haven't heard him play for several years, the flutist sounded to me like it might be ... what I would imagine Joe Farrell would be sounding like now; especially at the end, he got in some good things too. Sounded very nice—4 1/2 stars.

3.  DAVE BRUBECK. World's Fair (from Time Changes, Columbia). Paul   Desmond, alto saxophone; Brubeck, piano, composer; Eugene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums.

There is nothing like a nice relaxed 13!

I liked the pattern very much 3-3-2-2-3 or 6 plus 7 or 13. Dave Brubeck has been playing these time things as a group longer than anyone else, but they don't seem to be very free within the time yet. For example, on this one they just kept playing the same basic beat. In other words they haven't got to the point yet where they can really mess with the time. I am a little surprised — I mean after playing these things for so many years. It seems they should be much further into it, given the amount of time they have been doing it.

I'm delighted to hear them doing this. This is the first time I have heard them playing in 13, and they played in it all the way through. Some of their original things they did, like the Rondo a la Turk, where they did the Turkish 9, they sort of copped out and went into 4/4 for blowing, but they stayed with this all the time.

I noticed Dave was having a little trouble there keeping his left hand right on the rhythm, but he came out okay. This is the type of thing I find most exciting — I'm just sorry that Dave and his group haven't been able to develop a more flowing thing, to get a little more imaginative. But the piece is nice; let's give them four stars.

4. YUSEF LATEEF. Kyoto Blues (from A Flat, C Flat and C, Impulse). Lateef, composer, bamboo flute; Hugh Lawson, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Roy Brooks, drums.

There are some amazing slides on the flute there at the beginning and — that leads me to believe that it was probably played on a wood flute, where all the finger holes are open, and you can control the air more than on a normal flute.

That also leads me to surmise that it might be somebody like Yusef Lateef, who has a fantastic command of unusual flutes. Last year I saw him in Buffalo, and his pockets were bulging with all kinds of flutes; he is quite an amazing musician.

One thing that didn't make too much sense in this context was to have the drums playing in a fast 7 and the piano playing in a slow 4/4 against that and the bass somewhere in between. To have all different meters going at once can be exciting in certain cases, but in this case nobody really played in any one of them; everybody just played in their own meter, and it never came together; consequently, it lost the effectiveness it could have had had the things come together occasionally or had one of the soloists, for instance, gone with the drums in 7 or something.

But the original idea I thought was excellent. The rest of the record didn't come up to the level of the original conception.

The solos weren't as imaginative as the piece, so for the original conception I'll give it four stars, but an over-all rating would be somewhat less than that.”