Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke by Dick Katz

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

"[Pianist Dick] Katz, who was working with J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, dropped in one night, and Pettiford asked him to sit in. "I'd admired him from afar with my jaw hanging down in awe," says Katz. Oscar had a kind of forbidding personality if you didn't know him. He played with real authority. That's an understatement. His was real authority, wasn't any kind of fake—I mean as music went—because underneath, you know, basically he was a gentle man. People don't see him that way.



"He was an unhappy man in lots of ways. He was a frustrated man. He had illusions of grandeur. It happened to a lot of people who came up when he did. He was trying to make his own adjustment to the inequities of the scene. He couldn't understand why he wasn't as famous as Dizzy Gillespie. He actually consciously thought about this a great deal. He was very unrealistic in his business dealings, particularly in that period.


"He was a proud man. You don't see this kind of pride any more. It wasn't cockiness — it was a different thing. It wasn't a hippie thing — like, 'I'm it and you're not.' It was a kind of competitiveness that comes with real authority and knowing you can do something really well. He didn't go around beating people up with this. It was kind of healthy — he put the kind of realistic pressure on a musician playing with him, like, 'Well, can you play or can't you play?" and I found it refreshing, although when I first played with him, I'll admit I was a little scared."


After this sit-in, Pettiford asked Katz to play with his group. "So I worked there for a few weeks," says Dick. "It was Kenny Clarke and Oscar, Art Farmer and Gigi Gryce." Playing in a rhythm section with two masters like Pettiford and Clarke was a revelation to Katz. [...] he talks about Clarke's "playing" the drums rather than "beating" them. "Oscar Pettiford played the bass the same way," he said. "It was a kind of strength. Technique is not merely facility. A lot of guys mix this up. They think that the ability to play fast is technique. It's only one aspect of technique, because technique is control, the ability to control what you're doing. To play softly — strong but at a low-volume level — is exceedingly difficult.


"Sometimes Oscar and Kenny were like two old women. They'd bicker. Each would accuse the other of goofing in the music, when they'd actually sounded great."


Pettiford and Clarke played together with an unusual brand of finesse. Katz compared them with the rhythm teams of the late fifties who are usually described as "cooking" or "really taking care of business." "These same kind of people who play hard— Kenny and Oscar would cook most of them out of the place on the same level that they're talking about, but they would do it with some grace. There was an intensity. My God, the first time I played with those two, I felt like I'd been run over by a Mack truck or a freight train. It was powerful, but it wasn't stevedore powerful—it's the difference between a Rolls Royce and a tractor.


"They could express a variety of feelings. They would listen to the music and adjust what they did to the music. There wasn't this kind of superselfconscious, sickening, overindulgent, 'I'm an artist' routine.""

- From Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the 40s [1966]

Winner of the 2025 Jazz Journalist Association Special Citation for Historic Writings, Steven Cerra is the author of anthologies on Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Shelly Manne, Jazz West Coast Readers Vols. 1-3, Profiles in Jazz, Vol.1, Jazz Drummers A Reader Vols. 1-2, Jazz Saxophonists A Reader, Vol. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Piano A Reader, Vols. 1, 2 & 3, Jazz Trumpet A Reader Vols. 1 and 2, A Companion Celebrating The 100th Anniversary of the Jean Goldkette Orchestras, 1926-2026 and a Companion to Jazz Interpretations of Porgy and Bess. His latest publication is A Bill Evans Reader Vol. 2 - THE NOTES; a collection of fully annotated liner, insert and boxed sets notes from Bill’s recordings. He also hosts the jazzprofiles.blogspot and cerra.substack blogs.