"I am a big fan of Herbie Hancock. I have always liked his music and sound. Unlike most writers on jazz, I will tell you about my experience with the sound and music of Herbie Hancock. It was 1973, and I was a freshman in college at a big music school. There were hundreds of musicians polishing their skills at this school, mostly jazz oriented, and as one became a part of the scene the rituals of all aspiring jazz musicians came to be learned. One ritual is that of discovery; where you find something in a recording or at a performance that takes you to a level of understanding. Another is learning tunes and defining your direction by studying the music that interests you.
My first "discovery" was when Pat Coil (who lived down the hall in the dorm) had Sextant on his stereo. The sound was amazing. Pat's only attempt to define this music to me (as a courtesy) was to say "Herbie...."
That night, hanging out at Sam Riney's house, the turntable exploded with Miles Davis's "My Funny Valentine." When the title track came up, Sam listened to the first few notes of the piano intro, closed his eyes and just said "Herbie...."
The very next day, my best friend at that time (Mike Lotz, a talented pianist) played something on his stereo, looked at me with a smug hipness and asked the question "Who's that?" All I knew was one word that would make me or break me in the world of college hipness, and I quietly said "Herbie." Mike was shocked. I was now 'in.' Clearly, I had to find out more about this Herbie guy." - Bob Belden, booklet notes to HERBIE HANCOCK:THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE SESSIONS
“ … perhaps Mulligan’s most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that milestone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.
It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but its focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.
“The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz.” ...
The recent European tour by his "Rebirth Of The Cool" tentette has put the spotlight firmly back on Gerry Mulligan. Critic Brian Morton assesses the career of the great baritone saxophonist.
- Brian Morton, Jazz on CD, 1992
“Ask almost any jazz horn player what attracted him to his instrument and chances are he'll make some reference to its proximity to the human voice. Since Bird and Trane, the notion of a “vocalised" tone has been closely bound up with that of the saxophonist as an impassioned shaman or a pentecostal adept, howling and crying and chanting in a language at several removes from everyday speech. Perhaps because he fails to fit the mould, Gerry Mulligan has been consistently undervalued as a saxophone improviser; perhaps because his language is so effortlessly logical, he has also been substantially discounted as a composer/ arranger.
If anyone's tone is vocalised, it is Mulligan's. He plays, as he speaks, in a deep, chesty burr, developing ideas logically (but not so logically that he can't indulge the odd non sequitur), punctuating his argument with unexpected gurgles of humour and outbreaks of quiet passion that sit uneasily athwart his allotted place in the ranks of the "Cool". The baritone saxophone, Mulligan's favoured instrument for over 40 years now, is one of the most thinly subscribed in the jazz orchestra. Harry Carney, in the Ellington band, was among the first to give it speech. Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams demonstrated that Carney's forceful, often dramatic approach was not just a one-off. Leo Parker played a brand of jovial bop on the big horn, trading on the same Eb tonality to create a deeper and inevitably slowed-up version of his namesake's dizzying flights. There was little more of substance until the ill-starred Serge Chaloff, who gave the baritone a dark, almost aggressive resonance.
Chaloff was Mulligan's first model, but tempered with the fleet, melodic scampers of Johnny Hodges and a hint of Hodges's aching ballad style. There is a story that Mulligan once walked into a studio where Chaloff was recording. Seeing his rival in the booth, Chaloff executed a perfect parody of the younger man's still awkward style and then tore it to shreds. Whatever impetus the experience gave him, Mulligan advanced by leaps and bounds and by the early fifties had become a soloist of astonishing poise and confidence. He has always denied hotly that the baritone is a cumbersome instrument, insisting that it has a physical balance and ease of execution that is missing on the lighter horns. Certainly, anyone who saw or heard Mulligan playing soprano saxophone during his brief flirtation with the straight horn may have heard "cumbersome" suggest itself as a paradoxically appropriate epithet. If he has made his name as an exponent of "cool" jazz, his work on soprano sounded merely frosty.
Labels, though, don't sit well on Mulligan. If you call him a radical only at your peril, it's equally unwise to dismiss him as a conservative. He has proved himself able to play in virtually any context, Dixieland, swing, be-bop, up to but significantly excluding free jazz. For Mulligan, there was no break in the continuity of jazz, in what it was possible to do with blues intervals and standard tunes, until in the 1960s (his "lost" decade) the scorched-earth campaign of the New Thing laid waste to much of what had gone before. (Mulligan was able to play comfortably not just with his mentor Johnny Hodges, but also with the supposedly maverick Thelonious Monk, whose own "modernism" was grounded on a strongly traditionalist view of jazz.) Mulligan believes that what Charlie Parker did was "logical" (which is still one step away of saying that it was predictable) and that there was nothing in any of his own so-called revolutionary work that wasn't already present in classic jazz and in the broad-brush arrangements of the swing era.
The fact remains, though, that just as Mulligan's crew-cut and Ray-Bans were once icons of West Coast "Cool", the sunny flipside of New York be-bop, so his music was once considered to be revolutionary, even "difficult". In his short story "Entropy", written in 1960 (and featuring a character bearing Monk's middle name, Sphere), the novelist Thomas Pynchon turns Mulligan's early 50s quartets with Chet Baker into the defining gesture of post-modernism, an accolade Mulligan would doubtless reject. The accepted version of the story is that when Mulligan and Baker turned up at the Haig Club in Los Angeles in June 1952, there was no piano available, and that the famous "pianoless" quartet was merely another instance of necessity mothering invention. Mulligan tells a slightly different version. There was, of course, a piano (what jazz club would be without one?) but it was no great shakes, and the saxophonist was already experimenting with small group, arrangements in which the baritone, already comfortably pitched for the task, took on much of the piano's role. Pynchon's version is more dramatic: improvisation without a safety net! No chords! Freedom! Uncertainty! The revisionist version is convincingly pragmatic: aren't most artistic revolutions a combination of inspiration and compromise? Mulligan's own account, though, is the most straightforward and the most illuminating. The relation between a be-bop solo and the informing chords had become ever more distant and uncertain and a growing understanding of modal or scalar improvisation - which abandoned the usual hierarchy of the harmonic sequence, allowing scales to be derived from any given note - was opening up the possibilities available to a jazz arranger in a way that suggests the experiment of a jazz group without harmony instrument was both '"logical" and, with a little hindsight, predictable, too.
Mulligan's gifts as an arranger were largely innate. While still in his teens, he was writing arrangements of popular material for Johnny Warrington's radio orchestra, but he first came to wider notice, after his recruitment to the sax section of the Gene Krupa band, with a hit arrangement of Disc Jockey Jump in 1947. He had an instinctive feel for the relationship of instrumental voices and for the transpositions required to keep instruments with dramatically different stride-lengths in step. The two-part counterpoint he developed with Baker and later with valve-brass players like Art Farmer (who has been working with Mulligan again recently in the reformed Tentette) and Bob Brookmeyer had a robust logic that belied its deceptively understated delivery. The quartet with Baker was a resounding success and created a climate of expectation that afforded Mulligan enviable freedom of movement in an idiom that ran counter to commercial trends in jazz and popular music. He has long been insistent that there is still considerable public affection and demand for big band music and that the only reasons for its decline are economic. In 1960, Mulligan organised the legendary Concert Jazz Band, whose very title enshrined the importance he placed on big band jazz as music to be listened to, not just danced to. With rock and roll on the rise, the band folded and Mulligan's career as a leader was somewhat eclipsed. Though he continued to arrange and work as a sideman, opportunities to work on his own account were limited until the formation in 1972 of a new big band, named (in recognition of his passion for old locomotives) The Age of Steam. The new band saw Mulligan make a surprisingly comfortable accommodation to the rock idiom that had denied him work so long, and it set him back on a insistently successful course that has been maintained up to the present. The story, though, runs a little ahead of itself, which is appropriate, for Mulligan's career almost needs to be seen in reverse. keeping with a spirit of revisionism, of critical misunderstanding and ungenerosity that has stalked him at every stage it is clear that perhaps his most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that millstone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.
It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but it's focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.
The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz. The "Birth of the Cool" nonet made unprecedented use of French horn and tuba and divided its sound range in such a way that the middle register (where one might expect to hear a tenor saxophone) was significantly attenuated. The effect was a music of superficial simplicity that nonetheless afforded the arrangers (and also the soloists, it shouldn't be forgotten) the possibility of considerable complexity. Mulligan's contribution to the sessions as composer was highly significant. He wrote and set three pieces for the group, Godchild and the wonderful Jeru for the January 1949 sessions, Venus de Milo, which featured his best solo of the time, for the second batch, cut in April, and the bouncy Rocker, recorded almost a year later.
It's difficult in retrospect to evaluate accurately the impact of these sessions, but Max Harrison has persuasively suggested that jazz's inability or unwillingness to capitalise on and develop its own innovations is what has condemned it to the status of a minor art. The ensemble playing on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions is as sophisticated as anything being attempted at the time by "legitimate" or "straight" composers and yet within a couple of years, jazz in general (though commendably few of the original participants) was content to settle back into the four-square thump of theme-and-solo "improvisation" on popular tunes.
The only slightly sour note surrounding The Birth of the Cool (as a product, rather than a misnamed historical moment) was the fact that it seemed to have been hijacked in Miles Davis's name. The trumpeter's subsequent career cast him with some unlikely bedfellows and with an acrobatic self-conception that pitched him at the opposite extreme from the notably purist Mulligan. Not least of his affectations seemed to be the belief that at every stage of his progress he shed yet another stylistic skin. Even at the end of his life, though, when he was set against (some thought) unpromising electronic backgrounds, Miles was still exploring the ensemble effects and minimalist gestures with which he and Mulligan had experimented in 1948 and 1949.
In the jazz fan's wish-list of great might-have-beens, there are few potential reunions more piquant than one that was mooted one summer night a year ago in Rotterdam. Mulligan told Miles of his desire to play the "Birth" music again. Miles asked to be kept posted, a willingness that may have seemed astonishing by the diffident standards of the Sixties and Seventies but which can't quite be explained away by his ubiquitous "special guest star" status of the final few years; for Miles's resistance to "jazz" was very specifically a resistance to the endless rehearsal of be-bop egotism. Sadly, he was already stricken in health, and died before the projected reunion could be realised.
Mulligan, though, stuck to the original idea and assembled a band that more than passed muster. With Phil Woods in for the otherwise-committed Lee Konitz (who has nonetheless appeared since in the reformed Tentette), and the young trumpeter Wallace Roney in for Miles, the band had a freshness and bounce that more than matched the original conception. With digital recording, "Re-Birth of the Cool" (not to be confused with a similarly-titled compilation of hip-hop music, a fact that caused Mulligan some little pain) dissolves the intervening four decades and brings to life some of the most effective charts in modern jazz. Mulligan's own voice has matured over the same period, losing some of the slight infelicities of diction and awkward caesuras [interruptions; breaks; pauses] that marked his soloing in the early days. At 65, he sounds stronger and more committed than ever, but committed not to a narrow conception of jazz as a particular ideology that has broken free of its own historical moment ("Re-Birth of the Cool" is emphatically not an exercise in nostalgia) but to the widest possible conception of music. [The recording is another of] … Mulligan's increasingly important forays into formal orchestral writing and can't be seen as a rejection of jazz, but simply as a rejection of the view that jazz is the only road to the joyous freedoms it expresses and stern disciplines it imposes. When Mulligan hooks on the big baritone, the voice is unmistakable. It's a speaking voice, which doesn't disdain to sing when the song is worth the breath.”
"Charlap is a lyrical repository. At thirty-two [this was written in 1999], he is the best, but least well known, of a swarm of gifted pianists who have appeared in New York in the past ten years or so. He has already filled much of the sizable space once occupied by Bill Evans, who still reverberates almost twenty years after his death. Unlike many of the younger pianists, whose tastes tend to be parochial, Charlap has absorbed every pianist worth listening to in the past fifty years, starting with Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rowles, Erroll Garner, Nat Cole, and Oscar Peterson, then moving through Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Bill Evans, and finishing with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Kenny Barron. His ballad numbers are unique.
He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes - some off the beat and some behind the beat - followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists.
He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us." - Whitney Balliett
It begins with my fondness for anything and everything to do with Henry “Hank” Mancini’s music for the Peter Gunn TV show which premiered on September 22, 1958.
The show was broadcast in 38 half-hour episodes from 9:00 to 9:30 PM Monday nights on NBC-TV from 1958-1961.
It starred Craig Stevens as private investigator Peter Gunn, Lola Albright as his girl, Edie Hart, Herschel Bernardi as Lt. Jacoby and Hope Emerson as Mother, at whose nightclub Edie sings. The program was created and directed by Blake Edwards. Henry Mancini was its Musical Director. The Executive Producer was Gordon Oliver; the sponsor was Bristol-Myers; and filming was done at Universal-International Studios in Hollywood.
Aside from the actual soundtrack from the series which Hank recorded for RCA, I’ve always particularly enjoyed the version of the music that drummer Shelly Manne recorded for Lester Koenig’s Contemporary Records - Shelly Manne and His Men Play Peter Gunn [C-7560; OJCCD 946-2].
The salubrious working relationship that Lester had with Shelly resulted in a number of sterling Contemporary recordings by Manne’s quintet on Koenig’s label. The mutual respect that the two had for one another was something to behold.
Lester had always wanted to own and operate his own Jazz label and Shelly had always wanted his bands to have a “home base” where they were free to record their interpretations of Jazz [this desire for a “home base” also manifested itself in Shelly’s opening his own Jazz club in Hollywood, CA in 1960 - The Manne Hole].
Looks like they both got their wishes thanks to the affinity they had for one another’s quests.
Lester Koenig offers more information about how this recording came about in the following insert notes.
And talk about nostalgia - be sure and check out the events that Lester describes following his statement that “Jazz has taken an increasing part in the everyday living of the nation, ….”
Would that it were so some 60+ years later!
“For the most part, television music was a vast jazz wasteland before the Peter Gunn series debuted in the fall of 1958. The show's score both made a name for composer Henry Mancini and changed the sound of televised drama. It was inevitable that Shelly Manne, Hollywood studio mainstay and a proven champion at jazz interpretations of Broadway shows, would give Mancini's music a more expansive blowing treatment, and the resulting album reminds us that there was more to Peter Gunn than its dramatic theme and the classic ballad "Dreamsville."
Fans of Manne's Men should note that the album was taped during the brief tenure of alto saxophonist Herb Geller, and that it makes winning use of the vibes and marimba of added starter Victor Feldman, whose piano would shortly be heard to superb advantage on the band's Blackhawk recordings (OJCs 656-660).
Peter Gunn is an adult mystery with a different kind of hero: a private eye who is literate, suave, well-groomed, and—digs jazz. The weekly show hit the NBC-TV network September 22,1958, and zoomed to a success which is, in part, the result of its jazz score, composed and arranged by Henry Mancini, known as Hank to the leading jazz stars in the Los Angeles area who have played for his soundtracks. Since November 1958, Shelly Manne and Victor Feldman have been regular members of the band which records the show's score. When Shelly became enthused about the idea of recording an album of Mancini originals from Peter Gunn, he invited Feldman to appear with him as a guest star.
Aside from its own considerable merits, the fact that a jazz score has created so much attention is a reflection of the staying power of the new marriage of jazz and TV, a nuptial which seems to have eclipsed the short-lived, annulled wedding of jazz and poetry. Jazz has taken an increasing part in the everyday living of the nation, and a summation of jazz in 1958 reveals, as leading critic Leonard Feather points out in the February 1959 issue of Playboy "... jazz—both modern and traditional—filled video screens... CBS' hour-long show, The Sound of Jazz... the first Timex all-star jazz show, emceed by Steve Allen, was seen on NBC... a unique effort to offer it on an educational level was undertaken when NBC launched a 13-week series, The Subject Is Jazz... Bobby Troup's Stars of Jazz was projected to the full ABC network... Disc jockey Art Ford kicked off his own weekly show on New York's Channel 13... In Chicago, WBBM-TV presented Jazz in the Round... CBS launched a five-nights-a-week series, Jazz Is My Beat...."
Other examples come to mind. In September a Westinghouse spectacular featured Benny Goodman, Andre Previn, Shelly Manne, and Red Mitchell. Previn also made a guest appearance on The Steve Allen Show. And jazz as part of the score for dramatic pictures and TV shows made a tremendous impact when Walter Wanger engaged Johnny Mandel to write a jazz score for I Want to Live (which featured Shelly Manne); when Revue Productions' Stan Wilson used a jazz group for the score of the weekly M Squad; and when Spartan Productions engaged Hank Mancini as Musical Director for Peter Gunn.
Although Hank Mancini is only 34, he has almost twenty years of experience behind him — so that when the opportunity arrived to compose the Gunn scores with no "upstairs" interference, he was technically equipped. He was born in Cleveland, raised in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh); his father was a flutist and Hank studied flute from the time he was eight. As a teenager he studied arranging with Max Atkins who led the pit band in the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh. Atkins was a friend of Benny Goodman, and gave BG one of Hank's arrangements. BG liked it, sent for him (those were the days when Benny created mass hysteria at the New York Paramount Theater), and commissioned several arrangements. But, at seventeen, Hank felt he wasn't really ready, and spent the next year studying at Juilliard. The war interrupted that; Hank was in the Army, and saw service overseas. On his return he joined Tex Beneke's band for a year as pianist and arranger. In 1947 he came to Hollywood, where it took him five years before he came close to his goal of writing for films. "I was starving," he recalls, "until one day I got a call from UI [Universal-International] for an Abbott and Costello picture — about two weeks work. I stayed six years—and composed for everything from A&C Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil." Among his many credits are The Benny Goodman Story, and The Glenn Miller Story. He also scored Voice in the Mirror and other dramatic pictures.
By the time Hank was called to do Peter Gunn, he was ready. For years he had felt jazz would be tremendously effective in film scoring, but never had the opportunity to try it. With Peter Gunn he had freedom to go all out, and the program's instant popularity proved his point.
In Shelly Manne, Mancini has an ideal interpreter for the Peter Gunn music. In recent years Manne's talent has matured, and developed so that today he is recognized as the most melodic and inventive of drummers, as well as one of the great swinging drummers of jazz history. For the past three years he has won first place in all three major jazz popularity polls — Playboy, Down Beat, and Metronome.
When Shelly and Mancini discussed the recording of this album, Mancini urged him to feel free to use the compositions as points of departure for creating personal jazz performances.
The album was done at one all night session which began at 6 Monday evening January 19th, with "Peter Gunn," and finished at 7:30 the next morning with "Fallout." Improvisation with six men is not easy. It takes musicians who are experienced and skilled, as well as great jazz players.”
In the late 1960s, Victor Feldman and Tom Scott led a quartet with Chuck Domanico on bass and Johnny Guerin on drums that featured regularly at Donte's on Lankershim Blvd, just up the street from the corporate offices of Universal Studios. On this track you can hear why the group rarely failed to tear up the place. Things get cooking at 0.58 minutes and Victor "explodes" at 1:18 minutes. Thank goodness that Gerry MacDonald had a tape recorder going so that all this great music didn't go undocumented. From my little perch at the bar, I can still see the smiles on everyone's faces whenever Victor, Tom, Chuck and Johnny performed at Donte's. Like most Jazz clubs it was dim, but this band literally "lit it up."
“The Paul Horn album, entitled Something Blue, was obviously influenced by the Miles Davis album, and indeed the Paul Horn group was one of the first fully to explore the new territory opened by Miles.
Paul Horn's 'Dun-Dunnee', for instance, is a forty-bar AABA tune with but one chord or scale for the eight-bar A sections. (It can be thought of as either one long G7 chord or a mixolydian scale; that is, a scale starting on G using the white keys of the piano.)”
- Bob Gordon, Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950’s
“Though the Paul Horn Quintet has a readily identifiable sound through the blending of the leader's alto saxophone or flute with Richards' vibraphone, it is the writing rather than the instrumentation that lends these performances their most personal quality. Paul and his sidemen alike, instead of relying on horizontal melodic values alone, tend to create compositional structures in which the harmonic setting, and often the metric variations, are striking characteristics that give these works much of their originality of color and mood.”
- Leonard Feather, The Sound of Paul Horn
“One final word: if you are not a musician and can't tell a bar from a saloon, don't let this deter you. As Paul cogently observed: ‘Any layman could listen to this music and tap his foot to it without knowing there is anything so different about our approach to time or meter.’ Then he thought a moment, smiled, and added a postscript: ‘Except, of course, the layman might wonder once in a while why his foot was out of step.’"
“Hod O'Brien. This quiet, unassuming man makes music of far reaching import; people the world over await each new recording and attend his performances as often as they are able. Why the immense popularity of Hod O'Brien? The reasons for this phenomenon, his loyal, worldwide audience, are manifold, each person appreciating O'Brien's art from his own perspective, for his own reasons.
I'll use myself as an example.
As a pianist I marvel at Hod O'Brien's virtuosity. His single-note attack and legato phrasing and his timely and explosive use of block chords are the result of the artful blend of initial gifts with years of intense study. Consistently well articulated, each note is crafted with care and shaped lovingly to achieve maximum effect.
As an improvising musician I'm thrilled by the seemingly endless flow of O'Brien's ideas that yield melodic lines of remarkable length and complexity.
He stays with each phrase, and this tenacity allows Hod to extract every last drop of melodic truth to be found there. He chooses his collaborators well-bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Kenny Washington join again with Hod-and listens and reacts honestly, the free exchange of ideas being the hallmark of truly prepared musicians who've learned, above all, to trust.
As a jazz fan I'm gratified by the homage Hod O'Brien pays to his musical forebears, in his choice of material and in the quality of his history-deepened improvisations." - Pete Malinverni
Here’s are Kenny Washington’s thoughts about the tune:
“The Matt Dennis song Angel Eyes is one of the great torch songs of all time. Ol’ Blue Eyes owned this one. I especially love the last lyric “scuse me while I disappear.” A year earlier, Gene Ammons had had a hit with this standard. This tune is usually done as a ballad, but Ahmad takes it at a nice medium tempo. Ahmad reshapes the form of this standard like a sculptor, to fit the needs of the trio playing a chorus and a half of the melody. He uses the intro as an interlude. For the first chorus of his improvisation, he switches to the regular A-A-B-A song form of the tune. He then goes directly to the bridge and the last A section with the interlude. This form is repeated again (bridge, last A and interlude). Listen to how he changes his dynamics to a pianissimo and brings back the bridge melody. The Gershwin classic It Ain’t Necessarily So is quoted for a second time at the last A before the intro is again stated for a powerful ending. This is another one of those performances where there’s a lot happening. This marvelous arrangement sounds so natural and the trio pulls it off with such ease.”
The most surprising aspect of the score for The Russia House is its simplicity in instrumentation and repetition. It's hard to imagine how a score of this minuscule size and scope could be so overwhelming in its appeal. That might say something about Goldsmith's raw talent, and perhaps it speaks to three years of development on the concepts.
His base elements are simple; a jazz trio handles the majority of the themes and underscore, with saxophone performances by Branford Marsalis (both scripted and improvised) that are nothing short of spectacular. Never once does he quiver unintentionally or even slightly miss a note. Perfection is bliss.
Michael Lang is equally renowned for his fabulous piano performances, and he delicately establishes an elevated level of classy bar room atmosphere for Marsalis' sax. The bass, performed by John Patitucci, has a larger role in the score, not only providing a rhythm for the other two jazz performers, but also handling a large portion of the underscore.
[The trio restatement of the theme kicks in at around 5.50 minutes of the video.]
"downbeat: How did you decide to record In Crowd? It isn’t exactly an obvious song.
Lewis: I was in Washington D.C. playing at the Bohemian Caverns. We had a record session coming up on the weekend. This was like on Tuesday. We were gonna do like nine tunes, and I think I had seven down. So one afternoon, I was having lunch in this place, and this waitress came over and she said, "What are you doing?" I was getting my notes together for the album, what I was gonna play. She said, "Why don’t you record The In Crowd?" The in what? She said, "It’s on the jukebox.” And she played it. So I said, maybe. I was kind of desperate at that moment. The session was three days away and I needed two more tunes. So I went by a record store, I bought the 45, took it back to my hotel, and played it, wrote out the changes, and we had rehearsal that day. And it felt good. But I said, well, at least it’ll fill the album out — because as far as I was concerned that was not one of the major tunes on the album. So we played it that night, and the people started reacting to it. So I said, maybe this will do good for the album. That following night, we recorded it, and the audience participation was out of sight. They were clapping and carrying on and, of course, it’s history now. " - Ramsey Lewis to Michael Bourne, downbeat 10.25.1977
I know I’ve shared this view before, but it bears repeating. Over the years, my enjoyment of Jazz has been considerably enhanced by the wise and thoughtful liner notes that graced the back of LPs or by the more recent insert notes that can be found in CD jewel cover booklets. Initially, these liner notes made up for the dearth of books as a source of knowledge on the subject of Jazz when I first began listening to the music in the 1950s. Holding the jacket cover in hand while listening to the album, my eyes poured over what Ira Gitler or Nat Hentoff or Leonard Feather, to name only a few of my early “mentors,” had to say about the music that was filling my ears and my heart with pleasure. Since I was also a student of the music for the purpose of wanting to become a Jazz musician myself during those early days, I was especially intrigued by writers that explained song structures, chord sequences and, especially, anything to do with rhythmic patterns or time signatures since these were particularly important to an aspiring, young Jazz drummer. It is safe to say that I owe an huge debt of gratitude to Leonard Feather, Ted Gioia, Bill Kirchner, Doug Ramsey, Whitney Balliett, Jack Tracy, Gary Giddins and others for helping me to learn and to appreciate more about the music that I have been in love with since I first heard it over 50 years ago. And because my appreciation of Jazz benefited so greatly from the information and knowledge that I gleaned from the writers of the annotations, comments and explanations that appear on album covers and CD booklets, I have decided to repay the favor with the inclusion of and reliance on these materials in many of the pieces that are prepared for Jazz Profiles. So when, to my immense delight, I found that the insert notes to the Grant Green: Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 57194 2 4] had not one, but three different sets of insert notes, and that these were by the likes of Ben Sidran, Michael Cuscuna and Bob Porter, the decision to prepare a piece using their remarks on this recording became axiomatic. As a point in passing, for reasons explained in these notes, Grant Green recorded so often and produced such an abundance of riches for Blue Note that these sides with Sonny Clark were not issued until 1979 – 1980, when most of the music on this 2 CD set was released as three, separate LP’s. First up are Ben Sidran’s notes to that portion of these tracks that comprised the 1980 Blue Note album Nigeria [LT 1032]. “TIME passes. What was fresh and important recedes under the collected weight of new fresh and important stuff. Enough time has passed since this collection was recorded that a lot of people reading these notes and hearing this music weren't even born on that winter day in 1962 when Grant Green went into the studio.
Back in 1962, Grant's guitar voice was one of the sparkling new additions to a musical universe that seemed to be expanding exponentially. It's hard to imagine-or even to remember- just how explosive the jazz scene was then, particularly in light of the mechanical music which has flourished these last ten years. One indication of the scene then might be the wealth of previously unreleased material, such as this record which is only now showing up in the stores. When Grant came to New York, he walked on to a stage crowded with stars. And he shone with the best of them.
He didn't blaze a trail to the city. He followed a more comfortable path, arriving to join Lou Donaldson's band in 1960. Some compared his hollow-bodied guitar style to that of the earliest pioneer, Charlie Christian. One also hears touches of that other great popularizer, Les Paul. For while Grant was not a radical player, he excelled at the basics and subtleties: he could swing like crazy and he played the prettiest phrases. Grant Green made esoteric music easy for the average listener to get to, just as jazz singers have done for years. Grant Green was a popularizer and a singer on his instrument.
Perhaps the greatest testament to his musical gift was that at a time when the guitar had fallen out of favor, suddenly, Grant Green could be heard everywhere, recording with several of the finest rhythm sections in New York. Within a year of his arrival in the city, he recorded three albums as a leader, featuring a rhythm section of Sonny Clark on piano. Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. Those albums, "Gooden's Corner," 'Oleo,” and "Born To be Blue," have only recently been released on Blue Note in Japan. This album, "Nigeria," falls in the middle of that period of time and has Art Blakey in place of Louis Hayes. It is the only time that Blakey and Green ever recorded together. Grant was a simple, elegant stylist. When he played a melody, with that kind of dressed-up strut, it was a reminder of just how classy bebop could sound. His interpretation of the title track "Airegin" (ingeniously encoded backwards to ward off the uninitiated) is no exception. It is interesting to note that in the early sixties, Grant performed and recorded an unusually large number of Sonny Rollins tunes, including "Solid ' " "Oleo " "Sonnymoon For Two," and, of course, "Airegin." After Grant states the head Sonny Clark hits one of his patented full keyboard slides and then strolls for a chorus while Blakey gets the groove settled Yawn. Sonny 's solo is a swinging compliment to Grant's, ignoring Green’s reference to 'When Lights Are Low" and turning the spotlight full up on the flowing snakes that were his specialty. Sonny, who had worked with both Rollins and singer Dinah Washington during the late fifties, is able to play both sides of the street here; he acts as the ideal accompanist to Grant's vocalized guitar work.
For my money, the highlight of the album is the stylized arrangement of "It Ain't Necessarily So." Blakey puts down a 12/8 Latin feel, and Grant plays the head in a totally unexpected series of phrases, altering the original melody to such an extent that he might well have called the song "So It Ain't Necessarily" and taken the publishing for himself. But it is the endlessly good groove that is the star of the cut. Interspersed with Blakey's press rolls, this fat-back groove - like those Art played on innumerable Jimmy Smith jam session dates - gets Grant all the way up on his toes. His tone is singing six different ways to Christmas, until he finally gets Blakey singing, for it is the drummer you hear shouting “whoa!” and grunting in response to Grant's precise preaching. By the time Sonny's solo arrives, Blakey is putting as much vocal into the overhead mikes as the cymbal. Clark seems to goad him on, and finally, when he’s taken is ninth chorus and seems read to turn it back to Grant, Blakey won’t let him go. You can hear Art laughing and shouting to Sonny, "No, go ahead, go ahead.” And go ahead he does, until Blakey finally turns him loose with an escalating series of strokes. As the song fades behind that Latin feel, I'm ready to do it all over. Side two sounds as if it will open with Miles Davis' "Four" but after the classic bebop introduction, the song abruptly half-steps into a very polite "I Concentrate On You." The tension between the tip-toe lounge groove and the powerhouse bebop minds that are playing it is never really resolved, and that is part of the charm of the piece. Grant is so sweet when he plays the melody, but his choruses become bittersweet fast, and soon, he's skipping down some dark memory lane, concentrating hard on some private "you." The song goes out with a vamp reminiscent of a neither the introduction nor the song itself; altogether, a very curious arrangement.
"The Things We Did Lost Summer" also opens with a rather bizarre waltz section, but then settles down into a very delicate ballad. The attitude Grant maintains playing the melody - particularly the little chromatic insertion he uses at the end of the first bridge - is a lovely balance of the benign and the mischievous. This is Grant's power, as a soloist or stating a theme, and it is something great jazz singers like Johnny Hartman are also known for: there is no better way to grab a listener than to lull him into bliss and then grab him by what Lord Buckley used to call 'your most delicate gear."
The record closes with a flag-waver, 'The Song Is You," in which we are reassured that straight ahead is the direction to go. Blakey is once again singing in his mikes, and Sam Jones, God bless him, is walking and shaking his head, There are few things in life more pleasant than walking along with Sam Jones shaking your head. Down home. Just folks. Kind of corny at times, but very hip. Grant Green was a perfect candidate for what today is called "cross-over hype," but back then was probably not called anything at all. Perhaps it was only natural that record companies would try to make Grant Green into a commercial product, a sow's ear out of a silk purse, as it were. I don't know how or why he turned from the hard, low life grooves he used to spark, towards the cocktail lounge which surely sealed his obscurity by the time he died in early 1979. Often, commercial pressures overwhelm players. After all, they are only musicians,, not lawyers and accountants that's why we buy records. If lawyers and accountants made records, nobody would buy them. At least, that used to be true, and it may be part of the reason why Grant didn't make a major mark on the music scene during the lost years of his life.
I, for one, kept looking for him around every corner, particularly as various guitar players, like Gabor Szabo, or George Benson, or even Eric Gale, would pop into prominence. I kept waiting for Grant to make his move. Unfortunately, his best recorded moves are those from more than fifteen years ago, when he truly was a fresh and important face on what may be the wildest contemporary jazz scene we'll ever know.”
-BEN SIDRAN 1980, original liner notes from "Nigeria” And here are Michael Cuscuna’s comments from the 1980 Japanese Blue Note release – Gooden’s Corner.
“THE tragedy of Grant Green's death in early 1979 was compounded by the fact that his recorded output for the last decade or more of his life was, for the most part, commercial, uncreative and lacking in individuality. He deserved better, but the economics of keeping a bond working and holding down a record contract forced him into situations far below his talent.
Fortunately, Blue Note thoroughly documented his artistry on a number of sessions under Grant's leadership in the early sixties. Moreover, he was the resident guitarist for Blue Note's stable of premier organists such as Jimmy Smith, John Patton and Larry Young and participated in dates by Lee Morgan, Horace Parlan, Don Wilkerson, Lou Donaldson and others.
Unknown outside of his hometown St. Louis except through his Delmark recordings with tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, Grant was brought to the label and to New York in 1960 by Lou Donaldson. Blue Note always operated on a family basis, developing an impressive, cross-fertilizing repertory group of musicians. Grant was quickly and fully instated in mid 1960.
Green represented not only a fresh, vibrant new voice on an instrument that had become rather sleepy in style in the fifties, but he was also a major link with the all too often neglected pioneer of the hollow body electric guitar in jazz, Charlie Christian. Grant executed bright, clean lines that never fully abandoned the melody, emphasized concise, linear, single note improvisations and possessed a unique rhythmic momentum that remains unmatched. He absorbed Christian, then bypassed such heroes of the day as Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery and moved directly to the formation of his own identity.
This album "Gooden's Corner", recorded on December 23, 1961, features a beautifully compatible quartet of Grant, pianist Sonny Clark', bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes. Ike Quebec joined the group for one tune 'Count Every Star", which was then extracted and used on Quebec's album “Blue And Sentimental” (Blue Note BST 94098). The rest of the session, previously unissued and without Quebec, is presented here in its entirety.
This particular quartet had a run of sessions for Blue Note under Grant's name, all they all remain unissued. On January 13, 1962, the band with Art Blakey subbing for Hayes recorded. On January 31 the quartet with Hayes back again recorded yet another album. And finally on March 1, 1962, the same group, this time with Quebec playing throughout the session, made yet another album's worth of material. Why these dates were never issued will never be known. Most likely, it is because Grant, like other Blue Note artists, recorded prolifically during these years, and there was just no way to get everything released. As this set bears out, the Green-Clark-Jones-Hayes combination is completely compatible and comfortable. Each man has an easy, natural sense of swinging that interlocks perfectly with his fellow musicians.
Sam Jones has been previously present on a handful of Blue Note dates, led for the most part by another guitarist Kenny Burrell. Louis Hayes was a familiar face at the label through his long term membership in Horace Silver's quintet and his frequent sideman appearances with Curtis Fuller and other Blue Note artists. From the fall of 1959 well into the mid sixties, Jones and Hayes were the pivot of Cannonball Adderley's successful band. They had been together in that capacity for more than two years when this album was recorded, and their empathy is clearly evident.
Although none of the Green dates with Sonny Clark at the piano have ever been issued, their pairing was a natural. Both men possessed the ability to swing hard in an effortless, instinctive manner. Clark is his usual brilliant self here, adding richly to the group texture and urging Grant on with some inspired comping. His solo work is typically two-handed, cooking and always interesting. It is a testament to Grant Green that he can breath such life into On Green Dolphin Street and What is This Thing Called Love as well as the overdone Henry Mancini hit of the day Moon River. He swings on What Is This Thing ... like no one else on his instrument could. And Moon River is a perfect example of his ability to construct a solo using the tune's melody as the substance of his variations. His rhythmic sense is best illustrated on Shadrack.
Grant contributes two originals, Gooden's Corner and Two For One. Gooden's Corner is a solid blues, given an irresistible performance by the entire group. Two For One, not to be confused with the Sonny Clark tune of the same name, is based on Miles Davis' modal So What, but after the theme, Grant breaks into some straight ahead playing.
This album is a lovely freeze frame in the career of one of the foremost guitarists of modern jazz, a man whom we lost to the commercial world in the late sixties and whom we lost forever in 1979.
-MICHAEL CUSCUNA 1979, original liner notes from "Gooden’s Corner" We close this piece with Bob Porter’s 1980 original liner notes from Oleo. “THE business of jazz is extremely difficult to describe to someone not involved in it. Most fans are aware of the qualities that make a great jazz musician: an individual sound; the ability to improvise melodically ("telling a story," in Lester Young's phrase); to swing, etc. There are any number of great jazz musicians who may be deficient in one of these areas, but generally they make up for it by doing one of the other things much better than other players. Yet in all this discussion, there has been no mention of playing melody. Name me a great jazzman who couldn't take a melody and make it uniquely his own.
Grant Green was widely known for his ability to play melodies. It didn't really matter what kind of melodies because Grant could do Latin tunes (see Blue Note 84111 - The Latin Bit); Gospel songs (Blue Note 84132 -Feelin' The Spirit); Western melodies (Blue Note 84310- Goin' West) as well as standards, blues, or jazz tunes. he had a great guitar sound and knew instinctively how to make melodies come alive.
Grant really arrived in 1961. He had made records in 1959 with his hometown friend, Jimmy Forrest, for Delmark and the following year he recorded with organist Sam Lazar, another St. Louis musician, for Argo. but when Lou Donaldson heard him playing in East St. Louis, he convinced Grant and clubowner Leo Gooden to come to New York and talk with Alfred Lion of Blue Note. From 1961 through 1965, Grant Green made more Blue Note lps as leader and sideman than anyone else. Clearly, he was a favorite, not only of Lion, but of Ike Quebec who did much of the A and R work for Blue Note until his death in 1963.
Considering Grant's versatility, it is not unusual that Blue Note used him in a variety of contexts: Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, John Patton, Lou Donaldson, Ike Quebec.
At a time when Down Beat was still giving New Star awards, Grant won in 1962. but critical raves have never helped in earning a living. Grant worked often with Jack McDuff during those early years, and was really scuffling for money. In addition to everything else, Grant had a narcotics habit. Now it may be hard to understand in the jazz world of 1979 when musicians, have generally learned to avoid the excesses of heroin and get their business together, but jazz players were very low in the economic strata of the early 60s, and one consistent source of revenue was the record company. It seems likely that Blue Note recorded Grant frequently during those years because he was always drawing money from Blue Note. Grant did at least six LP sessions under his won leadership for Blue Note in 1961. The furious recording pace continued right into 1965, and try as they might, Blue Note could never issue the LPs as fast as Grant could record them!
In a sense, Grant's situation and that of Sonny Clark were similar. They had the identical problems and each was a Blue Note favorite. The initial pairing of these two talents came just before Christmas, 1961, and resulted in the album, Gooden's Corner. Sam Jones and Louis Hayes were still members of Cannonball Adderley's band at the time, and their appearance together is another reminder of Blue Note's care in assembling rhythm sections. Alfred Lion's choice of bass and drums almost always reflected an ability to play together in support of the leader, rather than to demonstrate individual brilliance.
The tunes played here are not unusual for Grant, although it should be noted that he had an attraction for Sonny Rollins lines. He also recorded "Solid' and "Sonnymoon For Two" during this period. A later version of 'My Favorite Things" was issued on the Matador album.
Grant never does get the tricky theme of "Oleo" exactly right, but it doesn't deter him from fashioning a solo of lightening-like inventiveness. Sonny Clark has always been considered a disciple of Bud Powell and perhaps the chief reason for that is the dynamic flow of his ideas. When playing standards, he sometimes would adopt a lighter touch (reminding one of Hank Jones in his delicacy), but his work throughout this session is in the cooking Powell mode.
If Grant has problems with "Oleo", he has none with "Tune Up." The melody, introduced and long-credited to Miles Davis, was actually written by saxophonist-bluesman Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who gave the tune to Davis during a period when he – Vinson - was not recording. Virtually the some thing happened with another Vinson compositions, "Four."
Green was always at home with the blues and "Hip Funk" is his adoption of the classic form that was definitely hip (meaning fashionable) for 1962. Sonny Clark was also a blues master as his work ably demonstrates. Hearing the music on this album (and Gooden's Corner) makes one immediately interested in hearing more. Alas, there is no more by the quartet, but a bit more than a month later, these same four players joined forces with Ike Quebec for an album that will be forthcoming on Blue Note [Blue and Sentimental].
Between 1965 and 1968, Green was still active as a performer, but his recorded appearances were few. When he returned to Blue Note in 1969, he had rid himself of the narcotics problem, but had acquired a new attitude toward music. The huge success of Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, and George Benson was very much on his mind. He considered himself the musical equal of all of them, yet he was the only one not to have made a significant commercial breakthrough.
His repertoire tended more toward rhythm & blues during his late Blue Note period. He would use repetitive vamps rather than chord changes as harmonic underpinning and his attention to phrasing melodies (always an outstanding feature of his work) become even more pronounced. And the commercial break happened for him! From 1969 to mid-1974, his Blue Note LPs were consistent best sellers and he was a popular attraction at clubs across the USA. He split with Blue Note shortly thereafter and made an LP for Kudu and another for Versatile.
Grant spent much of 1978 in the hospital with a variety of ailments, and he was not a well man when released in December, 1978. His doctors advised him to rest, but there were expenses to meet, so he went back on the road almost immediately. He died of a heart attack on January 31, 1979 - seventeen years to the day of this recording.
During 1969 and 1970 when I was producing records for Prestige, I got to know Grant Green well. He played on albums with Rusty Bryant, Don Patterson, Charles Kynard, and Houston Person which I supervised. I used to marvel at the ease with which this man with enormous hands could make that guitar sing. At one session, during a break, he treated everyone to a solo rendition of "Oleo" which was stunning. After his death, I thought many times of how his career would be judged by historians, since so much of his later recordings were in a commercial vein. But with albums such as Matador, Gooden's Corner, and now Oleo, his stature is assured. Without question, Grant Green was one of the major artists on the guitar during his lifetime. His friend, Lou Donaldson, put it best when he said:
"All the top guitarists who came later - like George Benson and Pat Martino - they've got some of Grant's stuff."
