Bass Players: Scott LaFaro and Gary Peacock

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Sometimes I think the acoustic string bass is the least appreciated of all the instruments used in the making of Jazz. One obvious reason for this might be that you have to listen carefully to hear it as it is often overshadowed by the volume coming from the other instruments in a Jazz band, whatever the size.

Perhaps the lack of appreciation that bass players are subjected to is exemplified in the joke in which one member of a couple listening to set at a jazz club turns to the other and says: “It’s OK, we can talk now, it’s only the bass solo!”

Despite the relative obscurity of the instrument for the general listener, there have been a number of pioneering bassists in the history of the music who have significantly enhanced the manner in which Jazz bass is played. Among these, Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus come to mind almost immediately.

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Scott La Faro and Gary Peacock rose to prominence by also appreciably adding to the technical and stylistic manner in which the instrument is played. 

Frankly, when Scotty and Gary first came up, they were “the talk of the town.” Everyone and anyone who heard them was impressed by what they were doing on the instrument.

Their sound was so strong that when you first heard it, you would have sworn that additional amplification was being used to create the huge tone that came out of their acoustic string instruments.

I was fortunate to hear both Scotty and Gary when they first made the scene with pianist Victor Feldman’s and pianist Claire Fischer’s trios, respectively.  Believe me, no one was talking when they played; everyone’s mouths were agape with astonishment at the stuff these guys were playing on a string bass.

The power and majesty that they generated on an instrument that was often thumped, whapped and plucked during its early years in Jazz combos was awe-inspiring.

Sadly, LaFaro was to die in tragic circumstances in 1961 at the age of 25, but fortunately for the Jazz world, Gary Peacock continued to play wonderfully in a variety of settings, most notably with pianist Keith Jarrett’s trio, until his death in 2020.

In 2009, Scott’s sister, Helene LaFaro-Fernandez authored Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro which is still in print and available through the University of North Texas Press [Denton, TX].

Here’s what the esteemed Jazz critic Martin Williams had to say about Scott and Gary while both were still early in their careers in his Jazz Changes [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992].

© -Martin Williams, Oxford University Press - copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The 1960s produced several outstanding young bass players. It was as if Charlie Mingus had released the instrument in the 1950s and those who followed found their ways of exploring its new role. ...

Scott LaFaro, by Way of Introduction

It's quite a wonderful thing to work with the Bill Evans trio," said bassist Scott LaFaro.

"We are really just beginning to find our way. You won't hear much of that on our first record together, except a little on Blue in Green where no one was playing time as such. Bill was improvising lines, I was playing musical phrases behind him, and Paul Motian played in free rhythmic drum phrases."

LaFaro is dissatisfied with a great deal of what he hears in Jazz, but what he says about it isn't mere carping. He thinks he knows what to do about it, at least in his own playing. "My ideas are so different from what is generally acceptable nowadays that I sometimes wonder if I am a Jazz musician. I remember that Bill and I used to reassure each other some nights kiddingly that we really were Jazz musicians. I have such respect for so many modern classical composers, and I learn so much from them. Things are so contrived nowadays in Jazz, and harmonically it has been so saccharine since Bird."

Charlie Parker was already dead before Scott LaFaro was aware of him, even on records. In fact Scott LaFaro was not really much aware of jazz at all until 1955.

He was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey, but his family moved to Geneva, New York, when he was five. "There was always the countryside. I miss it now. I am not a city man. Maybe that is why Miles Davis touches me so deeply. He grew up near the countryside too, I believe. I hear that in his playing anyway. I've never been through that 'blues' thing either."

LaFaro started on clarinet at fourteen and studied music in high school. He took up bass on a kind of dare. "My father played violin with a small 'society' trio in town. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I had finished school, and my father said - half-joking, I think  -  that if I learned bass, I could play with them. When I did, I knew that I wanted to be a musician. It’s strange: playing clarinet and sax didn't do it, but when I started on bass, I knew it was music." He went to Ithaca Conservatory and then to Syracuse; it was there, through fellow students, that he began to listen to Jazz. He got a job in Syracuse at a place called the Embassy Club. "The leader was a drummer who played sort of like Sidney Catlett and Kenny Clarke. He formed my ideas of what Jazz was about. He, and the juke box in the place - it had Miles Davis records. And I first heard Percy Heath and Paul Chambers on that juke box. They taught me my first jazz bass lessons. There was also a Lee Konitz record with Stan Kenton called Prologue."

In late 1955, LaFaro joined Buddy Morrow's band. "We toured all over the country until I left the band in Los Angeles in September 1956. I didn't hear any Jazz or improve at all during that whole time. " But a few weeks after he left Morrow, he joined a Chet Baker group that included Bobby Timmons and Lawrence Marable. "I found out so much from Lawrence, a lot of it just from playing with him. I have trouble getting with people rhythmically and I learned a lot about it from him. I learned more about rhythm when I played with Monk last fall; a great experience. With Monk, rhythmically, it's just there, always."

LaFaro remembers two other important experiences in California. The first was hearing Ray Brown, whose swing and perfection in his style impressed him. The other came when he lived for almost a year in the mountain-top house of Herb Geller and his late wife, Lorraine. "I practiced and listened to records. I had - I still have  - a feeling that if I don't practice I will never be able to play. And Herb had all the Jazz records; I heard a lot of music, many people for the first time, on his records."

In September 1958 LaFaro played with Sonny Rollins in San Francisco, and later he worked with the same rhythm section behind Harold Land. “I think horn players and pianists have probably influenced me the most, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Sonny perhaps deepest of all. Sonny is technically good, harmonically imaginative, and really creative. He uses all he knows to make finished music when he improvises.”

“I found out playing with Bill that I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns, and form. I think a lot more imaginative work could be done within them than most people are doing, but I can't abandon them. That's why I don't think I could play with Ornette Coleman. I used to in California; we would go looking all over town for some place to play. I respect the way he overrides forms. It's all right for him, but I don't think I could do myself.”

“Bill gives the bass harmonic freedom because of the way he voices, and he is practically the only pianist who does. It's because of his classical studies. Many drummers know too little rhythmically, and many pianists know too little harmonically. In the trio we were each contributing something and really improving together, each playing melodic and rhythmic phrases. The harmony would be improvised; we would often begin only with something thematic and not a chord sequence.

'I don't like to look back, because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now. (I don't even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.) There are too many things to learn and too many things you can do, to keep doing the same thing over and over. My main problem now is to get that instrument under my fingers so I can play more music.” (1960)

…

Gary Peacock: The Beauties of Intuition 

As recently as a year ago, few persons would have numbered Gary Peacock among the more proficient young bassists in Jazz. Today there are few who would not.

Scott LaFaro's unexpected death was a loss in several senses, not the least of which was regarding his contribution to development of the future role of the bass in Jazz, Peacock's recent spurt of development is a gain for much the same reason. His playing has come far indeed from that heard on a Bud Shank record released about two years ago. He is sure, incidentally, that “although you may have an idea of where you are in your work, a record will show you where you really are - you and anyone else who hears it."

Truly contemporary bass playing probably can be said to begin with Charlie Mingus-and perhaps Wilbur Ware and Red Mitchell. The most provocative young bassists do not play a quarter-note walk, 1-2-3-4/1-2-3-4-they do not play "time" and they do not necessarily play a harmonic part. And the horn players know that they do not need them to keep time or provide changes, harmonic reminders. The newer bassists do not merely “accompany" others and take an occasional solo but participate more directly in the music.

In their various ways, truly contemporary bass players are melodists - percussive melodists, lyric melodists, or in LaFaro’s case and Peacock's, virtuoso melodists. Furthermore, like the young horn men, they explore their instruments even beyond what is supposedly their legitimate range and function.

The Peacock who suddenly burst through on recordings with Clare Fischer and with Don Ellis and Paul Bley is a Peacock who is learning to make his way in the most advanced groups and among the most challenging young players in jazz.

He was born in Burley, Idaho, in 1935 and grew up there and in Washington state and Oregon. He studied piano for about six months when he was thirteen, and in junior high and high school was a drummer in student bands. He heard a great deal of so-called western-swing music, which is very popular in the Northwest.

One of his earliest conscious exposures to jazz came when he is sixteen. "A trumpeter I knew played me some of those early records by Bird and Dizzy - Salt Peanuts and those things," he said. I was really amazed, and I asked him who the second alto player was! I could hardly believe him when he answered there is only one."

Peacock left home at seventeen and spent a year in Los Angeles, studying vibraharp for several months at Westlake College. From 1954 to 1956, he was in the Army, stationed in, Germany. It was then that his interest in music really began to take shape. He found himself the leader of a group in which he played drums or piano, and occasionally vibes. But then his bass player left, and Peacock picked up the instrument.

Suddenly things were different: "My hands went down right almost from the beginning. The instrument seemed to fall under my fingers. I never really tried to learn bass - it was as if I just started playing it."

After the service, he went back to Los Angeles, went on the road with Terry Gibbs, and subsequently worked with (as he puts it). every group in the area except Red Norvo's - Harold Land, Art Pepper, Dexter Gordon, Bud Shank . . ..” In the course of  it, his whole approach to the bass changed from the old one to the new.

'I don't know exactly when it happened," Peacock said. "It must have been gradual. Before I realized it, I was there."

It definitely happened later than one evening he remembers when he chanced to end up on the same bandstand with Ornette Coleman. ("When he started to blow, I just froze; I couldn’t play.") But it happened.

Then he no longer had any trouble with groups that improvised freely and no longer had to work only with players who go through every piece cyclically and harmonically, ever repeating the structure.

"Only for about six months in 1959 did I put in any extra practicing and exploring my instrument. I had begun to try things I couldn't execute properly and had to find a way to play them. The rest of the time I learned on the job, just by playing and listening. I grew quite unsatisfied with just playing time. It became redundant, a strait jacket. Along with several people, I found that if a tempo is simply allowed to exist, you don’t need to play it - it's even redundant to play it.”

"But it is a personal thing. If it's right for a given player time, okay. But if it isn't, it won't feel right to him or sound to his listeners. "

This latter observation reflects an attitude that several young players seem to have: an awareness that what is right for them to play or to search for is not necessarily right for everyone.  Peacock, for instance, talks readily of his great admiration for Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and for the Modern Jazz Quartet. But the MJQ holds still another lesson for him, for theirs is truly a group music, and future Jazz will be truly group music.

"You know the title of that LP of Ornette Coleman’s,” he asked, This Is Our Music? I think that tells the story. I think in the future, we will hear a group music by equal participants.  Each member is going to have to be a leader to some extent.”

"It will have to be that way, In my own experience, we work now with a kind of psychic communication. We just know when a drummer has finished a phrase and when he has finished a solo. We know when a horn player has finished developing his ideas.”

"Perhaps this is only the first stage, and we will have different ideas later on. Perhaps we will have more conscious reasons for what we do, but for now, things are evolving this intuitive way.”

Peacock has thought about the dangers, delusions, an, contradictions in a freer music, however.

"The pitfall in the concept of freedom is that total musical freedom invites chaos," he said. "And I think we should also remember that freedom isn't necessarily valid unless it produces something. Also, so-called self-expression is not necessarily musical or artistic. I think we should keep those things in mind when we play. And most of all, we have to know when to stop. We must know when we have said it all, or when it isn't happening.”

"But for myself at this stage, I know that generally my best playing comes when I don't think too consciously about what I'm doing, and frankly that doesn't bother me too much. You can be specific about logical causes and about emotional causes, but about intuition there are no reasons. You just do what the intuition says. Incidentally, I think Ornette Coleman plays by intuition, too, not just feeling, as some people say. Anyway, I think that now we just have to play out the intuitions and see what happens. After all, if you go so far wrong, you'll eventually get back to what's right. And the only way to find out about some of the things we're working on is just plunge in and do them."

About the attitude that it is up to each player to explore the possibilities of his instrument, Peacock said, "Musicians tend not to regard their instruments as a whole. They take only a section of what can be done. The bass has two worlds. At the bottom, it affects everyone, especially in rhythm. At the top, you are into the piano's range and are more of a horn. There you can't upset the time and rhythm.”

"The thing to do is ask, 'What can I do with texture? Dynamics? Timbre? What can I do with one note? What can I do with the whole range? And can I extend it?' These ideas are reaching a lot of players, and particularly bass players - especially, I should name Steve Swallow in this. They are asking these questions, and asking how the answers affect the group music. But a player should work these things out at practice, not on the job. A job is a place to play, not experiment.”

"Take Ornette Coleman. He takes a note, bends it, twists it, even spits it out. It's beautiful; it gives the instrument a new life. Jimmy Giuffre is doing the same sort of thing with the clarinet."

Peacock has substituted for Steve Swallow in Giuffre's current trio on a couple of occasions and considers the experience among the most musically exciting he has had, "Jimmy and Paul [Bley] don't need anyone keeping time - in fact, it would get in their way. But playing with them is very exacting. They have really broken through recently. Their new Columbia record tells the story."

If Bley is not working with Giuffre, he and Gary Peacock can probably be found together. They worked recently at a Sunday session at New York City's Five Spot, with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Pete LaRoca, after which Bley moved over to the Take 3 coffee house to take his place with Giuffre and Swallow. Peacock and Bley also have made a television appearance on New York's educational Channel 13, and Peacock recently played a weekend with tenorist Archie Shepp and trumpeter Bill Dixon. But players of their persuasion don't get much of the work yet.

Nevertheless, it is very important to Peacock to be in New York now. "It only took me one day here to know that this is the place,” he said. "In Los Angeles, the first thing you think of doing is relaxing. In New York, we play things and work things out things that need to be worked out. This is the place - the music the quality of the music, and the interest in it." (1963)

This audio track features bassist Gary Peacock’s original composition “Liddledabllduya” [i.e.: ‘a little dab will do you’] on which he is joined by Carmell Jones, trumpet, Bud Shank on alto saxophone, Dennis Budimir on guitar and Mel Lewis on drums.

Forrest Westbrook: "A True Artist"

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Jazz 'toons There was always music in Forrest Westbrook's house

By Robert Bush, The San Diego Reader, July 8, 2015

When local jazz pianist Forrest Westbrook passed away last year, his daughters Leslie and Yvonne had to clean out his City Heights apartment.

“We had the daunting task of clearing out 10,000 LPs, 4000 CDs, 33 speakers (hooked up!), and other audio equipment scattered about,” Leslie Westbrook informed The Reader via email. She also came across a potential treasure: “I did not know the tapes existed. Among the detritus of a lifetime, we came across...several boxes of reel-to-reels.”

The tapes included a never-released session led by Kansas City musician Carmell Jones (best known as the trumpeter on Horace Silver’s “Song for my Father”) with her father and bassist Gary Peacock.

“The process of releasing it [started with] finding a way to listen to the tapes to begin with. I didn’t know if they were still any good or how they would sound. My father had left his music to his best friend Jim West who lives in San Diego. Jim very kindly gave the tapes to me and my sister so we could try to get the music out to the world.”

Wall Street Journal writer Marc Myers put Leslie Westbrook in touch with Jordi Pujol, the founder of the Spanish record label Fresh Sound and an avid West Coast jazz fan. “So we met and talked about how we might do this. First we had to hear them! We took the tapes to an engineer in the San Fernando Valley — had a listen and went Wow! Then Jordi went about the arduous task of listening to the tapes and deciding if there was enough for a CD. There turned out to be enough for two or three.”

The mystery tapes were recorded in L.A. in 1960 and have been released on Fresh Sound as Carmell Jones: Previously Unreleased Los Angeles Session.

I asked Leslie Westbrook what she remembered about her dad the jazz musician. “Everything! I was breast-fed on jazz. I met Count Basie (and got his autograph) when my pop was working with June Christy. My father practiced his piano every day, and when I was a kid when I asked if I could watch TV, he said ‘Sure — with the volume turned off.’ So, I had a jazz soundtrack to my cartoons!

“My father was very modest, never promoted himself, and was very reluctant to record. [But] there was always music in the house.”

One often hears a lot about the vicissitudes of Life: how it moves in circles; exists in parallel universes; is always in the present because the past is a memory and the future hasn’t happened, yet.

But then, someone reaches out to you, in this case via the Jazz Journalists Association, and the next thing you know, Life is reconnecting with previous social circles and bringing past associations into the present.

I know this sounds philosophical, let alone confusing, but perhaps it will all become less so when I add a few more details about the sequence of events.

The “reaching out” was done by Leslie Westbrook, a journalist based in Carpinteria, CA [a coastal community located a few miles south of Santa Barbara].

It seems Nanette Evans, the wife of the late, iconic Jazz pianist, Bill Evans, had sent Leslie a link to my blog posting about one of Gene Lees’ Jazzletter Bill Evans essays. Gene and Bill were close friends for over twenty years [Bill died in 1980 at the age of fifty-one.]

Leslie was friends with Gene [who died in 2010] and Gene’s wife Janet who passed away in 2013.

Per the original contact message concerning Gene’s essay on Bill, I shared with Leslie that Gene had allowed me copyright permission to post a number of his Jazzletter essays on my blog as a way of experimenting with a digital format for his writings.

Leslie wrote in return that her father was pianist Forrest Westbrook and she also sent me a link to the Robert Bush San Diego Reader article on Forrest that forms the lead-in to this posting.

After I read Mr. Bush’s piece with its reference to the Fresh Sound Carmell Jones Quartet CD [FSR 867] on which her Dad, Forrest, appears with Gary Peacock on bass and Bill Schwemmer on drums, I asked her if a preview copy was available.

She graciously wrote back and indicated that she would ask Jordi to send one along.

Here’s where the small world part comes in.

In the introduction to my blog posting on Kenny Clarke I had written that Bill Schwemmer gave me one of my earliest drum lessons. The lesson contained some important points about how to play a ride cymbal beat and Bill used a recording on which Kenny Clarke plays to demonstrate this “feeling.” It was a lesson that I never forgot.

That lesson probably occurred in the summer of 1960 around the time that Forrest Westbrook along with Bill and Gary were recording with trumpeter Carmell Jones who had recently arrived in Los Angeles [August, 1960].

It also turns out that I had met her Dad, “back-in-the-day,” which I shared with her, but I didn’t tell her the context because I wanted to save it for this piece.

Sometime during the early 1960’s, Forrest Westbrook appeared at the Starlight Club with Wilfred Meadowbrooks on bass and Foreststorn Hamilton on drums.

Located at the corner of Moorpark and Tujunga in Studio City, CA, The Starlight Club is one of the many small, neighborhood bars that populate the San Fernando Valley, an area north of Los Angeles that became the home of many of the Jazz and Studio musicians based in southern California due to the surge of newly created affordable housing that filled out the Valley in the 1950s and 60s.

Off night and weekend Jazz gigs in these neighborhood cabarets abounded for the Valley-based musicians whose “day gig” often consisted of working in the Hollywood movie, TV and recording studios. [Oh, for the good old days when one could actually make a living as a musician.]

Of course, Foreststorn is better known by his nickname “Chico” and it was at this point in career that he was transitioning from “The Original Chico Hamilton Quintet” format with its woodwinds-guitar-cello front line to the quintet that he led from about 1963-66 that featured Charles Lloyd on tenor saxophone and flute, George Bohanon on trombone, Gabor Szabo on guitar and Al “Sparky” Stinson on bass.

I knew about Chico’s gig at The Starlight Room because I was friends with Sparky Stinson and we checked out the group when Sparky was talking with Chico about becoming a member of the soon-to-be-unveiled “New” Chico Hamilton Quintet.

Sparky would call and and ask me if I wanted to go with him and listen to the “Forest Meadow Forest Trio,”his take on Forrest [Westbrook], Meadow[brooks] and Forest[storn]. [Did I mention that musicians sometimes have very weird senses of humor?]

I had heard Wilfred and Chico before, but Forrest Westbrook’s piano playing was new to me and it just knocked me out. He reminded me of a cross-between Lennie Tristano and Wynton Kelly because he’d get these low rumbling riffs going on the bass keys ala Tristano while sprinkling blues-inflected single-notes phrases in the middle and higher registers of the piano; shades of Kelly at his best.

Well, one thing led to another, and Sparky and I sat in with Forrest for a portion of a last set on two, separate occasions.

It’s one thing to listen to another musician from a place in the audience, but quite another to “feel” their music from the drum chair as it is being played. Forrest really explored the piano the way that Lennie Tristano, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor explored the instrument: the words free, adventurous, and unexpected come to mind. And when he went out on these forays, he expected the drummer to “stay-at-home” so as to become a beacon for his “return home” [i.e.: to more conventional playing].

You have to keep in mind that Forrest was doing this stuff years before the “Free Movement” came into vogue. In actuality it was more rhythmic displacement [where the motif is moved to different beats in a bar, keeping the motif's rhythmic structure intact.] than “Free Jazz” and some of his contemporaries including pianists Bill Evans, Paul Bley, and some of Dave Brubeck’s wild rides before he got into the odd time signatures also display this approach.

Discipline and a great awareness of where you are in the music are essential when taking liberties with Jazz structures and Forrest was absolutely masterful at this in a very non-ostentatious way. He wasn’t showing off; but he wasn’t playing it safe, either. It’s just how he heard the music. One minute he’s laying down this far out stuff and the next he’s popping single-note blues phrases that cook the time along like Count Basie, Red Garland or Wynton Kelly.

In addition to the more direct reconnections with my past associations with Forrest Westbrook and Bill Schwemmer, there was also a six-degrees-of-separations connection with bassist Gary Peacock and trumpeter Carmell Jones as I heard both of them perform at the Drift Inn, a combination seafood restaurant and Jazz Club, as members of alto saxophonist Bud Shank’s quintet which also featured Dennis Budimir on guitar and Frankie Butler on drums. Located in Malibu, California, its bamboo decor with tiki-heads popping out everywhere was very reminiscent of the early years of another beach town Jazz club - The Lighthouse Cafe - which was located further south in Hermosa Beach, Ca.

Gary and drummer Gene Stone were members of one of pianist Claire Fischer’s earliest trio and bassist Harvey Newmark and I spent a glorious afternoon auditioning with Claire at his beautiful Laurel Canyon home in the San Fernando Valley foothills when Gary went to New York and Gene joined another band.

With the exception of my reference to Bill Schwemmer’s drum lesson in the introduction to my blog posting about Kenny Clarke, all of these memories lay dormant for many, many years.

The arrival of Leslie’s note and Jordi Pujol’s kindness in sending along a preview copy of Carmell Jones Quartet CD [Fresh Sound FSR 867] shook these recollections free from my subconscious.

Here’s more about Forrest’s career from Jodi’s insert notes to the CD:

“Another rewarding thing about these early Carmell Jones recordings is to discover a pianist as highly talented as Forrest Westbrook. It is hard to understand how he remained so overlooked for so long, and that no record producer offered him a record date until years later. These recordings, found only a year ago, make the neglect of such a fine artist a matter for great regret.

Forrest, a second generation Californian, was born in Los Angeles, California on August 29, 1927. He grew up in the small town of Nuevo, California where he attended Nuevo Elementary School and Perris Valley High School. He studied piano from the age of seven and had a natural musical talent inherited from his mother, Flossie Jolly Westbrook, who played the piano and sang in church choirs.

In the 1950s, he was part of the West Coast jazz movement in Los Angeles, playing clubs, even burlesque houses, and jamming with friends at home, which always required large living rooms to accommodate his piano and audio equipment.

In July 1954, Forrest Westbrook played The Tiffany Club with the Art Pepper-Jack Montrose Quintet that included his good friend Bob Whitlock on bass, and Billy Schneider on drums. They alternated sets with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet.

While jazz was trying to survive in a rock and roll world, Westbrook worked jazz clubs, toured with jazz singer June Christy, appearing at an NAACP benefit with Count Basie and with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars in 1963, among other gigs and occasional studio dates. Although reluctant to record — he felt that improvisational jazz was an art that should be left to its time and space — he did record two albums. He played Electar on the first album of electronic jazz on Verve records titled: "Gil Melle Tome VI, the Jazz Electronauts". His lasting musical legacy is what he considered his real music — preserved for posterity in the album "This Is Their Time, Oh Yes!" on Bill Hardy's Revelation label.”

The following video features Forrest on Willow Weep for Me from the Carmell Jones Quartet CD [Fresh Sound FSR 867].