Max on Monk

Max on Monk

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

The “Max” in the title of this piece does not refer to the more obvious connection to Thelonious Monk – drummer, Max Roach – but rather, to one of the more original, urbane and erudite perspectives in Jazz writing, that of, Max Harrison.

To attribute to Max his comments about Monk in the opening sentence of the following essay “… his singular originality was enough to ensure a hostile reception” – would be to put the matter lightly as Mr. Harrison’s musings always seemed to inflame passions wherever and however they were expressed.

Perhaps the strong reactions from some Jazz fans engendered by Max’s opinions had to do with the fact that he generally knew what he was talking about and wasn’t afraid to express his views very directly.

He’s not always easy to read, but if one is willing to make the effort, one usually comes away from Max’s essays well-rewarded with more knowledge and a totally different “take” on Jazz and its makers.

Here’s a sampling.

© -  Max Harrison/Jazz Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“If his singular originality was enough to ensure a hostile reception, it still is ironic that for many years comment on Monk centered around his supposed incompetence as a pianist. On his best days his public perfor­mances demonstrated, with a clarity which no recording ever could approach, that this musician was, in his highly individual command of the instrument and absolute control of his especial musical resources, as remarkable a virtuoso as, say, Earl Hines. The two transcendent techniques were, obviously, quite different, and in Hines's case the dazzling texture of his music, although shaped by an eminently characteristic melodic and rhythmic invention, was firmly rooted in the scale, arpeggio and chordal formations that have always provided the basis of tonal keyboard music.

In sharp contrast, Monk's pianism, strictly in accord with other aspects of his work, if it did not lead us to go quite so far as Andre Brassai, who wrote "awkwardness means greatness and lack of skill means talent and these things are signs of genuine creativity" (i), still had little connection with established conventions, and was of a purer, more directly musical order. His strength lay not in complex executive feats but in a deployment, at once sensitive and vividly incisive, of some of the basic elements of jazz: time, metre, accent, space. This is why, with minor exceptions like the Dutchman Stido Astrom, his influence was not on other pianists but on players of other instruments: the lessons he offered were purely musical, not arising of necessity out of the keyboard.

Certain of Monk's recorded solos, or sections of them, consist of rhythmic variations on the thematic line with shifting metres and evolving patterns of accentual displacement. When he first appeared, in the 19408, such a method seemed dangerously radical in comparison with the then usual system of basing improvised lines solely on the chordal harmonisation of the theme, not on the theme itself. That was because people who listened to Monk had never heard Jelly Roll Morton, and people who knew of Morton's use of motivic development wished to hear nothing of Monk. To both, of course, thematic varia­tion was an essential process.

Much was made of Monk's harmonic innovations, and his pungent, hard-biting sonorities were the aspect of his language which aroused nearly as much adverse criticism as his playing. Yet this shows how right Stanley Dance, a tireless advocate of progress in jazz, always a friend of the latest development, was to complain of the jazz audience's frequent "inability to appreciate the joy of the musician in expression through harmonies rich and strange", of listeners' "narrowed sen­sibility which does not permit them to perceive, through its subtlety and complexity, the inner integrity of much of the later jazz" (2). Certainly in Monk's harmony, and perhaps more immediately than in his exceptionally subtle rhythm, we apprehend a needle-sharp in­telligence which rigorously avoids the commonplace.

Yet however striking this music may be on rhythmic and harmonic planes, it is always informed and directed by the requirements of melody. If the melodic construction is often severe in its economy this is because Monk knew precisely what he wanted to say and how to say it, because he had full command both of his ideas and their means of communication. Thus is explained much of the immense temperamental drive and magnetic cogency of his finest work—again, not fully conveyed on any recording. In his most representative moments all effort was devoted to the true expressive aim, none wasted on mere decoration. Such control is an authentic sign of mastery, but naturally Monk could not bring it off every time; indeed, he was in the same situation as a sculptor for whom one false stroke could ruin the whole statue.

In fact it is misleading to discuss the separate aspects of Monk's work too much in isolation. All elements of rhythm, melody and harmony interact so closely that it is unrealistic to consider one without the others. Monk did not offer an assemblage of easily identifiable trade marks in the manner of a popular soloist: his improvisations are new wholes, not just accumulations of pleasing objects. He was, in short, a composer, not simply because he wrote many 'tunes', or even themes, but because the compositional mode of thinking is evident in everything he did. One instance is his accompanying of other improvisers, for, instead of providing the normal type of chordal support, he often set modified fragments of the theme beside—not behind—the soloist's line in such a way as to give extended performances a closer-knit feeling of thematic reference. A different illustration is his treat­ment of popular songs like Smoke gets in your eyes, where he abstracts and rearranges the components to a quite drastic extent.

Just as Monk's pianism was unusually direct in its musicality, so his recordings, for all their self-consistent idiosyncrasies, have a curious air of objectivity. Even when the choruses follow the conventional AABA pattern of four eight-bar phrases, they are in the tradition of 'com­positions for band', like Morton's Cannonball blues or Bix Beiderbecke's Humpty Dumpty, rather than jazz versions of mere songs. As such, pieces like Epistrophy or Criss cross are altogether foreign to the world of pop­ular music in a way that, for example, even masterpieces of transmuta­tion such as Coleman Hawkins's Talk of the town or Charlie Parker's Embraceableyou can never quite be. And, with a few exceptions like the train piece Little roo tie-too tie, his works never attempt to establish a particular atmosphere, as does Mood indigo by Duke Ellington, or to suggest a specific place, like Tadd Dameron's Fontainebleau.

They are, rather, investigations of perfectly specific musical ideas, such as the minor seconds idea of Mysterioso or the diminished fifth ideas of Skippy, which arise out of his unusually acute awareness of the expressive weight of a given melodic interval or rhythmic or harmonic pattern (3). If, however, there remains, even in the most violent

passages, a kind of detachment, a feeling of objective exploration, it should not be imagined that all Monk offers is a series of abstractions. It is his achievement that in following such a path he created jazz which balances the rival claims of surprise and inevitability. Such music, to quote Brassai again, is "a rebellion against the misdeeds of a mechanised civilisation" (i), but also shows the artist, at an extreme pitch of technical and psychic tension, coming to terms with violence and disorder in the self and in the public world; indeed, that presumably is what its reconciliation of opposites is really about.

Monk's best jazz has, then, a more substantial intellectual content than most, and, while it would be naive to imagine that lessens its power to move us, this world is not the easiest to enter. The private, self-contained nature of his music, its strange, mineral toughness, make it hard to grasp, and help explain the disproportionate popularity of a relatively untypical piece like Round about midnight. It may also account for undue emphasis on the humour in his work. A sharp wit, as ever manifesting itself in directly musical terms, is clear in such things as his caricature of Tea for two, with sophisticated bitonal harmony countered with deliberately stiff rhythms. But whenever we saw Monk at the piano he presented that admirable and, in the jazz world, rare spectacle of a serious artist wholly possessed by the urgency of the matter in hand, the creation of music. Humour was evident in his eccentric platform demeanour—away from the instrument—which, however offhand, clearly aimed if not to amuse then at least to dis­concert. This may be regarded as a characteristically oblique com­ment on the social isolationism and outright rejection of the audience practised by other musicians of his generation, such as Charlie Parker. With typical parochialism, the jazz community believed the boppers' attitude to be unique, and uniquely reprehensible, while, as Monk's very dryness implies, it was a mild gesture compared, say, with the cubist painters' hermeticisation of content several decades earlier in protest against a commercialised academic tradition.

It is a deceptive simplification to say that we get the art we need and deserve, yet it may be that Monk was a little like the court jesters of old, who clothed their home-truths in just sufficient foolery. Whenever we saw him, the stiff-limbed, ungainly movements and bland smile appeared to be those of a buffoon, yet the harsh rhythms and acidulated dissonance of the music he played us said something altogether different (4).”

Jazz Journal, June 1961, as quoted on pages 28-31 of Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect, New York: Crescendo Publishing, 1976.

Footnotes:

1   Andre Brassai: Graffiti (Stuttgart, 1960).

2  Stanley Dance:  'Towards Criteria' in Jazzbook 1947 edited by Albert McCarthy (London, 1947).

3  Certain of these "specific ideas" are helpfully illuminated by some of Andre Hodeir's treatments of Monk themes, which are in effect musical   instead   of  verbal   commentaries.   Instances   are   his variations on Mysterioso titled Osymetrios /and // (American Philips PHM2OO-O73)   and   his   atomisation   of Round  about   midnight (American Epic LN3376).

4  Further reading: Lucien Malson: Les Maitres du Jazz (Paris, 1952; rev. ed. 1972); Gunther Schuller: 'Thelonious Monk', Jazz Review, November 1958; Max Harrison: 'Thelonious Monk' in Just Jazz 3 edited by Sinclair Traill (London, 1959); Grover Sales: 'Monk at the Black Hawk', Jazz, Winter  1960; Nat Hentoff:  Thelonious Monk—a List of Compositions Licenced by B.M.I. (New York, 1961); Nat Hentoff:  The Jazz Life (New York,  1961); Andre Hodeir: Toward Jazz (New York, 1962); Wilfrid Mellers: Music in a New Found Land (London, 1964); Max Harrison: entry on Monk in Jazz on Record edited by Albert McCarthy (London, 1968); Jack Cooke: entry on Monk in Modern Jazz: the Essential Records 7945-70 edited by Max Harrison (London, 1975).

Dizzy Gillespie Story - Spending Time With The Writings of Max Harrison

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

Many of Max Harrison’s singular comments on Jazz and its makers were reprinted in A Jazz Retrospect which is made up of a selection of his 1950s/60s reviews from the Jazz Review and Jazz Monthly magazines.

Max belongs to a select group of original thinkers that include Philip Larkin, Benny Green, Martin Williams and Stanley Crouch who speak their mind very directly about their likes and dislikes about Jazz, often in a style that is as much caustic and acerbic as it is literary.

His writings about John Lewis and Tadd Dameron have previously featured on JazzProfiles, to which we now add this insightful, yet, very opinionated essay on the early recordings of Dizzy Gillespie.

© -Max Harrison/Jazz Review, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Gillespie's innovations long since passed into the life blood of jazz and it scarcely is necessary to discuss the elements of his style now. Yet although the extent of his influence cannot be questioned, his position in the music has for many years been quite different from what it was just after World War II, when bop made its first impact. For non-American listeners that impact was initially felt through the records he made, several with Charlie Parker, for obscure, long-defunct companies such as Guild or Musicraft in 1945-46. To have gone on listening to these for some thirty years has been a considerable enrichment because, although on first acquaintance they seemed to possess a rather contrived audacity, they have retained a power to delight, even astonish. Uneven in musical quality they certainly are, but all contain great moments, and it long ago became obvious that the finest of them are among the classics of recorded jazz, their value as unlikely to diminish in the future as it did in the past.

Many factors went into the making of postwar jazz: some were the creation of individuals and some were the result of a cross-fertilisation of ideas; some had been for years developing in the jazz of the 1930s, even of the late '20s, others had come from spontaneous insights. The early Gillespie records were the first attempt at a synthesis of all the playing and thinking which had gone on, but if by 1945 the key musicians were ready, the record company supervisors were not. It took them a while to grasp that something fresh had occurred, and so on many sessions boppers were confronted with players whose ideas had been completely formed in the 19305. In view of the new music's deep roots this was not too damaging, but unquestionably these early performances, in terms of style, are less than completely integrated.

Melancholy baby, Cherokee and On the Alamo, recorded under the clarinetist Joe Marsala's name, are representative here, setting Gillespie in a tight, jivey late-swing framework. He sounds like a disciple of Roy Eldridge—not in the negative sense of a Johnny Letman, mechanically echoing the mannerisms, but as one who has divined further possibilities within that idiom and can see where they might lead. His continuity already is better than Eldridge's, his use of the upper register less illogical. Blue and  boogie, the first item recorded under Gillespie's own name, finds him in comparable circumstances but achieving more positive results. The underlying pulse is wrong, and his execution is less immaculate than it soon became, yet the lengthy trumpet solo, although loosely put together, includes features of melodic invention, rhythmic structure, harmonic thinking and tone-colour that were to remain characteristic. Everything else in the performance is made to sound redundant, and, the 1944 recordings of Parker with Tiny Grimes and Thelonious Monk's with Coleman Hawkins notwithstanding, this improvisation is the earliest fully-fledged statement that we have from a major postwar jazz musician.

Soon Gillespie recorded with a more apt personnel, including Parker and Clyde Hart, who pecks out the chord changes with discretion and sympathy, and was among the few pianists qualified for this sort of music in 1945. Grooving high and Dizzy atmosphere are typical of the boppers' initially rather drastic renewal of the jazz repertoire, and are fertile ground for improvisation, their themes packed with musical incident yet enigmatically honed to bare essentials. Parker, indeed, is especially fluent, revealing a side of his musical personality not much represented on studio recordings: his tone has an airy, singing luminosity reminiscent of Benny Carter, and the alto saxophone solos on both these pieces are full of grace and elegance. This delicacy again characterised his work on the 1946 Ornithology session, and, to a lesser degree, the Relaxing at Camarillo date of the following year, but it was always rare.

Gillespie has two solos in Grooving high the first of which begins strikingly but collapses with a miscalculated descending phrase which leads into a bland guitar solo by Remo Palmieri. Later the tempo halves and he plays some beautifully shaped legato phrases that would then have been quite beyond any other trumpeter; this passage later provided the basis for Tadd Dameron's fine song If you could see me now. On the faster Dizzy atmosphere he takes a daring solo which conveys the essential spirit of the bop solo style and in itself is almost enough to explain the commanding position Gillespie held in the immediate postwar years. After the solos there is an attractive unison passage for trumpet and alto saxophone which flows into a deftly-truncated restatement of the theme—a neat formal touch.

The date which produced Hot house and Salt peanuts had a still better personnel, including Al Haig at the piano. Using the chord sequences of popular songs as the basis for new compositions was common during this period (though not an innovation, as so often claimed), and Dameron's Hot house is a superior instance of the practice, supplanting the usual AABA pattern of four eight-bar phrases with one of ABCA. Gillespie's solo here is effectively poised over Haig's responsive accompaniment, and, as on One bass hit part 1, contains definitive illustrations of the bop use of double-time. Parker digs deeper than at the previous date and shows himself well on course for his great Koko session, which took place a few months later and is dealt with on an earlier page.

Salt peanuts is a good, rather aggressive theme based on an octave-jump idea, and this arrangement, which includes some interesting harmonic touches, draws from the two-horn ensemble a fuller sound than usual. Parker seems less assured than before, yet Haig is good and Gillespie better. His entry could scarcely be more arresting, and emphasises as clearly as any moment on these recordings the absolute freshness of his imagination at this time: surely nobody else would then have dared to attempt this passage on the trumpet. The rest of his improvisation is played with equal conviction, but in another version of this piece, recorded soon after, some of the intensity is replaced with a sharper clarity of organisation.

Although Parker's work was uneven almost throughout 1945, there is no doubt of the added emotional depth he gave to these recordings, and Gillespie noticeably dominates more in his absence. Twelve months after the Salt peanuts date the trumpeter led a session on which—at last—all the participants were bop adepts. Sonny Stitt, who shared with Sonny Criss a reputation (which really belonged to John Jackson) of being the first man to emulate Parker's style, has a fair sixteen-bar solo in Oop bop sh'bam that is close to the master in tone yet far simpler in melodic and rhythmic concept. Its effect is completely obliterated, however, by Gillespie. The trumpeter did other fine things at this date, such as his solo on That's Earl, brother and his imaginative accompaniment to Alice Roberts's singing in Handfulla gimme, but on Oop bop sh'bam he plays with unrelenting intensity and perfect balance between detail and overall form that produce a masterpiece of jazz improvisation, worthy to stand beside Louis Armstrong's stop-time chorus on Potato head blues of almost exactly nineteen years before.

Despite the originality of their small combo work, to which almost equally powerful expression was given on several other titles in this series, including Confirmation, Bebop and Shaw 'nuff, the boppers were unable to establish a comparable orchestral idiom. In fact, due to its intimacy and relative complexity, bop, like New Orleans jazz, was inherently a music for small groups. The harmonic vocabulary, which scarcely was more advanced than Duke Ellington's of several years before, could easily have been written into band scores, but melodic and rhythmic subtleties derived from the leading soloists' improvisations could not. The linear shapes of the reed and brass scoring in Gillespie's earlier big bands, like that of Billy Eckstine which preceded them, did incorporate some new ideas, but included no innovations of ensemble texture comparable to those then being carried forward by Gil Evans with Claude Thornhill's band which are discussed elsewhere in this book. The boppers were able only to adapt their style to the big band rather than the converse.

Their best arranger was Gil Fuller, who, while possessing a good sense of traditional swing band style, and having an acute awareness of any large ensemble's requirements, managed to sacrifice fewer of the new ideas, to compromise less with the old. In fact, his scores, which are less subtle of mood and texture than Ellington's but more complex than Count Basic's, seem, in their use of the orchestra as a virtuoso instrument, to descend from Sy Oliver's work for Jimmy Lunceford. Marked differences arise because of Fuller's wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic vocabularies, yet both men used their orchestras as vehicles for dazzling ensemble display, with sudden contrasts that, however aggressive, never descended to Kentonesque melodrama. Fuller's imagination, like Oliver's, was disciplined, in a sense almost conservative, and his scores are characterised by clarity of texture, an exceptional fullness of sound whether loud or soft. And yet if there are orchestral scores which at least partially embody the spirit of the little bands of the mid-19405 they are Gerald Wilson's Grooving high, Oscar Pettiford's Something for you, both of 1945, and Fuller's 1946 Things to come, an adaptation of the small combo Bebop. Unfortunately they were all played too fast in the recording studio to produce their complete effect, and Fuller got this conception over more successfully in The scene changes, which he recorded for the obscure Discovery label three years later.

On neither Things to come nor One bass hit part 2 are Gillespie's solos at all happy (in fact he does better on Pettiford's Something for you). His inventive power is as evident as before, yet it is as if he had difficulty in shaping his material in relation to the heavier sounds and thicker textures of this setting—which is surprising in view of his prewar experience in swing bands. The above comments on the orthodox nature of his orchestra's library are borne out by a conventional statement of Dameron's excellent Our delight theme or by the saxophone writing in One bass hit part 2, but on the former, and also in Ray's idea, Gillespie responds to the themes' melodic substance with masterful solos that are better aligned with their accompaniment. On Emanon, basically a rather old-fashioned powerhouse blues, there are uncommonly forceful exchanges between leader and band, some agreeably pungent ensemble dissonance, a piano solo by John Lewis, and a striking passage for unaccompanied trumpet section. There seems no escaping the fact that in such relatively backward-looking pieces as this the boppers' attempts at orchestral jazz succeeded best.

It was also in 1946 that Gillespie made his first recordings with strings. These were of Jerome Kern melodies and remained unissued for many years because of objections made by that composer's widow to the allegedly bizarre treatment to which they were subjected. During 1950 he made another attempt and recorded eight miscellaneous titles which suggest that Mrs. Kern may have been right, even if for the wrong reasons. Eddie South, on some delightful records made in Paris with Django Reinhardt during the late 19305, proved that the violin is a fully viable jazz instrument, but this lead has never been followed up (least of all by the crudities of Stuff Smith). En masse, certainly, strings have been a consistent failure in this music, and it has been widely accepted that they cannot be employed in jazz due to their inherent sweetness. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a large number of works by twentieth-century composers, such as Schoenberg's String Trio, Bartok's Quartets Nos. 4 and 5, Xenakis's ST/4, or Boulez's Livre, which prove that this whole family of instruments can yield sounds as invigorating, indeed as harsh, as any found in jazz. In short what is wrong with the use of strings on jazz dates is the incompetence of the arrangers employed, and never was this more so than with Gillespie's 1950 attempts, where they were only one of a number of apparently irreconcilable factors.

For Swing Low, sweet chariot Johnny Richards wrote an absurd light-music introduction for the strings and then established the rhythm with—of all things in a Negro spiritual—Latin American percussion; a male voice choir sings not the rather sultry original melody but a commonplace new one, presumably also by Richards; Gillespie's trumpet solo has better continuity than we might expect in these circumstances, but a final touch of incongruity is provided by a return of the strings' introduction. On Alone together and These are the things I love the strings interrupt less often, and he manages a few dashing phrases in Lullaby of the leaves, but he never really sounds involved and it is impossible to understand his enthusiasm for this project, which was carried through at his instigation. On the Alamo typifies the whole enterprise, for although Gillespie blows with real power here, the trumpet passages are separated by interludes of quite offensive gentility from piano and strings —light music at its heaviest. If Interlude in C, a tasteless hodge-podge on a theme from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, seems to have the thinnest string writing of all it may only be due to comparison with that composer's far richer alternative being unavoidable.

The virtually complete musical failure of these 1950 items with strings may seem unimportant until we recall that already the previous year, with his conventionally-instrumentated band, Gillespie had recorded such inanities as You stole my wife, you horse-thief. A random sampling of his small combo recordings from about this period tells the same tale, and shows an almost catastrophic decline from the masterpieces of just a few years before. The champ, an excellent theme, gives rise to a fine trombone solo from J. J. Johnson, but Gillespie merely reshuffles his mannerisms, and the other players are frankly exhibitionistic. Tin tin deo or Birk's works, also from 1951, are only negative in their restraint—despite some good moments from Milt Jackson's vibraharp on the latter and Stardust, which features the trumpeter throughout, is distressingly pedestrian. The reunion session with Parker compelled Gillespie to make an altogether exceptional effort (e.g. his solos on take 2 of Relaxing with Lee or take 4 of An oscar for Treadwell), but the overall impression left by most of his records from this time is of an artist who no longer wishes to dominate, or even to control, his surroundings. And rarely did he ever again. Perhaps the reasons for this were psychological as much as artistic, but Gillespie's rarely swerving downward path from the classic small combo recordings he made during the immediate post war years was among the most saddening features of the jazz landscape in the 1950’s.

Jazz Review, November 1959”

Max Harrison Review of Jazz West Coast by Robert Gordon [From the Archives]

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

Along with Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960 and Alain Tercinet’s West Coast Jazz [currently available only to French language readers, Robert Gordon’s [“Bob” to his friends and I’m happy to include myself among them] Jazz West Coast forms a trilogy of information and documentation about a period of Jazz that is near and dear to my heart.

I experienced much of this style of Jazz first-hand and even performed it with a number of its luminaries.

Over the years, Bob has been kind enough to allow JazzProfiles to highlight each of the book’s ten chapters as separate blog features and even gave his consent to reproducing it in its entirety which you can locate via this link.

The author and critic Max Harrison has been described as one of the “… few great contemporary listeners.” What follows is the review he did for Wire Magazine [1987] of Bob Gordon’s book which is currently appearing on JazzProfiles.  It is interesting to note Max’s reference to Howard Rumsey in the opening line of his review as Howard died last week on July 15, 2015 at the age of 98!

I have attached a West Coast Jazz video playlist at the end of the review.

Max Harrison’s Review of Jazz West Coast BY ROBERT GORDON (Quartet Books, 12.95 pounds)

Wire Magazine 1987

“THE NEWS THAT Howard Rumsey will be 70 in November brusquely puts West Coast jazz of the 1950s into one sort of perspective. If his name now means nothing there are good, or rather had, reasons for the fact. As Michael James remarked a while back, if a style takes the public's fancy for a spell it is afterwards condemned to a bad press. Thus all boogie is forever "monotonous", all West Coast jazz "gutless and academic". This repetition of facile  pseudo-judgments, which constitutes a large part of jazz commentary, can only be a source of amusement to those who actually listen to the music and can hear what they listen to. Robert Gordon is one such eccentric, and his book admirably unsettles what has long been a comfortably settled questioned. Indeed, it is so much overdue as virtually to qualify as a brave venture on the parts of author and publisher.

Of course, the West Coast scene has always been far more diverse than the standard histories allow - when they admit such places as Los Angeles and San Francisco even exist, that is. It is also considerably older, as Gordon hints when he says that the Club Alabam on LA's Central Avenue goes back to the 1920s. Ornette Coleman was first heard of on the West Coast, which was the scene of Mingus's initial activities, was where the Clifford Brown-Max Roach group started, where Dexter Gordon and Eric Dolphy came from, where Dupree Bolton was recorded. Though discredited from an early date by such records as Liberty's Double Or Nothin'(a Howard Rumsey initiative), which features jazzmen from both coasts to singular advantage, New York/California polarizations, with all virtue residing in the former, always enjoyed wide currency. That is because they simplified, made things easy. But these crass generalizations took many victims, like the Curtis Counce group, which, if its Contemporary and Doortone LPs are anything to go by, ought to have a secure place in jazz annals, as should Paul Horn's combo. Gordon writes about these and comparable bands eloquently and at length, and they deserve it.

What we think of as specifically "West Coast" jazz, the work of Rogers, Giuffre, Manne, etc, will ultimately require discussion in conjunction with earlier and later cases of the "cool" vein of expression that recurs periodically in jazz history; and its more formal, and experimental, aspects will need to be set in relation to composing and arranging practices in other styles. For the present, Gordon concentrates almost exclusively on events in California during the 1950s, and this is wise for a first substantial book on the subject.

He starts back in the 1940s, naturally, with the appearance of Parker and Gillespie at Berg's in Hollywood, though he is careful to point out that was not the first time bop was heard on the West Coast. The Howard long been a comfortably settled questioned. Indeed, it is so much overdue as virtually to qualify as a brave venture on the parts of author and publisher.

McGhee-Teddy Edwards group was already in action, as were others that went unrecorded. Gordon tells of Parker's subsequent adventures and in dealing with the Central Avenue scene makes it clear just how much jazz was to be heard in places like LA. The chapter on Milton Michael Rajonsky and His Giants begins with the Capitol recordings of Miles Davis and Tristano, explains why such jazz would appeal to West Coast musicians, and passes on to Rogers's early experience with Herman and Kenton. It was out of this latter, plus the contributions of the participants, that the characteristic sounds and textures of the Giants came, not from the simple watering-down of Davis's Capitols proposed by most histories. Gordon, though bypassing the Clickin' With Clax LP, has excellent comments on the music, for example on Shorty Courts The Count an imaginative venture that was the cause of much pious horror ("Travesty!") when first issued in Britain.

A chapter on Mulligan tackles the Quartet, Tentet, Chet Baker's earliest independent ventures. Too bad Gordon was nor able to take account of all the Baker-Russ Freeman material that has lately appeared on Mosaic. "The West Coast Sound" deals with Manne, the Almeida-Shank anticipations of bossa, nova, Niehaus, Jack Montrose. Two chapters are given to "California Hard", and these tell of Brown-Roach, Joe Maini, Hampton Hawes, the Gellers, Counce, Pepper Adams, more on Baker, etc. Among numerous valuable reminders is one about the Gellers' Emarcy LPs, which never had the circulation they continue to deserve. As Gordon remarks, such items "were largely ignored by influential East Coast critics".

But now this book has appeared they should be ignored no longer. Indeed, as with other good writing like this, one of its virtues is that we are led back to music that has been too long neglected, Such as the marvelous Getz-Brookmeyer Shrine concert performances or the 1955 Jack Montrose Sextet, However, because such a large quantity of relevant material invites consideration Gordon is inevitably selective, and one is surprised that he gave space to such bland efforts as Manne’s My Fair Lady and Paich’s Art Pepper Plus Ten. Better to have tried, say Music to Listen to Red Norvo By with its Montrose Poeme and Bill Smith’s 20-minute Divertimento and Duane Tatro's "Rubricity". The latter has another piece, "Maybe Next Year", on the Smack Up! LP which the author meets with in the chapter on Pepper, and while he recognizes it as "a strikingly original composition", one regrets that he did not go on to investigate Tatro's fascinating Jazz for Moderns LP of 1954-55.

In fact he is not quite independent enough. He stoutly defends the West Coast scene as a whole, and shows ample justification. But he also draws close to the once-fashionable dismissals of the sort of sophisticated and complex writing found on Tatro's record, on Giuffre's Tangents in Jazz, etc- Not too much should be made of this because a good account is given of the often exploratory compositions by Rogers, Montrose, Giuffre and Cooper that make up Contemporary's Shelly Manne Vol. 2, and of the same leader's adventurous The Two and The Three. Gordon is critic enough to tackle such material, as his detailed comments on the orchestrations in Manne's The West Coast Sound or the form and harmony of Horn's "Dun-Dunnee" and "Tall Polynesian" prove. Yet he sometimes retreats to a notional "East Coast" attitude that "straight-ahead blowing" is the only satisfaction players or listeners can legitimately seek in this music, anything beyond having "only a peripheral relationship to jazz". Again, lie commends certain LPs as "always easy to listen to". Should good music always be easy to listen to?  Remember Ives's "Very pleasing - if you want to be pleased.”

Undoubtedly the book's chief omission, however, is that while it contains many references to Giuffre, there is no discussion of the large body of music which he has brought into being. It is unaccountable that LPs such as the darkly seductive Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet or The Music Man should be ignored. The latter is, musically speaking, almost the sole survivor among countless jazz versions of Broadway show scores which appeared during those years.

Not all the book's chapters have been mentioned, but consideration is given to later work by Rogers, Montrose, Baker, Teddy Edwards, to Cy Touff, Chico Hamilton, Shank (New Groove), Joe Gordon (Lookin' Good), Harold Land (The Fox, of course), Richie Kamuca, Elmo Hope, Bill Perkins, Frank Morgan. There is a piece on the LA underground which has fine comments on Dolphy and particularly Ornette Coleman. Indeed, what is said here about the latter's early days well complements John Litweiler's treatment of the Atlantic ILPs in The Freedom Principle.

Gordon's book is, of course, recommended. There is a great deal more to be said on the subject, yet it fills an obvious gap on the library shelf. Unlike most of what comes out of the US these days, it is written in decent English, and it has been well researched. The factual errors are minor and only a few need be mentioned here. Parker's "Koko" session was in November, not December, 1945. The Fox was not Dupree Bolton's recording debut. Clifford Brown's dates with West Coasters did not precede all titles made by the group with Roach. The five-trumpet instrumentation of Rogers's "Astral Alley" and "Serenade In Sweets" was not "unique": As you see, the nits scarcely merit picking. But this book should be picked up, and all the records in its Annotated Discography listened to. Listened to and heard.”