Claude Thornhill, Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan: Three of a Mind

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

“Well, I suppose it must have been after the Krupa band that I started to play the baritone. I don't really know why I did it. I hung out sometimes with a baritone player named Johnny Dee who played with Frankie Carle's band. He was very interested in horns for their own sake. I don't know if he was teaching or buying and selling horns, but for some reason I made the decision. I don't know if it was anything that Johnny said, or if he had an influence on me or what it was. I can't recall. But it seemed like a pretty arbitrary thing to do. I took the old horns that I had—my alto, tenor, and my clarinet—and sold them, and decided I was just going to play baritone. Why I did it, I never really understood, because I hadn't really been playing it. I wasn't playing baritone with Ike Carpenter, I wasn't playing baritone with Krupa's band ever, so it was just one of those kinds of left-field decisions that I've never been able to rationalize in any way, but that's what I did. I was always kind of sorry that I did because I wound up never finding an alto I liked as much as the one that I sold. Later on I went and bought one, and I never played it much because I never liked it. Same thing with the tenor. So it was all of those things that kept me playing baritone. I wasn't even tempted to play the other horns. And that was the beginning of it. I started going to jam sessions playing nothing but baritone. When I worked with a band it was on baritone.

I had always been fascinated with the role the baritone played in the band. It wasn't just the bottom note, instrument or ensemble. But a lot of the bands, a lot of the arrangers that I liked used the baritone in a way that was very melodic. And, of course, Ellington's band, the way it appears is that Duke wrote the top line of the ensemble, the melody line for the trumpet, and he wrote a bottom line that was the baritone. There was a lot of contrary motion in these two lines, and then you could figure what the rest of the section is doing based on these two main lines. So that means the baritone line was essential to the ensemble, and I liked that very much. ….

Most of the bands when they added a fifth saxophone, a baritone sax, they stuck it on the bottom like a tuba, which can be boring to play. But if you've got something interesting in the ensemble, it's a great register. It's like playing the cello in an orchestra, which is a beautiful register in relationship to the whole ensemble.

In fact, I've often thought, when people ask me, "Why did you choose baritone instead of alto?" I said, "Well, if I had been a string player in my youth, I probably would have chosen cello over violin for the same reason." There's just something about the register that you are attracted to, that you choose to play in. The cello and the baritone are both very much human voice registers.”

- Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]

“Gil, instead of offering any advice at all, was mad at me. That was no help. I really needed some direction. Somebody had to tell me because I didn't know how to deal with people. It was hard to get along because I've always, with my quick temper . . . things would erupt out of my mouth that were not what I wanted to say but then the damage would be done and I didn't know how to undo it. That led to a lot of personal trouble for me in dealing with people.” 

- Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]

As Gerry moved from his early associations with the Gene Krupa, Tommy Tucker and Elliot Lawrence big bands, his next musical environment found his music shaped and molded by a tenure with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra and one of its principal arrangers, Gil Evans.

Also reflected in the following piece is Jeru’s astute awareness - Mulligan was a keen observer of people, places and things. He didn’t miss much about what was going on around him.

Unfortunately, though, his observational acumen notwithstanding, this was still a period when the early Mulligan lacked the social skills he needed to interact successfully with people in general and other musicians in particular.

CLAUDE AND GIL from Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]

“There is a kind of irony about the Thornhill band, or a coincidence at least. I had loved the band as a kid still in high school, and I started getting Thornhill records because the sound of the band was beautiful. I always thought that Claude approached writing for a dance band as if it were an orchestra, and even though there were no strings, he always used, in the early band especially, two clarinets. A lot of the time people thought there were French horns in the band, but there weren't. In the early band it was just five brass and the four saxes plus two clarinets, and he managed to get those orchestral sounds that way. It was the clarinets that did it, not the French horn. Later on he did have French horns because that enhanced the thing and gave it more depth, but even so, as an orchestration device, you can get those kinds of orchestral, faraway sounds that they did so well. There was always imagination in the arrangements. They always came up with some kind of unique approach to tunes. There were some things they played that were just so imaginative and beautiful to me, and he had a great vocal group that they used in interesting ways.

At one period during the early war years, or even before the war, maybe starting in 1939 or so, Glenn Miller had a daily half-hour broadcast. It was a very popular show even though it was on at 6:00 a.m. or what seemed like an ungodly time, but it was, I suppose, before the news or after. It became like an important slot for a music program. It was very popular.

Then, after a while, they stretched the show and did another segment that had Claude Thornhill's band on it. So for a while it was Glenn Miller, I think for a half-hour, and then Thornhill's band for a half-hour. I loved the band. Then when Miller and his band were drafted into the service, Claude was given the Glenn Miller time slot, so he was really set up to become the most popular band in the country. And it was popular. People loved it.

So things were really looking up for a while and then, after not too long a time, Claude got drafted and it wasn't a high-profile draft. He chose to go into the navy and Miller got into the air force; I guess it was still called the air corps then. Miller was made a major and was high profile. And you know, they made a big fuss about it, and it was something that everybody felt something about.

Claude, on the other hand, ended up being like a chief petty officer or something because the navy wasn't about to make any musicians into officers. They figured that the upstart air force could do that, but the navy was not about to breach tradition. So none of the musicians were made officers. Claude became the piano player in Artie Shaw's band, and Shaw was a chief petty officer. I don't know what rank they gave to Claude, but number one, it was low profile, and number two, it was really tough because they sent those guys out to the South Pacific and they had some hair-raising stories to tell.

Artie left after a while. I don't know how long he was out there. Claude took it over, and from all of the accounts that I've heard about it, Claude was really remarkable out there. He'd play a piano if they had one or he'd play accordion if they didn't. He proceeded to try to make good music for the guys, island hopping for God's sake, flying island to island and going around playing for the guys. I mean, it was really physically tough and I don't know how many years they did that; really something.

So finally, when the war was over and Claude came back, I heard that they were reorganizing, and I was back in New York staying at the Edison Hotel. I had a room that was on the back of the building, which meant it faced the back of all these other buildings. So it was like a great big, not just a little air shaft, but a big air well between the buildings.

The first morning I was there I hear music, and I open up my window and I say, "My God, that sounds just like Claude Thornhill’s band. It must be somebody playing records or something somewhere," and I listen. They play the thing through and a while passes, and they start playing the thing again and they stop. I say, "My God, they're rehearsing," and it turns out my room was just about over where the rehearsal hall was.

I had this friend who was like one of my crazy Texas friends who just loved music. He was a guitar player, but he just loved to be on the scene and he was fun-loving. His name actually was David Wheat but his nickname was Buckwheat, and it fit him down to the ground. He was really a character. He showed up in my room and he had some good Texas pot or something, so we'd sit there and smoke and listen to Thornhill's band as long as they rehearsed. For the whole week, every morning and into the afternoon, the band would be rehearsing.

So I heard them when they were putting it together again. I was like the kid in the candy store. I never did go down to the rehearsals at that point because I always hated to interrupt some place if I didn't know somebody.

At some point I had gone back to Philadelphia and I was living there. One day I got a postcard from Gil Evans that said, "What the hell are you doing in Philadelphia? Come to New York where everything is happening. . . . Gil."

I had met Gil Evans, most likely when I was with Krupa's band. I remember going to some place in New York and I met Gil, who was there backstage, and we became friends.

I said, "Well, I guess you're right." I took off for New York and found myself a place to live and proceeded to hang out at Gil's place most of the time. Finally, Gil talked to Claude and Claude invited me to write for the band, and it was just kind of a natural evolution.

My first arrangement was "Poor Little Rich Girl," which Claude liked a lot. So they used to use that as the opener from then on, kind of the warm-up piece. Gil and Claude always felt that Gil's writing and my writing, and also Bill Borden’s writing, all kind of fit together. Even though there were different stylistic things, they were kind of complementary to each other.

So that worked out nicely, and I wrote for the band for quite a while. I was very much in awe of Claude, you know. Claude was such a shy man and I was always basically kind of shy and reticent, so our conversations together were always a lot of hemming and hawing, and neither of us could talk to each other.

I never intended to play with the band, but they were going out on a tour and Gil and Claude wanted me to go with the band at that point. What had happened was we spent a lot of time having sessions in New York. Whenever the band was in town, the rhythm section, who were all kind of disciples of Gil, would always get together and blow with Danny Polo, the clarinetist, and maybe one or two other guys.

I was playing with them a lot in that way, so it seemed a natural evolution to go out and play with the band for a while. I was out with them for a few months, I guess. It wasn't a terribly long time and it wasn't the greatest period for the band either, because that was the time when things were starting to fall apart in the whole music business. I think they had a hell of a time keeping the band working and getting a price for the band. It started to happen in 1948. That must have been kind of a crucial year. The bands started to disband one after another because the guys just didn't have the money to sustain themselves. Duke, for years, sustained himself on his composer's royalties and ASCAP royalties and sank the money into the band and kept his band going. But not everybody had the means to do it. I remember Count Basie in the early 1950s went out with about a seven-piece band after he disbanded. Woody even, for a while, had a small band so it really died very quickly; going from having hundreds and hundreds of bands all over the country, it just sort of disappeared.

The focus was moved. I guess all of show business was in kind of a ferment; they didn't know quite what to do with themselves. It was also a transition from the important days of radio. Radio was still it, you know. What the family did in the 1930s, man, you had your favorite show, the Jack Benny show and the Fred Allen show and Burns & Allen and so on and everybody would sit and look at the radio set. But radio was great, and as a social focus I always felt radio was a healthy evolution and television was unhealthy, because radio did things that you still had to use your own imagination; you did your own visualizing. Television does it all for you, you know; you're just kind of a blob who sits and reacts to all of this. When you compare the stuff they do now to the science fiction things they did in the 1940s and 1950s, I mean, there's no comparison, and the 1930s even more so, though I must say the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers things were quite satisfying when we were kids.

But musically it was a good period for me because the band traveled by cars most of the time at that period, and Danny liked to have his own car. Because I was young and strong, I always had the first gig of driving after the dance was over. Danny and I liked to take back roads instead of going on the main highways. We'd say, "This road looks good on the map." So we wandered around and sometimes wound up in the middle of somebody's farm in Indiana at six in the morning. We had some kind of eerie experiences that way.

Being with Danny was kind of a settling experience for me because Danny was very mature and gentle and kind of spiritual. There was a quality about the guys in "Thornhill's band who were close to Gil. They all had this kind of spiritual quality. There were lots of almost religious-sounding theories that these guys were always into. When they were in town, Gil and Billy Exner, the drummer, would talk all night. They were very much into mysticism. In fact, the relationship with Danny and Gil was mystical to begin with.

Gil had known Billy for years apparently, and Billy had been a seaman all his life. He didn't start playing drums until he was about forty, and some place he was in — South Africa or Asia or somewhere — he bought a picture of a man with an Asian face. It was just a beautiful picture: a very serene, wise-looking man with kind of a wispy gray beard. He brought that picture back and gave it to Gil. Well, sometime later, Danny Polo joined the band, and Danny Polo was the absolute spitting image of this picture that Billy had brought back. Man, he looked like a younger version, not that much younger either, because Danny had gray hair and his mustache had turned gray. He was probably in his fifties, but he was just identical to this picture. There were lots of little things like that about those guys that made for a kind of contact between them that was unusual.

The guys in the rhythm section, like Joe Shulman, the bass player, loved Billy — and they just had all these theories about how rhythm should be played and its function in the band. They were very influenced by the Basie rhythm section, where Freddie Green was really the control center of it. Barry Galbraith, guitarist with the Thornhill band, was very much in that mold. He played with the band in a similar way to Freddie, and later on when I got to know Freddie, I realized that there were other similarities in personality, which often happens — that people who are of similar physical structure and similar personality often have the same kind of approach to music. And there will be something recognizable in the ways that they play. There are these basic structural similarities. I was always fascinated with the ways that people's physical presence related to their playing.

A good example was Lester Young, whose music, especially when he was young and playing with the Basie band, had such grace and a flying, soaring quality to what he played. It just came out so effortlessly, and he would stand and look so graceful and hold his horn up, man, he was flying.

Bird, on the other hand, who was very down to earth, had a hard, straight-ahead kind of time. He could swing but it was in another kind of way altogether. Bird would walk on the stand and plant his feet like a tree, you know; he was like rooted to the ground and so he'd play this stuff that was fiery and with that same kind of earthy, basic beat going on. The ways that they held themselves physically related to the ways that they played.

I'll never forget one time I was standing outside Birdland and I turned around and saw Prez's hat kind of sailing up the stairs, you know, a porkpie hat with the big brim, and he'd sail it upstairs . . . effortlessly, man. He floated, you wouldn't see him taking steps, he'd kind of float out of the place and down the street and right behind him a couple of minutes later came Charlie. And Charlie comes stomping up the steps and the whole place rattled — such a total difference in personality.

Several of the musicians in the Thornhill band were drawn to Gil Evans. I think they gravitated toward him because Gil tended to be a philosopher. He adopted attitudes that I think were his associations with, probably, Zen Buddhism. That seemed to be the direction that he was evolving. But his attitudes were very considered and nonjudgmental, and there was always this kind of activity of thinking and theorizing and talking. It was an ongoing thing. So it was a very rewarding experience for everybody to be part of something, and you'd feel like something is happening. Gil was very much the focus of it. He brought that out in other people.

He was a leader in a way, but he refused the conventional roles of leadership, and he was very happy to let Claude be the one who had to deal with an audience and with agents and with the musicians. You know, it suited him just fine that he didn't have to do any of that and he could just concentrate on writing, which of course is a very selfish way to be and he realized that. It's a hell of a lot easier to let somebody else do all the worrying and all the kind of work you don't want to do.

But if you want a band and you want the things that go with having a band — the music — somebody's got to do it. Bands don't just happen. They don't run themselves, and they have to be self-supporting or they can't function.

As a consequence, Gil was a kind of guru to everyone, even though he really refused the role. There are things that happened to me during that period that if Gil had really offered advice, it's quite likely that I would have done things differently. But he didn't, so I went my way. After the fact, sometimes he would get mad at me because of what I did. I'd say that it's too late and I wasn't smart enough to go and undo what I had done.

For instance, at one point all of us, even though we were writing for Thornhill, needed to write for other bands to make money. And George Russell, he was always looking for other bands to write for, and Johnny Carisi, you know, we had to do it. One time I got an offer to write some stuff for Herbie Fields, a tune that he wanted that was a vocal for the girl singer. Herbie had a band that was kind of a stomping band. There were a couple of bands like that. I always liked them but I never really thought for myself that I had a feeling for writing for them. I was always trying for orchestral things, the interrelation of parts and counterpoints and all that kind of stuff, and these kinds of bands didn't function well in that kind of situation. These were ensemble bands, and that's what you should write for them.

Well, I did the best I could on this thing and brought it into the rehearsal and they liked it and it worked out all right, but Herbie wanted me to change the ending. Well, I was kind of stunned, not because I felt that it had been written in stone and that it couldn't be changed, it was because I couldn't change it. I didn't know what to do. I had done what I could do, and this was again my own limitations. So without saying anything to him, I collected the music and left. I'll never forget the look of astonishment on Herbie's face and on the musicians, like, "What happened?"

I went back and told Gil what had happened, and, you know, I was kind of being a little smart-ass about it I guess, like wanting somebody to give me a pat on the back or something, and he was furious with me. Well, I agreed with him, and I learned a little bit about being able to swallow false pride or to be able to overcome my own blustering, because I think we usually bluster, do dumb things in life, because of our basic inability to know the right way to do it. You make the worst mistakes trying to cover up what you're trying to hide. In this case, I was trying to cover up the fact that I didn't know what the hell to do, and I made a bunch of people unhappy. I really hurt Herbie's feelings. I never meant to do it and I didn't know how to undo it.

Gil, instead of offering any advice at all, was mad at me. That was no help. I really needed some direction. Somebody had to tell me because I didn't know how to deal with people. It was hard to get along because I've always, with my quick temper . . . things would erupt out of my mouth that were not what I wanted to say but then the damage would be done and I didn't know how to undo it. That led to a lot of personal trouble for me in dealing with people. I am embarrassed to this day to have hurt Herbie Fields' feelings when he had nothing to do with it. It was my inability to be able to do what he wanted with the arrangement. That was life. That was just one example.”

"My Year with Claude Thornhill" Richard Cox Talking To Gordon Jack

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

“Claude Thornhill’s 1940s big band helped shape the sound of modern jazz, and orchestral bop and ethereal ballads tinged with classical influences set the stage for masterpieces by Miles Davis and helped to inspire the West Coast or “cool jazz” movement of the 1950s. Thornhill and collaborator Gil Evans created a beautifully colored and sophisticated tapestry of music that would be referenced and known around the world.”

- Downbeat Archives

Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journal and a very generous friend in allowing JazzProfiles to re-publish his perceptive and well-researched writings on various topics about Jazz and its makers.

Gordon is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospective and he also developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ book Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.

The following article was published in the January, 2012 edition of Jazz Journal. 

For more information and subscriptions please visit www.jazzjournal.co.uk                                                                                                                             

© -Gordon Jack/JazzJournal, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“Reference books and discographies often overlook some fine musicians whose appearance on the jazz scene was a brief and fleeting one. Such a player is Richard Cox who played baritone sax with Claude Thornhill’s orchestra for a year in 1952. We met in his home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma where he reminisced about performing nightly with fellow-sidemen Bob Brookmeyer, Gene Quill, Brew Moore and Med Flory.

“I had just finished a small tour playing tenor with Jerry Wald’s band and was living at the President Hotel in Manhattan which is where most of the guys from the road-bands stayed. The tenor was my first love and Coleman Hawkins, Lucky Thompson, Allen Eager, Stan Getz and Zoot Sims were all my heroes. Anyway, a couple of friends came by and said Claude Thornhill was auditioning down at the Local 802 union hall because he was organizing a new band. I tried out with a lot of New York tenor players but didn’t make the cut. Luckily for me the baritone man didn’t show and Claude’s manager asked if I could play one. So the next day I went down to a music store and hired an instrument which you could do in those days.  The baritone chair was next to Claude and we started rehearsing some Mulligan charts like Poor Little Rich Girl and Jeru where the baritone occasionally descends in fifths with the piano. I was cutting it pretty well and I could tell Claude was happy because he was laughing and enjoying what I was doing. I got the job which paid $125.00 a week and I had to get a bass clarinet too because of all the doubling.  

“We started on a string of one-nighters and it was all sight-reading which didn’t give me any trouble at all. Claude was only interested in how well I read the book because the baritone was not an important solo horn in that band. In fact I can’t remember having any solos at all. Med Flory led the section, Gene Quill had the jazz alto chair, Brew Moore took care of the tenor solos and Dave Figg played second tenor. I could have asked for a solo but I didn’t dare with Med, Gene and Brew sitting there. 

“It was a joy to play Gil Evans and Mulligan arrangements and Claude had written some good stuff too. We worked full-time traveling in and out of New York, usually at the Statler Hotel in town and places like The Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. We played all down the east coast, through North Carolina and Georgia as far as Florida, usually in ballrooms, colleges and private dances. We didn’t have a bus so Claude hired four or five cars with a van which wasn’t easy but it worked out well. I drove one of the cars because I wasn’t a drinker and I usually had Sonny Rich and Chris Connor with me. She was a great singer and very easy to get along with. One night at a club in Massachusetts she had a call from Stan Kenton which is when she left the band and she was irreplaceable.” (Claude had originally hired her in 1949 to join his four-piece vocal group, The Snowflakes). “We only had one French horn (Al Antonucci) and we didn’t have a tuba at the time which was a pity because it would have been nice to have played with Bill Barber.” (Bill was a virtuoso able to play Lester Young solos which he transcribed for the tuba)  

“Claude was a shy man but he got along great with all the guys. He was very laid-back leaving everyone to their own devices but he wouldn’t tolerate any drug-taking. He never called a tune on the stand and the piano parts were not written. He would just start playing an introduction and you really had to scuffle looking through the pad of about 250 tunes to find what he was playing which made it pretty difficult if you were new.” (Gene Allen who played baritone with the band a few years earlier once told me, ‘It was a many-sided education to be in Thornhill’s band. It had an entirely different sound and tone quality to anything else at that time. His piano fill-ins gave the arrangements a certain flavour because they always related to the warp and weft of what was being played’). 

“Brew Moore was from Indianola, Mississippi and we all loved his playing but he was a real character – very hard to handle. He was juiced most of the time to the point where he could hardly function although it didn’t affect his playing at all – I’m talking alcohol here not drugs. I remember driving with him to Buffalo to play the Statler Hotel there for two weeks and on the way we stopped at a little town to have breakfast. He was being really difficult with the waitress and we just couldn’t calm him down.  Med Flory was with us and he got so fed up he went out to the car to collect Brew’s saxophone - we left him there in the restaurant with his horn while we drove off to the job. We used a local baritone player for those two weeks and I took over as the tenor soloist and had a wild time.” (Now almost a forgotten figure Brew Moore was one of the very best of the ‘Lestorians’ but his discography is a sadly slim volume. The 1949 recordings with Kai Winding, George Wallington and Mulligan are well worth tracking down, especially OJCCD-2- P7023 which includes two of his best recorded solos on Sid’s Bounce and A Night On Bop Mountain).

“Bob Brookmeyer was with the band for quite a while and he was a heavy drinker too but just like Brew it didn’t affect his playing because he always played real well – some guys can do that. I’ve heard Stan Getz could drink a pint of scotch before a recording session and then wouldn’t miss a note. Towards the end of the gig Claude would be ready to go back to the hotel because he liked to leave early which is when Bobby would take over on piano - complete with Claude’s intros but done humorously. He was very intellectual and a nice guy but he had quite a temper. We drove all the way down from Buffalo one night for a gig at the Virginia Military Institute and everyone was stressed and tired when we finally checked into the motel. The band manager then announced we had an extra afternoon concert to play as well but when he knocked on his door Bobby said, ‘I won’t do it and I’m not putting up with this anymore’ – there might have been a few expletives exchanged too but that is when he left the band. 

“Gene Quill was a great player but totally out of control when he was drunk although he had a young lady traveling with him who could keep him straight and calm him down most of the time.” (Bill Crow told me that when he was on the band in 1953 Gene had the lead clarinet book. Occasionally he would get impatient with the leader if he thought the band was playing too many dance tunes – the ‘go-to-sleep-medleys’. One night instead of playing the dance medley on clarinet he stood on his chair and played lead on alto as loud and wild as he could and before he sat down he gave Claude the finger. Claude just laughed because he loved weirdness and he thought that was really funny. Gene also had a sense of humour. Once when he was coming off the stand with Gerry Mulligan’s CJB at Birdland a customer said, ‘Gene Quill - all you’re doing is imitating Charlie Parker.’  Handing his alto to him Gene replied, ‘Here, you imitate Charlie Parker!’).  “He was happy with Thornhill because it was steady bread and all his friends were there – Med Flory, Bobby, Teddy Kotick and Winston Welsch.

Unfortunately for Gene he was in the wrong place at the wrong time one night in Philadelphia when he got badly beaten up – it wasn’t a mugging, it was an assault”. (Phil Woods and Bill Potts visited him when he was hospitalized. He was lying in a semi-comatose state in an oxygen tent with tubes connected to every orifice. Phil leaned over his bed and said, “Is there anything I can do?”. Gene whispered “Yeah, take my place!”).

“Apart from playing the lead book really well, Med Flory also sang a little bit. He was a nice guy but he always wanted to be a movie star so eventually he went out to the west coast and got some bit parts in TV series like Bonanza, Daniel Boone, Lassie and Mannix.” (Also along with Buddy Clark he became co-leader of Supersax in 1972).

“Nick Travis didn’t travel with us because he was one of the ‘A’ Team of studio players but if we were in New York he took over on lead especially if we played somewhere like the prestigious Café Rouge at the Statler.” (The Statler hotel’s telephone number was famously name-checked on the 1940 Glenn Miller hit Pennsylvania 6-5000).  “We were a traveling band so we could play a supper-club or hotel engagement in town because they were short engagements but we couldn’t do any other gigs. To work regularly in New York a Local 802 union card was needed and you had to be resident there for six months to get one.  

“I never fell in love with the baritone - I was still playing the one I rented when I joined Thornhill. It was always the tenor for me because there were more solos so I left eventually and joined Art Mooney’s band on tenor for about fifteen months. I remember we were playing a resort in Maine when I had a call from my brother here in Tulsa asking if I was ready to come off the road?  I had been recommended for a junior high-school band director’s job in town and I felt I was ready to go home anyway. I started teaching and working on my Master’s Degree and remained in public education until I retired as principal of Edison High School in 1992. 

“I have carried on playing though. I did a tour with Henry Mancini and Bob Hope in the sixties and whenever shows like Chicago, Chorus Line, The Will Rogers Follies or Oklahoma come to our Performing Arts Centre I still get called to play tenor.””

Pre Birth of the Cool - Claude Thornhill

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

I found the following in the Down Beat online archives [http://downbeat.com/news/detail/pre-birth-of-the-cool-claude-thornhill visited 8/11/2021] and wanted to share with you its many insights into how the commonly referred to “Birth of the Cool” or just “Cool School” jazz sound evolved primarily through the work of pianist and bandleader Claude Thornhill and his close arranging associate, Gil Evans.

“In the decades following World War II and the decline of the swing era, the query “Will the big bands ever come back?” was bandied about by older critics and jazz fans. The notion of a large ensemble has become cool again, with younger composers and arrangers such as Darcy James Argue reinventing the concept and adapting it to contemporary instrumentation. 

With that in mind, it’s worth taking another look at a bandleader whose impact started 70 years ago and continues today [June 25, 2012] — Claude Thornhill.

Thornhill’s 1940s big band helped shape the sound of modern jazz, and orchestral bop and ethereal ballads tinged with classical influences set the stage for masterpieces by Miles Davis and helped to inspire the West Coast or “cool jazz” movement of the 1950s. Thornhill and collaborator Gil Evans created a beautifully colored and sophisticated tapestry of music that would be referenced and known around the world.

The birth of the cool began in Thornhill’s hometown of Terre Haute, Ind., a city on the Wabash River where Thornhill was born Aug. 10, 1908. The shy-but-gifted boy was a prodigal pianist, playing as a teenager in movie houses, on riverboats and with local orchestras. The Terre Haute Star, somewhat prophetically, called him “years ahead of his time in the playing of modern popular music.” Thornhill later claimed that he had attended various conservatories, but his talent flourished locally in a city with a top-flight classical symphony and vibrant musical culture.

Thornhill left Terre Haute by the end of the 1920s and spent the next decade making a slow but steady climb to bandleader. He became good friends with a young, up-and-coming clarinetist named Artie Shaw, who described him as “a funny-looking gent, with a potato nose and round Germanic face…It wasn’t easy for him to express himself. But he was more guileful than he appeared, because he generally got what he wanted.”

Thornhill worked as an arranger and pianist with Ray Noble, as well as the first big bands of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. He played on several early Billie Holiday recordings, and he also gave Maxine Sullivan her first hit with an arrangement of “Loch Lomond.” A stint with popular light-classical music maestro Andre Kostelanetz’s radio orchestra would influence Thornhill’s later use of tonal color—and a Hollywood gig with bandleader Skinny Ennis was his key introduction to Evans.

By 1939 Thornhill was ready to start his own band, and he worked hard to develop an original sound—one that would evolve over the next 10 years, described by jazz writer Ira Gitler as “vibrato used sparingly to heighten expressiveness; trumpets and trombones that could imitate French horns; unison clarinets suggesting strings, and a masterful control of dynamics, which made the band sound strong when playing softly.” It evoked classical composers like Ravel, Berlioz and Thornhill’s beloved Debussy. The sound, as Gil Evans later remarked, hung like a cloud—or else it seemed to glide like one.

Thornhill’s most famous tune was one that he originally wrote as part of a suite for Ray Noble’s band in the 1930s, called “A Fountain In Havana.” In 1940, in need of a band theme, he pulled the composition out and gave it a new title that made its future as a holiday classic: “Snowfall.” Evocative and ethereal, “Snowfall” embodies its author’s lyrical, melancholy temperament. Another Thornhill composition, “Portrait Of A Guinea Farm,” reveals the composer’s notoriously quirky sense of humor and a willingness to venture into musical realms beyond the conventional confines of big-band music.

“Snowfall” and “Portrait Of A Guinea Farm” were both recorded in 1941, a significant year for Thornhill, because Evans joined his band. Evans was a brilliant arranger who expanded on Thornhill’s innovations in instrumentation and arrangement and added increasingly advanced harmonies. Evans, who became famous for his work with Davis, offered much of the credit for his sound to Thornhill, saying that he had given him a musical vision and an orchestra within which Evans was able to create something even more interesting and complex. An early example of Evans’ work with the Thornhill band is a breakthrough Thornhill-Evans tune called “Buster’s Last Stand.” Jazz writer Allen Lowe described “Buster’s Last Stand” as “a bravura swinger, unlike anything else of its time, a creation way outside of Swing Era conventions, block-voiced with feathery lightness and kicked along with the momentum of a tin can along a curb.”

In 1942, with America fully immersed in World War II, Thornhill broke up his band and joined the Navy. He spent some time playing piano with Artie Shaw’s Naval orchestra, but the two men’s friendship became strained, and Thornhill eventually left to lead his own band. By war’s end he wanted to reform his civilian orchestra, and because he was so liked and respected, he managed to get many of his former musicians back, including Evans.

The war had taken a toll on Thornhill, however, and more and more of the writing duties fell upon the shoulders of Evans. Given creative license by Thornhill, Evans took the orchestra in a more modernistic direction, incorporating bebop’s revolutionary new sounds into his charts. 

Up-and-coming musicians such as Lee Konitz, Red Rodney and Gerry Mulligan all did stints with the band, and they recorded several bebop anthems (such as “Anthropology” and “Donna Lee”) that have become iconic moments in the Thornhill legacy. One such moment was “Robbins’ Nest,” which jazz writer Whitney Balliett described as “a classic instance of how the Thornhill band almost completely circumvented the big-band clichés of riffs, call-and-response patterns and empty counterpoint…There is a lot of fast and subtle rhythmic footwork on the recording, and Thornhill’s use of dynamics is exhilarating. Yet everything is quiet.” “Robbins’ Nest” and other 

Thornhill recordings from this period point the way to the cool-jazz movement of the 1950s, founded with Davis’ Birth Of The Cool recordings at the end of the 1940s. Many of the tunes were recorded by a circle of musicians that included former members of the Thornhill orchestra.

At the same time, Evans continued the Thornhill tradition of classical influences and adaptations, and anticipated his own later work with Miles Davis on albums such as Miles Ahead and Sketches Of Spain through pieces like Tchaikovsky’s “Arab Dance” and Sebastián Iradier’s “La Paloma.” These recordings also foreshadow the rise of the 1950s Third Stream movement, in which composers and musicians began to consciously combine aspects of jazz and classical music into a single form.”

"Hidden in Plain Hearing: The Roots of Cool Jazz in the Big Band of Claude Thornhill" – From The Archives

“I wonder if the world will ever know how much it had in this beautiful man.”

- Duke Ellington

I am reposting this feature to help celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Birth of the Cool recordings nominally under the leadership of Miles Davis, but perhaps, more closely aligned with the early work of arranger-composers Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan John Carisi and John Lewis.

© -Tom Nolan/Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved. July 5, 2008.

“Sixty years ago, in the hot summer of 1948, a cadre of young arrangers and players worked in a basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry on West 55th Street in New York to craft music that would later be tagged "the birth of the cool" -- the first notable instance of a harmonically rich, emotionally subtle type of jazz that washed its gorgeous chords and subtle dynamics over a big chunk of the 1950s.

Trumpeter Miles Davis was the nominal leader of this ensemble, but it was the outfit's arrangers -- primarily Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan -- who were the real stars. The devices they drew on had been available for years, hidden in plain hearing within the big band of Claude Thornhill.

The shy, Indiana-born Thornhill had been on the swing and dance-band scene since the 1930s: a pianist, arranger and leader whose self-penned theme-song, Snowfall, was an ethereal tone-poem in which time almost seemed to stop. Thornhill favored slow tempi and lingering phrases. His band's instrumentation included two French horns, a sonorous tuba, and enough reed players to allow for passages with six or seven clarinets at a time. With a theme like Snowfall, the Thornhill band epitomized coolness from the moment it took the stage.

The Canadian-born Gil Evans, who joined that band in 1941, proved to be Thornhill's ideal arranger. When bebop emerged, Evans blended its busy lines and advanced progressions with Thornhill's meditative approach, writing engaging arrangements of bop standards such as altoist Charlie Parker's Anthropology and Yardbird Suite.

Evans also arranged Donna Lee, a tune by Parker's young sideman Miles Davis. Lee Konitz, then an equally young alto-sax player from Chicago whose dry-ice tone fit perfectly into Thornhill's low-vibrato outfit, remembers Davis coming to hear the band in 1947 at New York's Pennsylvania Hotel.

"It was basically a ballad band," Mr. Konitz (now 80 and still active as a player) said recently. "People loved dancing to it. Gil's beautiful writing was very danceable. . . . Miles liked the band." In 1950, Davis would describe Thornhill's orchestra to Down Beat magazine as "the greatest band of these modern times. . . . It was commercially good and musically good."

But Thornhill disbanded this orchestra in early 1948 for undisclosed reasons. "Thornhill was pretty removed from everything," says Mr. Konitz. "I don't think I ever said much more than 'hello' to him in 10 months."

Gil Evans's tiny apartment on West 55th -- a place Thornhill himself had lived in, back in 1940 -- then became a sort of workshop where Evans and Mulligan, encouraged by Davis and joined by John Lewis and John Carisi, attempted to re-create the Thornhill band's sound with as few instruments as possible. This proved to be nine: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto sax, baritone sax; and a rhythm section of piano, bass and drums.

Players for this nonet were chosen (including several Thornhill veterans). Rehearsals were held. Davis became the nascent band's leader, but the ensemble was no showcase for individual players, says Mr. Konitz (who became its alto saxophonist): "This was a chamber group -- compositional. Solos were kind of incidental."

The nonet was booked for a few weeks' work at the Royal Roost, a jazz venue on Broadway. In September 1948, "'Impressions in Modern Music,' with the new Miles Davis organization" made its debut, and some of its sets were heard by insomniac New Yorkers via remote wee-hours radio broadcasts.

The nonet attracted the attention of a Capitol Records executive who made sure it recorded a total of 12 numbers in 1949 and 1950 -- tracks that came out first on 78-rpm singles, then on a 10-inch long-playing disc, and, in 1957, on a 12-inch album at last titled Birth of the Cool. By then the Davis group had inspired or influenced a host of other cool-sounding nonets, octets, quartets and tentets -- the most successful of which was Gerry Mulligan's "piano-less" foursome with trumpeter Chet Baker, whose lyrical, minimal style was not unlike Miles Davis's.

The Complete Birth of the Cool, a 1998 Capitol CD including broadcast transcriptions from the Royal Roost, continues to sell. And the "Birth of the Cool" mystique grows: This February, jazz-drummer and writer Bill Moody published "Shades of Blue" (Poisoned Pen Press), a contemporary mystery novel turning on events surrounding the Davis nonet.

Mike Zwerin, the young trombonist in that '48 live-performance unit (but not on the records), reversed the career arc of several nonet members: After first working in Davis's group, he later played with the Claude Thornhill band -- albeit a much-diminished 1958 touring outfit. "[Claude] kept his dignity as his audience dwindled," wrote Mr. Zwerin, now a well-regarded music journalist and author. " . . . I marvel at how much control that must have involved, considering the skid he was on. He knew he had been something special." Thornhill died in 1965, at the age of 55, on the eve of another comeback.

Davis followed Birth of the Cool with a long and noteworthy career that saw several more collaborations with Evans, including their epochal LPs Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess.

And Evans made several albums of his own, including a 1961 platter titled (in acknowledgment of his musical genesis) "Out of the Cool." Perhaps the most ear-catching track on that disc was an Evans opus that became a sort of signature piece for the big band he'd lead in sporadic performance for 30 years; it was probably Evans's best-known composition.

Claude Thornhill's old protégé named this semi-theme song La Nevada -- Spanish for Snowfall.”

Mr. Nolan is editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen & Landru).