Paul Desmond - "Summertime"

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

“Much of the critical praise Desmond has received was given in the manner of a

backhanded compliment; the ploy was to praise Desmond at Brubeck's expense. This was unfair to both. Desmond wasn't just mainly responsible for the musical interest the famous quartet held for anti-Brubeckians. He was and is a very personal player of great sensitivity and musicality, with a rare sense of form and structure, and a real melodic gift.”

- Dan Morgenstern

“ …  Summertime, [was] recorded for Herb Alpert's and Jerry Moss's A&M label and supervised by Creed Taylor, who would play an important part in Desmond's post-Brubeck recording activity. Don Sebesky arranged backgrounds, some cushiony, some incisive, for ensembles made up of many of New York's finest jazz and studio musicians. Pianist Herbie Hancock and Bassist Ron Carter, fresh from Miles Davis's quintet, were in the rhythm section, along with Brazilians Airto Moreira and Eumir Deodato. The brass section skimmed the cream of modern trombonists, J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, Urbie Green and young Bill Watrous. The repertoire accommodated Desmond's interest in Brazilian music and in good pop material, including Sebesky's bossa nova "Olvidar," a samba treatment of Louis Armstrong's "Struttin' With Some Barbecue," the Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and Johnny Mandel's "Emily." In his own blues, "North By Northwest," Desmond reprised the "Balcony Rock" melody that had been so felicitous in "Audrey."” 

- Doug Ramsey, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond

I’m sure I would have gotten to Paul Desmond's Summertime LP [A&M 3015] another way, but when I put out a question to my fellow Jazz drummers about who to listen to in order to take my bossa nova drumming to another level, everyone came back with - “You gotta checkout Leo Morris.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The year was 1968 [I know, I know - “The Summer of Love” and all that jive].

I was back in the world of music in a big way with lots of casuals and some club dates coming my way. [Believe it or not, there were still some Jazz clubs in existence in southern California in 1968 - barely].

One of the groups I was regularly working with focused on Latin Jazz with a particular emphasis on Bossa Nova [Think Sergio Mendes, but with a hip, slick and cool twist].

I was getting very tired of playing the basic bossa nova beat - a clave derivative with a samba inflection - the idea being to cool down the traditional samba beat and make it less like a marching band cadence and more like the softer Jazz drumming of the West Coast Jazz cats like Chico Hamilton and Shelly Manne.

So I started digging around for licks, kicks and rhythmic inflections that would keep the basic bossa nova “feel” but also make it interesting and challenging to play. There were no drum books on the subject of bossa nova drumming in 1968; no videos either.

“Leo Morris’” name kept cropping up as a source for some excitement with a bossa beat; a drummer who added more substance to it. “Hey Man, Leo lays down some bad stuff.” [“Bad” = good and “Stuff” wasn’t the word that was used although the word that was used did begin with an “S,” if you dig what I mean?]

But who was this “Leo Morris” that everyone who recommending? I mean that name didn’t sound very Brazilian/Portuguese - no offense to either party - let alone familiar. [To add even more irony to the "what's in a name aspect" of Leo Morris, in his later career, he became famous for his funky New Orleans street beats under the name of Idris Muhammad!]

Enter Paul Desmond's Summertime [A &M 3015] as Leo Morris appears on five of the album’s ten tracks.

To put it mildly, Leo plays some of the best bossa nova beats this side of Airto Moriera, the monster Brazilian percussionist who just so happens to be on the other  tracks on Summertime [A&M 3015] on which Leo doesn't appear.

The trick with bossa nova is that you have to keep the “feel” light and airy; you can’t step on it or overplay. You have to make the rhythm float.

You also have to simulate the complexity of a Samba rhythm section with its bells, gourds, and whistles so as to add “texture” to the music.

Leo Morris does this in a variety of ways from double pumping his bass drum with a light eighth note feel while making the sound of that drum into a light thud; using a heavy ride cymbal to get more of a pinging sound and thus reducing the normal overtones or whooshing sound; using a dishy crash cymbal for accents along with light crashes from the hi-hat cymbal that are formed when the left foot doesn’t close the cymbals all the way [i.e., instead of the usual clicking sound].

Drummers listen to music in a different way because they are not distracted by the usual requirements of melody and harmony. Their job is to establish and push the pulse or beat of the music, the metronomic insistence that makes Jazz what it is.

But they are also the source of the music’s rhythmic excitement and playing the same thing over and over again is not particularly exciting.

Thanks to Susumu Murakoshi, this piece concludes with a YouTube video that includes all ten tracks of Paul Desmond’s Summertime [How he escaped the wrath of the Copyright Gods and was able to accomplish this feat is beyond me.].

Listen closely to the first track Samba with Some Barbecue to hear the ultimate in bossa nova drumming excitement as Leo Morris lays down a stunning array rhythmic accents that employ many aspects of the drum kit to generate a positively propulsive bossa nova beat.

As a point in passing, Richard Cook and Brian Morton in their always informative Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD 6th Ed. assert that "Paul Desmond never made a recording on his own account with a pianist other than Dave Brubeck."

I guess Herbie Hancock's appearance on 8 of the 10 tracks on Desmond's Summertime [A&M 3015] somehow don't figure into this assessment?

For the most part, Eugene Boe’s original LP liner notes are fun to read and even occasionally helpful [he said in a somewhat snide manner!]. But the reviews of the recording by Steve Voce in JazzJournal and Dan Morgenstern in Downbeat provide the Jazz fan with more relevant insights into Paul’s special qualities as a player and the many good things that make Summertime [A&M 3015] a special recording.

Eugene Boe original LP liner notes to Summertime [A&M 3015]

“When the Dave Brubeck Quartet called it a set at the end of 1967, Paul Desmond decided it was high time for Time Out  And rightly so, After all, he had been with the quartet since "before the Crimean War" (factually, 17 years), logged a million-plus miles in air travel, cut 50 or so LP's and played in as many countries, and was plain bushed. For nine months he never laid lips on an alto sax. Four of those months he whiled away pleasantly in a rented house in Montego Bay, There he conceived the idea and set down the first jottings for a book of reminiscences- a book tentatively titled "How Many Are There In Your Quartet?"

It was a question Paul and his colleagues had learned to live with, since it was put to them so sweetly- and so often!- by airline stewardesses. Summertime is Paul's first post-Brubeck reading and it was quite an experience. "Being in a fur-lined jet cocoon all those years," he recalls, "I had never been around New York really long enough to play with other musicians. Then to walk into a recording studio and have everything work so beautifully. Ron Carter (bass) and Herbie Hancock (piano) are both geniuses and incredibly easy to work with, The same goes for Airto Moreira, the Brazilian percussion player,"

Summertime brings together some of Paul Desmond's most favourite things. It's a mixed bag of gems whose brilliant arrangements- all bearing the imprimatur of Don Sebesky- are large on excitement and ingenuity. If there is a bias in the treatment, it perhaps inclines toward a Caribbean - South Atlantic axis whose poles might well be Montego Bay and Rio. But the ultimate criterion for inclusion was pragmatic; every number had to make it in the rendering. Observe how there isn't a loser in the pack,

Louis Armstrong might have to listen twice to recognise his Struttin' With Some Barbecue, which he wrote way back in 1941 [Mr. Boe is incorrect as Struttin’ With Some Barbecue was written by Lil Hardin Armstrong and recorded by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven in December, 1927.]. In 1969, Struttin's lost its Dixie beat (but not its melody) and gone the Brazilian route. It moves along with a lively, lyrical gait, Arranger Sebesky doubles as composer in Olvidar, a lovely haunter that sets Desmond way up there in a slow, dreamy remembrance of things past- you have to allow even this engagingly self-deprecating sax player his vanity. Listening to the tapes of the latest Beatles album, he gave his best hearing to those lyrics that begin, "Desmond had a barrow in the marketplace". But Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da also presented the challenge of how to record - and make interesting - a simple monotonous song whose very monotony is its chief fascination. The result is a sassy, infectious Calypso-type tune which seems to have been appropriated by a transistorised Brazilian street marching band  And it's Carnival time, of course. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, life goes on, bra lala"

Johnny Mercer's and Johnny Mandel's Emily is an eloquent serenade to a neglected heroine (from a neglected picture, "The Americanization Of Emily") who deserves the kind of attention given other such lovelies as Laura, Linda, Nancy, Dinah and Sweet Sue, This celebration of her charms should do much to bring Emily out. The only waltz on the album, Someday My Prince Will Come (from "Snow White") has long since achieved the status of a standard. Brubeck, Miles Davis and Bill Evans have recorded it, and here it serves as a spring-board for the alto saxophone's most joyous flights of fancy Autumn Leaves, a Johnny Mercer evergreen, undergoes a change of life to emerge as a snappy samba with lots of polished brass showing  

In the stage and film versions of "Oliver", it's young Oliver himself who sings the yearning, heart-rending Where Is Love?, which may also be the score's trickiest and most sophisticated number, musically speaking This meticulous recital captures all the pathos, and even the casual listener will delight in its key-hopping wizardry. Hugo Montenegro's Lady In Cement is the rhythmic shaker from the Frank Sinatra film of the some name. Note the switches in time signature, with 7/4 and 5/4 spelling the traditional 4/4 beat. North By Northeast is a nostalgic blues essay penned by Desmond himself. But don't look for any significance in the title   It was supplied by the producer and may reflect nought but a compass point designating the direction of the recording studio from the producer's offices. In George Gershwin's Summertime, Paul reverts to his favourite rhythmic innovation; the 5/4 beat he introduced in Take Five- which has now been well-absorbed into the jazz mainstream. The tides of fashion swept the Dave Brubeck Quartet "in" and "out" several times   But over the years Paul Desmond himself has been a chronic poll-winner. Summertime demonstrates again- in fresh company- what has been said about him so often: his may be the purest, most lyrical tone ever to come from an alto saxophone.”

Steve Voce Review of  Summertime [A&M 3015]/Jazz Journal, September 1969

“Seventeen years was a life sentence as far as Desmond's tenure in the Brubeck organisation was concerned, and I was pleased when the group finally wound up because I anticipated that Desmond would find the settings that his superb playing deserves. In this, his first record since then and following a nine-month period when he never touched his horn, he is almost there. His delicate solos are set against a crisp, Van Gelder-recorded group which, undoubtedly commercially intended, none the less produces a pretty good jazz album. Don Sebesky's arrangements are ideal, and Desmond's whispy Konitz-thru-Getz sound really benefits- Paul is also nudged into some considerable blues by the hard brass of Lady In Cement. His own ethereal blues style reappears on North By Northeast, along with the strongly- structured coda which previously graced Balcony Rock and Audrey. Struttin' With Some Barbecue is a great treatment and, like Ob- La- Di, bundles along with what, by Desmond standards, is abandoned gaiety   The ballads are beautiful, and all round this is an enchanting album which should please most people Steve Voce

Dan Morgenstern, DOWNBEAT, November 27, 1969   Rating: * * * *

“Desmond's first recorded outing since leaving Brubeck was worth waiting for. During his long tenure with the pianist, Desmond often recorded on his own, but rarely have his talents been more tellingly displayed. The personnel list looks gigantic, but represents six different sessions; in fact, Don Sebesky's scoring is discrete, and for long stretches, Desmond is backed by rhythm only, often in a bossa nova groove.

Varied and often interesting material, a recording quality that beautifully captures and projects the altoist's sound, and the sympathetic backing he receives-from Hancock, Carter and Beck in particular- help carry the album, but it is Desmond's consistent excellence that holds it up.

Much of the critical praise Desmond has received was given in the manner of a

backhanded compliment; the ploy was to praise Desmond at Brubeck's expense. This was unfair to both. Desmond wasn't just mainly responsible for the musical interest the famous quartet held for anti-Brubeckians. He was and is a very personal player of great sensitivity and musicality, with a rare sense of form and structure, and a real melodic gift.

Desmond is too honest a player to be tempted by the relatively "commercial" setting he receives here. Some might consider his lyricism soft, but it isn't; though he is a gentle musician, his work has the inner strength that marks the genuine jazzman   His distinctive sound has mellowed and ripened, as has his conception, and his playing here has a firmness and sureness that mark a new-found maturity.

My favorite tracks are Where Is Love? and Emily for ballad beauty; the Beatles' Ob-La-Di for humour and swing (an apt quote from Hey Jude and a fleeting glimpse of Pete Brown are added attractions); North by Northwest for blues feeling (it ends with Audrey, another Desmond original), and, best of all, Struttin' With Some Barbecue, The Armstrong classic is ideally suited for bossa nova treatment, and the lovely arid still fresh melody gives Desmond something to play on.

"Louis Armstrong might have to listen twice to recognize (his tune), which he wrote way back in 1941," says the liner note. It was way, way back in 1927, chum, the tune is credited to Lil Armstrong, and Pops would know it after two measures   And like it for Desmond's graceful melodic flow. He might also enjoy the way Hancock picks up on Desmond's last solo phrase and builds his statement from it Barbecue is easy to like.

In fact, so's the entire album   Good music often is.”

"I Remember Bill" - Don Sebesky's Tribute to Bill Evans

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

"...I wasn't striving to be an identifiable stylist — I was really only striving to make music and to put it together in some way of my own."   

- jazz pianist Bill Evans

Considering how beautiful all aspects of the late pianist Bill Evans music is, I’m surprised that there have not been more efforts to reconstitute it in other settings.

“Reconstitute” is the key word here in the sense of building something up from its parts; reconstruct in another setting might be another way of putting it.

Guitarist John McLaughlin had a go at is when he along with the members of the Aighetta guitar quartet recorded the Verve CD Time Remembered: John McLaughlin Plays Bill Evans which we posted about here.

But for the most part, orchestrators and arrangers have shied away from reconstituting Bill’s compositions and improvisations in other musical formats.

Perhaps, as was the case with the work of the late pianist, Michel Petrucciani, they seem to be near perfect as performed in Evans’ preferred setting of a piano-bass-drums trio. Perhaps, too, they feel unequal to the task of trying to match Bill’s brilliance.

When such attempts do come along, they seem to be “here today and gone tomorrow,” or at least that’s my impression of one such effort, Don Sebesky’s 1998 CD -  I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans [RCA BMG Classics 09026 68929-2].

Although Don’s arrangement of Waltz For Debby won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Arrangement, I doubt that many Jazz fans in general and Bill Evans fans in particular have ever heard of the recording. [It has been removed from distribution by the label and is only available from third-party sellers on Amazon. The site does not offer a digital download.]

In her insert notes to the recording, Stephanie Stein Crease, the author of the definitive Gil Evans: Out of the Cool: His Life and Music and whose writings about Jazz have appeared in The New York Times and Down Beat, offers these insights into Bill and his music and Don Sebesky efforts at reconstituting it on I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.

"...I wasn't striving to be an identifiable stylist — I was really only striving to make music and to put it together in some way of my own,"   said the jazz pianist Bill Evans, in his talk that closes this tribute. Nonetheless, the Bill Evans sound has been a persistent force in modern jazz since word about Evans —   quiet and introspective, never a self-promoter — started humming through the New York jazz  scene during the mid-1950s.

Evans followed in the wake of Bud Powell, the pianist who'd forged a dazzling hornlike approach to bebop piano. The young Evans had an awesome grasp of the intricate language of bop and its harmonic possibilities. He had the ability to express, with dazzling clarity, a musical whole along with a range of subtleties. And he developed a sound on the piano — each note rounded from within, his playing fiery at times, uniquely understated at others — that was as full of warmth and individuality as that of Erroll Garner or Arthur Rubinstein.

The cumulative effect? An upturning of every musical idea or chord voicing or standard song into something never quite heard before. Evans' music flowed from his profound and analytic intelligence. His playing was often tinged with a deep melancholy, and was always illuminated with a rare beauty.

Evans, who died in 1980 at the age of fifty-one, started studying piano formally at the age of six, the violin at age seven, and the flute at thirteen. He was all of twelve when he started subbing for his older brother Harry in a no-name dance band in New Jersey, with its book of stock arrangements. It was in this setting, fooling around with standard dance tunes, that he experienced the first thrill of musical freedom: the insertion of a chord change, a melodic variation, or a short improvisation all started pointing Evans towards jazz. His first real jazz gigs were occasional summer jobs with the guitarist Mundell Lowe (another master of supple understatement), who Evans met in the late 1940s while attending Southeastern Louisiana University in New Orleans. After an army stint in Korea from 1951 to '54, the pianist settled in New York. By 1956, he had made his debut recordings as the leader of his own trio.

The following year, he performed one of his most brilliantly developed solos ever in George Russell's extended work All About Rosie, a virtuosic vehicle designed for Evans (who performed it in concert and recorded it). After a relentlessly creative eight months with Miles Davis in 1958 (which resulted in Kind of Blue), Evans steadfastly pursued his own muse, for the most part in a trio with bass and drums, making the piano trio a viable and vibrant setting for jazz.

Interplay/intuition was key, in Evans' relationships with bassists and drummers, in his duets with Jim Hall, in virtually all his musical collaborations and even with himself (as in his Conversations With Myself). This sensibility, as well as Evans' dedication to musical exploration, helped generate this tribute, a project that the acclaimed arranger Don Sebesky has brought to fruition after five years. Sebesky has artfully reconstructed Evans' elliptical compositions such as Peace Piece and Epilogue, and transformed Evans' subtle deliberations and piano voicings for jazz orchestra on such standards as So What and Autumn Leaves. Bill Evans was an arranger too: reharmonizations, rhythmic development, well-defined contrapuntal lines, and Evans' extraordinary voice-leading — his unique way of spelling out emotions —   were part and parcel of his work.”

And Don Sebesky added his own thoughts about Bill’s music and this recording in these excerpts from the insert notes to I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.

I Remember Bill

“Rarely does a day go by without my feeling the influence of Bill Evans. Bill didn't just strive for perfection. He, like all true geniuses, was incapable of putting forth less than his very best: the best note, the truest chord, the richest voicing, creating a balance between head and heart which characterizes his music and makes it so fresh and interesting every time we listen. He set a standard of excellence to which we all aspire, and by which we all measure ourselves, and our work. In this album, I pay tribute to him in gratitude for his having enriched us all with his remarkable gift.

After much thought, I've selected a mix of tunes which Bill composed (Waltz for Debby, Very Early, T.T.T.T., Peace Piece, Epilogue, Blue in Green); standards which he liked to play (Autumn Leaves, All the Things You Are, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You); and a couple of pieces I've written and dedicated to him (I Remember Bill, Bill Not Gil).

The first time I ever heard Bill play was on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, arguably the most influential recording of the last fifty years. From that album, I've selected two tunes. Blue in Green has new lyrics by Gene McDaniels, which encompass not only the tune, but also Miles' and John Coltrane's solos. I've also included So What, in which I've doubled the original tempo and built the arrangement around an orchestration of Bill's solo.

I've inserted orchestrated versions of excerpts from Bill's improvisations into All the Things You Are, Autumn Leaves and I'm Getting Sentimental Over You as well — treating the ensemble as if it were a giant piano instead of limiting it to a traditional big band role. Being especially fond of Bill's solo playing, I arranged and orchestrated his elegant improvised adagio, Peace Piece. In this version, you'll hear echoes of Copland, Bartok, and probably a few other classical composers, though the actual notes are Bill's.

In the opening choruses of All the Things You Are and I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, I've treated the band in a way that I imagine Bill might have, had he been an arranger, creating contrapuntal interplay between lines and allowing the rhythmic aspect of the tunes to be carried by the horns only — no rhythm section.

We were fortunate to have been able to reach out all over the world to musicians who played and recorded with Bill over the years. Two of his rhythm sections, Eddie Gomez with Marty Morell and Marc Johnson with Joe LaBarbera provide the support for the brass and string ensembles which surround them. Alumni Lee Konitz, Bob Brookmeyer, Toots Thielemans, and Tom Harrell (who was on Evans' last recording) all demonstrate their own remarkable musicianship here, as do Larry Coryell, Joe Lovano, Eddie Daniels, Hubert Laws, Dave Samuels, John Pizzarelli, Jeanie Bryson and New York Voices. My heartfelt thanks to them all for contributing their artistry to this project.

-Don Sebesky”

My favorite reconstitution by Don of Bill’s work is his string arrangement of Quiet Now, an original by fellow-pianist Denny Zeitlin that Bill played often. It features clarinetist Eddie Daniels and vibraphonist Dave Samuels and you can check it out on the following video.