"I remember probably better than anything the time we were tied up in Shanghai alongside a ship that had come out later, and somebody on it had a record of Black and Tan Fantasy- played, as I did not learn at the time,...
by Duke Ellington. That was a world heard through a porthole, and never to be forgotten."
- Otis Ferguson, Seaman First Class (later journalist), ca. 1928
“Duke Ellington has not been well served by writers. Two books, one by Terry Teachout and one by James Lincoln Collier are not only inaccurate but border on the malicious. Unlike them, Jack Chambers knows jazz. His books on Miles Davis and Richard Twardzik are the results of research, tempered with admiration. The overriding impression that remains when you read this book is of Chambers’ love and admiration for his subject. In his own words he hopes ‘to provide new insights to readers who already know Ellington’s music’ +and ‘most of all’ to offer ‘an entry-point for relative newcomers’.
The task of encapsulating the vast legacy that Ellington left is a conundrum. Chambers has rejected the biographical or the discographical approach. He has, as the book’s title suggests, chosen to look at themes. The themes include the importance of plunger mutes, tenor players from Webster to Gonsalves, the mystery of the Hodges-Strayhorn relationship, the story of “the stockpile”, Ellington’s piano playing and the musical links with Shakespeare and with Africa and Asia.
This is a fascinating book full of generosity, insight and detail that is not available elsewhere. It is a script to return to. It challenges, informs, illuminates, reassures, intrigues. The admiration that Chambers has for his subject is evident throughout. He is a great guide to the vast swathes of Ellington; driving you back to the albums or inspiring you to buy some of the music. The book stands side by side with the other great book on Ellington. ‘A Listener’s Guide Duke Ellington’ by Eddie Lambert (Scarecrow Press). Both of them increase understanding and enable deeper understanding of the remarkable musician and composer.”
-Reviewed by Jack Kenny, Jazz Views blog
Jack Chambers, a jazz author and critic is perhaps best known for his two-volume biography of Miles Davis Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [New York: William Morrow, 1989].
He has also written the first full-length biography of the pianist, Bouncin' With Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik, published by The Mercury Press. In 2008.
Talk about a study in contrasts: from one of the most well-known and influential Jazz musicians in the history of Jazz to one of the music’s most short-lived and obscure players!
Jack is once again back to the famous and prominent, this time as the author of Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes [self-published, Milestones Music and Art, 2019].
“Sweet Thunder explores the music of Duke Ellington by tracing nine themes through his amazingly productive 50-year career as composer, orchestrator, pianist, and cultural icon. Lifelong listeners to Ellington and newcomers seeking an entry-point into Ellington’s voluminous works will find this book stimulating, illuminating, and entertaining.”
How the book is organized and how best to read it is explained by Jack in the following Introduction: Black and Tan Fantasies:
This book invites readers to explore the music of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) by pursuing nine themes that recur in his music. The themes have been pieced together selectively from Ellington's voluminous output and show how he developed them, picking and choosing images, ideas and predilections that intrigued him. The themes that I discuss here are organized in ways that make them coherent and accessible, and tracking them can bring great satisfaction to listeners of diverse tastes and backgrounds. I know this because I have tested all of them with audiences. I have presented them all and seen them work.
I hope the organization into themes will bring new insights to listeners who already know Ellington's music. Most of all, I hope it will provide an entry-point for relative newcomers to Ellington's 50-year creative journey. Previous presentations of each of the themes (or chapters, in this context) are listed at the end of this Introduction; it is a scholarly appendage that can be easily skipped but giving it a glance might be encouraging for readers who might harbor doubts.
Duke Ellington's music is in danger of being ignored. He is not alone, of course. Serious music of all kinds faces the same threat. Ellington poses a formidable task for listeners who might be attracted to him because of the sheer volume of his work. The numbers defy credulity - more than 2,000 compositions, including songs, soundtracks, revues, hymns, big-band jazz, ballets, tone poems, and concert pieces. He was at least a hundred times more prolific in his output than Bach, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie,Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, or other musicians who might entice listeners looking for substantial musical experiences. What really counts has nothing to do with the numbers, of course. Ellington's works resound with memorable melodies, fascinating rhythms and, above all, splendid harmonies. That is what counts.
Where does one begin? The themes in this book make very good starting points.
Not only is the sheer volume formidable, but most of his music, nearly all of his greatest music, is music without words. He wrote at least a hundred songs, including the standards "Sophisticated Lady," "Satin Doll," "I'm Beginning to See the Light," "Just Squeeze Me (But Don't Tease Me)," and dozens more. His songs seem like confections in the company of the masterful instrumental compositions. Happily, Ellington's first astute critic, the classicist R. D. Darrell, in a prescient critique in 1932, made exactly the same point. "Ellington writes naturally for instruments alone," Darrell wrote. "The human voice is not disdained" but "Ellington has emancipated American popular music from text for the first time since the Colonial days of reels and breakdown." In our day the inextricable mating of words with music has come not fromTin Pan Alley (as in Darrell's day) but from rock music in its many guises, including hip hop, perhaps the most doggedly prosaic pop music of all time. For more than half a century the most common music to which three generations of young people have been exposed is almost exclusively music with words, music dominated by lyrics. It envelops us in elevators, shopping malls, on iPods and web streams. The quality of the lyrics can be poetic or pathetic. No matter. The quality is less important than the fact that the words predominate. Words are the common coin of our daily existence; words are the stuff of shopping lists, invoices, memos, want ads, newspapers, e-mail messages, tweets, Harlequin romances....
Words in a song affix music to our conscious experience, our daily lives. Music, in its essential form, is nonverbal. Music without words, if it is inspired, bypasses experience that is rooted in the verbal and infiltrates a more mysterious human domain, a place that can be eloquent though wordless, expressive though uncanny, intelligent though rooted in feeling. So the generations who have heard only music with words must learn to discover the thrill of music without words, music that is not burdened by verbal messages but has a deeper reality.
Obviously, songs are music too. Music with words has its own distinguished place. Most of my chapters discuss songs.1 [1 Indeed, one of the themes I have traced through Ellington's music, though it is not included in this book, is his creative use of the voice; it is called (quoting R.D. Darrell) "The human voice is not disdained." For details, go to <torontodukeellingtonsociety. com> and click on "Archives."]
Those songs range from the playful, such as "Drop Me Off in Harlem" (in chapter 1) to the dramatic, as in Billy Strayhorn's stunning "Lush Life" (in chapter 4). One chapter discusses songs that have Shakespeare's words set to Ellington's music (chapter 6). But mostly I discuss music without lyrics, and I hope listeners will discover that it carries the sensual thrill of an experience that goes deeper. It carries the sensation E.E. Cummings captured in his famous stanza -
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
Symphony-goers, opera buffs and modern dance aficionados -people who have had the curiosity to look beyond word-laden pop music - will need much less persuading to take this guided tour through Ellington's music.
Duke Ellington's music is rich and various. Chosen with care, it has the breadth of Shakespeare, but Ellington is four centuries closer to us than Shakespeare. Judiciously selected, it has the depth of Bach, but Ellington is two hundred years closer to us than Bach. Ellington's music is grounded in times and places and situations more or less familiar to us and yet sublimated so that we see them freshly, as if for the first time. His music has its roots in dance-band rhythms, blues harmonies and pop-song melodies but it is, at its best, so much more than any of those things. It literally rose out of them.
Listeners with preconceptions will lose those preconceptions as we make our straightforward trip through the themes in this book. Readers who come to it saying, "I don't like jazz," will be consoled to discover that Duke Ellington also didn't like jazz. Those who come to it saying, "I don't understand jazz," will have the inestimable advantage of hearing the music fresh and unfettered.
The themes in this book trace evolutions and configurations in the way Ellington used instruments (the plunger-muted trombone, the tenor saxophone, the piano), and the way he expressed emotion (sensuality, melancholy, comedy, tragedy), and the astonishing ways he used tones as evocations of the world around him (flora and fauna, cityscapes, a river flow, wise guys, nobility). The themes explore some of Ellington's "black and tan fantasies," as he put it in the title of his first great composition (1927). In tracing these themes in Ellington's music, I have sometimes encumbered the text with scholarly trappings (tables, figures, discographies, an occasional footnote) but they are easily ignored by those who don't want them or need them. Ellington's music speaks for itself, of course, and I hope it speaks all the louder by allowing each piece to shine in its place and time.
Duke Ellington's music deserves your attention. All it asks of you is an open mind and a willing spirit. With good planning and a little luck, it will make its way into the part of your mind where feeling is first.
Each chapter is intended to be self-contained. (Because of that, there is occasionally some repetition, but, I hope, not annoying.) Each chapter, including this one, ends with the list of References (with page references to direct quotations in italics} and the Playlist (the recorded works in order of their appearance in the chapter). The order of the chapters is not arbitrary. I start with "Ellington's Harlem" (chapter 1) because that theme more than any other follows the major peregrinations of Ellington's first 50 years. I want the music to be the focal point, not the biography. (There are many biographies, some better than others.2) Starting with themes that take in a span of time will provide enough biography, I think, to satisfy most music lovers whether they come to the book knowing something or nothing about Ellington's life. I end with "Three Steps into The River" because the strangely imperfect form of that masterpiece of Ellington's last years necessarily implicates the frenetic pace at which Ellington felt compelled to live those years. The River is often overlooked even by specialists (and, as I show in the chapter, by Ellington himself) at least partly because of the hurly-burly surrounding it. The hurly-burly makes a striking contrast to the grace and serenity of the music that came out of it.
Reading the chapters in sequence is not required or expected. From my experience in presenting these themes to audiences, the ones that audiences seem to find most entertaining are "Bardland: Shakespeare in Ellington's World" (chapter 6) and perhaps "Panther Patter: Duke Ellington at the Piano" (chapter 5). They appear near the middle of the book. According to the sequencing strategy people are taught in marketing classes, they should have been placed last and first, respectively. Readers should feel free to apply this sequencing strategy or any other.
In whatever sequence you choose, I know you will find a rich, rewarding, sensual experience. Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) had the uncanny ability to convey the world around him in melody and harmony and rhythm. It is a world of color and grace and pulsations, at once novel and wry and yet strangely familiar.”
Hopefully this feature has whet your appetite for a further reading of Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington’s Music in Nine Themes but will have to wait awhile as Jack shared the following in a personal email:
“Good to hear from you, Steven. I took the book out of print to clear the way for a larger work, twice the size with five more themes. One of the few blessings of COVID-19 canceling my classes. It is near completion …”
Needless to say, when the expanded version is published, a review of it will appear on these pages.
“Side 1: Dr. Jekyl, while not especially melodic, gives the group an excellent opportunity to "stretch out." The eights and fours between Miles and Philly Joe Jones are fiery and invigorating. Paul Chambers, in spite of the fast tempo, takes a soulful solo. The exchange of choruses between Coltrane and Cannonball is the high point of the track, and the rhythm section is very stable throughout.
Sid's Ahead is, in reality, the old, and now classic, Walkin'. During his solo, Coltrane is very clever and creative in his handling of the substitute chords. Miles strolls (without piano) beautifully. He is a true musical conversationalist. Cannonball is quite "funky " at times, and Chambers exemplifies his ability to create solo lines in the manner of a trumpeter or saxophonist.
The third track, Two Bass Hit, opens with everyone on fire—particularly Philly , whose punctuation and attack are as sharp as a knife. Coltrane enters into his solo moaning, screaming, squeezing, and seemingly projecting his very soul through the bell of his horn. I feel that this man is definitely blazing a new musical trail. Philly and Red Garland back the soloists like a brass section, an effect which always creates excitement.
Side 2: The theme of Milestones is unusual, but surprisingly pleasant particularly the bridge where Miles answers the other horns, achieving an echo effect. Philly' s use of sticks on the fourth beat of every bar is quite tasteful. Cannonball cleverly interweaves melodies around the changes. Miles is as graceful as a swan, and Coltrane is, as usual, full of surprises.
Red Garland, who is undoubtedly one of today's great pianists, is spotlighted in Billy Boy with Philly and Paul. The arrangement is tightly knit and well played. Red employs his block chord technique on this track and plays a beautiful single line, as well. Philly and Paul do a wonderful job, both soloing and in the section.
Straight No Chaser is a revival of a Thelonious Monk composition of a few years ago—the spasmodic harmony makes it quite interesting. Cannonball is excellent on this track. I may be wrong, but he seems to have been influenced somewhat by Coltrane. Miles paints a beautiful picture, as surely as with an artist's brush He has a sound psychological approach in that he never plays too much. He leaves me, always"wanting to hear more. I have heard no one, lately, who creates like Coltrane. On this track, he is almost savage in his apparent desire to play his horn thoroughly. Red plays a single line solo with his left hand accompanying off the beat. He closes the solo with a beautiful harmonization of Miles ' original solo on Now's The Time. Here, Philly goes into a subtle 1-2-3-4 beat on the snare drum behind Red's solo, setting it off perfectly. This is the best track of the album. In closing, I'd like to say — keep one eye on the world and the other on John Coltrane.”
- Benny Golson, The Jazz Review, January 1959
One of the reasons that I set up this blog was to have a place to celebrate my heroes and to share them with you.
I was very fortunate to have an early career playing in Jazz groups of every configuration imaginable and I enjoyed it all immensely.
Musically, I made money in commercials and studio work and while that income helped put me through college, the setting for it also helped me realize that the world did not need another, starving Jazz musician, which is what I would have become without the studio work.
But although I subsequently made my way in the world without music, I kept in touch with many of my “old Jazz friends” by buying and listening to their records, reading their books and magazine articles, and attending their club and concert appearances.
Along the way, I also made “new” Jazz friends, many of whom are Jazz writers and critics who have expanded my knowledge and awareness of the music and its makers.
One such new friend is the author, Jack Chambers.
I first “met” Jack on a stormy Sunday afternoon in San Francisco when undeterred by “The great El Niño of 1997-98” [headline from The San Francisco Chronicle], I hopped into my car and headed for the now defunct Borders Bookstore on the corner of Post and Geary Streets.
Over the course of that weekend, I had come to the realization that I did not know very much about Miles Davis’ pre-Columbia Records years, so I headed into town in search of a book that would give me more information about Miles’ earlier discography.
By some miracle, Borders always stocked an ample supply of books about Jazz and lo and behold there was Jack’s book Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis which provided me with all the information I needed about Miles’ recordings.
I was fortunate enough to get a combined edition, but Jack’s book was originally published in two volumes as explained in the following excerpt from his Introduction:
“My book is organized in two volumes, which subdivide Davis's long and extraordinarily productive career into its main phases. Milestones I traces the emergence of the teenaged Davis from East St. Louis, Illinois, into post-war New York City, where he joined the ranks of the bebop revolutionaries, worked out his individual style, and took his place in the forefront of jazz music by late 1959. Davis's activities during this period are covered in two main movements: the first, under the heading "Boplicity," details his apprenticeship, first in his hometown and later under the aegis of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, culminating in his first masterwork with the short-lived experimental nonet of 1948; the second, titled "Miles Ahead," concerns his creative recess during his years of heroin addiction and his dramatic return to form in the 1950s, culminating in the years of the first great quintet and the sextet. Milestones II takes up his music and his times from 1960, also in two main movements; it begins, in "Prince of Darkness," with his formal reorganization of bebop in the second great quintet and continues in "Pangaea" with his restless search for further formal expansions, leading to fusions with free form, rock, and other music.”
While I initially sought out Jack’s Miles book to help fill the gaps in my knowledge about Miles’ earlier recording career before he signed with Columbia in 1955, what convinced me to buy it was the following annotation about my favorite Columbia recording by the Miles Davis Sextet.
I literally wore this record out practicing to it so I thought I was familiar with it, yet what struck me was how much Jack’s observations and insights enhanced my appreciation of the music on Milestones.
See what you think; I’m willing to wager that you’ll see the recording differently after you’ve read Jack’s assessment of it.
“Miles Davis Sextet
Miles Davis, tpt; Julian Adderley, as; John Coltrane, ts; Red Garland, pno; Paul Chambers, b; Philly Joe Jones, dms. New York, 2 April 1958 Two Bass Hit; Billy Boy (rhythm trio only); Straight No Chaser; Milestones (all on Columbia CL 1193)
Same personnel but omit Garland on Sid's Ahead; Davis plays piano and trumpet; same place; 3 April 1958
Dr. Jekyll [Dr. ]ackle] Sid's Ahead [Walkin']
(both issued as above)
Dr. Jekyll is a misspelling (pace Robert Louis Stevenson) of Jackie McLean's title, Dr. Jackle.
With the expanded instrumentation from the quintet to the sextet, Davis makes strategic use of the instrumental combinations. Red Garland's role as a solo voice almost disappears, except for the trio track, Billy Boy, the American folk song that Ahmad Jamal rearranged into a swinging vehicle for piano players. Garland's version was only one of dozens being played at the time, which later prompted Jamal to complain, "I was stupid enough not to copyright the arrangement, and then Oscar Peterson did it, Red Garland did it, Ramsey Lewis did it, everybody did it, and I didn't get paid for it." Garland's only other solo turn is on Straight No Chaser, and everywhere else the space conventionally taken by the piano player is given to Paul Chambers on bass, who solos on every track except Two Bass Hit and Milestones.
The unusual emphasis on bass rather than piano as a solo voice rankled Garland, who walked out of the studio during the warm-up for Sid's Ahead, leaving Davis to double on piano and trumpet on the recorded version of this track. But the emphasis not only reflects Davis's displeasure with Garland; it also, more positively, reflects his delight in his bassist's development. Soon after these recordings were made, Davis told Nat Hentoff, "Paul Chambers ... has started to play a new way whereby he can solo and accompany himself at the same time - by using space well." How that polydexterity might translate into performance is hard to guess, but Chambers was given ample opportunity to show his wares both arco and pizzicato.
The solo orders take some unconventional turns, too. Adderley is the first soloist on Milestones and Straight No Chaser, followed by Davis and then by Coltrane, an order that exploits the stylistic contrasts among the three horns magnificently and also preserves the dynamics of the superseded quintet by allowing Coltrane to charge in behind Davis. On Sid's Ahead and Two Bass Hit, Coltrane opens the solo round, with Davis again interposed between the two reedmen on the former but not soloing at all on the latter. On Dr. Jackie, Davis solos first, exercising the traditional privilege of the leader in jazz bands, but the round of solos turns out to be another innovation, as Davis shares his final three twelve-bar choruses with Philly Joe Jones, and then Adderley and Coltrane trade choruses in their turn.
Probably a more challenging problem for Davis than alloting solo space for the expanded band was working out the ensembles. Only Dr. Jackle seems cluttered in the ensembles, and that impression probably comes not from the lines played by the horns so much as the quick tempo at which they are asked to play it, which prevents them from giving full value to each note. Otherwise the arrangements are very effective, even on the complex Two Bass Hit, where each horn takes charge of a counter-theme in a glorious small-band adaptation of John Lewis's composition. Equally noteworthy are Adderley's lead on the ensemble of Straight No Chaser, with the other horns playing tight dissonances under him, and the startling fanfare of Milestones from which Davis's translucent tone rises at the bridge.
But despite all the attention to solo orders and ensembles that went into these recordings, they succeed only because of the improvisations that sustain the moods of the ensembles and cohere both individually and collectively. Benny Golson, who reviewed this album for Jazz Review, remarks that in Two Bass Hit "Coltrane enters into his solo moaning, screaming, squeezing, and seemingly projecting his very soul through the bell of the horn," and he adds: "I feel that this man is definitely blazing a new musical trail." Perhaps the best evidence of that new trail, in retrospect, occurs on Straight No Chaser, where Coltrane stacks up chords in breathless runs of eighth-notes and sixteenth-notes, a solo that makes a textbook demonstration of the "three-on-one" approach he discussed in his Down Beat article.
Golson and most other reviewers noted that Adderley's playing here shows Coltrane's influence, but that influence is more apparent than real at the point where most listeners think they hear it. In Dr. Jackie, the seams between the alternating choruses by the two players are almost indistinguishable, and there is momentary confusion on a first listening as to where Adderley leaves off and Coltrane begins, and vice versa. But the confusion does not seem to be caused by similarity of phrasing so much as by similarity of tone, as Adderley's full, rich tone on the alto almost seems to be aping Coltrane's tenor in the transitions. Coltrane's influence comes across more clearly on Adderley's solo on Sid's Ahead, a series of sweeping glissandi worthy of Coltrane at his best. The two reedmen are balanced by Davis's sure, spare trumpet, characterized by Golson as "a sound psychological approach in that he never plays too much." Golson adds, "He leaves me, always, wanting to hear more."
The power of the sextet is thus clearly demonstrated in their first recordings. Apart from Dr. Jackie's flawed ensembles, each composition crystallizes various aspects of that power as a self-contained miniature. The intricate, ingenious arrangement of Two Bass Hit, which is worthy of Gil Evans, was almost certainly put together with only a few gestures by way of instruction for the reallocation of parts. For Ian Carr, the British trumpet player, it is Straight No Chaser that wins the accolades. "With Miles Davis, everything counts," Carr told Lee Underwood. "Everything must count, and every note must be accountable. If there's no reason for its being there, then it shouldn't be there. And he swings. For me, he swings more than any other trumpet player, more than almost anybody - just listen to his solo on Straight No Chaser on the Milestones album. No other trumpet player swings like that." Benny Golson points out, among the more arcane delights of this music, that Red Garland ends his solo on Straight No Chaser with "a beautiful harmonization of Miles's original solo on Now's the Time." He states flatly that Straight No Chaser is "the best track on the album."
At least as many people would choose Milestones as the best track. This new composition by Davis, which recycles the title he first used in 1947-it was obviously too good a title to simply abandon - but otherwise bears no resemblance whatever to the earlier composition, contains a remarkable unity. Michel Legrand remarks, "I love the way they approach this melody-everything is for the melody; the chords are very simple, like a carpet on which all the music is based. In other words, the whole thing is not based on complexity, but on simplicity and purity." (It is juvenile, of course, to speak of any work of art as 'perfect,' but it is somehow irresistible to come right out and say - at least parenthetically - that Milestones seems to be a perfect jazz performance. Its components are a simple, memorable, highly original melody, followed by three individualistic explorations of the theme, each one as memorable as the theme itself, by Adderley, Davis, and Coltrane, all buoyed by the brash but sensitive rhythm section, and then the simple, unforgettable melody again. There is nothing more, it seems to me, that one might hope for or ask for in a jazz performance.)
Amazingly, Milestones, which appears to be simple, highly accessible, and above all swinging, also represents a structural innovation of great consequence not only for the music of Miles Davis but also for jazz in general. It is Davis's first completely successful composition based on scales rather than a repeated chord structure. James Lincoln Collier, in his history of jazz, describes its structure this way: "The ability to place his notes in unexpected places is Davis's strongest virtue. It colors his work everywhere. His masterwork in this respect is his Milestones ... It is made up of the simplest sort of eight-bar melody - little more than the segment of a scale, in fact - which is repeated and then followed by a bridge made out of a related eight-bar theme, also repeated. After the bridge, the theme is played once more. The point of it all lies in the bridge, where the rhythm goes into partial suspension. Miles stretches this passage out with notes falling farther and farther behind their proper places. Indeed, in the reprise of the theme at the end of the record he stretches the bridge so far out that he cannot fit it all in and has to cut it short." Collier adds: "It is built not on chord changes but on modes... For Davis, who was already making a point of simplicity, they were a perfect vehicle. He was not the first to see what could be done with them, but he was the one who brought the idea to fruition. Milestones uses one mode on the main theme, then switches to a second mode for the bridge."
Collier correctly points out that Davis was not the first jazz player to promote a modal foundation for jazz compositions - that distinction probably belongs to George Russell. During one of Russell's enforced absences from jazz activity due to tuberculosis, he formalized his thinking in a dissertation called The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, first published in 1953 and required reading ever since for jazz scholars, but well before that Russell had tried to use modes in his writing. The first composition in jazz to use a modal organization is probably Russell's introduction to the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra's Cubano Be. "Diz had written a sketch which was mostly Cubano Be," Russell says. "His sketch was what later turned out to be the section of the piece called Cubano Be except that I wrote a long introduction to that which was at the time modal. I mean it wasn't based on any chords, which was an innovation in jazz because the modal period didn't really begin to happen until Miles popularized it in 1959. So that piece was written in 1947, and the whole concept of my introduction was modal, and then Dizzy's theme came in and we performed it,"
Davis's contribution was not in discovering the innovation but in making it work. He was fully aware of the breakthrough he was making in Milestones, as its title indicates, and he described its advantages to Nat Hentoff at the time. "When you go this way," he said, "you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and you can do more with the line. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done -with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them."
This was the innovation that Coltrane described when he spoke of Davis's "new stage of jazz development" and of his compositions with "free-flowing lines and chordal direction." Hentoff draws the conclusion from his discussion with Davis that "Davis thus predicts the development of both Coltrane and, to a lesser degree, the more extreme, more melodic, Ornette Coleman."
For the ordinary jazz listener, Davis's modal breakthrough is meaningful not for its formal musical properties or for its historical importance but for the gain in expression it allows the musicians, which in the hands of individuals of the caliber of Davis, Coltrane, and Adderley is heard and felt powerfully.
In Milestones and in the other modal compositions that follow it in Davis's repertoire, there is no feeling of self-conscious experimentation and no implication that these musicians are revising the structural foundations of their art. In this regard, Davis contrasts strikingly with the proponents of third stream music and even with the humbler innovators in his old nonet, and also with the avant-garde or free form musicians soon to follow, all of whom spent more than a little energy talking about the uniqueness of their contributions rather than making their music.”
“The Eisenhower years, so Miltown-ized on much of the home front, were turbulent times for jazz. The revolutionaries of the early 1950s were themselves ushered aside by a new avant-garde before the close of the decade. Jazz was like one of those newspaper chess problems: move from bop to free in ten moves. Change was the byword, and it proved to be a cruel taskmaster. Even jazz stars who had perfected wondrous styles—Miles and Coltrane serving as the preeminent examples here—soon felt compelled to throw them overboard in pursuit of the next (and in itself transitory) new thing.
Yet the personal lives of the jazz elite were often even more tumultuous than the music itself. Critics and historians have danced around the issue of jazz and substance abuse, whitewashing and demonizing by turns, but a simple perusal of the names and dates on the tombstones tells you that something was seriously wrong with the masters of the art form during this era. Not everyone was a casualty, but even those who survived, often paid a price in other ways: time in prison, broken families, potential unrealized, financial security traded for a string of fixes.
In the midst of this, it is easy to lose track of Richard Twardzik. This pianist, dead at age 24, never lived to see the release of his first leader date on the Pacific label. It was almost a miracle that this material was issued at all. Pacific only had 22 minutes of Twardzik's music on hand, and needed to package it with trio sides by pianist Russ Freeman in order to fill up an LP album. Over the years, other recordings of Twardzik's music have become available, usually featuring him in a sideman role; but none of these projects is well known outside an inner circle of jazz devotees.
It would thus be all too easy to forget Richard Twardzik. . . except that his music is anything but forgettable….
Now Jack Chambers, a jazz critic best known for his two-volume biography of Miles Davis, has written the first full-length biography of the pianist, Bouncin' With Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik, published by The Mercury Press. Chambers, who first heard Twardzik on record back as a high school student in 1956, has taken this mysterious figure from a bygone jazz era and brought him fully to life in the pages of this remarkable book.”
- Ted Gioia writing on www.Jazz.com
I’ve now studied with Jack Chambers on two, different occasions, which is no mean feat considering the fact that he is a Linguistics Professor at the University of Toronto and I live in Southern California.
Of course, in this era of online education, one could assume that the geographical gap between us could easily be bridged by the Internet.
But that would be an incorrect assumption as both of my tutorials with Professor Chambers involved reading books he has authored, one of which was written over thirty years ago.
Please let me explain.
After a long absence from Jazz due, in part, to the usual personal and professional reasons that find all of us otherwise preoccupied and away from the passions of our youth during “the middle years,” I reconnected with the music in a big way when the compact disc era that began in the 1980s provided easy access to much of the recorded history of Jazz.
At some point in this reawakening, I realized how little I knew about Miles Davis’ music before his now classic records on Columbia [Sony] such as Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess.
During one of my Saturday pilgrimages to the Borders Bookstore at the corner of Post and Powell Streets in San Francisco [just north of the St. Francis Hotel], I came across a copy of Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis [New York: William Morrow, 1989].
Its author was Jack Chambers.
I had never heard of Jack, but after thumbing through the book, I gathered that the work had originally been published as two, separate books with 1960 as the dividing line, a year that would have roughly coincided to when I began to listen to Miles in earnest.
I bought a copy, found it so fascinatingly full of information on Miles that I couldn’t put it down.
I carried it with me everywhere including on my business travels of which there were many in those days. I’d make notes about Jack observations of Miles’ early recordings on labels such as Savoy, Prestige and Blue Note.
And then, upon returning home, I’d seek out the CD reissues of these Miles recordings at the Tower Records Store on Columbus in the Russian Hill section of San Francisco which had a room set-off from the rest of the store that was totally devoted to Jazz [Can you imagine?].
Armed with my newly acquired digital Miles treasures and Jack’s book on Miles, I would relate one to the other while listening to the music on my portable CD player during subsequent business flights and the accompanying [and seemingly interminable] hotel stays.
Jack became my mentor on everything-Miles before 1960 [and after 1960, too, when I read Part II of his definitive work].
Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis hasassumed an honored place on my Jazz books shelf.
Aside from the odd reference search every now and again, there the matter rested until I began to “study with” Jack almost 20 years later on a completely different Jazz topic.
Please let me further explain.
While doing some research for a blog feature on the music of Richard Twardzik, a rather obscure Jazz pianist who had an all-too-brief career in the early 1950s before succumbing to a heroin overdose in 1955, I came across an essay that Ted Gioia wrote for jazz.com.
At the time of its writing, Ted’s Twardzik essay was essentially based on a review of a new biography about the pianist entitled - Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik [Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2008].
The author of the Twardzik biography was - you guessed it - Jack Chambers!
I wrote to Ted concerning his Twardzik essay and he sent me Jack’s e-mail address and suggested that I get in touch with him.
In the meantime, I had written to a friend who is probably THE leading authority on all aspects of Pacific Jazz Records - the label that thankfully recorded Twardzik performing some of his music before his sudden death - and asked him if I could borrow his copy of Jack’s biography [I just assumed he’d have a copy because he has just about everything and anything ever written about Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label].
I was right, he did have the book and he offered to bring it along with him when we next met for one of our Jazz-and-coffee-get-togethers.
Since Jack’s book was forthcoming as a loan from my Jazz buddy, I never did get around to writing to Jack, per Ted’s suggestion.
I didn’t have to because he wrote to me!
It seems that my friend who is expert in all-things-Pacific-Jazz and Jack Chambers had been corresponding for quite some time.
As a result of their friendship, Jack sent along my very own copy of Bouncin’ with Bud: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik and inscribed it with a personal greeting!
After reading Jack’s book, it soon became apparent to me that any blog posting that I might prepare on Richard Twardzik had to incorporate Jack’s knowledge and perspective on the subject.
So I wrote to him, thanked him for his generosity and asked:
“Jack:
As a starting point for my planned feature on Richard Twardzik and his music, I don't think I can do much better than the introductory chapter to Bouncin' with Bartok - A Crutch for the Crab.
May I have your permission to use it in its entirety? ...
Although the album in question would no doubt be different, I'm sure that many Jazz fans can relate to your anecdote about happening upon Twardzik's music, being intrigued by it and then going on a quest to find out more about it.
Thanks for considering this request.
Kind regards,
Steve”
Jack sent back the following reply:
“Steve— I am pleased to give permission for you to reprint Chap. 1 with the acknowledgments and links you list below. Yes, I am sure most music lovers have an experience like mine on first hearing a magnificent piece of music. After I put a note about it on my website, I discovered that many others had their experience with "A Crutch for the Crab."
One person wrote and said, ‘Until I read your article, I thought Richard Twardzik was a figment of my imagination.’
“I first heard a recording of Richard Twardzik playing piano in 1956, when I was a high-school student. The tune was called A Crutch for the Crab, and it was one of the tracks on a promotional LP put out by Pacific Jazz, a sampler called Assorted Flavors of Pacific Jazz (LIFS-1). It cost $1.98 brand-new; and that was the kind of bargain you couldn't pass up if you were a jazz-struck, underachieving, underage smoker with a pompadour and black horn-rims who made five dollars on Saturdays squeegeeing the windows of Welsh's Butcher Shop and three other stores on King Street in a town called Stoney Creek on the Canadian side of the Niagara border.
Side One of Assorted Flavors strung together a lot of excerpts from the Pacific Jazz catalogue while a man with a radio voice told a kind of company history of West Coast jazz, starting with Gerry Mulligan's piano-less quartet at the Haig in 1952.The radio man sounded like he gargled with Coppertone. His voice-over commentary obscured the beginning of A Crutch for the Crab, and the ending disintegrated in a fade-out. The excerpt, counting the commentary, was less than two minutes long. It was, you would have thought, the worst way to hear any kind of music.
In fact it was sensational. Twardzik's piano playing was fluent and eccentric and painfully beautiful. His tune—a composition, really, when we finally got to hear all of it—was full of jagged turns and crisp releases. Somehow it came out sounding exactly right for its wild title, crabbily fluid with sudden lurches. It was like nothing else in the world. It was a revelation.
What the narrator said, oozing cool, was also a revelation. He said:
'When Chet Baker went to Europe in September of 1955, he took with him a startling new pianist from Boston named Richard Twardzik. Twardzik died in Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his. Here's the late Richard Twardzik as he sounded in 1954 playing his own composition, A Crutch for the Crab.'
It was the only time I ever heard a news item on an LP.
I tracked down the source LP, partly fearing that I had been bamboozled—that Richard Twardzik would turn out to be an ordinary piano player who had been cleverly edited to make a few brilliant minutes on a promotional record. I had to wait a long time to find out. Twrardzik's LP was a new release, copyright 1956, the same as the sampler. I had to order it at the record store, as an import."It's gonna cost you, son," said the man at the record shop,"and it's gonna take six weeks at least."
The LP was called Trio (Pacific Jazz 1212). Just looking at it, holding it in my hand still swathed in its protective plastic sheath, took my breath away. The cover was the print of an oil painting in shades of brown, with three solid figures, guys built like cairns, tossing boulders around as if they were helium balloons. The credit line said "west coast artists series/Edmund Kohn" and the back cover carried a profile and a small picture of old Edmund, a round man with a handlebar mustache and a kerchief knotted around his neck, looking like the street musician with the dancing monkey you see in cartoons. It also told about Edmund's success as an illustrator and about the awards he had won at the Sacramento State Fair and other lesser places. Since then I have read testimonials by very serious people about how their lives were changed forever when they saw Picasso's Guernica or Botticelli's Primavera. For me, it will always be Edmund Kohn's unnamed cover painting for Trio.
The billing on the cover indicated that Twardzik shared the LP with another piano player, Russ Freeman. In fact, it gave Twardzik second billing on the cover, but on the actual disk the six tracks by Twardzik's trio filled the first side. The second side was given over to Freeman, and I already knew7 something about him. He was the dean of West Coast piano players by dint of appearing on nearly every jazz record that came from California.
The back cover was packed with information: besides the box about Edmund Kohn, there were six column inches about Russ Freeman, another six column inches by Freeman about Richard Twardzik, and two black & white 3.5" x 4" portraits. One of the portraits was of Freeman by the famous California photographer William Claxton showing Freeman with a pencil mustache and dark suit, looking more like a used car salesman than was surely intended. The other portrait was of "The Late Richard Twardzik" (as the caption portentously put it),and it showedTwardzik against a dark background, hollow-cheeked, staring into the distant gloom. It was (and is) brilliantly evocative, and for many years it was the only known portrait of Twardzik.
The liner credited the portrait to "Nick Dean, Boston," not a name that registered any recognition. Years later, I spoke to numerous Boston contemporaries of Richard Twardzik, and none could place Nick Dean, the photographer. But some 45 years later, I discovered more photographs by Nick Dean, as we shall see, some of them the equal of the back-cover portrait. His old business address is stamped on the back of one of the portraits: "Photograph by/ Nick Dean/41 Charles Street/Boston 14, Mass./CA 7-8440." And finally, with the help of Richard Twardzik's second cousin who was born long after Richard had died but came to maturity in the internet era, I would find Dean himself.
Freeman was credited as producer of Twarcizik's recording session. In his liner notes about Twardzik's music. Freeman praises Twardzik's "really original concept," and tells how he came across him in Boston and was struck by his music, "fresh and very uninhibited, especially harmonically" Freeman said that the recordings by Twardzik came about because he phoned Richard Bock, the owner and producer of Pacific Jazz Records in Los Angeles, to tell him about this hot young player, and Bock gave him permission to record Twardzik for the label.
Freeman says the recording took place "late in 1954," but the exact date— 27 October 1954 —was only fixed 35 years later with the kind of sleuthing (as we will see later) that jazz discographers revel in. The recording was made in Rudy Van Gelder's parlor in Hackensack, New Jersey, the now-legendary recording studio that was just beginning to earn its reputation when Freeman took Twardzik and the other musicians there. Accompanying Twardzik were Carson Smith, Chet Baker's regular bassist, a Californian who was young, only 23, but already well known for playing in Mulligan's Quartet as well as Baker's, and a young, unknown Boston drummer, Peter Littman. (Complete details for these and all other recordings by Twardzik are listed in the discography at the end.)
Freeman's endorsement sounds like an understatement on the evidence of Twardzik's music. The original Pacific Jazz release included three standards, Bess You Is My Woman Now, 'Round About Midnight and I’ll Remember April, and three originals, Albuquerque Social Swim, Yellow Tango and, of course, A Crutch for the Crab.
The standards were fresher then than we can imagine today. Twardzik's recording of Bess You Is My Woman Now pre-dates by four full years the Porgy and Bess boom that came with its movie version in 1959 and brought with it jazz versions of its score by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Mundell Lowe, Bill Potts, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Gershwin's opera had been revived in 1952 for an international tour starring soprano Leontyne Price, but that was a more operatic version than the film would be, and it hardly caught the attention of jazz musicians, except for Twardzik. Although several George Gershwin songs ranked high in the standard jazz repertoire, the ones from Porgy and Bess were not common among them except for Summertime, and that by virtue not of the opera but of a seminal 1939 jazz recording by Sidney Bechet.When Twardzik recorded Bess You Is My Woman Now in 1954, it was completely unknown as a jazz vehicle.
More surprisingly, so was 'Round About Midnight. Thelonious Monk had made his original studio recording of his song in 1947 and, apart from an obscure solo recording he made of it in Paris in 1954, he did not record it again for a decade, until 1957. By then, it had been widely discovered as a jazz vehicle and Monk's interpretation of his own ballad was one of dozens, albeit primus inter pares. It was destined to become one of the two or three most recorded jazz compositions of all time. But Twardzik's pensive, almost introverted, take on it in 1954 caught it on its rise into the standard repertoire, and surely it was one that caught the ear of many other piano players.
Refreshing as the ballads were, Twardzik's original compositions were positively brilliant. Yellow Tango is a confection based on a mannerly Latin beat sustained by bass and drums while Twardzik teases the genre with high-note filigrees in the manner of then little-known Ahmad Jamal. Albuquerque Social Swim is tougher, its oblique melodies played staccato with sudden, unexpected stops.The improvised choruses burst into rock-steady 4/4 time, and after the stutters of the theme they come as a blessed relief. The device of inexplicable stops released into flowing melodies dominates Albuquerque Social Swim and animates it by creating knots of tension and unraveling them in flowing melody. In A Crutch for the Crab the stop-and-release is just one of several devices.
If Twardzik's side of the original LP had a flaw, it was in programming. A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim were set together at the beginning, as tracks one and two, where their similarities somehow tempered their stunning differences.
A Crutch for the Crab, heard in its entirety, is a 3-minute symphony. Its structure is ambiguous: the opening exposition takes 24 bars but the final reprise takes only 20, having lost the first four bars. Those first four bars open the piece as a kind of cadence; they might be a prelude. The second four bars are syncopated, with the piano playing on one and three while the drums accent two and four. The effect is unforgettable, and sets up a repeated figure in the 17th and 23rd bars where the piano fills the second and fourth accents with its own out-of-tempo syncopations. The same figure comes back at points in the improvisation, and so do references to other melodic figures, always modulated in some way. The performance is rich with nuance. It ends too soon from one vantage point, but from another it entices you to go back to it time and again, as real art always does.
In my mind's eye, the syncopation caught the crab's motion of the title with unimaginable perfection, seemingly lurching, almost awkward, but at the same time fluid and swift.Try to catch it and it darts through your hands. It is edgy and slightly frightening, and just when you think you have it cornered, it is gone.
Twardzik offered an alternate explanation for the title in the liner notes. It came, he said, "from watching the hands of the Polish pianist, Jan Smeterlin, as they scurried crab-like into the keys." But that came too late for me. By then, I had my own objective correlative for the title embedded in the music, and it could not be shaken. Besides, there was good reason for not taking Twardzik literally. Another explanation that he put forward was obviously intended to give the finger to the unwary. Yellow Tango, he said, "wras written as incidental music for a Shake-dance." Oh sure.
The recordings by Richard Twardzik on the Trio LP last 21 minutes and 44 seconds. (A mistake on the timings printed on the cover made it seem even less by more than a minute, but Yellow Tango is over five minutes, not 4:18.) Of the six tracks, the three ballads arid three originals, all but Yellow Tango are around the three-minute mark, the industry standard length in the era of brittle old 78 rpm shellac records and one that was imprinted so forcibly onto the psyches of musicians and producers that it was still the industry standard length in 1954, two years after jazz recordings invariably came out on unbreakable vinyl at 33 rpm.
Twardzik's Trio recording was easy to miss, even for vigilant jazz fans. It was, after all, just half a record by an unknown piano player with too many consonants in his name. His music held up to repeated listenings, in fact endlessly, but there was still too little of it. You never got tired of it.You never got enough of it.
From the start I knew there was more recorded music by Richard Twardzik, because Russ Freeman, in his liner note, wrote, "He recorded with Serge [Chaloff] and Charlie Mariano," who I knew about as two Boston jazz musicians with national reputations. Freeman added, "He also had an original, TheFable of Mabel, recorded by Serge for Storyville Records."
Those were tantalizing clues, and they cost me many frustrating hours. The man at the record shop could find no listings for either Chaloff or Mariano as leaders, and nobody I knew with a jazz collection had ever heard of these particular records. Even Joe Rico, the jazz jockey on Buffalo radio who seemed, in my teenage pantheon, to know everything worth knowing not only about jazz but about life, when I finally got a friend of a friend's friend to make an inquiry, just shrugged.
In 1956, channels of communication were sluggish. It was years before I realized that those other records Twardzik had played on had had mainly local distribution around Boston, and that the Mariano record was out of print even before I had started making inquiries about it. Probably the Chaloff record was too. In 1963, when I found a discography of Richard Twardzik's recordings in an English jazz magazine called Jazz Monthly (Morgan 1963), I finally learned more of the details—labels, titles, recording dates, personnel, instruments, compositions. It turned out there were two Mariano records with Twardzik on them, and not only did Chaloff record Twardzik's composition The Fable of Mabel, but Twardzik played on it too. I wrote the titles of all three records on the list of collectibles I carry in my wallet. Over the years, dozens of items on that list came and went, but those Boston LPs took on a frustrating permanence. As jazz buffs do, I watched for the records to come up in delete bins and record auctions. As my travels broadened, first in my college days when I found myself across the river from Detroit and then as my professional pursuits took me to conferences all over North America and eventually Europe, I spent hours pawing through dusty stacks of vinyl in far-flung cities on two continents.
To this day, I have never found those records, any of them, in the LP format. I finally got to hear them when the commercial boom brought on by the new CD technology at the tail-end of the 1980s led record companies to sweep out their vaults.
Freeman's liner note also offered the news that Twardzik's "professional career began at the age of fourteen," and that "he worked with Tommy Reynolds, Charlie Barnet, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, Serge Chaloff, Charlie Mariano, Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker." With that background, somewhere there had to be live performances on acetate or tape reels, and, sure enough, a few years later a single track surfaced of Charlie Parker with a pick-up band in a Boston nightclub. Twardzik's piano was largely inaudible, but he was there, and the very existence of the performance held the promise of more, and over the decades more performances have slowrly accumulated, never out of regard for Twardzik himself but usually triggered by lingering sentiments for the leaders of the bands he happened to be playing in—Parker, Chaloff, or Chet Baker.There is quite a bit more to come, I now know; and come it will if the growing sentiments for Twardzik, or at least curiosity about him, gather a little momentum.
With only the twenty-odd minutes of the trio recordings, it might have been impossible for me and for other jazz fans to sustain interest in the ill-fated piano player for the next half-century or so. But there was more. Pacific Jazz Records released a new recording with Twardzik on it the same year as the trio record, and the second recording was a small treasure of beguiling, open-minded, cool music that provided a whole new view of Twardzik's brilliance, and solidified his singular ability in case there were any doubts.
The records were made in a Paris studio by the Chet Baker Quartet in two sessions. The date of the second session was exactly one week before Twardzik died. The LP that was issued in North America was called Chet Baker in Europe (Pacific Jazz 1218), and it carried the grandiose subtitle A Jazz Tour of the NATO Countries. The tracks with Twardzik consisted of six pieces of extraordinary delicacy, almost like chamber music. Once again, they amounted to only half a record. They filled the second side, all 25 minutes of it. There were also five tracks on the first side, fillers in my mind, by Baker with European musicians recorded after Twardzik's death.
My copy of the Pacific Jazz LP has disappeared, as things tend to do in four decades or more. It was a rare one. It has never been reissued in the original format and I now realize that its rarity has nothing to do with the tastes of the company executives, about whom I harbored resentment for years, assuming they did not know they were hiding a masterpiece in their vaults. I now realize that the music never belonged to the American distributor, Pacific Jazz, but had to be leased by them from Barclay Records in Paris, the original producer and owner.
That explained why the LP came with strangely impersonal packaging, with a cover photo focusing on the tail of a Pan American airliner instead of the customary romantic pose of Chet Baker, who was not only the best-selling jazz musician of the moment but also a highly photogenic boyish hipster. I now know that Baker was still in Europe when Pacific Jazz leased this music and packaged it in an effort to keep alive the American fin interest in their hottest musician. The cover photo shows a young couple embracing in the shadow of the airliner, but it isn't even Baker, although the male figure obscured by the woman shows a Chet-like pompadour.
Baker's cover poses, except for this one, had a certain cachet. In fact, they have proven to have something close to the lasting power of art. Years later they were collected in coffee-table format in Young Chet (Claxton 1993). So at the time of its release, the cover of Chet Baker in Europe seemed a bit weird, with make-believe Chet hidden behind the young woman hugging him on his supposed return to American soil. Equally weird were all those strange foreign names of the musicians on the filler tracks. But come to think of it, they were no stranger than the names of what had been, until Twardzik's sudden death, Baker's working quartet.
Baker's young sidemen were so unknown beyond their own hometowns that advertising them by name would have stirred no expectations abroad and almost none at home.
What set Chet Baker in Europe apart was the music. The brilliance of the recordings Baker made in the Paris studio with Twardzik would turn out to be due in part to an invisible fifth member of the new quartet. Baker's group recorded nothing but original compositions in the Paris studio, a very unusual situation for Baker, whose reputation rested on ballads and jazz standards before this and, it would turn out, forever after. Of those original compositions, one was written by Twardzik, and the other five were written, according to the composer credit on the label, by "Bob Zieff." There were actually three more Zieff compositions recorded at these sessions but it would be several years before we knew that, except for the few fans who had access to the original French issue on Barclay Records.
Bob Zieff was another mystery man, arid the mystery was hardly solved by Baker's identification of him in the liner note (1956) as "the young Boston writer that Dick Twardzik, my pianist, brought to my attention." His music was mysterious too.There were no funny valentines, no lilting Mulliganesque ditties, no harmon-muted bleeding sentiments—in other words, none of the hallmarks on which Baker's popularity was based.
Baker was well aware of the differences. His liner note added, "The originality and freshness of Zieff’s line and chordal structure is going to please a lot of people, I think—at least musicians and other serious listeners." That statement seemed like an attempt at preparing Baker's regular fans for the kind of departure that Zieff's music represented. It was, above all, cerebral music. (You can dance to it, in the bop mockery of the hopelessly passe Swing Era, but only if you work out your steps very very carefully.) Each composition is an intricate little gem. Each note seems deliberately laid into its position in the composition. Each composition sounds more difficult to play than the last one, no matter what order you listen to them in, but the rewards of mastering their difficulties are obvious in the subtle swing and the melodic surprises.
Playing Zieff's compositions obviously requires discipline and control, the aspect that gives the pieces the chamber-like feel, but that should not imply that the quartet's performances of these pieces are subdued or in any way timid. Baker and Twardzik, the principal soloists, range freely through key changes and tempo shifts with what seems uncanny ease.
Baker was praised from the beginning of his career for his spontaneity He had a knack for inventing attractive phrases on the spot. In jazz, spontaneous invention is essential, and most jazz musicians rely on rote devices to relieve them of the burden of constant invention. Baker needed fewer of them than many others. When it came to spinning lines of disarmingly simple and lyrically attractive variations, he had few peers. All that was widely recognized, but in his career he received scant notice for the beauty of his tone or the fullness of his range on the trumpet, perhaps because he displayed them so infrequently, sticking almost exclusively to the middle register. There was no way he could do that in Zieff's music. It required him to move briskly over the scale, especially on the tunes called Rondette and Re-Search, and to play rapid exercise-like sequences in Mid-Forte and Piece Caprice, sometimes requiring octave leaps. Baker carried it off with total control. He made it sound easy. His technical skills were seldom so evident, before or after. And through it all his lyrical bent, the heart of his talent, never flagged for a second.
Zieff's music sets Baker into brooding moods on Sad Walk, Just Duo and Brash, and winsome melodies with minor drags on Rondette, Sad Walk and Pomp. The ingenious harmonies draw out Baker's sensitivity, seeming to extract it without pretense or posing as he traces fresh melodic lines over the layered harmonies.These recordings may represent the apogee of Baker's talents as a pure musician.
The only other composition recorded by the young quartet in Paris was composed by Twardzik himself, called The Girl from Greenland. If I had never heard A Crutch for the Crab and Albuquerque Social Swim (and, eventually, The Fable of Mabel, Twardzik's other remarkable composition) it would be tempting to credit Zieff with it rather than Twardzik. The kindred feelings in the music of Twardzik and Zieff were no coincidence, I would discover 20 years later, when I accidentally sat down beside Robert L. Zieff at a conference in Oldham, Lancashire, on the music of Duke Ellington.
Twardzik's Girl from Greenland is a ballad (A A'B A') built on a lilting rhythm. Baker's statement of the ascending scale of the melody is countered by Twardzik's trills at the top of the piano. When Baker and Twardzik break free of the melody in their solo choruses, they sustain the contrasting moods of their melodic motifs. Baker emphasizes the minor mood, brooding over it quietly. Twardzik mocks the mood, teasing it by spreading four bars of melody over eight and inverting phrases. Baker is involved and Twardzik is aloof. Baker is romantic and Twardzik is cynical. It is an ingenious arrangement, perfectly executed. Both musicians play their parts brilliantly, but it is the interaction of the parts that raises the music to a higher level.
And when the last note of The Girl from Greenland faded, there would be no more music from Richard Twardzik. Or so it seemed. As the man with the Coppertone voice on the Pacific Jazz sampler said, "Twardzik died m Paris a few months later, depriving us all of the great ability that was his." Now, to add to that, we had the eyewitness testimony of Chet Baker. In his liner notes for Chet Baker in Europe (1956),Baker included this diary entry in his account of his tour of the NATO countries (with the elisions in the original):
‘OCT. 21 —Today here in Paris, alone in his room, Dick Twardzik died suddenly at 24, cheating all of us of his very real genius.... His conception was so completely original; the way he played with meter was uncanny, turning it around and around, never goofing, always there. He leaves behind far too fewr examples of the genius he possessed. My association with him has enriched my life greatly and I'm thankful for that.We are all deeply saddened.... a wonderful person and a brilliant musician.’
There did indeed seem to be too few examples of his genius. The Baker quartet tracks from Paris, on the Pacific Jazz release, amounted to 24 minutes and 29 seconds. Add to that the 21:44 of the piano trio recordings and you get the grand total: 46 minutes and 13 seconds. Enough to establish a reputation, but hardly enough to sustain it, by any reasonable standards.There would be, miraculously, another 15 minutes of Bob Zieff's music by Baker and Twardzik in Paris, and when it is added on it brings the grand total to 61:12, one hour and one minute and a few seconds. Eventually more music by Twardzik would be found, a fair amount really, considering the brevity of his life, some of it excellent, but the very best of it is here, in the hour from these two studio recordings.
Over the years, I have returned to this music often, and always with the fear that I would find its pleasures gone flat. As I left behind the horn-rimmed teenager I had been when I first heard Richard Twardzik playing A Crutch for the Crab, I feared that I might find out that my feelings for it were based on nothing more than adolescent brooding for a doomed young artist. I was afraid something inside me would say, Snap out of it, for god's sake.
It hasn't happened.” For order information on Jack's book please go here.
For the following video tribute to Richard Twardzik, I selected his interpretation of Bess, You Is My Woman Now because as Ted Gioia explains:
His interpretation of "Bess, You Is My Woman" is a case study in the jazz-ballad-as-art-song. This latter performance is worth hearing for the pedaling alone—and how often can you say that about a jazz track? But even more striking is his splashes of sound color—the term "voicings" hardly does justice to what Twardzik
