Mel Torme, Marty Paich and Vo-Cool-izing

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

If you are a hip, slick and cool Jazzer, you know that experiencing Mel Torme’s vocals are a real treat and that nobody ever wrote better Jazz arrangements than Marty Paich.

You also know that encountering Mel and Marty together is an ineffable musical happenstance.

And if you are in the mood to thank the Jazz Gods for leaving us the legacy of four - FOUR!!!! - albums that they made together from about 1955-1960, please be my guest.

Any thank them, too, for showcasing their talents ably aided and abetted by Jack Sheldon on trumpet, Frank Rosolino on trombone, Art Pepper on alto sax, Jack Montrose, tenor sax, Victor Feldman, vibes, Barney Kessel, guitar, Joe Mondragon, bass, Mel Lewis on drums and a host of other West Coast Jazz musicians in their prime.

The music on the four recordings that Mel and Marty made together is a national treasure.

If you haven’t heard it, buy ‘em all and treat yourself to one of the most glorious listening experiences available in recorded Jazz.

Because Mel Torme was born 1925 [in Chicago], he missed the height of the band era, getting in only at its tail end. Like his colleagues Mickey Rooney Buddy Rich, and Sammy Davis, Jr., he began as a child performer who grew up into a high-energy performance dynamo.

Ben Pollack, the impresario-bandleader who was to Chicago whites what Fletcher Henderson was to New York blacks, put Torme in Chico Marx's all-juvenile orchestra when the pianist-comic fronted a dance band to pay off some gambling debts (and also toyed with the idea of building a similar kid band arour.: Torme).

Not long after Torme broke into pictures (he had previously played child parts on radio soaps) and a few month before his enlistment, he put together his first edition of the Mel-Tones and recorded with them on Jewell and Decca.

After the war, Torme rejoined the group, got them on Musicraft  Records, where they made a series of sessions with and without Artie Shaw and brought the vocal group into modern jazz.

After "giving up the ghost" (Mel's term) with the Mel-Tones, Torme for a time seemed destined to become a "big-time bobby-socks idol" (Look magazine's term), when Carlos Gastel — who had helped make stars of Nat Cole and Peggy Lee, and put Stan Kenton and Anita O'Day together —moved him up to Capitol Records and MGM Pictures. He had hits, which incurred the resentment rather than the respect of the older showbiz communly (prior to the baby-boom young adults rarely became singing stars) at his ill-planned New York debut at the Copacabana.

If anything, Torme's records for Musicraft and the much bigger Capitol Records were too successful: They led his managers and A&R men to think Torme could be converted, like so many other talented artists, into a mere cog in the hit-making machinery. But he had, in William Blake's words, learned what was enough by first learning what was more than enough.

After a few years of bobby-sox idolatry, Torme decided to stick with smaller labels and classier music. His first long-playing record had also been the first Capitol LP, his own most spectacular stab at an extended composition, The California Suite (on Discovery DS-900), a thirty-five-plus-minute work that extols the virtues of the Sunshine State in eleven parts, all being songs but none fitting traditional thirty-two-bar AABA patterns.

Torme made his first conventional album, Musical Sounds Are the Best Songs [1954, Coral], in which he says goodbye to the big-band era in a set of nonsensical but very hard-swinging rhythm numbers. He followed Musical Sounds with lush ones on It's a Blue World [1955, Bethlehem], which shows how much better his ballad singing had gotten since the Musicrafts and Capitols.

The vo-cool era, then, begins at its highest point, Mel Torme and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette, which leads to four other Torme-Paich collaborations, the second also on Bethlehem, Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire (1956), and the others on Verve: Torme 1958), a flawless collection of unlush ballads with a small string section; Back in Town (1959), the Mel-Tones' reunion album; and the climax, not only of the Torme-Paich relationship but of the whole cool genre, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley (1960).

Torme today dislikes the sound of his voice on these records, and, in fact, once offered to remake them for the current corporate owners of the Bethlehem catalog. But even though his voice is a finer-tuned instrument in the late eighties, I doubt that anything could improve these records, especially the first and the last. The original Dek-Tette recording set the greatest diversity of tempo and on more adventurous works such as "The Blues" [which is an excerpt from Duke Ellington’s extended suite Black, Brown and Beige] in which he translates the multileveled Ellingtonian sound into multileveled Torme-Paich sound.  

On "Lullaby of Birdland," Torme gradually flies farther and farther out, not by Ella-vating himself off the nearest chord progression but by building a scaffold of scat (and voice-horn interplay with the Dek-Tette) that he can climb as high as he wants.

All twelve songs on Shubert Alley, by contrast, come from the same source, the book-shows of post-Oklahoma! Broadway, and Torme and Paich reconfigure them all into the same medium-bright tempo. All have been thoroughly re-composed so that the familiar patterns of vocal-band-vocal and band-vocal-band are exceptions rather than rules, and only the closing chart, "Lonely Town" (the one track on Shubert Alley to use a piano), could have been sung by any other singer on any other album.

On two numbers, Torme and Paich postulate on the possibility of blues devices  in   other  kinds  of material,   as  when  Torme  gathers momentum by repeating the penultimate six notes of "Just in Time," over and over without the final tonic, until it assumes the shape of a Count Basie-Joe Williams blues, and when in "Too Darn Hot" they have trombonist Frank Rosolino and altoist Art Pepper not wait for the "instrumental" second chorus to solo but instead take their eight-bar turns after each of Torme's opening A sections—in other words, shaping a standard as if it were Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow."

Interpolations, of the kind that will eventually become a Torme perennial, figure on almost ever track, though they're not usually made by the singer but by the band behind him, as on the second chorus of "Once in Love With Amy," where Torme sings the first A and the Dek-Tette play "Makin' Whoopee," switching to "Easy Living" for the second A and also when Torme sings the Latinate "Whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets" and Paich and crew pay homage to Gerry Mulligan by way of "Bernie's Tune."

Its virtues could be extolled ad infinitum but the point is that the strength of the album does not lie in and of its individual elements, nor do certain tracks stand out above the others. Instead, from start to finish, Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley is a masterpiece. Neither the vo-cool specifically nor vocalizing in general got any better than this, though a few contenders have come along in the interim.”

Sources:

Joseph Laredo insert notes to Mel Torme with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 75732

Joseph Loredo insert notes to Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire [Bethlehem/Avenue Jazz R2 79847]

Mel Torme original liner notes to Back in Town: Mel Torme with the Meltones [Jazz Heritage CD 515088L]

Lawrence D. Stewart insert notes to Mel Torme Swings Shubert Alley with The Marty Paich Orchestra [Verve CD 821-581-2]

Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond.

Over the Rainbow: Rare and Unissued Art Pepper,1949-1960

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Each year, the Los Angeles Jazz Institute makes available a CD of previously unreleased recordings from its vast holdings as a bonus to those who become members of the Institute. You can locate more information about membership in the LA Jazz Institute as well as a detailed description of its collections and forthcoming events by going here.

This year’s bonus CD is entitled Over The Rainbow: Rare and Unissued Art Pepper, 1949-1960 [LAJI 0012] and it contains 15 tracks by Art both on alto and tenor saxophones in a variety of settings. Ken Poston, who produced the CD and who is the Director of the LA Jazz Institute offers the following perspective on the music in his insert notes to the CD.

“This collection spans an eleven year period in Art Pepper's career that showcases his rise from promising sideman with the Stan Kenton Orchestra to legitimate jazz star. It was a very prolific period in spite of the fact that he spent close to three of those years off the scene.

The recordings on this CD are organized chronologically which enables us to hear his stylistic evolution as it develops throughout the decade. The first four tracks demonstrate a very lyrical individual voice that stood out from so many other alto saxophonists who came more directly out of the Charlie Parker mold.

The three years spent incarcerated were not totally wasted. He spent his time wisely, doing a lot of practicing and writing. When he re-emerged in early 1956 his playing had taken on some new distinctive qualities. His melodic ideas were more mature, he had become much more harmonically advanced and he had perfected his overall sound. He had always had a special ability to express emotion in his playing but it was even more evident during this period.

Although he recorded frequently between 1956 and 1958, jobs were still hard to come by and he started playing tenor with a rock and roll band in the San Fernando Valley. He also worked frequently with a mambo orchestra mostly on baritone. Those experiences resulted in a few other subtle changes in his playing that began to appear towards the end of the decade when he developed a slightly more aggressive approach and began expanding his harmonic language even more.

The collection ends with his final session as a leader prior to his incarceration in San Quentin that takes him off the scene for most of the 1960s.

Most of the recordings on this disc are previously unissued or very rare.

Enjoy

Ken Poston”

The following video tribute to Art Pepper and arranger-conductor Marty Paich offers a sampling of the music on this special CD. The tune is Dizzy Gillespie’s Shaw ‘Nuff.

Victor Feldman and The Venezuelan Joropo

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

Cross-cultural influences have always been a part of the Jazz experience from the music earliest beginnings in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century when French, English, Spanish, Creole, African, and Native American Indian elements all contributed to the music’s unique sound and rhythmic feeling.

Rhythmic feeling has often been responsible for some of the greatest changes in the sound of the music as it evolved from ragtime to Dixieland to Swing to Bebop to Hard Bop to the freer forms of the music associated with unusual or time signatures which began to manifest in the late 1950’s and early 1960.

Since then, Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms from Cuba, Samba and Bossa Nova beats from Brazil, Indian ragas, Japanese theatrical music from Noh and Kabuki plays, Middle Eastern, Central European and Turkish dance rhythms that place accents at different intervals - all these and many more rhythmic influences have found their way into the Jazz idiom as the music became more universal and more cosmopolitan in the second half of the 20th century.

Not all of these cross-cultural adaptations have resulted in lasting influences on Jazz, but some of them are fun to explore as isolated instances of what the music sounds like in different environments.

One of my favorites recordings of such vanished experiments is Victor Feldman’s 1967 The Venezuela Joropo LP[Liberty Pacific Jazz PJ-20128]

Listening to The Venezuela Joropo, brings to mind  Philip Elwood’s assessment that “… Victor’s knowledge of rhythms and meters, and the possibilities inherent in combining melodic lines with percussion expressions, greatly expounds the sounds of any group within which he works.”  

Only someone with Victor’s bent-of-mind could even conceive of taking music such as this into a Jazz setting.

To digress from a moment, Latinsville [Contemporary CCD-9005-2], an album done much earlier in his career [1958-59], was Victor’s first, major recorded statement of his affinity for various Latin jazz styles. And while it served as a precursor to The Venezuela Joropo it can also be considered a direct link to it from the standpoint of Victor’s lifelong fascination with different rhythms and his uncanny ability to place them successfully in a Jazz context.

Another influence that helped spawn the original 1958-59 recording project was the great admiration that Victor had for Cal Tjader, both as a vibist and as a fellow drummer, and the Latin Jazz music Cal was then performing with his quintet.

Pianist Vince Guaraldi was a member of Cal’s group at that time and he and Victor were great friends from their stint together on the Woody Herman band [Vince even replaced Victor with the Lighthouse All-Stars for a time before returning to his native San Francisco in 1960]. Vince and Victor had many conversations about Latin Jazz, often demonstrating certain figures or phrases while playing “montuno” 5-note rhythmic patterns using claves [two small wooden rods about 8 inches long and 1 inch in diameter; they are typically made of rosewood, ebony or genadillo].

The seeds for what became The Venezuela Joropo [Liberty Pacific Jazz PJ-20128] must have been “germinating” in Victor’s mind for quite some time as he talked about his interest in this music during his 1965 interview with Les Tomkins:

“I've heard some music from Venezuela that I have some tapes of at home. Everything's in 6/4. There's a harp player, a maracas player, a guitar-or, actually, it's a quarto-and a gultarone on there, playing the bass notes. And it's the first time I've heard a harp player really swing. I've heard people try to play the harp in jazz, but it's syncopation, rather than swing. This guy's fantastic. There's a few of 'em in Venezuela. I can't recall his name; it's on the tip of my tongue.

The maracas player is also a marvelous musician. He makes fill-ins at the right time into the bridges, he can make trills on the maracas-all kinds of amazing things. And the sound these guys get with what they do! It really swings. I'm going to try and incorporate it into something I do on a record, and let it be sort of an influence. The harmonic structure's so simple. There's 7th chords and major chords - but it's a matter of knowing how to improvise on that. Because when you've improvised on the chord structures that I commonly use - this is entirely different. So I'm working on it.”

With Marty Paich [with whom Victor studied arranging] contributing an arrangement of one of the tracks, there is some very beautiful music on The Venezuela Joropo and it is regrettable that it has never made it to CD.

On it, Victor, who plays vibes and/or marimba on all tracks, uses two bands: [1] Emil Richards [vibes/marimba], Bill Perkins [flute/alto flute], Dorothy Remson [harp], Al Hendrickson [guitar], Max Bennett [bass], Larry Bunker [timbales], and Milt Holland [maracas and percussion]; [2] Bill Perkins [flute/alto flute], Dennis Budimir [acoustic and electric guitars], Monty Budwig [bass] and Colin Bailey [drums].

Dr. Robert Garfias, then of the Archives of Ethnic Music and Dance of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA wrote the liner notes for the album. They tell a fascinating story of the serendipitous way in which the album came about and, since the album has never been issued in CD form, they are re-printed here in their entirety.

“Perhaps a little more than a year ago I received a phone call from Victor Feldman. He had by chance happened to hear in Los Angeles one of my radio programs dealing with the traditional and folk music of Venezuela and was anxious to hear more of this music, and to know something about it.  In this way a rather sporadic exchange of tapes, letters and phone calls was begun which at last resulted in the exciting music included on this LP.

Before this, Victor Feldman was known to me only as the very sensitive pianist who had played for a time with Miles Davis. I was honestly surprised at the thought that a musician in the mainstream of jazz today might be attracted by the music of Venezuela as a possible vehicle for his own expression.

Certainly there have been incursions of Latin-American music into jazz and popular music in the United States. The several waves of Cuban music and most recently the Sambas, Maracatus and Baiaos of Bossa Nova have each had strong and lasting effects.

But the music of Venezuela is somehow rather special. Being primarily an outgrowth of the old popular music of the Spanish Colonial period in Venezuela with little Afro-American influence, this music has not lent itself to the fervor or flashy intensity of the music of Cuba or Brazil.

There is certainly a high degree of rhythmic intensity in the music of Venezuela but its usual rhythms occur In groups of six beats with the characteristic groupings and alterations of 3-3 with 2-2-2, which link this music with other remnants of Spanish Colonial music, the Mariachi of Southwestern Mexico, the harp music of Vera Cruz, the popular songs and dances of Yucatan, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.

The typical Venezuelan ensemble of Spanish harp, cuatro (a small four-string guitar) and maracas, does not at first glance appear to lend itself to easy assimilation with jazz. It is a real tribute to the imagination and good taste of Victor Feldman that this first attempt should be musically such a success. He has given a beautiful sampling of his talents on this LP.

There are a few examples of resetting of traditional Venezuelan songs. The others are a mixture of standards from the jazzman's repertoire and original compositions showing varying degrees of Venezuelan influence. The result is not only a fascinating document of the meeting of two traditions but the entire LP as a unit is an excellent example of ‘musique a faire plaisir,’ music to give pleasure.

Although on first hearing the music recorded here goes smoothly and effortlessly by, careful listening reveals a wealth of musical subtleties and refinements. One of the highlights of the LP is an original by Victor Feldman, ‘Summer Island.’ The composition follows the now standard formal structure A A B A, but the orthodoxy ends there. While it is becoming increasingly common to hear jazz musicians play in asymmetrical rhythmic patterns and meters, this beautiful and light tune dances easily through some truly amazing changes. The four phases of the A section are in 11 beats (5 plus 6), 11 beats, ten beats (5 plus 5) and 11 beats which are repeated before coming to the B section which is set in a regular six beat meter. This is in turn followed by another statement of the A section. The rhythmic structure does not conveniently become regular to accommodate the solos, and Victor's vibes solo especially highlights the logic of this otherwise unconventional meter. One has only to listen to the beautiful ease of this evocative tune to realize that this is no mere exercise in esoterica.

Another adventure in irregular rhythms is the Marty Paich original ‘Caracas Nights.’ The piece is solidly set in a meter of five beats (3 plus 2), which is relieved only by a short section in six beats towards the end of the second section. A quiet kind of insistence is built up in the piece through the use of a repeated drone in the bass part which changes to a new tonality in the second section. Tight, sure and neatly structured solos by Victor and Dennis Budimir add another level of definition to the performance and are further highlighted by yet another change of tonality in the supporting bass part. Bill Perkins' solo bursts in at the section in six beats and brings with it the faint suggestions of the return to the composed melody and the close of the piece.

The third original composition on the record is another from the distinguished Victor Feldman pen. This one is entitled simply ‘Pavane,’ and although it bears little formal resemblance to the Renaissance or Baroque forms of the ancient dance of the peacock , it does suggest much of the graceful ease of the original. Set in an easy meter of six beats, ‘Pavane’ is perhaps structurally the simplest piece of the group and yet, for me, the most haunting and the one which remains longest in the memory, reappearing unexpectedly long after I have put the record away.  Bill Perkins' flute sings through the first statement of the melody, but even afterwards the same melody seems to be quietly winding its way on through Victor's and then Bill's improvised solos. Dennis Budimir's guitar solo then leads to the unobtrusive return of the melody that seems never to have ceased at all.

The two standards in the group, ‘Frenesi’ and ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ each receive very different treatment. ‘Frenesi’ is marvelously transformed by removing it from its traditional Cuban Bolero rhythm of four beats to a Venezuelan flavored rhythm of six. One wonders if other well-worked Latin standards could appear so revitalized in a new setting. The transformation for ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ is, at first hearing, less pronounced. However, the sure and steady bass line of Monty Budwig makes thorough use of the many possible permutations offered by the Venezuelan rhythm of six, albeit at something slower than the standard Venezuelan tempo. Over the quiet pulsations of the rhythm this now well-known melody moves steadily along without changing any of its essential character.

The four remaining pieces on this LP have the strongest Venezuelan flavor. ‘Obsession Waltz,’ a popular Venezuelan waltz, is set here in a slow yet undulating tempo of a romantic ballad rather than a tight cross-rhythmic six of the usual Venezuelan waltz. Although this popular song is not known widely outside of Venezuela, in this setting it seems difficult to believe that its origins are any different from those of ‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ The melody is given rather straightforward treatment throughout, opening with an alto flute solo, followed by vibes and guitar solos - Victor's vibes solo being the only one to dramatically depart from the original melody.

‘Por El Camino Real’ and ‘El Gavilan’ are traditional Venezuelan dance tunes of the ‘Pasale’ and ‘Joropo’ type. ‘Por El Camino Real’ is an original composition by the famous Venezuelan harpist, Juan Vicente Torrealba. It follows the traditional rhythmic and melodic pattern of many Venezuelan songs. Its first section is in a minor key. The startling element in the tune occurs in the second section which in each statement begins with a measure of eight beats, in an otherwise strictly six beat meter. The change is quite refreshing and I suspect that it was exactly this that caught Victor’s imagination.

The piece opens with a statement of the melody on the vibes and bass done in the style of a semi-free introduction.  This soon leads to a soft-spoken version the Venezuelan ‘Pasaje’ rhythm supporting the rest of the performance. ‘El Gavilan’ is an old traditional ‘Joropo,’ the composer of which is no longer even known. The text to this song is one of those deceptively simple Spanish folk songs that may be filled with surprising double meanings, which may have been considered the height of spiciness a century ago. This song is given the most authentically Venezuelan treatment of any of the selections on the LP. The little ensemble of instruments that Victor has put together for this performance  gives an excellent idea of the fire and bite of a good Venezuelan trio.

Certainly the most amazing piece on the entire record is Victor Feldman's composition ‘Pasion.’ Although it is an original composition by Feldman it captures as much of the true flavor of Venezuelan music as can be heard in ‘El Gavilan.’ The performance retains the tight synchronized rhythmic quality of Venezuelan music throughout, but it is the natural ease and the strong Venezuelan flavor of the tune itself which make it practically impossible to distinguish from traditional Venezuelan music.

Whether or not Venezuelan music henceforth exerts a great wave of influence jazz does not detract in any way from the success and delightfulness of the musical experiments contained in this record.”

Obviously, Venezuelan music did not exert a great influence on Jazz, but it’s interesting to look back on this surviving example of Victor’s Venezuelan Venture [sorry, I couldn’t resist].

The following video features Marty Paich’s Caracas Nights track from Victor’s Venezuela Joropo.