"B.G." - Whitney Balliett on Benny Goodman

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

Not always associated with the nascent development of Jazz in the 1920s, Benny Goodman was involved in many aspects of it, including a four-year on-again-off-again stint with Ben Pollack’s influential band from around 1926-1929.

During that period and continuing into the early 1930s, Benny worked both as a freelance studio musician, as well as, an independent Jazz artist who recorded with many different bands before making the move to head up his own big band in the mid-1930s, a decision that led to his claim to fame as The King Of Swing.

The following is from the long time New Yorker Jazz writer, essayist and critic Whitney Balliett”s Goodbye and other Messages, A Journal of Jazz, 1981 - 1990, a collection of shorter pieces done during this period “for those players who are gone, those who are here and those to come.”

“Benny Goodman sometimes gave the impression that he would live forever. Like most prolific virtuosos, he was difficult to keep in focus. He made a pass at retiring when he was forty, but he kept reappearing with a new group or a new recording. He was the first important jazz musician to play classical music—a seeming trespass that caused bewilderment and concern among the faithful of both persuasions. His image gradually changed from severity (rimless glasses, patent-leather hair, business suits) to geniality (horn-rims, tousled hair, tweed jackets). He disappeared into his own legend, which decreed that he was a monster—a penny-pinching, thoughtless martinet, who bullied his sidemen and hogged the solo space. It was often said after he reached fifty that his abilities had declined. Yet, however uneven he may occasionally have sounded (he was plagued by depression and back problems), he played almost as well at the end of his career as he had at the beginning.

But Benny died in June [1986], at the age of seventy-seven, and perhaps it is time to tally the results. There were a lot of Benny Goodmans: the pioneer jazz virtuoso who made the clarinet as important a solo instrument as the trumpet was in the thirties; the unwitting and perhaps unwilling musical evangelist who, in 1935, introduced the young of this country to their own great native music, aerating their Depression lives and making them dance like Shakers,- the tough Chicago boy who married a Vanderbilt; and the second-generation Russian Jew who became one of the most famous of the many Russian Jews who have graced American music for the greater part of this century.

Goodman was the ninth of twelve children. His father worked in the stockyards, and his mother was illiterate. He studied with the classical clarinettist Franz Schoepp, who also taught Jimmy Noone and Buster Bailey. He joined the musicians' union when he was thirteen and Ben Pollack's band when he was sixteen. He worked for Pollack on and off from 1925 to 1929, in company with Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden, Bud Freeman, and Jimmy McPartland. From 1929 to 1934, when he formed his first big band, he scuffled in New York, playing in Broadway pit bands and doing radio shows, and recording with everyone from Bessie Smith to Enrique Madriguera and Ruth Etting. In 1934, his band became one of three bands chosen to play on a weekly three-hour NBC program called "Let's Dance." "If anyone were to ask what was the biggest thing that has ever happened to me," Goodman once told this writer, "landing a place on that show was it." A year later, at the behest of his booker, Willard Alexander, he took his band on the road. 

They played Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco without much success. But when they got to Sweet's Ballroom, in Oakland, the NBC show had begun to take effect, and there were lines around the block, and it was eventually the same at the Palomar, in Los Angeles, where they were held over for a month. They stopped at the Congress Hotel, in Chicago, on their way east, and stayed six months. They had the country jumping. Back in New York, they had a long engagement at the Hotel Pennsylvania, then went west again to do the Palomar and make a movie. They were at the Pennsylvania in the fall of 1936, and during the winter they made their uproarious appearance at the Paramount Theatre; the audiences, thoroughly worked over by Goodman's recordings and almost daily radio broadcasts, danced in the aisles, stood on their seats, and sometimes stayed through all five shows, In January of 1938, Goodman reached an apogee when, still the unwitting ground-breaker, he gave his famous Carnegie Hall concert. (It was a press agent's idea.) With the exception of Jess Stacy's "Sing, Sing, Sing" solo, the evening was not musically prepossessing, but the concert gave jazz a stature it had not had before.

By this time, the band included the trumpeters Ziggy Elman and Harry James, the pianist Jess Stacy, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the small-group specialists—the pianist Teddy Wilson and the vibraphonist, drummer, and singer Lionel Hampton. The personnel of Goodman's bands rarely remained fixed for more than a week. He constantly fired musicians, or they quit, offended by his capricious behavior. He had a particularly hard time with drummers. Here is an incomplete list of the drummers, stars and journeymen, who passed through his bands between the mid-thirties and the mid-forties: Sammy Weiss, Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton, Dave Tough, Buddy Schutz, Nick Fatool, Harry Jaeger, Jo Jones, J. C. Heard, Sidney Catlett, Ralph Collier, Alvin Stoller, Howard Davis, Morey Feld, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson, Lou Fromm, Tom Romersa, Don Lamond, and Cozy Cole. [By comparison], Duke Ellington used Sonny Greer from the mid-twenties to 1951.

For whatever reasons —perhaps it was an unconscious wish to keep the competition down within his band—Goodman never hired any first-rate trombonists or tenor saxophonists in the thirties. (Goodman could be inscrutable. In 1938, he borrowed Lester Young from Count Basie for a recording date, and in the course of six numbers allowed Young just one eight-bar solo.) This most famous of the Goodman bands was sandwiched between the frenetic trumpet playing of Elman and James and the heavy, here-we-go-down-the-pike drumming of Gene Krupa, with Goodman as its main soloist. The band never had the subtlety of Basie and Ellington and Andy Kirk. It was a very white band, and relied on bravado and muscle. It tended to shout when it played "Bugle Call Rag" and "King Porter Stomp," and to breathe heavily in slow ballads.

Goodman's next and most important band was altogether different. It began to take shape in the late thirties, after James and Krupa departed and Goodman switched from Victor to Columbia. He hired the lead trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell and, in the next year or two, the trumpeters Cootie Williams (from Ellington) and Billy Butterfield (from Artie Shaw), the guitarist Charlie Christian, the trombonist Lou McGarity, the pianist Mel Powell, and, in 1941, the bassist John Simmons and the drummer Sid Catlett. And the satiny arranger Eddie Sauter took over. But this graceful band didn't last long. Christian fell ill and died, Simmons and Williams left, Catlett was fired, Billy Butter-field went with Les Brown, and Mel Powell was drafted. The musicians'-union recording ban, which went into effect in the summer of 1942 and lasted almost two years, was the final stroke. Toying occasionally with bebop, which he never liked much, Goodman had a series of middling bands in the late forties. He had, by then, made close to a hundred recordings with his small groups, many of them among the finest of all jazz records. Then, crippled by the popularity of singers and by a thirty-percent wartime entertainment tax, the big bands began to fail, and in 1948 Goodman gave up his band. The most successful part of his career was over; it had lasted just thirteen years. For the rest of his life, he put together a seemingly endless succession of big and small bands for State Department tours, for night-club gigs and television shows, for recording sessions, and even for a fortieth-anniversary celebration of his Carnegie Hall concert. This reconstituted evening remains vivid only because he had three pianists shuttling on- and offstage (Jimmy Rowles, John Bunch, Mary Lou Williams}, a girl singer he had first heard a week or so before, and a finale in which he sat down and soloed with his feet up on one end of Lionel Hampton's vibraphone.

Goodman played a demanding instrument with almost unfailing beauty for fifty years — an extraordinary stretch, unmatched by any other jazz musician. Buddy DeFranco once explained why the clarinet is hard to play: "The clarinet's three registers — chalumeau, middle, and altissimo—are built in twelfths. If you press the octave key on a saxophone, you go up or down an octave, but on a clarinet you go twelve tones — from, say, low F to middle C. Saxophones have pads over the air holes. When you press a key, the pad closes the hole and you get a note. Clarinets have seven tone holes and no pads, and you have to close them with the ends of your fingers. So you have to have absolute finger control. If any air escapes, you get a terrible squeak or no note at all. Going from the middle register of the clarinet to the altissimo is very awkward because the fingering changes completely. That's the reason so many clarinettists seem to lose control when they go into the top register, why they tend to shriek." Goodman had a full, even tone in all three registers. But it never got in the way of his playing. It never came first, as it often did in the work of Pee Wee Russell and Edmond Hall and Irving Fazola. He was a melodic improviser, and his attack — the snapping runs, the quick, almost epigrammatic melodies, the carefully screened emotion, the rhythmic surefootedness—invariably implied that he knew where his solo would land long before it got there. Goodman's style changed little. In the thirties and the early forties, he would occasionally growl and carry on, but later he abandoned such emotional yawing and became almost academic. After he married gentry and became a Connecticut gentleman, his playing always had a press [seemed somewhat forced].”

The Sound of Jazz by Whitney Balliett [From the Archives]

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

Until the publication of Whitney Balliett’s essay “The Sound of Jazz” in the New Yorker [1983], very little of the background information was known by the general public about what is arguably the best program on Jazz in performance ever produced for TV as well as Whitney’s role in its development.

It’s a fascinating story from so many perspectives that I thought I’d share it with you as a remembrance of times gone by for some of the original makers of the music.

MP3 files of the program are available for download and used CD copies can still be found through various online sellers.

“The confusion about the soundtrack of "The Sound of Jazz," the celebrated hour-long program broadcast live on CBS television on December 8, 1957, began a minute or so before the program ended, when an announcer said, "Columbia Records has cut a long-playing record of today's program, which will be called The Sound of Jazz. It'll be released early next year." 

A Columbia recording by that name and bearing the CBS television logotype was issued early in 1958, but it was not the soundtrack of the show. It was a recording made on December 4th in Columbia's Thirtieth Street studio as a kind of rehearsal for the television production. It included many of the musicians who did appear on December 8th, and except for one number the materials were the same. Columbia probably made the recording as a precaution: a live jazz television program lasting a full hour (then, as it is now, the basic unit of television time was the minute) and built around thirty-odd (unpredictable) jazz musicians might easily turn into a shambles. It didn't. The soundtrack, which is at last available in its entirety — as The Real Sound of Jazz, on Pumpkin Records — is superior to the Columbia record in almost every way, sound included.

The Sound of Jazz has long been an underground classic, and a lot of cotton wool has accumulated around it. So here, allowing for vagaries of memory, is how the program came to be. In the spring of 1957, Robert Goldman asked me if I would be interested in helping put together a show on jazz for John Houseman's new "Seven Lively Arts" series, scheduled to be broadcast on CBS in the winter of 1957-58. I submitted an outline, and it was accepted. I invited Nat Hentoff to join me as co-advisor, and we began discussing personnel and what should be played. Our wish was to offer the best jazz there was in the simplest and most direct way — no history, no apologetics, no furbelows. But John Crosby, the television columnist of the Herald Tribune, had been hired as master of ceremonies for the "Seven Lively Arts," and we feared that he would do just what we wanted to avoid — talk about the music. We suggested listing the musicians and the tunes on tel-ops (now common practice), but Crosby was under contract for the whole series, and that was that. Crosby, it turned out, pretty much agreed with us, and what he did say was to the point. For the brilliant visual side of the show, CBS chose the late Robert Herridge as the producer and Jack Smight as the director. The excitement of the camerawork and of Smight's picture selection — he had five cameramen — has never been equaled on any program of this kind.

Here is the form the program finally took: A big band, built around the nucleus of the old Count Basie band, was the first group to be heard, and it included Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Joe Newman, Joe Wilder, and Emmett Berry on trumpets; Earle Warren, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Gerry Mulligan on reeds,- Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, and Dicky Wells on trombones; and a rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Eddie Jones, and Jo Jones. This Utopian band, which Basie seemed immensely pleased to front, played a fast blues, "Open All Night," written and arranged by Nat Pierce, who did all the arranging on the show. Then a smaller band, made up of Red Allen and Rex Stewart on trumpet and cornet, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, Hawkins, Dickenson, Pierce, Danny Barker on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Jo Jones, did the old Jelly Roll Morton-Louis Armstrong "Wild Man Blues" and Earl Hines' "Rosetta." The group was a distillation of the various historic associations, on recordings, of Allen and Russell, of Allen and Hawkins, and of Stewart and Hawkins, with Dickenson's adaptability holding everything together. 

The rhythm section was all-purpose and somewhat in the Basie mode. Thelonious Monk, accompanied by Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Osie Johnson on drums, did his "Blue Monk." The big band returned for a slow blues, "I Left My Baby," with Jimmy Rushing on the vocal, and for a fast thirty-two-bar number by Lester Young called "Dickie's Dream." Billie Holiday sang her blues "Fine and Mellow," accompanied by Mal Waldron on piano and by Eldridge, Cheatham, Young, Hawkins, Webster, Mulligan, Dickenson, Barker, Hinton, and Osie Johnson. The Jimmy Giuffre Three, with Giuffre on reeds, Jim Hall on guitar, and Jim Atlas on bass, did Giuffre's "The Train and the River," and the show was closed by a slow blues, in which Giuffre and Pee Wee Russell played a duet, accompanied by Barker, Hinton, and Jo Jones. Crosby introduced each group, and there were pre-recorded statements about the blues from Red Allen, Rushing, Billie Holiday, and Guiffre. (I found these intrusive, but Hentoff and Herridge liked them.) 

The show was held in a big, bare two-story studio at Ninth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, and the musicians were told to wear what they wanted. Many wore hats, as jazz musicians are wont to do at recording sessions. Some had on suits and ties, some were in sports shirts and tweed jackets. Monk wore a cap and dark glasses with bamboo side pieces. Billie Holiday arrived with an evening gown she had got specially for the show, and was upset when she found that we wanted her in what she was wearing—a pony tail, a short-sleeved white sweater, and plaid pants. There was cigarette smoke in the air, and there were cables on the floor. A ladder leaned against a wall. Television cameras moved like skaters, sometimes photographing each other. The musicians were allowed to move around: Basie ended up watching Monk, and later Billie Holiday went over and stood beside Basie.

The atmosphere at the Columbia recording session was similar. Many of the musicians had not been together in a long time, and a rare early-December blizzard, which began just before the session and left as much as a foot of snow on the ground, intensified everything. It also caused problems. Our plan had been to reunite the All-American rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page on bass, and Jo Jones, but Page called and said that he was sick and that, anyway, he couldn't find a cab. (He didn't make the television show, either, and he died two weeks later.) Eddie Jones, Basie's current bassist, replaced him. Thelonious Monk didn't turn up, and that is why Mal Waldron recorded a four-minute piano solo, aptly titled "Nervous." 

There were various other differences between the recording and the show. Frank Rehak took Benny Morton's place on the recording, because Morton was busy. Harry Carney, a man of infinite graciousness, filled in for Gerry Mulligan, a man of infinite ego, because Mulligan insisted he be paid double scale, and was refused. Doc Cheatham solos on the Columbia session but only plays obbligatos behind Billie Holiday on the television show; he had asked to be excused from all soloing, claiming that it would ruin his lip for his regular gig with a Latin band. Lester Young provides obbligatos behind Jimmy Rushing on "I Left My Baby" on the Columbia record, and he also solos twice. He was particularly ethereal that day, walking on his toes and talking incomprehensibly, and most of the musicians avoided him. But he was intractable on Sunday during the first of the two run-throughs that preceded the television show. He refused to read his parts, and he soloed poorly. He was removed from the big-band reed section and was replaced by Ben Webster, and his only solo is his famous twelve bars on "Fine and Mellow"—famous because this sequence had been used so many times on other television shows and because of Billie Holiday's expression as she listens to her old friend, an expression somewhere between laughter and tears. Billie Holiday came close to not being on the show. A week or so before, word of her difficulties with drugs and the law had reached the upper levels at CBS, and it was suggested that she be replaced by someone wholesome, like Ella Fitzgerald. We refused, and were backed by Herridge, and she stayed.

It is astonishing how good the music is on "The Real Sound of Jazz." Billie Holiday and Red Allen and Jimmy Rushing are in fine voice. The big-band ensembles are generally dazzling. The solos are almost always first-rate. (Giuffre is dull, and Roy Eldridge is overexcited.) Listen to Dickenson's boiling, shouting statement on "Dickie's Dream," wisely taken at a slightly slower tempo than on the Columbia record, and to his easy, rocking solo on "Wild Man Blues." And listen to Rex Stewart, sly and cool, on "Wild Man" (he had recently emerged from a long semi-retirement) and to the way Jo Jones frames its breaks—suspending time, shaping melody, italicizing emotion. Some of the music on the show has not weathered well. Monk, surprisingly, sounds hurried and the Giuffre trio, which was extremely popular at the time, is thin and synthetic. And Pee Wee Russell swallows Giuffre in their duet. CBS never ran the program again, but it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the sixties, and there is now a copy at the Museum of Broadcasting.”

"Miles" - Whitney Balliett

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

“He has never been much of a technician, and he has been clever enough to keep his style within his abilities.”

“He also softens his attack with his tone. It is full, but it is not a brass tone, a trumpet tone. It is human sound compressed into trumpet sound. Davis has succeeded in making almost visible the emotions — longing, sadness, pity — that move just beneath his complex surface.”

“Davis's eyes, looking into the middle distance, are cold and furious, as if he were tallying the various imponderables that have kept him from becoming the genius he believes himself to be.”

- Whitney Balliet

The Boston Globe stated: “Balliett’s genius for pictorial description (which helps make him a gifted writer of profiles) extends to the music itself. No one writes about what they listen to anywhere near as well.”

Although he played drums during his college days and was a member of a band, Whitney was not a studied musician. He had no formal training in theory and harmony so during the 40+ years he wrote Jazz profiles for The New Yorker magazine he had to fall back on his other gifts when describing the music - his gift for “pictorial description.”

In many ways, this made Whitney’s Jazz writings more accessible to the majority of Jazz fans since they, too, for the most part, lacked procedural training in melody, harmony and rhythm - the building blocks of music.

As a result, "Balliett comes as close as any writer on jazz—perhaps on any musical style — to George Bernard Shaw's intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments. This volume approaches indispensability." Choice reviewing Balliett’s American Musicians.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share some briefer pieces from the pen of our ideal - Whitney Balliet - to give you an appreciation for his “ … genius for pictorial description.” This is the fifth in a series of six continuously running featuring Whitney’s sui generis pictorially descriptive approach to writing about Jazz which is marked by what Gary Giddins has labeled “writerly attributes: insight, candor, observation, discernment, delineation, style, diligence and purpose.”

These are all drawn from Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981-1990 [1991]. This is number 5 in a series.

Published in 1989, two years before Miles’ death in 1991, this piece is at once an overview of the highlights of Miles career through a parsing of the Miles autobiography that was published in the same year as Whitney’s profile as well as an analysis of why, despite limited gifts as a technician, Davis went on to become such a smashing success in the Jazz World.

“Miles Davis has led a bedevilled life. 

He was born in 1926 in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis. He has an older sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, Vernon. His father was a dentist who eventually retired to a two-hundred-acre farm he owned, in Millstadt, Illinois. His mother was beautiful, stylish and idle. He got on well with his father, but found his mother, whom he loved, possessive, peevish, and heavy-handed. 

He took up the trumpet at ten, and by the time he was in high school he had been given his second trumpet and had met his first idol, Clark Terry. He worked in a local band led by Eddie Randle, then, at eighteen, he suddenly accelerated. He had the first of two children by a woman whom he never married; he graduated from high school; he worked for two weeks in Billy Eckstine's legendary bebop band, with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey; he moved to New York and enrolled in Juilliard; and he began hanging out with Parker and Gillespie and Fats Navarro. A year later, his attractive aura already working, he was on one of the earliest and most famous bebop records ("Billie's Bounce," "Now's the Time"), with Parker, Gillespie, and Max Roach. And he appeared on Fifty-second Street with Parker and Coleman Hawkins. His style, though still hesitant, began to emerge.

In the late forties, inspired by Claude Thornhill's big band, he organized the nonet (among the players Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, Kai Winding, John Lewis, Max Roach) that made the celebrated Capitol album "Birth of the Cool." The nonet's laid-back quality and calm, intricate, deep-red arrangements made it the most adventurous small band since the Ellington small bands and some of the Woody Herman Woodchopper sides of 1946. (The typical small bebop bands of the time were not ensemble groups, like the nonet. They used leaping, tongue-tying unison opening-and-closing collective passages, but the often long solos that came between carried the musical weight.) Davis also began taking drugs. He describes what happened in his new autobiography, Miles (Simon & Schuster): "I lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift. It wasn't like I didn't know what was happening to me. I did, but I didn't care anymore. I had such confidence in myself that even when I was losing control I really felt I had everything under control. But your mind can play tricks on you. I guess when I started to hang like I did, it surprised a lot of people who thought I had it all together. It also surprised me." (The book, done with a poet and teacher named Quincy Troupe, is petulant, outspoken, defensive, honeyed, error-filled, and impressionistic — and loaded to the gunwales with four-letter words. Davis uses them more as hammer blows than for their literal meanings, and they soon become a dull barrage, which, for whatever reasons, gradually abates as the book goes along.)

Davis takes pains to point out that he was not alone in his addiction. Many of the best young musicians of the late forties — black and white — became heroin addicts, and he needlessly names them. Here, in the late fifties, is Billie Holiday, one of the most famous victims of this devastating plague: "She was looking real bad by this time, worn out, worn down, and haggard around the face and all. Thin. Mouth sagging at both corners. She was scratching a lot." (There are other eloquent patches in the book, but it is difficult to tell whether they are Davis's or Troupe's doing. Listen to this description of the church music Davis heard early in his life: "We'd be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. Anyway, we'd be on the side of the road — whoever I was with, one of my uncles or my cousin James — and I remember somebody would be playing a guitar the way B. B. King plays. And I remember a man and a woman singing and talking about getting down! Shit, that music was something, especially that woman singing. But I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean? That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm.") Davis began stealing and even pimping to support his heroin habit. He was busted on the West Coast. He was busted again when he went home, ostensibly to give up drugs. He quit heroin in 1953, backslid, and quit for good in 1954.

Almost immediately, his professional life turned around. He led two classic recording sessions in 1954. The first consisted simply of two blues, the medium-tempo "Walkin"' and the faster "Blue 'n' Boogie." Each took up one side of a ten-inch LP, and both were played by Davis, Lucky Thompson, f. J. Johnson, Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke. Davis's mature style—annunciatory, clipped, vibratoless, singing—dominated both numbers and both recordings. The second recording had three originals and one standard tune, and on hand were Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, Heath, and Clarke. (Davis, along with Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, has always chosen musicians who can both obey and enrich his sometimes abstruse musical designs.) Davis was in a paradoxical mood. Although he loved Monk's playing, he made him lay out behind his solos on three of the numbers. Both recordings were hailed as bellwethers; actually, they marked an enlightened reshaping of the straight-ahead, uncluttered swing of Red Norvo and Count Basie and the trumpeter Joe Thomas. Davis and his men set aside the eccentricities and excesses of bebop (in whose house most of them had been raised) while retaining its broadened harmonic base. A year later, Davis appeared at the second Newport Jazz Festival with a pickup group consisting of Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Monk, Heath, and Connie Kay — all musicians he had worked with. He played three numbers — open-horn versions of "Hackensack" and "Now's the Time," and a muted, inner-ear "'Round Midnight." His from-the-mountain-top, time-stopping open-horn solos made it clear that Davis, who had been struggling for much of the time since he came East, had arrived. Columbia Records agreed, and before the year was out had signed him to a contract he says was worth three hundred thousand dollars a year. (He stayed with Columbia until 1985, when he went to Warner Brothers Records.) Davis's comments in Miles on the Columbia signing are far from the it's-not-my-fault defensiveness of the artist who has had a windfall: "And yes, going with Columbia did mean more money, but what's wrong with getting paid for what you do and getting paid well? I never saw nothing in poverty and hard times and the blues. I never wanted that for myself. I saw what it really was when I was strung out on heroin, and I didn't want to see it again. As long as I could get what I needed from the white world on my own terms, without selling myself out to all of those people who would love to exploit me, then I was going to go for what I know is real."

Davis had entered his great period. He assembled the first of two working bands, and it included, at various times, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Red Garland, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. Davis, like Mingus, began experimenting with different kinds of improvisation, and he made the album "Kind of Blue," in which he gave his players modal sketches to work their variations on, and set them loose, one take per number. The results are cool, subtle, edgeless music. Davis was also busy in the Columbia studios making three concerto albums — "Miles Ahead," "Porgy and Bess," and "Sketches of Spain" — in which, accompanied by a big band playing Gil Evans' velvet arrangements, he was the only soloist. (Would that Louis Armstrong had had such cosseting when he was at his height, in 1933!) Davis's second famous small working band arrived in the sixties and had Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Its repertory moved between mooning, muted ballads and furious up-tempo numbers, in which Davis, always a middle-register player, ventured into the upper regions and used unaccustomed avalanches of notes.

Davis's life since the early sixties has been hill-and-dale. He has been married to and divorced from the dancer Frances Taylor and the actress Cicely Tyson. He has been plagued by medical problems, among them hip operations, a stroke, two broken ankles, pneumonia, and diabetes. From 1975 to 1980, he dropped out. He gave up playing and retired to his house, on West Seventy-seventh Street. Here, brutally, is what he did: "I just took a lot of cocaine (about $500 a day at one point) and fucked all the women I could get into my house. I was also addicted to pills, like Percodan and Seconal, and I was drinking a lot, Heinekens and cognac. ... I didn't go out too often and when I did it was mostly to after-hours places up in Harlem where I just kept on getting high and living from day to day. . . . The house was filthy and real dark and gloomy, like a dungeon." George Butler, of Columbia Records, got Davis back on the track, and he began coming out again in 1981. Since then, he says, he has given up drugs and drinking. He has also given up his house, and now divides his time between Malibu and an apartment on Central Park South.

Although Davis has tinkered endlessly with his music (various types of improvising, odd time signatures, synthesizers, an electric trumpet), his playing, which resides at the still center of all these experiments, has changed little. He has never been much of a technician, and he has been clever enough to keep his style within his abilities. When he came East in the forties, he ignored his limitations, and his solos were sometimes a string of clams. He ignored them again when he had the Shorter-Williams band and began shooting wildly into the upper register, with nerve-racking results. Many people have influenced Davis — Louis Armstrong, Clark Terry, Shorty Baker, Fats Navarro, Ahmad Jamal, Bobby Hackett, Gil Evans, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps the heaviest hand on his playing was that of an early teacher who told him never to play with a vibrato, that he'd have plenty of time for a vibrato when he grew old and could no longer control his lip. His no-vibrato attack sometimes gives his playing an abrupt, telegraphic air, but he softens this by using a lot of rests and long notes. He also softens his attack with his tone. It is full, but it is not a brass tone, a trumpet tone. It is human sound compressed into trumpet sound. His solos in the Gil Evans "Sketches of Spain" album have a unique pleading, sorrowing quality. There have been many other players who have got a human sound —  Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell — but their tonal qualities have never superseded the basic sound of their instruments. Davis has succeeded in making almost visible the emotions — longing, sadness, pity — that move just beneath his complex surface. But his eerie, buttonholing sound is not as common on his recent, synthesizer-controlled recordings, where electronics and odd time signatures dominate the surroundings, and cause him to sound removed and disjointed. The great Davis still resides in his recordings of thirty years ago.

Davis has become a business. On one of his Warner Brothers Records release, "Amandla," he lists his production coordinators, his tour manager, his business manager, and his personal manager. The cover of the album is a semi-abstract self-portrait. (Like such earlier worthies as Pee Wee Russell and George Wettling, Davis has taken up painting.) Beneath Davis's head are the bell of a trumpet and a globe, with the African continent thereon. Davis's eyes, looking into the middle distance, are cold and furious, as if he were tallying the various imponderables that have kept him from becoming the genius he believes himself to be.”

The Sound of Jazz by Whitney Balliett

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

Until the publication of Whitney Balliett’s essay “The Sound of Jazz” in the New Yorker [1983], very little of the background information was known by the general public about what is arguably the best program on Jazz in performance ever produced for TV as well as Whitney’s role in its development.

It’s a fascinating story from so many perspectives that I thought I’d share it with you as a remembrance of times gone by for some of the original makers of the music.

MP3 files of the program are available for download and used CD copies can still be found through various online sellers.

“The confusion about the soundtrack of "The Sound of Jazz," the celebrated hour-long program broadcast live on CBS television on December 8, 1957, began a minute or so before the program ended, when an announcer said, "Columbia Records has cut a long-playing record of today's program, which will be called The Sound of Jazz. It'll be released early next year." 

A Columbia recording by that name and bearing the CBS television logotype was issued early in 1958, but it was not the soundtrack of the show. It was a recording made on December 4th in Columbia's Thirtieth Street studio as a kind of rehearsal for the television production. It included many of the musicians who did appear on December 8th, and except for one number the materials were the same. Columbia probably made the recording as a precaution: a live jazz television program lasting a full hour (then, as it is now, the basic unit of television time was the minute) and built around thirty-odd (unpredictable) jazz musicians might easily turn into a shambles. It didn't. The soundtrack, which is at last available in its entirety — as The Real Sound of Jazz, on Pumpkin Records — is superior to the Columbia record in almost every way, sound included.

The Sound of Jazz has long been an underground classic, and a lot of cotton wool has accumulated around it. So here, allowing for vagaries of memory, is how the program came to be. In the spring of 1957, Robert Goldman asked me if I would be interested in helping put together a show on jazz for John Houseman's new "Seven Lively Arts" series, scheduled to be broadcast on CBS in the winter of 1957-58. I submitted an outline, and it was accepted. I invited Nat Hentoff to join me as co-advisor, and we began discussing personnel and what should be played. Our wish was to offer the best jazz there was in the simplest and most direct way — no history, no apologetics, no furbelows. But John Crosby, the television columnist of the Herald Tribune, had been hired as master of ceremonies for the "Seven Lively Arts," and we feared that he would do just what we wanted to avoid — talk about the music. We suggested listing the musicians and the tunes on tel-ops (now common practice), but Crosby was under contract for the whole series, and that was that. Crosby, it turned out, pretty much agreed with us, and what he did say was to the point. For the brilliant visual side of the show, CBS chose the late Robert Herridge as the producer and Jack Smight as the director. The excitement of the camerawork and of Smight's picture selection — he had five cameramen — has never been equaled on any program of this kind.

Here is the form the program finally took: A big band, built around the nucleus of the old Count Basie band, was the first group to be heard, and it included Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Joe Newman, Joe Wilder, and Emmett Berry on trumpets; Earle Warren, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Gerry Mulligan on reeds,- Vic Dickenson, Benny Morton, and Dicky Wells on trombones; and a rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Eddie Jones, and Jo Jones. This Utopian band, which Basie seemed immensely pleased to front, played a fast blues, "Open All Night," written and arranged by Nat Pierce, who did all the arranging on the show. Then a smaller band, made up of Red Allen and Rex Stewart on trumpet and cornet, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, Hawkins, Dickenson, Pierce, Danny Barker on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Jo Jones, did the old Jelly Roll Morton-Louis Armstrong "Wild Man Blues" and Earl Hines' "Rosetta." The group was a distillation of the various historic associations, on recordings, of Allen and Russell, of Allen and Hawkins, and of Stewart and Hawkins, with Dickenson's adaptability holding everything together. 

The rhythm section was all-purpose and somewhat in the Basie mode. Thelonious Monk, accompanied by Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Osie Johnson on drums, did his "Blue Monk." The big band returned for a slow blues, "I Left My Baby," with Jimmy Rushing on the vocal, and for a fast thirty-two-bar number by Lester Young called "Dickie's Dream." Billie Holiday sang her blues "Fine and Mellow," accompanied by Mal Waldron on piano and by Eldridge, Cheatham, Young, Hawkins, Webster, Mulligan, Dickenson, Barker, Hinton, and Osie Johnson. The Jimmy Giuffre Three, with Giuffre on reeds, Jim Hall on guitar, and Jim Atlas on bass, did Giuffre's "The Train and the River," and the show was closed by a slow blues, in which Giuffre and Pee Wee Russell played a duet, accompanied by Barker, Hinton, and Jo Jones. Crosby introduced each group, and there were pre-recorded statements about the blues from Red Allen, Rushing, Billie Holiday, and Guiffre. (I found these intrusive, but Hentoff and Herridge liked them.) 

The show was held in a big, bare two-story studio at Ninth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, and the musicians were told to wear what they wanted. Many wore hats, as jazz musicians are wont to do at recording sessions. Some had on suits and ties, some were in sports shirts and tweed jackets. Monk wore a cap and dark glasses with bamboo side pieces. Billie Holiday arrived with an evening gown she had got specially for the show, and was upset when she found that we wanted her in what she was wearing—a pony tail, a short-sleeved white sweater, and plaid pants. There was cigarette smoke in the air, and there were cables on the floor. A ladder leaned against a wall. Television cameras moved like skaters, sometimes photographing each other. The musicians were allowed to move around: Basie ended up watching Monk, and later Billie Holiday went over and stood beside Basie.

The atmosphere at the Columbia recording session was similar. Many of the musicians had not been together in a long time, and a rare early-December blizzard, which began just before the session and left as much as a foot of snow on the ground, intensified everything. It also caused problems. Our plan had been to reunite the All-American rhythm section of Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page on bass, and Jo Jones, but Page called and said that he was sick and that, anyway, he couldn't find a cab. (He didn't make the television show, either, and he died two weeks later.) Eddie Jones, Basie's current bassist, replaced him. Thelonious Monk didn't turn up, and that is why Mal Waldron recorded a four-minute piano solo, aptly titled "Nervous." 

There were various other differences between the recording and the show. Frank Rehak took Benny Morton's place on the recording, because Morton was busy. Harry Carney, a man of infinite graciousness, filled in for Gerry Mulligan, a man of infinite ego, because Mulligan insisted he be paid double scale, and was refused. Doc Cheatham solos on the Columbia session but only plays obbligatos behind Billie Holiday on the television show; he had asked to be excused from all soloing, claiming that it would ruin his lip for his regular gig with a Latin band. Lester Young provides obbligatos behind Jimmy Rushing on "I Left My Baby" on the Columbia record, and he also solos twice. He was particularly ethereal that day, walking on his toes and talking incomprehensibly, and most of the musicians avoided him. But he was intractable on Sunday during the first of the two run-throughs that preceded the television show. He refused to read his parts, and he soloed poorly. He was removed from the big-band reed section and was replaced by Ben Webster, and his only solo is his famous twelve bars on "Fine and Mellow"—famous because this sequence had been used so many times on other television shows and because of Billie Holiday's expression as she listens to her old friend, an expression somewhere between laughter and tears. Billie Holiday came close to not being on the show. A week or so before, word of her difficulties with drugs and the law had reached the upper levels at CBS, and it was suggested that she be replaced by someone wholesome, like Ella Fitzgerald. We refused, and were backed by Herridge, and she stayed.

It is astonishing how good the music is on "The Real Sound of Jazz." Billie Holiday and Red Allen and Jimmy Rushing are in fine voice. The big-band ensembles are generally dazzling. The solos are almost always first-rate. (Giuffre is dull, and Roy Eldridge is overexcited.) Listen to Dickenson's boiling, shouting statement on "Dickie's Dream," wisely taken at a slightly slower tempo than on the Columbia record, and to his easy, rocking solo on "Wild Man Blues." And listen to Rex Stewart, sly and cool, on "Wild Man" (he had recently emerged from a long semi-retirement) and to the way Jo Jones frames its breaks—suspending time, shaping melody, italicizing emotion. Some of the music on the show has not weathered well. Monk, surprisingly, sounds hurried and the Giuffre trio, which was extremely popular at the time, is thin and synthetic. And Pee Wee Russell swallows Giuffre in their duet. CBS never ran the program again, but it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the sixties, and there is now a copy at the Museum of Broadcasting.”

Bill Evans - Romantic Agony - Whitney Baillett

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

Written as a 1985 New Yorker review upon the issuance of a boxed set of Bill Evans’ Riverside recordings and newly discovered recordings of a Paris concert by his last trio, Whitney’s essay also offers a concise distillation of many of the qualities that made the late pianist Bill Evans’ music unique and as such we wanted to include it on these pages as part of the editorial staff at JazzProfiles efforts to represents as much as possible about Bill in the Jazz literature.

Boxed sets and newly discovered or never-before released recordings have become quite commonplace in the 30+ years since this essay was published but both were a “big deal” in 1985 [especially before the onslaught of CD ressiuses that began in the late 1980s]. 

Equally important is Whitney’s refusal to contribute to the Bill Evans hagiography that has grown up around the Bill Evans Legend since his death in 1980. Objectively and subjectively, Balliett does his usual job of pointing out the singular features that made Evans’ contributions to Jazz unique, as well as, those that were perhaps more mundane.

This brief essay is elegantly written and offers more of what the Boston Globe once described as Whitney’s “pictorial descriptions [which makes him a gifted writer of profiles].”

“Balliett comes as close as any writer on Jazz -perhaps on any musical style - to George Bernard Shaw’s intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments.” - Choice Magazine

Romantic Agony

“Bill Evans, who died in 1980, at the age of fifty-one, became the most admired and influential pianist since Bud Powell. He continues to be celebrated. Elektra Musician has issued—in a two-L.P. set called "Bill Evans: The Paris Concerts"—selections from a pair of concerts Evans gave in one evening in Paris in November, 1979. And Fantasy has brought out "Bill Evans: The Complete Riverside Recordings,” a blunderbuss album made up of a hundred and forty-six numbers (on eighteen L.P.s) set down between 1956 and 1963, when Evans moved from Riverside to another label. (The album is misnamed; Evans made a good many other Riverside records, as is made clear in the exhaustive album booklet.)

When he played, Evans sat back a couple of feet from the instrument, his back bent completely, his forehead almost touching the keyboard. He kept his hands flat, and during the last decade of his career they rarely strayed from the two middle registers, as if they were invisibly hobbled to middle C. This abject, prayer like posture suggested several things: that Evans was paying homage to his instrument, to his music; that he was so enfeebled by drugs that he couldn't sit up straight (his addiction, reportedly conquered during much of the seventies, was an open secret); that he was overpowered by shyness. The last was probably true, and it had a strange effect on his playing, which was always, as I wrote in these pages when Evans first appeared, "a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private music and an equally intense wish to express his joy at having found such a music within himself." His music seemed to be withdrawing, to be bowing out, slipping away. His diffidence was such that he had to be persuaded to make his first solo recording, and he then waited two years before making another. 

By his own admission, Evans was a slow learner with medium gifts who had to work very hard for everything he achieved. He was pleased by the facility of young players, but he most admired those who made their way inch by inch. He gave as an example Miles Davis's slow but spectacular progress from imitative bumbler in the mid-forties to lyrical innovator in the late fifties, when Evans briefly worked for (and influenced) him. 

Evans' constant inner struggle made him difficult to listen to, whether on records or in the flesh. His playing demanded concentration of a sort not usually found among jazz audiences, who like to take easy emotional gifts away with them. His music was lucid and orderly, but it had a contemplative, rarefied, almost abstract quality, which kept its emotional content at various removes from the listener. This was particularly true during the last ten or so years of his career, when his playing became so pallid and secretive that it seemed to have lost its emotional center. All of which makes his famous, sparkling "All About Rosie" solo that much more startling. Delivered in the midst of a George Russell piece at a 1957 Brandeis University concert, it seized you immediately, and remains one of the classic recorded jazz piano solos.

Evans' style was a distillation of Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano. He had been trained as a classical pianist, and his style also reflected his admiration for Chopin and Grieg, for Debussy and Ravel and Scriabin. His right-hand single-note melodic lines were short and rhythmic and beautifully shaped. They had a smooth, logical flow that needed no decorative devices. The first note in each phrase, generally struck a fraction ahead of the beat, pulled the notes that came afterward, and by themselves the lead notes formed one melody while the secondary notes formed another. Evans would often conclude a solo with a chordal passage, which suggested the "locked hands" parallel chords of Milt Buckner or the harmonic piles of Art Tatum. 

These chordal layings-on occupied Evans increasingly in his last years, and he would sink into them, his ad-lib flags unfurled, his loud pedal engaged. He worked hard at a Nat Cole kind of touch, but he was never a pianistic player. He rarely used either end of the keyboard, and one sometimes wondered if he wouldn't have been a brilliant guitarist. (Red Norvo once pointed out that many musicians end up on the wrong instrument.) He was a romantic who kept his edges firm, who attracted apologists, as Martin Williams' notes to the Fantasy album attest. He had none of Bud Powell's tough, bitter edge and none of Lennie Tristano's mathematical directness. His slow solos bloomed, and his fast ones wheeled like terns.

The "Riverside Recordings" album chronicles in massive detail Evans' progress from flashy bebop pianist to his studied lyrical self. Twenty-five of the numbers are with three different small groups, which include Jim Hall, Zoot Sims, the young Freddy Hubbard, and Cannonball Adderley, and not a great deal happens. Seventeen selections are solo piano, thirteen of them previously unissued. These are often ad lib or done in implied rhythms, like "All the Things You Are," which is almost abstract, and "I Loves You, Porgy," which Evans played again and again. They are Evans at his most private. 

The remaining hundred or so numbers in the album were done by six different trios. Three were put together solely for recording, and three were working groups. The most famous trio had Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums, and it existed from late 1959 until the summer of 1961, when LaFaro was killed in an automobile accident. LaFaro, in his mid-twenties, was an admirer of Charles Mingus and a brilliant bassist, whose methods are best heard in the work of Michael Moore. Dancing, crowded, passionate melodic lines poured out of him, and he quickly and probably unwittingly became the dominant voice, forcing Evans in on himself and making the group his own. Evans, of course, wanted the trio to be three equal voices, not a piano with bass-and-drums accompaniment, but LaFaro's imaginativeness wrecked this idealistic notion. Evans, reportedly bereft when LaFaro was killed, apparently didn't fully realize LaFaro's strength. Or did he? Listen to the solo numbers Evans made not long after LaFaro's death and to the new trio, with Chuck Israels on bass. Evans holds forth, he sparkles, he swings ("Show-type Tune," "Ev'rything I Love," "Stairway to the Stars"), and much the same is true of the last quartet in the album. (Larry Bunker, a less assertive drummer than Motian, had come in.)

It has been said that the "Paris Concert" L.P.s mark a return to Evans' outgoing brilliance of the late fifties, that they are the beginning of a new period in his playing. (His final trio had Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums.) To be sure, he moves around more on the keyboard, and he is adventurous harmonically ("Gary's Theme," "Laurie"), but what seems new is a long-windedness ("Nardis"), an absorption with sound (Noelle's Theme"), a kind of pianistic pomposity. Perhaps the struggle within him was at last over, and the extrovert had come forth.”

Michel Petrucciani by Whitney Balliett

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

“Jazz was once a spare, monosyllabic music.… By the sixties, soloists were going on for forty-five minutes, for an hour, for an hour and a quarter. Listening to John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor became an unselfish act: you gave up an hour of your life each time one of them soloed.

During recent years, this floridity has struck pianists particularly hard.

At first, the tiny, twenty-one-year-old French pianist Michel Petrucciani seemed the newest member of this group. He likes to show off his technique. He likes to rhapsodize and to wander through ad-lib meadows. He likes the loud pedal. But much of this is adolescent fat, for the more one hears Petrucciani the clearer it becomes that the improvisational horses he is driven by are tough and original.”

- Whitney Balliett, Jazz author and critic

The career of Michel Petrucciani, who was considered one of the great romantics of the jazz piano, flourished in spite of a severe physical disability. The pianist was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as ''glass bones,'' a disease that stunted his growth (he was only three feet tall and weighed barely 50 pounds) and weakened his bones. Michel had to be carried onto the stage, and he used a special attachment to work the sustaining pedal of the piano.

“People don’t understand that being a human being is not being 7 feet tall; it’s what you have in your head and not your body,″ he once said of his handicap in a 1994 interview.

Dead by the age of 36 [1962-1999], his technique and lyricism earned him comparisons with the great Bill Evans.

The following piece by Whitney Balliett appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1984 and was subsequently published in Whitney’s Goodbye and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz, 1981-1990 [1991] which he describes in his opening note as “a collection of shorter pieces done during this period for those players who are gone, those who are here and those to come.”

Michel’s work in the 1980 was still something of a cognoscenti affair so it's nice to have something by the Dean of Jazz writers documenting Petrucciani’s first steps as it were.

“Jazz was once a spare, monosyllabic music. Improvisers thought in terms of individual notes, of bar lines, and of the twelve-bar (blues) or thirty-two-bar (standard) chorus. They grew up within the three-minute limitations of the ten-inch 78-r.p.m. recording, and they appreciated being given an eight- or sixteen- or twenty-four-bar solo. (Sometimes a slow number lasted only two choruses.) Such compression often resulted in beauty and high emotion. King Oliver and his protégé Louis Armstrong were wasteless players (Armstrong passed through a rococo period in his late twenties and early thirties), and so was Bix Beiderbecke, who hung his notes in the air like moons. They were joined in the thirties by Red Allen and Benny Carter and J. C. Higginbotham, by Lester Young and Ben Webster and Sidney Catlett and Jimmy Blanton. 

Some improvisers developed telegraphic styles — what they didn't play meant as much as what they did play. These included Count Basie, Joe Thomas, Emmett Berry, Bobby Hackett, Johnny Hodges, and Pete Brown. 

Then Art Tatum took hold. His travelling arpeggios, harmonic towers, virtuoso technique, and tireless desire to dazzle suggested that jazz could be a baroque music. Charlie Parker studied Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie studied Parker, Bud Powell studied all three, and by the time their countless students came forward jazz had become baroque. 

Improvisers filled their solos with runs and with sixteenth and thirty-second notes. New multi-noted chords bloomed like orchids. Soloists, encouraged by the twenty-five minutes to a side of the new L.P. recording, became garrulous. Few ever knew what they wanted to say, because they had so much time to decide. By the sixties, soloists were going on for forty-five minutes, for an hour, for an hour and a quarter. Listening to John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor became an unselfish act: you gave up an hour of your life each time one of them soloed. 

During recent years, this floridity has struck pianists particularly hard. In the manner of the great nineteenth-century rhapsodists, they envision their pianos as theatres. Consider their forefather, Dave Brubeck, carrying his immense Wagnerian solos from campus to campus in the fifties. Also Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Roger Kellaway, and Keith Jarrett. At first, the tiny, twenty-one-year-old French pianist Michel Petrucciani seemed the newest member of this group. He likes to show off his technique. He likes to rhapsodize and to wander through ad-lib meadows. He likes the loud pedal. But much of this is adolescent fat, for the more one hears Petrucciani the clearer it becomes that the improvisational horses he is driven by are tough and original.

He was born in Orange, and grew up in Montelimar, not far from Avignon. His father is Sicilian and his mother French, and he has two brothers. All the men are musicians. He settled in Big Sur a couple of years ago, and did his American apprenticeship with the tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Petrucciani first appeared in New York at the Kool Jazz Festival in 1983, and he made his New York night-club debut recently at the Village Vanguard. The girdling presence of a bassist (the Swede Palle Danielsson) and a drummer (Eliot Zigmund) helped bring his passionate style into focus. He has listened widely. He says that Bill Evans was "a god on earth," and he admires Debussy, Ravel, Bach, and Bartok — the idols of most big-eared jazz musicians. 

Evans is at the heart of his work, and there are passing allusions to Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Thelonious Monk, Tatum, and Tyner. He has a strong touch. His hands are not large (he suffers from a bone ailment, and is just three feet tall), but they are steel. Petrucciani is a complete improviser, in the manner of Lester Young and Charlie Parker. He often plays his own compositions, and he rarely states their melodies. This can be confusing, since American listeners love the pleasant game of ferreting out an improviser's sources. Even when he does a standard, he disguises it, keeping his melodic flags in the far distance. Like most young improvisers, he has a great deal to say, and sometimes he tries to say it all at once. 

Chords are piled on chords, arpeggios surge and vanish and surge again, complex single-note figures collide in the middle registers. He is an avid new reader telling you the entire plot of his first Dickens. But the next number will be open and uncrowded and breathing. He will play well-spaced single notes, placing them carefully around the beat and shaping them into beautiful new melodies. He will construct a ladder of octave chords, cap it with a two handed tremolo, go into a short, double-time run, and return to his single notes, three or four of which he will repeat over and over, changing them slightly each time.  He may use an ascending staccato pattern, his hand rocking rapidly up the keyboard or he may rumble around in the cellar the way Eddie Costa used to. 

The piano has no vibrato, its timbres are limited, blue notes can be only hinted at, there is no way to play a Johnny Hodges dying glissando. But the sheer vivacity of Petrucciani's attack carries him through these obstacles, as does his use of certain emotion-producing devices: dynamics, placement of notes behind the beat on fast tempos or ahead of the beat on slow ones large intervals, tremolos, and sudden forays into the higher register.