Dick Grove: Little Bird Suite

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

Although we couldn’t remember exactly when, an Internet friend informs us that we acquired our LP copy of composer-arranger Dick Grove’s Little Bird Suite [Pacific Jazz #74] in 1963.

Dick was very active in Southern California Jazz and musical circles dating back to the mid-1950s when, as its pianist, he was a member of the Westlake College of Music Quintet that won the “Easter-week, Intercollegiate Jazz Festival” sponsored by bassist Howard Rumsey and the famed Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, CA.

Under the direction of John Graas, one of the few French-Horn players who specialized in Jazz and who was also a composer-arranger, the award winning quintet recorded an album for Decca – College Goes to Jazz: The Westlake College Quintet [DL 8393]. For your review, we have included a video tribute to the group and the music on this album at the end of this piece.

Dick would subsequently teach at Westlake, the archetype for Jazz conservatories. The college was founded in 1945 in a Beaux-Arts house located near 6^th and Alvarado, not too far from downtown Los Angeles. The college is no longer in existence.

He later formed his own Dick Grove School of Music in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. Dick’s school offered classes in harmony & theory, composition, orchestration and arranging, keyboards, songwriting, et al. For a full list of Dick’s credits go here.

We spent some time in one of Dick’s rehearsal bands. He was a marvelous educator, an extremely kind and gracious person and one of the few composer-arrangers who actually knew how to write a drum part that keyed the drummer into what was going on in the music instead of simply writing “8-bars of swing on the hi hat” and having a few downbeats noted here and there for “bass drum” or “cymbal crash.”

While re-discovering the Pacific Jazz LP and making the following video tribute to Dick, we were very surprised to learn that this wonderful music had not been digitalized and transferred to CD. The audio track is entitled Circlet and the soloists are Paul Horn on alto saxophone and Bill Robinson on baritone saxophone.

Leonard Feather wrote these informative liner notes for Dick Grove’s Little Bird Suite  Embedded into Leonard’s notes is a video that features another cut from the album. This one is entitled Doodad.

“It seems that there is always a stage in the career of every major artist at which the remark is made by surprised listeners: "Where has he been all these years?," or "Why hadn't I heard of him before?" With the obvious exception of child prodigies, most of the important contributors have to go through this phase; in the case of Dick Grove there can be no doubt that it will be the near-unanimous reaction to this album.

As was the case with Clare Fischer, Gil Evans and others now recognized as important arrangers, Dick Grove had to wait until he was in his thirties before he could make any impact on the jazz scene. Unlike the others, he is a latecomer in the actual craft of writing. "It's only in the last three years," he says, "that I really learned to write, to the point where I could say I wanted to."

Born December 18, 1927, in Lakeville, Indiana, he was not seriously interested in music until about 1942. "My mother and brother were both musicians; he was quite a bit older and played in movie houses, piano and organ. I didn't study until I got out of high school and went to Denver U. for a couple of years. I'm mainly self-taught, trial and error style. I picked up piano and-used to double on vibes."

In 1954 he moved out to California, concentrating for the most part on backing singers, writing and teaching. He played with Alvino Rey for a while (but then, who hasn't?), and lately has done some effective playing and writing (without any credit for the writing) on records with Mavis Rivers.

"Didn't you ever try to submit anything to any of the name bands?" I asked him.

"No, I got into sort of a trap, by getting things going in my own direction. If I were to submit something to Harry James, say, I would have to write the way the Harry James band plays. Or if I wrote for Basie in the Basie style, it wouldn't be me at all. I almost got to the point where I was going to have to do something like that, but I feel I have something of my own to say and it finally dawned on me that anything I do is worth more to me under my own name."

In this manner, the necessity for personal expression became the mother of orchestral invention and the Dick Grove Orches­tra came into existence.

The band has been together, with a few personnel variations, for three years, but chiefly as a rehearsal group. Lately there have been a few in person appearances at college concerts; the plan, now that the group has finally been committed to records, is to keep together, play more concerts and go on the road if and when the demand warrants it.

Of his influences, Dick says: "Naturally I admire Gil Evans, mainly for the mature conception he has; but rhythmically I write very differently." An important difference also is that Gil's best known ventures have been arrangements of standard material, whereas Dick essentially is a composer-arranger who concentrates on his own original themes.

Of the instrumentation, he comments: "I use the regular basic set-up of reeds, brass and rhythm, but I don't write by sections. There are so many ways to create variety through unusual voicings or instrumental combinations.

"All the trumpets double on flugelhorn, which gives a better blend with the woodwinds. I use the piano occasionally, but only as an orchestral thing, not in the rhythm section.

"All the originals in this album except Little Bird were origi­nally commissioned by Dave Robbins' Jazz Workshop. Dave is a trombonist and conductor; his orchestra is heard every other week from Vancouver in a government-subsidized Canadian radio series. I've been writing for him regularly for a couple of years. The versions in the album are slightly different.

"As for Little Bird —it started out as a thing called Blues Two Ways. Pete Jolly took the background theme of the minor part and made a separate 16-bar thing out of it, as a bossa nova. Tommy Wolf added lyrics and it became Little Bird. As it turned out, we were pretty lucky with it; we got seven recorded ver­sions, and my own makes it eight."

There is a suite-like relationship, Dick says, between the three tunes on the first side and the first two on the second side. In other words, the five compositions with bird references in the titles, though they stand by themselves as entities, are tied together in the sense that they make logical continuous listening.

Nighthawk, the moderately paced but firmly-swinging opener, gives immediate exposure to Grove's extraordinary flair for color and variety of timbres in orchestration. There is also a prompt introduction of the soloist who, on the strength of this album, seems certain to earn the belated publicity as an instru­mentalist that Grove will acquire as a writer. His name is Joe Burnett; coincidentally, he is Grove's age. Dallas-born, he has played with just about every name band from Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson to Woody Herman and (of course) Charlie Barnet; but he has never had any substantial solo exposure on records. His solo vehicle here is the flugelhorn and his work shows a lyrical beauty that establishes him as the orches­tra's most remarkable instrumental voice.

Bird of Paradaiso, the longest and most brilliantly variegated track, is practically a concerto for Burnett. His lonesome wistful sound, unaccompanied, serves as an introduction and main­tains a sense of tension until, a minute and a half in, a tempo is established by Pena and Jeffries. By using a cluster type of voicing, Grove achieves special moments of rich orchestral texture, these passages being skillfully interwoven with the flugelhorn’s statements.

Mosca Espanola is a vivid pastiche of sounds all the way from the opening F and B Flat triads, through the opening ensembles into the sharply delineated Bill Robinson baritone solo, the gracefully swinging Dick Hurwitz trumpet, and on to the closing passages throughout which bass and drums are ingeniously integrated. The instrumentation in a passage near the beginning, in which I thought I heard muted trombones, actually is played by four open horns, with flugelhorn on top, two tenor trombones and bass trombone.

This voicing, Dick points out, is used at other points, some­times with bass clarinet added, as is the case in Canto de Oriole. The latter is a moody, almost stately piece, performed with an obviously keen, sensitive ear for dynamic and phrasing requirements on the part of every man in the orchestra. Both here and on the preceding track, Little Bird, one is constantly aware of the importance of Jeffries' and Pena's roles, not only as resolute swingers but as part of the overall sound. (Pena's parts in Oriole and Paradaiso were all written out.) Little Bird is noteworthy also for the work of Paul Horn, one of the most accomplished flutists in contemporary jazz; and for the tenor by Bob Hardaway.

Doodad and Circlelet, as noted above, are in a slightly dif­ferent bag from the rest of the compositions, though they retain the ingredients essential to the very personal Grove palette. Paul Horn is the featured alto soloist on both; his sound on alto for several years has been one of the very few distinctive ones on this horn. Circlelet also provides another glimpse of Bill Robinson's full-blooded baritone. Doodad is perhaps closer to the standard big band concept, in structure and sounds; than any of the other works in this set.

Repeated hearings of the album will reveal much more than can be outlined in any verbal summation. There are so many intricate or unusual uses of various tonal colors —the flute dou­bling the lead an octave higher, the woodwinds above the brass, the added warmth obtained through the use of the flugelhorns — that the whole set of performances takes on more interest at each hearing, both technically and harmonically.

Not the least noteworthy aspect of Dick Grove's success is his ability to achieve these results without resorting to such devices as atonality or continuous meter-shifting. "There are so many things that can be done within the present frame­work," he says, "and my feeling is, if you can't hear it, you shouldn't write it."

Clearly there are so many things he can hear that the lis­tener's ear is engaged from the first moment and never allowed to wander as the album follows its polychromatic course.

If orchestral jazz is going to survive, the strength of its will to live must depend on the initiatives of men like Dick Grove. And because of men like him, I am confident that its survival is assured.

-LEONARD FEATHER”

Joe Magnarelli

I first met Joe Magnarelli in March, 1998 in a Seattle recording studio where we were recording Italian Jazz pianist Dado Moroni’s Out of the Night CD which I co-produced with Philip Barker for his Jazz Focus Records.

In between takes, we chatted amiably and Joe’s warm personality seemed a perfect compliment to his mellow approach to the trumpet which he plays in a style very reminiscent of Kenny Dorham.

Aside from his work on the Moroni album, I had previously heard Joe on recordings he made for Gerry Teekins’ Holland-based Criss Cross Records, a label he continues to record for under his own name and in combination with Philadelphia-based trumpeter John Swana.

Persistence [RSR CD 194] is my first encounter with “Mags’” work on Mark Feldman’s Reservoir label and it is a thoroughly enjoyable one.  On it, Joe is joined by Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone and a rhythm section that is one of the best on today’s Jazz scene: pianist David Hazeltine, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington.

Peter Aaron is the music editor of Chronogram magazine and a contributor to the Village Voice, the Boston Herald, All About Jazz.com, All Music Guide.com, and Jazz Improv and Roll magazines. Here are his insert notes to Persistence [Reservoir RSR CD 194].

© -Peter Aaron, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There are several indispensable qualities an artist must have if he or she is to survive as a jazz musician. Tone. Technique. Ears. Resourcefulness. Adaptability. Good communication skills. Patience. Confidence. Individuality. Taste. Drive. Soul.

But perhaps the most important quality a great  jazz musician - or any great artist, really -must have is persistence. Lots of it. Because without it, none of the other qualities mentioned above can be attained; when we see them manifested these characteristics can seem like assets an artist has been born with, but the truth is they have to be nurtured, developed. Which takes persistence. And persistence itself is what keeps an artist's eves on the prize, a strength that will carry him or her through the lean times, the slings of the naysayer, the chatty, indifferent audiences, the jet lag, the bad road food, the near-empty clubs, the sleepless nights of self-doubt that all artists encounter. The ones who don't have that all-important stick-to-itiveness eventually give up the ghost and quit playing, at least professionally.

But Joe Magnarelli has persistence. Lots of it. Joe, or Mags, as the trumpeter is often called, has been playing his horn for nearly 40 years. And for more than half of those years he’s been doing it professionally, both as a leader and in the bands of Lionel Hampton, Brother Jack McDuff, Harry Connick, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, Jon Hendricks, and Ray Barretto, as well as in the Glenn Miller and Carnegie Hall jazz orchestras. Joe is also a teacher, serving as an adjunct professor at the New School of Social Research in Manhattan and New Jersey City.

University in Jersey City and conducting clinics and master classes outside of these schools. And, having been a stellar student himself under James Moody, Tommy Turrentine, and others, Joe certainly has a lot of knowledge and experience to pass on. But in addition to the notes-and-bars music theory material he covers, one lesson he imparts to his students is that of maintaining their resolve despite the tests and trials of learning and playing music-in other words, persistence. "Sometimes you do have to give the kids a pep talk," Joe says. "You know, that idea of 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."' And, indeed, all tenured musicians know the value of emotional strength, both on and off the bandstand.

Since 1994 Joe has been making acclaimed albums as a leader and co-leader, but this is his first for RESERVOIR MUSIC. (He played as a sideman on Gary Smulyan's exemplary 2003 RESERVOIR release, THE REAL DEAL.) "Being on Reservoir is a really good situation for me," says Joe. "Mark Feldman has the right sensitivity as a. producer. During the session he pretty much just let us do our thing, but when he did offer input it was right on the mark. And I’d already known [engineer] Jim Anderson from some big band and small combo dates I'd played on, so it was all very easy, very relaxed." It definitely comes across: One of the hallmarks of PERSISTENCE is its overall relaxed, free-flowing feel. It's not hard to believe him when Joe mentions that the tunes were "pretty much all done in one or two takes."

Of course, the absolutely killer band Joe put together for the session enters into the equation, too. Check this lineup, jazz fans, and just try not to salivate: Mags on trumpet, Gary Smulyan on baritone, David Hazeltine on piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Kenny "The jazz Maniac" Washington on drums. A veritable all-star team of New York’s world-class straight-ahead scene. "They're some amazing cats, alright," beams Joe. "We'd all worked with each other separately before, so we were all familiar with each other. They could all sense what I wanted play, right from the first note."

Joe wrote Persist during his tenure with the late conga king Ray Barretto. "The tune was originally called 'Persist Until You Succeed' and had lyrics written by Sue Giles, and then I just started calling it Persist," Joe explains. "But Ray didn't like that title and renamed it ‘Mags,’ after me." As  "Mags:' the piece was done in a Latin arrangement for Barretto” s Grammy-nominated 2005 release, TIME WAS - TIME IS. Reworked into a 4/4 swing-time adaptation, Persist opens this album and provides the inspiration for its title. The track kicks off with an ensemble flourish and a strong pronouncement by Kenny Washington, and features a wonderfully scrambled recurring horn vamp and colorful and blustery solos by the leader and Smulyan.

The Village, with its effortless, light bossa nova groove, recalls the music of Joe's time with Barretto as well as the lively culture of Greenwich Village, where the trumpeter was living when he composed the tune. Hazeltine takes a great, sparkling turn here, staying clear of any predictable Latin keyboard clichés, and Joe contributes a fine, bubbly solo.

The band next reprises the standard I Had the Craziest Dream, giving the Harry Warren/Mack Gordon chestnut a smooth and buoyant but relentlessly swinging treatment. While Joe delivers the tune's gorgeous melody with measurably heartfelt tenderness, it's the (non-related) Washington’s that almost steal the show here. "A trumpet player hardly ever gets to play a beautiful standard with a rhythm section like that," says Joe. "It was too much fun, playing that tune with those cats." Peter Washington's strutting bravado drives the performance, and the riveting breaks that he and Kenny Washington contribute are likewise highlights.

It's not hard to guess where the title of D Train Boogaloo came from. "I was on the D train heading downtown to a gig at Birdland when I wrote it," recalls Joe. "Before every record date I force myself to write one tune just for that particular session. The pressure helps me get focused for the date, and D Train Boogaloo is the one I wrote for this album."

PERSISTENCE also boasts a pair of ageless standards by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Joe picked up Haunted Heart just a few years ago, while he was playing with Barretto. "I didn't realize that Dietz and Schwartz had written the tune, but I'd always loved it," Joe says. "Barretto’s band had done an arrangement of it, and Barretto liked what I was playing on it. He said, 'Man, you should always play that tune.' I love it." And no doubt listeners will love this version, with -warm deep Smulyan solo, and the lyrical musings of the leader. You and the Night and the Music, on the other hand, was an unplanned inclusion. "That was the last tune we cut. There wasn't any arrangement, we just blew." And blow, they do, especially Smulyan and Kenny Washington during an early, fiery exchange that proves one of the set’s high points.

The ballad Barretto is an homage to Joe's former mentor, who died in 2006. "I started writing it pretty soon after he passed," says Joe. "I'd work on it every morning, adding to it little by little."  It would seem the tunes namesake would've been deeply touched by the tender tribute, which is graced by the trumpeter's gorgeous lines and Smulyan's simpatico comping behind them, as well as a spare, exquisite passage by Hazeltine.

Joe had some fun with the tide of the last tune, Soul Sister. "It's basically 'Body and Soul' redone as a waltz:' he says. "I like to write on top of a standard once in a while. It's fun to do." The tracks, loping, easy, pendulum-like groove offers an excellent backdrop for the lithe intervals of Peter Washington and the leader's occasional Coltrane-esque trills. After such a satisfying ride, its the perfect performance to bring the album in for a smooth landing. And Mags and the band make it all sound so easy.

But of course it isn't easy. Oh, it gets easier as the years roll on. But only after the players have already poured years of dedication and sweat into their craft. Which is a fruitful and never-ending process for Joe Magnarelli. And one jazz lovers will never tire of listening to. If there's one lesson that this music illustrates, it's that persistence pays off.

“Life can be very demanding, but you can't let the tough times get you down," offers Joe. "Every day when you wake up it's a chance to start fresh.”

PETER AARON JANUARY 2008

I have always liked the tune – You and the Night and the Music – particularly after hearing pianist Bill Evans’ interpretation of it on the Interplay album which features a sparkling solo by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.

The version of the tune on Persistence does not disappoint, especially if you are a fan of straight-ahead Jazz.

As you can hear on the sound track to the following video, after Joe plays the line [melody] using a Harmon mute, baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan and drummer Kenny Washington launch into trading eights, fours and twos that are of such a high quality that they could serve as a model of how this form of – if you will – interplay between horn and drums is done.

Kenny’s exchanges with Gary begin at 1:09 minutes with the 8’s starting at 1:16 minutes; the 4’s at 2:01 minutes and the 2’s at 2:47 minutes.

And, if you are so inclined, listen to this audio a second time and just concentrate on the bass line that Peter Washington lays down behind Joe’s playing of the melody from 18 seconds to 1:08 minutes. All hyperbole aside, this is simply some of the most magnificent bass playing that you are ever likely to hear.

STAN KENTON – THE LATER YEARS

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

“[Mike] Vax claimed Warren Gale to be the most significant [trumpet] soloist in the [Kenton] band: ‘If ever there was a fiery Jazz trumpet player that was perfect for the Kenton band it was Warren.  …’

‘Dick Shearer was the most important person on the band. I think that Stan felt about him like a son. … the thing is, the way Dick played trombone, that was the Kenton sound. Dick’s trombone was derivative of all the great Kenton lead players, going all the way back to Kai Winding. But sometimes the person who’s the end of a legacy, becomes the culmination of the legacy, so I think Dick was the greatest lead trombone player of them all.’”

- Mike Vax, lead trumpet player with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, as quoted in Michael Sparke, Stan Kenton: This is an Orchestra! [Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2010, p. 222].

A number of the guys I grew up playing music with – among them, trumpeter Warren Gale and trombonist Dick Shearer – later went on the Kenton band, roughly around the mid-to-late 1960s.

When I first gigged with Warren, he was living in Long Beach, CA and playing like Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard during their years with drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Given his captivation with Lee and Freddie’s hard-bop style of trumpet playing, in a million years I wouldn’t have figured him for the Kenton Band.

Dick Shearer, on the other hand, rarely talked about doing anything else. Playing trombone with Stan Kenton’s Orchestra was a dream come through for Dick.  Not many of us get to realize our dreams. Dick did.

While Warren, Dick and others [Ray Reed] were making their journey through Kenton’s music. I was making my own journey, thanks to a government sponsored trip aboard. When I got back, the world had changed and so had I.

I moved away from performing music and on to others things in my life.

But Stan’s music always continued to fascinated me and I vicariously followed it as it made its way around various colleges campuses in nearby Redlands, California or in such far-flung places as Provo, Utah [Brigham Young University] and Indianapolis, Indiana [Butler University].

In all my years of following it, I never knew there was so much to know about the Stan Kenton Orchestra, that is, until I read Michael Sparke’s book about the band entitled Stan Kenton: This is an Orchestra!.

Published in April, 2010 by the University of North Texas Press, it offers a detailed, chronological analysis of the band from its beginnings in 1941 until Stan’s death in 1979.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is especially indebted to Michael [isn’t everyone who ever wanted to know more about Stan and his music?] for his chapters on The Later Years of the band’s existence, a period of the band's history about which we lacked details.

For a variety of reasons, fans of the Kenton band, particularly those who followed it closely in the 1940s and 1950s, were not partial to Stan’s music during the last decade-and-a-half of its existence. I had the impression from some of musicians on the band at this time that they were keenly aware of this bias and felt it to be undeserved.

As Michael Sparke explains it:

“Musicians from the Seventies often feel like the underdogs, because they know they played good music well, yet in general it is the earlier bands that are most often feted and remembered. In moments of hon­esty, however, many will admit they understand and endorse this com­prehension. The truth is, none of the few remaining touring bands of the Seventies, whose leaders roamed the land like the sole remaining dino­saurs of an almost-extinct species, were quite the same as they had been in their younger days. Conditions were so totally different the decline was inevitable, especially as age and illness took its toll. But it is also true, many talented musicians worked for Kenton in the Seventies, and a lot of significant music was played. The listener who ignores this last decade will be the loser.” [p.222]

In addition to all of the fabulous music they performed, much of it extremely challenging both from a compositional standpoint and because of its use of unusual time signatures, Stan and The Later Years orchestras made a very significant contribution to Jazz education by their presence at clinics held at many of the country’s universities.

Stan embraced these teaching laboratories as a way of perpetuating Jazz and its traditions, as well as, a means of developing future performers for his and other big bands.

With the end of the Neophonic Orchestra after four seasons in 1968, Stan really poured his heart and soul into these music camps which usually began and ended with a concert by the orchestra with various teaching scenarios contained in between these performances.

We thought we’d end this multi-part look at the music of Stan Kenton by sharing the liner notes from the Creative World 2 LP album Stan Kenton & His Orchestra: Live at Redlands University [ST-1015; reissued on CD as GNP Crescendo GNPD-1015] to place Stan and the orchestra’s relationship to the Jazz education in a broader context.

At the conclusion of this piece, you can also view a video that employs an audio track consisting of Ken Hanna’s Tiare, from the Stan Kenton & His Orchestra: Live at Redlands University album. We picked this music because trombonist Dick Shearer is well-heard on it and we wanted to serve the memory of “Dickus” as we come to the end of our visit with Stan Kenton’s music.

For those who may not be aware, Kenton’s library of arrangements was bequeath to the University of North Texas [Denton., TX] where the legacy of Kenton’s orchestral Jazz continues to be honored by the many fine bands comprised of the students at the university and their teachers.

© -Stan Kenton/Creative World Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

STAN KENTON AND HIS ORCHESTRA AT REDLANDS UNIVERSITY

“This two-record album was recorded live at a special concert at Redlands University under the most unique circumstances. Unique because the audience consisted of student musicians, music educators and the teach­ing staff which had gathered for this year's week of "Kenton Clinics."

Due to its deep involvement with the study of Jazz, the audience proved to be not only sensitively perceptive to the music played but very critical of how it was per­formed by the Kenton Orchestra. This challenge, from student to professional musician, fanned itself to burning excitement as the band outdid itself to provide total communication with this select audience.

Many of the selections were recorded at the request of the many Kenton fans who had heard them played at concerts while the band was on tour. Four have never been recorded by anyone as they were written especially for the Kenton Orchestra. The recordings on this concert album are vivid, exciting testimony to the total communi­cation which took place at Redlands University between music students, educators and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, who firmly established itself as their "Jazz Orchestra In Residence."

'The Jazz Orchestra In Residence" concept evolved from the many fruitful and informative years of the "Kenton Clinics." This new idea places the full Kenton Orchestra in a college or university for three days to a week where they work in conjunction with the music and humanities departments as a closely related and integrated extension of both. By exposing the students to the professional standards of actual performing dem­onstrations, the band creates exciting examples that establish goals for the young musicians to pursue.

The "Jazz Orchestra In Residence" program is com­posed of highly intense sessions which cover all perti­nent aspects of Jazz in order to provide the student with a further well-rounded, all encompassing knowledge of music. Courses include Jazz Improvisation, Composition and Arranging, and Instrumental Clinics, in which the solutions to problems most often encountered with the various instruments are discussed and examined. Two of the many related lectures include "Jazz and the Humanities" and "Jazz, The Extension to the Formal Study of Music."

As an adjunct, Kenton has produced two color films on Jazz: 'The Substance of Jazz," which describes how and why Jazz is so different from all other musical forms and "The Crusade for Jazz," a one-hour documentary which takes the viewer on an intimate road trip by bus with the band, where they are confronted with the dis­comfort of living out of a suitcase for three months, the one night stands and eating on the run; but most of all, the viewer feels all the excitement generated by each member of the band just before curtain time, and the deep sense of personal involvement each one has with the band and the music they love to play anywhere: Jazz.

During the "Jazz Orchestra In Residence" the musi­cians carefully nurture each student's particular prob­lem until finally, at week's end, a new awareness has taken place within these youngsters; an awareness that has them reaching notes they couldn't have imagined earlier, playing complex arrangements and even writ­ing an original score for the Kenton band to play and comment on. Most important, they have developed a sensitive understanding, not just for music and their own ability, but for the innovative and deeply personal excite­ment of Jazz.

The pictures point out the intense interest and serious­ness of the students. Their enthusiasm became so boundless that even while eating, the discussion was Jazz and their own expanding musical horizons. The "Creative World of Stan Kenton" has been closely asso­ciated with university music education for many years by furnishing professional orchestrations for the student musician. The "Jazz Orchestra In Residence" concept now provides the serious student the opportunity of working with the professional musician who plays these intricate scores in front of thousands of Jazz fans in con­cert halls and night clubs throughout the country.

This concept is proving so successful that the Kenton Orchestra is making plans to expand these three day to a week appearances greatly during their normal concert tour as extensions to regular music department curricula.

Redlands University's "Jazz Orchestra In Residence" has worked. It is already turning out musicians today who will soon become the Jazz innovators and teachers of tomorrow.”

Mike and Cedar in Bolivia

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has always been quite fond of pianist Cedar Walton's original composition Bolivia. In March 2002, Mike Abene arranged Cedar's tune for Holland's Metropole Orchestra, hence the title of this piece. The piano solo is by Hans Vromans, Leo Janssen does the honors on tenor saxophone and Mike conducts the orchestra which, once again, demonstrates how talented its strings players are at Jazz phrasing. With his arrangement, Mike essentially captures all the moods, human sensibilities and vistas reflected in th images of Bolivia as contained in the video. Mike and Cedar are in Bolivia in that their music complements and compliments these graphic representations of the country and its people.

Charlie and Stella

One might be hard-pressed to find more virtuoso and heartfelt alto sax playing than that displayed by Charlie Mariano on this Bill Holman arrangement for the Kenton Orchestra of Stella by Starlight.  In addition to his marvelous statement of the melody at the outset, checkout what Charlie puts together as an ending from 4:09 minutes including his cadenza at 4:52 minutes.

Stan Kenton : New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm – Part 1

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

“There can be little doubt Stan Kenton saw himself as a musical visionary—a questing, exploratory spirit—and it's a tribute to his strength of purpose no less than his charisma that he was able to impose his vision on, and carry with him so many others on his quest.

Then too, despite whatever one might think of his music, particularly as it has held up in light of all that has transpired in jazz since he first appeared on the scene, it's clear that he succeeded in his major goals. It is partially as a result of his efforts that jazz is now accorded respect as a serious music, perhaps America's major contribution to world music; that the locus of the music has shifted from the nightclub to the concert hall and festival stage; that the synthesis with European concert music he envisioned has been enabled to take place in the work of others who followed in his wake; and that the music has had its horizons widened through various of the concepts he pioneered and set in motion. That he enriched the vocabulary of jazz and changed the character of the jazz orchestra are undeniable; one simply has to listen to those that came into being after him to have this confirmed. …

If he was nothing else, Kenton surely was a catalyst who drew to himself large numbers of gifted artists and, through his example, inspired them to give of their best.”

- Pete Welding

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

This is where I came into Stan Kenton “World,” although at the time I had no idea that it was the New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm era or that there were such periodizations of Stan’s music.

Having heard many of the earlier hits by the band -Concerto to End All Concertos, Collaboration, and Intermission Riff – to name a few, I was certainly ready for more when I encountered Stan’s Contemporary Concepts [Capitol, 1955] and Back to Balboa [Capitol, 1957] albums.

These were the Kenton albums that introduced me to Sam Noto’s beautiful sound in the “Jazz” trumpet chair and the power and precision of the lead trumpet work of Al Porcino and Ed Leddy.

The trademark, vibrato-less Kenton trombone sound was, by now, well-developed and in the capable hands of the likes of Bob Fitzpatrick, Kent Larson and Kenny Shroyer.

Richie Kamuca and particularly Bill Perkins took Lester Young’s hollow sound to new levels on tenor sax while Charlie Mariano’s poignant wail and Lennie Niehaus’ beautifully constructed long lines on alto saxophone made my heart sing and leap, respectively.

These were the albums that introduced me to the slash and bash style of Mel Lewis’ big band drumming; has any big band drum ever played better fills or dropped more well-placed bombs?

But the music on these albums and on the other recordings that were a part of the New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm period [roughly 1952-1958/59] was different than the 78s I had listen to from the 1940s in that it was arranged more linearly and the sound from these arrangements flowed more smoothly to the ear.

All of the usual Kenton “fireworks” – the screaming, high register trumpets, the huge, fat trombone sound anchored by two bass ‘bones, the big cymbal splashes – were still all there, but now you could pop your fingers and tap your foot to the charts on Contemporary Concepts and Back to Balboa in a way that was more characteristic of the big bands led by Woody Herman and Count Basie.

As I came to later understand, the reasons for this change in the sound of the Kenton band had everything to do with the arrangers that Stan chose to work with at this time: people like Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman and Marty Paich. To some extent Bill Russo, Gene Roland and Johnny Richards also belong to this group although they along with Stan and Pete Rugolo would continue to contribute the band’s more customary, orchestral arrangements.

Stan’s music began to move; it acquired more of a metronomic “feel” to it. The arrangements by Mulligan, Holman and Paich had a lighter sound with more of a middle texture that brought the saxophone section more prominently into the band’s arrangements.

To my ears, Bill Russo’s compositions and arrangements represented a transitional style between the Concert Kenton [what Will Friedwald refers to as “… Kenton’s obsession with artmusik”] and the less grandiose looser feel particularly of the Contemporary Concepts album which would largely be made up of the arrangements of Bill Holman [with a tip-of-the-hat to Gerry Mulligan and Marty Paich].

Pete Welding in his insert notes to the CD reissue of New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm offers these thoughts on Kenton’s music at this time:

“To place things in perspective, this particular edition of the Kenton orchestra followed on the heels of the ambitious 40-piece "Innovations In Modern Music" concert ensemble Stan had mounted in early 1950 after a year's sabbatical during which he had completely rethought his musical philosophy. He viewed the larger orchestra, …, as the best means of re­establishing his primacy in vanguard musical thinking. A corollary aim was that by playing only concert engagements, the band's previous ties with dance music would be clearly and finally severed and Kenton would be freed to concentrate on the "serious" concert music he wished to pursue to the exclusion of all else.

While he might have been successful in putting dance music behind him, Kenton soon found the "Innovations" orchestra to be a mixed blessing. He persevered with it on and off for much of the ensuing two years but ultimately the formidable logistics and financial burdens involved in maintaining such a large ensemble proved much too daunting even for him, and the orchestra was disbanded after only two moderately successful concert tours were concluded and a third, of Europe, was canceled.

A return to the "Progressive Jazz" format led ultimately to the group and approach heard here and an abandonment of the grandiose designs of the "Innovations" orchestra in favor of the lighter textures, greater rhythmic resilience and more conventional—but far more deeply creative and ultimately more satisfying —orchestral approaches followed with such happy distinction by Mulligan, Holman and Russo. Their writing for the band clearly showed that when approached with imagination, wit and resourceful creativity such as they possessed, and a solid, informed knowledge of the conventions of big band jazz, which they also had, the music was anything but moribund or played-out but could course with a plenitude of freshness, invention, vitality and bristling contemporaneity. Certainly these charts do, sounding just as spirited and invigorating today as when they created such a furor of excitement on their release 36 years ago.”

Given the preponderant number of arrangements that Bill Russo and Bill Holman wrote for the band during the New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm era, not surprisingly, Mosaic Records elected to label the boxed set it issued of this music as simply Stan Kenton: The Holman and Russo Charts[MD4-136].

Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic has graciously granted copyright permission to JazzProfiles in order that it might reproduce this portion of Will Friedwald’s insert notes to the set.

In order to keep this piece from getting a bit too unwieldy, we have divided Mosiac and Will’s notes into a Part 1 focus on Bill Russo while covering their thoughts on Bill Holman in a following Part 2. Please keep in mind that the influences on the writing of both Russo and Holman were not strictly chronological.

© -Mosaic Records and Will Friedwald. Used with permission, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Most of us who've come along since the '50s read our first objective and usuable appraisal of Kenton in Feather's original Encyclopedia of Jazz, which described his music as operating on three levels. On the bottom level there are low­brow pieces designed to attract the general public. The middle level contains the Kenton band's straight jazz pieces, written by men who also established reputations as major jazz orchestrators before (Gerry Mulligan), during (Shorty Rogers) and after (Bill Holman) their tenures with Kenton - of these, only Pete Rugolo did virtually all of his most significant work as an instrumental jazz orchestrator during his Kenton period (Rugolo's best work as a consistently-inspired arranger for the great vocalists came later).

In Kenton's own point of view, moving up the ladder landed one on the third and highest rung, that of his most deliberate and, in John S. Wilson's term - "arty art" music - composi­tions that both challenged one's ears in terms of tonality one's watches in terms of length, the most famous and infamous being Bob Graettinger's City of Glass. Even the title was imposing enough to scare the hell out of you.

Most of what we read about Kenton tells us that the man himself only really loved his music at that third, highest-browed level, but he produced so much good pop, jazz and dance music that it must have held a strong attraction for him.

With the possible exception of the years when Pete Rugolo served as the band's musical director, the music written for Kenton by Bill Holman and Bill Russo, represents the best that Kenton ever recorded from every possible angle - the three levels of low, high and middle brow as well as the distinction between Kenton's rules and the exceptions to same. They're also Kenton's best ravioli - delectably tasty combinations of the band's familiar starchy pasta sound but containing real meat in the middle!

It's generally oversimplified that Russo wrote mainly serious works and Holman was responsible for the band's swingers; Russo also did "lighter vein" pieces like Bill Blues and Holman also came up with the pompously-titled Theme and Variations (both also arranged standards and vocal features for the band). However, the two Bills do exemplify the two approaches towards appreciating Kenton: Russo wrote music that, to use a fittingly Wagnerian term, represents the ne-plus-ultra of Kenton; Holman took Kenton to the limits of un-Kenton.

Wagner's extra-musical angles - leaving aside the radical misinterpretation of the composer's intentions through a racial point of view by certain 20th-century political regimes -parallel Kenton's in that "Artistry in Rhythm" represents the ultimate expression of the American jazz-pop aesthetic in terms of an Anglo-Saxon patriarchal point of view. There's a further theoretical similarity with many a heavy metal rock band of the '70s and '80s, British or otherwise, which use Nordic icons as part of their visual presentations (stage props and album cover art); not in the sound, since Kenton, even at his worst, always at least made music, but in the complete absence of black or ethnic elements.

Performers from the American east, from Benny Goodman to Frank Sinatra or even Kenton's own Vido Musso, brought their Jewish or Italian backgrounds to this Afro-American music no less than the black players of Southern ancestry brought their own collective heritage. The kind of Kenton sound that Bill Russo brought to its highest point, "Kenton-Kenton" suggests not an Aryan arrogance but pride - posing that this is no less the stuff of music for both the head and the feet than the music created by the descendants of those who arrived on American shores after 1700.

The second Bill Russo piece to be recorded by Kenton, Halls of Brass, serves as a striking an example of pure "high Kenton" as any in the band's history. An amazingly together piece to come from a 22-year-old (neither Kenton nor Rugolo created anything comparable until their '30s), we can forgive its young composer his attempts to rocket in so many directions at once since his four years with Kenton would give him a remarkable opportunity to adjust his focus. But far more than Kenton's later direct assault on The Ring and Tannheuser et al, Halls of Brass constitutes a far more successful attempt to bring Wagner and Germanic-period Stravinsky into Kentonian terms. And that's mainly because it has such a strong under­current of teutonic masculinity - a symphony whose primary color is testosterone, it might well be called Balls of Brass.

… Russo's works for the band are thoroughly Kentonian right down to their 'bones (pun), as they continued the Kenton trombone tradition. Of the 40 or so pieces of Russo's (who stayed in the trombone section until 1953) recorded by the band, virtually all use the instrument extensively, in solos and sections. Solitare (Milt Bernhardt), Ennui (Harry Belts), Frank Speaking, I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues and I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good (all Frank Rosolino), Over the Rainbow (Bob Burgess), A Theme of Four Values and Thisbe (both Bob Fitzpatrick) and the unrecorded Kenton arrangement of Aesthete on Clark Street are all trombone features, whereas by contrast he only penned perhaps one or two specialty features apiece for any of the other horns.

On both features for trombones and other instruments, and other multi-solo pieces too, Russo digs juxtaposing the soloist with birds of a feather - the way in Portrait of a Count, hot trumpeter Conte Candoli is accompanied by a section of blaringly open horns, like Fred Astaire in top hat in TOP HAT surrounded by a chorus line of slender, light-footed dancing men in top hats. And on the solo features as well as other kinds of pieces, besides getting more than one tempo going, he often starts several melodies rolling at once, sometimes in a carefully-controlled cacophonic chaos, sometimes in a simple setting of one theme atop another - and, to return to the space opera ideal, he's especially into the "twinkling stars" sort of backdrop, prominent in Halls of Brass, I Got It Bad and especially Edgon Heath, which plays with notions of fore­ground and background.

The features for instrumental stars, as written by both Russo and Holman (especially in the "St-St-Starry" master­pieces Stella by Starlight and Stairway to the Stars) come out of the Kenton vocabulary as recently defined by Rugolo, Shorty Rogers and the leader. 'They were slow and kind of fast in the middle," said Holman, "going back to the things Shorty had done like Art Pepper and Maynard Ferguson, you can use a beautiful song, and let the guy get hot in the middle and finish up the same way." Their slow-fast-slow set-up grows out of Jimmy Dorsey's earlier and more light-hearted three-tempo pop pieces like Tangerine, and, more directly, Dizzy Gillespie's multi-tempo Lover Come Back to Me.

"Stan was right about one thing," Holman added. "On ballads, it was better to feature a solo horn rather than trying to make the whole band sound warm on a ballad melody. It's much better to let a soloist do it because he can put so much more into it than a section playing a written out thing. So, we extended that to some of the hot pieces too, just to give a focus for the chart, to build it around one guy." Whether Russo's solo-spotlight features modulate from dirge to flagwaver or just from slow to stately, in a way that must have really turned Kenton on, they tend to get serious just at the point when another arranger would get sentimental.

Many of the Russo-Kenton concerti affect their speed changes dramatically, sometimes using an a capella pause as the point of tempo modulation, which becomes even more appropriate in the Latinate pieces, as the Latin-jazz orchestra enjoys a healthy tradition of pausing (or in the annals of Perez Prado, pausing and then grunting, though the Kenton-Russo trombones grunt with far greater grating grunginess than even the most road weary of human voices). 23 Degrees North – 82 Degrees West, that cacophonies cackling of the coordinates of Cuba for lascivious lovers of Latin latitudes, represents Russo's masterpiece of poly-everything, being polyrhythmic and poly­phonic;, contrasting different time signatures, different sections, different melodies on top of each, both at once and after more of those band-stopping rests.

…

Writing in Time Magazine in July, 1953, Kenton com­mented … 'The orchestra as it stands today is the greatest we've had in the twelve years of its existence. With the addition of men like Lee Konitz, Bill Holman, Frank Rosolino and Stan Levey, the band seems to have more drive than ever before - plus the fact that it's 'swinging.' (…) Even Whitney Balliett, the most articulate of anti-Kentonites, conceded in 1953 that the orchestra, ‘reveal(s) a much clearer jazz feeling than ever before.’

The new band used many of Kenton's '40s arrangers at first, including Johnny Richards, Shorty Rogers, Bob Graettinger and the leader, but as it got deeper into its own touring schedule, Kenton, ever anxious to break new ground, relied more and more on Russo. By this time, the aforemen­tioned established arrangers mainly wrote for Kenton as for a certain, very specialized kind of art kick while workaday studio gigs paid their Bel Air mortgages, but Russo, who remained in the trombone section, grew closer to both the man and the band as his own talents blossomed, and became the first to develop a new, post-Innovations style for the Kenton Orchestra.

In fact, both Russo's "low" and "high" brow pieces brought Kenton closer to what he had striven for with Innovations than he was ever able to do with the really big band. Johnny Richards may have landed the plum chore of explaining to the fans that this new group was in the best Kenton tradition in his Prologue [This is an Orchestra], a latter day equivalent of Benny Goodman's Ooh,Boom wherein B.G. showed he still had a great band (including Lester Young) despite the recent departure of Gene Krupa. But Russo dominated this particular Kenton era, writing virtually all four of Kenton's first original LPs, which included two collections of standards and the first Kenton collection to spotlight a name other than his own – The Music of Bill Russo. Russo also wrote almost all of the album which titled this entire period of the band's development, New Concepts, with the following phrase in much smaller letters near the bottom of the front cover, ‘Of Artistry In Rhythm.’

In his highly-concentrated Kenton career, Russo delved so deep into the essence of Kentonia that he was bound to dig clear through to China. To explain, let's go three degrees backwards and two degrees to the left: Kenton maintained his uniqueness by never going 100% into the mode of any era; only Woody Herman trusted his audiences enough to com­pletely go native with every worthwhile new trend. Whether Kenton played bop or semi-classical pieces they always sounded like Kenton first and whatever other style they happened to be in second.

And that includes the "cool" movement, of which, quite literally, every major writer and player had been part of the Orchestra at some time (and, as Russo pointed out, "'colo­nized' Los Angeles because that was Stan's home base when they worked for him"). They had comparatively little effect on the Kenton sound, mainly because he filtered those cool and contrapuntal ideas through his intrinsic heaviness. Even Shorty 'Twinkletoes" Rogers - with Gerry Mulligan the major "cool" arranger - sounds comparatively heavy in his Kenton pieces. Only Russo, in pieces like Fascinatin’ Rhythm, gives the weighty Kenton aggregation the true bottomless bounce of "cool" at its best, without removing any of the elements that let you know in two shakes of a monkey's tail exactly whose band you're listening to. Said Russo, "a Kenton band is almost instinctively recognizable because of its distinctive sound, personality and flair for the unusual."

On some of his settings of standard ballads as well, Russo finds in the Kenton sound something no other arranger had ever been able to bring out: lightness and elegance - a discovery as potent as Bill Holman's demonstration that the Kenton sound, in and of itself, could swing. Gerry Mulligan, briefly a Kenton arranger but for a long time one of his most astute commentators, has often expressed his preference for Claude Thornhill's great band (especially in the years after the war and before the second ban, when Gil Evans wrote the bulk of its arrangements), explaining that Thornhill's impres­sionistic tone-poem-like tableaux contained more beauty than Kenton's muscle-heavy machinations.

However, Russo, in these 1953 homages to the greater glories of Tin Pan Alley, brings a Thornhillian gentleness (most directly on There’s a Small Hotel) to the Kenton pallette, again, without taking away anything from what the boss expected. This Sophisticated Lady, for instance, even betrays lipstick traces of authentic femininity - the trumpet is muted rather than blaring through your brains - even if said lady does insist on running her jungle-red fingernails across the chalkboard of your heart, whereas You and the Night and the Music deftly shows that Astaire might have made a better dancing partner for this band than Tex Ritter. April in Paris, in Kenton style, threatens to become "December in Dresden," but its comparative featheriness and muted trumpet part point to the slightly later hit Basic version. How High the Moon retreats to its pre-jazz ballad tempo, with the characteristic blasting very nearly shooting higher than said satellite.

Having finished the two ten-inch albums of his re-thinkings of standards, Russo's final four "mood" pieces for Kenton, A Theme of Four Values, Dusk, Edgon Heath and Thisbe, show that the composer had completed a remarkable evolution since his initial works for the Innovations band only four years earlier. These are the kind of pieces that must have thoroughly thrilled and frustrated Kenton at the same time. Just as Kenton felt that Pete Rugolo captured what he wanted in 1945 better than he could, in 1954 Bill Russo is using every element of the Kenton sound - the Chopinesque piano, the brass demolition crew, the wild fluctuations in volume and dynamics - in a way that Kenton never really trusted himself to.

Russo creates truly serious and very heavy compositions that are not at all pretentious (because it achieves everything it sets out to do). Contrastingly, Kenton, especially after the commercial success of peanut vendor and the creep, only trusted his own abilities in terms of jukebox-oriented singles. In sponsoring and then conducting the more "serious" works of Graettinger and Russo (and, to another extent, the full swing pieces of Holman) Kenton must have been getting his thrills vicariously.

The key was to explore elements in keeping with the Kenton character yet which previous arrangers had not yet fully exploited. Ultimately, Russo prefers to polythematically play two riffs against each other at once, while Bill Holman would rather take one irresistible riff and bounce it along until it gradually leads into solos and subsequent phrases; the various melodies generally come one at a time, not simultaneously.”

To be continued in … New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm – Part 1