Ronnie Scott's Redux

With the posting of the BBC video documenting the origins  of Ronnie Scott's famous London Jazz club, which you can locate below this feature, I thought it might be fun to dig into the JazzProfiles archives and revisit this earlier posting on Ronnie and his famous club.

The music is Big Top from a 1956 Victor Feldman big band recording on which Ronnie takes the tenor saxophone solo.

If you are a Jazz fan, Ronnie's was and is a special place.

“The feel becomes more important, the truth of it. You accept yourself for what you are. If it’s not Stan Getz or Mike Brecker or John Coltrane, at least it’s you. For better or worse.”

- Ronnie Scott

“There have been musician-run Jazz clubs before – Shelly’s Manne Hole, Ali’s Alley, Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge – but none with the quiet charisma of Ronnie Scott’s in London’s Soho.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD

“It is no small tribute to the talents of Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes that their Couriers of Jazz Quintet was the first to break the ice for modern Jazz with a two-tenor combo, by no means an easy unit to work with. There has been one other such successful two-tenor unit in recent years, that of tenors Al Cohn and Zoot Sims which excited Jazz fans during its brief existence.”

- Ralph J. Gleason

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

Over the years, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has had the good fortune of visiting London on a number of occasions.

These trips were mostly to do with business, but usually included a little pleasure thrown in on the side.

One cold and rainy night [apologies to Dickens] as we were finishing work, a colleague who was also a Jazz fan suggested that we drop-by tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott’s world-famous Jazz Club located at 47 Frith Street in the Soho section of the city.

The club opened on 30 October 1959 at 39 Gerrard Street, also in Soho, before moving to its present location in 1965.  Having celebrated its 50^th anniversary in 2009, it is still in operation today.

My colleague had a membership in the club which provided for a reduced cover charge, a discounted drinks ticket and other privileges including an annual subscription to the club’s newsletter.

He was also apparently so well-known to those granting admission that they allowed us access to the downstairs bar, a small basement room at Ronnie’s where musicians hung-out before, during and after sets.

After we had settled-in, we both noticed that Ronnie Scott was there smoking a cigarette and having a drink. I gathered that my associate knew Ronnie well enough to walk over to say "Hello" ["Hallo"?] and introduce me to him.

Upon meeting Ronnie, I blurted out something to the effect that I had been in his debt for a number of years.

By way of background, I had studied drums in Southern California with the late, Victor Feldman.

Also a native of London, Victor had come to the United States in 1956 at the urging of none other than Ronnie Scott.  Scott had been like an older brother to Victor, so when he basically told Victor that there was nothing left for him to achieve in English Jazz circles, Victor took his advice and accepted Woody Herman’s offer to come to the USA and join his big band

It was the beginning of a 30-year career for Victor [who died in 1987] which was marked by huge commercial success in the Hollywood studios as well as a number of artistic high points in the Jazz World including a stint with Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet, a recording session and short term gig with Miles Davis and a number of his own, excellent piano-bass-drums trios with bassists such as Scott LaFaro, Monty Budwig and John Patitucci and drummers like Stan Levey, Colin Bailey and Johnny Guerin.

All of which prompted me to say to Ronnie Scott: “If it hadn’t been for you, Victor Feldman may not have come to the states and I might have missed the chance to study with him and to get to know him as a friend.”

Ronnie shook my hand and then said: “Victor and Tubby Hayes were the best Jazz musicians that England ever produced.”

To which I said: “I’m glad I never had to choose between them.”

Ronnie Scott smiled and retorted: “Smart man.”

He then motioned with his head to bring over a nearby cocktail waitress and as she approached us he turned and said: “Keep your money in your pocket, you’re my guests tonight.”

Nice man who did a ton for Jazz.

If you wish to know more about Ronnie Scott, his career in music and the history of his club, there is no better pace to start than with a copy of John Fordham’s Jazz Man: The Amazing Story of Ronnie Scott and his Club, [London: Kyle Cathie Limited, Rev. Ed., 1995].

Mr. Fordham is a Jazz critic, writer and broadcaster who contributes regularly to The Guardian and he has a number of other books on the subject of Jazz to his credit.

© -John Fordham, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“'Blow!' yelled Tubby Hayes. His partner Ronnie Scott launched a solo on 'Some of My Best Friends Are Blues', a mid-tempo twelve-bar blues that constituted one of his rare contributions to the art of jazz composition. The tenor was harder and more gravelly now, but zigzagging gracefully over the chords. A packed house at London's Dominion Theatre on that night in 1958 had already warmly greeted the band's breakneck opening version of Cole Porter's 'What Is This Thing Called Love?', even though the band they had really paid to hear was still to come - the American Dave Brubeck Quartet, then at the beginning of its boom years.

Hayes and Scott cut distinctly contrasting figures in the footlights. Though both were immaculate in suits - something that the sartorially pre­occupied older man had always insisted on - clothes looked as if they fitted Scott to the last thread, while Hayes couldn't help resembling a schoolboy who had borrowed his father's Saturday night special.

As with most British modern jazz ensembles, nobody did anything par­ticularly demonstrative on stage. Scott would stand virtually motionless at the microphone, the horn held slightly to one side, his eyes often closed. He was restrained in the presentations on that night, slightly nervous but still registering his old familiar trademark.

'Thank you very much,' he said to the audience's applause for 'Some of My Best Friends Are Blues'. 'And now from a brand new LP which you may have seen in the shops, entitled Elvis Presley sings Thelonious Monk...'

The headlong delivery of the Cole Porter tune had been virtually a def­inition of their style, preceding the melody with wild, nervy riffing like the sound of frantic footsteps on a staircase, Porter's original notes suddenly materialising as if the perpetrator had burst through a door.

Most of what the Couriers did had that crazed momentum about it, it was sealed, hermetic, impervious, music not particularly suited to the expression of human frailties of the kind that were being poignantly articu­lated at the time by Ronnie Scott's old playing partner, the West Indian Joe Harriott, or by the Scottish player Bobby Wellins. But it had a gleeful, belli­cose appeal. On the Dominion gig, they closed an equally tumbling version of 'Guys and Dolls' with a call-and-response section that turned into a head­long unison coda, ending on a blipping high note as if someone had abruptly planted a full stop in the music. It brought the house down. The finale was a rendition of 'Cheek To Cheek' so fast that only dancing partners bound at the neck could possibly have sustained the lyric's original sentiments.

Though Brubeck himself, highly impressed with Scott and Hayes, was to say at the end of the tour 'they sound more like an American band than we do', there was an unintentional irony in his remark. Brubeck didn't really sound much like an American band at all, being preoccupied with European conservatoire music and a kind of ornate, theoretical jazz. But American modernist outfits like those of Art Blakey and Hank Mobley in reality sounded quite different to the Couriers.

The attack of the rhythm sections was the dividing line - Blakey's cym­bal beat was restless and probing, the momentum sporadically lifted by huge, breaker-like rolls and admonishing tappings and clatterings. With underpinnings so strong, the soloists could afford to play less, and avoid the hysterical, fill-every-chink manner frequently adopted by their admir­ers abroad. Insecurities about their quality by comparison with the Americans led British bebop bands to a kind of over-compensatory pyrotechnics, like teenagers driving cars too fast to prove their mettle. The palais-band tradition was audible in the Couriers' work too, in expert but slightly fussy arrangements that sounded very close to the repertoire of a miniature dance orchestra. But the Brubeck tour of Britain was a golden opportunity for the band, and the Dominion gig - recorded for EMI as The Jazz Couriers In Concert - was a high spot of it.

Though the band represented as much as he'd ever wanted from playing, Ronnie Scott revealed later that year, in a passing remark during an inter­view, that he had not forgotten that old 52nd Street dream. He was featured in Melody Maker in the autumn of 1958, where he was described as 'one of the post-war angry young men of jazz'. Scott reiterated his dislike of critics, a point he made whenever he got the chance. He was asked if he wanted to be a session player and replied that nothing would please him more, except that 'the only sessions I've done recently have been rock 'n' roll, where I have to play out of tune/ But the end of the interview showed the way his mind was turning. What were his hopes for the local jazz scene? Td like to see a new type of jazz club in London/ Scott replied. 'A well-appointed place which was licensed and catered for people of all ages and not merely for youngsters/

By the summer of 1959, the steam was going out of the Jazz Couriers. Tubby Hayes had never really stopped relishing the idea of a larger band, one that could handle the growing scope of his writing and arranging.

The last date was 30 August at the City Hall in Cork. And after the demise of the Couriers, which Ronnie Scott would have continued with indefinitely if the choice had been entirely his, there seemed little enough to get excited about in the jazz world. The only versions of the music that seemed likely to attract a substantial following were the Dave Brubeck group and the Modern Jazz Quartet. They were subtle, intelligent outfits, but they didn't display that infectious creative tension audible in Stitt's band, or Miles Davis's, or the Couriers themselves on a good night. After the first tidal wave of rock 'n' roll had subsided, you could demonstrate your taste by having a recording of one of Brubeck's explorations of fancy rhythms and hybrid classicism in your collection, or the hushed, cut-glass chamber-jazz of the MJQ. They were the closest fifties jazz came to pop­chart success.

Critics were divided about them. Benny Green had by this time virtu­ally stopped playing and was working regularly as a jazz critic for the Observer, a new career offered to him by that newspaper's most influential jazz fan, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Green was a fluent and witty writer, one of the few jazz musicians who was comfortably capable of turning the offhanded, oblique, observant and frequently macabre humour of the music business into prose. He hated the hyping of Brubeck and the MJQ and frequently laid into them in print. 'The British jazz fan is highly con­scious of his own insularity,' Green began an article on Brubeck during the pianist's 1959 visit to the Royal Festival Hall. 'He yearns to be in the swim, so our promoters cater most thoughtfully for this desire by sticking topical labels on their American touring shows/ Green went on to describe Brubeck's popularity 'as one of the peculiar aberrations of current taste'.

The Modern Jazz Quartet fared little better. Green concluded resignedly that: 'For the last five years four men have sought with painful eagerness to transform the racy art of jazz into something aspiring towards cultural respectability/ That much was undeniable. The MJQ took pains to dress like a classical chamber group, and performed with a measured and metic­ulous deliberation, for all the improvisational gifts of its four members in other settings.

While on holiday in Majorca that year, Scott had a reminder that maybe running a club could simply be fun (which was all he'd ever really asked for) and an opportunity to make a little money, present musicians he admired, and have somewhere amenable to play. He met a drummer and club proprietor called Ramon Farran, who was the son of a Catalan band­leader and had married Robert Graves's daughter Lucia. Through Farran, Scott came to meet the writer at Canellun, the house that Graves had built in the picturesque village of Deja in 1929. The poet broke the ice by simply enquiring: 'What's the pot situation like in London now?' He turned out to be fascinated by jazz, had even acted as patron to unconventional artists like Cecil Taylor. Scott was in turn fascinated by Graves and a little dis­comfited by his circle too. They had all read so much, and they were so funny, but with a sense of humour impenetrably dependent on knowledge and an education Scott hadn't had the benefit of, not the wisecracking, fatalistic, self-defensive shield against fate that came from a childhood on the streets of the East End.

Graves showed Scott around his booklined study. He seemed, Scott reflected later, to have written most of them himself. 'I've tried writing,’ Scott began tentatively, 'but I find it the hardest thing in the world.'

'Of course you will,’ Graves replied somewhat brusquely. 'Unless you're God.'

They got on well. Scott spent a good deal of time walking and swim­ming with Graves. He was astonished by the old man's boundless energy, springing up the steep slope from the sea to the house like a gazelle.

By 1961 Ronnie Scott was visiting the Majorcan capital Palma regularly, often performing with Farran's Wynton Kelly-like trio at the drummer's Indigo Club, and he was to continue his visits until the early 1970s. Graves would periodically visit London, too, in the days after Ronnie Scott had become a promoter as well as a performer of jazz. 'Robert's in the club/ Scott would call through to Benny Green. 'Do you want to come down?'

The breakthrough was an accident, of course. Jack Fordham, the Soho entrepreneur, had lost interest in the Gerrard Street premises that Scott and King had occasionally used for their own jazz presentations. Fordham's principal living came from the hamburger joint - one of the first - he ran in Berwick Street. Eventually he offered 39 Gerrard Street to Scott for a knock­down rent. It became Ronnie Scott's first club.

Pete King - who like Benny Green had by now realised that he needed to choose between a playing career and something more promising - was almost entirely involved with promotion, partly on his own account, and partly in association with Harold Davison, and worked out of his own Soho office. He caught Ronnie Scott's enthusiastic conviction that this was the moment they'd been waiting for. Then Scott went to his parents to ask for help and got a loan of £1000 from his stepfather to get the ball rolling. Sol Berger was by this time a successful partner in a textiles company, and he willingly bought a stake in his step-son's club.

Number 39 Gerrard Street had nothing but space and not very much of that. The two would-be club proprietors went to the East End in search of cheap furniture and bought a job lot of chairs which they arranged in aus­tere lines in front of the bandstand. Pete King's father-in-law, a Manchester carpenter, came down to help build a few rudimentary tables. Then there wouldn't be room for dancing, so it was going to have to be a venue for fans who really wanted to come and listen. There was no liquor licence and the best the establishment was likely to be able to provide was tea, for years sta­ple fuel for the Archer Street metabolism (the two men had established a lifelong 'tea bag connection' with a Chiswick wholesaler), coffee, and maybe a hamburger.

From the start, it was an unspoken agreement that the front man would be Ronnie Scott and that the club would bear his name, though King was crucial to the graft of administration even then, and would become the dif­ference between survival and collapse in later years. King's commitment was total, and Stella was obliged by the working hours to bring up their two children almost singlehanded. But to King, Scott was the unchallenged star. Someone had to embody the club in the eyes of the jazz public. Scott was the most highly regarded modern jazz musician in Britain, apart from Tubby Hayes, and his reputation was something money couldn't buy.

The London modern jazz world of the late 1950s was a limited market and for the new contenders in it, the lie of the land was not so difficult to gauge. In Wardour Street, a stone's throw away, was the Flamingo, already in existence for two years. The old Studio 51, which opened after the Club Eleven's demise, had started life with a modern jazz policy but by 1959 was presenting revivalist and traditional music. As for the amount of music you could reasonably expect to present and still come out ahead, Saturday night audiences were good and Sundays passable, but weekdays were graveyards.

Scott and King thought the entrance prices charged by the other jazz clubs were too low ever to be able to finance really unusual acts. They never considered Americans, and anyway the embargo was still firm. They would gradually improve their modest premises so that one day it would be the kind of place where people wouldn't mind paying a little more just to be in a real club. And they would build towards making jazz a part of London life. After scratching together the basics, they went about developing a marketing policy. What this amounted to was a weekly pooling of gags by the musicians that could be deployed as publicity in small ads in Melody Maker. Scott had never seen any reason why you shouldn't present any enterprise to the customers as if the whole thing were a joke, as long as you didn't treat it as one when it really counted, and that meant playing. He therefore placed an entry in the columns of Melody Maker of 31 October 1959 which declared the following:

RONNIE SCOTT'S CLUB

39 Gerrard Street, W1

OPENING TONIGHT!

Friday 7.30pm.

Tubby Hayes Quartet; the trio with

Eddie Thompson, Stan Roberts, Spike Heatley.

A young alto saxophonist, Peter King, and

an old tenor saxophonist, Ronnie Scott.

The first appearance in a jazz club since the

relief of Mafeking by Jack Parnell.

Membership 10/- until January 1961.

Admission 1/6 (to members) 2/6 (non-members)

The entry concluded boldly: 'The best jazz in the best club in town' - Ronnie Scott having learnt from the American example that you didn't lose any­thing by excess. If the punters didn't agree they could always vote with their feet. It was a gamble, but Ronnie Scott came from a long gamblers' line.

Scott and King had opened the proceedings with a shrewd mixture of attractions, a blend of the new and the familiar intended to cut across as many of the modern jazz persuasions as possible. Hayes was a sure-fire cert, of course, and would be appearing with the Couriers' old pianist Terry Shannon, and with Phil Seamen on drums and a brilliant new bassist, Jeff Clyne, who had played on the streets of Edgware with Ronnie Scott's step­sister Marlene and who had revered the local heroes, the Feldman brothers, on those same streets. As for the reference to the 'young alto saxophonist Peter King', this was not a gag at his partner's expense but introducing a sensational new arrival on the scene, a thin anxious-looking nineteen-year-old from Tolworth in Surrey, who had been playing for just a little over two years and already demonstrated his intense admiration for the work of Charlie Parker - King's speed of thought and richness of resources were close to rivaling Tubby Hayes even then. The newcomer's preoccupation with Parker extended, as Benny Green observed, to his small-talk, which consisted almost entirely of analyses of the structure of various Parker solos.

In the press, Peter King was modest about his achievements. He said he was 'limited both technically and musically. But I can feel something com­ing.' In fact, as the more discriminating of local observers immediately realised, King was virtually there. He was already one of the few British interpreters of Parker's methods to execute the complexities of bop with an air of ease and relaxation. This was not so much discernible in the young man's demeanour onstage (his eyes would be downcast as he played, his legs splayed and knees bending with the beat like a man who had spent a long time on horseback, and he perpetually looked nervous) but in the flu­ency with which streams of new melody tumbled from his horn, and the momentum of his rhythmic attack.

King had never served an apprenticeship in one idiom and then switched to another. He was a modernist through and through. His very existence was a testament to the value of the players of Scott's generation having made those pilgrimages to New York and spent those long hours in Carlo Krahmer's studio listening to imported 78s. They had built a spring­board for new players that would make possible a conclusive rejection of the inferiority complex that British players had about their jazz.

The first gig also featured Eddie Thompson, a pianist whose ideas absorbed swing music, bop, the majestic 'orchestral' jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Duke Ellington and a good deal of classical music too. In fea­turing Thompson, the club was opening with one of the finest keyboard artists in the land.

It was an evening of magic. Scott and King had already set themselves several dates that they had eventually missed and the club wasn't really ready for business even on that memorable occasion of 30 October 1959. There were shows every night of that weekend; in the daytime frantic efforts were made to improve the place. The club was packed with musi­cians and friends. Ray Nance, Duke Ellington's trumpeter who was returning to the States after the band's European tour, dropped in on the Friday night to wish Scott luck. It became obvious that the all-nighters were such a magnet for after-hours players looking for somewhere to blow that the club began to charge them 2/- for the privilege, a state of affairs that caused a certain amount of hurt surprise.

Many in the business, who thought they knew only too well not only the prospects for modern jazz in London, but the temporary nature of some of Ronnie Scott's enthusiasms as well, gave the place no more than a couple of weeks. But in the event it was just what the London jazz public needed. It was informal, it didn't charge nightclub prices, the music was consistently good and it was devoted to a no-messing policy of presentation of the best practitioners of jazz in Britain. Melody Maker ran a spread on the club the week after it opened, with photographs of Scott, Thompson, Tubby Hayes and others. The copy declared:

In addition to presenting the top names of British modern jazz, Ronnie intends to feature promising young musicians at the club and Friday's guest stars included the new alto sensation, Peter King.

In its pre-Christmas edition, its correspondent Bob Dawbarn also com­mented on the new arrival as 'a highly optimistic note for British jazz. There are still too few places for the modern musician to ply his trade, but the players themselves took matters into their own hands.'

Word of mouth was the publicity machine for the most part, apart from those little ads in Melody Maker. Scott devoted himself to making a minia­ture art-form out of them in the hope that people would seek them out, promising anything he could think of. He would claim that the club would be featuring an unexpected joint appearance by Sir Thomas Beecham, Somerset Maugham and Little Richard. He would promise food untouched by human hands because the chef was a gorilla.

The place caught on. Visiting musicians from abroad, increasingly prevalent in Britain as Harold Davison and others staged more and more concerts that would tie into existing European tours, were to be seen in Ronnie Scott's, which added to the glamour of being there. There were, after all, few enough places in any town where such a rare bird as a jazz musician could truly feel at home. The drummer Shelly Manne, in London with one of Norman Granz's 'Jazz At The Philharmonic' packages, even returned to the States to open a club of his own after having spent some time absorbing the atmosphere at Gerrard Street. That the place was run by musicians was already promising to be a considerable benefit. Even though Scott and King were not in a position to pay big money, they were in the same business as the professionals they were hiring, and they were honest. Players didn't suffer the crippling paranoia, fleecing and all-round disrespect that often characterised relationships between jazz musicians and promoters.

Two problems were soon apparent. The first was that there was a law of diminishing returns about presenting British jazz players - even the very best - night after night. Scott and King soon felt the draught of this diffi­culty. They ran the establishment on a simple principle, based on a consul­tation with the rudimentary accounts at the end of each week. If there was enough in the kitty to pay the artists and the rent for another week's work, it meant the place was still open.

The second snag was the absence of a bar. Scott and King looked into the formalities and the regulations were complicated. If you were going to serve alcohol, you needed a 'wine committee'. Ronnie Scott and Pete King formed two-thirds of the wine committee and asked Benny Green to be the third, being a literary man and a correspondent for a high-class newspaper. Green duly travelled to Wembley police station to make a statement as to why Ronnie Scott's Club wanted to make a public nuisance of itself in this way.

'What is the purpose of this club?' asked the station sergeant wearily.

'It's to try to get rhythm sections to play in time,' intoned Green, straight-faced.

The sergeant dutifully took it down word for word. The club's liquor licence was also dependent on providing some form of emergency exit in the case of fire. It was rudimentary enough, and fortunately never had to be tested, being simply a metal ladder that extended upstairs into the hallway of the Jewish garment manufacturer above. Relationships with that estab­lishment were mixed during Ronnie Scott's tenure in Gerrard Street.

 Early on it became apparent that Scott and King were going to be no orthodox club-owners. Scott's guiding philosophy, as it had been back in the days of the nine-piece, continued to be that if you could get a laugh out of it, it couldn't be all bad. The word soon got around. Here was a place where all of the misfits and square pegs of a square mile of London dedicated to the entertainment of the normals by the weirdos could relax in congenial company - like writer Colin Maclnnes, a deep devotee of jazz and friend of Denis Rose, like actor and playwright Harold Pinter. A man called Fred Twigg attached himself to the club, and became its odd-job man and cleaner. He took to sleeping on the premises, which worsened a chronic condition that Twigg lived with - apparitions. He often complained to the proprietors of flying creatures and gorillas that frequented the establish­ment at night. And in those early days, the club unexpectedly became an actors' studio as well.

Ronnie Scott had known the actress Georgia Brown from the East End, and she suggested to him that the Gerrard Street cellar would be perfect as a daytime rehearsal room for an actors' company. The company turned out to involve the likes of Maggie Smith, George Devine of the Royal Court Theatre, Michael Caine and Lindsay Anderson. (Ronnie Scott fell unrequitedly in love with an actress called Ann Lynne and visited the Royal Court night after night to watch her in performance with Albert Finney.) Scott and Benny Green found the rehearsals irresistible. They both took to standing behind the tea bar for hours, endlessly making lemon tea for the labouring thespians and eventually found their own communications with others helplessly enmeshed in fake stage-speak. 'What dost thou fancy in the 4.30?' Scott would enquire of Green.

One of the rehearsals involved George Devine donning an elaborate mask, and demanding that the actors guess the emotion expressed by his body-language only. Devine went up to the street to prepare, and promptly vanished. It transpired that the passing citizens of Soho had concluded from Devine's mask that exotic fetishistic pursuits were going on downstairs, and had mobbed him. Devine eventually tore himself away and fled inartistically down the steps. 'Fear!' promptly supplied the members of the actors' company on the appearance of the master, still sticking to instructions.

Throughout 1960, the difficulty of sustaining an audience for the local musicians continued to nag at Scott and King. The Musicians' Union ban had stopped being unconditional two years previously and international artists regularly came and went. But residencies, the maintaining of an imported star in a British venue night after night for a week, or a month, had not been considered. King, who still worked with the now highly suc­cessful impresario Harold Davison, knew that the latter would not be keen that his protégés step on his territory.

But King also knew that things could not go on as they were. He began at the British Musicians' Union, with the assistant secretary, Harry Francis, who was amenable to the idea of a new arrangement that would suit the requirements of a specialist nightclub. If the exchange of artists would be one for one, Francis was convinced that the request would go through on the British side. King turned his attention to the real nub of the problem. Since the 1930s, James C. Petrillo of the American Federation of Musicians had effectively battened down any form of trade in musical resources likely to cause loss of earnings to his own members. Petrillo (nicknamed 'Little Caesar' because of his stocky, pugnacious, Edward G. Robinson-like demeanour) was a man with a straight-shooting style of negotiation that made him a formidable opponent. The American Federation's policy had grown out of far leaner years than the 1950s and King, as a musician himself, was generally sympathetic to the union's orig­inal position. Its inflexibility from the mid-fifties onwards was principally fuelled by the attitude of the British Musicians' Union, which was con­vinced that American members would receive far more attractive invita­tions to Britain than the other way around. King reasoned that if jazz musicians were the Cinderella’s of the profession already, it was short­sighted now that times were not so hard to turn down a policy that might further the public's interest in the music generally.

Scott and King needed to pick their first guest, then worry about the bureaucracy afterwards. They chose Zoot Sims, a one-time partner of Stan Getz in the Woody Herman band and a player with much the same lyricism and raffish elegance as Getz but with a more robust and muscular delivery. Sims was popular at the Half Note Club in New York, an Italian family business by the Cantorino brothers, with a reputation similar to that of the Scott club in London for presenting good music to audiences that cared about it in an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and inventiveness. Sims accepted readily.

King then went to New York to try to sew it up. He told the music press that Tubby Hayes was taking a holiday in America at the same time, and it was only reasonable that he, as Hayes's manager, should make an attempt to arrange some work for his client. King met Sims for a beer to chew it over. They played Tubby Hayes's records to the Cantorino’s, and from dis­trusting a project they felt they didn't really need - an English jazz soloist on a month's residency in the heart of New York's jazzland - the Italians came around to the idea, and wanted to help Zoot, an old friend. The mat­ter went backwards and forwards inside the American Federation officials' headquarters for what to King seemed like an age. But the news finally came through that Petrillo had accepted the deal. King rang Scott in London and told him they were in business. Scott rang Harry Francis at the Musicians' Union and the swap was on. Finally they called Sims, who asked simply: 'When do I come?'

The exchange was arranged for November 1961. Ronnie Scott's Club was about to become an international jazz venue.

Zoot Sims was a delight.

After his first show, the proprietors of London's new international jazz club sat bemused in their locked up premises, counting the hours until they could hear him play again. For Scott, who had probably already subcon­sciously decided that a policy of booking practitioners on his own chosen instrument was going to be one of the principle ways he would enjoy being a promoter, Sims was a definition of the modern jazz musician who was still functioning wholeheartedly and pragmatically in the world everybody else had to live in.

He had a lot in common with Ronnie. He had been a teenage saxophone star in a showy jazz orchestra, the Woody Herman band. He was an unpre­tentious, unaffected, music-loving enthusiast. He knew jazz history. And he always played the music as if he enjoyed it. Sims was the kind of player who could have thrived in just about any sort of jazz band of the previous forty-odd years.

Sims delivered his easy-going swing and gentle rhapsodising through­out the month of November 1961 to thrilled audiences at the club. A casual, fresh-faced man, Sims would play without demonstrativeness, holding the instrument still. His opening bars would establish the tune with the direct­ness and confidence of a player completely at ease with his raw materials, and much of his appeal was founded on the manner in which his sound exhibited both confidence and a heady lightness, as if he were performing a graceful juggling act in slow motion. King arranged a short tour of out-of-town venues for Sims, and the proprietors presented him with a silver brandy flask after his last performance. Other local musicians donated such peculiarly British gifts as copies of Goon Show records.

Sims was also one of the first Americans to experience the off-beam goings-on that entered the folklore of the Ronnie Scott Club in its various in­carnations. Somebody threw a smoke-bomb into the room on 5 November which cleared the premises, but the Californian, a man after the Eastenders' hearts, barely raised an eyebrow. Fred Twigg, the club's vision-prone cleaner, was deeply suspicious of the quiet, unassuming visitor. 'Russian spy,' he warned Scott ominously. 'He's a Russian spy.'

In an interview, the usually unforthcoming Sims declared he was delighted with playing in London, since the intimacy of a club gave him the opportunity to relax. 'It reminds me of the Half Note,' Sims said. 'The atmosphere is warm and it's an easygoing place. Musicians like it. It has the same kind of management.' Sims added that he'd like to see Ronnie Scott play in the States. 'It depends on his confidence,' the American accurately observed.

For Scott's part, he was sad to see Sims go. 'My God,' he mused. 'What an anti-climax next week's going to be.'”

BOBBY MILITELLO INTERVIEW With Gordon Jack

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

Gordon Jack and the nice folks at Jazz Journal which published this interview in its August 2006 edition were kind enough to allow its reprinting on these pages.

As always, it is a great pleasure to have one of Gordon’s well done interviews on the blog.

I have added the images that populate and the video clip that concludes this piece. You can locate more information about Jazz Journal here.

© - Gordon Jack/JazzJournal, copyright protected; all rights reserved. Used with permission.

It is a well kept secret that Bobby Militello is one of the most exciting and inventive alto soloists in jazz today. His stimulating approach has been an important ingredient in the continuing success of the Dave Brubeck Quartet since 1982. We met in the summer of 2004 to discuss his career, which included four years as a (very) reluctant baritone player with Maynard Ferguson’s big band.

“I was born in Buffalo, New York on March 25th, 1950 and in some respects it was thanks to my mother that I became a musician. She was a big jazz fan and had bought the first record that we had in our house – Maynard Ferguson’s Message From Newport (CDP7 937272-2). She would often telephone from jazz clubs when I was growing up and hold the ‘phone off the hook so I could hear Getz, ‘Trane or Cannonball blowing in the background.  Buffalo was a haven for jazz in those days with clubs everywhere all featuring nationally known players. We went to see ‘The Benny Goodman Story’ when I was about ten years old which is when I decided that I just had to learn the clarinet. 

Eventually in my freshman year of high school I started studying the saxophone with John Sedola who had been with Paul Whiteman and had taught Don Menza among others. He was an excellent old-school teacher who expected you to practice at least six hours every day.  He taught classical techniques and was very insistent that nobody can teach you how to play jazz. It has to come from within so that you can develop a style and feel that is completely yours. Some people though just want to sound like Eric Marienthal for instance, which is fine for them.

  

“Over the years, Maynard had some great sax players like Lanny Morgan and Jimmy Ford that I liked to listen to and I also started memorising a lot of Paul Desmond and Stan Getz solos. For instance, I learnt most of Stan’s Jazz Samba album (Verve CD831368-2) by playing the record over and over until I could scat all the lines which I then played on my horn.” (One of the many Desmond solos he learnt came from the Dave Brubeck quartet’s 1954 recording of Audrey which was dedicated to Miss Hepburn (Columbia CK  65724).  At her death in 1993 there was a ceremony at the UN headquarters in New York to celebrate her international work with children. In Doug Ramsey’s immensely well researched biography of Paul Desmond (Take Five), he points out that her husband specifically requested the Brubeck quartet to play Audrey for the occasion – a number which she called ‘My Song’. Ramsey says, ‘Brubeck’s new alto saxophonist, Bobby Militello, played Desmond’s solo note for note, inflection for inflection. He had memorised it when he was a boy.’  For those who would like to play along to the original recording, this memorable solo has been transcribed and analyzed by Gary Foster in Ramsey’s book. Just as an aside, the actress apparently played it every night before retiring. Desmond was unaware of this, which is a pity because as Iola Brubeck told Ramsey, ‘Paul was so in love with Audrey’.)

“The first name band I played with was Maynard Ferguson’s on baritone. Maynard had heard me on alto in the early seventies with a Buffalo band by the name of New Wave.

We had two horns and a singer and we did a lot of material from the Cannonball Adderley album with Nancy Wilson (Capitol CDP0777) as well as Horace Silver  originals like Sophisticated Hippie. We also did a lot of hip, fusion things and I remember I was nuts about Bob Berg at the time. I had pretty good chops and like any youngster with tons of testosterone, I made all the changes and the audience would freak out because I could play so many notes - wisdom just didn’t come into it! You don’t realize at the time, that one note can say it better than all of them in certain circumstances. I learnt later that a substitute change can work over the three you might have used, which simplifies things.

“It was in 1975 that Mike Migliore who was playing lead alto with Maynard called to say that Bruce Johnstone was leaving, so they needed a replacement on baritone.  Now I wasn’t a baritone player and I didn’t really like the instrument too much but I needed a gig and I had always wanted to play with Maynard. Not having a baritone, I went to Manny’s music store in New York where they had two Selmers – one with the low A and one without but I didn’t like the model with the low A at all. The balance felt all wrong so I went for the other horn which cost me $850.00 and four years later after I left the band, I sold it for $3000.00.  I probably would have stayed with Maynard even longer but he didn’t want me to switch to tenor or alto. If I am really honest I would have to say that I was never in love with the baritone so I didn’t practice it too much but as my teacher said, ‘It’s just a saxophone, don’t worry…’

“Of course there are baritone soloists I liked like Gerry Mulligan who had a unique approach and Nick Brignola, who was the epitome of how to play bebop baritone. Bruce Johnstone is another one of my favourites. He has an amazing sound rather like a tenor from his middle G on up. Ronnie Cuber too is just phenomenal - I love that Cookbook album he did with George Benson.” (Columbia CK 52977. A Ronnie Cuber album that is long overdue for reissue on CD is Cubre Libre on the Xanadu label –135). 

“While I was with the Ferguson band I wanted to make some extra money, so I became the road manager. It meant a lot of heavy lifting from the bus to the stage and back again as well as looking after all the music, but I could supplement my basic $225.00 a week as a sideman, with an extra $150.00 as a member of the ‘crew’.

 “Maynard was living on the west coast but we usually met in Chicago or New York to begin a tour. Most of the charts were from the older band but then Jay Chattaway introduced some newer, fusion things which Maynard really liked. He was keen on the idea of switching styles although some people gave him a hard time about it. On Primal Scream (Col PC33953) the producer Bob James hardly used any of the regular band at all. He had a formula so he wanted to use his usual studio guys like Eric Gale, David Sanborn, Joe Farrell, Steve Gadd and Marvin Stamm. All those cats knew exactly what to do because Bob didn’t write everything out – some charts just ‘happened’. I was there because of my solo abilities on baritone and flute which created some problems with the rest of the Ferguson band who had to miss the date.  On Soar Like An Eagle for instance he told me to copy on the flute exactly what he played on the piano even though there was no flute part (CBS 81839). We did another album for him where Mark Colby played beautifully on Over The Rainbow. After he left the studio, Maynard asked me to blow a flute solo on the same tune. I went into the booth and did a ‘one-taker’ which was eventually used on the record instead of Mark’s solo and I had to live with that!  As a musician, you have no control over those things. For instance, some critic might write, ‘Maynard doesn’t play so great here, but Militello…!!’ The next day you get on the bus and there is complete silence because everyone has read the article and they’re pissed off at you. You had nothing to do with it but you have to live with the ramifications.

“In 1982, I had a call from Dave Brubeck asking me to come to New York for an audition. He had heard me years earlier with Maynard at the Sugar Bush Jazz Festival in Vermont playing a flute solo. It was quite a production because the band stopped while I did harmonies, singing and playing at the same time. Rather like Sam Most had done way back when, although most people think that approach started with Roland Kirk. Iola had written my name down in her little book and when Jerry Bergonzi was leaving they needed a replacement. The audition was held at Studio Instrument Rentals in New York which is a big complex where you can rehearse a show because they provide PA systems and instruments if you need them. I walked in with my alto, tenor and flute and felt completely intimidated. Joe Morello, Gene Wright, Chris Brubeck, Randy Jones and Dave were all there and the hardest thing for me was not asking for everybody’s autograph! But you can’t blow your cool – you have to act like you belong there.

“They had already sent me about ten charts, including Tritonis, Blue Rondo and Take Five which I had committed to memory. I had them ‘down’ with a good working knowledge of what to do with them so I was ready to go. When we finished those we started fooling around because I knew a lot a lot of standards. Everything Dave played I knew, in any key he wanted.  After about two hours, he hired me and I got the gig. 

“By this time I had decided to relocate to LA because I wanted to continue growing as a player and it didn’t matter to Dave whether he flew me from Buffalo or California.  Of course I was only with the group on a part-time basis as Bill Smith was still doing most of the work. I started doing a lot of weddings and parties in LA - what we call casuals because you can’t just jump straight into the jazz scene. Don Menza helped me get a gig with the Dee Barton big band on tenor which is where I met Pete Christlieb and a whole bunch of the cats.

What a player Pete is. He can play bebop with the best of them but he also creates such beautiful melodies on ballads. He had lessons from Bob Cooper and I am sure that is where he developed his melodic style and you can also hear some Eddie Davis and Ben Webster too in his sound. The public might not know him too well but he has a great reputation among musicians and he is very busy in the studios. It is very expensive to take him on the road because he makes a lot of money in LA just by staying home and not having to travel.” (Pete Christlieb is indeed a giant and an excellent example of his work is on Apogee with Warne Marsh on Warner Bros. 8122-73723-2).

 “Within three weeks of arriving in LA I was making about $1500.00 a week, and quite soon I was playing tenor on Bob Florence’s band and second alto to Lanny Morgan with Bill Holman. I got a lot of calls to do rehearsal bands which I love doing and playing with Bill’s band was like going to confession for a Catholic – every Thursday at 10 a.m. in room six at the Musician’s Union. Towards the end of my time with Bill, Joe Romano took over on lead as Lanny was touring with Natalie Cole. That was fine because Bill used to say that the lead alto sound he had in his mind when he wrote his charts was either Joe or Lanny. Joe had that Bird influence in his sound and his solos were great.  Playing with those bands got me started with all the jazzers in town like Bob Cooper who was a beautiful player. If he had a double booking or wanted to slow down a little he would always give guys my name. With all the competition out there some people feel intimidated about giving you a gig in case you do too well and they don't get the call next time. Bob was different – just a perfect gentleman with no ego or arrogance.  Of course I

was also getting a lot of calls on baritone because there aren’t too many around and everyone needs them. You can work like a son-of-a-bitch if you play bari, but I didn’t want a career on the instrument, so I took a brave decision and sold the sucker.

“When I first started playing with Bob Florence I would often question him about my part, asking if this note or that note was right. Of course everything was fine but if there was a dissonant half-step I had to learn to place it harmonically and volume-wise inside the chord so that the balance was correct. Bob is one of the few guys who transposes as he writes and the maths involved in keeping track of all those changes is extraordinary.

By this time my reading had really improved because I was doing it all the time although I am not a great sight-reader like Christlieb for instance. I subbed in Supersax a couple of times and Med Flory was very nice to me but I couldn’t keep up with some of those things. The inner voices are very difficult to play because of the way they are written but they work and you learn to skim the chart missing out some of the notes in between! It was intimidating but fun to be with cats like Nimitz and Med because they created something that was cool. If I wanted to do a Supersax thing now I would do it with Cannonball’s solos.

“While all this was happening, I was getting calls from Dave to go on tour with the quartet somewhere. Flying back I would change in the parking-lot of the airport and go and do a six hour casual, which started to get to me in the end.  After nine years in LA I was getting more and more jazz calls but it had been a slow process because there are so many great players there. Studio work had slowly died since the union strike a few years earlier so the studio guys were reduced to doing weddings just to keep working. There were a lot of cliques too, so eventually I decided that it was time to go home to Buffalo. I had invested in a restaurant there with my brother and sister and soon after I got back, I made the first of three albums with organist Bobby Jones (Heart & Soul on PMD 78006-2).  He is a wonderful player with fantastic co-ordination in his feet which means we can play the fastest tempo without a problem. He is one of those guys who should have a great reputation but he has always stayed close to home, so not too many people know about him. We’re probably going to go on the road as an organ trio soon - you can rent organs and we can pick up a drummer as we go. I also started working with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band along with people like Ernie Watts, Conte Candoli, Snooky Young and Ed Shaughnessy. Doc took the band on the road after the Tonight Show had finished and it was like listening to jazz history hanging out with Conte and Snooky on the bus. After about a year Dave’s schedule became so busy that I had to leave but I know I could go back tomorrow if I was free.

“As I mentioned earlier, Jerry Bergonzi had been with Dave before I joined and he is probably the most unpretentious and creative tenor player in the world and one of the few that Michael Brecker likes to listen to. Michael told me once that he is in awe of him. Jerry’s playing is a great example of theory being developed and Pat LaBarbera is another one like that.  All the thought process is in the practicing, so what you get in the performance is a combination of bebop and inside/outside playing that builds a tension that is extraordinary.

“On alto I have always liked Phil Woods and Paul Desmond of course was an early influence but Cannonball is probably my all-time favourite. I was completely taken with his sound, soul and aggression. I listen to Hubert Laws on flute big time and Sam Most too was a major influence. James Galway and Jean-Pierre Rampal were also important because I wanted to get that pure legitimate flute sound so that I didn’t sound like a ’doubler’. The challenge for me was to make the flute appear to be my principal instrument.  

“I have been with Dave Brubeck now for almost 22 years, longer than Desmond and probably longer than anyone except Bill Smith. Dave is like Maynard because if you can play, he places no limitations on you at all. If you decide that tonight you are going to take it ‘out’ – go ahead and do it. If tomorrow you want to play bebop on the same tune – do it. If you want to experiment once in a while and play that extra four choruses that you normally wouldn’t play – that’s fine with Dave too. He isn’t afraid of sharing the spotlight because he looks forward to you expressing yourself. In many of my other playing situations I am a leader myself, but as a sideman with Dave I still get the ultimate freedom of expression while he has all the responsibility. It’s nice to just land at the hotel and have someone else take care of everything. You don’t have to deal with all the issues the leader has like fronting the group, making announcements and worrying about who is late. In many ways being a sideman is one of the better things in life because your job each night is just to go to the gig and blow.

“I love playing with Dave and in case you’re wondering, I never get tired of playing Take Five!”

The following video tribute to Bobby features him on “Graduation Day” from his Heart and Soul CD [PMD 78006-2] with Bobby Jones on Hammond B-3 organ and Bob Leatherbarrow on drums.

Anthony Caro and Oliver Nelson: Structure in Art

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

Structure is a key concept in all art forms; it is inherent in the art itself. Structure is what holds things together. It gives the senses a focus whether it be hearing music, seeing a painting, touching a sculpture, smelling and tasting a fine cuisine.

Art is generally built, it is brought into existence, created through a process, a step-by-step unfolding of actions in a medium of expression.

Applying paint to a canvass, carving a block of stone or improvising Jazz, all take a certain ordering of skills and materials to achieve a successful result. As bassist, bandleader, composer-arranger Charlie Mingus so succinctly put it: “You have to improvise on something.”

One artist who has drawn heavily on the structural elements in architecture as the basis for syncretizing his art is the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who died on October 23rd of this year at the age of 89. As the obituary drawn from The Economist magazine explains, Sir Anthony went so far as to label his work “Sculpitecture.”

Composer-arranger Oliver Nelson always struck me as another artist for whom forms outside of Jazz had a large presence in his work, particularly in his fondness for developing extended compositions such as Sound Pieces for Jazz Orchestra, The Kennedy Dream [about which I will have more to say on November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy], and The Jazzhattan Suite.

Created with the architecture and urban planning of New York City in mind, Oliver’s Jazzhattan Suite [Verve V6-8731] is one of the “... best recorded examples of the full range of his compositional abilities in a Jazz context [Kenny Berger].”

The suite open’s with A Typical Day in New York, followed by The East Side/The West Side, 125th and Seventh Avenue, A Penthouse Dawn and One for Duke [no one reflected New York’s urbanity better than The Duke].

The suite ends with Complex City which, as Kenny Berger describes in his insert notes booklet to Oliver Nelson: The Argo, Verve and Impulse Big Band Studio Sessions [Mosaic MD6-233] “... begins quietly with French horns and vibraphone prominent. This section is followed by a clarinet and xylophone-dominated section that sounds like Gershwin's AN AMERICAN IN PARIS on LSD. When things settle into a 6/4 groove we are back in blues territory with the theme stated by Woods' alto. This is followed by an exposition of several short melodic cells in a series of shifting meters in which Nelson makes imaginative use of the clarinet choir. The blues theme is then stated in a hard swinging 4/4, leading to solos by Patti  Bown, Zoot Sims and Joe Newman, with vigorous hand-in-glove backing from Ed Shaughnessy's drums and Bob Rosengarden's bongos. The piece ends with a return to the original 6/4 blues section and builds to a powerful finale.”

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to combine the work of  Anthony Caro and Oliver Nelson into the video located at the conclusion of this feature using images of the former’s "Sculpitecture” with the latter’s orchestration of Complex City.

Here is more on Sir Anthony Caro’s life and work from The Obituary that appears in the November 9th-15th edition of The Economist.

© -The Economist, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“THE pieces of steel, rescued from the London docks, made a trapezoid, a circle and a square. In 1960 Anthony Caro put them up on chairs in his garage in Hampstead, in north London, and found, to his increasing happiness, that when they were tacked together he had a piece of sculpture. It did not look like anything; it was not about anything. It was just itself. It was good as itself. He painted it dark brown, put it out in the courtyard and called it "Twenty-Four Hours".

He had taken years to reach this point: to produce a sculpture that had nothing to do with human figures, or with clay or stone. It seemed a smallish breakthrough, as breakthroughs go. But it proved huge. "Twenty-Four Hours" was the first of a series of extraordinary pieces in which brightly painted beams and rods of steel, heavy as they were, seemed to float in space. When they were shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1963, they caused a sensation. Suddenly, sculpture was set free to go in any direction at all.

It was also democratised, for rather than using plinths Mr Caro set the pieces on the floor, at the viewer's level, to make them "have more meaning". Someone looking at "Early One Morning" (above) could see it as an open window, a sailing boat, a landscape, or nothing at all. There

was no narrative, no "arm-twisting". All Mr Caro would cheerfully say was that, after letting it flow out of the garage, he had taken advice from his painter-wife Sheila Girling and painted it bright red; and "early one morning" he had finished it.

Sculpture in his hands was fun, surprising and iconoclastic. There were no rules, he told his students at St Martin's. Sculpture could be feathers. It could be balloons, a builder's skip, a tank. It could be music, and he hoped his was, the pieces "dances" or "songs" that would run, touch and join. Above all, it should be direct, affecting people just for what it was.

Steel ("you just stick it or cut it off and bang! you're there") was his favourite medium. But anything went: car doors, girders, industrial springs, bollards and bedsteads, all piled up in a great rusting heap outside his studio in Camden Town. Teaching in America in 1964, he found z shapes of steel; a beautiful tension came from floating slim rods across them. In Italy in 1972 he discovered rolled-end steel, with softly waving edges to put beside sharp, straight ones. One of his loveliest pieces, the petal-light "Orangerie" of 1969, was inspired by ploughshares found in Devon.

Though trained as an engineer, he said he was lousy at it. His way of working was accretion, collage, "put and take". Hewould think about some bit of metal for a while, let it work on him, and then he would start to add and subtract. He could fearlessly go giant-sized, offering to make a piece three city blocks long for Park Avenue in New York; or small, in his hundreds of "table pieces", in which delicate assemblages of metal hung in perilous equipoise over a right-angled edge. The only predictable thing about him was that as soon as his work became the fashion, he would push on: so when city parks in the 19708 burst out in brightly painted metal, he puckishly turned his attention to brute chunks of raw steel covered in rust.

Clay on the floor

He left sculpture utterly different from how he had found it; and this surprised him as much as anyone. He had thought he would always be a figurative sculptor. It did not take him long, however, to realise how the scene in the 19508 was still tyrannised by generals on horseback, Canova's "Three Graces" in insipid white marble, Michelangelo's showy "David", and the rest. The hallways at the Royal Academy Schools where he learned his art (his stockbroker father's objections still ringing in his ears) were crammed with classical casts.

In 1951 he went as an assistant to Henry Moore, the greatest sculptor of the age; he found him an inspiration, but the human form now pursued him in organic and curvaceous style and huge as the hills. In an effort to get away from it he tried throwing clay on the floor and beating it with sticks, desperately looking for a new start. He put plaster on old wings of cars, but these were still "pseudo-people". On the Devon coast he collected large stones; they became the breasts of "Woman Waking Up".

His encounter in 1959 with avant garde American artists made the bold break, at last. They persuaded him that sculpture could be like painting: Cubist and Abstract as well as figurative, but in three rather than two dimensions. Advised to "change his habits", he threw out clay and plaster for steel and aluminium. Much later, in the 19908, he decided that sculpture could be like architecture too ("sculpitecture" was his word). No need to stand outside it: if he put in steps, towers and lookout platforms, that was yet another way of making sculpture say something immediate and fresh.

He had found his new language and, in his last years, considered the battle won. Sculpture could be what it liked. So when, after trips to the friezes of ancient Greece, his sculptures began to look a bit like figures again, he was unbothered. An installation of 2002, "The Barbarians", even featured terracotta warriors riding on gymnasium horses. His critics cried betrayal, but he said no. His shapes had, as always, decided their own identity; and human forms were what they wanted to be.”

Chico Hamilton - A Different Journey

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

“Hamilton … [is]one of the most underrated and possibly influential jazz percussionists of recent times. Rather than keeping up with any of the Joneses, he sustains a highly original idiom which is retrospectively reminiscent of Paul Motian's but is altogether more abstract. “

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

Chico Hamilton has always done things in Jazz in a different manner.

It starts with the way he plays drums.

His approach to the instrument is so loose that it almost sounds sloppy. He prefers brushes and mallets to sticks. For most drummers it is usually the other way around.

His cymbal beat is barely discernible; he only just steps on the hi-hat to emphasize the 2nd and 4th beats; his bass drum sounds like a hollow 55 gallon vat when he strikes it with the bass drum pedal.

And then there are the different configurations of his Jazz groups beginning with his famous quintet that was comprised of a woodwind player who doubled on flute, clarinet and alto/tenor sax, a guitarist, a cellist [!], bassist and Chico.

A few years later he got a bit more conventional, but only just, with a quintet comprised of a tenor saxophonist who doubled on flute, trombone, guitar, bass and drums.

As Richard Cook and Brian Morton note in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“A less celebrated drum-led academy than Art Blakey's, and yet Chico Hamilton has always surrounded himself with gifted young musicians and has helped bring forward players as inventive as Eric Dolphy, Larry Coryell, Charles Lloyd and, much later, Eric Person as well.

Hamilton has always taken an inventive and even idiosyncratic approach to the constitution of his groups, and often the only identifying mark is his own rolling lyricism and unceasing swing.

Anyone who has seen the classic festival movie, Jazz On A Summer's Day, will remember the almost hypnotic concentration of his mallet solo.”

After a long stint with Pacific Jazz Records, Chico joined Reprise Records in 1961.

His first album for that label was unsurprisingly entitled - A Different Journey [R-6078]. The quintet at the time consisted of Charles Lloyd on tenor sax and flute, George Bohanon on trombone, Gabor Szabo on guitar, Albert Stinson on bass and Chico on drums.

Charles Lloyd and Gabor Szabo would go on to lead their own groups; George Bohanon became a member of the Jazz Crusaders and then led a very successful career as a studio musician; Chico is still going strong today in both conventional and unconventional Jazz settings.

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