The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra: A Big Band Is Born [From the Archives]

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

Who would have thought that a big band born twenty years [20] after their heyday would still be going strong almost forty-five [45] years later?

Such is the case with The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra which came into existence in February, 1966 at The Village Vanguard in New York City and still holds forth every Monday night in the same location as The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

Obviously, its personnel has gone through changes over the years but the high quality of the band’s music hasn’t.

Of course, this is my interpretation of the band’s historical, shall we say, line of continuity.  Following this introduction, Bill Kirchner offers a much more accurate demarcation between the original Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra and the ones that came after it.

At its inception, the signature aspect of the band’s sound was the writing of Thad Jones, although Bob Brookmeyer, Tom McIntosh and Garnet Brown [all trombonists!] contributed charts to the band’s initial play book.

The band’s founders, trumpeter, composer and arranger, Thad Jones, and drummer, Mel Lewis, traveled widely divergent paths in coming together to form the band.

For years, Mel had been a first-call drummer with The Stan Kenton Orchestra, the Bill Holman Big Band, what has come to be known as the Terry Gibbs Dream Band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band.

Few big band drummers in the history of Jazz have ever been more successful than Mel who would cap his career with almost a decade-and-a-half of performing with the big band he co-led with Thad.

On the other hand, during this same timeframe, Thad Jones had enjoyed an almost exclusive association with Count Basie’s big band [1954-1963] as a trumpet player and composer-arranger, although many of the charts that gave birth to the distinctive sound of the orchestra that he co-led with Mel were largely rejected during his tenure with Basie for the reasons noted below by Bill.

“Gave birth” may be a suitable metaphor for many aspects of the music of The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra as one of Thad’s earliest and, by now, most famous compositions is entitled A Child Is Born.

Music has a way of sometimes capturing – The Ineffable – that which is beyond words and so it is with A Child Is Born. The miracle of human birth is beautifully captured in the melodic refrains of the song in a way that supersedes and transcends verbal expression.

Thad and Mel once said that the music of A Child Is Born should be played when every child is born.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is in full agreement with this sentiment, so much so that we’ve used the band earliest, recorded version of A Child Is Born as the audio track in the following video tribute to the band.

In 1994, Michael Cuscuna and his team at Mosaic Records gathered together the band’s first, half-dozen LP's and issued them as The Complete Solid State Recordings of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra [Mosaic MD-5-151].

Michael asked Bill Kirchner, the eminent Jazz musician, author and editor, to write the insert notes to the collection.

Michael and Bill were kind enough to grant us permission to reprint a portion of Bill’s insightful writings about The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra’s origins and subsequent history.

© -Bill Kirchner/Mosaic Records; used with the permission of the author; copyright protected, all rights reserved.

"On February 12, 1966, The New York Times ran a review by John S. Wilson entitled "2 New Big Bands Here Appeal To More Than Old Memories." Wilson first men­tioned the reorganized Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and its new director Urbie Green, as well as such sidemen as Howard McGhee, Budd Johnson, Dave McKenna, Mousey Alexander, and Arnie Lawrence. "Most of these sidemen are successful freelance New York musicians," wrote Wilson. "And that makes the band's future questionable. When the band ends its run at the River Boat, will these men be willing to go on the road, or will Mr. Green have to fill in with less experienced musicians?"

The review continued:

“One band that is not likely to leave New York is The Jazz Band, an 18-piece group jointly led by Thad Jones, a former Count Basie trumpeter, and Mel Lewis, a drummer who has served with Woody Herman, Stan and Ben Goodman. Organized last Thanksgiving as a rehearsal band that met once a week, The Jazz Band gave its first public performance Monday night at the Village Vanguard in an enthusiastic atmosphere reminiscent of the great jazz days on 52nd Street. This all-star band — it includes Bob Brookmeyer, Hank Jones, Richard Davis, Snooky Young, and Jerome Richardson, among others — ripped through Thad Jones's provocative, down-to-earth arrange­ments with the surging joy that one remembers in the early Basie band or Woody Herman's First Herd. Those were young bands whose skills sometimes could not keep up with their desires. But these are old pros, having a wonderful time and rising to each other's challenges, even to such adventures as three-part improvisation. Because these musicians have regular jobs, they can only get together once a week. That will be on Mondays at the Vanguard for the next few weeks at least.”

What was obvious to everyone present at the Vanguard on the night of February 7, 1966 was that an exceptional ensemble had been born. What no one could have predicted was that the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra would become one of the most acclaimed and innovative big bands in jazz history, that it would tour extensively throughout three continents, and that its offspring, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, would still be in residence on Monday nights twenty-eight years later.

Two events gave impetus to the formation of the Jones/Lewis band. One was the breakup of the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band (of which Jones, Lewis and Bob Brookmeyer were members) in 1964. The second was Count Basie's commissioning of Jones to write an album's worth of arrangements for the Basie band in 1965.

In his nine years as a Basie sideman (1954-63), Jones had contributed significantly to the Basie library (as is evi­denced in Mosaic's boxed sets of Basie's live and studio Roulette recordings), but this new commission resulted in his most ambitious writing for Basie. As far as we know, Jones wrote seven originals: The Second Race, The Little Pixie, A-That's Freedom, Low Down, Backbone, All My Yesterdays, and Big Dipper. Basie tried all of them and ultimately rejected all of them; apparently they were too difficult for the band, as well as too atypical of the band's style.

He did, however, allow Jones to keep the scores and copied parts. At that point (the fall of 1965), Jones and Lewis decided to make their move and called a rehearsal.

Most of the musicians they contacted were, like them­selves, active in the New York television and recording scenes. It was a period when all three television networks, plus the syndicated shows, had large orchestras with musi­cians on staff. Many of these players, and many others as well, also did record dates and jingles; it was quite com­mon for a busy recording musician to do two, three, or four dates a day, every day.

(Much of this work has disappeared, in New York and elsewhere. Most of the network staff jobs have been abol­ished, and record and jingle dates have considerably diminished in number, to a point where most recording musicians now consider studio work a secondary activity in their careers. As one musician, formerly very active in the studios, half-facetiously put it, "If you want to be success­ful in the studios nowadays, start a synthesizer cartage firm.")

A number of musicians on the early Jones/Lewis band were, as was Jones, on staff at CBS: Jimmy Nottingham, Jack Rains, Cliff Heather, and Hank Jones. Snooky Young and Jimmy Maxwell were at NBC, and Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Berry and Danny Stiles did the syndicated Merv Griffin show. Others, such as Jerome Richardson, Jerry Dodgion, Pepper Adams, Richard Davis, and Lewis were active in recording. And there were some talented up-and-comers: Eddie Daniels, Jimmy Owens, Garnett Brown and Joe Farrell. (Brown and Farrell had worked alongside Jones with George Russell the previous year.)

The rehearsals began in December, 1965 and although memories differ as to how frequently they occurred, the consensus is that they were held more-or-less weekly, usu­ally on Mondays, beginning at midnight and lasting until three or four in the morning. (Considering the busy sched­ules of these players, the late hours come as no surprise.) For the most part, the rehearsals took place at A & R Studios, 112 West 48th Street near Sixth Avenue (and next door to the famous musicians' bar Jim and Andy's). Occasionally, the location shifted to the second A & R stu­dio at 799 Seventh Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, or to Soundmixers at 1619 Broadway at 49th.

In exchange for free studio time, Thad and Mel allowed engineer Phil Ramone to use the rehearsals as practice sessions for his student engineers. One such engineer was Don Hahn, who in later years was to record several Jones/Lewis albums, including two in this collection. The rehearsals were recorded on 7 1/2 inch mono tapes; unfor­tunately, the tapes were placed in storage and were probably destroyed.

Though the rehearsals were private, there were a num­ber of invited guests. One was Manny Albam, one of the busiest composer-arrangers in New York during the fifties and sixties. Albam also served as "musical director" for the Solid State label and worked in the engineer's booth during most of the sessions heard here. Another guest was Dan Morgenstern, then New York editor of Down Beat. He recalls that even at the very beginning of its existence, this band was different, not only because of Thad's writing, but also for his use of the rhythm section. For contrast, Jones would at various times cue rhythm players in and out behind soloists. Occasionally, the entire rhythm section was pulled out, and a saxophone or trombone player would be left entirely on his own.

These practices became a source of pride to the band members. As Jerry Dodgion remarked with a chuckle, "It was supposed to be different."

Another invited guest was WABC-FM disc jockey Alan Grant, who, among other activities, was broadcasting live from the Half Note (at Spring and Hudson in the West Village) on Friday nights. One of those broadcasts had fea­tured the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet with Mel Lewis. After attending a rehearsal of the orchestra, Grant went to Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard, and urged Gordon to book the band for some Monday nights.

New York's jazz clubs at that time were in economic doldrums. Birdland had recently closed for good, and some clubs were reverting to a weekends-only policy. The Vanguard was running Monday night jam sessions that sometimes were hosted by Roland Kirk (pre-Rahsaan). Probably the highlight of those sessions was the night when a 20-year-old Keith Jarrett sat in and dazzled everyone in the audience — including Art Blakey, who hired him.

Grant persuaded Gordon to book the Jones/Lewis band for two Mondays in February. To make the band financially affordable for the club, the musicians agreed to work for very little money. Each sideman's salary was $17; admis­sion at the door was $2.50. As much as can be pieced together, the probable personnel of the band that night was: Thad Jones, conductor, cornet or flugelhorn (he alternated between the two instruments during his years with the band); Snooky Young, Bill Berry, Jimmy Nottingham, Jimmy Owens, trumpets; Bob Brookmeyer, Garnett Brown, Jack Rains, Cliff Heather, trombones; Jerome Richardson, Jerry Dodgion, Joe Farrell, Eddie Daniels, Marvin Holladay, reeds; Hank Jones, piano; Sam Herman, guitar; Richard Davis, bass; Mel Lewis, drums.

The club was packed, the acclaim was instantaneous, and The Jazz Band (as it was then billed) was off and run­ning. Max Gordon extended the band's run indefinitely, and the sidemen's salaries were increased to $18. In March, the band played a concert at Hunter College in New York City, and in May, it began its recording career.

What was its impact? Of the big bands that emerged in the early-to-mid-sixties (the others being those of Quincy Jones, Terry Gibbs, Maynard Ferguson, Gerry Mulligan, Gerald Wilson, Buddy Rich, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland, and Don Ellis), the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band was, in this writer's view, the most influential. The Quincy Jones and Mulligan ensembles, though in more conservative ways prophetic of the Jones-Lewis approach, were relatively short-lived. Wilson's and Gibbs's groups were rarely heard outside of California except on records, and the same was true of Clarke-Boland in Europe. Rich, Ferguson and Ellis pose a different consideration: though they all led consis­tently well-drilled bands that were capable of fine performances, their groups were built around their leaders' flamboyant personalities more than on enduring music.

Thad Jones and Mel Lewis were, first of all, two of the most esteemed "musician's musicians" of their time. Neither was a "star," but both were unique instrumentalists whose skills were valued by leaders ranging from Basie, Kenton and Goodman to Gillespie, Monk and Mingus. They therefore had no trouble in assembling a band full of New York's finest jazz-oriented players, all of whom were first-rate ensemble performers and most, in addition, good to exceptional soloists.

As a composer-arranger, Jones perhaps more than any­one else in the sixties revitalized conventional big band writing; this is with due respect given to such contempo­raries as Oliver Nelson and Gerald Wilson. ("Conventional," by the way, refers to the standard trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and rhythm section instrumentation, thereby removing the work of Gil Evans from this discussion. Evans's methods and instrumentations were considerably less orthodox — for one thing, he eliminated the saxo­phone section from his writing.) Jones certainly drew from his long experience with Basie, but he had an affinity for the dense cluster harmonies of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn as well. Combining these influences with the rhythmic and harmonic innovations of bebop, a profound melodic gift, and a subtle sense of humor, Jones rose in a few years from relative obscurity to a position as a preeminent jazz writer.

Above all, what made this band unique among big bands was its rhythm section. Richard Davis and Mel Lewis were highly in demand in New York recording cir­cles for all kinds of projects. Arranger-conductor Peter Matz, for example, used them on several Barbra Streisand albums and on numerous pre-recorded segments for televi­sion shows such as THE KRAFT MUSIC HALL and HULLABALOO. ("We were a team," Davis recalled emphatically.) Obviously, the empathy between these two was enormous, and com­bined with such pianistic wizards as Hank Jones and his successor Roland Hanna (and occasional "subs" such as Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Albert Dailey), the section coupled the precision of the best big band rhythm foundations with the inventiveness and flexibility of the best small groups. What Davis in particular did could be highly unorthodox ("Richard Davis would have been fired from any other big band for playing like that," a prominent jazz bassist once remarked admiringly). Yet everything he played worked, and even Jones's more conventional pieces took on a unique flavor.

In the beginning, of course, the rhythm section included a Freddie Green-style guitarist, Sam Herman, who was also the band's music copyist. As the band developed and the rhythm section became more daring, Herman played less guitar and more shaker (which, by the way, ain't easy). Eventually, the guitar was phased out, though Barry Galbraith, Sam Brown and David Spinozza were later brought in for studio sessions.

The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra lasted thirteen years, becoming for many listeners the most admired big band of its time. It never became a full-time entity in the sense of the Ellington, Basie, Herman and Kenton ensem­bles, but the band nonetheless did a substantial amount of touring, including numerous trips to Europe and Japan and a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union in 1972. By that year, most of the early members had departed, though Roland Hanna, Pepper Adams and Jerry Dodgion remained until 1974, '77 and '78, respectively. The replacements included veterans of the caliber of Quentin "Butter" Jackson, Frank Foster and Walter Morris, as well as such outstanding young players as Jon Faddis, George Mraz, Gregory Herbert, Harold Danko, and Dick Oatts.

By the time the orchestra parted ways with Solid State (which was then being phased into the Blue Note fold) in 1970, they'd done the three studio albums and two live Village Vanguard sessions included in this set. They also backed up Joe Williams and Ruth Brown for the label and participated in a European all-star tour that yielded a double album for Blue Note called ja/z wave ltd.

The band recorded sporadically in the seventies for Philadelphia International (POTPOURRI), Nippon Columbia (Live in Tokyo and for A & M (SUITE FOR POPS, NEW LIFE and LIVE IN MUNICH). On a for-hire basis, they also recorded Thad Jones-arranged albums by Jimmy Smith (Portuguese Soul), organist Rhoda Scott and vocalist Monica Zutterland.

Thad and Mel also led the Finnish UMO Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Jazz Group on several recordings. They also worked frequently as a quartet, making one album for Artists House, later reissued on A & M.

In January 1979, Thad Jones, by all accounts without warning or explanation, left the band and moved to Copenhagen to lead the Danish Radio Orchestra. Mel Lewis, more than a little embittered, assumed sole leadership and proceeded to build a new library with contributions from alumni Bob Brookmeyer, Jerry Dodgion and Bob Mintzer, members such as Jim McNeely, Kenny Werner, Ed Neumeister, Earl Mclntyre, and Ted Nash, and other contributors (Bill Holman, Bill Finegan, Mike Abene, Rich DeRosa, Mike Crotty). Mel continued to play Thad's music; he even acquired the new charts that Thad was sending back to the U.S. to be published.

After a few years, Jones and Lewis achieved a grudging kind of reconciliation. One incidence of this occurred in 1985, when Jones returned to the States for a short time to lead the Count Basic Orchestra. In New York on a Monday night, Thad paid a visit to the Vanguard to see his former band. He went up to Mel and gave him a big bear hug; Mel's arms remained at his sides.

Thad Jones returned to Copenhagen, where he died of cancer on August 19, 1986 at age 63. On September 2, a memorial service was held at St. Peter's Church in New York City. Mel was asked to speak and gave a moving impromptu talk about his former partner. He couldn't resist quipping: "Thad left without saying goodbye — that's twice.”

Mel Lewis died in New York on February 2, 1990 at age 60 after a long battle with melanoma. Fittingly, his last gig was with his orchestra only three weeks before he died.

The band, now a cooperative called the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, continues the Monday night tradition estab­lished a generation ago. It's a tradition unlike any in the entire history of jazz. But then, it was supposed to be different.”

The band traveled to Rotterdam in September, 1969 and was filmed on Dutch NPS television performing Jerome Richardson’s arrangement of his composition – Groove Merchant.

Hod O'Brien - The Gordon Jack Interview

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

Gordon Jack “stopped by” the editorial offices of JazzProfiles and granted us permission to use his interview with pianist Hod O’Brien which first appeared in the JazzJournal magazine in June, 2001.

The interview with Hod also can be found in Gordon’s singular book, Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective [Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004.

The footnotes references are located at the conclusion of the feature as is a video that will offer you a taste of Hod’s Jazz piano style.

© -  Gordon Jack/JazzJournal; used with the author’s permission; copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Hod O'Brien's musical C.V. is an eclectic mix of the old and the new. He has played with Russell Procope, Sonny Greer, and Aaron Bell as well as Warne Marsh, Roswell Rudd, and Archie Shepp, but despite making his debut on the New York jazz scene in the late fifties with Oscar Pettiford at the Five Spot, this talented pianist has maintained a low profile with the record-buying public. His latest release on Fresh Sound Records should help correct this. He was interviewed in June 2000, when he replied on cassette tape to my questions.

“My full name is Walter Howard O'Brien, and I was born in Chicago on January 19, 1936, and adopted six weeks later. My biological family on my mother's side was musical, and by the time I was ten years old, I was listening to records my step parents had by people like Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. I just flipped over boogie-woogie and learned to play it by ear. I also liked Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Later, Nat Cole got me going in another direction, but by the time I was fourteen, I was hooked on bebop through listening to "Jazz at the Philharmonic" records. By then, Billy Taylor and Hank Jones were influences, but Bud Powell was a little harder for me to fathom at first, because the music was so fast, with discordant harmonies that I didn't pick up on right away. It was powerful music, and more complicated than Nat Cole for instance, but Bud was the source for all the pianists who subsequently became my influences—like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and Claude Williamson. It was Claude who really got me into the "Bud" mode, because he was the distillation of that style, and I could understand Bud better by listening to Claude's early records.

I was seventeen when I attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville and met Roswell Rudd for the first time. In those early years he was playing Dixieland trombone, and we used to jam with his father, who was a good drummer, and Jim Atlas, who later played bass with the Jimmy Giuffre Three. Roswell and I parted company in the late fifties and didn't meet again until the mid sixties in New York, by which time he was playing totally out, with people like John Tchicai and Archie Shepp. In 1954 I spent a semester at Oberlin College, but I was very neglectful and didn't finish niy studies by a long shot. Dave Brubeck had recorded there the year before, and I used to listen to that album because I liked Brubeck's quartet. Some of us would go into town and listen to Max Roach with Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Billy Taylor, etc. Oh boy, the old days were great!

In the summer of 1955 I did my first professional gig, subbing for Randy Weston, with Willie Jones on drums. Willie invited me to New York, where he was playing with Charles Mingus, and I once went over to Mingus's house to listen while J. R. Monterose and Jackie McLean rehearsed the "Pithecanthropus Erectus" album. It was Willie who introduced me to the New York loft scene, where everything was happening, and that's when I first met all the Detroit guys like Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, and Pepper Adams. I also remember listening to Freddie Redd, who just knocked me out. I stood by the piano, watching him with his head thrown back, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, playing all that rich, beautiful bebop.

In the fall of 1956 I started studying at the Manhattan School of Music. I met Donald Byrd there, but the only time we played together was on a recording for Teddy Charles at Prestige the following year, and it was really thanks to Hal Stein that I was called for the date. He was playing alto with Teddy at the Pad in Greenwich Village, and he knew me from a loft session, so when I visited the club, I was invited to sit in. Teddy liked my playing and said he could use me on an album he was producing for Prestige called "Three Trumpets," with Donald, Art Farmer, and Idrees Sulieman. It was my first record date, and I was a little nervous. I remember playing a big fat B-minor 7th on the first chord of the bridge on "Cherokee," and Idrees cocked his head and smiled when we listened to the playback. I loved Idrees, man, although Art's playing was beautiful, especially from that period, when he was with Gigi Gryce. But Idrees stands out as being the most interesting in terms of ideas, sound, and energy.1

Later on in 1957, at the recommendation of Red Rodney, I had the dubious distinction of replacing Bill Evans with Oscar Pettiford because Oscar didn't like Bill's playing. Bill had a new and unusual approach to time and harmony, and Oscar was apparently getting very put out with him. One night he got so mad that Red had to calm him down, which is when I was hired, because I played straight-ahead bebop, which Red and Oscar liked. I worked for about eight months with Oscar, and although he could get pretty rumbustious and difficult, he never got out of hand while I was with him. Eventually, Red's drug habits caused Oscar to change trumpeters, and Johnny Coles came in, sounding great. Sahib Shihab was in the group on alto and baritone, with Earl "Buster" Smith on drums, and sometimes Oscar added Betty Glamman on harp. She was known as "Betty Glamour" because she looked good onstage, which Oscar liked, and anyway, he thought the harp made us look distinguished!

We worked mostly at the Five Spot and Smalls, and when Oscar left for Europe in the summer of 1958, I started playing with J. R. Monterose. At first we used Al Levitt and Buell Neidlinger, but later on, Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware were with us for several months. I'll tell you a funny story about Wilbur, who was a wonderful bass player. We were at a concert in some town where J .R.'s in-laws lived, and he naturally wanted to impress them, but Wilbur was in his famous drugged and drunk state, and I wasn't much better. I was trying to play, but he kept falling over his bass, finally ending up slumped on top of me. The two of us were sprawled on the piano, and Elvin and J.R. finished playing by themselves. Elvin got mad, and J.R. wasn't too happy, but we all loved Wilbur—he was "Mr. Time." That group also played on weekends at a rather infamous club in the red-light district of Albany, called the Gaiety.2

In 1960, I did an album for Decca with Gene Quill, Teddy Kotick, and Nick Stabulas, which unfortunately was never released. I had come into contact with Gene because "Phil and Quill" were happening at the time, and I remember learning "Things We Did Last Summer" the night before the recording. It's a great tune, and Gene played a nice version of it. Just prior to the album, I'd worked with Phil Woods at the Cork 'n' Bib, which is where I first met Chet Baker. Everybody came out to see Chet, and I had never seen the club so full. For the next three years until 1963, Don Friedman and I were the resident pianists at a club on Staten Island called the Totten Villa. We usually had Vinnie Ruggiero, who was a great drummer and probably the white man's answer to Philly Joe Jones, and when he couldn't make it, Art Taylor would take his place. It was Teddy Kotick's gig, and he booked people like Phil, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Rouse, Lee Konitz, Al Cohn, Stan Getz, and Bob Brookmeyer. We played "common denominator standards," in other words just calling tunes and blowing, with no arrangements and nothing written down, which is just as well, as I'm not a sight-reader. I liked Brookmeyer a lot, especially from those days, and I loved the "Interpretations" album he did with Getz, partly because of Johnny Williams, who was the pianist on the date. He was one of my favorites at the time because he had a rhythmic approach in his solos and his comping that was really impressive.

I started studying with Hall Overton, who was an authority on Thelonious Monk. He was also a nodal point between modern classical and the  world, and that is when I became interested in avant-garde electronic music, which I studied with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt. I dabbled in free jazz for a while, which can be great when it's coherent, but with a lot of players, it's just plain gibberish. Roswell Rudd, though, is an exception, because he plans structured sections which can be played freely, making his music successful. By the middle of the sixties I found interest in jazz falling away, partly due to the avant-garde and partly because of the popularity of groups like the Beatles, and this is when I dropped out of the music scene for a while.

I enrolled at Columbia University and eventually graduated with a degree in psychology, but I was still playing occasionally with Nobby Totah, who was a good friend. He used to invite me down to El Morocco to sit in with Chuck Wayne, and then around 1973 I rekindled my relationship with Roswell. He was teaching at a college in upstate New York with my ex-wife, and we decided to open our own club in Greenwich Village. We called it the St. James Infirmary, and it became quite a saga. His wife, Mosselle, knew all kinds of people in the Village, and as she had a gift for public relations, she became the manager. Unfortunately she was not very organized, so we ended our partnership after three months. Mosselle was very persuasive, though, and convinced the club's rhythm section, Beaver Harris and Cameron Brown, to go on strike along with Roswell! I was left without a band, so I called Richard Youngstein, the bass player, who brought in Jimmy Madison on drums, along with altoist Bob Mover, and we had a great time.

Bob was also playing with Chet at Stryker's Pub, so for a while Chet came into the St. James and did two nights a week with us. Sometimes we had Archie Shepp on weekends, and the only time the club went into the black was when Chet and Archie played together. We would actually be about $300 or so above the overhead for the week, whereas most of the time we lost money. Archie didn't play much free stuff at that time, because he had been through all that in the sixties, and he sounded great when he played straight-ahead music. Pepper Adams also played the club, and he was a big influence on me. His melodic lines were so impressive that I tried to incorporate them into my own blowing licks, so to speak.

Getting back to Chet, I think playing at my club had a lot to do with him getting back on his feet after that terrible beating and all the problems he had with his embouchure. Every night he seemed to get better and stronger, and that was when the real depth of his music started for me. He was fairly easy to work for, and we often played together when he came to New York, but for some reason, he didn't always like the way I comped. It was difficult to satisfy him sometimes, which made me resentful, because I think my comping is pretty damn good, as most people do. The only other person who doesn't is Frank Morgan, and there may be something in the fact that they both had similar ways of life. Working with Chet, though, was a privilege and honor, because he is a very important part of our jazz family and one of the great poet laureate musicians of all time. By the summer of 1975 Chet, Archie Shepp, and a lot of other guys we were featuring went over to Europe to play the festivals. That was when I decided to close the St. James, and that was the end of my career as a club owner. I started playing with Marshall Brown, who had a great book, and we had a long-lasting relationship until he died in 1983.

In 1977, I did three months at Gregory's with Russell Procope and Sonny Greer. I took the place of Brooks Kerr, who was hospitalized, and although it was just a trio job, Aaron Bell used to sit in on bass sometimes. Brooks was almost raised with the Ellington Orchestra, because his mother could afford to have them play at her apartment when he was young. When he was older, he used to go on gigs with the band, and if Duke forgot something, he would have Brooks play it for him, because he knew everything that Duke had written. Brooks often had Ellington sidemen play with him, but the mainstays were Russell and Sonny. Russell made no bones about not liking bebop or Charlie Parker, but I managed to turn him on to "A Night in Tunisia," which he eventually liked a lot.

When they left, I stayed on with Joe Puma and Frank Luther. The job lasted until 1982, but Joe let Frank go after a couple of years because Frank's playing was getting too outlandish. Joe said, "I'm trying to play Dixieland and he's playing Stravinsky!" Although when Frank buckles down and plays time, he's one of the best there is. A lot of fine guitarists like Jim Hall, Jimmy Raney, Attila Zoller, and Chuck Wayne used to sit in, and whenever Joe Pass was there, he and Puma would really go at it. We had some great times, especially when "Papa" Jo Jones came by and played brushes on a newspaper, which was a real trip. Stan Getz sat in one cold January night when the club was nearly empty, and a guy came in looking for girls. When he saw there weren't any, he stood listening for a while and, walking to the door, said to the owner, "Well, he ain't no Stan Getz!"

In 1982 I recorded with Allen Eager on his first record date in about twenty-five years.3 He had been involved in racing cars and hanging around with society people, and when he started playing in the studio, it was as though he had never blown a sax before. I was pretty shocked, but he kept at it, and slowly but surely, the lines got longer and clearer. It was as though he learned to play again in the space of half an hour. He didn't sound anything like I remembered from the forties or fifties, when he was with Fats Navarro or Tadd Dameron, but as he loosened up, he became more coherent from tune to tune. In fact at the end of three hours, when we did "Just You, Just Me," which was our last title, he played something that was worthy of Lester Young. It was a gem, just a perfect solo. He was a temperamental guy, though.

Phil Schaap brought him to the West End in Manhattan around that time, and Phil booked a straight-ahead rhythm section for him. Halfway through the first night, Allen decided that he didn't want to play that way, so he fired the band because he wanted to play completely free. He hired a new group of free players for the next night and continued the gig in that bag. I don't know what he's doing now, but I think he's living and playing down in Florida.4

In 1984 I recorded with Warne Marsh and Chet Baker in Holland.5 Warne was a very important saxophone player who used the upper partials, which are the tones above the sevenths, and his ability to handle that part of the harmonic spectrum was remarkable. On the record date Chet really didn't know what to do, so Warne took charge and ran the whole show. He picked the tunes, blew on the changes without stating the melodies, then retitled everything so he could get the royalties. It was around this time that I began collaborating with Fran Landesman by putting music to some of her poems,6 and my wife, Stephanie Nakasian, recorded one of our tunes, "Mystery Man," on her 1988 CD with Phil Woods.7 Fran and I made a demo of eight songs, which we sent to Bette Midler because they would have been perfect for her, but I don't think they ever got past her henchmen.

I have already mentioned some of my early influences, but there are many other pianists who are important to me, like Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, George Wallington, Duke Jordan, and especially Al Haig, who almost defined the sound of bebop piano. I love Jimmy Rowles, who was a sort of white version of Thelonious Monk. He had an offbeat way of coloring and harmonizing that was uniquely his. Dave McKenna, too, is incredible. I love the way he gets that walking bass line going with the right hand comping and blowing a melodic line, while making it all sound smooth and fluid. It's amazing that anyone besides Art Tatum can play that much solo piano; he's a one-man orchestra. Dave is just as good in an ensemble setting, and he makes his cohorts feel needed, unlike Art, who I'm told used to make them feel superfluous.

At the end of 1999 I recorded a trio album for Fresh Sound that is my best yet.8 It has Tom Warrington on bass and Paul Kreibich on drums and should help publicize the West Coast tour that Stephanie and I are undertaking later this summer. She and I work a lot together and will continue to do so.

NOTES

1.  Trumpets All Out (originally issued as Three Trumpets). Prestige OJCCD-1801.

2.  Nick Brignola dedicated his original "Green Street" to the club on Reservoir RSR CD 159.

3.  Allen Eager, Renaissance. Uptown 27.09.

4.  Since this interview, Allen Eager passed away, on April 13, 2003.

5.  Chet Baker/Warne Marsh, Blues for a Reason. Criss Cross 1010.

6.  Fran Landesman of course has written many fine lyrics, and none better than "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," with music composed by Tommy Wolf. It was originally featured in a 1959 Broadway musical titled The Nervous Set, a satire on the Beat Generation, with Larry Hagman as Jack Kerouac and Del Close as Allen Ginsberg. The score also included "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men."

7.  Stephanie Nakasian, Comin' Alive. V.S.O.P. 73.

8.  Hod O'Brien, Have Piano . . . Will Swing! Fresh Sound FSR 5030 CD.

Hod is featured in the following video with Ray Drummond on bass and Kenny Washington on drums performing Bob Dorough’s Nothing Like You Has Ever Been Seen Before.

Bebop: Some Writings About The Music and Its Origins [From The Archives]

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

I didn’t like it the first, few times I heard it.

My ear couldn’t follow it.

It sound so cluttered; everything seemed to clash with everything else in the music.

None of the melodic mellowness and rhythmic certainty of the Swing Era big bands led by Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, or Harry James was anywhere apparent.

Just flurries of notes, often played at breakneck speeds with lots of harmonic dissonance.

Even its name was oft-putting – “Bebop.” What was this stuff with the funny sounding name?

© -Marshall Stearns/Oxford University Press , copyright protected; all rights reserved.

From the few histories of Jazz then available, I looked up the chapter on “Bop” in Marshall Stearns’ The Story of Jazz and it noted:

“In terms of melody, bop seemed deliberately confusing. Unless you were an expert, there was nothing you could whistle, and if you were an expert, there wasn't much you'd want to whistle. Yet a great many bop numbers were based upon the chord progressions of standard jazz tunes such as 'I've Got Rhythm,’ the 12-bar blues, 'In­diana,’ and, of course, 'How High the Moon.’ The piano, guitar, and bass would play the same accompaniment to 'Indiana' as they might ordinarily, for example, and the soloist would improvise as usual—but nobody would play the tune. It wasn't exactly new to jazz, but bop made a practice of featuring variations upon melodies that were never stated.

To take the place of the melody, bop evolved a framework of its own, a written or memorized unison chorus in bop style, played at the beginning and at the end of each number. It was generally quite complicated and, some­times, even memorable. If you could manage to whistle the original tune at the same time, it would fit in a bop-pish way. In between, each musician took his solos in turn.

Charlie Parker, like Dizzy Gillespie and other early boppers, … , knew exactly what he was doing. He dated the first occasion when he began to play bop in December 1939, at a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 14Oth streets:

‘... I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes [i.e. chords] that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it.

Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.’

This is an accurate and fairly technical description of what took place.

Since bop was played by small groups which permitted experimentation, the riffs or repeated phrases of the swing bands died out and a longer solo line became possible. The bop soloist now started and stopped at strange mo­ments and places, reversing his breath pauses, and some­times creating a long and unbalanced melodic line which cut across the usual rests. No more running up and down chords as in the Swing Era.

In terms of rhythm, bop made some radical changes. On first hearing, even a sympathetic listener might well have been dismayed. 'If that drummer would quit banging that cymbal,' the traditionalist objected, 'I might be able to hear the bass drum.' In point of fact, there wasn't any bass drum to hear—at least, not the heavy 'boom, boom, boom’ of Gene Krupa's day. Instead, the hiss of the top cymbal dominated the music (once in a while, in the early days, the cymbal nearly drowned out the soloists), changing phase to fit the inventions of the soloist. The bass drum was reserved for explosions, or special accents, and the string bass—alone—played a steady, unaccented four-to-a-bar. The beat was there but it was light, flowing, and more subtle.

Many listeners were left painfully in the lurch and any resemblance in bop to the heavy march rhythm of Dixieland was entirely unintentional. To the soloist in bop, however, these changes were an enormous help. They gave him a new freedom and a new responsibility.  …” [pp. 229-231].

To one who was new to the music of bebop, it’s melodic, harmonic and rhythmic “freedom” left me bewildered and confused.

But Stearns’ description of some of the things that were going on in bebop at least gave me some starting points.

Of course, around the time that Stearns was researching and writing his book in the mid-1950s, bebop was still in its infancy.

Charlie Parker had just died, but most of the originators of bop were still around.

My ear soon caught up to Bebop’s complexities and, throughout its many later manifestations, I began a life-long love affair with the music.

Fast forward a half century later and there many more books are on the subject of Jazz in general and bebop in particular.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles would like to call your attention to two of these: the chapter entitled Modern Jazz: The Birth of Bebop in Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz [Oxford University Press] and Scott and Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History [University of California Press].

Now in its second edition, Ted’s excellent account of the growth and development of Jazz offers these introductory thoughts on the growth and development of Bebop [pp. 200-205].

© -Ted Gioia/Oxford University Press, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

‘Long before modern jazz emerged as a dis­tinctive style, an ideology of modernism had been implic­itly embraced by the music's practitioners. From its earliest days, jazz had been an forward-looking art, continually in­corporating new techniques, more expansive harmonies, more complex rhythms, more intricate melodies. …. whether they expostulated about the future of music or merely announced its arrival through the bell of their horns, the leading musicians of early jazz were modernists in the truest sense of the term. They were admired—or chastised, as the case may be—as daring exponents of the new and bold.

It is easy to lose sight of just how remarkable this modernist bent was, given its context. ….

Almost from the start, jazz players embraced a different mandate, accepting their role as entertainers and pursuing experimentation with an ardent zeal. This created a paradoxical foundation for jazz, one that remains to this day: for the jazz musician soon proved to be a restless soul, at one moment fostering the tradition, at another shattering it, mindless of the pieces. ….

Given this feat, the rise of a more overt modernism in the early 1940s should not be viewed as an abrupt shift, as a major discontinuity in the music's history. It was simply an extension of jazz's inherent tendency to mutate, to change, to grow.  ….

[One] irony is that modern jazz sprang from none of …  [its] roots. True, it drew bits and pieces of inspiration from … [earlier forms of Jazz] , but it sounded like none of them. Instead, the leading jazz modernists of the 1940's developed their own unique style, brash and unapologetic, in backrooms and after-hours clubs, at jam sessions and on the road with traveling bands. This music was not for commercial consumption, nor was it meant to be at this embryonic stage. It survived in the interstices of the jazz world. …

What was this new music? Early modern jazz, or bebop as it soon came to called, rebelled against the populist trappings of swing music. The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing background music to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections— these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style. Some things, of course, did not change ….

True, the beboppers preferred the small combo format to the prevalent big band sound, but the underlying rhythm section of piano, string bass, drums, and occasionally guitar remained unchanged, as did the use of saxophones, trumpets, and trombones as typical front-line instru­ments.

But how these instruments were played underwent a sea change in the context of modern jazz. Improvised lines grew faster, more complex. The syncopations and dotted eighth-note phrasings that had characterized earlier jazz were now far less prominent. Instead, long phrases might stay on the beat for measures at a time, built on a steady stream of eighth or sixteenth notes executed with quasi-mechani­cal precision, occasionally broken by a triplet, a pregnant pause, an interpolation of dotted eighths or whirlwind thirty-second notes, or a piercing offbeat phrase. The conception of musical time also changed hand in hand with this new way of phras­ing, otherwise this less syncopated approach might have sounded rhythmically life­less, a tepid jazz equivalent to the even sixteenth notes of baroque music. …

The harmonic implications of this music also revealed a newfound complexity. …

But more often, the harmonic complexity of modern jazz was implicit, sug­gested in the melody lines and improvisations rather than stated outright in the chords of the songs.

Yet, there was also a core of simplicity to this music. Arrangements were sparse, almost to an extreme. Renouncing the thick textures of the big band sound, be-boppers mostly opted for monophonic melody statements. ….

The boppers were not formalists. Content, not form, was their preoccupation. Instrumental solos were at the heart of each performance, sandwiched between an opening and closing statement of the melody. ….

The celebrated histories of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie might lead one to believe that this musical revolution took place only on the front line, an upheaval among horn players. In fact, much of the changing sensibility of modern jazz was driven by the rhythm sections. …. Each instrument in the jazz rhythm section, in fact, underwent a transformation during these years. The pulse of the music became less sharply articulated, more pointillistic. Sudden accents— the so-called bass drum "bombs" dropped by bebop percussionists or the crisp comping chords of pianists and guitarists—now frequently arrived off the beat or on weak beats. The spitfire tempos required impeccable timekeeping and unprece­dented stamina. After the onslaught of modern jazz, the rhythm section would never be the same.

… Bebop was [also] defined by its social context as much as by the flats and sharps of its altered chords. Outsiders even within the jazz world, the modern jazz players had the dubious distinction of be­longing to an underclass within an underclass. Remember, this was a musical revo­lution made, first and foremost, by sidemen, not stars.  ….

Thus, the birth of modern jazz took place at a strange crossroads: drawing, on the one side, from the pungent roots and rhythms of Kansas City jazz, on the other delving into the rarefied atmosphere of high art.”

Not surprisingly, with almost seventy-five years having elapsed since the earliest expression, Bebop has had a number of full length books devoted to it in recent years.

One of the most comprehensive works on the subject is Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History [University of California Press].

Here are some excerpts from Scott’s Introduction: Stylistic Evolution or Social Revolution?

© -Scott DeVeaux/University of California Press, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There is a trick to balancing a yardstick. Hold the yardstick out flat, with one index finger under each end. Then bring these fingers in slowly toward the center. They will not slide in evenly: one will be held up by friction while the other spurts ahead until it, too, is caught. But inevitably they will meet at the pivot point of the span and come into balance.

Imagine for the moment that the history of jazz is a solid, linear object, like a yardstick. One endpoint marks the origins of jazz, somewhere in the mists of the early twentieth century; the other, the present. As of this writing, at least, the point at which the yardstick comes into balance falls somewhere in the mid-i94os.

By any measure, this is a crucial period for the history of jazz. During the years 1940-45 the first modern jazz style, shaped by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others, came into being. This music was known as bebop, or simply bop: "a most inadequate word," complained Ralph Ellison, that "throws up its hands in clownish self-deprecation before all the complexity of sound and rhythm and self-assertive passion which it pretends to name/7 But this music was crucial for the evolution of jazz and American music. For Ellison, bebop marked nothing less than "a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sensibility; in brief, a revolution in culture."

As the twentieth century comes to a close, bebop lies at the midpoint of what has come to be known as the jazz tradition. It also lies at the shadowy juncture at which the lived experience of music becomes trans­formed into cultural memory. Inevitably, there will be fewer and fewer witnesses to contribute to—or contest—our ideas about the past. The recent passing of Dizzy Gillespie (1917-93) and Miles Davis (1926-92), among others, underscores our closeness to the physical and psychic re­ality of that history. In their absence we will be left with the image of bebop and jazz that we construct for ourselves.

Even as bebop recedes further into the past, it is unlikely to be dislodged any time soon from the heart of jazz discourse. Tradition, after all, is not simply a matter of cherishing the past, holding its memory sacred. There is some of that in jazz, but not much. What counts, as the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has argued, is the continuing existence of the past in the present.

In this sense, bebop has a more legitimate claim to being the fount of contemporary jazz than earlier jazz styles. The large dance orchestras of the Swing Era and the improvised polyphony of the early New Orleans groups may hold a place of honor, but musicians no longer play that way. The nuances of the past have largely disappeared, along with the social contexts of nightlife and dancing that shaped and gave them meaning. A jazz orchestra of fifteen or more musicians suggests either nostalgia, the specter of superannuated bodies shuffling to yesterday's dance music, or the academic sterility of the university "lab band/' The small New Or­leans or "Dixieland" combo was long ago ceded to enthusiastic and atavistically minded amateurs. Even the most accomplished modern jazz repertory groups only drive home how difficult it is for a contemporary musician to inhabit the musical sensibility of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Mor­ton, or Jimmie Lunceford.

By contrast, ask any member of the current generation of jazz musi­cians to play Charlie Parker's "Anthropology," or Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia," or Monk's "'Round Midnight." It may not be their preferred avenue of expression, but they will know the music and how to play it. Bebop is a music that has been kept alive by having been absorbed into the present; in a sense, it constitutes the present. It is part of the expe­rience of all aspiring jazz musicians, each of whom learns bebop as the embodiment of the techniques, the aesthetic sensibilities, and ultimately the professional attitudes that define the discipline. A musical idiom now half a century old is bred in their bones.

The perennial relevance of bebop is thus not simply a tribute to its enduring musical value. After all, the music of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington enjoys a critical esteem equal to that of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk, and it is better known and loved by the general public. But bebop is the point at which our contemporary ideas of jazz come into focus. It is both the source of the present—"that great revolution in jazz which made all subsequent jazz modernisms possible"—and the prism through which we absorb the past. To understand jazz, one must understand bebop.”

When I was first looking for Bebop recordings, I had to scramble around and piece together a representative sampling of the music.  This was largely due to the fact that many of these records were issued in very limited quantities on obscure labels that soon went out-of-business, or because the recordings were simply out-of-print.

If you are new to the music or wish to revisit if, Bebop Spoken Here is a Properbox [#10] 4-CD anthology that features 97 tracks of Bebop along with a 56-page explanatory booklet. 

You can listen to a selection from the set in the following video tribute.