"In Walked Horace" - Horace Silver - His Life and Music

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

Put directly, I find the music of Horace Silver irresistible. When I listen to it, I feel happy, joyous and free. I was reminded of this fact when I re-read portions of Horace’s autobiography while doing a deep dive into examining the elements of the Jazz style that has come to be referred to as "Hard Bop."


With this research topic in mind while perusing the book resulted in the parallel activity of getting out his many Blue Note recordings and listening to them again, but it also raised the question in my mind of what was it about his music that I found so appealing?

As noted, Horace’s music is usually associated with the Hard Bop style and, according to a number of noted writers on the subject, Horace is one of the originators. of “Hard Bop.” Some maintain that he is THE originator of Hard Bop.

So are the ingredients that constitute Hard Bop the reason why I like Horace’s music so much? If this could be the basis for my preference, what are these ingredients; what is Hard Bop?

For the author, Richard Cook, in Blue Note Records: The Biography [London: Secker & Warburg, 2001], the evolution of Horace’s music into what has come to be known as Hard Bop may not only have resulted in a new Jazz genre, it may have also saved Blue Note records itself from extinction.

To paraphrase Mr. Cook, after ten years of following a similar methodology, by the mid-1950s, the bebop scene had begun to atrophy – it’s ad hoc nature grew to seem like a very curse.

Although there were some more or less regular formations, the faces in the musical community were familiar but not working together in ways which let ensemble identities gel. As Art Blakey would later remember: ‘Guys then would throw together a band for one night and play standard bebop tunes, just stand there and jam. And people got tired of that. Everybody was just copying.’ [p. 72].

As a result, Blue Note was in such a perilous financial state that it was even entertaining offers to buy the label when, with apologies to J.J. Johnson – “In Walked Horace.”

Horace came to the label’s rescue through the record date on November 13, 1954 for which Horace created “… the blueprint for perhaps the greatest small group in post-war jazz.” [Cook, p. 72. Just to be clear, I think that what Mr. Cook is referring to as “greatest” are the many versions of the quintet that Horace has led over the years and not just this particular group]

For this date, Silver employed Hank Mobley [ts], and Doug Watkins [b], who were working with him at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, and added Kenny Dorham [tp] and Blakey [d].

In many ways, this was to become the seminal album that resulted in the birth of the Blue Note “Sound,” the start of Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers and start of the many versions of the Horace Silver Quintet [HSQ].

The music on this album seemed to transition be-bop into an earthier, more blues-gospel orbit that connected with audiences and forged the direction that this particular school of bop would take for years to come.

With one exception, all of the compositions on the LP were penned by Horace [among them The Preacher and Doodlin’] and Mr. Cook describes Silver’s music this way, a description that may offer a first clue as to why it is so appealing [paragraphing modified]:

“Each of them seems cut from the same cloth: rocking beats, nothing too quick but nothing that dawdled; sashaying minor melodies, voiced in clean unison by tenor and trumpet with riffing interjections from the piano; gospel and the blues seeming to soak into every eight-bar passage.

Compared to the careening tempos and linear charge of ‘true’ bebop, this music might have seemed almost too simple, a reduction rather than a development. But Silver’s group opened up possibilities in other ways.

His themes had a melodious side to them, which the slash-and-burn tactics of bop had little time for. It was listening music, but it opened the door to backbeats, a grooving motion which audiences tired of abstraction were ready to welcome.

In the new black popular music – typified by the kind of [rhythm and blues] output which Atlantic …. was making money from – bebop had no place. But [Horace’s] … blend of funky sophistications could take a seat at the table. [p.73].

The style of music didn’t have the name – “Hard Bop” – as yet, but the band had a name – 'The Jazz Messengers,' an identifiable sound, and even hung together for a while to play a number of gigs in and around New York City.

And while, The Preacher and Doodlin’ were to capture the popular fancy, my favorites on the album are the more hard-driving Room 608 and Stop Time, and the heavily blues oriented Creepin’ In and Hippy.

Frankly, after listening to the music on this album and the two subsequent live at the Café Bohemia that were recorded a year later in November, 1955, I continued to be puzzled by what is meant by the “hard” in “Hard Bop.” To my ears, the music is anything but “hard.” I always thought that the angular lines, convoluted harmonies, four-chord-changes-to-the-bar, take-no-prisoners tempi of the original bebop was a much “harder” sound than the blues and gospel inflected tunes and arrangements penned by Horace.

Or to repeat Mr. Cook’s characterization of the music: “…: rocking beats, nothing too quick but nothing that dawdled; sashaying minor melodies, voiced in clean unison by tenor and trumpet with riffing interjections from the piano; gospel and the blues seeming to soak into every eight-bar passage.” [Ibid.]

In his The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997] Ted Gioia offers a perspective that is similar to that of Mr. Cook [and others] as to the key ingredients that made Hard Bop in general and Horace’s music in particular so unique, but he also goes on to identify other elements that contributed to its singularity and to its appeal [paragraphing modified]:

… ‘The Preacher’ [was] a funky blues piece infused with elements of gospel music. … The time was right for this return to the roots. Rhythm and blues and the gospel sounds of the sanctified church were starting to exert a powerful influence on American popular music. Singers as ostensibly different as Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles were drawing on these same traditions in pursuing their sharply contrasting sacred and secular agendas.
Over the next few years, rock and roll would incorporate many of these same ingredients into a brusque, clangorous style whose impact still reverberates. The jazz idiom also benefited from a return to these first principles of African American music – at least for a time.

Eventually these funky and soulful sounds would become stale clichés in the jazz world, but for a period in the 1950’s their simpler attitudes – grooving two steps, guttural back beats, insistent melody lines drenched with blues notes- offered a healthy alternative to the more cerebral and aggressive strands of modern jazz." [p. 316]

But it when Mr. Gioia moves a bit further into his analysis of Horace’s music that the real preferences that I have for Horace’s music begin to manifest themselves. While there is the “… ‘down-home’ approach exemplified by ‘The Preacher,’ Gioia comments that Horace “refuses to be limited by it,”… and goes on [paragraphing modified]:

Silver is often described as a key exponent of this funk-inflected style, yet his major contributions reveal, in fact, a refreshing diversity. These efforts include explorations of 6/8 rhythms (“Senor Blues”), Caribbean-Latin hybrids (“Song for My father”), medium tempo jaunts (“Silver Serenade”), free-spirited romps (“Nutville”), jazz waltzes (“Pretty Eyes”) and serene ballads (“Peace”).
The one linking factors in these works is not so much Silver’s funkiness, but rather the sharp focus of his musical vision. His sound is uncluttered. His melodies are succinct and memorable. The rhythms are propulsive without being overbearing. The obsession with virtuosity, so characteristic of bebop, is almost entirely absent and never missed. "[pp. 316-317].

That’s it in a nutshell: [1] melodies that are easy to remember and which you can sing, whistle or hum; [2] propulsive rhythms that you can snap your fingers to or pat your foot to [or both]; [3] a wide variety of different “settings” in which the music takes place including Latin beats, cookers, ballads; [4] music that is fun and enjoyable and played by musicians who are excellent but don’t take themselves too seriously.

Gene Seymour in his essay entitled Hard Bop, in Bill Kirchner [ed]., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 200, pp. 373 – 388] points out that the liner notes to Horace’s Serenade to a Soul Sister [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 84277] includes “… the pianist’s guidelines to musical composition: a.) Melodic Beauty, b.) Meaningful Simplicity, c.) Harmonic beauty, d.) Rhythm, e.) Environmental, Heredity, Regional and Spiritual Influences.” [p. 382].

Seymour continues: “… others have inferred that … the fifth guideline is an elaborate definition of what came to be known as the ‘funky’ essence in Silver’s music given its suggestion of African-American strains of blues and gospel.” [p. 383].
As Horace explained to Kenny Mathieson in Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-65 [Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2002]: “ Funky just means earthy, coming out of the blues and gospel thing, but it’s not a style, it’s a feel, an approach to playing. The funk element came from my love for black gospel music and the blues, a combination of the two.” [p. 41].

From 1956 with the release of Six Pieces of Silver [Blue Note CDP 7 81539 2] to Serenade to a Soul Sister in 1968, Horace would release fourteen Blue Note albums all reflecting a “… combination of funky, [gospel or] folk-inflected themes with sophisticated bop….” [Mathieson, p. 41].

Recorded on November 10, 1956, Six Pieces of Silver was Horace’s first album with his permanent group – the Horace Silver Quintet [HSQ] - which in this case consisted of Donald Byrd [tp], Hank Mobley [ts], Doug Watkins [b] and Louis Hayes [d]. With the exception of the ballad, “For Heaven’s Sake,” all of the tunes on the LP are Horace’s and, as Mathieson points out:

“… several distinctive signatures were already emerging including his liking for interpolating ensemble interludes between the solos, a trait heard here in the 8-bar interjections on both ‘Cool Eyes’ … and ‘Virgo.’

In addition, his penchant for unorthodox rhythmic alterations emerges on ‘Camouflage,’ the Latin-inflected ‘Enchantment,’ and the ambitious rhythmic experiments of the album’s best known track, ‘Senor Blues’. [Ibid.]

In the album’s original liner notes, Leonard feather described ‘Senor Blues’ this way:

“Senor Blues is, for the listener at least, the most exciting of the seven performances on these sides. Set in a minor key, with the horns voiced, it is in triple time, which Horace describes as 6/8, though I would be inclined to call it 12/8. The performance is full of tricky rhythmic and counter-rhythmic effects …. Both in its solos and in its ensemble approach, this is a striking example of the degree of originality to which a twelve-bar motif can be stretched.”

Intricate sounding, yet simple in construction: the amount of though that Horace puts into the structure of his compositions is certainly a main element in why his music is appealing to me and there is so much more of this quality in the tunes on the album – Further Explorations by the Horace Silver Quintet [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 56583 2 7] with Art Farmer [tp], Clifford Jordan [ts], Teddy Kotick [b[ and Louis Hayes [d].
This is not a recording with tunes based on running the changes to Cherokee or developing thematic points-of-departure on the chords sequence in I’ve Got Rhythm.

Or, as Richard Cook phrased it in The Biography of Blue Note Records: “All but one of the tunes are Silver originals – no simple blues derivations or melodies dumped on to standard chord changes.” [p. 119].

The opening track, The Outlaw, is vintage Horace with its twists and turns containing all sorts of surprises due to its unusual structural form. Like Ecaroh, another Silver original, it employs both 4/4 straight-ahead and Latin-inflected rhythmic passages, but The Outlaw does so within an asymmetric construction that employs two sections of thirteen [13] bars divided into seven [7] measures of straight-ahead 4/4 and six [6] of Latin rhythms, a ten [10] bar 4/4 section which acts as a bridge followed by a sixteen [16] bar Latin vamp [or Latin pedal] with a two [2] break that leads into the next solo.

It’s a masterpiece whose seemingly disparate parts generate a powerful “tension and release” effect that will leave you wanting to listen to this sprightly bit of musical magic over and over again.

Another of the album’s tracks is Moon Rays which to paraphrase, Leonard Feather description in his liner notes, “ingeniously uses the horns to employ a two-part harmony with pedal-point rhythm effects on the dominant” to create a moody and haunting ballad the breaks into a straight-ahead cooker at the solos.


Pyramid is characterized by sharp rhythmic punctuations, the intermittent use of Latin beats during the channels, a “quasi-Asiatic theme” while Safari is a straight-ahead, minor bop burner taken at a wicked tempo with Louis Hayes on drums once again demonstrating that his hands and feet are so fast that they complete phrases in an extended solo before his mind can finish conceiving of them!


Melancholy Mood which is built on 7 bar sections to form an unusual 28-bar AABA and yet it plays so beautifully, is an example of Horace taking something as basic as a ballad and crafting it different and unusual fashion.

Horace’s music has so much going on that the listener can return for repeated samplings and focus on it from completely different perspectives such that something new is heard each time. It’s a veritable, movable feast.

Brian Priestley has this to say about Horace’s uniqueness in Jazz the Rough Guide: The Essential Companion to Artists and Albums [London: Rough Guides Ltd., 1995] which he authored along with Ivan Carr and Digby Fairweather: [paragraphing modified]

“His composing ability is pre-eminently a stylistic consolidator, although one less academically inclined would be hard to find. In the mid-1950’s he created the ‘hard bop’ writing style virtually single-handed, by taking for granted that even a fairly ‘mainstream’ rhythm section would be heavily bop-influenced and contrasting this with simple swing-era phrasing for the front line instruments.
This joyously conservative approach stems directly from Horace’s piano style…. Even when a tune is voiced in two-part harmony [“Ecaroh” or “Silver Serenade”], it turns out to be just the two top notes of the full two-handed piano chords.

Whether soloing or backing, Horace is first and foremost a rhythm player…; like [Art] Blakey, his accompaniment can be almost overwhelming but its flowing compulsion cushions the soloists and forces them to say what they have to say.” [p. 588].

I think that Mr. Priestley has hit upon a point that has always fascinated me about Horace’s music and this is its musical forcefulness. Perhaps the “Hard” in Horace’s bop comes from the fact that he adds a drumming quality or fluid propulsive-ness to his music.

A major contributor to the insistent swing of Horace’s music is his choice of drummer, especially Louis Hayes.

As Bob Blumenthal points out in his insert notes the CD reissue of The Stylings of Silver [Blue Note CDP 7243 5 40034]:

“In the immediate instance a special nod should go to Louis Hayes, who was roughly three weeks short of his 20th birthday when … [the album] was recorded. Hayes was a mainstay of Silver’s quintet over the first three years of its existence, and provided a fluent drive that, for this listener’s money, none of his successor’s were able to match.

A drummer cannot just close … [their] eyes and swing on a Silver chart, where accents must be precisely struck and the music may move through several variations of jazz and Latin time within an 8-bar phrase. Hayes is on top of things all the way here, which is a testament to both how much the Silver quintet worked and the drummer’s own precocious skills.”

The No Smokin’ track on Stylings is an example of the percussive qualities to which that Mr. Blumenthal is referring and they are also in evidence in a more understated way on Soulville which has some ‘big band’ kicks and fills by Louis in its bridge.

The Back Beat and Soulville [which, in addition to its other attributes, has a beautifully constructed ‘shout chorus’ played in unison by Farmer, Mobley and Silver before the group returns to the tune’s blues line] are also a perfect examples of the following characterization of Horace’s music by Martin Williams in his The Jazz Tradition [New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1993]: [paraphrased]

“Silver’s groups sometimes give the impression of a cross between a bebop quintet and a little southwestern jump-blues band of the thirties or early forties and on several pieces, Silver has in effect done some of the best big band writing of the period.”

In their chapter on Horace from Jazz Portraits: The Lives and Music of the Jazz Masters [New York: William Morrow-A Quill Book, 1989], Len Lyons and Don Perlo offer this [paraphrased] appraisal of Horace’s music:

“Silver is primarily self-taught [in Jazz] and studied it by playing records on a wind-up machine at a slow speed, allowing him to figure out solos and chord changes by ear. … Silver credits Monk’s playing with showing him that openness and simplicity are options ….

Silver has even simplified Monk, evolving more visceral rhythms, less sophisticated melodies, and a more traditional rendering of the blues. In short, Silver cut the complexity out of bebop, making it more lyrical and funky.” [pp.466-467].

Nowhere is Lyons and Perlo assessment of Horace’s music more in evidence than on Finger Poppin’ [Blue Note CDP 7243 8 84008] which introduced the group’s new front line of Blue Mitchell [tp] and Junior Cook [ts] along with a new bassist, Eugene Taylor.

Finger Poppin’, Juicy Lucy, Swinging’ the Samba, and most especially Cookin’ at the Continental are not lines or melodies to be played and disposed of a soon as possible, they are ingeniously constructed thematic launching pads, each with a slightly different rhythmic “feel,” that soloists what to play “in” and not just “on.”

As has already been noted, the melodies that Horace writes are trouble-free andstraightforward, but the possibilities for improvising on them are endless – their uncomplicated nature seem to help the soloist weave new melodies on top of the original line. And then there’s everything else that’s going on: background riffs, interludes between solos, countermelodies in the bass line [sometimes played in unison with Horace left-hand in bass clef].

Steve Huey notes in his review of the album for www.allaboutmusic.com “Silver always kept his harmonically sophisticated music firmly grounded in the emotional directness and effortless swing of the blues, and Finger Poppin’ is one of the greatest peaks of that approach. A big part of the reason is the chemistry between the group — it’s electrifying and tightly knit, with a palpable sense of discovery and excitement at how well the music is turning out.”

Another aspect of what I have always found engaging about Horace’s music comes from the musicians he used in his bands and Kenny Mathieson underscores this point in his review of Finger Poppin’ when he states:

“It is easy to hear even in the first outing why Silver liked the horn combination of Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook. They play his ensemble writing in disciplined fashion throughout, and also provide consistently attractive, imaginative and logically developed solos, but without ever overpowering his material, an important consideration for a musician as focused on the craft elements of composition as the pianist. While both are well capable of dealing with any technical challenges which arise in the music, neither depends on displays of overt virtuosity or emotional abandon in their playing, another quality which may well have endeared them to their leader. With a solid but responsive rhythm team picking up each nuance of Silver’s directions, this band already sounds like a well-seasoned unit, and that seemingly in-built empathy would survive the subsequent changes of drummer intact.” [Cookin’ pp. 41-42].

In August and September, 1959, the Blue Mitchell/Junior Cook version of the HSQ was to record one more album together – Blowin’ the Blues Away [Blue Note CDP 7 46526 2] which would include the formative title track that the soloists bobbing and weaving over its blues changes; Peace, one of Horace’s more beautiful ballads based around a ten bar composition and Sister Sadie, another of Horace’s gospel-inflected tunes in the manor of Juicy Lucy that cleverly evokes a blues feeling while using a 32-bar AABA form. So much thought goes into everything that Horace does on these recordings. As Mathieson comments about Sister Sadie:

“… [its] instantly catchy theme would be enough for many musicians [but] as usual, … the pianist is not content to state the theme and launch the band into a series of solos. He sounds a series of carefully thought out accompaniment figures behind Mitchell’s succinct solo and again under the first chorus of Cook’s. In the A sections of the saxophonist’s second chorus, Silver and Mitchell play a series of powerful Basie-style rifts behind Cook’s exuberant explorations. After Silver’s own two choruses, the ensemble plays a new theme on the section of the tune, and then another [related to the earlier background riff] in the next chorus, before finally returning to the original theme to close the tune. Each of these developments, while straightforward in themselves, add considerable variety and interest to a simple theme and a conventional structure.” [Ibid, p. 46].

As pointed out earlier, Horace puts so much thought into all of these charts that there seems to be a never-ending series of focal points to continue to surprise and delight the listener – happy, joyous and free – indeed!
On the subject of the albums that Horace made for Blue Note and the men who made them with him, once again, here are some insightful comments from Richard Cook, but this time in conjunction with Brian Morton as taken from The Penguin Guide to CD: Sixth Edition [London: The Penguin Group, 2002, p. 1343]:

“It’s hard to pick the best of the [Blue Note albums by the HSQ] since Silver’s consistency is unarguable: each album yields one or two themes that haunt the mind, each usually has a particularly pretty ballad, and they all lay back on a deep pile of solid riffs and workmanlike solos. Silver’s own are strong enough, but he was good at choosing sidemen who weren’t so … [full of character] that the band would overbalance: [Junior] Cook, [Blue] Mitchell, [Hank] Mobley, Art [Farmer], [Clifford] Jordan, Woody [Shaw], [Joe] Henderson, and [James] Spaulding are all typical [HSQ] horns….” [p. 1383].

Perhaps the best way to conclude this exploration into Silver’s “buried treasured” is by turning to his own words as a way of summarizing what makes his music so singular.
These excerpts are drawn from Ben Sidran’s Talking Jazz: An Oral History [New York: Da Capo Press, 1995].

“Ben: You also developed some techniques I think that are still used today, such as the way you used interludes to set up the solos and the melody and the way you used themes that really set your writing aside from a lot of the blowing dates that were going on in the ‘50s.
Horace: Well, I was trying to do something a little bit different I guess, You know, to make our band sound uncommon. ‘Cause most of the groups, they came in, they played the head and soloed and played the head on out and that was it, you know? Whereas I thought to color it up a little bit and make the whole presentation more uplifting and desirable for people to listen to. You know, with an introduction and a few little interludes here and there. Maybe a shout chorus or a tag ending or whatever, you know. Embellish upon it a little bit. Not overarrange, but you know, just something to make it a little more interesting, and more unique. More original.
Ben: The simplicity of what you were doing back then, I think, made possible. Everything, down to the last three notes of a song like “Blowin’ The Blues Away,” was definitive and simple and right on it. There no question about what you were doing or what your musical intentions were.
Horace. Well, you know, I think it takes a composer a while to learn simplicity. Some of the early things that I’ve written were too notey, you know. I wrote a lot of bebop lines in the early days that had a lot of notes to it, you know, that were difficult to play and not much space for the horns to catch their breath in between phrases and all that stuff. But as I got a little older and learned a little more, I began to realize that all that wasn’t necessary, you know. You can cut out all of those notes and it can still be great, and might even be greater, because more people can understand it. And it can still be profound, you know, and beautiful. Beautiful profound harmonies and beautiful profound simple melody … simplicity is very difficult you, know.

Now, in my opinion, you gotta be very careful with simplicity because, if you’re not careful, you can write a simple melody that can be very trite and non-meaningful, you know. But it’s most difficult to write a simple melody that is profound and deep. That is a very difficult thing to do. Find some beautiful harmonies that are not too complex, but yet beautiful, different, moving in different directions, interesting, you know, stimulating to the mind, for a player. But not too complex, so that it makes it hard to play.

And a simple melody that’s not complex to play either, but yet it’s beautiful and has some depth and some beauty and some meaning to it you, know.
Because if you’re not careful, when you’re trying to be simple, it can be very corny or trite, you know. That’s the hard part about simplicity. But once you get it, you really got something.” [pp.143-45]

Well, there you are – the reasons why I like Horace Silver’s music so much as summarized by Horace, himself. He makes it all sound so easy; would that it were.

I am also indebted to all of the authors referenced in this article for their assistance with my quest to explain why I find Horace Silver’s music so appealing and satisfying.

While preparing this piece I was reminded once again of the inherent contradiction in trying to describe music in words.

Obviously, to find what may be appealing to you in Horace’s music, all you need do is listen to it!

An Interview at Mid-Career with Bob Brookmeyer - Part 2

WE: About 1960 you joined Gerry Mulligan's Concert jazz Band. How did that come about?

BB: Gerry came by early in that year and had a week at Basin Street East and wanted to know if I'd write an arrangement for him. We hadn't played together for a couple of years. And I think he was kind of de­pressed that I quit‑I quit in '5 7. So we got to be a little tighter, and the one week at Basin Street East turned into a band. I saw the opportunity to be part of a band that I'd wanted since I'd been a kid. The band I couldn't find when I first came to New York. Every band I played in was dumb. I mean, this was not the way it was supposed to go. The bands I played in when I was a kid were OK, but they should have been better, and we always had final points we couldn't go beyond.
This was a chance to work with a supreme musician‑Gerry is a great writer and player and a great leader‑and it was a ready‑made circum­stance. So I really tried to keep his interest up as much as I could, and I got some people for him to listen to. We finally wound up with a great band‑we had Mel Lewis, and Buddy Clark, and Nick Travis‑a really excellent band. And that was an achievement, I think. We stayed together for about four years.

WE: Were you and Mulligan co‑leaders of that band?

BB: I wasn’t a co‑leader. I played first trombone, and I did some of the writing. My investment was emotional. I wanted that band, more some­times probably than Gerry did. That's what I lived for in that year. I wanted to keep that going.

WE: So it was a spiritual co‑leadership.

BB: Yeah, I wasn't going to let it die.
WE: But the band folded in the mid-sixties. What happened?

BB: I think a lack of work and a lack of interest, and Gerry's interest was getting ‑ it's a helluva responsibility to be a big‑band leader. It's a mess. And my interest was getting scattered around. My personal life was cha­otic ‑ up and down. So with both of us kind of in and out emotionally and with the work situation getting hard, I think that we just decided to concentrate on the quartet.
We never talked about it much. Maybe we felt that we had gone far enough with it, I don't know. My feeling was that I wished we had gone further. After 1960 I wanted us just to keep on expanding and get new music from George Russell, get Gil [Evans] to write for us, and do all this stuff, you know. I'm quite childlike and enthusiastic about that, I guess. But realities kept surfacing. So we did four years, and that was our time.

PR: Gary McFarland wrote for the Concert jazz Band. What do you recall about him?

BB: Well, Gary was just different. He was one of those people that just seemed to hear everything and translate everything differently. He called me in early 1961. Gerry's band had just started, and he wanted to know the personnel, and he asked me if it would be OK if he brought something in. I said sure and encouraged him to please do that, and he brought in t first piece, an arrangement of "Weep."

PR: Was he known at the time?
BB: I'd never heard of him. Just a little bit through John Lewis and the [Lenox] School of Jazz, where I taught for a couple of years. He brought it in and it was quite successful and very different. So he did another for us, and people began to hear about him, and Creed [Taylor] heard about him at Verve and took the chance on McFarland's first album.
I think it was How to Succeed in Business. So that was it, and he was off. He was a very nice man; I liked him very much. We miss him now, be­cause in my estimation what we're still looking for the most are good music writers. We have good soloists and good ensemble players, but we're still short on really good writers.

PR: Do you think that McFarland's recordings turned commercial dur­ing the last years of his life?

BB: I wasn't seriously around Gary after about the middle sixties. We shared some office space with a couple of other guys for a long time. He liked to socialize very much. He liked the Cary Grant‑type of life ‑ the cashmere coats and the cocktail hour and all that ‑ as we all did but in varying degrees of assiduously persevering on it. He might have gotten turned, I think, a little bit to being something that would be a hit.
You know, it's a helluva thing. We were talking the other night with somebody about being true to what we do. If somebody were to come to me and say, "Here's a hundred thousand bucks, we'd like you to do this project," my only answer is that I've gotten myself down to such a place that I really wouldn't know what to do with the money. It would be nice to have, but it wouldn't change what I do. I've become, not monkish, but I've become pretty austere in my personal life. But it's a big decision.
If they say, "You wouldn't have to be that much different. Just do some of this, and just like that, just this one shot." And of course, that's a se­ductive drug-like atmosphere ‑ you find all these things are possible. You can go to here and there and wear this and bank this and drive this, you never could before, so just one more. It's the Las Vegas syndrome. I know people in Las Vegas that have been there twenty years that just went for six months to get some money together.
But it's a real‑life situation, and you can't say that somebody denies their art to do it. It's too complex for that. A lot of people remain true to their art because nobody likes what they do [laughter]. But they keep doing what they do, and later on ‑ a hundred years later ‑ somebody finds out, hey, they were really good. They were pure artists. Well, I think that might've been rot. They just couldn't sell anything they wrote. So it's once again a real‑life process, I think.

WE: You were signed with the Verve label in the sixties. There were so many Verve recordings in those days with basically the same roster of musicians. Were you all over-recorded? BB: I think we recorded too much then, probably. The band you heard was what they called the "A band" in New York. They had the best jazz people, that they thought were the best, anyway, that they would get for all the records. One thing we had then that we have a severe shortage of now, we had some very good producers: Creed Taylor first at ABC Para­mount, and later on at Verve, Bob Thiele did some good work. We had Jack Lewis in the early fifties and the middle fifties who did some great things at Victor and later on at United Artists. We had people to start projects for us and who had the funding. We have some people now with good ideas that have trouble getting money because the record business has become so catastrophic and such a really big business venture. But the producers then were really instrumental in giving us ideas. They'd think of a project and say, "What do you think of this?" And we would be off on it, so that was a great help.

WE: Have you done much studio work?.

BB: Yeah, all my life until about two years ago.

WE: Did you find it stifling?

BB: Well, I'll tell you, in the fifties it was fun because they had jazz‑type backgrounds. We had a Bobby Darin date, Al Cohn and Ralph Burns would write the arrangements. And we had a forty‑five‑piece band you could pat your foot to. But by the sixties, when rock & roll really began to hurt ...
As I went to California, I really felt I'd sunk into something because I went everywhere and nobody smiled, nobody joked or laughed, you never drank on a date. You never snuck out and got high or anything, you know. It was really serious business, and you were supposed to really act like you respected what you did. And for me, with my personality, it was just mur­derous, so I couldn't do it; I failed the studio work. A lot of people can do it ‑ work all day with earphones and do rock & roll and come out at night and play for five hours. They have my admiration and gratitude. I couldn't, you know. I just do what I do, that's all.

PR: In the sixties, we'd go to New York's Half Note one night to heat the quintet you co‑led with Clark Terry and return the next night to take in the John Coltrane Quartet. Did you and the members of your band ever exchange views with Coltrane?
BB: Not really, not between John and us. My recent experience tells me that people who are now about thirty‑five have a very reverential attitude towards those days, toward John and his music, because John is their hero, you know. The day after John died they ran a radio interview in New York, and Bill Evans was speaking of Miles's band and Miles's attitude towards Coltrane, which was supportive. Bill said the rest of us used to wonder why Miles hired him, because he wasn't playing too well. But Miles heard the true Coltrane.
So therefore, when I'd hear John, he'd play one tune for forty‑five minutes, and he'd play an awful lot of notes. I'd enjoy it up to a point. So my ears were responding ‑ I didn't feel reverential. He was another man in the same business. I probably should have been more reverential, but there wasn't cross‑pollinating between us because John was much more advanced than either Clark or I were. He was consciously trying to ad­vance as an artist, and Clark and I were doing what we did.
PR: Were there jam sessions in the sixties when younger players could get on the bandstand with you and test their mettle?

BB: No, I don't think so then. There weren’t the chances. When I first came to New York, I was twenty‑two years old, I played piano at a place on the Lower East Side, and it would loosely be called the Dixieland Place. And some nights the four or five horns would be Coleman Haw­kins, Pee Wee Russell, Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, and maybe Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz. One night we had a rhythm section of George Wallington, Baby Dodds, and Pops Foster, and I played trombone. So I got to play with a lot of different people.
My observation on somethin' that was true then that may not be true now, I think, could be interesting. When I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I became friendly with the guys in Duke Ellington's band because we did a couple of tours together. I was with either Mulligan or Getz. They were very warm and supportive, and I established, I guess, what the psychologists would call a "father‑son relationship," not quite that heavy. But they were fully grown up in my eyes: they were men, and they played like men and lived like men. I was very young, and they would come down gratuitously and say, "Now look," and we'd talk about stuff, rarely music. But we'd talk about the way to live your life or "Where you gonna settle in L.A.?' We'd rub each other, and we'd get warm over the process. So it was an older generation warming up a younger one, saying,
"It's OK, I approve of you, and I support what you do. Now, go out and do it."
They could have hated the way I played music, but they acknowledged me to be in their business, as John [Coltrane] and I, without saying any­thing, acknowledged [that we were] in each other's business. We didn't have to love each other's playing, but we were in the same area. There was no "He can't play," "He should play this way," or "He can't play at all." We were in the same business, and the guys in Duke's band taught me that, and Count Basie's also.

WE: Do you think that some of the younger so‑called avant‑garde play­ers today, like George Lewis, are extending the jazz trombone tradition?

BB: Well, sure. I just heard a bit a couple of years ago of a solo trombone album. Obviously the man can play. I don't, as much as I used to, say "Gee, he really can't play, I don't like that." I don't care what I don’t like, it's not important. I try to support what I do like, and what I do like are people who are trying to make things better, trying to find ways to ex­pand the language.
In George's case, he is working hard at what he does. People could sit down and say that he doesn't swing. I say, well, OK. There are some jazz musicians who don't swing, and I'm among'em sometimes, but what else does he do? Jazz is a language. It's now a way of thinking and writing. I'm beginning to write music for jazz orchestra that doesn't bear an awful lot of relationship to 4/4 swing, and it's going to get more and more that way. And I'm going to fight to have my music considered music by a jazz composer. 'Cause that's what I am.
If I were a classical ‑ this is varying it a bit, but I think it's explana­tory ‑ if I were a classical composer coming in to write jazz, obviously I would be unsuited. I would say all classical composers are unsuited to write jazz music. That is not their experience. That is not what their feet say. My feet say jazz music, so anything I write I think would come that way because that's what I am.
If somebody comes along in my world and wants to make jazz music better, I say go ahead. I don't have to like it, but I do have to encourage them to keep on doin' it, I think. That's my job, because out of that, you we ‑ I'll maybe explain something that I've come to feel, that all artists kinda work a general field, however big you want to make it in your mind. It's a field of earth. Our job is to go out every morning and work that field all day doing what we do. Once in a while, the musician, whoever it is, comes and drops a seed, and we get a Coltrane or a Charlie Parker or a Jelly Roll Morton or a Louis Armstrong. But the rest of us go out there and plow every day anyway. That's our job.
PR: Is your playing a way for you to find out more about your own identity?

BB: Yeah, well, it is for me, because I need to keep on top of things, you know. I'm a sober alcoholic, and I've been sober for about four years, and my penalty for not living my life in some kind of reasonable and advanc­ing way is probably not living.
So my choices are clear‑cut. I'm fortunate: I either live or die every day. It's not dramatic like that, but everybody's choice is life or death. So far, anyway, I opt to live, and my choices toward music are that way. And I've been, fortunately, given a clear‑cut choice. A lot of people have the pull between "Shall I be rich today and rich and famous tomorrow" and then "Thursday I'm gonna cut out this nonsense and settle down and really work hard for a couple of days." It's not important because I'm almost fifty‑one, and my time has become finite, as everybody's is. When you’re twenty‑one your time is finite, you know.
Yeah, I'm seeing things clearly, more clearly now for many reasons. That's why I explained the other thing ‑ the alcoholism thing. So a lot of things are clear and getting clearer. I'm in a very fortunate position hav­ing been where I have been to get where I am. I think that was worth it. So yes, I try to get more control over me, because that's going to give more control over what I do. Like Lee [Konitz] was talking about. That's why I admire him very much, because he's been an artist and some people are born that way, They just see artistically. It's taken me a long time to even get close to that. Now I'm working probably to where he's been, mentally.

An Interview at Mid-Career with Bob Brookmeyer- Part 1

Bob Brookmeyer has always been a man of strongly-held opinions and, after reading this interview from 1980 with Wayne Enstice & Paul Rubin from their Jazz Spoken Here: Conversations with 22 Musicians [New York: Da Capo Press, 1994, pp. 59-75], I’m sure you will agree that not much has changed in this regard.

In addition to explaining how he got started in music, he shares many revealing anecdotes about and the musicians and groups he has worked with, especially those from the 1950’s and 60’s, and discusses the Jazz scene in and around 1980.

Never one to shy away from expressing his views, he also “holds court” on such far-ranging subjects as teaching improvisational skills to the ‘current’ generation of Jazz players, going back to the source as the proper place to begin one’s education in a particular style of the music, and his views about what he personally needs to do in order for Bob Brookmeyer to have a future in Jazz.

Obviously, in the intervening decades since this interview was conducted, Brookmeyer has been doing what needed to be done and has been able to add many more years to an already distinguished career. During the past 20 years, Bob would move to Europe and concentrate on composing and arranging large pieces for some of the state-supported, resident orchestras in The Netherlands [The Metropole Orchestra] and Germany [The WDR Big Band]. He now maintains dual residences in the USA and Europe and is currently the director of the New Arts Orchestra based in Lubeck, Germany.

The following interview is [C] copyright protected, all rights reserved.

Deep‑toned and incisive, the playing of valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer is one of the most unmistakable sounds in jazz­. The only important jazz musician other than Juan Tizol [played valve trombone in Duke Ellington's orchestra from 1929 to 1944 and again from 1951 to 1953] to concentrate on the valve trombone, Brookmeyer is also an accomplished pianist and composer‑arranger.

Born in 1929, the Kansas City, Kansas, native studied piano and com­position at the Kansas City Conservatory. He began his professional career as a pianist in the early fifties, comping for various bandleaders, including Tex Beneke, Ray McKinley, Louis Prima, Claude Thornhill (with whom he played trombone and second piano), and Woody Herman. Brookmeyer started doubling on valve trombone in 1952, and in 1953 he did a year's stint with the Stan Getz Quartet that included the Paris Jazz Festival. It was not until the spring of 1954 when he replaced Chet Baker in Gerry Mulligan's West Coast‑style piano-less quartet, however, that Brookmeyer achieved national prominence.
Brookmeyer worked steadily with Mulligan's sextet and quartet until 1957, then finished the decade by playing with the Jimmy Giuffre 3 and free‑lancing as a player and a writer in New York for a year. He toured with Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band in 1960, contributing charts and taking key solos on trombone and occasionally piano. In 1961 he found a kindred spirit in trumpet player Clark Terry, and the two began a five‑year association co‑leading a popular and critically well‑received quintet. The series of recordings they made for the Mainstream label persuasively captured the solid, straight-ahead blowing, the fresh arrange­ments, and the contagious joy that were consistent features of this con­genial unit.


Brookmeyer was a charter member of the famed Thad Jones‑Mel Lewis Orchestra in 1965, dividing his chores between arranging and playing, and he found steady work as a band member on television's Merv Griffin Show. Beset by personal problems, Brookmeyer left New York in 1968 to resettle in southern California. For the next decade he did some studio work but was relatively inactive as a jazz musician.


Bob Brookmeyer came out of jazz retirement in 1978. He returned to New York and in 1979 began a long‑term relationship as composer-arranger and musical director of Mel Lewis' retooled big band. Although Brookmeyer has concentrated on writing over the last thirteen years (the American Jazz Orchestra premiered one of his works in 1986, making him the first composer to be so honored), he continues to tour and is particul­arly popular with European audiences. Since 1979 he has also released some memorable small‑group recordings on the Gryphon and Concord labels, which demonstrate that despite this versatile jazzman's devotion to composition, his gifts as an improviser and his abilities as a technically dazzling stylist have not diminished.

WE: We enjoy the humor in your music. Do you hear humor in today's

BB: Well, I think there's been a slight change. To me, there's a broader way to look at it. In the times, say, from the late twenties through the thirties and the early forties, we had a period of great individualists. We had Lester Youngs, Charlie Parkers, Thelonious Monks, Duke Elling­tons, and Count Basies, and I guess the magic of the gift made them very innovative in what they did. I think probably if you're extremely different you become very secure in what you do. So I would think that a sense of humor would be implicit in a way to face and deal with life.
In the sixties we had some very outstanding musicians, but we didn't have quite the individuals that we had before. I've talked this over with some friends of mine who are writers and who are painters, and I think there is a general, if you want to call it, a cultural malaise. I'm not looking down my nose at it‑it's a comment‑that we have very fine musicians now‑great musicians‑but the character of the timber of the land doesn't seem to be suitable right now for producing the great individuals et twenty or thirty or forty years ago. And I'm not one who looks back to the good old days; to me, today is a good old day. I think that maybe that's one of the reasons that the humor might be‑if it is missing - ­might be missing.

PR: One reviewer once said that "of all the dropouts from the ranks of active jazz men in the sixties few left less conspicuously than Bob Brook­meyer or were more missed." How do you respond to that?

BB: Well, when I moved to California I was in the process of dropping out of life. I was fairly ill at the time, and I went to California a sick man. I spent ten years there, and I got my health back. So it wasn't "I'm fed up, I quit." It was a confused "I wonder what's going wrong" or "what's going worse," and everything seemed to go worse. When I got my health back, things began to dramatically improve, and I am glad that they missed me.

PR: What was it like when you returned to New York?

BB: When I went back to New York I hadn’t been active there really for about fifteen years as a functioning jazz musician. So it was a new world to me. There were a whole generation of people around town who were playing and working that I had to get to know again, and they didn't care what I'd done. They wanted to know what I could do.



PR: Could you give us an example?

BB: I think the best example was Mel Lewis' band. They were all new to me. And I came down, and I was the old geezer who'd written some of the fifteen‑year‑old arrangements that they were playing. They could look at me and say, "Well, he did that," but that was no wedge for me in the door. I had to spend the first year and a half in New York getting to know them and saying, "Well, now look, here's what I do, what do you think of that?" So it was really reestablishing credentials, because not many people of the younger generation would say, "Gee, that's really great you played with Gerry Mulligan or Stan Getz." They couldn't care less, you know. If I'd played with maybe Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea or John Coltrane‑those were people who were important to them. So it was a different set of heroes and a different set of judgmental values.

WE: Did the response of those young band members strike you as nar­row‑minded?

BB: No. When I first started playing my life was Count Basie and Bill Harris and Woody Herman. I didn't like Duke Ellington. I thought the man was sloppy and out of tune. That's how much I knew when I was m my late teens. And so I had firm opinions. I used what attracted me. I didn't say, "Well, I should like I heard Stravinsky, and I liked that first, then I learned to like Bach, and then I learned to love Bach, and I learned to like Mozart and like Haydn, you know. You can't say to some­body, "This is the right way, read this Bible and you will feel better to­morrow." They have to find for themselves what they want.

WE: What do you think of young players that you meet in clinics?

BB: The general rap that I heard before I began to do any clinic work­ – and I've not done a great deal‑ is great ensemble, no solo. That has been somewhat borne up by my experience. Once again, I'm speaking from a very small frame of reference.
What I think is most needed now are some traveling improvisational teachers who can teach people to begin to play a song on a C‑major scale or make up a melody with four notes and make up another melody on four notes. To learn to instruct your mind to become an improvisational organ. You know, it's a skill. And then, when you start writing songs, you would naturally, I think, go around Lester Young and graduate to Charlie Parker to hear how things get refined and broken up.

WE: Do you think that improvisation has become a lost art?

BB: Well, it isn't a lost art, really. I think people imitate what's before them, that they find attractive, and what is being imitated now is a refine­ment of a basic. I have some friends in New York in their early thirties I advised to stop listening to Cedar Walton and Bill Evans and to Richie Beirach and whoever, and go back and listen to Bud Powell. This person wanted to be a hot piano player, "hot bebop piano player," end quote. I said. "Well, go back to where it began." If you listen to all of these other people they are reflecting what they heard in Bud Powell. It's like listening to Phil Woods to try to find out how Charlie Parker played. Phil Woods is a fantastic saxophone player, but we all listened to Charlie Par­ker to learn that lesson. So go back to the source.

PR: Let's turn to your early years. Since you were born in Kansas City, did the jazz scene there have any influence on you? BB: I was about eight or ten years old when I first heard Count Basie, so I wasn't gettin' around town too much then. My limit was about four or five blocks away from the house. The radio did [influence me], because we heard a lot of big bands. And I liked all the big bands. That was the closest thing to jazz music we could hear. I liked dixieland on the radio from Chicago.

When I got old enough to get around in the clubs, there was, I think at that time, a Kansas City sound from rhythm sections. It was a very smooth, fluid sound, much like Count Basie had. And I knew a few play­ers that had been, say, with Lionel Hampton that played that way, and they were magical to play with. The younger, white players tried to play like Max Roach or Buddy Rich. But from the black musicians that I was around a lot, I got more of a good feeling about the music.
When Charlie Parker left, the soloists were all gone. Right before I left, I worked a bit with Ben Webster. He had come back to town when I was about twenty. He came back for a few months. But it was pretty quiet by that time, and it's been, I think, fairly quiet since then.

PR: We read that you began on clarinet and played some piano before picking up the trombone.

BB: Well, it's a little out of sequence. I went from clarinet to trombone. I was shanghaied into playing trombone by my parents and the band di­rector that needed a trombone player. I wanted to be a trumpet player or a drummer, for which I'd saved money. So after being sold down the river, I didn't really care that much for playing slide trombone, and I learned quickly how to finger like a trumpet. That was my second choice of instrument, drums being first. I began to play the baritone horn all I could. And as soon as I could, I got a series of exotic valve trombones and finally, when I was eighteen, got an official one from Reynolds. So I wanted to be something else than a trombone player. I still do, but I would like to look like Robert Redford and sound like Walter Cronkite. So I'm a trombone player. That's my voice, I guess.
The piano came by accident, kind of. I wanted to write music also. When I was about thirteen I began to teach myself how to write. And by the time I was fifteen, I was selling arrangements to a territory band company in Omaha, Nebraska. I sent them a copied arrangement every other week for twenty bucks. And I then finally got a piano just before I was sixteen, so I began to learn officially how a piano went. And since valve trombone players didn't work too much in Kansas City, maybe one night a year, I began to learn how to play piano so I could support myself playing piano ‑ which I did. I supported myself in New York for my first year largely by playing piano.

WE: Your trombone playing abounds with vocal references. What's the source for that?
BB: The biggest impact on me as a trombone player was Bill Harris. He was a very emotive vocalese‑type player. That's the way I tried to play on slide trombone, and that has hung over. I would tell anybody that if you want to play something through an instrument that you should be able to sing it with some conviction and authority and pleasant feelings in your heart as you do it before you can play it. I think it's still a melodic singing process. Beating on something and singing are the things that we start with before we approach an instrument or a chord.

PR: Early on, you played with the Claude Thornhill and Tex Beneke bands. In your estimation, were those dance bands or jazz bands?

BB: I would consider Claude Thornhill very close to being a jazz band. Gil Evans had written almost the entire library, and we had Gene Quill and Brew Moore in the band, Teddy Kotick was the bass player, so we had a very good band. Tex Beneke was obviously a Glenn Miller‑type dance band. I was playing piano, Mel Lewis played drums, and Buddy Clark played bass, so we had fun. We had a band within a band. I did a lot of other dance band work. My first road job was playing piano with Orrin Tucker for six months. I got to travel, and I was in Chicago for three months, and I met an awful lot of people there.

PR: How old were you at the time?

BB: Twenty. And in California I met some people, so my philosophy was then to take the first job you can get leaving town, and when you're on the road get out and play all you can. That's what we did.
WE: Let's talk about J. J. Johnson. He is credited in the media as having been the translator of bop for the trombone. Is that true?

BB: I'm a friend and fan of J. J.'s. Yes, he was the man, as probably Dizzy Gillespie was, and Charlie Parker. The transition to playing bebop on trombone was very difficult, and J. J. solved it, I think, probably about as good as you could at that time.
Obviously, you don't have the upper range that is still desirable as you do in trumpet and alto. The timbre of trombone is dark and muddy and gets swallowed up by the overtone series of the drums and the bass. So it’s sometimes a fight for total survival ‑ acoustic survival ‑ down there. But he found really a good way to do it. J. still plays that way, and he plays better every year, so he found a true vein. He was an innovator. He’s the Charlie Parker of his instrument, I think.

PR: You played with Woody Herman.

BB: Briefly, yeah. All these big band stints were brief. In my first year in New York were stints with six or seven bands, I think. I went through a whole bunch of bands in a hurry. I didn’t like any of them. They were all bands past their prime, and I was looking for something, I guess. I'd had a chance to join Woody Herman a little earlier when I was in Kansas City, and that was the kind of band I wanted to be on ‑ the one with Doug Mettome. The bands I was on were not that good, so I quit. I figured I'd find something else. And I did.

WE: In the early fifties, didn't the melodic emphasis in your playing and Stan Getz's run counter to the bebop mainstream?

BB: The group in New York, of which Stanley became known as the leader, I guess ‑ he received the greatest notoriety ‑ would be Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Herbie Steward. They were the saxophone players I liked, because my instrument was very close to the tenor, so I heard as a tenor player. So I became, I guess, a Lester Young‑type player. Because that's what I liked. That's the way I liked to speak.
It's what we were attracted to. And I think most of the alto players that I was around liked to play like Charlie Parker. Very few Johnny Hodges alto players or Ben Webster tenor players in those days. We all, as now, we all rode the crest of what was popular. Those were the voices that we heard that we liked and understood. Much more than we'd have heard Chu Berry or Coleman Hawkins and said, "Oh, that really turns me on. That physically excites me." Lester Young physically excited us, and that process of making music was what physically excited us.
I was about ten years old when I first heard Count Basie live at the Tower Theatre in Kansas City. I heard six shows a day and saw a rotten movie five times [laughter]. It was the only time I ever cut school in my ­life: four or five times a year I spent seven days a week there. And in the morning for the first show the band would be behind the screen. And to hear the first note ‑ it was the severest physical thrill I think I've ever had. Drugs and sex and all that stuff ‑ it was just the most powerful thing. ­Playing still gets that way. It's still just viscerally the most thrilling thing that I can do, and most guys, I think, feel that way.
So this is to say that when you pick somebody to play like, it's not a selection process, like you sit down rationally and choose a car, it's what really moves you, and that man's playing really thrills you. And that's all there is to it ‑ it's like falling in love. That's the woman you must have at all costs. So it's the same process.

WE: That seems to contradict something Lee Konitz told us. He said that he consciously avoided listening to Charlie Parker because at first the music was too hard and then later because Parker's influence would have been too strong.

BB: I'm speaking for most of us. Lee is an exceptional man. He's a great artist, and there is a big difference. Lee has been aware of the process most of his life, I think. Jim Hall is another one. Jim Hall is aware of what goes into his music, and he treats his musical life much as a classic artist would. He keeps going back, enriching and working on fundamentals.

PR: In the fifties, the term chamber jazz emerged in reference to, for instance, the piano-less groups of Gerry Mulligan and Chico Hamilton. Was that term just a media invention?

BB: Yeah. Bebop is a shorthand; chamber jazz is a meaningless phrase.

PR: We figured as much. We know that you worked with Jimmy Giuffre with no piano and ...

BB: No drums and no bass. Just Jim Hall and Giuffre and I. We liked it. We stuck with that for a long time. The first three months we almost didn't make it. We were really scuffling in New York, and finally the booking got better. What I look back now and find is that we didn't know it then, but we were a truly avant‑garde band. We played everything from folk‑sounding music, which Jimmy was writing then, to ‑ we used to im­provise all the time. We had free improvisations every set.
And sometimes I played piano, and we'd sound like twelve‑tone mu­sicians. Sometimes we sounded like, I guess, a lot of the free music today, ‑ [we'd] bash and clatter about. There were different ways we liked to play. And not different ways we contrived to play so we could sound like some­bodv ‑ these were just ways that we would play if we were let alone to play. So that was it. It was nice. There was no word for it. They just said we were the guys with no bass player and no drummer [laughter]. But the words like chamber jazz don't mean much.
PR: Are there any good recordings from that period?

BB: We made two records‑ one when we first started [The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Trav’lin Light, Atlantic, January 1958] and one just be­fore we broke up [The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Western Suite, Atlantic, December, 1958]. If we'd have had tape recorders then like we do now, we would have had a lot of good tapes. But we don't.

PR: Was that a popular band?

BB: We did pretty well. My fondest memory is when we began to work in New York with the band we did eight straight weeks at the then Café Bohemia. And we started off, I think, against Wynton Kelly's Trio, and Wilbur Ware had a quartet, and somebody else ‑ the dynamite was get­ting hotter. And the last two weeks Miles [Davis] was there with a roar­ing band with John [Coltrane], and Bill Evans had just joined. And we thought, "We're really going to get killed because they're goin' to scream through us," because we at times were very soft, and "They're just gonna love Miles." Max Roach was down one night, and we were talking. He was saying that everybody talks through Miles and listens to you guys and it was the damnedest thing we ever heard.
I guess we were so soft and we were really serious about what we were doing that they'd stay quiet, I think, out of curiosity probably. But yes, I think people liked it, and they liked it not because we told them that we have a new way to play. They liked it because we sat down and played for them, and they appreciated what they heard. They weren't warned in front that it was going to be different. There weren't so many severe labels like they got to be later on. Like "this is really an eclectic experi­ence" and "this is gonna blow your mind." Rock 'n' roll hadn't come into the merchandising yet. So we were still just a jug and country and string band gonna be in your town next week.

WE: About 1960 you joined Gerry Mulligan's Concert jazz Band. How did that come about?

…. To be contuned in PART 2

Bill Moody's "Swinging Detective" - John Dunton

John Dunton is a past, regular contributor to www.pennilesspress.co.uk which is edited by Alan Dent. I came across this piece while looking for information about Bill Moody’s Jazz mystery novels featuring Evan Horne, aka, Mr. Dutton’s “Swinging Detective” and thought it might be of interest to Jazzprofiles’ readers.

Since Mr. Dutton concluded his essay, Bill Moody has published two more Evan Horne novels – Looking for Chet Baker [London: Walker & Company, 2002] and Shades of Blue [Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2008]. A brief synopsis of each of these works follows the conclusion of Mr. Dutton’s treatment which, as is the case with everything that appears on this blog, is 
[C] Copyright protected; all rights reserved.


THE SWINGING DETECTIVE
John Dunton

“Most crime novels follow a fairly conventional formula, especially when they use the stock device of building a series of stories around the activities of a specific investigator. The clues lead to more mysteries, the body count rises and a result is eventually achieved. The quality of the writing is often what distinguishes one novel from another. That and perhaps some sort of new or different background. Crime writing with a Jazz angle isn't new, though most of it has had a skewed vision of the music and its practitioners, and it's only with a writer like Bill Moody that the genre has come up with books that have a genuine feeling for jazz. Moody isn't an innovator in terms of the way he writes, and he sticks to the format described above, but he writes convincingly about the music.

He is, in fact, a jazz drummer, as well as a writer, and has had wide experience, including working with Earl Hines, Maynard Ferguson, Lou Rawls, and Annie Ross. He also works as a jazz critic and is the author of a factual book. The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad, which offers insights into the lives of musicians like Art Fanner, Phil Woods, and Red Mitchell. Moody has academic connections, too, and has taught at the University of Nevada and Sonoma State University in California.
His first novel, Solo Hand, introduced the character of Evan Horne, a jazz pianist who has injured his right hand and is unable to play. The book starts with an atmospheric description of him working at Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse club In Hermosa Beach, but it turns out to be a dream and ends: "The Lighthouse, I remind myself, no longer features jazz. I no longer play piano." This note of slight pessimism, and the feeling that not only has the individual career of the pianist been affected but that Jazz itself is increasingly being pushed aside, run throughout Moody's books generally. Chick Corea goes electronic and enters "the void of fusion," and "even Down Beat, once the jazz bible, now features more rock than Jazz in its pages."

Horne is pulled, reluctantly, into the role of private detective when a singer he once worked for is blackmailed. The singer has gone pop, which gives Moody the opportunity to put more comments about the decline of the music scene into Horne's mouth. He's particularly dry about country music, commenting that, "there is really only one country song. Most of them deal with prisons, ex-wives, trucks, dogs, and drinking. Variations on all these themes are sung by all singers who claim roots in Nashville or Mussel Shoals" I'm inclined to wonder what Horne would have thought had he met Charlie Parker, who was reputed to often play country records on the jukebox in Charlie's Tavern, a wall-known jazz hangout in New York. When taken to task about this by another musician, Parker replied: "the stories. Listen to the stories."


I don't intend to analyze the plots of Moody's novels As I said earlier, they follow an established pattern, with snappy dialogue, sharp confrontations, and twists and turns which sustain the suspense. And it all works efficiently and in a readable way. But the originality lies in the character of Even Horne and the detail provided about jazz. Bearing in mind that everything is seen from the point of view of Horne, with his jazz musician's tastes and prejudices, we are taken into a world of recording sessions, night-clubs, and so on. At one point Horne has to call at the Musicians' Union office in Los Angeles, and he notes the presence of "musicians dressed in designer jeans and golf shirts picking up recording cheques from television and film studios or session dates from any of the hundreds of record labels that have studios in Southern California. These are the best-paying gigs, but also the hardest to break into." Horne adds that a musician has to be highly adaptable to work in this kind of environment, and says: "The general rule is, the worse the music the better the pay."

Horne also meets individual musicians, some of them real people and some fictional characters, though often based on actual jazzmen. He seeks advice from a photographer who was, at one time, a wall-known drummer: "Carl Caye had always been one of my heroes. He was old enough to have played a supporting role in the bebop revolution and he'd recorded with some of the Fifty Second Street greats like Bird and Dizzy and Miles. He'd played on scores of record dates since then, and toured with just about everybody, including singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan." A basic knowledge of the history of modem jazz will tell you that this is Stan Levey, who was around New York in the 1940s, became a leading light on the West Coast in the 1950s, and did work with just about everybody. He was also a keen photographer, and when, In his words, "the music business changed," he turned to other things, such as running a successful photographic studio.
Real people mixed with fictional ones occur in the second Evan Horne mystery, Death of a Tenorman, the tenorman in question being Wardell Gray, who died in mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas In 1955. Horne, slowly getting back into shape again as a pianist, is offered a job playing in a shopping mall in Las Vegas. He's also asked by a friend who is a professor at the local university to do some research into Gray's death. Gray was one of the finest tenormen of the bop era and had recorded with Earl Hines, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Benny Goodman, and others. He was found dead in the desert outside Las Vegas while working there with Benny Carter's band.

A known drug-addict, Gray had been friendly with a dancer named Teddy Hale, also an addict, and it was said that Hale had panicked when Gray fell and broke his neck and had dumped the body. But rumours persisted that Gray had been murdered, though not by Hale, and the crime made to look like an accident. The Las Vegas police were not really all that interested in the death of a black, junkie jazzman, so no proper investigations seem to have taken place.
Looking into this mystery, Horne encounters people who don't want the events of the 1950s revived, not so much because they know how and why Gray died, but because there are other matters of a shady nature that they don't want brought to light. Horne's quest for information brings him into contact with local musicians and lets him observe what has happened to music in Las Vegas. Once known as a place where employment opportunities abounded because of the number of clubs, theatres, restaurants, and other establishments with live music, it has now. noticeably changed: "The music for the production shows at the major Strip hotels is now tape, replacing the live bands with music pre-recorded by musicians who are now out of work The majority of the other hotels that feature star policies - big-name singers and comedians - have reduced their house bands to skeletal combos or in some cases eliminated them altogether. The lounges for the most part hire self-contained groups with fewer and fewer musicians. Thanks to synthesizers, drum machines, and the awakening of the musician's union, Top Forty groups dominate the entertainment for audiences that are only killing time between gambling and eating." Needless to say, Horne keeps up his banter about country music and comments on the predictability of a singer's performance and how the audience laps it up.

Death of a Tenorman mentions a couple of jazz clubs in Las Vegas, which turn out to be real places. Moody's book about Jazzmen who worked in Europe has a chapter about baritone-saxist Jay Cameron who, when he returned to the USA, lived In Las Vegas for a time and played at a club called the Hobnob, "a haven where musicians could stop by and sit in after performing for Strip hotel shows." It closed as a jazz spot In 1992. There are also references to the Four Queens Hotel and Monday night jazz sessions run by a man called Alan Grant, who Is an actual person who tried to keep the jazz spirit alive In Las Vegas. The parallel investigation - of past and present - also plays a part in The Sound of the Trumpet, with Horne asked to authenticate some tapes which are supposedly by trumpeter Clifford Brown, who was killed in a road accident in 1956. The action again takes place in and around Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with the tapes much sought after by collectors and the competition leading to death. Real people are also present, with vibraphone player Dave Pike described at work in a club, and tenorman Jack Montrose, who recorded with Brown, asked to listen to the tapes and give his opinion about their authenticity. Other musicians and fans listen to them, and the book neatly highlights how even the most knowledgeable amongst them are uncertain about whether or not they feature Brown's playing or that of another similarly-styled musician from the 1950s.

There is a minor technical variation in the structure of The Sound of the Trumpet in that short chapters describing Brown's presumed activities on the night of his death are inserted into the narrative.. I say "presumed activities," because although the basic facts are well-known enough Moody invents conversations and minor situations to construct a plausible picture of what might have happened.

I've not referred to all the recordings by a variety of artists mentioned in Moody's books. Home listens to the radio when he's driving, and he plays cassettes, CDs, and LPs when at home. He has to listen to old records to try to obtain information which might be relevant. And people he visits often have music playing. Numerous names crop up, from Chet Baker to Miles Davis to Horace Parlan to Tadd Dameron. A lot of pianists are mentioned, which is natural enough In view of Horne's own involvement with the instrument, and his injury which makes him constantly aware of what he'd like to do and what, in fact, he can do.

Bird Lives! the most recent Moody novel, opens with Horne performing at a jazz club in Culver City as a substitute for a delayed (and real) Monty Alexander. He plays well, is approached by someone from a small record-company, and begins to think he's almost back on form. But there's a report on T.V. that a saxophonist named Ty Rodman has been stabbed to death. Horne doesn't think much of Rodman: "Ty Rodman and I don't travel in the same circles. He's one of a half-dozen sax players who’ve fused blues riffs with a rock beat and turned it into a fortune while breathing down Kenny G's neck." A friend In the police contacts Horne and asks for help with some clues. The slogan Bird Lives I has been scrawled in blood on a mirror and a record by Parker left playing at the scene of the crime. It also happens to be March 12th, the anniversary of Bird's death in 1955. And the police tell Horne that a couple of other fashionable musicians in the fusion style have died in similar circumstances.
Horne, despite his misgivings, is drawn into the investigation, and his activities give him plenty of opportunities to air his views about "lights-out jazz," or whatever name is given to these kind of repetitive and watered-down contemporary sounds. Horne describes it as music that's "known in the trade as fusion, smooth Jazz, almost pop music," and his uncompromising opinions lead to some amusing encounters with policemen who can't understand what's wrong with it. When asked why performers of smooth Jazz make more money than straightforward jazzmen, Horne replies: "The same reason writers like Stephen King and Danielle Steele make more money than John Updike or Saul Bellow. Mass market. They appeal to a lower common denominator."



He listens to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans at home, hears Dexter Gordon on his car radio, and thinks about clubs like the Jazz Workshop and the Blackhawk in San Francisco. The Blackhawk had an eccentric owner and was hardly luxurious: "A leaky roof, wooden tables, and hard chairs, but acoustics so good the Modern Jazz Quartet could work there without microphones. And Guido left the musicians alone. The only important thing was the music, and now, like so many jazz meccas -Birdland, The Five Spot, Shelly's Manne Hole - the Blackhawk was gone." As a contrast, and as part of the investigation, Horne has to make an appearance with a semi-rock band at a large open-air event: "Buster stamps his foot for the tempo, and we're under way. I see my hands on the keyboard, but between the crowd noises and the roar of amps and speakers, I can't hear a note. The ear-splitting guitar screams, the drums pound, and the drone of Buster's bass resonates and slaps against the plastic canopy covering the stage. A three-chord vamp is all we have to play while the guitarist bends strings and sends his body into quasi-convulsions for nearly five minutes."



It's obvious that although Bill Moody is writing crime novels he uses them for some interesting comments on jazz and the general state of music today. In Bird Lives! a cynical and successful saxophonist questions Horne about his dedication to bebop: "Shit, let your hair grow a little more, get funky, and I could get you into some big bucks See, you don't get it, man. Bebop is dead. Smooth Is where it's at. It's on the radio. It's In Tower Records. Hell, I'm doing a TV commercial next week. Most of the people who buy CDs don't even know who Cannonball is, much less Bird." I suppose, too, that Moody, through Horne, is also reflecting on society in general and not just the music it listens to. The idea that it's money and success that counts and not any kind of dedication to something worthwhile is sadly all too prevalent in all walks of life. Evan Horne is not unlike Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in attempting to preserve some sort of integrity in a corrupt and hostile world.



I've not made any claims for Bill Moody's novels as great or significant literature, but within their chosen framework they do their job efficiently and have the added attraction of ringing true about jazz. Even Horne is a believable character, possibly even to the point where someone not sharing his musical ideas might think him arrogant. But if, like me, you do share his ideas and tastes then you should find him immensely appealing. Out of curiosity as I wrote this piece I tuned into Jazz FM and heard a smooth saxophone riffing over a rippling and repetitive rhythm, and I could imagine Even Horne's response to the lack of imagination and spontaneity in the whole performance. And if you can think about how a fictional character might respond to a real situation then it seems to me that the writing has succeeded.”




NOTE:
Solo Hand was published by Slow Dancer Press, London, 1999. It was originally published in the USA in 1994 by Walker Publishing. Walker also published Death of a Tenorman in 1995, The Sound of the Trumpet in 1997, and Bird Lives! in 1999. Bill Moody's The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad was published by the University of Nevada Press, 1993. From Publishers Weekly – Looking for Chet Baker – 2002 – Walker & Company
"I'm a pushover for minor keys, minor chords, minor blues. Always have been," says jazz pianist and amateur detective Evan Horne. "I was drawn to those players and composers for whom minor keys and blues-drenched creations were a way of life." A blues-drenched creation aptly sums up Moody's sad and mellow Evan Horne mystery, his fifth (after 1999's Bird Lives!), in which his suffering hero, still recovering from the aftereffects of the violence of earlier cases, decides to get away and takes some gigs in Europe. In London, Horne meets an old friend, Ace Buffington. An English professor who needs to publish one more book to achieve tenure, Ace wants Horne to help him research real-life jazz great Chet Baker. In 1988, Baker fell (or was pushed) from his hotel window in Amsterdam, i.e., he died "under mysterious circumstances." Horne has no interest in more detective work, but when he gets to Amsterdam, he discovers that Ace has disappeared. Since the police express little interest in finding the missing professor, Horne is obliged to go looking for his buddy himself. Ace's trail parallels that of Chet Baker's last days, so Horne has to learn a lot more about Baker, his legendary talent, his tragic addiction to drugs. Moody does a wonderful job of re-creating the man and his times. For anyone interested in jazz, this is a must. For anyone just interested in a good mystery, this is just what the coroner ordered. Agent, Philip G. Spitzer. (Mar. 13)Forecast: As a jazz drummer and respected critic in the music world (Howard Mandel, president of the Jazz Journalists Association, and Dick Conte, of San Francisco's KCSM/KKSF, supply blurbs), the author is well positioned to push this latest jazz mystery to the obvious crossover audience.


From Library Journal


Series narrator/sleuth Evan Horne has success playing jazz piano in Europe after recovering from an injury to his hand. He winds up in Amsterdam, stays at the same hotel where some 11 years earlier jazz musician (and junkie) Chet Baker mysteriously fell to his death from an upper window, and becomes concerned about the disappearance of a friend researching Chet's life. Horne's own search involves a local jazz archive, a marijuana "restaurant," other American expatriate musicians, and frequent narrative diversions into the convolutions of jazz. Intricately described, carefully paced, and gently suspenseful, this is fitting for most collections. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Shades of Blue – Poisoned Pen Press – 2/15/2008 - From Library Journal After several months of successful work in London and Amsterdam with American expatriate Fletcher Paige, Evan Horne returns to the states and settles in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he reunites with his girlfriend, FBI agent, Andie Lawrence. And Evan quickly makes inroads into the Bay Area jazz scene. Life is good until a phone call from a Los Angeles attorney turns his life upside down. Evan’s old friend and former mentor, pianist Calvin Hughes, has died, and named Evan as his sole beneficiary. Evan is shocked to learn that Hughes has left him his small Hollywood house, money, and all his possessions. But when Evan begins to play through some hand-written sheet music, he recognizes one as a song from the landmark Miles Davis recording Birth of the Cool, and another from Kind of Blue, arguably one of the most important recordings in modern jazz. Was Calvin Hughes the un-credited composer of one or both of these tunes, or was it simply Hughes’s transcriptions from the recordings? In addition, Evans finds a cryptic note, and a photo taken almost 40 years earlier—a young Cal with his hand on a baby carriage. Both are taped to the bottom of a dresser drawer. A friend of Cal’s Lisa Gaines will continue to take care of Milton and rent from Evan. Evan is soon on a whirl-wind journey across the country to find answers from his family and to confront his mother. What was her relationship with Calvin Hughes? And just how did Jazz come into the equation?

The Improbability of the Clarke Boland Big Band - Part 2

Between 1967 and 1969 the CBBB recorded a series of fine albums, including Faces, Latin Kaleidoscope (with Phil Woods) Fellini 7 1/2 and Off Limits for the MPS label which were excellent showcases for the arranging and compositional talents of Francy Boland and for the band's exceptional 'togetherness'.

The vintage year of the Clarke‑Boland Band was 1969 and by common consent the peak performances of the band's career were heard ‑ and, happily, recorded ‑ during an unforgettable two‑week engagement at Ronnie Scott's Club in London from 17 February to 1 March. As I wrote at the time, if there has to be one set of recordings, from all of the band's repertoire on disc, selected to stand as a monument to the finest jazz ensemble to come out of Europe, then it has to be the thirteen tracks and two albums from that 1969 Ronnie Scott’s Club date.

The band broke attendance records at the club and, says Campi, only then did the musicians really feel the full extent of the power of which they were capable. To have the opportunity of playing together night after night for two weeks made it possible to achieve a rapport and a mutuality of feeling that even this intuitively integrated band had not equaled hitherto.

By this time the CBBB had an additional drummer. Recruiting a second drummer for a band that has Kenny Clarke in its rhythm section would seem to be setting a new standard in futility. But it worked. British drummer Kenny Clare, a noted session musician, with excellent technique and good reading ability, had first come into the band as a sub when Klook had other commitments. He handled the job so well that he was taken on the 'permanent staff.’ There are various explanations as to why this happened and, in all probability ‑ as is usually the case ‑ there is an element of truth in most of them.

Whenever it was suggested to Klook there was one drummer too many in the band, he vigorously disagreed. Two drum-heads, he argued, are better than one. He told Max Jones in a Melody Maker interview published on 15 March 1968:

It came about because of my teaching. From my experience with students I thought that maybe drummers can play together without being noisy or confusing. So I tried it out at the Selmer school in Paris and found it worked well.

Between the two of us, I think that Kenny and I can play anything in the world ... He is someone who thinks exactly the same way I do about drumming. He's one of the most intelligent drummers I've ever met ... We're two soul brothers.

I would suggest that this may be another example of Kenny's tendency to retrospective rationalization. Ronnie Scott's recol­lection is that Kenny Clare's presence in the band was in­tended to take some of the pressure off Klook, 'who wasn't the greatest reader in the world. The arrangement allowed Kenny Clarke to coast from time to time ‑ and it worked because they were so compatible. It would have been disastrous otherwise.' And in best Ronnie Scott style he instanced the massive all‑star band organized by Charlie Watts in 1987 which had not two drummers but three. 'Someone asked the vibraphone player what he thought of the tempo of a piece the band was rehearsing. "Fine," he said, "I liked all three of them."'

Kenny Clare recalled his first gig with the band when he talked to Crescendo's Tony Brown in May 1968. He had made a good impression and was asked by Gigi Campi to play alongside Klook on the next date.

They gave me a couple of notes on vibraphone which I invariably played wrongly ‑ well, they figured that I'd always be available to do anything that Klock wouldn't be free to do. I could do sundry percussion. Then one number was a Turkish march thing and I played snare drum. When it was played back it sounded very much together, like one drummer. They talked it over. Next time I came, would I bring my drums as well? See if we could make it with both of us playing. It worked ‑ and it's been like that ever since.

There is no doubt that driving the CBBB took a lot of energy and endurance and the addition of Clare not only added to the rhythmic foundation but also spread the heavy percussion load.

Playing along with the greatest drummer in the world was a pretty intimidating experience for Clare. He once told me of the first gig with Klook in Ostend in 1967 when the dual drumming exercise became a nightmare. 'Try as I would at rehearsal, I just couldn't get it together. The drums were fighting each other.'

He left the theatre after the rehearsal full of gloom and depression and decided that the best thing to do for the sake of the band would be to slip silently away. He went to book a flight back to London ‑ but there wasn't one. He shrugged resignedly, walked around the town for a couple of hours, then finally made his way back to the theatre for the concert. 'I started the first number full of apprehension ‑ but from the very first beat, it all came together miraculously. I just couldn't believe it!'

And that was the beginning of a beautiful percussion friendship. From then on, Clare became an integral part of the rhythm section and missed only one gig with the band. Strangely enough, Clare said he was never able to play the same away from the band. 'There are many drummers who would love to get the same springy kind of beat that Klook gets. I'm one of them. When I'm with him, I can play that way without even thinking about it. As soon as I'm away from him, I can't do it any more.'

True to character, Klook gave every encouragement to Kenny Clare and undoubtedly one of the important reasons why they worked so well together was that they had such a warm relationship off the stage, as well as on.

British drummer Frank King, reviewing the two Polydor albums that resulted from the Scott engagement, wrote in Crescendo: 'The perception and telepathy between Kenny Clarke and Kenny Clare is magnificent. They have such a fantastic togetherness that in places it is miraculous.'
With Jimmy Woode unavailable, Ronnie Scott's bassist, Ron Mathewson, was brought in for the club engagement and with Clare, Scott, Tony Coe (on tenor and clarinet), Humble and Tony Fisher (trumpet, depping for Jimmy Deuchar), the British contingent in the band was as big as the American. Yugosla­via's Dusko Gojkovic was recruited into the trumpet section.

Gigi Campi had to miss the first week of the engagement, but when he walked into the club on the Monday of the second week, Johnny Griffin told him, 'Gigi, you're gonna hear some shit tonight!' Campi sat at a table with writer Bob Houston, my wife and myself and beamed as his 'family' took the stage. ('Italians, he'd explained to me once, 'always try to wrap everything up in a sense of family ‑ and that's how I regard the band.') Campi had heard practically every note the band had played since its debut. But when it hit, with a high‑voltage version of 'Box 703', Campi turned to us wide‑eyed and said, 'Wow!' Later he told me: 'I couldn't believe how good the band sounded. When they played the tutti in "Now Hear My Meanin' " I got goose pimples all over.'

For Ronnie Scott those two weeks were undoubtedly one of the major highlights in the history of the club, as well as being musically inspirational. 'It was marvellous. People used to applaud in the middle of the arrangements ‑ showing their appreciation of some of the tutti or soli passages. It was really one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.'
The year 1969 was certainly a banner one for the Clarke­ Boland Big Band. It played the Pori Festival in Finland that summer and Lars Lystedt, Down Beat's Scandinavian corres­pondent, described the condition of the audience as 'spell­bound'. In September the band shared the bill at Rotterdam's De Doelen concert hall with the mighty Thad Jones‑Mel Lewis Orchestra, and reporting for Britain's Melody Maker, Jan van Setten told of 1,780 people 'exploding into thunderous acclaim after the four‑and‑a‑half‑hour marathon concert'. It was a real battle of the bands, he said. 'Who won? Music.'

At the Prague Jazz Festival in October, the CBBB 'totally eclipsed' the Duke Ellington band, according to Melody Mak­er's Jack Hutton. 'This year's Prague Festival proved one thing conclusively to me ‑ the Kenny Clarke‑Francy Boland Big Band is the finest big band in existence,' he wrote.
And after a Paris concert in that same month, Jacques B. Hess of Le Monde wrote:

'The CBBB is a triumph, at the highest level of talent and professionalism.
The warmth, the commitment and the enthusiasm of the musicians is refreshing and a marked change from the lackluster and blasé perform­ances of the Ellington and Basie bands which we have become used to over the last few years.'
In October 1970 the CBBB was back in Britain for a three‑week engagement at Ronnie Scott's and at this time Carmen McRae came to London to record with the band in the Lansdowne Studios. With a minimum of rehearsal time, the superbly professional ex‑Mrs. Clarke managed astonishingly well with some difficult scores, especially considering that six of the eight tunes recorded were new to her. The whole session was completed in eight hours. It was named after a Boland-­Jimmy Woode song on the album, 'November Girl'.

There followed a three‑week European tour which had Dizzy Gillespie as special guest and which culminated in an appearance at the Berlin jazz Festival. But the tour was not a great success musically because the band had to submerge its own personality to play a programme that was more closely associated with Dizzy.

In fact there were now signs that the band was beginning to run out of steam and, no doubt, one of the factors which undermined its momentum was Campi's failure to conclude an agreement to take the band to the United States. It was a great disappointment for Kenny Clarke ‑ and for all concerned with the CBBB. But, for a variety of reasons ‑ predominantly financial ‑ plans to have the band appear at the Village Gate in New York, followed by concerts in Boston and Chicago, an appearance at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival and a tour of Canada, did not come to fruition.

'I'd really love to take the band on the road in the States/ Kenny Clarke told me in 1967, 'just to prove the point about the high standard of European musicians.' But it was not to be.

What finally caused Kenny Clarke to acknowledge that the days of the CBBB were numbered, however, was the untimely death of Derek Humble on 2 February 1971 at the age of thirty‑nine. 'The band was never the same without Derek/ Kenny said, voicing a sentiment that was shared by the whole CBBB family.

In June 1971 the band made its last recording, Change of Scenes, with Stan Getz as guest soloist and, in March 1972 in Nuremberg, played its last concert date when, according to Gigi Campi, 'it was a sorry shadow of its former self'. He went on:

Johnny Griffin came to me after the concert, and virtually read the funeral service. The following morning I had a long discussion with Francy and Klook to see if we could keep the band going. I still thought there might be a possibility of pulling off an extensive tour of the USA which could have regenerated the spirit of the band. So some days later I went on a round trip of Europe to try to put the band together again. I called on Idrees, Nat Peck, Tony Coe and Johnny Griffin and finished up in Montreuil with Francy, Mook and Benny Bailey. And finally I realized that it wasn't going to happen ...

And that's when even Campi's apparently unquenchable enthusiasm gave out. It was April 1972 and the Clarke‑Boland Big Band had breathed its last.

But, as Bob Houston, who was closely associated with the band through most of its lifetime, wrote afterwards, though the demise was a matter for regret, that the band had existed at all was a matter for celebration ‑ 'as with all phenomena which survive on excellence against the tides of current fads and fashions ... The CBBB was one of the most enjoyable mani­festations of the last decade in jazz. Be grateful that it happened at all, and that we have it on record to enjoy.'

And Kenny Clarke said, 'It was a fantastic, unique experi­ence from which I learned a lot. It was not only a great band, it was a community, a congregation of friends ‑ and one of the happiest bands I've ever worked with.'

The Clarke‑Boland Big Band left a rich legacy of its reper­toire on record. In the eleven years of its existence it recorded thirty‑nine albums.

Kenny Clarke's role in the CBBB was not only the obvious one of being the rhythmic dynamo; he was important as a co‑leader in his own reserved and unobtrusive way. He led by example; he had the total respect of all the musicians who ever played in the band, and that respect, coupled with respect for one another, was what kept the band so tight and its musical standards so high.
Says Johnny Griffin,

The CBBB couldn't have lasted with a Benny Goodman or a Buddy Rich leading it ‑ because there were too many bandleaders in the band. It wouldn't have worked if the leaders had been dictators. I mean, the vibrations from the egos! My God, imagine ‑ three trumpet players all Leos: Idrees Sulieman, Benny Bailey and Art Farmer. It was like an armed truce. It was amazing with all those different characters and the strength in each one. And it would mesh! There was no one on the band that you could pick on! It was really like a zoo, with tigers, lions and gorillas in it!

'I never met anyone who stayed so calm/ Kenny Clare said of Klook in an interview with Crescendo's Tony Brown. 'You should come along to a recording session. All pandemonium let loose, everybody talking or blowing like a bunch of madmen. Kenny never raises his voice or gets excited. He is a wonder.'


Ronnie Scott confesses that he was always a little bit in awe of Kenny Clarke. 'But he was always so amiable and pleasant. He didn't come on like your typical extrovert bandleader. He just sat there, and played ‑ and that was enough.'

Gigi Campi remembers times when Kenny would arrive late for rehearsal or recording due to plane or train delays. 'We would all be waiting in the studio ‑ and as soon as Kenny walked in you were aware that there was suddenly more power in the room. His presence ‑ quiet, dignified and calm ‑was such a positive force.'

Jimmy Woode says that it was simply not Klook's way to get out in front of the band and pep‑talk the musicians. 'He might speak quietly. to you individually ‑ but his leadership was implicit in his solid integrity. Francy and Klook were not exactly charismatic leaders like Duke.'

Ron Mathewson remembers Klook as a man who comman­ded respect from all the members of the band without any attempt to pull rank: 'He was really helpful to me when I came into the band for the gig at Ronnie's. He said, to me, very nicely, "Keep a straight four. Let the guys feel you, because you're new. They want to trust the rhythm section. Just play it cool and let it happen."'

Francy Boland's co‑leadership consisted entirely of creating the band's inimitable book, writing not for the instruments but for the musicians, and providing support and solos from the keyboard that were consistently streets ahead of his own evaluation of them. Boland carries self‑effacement almost to the point of self‑erasure. He told me, 'Kenny didn't really have a lot to do with the music. And I wanted it that way because I was the arranger.'

And without any apparent awareness of the sublime irony of a Boland being struck by someone else's inclination to maintain a low profile, he added, 'Kenny was a very reserved person and he kept his thoughts to himself. He never express­ed enthusiasm when I came in with a new arrangement; though he might give me a compliment ‑ a small compliment ‑from time to time.'

Clarke and Boland, during their association together, were never in any danger of engulfing one another in explicit mutual admiration. But had it not been there in some abund­ance, the band simply would not have flourished. Whatever Boland may feel about the measure of respect and appreciation he received from Kenny, Gigi Campi remembers an incident which speaks eloquently of Klook's high regard for his partner.

The band was rehearsing and swinging like a demon ‑ without a drummer. Kenny was standing out in front, rolling a joint. Suddenly he looked up in mock disbelief and genuine joy, and said, 'This band doesn't need a drummer. That Belgian motherfucker swings it just with his writing, goddam it!

'For Kenny,' Campi adds, 'there were two great arrangers in Tadd Dameron and Francy Boland.'