Freddie Gruber 1927-2011: A Drummer’s Drummer

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

  

"Drummers begin by whacking things for the thrill of turning serenity into noise. Over time, they learn rudiments, tools by which most rhythms are fundamentally formed. Drummers grow their abilities to keep rhythm and, with positive experiences, they learn to consider the aesthetic effect; how rhythm seduces us. Drummers who play long enough re-learn, or re-invent, themselves to change with the times. Musical growth is often cyclical; seldom does it go in straight lines."

- Gregory J. Robb

“The drum stick should be an extension of your hand. The motion should be as natural as waving a cap or to someone on the street.”

- Freddie Grubber

“Get out of your own way. Don’t think, just play it as its lays.”

- Freddie Grubber

Every instrument has one; a “Mr. Fix-it.”

Their reputations are carried word-of-mouth throughout the Jazz community.

They are the people to see when you hit the proverbial brick wall and can’t get into your hands what you are hearing in your head.

For drummers, names such as “Murray Spivak,” “Billy Gladstone,” and “Freddie Gruber” come to mind.

These guys had the ability to literally transform your playing.

When you went to see him, Murray wouldn’t let you play anything but snare drum.

He’d sit back and observe while you read and played written exercises based on the 26 rudiments from the George Lawrence Stone or Jim Chapin books on drumming techniques.

Sometimes he would ask you to do certain things over again with his eyes never straying from watching your drum sticks in motion on the snare drum.

Then he would make a suggestion or two about grips or hand placements and everything just fell into place . No more barriers; things just started to flow again.

Freddie Gruber, who died on October 11, 2011 at the age of eighty-four [84], was another clinical wizard who had earned a revered place in the Pantheon of Drummer Gods.

Freddie had the uncanny ability to get inside your technique, both analytically and intuitively, and make suggestions that would literally elevate your playing to another dimension.

Freddie could free you; he could liberate you, often times while disguising the fact that he was “teaching” you by telling you parables, or fables or old war stories.

The next thing you know – shazam! – no more hang-ups.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it would be nice to remember Freddie on these pages with the following piece by Bill Milkowski.

© -Jazz Times; Bill Milkowski. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

NOVEMBER 2004

Freddie Gruber: None of a Kind

By Bill Milkowski

Freddie Gruber and Buddy Rich are driving along at 3 a.m. in Palm Springs, heading to a 7-Eleven near Rich's pad to get a late night nosh. They're kibitzing back and forth, as old-school New Yorkers tend to do, when all of a sudden Rich blurts out, "Jesus Christ, Gruber! You're one of a kind, man!"

One year later, Rich and Gruber are driving along that same stretch of road in Palm Springs, heading to the same 7-Eleven at three in the morning when out of nowhere Buddy blurts out, "I changed my mind. You're none of a kind!"

This is one of many classic Freddie Gruber stories-apocryphal or not-that many of his students like to tell.

But Rich was right.

Anyone who has ever gigged with, studied with or even encountered the colorfully cantankerous Freddie Gruber - as I did in a marathon late-night interview session at his midtown Manhattan pad-understands that he is indeed none of a kind. And though he may be regarded largely as irascible and enigmatic, Freddie remains one of the most widely revered figures in the drumming world.

Active on New York's 52nd Street scene during the late '40s, Gruber has for nearly 50 years been primarily behind the scenes as a world-renowned drum teacher. Dispensing the Zen-like wisdom of Yoda with the caustic delivery of Don Rickles, Freddie has enlightened and altered the playing habits of countless students, including Bill Goodwin, John Guerin, Jim Keltner, Peter Erskine, Adam Nussbaum, Ian Wallace, Anton Fig, Rod Morgenstein, Kenny Aronoff, Neil Peart, Clayton Cameron, Dave Weckl and Steve Smith. As drummer Nussbaum notes: "Freddie has helped me become more physically aware of what's happening with my body and the instrument. He's really opened me up."

Vital Information bandleader Steve Smith adds, "Freddie was able to help me play with a much more graceful and natural approach, which translates to a more relaxed and swinging time feel and the ability to easily play my ideas. When he comes to my gigs and I'm getting in the way of the music or trying to force something, he'll nail me on it, and he'll always be right."

Or as Jim Keltner puts it, "Freddie is a veritable walking book of musical history and one of the few remaining links to the most innovative era in drumming."

Born on May 27, 1927, Gruber grew up in an East Bronx tenement. Living in that ethnically mixed neighborhood, Freddie quickly soaked up the clave feel until he had the Afro-Cuban rhythm in his bones. "I picked up the Latin thing from playing in the backyards on soup cans and from hearing it every day on the way to school. That was the language of the neighborhood and I understood that language. It helped keep me from getting beat up."

Starting out as a tap dancer gave Gruber a strongly ingrained sense of swing, which he applied to his drums. Along the way he studied with some great teachers, including Henry Adler, Freddie Albright and Mo Goldenberg, while apprenticing with pianist Joe Springer, who was also Billie Holiday's accompanist at the time. Gruber would later put in nine months of roadwork with Rudy Vallee and debut on 52nd Street with Harry "The Hipster" Gibson at the Three Deuces. Meanwhile, his penchant for subdivisions and polyrhythms behind the kit began drawing favorable notice from members of the jazz press.

"The Shape of Drums to Come," a 1947 Metronome article by Barry Ulanov, raves about the hotshot 19-year-old drummer from the Bronx: "This kid is the end, or anyway the beginning...something like a cross between a Belgian percussionist and Buddy Rich, with overtones of the music of Edgard Varese, that astonishing composer for the drums. It's a handsome amalgam of all the great schools of percussion-primitive, sophisticated, old, modern; and it jumps!"

Two years later, when he was playing in a quartet led by clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and also featuring guitarist Tal Farlow, Gruber was included in a 1949 Down Beat roundup, "Listing Top Drummers," that stated: "His ability to play multiple rhythms, his constant playing behind the band and what seemed like his impeccable taste in his choice of what to play, mark him as a musician to watch closely."

The legendary drum teacher Jim Chapin and jazz writer Ira Gitler confirm that Gruber was indeed way ahead of his time with his freewheeling approach to the kit. As Chapin said in a recent instructional DVD: "Forty-five years have gone by, and nobody has caught up to Freddie's solo style yet. He was the first one, to my knowledge, to play in a polyrhythmic way."

Although Gruber's years in New York during the golden years of the 52nd Street scene are filled with rich tales of innumerable gigs, sessions, rehearsals and loft jams-a veritable bebop highlight reel-one of his more memorable musical situations was an all-star big band that came together briefly in 1949. The group was comprised of such heavyweights as Charlie Parker, Zoot Sims, Red Rodney, Frank Rosolino, Al Cohn and Al Porcino. "That was basically a rehearsal band, but the problem was you couldn't control these guys because everybody was a star and everybody was stoned out of their minds. The best moments happened when everybody went to the bathroom to get high, leaving just the rhythm section and Bird to play. That's when it really took off." (Today, only bootleg recordings exist of this mythical rehearsal group.)

Around this same time, Gruber also played several private parties at the home of New York photographer Milton Greene (famed for his iconic shots of a young Marilyn Monroe, among other celebrity subjects). Some of the other participants at those bop-fueled jams included Bird, Dizzy Gillespie, Sims, Cohn, Rodney and Allen Eager. A few of those 1949 jams at Greene's place were documented and some are on a two-CD Allen Eager compilation, In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee (Uptown, 2003).

From 1952 to 1955, Gruber maintained a special friendship with drummer Philly Joe Jones. He was living in Greenwich Village during that period and gigging regularly at the nearby Riviera restaurant, where he played strictly brushes in a piano trio with Roger "Ram" Ramirez (composer of "Lover Man"). The subsequent pianists on that Riviera gig were George Handy and then Gil Evans, a close friend from their Claude Thornhill big-band days. Gruber also played briefly at Snooky's with bassist Oscar Pettiford while jamming and gigging informally with a host of "under the table guys" including saxophonists Brew Moore, Dave Schildkraut and Eddie Shu (who also worked as a ventriloquist when he wasn't playing in the Gene Krupa Trio) and cult-figure trumpeter Tony Fruscella, whom Gruber calls "the heart and soul of what lyricism is all about."

But by 1955, Gruber's long-standing heroin habit had gotten the best of him. "By that time I was down to 92 pounds and I couldn't get further than the corner to see my connection," he says. "Every day it was the same horseshit, and at some point I just realized, 'Man, I'm gonna die!' Fuck this! I'm outta here!'"

He remembers seeing Charlie Parker three days before his death on March 12, 1955, and by May he left town with the intention of reclaiming his life and his career in Los Angeles.

And although he got sidetracked in Las Vegas for about a year and a half ("That was a fun time-staying up all night, having breakfast with crazy comics like Buddy Hackett and Shecky Greene"), Gruber did eventually make it to Los Angeles in 1957. One of the first people he ran into there was fellow drummer Shelly Manne, who encountered him on Sunset Boulevard one day and stated, "I thought you were dead!"

Manne had known Gruber from back in New York and promptly set him up with a musicians' union card and a job playing at the Beverly Wilshire. But Gruber rebelled against the conservative nature of that gig and he soon gravitated to a wide-open after-hours scene outside the city limits where he mixed it up with such potent players as pianists Hampton Hawes, Elmo Hope and Joe Albany, saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards and Harold Land, bassist George Morrow and vibist Bobby Hutcherson, among many others. A young bass player named Charlie Haden had just come to town and he also participated in that free scene. It was there that Haden met such similarly forward-thinking players as Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, whom Gruber refers to as "the Nijinsky of drums" for his ability to hang in the air and defy gravity on the kit. "After that lame hotel gig, I was in my element again," Gruber says. "We'd finish playing at sunrise, go have breakfast, then go across town and play some more until 3 p.m. We weren't making any money but we were having a ball."

But by 1965, Gruber reverted to his old ways with heroin. "I went back to the New York City of my mind and took it out again," he says. "I was having a picnic, periodically going into hiding, not being seriously career-oriented."

Around that time that he received a helping hand from another transplanted New Yorker living in Los Angeles, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs. "He was getting involved with The Tonight Show and he asked me to start teaching at his music store in Los Angeles," Gruber recalls. "Next thing I knew I was doing what I said I'd never do-teaching."

Drum students began seeking him out at Gibbs' music store strictly by word of mouth and Gruber generously shared his wisdom, experience and abrasive charm with every one of them. By the early 1970s, as he began to formalize his intuitive teaching methods somewhat, his students began getting jobs in small groups, big bands, TV, movies, jazz and pop. Another result of this teaching phase was that Gruber himself started to get healthy. "I was swimming every day in the reservoir, which was technically illegal, and banging everything that moved," he recalls with a tone of swagger. "I was as strong as a bull then. And every night around midnight all these drummers were hanging at my house-Buddy, Irv Cottler [Frank Sinatra's longtime drummer], Mitch Mitchell [Jimi Hendrix's drummer], Jim Keltner and others. I was having a ball."

Gruber would return to New York in the mid-'70s and begin a lengthy period of bonding and just hanging out with his old pal Buddy Rich. "I ended up at Buddy's with the keys," Gruber says. "We just spent a lot of time together-walking around, shopping, just sitting in Central Park talking, watching the pickpockets do their thing, observing and commenting on life going by. And I think back and realize now that whenever I was out of my mind or in a bad place for whatever reason, Buddy was always there for me. He was the best friend I ever had. I miss that guy a lot."

Through the '80s and '90s, Gruber's ideas about drum ergonomics-a means of achieving fluidity and alleviating tension while playing the drums-aided countless more players. "Freddie can watch a drummer play and be able to deeply understand where they are coming from," says Steve Smith. "He'll be able to understand their conceptual approach and technical approach, and he can zero in on exactly what they need in order to take their playing to the next level. He'll break a technique down, demonstrate the motions slowly and help you really get it."

Peter Erskine recounts one enlightening lesson with Gruber when he really "got it": "After a couple of false starts-lessons where we seemed to get to know each other over several cups of coffee, trading stories, but not much else-and my insisting that he show me something concrete, Freddie suddenly began to tap dance. So he's dancing away and he finally looks up at me with a big smile, and says, 'Do you see? Do you get it?' as he continued tapping away. I told him, 'Help me out here, I'm not getting it,' and he explained, still dancing, 'Don't you see, baby? I'm not trying to dance beneath the surface of the floor, I'm dancing on top of the floor.' A light bulb started to go off in my head and I asked him to show me this same idea on the drums: 'Sure,' he replied, and he danced over to the drums and proceeded to play his kit and produce a full and beautiful tone that was, at the same time, light and filled with velocity. At that point, I got it, and I thanked him. And his lesson has stayed with me.

"Freddie has shown me one other thing," he continues, "and that is about the beauty and importance of expressing our love and enthusiasm for each other and what we do. Freddie has been up and down during his storied lifetime, but he has always been a true believer in music and a true giver to other people. I'm grateful for his wisdom-street wisdom, drumming mechanics wisdom, jazz wisdom, human/life wisdom-that he imparts to our community. For drummers, Freddie is a national treasure."

While visiting New York last June, during which time he met up with one old friend, Roy Haynes, and attended a memorial for another, Elvin Jones, Gruber got caught up in the nostalgia of being back in his hometown. "I tramped all over this town in the '40s, from the Bowery to Sugar Hill, and every street along the way has memories," he says. "Man, if my footprints could light up, this city wouldn't need Con Edison."

Though still energized and excited about the music, Gruber is far less frantic than he was during his fabled tenure on 52nd Street. "When I was young I was hopping and zipping and coming and going like somebody jabbed me in the ass with a hot fork," he laughs. "Now it's time to take a swing, take a breath, be around the people I love and say thanks."

"I've come to a period in my life where you begin to look back and wonder, 'What was it all about?'" he adds. "But I really had some fun in my life, man. And if I could do it all over again-all the good and the bad, the ups and the downs-I would do it exactly the same and not change a thing. I really am aware, man, of the magical thing that happened here in New York. It was a helluva ride."

Ella and Norman

© -Jazz Times; Tad Hershorn, University of California Press. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Any book on my life would start with my basic philosophy of fighting racial prejudice. I loved jazz, and jazz was my way of doing that,” Norman Granz told Tad Hershorn during the final interviews given for this book. Granz, who died in 2001, was iconoclastic, independent, immensely influential, often thoroughly unpleasant—and one of jazz’s true giants. Granz played an essential part in bringing jazz to audiences around the world, defying racial and social prejudice as he did so, and demanding that African-American performers be treated equally everywhere they toured. In this definitive biography, Hershorn recounts Granz’s story: creator of the legendary jam session concerts known as Jazz at the Philharmonic; founder of the Verve record label; pioneer of live recordings and worldwide jazz concert tours; manager and recording producer for numerous stars, including Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.

Excerpted with permission from Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice by Tad Hershorn, an archivist at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University. To be released October 2011 from University of California Press.

The following excerpt appeared in 08/15/11 edition of the Jazz Times. For more information about subscribing to the magazine go here. For information on ordering a copy of the book directly from the University of California Press go here.

Tad Hershorn

Norman Granz, the impresario who made his name at the helm of Jazz at the Philharmonic, was hardly impressed when he first heard Ella Fitzgerald with the Ink Spots in his hometown of Los Angeles in the early ’40s. The singer was equally hesitant about Granz’s vaunted intensity when, four years after she debuted with JATP in 1949, he asked to become her personal manager. Nevertheless, he began producing her records in 1956 with the formation of Verve Records, resulting in some of the most thrilling and enduring vocal sides of all time. The combination of Granz’s business savvy and Fitzgerald’s immense talent elevated her status from one of jazz’s most beloved singers to the international First Lady of Song.

This excerpt from Tad Hershorn’s soon-to-be-published Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice (University of California Press) explores the complex history and sometimes mysterious nature of that legendary partnership.

*****

Jazz at the Philharmonic’s 1953 tour of Japan was still in progress when Norman Granz acquired the Hope Diamond of his career. On the flight between Tokyo and Osaka, he talked with Ella Fitzgerald about taking over her personal management when her contract with Moe Gale at Associated Booking Corporation would expire that December. Gale, one of the owners of the Savoy Ballroom, had been involved with Fitzgerald since the beginning of her career as part of his managing the Chick Webb Orchestra from late 1929. Gale had also delivered the band to Decca Records as one of the new label’s earliest attractions, and had pressed Webb to bring a female vocalist into the band.

“I’d been thinking for years about taking over Ella’s personal management. … Ella was afraid. She thought I was too much of a blow-top,” Granz reflected. “So I told her it was a matter of pride with me, that she still hadn’t been recognized—economically, at least—as the greatest singer of our time. I asked her to give me a year’s trial, no commission, but she wound up insisting on paying the commission. We had no contract. Mutual love and respect was all the contract we needed.” In 2001, he added, “I didn’t claim to be the only manager. I never had a contract with Ella or Oscar [Peterson] or Basie or Duke. I told Ella, if you want the luxury of saying, ‘Norman, I quit,’ you’re off. Go for yourself, but I want the luxury of quitting you, too. So we had a nice relationship. Ella lasted for maybe 40 or 45 years, Oscar well over 50.” After she agreed to go with Granz, he satisfied an IRS debt that Gale had allowed to pile up and that the government was pressing to settle. The changing of the guard was at hand.

Together, they worked to polish her talent and enhance her reputation. Granz had plans to widen her scope musically and upgrade the venues in which she appeared, as well as to get her higher pay that would leave what Granz called “52nd Street money” in the dust. Signs were abundant that Fitzgerald was ready to enjoy a deeper appreciation of her talent. In May 1954, on her opening night at New York’s Basin Street East club, the entertainment elite gathered to celebrate her 19 years in the business. Decca Records presented the singer with a plaque citing her sales of over 22 million records since the Chick Webb days. Newsweek’s coverage of the evening captured the essence of what Granz would capitalize on in the years ahead, when he coordinated her personal management and recording activities. “Other popular singers tend to become identified with a particular musical groove,” the magazine reported. “Ella Fitzgerald plays the field, exerting a talent which, in addition to an unmatched pliability, has demonstrated an uncommon staying power.”

Granz translated that acclaim to book the singer into more prestigious clubs and hotel showrooms that had previously been closed both to black artists and to jazz in general. Granz and Fitzgerald were not alone in thinking that her talent deserved a higher profile. In early 1955, Marilyn Monroe lent her prestige to help broker Fitzgerald’s first appearance at the Mocambo on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. The run was extended to three weeks after sold-out crowds brought club-owner Charlie Morrison completely around and led him shortly thereafter to book Nat Cole and Eartha Kitt. Fitzgerald returned to the Mocambo twice more in the next year and a half, generating the club’s largest business after the release of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook in 1956. The success of Fitzgerald’s appearance also helped usher in the opening of integrated nightclubs in Hollywood, among them Pandora’s Box, the Purple Onion, the Crescendo and the Renaissance.

Word of Fitzgerald’s drawing power at the Mocambo spread across the industry, and within a month Granz had booked her for three weeks at the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, marking the first time the room had ever booked a jazz act. In November 1955 she returned to Las Vegas after a five-year absence for a date at the Flamingo Hotel.

Granz’s campaign for Fitzgerald’s recording contract became more aggressive as the deadline to re-sign with Decca Records approached and her apparent frustrations with her longtime label surfaced. Nat Hentoff conducted a particularly revealing interview published in February 1955, when one can almost hear Granz’s prompting behind her unusually frank and public airing of what she considered missed opportunities with Decca. Granz finally had the opportunity to pry Fitzgerald away 10 months later and swooped in like a hawk. In June 1955 Universal had begun prerecording the soundtrack of The Benny Goodman Story starring Steve Allen as Goodman. Many of the musicians from the clarinetist’s former bands played themselves, along with a handful of contemporary musicians. Decca did not know or did not think it mattered until late in the game that Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson and Stan Getz were all under exclusive contract to Granz. Although Lionel Hampton recorded extensively for Granz, he was not similarly bound contractually. When

Decca finally came to Granz seeking a release for the musicians, he expressed his willingness to negotiate. Ever the wily bargainer, he knew he held all the cards. “I proposed that if they wanted the soundtrack badly enough, in return I wanted a release of Ella from her Decca contract. It was that simple.” The label finally ceded Fitzgerald in the first week of January 1956, barely a month before the film’s release on Feb. 2. Granz, anticipating Ella Fitzgerald’s arrival, announced the formation of Verve Records almost as soon as she departed Decca.

Thus began the second and greatest of the three major phases of her recording career, the last being the Pablo years in the 1970s and 1980s. Granz insisted that her leaving Decca and the establishment of Verve were unrelated. His plan, he said, had been to merge Clef, Norgran and Down Home into a broader-based entity that would include popular music as well as jazz. Rather than being created merely as a vehicle for Fitzgerald, Verve was his solution to another longstanding problem: the hemorrhaging of money from his jazz labels, whose finances had up until then depended exclusively on the tours. Granz said the wider focus of Verve allowed him to design a more effective network of disc-jockey promotion and other activities more associated with pop music.

“Granz will have no connection with Verve except for owning it,” DownBeat reported. “All central operations will be handled by 24-year-old arranger-conductor Buddy Bregman.” The two had met in November 1955 on the tennis courts at Rosemary Clooney and José Ferrer’s home in Los Angeles. Bregman, the nephew of songwriter Jule Styne, had been a fan of Granz and JATP since seeing the concerts at the Civic Opera House in the late 1940s. Granz told him of his plans to begin a new label and asked if he would consider going to work for him. Bregman’s early successes with popular music and his enthusiasm gained Granz’s confidence. Granz may have also felt that Bregman’s youth would make him more affordable, more controllable, and better attuned to the contemporary pop markets than an established arranger. He reported for work at the Granz offices at 451 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills as head of pop A&R at a weekly salary of $500, plus scale for all orchestrations and sessions. “I started on a Monday, we did not have a name on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, Norman had come up with Verve.”

Granz had wanted Fitzgerald to do a Cole Porter album for many years and had unsuccessfully appealed to Decca to undertake such a work. “They rejected it on the grounds that Ella wasn’t that kind of singer,” Granz said in 1990. “I could understand it from their point of view, because they had one thing in mind and that was finding hit singles. I was interested in how I could enhance Ella’s position, to make her a singer with more than just a cult following amongst jazz fans. … So I proposed to Ella that the first Verve album would not be a jazz project, but rather a songbook of the works of Cole Porter. I envisaged her doing a lot of composers. The trick was to change the backing enough so that, here and there, there would be signs of jazz.”

Granz prepared for the Porter recording with the same methodical zeal that he had shown in producing such pioneering deluxe album projects as The Jazz Scene (1950) and The Astaire Story (1953).

He instructed his main assistant, Mary Jane Outwater—“secretary” would be too narrow a term to describe the role Granz entrusted her with—to track down two copies of every Cole Porter song in publication and then winnow them down to about 50 songs for Fitzgerald to consider. His first choice to arrange the 32-song two-LP set was Nelson Riddle, the former Tommy Dorsey trombonist and arranger who had made his mark in the early 1950s when Nat Cole selected him to oversee his Capitol vocal sessions. Frank Sinatra credited Riddle for virtually reviving his career on the same label. However, Riddle’s manager, Carlos Gastel, was not keen on loaning him out. Finally Granz chose to “take a chance on Bregman. He knew all of the songs and had an affinity for the material.”

Fitzgerald, Bregman and Granz soon got down to work. Bregman’s varied arrangements, played by top-drawer Los Angeles jazz and studio musicians, gave a pop quality to the songs; still, the sessions retained room for jazz feeling and some improvisation, accommodating Fitzgerald’s jazz instincts. Granz also leaned on Fitzgerald to sing all the verses to the songs—“She had to spend time learning the verses and she didn’t want to,” he recalled—to feature the full scope of the lyricists’ art and make the albums that much more distinctive and authoritative. The songbooks required a different approach from what Fitzgerald had been used to, when she went into a studio with a trio and reeled off tunes in two to three takes before quickly moving on. Granz noted, “When I recorded Ella, I always put her out front, not a blend. The reason was that I frankly didn’t care about what happened to the music. It was there to support her. I’ve had conductors tell me that in bar 23 the trumpet player hit a wrong note. Well, I don’t care. I wasn’t making perfect records. If they came out perfectly, fine. But I wanted to make records in which Ella sounded best. I wasn’t interested in doing six takes to come back to where we started. My position has always been that what you do before you go into the studio really defines you as a producer. The die has been cast. I have very little to do other than to say one take is better than another.”

Though Granz and Cole Porter had been friends through Fred Astaire since around the time of The Astaire Story, Granz chose not to involve him in the process, as Porter was notoriously picky about how singers recorded his work. Instead, once the recordings were done, he took a stack of the acetates with him to New York to play for Porter. “He loved them,” Granz said after two hours with the composer at his Waldorf Astoria apartment. Porter was delighted by Fitzgerald’s treatment of his work, including her diction. And if Porter was happy, the listening public was ecstatic to hear the old and familiar “Night and Day,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “I Love Paris” side by side with lesser-known songs such as “All Through the Night,” “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” or “I Am in Love.”

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook took off beyond Granz and Fitzgerald’s wildest expectations, both commercially and artistically, becoming one of the top-selling jazz records of all time. Sales boosted the fortunes of the young Verve and laid the groundwork for the remainder of its signature series in the years to come. When sales hit 100,000 in the first month, the album went to No. 15 on the Billboard charts, and two weeks after its release it was ranked second in a DownBeat poll of bestselling jazz albums. “It was the 11th biggest LP of the year. That was insane for me. Verve put me in the commercial market for the first time,” Granz said of the best selling album of his career.

On Aug. 15, 1956, a spectacular concert at the Hollywood Bowl featured Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars and Art Tatum alongside Fitzgerald, the Oscar Peterson Trio and a JATP ensemble filled out by Roy Eldridge, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips, Illinois Jacquet and Buddy Rich. The album, Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl, became effectively the 1956 volume of the JATP recordings. Granz later received a letter from the Hollywood Bowl telling him that the concert had been the best attended jazz event in the history of the outdoor facility—ironic given that 11 years earlier the Bowl’s management told Granz that they did not want to host any event with the word “jazz” in its title.

Fitzgerald and Armstrong went into the studio with the Oscar Peterson Trio and Buddy Rich the day after the Bowl concert to record the first of three albums that not only sold well but are thought to be among the finest of Granz’s career. Armstrong was unusually hard to corral given his seemingly nonstop touring schedule, and often his trumpet playing was barely up to par when Granz had the chance to record him: To compensate, Armstrong sang more. His manager Joe Glaser didn’t make it any easier by approving dates for Armstrong at the last minute, leaving Granz with only a day or two at most to prepare, as was the case with all three of the Ella and Louis records from 1956 and 1957. Granz later said that Armstrong, unlike Fitzgerald, with her perfect diction and loyalty to the music as written, “never deferred to the material. He did what he did, and that was the thing I was trying to capture. You could hear his breathing or sighing or, instead of the word, he’d come out with a sound. But to me, that’s its quality.” The contrast between their styles was pure magic. Fitzgerald deferred to Armstrong to make the final choices on the songs and keys. Photographs taken during the sessions show Armstrong and Fitzgerald, dressed in casual summer clothes, thoroughly enjoying one another.

Shortly afterwards, on Aug. 21, 1956, Granz, Bregman and Fitzgerald returned to Capitol Studios to get started on the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songbook and thereby capitalize on the momentum provided by the Porter release. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook followed the pattern set by the Porter, with big band, band with strings and small-group arrangements. Though the content of the Songbook albums was pretty much set by Granz in consultation with Fitzgerald, there was still give-and-take in the studio when the singer occasionally resisted her manager’s wishes. For example, during the recording of Rodgers and Hart, she refused to sing “Miss,” as in “Have You Met Miss Jones?” Granz recalled, “It was not a woman’s lyric. So she changed it to ‘Have you met Sir Jones?’ I was very unhappy about that, but we were in the midst of recording and Ella was very firm. I had to think of the whole project, and I didn’t think it warranted a stand on principle. I could have eliminated the song, and I considered that. But since it was such a good song and Buddy’s arrangement was good, I gave in.”

The benefits of Granz’s management, which, like Fitzgerald’s singing, found distinctive ways of melding jazz and pop, can be seen in an infatuated review in the Hollywood Reporter of her October 1956 Mocambo appearance. “The contagion grew to such proportions that they wouldn’t let the gal go after 13 songs and 50 minutes. It was a beg-off. … Miss Fitzgerald, spurred on by such idolatrous acclaim (heralded, of course by her smash LP album of Cole Porter songs), has never been in finer form,” the reviewer noted.

“Ella was easy,” Granz said late in life. “All Ella needed was a good manager, which I was for her compared to what she’d had—and the record company, that was total. Decca did good things for her and Milt Gabler was a good producer, but she was one of many artists at Decca. When I formed Verve, she became the artist and she had the advantage not only of someone to manage her, but also presenting her concerts. I was unique among managers, in that I owned the record company and I was also an impresario.” But Fitzgerald told her old friend Leonard Feather that she and Granz had had many confrontations over the years and that she had never been just putty in his hands. Rather, the two of them combined formidable qualities in making their partnership successful. “Granz has an irascible side; Ella says she has learned to live with it,” Feather said. As Fitzgerald explained, “The idea was, get him to do the talking for me and I’d do the singing. I needed that. Sometimes we’d argue and wouldn’t speak for weeks on end, and he’d give me messages through a third party, but now I accept him as he is, or I may just speak my mind. We’re all like a big family now.”

The exact nature of Fitzgerald and Granz’s relationship has long been a subject of fascination, with some believing that Granz exercised a disproportionate and domineering influence over the singer’s affairs. Others who knew her better paint a more complex picture of someone for whom work—and lots of it—was her life. Granz’s focus on Fitzgerald’s career demonstrated the attention to detail he had so fully mastered over the years. Pianist Paul Smith said Granz selected about 99 percent of the music Fitzgerald sang and recorded in the ensuing decades. He also handled the messy duty of hiring and firing musicians, always acting in concert with Fitzgerald’s wishes. “At the very beginning, I turned Ella’s career around by merely dictating different approaches—work at the Fairmont Hotel, not the 331 Club. But that was an economic decision,” Granz said. “When I first broke the Fairmont in San Francisco with Ella, she asked me what she was getting. I told her and she said, ‘But that’s not right. We’re getting less than in a club.’ I said, ‘Yes, but you’re building a reputation for playing the Fairmont Hotel. Next time around, you’ll get 10 times more.’”

Given her insecurities despite her renown, she needed some coaxing to come out of her shell to help Granz promote her career. For example, Virginia Wicks, both a personal friend and her publicist during this period, said Fitzgerald feared interviews partly because of her general shyness around other people. “She knew there were many intelligent people coming to interview her,” Wicks said. “She didn’t think she had the vocabulary or knowledge to deal with them. You almost had to trick her into an interview. It was very important to Norman. Yet Ella would really sulk. But she didn’t do a lot of talking. She kept a lot inside her head.”

Some have charged Granz with overworking Fitzgerald in the giddy years when she began to roam the upper echelons of the entertainment world. But those who knew Fitzgerald better describe someone for whom singing was her life. Her pianist Paul Smith first toured with Fitzgerald in 1960, spending six months in South America and Europe; in 1962, he was on the road with the singer for 46 weeks. “She was fun. How could you not have fun playing with her?” he said. “As far as the amount of work, Norman was kind of trapped in between. Ella would complain that she was working too hard and he would not book her for about two weeks. Then she would say, after about the first week, ‘Why aren’t I working? Don’t people want to see me?’ Norman was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Ella really didn’t have much of a home life. Her home was the stage. When she was onstage, she was loving it.”

Smith acknowledged that sometimes Fitzgerald got extra nervous when she knew Granz was coming in to hear a show and that sometimes Granz imposed his views on her repertoire in ways she didn’t like. For instance, Granz “disliked anything Stephen Sondheim ever wrote” and made sure Fitzgerald didn’t perform it. “Benny Carter wrote a beautiful arrangement of ‘Send in the Clowns,’” Smith remembered. “Norman came in and said, ‘What are you playing this for?’ He made such an issue of it we took it out of the book.”

Granz was also irritated, according to Smith, by the idea of Fitzgerald recording with her Verve label-mate Mel Tormé, who was Fitzgerald’s friend and was, like her, a master of scat singing as well as a gifted songwriter, arranger and all-around musician. The mentions of Granz in Tormé’s later memoirs are not entirely complimentary. After a concert tour with Fitzgerald to Australia, which Granz oversaw, Tormé came to the conclusion that “Norman was not one of nature’s noblemen.” Later he wrote, “What Ella needed was direction. She was in danger of falling into the ‘cult singer’ trap, an abyss wherein only jazz fans and musicians appreciated her. This was not the way to gold, and, even though she was solidly committed to singing in her jazz-oriented, jazz-influenced manner, she wanted more out of life than smoky joints and out-of-the-way venues in which to ply her trade. … Her help came in the form of Norman Granz. This Svengali-like handling of Ella has produced astounding results. . . . He had her embark on a series of ‘songbooks’ that elevated her into a new category, a ‘pop-jazz’ singer. These songbooks were landmark recordings and led to Ella becoming persona grata in every part of the civilized world. Her fame spread to the four corners of the earth, and in this country, she played where she wanted to.” Granz, however, disputed the “Svengali” image and the idea that he had begun to totally run the singer’s life from top to bottom.

“None of that bothered me,” he said. “I had a job to do and I did it.”

Granz explained his relationship to Fitzgerald and how he saw his role in a 1987 interview with the record producer and broadcaster Elliot Meadow. “If I’m standing next to Ella Fitzgerald and people want her autograph, and someone in the line says, ‘I don’t know who that tall old man is standing next to Ella, but I think I’ll get his autograph, too. Who knows who he is?’ That’s all right,” Granz said. “My ego’s just as large as any performer’s, because I know my function. … Don’t worry. I know what my contribution was just as much as I know Ella’s contribution.”

Granz’s interest in seeing that Fitzgerald’s artistry and dignity were protected did cross over into her personal life. When Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the center of the action with Granz, she bought a home on Hepburn Avenue on the predominantly black West Side. But as Granz later recalled, “Finally, when she really made big money, I suggested she move to Beverly Hills. The people who wanted to sell the house wanted the money, and they happened, by coincidence, to be Ella fans. I talked to the real estate agent, bought the house in my name and gave it to Ella in her name. That way, we circumvented the racism that existed. Ella was always shielded from economic choices, but she was always made aware of them.”

“There was a kind of naiveté about her,” Paul Smith said. “She was like a little girl. If she was unhappy she’d pout like an 8-year-old, which, in a way, she was. I always thought of her as a lady who never quite grew up. She always had that little girl quality about her. Her feelings could be hurt very easily. Ella was a very tender lady. She loved kids. She was kind of like a kid herself, inside. She never had a romantic life. Ella was a lonely lady and every once in a while one of those guys would come by and they’d have a live-in relationship for a short while. … Ella’s naiveté permeated her relations with men.”

One of her romances that ended up causing friction with Granz involved a Norwegian man whom she had met while touring Scandinavia with JATP. In July 1957, Reuters reported that she had married Thor Einar Larsen and was staying for the time being in a suburb of Oslo, a rumor she soon denied, although she indicated she might like to see it happen. She maintained an apartment in Copenhagen for four years. Granz, at her request, was working to help Larsen gain a visa to come to the United States. “Ella had called me from Europe, which she didn’t very often do, and said, ‘I’m in love.’ I think there came a point where Norman was losing patience with the man,” recalled Virginia Wicks, who was present backstage one night when the subject turned to Larsen. “There were words between Norman and Ella. I think that Norman realized before Ella did that Larsen was taking advantage of her. Norman tried to explain what was going on, and she was angry with him, saying, ‘You don’t run my life. You don’t run my personal life. You don’t know what goes on.’” As it turned out, Larsen had been convicted of defrauding a previous fiancée and had received five months’ hard labor in Sweden for his offense, so he was not even eligible to enter the United States for another five and a half years.

Phoebe Jacobs met Fitzgerald during the singer’s Decca period in the early 1950s and got to know her better over the next three decades at her uncle Ralph Watkins’ Basin Street East club in New York. “He ruled her life. I remember his buying her a sable coat, and Ella saying, ‘He bought it for me because he thought I should have one.’ Ella could have cared less whether or not she had a Rolls Royce. Norman saw to it she had one. He wanted her to have the best. She was his star.”

Jacobs, now president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, continued, “I don’t know whether Norman and Ella were a good pairing. It was truly a professional relationship. They didn’t socialize. Norman was never a great extrovert. Music was the common denominator. He treated her like she was a queen. He was dedicated to presenting her in the atmosphere she should enjoy befitting her talent. He was a very savvy guy and Ella respected and trusted him implicitly.” That trust and love would be the basis of a shared enterprise that would fill record bins and concert halls and create a legend.

Fitzgerald said as much in a brief undated telegram that caught up with Granz in Paris: “Even half asleep, I love and appreciate you. Thanks very much. Ella.”

Monty Alexander - Exhilirating!

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Audiences find Monty Alexander’s music instantly accessible, exciting and exhilarating, and they quickly warm to it and respond to it….”

-Mike Hennessey, Jazz writer/critic

“Monty plays – I mean plays – with Tatum’s grace, Peterson’s richness, Garner’s force, Nat Cole’s wit. And over all, the very real trio conception and brisk charts recall the tight structures of the early Ahmad Jamal trio.”

- Fred Bouchard, Downbeat

“The striking qualities of Alexander's playing are his intimate knowledge of the Jazz tradition, his reverence for the pre-bebop piano legacy, his prodigious technical facility, and his resilient connection to the cultural heritage of his native Jamaica.”

- Derk Richardson, columnist

“Monty continually creates very logical melodic lines and yet the constant surfacing of his improvisational surprises maintains interest no matter what musical context he presents to his listeners.”

- Jerry Dean, Jazz radio host

Whenever I want to experience what Duke Ellington so aptly described as “The Feeling of Jazz” at its best, I play a recording by Monty Alexander.

What a “swinga” this guy is.

Derek Jewel of The London Sunday Times once wrote: “His work is in a sense, a history of Jazz piano … and yet, he distills all these influences into his own style.”

Monty comes out of everybody who has gone before him and I mean everybody: from Earl “Fatha” Hines to Teddy Wilson to Nat King Cole to Oscar Peterson; the man is a walking encyclopedia of Jazz piano.

In the insert notes to Monty’s Concord Jazz album Full Steam Ahead [CJ-287], Gordon Raddue wrote:

“Distinguished New Yorker magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliett must have had someone like Monty Alexander in mind when he wrote that the fundamental intent of jazz "is to entertain and recharge the spirit with new beauties."

Indeed, the title of the book from which the above quotation is taken, The Sound of Surprise, serves as an apt description of what Jamaican-born pianist Alexander has been producing ever since he crashed the big-time jazz scene in the late 1960s.

What sets him apart from most of his keyboard colleagues is the enormous range of his musical interests. He not only has paid his dues as a performer but, perhaps more importantly, as a listener as well.

He brings the joy of celebration to his work: a celebration of his life in music and the music of his life. Delightful surprises abound in both the selection of his material and the execution of same.”

Benny Green, the esteemed Jazz writer and critic, offered these comments about Monty in his liner notes to vibraphonist Milt Jackson’s Soul Fusion [Pablo S2310 804]:

“… Alexander is a past master in the art of placing his accompanying chords, and knowing exactly which rhythm to use in defining them.

Some of the exchanges between he an Milt sound so tight as to be telepathic, so perfect is the balance between them. [This is particularly true of the tunes played at slower tempos].

The essence of a performance at this tempo are the silences, and the shapes into which the played notes mould those silences. Alexander is marvelous at this.

It is the sort of thing that no orchestrator could ever achieve, and which classical musicians have trouble comprehending.

It is an intuitive art, born of an alliance between inclination and experience, and is one of those aspects of Jazz which distinguish it from all other forms of making music.

As a matter of fact, Alexander, with whose playing I had not been acquainted before hearing these tracks, is the sort of musician who makes the analyst’s job child-play.

The writer Ford Madox Ford once described how, in his capacity as an editor, he received through the post one day an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown writer called D.H. Lawrence.

Glancing casually at the story’s opening paragraph, Ford took note of this and that phrase, this and that construction; then without bothering to read any further, he tossed the manuscript on to the “Accepted” pile, remarking to his secretary as he did so, “It’s a big one this time.”

Ford, with his enormous experience of the art of literary improvisation, assessed real ability instantaneously.

In the same way the experienced listener of good Jazz will hear a few bars from any one of Alexander’s piano solos, or even a few punctuations from his accompaniments, and will do what Ford did with Lawrence, throw him on to the “Accpeted” pile and tolerate no further arguments on the subject.

It does not take long for a true Jazz artist to assert that artistry, and Alexander does this a thousand times over in this album.” ….

Perhaps you’ll come to the same conclusion as did Benny Green after listening to Monty’s playing on the following video tribute and toss it in your “Accepted” file?

Grant Green 1931-1979: A Tribute

When our earlier feature on Grant Green posted to the blog which you can locate by going here, the following video tribute to him had not as yet been developed by the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD.

We thought we’d put it up on the site for visitors to enjoy. The audio track finds Grant’s guitar in the company of James Spaulding on alto saxophone, Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.

The tune is Joe Henderson’s The Kicker. Just click the "X" in the upper-right hand corner to close out of the ads when these are displayed on the video.

Nat Adderley and Alto Saxophones Players

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

“Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley’s enormous personality and untimely death, together with his participation in such legendary dates as Miles’s Kind of Blues, have sanctified his memory …. But brother Nat was a big part of the band they had together from 1959 until Cannonball’s passing in 1975 at the age of 45.

One of the few modern players to have specialized on the cornet, … Nat was always the more incisive soloist, with a bright ringing tone that most obviously drew on the example of Dizzy Gillespie  but in which could be heard a whole raft of influences from Clark Terry to Henry ‘Red’ Allen to the pre-post-modern Miles Davis of the 1950s.”

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

“Nat Adderley received top billing in the Cannonball Adderley Quintet from 1959 to 1975. Although overshadowed by his brother Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Nat's own contribution to the band's success was substantial….

Nat contributed to the quintet as both player and composer. He wrote several hits that became jazz standards, including "Work Song," "Sermonette," and "Jive Samba." His instrumental style bears the influence of Clark Terry, Miles Davis, and, in brassier moments, Dizzy Gillespie.

How­ever, Nat's solos are often highly personal in their use of half-valve (slurred) effects, unusual tone color, and a wry sense of humor.

Without him, the quintet would have been an altogether different, and perhaps more somber, band.”

Len Lyons and Don Perlo, Jazz Portraits

“Nat Adderley became a bandleader in 1975 without really wanting to ….”

- Orrin Keepnews

As I have mentioned before on these pages, business travel was a constant part of my life, especially during the last two decades of my career.

Most of it was national, some of it was international. Occasionally, and much to my relief, it was local.

One such local trip that I made on a quarterly basis involved visiting a client who owned a business based in Stockton, CA, which is about 80 miles due east of my office in San Francisco.

Since the purpose of these visits involved an early morning meeting with the company’s Board of Trustees, I would usually drive out for dinner with my client the previous evening to discuss the agenda, and then stay the night in a nearby hotel. It was easier than battling the morning traffic and the especially-dangerous morning fog.

A big box bookstore was located in the same complex with the hotel, and as I was restless following dinner, I wandered over to it to kill some time before turning in.

The store carried an extensive display of CD’s [remember those?] and while browsing its collection, I came across some music by Nat Adderley’s group featuring “Vincent Herring,” an alto saxophonist whose name was new to me.

I’d always dug Nat’s playing, the discs were being offered at half price and the “kicker” was that Jimmy Cobb was the drummer on two of the three that I purchased.

Boy, was I in for a treat.

When I returned to the room, I popped one of the CDs into my portable player, put on my ear phones and there went my early night as I stayed up half of it being blown away by Vincent Herring.

Poor Nat; here he was with another fantastic alto sax player.

As was the case with brother Julian, Nat more than held his own, but, man, Vincent Herring was somethin’ else [no pun intended].

As Nat described to Alwyn and Laurie Lewis in his March 1992 interview with them for Cadence Magazine: “Vincent plays Vincent; he has the style of Cannonball’s, but he does not play Cannonball’s licks. And that’s why I like him.” [paraphrased]

Elevating, exciting, electrifying - whatever the best words are to describe Vincent Herring - one thing is certain, you can’t expect to listen to his playing and easily go to sleep, afterwards.

Although a little groggy from lack of sleep, I showed up to the Trustees’ meeting the following morning with a big smile on my face. That and saving the client a good deal of money on their reinsurance placement must have won the day as I was able to renew the contract for one more year.

I owe it all to Nat Adderley, at least, the smile on my face, as if it hadn’t been for him, I most probably wouldn’t have discovered Vincent Herring.

Judge for yourself whether it was a worthwhile finding as Vincent is featured on the audio track to the following video tribute to Nat. Work Song is one of Nat's more famous tunes. David Williams on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums and Larry Willis does the honors on piano.

Andy Martin: Professional Musicianship At Its Best

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

How do you make a Jazz trombonist smile?

Have him sit in a big band trombone section when Andy Martin stands up to take a solo.

I’ve seen this happen time and time again.

Whatever the context – Tom Talbert’s Band, the Les Brown Band, Louie Bellson’s Big Band Explosion, the Bill Holman Orchestra, the Phil Norman Tentet, the Carl Saunders Bebop Big Band, the Tom Kubis Orchestra, The Metropole Orchestra of Holland, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band – Andy’s solos put a knowing smile on the faces of all of his mates in the trombone sections of these bands.

They are all first-rate trombone players, many of whom are excellent soloists themselves and they all know what’s on offer when Andy plays.

A gorgeous tone, flawless technique and musical ideas that just flow seamlessly one after the other; one into the other.

Smooth, pure, powerful: listening to Andy Martin take a solo is the epitome of professional musicianship at its best.

Based on the West Coast, Andy invariably draws comparisons with Frank Rosolino and Carl Fontana, two other monster Jazz trombonists who spent the majority of their careers in and around Southern California.

Andy has done an album with Carl and one that is dedicated to the memory of Frank. You can find more information about these and all of his recordings by visiting his website. It is also a great source for details concerning all aspects of Andy's career.

Distributed in 1998 on Chartmaker Records, I have always been partial to Walkin’ The Walk,  a recording that Andy made with Bill Liston on tenor and a truly superb rhythm section comprised of Tom Ranier on piano [and too rarely heard outside of Southern California], John Clayton on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums.

Andy’s original composition Line for Lewis is from this CD and forms the audio track on the following video tribute. The tune is based on the melody of the old standard,  Limehouse Blues. Checkout the four bar drum solos that Jeff Hamilton lays down beginning at 3:34 minutes.

You don’t have to be a professional Jazz trombonist to smile when Andy Martin plays. All you have to do is listen; the smile will take care of itself.