Big Band Renaissance

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

Sadly, the Smithsonian isn’t into Jazz recordings anymore.

The institution with it’s mission of preserving and perpetuating things related to Americana has discontinued its involvement with issuing recorded compendiums of the music.

I have no idea why it made the decision to abandon producing Jazz anthologies such as The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz or Big Band Jazz: From the Beginnings to the Fifties,  but I suspect that it may have something to do with the fact that many Americans today have little interest in Jazz.

Fortunately, for me, and quite by happenstance, an Australian internet acquaintance was having trouble negotiating the Smithsonian website during the early days of ecommerce and put out a call sometime during the mid-1990’s for help to the members of a stateside Jazz chat group to which we both belonged.

I volunteered to try my luck on his behalf and luckily succeeded in ordering two copies of Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra, the 1940s and Beyond.

After sending one boxed-set safely on its way “down under,” I sampled my copy and was as pleased with the written annotation accompanying the 4 CD set as I was with the music it contained.

The booklet’s introductory essay and the annotations for each of the retrospective’s 75 tracks were written by Bill Kirchner, who, as you may be aware, is a composer-arranger, multi-reed player, educator and editor of The Oxford Companion to Jazz. Bill also hosts Jazz from the Archives, a periodic radio series on WBGO. You can visit with Bill at his website.

Talk about a stroke of luck, if it hadn’t been for this Aussie friend-in-need, I might have missed out on this excellent retrospective of American big band Jazz from the Second World War until the close of the 20^th century.

Incidentally, used copies of Big Band Renaissance: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra, the 1940s and Beyond are still available from CD resellers.

According to Bill’s acknowledgements, Bruce Talbot “… conceived the project and enabled it to become a reality.”

Both Bruce and Bill kindly granted the editorial staff at JazzProfiles permission to share the following excerepts from the series booklet.

In addition to the three videos at the conclusion of Bill’s essay which feature audio tracks drawn specifically from the Smithsonian collection, we have populated Bill’s essay with others films about big bands previously developed by the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD.

© -Bill Kirchner; used with the permission of the author. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“This collection is intended as a follow-up to Big Band Jazz: From the Beginnings to the Fifties  (Smithsonian Collection of Recordings RD/RC 030), compiled and annotated by Gunther Schuller and the late Martin Williams in 1983. The objective of that set was to trace the growth and development of the idiom from its beginnings to an arbitrary (by necessity) cut-off point at mid-cen­tury. By that time, the swing era had passed, and big bands were no longer the cynosure of either jazz or popular music. As author Ted Gioia observed, "In the early 1950s, jazz was undergoing a major upheaval; it was ceasing to be the popular music of the land and was evolving into a serious music for dedicated aficionados."

Until the end of the swing era, virtually all of the hundreds of working big bands—from the most jazz-oriented to the most commercial "Mickey Mouse" varieties—functioned primarily as dance and show bands. Engagements at ballrooms and dance pavilions, movie theaters, and hotels were mainstays of their bookings. True, the most ambitious of them entertained other aspira­tions: Benny Goodman led his band (along with guests from the Duke Elling­ton and Count Basie bands) in a famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, and in 1943 Ellington began a string of annual Carnegie Hall appearances, lasting through the decade, for which he wrote a series of extended works, the first and most famous of which was Black, Brown and Beige. Other big-band leaders, most notably Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton, chafed under the limita­tions imposed upon them by the entertainment industry and sought ways to expand the vocabulary and resources of popular music; several bands, for example, chose to add string sections, some more successfully than others. But for reasons we will explore presently, the number of big bands declined precipitously after 1946, and those of a jazz stripe that continued to function did so under new rules.

Our survey of these bands is divided into road bands, part-time bands, stu­dio bands, and the avant-garde. The road bands were full-time ensembles that in most cases spent the bulk of each year on tour. Of the major swing-era jazz bands, those that survived into the ensuing decades were the Ellington, Basie, Kenton, Woody Herman, Harry James, and Lionel Hampton bands. Other more commercial entities such as the Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Jimmy Dorsey orchestras continued as "ghost bands" after their leaders had died.

As the business risks of leading a road band became immeasurably greater, there emerged a number of major jazz orchestras that can best be described as part-time bands. Such groups assemble on a limited basis and, however praiseworthy their music might be, are not intended to provide full-time employment for their members. These ensembles are frequently described as "rehearsal bands," but that term does not do the most active of them justice. Many part-time bands have recorded (some of them extensively), appeared in clubs and concerts, and have even toured internationally; for this reason, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, among others, resented the rehearsal-band label. While big bands declined as full-time touring aggregations and as the focus of popular music, they remained a backbone of recording until well into the 1960s. In a number of key cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, London, and others—studio musicians recorded daily in ensembles put together for specific recording projects. Most of this work was non-jazz in nature—music for television and radio commercials, singers' recordings, film and television scores—but, not infrequently, record companies were willing to fund orchestral jazz on an ad hoc basis in the 50s and 60s. A great deal of the best post-1945 big band jazz was conceived for the recording studio, or for concerts presented primarily as opportunities for recording. As author Max Harrison has commented, "Despite their undoubted—if somewhat over­rated—contribution to jazz, the swing bands, once established, stood in the way of further orchestral developments. These could only resume when the bands came off the road and orchestral jazz was created by ad hoc groups assembled mainly, if not exclusively, for recording purposes. Such conditions allowed far more varied instrumentation than hitherto, a wider choice of repertoire—which no longer had to be orientated to a dancing public—and the application of more diverse techniques of writing."

The last section is devoted to orchestral developments in the jazz avant-garde, which for our purposes can be defined as post-Ornette Coleman "new music." Like its postwar antecedents bebop, "cool" jazz, and hard bop, avant-garde jazz is primarily small-group music, but there have been efforts at using the language (or, more accurately, languages) of the avant-garde in orches­tral settings. A few of the most successful are heard in this collection.

It goes without saying that some of the bands heard here do not fit neatly into a single category. The Les Brown band, for instance, was a road band until the 50s and thereafter was heard primarily on records and as a studio band on television, though it continued to make annual USO trips with Bob Hope as well as occasional appearances on its own. The Elgart brothers had bands that often played for dances, but the recordings were done with a mix­ture of studio musicians and road personnel—none of whom were identified on the album jackets, by the way. And Dizzy Gillespie's mid-50s orchestra, included herein as a part-time band, did two State Department tours and some other engagements but was laid off and reassembled while Gillespie participated in one of Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours as a featured soloist. But this Gillespie band lasted longer than, say, Artie Shaw's 1949 road band, which had a lifespan of only a few months.

In any case, the categories are used as a convenience. Most important is that all of the ensembles heard in this collection have exceptional musical merit, and all of the selections picked represent their best, though not nec­essarily their most typical, jazz efforts; the Billy May selection is a case in point.

Big Band Renaissance begins with Jay McShann's Swingmatism because that recording, with its featured soloist Charlie Parker, portends the beginning of post-swing era orchestral jazz as much as any one recording can. (Ironically, other McShann pieces featuring Parker that could have made that point even more emphatically went unrecorded.) All of the other selections date from 1945 and later and represent the blossoming of orchestral jazz as a listener's—as opposed to a dancer's—music. In a few cases, recordings are used that are not big-band formats as such, but that illustrate specific aspects of big-band craftsmanship—the Benny Carter and Curtis Fuller-Manny Albam selections, for example.

I have sought to avoid re-treading ground already covered in Schuller and Williams's Big Band Jazz set, so no selections by such bands as the 1940s Dizzy Gillespie band, Woody Herman's First and Second Herds, and the Claude Thornhill band are featured. Exceptions to this rule include the Boyd Raeburn band, this time represented by a George Handy composition. Handy's work—not included in the earlier set—was, I believe, central to the Raeburn band's impact.

In all, these 75 recordings represent a half-century of artistry in a musical genre that author Gene Lees has aptly called "the first important new orches­tral formation since the symphony orchestra took shape in the time of C. P. E. Bach." Of course, any collection such as this can serve only as a sampling, and space limitations rear their ugly heads. There are many worthy bands and composer-arrangers who could not be included because of such limitations, and for that reason the listener is urged to continue pursuing the subject.

Whatever an individual's tastes may be, we hope that the diverse delights of post-swing era big band jazz will be a revelation and will lead to further investigation of its riches.

THE RISE, FALL, AND REBIRTH OF BIG BAND JAZZ

What is commonly known as the swing era (or, synonymously if not altogether accurately, the big-band era) lasted for little over a decade. Its unofficial inaugural was the Benny Goodman band's tri­umph at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on 21 August 1935, and the equally unofficial end came in December 1946 when eight popular leaders— Les Brown, Benny Carter, Tommy Dorsey, Goodman, Woody Herman, Ina Ray Hutton, Harry James, and Jack Teagarden—disbanded their orchestras almost overnight. While this turn of events did not mean the end of big bands, it did signal that the conditions that had facilitated their predominance were changing. We'll explore these conditions in a moment, but first it should be stated that big bands evolved over a period of at least two decades prior to the Goodman band's ascendance. Commentators such as Gunther Schuller, James T. Maher, and James Lincoln Collier have explored these beginnings in detail, but the following will serve as a brief summary.

In the second decade of this century the prototypes of the big band origi­nated in early dance orchestras such as those of Art Hickman and George Morrison, as well as the 369th Infantry Hell Fighters Band, a 50-piece African-American ensemble led by James Reese Europe during World War I. In the 1920s and early 30s the developments were continued by both black orches­tras (e.g., Fletcher Henderson's, Duke Ellington's, McKinney's Cotton Pick­ers) and white ones (Paul Whiteman's, the California Ramblers, Jean Goldkette's). There was much cross-pollination between the black and white orchestras, and their collective innovations were crystallized by a few key arrangers, including Ferde Grofe, Bill Challis, Ellington, Don Redman, John Nesbitt, Benny Carter, Gene Gifford, and Fletcher and Horace Henderson. Redman (1900-1964), who in the 20s was the chief writer for Fletcher Hen­derson and McKinney, incorporated Louis Armstrong's rhythmic innovations, the basis of "swing," into big-band scoring. Furthermore, he used the call-and-response (antiphonal) pattern common in black music and, along with Henderson, popularized it as a mainstay of big-band arranging—pitting trum­pet, trombone, and reed sections against each other and then combining them. This became the modus operandi for most swing-era bands; Ellington, who conceived his orchestra as a collection of individual voices to be mixed at will, provided the most distinctive alternative.

By the mid-30s, these bands and numerous others—the Casa Loma, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, and Chick Webb orchestras as well as "sweet" bands ranging from Guy Lombardo's to Hal Kemp's—had advanced the concept of the big band to the point where a breakthrough to mass popularity could occur. Goodman's triumph at the Palomar ignited that breakthrough, which was largely made possible through radio: earlier that year, young West Coast fans had listened with particular attention to Goodman's live national broadcasts on the Let's Dance program, and had also bought his recordings. Unbeknownst to Goodman, these fans were waiting for him at the Palomar, as were many members of the Los Angeles music community.

From the start, then, radio was the greatest source of exposure for the big bands, and this remained so throughout the swing era. Four major radio net­works broadcasted the big bands every night, including "remotes" done from hotels, ballrooms, and dance pavilions throughout America. In fact, until the 1940s, record companies prohibited the playing of commercial recordings on the radio; only specially licensed "transcriptions" were permitted airplay. This prohibition was increasingly ignored, and a number of artists and record com­panies sued to prevent airplay of their recordings. The suits ultimately were unsuccessful, and the result was the rise of commercial radio as we know it today—disc jockeys, "hit parades" and, later, "top forty," and the decline of live music on the air.

Another business-related development also had long-term cultural effects. In 1941 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) demanded an increase in money paid by radio broadcasters to ASCAP composers, among whom were most of the major Broadway song­writers. The broadcasters refused and a ten-month battle ensued, during which ASCAP-licensed music could not be played on the radio. This led to the rise of Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), a rival licensing organization founded by the broadcasters. The dispute was resolved—in the broadcasters' favor—and as author Albert McCarthy has pointed out, "By this time BMI had destroyed the Tin Pan Alley monopoly, and writers and publishers of country and blues material found an outlet for their work that had previously been denied to them." This development aided the national rise of formerly regional genres such as country, folk, and rhythm-and-blues. And a decade or so later, it led to rock-and-roll.

But the most serious industry blow to big bands was the American Feder­ation of Musicians (AF of M) recording ban, begun on 1 August 1942 and not fully resolved until November 1944. Federation president James C. Petrillo, fearful that the playing of recordings on radio and jukeboxes constituted a threat to live music, wanted the recording companies to prohibit the use of records in these media. Petrillo eventually revised his strategy, demanding instead a tax on recording dates which, once agreed upon, ultimately led to the establishment of the Music Performance Trust Fund, to this day an impor­tant funder of live music concerts of all sorts that are presented to the public free of charge.

Before this settlement, however, the union enforced a ban on the record­ing of instrumental music. This ban did not include singers, who were not Federation members; they continued to record, albeit only with choral back­ing, and by the end of World War II solo singers had outdistanced the bands as the dominating force in popular music. Also benefiting were small record labels, which settled with the union earlier than did the three majors, Colum­bia, Decca, and RCA Victor. The non-majors, with their lower budgets, tended to record small-group music of various kinds, in the process breaking the dominance of both the Big Three and big bands.

World War II of course created a slew of problems. Large numbers of musi­cians were drafted into the armed services, seriously depleting the ranks of bands, and gas rationing made travel more difficult for both bands and the public, as did midnight curfews. On top of all this was a 20-percent tax on "entertainment" (bands that played for dancing or that included singers), which discouraged dancing; the tax, in fact, lasted well beyond the war years.

For that matter, the effects of most of these problems, along with new ones, continued to mount even after the end of the war. A postwar recession and the return of veterans eager to settle down led to a reduction in spend­ing for live music, and the introduction of television made most people that much more eager to stay at home. A second AF of M recording ban, lasting through most of 1948, simply worsened an already deteriorating situation. For the bandleaders, the costs of keeping a band on the road—salaries, trans­portation, lodging—kept growing. So did their nightly performance fees, which to some extent eventually priced them out of the market.

As for the music, it was growing, too, or at least the best, most jazz-ori­ented of it was. The innovations of bebop, in the main a small-group music, were leaving listeners dazzled, bewildered, or repelled, but in any case, jazz was drifting further and further away from dancers and dance tempos. For the most musically ambitious big-band leaders—Stan Kenton being a case in point—this was a welcome development even though most road bands still maintained a "dance book," since dances remained an important part of their bookings. Kenton was fortunate in that he was able to develop a large audience for a good deal of the music he wanted to play. Few post-swing era jazz orchestras, whatever their musical merits, have been able to make that claim.

Road bands, part-time bands, studio ensembles, and avant-garde configu­rations have all contributed to the wealth of big band jazz produced during the past half-century, but there are other milieus that should be mentioned as well. One is the rhythm-and-blues tributary, which produced some notewor­thy orchestras, including those led by Les Hite, Lucky Millinder, composer-arranger Buddy Johnson, Johnny Otis, and more recently, singer Ray Charles.

Another is the largely European institution of state-supported big bands, many of which exist primarily for broadcasting. The British Broadcasting Cor­poration (BBC) sponsored one as early as the mid-1930s; one of the orches­tra's arrangers was Benny Carter. In the post-World War II era, the most notable among such orchestras have been the WDR band in Cologne, the Danish Radio Orchestra, the UMO Jazz Orchestra in Finland, and the Swedish Radio Big Band. Interestingly, many of these bands have imported Americans as resident conductors (Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, Jiggs Whigham, Bill Dobbins, and Rich Shemaria), and many other American musicians have moved to Europe to play with them.

In the United States, tax-supported jazz orchestras are rare, and most of the few that do exist are maintained by the armed services. The Air Force Air­men of Note, the Navy Commodores, and the Army Jazz Ambassadors are all based in Washington, D.C., and others are based in the hinterlands. Also, in a handful of American cities, municipally named jazz ensembles have been founded.

Since the 1970s a new big-band development reflecting a growing interest in jazz history has gained momentum. Jazz repertory had its beginnings with the worthy but short-lived New York Jazz Repertory Company and Chuck Israels's National Jazz Ensemble, and other such ensembles have followed: the now-defunct American Jazz Orchestra, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orches­tra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orches­tra, and bands led by Loren Schoenberg and Walt Levinsky. All of these bands have, in varying ways, concentrated on works of the past.

But the most important refuge for big bands has been the jazz education movement. Begun in earnest after World War II and based in large part on the foundation of big bands (or, as they were euphemistically known for years, "stage bands"), jazz education has flourished. In the United States alone there are thousands (estimates range between 15,000 and 20,000) of secondary schools with big bands, and hundreds of colleges. The best of the college bands, including those at the University of North Texas (formerly North Texas State), the Berklee College of Music, the Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and elsewhere, play on a profes­sional or near-professional level, and many of the finest jazz musicians of the past three decades have emerged from these programs.

The irony of this situation is that, all of this activity notwithstanding, pro­fessional opportunities for jazz orchestras are not expanding but may in fact be diminishing even further. Most of the few remaining road bands have become history in the past decade, or now work sporadically as ghost bands. Travel costs continue to mount, performance opportunities have declined in number and often do not pay a living wage when they do exist, and most com­mercial record companies display little interest in big bands. In recent years it has become the norm for aspiring leaders of big bands to produce (and pay for) recordings of their groups and then to "shop the master tapes" in hopes of having them released commercially by a label. The days when big-band leaders made lots of money are obviously long gone.

In the future it may be that big bands will survive in the way that sym­phony orchestras currently exist: through public and private subsidy or under educational auspices. There are pros and cons to such arrangements, but it remains to be seen whether jazz orchestras and their music continue to evolve or become period ensembles playing music of the past. Regardless of what happens, the music—big band jazz—deserves to endure, and no doubt it will.

THE INNER WORKINGS OF A BIG BAND

Despite the abundance of big-band recordings and fans thereof, there is frequently a lack of understanding about how these bands are organized. Some words about this will, I hope, add to the enjoyment of the music.

As most listeners know, a standard big band instrumentation comprises a trumpet section (usually four players), a trombone section (usually two or three tenor trombones and a bass trombone), a saxophone section (usually two altos, two tenors, and a baritone), and a rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums, frequently guitar, and occasionally additional percussion). The trum­pet, trombone, and saxophone sections each have a leader, known to musi­cians as "lead players."

Lead players in big bands set the phrasing (how the written notes and phrases are articulated) and dynamics (degrees of loudness or softness); the ability to do this, and command a section in general, is a special skill, and a number of musicians have had distinguished careers as lead players. This is especially true of lead trumpet players, who have to dominate the entire band—not a job for the weak of nerve. In the trumpet personnel listings for the selections, certain names appear again and again: Cat Anderson, John Audino, Buddy Childers, Bernie Glow, Conrad Gozzo, Jimmy Maxwell, Al Porcino, Ernie Royal, Nick Travis, and Snooky Young. These are among the finest lead trumpeters in the history of big band jazz.

Many discographies and other listings of big-band personnel tend to mud­dle the order, especially of trumpet and trombone sections. The listings are often alphabetical or haphazard, giving no inkling of the actual makeup of the sections. When possible, I have attempted to list the section players in the order of the chairs they played, a matter complicated somewhat by the fact that trumpet and tenor trombone players tend to pass parts around the sec­tions. Because of the nature of brass instruments, lead trumpet and trombone playing is physically demanding, and it is common for lead players to exchange certain parts with other musicians in their section in order to give themselves a rest.

Until recently, lead players, especially trumpeters, tended to be non-improvisers or only occasional ones, although this situation has changed somewhat. Improvising trumpet players normally play the third or fourth book in a section, trombone players lead or second.

In the saxophone section (sometimes called the reed section), things are somewhat different. The lead alto player is more likely to keep all of the first parts and to be an improviser; lead alto players, like lead brass players, sit in the center of the section in order to be best heard. All of the saxophonists may well be improvisers, though the tenors tend to be the most featured.

Most swing-era saxophonists were also expected to "double" on clarinet, and baritone players on bass clarinet. With the advent of the Boyd Raeburn and Sauter-Finegan bands, doubling took on a whole new complexity, and the results were very influential, especially for studio recording. It is now com­mon for big-band saxophonists to double on flutes (which, unlike other wood­winds, do not have reeds) and clarinets, and sometimes on soprano and bass saxophones, piccolo, bass clarinet, alto and bass flutes, oboe, English horn, and bassoon. (Gil Evans took things a step further by eliminating the saxo­phone section from most of his bands and using mixed woodwinds instead.)

The rhythm section is the foundation of any big band, or for that matter, any jazz ensemble. All of the players have time-keeping functions, and all except the drummer (and non-mallet percussionists, if any) have harmonic functions as well. It is particularly important for the bassist and drummer to hook up rhythmically as a team; it is often said that the most important musi­cians in a big band are the drummer, the bassist, and the lead trumpeter. If all of these players do their jobs well, the rest of the band will follow.”

Here are three examples from the 75 annotations that Bill prepared to accompany the tracks in the Big Band Renaissance anthology along with a video tribute to the bands of Charlie Barnet, Buddy Rich and Clare Fischer, respectively, to give you an example of the music on hand in the collection and Bill’s excellent insights and observations about it.

CHARLIE BARNET AND HIS ORCHESTRA – EUGIEPELLIV [MUS. PAUL VILLEPIGUE]

Arr., Paul Villepigue. Rec. 1/16/49, New York. First issue Capitol T624; mx 3385-1D1.

John Howell, Tony DiNardi, Lainmar Wright Jr., Doc Severinsen, Dave Burns (t); Dick Kenney, Obie Masingill (tb); Kenny Martlock (btb); Barnet (ss); Vinnie Dean, Art Raboy (as); Kurt Bloom, Dave Matthews (ts); Danny Bank (bars); Claude Williamson (p); Eddie Safranski (b); Cliff Leeman (d); Diego Ibarra (bgo): Carlos Vidal (cga).

Soloists: Ibarra & Vidal; Barnet; Wright(?).

“Charlie Barnet [1913-91] re-formed his band around the same time as [Benny] Goodman did [late 1948], and it lasted about the same amount of time, but Barnet embraced the new music [Bebop], whereas Goodman merely tolerated it.  Barnet acquired arrangements from a variety of forward-looking writers, including Gil Fuller, Manny Albam, Paul Villepigue, Tiny Kahn, Obie Masingill, and Dave Matthews, and he put together a band whose enthusiasm matched his. It included a five-man trumpet section with powerhouse players; others who passed through the section included Maynard Ferguson, Ray Wetzel, and Rolf Ericsson. (During this period, Stan Kenton was inactive, and Capitol Records apparently was hoping that the new Barnet band could fill the void. Barnet's orchestra, incidentally, was one of the first after Kenton's to use a bass trombone.)

One of the band's most interesting recordings was Eugipelliv, the title obviously the backward spelling of its composer's surname. At its core a blues in G-minor, the piece is an amalgam of rich Ellington-like saxophone scoring (led by the leader's soprano), Latin rhythmic elements, and Villepigue's con­siderable originality. Barnet also recorded Villepigue's lovely ballad Lonely Street, but what could have become a major writing career was tragically cut short in 1953 when Villepigue took his own life at the age of 33.

Barnet himself continued to lead bands for "pickup" engagements and occasional recordings as late as the 1970s.”

THE BUDDY RICH BIG BAND Goodbye Yesterday [MUS. DON PIESTRUP)

Arr., Don Piestrup. Rec. 7/10/68, Las Vegas. First issue World Pacific Jazz ST-20133.K

Al Porcino, Kenneth Faulk, David Gulp, Bill Prince (t); Jim Trimble, Rick Stepton (tb); Peter Graves (btb); Art Pepper, Charles Owens (as); Don Menza, Pat LaBarbera (ts); John Laws (bars); Joe Azarello (p); Walt Namuth (g); Gary Walters (b); Rich (d).

Soloists: Prince; Menza.

“Buddy Rich (1917-87) was a phenomenon: an enfant terrible who became, after stints with Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey, one of the most in-demand drummers of the swing era. He formed his own big band in 1946 and led one intermittently into the early 50s, but from then until 1966 Rich alternated between leading his own small group and working as a sideman, most frequently with Harry James.

In April 1966 Rich left a lucrative position with James and formed a new big band. This time, through a mixture of showmanship, a shrewd choice of material (including arrangements of current pop fare that attracted a young audience), and frequent television exposure, Rich achieved the success as a big-band leader that had eluded him in the 40s. For the rest of his life he maintained, with only short hiatuses, a road band that remained a popular concert attraction.

The band's music ranged from the substantial to the superficial, but to all of it the leader brought his own unsparing intensity. (Though he was a renowned terror to his musicians, Rich employed an abundance of excep­tional, and mostly young, players.) Some of the most advanced writing was done by Don Piestrup (b. 1937), a free-lance composer-arranger whose jazz activity was documented principally by the Rich band; Piestrup eventually settled into a career writing jingles and commercial music. Goodbye Yester­day is one of Piestrup's best efforts, and it's a good example of his style: a fusion of Bill Holman-like linearity with some of the newer harmonic ideas that were in the air in the 60s.

The band's performance has the searing quality typical of Rich. Though he was a widely acknowledged nonpareil technician—the highlight of any Rich concert was an extended drum solo—he was a superb ensemble player as well, and that quality is heard throughout this track, recorded live at Caesar's Palace. Aside from Rich, the band's most heavily featured soloist was always a hard-driving tenor saxophonist, and Don Menza (b. 1936) here fills that role to perfection. Don't miss, though, the subtle rhythm section work of guitarist Walt Namuth.”

THE CLARE FISCHER BIG BAND Miles Behind (MUS., CLARE FISCHER)

Arr., Clare Fischer. Rec. fall 1968, Los Angeles. First issue Atlantic SD 1520; mx 15398.M "

Buddy Childers, Larry McGuire, Conte Candoli, Steve Huffsteter, Stewart Fischer (t); Gil Falco, Charley Loper, David Sanchez (tb); Morris Repass (btb); Gary Foster (as, pic); Kirn Richmond (as, fl); Lou Ciotti (ts, cl); Warne Marsh (ts); Bill Perkins (bars); John Lowe (bsx); Clare Fischer (p, el-p); Chuck Dornanico (b); Larry Bunker (d); unidentified cga.

Soloists: C. Fischer; Bunker; C. Fischer; Marsh; Candoli; Bunker.

“Since his move to Los Angeles from the Midwest in 1957, Clare Fischer (b. 1928) has been one of the most versatile musicians in residence on the West Coast—a singular stylist as pianist, organist, composer, and arranger. He first gained attention as musical director of the Hi-Lo's vocal group, then as arranger for recordings by Dizzy Gillespie, Cal Tjader, and oth­ers, and most of all as leader on a memorable series of record dates for Pacific Jazz in the early 60s.

Fischer's wide-ranging musical interests have always included a deep knowledge of Latin music; Miles Behind is a case in point. Written in 7/4 time, it has a tuneful melody and distinctive harmonies typical of Fischer, plus expert orchestration using instruments ranging from piccolo and bass saxo­phone to Fender Rhodes electric piano and congas. (Notice the use of six sax­ophones.) An especially clever touch comes after the trumpet solo: Fischer gives the baritone and bass saxophones a complex line, then places them in counterpoint while the other saxophones repeat that same line in a higher register.

Fischer's band, which played in the Los Angeles area in the late 60s, included some of that city's most prominent jazz musicians. Of the soloists, the standout was probably Warne Marsh (1927-87), a tenor saxophonist best known for his work with pianist Lennie Tristano in the 40s and 50s. Here Marsh plays one of the most unusual solos of his recording career, in a Latin setting rare for him.”

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.