One of the great
things about hanging out with Jazz musicians is that you’re never far from a
laugh.
Whether it’s a
play-on-words in a song title, a nickname, or the telling of a yarn, Jazz
musicians love a good chortle.
Playing Jazz takes
a lot of concentration, and humor is a great way to relieve the pressure that
builds up during a performance, a recording date or even a rehearsal,
especially when reading through new music.
Whether you are a
Jazz musician or a fan of the music, if you like the transformational feeling
that laughter brings on, you can’t do better than a perusal of the funny
stories in Bill
Crow’s Jazz
Anecdotes [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990].
“Not having
[trumpeter] Clark Terry tell this one robs it of some of its charm. You have to
imagine the devilish look in Clark’s
eye as he sings each song!
A guy walked into
a pet store looking for a Christmas gift for his wife. The storekeeper said he
knew exactly what would please her and took a little bird out of a cage.
"This is Chet," he said, "and Chet can sing Christmas
carols." Seeing the look of disbelief on the customer's face, he proceeded
to demonstrate.
"He needs
warming up," he said. "Lend me your cigarette lighter."
The man handed
over his lighter, and the storekeeper raised Chet's left wing and waved the
flame lightly under it. Immediately, Chet sang "Oh Come, All Ye
Faithful."
"That's
fantastic!" said the man.
"And listen
to this," said the storekeeper, warming Chet's other wing. Chet sang,
"O Little Town of Bethlehem."
"Wrap him
up!" said the man. "I'll take him!"
When he got home,
he greeted his wife:
"Honey, I
can't wait until Christmas to show you what I got you. This is fantastic."
He unwrapped
Chet's cage and showed the bird to his wife.
"Now, watch
this."
He raised Chet's
left wing and held him over a Christmas candle that was burning on the
mantlepiece. Chet immediately began to sing, "Silent Night." The wife
was delighted.
"And that's
not all, listen to this!" As Chet's right wing was warmed over the flame,
he sang, "Joy to the World."
"Let me try
it," cried the wife, seizing the bird. In her eagerness, she held Chet a
little too close to the flame. Chet began to sing passionately, "Chet's
nuts roasting on an open fire!""
Medium tempo blues practically play themselves especially when the rhythm section just lays it down and stays out of the way, which is exactly what bassist Peter Washington and drummer Joe Farnsworth do on the audio track to the following video. The tune is entitled Systems Blue. Trombonist Steve Davis wrote it and performs on it along with Mike DiRubbo on alto saxophone, David Hazeltine on piano and, of course, Peter and Joe.
Jazz musicians like to open the first set of club dates or concerts with a medium tempo blues. The easy tempo, simplified song structure [usually 12 bars which repeats once] and the groove generated all serve to get the juices flowing.
Smiles all round after listening to "the kids" making it happen on this one.
Jazz is in good hands.
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Alto saxophonist
Paul Desmond died on Memorial Day, 1977.
On this Memorial
Day weekend, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be
appropriate to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Paul’s passing
with the following videos that feature his superbly unique alto playing in
different musical contexts.
To ours ears,
Paul’s sound is associated with everything that we find beautiful in the
music. His was a masterful command of
the alto saxophone and his conception took the instrument to new heights, both
figuratively and literally.
Paul’s music was
like a good book: you could put it down and pick it up again anytime the mood
suited you or you could stay up all night reading it. It was full of melodic
“stories,” humor, and great depth of feeling.
Listening to Paul
play was always a satisfying experience; and like the reading of that good
book, one generally came away wanting more.
Stardust – Paul with pianist Dave Brubeck, bassist Ron Crotty and drummer
Joe Dodge.
You Go To My Head – Paul with Don Elliott on trumpet and
mellophonium, Norman Bates on bass and Joe Dodge on drums.
Chorale – Paul with Dave van Kriedt on tenor saxophone, Dave Brubeck on piano, Norman Bates on bass and
Joe Morello on drums.
I’ve Got You Under My Skin – Paul with Jim Hall on guitar, Milt Hinton
on bass, Robert Thomas on drums and strings and horns arranged by Bob Prince.
[Click on the “X” to close out of the ads when these appear on the video].
From a concert performed by the orchestra on April 28, 2011 at The Bimhuis in Amsterdam, the composition is entitled Black, Whiter and Brown and featuresPeter Beetson piano, Joris Roelofs on bass clarinet, and Jan van Duikeren on trumpet with Martijn Vink booting things along in the drum chair.
“It’s just one way and every man must go his own way.”
- Jimmy Giuffre, Down Beat, November 30, 1955
“Jimmy is an innovator and much has been written about his contributions to clarinet playing style and to Jazz composition, but this is secondary. It is the basic quality of his music, with its uncontrived simplicity and glowing inner feeling that sets Jimmy apart.”
- Gary Kramer, liner notes to The Jimmy Giuffre 3 [Atlantic 1254]
“the spirit of Jazz suffuses all of these performances …and important step in the long Giuffre musical odyssey … they are simply marvelous, full of life brimming with ideas, and chock-full of rich, rewarding, imaginative writing and playing.”
- Peter Keepnews, liner notes to the PAUSA: Jazz Origins reissue of Giuffre’s 1950 Capitol LPs
“When one listens to Giuffre's music for what it is—and not for what one thinks it should be—the beauties of this rich and strange musical landscape begin to emerge. Or rather, landscapes. For Giuffre never found a single musical Garden of Eden, a definitive style or format he could stay in for long. Like his more celebrated contemporary Miles Davis, Giuffre remains a musical chameleon, a distinctive stylist who constantly feels compelled to change his sonic setting.”
- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1969 [p.227]
Almost forty years after I first heard it, I tracked down Jimmy Giuffre and wrote him a letter about how much I enjoyed the music on his Capitol LP – Tangents in Jazz [T-634].
Jimmy was living in Massachusetts and I in San Francisco at the time. Because of health issues, his wife Juanita helped compose his response. Juanita, a professional photographer, also kindly enclosed a portrait of Jimmy which he had autographed,
In my letter to him, I explained that I had been particularly taken with the four relatively short pieces on the Tangents in Jazz LP entitled Scintilla I-IV.
On the album, the four-parts of Scintilla are sequenced: Scintilla II, Scintilla I, Scintilla IV and Scintilla III.
On a lark, I had decided to re-track these four Scintilla parts and record them in consecutive, numeric sequence.
I had included a copy of a tape recording with the re-sequenced Scintilla I-IV along with my letter to Jimmy.
In his reply, Jimmy shared that this was the first time that he had heard this music in its original order since he wrote and recorded it in June, 1955!
He also explained that although Will McFarland’s liner notes to the LP indicate the four Scintilla pieces being played in numerical order, somehow when the album was being prepared for pressing, it was sequenced according to the Master numbers assigned to each track when they were recorded on June 6,7,10, 1955.
Interestingly, when Mosaic Records reissued these recordings as CDs & LPs as part of their The Complete Capitol and Atlantic Recordings of Jimmy Giuffre [Mosaic MD6-176], Mosaic also used the master track sequence instead of grouping the four Scintilla tracks as a consecutive, inter-connected musical “suite.”
The audio track in a video tribute to Jimmy with the four-part Scintilla suite in the original sequence has been taken down due to copyright issues. But I was able to find a YouTube of the entire album with the original sequence interspersed in the correct sequence between other tracks on the Tangents in Jazz album.
The video is followed by Jimmy’s “Questions and Answers” about the music on the album which form the original LP’s liner notes, excerpts from Will McFarland’s descriptions of Scintilla I-IV and a postscript on the album by Ted Gioia.
As an aside, I got to know Artie Anton, the drummer on these tracks, quite well as he was for many years a drum shop proprietor and drum teacher in near-by North Hollywood, CA. He always considered his playing on Jimmy’s 1950s Capitol recordings as “one of my most enjoyable times in music.” He would also declare to anyone who would spare him the time to listen to them that his “… playing on these cuts proves that the drums are a musical instrument [big smile – His]!.”
The puckish trumpet work is provided by the inimitable Jack Sheldon; also prominent on all these performance is the robust bass tone of Ralph Pena who sadly left us much-too-quickly at age 42 because of his involvement in a fatal car accident in Mexico.
“A top-level soloist and writer makes his most daring move to date: Jimmy Giuffre sets forth a bold new form for improvised music.
The music is revolutionary; yet its advent was a foreseeable, logical step in jazz maturation. Giuffre's new concept is controversial ; its evidence here is a must for serious jazz-followers, yet the range of its appeal is so unpredictable that its champions could include bouncing dilettantes, hard-shell traditionalists, even jazz-apathists.
Specifically, this music puts on view a quartet that functions without an audible beat — no walking bass, no riding cymbal; yet thanks to Giuffre's indomitable folksiness, this flouting of tradition results in jazz that out-thumps the music of most of his heavy-handed neighbors.
Jimmy answers some leading questions...
Q What is this music?
A Jazz, with a non-pulsating beat. The beat is implicit but not explicit; in other words, acknowledged but unsounded. The two horns are the dominant but not domineering voices. The bass usually functions somewhat like a baritone sax. The drums play an important but non-conflicting role.
Q Why abandon the sounded beat?
A For clarity and freedom. I've come to feel increasingly inhibited and frustrated by the insistent pounding of the rhythm section. With it, it's impossible for the listener or the soloist to hear the horn's true sound, I've come to believe, or fully concentrate on the solo line. An imbalance of advances has moved the rhythm from a supporting to a competitive role.
Q But isn't the sounded beat an integral part of jazz?
A The sounded beat once made playing easier, but now it's become confining. And to the degree that the beat was there to guide dancers, it is, of course, no longer necessary to concert jazz. I think the essence of jazz is in the phrasing and notes, and these needn't change when the beat is silent. Since the beat is implicit, this music retains traditional feeling; not having it explicit allows freer thinking.
Q Hasn't this been done before, particularly by you?
A Several of today's writers have dropped all sounded beat for contrast, but never for an entire work. I've written works completely lacking sounded beat, but the difference between this music and all previous work is the use of the drums. My previous attempts at this approach, while achieving some of the clarity I sought, were always vaguely unsatisfactory to me until I realized the trouble: the drums, by their nature, cannot carry a simultaneous or overlapping line; when the drum is struck, any other note is obliterated, and attention is torn away from any other line. In this music, the drums' lines are integrated but isolated.
Q How is it possible to ensure this isolation during solos, when tacit is usually unpredictable?
A By writing rests in the ad lib parts, allowing the drums to fill. I strive to write the rests at natural phrase endings, holding restriction to a minimum.
Q But isn't there generally more restriction — don't the soloists have a good deal less freedom than before?
A In a sense, they have more freedom. No longer fed a stream of chords, or fighting a pounding beat, they are free to get a more natural sound out of their horns, and try for all sorts of new effects.
Q Didn't you have to select your musicians with extra care?
A Yes, I discussed my plans at length with each of them to make sure they were completely attuned to the project. Artie Anton, the drummer, has had wide band experience; from the beginning he was sympathetic to my new ideas. He is a skilled reader, as is Ralph Pena, a bassist with great sound, jazz feeling and a classical background, who has worked with many big bands and Stan Getz. Pena has recorded previously with me, as has Jack Sheldon, an ex-Lighthouse trumpeter who has also recorded under his own name. Sheldon is a major soloist, and fits perfectly into my conception of the quartet.
Q This music is such a sharp departure; do you have any misgivings about making the leap?
A This music is no novelty; it's the result of almost a decade of formal study, the culmination of all my thinking, writing and blowing. To me, it seems like sheer insanity to continue to play against that hammering beat. Classical music, once the rhythm is stated, assumed the freedom to move unaccompanied, and if jazz is going to continue to grow, it needs this same freedom.
Q New styles usually provoke extreme reaction; what sort of general judgment do you hope for?
A Early works in a new style necessarily grope; each new tune helps to expand and define the form; this album is not final. All I really ask for this music is an isolated judgment —for what it is, rather than for what it isn't. It isn't an attempt to compete with, or supplant other forms; I knew when I took the step that I must sacrifice a large segment of the usual jazz audience. It is, I think, jazz, and a swinging music, but those are ambiguous terms. Does it excite interest? Is it pleasurable? Does the interest hold up? These are the real questions.
Q You've been considered one of the great blowers with the very sort of rhythm you now flee; are you abandoning it for good?
A As a working musician, I must continue to play other music until the quartet works more steadily, and there are problems — such as the extreme awkwardness of any turnover in personnel. I still enjoy playing with a stomping rhythm section occasionally, but my heart lies here; I believe in this music.
Will McFarland comments on the four Scintilla selections ...
Scintilla One — This bright brief opener, mostly ensemble work, serves both as an introduction to the album and as a basis for three subsequent sparkling variations. There is no improvisation or development as yet, but extensions of the form are heard.
Scintilla Two — The ensemble plays the first eight bars of Scintilla One to introduce a development of that theme — minus extensions. This fast, tough, earnest variation is used as a basis for blowing; it's Giuffre's tenor all the way, very free.
Scintilla Three — Another variation on the root Scintilla, lighter and cute this time, stars the trumpet. Jack Sheldon's depth in running ideas is given plenty of leeway, and the clarinet comments from the middle-ground, half written, half spontaneous.
Scintilla Four — Climaxing the album, Giuffre unveils a stirring development and finale: the drums are fingered; there is imitation; all four players take a final four; all previous Scintilla material is recapitulated and used; a couple of canons, and the concert closes.
– Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1969 [pp. 235-36, paragraphing modified]
“Despite Giuffre's rhetoric, the pieces on Tangents in Jazz do swing. In many ways the listener is even more drawn to the rhythmic element of the music, by the way it moves from instrument to instrument, instead of resting solely with the "rhythm" section. On Tangents Giuffre was again joined by Pena, Sheldon, and Anton, and though none of them stretches out at length during the course of the album, each is very much put in the spotlight as Giuffre employs a wide range of compositional devices: call-and-response figures, two- and three-part counterpoint, unison and harmony lines, canonic devices. These take the place of solos in Giuffre's new conception.
As a filmmaker conveys a sense of momentum through a sequence of rapidly shifting camera angles, Giuffre's constant movement from one musical device to another achieves a similar effect. Part of the achievement of Tangents in Jazz is that, despite the leader's stated disregard for a "propulsive" beat, these pieces are constantly propelled, if not by a metronomic beat, certainly by Giuffre's constant changes in compositional focus. If anything, Giuffre overcompensates on Tangents, avoiding lengthy solos and shifting musical gears with abandon. The result is a highly concentrated music—which may be pleasing to the listener, but also makes severe demands on the attention.”
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has long
wanted to have a piece on the site in honor of the memory of Coleman
Hawkins, the man most responsible for
bringing Jazz to the tenor saxophone.
And what better way to do this for the man who was affectionately known
to his peers as “Bean,” than with more of the writing of Whitney Balliett, this
time from his anthology entitled Dinosaurs in the Morning: 41 Pieces on Jazz [Philiadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott, 1962].
At the conclusion of Mr. Balliett’s essay,
you will find a video tribute to Coleman Hawkins made with the assistance of
the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD. The audio track is Frank Foster’s
“Juggin’ Around” on which Frank is joined on tenor saxophone by Gene Ammons and
Frank Wess, along with Nat Adderley on cornet, Bennie Green on trombone and a
rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan, Ed Jones and Albert “Tootie” Heath on piano,
bass and drums, respectively. All three tenor saxophonists were heavily influenced by Bean.
“IMPROVISATION, the seat of jazz, is a remorseless art
that demands of the performer no less than this: that, night after night, he
spontaneously invent original music by balancing‑with the speed of light ‑emotion
and intelligence, form and content, and tone and attack, all of which must both
charge and entertain the spirit of the listener. Improvisation comes in various
shapes. There is the melodic embellishment of Louis Armstrong and Vic
Dickenson; the similar but more complex thematic improvisation of Lester Young;
the improvisation upon chords, as practiced by Coleman Hawkins and Charlie
Parker, and the rhythmic-thematic convolutions now being put forward by
Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. There are, too, the collective
improvisations, such as, the defunct New Orleans ensemble, and its contrapuntal descendants, which are
thriving in the bands of John Lewis and Charlie Mingus. Great improvisation
occurs once in a blue moon; bad improvisation, which is really not
improvisation at all but a rerun or imitation of old ideas, happens all the
time. No art is more precarious or domineering. Indeed, there is evidence that
the gifted jazz musicians who have either died or dried up early are primarily
victims not of drugs and alcohol but of the insatiable furnace of
improvisation. Thus, such consummate veteran improvisers as Armstrong,
Dickenson, Hawkins, Buck Clayton, and Monk are, in addition to being master
craftsmen, remarkable endurance runners. One of the hardiest of these is
Hawkins, who, now fifty-four, continues to play with all the vitality and
authority that be demonstrated during the Harding administration as a member of
Mamie Smith's jazz Hounds.
Hawkins, in fact, is a kind of super jazz musician,
for he has been a bold originator, a masterly improviser, a shepherd of new
movements, and a steadily developing performer. A trim, contained man, whose
rare smiles have the effect of a lamp suddenly going on within, he was the
first to prove that jazz could be played on the saxophone, which bad been
largely a purveyor of treacle. He did this with such conviction and imagination
that by the early thirties he had founded one of the two great schools of
saxophone playing. In 1939, Hawkins set down, as an afterthought at a recording
session, a version of "Body and Soul" that achieves the impossible -
perfect art. A few years later, he repeated this success with "Sweet
Lorraine" and "The Man I Love." Unlike many other jazz
musicians, who are apt to regard anything new with defensive animosity, Hawkins
has always kept an ear to the ground for originality, and as a result he led
the first official bebop recording session, which involved Dizzy Gillespie, Max
Roach, and the late Clyde Hart. Soon afterward, he used the largely unknown
Thelonious Monk in some important recordings. Then his playing inexplicably
began to falter and he went into semi-eclipse, from which he rocketed up,
without warning, in the early fifties, landing on his feet with a brand-new
style (his third), whose occasional febrility suggests a man several decades
younger.
Hawkins's early style was rough and aggressive. His
tone tended to be harsh and bamboo-like, and he used a great many staccato,
slap-tongued notes. But these mannerisms eventually vanished, and by the
mid-thirties he had entered his second and most famous phase. His heavy vibrato
suggested the wing beats of a big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet
and lit by huge fires. His technique had become infallible. He never fluffed a
note, his tone never shrank or overflowed-as did ChuBerry's, say-and he gave the impression that he had enough
equipment to state in half a dozen different and finished ways what was in his
head. This proved to be remarkable, particularly in his handling of slow
ballads.
Hawkins would often begin such a number by playing one
chorus of the melody, as if he were testing it. He would stuff its fabric with
tone to see how much it would take, eliminate certain notes, sustain others,
slur still others, and add new ones. Then, satisfied, he would shut his eyes,
as if blinded by what he was about to play, and launch into improvisation with
a concentration that pinned one down. (Hawkins's total lack of tentativeness ‑
the exhilarating, blind man tentativeness of Pee Wee Russell or Roy Eldridge ‑
suggested that he had written out and memorized his solos long before playing
them.) He would construct‑out of phrases crowded with single notes, glissandos,
abrupt stops, and his corrugated vibrato‑long, hilly figures that sometimes
lasted until his breath gave out. Refilling his lungs with wind‑tunnel
ferocity, he would be off again‑bending notes, dropping in little runs like
steep, crooked staircases, adding decorative, almost calligraphic flourishes,
emphasizing an occasional phrase by allowing it to escape into puffs of breath.
He often closed these solos with roomy codas, into which he would squeeze fresh
and frequently fancy ideas that bad simply been crowded out of his earlier
ruminations. If another soloist followed him, he might terminate his own
statement with an abrupt ascending figure that neatly catapulted his successor.
When Hawkins had finished, his solo, anchored directly and emphatically to the
beat, had been worked into an elaborate version of the original melody, as
though be had fitted a Victorian mansion over a modern ranch house. At fast tempos,
Hawkins merely forced the same amount of music into a smaller space. There
seemed to be no pause between phrases or choruses, and this produced an
intensity that thickened the beat and whose vehemence was occasionally
indicated by sustained growls. Yet for all this enthusiasm, Hawkins' playing
during this period often left the listener vaguely dissatisfied. Perhaps it was
because his style had an unceasing - and, for that time, unusual - intellectual
quality, with the glint of perfection and a viselike unwillingness to let any
emotion out, lest it spoil the finish on his work. One kept waiting for the
passion beneath the surface to burst through, but it never did-until five years
ago.
Hawkins can now be volcanic. His present style is
marked primarily by a slight tightening of tone, which sometimes resembles the
sound he achieved at the outset of his career; the use of certain harsh notes
and phrases that, not surprisingly, suggest Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins;
and an almost dismaying display of emotion. This exuberance has been costly. In
his pursuit of pure flame, Hawkins sometimes misses notes or plays them badly,
and he falls back, perhaps out of fatigue, on stock phrases of his own, such as
a series of abrupt, descending triplets. When everything is in mesh, however,
the results are formidable. …” Click on the "X" to close out of the advertisements should they appear while you are viewing the video.
When we prepared our earlier book review of Timme Rosenkrantz's Harlem Jazz Adventures we came across the following information about how Erroll's career in Jazz almost didn't happen. I wonder how many other talented players got discouraged and were never "discovered" in the world of Jazz during it's heyday?
We decided to "re-discover" the wonder that was Erroll Garner by reposting our earlier piece about him on the left columnar sidebar while displaying below these excerpts from Timme's book as well as an earlier video tribute to Erroll.
- “Young Garner's father was a singer who played several instruments, as did his older brother, Linton. Erroll was an entirely self-taught musician who hit the keys when he was three years old and never did learn how to read music. But he played like no other pianist, and his flamboyant style was a delight to the ears. He would start a ballad with a long, discordant introduction that didn't even hint at the melody to come. At last when he swung into it, his left hand lay down chords like a guitar, keeping up a steady pulse, while his right hand never seemed to catch up, improvising chords or playing octaves that lagged way behind the beat for the rest of the number. Just a pinch of Fats Waller added spice.
I was fascinated by this fellow's joyously swinging piano, and I sought him out while Louis Prima was on [Garner was the intermission pianist at the Tondelayo Club on 52nd St. in NYC where Prima was the featured act]. Erroll was anything but happy. He didn't know many people in New York and was downhearted. No one was interested in listening to him—Louis Prima was the showman attraction. And Erroll was only making forty dollars a week!
He told me he thought he'd go home soon, as it seemed nothing was going to happen for him in New York. Somehow, I had to stop him. I invited him home to 7 West 46th Street, showed him my rented Krakaur grand, and once he got started, it was impossible to pry him off the bench. Little did I know at the outset that he had a bad case of asthma and couldn't sleep lying down!” [p. 176]
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