Randy Weston: Hi-Fly, Little Niles and Africa

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

More observant listeners are impressed with Randy’s strong, virile attack, his steady beat and his melodic imagination; both in improvising and composing he seemed to show the influence of Thelonious Monk.

- Leonard Feather, Jazz author and critic

“I expect that in the decade and more ahead, Randy will become as recognized for his compositions as for his playing.”

- Nat Hentoff, Jazz author and critic, writing in 1957

Weston's '50s recordings for Riverside (expertly supported by Cecil Payne), Dawn, Jubilee, Metro, and United Artists are among the most charmingly anomalous in the postbop era. His penchant for triple time, pentatonic melodies, and a shrewdly rhythmic piano attack, heavy on bass, was established before he went to Africa and developed further during the course of two tours of Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961 and 1963, and a 1966 state department visit to fourteen African countries. By 1969, he had settled in Morocco, living in Rabat and Tangier, where he operated the African Rhythms Club.

- Gary Giddins, Jazz author and critic

“You can have it. It’s not music that’s going to get any air time on my show.”

The speaker was a family friend who hosted a very successful AM radio program that primarily featured the music of popular singers like Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Vic Damone, Rosemary Clooney or Patti Page; singers who sang the commercial hits of the day as arranged by Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Henry Mancini and a whole host of other, orchestrators.

Given the sterling reputation of his radio show, many distributors sent him sample copies of long-playing records, today known as “vinyl,” many of which contained music that was superfluous to his program.

His offer of a gift had to do with an LP that I was holding in my hands with music by the Randy Weston Trio and the Lem Winchester Quartet that was recorded one afternoon [July 5^th] during the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

Entitled New Faces at Newport,  the album was on the obscure Metro Jazz label [E1005].

I had no idea who [pianist] Weston or [vibraphonist] Winchester were, but hey, free is free, especially at a time in my life when popping $5 bucks for a Jazz record was still a lot of money.

I was familiar with the rhythm section of Ray Santisi on piano, John Neves on bass and Jimmy Zitano who accompanied Winchester from a Herb Pomeroy’s Boston-based big band LP that I had in my “collection” so I first played Lem’s side of the LP leaving the tracks by Weston for a later listen.

The time allotted to the four tracks by Randy on this album is largely taken up by a long drum solo by G.T. Hogan on an “excerpt” from Weston’s Bantu Suite. I didn’t find the remainder of that suite until many years later, but the title was a portent of things to come as Randy was to become a major exponent and interpreter of African music for much of his later career.

When I did get around to a close listening of the other tracks by Randy Weston on that Metro Jazz LP, what struck me – to the point of fascination – was Randy’s original composition Hi-Fly. Melodically, it is little more than a ditty based on a repetition of fifths, but I found myself whistling or humming it for days.

I was also taken by Weston’s minimalist approach to piano playing. He seemed to frame the tune with thoughtful improvisations much like Jimmy Rowles or Duke Jordan or John Lewis, but his style was somehow very distinctive.

As Dick Katz describes it in his essay on Jazz pianists from the 1940’s and 1950’s in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz:

“Like Thelonious Monk’s, Randy Weston’s piano style defies outright imitation. He takes elements of Monk, Ellington, and a little Bud Powell, and ingeniously melds them with aspects of his own intense interest in African cultures, particularly those of Morocco, Tangier and Nigeria. His compositions, like Monk’s, are intrinsically bound to his playing style. In addition to many waltzes, his Little Niles, Hi-Fly and African Cookbook are justly well-known.”

Dick’s comments about Randy and waltzes were a prelude to my next encounter with Weston’s music. At a time when unusual or “odd” time signatures began to have an wider impact on Jazz, one of the first Jazz waltzes I ever played on was Weston’s Little Niles.

And here again, I couldn’t seem to get the jaunty snippet of a melody that forms the theme to Little Niles out of my mind for weeks.

The Metro Jazz LP helped me to familiarize with some of Randy Weston’s music, but I never knew much about him in general nor about the body of work he produced largely due to the influence of African music [as noted in the comments Dick Katz’s comments].

Two, recent acquisitions helped remedy this deficiency. The first was being “gifted” a copy of Len Lyons’ masterful The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music [New York: DaCapo, 1989].

The following forms the introduction to a lengthy interview that Len conducted with Randy:

© -Len Lyons/DaCapo, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Randy Weston is an imposing, almost regal figure.

Large-limbed and graceful, he stands six feet seven inches tall. Wearing a dashiki and a colorful skullcap, he greeted me in his motel room overlooking San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. During much of our interview he method­ically rubbed body oils into his hands, feet, and neck. Weston seems to glow with pride when he speaks of Africa, where he lived from 1967 to 1973 and operated a cultural exchange center for musicians called the African Rhythms Club.

More than any other jazz pianist, Weston incorporates African elements into his playing in an obvious way. He shifts meters frequently-between 4/4, 3/4, and less common metric patterns. He also uses the bass register of the piano as a kind of tonal drum. During a trio set the night before (with James Lean/, bass, and Ken Marshall, drums) Weston demonstrated an uncanny ability to establish driving, hypnotic rhythms by using only one or two chords-sometimes only one or two notes-per measure. He has perfected what Bill Evans called the rhythmic displacement of ideas. There were times he made the whole room sway to his personal beat.

Weston's exposure to African culture and its derivative music began in childhood. His father, born in Panama, was of Jamaican descent and operated a restaurant in Brooklyn, serving West Indian cuisine. Realizing that Randy would not learn African history at school, his father educated him in his heritage at home. The restaurant was frequented by jazz musicians, who ex­posed Randy to the music of New York during the rise of modern jazz. He remembers listening to Bud Powell, Duke Jordan, Art Tatum, Willie "the Lion" Smith, and Erroll Garner. His most important influence, evident from the degree of space, or silence, he leaves in his music, was Thelonious Monk.

Weston began his career at the unusually advanced age of twenty-three, and his first job was accompanying the blues singer Bull Moose Jackson. He then worked with saxophonist Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and drummer Art Blakey. In the late fifties Weston met historian Marshall Stearns and toured with him on a lecture circuit, giving demonstra­tions of jazz piano styles. Weston became well known as a composer, especially of jazz waltzes like "Little Niles" and "Hi-Fly," which have become classics in the jazz repertoire. In I960 Weston composed "Uhuru Africa" for a big band and vocalist, with text provided by poet Langston Hughes. In 1967, following a State Department-sponsored tour of fourteen African countries, Weston moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he established the African Rhythms Club. In 1973 he moved to Paris. Since then he has done most of his playing in Europe and Africa.

Weston is very disturbed by the picture of Africa presented in America. "All we hear about are the problems of Africa," he said, "like wars, famines, and racial problems. That's what makes the news. But there are tremendous musical and cultural experiences there." His own African experience, he ex­plained, made him aware of spirituality, nature, and the historical role of the musician in African culture. "He was a communicator, whose task it was to spread knowledge of the traditions of the people. He was a healer, too; scien­tists in the West are just beginning to look into music as therapy. There is music for weddings, funerals, and virtually every aspect of life. In Africa today the musician is still an integral part of all community life."

Weston sees jazz piano as part of the black man's Africanization of Euro­pean instruments. "I would like to have been there when our people first came into contact with these instruments," he said. "Can you imagine the excite­ment, the freshness of the first encounter? To me, what Louis Armstrong did was fantastically modern, really avant-garde." My line of questioning began with the origins of jazz.”

The other source of my enlightenment about things Weston resulted from my acquisition of the limited edition 3-CD Mosaic Select Randy Weston boxed set.

A summation of Randy’s significance in Jazz and the contents of the boxed set is contained in these remarks by its producer, Michael Cuscuna.

“During the past 50 years, Randy Weston has created an outstanding and forward-thinking body of work as a composer, pianist and band leader. But before his association with French Verve, which began in 1989, his discography was scattered over dozens of American and small European labels and albums disappeared as quickly as others were released.

The six albums in this collection have all collided under EMI's ownership and represent some of his most important early sessions. Piano-a-la-Mode, made for Jubilee, is one of his best early piano trio albums. Little Niles was his first for a major label and focused on his considerable skills as composer. Live at the Five Spot featured an extraordinary guest in the person of [legendary tenor saxophonist] Coleman Hawkins. A first album for Roulette with Cecil Payne, Ron Carter and Roy Haynes has never been issued before. Uhuru Afrika and Highlife were among the first informed fusions of jazz and African music, made at a volatile time when newly independent nations were emerging in Africa on a regular basis.

Sadly, Randy's African-influenced work did not catch the cultural wave at the time. Abbey Lincoln recorded African Lady and Horace Parlan picked up on Kucheza Blues (see Mosaic MD5-197), but Uhuru Afrika went largely unnoticed and was a rare collectors' item within a few years of release. Stanley Turrentine recorded In Memory Of and Niger Mambo (see Mosaic MD5-212) soon after Highlife was released, but again that album failed to reach an audience among musicians or the public.

It is with great satisfaction that we make this delightful and important music available. Special thanks to Randy Weston, a man as elegant and gracious as he is talented, for sorting out many discographical questions such as the drummers on the Five Spot session. Incidentally, a third United Artists album featuring the music of Destry Ricks Again was an A & R man's attempt at commercial success that a then acquiescent Randy would rather forget. For that reason, it is not included here.

— MICHAEL CUSCUNA, 2003”

And the distinguished Jazz author Nat Hentoff had this to say about Randy and his music in these excerpts from his 1957 liner notes to Piano-a-la-Mode [Jubilee JGM 1060].

© -Nat Hentoff, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Randy Weston, 31, is evolving into a vigorously personal jazzman with spirited intelligence, and a large reservoir of what the young mainstreamers like Quincy Jones and Cannonball Adderley call soul.

Within the past year, Weston's career is also quickening. He's worked the Cafe Bohemia, several Sunday afternoon concerts at Birdland for Jazz Unlimited, Cy Coleman's Playroom, The Five Spot, and concerts at Town Hall and Loew's Sheridan presented by the Village Voice, the resiliently hip Greenwich Village weekly. He has also signed with the Columbia Lecture Bureau for the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958 to present a series of jazz lecture-demonstrations at colleges and in auditoriums.

Weston, as articulate verbally as he is on piano, usually opens his lecture program with demonstrations of the roots of jazz — African rhythms, spirituals, boogie-woogie and the blues. The second half reflects his own modern approach, and invariably includes several of his originals.

Randy has become a jazz writer of growing distinction. He's written some 23 originals, and several of them, like the waltz, Little Niles, are being recorded and performed by a number of his contemporaries, including Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford and George Shearing. Milt Jackson plans to record Randy's Pam's Waltz, and I expect that in the decade and more ahead, Randy will become as recognized for his compositions as for his playing.

Randy's attitude toward jazz is strongly involved with his love and respect for the traditions of the language. One of his three major influences is Duke Ellington. "The way he plays," Randy begins, "for one thing. He's not recognized too much as a pianist, but he's a fine one. He's very definite; he's not afraid to do what's in his mind; and his playing has that sound and drive he gets from his orchestra. And there's his feeling for change of pace; he can be wild and then become so subtle. The blues feeling he had his band have moves me so. The whole band has that blues sound and feeling, no matter what they're playing."

Art Tatum is a second influence, as he has to have been to almost every jazz pianist by virtue of his total command of the instrument. A third is Thelonious Monk. "When I first met Monk," says Randy, "I was more interested in Nat Cole and Eddie Heywood, who lived around the corner from me. I wasn't in a musical position to appreciate what Monk was doing. This was in 1944, and I heard Monk at the Down Beat with Coleman Hawkins. I had great respect for Hawkins, and I figured that if Hawkins had hired Monk, Monk must have something to say. I became so fascinated by him in time that I decided to meet and talk to him. There wasn't much at first in the way of conversation, but I'd go by his house, starting around 1947 and continuing intermittently for several years, and he'd play piano and I'd listen for three or four years. I really do feel Monk is a genius."

"If it's not a paradox," Randy adds, "Monk has a command of freedom. I never get the feeling of paper and notes in his work. There is a complete freedom in his work. It doesn't sound as if he's affected by barriers or conventions. Whatever he feels, he writes and plays; and yet he still keeps alive that old definite piano sound like Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. Monk inspired me in that he showed me you can stretch out and be yourself. Some people say he hasn't much technique as a pianist. Technique isn't important. It's the message you have that counts, especially in jazz. I once heard a piano player who could only play three or four chords, but when he was through, you knew emotionally he'd been there!

"As a writer, Monk can create a melody that sounds like no one else's and yet just seems to have flowed naturally from him. I can't verbalize how he does it; I don't think he can verbalize it either. I've never taken a formal lesson from him, but I've listened and talked to him a lot, and he's changed my whole conception. I remember one lesson he taught me especially well. There was some music going on at his house. I didn't care for it, and said so. Monk said nonchalantly but firmly, "You've got to listen to everybody and everything. Everybody has something to say."

"I've found that to be very true."

Here’s a video montage of images of Randy and some of the artwork from his many recordings which employs as its audio track the version of Hi-Fly from the 1958 Metro Jazz LP that he recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival with George Joyner on bass and G.T. Hogan on drums.

Happy New Year!

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles would like to thank its readers for their continuing patronage and to wish them all happiness, health and peace in 2013.

Deborah Brown, Eric Ineke and The JazzXpress: All Too Soon

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

Like the needs of businesses and universities, Jazz singers and Jazz groups often exist in parallel universes. The interests of both rarely meet.

Singers are interested in performing, in putting a song over to an audience and in having audience approval for their dramatic interpretation of a song’s lyrics.

For many Jazz musicians, the song is just a means to and end; a platform from which their improvisations spring.

And while there is no doubt that many Jazz musicians agree with tenor saxophonists Lester Young’s and Ben Webster’s axiom that you play a ballad better if you know it’s lyrics, most of the songs that Jazz musicians improvise on have no lyrics.

Many singers are not musicians. They have no formal education in theory and harmony. They sing by ear, often, out of tune. They don’t even know the keys in which they sing their songs.

Singers don’t play in groups with other musicians, they are often “backed” by a pianist, sometimes in a piano-bass-drums trio.

The music revolves around the singer who is usually not an integral part of the group. He or she stands before a microphone, maybe does the verse to the tune, sings the melody, the pianist plays a brief 16 bar solo, the singer comes back in at the bridge and takes the tune out.  Applause, adulation and adoration.

If there are horn players involved, they may play some background vamps behind the singer, perhaps one of them will take the brief chorus instead of the piano player, and then play an ending note in unison when the singer closes.

Occasionally – or all too frequently – the singers decides to dispense with the lyrics and “scat.”

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz defines scatting as: “A technique of Jazz singing in which onomatopoeic or nonsense syllables are sung to improvised melodies.”

The idea is for the singer to use the human voice to mimic a horn, but if the ear can’t follow the line of the music, what comes out is not scatting, but rather, something which sounds like exuberant blathering.

But since the singer is often billed as “the star” and because many in the audience can relate more easily to sung lyrics as opposed to instrumental improvisations, the musicians just goes along for the ride. It’s a living.

Of course, there are numerous exceptions to what I’ve just described, but all-too-often, the parallel universes in which vocalists and musicians exist is the rule rather than the exception.

But when there is a blending of vocal talent with Jazz instrumentalists – when it does work – it becomes the best of all possible worlds.

There’s nothing quite like the magical expressiveness of the human voice in a setting formed by a Jazz group.

You can hear such a coming together in the recently released CD All Too Soon: Deborah Brown [Jazzvoix] on which Deborah is joined by drummer Eric Ineke’s quintet – The JazzXpress.

Deborah Brown sings with the band and if that band is led by Dutch Jazz drummer Eric Ineke, you better know what you are doing because he is a stern taskmaster who comes to play.

No one messes with Eric Ineke when it comes to the high standards he maintains – no exceptions – instrumentalist or vocalist you’d better bring your best when you make music with him.

And Deborah Brown does just that: whether it is on the more familiar Ellington All Too Soon, or the Ellington, Billy Strayhorn collaboration One Hundred Days From Now, or Rudy Friml’s Indian Love Call with its lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein; or new material like Rob van Bavel’s Thanks with lyrics by Liesbeth Kooymans or Toots Thielmans’ Hard to Say Goodbye to which Deborah, herself, added lyrics; or the rarely sung – because of its difficulty – The Peacocks by Jimmy Rowles with lyrics by the great singer Norma Winstone, Deborah brings her musicality up to the highest level of professionalism.

The music on this recording is crafted. Everything is well-thought-out. The tempos and keys are comfortable for Deborah such that she doesn’t have to overreach but can stay within her comfort zone. Her singing adds enough zest and spark to bring out the best in the fine instrumentalist who make up Eric’s JazzXpress.

The horn solos by tenor saxophonists Sjoerd Dijkhuizen and trumpeter Rudolpho Fereira Neves on trumpet – the newest member of the group – are influenced and inspired by Deborah’s singing.

The soloists are not just playing something because they are expected to, they are feeding off of the atmosphere of excitement and energy generated by Deborah’s vocals.

The JazzXpress rhythm section made up of Rob van Bavel on piano, Marius Beets on bass and drumming maestro Eric Ineke is one of the best in all of Jazz. They play together as a unit and give everything a lift with the light and bouncy feeling that they bring to the time [meter]. All three are excellent soloists who really shine when called upon to do so.

Rob van Bavel continues to impress me each time I hear him with his skill as an accompanist and his well-constructed solos. He has really come into his own in recent years and his maturity, poise and swinging solos remind me a lot of Italian Jazz pianist, Dado Moroni.

Marius and Eric deliver that “marriage between bass notes and cymbal beat” that bassist Chuck Israels loves to hear when he listens to Jazz and their intense swing is done so effortlessly that you “feel” it as well as hear it.

I have a difficult time with a new musician or vocalist who plays or sings music that is all new to me. There is no place for me to “set my ears.”

Although I was encountering Deborah’s singing for the first time on this CD, her versions of Indian Love Call, All Too Soon and One Hundred Dreams From Now – all tunes which were previously known to me – made possible my enjoyment of her renditions of the many tunes on the CD that were completely new to me, for example, Light In Your Eyes [Pierre van Dormael], Like It was Before [Pamela Watson] and Fine Together [by Lars Gullin, the late Swedish baritone saxophonist, with lyrics by Philip Tagg].

About the material on this recording, Deborah notes: “Through the years some of these songs never left my mind and because they were compositions from the past, it was a challenge to bring new life to them. …

In these stressful days when people just want something soothing to listen to, I decided to select songs by degree of difficulty. I think my Jazz audience expects music with substance.

Also as singers, we like to look for those “hidden gems,” something seldom done, and there are many beautiful melodies that have been done in the past. So, if you like strong melodies and timeless classics with a slight twist, this is for you!”

Mention should also be made of alto saxophonist Bobby Watson’s presence of the CD both as a player and for his role as one of the co-producers.

You can hear Bobby along with Deborah and Eric’s marvelous JazzXpress on the following audio-only track from All Too Soon which is available both as a CD and as a download from Amazon.com and other online retailers.

"The Incredible" Jimmy Smith

While the editorial staff at JazzProfiles completes a planned featured on Hammond B-3 organist Jimmy Smith, we thought you might enjoy viewing this montage of photographs of him and his many recordings.

When Miles Davis first encountered what Jimmy was doing on the Hammond B-3 organ, it is reported that he exclaimed: "This Cat is the 8th Wonder of the World."

When Alfred Lion, the president of Blue Note Records, first heard Jimmy perform, he signed him to a recording contract and proclaimed him - The Incredible Jimmy Smith.

When we first heard Jimmy play, we just smiled.

If this is your first listening to Jimmy, you will, too.

[Click on the "X" to close out of the ads.]

Erroll Garner in Carmel, California for A Concert By The Sea

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

“The DVD of the 1963 concert in Belgium with Erroll includes a stunning reading of Garner's most durable original composition, "Misty," which had already proved a pop hit both for himself and for several singers.

Garner looks particularly happy to be playing it. Throughout the tune, he sits there drenched in perspiration but with a beaming smile on his face and an irresistible expression of joy.

He looks like someone who has just enjoyed the single most pleasurable experience a man can have – at least while wearing a tuxedo.”

- Will Friedwald

“By the early 1950s, Garner had settled into his preferred format and style – swashbuckling trios which plundered standards with cavalier abandon.”

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

“Erroll Garner (1921-1977) was entirely self taught; at the keyboard he was a fun loving ruffian. … No pianist is likely to have admired his technique, but many envied his witty and melodic improvising, which seemed to flow from a bottomless reservoir.”

- Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists

In terms of furthering my Jazz education at a time when there was virtually no such thing available on a formal basis, probably the most important step I ever took was subscribing to the Columbia Record Club when it first came into existence.

Although I have forgotten the exact details, I seem to recall that subscribers received three of four Columbia LP’s for a low price as a signing bonus with their pledge in return to buy a specified number of albums during a one year period for the retail price plus shipping.

The subscriber could reject the Club’s monthly selection [or its alternate] by simply returning the postcard that announced these choices before the due date stamped on the card.

Therein lay the rub.

I was a teenager and remembering anything except the source of whatever instant gratification I was into at the time was a major hassle, let alone a sheer, biological and psychological impossibility. I mean, c’mon; who ever heard of a responsible teenager?

Talk about a contradiction in terms.

Because I never seemed able to remember to return the Club’s cancellation notice by the cut-off date, in-the-door walked the likes of Columbia’s Such Sweet Thunder by Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah-Um, the Gil Evans-Miles Davis collaboration, Miles Ahead, Brubeck’s Dave Digs Disney, Art Blakey’s Drum Suite and Erroll Garner’s Concert By The Sea.

In other words, through my [inadvertent] carelessness, I provided myself with the best Jazz education there is – listening to Jazz greats play it.  Because some aspects of Jazz really can’t be taught, I was able to learn more about it by hearing it performed on these classic, Columbia LP’s.

[I realize that this generalization is open to debate and I certainly mean no disrespect to the many hard working Jazz educators out there.]

Of these Columbia Record Club Jazz masterpieces, I was so impressed with Erroll Garner’s playing on Concert By The Sea that I wrote to Columbia Records requesting an autographed photo and actually got one in return!

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles was in Carmel, CA recently and while there, it collected images by some noted photographers who specialize in this area.

With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities of StudioCerra, we thought it might be fun to create a video montage of these images of Carmel, CA and the Monterey Peninsula set to Erroll’s Mambo Carmel from Concert By The Sea.

You can locate the video at the conclusion of these excerpts from Stanley Dance’s insert notes to the recording and some thoughts by Will Friedwald about how the record came about and its significance which appeared in the Wall Street Journal [September 17, 2009].

© -Stanley Dance, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Erroll Garner was a natural, a phe­nomenon. He never learned to read music, but he could create more of it spontaneously than the most schooled musicians in his field. He recognized the source of his gift in a characteris­tically modest statement: "The good Lord gave it to me and I'm trying to develop it." And he did that in his own unique fashion until he was the most popular piano player in the world. With a Manhattan telephone direc­tory (or its foreign equivalent) adding height to the piano stool, the elfin Garner- became an international star comparable to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Like Ellington, he was a good listener with good ears and a good memory. He absorbed what he liked from all that he heard, thus constantly nour­ishing his melodic imagination. And it was undoubtedly his emphasis on mel­ody and rhythm that endeared him to millions. Contrary to concepts preva­lent as he rose to fame, he esteemed his audience and always sought to please or entertain it. Writing in 1971, Melvin Maddocks aptly described him as the Happy Entertainer, and at that time bitterness and anger were very much the vogue artistically. Going his own way, then as always, Garner was subconsciously linked to an earlier jazz tradition.

For all the originality of his style, the pianists whom he referred to as his basic influences were Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Earl Hines. Significantly, both Hines and Garner came out of Pittsburgh, and when producer George Avakian began to work with the latter at Columbia he had decided Garner "was the greatest thing to come along on the piano since Earl Hines." Each of these artists broke stylistically with contemporary modes and each was endlessly inven­tive, yet neither one saw anything demeaning in the notion of entertain­ing those who paid to hear him. Although communication was certainly at issue, it could be achieved with minimal compromise.

Born in 1921, Garner had begun to play piano when he was three by imi­tating phonograph records. He was playing publicly when he was seven and later even worked on the Alle­gheny riverboats before setting out for New York in 1944. There he quickly found a place for himself among the swarming jazz talents on 52nd Street, and there his prolific recording career began almost imme­diately. By the time he signed with Columbia in 1950 he had recorded as an unaccompanied soloist, in trios, with alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Charlie Parker, with tenor saxo­phonists Don Byas, Coleman Hawkins, Wardell Gray, Lucky Thompson and Teddy Edwards, with Howard McGhee, Charlie Shavers and Vic Dickenson, not to mention the orchestras of Georgie Auld and Boyd Raeburn.

These achievements were a triumph of both ability and personality. Musicians liked this quiet, unas­suming guy who could constantly surprise them with his keyboard fantasies.

Garner's style was essentially orches­tral, unlike the horn-like, single-note style of the fashionable beboppers. His left hand laid down a firm beat like that of the rhythm guitarists in the big bands. Against it, with the right hand's phrasing lagging slightly behind, he improvised a rich tapestry of sound, one full of dynamic con­trasts like those of the Ellington and Lunceford bands, where solos con­trasted with brilliant ensembles and where the ensembles themselves were notable for carefully nuanced shading. Like those of such bands, too, his programs were knowingly devised to give audiences a stimulat­ing variety of music at different tem­pos and in different moods. The impact of his lushly romantic versions of ballads, for example, was height­ened by that of his driving interpretations of rhythmic numbers, and vice versa. In either vein, the sheer plea­sure he manifested in playing reached out and enchanted listeners.

When this album, Concert By The Sea, was recorded at Carmel in Cali­fornia in 1955, his reputation was established and his popularity immense. The area's coastline was beautiful, the acoustics in an audito­rium that had formerly been a church [known today as the Sunset Cultural Center] were perfect, and the audience was warmly appreciative, all of which undoubtedly helped inspire Garner, bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Denzil Best that night. Yet when Gar­ner's manager, Martha Glaser, brought a tape of the performance to George Avakian, he was at first daunted by its technical deficiencies. The spirit of the music was such, how­ever, that he devoted two weeks to making "a good-sounding master out of it," as he explained in James M. Doran's revealing book, Erroll Gar­ner: The Most Happy Piano (Scarecrow Press).

“The rest, as they say, is history – still the all-time best selling Jazz piano album of them all.”

© -Will Friedwald, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The pianist Erroll Garner was one of the great improvisers of all time -- and not exclusively in his music. As writer John Murph notes, a New York Times profile of Garner in 1959 by John S. Wilson observed that the musician refused to make any kind of plan until the very last minute; he cooked elaborate dishes without the aid of a recipe book by simply throwing different ingredients together and tasting; he taught himself to play golf without instruction. He also played thousands of songs entirely by ear, without ever bothering to learn to read music, and composed many original tunes that way, including the standard "Misty." Therefore it shouldn't be surprising that Garner (1921-1977) made his best album -- the legendary "Concert by the Sea" -- practically by accident.

On Sept. 19, 1955, Garner (who is also represented on a wonderful new DVD of two concerts from Europe eight years later, "Live in '63 & '64," as part of the Jazz Icons series produced by Reelin' in the Years and available at www.reelinintheyears.com) performed at Fort Ord, an army base near Carmel, Calif., at the behest of disc jockey and impresario Jimmy Lyons. Martha Glaser, who served as Garner's personal manager for nearly his entire career, happened to be backstage when she noticed a tape recorder running.

As she recalled for the Journal last week, it turned out that the show was being taped -- without Garner's knowledge -- by a jazz fan and scholar named Will Thornbury, strictly for the enjoyment of himself and his fellow servicemen. Ms. Glaser told him, "I'll give you copies of every record Erroll ever made, but I can't let you keep that tape." She took it back to New York (carrying it on her lap), where she assembled it into album form, titled it "Concert by the Sea," and then played it for George Avakian, who ran the jazz department at Columbia Records. Garner had actually left Columbia three years earlier, but, as Mr. Avakian recently told the Journal: "I totally flipped over it! I knew that we had to put it out right away."

When Columbia released "Concert by the Sea" a few months later, this early live 12-inch LP was a runaway sensation. It became the No. 1 record of Garner's 30-year career and one of the most popular jazz albums of all time. It's not hard to hear why: From the first notes onward, Garner plays like a man inspired -- on fire, even. He always played with a combination of wit, imagination, amazing technical skill and sheer joy far beyond nearly all of his fellow pianists, but on this particular night he reached a level exceeding his usual Olympian standard.

"Concert" begins with one of Garner's characteristic left-field introductions -- even his bassist and drummer, in this case Eddie Calhoun and Denzil Best, rarely had an idea where he was going to go. This intro is particularly dark, heavy and serious -- so much the better to heighten the impact of the "punchline," when Garner tears into "I'll Remember April." Originally written as a romantic love song, Garner swings it so relentlessly fast that you can practically feel the surf and breeze of the windswept beach image from the album's famous cover.

The sheer exhilaration of Garner's playing never lets up; even when he slows down the tempo on "How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me" (a tune also known as Duke Ellington's "Sultry Serenade"), the pianist shows that he's just as adroit at playing spaces as he is at playing notes. The bulk of the album showcases his brilliant flair for dressing up classic standards such as "Where or When" (when Garner plays it, he leaves the question mark out -- you know exactly where and precisely when), but "Red Top" illustrates what he can do with a 12-bar blues and "Mambo Carmel" comes out of his fascination with Latin polyrhythms.

"Concert by the Sea" has never been off my iPod. Sadly, it's also one of the few classic jazz albums that has never been properly reissued. If any album's audio could use a little tender loving care, this is it; the original tape was barely a professional recording, and the bass, for instance, is barely audible. Sony issued a compact disc in 1991, but it's just a straight transfer of the 1955 master, and the digital medium makes it sound worse rather than better.

More frustrating, both Ms. Glaser and Mr. Avakian confirm that the original tape includes, in Ms. Glaser's words, "a whole album's worth of unissued tracks" (four of which are listed in the Online Jazz Discography at lordisco.com) that still exist in the Sony vaults. "We didn't put them out at the time because Erroll had already done those songs for Columbia," says Mr. Avakian. "But ideally there should be a new, remastered CD that includes the complete concert." Ms. Glaser, who continues to represent the Garner estate, and Sony Music Entertainment have been unable to work out an agreement for the release of the additional material.

The overall disappointment in the lack of a definitive "Concert by the Sea" package is alleviated somewhat by the excellent new DVD of two subsequent concerts by Erroll Garner, from Belgium in 1963 and Sweden a year later. Both shows are replete with Garner's famous bait-and-switch trick with tempos: "It Might as Well Be Spring" and "When Your Lover Has Gone," both normally slow love songs, here become rollicking and strident, while "Fly Me to the Moon," usually heard as an uptempo swinger, shows Garner at his most tender and introspective. He plays "My Funny Valentine" with so much harmonic ingenuity and melodic originality, with cascading runs of notes that enhance rather than distract from the romantic mood, that you don't even mind hearing that overdone chestnut yet again.

The most irreverent performance here is also Garner's most classically inspired. In his treatment of "Thanks for the Memory," he goes comically overboard with classical references: "To a Wild Rose," "Voices of Spring," Liszt's "Lieberstraum" and Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C-Sharp Minor." In a 1983 interview on a liner note for a French LP, the pianist Martial Solal praised this aspect of Garner's artistry, likening his use of quotes "to telling jokes," adding: "The independence of [Garner's] hands was very seductive. I even transcribed his solo on "The Man I Love" -- that was one of the only pieces I've ever written out. For about three months I tried to play like Garner."

The concert in Belgium also includes a stunning reading of Garner's most durable original composition, "Misty," which had already proved a pop hit both for himself and for several singers. Garner looks particularly happy to be playing it; throughout the tune, he sits there drenched in perspiration but with a beaming smile on his face and an irresistible expression of joy. He looks like someone who has just enjoyed the single most pleasurable experience a man can have -- at least while wearing a tuxedo.

—Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.”

Two from The Boys in Rotterdam

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

The piano player on the gig asked me: “Do you have tympani mallets?”

I said: “Yeah, they are in my trap case, why?”

“We’re gonna play Invitation during the next set so you better go get them.”

I got them and when the tune was called, I used them to play a slow rumba beat on the drums.

With the snare drum strainer turned off, that gave me three tom toms upon which to use the tymp mallets to tap out a steady Latin-feel over which the tenor saxophonist played a lilting version of Bronislau Kaper’s beautiful melody to Invitation.

I first heard Invitation on an obscure George Wallington with Strings Norgran LP and later on a John Coltrane Prestige LP entitled Standard Coltrane, drummer Lenny McBrowne’s Lenne McBrowne and the 4 Souls Pacific Jazz LP and vibist Milt Jackson Riverside LP of the same name.

Over the years, versions of Invitation taken at various tempos and played in a variety of styles kept appearing in my Jazz collection mainly because as Ted Gioia explains in his marvelously-fun-to-read The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire:

“Invitation has survived solely because Jazz musicians have enjoyed playing it. [Kaper also penned On Green Dolphin Street and All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm, each of which garnered more interest from Jazz players than from the general public]. …

The song is usually taken at a medium tempo with dark hard bop overtones, but is capable of a range of interpretative angles. … Invitation is still inviting enough to keep Jazz musicians interested, and is likely to hold on to this constituency for some time to come.” [pp.201-202].

I recently came across the Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra’s version of Invitation and it along with their treatment of Cole Porter’s Love for Sale gave this piece its title and prompted me to write it in the first place.

The RJO big band arrangement of Invitation was written by Johan Plomp and puts tenor saxophonist Simon Rigter in the solo spotlight behind a driving beat which is laid down by bassist Aaaron Kersbergen and drummer Martijn Vink.

Checkout the screaming trumpet section that begins the shout-me-out-chorus at 3:36 minutes and the way they reintroduce the theme with quarter note triplets at 3:47 minutes.

If you close your eyes, you might be able to conjure up images of Zoot Sims taking one of his great tenor saxophone solos with Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band as booted along by Bill Crow on bass and Mel Lewis on drums

Those tympani mallets were handy to have around because later that evening, we played Cole Porter’s Love for Sale in a style that was very reminiscent of the version that Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis made famous on the forrmer’s Somethin’ Else LP.

[On this classic Blue Note recording, drummer Art Blakey used the tympani mallets to form a conga drum phrase behind his always-insistent, cymbal beat.]

Turning once again to Ted Gioia for commentary about the tune, Dottore Gioia has this to say about Love for Sale in The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire:

“By the 1960’s, the taboo associated with "Love for Sale" had faded [it was banned from radio play for years because its lyrics are sung from the prospective of a prostitute], and it became entrenched in the repertoires of Jazz players. And for good reason. The opening theme is suitable for vamps of all stamps, from Latin to funky, and the release offers effective contrast both rhythmically and harmonically. A tension in tonality is evident from the outset: this song in a minor key nonetheless parts on a major chord, and seems ready to go in either direction during the course of Porter's extended form. A composition of this sort presents many possibilities, and can work either as a loose jam or bear the weight of elaborate arrangement.” [pp.240-241]

The are a number of big band recorded versions of Love for Sale including one on Pacific Jazz that offers some exciting drum breaks by Buddy Rich [Big Swing Face].

In recent years, I have also become very partial to Johan Plomp’s arrangement of the tune which appeared on the RJO’s debut recording Introducing the Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra [2005].

You can hear this arrangement on the following video tribute to the RJO with Jan van Duikeren playing an extended trumpet solo in a manner that may rekindle memories of Clark Terry’s joyous flights of fancy on the instrument. Also listen throughout the performance for the kicks, fills and solos of Martijn Vink, one of today's best big band drummers. [See if you can pick-up the key change at 4:10 minutes following one of Martijn’s explosions.]

The Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra debut recording is available from Amazon and other online retailers and the RJO has its own website – www.rotterdamjazzorchestra.com – should you wish to find out more about the orchestra’s current activities.

Dave Brubeck – The Economist Magazine and The Week Obituaries

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

For those of you who do not take The Economist or The Week, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought you might find their obituaries of Dave Brubeck, one of the seminal figures in the development of Jazz, to be of interest.

Many readers of these pages had the good fortune to experience and appreciate Dave Brubeck’s music.

In my case, it changed the course of my life – irrevocably.

The images that accompany the obituaries were selected by the magazines.

© -The Economist, December 15, 2012 copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Dave Brubeck, pianist and composer, died on December 5^th, aged 91.

“TO PUT Dave Brubeck in a box was an unwise thing to do. He'd just jump right out again, big, broad and strong, with those horn-rimmed glasses and that crazy, slight­ly cross-eyed smile. Call him cool, and he'd tell you that many of his jazz arrangements were so hot, they sizzled. Lump him with players of white west-coast jazz, and he'd object that he felt more black than white. Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940's, and he would say nope, he didn't listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing. Call him the usher of a new jazz age, put him on the cover of Time magazine, where he landed in 1954, and he was crestfallen. Duke Ellington deserved all that, he said, but not him.

His contrarian ways went further. Give him a few bars of Beethoven, and he'd weave a jazz riff through it; but put him in the middle of a jazz set, and he would come up with classic counterpoint as strict as the "Goldberg Variations". Sing him a tune in C, and his left hand would play it in E flat; give him a jazz line in standard 4/4 time and he would play 5/4, 7/4, even 13/4 against it, relentlessly underpinning the adventure with big fat blocks of chords. He was a jazzman who struggled to read nota­tion and who graduated on a wing and an ear from his college music school; and he was also, in later years, a composer of can­tatas and oratorios who was proud to have written a Credo for Mozart's unfinished "Mass in C minor.”

The musicians he picked for his quartet, which dominated the popular jazz scene from 1951 to 1967, were chosen because they could break out of the box like him: Paul Desmond on feather-light, floating alto sax, Joe Morello razor-sharp and witty on drums, Eugene Wright rock-solid on bass. Their greatest success, an album called "Time Out" (1959) that sold more than 1M copies, was a collection of breezily poly tonal pieces in wild time signatures, center­ing on a Desmond piece called "Take Five" written in teasing 5/4, and "Blue Rondo a la Turk", devised by Mr. Brubeck after hearing street musicians playing in 9/8 in Istanbul. These two pieces alone consolidated the quartet's fame on campuses and in clubs all over America; but Columbia Records re­fused to release the album for a year, just baffled, said Mr. Brubeck impatiently, by the fact that it broke so many rules. It did, but hey, it sounded good.

Whenever he sat down at the piano-an instrument as satisfying, to him, as a whole orchestra-his aim was to get some­where he had never got before. It didn't matter how tired he was, how beat-up he felt. He wanted to be so inspired in his explorations that he would get beyond him­self. He liked to quote Louis Armstrong, who once told a woman who asked what he thought about as he played: "Lady, if I told you, your mind would explode." In his own words, he played dangerously, pre­pared to make any number of mistakes in order to create something he had never created before.

Horsebeat and heartbeat

Several people had set him on this path. His mother had first taught him piano when he preferred to be a rodeo-roper; her rippling playing of Chopin round the house he remembered in a piece called "Thank You". His platoon commander in 1944, having heard him doodling on a pi­ano, kept him away from the front line. And Darius Milhaud, his teacher after the war, taught him to see jazz as the natural id­iom of America and the music of free men. Mr. Brubeck believed seriously in jazz as a force for democracy: in post-Nazi Ger­many, in the Soviet Union, in the fragile post-war world (where he toured on be­half of the State Department) and in Amer­ica's South, where he insisted on perform­ing with his black bassist and, when he could, pushed him to the front of the stage.

Yet his mission was never to make jazz freer or more popular; it was to make mu­sic, pure and simple, any way he could. He sang his first polyrhythms against the steady trot of his horse as he rode round the 45,000 acres near Concord, California, where his father managed cattle. In high school, playing at rough miners' dances in the foothills of the Sierras, he would riskily "screw up the shuffle" by adding triplets to it. He wrote on the road, dreaming up "Un-square Dance" (in 7/4) while driving to New York, and composing "The Duke", his tribute to Ellington, against the beating windscreen wipers of his car. All this, with his use of folk songs and hymns and blues and birdcalls, his little snatches of homage to George Gershwin or Aaron Copland, and the freight-train urging of his playing, gave his jazz a flavour less of smoky dives than of open skies and plains.

Critics attacked him for getting rich from it. He said he had never wanted more than the union scale. They said he was too "European", too college-focused, that his music couldn't be danced to and hadn't got swing; he pointed out the happy feet tap­ping at his concerts, and the number of re­cords he sold. Above all they found it hard to believe that the most successful jazz in America was being played by a family man, a laid-back Californian, modest, gen­tle and open, who would happily have been a rancher all his days-except that he couldn't live without performing, because the rhythm of jazz, under all his extrapola­tion and exploration, was, he had discov­ered, the rhythm of his heart. •”

© -The Week, December 21, 2012 copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The Pianist Who Reshaped The Rhythms of Jazz

Dave Brubeck

1920-2012

“By the jazz world's wild stan­dards, Dave Brubeck was a total square. He didn't smoke or take drugs, and he limited himself to one martini before dinner. The pianist favored expressions like "baloney" and "you bet" over coarser alternatives. But when it came to music, Brubeck was anything but conven­tional. He experimented with challenging time signatures on tracks like "Take Five" and ran through all 12 keys on "The Duke," winning the respect of his harder-living contemporaries. On tour in the Netherlands in the 1950s, stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith was asked by a reporter, "Isn't it true that no white man can play jazz?" Smith gestured toward Brubeck and replied, "I'd like you to meet my son."

Nothing in Brubeck's background suggested that he was destined to be a jazz great. He grew up on the cattle ranch his father man­aged in northern California, said NBCNews.com. His mother, a classically trained pianist, banned her three sons from listening to the radio, believing they should play music if they wanted to hear it. The young Brubeck quickly mastered the piano, learning mostly by ear because he was born cross-eyed and had trouble reading music. Brubeck thought his future lay in ranching and had to be prodded to go to college, where at first he studied veterinary medicine. But he quickly "became smitten with jazz," said the Associated Press, and switched his major to music.

After graduating in 1942, Brubeck enrolled in the Army as an infantryman, only to be pulled from frontline duty and given a military band to lead. There he met Paul Desmond, who would become Brubeck's most important musical partner. The alto saxo­phonist "was a perfect foil; his lovely impas­sive tone was as ethereal as Brubeck's style was densely chorded," said The New York Times. Brubeck led a series of bands after being demobilized, and in 1951 he invited Desmond to join the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  The group's smooth West Coast sound proved a hit on college campuses, and "with the release of Time Out in 1959, Brubeck had an unexpected best seller," said The Washington Post. It became the first jazz LP to sell more than a million cop­ies, even though it included complex tunes like "Blue Rondo a la Turk." The piece is in 9/8 time—nine beats to the measure instead of the customary four beats—and blended Turkish folk rhythms with jazz and Mozart.

This success didn't "come without reservations in the jazz world," said The Guardian (U.K.). Some critics suggested that Brubeck only topped the charts because he was white, even though the pia­nist was a high-profile civil rights activist. He refused to play any venue that barred black musicians—his bassist, Gene Wright, was black—and he turned down a 1958 tour of South Africa when told that he could only perform with an all-white band. Brubeck always believed that race was irrelevant to music, explaining that jazz was based on the universal rhythm of the human heart. "It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat," he said. "It's the first thing you hear when you're born—or before you're born— and it's the last thing you hear."”