Pops, Dave and Iola Brubeck - [From The Archives]

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

The Jazz World recently lost Dave Brubeck and not enough people talk about Pops these days. The former is a sad fact of human existence; the latter is unconscionable.

To honor the memories of both these Jazz icons, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought, perhaps, a re-posting of this feature might be in order.

Can you imagine being a fly-on-the-wall when Louis, Dave and Iola created The Real Ambassadors?

Look at the smiles on their faces in the above photograph for one answer to that question.

From when Giants walked the earth.

“… in 1961, when Dave and his wife lola wrote The Real Ambassadors, which featured Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross as well as the quartet, ‘lola wanted Carmen, and we were very flattered when she agreed to do it, because she chose her material very carefully,’ Brubeck said of the singer who recorded a subsequent album with the quartet.

‘But Louis' road manager wouldn't give me access when I wanted to discuss the project with him in Chicago, so I found out the number of Louis' hotel room, sat in the lobby until room service came and hollered “Hi, Louis” when the door opened. Louis invited me in, ordered me a steak and thought the idea was interesting. I gave him copies of the tunes to listen to on the road; and at the sessions, he was the first one in the studio and the last guy to leave.’”

- Dave Brubeck

“Why was Pops’ performance in Dave and Iola Brubeck’s The Real Ambassadors such a moving and meaningful experience for him? Does this project have a special significance in Pops’ life beyond the music itself?”

“I think it does.  First, there was the challenge of learning an entire score of new material, something he really had never done before.  Even on Verve albums with Ella such as “Porgy and Bess,” I’m sure he was at least familiar with some of those great songs.  But the Brubeck’s wrote all these new songs with Louis in mind and Louis rose to the challenge by nailing it.  Also, there was the subject matter, songs about race, politics, religious, etc.  This was deep stuff and Louis responded with more seriousness and sensitivity than even Brubeck imagined bringing tears to those who heard Louis in the studio or those who witnessed the only live performance of The Real Ambassadors at Monterey in 1962.  I really think he considered it one of the highlights of his life (he dubbed it many, many times on his private tapes, right up to the end of this life) and proudly told reporters that Brubeck had written him ‘an opera.’”

-response to JazzProfiles interview question by author Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years

I got so caught up in listening to the music on The Real Ambassadors [Columbia CK 57663], that I delayed writing this piece for days. Hearing the CD again after all these years just left me spellbound, and, at times, listening to Pops really tugged at my heartstrings.

The artistry on the recording is resplendent to such a degree that it becomes all-absorbing.

And, the music is in places very reminiscent as nine of the twenty songs that make up The Real Ambassadors were previously recorded by Dave’s quartets under the same, or, different titles. Dave and Iola later added lyrics and incorporated them into the larger framework of their Jazz opera [the libretto is there but the theatrical setting is missing].

So listening to The Real Ambassadors sends you off to the record collection searching for when you first heard these tunes by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. [Just to prove, of course, that either you’ve still got it, or you’re not losing it – depending on your point-of-view.]

For example: I Didn’t Know Until You Told Me, a feature for Carmen McRae with Pops harmonizing the ending, was originally Curtain Time from the quartet’s Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. about which Dave wrote:

“Curtain Time is like a pencil sketch of Broadway, a mere suggestion of what the full-color painting should be with strings, brass and the full complement of a theatre orchestra. All we have here of the real pit band is the soft tinkle of the triangle in the opening bars. The rest of the or­chestration is for you to paint as the four of us try to conjure some of the excite­ment and glamour of a Broadway musical at curtain time.”

The piece retains its lightness and gentleness when Carmen performs it as I Didn’t Know Until You Told Me and having Pops do the harmony at the end is so unexpectedly perfect – a moment in time.

Carmen also is the primary vocalist on In the Lurch, which adds lyrics to Dave’s Two-Part Contention, previously performed on Brubeck Plays Brubeck [Columbia CK-65722] solo piano album and is also a featured piece by the quartet on their recording from the group’s 1956 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival [Columbia CL 932; SRCS 9522].

Mercifully for Carmen, the structure of In the Lurch is revised a bit from this description by Dave of the more complicated original:

"Two-Part Contention is divided into three sections, marked by three tempo changes. The first is a medium tempo; the second, slow; and the last, a fast tempo. The written portion of this tune is heard in the opening 32 bars. These two melodic lines are repeated throughout the piece. In the second section (slow tempo) I introduced a pattern of answering the right hand with the left hand, abruptly changing the register of the piano. In the third (fast) section, I tried to improvise within the limitation of two lines in the first chorus.”

Everybody’s Comin’, the tongue-twisting, jaw-cracking opening track is based on Everybody’s Jumpin’ from the Time Out album [Columbia CK-65122] with the 6/4 time signature of the original replaced by a straight 4/4 call and response between Pops and the LHR that serves to summon the faithful to the celebration.

To my ears, one of the great surprises on The Real Ambassadors is Pops’ performance on Nomad. The original version of the tune is contained on Jazz Impressions of Eurasia [Columbia CK 48351] and features a sultry, very Middle Eastern sounding alto saxophone played by the late Paul Desmond over Joe Morello’s use of tympani mallets on tom toms.

As described by Dave, the effect he was trying to achieve in Nomad was “the intricacies of Eastern rhythms … suggested by … superimposing three against the typical Jazz four.”

This Nomad is taken at a slower tempo to give Pops a chance to enunciate its clever lyrics. Clarinet replaces the alto and Joe’s tom toms are subdued while the beat is carried on a tambourine. Pops sings the first and third choruses and then takes an instantly recognizable Satchmo trumpet solo on the middle chorus which switches to straight 4/4 time.

Yet, despite these changes, The Real Ambassadors’ Nomad still evokes Dave’s intent when he originally wrote the piece: “I tried to capture the feeling of the lonely wanderer. The steady rhythm is like the ever-plodding gait of the camel, and the quicker beats are like the nomadic drums or the clapping of hands.”

It’s a credit to Pops’ genius that he could take music that is so recognizably Brubeckian and make it his own without changing the inner spirit of the piece.

Other previously recorded tunes that were converted by Dave and Iola for use in The Real Ambassadors include My One Bad Habit [My One Bad Habit is Falling In Love from The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe]; You Swing, Baby [The Duke from Jazz Red Hot & Cool, Brubeck Plays Brubeck and The Dave Brubeck Quartet at the Newport Jazz Festival]; Swing Bells [Brubeck Plays Brubeck], One Moment Worth Years [Brubeck Plays Brubeck]; Summer Song [Time Signatures].

The music on The Real Ambassadors was performed once – in September, 1962 at the Monterey Jazz Festival – which would make this year’s MJF bash at the Fairgrounds in Monterey, CA the 50^th anniversary of that momentous event.

The 20 tracks that comprise this “musical production by Dave and Iola Brubeck” [5 of them previously unreleased] were recorded exactly one year earlier in September 1961 at Columbia’s 30^th Street Studios in NYC.

Can you imagine – Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars, Carmen McRae, Lambert Hendricks and Ross and a rhythm section made up of Dave Brubeck on piano, Gene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums – all gathered together in a recording studio?

Talk about a fantasy come true!

For various reasons, The Real Ambassadors almost didn’t happen and, given the circumstances under which it eventuated, it is a miracle that it came off so well.

We wanted to do justice to a feature on The Real Ambassadors so we asked Ricky Riccardi, author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years [New York: Pantheon, 2011] for permission to use the following excerpts on the evolution of the concept behind its recording and performance.

It is the most detailed description about the event that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has been able to reference.

You can locate order information for Ricky’s What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years by going here.

© -  Ricky Riccardi/Pantheon Books, copyright protected; all rights reserved. Used with permission.

“In September, the All Stars settled in New York to make one of the most challenging records of Armstrong's career. Pianist-composer Dave Brubeck and his wife, lola, had collaborated on a musical project titled The Real Ambassadors, which was informed by social protest suggesting that jazz musicians would make better politicians than those then in charge. It touched on many issues of the day, especially race, and the Brubeck’s had conceived of the project with Armstrong in mind after his incendiary Lit­tle Rock comments. "I think that's what we really tried to overcome when we wrote The Real Ambassadors," lola Brubeck remembered, "because before we got into this project we didn't really know Louis that well, but we sensed in him a depth and an unstated feeling we thought we could tap into without being patronizing, and I think that's why he took to it."

While they intended eventually to stage a play, the Brubeck’s wanted to record the score first. Singer Carmen McRae and the vocalese group Lam­bert, Hendricks and Ross agreed to participate, but Armstrong proved difficult to get hold of, as Dave Brubeck related. "Louis's road manager wouldn't give me access when I wanted to discuss the project with him in Chicago, so I found out the number of Louis's hotel room, sat in the lobby until room service came and hollered, 'Hi, Louis' when the door opened . . . Louis invited me in, ordered me a steak and thought the idea was interesting. I gave him copies of the tunes to listen to on the road; and at the session, he was the first one in the studio and last guy to leave."

Brubeck's demo tapes of the material are at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. Listening to them today, one hears a very polite Bru­beck explaining the nature of the project and what Armstrong means to it. It is possible, that Brubeck gave Armstrong the demo tapes of the songs in the summer of 1961 before an All Stars' four-day tour of Germany, for Brubeck is heard saying, "I've just talked to Joe Glaser and he's told me how difficult it will be for you to record any of these things before going to Europe. But I'm hoping you can figure out the backgrounds with my group playing and me singing the songs like you asked me to do."

To his meeting in Chicago, Brubeck had brought along the lyrics to a song called "Lonesome." Without knowing the melody, Armstrong gave an impassioned reading that greatly affected Brubeck. "Now I told my wife about the way you read the song 'Lonesome' in Chicago," Brubeck says in the tape. "You didn't sing it, you just read it, and it was such a mov­ing job that I thought maybe you would be able to read this on tape and send that back to us because this wouldn't involve you singing or trying to match your voice with the backgrounds that I've sent you by my combo." Brubeck went on to tell Armstrong about lola's regard for him: "She's always considered you the greatest ambassador we've ever had." lola herself then tells the trumpeter: "I saw you tonight on [the television program] You Asked for It and I was very, very impressed with your performance on the show. It thrilled me particularly because I heard you deliver some lines in a way that I knew it was possible for you to do some of the scenes in the show I had written for you. Now, I had the feeling all along that you could do them, but I had never heard you do anything like that before, and when I saw you tonight and saw the sincerity with which [you spoke] some various lines, it impressed me terrifically." The rest of the tape fea­tures Brubeck and his trio playing the show's originals with Brubeck sing­ing the melodies ("I'm ashamed of the horrible way in which I sing," he tells Armstrong at one point).

Armstrong practiced the Brubecks’ material whenever he had the rare luxury of free time. "Louis told everybody that we had written him an opera," Brubeck remembered. The only problem was finding someone who wanted to record it. "All of the producers I took it to, thought it was great, but they'd give me all these excuses . . . You weren't supposed to have a message. I forget the word they used, but it meant you weren't entertaining. We couldn't lecture the American public on the subject of race."

Eventually, Brubeck's own label, Columbia, agreed to take on the project, which was completed over the course of three sessions in Sep­tember 1961. The first song recorded was "They Say I Look Like God," a mournful piece that pitted Armstrong's blues-infused singing against Gregorian-chant-like lines delivered by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The Brubeck’s intended the song as satire, with Armstrong wondering if God could be black. "If both are made in the image of thee," he sings, "Could thou perchance a zebra be?" Expecting Armstrong to deliver the line with his usual jocularity, they were shocked and moved by Armstrong's chilling seriousness. Armstrong had tears in his eyes when he got to the song's final line, "When God tells man he's really free"; he repeated "really free" with haunting sincerity. "Goose pimple, I got goose pimple on this one," Louis said after recording it.  For me, this is arguably the most emotionally wrenching recording of Armstrong's career—a performance that dispels any notion of Armstrong as merely a clown in his later years.

Not every song on The Real Ambassadors is quite so serious; some, such as the romping "King for a Day," are full of good humor. The first session ended with the title tune, "The Real Ambassadors," on which Armstrong sang autobiographical lyrics:

I'll explain, and make it plain, I represent the human race And don’t pretend no more.

The next day, Armstrong was joined by Carmen McRae for heav­enly vocalizing by both singers. "I Didn't Know Until You Told Me" is mainly McRae, but Armstrong harmonizes with her sublimely at the end. Next up was a vocal version of Brubeck s well-known instrumental "The Duke," re-titled "You Swing Baby." The performance was left off the original album, but it contains some stunning trumpet, with Armstrong interpreting the tricky melody made famous by Miles Davis after his own fashion. "One Moment Worth Years" features an absolutely gorgeous mel­ody, Armstrong and McRae demonstrating deep chemistry, in one of the most charming performances of Armstrong s later years.

The highlight of the day, however, was "Summer Song," a heartbreak­ing ballad that would become the album s most lasting track. "On his poi­gnant performance of 'Summer Song,' you can hear the elder Armstrong accepting the inevitability of death and looking ahead towards his final peace, even as he casts a parting glance at all of his remarkable achieve­ments," writes Chip Stern in the liner notes to the CD reissue.56 Dan Morgenstern was present at the recording session and vividly remembered that "Summer Song" was accomplished in one take, before which Brubeck at the piano had played the song for Armstrong as he mastered the lyrics. In the documentary The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, Morgenstern said, "Brubeck was totally overwhelmed. As a matter of fact, tears came to his eyes when he heard Louis do this thing, and the record of it is marvel­ous." Jack Bradley, who was also present, described the session as a "a love fest, especially between Dave Brubeck and Louie. Dave would run up and hug and kiss Louie after every take. It was a wonderful session, and it went well, considering they didn't have time to rehearse."

The lack of rehearsal led to Armstrong having trouble with some of the Brubecks’ tricky lyrics. One song, "Since Love Had Its Way," required fifteen takes to get the lyrics right. After take one of "King for a Day," Armstrong remarked, "That was a real tongue twister." Brubeck asked, "Pops, what do you want to do next?" A game Armstrong replied, "I don't care, you call ‘em." Brubeck said, "I was thinking of your lip." Armstrong answered, "It ain't the lip, it's the lyrics. You don't have to worry 'bout my chops." After another tricky lyric on "Nomad," Bradley remarked to Arm-

strong, "You'll get your tongue worn out with those lyrics." Armstrong replied, "More than that, I’ll get my brains worn out."

But in the end, the hard work was worth it. At the time of the sessions, Brubeck exclaimed, "This is a miracle that it came off. I didn't think it would come off, without even any rehearsal." On the final night of the ses­sions, Bradley watched as every musician left until the only ones left in the empty studio were a satisfied Brubeck and Armstrong. "Boy, oh boy, what a night we've had," Brubeck said. "We've done everything on schedule. God, boy, we had such a ball."

While in Germany the following year, Armstrong was interviewed on television by Joachim-Ernst Behrendt. "The latest thing I've done is with Brubeck," he told Behrendt. "It turned out nice. Yeah, I told a guy, I just made a record with Brubeck.' 'Brubeck!?' I said, 'Yeah! I'll play with anybody, man, you kidding?' That's my hustle. Good, too!" (Nor was Armstrong kidding about playing with anybody. Only two weeks after the Brubeck session, he had reunited with trombonist Kid Ory at Disneyland.)

Having recorded the tracks for The Real Ambassadors, the Brubeck’s set about staging the play, but could not get it off the ground. But by the time Armstrong was interviewed by Behrendt, things seemed more promising. "We're going to do a concert with everybody that was in this session, right from the stage," Armstrong said. "It even might be on TV. . . And we're going to have the ranks and everything, same as opera, you know what I mean. It's going to be all right. We're doing it at the Monterey Jazz Festival."

On September 23,1962, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, The Real Ambas­sadors had its first and only performance, complete with costumes and scenery. The performance opened with a speech read by a narrator that showed no doubt that this work was written with Armstrong in mind:

Our story concerns a jazz musician not unlike the musicians you have seen on this stage the past three days. The personal history of our hero reads like the story of jazz—up from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to Chicago and beyond—from New York to San Francisco, London to Tokyo and points in between. The music which poured from his horn became his identity—his passport to the world—the key to locked doors. Through his horn he had spoken to millions of the world's people. Through it he had opened doors to presidents and kings. He had lifted up his horn, as our hero would say, and just played to folks on an even soul-to-soul basis. He had no political message, no slogan, no plan to sell or save the world. Yet he, and other traveling musicians like him, had inadvertently served a national purpose, which officials recognized and eventually sanctioned with a program called cultural exchange.

Brubeck remembered a funny story about the Monterey performance. "At dress rehearsal, I said to Louis, 'You're the real ambassador, will you wear this top hat and carry the attaché case? The audience will imme­diately identify you as the real ambassador,' and he said, 'Dave, I'm not wearin' a top hat and I'm not carrying that case.' It came time to open and it was time for the concert to begin, Louis to make his entrance, and he came in, there's the top hat, the attaché case and he struts right by me and he says, 'Pops, am I hammin' it up enough to suit you now?' " There was no hamming when Armstrong reprised "They Say I Look Like God." Before an audience, Brubeck still expected the lyrics to get a laugh, but once again Armstrong remained completely serious. "There wasn't a smile in the audience, Louis had tears," Brubeck remembers. "He took those lines that we thought would get laughs right to his heart and everybody in that audience felt what he felt."

The Real Ambassadors was a triumph for Armstrong, but because of Joe Glaser no film of the live performance survives. "Well, the reviews were fantastic," Brubeck said. "[Ralph] Gleason and [Leonard] Feather—to give you an example of two people who weren't too kind to me—they flipped over it. They had tears in their eyes after the concert, and said they felt it was the greatest thing ever done at Monterey. But Glaser wouldn't allow me to have the TV crew turn the cameras on—and they were stand­ing right there."62 Glaser's insistence on not filming The Real Ambassadors has deprived jazz fans of the chance of witnessing one of the most impor­tant evenings in the careers of both Armstrong and Brubeck, but the stu­dio recordings are still in print and grow in stature with each passing year. Armstrong remained proud of the project, telling Feather, "It was five years ahead of its time and the big shots that buy shows for Broadway were afraid of it... I had to learn all that music, and I'd never done nothing at this kind before. Brubeck is great!"  And Brubeck wrote: "When The Real Ambassadors was performed . . . the most critical jazz audience in the world rose as one body to give Louis Armstrong and the cast a standing ovation. It was an electrifying moment.

With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities at StudioCerra, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles developed the following video montage which has as its audio track, Pops’ beloved Summer Song as sung by him to the accompaniment of Dave Brubeck on piano, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums. [Click on the “X” to close out of the ads should they appear.]

“Rights of Swing/Right to Swing” – Then and Now

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

Today is the release date for Phil Woods with the DePaul University Jazz Ensemble: Right to Swing on Graham Carter’s Jazzed Media label [JM1061].

According to Graham’s press release:

“A dynamic, swinging set of big band and "Little Big Band" performances featuring newly crafted arrangements of works by jazz icon Phil Woods. The brilliant performance of alto saxophonist and composer Phil Woods, the DePaul Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Nonet (i.e. - The Phil Woods Ensemble at DePaul University) is beautifully captured in these studio recording sessions.

The title piece, Woods' classic five-movement "Rights Of Swing", distinguishes itself from the original 1961 recording in a beautifully re-orchestrated arrangement for nonet that includes some new material in each movement.”

And Bob Lark, the Director of the DePaul University Jazz Ensemble, wrote in his insert notes to the disc:

“Since the time of the original recording, Phil has re-worked each of the movements to his Rights Of Swing, supplementing and at times embellishing the original score with fresh ensemble material. The intention of our ensemble, and that of Phil, was not to imitate the 1961 version of the work. Indeed, many of the revisions - at times subtle, and at other times extensive - were created by Phil during the summer of 2011 in preparation for this recording. We expanded the band to include vibraphone (David Bugher), piano (Pete Benson), bass (Matt Ulery), drums (Keith Brooks),    trumpet (Dave Kaiser), trombone (Andy Baker), tenor saxophone (Sean Packard), baritone saxophone (Mark Hiebert), and alto saxophone (Phil Woods & Brent Griffin). As a result, Phil created a new treatment of his masterpiece with the addition of some background and ensemble passages, and interesting, fresh voicings.

The opening movement, Prelude, establishes the dynamic nature of the work with an up-tempo swing groove and demanding ensemble work. Woods' solo sets the table, demonstrating a mastery of sound, pulse, dynamics, articulation - and the ability to listen to his fellow musicians. Vibraphonist Dave Bugher, trombonist Andy Baker, and pianist Pete Benson play well-structured solos that showcase their fleet technique. Throughout the five-part piece, the rhythm section team of Keith Brooks (drums), Matt Ulery (bass), Benson and Bugher provide tremendous energy, drive and nuance.

Contrasting favorably with the more energetic movements is the second movement Ballad. Trumpeter Dave Kaiser plays the melody with warmth, and follows with a solo improvisation that remains sensitive to the arrangement. Woods' improvisation showcases his legendary sound in a hauntingly rich harmonic and rhythmic statement.

The third movement, African Violets, is a jazz waltz that features a syncopated, eighth-note based theme. Solos by Pete Benson and Sean Packard are energetic and display a contemporary vocabulary. Eighteen-year-old alto saxophonist Brent Griffin plays a dynamic solo that belies his youth, while Phil plays a solo that is both stimulating and inspired. Woods added much new material to this movement, including a beautiful ensemble chorus that follows the solo improvisations.

Scherzo, the fourth movement of the suite, is a moody, medium-tempo groove with passages in 6/8 and 4/4 meter. Phil's solo improvisation is soulful, patient and subtle; it sets the table for the student solos. Each soloist effectively reflects the context of Woods' arrangement, with the ensemble performing with fine attention to the nuances of jazz style.

Finale recalls the opening motif from the opening Prelude movement, albeit with a slight alteration. The angular - and difficult - melodic line is presented by the ensemble at a brisk tempo, followed by solo improvisations that reflect the energy and intensity of the arrangement. And Phil plays a solo that showcases his unparalleled ability to swing - the lion roars! ….”

In addition to the five-part Right to Swing suite, the Jazzed Media CD includes five, more original compositions by Phil, two of which he arranged – Hank Jones and Blues for Lopes – and Weak End arranged by Carl Kennedy, Pairing Off  arranged by Paul Dietrich, and Casanova arranged by Cormac McCarthy, all of whom are student arrangers at DePaul.

“RIGHTS OF SWING is Phil Woods' first large-scale composition, and this per­formance represents a striking growth in Woods as a player as well as a writer. It is impossible to separate Woods as an improvising jazzman from his work as a composer-arranger. "He's developed so much as a soloist," says Quincy Jones, "that he continually creates very logical melodic lines, and unlike many jazzmen who just string licks together, Phil actually does compose as he plays. Conversely, he thinks in blowing terms when he composes so that his writing does have the feeling and the impact of improvisation. With Phil, writing and playing is like a marriage—a marriage that works."

Nat Hentoff produced the 1961 session of Rights of Swing for Candid Records which has been reissued on CD in Japan as Candid TECW-20491.

Here’s are Nat’s opening remarks from the original LP’s liner notes.

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

I've been an admirer of Phil Woods since he began recording in the middle-1950's, as my DOWN BEAT reviews of the time indicated. For one thing, he was one of the very few young altoists who was much more than a shadow of Charlie Parker. Obviously indebted to Parker—as are all modern jazzmen—Woods, how­ever, was very much his own man from the beginning of his recorded work for Prestige and other labels. His conception was furiously personal as was his slashing, fiery tone. And there was never any question of his enormous capacity to swing. My only reservation then was an occasional tendency in his work to fierce impatience so that he sometimes didn't wholly finish what he began. There were also a pervasive hunger and raw emotion in this playing that were stingingly stimulating but which seldom settled down into mellowness or ten­derness. In the past couple of years, Woods has broadened and deepened his emotional message without losing the urgent individuality of his earlier playing. "I don't think," Phil said recently, "that I'm quite the angry young man I once was. I'm realizing more and more about the range of expressive possibilities in music. They used to call me strident, for example, and I don't think that ap­plies any more. Yet, I still intend to keep playing strongly and with, let us say, gonads."

Concomitant with Phil's expansion as a player has been his exultant discovery of the pleasures of writing. He had been writing originals for several years, but during his period with the Quincy Jones band—in which he is a featured soloist —Phil's desire to write became a passion. "When we were in Europe," Quincy recalls, "Phil started turning music out night and day. And this was real writing. As I said before, the writing reflected his playing—direct, driving lines that were extensions of his blowing. Writing, furthermore, is natural for him. He has the feel for it, the knowledge, and the sense of how to organize the horns in thoroughly jazz terms. Now that he's added a great deal of experience to so sound an instinct he's become capable of producing as ambitious and successful a piece as this is. Phil's RIGHTS OF SWING contains organic development, variety of moods and colors and clarity of lines and voicings. Furthermore, it's so much an extension of him that it can't be categorized. It's simply Phil Woods."

This is not, to elaborate on Quincy's point, "third stream" jazz. Phil's writ­ing, like his playing, is based solidly on jazz traditions. By temperament, Phil is not an avant-gardist. He believes that much development remains possible within the main lines of the jazz language from early blues to the present. But he's also not a conservative. His concepts are fresh, viable, and intensely personal.

From his colleagues in the Quincy Jones band, Phil selected Benny Bailey, Sahib Shihab, Julius Watkins, Buddy Catlett and Curtis Fuller (except for the final section on which Willie Dennis played trombone. Added to the rhythm section were Osie Johnson and Tommy Flanagan. Woods' solos are consistently powerful in their authoritativeness, emotional force, melodic continuity, and individuality of conception. Benny Bailey is characteristically big and wide-ranging in tone (note, for example, his statement in the BALLAD) and penetrat­ingly personal in execution. Shihab is robust and sometimes sardonic on bari­tone and full-bodied on flute. Fuller is incisively fluent, as is Dennis, while Julius Watkins again demonstrates how completely and pungently he had made the French horn into a jazz instrument. The rhythm section is exceptional in its understanding of all the strands in this mosaic and its capacity to keep the time flexibly alive. A key factor in the performance was Quincy Jones, who conducted the ensemble and gave invaluable advice.

This album, to recapitulate, is in no other stream but that of Phil Woods who, in turn, is wholly committed to the rights of jazz.               

—NAT HENTOFF”

Here’s an audio-only track of Prelude as performed by Phil Woods and the DePaul University Jazz Ensemble:

You can compare it with the original version of Prelude on this audio-only track:

Order information is available at http://www.jazzedmedia.com/

Roscoe Mitchell In Performance In Seattle, WA – June 7th/2013

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

Luke Bergman of the media relations firm Tables & Chairs “stopped by” recently and laid the following information on us about this upcoming concert by Roscoe Mitchell, whom many of you may know from his long association with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought that those of you with ready access to the greater-Seattle area might like to make your plans to attend this concert by one of the legendary players in modern Jazz history.

Here's more about Roscoe and the forthcoming concert.

"Seattle, WA—New Music record label Table & Chairs is proud to present a performance dedicated to Roscoe Mitchell's renowned composition, "Nonaah" [noh-NAY-uh], at Benaroya Hall's Nordstrom Recital Hall on June 7th at 8:00 PM. The performance will feature Mitchell giving a rare, extended solo saxophone performance and the world premier of a new arrangement of "Nonaah" for the Table & Chairs group, Lawson. Bad Luck will also present a contemporary piece rooted in the melodic themes of "Nonaah." The rest of the program will comprise of different arrangements of "Nonaah." The event will also include a pre-concert talk with Mitchell, which will consist of an interview about his career and the evolution of the renowned piece, as well as a question-and- answer session with the audience.

Benaroya's Nordstrom Recital Hall; Friday, June 7th; Pre-concert talk at 7:15; Concert begins at 8:00 pm. $30 general; $20 students.

Click here to buy tickets

For Table & Chairs, the opportunity to present Mitchell in the first ever concert dedicated only to "Nonaah" represents a meaningful and direct connection to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the most successful and widely influential artist collectives of all time."

The Lighthouse All-Stars and the Early Days of FM Jazz Radio

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

“We're very fortunate that these broadcasts exist, especially when you consider the state of FM radio in 1957.  FM was still somewhat a novelty and programming was mostly classical music, easy listening and other non-popular programming. As a matter of fact, most popular brands of radios that were available at that time didn't even have an FM band.

AM was still king and would remain so for another 20 plus years. Besides the fact that FM wasn't widely listened to, this was a local broadcast that aired at 11:30 pm on Wednesday nights. It was a live broadcast so the only way for these programs to survive was for someone to record them off the air.

Luckily, we have two collections at the Institute which include "off the air "recordings from the program - the Charles French collection and the Bob Andrews collection.

Between the two, we have 10 different Nightlife broadcasts from the Lighthouse. The earliest is from November 6, 1957, and the last from March 5, 1958, which was the final program in the series.”

- Ken Poston, Director, Los Angeles Jazz Institute

From its beginnings in 1949 until the famed Jazz club in Hermosa Beach, CA went to a visiting “name” group policy, the resident version of the Lighthouse Café All-Stars [LHAS] generated a great deal of original music.

Bassist Howard Rumsey, who led the All-Stars and served as the musical director for the club, encouraged everyone in the band to write compositions.

For some, like trumpeter Shorty Rogers and saxophonist and clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, composing and arranging was a continuation of what they had done previously as members of the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman orchestras. Only the small group setting was different.

For others, like tenor saxophonist Bob Cooper, composing original music and arranging tunes from the Great American Songbook was a new experience.

Bob took to it like a duck takes to water.  In the four years or so that he was with the LHAS his output was prodigious. One could almost go so far as to state that during his time on the band, Bob Cooper was the sound of the All-Stars.

Today, the Los Angeles Jazz Institute [LAJI] under the direction of Ken Poston, serves as the repository for much of the music that was created over the years exclusively for the LHAS.

It is sad that this music hasn’t had a wider audience because much of it is on a par with the music of Tadd Dameron, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, Hank Mobley and a number of other contemporaneous composers who predominantly worked in New York and therefore had a greater exposure to the general Jazz-going public.

Recently, the LAJI issued Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars: On The Air, 1957 as a members-only, bonus CD.

The disc contains 16 tracks of music and commercials from FM radio station KMLA’s regular, Wednesday night broadcasts from the Lighthouse Café.

You can located more information about the LAJI and the CD by going here.

All of the music on Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars: On The Air, 1957 is either composed or arranged by Bob Cooper.

Here are two audio-only examples from the CD that demonstrate Bob Cooper’s artistry [November 20, 1957 KMLA FM radio broadcast].  It is a shame that his music has not had more exposure over the years.

And here’s a video tribute to Howard and the Lighthouse All-Stars which is set to Topsy from the December 18, 1957 KMLA FM radio broadcast.

Tony Fruscella: THE NAMES OF THE FORGOTTEN [From The Archives]

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

Jazz history is full of enfant terribles, mythical characters, maudits, legendary figures who seem to have been born in order to become protagonists in hardboiled stories of the darkest nature. Outsiders destined to a mala vita, which can only be avoided thanks to an inborn talent that transforms them into all-time romantic symbols of the artist and his struggle. Tony Fruscella was one of these characters.

As a musician, Tony Fruscella led an intermediate path between Bop (Dizzy Gillespie) and Cool (Miles Davis), a style later made popular by Chet Baker (whom Tony regarded as "Chatty" Baker, by the way). His dense, muted, velvety sound expressed a sense of poetry full of "literary" references, in the low and medium registers, of a rich variety of tonalities that made his solos sensual, deep and somewhat melancholy.

- J.G.Calvados. Translated by A. Padilla

“Tony is no Bix, and for that matter, no Miles Davis, …, but it’s the rich, full whisper of his middle and especially his low register that sets him apart immediately.”

- Claude Nobs

“In the right setting, Tony’s lyrical creativity was unsurpassed.”

- John Williams, Jazz pianist

“All works of art are not produced by a handful of major poets, painters, musicians, or whatever, and at any time there are always hundreds of others active and often creating worthwhile, but overlooked, contributions to their chosen area of activity. It ought to be the duty of a critic to recognize those contributions, though too many take the easy way out and concentrate on a few famous names. This is certainly true of jazz writing, with the result that numerous musicians are virtually forgotten.”

– John Dunton

Originally a sidebar posting, I was able to bring this posting over to the main page on 11/15/2011.

However, for a time, I lost the ability to use the video that concludes the piece and the posting reverted to the archives without it.

YouTube has since liberalized its copyright policy so I thought it would be appropriate to again feature this profile about Tony, include the video and, in so doing, to help in some, small way to remember him.

John Dunton is a past, regular contributor to the Penniless Press which is edited by Alan Dent.

I have populated the piece with photos that are not a part of the original essay. The video tribute to Tony was developed with the assistance of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD.

© -  John Dunston/The Penniless Press, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The name Tony Fruscella may not mean much unless you have a specific interest in the modem jazz of the l940s and 1950s but the facts of his life and his few appearances on records, say a great deal about the period and the musicians he worked with. A fascinating jazz "underground" comes to life when his activities are examined, and it offers, as well, a comment on the society in which Fruscella and his contemporaries sought to function. 

Fruscella was born in Greenwich Village in 1927, though his family belonged to the Italian-American working class of that area rather than to the bohemian element. His childhood years are largely undocumented, but he was brought up in an orphanage from an early age and seems to have had little exposure to music other than as it related to the church. However, he left the orphanage when he was about fourteen or fifteen, started studying the trumpet, and came into contact with both classical music and jazz. He appears to have been quick to develop his skills and was soon playing in public. When he was eighteen he went into the army and gained more experience by playing in an army band. It was around this time that Fruscella also encountered the new modern sounds of the day, and the post-war years saw him mixing with the many young, white New York jazzmen who were devoted to bebop and cool jazz. They had an almost-fanatical belief in the music and had little time for anything else.

William Carraro recalled: "We'd jam at lofts, or flats in old tenement houses on Eighth Avenue, around 47th or 48th Street. The empty rooms were rented for a few hours, and the musicians and the 'cats' that came by just to listen would chip in whatever they could afford at the moment to help pay the rent. Brew Moore, Chuck Wayne and many other names-to-be came by." 

One of the musicians who participated in these sessions was an alto-player by the name of Chick Maures, and in 1948 he and Fruscella recorded for a small label called Century, though the records never appeared commercially until thirty years later. They are fascinating documents in terms of what they say about jazz developments. Of course, by 1946 bebop was well-established, and the music shows the influence of the famous Charlie Parker quintet of those days. But the tricky themes played in unison by the alto and trumpet also suggest an awareness of the kind of approach favored by pianist Lennie Tristano and his disciples Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, who were cooler and more careful in their improvising. And Fruscella's trumpet playing, though superficially akin to that of Miles Davis, had its own subtlety and warmth. [In my opinion,] Fruscella was more melodic than Davis. 

But what happened after the heady days and nights of the late1940s'? Fruscella and the others no doubt continued to play when and where they could, and a few even got to work professionally. But paying jobs, especially those involving jazz, were often hard to come by. Bob Reisner, a writer around Greenwich Village in the early1950s, recalled that Fruscella never seemed to have a permanent address:

"Short marriages, short stays in hospitals and jails, and he invented the crash pad. He walked the streets, an orphan of the world, but with incredible dignity. He never accepted anything for free. He would cook and clean and play music if you put him up."

The chaotic nature of Fruscella's life wasn't improved by his use of alcohol and drugs. He wasn't alone in this. Chick Maures, his companion on the 1948 record date, died from a drugs overdose in 1954, and Don Joseph, a trumpeter who was not unlike Fruscella in his playing and was close to him as a person, had a career that was marred by drug addiction. Both were wayward to the point of self-destruction. Bob Reisner once got them an engagement at the famous summer festival at Music Inn in the Berkshires, but Fruscella, when asked by a polite listener what he would play next, replied "We Want Whiskey Blues," and refused to carry on until a bottle was provided. And Joseph somehow managed to insult the son of the owner of the place. Bassist Bill Crow, who was around New York at the time and later wrote a fine book, From Birdland to Broadway, about his experiences, remembered Fruscella almost losing them a rare job in a club with his response to a customer's invitation to have a drink: "Well, I'm already stoned, and the bread is pretty light on this gig, so would you mind just giving me the cash?" Crow said that he "loved the way Tony played in a small group,” but noted that he didn't fit into a big-band format. His low-key style needed a small group and an intimate club setting to allow it to flourish. 

It's perhaps indicative of Fruscella's lifestyle, and his liking for a Bohemian environment that Beat writer Jack Kerouac knew him in the 1950s. In his "New York Scenes," a short prose piece included in Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac writes:

"What about that guy Tony Fruscella who sits cross-legged on the rug and plays Bach on his trumpet, by ear, and later on at night there he is blowing with the guys at a session, modern jazz." Kerouac also mentioned Don Joseph in the same piece: "He stands at the jukebox in the bar and plays with the music for a beer." 

There were a few moments of near-glory in Fruscella's career. In 1951 he was hired to play in Lester Young's group, though the job lasted only a couple of weeks and no recorded evidence of it exists. It would seem that Fruscella was ousted from the band due to some sort of rivalry which may have involved a form of reverse racism.

Pianist Bill Triglia, who worked with Fruscella over the years, tells the story:

'Fruscella was a white fellow and very friendly with Miles Davis and used to jam with him. He played with myself and Red Mitchell a lot. He had a beautiful sound. He didn't play high, he didn't play flashy, but he played beautiful low register, very modem. When Kenny Drew left and some jobs came up, John Lewis was playing with Lester. According to what I heard, and Tony Fruscella was a good friend of mine, Tony used to get drunk with Lester. Lester loved him. He didn't play the same style as Lester, but it fit nicely, it was a beautiful contrast, but John Lewis didn't like Tony. Tony said he didn't like him because he was properly white, I don't know, but John Lewis tried to get somebody else on. The next job they had Lester's manager didn't call Tony Fruscella and he was so hurt, because he loved Lester, you know. He wanted to stay with him, he was a young fellow and very tender."

It was just after this experience that Fruscella again recorded some tracks which, like those from 1948. didn't appear until many years later. In February, 1952, he joined forces with altoist Herb Geller, tenorman Phil Urso, pianist Bill Triglia, and a couple of others, to produce some music which ought to have been heard at the time and drawn some attention to Fruscella. Instead, it simply disappeared into the vaults, and Fruscella and his companions carried on struggling to play their music and earn a living. Critic Mark Gardner noted that, although the 1950s were, for many, years of affluence, the good times did not necessarily arrive for musicians, "especially those who had rejected the commercial sop dispensed over the airways and via the jukeboxes." Gardner added:" Jazzmen adapted, as they always have, and found places to play the way they wanted - in basements and cellars, seedy bars, strip clubs and coffee houses.

Surroundings were uncongenial but unimportant. The main thing was that in those varied environments were the patrons were either alcoholic/moronic or intellectual/revolutionary, nobody told you how to play or what to play.   If you were looking to dig what was happening you went to the open door in Greenwich Village or wangled an invitation to pianist Gene DiNovi's basement or to where Jimmy Knepper and Joe Maini lived  The people who passed through these underground pads and dives were the jazz underground   The life of prosperous, middle-class America was far removed from those basement jam sessions, those rehearsals and gigs in down-at-heel corner bars. Musicians, natural skeptics, turned their backs on McCarthyism and the rest."

A little steady work did come along now and then, and in 1953 Fruscella was hired to play with Stan Getz's group. Some poorly-recorded excerpts from a broadcast from Birdland do exist, and on "Dear Old Stockholm" Fruscella demonstrates all that was best in his playing as he shapes a solo that is relaxed, warm, melodically coherent, and in which the use of spaces between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. Some listeners might think there is a resemblance to Chet Baker in Fruscella's sound. He did play with Gerry Mulligan's group briefly in 1954, but it is only slight, and Fruscella very much had his own way of constructing a solo. There are interesting comparisons to be made between Baker's 1953 recording of "Imagination" and Fruscella's version from the same year. Admittedly, Baker's was a studio recording, with the disciplined format that implies, whereas Fruscella 's was from a live session at the Open Door and has a relative looseness, but even so, there is greater depth in Fruscella's playing. As Dan Morgenstern said of it: "It is music very much of its time - a time of scuffling, an inward looking time, a blue time." 

The recordings from the Open Door - and, yet again, they came to light only years later - are valuable not only for the way in which they allow us to hear Fruscella soloing at length, but also for the window they provide into the modern jazz world of New York. The Open Door was a bar and restaurant frequented by jazz musicians and which they soon began to use as a place for jam sessions. Dan Morgenstern remembered it as a "haven for jazz people with no money. It was a weird place. When you walked in off the street, you entered a room with a long bar that had a Bowery feeling to it. At one end of this bar stood an ancient upright piano, manned most evenings by Broadway Rose, a fading but spry ex-vaudevillian, her hair dyed an improbable shade of red. She knew a thousand old songs and cheerfully honored requests. From the bar, right next to Rose, a creaky door led to the huge, gloomy back room, sporting a long bandstand, a dance floor which was never used, and rickety tables and chairs."

Bob Reisner, a freelance writer who some years later produced a couple of short but lively memoirs of the 1950s, and also wrote a funny book about graffiti, hired the room for Sunday afternoon concerts at which Charlie Parker sometimes appeared.  Others spontaneous sessions appeared and drummer Al Levitt recalls musicians like Herb Geller, Gene Quill, Jon Eardley, Milt Gold, and Ronnie Singer, dropping in to play. Geller did go on to make a name for himself on the West Coast in the late 1950s and is still around, having lived in Germany for many years. Most of the others made only occasional appearances on record and those mostly in the 1950s. And the casualty rate amongst them was high. Quill was badly injured in a road accident and spent the rest of his life virtually immobilized, Singer committed suicide and Eardley had an up-and-down career due to drug addiction. 

The music produced by Fruscella at the Open Door, mostly with tenorman Brew Moore and pianist Bill Triglia, sounds relaxed almost to the point of casualness, and it is played without any concessions to non-jazz tastes. Using a few standard tunes from the jazz and popular music repertoire (the popular music of the pre-rock period, that is), the emphasis is on improvisation, and Fruscella shows how inventive he could be in such a setting. He never repeats ideas and always sounds poised, no matter the tempo. He was fond of the ballad, "Lover Man," using it at the open Door sessions and also at an engagement at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey which must have taken place around the same period (1953). "A Night in Tunisia," the classic tune from the hop era, also crops up at both places. There are moments on the ballad performances when Fruscella can sound pensive, almost hesitant, but he skillfully uses that mood to shape his solos and his emotional sound complements it.

It needs to be noted that the Ridgewood High School recordings, presumably made by one of the musicians or an interested fan, were some more that only went into general circulation twenty or so years later. Bill Triglia appears to have been the man who organized the group's appearance. Interestingly, some other live recordings from the same period and with Triglia again in the group feature Don Joseph and a good alto-saxophonist, Davey Schildkraut, who was in Stan Kenton's band in the 1950s, recorded with Miles Davis, but then drifted from sight. Memoirs of the New York scene prior to 1959 or so place him in the center of a lot of the activity at the Open Door and elsewhere. 

1955 was probably the peak year in Fruscella' s short career, and he was featured on a couple of recordings by Stan Getz and was also invited to make an LP under his own name for the Atlantic label, a well-established company. Fruscella chose Bill Triglia to accompany him on piano and he added tenor-saxophonist Allen Eager, a musician who had been highly thought of in the 1940s, when he was amongst the leading hop players, but who was by 1955 slipping into a shadowy world of occasional public appearances and even fewer recording dates. With Phil Sunkel, another little-known trumpeter, acting as composer-arranger, Fruscella came up with some of his finest work, especially on "I'll Be Seeing You" and the attractive "His Master's Voice," on which he uses some of his classical background to fashion an engaging Bach-like series of variations. Fruscella and those who admired him no doubt imagined that this album would help him widen his reputation, but it soon slid from sight and was remembered by only a few enthusiasts. The mid-1950s were reasonable years for some jazzmen provided they could be identified with bright West Coast sounds or the hard hop forcefulness associated with black New York. Fruscella's music, like so much good, white New York jazz of the 1950s, didn't fit into either category. 

What happened to Tony Fruscella after 1955? Very little, it seems, if the reference books are anything to go by. He probably still played at jam sessions and perhaps even did some club work in obscure places, but the "dogged will to fail" that Bob Reisner saw in him, and his drug and alcohol problems, must have held him back. And the 1906s were lean years for a lot of jazzmen, as pop music took over in clubs, dance halls, and on the radio. His kind of music, quiet, reflective, and requiring sympathy and understanding from the listener was hardly likely to appeal to many people. It never had, it's only fair to say, but things got even worse in the 1960s. After years of obscurity, Fruscella died in August, 1969, his body finally giving up the struggle against barbiturates and booze. Bob Reisner, in a touching elegy written for a jazz magazine just after Fruscella died, said: "If I were an artist, I would paint Fruscella in the Renaissance manner. A side portrait of him bent in concentration over the horn which produced the flowing and delicate music. The usual background landscape would be strewn with a couple of wives, countless chicks, barbiturate containers, and empty bottles. His artistic life, however, was in sharp contrast. He was completely austere and disciplined. There was not a commercial chromosome in his body."

This short survey of Fruscella's life is scattered with the names of the forgotten. What did happen to Don Joseph and Davey Schildkraut? Allen Eager is dead. And a whole world of New York jazz of the 1950s comes to mind when one listens to a few of the records by Fruscella and others. Where are Jerry' Lloyd, George Syran, and Phil Raphael and Phil Leshin? Jerry Lloyd was around in the 1940s and 1950s and recorded with Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington, though he never became well-known and worked as a cab driver even when he was featured on many records. George Syran was on an album with Jon Eardley which also featured trombonist Milt Gold, and the two Phils worked with Red Rodney in 1951, but what else? That fine tenor-saxophonist Phil Urso, who soloed on Woody Herman records in the early-1950s, was with Chet Baker's group a few years later, and then seems to have faded into obscurity around 1960 died in 2008. There were so many who had only a brief moment or two in the spotlight. Not all of them were necessarily as ill-fated as Fruscella. Bill Triglia. who figures so prominently in the Fruscella story, seems to have still been alive in the 1980s, though hardly in the forefront of jazz.

Nor would it be true to say that all the musicians mentioned were victims of an unjust or uncaring society. When there were casualties, they often came about through personal waywardness and self-indulgence rather than from any form of oppression. Some jazzmen may well have felt that their music was misunderstood and neglected, but that's hardly an excuse for taking drugs or drinking heavily. Dan Morgenstern may have got nearer the truth  when he said it was an 'inward-looking time." Were drugs a part of that inwardness or simply just a social fashion? 

But a lot of musicians probably just gave up playing jazz, or even playing any kind of music, and some possibly turned to commercial sounds in order to earn a living.

Compromises are often necessary if one wants to eat. The point is, though, that all those I've named, and more whose names are mentioned when people reminisce, deserve to be remembered for their contributions to jazz, even if those contributions were small ones. We do the artists and ourselves a disservice when we neglect the past. A form of "organized amnesia' takes over, as is so often evident when one listens to those radio stations which purport to cater for a jazz audience but which mostly present a non-stop procession of bland sounds. There is little or no historical sense in what they do, and certainly no place for a fine, forgotten musician like Tony Fruscella."