Bunny Berigan: Boy With A Horn

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

“As always, there is Berigan’s incomparable – and irrepressible – swing. … Berigan’s sense of swing was an innate talent, a given talent, a feeling beyond study and calculation, one that Berigan heard in the playing of both Beiderbecke and Armstrong, but which he synthesized into his own personal rhythmic idiom.”

“Berigan’s other great asset was the extraordinary beauty of his tone. Though technically based on perfect breath support, the purity—and amplitude—of his tone was controlled at the moment of emission by his inner ear, as with any great artist renowned for his tone. Berigan could project in his mind and ear a certain sound, and then the physical muscles (embouchure, breathing, fingers) would, in coordination, produce the desired result.”

- Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era

“If you could have seen him out on that stage in a white suit, with that shiny gold trumpet, blond hair and gray penetrating eyes – well, if it didn’t knock you over when he started to play, ain’t nothin’ gonna knock you down.”

- Joe Bushkin, Jazz pianist

For the first half century or so of its existence, trumpet players were the Rock guitarists of Jazz.

It seemed that every aspiring young musician wanted to play a shiny, brass trumpet much like today’s youngsters want an electric guitar hanging from their hip.

Of course, it was all Louis Armstrong’s fault.  Pops started the craze in the mid-1920s when as a member of King Oliver’s Band [another trumpeter] he stood up to take his memorable solos at Lincoln Gardens in downtown Chicago.

Pops was the first Jazz soloist and he took them on a gleaming, glittery and glossy horn that formed the center of attraction for many Jazz groups, big and small, that span Jazz styles as diverse as Dixieland, Swing, Bop, Modern, Free and Fusion.

The list is endless: Jimmy McPartland, Red Nichols, Henry “Red” Allen, Harry James, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart, Ray Nance, Buck Clayton, Harry James, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Howard McGhee, Harry “Sweets” Edison and Miles Davis, all continued “the boy with a horn” tradition that Pops started with his clarion calls to Jazz.

There seems to be something ill-fated with Jazz trumpet players whose first or last  name begins or ends with the letter “B.” Bix Beiderbecke, Booker Little, Sonny Berman, Clifford Brown, Bunny Berigan – none made it to thirty years of age. Heck, Berigan just barely made it beyond as he died in 1942 at the age of thirty-three. In some respects, these marvelous trumpet players scarcely made it out of boyhood making the phrase – “Boy with a Horn – an apt one, indeed.

I didn’t know much about Bunny Berigan other than that his version of I Can’t Get Started was immensely popular and became a kind of “acid test” for trumpeters after it was recorded in 1936 in much the same way that Pops’ West End Blues had dazzled them about ten years earlier.

So I turned, as I so often do when I’m looking for information about The Swing Era, to George T. Simon’s The Big Bands, Gunther Schuller’s The Swing Era and Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords, White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945.

© -George T. Simon, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"I Can’t Get Started was Bunny Berigan's theme song. It was also a pretty apt description of his career as a bandleader.

Bunny could have and should have succeeded handsomely in front of his own band. He was a dynamic trumpeter who had already established himself publicly with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey via brilliant trumpet choruses that many of the swing fans must have known by heart — like those for Benny on "King Porter Stomp," "Jingle Bells" and "Blue Skies" and for Tommy on "Marie" and "Song of India." So great were Berigan's fame and popularity that he won the 1936 Metronome poll for jazz trumpeters with five times as many votes as his nearest competitor!

It wasn't just the fans who appreciated him, either. His fellow musicians did too. One of them — I think it was either Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey —  once told me that few people realized how great a trumpeter Bunny was, because when he played his high notes he made them sound so full that hardly anyone realized how high he actually was blowing! Red McKenzie, referring to the notes that Bunny did and didn't make, once said, ‘If that man wasn't such a gambler, everybody would say he was the greatest that ever blew. But the man's got such nerve and likes his horn so much that he'll go ahead and try stuff that nobody else'd ever think of trying.’

All of these men, Miller, Dorsey, McKenzie, plus many others, including Hal Kemp, featured Bunny on their recordings. How come Kemp? Because his was the first big name band Bunny ever played with. Hal had heard him when he was traveling through Wisconsin in 1928, was attracted by his style, but, according to his arranger-pianist, John Scott Trotter, ‘didn't hire him because Bunny had the tinniest, most awful, ear-splitting tone you ever heard.’ Berigan broadened his sound considerably (it eventually became one of the "fattest" of all jazz trumpet tones), came to New York, joined Frank Cornwall's band, was rediscovered by Kemp (‘Bunny had discovered Louis Armstrong by then,’ Trotter points out), joined the band, then went off into the radio and recording studios (he cut some great sides with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra) and was at CBS doing numerous shows, including one of his own, which featured Bunny's Blue Boys, when Goodman talked him into joining his band. He stayed six months, returned to the studios and then joined Dorsey (or a few weeks—long enough to make several brilliant records.

Even while he was with Tommy's band, Bunny began organizing his own, with a great deal of help from Dorsey and his associates. First he assembled an eleven-piece outfit, which recorded several sides for Brunswick and which really wasn't very good, and then in the spring of 1937 he debuted with a larger group at the Pennsylvania Roof in New York.

The band showed a great deal of promise, and it continued to show a great deal of promise for the close to three years of its existence. It never fulfilled that promise, and the reason was pretty obvious: Bunny Berigan was just not cut out to be a bandleader.

As a sideman, as a featured trumpeter, as a friend, as a drinking companion, be was terrific. The guys in his band loved him, and for good reason. He was kind and considerate. Unlike Goodman, Dorsey and Miller, he was not a disciplinarian—neither toward his men nor, unfortunately, toward himself. Playing for Bunny Berigan was fun. And it was exciting too — like the night a hurricane blew the roof off Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where the band had just begun to establish itself, or the time it showed up for a Sunday-night date in Bristol, Connecticut, only to find Gene Krupa's band already on the stand (Berigan had gotten his towns slightly mixed—he was supposed to have been in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that night.)

The band projected its share of musical kicks too. On that opening Penn­sylvania Roof engagement, it unveiled a new tenor sax find from Toronto, Georgie Auld, who perhaps didn't blend too well with the other saxes but who delivered an exciting, booting solo style. It had a good arranger and pianist in Joe Lipman and several other impressive soloists, including a girl singer, Ruth Bradley, who was also a clarinet player.

Berigan was good at discovering musicians. Ray Conniff started with him, and so did two brilliant New York lads, a swinging pianist named Joe Bushkin and a rehabilitated tap-dancer-turned-drummer named Buddy Rich.

The band recorded a batch of sides for Victor; some were good, some were pretty awful. Naturally his "I Can't Get Started" was his most important. (He had recorded the number earlier with a pickup band for Vocalion, and to many musicians this was a more inspired version.) Also impressive were "Mahogany Hall Stomp," "Frankie and Johnny," "The Prisoner's Song," "Russian Lullaby," several Bix Beiderbecke numbers and a few pop tunes, especially if Kitty Lane happened to be the singer. He featured other girl singers, such as Ruth Gaylor, Gail Reese and Jayne Dover, and sang occa­sionally himself, but not very well.

As Berigan's self-discipline grew even more lax, his band became less successful. By late 1939 it was obvious that as a leader, Bunny was not going anywhere. Early in 1940 he gave up.

Almost immediately his friend Tommy Dorsey offered him a job. Bunny accepted and sparked the Dorsey band to brilliant heights, blowing great solos and infusing new life into a band that had begun to falter. (For a sample of how Bunny was playing then, try Tommy's record of "I'm Nobody's Baby.")

Bunny's stay lasted only six months, however. There was marked disagree­ment about why he suddenly left the band on August 20, 1940, after a radio broadcast at the NBC studios. Dorsey said, "I just couldn't bring him around, so I had to let him go. I hated to do it." Berigan, on the other hand, complained about not "enough chance to play. Most of the time I was just sitting there waiting for choruses, or else I was just a stooge, leading the band, while Tommy sat at somebody else's table."

So he reorganized and for a while the new band, composed entirely of unknown musicians, showed promise, according to writer Amy Lee, who reviewed a May, 1941, air shot from Palisades Park in New Jersey: "That fifteen minutes was enough to tell the listener that Bunny is playing more magnificently than ever, that he has a band with a beat which fairly lifts dancers or listeners right off their seat or feet ... his range, his conception, his lip, and his soul are without compare, and to hear him again is the kick of all listening kicks."

But again Bunny couldn't get started quite enough to last. The combination of too many one-nighters and unhealthy living began to catch up with him again. The last time I heard the band was in a Connecticut ballroom during the summer of 1941, and for one who admired Bunny's playing so tremen­dously and who liked him so much personally, it was quite a shattering experience. I reported in Metronome:

"The band was nothing. And compared with Berigan standards, Bunny's blowing was just pitiful. He sounded like a man trying to imi­tate himself, a man with none of the inspiration and none of the technique of the real Berigan.

He looked awful, too. He must have lost at least thirty pounds. His clothes were loose-fitting; even his collar looked as if it were a couple of sizes too large for him.

Apparently, though, he was in good spirits. He joked with friends and talked about the great future he thought his band had. But you had a feeling it would never be. And when, after intermission, Bunny left the bandstand, not to return for a long time, and some trumpeter you'd never heard of before came down to front the band, play Bunny's parts, and spark the outfit more than its leader had, you realized this was enough, and you left the place at once, feeling simply awful."

Shortly thereafter he gave up the band,  and Peewee Erwin, who had replaced him in both Goodman's and Dorsey's outfit, took it over. Berigan declared bankruptcy. He was obviously quite ill, but he carried on doggedly, fronting yet another band. He broke down several times. He was hospitalized in Pennsylvania with a severe case of pneumonia. More than anything and almost anyone else, Bunny needed a rest and help. But probably out of sheer loyalty to his men, and faced with the responsibilities of supporting a wife and two young children, he refused to give up.

On June 1, 1942, he was scheduled to play a job at Manhattan Center in New York. The band showed up. Bunny didn't. He was seriously ill in Polyclinic Hospital with cirrhosis of the liver. Benny Goodman, playing at the Paramount Theater, brought over his sextet and filled in as a gesture of friendship toward his first star trumpeter.

On June 2, 1942, Bunny Berigan died, a financially and physically broken man. like another wonderful trumpeter with the same initials, Bix Beiderbecke, whose horn had also been stilled a decade earlier by too much booze, Bunny lived much too short a life. He was only thirty-three when he died. And yet during that brief span, he grew to be a giant on the jazz scene — per­haps not as a big bandleader but certainly as one of the best-liked musician-leaders of his day and one of the most inspiring jazz soloists of all time.”

Gunther Schuller offers this view of Bunny, his music and his significance in the Jazz World.

© -Gunther Schuller, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jazz loves its legends, especially its alcoholic martyrs. To qualify for such can­onization you had to die early, preferably from too much drinking; and it is best that you were white — and played the trumpet. The two BB's—Bix Beiderbecke and Bunny Berigan—were ideal candidates, and they are idolized and romanti­cized to this day, while Jabbo Smith, Frankie Newton, Tommy Ladnier, and John Nesbitt, who either died prematurely or were forced into early retirement, are allowed to languish in quiet oblivion.

On the other hand it doesn't pay to live a long and active healthy life: that will get you very few points in the legend business. Berigan was unquestionably one of the trumpet giants of the thirties. But as one reads much of the jazz literature, especially in its more anecdotal manifestations, one could easily gain the impression that, after Armstrong, there was only Berigan, and that such pre-Gillespie trumpeters as Roy Eldridge, Henry "Red" Allen, Rex Stewart, Cootie Williams, Buck Clayton, Harry Edison, Harry James, Charlie Spivak, Ziggy Elman, Sy Oliver, "Hot Lips" Page, Taft Jordan, Eddie Tomkins, Bobby Hackett, Charlie Teagarden, Mannie Klein, and a host of others simply never existed or were inconsequential peripheral figures.

Such biased writing takes much encouragement from Armstrong's oft-quoted response to a question about his successors: "The best of them? That's easy, It was Bunny." (That must have made Roy Eldridge happy!) Whatever Armstrong's reasons for making that comment might have been—if indeed it is authentic and not taken out of context—the fact is that Berigan, as good as he was, was by no means as unique as his most ardent admirers would have us believe.

That he was a superbly talented and in his early years a technically assured trumpet player is beyond argument; but so were all the above-listed trumpet players, some even more consistent or technically spectacular than Berigan. That he was a superior musician with superb musical instincts and a relentlessly creative mind is also unarguable; but so were Eldridge, Allen, Stewart, and Cootie. That he was always a moving lyric player is equally true; but so were a number of others, particularly Cootie and Ladnier, Clayton and Hackett.

And while a lyric, singing approach to the trumpet was Berigan's forte, players like Stewart, Newton, and Eldridge could create eloquent lyric statements, as required, in addition to other kinds of personal expressions. That Berigan used the full range of the trumpet, exploiting especially the low register, is undisputable; but so did Eldridge and Jabbo Smith, and they indeed expanded the top range much more vigorously. That Berigan took chances in his flights of imagination is also undeniable; but it would be impossible to deny that Eldridge did, and that, in fact, he did so within a more venturesome and complex style, and — it must be said — with greater technical consistency.

Berigan's idolization by certain authors has even led to the deification of his mistakes. A fluff by Berigan is cherished in those circles as some glorious creative moment, which no one else could have dared to imagine. The fact is that, from a brass-playing point of view, many of Berigan's missed notes—discounting the final years when his deteriorating health really affected his coordination—occur not in his technically most daring passages but in relatively ordinary ones. Some of his more spectacular trumpet feats are the result of his most daring concep­tions, whereas the more conservative musical ideas are often those which are technically blemished.

All of this is not to denigrate Berigan's talent and achievements but merely to put them in perspective and to demythologize somewhat his position in jazz history. He does occupy an important role in the jazz trumpet's development in that he, more than anyone else, fused elements of both Armstrong and Beiderbecke into a new, distinctive, personal voice.

By all accounts Berigan, like Eldridge, seems to have discovered Armstrong relatively late; and when he did, it was primarily the Armstrong already em­barked on a career as a lyric balladeer and bravura soloist. But it would be wrong to assume that Berigan was, even in the early stages of his career, a mere Armstrong imitator … Berigan not only had his own sound and melodic identity but also had the ability to create fluent, well-structured explorative solos….

“Hallmarks of Berigan mature style are remarkable fluency in the lowest range of the trumpet, an area that Armstrong had begun to explore, but which Roy Eldridge and Berigan were to make an integral and consistent part of the trumpet’s technical/expressive vocabulary,  Berigan’s inventiveness of imagination in his ability to adroitly combine the expected with the unexpected and a glorious rich golden singing tone.” [paraphrase]…

One of the many musicians who was strongly impressed by Berigan's talent was Benny Goodman. Benny and Bunny had often worked together in the stu­dios in the early thirties in pickup bands (sometimes led by Goodman) and, as mentioned, on the Let's Dance broadcast series. When Goodman took his band on its first transcontinental road trip in the summer of 1935, he hired Berigan as his leading soloist.

The recordings made by the Goodman band with Berigan are some of the best representations of both artists. Certainly Berigan's two solos on King Porter Stomp (recorded July 1, 1935) must count as among his very finest creative achievements. His performance here represents the mature Beri­gan in full opulent flowering.

Berigan's solo work on King Porter exemplifies his unerring sense of form, a virtually infallible clarity of statement. His two solos, one muted, the other open horn, are miniature compositions which many a writing-down composer would be envious of having created, even after days of work. This structural logic trans­mits itself even to the lay listener in the absolute authoritativeness of his playing.

The ingredients in both solos are really quite simple: great melodic beauty combined with logic and structural balance. Every note, every motivic cell, every phrase leads logically to the next with a Mozartean classic inevitability. And each phrase, whether heard in 2-bar or 8-bar segments, has its own balanced structur­ing and symmetry. Take, for example, the last eight bars of his first solo (Ex. 18). Starting on the syncopated high Cs, the phrase falls to its midpoint, rests there a moment (in bar 20) and then rises again to the final tonic note. And whereas the first four bars use syncopation as an element of surprise, of swing and of tension, the last four bars lie squarely on the beat, providing a wonderful sense of resolution not only to the phrase but to the whole solo….

…symmetrical balancing gives the solo a wonderful equilibrium, seemingly a natural gift with Berigan.

But this is not all. As always, there is Berigan’s incomparable – and irrepressible – swing. … Berigan’s sense of swing was an innate talent, a given talent, a feeling beyond study and calculation, one that Berigan heard in the playing of both Beiderbecke and Armstrong, but which he synthesized into his own personal rhythmic idiom.

Berigan’s other great asset was the extraordinary beauty of his tone. Though technically based on perfect breath support, the purity—and amplitude—of his tone was controlled at the moment of emission by his inner ear, as with any great artist renowned for his tone. Berigan could project in his mind and ear a certain sound, and then the physical muscles (embouchure, breathing, fingers) would, in coordination, produce the desired result.”

© -Richard Sudhalter, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“In the half-century since his death, Bunny Berigan still inspires ecstasy in those who knew him, worked with him, and admired him from afar. It's in the Joe Bushkin utterance that begins this chapter, rapt acknowledgment of a reality quite beyond the events of an ill-starred trumpeter's life.

"Bunny hit a note — and it had pulse," said clarinetist Joe Dixon, a member of Berigan's band in 1937-38. "You can talk about one thing and another — beautiful, clear, big tone, range, power — and sure, that's part of it. But only part of it."

He gropes for the one elusive, all-encapsulating thought. "It's hard to de­scribe, but his sound seemed to, well, soar. He'd play lead, and the whole band would soar with him, with or without the rhythm section. There was drama in what he did — he had that ability, like Louis [Armstrong], to make any tune his own. But in the end all that says nothing. You had to hear him, that's all."

You had to hear him. Hyperbole and magic, pressed into service yet again to explain the inexplicable.

But what is the reality of this trumpet player, dead, emptied of life-force, at age thirty-three? Is Bunny Berigan, as more than a few chroniclers would have us believe, merely a very good musician whose significance has been exaggerated by generations of votaries? Or is something else at work in the minds and mem­ories of those who heard him?

George "Pee Wee" Erwin, who followed Berigan into Tommy Dorsey's trum­pet section, insisted: "I don't think you could ever really appreciate [Bunny] unless you stood in front of that horn and heard it. I've never heard anyone who could match it. When he'd hit a note it would be like a cannon coming out of that horn. And I'm not speaking of sheer volume—I'm speaking of the body of the sound." …

Steve Lipkins, who played lead trumpet with Dorsey and with Berigan's own band, declared him "the first jazz player we'd heard at that time who really played the trumpet well, from bottom to top, evenly and strongly throughout. Besides that, he had something special in the magic department — and you had to hear that to understand it." [Emphasis, mine]

Many trumpeters had power, beauty, and density of tone. Manny (sometimes Mannie) Klein had near-perfect control in all registers, too; he could lip-trill the high notes just as adeptly as Berigan. Roy Eldridge was a more daring high-wire walker, leaping and swooping and racing around his horn like a clarinetist; Sonny Dunham, with the Casa Loma Orchestra, had a keen sense of drama; Harry James could whip audiences into a hysterical frenzy, and his Goodman band section-mate Ziggy Elman was a powerhouse in both solo and lead. Henry "Red" Allen was probably more creative, Rex Stewart more abandoned. Cootie Williams—in his open-horn moments, at least—equally majestic (hear his opening chorus to El­lington's 1934 "Troubled Waters").

But it's hard to imagine any of those men, however accomplished, inspiring talk of "something special in the magic department." Berigan, then, can't be understood as simply an amalgam of skills and attributes. There is another di­mension; even his less distinguished recorded work exudes a sense of something transcendental, unmatched by any other trumpet soloist of the 1930s.

The only comparison that comes to mind is the mighty, all-pervasive—and now increasingly mythic—figure of Louis Armstrong. And indeed, Armstrong was at pains to make clear that "my boy Bunny Berigan" was in a class by himself "Now there's a boy whom I've always admired for his tone, soul, technique, his sense of 'phrasing' and all. To me, Bunny can't do no wrong in music."

At the end of the 1920s, when Berigan arrived in New York, many white brassmen admired Louis Armstrong, but few attempted to emulate him. Jack Purvis had been the trailblazer with his recording of "Copyin' Louis," discussed in the previous chapter. Tommy Dorsey, who in those days doubled regularly on trumpet, brought to the horn an Armstrong-like intensity quite different from his trombone playing.

But most white trumpeters were under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke, whose introspective sensibility wedded romanticism with a classicist's sense of order and structure. Where Louis's solos were bold, emotionally dense statements, painted in bright primary colors, Bix's were more subdued, richly layered, nuanced.

That polarity created a dilemma for musicians who admired both men. Rex Stewart, one of Berigan's first friends in New York, confessed to being unable to make up his mind between Beiderbecke and Armstrong and embraced both in a most original manner. The solos of John Nesbitt, arranger and trumpeter with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, show the same sort of division.

But the duality found its most fully realized expression in Bunny Berigan….

In 1932, Bunny Berigan hit his stride….

Berigan was now one of the most polished and versatile trumpet men in the music business. His range was big, glowing, and secure all the way up to his high G. His control of high-note lip-trills was nonpareil. His flexibility was re­markable even by today's advanced standards of technique: he could vault from the lowest to the highest reaches of his horn with the same matter-of-factness displayed on his records with Kemp, but with ever greater confidence and polish, and no loss of tonal size or quality.

He used this technical equipment in shaping solos often stunning in their power to move a listener—something special, as Steve Lipkins put it, in the magic department; it is this quality, above all, that sets Berigan apart from even such supremely gifted contemporaries as Roy Eldridge.

Comparison of Eldridge and Berigan is instructive. Each exploits the dramatic potential of his instrument, but to somewhat different ends. From his first ap­pearance on record, the 1935 "(Lookie, Lookie, Lookie) Here Comes Cookie," with Teddy Hill's orchestra, Eldridge is clearly an unprecedented force in jazz trumpet playing. His ability to get around the horn is awe-inspiring, combining Stewart's flexibility and Jabbo Smith's daredevil acrobatics—but with greater ac­curacy and sense of purpose.

Nothing in any trumpeter's work up to that time remotely approaches the mile-a-minute stunt flying of "Heckler's Hop," "After You've Gone," or "Swing Is Here." But Eldridge (in common with Dizzy Gillespie, whom he directly in­spired) did not form his approach out of the examples of either Armstrong's stateliness or Beiderbecke's introspection. He admired Red Nichols—but largely, he added, for the latter's fluency and command of his horn. It was in saxophon­ists, notably Coleman Hawkins, that Roy Eldridge found his role model. Though capable of eloquent moments at slow tempos ("Where the Lazy River Goes By," "Falling in Love Again," and, with Billie Holiday, "I Wished on the Moon"), the closest he gets to the brooding majesty of Berigan's utterances on the 1935 "Nothin' but the Blues" (under Gene Gifford's name) is his two sombre, grieving choruses on Teddy Wilson's 1936 "Blues in C-sharp Minor."

But these two trumpeters are singers of quite different songs. Berigan was, in one colleague's admiring phrase, "the ultimate romantic." His every solo flight, so expansive in the Armstrong manner, so reminiscent of the great tenors of Italian grand opera, also includes (and here he differs sharply from Eldridge) something of the sentimental. Never dominant, seldom even rising to the surface (quite unlike the saccharine excesses of Harry James, Ziggy Elman, or, at times, Charlie Shavers), it's nonetheless an ingredient.

Eldridge's sharply honed competitiveness seems quite at odds with Berigan's more bardic tendencies. Unlike Roy, Bunny seems never to think in terms of effect, display or spectacle. In all his recorded work it's hard to find a solo, even a single phrase, that seems calculated to impress. Berigan doesn't compete: he prefers to follow his instincts as a teller of stories.

If, as in his astonishing break toward the end of "That Foolish Feeling," he leaps from his horn's next-to-lowest note, a concert F below middle C, two and one-half octaves to a concert C above, he's not doing it to show that he can do it, or to intimidate potential challengers; he's doing it solely because his sense of phrase, balance, and dramatic narrative tells him that's where he must go.

Relevant here, if unlikely, is an observation by Edgar Allan Poe. Setting out guidelines for the successful short story, he declares, "In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design."

Granted, most jazz improvisers work to far more generalized, less "pre-established" designs than do writers; but the jazz­man's art as a (short) storyteller conforms no less strictly to Poe's stated criterion. Each part serves the whole; each phrase moves the story forward, furthers the grand design. This is obvious in the work of Lester Young, of Bix Beiderbecke, of Pee Wee Russell—master storytellers all. And it is richly, gloriously true of Bunny Berigan….

[The April 13, 1936]… version of "I Can't Get Started" is the first of two performances recorded by Berigan sixteen months apart; many listeners prefer it to the latter, rather grander Victor version. It's quite unself-conscious, relaxed, almost carefree: let's just play the damn thing, Bunny seems to say here—if we get it, fine. If we miss, what the hell.

They don't miss. After a thoughtful opening tutti, Berigan sings a chorus in his high, light voice, his fast vibrato lending a sense of vulnerability. Crawford's tenor takes eight bars in a subdued ballad mood, and then it's all Bunny, playing at a bravura peak. Moving easily throughout the entire range of his horn, he climbs at the outset to a titanic high concert D-flat, and E-flat, only to plunge near the end to four broad-toned, sotto voce bars before a final climactic ascent.

There's no minimizing the importance of this three-minute tour de force. It's the apotheosis of Bunny Berigan's art as a soloist in the grand tradition established by Armstrong and illustrates graphically why Louis, while praising Eldridge for his "chops" and others for their various "ingredients," as he was fond of calling them, singled out Berigan as the one who "can't do no wrong in music." He knew what he was hearing.”

This video tribute to Bunny features the famous 1936 original version of I Can’t Get Started, a fitting and sad epithet for his all-too-brief Jazz career.

A Conversation About Jazz with Gary Giddins

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

“… if Bix, Bird, and Cecil were all jazz, then this was a world without end. I had to hear everything by the artists I loved, especially Armstrong and Ellington. The lack of repetition was addictive, invigorating. I loved the fact that I might hear a few bars of, say, trumpet and know “that’s Clifford Brown,” long before I understood why I knew it….”  

“Criticism is as personal a field as singing and, beyond the fact that a lot of practitioners in both fields aren’t particularly good at it, the reasons readers respond favorably to one and not to another are just as personal…. Most of us become critics because we venerate critics. We try and measure up….”

“A writer writes about what he or she knows, wants to know, and wants you to know. I thought I had something to say about jazz and that through jazz, I could speak to every issue that interested me….”  

- Gary Giddins

There is no one on the subject of Jazz than I would rather read than Gary Giddins.

His Jazz writings are unsurpassed, they are matchless.

Reading Giddins on Jazz is like sitting down to three scoops of your favorite ice cream with a liberal topping of chocolate sauce – you never want it to end.

It has been said that God sprinkles a few artistic geniuses into each generation to inspire the rest of us.

For me, Gary Giddins has always been one such inspiration.

I asked Gary if he would consent to a JazzProfiles interview.

As you will no doubt note when you read through the following “conversation,” he more than generously responded to my request.

You can review Gary’s many awards and achievements by visiting him at www.garygiddins.com/. I have re-posted two, earlier JazzProfiles features about Gary and his work to the blog's sidebar.

- How and when did music first come into your life?

My parents bought me a plastic phonograph when I was three — they were amused that I could identify the songs on my mother’s 78s or my aunt’s 45s by the labels and print, before I could read. On a few occasions, my father and I walked to Coney Island and I’d cut a plastic record in a phone-like booth. Eventually, he bought our first hi-fi (monaural, of course) and a few LPs, mostly Sinatra-generation pop, but also the Readers Digest classical music box-sets and that really did it: I was over the moon playing my way through them. 

- Did you play an instrument?

         

Piano, accordion, clarinet, bongos, guitar, alto sax, each under a separate tutor who took my parents’ dough and stared at me balefully, wondering why we bothered to go through the motions. My instrument was turntable. I didn’t want to be Sonny Rollins or Pablo Casals; I just wanted to listen to them. On the other hand, learning the rudiments of an instrument gives you useful insights into the labors they demand.

- What are your earliest recollections of Jazz?

         

I’ve written about this, and refer anyone interested to Weather Bird, pp. xiii – xx, and pp. 208-210.

         

- Conversations about Jazz invariably turn to “impressions” and “favorites.” So let’s turn to “impressions;” who were the Jazz musicians who first impressed you and why?”

Louis Armstrong changed everything. The longer answer is in Weather Bird, but a short one is this: after years of listening to 1950s rock and roll, a limited library of 19^th century and early 20^th century classics, folk music, and blues, the one piece that absolutely owned my Jewish soul was the [Johann Sebastian Bach] B Minor Mass, and Armstrong’s 1928 recordings replicated that kind of power, a discovery that simply blew my mind. At the same time, Ray Charles, whom I adored, made a record called Genius + Soul = Jazz and that perked my curiosity about that mysterious word. Others in the first years (1963-65) were Ellington (Masterpieces, In a Mellow Tone), Dizzy (Jambo Caribe, Something Old Something New), Miles (In Europe, Walkin’), Monk (Criss Cross, Thelonious Alone) Brubeck (At Carnegie Hall) Sonny (Work Time, Our Man in Jazz), Coltrane (Ballads, Live at the Vanguard), Getz / Gilberto, Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby), Hawkins (RCA Vintage anthology and At the Opera House with Roy), Mingus (Pre-Bird Mingus, The Clown), Billie Holiday (Columbia, Commodore sets), Pee Wee Russell (New Groove), Fats Waller (the RCA Vintage sets), Eric Dolphy (Out There), and Ornette (Ornette!) There were many more, though oddly I didn’t get into bop and the big bands until a little later. Bud Powell’s “Cherokee,” on a Verve collection, was life altering, as were the Parker Dials and Savoys and Verves (in order of encounter: Bird Symbols, The Charlie Parker Story, The Essential Charlie Parker), Tatum (This is Piano), Horace Silver (Song for My Father, Sarah (+ 2, No Count Sarah), Basie and Pres (The Lester Young Memorial Album, Lester’s Keynotes), the Django set on Capitol, Gil Evans (Out of the Cool), Barney Kessel (Workin’ Out) and on and on, as I grew determined to see everyone listed in Feather’s 1960 Jazz Encyclopedia still alive, and hear all those who weren’t. The cumulative effect and answer to your question lay in the wondrous variety and individualism they represented: if Bix, Bird, and Cecil were all jazz, then this was a world without end. I had to hear everything by the artists I loved, especially Armstrong and Ellington. The lack of repetition was addictive, invigorating. I loved the fact that I might hear a few bars of, say, trumpet and know “that’s Clifford Brown,” long before I understood why I knew it.   

- For reasons which you explain in the introduction to Visions of Jazz: The First Century, you did not include a number of “major figures…personal favorites … and popularizers” in the book. Continuing with your impressions for a while longer, what comes to mind when I mention the following Jazz musicians who were excluded from Visions of Jazz?

- Benny Carter

         

One of the wisest, most brilliant men I’ve had the honor to know. The first time I saw him play, in the 1970s, I understood the awe in which older critics and musicians held him. Before then, I had not heard most of his key recordings. His playing is beyond time, no matter the context. The other day I listened to his records with Julia Lee; to paraphrase something Benny once said about Ben Webster, you instantly know who it is and who he is. Working with him in the American Jazz Orchestra and seeing him every Labor Day weekend at the Gibson Jazz Party in Colorado over more than two decades was a kind of graduate school. I’ve written a lot about Benny, if not nearly enough; see Weather Bird.

         

- Ben Webster

         

He and Bud Powell were the two guys on my Feather list I never got to see so I took his death to heart. I had tried to find him when I studied in France in 1967, but no luck, though that was the summer I became friends with Ted Curson and Nick Brignola, the most important “studying” I did that summer. Ben was the most schizoid jazz player: supreme romantic, ferocious aggressor. Is there a better improv than “Cotton Tail?” Not that I knew of. Is there a more sublime encounter than Ben and Tatum? He’s one of the musicians I wrote about early on (Booker Ervin was another), including long liner notes, so by the time I started writing the column and books, I neglected him along with too many others. Never enough time or words. Mea bloody culpa! But I listen to him all the time. 

- Jack Teagarden

         

I like everything about Teagarden, the rippling trombone triplets, the insouciant voice (even Bing sounded taut by comparison), the bemusement (just look at him looking at Chuck Berry in Jazz on a Summer’s Day), the interplay with Pops and later with Bobby Hackett, and the perfect—as in P.E.R.F.E.C.T.—rendition of “St. James Infirmary” at the 1947 Town Hall concert. (Though Don Goldie, the trumpet player in his later band, wore me the hell out.) A 1977 essay on Big T, “The Best Trombone Player in the World,” is in Riding on a Blue Note.  

- Mary Lou Williams

         

Another spirit beyond time. Her first solo piece, “Nite Life,” was one of the first historicist jazz recordings in that, as, Jaki Byard would do decades later, she isolates and unites stylistic components of early piano, from Eubie to James P. to Hines. She was a marvelous composer and a genuinely great orchestrator, but it’s her piano I relish most, the free-floating harmonies and assertive time. She helped to revive the New York scene in the early ‘70s, when she convinced Barney Josephson to install a piano at the Cookery and then “embraced” Cecil Taylor—not a complete success musically but a true cultural occasion at the time. Mary asked me to deliver the eulogy at her funeral service at St. Patrick’s, a tremendous honor. I’ve written a lot about her, little of it in my books, though I compensated a bit by expanding a section on her in the trade edition of Jazz, the textbook I wrote with Scott DeVeaux. Carol Bash is now completing a long-awaited film about Mary.

- Tadd Dameron

         

If I could hear him now, I’d feel no pain. One of the tragically under-realized talents in jazz, the rare swing figure who understood bop before the boppers did. Blending Wardell and Eager and Navarro was pure genius; and the melodies and voicings unmistakably his own. Fountainbleau has transcendent moments. He helped posthumously to spur jazz historicism in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and it’s ironic and sad to me that I wrote more about Dameronia than Dameron. 

- Mildred Bailey

         

A complex dazzling woman who, like Billie, had to completely reinvent herself. In return for helping to launch Bing’s career, when she was still an unknown working speakeasies, he arranged for Whiteman to hire her: the first woman ever to tour as a band vocalist. The combination of Mildred, Red Norvo, and the arranger Eddie Sauter is damn near sublime. She had a high girlish voice, insinuating style, occasionally arch phrasing, unwavering pitch; her taste in accompanists was beyond cavil. There is quite a bit about her in Weather Bird, but someone should write a biography. Her granddaughter Julia Rinker has been mounting a one-woman campaign to restore Mildred to the pantheon, where she ought to be. The Mosaic box is a treasure.

- Lennie Tristano

         

The early recordings are quick, surprising and provocative, a brief for free improvisation if not free rhythm, which he later attempted to cage. “Wow” is a genuine wow and “I Can’t Get Started” with Billy Bauer takes harmonic substitutions to the point of re-composition. But the Atlantics exemplify his gifts. The 1955 “You Got to My Head” is one of the great piano improvisations and “Line Up” and the later “Becoming” are endlessly mesmerizing. Just as you can hear vestigial elements of Hines in Nat Cole, you can hear vestiges of Nat in Tristano. I find myself rediscovering him, ignoring him, then finding him again, a relationship I have with several writers and with opera, but not much in jazz.

- Serge Chaloff

         

By all accounts a madman, but the two Capitols, Boston Blow Up and Blue Serge, are among the outstanding postwar albums. With due respect to Carney and Mulligan, no one explored the range of the baritone more completely and effectively than Serge, especially on ballads, of which his “Body and Soul” and “Thanks for the Memory” are incomparable masterworks.

- Django Reinhardt

         

Everyone loves Django; impossible not to — the later stuff with Hubert Rostaing as well as the classic Quintette and everything he did with visiting Americans, especially Eddie South, who never played better than he did with Django, Rex Stewart, Benny Carter, Hawk (“Out of Nowhere” is one of his very great solos, and has Benny on trumpet for lagniappe). “St. Louis Blues,” “Improvisation,” and his delirious adaptations of Bach’s D minor concerto, with South and Grappelli, are pure pleasure, and then there are his those lovely original tunes. I listen to Django a lot, but I seem to have written about him mostly en passim or by indirection, as in an essay on James Carter’s smart homage to him. (See miserable excuse under Ben Webster above.)

– Ted Heath

         

The supreme British bandleader, tremendously popular in his day, and at his best a stubborn defender of the jazz faith — though now sadly forgotten. I hadn’t played him in a while when something rekindled my interest, so I went to an old-vinyl store called Footlights and bought more than a dozen LPs, listened with much pleasure, made copious notes for an essay, and then get derailed by something else and never wrote it. You can see him and get a sense of how hip he was in the excellent 1949 Michael Powell bomb-defusing-thriller-meets-the-lost-weekend film The Small Back Room (based, incidentally, on a very good Nigel Balchin novel), when Kenny Baker and Johnny Gray were in the band and Tadd Dameron was one of his arrangers. I don’t believe Tadd wrote the music in the film, but it definitely reflects his influence. Heath, along with Louis Armstrong, recorded and had an international hit with “The Faithful Hussar,” the song that (a year later) Christiane Kubrick sang at the end of Paths of Glory.

- Dave Brubeck

         

Like countless other boomers, I found in Dave an early and irresistible conduit to jazz. I grew bored with his post Desmond, post Mulligan, post (for a very short time) Braxton band, and felt guilty about it because he was a wonderful and generous man. The first time I spoke to him, I wanted to interview him for a piece I was writing for Esquire about upcoming jazz talent. He was on tour and his office gave me the number of his hotel in Vancouver. We got into an animated conversation, when suddenly he said, “Where are you?” I said, “New York.” He said, “This is costing you a fortune, let me call you back.” He did and we spoke for an hour. When I worked on a documentary about Pops, he and Iola drove to New York to shoot an interview in the Armstrong house, though we would have been happy to do it anywhere at their convenience. (They loved Pops.) A couple of years ago, I interviewed him on stage at the Kennedy Center, and he was as forthright and funny as ever, and seemed genuinely moved when I told him afterward how much I liked his recent solo piano CD, which is all but antithetical to the usual stomping Brubeck style. I’m happy with the Brubeck essay in Weather Bird, and with one on The Real Ambassadors in my book Natural Selection. Billy Taylor once told me, “Dave doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an innovator.” He was right. Nor does he get enough credit for The Real Ambassadors, which along with Ellington’s Jump For Joy, is the closest we have to a Broadway jazz musical. Of course, neither of them got close to Broadway and they exist solely as recordings. But someday, a smart producer will see the possibilities!            

- Why were there such rapid developments in Jazz from 1946-1965? Did the speed of this revolution in the music sow the seeds for its own destruction?

         

What destruction? Every movement sows seeds of destruction and rebirth. It isn’t the fault of jazz  that people can’t or don’t want to keep up with it. That’s all to the glory of jazz. Besides, the further we get from 1965, or any other departure point, the more unified the development of jazz appears.

- Mike Zwerin has written that Jazz went to Europe to live [in many ways, literally] in the 1960s. Did you agree with this assessment?

Yes and no. It went to live there for about four years, the height of the rock juggernaut when jazz artists who knew better tried to fit it in by wearing bad haircuts, sporting funny clothes, and buying shares in Fender Rhodes. The middle ’60 were splendid years: in the space of four days in 1966, you could (and I did) hear Bill Evans at Town Hall, and Titans of the Tenor at Philharmonic Hall, not to mention the serious action at the Vanguard and Gate and Half Note. It crashed in the early ‘70s, but by 1972, the long exile was terminating and each week brought remarkable new talent from around the country—all those acronyms: AACM, BAG, AEC, WSQ—along with the triumphant returns of everyone from Ted Curson to Red Rodney, Red Norvo to George Russell, Helen Humes to Betty Carter, Dexter and Moody and McLean and Benny Carter and Don Cherry etc. Cecil came back from the academy, Mingus and Rollins ended sabbaticals, Al reunited with Zoot, Sarah re-launched herself, Phil Woods Americanized his rhythm machine. Even Don Byas came by for a snort. By 1975, jazz returned to New York to stay. Mike remained in Europe, and he made the International Herald Tribune worth reading.  

- In Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation you wrote: "My intuition tells me that innovation isn't this generation's fate...the neoclassicists have a task no less valuable than innovation: sustenance. [M]usicians such as Marsalis are needed to restore order, replenish melody, revitalize the beat, loot the tradition for whatever works, and expand the audience. That way we'll be all the hungrier for the next incursion of genuine avant-gardists..." (161) Is this still your assessment of developments in Jazz circa, 1970-2000?

Sort of, but the phrase “the next incursion of genuine avant-gardists” now strikes me as facetious at best and perhaps just plain stupid; and, in any case, it’s okay with me — tradition isn’t the enemy of novelty or vice versa. In recent weeks, I heard a magnificent concert by Josh Redman with his superb quartet (including Brad Mehldau) and strings; and an energizing bass recital by Charnett Moffett. Three of the best albums I heard in this period are Marc Carey’s For the Love of Abbey, a pianistic exploration of Abbey Lincoln’s compositions; Bob Dorough’s lavishly produced hommage à moi Duets (likely the best album ever released by a nonagenarian); and Chucho Valdés’s stirring Border-Free. Each is obviously steeped in traditions (Valdés call his band the Afro-Cuban Messengers), yet each is startling, fresh, innovative, and audaciously, shamelessly in thrall to melody. It’s a wise music that knows its father.

- Gene Lees observed: “Writers about jazz are often notable for an ill-concealed jealousy and a sullen conviction that they alone know anything about the subject, that it is or should be their exclusive domain.” What are your views about Gene’s statement?

If I say “Gene Lees is an idiot,” do I prove his point? I don’t think so. To my left is a wall of jazz lit, about 1200 volumes, many of which I relish. Martin Williams and Dan Morgenstern made me want to listen to music I had never heard of and later made me want to write about it. Jealousy? I loved the rhythmic elation of Baraka’s writing about the avant-garde and Ira Gitler’s bebop wit, Don DeMichael’s meticulous praise, Whitney Balliett’s watercolor prose, Ralph Ellison’s musical patriotism, Max Harrison’s Olympian acuteness. I read avidly the Chicagoans like John Litweiler and Larry Kart, and the measured sanity of John McDonough alongside the measured insanity of Stanley Dance, who nonetheless documented with enormous skill the musicians he loved. I was mentored by Albert Murray’s swinging so-and-so and so-and-so locutions. When I started writing, I was delighted to be part of a generation of critics I could learn and steal from, including JR Taylor, Stanley Crouch, Bob Blumenthal, and Francis Davis. And I love attending a concert or hearing a record and later reading Nate Chinen nail it in the Times or Will Friedwald in the Journal or Doug Ramsey online. The other day I read a genuinely original and moving piece about Bill Evans and jazz racialism by Eugene Holley Jr; I read illuminating stuff all the time by Bill Milkowski, David Adler, and others. Greg Thomas brought solid jazz coverage back to the Daily News and no one should fail to subscribe to the East Stroudsburg University’s The Note for Phil Woods’s column and the interviews. Howard Mandel succeeded in creating the Jazz Journalists Association because most of us respect each other. The existence in any literary field of fools does not undermine the presence of those who write with passion, humility, discernment.

          Having said that, there are plenty of critics I find useless for reasons that invariably have more to do with me than them. I found Gene Lees’s narcissism insufferable and his self-serving, conspicuously unsourced faux-biographies of Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer offensive. I often found Benny Green’s orotund eloquence pompously insincere. I owe a tremendous debt to Andre Hodier, whose early books I read and reread with Talmudic devotion; but the more I learned about music and myself, the less meaningful his work became to me. Critics aren’t simply vendors of opinion; as I emphasized repeatedly when I taught criticism at Columbia, opinions are the least interesting aspect of criticism, which must needs represent a larger gestalt, a way of seeing and understanding the world. It’s true that many critics are paranoid. Not long ago, I saw a not-very-bright film critic praise a great film critic, after noting that he didn’t always agree with him. Of course you don’t always agree with him; if you did, you would be him.

Criticism is as personal a field as singing and, beyond the fact that a lot of practitioners in both fields aren’t particularly good at it, the reasons readers respond favorably to one and not to another are just as personal. The first time I read an issue of Down Beat, when I knew absolutely nothing about jazz, I intuited that I could trust reviews that were signed Dan Morgenstern, and not reviews by two fellows named Harvey. I respected and admired Robert Palmer, but his take on music was so foreign from mine that even when we agreed we disagreed. But I’d bet the ranch that neither of us was jealous of the other. Most of us become critics because we venerate critics. We try and measure up.  

- Staying with your thoughts about another comment by Gene, he realized very early on in his career that he “…could never be a Jazz critic,” and yet, you’ve written Jazz criticism for almost your entire writing career. Why this preference on your part?

I wanted to write from the time I was eight, and write criticism from the time (six and seven years later) I discovered Dwight Macdonald and Edmund Wilson. I fully expected to be a literary critic. Long after jazz and Mr. Armstrong happened to me, I figured my ignorance of musicology cashiered any ambition in that area. But there was something liberating about what Martin Williams used to call his “amateur status.” And so when I’d read some clown opining that Sonny Rollins lacked imagination, or that Charlie Rouse was boring, or that Garner was as predictable as canned soup, or that Ellington’s Far East Suite represented a decline, or the late Billie is merely neurotic, or that Jabbo Smith was a superior musician to Louis Armstrong, whose artistry allegedly went downhill after 1928 (I am making none of this up), I felt compelled to offer my two cents. A writer writes about what he or she knows, wants to know, and wants you to know. I thought I had something to say about jazz and that through jazz, I could speak to every issue that interested me.  

- Although you write about many topics related to the broad category of entertainment, what made you decide to become primarily a Jazz writer and is there a form of writing about Jazz that you prefer: reviews, insert notes, articles, books …?

I’ve answered the first part. As to form, I prefer the medium-track essay, 1500 to 2500 words. I never wanted to write brief newspaper accounts and when I tried, I wasn’t any good at it. The Voice gave me a page and let me fill it as I pleased for 31 years. It was the best job in the world on many accounts, not least that it afforded me short rest periods when I felt stale and longer ones when I worked on books. For most of those years, I worked with the brilliant Bob Christgau, who among many other things taught me the discipline of backing up my ideas. Before the Weather Bird column, the one format that allowed me to write at that length was liner notes, but I soon grew to hate writing them; I always felt I was whoring or compromising to sell a product, and I pretty much cut them out by the early 1980s, except for occasional historical reissues or favors to musician-friends. And it infuriates me that record companies not only own them in perpetuity but feel free to edit and even revise them without asking permission.  Since 2003, when I left the Voice, I’ve worked almost exclusively on books (also sold one unproduced screen treatment), a luxury I never thought I’d have, made possible by my work as Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I am very lucky, and know it.

- Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop [1981] is your first published book. What is the main theme of this work; how and why did this book come about?

At first, it had no theme. An editor asked me to consider publishing a collection of my essays. When I finished it, the editor said it was fine and took a pregnancy leave. The book then went to her colleague who hated it and demanded I return the paltry advance. Sheldon Meyer at Oxford had been asking me to do a book and we hadn’t come up with anything, so I asked my agent to send him the manuscript (originally called System of Ribbons, another Ellington phrase; my agent told me that a title with the word “system” sounds like an engineering manual). He bought it that week. What Bob taught me about newspaper writing, Sheldon taught me about book writing and over the course of 20-plus years, I did six books for him. Sheldon said I should delete two essays, one because it was the only one not centered on a particular individual. That was when I began to see the book as a book, with a unified approach and theme. We organized the pieces into four sections and underscored the jazz and pop theme. When I asked him why he wanted to cut the second piece, he said, “Because it isn’t worthy of you.” Right again. For Visions of Jazz, I wrote a better chapter on that same figure. 

  

- As stated in the introduction to Visions of Jazz, “In Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation, [published in1985], I posed the question as it related to jazz: ‘Few educated Americans can name even five jazz musicians under the age of forty.” What Jazz musicians under the age of forty do you listen to?

As a civilian, I’m no longer quite as conscious of age, but I think Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire, Darius Jones, Aaron Parks, Christian Sands, Esperanza Spaulding, Miguel Zenon, Eric Harland, Robert Glasper, Nathaniel Facey, Ryan Truesdell, Aaron Diehl, Christian Scott, Mary Halvorson, and Gerald Cleaver all make the cut.

- After Celebrating Bird in 1987 and Satchmo in 1988, why did you turn your attention to Bing Crosby as the focus for your next biography [Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, 2001]? Why not a Dizzy Gillespie companion volume to your work on Charlie Parker; a book about Miles Davis; a biography about Gerry Mulligan – each of whom were significant shapers of the music?

You write about what you find intriguing, and I have written extensively about Dizzy, Gerry, and Miles. In any case, Dizzy had just completed an as-told-to and Jerome Klinkowitz was working on Gerry, and everyone was doing Miles. I did agree to write Stan Getz’s autobiography, but he died the week we negotiated the contract. The two short books you mention are extended biographical essays that served as a kind of apprenticeship for a serious biography, and I had no intention of doing another one. I wanted to tackle a serious biography on Ellington. However, while I was working up a proposal, the Ellington papers were embargoed at the Smithsonian for “inventory,” which left me hanging. Paul Bresnick, with whom I did Satchmo, had repeatedly asked me to consider Crosby and I said no. In the absence of the Ellington project, I began looking at Bing. I always loved his jazz sides and had covered his Uris Theater engagement in 1976 (see Riding on a Blue Note). I was astonished to find that there had not been a serious book about him since two that came out in the late 1940s. The more I researched, the more fascinated I became with the themes of fame, persona, and the doppelganger effect: the person that the public creates as opposed to the person behind closed doors. I also found that I admired his pop work in the 1930s and 1940s more than I expected, along with his more obscure movies. Then there was his virtually forgotten contribution to modern technology, from popularizing the carbon microphone to the financing of tape to his decisive role in changing radio into a prerecorded rather than live medium. Finally, I was moved by his integrity regarding Civil Rights, especially in his relationship to Louis. Suddenly he seemed a perfect subject for me. Of course, it was supposed to be a 300-page book, requiring at best three years to write. After nine years, I published the first volume, 700 pages ending in 1940; I’m now closing in on volume two.

- In Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century [2004]you raise this question in one of its essays - “How Come Jazz Ain’t Dead?” How come it ain’t?  

         

You’ll have to read the essay to find out. Not much has changed.

- What books are you currently working on?

         

Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star. A revised edition of Celebrating Bird will be published by the University of Minnesota Press this fall and Scott DeVeaux and I are preparing a new edition of Jazz. 

Switching to the subject of “favorites:”

- What are some of your favorites books about Jazz?

Everything by Martin [Williams], especially The Jazz Tradition, Where’s the Melody, Jazz Masters in Transition, and Jazz Panorama, which he edited. Dan [Morgenstern]’s Living with Jazz and his amazing liner essays that remain to be collected. Louis Armstrong’s Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Marshall Stearns’s unjustly forgotten Story of Jazz and Jazz Dance, Sidney Finkelstein’s Jazz: A People’s Music. Bernie Wolfe’s Mezz Mezzrow book Really the Blues, and, among the novels, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn, Henry Steig’s Send Me Down, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Nicholas Christopher’s Tiger Rag, and the glowing jazz tidbits that run throughout John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick detective novels. Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues and Blue Devils of Nada, Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz, Hampton Hawes and Don Asher’s Raise Up off Me, Art and Laurie Pepper’s Straight Life, Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, Laurie Wright’s King Oliver, Walter Allen’s Hendersonia, Ira Gitler’s Jazz Masters of the ‘40s and Swing to Bop, Whitney Balliett’s American Musicians, Jean Lion’s Bix, Harry Sampson’s Swingin’ on the Ether Waves, Geoffrey Ward’s Jazz, John Szwed’s Space in the Place, Anita O’Day’s High Times Hard Times, Stanley Crouch’s Considering Genius, Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop, Jack Chambers’s Miles, Don Marquis’s In Search of Buddy Bolden, William Russell’s Oh Mister Jelly, Laurent de Wilde’s Monk, Rex Stewart’s Jazz Masters of the ‘30s and Boy Meets Horn, Jelly Roll Morton and Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll, Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz, Ekkehard Jost’s Free Jazz, Duke Ellington’s Music is My Mistress, Joe Goldberg’s Jazz Masters of the 50s, Bobby Reisner’s Bird, A. B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business, Will Friedwald’s Biographical Guide to Singers, Stanley Dance’s World of series, The John Coltrane Reference edited by Lewis Porter, the 16-volume Italian discography Duke Ellington on Records, the Brian Rust discographies, Jan Evensmo’s Solography booklets, David Schiff’s The Ellington Century, Carl Woideck’s Charlie Parker, Doug Ramsey’s Take Five, the Leonard Feather encyclopedias and From Satchmo to Miles, Max Harrison’s Essential Jazz Records, Valerie Wilmer’s As Serious as Your Life, the collected Otis Ferguson, Milt Hinton’s Bass Lines, Jimmy Heath’s I Walked with Giants, Terry Gibbs's Good Vibes. and . . .  I had better stop. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. 

- What are some of your favorite Jazz recordings?

         

Surely you jest. I’ve written a dozen books in an attempt to answer that.

- Who are your favorite big band arrangers?

Ellington, Ellington, Ellington, Ellington, Ellington. Also Strayhorn, Gil Evans, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Bill Challis, Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Sauter, Benny Carter, Sy Oliver (all the Lunceford writers), George Russell, Count Basie (all the Basie writers), Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman, Artie Shaw (all the Shaw writers), Gerald Wilson, Bob Brookmeyer, Thad Jones, Nelson Riddle, Ralph Burns, Gil Fuller, Tadd Dameron, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, Neal Hefti, Johnny Richards, Chico O’Farrill, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Gary McFarland, Horace Silver, Muhal Richard Abrams, Charles Mingus (all the Mingus writers, particularly Sy Johnson), David Murray, James Newton, Bob Belden, Uri Caine, Butch Morris, for starters.    

- Who are your favorite Jazz vocalists?

Armstrong, Crosby, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Rushing, Dinah Washington, Rosemary Clooney, Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Ray Charles, Abbey Lincoln, Helen Forrest, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Witherspoon, Connie Boswell (and the Boswell Sisters), Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Lee Wiley, Harry and Donald Mills (and the Mills Brothers), Bill Kenny (and the Ink Spots), Joe Williams, Jackie Wilson, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, Tony Williams (and the Platters), Louis Jordan, Maxine Sullivan, Jack Teagarden, Ivy Anderson, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Bob Dorough, Johnny Hartman, Bobby Bland, Anita O’Day, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Betty Carter, Peggy Lee, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Etta Jones, Julia Lee, Helen Humes, Kay Starr, Carmen McRae, Helen Merrill, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Mary Cleere Haran, Dianne Reeves, Jane Harvey, Fats Domino, and Herb Jeffries for starters.

- Who are some of your favorite Jazz instrumentalists?

         

Can’t do it.

- Of all your writings about Jazz over the years, which one/s are you most fond of and why?

         

I like all my books: the best are probably Bing Crosby: Pocketful of Dreams and Visions of Jazz, though I suspect my best essay writing is in Weather Bird and Natural Selection. I have personal affection for Faces in the Crowd because it was written over a four-year period beginning shortly before our daughter was born, an extraordinarily happy time and I think the book reflects that. Celebrating Bird and Satchmo were well received and fun to do, and fun to revise! (You don’t often get that second chance.) Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema is my first book entirely about film, though quite a bit on jazz crept into it. Jazz, the book written with Scott, is the intro we wish we had had when we started listening.   

- What are your thoughts about blogs and websites devoted to Jazz?

         

Bravo to all! But I confess I read very little that doesn’t have pages I can turn and scribble on. Until The New York Daily News penny-pinchers caught up with him, I enjoyed Greg Thomas’ online and print weekly jazz feature stories on jazz artists and events in New York City.

- If you could host a fictional “Jazz dinner,” who would you invite and why?

         

Although I’d kill for a 30-minute interview with King Oliver, my dinner parties would include only the most entertaining and convivial artists I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, now gone and sorely missed: they would include (with their spouses and significant others): Roy Eldridge, John Lewis, Rosemary Clooney, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Ted Curson, Mel Lewis, Sarah Vaughan, Gerry Mulligan, Benny Carter, Gil Evans, Tommy Flanagan, Jaki Byard, Martin Williams, Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, Steve McCall, Mary Cleere Haran, Pops and Bing (they make the cut as I met each of them once), and my indispensable assistant of 14 years Elora Charles. I’d add Artie Shaw, but no one else would get a word in edgewise.       

- Whose music do you listen to when you want to be alone with the music, so to speak; not to analyze it for the purposes of writing about it, but allowing it to reach directly into your emotions?

         

It varies, and any month would bring a different answer. Last week I listened to a lot of Wardell, Hampton Hawes, Sonny Clarke, and 1950s Duke. Then there was a day of Cecil Taylor. Last night: Tommy Flanagan. I doubt a week goes by that I don’t listen to Tatum, Nat Cole, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown. Armstrong is a constant tonic. So is Bud Powell. Revising the Bird book had me digging through obscure live performances I hadn’t played in years. I often jog to Ray Charles. The Joshua Redman concert had me returning to his early work. The great thing about leaving journalism is that I listen only to what I want to hear, which includes a lot of classical music as well. One thing I can tell you with certainty: when I’m alone with the music and my wife, we listen mostly to vinyl. I am so glad I did not unload my vinyl!   

- I realize that your interests are wide-ranging, but could you please conclude this “interview” by talking a bit about what excites you as you look out over the current jazz scene?

         

The incredible number of gifted, dedicated musicians (including the children of several close friends), who want nothing more than to master and play jazz, utterly resolved and unshaken by warnings from people like me that the work opportunities may be limited.      

Badd Steve Gadd

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

I’ve shared this quotation from trumpeter, composer and band leader Wynton Marsalis before, but it bears repeating in the context of this blog feature: “Change the rhythm and you change the music.”

Drummer Steve Gadd changed the rhythm and he changed Jazz.

The revolution that he brought to Jazz drumming is akin to what Gene Krupa did for swing music, Kenny Clarke and Max Roach did for bop, Philly Joe Jones did for hard bop and the polyrhythms that Tony Williams and Elvin Jones brought to Jazz in the 1960s.

Of course, many other drummers made their contributions to changing the “time feel” of Jazz and therefore changing the music over the years but, with the exception of Tony Williams, few other drummers bridged Jazz into Rock and Salsa to the extent that Steve Gadd did.

Earl Palmer, Jim Keltner and Hal Blaine made a fortune as “in the pocket” Hollywood studios drummers for Rock sessions and while are all very fine drummers, Steve Gadd brings many added dimensions to the backbeat drumming the predominates in today’s Jazz-Rock fusion.

He wraps the backbeat in a New Orleans marching band syncopation in the manner of drummer Idris Mohammed, simplifies the right-hand cymbal beat to a straight four-four, plays a cow bell as though it is a ride cymbal to create Latin Jazz inflections which he also heightens with the addition tom toms; tunes his drums to sound flat and tubby including a tight, cracking sounding snare drum and carefully crafts sustained grooves that give the music insistence and intensity.

Steve grooves, cooks and burns; his playing is never flashy but he always envelopes you in the rhythm he lays down.

His versatility is such that he sounds equally at home backing Rock vocalist James Taylor, or the late, pianist Michel Petrucciani or making classic Jazz recordings with Chet Baker, Paul Desmond and Jim Hall.

Yet, whatever the setting, you can tell immediately that it’s Steve Gadd.

At one time in Jazz parlance, to refer to a musician as a “bad” player meant just the opposite. A “Bad” player was one who had the epitome of skills, one who sometimes left you shaking your head in disbelief over what you had just heard.

“Badd” Steve Gadd is one such musician.

Steve has a new CD out and I thought I’d call your attention to it by sharing the following media release from Chris DiGirolamo’s Two for the Show Media.

Gadditude [BFM Jazz 302 062 418 2] – Street Date: September 3, 2013

Drumming Icon Steve Gadd Leads All-Star Crew on Gadditude Grooving new session for BFM JAZZ features fellow James Taylor sidemen.

“For Gadditude, his tenth outing as a leader and second for BFM Jazz, world class drummer Steve Gadd got a little help from his distinguished friends - guitarist Michael Landau, keyboardist Larry Goldings, trumpeter Walt Fowler and bassist Jimmy Johnson. Together they had already established a high degree of bandstand chemistry as the touring band for superstar singer-songwriter James Taylor. That goes a long way in explaining the sense of comfort and ease from track to track on this relaxed session recorded in just one week at Landau's home studio. "It was like a big family affair," says Gadd. "It's fun to get together with people that you care about, that you trust musically and just share the energy and try to make the music the best that it can be."

While Gadd's inimitable touch on the kit - the same one that defined hundreds of studio sessions since the 70s - underscores these nine tracks with understated authority, the rest of the Gadd Band follows suit with a collective feel that is relaxed, economical and imbued with deep soul. Together they put their own unique stamp on Keith Jarrett's "Country" and The Windup" and Radiohead's "Scatterbrain," along with evocative originals by Landau and Goldings.

"These guys are all great players," says Gadd. "We've played together a lot in James Taylor's band and I've also played with them in other circumstances too. They're some of the best guys in the world. And my belief is, when you put people like that together, the music will sort of dictate what will happen. That's where it was at on this session. We picked some music, put our heads together and everything fell into place real naturally."

Like no other drummer on the scene over the last four decades, Gadd has an uncanny ability to get 'inside' a tune. Gadditude is yet another example of the highly respected and hugely influential drummer finding the 'pocket' and making the music feel so good. The opener, Landau's "Africa," carries a cool, mysterioso vibe that recalls Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. With Gadd cooking on a low flame underneath, Landau offers slinky guitar lines on top of Goldings' hovering Hammond organ cushion while Fowler adds a touch of Miles on mellow muted trumpet.

Goldings' beautiful ballad "Ask Me" has the composer switching to Fender Rhodes and Gadd resorting to his signature drum 'n' bugle corps grooves. "That was like a snare drum thing," he explains. "I love the sound of the snare drum and I love that kind of playing, and it just sort of worked for this song." Fowler, a former member of Frank Zappa's band who more recently has been doing orchestrations for movies, contributes some clear, open flugelhorn on this lyrical number.

Shifting gears, they put a new spin on Keith Jarrett's "Country" by playing it in 3/4, with Gadd's alluring brushwork setting the table for Goldings' gospel-ish Wurlitzer work and Fowler's bright horn solo. "I came up with the idea of doing it in three," says Gadd. "It's such a great Keith tune and we just tried to make it feel like it was our own."

Goldings's other composition here, "Cavaliero," is paced by Gadd's ultra-relaxed, behind-the-beat second line groove and colored by Landau's Ventures-like guitar lines. The bluesy "Green Foam" is a group composition that hinges on Landau's catchy guitar riff. It is reminiscent of Junior Wells' take on "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" from his landmark 1965 album Hoodoo Man Blues (a familiar riff later 'borrowed' by Jimi Hendrix for his Band of Gypsys tune, "Who Knows"). "All of those old songs are inspiring to all of us," says Gadd, "so we just started grooving on that riff and went a little bit crazy with it. But it was all fun. We had a lot of fun throughout this whole session." With Goldings on organ, this earthy number shifts to a downhome blues midway through, and Gadd provides the momentum.

The great drummer then puts up an undulating groove under a Stax/Volt flavored interpretation of Abdullah Ibrahim's peaceful "The Mountain" (from 1985's acclaimed Water From An Ancient Well), which has Goldings on Wurlitzer and also features another potent trumpet solo from Fowler.

Landau's "Who Knows Blues" is a N'awlins flavored shuffle with Fowler on muted trumpet and Goldings providing a velvety B-3 cushion beneath him. Landau takes his time on an economical solo here that recalls Gadd's erstwhile bandmate in Stuff, the late Cornell Dupree. This moves into an energized romp of Keith Jarrett's original, "The Windup." After navigating through the tricky head, Gadd settles into a kind of calypso flavored beat as Fowler and Goldings add uplifting solos. The date concludes with the group's take on Radiohead's atmospheric "Scatterbrain" which is a nice feature for Fowler, who 'sings' through his horn with unbridled lyricism. "That was Jimmy Johnson's idea to bring in that song," says Gadd, "and I really liked the way it came out. It's one of my favorites on the record."

"I think all the grooves were pretty cool on this thing, they felt pretty comfortable," says the man whose extensive list of credits include landmark recordings with the likes of Paul Simon, James Taylor, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan, Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke and Chuck Mangione. "It's a good listening album, pretty melodies, good playing. And I hope people like it."

Gadditude, the great drummer's second album for BFM Jazz, is scheduled for release on September 3. It marks the first joint marketing venture between BFM Jazz and PledgeMusic, which will give fans the opportunity to enjoy exclusive videos that feature early versions of the tunes, behind-the-scenes clips from the recording sessions and exclusive signed CDs. "It's a rare chance to see what it's like to be in the studio with us day by day as our new album takes shape," says Gadd. "And a significant portion of your pledge will go to an incredible organization that I care about deeply, called MusiCares, which provides assistance for music industry people in great times of need."

This link will take you to YouTube where you can preview the Africa track from the CD.

David Stone Martin: Jazz In Line and Color

© -Michael Miller/Los Angeles Times/6.23.2013, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“David Stone Martin led a period when being a record-jacket illustrator seemed like an endeavor worthy of a substantial artist."

-William Wilson, Art Critic, Los Angeles Times, 1987

 “The saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention, and for Vince Gerard it ended up being the mother of a new gallery in one of Southern California's artiest areas.

The founder of Jazzartz got the idea for his project when he went shopping for fine-art prints of work by David Stone Martin, who designed more than 400 album covers for Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and others. Gerard was unable to find any, though, so he began creating them himself— buying albums on eBay, contacting the artist's estate and making digital replicas of original works.

"The thing about David is, he's by far the most highly collected album cover artist in the world," Gerard said. "People collect him all over the world, especially in Europe and Asia, where there are huge jazz fans. But no one's ever seen his art beyond the album-cover size."

Until now, perhaps. Jazzartz, which opened in spring in Laguna Beach, CA sports dozens of prints of Martin's work around its compact space, with many of the original albums propped against the wall below the replicated images. Upstairs is Gerard's print room. Each of the works on display is part of a limited-edition series, and any customer who orders one will receive a new copy — even with alterations, as Gerard is happy to adjust color schemes or superimpose personal messages.

The show, scheduled to run through Sept. 15, is Jazzartz's first exhibition and also cele­brates a milestone: Martin, who died in 1992, would have turned 100 this year.

His images are often minimalist, with fig­ures depicted in spare ink strokes and two or three colors that wash over the outlines. In a 1987 appreciation, Times art critic William Wilson wrote that Martin "led a period when being a record-jacket illustrator seemed like an endeavor worthy of a substantial artist."

Bridget R. Cooks, an art history and African American studies professor at UC Irvine, said the loose interplay between line and color in Martin's images evokes the feel of the music itself. "It's not a kind of meticulous, measured and regulated sort of stroke," said Cooks, who plans to touch on jazz album cover art in her next book. "There's a kind of ease that goes with the technique of painting in this way."

Due to the considerable interest, Gerard is considering expansion, to Palm Springs. "Peo­ple come here from San Francisco and Los Angeles," Gerard said. "Every weekend, there will be a couple dozen people who come to look at the stuff and make purchases. They actually make special trips. Jazz fans are loyal fans."