Bill Evans by Chuck Israels

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

Chuck Israels is a composer/arranger/bassist who has worked with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock, J.J. Johnson, John Coltrane, and many others. He is best known for his work with the Bill Evans Trio from 1961 through 1966 and his recordings with the Bill’s Trio include The Town Hall Concert; The Second Trio; Trio '65; Live at the Trident; Time Remembered; and Live at Shelley's Manne Hole. Chuck is also acknowledged for his pioneering accomplishments in Jazz Repertory as Director of the National Jazz Ensemble from 1973 to 1981. He is now the Director of Jazz Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

You can visit Chuck online at www.chuckisraels.com

While somewhat technical in places, Chuck’s essay offers a number of insights into what made Bill’s style unique and how through hard work and application he developed the immediately identifiable sound that most Jazz musicians strive to achieve. I thought it might also serve to enrich your listening experience of Bill’s music and provide a gentle reminder to either revisit his recordings if you haven’t in a while or perhaps look into them if Bill’s music is new to you.

You will find a playlist of Bill's music at the conclusion of this piece.

© -  Chuck Israels, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"The professional life of pianist-composer Bill Evans spanned a period of twenty-five years, from 1955 to 1980, coinciding with the careers of many musicians who made major contributions to the art of American jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian Adderly, Philly Joe Jones (the last three worked with Evans in Miles Davis' group), as well as Jim Hall, Scott La Faro, Phil Woods, and many others. Each left his personal mark on music, but there are aspects of Evans' work that may prove uniquely significant. He was a pathfinder while others, claiming to be the avant-garde, trod all too familiar ground. Clifford Brown influenced the sound of almost every jazz trumpeter who followed him. Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins have had similar influence on their musical progeny. The full influence of Evans' music has not yet been felt.


General reaction to Evans' work has centered on easily recognizable idiosyncrasies, with much attention given to his voicings and the entirely mistaken idea that he was not playing in meter. Few have gone deeper into his work to find the underlying principles. Superficial imitation of Evans' obvious characteristics only results in the loss of identity of the imitator. In contrast, a search for the universally applicable principles in his music provides a broad avenue for the pursuit of personal jazz expression. His greatest contribution to the development of jazz lies beneath the surface of his style, in his creative use of traditional techniques. Evans was quick to recognize parallel cases to his own in which he could apply his extensive knowledge of the music. He did this by melding the appropriate device to the situation at hand, drawing from a wide range of musical background and history and putting old ideas to work in new ways.

Evans' view about rhythm was a combination of the swing of Bud Powell with the more varied cross rhythms of Bartok and Stravinsky; he carried this synthesis to great lengths, achieving a rare subtlety of placement and drive. He would start an idea with a short rhythmic motive, repeat and extend it with increasing complexity, and end it in a burst of notes that resolved those complexities. In this, he was not limited to the basic jazz unit of the eighth note and its typical subdivisions. He used complex relationships, adding to the swing that comes from the more usual duple/ triple conflict in jazz by layering other duples and triples over the more basic ones. He did this with a supreme clarity and unerring sense of his rhythmic goal, which often revealed itself in an exciting resolution many measures after the start of the phrase.

The development of these rhythmic techniques can be traced in a long line from Louis Armstrong's performance of "West End Blues" through Lester Young and Charlie Parker, to some of the work of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz. These men clearly influenced Evans' sense of rhythm, but none drew on as many sources at once as he did. The integrity of this variety in Evans' playing was remarkable. Nothing sounded pasted on or eclectic; ideas filtered through him and emerged with deep conviction and he rarely did anything superficial.

Every great jazz musician has a highly developed sense of rhythm, which operates independently of the other musicians around him. He does not need any external input in order to keep time. Evans' internal clock was so well controlled that he could risk considerable rhythmic freedom at the same time that other musicians playing with him took risks of their own. It was rare when such adventurousness resulted in what musicians graphically refer to as a "train wreck." The incidence of dropped beats was remarkably small in Evans' playing, considering the number of opportunities there were for such errors in his daredevil rhythmic style. He actually welcomed the interplay of his colleagues' rhythmic ideas and was empathetic to what they were doing.

Another remarkable aspect of Evans' playing was his command of tone color. With fingers like pistons, poised a scant millimeter over the keys, he dropped into the depths of the action as if propelled by steel springs, or he would caress the keys with the stroke of a loving mother touching her baby's cheek. All dynamic gradations short of bombastic pounding were at his command, and he used them to express delicate nuances of melody, and to separate and distinguish various voices of the harmonic texture. In some important ways, Evans' harmonies consisted less of chords than of piling up of contrapuntal lines in which the tension and release between the melody and the secondary voices was exquisitely shaded by his control of pianistic touch. His legato line was unsurpassed by any other pianist. No note was released before its fullest time, giving his playing a richness that resulted from the momentary clashes of overtones as successive tones overlapped in the sounding board.

Evans' superficial imitators mistook this sound for the wash that comes from standing on the sustaining pedal. Critics pointing to Evans' influence on young pianists often confused over-pedaling with complex finger-work. His sound was in his fingers and the subtle linear aspect of Evans' harmony was Chopinesque just as his textural interjections were often derived from Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Debussy. His bass lines were steeped in knowledge of Bach. The entire piano literature was open to his voracious pilferage. Yet everything was synthesized into an integrated style; wide open and broad enough for any musician to find references to his own particular sensibilities.

Evans once said that he strove for the improvisational freedom to change direction at any moment. When you realize the rigorous and unflinching logic with which he followed that principle, the enormity of the challenge begins to become apparent. A motive-thirds or fourths, for example-would move upwards through the chord progression, then, in an instant, down, then up, then down, continuing through a series of chords without an error or harmonic miscalculation. The choice of sustaining or abandoning a direction was always made according to aesthetic and expressive principles and never for the convenience of technical limitations. This gave Evans his spontaneity and great flights of fancy, and the ability to accompany, to follow another's musical direction in conversational sympathy. He could listen and put his responses at the service of another musician's creative impulse, and he could do this while maintaining the identity of the accompaniment, adapting his own musical motives to the direction of the soloist.

A characteristic part of Evans' keyboard aesthetic lay in the way he separated the main line from the accompanying texture by tone and touch, as well as in the more conventional jazz technique of keeping the melody active in the right hand while the left hand was playing chords. He would sometimes play a darkly colored inner voice as counterpoint to the brighter line of the melody. The technique was certainly pianistic but it was also orchestral in its effect, suggesting French horns against trumpets, or violas against flutes. Evans' playing was colorful, not in the usual sense of flash and mercurial change, but in the sense that control of timbre was an integral part of his playing. This was simply the way he heard music and when he played a harpsichord, the result was the same; different colors for different voices without using the harpsichord's various stops or manuals.

This ability to give different color and weight to different voices gave Evans' playing a textural variety not found in the work of more conventional jazz pianists. Often, a single line served as accompaniment to the improvisation in the right hand, establishing a three-voice textural hierarchy. The right-hand melody carried the primary interest, with the bass player's line next in importance. Against this, the third voice appeared in Evans' left hand, clear and separate, shading the other lines, emphasizing a poignant harmony or nailing down a contrasting rhythm. Occasionally (in the blues, for instance) this was done with as few as five chromatic notes, extracted from the changes. The remarkable thing about this was the clarity it produced; by eliminating voices from the chords, Evans brought out the melodic character of the secondary lines, making them respond to, as well as guide, the progress of the improvisation. This also allowed for the possibility of increasing textural density by adding voices to the chords in order to build intensity from chorus to chorus. Another result of this simplified left-hand texture was the freedom to choose more varied colors in the melodic realization of the harmonic progression. If the thrust of melodic development called for chromatic alteration of the harmony, it would not be in conflict with a complete and specific left-hand chord. Motivic or serial development could then take precedence over the more limited interpretation of the harmony that a fully spelled out chord would require.

Evans' approach to arranging music was equally individualistic and exacting. The melody of each standard tune was subjected to intense scrutiny until every harmonic nuance was found. Accompaniments were fashioned from standard progressions which were then carefully adjusted and fine-tuned to the contours of each melody. This was done in so complete a way, tat when the accompaniment was played without the melody, the notes that were most strongly evoked were always those of the original missing tune. These exacting progressions were repeated during the improvised choruses, so that the individual character of the piece was implicit in the solo. Obviously this is not the only way to integrate an improvised solo into a piece of music, but if followed to its logical conclusion, as it was by Evans, it can be a strong organizational element and a liberating one.

Another aspect of Evans' approach to phrasing and rhythm was not unique to him but was developed from the tradition epitomized by the work of Charlie Parker. The great majority of jazz forms are four square in nature; their phrase structure occurs in regular multiples of twos or fours. The eight-measure phrase is such a commonplace occurrence that few musicians give it much thought once they have internalized it in their formative years. What makes jazz phrasing and rhythm interesting and inventive is how it plays off unpredictable irregularities against the regularity of the under- lying forms. In this, Evans, like Parker, was a master. His phrases would start and end in ever-changing places, often crossing the boundaries between one section of a piece and another. In a thirty-two-measure form, for example, the last two measures are usually a kind of vacuum between choruses where the harmony cycles from the tonic to the dominant in order to be ready for the tonic that normally comes at the beginning of the next chorus. Jazz musicians call this a "turnaround." Many sophisticated improvisers save some of their best "licks" for such moments, partly because the harmonies fall into a limited number of patterns which recycle throughout the performance.

Evans' view of the turnaround was that it belonged to the following chorus, rather than to the one just ending. In practice this meant that a new idea introduced at the turnaround could be carried over into the next chorus. This simple conceit is hardly earth-shaking, but it had an electrifying effect on the ensembles. One could move from one chorus to the next with confidence, knowing whether a solo was continuing, building, or ending, by staying alert during the tumarounds. Evans made it a guiding principle to dovetail the joints of a song, making for smooth and interesting transitions. He was not alone in this practice, but he was a master of it and it made everyone who played with him feel comfortable.

Evans' compositions are each constructed around one main idea. "Re: Person I Knew" is built on a pedal point; "Walkin' Up," on major chords and disjunct melodic motion; "Blue in Green," on doubling and redoubling of the tempo; and "Time Remembered," on melodic connection of seemingly unrelated harmonic areas. Each piece is so committed to a central idea that a program of Evans' music is foolproof in its variety from composition to composition.

"Peace Piece" is an example of the depth of Evans' compositional technique. It is an ostinato piece, composed and recorded long before the more recent superficial synthesis of Indian and American music; in fact, it owes more to Satie and Debussy than to Ravi Shankar. The improvisation starts simply over a gentle ostinato, which quickly fades into the background. Evans allows the fantasy that evolves from the opening motive (an inversion of the descending fifth in the ostinato) more freedom than he would in an improvisation tied to a changing accompaniment. He takes advantage of the ostinato as a unifying clement against which ideas flower, growing more lush and colorful as the piece unfolds. Polytonalities and cross rhythms increase in density as the ostinato undulates gently, providing a central rhythmic and tonal reference. The improvisation becomes increasingly complex against the unrelenting simplicity of the accompaniment, until, near the end, Evans gradually reconciles the two elements. This effective use of form to communicate abstract feelings and ideas is one of the strongest aspects of Evans' work, and one that separates him from most jazz improvisers. His interest in other music that contained this strength guided him intuitively even when his conscious attention was on smaller details. Monk, Bud Powell, and Bela Bartok were equally masters of things Evans needed; he borrowed from them without regard to their source.

Evans had an uncanny capacity for concentration and profound expressivity. He considered his work to be "controlled romanticism," and he exercised this control with exquisite care. He knew when to give rein to his imagination and when not to risk losing his grip on the piece. Intellect and deep feeling co-existed in his music, giving the lie to the view that they are mutually exclusive. In this respect he was a perfect partner for Miles Davis, and their recorded collaborations remain monuments in the history of American music.

It is true that Evans worked in small forms. The thirty-two-measure song was his own back yard, and he never ceased to find new corners of it to explore. He played with a sense of discovery, even as he worked and reworked the most familiar territory. He had the great improviser's gift for creating spontaneous expressivity in the performance of a piece he had played hundreds of times. But Evans did achieve a high artistic goal; he raised the performance of the simplest song into a worthy experience in expressivity and communication. That he stayed inside the boundaries of the song form is more a reflection of how Evans saw himself than of his depth as a musician. He thought of himself as a man of ordinary gifts committed to honesty in his work. He shunned superficial embellishments he did not feel, and probed deeply into music he had learned well. To some, he sold his talent and his training short by not embracing greater projects, such as a symphony or an opera. When opportunities for large recording and writing projects presented themselves, he left them to others of lesser talent who rarely brought out his best performances. In that sense, he remained, to quote Gunther Schuller, a "cocktail pianist" all his life-in the same sense that Schubert was a "song writer."

Evans made two records in collaboration with guitarist Jim Hall, in which one performance in particular stands out as an example of the highest level of achievement in ensemble playing. Their improvisation on "My Funny Valentine" ranks among the great jazz duets, along with the classic Amstrong/Hines "Weatherbird." It has every quality of memorable chamber music. I cannot imagine a note or nuance that might be changed. It is as perfect, in its way, as a movement of a Bartok string quartet. But spontaneous and inspired as that performance is, it is clearly the result of careful preparation. The saving of the chromatic line for the second section of the tune, the pedal tone at the bridge, the exchange of roles in the opening and closing choruses, all indicate an agreement about details that could only come from thorough planning. This is a responsibility that Evans took upon himself, and once a musician has been exposed to his arrangement of a song, it is difficult to accept any other. He found the crevices in which to insert harmonic details that fit so beautifully that later hearings of the melody seem to call his harmonies to your ear. The effect is one of melody, bass line, and inner voices having a three-way magnetic attraction binding them to one another. Sometimes, as in "My Funny Valentine," Evans would leave something out for clarity, or bring it in at a more effective moment. By leaving the chromatic secondary line out of its usual place in the first and last sections of this song, he focused attention on its entrance in the second eight measures, and kept it from disappearing into a background drone.

The sphere of Bill Evans' influence is expanding but its ultimate growth depends on the further understanding of the many artistic truths in his music. Time, the exigent critic and generous healer, will dole out the legacy in judicious portions as we find ourselves better prepared to receive it."

Jimmy Knepper

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

A contrafact is a musical work based on a prior work. The term comes from classical music and has only since the 1940s been applied to jazz, where it is still not standard. In classical music, contrafacts have been used as early as the parody mass and In Nomine of the 16th century. 

After listening to Sonny Rollins’ original composition Audubon - a contrafact based on the chord progressions to Honeysuckle Rose  - from pianist Don Friedman’s Hot Knepper and Pepper CD [Progressive PCD-7036], I got to thinking about trombonist Jimmy Knepper and thought it would be nice to put up a brief feature about him on these pages.

Jimmy was born in Los Angeles in 1927 and his early career included stints with the orchestras of Freddy Slack, Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman. Knepper became widely known after his association with bassist Charlie Mingus.

Len Lyons and Don Perlo pick up Jimmy story from here in this excerpt from their Jazz Portraits: The Lives and Music of the Jazz Masters [pp. 330-331]:

“As a member of the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop from 1957 to 1961, Knepper established a reputation for consistently well-conceived, soulful, and technically adroit solos. Though rarely complimentary, Mingus called Knepper "probably the greatest trombone player who ever lived." Their admiration was mutual; Knepper has become known as an authority on Mingus's intriguing music and personality.

Knepper began studying trombone at age nine. As a teenager, he was working in Los Angeles — based big bands, and in 1945 he joined saxophonist Dean Benedetti's band, one of the first bebop groups in Los Angeles. It was in this band that Knepper met Mingus, who was filling in for Benedetti's regular bassist.

Knepper spent the late 1940s and early 1950s traveling between California and New York in search of steady jobs. The highlight of this disheartening period was a week of sitting in with Charlie Parker. In 1953 Knepper retreated to Los Angeles to attend college. He was now planning to become a teacher. But three years later, disenchanted with school and finding few opportunities to work, Knepper returned to New York with his wife and daughter.

In 1957 Mingus hired Knepper away from the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, where Knepper had found work, on the recommendation of Mingus's departing trombonist, Willie Dennis. Knepper maintains a smooth, glowing tone on his earliest recordings with Mingus, even through his most axing double-time and upper-register figures (Tijuana Moods, RCA). His plaintive blues licks embroider Mingus's earthy compositions like "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and "Better Git It in Your Soul." Although Knepper claims his chief inspiration was Parker, his playing makes explicit reference to the trombone tradition, including tailgate style, the "talking" sounds of Sam Nanton, and the luxurious muted tone of Lawrence Brown (Better Git It in Your Soul, Columbia).

An infamous incident in which Mingus struck Knepper in the mouth over a musical disagreement precipitated a ten-year estrangement between them. During this period, Knepper toured the Soviet Union with Benny Goodman (1962) and free-lanced in studio groups, pit orchestras, and pick up bands for social functions. In the late 1960s, Knepper began a seven-year association with the Thad Jones—Mel Lewis big band. Knepper rejoined Mingus for the bassist's final recording sessions in the mid-1970s, and from 1979 to 1981 he toured with the Mingus Dynasty band, still playing with great fluency (Live at Montreux, Atlantic).”

In their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed., Richard Cook and Brian Morton remarked of Jimmy:

“Long associated with Charles Mingus, Knepper has an astonishingly agile technique (based on altered slide positions) which allows him to play extremely fast lines with considerable legato, more like a saxophonist than a brass player.

Doing so has allowed him to avoid the dominant J.J. Johnson style and to develop the swing idiom in a direction that is thoroughly modern and contemporary, with a bright, punchy tone.”

In Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler’s, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz,

Frank von Dixhoorn wrote of Jimmy:

"Every inflection in Jimmy Knepper's phrases, every move from third to fourth position is a split-second victory of form over vacuum. His wit, the veil over one measure and the razor-sharp intonation which reveals another, all these might be described. But they can't be predicted." [p. 389]

Before his death in 2003, Jimmy would also be associated with the Gil Evans Orchestra, the Thad-Jones Mel Lewis Orchestra, the Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra, the American Jazz Orchestra, the National Jazz Ensemble and the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra.

Gunther Schuller in his essay on The Trombone in Jazz in Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ranked Jimmy as one of the “young Turks” who were influenced by J.J. Johnson’s style of playing Bebop on the trombone while noting that:

“All were spectacular technicians, easily expanding the range of the trombone to the trumpet’s (!) upper register (high B flat and C), and with their new-won technical wizardry capable of playing things that a few years earlier could have only been played on a trumpet, or a flute or violin. Knepper in particular carved out a remarkably successful career in New York, both as a much sought-after, highly individual freelance studio and session player — possessing superior reading skills and the ability to play in a variety of jazz styles — and, most important, as Charles Mingus's favorite trombonist, which led to a long-term association with the great composer-bassist.” [pp. 638-639].

With Jimmy Knepper, one thing was certain: two notes and you knew it was him.” [Pun intended]

Jimmy, Pepper and Don are joined by bassist George Mraz and drummer Billy Hart on this version of Audubon.

Bob Brookmeyer: A Musician of Humor and Humility [From the Archives]

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

“Almost the first sounds to be heard on the classic Jazz on a Sum­mer's Day soundtrack are the mellow tones of Bob Brookmeyer's valve trombone interweaving with Jimmy Giuffre's clarinet on The Train And The River. It's a curiously formal sound, almost academic, and initially difficult to place. Valve trombone has a more clipped, drier sound than the slide variety, and Brookmeyer is probably its leading exponent, though Maynard Ferguson, Stu Williamson and Bob Enevoldsen have all made effective use of it.”

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

“Getting to the core could well be the Brookmeyer credo. As a jazz soloist and writer, Bob wastes litt­le energy on unnecessary curli­cues and affected sounds for the sake of an artificial eloquence... This is a signpost of basic musi­cal honesty. At the same time, Bob is dedicated to emotion and the investigation of every nuance beneath the surface of a selection. The result of this approach is a forceful personalized trans­mission of the emotional content of the musical material to the listening audience...”

- Burt Korall, Jazz writer and critic

“I've loved Bob's compositions and arrangements and his playing since the moment I first heard his music in the '70s.  It turned my life around.  Bob became a wonderful teacher, mentor and dear friend.  And he was enormously generous to those lucky enough to be his friend.”

- Maria Schneider, Jazz composer-arranger

“Bob has added an amazing amount to Jazz. He was in the thick of the New York scene in the 50s and 60s and even hung out at "The Loft." To the average listener he probably is not that we'll known. But to me he'll remain one of those fundamental sounds [of Jazz].”

- Dr. Ken Koenig, Jazz musician

“Wherever he goes Bob's bound to make further contributions and stir up emotions with his "thinking differently.’”

- Brian Hope, Jazz Fan

“Bob studied at the Kansas City Conservatory and origi­nally played piano; he took up the valve trombone when he was twenty-three, and almost immediately became a major figure in jazz.

Most of Bob's career has been in New York, working with almost every major jazzman there, but most significantly Clark Terry, with whom he co-led a quin­tet. His association with Mulligan contin­ued, and when Mulligan formed his concert band, Brookmeyer played in it along with Zoot Sims, Bill Crow, Mel Lewis, and Clark Terry, and did a great deal of its writing. The band's haunting arrangement of Django Reinhardt's "Manoir de mes reves" is Bob's.

Bob is a classic illustration of the dictum that jazzmen tend to play pretty much as they speak, which is perhaps inevitable in music that is so extensively improvisatory. He is low-key and quietly ironic in speech, and he plays that way.”

- Gene Lees

Bob Brookmeyer was born on December 19, 1929. He died on December 16, 2011, three days before what would have been his 82^nd birthday.

I will miss his magnificent musicianship, both as an instrumentalist, he played both valve trombone and piano, and as a composer-arranger.

It seems that Bob has been a part of my Jazz scene ever since I can remember. Although he replaced trumpeter Chet Baker with Gerry Mulligan’s quartet in 1953, I first heard him a few years later on the Emarcy recordings made by Gerry’s sextet.

What a group: Gerry on baritone sax, Bob on valve trombone, joined on the “front line” by trumpeter Jon Eardley and tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, with bassist Bill Crow and drummer Dave Bailey cooking along in the rhythm section.

What struck me most about Bob’s playing was its humor. Lighthearted and unexpected phrases just flowed in and out of his solos and he always seemed to swing, effortlessly.

Bob had fun with the music while not taking himself too seriously. I mean, anyone who names an original composition “Jive Hoot” must certainly smile a lot.

Bob knew what he was doing musically, but he never put on any airs about it.

He had great reverence and respect for those who came before him in the Jazz tradition and he even made it a point to “revisit” some of what he referred to as Jazz “traditionalism” in a few of the earliest recordings that he made as a leader.

Another of Bob’s virtues was his honesty and his directness. You never had to guess what he was thinking on subjects that were near-and-dear to his heart. In interview after interview, reading Bob’s stated opinions was akin to being “hit” by both barrels of a shotgun loaded with the truth-according-to-Brookmeyer.

If as Louis Armstrong once said, “Jazz is Who You Are,” then you always knew where Bob stood. Musically, his playing and his compositions radiated with candor and clarity; his big band arrangements, in particular, just sparkled with lucidity and precision. I would imagine that no one performing Bob’s music was ever in doubt as to what he wanted you to play.

Nothing was implied or suggested in his writing; he told you what he wanted you to play. For better or for worse, Bob just put it out there. No wonder he remained such close friends with Gerry Mulligan throughout his life.

As described above in the introductory quotation by Gene Lees, Bob was to work with many of the Jazz greats on the West Coast Jazz scene of the 1950’s and both the New York Jazz and studio worlds of the 1960’s. He returned to California in the 1970’s primarily to work in movie and television composing and did some small group gigging at Jazz festivals and concerts in the USA and abroad throughout the 1980’s.

Upon his return to New York in the 1980’s, Bob would also become “the de facto musical director for the orchestra that Mel Lewis led following the death of Thad Jones.”

In an interview he gave to Scott Yanow, Bob said: “Before my stay in California [1968-1978], I considered myself a player first and a writer second. … In addition to Gerry Mulligan’s writing, my big band arranging was inspired by Bill Finegan, Ralph Burns, Al Cohn, Eddie Sauter, Gil Evans, Bill Holman and George Russell.”

From 1991 up until his death, Bob spent much of his time in Northern Europe exploring new approaches to composing, arranging and orchestrating for some of the resident, larger orchestras in Holland and Germany, including his own New Art Orchestra which was based primarily in Cologne, Germany.

We hope this all-too-brief remembrance will serve in some small measure as our celebration of the musical life of Bob Brookmeyer.

Wycliffe Gordon - "Sing It First" [From the Archives]

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

Gordon’s albums [on Nagel-Heyer and Criss Cross] are a step in the direction of pushing the trombone forward into contemporary prominence. [His solos] … are a harmonious mix of sharp improvising and daring high-jinks. … Gordon not only leads from the front, but he imparts heroic good humor to go with the crackling invention of his playing ….”

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

“Gordon’s tonal personality encompasses raw tailgate vocalizations from early 20th century New Orleans Brass Bands, the capacious tonal palette of Ellingtonia, the instrumental facility of J.J. Johnston and Frank Rosolino, even the multiphonic innovations of German pioneer Albert Mangelsdorff, but his sound is consistently identifiable as his, very note imbued with its own character.”

- Ted Panken

“I heard Wynton Marsalis’ Septet before I joined it The level of musicality was pretty stupefying. The guys in the band were improvisors and masters of their instruments. When I left college from Florida A&M and started playing with Wynton, the first year and a half in the band, I had to get my playing together.

Wynton and the guys motivated me to get to higher levels. Wynton exemplified greatness. When you're on stage and you hear someone like that, you have to decide if you want to do that yourself, or if you want to simply witness someone doing that. I wanted to do it, so I became like a sponge, and strived to play at the level. I always tell students I encounter, "Stay around people who play better than you — that's how you get better." You either take it seriously and remain where are you get to work and make it happen. To be around cats playing at the level made me want to achieve that.”

- Wycliffe Gordon

Wycliffe Gordon is one heckuva trombone player. He would have been a standout player in any era of Jazz and certainly is in the present one.

As a performer, educator, conductor, composer, arranger, Gordon has developed an impressive musical career, regularly touring the world, performing a variety of jazz and blues styles for audiences ranging from heads of state to elementary school kids. He was a veteran member of the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the renowned New York big band collective the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — a versatile ensemble comprised of skillful and expressive jazz soloists and ensemble players. He was also a featured guest artist on Billy Taylor's "Jazz at the Kennedy Center" series. Gordon has been especially active gigging at clubs in between playing concerts across the globe, conducting clinics, and collaborating with other composers and musicians.

Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon talks about his new book and teaching approach, called "Sing It First." This "In Person with JazzTimes" interview was done aboard the MS Westerdam during the Jazz Cruise 2012. A longtime regular on the Jazz Cruise, Gordon performed as an All-Star in various configurations. Interview by Irene Lee. Video by Lee Mergner. Footage shot on Canon EOS 5D Mark.

Jack Teagarden, Basin Street Blues and New Orleans [From the Archives]

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

“‘Jack was just a gentle, good-natured, soft-spoken guy,’ said bassist Jack Lesberg, who worked with Teagarden countless times in the 1940s and '50s. ‘Never craved attention, or asked anything special from anybody. Never wanted to put himself forward. Just wanted to play and sing, and let life take care of the rest in whatever way it was going to.’

But all too often life doesn't take care of the rest. Even the yellow brick road can be all uphill, and there are indi­cations aplenty that, for Jack Teagarden, the slope was sometimes pretty steep.”

- Richard M. Sudhalter, The Complete Capitol Fifties Jack Teagarden Sessions [Mosaic MD4-168]

Thanks to its location in a small suburb about a dozen miles west of New Orleans, business trips to visit one of my oldest and largest clients often brought me to The Crescent City.

If truth be told, due to New Orleans’ famed Epicurean delights, my boss spent more time with the client over the course of a year than I did.

His explanation for this disparity was so that he could properly help them savor the wining and dining delights that the city is famous for as his way of saying “Thank You” for their business.

I generally got called in to smooth over any trouble spots and to do the “minor things” like the contract renewal!

Although the client was located in a suburban community just outside the city, we stayed at one of New Orleans’ downtown hotels, preferably The Fairmont.

And since I usually wasn’t a part of the eating rich foods and staying up late drinking 18-year old Scotch brigade, I often spent my free time walking along streets of the city’s French Quarter; streets whose names had been made famous in the titles of Traditional or Dixieland Jazz such as Bourbon Street, Rampart Street and Basin Street.

Of course, by the time I got there, with the exception of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and occasional appearances by trumpeter Al Hirt and clarinetist Pete Fountain, Traditional Jazz had since been long gone from the streets of New Orleans, and especially from the French Quarter.

Still it was fun to amble down some of these historic venues in the early afternoon with the refrains of Jack Teagarden singing Basin Street Blues going through my mind.

For as long as I can remember, Jack Teagarden was a vicarious member of our family; my Father loved his playing so much that he would have easily adopted Jack into it.

He had many of Jack’s original 78 rpms records and played them constantly all the while miming Jack’s trombone sound by pressing an imaginary horn’s mouthpiece to his lips with the first, two fingers of his left-hand and working a make-believe trombone slide with his right.

My Dad’s devotion to Jack Teagarden did ultimately benefit me as he gave into my teenage pleadings to attend the Newport Jazz Festival [NJF] in July, 1957 after he found out that “Big T” would be there as part of a birthday celebration for Louis Armstrong.

Here are some thoughts, observations and comments about Jack as drawn from the writings of a number of respected authors.

Whitney Balliett, American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, excerpts taken from pages 160-164].

“Jack Teagarden was obsessed by music and by machines. In New York in the late twenties, when he was with Ben Pollack's band, he would some­times play around the clock. He would start at 6 p.m. with Pollack at the Park Central Hotel and would finish somewhere in Harlem, where he had gone to jam, the afternoon of the next day. …

Teagarden's love of machines was an extension of his love of his instrument. He thought of his trombone as a kind of machine, and he spent his life mastering its deceptive, resistant techniques, and redesign­ing mouthpieces, water valves, and mutes. His father, an engineer who took care of Texas cotton gins, taught him mechanics. When Teagarden was thirteen, he replaced the pipes in his grandmother's house, and a year later he became a full-fledged automobile mechanic. As an adult, he re­built and drove two Stanley Steamers. He was a flamboyant inventor. … Sometimes he built machines simply for the sake of building them. He constructed one that filled a room, and when he was asked what it did he replied, "Why, it's runnin', ain't it?"

His trombone and his machines were the interchangeable lyrical centers of his life, and they helped hold it together. It was, in many ways, a desperate life. Women flummoxed him. He was married four times, and none of the relationships worked very well. (He had two children by his first wife, and one by his last.) He had no head for money, and he was a gargantuan drinker—almost in the same class as his friends Fats Waller and Bunny Berigan. He was careless about his health: he had lost all his teeth by the time he was forty, and he had several bouts of pneumonia. He had little sense about his career.  …

Teagarden's demeanor and appearance always belied his travails. He was tall and handsome, solid through the chest and shoulders. He had a square, open face and widely spaced eyes, which he kept narrowed, not letting too much of the world in at a time. His black hair was combed flat, its part just to the left of center. He was sometimes confused with Jack Dempsey. He liked practical jokes, and he had an easy, Southern sense of humor, the kind that feeds on colloquialisms. (Asked once why he slept so much, he said that, like all Southerners, he was a slow sleeper.) …

Teagarden had several different tones: a light nasal one, a gruff, heavy one; and a weary, hoarse, one—a twilight tone he used for slow blues, and for ballads that moved him. He had a nearly faultless technique, yet it never called attention to itself. Opposites were compressed shrewdly in his style. Long notes were balanced by triplets, double-time spurts by laconic legato musings, busy­ness by silence, legitimate notes by blue notes, moans by roars.

Teagarden developed a set of master solos for his bread-and-butter tunes—the tunes that his listeners expected and that he must have played thousands of times: "Basin Street Blues," "A Hundred Years from Today," "Beale St. Blues," "Stars Fell on Alabama," "St. James Infirmary," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "After You've Gone." Each time, though, he would make generous and surprising changes—adding a decorative triplet, a dying blue note, a soaring glissando—and his listeners would be buoyed again. Sometimes he sank into his low register at the start of a slow blues solo and rose into his high register at its end. Like his friend and admirer Bobby Hackett, he stayed in the bourgeois register of his horn, cultivating his lyricism, his tones, his sense of order and logic. Teagarden was a good jazz singer. His singing, a distillation of his playing, formed a kind of aureole around it. He had a light baritone, which moved easily behind the beat. The rare consonants he used sounded like vowels, and his vowels were all pureed. His vocals were lullabies—lay-me-down-to-sleep patches of sound.

Teagarden gathered friends wherever he went. His playing stunned them when they first heard it, and it still stuns them. [Pianist] Jess Stacy:

"I thought he was the best trombonist who ever lived. When I made those Commodore sides with him in 1938—'Diane’ and 'Serenade to a Shylock'—he just walked in, warmed up, and hit out, and he played like an angel. He was an ace musician who could talk harmony like a college professor. He'd sit at the piano after a take and say, ‘Try this chord on the bridge, this C with a flatted ninth,’ and he'd be right. Of course, he was a wizard with tools, too. He always carried a tuning fork. He had perfect pitch, and he couldn't stand out-of-tune pianos. So he'd work at a bad piano between sets until he got it where it didn't drive him crazy anymore. They couldn't make them any nicer than Jack—never any conceit, never got on anybody's nerves."”

Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman [New York: Norton, 1993, excerpts drawn from pages 50-51].

“ …. We never heard anything like it. Such style and good taste and the way he knew his harmonies. It was such a wonderful feeling inside to hear someone do something so well."

Teagarden's warm, richly melodic, blues-drenched playing was com­pletely unlike the technically accomplished but emotionally remote approach to the instrument favored by Miff Mole, the premier white jazz trombonist up to now who was emulated by most other white trombone players, including Glenn Miller. Teagarden's impact upon the Pollack musicians and the rest of the jazz community in New York, black as well as white, can hardly be exaggerated. Gil Rodin thought he was the best trombonist he'd ever heard and claimed that the main reason Miller didn't return to the band was that he was humbled by Teagarden's hands-down superiority and knew everyone else really wanted him.

Benny and Teagarden took to each other's playing immediately. "Benny has always thrilled me," Teagarden said. "When we worked together in the old Ben Pollack orchestra ... he used to leave me so weak I couldn't hardly get out of the chair." For Benny, Teagarden "was an absolutely fantastic trombone player, and I loved to listen to him take solos." According to Pollack, "Benny Goodman was getting in everybody's hair about this time, because he was getting good and took all the choruses. But when Jack joined the band, Benny would turn around and pass the choruses on to Teagarden."

"I got about as many kicks out of hearing Jack play as any musician I've ever worked with," Benny maintained. But the peculiar remoteness that eventually became such a puzzling part of Benny's personality kept it from seeming that way at the beginning. "Benny used to worry me," Teagarden recalled. "He'd keep looking at me all the time, and it got on my nerves. One day I asked him, 'Say, you keep staring at me all the time. Do I annoy you—or is anything wrong?' Benny laughed and said, 'My gosh, no. But the things you play just keep surprising me!' " "Benny was hard to read,"

McPartland agreed. "He'd get a look on his face, and you really didn't know what he thought about anything. But he meant no ill will." "I never was much of a hand for talking about things I like, especially in those days," was Benny's comment on the incident. Bud Freeman claimed that Teagarden's advent changed the style of the band and left a permanent mark upon Benny's playing. "Benny Goodman, up to the time of hearing Jack, had not played much melody. He became a strong melodic player. I'm certain that this influence contributed strongly to Benny's greatness."

Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, excerpts drawn from pp. 709-710; 718].

“… [Jack’s] fascination with things mechanical found its most lasting expression in the unique way he played the trombone, particularly the solutions he devised to its technical problems

He found a solution, based on an intuitive understanding or now brass in­struments work. The higher a trumpet or trombone plays, the closer together the notes … and the more options it offers for producing a given note. Some such alternatives are so naturally out of tune that (on a valved in­strument especially) they can't be used at all. A trombone slide offers a chance to correct such pitch anomalies with often finely calibrated adjustments.

Multiplying this by all the levels of the overtone series makes clear what young Weldon discovered very early: with diligent practice, and relying on an unusually acute ear to adjust intonation, he could play almost any note he wanted (save the very low ones) by favoring positions which kept the slide close to his face.

Jazzmen who heard Teagarden throughout his career were often amazed that such a musical torrent could come of so little apparent slide movement. British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, for one, ‘marveled at the way in which [Teagarden's] huge, square right hand seemed to wave languidly an inch or two in front of his face while the notes tumbled out.’

…. [Lyttelton goes on to say that] ‘It is hard to find a single Teagarden record which he did not enhance with his beautiful, curiously blunted tone, his marvelously fluent articulation, his perfect rhythmic poise and the sheer elegance of his musical thought.’”

Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed., [pp. 1429-30]

“… Teagarden took the trombone to new levels, with his impeccable technique, fluency and gorgeous sound, allied to a feel for blues playing which alluded many of his white contemporaries. …

Teagarden's star is somehow in decline, since all his greatest work predates the LP era and at this distance it's difficult to hear how completely he changed the role of the trombone. In Tea's hands, this awkward barnyard instrument became majestic, sonorous and handsome. By the time he began recording in 1926 he was already a mature and easeful player whose feel for blues and nonchalant rhythmic drive made him stand out on the dance-band records he was making.”

Gunther Schuller, The Trombone in Jazz, in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz, [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 631-32].

“Jack Teagarden brought a whole new level of musical sophistication and musical expressivity to trombone playing.

… Teagarden had a very easy, secure high register, and as a con­sequence was one of the first trombonists to develop an abundance of "unorthodox" alternate slide positions, playing mostly on the upper partials of the harmonic series and thus rarely having to resort to the lower (fifth to seventh) positions. Since many of these alternate posi­tions are impure in intonation, it is remarkable how in tune Teagar-den's playing was for that time. He had also developed an astonishingly easy lip trill—a sine qua non for today's trombonists, but still a great rarity in the 1920s—and was constantly experimenting with novel so­norities, produced by, for example, playing with a water glass held over the bell of his horn, or removing the bell altogether.

Teagarden was unique among trombonists in playing with a laid-back, "lazy" style, which many observers called a "Texas drawl." He also had quite a reputation as a singer, particularly of the blues, again in a superbly relaxed manner. Teagarden's essentially vocal, lyric trombone style, using lots of what brass players call "soft tonguing," has its parallel in the "slurred speech" approach—almost to the point of mushiness—in his singing.”

Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, [New York: Oxford, 1997, excerpts taken from pp. 82-84].

“Only one other white brass player of the day could approach [Bix] Beiderbecke in terms of individuality and creativity. Jack Teagarden stands out as the greatest of the traditional Jazz players on the trombone, and also left a mark as an important Jazz singer. …

Teagarden had few models to draw on—either on record or in person—during his formative years. The New Orleans tradition, despite its frequent use of the trom­bone, had done little to develop its possibilities as a solo voice. It more often served as a source of counter melodies or rhythmic accents, often linking harmonies with the slurred chromatic glissandi that characterized the "Tailgate" sound, a stock New Or­leans device associated most closely with Kid Ory….

In many ways, Teagarden's playing showed a disregard of formal methods, especially in his reliance on embouchure and alternate positions rather than slide technique; …, by the time of his arrival in New York [1927], Teagarden was already a seasoned musician. …

Teagarden displayed a sensitivity to the blues that few white players of his gener­ation could match. …

Although he was capable of virtuosic displays, Teagarden was most at home crafting a carefree, behind-the-beat style. Especially when he was singing, the lazy, "after-hours" quality to his delivery— incorporating elements of song, patter, and idle conversation—proved endearing to audiences, especially in the context of a jazz world that was only just discovering the potential of understatement. Teagarden was just as comfortable in simplifying the written melody as in ornamenting it.”

And let’s close this overview of Jack Teagarden with these comments from Martin Williams Preface to Jay D. Smith’s and Len Guttridge’s Jack Teagarden: The Story of a Jazz Maverick [New York: Da Capo, 1988].

“Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his in­strument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing that Jay D. Smith's and Len Guttridge's book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a jazz musician.

A jazz musi­cian simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make the music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.

You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life.

I could say that Smith and Guttridge engaged in a labor of love in researching and writing their book for Jack. But I would also describe it as a labor of infatuation, and

I offer that further description with respect.”

— Martin Williams October 1987”

“Infatuation” is a good word to use with Jack Teagarden’s music.

The Art of the Jazz Trombone [Revisited]

With this feature, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles begins "Trombone Week," a kind of a mini-retrospective featuring seven pieces that previously posted to the blog which examine the careers and music of some of the principal Jazz trombonists.

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

There are times when I enjoy just hearing the music while visualizing it through the use of “videos” developed with the help of the world-class graphics team at CerraJazz LTD.

As I’ve noted before on these pages, there is a limit to how effectively writing about Jazz conveys what’s going on in the music.

And, although it is inherent in the nature of blogging, it’s difficult to write about Jazz all the time.

Trying to maintain a steady stream of written content on the subject sometimes makes me feel like E.B. White of The New Yorker when he said: “Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.”

Perhaps the Pulitzer-prize winning Mr. White will allow me to rephrase this marvelous insight to read: “ … Jazz’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.”

When I’m feeling this way, I find solace in listening to and “looking at” Jazz.

From time-to-time, then, I stop, collect a bunch of photos, album covers and graphics, add an audio track of splendid Jazz, and sit back and savor it all.

My latest undertaking in this regard is The Art of Jazz Trombone:

Gunther Schuller’s essay, The Trombone in Jazz, in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000] provides an excellent overview of the history of the instrument in Jazz.  Here are a few excerpts:

“The trombone is the only instrument in the Western music tradition that is virtually unchanged in its basic construc­tion (shape and size) and technical function since its first appearance in the late fifteenth century. All other instru­ments—whether the violin, the organ, or even the trum­pet—have experienced important changes or physical additions (such as valves on trumpets). Although a valve trombone was developed eventually in the early nineteenth century, it never replaced in clas­sical music or in jazz the so-called slide trombone, the instrument with which this article will be primarily concerned.

Thus, given the trombone's stable and venerable history, it is some­what ironic that it was originally developed as an offshoot of the Renaissance slide trumpet, in use in late medieval music, extending the brass family's registral range to the tenor and baritone regions. Moreover, from its very beginnings the trombone, with its inherent agility of movement and potential freedom from fixed pitches (a lim­itation, for example, for valved or keyed instruments), was considered no less versatile than a violin or cornetto. This goes a long way toward explaining the instrument's central and consistent place in the music literature of the last five hundred years.

This intrinsic versatility also accounts for the prominent role the trombone has played in jazz from its inception and even in its pre­history, rivaled only by the trumpet and possibly the clarinet. Late nineteenth-century ragtime ensembles, the concert bands prevalent all over the United States and the Americas, and especially the brass and parade bands so popular in New Orleans around the turn of the century all featured the trombone in a variety of musical functions, ranging from soloistic to accompanimental, from individual to ensem­ble roles. Thus it cannot come as a surprise that in the earliest man­ifestation of jazz (i.e., the New Orleans collective ensemble style) the trombone was a preeminent, indispensable member of the so-called three-instrument front line: cornet (or trumpet), clarinet, and trom­bone. In that typical formation the three instruments were assigned quite specific roles, with the trombone providing commentary asides, countermelodies, and harmonic fill-ins to the main tune played by the cornet and the clarinet's high-register obbligatos, in general pro­viding a link between the melodic/thematic material and the rhythm section, even occasionally and intermittently participating in both ar­eas. Much of the earliest "jazz" in the first two decades of the cen­tury—before it had even acquired the name jazz and before the advent of jazz recordings in 1917—was played outdoors, at picnics, church functions, fraternity dances, or funeral processions and on ad­vertising wagons, with the trombonist usually positioned at the back of the wagon so that he could freely manipulate his five-foot-long slide. This type of playing acquired the name tailgate. It featured a copious use of glissandos, a sliding effect endemic to the slide trom­bone and not particularity practical on other wind instruments; it later became an overused cliché in Dixieland bands and the 1940s New Orleans revival.

In the earliest decades of the century, the musician who contrib­uted most to the evolution of the trombone in jazz was Kid Ory. An early specialist in the tailgate style, he developed stylistically along with the advances in jazz in the 1920s, working effectively with such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong (Hot Five) and Jelly Roll Morton (Red Hot Peppers). A fine example of his playing can be heard on "Ory's Creole Trombone/Society Blues," recorded in 1922 in Los Angeles as Ory's Sunshine Orchestra (incidentally the first black New Orleans-style jazz band to be recorded).

Two other fine early trombonists were George Brunis (originally Brunies) and Jim Robinson. … 

… [Many of the earliest Jazz] musicians were essentially self-taught and initially non- or semiprofessional, playing in simple, relatively crude personal styles. But under the influence of a number of dramatic developments in jazz in the 1920s, musicians—trombonists, of course, included—be­gan to rise to new challenges. It was during the early 1920s that jazz developed into the major dance and entertainment music of the coun­try and became a viable profession in music (even for blacks); the initial small groups in jazz (quintets, sextets, septets) expanded to ten-and twelve-piece orchestras; composers and arrangers gradually cre­ated even more sophisticated performance demands (both in terms of solo improvisations and ensemble work); and, even more compelling, major innovative virtuosos, such as trumpeters Armstrong, King Ol­iver, and Jabbo Smith and trombonists Jack Teagarden and Miff Mole, challenged the whole field to reach out to new technical and creative heights….

The 1920s saw a number of other outstanding trombone players come to the fore, among them Claude Jones, Vic Dickenson, J. C. Higginbotham, Benny Morton, Dicky Wells, Sandy Williams, Trummy Young, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and, last but not least, the three remarkable players associated with Duke Ellington's orchestra: "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Juan Tizol, and Lawrence Brown. Although most of these players were not major innovators, technically and cre­atively, they did build in various personal ways on the advances of their immediate brass-playing predecessors. …

Another remarkable trombone section, totally different from El­lington's was that of Stan Kenton's orchestra. Beginning in the mid-19408, its style initiated and set by Kai Winding, it revolutionized trombone playing stylistically, especially in terms of sound (brassier, more prominent in the ensemble) and type of vibrato (slower, and mostly lack thereof), as well as by adding the "new sound" of a bass trombone (Bart Varsalona, later George Roberts). The Kenton trom­bone section's influence was enormous and pervasive, and continues to this day. Although the section's personnel changed often over the decades, it retained an astonishing stylistic consistency, not only be­cause such stalwarts as Milt Bernhart and Bob Fitzpatrick held long tenures in the orchestra, but because incoming players, such as Bob Burgess and Frank Rosolino and a host of others, were expected to fit into the by-then-famous Kenton brass sound.

But the biggest breakthrough on the trombone toward full mem­bership in the bop fraternity was accomplished by J. J. Johnson, who essentially proved convincingly that anything Gillespie could do on the trumpet could now also be matched on the trombone. Johnson is regarded as the true founder of the modern school of jazz trombone, developing astounding (for the time) speed and agility on the instru­ment, and thus becoming a charter member of the bop evolu­tion/revolution. ….”