Another Look At The Strange, Sorrowful and Sad Life of Billie Holiday [From the Archives]

“I loved her. It was almost like she grew to be a part of me. Her insides were her outsides, you know? When she passed I was crying, not crying with sorrow, but crying because she was at peace at last. It was so beautiful, she gave so much feeling, it was overwhelming.”

- Shirley Horn [vocalist and song stylist]

“A great woman, very cool, and the hippest thing I ever knew.”

- Etta James [vocalist and song stylist] 

“How many Billie Holidays are there and which do you prefer? Elated or dour, funny or truculent, sweet or sour, our Lady of Sorrows or 52^nd Street’s Queen, early Billie or late, Billie of hope or Billy or heartache, Billie with Pres or with strings, Lady Day or Lady Nightmare or Lady in Ermine, Lady Be Good, Lady in Red, Lady Luck, Lady Blue, Lady Divine, the Lady Who Swings the Band, Lady Mine – crank up the record machine, listen closely and take your choice.

For Billie Holiday is one of those exceptional artists whose work is a perfect tuning fork for our own inclinations. She echoes our emotions, rehabilitates our innocence, cauterizes our nerves.

That she managed so capacious a vision with her slim vocal range and infinite capacity for nurturing demons is a miracle to which generations of interpreters have been and will continue to be drawn. The greatest art never loses its mystery. The better we know hers, the more dreamlike and sensational it seems.”

- Gary Giddins

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

I had a fleeting look at singer Billie Holiday, once.

It came in the form of her appearance of The Sound of Jazz, a CBS television “Seven Lively Arts” special that was broadcast on Sunday afternoon, December 8, 1957.

Our television set was positioned in the living room of a third floor bay window out which one could see the streets, tenements and church bell towers in what has now become the fashionable Federal Hill area of Providence, RI.

It was a dreary day with skies that darkened and became very foreboding the way late afternoons could often, suddenly become during early New England winters [these also stayed late].

After two, stirring performances of Traditional or Dixieland Jazz by trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen’s All-Stars, the camera turned to Billie who was seated on a stool with members of pianist Mal Waldron’s group standing behind her and off to her left.

Suddenly, everything on the television screen looked and sounded as though it had become sluggish and subsumed by the murky mood of the day.

When the TV cameras focused on Billie, the view from the television screen appeared to go into slow motion.  In this they were aided and abetted by Billie enunciation’s as her singing was languid, almost lethargic.

The TV cameras panned around the standing musicians in an unhurried manner and tenor saxophonists Lester Young, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins along with trumpeter “Doc” Cheatham and trombonist Vic Dickenson all took solos interspersed around Billie’s singing that were measured, bordering on being belabored.

Earlier that summer, I had attended the Newport [RI] Jazz Festival and loved being amidst the music and the musicians in what seemed like one continually joyous celebration of life.

But while watching and listening to Billie, I was struck by how strange, sad and sorrowful the music could become.

At the time, I was too young to realize that the television program was trying to achieve a “primitive” aura or that strange, sad and sorrowful were indeed an accurate description of Billie Holiday’s short-lived life [she died two years later in 1959 at the age of 44!].

Some months after Billie’s death, I purchased an issue of The New Yorker magazine and a record album of the music from The Sound of Jazz.. Whitney Balliett’s savvy writing in the former and Eric Larrabee’s liner notes to the latter offered me details about Billie television performance that provided a deeper understanding of what I had witnessed that dreary day in December 1957.

We thought we’d share Whitney and Eric’s essays with you, along with a video tribute to Billie which concludes this piece, as a way of remembering the role that Billie Holiday played in shaping The Sound of Jazz.

© -Whitney Balliett/Lippincott/The New Yorker Magazine, copyright protected; all rights reserved [paragraphing modified].

Miss Holiday

“Toward the end of her life, Billie Holiday, who died last summer, at the age of forty-four, had be­come inextricably caught in a tangle of notoriety and fame. It was compounded of an endless series of skirmishes with the police and the courts (she was shamelessly arrested on her deathbed for the alleged possession of narcotics); the bitter, vindic­tive, self-pitying image of herself established in her autobiography, published in 1956—a to-hell-with-you image that tended to repel rather than attract compassion; and the fervent adulation still granted her by a diminishing but ferocious band of admirers. Her new listeners must have been puzzled by all this turmoil, for she sang during much of the fifties with a heavy, unsteady voice that sometimes gave the im­pression of being pushed painfully in front of her, like a medicine ball. She seemed, in fact, to be em­battled with every song she tackled.

Nonetheless, her admirers were not mad. Between 1935, when she popped out of nowhere, and 1940, Miss Holi­day had knocked a good portion of the jazz world on its ear with a hundred or so recordings, several dozen of which rank with the greatest of non-classi­cal vocal efforts. Part of the success of these record­ings, which have an uncanny balance of ease, con­trol, unself-consciousness, emotion, and humor, is due to the accompaniment provided by small bands made up of men like Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson. Though their work—in obbligatos that underline the grace of her voice, in exemplary solos, and in tumbling, laughing ensembles—often takes up as much space as the vocals, it is Miss Holiday who continues to astonish.

Until she appeared, genuine jazz singing had been practiced largely by a myriad of often obscure blues singers led by Bessie Smith, and by a handful of instrumentalists led by Louis Armstrong. Bessie Smith leveled a massive lyricism at limited materials, while Armstrong's coalyard rumblings, though ir­resistible in themselves, occasionally seemed to have little to do with singing. Distilling and mixing the best of her predecessors with her own high talents, Billie Holiday became the first full-fledged jazz singer (and, with the defection in recent years of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, possibly the last). She could sing anything, and her style was completely her own. She appeared to play her voice rather than sing with it. In addition to a hornlike control of melody and rhythm, she had an affecting contralto that took on innumerable timbres: a dark-brown sound, sometimes fretted by growls or hoarseness, in the lower register; a pliable oboe tone in the high register; and a clear, pushing, little-girl alto in between.

Her style came in three subtly dif­ferent parts. There was one for ephemeral popular songs, one for the more durable efforts of George Gershwin and his peers, and one for the blues. Since she was primarily an improviser, not an in­terpreter, she was often most striking when han­dling pop songs, like "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town," "It's Too Hot for Words," and "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," which she spattered with a mocking, let's-have-some-fun-with-this air. Thus, at a fast tempo, she might loll back in half time, and not only elongate each word, so that it seemed nothing but vowels, but flatten the melody into a near-monotone of four or five notes. Then, in the last eight bars or so, she would suddenly pounce on the beat, pick up the melody, and close in a here-I-am rush. (If the evil was in her she might stomp such a number all the way through, rocking it relentlessly back and forth and coating it with dead-serious growls.) At slow tempos, she would use the full range of her voice, adding exaggerated smears to her phrases or dotting them with series of laughlike staccato notes. At the same time, she was busy fashioning a deceptively simple and thor­ough melodic variation on the tune, smoothing its wrinkles, toughening up its soft spots, and lending it far more lyricism than it usually deserved. This was accomplished not by superimposing melodic candelabra on her material, in the manner of Sarah Vaughan and her baroque students, but by unob­trusively altering its melodic and rhythmic structure with a flow of marvelously placed phrases that might wander around behind the beat, and then suddenly push ahead of it (each syllable urgently pinned to a staccato note) or slide through legato curves full of blue notes and generous vibratos. Miss Holiday's rhythmic sense had much in common with Lester Young's, who would sooner have gone into another line of work than place a note convention­ally. Moreover, her enunciation of pop songs was a mixture of clarity and caricature, bringing into action that rule of ridicule that the victim be reproduced perfectly before being destroyed. Her "moon"s and "June"s rang like bells, and one didn't hear their cracks until the sound began to die away. The com­posers of the pop songs she sang should be grateful; her renditions ("Ooo-ooo-ooo/ What a lil moon-laight can do-oo-oo"), and not the songs, are what we remember.

Her approach to Gershwin and such was almost reverent in comparison. In a number like "Summer­time," she allowed the emotion that she had spent on lesser materials in sarcasm or near-flippancy to come through undisguised. Ceaselessly inventive, she would still shape the melody to fit her voice and mood, but in such a way that its beauties—and not hers—were pointed up. (The number of popular singers, to say nothing of jazz singers, who have been able to slip inside their material, instead of plodding along beside it, is remarkably small.) "Summertime" became a pure lullaby, "But Not for Me" a self-joshing lament, and "Porgy" a prayer. When there were superior lyrics on hand, she under­lined them with a diction and an understanding that shunted the meaning of each word forward. More than that, she would, at her best, lend a first-rate song a new and peculiarly heightened emotion that, one suddenly realized, its composer had only been reaching for. And the effort never showed.

Miss Holiday simply let go when she sang the blues. She was never, however, a loud singer, nor did she depend on the big whisper of most of her mi­crophone-reared successors; instead, she projected her voice firmly, keeping in steady balance her enunciation, timbre, and phrasing. She was, in fact, a model elocutionist. Free of the more complex structures of the standard popular song, she moved through the innumerable emotional pastures of the form, ranging from the down-and-out to the joyous to the nasty and biting to quiet, almost loving blues.

Then, in 1944, when Miss Holiday started re­cording again (after the recording bans), the magic had begun to vanish. Perhaps it was the increasing strain of her private life, or the mysterious rigor mortis that so often freezes highly talented but un­trained and basically intuitive performers. At any rate, she had become self-conscious. Although her voice had improved in resonance and control, her style had grown mannered. She ended her phrases with disconcerting, lachrymose dips. She struggled with her words instead of batting them about or savoring them. The melodic twists and turns lost their spontaneity. One could accurately predict her rhythmic patterns.

Even her beauty—the huge gar­denia clamped to the side of her head; the high, flashing cheekbones; the almost motionless body, the snapping fingers, and the thrown-back head; the mobile mouth, which seemed to measure the emo­tional shape and texture of each word—implied careful calculation. From time to time, some of this stylization lifted—she never, of course, lost her presence, which became more and more melancholy —and there were glimpses of her old naturalness. After 1950, her voice grew deeper and coarser, and her sense of pitch and phrasing eluded her, and finally she became that most rending of spectacles —a once great performer doing a parody of herself that could have been bettered by her inferiors. Her still devoted partisans clamored on; they would have done her greater service by doffing their hats and remaining silent. …”

© -Eric Larrabee/Harper and Bros./Harper Magazine, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The best thing that ever happened to television happened on CBS between five and six in the afternoon on Sunday, December 8. At least that was where and when it happened first; the pro­gram may have been run at a different hour and date in your part of the country, and—if there is any justice—it will be repeated, the more often the better. It was an installment in "The Seven Lively Arts" series called "The Sound of Jazz," and as far as I'm concerned you can throw away all previous standards of comparison. This is where live television began to amount to some­thing.

It was opened and closed, and from time to time interrupted, by John Crosby as "host," but mostly it was musicians playing jazz—in a bare studio, dressed in whatever they liked (hats, sweat shirts, it didn't matter), smoking, talking to one another, or just walking around. Each group was introduced and then away it went, with time enough (in nearly all cases) to get the music going, while the camera roamed over the faces of participants and spectators. There were no phony or elaborate explanations. As the executive pro­ducer, Jack Houseman, remarked approvingly to the music critic Virgil Thomson, during the dress rehearsal: "This is the first program about jazz that doesn't say it started in New Orleans and then went up the river."

Technically "The Sound of Jazz" gave the appearance of being very (as they say on the Avenue) "primitive." You knew that you were in a studio and that these people were being televised. If it sounded better to have a micro­phone right in front of a man's face, there the microphone would be; and if one cameraman got in another's way he didn't scurry ashamedly out of it. But this impromptu effect, of course, took a deal of contriving. The musicians couldn't be­lieve at first that hats were really okay, and Billie Holiday had to be persuaded to appear in slacks and pony-tail instead of the gown she had spe­cially planned on. The air of casualness was in fact the end product of months of work.

THIS milestone was primarily made possible by Houseman, his assistant Robert Goldman, and the producer for this show, Robert Herridge, who had the unbelievable courage and good sense to hire good taste and turn it loose. They found two jazz critics with some ideas, Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, and after the usual round of con­ferences and memos, gave them complete artistic control. Balliett and Hentoff, from the start, had the kind of program in mind that they eventually produced—one that would concentrate on music. When I asked Balliett at what point they had decided in favor of visual realism and informality, he thought a moment and said, "I don't think it ever occurred to us to do it any other way."

They got the musicians they wanted, whether currently well known or not and whether or not "485" (the address on Madison of the Columbia front office) would have made the same choice. They were able to assemble combinations of musicians whose booking arrangements usually keep them apart, and also let an old-timer like Pee Wee Russell play side by side with a modern­ist like Jimmy Giuffre. The name of one performer made "485" nervous, but Balliett and Hentoff put their feet down—and they won. Let it be written that as of 1957 there was still some decency left, and somebody willing to fight for it.

As "The Sound of Jazz" came into the final weeks before air-time, it began to make other people uneasy, and for better reasons. Since there was so little of the normal panic on the surface, everybody panicked inside. The director, Jack Smight, found that he was twice as jumpy with­out actors around to worry about; and when "485" found out in the last few days that there really wasn't any script to speak of it began to emit angry noises: "What are you doing down there?" Balliett and Hentoff could only answer that everything was going to be fine, the musi­cians would turn up, and there would be some music. They hoped this was true.

THEY needn't have worried. If you were lucky enough to have seen "The Sound of Jazz" I don't have to tell you how great it was and, even if you weren't, what I'd want to do anyway is sell you an explanation of why it was great. The cornerstone of live television, class will please now repeat, is the human face—with its spon­taneity and tension, its halo of contradictions, its hints of life lived and life to come. Of course the TV camera is merciless; it draws on the person behind the face for all the resources that it can find there. It is not one eye but millions of eyes; it has high expectations and asks that the person before it be poised in the balance, somehow challenged or tested, so as to bring forth the most meanings from the ever-changing interplay of expressions in the face.

What made the jazz musicians extraordinary, when the camera put their features through its harsh examination, was how much it found there. Children and animals make the best movie actors, as Douglas Fairbanks said, because they are un-self-conscious and unable to fake. No more could these musicians be anything but themselves, for they are committed to independence and to a headlong attack on the cosmos. It showed; here— and no kidding—were individuals of stature and profundity, of flesh and substance, of warmth and bite. The music was good, yes, but what lifted "The Sound of Jazz" to a level hitherto un-attained was the sight of it being made. As a lady in White Plains sat down and wrote CBS as soon as the show was over, one so seldom has the chance "to see real people doing something that really matters to them."

Neither Balliett nor Hentoff expected the visual effect to be as sensational as it was. They knew that director Jack Smight "dug" jazz, but they would never have dared anticipate the deft and intricate camera work that enabled him to cut from one shot to another as skillfully as though he were a movie editor, working with developed film instead of a live show. The cameramen simply outdid themselves (for the record, and giving them a credit line they should have had on the air, they were Bob Heller, Harold Classen, Joe Sokota, Jack Brown, and Marty Tuck). Balliett and Hentoff's long and careful planning had made it possible for the musicians to extemporize; now the cameramen and director could extemporize too, with the freedom to smudge the edges—leave that head half in the way—of practiced talent, the artistic intelligence that dares to risk a blunder because it knows precisely what it is doing. Jazz is like that, and as a result the two effects of "The Sound of Jazz"—on the eye and on the ear—were miraculously in tune with each other.

NOW there is talk not only of a repeat but of a series, and no one could better deserve it than this new-found team. But one wonders if the miracle can happen twice. Part of the reason that Balliett and Hentoff were let alone was that no one in high authority really understood what they were up to. Now the secret is out and thpre will be many hazards. As I sat with them in producer Robert Herridge's office, going over the first day's mail, the phone rang and Herridge answered it. He listened, laughed explosively, and hung up. "Lawrence Welk," he said, "de­mands equal time."

—ERIC LARRABEE

Copyright, 1958, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission from Harper's Magazine.”

The personnel and solo sequence for the Billie Holiday video tribute are -

Fine and Mellow—Billie Holiday with Mai Waldron All-Stars including: Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, tenor sax; Doc Cheatham, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Mai Waldron, piano; Jo Jones, drums; Danny Barker, guitar; Jim Atlas, bass.

1st chorus: Holiday

2nd chorus: Young

3rd chorus: Webster

4th chorus: Holiday

5th chorus: Cheatham

6th chorus: Hawkins

7th chorus: Holiday

8th chorus: Dickenson

9th chorus: Holiday

10th chorus: Holiday

Tony Scott - The Lost Tapes on JazzHaus

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

“Tony Scott's position as a master of his instrument has never been in question, but it was that instrument's own status which bebop and after was disputing, and [his many] excellent records … have been comparatively lost as a result. ...

In 1959 Tony Scott turned his back on America, wounded by the death of several friends (Hot Lips Page, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lester Young) and by what he considered the 'death' of the clarinet in jazz terms. Since then he has been a wanderer, exploring the culture and music of the East, trading in the sometimes aggressive assertions of bebop for a meditative approach to harmony that at its best is deeply moving, at its least disciplined a weak ambient decoration.

Influenced primarily by Ben Webster, he seems to condense and process an enormous acreage of jazz history in his enticingly miniaturist structures.

Scott enjoyed a close and fruitful relationship with Bill Evans, and perhaps his best recorded work is the session of 16 November 1957 with the Evans trio and guests, tackling a copious roster of originals and well-worn standards…. . Evans's light touch and immense harmonic sophistication suited his approach ideally. Scott was at the top of his professional tree and enjoyed great critical acclaim. More recent years have found him a relatively forgotten figure. But he is unmistakably an original.”

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

The recent arrival of the Tony Scott - The Lost Tapes: Germany 1957/Asia 1962 JazzHaus CD [#101 743] sparked a number of flashbacks in my mind to a time when Tony along with Buddy DeFranco were two of the hipper clarinetists on the modern Jazz scene.

Unfortunately for Tony and Buddy and a few other “licorice stick” players who spoke the language of bebop, their recognition for this achievement would be short-lived as interest in the instrument waned by the end of the 1950’s.

Once the equivalent of the Rock guitar during The Swing Era when clarinet players like Benny Goodman, Woody Herman and Artie Shaw headed-up some of the most popular big bands, the clarinet fell out of favor in the modern Jazz era which began around 1945 when small combos featuring trumpet and saxophone front lines became the predominant sound of the music.

Here are the details on Tony Scott - The Lost Tapes: Germany 1957/Asia 1962 JazzHaus CD [#101 743] and Fabian Grob’s insert notes to the disc.

Studio Recording Villa Berg, SDR Stuttgart April 24,1957

Live Recording Liederhalle Stuttgart, April 23,1957

Live Recording City Hall, Hong Kong, spring 1962 Live Recording Singapore, unknown venue, 1962

Tony Scott (cl) / Horst Jankowski (p) / Peter Witte (b) / Hermann Mutschler (dr) / Conny Jackel (tp) / Gerald Weinkopf (ts) / Helmut Brandt (bs) /Werner Baumgart (bs) / Mario Costalonga (tp) / Colin Stuart (tp) / Frankie Van Seca (g) / Giancarlo Barigozzi (ts)

For the Singapore recording: (probably) Silvano Salviati (p) / Sandra Paganucci (b) /Alfredo Bendini (dr)

Moonlight In Vermont (Stuttgart)         

The Man I Love                                   

Lover, Come Back To Me                      

You Go To My Head                              

Blues                                                  

A Night In Tunisia

There Will Never Be Another You

Blues For Charlie Parker

Hongkong Jazzclub Blues

All The Things You Are

Moonlight In Vermont (Singapore)

Ben and Bird

“Both Sides Of Tony Scott is the title of an LP the clarinettist recorded in 1956 following a period of artistic reflection. For the previous nine months, as Harry Belafonte's musical director, Scott had not touched his instrument. Now he used the occasion to concentrate on his two principal role models: Charlie Parker, whose polyrhythmic playing and asymmetric phrasing fascinated him, and Ben Webster, who had taken him under his wing as a young musician and whose emotional, melodious ballad playing had inspired him to adopt the same unusually warm and gentle tone on the clarinet Both sides came across significantly in Scott's playing: the thin, brittle, almost shrill tone of his virtuoso, uptempo bebop lines contrasted with the inimitable intimacy and warmth of his legato ballad style, a sound Scott literally breathed into the clarinet unlike anyone.

The two approaches are equally characteristic of the recordings Scott made in April 1957 as a guest at the Stuttgart radio broadcaster SDR, as well as the live performances recorded for posterity by Joachim-Ernst Berendt on behalf of SWF in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1962 under far from ideal conditions- using a portable tape recorder and a single microphone. Despite certain acoustic deficiencies, most notably audible on the track from Singapore, these recordings are deserving of our attention as rare testimony to a hitherto little documented phase in Scott's career.”

As you may recall from others postings about this series, JazzHaus will bring forth audio and video discs featuring “an indefinite number of audio and video jazz programs taken from live radio and television recordings from the archives of Sudwestrundfunk Stuttgart, Baden-Baden and Mainz in southwest Germany.

Jazz broadcasts by Sudwestrundfunk (SWR) started in the summer of 1947 with young impresarios Joachim-Ernst Berendt and Dieter Zimmerle. Today, almost 65 years later, the archives contain about 1,600 audio and more than 350 television recordings of all major modern jazz artists - probably the biggest collection of unpublished live jazz recordings in the world: 3,000 hours - and almost all of it has never been released before. More than 400 ensembles and soloists are listed - many of them recorded three, four, five or more times over the decades.

For the last three years, the JAZZHAUS team has been thoroughly researching the vaults, carefully making the final selections. The old tapes are currently being re-mastered to high-end technology standards and will be released on CD, DVD, vinyl, and as audio /video-on-demand downloads.”

In the introductory quotation to this feature, Cook and Morton refer to November 16, 1957 and the recordings that Tony made with Bill Evans. Actually, Tony made twenty-four - 24! - recordings on that single day, some with a trio made up of Bill on piano and either Henry Grimes or Milt Hinton on bass and Paul Motian on drums and others with that rhythm section added to tracks that were recorded with Clark Terry on trumpet, Jimmy Knepper on trombone and Sahib Shihab on baritone saxophone.

All of these have been collected and re-issued on a 2-CD set entitled A Day In New York [Fresh Sound Records FSR CD-160/1-160/2]. The set contains this excellent overview of by Mike Baillie’s description of Tony’s career before and after these recordings were made.

© -  Mike Baillie/Fresh Sound Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Tony Scott - with Bill Evans

“Born Anthony Sciacca in Morristown, New Jersey in 1921, Scott was the first clarinet player to transcribe the startlingly new musical ideas of Charlie Parker, thereby changing the role of the instrument away from its (literally) traditional New Orleans function, and the «swing» style originated by Benny Goodman. In fact Scott to this day remains totally loyal to Bird's musical concepts, and sincerely feels that Parker continues to be his mentor and inspiration. During an interview here in Barcelona some three years ago, he said: «The motivation behind me is that every note I play is from him.»

After attending Juilliard musical college in New York City, Scott was an extremely active and familiar figure on 52nd Street in the 40's, «the proving ground for bop», as he himself put it. He'd go from one club to another, and sit in and jam with anybody, most frequently with black musicians —Roy Eldridge, Don Byas, Ben Webster, Erroll Garner, Stuff Smith— even Charlie Parker, for Scott was that self-confident. «l'd blow from joint to joint» he told Downbeat magazine, but to make a serious living as a musician he took jobs with big bands (usually white) such as Claude Thornhill's or Charlie Ventura's, though one memorable month was spent on tour with Duke Ellington. Scott's very first recording was in 1947, and the date included not only Dizzy Gillespie and Ben Webster, but Sarah Vaughan, who sang on one of the three titles made that day.

From '55-'59 Tony Scott was the Number One on clarinet, and enjoyed considerable fame, having been awarded top clarinet honours by the Downbeat International Jazz Critics' poll, as well as winning Downbeat's «New star on baritone sax». He was offered a 3-month State Department tour of Israel, fronting a big band, but refused on grounds of conscience for the compromises he knew he'd have to make.

Furthermore, RCA Victor was quite prepared to back him financially and with a full-scale exploitation campaign, but because he wouldn't bow to their commercial insistences, he declined —in spite of the nine months he'd spent as Harry Belafonte's musical director at RCA, when that singer was then enormously popular and a huge commercial success.

No, Scott preferred the freedom to play and blow wherever and whenever he wanted. He claims to be the first person to have used pianists Dick Hyman and Bill Evans, and for Billie Holiday he is proud to have procured Bobby Tucker (a friend of Scott's from high school days), who was to remain with Lady Day for a long time as her accompanist.

Scott's sincerely held belief is that improvisation is the very essence of good jazz, and he himself has always been a totally committed jazz player, with absolutely no qualms about airing his often very outspoken views, particularly on matters of race. He anticipated the Free Jazz of the 1960's, Indo-Jazz fusions and the incorporation of ethnic music into the (jazz) music of the 1980's. (He can also play the loudest clarinet I've ever heard - yet so softly and quietly too that one can «hear the wood» of the instrument).

By 1959, thoroughly disillusioned with the jazz scene in America, he decided to take himself off to the Far East in search of musical and spiritual refreshment. By doing so he became the first modern American jazz musician to play in Japan, and he toured extensively —Formosa, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Bali, Thailand and Singapore. He finally returned to the U.S.A. some six years later with a new (and oriental) wife.

At the time the recordings on this album were made he showed a preference for fairly straightforward material, or standards, and his music could really catch fire when the company was compatible. He also liked the swinging-blowing-type atmosphere, where there is plenty of freedom for the soloists, and the general feeling «loose», and this collection certainly fits into that category. Scott himself is composer of no less than ten of the pieces played, more in the nature of sketches or outlines really, and at least two would seem to be improvised variations on «Bernie's tune». Bill Evans contributes one, the very enjoyable «Five», while the remainder are a mixture of better and lesser-known standards.

The combinations of musicians used vary from track to track, which makes for some very stimulating listening.

It is also revealing to note that a staggering twenty-four titles were recorded on one single day - a truly remarkable achievement, considering the high quality of the music, and the level of imagination and inventiveness shown by his sidemen-cum-friends. (The brilliant Jimmy Knepper was his favourite trombone player and is heavily featured here, Clark Terry a buddy from military days spent together, Milt Hinton a colleague from the 52nd Street jam sessions, and the young Bill Evans had been first snapped up by Scott immediately after finishing his military service. Knepper was later voted New Star on trombone in the '58-'59 Downbeat International Critics' poll, while Evans was voted New Star on piano, and whose playing here gives hints of things to come.)  Tony Scott certainly knew how to pick 'em, and to have such a diverse set on one album is riches indeed.

Scott became in later years very much the loner [Tony died in 2007], a kind of wandering jazz troubadour playing all over Europe, with Italy the home base for his gypsy lifestyle. He is still a fascinating and provocative musician, and, travelling light (with the prized photos he himself took of Billie Holiday always in his knapsack), he cuts a most remarkable figure. On these recordings we can hear him again at a peak moment in his life. - Mike Baillie - 1991”

Since these newly released JazzHaus “Lost Tapes” were recorded primarily in 1957, we now have more of Tony at his peak to savor and enjoy.

Tony Scott was one of the true original voices in Jazz and these recordings are a credit to his legacy.

The following video features Tony performing The Man I Love from Tony Scott - The Lost Tapes: Germany 1957/Asia 1962 JazzHaus CD [#101 743] with Horst Jankowski on piano, Peter Witte on bass and Hermann Mutschler on drums.

In Search of Tad(d) Dameron by Ian MacDonald

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

“... Dameron is a much underrated performer who stands at the fulcrum of modern Jazz, midway between Swing and Bebop. Combining the broad-brush arrangements of the big band and the advanced harmonic language of bop, his own recordings are difficult to date blind. The title of one of his most renown tunes - On A Misty Night - catches the sense of evanescence which seems to surround both the man and the music.”

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

At the time [1948] that Miles began spending more time at Gil's basement apartment, the New York scene was vibrant but also in another state of upheaval. Big bands were bailing out, and the 52nd Street clubs were closing one by one or converting to strip joints. Yet New York's jazz world, drastically shrunk now in its venues, was still innovating. The seeds of a post-bop direction were already in evidence, not just among Evans and his friends. Arranger/composer/pianist Tadd Dameron, who had written for Gillespie's big band, was fronting a medium-sized combo; his current music had a light, fluid approach that veered off from the more frenetic side of bop.6 Dameron's music and working groups provided an alternative to Miles Davis's work with Charlie Parker in the late 1940s and had a formative impact on Davis’ evolving style.”

- Stephanie Stein Crease, Gil Evans, Out of the Cool: His Life and Music [pp. 154-55]

“‘I taught Tadd, you know,’ recalled Dizzy. ‘You can tell that his writing was very much influenced by my harmony, by what I had worked out on the piano by myself.’”

- Dizzy Gillespie to Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High, The Life of Dizzy Gillespie [p. 163]

While doing research of the music of Tadd Dameron, mainly to increase my own knowledge of it and to enjoy listening to more of it in the process [blog master’s perquisite?], I came across this information about Ian MacDonald’s own search for information about Tadd that resulted in his self-published book on the subject: Ian McDonald, author of TADD: The Life and Legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron.

I have yet to obtain a copy of Ian McDonald’s TADD: The Life and Legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron, but while I continue the search, I thought you might find this article about Ian’s Tadd-quest of interest. It was published online by the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

Below Ian’s overview of his book,you will find the review of it that Don Rose posted to the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s website.

We are planning to add future features on Tadd’s music by Max Harrison and Dan Morgenstern.

© -  Ian McDonald and Don Rose, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In Search of Tad(d) Dameron by Ian MacDonald

“The following material is based on the author's research into Dameron's life and music, which culminated in the recent publication of Tadd—the life and legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron….

In October [2003], a compilation CD titled "The Lost Sessions" will hit the stores which will include previously unreleased material from the Blue Note vaults. Featured will be various bands led by Charlie Rouse, Ike Quebec, Duke Pearson and...Tadd Dameron.

The Dameron session dates from December 1961, a few months after his release from the Lexington Federal Narcotics Hospital and four years before his death. It will provide the only available record of his piano playing since the 1956 "Mating Call" session with John Coltrane. The band features Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Julius Watkins, Sam Rivers, Cecil Payne, Tadd, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. It was produced by Michael Cuscuna and it includes material originally listed as "rejected." 

A couple of years back, when I was researching my biography of Dameron, I asked Cuscuna about this unreleased session. He said that, "The ensembles were a mess. There had been trouble with the copyist." He added that he hoped "to revisit the tapes at some stage to see if they could be released—for historic importance."

Happily, that has now happened, although Cuscuna stresses that the issue will include a caveat about the flaws. This is not likely to bother true Dameron followers, who will be keen to know if Dameron's piano playing changed during his three year stay in Lexington, where he not only led the "house band' but also practised piano most days. [See George Ziskind's essay about the post-Lexington Tadd Dameron.]

Until now, only a few people have heard the post Lexington piano of Dameron. A few lucky souls heard a tape of his solos made privately for Chris Albertson, in December 1961, which went missing after being loaned to Lil Harding. Another private tape that year, made at Ray Bryant's apartment, was stolen.

In 1947, a numerologist had advised Tadd, "To be lucky, you need to add an extra letter to your name." Thus Tad become Tadd. He must have wondered about the wisdom of that change. His run of bad fortune continued in early 1962 when master tapes from a studio session featuring Dameron directing a band led by Milt Jackson and Kenny Dorham were destroyed in a fire.

The "Lost Sessions" from Blue Note will include Dameron tunes Aloof Spoof, The Elder Speaks, Bevan Beeps and Lament For The Living. The first two have not been recorded, but Beeps and Lament were recorded by Chet Baker.

Many Dameron stories have entered into jazz folklore—an Oberlin pre-med doctor story; a Sir Thomas Beecham connection; I Love Lucy theme rumors; Dimitri Tiomkin and the Love Theme from the film Giant; a Mexican ballet; and more. As I researched my book, I naturally sought the truth.

Interviews with people who knew Tadd going back to the 1930s (including someone who saw Tadd make his public debut playing Stardust with the Snake White band in 1936), research at the Oberlin alumni archives, talks with Beecham's road manager, and with Tadd's widow Mia, brought us most of the answers. You'll have to read the book. For now—the Mexican ballet story is untrue.

I wanted to build up as complete a picture as possible of Dameron's compositions and recorded output. I started with a core of about 100 known Dameron tunes and was greatly aided by Dameron buffs such as Andrew Homzy, Brooks Kerr, Bob Sunenblick and Don Sickler in finding more. The tune and song list is now at 190, with the probability of more to come. Along the way I found Sermon On The Mount, a nine part religious suite written by Tadd, Irving Reid and Ira Kosloff (co-writer of Elvis Presley's early hit I Want You I Need You I Love You).

Some of the songs were collaborations with Carl Sigman, Irving Reid, Bernie Hanighen, Maely Daniele, Shirley Jones, Jack Reynolds, Charles White, Albert Carlo, Darwin Jones, Ira Kosloff, and Ann Greer. Boxes of manuscripts, some without chord symbols, are still to be sorted and catalogued. Many of these are likely to be Dameron compositions.

Putting together a Dameron discography proved a lot easier, which ran to almost 300 recordings as player, arranger or conductor. Many have been issued under Tadd's leadership, but others sessions were under the names of Harlan Leonard, Jimmy Lunceford, Sabby Lewis, Billy Eckstine, Georgie Auld, Buddy Rich, Sarah Vaughan, Dickie Wells, Earle Warren, Dizzy Gillespie, Don Redman, Illinois Jacquet, Louie Bellson, Pearl Bailey, Babs Gonzales, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon Coleman Hawkins, Anita O'Day, Kay Penton, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Miles Davis, Tony Proteau, Ted Heath, Bull Moose Jackson, Billy Paul, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Carmen McRae, Blue Mitchell, Milt Jackson, Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker.

Scores in Tadd's hand were unearthed for Duke Ellington, Boyd Raeburn and Stan Kenton, none of which was ever recorded. Tadd collaborated early on with Billy Strayhorn—they regularly compared notes and ideas at the home of Billy Taylor—but apparently they did not write anything down. Scores written for Gil Evans exist but are missing. Detailed searches by Bob Sunenblick and Gil's son, Miles, have failed so far to unearth them.

I listened to many Dameron tribute albums. Not just the well known material by the Philly Joe Jones Dameronia repertory band, but also albums by Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Muriel Winston, Barry Harris, the Japanese big band The Blue Coats, Per Husby, Andy LaVerne, Warren Rand, Dave Cliff and Geoff Simkins. This led me to the beautiful voices of Dameron admirers Vanessa Rubin and Jeri Brown.

I found professionally-recorded versions of Dameron tunes for which I possessed sheet music or lead sheets, but had never heard. These included I'm Never Happy Anymore (three different versions), Lovely One In The Window, Love Took The 7.10 Tonight, Never Been In Love, Take A Chance On Spring, That's The Way It Goes and Weekend.

I owned two versions of Dizzy Gillespie's band playing A Study In Soulphony In Three Hearts but also unearthed a piano solo based on one portion of the longer orchestral piece. Pianist Clifton Smalls told me that Tadd had given him a copy of that piece. He said that Tadd was writing a whole stage act for singer Brook Benton, much in the style of his stage act writing for the 1953 Atlantic City Harlem Revue.

Research into the 1953 Atlantic City period unearthed an agonizing "might have been." I located a tape of Tadd's band which included Clifford Brown which was made privately by cab driver, and occasional baritone saxist, Kellice Swaggerty. He sometimes sat in with the band and taped not just the jazz proceedings, but the whole revue—comics, dancers, singers et al.

Unfortunately Swaggerty's tape machine sounds as if it was placed too near to a bandstand air-conditioning unit. The sound is so distorted that it is unlikely that this could ever be packaged for a wider audience—not even for historical purposes

The search for more tunes and missing tapes goes on. In the meantime Dameron fans have those 1961-vintage "Lost Sessions" to look forward to.

[Ian MacDonald, a journalist and editor for 35 years, is the secretary of the Sheffield (U.K.) Jazz Society and author of Tadd—the life and legacy of Tadley Ewing Dameron. It includes a foreword by Benny Golson and is published by Jahbero Press (ISBN 0 9533778 0 6) and distributed by Cadence (North America), Norbert Ruecker (Germany) and Cadillac Jazz Distribution (UK). For more information, email Jahbero@aol.com or write Jahbero Press, 38 Wadbrough Road, Sheffield S11 8RG, England. Copies of photos of Dameron may be obtained directly from Val Wilmer at 10 Snyder Road, London N16 7UG. Send a SASE for details.]

[Caution: the above contact information dates back to 2003 when this piece was published by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and it may no longer be accurate or active as of this posting].

Reviewed by Don Rose for The Jazz Institute of Chicago

“Tadd Dameron, born in 1917, seamlessly bridged the crucial musical years from swing to bebop. He wrote and arranged for late-1930s bands such as Lucky Millinder, Andy Kirk and Vido Musso before he was 20, jammed with his fellow musical "outlaw" Charlie Parker in Kansas City in 1939 and went on to become an indispensable—though undersung—part of the modern music scene of the '40s through the early '60s.

His compositions "Hot House" and "Good Bait" were heralds of the bebop era. The latter was first introduced by a Dizzy Gillespie small band at one of the first bop-age recording sessions, though the Basie band played it occasionally as many as three years earlier. The former, an unusual ABCA riff on "What is This Thing Called Love," was part of the first Gillespie-Parker small band session that essentially launched the era.

He first recorded another of his masterpieces, "Lady Bird," in 1948 with a remarkable group that included Fats Navarro on trumpet and Wardell Gray and Allen Eager on tenors. It became an instant classic—Miles Davis wrote the counter-melody "Half Nelson" for a recording session that included Parker on tenor—and we're still hearing the lovely tune today, though it actually dates from 1939!

The Cleveland-born composer-arranger-pianist led the band that backed Sarah Vaughan's landmark recording sessions of 1946 and wrote one of the great hits from that session, "If You Could See Me Now." (He adapted a Gillespie coda to create the line.) Two years later the Gillespie big band introduced Dameron's "A Study in Soulphony," the first extended composition of the bop era—but sadly no studio performance was ever released. Most of that year, however, Dameron led what was essentially the house band at the legendary Royal Roost in New York, frequently with Navarro, sometimes with Davis.

He recorded with Navarro for Savoy and Blue Note— almost every side a classic—mentoring the brilliant horn man along the way. (Dameron, like Thelonius Monk, was an excellent teacher, even to the extent of helping horn players improve their tone. Another mentee was Clifford Brown.) Eight years later, Dameron recorded his most impressive extended work, "Fontainebleau," which remains one of the epic jazz compositions. The same year, 1956, he accompanied an emerging tenorman named John Coltrane on an album of Dameron originals.

Like so many of his compadres, Dameron was also hooked on heroin and, two years after the Coltrane date, served three years in the federal narcotics prison at Lexington, Ky. He emerged to find a rapidly and radically changing musical scene in 1961. But he went right back to work playing, composing and recording until his death from cancer in 1965, leaving behind a repertoire of close to 200 songs, including many ballads that have been set to words—even an amazingly popular commercial jingle "Get Wildroot Cream Oil Charlie." (Some of his other well known tunes, done for Gillespie's big band as well as his own groups, include "Cool Breeze," "Gnid," "Our Delight," "The Tadd Walk" and "On a Misty Night.")

This is just the quickest sketch of the life and achievements of this extraordinary musician — one who should be ranked right up there, just behind Ellington, Monk and Mingus as a composer — but who still remains an undersung hero even though several tribute bands exist and testimonial albums have been issued.

Author MacDonald set about accumulating the facts of Dameron's life, mainly through clippings, discographical material and interviews with dozens of the admiring musicians who knew and worked with Dameron. This self-published biography (the publishing house name is another Dameron tune) is a great tribute to its subject and reveals a trove of forgotten or ignored facts. It also includes several discographical appendices, which are interesting and useful, albeit a bit confusingly organized and lacking in detail.

This work is far from fine biography and almost devoid of musical analysis—rather, it's a fan's appreciation, richly and extensively quoting scores of players who knew or worked with its subject. As such it can't compare with works such as Lewis Porter's exemplary bio of Coltrane and works of that caliber, but it's serious in its effort to tell a story that well deserves telling. Dameron fans and relative newcomers alike will be enriched.”

The following video montage features Dameronia under the direction of Don Sickler performing If You Could See Me Now with Charlie Rouse doing the honors on tenor saxophone. It was performed at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, NYC in August, 1988 and, to my knowledge, it has not been released as a commercial recording.