Jon Gordon: Finding His Way

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

“When Benny Carter and Phil Woods are lining up to play on your record and Joe Lovano's on hand to write an enthusiastic liner-note, it's pretty clear that something is happening. Gordon is young, bright and effortlessly accomplished, with none of the brashness and over-confidence that often come with 'effortless' talent (which of course it ain't). He handles tricky material with a naturalness born of considerable application, ….”

“The move to Criss Cross was good for Gordon, putting him in the way of a growing pool of young, relatively like-minded musicians who are not constrained by fashion, or indeed by retro ideologies, but who are simply dedicated to mainstream jazz.”

Unlike many players of his type, Jon Gordon communicates brilliantly on record and uses the studio with great imagination.”

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

"One thing that's important to me is that I've often been in situations with a lot of older musicians, many of whom were very traditional and I feel really honored about that.  People like Roy Eldridge, Eddie Locke, Red Holloway, Barney Kessel, Doc Cheatham, Jay McShann and others.  I try to be as forward looking as I can be but I don't want to ever lose the central qualities that those guys had and I got to be around."

• Jon Gordon, alto saxophonist

The subject of young Jazz artists on Gerry Teekens’ Criss Cross label based in The Netherlands was the focus of a recent blog feature about trumpeter Scott Wendholt and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to return to that theme as it also pertains to alto saxophonist, Jon Gordon.

I had a brief introduction to Jon’s playing via keyboardist Mike LeDonne sextet recording for Criss Cross called Soul Mates [Criss 1074], which features Jon on the front line with Ryan Kisor and Joshua Redman.

I liked what I heard and plumped for three Criss Cross CD’s that Jon had out as the leader: Ask Me Now, [Criss 1099], Witness, [Criss 1121] and Along the Way [Criss 1138].

Masterful tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano had this to say about Jon in the opening paragraphs of the insert notes to Ask Me Now:

“This is Jon Gordon's debut recording for Criss Cross Records. For the date he put a band together of some of New York's most exciting and creative musicians of the day: Tim Hagans, trumpet, Bill Charlap, piano, Larry Grenadier on bass and Billy Drummond on drums.

This period right now in 1995 is one of the most inspired periods for jazz I've experienced in New York City since I arrived here in 1976. Since then I've seen and heard a lot of young cats grow in their own music, as well as develop around the world's greatest Jazz Masters that live and work in the New York scene.

Jon Gordon is one of these amazing young musicians I'm speaking of. We first met in 1988 when Jon called me for a lesson. I was doing quite a bit of teaching at the time on the faculties of William Paterson College as well as New York University. I had the chance to have some very intimate musical exchanges with some very inspiring young saxophonists. I'll never forget when Jon came to my loft. He played with such a strong sound and direction. It didn't fee! like a lesson at all! We played music together!”

Using the CD’s title as the basis for a play on words, Joe concludes by stating:

“So if you ask me now, I am saying so, Jon Gordon is a masterful young altoist with an amazing brilliant future ahead of him. We can all be part of it. All we have to do is listen!!!”

Jon Gordon provides an overview of his career and approach to Jazz in an interview that is largely the basis for Ted Panken’s insert notes to Along the Way [Criss 1138]:

"I think we're in a contemplative time in Jazz," says alto saxophonist Jon Gordon while we discuss Along The Way, his third Criss Cross release. "There's no one genius out there, no one Bird or Monk or Coltrane who is forging ahead in a path. So much has happened so quickly, and there are a lot of musicians like me who are just trying to find our way.  I remember seeing a comment by Miles Davis that as a kid he had five or six records in the house, and he'd go hear bands live.  Now you have the whole history of the music. You have indigenous tribal music, Gregorian chant, all this stuff to sort through to find your own voice."

The winner of the 1996 Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition continues, "I'm 30, but I feel only in the last five years I've had some recordings that show a sense of my finding my way, as it were."

The Staten Island native's preoccupation with music began even before he picked up an instrument.  His mother Sue's first husband was the baritone saxophonist Bob Gordon, who died in a car accident in 1955, eleven years before Jon's birth.  "It's kind of complicated," he explains, "but when I was a kid, up until the age of 9 or 10, I thought Bob had been my father. To me, in my childhood mind, in shaping my psyche as it were, this jazz saxophone player was Dad to me.  I knew I wanted to get involved with music, but I wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do with my life."

The articulate saxophonist recalls his formative years: "I started playing in junior high school when I was 10 years old, through a very good teacher named Larry Laurenzano. The band at my school was really good for that level -- in fact it was supposed to be one of the top dozen junior high school bands in the country -- and hearing it when I got to school imbued in me a desire to be part of this process of making music.  Larry helped me a lot. At the end of junior high he got me free lessons at the Jewish Community Center on Staten Island with a wonderful teacher named Caesar Di Mauro, a marvelous player who gave me a great foundation on the saxophone.  For instance, he had me play scale exercises, playing in every key, in every interval, seconds through sevenths, which really built my technique.

"After junior high school I attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life.

The ferryboat ride across New York Harbor is a much greater distance in terms of art and culture than it appears. When I first came there at 13, suddenly I met a Chinese girl playing violin who'd been studying seriously since she was two who could absolutely play the shit out of anything you put in front of her.  I went from playing selections from Rocky for my entrance piece into this world of much greater depth and width.  By the end of my junior year I was a pretty good Classical saxophone player, and won high marks on juries. That enabled me to play with the school orchestra, which gave me a real sense of accomplishment.

"Right around the time I hit 16, though, I fell in love with Jazz. I heard two Phil Woods records, Musique Du Bois and Song of Sisyphus, and they totally flipped me out. That started a one-year odyssey where I followed Phil around to all the clubs and haggled him for a year.  Finally one day, he looked at me and said, 'Well, can you play?” Before I could respond, he said, 'Well, it doesn't matter because you've got to pay me anyway.  Here's my card. Call my wife.' That began a wonderful two-year association where I studied with him maybe 10 or 11 times over a two-year period. After the second lesson, he never accepted a cent!  I think there's something very magical about being able to stand next to one of your heroes, and something happens to you when you hear music live as opposed to hearing records.  I was able to play duets with Phil at a point where he was like my hero, the one guy in the world I would choose to study with.

"I studied with Phil until just before I turned 19, and I grew a lot from being with him.  I'd heard Bird when I was 15 or something, and I don't think I really got it, but once I heard Phil, I got that immediately. Sonny Stitt, Cannonball, then Bird, and then Trane. It was a progression of things, a domino effect; once I absorbed one thing, then I was able to go further and further.  Phil gave me the groundwork for learning how to be an improviser, how to play on Il-V's. When he'd give me information, his attitude was, 'Don't come back until you get it.'  Phil was incredibly supportive when I needed it, but when he wasn't happy with something he would come right out with it."

During this time of intense study, Gordon got an invaluable bandstand apprenticeship with some of New York's living masters after tenor saxophonist Eddie Chamblee, the Lionel Hampton veteran who ran a Saturday jazz brunch at Sweet Basil in Greenwich Village, took him under his wing. Gordon explains: "When I'd just turned 17, just starting to study with Phil, Margaret Davis, a friend of mine whose daughter I went to high school with, told me that people sometimes got to sit in there at Saturdays, and suggested I bring my horn.  Eddie Chamblee is an angel of a human being.  He welcomed me with open arms. When I went up to say hello to him at the end of the gig, he saw my horn and said, 'Well, you come right back and play!' After that, I'd basically go and play half the gig every Saturday for five years.  Eddie's rhythm section was Ernie Hayes on piano, Jimmy Lewis, bass, Belton Evans or Khalil Mahdi on drums; Harold Ousley and Percy France, both wonderful tenor players, would sub for Eddie when he couldn't make it.

"Another one of my musical fathers was Eddie Locke, the drummer. He taught a drummer I used to play with, and he took me and a number of us under his wing.  I actually got to play a concert with Roy Eldridge when I was 20, in 1987, where he was singing, not playing trumpet. That was the thrill of a lifetime, man.  He came in, he played two choruses of the Blues, he spun around to me, pointed the mike at

my bell, stomped his foot and said, 'Blow!!”  I literally felt as though I was 6 inches off the floor at that point.  It was such an incredible experience.  I was kind of just finding out who Roy Eldridge was at that point.  I was just learning about the music. Also, I played with Doc Cheatham on the Sweet Basil Sunday brunch, and at festivals and things.

"Even though I try to write and play in (for lack of a better term) a modern kind of concept, to me there is nothing like somebody playing from their heart and soul. There's nothing hipper than Ben Webster playing a ballad.   That's the feeling I want to hear when I listen to music; it doesn't matter what the style or notes are.”

You can check out Jon’s brilliant alto playing on the following video on which he performs Chick’s Tune with Tim Hagans, trumpet, Bill Charlap, piano, Larry Grenadier on bass and Billy Drummond on drums. If the tune sounds vaguely familiar to your ear, it may be because it is based on the changes to You Stepped Out of A Dream.

Louie Bellson: Blazing, Bombastic and Beautiful

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

Although his illustrious career is detailed in any number of places including his own website, Louie Bellson’s name is not the subject of a dedicated chapter in any of the major anthologies on Jazz drumming.

Come to think of it, for that matter, neither is Joe Morello, although Joe does get his own chapter in Georges Paczynski’s Une Histoire de la Batterie de Jazz, Tome 2, while Louie has to share one with another former Ellington drummer, Sam Woodyard, in which the focus is on Skin Deep [which Louie composed.] Duke used it as a wowie, zowie drum solo intended as crowd pleaser.

Along with Gene Krupa and Buddy, Louie is often mentioned as part of what Duke referred to as “The Big Three,” but I suspect that this is more to do with Ellington’s habit of hyping things up than with any real recognition of Louie’s skills as a drummer.

Over the years, I got to know Louie a bit and I’ve never been around anyone who visibly enjoyed playing drums more than Louie Bellson.

When he sat down behind the monster, double bass drum kit that he preferred, he just exuded energy and enthusiasm.

Louie was a well-schooled drummer with lots of technical skills and an uncanny knack of seeming to ride over a set of drums, almost as though he was barely touching them. He speed was blazingly fast, but unlike Buddy Rich, he rarely generated any power to go along with his lighting-fast stick control. He touched the drums instead of striking them.

When he did produce the sound of power in his solos, it generally came from coordinating the double bass drums with single stroke rolls on the snare drum and tom toms. Once he got those big bass drums going [he used two, 30” diameter bass drums], it sounded like artillery rounds were being fired off as a commemorative salute.

Louie generated his speed from the finger control method of playing drums in which the rebound from the stick is employed along with very relaxed wrists to perpetuate movement on and around the drum heads. The stick is tapped back down instead of being banged or slapped into the drum.

Louie was not a big guy; if anything he was slight and a bit demure, but boy, get him behind a set of drums and he “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“Who cares about winning polls. I’ve got my own big band and we’re having fun.”

“Who do I like in today’s Jazz drummers? I like ‘em all. I always learn something from every drummer.”

“What type of stick do I use? I use a variety of ‘em: different lengths; different beads; different weights. Keeps your hands more sensitive and responsive.”

All these responses and many more like them came from Louie’s answers to questions at drum clinics. He was usually mobbed afterwards with everyone coming up to give him a hug and to thank him.

“Sure, sure,” he would say: “Hey, does anyone want to try the double bass drums? Don’t be afraid [everyone was because hardly anyone had that kind of coordination]. It’s easy. Just sit down and just do it.”

When one of us would try playing the two bass drum kit, he’d always say - “Beautiful, beautiful” - no matter how badly we messed them up.

Louie Bellson had blazingly fast hands, used his feet to “detonate” bass drums bombs” while all the while wearing a beautiful smile on his face.

He was revered by drummers and just about every musician he ever worked with because he was an excellent drummer but never lorded his talents and abilities over anyone. Jazz cats come in all “shapes and size.” Some have incredible technical skills while others just get by on their instruments with a strong will and deep feelings. Louie didn’t care as long as you loved the music and were honestly yourself while trying to play it.

In all the years I’ve been around Jazz musicians, I have never met a kinder more nobler soul that Louie Bellson.

Len Lyons and Don Perlo put together this brief synopsis about Louie and his career in their Jazz Portraits: The Lives and Music of the Jazz Masters:

Louis Bellson - also “Louie” - Louis Paul Balassoni [1924 - 2009]

[Ed. note. - Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni]

‘Bellson, an excellent technician and all-around musician, can power a big band with his driving beat, or tastefully accompany small combos and vocalists. He pioneered the use of twin bass drums during the mid-1940s, sparked the languishing Ellington Orchestra from 1951 to 1953, and during the 1970s led his own big band, for which he composed and arranged. Modest and gregarious, Bellson solos little for a drummer of his virtuosity and easily slips in and out of diverse environments: jazz clubs, TV, educational clinics, and orchestras.

The son of a music-store proprietor, Bellson learned to tap-dance as a boy, which he credits with developing his sense of time and rhythm. He was soon proficient on drums and won several competitions, including one sponsored by an early idol, Gene Krupa. Bellson worked for Benny Goodman in 1943 and again in 1945-46. In 1946, with Ted Fio Rito's commercial band, he inaugurated the use of two bass drums, which increases the drummer's ability to propel a large group. Bellson then replaced Buddy Rich, with whom he is often compared, in the Tommy Dorsey band (1947-49).

The subsequent period with Ellington, however, established him as a major talent. Bellson was a precise yet fiery drummer and a capable composer, adding to the band's book "Hawk Talks," "Ting-a-ling," and "Skin Deep," which showcased an extended drum solo.... In 1953 Bellson left the Ellington band to further the career of his new wife, Pearl Bailey.

Bellson accompanied Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum and various small combos. He rejoined Ellington (1965—66), served as Bailey's music director, and composed for various bands. During the mid-1970s, Bellson organized a Los Angeles—based group for which he wrote many brassy, extroverted pieces - The Louie Bellson Explosion.  In addition to performing, Bellson has been a popular visiting instructor at college percussion seminars and clinics.”

The distinguished Jazz author, critic and historian Leonard Feather offers a slightly different recap of Louie’s career, as well as, an elaboration of Louie’s Big Band Explosion in these introductory paragraphs that are excerpted from his insert notes to The Louis Bellson Explosion [Pablo/Original Jazz Classics - OJCCD-728-2]:

“Louis Bellson lives in two worlds, enjoying the best of both. By this I do not refer to his dual life as a drummer and composer, or composer and bandleader, but rather to his simultaneous occupancy of past and present. There is no better evidence than this new album of his ability to draw on early experiences while infusing his orchestra with a spirit that is contemporary in the best sense of the word.

Louis, of course, paid lengthy dues as a sideman, with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Count Basie, and most notably Duke Ellington. But because of his qualifications as an all-around musician, he probably was destined from the start to be a leader.

Historically, it is interesting to note that he undertook this role on records for the first time with a Los Angeles session for Norman Granz's Clef label in 1953.

Throughout the 1950s he continued to record for Granz, in addition to touring with Jazz at the Philharmonic. With his appearance in combos on several recent Pablo albums, and particularly with the return to records of his own orchestra via this flourishing new company, the wheel has come full circle.

Writing some years ago about Louis's juggling of multiple careers, I noted that he had found a successful solution to the problems posed by any attempt in the post-swing era to organize a big band. Instead of keeping an ensemble together on a year-round basis, he draws on a pool of important Los Angeles-based musicians who can be counted on to constitute a firm foundation. A key figure has always been trombonist Nick Di Maio, who has doubled as manager for the bands since the 1950s. Di Maio is one of a half dozen members of the present unit who play regularly in Doc Severinsen's band on the Tonight show, as does Louis himself whenever he has a little spare time in town.

Several of the sidemen have credentials that include long associations with Bellson. Cat Anderson was a colleague back in the Ellington days. Pete Christlieb, the powerhouse tenor player, now 30, was 22 when he began working with Louis. His section-mate, composer Don Menza, moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and started gigging with the band almost immediately. A more recent addition is Richard "Blue" Mitchell, the poised and expressive trumpeter who had put in long stints with Horace Silver, Ray Charles, and John Mayall before undertaking a cross-Canada tour with Louis in 1974. The two keyboard occupants who share duties here, Nat Pierce and Ross Tompkins, have worked separately with Louis for several years off and on.

To fortify the rhythm section, it was decided to enlist the services of Dave Levine and Paulo Magalhaes, whose additional percussion work was scattered through the two sessions.

All these elements, along with the band's characteristic esprit de corps in the brass and reed sections, come into focus from the opening track.”

For the following video montage, I have selected the closing track from The Louis Bellson Explosion [Pablo/Original Jazz Classics - OJCCD-728-2], about which, Leonard provides these insights:

“La Banda Grande, by Jack Hayes [a long-established orchestrator, conductor and composer for films who has been collaborating with Bellson since they met at an Academy Awards broadcast in the 1960s when both were working for Henry Mancini] and Bellson, is characterized by Louis as "a Chick Corea type Latin thing." Along with contributions by [Blue] Mitchell and [Pete] Christlieb, and a brief spot for [guitarist] Mitch Holder, there is a joyous samba groove that brings out the value of that extra percussion as Louis plays off against Dave Levine and Paulo Magalhaes.

"We really got a good feeling in the studio," says Bellson, "with the help of a natural set-up. The band was arranged just the way we would be in a nightclub, which enabled us to relax; and the engineer got a great sound. John Williams was fantastic both on acoustic and on electric bass. In fact, I'm very happy about the way the whole album turned out."

What Bellson could not add, because bombast is not his style, is that no band of first-class musicians, directed by an instrumentalist so gifted and so unanimously respected, is likely to go very far wrong. "Working for Louis was a ball," somebody remarked to me after a recent gig with the band. I can't remember which sideman said it, because over the years some similar phrase has been echoed by just about everyone who has worked for him. If you don't care to take my word for it, the performance itself offers eloquent proof.”

—Leonard Feather

The Modern Jazz Quartet - "No Sun In Venice"

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

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

It didn’t last very long, but it was fun while it did.

Movies and TV series with Jazz scores written and performed by prominent composers, arrangers and Jazz combos were all the rage for a while.

Johnny Mandel’s score to the movie I Want to Live, Miles Davis’ themes and improvised sketches for  Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (Lift To The Scaffold, and one that has always been among my favorites, pianist John Lewis’ original film score to No Sun in Venice which he performs with his colleagues on The Modern Jazz Quartet No Sun in Venice LP/CD [Atlantic 1284-2].

A recent listening of this recording prompted me to do a bit of research about the group and how John Lewis came to write and record the film score in 1957.

I must admit that the cover painting by J.M.W. Turner [1775-1851], one of a series of famous Venetian oils he created about la serenissima, may have had a great influence on my purchase of this recording as I had never heard the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet [MJQ], nor had I seen the movie.

Thus began my enamorment with one of the most unique groups in the history of Jazz.

Gary Giddins provided this background on the formation of the MJQ in these excerpts from his masterful Visions of Jazz: The First Century:

Modern Jazz Quartet [The First  Forty Years]

“‘In creating, the only hard thing is to begin,’ wrote James Russell Lowell [Poet, Harvard Professor, Editor of The Atlantic Monthly]. For the Modern Jazz Quartet, the world's most venerable chamber group in or out of jazz, the beginning was a three-year trial. Few people in the early '50s would have entertained the idea that a small jazz band could flourish over four decades, bridging generations and styles. Big bands had proved durable in part because, like symphony orchestras, they could withstand changes in personnel, and because they counted on dancers to sustain their appeal. No jazz chamber group had ever lasted more than a few seasons.

When the MJQ first convened, American music was in one of its many transitional phases. The public's taste changed with frightening alacrity. A decade earlier, the country was jitterbugging to swing. After the war, bop ruled jazz, while big bands struggled for survival and pop songs grew increasingly bland. In 1952, there was talk of a cool school in jazz, while younger listeners were drawn to rhythm and blues. A couple of years down the road, there would be hard bop, soul, and rock and roll. Then the deluge: third stream, free jazz, neo-romanticism, acid rock, new music, fusion, neoclassicism, disco, original instruments, hip hop, grunge, and more.

Yet through it all, the Modern Jazz Quartet persisted and prospered. We do well to remember that the fortieth anniversary of the MJQ in 1992 was only the seventy-fifth anniversary of jazz on records, if we honor as genesis the sensationally successful 1917 Victor release of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues” b/w "Dixie Jazz Band One-Step.” Thirty-five years later, on December 22, 1952, John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke met at a Manhattan recording studio leased by Prestige Records and recorded two standards ("All the Things You Are" and "Rose of the Rio Grande") and two Lewis originals with exotic names: "La Ronde," which had its origins in a piece recorded by the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra, and "Vendome," which prefigured the merging of jazz and fugal counterpoint that became an abiding trademark of the MJQ. The records were widely noted, but less widely embraced. With Lewis spending most of his time working toward a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music, the first session was — notwithstanding a gig in an obscure Greenwich Village bistro called the Chantilly — an isolated foray.

The world was a different place that chilly day. At the very moment the quartet cut those records, President-elect Eisenhower was at the Commodore Hotel a few blocks away, meeting with a group of Negro clergymen to whom he expressed "amazement" that discrimination was widely practiced; he promised to appoint a commission to study the matter, adding that he was determined to abide by the law even if every Negro in America voted against him. Also in the news: the Soviets accused the U.S. of murdering eighty-two North Korean and Chinese POWs; allied fighter-bombers strafed Korean supply depots; more than seven hundred protesters staged a rally for the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing; Sugar Ray Robinson announced his retirement from the ring. The New York Times''s music pages noted a concert by George Szell and Guiomar Novaes and two debuts by Stravinsky, but, as was customary, expended not a word on jazz or popular music, and devoted twice the space to radio listings as to television.

In jazz, 1952 is best remembered for the formation of the MJQ, but it was also the year Count Basie (a profound influence on Lewis) returned to big band music after leading an octet for two years; Gerry Mulligan started his pathbreaking quartet; and Eddie Sauter fused with Bill Finegan. Norman Granz took Jazz at the Philharmonic to Europe, where Dizzy Gillespie's sextet was also on tour. Fletcher Henderson died, and trombonist George Lewis was born. Clifford Brown went on the road with an r & b band, while John Coltrane played section tenor for Earl Bostic and Cecil Taylor matriculated at the New England Conservatory. Louis Armstrong had two hit records, "Kiss of Fire" and a remake of "Sleepy Time Down South"; George Shearing introduced his "Lullaby of Birdland"; Thelonious Monk recorded with a trio for the first time in five years. Charlie Parker didn't record in a studio, but he kept busy, performing "Hot House" with Gillespie on TV, leading his strings at the Rockland Palace and Carnegie Hall, and working Birdland with four musicians who, one month later, would make their recorded debut as the Modern Jazz Quartet.”

[Connie Kay replaced Clarke in 1954 and remained in the drum chair with the MJQ until his death in 1994.]

In reviewing the MJQ’s recordings from 1955-onward that have been released as CD’s on Prestige, Atlantic and Pablo Records, some of the qualities that make the Modern Jazz Quartet’s music unique are described in Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“Frequently dismissed - as unexciting, pretentious, bland, Europeanized, pat - the MJQ remained hugely popular for much of the last 30 years, filling halls and consistently outselling most other jazz acts. The enigma lies in that epithet 'Modern' for, inasmuch as the MJQ shifted more product than anyone else, they were also radicals (or maybe that American hybrid, radical-conservatives) who have done more than most barnstorming revolutionaries to change the nature and form of jazz performance, to free it from its changes-based theme-and-solos cliches. Leader/composer John Lewis has a firm grounding in European classical music, particularly the Baroque, and was a leading light in both Third Stream music and the Birth Of The Cool sessions with Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis. From the outset he attempted to infuse jazz performance with a consciousness of form, using elements of through-composition, counterpoint, melodic variation and, above all, fugue to multiply the trajectories of improvisation. And just as people still, even now, like stories with a beginning, middle and end, people have liked the well-made quality of MJQ performances which, on their night, don't lack for old-fashioned excitement.

The fact that they had been Dizzy's rhythm section led people to question the group's viability as an independent performing unit. The early recordings more than resolve that doubt. Lewis has never been an exciting performer (in contrast to Jackson, who is one of the great soloists in jazz), but his brilliant grasp of structure is evident from the beginning. Of the classic MJQ pieces -'One Bass Hit', 'The Golden Striker', 'Bags' Groove' - none characterizes the group more completely than Lewis's 'Django', first recorded in the session of December 1954.

The Prestige [The Artistry of the Modern Jazz Quartet]is a useful CD history of the early days of the band, but it's probably better to hear the constituent sessions in their entirety. Some of the material on the original two-disc vinyl format has been removed to make way for a Sonny Rollins/MJQ set ('No Moe', 'The Stopper', 'In A Sentimental Mood', 'Almost Like Being In Love'), which is a pity, for this material was long available elsewhere.

Connie Kay slipped into the band without a ripple; sadly, his ill-health and death were the only circumstances in the next 40 years of activity necessitating a personnel change. His cooler approach, less overwhelming than Clarke's could be, was ideal, and he sounds right from the word 'go'. His debut was on the fine Concorde, which sees Lewis trying to blend jazz improvisation with European counterpoint. It combines some superb fugal writing with a swing that would have sounded brighter if recording quality had been better. Though the integration is by no means always complete, it's more appealing in its very roughness than the slick Bach-chat that turns up on some of the Atlantics.

The label didn't quite know what to do with the MJQ, but the Erteguns [Ahmet and Neshui, brothers who emigrated to the USA from Turkey] were always alert to the demographics and, to be fair, they knew good music when they heard it. One of the problems the group had in this, arguably their most consistent phase creatively, was that everything appeared to need conceptual packaging, even when the music suggested no such thing. Chance associations, like the celebrated version of Ornette's 'Lonely Woman', were doubtless encouraged by the fact that they shared a label, and this was all to the good; there are, though, signs that in later years, as rock began to swallow up a bigger and bigger market share, the group began to suffer from the inappropriate packaging. Though home-grown compositions reappear throughout the band's history (there's a particularly good 'Django' on Pyramid), there are also constant references to standard repertoire as well and some of these are among the group's greatest achievements.

By the same inverted snobbery that demands standards rather than 'pretentious classical rubbish', it's long been a useful cop-out to profess admiration only for those MJQ albums featuring right-on guests. The earlier Silver collaboration isn't as well known as a justly famous encounter with Sonny Rollins at Music Inn, reprising their encounters of 1951, 1952 and 1953, which were really the saxophonist's gigs. Restored in a fresh mastering, it's clear how much Sonny was an interloper on an already skilled, tight unit. Most of the record is by the MJQ alone, including one of their delicious standard medleys and a brilliant reading of Lewis's 'Midsommer'. The two (live) tracks which Rollins appears on aren't entirely satisfactory, since he cannot make much impression on 'Bags' Groove', already a Jackson staple, and sounds merely discursive on 'A Night In Tunisia'. Overall, this set very much belongs to the MJQ.

Lewis's first exploration of characters from the commedia dell’arte came in Fontessa, an appropriately chill and stately record that can seem a little enigmatic, even off-putting. He develops these interests considerably in the simply titled Comedy, which largely consists of dulcet character-sketches with unexpected twists and quietly violent dissonances. The themes of commedia are remarkably appropriate to a group who have always presented themselves in sharply etched silhouette, playing a music that is deceptively smooth and untroubled but which harbours considerable jazz feeling and, as on both Fontessa and Comedy, considerable disruption to conventional harmonic progression.

Given Lewis's interests and accomplishments as an orchestrator, there have been surprisingly few jazz-group-with-orchestra experiments. More typical, perhaps, than the 1987 Three Windows is what Lewis does on Lonely Woman. One of the very finest of the group's albums, this opens with a breathtaking arrangement of Ornette Coleman's haunting dirge and then proceeds with small-group performances of three works - 'Animal Dance', 'Lamb, Leopard' and 'Fugato' - which were originally conceived for orchestral performance. Remarkably, Lewis's small-group arrangements still manage to give an impression of symphonic voicings.

Kay's ill-health finally overcame him in December 1994 and the following February, the MJQ issued in his memory a concert from 1960, recorded in what was then Yugoslavia, a relatively innocuous destination on the international tour. Whatever its historical resonance, it inspired (as John Lewis discovered when he auditioned these old tapes) one of the truly great MJQ performances, certainly one of the very best available to us on disc. It knocks into a cocked hat even the new edition of the so-called Last Concert. Jackson's playing is almost transcendentally wonderful on 'Bags' Groove' and 'I Remember Clifford', and the conception of Lewis's opening commedia sequence could hardly be clearer or more satisfying. Dedicated To Connie is a very special record and has always been our favourite of the bunch, ….”

Gary Kramer provides this explanation of the turn-of-events that brought about the occasion of John Lewis’ film score for No Sun in Venice in his insert notes to The Modern Jazz Quartet No Sun in Venice LP/CD [Atlantic 1284-2].

“In December 1956 the globe-trotting Modern Jazz Quartet found itself in Paris. Among the enthusiastic Parisians who flocked to St. Germain-des-Pres to hear the group was Raoul Levy, producer of the film And God Created Woman and other international cinema hits. Levy did not come over to the Left Bank merely to spend a pleasant evening digging jazz sounds, but to make John Lewis a business proposition. He was about to produce Sait-On Jamais, a film to star Francoise Arnoul, and wanted to know whether John would be free to write the background music and whether it would be possible to use The Modern Jazz Quartet to make the soundtrack.

John consented to write the score and worked on it assiduously during his scanty leisure hours while he and the Quartet were touring the United States in the first months of 1957. Despite the fact that some of the music was written in Los Angeles, some in Chicago, some of it in New York, the score has structural unity and a high degree of internal organization. It was John Lewis' first film score and represented a special challenge. As he put it, "Jazz is often thought to be limited in expression. It is used for 'incidental music' or when a situation in a drama or film calls for jazz, but rarely in a more universal way apart from an explicit jazz context. Here it has to be able to run the whole gamut of emotions and carry the story from beginning to end."”

Sait-On Jamais (a literal translation of which is One Never Knows) was released in the United States in 1957 as No Sun In Venice by Kinglsey International Pictures.

As I write this feature almost fifty years later, I still have not seen the movie. I noticed that it is now available on DVD, but at $60 bucks, I think I’ll pass.

However, in the intervening half century, I have listened to John Lewis’s score to the film many times and I highly recommend it to you.

The following video contains lots of sunny images of Venice as set to the Cortege track from John Lewis score to One Never Knows.

Connie Kay's use of triangles, finger cymbals, tambourines, open high hats and mallets on cymbals to create gong-like effects almost adds a forbidden sense of joy to this dirge.

Houston Person: "A Veteran of A Vanishing Tenor Saxophone Generation"

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

Recently, one of my Jazz buddies from an internet chat group asked those of us on the list who were familiar with his playing to provide more background information on Houston Person, a tenor saxophonist who was relatively new to her.

I thought I would provide my share of an answer to this query in the form of this blog posting, one that includes the usual concluding video with a sample of the profiled musician’s music.

“A blues oriented player with a large, warm sound" is the description of Houston Person given in Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz.

Eddie Cook writes of him:

“He was born in Florence, South Carolina on November 10, 1934). Although he was taught piano by his mother as a child, he took little interest in music until he began collecting jazz recordings and playing tenor saxophone at the age of 17. During his military service in Germany he played in groups that included Eddie Harris, Lanny Morgan, Leo Wright, Cedar Walton, and Lex Humphries.

He attended the Hartt School of Music [West Hartford, Connecticut] and then toured with Johnny Hammond; from that time he showed a liking for working with organists. After leaving Hammond he formed his own group, which, with changing personnel, has made a number of recordings. He performed intermittently with Etta Jones from 1968 and from 1973 they worked together regularly, making nightclub and concert appearances.

Besides his recordings as a leader, Person has taken part in sessions as a sideman with Groove Holmes's quintet and Charles Earland, and in a duo with Ran Blake. In 1984 he performed at the Grande Parade du Jazz, Nice, France. The influence of rhythm-and-blues is evident in Person's direct, swinging style and full-toned sound; he performs blues and ballads with particular skill. [The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz].”

Eddie also authored an article about Houston that appeared in JazzJournal International:" 'I Just Like People who Swing': Houston Person," JJI, xxxviii/1 (1985).

Richard Cook and Brian Morton remark: “Person is in the Coleman Hawkins mold, a fine ballad player with a low, urgent tone.”

They go on to write:

“Though Person's Muse catalogue has not yet comeback on line [more of it has become available since this writing], his stock remains high as a forefather of the acid jazz movement, a linage explicitly celebrated on a Prestige compilation.

It's pretty straight ahead stuff: blaring brass, chugging organ, square-four rhythm and the beefy sound of Houston's tenor over the top; inexhaustible, reliable, seldom anything other than squarely on the beat and on the case.

The gospelly side of his playing personalty is surprisingly much in evidence on his dance-orientated sets. Let Every Voice And Sing on Legends has the power to bring a lump to the throat, and there are moments on his discs when Person, sounding like a latter-day Ike Quebec, negotiates some quite subtle interchanges with the rhythm players. One either goes for this aura! equivalent of soul food or one doesn't. … He is a veteran of a vanishing saxophone generation.” [The Penguin Guide of Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.