Nueva Manteca - "Varadero Blues"

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

“Jazz and Latin music have cross pollinated each other for quite some time. Some trace it back to Jelly Roll Morton's experimentations with what he called "the Latin tinge." Of course, none of this should be all that surprising. The Motherland, Africa, and its' people have developed a rich heritage of musical and rhythmic styles which have made their way through Latin America and the rest of the world and continue to serve as inspiration for so many.

What is surprising is the manner in which gifted artists have decided to use this inspiration as a platform for their own creative endeavors. The permutations are quite plentiful, but often it comes down to the grafting of Latin rhythmic patterns onto a decidedly jazzy improvised mode of music. There are even current practitioners who have evolved a hybrid that almost hints at 20th century classical music with Latin flavors.

In the final analysis, the purest and most satisfying blends comes with a thorough understanding of the Latin rhythmic elements (a complex and demanding feat in and of itself), which are then seamlessly utilized to complement the flavor of the melodic content. In other words, it should be about much more than playing a jazz standard and then deciding to do it with a mambo rhythm attached.”

- C. Andrew Hovan

Varadero is a resort town in Cuba’s Matanzas province and is also one of the largest resort areas in the Caribbean. It is situated on the Hicacos Peninsula, between the Bay of Cárdenas and the Straits of Florida, some 140 km east of Havana, at the eastern end of the Via Blanca highway.

It is also home to a highly regarded International Jazz Festival at which Nueva Manteca has been a featured group.

Led by pianist Jan Laurens Hartong, the eight-piece band Nueva Manteca are a Netherlands-based Latin jazz outfit who produce a highly authentic distillation of Latin music and also embrace traditions such as Arabic, classical, Dutch Antillean and salsa. As Hartong told the press in 1996, ‘It’s the same situation as hearing a Korean violinist playing a Beethoven concerto. It’s already accepted in the jazz world. In the whole world music development, a lot of people are digging into all kinds of cultures.’

Born in 1941, Hartong began playing dixieland piano at the age of 12, before progressing to bebop by 15, at which time he began to work professionally. He played alongside Jan Hammer and Joachim Kühn in a 1966 international jazz festival judged by Cannonball and Nat Adderley where he won a medal.

A fan of Latin music since his childhood, Hartong formed a 10-piece salsa band in Rotterdam in 1983. He also visited the music’s home in Cuba in 1984 and 1987, which led to him switching to a Latin jazz style and changing his group’s name from Manteca to Nueva Manteca.

Nueva Manteca also included the famed beach in the title of one of its one of its earliest CD’s - Varadero Blues [Timeless SJP 318]. The music on this 1991 CD [the music was first recorded in April and September, 1988 and later released on CD]] consists mainly of Latin Jazz adaptations of songs from the Great American Songbook including Yesterdays, April in Paris and Just Friends, but it also brings forth Jan’s intricate arrangements of Jazz Standards such as Monk’s Round Midnight, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Lee Morgan’s beautiful ballad, Ceora.  The group also offers treatments of Latin Jazz staples such as Macumbia by Francisco Zumaque. The CD gets its title from Jan’s original Varadero Blues.

This posting represents another of our continuing efforts to highlight the many Latin Jazz adaptations that form the themes for Nueva Manteca’s music.

Jan Laurens Hartong contributed the following insert noted to Varadero Blues [Timeless SJP 318] which further explain its musical mission of fusing the primarily rhythmic aspects and styles of Cuban music with Bebop and Hard Bop.

“Ever since Jelly Roll Morton's 'Spanish tinge' reference, musicians have been fascinated by the idea of Latin-Jazz fusion.

In the 1940's, Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza, musical director of the legendary Machito orchestra, started it all by inviting leading Bebop musicians as guest soloists, notably Charlie Parker. It also was Mario Bauza who brought his friend Dizzy Cillespie into contact with the Cuban cultus drummer Chano Pozo, resulting in the creation of the classic Cuban Bebop composition 'Manteca'.

In the 1970's, after the Beatles Era, Latin music became all the rage under the name Salsa. Capitalizing on this development, a number of New York top musicians co-lead by the brothers Andy and Jerry Gonzalez took up again the musical thread of the past, extending it further. The SoundScape, a warehouse loft on 10th Avenue, became the center of Latin Jazz experiments for many years.

Mambo King Tito Puente formed his small Latin ensemble Heavily emphasizing the jazz idiom, In Cuba, after the Revolution, the musical world also got into turmoil: trap drums took a leading role in Cuban percussion and a group of progressive musicians from the Orquestra Cubana de Musica Moderna created the first prominent Cuban Latin Jazz band - Irakere. Soon the second generation followed : Grupo Afro Cuba, Proyecto, Emiliano Salvador quintet,

Inspired by these developments and by my own personal contacts,  I formed a 10-piece group in Rotterdam in 1982 called 'Manteca', named after the famous CuBop song,

Its aim was to stimulate the Latin Jazz synthesis in Holland. Manteca succeeded to attain a top position in the Netherlands and also scored high internationally, performing at the First London Salsa Festival in 1986, In the course of time, the accent of our music had shifted more to Salsa dance music, In 1987, after returning from a second field trip to Cuba, I decided to change the band's musical direction, strongly inspired by the possibilities of using drums together with Latin percussion, A new band was created, a return to the original CuBop concept: the NUEVA MANTECA LATIN JAZZ SEPTET,

As for the music : we work as much as possible with our own arrangements and concepts, expanding our horizon, by sometimes including other Latin traditions as well. Check out 'Macumbia' and 'April in Paris'. We also strive at reviving fairly unknown or forgotten Jazz pieces in a Latin way, for example 'Ceora'. We'd like to dedicate this recording to the memory of the great CuBop pioneers. - Jan L Hartong”

The following video features Nueva Manteca’s arresting rendition of Lee Morgan’s Ceora.

The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra: A Big Band Is Born [From the Archives]

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

Who would have thought that a big band born twenty years [20] after their heyday would still be going strong almost forty-five [45] years later?

Such is the case with The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra which came into existence in February, 1966 at The Village Vanguard in New York City and still holds forth every Monday night in the same location as The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

Obviously, its personnel has gone through changes over the years but the high quality of the band’s music hasn’t.

Of course, this is my interpretation of the band’s historical, shall we say, line of continuity.  Following this introduction, Bill Kirchner offers a much more accurate demarcation between the original Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra and the ones that came after it.

At its inception, the signature aspect of the band’s sound was the writing of Thad Jones, although Bob Brookmeyer, Tom McIntosh and Garnet Brown [all trombonists!] contributed charts to the band’s initial play book.

The band’s founders, trumpeter, composer and arranger, Thad Jones, and drummer, Mel Lewis, traveled widely divergent paths in coming together to form the band.

For years, Mel had been a first-call drummer with The Stan Kenton Orchestra, the Bill Holman Big Band, what has come to be known as the Terry Gibbs Dream Band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band.

Few big band drummers in the history of Jazz have ever been more successful than Mel who would cap his career with almost a decade-and-a-half of performing with the big band he co-led with Thad.

On the other hand, during this same timeframe, Thad Jones had enjoyed an almost exclusive association with Count Basie’s big band [1954-1963] as a trumpet player and composer-arranger, although many of the charts that gave birth to the distinctive sound of the orchestra that he co-led with Mel were largely rejected during his tenure with Basie for the reasons noted below by Bill.

“Gave birth” may be a suitable metaphor for many aspects of the music of The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra as one of Thad’s earliest and, by now, most famous compositions is entitled A Child Is Born.

Music has a way of sometimes capturing – The Ineffable – that which is beyond words and so it is with A Child Is Born. The miracle of human birth is beautifully captured in the melodic refrains of the song in a way that supersedes and transcends verbal expression.

Thad and Mel once said that the music of A Child Is Born should be played when every child is born.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles is in full agreement with this sentiment, so much so that we’ve used the band earliest, recorded version of A Child Is Born as the audio track in the following video tribute to the band.

In 1994, Michael Cuscuna and his team at Mosaic Records gathered together the band’s first, half-dozen LP's and issued them as The Complete Solid State Recordings of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra [Mosaic MD-5-151].

Michael asked Bill Kirchner, the eminent Jazz musician, author and editor, to write the insert notes to the collection.

Michael and Bill were kind enough to grant us permission to reprint a portion of Bill’s insightful writings about The Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra’s origins and subsequent history.

© -Bill Kirchner/Mosaic Records; used with the permission of the author; copyright protected, all rights reserved.

"On February 12, 1966, The New York Times ran a review by John S. Wilson entitled "2 New Big Bands Here Appeal To More Than Old Memories." Wilson first men­tioned the reorganized Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and its new director Urbie Green, as well as such sidemen as Howard McGhee, Budd Johnson, Dave McKenna, Mousey Alexander, and Arnie Lawrence. "Most of these sidemen are successful freelance New York musicians," wrote Wilson. "And that makes the band's future questionable. When the band ends its run at the River Boat, will these men be willing to go on the road, or will Mr. Green have to fill in with less experienced musicians?"

The review continued:

“One band that is not likely to leave New York is The Jazz Band, an 18-piece group jointly led by Thad Jones, a former Count Basie trumpeter, and Mel Lewis, a drummer who has served with Woody Herman, Stan and Ben Goodman. Organized last Thanksgiving as a rehearsal band that met once a week, The Jazz Band gave its first public performance Monday night at the Village Vanguard in an enthusiastic atmosphere reminiscent of the great jazz days on 52nd Street. This all-star band — it includes Bob Brookmeyer, Hank Jones, Richard Davis, Snooky Young, and Jerome Richardson, among others — ripped through Thad Jones's provocative, down-to-earth arrange­ments with the surging joy that one remembers in the early Basie band or Woody Herman's First Herd. Those were young bands whose skills sometimes could not keep up with their desires. But these are old pros, having a wonderful time and rising to each other's challenges, even to such adventures as three-part improvisation. Because these musicians have regular jobs, they can only get together once a week. That will be on Mondays at the Vanguard for the next few weeks at least.”

What was obvious to everyone present at the Vanguard on the night of February 7, 1966 was that an exceptional ensemble had been born. What no one could have predicted was that the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra would become one of the most acclaimed and innovative big bands in jazz history, that it would tour extensively throughout three continents, and that its offspring, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, would still be in residence on Monday nights twenty-eight years later.

Two events gave impetus to the formation of the Jones/Lewis band. One was the breakup of the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band (of which Jones, Lewis and Bob Brookmeyer were members) in 1964. The second was Count Basie's commissioning of Jones to write an album's worth of arrangements for the Basie band in 1965.

In his nine years as a Basie sideman (1954-63), Jones had contributed significantly to the Basie library (as is evi­denced in Mosaic's boxed sets of Basie's live and studio Roulette recordings), but this new commission resulted in his most ambitious writing for Basie. As far as we know, Jones wrote seven originals: The Second Race, The Little Pixie, A-That's Freedom, Low Down, Backbone, All My Yesterdays, and Big Dipper. Basie tried all of them and ultimately rejected all of them; apparently they were too difficult for the band, as well as too atypical of the band's style.

He did, however, allow Jones to keep the scores and copied parts. At that point (the fall of 1965), Jones and Lewis decided to make their move and called a rehearsal.

Most of the musicians they contacted were, like them­selves, active in the New York television and recording scenes. It was a period when all three television networks, plus the syndicated shows, had large orchestras with musi­cians on staff. Many of these players, and many others as well, also did record dates and jingles; it was quite com­mon for a busy recording musician to do two, three, or four dates a day, every day.

(Much of this work has disappeared, in New York and elsewhere. Most of the network staff jobs have been abol­ished, and record and jingle dates have considerably diminished in number, to a point where most recording musicians now consider studio work a secondary activity in their careers. As one musician, formerly very active in the studios, half-facetiously put it, "If you want to be success­ful in the studios nowadays, start a synthesizer cartage firm.")

A number of musicians on the early Jones/Lewis band were, as was Jones, on staff at CBS: Jimmy Nottingham, Jack Rains, Cliff Heather, and Hank Jones. Snooky Young and Jimmy Maxwell were at NBC, and Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Berry and Danny Stiles did the syndicated Merv Griffin show. Others, such as Jerome Richardson, Jerry Dodgion, Pepper Adams, Richard Davis, and Lewis were active in recording. And there were some talented up-and-comers: Eddie Daniels, Jimmy Owens, Garnett Brown and Joe Farrell. (Brown and Farrell had worked alongside Jones with George Russell the previous year.)

The rehearsals began in December, 1965 and although memories differ as to how frequently they occurred, the consensus is that they were held more-or-less weekly, usu­ally on Mondays, beginning at midnight and lasting until three or four in the morning. (Considering the busy sched­ules of these players, the late hours come as no surprise.) For the most part, the rehearsals took place at A & R Studios, 112 West 48th Street near Sixth Avenue (and next door to the famous musicians' bar Jim and Andy's). Occasionally, the location shifted to the second A & R stu­dio at 799 Seventh Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, or to Soundmixers at 1619 Broadway at 49th.

In exchange for free studio time, Thad and Mel allowed engineer Phil Ramone to use the rehearsals as practice sessions for his student engineers. One such engineer was Don Hahn, who in later years was to record several Jones/Lewis albums, including two in this collection. The rehearsals were recorded on 7 1/2 inch mono tapes; unfor­tunately, the tapes were placed in storage and were probably destroyed.

Though the rehearsals were private, there were a num­ber of invited guests. One was Manny Albam, one of the busiest composer-arrangers in New York during the fifties and sixties. Albam also served as "musical director" for the Solid State label and worked in the engineer's booth during most of the sessions heard here. Another guest was Dan Morgenstern, then New York editor of Down Beat. He recalls that even at the very beginning of its existence, this band was different, not only because of Thad's writing, but also for his use of the rhythm section. For contrast, Jones would at various times cue rhythm players in and out behind soloists. Occasionally, the entire rhythm section was pulled out, and a saxophone or trombone player would be left entirely on his own.

These practices became a source of pride to the band members. As Jerry Dodgion remarked with a chuckle, "It was supposed to be different."

Another invited guest was WABC-FM disc jockey Alan Grant, who, among other activities, was broadcasting live from the Half Note (at Spring and Hudson in the West Village) on Friday nights. One of those broadcasts had fea­tured the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet with Mel Lewis. After attending a rehearsal of the orchestra, Grant went to Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard, and urged Gordon to book the band for some Monday nights.

New York's jazz clubs at that time were in economic doldrums. Birdland had recently closed for good, and some clubs were reverting to a weekends-only policy. The Vanguard was running Monday night jam sessions that sometimes were hosted by Roland Kirk (pre-Rahsaan). Probably the highlight of those sessions was the night when a 20-year-old Keith Jarrett sat in and dazzled everyone in the audience — including Art Blakey, who hired him.

Grant persuaded Gordon to book the Jones/Lewis band for two Mondays in February. To make the band financially affordable for the club, the musicians agreed to work for very little money. Each sideman's salary was $17; admis­sion at the door was $2.50. As much as can be pieced together, the probable personnel of the band that night was: Thad Jones, conductor, cornet or flugelhorn (he alternated between the two instruments during his years with the band); Snooky Young, Bill Berry, Jimmy Nottingham, Jimmy Owens, trumpets; Bob Brookmeyer, Garnett Brown, Jack Rains, Cliff Heather, trombones; Jerome Richardson, Jerry Dodgion, Joe Farrell, Eddie Daniels, Marvin Holladay, reeds; Hank Jones, piano; Sam Herman, guitar; Richard Davis, bass; Mel Lewis, drums.

The club was packed, the acclaim was instantaneous, and The Jazz Band (as it was then billed) was off and run­ning. Max Gordon extended the band's run indefinitely, and the sidemen's salaries were increased to $18. In March, the band played a concert at Hunter College in New York City, and in May, it began its recording career.

What was its impact? Of the big bands that emerged in the early-to-mid-sixties (the others being those of Quincy Jones, Terry Gibbs, Maynard Ferguson, Gerry Mulligan, Gerald Wilson, Buddy Rich, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland, and Don Ellis), the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band was, in this writer's view, the most influential. The Quincy Jones and Mulligan ensembles, though in more conservative ways prophetic of the Jones-Lewis approach, were relatively short-lived. Wilson's and Gibbs's groups were rarely heard outside of California except on records, and the same was true of Clarke-Boland in Europe. Rich, Ferguson and Ellis pose a different consideration: though they all led consis­tently well-drilled bands that were capable of fine performances, their groups were built around their leaders' flamboyant personalities more than on enduring music.

Thad Jones and Mel Lewis were, first of all, two of the most esteemed "musician's musicians" of their time. Neither was a "star," but both were unique instrumentalists whose skills were valued by leaders ranging from Basie, Kenton and Goodman to Gillespie, Monk and Mingus. They therefore had no trouble in assembling a band full of New York's finest jazz-oriented players, all of whom were first-rate ensemble performers and most, in addition, good to exceptional soloists.

As a composer-arranger, Jones perhaps more than any­one else in the sixties revitalized conventional big band writing; this is with due respect given to such contempo­raries as Oliver Nelson and Gerald Wilson. ("Conventional," by the way, refers to the standard trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and rhythm section instrumentation, thereby removing the work of Gil Evans from this discussion. Evans's methods and instrumentations were considerably less orthodox — for one thing, he eliminated the saxo­phone section from his writing.) Jones certainly drew from his long experience with Basie, but he had an affinity for the dense cluster harmonies of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn as well. Combining these influences with the rhythmic and harmonic innovations of bebop, a profound melodic gift, and a subtle sense of humor, Jones rose in a few years from relative obscurity to a position as a preeminent jazz writer.

Above all, what made this band unique among big bands was its rhythm section. Richard Davis and Mel Lewis were highly in demand in New York recording cir­cles for all kinds of projects. Arranger-conductor Peter Matz, for example, used them on several Barbra Streisand albums and on numerous pre-recorded segments for televi­sion shows such as THE KRAFT MUSIC HALL and HULLABALOO. ("We were a team," Davis recalled emphatically.) Obviously, the empathy between these two was enormous, and com­bined with such pianistic wizards as Hank Jones and his successor Roland Hanna (and occasional "subs" such as Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Albert Dailey), the section coupled the precision of the best big band rhythm foundations with the inventiveness and flexibility of the best small groups. What Davis in particular did could be highly unorthodox ("Richard Davis would have been fired from any other big band for playing like that," a prominent jazz bassist once remarked admiringly). Yet everything he played worked, and even Jones's more conventional pieces took on a unique flavor.

In the beginning, of course, the rhythm section included a Freddie Green-style guitarist, Sam Herman, who was also the band's music copyist. As the band developed and the rhythm section became more daring, Herman played less guitar and more shaker (which, by the way, ain't easy). Eventually, the guitar was phased out, though Barry Galbraith, Sam Brown and David Spinozza were later brought in for studio sessions.

The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra lasted thirteen years, becoming for many listeners the most admired big band of its time. It never became a full-time entity in the sense of the Ellington, Basie, Herman and Kenton ensem­bles, but the band nonetheless did a substantial amount of touring, including numerous trips to Europe and Japan and a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union in 1972. By that year, most of the early members had departed, though Roland Hanna, Pepper Adams and Jerry Dodgion remained until 1974, '77 and '78, respectively. The replacements included veterans of the caliber of Quentin "Butter" Jackson, Frank Foster and Walter Morris, as well as such outstanding young players as Jon Faddis, George Mraz, Gregory Herbert, Harold Danko, and Dick Oatts.

By the time the orchestra parted ways with Solid State (which was then being phased into the Blue Note fold) in 1970, they'd done the three studio albums and two live Village Vanguard sessions included in this set. They also backed up Joe Williams and Ruth Brown for the label and participated in a European all-star tour that yielded a double album for Blue Note called ja/z wave ltd.

The band recorded sporadically in the seventies for Philadelphia International (POTPOURRI), Nippon Columbia (Live in Tokyo and for A & M (SUITE FOR POPS, NEW LIFE and LIVE IN MUNICH). On a for-hire basis, they also recorded Thad Jones-arranged albums by Jimmy Smith (Portuguese Soul), organist Rhoda Scott and vocalist Monica Zutterland.

Thad and Mel also led the Finnish UMO Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Jazz Group on several recordings. They also worked frequently as a quartet, making one album for Artists House, later reissued on A & M.

In January 1979, Thad Jones, by all accounts without warning or explanation, left the band and moved to Copenhagen to lead the Danish Radio Orchestra. Mel Lewis, more than a little embittered, assumed sole leadership and proceeded to build a new library with contributions from alumni Bob Brookmeyer, Jerry Dodgion and Bob Mintzer, members such as Jim McNeely, Kenny Werner, Ed Neumeister, Earl Mclntyre, and Ted Nash, and other contributors (Bill Holman, Bill Finegan, Mike Abene, Rich DeRosa, Mike Crotty). Mel continued to play Thad's music; he even acquired the new charts that Thad was sending back to the U.S. to be published.

After a few years, Jones and Lewis achieved a grudging kind of reconciliation. One incidence of this occurred in 1985, when Jones returned to the States for a short time to lead the Count Basic Orchestra. In New York on a Monday night, Thad paid a visit to the Vanguard to see his former band. He went up to Mel and gave him a big bear hug; Mel's arms remained at his sides.

Thad Jones returned to Copenhagen, where he died of cancer on August 19, 1986 at age 63. On September 2, a memorial service was held at St. Peter's Church in New York City. Mel was asked to speak and gave a moving impromptu talk about his former partner. He couldn't resist quipping: "Thad left without saying goodbye — that's twice.”

Mel Lewis died in New York on February 2, 1990 at age 60 after a long battle with melanoma. Fittingly, his last gig was with his orchestra only three weeks before he died.

The band, now a cooperative called the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, continues the Monday night tradition estab­lished a generation ago. It's a tradition unlike any in the entire history of jazz. But then, it was supposed to be different.”

The band traveled to Rotterdam in September, 1969 and was filmed on Dutch NPS television performing Jerome Richardson’s arrangement of his composition – Groove Merchant.

Hod O'Brien - The Gordon Jack Interview

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

Gordon Jack “stopped by” the editorial offices of JazzProfiles and granted us permission to use his interview with pianist Hod O’Brien which first appeared in the JazzJournal magazine in June, 2001.

The interview with Hod also can be found in Gordon’s singular book, Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective [Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2004.

The footnotes references are located at the conclusion of the feature as is a video that will offer you a taste of Hod’s Jazz piano style.

© -  Gordon Jack/JazzJournal; used with the author’s permission; copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Hod O'Brien's musical C.V. is an eclectic mix of the old and the new. He has played with Russell Procope, Sonny Greer, and Aaron Bell as well as Warne Marsh, Roswell Rudd, and Archie Shepp, but despite making his debut on the New York jazz scene in the late fifties with Oscar Pettiford at the Five Spot, this talented pianist has maintained a low profile with the record-buying public. His latest release on Fresh Sound Records should help correct this. He was interviewed in June 2000, when he replied on cassette tape to my questions.

“My full name is Walter Howard O'Brien, and I was born in Chicago on January 19, 1936, and adopted six weeks later. My biological family on my mother's side was musical, and by the time I was ten years old, I was listening to records my step parents had by people like Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. I just flipped over boogie-woogie and learned to play it by ear. I also liked Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Later, Nat Cole got me going in another direction, but by the time I was fourteen, I was hooked on bebop through listening to "Jazz at the Philharmonic" records. By then, Billy Taylor and Hank Jones were influences, but Bud Powell was a little harder for me to fathom at first, because the music was so fast, with discordant harmonies that I didn't pick up on right away. It was powerful music, and more complicated than Nat Cole for instance, but Bud was the source for all the pianists who subsequently became my influences—like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and Claude Williamson. It was Claude who really got me into the "Bud" mode, because he was the distillation of that style, and I could understand Bud better by listening to Claude's early records.

I was seventeen when I attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville and met Roswell Rudd for the first time. In those early years he was playing Dixieland trombone, and we used to jam with his father, who was a good drummer, and Jim Atlas, who later played bass with the Jimmy Giuffre Three. Roswell and I parted company in the late fifties and didn't meet again until the mid sixties in New York, by which time he was playing totally out, with people like John Tchicai and Archie Shepp. In 1954 I spent a semester at Oberlin College, but I was very neglectful and didn't finish niy studies by a long shot. Dave Brubeck had recorded there the year before, and I used to listen to that album because I liked Brubeck's quartet. Some of us would go into town and listen to Max Roach with Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Billy Taylor, etc. Oh boy, the old days were great!

In the summer of 1955 I did my first professional gig, subbing for Randy Weston, with Willie Jones on drums. Willie invited me to New York, where he was playing with Charles Mingus, and I once went over to Mingus's house to listen while J. R. Monterose and Jackie McLean rehearsed the "Pithecanthropus Erectus" album. It was Willie who introduced me to the New York loft scene, where everything was happening, and that's when I first met all the Detroit guys like Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, and Pepper Adams. I also remember listening to Freddie Redd, who just knocked me out. I stood by the piano, watching him with his head thrown back, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, playing all that rich, beautiful bebop.

In the fall of 1956 I started studying at the Manhattan School of Music. I met Donald Byrd there, but the only time we played together was on a recording for Teddy Charles at Prestige the following year, and it was really thanks to Hal Stein that I was called for the date. He was playing alto with Teddy at the Pad in Greenwich Village, and he knew me from a loft session, so when I visited the club, I was invited to sit in. Teddy liked my playing and said he could use me on an album he was producing for Prestige called "Three Trumpets," with Donald, Art Farmer, and Idrees Sulieman. It was my first record date, and I was a little nervous. I remember playing a big fat B-minor 7th on the first chord of the bridge on "Cherokee," and Idrees cocked his head and smiled when we listened to the playback. I loved Idrees, man, although Art's playing was beautiful, especially from that period, when he was with Gigi Gryce. But Idrees stands out as being the most interesting in terms of ideas, sound, and energy.1

Later on in 1957, at the recommendation of Red Rodney, I had the dubious distinction of replacing Bill Evans with Oscar Pettiford because Oscar didn't like Bill's playing. Bill had a new and unusual approach to time and harmony, and Oscar was apparently getting very put out with him. One night he got so mad that Red had to calm him down, which is when I was hired, because I played straight-ahead bebop, which Red and Oscar liked. I worked for about eight months with Oscar, and although he could get pretty rumbustious and difficult, he never got out of hand while I was with him. Eventually, Red's drug habits caused Oscar to change trumpeters, and Johnny Coles came in, sounding great. Sahib Shihab was in the group on alto and baritone, with Earl "Buster" Smith on drums, and sometimes Oscar added Betty Glamman on harp. She was known as "Betty Glamour" because she looked good onstage, which Oscar liked, and anyway, he thought the harp made us look distinguished!

We worked mostly at the Five Spot and Smalls, and when Oscar left for Europe in the summer of 1958, I started playing with J. R. Monterose. At first we used Al Levitt and Buell Neidlinger, but later on, Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware were with us for several months. I'll tell you a funny story about Wilbur, who was a wonderful bass player. We were at a concert in some town where J .R.'s in-laws lived, and he naturally wanted to impress them, but Wilbur was in his famous drugged and drunk state, and I wasn't much better. I was trying to play, but he kept falling over his bass, finally ending up slumped on top of me. The two of us were sprawled on the piano, and Elvin and J.R. finished playing by themselves. Elvin got mad, and J.R. wasn't too happy, but we all loved Wilbur—he was "Mr. Time." That group also played on weekends at a rather infamous club in the red-light district of Albany, called the Gaiety.2

In 1960, I did an album for Decca with Gene Quill, Teddy Kotick, and Nick Stabulas, which unfortunately was never released. I had come into contact with Gene because "Phil and Quill" were happening at the time, and I remember learning "Things We Did Last Summer" the night before the recording. It's a great tune, and Gene played a nice version of it. Just prior to the album, I'd worked with Phil Woods at the Cork 'n' Bib, which is where I first met Chet Baker. Everybody came out to see Chet, and I had never seen the club so full. For the next three years until 1963, Don Friedman and I were the resident pianists at a club on Staten Island called the Totten Villa. We usually had Vinnie Ruggiero, who was a great drummer and probably the white man's answer to Philly Joe Jones, and when he couldn't make it, Art Taylor would take his place. It was Teddy Kotick's gig, and he booked people like Phil, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Rouse, Lee Konitz, Al Cohn, Stan Getz, and Bob Brookmeyer. We played "common denominator standards," in other words just calling tunes and blowing, with no arrangements and nothing written down, which is just as well, as I'm not a sight-reader. I liked Brookmeyer a lot, especially from those days, and I loved the "Interpretations" album he did with Getz, partly because of Johnny Williams, who was the pianist on the date. He was one of my favorites at the time because he had a rhythmic approach in his solos and his comping that was really impressive.

I started studying with Hall Overton, who was an authority on Thelonious Monk. He was also a nodal point between modern classical and the  world, and that is when I became interested in avant-garde electronic music, which I studied with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt. I dabbled in free jazz for a while, which can be great when it's coherent, but with a lot of players, it's just plain gibberish. Roswell Rudd, though, is an exception, because he plans structured sections which can be played freely, making his music successful. By the middle of the sixties I found interest in jazz falling away, partly due to the avant-garde and partly because of the popularity of groups like the Beatles, and this is when I dropped out of the music scene for a while.

I enrolled at Columbia University and eventually graduated with a degree in psychology, but I was still playing occasionally with Nobby Totah, who was a good friend. He used to invite me down to El Morocco to sit in with Chuck Wayne, and then around 1973 I rekindled my relationship with Roswell. He was teaching at a college in upstate New York with my ex-wife, and we decided to open our own club in Greenwich Village. We called it the St. James Infirmary, and it became quite a saga. His wife, Mosselle, knew all kinds of people in the Village, and as she had a gift for public relations, she became the manager. Unfortunately she was not very organized, so we ended our partnership after three months. Mosselle was very persuasive, though, and convinced the club's rhythm section, Beaver Harris and Cameron Brown, to go on strike along with Roswell! I was left without a band, so I called Richard Youngstein, the bass player, who brought in Jimmy Madison on drums, along with altoist Bob Mover, and we had a great time.

Bob was also playing with Chet at Stryker's Pub, so for a while Chet came into the St. James and did two nights a week with us. Sometimes we had Archie Shepp on weekends, and the only time the club went into the black was when Chet and Archie played together. We would actually be about $300 or so above the overhead for the week, whereas most of the time we lost money. Archie didn't play much free stuff at that time, because he had been through all that in the sixties, and he sounded great when he played straight-ahead music. Pepper Adams also played the club, and he was a big influence on me. His melodic lines were so impressive that I tried to incorporate them into my own blowing licks, so to speak.

Getting back to Chet, I think playing at my club had a lot to do with him getting back on his feet after that terrible beating and all the problems he had with his embouchure. Every night he seemed to get better and stronger, and that was when the real depth of his music started for me. He was fairly easy to work for, and we often played together when he came to New York, but for some reason, he didn't always like the way I comped. It was difficult to satisfy him sometimes, which made me resentful, because I think my comping is pretty damn good, as most people do. The only other person who doesn't is Frank Morgan, and there may be something in the fact that they both had similar ways of life. Working with Chet, though, was a privilege and honor, because he is a very important part of our jazz family and one of the great poet laureate musicians of all time. By the summer of 1975 Chet, Archie Shepp, and a lot of other guys we were featuring went over to Europe to play the festivals. That was when I decided to close the St. James, and that was the end of my career as a club owner. I started playing with Marshall Brown, who had a great book, and we had a long-lasting relationship until he died in 1983.

In 1977, I did three months at Gregory's with Russell Procope and Sonny Greer. I took the place of Brooks Kerr, who was hospitalized, and although it was just a trio job, Aaron Bell used to sit in on bass sometimes. Brooks was almost raised with the Ellington Orchestra, because his mother could afford to have them play at her apartment when he was young. When he was older, he used to go on gigs with the band, and if Duke forgot something, he would have Brooks play it for him, because he knew everything that Duke had written. Brooks often had Ellington sidemen play with him, but the mainstays were Russell and Sonny. Russell made no bones about not liking bebop or Charlie Parker, but I managed to turn him on to "A Night in Tunisia," which he eventually liked a lot.

When they left, I stayed on with Joe Puma and Frank Luther. The job lasted until 1982, but Joe let Frank go after a couple of years because Frank's playing was getting too outlandish. Joe said, "I'm trying to play Dixieland and he's playing Stravinsky!" Although when Frank buckles down and plays time, he's one of the best there is. A lot of fine guitarists like Jim Hall, Jimmy Raney, Attila Zoller, and Chuck Wayne used to sit in, and whenever Joe Pass was there, he and Puma would really go at it. We had some great times, especially when "Papa" Jo Jones came by and played brushes on a newspaper, which was a real trip. Stan Getz sat in one cold January night when the club was nearly empty, and a guy came in looking for girls. When he saw there weren't any, he stood listening for a while and, walking to the door, said to the owner, "Well, he ain't no Stan Getz!"

In 1982 I recorded with Allen Eager on his first record date in about twenty-five years.3 He had been involved in racing cars and hanging around with society people, and when he started playing in the studio, it was as though he had never blown a sax before. I was pretty shocked, but he kept at it, and slowly but surely, the lines got longer and clearer. It was as though he learned to play again in the space of half an hour. He didn't sound anything like I remembered from the forties or fifties, when he was with Fats Navarro or Tadd Dameron, but as he loosened up, he became more coherent from tune to tune. In fact at the end of three hours, when we did "Just You, Just Me," which was our last title, he played something that was worthy of Lester Young. It was a gem, just a perfect solo. He was a temperamental guy, though.

Phil Schaap brought him to the West End in Manhattan around that time, and Phil booked a straight-ahead rhythm section for him. Halfway through the first night, Allen decided that he didn't want to play that way, so he fired the band because he wanted to play completely free. He hired a new group of free players for the next night and continued the gig in that bag. I don't know what he's doing now, but I think he's living and playing down in Florida.4

In 1984 I recorded with Warne Marsh and Chet Baker in Holland.5 Warne was a very important saxophone player who used the upper partials, which are the tones above the sevenths, and his ability to handle that part of the harmonic spectrum was remarkable. On the record date Chet really didn't know what to do, so Warne took charge and ran the whole show. He picked the tunes, blew on the changes without stating the melodies, then retitled everything so he could get the royalties. It was around this time that I began collaborating with Fran Landesman by putting music to some of her poems,6 and my wife, Stephanie Nakasian, recorded one of our tunes, "Mystery Man," on her 1988 CD with Phil Woods.7 Fran and I made a demo of eight songs, which we sent to Bette Midler because they would have been perfect for her, but I don't think they ever got past her henchmen.

I have already mentioned some of my early influences, but there are many other pianists who are important to me, like Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, George Wallington, Duke Jordan, and especially Al Haig, who almost defined the sound of bebop piano. I love Jimmy Rowles, who was a sort of white version of Thelonious Monk. He had an offbeat way of coloring and harmonizing that was uniquely his. Dave McKenna, too, is incredible. I love the way he gets that walking bass line going with the right hand comping and blowing a melodic line, while making it all sound smooth and fluid. It's amazing that anyone besides Art Tatum can play that much solo piano; he's a one-man orchestra. Dave is just as good in an ensemble setting, and he makes his cohorts feel needed, unlike Art, who I'm told used to make them feel superfluous.

At the end of 1999 I recorded a trio album for Fresh Sound that is my best yet.8 It has Tom Warrington on bass and Paul Kreibich on drums and should help publicize the West Coast tour that Stephanie and I are undertaking later this summer. She and I work a lot together and will continue to do so.

NOTES

1.  Trumpets All Out (originally issued as Three Trumpets). Prestige OJCCD-1801.

2.  Nick Brignola dedicated his original "Green Street" to the club on Reservoir RSR CD 159.

3.  Allen Eager, Renaissance. Uptown 27.09.

4.  Since this interview, Allen Eager passed away, on April 13, 2003.

5.  Chet Baker/Warne Marsh, Blues for a Reason. Criss Cross 1010.

6.  Fran Landesman of course has written many fine lyrics, and none better than "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," with music composed by Tommy Wolf. It was originally featured in a 1959 Broadway musical titled The Nervous Set, a satire on the Beat Generation, with Larry Hagman as Jack Kerouac and Del Close as Allen Ginsberg. The score also included "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men."

7.  Stephanie Nakasian, Comin' Alive. V.S.O.P. 73.

8.  Hod O'Brien, Have Piano . . . Will Swing! Fresh Sound FSR 5030 CD.

Hod is featured in the following video with Ray Drummond on bass and Kenny Washington on drums performing Bob Dorough’s Nothing Like You Has Ever Been Seen Before.