I always thought that for Chet Baker, playing a beautiful, melodic solo was as easy as putting the trumpet to his lips.
It seems, however, that there was a time during his career when placing the trumpet against his lips was more excruciating than musically rewarding.
The cause of this agonizing pain was the dark side of drug addiction which caught up to Chet one night in 1968 when a group of San Francisco San Francisco junkies “… relieved him of his dope money and his teeth and made him decide he’d have to give up heroin or die.”
Recorded in 1974, this was “… Chet’s first major recording since the night in San Francisco in ’68 …” when Chet encountered every brass player’s nightmare – losing one’s teeth!
Or as Chet explains to Doug: “Believe me, when a trumpet player has had his teeth pulled, it is a comeback.”
“Baker says that with the lack of self-pity that is as characteristic as the absence of hyperbole when he evaluates his artistry, past and present.
Of those early triumphs in the polls, he says, ‘I never really believed that I deserved it. As far as my playing now, I believe I have progressed conceptually, which is the important thing. At the time I won the polls, my style was very lyrical, a style the average person could listen to and understand without being overwhelmed with technique. I can still play that way, very cool, few notes, lots of empty spaces. I can also play very fly, very hard. I believe I play ten times better now than I did then. And I don't want to lose people, I want them to understand what I play on my horn.’
In this album, you’ll hear Chet play both ways, cool and “very fly." The lyricism is intact. The tone, if anything, is deeper and fuller. The celebrated similarity between Baker's instrumental and vocal phrasing is vividly displayed on those two gorgeous ballads of regret, "She Was Too Good To Me" and "What’ll I Do." The sense of loss expressed by the lyrics has never been more poignantly interpreted. And you’ll surely be able to "understand what I play on my horn" in the 16 bars of trumpet between the vocal sections of "She Was Too Good To Me." It's a classic melodic statement, in a league with Bobby Hackett's 1939 "Embraceable You," Jack Sheldon's bridge on "Then I’ll Be Tired Of You" with the Hi-Los, and Chet’s own "My Funny Valentine."
On the faster pieces, the springiness of phrasing; the floating, easy swing; the intelligent lines; the high personal sound with a touch of added brilliance; all of these elements testify to the continued vitality of an important trumpet artist. …”
With the assistance of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has developed the following video to demonstrate “the lyrical” aspects of Chet’s playing on She Was Too Good To Me.
It features Chet on Hank Mobley’s Funk in Deep Freeze Assisting Chet on the first performance are Hubert Laws on flute, Bob James on electric piano, Ron Carter on bass and drummer Steve Gadd.
Artistic perfection is something that every musician strives for.
With Chettie, even with broken teeth, artistic accomplishment seemed to occur as though he was in a continual state of grace and the Jazz Gods had shined a ray through him.
"On the baritone sax, he was the greatest we've ever had."
- Phil Woods, alto saxophonist
''He was a rare genius on the horn."
- Philip Levine, Poet Laureate of the United States 2011-2012
“Throughout jazz's illustrious history, live and studio performances have been frozen in time on recordings, preserving for listeners the musical traditions passed down from generation to generation by jazz's great improvisers. Because of recordings' pivotal role in conveying jazz's oral tradition, it can be argued that recordings are jazz's most basic and enduring artifact. If that's indeed the case, then discography — books that list these recordings — is jazz's most fundamental reference work.”
- Gary Carner, Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography
I have had my copy of Gary Carner’s Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography for some time now, but I wanted to “test drive it” before writing about it.
This is not a narrative biography of the life of baritone saxophonist, composer and arranger, Pepper Adams.
What it is can be found in the following explanation:
Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes drawn from the authors unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously unknown, behind-the-scenes drama around legendary recordings made by David Amram, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Duke Pearson, and many others.
All types of sound material — studio recordings, private tapes and broadcasts, film scores, audience tapes, arid even jingles — are listed, and Adams' oeuvre is pushed back from 1956 to 1947, when Adams was sixteen years old, before he played baritone saxophone. Because of Carner's access to Adams' estate, just prior to its disposition in 1987, much new discographical material is included, now verified by Adams' date books and correspondence.
Since Adams worked in so many of the great bands of his era, Pepper Adams 'JoyRoad: An Annotated Discography is a refreshing, sometimes irreverent walk through a large swath of jazz history. This work also functions as a nearly complete band discography of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the most influential big band of its time: Adams was a founding member and stayed with the band until a year before Jones left to relocate in Denmark. Finally, Carner charts the ascent of Adams as an original, yet still underappreciated, composer, one who wrote forty-three unique works, nearly half of them after August 1977, when he left Jones-Lewis to tour the world as a soloist. Pepper Adams' Joy Road the first book ever published about Pepper Adams, is a companion to the authors forthcoming biography on Adams.”
For those of you who may not be familiar with him, Gary Carner is an independent jazz researcher, is the author of Jazz Performers and The Miles Davis Companion. From 1984 until Adams' death in 1986, Carner collaborated with Pepper Adams on his memoirs. Carner's research on Adams' career, collected at pepperadams.com, spans four decades. Carner has also produced all forty-three of Adams' compositions for Motema Music. For more about Gary, Pepper and the Motema Music project, I urge you to visit Gary’s Pepper Adams website.
I am by no means a Pepper Adams “Completist,” although I do have many of Pepper’s recordings including most of those that he made with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra.
It was a sheer delight to play Pepper’s music while reading Gary’s annotations about what led up to the sessions and what was involved in making the music of a particular recording [including, in some cases, some very revealing personal anecdotes]. Because there are not very many listeners’ guides to the music, it’s hard to remember a time when I had a more satisfying experience listening to recorded Jazz of a particular musician [although Gary’s annotated discography on Pepper brought to mind my posting on Noal Cohen and Michael Fitzgerald fine biography/annotated discography - Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce].
Not only was my listening pleasure enhanced by Gary’s attention to detail and his insights into Pepper’s music, but I also gained a fuller appreciation of what goes into the artistic life of a Jazz musician. Gary helps the reader understand Pepper Adams the person; a person who artistically expresses himself through the medium of Jazz.
Dan Morgenstern, the distinguished Jazz historian and now retired Director of The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University further amplifies the focus of Gary’s study on Pepper in his Foreword to the book:
“While correct, "Annotated Discography" by no means says all about this fascinating record of a great musician's career and life. For decades, Gary Garner has devoted himself to tracing every musical step by Pepper Adams, from the very first teenaged endeavor, captured by a recording device, professional or amateur, issued or not. And he has enhanced the carefully gathered discographical details with additional information, musical, technical and personal, about the performance circumstances, more often than not obtained from participants and observers, as well as from interviews, published and personal, with the man himself.
Quite a man, too — not only one of the outstanding practitioners of the baritone saxophone, but a brilliant, complicated guy, whom I had the distinct pleasure of knowing. If there is a subtext here, it would be the fact that Pepper was the only white musician in the "Detroit Invasion" that descended upon the New York jazz scene in the late 1950s, accepted as a "primus inter pares" by his black colleagues—and friends. Early on, you will find an amusing anecdote about Alfred Lion's first reaction to Pepper's music: the founder of Blue Note Records refused to believe that the player on the demo tape the young baritonist had submitted was not black, going so far as to calling him a liar. Pepper would of course go on to participate in many a Blue Note session — if Lion ever apologized, we'll never know.
Good discographies are certainly very useful tools, but it is highly uncommon for a discography, even an annotated one, to also qualify as a good read. But Pepper Adams' Joy Road most definitely is. It brings the man as well as his music to life. Read—and listen—well!
—Dan Morgenstern”
Gary provides his own thoughts about his endeavor on behalf of Pepper and his music in these excerpts from the Preface to his book:
“Throughout jazz's illustrious history, live and studio performances have been frozen in time on recordings, preserving for listeners the musical traditions passed down from generation to generation by jazz's great improvisers. Because of recordings' pivotal role in conveying jazz's oral tradition, it can be argued that recordings are jazz's most basic and enduring artifact. If that's indeed the case, then discography — books that list these recordings — is jazz's most fundamental reference work.
A jazz musician's discography is a musical story. It shows the people he played with, the venues he played, the progression of his art over time, the maturation of his repertoire, the compositions he wrote. It functions as a life chronology and a buying guide.
What you have in your hands is Pepper Adams' story, as told by his recordings. [Emphasis, mine] It's the culmination of three decades of research on Adams' recorded work—from the LP and cassette era to VHS, CDs, DVDs, and now YouTube — that began in 1984, when I worked with Adams on his memoirs during the last two years of his life.
After much of our work was done, in 1985 I moved from New York to Boston to study jazz musicology with Lewis Porter. I was already well along on the biographical aspects of Adams' life, but I needed to learn from an expert about discographical research, and to round out my knowledge of jazz history, especially the 1920 and '30s. Apart from all that Lewis Porter taught me (and it was considerable), during that time I adopted an overarching strategy to my Adams research: I would, at the very least, try to interview everyone still alive who recorded with Adams, with the aim of verifying published and anecdotal discographical information. The end result was vastly improved data, plus two things I hadn't anticipated: The first was the discovery of many unknown recordings. The other was learning fascinating new details of well-known sessions, sometimes in glorious detail, that cast entirely new light on the creative process and on the business of jazz.
While busy making sense of this, in 1987 Evrard Deckers, an independent researcher working in Belgium, asked me to review the discography he was compiling on Pepper Adams. After a few years of correspondence, and a trip to Belgium, in 1992 Deckers and I decided to collaborate on a co-authored work. It was a wonderful division of labor, since I'd focus on my archival materials and North American research while Deckers could mine the many resources available in Europe. This was before the internet and Google era, so geography mattered far more than it does now. Evrard Deckers contributed much new information, especially regarding reissues, European radio broadcasts, and audience recordings, before he died in his sleep at home in 1997.
In the fifteen years since his death, however, this book has become an entirely different entity. The biggest change is the addition of transcribed interview material that took me two years to complete. It occurred to me that some of my interview material only pertained to Adams' discography, and was too nuanced to be used in an Adams biography. If not used here, it would never be published.
Also new to the manuscript, I've identified Adams' solos, so that listeners can focus on these recordings, as opposed to those he did as a sideman or studio player. Moreover, much new recorded material, and a new generation of reissues, has been released since 1997, necessitating a great deal of additional research.
The format of the discography, too, has been completely overhauled to better conform to current standards and make it more legible. Annotations and footnotes, for example, have been redesigned, LP titles have been added, and subtle changes have been instituted, such as adding the country of origin and identifying 78s, 45s, LPs, CDs, VHS, and DVDs.
Joy Road is so named not just to riff on one of Adams' great compositions. I chose it to also capture the essence of Adams' life on the road, playing jazz with a cast of thousands, some of whom are quoted in this book. It's also my tribute to Adams' great recorded oeuvre, his 43 magnificent compositions, and the joy he derived from playing the baritone saxophone.
Much about Adams' personality is woven throughout the annotations, especially among younger musicians that witnessed Adams' final illness. In a sense, I've tried, like documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, to infuse my work with a kind of "emotional archeology." Those who are interested in getting a still deeper understanding of Adams' life might enjoy my companion volume, a full-length biography of Adams, tentatively entitled In Love with Night. I'm planning to finish it well before 2030, the centennial of Pepper Adams' birth. In the meantime, please consult www.pepperadams.com, the website I maintain as the historical record of his life and work.
Gary Carner
Braselton, Georgia
Far too few, significant Jazz musicians have discographical guides to their recorded work. Thanks to Gary Carner’s dedication and his abilities at compilation and annotation, Pepper Adams fortunately is not one of them as is attested to in Pepper Adams 'JoyRoad: An Annotated Discography.
Pepper is featured on the following video as a member of pianist Don Friedman’s quintet performing Sonny Rollins' Audubon with Jimmy Knepper [tb], Pepper Adams [bs], George Mraz [b] and Bill Hart [d].
“Beautifully repackaged and presented, the January 1955 sessions are, in retrospect, most remarkable for Neal Hefti's delicately nuanced arrangements which always seem to deliver up surprises. The 12 tracks are almost perfectly uniform in length and delivery, and it's all the more remarkable that they remain fresh and inventive. Brown sounds as bright as a new pin in this digitally remastered version, but he isn't artificially foregrounded in front of the strings; they receive their due share as well.”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
Clifford Brown was twenty-six years old when he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to a gig in Chicago.
Twenty-six!
He didn’t take up the trumpet until he was 15 so figure a couple of years to develop some chops [in his case, SOME chops], and what’s left; 7-8 years of performing and recording?
Thank goodness for the wise and generous people in the Jazz business who put that time to good use. As a result of their perspicacity and financial wherewithal, Clifford left behind a considerable recorded legacy.
Among my favorites is the recording he made in 1955, a year-and-a-half before his death in 1956, entitled Clifford Brown With Strings [Emarcy CD 814 642-2]. The string arrangements were done by Neal Hefti and they are perfectly suited to Clifford’s big, juicy, pellucid tone.
Kiyoshi Koyama prepared the following narrative about this recording, Clifford Brown’s career and the arrangements by Neal Hefti for the Japanese CD version of Clifford Brown With Strings and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it would be a fun way to begin a series of retrospective blog postings about some of the highlights of Brownie’s all-too-brief time in the Jazz World.
[Please keep in mind that Mr. Koyama’s remarks have been translated from Japanese into English and that the translator’s “skills” may be a little rusty in this regard.]
CLIFFORD BROWN WITH STRINGS
“This album features a collection of ballads in moving performances by Clifford Brown, the trumpeter of genius whose name will forever remain in the annals of Jazz history, and whose brief life came to an end after only twenty-five years, accompanied by strings.
Clifford Brown, who was always known by the nickname" Brownie" recorded this album between the 18th and 20th of January 1955. Brownie had just turned twenty-four, and six months had passed since, together with the drummer Max Roach, he formed the Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet. This was the time at which he was beginning to come into the limelight, and become the focus of attention throughout the world.
During the previous year of 1954, Clifford Brown had been chosen as the top new star in the trumpet section of the international critics poll held annually by Down Beat jazz magazine. With the appearance of Brownie, it was felt that a successor had at last appeared to Fats Navarro, who had died prematurely in 1950, and, together with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Daves, the greatest hopes were held out for his future development.
In contrast to Fats Navarro, Brownie was the very picture of health, and on account of his constant smile was known from early on as a"Sweet Guy" or "Sweet Brownie. He was looked upon with affection by all who knew him. Everybody was attracted by his warmth and thoughtfulness, and extravagant praise was bestowed upon him.
Brownie held out the promise for a brilliant future, and his work suggested that the possibilities he held in store as a trumpeter were virtually unlimited. Nobody could thus have foreseen that, only eighteen months after this album had been recorded, Brownie would meet with a tragic automobile accident which would put an end to his brief twenty-six years of life.
Given the magnitude of this tragedy, it seems nothing short of the grace of heaven that Brownie should have left us this album before he died.
Although Clifford Brown's career was only very brief, he produced a total of thirteen albums containing many great performances during his period with EmArcy between 1954 and 1956. The present album, in which Brownie took on the supreme challenge of performing ballads all alone to the accompaniment of strings, is a true classic which gives a full display of Brownie's genius as a trumpeter. While Brownie's blistering hot improvisations, as can be heard on "Study in Brown" and "Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street", are here absent here, what is present instead is Brownie's sensitivity and human warmth, in other words Brownie himself, as represented by the features which earned him the affectionate nickname of "Sweet Brownie".
Clifford Brown With Strings , in which the spotlight in constantly upon Brownie, also gives a full display of the trumpeter's consummate technical skill. Brownie thus had to give his all to these performances. He had to take on the challenge of investing his trumpet with the whole scope of his God-given technique and imagination.
On the surface he seems to be performing his melodic lines in a nonchalant fashion, but in actual fact it took eleven takes before he was satisfied with "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". Not a single piece was completed after only one take. Brownie completed the album after a full three days at the rate of four pieces a day.
The pieces performed are entirely standard ballads of the highest quality, well-known to everybody. The performance of such pieces presented no mean challenge to this young twenty-four year old musician. Generally speaking, the ballad was a form of musical expression only tackled by musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz after attaining their full maturity.
A young and immature musician could scarcely be expected to cope with the highly exacting genre of the slow ballad. However, the total success of Clifford Brown in this genre was precisely due to the fact that his genius had allowed him to attain maturity at a young age. Brownie thus gave his individual, fully committed interpretations, with an astonishing display of technical mastery, of great American pieces, pieces of great beauty in themselves, such as "Stardust", "Yesterday" and "Laura". The warm trumpet sound combines with the impeccable string arrangements of Neal Hefti to move the listener deeply.
Brownie's natural genius as an interpreter of slow ballads is truly concentrated into this album. Listening now to the performances surviving on the original master tapes, one almost has the feeling that Brownie has come back to life. The superb recording breathes life into the superb performance, and one is left feeling grateful that we are still able to hear these performances today. Wynton Marsalis, the brilliant young trumpeter of this decade who has been hailed as the reincarnation of Brownie and for whom the highest hopes are held out for the future , holds this album in the greatest regard, and has set the attainment of the level reached therein as his own goal. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Clifford Brown is referred to as "Immortal".
The Career of Clifford Brown
Clifford Brown was born on 30th December 1930 in Wilmington, Delaware. He was given a trumpet by his father in 1945 when he entered high school and began to take lessons in trumpet, jazz harmony and music theory from a local musician Robert Laurie. After studying mathematics at Delaware State University, in 1949 he was awarded a music scholarship which enabled him to change to the study of music at the Maryland State University. This was the year in which his abilities came to the attention of Fats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie, and he thus came into public attention. He was seriously injured in an unfortunate automobile accident in June 1950, recovering and leaving hospital in May of the following year.
He performed with Charlie Parker immediately afterwards, and then began his career in earnest with the Chris Powell Rhythm and Blues Band, with whom he worked in 1952 and 1953. He then worked with Tadd Dameron in 1953, with Lionel Hampton between August and December 1953, going on a European tour with this group, and with the Art Blakey Quintet in 1954. He was chosen in top place in the Down Beat "New Star" category of the magazine's 1954 international critics poll, and great hopes were thus held out for his future. In March 1954 he formed the Brown & Roach Quintet with Max Roach, and thus became a figure of even greater importance on the jazz scene.
This quintet, with Harold Land, and subsequently Sonny Rollins, on tenor sax, was one of the top combos active during the heyday of modern jazz in the early fifties, and will remain in history for the series of great recordings it made for EmArcy. However, early in the morning on 26th June 1956, the car in which Clifford was a passenger went into a skid on a Pennsylvania highway, wet from the rain. It smashed against the protective wall and took away the lives of Clifford Brown, the pianist Richard Powell, and the latter's wife, who was driving the car at the time. Having blazed like a meteor, but with infinite possibilities still unrealised, the life of Clifford Brown came to an end after twenty-five years.
After Brownie's death, Quincy Jones remarked sadly that "We have lost a young genius who would have been the main force behind the generation to succeed Parker, Dizzy and Miles" and Sonny Rollins said that "Brownie was the musician I respected most after Parker and Lester Young". Benny Golson, who had been a close friend of Brownie, subsequently wrote the great piece "I Remember Clifford". Brownie's influence extended strongly over trumpeters of both his own and subsequent generations , this influence being clearly present in the work of Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, as well as in the work of trumpeters who have made their mark in the present decade such as Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.
The Arrangements of Neal Hefti
The arranger and conductor of the strings on this album was Neal Hefti, who is well-known especially for having provided the Woody Herman and Count Basie Orchestras with many fine arrangements. The string ensemble consisted of six violins, two violas and one cello, and was supplemented by three members of the Brown & Roach Quintet, namely Richie Powell on piano, George Morrow on bass, and Max Roach on drums, together with Barry Galbraith on guitar. Hefti was also a trumpeter, and thus proved to be the ideal arranger for Clifford's string section. The ambitious sound of the strings, together with Brownie's classic performance, results in a recording that has lost none of its sparkle over the years.
(Kiyoshi Koyama)”
The following video features Clifford performing Neal Hefti’s beautiful arrangement of What’s New from Clifford Brown With Strings.
Each year, the Los Angeles Jazz Institute makes available a CD of previously unreleased recordings from its vast holdings as a bonus to those who become members of the Institute. You can locate more information about membership in the LA Jazz Institute as well as a detailed description of its collections and forthcoming events by going here.
This year’s bonus CD is entitled Over The Rainbow: Rare and Unissued Art Pepper, 1949-1960 [LAJI 0012] and it contains 15 tracks by Art both on alto and tenor saxophones in a variety of settings. Ken Poston, who produced the CD and who is the Director of the LA Jazz Institute offers the following perspective on the music in his insert notes to the CD.
“This collection spans an eleven year period in Art Pepper's career that showcases his rise from promising sideman with the Stan Kenton Orchestra to legitimate jazz star. It was a very prolific period in spite of the fact that he spent close to three of those years off the scene.
The recordings on this CD are organized chronologically which enables us to hear his stylistic evolution as it develops throughout the decade. The first four tracks demonstrate a very lyrical individual voice that stood out from so many other alto saxophonists who came more directly out of the Charlie Parker mold.
The three years spent incarcerated were not totally wasted. He spent his time wisely, doing a lot of practicing and writing. When he re-emerged in early 1956 his playing had taken on some new distinctive qualities. His melodic ideas were more mature, he had become much more harmonically advanced and he had perfected his overall sound. He had always had a special ability to express emotion in his playing but it was even more evident during this period.
Although he recorded frequently between 1956 and 1958, jobs were still hard to come by and he started playing tenor with a rock and roll band in the San Fernando Valley. He also worked frequently with a mambo orchestra mostly on baritone. Those experiences resulted in a few other subtle changes in his playing that began to appear towards the end of the decade when he developed a slightly more aggressive approach and began expanding his harmonic language even more.
The collection ends with his final session as a leader prior to his incarceration in San Quentin that takes him off the scene for most of the 1960s.
Most of the recordings on this disc are previously unissued or very rare.
Enjoy
Ken Poston”
The following video tribute to Art Pepper and arranger-conductor Marty Paich offers a sampling of the music on this special CD. The tune is Dizzy Gillespie’s Shaw ‘Nuff.
“In the beginning - 1984 pianist Rob van Bavel, bassist Marc van Rooij and drummer Hans van Oosterhout formed a jazz trio called 'Fezz' and after many gigs at local venues in Holland they became quite popular. They created their own style, one that was full of energy and dynamism. In the years that followed, their individual careers as musicians developed as rapidly as did the reputation of their trio. All three attended The Rotterdam Conservatory; during these years the trio won many prizes at competitions.
In 1986 Marc won the solo prize at the Middelsee Jazz festival; in 1987 Rob graduated the conservatory with the highest cum laude and won the Wessel Ilcken Prize, the most prestigious Jazz award in The Netherlands. In 1988 the trio won first prize at an international competition earning the title 'European Young Jazz Artists’ at the Leverkusen Jazz festival. Rob went on to win second prize in the final of the International Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition in Washington, DC.
Also in 1988, the trio recorded it first CD - Just For You - and had a successful tour in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai which included many TV, radio and concert performances.
The trio morphed into the rhythm section for the Rob van Bavel Quintet and Octet and, as a rhythm section, they were also asked to accompany many Dutch and international Jazz musicians visiting Holland and/or touring Europe including Woody Shaw, Bob Mintzer, Ferdinand Povel, vocalist Deborah Brown, Mike Manieri, Slide Hampton and Peter Guidi.
In 1990, the Rob van Bavel Trio were the recipients of the Edison Award - the Dutch Grammy.
After 10 intensive years together the musicians decided to go their separate ways. … reuniting briefly in 2009 for a concert with trombonist Bert Boeren at the Breda Jazz Festival.
Now on its 30th Anniversary [GKI Music, RVB 2014-01] the Rob van Bavel Trio is back with the same drive and energy, with new songs and arrangements by Rob, played with more experience and appealing to a wider audience.” [Source: insert notes to the CD].
You can locate more information about Rob and his career by visiting his website at www.robvanbaveltrio.nl.
In recent years, my contact with Rob van Bavel has been in his role as the pianist in drummer Eric Ineke’s JazzXpress. In my review of DayBreak subsidiary of Challenge Records, Cruisin’ [DBCHR 74588] the most recent of the JazzXpress CD’s I wrote:
In many ways, the “secret ingredient” or “special sauce” of Eric Ineke JazzXpress is pianist Rob van Bavel. The piano chair plays a pivotal role in a Jazz quintet. It becomes third “voice” with the horns; either in unison or in harmony; either in bass clef or in treble. While it may not be distinctly heard as such, when the piano phrases the lines with the horns, it can provide a bottom or a top and thus make the music sound fuller.
Anniversary affords the listener with an unfettered view of Rob’s talents as a pianist and they are considerable as are those of bassist Marc van Rooij and drummer Hans van Oosterhout [who has also been a mainstay in pianist Karel Boehlee’s trio for many years]. Van Rooji’s playing was new to me but he doesn’t disappoint and comes across as the perfect bass clef accompaniment to van Bavel.
Of the ten tracks that make up the music on Anniversary, five are originals by Rob van Bavel, one is written by his mentor, Rob Madna, another excellent pianist, Rob Madna, two are by Duke Ellington, one is by Bill Evans who were themselves both excellent pianists, and the remaining track is the evergreen Jazz standard, How High The Moon.
Every tune is a prepared arrangement; every tune contains a surprise, be it melodic, harmonic or rhythmic; every tune displays the first rate musicianship of Rob, Marc and Hans, singly or in combination.
Rob provides these brief insights or annotation for each track:
01 - Prelude for Jules, The first of van Bavel’s originals which he notes was “inspired by Scriabin” [with overtones of Bill Evans’ approach to voicing chords]
02 - How High The Moon - “combined with Charlie Parker’s contrafact - Ornithology”
03 - Don’t Get Around Much Anymore - [Duke must be smiling at this interpretation]
04. R.B. The second of van Bavel’s tunes this one named after Dutch trumpet player Ruud Breuls
05. Sweet Model - [More Bill Evans inspired music but this time in an uptempo manner with Rob and Marc playing the line in unison in bass clef.]
06. Mood Indigo - “with the famous Poinciana grove that Vernel Fournier made famous with the Ahmad Jamal Trio”
07. Remembering the Rain - “by Bill Evans and a very appropriate title for Holland”
08. Just a Tune for You - Rob’s dedication for this original simply reads “For Mihan….” [Mihan Hong of the Amsterdam Academy where Rob also teaches]”
09. School Blues - “by Rob Madna and in honor of one of the most inspiring pianists, teachers and colleagues I’ve ever know
10. It’s A Shuffle - “ which previously appeared on our Edison Award winning 1990 CD, The Rob van Bavel Trio” [It’s nice to hear a Jazz CD close with a blues; shades of Wynton Kelly and Red Garland]
