Chico Hamilton - A Different Journey [From the Archives]

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

“Hamilton … [is]one of the most underrated and possibly influential jazz percussionists of recent times. Rather than keeping up with any of the Joneses, he sustains a highly original idiom which is retrospectively reminiscent of Paul Motian's but is altogether more abstract. “

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

Chico Hamilton has always done things in Jazz in a different manner.

It starts with the way he plays drums.

His approach to the instrument is so loose that it almost sounds sloppy. He prefers brushes and mallets to sticks. For most drummers it is usually the other way around.

His cymbal beat is barely discernible; he only just steps on the hi-hat to emphasize the 2nd and 4th beats; his bass drum sounds like a hollow 55 gallon vat when he strikes it with the bass drum pedal.

And then there are the different configurations of his Jazz groups beginning with his famous quintet that was comprised of a woodwind player who doubled on flute, clarinet and alto/tenor sax, a guitarist, a cellist [!], bassist and Chico.

A few years later he got a bit more conventional, but only just, with a quintet comprised of a tenor saxophonist who doubled on flute, trombone, guitar, bass and drums.

As Richard Cook and Brian Morton note in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.:

“A less celebrated drum-led academy than Art Blakey's, and yet Chico Hamilton has always surrounded himself with gifted young musicians and has helped bring forward players as inventive as Eric Dolphy, Larry Coryell, Charles Lloyd and, much later, Eric Person as well.

Hamilton has always taken an inventive and even idiosyncratic approach to the constitution of his groups, and often the only identifying mark is his own rolling lyricism and unceasing swing.

Anyone who has seen the classic festival movie, Jazz On A Summer's Day, will remember the almost hypnotic concentration of his mallet solo.”

After a long stint with Pacific Jazz Records, Chico joined Reprise Records in 1961.

His first album for that label was unsurprisingly entitled - A Different Journey [R-6078]. The quintet at the time consisted of Charles Lloyd on tenor sax and flute, George Bohanon on trombone, Gabor Szabo on guitar, Albert Stinson on bass and Chico on drums.

Charles Lloyd and Gabor Szabo would go on to lead their own groups; George Bohanon became a member of the Jazz Crusaders and then led a very successful career as a studio musician; Chico is still going strong today in both conventional and unconventional Jazz settings.

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The Origins of Gene Lees’ The JazzLetter – The First Jazz Blog? [From the Archives]

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

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles subscribed to The JazzLetter for many years.

Its author, Gene Lees, who died in April, 2010 at the age of eighty-two, published The JazzLetter in monthly editions of 6-8 manuscript-sized, printed pages and mailed them to his subscribers.

Gene would often get behind in his efforts to put it out on a monthly basis and a clump of them would sometimes arrive in one envelope.

Who cared. Whenever one or more copies of The JazzLetter hit my mailbox, it marked a joyous occasion as I was about to be transported into some aspect of the world of Jazz and its makers by Gene Lees, whom Glen Woodcock of the Toronto Sun once labeled: “… the best writer on Jazz in the world today.”

Although, Tim Berners-Lee devised the first web browser and server at CERN and launched the World Wide Web in August, 1991, about ten years after Gene began publishing The JazzLetter in 1981, the publication never made an appearance on the world-wide-web.

Irrespective of the fact that The JazzLetter never went digital, I have always thought of it as the first Jazz blog.

Perhaps after you read this account from Gene’s introduction to his Cats of Any Color compilation on the origins of The JazzLetter you, too, might agree that the publication deserves to be considered in this fashion.

Also, when you read Gene’s account of how it all began, you may get a sense of nostalgia at the thought that such a time will never come again.

© -  Gene Lees/Da Capo Press, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Often it will be found that someone speaks a third language with the ac­cent of the second. My Spanish, for example, has a French accent. Gene Kelly spoke French with a slight Italian accent. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Over the years, I have also observed that anyone who has had two profes­sions practices the second with the disciplines and outlook of the first. You can see this in movie-makers. Directors who were first actors elicit fine work from their performers—for example, Richard Attenborough. Consider the miraculous performance he got from Robert Downey, Jr. as the English Charles Chaplin. Or the performances Robert Redford gets from actors, as in Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It. Or Sydney Pollack and Mark Rydell, both of whom had been actors, in any number of pictures.

Alfred Hitchcock, who early manifested a skill in things mechanical, went to work for a telegraph company, then broke into the film industry as a tide-card illustrator. His pictures were always visual, mechanical, and short on great acting, no matter the idolatry toward his pictures fashionable in film circles. He was quoted as saying that actors should be treated like cattle, and his movies look like filmed storyboards. David Lean began as a film editor, and though his films—The Bridge on the River Kwai - for example— reflect prodigious gifts for working with actors, they also reveal his first training in that they are magnificently, meticulously photographed and edited.

I was trained as an artist, but my first profession was journalism. I had been a newspaper reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for ten years before I became the editor of Down Beat in April, 1959, and a thirst for factuality would stay with me. I looked the magazine over and sent a memo to staff members and contributors saying that its first duty was to be a good magazine, literate and readable. If it did not fulfill that obligation, it could not serve its subject matter well. I also urged a concern for factuality, in contrast to the opinion-mongering that comprised much, even most, of jazz criticism, and still does. To say something is exciting or boring or touching or disturbing is only to confess what excites, bores, touches, or disturbs you. It is not a fact about the work of art in question, it is a fact about the critic, a projection of his or her own character and experience.

I did what everyone did at Down Beat: I wrote record reviews. Project­ing your opinions in print is the fastest way in the world to alienate the vic­tims of your inescapable subjectivity. In any case, unless you are like Addison DeWitt in All About Eve and enjoy causing pain, writing criticism ain't your thing. So I fired myself as a record reviewer soon after joining the magazine. I have written very, very little jazz criticism, which is why I was in early years discomfited to see myself referred to as a jazz critic, later em­barrassed, and finally resigned to it.

My education in jazz came not from magazines and books but from studies of composition, piano (with Tony Aless, among others), and gui­tar—and from long, rich conversations in such places as Jim and Andy's bar in New York with Phil Woods, Gerry Mulligan, Ben Webster, Cole-man Hawkins, Hank d'Amico, Will Bradley, Jimmy McPartland, Lockjaw Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, J.J. Johnson, and many more. I found that jazz history, as it was generally accepted, was to a large extent a fiction that has been agreed upon, as Voltaire said of all history. It dawned on me that, since such founding figures as Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines were still with us, I had met nearly all the great jazz musicians who had ever lived, and knew some of them, such as Bill Evans and Woody Herman, intimately. At the same time, because of my activities as a lyricist, I met and in some cases came to know many of the major song­writers who had inspired and influenced me, including Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz, Harold Arlen, Johnny Green, Hoagie Carmichael, Mitchell Parrish, Harry Warren, and particularly Johnny Mercer, some­one else who became a close friend.

After leaving Down Beat toward the end of 1961, I settled in New York and devoted myself primarily to songwriting. I spent the early 1970s in Toronto, then settled in 1974 in Southern California, where I have re­mained ever since, the climate being one of its blandishments. By the end of the 1970s, my songs had been recorded by Mabel Mercer, Frank Sina­tra, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan (my dear, dear friend!), Ella Fitzgerald,Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Carmen McRae, Peggy Lee (another dear friend), and so many others that my royalties, at least in theory, made it possible for me to retire, and I tried. I soon found that I missed my friends, among them all the jazz musicians I had come to know since 1959.

On a morning in May, 1981, I sent a questionnaire to several hundred persons, asking whether I should start a letter—not a newsletter, giving record reviews, nightclub listings, and current news, but a letter on matters of interest to all of us. I specified that it would contain no advertising. Within a week, I had a mailbox full of letters urging me to do it, some of them containing checks. I realized that I was committed. Broadcaster Fred Hall and composer-pianist-arranger Roger Kellaway gave the Jazzletter its name. I still remember the list of early subscribers. It included Phil Woods, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Shelly Manne, Benny Carter, Jimmy Rowles, John Lewis, Art Farmer, Kenny Wheeler, Kenny Drew, Sahib Shihab, Rob McConnell, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel, Julius La Rosa, Jackie and Roy Kral, Robert Farnon, and Audrey Morris, such record-company executives as Charles Lourie, Bruce Lundvall, and Ken Clancy, and a number of critics and jazz historians, including Whitney Balliett, Doug Ramsey, Grover Sales, James Lincoln Collier, Philip Elwood, and the late Leonard Feather, as well as academics.

The Jazzletter addressed a list of subscribers almost all of whom I knew personally. It was written for musicians, dealing with matters that concern musicians—jazz musicians to a large extent but not exclusively. I did not de­sign it to exclude laymen, and indeed whenever technical discussions proved necessary, tried to make them as clear and brief as possible. But in general, the publication assumed a measure of knowledge in its readers. I asked gui­tarist and composer Mundell Lowe what he thought the limits of Jazzletter subject matter should be. He said, "Anything that is of interest to us"

And what was of acute interest to jazz musicians was the history of the music and its makers, whether one of the older players and the era he or she had lived through, or younger ones, anxious to know about the times they did not know. And given that I faced no limits in length, I was able to write extended pieces that simply would not be practical in most mag­azines for structural reasons. I soon found that I was recording the life stories, derived from extended interviews, of musicians who might de­serve book-length biographies but were unlikely to get them, the nature of publishing being what it is. I found myself writing what I came to think of as mini-biographies.

In time, Oxford University Press published four anthologies of these essays, each of them gathered loosely around a central theme. Cats of Any Color was the fourth of these collections. Cassell has published a fifth, Arranging the Score, Yale University Press is publishing a sixth, and a sev­enth is pending. I know of no other publication that has produced a comparable quantity of anthologized material. Two of the books received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.”

Thanks to the collective efforts of many Jazz bloggers, the spirit of The Jazzletter lives on today in a variety of digital formats.

But for those of us who looked forward to that thud hitting the front door mat announcing that Gene had sent out another batch of his inimitable Jazzletter essays, musings and commentaries, there will never be anything quite like it again.

Michael Dees - "The Dream I Dreamed"

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

"Michael could always sing wonderfully in the tradition. And now, it's a

real pleasure to hear him writing in the tradition. We applaud them both."

Alan and Marilyn Bergman

"His words and his music make a promise to us. His voice keeps it."

Arthur Hamilton

"Michael has spent his career singing other people's songs and making them sound better. This time around, Michael is singing his own songs and they sound great. Congrats, Michael!"

Johnny Mandel

In current Jazz Circles, there are two people whose opinion I’ve come to have a high regard for: Graham Carter, the owner-operator at JazzedMedia Records and Holly Cooper of Mouthpiece Music Publicity and Marketing.

So when I found out that both were associated with The Dream I Dreamed,  vocalist Michael Dees’ new CD which is due out on JazzedMedia Records [JM 1071] on May 12, 2015, I took notice despite the fact I was only indirectly aware of Michael’s singing.

Boy am I glad I did because as Holly and her team at Mouthpiece Music have commented about Michael: “Dees is a consummate singer who doesn't need superfluous embellishments to convey the essence of a song. His style invokes the best of the male jazz vocalist tradition, and his compositions are highly reminiscent of the Great American Songbook. His melodies have a lyrical quality that stays with you, and his lyrics are smart, sensitive and cohesive.

Dees is accompanied by a powerhouse band, each with a long resume of recordings and performances both as leaders and as sidemen with some of the biggest names in music.

Consisting of 14 fourteen original compositions by Michael Dees. The Dream I Dreamed is the work of an experienced, confident performer who deserves the wide public attention due a superb artist.”

What is particularly impressive about Michael’s singing is its poise and control. He doesn’t make the listener work at it; he just takes you there. Whatever the feeling that he is trying to convey - love, sadness, sorrow disappointment, happiness, joyousness - Michael brings it across and puts the listener in his music.

Like a poet reading rhyme or an author speaking a narrative or an actor inferring a storyline through gesture and persona, Michael is a professional singer who creates and experience for the listener through his music.

What Michael Dees does is tell stories through lyrics and music and he does so in such a convincing fashion that you want them to go on forever.

Michael Dees is an accomplished artist who has been honing his art for almost half a century and it shows on The Dream I Dreamed.

If you are into vocal music infused with hip Jazz inflections sung by someone who knows his way around a lyric, then Michael Dees The Dream I Dreamed  [JazzMedia Records JM 1071] is a can’t miss choice.

© -Graham Carter/JazzedMedia Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“A few years ago I first became aware of Michael Dees while attending The Los Angeles Jazz Institute's concert series saluting Frank Sinatra. Michael performed a marvelous concert of Frank Sinatra/Count Basie songs accompanied by the Frank Capp Juggernaut Big Band. What I remember most was that Michael did not do the usual Sinatra type singing impression but instead sang each song with his own very

special sound and approach, and in the process bringing new life to the songs from the famous Sinatra/Basie collaboration we all know and love. He really nailed the songs and had everyone in the audience swinging and swaying in their seats.

Michael's background is rather surprising in that he was born in Houston, Texas but you would never know that from talking with him. His accent sounds much more East Coast than Texan. Michael kicked around the U.S. professionally during the very late '50s and early '60s, finally settling in Los Angeles in 1961 (Michael currently lives in Palm Springs, CA). The '60s brought much travel throughout the U.S. as Michael played the Playboy Clubs while he concentrated on honing his jazz chops. ….

Starting in the early '70s Michael Dees embarked on a long term career move by performing in over 100 television and movie soundtracks. Recent examples include Sabrina and the singing voice of Frank Sinatra in HBO's The Rat Pack. During this period Michael has sung, written or produced hundreds of commercial "jingles" for radio and television.

Missing in all this activity are any jazz vocal recordings by Michael since the '60s, until the recently formed Mack Avenue label asked him to do an album in 2001 (One Single Rose). Unfortunately that was Michael's only recorded jazz output of the past few years, until now.

My goal in starting the Jazzed Media label in 2002 was to give deserving jazz artists a home to perform and record music for release. This new release from Michael is a further step in that process by hopefully giving one of the great male jazz singers the recognition he so richly deserves (and has earned).

What makes this new album of Michael's so exciting is that he also wrote the words and music. It is unusual today to find this combination in male jazz vocalists. There is a sincerity in what Michael writes and sings. He strips away most of the flower and ornamentation we are used to hearing from male jazz vocalists singing the Great American Songbook and instead gives us an intimate reading of love's challenges and joys. This is a man speaking and singing from the heart and a road well-traveled….”

© -Holly Cooper/Mouthpiece Music, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Michael Dees is a rarity in jazz. He's a singer who writes music that is lyrical and lyrics that are poignant and emotive. The Dream I Dreamed, Dees' newest recording as a leader since his 2002 release One Single Rose, features 14 fourteen of his own original compositions, accompanied by some of the finest musicians on the West Coast.

Dees may be the most famous singer you never heard of. His long list of accomplishments stretches back to the 1960s when he was featured several times on The Steve Allen Show and recorded a complete album of his music. He was voted "Best New Male Singer" at the 1968 International Popular Song Festival in Rio de Janeiro where he met Elmer Bernstein, which led Bernstein to ask Dees to record the song "A Walk in the Spring Rain" for the soundtrack of the movie of the same title. He recorded two albums for Capitol Records, including Talk to Me Baby, which featured several Alan & Marilyn Bergman songs. The famed songwriting team liked his work so much, they asked him to sing their well-known tune "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life" for the soundtrack of the movie The Happy Ending. In the 1970s he began a long career as a studio singer, performing on over 100 television and movie soundtracks, including as the singing voice of Frank Sinatra in HBO's The Rat Pack and recording songs on the soundtrack to Sabrina, the 1995 movie starring Harrison Ford. He has also sung, written or produced hundreds of commercial "jingles" for radio and television.

Dees' voice is warm and full of colors. He knows how to cut to the heart of a lyric and sings with great nuance but without extraneous ornamentation. Although he penned these compositions within the last 10 years, they are incredibly reminiscent of the Great American Songbook. Had he written them earlier, they surely would be considered part of that timeless pantheon.

When asked where he gets his inspiration when he writes, he replies, "From every song I've ever heard." Judging by these songs, he's certainly heard a lot of them. The tunes on this disc are stylistically diverse. There are swingers like the opening "In A Moment" to gentle ballads like "I Miss You" and "Look At Me" to jazz waltzes like "A Long Time Comin'." He even captures a Dixieland feel with "Back In New Orleans." His melodies stay with you long after you've heard them, and his lyrics tell stories that are full of passion and longing. His songs are notably articulate and cogent, which Dees achieves by reading the lyrics out loud when he's writing, as if he were performing a monologue in a play.

The musicians on the project are leaders in their own right. The fantastic rhythm section comprises four legendary musicians, including Terry Trotter on piano, Chuck Berghofer on bass, Steve Schaeffer on drums, and Don Williams on percussion. The horn section is no less august with the Doug Webb and Chuck Manning on tenor sax, Bob Sheppard on tenor sax and clarinet, Sal Marquez on trumpet, and Steve Huffsteter on trumpet and flugelhorn.

The Dream I Dreamed is the work of an experienced, confident performer who evokes the best of the male jazz vocalist tradition. With his warm, intimate voice, memorable melodies, and affective lyrics, Michael Dees deserves the wide public attention due a superb artist.

The Dream I Dreamed is available through www.JazzedMedia.com,  Amazon and iTunes.

The following video features Michael singing Look At Me track from the new CD.

Don Ferrara - The Gordon Jack Interview

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Don is a real improviser and a very complete player—sound, ideas, time. He possesses very cohesive intuition." … Don was a powerful player and one of the few trumpeters to have some of Roy Eldridge's heat."

- Lee Konitz, alto saxophone

Where I grew up, everyone’s last name ended in a vowel, or so it seemed for a very long time.

Names like “Ranucci,” “DiStefano,” and “Capaldi” - it was all so mellifluous to listen to the teachers call the attendance roll each day in the classroom.

“DeSantis” was the name above the entrance to the bakery, “DiPippo” owned the store where you went to buy musical instruments and took music lessons and “Ferrara and Ferrara” was really a law firm.

The son of one of the Ferrara attorneys was my best buddy through most of grade school and as a result of this boyhood friendship, I’ve always had a fondness for the last name of “Ferrara.”

And my fondness for that family name didn’t diminish once I heard the brilliant trumpet playing of Don Ferrara on recordings by the Gerry Mulligan Sextet and then later on LPs with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and Gerry’s Concert Jazz Band.

Don Ferrara’s beautiful sound on trumpet always brought to mind another of my favorite trumpet players who shares the same first name - Don Fagerquist [and the same initials!]. And what I wrote about Don Fagerquist in this excerpt from a previous blog posting also applies equally as well to Don Ferrara.

“One of the musicians on the Left Coast who always knocked me out was trumpeter Don Fagerquist.

He had one of the most beautiful sounds that I ever heard on trumpet; plus, he was one heckuva swinger, which always caught me by surprise. Here’s this lyrical, pretty tone, and the next thing you know the guy is poppin’ one terrific Jazz phrase after another.

The trumpet seemed to find him. His was one of the purest tones you will ever hear on the horn. In Don Fagerquist, the instrument found one of its clearest forms of expression.

Don never seemed to get outside of himself. He found big bands and combos to work in that both complimented and complemented the way he approached playing the trumpet.

His tone was what musicians referred to as “legit” [short for legitimate = the sound of an instrument often associated with its form in Classical music].

No squeezing notes through the horn, no half-valve fingering and no tricks or shortcuts. Even his erect posture in playing the instrument was textbook.

If you had a child who wished to play trumpet, Don would have been the perfect teacher for all facets of playing the instrument.

He was clear, he was clean and he was cool.

His sound had a presence to it that just snapped your head around when you heard it; it made you pay attention to it.

No shuckin’ or jiving’, just the majesty of the trumpeter’s clarion call . When the Angel Gabriel picked trumpet as his axe [Jazz talk for instrument], he must have had Don’s tone in mind.”

- the editorial staff at JazzProfiles

Regrettably, there is not much information about Don Ferrara in the Jazz Literature, a fact that has been somewhat remedied by the following interview that Don Ferrara gave to Gordon Jack and which first appeared in the June, 2000 edition of JazzJournal.  It also forms Chapter 11 is Gordon’s invaluable Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective.

Gordon very graciously gave his consent to allow JazzProfiles to repost his Don Ferrara interview as a blog feature. I have retained the footnote numbering in the body of the text and you can find these sources at the end of Gordon’s interview along with a video that will give you an opportunity to sample Don’s trumpet playing.

[Gordon also advised regarding the photo that appears at the beginning of this feature: “One piece of information regarding the Ferrara, Travis, Candoli picture in my book was that they were all on stage with Mulligan's CJB in Paris at the time -1960.”]

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

What is really surprising about Don Ferrara, who worked with major figures like Georgie Auld, Woody Herman, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and Lennie Tristano, is that he is not mentioned in any of the standard jazz reference books. Tristano once said that Ferrara had ‘absolutely everything,' but in a long career, despite an earlier attempt by Leonard Feather, this is the first interview he has agreed to give. It took place in 1996, when he replied on cassette tape to my list of written questions.

“I was born on March 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York. I started playing the trumpet when I was ten years old, and I was the only professional musician in my family. The radio was filled with music every night, broadcasting from clubs and hotels all over the city, and I would listen to Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Duke, Basie, and Woody. I was hungry to hear as much as I could, and I was knocked out by how well the trumpeters played and how different they all sounded.

Jerry Wald had a good commercial band, and it was the first big band I played with for four months in 1945, but he was more of a businessman than a musician and he didn't make much contact with the guys. I left to join Georgie Auld, and along with Diz and Woody, he had one of the best big bands in the country. Al Porcino, who was a great lead trumpeter, was there along with Al Cohn and Serge Chaloff. Al Cohn wrote most of the book, which was very loose and musical, and Georgie was a friendly guy who would hang out with the band. He was a wonderful musician, not at all competitive, and I stayed with him until May 1946, when I was inducted into the Army. That is where I met Red Mitchell, because we were both in the same Army band, and Howie Mann was there too. Howie was a friend of mine from high school, and he was a good drummer who later worked with Elliot Lawrence.

I first met Warne Marsh at this time, and we spent a lot of time playing together and listening to records, which is when I found out about Lennie Tristano. As soon as I was discharged in April 1947,1 started studying with him, and right from the beginning he got me into chords, because I didn't know how any of that worked. It was thanks to Lennie that I was able to find my own direction, although I wasn't copying anyone's playing, so there wasn't anything to change. This was really when everything started for me, and I carried on studying with him for a total of fourteen years. 1947 was also the year I started teaching.

1950 was a very busy year for me because I was rehearsing with a band that Gene Roland put together for Charlie Parker. It was Al Porcino who recommended me to Gene, who was organizing an unusual big band with the idea of working and recording with Bird. A couple of weeks before rehearsals, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and I went to hear him at a club out in Queens, and we all ended up on the bandstand with Miles and J.J., who were working with him that night. I really enjoyed it. I had never played in a band as big as Gene Roland's—eight trumpets, five trombones, eight saxes, and four rhythm—and it was unbelievable to hear Bird playing in an eight-man sax section. He was so strong and beautiful, playing lead the way he played everything else, and the feeling and looseness were just wonderful. One of the tunes was "Limehouse Blues," and even though he had thirteen brass in cup mutes behind him, his line and sound cut through everything. I did about two weeks' rehearsals, but I couldn't make the recording with Bird because, once again thanks to Al Porcino, I was called for a record date with Chubby Jackson.1 Howard McGhee was in the trumpet section with Al and me, along with J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding in the trombones and a very hip sax section of Charlie Kennedy, Georgie Auld, Zoot Sims, and Gerry Mulligan, with Tony Aless on piano and Don Lamond on drums. There was talk of Chubby taking the band out to a new club in Texas, but I didn't go because Red Mitchell had recommended me to Woody Herman, so I started working with the Third Herd in April 1950.

Our first job was a month at Bop City in New York, and we had some wonderful soloists like Milt Jackson and Bill Harris that I really enjoyed listening to. The trumpet section was very strong, and Bernie Glow played most of the lead, although the way the book was written, some of the tunes had the lead split three ways. Being a "Four Brothers" type band, the saxes had most of the solos, but once in a while the trumpets got a chance. On "Route 66" for instance, Woody asked me to write a chorus for the section to play in unison in harmon mutes, which was followed by a solo for Doug Mettome. I arranged for Jeff Morton to take Sonny Igoe's place on the band for three weeks when Sonny got married, and the rhythm section sounded wonderful. Woody was nice to work for and I stayed with the band for fifty weeks, but eventually I left and went back home to Brooklyn to study with Lennie again, and I think that Don Fagerquist took my place.2

Over the next few years I was teaching and studying as well as playing at lots of jam sessions around town. Then, in 1955, Lee Konitz asked me to join his group with Sal Mosca, Peter Ind, and either Dick Scott, Ed Levisen, or Shadow Wilson on drums. Billy Bauer sometimes worked with us, and the repertoire consisted of originals by Lee and me, pieces by Lennie, together with some of Bird's lines. It was a great band. I loved the way Lee, Peter, and Sal played, and we had a wonderful time for a couple of years, playing at clubs like Birdland, Cafe Bohemia, and the Half Note.

The first time we worked opposite Mulligan and Brookmeyer, Gerry said he was so knocked out with my playing that he called me to record with his sextet. I rehearsed with the group in the afternoon of September 26,1956, and after we took a break and went out for something to eat, we recorded the album later that night.3 That was the only time I played with the sextet, but a few days later Bill Crow called and said that Gerry wanted me to join the band. I didn't because I was still working with Lee, although I really liked the sextet. The writing was very good, the blend and intonation of the four horns was perfect, and everyone could really blow. The following year I recorded again with Gerry, only this time in a big band, and just about everyone had a short solo.4 That same year Lee and I were in the studio for Norman Granz, and on "Billie's Bounce" we played Bird's four choruses from memory, because most of the people studying with Lennie were memorizing solos by Lester, Bird, and Roy Eldridge.5

One of my students was a good friend of Mulligan's, and Gerry told him to get me to call because he wanted me to join the Concert Jazz Band, which he was organizing. After three months of auditions and rehearsals we played our first gig in January 1960 at Basin Street East. The club was filled every night, and I couldn't believe how many musicians were coming to hear us, as well as film and stage people who were friends of Judy Holliday. I had already met her at the rehearsals, and she was there at the band's first night, sitting next to Dora, my wife, and they were having as much fun listening as we were playing. I remember one night later on at the Village Vanguard, someone was whistling loudly after solos and at the end of every tune, generally having one hell of a time. When we came off the stand I asked Dora who was making all the noise, and she said it was Judy!

Nick Travis played all the lead, and he had good chops and excellent time. He was a fine consistent player with a relaxed feeling, but when we were in Europe he had a loose tooth on the top, right under the mouthpiece. He really had a problem for the last part of the tour, but it wasn't apparent to anyone, and as you can hear on the records, he sounds as full and consistent as always. Gerry already had Brookmeyer, but he wanted another strong soloist in the trombone section, so a couple of months before we left for Europe, Willie Dennis joined us, and he was perfect. I had first met Willie when he was with Elliot Lawrence in 1948, and he was a very good friend of mine. When he left Elliot's band, he moved to New York and started studying with Lennie, and his playing was just beautiful. He had very good chops and great time, with a soft texture to his sound, and despite what you may think, he was not slurring all the time but tonguing very lightly. He was very spontaneous, immediately reacting to what was happening. He was also a very good cook, and if you ate at his house, you ate well. Unfortunately Willie was killed in a car accident in Central Park; Dora and I went to his funeral, which had a closed casket. His wife, Morgana King, told us that on the night of the accident, it had been raining, and the road turned but the driver didn't. He hit a tree, sending Willie through the windscreen.

Gene Quill was a great character, and one of his features in the band was "18 Carrots for Rabbit," which was nearly all alto followed by a short solo from Gerry. One night after Gene finished and Gerry took over, the audience exploded because Gene had played so well. He took an extravagant bow, turned round to the band, giving us a real dirty look, and kissed himself on the shoulder. We just broke up and couldn't play anything, missing a whole bunch of phrases to be played behind Gerry's solo. At the end of the piece, Gerry asked us what had happened. We told him what Gene had been doing and Gerry, shaking his head, said, "I don't want to play after him anymore. Who the hell can play after him!" Which is when we all started laughing again. It was great having Zoot Sims on tour with us because he was so musical. He had great time and a sound that projected a wonderful feeling every time he played. On the subject of sounds, Gerry had the best of any baritone player, and he was extremely melodic. Bob Brookmeyer, too, had a superb sound and time, and they both played piano very well.

It was very easy working with Gerry. He was definite and consistent, so you knew exactly how he wanted his things played, and he always listened intently to the soloists, letting them know how much he dug their playing. We were all friends, and it was a happy band, in fact the best big band I ever played with. Gerry also had a good sense of humor. I remember one night he became angry with some of the audience for keeping time with the band by tapping on their glasses. He walked to the mike and told them he didn't like it and it was costing everyone in the room a lot of money to hear us. Those people got up to leave, and Gerry announced that it would be a good time to play "Walkin' Shoes."

I started working with Lennie at the Half Note in November 1962, and it was the best time I ever had playing. For about a year and a half we did three weeks there every two or three months, and Lennie was just unbelievable; his surprises were endless. I had been listening to him for years at lessons and jam sessions, but to be on a gig with him was something else, because he totally followed through on everything he told his students. He had great time and he was the most melodic player I ever heard. His chords and lines were extremely rich and intense, and I couldn't believe what a great sound he got out of those terrible nightclub pianos. Lennie would ask what tune I wanted to play and at what tempo. He would tap off, and we would just start improvising.

In 1964 Dora and I were busy with the first home that we had bought in New Jersey, and for the rest of the sixties I carried on teaching and making sessions. In 1972 we moved to Pasadena, California, which is where Warne Marsh introduced me to Gary Foster. I started teaching at Gary's studio and did some playing with Gary, Alan Broadbent, and Putter Smith, who are all excellent musicians.

Lennie Tristano was very important to me, as well as being one of my best friends, and I kept in touch with him until he died in 1978. Jeff Morton was a great drummer, and we played together as often as we could until his death in 1996. We have now moved to southern California, just north of San Diego, and because I teach by cassette, we can live anywhere in the country and still keep all my students.

No interview with Don Ferrara would be complete without discussing Roy Eldridge, who had an enormous influence on his playing, and his comments in a 1956 series of articles he wrote for Metronome magazine are particularly succinct: "Every note Roy played had meaning and life . . . his feelings pushed the valves down, not his fingers." In a recent telephone conversation Don told me, "Roy was the most important trumpeter for me. His time and sound were great. His line was always melodic, and the feeling was always very intense. He had the best chops of all the trumpeters, sounding loose and strong, and it didn't matter what tempo or in what range he played; it was all meaningful."

I concluded the interview by asking Don to list some of his favorite instrumentalists, singers, arrangers, and bands. His selections are as follows:

Trumpet—Roy Eldridge. Trombone—Bob Brookmeyer, Willie Dennis, and Bill Harris. Alto—Lee Konitz and Charlie Parker. Tenor—Lester Young, Warne Marsh, and Zoot Sims. Baritone—Gerry Mulligan and Lars Gullin. Clarinet—Artie Shaw and Lester Young. Vibes—Milt Jackson. Piano— Lennie Tristano, Sal Mosca, and Bud Powell. Guitar—Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Billy Bauer. Bass—Peter Ind and Red Mitchell. Drums—Jeff Morton, Max Roach, and Roy Haynes. Singers—Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. Arrangers—Ralph Burns, Neal Hefti, Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, and Bill Holman. Big Band—Gerry Mulligan and Woody Herman. Small Group—Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker.

Don Ferrara's solo abilities are well represented on the albums he made with Mulligan's sextet and the CJB. In 2000 Peter Ind released previously unissued tapes of a 1957 Lee Konitz engagement at the Midway Lounge, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, containing four numbers featuring the trumpeter.6 A particularly good example of Don's work in a small group situation is the LP. he mentions in the interview, where he and Konitz play Parker's famous solo on "Billie's Bounce." The album allows him to stretch out and really develop his highly individual ideas, and it has the additional advantage of including two of his distinctive compositions, "Sunflower" based on "Yesterdays," and "Movin* Around" based on Tristano's "Pennies in Minor" It is a recording that is long overdue for reissue on CD.”

NOTES

1.  Chubby Jackson Big Band. Fantasy OJCCD-711-2.

2.  In Bill Clancy's book on Woody Herman, Chronicles of the Herds (Schirmer Books), a June 1950 photograph shows Don Ferrara playing with the band at the Capitol Theater in New York.

3.  Gerry Mulligan Sextet. Emarcy Jap 826993-2.

4.  Gerry Mulligan, Mullenium Columbia/Legacy CK 65678. In addition to some examples of Gene Krupa and Elliot Lawrence playing Mulligan charts from the late forties, this CD also features six titles recorded by a Mulligan big band in April 1957. It includes a restored Ferrara solo on "Thruway" that had been removed on the original L.P. The CD booklet has some excellent and previously unpublished photographs from the session.

5.  Lee Konitz, Very Cool. MGV 8209. May 1957. Talking about Ferrara on the sleevenote to Nat Hentoff, Konitz says, "Don is a real improviser and a very complete player—sound, ideas, time. He possesses very cohesive intuition." More recently he told me: "Don was a powerful player and one of the few trumpeters to have some of Roy Eldridge's heat."

6.  Peter Ind Presents Lee Konitz in Jazz from the Fifties. Wave CD 39. February 1957.

If you wish to spend a fun evening listening to recorded Jazz sometime, try playing back-to-back records by Bobby Hackett, Don Fagerquist and Don Ferrara see where that takes you.

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