The Hi-Lo's And All That Jazz

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

For the purposes of this feature, I wasn’t sure how best to describe The Hi-Lo’s, one of my all-time favorite vocal quartets, so I thought perhaps I would turn Gene Puerling, one of the group’s founding members, for the most accurate description.

Except that when I turned to his explanation in the insert notes to The Hi-Lo’s And All That Jazz, I got somewhat of a hedge as you will no doubt discern when you read the following:

“Outside of "Howd'ya get together?" the question most often asked of The Hi-Lo's is "Do you consider yourselves a jazz-vocal group?" The answer that rolls from our tongues (quite automatically by now) is, "We would rather not be categorized." Somewhat of an indirect answer, perhaps, but this is our feeling.

Since we endeavor to delve into all phases of vocal group work, such as our usual four-part harmonic constructions of standards, folk songs, and even barbershop gems in their traditional harmonies; and since our future plans call for the vocal adaptation of instrumental themes by the "classical masters," even work with Bach chorales, we can hardly be categorized as a “Jazz" vocal group. (Besides, has anyone really come up with an acceptable" definition of the word "jazz"?)

Looking at the contents of this program, however, we feel that we have directed our attention, for the most part, to the Jazz idiom. In doing so, we secured the great mind of Marty Paich for the instrumental backgrounds. Here is a man whose fine musical sense never cease. The instrumental scores here are tasteful and complete, fulfilling the job that is most difficult when backing a vocal group: that of complementing the group without overshadowing the basic vocal arrangement.

Marty, in turn, surrounded himself with the usual array of fine West Coast musicians. In the special-credits department, we see the name Clare Fischer. Clare is our accompanist (and our biggest critic). He is responsible for two originals here, including both vocal and instrumental writing. We feel that we have a real "find" in this talent from Michigan State University.

Onward, then! You'll find originals by Marty Paich, Russ Freeman, and Clare Fischer; vocal arrangements by Marty, Clare, and yours truly. And if you listen closely, the unmistakable tones of our friend, Frank DeVol, in 'THE HI-LO'S and all that jazz.”

In 1998 a collection of songs all taken from The Hi-Lo’s earliest recordings for Trend and Starlite were issued on a Varese Vintage CD [VSD 5694] entitled The Best of The Hi-Lo’s for which Elliot Kendall prepared the following insert notes. They represent an excellent historical overview of a singular vocal quartet - The Hi-Lo’s.

“Excitement, energy, emotion, humor and dynamics - these are just a few of the many elements found in the breathtaking vocal performances of The Hi-Lo’s. When they emerged as a musical force in the early 1950’s, the Hi-Lo's broke all the rules for vocal quartets. Traditional musical categories can't even begin to describe them; they lent their unique sound to pop, jazz, barbershop, calypso, folk, bossa nova and musical theater. The Hi-Lo's themselves pre­fer not to be categorized as their encompassed almost every contemporary musical style.

These recordings represent the formative years of the Hi-Lo's. During this period, the group took great risks and liberties with familiar standards, and added new twists and ad-libs to then-contemporary selections.

Group leader and bass singer Gene Puerling developed his many different musical ideas while growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "I formed several groups during the late '40’s," he recalls today. "I started the Double Daters, the Honeybees and the Four Shades.

The Four Shades included future Hi-Lo's baritone singer Bob Strasen, who was originally from Strasbourg, France. When I first met him, he already had considerable experience in choir work and other vocal groups in and around Milwaukee. Bob was a terrific barbershopper, and he had a wonderfully smooth vocal quality

In 1951, Puerling moved to Los Angeles and, within a week of his arrival, met tenor singer Clark Burroughs. Burroughs was a Los Angeles native, a graduate of Loyola University and a member of Roger Wagner's chorale before he met Puerling. Puerling and Burroughs were soon roommates and singing partners in a quartet called the Youngsters on the "Alan Young T.V variety show." To make ends meet, Puerling did occasional session work (including one with Les Baxter’s orchestra) until he eventually started working at Wallichs Music City record store in Hollywood. He also worked for a brief period as a shipping clerk at London Records.

Meanwhile Burroughs joined the Encores, the vocal group which performed with the Billy May band. The baritone singer in the encores was Bob Morse, a native of Pacoima, California and a skilled graphic artist who was attending Chouinard Art Institute (this skill was later utilized when he designed the group's early album covers and on-stage wardrobe). Burroughs and Morse sang in the Encores for over a year and, when the group split up, Puerling approached them with the idea of forming a vocal quartet. When they agreed, Puerling summoned his former singing partner Bob Strasen from Milwaukee who flew to Los Angeles and The Hi-Lo’s were born. The first vocal work­outs immediately convinced all four that they had made the right decision. As Puerling put it, "as soon as we sang a few chords together, we knew it was going to be great.”

For ten weeks or more the Hi-Lo's rehearsed at least three hours a day. Every note, syllable and dynamic was tirelessly planned out before they even entered a recording studio. Writing and arranging most of the vocal charts were Gene Puerling responsibility. "For one thing," Gene notes, "Clark had a phenomenal vocal range, and that opened up all sorts of arranging possibilities. I found myself conceiving very complex vocal ideas, most of which these guys sang with great aplomb. The more difficult I wrote, the more they seemed to love the challenge. “Marvelous talent!" Clark Burroughs adds: "When Gene finished creating and polishing an arrangement, it was comparable to all the intricacies and workings of a finely-crafted Swiss watch. It really became a work of beauty and art."

In April of  1953, the Hi-Lo's were signed to Trend records in a deal made possible by arranger-conductor (and future film composer) Jerry Fielding. "As I recall, we literally began knocking on doors to sing for people, and one of those doors just happen to belong to Jerry Fielding,” Puerling remembers with a laugh.

Burroughs recalls that, "Jerry was very excited about our sound; I can still remember how effusive he was. He was really knocked out, Two of the songs we auditioned for him were They Didn't Believe Me and Georgia. He took us immediately to Albert Marx who owned Trend records, and in no time at all we had a signed contract. From that point on, things really started to happen. We secured a management deal with Paul Cerf and Bob Ginter of Beverly Hills, and several radio stations picked up our first record right after it was released. Soon after that Bill Loeb became our personal manager.

On April 10, 1953, The Hi-Lo’s recorded They Didn’t Believe Me, Georgia, Peg ‘O My Heart and My Baby Just Cares For Me for a Trend extended play LP.  All four songs were recorded between 9:30 PM. and 12:30 AM at Radio Recorders Annex on Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood. Among the 15 musicians employed for the session were such jazz greats as William "Buddy" Collette (saxophone), Conrad Gozzo (trumpet), Dick Nash (trombone), Ted Nash (saxophone) and George "Red" Callender (sass). Soon after this session, the group also recorded a single of Love Me or Leave Me with legendary jazz vocalist Herb Jeffries for the Olympic label.

By late 1954, the Hi-Lo’s had left Trend and signed a new deal with Starlite Records where they were fortunate enough to have their orchestrations arranged and conducted by Frank Comstock. Under Comstock, the Starlite sessions were recorded at Goldstar and Capitol studios in Hollywood. "Those were certainly exciting sessions and they were done very quickly, with no overdubs," Frank Comstock recalls today. "Every minute of studio time was utilized, and we would easily finish an album in three days, perhaps recording four songs a day during that time. I think that's what makes those records sound so fresh and exciting today." Clark Burroughs elaborates, "Gene would write the vocal arrangements, and then Frank would write orchestra parts to complement Gene's arrangements. It was actually very simple."

In 1957 the Hi-Lo's signed with Columbia Records, where they continued their vocal harmony legacy with orchestras led by Frank Comstock, Warren Barker, Frank de Vol and Marty Paich. In 1959, Bob Strasen left the Hi-Lo’s and was replaced by tenor Don Shelton.

The Hl-LO's were also extremely popular on variety television, and appeared on, among others, the Steve Allen show (6 episodes), the Rosemary Clooney show (39 episodes!), Swing Into Spring with Peggy Lee, The Nat “King” Cole Show, The Garry Moore Show, a Frank Sinatra Special, The Bell Telephone Hour's Main Street U.S.A. and the Pat Boone show.

The early 1960’s found the Hi-Lo’s signed to Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records, where they continued their unique and innovative sound until they disbanded in 1964.

In 1967, Gene Puerling and Don Shelton former The Singers Unlimited with Bonnie Herman and Len Dresslar and began a new era for vocal harmony work with the use of studio overdubbing.

The Hi-Lo’s reunited and performed at the 21st Annual Monterey Jazz Festival in 1978 and recorded a pair of inspired albums for the MPS label in 1979 and 1981.

The following video features The Hi-Lo’s performing Marty Paich’s arrangement of Of Thee I Sing.

Nicholas Payton "Plays Well With Others"

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

Trumpet pairings in Jazz date back to the very beginnings of the music when King Oliver and Louis Armstrong shared a front line in New Orleans where the music originated and a few years later in Chicago where the music had migrated in the 1920’s via the steamboats that plied the Mississippi River.

Trumpet has always been the dominant or lead voice in Jazz both because the sound of the instrument can generally be heard above all the others and because of where the sonority of the instrument falls in terms of musical keys.

Because the instrument has the ability to overpower all of the other horns, it’s relatively rare in Jazz to have a combo fronted by two trumpets.

Big bands occasionally feature “duels” between the three or four trumpets that make up its “trumpet section,” but generally, only one trumpet in the section takes the trumpet solos.

And due to the huge and lasting footprint that Louis Armstrong left on the music, trumpet has always had a special place in the pantheon of Jazz instruments with each generation bringing forth its own clarion call bearers.

Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie steered the instrument into the modern era and were immortalized on a number of recordings produced by the impresario, Norman Granz.

Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard were the horn’s messengers during the hard bop era and beyond. Sadly, none of these modern trumpet giants recorded together but Freddie Hubbard did pair up with Woody Shaw, a later modern Jazz trumpet disciple, for an LP. [As you will note from the published comment below, Freddie and Lee DID record together on Blue Note's Night of the Cookers. Thanks to an attentive reader for this correction.]

Randy Brecker, Arturo Sandoval and the late, Woody Shaw gave power and presence to the playing of the trumpet during the last quarter of the 20th century. Randy and Arturo continue to amaze on the modern scene with Wynton Marsalis having taken the instrument to a whole new role of prominence with his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

On the West Coast, the brothers Candoli - Pete and Conte - deserve mention for their LP’s featuring two trumpets.

I was reminded of the two trumpet format during a recent listening of Nicholas Payton’s CD Payton's Place [Verve 557327-2] that features Payton with fellow trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Roy Hargrove (t); Joshua Redman, Tim Warfield (ts); Anthony Wonsey (p); Reuben Rogers (b); Adonis Rose (d). 9/97,1/98.

Nicholas Payton has a ripe, full trumpet sound and is also a composer whose writing is steeped in traditional harmony with a hard, modern edge.

Payton is a traditionalist who, in addition to developing his own book of songs, has shown a deep interest in classic jazz [he made a wonderful tribute CD to “Pops” entitled Dear Louis].

His playing is underscored by a strong sense of swing, a bright, ringing tone and a  skilled storytelling voice. He makes no demands on himself that he can't comfortably fulfil, and his best solos occupy that middle register which so many younger players seem to think is either dull or sissy.

On Payton Place, Marsalis stops long enough for two tunes, Brownie A La Mode and the self-explanatory 'The Three Trumpeteers' (on which Hargrove also guests). Roy is the unexpected choice of partner on With A Song In My Heart and shows a side of his playing which rarely surfaces in his own work, bright, fleet and softly lyrical. Josh Redman comes in on A Touch Of Silver and continues to prompt questions as to how great he really is.

Payton's writing has come on in leaps and bounds, utilizing unfamiliar registers and altered harmonic patterns to give the album a hint of strangeness.

It’s nice to find another trumpet player who plays well with others.

"Jazz Lives - An Afterword" by Gene Lees

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

Afterword- Jazz Lives

By Gene Lees

The title of this piece alludes to a play on words since it is indeed the “Afterword” that Gene Lees wrote to a book which he co-authored with Canadian photographer John Reeves entitled Jazz Lives: 100 Portraits in Jazz.

While the book’s title is stated with the other pronunciation for the word - “lives” - both the book’s beautiful photographs of Jazz musicians, young and old, and the argument in Gene’s Afterword make the point that Jazz is very much alive.

I bought my copy of  Jazz Lives: 100 Portraits in Jazz [Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 1992] many years ago while coming upon it quite by accident at the Borders Bookstore that for many years occupied the corner of Post and Powell Streets just off Union Square in downtown San Francisco. It was a great place to browse for books while listening to the conductors hammering away at the bells on the City’s famous Cable Cars as the headed down to the turnaround at the bottom of Powell as it runs into Market Street.

All 100 of the John Reeves’s Jazz musician photographs are magnificent but the one he snapped of Dave Brubeck is a personal favorite of mine because John used an angle for Dave’s portrait that really brings out Dave’s American Indian genealogy.

In 1997, I took the book with me to a concert by Dave’s quartet and the Pacific Mozart Ensemble at the Calvary Presbyterian Church on Fillmore Street that premiered Dave’s extended work - The Gates of Justice.

I was hopeful that after the performance, I could talk Dave into autographing it for me.

As the program was about to begin, I looked up to see Iola Brubeck, Dave’s wife, taking the seat next to mine. I smiled, showed her the Reeves photograph of Dave and very spontaneously asked her if she would autograph it for me.

She graciously signed my book just above Dave’s photo.

When the concert finished, many friends came by our seats to greet Iola and comment on the music.

I used this as an opportunity to slip away without seeking Dave’s autograph, too.

I mean, how many Jazz fans have a photograph of Dave Brubeck signed by Iola?

Although it is not the Jazz of my “Ute” [apologies to Joe Pesci - youth], Jazz is still being played today by some wonderfully talented musicians. Here’s hoping that whoever writes a piece similar to the one that follows is able to say the same thing about the music 100 years from now.

“Almost from its earliest days, some of the admirers of jazz have been announcing its imminent demise. Each advance in the music has been denounced as a virus that would destroy it, the prognosis being issued with indignant ferocity. I know of no art that has inspired such partisan division.

When Louis Armstrong departed from the practices of New Orleans polyphony, admirers of that music lamented the sacrilege. After Armstrong came 1930s small group swing and the big band jazz explosion. This "modernism" was considered treasonous. Then in the 1940s came bebop: the schism it caused was bitter. Bebop was called "Chinese music" by the one faction, who in turn were abused as moldy figs by the advocates of bop.

And the cry "Bebop killed the big bands!" was heard in the land, although it was patently absurd: not all the bands took up the new music and the public was perfectly free to patronize those that did not and to ignore bebop if it preferred a harmonically and rhythmically simpler music. Some fundamentalists were still clinging to this tenet forty years after bebop arrived, ignoring the historical fact that it was just those bands that accepted and accommodated elements of it that survived, including those of Woody Herman and Count Basic. Duke Ellington had no trouble absorbing players with bebop proclivities, such as Clark Terry, into his own overall style. Later on, Ellington recorded with John Coltrane. Ellington survived as a bandleader into the 1970s, Basic and Herman into the eighties, and all three bands are still extant under other leaders. They may play on in the dawn of the twenty-first century; their music has become part of the living repertoire as surely as that of Mozart, Johann Strauss, and Debussy. Bebop didn't kill the big bands, various social forces did the job.

If successive groups of people wanted whatever form of jazz they favored to remain fixed forever, another group has continually peered, hand shading forehead, into the future, asking a question which became anathema to jazz musicians: "Where is jazz going?" Legend has it that Stan Kenton once replied, "Well, we're going to Kansas City."

Back in 1934, in a book entitled Music Ho!, the British conductor, composer, and writer Constant Lambert examined what had happened to European concert music. It seemed to have advanced as far as it could go, he thought, certainly as far as the audience could follow, and some composers were resorting to what he called "time traveling," moving back and forth in historical periods. Jazz critics would lay the same charge on alto saxophonist Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, among others, and started using terms such as "neo-conservatism," "neo-bop," "bebop revival movement."

When jazz began to be taken seriously as art, many of its chroniclers and commentators, it seems to me, looked to classical-music critics for their models, and in the process made a fundamental mistake. Classical music is largely a written tradition. Jazz is an oral tradition, based on the precedents of other players, the study of their records, and, when possible, the absorption of personal lessons from those who, like Dizzy Gillespie, Phil Woods, Clark Terry, and more, were willing to pass their knowledge along in clinics or just private conversation. In that sense, I suppose, you can make a somewhat tenuous claim that jazz is a folk art. But then so is the use of personal computers, since the manuals are incomprehensible and we teach each other to use the equipment.

Though jazz is now taught in thousands of schools, its tradition still is primarily communicated through listening to records and emulating its masters. Thus it is not only an oral tradition, it is an aural one. Though most jazz musicians read music well, jazz is not about reading, it is about playing, and above all about improvising in (as Jane Ira Bloom emphasizes) a personal voice.

When jazz became respectable — and legend to the contrary, many American intellectuals proclaimed its importance from its early days — a number of writers arose to argue its case. Few among them had any real technical or historical background in music — which is strange, in that the musicians usually have a considerable knowledge of classical music, as indeed do many members of the lay jazz audience. These critics were mostly fans with typewriters; one of them was an electrical engineer. I have often thought that one of the most unfortunate things that happened to jazz was to be proclaimed an art form, for that made it self-conscious and some of it became pretentious. But worst of all, those eager writers who cried out for its respectability adopted the model of classical-music criticism. And classical-music criticism was itself fundamentally flawed, since it looked on music as exploration rather than expression. That is to say, to be considered important, the composer was expected to revise and "expand" the musical language, not merely use it. If he did not do so, he was not "original."

This view, which developed in the nineteenth century, was, I think, the misapplication to art of the experience of science. Why, you could see it for yourself. In the branches of science, new discoveries constantly caused the revision or superannuation of previous models of reality. New "truths" replaced old and then in turn were themselves superseded, which of course they could not have been if they had ever been truths in the first place. The scientists of our own time have at last attained what may be the one sensible scientific truth: that we cannot know reality, we can only design models of it, subject to revision as we get more "information."

The nineteenth century began with Beethoven, a young piano virtuoso of thirty-one. Mozart had been considered the finest improviser of his age, and according to contemporary accounts, Beethoven surpassed him. In 1800 he gave a concert in which his First Symphony was performed. After that the vocabulary of music expands rapidly, with Beethoven's late quartets sometimes seeming to anticipate jazz in their harmonic usage and coloration. It was inevitable that music would seem to be "progressing." So it was in science; so it must also be in art.

But, matters of formal structure aside, the "progress" consisted to a large extent of exploring harmony. By the time of Arnold Schoenberg's maturity, the methodology seemed to have become so complicated that he rejected it and developed a system of twelve-tone or serial composition, in effect declaring all tones equal, none being more important than the other, and he created a kind of music that almost a century later remains bafflingly impenetrable to the layman.The idea that art is an unending exercise in revolution is a doubtful one even for classical music, and it is utterly inapplicable to jazz, if only because jazz is primarily an oral rather than a written tradition. There is one other way in which it differs, perhaps even more important. We have noted that the master composers in and before Beethoven's time were also master performers and improvisers. As the nineteenth century progressed, music became a matter of master composers and their minions, the orchestra players who lived only to reproduce the music of other men. A great division opened between the creation of music and its re-creation. A performer was judged by how well he played someone else's work, a standard that in classical music still prevails.

But jazz restored the oneness of creation and performance, the tradition of masterful improvisation. And it expanded the art in that it developed a system of group improvisation. It thereby created a perfect paradigm of democracy, with the voice and message and emotions of each participant held in due respect. This doubtless is one of the reasons dictators in recent decades have hated and proscribed it. It is also a reason, we might note in passing, that musicians living under tyrannies like that of (until recently) Poland or even highly structured societies like that of Japan — for example, Adam Makowicz and Kei Akagi, respectively — should have perceived in jazz an escape into freedom.

What jazz did in the first half of its life was to follow the pattern of European harmonic evolution, exploring the implications of the overtone series. But there are evident limits to what an audience can hear. And it was all too easily forgotten that serialism had not found much of a following a half century after its development; it still hasn't, after the better part of a century. Much twentieth-century classical music has been interesting primarily to a small group of specialists. For the most part it has survived in a greenhouse atmosphere of grants, endowments, and patronage, sequestered from the withering winds of reality.

Jazz has enjoyed no such indulgence. While it is true that the music has been admired and praised by leading intellectuals and thoughtful musicians since its early days, it is also true that some of the members of the cultural establishment have been frightened by its energy, immediacy, and emotion. Now, to be sure, thousands of courses on playing jazz are taught throughout North America, but there has been no such expansion of courses in its appreciation, comparable to, say, English literature courses. The jazz musician still must attract an audience.

And it is, I think, out of the tension of serving two masters, the artist's own inner sense of what is the best and highest in his work on the one hand and the limitations of a lay though willing audience on the other, that jazz has kept its head when all the musics about it were losing theirs, whether the coarsest and most ignorant of current pop music or the most arcane and uncompromising of intellectualized "classical" music.

Jazz is best appreciated by those who couple a measure of intellectual understanding with a desire and capacity to feel. This is its greatness. It is to me the music that speaks best to and for our time, this remarkable art that began to formulate itself in the Louisiana delta as the century began and by century's end has become first a special and highly intelligent musical language for America and finally an idiom for all the world.

I pay no attention to those who coin terms like "neo-traditionalist" and "bebop revivalist." The jazz composer-player — for in jazz the two have again become one — can and does borrow on the whole rich tradition of this music in a way that the classical composer is enjoined from doing.

I am reminded of a comment by John Clayton, who has had success in both the classical and jazz worlds: "The influences in jazz are enormous. The things that we have to draw from, I think, are what makes it so expansive, especially when you compare it to classical music. In classical music there are more rules that allow you to accept or reject the music. If you don't play Mozart and composers of that period in that style, then it's quote 'wrong.' In jazz we invite your contributions to stride or bebop or whatever it is. If you want to throw some different stuff in there, it's welcome. It's wanted, in fact."

This is a difference of great magnitude.

Jazz is not "going" anywhere. It is there. It has explored and consolidated its conventions and vocabulary. If you consider the work of only the pianists in this book — Oscar Peterson, Cedar Walton, Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, Roger Kellaway, Warren Bern-hardt, Lou Levy, Alan Broadbent, Geri Allen, Renee Rosnes among them — you will realize that they achieve highly personal and deeply moving music out of the same vocabulary on the same instrument. This is a far greater creativity, to my mind, than a constant anxious search for originality through altering the vocabulary of the art. In the sense of the artist's improvising original expression out of known vocabulary and a strong tradition, jazz has gone back to Bach.

If our species survives, and as an American folk expression has it, "the Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise," Roy Hargrove and Chris Potter will be making jazz fifty years from now, and Renee Rosnes and Geri Allen will be something like Myra Hess and Nadia Boulanger when the twenty-first century is fifty years old.

With Spiegle Willcox and Benny Carter still out there and young Kenny Washington, bebop revivalist or not, studying and assimilating the music's tradition, it is ludicrous for anyone to say that jazz is dying.

Quite to the contrary. Jazz lives.

Gene Lees

West Coast Jazz by John Dunton [From the Archives]

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

"... [M]y main aim in this piece was to point out that a lot of the music dismissed as shallow or undemanding was, in fact, good in its own way. If the more jazz inclined records that came from the West Coast are added to the big band tracks, the excursions into Latin American rhythms, the experiments with instrumentation, and the kind of good natured, easy swinging music I have described, it will be seen that the Los Angeles scene produced a great deal that was exciting, innovative, and good to listen to. And much of it is still interesting."

"One of the false ideas prevalent in jazz circles is that the records produced in California in the 1950s were, in the words of one critic, "bloodless museum pieces, a neatly packaged soundtrack for the cold war." And, if you listen to jazz programs, you will hear few examples of West Coast Jazz. The occasional Gerry Mulligan or Chet Baker disc will creep in, but it's rare to hear music by Chico Hamilton, Conte Candoli, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Herbie Harper, and Lennie Niehaus, to mention just a few of the excellent musicians working around Los Angeles in the period concerned.

It needs to be said that it's also rare to hear much of the white jazz played in New York around the same time, and Nick Travis, Sam Most, Eddie Costa, Joe Puma and others like them, are consigned to near-oblivion. It's almost as if there is an unspoken assumption that the only 1950s jazz worth remembering is the hard bop played mostly by black musicians and very often recorded for Blue Note. This isn't to suggest that it isn't worth listening to, but simply to point out that a lot of other good music was also put on record.

I'm tempted to say that a kind of reverse racism almost applies, with black being good and white being bad, but it may be that it's actually a case of the kind of amnesia that marketing and the need to stay in fashion produce. People forget the past until it's conveniently revived for them in easily-identifiable packages. But I don't want to extend this argument, and my intention is to point to the liveliness and charm of many examples of West Coast jazz." Charm" isn't a word used often in the language of jazz criticism, and it certainly couldn’t be extended to describe tough, hard bop, but it does apply to at least some of the music from 1950s Los Angeles.

West Coast Jazz was efficiently marketed, and there was a degree of truth in the assertion made by black musicians in California that it often left them out, the packaging tending to highlight clean-cut, young white musicians wearing neat suits or casual clothes. Sun, good living, tidy jazz, and regular earnings, were all suggested by the album covers. It wasn't exactly true of the lives of some of the musicians, of course, and you only need to read about the activities of Art Pepper, Joe Maini, Gary Frommer and others to realize that the jazz life, even in sunny California, still involved a great deal of scuffling and more than a little personal waywardness.

But some musicians did make a comfortable living in the film and recording studios, so they didn't need to rely on jazz for their bread-and-butter money. Black jazzmen like Teddy Edwards, Harold Land, and Hampton Hawes, who had been around Los Angeles since the heady days of 1940s bop, could be forgiven for thinking they were treated unfairly, though it isn't accurate to say that they were denied the opportunity to record in the 1950s. It may have been that the West Coast boom actually provided more opportunities than they would normally have had.

Jazz on the West Coast didn't arrive in the 1950s, of course, and Central Avenue in Los Angeles had been a Mecca for some leading modernists in the mid-1940s. Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Howard McGhee, and Sonny Criss were active in the clubs and on records, and Charlie Parker lived in California for several months. But things slackened off at the end of the decade, and when the 19505 began there was something of a feeling that not a lot was happening. It was a time when modem jazz was hovering between movements, with be-bop coming to the end of its dynamic, experiential period, cool jazz edging in, and some musicians who were to be influential later in the 1950’s - Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, for example - being relatively inactive.

These are generalizations, because things don't begin and end in clear-cut ways and individual jazzmen often escape being put into one category, but there was a move towards jazz that was less intense than bop. The music was not necessarily any less complex - listen to Lennie Tristano, and his followers like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh for jazz which is highly cerebral - but a quieter, more relaxed approach was often in evidence, as witness the playing of Stan Getz, the work of the George Shearing group, the tidy style of Red Norvo's bright trio, and the rise of the whole gang of cool tenor men, such as Phil Urso, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Richie Kamuca.

On the West Coast, there was an influx of young, modern jazzmen. Many of them had been in the big-bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman and others moved to the area because of the possibilities of studio work. Shorty Rogers, Claude Williamson, Art Pepper, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper, Shelly Manne, Stan Levey, and many more found the combination of a decent climate and regular work was attractive. Not all of them were West Coasters, in the sense of having been born there. Jazz musicians, especially in the days when big-bands toured the country, went where the work was.

But whereas, in the past, New York had been the home base for most modernists, Los Angeles now provided an alternative. Some slightly older musicians, such as Herbie Harper, Howard Rumsey and Roy Harte, were already there, and it was Rumsey who was perhaps responsible for giving West Coast Jazz both a physical location and a sense of musical direction. In 1949 he persuaded a reluctant club owner to try a series of Sunday jam sessions, thus giving birth to the famous Lighthouse at Hermosa Beach, where so many local musicians and visitors appeared and where new ideas were put into practice.

The sessions at the Lighthouse were often necessarily fluid in terms of the music, at least in the early days. Recorded evidence shows that a loose, jam session mood predominated, with a basic theme stated by the ensemble followed by a string of solos. The sound isn't particularly West Coast, at least not in the way that later, more-organized music was. Many of the players had cut their teeth in the 1940s and bop ideas influenced their solos. There are some interesting sessions from the Lighthouse in 1953 which find West Coasters like Rogers, Shank, and Cooper, playing alongside the Swedish trumpeter Rolf Ericsson, hop drummer Max Roach and Miles Davis. In addition, pianist Hampton Hawes, a West Coast resident influenced by the music of Charlie Parker and other boppers, also present, and the ill-fated Lorraine Geller and the now-forgotten Frank Patchen appeared on some tracks.

The point I'm making is that the music was not easily categorized, and only the most prejudiced listener would want to describe it as lacking in vitality or invention. Some other early-19505 albums, compiled from sessions at The Haig and Trade Winds, two Los Angeles clubs, likewise highlight the mixed nature of modern jazz on the West Coast. Tenor men Wardell Gray and Dave Pall work together comfortably, the bop altoist Sonny Criss is heard with cool stylist Chet Baker and there is a general mixture of white and black musicians mostly playing bop classics or tunes from the standard song repertoire.

What is true is that many of the white musicians had been impressed by the twelve tracks recorded by the Miles Davis band in 1949 and 1950. These were the famous "Birth of the Cool" records on which the ensemble playing and the quality of the arrangements were as important as the solos and provided a background against which the soloists could fashion something thoughtful, relaxed, and cool in tone. Gil Evans is often credited with being a major influence in the shaping of the Davis band's style, but Gerry Mulligan provided several of the arrangements and it his influence which carried over to the West Coast, where the musicians wanted to play in a lively, bright, and well-organized way.

An early example of what they were after was provided by Shorty Rogers in 1951 when he recorded six sides with a group which included a tuba and French horn alongside the usual tenor, alto and trumpet found in most modem jazz units. There has been a tendency to relate the Rogers recordings to those of the Davis band, and to rate them as lesser achievements, but this is unfair. Rogers didn't set out to copy Davis, and in any case had experience of writing for large groups when he worked with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. His arrangements were energetic and imaginative and they allow the soloists far more freedom than was evident on the Davis sides. In their way, they typify what was best about West Coast jazz, with their crisp and humorous charts providing a framework for solo work that may be cool but is always spirited.

What I've done so far is to describe, in a general way, what had happened prior to 1953 or so. There were other major developments, including the impact of the Gerry Mulligan quartet with Chet Baker, the rise of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond and the increasing presence in the recording studios of people like Frank Rosolino, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank and Shelly Manne, often as members of Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars. When it became obvious that something was coming out of the West which could be clearly said to be unlike jazz produced in New York, the record companies began to market it accordingly.

After 1953 West Coast Jazz boomed and recording facilities became available to all and sundry. Some writers have carped about this situation, but it seems to me that it allowed a large number of interesting musicians to make a contribution to the overall development of jazz. They weren't necessarily major jazzmen, but their work provided a backcloth against which the leading figures could perform. And it made for variety. There were also a few occasions when some of these minor musicians could produce work which - fresh and original, and had that attribute I referred to earlier- charm. It's possible to talk in general terms about these small, but valuable achievements, but perhaps more interesting to look at the careers of three musicians who are responsible for some of them.

I mentioned earlier that Shorty Rogers used a French horn on his 1951 recordings, and it was played by John Grass. He was born in 1924 and worked with symphony orchestras in the early 1940s before joining Claude Thornhill's band, which was acknowledged as the first to have the cool approach. More classical experience followed and then stints with Tex Beneke (when the ex-Glenn Miller saxophonist had a large outfit which included a string section) and Stan Kenton. Grass then settled in California so that he could work in the film and recording studios.

He also involved himself with the jazz scene, as the Rogers recordings show, and in 1953 was offered a recording date under his own name by Trend, a small West Coast company. One of the accusations leveled against West Coast Jazz was that the groups, particularly those assembled for recording sessions, were often comprised of the same small group of musicians who simply handed the leader's hat round amongst themselves. And, looking at the line-ups, there could be some truth in this, though it's more likely that it was a case of people of like-minded interests being in close touch and inviting their immediate contacts to participate. The Graas group included Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper and Shelly Manne, all of them central to West Coast Jazz.

Working within a small group framework, Graas and his arrangers, and they included Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre and Nelson Riddle, managed to produce music that was light, varied and inventive in its use of shading and dynamics. There were little experiments with time, as on the aptly titled 6/4 Trend, and often an intriguing use of Latin American rhythms. A couple of the titles, Egypt and Pyramid, seem to nod in the direction of the Middle East, but the rhythmic impulse behind them has more to do with Cuba than Cairo.

Not that it matters, because the sound is intriguing enough in its own right. Graas's French horn is used effectively in the ensemble passages and as a solo instrument, and the other soloists, once they cut loose from the arranged passages, demonstrate that they could be forceful and humorous. Rogers and pianist Russ Freeman are especially effective in this regard.

The music did not have the edgy brilliance of the best be-bop, nor was it as carefully intricate as the cool experiments of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz, but it provided a useful contrast to the harder, more intense sounds that were coming from the East as Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Sonny Rollins, pushed their kind of jazz into prominence. Note that I use the word contrast", because it seems to me that the varying approaches to the making of jazz are valid.

Graas continued to work throughout the 1950s and his records maintained a consistently high level of performance. A 1954 date gave him and some other West Coast musicians, such as trumpeter Don Fagerquist and the outstanding alto player Herb Geller, an opportunity to stretch out on tracks like Laura and Here Come The Lions, both of which are lively and good-natured. Perhaps the best item from this session was Graas Point, with the small group producing a very full sound and providing sensitive backing for soloists. Fagerquist, a trumpeter who mostly worked with the big-bands, has been neglected by jazz writers, but his playing here is particularly good, his tone and ideas combining to give the impression of delicate insistence. The piece also incorporates a fugue-like sequence which reflects the interest and often the training that many West Coast musicians had in classical music.

Other examples can be found on Graas records, as in Petite Poem, part of a sonata by pianist Paul Moer, and Jazz Overture, composed by Graas for a jazz opera. He also worked on a symphony combining both jazz and classical ideas, selections from which were used on his albums. What came across in his music was a sense of discovery, and a searching for a way to blend jazz and classical music without abandoning the beat or the improvisational strength that lies at the heart of Jazz. He may not have been totally successful, but he did attempt to move beyond the usual format of a simple theme statement followed by a string of solos. And everything he did had individuality, as witness his version of Lionel Hampton's Midnight Sun, which is, unusually, taken at a fast tempo and highlights solos by Art Pepper and Bob Cooper, or his neat arrangement of the popular song Inch Worm. John Graas died in 1962, so never achieved his full potential, but the music he did make is still worth hearing.

Graas was relatively well known on the West Coast scene, and the handful of surveys of it usually mention him, but Jack Millman gets little or no recognition of his existence. A trumpeter, arranger, and early devotee of the flugelhorn, he had some Big Band experience with Stan Kenton in the 1950's (he was born in 1930) and led his own groups m California. Millman had sound musical training and composed a jazz symphony, but his appearances on records were limited. For a 1955 session under his own name he brought together an impressive array of musicians, including Shorty Rogers, Maynard Ferguson, the talented baritone saxophonist Bob Gordon who died in a car crash later the same year, and Herb Geller.

He also added Latin American rhythm instruments for several tracks and used a flute and a vibraphone to further vary the music. Bolero de Mendez features a flute across a rolling rhythm, Pink Lady neatly intertwines flute and vibraphone, and Just a Pretty Tune similarly uses both instruments to good effect. Millman clearly liked ensemble sounds and Ballad for Jeanie emphasizes that aspect, while When You're Near, has an introduction in which muted horn, tenor and guitar combine. Millman himself was not an outstanding soloist, nor did he try to be, and his work is shaped to fit in with the group rather than dominate it.

A 1957 Millman date found him with a smaller group, though again the imaginative use of flute and clarinet adds to the range of sounds on offer. He had a taste for good tunes - Cathy Goes South from the earlier session was a very attractive theme - and his versions of standards such as Skylark and Polka Dots and Moonbeams are notable for the care with which he handles the basic materials. There are few diversions from the original melodies. Elsewhere, he takes Gone With the Wind at a brisk pace, adds some attractive ensemble passages, and uses Latin American rhythms to keep things bubbling. And on the Great Lie, the tune from the 1940's the low keyed clarinet of Jimmy Giuffre is spot lighted. Was all this great jazz? No, but it was very appealing and pleasant to listen to, and why decry that kind of achievement? Millman made just one more session in 1957 and then seems to have faded from sight.

Perhaps the best known of the three musicians I have chosen to write about was Dave Pell, a tenor saxophonist and band leader whose reputation was established when he worked with Les Brown's Band between 1947 and 1955, and who recorded extensively with his own groups in the 1950s. In some ways Pell came to be seen as almost personally responsible for the perception of West Coast jazz as bland, over-arranged and lacking in spirit, and musicians and critics referred to his music as "Mortgage Paying Jazz", or "Grey Flannel Suit Jazz", and described it as designed not to disturb anyone.

Pell himself appeared to accept the criticisms and sounded almost apologetic when asked about his records, but he possibly under-rated his minor, but not inconsequential skills. His groups always employed competent musicians, some of them from the Les Brown band and others from the general pool of West Coast jazzmen.

The earliest album under Pell's name was recorded in 1953 and was built around a selection of Irving Berlin songs (Pell later recorded material by Rodgers and Hart and generally drew from the classic period of American song writing) which ware arranged by Shorty Rogers, Bill Holman and Jerry Fielding. Rogers arrangement of I'm Putting All my Eggs In One Basket is taut and gives solo space to the excellent Don Fagerquist, and Jerry Fielding's version of Change Partners has an intriguing opening and a slight Latin American flavor. Tracks such as these were short and neither arrangements nor solos were breaking new ground, but they had what I mentioned earlier - a charm that can disarm most criticism.

Some of Pell's best small group work cropped up on a number of tracks from Capitol which were recorded in 1955 and 1957. Both sessions drew heavily on the Brown band, though the earlier one used baritone player Bob Gordon. First rate arrangers were also involved, including Marty Paich, Jack Montrose, and Andre Previn. A fine trombonist, Ray Sims, soloed on People in Love, and Gordon was featured on I Had the Craziest Dream, Star Eyes, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, and a delightful dance around the old Shirley Temple number On the Good Ship Lollipop. It was this kind of music - bouncy witty and brief - which persuaded some purists that West Coast jazzmen were not to be taken too seriously, and yet it has retained much of its interest in the ensuing forty years and may, in fact, have lasted better than some longer and looser performances. Why denigrate the moody version of Time After Time with its moving Don Fagerquist solo or the spirited romp through Star Eyes?
Listening to these records now one is constantly aware that although they were tightly arranged and played with great skill the musicians were never slaves to precision. They swung, albeit lightly, and within the limited framework came up with original solo ideas. There were other interesting Pell records, including one which spotlighted trumpeter Jack Sheldon and trombonist Bob Burgess and supposedly aimed for a broader jazz feeling, but the Capitol album has always seemed to me one of the best of its kind. The tracks are also good to listen to because of the way in which they focus attention on forgotten or neglected musicians. Bob Gordon died too early to really make a mark, but the music he left behind is all good. His style, not unlike Gerry Mulligan's, though digging in a little deeper, seemed likely to place him amongst the leading exponents of the baritone saxophone.

And Don Fagerquist, who I've mentioned several time, surely ought to have been better regarded? His solos, scattered around 1940's and 1950's Big Band records by Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, and Les Brown, were always well shaped as ware his contributions to the Pell records on which he appeared. Fagerquist made only one album under his own name at the time of the West Coast boom, but it is worth trying to track it down. Like Pell, he had a taste for good songs and his immaculate work on Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Easy Living and All the Things You Are is both imaginative and subtle.

Obviously I have considered only a handful of West Coast jazz records and I would accept they are not necessarily the best from a jazz point of view. That wasn't what I was looking for, and performances by Conte Candoli, Stu Williamson, Bill Perkins, Art Pepper and many more would need to be taken into account if one wanted to evaluate the level of improvisational skill achieved by West Coast jazzmen. A musician like Candoli, for example, came up with some solos which stand comparison with anything produced in New York but he has never been given the recognition he deserves.

But my main aim in this piece was to point out that a lot of the music dismissed as shallow or undemanding was, in fact, good in its own way. If the more jazz inclined records that came from the West Coast are added to the big band tracks, the excursions into Latin American rhythms, the experiments with instrumentation, and the kind of good natured, easy swinging music I have described, it will be seen that the Los Angeles scene produced a great deal that was exciting, innovative, and good to listen to. And much of it is still interesting."