"Looking for Chet Baker" - Bill Moody

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

“Chet Baker—or Jet Faker, as I often called him—and I met in the early 1950s. The musical rapport between us was immediate. We worked, recorded, and traveled together for nearly five years. In 1953 Chet, his first wife, Charlaine, and I rented a house together in the Hollywood Hills. It was there that I wrote many of the compositions we later recorded. In addition to being arranger, composer, and pianist with the quartet, I took care of all the details when we went on the road, so I came to know Chet very well.

Chet was often thoughtless where other people were concerned, but he could play. He loved cars and drove too fast, but he could play. He was a drug abuser for forty of his fifty-eight years, but he could play. All that is true.

It's not true that Chet couldn't read music, although he couldn't read it well enough to do studio work. But it is true that he knew nothing about harmonic structure or chords, even simple ones. If you asked him what notes were in a certain chord, he couldn't tell you. He was, however, a truly instinctive player with an incredible ear and great lyrical sense.

If anyone has doubts about this, just listen to "Love Nest" or "Say When" from the CD - Quartet: Russ Freeman and Chet Baker [Pacific Jazz]. It's unfortunate that many critics and musicians were unaware of what they were listening to. Chet Baker was unique; there will never be another like him.

Bill Moody has done an outstanding job in capturing a very difficult subject. Not only is Looking for Chet Baker an enjoyable read, but Bill provides a further glimpse into the jazz life and the character of one of the music's most remarkable musicians.”

—Russ Freeman Las Vegas, 2001

Bill Moody’s background as a musician and his talents as a writer have made the Evan Horne mysteries a favorite of jazz aficionados and crime-fiction fans alike. Investigating the death of Chet Baker, a major cult figure in the world of music, brings out the best in both the author and his pianist sleuth, Evan Horne. Moody, a professional drummer and noted critic, lives in northern California. Looking for Chet Baker is his fifth Evan Horne mystery.

Previous titles in the series are Solo Hand [1994, which introduces his main character, pianist and private detective, Evan Horne], Death of a Tenor Man [1997, which focuses on the mysterious death of tenor saxophonist, Wardell Gray], The Sound of the Trumpet [1997, Clifford Brown] and Bird Lives [1999, Charlie Parker].

I found out about the publication of Looking for Chet Baker through two reviews that appeared in May, 2002 in The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, respectively.

The Times review was written by Julius Lester who is an author of numerous books and a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

King of Cool - Julius Lester

“When I was in high school, there was a small group of us who liked jazz. I don't recall how we discovered it in the Nashville, Tenn., of the mid-1950s, but in the sounds of the Count Basie Orchestra, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown and Max Roach we heard statements about living that were far different from those in the banjos and steel guitars of the country music for which Nashville was famous.

Bebop had the exhilaration of an improvisatory order being imposed on a chaos that could be controlled only lo the extent and only as long as one plunged into it. It was one cultural response to the giddiness of the postwar economic expansion accompanied by the Cold War against a communist enemy and the ever-present possibility of a nuclear war that could end human life on the planet.

Another and almost opposite cultural response was found in the "cool" sound of what came to be known as West Coast jazz. Where Parker and Gillespie would leave one breathless with the number of notes they could play on one breath, "cool" jazz made silence an integral part of the music and showed that one held note was as expressive as the 10 Parker or Gillespie would have played in the same time.

"Cool" jazz was both more controlled and more melodic than bebop, attributes that made it more accessible and appealing to white audiences.

For a brief few years in the '50s, no one exemplified cool jazz more than the white trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. …

Bill Moody's mystery, Looking for Chet Baker, describes vividly the paradoxical existence of a man who created art of ineffable beauty while simultaneously living a sordid and self-destructive life.

Born in 1929 in Oklahoma, Baker moved with his parents to the Los Angeles area in 1940. His father, a failed musician, bought him his first instrument, a trombone, and later a trumpet when Baker found the trombone too big to handle. Because music came as naturally to the young Baker as breathing, he could scarcely read a score and was never known to practice. He only had to hear a melody once to be able to play it back flawlessly. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, with whom Baker teamed in 1952 to make some of his best recordings, describes him in "Deep in a Dream" as an idiot savant, "a kind of freak talent. I've never been around anybody who had a quicker relationship between his ears and his fingers." Ruth Young, one of Baker's many abused lovers, went further: "You gotta realize, Chet was not that intelligent. He did not know what he was doing-----He just did it."

Baker's reputation grew when, at 23, he played with Parker on the great alto saxophonist's West Coast tour. In 1953 and 1955, Baker was voted the top trumpet player by the readers of Down Beat, the jazz magazine. Black musicians derided him as the "Great White Hope" and wondered if Baker really believed he was a better musician than Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gillespie and Brown, all of whom finished behind him in the polls.

But Baker's popularity was not only the result of the lyric sweetness of his trumpet playing and the depth of feeling he conveyed. His image on album covers was the quintessence of "cool." He looked like an androgynous puer aeternus, the eternal youth who belonged on a Keatsian Grecian urn. Baker was perhaps the first jazz musician who was conscious of his image, so much so that he seldom opened his mouth to reveal the missing front tooth knocked out when he was a child.

James Gavin in his Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,  says that beneath that cool exterior, however, was an insecure man. Because playing jazz came so easily, perhaps he did not value his talent or think he deserved the acclaim. He admitted to an Italian magazine that playing in public terrified him and only drugs made him feel in control. "The public stops being an enemy, a hostile bunch of adversaries ready to strike me down with their whistles. I don't have anyone in front of me anymore. I am alone with my trumpet and my music."

But perhaps there is no deeper reason for Baker's almost lifelong drug addiction than what he wrote in his brief memoir, As Though I Had Wings.  After thanking the person who introduced him to marijuana, he added, "I enjoyed heroin very much." Heroin use was an integral part of the world of jazz, bebop and cool. But although many musicians, such as Davis and John Coltrane, struggled to free themselves from the drug, Baker was among those musicians for whom playing jazz was merely the means to make enough money for the next fix. In Europe, where Baker lived most of the time from 1955 until his death in Amsterdam in 1988, many doctors were willing to keep him supplied with narcotics.

Mulligan explained Baker's popularity in Europe as "a case of worshipping the self-destructive artist... .It's a Christ-like image of self-immolation."

By the end of his life, he was injecting drugs into the arteries of his neck because a lifetime of needles had destroyed the veins everywhere else on his body. ...

Baker died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found lying in the street outside an Amsterdam hotel, his head bashed in. Some believe he got high and slipped or jumped from his hotel room, but the one window in the room was only raised 15 inches. Others think he was killed by drug dealers to whom he owed money.

The mystery of Baker's death is the subject of Bill Moody's Looking for Chet Baker, the fifth in his wonderful mystery series featuring Evan Horne, a jazz pianist who gets embroiled in unraveling mysteries, generally involving the lives and deaths of jazz musicians.

Horne is in Europe for a couple of gigs when his close friend, Ace Buffington, a professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, seeks his help in researching a book on Baker, but Home turns him down.

However, Horne's Amsterdam promoter has gotten him a room at the same hotel in which Baker was staying at the time of his death, the same hotel from which Buffington has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind his leather portfolio containing his research materials. Concerned that something has happened to his friend, Home begins looking for him. To find Buffington, he must retrace Baker's steps during the last days of his life and try to solve the mystery of his death.

A characteristic of the modern mystery novel is the intimate look it provides to readers of a world they might never see. As a professional jazz drummer, Moody knows jazz clubs and musicians, and he is adept at evoking place, whether it is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Amsterdam. He is wonderful at melding the facts of musicians' lives with fiction, and here he vividly re-creates the sad and painful last days of Baker.

Looking for Chet Baker is the best in the series. The writing is fluid, the plotting is tight and there is a wealth of interesting minor characters. The book also has a lovely introduction by Russ Freeman, who played with Baker for many years, and closes with a selected discography of Baker recordings; Gavin's biography contains as complete a discography as one will find. Moody's and Gavin's books skillfully recreate the jazz subculture and pay tribute to a man who could not apply his extraordinary musical intelligence to the rest of his life.”

The Wall Street Journal review was written by Gene Santoro, a former working musician and Fulbright Scholar, who also covers film and jazz for The Nation and the New York Daily News.

He has written about pop culture for publications including: The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, Atlantic Monthly,People, The New York Post, Spin, 7 Days and Down Beat.

Santoro has authored two essay collections, Dancing In Your Head (1994) and Stir It Up (1997), which were both published by Oxford University Press, and a biography of jazz great Charles Mingus, titled Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (Oxford, 2000). He is currently completing Made in America, essays about musical countercultures.

Die Cool: A mystery novel revisits the 1988 death of the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Amsterdam. - Gene Santoro

LOOKING FOR CHET BAKER By Bill Moody. 253 pp. New York: Walker & Company. $24.95.

“JAZZ and detective fiction have been linked almost since the days of hard-boiled pulps, and their relationship deepened once film noir set it to soundtracks. Some of the spark between the two is the stuff of genre: jazz as the dangerous sound of the other side of the tracks was part of the atmosphere  private  dicks moved through on the margins of America.

Bill Moody has taken the next step, creating a jazz pianist-sleuth named Evan Horne. A Berklee-trained musician, Horne packs a piano player's curiosity about and thirst for harmony — in jazz terms, possible scenarios for a melody and musical arrangement. Like a hero out of Hitchcock, he is drawn, usually against his will, into amateur crime-solving — in his case, crimes involving jazz. (In the wryly tongue-in-cheek Bird Lives, he helped the F.B.I, track a killer stalking smooth- Jazz stars.) Once hooked, Horne translates his musical talents into investigative skills. Just as he would with a new piece of music, he focuses on the plot's key features, runs alternative variations to see how they play, eliminates extraneous elements and searches for coherence.

Looking for Chet Baker is the fifth Horne novel, which says something about how good Moody is. A musician himself, Moody is a fluent writer with a good ear for dialogue, a deft and ingratiating descriptive touch, a talent for characterization and a genuine feel for the jazz world. His anti-hero is white and vaguely middle-aged, smokes nonstop and is coming back from a hand injury that nearly ended his musical career. He also has his own ironic twist. As Fletcher Paige, the saxophone star who duets with Horne on and offstage, notes slyly: "F.B.I. girlfriend, cop friend, ex gonna be a lawyer. Man, you the most law-enforcement-involved piano player I ever knew.”

In earlier novels, Horne's sidekick was a professor named Ace Buffington. A fan who aided Horne's musical comeback, Ace reflects jazz-milieu tensions between insiders and outsiders. In Moody's new novel, Ace is at the mystery's heart. While researching a biography of Chet Baker, he shows up in London, where Horne is gigging at Ronnie Scott's club. Ace sees his Baker book as the steppingstone to becoming chairman of his English department, but he needs Horne's help to get inside the jazz world. Horne refuses. But when Horne arrives in Amsterdam a few days later, he discovers Ace has disappeared — from the same Amsterdam hotel Baker died in front of in 1988, after falling (did he jump or was he pushed?) from a window.

Horne's fears for his friend and his curiosity shift him into high gear once he finds Ace's research wedged behind the radiator of the hotel room where Ace stayed — the room that was Baker's last. As Horne chases leads, he rings some standard P.I. changes — withholding information from cops, getting set up and drugged by his quarry. All the while, Ace's mystery and Baker's become more entwined.

Moody works these story lines like a clever arranger setting two familiar melodies in unexpected counterpoint. Fletcher Paige helps make it swing. A 69-year-old veteran of the Count Basie band, Paige has moved to Europe, where his life is relatively free of racism and full of celebrity perks. A fan of hapless Hoke Moseley, hero of Charles Willeford's mysteries, Paige plays a street-smart but cautious Watson to Horne's Holmes. Their musical dynamics give rise to some of the book's most vibrant descriptions: "I start a rubato introduction, letting the minor chords do the work through one out-of-tempo chorus. Then I start a vamp, in tempo, just beyond ballad speed. Fletcher slips in like he's parting a curtain, and just suddenly there, sliding into the melody, singing with his horn, catching everybody off guard with long, elegant lines, at times almost like cries, floating and lingering like billowy clouds in the air even after they're gone."

Though it’s Long Goodbye denouement ties up loose ends a bit too neatly, Looking for Chet Baker is thoughtful entertainment. And like Baker’s music, it is open to anyone - no jazz-insider ID required.”

Rosario Bonaccorso's "Beautiful Story" on Via Veneto Records and Jando Music

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

The press release that accompanies Via Veneto and Jando Music’s latest recording states that:

“A Beautiful Story is the title of the new album by Rosario Bonaccorso, produced by Via Veneto Jazz. Following his last album released in 2015, Viaggiando on Via Veneto Jazz (VVJ 098 CD, 1991), Rosario Bonaccorso continues to enrich and expand his musical pathway, evolving his ideas as a bandleader and composer.

The twelve outstanding compositions on A Beautiful Story immediately enchant the listener with their beauty and depth. Once again, his music is smooth and powerful, and the listener is swept away into an overpowering, yet refined, intimate universe.

On this new album, the double bassist is joined by a group of acclaimed musicians: his friend Dino Rubino on the flugelhorn, Enrico Zanisi on the piano and Alessandro Paternesi on the drums. These young "lions", widely appreciated by critics and audiences on both Italian and European jazz scenes, are sensitive and mature artists and despite their young age, they boast of a rich variety of noteworthy collaborations and experiences.

There's a particular charm in the musical direction and the refined sound of this quartet, where the Italian flair for writing music is manifest, Rosario Bonaccorso representing this at its finest. With A Beautiful Story, Rosario Bonaccorso allures the listener into a sonic journey filling heart and soul, radiating the myriad of emotions in his music.”

Of course, the purpose of a press release is to impress upon the reader the benefits of the music such that the Jazz fan buys the recording.

But there is much about this description that is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on in Rosario’s latest recorded outing.

Let’s start with the musicians as they all display wonderful control over their instruments which allows them to be very expressive, both in terms of their individual solos and in the way they provide accompaniment.

Nothing is rushed on this recording; everything unfolds - beautifully. “The “beautiful story” on this disc is this totality of the music itself.

Bass players inhabit a quiet world; they bring down the volume of the music when they solo. The listener has to seek out what they are “laying down.”

Also, because the bass has to be plucked with the use of a finger [perhaps two or sometimes three depending on the technique of the bassist], bass music is made one note at a time.

As a result, there is a lot of space between the played notes by a bass, not to mention the leisurely way in which they are conveyed.

Rosario has imposed these qualities - quietude, space and an unhurried pace - to create a music on A Beautiful Story that is pleasantly reflective and sonorously alluring.

The title track - A Beautiful Story -opens with a legato flugelhorn and piano theme statement that serves as a wonderful introduction to Dino Rubino’s strikingly lush and full tone on the  flugelhorn whose smooth articulation leads into light and airy solos by Rosario and pianist Enrico Zanisi.

Come l’Acqua tra le dita has a bell like introduction played by Enrico and Rosario that unfolds into a ¾ tempo and another grand statement by Dino.

Drummer Alessandro Paternesi employs a stick-clicking, four-beats-to-the-bar device to create a Latin-feel over which the melody to Der Walfish just floats.

On Duccidu, Rosario’s big bass sound crafts a Jazz-Rock feel that is pulsating but never overpowering.

My Italian Art of Jazz uses tonal centers and tonal clusters played over a sustained bass riff that literally evaporates over a melody played out of tempo by Enrico.

The other seven tracks have more music that continues to create an introspective mood, almost to the point of allowing the listener to enter the souls of the musicians as they are creating the music.

If you like beautiful Jazz, than A Beautiful Story is tailor-made for you and you can order a copy of it at The Forced Exposure website.

Here’s a sampling:

Cecil Payne - December 14, 1922 – Nov. 27, 2007

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

“Although he was one of the finest baritone saxophonists to emerge from the bop era, Cecil Payne has been underrated and frequently overlooked throughout his long career. Payne, who played guitar, alto and clarinet (and spent 1943-46 in the military) first played baritone with Clarence Briggs’ band in 1946, giving up alto around the same period (after making his recording debut on the smaller horn with J.J. Johnson). Payne made his reputation as a key member of Dizzy Gillespie’s classic bebop big band (1946-49), appearing on virtually all of the orchestra’s famous recordings. Payne played with Tadd Dameron, James Moody and with the popular Illinois Jacquet band (1952-54), but then spent a period working at a day job. He returned to music in 1956, starting a long-term association with Randy Weston, and he had periods with Machito (1963-66), Woody Herman (1966-68) and Count Basie (1969-71), but despite appearing on many records over a five-decade period, fame (except among musicians) has always eluded Cecil Payne. He led dates as a leader for Decca (1949), Savoy (1956-57), the Charlie Parker label (1961-62), Spotlite, Strata-East (1969-70), Muse and Empathy.”

— Scott Yanow, All-Music Guide

“This powerfully voiced New Yorker gave up playing alto and switched to the big horn in 1946 while working with JJ Johnson. If bebop seemed resistant to the tenor saxophone, it was even more so to the baritone. Payne, though, established a limber, articulate touch while with Dizzy Gillespie, and he has continued to make convincing bop-tinged jazz ever since, albeit with a lighter tone which owes a debt to Lester Young.”

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

I wanted to remember Cecil Payne, the late baritone saxophonist, on these pages and went searching for stuff about him on the internet where I found a touching description of his last years on the Jazz Foundation of America’s website and Peter Keepnews moving obituary in The New York Times.

It is very difficult for Jazz musicians to grow old with any degree of security and comfort because for most of them ther work is very inconsistent and its is difficult to accrue the necessary savings and resources to provide for the needs of old age.

Typically, when they do find work, their wages are paid into the Musicians Unions of the big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles where dues and other fees are collected out of them before a check gets issued to the musician.

Many of these unions do make available basic medical and hospital health insurance plans, but in order to gain and maintain the coverage, the musician has to generate enough hours worked to qualify for them.

What more typically happens is that the work of playing and/or recording Jazz is so sporadic that the musician essentially leads a hand-to-mouth existence, skips going to the doctor or getting health care on a regular basis and puts very little away for a “rainy day” or for retirement.

Rent controlled apartments are a blessing as are cheap restaurants and fast food stores as Jazz musicians usually generate enough money to pay the rent and eat junk food - barely.

For many years, Jazz musicians who were skilled at reading music could find studio work recording sound tracks for movies and television shows, TV commercials and radio jingles.  But such work was only available to a small coterie of Jazz musicians and has since largely dried up with the advent of digitally developed music that relies largely on electronic “instruments” that can synthesize a wide variety of sounds.

For many Jazz musicians, this world of “studio security” largely passed them by including Cecil Payne. But he bravely carried on through the years forming small combos with musicians in the greater New York area, playing at clubs and festivals, doing a little touring abroad until one day he just disappeared.

Fortunately for Cecil, the Jazz Foundation of America afforded him some comfort and dignity during the closing years of his life.

If you are one of the lucky beneficiaries of the joys of Jazz, you might want to consider visiting the website of this fine, charitable organization and supporting their work on behalf of those Jazz musicians who have brought so much pleasure into your life. Here’s a link to their website - Jazz Foundation of America.

Jazz Foundation of America

“Cecil Payne has proved to be one of the bebop era's strongest baritone saxophonists. Payne joined the most progressive big band of the era, Dizzy Gillespie's, where he made his reputation as a fluid player on a sometimes cumbersome instrument and played on the orchestra's groundbreaking recordings, including Cubano-Be/Cubano-Bop. Payne later freelanced in NYC with Tadd Dameron and Coleman Hawkins, and later working with the Illinois Jacquet.

About nine years ago, Cecil had gone into seclusion because his eyesight was failing due to severe glaucoma, which could have been prevented if he'd had access to proper health care. He didn't reach out to friends for help because he had been a strong and independent man all his life, and he "didn't want to bother anyone." One night Jazz bassist Ron Carter ran into Wendy Oxenhorn [Executive Director of the Jazz Foundation of America] at a club in Harlem and said, "I'm worried about Cecil. No one has seen him in a year."

The next day Wendy called Cecil and spoke with him. He said he was "fine" and didn't need any help. He admitted that he had been going blind. When Wendy asked him how he managed to shop and cook for himself, he confessed that he could only walk as far as the local corner 7-11. He had been living off two cans of SlimFast and a package of M and M's a day for over a year and a half. After hearing that, Wendy tried to tell him that they could at least get "Meals on Wheels" delivered to his home, and he'd get a wonderful meal each day. Cecil wouldn't hear of it. He hung up the phone immediately. The next day, Wendy called him again and said, "Cecil, I was up all night worried about you - please would you let us try the Meals on Wheels just once." "Well, I don't want you to worry about me…actually...Meals On Wheels…sounds cool," he said slowly in his Cecil way, "Meals...on Wheels..."

As it turned out Cecil loved the Meals on Wheels. He called up Wendy the next day and told her, "The volunteer was so nice, and the food was great. I forgot greens were green!"

Because of these nutritious meals, his health improved. He came out of seclusion and started to play again in New York City at Smoke with Eric Alexander, Harold Mabern, John Farnsworth, John Weber and others he loved dearly. We were able to help Cecil in other ways too. We looked into housing organizations for the blind and got him a home health aide to help him out with laundry and shopping. When he discovered he had liver cancer, we were able to help him with his medical needs as well.

Payne had remained highly active during the decades since; even though his eyesight had begun to fail him, his songful sax, flowing lines, and warm tone remained fully intact well into his 80's.

Cecil had the chance to play the Jazz Foundation's Annual "A Great Night In Harlem" benefit concert at the Apollo Theater, where he was reunited with many old friends like Quincy Jones, Ron Carter, Frank Foster, Freddie Hubbard, Candido, Ray Baretto, Clark Terry, Frank Wess and many others. You would have thought he was 25 again if you had seen his face light up when being reunited with his peers.

After this, Cecil found time to perform in the local nursing homes in the Somerdale area, entertaining elderly patients for free. When it became time for Cecil to enter an assisted living situation, we were able to facilitate a smooth transition for Cecil to move into a very good nursing home in Stratford. Never complaining about the pain of his cancer, just the same optimistic Cecil who would say, "The Sun is up and so am I...it's a good day."

In 2007, Cecil said to Wendy, "I want to go home." He said he was tired and ready. He said, "It's time to go." He passed at 6:30 AM on November 27th. He did not die alone. Bucky, his friend and landlord, called to say "He's gone." The sun came up this morning and Cecil rose with it.

Cecil Payne was one of the truly great human beings on this Earth. His positive attitude and his endlessly optimistic nature, no matter how bad things were, always got you a "It is what it is" and "Everything is Everything" and never a complaint or a negative word was uttered from his mouth. The Earth is a little emptier from his passing.”

Cecil Payne, Baritone Saxophonist, Dies at 84

By PETER KEEPNEWS DEC. 6, 2007 NY Times

“Cecil Payne, who in the 1940s was one of the first baritone saxophonists to master the intricacies of modern jazz and who for more than half a century was a leading exponent of his instrument, died Nov. 27 in Stratford, N.J. He was 84.

The cause was prostate cancer, said Wendy Oxenhorn, director of the Jazz Foundation of America, which provides support to musicians in need and had been helping Mr. Payne.

Mr. Payne spent virtually his entire career out of the spotlight: he never led a band of his own, recorded only a few albums as a leader and played an instrument that rarely takes center stage in jazz. But he was highly regarded by his fellow musicians, especially those he worked for — a list that included Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Randy Weston and many others — and by the critics.

The beginning of Mr. Payne’s career coincided with the birth of bebop. With its complex harmonies, tricky rhythms and blistering tempos, the new music posed challenges to all musicians, but some instruments were better suited to its demands than others. While the often cumbersome baritone saxophone was not an ideal vehicle for modern jazz, Mr. Payne’s highly fluid and melodic approach effected a seamless marriage between instrument and idiom.

One of his first high-profile jobs, shortly after he was discharged from the Army in 1946, was with Gillespie’s big band, an ultramodern ensemble that played a famously demanding repertory. He remained with Gillespie’s band for three years and was prominently featured on some of the band’s best-known recordings. Few if any baritone saxophonists recorded as many memorable solos in the early days of bebop.

Cecil McKenzie Payne was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 14, 1922. As a teenager he studied alto saxophone, and his earliest recordings were made on that instrument. By the time he joined Gillespie, after a brief stint with Gillespie’s fellow trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the baritone had become his primary horn.

After leaving Gillespie in 1949, Mr. Payne worked with various other bandleaders, notably the tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet. But by the mid-1950s he was essentially a freelance sideman, and he remained one for the rest of his life.

In his later years he battled glaucoma and other health problems, but he continued performing and recorded several albums for the Chicago-based Delmark label. Encouraged by a group of younger musicians who worked with him, and given financial and medical help by the Jazz Foundation, he was a frequent attraction at the Upper West Side nightclub Smoke and, more recently, at the Kitano Hotel at Park Avenue and 38th Street.

Survivors include his sister, Cavril Payne, a singer.”

For many years, Cecil has a close association with pianist Randy Weston and he performs Randy’s original composition J & K Blues on the following video montage along with Ray Copeland on trumpet, Randy, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Wilbert Hogan on drums.

The Brothers Candoli

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

Being around the Southern California Jazz scene in the second half of the 20th century was great for so many reasons, not the least of which were the many opportunities to hear trumpeters Pete and Conte Candoli perform in a variety of settings.

Pete (left in photos) and Conte Candoli would be high on anyone's list of illustrious brothers in jazz. Both came to the fore in the exuberant First Herd of Woody Herman, the band that included Ralph Burns and trombonist Bill Harris. Pete had played in the bands of Sonny Dunham, Will Bradley, Ray McKinley, Tommy Dorsey, and Teddy Powell, but it was Herman who featured him to fullest advantage.

Because he was so handsome and so powerful a trumpet player, Pete took on a Superman status, and finally Woody featured him in that role. In a Superman costume made by his wife, Pete would leap onstage from the wings, trumpet held high, and blast out the high notes. It was very funny, and typical of that brilliant, crazy band.

Conte Candoli first played with Woody in 1943 during the summer vacation months, when he was still a sixteen-year-old high school student. On graduation in 1945, he joined the band full-time, where the brothers Candoli sat side by side in the trumpet section.

Pete is primarily a lead-trumpet player. Rob McConnell has said, "Give me a great drummer and a great lead trumpet and I'll give you a great band." The lead-trumpet chair is a strenuous and demanding position. Pete is one of the best.

After leaving Woody, Pete played lead for Boyd Raeburn, Tex Beneke, Jerry Gray, Les Brown, and Stan Kenton. He settled in Southern California and immediately found himself in demand in the studios. If you ever see the Marlon Brando film One-Eyed Jacks, note the solo trumpet in Hugo Friedhofer's haunting score. That's Pete.

Conte is a bebopper inspired by Dizzy Gillespie. He has played with so many major jazz performers that it is impossible to list them all. Gerry Mulligan, Teddy Edwards, Shelly Manne, Terry Gibbs are only a few. Like many jazz musicians, Conte is active as a teacher.

From time to time, Conte and Pete performed together. You can hear the differences in their playing. And you can notice the warm fraternal love they have for each other, which John Reeves has captured so well in these portraits.

The Brothers Candoli are no more, but you can enjoy some of the magic they made while playing together with a sampling of their music on the following video tribute to them.

The Individualism of Gil Evans

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

“Born with the Victorian-sounding name Ian Ernest Gilmore Green, and first marketed by major record labels in the 1960’s as a middle-aged hipster in a business suit, Gil Evans … was a unique American artist who rebelled against stereotypes of class and race. Born in Canada of Australian parentage in 1912, Evans was raised mainly in California.   He seemed to live with a spirit that was marked by the Californian dream in its purest form: to create the impossible in everyday life, through means that are both peaceful and sensual. It was this humble fire, expressed through an unpretentious demeanor and relentless musical curiosity, which fueled Evans' works and won him the respect of such younger rebels of the 1940’s Jazz scene as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan and Max Roach.”

- Eliot Bratton

I wanted to spend time doing blog features about some of my favorite recordings and The Individualism of Gil Evans [Verve 833 804-2] certainly ranks high on that list.

As Richard Cook and Brian Morton observe in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.: “Evans’ name is famously an anagram of Svengali and Gil spent much of his career shaping the sounds and musical philosophies of younger musicians. … His peerless voicings are instantly recognizable.”

Beginning with New Bottle, Old Wine with its very revealing subtitle - “The Great Jazz Composers Interpreted by Gil Evans - and continuing with his orchestrations for Miles Davis on their Columbia epochal associations including Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, my repeated listening to Gil’s arrangements revealed a relaxed sophistication, use of very simple materials, and lots of open measures and other forms of space that created a texture in his music that was unlike any other that I’d ever heard before - and with the rare exception - since.

“Texture” joins with melody, harmony and rhythm [meter] as a fourth building block used to create a musical composition? Ironically, of the four basic musical atoms, the most indefinable yet the one we first notice is – “texture.”

“Texture” is the word that is used to refer to the actual sound of the music. This encompasses the instruments with which it is played; its tonal colors; its dynamics; its sparseness or its complexity.

Texture involves anything to do with the sound experience and it is the word that is used to describe the overall impression that a piece of music creates in our emotional imagination.

Often our first and most lasting impression of a composition is usually based on that work’s texture, even though we are not aware of it. Generally, we receive strong musical impressions from the physical sound of any music and these then determine our emotional reaction to the work.

By the time of its issuance in 1964 The Individualism of Gil Evans represented a major step away from the close Columbia collaboration that Gil had formed with Miles and a major step into his own music on Verve [and later Impulse!] which allowed the sonority [texture] of Evans’ arrangements to become even more pronounced.

As Stephanie Stein Crease explains in her definitive biography Gil Evans Out of the Cool: His Life and Music:

“ … Gil held his own first recording session for Verve with Creed Taylor as producer in September 1963. Gil lucked out with Taylor (founder of the Impulse! label and producer of Out of the Cool). Arriving at Verve not long before, Taylor made an immediate splash as producer of the first wildly successful bossa nova records (with Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Joao and Astrud Gilberto), including "The Girl from Ipanema." Verve gave Taylor carte blanche, which he passed along to Gil. Gil was allowed the number of musicians and recording time he wanted. He was even able to record some sketches on studio time—an unheard-of luxury for a composer/arranger. Gil was also allowed to record one or two pieces at a time, whenever he had something ready, instead of conceiving of an entire album beforehand. Taylor was confident that an album would eventually materialize if he gave Gil free reign.

At the first session, Gil recorded two of his own compositions, "Flute Song" and "El Toreador," It wasn't until April 1964 that he recorded another two arrangements; then, in the following six months he recorded six new arrangements for large ensembles and several sketches with a quartet. The resulting album became The Individualism of Gil Evans, released in late 1964.

The album contains some of Gil's best music on record. Selections include Kurt Weill's "The Barbara Song" and four Evans originals: "Las Vegas Tango," "Flute Song," "Hotel Me," and "El Toreador." Several of the musicians, including Johnny Coles, Steve Lacy, Al Block, Jimmy Cleveland, Tony Studd, Bill Barber, Elvin Jones, and Paul Chambers, played on all the sessions, preserving a consistency in the textures, mood, and overall sound. Other stellar personnel—Eric Dolphy on various woodwinds, Wayne Shorter on tenor, Phil Woods on alto, and Kenny Burrell on guitar—were on hand for some sessions and recorded with Gil for the first time. Gil plays piano on every track, and his performance, particularly on "The Barbara Song," functions as an indicator of his conceptual direction. On the Weill song, the mood is full of pathos, with Wayne Shorter's tenor sax taking up the cry. "El Toreador," built on one chord, sounds like a development of one of the Barracuda cues; Johnny Coles's plaintive trumpet is the foremost voice, cutting through the rumblings of the low brass and three acoustic basses and a whirring tremolo in the high reeds.

The musicianship on all the Verve sessions is of the highest order. The musicians dig deeply into the music, both as soloists and as ensemble players. Again there is an Ellingtonian parallel; the musical personalities are so strong on these recordings that horn voicings and ensemble passages are characterized by the collective sound of the people playing them.”

And here are excerpts from Gene Lees’ original liner notes to  The Individualism of Gil Evans:

“The gifted young composer, arranger, and critic Bill Mathieu once wrote of Gil Evans: "The mind reels at the intricacy of his orchestral and developmental techniques. His scores are so careful, so formally well-constructed, so mindful of tradition that you feel the originals should be preserved under glass in a Florentine museum."

Mathieu's feelings about Evans are not unusual. Without doubt the most individualistic and personal jazz composer since Duke Ellington, Evans is held in near-reverence by a wide range of composers, arrangers, instrumentalists, and critics. This feeling is only intensified by the fact that he is a rather inaccessible man — not unfriendly, or anti-social; just politely, quietly inaccessible — whose output has been small, and all of it is indeed remarkable.

What is it that makes Evans' work unique? This is impossible to say in mere words, but with your indulgence, I'm going to try to clarify some of it. What I want to say is not for the professional musician but the layman; the pros are invited to skip the new few paragraphs.

Every "song" is built of two primary components: its melody and its harmony. Rhythm is the third major factor, but I want to confine myself to the first two.

As the melody is played, a certain sequence of chords occurs beneath it. Now the bottom note of these chords sets up a sort of melody of its own. This is referred to as the "bass line" and it has great importance to the texture and flavor of the music. As a first step to the appreciation of Gil Evans, try not hearing the melody but listening to the bass line on some of these tracks.

Between the bass note and the melody note fall the other notes of the chord. You can put them down in a slap-dash fashion, so that you've got merely chords occurring in sequence like a line of telephone poles holding up the wire of melody; or you can link the inner notes of one chord to the inner notes of the next one, setting up still other melodies within the music. These new lines are called the "inner voices" of the harmonization. How well he handles inner voices is one of the measures of a composer's or an arranger's writing skill.

Gil's handling of them is often astonishing. His original melody, his bass line, and his inner lines are always exquisite. The result is that one of Gil's scores is faintly analogous to a crossword puzzle: it can be "read" both vertically (up through the chords) or horizontally in the form of ihe various melodies he sets up. Heard both ways simultaneously, his music can be breathtaking.

That's part of it.

Another and important part is his use of unusual instrumentations. Evans has virtually abandoned the standard jazz instrumentation of trumpets - trombones - saxes. He uses flutes, oboes, English horns (the standard classical woodwinds), along with French horns and a few of the conventional jazz instruments to extend the scope of the jazz orchestra. Evans was one of the first to use French horns in jazz, in the days when he was chief arranger for the celebrated Claude Thornhill orchestra. Not only does Gil use "non-jazz" instruments (usually played by jazz players, however), but he puts them together in startling ways, to create unearthly and fresh lovely sounds.

Finally, there's his sense of form, of logical construction. Everything he writes builds to sound and aesthetically satisfying climaxes, beautifully developing the previously-stated material. I know of no one in jazz with a more highly-developed sense of form than Gil Evans.

Yet, with all his gifts, Gil is oddly down-to-earth about his music. Once, when I told him that some people were having trouble deciding whether an album he had done with Miles Davis was classical music or jazz, he said, "That's a merchandiser's problem, not mine." Another time he said, "I write popular music." What he meant, of course, is that he wanted no part of pointless debates about musical categorizations; that he was making no claims on behalf of his music; and that since that music grew out of the traditions of American popular music, he was content to call it that.

On another occasion he said, "I'm just an arranger" This comment I reject. Even when Gil is working with other people's thematic material, what he does to it constitutes composition. …

To say that this album has been long-awaited is no cliche. It is the first Gil Evans recording in three years. "I stayed away from music for two years!' he said. "I wanted to look around and see what was happening in the world outside of music."

Welcome back.

We've missed you.”

The following video montage has on offer the Nothing Like You track from The Individualism of Gil Evans.