Rhythmstick

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

“The young revolutionary of long ago, with the horn-rimmed glasses and the beret and the goatee and the impish smile, had lived to be the elder statesman, the master, the sage of this music, and gathered about him were all these gifted players who were, directly or indirectly, his musical descendants.”"Dizzy changed the way of the world," Phil Woods said. "That music means so much to so many people everywhere."

“The music resumed. Tito Puente and Airto began to cook, Latin rhythm swirled around John Birks Gillespie. He took up his Rhythmstick, and tapped it on the floor, and shook it in the air, this remarkable man who can make music on a stick.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author, critic and editor

Wynton Marsalis, the trumpet playing leader of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, has been quoted as saying: “Change the rhythm and you change the music.”

Such profundity from such an apparently simple statement.

But when the subject is rhythm in Jazz there’s nothing simple about it and the fact that Jazz can readily incorporate so many different rhythms is one of the features that keeps it vibrant; full of the energy that is so much a part of the music’s initial and continuing appeal.

No one in the history of Jazz ever brought more different forms of rhythm to it than John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie.

Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, Samba, Bossa Nova, Tango, Portuguese Fado, and Middle Eastern rhythms are just some of the patterns which are everywhere apparent in Dizzy’s music.

And to top it all off, there’s his Rhythmstick, a gift from a friend and one of the great joys of the latter years of his life.

Rhythmstick [CTI R2 79477] is also the name of one of my favorite albums which was produced by the legendary Creed Taylor in 1990 and features Dizzy along with the “CTI All-Stars.”

Here are Gene Lees’ informative and instructive insert notes to the recording.

“The spirit of Dizzy Gillespie is throughout this album.

It isn't only a matter of his beautiful solos, it is in the influence he has had on the generations of players heard on this recording.

Dizzy was born on October 21,1917; Phil Woods on November 2,1931, when Dizzy was fourteen years old. Dizzy and his partner-in-change, Charlie Parker, would have a profound influence on Phil, and Phil in turn would have a deep influence on younger players. Charlie Haden, born August 6,1937, remembers slipping into an older brother's room to listen to Parker and Gillespie records during the 1940's, when Diz and Bird were expanding the vocabulary of jazz in a music that, for better or worse, became known as bebop.

Benny Golson said of Dizzy, "He was always didactic. Really. He was a teacher without even intending to be."

Yet John Birks Gillespie is unbelievably self-effacing about, his enormous pedagogic effect in jazz. As he arrived for this recording, I told Dizzy, "Everybody I've talked to, Phil Woods, Benny Golson, Art Farmer, said you have always been a great teacher. I remember Nat Adderley said once, “Dizzy's the greatest teacher in the world if you don't let him know he's doing it.”

"Is it true? I don't know about that," he said, and there was a shy embarrassment about him. This was no affectation of modesty; this was genuine humility. "But what little I do know, I'll give it, any time. So I guess it's not actually someone with a whole lot of knowledge giving it out to people. But anything I learned, I'll tell somebody else. That's what they mean by that. I will tell anything that I've learned."

Phil Woods said, "I met Dizzy-in 1956, when we did a State Department tour, first stop Abadan, Iran; next stops Aleppo and Damascus, Syria; then Beirut, Lebanon. All the trouble spots, all the places that are now on fire, the State Department sent Dizzy. I think if they'd sent him one more time, he could have cooled it out.”

"They loved the music. They didn't understand the jazz part, but Dizzy has such an important thing — the rhythm. That grabs people immediately. Dizzy is such a master of rhythm, the Afro, the South American. He was the first cat to fuse the jazz and Cuban and the South American. Dizzy is the cat who discovered that, the first cat who used conga drums and all that, with Chano Pozo. That's a real big contribution of Diz, which is sometimes overlooked — not by musicians, of course. A lot of people know about the bebop part, but not the rhythm. He loves to play drums."

"That stick he carries — did you ever see that, that thing he made out of a stick and Coca-Cola bottle-caps?"

I had indeed. There's no name for this instrument of Dizzy's invention. It is a pole, like a piece of broomstick, with pop-bottle caps, hammered flat, mounted on nails along its length, like little stacks of finger cymbals. He can bounce it on the floor and kick it with his toe and stomp a beat with his foot or shake that stick in the air, setting up the damnedest swing you ever heard. I just call it Dizzy's Rhythmstick.

Phil said, "I once flew back with him on the Concorde. When you travel with Dizzy, it's -incredible. .He was carrying that stick, right through the metal detector at the airport. The detector flipped out with a hundred Coca-Cola caps rattling. And all the control people cheered and applauded: here comes Dizzy with that silly stick. He plays it all the way through the airport; you can hear him a mile away."

Phil's view of Dizzy's rhythmic influence was echoed by Flora Purim, who, with her husband Airto, had just returned from a European tour with Dizzy. Flora said, "It was great working with Dizzy. Dizzy is one of the greatest teachers. He shows you ways of handling life. When he goes onstage, and the music changes, it's so easy, so humorous. Everything is a laugh, it's fun, and if it's not fun, he doesn't want to do it. He's been a big inspiration to us lately. During the past year we've been touring with him."

Romero Lubambo, an excellent young guitarist from Brazil, talked of Dizzy's influence on his country's music. He said, "The whole time I was in Brazil, I liked to listen to American musicians to learn how to improvise, how to play jazz. Now I am playing with the greatest musicians in the world, I. think. For me, it is fantastic. We used a lot of the American know-how of jazz improvising. For me, American jazz and Brazilian music are sympatico."

When Dizzy arrived at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, the music that was in rehearsal stopped so that all the musicians could greet him. There was an aura about him. It wasn't exactly a matter of people lining up to pay tribute: jazz musicians are too democratic, the music itself is -too democratic, for obeissance. But it certainly was an "homage," in the way the French use that word. The young revolutionary of long ago, with the horn-rimmed glasses and the beret and the goatee and the impish smile, had lived to be the elder statesman, the master, the sage of this music, and gathered about him were all these gifted players who were, directly or indirectly, his musical descendants.

"Dizzy changed the way of the world," Phil Woods said. "That music means so much to so many people everywhere."-

The music resumed. Tito Puente and Airto began to cook, Latin rhythm swirled around John Birks Gillespie. He took up his Rhythmstick, and tapped it on (he floor, and shook it in the air, this remarkable man who can make music on a stick.

1.  Caribe, a composition by Michel Camilo, opens with a -piano solo by Hilton Ruiz and Brazilian forest sounds. Actually they are coming from the collection of percussion instruments used, and in some cases invented, by Airto.'Then Dizzy shows how at home he is in the complexities of Latin rhythms. The burning tenor solo is by Bob Berg.

2.  Friday Night at the Cadillac Club is a piece Bob Berg wrote to recall a rough-and-ready New Jersey nightclub where he used to work. He plays the tenor solo, which is followed by a hot but pretty trumpet solo by Art Farmer, then some typically all-out alto by Phil Woods, earthy guitar from Robben Ford, and a steaming organ solo by Jim Beard.

3.  Quilombo. It is more than twenty-five years since the bossa nova movement burst on the United States and we became familiar with the propulsive character of Brazilian guitar and percussion. That sound is still there, but a good many younger songwriters and singers have come up, one of the most exciting being Gilberto Gil. This is his song. The guitar is that of Romero Lubambo, the voices are led by Flora Purim. Phil Woods plays eight bars leading into a duet with Bob Berg. Airto shouts encouragement from behind his percussion instruments, and then Art Farmer comes in again. As Dizzy said, "Art Farmer plays so pretty,"

4.  Barbados. This is a blues by Charlie Parker and, appropriately, Phil Woods, one of his most brilliant successors, leads it off. The bassist is the wonderful Charlie Haden, another of the universalists who have grown up in jazz.

5.  Waiting for Angela is an exquisite ballad by Toninho Horta, with lyrics by Flora Purim. Bob Berg plays the soprano saxophone obligate and solo. The lovely synthesizer work is that of Jim Beard.

6.  Nana is by the outstanding Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and composer Moacir Santos. One of the things Santos has done is to draw such American influences as bugaloo into the music of Brazil. This is an example of this land of alloy. Bob Berg and Phil Woods are featured. Jim Beard plays the funk-filled piano solo.

7.  Softly as in a Morning Sunrise is from the 1928 musical The New Moon. Creed Taylor drily commented, as Art Farmer and Romero Lubambo began it, "You know, Sigmund Romberg didn't write this as a samba," But it works beautifully that way. This track occurred utterly impromptu at the session. Art plays flugelhorn, his usual instrument in recent years.

8.  Colo de Rio is by Enio Flavio Mol and Marcelo Ferreira. The amazing thing is the facility and intonation with which Flora negotiates the high-speed syllables. Phil Woods, Art Fanner, Bob Berg, and Romero Lubambo are soloists, with lovely synthesizer effects from Jim Beard.

9.  Palisades in Blue is by Benny Golson, the widely admired—and widely played—jazz composer who co-led the celebrated Jazztet with Art Farmer. After many years as a film and television composer, Benny—who arranged this album—has returned full-time to the jazz world. This tune somewhat recalls his earlier and hugely successful -Killer Joe. The soloists are Phil Woods, Art Farmer, Bob Berg, Robben Ford, and Jimmy McGriff.

10. Wamba was written by the African composer Salif Keita. The opening time signature is six:eight, but the song is, in fact, polyrhythmic. Bob Berg, Airto, Flora Purim, Tito Puente, Phil Woods, and Dizzy are featured. Airto and Tito play a percussion duet, followed by Dizzy's Rhythmstick exchanges with Tito's timbales. Dizzy is in the center channel; you can hear him tapping the stick on the floor as the synthesizer comes in. Dizzy picks up his famous trumpet and becomes the center of it all; he has been for more than forty years, this American national treasure.”

The following video feature my favorite track from Rhythmstick [CTI R2 79477], Bob Berg’s Friday Night at the Cadillac Club with Bernard Purdie’s pulsating backbeats powering everyone to exciting flights of solo fancy.

Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich

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

Mr recent posting about the newly released Nat King Cole Trio’s 1950 performance in Zurich brought to mind Nat’s work on another of my favorite recording - Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich - which was recorded in 1946 by Norman Granz for his Clef Records label and released on CD as Verve 314 521 650-2.

Because Nat had been under contract with Capitol since 1943 he surreptitiously made these recordings using the pseudonym “Aye Guy.”

Granz and Cole had a close friendship dating back to the early 1940s when Norman used to hang out at the Swanee Inn in Hollywood where Nat’s trio was featured, but his career as a concert impresario and record producer didn’t really kick off until the close of WWII in 1945.

Nat would be the headliner for Norman’s second Jazz at the Philharmonic concert which took place on July 30, 1945 at Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles at which Buddy Rich also performed.

Recorded in April, 1946 and initially issued on Mercury Records, Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich would ultimately be among the first recordings that Norman re-released as 78 rpms on Clef Records upon its founding in June, 1947.

Lester’s association with Norman dates back to the early 1940’s when he co-led a band with his brother, drummer Lee Young, that Norman often listen to in the clubs on Central Avenue in Los Angeles when he was a student at UCLA. This early relationship with Lester was to culminate in photographer/director Gijon Mili’s cult film “Jammin’ the Blues” which was released in theaters in December 1944 and for which Norman hired the musicians and served as recording supervisor and producer.

As explained in Bill Kirchner’s insert notes to the Verve CD reissue of Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich, the bond between Lester and Norman would become even closer when Young signed a personal management contract with Granz in 1946.

Bill is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Jazz, an excellent saxophonist who heads up his own notet and a distinguished music educator. Over the years, he has also been extremely kind to these pages in allowing his work to be featured on them.

To put things in perspective, during the formative years of his association with Jazz, Norman Granz, essentially hung out with the three musicians that recorded the music for Lester Young Trio with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich.  

With the early guidance and friendship of these Grand Jazz Masters, is it any wonder that Norman later went on to do great things in the music?

Reissuing Lester Young Trio

“In the spring of 1946, a lot of things were changing.

World War II had ended, and amid vast alterations in the world's political landscape, the US was returning to a peacetime economy — though one that was quite different from its Depression-era counterpart. Americans were drawn to new forms of entertainment: network television was in its infancy.

And Lester Young was out of the Army.

Much has been written about the traumatic effects of Young's fourteen months of military service: his arrest, court-martial, and conviction for possession of marijuana and barbiturates: his ten months in the detention barracks at Fort Gordon, Georgia: and then his dishonorable discharge on December 1, 1945. Some of his associates have said that the effects of these events were deep and lasting. And a number of commentators have made the case that, whatever the merits of his postwar playing, he was seldom if ever the joyous Lester Young of his early recordings.

One thing is clear, though: On a single, undetermined date in late March or early April of 1946 (not December 1945 as was previously thought). Lester Young played some music that ranks with his finest recordings. You'll find it in this package.

Hearing Young at the peak of his powers is a pivotal experience in jazz listening. If Louis Armstrong’s rhythmic innovations in the 1920’s made the Swing Era possible, then Lester Young more than any other musician changed the focus of that era. His buoyant, airy sound, his lyricism and unorthodox phrasing, and his comparatively even eighth-note feel fit perfectly with the innovative Count Basie rhythm section.

He made further rhythmic developments by Charlie Christian. Kenny Clarke. Dizzy Gillespie. Charlie Parker, and others not only possible but necessary. (Even in the late Thirties, though. Lester's innovations didn't stand alone. Listen to Django Reinhardt’s 1937 solo on "Japanese Sandman with Dicky Wells, and you'll hear an even eighth-note conception worthy of Wayne Shorter.)

So for hosts of players, including the fledgling Charlie Parker (and later Miles

Davis and Dexter Gordon), Lester Young became an idol whose recorded solos were eagerly memorized. And it wasn't just the instrumentalists who were entranced. Composer-arrangers such as Eddie Finckel. Jimmy Giuffre. and Johnny Mandel incorporated Young's innovations in their scoring. As Finckel. who wrote for the Gene Krupa. Boyd Raeburn and Buddy Rich bands, told historian Jack McKinney. his goal was "orchestrated Lester.”  And as Mandel said recently: "Lester was the first to play the saxophone like a percussion instrument. Probably because lie started as a drummer.”

In 1946, Young was perhaps at the height of his influence in jazz. He had just signed a personal management contract with impresario Norman Granz, an association that continued almost until Young's death in 1959. Signing with Granz provided Young with considerable recording opportunities plus lucrative tours with Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP). (Some complained, though, that the often extroverted jam-session formal of JATP was a less than ideal setting for the sensitive Lester.)

The Young-Cole-Rich date was thus a Norman Granz production, though it is unclear whether the idea to record without bass player was Granz's or the musicians'. Whatever, it was an inspired choice.

“These recordings," says Frank Ichmann-Moller in his Lester Young biography, You Just Fight for Your Life, Praeger, New York, 1990),

"are now classics. Every number has a high quality and its own beauty. Lester and Cole really listen to each other all the way through, and Lester is marvelous throughout. When necessary he is very romantic, poetic, dreaming, urgent, melancholy, humorous, cheerful, aggressive, or showing great drive. Because there is no bass player he is also forced away from lying behind the beat, playing much in the same way as he did in his earlier recordings."

Like Lester Young, Nat "King" Cole was a musicians' favorite but he was, more so than Young, a figure of wide popularity. “Straighten Up and Fly Right" had been a hit for the King Cole Trio in 1944, and the group, featuring the leader's piano and vocals and a soon-to-be widely copied piano-guitar-bass format, recorded prolificacy.

Moreover, Cole was one of the most important jazz pianists of the day, with a "crystalline sound'* (as Gene Lees has written), advanced harmonic concept, and impeccable swing. It is not surprising that most of the major jazz pianists who emerged in the next decade and a half — including such disparate stylists as Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Hank Jones, Wynton Kelly, Oscar Peterson, and Bud Powell — were influenced by Cole. (For a sampling of this influence, listen to the opening chorus of “I Want to Be Happy"; such technique was surely not lost on Powell.)

From his beginning as an enfant terrible who sparked the Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey bands. Buddy Rich had become one of the most in-demand drummers of the era. (In 1944, reports Doug Meriwether. Jr. in his bio-discography of Buddy Rich, Count Basie presented Rich with a blank check after Rich filled in for two weeks with the Basie band. Rich graciously declined it.) At the time of these recordings. Rich was appearing in Los Angeles at the helm of his own big band and was thus available for these recordings.

Those who regard Buddy Rich as a flamboyant but not particularly sensitive virtuoso may well be surprised by this session. For one thing, Rich remains almost entirely on brushes, which is perfect for the needs of this group, especially on "I Want to Be Happy". (On “Peg o' My Heart,” he is absent entirely, having gone to get something to eat; Lester was merely fooling around with the Fisher-Bryan chestnut when Nat started filling in behind him. Norman decided to record it and another gem was cut.)

There is no need for a play-by-play description of this music, but it should be pointed out that the most adventurous interplay comes on the two fastest tracks, “I've Found a New Baby” and “I Want to Be Happy.”Lester is exquisite — totally relaxed and in complete control of all registers of his horn. Nat is propulsive yet sensitive — listen to the touches of Earl Hines (an early influence) and Art Tatum that crop up in his playing. Buddy Rich sounds like he's having a ball — you can hear his vocal exhortations.

In fact, all three sound like they're having fun; the prevailing mood is serious yet playful. (Don't miss Lester's quotes from "March of the Toy Soldiers" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" on "I Want to Be Happy".)

In 1950, down beat gave a release of four of these selections its highest rating, saying: "Four magnificent sides, made four years ago, with Lester most often at his fluent best. 'Baby', in addition to some wonderful tenor, has some deft and humorous kidding between Cole's piano and Rich's drumming."

Over four decades later, that review — and this music — still rings true.”

Bill Kirchner, 1993

One of the first tunes I ever played Jazz on was I Found A New Baby [doesn’t everybody?] It’s one of the reasons I selected it as the soundtrack for the following video montage.

Billy Strayhorn: Singular Unsung Genius by John Edward Hasse

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

“They were like two aspects of a single complex self. Where Duke Ellington was immodest, priapic and thumpingly egocentric, his longtime writing and arranging partner, Billy Strayhorn, was shy, gay and self-effacing. It's now very difficult, given the closeness of their relationship and their inevitable tendency to draw on aspects of the other's style and method, to separate which elements of an

'Ellington-Strayhorn' composition belong to each; but there is no doubt that Swee' Pea, as Ellington called him, made an immense impact on his boss's music. Even if he had done no more than write 'Lush Life' and 'Take The "A" Train', Strayhorn would still have been guaranteed a place in jazz history.

The ground-rules have shifted a little since the publication of David Hajdu's 1997 biography of Strayhorn, a book which intends no disrespect to the genius of Duke Ellington but which relocates some significant emphases and suggests that Strayhorn may have had a greater part in creating the Ellington sound than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, it may be that association with Ellington significantly redirected aspects of Strayhorn's own talent; whether to his benefit or loss remains ambiguous.”

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

The following piece by John Edward Hasse appeared in the May 30, 2017 edition of The Wall Street Journal and it, too, helps redress the general lack of awareness of Billy’s immense contribution to the Ellington compositional oeuvre.

“Duke Ellington led the greatest jazz orchestra for 50 years, and for 27 of them Billy Strayhorn was his indispensable musical partner. Strayhorn composed its exuberant theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” co-authored the perennial “Satin Doll,” and wrote more than 100 other works. Theirs was a different-drummer collaboration, one of the most unusual in musical history. Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, it’s time to give Billy his due.

They worked together in three ways. Some pieces, like “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” were wholly written by Strayhorn. As if handing arias to his favorite soprano, Strayhorn wrote a number of ballads to feature Ellington’s star alto saxophonist, Johnny Hodges, including the haunting “Passion Flower” and the ravishing “Isfahan.”

Sometimes working over the phone, the two composers wrote pieces such as “C Jam Blues.”

And in suites such as “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Far East Suite,” the individual movements had separate authors. The collaborative composing of Strayhorn with Ellington is extremely rare, if not downright unprecedented in orchestral music.

So crucial was Strayhorn to the building of Ellington’s repertoire that many of the original compositions are yin-yangs, the result of two contrasting creative forces coming together. Unlike Ellington, Strayhorn was well-trained in European classical music and brought his own sensibility and style, as in his impressionistic tone poem, “ Chelsea Bridge ” (1941). Ellington’s sound was rooted more deeply in the African-American vernacular of ragtime and blues—for example in his well-disguised minor-key blues, “Ko-Ko” (1940).

Yet, even 50 years after his passing, Strayhorn’s name is, I would guess, not even one-tenth as familiar as Ellington’s to people other than jazz aficionados.

In their personal lives, the two were opposites. While the handsome, charismatic, 6-foot-1-inch Ellington moved through life with dash and theatricality, charming women and manipulating people, the cherubic Strayhorn was 16 years younger, 10 inches shorter, soft-spoken, modest and gay. Despite these differences, they formed an exceedingly close musical relationship that ended only with Strayhorn’s death, at age 51.

That relationship was complicated. Strayhorn seemed to need a father figure—that was the domineering Ellington who loved and accepted him and provided a home base for his enormous creativity. But Strayhorn wanted credit for his creativity and eventually grew angry with Ellington’s stinginess with attribution. At a crucial dinner in 1956, Billy demanded equal billing—and Duke agreed.

Why was Strayhorn a shadow figure in the Ellington story for so long? Ellington, with his large ego and controlling personality, was, at best, careless at assigning composer credit and royalties to Strayhorn. Shy and retiring, Strayhorn avoided the limelight. Ellington’s late-career publicist Joe Morgen was antigay and diligently kept Strayhorn’s name out of the press. Prejudice prevailed. Some record producers preferred the simplicity of a single name on an album.

A lack of primary sources had long hindered scholarly assessment. But in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution began cataloging and making available the Duke Ellington Collection, a treasure newly acquired from Duke’s son, Mercer, of some hundred thousand pages of unpublished scores and parts written by Ellington and Strayhorn and a few other collaborators. This sparked an Ellington renaissance, opened up access to Strayhorn’s handwritten manuscripts, and enabled authoritative insight into the contrast in their styles and who wrote what.

In 1990-93, when I was writing my biography of Ellington, the basic research on Strayhorn hadn’t been done. Since then, three works have appeared that have considerably raised his critical standing: David Hajdu’s pioneering “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” (1996), Walter van de Leur’s scholarly “Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn” (2002), and Robert Levi’s revealing PBS documentary “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” (2007).

And work on Strayhorn goes on. The Strayhorn family repository of original manuscripts has helped unveil heretofore unknown compositions. In the year 2000 alone, Strayhorn Songs copyrighted 200 newly discovered titles.

Beyond his output for Ellington, Strayhorn moved in other intriguing orbits. Before joining Ellington, Strayhorn composed classical-sounding pieces and a successful musical revue, “Fantastic Rhythm.” In the 1940s, he became the soul mate of singer Lena Horne and worked with her in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. And he composed a number of pieces totally independent of Ellington, most notably the arresting, world-weary ballad “Lush Life”—one of America’s premier popular songs—written when he was a teenager.

Ellington deeply loved, admired and depended on Strayhorn. Three months after his passing, the Ellington orchestra began recording a sorrowful, sometimes angry, tribute album made up almost entirely of Strayhorn compositions, “…And His Mother Called Him Bill”—one of the band’s finest works. It’s well worth a listen. Let’s finally give Billy his due.”

— Mr. Hasse is Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian and author of “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.”

The Dave Holland Big Band - Something Special This Way Comes

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

Whoosh!

It was in incredible.

My first experience listening to the Dave Holland Big Band involved a track that lasted 17.26 minutes, and yet, it felt like it was over in a flash.

What happened?

How can something with a duration of nearly one-third of an hour seemingly elapse so quickly?

After listening to this selection - What Goes Around – the title track from the band’s first CD on ECM [#1026] - I was instantly and completely absorbed in the music of this big band.

In case you are not familiar with Dave Holland, he is a bassist who assumes a very dominant and propulsive role in the band’s music.

How can you swing a big band with from the bass chair?

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening in this band’s music – the bass player is the driving force behind it – both figuratively and literally.

Dave Holland has impeccable credentials as a bass player dating back to the late 1960s and his tenure with Miles Davis.  Over the years, Dave has been the mainstay, a force, if you will, in a number of small groups where his huge tone, superb note selection and excellent sense of time have contributed greatly to the overall quality of the music.

But, bringing all of these skills to bear in a big band is quite a different matter as, more-often-than-not, the sound of the bass is lost in such surroundings.

In addition to Dave’s bass and the sterling musicianship of the other players, it is the nature and quality of the big band’s arrangements that distinguish its music.

Traditionally, big band arrangements have been tightly configured vehicles ruled by the constrictions of time and structure. Initially, one reason for this was to take commercial benefit of the earliest records, which along with radio broadcasts, supper club and ballroom appearances, served to generate audiences for the big bands.

The big band tradition came into existence at a time when 7-10” 78 rpm recordings were the mainstay, thus allowing for approximately 2:00 – 3:30 minutes of music to be captured on them.

The temporal and spatial restraints of these early 78’s curtailed the time available for the playing out of a big band arrangement and related solos.

Typically, the earliest big band arrangements, particularly from their high point in The Swing Era, 1930 – 1945, involved a statement of the melody and the release [bridge], brief solos by one or two instrumentalists and then a slightly altered restatement of the theme to close things out.

The advent of the long-playing album in the 1950s made possible longer recorded performances which resulted in more time for featured soloists and the interspersing of riffs, interludes and “shout choruses” [fanfare-type choruses that preceded the closing restatement of the theme], thus extending the typical big band arrangement to approximately 4-6 minutes.

Of course, there were exceptions to this format and these usually occurred when a big band was recorded in performance at a club or Jazz Festival.  One of the more notable examples of such an extended, recorded performance was the classic 20+ choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves on the 14.37 minutes of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue on the Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival Columbia LP.

But here again, the structure of the arrangement is largely patterned after the more traditional big band arranging format which is altered to allow Gonsalves time to spin his saxophone magic and enchant the crowd at Newport, Rhode Island’s Freebody Park on July 7, 1956.

There were also exceptions to this generalization by arrangers who emphasized concert or orchestral approaches such as those associated Stan Kenton, as well as, big bands scored for by Gil Evans and Gerald Wilson, and, of course Duke Ellington’s extended suites.

Due to copyright restrictions, the crackerjack graphics theme at CerraJazz LTD was unable to use the music from the “first impression” What Goes Around recording on its video tribute to the Dave Holland Big Band, but we were able to put together an audio only Soundcloud music file which you'll find at the conclusion of this piece which uses the band's performance of What Goes Around from the 2003 Saalfelden Jazz Festival [Austria].

For the closing video turned to a live performance of Dave’s tune The Razor’s Edge from the band’s appearance at the 2005 North Sea Jazz Festival which contains smashing solos by Alex "Sasha" Sipiagin on trumpet, Steve Nelson on vibes and Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone.

In Dave’s arrangement of the tune, you can hear all of the ingredients that make the band so engaging, engrossing and enthralling such as:

- collective improvisation by one, two instruments or even the entire band as an element in the arrangement and/or a background for the soloists to improvise over

- stop time

- the rhythm section “laying out” [stops playing to create a sudden background of quiet]

- restating the theme between solos

- rhythmic riffs played behind soloists and between solos

- alternating such riffs between sections [i.e.: brass and reeds] to give them contrasts

- counter melodies played between sections

- multiple shout choruses as a prelude to the closing theme

Basically, the arrangement is being elongated to allow the soloists to expand their solos, a format which is more characteristic of Jazz in a small group rather than a big band setting.

And, by variegating these orchestral backgrounds, it serves to energize the soloists who now have many more stimuli to chose from as a springboard for their improvisations.

The implementation of all of these arranging, orchestrating and scoring devices provides for a landscape of continually changing sonorities that keeps the music interesting for both the musicians and the listener.

Amazingly, given the variety of the devices employed, they always seem to occur in exactly the right place in the charts for Dave’s band.

With all this going on in the music, is it any wonder that time seems to standstill while listening to it?

If you are looking for something “new and different” in your big band fare, why not give the music of the Dave Holland Big Band a try. 

Don’t be surprised if you lose track of time while doing so.