"To The Ladies" - Annie Ross

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

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has had a feature on vocalist Annie Ross of Lambert-Hendricks-Ross fame in the works for some time now, but the discovery of the October 1998 issue of Gene Lees’ JazzLetter and his anecdote about girl-singer jokes pushed the project front-and-center at this time.

At the conclusion of this piece, you will find a video with Annie performing her famous version of tenor saxophone Wardell Gray’s Twisted on a 1959 TV show accompanied by the Count Basie Septet. She is joined later by Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks in a stirring version of Everyday I Have The Blues, a tune long-associated with then-Basie vocalist Joe Williams who also makes a brief appearance in the video.

TO THE LADIES

“Here is the latest girl-singer joke.

Pianist calls for a rehearsal. Says to the girl singer, "I want to go over Autumn Leaves. We'll start in G-minor. At bar five, we'll modulate to B-flat major. You'll do three bars in five-four time, and the next bar we'll go to D-major." He continues these complex instructions until the girl protests:

"But you can't expect me to do all that!"

"Why not?" he says. "You did it last night."

Girl-singer jokes are like Polish jokes, Brazilian jokes about the Portuguese, and Canadian jokes about the Newfies. Sample:

"How many girl singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

Answer: "Just one. She'll get the piano player to do it anyway."

Another: "Why does the girl singer knock at her own door?"

Answer: "She can't find her key."

I laugh at these jokes, like everyone else. But the discomfitting truth is that they reflect a deep hostility in the jazz world toward singers, and particularly from pianists, who often resent playing for singers. (This is because pianists are Great Artists and should not be forced into the subservient role of accompanist.) I call it the war between the singers and the pianists, and every singer knows what I mean. Among the exceptions: Mike Renzi, Eddie Higgins, and Lou Levy love to accompany good singers.

There's the rub. Why does every amateur sitting-in girl singer feel constrained to do Lush Life? Only a master should essay it. But the amateurs do it, to show off, I suppose, how good they are, or think they are. And then there are the Sarah Vaughan wannabes who deconstruct My Funny Valentine. Florence Foster Jenkins lived. So did Mrs. Miller.

The amateurs aside, the condescension to girl singers derives in part from an anomaly of the English language.

The terms "boy singer" and "girl singer" derive from the days of the big bands when, during ensemble and instrumental solo passages, the two would sit demurely on chairs in front the sax section, looking, I always thought, an uncomfortable cross between superfluous and hapless.

Because English has limited structural resources for identifying gender — mostly the -ess suffix to which the extreme element of the women's movement has taken umbrage — we don't know what else to call male and female singers. The French word for "sing" is chanter, and a singer is a chanteur or a chanteuse. There was for a time a gossip-column grafting into English of the word chanteuse, but it had about it a faint condescension and sarcasm, ending in the deliberate mispronunciation shon-too-zee. Nowadays actresses want to be called actors, and that seems reasonable. We do not refer to doctresses, after all. But the French aren't confronted by this problem. In French, all things have gender: the world is masculine, the sea is feminine. You never refer to anything as it but as he or she. French has no neuter pronouns.

We were stuck with boy singer and girl singer because we couldn't say singer and singess. The term boy singer has vanished; girl singer has not.

But the girl-singer jokes simply do not fit the reality. Not all of it, anyway. The good "girl singers" are very solidly skilled, and often highly trained.

Once America was blessed with any number of small nightclubs that featured excellent singers singing excellent songs, and even the big record companies were interested in recording them. Some of the best singers played piano ranging from the competent to — Blossom Dearie, for example — the excellent. Most of them were women, and there was a glamour about them, superb singers such as Betty Bennett, Irene Krai, Ethel Ennis, Marge Dodson, Lurlean Hunter, and "regional" singers such as Kiz Harp of Dallas. Many of them are forgotten; Shirley Home has enjoyed a resurgence; in Chicago Audrey Morris is still singing subtly to her own lovely piano accompaniment; New York has Anita Gravine and Nancy Marano (who you might catch writing her scat solos in taxis), and Washington D.C. has Ronnie Wells.

These people were sometimes called jazz singers, although they were no such thing, or torch singers, a term I found demeaning, not to mention inaccurate. Male singers were with equal condescension from an ignorant lay press called crooners.

The songs they sang were drawn from that classic repertoire that grew up in the United States between roughly 1920 and the 1950s, and had any of us been equipped with foresight, we'd have known that the era was ending, doomed by How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? and Papa Loves Mambo and Music Music Music even before the rise of rock.

For a number of reasons, I have been thinking of late how many of those "girl singers" have been friends of mine over the years, and how skillful — aside from gifted— they have been. …

ANNIE

“Another "girl singer" friend is Annie Ross, who in 1957 — forty-one years ago; are you ready for that? —joined Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks to form Lambert-Hendricks-Ross, one of the best vocal groups in jazz history, and the most adventurous.

Annie was born in Mitcham, England, on July 25, 1930, but spent her childhood in Los Angeles with her aunt and foster mother, the Scottish-born singer Ella Logan. Logan had toured Europe, performed in Broadway musicals (including Finian’s Rainbow) and film, and recorded with Adrian Rollini and other bands. In California, Annie was a child movie actress. She moved to Europe in 1947 and sang all over the continent, returning to the United States in 1950. She wrote words to Wardell Gray's Twisted and recorded it, causing a sensation in jazz circles.

The pioneer of bop vocals was Dave Lambert, born in Boston on June 19, 1917. With Buddy Stewart, born in New Hampshire in 1922, he recorded What's This? with the Gene Krupa band in 1945 — the first recorded bebop vocal. (Stewart was also a superb ballad singer. I have always thought that if Clifford Brown had lived, Miles Davis would have had some serious competition for pre-eminence, and so too would Frank Sinatra, had Buddy Stewart lived. Like Clifford Brown, Buddy Stewart was killed in an automobile crash.)

Jon Hendricks was born in Newark, Ohio, on September 15, 1952. When he was fourteen he would sometimes sing with fellow Ohioan Art Tatum. He played drums while he was in college, studying literature and law, but was encouraged by Charlie Parker to make music his profession and moved to New York, where he met Dave Lambert, who became his room-mate. He and Lambert began planning an album that would eventually be called Sing a Song of Basie, to be recorded using ten top New York City studio singers.

They were introduced to Annie at record producer Bob Bach's apartment, and, because of her jazz background, particularly her recording of Twisted (and Farmers Market), they asked her to come to their rehearsals and coach the singers for phrasing. She tried, but the singers just couldn't get the Basie feel, and producer Creed Taylor was growing frustrated. "Frankly," Annie said, "I was a little miffed that they hadn't asked me to do it in the first place." She would get her chance. It was evidently Creed Taylor's idea that they let the vocal group go, and that Jon and Dave, with Annie, overdub their voices up to the full orchestrations.

The album was a smash. It was followed by The Swingers (1959), The Hottest New Group in Jazz (1959), Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross Sing Ellington (1960), and High Flying (1961).

In 1962, Annie returned to England. She was replaced by Yolanda Bavanne. And in 1964, Dave Lambert left the group. He was replaced for a time by Don Chastain, and sometimes in later years Jon worked with his children.

None of it was quite the same. Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross struck magical sparks, and anyone who never saw them in a club or on a stage such as that of the Monterey Jazz Festival has no idea how much excitement the three of them could generate, singing difficult ensemble passages or complex lyrics set to (by Annie and, even more, by Jon) famous jazz solos.

One night in October, 1966, Dave was returning to New York from a gig in Cape Cod. "He was always a good Samaritan," Jon said. "If anyone was in trouble on the road, he'd always stop and help." Near Westport, Connecticut, Dave saw a motorist with a flat tire. Dave pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. According to Jon, Dave was working on the lugs of the man's wheel when a big semi went roaring by. Jon said Dave was pulled under its wheels. Whatever the details, that was the end of any hope of reconstituting Lambert-Hendricks-Ross.

I would see Annie occasionally in London. She married actor Sean Lynch, whom I found to be a delightfully warm and friendly man. I remember meeting the late Marty Feldman at a party at their apartment. And I remember a letter Annie had received from a farm woman in Devon. Annie had sung my lyrics to Bill Evans' Waltz for Debby on her television show. The woman had written to tell her how touched she had been by that lyric, which expressed her feelings about her little girl, and asked for a copy of it, which Annie sent her. I don't even know the woman's name; but she gave me the best review I ever received.

Annie had her own nightclub, called Annie's room. It was a very pleasant club, in a basement, and I beat its slot machine all one evening. Annie had that club from October 1964 until the fall of 1965, and so when we talked recently I said, "My God, Annie, we haven't spoken in more than thirty years."

Jon and I were talking about Annie, and Sean's name came up. "He was such a lovely person," Jon said.

"I said, 'What do you mean, was?"

"Didn't anyone tell you?" Jon said. "He was killed in an automobile accident."

Another one.

In 1985, Annie returned to the U.S. and, like Jon Hendricks, lives in New York City. She can sing anything: the L-H-R years have left an impression that bop vocals are all she can do, but she is also an excellent ballad singer. So, by the way, is Jon Hendricks, although few people realize it.

It was inevitable that she and Jon would start thinking about reviving the L-H-R repertoire, and a few months ago they went into rehearsals. "It wasn't really that hard," Annie said, "although at the very beginning, I thought, 'Oh my God!'

"Then it became a matter of, 'Which of Dave's lines do I sing, which ones does Jon sing?'

"But then, after we got over the nervousness, the energy and the excitement were still there. It works, and it swings, and my voice is getting stronger. It's back to that hard swing. It's a workout, but it's worth it. Oh, it feels incredible!"

Jon said, "It's the first time we've sung together in thirty-six years. Well, we did, once in that time, but this is a real reunion. The audiences are incredible. People who heard us in the old days are having tears of joy, and their children are jumping."

Much has been made of the space trip at seventy-seven of John Glenn, as an inspiration to older people. Try this one on: Jon Hendricks is also seventy-seven. And Annie is sixty-nine. And they are out there swinging.”

Jon Hendricks was born in 1921 which now makes him 93 as of 2014; Annie Ross was born in 1930 was now makes her 84 as of 2014.

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.