Ornette Coleman The "New Bird" by Grover Sales

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

“When the musicians hang on to a few rhythmic phrases Coleman has been able to create — when they realize they have a new camouflage of atonality, no time bars, no key signature — when they simultaneously begin to jabber in this borrowed style in all the nightclubs all over America—then the walls of all the nightclubs will probably crumble. . . .”

- Charles Mingus,Mingus Dynasty (Columbia CL 1440):

“Mingus's foresight bordered on clairvoyance. In the sixties, as "free jazz" began to alienate much of the jazz audience, coinciding with the ascendancy of rock among the young, leading jazz clubs from New York to San Francisco closed their doors forever.”

- Grover Sales

Jazz is constantly transforming itself.

For proof of this, just checkout the many styles of the music that rapidly evolved from 1925 to 1975: from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives/Sevens recordings in 1925 to Miles Davis’ Jazz-Rock Fusion, electronically ladened troika of Get Up With It [1974], Pangaea [1975] and Agharta [1976], the number of approaches to the music and the pace at which these changes occurred would literally make one’s head spin.

Many of these changes were jarring at first: The Swing Era’s collision with the Bebop movement as led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie;  the Birth of the Cool and Modal Jazz with Miles Davis in the vanguard; the “Coltrane Changes” [major thirds modulations]; the unusual time changes initiated by Dave Brubeck’s Quartet; the fusing of Jazz with Rock ‘n Roll, to emphasize only a few, transformative examples.

But they were nothing compared to the explosive reaction from the Jazz World that greeted the arrival of the “music” of Ornette Coleman [1930-2015]. I put the word music in quotation marks because there were many at the time who refused to considered it as such.

One of the better descriptions of the effect that the appearance of Ornette Coleman had on the Jazz scene is contained in Grover Sales, Jazz America’s Classical Music.

By way of background, the following appeared in www.jazzhouse.org as an obituary following Grover Sales’ death in 2004. You can locate the complete text for Ornette Coleman The "New Bird"  in Jazz: America’s Classical Music [New York: Prentice Hall, 1984; New York: Da Capo Paperback Edition, 1992].

“Strongly opinionated and superbly literate, longtime Bay Area resident Grover Sales was the kind of jazz critic who left no doubt about where he stood on issues ranging from the genius of Lenny Bruce to the paucity of gay jazz musicians.

During a career that spanned 50 years Sales wrote about jazz, film and cultural politics and published widely in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Tiburon Ark and Gene Lees' Jazzletter. He wrote three books: Jazz: America's Classical Music, a biography of John Maher and, with his wife Georgia, The Clay-Pot Cookbook, which sold more than 800,000 copies.

Sales was also publicist for the Monterey Jazz Festival from its birth in 1958 until 1965, and for the hungry i nightclub. He also did freelance publicity work for artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland and Dick Gregory, and wrote liner notes for several Fantasy recordings.

Over the years, he taught jazz history courses at Stanford University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco State University and the JazzSchool.

Sales became a jazz fan at 16, after hearing a broadcast of Benny Goodman's band with drummer Gene Krupa, and later became what he called "an inveterate Ellington groupie" after hearing a recording of "Black And Tan Fantasy".

After serving in the Army Air Corps in Southeast Asia during World War II, Sales studied at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and then settled in the Bay Area, where he received a BA in history from the University of California at Berkeley.”...

“Even before the passing of Bird the jazz press was abuzz with speculation on his successor, a fitting pastime for an era obsessed with experiment and change. Because jazz musicians and journalists tend to form a cloistered in-group, they naively anticipated a Mozartian fertility god like Parker to pop up every spring like some new welterweight. Where, they wondered, was the "New Bird"? Was it tenorman Johnny Griffin who was "faster than Bird"? Sonny Rollins? John Coltrane?

Suddenly, in 1958, word got out that the Messiah had arrived in the person of Ornette Coleman, a strange, intense young Texan who wrote bizarre tunes declaimed on a plastic alto sax in a radically new and disturbing way. Few would deny that Ornette Coleman is the most controversial musician in all of jazz. Even more than Parker and Gillespie in the bebop era, Coleman's ascension split the jazz world into two hostile camps. Nor was this breach soon to heal, for unlike Parker, the controversy over Coleman rages to this day.

Coleman's earliest champions included Gunther Schuller, Nat Hentoff, and Martin Williams who assigned him no less than three lengthy cuts in the Smithsonian Collection (Smic 12/1, 12/2, 12/3). His most prestigious support came from the Modern Jazz Quartet's John Lewis who claimed "Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of Parker, Gillespie and Monk." (Spellman, Black Music: Four Lives.) Many young soloists who were already notable and were to become more so — Rollins, Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy — were profoundly changed by Coleman's concept of "free jazz." Tenorman Joe Henderson told Leonard Feather in 1966: "Ornette inspired me to move from the canal-like narrow-mindedness of the 40s through the latter 50s to the Grand Canyon-like harmonic awareness of the 60s." (Feather, Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies.) Shelly Manne, the drummer on Coleman's second LP and one of the few older musicians to endorse his new style, offered a rare insight when he told Nat Hentoff:

Ornette sounds like a person crying or a person laughing when he plays. And he makes me want to laugh and cry The real traditional players will do those things to you. Although he may be flying all over the horn and doing weird things metrically, the basic feelings are still there. ... He makes you listen so hard to what he's doing that he makes you play a whole other way. . . . somehow I became more of a person in my own playing. He made me feel freer." (Hentoff, The Jazz Life.)

But most of the established players regarded Coleman's departures from bebop with skepticism at best. Roy Eldridge told Hentoff in The Jazz Life:

I listened to Coleman high, and I listened to him cold sober. 1 even played with him. I think he's jiving, baby. He's putting everybody on. They start out with a nice lead-off figure, but then they go off into outer space. They disregard the chords and they play odd numbers of bars. I can't follow them. I even listened to him with Paul Chambers, Miles Davis' bass player, "you—you're younger than me—can you follow Ornette?" Paul said he couldn't either.

Thelonious Monk, once stigmatized as a far-out cultist, sounded a lofty note of orthodoxy when he told Hentoff, "there's nothing beautiful in what he's playing. He's just playing loud and slurring his notes. Anybody can do that... 1 think he has a gang of potential though, but he's not all they say he is right now." (Hentoff 1975.) Leonard Feather's down beat "Blindfold Tests" drew similar responses when Ornette first burst on the scene:

Charlie Byrd: (1960) "Coleman's a sweet and sincere guy... but I resent his being touted as a great saxophonist ... as for people making an analogy of Parker and Coleman, that's kind of ridiculous."

Andre Previn: (1961)".. . an unmitigated bore . . . turning your back on any tradition is anarchy."

Benny Carter: "From the very first note he's miserably out of tune."

Miles Davis: "Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you're talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside."

Alto saxist Paul Desmond told Gene Lees that "listening to Ornette is like being imprisoned in a room painted red with your eyes pinned open."

Coleman's painful struggle for acceptance and the barest livelihood is well covered in A. B. Spellman's Black Music: Four Lives. A native of Fort Worth, he toured the Southwest territory with rhythm 'n' blues bands that left a lasting mark on his urgent style. For all his drastic departures from tradition, Ornette, claim his advocates, remains basically a blues-man. By the late 1940s he was already forming the eccentric, unpredictable style that aroused the anger of fellow bandsmen. Leaders fired him or paid him not to play. Tenor sax giant Dexter Gordon rudely ordered him off the bandstand. He supported himself, poorly, with a succession of menial daytime jobs—the kind that jazzmen call "slaves." These humiliations were compounded by ugly brushes with racial violence that left him guarded and touchy but no less determined to follow his own bent. Moving to Los Angeles, Coleman began to attract a coterie of young players like the dextrous drummer, Ed Blackwell, who told Spellman:

Ornette sounded a lot like Parker back then, and he was still hung up with one-two-three-four time. I had been experimenting with different kinds of time and cadences . . . Ornette's sound was changing too, and a lot of musicians used to think he played out of tune. He never used to play the same thing twice, which made a lot of guys think that he didn't know how to play.

Coleman's first break came in 1958 when Lester Koenig, producer of the Los Angeles jazz label, Contemporary, gave him his first record date, Something Else! (Contemporary S7551) with Don Cherry on trumpet, Walter Norris on piano, Don Payne on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. For all the fuss this record kicked up, its departures from standard bebop hardly seem radical compared to the records Coleman was to make within a few years. The instrumentation and basic structure of Angel Voice was similar to the Bird's Nest of Parker a decade earlier. Both pieces are based on I Got Rhythm; both begin and end with trumpet and alto sax unison statements of a "head" that sandwich a succession of solos. Coleman's pianist and bassist are still working along conventional bebop lines. What is most striking about Something Else!, besides Coleman's slide-whistle conception of pitch, is the originality of compositions like Invisible and The Disguise.

Coleman soon made drastic changes in his group to urge it closer to the "free" concept he had been hearing all along. Though the pianoless quartet did not originate with him, Coleman's exclusion of a keyboard instrument was grounded on a different rationale than Gerry Mulligan's. His playing, and that of his disciples, was freeing itself from the pianistic "prison" of the chromatic scale in order to explore off-pitch notes and quarter tones, common in African and other ethnic musics, that would clash with a "properly" tuned keyboard. "There are some intervals," said Coleman, "that carry the human quality if you play them in the right pitch. I don't care how many intervals a person can play on an instrument; you can always reach into the human sound of a voice on your horn if you're actually hearing and trying to express the warmth of the human voice." (Spellman, Black Music.) Coleman's most gifted followers—Coltrane, Dolphy, and Kirk—adapted his notion of "crying" through a horn.

The absence of a piano also helped to free Coleman and his group from improvising on chord progressions. Coleman told Nat Hentoff,

What I'm trying to do is to make my playing as free as I can. The creation of music is—or should be—as natural as breathing. ... Jazz is growing up. It's not a cutting contest anymore . . . if you put a conventional chord under my note, you limit the number of choices I have for my next note. If you do not, my melody may move freely in a far greater choice of directions. (Liner notes, The Best of Ornette Coleman, Atlantic SD 1558.)

Coleman's discovery of bassist Charlie Haden proved a major breakthrough; at last he had found the "free" bassist he sought all along. Coleman instructed the flexible, receptive Haden to

forget about changes in key and just play within the range of the idea.... so after a while of playing with me it just became the natural thing for Charlie to do ... it doesn't mean because you put an F7 (chord) down for the bass player he's going to choose the best notes in the F7 to express what you're doing. But if he's allowed to use any note that he hears to express F7. then that note's going to be right because he hears it, not because he read it off the page. (Spellman, Black Music.)

Coleman allied himself with drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, who developed a freer style not tied to playing steady time but to making the drums more of an independent melodic instrument. As with bebop, Coleman's unorthodox rhythm section was the high hurdle most traditional players could not clear. Coleman's biographer, A. B. Spellman, confessed his reaction to the first LP was skeptical: "... typical of the general critical reception, I thought the saxophonist was some oddball imitator of Parker, but I can see now that this was more because of the rhythmic placement of his notes than because of the actual melodic material that he was using."

Aside from Coleman's "rhythmic placement of notes," his pitch threw many listeners off. Spellman wrote: "On first hearing, I actually did not recognize the melodic content of Ornette's music (because).. . these melodies, simple as they are, are difficult to sort out if one is offended by the sound of Ornette's instrument."

Lonely Woman (Smic 12/1) is Coleman's best-known and most accessible piece for the uninitiated. This haunting ballad begins and ends with a trumpet and alto sax unison statement of a theme that, for all its originality, lies so much within the tradition of the popular song that singer Carmen McRae performed it with her own lyrics. What lies between, however, is Coleman's and Charlie Haden's unconventional sliding in and out of pitch and drummer Higgins's "free" concept of time. Listeners who approach Lonely Woman with open ears and steel themselves against the abrasive "off" pitch of Coleman's plastic horn may find themselves strangely moved by the naked emotions of this declamatory outcry. His oblique approach to Gershwin's Embraceable You (Atlantic SD 1558) shows how far he departed from the relative orthodoxy of Parker's treatment (Smic 7/8, 7/9). On the same album Ramblin’ offers a good example of Coleman's way with a funky blues, bristling with wit and high spirits as does much of his work.

With his celebrated package, Free Jazz (Smic 12/3), Coleman cut his few remaining ties to bebop. The ten-minute excerpt in the Smithsonian Collection was taken from a 36 minute performance on Atlantic (S-1364).

Thanks to the long playing record, free jazz advocates could now stretch out as they did in nightclubs with uninterrupted 45 minute sets devoted to a single composition (to the alarm of club owners anxious to push drinks). Here, stereo recording technique plays a crucial role because Coleman spatially divided his disciples into a double-quartet for the 1963 waxing of

Free Jazz:

alto sax (Coleman) trumpet (Don Cherry) bass (Charlie Haden) drums (Ed Blackwell)

and

bass clarinet (Eric Dolphy) trumpet (Freddie Hubbard) bass (Scott LaFaro) drums (Billy Higgins).

Stereo allows the listener to separate these voices of an unusually dense octet that is improvising collectively. As Martin Williams indicates in his Smithsonian notes, this session took place "with no preconceptions as to themes, chord patterns or chorus lengths. The guide for each soloist was a brief ensemble part which introduces him and which gave him an area of musical pitch."

Today, twenty-five years after Coleman's hotly-debated debut, how does his work stand up? Do his records stand the test of time or will they survive only as historical curiosities? Is his legacy permanent? Just what kind of a musician is he?

In The Making of Jazz, James Lincoln Collier makes a sound case for Coleman as that anomaly in modern jazz, a primitive musician. Nothing derogatory is implied here. As Collier points out, primitive artists, like the painter Rousseau, function largely on instinct without the benefit (or, as some may insist, the hindrance) of formal academic training. While Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker were well schooled in harmony and could "think ahead" any number of chord changes at high speed, Ornette Coleman, unencumbered by such theories, felt "free" to pour out anything summoned up by his raw emotional state of the moment. This notion of Coleman-as-primitive is buttressed by his naive, self-taught playing of trumpet and violin, on which, his admirers claim, "he sounds amazingly like himself." (It was said that after hearing Coleman play violin in a club, Thelonious Monk admonished him at intermission: "Why do you bullshit the people? Do you have any idea how much discipline and training it takes to play the violin? Stick to the alto—you can play that.")

Coleman inspired a number of front-rank players whose work shows greater promise of survival than his own—Coltrane, Rollins, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and the extraordinary Eric Dolphy who has yet to be given his due two decades after his early death. History seems to recall not those who did it first but those who did it best. Franz Lizst was an early influence on Bartok, but few would deny Bartok was the better composer.

While Coleman opened new exploratory fields for Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, trombonist Roswell Rudd, soprano saxist Steve Lacy, and even former detractors like Cannonbail Adderley, his notoriety emboldened lesser talents to drape themselves in "free jazz" or the "new thing" to cloak a lack of inspiration and originality. Charlie Mingus saw this early in his 1959 liner notes to Mingus Dynasty (Columbia CL 1440):

When the musicians hang on to a few rhythmic phrases Coleman has been able to create — when they realize they have a new camouflage of atonality, no time bars, no key signature — when they simultaneously begin to jabber in this borrowed style in all the nightclubs all over America—then the walls of all the nightclubs will probably crumble. . . .

Mingus's foresight bordered on clairvoyance. In the sixties, as "free jazz" began to alienate much of the jazz audience, coinciding with the ascendancy of rock among the young, leading jazz clubs from New York to San Francisco closed their doors forever.”

[Obviously, the above was written in the early years of Ornette’s career. By the time of his death in 2015, Coleman’s music had endured and Ornette had attained international status as an acclaimed Jazz star.]

The Smithsonian references are to The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz which is available in both CD and vinyl used copies either singly or in boxed sets from a variety of resellers.

Stuff Smith: 1909-1967

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

“Smith was comparatively more adventurous harmonically and in his playing which favored a rough, vibrato-less tone. In the 1930’s he was the first to amplify his violin which enabled him to project his sound over large ensembles. This became standard practice, allowing violinists to perform in a wide variety of Jazz setting.”  

- Christopher Washburne, in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz

The violin, which is only occasionally heard in Jazz circles today, had a fairly prominent place in the early history of the music when a number of groups used it as a lead voice along with trumpet and clarinet. Violin and piano duos were a common format in early Jazz, which was partly a reflection of how popular these instruments were in early 20th century family life in America.

The instrument was all but gone when Jazz evolved from the Swing to the Modern era as very few violinists were able to make the transition from swing-to-bop.

Born in 1909, Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff” Smith was by all accounts good enough on the instrument to tour with Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers before his twentieth birthday. Smith moved to New York in 1936, where he led a quintet at the Onyx club that included Jonah Jones and Cozy Cole; here he began using an amplified violin. Smith was chosen to lead Fats Waller's band after the pianist's death in 1943.

Smith was an innovative musician. He played violin in a raucous style and with a sense of swing that was of unequaled intensity. Harmonically his work was extremely adventurous, and he evolved radical techniques to accommodate his wildly inventive ideas. Wide vibrato, hoarse tone, expressive intonation, and rhythmic creativity are all hallmarks of his style. Dizzy Gillespie has cited Smith as a profound influence upon his playing.

A lull in his career was followed by a series of excellent recordings for Norman Granz in 1957. He began touring more extensively in the 1960s, and in 1965 he settled in Copenhagen, where he remained quite popular until his death.”

Thank goodness for Dizzy Gillespie and Norman Granz as they enabled me to finally catch up to Stuff Smith and his music via the double CD on Verve entitled Stuff Smith - Dizzy Gillespie - Oscar Peterson [314 521 676-2 which combines Stuff’s three Verve LP’s Have Violin, Will Swing , Stuff Smith, and Dizzy Gillespie-Stuff Smith].

It would appear that Norman had a penchant for such actions and all of us in the Jazz world are many times indebted to him for all of the music that he presented and preserved for Jazz annals and Jazz aficionados. As Richard Cook and Brian Morton point out in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6 Ed. point out:“Verve have, of course, always had a gift for picking up artists relatively late in their career and injecting new life into them. The sessions with Diz and Oscar are beautifully recorded, if not sublimely musical, and one values the record - a generously filled two-CD set….”  

Cook and Morton go on to say:

“Initially influenced by Joe Venuti, Smith devised a style based on heavy bow-weight, with sharply percussive semiquaver runs up towards the top end of his range. His facility and ease … is jaw-dropping. Like many 1920’s players, Smith found himself overtaken by the swing era and re-emerged as a recording and concert artist only after the war, when his upfront style and comic stage persona attracted renewed attention. Even so, he had a thriving club career in the meantime, most famously at the Onyx Club on 5ind Street, and managed to hold his ground while the bebop revolution, which he either anticipated, or was left untouched by, depending on your point of view, went on around him.”

There isn't much information about Stuff Smith in the Jazz canon, but thankfully, Harry Pekar did provide some elaboration on Smith and his approach to Jazz violin in the following excerpts from his insert notes to Stuff Smith - Dizzy Gillespie - Oscar Peterson [314 521 676-2]:

“The violin is one of the easiest instruments to play fast, and many jazz violinists take advantage of this to improvise many-noted solos which, at worst, are overly decorative. Stuff Smith can't be accused of getting too flowery, however; a very original player, he is less indebted to classical violin technique than were his contemporaries Stephane Grappelli, Eddie South, and Joe Venuti. His style seems derived from horn players as much as from any other instrumentalists.

Smith confirms this in Nat Hentoff's liner notes to Have Violin Will Swing, the first of three LPs reissued on this album:

‘I've always visualized myself playing trumpet, tenor, or clarinet. Also, I don't use the full bow — only the end, about six inches, maybe eight inches at times. The reason for that is you can slur more easily, the way a horn would, and you can get more warmth. Using the end of the bow, moreover, causes you to bow the way you breathe. I mean, it's my equivalent of a horn player's breath.Then, If I want to make a staccato accent, I bring the bow up, but almost as if I were hitting a cymbal.’

Louis Armstrong's recording of "Savoy Blues" has been cited as impressing Smith so much that it inspired him to become a jazz musician. And Smith has confirmed that in his comments on the people who marked his style:

‘My major influence was Louis Armstrong. I first heard him in the mid-Twenties and that was the way I wanted to play. As for violinists, I liked Joe Venuti very much, the way he phrased, his speed, his technique. Other people I admired were Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, and Red Nichols. Red for the way he slurred and the quality of his notes, like Bix. As it happened, I didn't get to hear Bix too much, so it was Red's work I knew better. There were also Frankie Trumbauer — the way

he slurred too — and Tommy Dorsey for his tone and the way he delivered a song.

‘Tommy could play with just straight tone and I prefer that. I don't use too much vibrato; you can't afford to in jazz. Your thoughts and your notes come too fast when you play jazz. Accordingly, what you have to work for is what I call a balanced form of melody. Now you can't balance well if you have a straight tone followed by one with vibrato, etc., so the best way, as I hear it, is to play straight tone all the way.’

Smith swings very hard, playing relatively spare, infectious lines and phrases, the kind you tend to memorize and maybe find yourself replaying in your mind a few hours later. There's nothing schmaltzy about his work. His tone is hard and penetrating; in fact, he pioneered the use of amplified violin.

Born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1909, Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith studied violin with his father and began playing professionally at fifteen. He worked with Alphonse Trent's band in Texas from 1926 to 1929, and in the early Thirties Stuff led his own group in the Buffalo, New York area.

Smith's sextet, including Jonah Jones (one of the most advanced swing trumpeters of the time), got a gig at the Onyx Club in New York in 1935. He gained a group of enthusiastic followers who were probably as attracted to his extroverted, humorous vocals as his violin playing.

In 1936 Smith made his first recordings, and one, "I'm a-Muggin'", became a hit. He continued to play well during the Forties and Fifties, but his music, which had anticipated Louis Jordan's, gradually went out of fashion. By the mid-Fifties Stuff was virtually a forgotten man. (Though it should be pointed out that in 1953 or '54 he appeared on the earliest Sun Ra recording thus far unearthed, "Deep Purple", available on the Evidence CD Sound Sun Pleasure.

So it is fortunate that Norman Granz remembered Smith and supervised some 1957 sessions showcasing him.

After the release of these IPs, a revival of interest took place in Smith's work. He recorded again for Verve and also for 20th-century Fox and Epic, and he made successful club appearances in New York and California. In 1965 he left for Europe, where he toured several nations, continuing to play well, and made LPs with other violinists, including Svend Asmussen, Stephane Grappelli, and Jean-Luc Ponty. Stuff settled in Copenhagen in 1965 and died in Munich in 1967. …

In terms of overall appeal, however, the 1957 material on this CD matches anything Stuff ever cut. He's impressive, Gillespie's inspired, and [Wynton] Kelly, [Carl] Perkins, and [Oscar] Peterson display about as much sensitivity and subtlety as they have on record. If you want to hear some Stuff, here's a good place to start.”

For our video tribute to Stuff we’ve chosen his performance of Ja-Da from the Verve reissue on which he is joined by Carl Perkins on piano, Curtis Counce on bass and Frank Butler on drums.

Finding Bix by Brendan Wolfe

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

The following appear in the July 14, 2017 Edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Review: “Young Man With A Horn”

By

John Check

FINDING BIX

By Brendan Wolfe

Iowa, 235 pages, $24.95

“He could barely read music and had to learn his ensemble parts by ear. Forever late and missing trains, he acquired such a taste for Prohibition-era gin that it proved to be his undoing. He would shine bright, recording jazz solos that still bring tears to the eyes of devotees—and empurpled superlatives to the pens of critics. And then he would burn out, dead at 28, his brief life and lasting art the stuff of legend. He, of course, was Bix Beiderbecke, and his story continues to fascinate.

In “Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend,” Brendan Wolfe draws together the sometimes incomplete facts of Beiderbecke’s biography and the often contentious debates about his significance. Beiderbecke (1903–31), one of the first great jazz soloists to have his work preserved on record, was a cornet player who dazzled not with displays of technique or excursions into the high range but with subtlety and understatement. The relaxed quality of his solos often stood out against the more tentative and even stilted playing of his fellow musicians. Achieving success first with the Wolverines (a small group in the Midwest), he would move on to the larger orchestra of Jean Goldkette, and then to the still-larger, and wildly popular, orchestra of Paul Whiteman, who was billed as “The King of Jazz.”

Calling the cornetist “part Keats and part Fitzgerald,” Mr. Wolfe grants that Beiderbecke has often been portrayed as though he were “a nineteenth-century Romantic hero refitted for the Jazz Age.” Ardent fans of Beiderbecke’s work—Bixophiles, they are called—have for decades tripped over one another in an effort to praise its quality. Mr. Wolfe, who grew up in the cornetist’s birthplace (Davenport, Iowa), tries to separate man and myth, but it turns out to be a difficult task. The more he looks, the more he finds: Beiderbecke has been celebrated in tall tales and adoring biographies, in a French graphic novel and a British television series. And yet, the more he finds—much of it inconclusive and contradictory—the further his subject recedes from him. By some accounts Beiderbecke was a “genius” whose fate was nothing short of “tragic”; by others, a “drunk” whose inability to negotiate everyday life made him “ridiculous.” No summary appears reliable or definitive.

Debates about Beiderbecke’s significance in jazz history tend to revolve around the matter of race. Fairly and with delicacy, without himself taking sides, Mr. Wolfe sets out the views of opposing critics, some believing that Beiderbecke’s contributions are underrated because he was white, others maintaining that he and other white musicians co-opted a musical tradition that was not theirs, impoverishing it in the process.

Mr. Wolfe is adept at introducing details that serve as promissory notes. Sometimes the details are minor, the payoff small yet satisfying. Early in the book he mentions chancing upon an obituary of the illustrator James Flora tucked into the pages of a second-hand biography of Beiderbecke. The significance of Flora, “a father of album cover art,” is revealed much later on, when we are shown a 1947 cover that, in Flora’s artistry, brings to life the important musical and personal relationship between Beiderbecke and his Whiteman bandmate, the saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer.

At other times the details Mr. Wolfe introduces are major. The most striking of these deals with an incident that occurred when Beiderbecke was 18, prompting a police investigation. (He was accused of a “lewd & lascivious act” with a 5-year-old girl; the charges were later dropped.) An early chapter ends with policemen “[knocking] on the door and politely [asking] for Mr. and Mrs. Beiderbecke.” We will learn about the incident itself (some of whose facts, Mr. Wolfe acknowledges, “are a muddle”) only much later in the book. Mr. Wolfe renders this visit from the police so skillfully that it endows the next hundred pages with a heavy sense of foreboding.

One of the book’s strongest chapters tells of a 1929 interview with Beiderbecke appearing in the Davenport Democrat. While calling it “the only known interview of the jazz legend,” Mr. Wolfe adds that “there’s always been something a little off” about it, something “that jazz scholars have struggled to clearly articulate.” After some sleuthing, he discovers that the interview was plagiarized from several sources, borrowing words from music journalists Henry Osgood, Abbe Niles and others. Perhaps Beiderbecke was reticent and the interview came to nothing. Then again, perhaps the temptation to plagiarize was too great for the Davenport reporter to resist.

Whatever the case may be, the result is that Mr. Wolfe’s understanding of Beiderbecke “grows smaller and smaller, until eventually he disappears.”

An engaging book, “Finding Bix” is hampered in places by greater authorial self-indulgence than necessary. Mr. Wolfe, an editor by trade, sometimes resorts to words (“icky,” “wuss”) and formulations (“sound geeks,” “info-laden charts”) that themselves could have been edited out. His habit of interspersing extremely short chapters—the shortest containing 46 words—among long ones feels writer-conscious. When he addresses the reader directly, the effect can be jarring: “You want and need Bix talking to you, and . . . you want and need to keep up with him.”

A more serious problem resides in Mr. Wolfe’s disinclination to discuss Beiderbecke’s music in any appreciable depth. He has long lived with these solos and absorbed them to their last detail, but his familiarity works against him. He perhaps forgets that many readers don’t know what to listen for. How, for example, does Beiderbecke’s style differ from that of Louis Armstrong ? While Mr. Wolfe notes their respective contributions to the history of jazz, he avoids going into specifics. How helpful it would have been to be guided, in a nontechnical way, through a comparison of, say, Beiderbecke’s solo on “I’m Coming Virginia,” recorded in 1927, and Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” from a year later. Through such guidance, listeners of today might come to find Bix in the way that matters most: through the medium of his music.

Another way of finding Bix Beiderbecke is in recordings that reflect his influence. In 1941, 10 years after Beiderbecke’s death, the Glenn Miller Orchestra recorded “A String of Pearls.” It would become one of the orchestra’s biggest hits. Two-thirds of the way through, there is a short solo, a minor masterpiece, by the cornetist Bobby Hackett. From its relaxed tone and charming understatement to its easy pacing and cogent construction, everything about the solo echoes Beiderbecke’s aesthetic sensibility. It became so famous that it was later lushly harmonized for the entire Miller trumpet section. The harmonization is plainly a tribute to the artistry of Bobby Hackett—but it is more than that. Bixophiles hear in it a tribute to an earlier cornetist whose influence can never be forgotten.”

—Mr. Check is a professor of music at the University of Central Missouri.

Sammy Nestico And The SWR Big Band - "A Cool Breeze"

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

SWR Big Band - Südwestrundfunk

Seventeen musicians-one sound. And a very convincing sound, at that. The SWR Big Band has so far been nominated four times for a Grammy - the most important music award in the world. Also it received in 2015 a Jazz Award in Cold ffom German music industry. Enjoyed a great honor in 2011, when it was the first German band ever suggested for the "Premio da Musica Brasileira", Brazil's most important music award. In the face of so much fame, it seems almost modest to say that the SWR Big Band is one of the best big bands in the world.

Jazz, fusion or world music, the repertoire is large. As is the list of guests: Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, Ivan Lins, Curtis Stigers, Roy Hargrove, Roberta Gambarini, Patti Austin, Sammy Nestico, Paula Morelenbaum, Joo Kraus, Toshiko Akiyoshi. Bob Florence, Rob McConnell, Slide Hampton, Maria Schneider, Frank Foster, Bill Holman, Bob Mintzer and Ralf Schmid. Or how about a shade more pop? No problem - for instance, with Paul Carrack, Max Mutzke, Mousse T., Andrew Roachford, Incognito or Götz Alsmann.

Like the big bands in the USA, the SWR Big Band has its own sound, bequeathed to it by its founder and conductor, Prof. Erwin lehn. The starting gun was first heard on April 1, 1951. Back then, the SWR Big Band was still known as a dance orchestra, the Südfunk Tanzorchester, Lehn saw to it that the band was increasingly referred to as the "Daimler of big bands". For it has shared the stage with many stars: Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Astrud Gilberto, Chet Baker, Caterina Valente or even Arturo Sandoval, Ever since the early nineties, the SWR Big Band has been appearing with various bandleaders, depending on the project and style of music.

• www.swrbigband.de

Sammy Nestico is a composer-arranger whose accomplishments and credits have earned him legendary status in the music business.

Today’s word that best describes him is “iconic.”

He has done it all: a host of big band arrangements including those for the Count Basie Band, The Airmen of Note and Germany’s SWR Orchestra, movie and television scores, and a variety of commercials.

Along the way, he has won a bunch of Grammy Awards and, judging by the smile that appears to never leave his face, he has had a great deal of fun doing what he loves to do.

He’s a perfect example of the adage: “Do what you love and the rest will follow.”

On June 9, 2017, SWR Music released A Cool Breeze: Sammy Nestico and the SWR Big Band [SWR 19039] which documents more of the ongoing love affair between this brilliant, Stuttgart-based big band and one of the most accomplished composer-arrangers in the history of big band Jazz.

Everything about this recording is simply splendid from the SWR’s technical execution of the arrangements, to the joyful and magical way Sammy’s charts play out on the listener’s ear to the audio quality which imbues the music with a rich texture and a warm sound. Listening to the music on this recording makes you realize why Big Band Jazz is a category apart and that when it’s done right, no other aspect of Jazz matches its majestic sonority.

The great drummer Louie Bellson once said that sitting behind a drum kit when a big band was in full flight was what it must feel like to “soar like an eagle.” Indeed, Louie loved this analogy so much that he wrote a tune with that title for his big band.

Sammy must have dug it, too, because his arrangements make the SWR big band “fly!”

Sammy offered these comments about his working relationship with the orchestra in the accompanying insert notes booklet:

Notes by Sammy Nestico

“When listening to the SWR Big Band CD, you always expect a high degree of musicianship Even though the orchestra produces variations to comply with changing trends, there is always a "feel" that is distinctive and basically a part of the SWR Big Band. It has always been one of the great experiences of my life to know and perform with these musicians.

Let's talk about the music.

Finding appropriate instrumental colors for Cell Talk was a problem and had to be approached from a different musical viewpoint. I settled on instrumental couplings rather than using a complete sax or brass section. It proved more appropriate due to the variety of cell phone conversations. Listen closely and you may even hear some senseless chatting going on.

Benny Golson has always been one of my favorite writers. Because we chose to take the tune Along Came Betty out of Benny's original jazz format, the band gave it a new personality.

Along with this tune, I've always had have a special feeling for my composition of A Cool Breeze. It was originally written for a young student band, but the melody was pleasing enough to take it on a more adventurous journey. Along with a hot rhythm section, the solos on Along Came Betty and A Cool Breeze are among the best on the recording.

Frankie and Johnny has been taken apart and reassembled with all the vigor that 18 musicians can muster Adding to this happy mood, the brass section is especially aggressive, urged on by Karl Farrent.

When adding Moonlight On The Ganges to the roster of old favorites, the usual instrumentation was embellished with an oboe, sitar, mallets and a gong for more authenticity.

Likewise, The Jazz Music Box highlights a compressed brass section to give the "music box" a little charm ... but alas, like all music boxes, it inevitably winds down. Enjoy!”

In the following insert notes, Ralf Dombrowski provides more background information about the long-standing working relationship between Sammy and the SWR Big Band - Südwestrundfunk and how this recording came about.

“The SWR Big Band bears a responsibility. On the one hand, it started out in the comparably comfortable situation of being securely financed by the fees that make the German broadcasting system possible. This means that the orchestra is not forced to rely on a safe repertoire when it comes to planning and designing its programs, The SWR Big Band can experiment, can invite people and set priorities that may appear surprising at first glance. In fact, the ensemble and its creative minds have managed to be nominated for a Grammy four times in years past and to develop, under bandleaders such as Erwin Lehn or Kurt Edelhagen, a profile independent of the beginnings and the early merits, which

stands for deep roots in the swing and bop tradition as well as for being open to ideas of contemporary sounds and a thrilling portion of fun in playing music. Recently, guests like guitarist Larry Carlton and composer and singer Ivan Lins have been able to take part in this mixture, as well as the entertainer Curtis Stigers or master guitarist Pat Metheny.

A Cool Breeze

Or the composer and arranger Sammy Nestico, as well. The paths of this friendly, white-haired gentleman from Pittsburgh, who has been one of the constants in the world of American music since the 1950s, have crossed with informal regularity those of the SWR Big Band which, with recordings such as "No Time Like The Present" (2004), "Basie-Cally Sammy" (2005), "Fun Time And More" (2008) and "Fun Time And More - Live" (2010), made a key contribution to sharpening the international perception of Nestico's late creative phases. He brought along plenty of experience, for his musical career enabled him to work with many defining and inspiring jazz personalities over the years. And it soon became apparent that he, like fellow arranger Neal Hefti, has an extraordinary sense of the impact of what is simple, clear, and accessible. As a youth, he taught himself to play trombone, worked as a studio musician after getting his degree from Duquesne University, and at a time when big bands were dying out,

cultivated his fascination for large ensembles by working in Washington primarily for the US Marines and Air Force orchestras.

Film music then attracted him in the Sixties. Nestico moved to Los Angeles, composing for films and television series and taking care of the didactic and pedagogical reworking of many classics and works of his own. Hundreds of charts came into being and were passed around at American schools and universities, such as the music for the Time-Life Big Band, which was involved in meaningfully transforming the ensemble jazz that had become traditional. In addition, Nestico's cousin Sal found him a job with one of the titans of the business: around 1968 he began arranging for the Count Basie Band, a collaboration that continued into the mid-eighties. Since this time at the latest, he has been considered one of the most important arrangers of trenchant modern jazz and was engaged by Ray Anthony, Frank Sinatra, Frank Stallone and even Phil Collins to give the large orchestra its proper, succinct form.

The Sammy Nestico Project

At any rate, he has found his style, and it sends the pros into raptures. "On the one hand, you notice after four or five bars that it is Sammy Nestico," says Marc Godfroid, trombonist with the 5WR Big Band who, among other things, attended to communication with the master on the other side of the world while the Sammy Nestico Project was being recorded. "On the other, he is still constantly developing.”  The music he wrote specially for this CD, for instance, is quite different from what you could hear from him five years ago." The enthusiasm for the repertoire on which the recordings of January 2016 are based, ran through the whole troupe of musicians. The casual precision with which the possibilities of orchestral configuration are boiled down to their essence is particularly extraordinary. Nestico's pieces are concentrates of lightness. You think you understand them at first glance, and yet under their accessible surface they conceal a mature complexity whose precision in the control of emotions and moods, in the coloring of the sounds, and in the intensification of the song dramaturgy brings out the magic of the overall impression.

"Beautiful things never disturb" is a motto that Nestico had already adopted while working with Count Basie. It also enables him to leave prevailing fashions behind. The music he wrote for the SWR Big Band sounds funky, has elements of fusion in its ingredients, but by the same token swing, a pinch of soul and the emotionalism of orchestral expression. It can scale back to a reduced combo momentum only to lead logically to the other extreme of opulent sound a little later. It is the intensification of compositional skill, which goes beyond what can be directly apprehended from the score, a creative mastery that baritone saxophonist Pierre Paquette sums up by saying, "Sammy is the boss!" However, this is only possible because a basis for mutual understanding was created during more than ten years of collaboration between the composer and the orchestra, a collaboration built not only on notes, but also on intuition.

Thus it also became possible to achieve the recordings of the Sammy Nestico Project with emphatic finesse even though the "boss" was sitting tight thousands of kilometers away in San Diego. In contrast to earlier collaborations, where Nestico himself stood on the podium of the SWR Big Band, he had decided not to undertake the hassle of intercontinental travel just before his 92nd birthday. Even so, Skype enabled him to take part in the recordings, at least as a digital onlooker. Again and again, pieces just recorded were sent to his computer, eliciting tears of joy from the elderly gentlemen, who would say, "I am only hearing that through the small speaker on the laptop, but it sounds great. We have already made four records, but this one here is the best, without a doubt!" The musicians who were standing around the screen in the SWR studio smiled and nodded. They lived up to their responsibility and experienced a little bit of happiness, as well.”

The American wing of Naxos International is handling the distribution and Michael Bloom’s team is in charge of media relations: musicpro@earthlink.net