University of North Texas Recently Released Big Band Jazz CDs

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

Recently, thanks to the generosity Ben Scholz of Scholz Productions, I have been the beneficiary of surfeit of riches in the form of five [5] CDs featuring various University of North Texas [UNT] big bands. Three of the five are multi-disc packages.

Their arrival brought back fond memories of Stan Kenton whose clinics and workshops on college campuses beginning in the 1960s played a huge role in establishing academia as a well-spring for the continuance of big band Jazz.

Fast-forward sixty or so years later and the October, 2017 edition of Downbeat was devoted almost entirely to Jazz study programs at university and colleges throughout the United States and growingly, through the World!

The arrival of all of these wonderful student big band CDs from the UNT under the direction of some of the best composer-arranger-educators also brought to mind a pilgrimage of sorts I made to Denton, TX about 10 years after Stan Kenton died in 1979.

Back-in-the-day, I had business clients in Fort Worth and after a series of meetings had concluded, I asked Leon Breeden, the director of the O’Clock Jazz Lab program, to come in from Denton and join me for lunch at the Petroleum Club on Main Street. We reminisced about Stan Kenton and his contributions to the Jazz program which at that time was called North Texas State.

He told me that in 1959, when he arrived at what was then North Texas State College, the school could already boast of having the oldest degree-granting “jazz” program in the nation. The trouble was, the boasts could only be whispered.

The program was founded a dozen years earlier by M. E. Hall, who had first taught a class in dance-band arranging at North Texas in 1942 as a graduate student there. Appointed to the faculty in 1947, Mr. Hall was charged with developing — quietly — a degree program in jazz.

It was a dangerous mission. In those years, upright citizens were inclined to think jazz disreputable, scarcely fit for nightclubs, much less for an institution of higher learning. For its own protection, the major Mr. Hall created was euphemistically called dance-band music.

After Leon replaced Mr. Hall in 1959, little by little, he brought jazz out of the closet and into the limelight.

Under his stewardship, the One O’Clock Lab Band performed at the White House with Stan Getz and Duke Ellington in 1967, toured worldwide and in 1970 appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

As Mr. Breeden told United Press International in 1981: “I knew what we were doing in the program here in the beginning was good in spite of the fact that some were saying, ‘Aw, playing that jazz music’s going to destroy their tones, it’s going to ruin ’em, they’re going to become bad players, they’re going to become dope addicts.’ ”

Hundreds of skilled jazz musicians passed through the North Texas program during Leon’s tenure including Dee Barton, Marvin Stamm, Archie Wheeler and Tom Wirtel, all of whom went on the Kenton band,

Though many were already superb players by the time they passed through Leon’s hands, they were students first and foremost, a fact of which he rarely lost sight.

That fact was perhaps never more evident than one summer in the late 1970s,, when the One O’Clock Lab Band accompanied Ella Fitzgerald at the Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, S.C. Impressed, Ms. Fitzgerald asked if she could take the band on the road with her.

Leon respectfully declined. He could not countenance having his charges miss so much class time!

Benjamin at Scholz Productions and Jim Eigo at Jazz Promo services sent along the following media release which contains an overview of the Division of Jazz Studies, College of Music, UNT, est. 1980, as well as, a brief annotation of each of the new CDs.

“The University of North Texas Jazz Studies Program Celebrates its 70th anniversary with new album release and four compilations

The 2016-2017 academic year marks 70 years of jazz at the University of North Texas. The program began in the 1946-47 academic year. To honor this anniversary, the North Texas Jazz record label has released four special compilation albums in addition to Lab 2017, the 50th annual release by the One O'clock Lab Band, which began releasing albums annually in 1967.

These recordings demonstrate that students are at the heart of our program's mission. Each year we devote significant resources to documenting our students' best work and providing them with the experience of recording, mixing, and releasing a recording that meets the highest professional standards. Generations of students have launched their careers this way.

By marking this special year with a new release and four compilations, we reaffirm our commitment to our program's past and future. We honor our former faculty Neil Slater, Jim Riggs, and Jay Saunders, who devoted decades to mentoring multiple generations of students, many of whom went on to productive careers in every part of the music profession. We honor faculty member Richard DeRosa, a distinguished composer who has been a prolific creator and an inspiring teacher of our students in jazz composition since he joined the faculty in 2010. And we honor our new One O'clock Lab Band director, Alan Baylock, himself a UNT alumnus, as he prepares to guide the band in new creative directions in the years to come.

The paragraphs that follow describe each of the five new releases.

Lab 2017

This recording is a milestone that marks 70 years since the North Texas jazz program began in the 1946-47 academic year, 50 years since the yearly series of recordings by the seven-time Grammy-nominated One O'clock Lab Band began with Lab '67, the first time in 30 years that North Texas Jazz has released a recording on LP, and Alan Baylock's first year as director.

                                                                                                 

The album has been submitted in six categories for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards:

•     Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

•     Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

•     Best Album Packaging

•     Best Instrumental Composition

•     Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella

•     Best Improvised Jazz Solo

The ten diverse tracks include student originals, compositions by faculty members Alan Baylock and Rich DeRosa, arrangements of works by Harold Arlen, Chick Corea, and Duke Ellington, and a composition by Don Menza.

The packaging is distinguished by original artwork, plentiful photographs, and liner notes by Sean Jones and Stefon Harris. The album is released on CD, a high-quality vinyl double LP, and all major digital platforms.

Sampler video: http://www.youtube.com/northtexasjazz/playlists

Legacy—Neil Slater at North Texas

Legacy—Neil Slater at North Texas is a 4-CD boxed set contains the complete recordings of all compositions and arrangements by Grammy-nominated composer Neil Slater written for and recorded by the UNT One O'clock Lab Band, plus a Grammy-nominated tribute piece composed by Rich DeRosa, 38 tracks in all. A 168-page book is included as part of the boxed set, featuring hundreds of photos and notes by band members, colleagues and friends. This landmark historical compilation honors the legacy of Neil Slater, the longest-tenured director of the world-renown One O'clock Lab Band.

"This boxed set is the most significant and ambitious CD release in the history of the jazz program at North Texas, and that is saying a lot, considering the magnitude of the North Texas Jazz record catalog and the accolades the One O'clock Lab Band has earned over five decades of critically acclaimed recordings," said Craig Marshall, lab band manager and producer.

It includes the Grammy-nominated compositions "Neil," by Rich DeRosa, for whom Slater was a mentor, and "Values" a commissioned work Slater composed to celebrate UNT's 100th anniversary.

Legacy is currently submitted for Grammy consideration in the historical album category.

Sampler video: http://www.youtube.com/northtexasjazz/playlists

Perseverance: The Music of Rich DeRosa at North Texas

Perseverance: The Music of Rich DeRosa at North Texas honors the continuing legacy of Prof. DeRosa here in Denton. The CD is a compilation of DeRosa's compositions and arrangements that have been recorded by members of the One O'clock and Two O'clock Lab Bands and the UNT Concert Orchestra from 2011—2016. It includes the Grammy-nominated composition "Neil," and "Suite for an Anniversary," a commissioned work which was composed to celebrate UNT's 125th anniversary. Interestingly, Neil Slater earned a Grammy nomination for "Values," also a commissioned work which Slater composed to celebrate the UNT Centennial 25 years earlier. DeRosa's "Suite" is currently submitted for Grammy consideration in composition and arranging categories.

Video of Rich DeRosa speaking about "Suite for an Anniversary" and the concert performance of the suite: http:www.youtube.com/northtexasjazz/playlists

Airstream Artistry: Jim Riggs' Best of the Two

This 3-CD set compiles 40 selections from 10 CDs recorded by the Two O'clock Lab Band under the direction of Jim Riggs, who taught saxophone at UNT for 35 years. Riggs’ consummate teaching and mentoring skills are reflected in former students who command professional respect worldwide, perform in elite U.S. military bands, teach in top-ranked colleges and universities and are represented among winners of the North American Saxophone Alliance Young Artist Competition, Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition and DownBeat Student Music Awards. Under Riggs' leadership, the UNT Two O'clock Lab Band was named recipient of DownBeat magazine's Annual Student Music Awards in 1994,1997, 2001, 2006 and 2008.

"Airstream artistry," "dart your air," "more point on the bass sound," "listen to the cymbal taps," and "transparency" are just a few of the many phrases or terms that were coined by Jim Riggs, one of the finest college jazz band directors...ever. These descriptive and sometimes cryptic gems are what defined the sound of the Two O'clock Lab Band for decades at the University of North Texas.

For most, the road to the One O'clock went through Riggs' band. There we were taught to strive for excellence by a leader with a curious, analytical, and persistent mind. Every nuance of the music was examined and scrutinized. He was known for walking around to the back of the band risers to adjust the sound of the bass amp or to comment on the timbre of the drummer's cymbals. He heard everything, had a clear picture of what the band should sound like, and expertly rehearsed the ensemble until the desired results were achieved.

Tim Ishii, Associate Chair, Music

Director of Jazz Studies and Saxophone, UT Arlington

Nice! Jay Saunders' Best of the Two

This 2-CD set compiles 18 tracks recorded by the Two O'clock Lab Band under the direction of Jay Saunders between 2008 and 2014. A veteran of the Stan Kenton Orchestra and a pillar of the Dallas scene for decades, Saunders taught lead trumpet and jazz history from 2000 to 2016. He also directed the One and Three O'clock Lab Bands.

Jay Saunders' gift as a director is to enable students to have fun playing at their absolute best. Drawing on a lifetime of listening, decades of experience as a top lead trumpet player, and infallible taste, he taught his bands to swing. His mentorship prepared his students to make a smooth transition to professional life because he expected a professional standard. Because he is as keenly attuned to the vibe and morale of the band as he is to the musical execution, his combination of infectious enthusiasm and musical mastery enables students to understand the link between feeling good and playing well. Jay's positive spirit shines through each one of these tracks.

"Jay Saunders is a great example of the consummate musician. He is a great first trumpet player, a remarkable leader of young people, and a deeply caring teacher. And yet, he has remained a very modest person. The respect and consideration he has shown to so many has come back to him in multiples from all who know him and with whom he has worked. He leads and has led by example."

—Marvin Stamm, New York City

Contacts:

Alan Baylock, Director, One O'clock Lab Band alan.baylock@unt.edu

Craig Marshall, Producer, Lab Band Manager craig.marshall@unt.edu

Phil Bulla, Producer & Recording Engineer phil@Dlatinumproductionsny.com

John Murphy, Chair, Division of Jazz Studies john.murphy@unt.edu

Ben Scholz, radio promotion info@beniaminscholz.com

Jim Eigo, publicist jim@iazzpromoservices.com

Websites

Artist Page https://www.scholzproductions.com/unttfLegacy

Division of Jazz Studies http://jazz.unt.edu/

One O'clock Lab Band http://oneoclock.unt.edu/ (has audio player with all Lab 2017 tracks)

CD Baby https://store.cdbaby.com/Artist/OneOClockLabBand

Social media

https://www.facebook.com/theoneoclock/ https://www.facebook.com/nQrthtexasiazz/ https://twitter.com/northtexasiazz https://www. voutube.com/user/northtexasiazz

Roger Kellaway and Finding New Wonders

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

Alto saxophonist, Phil Woods calls him Jazz’s Boswell. Phil ought to know as he has been around long enough to have been involved in over half of the history of Jazz. 

Most of us know said Boswell as Bill Crow - bassist, author and all-round good guy.  And if Bill has a rule-to-live-by, one which he stresses over-and-over again, it’s that “Jazz is supposed to be fun.”

To my ears, no one better exemplifies this approach to Jazz than pianist Roger Kellaway. But please don’t misunderstand this to mean that Roger isn’t serious about his music or that he is in any way belittling Jazz.

Roger’s music is full of joy, happiness and unexpected adventure and, as such, is full of the fun of finding new wonders in Jazz. Listening to Roger play is like being let into the funhouse at the amusement park. For Roger, as for Bill Crow, Jazz is fun. That’s the point of the whole thing.

Roger, too, has his own Boswell. Gene Lees, the eminent Jazz writer and reviewer, has devoted an entire chapter to him in his Arranging the Score: Portraits of Great Arrangers [New York: Cassell, 200]. Appropriately, the chapter on Roger in Gene’s book is entitled “Soaring.”

In another of his compilations, Gene Lees tells the story of  how when pianist Alan Broadbent first encountered the music of Bill Evans as a young boy growing up in his native New Zealand, he burst into tears at the sheer beauty of it.

The first time I ever heard the music of Roger Kellaway as a young man, I burst out laughing. It was the laughter of delight based on the thrill and disbelief of what I’d just heard him play.

Whenever Roger soloed during this first hearing, it was the musical equivalent of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” - Walt Disney’s famous cartoon adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in The Willows.

Roger was all over the place: dense bop lines followed by stride piano licks; dissonance followed by melodically beautiful phrases; propulsive rumbling out of the lower register followed by cat-running-along-the-piano-keys tinkling in the high notes.

The Power of Positive Swinging [Mainstream 56054; Mainstream Legacy JK 57117] was the source of my initial Kellaway encounter. The album also introduced me to the Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer quintet which featured the trumpet-flugelhorn sound of the former blended with the valve trombone tone of the latter.

Brookmeyer had played with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in the late 1950s so I was not surprised to find bassist Bill Crow and drummer Dave Bailey from Geru’s quartet continuing with Bob in the new group that he had formed with Clark. Roger Kellaway joins in as the piano player on the album. It was a name I had never heard before, but one that I would never forget after hearing him perform on this LP.

The shock was immediate. It began on the opening tune. With a title like Dancing on the Grave, I should have guessed that something unusual might be going on.

In a band led by Terry and Brookmeyer, two of modern Jazz stalwarts, I’m listening to this ultra hip, slick and cool arrangement when quite suddenly, its piano player begins to interject licks made up of an admixture of stride, honky-tonk and boogie woogie styles!

I couldn’t believe my ears and found myself laughing at the sheer boldness of expression. It was almost the musical equivalent of the verbal idiom: “Wait a minute, you can’t do that” or “Did you hear what he just did?”

Did I get a prize because I had found this musical anachronism? Didn’t I just find the transistor radio in full display next to the driver on the buckboard wagon?

And if Roger was stylistically “all over the place” on the first tune, he didn’t let up on the second one – Battle Hymn of the Republic.

On The King by Count Basie he plays the most marvelous straight ahead solo with some phrases ending in train wrecks [clusters of notes that sound as though their crashing into one another] in the upper and lower register before closing out with licks from the Dixieland anthem - 12^th Street Rag -  played in a ragtime style. Who was this guy?

Dissonance and rhythmic duets with himself on A Gal In Calico, the most sublime and swinging introduction on Brookmeyer’s original Green Stamps with a marvelously sustained tremolos in the left hand that becomes another delightful surprise during a piano solo that creates the feeling of riding on a cloud, followed by blurted tonal clusters and more unexpected diversions in his solo on Just an Old Manuscript: who was this guy?

In his liner notes to the album, Nat Hentoff quotes Bob Brookmeyer “… in a rare surge of adjectives,” as saying: “Roger is one of the most impressive, versatile talents I’ve heard in recent years. He can play any way; and no matter what way it is, it’s clear he’s not jiving.  He really is able to become part of a wide range of contexts.”

Well, that cleared that up; if Brookmeyer says Kellaway’s “not jivin’” then at least I could be reassured that this wasn’t a put on.

But with Roger resident on the east coast in a group that didn’t travel to the west coast [my home was in California], this was the extent of my exposure to Roger and his music.

That is until he showed up a couple of years later on the West Coast!

Roger’s move to California a few years later provided me with an opportunity to hear him in performance a few times.

Along the way I had also gathered-up his earlier trio recording for Prestige and some sides he did with guitarist Jim Hall.

Being already predisposed to Roger’s distinctive pianism, I next heard him on Spirit Feel [ST- 20122] an LP for Pacific Jazz he recorded in 1967 on which he is joined by Tom Scott [soprano & alto saxophones], Chuck Domanico [bass], Johnny Guerin [drums]. On some tracks Paul Beaver adds musique concrète effects through the use of a tape recorder.

Spending time with this album, it wasn’t long before I recognized that I was in the presence of a unique, musical mind; a mind that would have to encompass genius to know all the things that Roger demonstrated in his music and put them together as well as he did.

Many years later, I encountered the following writings by the late Gene Lees and the late Richard Sudhalter that confirmed my original assessment of Roger's genius.  It was comforting to have my opinion of Roger's exceptional and extraordinary talents be in such good company.

At the conclusion of these narratives, you will find a video tribute to Roger that was developed by the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and features as its soundtrack, Roger’s trio performance of Milt Jackson’s Spirit Feel replete with Paul Beaver’s tape recorded musique concrète effects.

© -Gene Lees/John Reeves, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“No one has had as much influence on my musical thinking as Roger Kellaway. When you write songs together, and Roger and I have been doing that for nearly twenty years, you get to know how your asso­ciate's mind works.

Once we were at a party at Henry Mancini's house. Roger was playing piano. Hank listened, shook his head in admira­tion of Kellaway's protean and unorthodox gifts, grinned, and said, "Roger, you're crazy."

No one I know can work in so many styles. He's recorded with everyone of note in jazz. One song Roger and I wrote had a simple country and western style melody. Yet Roger is an established and highly respected symphonic composer.

His jazz playing can be poignantly lyrical or rhythmically powerful, and when it's the latter there is a certain wildness in it, for Roger has a taste and talent for polytonality. His hands have an astonishing rhythmic independence.

Roger's icono­clastic Cello Quartet records, with an instrumentation of cello, bass, percussion, and piano, are now considered classics.

Roger is a product of the New England Conservatory in Boston. He worked pro­fessionally as a bass player as well as a pian­ist, and sang in the conservatory chorus, on one occasion under Charles Munch. His tastes run all the way from the earliest music to the most experimental.

For all the scope of his accomplishments, Roger sometimes has attacks of the uncertainty that plague all artists. Once we attended a rehearsal of the music he wrote for a George Balanchine ballet. He asked me to tape it for him. Later we sat in his car and listened, and at the end he said with a sort of sigh, ‘Well, I guess I do have some talent.’” [Jazz Lives: 100 Portraits in Jazz, Buffalo, NY: Firefly, 1992, p. 144].

© -Richard M. Sudhalter, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“My first realization that Roger Kellaway might be something out of the ordinary came, I think, because Bud Farrington left his drums in my basement.

It was 1954, or thereabouts. We were high school students, crazy about listening to, and playing, jazz. Bill Haley and the Comets might be the frisson du jour on the pop charts, but as far as we were concerned they might have been active on Mars; our world consisted only of Lester Young, Bobby Hackett, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and other major jazz figures.

We'd had a weekend jam session, a regular event in our tight little circle in suburban Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.  I played cornet in a self-consciously Bix Beiderbeckish manner; Dave Shrier brought his tenor sax, Don Dygert his trombone. Frank Nizzari, our 14-year-old prodigy, was on clarinet, and Fred Giordano was the pianist.

Roger played bass. We knew he also played piano; but his use of "modern" chords, and his busy, boppy ways of comping behind a soloist were a source of eternal contention: Roger played great, we thought, but he played too much. He filled the gaps, never left a soloist room to breathe; led you down what whatever harmonic path took his fancy in a given moment. Giordano, if technically half the pianist, was also about half as cluttered: his economical, swing-based approach generally kept everybody happy.

Bud - now Gen. Anthony j. Farrington, USAF, ret. - had left on a two-week family vacation directly after the session. Seeing the drums there, set up and begging to be played, was too good a chance to pass up. I phoned Kellaway.

"Hey, Rajah," I said, using a nickname whose full genesis would only be comprehensible to a fellow-New Englander, "want to have a crack at Bud's drums? All the cymbals are here, and he's even left sticks and brushes. Come on over." Within half an hour he did just that, and we set to work jointly unraveling the mysteries of jazz percussion.

I went at it with more enthusiasm than skill, gradually working up an energetic (if home-cooked) simulacrum of George Wettling's Chicago-style ensemble shots and devil-take-the-hindmost approach to four-bar solo breaks. (It was to serve me well some years hence when, through a chain of accidents not worth repeating here, I found myself playing drums on a rockabilly record date in pre-Olympic Atlanta, Georgia).

But never mind.  Roger tinkered with the set for about an hour, figuring out how every element worked; suddenly, it seemed, he was quite at home, playing along with - was it a Basie record?  He just had it down: elegant time, light touch, Jo Jones-like use of the cymbals. With or without technique, he could easily have fit into most anybody's rhythm section then and there.

Bud came home, reclaimed his trap set, and life went on.  I heard Roger play drums a couple of times after that, usually sitting in for a number during the last set of a dance gig. My abiding sense of it is that, had he so chosen, he could have made himself a quite respectable career as a drummer.

But that's the way it's always been with Kellaway.  He listens, watches, has a go and he's got it, now and forever. We often played tennis on Saturday afternoons: all it took was figuring out how the various strokes worked, and all at once he was Jimmy Connors, mopping up the court with me.  Sure, I won one now and then -- but even now, all these years later, I can't escape a hunch that he let me cop a few just to keep me believing I could do okay against him.

He'd picked up bass that way, too, when we were both at Levi F. Warren Junior High School. The bandmaster, one Vincent J. Marrotto, needed a bassist for the school orchestra.  Kellaway, in turn, needed little persuasion: he just took the damn thing home one day, figured it out, practiced himself into some technique, and -- Shazam!  He was a bas­sist. And it was as a bassist that he went on the road for the first time, as part of a band cornetist Jimmy McPartland was taking to Canada.

But it soon became obvious that piano was his major instrument, and had been all along.  It remained the locus of his creativity, and over the following decades he became one of the most versatile and inclusively creative pianists on the New York jazz scene.  I say "inclusive" because stylistic categories and distinctions seemed to mean little to him: he was equally at home, equally comfortable, playing for Don Ellis or Bobby Hackett, Tom Scott or comedian Jack E. Leonard; or accompanying Joni Mitchell or Bobby Darin. Whatever the setting, Kellaway was - as Ian Carr put it in The Penguin Rough Guide to Jazz – ‘a technically brilliant and often exceptionally adventurous pianist as well as an excellent composer.’

So it has remained. Mark well the word "adventurous": part of what makes Roger special is his willingness, even ardor, in accepting challenges. Whether composing a ballet for Balanchine or knocking off a raggy closing theme for the eternally popular TV sitcom All In The Family, he's forever in control, forever fresh -- and never, ever, predictable.

For awhile he and Dick Hyman appeared at Michael's Pub and various jazz events as a piano duo. That the two of them should have taken to one another comes as no surprise; they learn the same way, figuring out how something works, how a sound is produced, then just wrapping it into an ever-expanding arsenal of skills. Hyman has worked duo with many pianists, some of them - Derek Smith and Roland Hanna, for example -- his technical peers.  But it's no disservice to any of them to say that Roger may have been the only one who both matched him technically and teased (some would say bullied) more out of him, forcing him to burrow beneath his own glossy surface to find richer stuff.

An album of Kellaway-Ruby Braff duets not long ago resulted in some of that cornetist's most inspired playing -- again, playing up to and beyond his own rigorous standards. Kellaway's own "Cello Quartet" --cello and rhythm section -- produced composi­tion and playing of a rare beauty.

But you can read all that and more in any jazz reference book. What's significant here is that, one day in 1987, Roger accepted my invitation to play a solo piano recital at New York's Vineyard Theatre.  Fortunately the concert was recorded, and appears in its entirety on this CD. Beginning to end, he plays with wit, style, consummate skill. And -- perhaps most important - there's not a moment when he loses the quality that lies squarely at the core of his work: a deeply felt sense of melody.

‘I think there'll always be people around who gravitate toward a melodic ability,’ he said in a between-sets conversation. ‘There will certainly be all the others - those people who do the flash-and-dazzle and tap-dance, and can play a skillion notes, and maybe impress you on the surface.’

‘But, looking at my life and getting older, [I'm] realizing how important it is to play a melody and a ballad, until you finally reach a point of understanding where you say, “Oh, yeah -- that's what music is about.”’

A visit to Israel some years ago resulted in a deep-going study of Jewish history, philosophy and law (which led him at one point to contemplate conversion).  The Endless Light, his trio for piano, violin and cello, came out of a sojourn in Jerusalem; one movement, David Street Blues, was played by the National Symphony Orchestra on the 40th anniversary of the state of Israel.  Further plans envisioned a large piece, perhaps a cantata, to be performed at the Citadel in the Israeli capital by orchestra, jazz quartet and up to 100 voices, with libretto in English and Hebrew. ‘I'd want that to be a glorification of man's relationship to God,’ said Kellaway.  ‘Not fear -- there's plenty of that around already -- but the glory. Consider the psalms, and the majesty they contain.’

As Roger sees it, a life in music must be one of universality, of interconnectedness.

Consider this recital: whether in the romanticism of Johnny Mandel's Emily or the gentle self-mockery of You Took Advantage of Me the roll-and-rumble of Ellington's early Creole Love Call (which is a blues) or trombonist Charles Sonnastine's Blackwall Tunnel Blues (which isn't), he finds new and poignant things to say. He can stride, as he shows on a playful When I Grow Too Old To Dream, then explore the light-and-shadow of Hoagy Carmichael's brooding New Orleans. And, ending the program, tender his own heartfelt plea for world understanding, in the new-age accents of "Un Canto Per La Pace," A Song for Peace.

In a sense, Roger Kellaway remains the same kid who mastered Bud Farrington's drum kit in my basement more than four decades ago. Musically omnivorous, intellectually tireless, energy undiminished, he's sui generis, his spirit growing and deepening by the day.

‘What's happened to me, I think, is that I've renewed what I can call my sense of spiritual responsibility: responsibility to myself to grow spiritually, and have that effect everything in my life.  Now, when I sit at the piano, I never waste time.  If I'm here it's to play, to get to the heart of as much music as I can, and to share it, communicate it.’

Which is, beyond any doubt or argument, precisely what he does here.”

[Insert notes to Roger Kellaway: The Art of Interconnectedness, Challenge Records, CHR 70042].

Billy Eckstine: The Evolution of The First Bebop Big Band

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

“BILLY ECKSTINE, ..., had a modern, swinging band during the mid-forties. He had been singing with Earl Hines for a number of years when one of his fellow bandsmen, Dizzy Gillespie, suggested to Billy that he ought to go out with his own crew.

It was a sensible suggestion, because Billy, an outstandingly handsome man with a great deal of charm, had built up quite a following not merely among musicians, who admired him as a person and as a singer, but also among a segment of the public that followed the jazz-oriented bands.

In the spring of 1944 Billy left the Earl. He took with him the band's chief arranger and tenor saxist, Budd Johnson, who, along with Gillespie, became one of the two musical directors of the new group. So great was the emphasis upon instrumental music and what was then considered to be progressive jazz that Billy's strong, masculine but highly stylized vocals were often subjugated to the playing of some young, budding jazz stars like Charlie and Leo Parker, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Fats Navarro, Howard McGhee, Kenny Dorham, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon. And for a while Eckstine also featured a timid young girl vocalist with a marvelously clear, vibrant voice. To this day Sarah Vaughan still looks back fondly on her association with the band and credits it for much of her musical development.”

- George T. Simon, The Big Bands, 4th Ed.

Within the mere three years of its existence, Billy Eckstine's band at one time or another featured just about every "modernist" on the scene. A tentative listing of the alumni reads like a real "Who's Who of Bebop!”  It is forever to be regretted that this band had so little opportunity to record [in part due to the Musicians’ Union recording ban then in effect] and that Eckstine was rarely able to convince producers (and audiences) that the real quality of his band was its musical potential. More so, of course, than his own vocals, although these are often of the highest quality.

As the story goes, before Gillespie was to really settle in on 52nd Street in the mid-1940’s, he became an important part of the newly formed Billy Eckstine orchestra. Gillespie and bassist Oscar Pettiford had had a falling out, and while Oscar remained at the Onyx (with Joe Guy on trumpet and Johnny Hartzfield on tenor), Dizzy moved across the street to the Yacht Club with Budd Johnson in tow. On the same show with them was their old colleague from the Earl Hines band, Billy Eckstine, billed as X-tine, thanks to his booking agent Billy Shaw.

Eckstine's, or X-tine's, career was not exactly roaring along. It was decided that he head a big band but, at first, he and Shaw argued about the basic philosophy.

Eckstine was committed to the new sounds and convinced Shaw he wanted Gillespie as his musical director and Charlie Parker, working at the time with Carroll Dickerson at the Rhumboogie in Chicago, as the leader of his reeds. In June 1944 the Billy Eckstine band was born.

BILLY ECKSTINE   

“It was a whole evolvement of something new, aside from the trite ways of doing things. When I started my band we got bad, bad reports on it. Even the William Morris office, they said, "Why don't you just get a band like in the vein of the Basic band and with good vocals of yourself, and you just sell the band on your vocals and things like that." But they didn't stop to realize that I was already hooked into this thing. If you look at some of the early downbeat write-ups,' Christ, they used to pan hell out of me. They said I kept singing, I was running all over the place and wouldn't sing the melodies, which was just a way of seeking at that particular point—you're hearing things also. Now when we all got together, when the different guys got together, I saw the reason why I wanted to sing—well, now we call it "changes" and because it was new usage.

When we recorded "Cottage for Sale" I ended it on major seventh. We had a guy in the control room named Emile Cote, who was a head of the Pet Milk Singers, as the A&R [laughs] man. When I hit that, he came out and said, "Well, I think we got a good balance on that. Now shall we go back in and do the thing?" I said, "Hey, that was it." "Oh, you're not going to end that on that note." I said, "Well, why not, it's a major seventh." Then he gave me the old cliche about Beethoven or somebody giving a lesson and a kid hit the major seventh and then left, walked off, and he had to run downstairs and resolve it. Well, I said, "I ain't gonna resolve it." Those kind of things during that era, and getting to what you've seen, it was a feeling among a nucleus at that time of younger people, of hearing something else. We didn't knock. You see that's the other thing that was so funny about the guys then. You couldn't find one guy, you take Dizzy, Bird, any of the guys that were in my original band, we never knocked nobody else's music.

My God, my band, when I started, the guy that gave me my music to get started was Basie. I went over here to the Hotel Lincoln and walked in there with Basie, and he said, "I understand you're gonna start a band," and I said, "Yeah, man, I ain't got no music." So he turns around to Henry Snodgrass and told him, "Give him the key." I went back in the back in the music trunk and just took scores of Basie's music to help me be able to play a dance. We didn't have any music. The only things that we had in our vein of things was "A Night in Tunisia" that Diz had written. As we kept doing these one-nighters, we were constantly writing. "Blue 'n Boogie" was a head arrangement. We were constantly just sitting down everywhere we'd go and have a rehearsal and putting things together on these kind of things. Little head arrangements and riffs that Diz started or Bird started. "Good Jelly Blues" and "I Stay In The Mood For You"—Budd Johnson wrote that on the same type of a thing. And the little things I wrote—"I Love The Rhythm In A Riff" and "Blowing The Blues Away," they were just more or less—we were gradually getting our music together, but when we started out we didn't knock anybody's music like that. My God, I don't think there was a time that we ever were anywhere where another band was that all our band, if we were off, was not right there listening to them. It wasn't a knock, of putting their music down in preference for ours. It was just another step, it was another step beyond. I guess, possibly the same thing happened back when Louie took his step past King Oliver, maybe, who knows. I wasn't around to pay any attention to music then, but possibly the same type of thing happened then.

Then another very important thing, too. Our music was more studied. Up until that point, you didn't have the musicianship, other than Ellington, Lunceford, like that, where you had some great schooled musicians up there on that stand. But a lot of the other bands, there were a lot of guys who couldn't read a note, even some of the first Basic band that came East. It was a head-arrangement band. When here we came on, in my band and in Earl's band, all musicians, seasoned musicians. But when we came along these were all new usages of chords, new voicings, the arrangers were hearing things, began to write. And another thing that happened, my band ruined a whole lot of musicians who had been bullshitting before. But everywhere we would go with my band, after it was together about two months, we'd look out into the audience, and the young, the real young, was out there going, "Yeah, man." It was hitting that young; it was the music of the young really, and because the young, a lot of them, were in the war in Europe, the widespread popularity never was acquired, never was achieved.

I'll never forget, though, we used to have more problems with the powers that be, the agents. Christ, that's where I had the problem. They wanted me to sing, and play "One O'Clock Jump"; the things that were famous or something of Glenn Miller's or something of Tommy Dorsey's; in other words, let the band copy other successful things and you sing. That wasn't my idea of what I wanted to do. Shit, if 1 wanted to do that I could have gone with—'cause after I left Earl and went back to 52nd Street, I started getting calls from certain bands, different bands like Kenton. They wanted me to come in the band as a vocalist, but I wouldn't go because I said, "Hell, if I'm gonna break up my own band, what am I gonna go with somebody else for when I couldn't make my own successful? And here's some guys who are gonna try more or less to copy what we're starting, and I'm gonna go with them? No way!"

So it was always a fight, a fight, man. Christ almighty, I'll never forget, they came down to the Riviera in St. Louis. And I was working in there with my band, and the William Morris office sent some schmuck down there to do a report on the band. He came back and said, "There's no love vein in the band." Imagine this guy gonna go dig a swinging band: "there's no love vein in the band." So when Billy Shaw, God rest his soul, whom I loved, when Billy called me—Billy believed in me— and he said, "Hey B, we're getting rapped, and this guy come back here sayin' 'There's no love vein in the band.' " I said, "Well, shit, he didn't check into it. Now me and Dizzy been goin' together for years. There's the love vein" [laughter].

Well you know what he told me to do: "Well, why don't you get a real pretty girl, with a big ass, to sing?" Didn't listen to Sass [Sarah VaughanJ. He's gonna tell me about some chick with a big ass, and here's a girl with the greatest voice that I've ever heard. He never even heard that. Well, that's the kinda shit you went through in those days and on. Man, it just got to the point—I think it discouraged a lot of people. It even carried on over into Diz's band, so Diz's band wasn't successful.

It was musically successful. So was mine. Now it's the "legendary Billy Eckstine band," and some of these same guys that are now calling it a legend rapped the shit out of me. Leonard Feather, he rapped the shit out of me. Every time we'd come in, "the band was out of tune," and the this and the that, and now it's the "legendary Billy Eckstine band."

I don't want this to appear racist, but nevertheless, it's factual. Anything that the black man originates that cannot be copied right away by his white contemporaries is stepped on. It was copied. Shit, Woody Herman, get a load of his things — "Northwest Passage." All those things were nothing but a little bit of the music that we were trying to play. All of those things. All they did was that. Shit, but they got the down beat number one band, yap, yap, yap, all of this kind of shit, but Woody better not have Jit nowhere near where my band was. Nowhere. And I can say it now because it's all over and I don't have to appear egotistical, but he better not have lit anywhere where we were. And that goes for any of them, because let me show you, we would play, and the guys that were in that band will tell you one thing; we played against Jimmie Lunceford at the Brooklyn Armory. Jimmie Lunceford, big star of the thing, and we were the second band. We ate his ass up like it was something good to eat, so much to the point — I'll never forget this, Freddie Webster, God rest his soul, was with Lunceford at the time, and Freddie wrote a letter to a buddy of ours in California, and all he wrote on the letter was, "Did you hear about the battle of jazz?" He says, "Billy Eckstine," no, "B and his band, life; Jimmie Lunceford," in very small letters, "Jimmie Lunceford and us, death" [Laughter]. That's what he wrote on this thing.

Musicians—that's the other thing—young musicians would be around us like this all the time listening, and they knew what we were trying to do. Arrangers started hearing. The technical aspect of the music was grasped first. People who knew something about music right away said, "Hey, this is something else." It's the moldy guys that relied so much on their ear. They didn't have the ear to follow this—it's the same as this Emile Cote that heard this major seventh, he didn't hear that thing resolved where he was waiting for it to resolve. And when I said, "Here's a cottage for sale," and he didn't hear that [sings]. He didn't hear that. All he heard was "da" and he was waiting for "daa."* [*The conventional ending would be the tonic. Eckstine, like many instrumentalists of the time, ended a half step below the tonic.]

That's what he's waiting for. His ear had been indoctrinated into that type of listening. But arrangers jumped on this. You'd be surprised, you know how many free arrangements I used to get? Every town I'd go into, some little young musician who's studying would bring me up an arrangement to play. He is voicing it off of the new voicings, the new thing; nine out of ten of them you couldn't use, but you could see the seeking, trying to, hearing this kind of music which used to inspire us.

And again to get back to the love thing, Diz and Sonny [Stitt], all the different guys will tell you this, that was in the band. We used to get in a town and, man, it was like the bus getting in at twelve o'clock— I wouldn't call rehearsal. The guys would go on to the hall, set up, jam, or Bird would take the reed section, sit and run through things. Just at night, the Booker Washington Hotel, there in St. Louis for Christ sake, when we was working the Riviera, the people used to move out, we'd rehearse four o'clock in the morning. Sit right in the room; the reed section would be there blowing all night. It was a love where everybody was seeking things like that, trying and learning. Sass and myself used to learn things on the piano.

I'll never forget, Diz wrote an arrangement of "East of the Sun" for Sass. We worked out the ending of it [sings]. We'd work out things vocally, because every aspect of music could fit into this. There was a way to do it vocally; there was a way we heard it vocally; a way it was done instrumentally; the way it was done rhythmically: everything had a new concept to it. It wasn't just one trumpet player playing his style which was an innovative thing. Or one saxophone. There was a collective unit of the whole concept. It was the camaraderie in that band. Me and Diz, the other night at the concert,*[*Newport Festival Tribute to Charlie Parker in 1974], we were breaking up laughing at different little things that we used to do in the band.

We still have big laughs, any time we get together—like the other night, Sonny and all of us were up there, and I swear to Christ that you would have thought that some great comic was in. We were breaking up in there laughing, remembering incidents that happened, which then were morbid. Riding these Goddamn Jim Crow cars through the South were these dirty cracker conductors, we all sitting in the aisles and all of this bullshit, in a little car that's got eight seats, and here we getting on there with twenty guys and no room. And now we just sit laughing about it. The different incidents where a guy would say, "Hey, ain't no more room. You all sleep, stay in the baggage car," and we get back in the baggage car and open all the doors, get undressed and lay back there in the baggage car, smelling the hay and shit, traveling. But we can sit back and laugh about these kind of things now. You had to then. You'd have never gotten through it. We said the same statement the other night, Diz and I. You had to make your own fun. You had to make it, 'cause, Christ almighty, this was during the war. We couldn't get a bus because you couldn't get priority then for gasoline.

So the only way, Billy Shaw worked some strings—this was '44—where if I would play for the troops, whenever I would get into the town—if there was an Army camp there—go right out and do a free show for the troops, then they would give me a priority for a bus. But I had to do a certain amount of them every week. Now, if I happened to be booked in such a place where there ain't no Army camps where we are, they look and see that I don't play no Army, they snatched the bus without even telling me. We go out one morning to get the bus, there ain't no bus. Now we got to run and grab all of this crap, look at the train schedule—and there was always an hour, and hour and one-half late, these trains in those days. You know, the troops and things. Jumping on you is the guys with their bass and amplifiers, for the book, and valets getting on these trains with this and what are you gonna do. If you can survive through that, man, you gotta make your own humor. I'm telling you, boy. And arguments, fights with soldiers and these crackers down South, and man you'd get in fights with them all the time. It drove me crazy.

And the guys still stuck it out, 'cause we'd get on the stand at night, regardless of what problem we had during the day, there's our chance to let it out. And, baby, some of the times when we've had the worst problems during the day, we'd get on the stand at night and, man, you never heard a band play like that in your life. We'd be wailing, because now's our chance to relax and do what we want to do. We were just waiting to get to that stand.”

[Sources, Ira Gitler’s Jazz Masters of the 40’s, Bill Kirchner, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Downbeat, Esquire, Jazz Review, Jazz Monthly and Metronome magazine archives, Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era, George T Simon, The Big Bands, 4th Ed., Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th. Ed, Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, and Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler, The Encyclopedia of Jazz.]