Cab, Alyn and Biographies - C.A.B.

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

“Duke's replacement at the Cotton Club, Cab Calloway’s … scat-jive vocals, epitomized in the "hi-de-ho" call-and-response effects on his hit "Minnie the Moocher," delighted audiences. Calloway had led the Alabamians in Chicago and, later, the Missourians in New York, and in 1929 had appeared in the revue Hot Chocolates, before securing the coveted Cotton Club job. Incorporating a heavy dose of novelty songs and scat vehicles into a more conventional hot jazz sound, Calloway achieved a celebrity—and record sales—to rival Ellington's at the time.”

- Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford, 1997, p. 130]

“At his very first session - in July 1930, with an astonishingly virtuosic vocal on 'St Louis Blues' – Cab Calloway served notice that a major jazz singer was ready to challenge Louis Armstrong with an entirely different style….

The lexicon of reefers, Minnie the Moocher and Smokey Joe, kicking gongs around and - of course - the fabulous language of hi-de-ho would soon have become tiresome if it hadn't been for the leader's boundless energy and ingenious invention: his vast range, from a convincing bass to a shrieking falsetto, has remained unsurpassed by any male jazz singer, and he transforms material that isn't so much trite as empty without the investment of his personality.”

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

“Many jazz historians with a purist and pro-instrumental bias have ignored or dismissed Calloway and his orchestra as musically irrelevant. And insofar as others have dealt with the band at all, they have generally picked their way through its several hundred recordings, snobbishly culling only the instrumental solos as being worthy of comment, usually by Chu Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, and one or two others. This is eminently unfair and historically unjustifiable on sev­eral counts.

First of all, Calloway was a magnificent singer, quite definitely the most un­usually and broadly gifted male singer of the thirties. Second, considering his enormous popularity, and therefore the temptation to cater to the basest of mass tastes, Calloway's singing—and even his choice of material (when all is said and don) is of far higher caliber than any other male vocalist's (with the exception

of Jimmy Rushing and some of the great blues singers of the period). Moreover Calloway, amazingly, even in his most extravagant vocal antics, never left the bounds of good taste. It was as though he had a built-in mechanism that kept him from turning corny.

Third, he was a true jazz musician and as such surrounded himself with a real jazz orchestra, something no other band-leading vocalist cared (or managed) to do. In that regard, though he had every excuse to do otherwise, his perfor­mances—especially in clubs and dances, as opposed to recordings with their absolute time limits—were always liberally sprinkled with instrumental solos and ensembles, more so the more popular he became (in this respect a deliberate reversal of the usual trend).

- Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 [New York: Oxford, 1989, pp. 329-330]

Okay, you can groan if you like, but I worked long and hard to get the title of this piece to abbreviate to C.A.B.

I wanted it to reflect the fun and joy that was Cab Calloway’s life and the pleasure I gained from reading Alyn Shipton’s splendid biography about this too-soon-forgotten figure in Jazz history.

This opening paragraph from Alyn Shipton’s Introduction and Acknowledgements to Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, also now available in paperback] provides this overview of Cab’s achievements and his significance in American contemporary music.

“Clad in white tie and tails, dancing energetically, waving an oversized baton, and singing "Minnie the Moocher," Cab Calloway is one of the most iconic figures in popular music. He was the first great African American vocalist in jazz who specialized in singing without also doubling on an instrument, and he was also a conductor and bandleader who assembled a series of remarkably consistent hard-swinging ensembles. By always striving to hire the best musicians and arrangers, he took the art of big band playing for­ward consistently from the start of the 1930s to the end of the 1940s. The tenor saxophonist Chu Berry made some of his finest records in the Calloway band, as did trumpeter Jonah Jones, saxophonists Ike Quebec and Eddie Barefield, and drummer Cozy Cole. At its peak in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Callo­way’s was the highest earning African American orchestra and, by virtue of its biggest hit "Minnie the Moocher," also one of the few to have broken through to the general public with a million-selling record. People loved Cab and his antics for what he was, irrespective of color. In later life, Cab transformed into an elegant and sophisticated star of the musical theater, but from the 1930s to the 1990s, he never forgot how to "hi-de-ho," and win over a crowd.”

Alan follows with this next sentence which I’m sure that many of us can relate to:

“Before I began work on this book I had only a scant awareness of the full and impressive range of Calloway's achievements.”

But now, thanks to Alyn Shipton’s detailed research and great skills as a storyteller, one can more fully understand and enjoy the fascinating exploits of Cab Calloway, one of the most creative entertainers in the history of American popular music.

The operative word here that Mr. Shipton’s work brings home to the reader is – entertainer. For when Cab was at the height of his career in the 1930’s and 1940’s, people expected to be entertained by popular music and that’s exactly what they got - and then some - from experiencing Cab and his orchestra of first-rate musicians.

Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway begins by providing a look back at the atmosphere of the times in which Cab’s personality and interests were formed with a description of the Baltimore and Chicago of the first quarter of the 20^th century.

Almost from the start, what Ted Gioia refers to as Cab’s “eccentric individualism” displayed itself as he grew into a street smart kid in Baltimore [1907-1927] and a very hip young man in [Chicago 1927-1930] who had a knack for seeing and for being seen.

Aspects of Cab’s nature are on display in all their glory in the following anecdote as shared by Cab’s daughter, Camay, in a 2005 interview with Mr. Shipton:

“When he was in high school he was a show-off. Because he was playing basketball, [and] he was very handsome, all the girls were around him, and before he left school, he got a car, because he had all these little jobs. He played the drums, but he also walked horses, sold newspapers, he was hustling, selling different things around town, so this meant he had enough money to buy a car. He told me how he parked it one day right in front of the school, when they were having this big assembly. As it began, the principal got up and asked if the teacher who had parked out front would kindly go out and move his car, because it was in a restricted area. There was silence in the auditorium, then my father stands up and the whole auditorium erupts, with kids shouting "Go Cab go!" as he walks his very hip walk up the aisle to go out and move his car.” [p. 12]

Always a great adapter, Cab’s vocal style owes much to his sister Blanche’s vocal experimentation as Mr. Shipton explains in his chapter Chicago High Life 1927-1930:

“The time that Cab and Blanche had spent together on the road with Plan­tation Days had given him an opportunity to learn many aspects of stagecraft and presentation from her firsthand…. She was, according to Cab’s grandson Christopher Calloway Brooks, who knew her in old age, "a truly electrifying performer.” Her wild dancing and uninhibited singing were undoubtedly a prototype for much of Cab s own act. She made a conscious break with the tradition estab­lished by the classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey who stood forward on-stage and sang over the footlights directly at the audience, irrespective of whether they were being supported by a pianist or a full pit orchestra. Instead, Blanche developed numbers in which she interacted directly with members of her supporting band. Cab was later to do this by encouraging his instrumentalists— and thereby his audience — to shout back verbal responses in answer to his lyrics. The most famous example was to be “Minnie the Moocher" but he also created routines in which he alternated musical phrases with his sidemen such as "The Scat Song." The immediate precedent for this was to be found in Blanche's act. In the surviving early mov­ies of Cab at work, we can no doubt see plenty of nuances directly derived from her vocal and terpsichorean performances.” [p. 19]

Through a rapid sequence of events, Cab climbed to the forefront of the New York entertainment world in 1931 after he began fronting the orchestra [then known as The Missourians] that would replace Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club in uptown, Harlem. Interestingly, Irving Mills, Duke Ellington’s manager would also become Cab’s manager after he began work at The Cotton Club.

Mr. Shipton offers this view of Cab’s rise to “fame and [relative] fortune” in his chapter entitled Cotton Club Stomp, 1930-1931:

“The year 1931 saw Cab using his base at the Cotton Club to begin his relent­less climb to national and then international stardom. Dressed in his white tie and tails, his long straight hair ruffled into a prototype Beatle mop, and con­ducting with an oversized baton, Cab Calloway crystallized his persona as an entertainer at the club. An accurate impression of how he appeared at the time can be seen in the 1934 movie Cab Calloway's Hi-De-Ho, in which his act was filmed on a mock-up of the Cotton Club stage. He holds the viewer's attention with effortless authority. Singing “Zaz Zuh Zaz," his vocal gymnas­tics are matched by exaggerated gestures, and between the vocalizing he moves spectacularly—running the gamut of jazz dance devices from frenetic movement to slow-drag walking. Indeed his movements drew on the entire lexicon of vernacular African American dance, with allusions to nineteenth-century survivals such as buck and wing alongside comparatively recent fads like the black bottom. His gestures and his vocals were designed to bring his band — and thereby his audience — into the act as well, highlighting the differ­ent sections of musicians, and encouraging them to shout or sing a response to his words.

As he throws his head back and projects his voice, displaying his distinctive perfect teeth, his singing is marked by a complete lack of inhibition, and a freedom that matches the finest jazz instrumentalists of the age. At twenty-six years old, when this film was made, he had used his first three years of working regularly at the Cotton Club to consolidate a stage personality that cut through racial and class boundaries. It turned him into an entertainer who connected with all of American society, not just the African American public who bought his discs, or the well-heeled white pleasure seekers who defied the Depression and flocked to Harlem to hear him in person.” [p. 50]

Some of the insider dealings, trials and tribulations of staffing and traveling with a big band in the 1930’s, particularly with an all-black big band, are graphically detailed in Mr. Shipton’s chapter, Harlem Fuss, 1931-1933:

"Cab was making changes," recalled guitarist Danny Barker. "From 1931 he . . . fired one Missourian of the original band at a time. Rumor says he fired them because when he first joined the band they resented him. [It was] a process: to break up a clique in a band. You get a clique in a band, that's trouble." [p.54]

“It was well known that some 1930s swing bands had influential inner cliques that dictated their entire repertoire and policy, including decisions on who the featured soloists would be, and who was to be marked out for promotion.” [p.55]

“In 1932, the band’s work settled into a stable pattern. It would work at the Cotton Club for several months on end, and then take off for one or two ten-week tours during the course of the year.” [p.69]

One of these tours involving stops at “resorts” in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina broke down terribly.

As Mr. Shipton explains: “Although Cab and most of his men had previously toured the South and Southwest in some combination or another, it was a shock to return there after the high life they had enjoyed in Manhattan. … Most of the musicians who made that tour had stories of the privations the band endured. … In these adverse conditions, Cab came into his own as a leader [helping to militate and mitigate the unpleasant conditions]. … The result was that Cab forged a bond between himself and his men.”

In his next chapter Zaz Zuh Zaz, 1933-1934, Mr. Shipton describes how Irving Mills became Cab’s new manager and sent the band on a 1933-1934 European Tour [with mixed results], takes us with Cab on a series of crisscrossing tours of the United States [On The Road Again,1934-37] during which Cab was to become a national sensation and then moves on to provide in-depth descriptions of the time spent on the Calloway Band by its two most famous Jazz soloists: tenor saxophonist Chu Berry [Chuberry Jam 1937-39] and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie [Dizzy Atmosphere 1939-1941].

All death is dreadful and untimely, but what made tenor saxophonist Chu Berry’s even more so was his relatively young age [33] when he lost his life in a car accident, his closeness to everyone in the Calloway Band, especially to Cab, and the fact that Chu’s brilliance as a musician was transforming Cab’s music into a full-fledged Jazz Orchestra.

As Mr. Shipton notes: “It was the tragic demise of one of the greatest saxophone talents in Jazz, and also the man who had been a key element in the gradual reform of the Calloway band, consolidating its position as a genuine Jazz orchestra at the highest level.” [p.159].

Turning to Doc Cheatham, Cab’s lead trumpet player for many years, Mr. Shipton goes on to reinforce the view that by the early 1940’s the band was looking to reinforce its Jazz credentials: “He [Cab] had to change the band, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to scream for the rest of his life.” [Doc Cheatham, Guess I’ll Go And Get The Papers, p. 46; Shipton, p.135].

During his first decade in the business, Cab had always tried to maintain an excellent band with fine soloists and imaginative arrangers and this was to become even more the case in what Mr. Shipton describes as Cruisin’ with Cab, 1941-1948.

The irony for Cab’s band is that the better it became artistically, what Mr. Shipton describes as the “more assured and confident sound of the band,” the sadder it was when this artistry was undermined by a variety of factors that came into existence in the decade of the 1940s.

Of course the main force at work during the first half of this decade was World War II.  But domestically, Cab had to also contend with many other pressures and stressors, all of which are ably described in detail by Mr. Shipton. For example:

“This and the other records made on July 27 were to be Cab's last commercial discs to be cut until January 1945, owing to a long-running dispute between the AFM and the record industry that began on August 1, 1942. In pursuit of a levy for musicians to compensate them for the loss of sales incurred through the proliferation of jukeboxes, the union forbade its members to record. The result was an unintentional but seismic shift in the record industry in favor of purely vocal records, because singers were not included in the ban. …

Cab, on the road with his huge entourage, selling out theaters, and still able to broadcast with the band over national radio networks, decided to stick with his existing record contract and wait for a settlement. It did not suit him to make purely vocal discs and abandon the show he had built up over so long, and which he was managing to retain more or less intact despite the draft. As things turned out, Columbia (one of Irving Mills's stable of labels) was one of the last firms to settle with the union, and so in 1943-44, apart from a handful of V-Discs made for American troops overseas, the band s only commercial recordings were done for movie sound tracks. This fitted Irving Mills's long-term strategy for Cab, which was to continue to build him into a star who was never dependent on just one form of mass communication. Consequently Mills started the process of intro­ducing him socially to the who's who of Hollywood with the aim of making him a crossover film star, thereby repeating his success with both the white and black public on radio, record, and stage. [p,164, Emphasis mine]

The result of Mills’ strategy for Cab was that he would make a number of important films in the 1940s including Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather and Sensations of 1945 that would establish him as a film star. This stardom then made it possible for Cab to crossover into other forms of entertainment when social and economic factors following the end of WWII essentially put an end to most of the big bands.

During this period, Cab’s band would feature a new theme song, “Gerald Wilson’s modernistic Cruisin’ With Cab,” along with a host of excellent Jazz soloists including trumpeter Jonah Jones,  tenor saxophonists Illinois Jacquet and Ike Quebec bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Cozy Cole. The band played it last gig in July, 1948 at the Roxy Theater in New York.

Jonah Jones recalled what happened next:

“He cut the band down to about seven pieces, me on trumpet, Keg John­son on trombone, and two saxes, Hilton Jefferson and Sam 'The Man" Taylor. There was Dave Rivera on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Pan­ama Francis on drums. That lasted for a while. Then he finally cut it down to four pieces and I was the only horn in the band. . . . There were three rhythm, and myself. . . . He was a wonderful director, he loved to direct, so even with the quartet he was directing us. He still changed clothes all night.” [p.182, Mr. Shipton’s 1995 interview with Jonah Jones]

Mr. Shipton’s Porgy, 1949-1970  opens with this description of the state of the big bands by the early 1950’s:

“Cab was not alone in facing the problems of maintaining a big band at the end of the 1940s. Of the most famous African American leaders, a few managed to keep their full orchestras afloat by rebalancing their repertoire. Duke Ellington, by subsidizing the band from his royalties, largely avoided such compromises. Lionel Hampton kept a smaller, but still sizable, band going by appealing to a different public. He adopted rhythm and blues techniques of style and presentation, which included Billy Mitchell playing the tenor saxophone on his back and fellow tenorist Gene Morris dropping to his knees during his solos. By contrast, Benny Carter was forced to dissolve his regular band in 1946. Despite the unexpected death of its leader in 1947, the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra struggled on a bit longer, but folded at the end of the decade following Ed Wilcox’s unsuccessful attempts to keep it going. ‘The Twentieth Century Gabriel,’ trumpeter Erskine Hawkins, scaled back his big band gradually, ending up with a quartet in 1953.

In January 1950, Count Basie was forced by rising costs and diminishing bookings to cut his regular touring group back to a septet. This small group became an octet when Basie s long-term guitarist, Freddie Green, rehired him­self, on the grounds that he'd given so much of his life to the band he was in no mood to be fired. Basics octet, with Clark Terry, Buddy DeFranco, and Wardell Gray among its members, and Neal Hefti writing the charts, used considerable ingenuity to compensate for the size of the band, and consequently made some of the best music Basic ever recorded. These discs sit interestingly at a stylistic crossroads between those made by his original Kansas City big band and the more forward-looking orchestra he was to lead in the 1950s.

Unlike Basie’s, the music that Cab recorded in 1949 is definitely not the most distinguished part of his legacy. It both mirrors his depressed personal state of mind, and also shows him searching for a new role as a popular entertainer. …”[pp,183-182].

Many of the musicians who climbed off the band buses went to work in smaller combos that played the Jazz club circuits; some formed into show bands that played cocktail lounges and the Las Vegas casinos; some got “day gigs” and resorted to playing the occasional weekend casual for weddings and private parties.

However, in the 1950’s and 60’s, those with good music reading skills initially found an abundance of work in the movie and television studios in Los Angeles and the Broadway theater and television studios of New York. In both cities, recording commercials and jingles for radio also offered steady work, as did cutting [the then new]long-playing albums as a recording orchestra contract player behind pop hit singers like Patti Page, Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney.

The Broadway stage was a very lucrative place to be when it was in vogue in the 1950’s and 1960’s and, after scuffling for a few years, Cab was to put his marvelous skills as a “crossover artist” on display there in productions of Porgy and Bess and Hello, Dolly!. He also took his Sportin’ Life Porgy and Bess characterization on the road in a one-man show that toured Great Britain.

As Mr. Shipton observes of Cab at this point in his career:

“The years in Porgy and Bess had given him the opportunity to develop a far richer and more flexible sound, which was to be the hallmark of his mature years….” [p.205]

Cab’s career was also helped along by television appearances on Person-to-Person with Edward R. Murrow and The Ed Sullivan Show and he gained a measure of financial security from performing as the halftime act for The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team which was then owned by Abe Saperstein whom he had known since the 1920s “when Cab was learning his trade in Chicago.” [p. 207].

The final two decades of Cab’s life are covered by Mr. Shipton in The Hi-De-Ho Man 1971-1994. During this period we find Cab literally struggling to get out of the house and in front of an audience.

As Mr. Shipton explains:

“Most of the marriages that came out of the era of the old Galloway band, such as those of Milt and Mona Hinton, Danny and Blue Lu Barker, or Dizzy and Lorraine Gillespie, were similarly long lived, but all of them had a compa­rable element of tension between the pull of the road (or the studios) and the hearth. Dizzy always longed to be home, but as soon as he had been back in his New Jersey house for a couple of days, he was planning his next escape, because as his road manager Charles Lake put it, "he didn't know what to do with himself when he was at home for any length of time.”

Cab was much the same.” [p. 213]

Cab’s creative urges found expression in a variety of settings including made-for-movie television episodes, a revival of the Broadway show The Pajama Game and a number of appearances at international Jazz festivals.

Of Cab’s career during this period, Mr. Shipton writes:

“His voice had developed into a fine musical theater baritone, capable of projecting forcefully into all but the largest of theaters, and his abilities as an actor grew at the same time. Now—as he approached his seven­ties—he was standing still artistically, and reverting to an ever-diminishing repertoire of his own most famous songs, most of which he could probably sing in his sleep.” [pp.219-220].

I doubt that many of us would want to join a touring company at the age of seventy, but then, none of us are Cab Calloway for that’s exactly what he did as described in the following excerpt from Mr. Shipton’s book:

“When he reached the age of seventy, he was fortunate that the growing vogue for African American stage musicals came to his rescue, and found him a new platform for his talents. In 1978 he joined the cast of the touring ver­sion of Bubbling Brown Sugar. The show was set in various fictitious Harlem nightclubs, and it was crafted by its author, Loften Mitchell, into a pacey sequence of songs, dances, and comic turns in the manner of a Cotton Club revue. Prior to Cab's arrival, the music contained in the show had altered slightly as it ran through 766 performances on Broadway, according to the talents of the available cast. Fundamentally, however, the repertoire was built around songs associated with Cab, Duke Ellington, Count Basic, Fats Waller, and Eubie Blake.” [p.220]

After sharing some amusing stories about Cab’s role in the movie The Blues Brothers Mr. Shipton offers this description of the final decade of Cab Calloway’s life as a performer:

“By the mid-1980s a new pattern had emerged. Cab and his new band would tour the United States and Europe in the summer festival months, they would take to the road again for short tours in the spring and fall, and he would otherwise pick and choose between individual engagements. Some of these were nostalgic, such as the memorial tribute to Ira Gershwin at the Gershwin Theater in August 1983, in which Cab sang a poignant version of "It Ain't Necessarily So," in mem­ory of Porgy and Bess's lyricist. Others were reunions with old friends, such as the all-star Songwriters' Guild event in January 1984 at the Palace in Manhattan, where Cab starred opposite Peggy Lee.

Particularly in Europe, on his summer tours in the 1980s and early 1990s, Cab's reception was terrific. This was not least because he was one of the few really high-profile survivors of the Cotton Club days who was still touring, and audiences hungered for an authentic link with the past. Louis Armstrong had died in 1971, Duke Ellington in 1974, ….” [pp.226-227]

There was not to be another decade as Cab Calloway died from complications of a stroke on November 18, 1994.”

Here are some thoughts that Mr. Shipton puts forth as an assessment of Cab Calloway’s storied career:

“… there is a wider legacy of Cab Calloway. Through his movie appear­ances in Stormy Weather and The Blues Brothers, we can see him in his pomp, and in his mature prime. In countless records, we can chart the extraordinary influence he had on jazz singing. With the reissue on CD of virtually all his work, it is possible to appreciate the sheer scale and consistency of his recorded achievement within the world of jazz, let alone his additional musical theater discs of Porgy and Bess and Hello, Dolly!

At a time when only Louis Armstrong had managed to bridge the gap between African American jazz and popular entertainment, Cab began by following in his footsteps and surpassed him. From the clubs of Baltimore to the cabarets of 1920s Chicago, and on to the mob-run Cotton Club, Cab ultimately transcended racial, class, and national boundaries. His music brought the storytelling traditions of African Americans to a huge public through his tales of Minnie and Smoky Joe, and his catchphrases became familiar the world over to several generations from the 1930s to the 1990s. With his straight hair and light complexion, he might have decided to pass for white, but he was always, uncompromisingly, a black artist.

Not being an instrumentalist like Armstrong, he initially achieved all this primarily as a vocalist, heard across America as he hi-de-hoed from the Cotton Club. His early triumphs like "St. Louis Blues," "St. James Infirmary," "Nagasaki," and "Minnie the Moocher" brought call and response to the fore­front of everyday entertainment in the 1930s. But these songs also set a tem­plate for the singers who would come afterward, from jump-jive vocalists such as Louis Jordan to more surreal entertainers such as Slim Gaillard, in whose work we find the early seeds of rap and hip-hop. In his films and recordings with the Cabaliers he sowed the seeds for doo-wop, just as pieces like "Calloway Boogie" looked forward to rhythm and blues.” [p.223]

It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living and that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway offers the best of both of these worlds: Mr. Shipton’s very thorough examination of a life well-lived, that of one - Cabell Calloway [1907-1994].

Mr. Shipton’s accomplishment with this biography of Cab can also be viewed as being in the best tradition of what E.E. Carr suggested when he wrote: “The historian is an inveterate simplifier. He tidies up the infinite variety of events in order to make them intelligible.” [Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 1977].

The book is fully indexed, contains a bibliography and a listing of Cab Calloway’s recordings. Copies can be ordered directly from Oxford University Press at www.oup.com.

Red Rodney: Jazz Master and Mentor

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

“I don't play like I played back in the early days with Bird. I play like today and that's what these young musicians help bring to me. I give them roots and traditions from fifty years of playing this music.  They weren't around when this music was born, but they had quite a bit of experience playing it because any Jazz musician has to go through the Bebop era.”.

- Red Rodney

“The warmth of Red’s solos, his impeccable ensemble work, the culmination of his vast experience and his highly original way of playing puts his name among my list of favorite modern Jazz trumpet players.”

- Joe Segal, owner, The Jazz Showcase, Chicago, IL

“Red turned his life around and ended back on top of the Jazz heap where he belonged. The Jazz life back in those days wasn’t an easy one. Too many of the cats checked out early or ended up broke or broken. Thank God every once in a while one of the guys managed to put the pieces back together again and go out on an up.”

- Joel Dorn, Jazz record producer and DJ

No one really masters the art of playing Jazz.

But trumpeter Red Rodney played it well enough over his 50-year career to be accorded the respect of - a Master [in the literal, not the aristocratic, sense].

And, during his later years, he also mentored a number of young musicians in the precepts of modern Jazz.

Yet, neither of these distinctions – Master or Mentor – were assured, for as the eminent Jazz writer, Gene Lees, points out:

“By all accounts, Red Rodney ought to have been dead.

Instead he was flying all over the earth in glowing good health, leading a quintet whose members were often a third his sixty-seven years, playing better than he had ever played, and enjoying what one critic called ‘one of the most celebrated comebacks in jazz history.’

‘In fact,’ Red said, ‘the odds were against my coming back and doing anything.’

They certainly were. Heroin was the elixir of bebop, but few of those who succumbed to its blandishments in the 1940s and '50s are using it today: they have either quit, like Red, or they're dead. A few, like Art Blakey, maintained their habits with such aplomb that they managed to reach a good age before dropping of other causes. By and large, dirty needles, self-neglect, improper nourishment, sojourns in the slammer, and all the other concomitants of heroin addiction took a devastating toll. Red Rodney is almost able to say, with Job, ‘And I only am escaped to tell thee.’

Red is briefly portrayed in the Clint Eastwood film Bird, which attracted both high praise and a bored condemnation in the jazz community.

They've never made a good movie about jazz, you'll hear it said by those who have not bothered to notice that they've almost never made a good movie about music—period. Red is listed in the credits as being an adviser on the film, but his advice, he says, was limited largely to telling the young man who plays himself how to hold the horn and stand. There is a scene in which the Charlie Parker character upbraids him for having taken up heroin. Some­thing like that happened in life: Bird, according to accounts I've heard from several musicians, urged his proselytes not to follow him into drug use. Few of them paid attention to his admonition; they paid attention to his example.

The question of drug use among artists is a complex one. You cannot say you have examined a question until you have entertained all sides of it. I believe we have reached the limits of what the mind now can do and arc trying to exceed them….

Loren Eiseley in The Immense Journey compared the human mind to a telephone switchboard that you encounter in a small motel. The motel has only a dozen or so rooms, but the circuitry is sufficient for thousands of rooms. The expansion of the brain and the brain case occurred compara­tively quickly in evolutionary time,

Eiseley reminds us. What is all that extra circuitry for? Will we some day learn to use it?

I suspect that it is this yearning for the balanced function of intellect and feeling, what Blake called the marriage of heaven and hell, the recurring suspicion that it can be achieved and that there is something more somehow, a something we glimpse occasionally and fleetingly through mist, a sublimi­nal flash of a divine future, that has drawn men such as Charlie Parker and Bill Evans into heroin. …

… Certainly no one can speak of drug addiction with a greater depth of experience than Red.

On the other hand, we should not dwell only on that aspect of his life. This is, let us keep constantly in mind, a brilliant musician, a gifted man. One of the protégé’s of Charlie Parker, for three years a member of Bird's quintet, standing night after night beside Bird's horn and hearing its out­pourings, Rodney was one of the first white bebop trumpet players. Red is uninhibited about discussing his past, and he is frank about it when young musicians ask him about it in music clinics.” [Gene Lees, The Nine Lives of Red Rodney, Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White [New York: DaCapo, 2000, pp. 91-93, excerpted].

Red began playing music at the age of ten when his Dad gave him a bugle and enrolled him in a drum and bugle corps in Philadelphia, PA. His first trumpet came along a few years later.

Red quickly developed the trumpet “chops” [skills] to serve as a substitute in a variety of big bands that came to Atlantic City, many of whom had lost musicians to the World War II selective service draft.

After the war, he was a member of the CBS radio orchestra based in Philadelphia and led by Elliott Lawrence.

“…. It is hard for people born after that era to grasp the range and creativity of radio's role in American musical life. Today it is a force for decay and debasement, but it wasn't in those days. In addition to all the remote radio broadcasts of the big bands and the various commercial net­work broadcasts that featured Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, John Kirby, and many more, and even full symphony orchestras maintained on staff by NBC and CBS in New York, various local stations had studio bands of their own, some of which were heard nationally through network hook­ups.

The Elliot Lawrence band was one of these. Though it is little men­tioned in big-band histories, the Lawrence band—Lawrence in recent years has been a conductor of Broadway musicals—was notable for intelligent, advanced arrangements. One of its writers was a young Gerry Mulligan.

‘I got Gerry in that band,’ Red said. ‘We stayed a year. That was the first I heard jazz.’

‘The studio band was a day gig. I would go around to the Down Beat club at night. It was the modern jazz club in that town. Bebop was starting to be played there.

Dizzy had worked there two years before as the house trumpet player. His mother Lived in Philly, and Dizzy lived in Philadelphia for quite some time. I didn't know who Dizzy Gillespie was, though. I went up there and tried to play. The piano player was a guy named Red Garland. I knew Exactly Like You and Body and Soul and that's it. And Red Garland said to me, “Young man, if you want to play with us, you're gonna have to learn some new tunes. So if you come in early tomorrow, I'll go over some with you.” How sweet.

‘Next day I came in early and he taught me how to play the blues and he taught me I Got Rhythm. I didn't know what the changes [chord progressions] were. I had no idea. All by ear. And I played in that band, a quintet, with a tenor sax­ophone player named Jimmy Oliver, who's still living in Philly.’

‘There was a streetcar conductor who used to stop the streetcar and run upstairs and sit in on drums. His name was Philly Joe Jones. He had the 11th Street run, and that's where the Down Beat was. The cars would be blowing their horns, people would be yelling, “Get that damn streetcar moving!” They finally fired him, so he wound up working at the Down Beat. …’

"There was a big night coming up. Gene Krupa's band came to town with Roy Eldridge. I'd already heard Roy on a big hit record, Let Me Off Uptown. I thought, 'Wow! That's sensational!' But it didn't have any attraction to me yet. That wasn't the Harry James tone. It was different. I thought it was sensational, but it didn't mean anything to me. Then I realized. Oh yeah. Roy Eldridge came to the Down Beat. Dizzy Gillespie was coming. And they were going to have a jam session.

That was the night that Dizzy made me think, “Oh my God.” I heard that Roy was great, but Dizzy was new. It was apples and oranges. You couldn't compare them.

That night Dizzy showed us—we were very young; I was eighteen years old—the way to go. I even thought in my head, “You know, if this guy didn't play such weird notes, he'd be great.” Roy played the notes that I could understand. Dizzy was playing harmonically things that I'd never heard.

Three weeks later, I realized they weren't weird notes.

There was my influence.

Then I started listening heavily. I tried to play like Dizzy, which of course I couldn't do. The notes that he made were sensational. The fire, the time that Dizzy had! He's truly one of the greats of the instrument.’

I was always pretty lucky, Even back then I had my own sound. Like it or not, it was me. You could always say, “Well, that’s Rodney. But Dizzy’s influence was already set.’ [Lees, Ibid, pp. 95-97, excerpted]”

Gerry Mulligan went on to join drummer Gene Krupa’s big band as an arranger in January, 1946. Later that same year, Red also became a member of the Krupa band. Both were 18-years old!

‘Gene embraced anything new. Nothing frightened him. And he had what was really the first white name bebop band. He tried, he did it, he let it happen. He let the young guys do what they had to do. I remember he billed me as the surrealist of the trumpet. I didn't know what the hell it meant. I had to go to him ask, “What does this mean?”’

But 52nd Street was beckoning.

“I wanted to come to New York and really become a full-fledged jazz player. I left the band at the Capitol Theater in New York. It was a difficult thing, because of Gene. I loved him. To the young ones he was like a father. He was never an employer or a boss. Never. He was so good. I've never met one like him. I loved Woody equally as much. But they were different.’ [Lees, Ibid, p. 98]

After scuffling around New York for most of 1947, Red landed a gig with the Claude Thornhill band where Mulligan was once again on the arranging staff, this time with the likes of the great Gil Evans.

From there he went on the Woody Herman band where Shorty Rogers joined him in the trumpet section. Shorty was also one of Woody’s chief arrangers and he would assign trumpet solos to Red and not to himself.

Red’s ongoing love affair with bebop resulted in his leaving the Herman band to hang around New York with his friends and fellow trumpeters Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham and Fats Navarro [“Fats was far ahead of all of us.”]

Then in late 1949 he became a member of Charlie Parker’s quintet and stayed for three years.

Following his departure from Bird’s group, “I stayed in music and I stayed a junkie.”

It was more a matter of Red being in and out of music for the next twenty years, mostly out due to being incarcerated for his heroin habit or running from the law as a result of various schemes he got caught up in order to support his drug habit].By some miracle, Red survived it all.

In 1976-77, during what would become his last imprisonment at the federal prison in Lexington, KY, Red was “rediscovered” by some knowledgeable Jazz fans led by Vince de Martino, a professor of trumpet at the University of Kentucky.

Vince, with the help of a sympathetic warden at the federal prison, got Red into teaching a Jazz theory class and into some closely supervised, local gigs.

In 1979, Red made parole and from 1979-1994, the year of his death, Red entered into the “mentor” phase of his life.

As Gene Lees describes it, “at this point Red's life changed completely. The woman's name was Helene Strober. She was then a buyer of women's wear for the 2000-store Woolco chain, which meant she had a great deal of power in the garment district of New York, that crowded and shabby area, not far south of Times Square, of narrow streets and double-parked trucks where workmen push carts full of dresses hanging from horizontal poles along the sidewalks from one establishment to another. It is incredibly busy in the daytime, bleakly deserted at night.”

Red tells it this way: ‘She had her natural mother instinct. Here I was in trouble, just getting out of it. She saw that I was really trying. She watched it very carefully at first. By the time we were ready to get married, she knew everything was fine. After the half-way house, I planned to get my own apartment. But I moved in with Helene. Out of a flophouse to a gorgeous apartment.

My first gig was in a restaurant called Crawdaddy's at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was only a trio gig: piano, bass, and me. An old publicist named Milton Karle, long dead, who had Stan Kenton and Nat King Cole, got me the gig. And on piano I hired Garry Dial, who was then twenty-three. That was the beginning of a long association. We worked there five or six weeks. We did good business, because Helene had the place packed with garment center people. The job was 6 to 11; they'd finish work and come over. The manager wanted us back quickly. …

My chops were good. I started working. I went to a gig in Florida and we bought an apartment in Boynton Beach. Ira Sullivan had the house band in the place, Bubba's, in Fort Lauderdale. I spoke to Ira. I said, I’m sup­posed to go into the Village Vanguard. Why don't you come in with me?' I talked him into it. He never traveled.

So we had a band together for almost five years, Rodney-Sullivan. Garry Dial on piano. We had Joey Baron on drums for a while. My favorite kid, man, he was sensational. I started recording quite a bit, some for Muse, some for Elektra Musician, for Bruce Lundvall.'

The association of Sullivan and Rodney was to produce a series of memo­rable albums. [Lees, Ibid, pp. 116-117, excerpted]

‘By now, I've been back in the music scene for twelve years and what I hope is the next thirty or forty years. My sights are squarely set on making the best music I can make, embracing ail of the newer forms of jazz that specifically fit my style. I'm not going to take anything that sounds like snake-charmin' music and fit that in, because it doesn't fit in.

So that's what's happening to me now. I'm enjoying a nice run of success. The music I'm involved in, I'd like to say it's bebop of the '90s, but it's even a little more. I think I'm leaping into the twenty-first century, using the new electronic instruments, but being me. We're playing jazz and using those instruments as colorations. I don't want to do what other experimenters have done, even though they've been very successful, like Weather Report. And they're very good. I just don't want it that way….

Having been with Charlie Parker did me a world of good. But what I did before is not what I'm working on and how I'm getting my work today. Life isn't lived yesterday. If I had to live through yesterday, I think I'd commit suicide. I look back at all these things and say, “Oh my God! How could I have done that? It's not me, it's a different person.”

Yet, when I look at it realistically, all I can say is, “Well it was me.” I'm very proud that I could overcome this. I didn't expect anything.

I've seen so many very fine players never come back: lose their health, lose their ability to play, lose their careers, then lose their lives.

This in a sense was not planned. It was hoped-for. I didn't expect to accomplish this much.’” [Lees, Ibid, p. 119]”

…

“In the early evening of Friday, June 18, 1993, Red performed in a two-fluegelhorn duet with Clark Terry in a huge tent on the lawn of the White House, during a conceit presented by President Bill Clinton. He played magnificently. That was the last time I saw him.

A few months later, he told me on the telephone that he had an inoper­able lung cancer for which he was receiving chemotherapy.

Red died on a morning in May, 1994.” [Lees, Ibid, p.121]

The following video tribute to Red features an audio track that was made in 1991. The tune is by Red's long-time associate, pianist Gary Dial’s and is entitled In Case of Fire. Red’s quintet at the time included Chris Potter on tenor saxophone, David Kikoski on piano, Chip Jackson on bass and Jimmy Madison on drums. Chris takes an absolutely breath-taking solo on this cut. He was all of 20-years old at the time! Red was certainly some mentor.

Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff – “The Catbird Seat”

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

I’m always asking Jazz musicians and Jazz fans what they are listening to or for their opinions about my current listening and/or favorite recordings.

It’s a fun way to get differing opinions about the music.

But when I asked Italian Jazz pianist Dado Moroni what he thought of Dwike Mitchell’s performance on The Catbird Seat from the Atlantic album of the same name, I was momentarily surprised by his answer.

“I cried,” he said.

Although I was taken aback for an instant, I intuitively understood why Dado would react this way to Dwike’s playing on this piece on which he is joined by bassist Willie Ruff and drummer Charlie Smith.

As George T. Simon describes it on the album’s sleeve notes:

“The Catbird Seat, a slow, swinging blues, gets its title because, as bassist Willie Ruff  points out, ‘it has such a groovy feel­ing. There's an old Southern ex­pression, “sitting in the catbird seat” which means you're sitting pretty and everything is groovy, and that's how we felt on this number. In fact, it's how we feel most of the time when we're at home in the club [Dwike and Willie owned The Playback Club in New Haven, CT].’ The piece projects a tremendously funky feel, but it's also full of musical polish, such as Willie's marvelous articulation, Dwike's tremendous technique and Charlie's beauti­fully controlled brush shadings. Note too the contrast between the long, tremulous, two-chorus build-up into the lovely, relaxed statement of the theme.”

The Catbird Seat is a slow burn all the way.  The very unhurried tempo at which it is played is one that is rarely heard today and very tricky to execute because there is a tendency to rush or drag.

The intensity is there but you have to let it quietly capture you. The track builds and builds and builds until it reaches an exciting climax. And just when you think it is finished, Dwike offers a different ending from the one that “your ears” are expecting.

In the Atlantic Jazz Keyboards CD [Rhino R2 71596], the noted pianist and Jazz author Dick Katz offered these comments about The Mitchell-Ruff Trio, featuring Charlie Smith performance of The Catbird Seat.

"Pianist Dwike Mitchell and bassist Willie Ruff are probably the least known {in the United States, at least) of any of the artists in this compilation. This is because they have chosen to function outside the mainstream of "the business." They are more comfortable in the concert hail and on college campuses than in clubs with cigarette smoke and long hours. [Ironically, Dwike and Willie took the plunge and later opened their own club in Hartford, CT called The Playback, but like most Jazz clubs, it was to be a short-lived enterprise]

Ever since their incredible triumph in the Soviet Union in 1959 — they were the first American jazz musicians to tour there — Mitchell and Ruff have thrilled audiences everywhere They are also educators of the first rank and have enjoyed special relationships with Yale University and New Haven, Connecticut

Make no mistake, here are two virtuosos ol unique ability. Dwike Mitchell rivals Oscar Peterson in the chops department, and Willie Ruff makes it rough on other bass players. His French horn playing, not heard here, is in a class by itself.

The Catbird Seat with the addition of the late drummer Charlie Smith finds them harking back to their Southern roots. It is truly a pianistic tour de force. Over a hypnotic, steady, unembellished quarter-note pulse, Mitchell builds to a thunderous climax via some awesome tremolo effects. The piece winds down gracefully and ends with a churchlike cadence.  This is state-of-the-art piano blues. It's interesting to compare it with Ray Charles' "The Genius After Hours." [Also included on the Atlantic Keyboards compilation.]

Elsewhere in his liner notes, George T. Simon has this to offer by way of background information on what came to be known as the Mitchell-Ruff trio.

“This is thrilling jazz. I know you read such superlatives in almost every liner note, but believe me, the music herein is really something special.

It's modern jazz with the emphasis on the jazz. Like many modernists, both Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff are thoroughly-schooled musicians. But, unlike most modernists, they haven't forgotten the basic romping, swinging beat of jazz, and the results here are pretty electrify­ing.

Maybe, like me, you remem­ber Dwike and Willie when they were just the Mitchell-Ruff Duo. They achieved international fame in 1959 when, as members of the Yale Russian Chorus that was touring the USSR, they tem­porarily tossed aside their ton­sils, hauled out piano and bass, and proceeded to regale the Rus­sians with American jazz.

At that time the group's jazz feeling was highly personal  -  al­most completely implied. Now though, with the addition of Charlie Smith's drums, you can't possibly miss it. Before his ad­vent, what they were playing had relationship to themselves only, just as in modern art a painting on an infinite canvas can only relate to itself. But now, thanks to Charlie, they have been supplied with a rhythmic framework inside which they are able to create jazz masterpieces with a spatial, or rhythmic rela­tivity that all of us can feel and understand.

Mitchell, a Floridian who graduated from the Philadelphia Musical Academy, and Ruff, an Alabaman who earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Music at Yale (they once played together in Lionel Hampton's big band) joined forces last year with Smith, a New Yorker, who has played for Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Billy Taylor, at a New Haven club called The Playback. It was founded by Ruff himself, ‘be­cause we needed a place in which we could work out things the way we wanted to, and just stay on until we felt we were really ready to show the rest of the world what we could do.’

For close to a year, the trio worked, played, and, in the case of Ruff and Smith and their fami­lies, even lived together. ‘We got so that each of us could feel what the others were going to do without even looking,’ says Smith. By early autumn of 1961 when they felt they were ready, they brought portable recording equipment into the club and re­corded the numbers heard herein. The first Artist and Repertoire man to hear the tapes, Atlantic's astute jazz-loving V.P., Nesuhi Ertegun, flipped, and - well, here's the result.”

Dwike Mitchell passed away on April 7, 2013 at the age of eighty-three.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember him on these pages with this feature and the following video tribute on which the music is – what else but - The Catbird Suite.

Bernie Senensky – Jazz Pianist

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

“I could just sit and listen to Bernie Senensky play all day.”

Like the late Bill Evans, so could I.

Bernie was also a favorite of the late alto saxophonist, Art Pepper.

According to Hal Hill, a Canadian broadcaster who booked Art into Bourbon Street in Toronto, CA and paired him when Bernie on piano for a week-long gig:

“I have many happy memories of being asked to pick a rhythm section for Art Pepper for an engagement at the now defunct night club 'Bourbon Street' in Toronto. You can imagine Art's delight at having such an ac­complished pianist to work with, someone who molded his ideas so well with Art's music. That was a week of sheer enjoyment, night after night, set after set.

When Art went on to New York at the end of the gig he phoned me to see if I could get Bernie to join him. Bernie, unfortunately, was not availa­ble due in part to his loyalty to a group he had started to work with on a regular basis in Toronto. Those sessions on Contemporary Records, Live At The Village Vanguard (1972) could have been with Bernie as pianist in­stead of George Cables.”

Bernie’s style just sparkles with a lightness and playfulness that makes his solos so easy and fun to listen to. You don’t have to reach for anything; it’s there.

He composes many of the tunes he records, but here again, as is the case with Lolito’s Theme which forms the audio track for the video feature to Bernie which you can locate at the end of this piece, his music is easily accessible.

Nothing tortuously introverted, but rather, music that becomes the basis for straightforward and melodious solo interpretation and a certain gentleness of expression in the tunes he writes as ballads.  To paraphrase Hal Hill, each tune he writes “… has a richness of detail that allows for the fact that we hear things differently.”

Many of Bernie’s recordings are available in digital formats as CO’s and Mp3 downloads.

Here are some background notes about Bernie’s considerable career in the World of Jazz.

© -  Canadian Jazz Archives, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“BERNARD (BERNIE) SENENSKY (pianist, composer) was born December 31, 1944 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Recognized as one of Canada’s premier jazz artists and one of the foremost jazz accompanists in the world, Senensky’s playing and his music have been featured in jazz festivals internationally. Since 1975, he has released eight albums, two of which were nominated for Juno Awards.

Senensky began playing piano at the age of eight, settling into his interest in jazz when he was 14, studying with Winnipeg jazz eminence Bob Erlendson. He began sitting in with local Winnipeg groups which included guitarist Lenny Breau and bassist Dave Young, eventually taking his considerable talent to Edmonton.

His work leading a house band with the Holiday Inn Hotel chain eventually took him to Toronto where he took up residence in 1968, quickly establishing himself as an accompanist playing for and with a wide variety of visiting musicians including Pepper Adams, Chet Baker, Ed Bickert, Terence Blanchard, Ruby Braff, Randy Brecker, Al Cohn, George Coleman, Buddy DeFranco, Herb Ellis, Art Farmer, Sonny Greenwich, Slide Hampton, Herbie Mann, Frank Morgan, Joe Pass, Art Pepper, Bucky Pizzarelli, Dizzy Reese, Red Rodney, Jack Sheldon, Zoot Sims, Sonny Stitt, Lew Tabackin, Clark Terry, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Williams, and Phil Woods.

He has recorded with dozens of the biggest names in the business, played in piano duets with Oscar Peterson and Marian McPartland, and performed with major name bands and ensembles including Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Rob McConnell’s Boss Brass, the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, the Elvin Jones Quartet, and the Herbie Mann/Al Grey All-Star Septet.

He formed his own trio in the early ‘70s, and began occupying the piano chair in The Moe Koffman Quintet in 1979 when the band was the number one small jazz combo in Canada. He had played with Moe on occasion prior to that and “was always impressed with his utter musicality and his complete mastery of the flute, alto, and soprano saxophones”. As part of The Moe Koffman Quintet, Senensky ultimately had the opportunity to contribute many of his own compositions to the band’s repertoire for more than 20 years, and continues to keep the memory and the music of Moe Koffman alive today as leader of his "Tribute to Moe Koffman Band."

The following audio only file features Bernie along with Gary Bartz on alto sax, bassist Harvie Swartz and drummer Akira Tana on the title tune from Frank Loesser's "Guys and Dolls."