The Improbability of the Clarke Boland Big Band

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

As has been the case recently with many of the earlier postings that have appeared  on the blog in multiple or sequential formats, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has taken the opportunity to combine these into single feature to make them more accessible in the blog archives.

I have also standardized the fonts and enhanced the accompanying graphics and images.

Lastly, I have added two videos to give the reader a sampling of the actual music under discussion.

This feature originally posted to the blog in two parts feature on July 6,2008 and July 8,2008, respectively.

The Improbability of the Clarke Boland Big Band – Part 1

For a variety of reasons, I missed the Clarke Boland Big Band [CBBB] during most of its existence on the 1960s Jazz scene . Although I recall that many of my friends raved about the band, and I remember seeing their initial Atlantic LP – Jazz is Universal – on display in record stores, I never actually heard the band’s music until over 20 years after it had ceased to exist in 1972.

Thanks to the glorious era of re-issuance that followed the development of the compact disc, I now know what all the fuss was about.  What a band! One of the all-time great bands in the history of Jazz.

Yet, judging by the opening paragraph from the chapter on the band in Mike Hennessey’s, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke [London: Quartet Books, 1990, pp. 160-177], it would appear that there were many reasons why this band should have been absented from that history in the first place.

And given Mr. Hennessey’s description of how the band came together and what it took to maintain it during the 12 or so years of existence, the fantasy world implication of the Disney art that adorns its More Jazz Japanese release may be more fitting than comical.

Of course, as a former drummer, how can you not love a big band that has two? But that’s another part of the improbable story as told by Mike Hennessey.

© - Mr. Hennessey , copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Almost everything about the Clarke‑Boland Big Band was improbable. It was invented, nurtured, nourished, fussed over, financed, promoted and absolutely adored by a German-­born Italian socialist whose qualifications for band management were that he was a trained architect and owner of a flourishing coffee bar in Cologne's Hohestrasse. Its leader were two musicians who competed with each other in the art of staying in the background and maintaining a low profile. It roster of members over the years embraced more than a dozen nationalities, half a dozen religions and a daunting assortment of egos, most of them on the large side. To bring the band together for rehearsal, record dates and concerts involved formidable complexity of travel arrangements and much intricate juggling with the musicians' individual work schedules.  Despite all of this, plus the inevitable, multiple frustration financial Everests, outbreaks of pique, petulance and pig-headedness, and that well‑known capacity of airlines to deliver a bass player to Cologne and his bass to Caracas, the band not only survived for eleven years but developed into a unit surpassing excellence, becoming an important ‑ and genuinely significant ‑ part of jazz history. It was by far the finest jazz orchestra ever assembled outside the United States.

And Pier‑Luigi 'Gigi' Campi, the man who made it happen, is quite emphatic that the band simply could not have existed without Kenny Clarke. 'We needed his magic touch he told me.”

As a teenager in Italy during the Second World War, Campi used to listen under the blankets in a Jesuit college to jazz broadcasts from the American Forces Network. He listened to Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Lunceford, Roy Eldridge and Duke Ellington and among his circle of friends, jazz records were more highly prized than black‑market coffee.

But it was when Campi heard a Charlie Parker record in 1948 that he started to become a real jazz devotee. In 1949 he attended an international meeting of young socialists from all over Europe and, as he alighted from the train in Zurich, he saw a poster announcing a concert that evening by Django Reinhardt. A record by the Quintette du Hot Club de France was among those he had heard clandestinely in college and he couldn't resist the opportunity to see and hear Django in person. So he decided to skip the scheduled briefing for the

political meeting that evening and attend the concert instead. Gigi recalls:

There was another group mentioned on the poster but the names meant nothing to me. Django played the first half and I was really excited by the music. But in the second half, this group of black musicians played ‑ and the music sounded strange, but wonderful. I remember coming out of that concert feeling absolutely exhilarated. I was telling myself, 'Django was fine ‑ but those black musicians, they were really fantastic.' Three years later, James Moody and his group were touring Germany. My wife and I were passing through Munich on the way to a ski resort and we discovered that Moody's group was playing in town that evening. We went to the concert and as soon as the band took the stage, I said to my wife, 'I've seen that drummer before.'

The drummer, of course, was Kenny Clarke, who'd been a member of the band that

had played the second half of the Django concert in 1949. And Gigi discovered that the men with Kenny at that time had been Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter and Tadd Dameron, fresh from the historic first Jazz Festival.

‘I went backstage after the concert/ Gigi says, 'and had my first close‑up of what you

later called "the thousand‑candle‑power-grin". Kenny impressed me enormously, not only as a drummer but as a person.'

The success of his coffee bar enabled Gigi Campi to indulge his love of jazz by

organizing concert tours and producing jazz records. He set up a tour for the Chet Baker Quartet and recorded Lars Gullin, Lee Konitz and Hans Koller for his Mod label. His enthusiasm, however, outstripped his entre­preneurial flair as a jazz promoter. He lost $10,000 on a 1956 Lee Konitz tour.

But I learned something from being on the road with Lee. My friends and I were big fans of cool jazz at that time, but Lee would always be singing Lester Young solos on the train. I think that tuned me in again to the swing‑band era. He also said that the next time he came on tour, I should make a point of hiring Kenny Clarke to play drums. But, after this tour had flopped, I decided to cut my losses and quit the jazz business. However, I remembered Kenny Clarke, of course, and I resolved that if I decided to get involved with jazz production and promotion again, the first thing I would make sure of was that I had a good rhythm section.

At the time that Campi was beating a retreat from jazz promotion, Francois 'Francy' Boland, a twenty‑ six‑year‑ old pianist, composer and arranger from Namur, Belgium, was in the United States writing arrangements for Benny Goodman and Count Basie, having been recommended by Mary Lou Williams. Boland, a largely self‑taught musician, had studied music for a few years at the local conservatory and had taken piano and harmony courses at the Liege Royal Conservatory. A great admirer of the swing bands, particularly those of Les Brown, Basie and Artie Shaw, he wrote his first big‑band arrangements in 1942 when he was thirteen years old.

Francy had also written arrangements for the German orchestras of Kurt Edelhagen and Werner Muller and it was through Edelhagen that Gigi Campi first became aware of his arranging skills. Kurt Edelhagen was the leader of one of Germany's most successful big jazz bands, a multi‑nation outfit which he assembled in 1957 and which, though a touch bombastic and lacking in subtlety, was one of the most impressive large jazz ensembles of its time in Europe and boasted some fine soloists ‑ including, at various times, Dusk Gojkovic, Jiggs Whigham, Carl Drevo, Peter Trunk, Jimmy Deuchar, Shake Keane, Ronnie Stephenson, Wilton Gaynair, Ferdinand Povel, Benny Bailey, Peter Herbolzheimer, Derek Humble and Ken Wray.

Edelhagen had a contract with the West Deutsche Rundfunk in Cologne, whose studios were opposite the office of Gigi Campi, and musicians from the band were always in the coffee shop. Campi used to go across the street to listen to the band rehearse, and on one of these occasions he heard a most arresting version of the Rodgers and Hart standard 'Johnny One Note'. He asked who'd done the arrangement and Chris Kellens, a Belgian who played trombone in the Edelhagen band said, 'That's one by the maestro, Francy Boland.' Campi toId Edelhagen that if he really wanted to develop the style and character of his band, he should give more arranging commis­sions to Boland.

Said Campi,

Francy was sending all the arrangements he was writing for Basie to Edelhagen as well, including 'Major's Groove', which later became 'Griff's Groove', a feature for Johnny Griffin. I had met Francy in 1955 when he was working with Chet Baker after the death of Chet's pianist, Dick Twardzik, and I remember enjoying his piano playing. Now, having listened to some of his arrangements, an idea was forming in my mind.

Later Francy, who had returned from the States after some disagreement over payment for the Basie arrangements, came to Cologne to look up some of his friends in the Edelhagen band, and Gigi told him that he was planning to put together a big band to play Boland's arrangements. They then spent an hour or so discussing the personnel for the band. At this time Gigi had returned to working as a jazz promoter, at least to the extent of featuring live jazz in his coffee house, so he had some musicians in mind. Campi made a point, in particular, of putting on jazz at the time of the annual fasching, the German mardi gras carnival, as a kind of antidote to what he called the 'traditional junk carnival music'. At carnival time in February 1960, Campi booked tenor saxophonist Don Byas and assem­bled in support Francy Boland, Kenny Clarke and a group of musicians from the Edelhagen band: Chris Kellens (trom­bone), Eddie Busnello (alto), Fats Sadi (vibes) and Jean War­land (bass). Recordings by this group were later issued by the German Electrola Company as Don Wails with Kenny.

The first real Clarke‑Boland recording, however, was made in Cologne a year later, in May 1961. It featured Kenny and Francy with Raymond Droz on alto horn, Chris Kellens on baritone horn, Britain's Derek Humble on alto, Austria's Carl Drevo on tenor and Jimmy Woode on bass. That was the firs manifestation of what was to become the regular rhythm section of the Clarke‑Boland band. Campi sent the tape to Alfred Lion of Blue Note who hailed it as 'fantastic' and released it under the title The Golden Eight.

Both the Electrola and the Blue Note albums had been recorded by a brilliant engineer, Wolfgang Hirschmann, who was to become the engineer of the CBBB over the next decade. Campi, Boland and Clarke all had the highest regard for Hirschmann. Kenny once said that the three sound engineers he really respected were Hirschmann, Rudy van Gelder and a German technician at the old Paris Barclay studios called Gerhard Lehner, because they all used just one mike above the drums to capture his sound. 'Sometimes they would use extra mikes for the hi‑hat and snare drum, but I preferred just one,' Kenny said ‑ which is another illustration of his belief in the efficacy of simplicity.

It was seven months later, in December 1961, that the Clarke‑Boland Big Band came into being in the Electrola Studios in Cologne ‑ and its recording debut was fortuitous. The session had originally been a date for Billie Poole, who was playing at the Storyville Club in Cologne at the time with Klook, Jimmy Gourley and Lou Bennett. Campi was arranging to record Billie for Riverside and had decided, with Kenny and Francy, to assemble 'a little big band' for the date. Francy wrote the arrangements and the line‑up was Benny Bailey, Roger Guerin, Jimmy Deuchar and Ahmed Muvaffak Falay (trumpets); Nat Peck, Ake Persson (trombones); Carl Drevo, Zoot Sims (tenors), Derek Humble (alto), Sahib Shihab (bari­tone), Francy Boland (piano), Jimmy Woode (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums).

France's Roger Guerin had worked often with Klook since 1956. Shihab had come to Europe in 1959 with the Quincy Jones band and had stayed over, settling in Stockholm. Zoot was on tour, and Persson, another former Quincy Jones sideman, was now based in Berlin and freelancing. Falay ha come to Europe from Turkey, and although some people thought he had acquired his middle name after mortally offending a none‑too‑literate fellow musician, it seems that it really was genuine. Benny Bailey, yet another former Quincy Jones alumnus, was living in Berlin and working in the Sender Freies Berlin radio orchestra, and Nat Peck, a Paris‑based American, had chalked up a great deal of big‑band experience with Glenn Miller, Don Redman, Duke Ellington and ‑ need­less to add ‑ Quincy Jones.

All was set for the record date, when, one week before the musicians were due to assemble in Cologne, Billie Poole had to return to the States because of a bereavement in the family. Rather than cancel the date, Campi had Francy Boland write seven new arrangements at breakneck speed and the session became the first date for the Clarke‑Boland Big Band. It was released by Atlantic, and aptly titled Jazz is Universal.

Campi told me,

The opening track on that album, 'Box 703, Washington DC', was like an explosion. I remember Ake Persson coming into the control room to hear the playback and saying, 'Gigi, put this band on the road for six weeks and we'll scare the shit out of everybody!' The spirit among the musicians was tremendous ‑ everyone knew that we had a sensational band together. The feeling was electric. I remember Ake came into the office after we'd finished recording late one night and I told him I had some extra money to give him. He shook his head and said, 'No, we don't have to speak about money.'

I said, 'You mean you're not happy with the fee? You want more?

'No. I mean that I should be paying you for the privilege of playing in a motherfucking band like this after all these years.'

And that was the kind of spirit that developed ‑ the music and the feeling became more important than the money ‑ a really remarkable thing when you consider how hard musicians sometimes have to fight to get paid, or to get paid adequately.

What was especially important about Jazz is Universal was that it proved beyond a doubt that jazz was no longer the exclusive preserve of American musicians. 'The thoroughly integrated sound that emerged from this band,' wrote 'Voice of America' producer and presenter Willis Conover in the liner note for the album, 'is convincing evidence that international boundaries have no meaning at all to the practicing jazz musician.'

Seven of the thirteen musicians in the band were European and their ability to hold their own with their American colleagues did no damage at all to the cause of winning a just measure of appreciation and recognition for some of the excellent European jazz musicians who were emerging. An indication of how the band's enthusiasm for the music was as abundant as its musicianship is the fact that the album was recorded in just four hours!

It was always Campi's goal, with the CBBB, to create a band which had an immediately recognizable identity ‑ which was why he wanted Francy Boland to write all the band's arrange­ments. Boland's very special concept of arranging helped to achieve this aim, and the brilliant solo and section work of a band whose members loved to play together and who de­veloped such a great personal and musical rapport, did the rest.

The key elements, according to Campi, were first of all the rhythm section: 'I knew when I heard Kenny, Francy and Jimmy play together for the first time that I simply had to build a big band around them.' A second crucial element was the magnificent lead trumpet and solo work of Benny Bailey ‑ a musician for whom both Dizzy Gillespie and Thad Jones expressed admiration tinged with awe. The third was the immaculate lead alto saxophone and brilliant, serpentine solo work of Derek Humble. And a fourth was the massive loyalty and surging enthusiasm of the big Swede, Ake Persson, who was an indefatigable champion of the band. Ake was also a formidable trombonist. Nat Peck once said, 'Every time I sit down with him it's like I'm hearing him for the first time Thrilling! I've never worked with anyone who has stimulated me so much.'

Encouraged by the success of the Universal album, Gigi Campi decided to assemble an even bigger band for the next record date on 25, 26 and 27 January 1963. Two albums resulted from this session made with a twenty‑one‑piece orchestra ‑ six trumpets, five trombones, five saxophones and an augmented rhythm section with Joe Harris on percussion ‑ Now Hear Our ­Meanin' released on CBS, and Handle with Care, released on the Atlantic label. Britain's Ronnie Scott came into the band for the first time, as did Idrees Sulieman and Austrian trombonist Erich Kleinschuster. And, in the absence of Zoot Sims, Campi flew in Billy Mitchell from the United States as principal tenor‑saxophone soloist. Also in the line‑up ‑ through a misunderstanding more worthy of fiction than fact ‑ was trombonist Keg Johnson, direct from New York.

The band needed a bass trombonist ‑ and nobody seemed to be able to come up with a suitable candidate. Then Ake Persson came to see Nat Peck, clutching an album. 'I've got him,’ he said. 'Listen to this.' And he played a track from the Gil Evans album, Out of the Cool. Nat was impressed. Persson pointed out the name on the sleeve and they called Campi in Cologne. 'You must get Keg for this date,' they said. Campi, always responsive to enthusiasm, agreed to bring Johnson in from New York.

During the session Keg did a pretty good job, but somehow, Peck and Persson thought, he wasn't quite matching his playing on the Evans album. After the first day's recording was over, Persson and Peck had drinks with Johnson. They told him how they'd heard him on the Gil Evans album. 'Some of the best bass‑trombone playing I ever heard in my life,' said Nat Peck. 'Absolutely fantastic,' confirmed Persson.

'Well, thanks,' said Keg. 'But actually, that wasn't me. I didn't play bass trombone on that album. As a matter of fact, I'm not really a bass‑trombone player at all. I had to borrow the instrument for this date.'

The bass‑trombone player was actually Tony Studd. But Ake and Nat took a year to break the news to Campi.

Talking to me about the album in November 1966 when I was preparing an article on the band for Down Beat, Kenny Clarke said it was one of the most satisfying dates of his career. He said:

The record is proof positive that there are as good musicians in Europe as there are in the States. I have never felt that the standard in Europe was much lower than in America. In Germany, it is just as high, even higher.

I've worked around the studios in the States and I really think that music here in Europe is on a higher plane.

When I asked Klook how the Clarke‑Boland compared with big band of Dizzy Gillespie he smiled the inimitable Klook smile and said, 'There is no comparison. That was the greatest band I ever played with in my life. I have never played in a band that was so inspirational and dynamic. It will never happen again in my lifetime. But we can come pretty close.'

It was not until May 1966 that the Clarke‑Boland Band played its first live concert ‑ in Mainz, West Germany ‑ which was broadcast in the regular jazz program of Jazz producer and critic Joachim Ernst Berendt for the Sudwestfunk, Baden­-Baden. Reviewing the concert, the critic of the Mainzer Zeitung wrote:

The Clarke‑Boland Band showed that musically and technically they are masters of their craft. The compositions and arrangements were excellent and the solos displayed a combination of vitality, a beautiful smoothness and command of musical range ... What strikes one after close listening is the classic harmony of the brilliant soli and tutti passages, played with elegance and confidence and distinguishing the band from all other big jazz ensembles.

Boland's arranging style did indeed make excellent use of the soli [a section of the band playing in harmony] and tutti [literally, “all together; the entire band or a section in unison] devices, and they became something of a CBBB hallmark. He used them in 'Get Out of Town' on the Handle with Care album, and they were dramatically in evi­dence on the Clarke‑Boland Band's third album, recorded in Cologne on 18 June 1967 for the Saba (later MPS) label of Hans Georg Brunner‑Schwer. For this album, which featured Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis as guest soloist, Boland wrote an arrangement based on 'Chinatown' and called 'Sax no End'. It was a masterpiece of saxophone scoring ‑ and it needed a saxophone team of the calibre of Derek Humble, Carl Drevo, Johnny Griffin, Ronnie Scott and Sahib Shihab to do it justice. After Eddie Davis solos over four choruses with just the rhythm section and Fats Sadi's bongos, the saxophone section, master­fully piloted by Humble, plays three complex and intricate soli choruses with fine precision, co‑ordination and compatibility. Two roaring tutti choruses follow. Saxophonist Kenny Graham, reviewing the Sax no End album in Crescendo in Mav 1968, said:

One particular bit did my old ears a power of good ‑ a saxophone chorus brilliantly led by Derek Humble. I just love hearing saxophones having a chance to play a well‑written chorus instead of riffs, figures and the boosting‑up‑the‑brass chores that they usually find themselves doing Maybe that's what Francy Boland is really all about. Nobody does saxophone choruses these days ‑ they're not on. F.B., oblivious of trends etc., bungs' em in. This and similar notions of his come off a treat because he believes in them.

Sax no End was a major landmark in the band's progress towards its ultimate corporate identity and it was followed by a number of other arrangements featuring saxophone soli, such as 'All the Things You Are', 'When Your Lover Has Gone', 'You Stepped out of a Dream', and many more. Ronnie Scott remembers those soli passages only too well. He says of 'Sax no End', characteristically self‑critical,

They  were very difficult to play ‑ in fact, I never really got ‘Sax no End’ down. But they were beautifully written and sounded marvellous. Derek was the navigator in chief ‑ and, of course, Shihab was a great anchor man. After about the first four times, he never had to look at the part.

Certainly the arrangement made a big impression and was always a favourite at live performances. Oscar Peterson was so taken with the chart that he actually recorded a trio version for his MPS album Travellin' On. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Sax no End album was that all seven titles were recorded in seven hours.

'It was almost always a first‑take affair when the band recorded’ Gigi Campi says. 'We hardly ever played anything more than three times ‑ and then we usually found that the first take was the best.'

In between the big‑band dates Clarke and Boland made a number of sessions with smaller groups featuring different members of the band ‑ Johnny Griffin, Fats Sadi, Sahib Shihab ‑ and an octet album with singer Mark Murphy. The band also began to make more live appearances, playing festivals and concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Holland, Belgium, France, Hungary, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Britain.

Campi worked tirelessly to project and promote the band and, recognizing early on the importance of getting airplay for the CBBB's music, he concluded an agreement in 1967 to sell a monthly half‑hour programme by the band to radio stations in Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hilversum, Brussels, Vienna, Zurich, Baden-Baden, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Saarbrucken, Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne.”

The Improbability of the Clarke Boland Big Band – Part 2

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

Between 1967 and 1969 the CBBB recorded a series of fine albums, including Faces, Latin Kaleidoscope (with Phil Woods) Fellini 7112 and Off Limits for the MPS label which were excellent showcases for the arranging and compositional talents of Francy Boland and for the band's exceptional 'togetherness'.

The vintage year of the Clarke‑Boland Band was 1969 and by common consent the peak performances of the band's career were heard ‑ and, happily, recorded ‑ during an unforgettable two‑week engagement at Ronnie Scott's Club in London from 17 February to 1 March. As I wrote at the time, if there has to be one set of recordings, from all of the band's repertoire on disc selected to stand as a monument to the finest jazz ensemble to come out of Europe, then it has to be the thirteen tracks and two albums from that 1969 Ronnie Scott’s Club date.

The band broke attendance records at the club and, says Campi, only then did the musicians really feel the full extent of the power of which they were capable. To have the opportunity of playing together night after night for two weeks made it possible to achieve a rapport and a mutuality of feeling that even this intuitively integrated band had not equaled hitherto.

By this time the CBBB had an additional drummer. Recruiting a second drummer for a band that has Kenny Clarke in its rhythm section would seem to be setting a new standard in futility. But it worked. British drummer Kenny Clare, a noted session musician, with excellent technique and good reading ability, had first come into the band as a sub when Klook had other commitments. He handled the job so well that he was taken on the 'permanent staff.’  There are various explanations as to why this happened and, in all probability ‑ as is usually the case ‑ there is an element of truth in most of them.

Whenever it was suggested to Klook there was one drummer too many in the band, he vigorously disagreed. Two drum-heads, he argued, are better than one. He told Max Jones in a Melody Maker interview published on 15 March 1968:

It came about because of my teaching. From my experience with students

I thought that maybe drummers can play together without being noisy or confusing. So I tried it out at the Selmer school in Paris and found it worked well.

Between the two of us, I think that Kenny and I can play anything in the world ... He is someone who thinks exactly the same way I do about drumming. He's one of the most intelligent drummers I've ever met ... We're two soul brothers.

I would suggest that this may be another example of Kenny's tendency to retrospective rationalization. Ronnie Scott's recol­lection is that Kenny Clare's presence in the band was in­tended to take some of the pressure off Klook, 'who wasn't the greatest reader in the world. The arrangement allowed Kenny Clarke to coast from time to time ‑ and it worked because they were so compatible. It would have been disastrous otherwise.' And in best Ronnie Scott style he instanced the massive all‑star band organized by Charlie Watts in 1987 which had not two drummers but three. 'Someone asked the vibraphone player what he thought of the tempo of a piece the band was rehearsing. "Fine," he said, "I liked all three of them."'

Kenny Clare recalled his first gig with the band when he talked to Crescendo's Tony Brown in May 1968. He had made a good impression and was asked by Gigi Campi to play alongside Klook on the next date.

They gave me a couple of notes on vibraphone which I invariably played wrongly ‑ well, they figured that I'd always be available to do anything that Klock wouldn't be free to do. I could do sundry percussion. Then one number was a Turkish march thing and I played snare drum. When it was played back it sounded very much together, like one drummer. They talked it over. Next time I came, would I bring my drums as well? See if we could make it with both of us playing. It worked ‑ and it's been like that ever since.

There is no doubt that driving the CBBB took a lot of energy and endurance and the addition of Clare not only added to the rhythmic foundation but also spread the heavy percussion load.

Playing along with the greatest drummer in the world was a pretty intimidating experience for Clare. He once told me of the first gig with Klook in Ostend in 1967 when the dual drumming exercise became a nightmare. 'Try as I would at rehearsal, I just couldn't get it together. The drums were fighting each other.'

He left the theatre after the rehearsal full of gloom and depression and decided that the best thing to do for the sake of the band would be to slip silently away. He went to book a flight back to London ‑ but there wasn't one. He shrugged resignedly, walked around the town for a couple of hours, then finally made his way back to the theatre for the concert.

'I started the first number full of apprehension ‑ but from the very first beat, it all came together miraculously. I just couldn't believe it!'

And that was the beginning of a beautiful percussion friendship. From then on, Clare became an integral part of the rhythm section and missed only one gig with the band. Strangely enough, Clare said he was never able to play the same away from the band. 'There are many drummers who would love to get the same springy kind of beat that Klook gets. I'm one of them. When I'm with him, I can play that way without even thinking about it. As soon as I'm away from him, I can't do it any more.'

True to character, Klook gave every encouragement to Kenny Clare and undoubtedly one of the important reasons why they worked so well together was that they had such a warm relationship off the stage, as well as on.

British drummer Frank King, reviewing the two Polydor albums that resulted from the Scott engagement, wrote in Crescendo: 'The perception and telepathy between Kenny Clarke and Kenny Clare is magnificent. They have such a fantastic togetherness that in places it is miraculous.'

With Jimmy Woode unavailable, Ronnie Scott's bassist, Ron Mathewson, was brought in for the club engagement and with Clare, Scott, Tony Coe (on tenor and clarinet), Humble and Tony Fisher (trumpet, depping for Jimmy Deuchar), the British contingent in the band was as big as the American. Yugosla­via's Dusko Gojkovic was recruited into the trumpet section.

Gigi Campi had to miss the first week of the engagement, but when he walked into the club on the Monday of the second week, Johnny Griffin told him, 'Gigi, you're gonna hear some shit tonight!' Campi sat at a table with writer Bob Houston, my wife and myself and beamed as his 'family' took the stage. ('Italians/ he'd explained to me once, 'always try to wrap everything up in a sense of family ‑ and that's how I regard the band.') Campi had heard practically every note the band had played since its debut. But when it hit, with a high‑voltage version of 'Box 703', Campi turned to us wide‑eyed and said, 'Wow!' Later he told me: 'I couldn't believe how good the band sounded. When they played the tutti in "Now Hear My Meanin' " I got goose pimples all over.'

For Ronnie Scott those two weeks were undoubtedly one of the major highlights in the history of the club, as well as being musically inspirational. 'It was marvellous. People used to applaud in the middle of the arrangements ‑ showing their appreciation of some of the tutti or soli passages. It was really one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.'

The year 1969 was certainly a banner one for the Clarke­ Boland Big Band. It played the Pori Festival in Finland that summer and Lars Lystedt, Down Beat's Scandinavian corres­pondent, described the condition of the audience as 'spell­bound'. In September the band shared the bill at Rotterdam's De Doelen concert hall with the mighty Thad Jones‑Mel Lewis Orchestra, and reporting for Britain's Melody Maker, Jan van Setten told of 1,780 people 'exploding into thunderous acclaim after the four‑and‑a‑half‑hour marathon concert'. It was a real battle of the bands, he said. 'Who won? Music.'

At the Prague Jazz Festival in October, the CBBB 'totally eclipsed' the Duke Ellington band, according to Melody Mak­er's Jack Hutton: 'This year's Prague Festival proved one thing conclusively to me ‑ the Kenny Clarke‑Francy Boland Big Band is the finest big band in existence.’

And after a Paris concert in that same month, Jacques B. Hess of Le Monde wrote:

The CBBB is a triumph, at the highest level of talent and professionalism.

The warmth, the commitment and the enthusiasm of the musicians is refreshing and a marked change from the lackluster and blasé perform­ances of the Ellington and Basie bands which we have become used to over the last few years.

In October 1970 the CBBB was back in Britain for a three‑week engagement at Ronnie Scott's and at this time Carmen McRae came to London to record with the band in the Lansdowne Studios. With a minimum of rehearsal time, the superbly professional ex‑Mrs. Clarke managed astonishingly well with some difficult scores, especially considering that six of the eight tunes recorded were new to her. The whole session was completed in eight hours. It was named after a Boland-­Jimmy Woode song on the album, 'November Girl'.

There followed a three‑week European tour which had Dizzy Gillespie as special guest and which culminated in an appearance at the Berlin jazz Festival. But the tour was not a great success musically because the band had to submerge its own personality to play a programme that was more closely associated with Dizzy.

In fact there were now signs that the band was beginning to run out of steam and, no doubt, one of the factors which undermined its momentum was Campi's failure to conclude an agreement to take the band to the United States. It was a great disappointment for Kenny Clarke ‑ and for all concerned with the CBBB. But, for a variety of reasons ‑ predominantly financial ‑ plans to have the band appear at the Village Gate in New York, followed by concerts in Boston and Chicago, an appearance at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival and a tour of Canada, did not come to fruition.

'I'd really love to take the band on the road in the States/ Kenny Clarke told me in 1967, 'just to prove the point about the high standard of European musicians.' But it was not to be.

What finally caused Kenny Clarke to acknowledge that the days of the CBBB were numbered, however, was the untimely death of Derek Humble on 2 February 1971 at the age of thirty‑nine. 'The band was never the same without Derek/ Kenny said, voicing a sentiment that was shared by the whole CBBB family.

In June 1971 the band made its last recording, Change of Scenes, with Stan Getz as guest soloist and, in March 1972 in Nuremberg, played its last concert date when, according to Gigi Campi, 'it was a sorry shadow of its former self'. He went on:

Johnny Griffin came to me after the concert, and virtually read the funeral service. The following morning I had a long discussion with Francy and Klook to see if we could keep the band going. I still thought there might be a possibility of pulling off an extensive tour of the USA which could have regenerated the spirit of the band. So some days later I went on a round trip of Europe to try to put the band together again. I called on Idrees, Nat Peck, Tony Coe and Johnny Griffin and finished up in Montreuil with Francy, Mook and Benny Bailey. And finally I realized that it wasn't going to happen ...

And that's when even Campi's apparently unquenchable enthusiasm gave out. It was April 1972 and the Clarke‑Boland Big Band had breathed its last.

But, as Bob Houston, who was closely associated with the band through most of its lifetime, wrote afterwards, though the demise was a matter for regret, that the band had existed at all was a matter for celebration ‑ 'as with all phenomena which survive on excellence against the tides of current fads and fashions ... The CBBB was one of the most enjoyable mani­festations of the last decade in jazz. Be grateful that it happened at all, and that we have it on record to enjoy.'

And Kenny Clarke said, 'It was a fantastic, unique experi­ence from which I learned a lot. It was not only a great band, it was a community, a congregation of friends ‑ and one of the happiest bands I've ever worked with.'

The Clarke‑Boland Big Band left a rich legacy of its reper­toire on record. In the eleven years of its existence it recorded thirty‑nine albums.

Kenny Clarke's role in the CBBB was not only the obvious one of being the rhythmic dynamo; he was important as a co‑leader in his own reserved and unobtrusive way. He led by example; he had the total respect of all the musicians who ever played in the band, and that respect, coupled with respect for one another, was what kept the band so tight and its musical standards so high.

Says Johnny Griffin,

The CBBB couldn't have lasted with a Benny Goodman or a Buddy Rich leading it ‑ because there were too many bandleaders in the band. It wouldn't have worked if the leaders had been dictators. I mean, the vibrations from the egos! My God, imagine ‑ three trumpet players all Leos: Idrees Sulieman, Benny Bailey and Art Farmer. It was like an armed truce. It was amazing with all those different characters and the strength in each one. And it would mesh! There was no one on the band that you could pick on! It was really like a zoo, with tigers, lions and gorillas in it!

'I never met anyone who stayed so calm/ Kenny Clare said of Klook in an interview with Crescendo's Tony Brown. 'You should come along to a recording session. All pandemonium let loose, everybody talking or blowing like a bunch of madmen. Kenny never raises his voice or gets excited. He is a wonder.'

Ronnie Scott confesses that he was always a little bit in awe of Kenny Clarke. 'But he was always so amiable and pleasant. He didn't come on like your typical extrovert bandleader. He just sat there, and played ‑ and that was enough.'

Gigi Campi remembers times when Kenny would arrive late for rehearsal or recording due to plane or train delays. 'We would all be waiting in the studio ‑ and as soon as Kenny walked in you were aware that there was suddenly more power in the room. His presence ‑ quiet, dignified and calm ‑was such a positive force.'

Jimmy Woode says that it was simply not Klook's way to get out in front of the band and pep‑talk the musicians. 'He might speak quietly. to you individually ‑ but his leadership was implicit in his solid integrity. Francy and Klook were not exactly charismatic leaders like Duke.'

Ron Mathewson remembers Klook as a man who comman­ded respect from all the members of the band without any attempt to pull rank: 'He was really helpful to me when I came into the band for the gig at Ronnie's. He said, to me, very nicely, "Keep a straight four. Let the guys feel you, because you're new. They want to trust the rhythm section. Just play it cool and let it happen."'

Francy Boland's co‑leadership consisted entirely of creating the band's inimitable book, writing not for the instruments but for the musicians, and providing support and solos from the keyboard that were consistently streets ahead of his own evaluation of them. Boland carries self‑effacement almost to the point of self‑erasure. He told me, 'Kenny didn't really have a lot to do with the music. And I wanted it that way because I was the arranger.'

And without any apparent awareness of the sublime irony of a Boland being struck by someone else's inclination to maintain a low profile, he added, 'Kenny was a very reserved person and he kept his thoughts to himself. He never express­ed enthusiasm when I came in with a new arrangement; though he might give me a compliment ‑ a small compliment ‑from time to time.'

Clarke and Boland, during their association together, were never in any danger of engulfing one another in explicit mutual admiration. But had it not been there in some abund­ance, the band simply would not have flourished. Whatever Boland may feel about the measure of respect and appreciation he received from Kenny, Gigi Campi remembers an incident which speaks eloquently of Klook's high regard for his partner.

The band was rehearsing and swinging like a demon ‑ without a drummer. Kenny was standing out in front, rolling a joint. Suddenly he looked up in mock disbelief and genuine joy, and said, 'This band doesn't need a drummer. That Belgian motherfucker swings it just with his writing, goddam it!

'For Kenny,' Campi adds, 'there were two great arrangers in Tadd Dameron and Francy Boland.'

 

Eddy Louiss, Ivan Jullien and PORGY & BESS

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

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. (...) Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it."

- Ernest Hemingway, 1960 Extract from A Moveable Feast

“French trumpeter, arranger, composer, and conductor Ivan Jullien paired up with organist Eddy Louiss for this expansive 1971 version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. An ambitious combination of small-group jazz, big band, and Gil Evans-style orchestration, Jullien's Porgy and; Bess also found him eschewing stylistic traditions with charts that touched upon hard bop, old-school swing, and AM pop, and even made room for bursts of electric fusion. It remains a landmark of French jazz and one of Jullien's most memorable recordings.”

- Matt Collar, AllMusic.com

Some years ago, I remember mentioning to a friend who lived and worked in Paris that I didn’t recall seeing much in the way of French big band Jazz.

“That’s because you don’t know where to look for it,” he said.

A few days later, he sent me some recordings that featured compositions and arrangements by Ivan Jullien, someone I had known primarily as a French Jazz trumpet player.

If you’ll excuse the bad attempt at a pun, Jullien’s work just blew me away.

I was particularly impressed with his collaboration with Hammond B-3 organist Eddy Louiss on George Gershwin’s light opera Porgy and Bess which was produced in 1971 as a Riviera LP [421.083] and later released as number 41 of the Jazz in Paris CD series [Gitanes Jazz Productions 013 039-2].

The respected French Jazz critic Alain Tercinet had this to say about the recording in his insert notes to the CD [Martin Davies translated these from the French.].

"An organ springing out of the sea

It's not Nemo, it's Eddy

Hoisting the organ on the horizon

Heave ho, it's Louiss".

"That's Claude Nougaro's tribute in song to one of his most loyal accompanists, an arranger and composer too, on occasion. For Paris Mai, for example, or C'est Eddy. "He's a genius", said Stan Getz, who'd fallen under the spell of his music and joined his trio on impulse. Eddy Louiss is now a man of Rabelaisian fanfares, the soul of Multicolore Feeling, and he, better than anyone, knew how to make the Hammond organ dance — an awkward instrument to say the least, if not as ungainly as a Henri II antique — probably because Eddy maintained a passionate and impassioned relationship with it : one day it was "Little by little, the organ became vital to me, it totally integrated itself inside my musical universe" - and the next day : "This organ's a bloody pain. Sometimes all my feelings just can't get out. As if the instrument had its own inertia. Except when I'm playing well, obviously."

That was something that happened more often than not. It happened on November 12th 1971 too, when Eddy was recording Ivan Jullien's rather iconoclastic version of "Porgy and Bess". A trumpeter and arranger before he turned to leading a band, Ivan Jullien had acquired solid big-band experience during his years with Daniel Jeannin — who'd been in the pit orchestra at the Olympia theatre for a time — and also with Jacques Denjean. He'd led the Paris Jazz All Stars in 1965, when it came into existence for a concert in Hamburg. "For us French musicians", he said, "it was quite a revelation, because French jazz in the big-band format was something we'd stopped believing in !" The following year, he recorded his first album with the cream of France's musicians, an album entitled "Paris Point Zero". It was during those sessions that he was inspired to throw an immortal line at Michel Portal : "Listen, old man, we're not looking for perfection here, this is jazz we're doing !"

This time there were 26 musicians, among them Benny Vasseur [trombone]and Jean-Louis Chautemps [tenor sax], but also Michel Grallier [piano], Pierre Cullaz [guitar] and Andre Ceccarelli [drums]. However, except for Ceccarelli, who was omnipresent and consistently apposite, and Ivan Jullien, who played a few short phrases on trumpet, none of them took a solo. They weren't there to provide accompaniment, but to provide an envelope that surrounded, submerged (and brought back to the surface) the Hammond of Eddy Louiss. The orchestra did this with sumptuous, moving layers of sound in a spirit that was inherited from Gil Evans, but contained nothing borrowed….

Would Gershwin have approved if he'd heard his work without such famous pieces as Summertime and It ain't necessarily so? Would he have recognised his Gone, gone, gone or There's a boat dat's leavin' soon for New York ? Behind the two long and abundant performances by Eddy Louiss, who navigates his instrument through all kinds of weather ? Probably not, but given the result, he would certainly have taken his hat off to them."

[Ed. note: Gone, Gone, Gone is not part of the original Gershwin opera, but was written in the spirit of it by Gil Evans for the recording of Porgy and Bess that he arranged for Miles Davis].

Eddy, with drummer Andre Ceccarelli’s “urging,” really turns it loose on the following video montage which is set to Ivan Jullien’s arrangement of There’s a Boat Dats Leavin’ Soon For New York.

I’m sure glad that my Parisian ami showed me where to look for French Big Band Jazz.

Unpreparedness and Listening to Jazz

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

“In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.”

- Orrin Keepnews [Emphasis mine]

For many Jazz fans who were raised on the Jazz of the 1920’s, what could be considered as the initial phase in the development of the music as it progressed from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, even the music of The Swing Era that followed let alone the subsequent Bebop Era were not True Jazz.

Put another way, these movements were not the music of “their time” and therefore did not merit their attention or close consideration. They held to the view that  these subsequent developments in the music were aberrations and not to be taken seriously, lest one lose time enjoying the better Jazz of the early makers of the music.

Of course, such an attitude could be labelled defensive but not to the purists that held it.

I think we all fall into these muddles over the course of our Jazz listening careers because we prefer the familiar to the unknown.

Sometimes it takes a bridge that helps us - to use pianist Barry Harris’ phrase - “see out a bit,” in other words, make the transition from the old and the familiar to the new and unfamiliar.

Orrin Keepnews makes this case rather convincingly in a very personal way in the following essay entitled A Jazz-Pilgrim’s Progress which can be found in his compilation A View From Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-1987 [Oxford].

See if you can relate to what he has to say about his journey of discovery in the World of Jazz.

A Jazz-Pilgrim's Progress

1956

“Way back in the fall of 1945, when I had very recently returned from the Pacific and was only vaguely aware that all sorts of new currents were supposed to be swirling about in jazz, a very bright-eyed young man whom I had just met insisted upon playing some new records for me. He gave the impression of being about to produce the Holy Grail, or at the very least a live rabbit out of an old top hat. But all I could hear was a screeching, exhibitionistic trumpet, a whining alto saxophone, very little discernible melody, and no sort of reliable beat. I hated it, and informed the young man, in a patiently paternal way (I was at least three years older than he), that this noisy fad could never take the place of The Real Thing. For I was, by exposure and inclination, strictly a Louis Armstrong-Jelly Roll Morton man, and what I had heard was something called "be-bop"—early-1945 recordings by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Such an experience was actually not too uncommon then. I may have had the new music thrust at me more abruptly than most, but quite a few traditional-jazz fans were, at about that time, more or less forced to listen to a couple of "far out" selections. Almost invariably, they recoiled several feet and then spent the next few years either trying to ignore or loudly preaching against all forms of modernism. There has been much written and spoken argument in the past decade about this antipathy, but I don't recall any notice having been taken of what I now consider to have been the core of the problem for myself and for a number of other defenders of early jazz. It was, simply, that we were not ready, were not at all prepared to listen to modern jazz.

Since only the really one-dimensional myths have any staying power, a great many people accept that fantastic oversimplification about jazz having been rather suddenly "born" in New Orleans. Quite similarly, it is almost as customary to accept bop as an instant revolution that was hatched overnight at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. But of course, just as a good many years and a wide variety of pre-jazz influences preceded New Orleans, the modern-jazz revolution has been gestating for a long time. You can go back and hear its first stirrings in, for example, some of Duke Ellington's records of the period when Jimmy Blanton was on hand, in Lester Young's work with Basie, in other big Negro bands, and in some of the small, nominally "Swing" groups of the late 1930s.

But the very important fact is that the typical traditionalist jazz fan was not listening to such music. I undoubtedly can no longer qualify as "typical," having sacrificed any such claims when I turned a hobby into a livelihood and turned myself into jazz writer and magazine editor, record producer, etc. But I was once, I suspect, a very typical sort of specimen: my interest began in the late 1930s, when I heard some records from the '20s; it was fanned by hearing live jazz at New York clubs like Nick's and the Hickory House (recommended by friends primarily as notably inexpensive places to take a date, and secondarily as places to hear good Dixieland). Thus the music that I absorbed was, roughly speaking, homogeneous. Armstrong, Jelly Roll, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Bix — these were the records; in person, at the Greenwich Village and Fifty-second Street clubs, there were such as Wingy Manone, Jack Teagarden, Red Allen, Joe Marsala, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the rest of the Eddie Condon mob. While all this certainly can't be called the same music, both the recordings and the live performances were specifically either in or closely derived from the original New Orleans tradition. Furthermore, although I wasn't particularly aware of it at the time, that live jazz had something else in common with those records: the musicians themselves, both in their way of life and in their music, were firmly rooted in the late 1920s, which was "their" time.

There was probably also a degree of snobbishness mixed in with such jazz tastes: not everyone knew about such things as recordings of the "pure" early jazz, or those small jazz groups playing in rather out-of-the-way places. Big bands and Swing meant "commercial" music, readily available to just anyone. Thus insulated, people like me had no need for the new snobbishness of the insiders who first adopted modern jazz. All in all, with my listening background, it would have been incredible if, at first hearing, I had (as the saying goes) flipped for Diz.

My personal alteration began with some rather accidental touches. In 1948, because I was newly involved in editing a music magazine and was potentially malleable, the head of a small jazz label spent an evening playing and explaining the very earliest Thelonious Monk records. Finally (possibly in self-defense), I found that I could at least feel and enjoy the beat. A year later, on a night when I had specifically gone to hear Armstrong and had been disappointed by a routine act, I reacted extremely hard to the other group in the place, which was the first George Shearing Quintet. (I remember being strongly impressed by his vibraphonist, Margie Hyams. Perhaps it was her effective use of an instrument that doesn't exist in traditional jazz — thus making comparison impossible — and that I had previously disliked — I've always considered Lionel Hampton a drummer gone wrong — that really began to turn the tide for me.)

In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.

As I am far from unique in this matter of broadening one's jazz tastes, I imagine that all I gained from virtually forcing myself to listen to modern jazz was to achieve a device for overcoming ingrained prejudices. Others less stubborn-minded than I, or with more willpower, ought to find it even easier. I can also recommend the use of a simple paradox: concentrate on both the differences and the sameness. By the former, I mean that there's no use looking for absolute parallels: New Orleans jazz sprang from a particular time and place (that it can be enjoyed outside that context is quite true, but irrelevant to my present point); current jazz expression belongs to here and now. This is not a value judgment: there is some inferior modern jazz, of course, but there was also some pretty bad music played in Chicago in the 1920s, too (you just don't bother to listen to those records any more, and let it go at that). There is also a lot that is wrong with the world of here and now, and a lot of that is in the music, too. But it is our time, so that at the very least it has immediacy on its side. I'll go so far as to say that I can't understand any serious listener, unless he is in love with archaism for its own sake, not finding something of value for him in some aspect of modern jazz.

As for the sameness, the major link lies in the aims of jazz musicians: roughly, in working from "popular" musical frameworks to create valid individual and group expression. There are some modernists, like Gerry Mulligan, whose innovations have fairly readily discernible traditional roots. There is the continuing important use of instrumental blues. Finally, there's even occasionally a tendency to think in the same way. I've recently been listening to the work of an extremely far-out musician whose trio is experimenting with something completely novel. He described it to me as "collective improvisation. "The term had a strangely familiar ring that had me puzzled for a minute. Then I remembered. The first time I had heard it used, quite a few years ago, was to describe the music of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band!”