Tony Fruscella: THE NAMES OF THE FORGOTTEN - John Dunton

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

Jazz history is full of enfant terribles, mythical characters, maudits, legendary figures who seem to have been born in order to become protagonists in hardboiled stories of the darkest nature. Outsiders destined to a mala vita, which can only be avoided thanks to an inborn talent that transforms them into all-time romantic symbols of the artist and his struggle. Tony Fruscella was one of these characters.

As a musician, Tony Fruscella led an intermediate path between Bop (Dizzy Gillespie) and Cool (Miles Davis), a style later made popular by Chet Baker (whom Tony regarded as "Chatty" Baker, by the way). His dense, muted, velvety sound expressed a sense of poetry full of "literary" references, in the low and medium registers, of a rich variety of tonalities that made his solos sensual, deep and somewhat melancholy.

- J.G.Calvados. Translated by A. Padilla

“Tony is no Bix, and for that matter, no Miles Davis, …, but it’s the rich, full whisper of his middle and especially his low register that sets him apart immediately.”

- Claude Nobs

“In the right setting, Tony’s lyrical creativity was unsurpassed.”

- John Williams, Jazz pianist

“All works of art are not produced by a handful of major poets, painters, musicians, or whatever, and at any time there are always hundreds of others active and often creating worthwhile, but overlooked, contributions to their chosen area of activity. It ought to be the duty of a critic to recognize those contributions, though too many take the easy way out and concentrate on a few famous names. This is certainly true of jazz writing, with the result that numerous musicians are virtually forgotten.”

– John Dunton

John Dunton is a past, regular contributor to the Penniless Press which is edited by Alan Dent.

I have populated the piece with photos that are not a part of the original essay. The video tribute to Tony 

© -  John Dunston/The Penniless Press, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The name Tony Fruscella may not mean much unless you have a specific interest in the modem jazz of the l940s and 1950s but the facts of his life and his few appearances on records, say a great deal about the period and the musicians he worked with. A fascinating jazz "underground" comes to life when his activities are examined, and it offers, as well, a comment on the society in which Fruscella and his contemporaries sought to function. 

Fruscella was born in Greenwich Village in 1927, though his family belonged to the Italian-American working class of that area rather than to the bohemian element. His childhood years are largely undocumented, but he was brought up in an orphanage from an early age and seems to have had little exposure to music other than as it related to the church. However, he left the orphanage when he was about fourteen or fifteen, started studying the trumpet, and came into contact with both classical music and jazz. He appears to have been quick to develop his skills and was soon playing in public. When he was eighteen he went into the army and gained more experience by playing in an army band. It was around this time that Fruscella also encountered the new modern sounds of the day, and the post-war years saw him mixing with the many young, white New York jazzmen who were devoted to bebop and cool jazz. They had an almost-fanatical belief in the music and had little time for anything else.

William Carraro recalled: "We'd jam at lofts, or flats in old tenement houses on Eighth Avenue, around 47th or 48th Street. The empty rooms were rented for a few hours, and the musicians and the 'cats' that came by just to listen would chip in whatever they could afford at the moment to help pay the rent. Brew Moore, Chuck Wayne and many other names-to-be came by." 

One of the musicians who participated in these sessions was an alto-player by the name of Chick Maures, and in 1948 he and Fruscella recorded for a small label called Century, though the records never appeared commercially until thirty years later. They are fascinating documents in terms of what they say about jazz developments. Of course, by 1946 bebop was well-established, and the music shows the influence of the famous Charlie Parker quintet of those days. But the tricky themes played in unison by the alto and trumpet also suggest an awareness of the kind of approach favored by pianist Lennie Tristano and his disciples Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, who were cooler and more careful in their improvising. And Fruscella's trumpet playing, though superficially akin to that of Miles Davis, had its own subtlety and warmth. [In my opinion,] Fruscella was more melodic than Davis. 

But what happened after the heady days and nights of the late1940s'? Fruscella and the others no doubt continued to play when and where they could, and a few even got to work professionally. But paying jobs, especially those involving jazz, were often hard to come by. Bob Reisner, a writer around Greenwich Village in the early1950s, recalled that Fruscella never seemed to have a permanent address:

"Short marriages, short stays in hospitals and jails, and he invented the crash pad. He walked the streets, an orphan of the world, but with incredible dignity. He never accepted anything for free. He would cook and clean and play music if you put him up."

The chaotic nature of Fruscella's life wasn't improved by his use of alcohol and drugs. He wasn't alone in this. Chick Maures, his companion on the 1948 record date, died from a drugs overdose in 1954, and Don Joseph, a trumpeter who was not unlike Fruscella in his playing and was close to him as a person, had a career that was marred by drug addiction. Both were wayward to the point of self-destruction. Bob Reisner once got them an engagement at the famous summer festival at Music Inn in the Berkshires, but Fruscella, when asked by a polite listener what he would play next, replied "We Want Whiskey Blues," and refused to carry on until a bottle was provided. And Joseph somehow managed to insult the son of the owner of the place. Bassist Bill Crow, who was around New York at the time and later wrote a fine book, From Birdland to Broadway, about his experiences, remembered Fruscella almost losing them a rare job in a club with his response to a customer's invitation to have a drink: "Well, I'm already stoned, and the bread is pretty light on this gig, so would you mind just giving me the cash?" Crow said that he "loved the way Tony played in a small group,” but noted that he didn't fit into a big-band format. His low-key style needed a small group and an intimate club setting to allow it to flourish. 

It's perhaps indicative of Fruscella's lifestyle, and his liking for a Bohemian environment that Beat writer Jack Kerouac knew him in the 1950s. In his "New York Scenes," a short prose piece included in Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac writes:

"What about that guy Tony Fruscella who sits cross-legged on the rug and plays Bach on his trumpet, by ear, and later on at night there he is blowing with the guys at a session, modern jazz." Kerouac also mentioned Don Joseph in the same piece: "He stands at the jukebox in the bar and plays with the music for a beer." 

There were a few moments of near-glory in Fruscella's career. In 1951 he was hired to play in Lester Young's group, though the job lasted only a couple of weeks and no recorded evidence of it exists. It would seem that Fruscella was ousted from the band due to some sort of rivalry which may have involved a form of reverse racism.

Pianist Bill Triglia, who worked with Fruscella over the years, tells the story:

'Fruscella was a white fellow and very friendly with Miles Davis and used to jam with him. He played with myself and Red Mitchell a lot. He had a beautiful sound. He didn't play high, he didn't play flashy, but he played beautiful low register, very modem. When Kenny Drew left and some jobs came up, John Lewis was playing with Lester. According to what I heard, and Tony Fruscella was a good friend of mine, Tony used to get drunk with Lester. Lester loved him. He didn't play the same style as Lester, but it fit nicely, it was a beautiful contrast, but John Lewis didn't like Tony. Tony said he didn't like him because he was properly white, I don't know, but John Lewis tried to get somebody else on. The next job they had Lester's manager didn't call Tony Fruscella and he was so hurt, because he loved Lester, you know. He wanted to stay with him, he was a young fellow and very tender."

It was just after this experience that Fruscella again recorded some tracks which, like those from 1948. didn't appear until many years later. In February, 1952, he joined forces with altoist Herb Geller, tenorman Phil Urso, pianist Bill Triglia, and a couple of others, to produce some music which ought to have been heard at the time and drawn some attention to Fruscella. Instead, it simply disappeared into the vaults, and Fruscella and his companions carried on struggling to play their music and earn a living. Critic Mark Gardner noted that, although the 1950s were, for many, years of affluence, the good times did not necessarily arrive for musicians, "especially those who had rejected the commercial sop dispensed over the airways and via the jukeboxes." Gardner added:" Jazzmen adapted, as they always have, and found places to play the way they wanted - in basements and cellars, seedy bars, strip clubs and coffee houses.

Surroundings were uncongenial but unimportant. The main thing was that in those varied environments were the patrons were either alcoholic/moronic or intellectual/revolutionary, nobody told you how to play or what to play.   If you were looking to dig what was happening you went to the open door in Greenwich Village or wangled an invitation to pianist Gene DiNovi's basement or to where Jimmy Knepper and Joe Maini lived  The people who passed through these underground pads and dives were the jazz underground   The life of prosperous, middle-class America was far removed from those basement jam sessions, those rehearsals and gigs in down-at-heel corner bars. Musicians, natural skeptics, turned their backs on McCarthyism and the rest."

A little steady work did come along now and then, and in 1953 Fruscella was hired to play with Stan Getz's group. Some poorly-recorded excerpts from a broadcast from Birdland do exist, and on "Dear Old Stockholm" Fruscella demonstrates all that was best in his playing as he shapes a solo that is relaxed, warm, melodically coherent, and in which the use of spaces between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. Some listeners might think there is a resemblance to Chet Baker in Fruscella's sound. He did play with Gerry Mulligan's group briefly in 1954, but it is only slight, and Fruscella very much had his own way of constructing a solo. There are interesting comparisons to be made between Baker's 1953 recording of "Imagination" and Fruscella's version from the same year. Admittedly, Baker's was a studio recording, with the disciplined format that implies, whereas Fruscella 's was from a live session at the Open Door and has a relative looseness, but even so, there is greater depth in Fruscella's playing. As Dan Morgenstern said of it: "It is music very much of its time - a time of scuffling, an inward looking time, a blue time." 

The recordings from the Open Door - and, yet again, they came to light only years later - are valuable not only for the way in which they allow us to hear Fruscella soloing at length, but also for the window they provide into the modern jazz world of New York. The Open Door was a bar and restaurant frequented by jazz musicians and which they soon began to use as a place for jam sessions. Dan Morgenstern remembered it as a "haven for jazz people with no money. It was a weird place. When you walked in off the street, you entered a room with a long bar that had a Bowery feeling to it. At one end of this bar stood an ancient upright piano, manned most evenings by Broadway Rose, a fading but spry ex-vaudevillian, her hair dyed an improbable shade of red. She knew a thousand old songs and cheerfully honored requests. From the bar, right next to Rose, a creaky door led to the huge, gloomy back room, sporting a long bandstand, a dance floor which was never used, and rickety tables and chairs."

Bob Reisner, a freelance writer who some years later produced a couple of short but lively memoirs of the 1950s, and also wrote a funny book about graffiti, hired the room for Sunday afternoon concerts at which Charlie Parker sometimes appeared.  Others spontaneous sessions appeared and drummer Al Levitt recalls musicians like Herb Geller, Gene Quill, Jon Eardley, Milt Gold, and Ronnie Singer, dropping in to play. Geller did go on to make a name for himself on the West Coast in the late 1950s and is still around, having lived in Germany for many years. Most of the others made only occasional appearances on record and those mostly in the 1950s. And the casualty rate amongst them was high. Quill was badly injured in a road accident and spent the rest of his life virtually immobilized, Singer committed suicide and Eardley had an up-and-down career due to drug addiction. 

The music produced by Fruscella at the Open Door, mostly with tenorman Brew Moore and pianist Bill Triglia, sounds relaxed almost to the point of casualness, and it is played without any concessions to non-jazz tastes. Using a few standard tunes from the jazz and popular music repertoire (the popular music of the pre-rock period, that is), the emphasis is on improvisation, and Fruscella shows how inventive he could be in such a setting. He never repeats ideas and always sounds poised, no matter the tempo. He was fond of the ballad, "Lover Man," using it at the open Door sessions and also at an engagement at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey which must have taken place around the same period (1953). "A Night in Tunisia," the classic tune from the hop era, also crops up at both places. There are moments on the ballad performances when Fruscella can sound pensive, almost hesitant, but he skillfully uses that mood to shape his solos and his emotional sound complements it.

It needs to be noted that the Ridgewood High School recordings, presumably made by one of the musicians or an interested fan, were some more that only went into general circulation twenty or so years later. Bill Triglia appears to have been the man who organized the group's appearance. Interestingly, some other live recordings from the same period and with Triglia again in the group feature Don Joseph and a good alto-saxophonist, Davey Schildkraut, who was in Stan Kenton's band in the 1950s, recorded with Miles Davis, but then drifted from sight. Memoirs of the New York scene prior to 1959 or so place him in the center of a lot of the activity at the Open Door and elsewhere. 

1955 was probably the peak year in Fruscella' s short career, and he was featured on a couple of recordings by Stan Getz and was also invited to make an LP under his own name for the Atlantic label, a well-established company. Fruscella chose Bill Triglia to accompany him on piano and he added tenor-saxophonist Allen Eager, a musician who had been highly thought of in the 1940s, when he was amongst the leading hop players, but who was by 1955 slipping into a shadowy world of occasional public appearances and even fewer recording dates. With Phil Sunkel, another little-known trumpeter, acting as composer-arranger, Fruscella came up with some of his finest work, especially on "I'll Be Seeing You" and the attractive "His Master's Voice," on which he uses some of his classical background to fashion an engaging Bach-like series of variations. Fruscella and those who admired him no doubt imagined that this album would help him widen his reputation, but it soon slid from sight and was remembered by only a few enthusiasts. The mid-1950s were reasonable years for some jazzmen provided they could be identified with bright West Coast sounds or the hard hop forcefulness associated with black New York. Fruscella's music, like so much good, white New York jazz of the 1950s, didn't fit into either category. 

What happened to Tony Fruscella after 1955? Very little, it seems, if the reference books are anything to go by. He probably still played at jam sessions and perhaps even did some club work in obscure places, but the "dogged will to fail" that Bob Reisner saw in him, and his drug and alcohol problems, must have held him back. And the 1906s were lean years for a lot of jazzmen, as pop music took over in clubs, dance halls, and on the radio. His kind of music, quiet, reflective, and requiring sympathy and understanding from the listener was hardly likely to appeal to many people. It never had, it's only fair to say, but things got even worse in the 1960s. After years of obscurity, Fruscella died in August, 1969, his body finally giving up the struggle against barbiturates and booze. Bob Reisner, in a touching elegy written for a jazz magazine just after Fruscella died, said: "If I were an artist, I would paint Fruscella in the Renaissance manner. A side portrait of him bent in concentration over the horn which produced the flowing and delicate music. The usual background landscape would be strewn with a couple of wives, countless chicks, barbiturate containers, and empty bottles. His artistic life, however, was in sharp contrast. He was completely austere and disciplined. There was not a commercial chromosome in his body."

This short survey of Fruscella's life is scattered with the names of the forgotten. What did happen to Don Joseph and Davey Schildkraut? Allen Eager is dead. And a whole world of New York jazz of the 1950s comes to mind when one listens to a few of the records by Fruscella and others. Where are Jerry' Lloyd, George Syran, and Phil Raphael and Phil Leshin? Jerry Lloyd was around in the 1940s and 1950s and recorded with Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington, though he never became well-known and worked as a cab driver even when he was featured on many records. George Syran was on an album with Jon Eardley which also featured trombonist Milt Gold, and the two Phils worked with Red Rodney in 1951, but what else? That fine tenor-saxophonist Phil Urso, who soloed on Woody Herman records in the early-1950s, was with Chet Baker's group a few years later, and then seems to have faded into obscurity around 1960 died in 2008. There were so many who had only a brief moment or two in the spotlight. Not all of them were necessarily as ill-fated as Fruscella. Bill Triglia. who figures so prominently in the Fruscella story, seems to have still been alive in the 1980s, though hardly in the forefront of jazz.

Nor would it be true to say that all the musicians mentioned were victims of an unjust or uncaring society. When there were casualties, they often came about through personal waywardness and self-indulgence rather than from any form of oppression. Some jazzmen may well have felt that their music was misunderstood and neglected, but that's hardly an excuse for taking drugs or drinking heavily. Dan Morgenstern may have got nearer the truth  when he said it was an 'inward-looking time." Were drugs a part of that inwardness or simply just a social fashion? 

But a lot of musicians probably just gave up playing jazz, or even playing any kind of music, and some possibly turned to commercial sounds in order to earn a living.

Compromises are often necessary if one wants to eat. The point is, though, that all those I've named, and more whose names are mentioned when people reminisce, deserve to be remembered for their contributions to jazz, even if those contributions were small ones. We do the artists and ourselves a disservice when we neglect the past. A form of "organized amnesia' takes over, as is so often evident when one listens to those radio stations which purport to cater for a jazz audience but which mostly present a non-stop procession of bland sounds. There is little or no historical sense in what they do, and certainly no place for a fine, forgotten musician like Tony Fruscella."

Benny Golson: “Soul Me”

“Although he has contributed several staple pieces to the hard-bop repertoire, Benny’s playing style owes more to such swing masters as Coleman Hawkins and Lucky Thompson; a big crusty tone and a fierce momentum sustain his solos, and they can take surprising and exciting turns ….[paraphrase, p.585]

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

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

It seems that I have loved Benny Golson’s compositions from the moment I first heard them. They are based on easy-to-remember melodies, which is something that drummers cherish because you can carry these tunes in your head while others are improvising on them.

Benny’s songs just seem to fall so logically on the ear.

Whisper Not, Along Came Betty, I Remember Clifford, Killer Joe, Domingo, and Blues March, among a host of others, are all Jazz standards whose tonal patterns are instantly recognized by Jazz fans all over the world.

As Dan Morgenstern has commented: “… Benny Golson’s gifts as a composer, arranger and player are of the sort that can stand the test of time.”

Fortunately, Benny is still around, still making music and doing interviews like the following one with the “Dean” of Jazz writers, Nat Hentoff.

After Benny’s chat with Nat, you’ll find some thoughts and anecdotes about Benny by Gene Lees, another esteemed Jazz writer.

By NAT HENTOFF

The Wall Street Journal April 1, 2009

© -Nat Hentoff/The Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“When the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was preparing its Jan. 24 tribute, "Benny Golson at 80," I was asked for a couple of lines to be included in the introduction. Hearing in memory Benny's "I Remember Clifford" and "Whisper Not," I told the producer: "His melodies are so natural and lasting, it's as if they invented themselves, as Benny keeps doing."

After the event, Benny reminded me that, in 1957, I produced the album "Benny Golson's New York Jazz Scene" for Contemporary Records, his first as the leader of his Jazztet. Back then, as now in his new Concord Music Group release "New Time, New 'Tet" (Amazon), I was drawn -- in his tenor saxophone improvisations and compositions -- to their flowing sense of ordered liberty, with the inner warmth of an adventurous romanticist.

Benny also reminded me that in 1958 -- when I was asked to phone some of the musicians chosen for the historic Art Kane photograph in Esquire magazine, "A Great Day in Harlem" -- I had told him where and when to be at 10 that morning on a Harlem street. Although Benny was a Dizzy Gillespie sideman at the time, he was not yet a member of the jazz pantheon and, he recalls, he felt like asking for autographs from such legends there as Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge and Rex Stewart.

Since then, after joining Art Blakey and then heading his own series of groups in an abundance of recordings -- with his original compositions being performed by many other leaders, too -- Benny has become an international jazz master, having also received that designation by the National Endowment for the Arts.

He now has over a thousand manuscript pages of his autobiography (tentatively titled "Whisper Not") during which, he tells me, "I have more to say about Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer, Clifford Brown and John Coltrane than anybody else."

Benny and Coltrane were friends in Philadelphia when Benny was 12 and John two years older. In a January "Down Beat" interview, Benny said of his fellow boyhood student: "He was always a little ahead of the rest of us. When we got to where he was, he was always somewhere else, always reaching. . . . He always got to it."

During my conversations with Coltrane years later -- when, as influential as he had become, he was still urgently searching -- he told me, "This music is as serious as life itself."

Hearing me recount that memory, Benny nodded in agreement. "That's why," he said, "when I play, I can't assume the role of an entertainer. Entertainers second-guess their audience, working to find out what they want to hear. My first obligation is to myself, when I play and when I write -- to say who I am, what I'm feeling, exploring in this jazz adventure, and what my dreams are."

A few weeks before, I'd heard Benny on National Public Radio during the Saturday morning program hosted by Scott Simon, an informed, intuitive interviewer. He asked Benny: "Is it a time of your life when you ask what you hope people take from your music?"

Said Benny: "I hope they can look into my heart's core to understand that what they hear is the reflection of my inner parts -- my thinking, my curiosity, my imagination."

In his current, often surprising recording, "New Time, New 'Tet,'" they'll also hear his twilit tribute to Chopin ("L'adieu"), a favorite composer when he was exploring, as a child, his first instrument, the piano. And, also unexpectedly, a virile, joyful celebration of "Verdi's Voice" (credited to Giuseppe Verdi, arranger Benny Golson).

Among other intriguing signs of Benny's insistence on continuing to renew himself are a rejuvenated "Whisper Not"; the Thelonious Monk-Kenny Clarke "Epistrophy"; and "Gypsy Jingle-Jangle," which comes from a time when, watching a Frankenstein movie on television at 4 in the morning, Benny's imagination lit up on seeing "a band of gypsies dancing around a campfire, accompanying themselves with a violin, accordion, tambourine, hand claps and cheerful shouts, as women danced wildly, spinning and jumping up and down. As my head matched their beat, I envisioned a band of hip jazz musicians walking into that happy camp-fire scene, asking shyly, 'Can we sit in?'"

You may find yourself at the campfire, moving in new ways, with Benny, Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Steve Davis (trombone), Mike LeDonne (piano), Buster Williams (bass) and Carl Allen (drums). For Benny and his new Jazztet comrades, music is indeed as serious as their continuing memories, fantasies and delights in being jazz musicians.

One performance especially, Benny's "From Dream to Dream," reminded me of conversations I had in my younger days with other jazz-struck friends about which tracks on which albums to play when making love. Jazz can be intimately erotic -- as when Johnny Hodges or Ben Webster of Duke Ellington's band was playing a ballad and, Duke told me, "a yearning sigh would come out of the dancers and become part of the music."

"'From Dream to Dream,'" I said to Benny, "may lead to a slight increase in the population. Where did this song come from as you started to conceive it?"

"It was based," he said, "on life. Life's rewards and disappointments. And disappointments are followed by dreams. I'm a dreamer. In life, in my music, I'm always involved in what's coming, in what could come. That's part of the adventure."

For listeners around the world, Benny Golson's past is also continually rewarding. Another recording released by the Concord Music Group is "The Best of Benny Golson" (Amazon), in which he is joined by such soul mates between 1957 and 2004 as Art Blakey, Art Farmer, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Ray Bryant and Paul Chambers.

Included in this set from Benny's 1957 first album as leader is the first "Whisper Not." In his notes, Marc Myers, host of JazzWax.com (a site often recommended by musicians), writes: "Benny's arrangement opens with a 'quiet-please' cymbal roll before proceeding like a cat walking on a fence. Listen as gently rising and falling lines are echoed by Julius Watkins's French horn and Jimmy Cleveland's trombone.

Benny recalls that the melody came so fast when he wrote it that he could hardly get the notes down on paper."

"Whisper Not" has been recorded 189 times. He often gets requests for it and "I Remember Clifford Brown," among his other classics. Of course, he never plays them the same way twice.

At one point in our conversation, Benny suddenly said, "I'm so privileged to be a jazz musician -- to say who I am and get paid for it."”

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

“Often one finds that the friendships of prominent jazz musicians go back to sem­inal high schools such as Cass Tech in Detroit, Wendell Phillips and Austin high schools in Chicago, Granoff in Philadel­phia, and Jefferson High in Los Angeles. And even when they do not originate in the same school, many such relationships go back to early youth. One such case is that of Benny Golson and a boy from North Carolina named John Coltrane. They grew up together musically, playing in rowdy local commercial bands to learn their craft. And they got fired together from one. Benny's mother consoled them: "One day both of you are going to be so good that that band will not be able to afford you."

Benny studied music at Howard Uni­versity, whose faculty officially frowned on jazz. The saxophone was not considered an "appropriate" instrument. Benny signed up for clarinet and practiced the saxophone in the laundry room, where no one could hear him. Already, composition was one of his main interests. He grew impatient with the academic rigidity he found at Howard and left before gradua­tion, joining the band of Bull Moose Jack­son and going on the road. He worked with Tadd Dameron and the big bands of Lio­nel Hampton (1953) and Dizzy Gillespie (1956-57), then joined drummer Art Blakey, with whom he worked in 1958 and '59. Blakey, like Horace Silver, was a major mentor of young jazzmen, and Benny's reputation, both as a composer and player, grew.

Many of Golson's compositions, such as "Killer Joe" and "I Remember Clif­ford," have become part of the permanent jazz repertoire. In 1959, he and Art Farmer —a Silver and Gerry Mulligan alumnus — formed their Jazztet, a sextet that at first featured trombonist Curtis Fuller and Art's brother Addison on bass. The group lasted until 1962.

Then Benny broke into television and film scoring in Hollywood, writing scores at all the major studios. He moved back to New York City in 1987, where he soon found himself busier than he had ever been, in all forms of composition and as a player too. In May 1992, Benny was awarded an honorary doctorate by William Paterson College. He teaches there.

One year, backstage at the Newport Jazz Festival, Benny ran into John Coltrane, who reminded him of the time they got fired in Philadelphia. "Remember what your mother said?" John asked. "Do you think they'd be able to afford us now?"”

"These Rooms" - Jim Hall Trio Featuring Tom Harrell

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

It seems like Herb Wong, the late Jazz author, education, record and concert producer and all-around good friend of Jazz was everywhere in the 1980, and it’s a good thing, too, as Jazz and it makers were having their fair share of troubles surviving during a time when fewer resources were supporting the music.

In an earlier piece, we described Herb’s role with the Stanford University Jazz Artist in Residence program in Palo Alto, CA and Blackhawk Records which was based in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s.

During the decade of the 1980’s, Herb was also active as a producer for DENON - Nippon Columbia for which he along with Executive Producer Tatsunori “Tats” Konno developed one of my favorite recording by guitarist Jim Hall with his trio made up of Steve LaSpina on bass and Joey Baron on drums. Tom Harrell is featured on trumpet and flugelhorn.

Issued in 1988 as These Rooms: Jim Hall Trio Featuring Tom Harrell [Denon CY-30002], it is an exquisite recording. Here are Herb’s instructive and insightful insert notes about the musicians on the date, which was recorded live to 2-track on February 9-10, 1988 at Sorcerer Sound in NYC with Tom Lazarus serving as recording engineer, and the ten tracks featured on the CD.

Just to be clear, here, had it not been for Dr. Herb hearing these musicians play together in his head, this record wouldn’t exist. His Jazz soul made this album happen.

“Among jazz guitarists, Jim Hall exceeds comparison. Unarguably he stands alone and is the one guitarist who can be spoken in the same breath as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. The mere mention of Jim sparks lively responses of praise. For several decades he has earned this top position of respect, but more important is his body of brilliant recordings, as what guards the unanimity of success is his conspicuous artistic integrity and finery. He is a superlative who embraces unique sound and design of his notes; every note selected is a needed choice fitting perfectly in the ultimate sculpture of his music.

His exceptional technique combined with confidence to use or not to use this or that in creating a mood is central to the lull resonant quality his guitar achieves, showing deep devotion and acute alertness to sound.

In producing this recording I was impressed once again by Jim's ability to minimize the use of amplification, sounding nearly like an acoustic instrument. In 1977 my interview with Jim elicited comments germane to this issue: "It's easy to overplay the amplifiers so we play really softly compared to the general dynamic level prevailing today. We begin very softly so we have someplace to go. And then it can sound like it's loud when we're just playing with moderate volume. You can draw the sound out of the instruments a lot better and not push the amps."

Jim's music is drawn from the heart core of the guitar and the heart of his own inner soul, unveiling the truth about their capacity. His horn-inspired solos are lyrical, impassioned and swinging — reflecting a fertile sense of composition. Moreover, his phrases develop in a natural flow from one to the next, his melodically and harmonically resourceful ideas are delivered with taste and logic, and rhythmically his sense of balance is without deflection.

Jim was born on December 4, 1930 in Buffalo. N.Y. and spent his childhood in New York, Columbus and finally in Cleveland. At 10 his Mother, a pianist, gifted Jim with a guitar and quickly at 13 he became a precocious pro in Cleveland. The great innovator Charlie Christian was introduced to him via hearing his famous solos with Benny Goodman. Subsequently, Jim became acquainted with the legendary Django Reinhardt's playing. "After high school I attended The Cleveland Institute of Music where I became seriously interested in classical composition. However, my desire to become a guitarist was so compelling. I had to check it out for fear of long term regrets." explains Jim. So he dropped out of a master's degree program to "pursue my fantasy". Thus began the long, distinguished odyssey of performing and recording. His associates stretch from Chico Hamilton (some 33 years ago). Bob Brookmeyer, Jimmy Giuffre. Ben Webster, Hampton Hawes. and Stan Getz to Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Zoot Sims, Lee Konitz, Ron Carter. Herbie Hancock, Red Mitchell and Wayne Shorter plus so many more.

Prior to this recording, a musician Jim had not had an open opportunity to include in his own recordings is Tom Harrell. I had ruminated over the sumptuous thought of Jim and Tom together — hearing their consonant blends and solos on guitar and flugelhorn in my head, with assuredness that a record of their respective and compatible geniuses should be produced in order that their absorbing subtleties and plentiful imagination could be shared. Both spin their own musical tales. In fact, including Steve LaSpina and Joey Baron, all four musicians on the project are fascinating story tellers who speak fluently thru their instruments.

My esteem for Tom's playing stems from his young teenage years in the San Francisco Bay Area playing in campus bands, jamming in many, many clubs and at the famed Jazz Workshop in S.F. with many name musicians. Born on June 16, 1946 in Urbana, Illinois, he was reared in the S.F. area from age 5 and started trumpet at 8. His gigs began at age 13. Early on, he modeled himself mainly after his inspiration — Clifford Brown and remains a torch bearer of the tradition and spirit of Brown but does tip his hat also to the likes of Blue Mitchell, Kenny Dorham. Lee Morgan, Dizzy Gillespie. Clark Terry and Woody Shaw. Tom notes, "Clifford was such a strong force and expressed so much warmth and joy." Today, Tom is one of the most sought musicians and has been climbing the rungs of jazz polls steadily. After 6 years on the road with Woody Herman and Horace Silver, he settled in NYC for the last decade recording on more than 70 records and is a main stay in the Phil Woods Quintet.

Phil has said to me, "Tom is the most complete musician in my experience. I continue to be impressed with his total harmonic recall, his knowledge of tunes of the past and his compositions reflecting the future." Tom indeed has perfect ears and an uncanny sense of time. He tries not to think when he solos, allowing "my playing to go beyond conscious thoughts". Like Jim, Tom places a premium on Ihe linkage between feelings and sounds — the fundamental pay off. On several previous recordings, I have invited Tom to participate: I simply value his ability to erupt without notice adding an enigmatical, special dimension.

There is unanimity on Tom's impact on any group. At one point in the studio Joey Baron said admiringly: "Tom, how in the world do you play trumpet like that?"

Bassist Steve LaSpina first played with Tom in the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra 10 years ago. “When Tom picked up his trumpet and blew his first notes, I couldn't believe it. I had never heard anything like it and I've enjoyed playing with him since, and he is just marvelous on this date."

Steve was born on March 24, 1954 in Wichita Falls, Texas and raised in Chicago. "My Father Jack, also a bassist, started me on his bass when I graduated from high school and he also taught me the electric bass." Steve was involved with rock and roll, yet his Dad tried to turn him on to jazz by playing records by Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown. Noi until age 13 when Steve heard Fred Alwood at a music camp at the University of Illinois did he catch the jazz fever.

He came to New York in 1979 and "playing with Jim Hall is like a fantasy corne true. Seems like it's always right... I can feel what he's going to play." Just a partial roster of people Steve has played with verifies his gourmet taste — saxophonists Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and David Liebman; pianists Jimmy Rowles. Marian McPartland and Steve Kuhn; vocalists Joe Williams, Mark Murphy, Morgana King and Helen Merrill. Steve obviously listens to many horn players. As for bassists, the key influences of Charles Mingus. Paul Chambers and Scott LaFaro stick out. Just listen to his story-telling on this recording.

"I love the way Steve sounds," Jim says with glee, "and we've worked together off and on for nearly 4 years. I sit in the car a lot in New York and I listen to jazz on WBGO radio and notice lots ol terrific bassists are being recorded, but I'm not pleased with the bass hitting you right in the face, whereas Steve's warm bass sounds like there is more room and depth being used. Steve recently put gut strings (G & D) in place of steel strings. He's definitely a virtuoso bassist." Take note Steve had acquired a more than 100 year-old French bass with great gut strings on the day of rehearsal and he was ecstatic over it. Its timely availability for the recording was a boost to the quality of sound.

"I look for guys who listen well and react well together, similar to what Jimmy Giuffre has drawn as an analogy between a 'mobile sculpture' and his trio (Giuffre-Brookmeyer-Hall) as not being uni-dimensional I've always kept that philosophy — meaning we should not sound like a guitar with a rhythm section!"

Joey Baron is a very in-demand drummer performing with Jim and Steve close to 2 years on a fairly regular basis. This is the first record of his membership in the trio. "Joey was recommended to me by numerous musicians coast to coast." The consensus is not surprising as Joey's long list of associations in the last 13 years is replete with unique voices of jazz; e.g., Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper, John Scofield, Toots Thielemans, Randy Brecker. Blue Mitchell, Pat Martino, Lou Rawls. Carmen McRae, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Red Rodney, Stan Getz, Bill Frisell, Al Jarreau and so many others.

Regarding Jim, Joey pours emotively: "He's a great musician — not so much the instrument itself, but that he plays the music! And I'm attracted to those who do. In Jim's case, you can pick him out of 1000 players every time. In playing with him, his concept of time is a model to emulate. I hope to approach Jim's level some day. He lets you relax and you don't have to baby sit... he opens the ground up for trust in an unspoken way. Lots of things happen between us that way. Jim's sound is the way he pulls people into him."

"I feel I can talk to Joey while he's playing.standing right in front of his cymbals, explains Jim. "Joey gets inlo high intensity without being loud in volume. He has perfect touch."

There's truly something distinctive about guitar and drums — a guitarist can't play 8-note chords all the time like many pianists who fill up the room and leave little space for the drummer. "Jim plays but a few notes, leaving space for conversations with me." Joey emphasizes, "and the way he accompanies, the way he puts intervals in — like he could just hit 2 notes over a chord and it pushes a different sound out of the chord, in contrast to someone who plays a straight chord."

The Music In This Collection

From the very first notes of Jim Hall's guitar on the 1929 Rodgers and Hart WITH A SONG IN MY HEART, you just know he's special. Then enters Joey Baron's melodic brushes and Jim counterpoints. The first rate solos by Jim, Steve and Tom are unpredictable in construction and have gorgeous sounds spilling out. It's plain all four are like vocalists singing their stories on the uplifting 6/8 waltz version — its format matching the spirit of the tune. Jim arranged a half step up modulation in the middle when Tom comes in on the first chorus, giving it more of rising feel. The tune moves along at a good pace but the chords are stretched out and move more slowly.

CROSS COURT — an appealing 24-bar blues is the first of several Jim Hall originals. It's a key of G blues but moves up a half step in the last 4 bars. It's not the routine "let's just play some blues, guys" type of piece, but an architectural piece. The title of ihe tune comes from Jim's love for tennis. "I took my first tennis lessons from the great Don Budge who's a big jazz fan, from Lester Young to Bill Evans." His specialty was a back hand cross court — therein lies the inspiration for the name. "The line of the tune in the beginning — the unison or octaves with bass and guitar is extremely hard to play on the bass and the guitar. It's supposed to sound easy but I keep writing these things because Steve can play them!

"I love the rhythm section feeling. Joey has a grin on his face most of the time which got me to write the last chorus — the jolly sound with the little breaks with Joey." And dig the trace of Stravinsky in the out chorus, spiking the music with quasi-humor.

A flugelhorn/guitar duet carries the unstrained conversation ol the hauntingly charming ballad SOMETHING TELLS ME composed by Jim's wife, Jane. Beginning with E-flat major it wanders thru different keys, finally settling on B-flat "I added a coda at the end," says Jim. "I wrote it specifically for Tom and I love the way Tom plays it." The two of them capture the beautiful mood and possibly the true mood of the tune.

When Jim performed and recorded with pianist Michel Petrucciani and Wayne Shorter at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1986, he wrote BIMINI on commission — a bright calypso similar to what he did with Sonny Rollins. The light, loping Caribbean line has nice “islandic” flavors. Joey is like a gang of percussionists rolled into one!

Ben Webster was a consummate master of improvising jazz ballads. ALL TOO SOON is one of these soothing Ellington compositions recorded in 1940 featuring Ben's suave tenor saxophone, "I first met Ben at one of the once a month concerts sponsored by my friend Dr. Lorin Stephens, an orthopedic surgeon in Arcadia, California during the early days. Red Mitchell and Hampton Hawes played with us frequently, too." Jim certainly narrows his concentration with intense sensitivity on his magnificent solo guitar essay. I felt an unaccompanied interpretation would bring out further colors to add to the whole.

"After turning on to the enticing concept about recording with Tom for the first time, I was inspired to catch Tom's sound," Jim recounts his process in designing THESE ROOMS — the title selection in three sections. "I jotted a little motif with low register for Tom's horn ... examining some intervals — little groups of 2 notes. It gradually took shape with Steve coming on with his counterpoint. Bartok influenced my linear writing: he was my hero. I tied it with the guitar section, including a whole chordal phase before Tom and Steve check in, just ahead of the start of the last section." Jim wrote the third section with some exciting surprises — a gospel. New Orleans street band sound with Joey's authentic marching drums heralding Tom's hip swinging. It gets a little more abstract and ends with the beginning motif. It leaves everyone with a good up feeling.

A segue to the durable 1939 ballad DARN THAT DREAM ushers in another ring of colors by way of a delicate development between Jim and Steve. Both converse with telepathic manifestation of melodic motifs. Steve's close link to Scott LaFaro's highly vocal quality is apparent. And Jim ... well, every note he plays sounds larger than life. Originally planned for the trio to play, it just felt intriguing for a duo, adding a different miniature theater.

MY FUNNY VALENTINE is the one track featuring the working Jim Hall Trio. The tasteful swing powers vitality into individual statements while they merge as three. Remember how people were knocked out by the superb ad hoc interpretation by Bill Evans and Jim on Bill's 1962 "Undercurrent" album!

WHERE OH WHEN is partly dedicated to Freddie Green who passed away in 1987. "Freddie was truly a big hero of mine," Jim says with deep sincerity. The format is fashioned to give generous opportunities for the group to express lyricism with ease.

Tom Harrell's own FROM NOW ON winds things up with chops and finesse. "This was inspired by the collaborations of Jim and Bill Evans," relates Tom, "and also by Dizzy's writing of his "Con Alma" and a little of the way Benny Golson uses certain sounds. It's a good vehicle for Jim's beautiful, sensitive playing". Indeed its harmonic movement is reminiscent of what Jim and Bill did on their iwo duo albums, especially the kinds of motion and colors — sort of a mood of sadness, but something positive rising out of dejection. The ABA structure of the tune finds its way thru different tonal centers. A nice ride to close the recording.

"This project brought Tom into my consciousness as I had never truly played with him, I was in my room writing almost everyday or at least thinking about it for two solid months. And I think it really paid off." Jim continues "I wanted tunes that represent variety not only between tunes but within the tunes to keep the interest burning. So for me, it was a lot of preparation — tons of paper! I just dug in there and I'm grateful for the motivating idea behind it. I'm thoroughly delighted!"

In the final analysis, it really matters little how Jim does it. At times he's like a Japanese brush painter's unfettered improvisations. Jim surprises often and disrupts prediction. His music always sound fresh. Perhaps his jazz life has been a quest for quality fulfillment. Jim Hall surely picks the choicest notes in the world.”

— DR. HERB WONG

“Tom Talbert: A Different Voice”

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

“The music of Tom Talbert is the essence of creative Jazz composition. Like all great artists, Talbert gains inspiration from his surroundings, both past and present, and molds it into his own musical voice. His music has been described as ‘a stylistic combination of Jazz, French Impressionism, abstraction and blowing.”

- Ken Poston, Director, Los Angeles Jazz Institute

“Since the mid-1940s, Tom Talbert has kept to his own path and his own vision, writing extraordinary music. Judged on talent and quality alone, he would be as well known a composer and arranger as Gil Evans, Bill Holman, Thad Jones and Bob Brookmeyer.”

- Doug Ramsey, Jazz author and critic

"A jazz classicist, schooled in the past, with a yen for the future, Tom Talbert is a romantic who shuns the cliché. He is a technician who trusts the heart. Even when he's being clever his notes are warm and tender."
- Budd Schulberg, writer and columnist

I’ve always had a fondness for rehearsal bands and over the years I’ve played in a great number of them.

A few of these were led by notable bandleaders, but the majority were assembled by composer-arrangers who were “amateurs” in the true, French meaning of that term.

Their main interest in running a rehearsal band was to have a vehicle in which to hear their arrangements, which, interestingly enough, is in line with the main reason why the great Duke Ellington maintained his own orchestra throughout his lifetime.

Because there is so little money involved, finding a time and place to rehearse and a group of musicians who can make it on a regular basis can be challenging. It also takes a few volunteers to copy all the parts for the arrangements.

Musicians play and interpret music differently, so it helps if the rehearsal band leader can keep at least a core or nucleus together and substitute around them.

The first trumpet and first alto chairs, lead trombone and rhythm section are the sources for most of the continuity in the “sound” of a big band arrangement and the “style” of the band itself.

Soloists obviously add a lot, too, but they are more interchangeable, because when someone gets up to blow, they are usually expressing their individualism and not that of the writer/leader of the band.

Some pretty talented arranger-composers have toiled in the relative obscurity of rehearsal bands.

A few of these rehearsal band leaders have become “discovered” and contracted with to write arrangements for well-known bands and vocalists .

Occasionally, they may even catch the ear of a producer who hires them to score an album of their own for a lesser known recording company.

One of the benefits of volunteering for rehearsal bands is that you often come across very different and even unconventional arrangements. It’s always fun to try and sound like the Basie Band or deal with the elaborate arrangements of Pete Rugolo and Stan Kenton or try to get into the light and airy feeling of the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra, but nobody ever does it as well as the originals.

That’s why it’s enjoyable to play the original music and/or arrangements of a New Voice, a writer who takes your ears in a different direction.

Someone who fits this mold perfectly is Tom Talbert, a composer-arranger who began his career in this manner. Following the Second World War, he put together a series of rehearsal bands that were primarily based in Los Angeles.

He described how it all began in the insert notes to a CD that Sea Breeze issued which documents Tom’s music 1946-1949 [SB-2069]. It’s a very familiar and almost classic story of the evolution of a series of rehearsal bands under a then-unknown composer, arranger and leader.

“My first Los Angeles band began rehearsing in the spring of 1946.

I had been in the army and was discharged from a band at Fort Ord, California the summer before. I had no formal music schooling and the year I spent as chief arranger for a good army dance band was a major part of my education. Worked with several bands and met arranger-bandleader Johnny Richards in Boston. Moved to Los Angeles the winter of 1946 and was soon living at the Harvey Hotel...a musician's hangout fondly referred to as the Hot Harvey.

Before long Richards appeared and, in his generous manner, started looking for things I could do. He soon encouraged me to start a band and that seemed a logical move for an out-of-work twen­ty-one year old arranger. We started with a group of guys who wanted to play and as we rehearsed some were changed and others just left for a real job. The trumpet section of Lou Obergh, Ronnie Rochat and Frank Beach was very strong. Veteran Babe Russin brought his beautiful tone to the sax section.

Richards' brother, Jack Cascales, had a small label, Paramount Records, and he was also acting as my manager. (Last I ever had.) He wanted to record the band. The session at Radio Recorders Studio in June 1946 went very well and we, the orchestra and my arrangements, were out in the world.

I took a smaller group to a nice but miniature casino at Lake Tahoe for July and August. Back in Los Angeles that fall, we were rehearsing and working occasionally. I wrote Flight of the Vout Bug. It was recorded with a good band put together for the date and having the great Al Killian playing lead trumpet was a joy for me. Dodo Marmarosa was tops as my featured piano soloist.

When we went to Tahoe I hired a fine drummer, Dick Stanton. He would later introduce a num­ber of good, young players into the band who were Los Angelenos. Then, in the summer of 1947, I went on the road with Anita O'Day and wound up in New York.

Returning to Los Angeles I started rehearsing the band again. There was considerable arrang­ing work as another musician's union recording ban was imminent. We did some sessions for Paramount with singer Joan Barton that were used on television, lip-synched in early TV fashion. Although I was unhappy with the engineering, we did a good date early New Year's Eve to beat the ban and to record a couple of forgettable pop tunes for the company. We included my Love Is A Pleasure, then called Never Meant For Me.

The band continued to rehearse and play an occasional job during 1948. Warne Marsh and Steve White were the tenors when we played the Trianon Ballroom that April.

Early in 1949 I met Ed Nathan, a warm-hearted, erudite man who worked at CBS. Ed put a lot of effort into trying to get something going for the band but L.A. was not the place nor was it the propitious time in the business. We were playing some jobs, rehearsing weekly, and the band was very tight and up for some concerts at the Coronet Theatre that spring. Don Prell was on bass. Wes Hensel now played lead trumpet between Johnny Anderson and Johnny McComb, so that section was set.

Art Pepper's arrival in the band gave us a new voice. We hadn't had an improvising alto player before and, at the time, Art was already one of the greatest players around. Harry Betts joined John Haliburton in the trombone duo. El Koeling and Don Davidson were still playing lead alto and bari­tone saxophones. Jack Montrose and Johnny Barbera were the tenors.

Pianist Claude Williamson had just left Charlie Barnet and was often in the audience we regu­larly had at rehearsals. I had broken my arm in a fall from a horse, and Claude started playing with Prell and the lightly swinging Jimmy Pratt on drums. The final band was now in place.

Everyone was young and full of energy. I wrote new music for each rehearsal and Don Davidson copied it. (As Ronnie Rochat had done for the first band. What great friends!) The band was extremely faithful about rehearsal and job commitments and good natured with my demands on shading and intonation. As a group, they grew to play with confident authority. Plus, we liked each other and each other's playing. Twenty-six years later Art Pepper reflected, "They were all such nice guys."

So, in November 1949, I was back in Radio Recorders good studio where we had first recorded. I was sending acetate audition discs east to the recording companies where they were then judged not commercial. Perhaps that surprised only me. Bands were being canceled, not signed. But, we kept having .rehearsals. That winter, 1950, Stan Kenton decided to reorganize. Pepper and Betts went on the Innovations Orchestra and I was asked to write. We disbanded.

I followed the audition records east that spring.”

In what has to be considered a true labor-of-love, Bruce Talbot, who is always doing nice things for Jazz, put together a fascinating book about Tom and his music.

Bruce was born in Wellington, New Zealand, where, as a young radio producer in the late 1950s he first heard and was moved by Tom Talbert's music. Moving to London, England in 1963 he worked for the BBC in radio, television and record production before being invited, in 1991, to come to the U.S. as Executive Producer of the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings record label.

Bruce’s book is entitled Tom Talbert: His Life and Times: Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004 | Series: Studies in Jazz (Book 45).

The following is a brief synopsis of the book.

"A jazz classicist, schooled in the past, with a yen for the future, Tom Talbert is a romantic who shuns the cliché. He is a technician who trusts the heart. Even when he's being clever his notes are warm and tender."

Budd Schulberg wrote these words in 1957. Almost 50 years later they still apply. A contemporary of Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Gil Evans, Bill Holman, and Ralph Burns, Tom Talbert is a composer, arranger, bandleader, and pianist. In the late 1940s he led his own big band in Los Angeles, featuring star artists like Art Pepper, Warne Marsh, and Claude Williamson. In New York in the 1950’s he wrote for Charlie Barnet, Buddy Rich, Claude Thornhill, Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, Machito, and conceived and scored some strikingly original jazz recordings that were issued under his own name.”

Tom Talbert returned to Los Angeles in 1975 and has continued to record his own innovative, impressionistic, and subtly swinging music using the finest players, even to this day. In this account of his life and career, Bruce Talbot paints a vivid portrait of Tom Talbert and his world. Utilizing first-hand accounts, the book is crammed with memories of Los Angeles in the 40s, road tours of the Mid-West, a rare glimpse of the Twin Cities jazz scene during World War II, and a portrait of New York City in the 50s when it was truly the jazz capital of the world. The book includes a complete discography of Tom Talbert's work and a CD containing fourteen of his most important and representative recordings.

---

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles collected these Editorial Reviews to give you some additional perspectives on the significance of Tom Talbert’s music and Bruce’s book.

“He could have been as famous as Gil Evans or Quincy Jones. Certainly the talent was there in abundance. Instead, Tom Talbert remains one of jazz's most neglected figures, his unique arranging and composing abilities known only to the discerning few who listen to music based on its content rather than its name value. Expatriate New Zealander Bruce Talbot, formerly head of the BBC and Smithsonian record divisions, brings his own vast jazz knowledge and experience to this fascinating biography. In dealing with Tom Talbert's life and works he depicts the man against the backdrop of an equally neglected period of American music, that of the post-war experimental years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where talent bloomed in the unlikeliest of places, flourished despite the awful conditions imposed on the traveling musicians, only to choke and die on the creeping blight known as rock 'n' roll. Truly a golden age that has been overlooked by jazz historians, here brought vividly to life again by the author.” (Brooks, Michael )

 “Since the mid-1940s, Tom Talbert has kept to his own path and his own vision, writing extraordinary music. Judged on talent and quality alone, he would be as well known a composer and arranger as Gil Evans, Bill Holman, Thad Jones and Bob Brookmeyer. In this fascinating biography, Bruce Talbot examines the circumstances and choices that have won Talbert the admiration of music insiders and left him a secret to most of the public. Talbot's book should do much to bring Talbert recognition he has long deserved.” (Doug Ramsey, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music )

“Bruce Talbot's edgy biography of an American Jazz original reads like a John dos Passos epic novel of America in the World War II and Post War years. Only it isn't a novel - it's the jazz life captured through the wide eyes of a young mid-western musician who was born to make his mark in jazz. Bruce Talbot turns in a dazzling writing performance - it's a very hip, very real, very full biography of a brilliant musician known until now as "the best kept secret in jazz'. Discover Tom Talbert and live life on the road, in the studios and in Jazz history.” (Dom Cerulli )

“This well researched book should bring belated recognition to one of the music's most neglected figures.” (Jazz Journal International )

“…not only a source of intrigue for the jazz enthusiast, but also fascinating for the average reader who may be unfamiliar with Talbert's quiet legacy. (International Musician)

“A fascinating view of this talented gentleman from the world of jazz. Beyond that, however, it also gives a perceptive insight into the various musical environments that formed Talbert's style, and the ways in which he contributed to the development of modern big band music. For those of you who just dig hearing inside stories from musicians, many of them full of humor, there is plenty of meat here for you. If you love delving more deeply into jazz history, you will also find great satisfaction in this volume.” (Jersey Jazz )

“Don't let the opportunity pass to learn more about [Talbert]. His is the stuff of real quality, and the Jazz world and anyone with an interest in composing and arranging should be made more aware of this fact.” (Jazz Now )

“There is an abundance of gorgeous writing and arranging on this disc, and combined with the book's many great stories, and its reevaluation of one of the music's great arrangers, this is truly one of the Jazz publishing events of the year.” (Cadence )

The following video tribute to Tom contains a sampling of his music with an audio track comprised of Shipping Out from his Louisiana Suite.