Riverside Records – Orrin Keepnews

“When Orrin Keepnews, the Grammy Award-winning jazz-record producer, writer and reissue master, was growing up in New York in the "30s and "40s, a teenager -- for the cost of a beer or two, when the legal drinking age was 18 (and, says Mr. Keepnews, carding was lax) -- could listen for hours to world-class jazz musicians at one of the clubs along 52nd Street or in Greenwich Village. According to Mr. Keepnews, now 85 and speaking from his home in Northern California, ‘It was advertised as: "Hey, this is a good way to have a cheap date," and I ended up getting interested in the music. That's being a little too cute about it -- but that's really, basically, where it started from.’”

- Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2008

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

In 1953, Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer founded Riverside Records. Despite, the latter’s best efforts to the contrary, Orrin managed to keep Riverside going for ten [10] years as an independently owned and operated record label devoted exclusively to Jazz artists, many of whom were virtual unknowns when he recorded them.

“One of the key elements in the development of Riverside and other independent labels, Mr. Keepnews says, was the "postwar deflationary period": ‘At that point, union-scale pay for a sideman for a three-hour session was $41.25; double that for the leader. Among other things, you could do a trio album for a total musician cost of, in round numbers, $250. That is probably the most important factor in the growth of independent jazz labels -- and why, as it turned out, the "50s was such a golden age for recorded jazz, I think.’”

- Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2008

Yet, this illustrious background notwithstanding, just like that, after I had put out a call for help via an internet chat group to which we both belonged, Orrin waked into a restaurant in San Francisco in 1999 and granted me an interview for an article I was working on about the late pianist and vibraphonist, Victor Feldman.

What a pleasure it was to listen to him respond to questions and to recount his stories about the music. For example, on the signing of Thelonious Monk for the Riverside label, Orrin shared:

"When we were told about his possible availability as a recording artist, we set up a meeting with Thelonious, and to my total surprise, he knew exactly what our past relationship had been.  Seven years before, I had interviewed him for what he informed me was the first article about him ever to appear in a national magazine. So that really made it very feasible for us. Prestige wasn't interested in retaining him; he wasn't selling records, and he was difficult to deal with... . So we signed him. And that really was the beginning of me as a jazz producer."

Orrin subsequently went on to establish Milestone Records with pianist Dick Katz in 1966 where he recorded pianist McCoy Tyner and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson.

He moved to San Francisco in 1972 to take on the Jazz Arts and Repertoire responsibility at Fantasy Records after it purchased Milestone where he was reunited with pianist Bill Evans and signed and recorded tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

Back on his own again in 1985, Orrin brought Landmark Records into existence and where he featured recordings by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, among others.

After selling Landmark in 1993, Orrin remained active in producing CD reissues such as the Duke Ellington 24 CD centennial set for RCA in 1999.

Ultimately, The Concord Record Group bought the catalogue of a number of independent Jazz record labels, including Riverside, and Orrin played a variety of roles in helping with Concord’s CD reissues under the rubric of “Original Jazz Classics.”

Or as Orrin explains:

“You stick in this business long enough," he says, "and the damnedest things happen." The archival materials he's now repackaging are the once-contemporary albums he himself produced half a century ago.

"I'm not complaining," Mr. Keepnews says with a chuckle. "I'm not bragging. But it's there -- and I must say that I find these things hold up rather well."

- Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2008

There’s no individual to whom the Jazz World is more indebted than Orrin Keepnews [March 2, 1923 - March 1, 2015].

In 2011, Keepnews was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts for his “significant contributions” to the field of jazz. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Our video tribute to him features a track from one of Orrin’s Riverside albums under the leadership of drummer Philly Joe Jones [Drums Around the World – Riverside LP 1147; Original Jazz Classic OJCCD-1792-2]. During our visit, Orrin happened to mention the fact that Philly played on more Riverside LP’s than any, other drummer.

The tune is Benny Golson’s Jazz classic Stablemates, which he also arranged for the date. On it, Philly and Benny [tenor saxophone] are joined by Lee Morgan and Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cannon ball Adderley on alto sax and Sahib Shihab on baritone sax, Herbie Mann on flute and piccolo, Wynton Kelly on piano and Sam Jones on bass.

Count Basie and Neal Hefti -" Flight of the Foo Birds"

"The Great Gillespie" - Whitney Balliett

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

This blog has always been as much about Jazz writings as it has been about the music and its makers.

For if it is true that Jazz can’t be taught but that it can be learned, fans of the music can acquire a great deal of knowledge about Jazz from those who write about it in an informed way.

Sometimes the writing is not only instructive and helps us appreciate the music more, but is itself beautiful, elegant and artistic.

This is generally the case with the essays on Jazz written for The New Yorker for many years by the late Whitney Balliett [1926-2007].

Whitney’s New Yorker pieces are as stylish as anything ever written on Jazz.

One of my favorites is The Great Gillespie [Dizzy Gillespie 1917-1993]. It is included in the 41  New Yorker essays published by Whitney as an anthology entitled Dinosaurs in the Morning [1962].

The article centers around his review of three recordings that Dizzy put out in the late 1950’s, but it goes well beyond Whitney’s thoughts about these LP’s and ultimately helps us understand Dizzy’s true significance in the evolution of Bebop [an unfortunate term - at best].

© -Whitney Balliett, copyright protected; all rights reserved. [Paragraphing modified to fit the blog format.]

OF ALL the uncommunicative, secret-society terms that jazz has surrounded itself with, few are more misleading than "bebop." Originally a casual onomatopoeic word used to describe the continually shifting rhythmic accents in the early work of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Thelonious Monk, it soon became a generic term, whose tight, rude sound implied something harsh and unattractive. (Jazz scholars, who are nonpareil at unearthing irrelevancies, have discovered that the two syllables first appeared in jazz as a bit of mumbo-jumbo in a vocal recorded in the late twenties.)

Although many admirers of Parker and Gillespie—and occasionally Parker and Gillespie themselves—helped this misapprehension along in the mid-forties through their playing, bebop was, in the main, a graceful rococo explosion. It replaced the old Republican phrasing with long, teeming melodic lines, melted the four-four beat into more fluid rhythms, and added fresh harmonies, the combination producing an arabesque music that had a wild beauty suggested in jazz up to that time only by certain boogie-woogie pianists (another of jazz's better-known code terms) and by such soloists, often considered freakish, as Pee Wee Russell, Dickie Wells, Jabbo Smith, and Roy Eldridge. Bebop was an upheaval in jazz that matched the arrival of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young, but it was not, as it is frequently taken to be, a total musical revolution. (The most usable elements of the movement have long since been absorbed into jazz, and the term itself has fallen into disuse, but a variation, known as "hard bop/' persists.)

To be sure, it introduced radical techniques, but it stuck close to the blues, which it dressed up in flatted chords and various rhythmic furbelows. The chord structures of popular standards, which provided the rest of its diet, were slightly altered, and were given new titles and often barefacedly copyrighted by their "composers." This renovating process, begun in the mid-thirties by men like Duke Ellington and Count Basic, proliferated in the bebop era. Thus, "Indiana" reappeared as "Donna Lee" and "Ice Freezes Red"; "How High the Moon" became "Bean at the Met," "Ornithology," and "Bird Lore"; and "Just You, Just Me" turned into "Evidence," "Spotlite," and "Mad Bebop." The music made little attempt at fresh ensemble voicings, but relied instead on complex unison figures—in the manner of the John Kirby band—that sounded like fattened-up extensions of the solos they enclosed. On top of that, bebop musicians continued to investigate, though in a sometimes obtuse, hyperthyroid way, the same lyricism pursued by their great predecessors. A final confusing peculiarity of bebop is that although Parker, Gillespie, and Monk, each of whom possessed enormous talent, emerged at about the same time, they never enjoyed the spotlight simultaneously, as did such slightly older men as Hawkins, Eldridge, Art Tatum, and Sidney Cat-lett. Gillespie had become celebrated by the late forties; Parker was at the height of his fame when he died, in 1955; and it is only recently that Monk has slid wholly into view. Meanwhile, Gillespie, who remains one of the handful of supreme jazz soloists, seems—possibly because of the widespread emulation of an uneven ex-student of his, Miles Davis—to have been put to pasture.

When Gillespie appeared on the first bebop recordings, in 1944, he gave the impression—largely because a long recording ban had just ended—of springing up full-blown. He had, however, been slowly developing his style for some seven or eight years. Although Gillespie was for a time an unashamed copy of Eldridge, the records he made in the late thirties with Cab Galloway—in which he tossed off strange, wrong-sounding notes and bony phrases that seemed to begin and end in arbitrary places—prove that his own bent, mixed perhaps with dashes of Lester Young and Charlie Christian, was already in view. By 1944, the transformation was complete, and Gillespie had entered his second phase.

Few trumpeters have been blessed with so much technique. Gillespie never merely started a solo-he erupted into it. A good many bebop solos began with four- or eight-bar breaks, and Gillespie, taking full advantage of this approach (a somewhat similar technique had been used, to great effect, in much New Orleans jazz, but had largely fallen into disuse), would hurl himself into the break, after a split-second pause, with a couple of hundred notes that corkscrewed through several octaves, sometimes in triple time, and that were carried, usually in one breath, past the end of the break and well into the solo itself. The result, in such early Gillespie efforts as "One-Bass Hit" and "Night in Tunisia," were complex, exuberant, and well-designed. (Several of Gillespie's flights were transcribed note for note into ensemble passages for various contemporary big bands, an honor previously granted to the likes of Bix Beiderbecke.)

Gillespie's style at the time gave the impression—with its sharp, slightly acid tone, its cleavered phrase endings, its efflorescence of notes, and its brandishings about in the upper register—of being constantly on the verge of flying apart. However, his playing was held together by his extraordinary rhythmic sense, which he shared with  the  other  founders  of  bebop.  When   one pinned down the melodic lines of his solos, they revealed a flow of notes that was not so much a melody, in the conventional sense, as a series of glancing but articulate sounds arranged in sensible rhythmic blocks that alternated from on-the-beat playing to offbeat punctuation, from double-and-triple-time to half time. One felt that Gillespie first spelled out his rhythmic patterns in his head and then filled in their spaces with appropriate notes. A hard, brilliant, flag-waving style, in which emotion was frequently hidden in floridity, it persisted until four or five years ago, when Gillespie popped, again seemingly full-blown, into his third, and present, period.

A   mild-mannered,   roundish   man,   who   wears thick-rimmed spectacles and a small goatee, and has a new-moon smile and a muffled, potatoey way of

speaking, Gillespie is apt, when playing, to puff out his cheeks and neck into an enormous balloon, as if he were preparing himself for an ascent into the ionosphere. He has a habit, while his associates play, of performing jigs or slow, swaying shufflings, accented by occasional shouts of encouragement— bits of foolishness that he discards, like a mask, when he takes up his own horn, an odd-shaped instrument whose specially designed bell points in the direction of the upper bleachers. Gillespie, at forty-two, an age at which a good many jazz musicians begin falling back on a card file of phrases— their own and others' — built up through the years, is playing with more subtlety and invention than at any time in his past.

He has learned one of the oldest and best tricks in art — how to give the effect of great power by implying generous amounts of untapped energy. This method is opposed to the dump-everything approach, which swamps, rather than whets, the listener's appetite.

His tone has taken on a middle-age spread; his baroque flow of notes has been judiciously edited; his phrase endings seem less abrupt; and he now cunningly employs a sense of dynamics that mixes blasts with whispers, upper-register shrieks with plaintive asides. However, his intensity, together with his rhythmic governor, which still sets the basic course of his solos, remains unchanged. Provided a solo does not open with a break, which he will attack with the same old ferocity, Gillespie may now begin with a simple phrase, executed in an unobtrusive double time and repeated in rifflike fashion. Then he will lean back into half time and deliver a bellowing upper-register figure, which may be topped with a triple-time descending arpeggio composed of innumerable notes that dodge and dodge and then lunge ahead again. These continue without pause for several measures, terminating in a series of sidling half-valved notes, which have a bland complacency, like successful businessmen exchanging compliments. In the next chorus, he may reverse the procedure by opening with a couple of shouts, and then subside into a blinding run, seemingly made up of hundred-and-twenty-eighth notes, that will end in high scalar exercises. And so it goes. Gillespie rarely repeats himself in the course of a solo. In fact, he is able to construct half a dozen or more choruses in which the element of surprise never falters.

Gillespie is in good form on three fairly recent records—"Crosscurrents" (American Recording Society), "Sonny Side Up," and "Have Trumpet Will Excite!" (Verve). …

There isn't an unforgettable moment on the[se] records, but there aren't many passages that could be surpassed by Gillespie's contemporaries, most of whom would be in other lines of work if it weren't for him.”

Christian Jacob: A Jazz Pianist, Composer and Arranger of Distinction

BUTTERFLY - Herbie Hancock and The Metropole Orchestra

Elegant People - "Triste" - Arranged by Mike Abene, Metropole Orchestra

Junior Cook - "Sweet Cakes"

John Coltrane – Supremely Loved and Loathed

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

"Tony Whyton has brilliantly revealed how it has become impossible to know

John Coltrane's A Love Supreme outside notions of race, spirituality, history,

authenticity, and nostalgia. For me, it's like hearing the music for the first

time.”

– Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and

American Culture

"Smart and engaging, Whyton's study highlights the multiple and ever-changing interpretations of Coltrane's most famous recording. In the process, Beyond a Love Supreme serves as an important corrective to those efforts—however well-meaning—that might limit how we understand jazz and its people."

- David Ake, Jazz pianist and author of Jazz Cultures and Jazz Matters

In Mahayana Buddhism, which is practiced in many forms mainly in Southeast Asia, China and Japan, a Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who has gained entrance into Nirvana [an equivalent of “heaven”], but holds back [i.e.: stays in the world] to help others accomplish the steps necessary to attain it for themselves.

In doing so, the Bodhisattva makes the world a better place for all concerned by exemplifying the state of enlightenment which results from the devolution of the Self.

Although reasoning by analogy is full of pitfalls, one could say that for many Jazz fans, and especially, many tenor and soprano saxophonists, John Coltrane has been the Jazz equivalent of a Bodhisattva for almost a half century since his death in 1967.

Here, however, I must emphasize the word “many,” because there are those in the Jazz world who view John Coltrane as Mara, the Evil One; a sort of loose Buddhist equivalent of the devil.

Nat Hentoff, the distinguished Jazz author and critic explains it this way in his collection of essays entitled Jazz Is [New York: Limelight Editions, 1991]:

“Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Col­trane, was an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of car­nal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infu­sion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz.

The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since. He considered music to be a healing art, an "uplifting" art.

Yet through most of his most relatively short career (he died at forty), Coltrane divided jazz listeners, creating furiously negative reactions to his work among some. (‘Anti-Jazz’ was one of the epithets frequently cast at him in print.) He was hurt and somewhat bewildered by this reaction, but with monumental stubbornness went on exploring and creat­ing what to many seemed at first to be chaos—self-indulgent, long-winded noise. Some still think that's what it was.

Others believed Coltrane to be a prophet, a musical prophet, heralding an enormous expansion of what it might now be possible to say on an instrument.”

The line of demarcation for mainstream Jazz enthusiasts concerning their acceptance of Coltrane’s work seems to be the changes in his playing that coincided with the recordings he issued on the Impulse! label during the last half-dozen or so years of his career.

Prior to that time, Coltrane’s work on Prestige, Bethlehem and Blue Note, and especially his work as part of the Miles Davis Quintet and Sextet as recorded on Columbia, met with general approval, if not, occasional, outright admiration.

John was a tenor saxophonist who rankled those who preferred the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Don Byas, Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins. They liked their Jazz soloist to have a melodic orientation and not the more harmonic one favored by Coltrane.  And then there was the matter of his sound – harsh, abrasive and grating – to his critics, not to mention the sheer number of notes that John played during his solos which prompted Jazz critic Ira Gitler to describe Coltrane’s style as “sheets of sound.”

In my recollection, one of John’s earliest Impulse! LP’s seemed to really set his critics off – A Love Supreme [CD# 05155-2]. Although Coltrane may have intended the recording to be a liturgical act of expression, his detractors had a field day with it. The recording provoked a storm of controversy that in many ways continues to this day.

At the time of its issuance in 1964, very few gave it the kind of acceptance and understanding contained in the following account from Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.:

“The first records in Coltrane's career as a leader were the work of a man who had submerged himself in heroin and alcohol and who had mortgaged his physical health as a result. If, as super­stition and a measure of biological science suggest, people are transformed every seven years, then Coltrane is something like proof positive. Few spiritual breakthroughs have been so hard won, but he had also reinvented himself technically in that time, creating a body of music in which simplicity of materials gen­erates an almost absurd complexity of harmonic and expressive detail. This is quintessentially true of A Love Supreme. Its foun­dations seem almost childishly slight, and yet what one hears is a majestic outpouring of sound, couched in a language that is often brutally violent, replete with split notes, multiphonics and toneless breath noises.”

When A Love Supreme first appeared, the Jazz press, by and large, excoriated it and consigned its fate to some form of eternal damnation. [Does music have a Dante’s Inferno?]

Few realized at the time, that A Love Supreme, Ascension, First Meditations along with the remainder of Coltrane’s Impulse! output were to become a clarion call for future generations of young tenor saxophonists in much the same way that the work of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young influenced the tenorists of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

To modern-day saxophonists such as the late, Michael Brecker, Bob Berg, Bill Evans, Larry Schneider and myriad others around the world, Coltrane became the musical equivalent of a Bodhisattva. John’s modal, scalar and harmonic patterns, lengthy, liberated and laboriously-drawn improvisations, and mastery of multi-rhythmic song structures were their keys to Jazz “enlightenment.” John “spoke" to them and they became his followers.

It seems that A Love Supreme would never cease to illicit strong feelings – pro and con [mostly con].

Thirty years later, while starring out at the night lights of San Francisco from my balcony, the husband of a work colleague that I was meeting for the first time at our flat for dinner asked me what I thought of Coltrane’s playing on it.

When I mentioned that I hadn’t listen to A Love Supreme recently, but that I was planning on purchasing a CD version of it in order to do so [the world had switched from analog to digital], he rushed off to collect something from his jacket which was hanging in the living room and was back in a flash saying: “Here, please take mine. I can’t stand the thing!”

Since Coltrane’s death in 1967, there have been many books written about him and his music. I’ve read a number of them and have especially enjoyed those by Lewis Porter, Eric Nisenson and Brian Priestly.

Each has offered me different angles of acceptance from which to view Coltrane’s music.

Recently, another such work has allowed me a more specific prism in which to understand the music on A Love Supreme.

Published in paperback on June 18, 2013, by the always-Jazz-friendly Oxford University Press, the book is entitled Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album.

Authored by Tony Whyton, who is a Professor of Jazz and Musical Cultures at the University of Salford and the co-editor of the Jazz Research Journal, this “book takes us through Coltrane's creative process and examines A Love Supreme as a cultural artifact, leading us towards a deeper appreciate of jazz as a whole. As Whyton states, ‘Coltrane's music... continues to have currency today and provides people with a way of understanding the past as well as envisaging the future of jazz.’”

The Oxford University Press media release goes on to say:

“Commonly believed to be one of the greatest albums ever recorded, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme has had a lasting influence on our culture. Recorded in 1964, by the 1970s it had sold nearly a half a million copies, an almost unimaginable number for a jazz musician today. Coltrane's free jazz style has become the industry standard, and popular musicians of all genres, like rock star Bono and guitarist Santana, cite A Love Supreme as being an influence on their work.

In BEYOND A LOVE SUPREME: jazz professor Tony Whyton provides us with a fresh, detailed analysis of this legendary, almost mythic album. Whyton discusses the deeply spiritual aspects of the album, the album's most common interpretations, and compares Coltrane's later work to this masterpiece album. He also explains how A Love Supreme challenged many of the traditional assumptions that still permeate jazz culture, such as the oppositions between improvisation and composition, black music and white music, and live performances and studio recordings.”

And this annotation is from the book’s dust jacket:

“Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, A Love Supreme is widely considered John Coltrane's magnum opus and one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. In Beyond A Love Supreme, Tony Whyton explores both the musical 111    complexities of A Love Supreme and the album's seminal importance in jazz ill   history. Marking Coltrane's transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album also embodies the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life.

The titles of the four part suite—"Acknowledgment," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm"—along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he "recites" instrumentally in "Psalm," reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of major jazz recordings. But Whyton also shows how A Love Supreme challenges many of the traditional, unreflective assumptions that permeate jazz culture — the binary oppositions between improvisation and composition, black music and white music, live performance and studio recording.

He critically examines many of the mythologizing narratives about how the album was conceived and recorded and about what it signifies in terms of the trajectory of Coltrane's personal life. Sifting through the criticism of late Coltrane, Whyton suggests ways of listening to these recordings that go beyond the conventional ideologies of mainstream jazz practice and open the music to a wider range of responses.

Filled with fresh insights into one of the most influential recordings in jazz history, Beyond A Love Supreme is an indispensable resource for jazz scholars, jazz musicians, and fans and aficionados at all levels.”

Totaling a little over 150 pages, Professor’s Whyton’s book is a relatively quick read, but nonetheless, a thought-provoking one.

Not only does it afford a deeper, socio-cultural context in which to view Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, but it also represents another example of how Jazz is becoming more and more, what the late pianist, educator and broadcaster Dr. Billy Taylor and the late, writer and critic Grover Sales once described as “America’s Classical music.”

Put another way, Jazz has evolved to a point where it is researched, studied and reinterpreted almost as often as it is performed.

What better example can there be of this emerging phenomena than Professor’s Whyton reference to Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s 2004 concert of their version of A Love Supreme?

Jazz, the music of spontaneity, forty years after the recording of A Love Supreme, becomes music that is scored [written out], conducted and orchestrated in much the same manner that the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms became canonized in the years following their deaths.

It is so odd to think that a half-century ago, books on the subject of Jazz would barely fill a living room bookcase.

And now it seems there are so many of them that they may very well fill the entire floor of a good-sized research library.

Books like Professor Whyton’s Beyond A Love Supreme will become invaluable to future generations of Jazz fans who were not around to witness and listen to John Coltrane’s music as it was being created.

For those of us who were, Dr. Whyton's work can serve to pull-the-lens back a bit and give us a wider angle from which to appreciate all of John Coltrane’s music.

Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album is available through online sellers and you can purchase it directly from Oxford University Press at www.oup.com./