Saturday, May 9, 2020
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Epitaph - Whitney Balliett on Miles Ahead: Miles Davis + 19
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"But an event in the autumn of 1948 changed the entire scene, acting as a catalyst not only within the United States but also over here in Europe. I refer, of course, to the formation of Miles Davis band, a nine-piece group which played for a fortnight at the Royal Roost on Broadway and subsequently recorded three historic sessions for the Capitol label. [The modern day reference for this music is The Birth of the Cool recordings.]
The Miles Davis sessions (the last of which actually took place in ,1950) have been analysed and discussed at great length already; I need do little more than reiterate that they ushered in a new era of small-group jazz, bringing to the music a fresh sound and a much more ambitious conception of texture. And as well as using trumpet, trombone, alto and baritone saxes, piano, bass and drums, the band included a french horn and a tuba; it was the first time that these two instruments had been incorporated within a specifically jazz group, although for some years they had been exploited very skilfully by the arrangers with Claude Thornhill's orchestra, one of the most interesting dance bands of the 1940s.
The link with Thornhill's band is significant, for not only were several of the musicians taking part in the Capitol sessions members or ex-members of that orchestra but the Miles Davis band had been planned at a series of meetings held in the apartment of Gil Evans, Thornhill's chief arranger. At that time Evans was thirty-six, a surprisingly mature age for a man just about to revolutionize jazz orchestration, although in no other art-form would it seem at all odd. In a way it was typical of Evans that he should have remained so stubbornly in the background before producing this tour de force. The same thing was to happen again between 1950 and 1957, the years which preceded his score for the "Miles Ahead" LP, when Evans worked at many tasks — "act music, vaudeville, night clubs", as well as orchestrating for radio and TV. He also occupied his time reading musical history, biographies of composers and music criticism and listening to records; he was filling in, as he put it later, "the gaps in my musical development", gaps which sprang from the fact— the surprising fact—that he had never received a proper musical education. "I've always learned through practical work," Evans told Nat Hentoff in 1957. "I started in music with a little band that could play the music as soon as I'd write it." This empirical method has been shared by at least two other distinguished jazz composers—Duke Ellington and Tadd Dameron. They, along with Evans, can boast, like so many of the pioneers of jazz, that no academicians ever defined for them what was possible and what impossible. ...
According to George Avakian's note on its sleeve, "Miles Ahead" started as a series of discussions between Davis and Gil Evans, "out of which grew the basic conception (largely Miles'). . . ." The record takes the form of a set of short 'concertos' (to use that term in its loosest sense) for flugelhorn and an eighteen-piece orchestra, the latter an expanded version of the ensemble used on the 1949 Capitol sessions. Quite how much of the solo line was actually improvised on the spot it is difficult to tell. The fact that so much of the work is built upon a scalar rather than a chordal basis suggests that at least many of the sections which have Davis alternating with or playing above the orchestra were carefully planned in advance, and that perhaps only those parts where the flugelhorn is heard above bass and drums come at all near being improvised. Not that it matters very much. The important thing is the quality of imagination which both soloist and orchestrator have brought to the occasion."
- Charles Fox, Jazz author, critic, BBC radio and television host
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has been looking for a context to post more about the late Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis [1926-1991] and the late, esteemed writer on Jazz Whitney Balliett [1926-2007] on these pages and we found a setting that includes them both in the following essay by Whitney
Whitney’s piece takes as its point of departure the end of the big band era and what he sees as its relationship to the 1957 release of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans Miles Ahead: Miles Davis +19 Columbia LP.
You’ll find the music from Sides A and B of this LP featured in the videos that conclude this piece.
"THE FINAL COLLAPSE of the big-band era in the late forties left a permanent hole in jazz. The best of the big bands provided not only floating finishing schools for young musicians but the sort of roaring, imperious excitement that the small jazz group, for sheer want of volume, rarely matches. There were at least three distinct types of big band—the milky, unabashed dance band (Guy Lombardo, Charlie Spivak), the semi-jazz dance band (Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw), and the out-and-out jazz band (Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson). The demise of this small but lively industry was due largely to economics; it is also true that the big jazz band had just about run dry. It ended as it had begun—as a plump, highly regimented expansion of the traditional New Orleans instrumentation of cornet, clarinet, trombone, and rhythm section.
There was not really much difference, for example, between the Goodman band of 1936 and the Woody Herman band of a decade later. Goodman had fourteen pieces and a mechanized, tank-like style, and Herman had four or five more sidemen and a loose, flag-waving approach, but both groups depended on the same basic practices-elementary harmonies, short solos framed by opening and closing ensembles, brass and saxophone sections that stated (sometimes in mild counterpoint) simple riffs, often written to be played in unison, and a clocklike four-four beat. Indeed, the riff became the identifying badge of the big band.
The exception was Duke Ellington, whose music of the period still sounds almost avant-garde. Ellington, in fact, had begun replacing conventional big-band devices in the mid-thirties with new harmonies, his own brilliant melodies, and little concerto-type structures usually built around one soloist. These departures gave his band the sound of a unified instrument, rather than that of several determined platoons marching in the same general direction. Some of his inventions rubbed off in the mid-forties on such quixotic, short-lived organizations as those of Boyd Raeburn, Elliot Lawrence, Raymond Scott, and Billy Eckstine, while Stan Kenton was testing various independent approaches. Today, however, there are just four or five big jazz bands — Kenton, Gillespie, Basie, Ellington, and Herman — and they are, in the main, only heavier, more pompous versions of their earlier selves.
In the face of this melancholy situation, Columbia has released a new big-band record, Miles Ahead: Miles Davis + 19, that is the most adventurous effort of its kind in a decade. All the ten selections, by a variety of hands, have been shaped by the gifted arranger Gil Evans into small concertos centered on Miles Davis, who plays the flugelhorn instead of the trumpet. Evans came into prominence in the early forties, when he wrote for the Claude Thornhill band a number of gliding, richly textured pieces that made use of such unorthodox instruments as the French horn. He reappeared as a collaborator with Davis and Gerry Mulligan in some of the suave, contrapuntal small-band recordings [Birth of the Cool] made for Capitol in 1949 and 1950. For "Miles Ahead," Evans’ choice of instrumentation — five trumpets, three trombones, bass trombone, two French horns, tuba, alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, bass, and drums — is an expansion of the ensemble involved in most of the Davis-Mulligan records.
Plush, subtle sounds predominate, and the tempos, with two exceptions, are slow or medium. All the solos are by Davis, whose instrument sounds fogbound. Buried in all this port and velvet is Evans' revolutionary use, for such a large group, of structure, dynamics, and harmony. Reeds and woodwinds mix gracefully with the brass and then withdraw; trombones play countermelodies against sustained French-horn chords; a distant, undulating basso-profundo figure is part of the background for a stark Davis solo; another background figure, played in stop time, is repeated with slightly different harmonies and by slightly different combinations of instruments; trumpet shouts disappear abruptly into mutes.
More important, Evans continually "improvises" on the melodies in the ensemble passages and rarely presents them any where in straightforward fashion. For all this, none of the pieces, except for parts of "Springsville" and "I Don't Wanna Be Kissed," ever get free from a chanting, hymnlike quality. There is, in fact, too much port and velvet, and Davis, a discreet, glancing performer, backslides in these surroundings into a moony, saccharine, and — in "My Ship"— downright dirge-like approach. The result is some of the coolest jazz ever uttered. (The use of the varying textures of other soloists might have relieved this.) Despite its technical innovations, "Miles Ahead" seems almost an epitaph for the cool school, whose beginnings are often dated by the Davis-Mulligan records and which has recently shown signs of wilting away. The playing throughout is impeccable."
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
The Casa Loma Orchestra and the Beginnings of The Swing Era
© -Steven Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Sometimes it is troubling to realize that my life has more history to it than future.
On the other hand, there are instances when it’s nice to have such a lengthy time span from which to review developments that have occurred in My World.
Or, as Mark Twain once explained: “When I was fourteen [14], I thought my father was the dumbest man in the world. When I turned twenty-one [21], I was surprised at how much he had learned over the last, seven [7] years!”
As is implied in the Twain anecdote, perhaps with the gathering of years comes some improved judgment and a tad more wisdom thanks to the additional information and knowledge we acquire along the way.
Some of these “smarts” may also have to do with learning from one’s mistakes and failures, and I have certainly had my share of these.
Thankfully, Jazz has been a part of my life since my early teens.
Over the “history” of my life, Jazz has changed from a casual, almost informal form of musical expression into an institutionalized art form.
As the writer and critic Grover Sales described it, Jazz has become America
My initial Jazz world consisted of listening to recordings which helped me decide that I wanted to learn an instrument so that I could play this music. This led to performing the music in various settings including rehearsals, clubs and concerts.
When I was coming of age in the music, playing Jazz consisted largely or listening, observing and asking lots of questions and then applying the results of these activities to long hours of practice.
There were no curriculum, study programs or tenured teachers devoted to Jazz. If one was lucky enough to encounter it, there might be a Jazz appreciation class, but it would have been the exception rather than the rule.
Most of the Jazz performers who helped shape my first experiences with the music in the 1950s and 60s had not as yet had books written about them, let alone been the subject of technical retrospectives of their work.
In many cases, the ready source of information about these early musical heroes were the liner notes that graced their LPs as written by such luminaries as Leonard Feather, Ira Gitler and Nat Hentoff, among many, many others.
Formalized scholastic research was at a minimum as were institutes, collections and museums devoted to Jazz and its makers.
Most of the originators of the music were still performing in the 1950s and 1960s and too busy earning a living to spare the time to invest in their musical legacies.
And then, just like that, the years had gone by and it seemed as though every major Jazz figure during the first 50 or so years of the music’s existence was receiving a full length book treatment.
Most of it is good stuff, too, and contains tons of information to help Jazz fans develop a more thorough view of select Jazz artists and their music.
For example, I always assumed that The Swing Era Big Bands era was initiated by the accolades that Benny Goodman’s orchestra received from admiring young Jazz fans of the 1930s.
But after reading the following excerpt Stephanie Stein Crease, Gil Evans Out of the Cool His Life and Music [Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2002], while preparing the recent two-part profile on Gil Evans which you can locate here in the blog archives, not only did I gain an insight into one of the major influences on Gil’s music, but I also derived a newfound understanding of the role the Casa Loma Orchestra played in the advent of The Swing Era Big Bands.
“The Casa Loma band, all but unknown today, was the most influential white jazz-oriented band of the early 1930s, when the broad sweep of the Swing Era was still a couple of years away. The band, based in Detroit
It adopted many of the musical elements of the best black dance bands led by Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Bennie Moten, whose popular Kansas City-based band later gave rise to the Count Basie Orchestra. Moten's swinging, riff-based, call-and-response arrangements were a huge influence on Gene Gifford, Casa Loma's chief arranger and guitarist. Gifford emulated Moten's arrangements but wrote with his own colleagues in mind and polished the southwestern style to a sheen. Gifford's scores "required a very high level of expertise... and this the Casa Loma band possessed in abundance."9 [Albert McCarthy, Big Band Jazz, p. 190].
Casa Loma developed its own precise, snappy style and projected an energetic unified swing sound. The band played catchy instrumental arrangements of tunes such as Wingy Manone's "San Sue Strut" and "Casa Loma Stomp"; interspersed in the up-tempo numbers were romantic ballads—such as "Smoke Rings," the band's theme song—that were ideal for close dancing.
Casa Loma's frequent radio broadcasts helped create a large, mostly white, collegiate audience for the band, particularly in eastern cities where swing already had a foothold in ballrooms and nightspots, but the band also had a following in small towns around the country. "In 1930 the average small-town white boy who loved jazz heard only the Casa Loma band... on phonograph records, in ballrooms and on the air," wrote jazz and jazz dance historian Marshall Stearns.10 [The Story of Jazz, p. 205]
Gunther Schuller, in his comprehensive book The Swing Era, called Casa Loma "the band that set the stage for the Swing Era, the first white band consistently to feature jazz instrumentals and pursue a deliberate jazz policy."11 [p. 632]
Monday, May 4, 2020
Teddy Edwards – Jazz Tenor Saxophonist of Importance
© -Steven Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Right from the beginning, Edwards’s recordings have been of consistently high quality, testimony to his likeable and no-nonsense approach. … Though he has had his ups and downs, Edwards’s relaxed, imperturbable manner has sustained him well; ‘steady with Teddy’ has been the watchword.”
- Richard Cook & Brain Morton, The Penguin Guide To Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
Sometimes I think that the “Los” in LOS ANGELES is an abbreviation for “Land of Obscure Saxophonists
How else to explain the relative lack of attention garnered by Harold Land, Sonny Criss, Curtis Amy, Jimmy Woods, Jack Montrose, and a number of other excellent saxophonists whose careers took place primarily in the City of Angels?
Teddy Edwards is another name that also seems to belong to this list of unheralded, Los Angeles-based saxophonists.
Thankfully, Les Koenig at Contemporary Records and Richard Bock at Pacific Jazz provided Teddy with a number of recording opportunities which helped document his excellence as a tenor saxophonist and composer.
In Teddy’s case, the initial reasons for his lack of public recognition may lie in the following explanation by Ted Gioia who writes:
“Although many West Coast musicians of Edwards's generation were beset by personal tragedy, few suffered more from pure bad luck. A series of recurring medical afflictions—gall bladder trouble as well as several oral surgeries necessitated by problems with his teeth—haunted Edwards throughout the 1950s, often sidelining him for months on end. When he was able to play, Edwards distinguished himself by being in the right place at almost the right time. At the start of the 1950s Edwards stood out as the most prominent member of the Lighthouse All-Stars, and his composition "Sunset Eyes" was the band's most requested number. Yet right before the All-Stars' rise to fame through a series of widely heard recordings, Edwards was dismissed by leader Howard Rumsey when a group of ex-Kenton players suddenly became available for active duty. Rumsey's decision was marked with eventual success, but Edwards was the unfortunate casualty of the affair. Nor was this all. In 1954, Edwards turned down an opportunity to go on the road with the Max Roach/Clifford Brown band because he had recently married and felt that the time was not right for an extended road engagement. The Roach/Brown band went on to be- come the most celebrated bop quintet of its day. Edwards never got another chance at such a high-profile gig. The tenorist's life during the heyday of West Coast jazz is an extended account of just such missed opportunities and misfortunes.” [West Cost Jazz: Modern Jazz in California
Les Koenig, owner-operator of Contemporary Records, offered this overview in the insert notes to his Together Again!!!! Contemporary album [Contemporary 7588; OJCCD-424-2] which features Teddy with his long-time musical associate and friend, trumpeter Howard McGhee:
“Edwards, …, continued to work in California
“Together Again remains a very satisfying album - it wears like a comfortable pair of sneakers. Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards were at the cutting-edge of jazz when they first got together in the late forties. By 1961 they were considered in the mainstream rather than the avant-garde, but both had continued to progress and increase the mastery of their horns. Backed by an exceedingly able rhythm section [Phineas Newborn, Jr. on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums], they prove that good jazz, like a fine wine, improves with age.” [Jazz West Coast, p. 212]
Writing in 1998 as the producer of the CD re-issue of Teddy’s Sunset Eyes Pacific Jazz album [CDP 94848]:
“Teddy Edwards is a superb tenor saxophonist whose probably best known for his Dial duets with Dexter Gordon, the live recording by the first incarnation of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quartet and decades of wonderful small group recordings under his own name. But his career includes big band and film studio work, arranging and even songwriting (Louis Jordan, Nancy Wilson and Lorez Alexandria are among those who've recorded his songs). At 74, he stills writing and playing beautifully.”
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