Part 5 - "1959: The Beginning of the Beyond - The Lydian Chromatic Concept and The Third Stream" - Darius Brubeck

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Russell codified the modal approach to harmony (using scales instead of chords) in a theoretical treatise that he says was inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned that he might try to find the closest scale for every chord ... Davis popularised those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.”

[Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 1998, 6]

Part 5 is from Darius Brubeck’s essay - 1959: The Beginning of Beyond - which in its final form, serves as Chapter 10 in Merwyn Cooke and David Horn, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz [2002].

As noted in the first posting, it’s a long piece, so we have used the subject headings within the essay as a means of presenting it on these pages in smaller samplings.

Keeping in mind Darius’ observation of 1959 as a pivotal year in the evolution of Jazz, the factors building up to why this was so from this portion of his essay emphasizes “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, the first text written specifically as Jazz theory and The Third Stream which had the potential to be created from a melding of Jazz and Classical music.”[paraphrase]

© Copyright ® Darius Brubeck, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“The Lydian Chromatic Concept”

“The first text written specifically as jazz theory was The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation by George Russell, first published in 1953 and issued in a revised edition in 1959. Russell is a composer, teacher and sometime bandleader who had a great influence on the rising third-stream intelligentsia of the 1950s and early 1960s. He studied composition with Stephen Wolpe and also wrote scores for Gillespie. He taught at Lenox in 1958 and 1959, which gave his ideas the most important exposure imaginable at the time, (He later taught at New England Conservatory from the late 1960s.) As an academically trained composer he added unusual technical skill at manipulating structure, harmony and balance, affecting the usual concerns of jazz composition, which are the interplay of improvised solos and arranged ensemble passages. He was a daring and rigorous experimentalist as a composer (see, for example, All About Rosie and Living Time). Perhaps because he did not project himself enough as a performer (on piano) his music is little known to the public but it remains controversial, influential and respected within professional circles. Whatever the ultimate verdict on The Lydian Chromatic Concept, there is no doubt he was an inspirational teacher. All About Rosie (re-issued on Schuller, The Birth of the Third Stream) is a singular accomplishment: it is mainly the exciting piano solo by Bill Evans that gives it an aura of historic specificity, but in style and conception it sounds as if it could have been written much more recently.

Unlike its respected author, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation for Improvisation (to use its full title) has a mixed reputation, probably because, according to Russell, 'The Lydian Chromatic Concept is as large as all of the music that has been written or that could be written in the equal tempered tuning system.” ... Unfortunately, his attempt to present and prove such an audacious comprehensive theory sometimes resulted in unreadably turgid discourse burdened with jargon, yet the work's influence has spread far beyond those who have actually read it:

Russell codified the modal approach to harmony (using scales instead of chords) in a theoretical treatise that he says was inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned that he might try to find the closest scale for every chord ... Davis popularised those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.

[Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 1998, 6]

Davis, who according to this story was indirectly responsible for the Lydian Chromatic Concept, is reported to have given it its most succinct formulation, something like 'F should be where middle C is on the piano.' What this means is that instead of basing pitch relations on the major scale from C to C, our basic scale should be the Lydian mode, the white notes from F to F. The reasons given in Russell are acoustic (overtone series), historical (the major/minor scale system was a compromise which allowed for cadential harmony using the subdominant) and musical (the dissonant sound of fourth against major third making the fourth an 'avoid note’ in major harmony). The series, moving up the cycle of fifths seven times starting from F, is as follows: F-C-G-D-A-E-B (-F). The augmented fourth (in either direction) is the last interval in this series, taking it back to F. Rearrange these notes in stepwise order and the result is the Lydian scale. To get to an enharmonic [notes that are the same in pitch though bear different names] version of the 'perfect fourth' of the major scale (A flat) would require going right to the end of the series of fifths. (Continuing one more fifth would land on E# which is F, the starting note.) A#, that is, B flat, is therefore the remotest possible note from the Lydian tonic. 'Enharmonic' distinctions are inaudible and therefore meaningless to Russell who takes equal temperament for granted. Why do we have a major scale with a perfect fourth rather than a Lydian scale and its derivatives?

The major scale probably emerged as the predominating scale of Western music, because within its seven tones lies the most fundamental harmonic progression of the classical era... the tonic major chord on C... the sub-dominant major chord on F ... the dominant seventh chord on G - thus, the major scale resolves to its tonic major chord. The Lydian scale is the sound of its tonic major chord.                            

   - [Russell 1959, iii, iv]

This is original, brilliant, even self-evident, but no one had quite said it before. The practical implications are indeed far-reaching and amount to a theory that works both for playing and teaching jazz. It follows then that Davis's original aim can be fulfilled by studying what are now called chord-scale relationships; this is, in fact, what jazz students are taught and there is of course much material (published by Aebersold) that supports teaching in this way. Davis's Kind of Blue is often used to illustrate what chord-scale relationships mean in practice and a pedagogy based on an ahistoric [lack of concern for history] but serviceable system of modes (of major and melodic minor plus synthetic scales, etc.) is how improvisation is formally taught. For example, one of the first pieces I teach beginners is 'So What', which gives a convincing demonstration that the Dorian mode and the minor-seventh chord (with all extensions) are co-extensive; somewhat like describing light in physics as either a wave or a particle depending on what you need the description for.

Russell himself, perhaps thinking more as a composer and theorist than as a musician in search of an 'approach', took things in a somewhat more obscure direction, inventing special terminology (e.g., Vertical polymodality' and 'auxiliary diminished scale'). The details of this aspect of the Lydian Chromatic Concept seem so far not to have infiltrated practice today but the basic principle of chord-scale is now pervasive, even cliched.

Russell was not merely tinkering with abstract relationships for the sake of it. His vision also had an observational and predictive dimension that was proven correct by the end of the 1960s:

Since the bop period, a war on the chord has been going on I think... [Parker] probably represented the last full blossoming of a jazz music that was based on chords... Even the need to do extended form pieces, whether successful or not, is a desire to get away from a set of chord changes.                                                                             - [Russell 1959, xx]

Ian Carr (Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, 1999) believes that Davis's mature career can be plotted as a gradual reduction of harmonic activity. The decade that started with Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain ended with In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

The justifications, precedents and far-reaching claims Russell crowds into his oddly organised treatise tend to complicate rather than clarify, but the Lydian Chromatic Concept meant liberation from the obsolete concerns and dictates of ‘legit’ academic theory which is based on a different tradition of tonal organisation.

Even back in 1959, the 'war on the chord' escalated to thermonuclear proportions with the advent of free jazz and [Ornette] Coleman's harmolodic theory, which he has not systematically defined. His music generally seems to include reference to a tonal centre but no key or tonal hierarchy, accidental harmonies generated by moving parts (considerable parallelism) but no set sequences of chords, and communicative and often beautiful or humorous melodies.

In recent correspondence on these jazz theories, Barry Kernfeld wrote to me:

the theoretical underpinnings of harmolodic theory are extremely suspect, even more so than those of George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept, but there is no question that these sorts of casual, home-made approaches to jazz theory have been of great value to performers and educators, helping them to capture, or to communicate, through inferential or emotive means, some of the processes involved in jazz improvisation.

To which I replied:

I think the word 'theory' in Coleman's case has to be taken in a less technical - as in music theory - sense and recast as something like 'critical theory', 'reception theory'; even a musical version of relativity theory. It is an outlook or idea rather than a process of analysis or a set of instructions. 

My workaday answer to 'what does harmolodic mean?' is 'the theory that melody, harmony and rhythm should not be considered separately, especially in improvisation, because they all generate each other'.

My workaday answer is an example of both the strength and weakness of formalism. It isolates a principle which Coleman has made the centre of his musical universe just as Russell has made the Lydian scale — 'the sound of its tonic major chord'- the centre of his. On the other hand, my quasi-definition cannot explain any particular musical result or why there was a need for harmolodic theory. Coleman must have had an intuitive cultural motive for dreaming up a word like "harmolodic' and making it stick by playing out its implications throughout a career spanning decades. Coleman came from obscurity and gutbucket rhythm-and-blues gigs to the foremost intellectual forum of jazz in Lenox, encoding as 'theory' the emotional, primal and sacral substratum of a music now on the threshold of entering its academic phase. He renders unto academe a substantial and varied body of work and a word for it, a technical-sounding neologism of dual 'signifyin, and formalist connotations. Now it is up to us, not him, to do the explaining. I think Kernfeld is right about the pedagogic importance of leaving a path open to continue communication 'through inferential or emotive means, some of the processes involved in jazz improvisation'. I would add, in the creation of music generally.

The Third Stream

'Third stream’ ideology offered the potential of the two great mainstreams of western music, jazz and classical, blending into a third style. For those who have not yet heard The Birth of the Third Stream, 'blending jazz and classical' could have kitsch connotations ranging from Paul Whiteman's orchestral jazz in the late 1920s to modern popularisations such as the often disparaged Bird with Strings, Jacques Loussier playing Bach accompanied by brushes on the snare drum, and orchestral 'pops' arrangements of Gershwin tunes sung by an opera star or even with a lonely jazz soloist in front. That third stream was entirely something else will become clear to any jazz fan looking at the list of composers on The Birth of the Third Stream: Jimmy Giuffre, J. J. Johnson, John Lewis, Charles Mingus, Gunther Schuller and George Russell. The majority of the players are jazz musicians (for example, Bill Evans, Bernie Glow, Miles Davis, Urbie Green and the composers) and, other than the basses and Barry Galbraith on guitar, there are no strings attached.

Despite well-made manifesto albums [two Atlantic LPs by the Modern Jazz Quartet] on major labels in the 1950s and a prolific and respected advocate in Schuller, third-stream music seems at first to have been only a movement of its time. Did any "invisible missiles' arrive in the future? Record producer George Avakian writes in the liner notes to The Birth of the Third Stream: 'With the passing years, it's been said that one doesn't hear much about third stream any more. There is a good reason for this; it has been absorbed into the mainstream.' Some of Schuller's new liner notes for this re-release contain the same message:

Looking back to those heady, exciting days of 40 years ago, it is also fascinating to observe how the technical and stylistic horizons of musicians have broadened and deepened in the intervening years... it is commonplace today to find many performers who will readily deal with any kind of music: improvised or written ... Varese and Stravinsky... Mingus and Coleman ... The world of music in the 1950s was still for the most part divided among sharply defined lines of musicians who, on the jazz side, could not (or preferred not to) read music... while on the 'classical side' musicians could not improvise, could not swing, could barely capture the unique rhythmic inflections and expanded sonorities of jazz.

To be continued ….

Tom Ranier - Something Old and Something New - The Evolution of a Jazz Musician

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Tom Ranier is a truly gifted multi-talented musician. His work is superb throughout … writing liner notes for this album has been a study for me in how many ways I can say - SUPERB.”

- Buddy DeFranco, clarinetist, liner notes to "In The Still of the Night"

By the mid-1970s I had moved away from music in a professional capacity, but I maintained friendships with many of the musicians from my working days, one of whom was the late vibraphonist Dave Pike.

Dave and I went to the same high school [although he was a year ahead of me] and I played drums in one of his early groups, a trio with bassist Ben Tucker.

In the 1970s, I was still getting residual checks and would drop by the musicians union on Vine Street in Hollywood, CA to pick these up and after doing so I made the always delightful stop across the street to visit the nice people who ran the Professional Drum Shop.

On one such occasion I ran into Dave who was scoping out some new mallets. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, I asked him what was going on and he mentioned that he had a gig with his quintet at a place called Hungry Joe’s on Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, CA.

It was about a 40 mile schlepp from my place, but Dave kept raving about the group so much that I promised him I would make it down over the weekend. 

Which I did; and am I glad because that’s when I heard Tom Ranier play piano and he completely blew me away.

The late Jazz master, pianist George Shearing once said about Jazz: “The hardest thing about this music is getting it from the head to the hands.” Well, listening to Tom play that night, you might have thought that George had made up that problem as it certainly didn’t pertain to Mr. Ranier.

Tom just knocked out everybody - including his own bandmates - with his fluid and inspired improvisation. 

The other thing that impressed me about Tom was his awareness as an accompanist: he was listening closely to what the other musicians were doing during their solos and he kept feeding them just what they needed in terms of chords, chord substitutions, rhythmic riffs and vamps, etc. Sometimes he had the good sense to just lay out [not play behind a soloist] rather than interfere with what was going on in the music 

His accompaniment wasn’t mindless or insensitive. It was perfectly suited to what the other players needed to help make their solos happen. Tom was a continual presence in the music - a persistent force to help keep things together and/or moving - especially since Dave could be a very flamboyant player who also had [the distracting to some] habit of singing out his vibe solos simultaneously. 

The other members of the band that night were Ron Eschete on guitar, Luther Hughes on bass and Ted Hawke on drums.

Reflecting on his time in Dave’s band at Hungry Joe’s from 1974-77, Tom got a big grin on his face and said: “Bebop five nights a week!” And in a message to me he wrote: “And on Monday nights they had a big band in - The Orange County Rhythm Machine.” Hungry Joe’s may have had “lousy drinks and cheap food,” but they were rich in Jazz.

Since that time, Tom has been a fixture on the music scene in Los Angeles on piano both as a performing artist and as a studio musician bringing to the latter the added benefit of being a first-rate clarinetist as well as a saxophone player.

There’s a very nice write-up about Tom’s background and his career in music and in music education, including excerpts from his interviews for the Los Angeles Times, on Wikipedia which you can access by going here. [Incidentally, Tom’s recent two year stint as an accompanist in vocalist supreme Tony Bennett’s quartet is not included in this information.]

Thanks to the 4-day festivals that the Los Angeles Jazz Institute [LAJI] puts on twice-a-year, I’ve had the opportunity to hear Tom perform in a variety of settings and on various instruments since I began attending these in 1996.

Although Tom mainly plays piano at these LAJI events, I’ve heard him perform on clarinet and he is dazzling on the instrument.

Which brings me to the arrival of a couple of recent treats which form the basis for this posting: Tom Ranier: In The Still of the Night  - The 20th Anniversary Remastered Edition [Contemporary Records 14067-2] and Tom Ranier This Way [self-produced recording]. [In The Still of the Night is available through Amazon and Tom informs me that This Way will be available through CDbaby. You can also inquire directly to purchase copies at Tomranier@Me.com].

With the former having originally been recorded in 1996 and the latter recorded and issued in 2020, these two recordings provide a glimpse of the evolution of Tom as an artist during this 25 year period in his career.

In many ways the two recordings are a study in contrasts with Tom Ranier: In The Still of the Night pointing to Tom’s Bebop and straight-ahead Jazz roots while Tom Ranier This Way is very much a product of how Tom hears the music now with greater rhythmic and harmonic variations and a heavy incorporation of electronics both in terms of instruments and recording techniques.

Fundamentally, what they represent are recorded examples of the evolution of Tom Ranier, an artist who has never stopped growing and developing.

A common thread throughout is overdubbing which provides a solution to how best to handle Tom’s amazing capabilities as a multi-instrumentalist, one who is as much at home on clarinet and other woodwinds as he is on acoustic and synthesized keyboards. 

Tom’s versatility as an artist is further underscored by the fact that 7 of the 11 tracks on Tom Ranier: In The Still of the Night have arrangements for a woodwind choir and a string section - all of which have been orchestrated by … wait for it … Tom!

But having said that, Tom’s work on this recording went from the sublime to the ridiculous when he conceived and transcribed Buddy DeFranco’s solo on Summer Me, Winter Me from Buddy’s album with Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass [OJCCD-867-2], harmonized it for four clarinets and then played all the parts!!!!

And the beautiful song selections that begin with Summer Me, Winter Me, continue with the wonderful trio versions of How Deep Is The Ocean, Where or When and Tom’s original up tempo burner Excuse Me, which is one of seven compositions that Tom composed for the recording with all of the others being set to strings.

Throughout, Tom’s touch produces a crystal clear tone on the piano with each note resonating so perfectly that it's almost as though Tom is wrapping the music in his personal sound and presenting it to the listener as a gift. 

Tom Ranier This Way finds Tom in a very introspective and reflective mood and these, too, are the operative words that best describe the overall texture [sonority] of this recording.

Tom’s music is evocative, poignant, haunting, suggestive - almost to the point of being, at times, mysterious.

No big woodwind and string ensembles here, just Tom on piano, synthesizer, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone saxes, clarinets, bass and contra alto clarinet - JUST!

Along with strong contributions by Thom Rotella on guitar, Trey Henry on bass and Ralph Humphreys on drums, Tom again offers a transcription to demonstrate his multi-instrumental talents, this time on the late Michael Brecker’s solo on Sacred Heart from the Brecker Brothers Out of the Loop album around which he wraps six originals and a singular version the Jobim classic Desafinado which he brilliantly converts to a 7/4 time signature!

The “mood” I referenced earlier comes into stark relief thanks to the overall sound of the recording and the mastering mix. Tom obviously had a particular sonority in mind and this becomes the underlying “concept” for the album, as irrespective of tempo, the tunes blend together as a kind of tone poem.

Tom fits you into the music and, through the use of different instruments, different combinations of instruments, and different harmonies, he changes the listening venues.

It takes a very mature musical mind to conceive all of this and very sophisticated musical skills to execute it. Tom is able to bring it off for a variety of reasons: innate talent, years of working to perfect skills, combined with a half-century of experience as a music performance and music educator.

This Way is an unforgettable trip into the musical mind of a master musician.  It’s a journey that will fill you with many surprises, but above all, what you’ll come away with is a unique Jazz experience courtesy of Tom Ranier and company.

It’s been 45 years+, but Tom Ranier is still knocking me out.

Here’s a taste of what’s on offer in the new CD.

Peggy Lee: The Incomparable

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

“The work with Goodman was grueling. The Paramount theater in New York is notorious in the memory of everyone who played it. They hated it, and those who survive still do. They played seven or eight shows a day, between movies, starting at 10 a.m. And at one point, Peg remembered, the band was adding to that schedule a set at the Terrace Room of the New Yorker Hotel. There was never time for a meal: the musicians survived on sandwiches brought to them by Popsy Randolph, the band boy, later a well-known photographer. Yet the experience was invaluable. She was absorbing lessons no school can teach, things that go deep into the subconscious, into the viscera, even into muscle memory.

"Johnny said something someplace," Peg said to me in one of our con­versations. There was no need to specify who Johnny was. To both of us, there was one Johnny: Mercer. "It had to do with sudden fame being so dangerous. So many people have sudden fame and they can't handle that. If you have to pay your dues, you have to do it.

"I used to call Benny Goodman's band boot camp. A finishing school.

"Time has to pass. You need a lot of experience. You learn as you go. You crawl before you walk before you run. You know how to handle a situ­ation on the stage when some crisis comes up. If it's early in your career someplace, it doesn't matter because very few people are going to see it or hear about it, and it won’t be in the trades the next day: So-and-so bombed.

That’s the heavy advantage of learning how to handle your stage presence by the experience you’ve had. If you do even a high-school play and the butler doesn’t come in when he’s supposed to, you learn to improvise. Or if you’re gown gets caught on the heel of your shoe, you learn to lean on the piano while somebody crawls under there and unfastens it. ” [pp. 136-37]

“Pianist Lou Levy, her accompanist and conductor over a longer period of time than any other, said, "Norman Granz, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and I went to hear her at Basin Street East in New York. We were all leaving for Europe with Jazz at the Philharmonic. I had just worked with her, and we all knew her. She did her tribute to Billie Holiday. By the time she was halfway through it, Norman, Ella, and Oscar were all in tears. It was that accurate. It was eerie. I guess I was the only one who didn't cry because I was dumbstruck by what was going on. She scared Count Basie to death with it."

‘I used to do it,’ Peg said. ‘But it brought so many people to tears that I stopped.’" [p. 141]

“[I was] … watching videos of two of her television shows at her home in Belair. She wore a tight, stark black gown in one, an equally tight white one in the other, and she had a gorgeous, voluptuous figure. I noticed in these shows something I had first paid attention to when she would play the Copacabana in New York: the min­imal use of motion. Such, however, was the effectiveness of the focus she established that if she cocked an eyebrow, the whole audience would laugh at the minute expression.

So, watching her stand almost motionless, singing, on television, I said, "Peg, where the hell do you get the courage to do absolutely nothing?"

There was a long pause. Then she said, "There is power in stillness."

[p. 141]

There is little I could write on these pages that would do justice to the storied career of vocalist and song writer, Peggy Lee, or, as she was often introduced – “Miss Peggy Lee.”

Then, as I was searching through my Peggy Lee recordings while working on a video project, I came across the following insert notes by the late, eminent Jazz author, Gene Lees, which I thought provided a succinct look at what made Peggy such a great artist.

And thus, this brief profile of one of Jazz’s most unique, song stylists came into being.

Gene also devoted an entire chapter to Peggy entitled In from the Cold: Peggy Lee which you can find in his book, Singers and the Song II, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The quotations and related pagination that I used to open this piece are excerpted from the chapter on Peggy from Gene’s book.

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

“There have been few careers in American music to compare to Peggy Lee's. Miss Lee evolved into our greatest singing actress, producing in her performances of songs—many of which she wrote—indelible character sketches of women in all walks of life. Her work has never flagged, the quality of it has never faltered, and she is still at it.

She is the most deceptive of artists, because she does what all great artists do: makes it look easy. She never shouts. I think of her work as Stanislavskian, because instead of projecting a song "at" you, she illuminates it from within. The closest parallel to her way of performing that I have ever found is the acting of Montgomery Clift. It is as if her songs are not so much heard as overheard.

This album is a return to the blues for her. Blues is a term that has two levels of mean­ing. Strictly speaking, it is a form of song 12 bars long with a specific harmonic structure. But the word has been used in a broader sense to mean any sad song. This album em­braces both meanings.

Six of the 12 songs are in true blues form: See See Rider, You Don't Know, Fine and Mellow, Kansas City, Love Me, and Beale Street. And Taint Nobody's Bizness, which is in eight-bar form, is assuredly a bluesy tune, and one that has long been associated with blues singers.

Singing the blues is a separate art. The great blues singers have tended to stay within the form, eschewing the classic American popular song. And the finest singers of the popular song have as a rule avoided the blues. Peggy Lee is one of those rare people-indeed, I can think of only one or two others—who are comfortable and convincing in both. Sometimes I get the feeling she can sing anything—and always with that deceptive ease.

The richness of the blues form is illustrated by the variety of the six songs named above; the form is the same but the flavor in each case is different. The richness of Peggy Lee's gift is illustrated in the way in which she brings out the differences.

Two of the songs are strongly associated with Billie Holiday. The influence of Billie Holiday in American music was, for a long time, enormous. And critical writings have often cited Peggy as one of the singers influenced by Billie. For myself, I was always more aware of the differences between them than the similarities. Those differences came sharply into focus one day when we were discussing singing, and to illustrate a point, she sang a phrase exactly—and I mean exactly—as Billie would have done it. It was uncanny. But it served to show how far apart they were in sound and style, though not in essential inspiration.

It has long been a tradition among jazz players to make reference in solos to the great source figures of the tradition—trumpet players quoting Louis Armstrong's opening passage of West End Blues, for example, or saxophone players quoting parts of Lester Young solos. I have never heard a singer do this until now. It's clever and subtle and you might miss it.

Peggy does two songs that were among those most closely associated with Billie Holi­day, the haunting and disturbing God Bless the Child and Fine and Mellow. The lyrics in both cases are by Billie. The music of God Bless the Child is by Arthur Herzog, but that of the blues Fine and Mellow is Billie's. Notice how Peggy pronounces some words in Fine and Mellow, for example the long I in the rhyming words yellow and mellow. It's a subtle, gentle, loving tribute to Billie Holiday, a reminder of a source. And it's charming.

Furthermore, if you remember his recording of the song, you may hear a smiling little tribute to Jack Teagarden in Basin Street Blues (which is not, by the way, a true blues, despite the title).

There is another way in which this album has a sense of return. Her performances on New American Jazz were accompanied only by a small jazz group. Later recordings involved large orchestras and some marvelous arrangements by gifted writers. Here she returns to a small-group context and some superb accompanists.

Some of the best accompanists to singers are players who themselves like to sing. Pianist Mike Renzi sings well—I've heard him—and drummer Grady Tate has recorded albums as a singer. The rest of this superb quintet consists of John Chiodini, guitar, Mark Sher­man, percussion (including vibes), and Jay Leonhart, bass.

It is little understood, except by singers themselves, that extremely soft performances are more difficult than bravura belting. The way Peggy sings high notes softly has always amazed me. Hers is the gentlest of voices, but there has always been power in reserve behind it, and she does amazing things with it. She has remarkable control. Notice how in See See Rider—done in three-four time—she comes into the first note low on the pitch and slips up into it, to suspenseful and bluesy effect, and then echoes it when the phrase recurs in the fourth chorus. Her singing is filled with shading of that kind.

The blues form is an American national treasure.

But then, so is Peggy Lee.

Gene Lees”

A Drum Is A Woman

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

In the lexicon of Jazz, the phrase “A Drum is a Woman” was made famous by Kenny Clarke, the father of modern Jazz drumming, who was affectionately known as “Klook.”

Although many have heard the phrase, here’s Michael Carvin’s explanation as to its more precise meaning as told to Ingrid Monson, author, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.64-65]. Michael is an excellent drum instructor based in NYC.

“It is a family. That's why you say a drum is a woman. That's what Klook [drummer Kenny Clarke] was talkin' about. That's what Prez [tenor saxophonist Lester Young] was talking about. He say, "Man, the drum is a woman, man." And I say, "Klook, what you mean by that?" He say, "Well, you take a woman that has four kids, and all four of them come home from school together.

One of them made an A; he's very happy. One made an F; he's very sad. One caught a cold today; he's upset. And one lost his jacket and he's very upset. Now when they hit the house, all four of them is hittin' the mother at the same time. The one that got an A'll say, "Mommy, look I got an A," and he's excited; and the one that got an F, say [crying tone of voice], "Oh mommy, I got an F"; the one that got a cold, "Mommy, I'm catching a cold," but she have to, at the same time, deal with all of them at the same time and cool each one of them out for the energy level that they are dealing with. And that's why they say the drum is a woman . . . cause that's the same thing a drummer has to do.

You come to the gig, [pace of speaking increases] the trumpet player's up, boy he feel like playing it. The saxo­phone, you know, he don't feel too good. The piano player say, "Aw, man, I shouldn't have ate so much, man, I'm feel­ing a little sluggish." It's the same thing. And . . . they all coming to you at the same time, so you're getting the news from all four of them at the same time. Right? Cause you're the bandleader, right? And you have to say, "Aw, man, damn you ate too much? [high tone of voice] Why, man, you big as a house." And you got to try to get him happy and the other guy that's already stretching, then you want to kind of cool him down, cause he's stretching too much. He got too much energy. And then the guy that is not feelin' so good, then you got to [give him] a pep talk ... before you go play.

And they never ask you, "How do you feel?" But when the four kids came in the house, they didn't ask mommy. Right? . . . But mommy had to go right into her motherhood and cool them out. That's why Klook said a drum is a woman.24 (Carvin 1990).”