Hampton Hawes - All Night Session!

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

“Comparatively little has been written on the art of jazz improvisation. How the jazzman plays notes, devises figures, invents rhythm, concocts chords which were not in his mind a moment before he plays them; how he succeeds in spontaneously altering the notes, chords, figures and rhythm patterns so as to achieve freshness and a jazz feeling — these are the enigmas of the creative process.”

- Arnold Shaw,pianist, songwriter, music business executive; taken from his liner notes to All Night Session! The Hampton Hawes Quartet

"It's hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging. That's the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life. I've reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah— like people do in church when they're converted to God. That's the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session."

- Hampton Hawes, Jazz pianist

By today’s standards, it may sound like some form of medieval torture from The Dark Ages, but from about 1945 - 1965, it was quite common for Jazz groups working in clubs on the Hollywood to play four or five sets between 9:00 - 2:00 PM [closing time]. Sometimes, one or more musician would finish the club date and then head over to a recording session on Sunset, Santa Monica or Melrose Blvd., all located within a few miles of each other.

In such a context, the term “all night session” was not all that uncommon. Following the Jazz club gig, breakfast at 6:00 AM, home to kip for a few hours if you had a daytime studio date for a TV commercial, radio jingle or movie soundtrack, or an all-day sleep if you didn’t: life was happy, joyous and free.

Given its semi-arid climate, Los Angeles could be very hot during the day but due to the low humidity caused by the aridity, the evenings were generally cool and filled with the lingering scent of lemon blossoms, flowering Jasmine and the fragrances from a variety of flowers, bushes and herbs.

In a way, leading a nocturnal life filled with the excitement of performing in Jazz clubs bathed in the glitter of incandescent street lamps, lighted storefront displays and automobile lights while sleeping the heat of the day away in air conditioned comfort was almost a privileged existence, especially if you were young enough not to have a care in the world to go along with this active night life.

Of course, not all of us denizens of the dark had recording contracts with labels led by sensitive and understanding executives such as Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records who took great pains to create environments in which Jazz musicians could relax and just blow.

Such was the case when Lester brought pianist Hampton Hawes into the “studio” [which was actually the back room of the label’s office that doubled as its warehouse when audio engineer Roy DuNann was not using it as to make recordings] along with guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Bruz Freeman to record for 16 hours from sunup-to-sunset and release the results of these performances contiguously on three LPs.

What Les was trying to recreate was a Jazz club in which a group of musicians play what they want for as long as they are want, night after night using the 16 hour duration to develop an atmosphere of relaxed informality to replace the more typical sterility of a studio setting.

Keep in mind that when Hampton’s all night sessions took place in November, 1956, professional “live” or “in-performance” recording was still in its infancy.

The following insert notes by Arnold Shaw detail more about the sessions, how they came about and selective aspects of each of the tunes

They are also some of the most instructive and insightful accounts I’ve ever read on how one musician approaches the process of improvisation.

All Night Session!, Vol. 1 [OJCCD-638-2]

“AS A GROUP, THE THREE ALBUMS and sixteen selections comprising All Night Session! represent a most unusual achievement in the annals of jazz recording. The almost two hours of music were recorded at a single, continuous session, in the order in which you hear the numbers, and without editing of any kind. This seems like an impossible feat. Playing steadily for several hours is a taxing physical experience at best, but improvising continually for that length of time is an exhausting one, mentally and emotionally. Yet the later selections in All Night Session! reveal no flagging of vitality, spontaneity, or inventiveness. "The feeling wasn't like recording," Hampton Hawes has said in commenting on the session. "We felt like we went somewhere to play for our own pleasure. After we got started, I didn't even think I was making records. In fact, we didn't even listen to playbacks. We didn't tighten up as musicians often do in recording studios—we just played because we love to play." Considering the buoyant beat, skillful pacing, variety of material, spontaneous jazz feeling and the richness of invention, All Night Session! is a testimonial of the highest order to the musicianship of jazzman Hawes and his associates.

As a pianist, Hawes possesses a remarkably robust and vigorous style. The sixteen selections in All Night Session! teem with a pulsating energy and are marked by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of ideas. Although he can create chord patterns of great beauty as in I’ll Remember April and April in Paris, and he can command a singing, lyrical tone, he is more attracted at this stage of his career to expressions of a dynamic character. His touch is firm and authoritative and he possesses a split second sense of timing. His technical mastery is so great that there is not a single blurred run, tangled triplet or ragged arpeggio, no matter how fast the tempo.

Included among the sixteen selections are four original compositions by Hawes. They are of interest for two reasons. In the first instance, it is to be noted that they were composed at the record date itself and not written down beforehand. This gives them a spontaneous, ebullient quality, which is in a sense, their strongest characteristic. I was interested to learn that virtually all or Hawes' originals have been composed in this way. Instead of being written down, they are transcribed from his live performance, emphasizing the fact that his creative activity is the result of his role of an improviser. The second fact to be noted is that all four selections are blues—fast, vigorous blues, but blues nonetheless. Like Charlie Parker, whom Hampton credits with being the strongest influence on his playing, Hawes believes that blues are the basic foundation of jazz and that all jazzmen, modern as well as traditional, must begin by mastering the blues.

BORN IN THE CENTER OF WEST COAST JAZZ on November 15, 1928, Hampton Hawes became a member of the musicians' union when he was sixteen. The following year, while he still attended L. A.'s Polytechnic High School, from which he was graduated in 1946, he played with Big Jay McNeely's band. Before he was drafted into the army in 1953 for the usual two year stint, he gigged around L. A. with various modern combos, among them, Wardell Gray's, Red Norvo's, Dexter Gordon's, Teddy Edwards', and Howard Rumsey's All-Stars at the Hermosa Beach Lighthouse. The latter assignment came through a meeting with trumpeter Shorty Rogers, who after hearing him at a Gene Norman concert, immediately  invited  him  to play  the recording date which produced the first Giants album on Capitol (1952).

On his release from the army in 1955, Hawes took his own trio into L A.'s [The] Haig [on Wilshire Blvd. in Hollywood, CA]. He also recorded his first trio album for Contemporary Records (C3505), employing Chuck Thompson on drums and Red Mitchell on bass. This was followed in short order by two other trio albums (C3515 and C3523), both with the same personnel. Hailed as the "Arrival of the Year" by Metronome in the 1955 yearbook, Hawes was voted in 1956 "New Star" on piano by the annual Down Beat poll of leading jazz critics. In the same year (1956), after completing a highly successful engagement at The Tiffany in L A., he left for an extended cross country tour which kept him on the move for six months. In the course of this tour, he met many Eastern jazzmen and was most impressed by Thelonious Monk as a musician and personality. In 1957 he made another tour back East, and enjoyed playing with Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers.

Although his first three albums for Contemporary were with his own trio, Hawes enjoys working with a quartet. "You can do more rhythmic things and you can have more beats going. The full rhythm of drums, bass and guitar gives you two instruments to play melody (guitar and piano) and two instruments to play rhythm (drums and bass) and keep the beat going. Then you can switch around. I like to hear other people play solos because it's inspiring, and gives you ideas other than your own to conjure with."

[To Be Continued]

All Night Session! Vol. 2 [OJCCD-639-2]

Comparatively little has been written on the art of jazz improvisation. How the jazzman plays notes, devises figures, invents rhythm, concocts chords which were not in his mind a moment before he plays them; how he succeeds in spontaneously altering the notes, chords, figures and rhythm patterns so as to achieve freshness and a jazz feeling — these are the enigmas of the creative process.

Of his approach to improvisation, here is what Hawes has revealingly said: "You know the tune you're going to play and after you play the melody through, it comes time for you to blow. You build your solo on the chords as they go by and you use the chord changes to tell your story . . . Just like, maybe a painter painting a picture, he has his brushes. Well, his brushes are the chord changes. What he paints is what he's thinking about, so what kind of solo you play is what comes out of your mind, or the soul that you have for that song you're playing. I believe that the way a person thinks usually comes out in his playing. You've got to really feel what you're doing. Even the way my hands feel on the keys, that has a lot to do with what I play. I like my hands to feel good when they're playing. Like between the black notes and the white notes on the piano, when I'm phrasing I like to have my hands fall off right so I can feel like I'm getting into it. If I know that my hands are feeling good, then I know that I'm phrasing right. If something feels awkward — well, I'm doing something wrong. I don't try to play too much at first. I like to start out just playing a few things and then keep building, chorus by chorus, until you reach a big climax, when you're playing to your fullest capabilities, in other words, where you're really doing everything you can do — then after that you cool it and give yourself a little rest and you're playing just a few things while you're thinking about something else to play . . . Sometimes I think about the melody. But before I think about the melody, I think about the 'underneath notes' of the melody — the harmony notes that move under the top notes and show where the chord goes . . ."

Three concepts stand out in Hawes' statement. While they involve technical matters, their import may be grasped by the layman without resorting to technical exposition. The three concepts pivot on the words: climax, chord changes, and "underneath notes." Climax in improvisation is not different from climax in a story so that it is not too difficult to discern. Hawes' procedure in adding notes, chords and figures, chorus after chorus, may be studied in Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me or Will You Still Be Mine where the third choruses are like the full, complex, colorful flowers that have sprouted from the small, simple buds of the original melody. The building process involves a variation of chord changes and, in turn, of the "underneath notes," which significantly determine the sequence of chords.

Imitation is an important device for developing a piece of music and, of course, as an improvisational technique. It involves the repetition of a line or riff in another key, a different register, or on another instrument. As an instance of imitation, listen to the way guitarist Hall picks up and echoes Hawes’ melodic line in Will You Still Be Mine and Hampton's Pulpit. In the latter, consider also the question and answer interplay between piano and bass, another device for variation. More important than either of these improvisational procedures is the shifting of accents and the variation of rhythm figures, which are wonderfully displayed in Hawes' improvised solos on April in Paris, Woody'n You and Blue 'N Boogie. Used imaginatively and with feeling, and not just manipulated mentally, these devices produce constantly  fresh variants of well-known melodies.

How an improviser handles these devices depends on a number of factors: specifically, on whether he is interested in a) motion or placidity, b) dissonance or prettiness, c) a thick sound or a delicate texture, d) static or shifting rhythm patterns, e) short or long melodic lines. To understand Hawes' handling of these factors, it will be helpful to see him in relation to other contemporary jazz pianists.

AT THE MOMENT, THERE ARE THREE AXES in jazz piano. I prefer the word 'axis' to school or style because within any one socalled school, there are sufficient tensions to make for a direction rather than a pat definition. For example, Brubeck and Tristano have more in common as representatives of a modernist-classical-intellectual-far-out approach than Brubeck and Garner.

Yet there are also obvious contrasts and conflicts. Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell as practitioners of bop piano share more characteristics than do Powell and Oscar Peterson. Yet there is an undeniable gulf between Monk's emphasis on an economy of notes as against Powell's tendency toward flooding and constant motion. Here then are the three major current axes in contemporary jazz piano: 1) a Garner-Tarum axis, stressing rich harmonies and the fullness and pumping beat of stride piano; 2) a Brubeck-Tristano axis, combining modern classical polyrhythms and poly-harmonies with jazz improvisation; and 3) a Bud Powell-Thelonious Monk axis, stressing a single note, horizontal style, using the left hand for punctuation, and playing off the beat.

Clearly, Hampton Hawes is closest to the bop axis of Powell and Monk. He strives for constant motion rather than placidity, tart rather than pretty harmonies, a delicate rather than a thick density, shifting rhythm patterns, and longer rather than shorter lines.

Within the bop axis, the main influence on Hawes' improvising comes from an alto sax player rather than any pianist. In 1947 when Hawes was just turning nineteen, one of the founders of bop, the late, great Charlie Parker came out to Hampton's native Los Angeles. Hawes not only met and listened to Bird, which proved a turning point in many a contemporary musician's career, but he played with him for almost two months in Howard McGhee's band. Not too long ago, Hawes described Parker's influence as having to do "with Bird's conception of time." Working with Parker, Hawes began taking liberties with time, "playing double time or letting a couple of beats go by to make the beat stand out— not just playing on top of it all the time." Hawes emphasizes: "I think Parker has influenced me more than anybody, even piano players."

The Parker bop influence is apparent in All Night Session! in many ways, not the least significant being Hawes' choice of material. Included among the sixteen selections are four Gillespie compositions that have become bop classics — Groovin' High, Woody'n You, Two Bass Hit and Blue 'N Boogie. Comparison of Hawes' version of Woody'n You with the Modern Jazz Quartet's chamber music treatment of the same reveals a style in which there is greater dissonance, more pronounced changes of rhythm figures, swifter shifting of accents and a feeling of intensity that reminds one of Parker. Characteristic of these selections, and particularly of an original composition Takin' Care, is Parker's device of altering melodic passages containing few notes with figures full of gusts of fast-moving notes.

[To Be Continued ]

All Night Session!, Vol. 3 [OJCCD-640-2]

IN ALL NIGHT SESSION THE CHARACTERISTIC SOUND of the quartet is produced by the interplay between Hawes and Red Mitchell's bass. As with many West Coast combos, Hawes prefers a drummer with a light beat. In selection after selection, the rhythmic pulse is generated by the bass while the drums are heard only in the delicate ching of an afterbeat cymbal.

Bassist Red Mitchell, a native New Yorker (born September 20, 1927) is, like many Wesc Coasters, a Californian by migration. He has been steadily associated on records with Hampton Hawes from the first Hawes Trio album made in June 1955. Mitchell has also recorded with combos led by Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow, Red Norvo, Jack Montrose, and Gerry Mulligan. He has also made two LP's with combos of his own, the most recent Presenting Red Mitchell for Contemporary (C3538).

Although Red played piano with Chubby Jackson (at the Royal Roost in 1949), alto sax in an Army band, … , he had a new love the moment he traded 15 cartons of cigarettes for a string bass while in Germany. Up until then he had been studying the piano on his own. He cultivated the bass in the same way, acquiring bass methods by Bob Haggart and Simandl, and industriously plowing his way through them. Mitchell also learned by listening to every bass player who came his way, on records or alive, acquiring in the process an unusual knowledge of the entire range of bassists.

"I guess the first bass player that really thrilled me," Red recently stated, "was Walter Page." This was on a Count Basie record even before Mitchell had settled on the bass as his instrument. Ray Brown, who played with Dizzy Gillespie, "just turned me inside out. I heard the new music, the new phrasing." At Minton's. Red heard Charlie Mingus, who "frightened me... because I remember the way he went up to the top of the fiddle." But the greatest of all bass players to Red was the late Jimmy Blanton, who is generally credited with inaugurating the revolution that took the bass out of the rhythm section in the late 30's and made a melody instrument of it.

Despite his talking intimacy with the top bassmen of our time, Red feels thai he has been more influenced by horn men and pianists than by bassists. He mentions among the jazzmen he has admired and studied: saxists Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Jimmy Giuffre; trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis; and pianists John Lewis and Hampton Hawes.

As an improviser, Red is to be heard to advantage particularly in Broadway and Groovin' High, both of which reveal not only a prodigious command of technique but fast, jazz solos of the very highest order. Red has a fat tone when occasion demands and there are slow, singing solos to be heard in Hampton's Pulpit and The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Insofar as giving the Hawes piano the rhythmic support it needs, Red's pulsating beat is masterful.

IN THE FALL OF 1956 JIM HALL, then a member of Chico Hamilton's group, used to sit in for kicks when Hawes' Trio worked at the Tiffany in Los Angeles. The discovered kinship of feeling between the two led to the invitation that made Hall a part of All Night Session!. Born in Buffalo, New York on December 4, 1930, Hall was raised in the Buckeye State. Although he attended the well-known Cleveland Institute of Music, receiving a Bachelor's degree in music, Jim studied guitar privately with Brenton Banks. His style was also formed by constant listening to recordings of the abortive American genius Charlie Christian and the French gypsy giant of the guitar, Django Reinhardt, Other formative influences include the tenor sax playing of Bill Perkins and Zoot Sims, whose modern improvisational lines are to be heard in Hall's solos.

At the precocious age of 13, Jim Hall began working with local Ohio bands. For short or long periods, he was associated with the Bob Hardaway Quartet, Ken Hanna's band, with whom he made a Capitol album, and later, with the Dave Pell Octet. In the early months of 1955, Hall came to Los Angeles and began studying with the classical guitarist Vincente Gomez. At about the same time, drummer Chico Hamilton hired Jim for his newly formed Quintet.

It was the Hamilton Quintet that brought Hall's name into the national jazz arena. During the latter part of '55 and early '56, Jim toured with Chico's Quintet, recorded three albums for Pacific Jazz with it, and appeared in a film Cool and Groovy. The Hamilton association also led to Hall's recording for Pacific Jazz with a trio of his own that included the late Carl Perkins on piano and Red Mitchell, on bass. Since making All Night Session! with Hawes, Hall has been steadily associated with the trio of Jimmy Guiffre. He also is to be heard with John Lewis in a new album just made by Lewis without the Modern Jazz Quartet.

OF THE ROLE OF THE DRUMS in his Quartet, Hampton Hawes has said: "I don't like a drummer that plays a heavy foot pedal because it has the dull sound of somebody trudging down a street. I like the drums to sound like a heartbeat—just like a heartbeat pumping blood into the tune, nice and smooth... I don't like a heavy-footed drummer."

In drummer Bruz Freeman, born in Chicago on August 11, 1921 and a West Coaster since 1954, Hawes found an ideal man for his quartet. Bruz became interested in music through his two brothers, tenorman Von and guitarist George. At 9 he was playing violin. At 13 he shifted to the piano. Then came the drums. After a stint in the Air Force, during which he flew with Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet (Percy as a fighter and Bruz as a bomber pilot), he returned to Chicago to gig with a group known as the Freeman Brothers Band. Later he played at Chicago's Beehive, silting in with men like Sonny Stitt, Bird, J. J. Johnson. Before he settled in California, he played for singers Ella Fitzgerald and Lurlean Hunter and went on the road with Anita O'Day and Sarah Vaughan. "On drums," he says, "Max [Roach] is my man. On other instruments: Miles Davis, J. J. and Bird."

Of the All Night Session!, Hawes recently said reflectively: "It's hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging. That's the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life. I've reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah— like people do in church when they're converted to God. That's the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session."

By ARNOLD SHAW

March 26, 1958

The following video feature Hampton on Duke Jordan’s Jordu.

Niklaus Troxler - A Festival Founder Illustrates His Passion For Jazz

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

The following article takes - dare I say - the illustrious [literally] history of Jazz whose rich tradition includes such luminary designers as David Stone Martin [Clef, Norgan, Verve], S. Neil Fujita [Columbia], Robert Guidi/Tri-Arts [Contemporary], Jim Flora [RCA], Reid Miles [Blue Note] among many others - to the next level as Niklaus Troxler not only makes poster art [and CD jewel case covers and book covers], but also hires the musicians for his own Jazz festival which he has staged over four days each summer in Willisau, SZ beginning in 1975. 

For as Michael Bierut, a partner in New York based Pentagram Design Group puts it: "I think every designer has a fantasy that they can somehow merge their enthusiasms, and have their life and work become one. For most of us this is hard to pull off. I know some designers, for instance, who decide they want to open a restaurant. They design a logo and menus, and then discover that running a restaurant is hard. So goodbye restaurant. To succeed takes a kind of generalized fanaticism, which is actually pretty rare. Troxler has it like few others."

© Copyright ® New York Times and Alice Rawsthorn, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Niklaus Troxler: A festival's founder illustrates his passion for jazz

By ALICE RAWSTHORN MARCH 4, 2007 NY Times

“LONDON — When legions of jazz buffs descend on the Swiss farming town of Willisau for its annual jazz festival, they discover the streets filled with posters dedicated to Cecil Taylor, Dexter Gordon, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, the Kronos Quartet or whoever else is playing that year.

Ever since the first festival in 1975, the posters have been the same size, printed in the same workshop and designed by the same man, the Swiss graphic designer and founder of Jazz in Willisau, Niklaus Troxler. Some are illustrative. Others have specially created typefaces. Many are visual puns depicting images in letters. All of the posters sparkle with Troxler's twin passions for jazz and design.

Troxler has become a cult figure in both the jazz and design worlds. This spring his posters for the festival are to be celebrated in an exhibition and concert at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center. With Cecil Taylor on the bill, the concert is to be a benefit performance for Common Ground, a nonprofit organization supporting the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and it has sold out.

Over the years many graphic designers have fused a personal passion with their work, particularly in music. Take Reid Miles, who designed the covers of the records of the American jazz label Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s. Or the British designer Barney Bubbles and his psychedelic album sleeves for Hawkwind in the 1970s; and Peter Saville's artwork for Joy Division and New Order since the early 1980s. Yet few designers have fused the personal and professional as completely as Troxler, whose working life is dominated by the festival, for which he orchestrates every detail, from booking musicians to balancing the budget.

"I think every designer has a fantasy that they can somehow merge their enthusiasms, and have their life and work become one," said the graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner of the Pentagram design group in New York. "For most of us this is hard to pull off. I know some designers, for instance, who decide they want to open a restaurant. They design a logo and menus, and then discover that running a restaurant is hard. So goodbye restaurant. To succeed takes a kind of generalized fanaticism, which is actually pretty rare. Troxler has it like few others."

Born in Willisau in 1947, Troxler discovered jazz in his teens. "I'd listen to it on the radio," he recalled. "My first interest was in more traditional styles, then Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and soon Miles Davis and the avant-garde." In 1966, when he was 19, he organized his first jazz concert. Yet Troxler was also interested in graphic design, particularly in the posters of Herbert Leupin and other Swiss designers. After leaving school in 1963, he trained as a typographer and, four years later, enrolled at Lucerne Art School to study graphic design. After graduation, he worked in Paris for a few years, before returning to Willisau in 1973 to open his own design studio.

Troxler continued to put on concerts, and in 1975 he upped the ante by staging a four-day jazz festival. "The first festivals were all in the avant-garde style," he said. "We had all the great masters of free jazz — Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, Sam Rivers and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. People came from all over the world."

Having designed the posters for all of his concerts, since the first one in 1966, Troxler continued to produce them for the festivals, working from his attic studio in a wooden chalet. He executes other design projects, too, mostly for Swiss arts organizations, but the festival and its posters always take priority.

The blank canvas of the poster has long been a rich medium for graphic designers. Switzerland has a fine history of modern poster design: from Herbert Matter in the 1930s and Joseph Müller-Brockmann in the 1960s, to Wolfgang Weingart in the 1980s and, now, Ralph Schraivogel. "Today when information is carried much more effectively by other means, such as email blasts, posters have become pure acts of vanity or love," said Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "In Troxler's case, it's definitely love."

Troxler belongs to the Swiss poster tradition, despite seeing himself as an outsider. "I never wanted to look like a typical Swiss graphic designer," he said. "My influences come more from Pop Art, different art styles and, of course, the music. I always wanted to get sound into my posters, and also movement and rhythm." He begins each poster by searching for metaphors of the music, then expresses them in illustrations or typography, but never photography, which he considers to be clichéd.

For "A Tribute to Thelonious Monk" in 1986, Troxler traced Monk's profile in lettering. "I wanted to visualize Monk's favorite composition, 'Round About Midnight,'" he recalled. "First I drew portraits of him, then, finally, I did it just with type." A 1989 poster for Cecil Taylor features the top of a finger, which alludes to "the radical playing of Taylor — fast until the end, to total pain."

Troxler often creates new typefaces for his posters, like the alphabet of rubber stamps he made for Jazz Italia in 2000. He also enjoys writing words by hand, as he did with last year's poster for Marty Ehrlich. To reflect Ehrlich's interest in politics and social issues, Troxler daubed the information about the concert in white paint on a carefully selected front page of The New York Times.

Graphic purists have criticized Troxler for being too eclectic in style, but for his admirers that's part of his appeal. "I love the poster series because it so neatly recapitulates the design history of the last few decades," said Michael Bierut. "You see the influence of Push Pin eclecticism, California new wave, Swiss post-modernism and post- punk grunge, all passed through the unique prism of a guy working in a really small town in Switzerland."

Walt Weiskopf and Andy Fusco -SO IN LOVE

Coleman Hawkins - "How Deep Is The Ocean" - An Analysis

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

I came across the following analysis of what made the late tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins [1904-1969] such a brilliant improvisor when I was researching my three-part blog feature on How The Rhythm Section got its name in Jerry Coker’s How To Listen To Jazz 

Jerry Coker, himself a teacher, composer/arranger, and noted saxophonist, has annotated every aspect of The Hawk’s performance on the 3.26 version of How Deep Is The Ocean which appears in the following video.

I have interspersed the video at several points in Jerry’s explanation of what’s going on in Coleman’s performance to make it easier for you to stop and start the video as you are reading the annotation.

Of course, Coleman’s renown for his 1939 solo on Body and Soul but he employs some similar techniques on How Deep Is The Ocean which was recorded in 1943 around the time that Bebop was coming into existence at Minton’s Playhouse and Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in NYC. And although Coleman is not playing in the bebop style per se what he is playing sounds very “modern” and in that sense almost timeless - like a solo that could have been recorded today.

It’s no accident that Coleman hired some of the early beboppers in his bands and that the beboppers held him in high esteem both because he took a chance on employing them and because he took chances in his own approach to the music.

Here’s how Jerry explains the elements that make Coleman’s solo on How Deep Is The Ocean so unique.

COLEMAN HAWKINS on "How Deep Is the Ocean"

vehicle type:    Standard (ballad) formal structure:    A(8)-B(8)-A(8)-BA(8)

arrangement:    4-measure piano solo introduction loosely placed melody chorus by tenor saxophone, with rhythm accompaniment, improvised chorus by tenor saxophone, with soft horns and rhythm section accompaniment improvised cadenza by tenor, followed by chord

Analysis/Annotations

Coleman Hawkins was an extraordinary improviser of ballads. He also played the blues and fast tempos commend-ably, but great ballad players are rare, and it was his classic  solo on "Body And Soul" (1939) that established his reputation for inspired mastery of the ballad. Three of his ballad solos were under consideration: "Body And Soul," "Say It Isn't So," and "How Deep Is the Ocean." The last was chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, because it contains a slightly greater number of Hawkinesque elements.

1.   Note the progression, which has both slow and fast harmonic rhythms and contains chord sequences that descend in semitones (chromatic). It also uses an interesting device in the first four measures of the A sections; the chord is the same for all four of the measures, but the bass line descends chromatically, producing a change of scale without actually changing the chord. Listen carefully and you can hear this device taking place in Hawkins' solo at many points in both choruses. Often it will sound as though he is playing the descending bass notes, but adding many other notes in between each of the longer, emphasized bass notes. The progression to the entire selection would have been apparent, in sound, even if there had been no accompaniment other than  Hawkins's self-accompanying phrases.

2.   Listen to the vibrato of his opening phrase and at the end of the selection. He is sometimes identified by that vibrato, though it is deeper and more pronounced than on perhaps any of his recordings.

3.   Listen to the manner in which Hawkins phrases the melody in the first A section (his first entrance). Because he is loosely rendering the melody and because he is implying the progression between the melody phrases, it would be helpful to listen to a recording of the tune by a group or player playing the given melody in its purest, simplest form, so that the listener will know which of Hawkins' notes are from the given melody and which are not.

4.   Hawkins decorated the melody so heavily in the next two sections (B and A) that the given melody is mostly implied, and in the last eight measures of his first chorus (BA) he has virtually abandoned the given melody altogether. Jazz players in general were beginning to adopt such practices to allow more time for creative improvisation. This became unnecessary with the invention of the long-playing (33-1/3 RPM) record.

5.   The harmonic device mentioned in # 1, in which the first four measures of the A sections have only one chord but in which a descending bass line causes changes in scale, produces an interesting scale in the second measure of those four measure sections, called the whole-tone scale. The name derives from the fact that only whole steps (two semitones equal a whole step) are used in constructing the scale, causing the scale to have a distinctive sound. Listen to what Hawkins played the second measure of his second chorus, where he used the whole-tone scale, not in a way that sounds like a scale, but like descending chord patterns. In the eighteenth measure of the second chorus (which is also the second measure of an A section), he plays a nearly identical pattern. As mentioned in Chapter 4, improvisers often hear (in their mind's ear) the same pattern against the same chord repeatedly.

6.   Another example of the association between pattern and chord was supplied by "Hawk" in the twenty-first measure of the first chorus, the fifth measure of the second chorus, and the twenty-first measure of the second chorus. Each of the three locations are identical, harmonically, all being the fifth measure of an A section, and he treated each of these places with the same improvised melody (which has an arresting double-time feeling).

7.   Notice the density of notes in the sixth measure of the second chorus, where he played six notes per beat, deftly. The density level is noticeably greater throughout the second chorus, which, along with the entrance of the horn background, served to raise the intensity level.

8.  The third time he played the double-time idea mentioned in #6, he repeated the idea sequentially through the chords of the twenty-second measure (of the second chorus), leading into the highly intricate, embellished  sequences of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth measures. "Hawk" finally got finger-tied on the last one of those embellishments (going into the twenty-fifth measure), unfortunately, but it is doubtful that anyone else could have executed it as well, much less conceived such a phrase. Hawkins' sequential phrases and fancy embellishments can be found on nearly all of his recorded solos.

9. Like Louis, "Hawk" sometimes speared relatively high notes suddenly after subdued phrases, as a preacher might employ the device to regain the attention of his audience. This trait is evident in many other solos, including "Body and Soul." In "How Deep Is the Ocean," he used the device twice, on nearly identical phrases, in the twenty-sixth measure of both choruses.

10. The tempo stops on the thirty-first measure of the second chorus, where Hawkins played his virtuosic cadenza, again creating the sound of chord motion without relying upon accompaniment.

SONNY STITT - The Early Years, 1941-1952 by Gordon Jack

                   

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

Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journal and a very generous friend in allowing JazzProfiles to re-publish his insightful and discerning writings on various topics about Jazz and its makers.

Gordon is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospective and he also developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ book Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.

The following article was published in the 20 May, 2020 edition of Jazz Journal. 

For more information and subscriptions please visit www.jazzjournal.co.uk

© -Gordon Jack/JazzJournal, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“Known as the ‘Lone Wolf’ Sonny Stitt was constantly moving from town to town and city to city attempting to find common cause with whatever local rhythm section was available. In his Jazz Masters of the Forties Ira Gitler said, “The complaint against the trios that backed him on his stops all over the map was that they were afraid of playing with him. By the time relaxation and confidence set in he would be off to another town.” Pianist Dolo Coker who worked with him in the fifties said Stitt liked to invite musicians to sit-in, “He really tested your mettle. He’d call a blues and then run it through all 12 keys. It really was a challenge to play with him on any instrument, period”. Even though Stan Getz was a close friend he felt that,” Sonny doesn’t let you rest. You’ve got to work hard or you’ll be left at the starting gate”.

 Mose Allison might almost have been thinking of Sonny Stitt when he recorded his hymn to touring jazz musicians – Ask Me Nice - in 1961, “I just got here day ‘fore yesterday - It won’t be long and I’ll be on my way - For these few days that I’ll be ‘round - Please don’t try to bring me down - I made my entrance on the Greyhound bus - I don’t intend to cause a fuss - If you like my style, that’s fine with me and if you don’t just let me be”. 

Edward Boatner Jr. (his name-change occurred a little later) was born in Boston on 2 February 1924.  It was a musical and religious household but a few years later his parents divorced and after his mother married Robert Stitt, Edward became known as Sonny Stitt. He studied the piano and clarinet and had saxophone lessons from Big Nick Nicholas who later sat in Tiny Bradshaw’s sax section with him. Wardell Gray was another of his tutors. His early instrumental influences at that time were Rudy Williams and Benny Goodman. The Stitts were living in Saginaw, Michigan and both Nicholas and Gray often stayed in the Stitt home when they worked locally because Saginaw’s only hotel did not accommodate African-Americans.

Around 1941/42 he started working with Thad Jones in Saginaw and Detroit as well as Newark, New Jersey. He toured with the Bama State Collegians and reached New York with them where he started sitting-in at 52nd street clubs as well as Minton’s Playhouse. While in the city he lived for a while with Bud Powell and his mother. One of his colleagues with the Collegians was trumpeter Willie Cook who went on to play with Duke Ellington for years. He once said, “At that time Sonny Stitt played like Johnny Hodges when he was drinking and like Benny Carter when he wasn’t.”

Thanks both to a vacancy caused by the US military draft and a recommendation from his friend Big Nick Nicholas he joined the Tiny Bradshaw band in 1943 touring the midwest. In Kansas City he famously met Charlie Parker for the first time. He had been very impressed by Parker’s recordings with Jay McShann and he told Robert Reisner, “He invited me right then and there to go and jam with him at the Gypsy Tea Room”.  After about an hour Parker said, “You sound just like me”.

In January 1945 he was invited to join the trail-blazing Billy Eckstine band in the alto chair that Charlie Parker had occupied the previous year. He was in a section that included John Jackson, Dexter Gordon and Leo Parker who became known as “The Unholy Four” possibly because of their extra-musical activities. Jackson is a somewhat forgotten figure now but he was a well-respected lead alto man at the time. Gordon told Ira Gitler, “The band was a little rough. I thought the reed section was the best – the most cohesive and most together… Sonny sounded like a whirlwind then. We’d all hang out together. We were so full of tempestuous youth that things didn’t always go too smoothly”. Early in 1946 Dizzy Gillespie had returned from the west coast and took up a residency at New York’s Spotlite club with Leo Parker, Milt Jackson, Al Haig, Ray Brown and Stan Levey. In May that year Dizzy’s sextet with Stitt replacing Parker and Kenny Clarke taking over from Roach recorded One Bass Hit, Oop Bop Sh’bam (which became something of a bebop hit), A Handfulla Gimme and That’s Earl Brother for the Musicraft label. These represented Stitt’s first recorded solos and it has to be said that anyone taking a blindfold test would be forgiven if they thought they were listening to Charlie Parker. Around that time Stitt also worked for about three months with Gillespie’s big band at the Spotlite.

In 1947 he won the Esquire Award as the New Star on alto which Charlie Parker had won the previous year. He also appeared at New York’s Lincoln Centre in a concert with Parker, Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many other stars of the new music. It was around this time that his heroin addiction led to the loss of his cabaret card making it illegal for him to work in New York nightclubs. (He was unable to work regularly in clubs there until the early sixties). He moved to Chicago for a while and worked with Gene Ammons who was enjoying success with his popular Red Top single which was often played on jukeboxes in the town. They also appeared on Dave Garroway’s radio show. Stitt occasionally played at dances with the nineteen year old Johnny Griffin before leaving for Detroit where he appeared at the El Sino club with Parker and Miles Davis.

Early in 1948 he was arrested on narcotic-related charges and sentenced to two years at the Public Health Facility at Lexington, Kentucky. Many other jazz musicians had been incarcerated there over the years like Red Rodney, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, Tadd Dameron and Elvin Jones. Lexington had a very liberal approach to drug rehabilitation because inmates were given instruments and encouraged to practice for several hours each day. While there he missed the possibility of playing with the Miles Davis nonet on the historically important sessions that became known as the Birth of the Cool. Miles apparently wanted him but Lee Konitz was selected because he had already shown in his work with Claude Thornhill that he would be the ideal choice on alto. The nonet was essentially a rehearsal group designed to create subdued Thornhill-like harmonies with the minimum number of instruments.

He left prison in October 1949 and for the next three years he recorded almost exclusively on tenor. This might have been because of the way he had been dismissed by some critics as essentially a Parker-copyist on alto. Even many years later the jazz press could be quite brutal. Steve Race who should have known better was quoted in a 1965 Crescendo interview saying, “Stitt had given up all pretence of individuality. He should stop playing Parker and (go) back to playing Stitt”.  It is difficult to understand why he attracted such opprobrium unless it was because he got closer to the master than just about anyone else. Very few managed to escape the almost overwhelming influence of Parker’s genius. (Lee Konitz, Art Pepper and Paul Desmond were three performers who managed to create their own highly individual voice at the time.) Just as an aside, when Gene Quill was leaving the stand one night at Birdland many years later a customer accused him of “Just imitating Charlie Parker”. Gene handed him his alto and said, “Here, you imitate Charlie Parker!”

On 7 October he played a week at New York’s Orchid Club (formerly the Onyx) with Wardell Gray, Tadd Dameron, Gene Ramey and Charlie Perry. They worked opposite Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Nelson Boyd and Roy Haynes and during the engagement both groups often combined their personnels.  His first recording session on tenor took place a few days after he closed at the Orchid on a J.J.Johnson date with John Lewis, Nelson Boyd and Max Roach. His sound is close to Lester Young’s by way of Wardell Gray and this was the session that introduced the pianist’s delightful Afternoon In Paris. On 24 December 1949 he appeared at Carnegie Hall in an all-star group with Miles Davis, Bennie Green, Serge Chaloff, Bud Powell, Curly Russell and Max Roach which was hosted by Symphony Sid.

Early in 1950 he formed a group with Gene Ammons. Two tenors standing toe-to-toe is one of the most exciting sounds in small-group jazz and their heady mixt of Bebop and R’n’B proved to be hugely popular. According to Prestige owner Bob Weinstock they played “A circuit of small black joints not real jazz clubs but not R’n’B rooms either”.  In March that year they recorded their celebrated Blues Up And Down with its series of uninhibited exchanges which was a minor hit and became their calling-card for the next two years. The following month they recorded Jimmy Mundy’s Gravy with Stitt switching to baritone and Bill Massey and Bennie Green added on trumpet and trombone respectively. In 1954 Gravy was re-named Walkin’ on a famous Miles Davis album with J.Johnson and Lucky Thompson and credited to the infamous Richard Carpenter. Writer James Gavin has pointed out that his speciality was persuading musicians to surrender their rights to originals and record royalties to him. Sonny Stitt who was managed by Carpenter for a time (as was Gene Ammons, Jimmy Mundy, Chet Baker, Lester Young and Tadd Dameron) once told Phil Urso when he was working with Chet Baker, “Richard Carpenter’s a motherfucker – don’t go near that guy, he’ll burn you”. In 1953 Stitt’s relationship with Carpenter eventually ended up in the courts over unpaid commissions.

Although Stitt was concentrating on tenor he also played baritone here and there with a powerful sound and concept reminiscent of the great Leo Parker’s. It’s a pity he did not pursue an interest in the instrument because he clearly would have become a major voice on the baritone just as he was on the alto and tenor. Good examples of his work on the big horn can be found on his 1950 recording of Cha-Bootie with Gene Ammons and a year later on This Can’t Be Love, and PS I Love You with Charlie Bateman. It is a little outside the time-frame of this article but I can’t ignore One O’Clock Jump, Tri-Tone Bloos and Baritone Blues recorded at Boston’s Hi Hat club in 1954 with what seems to be a local rhythm section. It was one of the few occasions when he had all three of his instruments on-stage with him and it seems to be the last time he recorded on the baritone saxophone.

When not on the road with Gene Ammons, he recorded prolifically between 1950 and 1952 in a quartet setting with stellar New York-based pianists like Kenny Drew, Junior Mance, Duke Jordan and a particularly notable date with Bud Powell which resulted in a stunning All God’s Chillun’ Got Rhythm. These sessions were mostly on tenor but there was one occasion when he had to borrow an alto from none other than Ira Gitler. On the JazzWax blog he told Marc Myers, “I remember Sonny’s Imagination session in 1950. Bob Weinstock told me that Stitt was having trouble with his alto and asked me to bring mine to the date. I was apprehensive about lending it to Stitt. Sonny had a reputation for disappearing with other people’s instruments and hocking them for cash. I didn’t mind since I was going to be there and could keep an eye on it. Sonny took my horn and recorded Imagination and Cherokee flawlessly on it”.  His last 1952 recording on tenor was an album titled Symphony Hall Swing with Fletcher Peck, John Simmons and Jo Jones. Symphony Hall Swing bears a strong resemblance to Thelonious Monk’s Rhythm-A-Ning.

A slight change in musical emphasis for Sonny Stitt began in 1953. Prior to his incarceration at Lexington in 1949 he performed on alto saxophone exclusively.  On his release and in an effort to avoid constant comparison with Charlie Parker the tenor became his primary instrument of choice.  From 1953 however and until the end of his career he successfully doubled on both, not only in the studios but also on his constant touring from club to club and town to town.”

Kenny Clare

Kenny Clare/Grisha Farfel - Swing Low, Sweet Chariot