The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson

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

I’m not sure why, but the piano artistry of Oscar Peterson, particularly the one on display in his Verve recording – The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson – conjures up flights of fancy in my mind while listening to it.

His version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Con Alma [which translates to “with soul”] has always seemed to bring imagery of beautiful birds into focus, hence the stitched graphic above.

After many years with guitarists Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis, Oscar had decided to bring in Ed Thigpen on drums and Edmund’s brilliant playing in all facets of the drum kit added different coloring and sonorities to the trio’s music.

Here’s more about Oscar and his career in a brief piece about him by Gene Lees, one of Oscar’s closest friends and a fellow Canadian, as excerpted from Jazz Lives: A 100 Portraits in Jazz [photograph by John Reeves].

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson

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

“Hank Jones has said, "Oscar Peterson is head and shoulders above any pianist alive today. Oscar is at the apex. He is the crowning ruler of all the pianists in the jazz world. No question about it." Andre Previn says emphatically, "He is the best!  When I surveyed seventy pianists on the subject of jazz piano, the close winners in the categories of personal favorite and "best" pianist were Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson. Oscar was Bill's favor­ite pianist. He is Roger Kellaway's favorite pianist. Dizzy Gillespie cites him as one of his favorite pianists to play with. Critic Leonard Feather said that if he were to be reincarnated, he would want to come back as Oscar Peterson.

Peterson is the son of a Montreal rail­way porter and former ship's bos'n who taught music to his five children. One of them was his daughter Daisy, who then became Oscar's teacher. Oscar went on to study with Paul de Marky, a Hungarian pianist who had studied in Budapest with Istvan Toman, whose teacher in turn was Franz Liszt. Oscar was already well known in Canada when he burst on the rest of the world in 1949 during a Jazz at the Phil­harmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. Since then, he has been at the pinnacle of jazz piano, a virtuoso whose playing has roots in the bravura of Liszt.

Oscar has led trios since the early 1950s, played solo recitals all over the world, explored the world of electronic music, and worked extensively with young peo­ple. Now he dedicates himself more and more to composition. Oscar suffered the slings and snubs of outrageous racism in Montreal in his youth. This has led him to take a staunch public stand against racism in Canada and elsewhere. In 1973 he was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, and afterwards told me almost shyly, "I never thought my country would honor me this way.” It continues to do so. In 1991 he was appointed Chancellor of York University in Toronto and received a Toronto Arts Award for lifetime musical achievement. At my last count he had ten honorary doctorates in music.”

Remembering Frank Wess: 1922-2013

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

One of the most joyous Christmas gifts I ever received was the Basie Plays Hefti Roulette LP.

I must have practiced to it on countless occasions so I could get all of drummer Sonny Payne’s “kicks, licks and fills” down to perfection.

In the process, I memorized all of the horn solos as well.

It’s where I first “met” tenor saxophonist and flutist, Frank Wess. I loved his playing then and have enjoyed it ever since.

Frank Wess was the personification of the stand-up-and-blow-your-horn Jazz musician.

One summer, I worked a gig in The Space Bar at Disneyland, a venue that is long since gone from the Anaheim, CA park.

The Basie Band often worked Disneyland during those summer months and many that followed.

I got to know and hangout a bit with Frank Wess during that summer gig at Disneyland. He introduced me to Sonny Payne by saying: “Hey Sonny, this kid knows all your sh**!” Me and my big mouth!!

Frank died on October 30, 2013 and I wanted to remember him on these pages with a look back at Frank via Peter Vacher’s obituary from the November 4th issue of The Guardian.

© -Peter Vacher/The Guardian, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“For 11 years, the tenor saxophonist Frank Wess, who has died aged 91, was half of one of the most irresistible pairings in jazz. He played alongside fellow saxophonist Frank Foster in the Count Basie orchestra and the two became known worldwide for their duets or "tenor battles", Wess taking the softer line while Foster played the tough guy. "Frank was smooth and I had a little more drive," Foster said. Billed as the Two Franks after Neal Hefti composed a special feature for them with that title, and seemingly joined at the hip, they continued their association long after both had left Basie, often performing together.

While with Basie, Wess soloed on flute as well as saxophone, helping to change the way the instrument was heard in big bands and winning Downbeat Magazine's critics' poll on flute every year from 1959 to 1964. It is no exaggeration to say that he "established the flute as an appropriate instrument for Jazz", in the words of Barry Kernfeld in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, into a middle-class African-American family, Wess grew up in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, where he began to play alto saxophone in his father's amateur band as a 10-year old, before settling in Washington DC in 1935. Both parents were schoolteachers and intended their son to be a dentist although Wess claimed that he knew early on that jazz was to be his career. He was soon good enough to play with local dance groups and to work in the house band at the Howard theatre, Washington's leading black entertainment arena.

It was then that he moved over to the larger tenor saxophone, inspired by the great Basie soloist Lester Young. "Lester showed me a lot of things about the horn," Wess told the writer Stanley Dance. His first "name" band experience was with the vocalist Blanche Calloway, the elder sister of the more famous Cab Calloway, this sojourn interrupted by his army call-up in 1940 (he was solo clarinettist with the 5th Army band).

After demobilisation in 1945, Wess joined the Billy Eckstine orchestra for two years, playing alongside several eager young boppers before he moved on to Eddie Heywood's small group and then worked for a year with Bull Moose Jackson's rousing R&B combo. Determined to take his flute studies seriously, Wess enrolled at the Modern School of Music in Washington under the GI bill in 1949 and was tutored by Wallace Mann, the National Symphony Orchestra's flute soloist, eventually earning his degree.

Wess's Basie breakthrough came in 1953 and if it took a while for the bandleader to realise that Wess was a flautist too, it did not take him long to sense that here was a crowdpleaser who deserved to be featured extensively on record and for live dates. Wess's time with the band coincided with its hugely successful rebirth following the Atomic Mr. Basie album, recorded in 1957, and its greatest period of international fame.

The memory of their first appearance in London in 1957 still resounds, the band's sheer swing power and the solo elan of the musicians, Wess included, proving quite overwhelming. Wess was the last surviving member of that mighty ensemble.

He recorded regularly away from the band with other modern jazz stars and under his own name for a variety of labels, his whole-hearted tenor sound and flute capability making him the ideal sideman. He also began to write for the Basie band, having studied arranging at Howard University; Seque was perhaps his most widely performed piece.

Wess left Basie to go into the pit band for Golden Boy on Broadway in the mid-60s, adding clarinet to his arsenal of instruments (Wess once said the clarinet "was invented by five men that never met") and continued working as a freelance, living at home with his family while responding to every kind of commercial call, in addition to leading his own jazz groups. This included playing for The David Frost Show (1969-72) and Saturday Night Live and for further Broadway musicals and on jingles.

He was a member of the trumpeter Clark Terry’s big band from 1967 to 1970 and toured overseas with the New York Jazz Quartet. His association with Foster was revived regularly. He travelled internationally with the Philip Morris Superband, visited Japan with his own equivalent to the Basie orchestra and played with the ensemble Dameronia. Meanwhile, his recording career continued unabated and it is estimated that he appeared on more than 600 recordings, his final album appearing a few months ago.

Dance described the softly spoken Wess as "one of those undemonstrative musicians who are the backbone of the profession". Revered by his peers, Wess was made a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master in 2007 and continued to perform at the highest level until earlier this year.

He is survived by his partner, Sara, and two daughters, Michelle and Francine, from his marriage to Virginia. A son, Richard, predeceased him.

• Frank Wellington Wess, jazz saxophonist and flautist, born 4 January 1922; died 30 October 2013”

Not surprisingly, the following video tribute to Frank features him along with fellow tenor saxophonist Frank Foster and the Count Basie band performing Neal Hefti’s Two Franks.

[HD] Greatest Hollywood Car Chase of All Time - Bullitt (1968)

A Portrait of Clark Terry As A Young Man

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

With apologies to James Joyce for modifying his book title, I’ve always enjoyed this story about the young Clark Terry as told by Gene Lees.

“Clark Terry was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 14, 1920, the son of a laborer at Laclede Gas and Light Company, the seventh of eleven children, seven of them girls. Before Clark's birth, one girl died. Clark's brothers never escaped the destiny of their father. Clark alone did. …

I'd known about the garden hose for years.

"I must have been ten, eleven years old," Clark said. "Twelve, maybe. My older sister's husband, Cy McField, played tuba in the Dewey Jackson band — Dewey Jackson's Musical Ambassadors — at a place called Sauter's Park in Carondolet in South St. Louis. That's where I was born.

“The park was all Caucasian. We were not allowed to go in there. Us kids, we'd walk down there, about three miles. Walk down to the end of Broadway, the county line. We'd stand up on something behind the bandstand and we'd listen to the band that way.

"I remember one cat who played in Dewey Jackson's band, Mr. Latimore. He was a big, huge guy, played lead trumpet. He used to like me and my brother-in-law used to take me to all the rehearsals. He'd say, 'Son, you can watch my horn.' And I'd say, 4Oh thank you,' and I'd literally sit there and watch his horn. After so many rehearsals, I became very, very close to him. He owned a candy store, and he always kept a pocket full of caramels and mary janes, and he'd give me a couple of caramels and a couple of mary janes and sometimes a couple of pennies. He was the greatest cat in the world, so I wanted to play the horn he played. I'm glad he wasn't a banjo player!

"So one time they went on a break. He said, 'You watch my horn.' I said, 'Okay, Mr. Latimore,' and by the time they came back, I had been magnetically drawn to this horn, huffin' and puffin' away, trying to make a sound. And he walked in. He said, ‘Ah, son, you're gonna be a trumpet player.' And I've always said, 'And I was stupid enough to believe him.'

“That, plus the fact that on the corner called iron Street and Broadway, near where I lived, there was a Sanctified church. We used to sit on the curb and let those rhythms be instilled in us." Banging a beat with his hands, he sang against it a strong churchy passage. "You know, with the tambourines, and the people dancin' and jiggin' and all that. That was as much as you needed to be instilled with the whole thing.

"We had this little band. We used to play on the corner. My first thing was a comb and tissue paper. The paper vibrates. Then I came across a kazoo, which is the same principle. Later on in my life, we had to have kazoos as standard equipment in the studio. Sometimes we would have do little things when you were record­ing for different commercial products.

"We had a guy named Charlie Jones — we called him Bones - who used to play an old discarded vacuum hose, wound around his neck like a tuba, into a beer mug." Clark sang a buzzy bass line in imitation, mostly roots and fifths. "It was a better sound than the jug." The jug of course was the old earthenware jug used in country music and jazz.

"We had a cat who played the jug, too. With the two of them, we had a good solid foundation. My brother Ed played — we called him Shorts, he was a little short cat — played the drums. He took the rungs out of some old chairs for sticks. In those days we didn't have refrigeration, we had ice boxes, and when the pan wore out, started leaking and got rusty, it would sound just like a snare. They had those tall bushel baskets in those days, I haven't seen one in a long time. He'd turn one of those upside down and hang the old discarded ice pan on the side and take the chair rungs and keep a rhythm like that. He got an old washtub and put a brick and fixed it so he could beat it." Clark laughed that delicious and slightly conspiratorial laugh of his as he pounded a beat.

I said, "He sounds like some kind of a genius."

"Yeah!" Clark said. "He was. Well, I got an old piece of a hose one day and coiled it up and got some wire and tied it so that it stuck up in three places so it would look like valves. I took a discarded kerosene funnel and that was my bell. I got a little piece of lead pipe — we didn't realize in those days that there was lead poisoning — and that was my mouthpiece."

It struck me that Clark had invented a primitive bugle, on which he could presumably play the overtones.

"Yeah!" he said. "By the time I got into the drum and bugle corps, I had already figured out the system like the Mexican mariachi players use. They were taught back in those days to play the mouthpiece first."

He did a rhythmic tonguing like a mariachi player, then pressed his lips together and buzzed. "After a while I figured out how to change the pitch." Pursing his lips, he did a glissando, up one octave and down, flawlessly. "And then they could do that with the mouthpiece. After you got the mouthpiece under control, and you got a bugle, you could play notes. You could make all the notes that went from one harmonic to the other."

Never having seen Clark teach, I realized what makes him such an incredible — and so he is reputed — pedagogue, and why young people who study with him worship him. And all of it is communicated with laughter and a sense of adventure.”

One of the earliest Jazz long-playing records I ever heard was a Emarcy sampler which included a track from Clark Terry’s first album as a leader. The tune is entitled Swahili which I found out many years later was co-composed by Clark and Quincy Jones. You can listen to it on the following video. 

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