"Enter Ennio" [From the Archives]

Have you ever noticed how self-effacing and mild-mannered many of the great composer-arrangers are  - people like Hank Mancini, Pete Rugolo, Claus Ogerman, Johnny Mandel, Robert Farnon, Nelson Riddle - to name just a few?

Of course, I'm well-aware that this generalization has many exceptions. I worked for more than my share of orchestral tyrants. But to me it was "the meek shall inherit the earth" types who seemed to be the real giants.

I can only guess at the psycho-dynamics that play a role in forming disparate personalities, but I've always been taken with creative musicians who score music that is essentially in the background of TV series, movies and recordings by important instrumentalists and vocalists and who seemingly could care less about their own anonymity.

Put another way: they go about their business in a completely unassuming and totally absorbed way and seem content to do their work in obscurity.

I was reminded of the softly-yet-stronger composer-arrangers whom I've admired over the years as I was getting this piece on Ennio Morricone ready for a reposting from the blog archives.

Although he had the reputation and the resources to have any number of skilled musicians do the legwork and heavy-lifting for him, Ennio was a hands-on orchestrator who treated every project as though it was his first assignment. 

Maestro Morricone just loved the work He learned early on to "do what you love and the rest will follow." The accolades and awards would come his way over the years, but for Ennio Morricone, it was the act of creation which really mattered.

Maestro Morricone died on July 6, 2020 in Rome, Italy. The editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember him on these pages with a re-posting of this earlier piece.

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

Liperoti said that For a Fistful of Dollars illustrated the perfect osmosis between images and music, the grandest success of Morricone's collaboration with Leone.

Morricone said, "It's a sort of poetry that comes without warning, as when two people fall in love with each other. The magic is totally unforeseeable . . . and empiric. As a result, Sergio always wanted me to compose the music before shooting, so that it could be played to the actors for them to be filled with it and understand it. That's how we did our best work, he and I."

- Geraldine Liperoti L’Epress interview with Ennio Morricone

"Popularity doesn't bother me. It attests to the affection and comprehension of the public. The important thing is to retain the pioneer spirit. I profoundly love the profession, and I work on each film as if it were the first — and the last. Giving the best of myself. Many of the 'greats' ask their arranger to write their scores for them. Me, I write all alone, from the first note to the last. All."

- Ennio Morricone, in an interview granted to Geraldine Pieroti, L’Express

“This too should be said: all his scores, no matter what the subject of the film, have an implicit mournfulness. It is as if their composer never for a moment escapes a sense, no matter how deep in his spirit it resides, of the eternal human condition.”

- Gene Lees, JazzLetter

The video tribute to Italian film composer Ennio Morricone which you will find at the conclusion of this piece features pianist Enrico Pieranunzi who, along with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron, has recorded two compact discs of Morricone’s music for the movies for the CamJazz label.

Subsequently, while digging through a pile of JazzLetters from 1998, we found an informative and beautifully written essay about Ennio authored by the late, Gene Lees.

We thought it would be nice to combine the video with Gene’s essay and offer the two for your review.

© -  Gene Less/JazzLetter, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

In the mid-1950s, when I was music and drama editor of the Louisville Times, I had to review just about every film that came out. I was also reviewing— and studying — the symphonic works commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, a rather famous program operated with a substantial grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. These works were then recorded and released in boxed sets for sale.

When, a few years later in New York, my neighbor Miles Davis found out that I had those records, he asked to borrow them. He never returned them, but no matter. There was little that I found memorable in these works.

But there was much that was memorable in the movie scores I was hearing, and I began to pay them fairly close attention. Much of that music, lightly dismissed by most critics, was far better than the stuff coming out of the Louisville Orchestra, particularly scores by Hugo Friedhofer for Boy on a Dolphin, The Best Years of Our Lives, and, later, One-Eyed Jacks, which were among some of the finest orchestral works of our time. Later, when Hugo had become one of the dearest (and most admired) friends of my life, my inexhaustible mentor in matters musical, I realized that composers around the world shared my feelings for him.

The condescension toward film music has somewhat diminished since then, and we can get a good many scores on CDs, although not all that I would like to see issued. Works like the scores of Alfred Newman and Alex North command some of the respect they deserve, and I am much taken with the scores of Jerry Goldsmith and Allyn Ferguson (about whom more in a near-future issue).

Cut to:

France 1958. I was living there on a fellowship, with all the time in the world to attend all the music and movie and drama and opera festivals I could find, which I did all the way from Stock­holm to Locarno, Switzerland. And I drove quite a bit in the south of France, where I came across landscapes that struck me as suitable for shooting western movies. But, good heavens, the western was an American genre, was it not? Well, American movie-makers have never shown any particular reluctance to film European subjects, whether set in ancient Rome or modern Paris. Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Arch of Triumph were made into American films, the latter starring the Swedish Ingrid Bergman as a French hooker (in those days the movie did not exactly spell out that she was a prostitute, nor that the doctor played by Charles Boyer was an abortionist), and Joan of Arc, in which Bergman again played a French role. She played a Spanish girl in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but what the hell, Harry, an accent's an accent, am I right?

Why then shouldn't some European film maker do a western, particularly a French film maker, since French cineastes had made a mystique out of the western, as they have out of the abominable movies of Jerry Lewis, whom they have proclaimed a genius. But then, Keith Richard and Paul McCartney have now been knighted, and Andrew Lloyd Weber is a lord.

Eventually, European film-makers did essay the western. The most successful of them was an Italian, Sergio Leone, and he didn't make his film among locations I had seen in the south of France, but in Spain. He called it A Fistful of Dollars, made in 1964 and released in the U.S., where it was a huge hit, in 1967. It resuscitated the career of Clint Eastwood and indeed set him on the road to becoming one of the biggest stars in the world.

The style of Leone's films almost certainly was influenced by the career of his father, Vincenzo Leone, a silent film director. Sergio Leone, as film scholar Leonard Maltin put it, "almost single-handedly invented the spaghetti western," a term that no longer needs explanation in America. I think Henry Mancini invented it; if he didn't, he was the first one I ever heard use it. It also established composer Ennio Morricone with audiences around the world, for his work, as Maltin rightly noted, "became a kind of Leone signature." Leone then did, and Morricone scored, For a Few Dollars More (U.S. release 1967), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), followed by the huge Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), one of whose writers was Bernardo Bertolucci. Henry Fonda played his first (and as far as I know last) role as a bad guy. Maltin, in his Movie Encyclopedia, put it succinctly: "While these films toyed light-heartedly with genre conventions, they also embodied Leone's own convictions, which included a distrust of the capitalist entrepreneurs who, as he feels, exploited the pioneers, and a bleak nihilism that, although hitting a responsive note with 1960s movie-goers, was out of touch with the general optimism that characterized American-made westerns." He called it "a languid, operatic masterpiece."

That is quite so. But the American westerns were themselves out of touch with reality. Simplistic ugh-how Indians were always the villains fighting the noble U.S. Cavalry, when in fact the reverse was closer to the truth; Serbian "ethnic cleansing" has nothing on what the white man did to the Indians in America.

Perhaps that is why the Leone westerns caught on: some sense that they were closer to the truth about the killers and trash who flowed into the American west than the Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and even earlier westerns wove into an American delusion about the founding of the nation, particularly its western reaches. As for Leone's view of the capitalists, one need only consider the careers of the likes of Leland Stanford, and of the railway tycoons who routinely hired Chinese laborers to build their iron roads and just as routinely executed them rather than pay them. William Wellman's 1943 The Oxbow Incident was a departure from the good-guys western. Later, so was Henry King's brilliantly written and executed 1950 film The Gunfighter, which closely honored the three unities — time, place, and events — of classic Greek (and later French) drama, occurring in exactly the time it took to tell the story. This unity is so unaffectedly achieved that you don't notice it until you have come to know the film well; I can think of no other film, ever, that so closely wove together its lines of suspense. Andre de Toth was largely responsible for the script.

Whether The Oxbow Incident and The Gunfighter offered any degree of inspiration or guidance to Leone I cannot say; but obviously he had studied the genre, and just as obviously he must have been familiar with these films, and possibly with Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow, which came out in the same year as The Gunfighter, both of them tragedies. And in Broken Arrow (which had a Hugo Friedhofer score) the white men were the bad guys, and the Indians were sensitively portrayed — how accurately I cannot say. (An Indian scholar, and I mean an Indian who was a scholar of Indian history, told me a couple of years ago in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that Indians liked Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves because, for once, at least the costumes were correct.)

Sergio Leone changed westerns forever, giving them an abrasive realism that precluded any return to anything like the Ken Maynard-Tom Mix-Tim Holt-Buck Jones-Hopalong Cassidy myth of the past, or even for that matter the better John Wayne vehicles such as The Searchers. We were jolted at first by the seedy-looking characters who peopled his pictures, unshaven and strange, looking nothing like Mexicans and even less like Americans. These weren't westerns from another country, these were westerns from another planet, as alien as, say, a film about the Edgar Rice Burroughs figures in the John Carter of Mars books, or his Pelucidar trilogy. And part of what made them so strange was Leone's use of silence and sound and of the music that infused both. Again, I think his father's experience as a silent film director may be relevant, and this is where Morricone comes in.

Our impression of the music in silent films, imposed on us by countless comedies, is that produced by a little old lady in a print dress in front of the flickering screen, playing sentimental or suspense music as needed on a tack-hammer piano with lots of rolls in the right hand. Hugo Friedhofer made me understand that this was anything but the case.

I have read in treatises on film music that the composers had to fight to get music into pictures. Not according to Hugo. I wasn't there, of course. But Hugo was. He wrote his first music-for-film when he did the arrangements for the 1929 musical Sunny Side Up, which was one of the early talkies. Thus he was involved in motion-picture music virtually from the inception of sound, and I'll take his word for what happened.

In small towns, perhaps, little old ladies tinkled the music for silent films on bad pianos, but in larger communities, the music often came from powerful Wurlitzer organs, and in major centers, from orchestras ranging up to full symphonic size. The more important pictures were accompanied by orchestral scores. Hugo was playing cello in a San Francisco pit orchestra during that period. Sometimes the scores would arrive with parts missing, and the conductor would assign Hugo to reconstruct them, which is how he got into what we might call pre-talky scoring.

Now, Hugo said, the producers of silent films wanted and expected music throughout a picture, as in the silents. It was music wall to wall, from the start of the corridor to its end. And the real struggle of composers in the early 1930s, Hugo told me, was to persuade producers and studio executives to let them leave music out of scenes involving perhaps sound effects or dialogue with which it could only clash. Scores became more discreet as time went on, Hugo said. He himself produced some of the masterpieces of the genre.

The dialogue in the Sergio Leone westerns is sparse. In For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Lee Van Cleef (whose career was also restored by Leone, much as John Travolta's recently has been by Quentin Tarantino) and Clint Eastwood had little to say to each other or anybody else. What talking there is in these movies is terse and sullen. And thus there are large long spaces of stares and leers and squints and walks and malevolent atmosphere and portentous pauses before the guns blaze. The style calls for music as much as the silent movies of Hugo's youth. (The coming of talkies devastated employment among musicians who had worked in movie houses; it cost my own father his professional career as a musician.) Even the sound of gunfire in Leone movies was distinctive, as distinctive as that of shots in the Warner Bros, movies. (You can spot a Warner Bros, movie of the 1930s, if you're surfing on television, by the sounds of gunshots and the Janssen Symphony.)

After the reforms of Hugo and composers such as Alfred Newman and Bronislau Kaper, music in films became subtly supportive. Ideally, it was (at least in Hugo's aesthetic) not supposed to be heard at all, only felt. That is not a view I share, and Hugo told me that Erich Korngold (whom he idolized, personally and professionally, and whose orchestrator he once was) looked on the Erroll Flynn swashbucklers for which he composed music as operas without arias.

And I think that must have been Leone's point of view. Leone went counter to that philosophy of the unheard. He hired Ennio Morricone, and he wanted that music not only to be heard but to intrude, to prod, to tell the story, even if necessary to irritate.

Leone used an amplified guitar in westerns. I found this disconcerting. I first encountered the sound in some Henry Fonda western, and I recoiled, thinking, "Where is the amplifier plugged in, in 1890?" or whatever year it was. And it bothered me as much in the Leone westerns. But of course, my reaction was ridiculous. They didn't have modern violins and French horns and valve trumpets in the time of Richard the Lion Heart, and that didn't disconcert us in Korngold's score for Erroll Flynn's Robin Hood. So, gradually, I became inured to Morricone's use of electric guitar in his extremely obtrusive scores. But I still didn't like his music. I was pulled up a little short on this when I found that Henry Mancini did like and respect it. To me, however, Morricone's music still had a cartoon quality. I thought he was incapable of subtlety. He thus is one of those musicians like Claus Ogerman whom I at first underestimated.

Then, two or three years ago, in New York, I was attending with a friend a wine-and-cheese party populated mostly by writers and aspiring writers somewhere in an apartment complex near NYU. Through the talk, I became aware of some music coming from a CD, fresh and touching. I asked the host what it was. He told me that it was Ennio Morricone's score for Cinema Paradiso. When it was over, I asked him to play it again. When I got home to California, I bought it. Morricone has a distinctive and distin­guished sense of melody, and the one he invented for Cinema Paradiso is surprising, wistful, and sinuously beautiful.

Since then I have been paying attention to Morricone's music. I picked up an Italian import, a CD titled Morricone 93: Il Cinema che Suona, which contains themes from a number of his movies. Heard with unprejudiced ears, they are quite effective. He has a taste for pulsing ostinatos, and he likes to use twanging instru­ments, such as guitar and harpsichord, and what sound to me like wooden or reed flutes and pan pipes. (Some of them sound like Andean flutes.) You hear that sound in the 1973 Leone film starring Henry Fonda titled My Name Is Nobody. That score has some odd stuff in it. Leone quotes Wagner's pompous Ride of the Valkyries but on harmonica or a little button accordion. It's buried in the score, but it's quite droll. There is another thing about the Leone-Morricone collaboration: it often seemed to me that the film was shot to the music. This turns out to be true.

When the intrusive is not called for, as in pictures emphasizing dialogue, Morricone can be subtle, discreet, almost inaudible.

I knew absolutely nothing about the man, however, until I came across an article about him in the French weekly news magazine L'Express.

Ennio Morricone, born in Rome October 11, 1928, started his musical life on trumpet, to which he was introduced by his father, who was a jazz trumpet player. Morricone is now seventy. He is probably the most prolific composer in film history, having written at least 400 scores, twenty-two of them in 1972 alone, which works out to one every sixteen days. He may not be as fast as Georges Simenon, each of whose Maigret novels was written in exactly eleven days. But Simenon collapsed in exhaustion after each such marathon writing session, and he didn't turn out twenty-two novels in a single year. Surprisingly, only six of Morricone's 400 films were with Leone.

A photo shows Morricone as a man with a round pensive face on which sit sage horn-rimmed glasses. His Express interviewer, Geraldine Liperoti, described him thus: "Caught in his Roman apartment, then in the privacy of his studio, where are mixed in joyous disorder books, music scores, CDs, chess board, and even a seventeenth century organ . . . from this flood of memorabilia emerges an artist who is all nuances: at once modest and sure of his value, serene and unpredictable, shy and jocular." She com­mented on the variety of his scores, his almost dizzying output. She noted that he had almost backed into a film career.

"That's true," he said. "When I got out of the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, I dreamed only of classical music. But the time after the war was a very hard period in Italy, and I needed to feed my family. So I started playing the trumpet evenings in clubs frequent­ed by Americans. I went there with no pleasure. It was with pain that I earned the money from diverting the occupants." He emphasized the word "occupants" a little. He meant the American military occupying forces.

"Then I wrote some arrangements for television, theater, and cinema. I worked clandestinely, for the prejudice against music deemed light was very strong at that time. Little by little, my name became known, and then Sergio Leone asked me to collaborate on For a Handful of Dollars.

"Leone, who knew my work on two previous westerns . . . . "

Ah, there is an insight for us on this side of the Atlantic: Leone did not make the first European westerns. "Sergio Leone . . . came to my residence .... When I opened the door, seeing his singular mouth ... I realized we had gone to the same primary school for boys .... Later, we even found a class photo.

"For that film, he told me he wanted a Mexican military song. I got out a little berceuse that I had composed for a television broadcast seven years early but never used. I played the trumpet, and so that's how the principal theme of For a Few Dollars More was born. I never confessed my little ruse to Sergio until many years later. Because of this, it became a game with him: he chose from among scores rejected by other directors."

Liperoti said that For a Fistful of Dollars illustrated the perfect osmosis between images and music, the grandest success of Morricone's collaboration with Leone.

Morricone said, "It's a sort of poetry that comes without warning, as when two people fall in love with each other. The magic is totally unforeseeable . . . and empiric. As a result, Sergio always wanted me to compose the music before shooting, so that it could be played to the actors for them to be filled with it and understand it. That's how we did our best work, he and I."

Did they have any thought that they were revolutionizing westerns?

"No. Moreover, when we saw For a Fistful of Dollars for the first time, Sergio and I, we found it awful. Sergio's films, and my work with him, got better, right up to his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America. And that wasn't a western. Of the four hundred film scores I've written, only thirty-five have been westerns, and you've only spoken to me of the westerns. Why?"

Liperoti said, "Because the impact on the public was immense. And what do you think of the expression 'spaghetti western'?"

"Ah! I detest this expression! Intelligent people have to call them Italian westerns. This isn't a soup we're talking about!"

Morricone apparently developed a reputation for falling asleep during recording sessions. The interviewer asked him about it.

"You know," he said, "I get up at 5 a.m. every day. One night, at four in the morning, I was asleep during a recording. Leone sent everyone home, put out the lights, turned on the microphone, and shouted in a cavernous voice, 'Ennio-o-o-o, you have no shame, to be snoozing while everyone is working.' I woke up thinking that it was the devil who'd spoken to me. It happened when we argued. Leone was a very anxious person. He had a need to transfer his anguish to others. But it never lasted more than five minutes."

Liperoti said to Morricone that he was known for the use of unusual instruments — she used the word 'insolite', for which I have never found a good translation; and anyway in her article she was probably translating from Italian into French — such as bells, the triangle, a whistle, even human and animal cries. Actually, Morricone was not working without precedent. Henry Mancini used all sorts of non-orchestral instruments, including boobams from the South Pacific, in his scores. The harmonica (which Morricone used in Once Upon a Time in the West, in a two-note motif that set up a haunting effect and told some of the story) has been common in western-movie scores.

Morricone said, "It was never my point to be provocative. I just thought that the sounds of animals were pertinent in the universe of the western. During my apprenticeship ... I always lent an ear to sounds, no matter how modest. Even the common tap of a pencil on a table, isolated from context, can be reborn in music. The cry of the coyote, if one listens well, is eminently musical. To translate it into music in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I asked two singers to cry together, then I mixed their two voices adding echo. When Leone heard the result, he went nuts with joy ....

"In Once Upon a Time in the West, the harmonica had to resonate like a cry of pain, for it incarnated all the humiliation of [Charles] Bronson's character. During the recording, we found the musician played in a sort of monotone. Sergio threw himself on him and choked him. That's why the sound is so brilliant."

As for the Ride of the Valkyries quote in My Name Is Nobody, he said, "I always retained a nostalgia for classical music. Even if I am aware that there is an enormous moat between the public that goes to concerts and that which goes to the cinema, these winks are a way of bringing the two worlds together No one knew, for example, that the principal theme of The Sicilian Clan [a 1969 French film with Jean Gabin and Alain Delon — ed.] was an homage to Bach. I elaborated it in superposing a first melody inspired by one of his preludes for organ and a second, which I was amused to compose from the letters B-A-C-H, which, in German, correspond to our si, la, do, si. It was an appreciation to a composer I love."

Morricone detests long voyages, and for all the work he does in American films, he will not go to the United States. He said: "If they want to work with me, they come here. If not, I don't do the film. Warren Beatty, for example, loves to come to Rome. I didn't even have to ask him."

Liperoti commented that this was the privilege of celebrity, to which Morricone replied:

"Popularity doesn't bother me. It attests to the affection and comprehension of the public. The important thing is to retain the pioneer spirit. I profoundly love the profession, and I work on each film as if it were the first — and the last. Giving the best of myself. Many of the 'greats' ask their arranger to write their scores for them. Me, I write all alone, from the first note to the last. All."

Morricone has been nominated four times for the Academy Award, including once in 1987 for The Mission. He lost to Herbie Hancock, who got it for the French film Round Midnight, about a jazz musician loosely — very loosely — based on the late life of Bud Powell, and starring Dexter Gordon as a "great" saxophonist of supposed significant originality. Gordon was hardly that. The film's sheer silliness need hardly be documented here. The score was made of jazz tracks. Liperoti asked Morricone if he was bitter about losing that year.

He said: "Certainly I was disappointed. Especially since ... the music that won was not a true original score: it was composed of pieces of already existing songs. I said nothing, but everyone protested the evening of the ceremony. To win an Oscar, it is necessary to campaign to the voters, and the production houses I worked with neglected to do it. But okay, I didn't make a complaint. I have received many other distinctions."

In 1986, The Mission, a film set in late eighteenth-century Brazil, featured Jeremy Irons, Robert de Niro, Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, a very good script by Robert Bolt, and an exceptional score by Morricone. The film, which is very dark, is about the slaughter and enslavement of the autocthonous population. Its point is that this ethnic cleansing continues even now in the upper Amazon rain forests.

In 1989, Morricone scored Brian de Palma's suitably outraged but cluttered Viet Nam sermon Casualties of War. He also scored that godawful de Palma version of The Untouchables, with a David Mammet script so bloody stupid, even more absurd than his script for The Edge, that in it the Canadian Mounties come galloping across the border in their red uniforms (they hadn't worn them on duty, any more than the U.S. Marines wear dress blues in combat, in years) to aid the American cops on United States soil, where of course they have no legal authority. The violence and camera gimmicks, including a shoot-out sequence copped from Potemkin, conspire to keep one watching, but the suspension of disbelief requires effort, and the Morricone score assists you into the cocoon of credulity. Any composer who could make that turkey fly has to be taken very seriously. [Emphasis, mine and gleefully so!]

Morricone has continued to work, very successfully and effectively, in American films, including last year's Bulworth. Warren Beatty, who wrote, produced, and starred in Bulworth (an interesting picture, by the way) obviously likes Morricone: he used him in the earlier (1991) Bugsy, about the life and death of Bugsy Siegal).

The last film on which Morricone worked with Sergio Leone was The Nine Hundred Days of Leningrad, presumably about the German siege of that city.

"It was the only time he refused to talk music with me ... For him, the film was a sort of dream which he knew he would never realize. A little earlier, he had refused a heart transplant. The last months of his life, he was very tired and knew that he was going to die.

"I often called to ask him when we would go to work. But he kept putting it off. It was only afterwards that I understood why. His nephew, Enrico, acknowledged it to me on the day of his death.

"Sergio was a great gentleman."

Sergio Leone died on April 10, 1989. A rare collaboration ended. When Morricone too is gone, it will no doubt be written that he was an unusual composer, a very fine one, and he changed film scoring.

This too should be said: all his scores, no matter what the subject of the film, have an implicit mournfulness. It is as if their composer never for a moment escapes a sense, no matter how deep in his spirit it resides, of the eternal human condition.”

Thelonious Monk’s Little-Known ‘Liaisons’

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

The following piece by Larry Blumenfeld appeared in the June 10, 2017 edition of the Wall Street Journal. More of Monk’s recorded music is always a treat, but I was particularly excited about the release of this music because it features Monk’s short-lived association with the rhythm section of Sam Jones on bass and Art Taylor on drums. Given the space that Monk gives to a rhythm section, it’s always interesting to listen to how they do their thing in terms of laying down a pulse for Monk Music.

Earlier that year, Sam and Art had participated in the February 28, 1959 NYC Town Hall performance of Monk’s music as scored for a larger group by Hal Overton.

I was also intrigued by Paris-based tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen’s appearance on some tracks along with Charlie Rouse who was on the front-end of a 10-year association with Monk in the tenor sax chair of Thelonious’ quartet.

“Pianist Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 10, 1917. The centenary of this moment will likely inspire a wave of celebratory concerts and recordings. Since Monk’s death, in 1982, the influence of his compact body of compositions has grown with each passing decade; once considered radical, they are now as elemental to modern jazz as are Bach’s to classical music. The characteristics of his piano playing — jarring rhythmic displacements, clotted chords, flat-fingered runs and spiky dissonances — still sound distinct even as they shape our ideas of contemporary music’s possibilities.

The first commemoration of Monk’s centenary comes early, a posthumous gift from the master himself. Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (Sam Records/Saga), available as a deluxe double-CD or LP set, contains Monk’s studio recordings for the soundtrack of Roger Vadim’s French film of the same name. This music has never been available outside the context of the film. The master tapes of Monk’s soundtrack were discovered in 2014, in the archives of Marcel Romano, the French promoter who introduced Vadim to Monk’s music. Romano, who had brought Miles Davis to director Louis Malle to score “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud,” also managed French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, who here joined Monk’s quartet for several takes.

Vadim’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel embraced a story of bourgeois infidelity and seduction as transposed to 20th-century France, with a jazz soundtrack. (Cocktail-party scenes featured Duke Jordan’s tunes played by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, later released on the Fontana label.) Though commercially successful in France, the film is memorable now mostly for its nudity and risqué tone. Monk’s music—recorded in Manhattan, in the summer of 1959—is, however, timeless musical expression that documents a significant moment.

The list of classics recorded in 1959—as transformative a year as jazz has known—includes Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” It was also a heady time in Monk’s career. Months earlier, he had played a landmark large-ensemble concert at Town Hall. His working quartet had just recorded a fine album with cornetist Thad Jones and, shortly before this soundtrack session, had played the Newport Jazz Festival to rave reviews. This quartet, excellent though short-lived, included bassist Sam Jones, drummer Art Taylor and tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who had just begun a decade-long association with Monk.

Yet as Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley observes in an insightful liner note, Vadim had “approached Monk at the absolute worst time.” A dizzying professional schedule along with some setbacks, especially the loss of his cabaret card following an unjust arrest, had left Monk in the grip of severe emotional instability. He was, as Mr. Kelley writes, “overcommitted, tired, and ill.” Thus, Monk wrote no new compositions or arrangements; these tracks seem more the stuff of a jazz-club performance or record date than a movie score.

Still, Mr. Kelley writes, “Monk chose the repertoire based on his understanding of the story, and played around with the tempos in order to capture the character’s emotional state or circumstance.” Indeed, the always-inventive Monk here emphasizes the emotional content of his music. A version of “Crepuscule With Nellie,” used for opening credits, contains noticeably pregnant pauses. Four versions of “Pannonica,” two as solo piano, reveal subtly shifting shades of feeling. For a scene in which the innocent Marianne and her seducer, Valmont, meet in a church, Monk, perhaps as irony, played a straightforward version of the Rev. Charles A. Tindley’s hymn “By and By (We’ll Understand It Better By and By),” which he likely learned as a teenager while playing for a traveling Pentecostal preacher.

Nothing sounds revolutionary in these tracks, yet they reveal Monk during a dynamic year, in the midst of turmoil, seeming relaxed, playful and at the top of his game. His version of “Well, You Needn’t” bristles with the particular energy afforded by this brief rhythm-section alliance with Jones and Taylor. “Rhythm-a-Ning” is notable for Monk’s differing interplay with each saxophonist. An improvised blues, originally untitled, listed here as “Six in One,” sounds like a sketch of what Monk recorded three months later as “Round Lights.” Here also is the only known studio recording of Monk’s “Light Blue” (two versions, in fact). On the second, a 14-minute version credited as “Light Blue (Making Of),” Monk implores Taylor, against his protestations, to “keep on doing what you’re doing”—to extend a three-beat pattern that forms a countermelody. Whether Monk was thinking about advancing Vadim’s cinematic tale or simply telling his own story is anyone’s guess."

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal. He also blogs at http:// www.blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes.

beau hunks saxtette & metropole orchestra - raymond scott - the penguin ...

JAZZ REPERTORY Revisited - by Jeffrey Sultanof

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

“The phrase ‘jazz repertory’ has many definitions and dimensions. Perhaps the most basic is: the study, preservation and performance of the many diverse musical styles in jazz. In recent years, the phrase most often applies to big bands and jazz ensembles performing classic and new music written for reeds, brass, and rhythm section in various sizes and combinations.” 

- Jeffrey Sultanof,Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [p.512]

I literally stumbled on this concept of Jazz Repertory while looking for a context in which to place two previous JazzProfiles blog features [1] The Raymond Scott Chesterfield arrangements commissioned and performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1937-38 and subsequently recorded by the Metropole Orchestra with The Beau Hunks Saxtette and [2] The Beau Hunks Saxophone Soctette involving their two beautifully recorded BASTA CDs

In searching for a way to highlight this music, I came across the phrase “Jazz Repertory” as noted above by Jeffrey Sultanof from his essay of the same name that appears in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 512-521] and it seemed to be a perfect description for a format in which to present The Metropole Orchestra Whiteman Chesterfield arrangements and the Beau Hunks retrospectives.

Since these earlier postings, Jeffrey and I have become internet friends and we share a common interest in Jazz preservation among other things related to the music. He has been a guest author on these pages contributing a marvelous piece on composer-arranger George Handy and the blog has also put up a review of his indispensable Experiencing Big Band Jazz: A Listener’s Companion [Rowman & Littlefield, 2017].

In addition to his efforts at Jazz education, Jeffrey is a composer-arranger, conductor, writer and teacher, as well as a wonderfully caring family man.

Always on the lookout for topics of interest for the blog, I suddenly realized that while I had referenced Jeffrey’s concept of “Jazz Repertory” as a point of departure, I had never actually put up the piece on my page.

So I wrote to Bill Kirchner and to Jeffrey to ask for their copyright permission to reproduce the essay, both agreed, but Jeffrey asked me to hold off so he could revisit the original narrative, edit it where appropriate and write a new introduction for it.

Here’s what followed. Please take particular note of Jeffrey’s ongoing activities on behalf of the music and its makers. Without them, I daresay, the documented legacy of the Jazz World would be a much poorer place. 

© Copyright ® Jeffrey Sultanof; copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with permission.

JAZZ REPERTORY – AN INTRODUCTION ON ITS REPRINTING

My career as a writer for a major book publishing house began here. Before this, I wrote for various publications, particularly the Gene Lees Jazzletter, which I considered the equivalent of an M.A. in writing for clarity, accuracy of information, and finding just the right words. Steven Cerra was kind enough to reprint my article on George Handy, and re-reading it was fascinating after so many years, plus I got to make several corrections.

Bill Kirchner and I have been each other’s champions since we met, and it was an honor to contribute this article for the Oxford Companion to Jazz. When I saw the list of contributors, I was overwhelmed. It was the big time at last. 

As I’ve written previously, mine was an unusual path in music. I always wanted to arrange and conduct, and studying scores of concert music gave me the idea that the big band libraries were important music as well and warranted study. At that time, stock arrangements and miscellaneous libraries were available in one form or another, but those items were only a piece of the big puzzle. Back then the libraries of Goodman, Ellington, Basie, etc. were not available. I wrote about making this music available back in 1972, and soon discovered that hardly anyone was interested. 

While in college, I was encouraged to pursue a conducting career by Roger Nierenberg, later the conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony and the Pro Arte Chorale. But I’d also met and was mentored by Jerry Graff, who was one of the top vocal arrangers in show business, who’d worked with Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne and Nat King Cole. The final straw was an opportunity to work as an editor/arranger at Warner Bros. Publications while I was still in college. For nineteen years, I edited and arranged music of all types, often anonymously; incredibly, many of my arrangements for chamber ensembles are still in print, but I shudder to think of the errors that were never caught (this was before MIDI, and I rarely heard any of my own music). I transcribed some very big hits for sheet music and worked with many of my heroes and heroines, as well as some real jerks. During that time, I continued to push for publication of vintage music from the big bands, but my bosses didn’t think there was a market. They also let it be known that they didn’t want me to be active in professional organizations, so it was years before I met people like Loren Schoenberg, Vincent Pelote, or Dan Morgenstern.

In 1994, Warner's moved to Florida and I joined Hal Leonard, where I continued to work with legendary creative artists in the jazz and pop world, and produced play-along CDs with a few of them. The people at that company were just as disinterested in vintage big band music. However, I was able to produce a folio of the Miles Davis Nonet music from original sources that came from Miles’ music library, as well as work with the Gil Evans estate, among others.

Hence in 1999, Bill Kirchner called me to write this article. As it turned out, I was represented twice, when James T. Maher needed help finishing his contribution. Bill asked me to work with James, and I was delighted to collaborate with him.

At the time, I was perhaps the least known of all the writers asked, and looking over the list, I’ve communicated with most of them at this point, and several of them are my friends.

When Rob DuBoff started Jazz Lines Publications, I began editing for him, and we have now issued hundreds of arrangements. Rob and I originally met back in the 1990s when I worked with him to publish a series of fake books, and he discussed his vision of making legendary big band and vocal music available. I then showed him about 200 scores that I’d edited for just that purpose. In the early 2000s, that dream became a reality, and a lot of diverse repertoire can now be played and studied. He has become one of the finest music editors I’ve worked with, immersing himself in copyright law and rights ownership, and continues to drive or fly all over the United States to gather images of manuscripts for publication. While there are other companies that publish vintage music, some of them only publish transcriptions, although Sierra Music has also obtained rights to important music and has a varied catalog. At this point, Jazz Lines is a respected company that is well known all over the world, known for accuracy, materials that are easy to read, and a wide stylistic range. Perhaps just as important, sales generate money for estates. To cite just one example, the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation has benefited from sales of classic arrangements written for this legend. Not only are we providing materials to people who want to sing to these arrangements, but money from sales is helping people. 

The essence of the article has not changed much, but some updates are necessary. I comment on the Boyd Raeburn compositions that were sold by Bill Schremp. Bruce Boyd Raeburn told me years later that Schremp never got permission from Bruce to sell Raeburn materials. Eventually it came out that Schremp had access to private libraries of music and stole quite a bit; some of it is still in boxes and is inaccessible. There are others who are making music available illegally and violating copyright laws. 

In the listing of where key libraries are, the Artie Shaw library was moved to the University of Arizona, but it may be elsewhere at this point; when I get specific information, I will update. The two institutions that should also be listed are the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, which have acquired important and diverse libraries of big band music, particularly such important libraries as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Willis Holman just to name three. There are major collections in Europe as well. 

Once again, Mr. Cerra has honored me by putting this article into wider circulation, and also plugs “The Oxford Companion to Jazz,” [Bill Kirchner, ed.] which remains an important book deserving of a wide public.” 

© Copyright ® Jeffrey Sultanof, Bill Kirchner, and Oxford University Press; copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with permission.

“The phrase jazz repertory has many definitions and dimensions. Perhaps the most basic definition is: the study, preservation, and performance of the many diverse musical styles in jazz. In recent years, the phrase most often applies to big bands arid jazz ensembles performing classic and new music written for reeds, brass, and rhythm section in various sizes and combinations.

In a sense, the small-group jazz repertoire movement began in the late 1930s. There had always been a core of traditional jazz fans and artists during the big band era, but a national focus on older styles was evident from new recordings made in the late '1930s by Jelly Roll Morton, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Sidney Bechet, et al. The rediscovery of trumpeter Bunk Johnson prompted new activity in older styles by such ensembles as those led by Lu Watters and Turk Murphy. Younger musicians such as Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern felt more sympathy with the music of an earlier era. Wilber even studied with his hero, Sidney Bechet, and became his protege.

Further interest in older styles of jazz was prompted by the publication of They All Played Ragtime, written by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. Blesh's own record label, Circle, concentrated on ragtime and older jazz styles. Admittedly, much of the interest and recordings of these styles was centered more on its novelty value (Lou Busch and Knuckles O'Toole [Dick Hyman]), but many worthwhile recordings by such artists as Dick Cary, Dick Wellstood, and Ralph Sutton gave new life to early jazz styles.

The late '50s saw the first small ensemble to perform music encompassing the earliest to the most contemporary styles of jazz: the Bobby Hackett ensemble, a band that could play dixieland classics and more up-to-date (for the period) jazz tunes. Given the fact that most ensembles still specialize in one particular era of music, it is rather amazing that this ensemble remains so little known.

Study and performance of more traditional styles of jazz can be found in the activities of such musicians as Bob Wilber, James Dapogny, Dan Barrett, and Randy Sandke. Sandke and Dapogny in particular have made major strides in this area. Dapogny edited an edition of Jelly Roll Morton compositions (G. Schirrner). Sandke has rediscovered and performed Louis Armstrong compositions the master never recorded himself. Even though many of the musicians listed above specialize in the music of particular eras, Hyman and Sandke have shown that they can play many different musical styles, from dixieland to modal and aleatoric jazz. [Aleatoric music is a music in which some element of the music is left to chance and/or some primary element  of a composed work’s realization is left to the determination of the performer/s.]

With regard to more modern styles, small groups that have been assembled to re-create and celebrate the music of particular innovators are Supersax (the music and solos of Charlie Parker - five saxophones and rhythm), Dave Pell's Prez Conference (the music and solos of Lester Young—four saxophones and rhythm), and the Tony Rizzi Ensemble (the music and solos of Charlie Christian—five guitars and rhythm). Other notable repertory small groups include Marty Grosz's Sounds of Swing, Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern's Soprano Summit, and Wilber's Bechet Legacy.

Excluding so-called ghost bands, which exist to perpetuate the music of a leader who has passed away, the first real jazz repertory big band was the Bob Crosby Orchestra of the late '30s. With musical directors Bob Haggart, Matty Matlock, and Deane Kincaide, the band featured an older, more New Orleans style of jazz, playing and recording such evergreens as "Muskrat Ramble," "Beale Street Blues," "Sugar Foot Strut," and "Panama." It also played the pop hits of the day in a two-beat style. The full orchestra and the Bobcats, the small group within the band, had a strong following and recorded prolifically for Decca Records. Crosby's postwar forays into bandleading were more modern in nature, but the Bobcats remained a New Orleans—style group.

The idea of studying and re-creating the music of vintage big bands began to take shape in the late 1960s. This writer wrote an article in 1972 (never published) about playing this music in concert and wondered if the music existed and where it was. The repertory band movement caught fire soon after, with several ensembles appearing and individuals actively transcribing, studying, and performing music from many periods of the big band. The New McKinney's Cotton Pickers began in 1972, when Dave Hutson, an alto saxophonist and disc jockey from Detroit, interviewed the original McKinney banjoist, Dave Wilborn, on the radio. That interview led to Wilborn's active participation in the new orchestra, which went on to record three LPs and tour Europe.

In 1973 two important ensembles were created in New York. Chuck Israels, former bassist with Bill Evans and teaching at Brooklyn College at the time, believed that an ensemble should be created that would not only perform the big band music of the past but also commission and play new music. He received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Jazz Ensemble gave its first concert in July of 1973. In its four-year existence, it gave many concerts in New York and other parts of the United States and made two albums. Its repertoire ranged from Duke Ellington transcriptions by David Berger to arrangements written by Israels of pieces by Bix Beiderbecke and Charles Mingus to new music by several writers.

The other ensemble was masterminded by Newport Jazz Festival creator George Wein. Entitled the New York Jazz Repertory Ensemble, this ambitious undertaking was announced to the press on July 2, 1973. There were several concerts in the first year, spearheaded by four musical directors representing jazz past and present: Stanley Cowell, Gil Evans, Sy Oliver, and Billy Taylor. This ensemble was also funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as the NEA and the Carnegie Hall Corporation. The first year of the ensemble's existence was only partially successful, with losses of over forty thousand dollars. The key problem was that individual concerts were made up of both older and newer styles of jazz; most often the newer music was programmed after intermission, and members of the audience did not return after the break. Having four musical directors was abandoned in 1974. For the second year, only one style or theme would be presented per concert, and a planning committee made up of Stanley Dance, Dick Hyman, Joe Newman, Jimmy Owens, and Bob Wilber designed the concert series. This plan existed until the ensemble played its last concert in 1975.

Even though its life was short, the New York Jazz Repertory Ensemble pointed the way to later, more successful jazz repertory orchestras. Its concert programming included the small ensemble music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, the big bands of Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, the small-group and big band music of George Russell, the music of Bix Beiderbecke, musically directed by Richard Sudhalter, a concert of the music of John Coltrane, musically directed by tenor saxophonist and Coltrane scholar Andrew White, and commissioned works by such composers as Charles Tolliver. Perhaps the high point of the ensemble's existence, however, was Dick Hyman's presentation of the music of Louis Armstrong. This presentation toured the world and was recorded and issued by Atlantic on LP.

Writer-historian Martin Williams produced a series of historical jazz concerts at the Smithsonian in the mid-'70s, which included an Ellington concert featuring Symphony in Black.

Another important leader of vintage big band music in the 1970s was bass saxophonist — bassist Vince Giordano. Giordano had been a student of the legendary Jean Goldkette/Paul Whiteman arranger Bill Challis, and met and played with many of the musicians active in the '20s jazz scene. He collected published arrangements from the '20s and '30s and organized his own bands by 1976. More often than not, Giordano's bands were made up of both young and older musicians who had an interest in playing these styles. By 1981 Vince Giordano's New Orleans Nighthawks had a regular engagement at the Red Blazer Too in New York City and also played at the swank Cafe Carlyle, as well as parties and dances. The library contained over thirty thousand arrangements. The band was inactive for a number of years until Giordano re-formed it in 1999.

Starting in this era, ensembles were organized to focus on particular big band styles or books. The bands most often featured were those of Count Basie (the music of Thad Jones, Frank Foster, Neal Hefti, Sam Nestico), Stan Kenton (the Kenton book was the first important library to be made available to musicians and educators; new editions of compositions and arrangements are available from Bob Curnow's company, Sierra Music), Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Duke Ellington, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman. Many of the pieces from the books of these bands were being published by such companies as Kendor Music, Hal Leonard, Lifeline Press, Jenson Publications, and Warner Bros. Publications. Other music circulated among collectors. In 1979 and 1980, the Mike Crotty band, based in Washington, D.C., gave two concerts of the music of the Boyd Raeburn ensemble of 1944— 48. The book was rediscovered by Crotty band manager Bill Schremp in a basement in Long Island. In its time, the music was considered quite advanced, but the modern performances of this still provocative-sounding music by George Williams, Johnny Mandel, Milt Kleeb, Ed Finckel, Johnny Richards, and particularly George Handy were well received. Schremp marketed some of this music, but few copies of the publications were sold.

One important band formed to perform the music of a single big band book was the ensemble begun by Harvey Estrin in 1976 playing the music of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra. Estrin's orchestra was made up of the best of the younger generation of instrumentalists just starting as professional musicians in the New York area, most of whom had never even heard of the band, let alone heard the music. The book was eagerly embraced by the musicians and audiences alike; after twenty-odd years, the music was still fresh and challenging, one of the unique big band libraries of any era. Both Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan attended rehearsals, coached, advised, and generally had a wonderful time. The ensemble was active for several years. Alas, it never recorded professionally.

The United Kingdom was also full of activity in the '70s. One of the most important ensembles was led by cornetist-trumpeter-author Richard Sudhalter. He obtained over two hundred arrangements from the Paul Whiteman library housed at Williams College in Massachusetts and organized the New Paul Whiteman Orchestra. The orchestra featured Sudhalter playing the parts originally written for Bix Beiderbecke, while saxophonist — sound engineer John R. T. Davies played the Frank Trumbauer parts. The band gave several well-received concerts during 1974—75, broadcast over BBC radio, and was profiled on BBC television. One of the concerts was recorded by the band's bassist, Peter Ind, and was later issued on his Wave label in England and on Monmouth Evergreen in the United States. One of the members of this ensemble, Keith Nichols, later formed the Midnight Follies Orchestra.

The '80s brought several new ensembles. On May 12, 1986, the American Jazz Orchestra, masterminded by writer-historian Gary Giddins and pianist-composer John Lewis, gave its first concert in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York. Tenor saxophonist Loren Schoenberg later became co—musical director. The ensemble had an extensive board of trustees, including Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Thad Jones, Muhal Richard Abrams, Albert Murray, and George Wein. The AJO performed both music from the past and scores especially commissioned from Abrams, Carter, Bob Brookmeyer, Sy Oliver, Henry Threadgill, Gerald Wilson, and David Murray. It was forced to cease operation in 1992.

The ensembles discussed below are still going strong at this writing [circa 2000]. Formed in 1988, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra has been quite successful under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Even though the ensemble plays a wide range of classic and new music, it is mainly known for its performances of the music of Duke Ellington (most often transcribed by David Berger) and of Marsalis himself. The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra began giving concerts in 1991 under the direction of its musical directors Gunther Schuller and David Baker. (When Schuller was affiliated with the New England Conservatory of Music, he organized and conducted ensembles devoted to The Red Back Book of Scott Joplin and his own transcriptions of the music of Duke Ellington.) The U.S. government gave the Smithsonian $242,000 to found the orchestra and to fund transcription and preservation of the classic jazz repertoire. The ensemble has given many free concerts at its home base in Washington, D.C. The Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, directed by trumpeter Jon Faddis, is the brainchild of George Wein. Founded in December of 1991, the ensemble's purpose is to "[showcase] classic tunes in refreshingly novel forms as well as many new works." All of these ensembles have toured widely and recorded CDs.

On the West Coast, Mark Masters has led his Jazz Composers Orchestra since the early '80s. While he concentrates on the repertoire and arrangers of the Stan Kenton band, he has also performed the music of other composers such as Ornette Coleman and Jimmy Knepper. Masters is known particularly for giving outstanding concerts of the difficult music of Robert Graettinger. The ensemble has recorded three CDs.

The Chicago Jazz Ensemble, with distinguished composer William Russo as its musical director, was founded in 1965 to perform Russo's compositions, although it also gave performances of Duke Ellington's First Concert of Sacred Music; this ensemble disbanded in 1968. Upon its reorganization in 1991, the ensemble gave concerts featuring the music of Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and music from the books of Stan Kenton and Count Basie. In 1995 it gave the first complete live performance of Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain, originally written for Miles Davis. The ensemble is in residence at Columbia College and has recorded two CDs.

In Holland, the Ebony Band specializes in "concert jazz," performing the music of the Stan Kenton Innovations Orchestra, John Carisi, and George Handy. They have recorded two CDs.

On another level, conductor-historian Maurice Peress has presented re-creations of two important concerts involving large ensembles and jazz. In 1988 he toured widely with the original 1924 Paul Whiteman Aeolian Hall concert, which introduced George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and in 1989 he researched and musical-directed a re-creation of the 1912 concert of James Reese Europe's Clef Club Orchestra. Both concerts were critically well received.

From the very beginning of the jazz repertory movement, several issues arose with regard to source material and performance issues. Some leaders feel that compositions and arrangements should be performed exactly as recorded, and recorded solos should be reproduced in concert. Others feel that older big band music should not be locked in a time capsule and that solos should be original. This difference in attitude and philosophy is also reflected in the publication of this music. The Classic Edition publications of David Berger's Ellington transcriptions have rhythm parts that are basically guides, as are Walter van de Leur's editions of Billy Strayhorn's compositions; the Smithsonian's own publications have all solos and rhythm parts totally written out.

It has been noted that many of the important works of the big band era exist in stock arrangements. The term stock arrangement was first used in music publishing circles as early as the nineteenth century. During the big band era, stock arrangements were, more often than not, issued by publishers and provided free to bandleaders so the publisher's songs would be played. In the cases where stock arrangements were issued that reflected a hit record by a particular band, often the arrangement was orchestrationally altered or musically simplified to make it playable by most bands. The stock arrangement of Artie Shaw's hit version of "Begin the Beguine," for example, has saxophone parts that are different from the original so that Artie Shaw's clarinet solo could be incorporated into the section proper. In addition, the recorded arrangement is in the key of D; the stock arrangement is in the key of C. For this reason, stock arrangements must be carefully scrutinized before they can be deemed authentic. Many need extensive audio checking and major surgery before they are ready for use. A full score must be prepared, not only to do this work more effectively but to root out note, rhythmic, and dynamic errors.

One of the most important pieces of advice is also the most obvious:

try as much as possible to ascertain whether the original arrangement exists in a collection or library. There are at least three known transcriptions of "King Porter Stomp" where the original score and parts are now housed, at the Benny Goodman Collection at Yale University. Yale even has a complete listing of the collection that is available for purchase.

The Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress continue to acquire important collections; among the most notable libraries these organizations now house are those of Duke Ellington, Charlie Barnet, Gerald Wilson, and Gerry Mulligan. In addition, both are dedicated to making the music available to those organizations who wish to perform it. In many other cases, however, the music is spread far and wide. A partial list of such collections follows:

Louis Armstrong: Queens College, Flushing, New York

Les Brown, Larry Clinton, Bob Crosby: University of Wyoming, Laramie 

Benny Goodman: New York Public Library; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Harry James: University of Wyoming, Laramie 

Stan Kenton: University of North Texas, Denton 

Red Nichols: University of Oregon, Eugene 

Red Norvo: Yale University Boyd Raeburn:  Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Tulane University, New Orleans 

Artie Shaw: Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University

Composer-historian Andrew Homzy has been assembling a master list of compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions of such big band material. Over a thousand pages in length, it is still quite a few years away from completion at this writing, particularly due to new donations of such material in the recent past.

In essence, the chances of obtaining usable material for a wide-ranging concert of big band music are erratic at best. With further research and the efforts of current and future historians of the jazz ensemble past and present, this will most certainly change in the years to come. However, as with film, much material is still in private hands and has not gotten into active circulation. Given the nature of the paper the music is written on (much of this paper, manufactured and printed during World War II, is highly acidic and unstable), it is essential to photocopy, recopy by hand or computer, and otherwise preserve what remains of the known big band libraries and published arrangements before it is too late.

The state of the jazz repertory movement is also dependent on the current audience for such music. This is best illustrated by the experiences of the New York Jazz Repertory Company and the American Jazz Orchestra. One of the main reasons for the dissolution of these ensembles may be seen in the great popularity of the Basie, Ellington, Goodman, and Lunceford concerts and the lack of interest in the concerts featuring more modern big band music. Jazz repertory, in the main, is still supported by audiences sixty and older, who listen to this music as a nostalgic experience. Perhaps it is true that a well-rounded jazz repertory, representing music from all eras of the jazz ensemble, is several years away from full acceptance. We must remember that there was relatively little interest in the music of Bach after his death until Felix Mendelssohn began performing it in the mid-nineteenth century.

Jazz repertory represents an important direction and challenge for the future: to acknowledge the creative gifts of the men and women who created ensemble music for listening and dancing, and to prepare usable performance materials so that ensembles can easily play and study it. Just imagine if materials from the baroque and classical eras of music had been allowed to collect dust in attics or languish in special collections in colleges and archives without editing and publication; by this time, they would probably have ceased to exist. We are only now accepting that the music of the big band is unique and warrants saving, not just in terms of American cultural history but of world music as well. It is imperative that this work continue for the sake of indigenous American music. Perhaps wide interest in thismusic is still several years away; yet the time to save it is now.”

Manny Albam - Cool (from West Side Story)

Manny Albam - West Side Story

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

“Albam's writing is characterized by the spaces he allows for solos, and by the fact that his arrangements invariably swing; he shuns over-ornamentation, and his lines are ready-made for the skilled performer.

He explains his approach this way: "I try to keep my writing simple enough so that there are no reading hangups; the parts can be read very quickly. And in addition to leaving spaces for soloists, I like to have it so that even the written figures can be interpreted in different ways by different players. The musicians in this album—like Al Cohn and Bob Brookmeyer—are especially satisfying to write for because their work suits this method so well. I can write breaks for them, and that helps me get away from the usual pattern of the first chorus, a couple of solos, and then the out chorus. And Osie Johnson's a wonderful help. Besides laying the time down, he leaves it loose. He never gets in the way of the arrangement, and if a player wants to go a little longer or a little shorter, Osie follows him. He's a beautiful musician"

These scores, in fact, illustrate how unpretentiously and functionally Manny's arrangements do swing—with the aid, of course, of several consistently imaginative jazzmen. …”

— Nat Hentoff, Insert Notes to Steve’s Songs [Dot  DLP 29008;FSR CD-545]

West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957 and a film adaptation appeared four years later after which followed a number of Jazz Impression of the Leonard Bernstein [Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal orchestrated] music and Steven Sondheim lyrics for the show to which Arthur Laurents provided the book [stryline] and Jerome Robbins the choreography.

Jazz versions of Individual songs from West Side Story abound in the broader Jazz discography.

However, one Jazz Impression of the show is often overlooked: Manny Albam and His Jazz Greats Play the Music of West Side Story [Fresh Sound Records FSR CD-545].

“In the late 40s Emmanuel (Manny) Albam put away his baritone saxophone because it was getting in the way of his pen. From then on, he established himself firmly as one of the most skilled, perhaps the busiest, of all the freelance arrangers on the New York scene. Although he worked with great success in the pop field, he was usually associated with jazz. His originals for Basie, Herman, Gibbs, Ferguson, and other big bands are as familiar as the many remarkable LPs listed under his own name. 

With West Side Story, Albam achieved one of his greatest works. Most of the material is emotionally charged and moody, but the precise execution of Al barn's inspired arrangements, along with superbly apt solos, injected considerably more jazz life into Bernstein's provocative score.” — Jordi Pujol

The original liner notes from the 12" LP album WEST SIDE STORY - Coral CRL 57207 were written by Manny and they afford a unique opportunity to understand how an arranger goes about creating a Jazz interpretation of music written for another idiom.

The music which Mr. Bernstein composed for the "West Side Story" depicts the tension, turbulence and torment of adolescence. When this adolescence occurs amid the concrete and exhaust fumes of New York tenements, we can, more likely than not, expect chaos, yet not without a particular humor.

When I sat and listened to the prologue to this opera-ballet at the Winter Garden, it was obvious from the first few bars that this was to be musical with an unhappy theme and probably an unhappy ending. This struck me as being different from any "musical" (other than opera) that I had up to this point seen or heard. The ballet music and "special" material never left doubt as to the effect that Mr. Bernstein wished to have his listeners feel. The prominent theme was unrest with an almost equal amount of musical whimsy. The jazz-like thematic structure showed the troubled adolescent, whereas the almost religious quality of the love ballads showed the innocence and sensitivity which is almost always found beneath the tough outer armor of the same person. The jazz is dissonant (not all jazz that one encounters is dissonant) to a degree of creating, in all who hear, a feeling of foreboding and disquietude. And, in beautiful dramatic contrast, the tenderness of the ballads (with just enough occasional dissonance so that the listener is always aware of the makeup of the characters) shows us that young love oversteps the bounds of juvenile unrest.

In creating a jazz version of the music from this score, I became aware of the thematic sense of it in the form of material that a jazz player could draw from in order to have his message read to the hearer. In some instances I found it necessary to regiment the songs into a form with which the soloists would feel free to apply their own ideas and yet retain the flavor of the original. As this idea developed it became obvious that I would have to orchestrate the ballads as simply as possible to provide the proper contrast which Bernstein originally felt. The songs "Maria" and "Somewhere" were orchestrated with absolute simplicity and "Tonight" with a bit of swing to it, because in its original quintet form, the characters "Riff" and "Bernardo" were there to interpolate their remarks into the piece.

The "Jet Song", the song of the "Jets", a juvenile gang (not the high-speed flying machines), is blues-like in structure. I thought of "I Feel Pretty", originally a happy waltz, as a happy swinging score with the soloists having their say in the matter. "Something's Coming" finds a bright-tempoed arrangement in order, as the song depicts future unrest among the cast. I used the tempo change as a device to further the instability of the meaning of the number. "Cool" is a slower grooved vehicle for the orchestra which allows the muted trumpet to have a cooling influence upon the hearer. In the final score, "Finale", which is a potpourri of some of the previous melodies and introduces us to "America", a rousing Latin-American tune, and "One Hand, One Heart" (which was scored for three trumpets and bass violin with a small hint of "Somewhere" by the trombone brought back as an afterthought), it was my intention to wrap up the various moods of the score into one number by restating some of the other songs.

I owe a great deal to the musicianship of every player in the final analysis of the sounds heard herein. The soloists and "part players" alike share with Leonard Bernstein, who provided the impetus with his highly imaginative and provocative score, the spotlight for the production of this album.”

— Manny Albam