Saturday, October 10, 2020
Benny Goodman And His Sextet - Blue Lou (featuring Wardell Gray)
BENNY GOODMAN AND HIS SEXTET Doug Mettome (tp); Benny Goodman (cl); Wardell Gray (ts); Buddy Greco (p, voc); Francis Beecher (g); Clyde Lombardi (b); Sonny Igoe (d).
Friday, October 9, 2020
Lee Morgan: Incandescent, Incendiary and Insouciant [From The Archives]
© -Steven Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Wherever the Jazz winds blow, you’ll find Lee Morgan blowing straight ahead and swinging. He blows with unflagging zest tempered with superb control. Add to this, a few more Lee Morgan fundamentals such as a sense of good taste and perception, and you have clues to his charismatic powers. From his debut as a teen-age trumpeter, Lee Morgan’s style and sound have always abounded with a warm joi de vivre.”
- Dr. Herb Wong, San Francisco , CA
“[Until his death in 1972 at the tragically early age of 33], … Lee Morgan was a prime contender for the title of the quintessential hard bop trumpet player. … He will be remembered chiefly as the man who took on the mantle of Clifford Brown (with more than a little influence from Fats Navarro - although that is implicit in Brown anyway - and Dizzy Gillespie, including adopting the latter's trademark upturned trumpet for a time), then went on to develop his own distinctive voice from those models.
He cast the definitive mould for hard bop trumpet style in the process, ….”
Morgan was always capable of both fireworks and a genuine expressiveness, and wrote some of the most memorable compositions to emerge from this genre.
At his best, he was simply incandescent.”
- Kenny Mathieson Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-1965 [pp. 143-44].
There’s the word I was looking for – “incandescent” – as in bedazzling, brilliant, bright; then there is lucent, lucid or luminous; or how about radiant, refulgent or resplendent!
Other words that come to mind when I think of how best to describe the music of Lee Morgan are incendiary as in “explosive” and insouciant as in “carefree” and charming, but never to the point of indifference.
At times, one gets the feeling that Lee Morgan doesn’t play the trumpet, he attacks it! Sturm und drang seems an apt phrase to associate with Lee’s music: it’s always full of action, excitement and the free range of emotion.
Although his early fame was, in part, based on records he made with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and a series he did for Blue Note in the 1950s, I first heard Lee on recordings that he made for VeeJay Records, a relatively obscure label based in Chicago
A DJ friend-of-the-family gave me a fistful of VeeJay demo’s [short for “Demonstration Copies”] including The Young Lions [VJ-001 with Lee joined by Frank Strozier on alto saxophone and Wayne Shorter on tenor; how’s that for a front line?], Here’s Lee Morgan [VJ-005] and Expoobident [VJ-008], both of which find Lee paired with Clifford Jordan on tenor.
All three albums were recorded in Chicago in 1960, by which time the Jazz critics were asserting that Lee’s style had “matured,” this concerning someone who had reached the ripe old age of twenty-two!?
Lee uses a number of stylistic devices to give his trumpet playing added power and pep. Among these are a half-valve technique, pecking and squeezing notes through the horn, and a heavy reliance on staccato phrasing - all of which served to create a super-charged tension in his solos.
In many ways, Lee’s approach to trumpet was a lot like Dizzy Gillespie’s and yet it was uniquely different.
Author and commentator Alyn Shipton explains the complimentary/complementary relationship between the Gillespie and Morgan styles this way in Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie:
“More notes are implied rather than played: there are half-valve effects, momentary hesitations and speed-ups, all of which personalize the playing…. [When] Lee Morgan came into the band … Dizzy had a trumpeter of comparable individuality to his own, and Morgan’s contribution to … ‘That’s All,’ despite a furious tempo, proves that it was not necessary to play similarly to Dizzy to hold down a trumpet chair in his band.
Morgan’s buzzier embouchure, squarer phrasing, and entirely different approach to the building block motif that ends his solo [on ‘That’s All’] displays a new kind of musical imagination at work. It’s one that draws on Dizzy’s approach, to be sure, but does not depend on it for survival.” [p. 287].
More similarities and distinctions between Dizzy and Lee can be found in this excerpt by bassist Paul West in Dizzy memoirs, To Be or Not to Bop [paragraphing modified]:
"Lee Morgan and I joined the band at the same time, and we were the two babies in the band. We were the two youngest in the band. Lee was eighteen, and I think, at that time, I was twenty-one. This was the greatest thing that could have happened to Lee Morgan at that time, his association with Dizzy. He was the baby, and he was very cocky and very happy-go-lucky and very comical. He was almost like a baby Dizzy. When you heard Lee play that solo on 'Night In Tunisia
Basically, this is one of the big differences between Lee Morgan's playing, and a lot of the younger musicians, trumpet players. Lee's playing had a lot of character, a lot of personality. He wasn't trying to prove how skillful he was, how highly technical his ability was, but he used that technical ability and skill to bring out his personality, his character, and this is typical of Dizzy's playing. Dizzy is not just a technician who aspires to try to convince somebody that he is technically astute, but he uses his technical ability to bring out his personality.
His playing has personality, it has character, it's not just exercises, and that's the basic difference. And this, I think, is one of the things Lee got from Dizzy as well as Brownie, whom he loved and adored. The relationship between Dizzy and Lee was one of master and student, and you can see that.” [pp. 436-37]
Lee Morgan was the kind of Jazz musician who made you take notice: he played stuff that turned your head around. Even experienced listeners like critic and writer Nat Hentoff were impressed as he described in the following reminiscence from Jazz Is:
“Dizzy Gillespie’s big band was at Birdland in New York Philadelphia
This first hearing of Lee Morgan made such an impression on Nat that he described it again in his insert notes to Lee’s The Gigolo [Blue Note CDP 7 84212 2 paragraphing modified]:
“With certain musicians I associate certain striking events. Sarah Vaughan scat singing at three in the morning at Minton's years ago. Sonny Stitt one night in a club long since disappeared suddenly stunning the audience, stilling all conversation, with a solo that literally turned heads. And Lee Morgan, not yet twenty at the time, at Birdland in the late 1950's. He was in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and although I'd heard about Lee from friends in Philadelphia Tunisia
But that night, the thin, jaunty kid from Philadelphia
… My favorite musicians are those who make me feel, especially those who can make me feel good as well as vulnerable, sanguine as well as mortal. That's why I loved Billie Holiday so much—she could make you feel like the first day of spring and also like it is having Christmas lunch alone in a self-service cafeteria. She had range.
What I've also dug about Lee is that he can plunge into blues, soar with crackling high spirits, and play his horn on a ballad …. All done with authority, with crispness, with a strong sense of self.”
In other writings about Lee and his music, Nat uses phrases like “carefree ebullience,” “dazzlingly technique” and a style that is “brisk, witty and strutting with confidence” - all of which seem to me to be particularly apt descriptions of Lee’s style of playing.
Commenting about Lee in his Blue Note Records: The Biography, Richard Cook asserts that “Morgan’s early flowering is a salutary reminder to many who think the getting of wisdom in Jazz is the preserve of older hearts and minds. … the history of the music is full of players who were already masterful at an indecently early age and Lee Morgan is only one of many.
… the Morgan of these first [Blue Note] dates did have much development to come, even as one listens back to this early music and wonders at the elusive brio of this brilliant young man.” [p. 95]
Fortunately for me, I was eventually able to catch-up to Lee’s early Blue Note recordings especially after the nice folks at Mosaic Records reissued them in a boxed set entitled The Complete Blue Note Lee Morgan Fifties Sessions. And although this limited edition is now sold out, most of Lee’s recordings from this nascent period in his development are still available as individual Blue Note CDs.
© -Mosaic Records and Bob Blumenthal . Used with permission, copyright protected, all rights reserved.
“After more than a decade during which the jazz world has been inundated by teenage and even a few preteen "young lions," it may be difficult to appreciate the sensation that Lee Morgan created in 1956. Today we tend to shrug when another 18-year-old phenomenon steps forward (usually with a recording contract from one of the multinational major labels); but teenage trumpeters with any level of facility were less common when Lee Morgan was 18, not to mention teenage trumpeters advanced enough to not only sit in the trumpet section of Dizzy Gillespie's big band but also to assume solo duties on Gillespie's signature piece, A night in tunisia. Morgan was indeed exceptional, and the subsequent flood of young musicians blessed with facility but not half of Morgan's soul only emphasize what rare gifts he possessed.
What has not changed is the mythic nature of Morgan's tragically short career. His early start was balanced by his premature death from gunshot wounds inflicted at Slug's Saloon in New York LEE MORGAN STORY — Gillespie, on the bandstand at the Newport Jazz Festival, introducing Morgan's Tunisia feature, as he does on the live recording of the event (reissued on Verve 314 513 754-2), or the earlier image of a skinny junior high school kid's legs, observed through the street-level window of a basement jazz club in Philadelphia where the touring bands performed and Morgan hung around to catch the sounds. Without question, however, this is the music that would reveal why Lee Morgan, the Gillespie sideman, turned so many heads.
We may assume, from the sketchy biographical information that survives regarding Morgan's youth, that he took full advantage of his proximity to several great musicians. He was born in Philadelphia July 10, 1938 . Leonard Feather has alternatively reported that either his father or his older sister played piano for a church choir. He began his trumpet studies with a private instructor, and continued them at Mastbaum Technical High School
Things really started to happen for Morgan in the summer of 1956, after he graduated from Mastbaum. First, he and DeBrest subbed with the Jazz Messengers when Art Blakey arrived in Philadelphia Boston JOE .
One more individual, through his absence, was critical to the early emergence of Lee Morgan, and that is Clifford Brown. The brilliant young musician, who promised to overshadow all of his fellow trumpeters for decades to come, had died in an automobile accident on June 26, 1956, and his death triggered a search for the new Clifford much in the way that Charlie Parker's passing the previous year sent producers and managers scurrying to find the new Bird. Morgan was the primary beneficiary of this attention, as Cannonball Adderley had been a year earlier; and, like Adderley, Morgan was recorded early and often. Fortunately, Alfred Lion brought Morgan into the rarefied environment of Blue Note Records, and showed his commitment to the young trumpeter by recording him as a leader six times over a period of 15 months, giving full exposure to Morgan's instrumental talents while presenting him in some of the most intelligently conceived small-group programs of the period.
…
POSTSCRIPT
Lee Morgan's career as a leader on Blue Note temporarily ends at this point. His career as a Gillespie sideman ended as well, with the breakup of the big band in January 1958. Morgan remained active in New York BLUE NOTE RECORDINGS OF THE TINA BROOKS QUINTETS (Mosaic 106). Some of the heady Monday night action at Birdland, with Morgan joined by several Philadelphians (Ray and Tommy Bryant, drummer Specs Wright and saxophonist Billy Root) plus Mobley and Fuller, was recorded and released on two Roulette albums.
A more permanent and vastly more influential conclave of Philadelphians was on the horizon. Benny Golson, who had also been freelancing since leaving Gillespie, was asked by Art Blakey to serve as musical director for a new edition of the Jazz Messengers in the summer of 1958. The saxophonist had to look no further than his hometown for the rest of the personnel — Morgan, Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt. Blakey returned to Blue Note to record the band on October 30; and the resulting album, containing the hits MOANIN', ALONG CAME BETTY and BLUES MARCH, launched a new era for the Messengers.
By 1960, Lee Morgan had become the musical director for the Jazz Messengers, developing into a composer of considerable strength and bringing Wayne Shorter into the fold. (The complete output of that edition of the band can be found in THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE RECORDINGS OF ART BLAKEY’S 1960 JAZZ MESSENGERS on Mosaic). As a leader, he made LEEWAY for Blue Note in 1960 as well as two albums for Vee-Jay, one for Riverside
In the summer of 1961, he took himself off the scene for almost two and a half years to deal with personal problems, not the least of which was heroin. When he emerged in November 1963, he returned to Blue Note where he participated in Grachan Moncur's evolution before cutting his own album THE SIDEWINDER. After the release of that album, Morgan, Blue Note and jazz itself would never be the same. But that story, and the highs and lows that followed, are for another day. Now is the time to enjoy the first chapter in the professional life of this extraordinary musician.
August 1995”
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Brigitte Studio Freddie Hubbard & The Allyn Ferguson Orchestra
Brigitte Studio Freddie Hubbard & The Allyn Ferguson Orchestra
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Martin Williams Gettin’ Together with Art Pepper in Jazz Changes
© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"Martin Williams is
perhaps the greatest living jazz critic."
- Gunther Schuller
"Martin Williams is one
of the few truly distinguished commentators on jazz and one whose writing on
the subject is acknowledged as a model of reflective, informed, and meaningful
criticism."
- Choice
"One of the most
distinguished critics (of anything) this country has produced."
- Gary Giddins, The Village Voice
"Read anything of
Williams you can getyour hands on....His knowledge of jazz is all but
unmatched."
- Washington
"His is a distinctively
colorful style, a cogent blend of history, criticism, and personal
opinion."
- Library Journal
"Williams is the most
lucid writer on American jazz traditions, able in the shortest pieces to
encapsulate major thoughts and present them, in comprehensible form to the
general reader."
- Kirkus Reviews
"Martin Williams
persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to
the very small body of authentic jazz criticism."
- Nat Hentoff
"The most distinguished
critic America
-Dan Morgenstern
Whenever possible,
the editorial staff at JazzProfiles tries to celebrate the
work of its mentors [in the broader, more informal sense of that word] – those
writers and critics who taught us all so much about Jazz and its makers over
the years.
In this regard,
Martin Williams has been absent from these pages far too long.
So we thought we’d
rectify this omission by bringing up Martin’s thoughts about one of our
favorite Art Pepper recordings by – Getting’ Together [Contemporary
7573/Original Jazz Classics CD 169-2] – on which the alto saxophonist is joined
by trumpeter Conte Candoli and Miles Davis’ rhythm section at that time: Wynton
Kelly, piano, Paul Chambers, bass and Jimmy Cobb, drums.
Martin wrote the
original liner notes for the recording in 1960 and then re-worked them as
printed below when they were published as a sub-chapter in Jazz
Changes [New York
“The square's
question about jazz may not be such a bad question if you think about it. I
mean the one that goes, "Where's the melody?" or "Why don't they
play the melody?" We could borrow the famous mountain climber George
Mallory's answer, "Because it's there." But a more helpful one might
be, the melody is whatever they are playing, or to put it more directly, they
don't play it because they can make up better ones. And if I wanted to
introduce the square to that fact, one of the people whose work I could use to
show it would be Art Pepper.
Getting’ Together [Contemporary 7573/Original Jazz Classics
CD 169-2] is a sort of sequel to the earlier Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm
Section (Contemporary C3532, stereo S7018), a set I would call one of the best
in the Contemporary catalog.
That one was made
in 1957 and the rhythm section of the title was the very special one of the
Miles Davis quintet of the time: Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass;
Philly Joe Jones, drums. This one is made with the (again special) Miles Davis
rhythm section of February 1960. Paul Chambers is still there, Wynton Kelly is
on piano, Jimmie Cobb is on drums. That former session was made under pressure,
for not only was the section available only briefly, Pepper himself had not
played for two weeks before the night it was done. For this one, the Davis
All of which
obviously does not mean that either session was made with the kind of haste
that makes waste.
I began by saying
that I could use Art Pepper's playing to convince our square friend that
jazzmen can make up better melodies than the ones they start with. (There are
many others I could use, but let's stick to the subject here, Art Pepper.) And
I could well begin with an Art Pepper record like Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise, for Pepper states that theme with
none of its usual melodramatics and proceeds to make up melodic lines
spontaneously that are superior to those he began with. And I might also use it
as an example of the emotional range he can develop within a solo from a very
limited point of departure, and without eccentricity or crowding.
Pepper is a lyric
or melodic player (those words are vague but when you have heard him, you know
what they mean). Very good test pieces for such qualities are slow ballads—and many
a jazzman of Pepper's generation wanders aimlessly and apologetically through
such tests. There are two ballads here. Why
Are We Afraid? is a piece Art Pepper plays in the movie The
Subterraneans. Diane is
named for Art Pepper's wife; he has recorded it before but he prefers this
version. So do I. It especially seems to me an emotionally sustained piece of improvised impressionism, and Kelly
also captures and elaborates its mood both in his accompaniment and solo.
Unlike many comparable players of his generation in jazz, Art is not so
preoccupied with making a melody that is "pretty" that he falls into
lushness or weakness in his melodic line. What saves him is a kind of rhythmic
fibre and strength that some lyric and "cool" players decidedly lack.
(Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise is
again a very good example.) For that reason, it should surprise no one to hear
him, particularly on the tracks where he plays tenor here, absorbing some
rhythmic ideas from the better players in the current Eastern "hard" school.
And to show how well they fit and are assimilated, that ad lib blues, Getting
Together, is prime evidence. Surely one of the things that makes jazz
so unsentimental and fluent an art is the jazzman's rhythmic flexibility, and
that is something Art Pepper has always been on to.
The events of Art
Pepper's biography include the fact that he took his first music lessons at
nine, but had been passionately interested in music even before that. In his
teens he was fully committed to jazz and playing nightly on Central Avenue in
Los Angeles with Dexter Gordon, Charlie Mingus, Gerald Wiggins, Zoot Sims, and
at eighteen he was a regular member of Lester Young's brother Lee's group.
Subsequently he was with Benny Carter and achieved his widest recognition when
he joined Stan Kenton on alto for the second time, from 1946 through 1951. When
these tracks were made he was, with Conte Candoli, one of Howard Rumsey's
Lighthouse All Stars at Hermosa Beach
As I said,
Chambers (who is surely as innately a jazz musician as any man ever was) has
been with the Miles Davis groups since 1955. Wynton Kelly's past is illustrious
enough to have included work with the other major trumpeter in the modern
idiom, Dizzy Gillespie; he has also accompanied Dinah Washington and Lester
Young, among others. Jimmie Cobb was brought into the Davis
It should come as
no surprise that Art finds playing with a rhythm section picked by Miles Davis
such a pleasure and stimulation. It is true that those two horn-men "use
the time" (as musicians put it) differently; Pepper is closer to the beat
in his phrasing for one thing. But Miles Davis is a unique combination of
surface lyricism, concentrated emotion, and has a decided, but not always
obvious rhythmic flexibility. (He has been called a man walking on eggshells; a
man with his kind of inner emotional terseness would surely crush eggshells to
powder.) The sections he picks for himself might therefore be ideal for Art
Pepper, for, although I don't think they convey emotion in the same way, they
have many qualities in common. Miles' rhythm sections have been accused of
playing "too loud" by some people. I am not sure what that means
exactly, but I am sure that they are never heavy and always swing at any
dynamic level they happen to be using, and that is a very rare quality. Their
swing always has the secret kind of forward movement that is so important to
jazz. (A handy explanation of "swing" might be "any two
successive notes played by Paul Chambers.")
There are several
other things on this record that gave me pleasure that I would recommend you
listen for. One of the first is the unity of Pepper's solo on Whims of Chambers and the way it builds.
(You cannot make a good solo just by stringing phrases together to fit the
chord changes—but nobody admits how many players don't try to do much more than
that.) The unity is subtle, but it is not obscure, and once grasped it becomes
a delightful part of experiencing the solo. For instance, if you keep the
phrase he opens with in mind, then notice how much of the solo is melodically
related to that phrase. And also how much of it is related to Chambers' theme.
Such unity is never monotonous because Art Pepper gets inside of these melodic
ideas, finds their meaning, and develops them musically—he is never just
playing their notes or playing notes mechanically related to their notes.
The curve of the
solo is also a delight. In a very logical way, more complex lines of shorter
notes begin in Art's third chorus (that is the one where Kelly re-enters behind
him). They reach a peak of dexterity in the fourth, tapering to a more lyric
simplicity at its end. There is a very effective echo of those more complex
melodies at the end of the fifth chorus, as the solo is gradually returning to
the simpler lines it began with. (There is nothing really difficult or
forbidding about following these things; if you can follow a "tune"
you can follow these melodic structures, although they are far more subtle and
artful than a "tune" is. And following them gives the kind of
pleasure that digging deeper always does.)
Thelonious Monk's Rhythm-A-Ning may sound like only a
visit to that "other" jazz standard (other than the blues, that is)
which its title indicates. It isn't just that. And the best part is the
"middle" or "bridge." Most popular songs are written with
two melodies and if we give each a letter to identify it, the form of them
comes out to be AABA. That B part of Rhythm-A-Ning
is an integral part of the piece because its melody is a development of one
of the ideas in the A part. The other thing is the way it is harmonized. You
can easily hear that it is unusual when they play it the first time. Hearing
what they do with it in the solos I leave to you to enjoy. I was also intrigued
with the idea that Monk would get a smile out of Pepper's writing on Bijou.
A musician friend
who had recently returned from California
If a man has come
to that insight, I think you can hear it in the way he plays. I think I hear it
here. (1960)”
The following
video features Art Pepper, Conte Candoli and THE rhythm section on Whims of Chambers from Getting’
Together.
The esteemed
writer Ray Bradbury once said: “You make your way as you go.”
Thanks to Martin
Williams many insights and observations, our travels in the World of Jazz a far
richer one.
Monday, October 5, 2020
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