"Mood Indigo" - A Sapphire of Tonal Brilliance by John Edward Hasse

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

A Sapphire of Tonal Brilliance

A departure from his swinging dance music, Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo softly conveys an intimate, ruminative and melancholy mood.

By John Edward Hasse

Oct. 16 - 17, 2020 edition of the Wall Street Journal 

“In the fall of 1930, if you were listening to a radio broadcast from Harlem’s hottest night spot, the Cotton Club, you might have heard something surprising. From just the first four notes of its opening chorale, you’d realize here is something fresh. You’d never forget its ravishing timbres, languid beat and poignant feeling. The song was Duke Ellington’s resplendent “Mood Indigo.”

By then, the composer-bandleader had shaken up the music world with his jazz band, which sounded unlike any other because of its imaginative harmonies and kaleidoscopic sonorities. He didn’t write for nameless trumpet, trombone or clarinet players, but for the signature sounds of his trumpeter Arthur Whetsel, his trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton and his clarinetist Barney Bigard, mixing their colors like a master painter. Ellington didn’t compose for the instrument, but for the man behind it.

Projecting urban sophistication and breaking barriers for Black musicians, Ellington had reached a new peak of popularity, thanks to the reach of radio and recordings. But one piece raised his renown to new heights—“Mood Indigo,” one of the most original and memorable musical miniatures of the 20th century. It would become his best-known composition, a career milestone, a hit, a standard, and a classic.

In late 1930, he made three recordings of the composition. The first and second, on Oct. 14 and 17, featured his band pared down to a septet. For the third, on Dec. 10, he used his full ensemble of 12 players and added an orchestral accompaniment that showcased the diaphanous, haunting solo of trumpeter Whetsel and the gentle, flowing sound of clarinetist Bigard.

Departing from swinging dance music, “Mood Indigo” softly conveys an intimate, ruminative and melancholy mood. It launched a new avenue for Ellington: quiet pastel pieces, some, like this one, denoting his favorite hue, blue: “Azure,” “Blue Light,” and “On a Turquoise Cloud.”

Jazz band arrangements typically contrasted three families of wind instruments — the trumpet, trombone and sax sections. True to form, the maverick Ellington rejected this norm, instead combining here a single trumpet and trombone — each using a mute and avoiding vibrato—with a clarinet. He placed the trumpet in its usual register, above the other instruments, put the trombone slightly below, in its high range, unexpectedly gave the clarinet smoky low notes, and assigned the instruments unusual harmonies. “The resulting tone colors,” observed composer Gunther Schuller, “had never been heard before in all of music history.” Even experienced musicians must have wondered “What was that?”

The song’s authorship is disputed. Ellington’s star clarinetist Bigard said that he developed the second theme based on a melody written by his New Orleans teacher Lorenzo Tio Jr., and that Ellington wrote the first. (Publisher Irving Mills, a known credit-grabber, listed himself as co-author, but it’s not clear if he contributed.) Neither Ellington nor Mills was scrupulous in giving credit to band members who contributed melodic ideas, and Bigard said he received only $25 for his role. Decades later, he sued and won a share of royalties.

Despite — or perhaps because of — its singularity, “Mood Indigo” became a national hit, Ellington’s first. Not only did critics and the public embrace “Mood Indigo” — so did musicians. A quintessential standard, it ranks 16th among jazz tunes in its number of recordings: more than 1,300. By the late 1930s, the song was used as the theme of 16 different radio shows.

“Mood Indigo” came to be a staple of Ellington’s repertory. To keep the piece novel, he — and later composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn — would periodically fashion a new orchestration. Strayhorn’s striking 15-minute concert version for the 1950 album “Masterpieces by Ellington” even goes into waltz time. Clarinetist/saxophonist Russell Procope commented, “a new arrangement would freshen it up, like you pour water on a flower, to keep it blooming. They’d all bloom — fresh, fresh arrangements.”

No fewer than 10 orchestrations of “Mood Indigo” lie among the roughly 100,000 pages of Ellington’s unpublished music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. One manuscript puzzled catalogers until they realized that the title “Ogidni Doom” was “Mood Indigo” playfully spelled backward.

In 1931, slangy lyrics were added, opening with:

You ain’t been blue—

No, no, no—

You ain’t been blue,

Till you’ve had that mood indigo.

Mitchell Parish, a staff lyricist for Mills, credibly claimed in a 1987 interview that he wrote the words to “Mood Indigo” but never got a byline or a royalty. “Mood Indigo” also became a popular-song standard, interpreted by singers ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone to Dr. John and Annie Lennox. 

If you listen to just one vocal rendition, however, it should be Frank Sinatra’s, from his landmark 1955 album “In the Wee Small Hours.” Cradled by Nelson Riddle’s lush orchestra, Sinatra—a wizard with words—vivifies the lyrics and summons the song’s 3 a.m. loneliness as only he could.

But because of the unique sonorities that Ellington’s band conjured in performance, the piece will always belong to the maestro. Its mark on music having lasted for 90 years, who’s to deny that the matchless “Mood Indigo” just might prove indelible?”

—Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. 

His books include “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington” (Da Capo) and “Discover Jazz” (Pearson).

Appeared in the October 17, 2020, print edition.

Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

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

Ricky Riccardi is Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum and author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years. He runs the online blog, "The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong," and has given lectures on Armstrong at venues around the world, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival. He has co-produced numerous Armstrong reissues in recent years, including Satchmo at Symphony Hall 65th Anniversary: The Complete Concert, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Cheek to Cheek: The Complete Duets, Pops is Tops: The Verve Studio Albums, and two volumes of Decca Singles for Universal Music, in addition to Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars for Mosaic Records.

Those of us who know Ricky - and I only “know” him through our internet correspondence and our friendship on Facebook - have always suspected him of having too much fun.

The proof of this is in the pictures I’ve seen of him in which he is unfailingly smiling.

Of course, the fact that he spends his time “working” in the company of the research collection of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and, when he’s not doing that, in the bosom of a loving and caring Italian-American family might have something to do with his incessant happiness.

Pops and the warmth and affection of all-things-Italian-American would be enough to keep a smile on anybody’s face all the time.

He has a new book out - HEART FULL OF RHYTHM By Ricky Riccardi [Oxford, 414 pages, $34.95] - and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has put the following feature together to help give you an informed view of it.

"Riccardi's Heart Full of Rhythm is the best account we have of Armstrong's vital work with big bands; the research is impeccable, the ardor contagious." -- Gary Giddins, Author of Bing Crosby: Swinging On A Star The War Years, 1940-1946

"This book is an exuberant treasury of new information about one of the most significant and influential musicians of all time. Most significant here is that this careful researcher torches the cliche that Armstrong rose in a 1920s flash and then fell onto the swords of commercialism. In soaring prose, Riccardi walks you through vital musical/cultural decades while re-introducing a man we thought we knew but who was even greater." -- Robert G. O'meally, Founder and Director Of Columbia University's Center For Jazz Studies and Editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and The Romare Bearden Reader

"At last! A thrilling and intimate journey through the most undervalued period of Armstrong's career! Every chapter is a revelation!" -- Catherine Russell, Grammy Award-Winning Jazz/Blues vocalist and daughter of Luis Russell

"This vitally American story has been expertly told in this superlative biography SWING THAT MUSIC indeed!" -- Loren Schoenberg, Senior Scholar/Founding Director, National Jazz Museum in Harlem

"Riccardi's meticulous scholarship and his exuberance for all things Armstrong make Heart Full of Rhythm a must-read for all interested in Armstrong, jazz, and our shared cultural heritage." -- Jon Faddis, Trumpeter, Conductor, Composer, and Educator

"Dedicated research, access to ideal sources, and fine storytelling combine to shed new light and insight on the most interesting and least well-documented period of Armstrong's fabled life. Riccardi has done it again, but even more so." -- Dan Morgenstern, Director Emeritus of The Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University

"A vibrant portrait of Armstrong focused on his career from 1929 to 1947, when he had a decisive impact on both jazz and popular music... Riccardi, whose previous book covered Armstrong's later years, brings the same erudition and enthusiasm to his latest. An appreciative, deeply informed biography."--Kirkus

"Riccardi brilliantly sums up the life and work of Armstrong."--Publishers Weekly

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Appeared in the October 10, 2020, print edition as 'That Satchmo Swing.'

‘Heart Full of Rhythm’ Review: That Satchmo Swing Louis Armstrong’s big-band sound carried his jazz innovations into new territory

By Will Friedwald

HEART FULL OF RHYTHM

By Ricky Riccardi

Oxford, 414 pages, $34.95

In the fall of 1935, the lyricist Sammy Cahn was hired to write songs for his boyhood hero, Louis Armstrong. The songs were to be a part of “Connie’s Hot Chocolates of 1936,” a revue that would be performed at Connie’s Inn, the famed New York nightclub recently relocated to Times Square from Harlem. Cahn, who was 22 years old at the time, would write, among other numbers for the show, “Shoe Shine Boy,” and go on to pen such hits as “Come Fly With Me” and “Time After Time.” One evening, Armstrong decided to take the young lyricist uptown for a night of club hopping. As Cahn later told me (and also recounted in his 1974 memoir, “I Should Care”), they went from one Harlem “nite spot” to another until the early hours of the morning, and in every club they found the same thing: A guy playing trumpet, singing and doing his version of Louis Armstrong. Cahn recalled that the 10th and final joint they visited featured a particularly dreadful Satchmo clone. “Louis, why are we here?” Cahn asked. “This man just tries to do everything that you do.” To which Armstrong replied, “Well, maybe he does something I don’t do!”

Ricky Riccardi’s new book, “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong,” covers the period from 1929 to 1947, and as such is a prequel of sorts to the author’s “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years” (2011), which took us through the final phase of Armstrong’s life and career. (Armstrong died, at age 69, in 1971.) As with “What a Wonderful World,” “Heart Full of Rhythm” is an all-encompassing, vividly detailed biographical portrait of one of the richest careers in all of music.

The new volume begins in March 1929, shortly after Armstrong recorded his final session with pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, concluding the 1925-28 series known collectively as the Hot Fives (and sometimes Hot Fives and Hot Sevens). Everything Armstrong would go on to do afterward would forever be compared to these early triumphs—and almost always found wanting. Indeed, nearly all the writing on Armstrong canonizes his 1925-28 work while dismissing virtually everything else. It wasn’t until Gary Giddins’s capsule biography, “Satchmo” (1988), and Terry Teachout’s “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong'' (2009) that any book gave more than passing mention to the final four decades of Armstrong’s life—the period that Mr. Riccardi covers in his two volumes.

Mr. Riccardi, the director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, N.Y., takes us through every recording session, and what seems to be an equally exhaustive list of surviving audio and video documents, including radio shows and movies. He starts with a remarkable double date in March 1929: Armstrong played an outstanding small-group session (with a so-called mixed band that included Jack Teagarden) followed by a big-band session with the Luis Russell Orchestra. The session-by-session analysis never gets tiresome, thanks in part to an abundance of firsthand reminiscences, especially by many of Armstrong’s sidemen, that illuminate virtually every date (especially from the 1930s).

What could have been a dry collection of record reviews instead becomes, in Mr. Riccardi’s hands, the most interesting part of the whole work. We encounter buried gems like Armstrong’s majestic 1941 big-band version of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which opens with Armstrong beautifully delineating both the lyrics and music with his horn. The author also dutifully acknowledges those occasions when Armstrong’s producers saddled him with “inferior material.”

Remarkably, Armstrong’s critics (both at the time and ever since) have consistently failed to celebrate the greatness of the musician’s post-1928 work; virtually every review Mr. Riccardi quotes keeps comparing Armstrong’s big-band work to the Hot Fives, getting everything wrong and completely missing the point. Writers in the so-called Negro press came much closer to understanding and giving Armstrong’s big-band years the acclaim they deserve.

Armstrong showed how the dance-band format could serve as the perfect canvas to display his spectacular solos, particularly on bravura instrumental features like “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” “Swing You Cats” and “High Society.” The backgrounds provided by his best musical directors (Luis Russell, Joe Garland, Teddy McRae) brilliantly showcase his soaring trumpet, even as Armstrong gradually moved from sheer gut-busting and lip-ripping technique (solos in which he would play 200 or more high C’s and, inevitably, do personal harm to his “chops” in the process) to a more melodic style. These were also the years when Armstrong began featuring himself more frequently as a singer and, appropriately, performing first-rate popular songs, both new numbers and standards. In his vocals, Armstrong excelled both as a comedian (on novelties like his surreal classic, “Laughin’ Louie”) and a lover (on romantic airs like “When Your Lover Has Gone,” which would inspire Frank Sinatra and multiple generations of great crooners to come). The era is rife with masterpieces, especially the 1935-36 sessions, on songs like “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “Solitude,” which combine sterling brass playing and warm, flawless vocalizing, both in the service of excellent songs.

Mr. Riccardi rightly points out that many of Armstrong’s most memorable sides from this period come from unlikely sources and combinations—Hawaiian songs (with guitars and ukuleles), genuine and ersatz Latin numbers, pre-Civil War plantation songs with the Mills Brothers—even while collaborations with fellow titans like Teagarden and Sidney Bechet yielded magnificent results.

The period of Armstrong’s greatest fame was perhaps the 1950s and ’60s, when he toured the world with his All Stars, and was a constant presence on the pop charts and on every television variety show. Sadly, by then, as Armstrong’s clarinetist Joe Muranyi told me, “Pops had lost the black audience—his people—and it really hurt him.” By the late ’40s, younger musicians were already starting to think of Armstrong as an Uncle Tom, although as modern trumpeter Jimmy Owens once told me, “Nobody who played the trumpet ever thought of Pops as an Uncle Tom.”

Still, the period of Armstrong’s greatest influence was undoubtedly the mid-to-late 1930s, those big-band years when not only every club in Harlem or on 52nd Street, but every joint in Chicago or New Orleans and even London, Paris and Berlin had a guy (or, in the case of Valaida Snow, a gal) trying to be Louis Armstrong. (As I once said, the entire world learned to play and sing jazz via the process of Satchmosis.) “He used to walk down Seventh Avenue in New York and all the young trumpet players would just follow him like you would follow Joe Louis,” said one of those younger players, Harry “Sweets” Edison. “He was an idol.”

—Mr. Friedwald is the author of “Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole.”

Jackie McLean Sextet ‎– Fat Jazz ( Full Album )

Someone To Watch Over Me (Live)

‘The Lost Berlin Tapes’ by Ella Fitzgerald Review: Always in Full Swing

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

On March 25, 1962, Ella Fitzgerald returned to Berlin, the scene of one of her greatest recorded triumphs - the Grammy award-winning Mack the Knife. What wasn’t known, until now, is that this sublime concert was recorded and the tapes remained sealed, unopened in their box for 58 years.

Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes finds the First Lady of Song at the absolute pinnacle of her powers, performing some of her best-loved songs as well as some that qualify as rarities in her catalogue.

As always with Ella, the warmth and joy of her voice turn the performance into a prolonged celebration of Jazz, singing and life itself. 

The following review by Will Friedwald appeared in the October 5, 2020 print edition of The Wall Street Journal.  

© Copyright ® Will Friedwald and The Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

On a newly released recording of a 1962 concert in West Berlin, the singer performs with her usual dynamism and style accompanied by her long time musical director Paul Smith on piano, Wilfred Meadowbrooks on bass and Stan Levey on drums.

“Thirty seconds of listening to “Cheek to Cheek,” the opening track of the newly released “The Lost Berlin Tapes” (Verve), makes it clear that we are hearing, at her pinnacle, the greatest of all artists American music has ever offered. And yet what we experience on this previously unheard concert recording from March 25, 1962, was just business as usual for Ella Fitzgerald—she performed at this level, or nearly so, every night of her long professional life. To truly surprise us, she would have had to give a performance in which she doesn’t swing, generates no excitement, and sings without any feeling. Obviously, this never happened.

It’s a famous part of the Fitzgerald story that she first entered an Apollo Theater amateur night contest (at 17 in 1934) as a dancer, but switched to singing at the last minute when she saw that a popular dance act was performing right before her. She won the competition singing—but in a real sense, her music is all about dancing. In the earliest part of her professional career, during her tenure with drummer Chick Webb’s orchestra, Fitzgerald was christened the “princess of the Savoy,” and it would have been appropriate for her to spend the rest of her career working in such ballrooms, rather than clubs or concert halls.

Not only does she begin the 1962 concert at West Berlin’s Sportpalast with “Cheek to Cheek” (singing Berlin in Berlin) but the beat never stops. Even when Fitzgerald is singing about not dancing, in “I Won’t Dance,” she never stops swinging. She uses rhythm to differentiate between the diverse songs in her 17-number set. “I Won’t Dance” includes a reference to the twist, and “Hallelujah, I Love Him So” begins with a grandly baroque piano introduction by musical director Paul Smith and goes on to introduce an R&B backbeat into Fitzgerald’s powerful 4/4 swing time.

A few years earlier, inspired by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Fitzgerald had greatly expanded her musical purview by incorporating elements of modern jazz into her music. Though she increased her capacity for harmonic improvisation, she stuck to her long-established principles of pure melody and unceasing swing. While there’s no long scat number (like “How High the Moon?”) in this concert, her big improv-driven piece here is “Mr. Paganini,” in which she ingeniously deploys scat as part of a longer narrative.

Even Fitzgerald’s ballads are driven by rhythm. Unlike Billie Holiday, she rarely slowed down to full rubato; “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Angel Eyes” are the perfect tempo for romantic social dancing. And although some observers have argued that Fitzgerald doesn’t always “care” about the words she sang, it’s hard to imagine anyone putting more feeling into these lyrics. “Someone to Watch Over Me” movingly reveals the heart of a woman who’s spent her life looking for the right man, while “Cry Me a River” and “Good Morning Heartache” are laments to the man who got away.

As in most of her concerts, Fitzgerald carefully modulates the mood, balancing between swingers (like the relatively rare “My Kind of Boy” and “Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie”) and what she called “pretty” numbers, like her blissfully warm and maternal “Summertime.” But by the time she finishes “Paganini,” the crowd is so ecstatic that she realizes there’s no dialing it back down. She even kicks things up a notch with “Mack the Knife,” the German theater song that caused a sensation at her legendary concert in the same city two years earlier. On that occasion, Fitzgerald had famously forgotten the lyrics but made musical history by devising new ones on the spot. She sings all the right words here (although she does forget what city she’s in) and attains an even higher level of exhilaration.

Then she does something extraordinary — rather than end with a very fast improv number, she concludes by slowing down. Fitzgerald characteristically generated incredible excitement with an uptempo blues like “Roll ’Em Pete,” but she rarely sang a slow one such as this. She starts with the lyrics to Big Joe Turner’s “Wee Baby Blues,” but soon begins making up her own: “I could go on singing all night long. But the union man tells us we’re through.” By the time she reaches the coda (thanking the German crowd with “danke schön”), she has us convinced that she could have been one of the world’s best blues singers had she done this kind of material more often. There was nothing that she couldn’t sing. No matter how great we expect her to be, she’s always even better.”

—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.

Cal Tjader: The Life & Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz - Second Edition - S. Duncan Reid

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

Within one of the most complex musical categories ever, Cal Tjader quietly pioneered as a jazz vibraphonist, composer, arranger and bandleader from the 1950s through the 1980s. This life story of a humble musician also reveals his charisma. Tjader's legacy is attested to by his large audiences and his innovations that changed the course of jazz.

Expanded and revised, this second edition now includes additional interviews and anecdotes from Tjader's family, bandmates and community, print sources, and rare photographs, presenting a detailed account of Tjader as well as the progression of Latin Jazz.

With thirty five pages of additional text, plus an enhanced Glossary of Terms, Discography, Bibliography and a New Foreword by Gary Foster who played alto sax and flute in Cal’s later groups, the second Edition of Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz gives the reader a wealth of new information and insights into the man that pianist George Shearing once called - “a rhythmic genius.”

Cal, who began his professional career as a drummer in a San Francisco based octet and later trio led by Dave Brubeck in the late 1940s, joined Shearing’s quintet in the early 1950s before returning to the San Francisco Bay area to lead his own Jazz and Latin Jazz quintets in the mid-1950s.

For almost thirty years until his death in 1982 caused by a heart attack, Tjader was a universally respected Jazz artist, especially in Latin Jazz settings with his own band and jointly with pianists Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente and a host of others. Vocal albums with Rosemary Clooney, Anita O’Day and Carmen McRae find him adding significant “Latin tinges” to the repertoires of these fine singers and the number of excellent hornmen, pianists, bassists and drummers and Latin percussionists Tjader worked with in his thirty plus year career is simply staggering.

Cal Tjader was a consummate musician and S. Duncan Reid has done a delightful job of describing, detailing and denoting the qualities that enabled him to become a premier Jazz performer.

The following excerpts from the Preface will put the benefits derived from the 2nd edition of his biography of Cal into sharper focus:

“Thanks to an in-depth interview with Tjader's best friend, Philip Smith, this second edition will document more of the future bandleader's childhood. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Tjader stood out as a drummer, vibraphonist and bongocero for Dave Brubeck. It was with Brubeck in San Francisco that he was first exposed to Cuban music and with George Shearing in New York that he fully perceived how the rhythms could alter the course of his career. He came back to the West Coast in 1954 and the jazz universe expanded.

As Tjader's life unfolds through the extensive research of this author, which features more than 60 interviews with colleagues, family and friends, the reader will learn about the melding of European and African music via the United States, Cuba and Brazil. Moreover, a tender, troubled and complex human being will be revealed.

The second edition gives an even larger view of his saga. Along with Philip Smith, who not only contributes anecdotes about Tjader's childhood but also his career—on stage and off—there are candid interviews with drummer Carl Burnett, bassist Stanley Gilbert, record producer Frank Dorritie, deejay Alan Schultz and further conversations with Al and Terry-Ann Torre, Eddie Coleman and the late Bob Redfield. Additional research from print sources has corrected some errors of commission and omission, brought Tjader's first known interview to light, and uncovered more on why influential critic Ralph J. Gleason went from being a proponent of Tjader to ignoring him. Plus, the vibraphonist's strained relationship with Sol and Max Weiss at Fantasy Records and his experiences with reverse racism on the jazz scene are explored to a greater degree. Finally, this second edition takes another step both in raising the profile of Cal Tjader and enlightening a new generation of musicians and music lovers about one of its founding fathers. At the same time, the way in which he was perceived by the jazz media during his lifetime is further illuminated.”

Duncan’s revised and expanded bio brings home to the reader what it was like to be a working musician during the Golden Years of Modern Jazz following World War II and how valiant and dedicated a Jazz musician Cal had to become to make it in the ever-shrinking Jazz world after the general public turned to Rock ‘n Roll in the mid-1960s and beyond.

The parade of Tjader gigs in the form of club dates, concerts and recording sessions read like a time gone by; such a schedule would be impossible to create today as the venues and recording opportunities do not exist anymore for Jazz artists.

After reading the additional annotations in the second edition what comes across even more strongly is that in the process of becoming a nationally and internationally recognized Jazz star, Cal had to work very hard to maintain a band and travel incessantly to keep it working.

Maintaining the necessary pace required to earn a decent living probably led to his early death. 

Duncan’s bio provides an accurate record of personnel changes in Cal’s many groups over the years and this helps the reader gain an understanding of the efforts Cal had to make to find replacement musicians. Some musicians were consistent members of Cal’s bands for lengthy periods of time while others stayed for only a club date or a concert tour. 

Cal was almost always looking for talented players and what made this especially difficult for him was that his repertoire included both straight-ahead and Latin Jazz and these are different skills not often found in the same musician. Often, Cal had to settle for one while teaching the other and with the advent of Rock ‘n Roll in the mid-to-late 1960s, the pool of young musicians interested in playing Cal’s style of music was dwindling.

When you add the fact that myriad personnel changes were done over a career lasting over thirty years his accomplishment of keeping a working band together becomes almost mind boggling.

Duncan’s book reads in such a way as to help bring home not only the professional considerations that Cal had to deal with as a top flight band leader but also the personal ones including many of the trials and tribulations in his own life.

The Jazz Life is anything but an 8-5 job. It takes a special discipline to develop the high level of skills needed to play the music, but these disciplines do not always carry over to the requirements of functioning on a regular basis in a working band.

The quirky individuality that blossoms into a distinctive Jazz “personality” sometimes fail to include the habits for becoming a responsible member of a band.

And the Jazz Life itself with the late hours, an environment filled with many unhealthy elements and the constant travel associated with it causes all sorts of friction and wreaks havoc on “normality.”

Duncan’s biography of Cal reflects on his life and those of his family and closest musical associates to reveal the stress and strains which everyone involved had to deal with and the toll they extracted on all concerned.

Thankfully, over the years Cal’s marquee value expanded such that he was able to sign with booking and management agencies that helped him find work which then allowed him to concentrate more on his music. This dynamic is fully covered in Duncan’s biography which offers the reader a look at the business dynamics of a working Jazz group.

Another facet of Cal’s career that’s brought home to the reader is the veritable constellation of Jazz luminaries that Cal performed with over the course of his career including Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Shelly Manne, Vince Guaraldi, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Illinois Jacquet, Harold Land, Scott Hamilton, Gary Foster, Hank Jones, Cedar Walton, Eddie Gomez, John Lewis, Roy Burns, Art Pepper, Hermeto Pascoal, George Duke, Airto Moreira, Jerome Richardson, Frank Strazzeri, Paul Horn, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, George Duvivier, Ralph MacDonald, Frank Wess, John Faddis, Clark Terry - the list seems endless.

And Duncan’s work documents Cal’s role in nurturing a whole host of excellent younger musicians including Lonnie Hewitt, Freddie Schreiber, Johnny Rae, Al Torre, Al Zulaica, Stanley Gilbert, Carl Burnet, Dick Berk, John Heard, Ratzo Harris, Harvey Newmark, Michael Smithe, Robb Fisher, Pete Riso, Vince Lateano, Poncho Sanchez, Roger Glenn, Mark Levine, and Ramon Banda, among many others. 

The world that was the working life of Cal Tjader will never come again which makes Duncan’s masterful recapturing of it even more important as a lasting record of this unique era when just about every major city had a Jazz scene and musicians could earn a living playing a circuit of them.

The overriding importance of Duncan’s revised biography of Cal can best be summed up in this paragraph:

“In the midst of the quintet's run at Howard Rumsey's Concerts by the Sea (November 29 to December 4, 1977), Ted Gioia, then a student at Stanford, wrote a positive capsule review of Guarabe [Fantasy ‎– F-9533, 1977] Gioia initially pointed to Tjader, Vince Guaraldi and Denny Zeitlin as examples of "excellent [Bay Area] musicians who never received the national attention they merited." Then he stated that Tjader, with his latest LP, "is possibly on the verge of becoming widely known." One significant thread that runs throughout this biography is that Tjader has not been, at least nationwide, accorded his proper status as a top tier jazz musician by the majority of critics and historians. However, this biography has documented that Tjader's popularity with the public both nationally and internationally was well established many years before Gioia's review was published.”

S. Duncan Reid’s second edition of Cal Tjader: The Life and Recordings of the Man Who Revolutionized Latin Jazz will go a long way toward enhancing our understanding and appreciation of Cal Tjader whom the late Jazz critic Richard Cook has called “an important and catalytic figure” in Jazz history.

Here's a link the order information at McFarland.

A FLG Maurepas upload - Cal Tjader - Black Orchid (1977) - Latin Jazz

A FLG Maurepas upload - Cal Tjader - Guarabe - Latin Jazz