Thomas "Fats" Waller - 1904-1943

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

"My father [Fats Waller] had a unique system to reward inventiveness in improvisation. Pop kept two bottles of gin on a table during the rehearsals. One bottle was for himself... The other bottle was the 'encourager,' as he called it. When one of the band excelled in an improvisational section, Dad would stop the rehearsal, pour him a healthy shot of gin, and the two of them would toast each other."

- Maurice Waller

“Both Fats Waller and his principal tutor, James P. Johnson, lived lives of aching frustration. Johnson ached openly because he could find no audience for his serious compositions, but Waller's desire to find acceptance as a serious musician was buried under a heavy coating of pervasive geniality. And while Johnson plodded steadily downhill in puzzled despair, Waller's blithely ironical attitude carried him up and up and up in the material world — eventually to a level that even his enormous energy could not cope with.

He was one of the most massively talented men who has ever turned up in the world of popular music — an inimitable entertainer whose charm has, if anything, grown in the nostalgic decade and a half since his death; the writer of some of the great evergreen songs in the popular repertoire ("Honeysuckle Rose," "Ain't Misbehavin'"); a jazz pianist whose playing was a landmark in the development of that instrument and whose influence on pre-bop pianists was surpassed only by that of Earl Hines; and a section man who could swing an entire band as no one else could.

All of these gifts were his and yet, like the inevitable clown who wants to play Hamlet, he had a consuming desire to bring to the public his love of classical music and of the organ. His need to offer this gift and have it accepted was almost childlike and, childlike, the hurt when it was rejected was deep and long.”

- John S. Wilson, Jazz author and critic, New York Times

I never knew what to make of Fats Waller. His music happened way before my time and I could not seem to reconcile the views some held of him as little more than a musical buffoon with those that labeled him a keyboard stylist and composer of the first order.

In attempting to make up my own mind about his music, part of the problem was that most of what I had access to was derivative, in other words, what other Jazz musicians had to say on Fats’ Ain’t Misbehavin’, Honeysuckle Rose [upon which Charlie Parker’s Scrapple from the Apple is based], Squeeze Me, The Jitterbug Waltz and Black and Blue.

It really wasn’t until the reissue mania associated with the advent of the compact disc in the 1980’s that I had the opportunity to sit down and listen to the collected works of Fats which helped me finally understand what the fuss had been all about concerning his playing and his music.

One of the great joys of recorded Jazz is being able to go back in time and listen to the music of the Jazz masters of yesteryear.

This synopsis of the career of Thomas “Fats” Waller from The Chronicle of Jazz reveals his contribution to Jazz as well as the factors that brought about his early demise; characteristics of personality and behavior that also felled many, other Jazz musicians over the years.

THE HARMFUL LTTLE ARMFUL

“Fats Waller's death in December 1943, accelerated by his habitual overindulgence, was a worldly exit fully in keeping with his flamboyant lifestyle. His clowning and infectious capers disguised a top-ranking musical genius whose importance lay in two distinct areas: the development of the STRIDE style of piano playing to its limits of virtuosity, and the promotion of jazz as a medium for refined popular entertainment.

Waller's early keyboard training was as a church organist, an experience that enabled him as a teenager to gain employment playing in the cinemas and theaters of New York. (In later life he shocked the musical establishment by playing jazz on the organ of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.) His skills as a pianist were fostered by James P. Johnson, whose own piano concerto Yamekraw Waller performed at Carnegie Hall in 1928. Waller's astonishing keyboard facility and compositional fluency resulted in a steady succession of fine works for solo piano characterized by a combination of dazzling virtuosity and harmonic ingenuity, including Smashing Thirds, Alligator Crawl, and Handful of Keys. Among his admirers was Al Capone, who allegedly had Waller kidnapped at gunpoint in Chicago in the mid-1920s, just to get him to play at the gangster's birthday party.

Waller's incomparable aptitude for songwriting was developed in collaboration with lyricist Andy Razaf. Many of their numerous hits began life in stage shows, including Ain't Misbehavin. popularized by the vocal talents of Louis Armstrong, on whose gravelly tone Waller partly modeled his own singing voice.The peak of Waller's achievements came after 1934 in a series of recordings on the Victor label, made with a versatile combo billed as "Fats Waller and His Rhythm." In this context he found full expression for his remarkable comic talents, interpreting his own songs with infectious wit and a strong dose of satire. Among the most celebrated numbers in his vast repertoire was Honeysuckle Rose, which became an indispensable standard for later jazz musicians, not only in its original form, but as a harmonic skeleton on which other compositions were based.

As a keyboard technician, Waller formed an essential link between the first generation of STRIDE performers and the innovative work of later pianists such as Art Tatum  and Thelonious Monk.”

The broader view of Fats’ importance to Jazz is contained in the following excerpts from Gary Giddins’ Vision of Jazz: The First Century  while a deeper examination of his historical significance can be had through a reading of the selections from Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz that follow it.

FATS WALLER (COMEDY TONIGHT) - Gary Giddins

“Fats Waller, one of the most enduringly popular figures in American music, is a state of mind. Jazz has always claimed him (what idiom wouldn't claim him?) and yet he spent most of his abbreviated career cavorting through, and contributing to, the Tin Pan Alley canon—applying a determined jazz accent, perhaps, but with the sui generis detachment of a free-floating institution. He wasn't witty, if that word is taken to imply a kind of humor too subtle to engender belly laughs— he was funny. He was also bigger than life, Rabelaisian in intake, energy, and output. His greatest joy was playing Bach on the organ, but he buttered his bread as a clown, complete with a mask as fixed as that of Bert Williams or Spike Jones. It consisted of a rakishly tilted derby, one size too small, an Edwardian mustache that fringed his upper lip, eyebrows as thick as paint and pliable as curtains, flirtatious eyes, a mouth alternately pursed or widened in a dimpled smile, and immense girth, draped in the expensive suits and ties of a dandy.

A ripe sense of humor is indigenous in jazz. It's a music quick to enlist whatever barbs can best deflate pomposity and artificiality. But jazz has not always been rich in humorists, though one can point to a few in any given period. Those in the postwar era include Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, James Moody, Jon Hendricks, Jaki Byard, Lester Bowie, Willem Breuker, the Jazz Passengers, and Waller's druggy disciple, Harry "The Hipster" Gibson. Humor was more extensive in the '20s and '30s, when Prohibition, the Depression, and the insularity of a new and predominantly black music conspired to create an undercurrent of protective irreverence. Accustomed to a place on the outside looking in, jazz took pleasure in skewering anything that made the mainstream feel safe and smug. It was a time when Fats Waller could count on a laugh by interrupting a particularly suave solo with the rumination, "Hmm, I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight."

Musicians, singers, and other entertainers created countless songs about bathtub gin, drugs, sex (of every variety), and other subjects unsuitable for Judge Hardy and his family, and invented slang—a new kind of signifying—to get it over….

Waller's primary influence was James P. Johnson, the songwriter and grandmaster of the Harlem school of stride piano. The term "stride" is descriptive and refers to the movement of the pianist's left hand, which upholds the rhythm while swinging side to side, from distant bass notes, played on the first and third beats of the measure, to close chords in the octave below middle C, played on the second and fourth beats. Stride was a social music, powerful enough to surmount the din of a rent party and vigorous enough to encourage dancing. It was also a competitive music, a specialist's art. The best players were fine composers, but stride was malleable: they could stride pop songs or classical themes, just as an earlier generation of pianists could rag them. Stride per se never had a large audience. It was bypassed during the boogie-woogie rage and overlooked by all but a few in the years of bop. Of its key practitioners, only Waller achieved real commercial success, and then only because of his wisecracks. Had he done nothing but pursue his art as a pianist, he might be no better known than Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Donald Lambert, Willie Gant, or other Harlem-based keyboard professors, who took themselves pretty seriously. The complaint aimed at Waller is that he didn't take himself seriously enough.”

HARLEM: THE TWO HARLEMS - THOMAS “FATS” WALLER - Ted Gioia

“ … Thomas "Fats" Waller did more than any of these players to bring the Harlem style to the attention of the broader American public. Born in Harlem on May 21, 1904, Waller honed his skills by drawing on the full range of opportunities that New York City could provide. His teachers included two great local institutions, Juilliard and James P. Johnson, as well as much in between. His early performance venues were equally diverse, reflecting Waller's aplomb in a gamut of settings, from the sacred to the profane. He was heard at religious services (where his father, a Baptist lay preacher, presided); at Harlem's Lincoln Theater, where he accompanied silent movies on the pipe organ; at rent parties and cabarets; literally everywhere and anywhere a keyboard might be at hand. His pristine piano tone and and technical assurance could well have distinguished him even in symphonic settings. Yet these considerable skills as an instrumentalist were eventually overshadowed by Waller's other talents. While still in his teens, Waller initiated his career as a songwriter, and over the next two decades he would produce a number of successful positions, many of which remain jazz standards, including "Ain't Misbehavin'," |Honeysuckle Rose," "Black and Blue," "Squeeze Me," and "Jitterbug Waltz" among others. In time, Waller's comedic abilities and engaging stage persona would add further momentum to his career, pointing to a range of further opportunities, only '"me of which he lived to realize.

Waller's reputation in the jazz world rests primarily on his many boisterous performances and recordings—the latter comprising around six hundred releases over a twenty-year period. With unflagging exuberance, Waller talked, sang, joked, exhorted band members, and, almost as an afterthought, played the piano on these memorable sides. At times, they sound more like a party veering out of control than a recording session. Indeed, this was party music for those who had come of age under Prohibition — a time when the most festive soirees were, by definition, illicit. Waller was skilled at playing Falstaff to this generation, hinting at speakeasy enticements with a wink of the eye, a telling quip, or other intimations of immorality. True, a cavalier aesthetic has always dominated jazz, celebrating the eternal in the most intense aspects of the here and now — do we expect anything less from an art form built on improvisation? — but few artists pushed this approach to the extremes that Waller did. And audiences loved it. With a winning, warm demeanor, Waller made them feel like they were honored guests at his party, drinking from the best bottle in the house, privy to the wittiest asides, and seated front-row center to hear the band.

Although Waller's small-combo work captured the public's imagination, his solo keyboard performances, documented on a handful of recordings and player piano rolls, remain his most complete statements as a jazz musician. The quintessential stride piano trademarks — an oom-pah left hand coupled with syncopated right-hand figures — are the building blocks of his playing, but Waller leavens them with a compositional ingenuity that raises them above the work of his peers. Waller's solo work revealed his omnivorous musical appetite, drawing on the blues (hear the majestic slow blues in "Numb Fumblin'"), classical music (evoked, for instance, in the high register figures of "African Ripples"), boogie-woogie (note its ingenious interpolation in the opening phrase of "Alligator Crawl"), as well as the ragtime roots of the music (as in "Handful of Keys" and "Smashing Thirds"). On "Viper's Drag," Waller toys with the contrast between an ominous dark opening theme in a minor key and a swinging major mode section — a device Ellington used frequently during this same period in crafting his own version of Harlem jazz. Combining his talents as a pianist and his sense of compositional balance, Waller's solo works stand out as the most fully developed musical documents of the Harlem stride tradition.

While most other jazz musicians of his generation gravitated toward the big bands in the 1930s and 1940s, Waller cultivated other ambitions. His activities took him anywhere and everywhere the entertainment industry flourished, from the theaters of Broadway to the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Even when he confined his attentions to music, Waller's restless seeking after new challenges was ever apparent. In a half-dozen areas — as pianist, organist, vocalist, songwriter, bandleader, and sideman — he made a mark that is still felt in the worlds of jazz and popular music.”

The Kenton Era Part 1 - Stan Kenton Band Bio - told by Frank Sinatra

The Kenton Era Part 2 - Stan Kenton Band Bio - told by Frank Sinatra

Wardell Gray Quintet - It's the Talk of the Town

I'm Confessin' that I Love You

Sweet Lorraine

Jazz Composition: What is It? - Martin Williams

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

"I want to be a composer-arranger, because when you play, you can only express one idea at a time. When you write, you can say it all."

- Oliver Nelson, saxophonist, composer and arranger

It is always a great honor to represent the writings of Martin Williams, the late Jazz author and critic, on these pages.

When he won the the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Criticism in 1970 for his The Jazz Tradition, Gunther Schuller praised him as "perhaps the greatest living jazz critic." Gary Giddins called him "one of the most distinguished critics (of anything) this country has produced.”

Martin Williams perceptively chronicled the development of jazz for over four decades. His major books - The Jazz Tradition, Jazz Heritage, Jazz Changes, Where’s The Melody and Jazz in its Time - and his many writings for Down Beat, Harper’s, The New York Times, Evergreen Review, Stereo Review all offered brilliant insights into the constantly changing jazz scene.

Thematic development was one of Martin’s favorite focal points and he returns to it in the following piece about what Jazz composition is and, equally as important, what it is not.

“CHARLIE PARKER was one of the great jazz improvisers. He also contributed many durable pieces to the jazz repertory. But Charlie Parker was not a great jazz composer.

His pieces were melodic lines, lines most frequently written to fit chord changes that were already there, borrowed from popular songs that had become jazz standards. Scrapple from the Apple, one of his best melodies, began with the chords of Honeysuckle Rose, with the bridge from I Got Rhythm. It is possible to write poor lines on preset chords, and it is possible to write good ones, but in either case, one is contributing only a succession of melody notes. What this article will consider a jazz composition will be something rather different.

Parker's best piece is Confirmation, a most delightful and ingenious melody. For one thing, it is a continuous linear invention.

Most pop songs and many jazz pieces have two parts, a main strain and a bridge, or middle strain. The main strain is repeated twice before the bridge and once after it. Confirmation skips along beautifully with no repeats (except for one very effective echo phrase) until the last eight bars, which are a kind of repeat in summary.

Moreover, the bridge does not seem an interruption or an interlude that breaks up the flow of the piece but is a part of the continuously developing melody. Finally, if the chord sequence to Confirmation preceded the melody, then the melody became so strong as Parker worked on it that it forced him to alter the chords to fit its developing contours. Vaguely in the background there seem to have been the / Got Rhythm changes, but they are so transformed in Confirmation as to be almost unrecognizable. Confirmation is Parker's approach to what this article is calling composition.

There is another basic point that might be established here. It is that a composition is, in some sense, a piece for instruments. It is not for voice — not a "song."

In its early stages, music begins as rhythm and then becomes vocal melody. But when man begins to use musical instruments, even simple drums, he discovers that the instruments have characteristics and resources the human voice does not have. Songs are written for the voice. The more able and trained the voice gets, the more complex the songs can become. But we write compositions for the specific resources of musical instruments.

The best test is that when we have heard a good song, we are likely to come away singing it ourselves. But when we have heard a good composition, we want to hear the instruments play it again. That explanation is not absolute, of course, because there are plenty of good instrumental melodies that we can sing or hum, and there are plenty of good songs that composers have been able to orchestrate effectively. But it is a good rule of thumb.

JAZZ, LIKE ANY other music, began as rhythm and then became song and chant. And soon this song and chant were imitated on homemade and "legitimate" instruments.

Apparently the whole intention of the early jazz player, as nearly as it can be deduced, was to imitate the human voice. At about the turn of the century, however, there developed a style called ragtime. Many ragtime melodies were derived from songs of various sources, but ragtime was primarily an instrumental music. At first it was a piano music, and simple, optimistic ragtime melodies had a definite instrumental conception, partly because ragtime was heavily influenced by march music.

Ragtime made a contribution in instrumental melody to jazz that is still being felt. Improvisation is not primary to ragtime, and even written variation is comparatively rare. But a ragtime piece is a two-handed composition for piano in which the melody and the harmony exist together.

Take the first really good rag, Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. The melody has little meaning by itself, and, despite their simplicity, the chord changes belong intrinsically to it. In his later years, in a piece like Euphonic Sounds, Joplin tried to extend the idiom further so that the left hand did not simply make rhythms and harmonies but was given an interweaving melodic function as well.

I believe the great jazz composers have been Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington and that the modern candidates are Thelonious Monk and John Lewis.

There are some interesting similarities among these men. Each is a pianist. Each also has been called a poor pianist — which, in some quite irrelevant way, each may be. Each man, in having an orchestral conception of piano and in terms of the specific techniques of jazz (techniques that jazz does not necessarily have in common with other music), is actually a kind of jazz virtuoso. Each also has, in his own way, a concern for overall form in a performance. That concern goes beyond composition to include exactly the way the soloist is related to the piece and to the total effect of a performance.

Monk, for example, is not the least bit interested in finger dexterity. But in terms of unique sound; of the most subtle sense of rhythm, meter, accent, and time; of the musical worth of each melody note and each note in each chord; of the ability to find endless and fascinating variations on even the simplest idea, Monk is one of the great jazzmen.

One of Morton's best recordings is of a piece he called Dead Man Blues. Like W. C. Handy's blues, and like ragtime pieces before them, Dead Man is built on several themes. These themes obviously need to work well together; they can't be three handy melodies just thrown into the same piece. And they need to be put into some kind of order that gives a musical and emotional development.

In orchestration one concern of the composer is to decide who plays what, who improvises when, and how to bring out the best in the improviser without letting him overpower the whole performance. The whole, in an ideal performance of a great jazz composition, has to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Morton's recording of Dead Man begins with the echo of a funeral, in an introductory bit of Chopin's Funeral March, played on trombone with just the merest hint of humor.

From this point on Dead Man attempts the very difficult task of being sober — even reverent — and at the same time being spirited. The first theme in Dead Man is stated in a dancing polyphony by the trumpet's lead, with the clarinet quietly in a second melody behind it, and a trombone in a rhythmic-melodic bass line. There is a wonderful lightness of melody and sound and rhythm in this chorus. It is quite unlike the heavy, plodding, and strident Dixieland ensembles we so often hear nowadays. Such masterful ensemble playing in the style is perhaps a lost art.

The second section of Dead Man is a series of variations. The first is a chorus by Omer Simeon's clarinet. In the second, trumpeter George Mitchell shapes two lovely, logically developed, simple melodies. Mitchell's second chorus is also a contrast to his first and it further prepares for the entrance of the third Dead Man theme. It is rare that a solo can have such structural uses and still be beautiful in itself, but the great jazz composers can always encourage such playing.

The third part of Dead Man begins simply, with a trio of clarinets playing a lovely, riff-like blues line. As they repeat it, Kid Ory's trombone enters behind them with a deeply sung countermelody. In the third chorus, as if encouraged by Ory, Mitchell and Simeon join the trombonist; the other two clarinets drop out. The three horns play a lovely three-part variation on the theme. Obviously, this section also echos the polyphonic chorus with which the record began, and it beautifully balances the piece with a similar effect at beginning and end.

(Warning: the version of Dead Man currently available is an incongruous composite tape-splice of several takes and that one section is from an obvious warm-up that no one would have wanted issued in any form. It will give you little idea of the real artistry of the final version of Dead Man Blues.)

Morton's best records abound with effects. Pieces like Black Bottom Stomp, Grampa's Spells, Kansas City Stomps have harmony, polyphony, solo, stop-time breaks, alternating 2/4 and 4/4 time, have rhythm instruments dropping out and re-entering, call-and-response patterns, riffs — Smoke House Blues even has a sudden double-time on top of a double-time.

Such a catalog of devices may make Morton's records sound ridiculously cluttered, particularly when it is remembered that most of them use at least three themes! But they are not. They move from beginning to end with a rare purpose, direction, and order.

ELLINGTON'S ACHIEVEMENTS place him beyond style or period to be sure; his stature as an orchestrator alone might assure that. But his is a truly co-operative art. Even the act of composition in the Ellington orchestra is a co-operative thing among the leader and his men. (But it is surely a measure of his stature that the subsequent careers of many Ellington sidemen have been less illustrious after they have left him.)

The important early Ellington-Bubber Miley pieces like Black and Tan Fantasy and East St. Louis Toddle-oo have been thoroughly discussed by Gunther Schuller in Jazz, edited by Nat Hentoff and Albert McCarthy.

Two of the masterpieces from what is perhaps his great period, 1938-1941, Ko-Ko and Concerto for Cootie, have been praised and meticulously analyzed by Andre Hodeir in Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence. There is another piece from the same period, which, if it is not a masterpiece, is excellent Ellington, and that shows the function of Ellington's leadership perhaps even more readily. It is Main Stem.

On the face of it, Main Stem is nothing but a scantly orchestrated fast blues: a theme, a string of solos, and the theme again.

That theme is equally deceptive, because it may sound like a swing-style riff of the 1930s. But a moment's listening shows that it isn't. It is an ingeniously organized rhythmic idea. The solos — Rex Stewart's cornet, Johnny Hodges' alto saxophone, Stewart again, Ray Nance's trumpet, Joe Nanton's trombone, Ben Webster's tenor saxophone, Lawrence Brown's trombone — pass in rapid succession. But there is not the slightest effect of haste or overloading. And it does not become only a series of individual episodes by the players. It is a continuously developing performance, with an overall effect of its own to which each player contributes.

The internal contrasts are lovely, too. For example, Barney Bigard's clarinet is, as usual, used more as an instrument of coloration than as a strong melodic voice. Stewart appears in both guises, once for instrumental color and once for strong melody. Nanton's trombone is for sound and emotion; Brown's is for lyric melody. And so on.

What gives Main Stem its special unity are the details of orchestration, background, transitional scoring. These group effects are essentially simple and almost perfect.

By contrast, a first-rate big-band blues from the same period, like Count Basie's One O'clock Jump, belongs to each soloist in turn, and then to the group for a wrap-up that is again almost a-thing-in-itself. Main Stem belongs to its composer, to its soloists, and to the group throughout.

IF ANY JAZZ composer can be said to have surpassed Ellington in any respect whatever, it probably is Monk in the uniquely instrumental conception of certain of his pieces, particularly Criss Cross.

Monk had to wait a long time to become known, but he wrote and recorded Criss Cross more than 10 years ago. Round Midnight aside, some of the best Monk pieces are those least often played. Examples: Criss Cross, Four in One, Skippy, Eronel, Gallop's Gallop, Epistrophy. Of course, Evidence; Well, You Needn't; Misterioso; and Straight, No Chaser are fine Monk pieces that one does hear done by others.

Certainly, one revealing aspect of Monk the composer is Monk the re-composer. That is, the Monk who takes a popular ditty — which, after all, is a melody that is usually harmonized in the simplest manner. He rephrases that melody, and he reharmonizes it until he has made a real two-handed composition for piano out of it. Excellent examples are things like I Should Care or (of all things) You Took the Words Right out of My Heart.

Another delightful aspect of Monk the composer is the way he will integrate the middle, the bridge, melody into a piece. I Mean You, for example, is in the standard popular-song form, 32 bars, A A B A. But the B melody of I Mean You is a musical development of the A theme. The same is true of many other Monk pieces.

Another delight is the way Monk fills in. His blues Blue Monk sounds almost like the most traditional of blues line. But most older blues (and some newer ones) are organized in four-bar units, and they have rests, open spaces of about three beats at the end of each unit. Blue Monk's melody logically fills in all the empty space with a continuous melody.

Like Monk, John Lewis works with materials that seem simple on the surface. One of his best pieces, for example, is The Golden Striker, which might be called a somewhat modernized Bugle Call Rag. Another Lewis achievement is the blues Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West. It sounds quite traditional and simple perhaps, but it has highly original twists of phrasing in its compellingly logical melody.

Lewis' best single piece is undoubtedly Django, and the Modern Jazz Quartet's performances of it are among the really sustained "extended" jazz performances on records.

The gradations of feeling in Django are also exceptional. It is of course, a memorial to guitarist Django Reinhardt, and its main theme suggests a French gypsy, a guitarist, and jazz, all at once.

It also is a funeral piece. And hovering in the background is the New Orleans tradition that funerals become occasions for rejoicing and reaffirmation of life as well as of reverent sadness. Besides its theme, Django is a chord sequence for the improvisers and not the same as that of the main theme. There is also a little recurring bass figure that is probably as old as jazz and that was used in King Oliver's 1926 blues Snag It.

Lewis has sometimes padded his music with more complex effects and with quite derivative classical devices, and the results have often been stilted and overblown. But when he reassesses the jazz tradition, with fairly simple melodies, Lewis is an eloquent jazz composer.

It should be mentioned that probably the one really successful Lewis piece that has been performed outside the MJQ is Three Little Feelings, written for a brass orchestra and Miles Davis. Lewis' Odds against Tomorrow is also admirable.

Boplicity, by Davis and scored by Gil Evans for the Davis nontet, has been called a first-rate jazz composition. Evans is of course, an excellent orchestrator. But it would seem that Boplicity has a rather indecisive melody, and it is more interesting for its orchestral color and as a framework for soloists.

THE FOREGOING, with the exception of Django, are works that, at least on records, last about three or four minutes. Nowadays one is likely to hear a favorite Ellington score and be disappointed. For one thing, it is not being played by the same group of men with whom it was originally worked out. Furthermore, there is likely to be extended soloing, and, thus expanded, the piece may lose its original terseness and force.

However, since at least 1931 and his first (and far more successful) recording of Creole Rhapsody for Brunswick, Ellington has been trying to extend jazz composition in length, in time, and in its musical form.

Most often his efforts have taken the form of suites. And several of the suites have been, in effect, a succession of separate Ellington pieces, some good, some not, some suggesting order, some not. The most nearly sustained, until recently, was Black, Brown, and Beige, but the latter sections of that piece probably can be considered superior, with the Come Sunday theme showing Ellington's sentimental streak off as badly as anything he has done.

These references are not to either recorded version of Black, Brown, and Beige. Both are incomplete. The earlier is the better, and the more recent one largely wastes everyone's talent, including Mahalia Jackson's.

Ellington's more recent Suite Thursday is another matter. After a rather overblown introduction, the opening section of that delightful work states nearly all the musical material on which the rest of it is based. Thereby all four sections of Suite Thursday follow along in a continuously integrated development.

Even a mention of extended jazz works is incomplete without the inclusion of George Russell's three-part variations, based on a children's jingle, which he calls All about Rosie, an exceptional piece of writing.

Russell has spoken more recently of his efforts with his new group to write so that the composition is loose and suggestive and so that the act of playing a piece and playing variations on it becomes one unbroken line — to write so that the soloist is almost forced to re-compose every piece in playing it, and the theme and variations assume a kind of equal status.

One is reminded of Charlie Mingus, for, similarly, some of Mingus' best pieces are the performances of such pieces.

One cannot imagine Pithecanthropus Erectus or Haitian Fight Song or Folk Forms aside from performance. It is as if the performance gave the composition whatever existence it has. A question like, "How does Pithecanthropus go?" is meaningless — it goes the way it is played, and only that way. Composition and collective performance are one.

Mingus often laments not having had a big band to work with all the time. But with achievements like Pithecanthropus and Fight Song, one wonders. Jazz would be poorer without them.”

DISCOGRAPHY

A Charlie Parker Quintet plays Scrapple from the Apple on Roost 2210. A Parker quartet does Confirmation on Verve MG V-8005.

On Riverside 12-110 is Scott Joplin's Euphonic Sounds. On Riverside 12-134 is Maple Leaf Rag. Both are transcriptions from piano rolls that were run a bit too fast when the job was done.

The faulty composite Dead Man Blues by Jelly Roll Morton is on RCA Victor LP Ml649, but the LP also has Black Bottom Stomp, Grampa's Spells, Kansas City Stomps, and Smoke House Blues.

Victor LP M1715 by Duke Ellington has Ko Ko, Concerto for Cootie, and the better version of Black, Brown, and Beige. Main Stem is a part of Victor LP M 1364. Suite Thursday is half of Columbia CL 1579.

On Blue Note 1509 are Thelonious Monk's classic Criss Cross, Eronel, Misterioso, and Four in One. Blue Note 1510 has Off Minor; Well, You Needn't; I Mean You; and Epistrophy. Blue Note 1511 has Skippy and Straight, No Chaser. Gallop's Gallop is on Savoy 12137. I Should Care is on his solo recital, Riverside 12-235. You Took the Words Right out of My Heart is on the other solo recital, Riverside 12-312. The original (and probably the best) version of Blue Monk is on Prestige 7159.

The Golden Striker is played by the Modern Jazz Quartet on Atlantic 1284. John Lewis' recent version of his blues line Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West on Atlantic 1375 is superb. The quartet has recorded Django on Prestige 7057 (1954 version), on Atlantic 1325 (1959), and on Atlantic 2-603 (1960). Three Little Feelings was on Columbia CL 941 and is currently rather hard to find, unfortunately.

The Miles Davis Nontet performances are on The Birth of the Cool, Capitol T 762.

The original version of All about Rosie was on Columbia WL 127; the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band plays it on the currently available Verve MG V-8415.

Pithecanthropus Erectus by Charlie Mingus is a part of Atlantic 1237. Haitian Fight Song is on Atlantic 1260 and 1337; it is elaborated as Folk Forms on Candid 8005.                                                                 

Source

Down Beat Magazine

February 15,1962