Mel Rhyne: 1937-2013 - R.I.P. [From the Archives]

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

“Rhyne immediately sounds different from the prevailing Jimmy Smith school of organ players. Instead of swirling, bluesy chords, he favors sharp, almost staccato figures and lyrical single-note runs that often don’t go quite where expected. … He has a way of voicing a line that makes you think of the old compliment about ‘making the organ speak ….’”

- Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

“Mel Rhyne is certainly among the best Jazz organists. He has fluent ideas, good time, and a clean, light touch. In his hands, the controversial instrument never becomes overbearing or cloying.”

- Dan Morgenstern, Director, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University

"Melvin's very unique because he's got his own thing. He really doesn't play typical organ. The organ just happens to be his instrument but he doesn't use it in the common way. Like any jazz player, he plays his lines, which are really subtle and personal. It's not like he's pulling out all the stops and doing the organ thing. He's unique, like a Hank Jones of the organ, a really subtle player."

- Guitarist, Peter Bernstein

"Melvin's got great time. I noticed that the first time I played with him, that his time does not move. Not only that, his choice of bass notes is always right. In fact, just his choice of notes period, the way he constructs his lines. There's nobody around playing organ like that. He's playing just as good as he did or better than on those classic Wes Montgomery sides. It's a pleasure to play with him because his time is so steady, which is something that doesn't happen all the time and that can be very hard on the drummer. But let me tell you, it's a gas to play with Melvin Rhyne."

- Drummer, Kenny Washington

Mel Rhyne passed away on March 5, 2013. Always one of my favorites, I wanted to remember him on these pages with a re-posting of this piece from the blog archives [12.4.2010]. I am posting it again because the videos accompanying both pieces were deleted due to copyright issues. Fast forward to 2021 and what a difference the 8 years make as they are now available again through YouTube.

And making music in the context of Hammond B-3 Organ Jazz trios is also “a gas” as I can attest from personal experience.

After playing drums professionally for about 12 years, I went into a different line of work, married and began raising a family.

I did keep a set of drums around and played the odd gig now and again, which is how I happened on to an organ-trio gig that began in the Spring in 1970.

It’s easy to remember the year as April and May of 1970 witnessed the titanic seven game professional basketball battle between the New York Knicks, who were co-led by center Willis Reed and guard Walt Frazier, and the Los Angeles Lakers, co-led by center Wilt Chamberlain and guard Jerry West.

The Knicks won the best-of-seven series in seven games, much to the disappointment of Lakers fans who, at the time, were looking for the team’s first NBA title since it had moved to Los Angeles from Minneapolis a decade earlier.

The venue for the gig was an upstairs room [some referred to it an “attic”] at Woody & Eddy’s, a well-established restaurant and bar that was located at the corner of San Gabriel Blvd. and Huntington Avenue in San Marino, CA [think “the Beverly Hills” of the San Gabriel Valley; northeast of Los Angeles]. 

For whatever reasons [probably increased patronage = selling more booze], the owners of Woody & Eddy’s had decided to turn the upstairs room into a Sunday afternoon Jazz club. The gig lasted from 4:00 – 7:00 PM, ending just-in-time [good name for a song] for the evening supper crowd.

The call for the job came from an old high school buddy who played what musicians sometime refers to as  “arranger’s piano.” The fact that he was [and still is] primarily an arranger may have something to do with this “choice” of styles.

“Arranger’s piano” usually consists of soloing with chords instead of playing hornlike phrases with the right hand and accompanying chords or intervals with the left.

When my pal called me for the gig, he mentioned the name of a tenor saxophonist/vocalist who would be joining us, the length of the gig and the “bread” involved [money].

When I asked him who would be playing bass he said somewhat evasively: “You’ll see.”

Upon showing up early at Woody & Eddy’s in order to set-up my drums, I suddenly understood “who” the bass player was going to be when there before me was a gleaming Hammond B-3 organ with its bass keyboard foot pedals.

From the first downbeat, we jelled as a trio and the huge sound coming from the Hammond helped to envelope everyone in an atmosphere of musical merriment [the early afternoon glasses of Chardonnay may have also had something to do with the salubrious effect brought on by the music].

Almost instinctively, and perhaps in no small measure due to the presence of the Hammond, our repertoire became -  The Blues.

Also somewhat curatively, my arranger- piano friend’s keyboard limitations were more than offset by the Hammond’s suitability to chords and chording.

Using the “stops” [devices that alter the sound texture] on the Hammond and locked hands [playing the same phrase in both hands at the same time], he pounded out explosive chords while the sax player sang “Goin to Kansas City” and I laid down heavy backbeats with rim shots on the snare drum.

My Slingerland Radio King snare drum really got a workout on this gig and I got extra “pop” out of it by using [very large] 1A drum sticks that had been recommended by Ron Jefferson [a drummer who had worked with organist Richard “Groove” Holmes; he was also pianist Les McCann’s regular drummer].

Luckily, too, I had remembered to bring along my 20” K-Zildjan ride cymbal and its harmonic overtones blended in perfectly with the sound of the Hammond, the tenor sax and the blues-drenched atmosphere of the music.

The most fun was watching my buddy dance his feet on the organ foot pedals which produced driving bass lines that soon had the upper floor walls of the club figuratively “breathing in and out” with their pulsations.

It was one of the best times I had ever had on a gig from every standpoint.

But it appeared that it was all going to end all-too-soon when the tenor player called in during the week to share the news that he and his wife had just celebrated the birth of their first child.

While we were delighted for he and his wife, the bad news was that he was no longer going to make the Sunday job at Woody & Eddy’s.

At this juncture, however, serendipity intervened with the result that a good gig was about to become a great one.

For obvious reasons, I had been listening to the three, superb organ-trio albums that the late guitarist Wes Montgomery made for Riverside Records before that label was besieged by financial woes and Wes made the jump to Verve Records and subsequent fame and fortune.

While listening to these sides, it dawned on me that since my earliest days in music, one of my closest friends was a guitarist who had recently gotten back into town after going on the road with Buddy Rich’s “new” big band.

To make a long story short, I telephoned him, he said that he’d love to make the gig and after we played our first song together, we knew something special was happening.

The Management at Woody & Eddy’s did as well and extended our time at the upstairs room through the Summer of 1970.  They even supplied and staffed the bar in the attic room so that the patrons didn’t have to [dangerously] go up and down the stairs to replenish their tankards [there was an elevator, but for some reason, no one ever took it as it negotitated the one flight slower than a hospital lift].

To top it all off, the guitarist taught us all of Wes’ original compositions from the Riverside albums.

I got to play on Fried Pies, Jingles and The Trick Bag, the latter becoming a solo vehicle for me until some of the early dinning patrons in the below restaurant complained to the owners about “the racket coming from upstairs.”

The organist on these, three classic organ-guitar trio LPs that Wes made for Riverside was Mel Rhyne.

Unlike my arranger-piano friend, Mel played the organ like a piano, foregoing the instrument’s theatrical effects in favor of a legato style of phrasing his solos. One thing they did have in common was a love for the instrument’s foot pedal keyboard, although Mel employs it in a more understated fashion.

After Mel made the Riverside LPs with Wes, he retired to the relative obscurity of the Jazz scene in his native Indianapolis and later moved to Milwaukee, WI where he had a prosperous career and where he was rediscovered in the 1990s by Gerry Teekens at Criss Cross Records.

All you need to know about the “disappearance” and reappearance of Mel is contained in the following insert notes by Lora Rosner from Mel Rhyne’s first Criss Cross CD which is appropriately named Melvin Rhyne: The Legend [Criss Cross Jazz 1059].

You can locate more about Mel’s Criss Cross Recordings by going here.

Here's Mel with he along with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Kenny Washington performing Wes’ The Trick Bag as its soundtrack.

More of Mel with Peter and Kenny can be found at the conclusion of Lara’s notes in a video tribute to Jazz guitarist Peter Bernstein which uses as its audio track Billie’s Bounce from Melvin Rhyne’s Mel’s Spell Criss Cross CD [1118].

© -Lara Rosner/Criss Cross Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Legend" is derived from the Latin verb "legere", meaning "to collect, gather or read" and the word has come to mean "things to be read or collections of stories about notable figures"; legends are both such people and the lore that surrounds them. When a musician makes a historic contribution or is part of a historically significant group, an undying interest in the personality and the documents he has left behind, combined with a lack of current information will often engender tales of his recent activities and past achievements which are created to satisfy and feed the public's curiosity and hunger for such news. While Mel Rhyne is too modest to feel comfortable being called a legend (Teekens' title), the legend of his whereabouts and his slim recorded output from 30 years ago are now happily supplemented and brought up-to-date with fresh recordings by this brilliant, original voice on the organ and master of his instrument at the peak of his powers.

Mel Rhyne (born 10/12/36) is best known as the lyrical, inventive, understated organist and longtime associate of Wes Montgomery who complemented the guitarist so beautifully on four of his Riverside LPs, including his first and last for the label: Wes Montgomery Trio; Boss Guitar; Portrait for Wes; Guitar on the Go. Wes' Riverside recordings document the period of his first maturity and the core of his purest, most inspired, small group playing (10-9-63). Wes and Rhyne both played with great imagination and a certain disregard for convention; they also shared great respect for one another. Wes loved his "piano player's touch." Mel has a good left hand from learning boogie woogie from his father as a child, which made playing basslines easier when he began playing organ in the mid-50's in order to get more work as a sideman.

One of the first jobs he did on organ was with Roland Kirk, another highly original, maverick performer grounded in the roots of jazz and the blues. While he later became a fan of the John Coltrane Quartet with McCoy Tyner, a devotee of Red Garland and a student of great organists like Milt Buckner, Jimmy Smith, Wild Bill Davis and Jackie Davis, his earliest musical education was based on listening to Nat Cole, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner records.

People interested in jazz history know that Chicago had DuSable H.S., Detroit had Case and Sam Brown taught at Jefferson High in south Los Angeles. Russell Brown was the open-minded band director and free spirit at Crispus Attucks, the only high school in Indianapolis' black neighborhood, who encouraged the jazz activity and featured the talents of many famous Indianapolites: J.J. Johnson; Slide Hampton; Leroy Vinnegar; Larry Ridley; Buddy Montgomery; Mel Rhyne; Freddie Hubbard; Virgil Jones; Ray Appleton - to name a few. Many young musicians took night school classes at the city's numerous clubs and after-hours joints such as the Turf Bar, the Hub-Bub, the 19th Hole, the 440 Club and of course the Ebony Missile Room where Wes Montgomery often held forth, drawing young talent and music lovers to him like a magnet.

From 1959-64 Rhyne played and toured with the guitarist except when Wes had the chance to work with his brothers as part of the Mastersounds. The difficulty of transporting an organ contributed to the group's demise but the final deathblow came when Riverside went into receivership and Creed Taylor, Wes' new manager, led him off into a world of large orchestras and more commercial music where Rhyne would have felt superfluous and out-of-place.

In 1969 Rhyne moved to Madison, Wise, to work with guitarist John Shacklett and his brother Ron Rhyne on drums and also appeared on Buddy Montgomery's This Rather than That (Impulse). Early in his career, Mel had backed great acts like T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin and Arthur Prysock, but after working with Wes he only wanted to play jazz. Buddy Montgomery persuaded him to move to Milwaukee in 1973, a town with enough jazz activity at the time to keep him working and stimulated. Last year Herb Ellis asked him to play the B-3 on Roll Call (Justice) and a few months ago Milwaukee native, trumpeter Brian Lynch who has known Mel since 1974, asked the organist to appear on his third CD for Criss Cross.

A few weeks before his record date Lynch heard guitarist Peter Bernstein at the Village Gate and was so taken with his playing that he asked him to be on the date as well. Bernstein predictably gains the respect of every great musician he works with; Jimmy Cobb first asked Peter to work with him in April '89 when he was all of 21 and the guitarist recently led his own quartet featuring Cobb for a standing-room-only week at the Village Gate. Lou Donaldson thought he was listening to a Grant Green record the first time he heard Peter play, subsequently featured him on his CD, Play the Right Thing (Fantasy). Peter's playing incorporates the best qualities of Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. He's an expressive soloist whose horn-inspired lines draw much of their power, beauty and effectiveness from his soulful time.

Criss Cross producer Gerry Teekens was so pleased with the results of Lynch's date that he asked Rhyne to do an impromptu trio recording the next day and Mel was quite happy to have Bernstein and young veteran Kenny Washington with him again in the studio. Although Organ-izing (Jazzland) was issued under Rhyne's name in order to capitalize on the organ fad of the time, the LP (1960) was a thrown-together session of four blues featuring horns, organ, piano and bass which limited his role as an organist; he had no idea he was the leader of the date. It seems hard to believe but The Legend is Melvin Rhyne's first recording as a leader; the world has waited long enough and so has Rhyne. His stunningly original ideas, impeccable taste and time, humor and unique sound make this CD special from its opening moments.

After so many years of imposed silence Rhyne bursts onto CD with a performance of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' Licks A-Plenty which conveys his youthful exuberance and enthusiasm and sheer delight in making music. While the title is an apt description of the head, a good name for the solos (especially Rhyne's) might be "Expect the Unexpected." The rhythmic shapes of his lines are irregular and unusual and have an arresting vocal quality. He plays with his audience setting up riffs which he deconstructs with subtle amendments, sly timing or the big sound of surprise when he pulls out a few more stops during a shout chorus. A drummer of Kenny Washington's caliber is needed to keep up with the organist's utterances. Bernstein can't help but respond to Rhyne and his solo reflects some of Mel's rhythmic originality. In his discreet comping Pete defers to Mel the way Mel deferred to Wes. The atmospheric Serenata is played much more slowly than usual and shows off Bernstein's beautiful sound and feeling for melody. He learned the tune in the studio without music. Mel told me that he thought Peter did a marvelous job; he was particularly happy with the trio's pleasing contrast of sound.

Dig the relaxed feeling and great solos on Savoy which is surely one of the highlights of the session. Mel digs in with a strong, dense sound and makes a blistering statement on The Trick Bag. Bernstein is an extension of Rhyne's lyricism and taste on a soulful Old Folks (gorgeous intro). Next Time You See Me was a 1958 hit for Frankie Lymon and many singers have done it since. Rhyne phrases the melody the way a vocalist would. True to his bebop roots and his own inner voice, Rhyne reinterprets Groovin' High at a brisk pace. Contributions from guests Brian Lynch and Don Braden brought the session to a close.

Melvin hopes to record again in the near future which will no doubt be eagerly anticipated. He is very happy with everyone's efforts and the music on The Legend. I'm sure all you listeners will agree with me -- it's been worth the wait!

Thanks are due to Ted Dunbar and Prof. David Baker for their invaluable insights on the Indianapolis scene. Enjoy!

Lora Rosner Jackson Heights, NY March 1992”

Peter Bernstein with Mel and Kenny on Billie’s Bounce.

Keepers of the Flame and Giants by Whitney Balliett

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

The Boston Globe stated: “Balliett’s genius for pictorial description (which helps make him a gifted writer of profiles) extends to the music itself. No one writes about what they listen to anywhere near as well.”

Although he played drums during his college days and was a member of a band, Whitney was not a studied musician. He had no formal training in theory and harmony so during the 40+ years he wrote Jazz profiles for The New Yorker magazine he had to fall back on his other gifts when describing the music - his gift for “pictorial description.”

In many ways, this made Whitney’s Jazz writings more accessible to the majority of Jazz fans since they, too, for the most part, lacked procedural training in melody, harmony and rhythm - the building blocks of music.

As a result, "Balliett comes as close as any writer on jazz—perhaps on any musical style — to George Bernard Shaw's intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments. This volume approaches indispensability." Choice reviewing Balliett’s American Musicians.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share some briefer pieces from the pen of our ideal - Whitney Balliet - to give you an appreciation for his “ … genius for pictorial description.” This is the sixth in a series of six continuously running featuring Whitney’s sui generis pictorially descriptive approach to writing about Jazz which is marked by what Gary Giddins has labeled “writerly attributes: insight, candor, observation, discernment, delineation, style, diligence and purpose.”

These are all drawn from Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981-1990 [1991]. This is number 6 in a series.

Whitney’s book concludes with chapters that offer a look at what he terms “Keepers of the Flame” in which he includes the sui generis pianist Erroll Garner and “Giants” which offers a wonderful description of vocalist Sarah Vaughan’s unique talents.

As regards, the former, Whitney comments:

“It is surprising that pianists should be the keepers of the flame, for the piano—inflexible and percussive and vibrato-less—does not transmit emotion easily. But jazz pianists, repeatedly beating back the army of broken, out-of-tune pianos which has besieged them since the beginning of the century, have learned how to circumvent the instrument's coldness. By raising and lowering their volume in strategic places, they startle the listener and italicize their phrases. They get vibratolike effects by holding certain notes, and by using the little tremolos that Earl Hines invented. And they place notes, and even chords, in unexpected spots—a rhythmic juggling that creates a fine tension.” 

He then turns to an explanation of how all these devices are in evidence in the playing of Keeper of the Flame, Erroll Garner [who could just as easily be included in the Giants category, too].

“Erroll Garner died in January of 1977, at the age of fifty-three. From the mid-forties, when he first arrived in New York from Pittsburgh, until 1975, when he gave his last public performance, in Chicago, he travelled around the world, obsessed by his music, delighted, inexhaustible, casting his shadow over almost every pianist who heard him, and making his audiences marvel at his ebullience and his melodic invention. Garner, who never learned to read music, could reportedly reproduce the styles of all the great pianists who preceded him, but his own style was inimitable, no matter how often it was copied. He liked to open a number with an ad-lib cadenza, lasting eight or ten bars and giving no indication of what was to come. Then he would drop his volume and go into tempo, his right hand embellishing the melody with behind-the-beat notes broken by offbeat chords, and his left hand keeping strict time with on-the-beat guitarlike chords. He would take the volume up slightly at the bridge and shift into double-time octave chords, lower his volume again, and close the chorus with staccato notes that gave the impression they were wildly trying to break off from the melody they were a part of. The rest of the number would be a constant round of raised and lowered volumes, doubled or halved rhythms, staccato and legato passages, and boiling chordal interludes that wiped his melodic slate clean and prepared the listener for his next surprise. Garner's fast numbers skimmed the earth, and his slow ballads were stately, ceremonious dances.

Garner made countless recordings. Whenever the spirit moved him, he'd rent a studio, summon his bassist and drummer, set down a dozen or more numbers — usually one take apiece. For years, there have been rumors of a trove of unreleased Garner material, and at long last Martha Glaser, his manager and producer, has begun to issue what she believes is the best of it. The first two albums include twenty numbers and are drawn from five different sessions—three in 1961, one in 1964, and one in 1965. The third includes fourteen numbers, set down during one session in 1954. Almost all are prime Garner. (Of course, he had off days. There are missed notes, chords that don't quite land where they should, and endings that don't return to earth.) On the first album, "Easy to Love," he plays a slow, dancing "September Song''; a hustling "My Blue Heaven," its second bridge constructed of an exuberant boppish trumpet line; a "Somebody Loves Me" that includes an even more rakish single-note passage; a medium "As Time Goes By," with a laughing Debussy introduction; and a very fast "Lover Come Back to Me," with a bridge in which his hands invent totally different melodic and rhythmic lines in exhilarating counterpoint.

The second album, "Dancing on the Ceiling," is memorable for a seesawing staccato line in "It Had to Be You"; for a rocking, medium-tempo "After You've Gone," in which Garner takes the breaks — miniature wonders in themselves — and moseys along behind the beat; a strange, slow, rhapsodic gospel blues, "Like Home," played largely with the loud pedal and with heavy, damask chords; and a stomping, new "Ain't Mis-behavin'." 

The third album has at least six marvels. There is an easy "Margie," an unexpectedly fast "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," and a medium-tempo "Louise," full of delayed notes, and double-time chords. There are a fast, ripping "My Gal Sal," a sly "Too Marvellous For Words," and a virtuosic reshaping of Zez Confrey's brittle 1921 "Kitten on the Keys." Audible on all three albums are the hums, grunts, "myeh's, and "oh-oh"s that Garner uttered as he played, the sounds of a man leaning deliriously into his work.

In the chapter on Giants, Whitney includes comments about recent recordings on Verve featuring Art Tatum and an assessment of the techniques that place vocalist Sarah Vaughan in this category.

Virtuosos do not fit easily into jazz. The music revolves around improvisation, and jazz improvisers need only enough technique to play what they hear in their heads. (The drummer Sidney Catlett never considered himself a virtuoso, but he got off certain dazzling snare and cymbal patterns that not even the virtuosic Buddy Rich could match. Catlett's technique was an extension of his imagination; impossible figures popped into his head and instantaneously became real.) Too much technique saps improvisation: it causes floridity and grandstanding, and it tricks audiences into believing that bombast is music. Jazz has harbored two undeniable virtuosos (Rich may have been a third), but no one has ever known quite what to do with them. They are Sarah Vaughan, who died last spring [1990] at the age of sixty-six, and Art Tatum (1909-56), whose final recordings have been issued — with an hour of previously unreleased material — on six compact disks called "Art Tatum: The Complete Pablo Group Masterpieces."

Sarah Vaughan was born in Newark and joined Earl Hines' big band as a singer and second pianist when she was nineteen. She never had any formal training  —she was a bebop baby. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were in Hines' band, and so was the singer Billy Eckstine. Vaughan made her first recordings with Eckstine when he formed his own big band in 1944, and a year later she made a small-band record with Parker and Gillespie. By the end of the fifties, she had become a famous singer who moved easily between jazz and popular song. By the end of the sixties, she was a singer of operatic dimensions. She grew to diva proportions, and so did her voice. She had four octaves, each clear and spacious. She sang falsetto, and she could sound like a baritone. She could drop from soprano to baritone in the space of one word. Her low tones were cavernous and her high notes were silver peaks. She had several different vibratos, and when it pleased her she could sing without any vibrato at all. (Think of the Kate Smith singers of the thirties: their vibratos led them.)

In 1980, the composer, conductor, and critic Gunther Schuller introduced Vaughan at a recital she gave at the Smithsonian, and he said that she was "the greatest vocal artist of our century," a hosanna that he immediately complicated by adding that she was "the most creative vocal artist of our time." 

This was true. She was a wonderful embellisher and improviser, who never sang a song the same way twice. She remade her materials — generally, the songs of Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, Kern, Porter, and Arlen—in her own image. The cost to the songs was sometimes high. She altered melodic lines and harmonies, mislaid lyrics, and used so much melisma that the words became unintelligible. At her most unfettered, she became a horn singer. Yet her melodic lines were of such complexity and daring that no horn player could have played them. Ultimately, she became a kind of abstract singer, whose materials were inadequate for what she did but were all she had. She could, of course, also sing a song relatively straight. But the richness of her voice was always there, and, no matter how few melodic and harmonic alterations she made, this richness tended to overshadow the song, to lean over it, like a voluptuous woman reading a book.

Vaughan and Art Tatum revelled in their techniques. Vaughan liked to show off her intervals, her perfect pitch, her vibratos, and her range. Tatum liked to show off his touch (the envy of every pianist of the past fifty years), his startling speed, his two-handed runs, and his left hand, which could match his right. As Vaughan and Tatum grew older, they inevitably leaned more and more on their technical tricks. Vaughan shuttled between her registers, held notes so long they took on a life of their own, and pretended she was Joan Sutherland or Paul Robeson. Tatum released harmonic clouds, making his chords sound as if they had fifteen or twenty notes, and connected them with long runs—coils of sound that trapped the listener and freed Tatum of the burden of fresh improvisations. He gave the impression at such times that he was speeding luxuriously through the song; in reality, he was pedalling easily in place. Both Vaughan and Tatum were worshipped by their audiences and by their fellow musicians — for their bravura effects and for their musicianship — and they wore their mantles with a pleased arrogance.”

"Miles" - Whitney Balliett

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

“He has never been much of a technician, and he has been clever enough to keep his style within his abilities.”

“He also softens his attack with his tone. It is full, but it is not a brass tone, a trumpet tone. It is human sound compressed into trumpet sound. Davis has succeeded in making almost visible the emotions — longing, sadness, pity — that move just beneath his complex surface.”

“Davis's eyes, looking into the middle distance, are cold and furious, as if he were tallying the various imponderables that have kept him from becoming the genius he believes himself to be.”

- Whitney Balliet

The Boston Globe stated: “Balliett’s genius for pictorial description (which helps make him a gifted writer of profiles) extends to the music itself. No one writes about what they listen to anywhere near as well.”

Although he played drums during his college days and was a member of a band, Whitney was not a studied musician. He had no formal training in theory and harmony so during the 40+ years he wrote Jazz profiles for The New Yorker magazine he had to fall back on his other gifts when describing the music - his gift for “pictorial description.”

In many ways, this made Whitney’s Jazz writings more accessible to the majority of Jazz fans since they, too, for the most part, lacked procedural training in melody, harmony and rhythm - the building blocks of music.

As a result, "Balliett comes as close as any writer on jazz—perhaps on any musical style — to George Bernard Shaw's intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments. This volume approaches indispensability." Choice reviewing Balliett’s American Musicians.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share some briefer pieces from the pen of our ideal - Whitney Balliet - to give you an appreciation for his “ … genius for pictorial description.” This is the fifth in a series of six continuously running featuring Whitney’s sui generis pictorially descriptive approach to writing about Jazz which is marked by what Gary Giddins has labeled “writerly attributes: insight, candor, observation, discernment, delineation, style, diligence and purpose.”

These are all drawn from Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981-1990 [1991]. This is number 5 in a series.

Published in 1989, two years before Miles’ death in 1991, this piece is at once an overview of the highlights of Miles career through a parsing of the Miles autobiography that was published in the same year as Whitney’s profile as well as an analysis of why, despite limited gifts as a technician, Davis went on to become such a smashing success in the Jazz World.

“Miles Davis has led a bedevilled life. 

He was born in 1926 in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis. He has an older sister, Dorothy, and a younger brother, Vernon. His father was a dentist who eventually retired to a two-hundred-acre farm he owned, in Millstadt, Illinois. His mother was beautiful, stylish and idle. He got on well with his father, but found his mother, whom he loved, possessive, peevish, and heavy-handed. 

He took up the trumpet at ten, and by the time he was in high school he had been given his second trumpet and had met his first idol, Clark Terry. He worked in a local band led by Eddie Randle, then, at eighteen, he suddenly accelerated. He had the first of two children by a woman whom he never married; he graduated from high school; he worked for two weeks in Billy Eckstine's legendary bebop band, with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey; he moved to New York and enrolled in Juilliard; and he began hanging out with Parker and Gillespie and Fats Navarro. A year later, his attractive aura already working, he was on one of the earliest and most famous bebop records ("Billie's Bounce," "Now's the Time"), with Parker, Gillespie, and Max Roach. And he appeared on Fifty-second Street with Parker and Coleman Hawkins. His style, though still hesitant, began to emerge.

In the late forties, inspired by Claude Thornhill's big band, he organized the nonet (among the players Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, Kai Winding, John Lewis, Max Roach) that made the celebrated Capitol album "Birth of the Cool." The nonet's laid-back quality and calm, intricate, deep-red arrangements made it the most adventurous small band since the Ellington small bands and some of the Woody Herman Woodchopper sides of 1946. (The typical small bebop bands of the time were not ensemble groups, like the nonet. They used leaping, tongue-tying unison opening-and-closing collective passages, but the often long solos that came between carried the musical weight.) Davis also began taking drugs. He describes what happened in his new autobiography, Miles (Simon & Schuster): "I lost my sense of discipline, lost my sense of control over my life, and started to drift. It wasn't like I didn't know what was happening to me. I did, but I didn't care anymore. I had such confidence in myself that even when I was losing control I really felt I had everything under control. But your mind can play tricks on you. I guess when I started to hang like I did, it surprised a lot of people who thought I had it all together. It also surprised me." (The book, done with a poet and teacher named Quincy Troupe, is petulant, outspoken, defensive, honeyed, error-filled, and impressionistic — and loaded to the gunwales with four-letter words. Davis uses them more as hammer blows than for their literal meanings, and they soon become a dull barrage, which, for whatever reasons, gradually abates as the book goes along.)

Davis takes pains to point out that he was not alone in his addiction. Many of the best young musicians of the late forties — black and white — became heroin addicts, and he needlessly names them. Here, in the late fifties, is Billie Holiday, one of the most famous victims of this devastating plague: "She was looking real bad by this time, worn out, worn down, and haggard around the face and all. Thin. Mouth sagging at both corners. She was scratching a lot." (There are other eloquent patches in the book, but it is difficult to tell whether they are Davis's or Troupe's doing. Listen to this description of the church music Davis heard early in his life: "We'd be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. Anyway, we'd be on the side of the road — whoever I was with, one of my uncles or my cousin James — and I remember somebody would be playing a guitar the way B. B. King plays. And I remember a man and a woman singing and talking about getting down! Shit, that music was something, especially that woman singing. But I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean? That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm.") Davis began stealing and even pimping to support his heroin habit. He was busted on the West Coast. He was busted again when he went home, ostensibly to give up drugs. He quit heroin in 1953, backslid, and quit for good in 1954.

Almost immediately, his professional life turned around. He led two classic recording sessions in 1954. The first consisted simply of two blues, the medium-tempo "Walkin"' and the faster "Blue 'n' Boogie." Each took up one side of a ten-inch LP, and both were played by Davis, Lucky Thompson, f. J. Johnson, Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke. Davis's mature style—annunciatory, clipped, vibratoless, singing—dominated both numbers and both recordings. The second recording had three originals and one standard tune, and on hand were Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, Heath, and Clarke. (Davis, along with Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, has always chosen musicians who can both obey and enrich his sometimes abstruse musical designs.) Davis was in a paradoxical mood. Although he loved Monk's playing, he made him lay out behind his solos on three of the numbers. Both recordings were hailed as bellwethers; actually, they marked an enlightened reshaping of the straight-ahead, uncluttered swing of Red Norvo and Count Basie and the trumpeter Joe Thomas. Davis and his men set aside the eccentricities and excesses of bebop (in whose house most of them had been raised) while retaining its broadened harmonic base. A year later, Davis appeared at the second Newport Jazz Festival with a pickup group consisting of Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Monk, Heath, and Connie Kay — all musicians he had worked with. He played three numbers — open-horn versions of "Hackensack" and "Now's the Time," and a muted, inner-ear "'Round Midnight." His from-the-mountain-top, time-stopping open-horn solos made it clear that Davis, who had been struggling for much of the time since he came East, had arrived. Columbia Records agreed, and before the year was out had signed him to a contract he says was worth three hundred thousand dollars a year. (He stayed with Columbia until 1985, when he went to Warner Brothers Records.) Davis's comments in Miles on the Columbia signing are far from the it's-not-my-fault defensiveness of the artist who has had a windfall: "And yes, going with Columbia did mean more money, but what's wrong with getting paid for what you do and getting paid well? I never saw nothing in poverty and hard times and the blues. I never wanted that for myself. I saw what it really was when I was strung out on heroin, and I didn't want to see it again. As long as I could get what I needed from the white world on my own terms, without selling myself out to all of those people who would love to exploit me, then I was going to go for what I know is real."

Davis had entered his great period. He assembled the first of two working bands, and it included, at various times, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Red Garland, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. Davis, like Mingus, began experimenting with different kinds of improvisation, and he made the album "Kind of Blue," in which he gave his players modal sketches to work their variations on, and set them loose, one take per number. The results are cool, subtle, edgeless music. Davis was also busy in the Columbia studios making three concerto albums — "Miles Ahead," "Porgy and Bess," and "Sketches of Spain" — in which, accompanied by a big band playing Gil Evans' velvet arrangements, he was the only soloist. (Would that Louis Armstrong had had such cosseting when he was at his height, in 1933!) Davis's second famous small working band arrived in the sixties and had Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Its repertory moved between mooning, muted ballads and furious up-tempo numbers, in which Davis, always a middle-register player, ventured into the upper regions and used unaccustomed avalanches of notes.

Davis's life since the early sixties has been hill-and-dale. He has been married to and divorced from the dancer Frances Taylor and the actress Cicely Tyson. He has been plagued by medical problems, among them hip operations, a stroke, two broken ankles, pneumonia, and diabetes. From 1975 to 1980, he dropped out. He gave up playing and retired to his house, on West Seventy-seventh Street. Here, brutally, is what he did: "I just took a lot of cocaine (about $500 a day at one point) and fucked all the women I could get into my house. I was also addicted to pills, like Percodan and Seconal, and I was drinking a lot, Heinekens and cognac. ... I didn't go out too often and when I did it was mostly to after-hours places up in Harlem where I just kept on getting high and living from day to day. . . . The house was filthy and real dark and gloomy, like a dungeon." George Butler, of Columbia Records, got Davis back on the track, and he began coming out again in 1981. Since then, he says, he has given up drugs and drinking. He has also given up his house, and now divides his time between Malibu and an apartment on Central Park South.

Although Davis has tinkered endlessly with his music (various types of improvising, odd time signatures, synthesizers, an electric trumpet), his playing, which resides at the still center of all these experiments, has changed little. He has never been much of a technician, and he has been clever enough to keep his style within his abilities. When he came East in the forties, he ignored his limitations, and his solos were sometimes a string of clams. He ignored them again when he had the Shorter-Williams band and began shooting wildly into the upper register, with nerve-racking results. Many people have influenced Davis — Louis Armstrong, Clark Terry, Shorty Baker, Fats Navarro, Ahmad Jamal, Bobby Hackett, Gil Evans, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps the heaviest hand on his playing was that of an early teacher who told him never to play with a vibrato, that he'd have plenty of time for a vibrato when he grew old and could no longer control his lip. His no-vibrato attack sometimes gives his playing an abrupt, telegraphic air, but he softens this by using a lot of rests and long notes. He also softens his attack with his tone. It is full, but it is not a brass tone, a trumpet tone. It is human sound compressed into trumpet sound. His solos in the Gil Evans "Sketches of Spain" album have a unique pleading, sorrowing quality. There have been many other players who have got a human sound —  Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell — but their tonal qualities have never superseded the basic sound of their instruments. Davis has succeeded in making almost visible the emotions — longing, sadness, pity — that move just beneath his complex surface. But his eerie, buttonholing sound is not as common on his recent, synthesizer-controlled recordings, where electronics and odd time signatures dominate the surroundings, and cause him to sound removed and disjointed. The great Davis still resides in his recordings of thirty years ago.

Davis has become a business. On one of his Warner Brothers Records release, "Amandla," he lists his production coordinators, his tour manager, his business manager, and his personal manager. The cover of the album is a semi-abstract self-portrait. (Like such earlier worthies as Pee Wee Russell and George Wettling, Davis has taken up painting.) Beneath Davis's head are the bell of a trumpet and a globe, with the African continent thereon. Davis's eyes, looking into the middle distance, are cold and furious, as if he were tallying the various imponderables that have kept him from becoming the genius he believes himself to be.”

Bunny Berigan - Whitney Balliett

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

“As always, there is Berigan’s incomparable – and irrepressible – swing. … Berigan’s sense of swing was an innate talent, a given talent, a feeling beyond study and calculation, one that Berigan heard in the playing of both Beiderbecke and Armstrong, but which he synthesized into his own personal rhythmic idiom.”

“Berigan’s other great asset was the extraordinary beauty of his tone. Though technically based on perfect breath support, the purity—and amplitude—of his tone was controlled at the moment of emission by his inner ear, as with any great artist renowned for his tone. Berigan could project in his mind and ear a certain sound, and then the physical muscles (embouchure, breathing, fingers) would, in coordination, produce the desired result.”

- Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era

The Boston Globe stated: “Balliett’s genius for pictorial description (which helps make him a gifted writer of profiles) extends to the music itself. No one writes about what they listen to anywhere near as well.”

Although he played drums during his college days and was a member of a band, Whitney was not a studied musician. He had no formal training in theory and harmony so during the 40+ years he wrote Jazz profiles for The New Yorker magazine he had to fall back on his other gifts when describing the music - his gift for “pictorial description.”

In many ways, this made Whitney’s Jazz writings more accessible to the majority of Jazz fans since they, too, for the most part, lacked procedural training in melody, harmony and rhythm - the building blocks of music.

As a result, "Balliett comes as close as any writer on jazz—perhaps on any musical style — to George Bernard Shaw's intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments. This volume approaches indispensability." Choice reviewing Balliett’s American Musicians.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share some briefer pieces from the pen of our ideal - Whitney Balliet - to give you an appreciation for his “ … genius for pictorial description.” This is the second in a series of six continuously running featuring Whitney’s sui generis pictorially descriptive approach to writing about Jazz which is marked by what Gary Giddins has labeled “writerly attributes: insight, candor, observation, discernment, delineation, style, diligence and purpose.”

These are all drawn from Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981-1990 [1991]. This number 2 in a series.

Incidentally used copies of the Time-Life Giants of Jazz Bunny Berigan LPs referenced in this piece can still be found on Amazon, eBay and other online record sellers.

“Louis Armstrong was the first sunburst in jazz — the light a thousand young trumpeters reflected. But two other trumpeters, both less imitable than Armstrong and both suffering from short, damaged careers, were also closely attended. One was Jabbo Smith, and the other was Bix Beiderbecke. These two had an equally evanescent admirer — Bunny Berigan. Out of fashion most of the forty years since his death, Berigan was once revered as a kind of Beiderbecke replacement. But he successfully absorbed both players (along with Armstrong, of course) and constructed his own passionate style.

Born in 1908 in Hilbert, Wisconsin, of a musical Irish-German family, Berigan took up the violin at six, switched to the trumpet at eleven, and had his first professional job when he was thirteen. He never finished high school, and was a full-time musician at eighteen. He moved to New York in 1928, got to know Rex Stewart and the Dorsey brothers, and in 1930 was hired by Hal Kemp. During the next four years, he did studio work, made a great many recordings, and worked for Paul Whiteman. He got married and had children and became a disastrous drinker. 

In 1935, he joined Benny Goodman. Jess Stacy was on piano, and he spoke recently of Berigan: "I worked with Berigan in the Goodman band in 1935 — in fact, travelled across the country with him in Goodman's old Pontiac. He dressed conservatively, and, with his little mustache and his widow's peak and his glasses, he looked like a college professor. He was a wonderful man and an electrifying trumpet player, and he didn't have a conceited bone in his body. He was always kind of not satisfied with his playing. After he took a solo, he'd say, 'I started out great but I ended up in a cloud of shit.' His drinking was awful. We'd stop every hundred miles to get him another bottle of Old Quaker, or some such. Of course, business was so bad until we got to the Coast that it was a panic band, and that didn't help him. We played a dance in Michigan and thirty-five people came  —  all of them musicians. In Denver, we had to play dime-a-dance music, with a waltz every third number. Berigan used to complain about Goodman all the time. Berigan was playing lead trumpet and hot solos, and, finally, every night about eleven, after those difficult Fletcher Henderson arrangements and all the solos, he'd say, 'This is impossible,' and take the last drink — the law-of-diminishing-returns drink — and wipe himself out. We roomed together in Denver, and, what with his drinking and the altitude, he'd wake up at night, his throat dry, thinking he couldn't breathe. He'd tell me, 'I'm dying, I'm dying,' so I'd soak some towels in cold water and wrap them around his head, and that would ease him and he'd go back to sleep saying, 'You saved my life, Jess.' 

I don't know why, but Berigan left the Goodman band while we were at the Palomar in Los Angeles, just after we caught on, and came back to New York, where he had his own little group at the Famous Door, on Fifty-second Street. On the way back from the Coast, Goodman had a long, successful run in Chicago, and when we hit New York we were the top — the biggest thing in American music. I've always wondered if Berigan regretted leaving the band when he did. But he never let on."

Berigan was at his peak during the next couple of years. He recorded with Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey, and with Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Johnny Hodges, Fats Waller, and Teddy Wilson. He sat in on a Louis Armstrong date, and one Sunday afternoon he backed Bessie Smith at the Famous Door. In 1937, he put together his own big band. It was spirited and swinging. (The likes of George Auld, George Wettling, Sonny Lee, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich, Joe Bushkin, and Allan Reuss passed through.) But Berigan was a poor businessman, and in 1939 he went bankrupt. His health had deteriorated. He worked briefly for Tommy Dorsey, and put a couple of temporary bands together. He died at the age of thirty-three, in 1942.

One side of Berigan's style was romantic, melodramatic, and garrulous. It had a kind of Irish cast. The other side was blue, emotional, down, funky. He would fool around in his lowest register, playing heavy, resonant notes — gravestone notes. He would play blue note after blue note. Both sides of his style would appear in a single solo. He might start two choruses of the

blues in his down style. He would stay in his low register, growling and circling like a bear. (Only Ruby Braff and Charlie Shavers got the same sound down there.) He would use four or five notes, shaping them into short, reiterated phrases. At the start of his second chorus, he would suddenly jump to a high C or D, go into a flashy descending run, and wing through a couple of large intervals. His vibrato would become noticeable, and his tone would open up. He might dip into his low register at the end of the solo, but he'd finish with a ringing Irish high C. Berigan's execution was almost flawless. 

He was a daring and advanced improviser, who fooled with offbeat and behind-the-beat rhythms and with all sorts of tonal effects. Yet his melodic lines were logical and graceful. There was an outsize quality to all Berigan's playing; he was a three-man trumpet section pressed into one. He dominated every group he was in: on Benny Goodman's recordings of "Sometimes I'm Happy" and "King Porter Stomp" and on Tommy Dorsey's of "Marie'' and "Song of India" his famous solos stand like oaks on a plain. Only Red Allen and Roy Eldridge achieved a similar majesty in their big-band work. (Louis Armstrong's big-band majesty was ready-made; he was often the only soloist.)

Berigan has been brought forward again by a Time-Life "Giants of Jazz" album and by Volume I of the RCA "The Complete Bunny Berigan," which will collect all eighty-nine of the recordings he made with his big band. The Time-Life album contains forty numbers made between 1930 and 1939. The first, a Hal Kemp "Them There Eyes," reveals Berigan as Louis Armstrong, and the last, an all-star "Blue Lou," as himself. Many of the finest numbers in the album were recorded in the mid-thirties with small pickup groups. (Omitted, though, are "Bughouse" and "Blues in E-Flat," done with Red Norvo and Chu Berry, and "Honeysuckle Rose'' and "Blues," done with Fats Waller and Tommy Dorsey.) 

Of particular note are Berigan's long melodic lines on the two Gene Gifford numbers; the three Bud Freeman selections, especially "Keep Smiling at Trouble," where he moves readily back and forth between the two parts of his style,-the growls and low, fat sorrowing notes on "Blues," made with his own group; and the rocking, irresistible way he plays the melody in the first chorus of Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go," backed by organ chords and a strong Dave Tough afterbeat. Tough and Berigan galvanized each other. In the Time-Life album, Tough also appears on Dorsey's "Marie'' and "Song of India," set down on one January day in 1937. Berigan's solos in both those numbers possess the eternal resilience that all improvisation aims at but rarely reaches. This quality shines through Berigan's celebrated miniature trumpet concerto "I Can't Get Started." The number, lasting roughly five minutes, begins with a bravura twelve-bar trumpet cadenza played over sustained band chords. Berigan sings a chorus in his pleasant, piping voice. A second, nine-bar cadenza follows, and he launches triumphantly into the melody, ending with a celestial E-flat.

The RCA reissue has thirty-one numbers. The best are "I Can't Get Started," "The Prisoner's Song," "Caravan," "Study in Brown," "Frankie and Johnny," "Mahogany Hall Stomp," and "Swanee River." The rest of the album is given over to songs like "The Lady from Fifth Avenue" and "All Dark People Are Light on Their Feet." Whatever the material, Berigan is everywhere, playing lead trumpet, soloing, filling the air with his serene and muscular poetry.”