Dexter Gordon "Doin' Allright" - The Blue Note Years - Part 2

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

“The King of Quoters, Dexter Gordon, was himself eminently quotable. In a day not unlike our own, when purists issue fiats about what is or isn't valid in jazz, Gordon declared flatly, ‘jazz is an octopus’—it will assimilate anything it can use. Drawing closer to home, he spoke of his musical lineage: Coleman Hawkins "was going out farther on the chords, but Lester [Young] leaned to the pretty notes. He had a way of telling a story with everything he played.' Young's story was sure, intrepid, dar­ing, erotic, cryptic. A generation of saxophonists found itself in his music, as an earlier generation had found itself in Hawkins's rococo virtuosity. …

Gordon's appeal was to be found not only in his Promethean sound and nonstop invention, his impregnable authority combined with a steady and knowing wit, but also in a spirit born in the crucible of jam sessions. He was the most formidable of battlers, undefeated in numer­ous contests, and never more engaging than in his kindred flare-ups with the princely Wardell Gray, a perfect Lestorian foil, gently lyrical but no less swinging and sure. …

Gordon was an honest and genuinely original artist of deep and abiding humor and of tremendous personal charm. He imparted his personal characteristics to his music — size, radiance, kindness, a genius for dis­continuous logic. Consider his trademark musical quotations—snippets from other songs woven into the songs he is playing. Some, surely, were calculated. But not all and probably not many, for they are too subtle and too supple. They fold into his solos like spectral glimpses of an alternative universe in which all of Tin Pan Alley is one infinite song. That so many of the quotations seem verbally relevant I attribute to Gordon's reflexive stream-of-consciousness and prodigious memory for lyrics. I cannot imagine him planning apposite [apt in the circumstances] quotations.”

- Gary Giddins

“Chuck Berg [Downbeat Magazine, February 10, 1977: There's one thing that especial­ly impressed Sonny Rollins and which has always intrigued me. That is the way you lay back on the melody or phrase just a bit behind the beat. Instead of being right on top of the beat with a metrical approach like Sonny Stitt and a lot of the great white tenor play­ers, you just pull back. In the process there are interesting tensions that develop in your music. How did that come about?

Dexter Gordon: Yeah. I've been told that I do that. I'm not really that conscious of it. I think I more or less got it from Lester because I didn't play right on top. He was always a little back, I think. That's the way I felt it, you know, and so it just happened that way. These things are not really thought out. It's what you hear and the way you hear it.”

“ON NOVEMBER 7, 1960, DEXTER GORDON signed with Blue Note Records in what was to become one of his most successful relationships with a record company both musically and personally. Until February 8, 1967, Dexter kept in touch with Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff by letter and card. The following examples from their correspondence give some idea of the involvement of Dexter in his recordings and of Alfred and Frank with Dexter as an artist and as a friend.”

- Maxine Gordon

“April 26, 1961 Dear Dexter,

It was nice talking to you yesterday on the phone. I'll send you the airplane ticket by the end of this week along with exact instructions as to the hotel you'll be staying at, etc. You have to be in New York by Wednesday afternoon or evening. As I explained to you on the phone, I would like to make two sessions. The first one I have planned for Saturday afternoon, May 6th with Horace Parian, piano, George Tucker, bass and Al Harewood, drums. This rhythm section has been working steadily with Lou Donaldson, and, lately, with tenor player Booker Ervin. I have an idea that this will work pretty smoothly as I told you on the phone. I don't want any complicated music; but rather some good standards in medium, medium-bright and medium-bounce tempos. This, of course, should also cover some blues. A slow, walking ballad should also be considered. I think we should keep away from real fast tempos this first one. I would rather emphasize a good standard, played in the right tempo and delivered in a soulful manner, more so than displaying a lot of technique. I'd like to make something that can be enjoyed and played on jukeboxes stationed in the soul spots throughout the nation, I think you know what I mean.

The second session, which I have planned for Tuesday evening, May 9th, should consist of another rhythm section. Let's see who will be available when you come in. I have Kenny Drew in mind, and maybe a trumpet, Freddie Hubbard, if he's in town. Bring along as much material, including your originals, as you can; and dig into your bag of standards that lay well with you. You might have a few that have not been over recorded lately. I'll do the same on my end here. So the next letter you receive from me will contain your airplane ticket and instructions in regard to the hotel in New York, etc. With best personal regards,

- Alfred Lion”

Dexter Gordon: Doin’ Allright [Blue Note CDP 784077 2]

Dating back to tenor saxophonist Coleman’s Hawkins’ 1939 virtuoso performance of Body and Soul, the instrument had become almost synonymous with Jazz. Along with Louis Armstrong’s earlier stylings on the trumpet, these two B-flat concert key instruments became the front line foundations of most modern Jazz combos in the 1950s and 60s.

The more widely recognized exponents of the instrument during this phase of Jazz’s development were John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz.

Almost forgotten among a plethora of talented “big horn” players during this period was the huge sound, melodic inventiveness and powerful, pulsating rhythmic phrasing of Dexter Gordon [Sadly, Hank Mobley also falls into this category, although in his case it was more a question of being overlooked].

Thanks to Blue Note’s owners, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the operative term in this dynamic was “almost.”

Here’s Ira Gitler notes to the first of Dexter’s Blue Note LPs - 

DEXTER GORDON —there is a name to conjure with. Veteran listeners will certainly remember him but younger fans probably will not although he was intermittently active during the '50s.To musicians (especially those saxophonists who have been directly or indirectly influenced by him). Dexter Gordon has always been a highly important player. As the first man to synthesize the Young, Hawkins and Parker strains in translating the bop idiom to the tenor saxophone, he was an important contributor. It is not, however, from a stylistic, historical angle that he has been appreciated. Dexter has always been a direct, exciting communicator of emotions; his big sound and declarative attack are as commanding of attention as his imposing height.

The owner of an acute harmonic sense, Gordon has never used it to merely run changes accurately. He is a melodist and can also contrast rhythmic figures effectively. His harmonic awareness was a great aid in preparing him to plunge into the new music that was fermenting in the early '40s. Unlike many of his immediate contemporaries, Gordon studied harmony and theory at the age of 13, the same time he took up the clarinet. Due to this, he was able to actively incorporate the beneficial effects directly into his playing as he was growing up. At 15, he started playing alto sax and two years later, in 1940, he quit school, switched to tenor sax and joined the "Harlem Collegians" in his native Los Angeles. From this local band he stepped into Lionel Hamptons aggregation in December 1940 and remained with Hamp through 1943. Illinois Jacquet was the principal tenorman and together they were featured on Pork Chops."lt was about the only thing I had to play," says Dexter.

After leaving Hampton, he returned to Los Angeles where he played with the groups of Lee Young (Lester Young's drumming brother) and Jesse Price. For six months in 1944, Dexter worked with Louis Armstrong's band. Then he joined Billy Eckstine's new orchestra and received a real chance to be heard: the tenor battle with Gene Ammons on Blowin' the Blues Away; his own bits on Lonesome Lover Blues and several of the modern jazz instrumental that the band played.

Gordon's impact was immediate. You could hear it in the work of his section-mate, Ammons. When he left Eckstine for New York's 52nd Street in 1945, his influence spread like the ripples a large rock makes when it is dropped into a pool of water. Allen Eager's first quartet recordings (Booby Hatch, Rampage) showed that he was listening and Stan Getz was captured temporarily according to such sides as Opus de Bop and Running Water. Of course, like Gordon, these players had been affected by Lester Young, but it seemed that in addition to getting inspiration directly from Pres, they were digging the Gordon translation, too. If a 12-inch, Mercury 78 rpm of Rosetta and I’ve Found a New Baby, cut with Harry Edison, demonstrated that Dexter could get very close to Young, the original version of Groovin' High, made with Dizzy Gillespie for Guild in February of 1945, showed a Gordon who had his own interpretation of the day's material.

Gordon worked at the Spotlite Club with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Bud Powell and then had his own group at the Three Deuces. The weekly Sunday afternoon sessions at the Fraternal Clubhouse and Lincoln Square Center usually included Dex as part of their all-star line-ups. His presence, before he even blew a note, always had an electric effect on the audience.

Gordon returned to the West Coast in the summer of 1946 but not before he had made several recordings with his own groups. He played for two months in Hawaii with Cee Pee Johnson. Then, in California, in the summer of 1947, he and Warded Gray teamed up at concerts, after-hours sessions and for their recording of The Chase. Later that year, it was back to New York and 52nd Street for Gordon but in 1948, he went home again, not to return to Manhattan until the May 1961 trip to record for Blue Note. He revived his association with Gray in 1950 but that soon ended and the next decade was not a very productive one for Dexter. The popularity of "West Coast" jazz left little opportunity for his brand of virile music to be heard in Southern California. Then, too, he was fighting personal demons. In the last five years of the '50s, he made only three record dates (two as leader) and worked sporadically in a small group context.

The '60s are a decade of new promise for Gordon. Through playwright Carl Thaler, he became involved in the West Coast version of Jack Gelber's The Connection. He composed an original score, led the quartet that played it on stage and held down a main speaking role. His success gave him a new confidence and led to a general revitalization.

Although his presence has not been directly felt on the jazz scene as a whole in a long time. Dexter has been with us. in part, through the work of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, two of the most important instrumentalists to develop in the '50s. Both owe a debt to Gordon for helping them to form their now highly personal styles. It is interesting to hear how Gordon, in turn, has now picked up on developments brought about by the men he originally influenced. Make no mistake, however, about Dexter. He is still very much his own man. His great inner power stands out in these recordings. He breathes maturity in every phrase he plays, his gigantic sound living up to the kind of musical voice one would expect from a person of his god-like dimensions.

A musician of Gordon’s reputation (particularly in the special setting of this recording), playing at the top of his game, will always inspire the men around him to do their best. Here, young Freddie Hubbard, impressive as he has been on Blue Note in the past, adds new, thoughtful qualities to his brassy fire. That this was no ordinary date is evident in every microgroove.

The rhythm section plays for Dexter, seeming to sense what he wants, following his lead yet never lagging. These three are no strangers to Blue Noters. As the Horace Parlan trio or as 3/5 of the Horace Parlan quintet (with the Turrentine brothers as the horns), they have made several swinging LPs. Presently, they are appearing around New York with tenorman Booker Ervin under the title, The Playhouse Four.

George Gershwin's I Was Doing All Right, the opener and title tune, is stated in a full-toned manner by Gordon at a loping medium tempo. He eases into his unhurried solo with a couple of bows to his old buddy Wardell Gray. Logic, warmth and melody abound. Hubbard plays beautifully and pensively, putting one in mind of Clifford Brown and some of Miles Davis' early '50s thinking. Parlan picks up the mood and spins out his solo in an equally relaxed, thoughtful way, ending with some perfumed chords.

The way he handles a ballad is one good indicator of a musician's depth. Dexter's You've Changed is a gorgeous piece of meaningful horn-singing by a man who knows what it's all about. Some of the lower register tones remind me of Don Byas, another old Gordon colleague (52nd Street vintage) who influenced quite a few people himself. The upper register and the story told are unmistakably Gordon. Hubbard is inspired again to play a poignant albeit short bit. Parian's even shorter interlude leads back to Gordons tender conclusion. Billie Holiday couldn't have done it any better herself.

For Regulars Only is a Gordon original with a catchy, contrasting theme. Dexter masterfully demonstrates how to build a solo, climbing up the thermometer, chorus after chorus, until his last one satisfies completely. Hubbard cooks in a brief solo; Parian alternates his stint between single-line and chords.

A marching, skipping, funky blues is Gordon's Society Red. It settles into a steady 4/4 as Hubbard takes an opening solo that beats things up with leaping rhythmic figures and a brightly burning flame of a sound. Again, Gordon builds to a point of climax. Here he does it more slowly than in For Regulars Only, spreading his expansive tone over a longer period of time. Parlan's single-line leads into a blue chordal exploration before George Tucker plucks his only lengthy solo of the set.

It's You or No One finds Dexter ascending to the upper reaches of his horn, alternating swift flights with rhythmic punching. Freddie is fleet but with underlying substance. After Horace's solo. Tucker walks and Harewood talks as they weave in and out of the ensemble.

All in all. Dexter Gordon's trip to New York was very fruitful. He renewed old acquaintances, made some new friends, bought a couple of groovy suits at a Broadway clothier and began an association with Blue Note that should prove to be mutually significant.

Dexter Gordon is a big man physically and musically. This album is representative of that kind of size.”

- IRA GITLER

Note: Supported by Freddie Hubbard and the Horace Parlan trio. Dexter Gordon began his association with Blue Note with this session, which quickly rekindled his career and ended an eight-year lull. As well as two magnificent readings on standards, it introduced two of his finest and most lasting compositions "For Regulars Only" and "Society Red” which found new life in the film ROUND MIDNIGHT. For this Compact Disc, an alternate take of "For Regulars Only" and another Dexter tune "I Want More” both previously unissued, have been added. Dexter would recut and release “I Want More" on his next Blue Note album DEXTER CALLING.

- MICHAEL CUSCUNA

Dan Morgenstern Sessions Notes from the Boxed Set Booklet -

(A) MAY 6,1961

“For his first Blue Note session, Dexter Gordon is supported by a working rhythm section and a rising young trumpet star. 

Pianist Horace Parlan, bassist George Tucker and drummer Al Harewood were three-fourths of The Playhouse Four, named for Minton's Playhouse, the once-famed Harlem nightclub where (with tenorman Booker Ervin) they were ensconced as the house band. Parlan, born in Pittsburgh in 1931, started on piano at 12 and wasn't deterred when stricken with polio—he merely compensated for an impaired right hand by developing an exceptionally strong left. A professional from 1952, he first gained notice with Charles Mingus's Workshop (1957-9) and had also worked with Lou Donaldson, the tenor team of Lockjaw Davis and Johnny Griffin, and the Turrentine brothers. (He settled in Denmark in 1973 where he was reunited with Dexter.) 

Tucker, born in Florida in 1927, had come to New York at 20 to study music at Julliard; turning pro, he worked with saxophonists Earl Bostic, Sonny Stitt and Jackie McLean and was in the house rhythm section at Brooklyn's Continental Club prior to hooking up with Parian. His sudden death of a heart attack in 1965 was a great loss. 

Harewood, born in New York City in 1923, first came into view in 1954 with J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding and subsequently worked with Gigi Gryce, Gene Ammons and David Amram; later associations included Stan Getz and Benny Carter. 

Freddie Hubbard, born in Indianapolis in 1938, had early classical training, hooked up with boyhood friends James Spaulding and Larry Ridley in his first working group, came to New York in 1960, and soon found himself in demand. Though he'd already participated in Ornette Coleman's landmark avant garde recording "Free Jazz" and worked with Eric Dolphy, his orientation was essentially straight ahead and 1961 was also the year in which he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

Oscar Peterson - In The Black Forest [From the Archives]

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

Oscar Peterson's contract with Verve ran out in 1964 and he left the company. He signed with Limelight, a new subsidiary of Mercury that would prove to be desultory and ineffectual and eventually was closed down. The Limelight albums are not rated among his best, although one is notable as his first substantial venture as a composer. This was The Canadiana Suite which the editorial staff at JazzProfiles covered in a previous feature.

I had been a long-time admirer of Oscar and his prodigious technique, but frankly, he put out so many LP’s during his association with Norman Granz’s Verve label that I began to hear a certain sameness in his playing despite the thematic context.

In a way, I had the feeling that Oscar was a victim of his own success and I began to view him as a musician who had stopped growing as an artist.

The best description of Oscar’s plight was contained in a piece that appeared in The Times on London, May 11, 1970, in which Max Harrison wrote that, after the Carnegie Hall concert of 1949, “in terms of fame and fortune he never looked back: he toured the world and made far too many LPs. Indeed, musically he seemed never to look forward. He traded in the dullest sort of virtuosity - keyboard mobility as an end in itself, the effect frantic but uncommitted. That was sufficient to enthral an international audience, yet gradually the cognoscenti gave Peterson up, and I recall describing him, in Jazz Monthly a decade ago, as 'the biggest bore in jazz.'”

And yet, in the late 1960s, I had a number of piano playing friends who assured me that Oscar was really a different pianist than the one who was making LP’s by the fistful for Norman Granz and that what he really had to offer was being put on display in a series of six recordings that he made for the MPS label which was based in Germany one of which was entitled - The Way I Really Play! [The exclamation point is mine.]

I sought out these LP’s and after listening to them, it didn’t take me long to agree that there was indeed another Oscar Peterson, one who seemed to perform differently when he was doing so - Exclusively For My Friends - which is the title of the 4 CD set of the MPS albums that was issued by Verve in 1992 [314 513 830-2]

Gene Lees describes the background of how this music came about and explains the circumstances that helped create a startlingly different Oscar Peterson than the one that had been “mailing it in” at the end of his Verve relationship with Norman Granz [Granz had sold the label to MGM in 1962].

“For some time Oscar had been playing a series of private parties for a German millionaire. They would eventuate in some of the most acclaimed albums of his career - indeed, Richard Palmer would write, "some of the most remarkable recordings in jazz history." These included his first important solo albums.

Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer's grandfather was a small businessman named Hermann Schwer, who manufactured bicycle bells in the Black Forest - Schwarzwald, in German - in the late nineteenth century. During the pioneering days of radio broadcasting, he began manufacturing receivers. The business grew.

Schwer had no sons to whom he could leave his business. He had only a daughter, Gretl, and she disappointed him when she married. She chose a musician, a symphony conductor named Brunner, who had been a classmate and friend of Herbert von Karajan. Brunner lived just long enough to father two sons, Hans Georg, born a little less than two years after Oscar Peterson, on July 21,1927, and Herman, who arrived two years later. His widow married a career army officer named Ernst Scherb.

Schwer's company was SABA, the acronym of a much longer name. Its factories were in the lovely little Schwarzwald city of Villingen, not far from the Swiss border. The surrounding folded hills are covered with steep-sloping farms and deep pine forests. In the 19308, SABA patented an automatic tuning device that locks a radio to a frequency, eliminating drift. It is still in use, though the patent has long since expired. SABA grew to be a major manufacturer of radio receivers. When World War Two arrived, the company was impressed into military manufacturing and prospered -until the Allied air forces put the small industries of Villingen, SABA among them, on their target list. They destroyed the SABA facilities.

With the defeat of Germany in 1945, Villingen fell into the French zone of occupation. The French commandant appropriated the finest home in the community for himself- the Brunner-Schwer house built by the grandfather and standing next to the ruined SABA works. The teen-aged boys, Hans Georg and Herman, and Gretl, their mother, were moved into the chauffeur's cottage. By then the grandfather was dead, and they, along with their mother, had inherited the estate, its lands, and what was left of SABA.

Stepfather Ernst Scherb, who had been captured on the eastern front, was at last released by the Russians, returned, and took over the reorganization of SABA, which he carried out with military discipline and clarity. In the meantime the French returned the home to its owners. Scherb decided the two boys should be trained to direct the company. Herman was a brilliant student who was chosen to run the business side of SABA. He obtained an MBA degree. Hans Georg was an indifferent student - in the formal sense at least - with a brilliant flair for those technical fields that interested him. He was elected to run the engineering and manufacturing side of the company.

Hans Georg had inherited from his father more than the love of music. Like the father - and like Oscar Peterson - he had the odd gift of absolute pitch. Again like Oscar, he was big, and he liked big things. He began collecting and restoring classic automobiles made by the now-dismantled Maybach company; some of his restorations are worth as much as half a million dollars. And Hans Georg built up, of all strange things, the world's largest collection of air-raid sirens, indicative of his intense interest in sound.

Hans Georg had learned to play accordion, then piano. Herman Brunner-Schwer, an enthusiastic soccer player, liked to associate with athletes; Hans Georg preferred the company of musicians and sound engineers. He knew the owner of the Berlin company that manufactured the excellent Neumann microphones, and people at Telefunken, as well as the manufacturers of the most sophisticated loudspeakers and recording equipment. He designed and installed on the third floor of his home at Villingen one of the most advanced recording studios in the world.

An associate put it this way: "Hans Georg loved sounds that matched his personality, full and deep, going down if possible to ten cycles and up to twenty thousand cycles. Commercially, these things were not available, but he was striving to achieve them."

The human ear cannot hear frequencies as low as ten cycles, but the body can feel them. And whereas the ear cannot hear higher than about fifteen thousand cycles - and many people can't hear even that far up the sound spectrum - the upper partials, as they are called, of sounds, which are in the very high frequencies, determine the timbres, the characteristic colours, of instruments.

Brunner-Schwer experimented with his advanced studio by recording German folk musicians from the Schwarzwald. But his deepest musical passion was for American bands of the swing era. Despite Hitler's formal proscription of jazz as "decadent Negroid Jewish music" - many musicians were sent off to concentration camps and eventually gas chambers for playing it - thousands of Germans nursed a secret love for the music and listened to caches of pre-war records or to the BBC from London, on whose signal they could hear Glenn Miller's air force band. Brunner-Schwer was one of these listeners.

In 1962, the Brunner-Schwer brothers began an association with a business consultant named Baldhard G. Falk, who had emigrated to the United States after gaining his doctorate in economics from the Free University in Berlin in 1951 and lived in San Francisco. Falk says the name Baldhard, drawn from Norse mythology and then misspelled on his birth certificate, is almost as odd in German as it is to the ear of the English-speaking, and even his American wife calls him BF.

Falk cleared up a business problem in the United States for SABA and the Brunner-Schwer family, after which he became their American business agent. A tall, fair-haired, humorous Prussian of considerable personal charm, Falk got along well with Hans Georg. For one thing, he too was a jazz fan. Once during the war, he was almost arrested for playing The Lambeth Walk outdoors on a wind-up gramophone. "And that," he said with a chuckle, "wasn't even jazz."

One of Hans Georg's early musical assignments for Falk was to find the American jazz accordionist Art Van Damme, whom Brunner-Schwer, an accordionist, considered one of the greatest players of the instrument in the world, and have him go to Villingen to record.

In the last days of the Ray Brown-Ed Thigpen edition of the trio, Oscar was invited to perform in a paid engagement for a small group of Brunner-Schwer's friends. From that point on, he would go to Villingen at least once a year to play under exquisite circumstances for Brunner-Schwer. The audiences were small, no more than twenty or twenty-five persons, and raptly attentive. "They were really only props," Falk said with a smile. "I don't think Hans Georg cared whether they were there or not."

These parties were reminiscent of the nineteenth-century salon gatherings at which Chopin and Liszt were heard to advantage. The Brunner-Schwer house is in the midst of two and a half acres of groomed gardens. Musicians stayed as guests of the family in the home, which has a huge entrance foyer, a sweeping curved stairway, and wooden detailing hand-carved in the last century by Schwarzwald craftsmen. The parties were superbly catered by the staff of the Schwarzwald Hotel Konigsfeld.

Brunner-Schwer was never present except at the start of these recitals. He would first set his microphones, then go up to his recording equipment in a studio under the mansard roof, watching the performance on a television monitor. More perfect circumstances in which to make music would be difficult to imagine, and every musician who ever performed for Brunner-Schwer came away vaguely dazed by the pleasure of the experience. Sometimes there was no party at all: Oscar would sit at the piano in shirt sleeves, as at home, and muse pensively on the instrument while Hans Georg, unseen and for the instant forgotten, captured these reflections on tape.

A friendship developed between Brunner-Schwer and Oscar Peterson, despite the fact that Hans Georg spoke almost no English, although such was the perfection of his ear that the few words he did command were pronounced so well that one was deceived into assuming he spoke it fluently. But Baldhard Falk, when he flew in from San Francisco, or Brunner-Schwer's wife, Marlies, would translate for them. Both Oscar and Hans Georg, Falk points out, were physically big men, and they shared several passions - for jazz, for the piano, for advanced technology, and for sound.

Oscar was fascinated by everything about Brunner-Schwer's equipment and use of it, including the radical (for the time) way he miked a piano. He used, at least in the early days, two microphones, usually Neumanns, placed inside the instrument and so close to the strings that they were almost touching; a much more distant mike placement was usual at the time. Some of the microphones, in fact, were prototypes Brunner-Schwer had borrowed from their inventors before they were even marketed commercially. And the piano itself was superb, a full nine-foot concert grand, a German Steinway. The German-made Steinways were rated much more highly by pianists than the American-made instruments.

Because of the power of his technique, Oscar dislikes pianos with light actions, and the action of Brunner-Schwer's Steinway was crisp and strong. After the salon recitals, when the guests were gone, Oscar and Brunner-Schwer would listen to the tapes, and Oscar would shake his head and tell his wife Sandy and anyone else who was there that no one had ever captured his sound the way Hans Georg did. And it seemed that these tapes were destined to languish unheard by the world, like Gerry Macdonald's tapes of the trio with Herb Ellis. SABA was by now marketing high-fidelity equipment with capacities that exceeded the quality of available commercial recordings.

Hans Georg had gone into the recording business in a limited way, setting up the SABA label, on which he issued his Art Van Damme and other recordings, a total of forty albums sold through equipment dealers in Germany. The Oscar Peterson tapes could not be issued because Oscar was under contract to Limelight, and there was no plan to issue them, although they were far superior to the Limelight albums.

SABA continued to grow throughout the 1960s, finally reaching the point where it had to be refinanced or sold. The Brunner-Schwer family decided to sell and considered offers from several companies. Falk - after long and complex negotiations - finally made a deal with the American company General Telephone and Electronics. GTE acquired SABA but Hans Georg retained the music division, including the inventory of tapes. At this point Hans Georg decided to go fully into the record business, marketing his material through his MPS label - Musik Produktion Schwarzwald. He thought that nothing could announce his entry into the business with as much eclat as the Peterson material. And Oscar's Mercury contract had elapsed.

Falk flew in for Brunner-Schwer's 1968 Oscar Peterson house party. Oscar and Hans Georg listened to hours of the tapes they had accumulated, selecting not the best of the material but the best that was not covered by the Mercury contract. Recording contracts specify that the artist cannot re-record material for a certain period, usually five years. None of the tunes recorded for Limelight could be issued in an MPS version. Oscar called Norman Granz to discuss possible release of the material by MPS. Falk, whose fluent English was one of his important business assets to Brunner-Schwer, spoke to Granz, who named a price to which Hans Georg agreed, and, that being done, Granz sent them a contract.

"It was the shortest contract I have ever seen," Falk said. "Only a page and a half long. It was a world-wide contract for release of four albums by Oscar, for a lump sum and royalties. So MPS started with that, those four albums. Hans Georg got his money from GTE for SABA and started investing heavily in music and hiring salesmen. It was at that time that we met you in New York." So it was. Oscar returned from West Germany in 1968 with test pressings of the first albums. Falk and Hans Georg flew to New York. Oscar called me. Given his developed skill at hiding his emotions, I was surprised at the enthusiasm in his voice.

Oscar had told me on several occasions that his best playing had been done in private. I had heard him play with a wonderful muted pensiveness, and nothing on record - even the London House records themselves - equaled what I used to hear in the late-night sets at the London House.

So when Oscar told me that he believed these German recordings were the best he had ever made, my eyebrows rose. He said he wanted me to write liner notes for at least two of the albums, both containing only solo performances. For now, he wanted me to meet the company's owner and his consultant in the United States. "The owner," he said, "is Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, and his associate is - you're not gonna believe this name - Baldhard G. Falk." In the argot of jazz, Baldhard is slightly salacious.

I met Oscar, Brunner-Schwer, and Falk for lunch at the Carlisle Hotel, after which Hans Georg and BF, as I was learning to call him, repaired to my apartment to listen to the pressings. I remember being astonished by the recordings. I told Oscar, "This is the way you really play," and one of the albums was titled The Way I Really Play. In the days after that, I played the albums for various jazz musicians, who agreed that these were the best Peterson recordings they had heard. By then Oscar had left New York to tell interviewers in various places that he thought the MPS recordings were his best.

And critics were soon agreeing with him, including some who had been among his skeptical listeners. In The Times of London, May 11, 1970, Max Harrison wrote that, after the Carnegie Hall concert of 1949, "in terms of fame and fortune he never looked back: he toured the world and made far too many LPs. Indeed, musically he seemed never to look forward. He traded in the dullest sort of virtuosity - keyboard mobility as an end in itself, the effect frantic but uncommitted. That was sufficient to enthrall an international audience, yet gradually the cognoscenti gave Peterson up, and I recall describing him, in Jazz Monthly a decade ago, as 'the biggest bore in jazz.' Always there were a few people, chiefly jazz pianists, who stubbornly maintained that in private he played in a manner which flatly contradicted his public image, but evidence was lacking and we never believed them.

"Peterson's apparent satisfaction with his easy successes confirmed such incredulity, yet between 1963 and 1968, when pausing from his travels, he was recording, almost secretly, at Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer's Villingen studio in the Black Forest. As never before, Peterson had sole charge of repertoire, tape-editing, etc., and many performances accumulated over those years were rejected. The survivors amount to about 170 minutes' jazz, however, and show him in so new a light as to compel reassessment. Earlier, irrespective of his material's character, Peterson strung together quite mechanical pianistic devices, the detritus, it sounded, of a thousand half-hearted improvisations, but here, as, say, the compact exploration of Perdido shows, spontaneity is balanced with the fruits of long consideration. These 26 treatments last from two minutes to over a quarter of an hour and always the length feels exactly appropriate. They are, in fact, substantially different one from another, and as the contrast between Little Girl Blue's velvety quiet and the bouncing gaiety encapsulated in Lulu’s Back in Town proves, the range of expression is wider than on all Peterson's other discs together....

"To hear Peterson's I'm in the Mood for Love pass from sombre opening chords through increasing but always cogent elaboration to its churning double-tempo climax is like watching the speeded-up growth of a natural organism, and the transmutation process whereby so much is drawn from so bad a tune is inexplicable....

"[Oscar Peterson] is, indeed, a conservative, a rare type in this music, but he has learnt one of Tatum's main lessons well, for, as the lithe, bounding phrases of Foggy Day or Sandy's Blues show, in his best moments decoration assumes a functional role and so is no longer decoration, ornament becomes integral to the processes of development."

Two years later, when My Favorite Instrument - one of the two solo albums for which I had written the notes - came out in England, Harrison wrote in Jazz Monthly, "It is a luxury to be able to indulge in a categorical statement for once, and to assert that this is the best record Peterson ever made. Of course, the sleeve note gets too excited and says he is better than Tatum" - the barb's aimed at me - "although even an offhand comparison between this version of Someone to Watch Over Me, described as a tribute to the older man, with the master's own performance of this piece reveals a considerable difference in executive refinement, and further listening uncovers the more concise yet more subtle structure of Tatum's reading. Such claims on Peterson's behalf are futile, but it is important to define just what his musical and pianistic achievements are.

"He is not original. Unlike, say, a James P. Johnson or a Cecil Taylor, there is very little in his music that can be isolated as being his alone. Peterson's strongest suit is his knowledge. He has learnt every procedure that has occurred in piano jazz up to his time and uses them in his own way. Put something in a new context and it can take on a fresh meaning: what is personal in [these] performances is not the musical and pianistic elements of which they consist but the particular way these are put together. Peterson's other point, obviously, is a technique which, unlike the techniques of most jazz pianists, has been systematically developed in all areas. This accounts not only for the feeling of completeness which all these improvisations convey despite their diversity of musical character, but also for his powers as a soloist: what Peterson does share with Tatum is that, contrary to popular superstition, he has no need of bassist or drummer. This is confirmed by the above program's freedom from that mechanical aspect which makes so many of his trio performances infuriating, and this in turn is underlined by such factors as that each track seems exactly the right length - two minutes is just right for Lulu, as are six for Little Girl Blue. And from none of the editions of his trio have we often encountered, say, the mood of wistfulness that sounds through Bye Bye, Blackbird or the lyricism of I Should Care.

"That Peterson's stance is essentially retrospective is shown by such things as the music's rhythmic vocabulary, as on Perdido. But notice that he displays a far better sense of dynamics here than we should ever suspect from his trio recordings, and that he makes a use of the bottom register superior to that of almost any other jazz pianist. The integration of bravura into the overall shape of Body and Soul is fine, too, even if it lacks the continuity which (no matter how often he is accused of not having it) is one of Tatum's most conspicuous qualities. Hear also the internal balance of the chords in Who?, the depth and warmth of tone - all taken for granted by non-pianistic listeners but none of them easy to achieve. Perhaps Little Girl Blue is Peterson's best recorded performance: its velvety quiet follows most tellingly on Lulu’s brief yet bouncing gaiety, and while nobody would claim for him the depth of Powell or Yancey, this music is more than merely pensive.

"Here, I am sure, is the one Peterson LP that should be in every collection."

The first four MPS albums were not only a critical success, they sold well in Europe, particularly West Germany.

Brunner-Schwer made two more albums with Oscar and then suggested a more formal and planned contractual arrangement. In view of the expansion of MPS, Norman Granz negotiated a contract calling for higher fees. And he suggested that for the first album, Oscar be recorded with a large orchestra, including strings. Oscar had made only one other album of that kind, a somewhat abortive and forgotten Verve recording with Nelson Riddle. Granz suggested that the arranger be Claus Ogerman, and Hans Georg immediately agreed. Ogerman - like Falk a Prussian by birth - was a far different arranger from Riddle. A former jazz pianist himself, he had revealed, in albums made for Creed Taylor at Verve after Granz sold it, deep sensitivity for soloists in albums with Bill Evans and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Ogerman had a distinctive gift for writing string arrangements of a curiously austere lyricism that somehow enhanced but did not interfere with the featured player. Granz suggested that the album be made in New York, and since Ogerman then lived there, it was a sensible arrangement, to which Brunner-Schwer agreed.

The session was set for the A&R recording studio, one of the best and best-known in New York. Oscar at that time was a contracted Baldwin artist. In exchange for the endorsement of their instruments by major artists, which they are able to use in their advertising, piano companies provide instruments on command for the engagements of their contracted artists in various locations. Steinway was noted for its indifference to endorsements; Baldwin sought them sedulously. And when Oscar arrived in a city, he had only to pick out a Baldwin he liked and the company would send him the instrument.

But the concert grand Baldwin he chose for the album with Ogerman for some reason could not be used, and Oscar confronted a studio piano he found inadequate - "I don't like the box," as he put it. He declined to record on it. Brunner-Schwer faced a dilemma. He had committed substantial funds to this recording, including Ogerman's arranging and conducting fees, the cost of the A&R studio, and the salaries of the musicians who sat there waiting, and would be paid whether they played or not. He made a decision: to record the orchestra now and to overdub Oscar's part in Villingen on the piano Oscar liked. Oscar instantly agreed, the session proceeded, and he completed the album later in Villingen. The album, Motions and Emotions, is a lovely piece of work. It would be described by some jazz critics as a pop album, but the definition is irrelevant. Oscar plays an extended embellishment of Jobim's Wave that is breath-taking.

Oscar made in all fifteen albums for MPS. The concepts for them were planned and prepared, often in conversations with Brunner-Schwer. One of them was a quartet album with Bob Durham on drums' and Sam Jones on bass - and guitarist Herb Ellis. It was called Hello, Herbie, the first words Oscar said when his old friend arrived from California for the sessions. Another was an album called In Tune, with the brilliant vocal group known as The Singers Unlimited, which Oscar had brought to the attention of Brunner-Schwer. Led by Gene Puerling, the group's arranger, and with the young Chicago studio singer Bonnie Herman as the lead voice, the group made elaborate orchestrational albums by complex overdubbing of the four voices. Bonnie Herman vividly remembers the sessions. By then Brunner-Schwer had built a new studio on the property, installing therein a Boesendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. It was there, in fact, that Oscar became familiar with the Boesendorfer, which instrument he would embrace. "You could look out the window when you were recording," Bonnie said. "You'd see all the gardeners working, and the paths leading from the main house, lined with roses. And every morning there was the smell of fresh-ground coffee. Marlies, Hans Georg's wife, would make us fresh-ground coffee."

The last recording for Brunner-Schwer, a trio album with Niels-Henning 0rsted Pedersen on bass, was made in the spring of 1972. Norman Granz had returned actively to the record business, with the Pablo label - named for Picasso - in Beverly Hills. Oscar became a contracted Pablo artist, doing all his recording from then until 1986 for that company.

Oscar told the French writer Francois Postif in an interview published in Le Jazz Hot in April 1973, "I've never counted the number of albums that have come out under my name or under that of my trio, but I think it has to be about 60 now. And I made lots of albums with other artists, like Dizzy and Roy. But I think the best album I've ever recorded was the first solo album for MPS." He was referring to My Favorite Instrument. "Perhaps it was because it was the first album where I was completely free, and in which I did what I felt like. I chose the tempos, the keys I wanted to play in, if I wanted to change keys in the middle of a tune, there was no problem, because I was alone at the piano, alone with no one to give me problems."

It is a wistful statement. "Wistful" is the word his nemesis, Max Harrison, used to describe his performance of Bye-Bye Blackbird in the Villingen recordings. Harrison said of the first Schwarzwald albums: "It would be ridiculous to sound a valedictory note on a man of 45, yet it is through such music that Peterson will be remembered."

The great improvisers of the past, Chopin and Liszt among them, had only one way to leave their music for posterity: to write it down on paper. But the jazz improviser can leave his actual performances, and his recordings are his legacy. It is not coincidence that jazz evolved coeval with the development of recording technology.

Those MPS recordings, the sound quality of which was the state of the art at the time, are so important a part of the Peterson body of work that one is forced to ask, what happened there in the Schwarzwald?

For one thing, the man who once made ten albums in a week in Chicago recorded only fifteen albums in Villingen in eleven years, and mostly under ideal conditions.

Oscar Peterson is quite possibly the bravest man I have ever known. Challenge him, and he will respond. If it's a drunk in the London House or the Hong Kong bar who is distracting him, he will simply put on the pressure until he has conquered both the distraction and the distractor. If bravura display is all that will reach the back of a huge concert hall, that will be what he does. He simply will not surrender.

But at Villingen, with the roses in the garden and the smell of coffee in the morning, he had no need to command or demand respect: he already had it, had indeed the adoration of the people around him.

Jack Batten described one of Oscar's appearances in Toronto. "Peterson," he wrote in Maclean's (April 17, 1965), "was introduced to the Massey Hall audience with a lavish encomium by a local disc jockey, and the crowd - the house had been sold out two days earlier - hailed him long and vigorously as he walked onstage, a huge coffee-colored man of bearish contour, resplendent in a modish jet tuxedo and laceless patent-leather shoes. His hands and wrists dazzled with gold - gold cufflinks, gold wristwatch band, gold identification bracelet, and large beveled gold wedding band on his left hand."

The identification bracelet was the one Fred Astaire had given him.

What happened at Villingen?

Nothing had to be conquered. The gold, as it were, came off, the patent-leather shoes were slipped aside. There in the Black Forest the shy and sensitive boy from Montreal High School sat down at a Steinway and played Bye-Bye Blackbird.”

The following video features Oscar along with Sam Jones on bass and Bobby Durham on drums performing a rather incredible version of Horace Silver’s Nica’s Dream. To my ears, this is a side of Oscar that was seldom heard up to the time of the MPS LP’s [c. 1965-1972] and rarely heard after their issuance when Oscar was again returned to recording for Norman Granz after he formed Pablo Records.