Jimmy Giuffre - The Quiet Man

Saddened by the recent passing of Jimmy Giuffre, the editorial staff of Jazzprofiles thought it appropriate to pause in its preparation of other articles for the site and to offer a celebration of his memory by making available to its readers these exquisite insert notes that Mr. Davis created for the Mosaic series [Jimmy Giuffre - The Complete Capitol and Atlantic Recordings MD6-176]. It has taken some liberties with the paragraphing.

These notes form a discourse on just how much thought Jimmy Giuffre put into his music, as well as, an indication of Mr. Davis’ thoughtful insights about Giuffre and how he created this music.

Given a long history of animosity between musicians and those who write about music (or merely write about it, as some musicians would say), I hope that Jimmy Giuffre won’t take my suggestion that he would have made an excellent jazz critic the wrong way.

I simply mean that during his most prolific period as a recording artist, beginning with the release of his first 10” LP for Capitol in 1954, Giuffre in interviews and liner notes provided his listeners with a running commentary on his motives and methods, revealing in the process a great deal of knowledge of such other disciplines as philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Reading Giuffre on Giuffre, a critic might despair, because this is one of the rare instances in which a performer has already been as fair and impartial a judge of his own successes and failures as anyone could hope to be.

(Especially for an artist as committed to public trial and error as Giuffre was during the period in which he recorded most frequently. There is also a sense in which a new piece of music can be heard as a critique of the work that came before it – yet another way in which Giuffre beat after-the-fact commentators like myself to the punch).

Best of all, despite seeming to rebuke the jazz rank-in-file of the 1950s for their conformist tendencies, Giuffre never lapsed into what I call the existential fallacy, that leap of hubris by which an artist (or for that matter, any individual) presumes that his new direction is one that everybody should follow.

In one of his earliest pronouncement – a Down Beat [November 30, 1955] article published under his byline in 1955, in which he explained his decision to limit the bass and drums on his controversial new album Tangents in Jazz [Capitol T-634] – he was careful to point out in his lead that he wasn’t trying to “preach a sermon” in order to bring the rest of Jazz into line. “It’s just one way,” he reiterated at the end, “and every man must go his own way.”

Giuffre gave the fullest explanation of his “way” of that time in the liner notes to Tangents in Jazz, answering a series of “leading questions” put to him by an unidentified interviewer (if not annotator Will MacFarland, then possibly Giuffre serving as his own devil’s advocate, a` la Edmund Wilson or Norman Mailer).

“What is this music?” Giuffre was asked.

His reply – “jazz, with a non-pulsating beat” – accurately describes not only Tangents in Jazz, but also the more experimental of his Capitol recordings of a year earlier and some of his atonal work of the same period with Shorty Rogers, Teddy Charles and Shelly Manne. It also applies to most of Giuffre’s subsequent recordings, including even so deceptively “conventional” an effort as his 1957 “cover” of Meredith Wilson’s score for The Music Man.

“The beat is implicit, Giuffre went on to explain, [I]n other words, acknowledged but unsounded. The two horns [in this case, Jack Sheldon on trumpet and Giuffre on clarinet, tenor or baritone] are the dominant but not domineering voices. [Ralph Pena’s] bass usually functions somewhat like a baritone sax. [Artie Anton’s] drums play an important but non-conflicting role ….

I’ve come to feel increasingly inhibited and frustrated by the insistent pounding of the rhythm section. With it, it’s impossible for the listener or the soloist to hear the horn’s true sound. I’ve come to believe, or [to] fully concentrate on the solo line. An imbalance of advances has moved the rhythm from a supportive to a competitive role ….

[T]o the degree that the beat was there to guide dancers, it is, of course, no longer necessary to concert jazz ….

Several of today’s writers have dropped sounded beat for contrast, but never for an entire work. I’ve written works completely lacking sounded beat, but the difference between this music and all previous work is the use of drums. My previous attempts at this approach, while achieving some of the clarity I sought, were always vaguely unsatisfactory to me until I realized the trouble: the drums, by their nature, cannot carry a simultaneous or overlapping line; when the drums is struck any other note is obliterated, and attention is torn away from any other line. In this music, the drum lines are integrated but isolated.”

That may be fine during written passages, Giuffre’s interlocutor challenged, but how can such “isolation” be guaranteed during improvised solos, where a drummer’s responses are impossible to predict?

“By writing rests in the ad lib parts [and] allowing the drums to fill,” Giuffre answered, in effect arguing that composition and improvisation could overlap - a notion that may have struck some listeners of 1955 as far more treasonous than dispensing with the beat, even though it summarizes a lot of Duke Ellington and is practically a truism for today’s jazz avant-garde. “Classical music, once the rhythm is stated, [assumes] the freedom to move unaccompanied, and if jazz is going to continue to grow, it needs this same freedom,” Giuffre insisted, acknowledging that by taking such a giant leap, he risked sacrificing a “large segment of the usual jazz audience.”

Giuffre ultimately did pay a price for his boldness, once going ten years between new releases (after Free Fall in 1963) and being omitted from most contemporary roll calls of the 1950s. Luckily, Giuffre underestimated the progressivism of ‘50s jazz buffs. Although never a force in mainstream culture like Stan Kenton or Dave Brubeck, and never a cause celebre like Lennie Tristano or Ornette Coleman, Giuffre appealed to many of the same listeners, for similar reasons.

Having been acclimated to revolution by bebop in the late 1940s, modern jazz devotees of the 1950s kept their ears peeled for another uprising, and Giuffre was clearly up to something new.

The crux of the controversy that surrounded Giuffre following the release of Tangents in Jazz , reaching a crescendo with the introduction of the first of his several drummer-less trios a year later, was his aversion to the sort of drum thunder then coming to be identified by many as the very heartbeat of jazz.

But in complaining of “an imbalance of advances” in modern jazz, Giuffre was also questioning what he felt was an over-emphasis on harmonic movement at the expense of linear development and subtler aspects of timbre (he later characterized chord changes as “vertical prison” [Loren Stephens, “The Passionate Conviction,” Jazz Review, February, 1960], and in the liner notes to Tangents in Jazz, he identified being “fed a steady stream of chords” by a pianist or a bassist and “fighting a steady beat” as twin evils. Another way of putting it might have been to say that the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had followed too quickly on the heels of those of Lester Young, with the result that Young’s still hadn’t been fully absorbed).

Giuffre’s displeasure with the chordal underpinnings of bop gave him something in common with Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan, in addition to anticipating Ornette Coleman. His solution was to substitute melodic counterpoint – which he called “slow motion counterpoint” – for harmonic structure, as well as pronounced beat.

Giuffre told Nat Hentoff in 1957 [“Jimmy Giuffre: Blues in Counterpoint” Saturday Review, July 13,1957]:

“The result is a certain feeling of suspension, of dissonance, if it’s handled right. In slow-motion counterpoint, for example, if one melody is an eight-note pattern that is changing notes often, the other melody changes notes much less often, perhaps every four bars. And for rhythmic interest, the slow-changing line can be broken up by repeated notes and rests. A third line and possibly a fourth could be proceeding at other varying rates of speed simultaneously."

Perhaps in response to a question from Hentoff about where this left the listener, Giuffre went on to explain:

“the contrast between lines made possible by this approach provides the clarity that is necessary to follow all the lines. [A]nd to a certain extent, the listener will have more time to absorb each harmonic feeling, because in my writing, the harmonies are the results of lines, rather than lines being fitted to the harmonies."

Were he less theoretically inclined, or less articulate, the native Texan could just have said that the folk-like material he was then writing for his trio allowed even the most casual listener an easy way in. But in outlining the principles of slow-motion counterpoint in such detail, he was paying tribute to his mentor and the theory’s father, Dr. Wesley La Violette, a Los Angeles-based classical composer and proto-guru whose other followers included Shorty Rogers and John Graas. “He had a great influence on my life,” Giuffre years later told Ted Gioia [West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960, New York: Oxford University Press , 1992]. “His scope of music is limitless …. It has given me the staff of life.”

Giuffre in the 1950’s was a man on a quest, much like Coltrane was a decade later. The difference was that Giuffre’s quest, like his music, was more muted, and that it manifested itself intellectually rather than spiritually. All jazz musicians seek their own sound, or at least pay lip service to that concept. The next step for those who find an individualistic means of expression is to attempt to broaden it into a group sound. For Giuffre, sound was a key to finding out who he was as a person, not just as a musician.

A former sideman with a variety of big bands, including those of Buddy Rich and Woody Herman, Giuffre was 33 when he began recording as a leader – a ripe age for a jazzman, by that day’s standard. He already enjoyed a reputation as a composer and arranger based on the success of his Four Brothers for Woody Herman’s Second Herd in 1947.

(Giuffre has always been quick to point out that he borrowed the idea of four tenor saxophonists – or in the case his anthem for Herman, three tenors and a baritone – playing in harmonic parallel and without a vibrato from Gene Rowland, his former roommate at North Texas State University).

He was in steady demand for gigs and recording sessions around Los Angeles in reward for a versatility that wasn’t limited to his being equally adept on three horns. On Howard Rumsey and the Lighthouse All-Stars’ 1952 recording Big Girl, Giuffre honked like a rock ‘n roller; at the opposite extreme, on Chant of the Cosmos, with Shorty Rogers three years later, he blew unpitched air through his horn without striking a note.

Such versatility is usually thought of as commendable in a musician, but Giuffre soon talked as though it was an elaborate mask for his insecurities, not as an improviser, but as a man.

“I began to see that I … had been changing my personally all the time he told Hentoff [op.cit.]. If I was playing with a Basie-type group, I’d sound more like them, and the same with a bop unit. I was a little bit of Stan Getz and Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a thousand different things, depending on who I was with."

In a subsequent interview with Dom Cerulli [“Jimmy Giuffre: I’m a Trio Now, he Says, But I Used to Just be a Boor,” Down Beat, September 19, 1957], Giuffre expanded on this theme in a way that his identity crisis wasn’t just musical:

“With the group [the original Jimmy Giuffre 3, with Jim Hall on guitar and Ralph Pena on bass], I’ve found that since the background follows the soloist, I’ve been shaking off all schools. Before, when I felt I was playing in an original manner, I was actually playing like a whole bunch of guys ....

[Dr. La Violette] helped me break down a lot of the inhibitions I’ve had. He made me realize I could do things my own way. The clarinet helped, too. There was only one way I could play it, in the middle and low registers. My lip’s just not ready to play in the high register. I don’t know if I can do it. I think I can, but we’ll see.

As I began to play the way I felt, it became comfortable. I could hear these voices saying I must play the other way. But it felt so good, I said, “The hell with it.” It has reached the point where a lot of the musical ideas I have might be considered old-fashioned or bluesy. I used to wonder, “What will the cats think? What will Miles think? What will Getz think? And Stan is miles ahead of me in technique. But something strange happened. I began to hear it in the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Horace Silver, in Gerry Mulligan, in the Getz group with Bobby Brookmeyer.

They were playing with this mood of the old-fashioned blues. It has a fresh new way about it. It sounds like a modern man playing with the old blues feel.”

Revealing that his first wife accused him of being a boor as a human being while a Lighthouse All-Star – a blinkered individual who demonstrated no interest in the solos of his fellow band members and who would go to his room to practice between sets – Giuffre explained to Cerulli that upon forming the 3, he had “developed an interest in [things other than music] and other human beings.”

Said Jim Hall in the same article: “Jimmy has a theory: Through finding yourself and getting a grip on yourself personally, you can do the same thing musically. There is a direct connection between personal and musical directness.”

Still later, in 1959, Giuffre responded to Lorin Stephens’s question “Why was sound so important to you?” by admitting that “perhaps it comes from childhood/”
“It was sort of like not wanting to go out unless I was dressed properly. I couldn’t release the music inside of me unless it sounded perfect – that was the first consideration – to have beautiful sound quality.”

“But why so important?” Stephens persisted.

“Well, it goes with my personality, I’m sure. I won’t accept the thing that I am an introverted personality, which some have tried to make me out. I have gone through periods, and I won’t say that I have shaken them off completely, but I have gone through periods where I was quiet: I like the pastoral, the country; I like Debussy and Delius – I like peaceful moods.”

Joe Morello - Drummer Extraordinaire

To continue with the Dave Brubeck theme as introduced in the “Seeing Out a Bit” posting, JazzProfiles now turn its attention to the drummer extraordinaire of the DBQ – Joe Morello – for further and deserved elaboration.

To paraphrase Ted Gioia from his chapter entitled The San Francisco Scene in the 1950’s from his seminal West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960:

“At the start of 1956 Brubeck made a personal decision that proved to be a most important change in his group. After three years with the quartet, drummer Joe Dodge decided to leave. Brubeck took a chance by hiring Joe Morello. Actually, little risk accrued from this decision as Morello was a masterful choice as his polished virtuosity and marked creativity made an immediate contribution to the quartet.
Described by some critics as a sort of purgatory for jazz drummers, Morello was to absolutely flourish in the confines of this supposedly ‘unswinging’ ensemble, especially with its high visibility, daring improvisations and later experimentation with odd or unusual time signatures.

All these factors helped launch Morello to a position of preeminence in the world of jazz drumming and with good cause. The leap into the limelight was no concoction of media hype but well-deserved fame for an exceptional musician.” [p.96].
Morello was born in Springfield, MA and after gigging around New York in the early 1950’s and recording with guitarist Tal Farlow and arranger-composer Gil Melle’s group, pianist Marian McPartland brought him into her trio along with bassist Bill Crow where they appeared together at The Hickory House on new York’s famed 52nd street from 1954-56.

In her book, All in Good Time, Marian talks about how the word on the street was all about this “fabulous” young drummer from Springfield. But given how many times she had been disappointed after actually hearing the Mr. Fabulous in question, she remained skeptical. Nevertheless, given her generous heart, Marian decided to give Morello a chance to sit in although when he showed up “… he looked less like a drummer than a student of nuclear physics.”

I really don’t remember what the tune was, and it isn’t too important. Because in a matter of seconds, everyone in the room realized that the guy with the diffident air was a phenomenal drummer. Everyone listened. His precise blending of touch, taste and almost unbelievable technique were a joy to listen to…. I will never forget it. Everyone knew that here was a discovery. [Pp.34-35.]As Gioia concludes:

With the Brubeck quartet, this powerful young workhorse on drums continued to have the same effect on audiences, but now in larger concert halls rather than in small clubs. Soon Morello was no loner a discovery, but a known commodity, emulated by a generation of young percussionists. [p. 98 paraphrased]
When in 1938, the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz was presented with one of the only 500 copies of Ansel Adams’ photographic masterpiece – Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail – Stieglitz declared: “I am an idolater of perfect workmanship and this is perfect workmanship.”

I, too, am an idolater of the perfect workmanship that is to be found in the drumming of Joe Morello as primarily exemplified in the many recordings he made with the Dave Brubeck Quartet from 1956-68. Sadly, Joe made too few recordings outside the DBQ including those under his own name.

Joe is a complete musician who listens actively to what the soloist is saying and tries to contribute to it. Equally as important in this context is that Joe can play brushes as well as he can play sticks so he doesn’t mind reverting to these unwieldy clumps of wire to express his drumming something which cannot be said about many contemporary Jazz drummers [some of whom don’t even carry a set of wire brushes in their kit].

Joe is a constantly inventive drummer. Unlike an Art Blakey or an Art Taylor or a Roy Haynes, Joe is not a drummer who played a prepared number of figures over and over again during his drums solos be these over a few bars or over a chorus or open-ended.

Although he played them with authority, Art Blakey repeated the same configurations in every solo he played. He may have combined these drum figures differently, but throughout his long and distinguished career Art’s arsenal essentially remained the same “licks,” “kicks” and “fills”.

While Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones were considerably more sophisticated in their approach to the instrument and had a larger repertoire of invented drum figures that they employed, they were also limited to what they had practiced and memorized when it came time to taking a solo.

Joe is from a school of drummers that includes Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson. They are drummers who, for all intents and purposes, know no limits and can create endlessly on the instrument. [Alan Dawson, Ed Shaughnessy and Dave Weckl are also in this category].

Like a professional athlete, these drummers essentially slow down the pace of things and are able to visualize and/or conceptualize how they are going to build a solo, especially and extended one.

What enables them to do this is their technical command of the instrument, a facility that is garnered over long hours of practice, as well as, the gift of talent.

Bill Evans once remarked to the effect that playing an instrument well was 98% hard work and 2% talent.

According the Eric Nisenson in his work Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest:

Any good Jazz musician has developed from hard work and hard thought, a personal conception. When he improvises successfully on the stand or in the recording studio, it is only after much thought, practice and theory have gone into that conception, and it is that conception which makes him different from other Jazz musicians. Once he knows what he is doing, in other words, he can let himself go and find areas of music through improvisation that he didn’t know existed. Jazz improvisation, therefore, is based on a paradox – that a musician comes to a bandstand so well prepared that he can fly free through instinct and soul and sheer musical bravery into the musical unknown. It is a marriage of both sides of the brain ….” [p, 53].

Morello devoted himself to mastering the drum rudiments [originally 26 but later expanded to 40] through long hours of practice essentially using only the snare drum. Drum rudiments are typically practiced slowly at first to gain control and to be able to initiate them or to alternate them with either hand.

Once these exercises are brought to a level of controlled speed on the snare drum, they can be expanded to include the tom toms that extend from the top of the bass drum shell and those that rest on the floor beside the bass drum through the use of telescoping legs. They can even be interwoven with the use of the bass drum as played with a foot pedal although very, very few drummers are able to execute this feat [no pun intended].

For those interested in the more technical aspects of drum rudiments, a narrative explanation can be found at http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/appendix/drumrudiments/Drumrudiments.html. For the notation of drum rudiments go here -http://www.vicfirth.com/education/rudiments.html or to this site as sponsored by the Percussive Arts Society -http://www.pas.org/Resources/rudiments/rudiments.html.

Joe also spent long hours developing the independence of limbs that enabled him to use all four of these at the same time on different parts of the instrument, sometimes playing against one another in contrasting time signatures.

If a drummer doesn’t have to think about how to play a rhythmic pattern, he can begin to think of what he wants to play, how he wants it to sound [what drums and/or cymbals to employ to produce this sound] and how to “tell his story” either in fragments [four bar, eight bar, 12 bar etc. exchanges with the horns] or in an extended solo.

Just as it is incumbent for a horn soloist to “say something” in their solo, preferably something more than just a linking pf phrases that have been heard many times before as played by other musicians, so too the drummer has to originate ideas that fit the context of the piece that is being performed and which generate a certain interest in and make a contribution to the piece in their own right.

Beyond the customary long drum solo piece that is intended as a highlight of many of the DBQ concerts there are a number of tracks that demonstrate what Marian McPartland described as Morello’s “precise blending of touch, taste and unbelievable technique ….”

For touch and taste, one need only listen to his brushwork accompaniment to alto saxophonist Paul Desmond’s enchanting and stirring solo on These Foolish Things from the Jazz Goes to Junior College Columbia recording [CL 1034/Sony Japan Sleeve CD 9523].

Desmond was a lover of ballads and he would use them as a platform upon which to build lyrically layered and titillating textured solos. He also once described himself as “the world’s slowest alto saxophone player." And while he was slowly weaving his wonderful solos he preferred that the drummer stay out of the way and simply keep time [quietly].

Paul was a major exponent of the style of drumming that the legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young once described as “a little tinky boom.”

While they initially clashed when Joe first came on board the USS Brubeck bringing all of his firepower to bear, Paul and Joe were later to become close friends.

And although Joe is anything but “a little tinky boom” drummer he can lay down sensitive and unobtrusive brushwork behind a soloist, even helping to achieve new heights in the intensity of their solo as is the case with Desmond’s magnificent exposition on These Foolish Things.

More of Joe’s magnificent brushwork can be heard again behind a Paul Desmond solo, this time on a more up tempo version of Tangerine on the The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe album [Columbia CL 1168/SRCS 9529] and this album is also an excellent place to hear Joe as a fabulous colorist with his use of tympani mallets on Nomad and The Golden Horde.

These Jazz Impression albums are also an excellent superb point from which to enjoy his marvelously constructed extended drum solos such as Watusi Drums on The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe, his intriquing finger drum solo meant to sound like and Indian “tabla” drum on Calcutta Blues from Jazz Impressions of Eurasia [Columbia CL 1251/CK 48531] and his clattering homage to the noises of Chicago’s on Sounds of the Loop from Jazz Impressions of the USA [Columbia CL 984].

However, Joe may have reached a pinnacle of extended drum solos with the one he recorded on Castilian Drums from The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Carnegie Hall [Sony Jazz 2K61455/Sony Japan 9365-6] performance given at this distinguished hall of the arts in February, 1963.

In 1961, RCA released Joe’s first album under his own name which was fitting entitled It’s About Time [RCA LPM-2486] which finds Joe in the company of a quintet made up of Phil Woods [alto sax], Gary Burton [vibes] John Bunch [piano] and Gene Cherico [bass]. It’s a corker of an album that was subsequently released in CD as Joe Morello [RCA Bluebird 9784-2-RB] and combines the six quintet tracks that made up the original LP with 9 tracks from previously unreleased 1961-62 big band sessions that were arranged and conducted by Manny Albam and which featured a bevy of prominent New York studio players.

Joe’s drumming on these recordings is hard-driving and aggressive and is an example of his ability to play in a cooking, straight-ahead manner which was not always possible in the more formalized and structured setting of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

I hope that in listening to these recordings and spending time in the company of Morello’s unparalleled talent that they will serve to confirm for you the adage -“God places occasional geniuses in our midst to help inspire the rest of us to greatness.” Joe Morello is one such genius.

Hank Mancini: Jazz Musician

Following service with the Army during WW II, Hank Mancini embarked on a decade-long apprenticeship as a free lance arranger and musician that included work on radio shows, providing the music for little man Billy Barty’s vaudeville act, developing music for choreographer Nick Castle and being a house arranger for Universal-International Pictures for most of the 1950’s.


As Mancini explained: I once referred to the music department at Universal as a salt mine, but it was a good salt mine, and younger composers in film today do not have access to that kind of on-the-job training. Being on staff there I was called upon to do everything. I mean everything. Whenever they needed a piece of source music, music that comes from a source in the picture, such as a band, a jukebox, or a radio, they would call me in. I would do an arrangement on something that was in the Universal library, or I would write a new piece for a jazz band or a Latin band or whatever. I guess in every business you have to learn the routine--in film scoring, the clichés--before you can begin to find your own way.

Aided by his own big band background from his days growing up in West Aliquippa, PA and serving as an assistant to Max Adkins in Pittsburgh, PA, during this stint with Universal, Mancini was tapped to be the lead arranger for the two best-known swing biopics, "The Glenn Miller Story" in 1954 and "The Benny Goodman Story" in 1956.

Little did anyone realize at the time that these apprenticeship and time in the salt mine would ultimately make Mancini one of the most successful film composers of his time. He had a knack for writing catchy tunes which was one of the major keys to his success. And what a success it was as from 1958 and through most of the 1960’s, Mancini so dominated the television and film music scene that everything else seemed to be either an attempt to clone his sound or a reaction against it.

Hank’s breakthrough came though Blake Edwards, a former editor at Universal who remembered Mancini's work on Orson Welles' 1958 film noir, "Touch of Evil," in which Mancini supplemented the canned source music used for the soundtrack with some Jazz inspired music and included Conrad Gozzo on lead trumpet and Shelly Manne on drums to insure that the music was phrased properly.

Edwards was extremely impressed with Mancini’s score for this film and asked him to write music for a Peter Gunn, a new television series he was now directing. Since he was working on a small budget, Edwards asked Mancini to write for a jazz ensemble of 11 players

At a time when many television programs were using uninspired canned or “generic” orchestral backgrounds, Mancini opted to use modern Jazz with innovative Jazz themes accompanying Gunn’s every move. The harmonies fit the mood of the show, which was a key to its success, and they served to lend the character even more of an air of suave sophistication.


Mancini's music, “especially the pounding, menacing sounding theme,” proved almost as popular as the series, and RCA rushed out an album featuring the title song and other pieces. The label first offered Shorty Rogers the recording job, but he refused RCA’s request insisting they use the composer himself. Although television soundtracks had been released on albums before, Music from "Peter Gunn" was a phenomenon. It reached #1 on Billboard's chart, stayed there 10 weeks, and stayed on the list for the next two years. It was so successful, RCA put together a sequel and Mancini received an Emmy nomination for the theme and won two Grammy awards for the first album.

Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme with its hip, bluesy, brass texture and insistent piano-and-bass line became as associated with crime fiction as Monty Norman’s theme for the James Bond films was to become associated with spy films.


These two albums – The Music from Peter Gunn and More Music from Peter Gunn contain a wealth of small group and big band Jazz that is often overlooked either because of their commercial success at the time or because they were overshadowed by the many success of Mancini’s later career.


I thought it might be fun to remind readers of Jazz Profiles about this music or make it available through this review to listeners that may be new to it.

In talking with trumpeter Pete Candoli many years later, he shared the view that “In all the years of studio dates that I worked on in Hollywood, I’ve never enjoyed doing anything more. The musicianship on these dates was first-rate and Hank’s scores were always beautifully written and fun to play on.”


Vibist Victor Feldman also recalled these dates with fondness and affection: “These were some of my earliest studio recording dates and it was a thrill to be around such an incredibly talented bunch of musicians. Hank couldn’t have been nicer and the themes and ‘charts’ [arrangements] were so wonderfully crafted and just a blast to play.”


The first of these albums [the two have now been combined into one CD] highlights Mancini’s skill in employing an endless variety of orchestral voicing in making 11 musicians sound like a full big band. With the success of the initial album, RCA granted Hank a budget for a full orchestra and the sound he achieves on these tracks is even more rewarding.

Brassy trombones, either as soloists or in a trombone choir, chords played in the background by a “block chord” combination of vibes-piano-guitar as made famous by the George Shearing Quintet, descending figures being howled out through a bevy of French Horns, bass trombones blatting pedal tones [with or without mutes], “Shout Choruses” on tunes like Fall Out, Timothy,” and Blue Steel that would rival anything ever written by any big band arranger past or present, flute choirs phrased in unison with piccolos “on top” and the rarely heard bass flute [where else?] on the bottom, marimbas, a solo feature that highlights the brushwork of drummer iconic studio drummer Shelly Manne, beautiful ballads in the form of Dreamland, Joanna, Blues for Mother and A Quiet Gass – it’s all here; beautifully and consummately played by a group of world class musicians that populated the Hollywood Studios during the day and its many Jazz clubs at night.

In the music from Peter Gunn, Hank Mancini has given us a feast for the ages; do yourself a favor and partake.

With the 70 anniversary of Benny Goodman's famed Carnegie Hall Concert just a few days away, the editorial staff of JazzProfiles thought the following commemorative article might be of interest to its readers.

When Carnegie Hall Swung
Benny Goodman headlined and Jess Stacy stole the show
By TOM NOLAN

January 12, 2008; The Wall Street Journal

"Sunday evening, January 16, 1938: Benny Goodman and his Swing Orchestra" read the placard 70 years ago in front of New York City's most prestigious classical-music venue. "The First Swing Concert in the History of Carnegie Hall."
Headlining this sanctum sanctorum must have seemed the only thing that Goodman, the 28-year-old, Chicago-born clarinet player, big-band leader and "king of swing," might then do to top a phenomenal 2½-year ride to the peak of the popular-music world. New York seemed to agree. Carnegie Hall sold out at once: all 3,900 seats.
At 8:45 p.m. that Sunday night, a nervous Goodman, in white tie and black tailcoat, launched the band into the evening's first number: "Don't Be That Way." The tempo was restrained, the orchestra tentative, the soloists polite. But 2½ minutes into the tune, drummer Gene Krupa jolted the ensemble to life with an explosive two-bar break. The event would need more such jolts. This "definitive program of swing music" came saddled with program elements that kept the concert out of step for its first half-hour.
A "20 years of jazz" segment and a quarter-hour "jam session" with guest players from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras proved wearying. Not until Goodman's trio and quartet -- specialty combos featuring first the impeccably brilliant pianist Teddy Wilson and then the rhythmically enthusiastic vibraphonist Lionel Hampton -- took the stage did the concert gain traction.
Goodman was at his best in small-group settings, where his melodic ease, great technique and strong sense of swing were on full display. The trio's "Body and Soul" and the quartet's "The Man I Love" and "Avalon" charmed the audience -- and the quartet's five-minute upper-tempo "I Got Rhythm" positively sizzled.
After intermission, the orchestra too was in fine form, demonstrating, for the Carnegie Hall crowd, just what this swing-era fuss was all about.
"Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" had the concert audience clapping in time (if unhiply on the wrong beat); and at the close of the band's euphoric performance of "Swingtime in the Rockies," the Carnegie crowd let out a roar worthy of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Then Goodman called again on his trio and quartet, for three more numbers.
It was good pacing to go from combo to big-band and back, but it also seemed emblematic of a schism that ran through the jazz world of the late 1930s: the split between young swing-music idolizers, hooked on the big bands' riffs, and an earlier generation of traditionalists who felt "true jazz" was played only by small groups of collectively improvising players.
This concert's earlier "history of jazz" segment paid homage to the "classic" jazz of the '20s; its most effective moment, for many, was when Bobby Hackett, a 22-year-old cornet player from Rhode Island, re-created the late Iowa cornetist Bix Beiderbecke's melancholy 1927 version of "I'm Comin' Virginia."
Beiderbecke had died an alcoholic's death in New York in 1931. A generation of jazzmen were haunted by his lyrical sound. Several of the men on stage, including Goodman, had played with Bix back in the day. Jess Stacy, the Goodman orchestra's outstanding pianist, had his style shaped through crucial exposure to Beiderbecke in 1923, in Davenport, Iowa, when Bix came aboard the riverboat an 18-year-old Stacy worked on.
"He played the pian-a," Stacy told pianist Marian McPartland decades later on her NPR program "Piano Jazz," "and he played [the type of] harmony like [he had], you know, [in his own] 'In a Mist'?" Stacy was referring to Beiderbecke's Debussy-like composition for keyboard. Beiderbecke had steeped himself in the sounds of such modern-classicists as Ravel, Elgar and MacDowell. "He played 'Clarinet Marmalade,' with that type harmony. Back in my head, I'd known that that was possible. But I didn't know how to do it, you know? But when I heard him do it -- it just bowled me over."
Bix, with his relaxed manner and modernist harmonies, seemed, for some, the ghost at the banquet of this swing-music concert, with his implied reproach: Mine was the path you might have taken. But toward the end of this longish evening, Benny Goodman found a way to merge these opposing visions of jazz via "Sing Sing Sing" -- the most raucous and elaborate of his big band's signature items, a "killer-diller" that had evolved into an epic.
The number began with a vengeance, as Krupa beat a tattoo beneath the snarling brass and strutting reeds. Riff patterns unfolded smoothly, and then Goodman's clarinet emerged, full of subtle spirit and insinuation. "Sing Sing Sing" rolled on and on -- through a false ending and a surprise return, a raucous Harry James trumpet solo, and three rhythmic ad-lib choruses by Benny that conjured the intimacy of an after-hours session even as they worked their way up to a tentative high C.
And then, after 9½ minutes, Goodman, in true jam-session fashion, turned "Sing Sing Sing" over to Stacy, who'd never before been featured on this number: "Take it, Jess."
The pianist began to unfurl a long, driving, ruminative meditation on "an old A-minor chord" -- a thoughtful exploration that would still sound fresh 70 years later. "I used to listen to records every night," Stacy told McPartland. "I listened to a lot of Ravel; I listened to Debussy and MacDowell. If you'll notice, in that chorus a little MacDowell crept in there." His extraordinary three-chorus, two-minute solo, which stretched from steamboat-stride to barely audible Impressionist ripples, induced what one witness called "a magical stillness." At last the band, booted by Krupa, returned for a thrilling half-chorus finale.
Benny Goodman's one-night stand at Carnegie Hall faded into the mists of memory -- until 1950, when acetate recordings of the event were issued on an LP that became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. An eventual CD version, "Benny Goodman: Live at Carnegie Hall" (Columbia), introduced still younger listeners to the concert that began as a press agent's brainstorm and turned into legend. Most all who heard the recording (including Goodman) thought Stacy stole the show with his two-minute soliloquy -- a solo seeded with the subtle phrasings and harmonic shadings that the pianist first encountered so long before, when a 20-year-old cornet player in Davenport came aboard the riverboat to play the piano.
Mr. Nolan is editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Detective," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen &Landru).

The Paul Horn Quintet

In 1962 during what was then called "Easter Week" [April], I was the drummer in a quintet that won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival which was held annually at The Lighthouse Cafe located in Hermosa Beach, CA. [For more about a DVD by Ken Koenig that chronicles the history of this Jazz club, please visit http://www.roseking.org/].

Much of the music that our quintet played was inspired by and/or derived from the Paul Horn Quintet. Although it was was formed in 1959, our quintet didn't catch-up to Paul's group until 1961 when it started to make a regular mid-week gig at Shelly's Manne Hole in Hollywood. Once we did hear Paul's group, it's music was to make a huge and lasting impression on us.

The original group consisted of Paul Horn [alto sax/flute], Emil Richards [vibes], Paul Moer [piano], Jimmy Bond [bass] and Billy Higgins [drums], although by the time it made the gig at Shelly's, Billy Higgins was in New York making all of those wonderful Blue Note recordings and Milt Turner had replaced him as the drummer.

The quintet that I performed with at the Lighthouse 1962 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival had the same instrumentation as Paul Horn's 5Tet except that guitar replaced vibes.

By 1962, nearly every Jazz fan had become familiar with the modal Jazz played by the Miles Davis Sextet in the Kind of Blue album,

and with "unusual" time signatures immortalized by the Dave Brubeck Quartet's

Time Out! album.

What made the Paul Horn Quintet particularly appealing to our us was that it was playing modal Jazz in combination with unusual time signatures, just the thing to peak the musical interest of 5 young lads ranging in ages from 18-22.

[For more on modal Jazz go here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_jazz and for unusual or complex time signatures go here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_signature].

So there we were for almost a year, spending our Wednesday nights [or was it Thursdays?] straddling chairs with their backs turned toward the stage, nursing Coca Colas for over four hours while we soaked in this wonderfully different music. On many nights, the five of us made up half the crowd at the opening set and the entire crowd by the closing set!

Of course, none of these tunes were available as published music so we had to memorize them and later notate them, correcting any flaws through subsequent listening at the club.

To their credit, both Paul's and Emil, who composed all of the group's original music, were extremely helpful in helping us correct mistakes and in explaining alternatives to or extensions in the music.

And they couldn't have been nicer about often times stopping at our table when a set had concluded to answer any questions before going out for a smoke or to visit the den of metabolic transmigration. Sometimes there were so many questions that they didn't get treated to a break between sets. I guess our enthusiasm and energy was contagious and they were pleased to be with others who shared their musical interests.

We listen to this music so often that thinking and playing modal Jazz in complex time signatures became almost second-nature to us and by the time of our 1962 performances at the Lighthouse Intercollegiate Jazz Festival no one had to count the unusual time signatures - we just felt them!

Count Your Change became for us a blues in 4/4 time for the first 8 bars of the theme followed by six measures in 5/4 time concluding with two measures again in 4/4; I mean, your basic 16 bar blues, right!?

Or how about Half and Half with its two introductions, the first centered around the piano and bass improvising on two chords and the second introduction consisting of a 12-bar section in 6/8 time with the tune breaking down into three phrases: [1] the first 12-bar phrase in 4/4 and is made up of 8 bars of ensemble or horn solo and 4 bars of drum solo, [2] an 8-bar phrase in 6/8 and [3] a final 8-bars in 4/4.

I particularly liked this one because as the drummer I got to finish the last four bars of every one's solo in the first 12-bar phrase. :)

By the time we started playing Paul Moer's Fun Time it was imperative that we "felt" the time instead of having to count it as the measures in the choruses run 3/4,3/4,/5/4 [repeated 4 times] followed by a chorus of 5/4,5/4,3/4,3/4.5/4!

I could continue with many more of these musical roller coaster rides contained in the quintet's musical repertoire, but I hope you get the idea from these brief descriptions about how intriguing and adventurous this music was and how proud we felt to be able to accomplish it.

The Paul Horn Quintet will always have a special place in my heart for making this musical journey possible in my life.

I think perhaps the uniqueness of the music that our group featured at the 1962 Lighthouse Intercollegiate Jazz Festival may have played a major role in our wining the competition both as a group and on all of our individual instruments, respectively; another reason for us to be indebted to the Paul Horn Quintet.

Much of this wonderful and intriguing music is preserved on the Collectibles two-fer CD that includes the Columbia albums "Profile of a Jazz Musician" and "The Sound of Paul Horn" [Collectibles COL-CD-7531, Sony AZ 61328] and "Something Blue" [hifijazz J-615 reissued on CD as OJCCD 1778-2].

If you wish to know more about the technical elements involved in each tune, Leonard Feather does an admirable job of describing them in the insert notes to the Columbia/Collectible albums as does Gene Lees in the insert notes to the hifijazz album. You can also located more about the Paul Horn Quintet beginning on page 204 of Robert Gordon's fine book, Jazz West Coast [London: Quartet Books, 1986].

Incidentally, the Paul Horn Quintet featuring Emil Richards on vibes staged a reunion at The Los Angeles Jazz Institute's "Jazz West Coast 3" held on October 2, 2005 [for more about the LA Jazz Institute go here - http://www.lajazzinstitute.org/].

Mike Lang [piano], John Belzaguy [bass] and Joe Porcaro [drums] made up the rhythm section and two of the tunes they played were none other than Count Your Change and Half and Half.