Dutch Jazz : Yesterday and Today

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

Recently a friend in Oregon sent the editorial staff of JazzProfiles the Dutch National Public Service radio broadcast of the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw’s April 28, 2011 performance featuring Jan van Duikeren, one of Holland’s premier Jazz trumpeters.

Thanks also to the generosity of a close friend in Holland, we have been able to listen to Dutch Jazz dating back to the 1950s right up to those creating the music for Holland’s contemporary Jazz scene.

As our previous features on the subject have indicated, The Netherlands has a long-established involvement with Jazz which has been fostered and developed by a number of resident large orchestras such as The Metropole, Rotterdam and Concertgebouw, a variety of fun-to-listen-to small groups and a whole host of engaging, individual soloists.

In order to share with visitors to JazzProfiles examples of both early and recent forms of Jazz in Holland, we asked the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD to develop the following videos.

The April 28, 2011 Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw [JOC] April 28, 2011 Bimhuis concert featuring the marvelous Dutch trumpet player Jan van Duikeren is the source for the audio tracks on the first, two of these. Henk Meutgeert is the musical director of the JOC and deserves a great deal of credit for the consistently high quality of its music.

On the first video, Jan performs his original compositions, No Flowers, while the second, continuation video puts pianist Peter Beets in the solo spotlight playing 1912 Seventh Avenue. The graphics for the second video consist of a retrospective of classic Dutch LP covers which we hope will help underscore the longevity of Dutch Jazz.

And here are the insert notes to a retrospective CD by The Diamond Five, one of the earliest Dutch Jazz quintets, after which you will a video tribute to the group.

“Time and again during the past decade or so John Engels would say to me: ‘Cees, don’ t you think its time for a CD of the Diamond Five? Isn’t there any way, any possibility to get this done?' And invariably my reply would be that in this day and age where especially in the entertainment business, most art forms are so volatile and everything has to be always new and different, nobody will be waiting for the recordings of a Jazz quintet from the sixties, and not even an American jazz quintet at that! So who on earth would be interested to furnish the money to realize such a project?

And then, out of a clear blue sky, here comes this man Henk Toorenvliet who not only is interested to release a Diamond Five CD and is prepared to invest in the project, but also goes out of his way to find out where the tapes are and who owns the recording rights and how he can lay his hands on them which, with all the recent mergers in the record industry appears to be not all that easy.  But with the determination and perseverance of a terrier  or should I say of a Jack Russell? - he sets his teeth into the matter and he gets it done!

Thanks so much Henk. We really are very much indebted to you for this.

So here it is. Music we recorded in the sixties as it appeared on our LP Highlights from the 60's which is now a collector’s item The second and third sentences of the liner notes I wrote on the cover of that album read as follows:  When we had that good feeling making our first recording in Brussels way back in 1959, we had no way of even suspecting that (now) in 1978 we would have that same good feeling listening to Alone Together and Diamondate   Much less that we would like the material to be reissued.  Now I may add: Let alone that in the 21st century this would happen again now taking advantage of great new techniques to make the sound even better.

We are all very proud and grateful that we had this rare opportunity to make a band that people later would refer to as the legendary Diamond Five. Something to rejoice for us.

Sadly the most legendary member of our group, Cees Smal [trumpet/flugelhorn] cannot share this with us. After a long illness he passed away on May 24, 2001. And let there be no doubt about this: Without Cees enormous drive and enthusiasm, his grand musicianship and his arranging skill, the Diamond Five would have been but a shadow of what they have become with him.  Fortunately Cees knew this CD was going to be released and he was thrilled by the idea.

And thus I may speak for all five of us whishing our many fans who will hear and/or own this CD many happy listening hours.

And. surprise! There's more to come after this one. so watch cut!”

- Cees Slinger, pianist, arranger and composer

"Highlights from the 60’s was the apt title for the LP compilation that was released in 1978. Although the original Diamonds were founded in the fifties, their 'finest hour' so to speak was their tenure at the Scheherazade Club in Amsterdam, where the band resided from October 1958 through April 1962. As a result no post-war Dutch jazz quintet with a bebop site has played as tastefully and with more tightness than The Diamond Five

I first encountered ‘The Diamonds from Haalem’ at a concert in the Stadsgehoorzaal in Leiden in the summer of 1955.

Cees Smal on valve trombone and Harry Verbeke on tenor sax were then front-lining Wim van Beelen, piano, Henk de Jong, bass, and Tonv Funke-Kupper on drums. In their neatly striped jackets and dark pants they performed standards along with original compositions by Cees Smal, who already then proved to be a real 100 carat diamond!

Actually this was the second version of the group, the first one having, beside Cees Smal on trumpet, Ruud Brink on tenor sax, Cees Slinger on piano Henk de Jong on bass and Ruud’s brother Han Brink on drums.

But the real Diamond Five - a little later so re-baptized when a popular duo called the Blue Diamonds scored a huge hit in Holland with their rendition of the old war-horse Ramona - were actually born when Cees Slinger was requested by the then owner of the Scheherazade to form a band that would pep up the place again after some bands of lesser quality had caused business to be slow. Slinger was lucky to recruit Harry Verbeke and Cees Smal whose catchy tunes and arranging skills were to become the most valuable asset of the group. The quintet was competed by John Engels on drums and Dick van der Capellen on bass, the latter soon after to be replaced by Jacques Schols.

And thus the languid lyrical lines of Harry Verbeke and the masterful versatility of Cees Smal were a perfect match for the great soloing and comping of pianist Cees Slinger the big booming bass of Jacques Schols and the ever-propelling, flexible timekeeping of drummer John Engels.

A typical night at the "ZADE" for me was a wet walk from the tram stop at the Rembranctplein trying to get in past doorman Willem Ruska (to later become 1972 Olympic champion judo in Munich) then opening the thick-padded door looking for a seat and finally winding up standing in front of someone.

Taking in the immense cloud of cigarette smoke, not thinking of all the alcohol in rows of bottles on the left side of the bandstand, I would soon be deeply immersed in the music just wondering who would drop in to jam.

It all comes back listening to the highlights from the 60's for the first time on CD, sounding as fresh as if recorded yesterday Thanks to the engineers and of course the cats that bared their souls in Brussels, Amsterdam and Hilversum some forty years ago.”

- Cees Schrama

host TROS SESJUN

(live jazz radio show)

Nat King Cole – Jazz Pianist

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

“Billy May is not one of your more maudlin chaps. It's hard to imagine him getting teary-eyed even when he talks about people that meant a great deal to him. His memories of Nat King Cole are about as sentimental as I've ever heard him get. ‘Nat was just a wonderful guy,’ May says. ‘He was also a talented and a very capable musician. He had a very open mind about music ... and everything. Nat was always a good musician and he never caused anybody any harm. He was a wonderful man.’"

- Will Friedwald, insert notes to Nat King Cole: The Billy May Sessions

Who knew?

My earliest impressions of Nat King Cole were based on the fact that he was as huge star – a popular vocalist with a slew of hit records, a highly rated television show and a celebrity status of enormous proportions.

For a while, he appeared to be everywhere: on billboards as you drove up the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, CA; on magazine covers; in television commercials.

It seems as though each month he had a hit record, was appearing as a guest artist on a television variety show [when not hosting his own], or was involved in some Beverly Hills gathering that made the society pages of the newspaper.

The Jazz pianists with whom I worked mentioned names like Bud Powell or Lennie Tristano or Dodo Marmorsa or Al Haig, among a host of other bebop era pianists when listing their favorites.

Art Tatum’s named was mentioned with lips parted in reverence and eyes lifted toward the heavens, but few brought up Early Jazz or Swing Era pianists among their direct influences. There was no mention of Earl “Fatha” Hines, or Thomas “Fats” Waller or Teddy Wilson, let alone, Nat King Cole.

For as Gene Lees asserts:

“Ironically, Nat Cole is remembered by the general public only as a singer, though he was one of the greatest pianists in jazz history, and one of the most influential.

Horace Silver once told me that when he first played the Newport Jazz Festival, impresario George Wein stood offstage calling out, "Earl Fatha Hines, Earl Fatha Hines!" This baffled Horace, since he had never listened to Hines. But later, he said, he realized that he had listened a lot to Nat Cole, and he had listened to Hines.

And that Cole assuredly did, in Chicago, when he was growing up. He would stand outside the Grand Terrace Ballroom listening to Hines, absorbing all he could.

Hines is a headwater of jazz piano, perhaps one should say the headwater, because of the influence he had on pianists who were themselves immensely influential, no one more so than Teddy Wilson, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans.

Who was this Nat Cole?”

Irony upon irony, I first became familiar with Nat King Cole’s history as a Jazz pianist while working a trio gig at the Swanee Inn on North La Brea Boulevard in Hollywood, CA. Sitting at the bar during one of our breaks, I noticed a photograph of Nat seated at the club’s piano and asked the bartender if he knew anything about it.

The bar keep replied that: “Oh, he got his start here playing solo piano.”

By way of background, Nat King Cole had been a minor celebrity on the South Side of Chicago where he began his career in the mid-1930s. In January, 1937, he married Nadine Robinson, a beautiful dancer, and the two of them went on the road with a variety show - Shuffle Along.

Shortly after the show opened in Long Beach, CA in May, 1937, someone made off with the payroll and Nat and Nadine were stranded in Los Angeles.

Gene Lees picks up the story from here:

“For a time Nat was playing solo piano. He was ap­proached by Bob Lewis, who owned a nightclub called the Swanee Inn. Lewis asked him to organize a small group and bring it into his club. Nat engaged Wesley Prince, a bassist he'd heard with Lionel Hampton, and the Texas-born guitarist Oscar Moore. There are conflicting theories of why he didn't also use drums. One is that Lee Young didn't show up on opening night. This is unlikely. Lee Young was as responsible and punctilious as his brother Lester was elusive. One story is that Lee thought the bandstand was too small for a quartet with drums. In any event, Cole went in with a trio, and if it was not unprecedented, piano-guitar-bass had not evolved to the heights of integration and sophistication he, Moore (later Irving Ashby), and Prince (later Johnny Miller) would take that instrumentation. They stayed at the Swanee Inn for six months, honing their material in the luxury of a secure situation.”

Gene goes on to say that:

“The Nat Cole trio in its early days had recorded for Decca, [he was twenty-three]….

The first recording strike by the American Federation of Musicians was about to hit the industry, and Johnny Mercer's newly-formed label Capitol acquired some Cole sides from the small Excelsior label, ….

Other than some of those earlier records and transcriptions, and a few extracur­ricular dates for Norman Granz later, Cole's entire body of recorded work was for Capitol. The chemistry of Cole-and-Capitol would propel him to a stardom that has not ended, though he has been dead thirty-five years.

The body of that work is among the most significant in American musical history. In 1991, Mosaic, the independent reissue label notable for the reverent quality of its product, acquired all the Capitol records on which Cole played piano and put them out in a boxed set. The arrangement covered such performances with orchestra as Nature Boy and The Christmas Song on which he played piano, but not those orchestral performances on which he only sang.

This Mosaic set of 18 CDs constitutes some of the most significant jazz documentation we have. Alas, you can't get it. It came out as a limited edition that has long been sold out. With 19 or 20 takes on each CD, the collection contains 347 tracks, including alternate takes. By my count, 64 of these are instrumentals, mostly by the trio.”

The editorial staff of JazzProfiles was fortunate enough to “be in the right place at the right time” to acquire The Complete Capitol Recordings Of The Nat King Cole Trio [Mosaic MD18-138].

Among the vast insert notes assembled for the Mosaic set is an overview by Dick Katz of what made Nat's style so distinctive and why it was so influential.

Dick, who passed away in 2010, was a pianist, composer and arranger who performed with the J.J. Johnson – Kai Winding Quintet, Oscar Pettiford, Carmen McRae, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Philly Joe Jones, Jim Hall, Helen Merrill, Lee Konitz, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter and Many others.

No one explains the workings of Jazz piano better than Dick Katz, who also authored the retrospective on the history of the instrument in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz.

Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records has graciously consented to allow us to reprint Dick’s writings on “Nat Cole – Jazz Pianist,” at the conclusion of which you will find a video tribute to Nat and the trio featuring their 1946 version of Sweet Georgia Brown.

© -Dick Katz/Mosaic Records; used with the permission of Mosaic Records; copyright protected, all rights reserved.

“When Nat Cole got up from the piano bench in the 1950's and concentrated primarily on his singing career, he inter­rupted one of the most brilliant sagas in jazz piano history. Of course, the transition was relatively gradual, because almost from the start, his vocal output with the King Cole Trio had met with considerable success, including a number of hit singles.

The realities of earning a living as a serious jazz musician obliged artists of an earlier era, including Nat Cole, to conform to the vagaries, and often indignities, of show business. (This writer vividly remembers waiting in line with Nat—sometime in the late 50’s, when he was already an international celebrity—to be fingerprinted for a cabaret card, then an odious requirement of all New York night club employees.) As jazz improvisation became increasingly complex, so did the problem of getting and keeping an audience. Early masters like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller (and later ones like Dizzy Gillespie) met this problem head-on by dividing their performances between instrumental segments and vocals, which made more direct contact with their listeners. Humor was often an all-important factor.

Pacing, dynamics, programming and the element of surprise were all essential ingredients of success. Nat Cole exemplified this approach; he was also a physically imposing figure whose sheer presence on the bandstand made an indelible impression. Above all, he was an extraordinary talent, like few others, because in addition to his obvious gifts, he had that rarity— exquisite taste—both pianistically and vocally.

Although Cole was born in Montgomery, Alabama, his father, a Baptist minister, moved the family to Chicago when Nat was a young child. His early exposure to church music and the flourishing Chicago jazz and blues scene was evidently crucial to his development.

"My church work was a constant worry to Dad," Cole has been quoted as saying. "I was inclined to play the accompani­ments too much on the hot side, which resulted in a familiar raising of the eyebrows that meant, Tone it down, son, or take the consequences later.'" (His mother's view—and she was the church's music director—is not recorded.)

Jazz history overflows with statements from major black artists who cite the church's powerful influence on their music. The Baptist, and, particularly the Holiness Church, are famous for being the source of the irresistible rhythmic thrust of a special kind of gospel music. Jazz greats like Milt Jackson are referred to as being "sanctified," although this musical credential does not always guarantee the greatness he achieved.

Chicago's great jazz and blues culture was an even more decisive influence. The New Orleans masters like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had flocked there a little before Nat's time, but Louis' records with the Hot Five and Seven were surely a part of Cole's musical upbringing. And he undoubt­edly heard other giants, like clarinetist Jimmy Noone at the Apex Club (whose pianist was Karl Mines.) Noone's theme song was Sweet Lorraine, which became one of Cole's most popular numbers. Art Tatum also worked a lot in Chicago in the 1930's, as did Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Then there were the boogie woogie masters—Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons, whose approach and feeling clearly influenced Cole, especially in his remarkable blues playing.

Blues of every kind were an important cultural force in Chicago's African-American community. The migration from the South brought many great rural artists and later resulted in the development of an urban blues tradition and a great body of recorded work by such artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others. All of this heady music undoubtedly influenced the young Nat Cole's musical perceptions and overall jazz conception.

In retrospect, however, Earl "Fatha" Hines would have to be identified as the primary and original inspiration. Cole grew up near the famous Grand Terrace, where Hines and his band were featured for 12 eventful years from 1928-1940. legend has it that an underage Nat used to listen to the band from the alley next to the club. In Stanley Dance's book. The World of Earl Hines, the songwriter and manager Charlie Carpenter quotes Nat Cole as saying, "Everything I am I owe to that man, because I copied him. Of course, through the years I've gotten away from him, but I'll never forget him, because he was my idol. He was always kind to me, and never too busy to say hello or to show me something."

Even Cole's physical demeanor at the keyboard resembled Hines. He often faced the audience at a right angle from the piano, while his hands seemed to have a life of their own. Cole's ability to accompany his singing in such a creative and independent way was truly remarkable, and was something he perfected independent of the Hines effect.

Cole's distinctive piano style developed fairly rapidly. His first recording date was in 1936 with a band led by his older brother, Eddie Cole, for Decca. Nat was only 19 years old, but had already mastered the essentials of Hines' style. The lightning-fast octave passages and the syncopated left-hand punctuations were fully assimilated. But in the manner of most youngsters, he tried to show all of his "stuff" at once.

In the years that followed, he absorbed gradually some of the harmonic savvy of Tatum, the rhythmic bite of Billy Kyle (also a Hines disciple) and the cool precision and assurance of Teddy Wilson, often expressed by the walking tenths in the left hand. But by 1943, when the Nat King Cole Trio began recording for Capitol Records, the pianist had added many innovative features to his playing, some of which pre-dated or coincided with the advent of bebop.

Harmonically, Cole far outdistanced both Hines and Wilson. Only Tatum surpassed him (and, for that matter, every other pianist) in that department.

This example (Figure A), excerpted from Easy Listenning Blues shows some of Cole's characteristic harmonic touches. Note the B-flat major seventh and C minor seventh suspension in bar 3, and also the descending minor sevenths in bar 8. Chromatic minor sevenths were to become commonplace from 1945 on, particularly in the blues and in "turnarounds" on standard tunes. Note, too, the II-7 to V-7 progression in bar 9.

When Easy Listenin’ Blues was recorded in 1944, these devices were quite rare. So either Cole initiated this himself, or he picked it up from some early "bopper." Ken Kersey was another pianist who was using minor sevenths at the time— but one can only speculate about who did what first.

Nat Cole's playing was so rich and many-faceted that any analysis can only scratch the surface. Understanding the technicalities can never substitute for feeling what he played.

The most striking feature of Cole's mature pianism was its singing quality. His single-note lines were very vocal-like and his actual singing perfectly matched his playing, both rhythmically and melodically. He was blessed with one of the most beautiful touches ever, pearly but firm, and he made everything he played come to life. He was vibrant without shouting. He was cool in the best sense of the word—great power, but always under control. He embellished the com­posed melodies of standards and originals in the manner of the great Jazz horn stylists—Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Benny Carter, to name a few.

I think it was Thelonious Monk who once told me, "If you can't play [improvise] a chorus at least as good as the tune you're playing, you're in trouble." Of course, Nat Cole, like all the masters, constantly did just that. And his statements of the original melody always seemed definitive, as if his was the only right way to play the melody. Sometimes his way of phrasing a song reminds me of Lester Young, whose laid-back conception must have affected Cole; his collaborations with Prez did indeed produce some masterpieces.

Probably the key element in Cole's style was his way with rhythm. One of the reasons he never sounds dated, even today, is his utterly relaxed way with the beat. He had thoroughly absorbed the 12/8 feel (think 4/4 in triplets) of the Southwest­ern blues players and the boogie woogie pianists. Also, he often favored those down-home, just-right, slow-to-medium walking tempos that the original Count Basic band played so well. In this regard he differs markedly from his predecessors, Hines, Waller, and even Wilson, who stated the beat more obviously, and more formally. Hines, of course, was metrically very complex, but he had an on-rushing quality which was quite different from Cole's later work.

To be specific, Cole's use of both quarter-note and eighth-note triplets gave his playing at medium tempos a lope and swing that no other pianist of the time had perfected to the same degree. These features are beautifully illustrated by this example (Figure B) from I Can’t See For Lookin’.

Like the great Southwestern players — Lester Young, Charlie Christian and others—Cole always "'told a story." His solos usually had a well-defined beginning, middle and ending. The ability to do this in just 16 bars, or one chorus, is a skill that has largely disappeared. The limits of 78-rpm records imposed a discipline that only the most creative musicians truly mastered.

Nat Cole was also an exceptional blues player, as was Tatum. although he was seldom thought of as such. Hines, Waller and Wilson, as great as they were, didn't relate to the blues as well as the Kansas City-based pianists like Pete Johnson, or Mary Lou Williams, or even Count Basie, whose own playing, in his New Jersey youth, had been much stiffer and less bluesy than it later became.

A beautiful example of Nat's blues prowess is Blues In My Shower. This piece has no theme or composed melody, but his improvisation is so vocal-like in its melodic contours that it is easy to imagine lyrics being put to it. Like many great blues performers, he gives the chord progressions less importance than the continuity and character of the melody and the projection of the blues feeling.

At faster tempos, Cole's playing was more straight-ahead, and he liked to display his considerable piano "chops," as he does on Jumpin’ At The Capitol. This carefully arranged piece shows his debt to Teddy Wilson in the two-handed passages.

Not to be overlooked is the influence of classical music on his playing. His non-syncopated use of thirds, and occasional quotes from classical composers, were probably commercial gestures (also used successfully by Tatum and his trio). A brilliant example is Cole's carefully worked out solo on Body and Soul, where he makes liberal use of Grieg's In The Hall Of The Mountain King. This solo is truly one of Cole's recorded masterpieces and he used portions of it intact in other performances of the tune. (For an in-depth analysis of this solo, see Gunther Schuller's book. The Swing Era.)

Body and Soul also offers a choice example of Cole's skill with block chords, a device he perfected early in his career. Other pianists, like George Shearing, used them in a more dazzling fashion, but none have surpassed Cole's expressiveness in the idiom. Of course. Milt Buckner is acknowledged as the originator of the technique.

No discussion of Nat King Cole's jazz contribution would be complete without pointing out the significance of the trio as a truly innovative force on the jazz and pop music scene.

The idea of a drummer-less trio was unheard of in 1937. But in Oscar Moore, Cole found a guitarist who was a perfect foil and musical partner. Moore expanded the harmonic and rhythmic language on his instrument as much as Cole did on the piano and, together, they found a way to blend with each other that has never been duplicated or improved upon. As this writer knows first-hand, piano and guitar are often incompatible, especially when both are playing chords. But Cole and Moore never got in each other's way, and the contrapuntal and ensemble passages they came up with are still amazing to behold. It is fair to say that Oscar Moore has never gotten his due, and has been sadly neglected by the critical establishment.

Not to be forgotten, either, is the work of his bassists, first Wesley Prince, then Red Callender, Johnny Miller and Joe Comfort. While not innovators like Moore, their steady and sensitive playing kept things flowing—the right word for the trio's irresistible pulse. And, as Callender recalls in his 1985 autobiography, ‘Nat was a very thorough arranger—that's why everything came off so well.’ This is a slight oversimplifica­tion, but it does emphasize that structure and organization are essential elements of musical communication, ones that many talented ensembles have perhaps unwisely downplayed in more recent times.

A good demonstration of this structure is the trio's recording of Rachmaninoff's Prelude In C Sharp Minor. Although the arrangement is credited (in the Capitol Songs Nat Cole Folio] to Nadine Robinson, Nat's first wife, it obviously has Cole's stamp on it—especially the way it is condensed to fit the three-minute time limit. (This "Third Stream" rendition predated the Modern Jazz Quartet— another structure-conscious group — by at least 10 years.) Most of Cole's trio's recordings benefit from this acute and razor-sharp sense of pacing and contrast. This fact alone had a great deal to do with the trio's ability to reach millions of non-jazz oriented listeners.

Coming on the heels of the big-band era, the trio proved you didn't have to shout to really swing, and it laid the foundation for countless piano-guitar-bass combos. It preceded the Art Tatum Trio by several years, and the Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal trios, too. (The Tatum trio in particular invites comparison because both Cole and Tatum sprinkled their work with "quotes"—everything from nursery rhymes to the classics. This device was a sure-fire way to get attention from noisy, boozing audiences.) However, the Tatum and later, the Peterson trios were often dominated by the pianists' virtuosity.

A final word about Cole's influence as a pianist. His deep "groove," harmonic awareness, supple phrasing, touch, dynamics, taste, and just plain delicious music had a profound effect on the following, to name only a few: Oscar Peterson, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Al Haig, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Ahmad Jamal, Monty Alexander, and many others, including myself.

Nat "King" Cole was aptly named. Just as surely as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Nat Cole was musical royalty. He was totally unique, and not the least of his accomplishments was his success in reaching millions while not compromising his musical standards, ever.

His music was pleasure-oriented. He wasn't interested in being the subject of the kind of analysis that puts jazz under glass to be dissected like a butterfly. But the end result has been that his piano playing satisfies on every level, including the intellectual.

Long live the King!”

Jack, Dave and Les - Sperling, Pell and Brown - That Is!

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

Imagine strolling into the Professional Drum Shop [PDS] on Vine Street across from Local 47 of the Musicians Union on a bright sunny day in Hollywood CA to buy a pair of drum sticks and, while doing so, coming across the illustrious group of drummers featured in this photograph taken by William Claxton.

Believe it or not, it was a common occurrence after Bob Yeager and Chuck Molinari opened the doors of the PDS in 1959.

Although not as well known to the Jazz public as Shelly Manne, Joe Morello, and Mel Lewis, Jack Sperling, wearing the dark glasses in the above Claxton photo, was one heckuva of a drummer.

[BTW – the other drummer in the lower left of the photo is Lloyd Morales, who, like Jack, would also work with Les Brown’s band and was very active on the Las Vegas scene in the 1960s.]

Jack was one of the very few drummers who could get around a two bass drum kit as easily as Louie Bellson.  He could do the showman stuff as you’ll see in the following video with Peggy Lee singing Fever [Max Bennett is the bassist], but most of the time, he played with very little, wasted motion.

Hank Mancini loved Jack’s drumming and used him on some of the early Peter Gunn episodes and on many of his subsequent albums, movie scores and TV soundtracks.

Jack could read up-side-down fly specks on a wall across a room. He tuned his drums to have a ringing sound so that the full beauty of the drum’s tone came through: his snare drum crackled, his tom toms boomed and his bass drum thudded.

It takes a great deal of tension on the drum heads to tune them this way. As a result, the stick rebounds come flying off the drums so you have to have the hand and wrist strength [and speed] to take this action back into the drums.

Jack’s fills [short drum breaks] were crisp and precise, his solos were musical and fit the tone of the piece and his time-keeping was impeccable.

I always thought that Jack along with Alvin Stoller and Irv Kluger were the unsung heroes among studio drummers. I’m sure that there are others who could be added to this list.

I first became familiar with Sperling’s superb playing when he was a member of the Les Brown Band. I also heard Jack on occasion with tenor saxophonist Dave Pell’s Octet. Dave was also one of the featured players in Les’ band.

During the heyday of Jazz on the West Coast, many musicians may have aspired to work with The Stan Kenton Orchestra, but Stan’s music was often daunting to execute and difficult to play; full of bravura.

While it could be daring in its own way Les Brown’s music was more accessible.

Seeing Jack Sperling in the Claxton photo also reminded me of the fact that the first, formal Jazz composition I ever played on was Dance for Daddy, one of the arrangements for his octet that Dave Pell made available through his music publishing firm.

In addition to Jack, Dave’s group also included others on the Les Brown Band such as Don Fagerquist on trumpet, Ray Sims on trombone and Rolly Bundock on bass.

Here’s a video tribute to the Dave Pell octet that features his group performing Dance for Daddy.

In the 1950s, Les Brown’s band was somewhat of a fixture at the spacious Hollywood Palladium. As Scott Yanow explains: “The Hollywood Palladium was the in-spot in Los Angeles It was open six nights a week and its daily attendance was between 5 and 8,000. The Les Brown Orchestra was able to satisfy both dancers and Jazz fans with its emphasis on standards, melodic playing and concise solos.”

During this time, Les and the band also had a long association with comedian Bob Hope’s radio and TV shows, recording contracts with Capitol Records and Columbia Records, not to mention the lucrative studio work which was ongoing throughout this period for many of the band members including Ronnie Lang, Don Paladino, Conrad Gozzo, Ted and Dick Nash and the aforementioned Messer’s Sperling, Pell, Sims and Bundock.

All of which combined to form the impression in my mind that Les and the band came of age in the 1950s.  Nothing could be farther from the truth as Les had paid his dues in the business dating back to the earliest years of the big band era.

For as Leonard Feather explains in his liner notes to the band 1953 Concert at the Palladium LP [Coral CRL 5700]: “It was a Duke University that Les, along with some fellow-collegians, started his first band. The Duke Blue Devils, as they called themselves, stayed together professionally until late 1937. After several months as a busy free-lance arranger, Les started a new band.

In later years his personal contributions as an instrumentalist and arranger became less and less frequent, though he continued to play clarinet occasionally. Though unwilling to feature himself as a soloist, Les is neither the figurehead nor the "businessman-only" bandleader type; he is the musical guide and mentor of everything that happens in the band.

The band business has undergone many vital changes in the past fifteen years. Of the few orchestras that have lived through all the vicissitudes of those years, some have made radical adjustments in style to cope with the new demands of a younger generation; others, through failing to recognize these demands, have waned in popular appeal. Still others have suffered inevitable and damaging changes in personnel.

Through the entire era, Les Brown alone has continued to move along smoothly in a straight line. His changes in style and personnel have been minor, his popularity has persisted unflaggingly. Yet he has never had the allegiance of the type of fan cult that has elevated the Goodmans, the Kentons, and Hermans to prizewinning pinnacles.”

The young musicians in my circle of friends and I referred to Les’ orchestra as the “fanfare band” because many of its arrangements began and ended with them.

In retrospect, it may have been an apt characterization because the band had a lot to celebrate: a bevy of great musicians, a wonderful sound, and a host of talented arrangers including Skip Martin, Frank Comstock, Wes Hensel, Ed Finckel, Bob Higgins, and Ben Homer.

Here’s a detailed overview of the band’s history from George T. Simon’s magnificent opus – The Big Bands 4^th Ed. [New York: Schirmer, 1981] at the end of which you will find our video tribute to Les Brown and the Band of Renown.

The audio track features a nice sampling of Jack Sperling’s stellar big band drumming Frank Comstock’s arrangement of Juan Tizol’s Caravan with solos by Dave Pell on tenor and Ray Sims on trombone.

“LES BROWN refers to his band as "The Malted Milk Band." If you equate malted milks with leading a relaxed, youthful life, with liking and trusting people, with enjoying what you're doing, with retaining a certain amount of unabashed naivete, then Les's description is quite accurate.

This band had fun. The guys always seemed to take pride in their music, and for good reason: it was always good music. Maybe it wasn't as startlingly creative as Ellington's or Goodman's or that of some other bands, but it was never music that the men would have any cause to be ashamed of. The ar­rangements (many of the early ones were written by Les himself) were top-notch, and throughout most of the band's history the playing of them was equally good.

Les's spirit and musicianship pervaded his band. Few leaders have ever been accorded such complete respect by their sidemen. Back in 1940 I wrote in Metronome what now, more than a generation later, still holds true:

It's difficult to find a better liked and more respected leader in the entire dance band business than Les Brown. Of course, a healthy personality and an honest character don't make a great leader by themselves. But they help an awful lot when the guy can do other things such as make fine arrangements, rehearse and routine a band intelligently, treat men as they want to be treated, and then impress himself on the public by playing a good clarinet. . . . Talk to some of the fellows in his band. A number of them have had better offers, for there have been some lean Brown band days, but they've refused them. "This band's too fine and a guy can't be happier than when he's working for Les. He knows just what he wants, how to get it, and he treats you right." So explain men as they ruthlessly turn down a Miller or a Goodman or a Dorsey in rapid succession.

Though there always existed a warm, close relationship among the mem­bers of the band, a preoccupation with musical precision prevented an equally close rapport with their audiences. Thus, during its first three or four years, the band made a stronger impact on other musicians than it did on the public.

Organized at Duke University, the band, known as the Duke Blue Devils, left the college in the spring of 1936 as a complete unit. The men, almost all still undergraduates, spent the summer at Budd Lake, New Jersey, and then, with the exception of two men who returned to school in the fall, took to the road for a year. During the summer of 1937, they played at Playland Casino in Rye, New York. Les recalls that "the guys made twenty-five bucks a week, and I made all of thirty-five. I was pretty green in those days. I remember that the song pluggers used to come up to see me to talk business, but most of the time I'd go off between sets with the guys and play shuffleboard."

The band broke up right after Labor Day—the parents of most of the boys had decided that their sons should go back to college and get their degrees. So Les moved in with' another arranger named Abe Osser, later better known as Glenn Osser, and supported himself by writing for Larry Clinton, Isham Jones, Ruby Newman and Don Bestor. For the summer season of 1938, Les returned to Budd Lake, fronting a local band which had also served as a road band for Joe Haymes. There he finally noticed a very pretty girl who had hung around the bandstand during the band's engagement two years earlier—noticed her enough to marry her. Today Les and Claire (Cluny) Brown are one of the most popular and respected couples in West Coast musical circles, parents of two grown children, a daughter, Denny, mother of two boys, and Les, Jr., a businessman, who married Missi Murphy, daughter of actor and former Senator George Murphy.

Meanwhile back at Budd Lake. The romance had been good; the band had been only fair. Les wanted out before the end of the season so he could go with Larry Clinton as chief arranger. But the customers liked Les and his band, so the management wouldn't let him quit.

At that time, RCA Victor had a very shrewd A&R chief named Eli Oberstein, who saw great promise in Brown. (Les had switched from Decca to Victor's subsidiary Bluebird label.) Oberstein convinced Les he should organ­ize a better band and arranged a booking in the Green Room of New York's Edison Hotel, for which Les received a hundred dollars a week—quite a salary for him in those days. The twelve-piece outfit wasn't an astounding success, but it satisfied the management and soon attracted booker Joe Glaser, who threw his support, financial as well as otherwise, behind the outfit. Thus began a warm relationship that was to last more than a quarter of a century.

Glaser was intensely devoted to the band. One summer, while Metronome was running its annual dance-band popularity poll, I received a telephone call from him. He wanted to buy 250 copies of the magazine. When I asked him why, he said he needed them for his friends, so they could use the ballot to vote for Les. When I told him we couldn't sell them to him because we wanted the contest to reflect a true picture of our regular readers' tastes (with our circulation, 250 votes could have made a strong impact), he said nothing and hung up. Our attitude must have made quite an impression, however, because for a long time thereafter, Les subsequently told me, Glaser kept referring to me as "What's his name—the guy at Metronome who couldn't be bought."

When it was formed in late 1938, the band had twelve men. As its engage­ments grew (it played the Arcadia Ballroom in New York and also spent a good part of the summer of 1940 at the New York World's Fair Dancing Campus), its personnel also grew, in quality as well as in numbers. It featured a couple of excellent tenor saxists in Wolffe Tannenbaum and Stewie McKay; a brilliant lead saxist, Steve Madrick, who later became the chief audio engi­neer for NBC-TV's "Today" show; and, starting in the summer of 1940, a very attractive seventeen-year-old ex-dancer from Cincinnati named Doris Day.

Doris had been discovered by the Bob Crosby band, but something went wrong. One report had it that a member of the band had made some pretty serious passes at the very young lady, which frightened her so that she gave her notice. In any event, Les heard her at the Strand Theater, was immedi­ately impressed, and, having heard the grapevine stories about her unhappiness, offered her a job in what was probably his most boyishly charming manner. She accepted and joined the band in New England in August of 1940, eventually to become one of its most important assets.

Twenty-five years later, Doris told me, "I was awfully lucky working with Les. The boys were so great. They softened things up for me when everything could have disillusioned and soured me."

Doris's stay with the band lasted less than a year. She recorded a few sides. Says Les, "I remember the first one was a thing called 'Beau Night in Hotchkiss Corners.' What was she like? Very easy to work with—never a problem."

How was she as a performer? I reviewed the band both at the Arcadia and at Glen Island Casino during the fall of 1940 and came away with this impres­sion: "And there's Doris Day, who for combined looks and voice has no apparent equal: she's pretty and fresh-looking, handles herself with unusual grace, and what's most important of all, sings with much natural feeling and in tune."

However, the band's chief failing still remained evident: it lacked intimacy, "Only at times does it ever get really close to the dancers," continued the same review. More novelties and more spotlighting of soloists were suggested.

That winter the band went to Chicago for a two-week engagement at Mike Todd's Theater Cafe. It stayed for six months. But before it returned East, Doris had left. She'd fallen in love with a trombonist in Jimmy Dorsey's band, become Mrs. Al Jorden and retired — temporarily.

During the following summer, the band really found itself. It spent the entire season at Log Cabin Farms in Armonk, New York, where the guys had a ball. Most of the men lived in houses in the area, and during the day they played softball and tennis and went through quite a health-kick routine. The band took on a new, even younger girl singer (some reports stated she was only fourteen, though she didn't look it) named Betty Bonney and with her made its first hit record, a timely opus called "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio." Inasmuch as the band was made up preponderantly of avid Yankee fans (Joe Glaser had a season's box at Yankee Stadium that Les and his friends fre­quently occupied), the effort proved to be quite a labor of love.

The band's approach, which up till then had been good but always quite serious, began to reflect the personalities of its members, and the rapport between musicians and audiences that had been missing for all the previous years was finally established. They had a very personable, romantic singer named Ralph Young, and a brilliant clarinetist named Abe Most, each of whom had a wild sense of humor. One of their favorite gags involved Most's pretending to sing a pretty ballad. Abe happened to have a horrible voice, but Ralph would sneak a mike off behind the bandstand and supply the sounds while Abe would lip-sync. Then, of course, as Abe would reach the climax of his chorus, Ralph would sing ridiculous lyrics or stop singing altogether, while Abe continued mouthing to no avail.

But the band's big novelty hits were performed by a cherubic baritone saxist named Butch Stone. "I caught him first when he was with Larry Clin­ton's band at Loew's State Theater in New York," reports Les. "I remembered he did a thing called 4My Feet's Too Big,' and he broke me up. Right after that, Larry was commissioned an Air Force captain, and so I offered Butch a job, and he's been with me ever since."

Stone was just one of many replacements Les started to make—not all of his own volition—when the draft started gobbling up some of the best musi­cians around. "It got so you wouldn't hire a guy," Les reports, "unless you were sure he was 4-F."

But the band continued to sound better and better all the time. And it found the formula for reaching the dancers and holding them—not merely through novelties but via some lovely ballads, like "Tis Autumn," which Les arranged, and a series of swinging versions of the classics, most of them scored by Ben Homer, including such items as "Bizet Has His Day," "March Slav" and "Mexican Hat Dance." Obviously the band had found its commercial groove. In October of 1941, it started a one-month engagement at Chicago's Blackhawk Restaurant and I stayed for almost five. It followed that with a series of lengthy dates at top hotel rooms like the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Pennsylvania, New York's prestige room, and the College Inn of Chicago's Hotel Sherman, the most coveted spot in that city. In 1942 it scored a big hit at the Palladium in Holly­wood, made its first movie, Seven Days Leave, with Lucille Ball, Victor Mature and Carmen Miranda, then began a whole series of appearances on the Coca Cola-sponsored radio show that emanated from service camps throughout the country. "We'd just travel and blow, and blow and travel, and travel and blow some more," Les relates. "Tommy Dorsey was supposed to have done the most of those Coke shows, but I'm sure we were a close second —it must have been something like eighty-two for him to seventy-six for us."

For several years, Les had been calling Doris, who by then had become a mother. For him she had remained the ideal girl singer—the ice-cream-soda girl for the ice-cream-soda band—and he wanted her back. It was during the band's Coke travels that he called her one more time. "We were in Dayton, Ohio, and I told her that's as close as we'd be coming to Cincinnati, where she was living. 'So how about it?' I asked her. And when she couldn't quite seem to make up her mind because of her kid, I told her the band would send her son and her mother ahead to the Pennsylvania Hotel, where we were going to open in a few days, and fix them up there and everything if she'd join us right away in Ohio. That's when she agreed to come back."

With Doris in the band again, Les started turning out a series of successful records, such as "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time," "You Won't Be Satisfied," and Doris' biggest hit with the band, "Sentimental Journey."

The first time the band played the tune, the reaction was negligible. "It was at one of those late-night rehearsals we used to have at the Hotel Pennsylvania," Doris recalls. "Nobody was especially impressed. But after we played it on a couple of broadcasts, the mail started pouring in. Before that I don't think we'd even planned to record it. But of course we did—right away—and you know the rest."

This was the same period in which Les recorded his other big hit, "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm." To show you how imperceptive recording companies can be, it wasn't released until almost five years later. "We did it between recording bans," Les reports. "We'd taken it along as one of those extra numbers you sometimes get a chance to do on a date, and we did the whole thing in fifteen minutes. For years after that it stayed in the barrel at Columbia.

"Then one night in 1948, when we were running out of tunes, we played it as a band number on one of our Hope shows. The reaction was terrific. Right away we got a wire from Columbia telling us to get into the studio the next day and record it. I wired back, 'Look in your files.' They did, and of course they found it and released it, and it became a big hit. I've often won­dered if Columbia had released it when we first did it whether it would have been as big for us. I have a feeling it might not have made it then. And you know what? Columbia still has a lot of things of ours that they've never released."

Actually, by the time the record came out, Les had given up his band, sup­posedly for good. It happened late in 1946, and the move wasn't entirely sur­prising to some of us. In the February issue of Metronome, after praising the band, especially saxists Steve Madrick, Ted Nash and Eddie Scherr, trum­peters Don Jacoby and Jimmy Zito, trombonist Warren Covington, pianist Geoff Clarkson, and Doris Day, "now THE band singer in the field, who is singing better than ever and displaying great poise," I concluded with: "As for Les himself, he is becoming sort of an enigma these days, apparently more interested in songs and the publishing field, less eager and enthusiastic about his band. . . . Such a change is discouraging and causes some uneasy wonder­ing about the Brown future."

A few months later he verified his retirement plans, first verbally, then actively. He quit in December, 1946. "I wanted to settle in L.A., where the weather would be nice and I could relax. It rained steadily for the first twelve days."

Les's plan was to take twelve months off. But he had a contract for a March date at the Palladium. "I'd forgotten all about it. The guys had taken other jobs. But the management wouldn't let me out of it, even though I had no band." So he reorganized. "I think we rehearsed about three times before we opened. We had some great men. But the band was uneven."

They broadcast twice a night from the Palladium. "Stan Kenton heard one of our early shows one night and, according to the guy he was with, said he thought the band sounded terrible. He was right. But then later on that same night, he tuned in our second broadcast, without knowing who it was, and asked the same guy he was with, 'Whose band is that? It sounds great!' He was right again. That's just how unpredictable we were with that new group."

Two years later, Les still had a band. But, he noted then, "I've given up the idea of being the number-one band in the country. It's not worth it. I'd much rather stay here in California, maybe doing radio work like I'm doing. . . . I've got a home here and I can be with Cluny and the kids and I can make a pretty good living."

Thirty-five years after he had emigrated to there, Les was still in Califor­nia. For most of those years he earned an excellent living from radio and television shows—Bob Hope's, Dean Martin's, the Grammy Awards salutes, etc. He and his band also traveled extensively with Hope to service camps all over, a regimen that Les gladly surrendered in the latter 1970s in favor of one that allowed him to remain at home in his warm, delightful, early-Amer­ican style abode in Pacific Palisades,, where he and Clare spend evenings lis­tening to classical music and entertaining their many friends.

Several nights a week, Les still leaves home to play west coast gigs with his band, but in the winter of 1981 he concluded what he insisted would be his final one-nighter tour. And this time, even more so than in 1946, when he issued a similar statement, he really meant it. Or at least, that's what he was saying!” [pp. 99-106].