Book Review - Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion by Barney Hoskyns

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

"Compelling and revealing."

—The Washington Post

“What enthralled me, and still does, is how the Dan’s happily seditious lyrics are wed to the complexity of the music. Most of the writers here understand that. . . . Becker and Fagen were notoriously tough interview subjects, and didn’t grant audiences often, so Hoskyns has managed to corral the best of the best. The pair’s biting humor comes across in the finest moments. . . . If I was teaching a class in writing about popular music, this would be one of the required textbooks.”

—Dwight Silverman, The Houston Chronicle

“Steely Dan saw the rottenness of the era ahead of time and staked a claim to a land that we would all eventually occupy. . . For a Dan fan, it’s fascinating to read about what the critics were hearing, which was a combination of baffled satisfaction, baffled ambivalence, and baffled displeasure. One thing that is consistent . . . is how different the Dan sounded from everything and everyone else. . . . Hoskyns has judiciously gathered a lot of perceptive thinking, especially admirable because of how unmusical most rock critics are and how complex the Dan’s music is.”

—The Brooklyn Rail

‘Like true English majors in love with words, Becker and Fagen knew the value of a story with indelible characters. Their songs' socially astute portraits of various strangers, gauchos, daddies, losers, alienated curb holders and unrehabilitated returnees stay with us the way a good piece of literature does.”

- Sibbie O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

I was aware of the Jazz-influenced, Rock Band Steely Dan when it came on the scene in the early 1970s mainly because of my close association with pianist Victor Feldman who played various acoustic and electronic keyboards as well as doubling on percussion on some of the band’s albums.  

Their sneaky and sometimes salacious lyrics amused me, although if truth be told, I didn’t always catch all of the socio-cultural allusions and references, but I always respected their informed literary bent and the overall quality of their music.

They used excellent horn players like Chuck and Steve Findley, Slyde Hyde and Plas Johnson, fine guitarists like Larry Carlton, Dean Parks and Walter Becker who more than held his own on guitar and on bass, as did Donald Fagen on keyboards along with the aforementioned Feldman and Don Grolnick, and some of the best groove drummers around including Steve Gadd, Bernard Purdie and Rick Marotta.

Basically, I took the music as it came and enjoyed the group’s recordings. The fact that they didn’t tour wasn’t a surprise to me because the guys they used in the band couldn’t afford to be on the road and away from their studio incomes for any length of time and because, as I had been told by Victor Walter and Donald had a very particular way of making the music “in the studio” with its recourse to instant alteration and modification of the music’s final sound.

What I wasn’t aware of was the amount of dissension amongst the Rock purists involving the use of Jazz elements in the music of Steely Dan.

I mean, c’mon, most Rock is based around 3-chord turnarounds and a backbeat on 2 and 4 and these guys were dissing musicians who actually understood theory and harmony, could read music and play it in a variety of keys and rhythmic configurations?!

After reading Barney Hoskyns - Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion [New York: Overlook Press, 2018] I learned that there’s more to it than the simple dichotomy in points-of-view that I thought was involved.

The author, Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock’s Backpages - www.rocksbackpages.com - and author of numerous books including Across the Great Divide, Waiting for the Sun, Hotel California, and Lowside of the Road. A former MOJO correspondent, Hoskyns writes for Uncut and other publications, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ.

Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion [New York: Overlook Press, 2018, 319 pages, $27.95] is the ultimate anthology of Steely Dan, one of the defining and best selling rock acts of the last half-century.

At its core a creative marriage between Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan has sold over 45 million albums and recorded several of the cleverest and best-produced albums of the 1970s ― from the breathlessly catchy Can’t Buy a Thrill to the sleekly sinister Gaucho ― making them one of the most successful rock acts of the past fifty years. More than ten years after their break-up in 1981, they returned to remind fans of how sorely they had missed their elegance and erudition, subsequently recording Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go during the following decade, touring continuously, and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Major Dudes collects some of the smartest and wittiest interviews Becker and Fagen have ever given, along with insightful reviews of―and commentary on―their extraordinary songs. Compiled by leading music critic and writer Barney Hoskyns, Major Dudes features contributions from Chris Van Ness, Steven Rosen, and the late Robert Palmer, and pieces including rare interviews and reviews of Steely Dan’s early albums from Disc, Melody Maker, and Rolling Stone.

With an afterword examining the musical legacy of and memorializing the late Walter Becker, who since his passing Rolling Stone has heralded as the “brilliant perfectionist behind one of rock’s most eccentric bands,” Major Dudes is the most comprehensive anthology of Steely Dan ever compiled and will be the centerpiece on every fan’s shelf.

Here are three additional reviews of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion from Down Beat magazine, Elmore magazine and The Washington Post.

HOW THE DAN DIVIDES US - Eugene Holley, Jr., Down Beat, September, 2018

“When Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist, lyricist, composer and member of the award-winning Steely Dan, died of esophageal cancer last year at age 67, it marked the end of an extraordinary four-decade career and a 50-year friendship with pianist and composer Donald Fagen. Becker's unfortunate demise makes the publication of Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion (Overlook Press) an important and timely book.

Edited by British music critic Barney Hoskyns — editorial director of the website Rock's Backpages and author of a number of books, including Joni: The Anthology—this collection consists of 40 reviews, interviews, profiles and essays published between 1972 and 2017 in publications ranging from The Los Angeles Times to New Music Express.

The book is full of insights into Becker and Fagen's career, especially their early years as songwriters at Manhattan's Brill Building (one of their songs. "I Mean To Shine," was recorded by Barbra Streisand); with the pop group Jay and the Americans; their first group in Los Angeles with guitarists Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Denny Dias and early lead vocalist David Palmer; and their first albums, including Can't Buy A Thrill, Countdown To Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic, which gave the world the Latin-lilted "Do it Again" and the dreamy "Dirty Work,"

A 1974 piece, originally published in CREEM magazine by Wayne Robbins, who went to school with Becker and Fagen at Bard College, yields a rare, first-hand assessment of their time as undergraduates.

"Whenever there was a social function that demanded a cheap rhythm section, we were there," Becker told Robbins with astonishing humility. But the influence of jazz was gaining ground in their music, as evidenced by The Horace Silver-basslined "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and Phil Woods' alto madness on "Doctor Wu." Some were not pleased. John Ingham wrote in his review of Katy Lied that he was "ambivalent" about it. In contrast, Ian MacDonald's review of Pretzel Logic, which included Duke Ellington's 1927 "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," exerted that the recording "exhibits far more range, depth and flexibility than its forebears."

Of course, the jazz influence reached its zenith on the Dan's 1977 Grammy award-winning Aja. which featured Victor Feldman's deft Fender Rhodes improvisations on the funky opening number "Black Cow," the shifting, moody melody of "Deacon Blues" and the title track, with tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter's galactic solo buoyed by Steve Gadd's vivid and volcanic drumming. In Dylan Jones' 2014 GQ piece, he praised the LP as "the best album of all time."

In cruel counterpoint, Rolling Stone reviewer Robert Palmer infamously wrote that the Dan's follow-up release, Gaucho, which yielded the funereal funked "Babylon Sisters" and the gospel-grooved "Time Out Of Mind," sounded like it was "recorded in a hospital ward." One could make the case that the taint of jazz and r&b in the Dan's music still divides fans and critics.

Because of Becker's personal issues— which fueled his move to Hawaii—the Dan was shut down, seemingly, for good. But after Fagen and Becker released solo recordings of their own, the group resurfaced in 1995 with Alive In America, chronicling their first tour in years. Two Against Nature followed in 2000 and was honored with a Grammy for album of the year. Their final release together was the prophetically titled Everything Must Go, released in 2003.

In David Cavanagh's obituary published last year in Uncut, Fagen described his late friend and collaborator as "smart as a whip, an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter... and hysterically funny." Cavanagh aptly eulogized Becker as "one of the most fascinating individuals in post-war American music."

Indeed, as this compendium shows. Steely Dan's jazz-tinged melodies and harmonies, edgy themes, sarcastic lyrics and meticulous, marathon studio sessions stretched and reshaped the boundaries of pop. rock and jazz. And in doing so. the band became a unique force of its own, beyond categorization.”

Ordering Info: www.overlookpress.com

Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion Edited by Barney Hoskyns

By Melissa Caruso, Book Review Music News in Elmore Magazine, June 18, 2018,

“Steely Dan: The band that was too cool for touring, too cool for the Grammys, too cool for the Rolling Stones, and too cool for Top 40 hits. They placed Duke, Miles, Debussy, and Coltrane on pedestals, which isolated them from the hippies at their alma mater, Bard College in upstate New York. They fused jazz and pop in unprecedented ways, and placed quality well over commercialism, garnering them the title “rock’s most obsessive nit-picks.” They cared only about the music and could give two shits if they were photographed on the red carpet or at some ritzy Hollywood hotel party.

Having both grown up on the East coast, Fagen and Becker listened to local jazz radio programs like Symphony Sid. In order to keep the lights on, jazz stations played a lot of Latin jazz from the ’50s and ’60s, and those influences are evident on the Dan’s impressive catalogue. But before Steely Dan came into existence, Fagen and Becker cut their teeth as session players along the eastern seaboard and tried selling songs as staff writers around the Brill Building and later at ABC-Dunhill (the latter thanks to an auspicious friendship with Gary Katz), but their lyrics were far from the upbeat Supremes’ 45s that dominated the airwaves of the late ’60s and early ’70s as evidenced in the Grassroots’ rejection of their song “Tell Me A Lie.” Barbra Streisand, however, ended up recording their song “I Mean to Shine” in 1971. They spent a year and half backing up Jay & the Americans on a couple tours, got a feel for the giant stages of Madison Square Garden, but Fagen and Becker always planned on having their own group. At night, when the ABC-Dunhill building was empty, Fagen and Becker would sneak in and lay the foundation of what would become Steely Dan.

On their first record, Can’t Buy A Thrill, Steely Dan was comprised of what seemed like permanent members, including Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, whose chops can be heard on the brilliant guitar solos of “Only A Fool Would Say That” and “Midnight Cruiser,” but eventually let him run off with the Doobie Brothers. Fagen and Becker preferred to hire session musicians instead of having permanent bandmates for their records, and that in itself is a testament to their longevity. Steely Dan was never a band per-say, rather a concept. In that case, Steely Dan could never be dismembered.

On the one hand with Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion, you’ve got archived reviews and interviews on Steely Dan that can be dug up if you have access to your uncle’s crate of 1970s copies of MOJO and Rolling Stone—or the internet. On the other hand, you’ve got a collection of some of the wittiest interviews Fagen and Becker have ever sat down for juxtaposed with a collection of the sharpest commentary from music journalism’s top dogs (Barney Hoskyns, Dylan Jones, Robert Palmer, Sylvie Simmons) that weave together the interesting saga that is Steely Dan. My only reservation? Two female writers among the Steely Dan Companion’s 33 contributors.

Sit poolside and in conference rooms as Fagen and Becker’s esoteric humor attempts to throw off naive journalists, learn about that time Keith Richards banged on their hotel room at 4 a.m. blasting Katy Lied, and impress your friends with your encyclopedic knowledge of Fagen’s recording techniques, like how he discreetly hung a microphone from the ceiling at Studio 54 during one of Steve Rubell’s business parties to achieve the party noises heard on “Ruby Baby” only to toss the recording (that obsessive nit-pick), and then throw his own party where “a lot of people got very drunk, and we got our party noises,” Fagen says.

The first time Steely Dan were invited to the Grammys, they declined because the invitation requested that they “wear beautiful clothes.” “They wanted me to come dressed like Cher!” Fagen says. They never toured because hitting the road would interrupt their energy in the studio. One need look further than Aja—the album that garnered acceptance from the National Recording Registry—to understand how vital continuity is. Performing in venues added another obstacle: The Dan’s sound was too complex for big arenas and they did not want to risk losing an audience to muddled reverberations.

Because of their idiosyncratic sound—with its intricate chord changes, high-register harmonies, and immaculate exteriors, other musicians have found it difficult to cover Steely Dan’s discography. However, plenty of hip-hop and R&B artists have sampled their songs in the last two decades decade. Ice Cube samples “Green Earrings” on his “Don’t Trust ‘Em”; Beyonce blends “Black Cow” on her J’Ty remix of “Me, Myself, and I”; Hit Boy/John Legend tie “The Boston Rag” on “WyW.” Fagen points out that he and Becker usually gave the green light to hip-hop artists who requested to use parts of the Dan’s music; however, when Kanye West requested to sample “Kid Charlemagne” on his 2007 single “Champion,” it was an immediate no. Though the additional income was appealing, “neither of us particularly liked what he had done with it,” Fagen says. Consequently, Kanye wrote Fagen and Becker a handwritten note: “I love your stuff, and I really want to use it because it’s very personal thing for me.” And with that, Fagen and Becker had a change of heart.

Hoskyns divides Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion into six sections that follow Steely Dan’s trajectory, but perhaps the most interesting sections are the final two, titled “Stand-Up Rock ’n’ Roll: The Return of Steely Dan” and “Grey Eminences,” which find Fagen and Becker coming to terms with their age, their adaptations to the 21st century (recording for CD versus vinyl) before concluding the collection with a poignant essay on the late Walter Becker by Uncut writer David Cavanagh.

“A lot of people think of them as the epitome of boring ’70s stuff” writes novelist William Gibson; yet the truth is, they have been accepted without the glitz, fancy clothes, and the Billboard hits. They are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Major Dudes who exemplified that intelligence was to be regarded with skepticism in the realm of rock ’n’ roll. What music critics called bitter and cynical, Steely Dan called funny. It’s difficult to imagine where we’d be without their sardonic perceptions of society; perhaps we’d be stuck in a world of pink bubble gum. Either way, it was the Dan who were the ones laughing all the way to the bank.

—Melissa Caruso

How Steely Dan made its mark on music — and shaped an American cool By Sibbie O'Sullivan writing in the Jul 13, 2018 The Washington Post

It’s been nearly five decades since Steely Dan released its breakthrough hit, “Do It Again.” (Are you humming it now?) Few would dispute the band’s influence or popularity — all told, it has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide — but with “Major Dudes,” Barney Hoskyns delivers a 300-page block of solid evidence of the musical and lyrical brilliance that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the originators of Steely Dan, unleashed on the world beginning in the 1970s.

The book — featuring essays, reviews and interviews about and with Fagen and Becker — covers the duo’s pre-Dan years through their solo careers and ends with Walter Becker’s death in 2017. It shows how the band was shaped by American radio and television in the 1950s and early ’60s, before escaping the suburbs for Manhattan. There, Fagen and Becker imbibed jazz and took on a Beat-infused style of dress and attitude. After playing college gigs at Bard, they toured with Jay and the Americans and then relocated to Los Angeles, where they perfected their “brand of ruthless cool,” a style that made their albums, from “Can’t Buy a Thrill” (1972) to “Gaucho” (1980), instant classics.

[Reading Steely Dan: The lyrical genius that helped define a decade]

Unlike a straight biography about the band — or even a memoir — “Major Dudes” filters the group’s rise through its interaction with journalists. As such, it offers a more critical take. The interviews are compelling and revealing (if at times repetitious), showcasing Fagen and Becker’s secluding habits and snarky put-ons. Becker, especially, is fluent, funny and prescient. One statement, from a 1976 interview with Michael Watts, in the magazine Melody Maker, stands out. Watts asks Becker whether their music might “be generally symptomatic of the times” Becker answers, “In terms of cynicism? Oh, I dunno. I don’t think these are particularly cynical times. You just wait to see what’s coming up! I’m inclined to think that things are going to become far more pessimistic.”

Readers expecting opinionated writing from rock journalists won’t be disappointed. In his review of the 1975 album “Katy Lied,” John Ingham writes, “When I first received this album, it engendered dispassionate dislike, but the more I play it, the more I become merely ambivalent.” Another critic mentions the band’s “gang-war instrumental break,” and another that “the band doesn’t exactly look like they jumped out of Modern Romance magazine.” Writing about Fagen’s 2014 memoir, “Eminent Hipsters,” Ian Penman says the book is “actually ‘On the Road’ with Alvy Singer.’ ”

Fagen and Becker’s lyrics have been described as cynical and sinister, and the artists themselves as “sociopaths masquerading as benign dictators,” a reference to their perfectionist methods in the studio. Regardless of whether one agrees with these assessments, Becker’s prediction about the future was correct. The lone shooter in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” from the band’s 1976 album “The Royal Scam” has, sadly, become a regular headline today.

[Obituary: Walter Becker, Steely Dan co-founder, dies at 67]

The interviews also uncover a great deal about the influences that shaped Fagen and Becker’s art. Fiction was a big one — both on the style and content of their songs. As young men, Fagen and Becker read the iconic writers of the ’50s and ’60s: John Barth, Terry Southern, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Hesse and, of course, William Burroughs. When singing, Fagen says he becomes a song’s “character,” or acts as the “narrator” of a particular story. The song “Everything You Did,” also from “The Royal Scam,” stings like a Raymond Carver three-pager.

I think, too, the surreal novels of Nathanael West, another author the duo admired, must have influenced their work. West’s collection of freaks, cons, cowboys and unpredictable women in his 1939 “The Day of the Locust” predates Steely Dan’s own collection of freaks, cons and gauchos by 33 years. Even Fagen’s desire — comic, perhaps — to write a song about the Congress of Vienna seems to echo West’s fantastic scene involving a failed Hollywood reenactment of the battle of Waterloo.

Unfortunately, the book, which unfolds chronologically, loses momentum (and possibly the reader’s patience) by needlessly repeating already-stated facts throughout the text. We understand that Fagen hearing Becker play blues guitar in an empty room at Bard College in 1967 is the second-most important howdy-do in rock history — July 6, 1957, St. Peter’s Church, Woolton, Liverpool being the first — but that doesn’t mean we want to repeatedly read about it.

That said, “Major Dudes” does effectively show how Fagen and Becker soaked up, skewed, and reformatted American images, habits and mismanaged dreams and made a groove out of them. In their songs, the “old, weird America” — to piggyback on Greil Marcus’s phrase — becomes the new, weird America, shining forth in urban present-tense, and on into the future, even into other worlds. Although some readers might fault “Major Dudes” for its dearth of longer essays that place Fagen and Becker in a wider cultural context, the book does give us plenty to read and think about. I have no doubt we’ll be thinking about and listening to Steely Dan until “California tumbles into sea.”

Sibbie O’Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.

Aretha Franklin - A Deeper Love

© -  The Economist, August 25, 2018, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“AT POINTS in her concerts, which enthralled America for 50 years, Aretha Franklin would fling her arms out wide. Sometimes it was to shrug her strong shoulders out of some satiny or feathery dress, or to throw away her long fur coat, like any diva (though she was the ultimate diva) who by the end of her career had won 18 Grammys and sold 75m records. Sometimes it was to embrace America, all colours, as when she sang “Precious Lord” at Martin Luther King’s funeral, or gave her rapturous version of “My Country ’tis of Thee” in a big-bow-statement hat at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Or possibly those arms just demonstrated how her voice, the whispering or crying height of it and drop-jaw depth of it, seemed to pass any limit that people might imagine.

Open arms suggested love, but more often Everywoman’s frustration, black or white. For every super-sharp man she daydreamed of, Turns me right on when I hear him say/Hey baby let’s get away, there would be ten who let her down: You’re a no-good heartbreaker/You’re a liar and you’re a cheat/And I don’t know why/I let you do these things to me. They messed with her mind, as she fumed in the Blues Brothers film in 1980, pummelling her palms into her big man’s stupid chest: Just think/Think about what you’re tryin’ to do to me. After all, it don’t take too much high IQs. Men in general didn’t begin to give her what she wanted, just a little respect when you get home…R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me. This, her most famous song, wasn’t just about a put-down woman and a do-wrong man; it became the anthem of every liberation movement because of her roof-raising style. It was her personal anthem, too. She wished to be called “Ms Franklin”, to be paid cash and to be spared air-conditioning. All I’m askin’, honey.

Those wide arms also showed how her whole body sang. When she accompanied herself on the piano, big rampaging chords picked up from Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum, she sang with the stomach as well as heart and head. As a child of ten she’d understood that, hiding her chronic shyness behind the instrument while she sang “Jesus be a Fence Around Me” with the voice of an angel, or a grown woman. That was the age she decided to be a singer, when she saw the great gospeller Clara Ward cast away her hat as she performed in church. One gesture settled it; she would do the same. Some said her father, the nationally famous pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, forced her into it, but it wasn’t so. The musical world of the time, Smokey Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Marvin Gaye, blues and jazz as well as gospel, passed through their house. Music opened her out, drew her into some other place, and it was she, not her father, who went off to New York to seek record contracts and who told would-be producers, frankly, “I want hits.”

Covering the bruises

For a while she sang almost anything, but that didn’t work. She had to bear witness to what she had been through, including her mother leaving home when she was six, having babies by two different men before she was 15, and at 19 marrying a slick pimp from Detroit, later her manager, who beat her up. Pain and fame grew together. The golden decade of hits, fostered by her move to Atlantic Records and Jerry Wexler in 1967, graced by her face on the cover of Time, was miserable at home. But soul music, as it always had, let her turn both suffering and sexual yearning into one freedom cry. Between sacred and secular she moved to and fro without effort. Her biggest-selling album, “Amazing Grace” (1972) was recorded at a church service 14 years after her first album, “Songs of Faith”, when her father was her manager. On that record, her young voice scraped on the high notes. In the interim her rough life had taught her smooth soaring.

She was proud to be “The Queen of Soul”. Rivals to her crown were tartly taken down. Once she had sung a song she owned it, and that was that. Yet the last thing she wanted, offstage, was stardom. Young Aretha hid behind drinking and smoking; mature Aretha retreated to her kitchen to find comfort in banana pudding, wrapping her ballooning body in ever more satiny and sparkly gowns. She did crochet, and refused to fly. I’ve been in the storm too long. All she thought and felt was on display on stage. No one needed to climb the wall she’d built around herself.

Someone, though, could see through that wall. He knew the things about her others only kept guessing at, such as the multiple causes of her sadness. He saw the bruises she covered up. When she teased journalists that she didn’t understand when they said her songs were raunchy, she wasn’t lying. The delivery might sound sexy, but they weren’t about a man. In her music she slipped into the zone, just as she had when she began at New Bethel Baptist, wobbling on her little chair. When she sang You make me feel like/A natural woman, head arched proudly back, one hand patting her hair, she was singing to God, just as when she screamed out her passion as a sinner cleansed by the blood of the Lamb: When my soul was in the lost and found/You came along to claim it. And when she threw out her arms wide under the spotlights, it was not to thank the fans who clamoured for her as much as to say, Precious Lord, take my hand.”

Tiny Kahn: Over 300 But Less Than 30

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

“Tiny's ears are what really got to me. I don't know if he had absolute pitch. Very likely he did—or came very close to it. He instinctively knew how to read an arrangement. Right off he would find what to do with a chart. Another thing—Tiny tuned his drums assiduously. He was concerned with the pitch of each drum. And he was very particular about cymbals; each one had to serve a particular purpose. He was like a modern Sid Catlett. He would have had that kind of influence, had he lived.

Tiny was very advanced harmonically. His arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" for the Barnet band indicates where he was going. He wrote it in Salt Lake City in two days.

The loss of Tiny Kahn was devastating He meant so much to music and to those who knew him. Everybody learned some­thing from Tiny. If you talked to or hung out with him, played in one of the bands that employed him or analyzed his writing, you came away with something.”

- Manny Albam, composer-arranger

“Tiny was melodic on drums ….. He probably was the most melodic drummer of all time. And the most economic. He made every stroke mean something. A whole school developed around his style.

Tiny could do so many things easily. When I was in the Army, the leader of the dance band at my base in Dallas told me he couldn't buy the "Jump the Blues Away" and "Wiggle Woogie" Basie stocks anywhere. I wrote Tiny about the problem—how all the cats in the band, including me, wanted to play this music. What did he do? He just copied all the music off the record­ings and sent the transcriptions to me. And that was an eighteen-year-old guy who had never taken a lesson.

How about this? When I came home on furlough, as World War II was winding down, Tiny hipped me to what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing and explained their music in detail. He knew every note and what to do with it. He would sit at the piano and play complete tunes for me, in some cases including all the solos. He always knew what was going down before anyone else.”

- Terry Gibbs, vibraphonist and bandleader

“Tiny Kahn was really a gigantic influence to all of us. Es­pecially all the young white players who were in the big bands and still trying to play jazz. He was such a marvelous musician. He was a dy­namic drummer with great time. He didn't have great hands, great feet, he wasn't really a showy drummer. He was just a real father time-type drummer. And he was a self-taught arranger, piano player, ….. Tiny knew how changes went from one to another. He was a tremendous influence on me and many others too.”

- Red Rodney, Jazz trumpet player and bandleader

“He was a very rare talent. Completely natural. He was the most unstudied musician in the whole world. And yet he wrote some excellent charts. He was a swinging drummer. A very unstudied one. But yet a natural swinger. He really wasn't a pi­anist. He would just sit down and kind of noodle away in the most illegitimate, unschooled way. But what came out was beautiful.”

- Frankie Socolow, Jazz saxophonist

“Tiny, believe it or not, was with Kenny Clarke, I believe those were the two distinct changes at that time. Tiny changed it from the Buddy Rich sound, from Gene Krupa, Louis Bellson. He came in with an opposite sound, and Mel [Lewis] came in right on the heels of Tiny, every one of us knew that.”

- Chubby Jackson, Jazz bassist and bandleader

“ Tiny never let anything deter him. He wanted to know! And he wasn't shy about it. He was curious about certain fills that I used when I worked with Parker and Dizzy. He dug their sound and feeling. So he just came up and asked. ‘How do you do those things? Show me how to play them.’

“Tiny was the one who led the way into the soft pulse—not a hard edge to it, [Ed. note — Stan more than suggested this concept in his own work, partic­ularly with small bands.] Drummers changed because of him, making their approach to sound and comment more musical, less percussive. Tiny had a rare understanding of the inner workings of a band because he was a writer. He knew how to control the time feeling, the tempo, how to take hold of the sections, the entire orchestra.

Everyone borrowed or stole from him. For a guy to die at the beginning of a great career is criminal. I know musicians who can't play or write who live into their nineties.”

- Stan Levey, Jazz drummer

"Though somewhat underrated throughout his brief career, Kahn was among the most capable of jazz drummers, with a knack for making his bandmates totally comfortable. Though he had little technical flair and rarely engaged in displays of showmanship, Kahn was renowned for his superb timekeeping and melodic playing, the latter an obvious result of his arranging and composing background. Like Jo Jones, Kahn displayed an extraordinary sense of shading and dynamics. Never one to overplay, his soft pulse and loose feel—combined with perfectly placed fills—were tailored to the music, making him one of the most distinctive players of his time.

“Tiny brought the improvisational feeling of small band drumming to the big band,” said Mel Lewis. “He played great fills and lead-ins that kicked the band along. He knew how to use space and never played too loud. Tiny was a straightforward player with a certain looseness, and his own kind of chops. His style was truly a combination of Davey Tough and a more simplified Max Roach. The man was an extremely musical player—a real listening drummer. His way of playing just worked.”

- Modern Drummer

[All of the above quotations by musicians and friends of Tiny are excerpted from Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s, Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men, The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years and Modern Drummer].

The subtitle in our feature about Tiny Kahn refers to the fact that for much of his brief life, this terrific composer, arranger and drummer weighed over 300 pounds [at one point, he topped out at 415 lbs.!], but didn’t live to reach the age of thirty [30].

Perhaps the two were related?  It would seem so for according to Johnny Mandel: “Tiny had warnings before he passed. He almost died in the late 1940s of a bad blood clot in his leg. Coronary problems, difficulties within the vascular system, were common for several years”.

During his tragically short lifetime, Tiny Kahn influenced and impressed just about everyone he performed with during Bebop’s nascent decade [1943-53].

So much so, that when news of his death reached drummer Stan Levey, a big, brute of a guy whom I never knew to fall prey to easy emotion or sentimentality, it caused this reaction:

“The day he died I was in Europe with Stan Kenton. We were about to begin a concert in Copenhagen for a tremendous audience. Somehow the word got to us that Tiny had died. Well, I just totally broke down. I finally pulled myself together and thought: ‘I'll play this one for Tiny. He gave me and other musicians so much.’”

Other than such references about his reputation from other musicians, I never knew much about Norman “Tiny” Kahn. I had heard him on the 1951 recordings that he made with Stan Getz Jazz impresario George Wein’s Storyville nightclub then located in Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel and I had even played on a few of his big band arrangements such as T.N.T and Tiny’s Blues.

So when the marvelous Dutch Jazz drummer, Eric Ineke, suggested Tiny for a feature on JazzProfiles, I thought it would be great to do a bit of research into Kahn’s career and to “get to know him better.”

Here are just a few testimonials about how Tiny was universally loved and respected:

Johnny Mandel: “The first time I came across Tiny Kahn was late one night at Child's Paramount, after we had finished the last set. There he was, standing around in an overcoat, indoors. Tiny sat down at the piano and started playing some funny stuff. I said to myself: ‘Oh, what's this?’ Then he got into some good things, and I was really impressed. I remember mumbling: ‘Oh,  my God!’ I didn't know until later that he was a drummer and arranger. I so admired Tiny's ideas and musicality and his qualities as a person that we were pretty much inseparable for eight years—until he passed.

He probably was one of the most honest and humorous people I ever met. Certainly that came out in his playing and writing. He was unlike anyone I've ever met. You can't compare him to anyone else. He was just different.”

Stan Getz: “Tiny was one of my favorite drummers of all time. He was the closest thing to Sid Catlett. He would musically get underneath you and lift you up. Most drummers batten you down from the top. And he wrote as well as he played. He was just the best!”

Elliot Lawrence: “Everyone insisted I hire Tiny. He was a great, ego-free player and a writer who knew how to develop material in the most meaningful I way. His charts almost played themselves. Everything swung.

He and Buddy Jones, our bassist, laid down what felt like a new kind of time. It was light and flew along. It didn't feel like the band touched the ground. The band was marvelous and wanted to make a new statement. Tiny, Al [Cohn], Johnny Mandel, Al Porcino, Nick Travis—a whole bunch of wonderful guys—had so much to say. This was a band that wanted to roar every night.

Tiny and I were together the better part of four years, …. It was going so well for him. And suddenly he was gone.”

[All of the previous quotations excerpted from Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men, The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years].

© -  Burt Korall, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Burt goes on to give this overview of the prominent aspects of Tiny’s brief career:

“Norman "Tiny" Kahn, one of Brooklyn's major gifts to jazz, has assumed legendary proportions since his untimely death in 1953, at twenty-nine. The drummer-composer-arranger-pianist-vibraphonist-humorist was a natural— a musician who had great instincts and a well-developed sense of what worked best in every circumstance. Had he lived, he certainly would have had an increasingly meaningful career in jazz and very possibly in other areas of music as well.

His sudden death was most deeply felt in New York, where he did some of his best work. But the impact extended through the country to Europe, where his recordings with George Auld, Stan Getz, Serge Chaloff, Red Rodney, Chubby Jackson, and Charlie Barnet and Lester Young certainly had more than a passing effect.

Kahn is remembered not only for his talent but for his warmth and sensitivity as a person. He was liked by everyone. He didn't have an evil bone in his rather large body.

Music consumed his waking hours. All kinds of music. He listened, then analyzed and evaluated what he heard. He had his own concept when it came to drums. Outside of instruction with drum teachers Freddie Albright and Henry Adler, covering sixteen months in all, at different times, Kahn was self-made—as a drummer, composer and arranger, pianist, and vibraphonist.

His drumming made bands sound better than they ever had before, particularly during his last years when he had all the elements of his style in enviable balance. His time was perfect—right down the center. He wasn't too tense or too laid-back. Kahn had his own sound and techniques on drums and could be quite expressive, using his hands and feet in a manner that was his alone. Certainly not a technical wizard, he transcended his relative lack of technical ability by developing a manner of playing that not only made up for this but raised his and his colleagues' performance level.

His primary contribution as a drummer was the inspiration he provided, motivating musicians to feel good and give the best of themselves. He played a classic supporting role in small and large bands, bringing a small band approach and flexibility to his work. He concerned himself with giving players the security and the wherewithal needed to free them. Kahn had so much going for him that was not immediately apparent. You had to listen and listen some more before it became completely clear what he could do for music. Then the revelation came in a rush.

Kahn the writer gave you much to hear and think about. Often his compositions and arrangements practically played themselves. Musicians remember how easy his charts were to perform; they felt right for all the instruments and never failed to communicate and make a comment. His unpretentious writing mirrored his concern for expressing ideas in an economical, telling, swinging manner.

It was immediately apparent to all who knew him, as a kid in Brooklyn and later on as well, that Kahn had music within him. As he grew older and ad opportunities to share his views and ideas with others, he became a great source to the many musicians drawn to him. He was a leader without ever desiring to be one.

Kahn set an example not only when it came to playing and writing but i how he lived. While others turned to hard drugs, drink, and an underground life, he moved ever more deeply into music. His only harmful habit" was food. A food junkie, he ate often and excessively. His need and great capacity for food could well have been the basis for more than a few sessions with a therapist. Many of his close friends feel he would have lived much longer had he managed to deal more logically with this problem.

Tiny Kahn's life had unusual consistency. He immersed himself in music early and did everything he could to further his knowledge and under­standing of all of it. …

Kahn hung out where the music was happening. He got to know players and writers in all the bands. Many of his friends around town loved Basie, Lester Young, and Jo Jones — the Basie band of the 1930s and early 1940s. A little later, they became fascinated with the innovations of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Bud Powell. They sought a rapprochement between the floating rhythm and musicality of Pres and Jo, the economy of the pianist Basie and the relaxed swing of his band, and what the modernists [i.e.: Parker and Gillespie] were doing. …

1949 was a key year for Tiny Kahn. He helped organize and rehearse the Chubby Jackson band, for which he wrote almost the entire library of arrangements. The band lingers in mind, even though it didn't last too long. Kahn played and wrote for the Charlie Barnet modern band that year. He also briefly became involved —because of Gerry Mulligan's strong recommendation — with Benny Goodman's bebop band. But the leader's peculiarities, when it came to drummers and things in general, negated a regular working relationship with the drummer-arranger. …

‘The Chubby Jackson band was the greatest band I ever played with,’ Kahn told Pat Harris. "The records give you a poor idea of how it sounded. Columbia didn't put as much effort into the record date as it could have - poor balance, etc. The idea seemed to be to get the date over as soon as possible. The band did ... the date before it ever had a job… .

The Jackson band had extraordinary impact for its size - fourteen piece - and swung with unusual ferocity. It really communicated! Kahn's charts were among the best examples of bringing together elements of bop and Basie. The soloists - tenorist Ray Turner, altoist Frank Socolow, trumpeter Charlie Walp - were unstintingly pulsating and creative. Kahn brought unusual life to the band from the drums. Jackson was a supportive, enthusiastic leader. He had all that was needed to make it. Unfortunately, poor business practices and the time [late 1940s] - which was notable for the decline of interest in big bands - denied the band the success it deserved. …

Swing Idol Charlie Barnet also hired Kahn in 1949 …. The Kahn-Barnet legacy is small – six Capitol recordings - … - 5 are arrangements by Manny Albam and the sixth is the imaginative ballad treatment by Kahn of “Over the Rainbow.”

All these Albam charts have a number of things in common: modern coloration, warm voicings, unfolding, developmental linear qualities. The rhythmic line provided by Kahn is uncluttered. His comments around the drums provoke yet remain a matter of telling simplicity. He's inspiring without disturbing the balance and forward motion of the band. …

Phil Brown, who replaced Kahn in the Stan Getz group in 1952., has an excellent grasp of what Kahn did as a drummer. He loved his playing back then and remains fascinated by it to this day.

Tiny was the first drummer to play matched grip almost all the time. He deviated only when brushes were called for; then he would revert back to the traditional/French grip in the left hand. Tiny was more comfortable with matched grip because his hands were on the fat side and he couldn't easily accommodate to the traditional grip in the left hand: the stick is lodged a fulcrum between the thumb and index finger and extends through the opening between the second and third finger.

Matched/timpani grip really worked for him. He was able to get around the drums more easily. His solos had their own sound because he used the tympani grip. Many of the guys performing back then didn't get the strokes  [Ed note: —in Tiny's case, mostly singles] to sound as even as Tiny did. He played some unusual things, and they were drummistic to a certain point without being technical.

What made him different? He let the time flow and roll along. He didn't play "four" on the bass drum. He didn't emphasize the "2-and-4" clicking sound of the hi-hat.

I got the best shot at him, in person, at the Showboat in Philadelphia, shortly before I joined Getz's band [Ed. note—Al Haig (piano), Curly Russell (bass), Jimmy Raney (guitar)]. I noticed he left beats out of his right-hand ride rhythm. It made it possible for him to rest, particularly on up-tempos, and add to the fluidity of the pulse. He was a precursor of today's rock drum­mers; they also skip beats in the ride rhythm.

To balance things out, he would comment with his left hand, on the snare or a tom-tom. He divided the ride rhythm while bringing into play other elements of the set. By breaking up the rhythm, he made the time more relaxed, more exciting and provocative. The way he used his left hand on the snare and how he played accents increased the rhythmic interest of his performances.

Some drummers said he played the way he did because he couldn't execute the traditional ride rhythm in fast tempi. But what he did was better, different. He was the first free drummer—in that he didn't strictly stick to playing time. What he thought and how he executed his ideas may have been dictated by lack of technique, but he proved necessity is the mother of unusual invention.

There was great honesty in Tiny's playing. He wasn't trying to copy. He wasn't into commenting on Max Roach or being like him. So many other people did that. He was just pure Tiny Kahn. He was one of truly great drummers. I'm including everyone in this comparison.

Tiny was the embodiment of a very singular time in jazz. He personified a generation of guys who grew up listening to Basic and Pres and then shifted a little bit to Charlie Parker and started to come up in the bebop world.

I was very conscious of the way Tiny sounded in Stan Getz's band and how effective he was. I wanted to see if I could perpetuate that tradition.

Others worked in this tradition. Osie Johnson is frequently mentioned as someone who took this manner of performance and brought to it his own vision. But Mel Lewis was Kahn's most widely listened-to disciple. He found himself within Kahn's style and enhanced and built upon it in a major way, emerging with something that had his stamp on it.

“My relationship with Tiny began when I came to New York from Buffalo with the Lenny Lewis band in the late 1940s. I heard and liked the recordings Tiny had made with Red Rodney for Keynote. We got together frequently. He came to hear me at the Savoy Ballroom. Soon after that I returned the compliment and went to hear him with the Boyd Raeburn band.

We got a chance to really talk during the afternoons we spent drinking egg creams on Broadway. I realized we liked the same drummers and the same sort of music. Apparently we were two of a kind. He even used low-pitched cymbals—same as I did. He tuned his drums in a highly individual way. I came to realize, by hearing Tiny, that I needed nothing larger than a twenty-inch bass drum.

Tiny was an innovator in so many ways. He brought a looseness and the improvisational feeling of small band drumming to the big band. I heard him every time I could. I loved what he did. He played great fills and lead-ins to explosions that kicked a band along. I must admit I even stole a few.”

My thanks to Eric Ineke for without his suggestion, I might never have looked into the creative brilliance of Tiny Kahn.  After reading about his story, is it any wonder that those musicians who knew him during his relatively brief lifetime were crushed by his untimely death?

Here’s a video which was filmed at the Los Angeles Jazz Institute’s 4-day East Coast Sounds May 30, 2010 concert of The Terry Gibbs Big Band Plays the Music of Tiny Kahn. The audio is Tiny’s arrangement of his original composition of Father Knickerbopper.