Toccata - Gillespiana - Composed by Lalo Schifrin

Bullitt (Main Title) - Lalo Schifrin

Main Title Dirty Harry - Lalo Schifrin

Theme from Enter the Dragon (Main Title) - Lalo Schifrin

Gillespiana Redux with Lalo Schifrin [From the Archives and Revised]

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

In his June 28, 2025 The Honest Broker Substack, Ted Gioia honored Lalo Schifrin's memory with a piece on his Mission Impossible theme song and the role such songs play in making action heroes such a powerful force in movie lore.

For Lalo, in addition to the recognition, I'm sure this work was also a source of great satisfaction due to the "schimolies" that landed in his bank account as a result of the royalties from the theme song.

But my impressions of Lalo's music were first formed much earlier when Verve records issued Gillespiana the five part suite that he wrote for Dizzy Gillespie in 1960 [the Mission Impossible theme did not appear until 1967].

In a prior JazzProfiles post, I mined the Jazz literature and created a compilation of articles on Gillespiana.

Unavailable to me at the time was Lalo Schifrin's composer notes which I came across through a later purchase of his autobiographical Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, edited by Richard Palmer.

So I though it might be fun to do a feature on Lalo’s recollections of how this wonderful suite of music came about in a separate posting which I later archived as part of the larger Gillespiana compendium. I also published this larger piece in Profiles in Jazz: Writings on the Music and Its Makers, Vol. 1. as a paperback and an eBook on Amazon.com.

I hope this will also serve a tribute to Lalo's memory. [1932-2025]

By way of background, “Lalo Schifrin is a true Renaissance man. As a pianist, composer, and conductor, he is equally at home conducting a symphony orchestra, performing at an international jazz festival, scoring a film or television show, or creating works for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and even the Sultan of Oman.

Lalo Schifrin received classical training in music at the Paris Conservatory during the early 1950s and simultaneously became a professional jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, playing and recording in Europe. After hearing Schifrin play with his own big concert band in Buenos Aires, Dizzy Gillespie asked him to become his pianist and arranger. In 1958, Schifrin moved to the United States and thus began a remarkable career.

Schifrin has written more than sixty classical compositions and more than one hundred scores for films and television, including Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Amityville Horror, and the Rush Hour films. To date, Schifrin has won four Grammy Awards (with twenty-one nominations), won one Cable ACE Award, and received six Oscar nominations.

Schifrin was appointed musical director of the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra in 1987, a position he held for two years. Among Schifrin's other conducting credits are the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Mexico City Philharmonic, the Orchestra of Saint Luke (New York City), and the National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina.

He was commissioned to write the grand finale to celebrate the finals of the World Cup soccer championship in Caracalla, Italy, in July 1990. In this concert, the Three Tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras, sang together for the first time. Schifrin also arranged the sequels for the Three Tenors at the subsequent World Cup finals, in July 1994 at Dodger Stadium; July 1998 in Paris, France; and June 2002 in Japan.

Schifrin's most recent commissions include Fantasy for Screenplay and Orchestra, for Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony, and Symphonic Impressions of Oman, commissioned by the Sultan of Oman, recorded in England with the London Symphony Orchestra and released by Schifrin's own record label, Aleph Records, in 2003.

It is Schifrin's ability to switch musical gears that makes him so unique in the music world. As a jazz musician, he has performed and recorded with great personalities such as Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, and Count Basie. His longtime involvement in both the jazz and symphonic worlds came together in 1993 when he was featured as a pianist and conductor for his on-going series of Jazz Meets the Symphony recordings, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and such notable jazz stars as Ray Brown, Grady Tate, Jon Faddis, Paquito D'Rivera, and James Morrison. The third of the series, Firebird: Jazz Meets the Symphony #3 (1996), received two Grammy nominations. Aleph Records released Kaleidoscope: Jazz Meets the Symphony #6 in August 2005, recorded at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Schifrin was invited back to Australia in 2006 to conduct a Jazz Meets the Symphony tour in Queensland, Adelaide, and Sydney. In 2006, Schifrin returned to Australia for the world premiere of his Double Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and Orchestra, commissioned by the SMILE Foundation.

In April 2005, Schifrin premiered Letters from Argentina, a piece combining tango and Argentinean folk music with classical music to create a fresh new sound reminiscent of his homeland. It premiered at Lincoln Center with Schifrin on piano, David Schifrin on clarinet, Cho-Liang "Jimmy" Lin on violin, Nestor Marconi on bandoneon, Pablo Asian on contrabass, and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion. These distinguished soloists toured the United States that summer, performing in Portland, Oregon; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and La Jolla, California. The piece was recorded and released on Aleph Records in May 2006.

Lalo Schifrin is a recipient of the 1988 BMI Lifetime Achievement Award. BMI also honored Schifrin in 2001 with a special composer's award for his original cult classic theme to Mission: Impossible. He was most recently honored for his significant contribution to music, film, and culture by the French performing rights organization SACEM, along with the 57th Annual Cannes Film Festival in 2004. That same year he was awarded the 65th Annual Golden Score Award by the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC). He has been honored by the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County, and the California Legislature, and he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1988. He also received the Distinguished Artist Award in 1998 from the Los Angeles Music Center, and he recently established a jazz and classical composition scholarship in his name for UCLA. He was honored by the Israeli government for his "Contributions to World Understanding through Music," and he was given honorary doctorate degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of La Plata, Argentina. Lalo Schifrin has been appointed Chevalier de Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of the highest distinctions granted by France's Minister of Culture, and in 1998, the Argentine government appointed him Advisor to the President in Cultural Affairs with a rank of Secretary of the Cabinet. 

Schifrin has been married to his wife, Donna, for more than thirty years. His three children include William, a writer for films and television; Frances, an art director/designer; and Ryan, a film writer/director. Schifrin scored Ryan's first horror feature film, Abominable, which was released in 2006. For more information on Lalo Schifrin, please visit www.schifrin.com”

CHAPTER    SEVEN -Gillespiana

“After an absence of four years, Buenos Aires was as I'd imagined Paris to be following its World War II liberation.

I had intended my visit to be short; I was still planning to return to France and had kept my apartment along the Boulevard St. Germain. A few days after I arrived back, though, I received a telephone call from the new head of national radio and television for Argentina, an Italian married to the daughter of our new vice president. He invited me to his orifice and said he'd held a similar position with the RAI in Rome; he was a jazz fan and wanted to establish a jazz big band as he'd done at RAI. He said he'd heard I was coming back and so had waited for me, having interviewed other Argentinean arrangers, none of whom had convinced him as potential bandleaders. Suddenly, therefore—and I was not even twenty-four years old—I was being offered my own orchestra, with the added dimension of radio and TV programs! At that time, Gato Barbieri was still playing straightforward be-bop tenor saxophone just like Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Stitt. We made our debut two months later with great success. The band had four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, and a rhythm section. I was conducting from the piano.

And then something even more special occurred: my long-standing jazz idol was about to arrive! From my late teens onward, every time I left the house I would say to my mother, as a joke, "If Dizzy Gillespie calls, tell him I'm not here!" But now he was materializing, the real flesh-and-blood Diz. It seemed like a fateful encounter: my return from Paris and his tour were on two converging lines!

He played in a Buenos Aires theater for the whole week, and it was sold out. I went to every concert and we met. During that week there was a reception for Dizzy, his wife, Lorraine, and the whole band, and I was asked to perform with my own band for them after the dinner. He heard my piano playing and my arrangements. Immediately after we'd finished our set, he came up and asked if I'd written all of the charts. I said, "Yes," and his response was "Would you like to come to the United States?" I thought he was joking. Perhaps they called him Dizzy for a good reason! But, no, he meant it.

It seemed, however, that the State Department was less keen for me to take up his invitation. American bureaucracy meant that I waited two years before getting my green card from the United States Consulate in Buenos Aires; I finally arrived in New York City on September 28, 1958. But even then I couldn't get a work permit from the American Federation of Musicians because of their own rule, and I had to wait almost a further year to be able to play piano with a regular band. I was allowed to write arrangements and to play as a replacement pianist, though. Xavier Cugart was preparing a new nightclub act for his singer, Abbe Lane, and I wrote all of the arrangements, became the musical director, and even did a symphonic album for Cugart himself (RCA). But I was still aiming to work with Dizzy Gillespie. . . .

After gaining my work permit, I formed my own trio, which played once a week in three different New York clubs: the Hickory House, Basin Street East, and the Embers. Meanwhile, I was calling Dizzy without any positive results. In those days there were no answering machines, and Dizzy didn't have an office. Eventually, one night he was performing at Birdland, and I went to see him. He said, "Hi, I heard you were in the U.S.—so why didn't you call me?" I said I'd tried, often. Anyway, Dizzy asked me: "Why don't you write something for me?" So over the weekend I composed the sketches for the Gillespiana suite. On Monday evening I went over to his house and played them for him. He asked me how I was planning to orchestrate it. I said I'd like to do a kind of concerto grosso for his quintet, surrounded by Latin percussion and brass orchestra, in which I would substitute four French horns and a tuba for the five saxophones of a standard big band. Right in front of me, he telephoned Norman Granz, the founder and then still head of Verve Records. Dizzy asked me how long it would take to orchestrate the suite. I estimated about two to three weeks. So he asked Norman to book a studio in one month's time. Just like that!

I started work immediately. But about one week later Diz called me to say, "I have some bad news." My heart fell: I thought he meant he wouldn't be recording the piece after all. Instead he said that pianist Junior Mance was leaving his group. Recovering slightly, I said: "Do you have someone in mind to replace him as pianist?" His answer being "I was thinking of you . . . ," I almost fell off my chair. The very idea that my first major piece, composed for a giant on his own turf, was not only going to be composed, arranged, and conducted by me, but I would also play piano for it!

When I arrived at the recording studio I felt very nervous, because not only was Diz there, but also such jazz stars as Clark Terry, Ernie Royal, Urbie Green, Gunther Schuller, Julius Watkins, et al. who were in the band. Still, the recording went well, and there was a lot of excitement. Gunther Schuller brought John Lewis along the next evening, and they signed the work to MJQ Music Publishing. The piece became very successful with both critics and the public. Dizzy got a gold disc and Norman Granz organized a world premier concert at Carnegie Hall, which sold out; after that he sent us on a tour all over the United States and Europe. I remember when we played at the Palais des Sports in Paris. At the end, Bud Powell came up to the stage to congratulate me. I had never met him before, and he was one of my idols as well as being the chief influence on my modern jazz piano playing.

I stayed on with his quintet from 1960 until late 1962. Playing with John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was immensely good for me spiritually—one of the happiest periods of my life in terms of music. It was very fulfilling to play with one of the giants of jazz all over the world, and to learn from him as a human being too. And there was never any end to my association with him. Even after I ceased touring with him on a regular basis, we were seldom out of touch and he was never far from my thoughts. Real friendship had intermingled with my admiration for his musicianship. And, of course, I continued to compose for him.

As many are aware, one of his greatest gifts was the power of his humor. One night, around late 1960, we were performing at Birdland when George Shearing came in with his wife and a group of friends. They had a table close to the bandstand. I told Dizzy I wanted to meet him, because — like Bud Powell — he'd been an early idol. When we'd finished our set, I sat beside him and said it was an honor to meet him. Then Diz came over and told him he couldn't stand hypocrisy and, as a good friend, he had to tell him the truth: "George, you are black—but you didn't know it!"

In 1970 the mayor of New York gave the keys of the city to Dizzy. I was invited to take part in a gigantic concert that reminded me of a psychedelic time machine. There was a big band to play the early repertoire of his Things to Come period. Then I had the pleasure of playing alongside two of the greatest drummers of all time in quite separate quintets: Buddy Rich and Max Roach. All of the periods of Dizzy Gillespie's career up to that point were represented — and all of the participants around me that night were giants of modern jazz.

I've often said that I've had many teachers, but only one master: Dizzy. And I mean it—now more than ever before.”

Lou Levy - An Interview with Steve Voce [From the Archives with Additions]

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

The following interview appeared in Vol. 35, 1982 of Jazz Journal International under the title of “Lou Levy Talks to Steve Voce” and Steve had kindly consented to allow its posting to these pages. Steve is a British journalist and music critic who has been broadcasting on the BBC for more than 50 years and contributing regularly to The Independent and to Jazz Journal for over 60 years.

Based in the UK, Steve uses English spelling.

© -  Steve Voce/JazzJournal - used with the author’s permission; copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The Stan Getz Quartet that took the honours at last year's Nice festival was full of both distinction and fine distinctions. Marc Johnson, its eloquent bassist, said of pianist Lou Levy "he is a genius with melody, and his main concern is to present the qualities of the melody to the audience, whilst I'm more concerned to use the melody as a basis for improvisation."

A quiet and modest man, Levy is content to take a subordinate role away from the limelight, preferring to support rather than lead, but with the Getz quartet Stan has subtly engineered a setting which makes Lou a prime mover and with this band Levy is playing with an authority that has probably not been apparent before.

"Stan and I have been together on and off with long periods of being apart, for more than 30 years, going right back to the time with Woody Herman in the forties. Off the stand we've been the closest friends for many years, so it's natural that we have a musical rapport. We understand each other's playing, agree on the format of tunes, on the length — just about everything musically. You'll notice with Stan that whenever anyone else is playing he listens. That's so rare in most of the bands I've worked with. Things will happen on the stand when a guy's soloing — the other musicians will talk to each other, maybe even go to the bar for a drink — I won't put up with that. I'll either tell them off right on the band stand or I'll just get up and walk. To me that's really an insult to the music, and also the audience doesn't go for it either. Those are usually the guys that don't play the best.

Stan always did play great, but now better than ever. I can feel him opening up from day to day, from set to set, from tune to tune. When you get guys like this who play so well, it's not easy to get them to play their best. It takes a while for every-body to really open up, and it's starting to happen now, on this festival especially.

Although we go back a quarter of a century in the quartet setting, this is new — has to be, because of our experiences in that time. Stan came from a totally different kind of band that he's had for some years, so his outlook is quite fresh. I brought in all the music, and I think that the standards we're using are as good material as you can find. I think it's assuming an awful lot when you come. across bands that use nothing but originals. All originals are not necessarily good. Once in a while you do come up with a good one, but a lot of the time it's ego trip stuff. Particularly when there are Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk! There's so much great material and you can do one tune in so many different ways. You got a lot of opportunity out there. And then if you write a great original, that's fine.

Stan's earlier groups used electric keyboards and electric bass, and oddly enough it's fresh to get back to acoustic instruments. Naturally I'm pleased. I don't mind playing an electric instrument once in a while, but I think it totally cancels out any-one's identity. You have no touch control, no personal contact with the thing other than your fingers are pushing down the keys and getting electrical impulses out of it. The only way you can possibly have any identity on an electric instrument is the way Chick Corea does where the composition is the identity. They have, or have had their place, but I see them going very fast, I really do. We used to use a celeste on dates with Frank Sinatra or Peggy Lee, but just as a tender thing on the verse of a ballad. It's okay, but it should be short and sweet.

Peggy? I think I accompanied Peggy Lee half of my life. It really was over a period of 18 years off and on. I left her for three years to go with Ella Fitzgerald, a year or so with Nancy Wilson — it was back and forth. But over the 18 years it was well over half of them, and it was a great lesson in music, showmanship and stage presentation. She's a marvellous interpreter of songs and I learned a lot about the other side of a song, the lyrics as opposed to the purely musical part. Lyrics play a very important part in my playing. I always follow the lyrics when I'm playing and always think of the melody. No matter how far into improvising I am the lyric is going through my head. That makes a great difference to how you play. As you know, Lester Young was a great believer in lyrics, and Bill Evans sounded like he knew lyrics to a great degree. All the good players, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker made a point of knowing lyrics and it shows in their playing.

I teach a class in accompanying at the Dick Grove Music Workshop in Los Angeles and I stress that the strongest point is to know the melody, but really know the lyrics as well. The kids are really getting it and after six or seven weeks I see how it affects their playing. They play less, but they play deeper. It's nice. I've been doing those classes for some months now. It's a great school. Dick Grove is a very fine arranger who started it and he brings in lots of fine tutors like Mancini and Nelson Riddle for film writing, and he brings in great musicians like Dave Grusin, Herbie Ellis, Monty Budwig. He asked me to teach an accompanying class because I've done so much of it that they figured I'd be able to get the point across. And that's strictly what I'm doing now. I might branch out a little bit, but I think that accompanying is vitally important for all jazz players to know about and not just for vocalists. When I accompany Stan Getz I'm accompanying a voice, a very fine voice, and it's just as important to know what to do for a guy with a horn in his mouth as it is for somebody who opens his mouth and sings lyrics.

At the school the students are prepared for about six months to make sure they understand all the chord symbols and things that we usually encounter when accompanying. You know, they throw a chord sheet at us — it's not written out like a classical piano part usually, it's just chord symbols. So what they do is they get the students that do play the piano but may not have much knowledge of harmony, so they make sure, and then at the end of the six months they hand them over to me and I don't have to worry about the language of chords. I don't have to struggle with that and so we can go straight ahead into the next phase, which is interpretation.

You ask whether I can anticipate what someone like Stan or Ella is going to do next. Well that's a bit like the question of how do you teach improvising? It's instinctive and it happens instantaneously. There are logical paths to follow which you can anticipate, and then sometimes when you hear something different you adjust along that way very fast. Luckily it comes very naturally to me. I've heard a lot of great piano players who play better than me, but who can't accompany, and it always makes me wonder. A guy can play fantastically, but maybe he's not interested, never been interested in accompanying, and so it doesn't work, he can't do it.

My first accompanying job was for Sarah Vaughan in 1947. It was in Chicago and I'm not sure if I'd even left high school. She'd just made the record Mean to Me with Charlie Parker and hadn't become popular yet. We worked in Roger's Park in Chicago, which happened to be in my neighbourhood, and she used to pick me up from home each night and then bring me back again after the job. She taught me so much, because she plays piano, and it was from her I first learned about accompaniment. Then I worked a couple of weeks with June Christy in Milwaukee, but the first big accompanying job I had, other than playing for Mary Ann McCall with Woody's band was the job with Peggy when I moved to California in 1955. Max Bennett and Larry Bunker who were with her got me the job when Marty Paich left.

Pretty much around the same time I worked with Sarah I had my first full-time professional gig. Georgie Auld had a little band that included Red Rodney, Serge Chaloff, Curley Russell and the late Tiny Kahn on drums. I met Tiny in Chicago when they came to work there and they had George Wallington on piano. We had some local jam sessions and Tiny heard me play and I guess he thought 'well, for a local kid he doesn't play too bad.' All of a sudden George Wallington got sick and they needed a piano player immediately, so Tiny suggested to Georgie 'let's try the kid'. It didn't turn out too badly, they liked me, and every night Tiny would teach me things. He was my real mentor. He was the biggest influence on me in the music business. He showed me what to listen to — other than Charlie Parker, everyone knew about Parker. But Tiny was fantastic. You never expect a drummer to be a teacher, no insult to drummers, but he knew the keyboard, he knew the harmony, he was just a total natural, the most beautiful musician you could ever want to be. He was a wonderful arranger, but unfortunately he died too young to leave a lot of music, but he left his impression on every-one. In fact his influence is still there.

Tiny taught me some things about arranging, but I'm not really that big an arranger. I'm an accompanist, pianist and jazz player. I wish I could arrange, but if I could my standard would be too high because t have friends like Johnny Mandel (who I think is the epitome of arranging), Al Cohn and Nelson Riddle. I worked with all these guys, and they're so great that I'm way behind them in arranging, so I'll stick to what I do.

Ira Sullivan and I grew up together in Chicago. A lot of guys would come through and I'd play with them, do local jobs, Minneapolis and so on. The first thing that took me out of town was when Tiny Kahn got me the job to go to Europe on Chubby Jackson's Fifth Dimensional Jazz Group. We went to Sweden in 1947 and Sweden had never really had a band like that up to that time, so it was a great trip. We had Denzil Best on drums, Frank Socolow on tenor plus Conte Candoli and Terry Gibbs, and I met all these guys for the first time. When we got back we worked a little around Washington DC. Chubby went back with Woody, and a month or two later he got me in Woody's band. It was the Four Brothers band, of course, and there I met Stan Getz and Al Cohn, and that was the start of the whole ball of wax. I replaced Ralph Burns, but Ralph didn't leave the band, he stayed on the road with us but strictly as an arranger. He wanted time to write. I stayed with that band for two years until it broke up, and then I went on the road with a little band of Louis Bellson's, along with Charlie Shavers and Terry Gibbs. Then that whole little band joined Tommy Dorsey's band and I spent about three months with him. He was a great bandleader and I respected him very much, although musically it wasn't my cup of tea. I've never been fired by anybody but Tommy Dorsey, but what he said to me was classic: `Kid, you play real good, but not for my band.' I thought that was about as honest as you could get. I'm not offended when someone says you played rotten or you did something wrong, because constructive criticism is the best thing for anyone.

Tommy was a wonderful trombone player as well as a great bandleader, and it's always a lesson to see how someone handles a band, handles men. He had it all together. At first glance Tommy was stricter than Woody, but Woody commands a lot of respect. It's a quieter thing. He just stands there, he doesn't say too much. He'll look and listen and let the guys do their craziness off the band stand, but on the stand the guys always seem to respect him, and he's still a great leader after more than 40 years.

Bill Harris came back into the Herd after I joined, but I'd worked with him before in a three-trombone band with Shelly Manne on drums. I worked often with Shelly in the late forties and still play with him now. In the Herd I was very heavily influenced by Al Cohn, because I'd never heard anyone play that way. Al is really a gem, as Stan Getz will tell you. I'm pretty sure that, along with Zoot, Al is his favourite player. Those two guys! The band was so vital and sounded so clean, and it had so much energy. I've heard bands with as much energy, but I've never heard one with so much polish to go with it and still sound natural.

There was a lot of different music came into the band, with charts by Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, a couple of real bebop arrangements by Gil Fuller and all the Ralph Burns arrangements, which go anywhere from jazz to semi-classical but always very original. I don't remember off the top of my head every chart that came in, but there were a hell of a lot. Gil arranged Bud Powell's Tempus Fugit for the band, and we're playing pretty much the same routine on that number now with Stan's quartet. We didn't play Gil's charts that often because I think Woody felt that they weren't quite in the style that he was used to. One arrangement that came into the band that we used to play a lot was Johnny Mandel's Not Really The Blues. Sometimes Woody would leave the stand for the last set in a ballroom and boy, as soon as he left we'd wail into that one and maybe again at the end of the set. We recorded a long version of it for Capitol, but unfortunately they cut it down to get it onto the 78 record length, which was still going at the time. It was a classic arrangement, like another that Johnny wrote at that time on What's New? as a Terry Gibbs feature. But I'm totally mad about anything that Johnny Mandel writes, because he's one of my idols, and I don't have too many idols.

I was never a New Yorker, although when I came back from Europe with Chubby I spent time living at his house and working out on Long Island, but I never had a Local 802 card. After I left Tommy Dorsey I went with a little band Bill Harris and Flip Philips had. While I was with the band I got married to a girl from Minneapolis. Her family had a business publishing medical journals and her father suggested that I should join the business. It was a very successful one, so I left the music business for three years and moved to Minneapolis. I kept in touch, though, played around the town, played with Conte and guys who came through. But the marriage didn't work out and after four years we split up so naturally I wasn't going to stay in the family business. I came back to music in Chicago, playing solo piano for the wonderful man that ran the Blue Note, the late Frank Holzfeind. I was still pretty young, and I went back with my folks and stayed there awhile, saved some money. I'd work opposite all the bands that came through to the Blue Note — Woody, Shorty Rogers and the Giants, and one day Shorty suggested that I moved out to California and said he'd give me his piano work. So I did, and I worked a lot with him and made quite a few of the Giants albums. Then he gave me my first movie call, for `The Man With The Golden Arm', and the next year the job with Peggy came up.

The only times I worked in the studios were when Shorty called me. They have guys in that job that can do anything, play anything at sight. I never was that kind of player. They'd call me if it was a jazz type of job, like `The Golden Arm' thing where we had two piano players — Ray Turner, who could do absolutely anything off the paper, and me, who could do very little off the paper, but I could make up something, and so that much studio work I did! Through the people I worked with and was friendly with like Shorty, Nelson Riddle and Billy May, who would do a movie score occasionally, I got to do some movie work, but I was never a movie studio musician.

On the other hand, I did a lot of record studio dates. 1 recorded with Nat Cole, and played piano through a whole album of his `Wild Is Love'. It was a good album, but then everything he did was fantastic. I knew him very well, and he was one of my all-time favourite piano players. When I was with Woody he did a tour with us with his trio, and I spent all my time with him and would sit and listen to him for hours. He got married at that time and his wife was with him on the tour, and we'd all go shopping together. Just being around him was a real pleasure, but he was a magnificent player in such a low-keyed way. Then when he got his own TV show in Los Angeles I appeared on it in the orchestra quite often. He was a great man, a perfect musician and a beautiful guy.

In the earlier days the first of my favourites was Al Haig, because he was on most of the records that I heard first. I played with Charlie Parker when I was very young. The first time I sat in with him he called me over afterwards and he said 'Kid, you ever heard Bud Powell?' I said that I'd heard about him, and Charlie blew a kiss to the heavens and said `You go check him out.' And he was so right!

If I sort of double back I can give you the order of my favourite piano players. Before those guys I heard records of Teddy Wilson with Benny Goodman, but I would say that my favourite players in order would be Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Nat Cole, Al Haig, Bud Powell and of course Bill Evans, probably the biggest influence of the last ten years on piano players. I like Chick Corea very much. He brought something startling into jazz. I don't know if he plays anything that's so much new. He doesn't play memorable, everlasting things like Lester Young played on the tenor — little phrases you could make songs out of. It's not so much that, it's just something sparkling and electrifying. I love the first record I heard of his, with Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitous, a trio record from 1969. That floored me. I think a lot of people don't realise how brilliant Fats Waller really was. He was like Nat Cole to me but maybe even more facile on the piano. He had this independent voice, and three things going at once — he was great to watch, great to listen to and he wrote wonderful songs.

If Nat Cole was missing anything it was that he was not a composer himself, otherwise he'd be a duplicate. Art Tatum still amazes me, and he still amazes anyone who knows anything about the piano. He did it all, and he was exquisite in so many ways. Harmonically he was so complex and logical at the same time, and his technique was so ridiculous. He was just something that came along and nobody can explain it and it will never be equalled. He's an influence on me harmonically, but I can't do it technically! Bud Powell is much more of an element in my playing as far as single line and melodic lines are concerned. In fact J S Bach is a bigger influence on me than Art Tatum as far as that's concerned. Nat had a wonderful loose way of playing that Tatum sometimes showed, as indeed Fats Waller. Two of my other favourites of course are Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones.

I'm an admirer of Oscar Peterson. It's a touchy subject to say something critical, but if you want me to be really honest, I've always liked Oscar least for the creative part of his playing. Maybe that sounds harsh, and I hope Oscar doesn't take it the wrong way, but I look at Oscar as being strong in all other departments. Here's a sort of left-handed thing: Thelonious Monk, who sounds as if he's playing with his knuckles, is very intensely creative at times. He plays a lot of memorable things. I worked opposite Oscar a lot when I was with Ella, and he's just brilliant, amazing, you know — beautiful touch, brilliant dynamics and that time feel he has! He's a giant, but he's not an influence on me.

I worked for Sinatra when his piano player had a bad accident. I'd do concerts and benefits with him, and I did some record dates with him — it's inconsequential, but I played piano on I Did It My Way. I've played a lot of private parties at his house and I played solo a lot on those occasions. I remember one time I played at a dinner party he gave for about ten people. He had Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Fred Astaire, Jack Benny and his wife, James Stewart and Cary Grant. I spent a lot of time around Jack Benny because my ex-wife was hairdresser for Mary Benny, and I used to go over to their home with her. Jack would be in his robe, walking round the pool playing the violin, and I used to talk to him a lot. He was a fantastic guy as you know, funny in any language.

We always looked forward to Frank singing at the parties, because he sings so great when it's informal. He'd come over to me and say `What'll we do?' and I'd say All Of Me and he'd just start right in, not tell me the key or anything, and he was wonderful. It's a thrill to play for him.

As an all-round singer I like Ella, but Peggy's interpretation of a song is unbeatable. She lives that thing. She actually cries — I've seen tears many times. Lena Horne? Probably I was never more impressed with all-round stage presence than when I worked with Lena. When I first got a call from her she had just moved to a place about 70 miles away from where I live in Studio City, California. So I drove up there, and met her out in the garden — she was gracious and beautiful in her blue jeans. She took me into the house, sat me down at the piano, put some music in front of me and said `okay, go ahead and play.' Then she'd put more music in front of me, and each time she'd say`that's right', and that's all the rehearsal we ever had. Then we went to Las Vegas where we were working and she listened to the band, still didn't sing, and she said `That's right'. Then when she hit the stage at the show that night my hair stood on end. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and seeing. I actually got goosebumps. I was conducting and trying to look round at her, and it paralysed me for a minute. I didn't blow the cues, but what a revelation! There's nothing in the world like Lena Horne on stage. I went to see her one-woman show in New York just recently and I just sat open-mouthed and watched her. Boy, it's even better from out front! I don't think there'll ever be anything like Lena Horne again. I don't think there could be.

Ella is probably the most wonderful natural person you could ever want to work with. There's no pretence about her. She's really beautiful, and as far as her singing goes, no one can swing like her, no one can sing more in tune than her, and nobody knows more tunes than she does. I learned a lot of new songs from her. I had to learn verses to things like I Got Rhythm. I didn't even know there was a verse to I Got Rhythm. Most of the material I play now, I learned the majority of it from working with Ella. We'd go out there and do 40 tunes. And then the next night do 40 different tunes. She'd give you a list of numbers at the beginning of a concert and by the second tune you're already off the list! She'll turn around on the spot and give you something different or, for example, if there's a kid in the audience she'll sing Three Little Pigs or nursery rhymes, Jingle Bells if it's Christmas time — you never knew what was going to happen. But it was always in tune and it always swung. I think my favourite album I ever made with any singer is the Ella Fitzgerald Gershwin — the five records in the box of Nelson Riddle's arrangements. That was a fantastic music lesson for me. The different ways that they did the songs — Lady Be Good so slow and beautiful. That was a great influence on me, and as a result I do a lot of fast ones slow now. It was like going to school.

With Peggy we rehearsed everything down to the footwork and the lights. But that's alright, too, it works out fine. I did it night after night, the same thing, and it never got boring. There was always room for creating and you still had the feeling conducting the orchestra that you were inspired. She was quite an inspirationalist — a great entertainer and a great musician.

I worked a lot in jazz clubs in Los Angeles but these days a lot of my work is out of the city. Recently I've been doing tours with Zoot and Benny Goodman as well as with Stan. A couple of times a year I have a duo gig at a place in New York called The Knickerbocker, which I love, so I'm actually going out of town a lot.

There are lots of great jazz musicians in LA, but unfortunately jazz is not as important there as it should be.

Stan lives in San Francisco, a place I love, and it's only 55 minutes by plane from LA. As long as Stan wants me, I'm sure I'll be around. I've never had the ambition so far of being Oscar Peterson and conquering the world. I like what I'm doing and I like playing with another instrument as in the quartet. I do take trio jobs and I make trio albums, of course, and they're fine. But I've always been an accompanist and I don't see me changing. I don't feel there's anything that relegates it to a lower station in life at all, especially if you get to play with the kind of people I'm playing with. Working with Ella is a pure jazz job, like being with Stan, and then I love to work with Al Cohn because he's such a great player. There are differences between Al and Stan when you play for them. You don't have the variety of material with Al. Mainly it's just a question of listening to Al and playing simpler things. The standards Stan uses are more challenging, and I enjoy those. He's a great teacher, too. We agree on most things, but there's lots of little things that we pick up on the way, like the format of the tune, that I mentioned earlier. He plays short solos — sometimes he'll play the first chorus on a ballad and let me play the second chorus and finish the number without him. I never worked with anyone else who did that before, but it makes a lot of sense — why go any farther? You've done two choruses of the ballad: it's lovely, so why spin it out? Stan knows just where to put the bass solo, the drums, you know. I don't like a guy who stands up there and plays chorus after chorus and if it doesn't work out tries another chorus. That's very boring. The good guys make their statements and get out fast.

I like to think there is fire in my playing as you suggest, but I hope it's the kind of fire that Bud Powell had. I like dynamics and I don't put the fire in there on purpose, and it's not the kind of bombastic fire that you get with McCoy Tyner. If the tune is Johnny Mandel's Time For Love, well naturally it's going to be tender and beautiful, but if it's The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, that's fun because you can just throw caution to the winds and sort of throw your hands at the piano and maybe punch it once in a while. It can take it, it's a darned strong instrument really.

We found we had too many endings that sounded the same, so the other day we sat down and said let's do this on the end of this and that on the end of that and sorted it out between us. I'm very proud of this quartet. That little guy Marc Johnson, young compared to me, every day I marvel at him. And Victor Lewis with that touch of his is one of the all-time best drummers I know. Stan's got everything you could want. I call him the Jascha Heifetz of the saxophone. Flawless. I'm not a saxophone player, but people who are that I talk to tell me that what he does nobody else can do. Technically some of the stuff he does is so hard that I can't describe it because I'm a piano player. We made that Concord album with Monte Budwig in for Marc when we first got together in our first week, and naturally we all feel that the quartet's better now, but the album's good. Incidentally, we use Marc when we're on the East Coast and Monte when we're in California.

If we're winding up now, I'd like to talk about the songs again. I see marvellous standards coming back into use again, and with them sane-ness and good taste are coming back, too. All that ego that was so apparent with some of the younger musicians is beginning to disappear, too, and the good is rising to the surface again. I'm not putting down everybody that's young and wants to play all their own tunes, but they've got to learn to do something out there besides them, you know. It's working out well for me, too. The music's come back. Thank God!"”

Hampton Hawes - All Night Session! [From the Archives with Revisions]

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

“Comparatively little has been written on the art of jazz improvisation. How the jazzman plays notes, devises figures, invents rhythm, concocts chords which were not in his mind a moment before he plays them; how he succeeds in spontaneously altering the notes, chords, figures and rhythm patterns so as to achieve freshness and a jazz feeling — these are the enigmas of the creative process.”

- Arnold Shaw,pianist, songwriter, music business executive; taken from his liner notes to All Night Session! The Hampton Hawes Quartet

"It's hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging. That's the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life. I've reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah— like people do in church when they're converted to God. That's the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session."

- Hampton Hawes, Jazz pianist

By today’s standards, it may sound like some form of medieval torture from The Dark Ages, but from about 1945 - 1965, it was quite common for Jazz groups working in clubs on the Hollywood to play four or five sets between 9:00 - 2:00 PM [closing time]. Sometimes, one or more musician would finish the club date and then head over to a recording session on Sunset, Santa Monica or Melrose Blvd., all located within a few miles of each other.

In such a context, the term “all night session” was not all that uncommon. Following the Jazz club gig, breakfast at 6:00 AM, home to kip for a few hours if you had a daytime studio date for a TV commercial, radio jingle or movie soundtrack, or an all-day sleep if you didn’t: life was happy, joyous and free.

Given its semi-arid climate, Los Angeles could be very hot during the day but due to the low humidity caused by the aridity, the evenings were generally cool and filled with the lingering scent of lemon blossoms, flowering Jasmine and the fragrances from a variety of flowers, bushes and herbs.

In a way, leading a nocturnal life filled with the excitement of performing in Jazz clubs bathed in the glitter of incandescent street lamps, lighted storefront displays and automobile lights while sleeping the heat of the day away in air conditioned comfort was almost a privileged existence, especially if you were young enough not to have a care in the world to go along with this active night life.

Of course, not all of us denizens of the dark had recording contracts with labels led by sensitive and understanding executives such as Lester Koenig of Contemporary Records who took great pains to create environments in which Jazz musicians could relax and just blow.

Such was the case when Lester brought pianist Hampton Hawes into the “studio” [which was actually the back room of the label’s office that doubled as its warehouse when audio engineer Roy DuNann was not using it as to make recordings] along with guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Bruz Freeman to record for 16 hours from sunup-to-sunset and release the results of these performances contiguously on three LPs.

What Les was trying to recreate was a Jazz club in which a group of musicians play what they want for as long as they are want, night after night using the 16 hour duration to develop an atmosphere of relaxed informality to replace the more typical sterility of a studio setting.

Keep in mind that when Hampton’s all night sessions took place in November, 1956, professional “live” or “in-performance” recording was still in its infancy.

The following insert notes by Arnold Shaw detail more about the sessions, how they came about and selective aspects of each of the tunes

They are also some of the most instructive and insightful accounts I’ve ever read on how one musician approaches the process of improvisation.

All Night Session!, Vol. 1 [OJCCD-638-2]

“AS A GROUP, THE THREE ALBUMS and sixteen selections comprising All Night Session! represent a most unusual achievement in the annals of jazz recording. The almost two hours of music were recorded at a single, continuous session, in the order in which you hear the numbers, and without editing of any kind. This seems like an impossible feat. Playing steadily for several hours is a taxing physical experience at best, but improvising continually for that length of time is an exhausting one, mentally and emotionally. Yet the later selections in All Night Session! reveal no flagging of vitality, spontaneity, or inventiveness. "The feeling wasn't like recording," Hampton Hawes has said in commenting on the session. "We felt like we went somewhere to play for our own pleasure. After we got started, I didn't even think I was making records. In fact, we didn't even listen to playbacks. We didn't tighten up as musicians often do in recording studios—we just played because we love to play." Considering the buoyant beat, skillful pacing, variety of material, spontaneous jazz feeling and the richness of invention, All Night Session! is a testimonial of the highest order to the musicianship of jazzman Hawes and his associates.

As a pianist, Hawes possesses a remarkably robust and vigorous style. The sixteen selections in All Night Session! teem with a pulsating energy and are marked by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of ideas. Although he can create chord patterns of great beauty as in I’ll Remember April and April in Paris, and he can command a singing, lyrical tone, he is more attracted at this stage of his career to expressions of a dynamic character. His touch is firm and authoritative and he possesses a split second sense of timing. His technical mastery is so great that there is not a single blurred run, tangled triplet or ragged arpeggio, no matter how fast the tempo.

Included among the sixteen selections are four original compositions by Hawes. They are of interest for two reasons. In the first instance, it is to be noted that they were composed at the record date itself and not written down beforehand. This gives them a spontaneous, ebullient quality, which is in a sense, their strongest characteristic. I was interested to learn that virtually all or Hawes' originals have been composed in this way. Instead of being written down, they are transcribed from his live performance, emphasizing the fact that his creative activity is the result of his role of an improviser. The second fact to be noted is that all four selections are blues—fast, vigorous blues, but blues nonetheless. Like Charlie Parker, whom Hampton credits with being the strongest influence on his playing, Hawes believes that blues are the basic foundation of jazz and that all jazzmen, modern as well as traditional, must begin by mastering the blues.

BORN IN THE CENTER OF WEST COAST JAZZ on November 15, 1928, Hampton Hawes became a member of the musicians' union when he was sixteen. The following year, while he still attended L. A.'s Polytechnic High School, from which he was graduated in 1946, he played with Big Jay McNeely's band. Before he was drafted into the army in 1953 for the usual two year stint, he gigged around L. A. with various modern combos, among them, Wardell Gray's, Red Norvo's, Dexter Gordon's, Teddy Edwards', and Howard Rumsey's All-Stars at the Hermosa Beach Lighthouse. The latter assignment came through a meeting with trumpeter Shorty Rogers, who after hearing him at a Gene Norman concert, immediately  invited  him  to play  the recording date which produced the first Giants album on Capitol (1952).

On his release from the army in 1955, Hawes took his own trio into L A.'s [The] Haig [on Wilshire Blvd. in Hollywood, CA]. He also recorded his first trio album for Contemporary Records (C3505), employing Chuck Thompson on drums and Red Mitchell on bass. This was followed in short order by two other trio albums (C3515 and C3523), both with the same personnel. Hailed as the "Arrival of the Year" by Metronome in the 1955 yearbook, Hawes was voted in 1956 "New Star" on piano by the annual Down Beat poll of leading jazz critics. In the same year (1956), after completing a highly successful engagement at The Tiffany in L A., he left for an extended cross country tour which kept him on the move for six months. In the course of this tour, he met many Eastern jazzmen and was most impressed by Thelonious Monk as a musician and personality. In 1957 he made another tour back East, and enjoyed playing with Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers.

Although his first three albums for Contemporary were with his own trio, Hawes enjoys working with a quartet. "You can do more rhythmic things and you can have more beats going. The full rhythm of drums, bass and guitar gives you two instruments to play melody (guitar and piano) and two instruments to play rhythm (drums and bass) and keep the beat going. Then you can switch around. I like to hear other people play solos because it's inspiring, and gives you ideas other than your own to conjure with."

[To Be Continued]

All Night Session! Vol. 2 [OJCCD-639-2]

Comparatively little has been written on the art of jazz improvisation. How the jazzman plays notes, devises figures, invents rhythm, concocts chords which were not in his mind a moment before he plays them; how he succeeds in spontaneously altering the notes, chords, figures and rhythm patterns so as to achieve freshness and a jazz feeling — these are the enigmas of the creative process.

Of his approach to improvisation, here is what Hawes has revealingly said: "You know the tune you're going to play and after you play the melody through, it comes time for you to blow. You build your solo on the chords as they go by and you use the chord changes to tell your story . . . Just like, maybe a painter painting a picture, he has his brushes. Well, his brushes are the chord changes. What he paints is what he's thinking about, so what kind of solo you play is what comes out of your mind, or the soul that you have for that song you're playing. I believe that the way a person thinks usually comes out in his playing. You've got to really feel what you're doing. Even the way my hands feel on the keys, that has a lot to do with what I play. I like my hands to feel good when they're playing. Like between the black notes and the white notes on the piano, when I'm phrasing I like to have my hands fall off right so I can feel like I'm getting into it. If I know that my hands are feeling good, then I know that I'm phrasing right. If something feels awkward — well, I'm doing something wrong. I don't try to play too much at first. I like to start out just playing a few things and then keep building, chorus by chorus, until you reach a big climax, when you're playing to your fullest capabilities, in other words, where you're really doing everything you can do — then after that you cool it and give yourself a little rest and you're playing just a few things while you're thinking about something else to play . . . Sometimes I think about the melody. But before I think about the melody, I think about the 'underneath notes' of the melody — the harmony notes that move under the top notes and show where the chord goes . . ."

Three concepts stand out in Hawes' statement. While they involve technical matters, their import may be grasped by the layman without resorting to technical exposition. The three concepts pivot on the words: climax, chord changes, and "underneath notes." Climax in improvisation is not different from climax in a story so that it is not too difficult to discern. Hawes' procedure in adding notes, chords and figures, chorus after chorus, may be studied in Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me or Will You Still Be Mine where the third choruses are like the full, complex, colorful flowers that have sprouted from the small, simple buds of the original melody. The building process involves a variation of chord changes and, in turn, of the "underneath notes," which significantly determine the sequence of chords.

Imitation is an important device for developing a piece of music and, of course, as an improvisational technique. It involves the repetition of a line or riff in another key, a different register, or on another instrument. As an instance of imitation, listen to the way guitarist Hall picks up and echoes Hawes’ melodic line in Will You Still Be Mine and Hampton's Pulpit. In the latter, consider also the question and answer interplay between piano and bass, another device for variation. More important than either of these improvisational procedures is the shifting of accents and the variation of rhythm figures, which are wonderfully displayed in Hawes' improvised solos on April in Paris, Woody'n You and Blue 'N Boogie. Used imaginatively and with feeling, and not just manipulated mentally, these devices produce constantly  fresh variants of well-known melodies.

How an improviser handles these devices depends on a number of factors: specifically, on whether he is interested in a) motion or placidity, b) dissonance or prettiness, c) a thick sound or a delicate texture, d) static or shifting rhythm patterns, e) short or long melodic lines. To understand Hawes' handling of these factors, it will be helpful to see him in relation to other contemporary jazz pianists.

AT THE MOMENT, THERE ARE THREE AXES in jazz piano. I prefer the word 'axis' to school or style because within any one socalled school, there are sufficient tensions to make for a direction rather than a pat definition. For example, Brubeck and Tristano have more in common as representatives of a modernist-classical-intellectual-far-out approach than Brubeck and Garner.

Yet there are also obvious contrasts and conflicts. Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell as practitioners of bop piano share more characteristics than do Powell and Oscar Peterson. Yet there is an undeniable gulf between Monk's emphasis on an economy of notes as against Powell's tendency toward flooding and constant motion. Here then are the three major current axes in contemporary jazz piano: 1) a Garner-Tarum axis, stressing rich harmonies and the fullness and pumping beat of stride piano; 2) a Brubeck-Tristano axis, combining modern classical polyrhythms and poly-harmonies with jazz improvisation; and 3) a Bud Powell-Thelonious Monk axis, stressing a single note, horizontal style, using the left hand for punctuation, and playing off the beat.

Clearly, Hampton Hawes is closest to the bop axis of Powell and Monk. He strives for constant motion rather than placidity, tart rather than pretty harmonies, a delicate rather than a thick density, shifting rhythm patterns, and longer rather than shorter lines.

Within the bop axis, the main influence on Hawes' improvising comes from an alto sax player rather than any pianist. In 1947 when Hawes was just turning nineteen, one of the founders of bop, the late, great Charlie Parker came out to Hampton's native Los Angeles. Hawes not only met and listened to Bird, which proved a turning point in many a contemporary musician's career, but he played with him for almost two months in Howard McGhee's band. Not too long ago, Hawes described Parker's influence as having to do "with Bird's conception of time." Working with Parker, Hawes began taking liberties with time, "playing double time or letting a couple of beats go by to make the beat stand out— not just playing on top of it all the time." Hawes emphasizes: "I think Parker has influenced me more than anybody, even piano players."

The Parker bop influence is apparent in All Night Session! in many ways, not the least significant being Hawes' choice of material. Included among the sixteen selections are four Gillespie compositions that have become bop classics — Groovin' High, Woody'n You, Two Bass Hit and Blue 'N Boogie. Comparison of Hawes' version of Woody'n You with the Modern Jazz Quartet's chamber music treatment of the same reveals a style in which there is greater dissonance, more pronounced changes of rhythm figures, swifter shifting of accents and a feeling of intensity that reminds one of Parker. Characteristic of these selections, and particularly of an original composition Takin' Care, is Parker's device of altering melodic passages containing few notes with figures full of gusts of fast-moving notes.

[To Be Continued ]

All Night Session!, Vol. 3 [OJCCD-640-2]

IN ALL NIGHT SESSION THE CHARACTERISTIC SOUND of the quartet is produced by the interplay between Hawes and Red Mitchell's bass. As with many West Coast combos, Hawes prefers a drummer with a light beat. In selection after selection, the rhythmic pulse is generated by the bass while the drums are heard only in the delicate ching of an afterbeat cymbal.

Bassist Red Mitchell, a native New Yorker (born September 20, 1927) is, like many Wesc Coasters, a Californian by migration. He has been steadily associated on records with Hampton Hawes from the first Hawes Trio album made in June 1955. Mitchell has also recorded with combos led by Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow, Red Norvo, Jack Montrose, and Gerry Mulligan. He has also made two LP's with combos of his own, the most recent Presenting Red Mitchell for Contemporary (C3538).

Although Red played piano with Chubby Jackson (at the Royal Roost in 1949), alto sax in an Army band, … , he had a new love the moment he traded 15 cartons of cigarettes for a string bass while in Germany. Up until then he had been studying the piano on his own. He cultivated the bass in the same way, acquiring bass methods by Bob Haggart and Simandl, and industriously plowing his way through them. Mitchell also learned by listening to every bass player who came his way, on records or alive, acquiring in the process an unusual knowledge of the entire range of bassists.

"I guess the first bass player that really thrilled me," Red recently stated, "was Walter Page." This was on a Count Basie record even before Mitchell had settled on the bass as his instrument. Ray Brown, who played with Dizzy Gillespie, "just turned me inside out. I heard the new music, the new phrasing." At Minton's. Red heard Charlie Mingus, who "frightened me... because I remember the way he went up to the top of the fiddle." But the greatest of all bass players to Red was the late Jimmy Blanton, who is generally credited with inaugurating the revolution that took the bass out of the rhythm section in the late 30's and made a melody instrument of it.

Despite his talking intimacy with the top bassmen of our time, Red feels thai he has been more influenced by horn men and pianists than by bassists. He mentions among the jazzmen he has admired and studied: saxists Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Jimmy Giuffre; trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis; and pianists John Lewis and Hampton Hawes.

As an improviser, Red is to be heard to advantage particularly in Broadway and Groovin' High, both of which reveal not only a prodigious command of technique but fast, jazz solos of the very highest order. Red has a fat tone when occasion demands and there are slow, singing solos to be heard in Hampton's Pulpit and The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Insofar as giving the Hawes piano the rhythmic support it needs, Red's pulsating beat is masterful.

IN THE FALL OF 1956 JIM HALL, then a member of Chico Hamilton's group, used to sit in for kicks when Hawes' Trio worked at the Tiffany in Los Angeles. The discovered kinship of feeling between the two led to the invitation that made Hall a part of All Night Session!. Born in Buffalo, New York on December 4, 1930, Hall was raised in the Buckeye State. Although he attended the well-known Cleveland Institute of Music, receiving a Bachelor's degree in music, Jim studied guitar privately with Brenton Banks. His style was also formed by constant listening to recordings of the abortive American genius Charlie Christian and the French gypsy giant of the guitar, Django Reinhardt, Other formative influences include the tenor sax playing of Bill Perkins and Zoot Sims, whose modern improvisational lines are to be heard in Hall's solos.

At the precocious age of 13, Jim Hall began working with local Ohio bands. For short or long periods, he was associated with the Bob Hardaway Quartet, Ken Hanna's band, with whom he made a Capitol album, and later, with the Dave Pell Octet. In the early months of 1955, Hall came to Los Angeles and began studying with the classical guitarist Vincente Gomez. At about the same time, drummer Chico Hamilton hired Jim for his newly formed Quintet.

It was the Hamilton Quintet that brought Hall's name into the national jazz arena. During the latter part of '55 and early '56, Jim toured with Chico's Quintet, recorded three albums for Pacific Jazz with it, and appeared in a film Cool and Groovy. The Hamilton association also led to Hall's recording for Pacific Jazz with a trio of his own that included the late Carl Perkins on piano and Red Mitchell, on bass. Since making All Night Session! with Hawes, Hall has been steadily associated with the trio of Jimmy Guiffre. He also is to be heard with John Lewis in a new album just made by Lewis without the Modern Jazz Quartet.

OF THE ROLE OF THE DRUMS in his Quartet, Hampton Hawes has said: "I don't like a drummer that plays a heavy foot pedal because it has the dull sound of somebody trudging down a street. I like the drums to sound like a heartbeat—just like a heartbeat pumping blood into the tune, nice and smooth... I don't like a heavy-footed drummer."

In drummer Bruz Freeman, born in Chicago on August 11, 1921 and a West Coaster since 1954, Hawes found an ideal man for his quartet. Bruz became interested in music through his two brothers, tenorman Von and guitarist George. At 9 he was playing violin. At 13 he shifted to the piano. Then came the drums. After a stint in the Air Force, during which he flew with Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet (Percy as a fighter and Bruz as a bomber pilot), he returned to Chicago to gig with a group known as the Freeman Brothers Band. Later he played at Chicago's Beehive, silting in with men like Sonny Stitt, Bird, J. J. Johnson. Before he settled in California, he played for singers Ella Fitzgerald and Lurlean Hunter and went on the road with Anita O'Day and Sarah Vaughan. "On drums," he says, "Max [Roach] is my man. On other instruments: Miles Davis, J. J. and Bird."

Of the All Night Session!, Hawes recently said reflectively: "It's hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it's really swinging. That's the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life. I've reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah— like people do in church when they're converted to God. That's the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session."

By ARNOLD SHAW

March 26, 1958

The following video feature Hampton on Duke Jordan’s Jordu.