"El Congo Valiente" - The Kenton-Richards Collaborations [From the Archives]

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

“Of the five genius big band composers and arrangers who emerged in full bloom in the 1950s — Gil Evans, Shorty Rogers, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman and Johnny Richards — Richards is the forgotten one. When Richards is remembered, it is for his works for Stan Kenton and not for the recordings of his own bands. So it is hoped that the recordings at hand [Mosaic Select #17 - Johnny Richards] — the earliest of which were recorded 50 years ago — help to remedy this neglect. It is inconceivable that music so brilliant has been out of circulation for so long.”

- Todd Selbert, insert notes to Mosaic Select #17 - Johnny Richards

“From the first moment I played with Stan and what little I exchanged with him, I knew him as a true pioneer and champion of music making. The world knows of his innovations and popularity, but little of the man's true depth as a creator. In the development of art forms throughout history, there are various stages and periods of innovation. Kenton was a milestone. He can be counted as a pillar that helped support the arches of lesser lights.”

- George Gaber, timpanist [Dr. William Lee, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm, p. 219]

Unlike many big band leaders to whom arrangements were brought, played through with maybe some editing here and there and then assigned to the band’s book, Stan Kenton actually collaborated with the many arrangers who provided his band’s charts over the years.

Perhaps this is because, unlike many other big band leaders, he was his band’s first arranger. Stan was dissimilar to Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and a host of other outstanding leader-soloists, in that, while he was a capable instrumentalist as a pianist, Stan’s primary forte was always his skill as an arranger.

Not surprisingly, then, through its almost forty years of existence, the Kenton band was sometimes referred to through Stan’s interactive collaborations with Joe Coccia, Pete Rugolo, Bill Russo, Bill Holman, Bob Graettinger, Johnny Richards, Lennie Niehaus, Bill Mathieu, Dee Barton, Hank Levy, and many others.

I am especially fond of the Kenton-Richards collaborations and Cuban Fire! has remained a particular favorite of mine since I first heard it a year or so after it was issued.

By way of background, in the chapter entitled Fuego Cubano (1956) from his definitive biography Stan Kenton This Is An Orchestra! [Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2010], Michael Sparke writes:

“On March 4, 1956, the band with its full complement left New York aboard RMS Queen Elizabeth, bound for its second European tour. But this time the first destination was Britain, following successful negotiations with the Union for a reciprocal tour of America by Ted Heath and His Music. Kenton's debut concert on English soil was at 2 p.m. on March 11, in London's vast Royal Albert Hall, the atmosphere electric as the capacity crowd greeted Stan's first-ever appearance leading his orchestra before a British audience in their homeland.

The English jazz "establishment" was uniformly anti-Kenton, and everything he stood for, but individual writers and musicians could not disguise their excitement and admiration for the powerful precision and outstanding musicianship of this fine orchestra and its distinguished soloists.

The program consisted of a mixture of older "classics" and the more recent Holman charts, including a brand new "Royal Blue" named especially for the UK tour, and one very fresh composition by Johnny Richards which really set the audience roaring (and 1 was one of them!) called "El Congo Valiente." Of the soloists, highest praise went to Perkins, Niehaus, and Fontana.

Kent Larsen sums up Stan's second European tour with a spirited reminiscence: "England was cold and rainy, we did 60 concerts in 33 days, we ate ham sandwiches until they came out of our ears, and we had a complete ball: the audiences were super! The Continent was just as hectic as regard to schedules, but it was a joy meeting and playing with so many wonderful musicians. The five days each way on the Queen Elizabeth were a thrill, just like a paid vacation. By the time we got back to the States, I'd spent more money than I earned, we found that Elvis was the biggest thing on records, and the band spent a week in New York recording Cuban Fire."

What Kenton hadn't explained was that "El Congo Valiente" was just one of a number of extended compositions Johnny Richards had written featuring the Latin-American idiom.

What Kenton didn't know at the time was that the complete Cuban Fire collection was destined to become the most musically popular and iconic album of his whole career. Stan's concept had been simple enough. Despite his enthusiasm for Latin rhythms, he'd often been chastised by Cuban musicians for not being sufficiently authentic in their use. Johnny Richards (family name Cascales) was Mexican by birth and spoke fluent Spanish, so Kenton commissioned John to spend time in New York with the Latin players and learn how to combine their genuine rhythms with North American jazz. "And then," Stan told Johnny, "I want you to create a Suite, but I want you to abide by all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys have."

As painstakingly recorded for Capitol, Cuban Fire was an outstanding achievement of immense proportions. Not only did it kick-start Richards' career, leading to his becoming one of the most vital composers in modern jazz, the album also gave a significant boost to the Kenton orchestra, becoming that rare combination, a success in both artistic and commercial terms. Cuban Fire was music that reached a new stature and dimension. Highly dramatic—some would say grandiose—passages are tempered by periods of sheer beauty and repose: as on the opening "Fuego Cubano" which begins with a flurry of high-powered excitement and brooding menace, but soon relaxes under the calming influence of the main theme statement played by a Larsen-Noto duet.

Most memorable of the six dances is "El Congo Valiente," because of its distinctive theme, stated at the opening by French horns. The difficulties inherent in Richards' writing are well illustrated by "La Suerte de los Tontos," on which the horns have to start the piece "cold." There's a Wally Heider recording from the Macumba Club later in the year, on which the horns fluff the introduction four times, and don't get it right even on the last attempt. On another Macumba date Stan makes the horns repeat the intro because of clams, and ironically explains it's a difficult thing to play: "Because it's hard to understand the title—something about the Sweat of the Horns!" (Correct translation: "The Fortune of Fools.")

Richards makes liberal use of the band's complement of soloists on every movement of the Suite (which, incidentally, does not include "Tres Corazones," despite the liner notes to the CD release). All perform with vigor and passion, but my personal pick would go to Bill Perkins, despite stiff competition from Lucky Thompson, whom the band had picked up in Paris, and who would depart right after the recording. Perk's fine tone and ability to dovetail his ideas with John's music are beyond reproach. Throughout, Richards uses the soloists to develop his compositions rather than engage in free expression, and solo performers are compelled by the dynamics of the music to work within this controlled melodic framework. Doubtless many of the musicians would prefer the freedom of improvisation allowed by the Holman/Mulligan-type charts, but Richards had such command of the orchestra, and has composed melodies of such outstanding merit, he gained the respect and (sometimes grudging) admiration of everyone involved. Under Stan's leadership the band plays with great energy and flair: the battery of Latin percussion instruments added for the occasion complement but never overwhelm the orchestra, however crucial they are to the success of the Suite.

Mel Lewis explains: "Willie Rodriguez had organized a special rhythm section playing specific instruments that would go along with the South American rhythms that Johnny had researched before he wrote the music. Johnny had rehearsed them before we even got there, and now they had to learn to blend with a jazz drummer and tympani. Tremendous care and effort went into every aspect of the Cuban Fire recordings, which became one of the finest works of Johnny Richards with the Kenton band."[pp. 134-35; 138-39]

And in his notes to the Cuban Fire Capitol Jazz CD [CDP 7 96260 2], Ted Daryll offers this background to the evolution of “...the most musically popular and iconic album of … [Stan’s] whole career.”

“The band had set sail for New York from the port of Cherbourg, France on May 10th [1956]. The cruise home had allowed an exhausted group of musicians their first genuine opportunity to relax and re-charge since their opening concert on March 11th at London's Albert Hall. Now in Manhattan and beginning rehearsals for the Cuban Fire recordings, the bulk of the touring band remained intact. Inevitably, a few chairs would change but the rhythm section, key soloists, and the majority of the brass and reed players were still on board. That this group had had plenty of performance time in which to settle and age was indeed a welcomed element considering the anticipated challenges of the new Richards' scores that were awaiting it. One or two of the charts had actually been completed prior to the tour and were taken along and performed occasionally during it.

Kenton set up rehearsals in the ballroom of the since-deceased Riverside Hotel located on West 73rd Street. A room that boasted a Kenton prerequisite: resonant, natural wood acoustics. Richards had enlisted the aid of percussionist Willie Rodriguez and together they assembled and rehearsed a five-man Latin percussion unit (Rodriguez at the helm on bongos) to execute with authenticity the rhythms that Johnny had researched in South America. Mexico. Cuba and New York. Unknown to most, due to the guise of his professional surname, Johnny himself was of Latin heritage being born John Cascales in upstate New York on November 2. 1911. It is not difficult to speculate then that the Cuban Fire project may well have had a special and more personal significance than some of his earlier work. And indeed it did turn out to be the catalyst that would project Johnny Richards into prominence as both a gifted jazz orchestrator/ composer and soon-to-be bandleader.

On May 22, 1950 all factions were collected at the Capitol Records studios on West 46th Street where the first of seven titles, RECUERDOS, was recorded. The following day. FUEGO CUBANO. QUIEN SABE, and EL CONGO VALIENTE. LA SUERTE DE LOS TONTOS, LA QUERA BAILA and TRES CORAZONES (the little-known seventh dance from the suite that had been omitted from earlier issues due to time/space limitations) completed the sessions on May 24th. [Obviously, Ted has made the choice to include Tres Corazones in the Suite, so perhaps he was not aware of the Richards/Sparke/Venudor position on the matter when he wrote these notes.]

The success of the "Cuban Fire!" album can be gauged in part by the ascent of Johnny Richards' star immediately following its recording. Bethlehem Records, a leading independent jazz label of the period, suddenly offered Johnny an opportunity to record his first album as a leader. By August of the same year he had assembled a top shelf group of LA based musicians and was at Radio Recorders studios producing the memorable "Something Else" LP. (BCP 6011/6032 and reissued in 1984 by Discovery Records DS-895). Although only a "studio band," it became the archetype for a permanent working band that Johnny ultimately established in New York about late 1956/early 1957 and kept together on and off until as late as 1965...just three years prior to his untimely passing in 1968. The New York band can be heard on a minimum of three albums made during this period for Capitol. Roulette, and Coral Records.

In the almost 40 year history of the Kenton orchestra, an orchestra that had leaned long and heavy on things Latin, Cuban Fire! stands at the pinnacle of those many outings. It remains an extraordinary coupling of jazz orchestration/improvisation and the deeply felt rhythms of those near and distant cultures. Musicians aligned with the Latin jazz movement in this country continue to cite it as an influence and inspiration.

And in Stan Kenton: The Studio Sessions, Michael Sparke and Pete Venudor have this to say about the music on Cuban Fire “... which collectively by common consent are recognized as one of the most distinguished of the Kenton-Richards collaborations.”

Stan told us : "The reason we made CUBAN FIRE is interesting. We had recorded a lot of Afro-Cuban music, and a lot of the Latin guys around New York complained : 'It's wrong, you're not writing the music correctly.’  And I used to argue with them. I'd say : "Why do you have to have such rules about how you write Afro-Cuban music?” They'd say: 'Because there's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. Why don't you try to do something with good harmonic structures and good melodic lines and have it right rhythmically ?'

"So I told Johnny : 'I want you to go to New York and start hanging around with those guys, and study what it is that makes a thing authentic.' And I told Johnny : 'I want you to create a Suite, but I don't want you to write it unless you abide by all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys have.' And it was easy for Johnny, because he spoke Spanish. So he did, he went to New York and hung around with those guys for two or three months, and then he started writing music which conformed with all the rhythmic rules that those Latin guys keep. It's different today, all that's been broken down, because the Latin guys have gotten into jazz, and the jazz guys have gotten into Latin, but CUBAN FIRE is completely authentic, the way it combines big-band jazz with genuine Latin-American rhythms."

The album was recorded a week after the band returned to the States from an exhausting two-month tour of Europe. EL CONGO VALIENTE had been performed to British audiences, and meanwhile Richards had been preparing in New York, as Mel Lewis explains : "We recorded CUBAN FIRE in the Ballroom of the Riverside Hotel in New York City on 73rd Street. Willie Rodriguez had organized with Johnny Richards a special rhythm section playing specific instruments that would go along with the South American rhythms that Johnny had researched before he wrote the music. Johnny had rehearsed with them before we even got there, and now they had to learn to blend with a jazz drummer, and we also used tympani. CUBAN FIRE turned out to be one of the finest works of Johnny Richards with the Kenton band."

A view echoed by Bill Perkins : "Tremendous care and effort was put into every aspect of the CUBAN FIRE recordings - perhaps the late Johnny Richards' crowning achievement. We spent many hours in the studio making sure everything was as perfect as we could possibly make it."

Though the discography lists six trumpets, only five play at any one time, with one man in reserve. Johnny Richards was present to help with direction, though Kenton conducted the orchestra during the sessions. Richards expert Jack Hartley says Johnny was adamant TRES CORAZONES (premiered on the "Music '55" TV show of August 9, 1955) was not intended as part of the Suite, though it has been included in the CD version. An unrecorded title, "Alma Pecadora", is headed "Cuban Fire Suite" according to the score held at North Texas University, and was presumably rejected as not up to the same standard as the other charts, which collectively by common consent are recognized as one of the most distinguished of the Kenton-Richards collaborations.”

In strictly Latin Jazz technical terms, the music on Cuban Fire! Breaks down this way:

FUEGO CUBANO (Cuban File) A commanding opening piece set against a bolero rhythm.

EL CONGO VALIENTE (Valiant Congo) An abierta, with exciting exchanges between the brass and rhythm.

RECUERDOS (Reminiscences) A slow, moody atmospheric creation, a guajira in rhythm.

QUIEN SABE (Who Knows) An attractive medium temp guaracha.

LA GUERA BAILA (The Fair One Dances) Afro rhythm, which Richards picked up observing dancers at weddings.

LA SUERTE DE LOS TONTOS (Fortune of Fools) This is a nanigo which continues the party atmosphere created in the previous title.

And in a fitting tribute to Stan Kenton’s always adventurous spirit, let’s close with this testimonial from George Gaber who played tympani on Cuban Fire! and who in 1960 went on to established the highly regarded percussion department at the University of Indiana School of Music:

“I played on Stan's Cuban Fire! album. Stan and I also met on campus when he had his jazz workshops back in the early '60s at Indiana University. It was at the jazz clinics that Johnny Richards suggested to Peter Erskine (later Stan's drummer) that he study with me. (Peter has gone on to the Maynard Ferguson band and to Weather Report.) Stan approved, and Peter followed me to summer clinics in Kentucky. Later, he came to study with me after he finished Interlochen High School.

From the first moment I played with Stan and what little I exchanged with him, I knew him as a true pioneer and champion of music making. The world knows of his innovations and popularity, but little of the man's true depth as a creator. In the development of art forms throughout history, there are various stages and periods of innovation. Kenton was a milestone. He can be counted as a pillar that helped support the arches of lesser lights.” [Dr. William Lee, Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm, p. 219]

Coming soon exclusively at Amazon.

 

The Magic of Paul Desmond in and Orchestral Setting

"In the midst of lolling away his time in semi-retirement after the Dave Brubeck Quartet broke up in 1967, Paul Desmond allowed himself to be lured back into the recording studio by producer Creed Taylor, who knew exactly what to do with his idle, but by no means spent, alto player. The result is a beautifully produced, eclectic album of music that revives Desmond's "bossa antigua" idea and sends it in different directions, directly toward Brazil and various Caribbean regions, as well as back to the jazzy States. "Samba With Some Barbecue" is a marvelous bossa nova treatment of Louis Armstrong's New Orleans rouser "Struttin' With Some Barbecue," whose opening bars bear an uncanny resemblance to those of "Samba de Orpheus" (which the erudite Desmond was no doubt aware of). No matter how many times you've heard "Autumn Leaves," Desmond's bossa nova treatment will give you a fresh jolt as he offhandedly tosses off the most exquisitely swinging ruminations; too bad it fades after only three minutes. In a pliable mood, Desmond even consents to record a then-new Beatles tune, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," samba-style, quoting "Hey Jude" along the way (it's very possible that he was attracted by the main character of the lyric, a fellow named Desmond), and he makes potent music out of movie tunes like "Emily" and even the snazzy "Lady in Cement." Don Sebesky brings in some intelligently crafted arrangements for big band augmented by French horns, Herbie Hancock turns in some often brilliant solo work in several featured spots, Ron Carter is on bass, and Leo Morris and Airto Moreira alternate on drums. Never before had Desmond's alto been recorded so ravishingly -- Rudy Van Gelder's engineering gives it a new golden-mellow glow -- and the original LP had a great, sarcastic cover: gleaming icicles. - Erlendur Svavarsson

"Oliloqui Valley" - Herbie Hancock

HERBIE!

"I am a big fan of Herbie Hancock. I have always liked his music and sound. Unlike most writers on jazz, I will tell you about my experience with the sound and music of Herbie Hancock. It was 1973, and I was a freshman in college at a big music school. There were hundreds of musicians polishing their skills at this school, mostly jazz oriented, and as one became a part of the scene the rituals of all aspiring jazz musicians came to be learned. One ritual is that of discovery; where you find something in a recording or at a performance that takes you to a level of understanding. Another is learning tunes and defining your direction by studying the music that interests you.

My first "discovery" was when Pat Coil (who lived down the hall in the dorm) had Sextant on his stereo. The sound was amazing. Pat's only attempt to define this music to me (as a courtesy) was to say "Herbie...."

That night, hanging out at Sam Riney's house, the turntable exploded with Miles Davis's "My Funny Valentine." When the title track came up, Sam listened to the first few notes of the piano intro, closed his eyes and just said "Herbie...."

The very next day, my best friend at that time (Mike Lotz, a talented pianist) played something on his stereo, looked at me with a smug hipness and asked the question "Who's that?" All I knew was one word that would make me or break me in the world of college hipness, and I quietly said "Herbie." Mike was shocked. I was now 'in.' Clearly, I had to find out more about this Herbie guy." - Bob Belden, booklet notes to HERBIE HANCOCK:THE COMPLETE BLUE NOTE SESSIONS

 

Gerry Mulligan: Born Again On the Little Bighorn by Brian Morton

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

“ … perhaps Mulligan’s most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that milestone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.

It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but its focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.

“The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz.” ...

The recent European tour by his "Rebirth Of The Cool" tentette has put the spotlight firmly back on Gerry Mulligan. Critic Brian Morton assesses the career of the great baritone saxophonist.

- Brian Morton, Jazz on CD, 1992

“Ask almost any jazz horn player what attracted him to his instrument and chances are he'll make some reference to its proximity to the human voice. Since Bird and Trane, the notion of a “vocalised" tone has been closely bound up with that of the saxophonist as an impassioned shaman or a pentecostal adept, howling and crying and chanting in a language at several removes from everyday speech. Perhaps because he fails to fit the mould, Gerry Mulligan has been consistently undervalued as a saxophone improviser; perhaps because his language is so effortlessly logical, he has also been substantially discounted as a composer/ arranger.

If anyone's tone is vocalised, it is Mulligan's. He plays, as he speaks, in a deep, chesty burr, developing ideas logically (but not so logically that he can't indulge the odd non sequitur), punctuating his argument with unexpected gurgles of humour and outbreaks of quiet passion that sit uneasily athwart his allotted place in the ranks of the "Cool". The baritone saxophone, Mulligan's favoured instrument for over 40 years now, is one of the most thinly subscribed in the jazz orchestra. Harry Carney, in the Ellington band, was among the first to give it speech. Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams demonstrated that Carney's forceful, often dramatic approach was not just a one-off. Leo Parker played a brand of jovial bop on the big horn, trading on the same Eb tonality to create a deeper and inevitably slowed-up version of his namesake's dizzying flights. There was little more of substance until the ill-starred Serge Chaloff, who gave the baritone a dark, almost aggressive resonance.

Chaloff was Mulligan's first model, but tempered with the fleet, melodic scampers of Johnny Hodges and a hint of Hodges's aching ballad style. There is a story that Mulligan once walked into a studio where Chaloff was recording. Seeing his rival in the booth, Chaloff executed a perfect parody of the younger man's still awkward style and then tore it to shreds. Whatever impetus the experience gave him, Mulligan advanced by leaps and bounds and by the early fifties had become a soloist of astonishing poise and confidence. He has always denied hotly that the baritone is a cumbersome instrument, insisting that it has a physical balance and ease of execution that is missing on the lighter horns. Certainly, anyone who saw or heard Mulligan playing soprano saxophone during his brief flirtation with the straight horn may have heard "cumbersome" suggest itself as a paradoxically appropriate epithet. If he has made his name as an exponent of "cool" jazz, his work on soprano sounded merely frosty.

Labels, though, don't sit well on Mulligan. If you call him a radical only at your peril, it's equally unwise to dismiss him as a conservative. He has proved himself able to play in virtually any context, Dixieland, swing, be-bop, up to but significantly excluding free jazz. For Mulligan, there was no break in the continuity of jazz, in what it was possible to do with blues intervals and standard tunes, until in the 1960s (his "lost" decade) the scorched-earth campaign of the New Thing laid waste to much of what had gone before. (Mulligan was able to play comfortably not just with his mentor Johnny Hodges, but also with the supposedly maverick Thelonious Monk, whose own "modernism" was grounded on a strongly traditionalist view of jazz.) Mulligan believes that what Charlie Parker did was "logical" (which is still one step away of saying that it was predictable) and that there was nothing in any of his own so-called revolutionary work that wasn't already present in classic jazz and in the broad-brush arrangements of the swing era.

The fact remains, though, that just as Mulligan's crew-cut and Ray-Bans were once icons of West Coast "Cool", the sunny flipside of New York be-bop, so his music was once considered to be revolutionary, even "difficult". In his short story "Entropy", written in 1960 (and featuring a character bearing Monk's middle name, Sphere), the novelist Thomas Pynchon turns Mulligan's early 50s quartets with Chet Baker into the defining gesture of post-modernism, an accolade Mulligan would doubtless reject. The accepted version of the story is that when Mulligan and Baker turned up at the Haig Club in Los Angeles in June 1952, there was no piano available, and that the famous "pianoless" quartet was merely another instance of necessity mothering invention. Mulligan tells a slightly different version. There was, of course, a piano (what jazz club would be without one?) but it was no great shakes, and the saxophonist was already experimenting with small group, arrangements in which the baritone, already comfortably pitched for the task, took on much of the piano's role. Pynchon's version is more dramatic: improvisation without a safety net! No chords! Freedom! Uncertainty! The revisionist version is convincingly pragmatic: aren't most artistic revolutions a combination of inspiration and compromise? Mulligan's own account, though, is the most straightforward and the most illuminating. The relation between a be-bop solo and the informing chords had become ever more distant and uncertain and a growing understanding of modal or scalar improvisation - which abandoned the usual hierarchy of the harmonic sequence, allowing scales to be derived from any given note - was opening up the possibilities available to a jazz arranger in a way that suggests the experiment of a jazz group without harmony instrument was both '"logical" and, with a little hindsight, predictable, too.

Mulligan's gifts as an arranger were largely innate. While still in his teens, he was writing arrangements of popular material for Johnny Warrington's radio orchestra, but he first came to wider notice, after his recruitment to the sax section of the Gene Krupa band, with a hit arrangement of Disc Jockey Jump in 1947. He had an instinctive feel for the relationship of instrumental    voices and for the transpositions required to keep instruments with dramatically different stride-lengths in step. The two-part counterpoint he developed with Baker and later with valve-brass players like Art Farmer (who has been working with Mulligan again recently in the reformed Tentette) and Bob Brookmeyer had a robust logic that belied its deceptively understated delivery. The quartet with Baker was a resounding success and created a climate of expectation that afforded Mulligan enviable freedom of movement in an idiom that ran counter to commercial trends in jazz and popular music. He has long been insistent that there is still considerable public affection and demand for big band music and that the only reasons for its decline are economic. In 1960, Mulligan organised the legendary Concert Jazz Band, whose very title enshrined the importance he placed on big band jazz as music to be listened to, not just danced to. With rock and roll on the rise, the band folded and Mulligan's career as a leader was somewhat eclipsed. Though he continued to arrange and work as a sideman, opportunities to work on his own account were limited until the formation in 1972 of a new big band, named (in recognition of his passion for old locomotives) The Age of Steam. The new band saw Mulligan make a surprisingly comfortable accommodation to the rock idiom that had denied him work so long, and it set him back on a insistently successful course that has been maintained up to the present. The story, though, runs a little ahead of itself, which is appropriate, for Mulligan's career almost needs to be seen in reverse. keeping with a spirit of revisionism, of critical misunderstanding and ungenerosity that has stalked him at every stage it is clear that perhaps his most significant single contribution to modern Jazz has been, until recently, poorly recognised and largely mis-attributed. Mulligan has spoken without rancour of the history books being "re-written" on the legendary "Birth of the Cool" sessions, performances which only acquired that millstone title many years after the event, in 1954, when the original 78s were brought together on a single 10" long player (and later still on the dominant 12" format) and (here was the crunch) issued under the late Miles Davis's name.

It was clear that the trumpeter had provided the original impetus for the band but it's focus was, as Leonard Father has recently described, Gil Evans's poky basement rehearsal room behind a Chinese laundry in New York City. Orthodox bebop enjoyed only a remarkably short life among its more innovative exponents. The patronage accorded Charlie Parker by the likes of Norman Granz, with his Verve label and Jazz at the Philharmonic packages, extended its perceived, public life and creative aftermath enormously. But at the tail-end of the 1940s, a substantial group of musicians, of whom Miles and Mulligan were among the most restless, were already looking for a new synthesis. What they created, with substantial contributions from Evans, pianist/composer John Lewis and the undersung John Carisi, was a music that consciously avoided the false climaxes of bop, the easily stage-managed harmonic and rhythmic tensions and obsessive individualism, in favour of a simpler, contrapuntal approach, with greater emphasis on instrumental texture and interplay, on modal patterns and intervals not associated with blues-based jazz.

The intention was to create a sound that combined the rich palette of a big band with the speed of response associated with small group jazz. The "Birth of the Cool" nonet made unprecedented use of French horn and tuba and divided its sound range in such a way that the middle register (where one might expect to hear a tenor saxophone) was significantly attenuated. The effect was a music of superficial simplicity that nonetheless afforded the arrangers (and also the soloists, it shouldn't be forgotten) the possibility of considerable complexity. Mulligan's contribution to the sessions as composer was highly significant. He wrote and set three pieces for the group, Godchild and the wonderful Jeru for the January 1949 sessions, Venus de Milo, which featured his best solo of the time, for the second batch, cut in April, and the bouncy Rocker, recorded almost a year later.

It's difficult in retrospect to evaluate accurately the impact of these sessions, but Max Harrison has persuasively suggested that jazz's inability or unwillingness to capitalise on and develop its own innovations is what has condemned it to the status of a minor art. The ensemble playing on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions is as sophisticated as anything being attempted at the time by "legitimate" or "straight" composers and yet within a couple of years, jazz in general (though commendably few of the original participants) was content to settle back into the four-square thump of theme-and-solo "improvisation" on popular tunes.

The only slightly sour note surrounding The Birth of the Cool (as a product, rather than a misnamed historical moment) was the fact that it seemed to have been hijacked in Miles Davis's name. The trumpeter's subsequent career cast him with some unlikely bedfellows and with an acrobatic self-conception that pitched him at the opposite extreme from the notably purist Mulligan. Not least of his affectations seemed to be the belief that at every stage of his progress he shed yet another stylistic skin. Even at the end of his life, though, when he was set against (some thought) unpromising electronic backgrounds, Miles was still exploring the ensemble effects and minimalist gestures with which he and Mulligan had experimented in 1948 and 1949.

In the jazz fan's wish-list of great might-have-beens, there are few potential reunions more piquant than one that was mooted one summer night a year ago in Rotterdam. Mulligan told Miles of his desire to play the "Birth" music again. Miles asked to be kept posted, a willingness that may have seemed astonishing by the diffident standards of the Sixties and Seventies but which can't quite be explained away by his ubiquitous "special guest star" status of the final few years; for Miles's resistance to "jazz" was very specifically a resistance to the endless rehearsal of be-bop egotism. Sadly, he was already stricken in health, and died before the projected reunion could be realised.

Mulligan, though, stuck to the original idea and assembled a band that more than passed muster. With Phil Woods in for the otherwise-committed Lee Konitz (who has nonetheless appeared since in the reformed Tentette), and the young trumpeter Wallace Roney in for Miles, the band had a freshness and bounce that more than matched the original conception. With digital recording, "Re-Birth of the Cool" (not to be confused with a similarly-titled compilation of hip-hop music, a fact that caused Mulligan some little pain) dissolves the intervening four decades and brings to life some of the most effective charts in modern jazz. Mulligan's own voice has matured over the same period, losing some of the slight infelicities of diction and awkward caesuras [interruptions; breaks; pauses] that marked his soloing in the early days. At 65, he sounds stronger and more committed than ever, but committed not to a narrow conception of jazz as a particular ideology that has broken free of its own historical moment ("Re-Birth of the Cool" is emphatically not an exercise in nostalgia) but to the widest possible conception of music. [The recording is another of] … Mulligan's increasingly important forays into formal orchestral writing and can't be seen as a rejection of jazz, but simply as a rejection of the view that jazz is the only road to the joyous freedoms it expresses and stern disciplines it imposes. When Mulligan hooks on the big baritone, the voice is unmistakable. It's a speaking voice, which doesn't disdain to sing when the song is worth the breath.”

Excerpt from "Bill Charlap: The Natural" by Whitney Balliett

"Charlap is a lyrical repository. At thirty-two [this was written in 1999], he is the best, but least well known, of a swarm of gifted pianists who have appeared in New York in the past ten years or so. He has already filled much of the sizable space once occupied by Bill Evans, who still reverberates almost twenty years after his death. Unlike many of the younger pianists, whose tastes tend to be parochial, Charlap has absorbed every pianist worth listening to in the past fifty years, starting with Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rowles, Erroll Garner, Nat Cole, and Oscar Peterson, then moving through Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Bill Evans, and finishing with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Kenny Barron. His ballad numbers are unique.

He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes - some off the beat and some behind the beat - followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists.

He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us." - Whitney Balliett

 

Shelly Manne and His Men Play Peter Gunn - "A Profound Gas"

 

Shelly Manne and His Men Play Peter Gunn - The Floater [Herb Geller alto sax , Conte Candoli trumpet, Victor Feldman vibes, Russ Freeman piano]