“Marty Paich was never a regular member of the arranging staff, but was one of the few writers that Stan entrusted to submit the occasional chart, and ‘My Old Flame’ became a classic in the book. In [Kenton trumpeter] Phil Gilbert’s view, ‘Marty Paich was one of Hollywood’s great arrangers. He wrote lush, rich charts for dozens of the best singers. His ballads were unique in their harmonies and extraordinary originality. I still remember the feeling I got when we first rehearsed ‘My Old Flame’ at Zardi’s [a Beverly Hills, CA supper club]. After all the moving moods throughout, came the classical climax. I said, ‘My God, that’s gorgeous. Everyone was stunned.”
- Excerpted from Michael Sparke, Stan Kenton: This Is An Orchestra [2010]
According to Mr. Wilner, at the time of this writing,” I was just a copy kid, but I was encouraged in my work by the late, great [NY Times critic] Robert Palmer.”
I corresponded with Paul about posting this piece to the blog and he gave his consent.
It’s always a pleasure to feature more writings about Bill Evans on this site and our thanks to Paul for allowing us to bring up his interview with him on this page.
CLOSTER By Paul Wilner New York Times, Sept. 25, 1977
“ I GREW up in Plainfield,” recalled Bill Evans, the jazz pianist who has won the Grammy Award five times. He was in the den of his house in Closter, the Bergen County community to which he moved a couple of years ago after an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx proved oppressively small for his growing family.
Now he was remembering the family he came from.
“My mother was born of a Russian immigrant coal‐mining family in Pennsylvania, and my father was of Welsh heritage. My mother was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church—they have marvelous music—and my father was into harmony.
“I started taking piano lessons when I was about 6½. We had a teacher with a very humanistic approach, and by the time I was 9 I was wailing through a lot of moderately difficult classical music and sight‐reading moderately well.”
Mr. Evans fell in love with jazz early.
“I started playing with a high‐school dance band when I was about 12,” he recounted, “and I started ‘jobbing’ around with older guys. They were good musicians, and I learned a good deal.
“We worked anywhere from Elizabeth to New Brunswick three or four nights a week all through high school. Then I worked all summer at different resorts.”
After serving a stint in an Army band near Chicago during the Korean War, Mr. Evans “came back to Plainfield for a year to get my self together to go to New York,” which was then, as now, a mecca for aspiring jazz musicians.
He hit the metropolis in 1955, signed a standard contract with Riverside Records at scale wages almost at once and worked at different clubs.
In 1958, he got his break: A surprise phone call from Miles Davis inviting the young pianist to join Mr. Davis's quintet for an engagement in Philadelphia.
“The first night there, he asked me if I wanted to come with the band,” recalled Mr. Evans, who jumped at the chance.
Was it tough to be the only white musician in the group?
“It was more of an issue with the fans,” he said. “The guys in the band defended me staunchly. We were playing black clubs, and guys would come up and say, ‘What's that white guy doing there?’ They said, ‘Miles wants him there—he's supposed to be there!’
“This is an age‐old disproven theory—that white men cannot play jazz. What black people who are talking that way might be saying is they want their race to get credit for developing the music as a tradition.
“Even then, however, many strains are in it. Most of the tunes in jazz are taken out of Broadway musicals. Miles would have been considered as militant as anyone, and yet he called me.
“Jazz is the most honest music I've come across. The really good jazz musicians only respect musicians they feel are worth respecting. There—there are no racial barriers.”
After a year with the Miles Davis group, which also included greats such as Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, Mr. Evans formed the first of his famous trios with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.
His home is decorated with photographs of different groups taken by jazz photographers, who are also fans of his.
Riverside releases of his early group are now collectors' items. “Japan is the only place I know where they have those records freshly pressed and printed,” Mr. Evans said wryly.
Although he has just left the Fantasy label for Warner Brothers, in hopes that his records will be better promoted, Mr. Evans has not gone in for the currently popular jazz‐rock mélange of styles.
The electronic console he received as a signing gift from Warner's sits forlornly in his music room, next to the more‐played standard piano.
Reticent on the subject of the mass success that groups such as Weather Report and Return To Forever are enjoying, Mr. Evans did say:
“I wonder, when people make a turn like this, how much of it is genuine musical desire and how much is ambition for larger commercial success. Everybody lives with their own destiny, you know. If somebody chooses to play a certain way, they've got to live with it.
“I came out of jobbing music, paying my dues, and that's where I learned to feel a certain form and work with it. I respect musicianship and honest creativity.”
The pianist, who has been accused of aesthetic conservatism, added:
“I'm not scared by the avant-garde. Charles Ives and Schoenberg were out there in 1910, so the sounds don't bother me. It's just what you're doing with them, you know.”
Primarily a family man in Closter, Mr. Evans played for his daughter's music class one day to “try to give them a little insight into what jazz is and the difference between written music and a more spontaneous form.”
Although he is fairly apolitical, confining negative comments about his new neighborhood to the single observation of “I'd like to see a little more integration,” music in the schools is something that Mr. Evans feels strongly about.
“Whenever budget problems come up, the first thing they cut is the arts,” he said. “The music department in many schools has been almost phased out.
“Physical education has been phased out, too. When I was a kid in Plainfield, we were out of school an hour a day playing and being physical. Here, the kids get out of school very seldom.
“Plato said that gymnastics and music are the two polarities which, at balance, create a broad and balanced personality. Those are the two things that are getting de‐emphasized in the schools.”
Mr. Evans doesn't socialize with fellow musicians in Jersey very much.
“I don't know too many guys out here,” he said. “I just come out here to be just a family person.”
And he doesn't seem to miss the bustle of the city at all.
“Most people think of New Jersey as the exit from the Lincoln Tunnel,” Mr. Evans observed. “They think of Secaucus as a dump. But I've been around a long time and, believe me, this is ideal. To live in this style this close to the city is just terrific.”
The pianist next turned his attention to the television set, and played briefly with his infant son, Evan Evans. Then he said:
“I look on myself as a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective, and I try to do things that will speak to me on the level that I respond.
“As I get older, I really feel that my perspective and aims get more simple.”
Mr. Evans has about 90 records released on which he has performed, along with perhaps 40 albums of his own groups and solo performances.
“I'm not so concerned with breaking barriers because I find that style and time aren't important,” he said. “Things that are good are good and things that aren't just aren't.” ■
It is hard to disagree with Ted Gioia’s claim that “Marty Paich is one of the unsung heroes of West Coast Jazz.”
Throughout the decade of the 1950's, Paich was active in West Coast Jazz performance while also working intensively in the studios. He not only played on, but arranged and produced, numerous West Coast jazz recordings, including albums by Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Terry Gibbs, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne, Anita O'Day, Dave Pell, Art Pepper, Buddy Rich, Shorty Rogers, and Mel Tormé. His professional and personal association with Tormé, though occasionally a difficult one, would last decades. Many jazz critics feel their work together with the Marty Paich Dektette to be the high point of their respective careers.
One of Marty's enduring contributions to the “West Coast Sound” was the development of arrangements that “… are gems of control and restraint; they boot the musicians along without unduly distracting attention from the soloists.” [Bob Gordon, Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950s, London: Quartet Books, 1986, p. 177]. Marty also became quite adept at voicing his arrangements to accentuate the signature sound of some of the more notable West Coast Jazz instrumentalists such as Jack Sheldon’s puckish trumpet and the full, mellow alto saxophone tone of Art Pepper.
Charles Barber described Marty’s skills as a composer arranger as follows:
“The music of Marty Paich is characterized by a wide-ranging catholicity of style, a tremendous sense of color, and impeccable taste. He was never a musical braggart, and never put himself first. His dedication was to the music he wrote and arranged, to the text it endorsed, and to the artists with whom he worked. Although notoriously perfectionist and demanding in the studio and onstage, Marty was a man of uncommon humility."
“The Washington Post has called Martin Williams "the most knowledgeable, open-minded, and perceptive American jazz critic today," and countless others have echoed that sentiment. To Gary Giddins of The Village Voice he is "one of the most distinguished critics (of anything) this country has ever produced," and Nat Hentoff has observed, "Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism."”
The following are Martin Williams’ comments and observations about one of the recording sessions that was ultimately released on CD in 1989 as Paul Desmond - Gerry Mulligan TWO OF A MIND [RCA Bluebird BMG 9654-2-RB] with insert notes by Will Thornbury.
It is one of six essays in the MUSICIANS AT WORK segment in Jazz Heritage, a compilation of Martin’s writings published by Oxford University Press in 1985.
As you can tell from the opening plaudits, anything by Martin on the subject of Jazz is worth reading and this one is especially welcomed because its story that is not often told - how Jazz goes about being made in a studio by two of the Giants of the modern idiom, in this case, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.
And, as you read Martin’s description of the session, please keep the following insight in mind: “Like most jazz recording dates, this one combined constant pressure, banter, and even levity with utter seriousness, hard work, and musical accomplishment.”
We so often take excellent Jazz recordings as a finished product, distilled in some magical way from the musicians’ minds, emotions and souls, and while that may be so to some degree, recording Jazz in a studio is a challenge under the best of circumstances, even for the likes of Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond.
“Studio A at RCA Victor Records is a large rectangular room, and recording engineers will tell you they get a very special sound there. If the group of musicians is a lot smaller than the room they install baffle boards and place their mikes carefully, and the sound they get is still special. The four-man group that Victor engineer Mickey Crofford was to record in Studio A on a warm summer evening was small in size, but not small in fame or talent—saxophonists Paul Desmond (who, of course, does most of his playing with Dave Brubeck) and Gerry Mulligan, plus bass and drums. And they were to improvise freely around arrangements written by Mulligan, which he had kept modest and flexible, with plenty of room for solo invention.
Like most jazz recording dates, this one combined constant pressure, banter, and even levity with utter seriousness, hard work, and musical accomplishment.
Desmond was early and by 7 p.m. he was seated in the engineer's booth just off Studio A. The booth is also a rectangular room, smaller than Studio A, with elaborate tape recorders and control boards at one end, and a comfortable visitors' area with chairs, couches, and a table at the other. From this booth there is a clear view of the rest of Studio A through the wide glass panel which runs along one end.
Desmond was going over some of Mulligan's scores with A & R man George Avakian, who was producing the date, and Avakian's associate, composer Bob Prince. As usual, the alto saxophonist was dressed in a neat brown Ivy League suit, white shirt, tie, and fashionably heavy-soled shoes. Also as usual, his suit was slightly in need of a press, his shirt a bit rumpled, and his shoes not recently shined.
Avakian seemed vaguely worried—for no good reason, but Avakian usually seems worried at the start of a recording date. Desmond seemed serious; Prince, confident. And Crofford was busy in the studio and in the booth with his microphones, switches, and dials.
Suddenly, all heads bobbed up as a knock on the glass and a broad grin revealed that Mulligan had arrived in Studio A. In contrast to Desmond, he was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks, a sports shirt, and a thick cardigan sweater. He was obviously ready to go to work: ready to exchange his black shoes for the white sneakers he was carrying, and to take his baritone sax out of its canvas sack and start playing.
Desmond had selected the Modern Jazz Quartet's Connie Kay as his drummer, and Kay entered almost on Mulligan's heels, waving his greetings and going immediately to work setting up his drums. Bassist John Beale, who had arrived soon after Desmond, was quietly running over his part to Kay's right. Kay had just returned from San Francisco with the Quartet. "Glad I finally got to you, Connie," said Desmond, crossing from the booth to the studio. "I was about to send up a skywriter—Connie Kay call Paul Desmond."
Crofford had placed music stands and high stools for the two horns facing the rhythm, with Desmond's alto on one stereo microphone and Mulligan's baritone on the other. Avakian—busy enough to be just now grabbing his supper, an oversized and somewhat over-drippy sandwich—was seated with pencils, note paper, and a stopwatch beside Crofford's complex array of knobs, switches, and dials.
There had to be at least one run-through to test balance and mic placement. "We'll try one, okay?" said Avakian into his microphone, as Mulligan turned to Desmond with a mock serious frown to remark, "And please try not to play your best chorus now."
"Yeah, I'll save it," he answered, perhaps implying that he really had no control over the matter.
The piece was Easy Living, with Mulligan carrying the melody, Desmond inventing a countermelody behind him and taking the first solo. The performance was promisingly good, but Prince and Crofford decided there was too much mike on Kay's cymbal, and went into the studio to move things around a bit.
After another partial run-through, Avakian asked, "Want to tape one to see how it sounds?" But Paul and Gerry had their heads together over the music sheets.
"Try that last ensemble bridge again," Mulligan was saying. "You have the melody. It's the part down there at the bottom of the page." He pointed. "It could be a little more legato sounding." Desmond looked it over.
"I just wrote those notes in so you could see the pattern," Mulligan reminded Beale. "You don't have to play anything."
"Suppose I blow what you're playing along with you?" They tried it, and everyone commented that it sounded good.
"Want to tape one?" asked Desmond, affirming Avakian's suggestion. "We can figure out from the playback what's wrong."
In a few minutes there was a preliminary take of Easy Living on tape, and after the last note of the playback had echoed through the studio, it was obvious that this was going to be a relaxed and productive record date. Even Avakian seemed convinced of it. Mulligan had played with buoyancy, Desmond with fluent melodic ideas, and the improvised counterpoint had had fine emotional and musical rapport. As one visitor said, "Yeah, tonight they're going to play!"
As saxophonist of the Brubeck Quartet, Desmond is in a rather odd position, for his talents are more respected by musicians and critics than those of his pianist-leader. There is, in fact, constant wonder in the trade as to why Paul doesn't leave Dave and go off on his own. At the same time, Desmond is of a cooler and more lyric persuasion than some of the hard-blowing funk merchants who sell well on records nowadays, which puts him out of fashion in certain circles. Mulligan is something of an elder statesman as things go in jazz: his popularity dates from the early fifties and the days of the Mulligan Quartet. Since then he has held a large following, while leading both large and small groups. Recently there has been as much talk of Mulligan the movie actor (The Subterraneans, Bells Are Ringing) and of Mulligan the Broadway composer (a promised musical version of Happy Birthday for Judy Holiday, who is to contribute the lyrics) as about Mulligan the jazzman.
Several visitors and friends were in the booth by now. And each time the door to Studio A was opened, the grinding monotony of a rock and roll date being held next door in Studio B assaulted the ears. It soon developed that some rather illustrious jazzmen were involved in that music next door, and their aesthetic escape proved to be frequent brief visits over to the Desmond-Mulligan session to hear what was going on.
After a good version of Easy Living had been put on tape, there was some banter in the studio about, "Okay, that's it. Everybody come back the same time tomorrow." And there was some serious unwinding over Cokes, while Connie Kay pulled out one of several hamburgers he had brought with him.
But discussion of the music didn't stop, and Mulligan was soon demonstrating a point, seated at the piano that stood in the far end of the studio.
Desmond said he wasn't sure he had quite done his best by Easy Living, and requested they try a slightly faster tempo—that they "make it a little brighter," as he put it— and all agreed to try the piece again. Just then Avakian threw his switch inside the booth and announced over the studio loudspeakers, "Gentlemen, I hate to say this, but I suggest you tune up a little."
"What? How could you even imply such a thing?" protested Mulligan with affected seriousness. And he carried his heavy horn over to the piano again to correct the matter.
When the tapes were rolling, Mulligan felt free enough to do some improvising even in his written parts.
At the end of the new take, before anyone had spoken, there was silent acknowledgment that it was the best yet. "Fine," said Avakian into his mike.
"Want to hear it back?"
Mulligan again affected his cantankerous tone. "It's bad enough making these things without having to listen to them." He turned to Desmond, bobbing his eyebrows a la Groucho Marx, "Right? That a good attitude?" And a moment later, "Well, Paul, what other tunes do you know?"
"I know Melancholy Baby."
"Who are you? Tex Beneke?" Desmond whispered quickly.
As Desmond improvised his solo, Mulligan again did his side-to-side strut. Then, with the tape still rolling and Desmond still soloing, Mulligan signaled to the rest of the group for a round of four-bar phrases from player to player, before he and Desmond went into the counterpoint choruses that finish the piece. An arrangement changed even while it was being recorded. They played the "fours," and as the saxophones were restating the theme at the end, Mulligan began to improvise and merely suggest the melody with a few key notes, as Desmond was playing it in full. It was an effective idea. This was really becoming a cooperative two-man date.
At the end of the take, Mulligan registered approval by turning his heavy horn horizontal and laying it across a raised knee. Paul entered the booth and asked almost shyly, "Where'd that coffee come from? Is it a local concern?"
Soon they were listening to a playback of a Mulligan blues they later decided to call Blight of the Fumble Bee, and a few minutes later they were running through the arranged parts of All the Things You Are. As they finished the conservative Bach-like ending Paul asked, "Isn't that a little daring?"
"Maybe," Mulligan countered. "It'll go okay in the Middle West."
As all this talk filtered through the open studio microphones into the visitors' booth someone muttered, "Maybe those two are trying to work up some kind of act. The bantering, and this Alphonse and Gaston about who's got the first solos and who has the melody and who the harmony. Maybe they could take it on tour."
"Connie," Desmond was saying, "do you remember the tempo of the last take you did?" Kay started to brush his snare drum with perfect memory, and unbelievable lightness.
On another All the Things You Are at a faster tempo, Paul seemed to be more comfortable. Gerry had been better at the slower one. Their only musical disagreement so far.
In a final take of All the Things You Are, Mulligan was smiling broadly as Desmond went into his opening "break" over suspended rhythm, and then invented a lyric solo as the beat resumed. He was still playing hunched over his horn, but this time he was allowing himself a slight motion of the legs in time to his improvising.
At the end, everyone seemed pleased with the performance. But the playback revealed a once-in-a-thousand accident: one of the microphones had briefly cut off during the counterpoint, and some bass notes didn't get on the tape. Desmond was especially disappointed, and for a moment looked as if he didn't want to play any more.
With their heads together, Avakian and Prince decided they could rerecord the bass part later and blend in the few missing notes, saving the performance.
"Otherwise, Bob," said Avakian, as everyone's relief settled in, "did you ever see a more relaxed and easy date?" Mulligan had again sat at the piano and was somehow running through a Mexican waltz, alternating it with some raucous low-down blues.
The ending Mulligan had designed for Stardust was rather complicated but Connie Kay had it after one explanation, and with no music sheet to refer to.
Mulligan said after a run-through: "Did you play a B flat there instead of a B natural?"
Desmond: "Um huh."
Mulligan: "Goodness gracious!"
As the take started, there was a fluent opening exposition by Mulligan, and it was evident from his first phrase that Stardust has a special meaning for him; he became so involved in his playing that at first he didn't hear Avakian calling out that there was not enough tape on the machines to finish the piece, that they had to put on another reel before making a full take.
On the next try, more new ideas rolled out of Mulligan's horn, and then Avakian waxed philosophical. "Very good! But it always seems to me if you get a very good one you should try another. A very good one may be a sign that an excellent one is on the way."
"Well, I don't hear anything dramatic about it," said Desmond quietly, "but otherwise it was very good."
They did Stardust again, and Mulligan's involvement was unabated. At one particularly delicate turn of phrase, a visitor in the booth yelled out. And in the studio Paul indicated his pleasure by smiling and pretending to conduct Kay and Beale, waggling his right forefinger in the student conductor's double-triangle 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4.
At the end, as they heard it played back, Mulligan smiled and laughed aloud at one of Desmond's phrases, and he danced a bit during the ensemble.
When the speakers were silent again, Desmond said quietly, "I think it's about time to amble on home, for me, anyway."
Mulligan started to play his theme song. And Kay had his cymbals almost packed away. (1963)”
"He's a late “arriver" - somebody who digs away and develops and develops and develops and then they bust through.
Tony Bennett is somebody I appreciate that way. I couldn't understand his thing, really, when I was young. I thought his vibrato was bad, his voice was thin, and yet Tony is the kind of person who loves and respects music on a very deep spiritual level. He just has gotten more inside himself, and more inside his art all the time, until finally he has the ability to transport the listener that's unmatched. I think it's a great art, in that type of singing, to take a straight song and sing it relatively straight and somehow put more meaning into it and be able to grab the listener and transport them. When I listen to Tony I don't hear words, I don't hear a vocalist - I just hear music. That's why I really love his singing. I find it is a much harder journey for the later “arrivers" but what they have at the end of it is something much richer."
This anthology contains the many articles, interviews and commentaries I gathered over the years - some of which are very rare - for a planned formal biography of Gerry Mulligan [1927-1996].
But when I realized that I lacked the necessary background in theory and harmony to do justice to the special qualities that made Gerry's music so distinctive, I decided to publish the research instead.
It's all here - 52 chapters and 390 pages - that cover the 50 year career of one of the most original musicians in the history of Jazz.
Available as a paperback and an eBook exclusively through Amazon.com.
