Unpreparedness and Listening to Jazz

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

“In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.”

- Orrin Keepnews [Emphasis mine]

For many Jazz fans who were raised on the Jazz of the 1920’s, what could be considered as the initial phase in the development of the music as it progressed from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, even the music of The Swing Era that followed let alone the subsequent Bebop Era were not True Jazz.

Put another way, these movements were not the music of “their time” and therefore did not merit their attention or close consideration. They held to the view that  these subsequent developments in the music were aberrations and not to be taken seriously, lest one lose time enjoying the better Jazz of the early makers of the music.

Of course, such an attitude could be labelled defensive but not to the purists that held it.

I think we all fall into these muddles over the course of our Jazz listening careers because we prefer the familiar to the unknown.

Sometimes it takes a bridge that helps us - to use pianist Barry Harris’ phrase - “see out a bit,” in other words, make the transition from the old and the familiar to the new and unfamiliar.

Orrin Keepnews makes this case rather convincingly in a very personal way in the following essay entitled A Jazz-Pilgrim’s Progress which can be found in his compilation A View From Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-1987 [Oxford].

See if you can relate to what he has to say about his journey of discovery in the World of Jazz.

A Jazz-Pilgrim's Progress

1956

“Way back in the fall of 1945, when I had very recently returned from the Pacific and was only vaguely aware that all sorts of new currents were supposed to be swirling about in jazz, a very bright-eyed young man whom I had just met insisted upon playing some new records for me. He gave the impression of being about to produce the Holy Grail, or at the very least a live rabbit out of an old top hat. But all I could hear was a screeching, exhibitionistic trumpet, a whining alto saxophone, very little discernible melody, and no sort of reliable beat. I hated it, and informed the young man, in a patiently paternal way (I was at least three years older than he), that this noisy fad could never take the place of The Real Thing. For I was, by exposure and inclination, strictly a Louis Armstrong-Jelly Roll Morton man, and what I had heard was something called "be-bop"—early-1945 recordings by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Such an experience was actually not too uncommon then. I may have had the new music thrust at me more abruptly than most, but quite a few traditional-jazz fans were, at about that time, more or less forced to listen to a couple of "far out" selections. Almost invariably, they recoiled several feet and then spent the next few years either trying to ignore or loudly preaching against all forms of modernism. There has been much written and spoken argument in the past decade about this antipathy, but I don't recall any notice having been taken of what I now consider to have been the core of the problem for myself and for a number of other defenders of early jazz. It was, simply, that we were not ready, were not at all prepared to listen to modern jazz.

Since only the really one-dimensional myths have any staying power, a great many people accept that fantastic oversimplification about jazz having been rather suddenly "born" in New Orleans. Quite similarly, it is almost as customary to accept bop as an instant revolution that was hatched overnight at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. But of course, just as a good many years and a wide variety of pre-jazz influences preceded New Orleans, the modern-jazz revolution has been gestating for a long time. You can go back and hear its first stirrings in, for example, some of Duke Ellington's records of the period when Jimmy Blanton was on hand, in Lester Young's work with Basie, in other big Negro bands, and in some of the small, nominally "Swing" groups of the late 1930s.

But the very important fact is that the typical traditionalist jazz fan was not listening to such music. I undoubtedly can no longer qualify as "typical," having sacrificed any such claims when I turned a hobby into a livelihood and turned myself into jazz writer and magazine editor, record producer, etc. But I was once, I suspect, a very typical sort of specimen: my interest began in the late 1930s, when I heard some records from the '20s; it was fanned by hearing live jazz at New York clubs like Nick's and the Hickory House (recommended by friends primarily as notably inexpensive places to take a date, and secondarily as places to hear good Dixieland). Thus the music that I absorbed was, roughly speaking, homogeneous. Armstrong, Jelly Roll, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Bix — these were the records; in person, at the Greenwich Village and Fifty-second Street clubs, there were such as Wingy Manone, Jack Teagarden, Red Allen, Joe Marsala, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the rest of the Eddie Condon mob. While all this certainly can't be called the same music, both the recordings and the live performances were specifically either in or closely derived from the original New Orleans tradition. Furthermore, although I wasn't particularly aware of it at the time, that live jazz had something else in common with those records: the musicians themselves, both in their way of life and in their music, were firmly rooted in the late 1920s, which was "their" time.

There was probably also a degree of snobbishness mixed in with such jazz tastes: not everyone knew about such things as recordings of the "pure" early jazz, or those small jazz groups playing in rather out-of-the-way places. Big bands and Swing meant "commercial" music, readily available to just anyone. Thus insulated, people like me had no need for the new snobbishness of the insiders who first adopted modern jazz. All in all, with my listening background, it would have been incredible if, at first hearing, I had (as the saying goes) flipped for Diz.

My personal alteration began with some rather accidental touches. In 1948, because I was newly involved in editing a music magazine and was potentially malleable, the head of a small jazz label spent an evening playing and explaining the very earliest Thelonious Monk records. Finally (possibly in self-defense), I found that I could at least feel and enjoy the beat. A year later, on a night when I had specifically gone to hear Armstrong and had been disappointed by a routine act, I reacted extremely hard to the other group in the place, which was the first George Shearing Quintet. (I remember being strongly impressed by his vibraphonist, Margie Hyams. Perhaps it was her effective use of an instrument that doesn't exist in traditional jazz — thus making comparison impossible — and that I had previously disliked — I've always considered Lionel Hampton a drummer gone wrong — that really began to turn the tide for me.)

In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.

As I am far from unique in this matter of broadening one's jazz tastes, I imagine that all I gained from virtually forcing myself to listen to modern jazz was to achieve a device for overcoming ingrained prejudices. Others less stubborn-minded than I, or with more willpower, ought to find it even easier. I can also recommend the use of a simple paradox: concentrate on both the differences and the sameness. By the former, I mean that there's no use looking for absolute parallels: New Orleans jazz sprang from a particular time and place (that it can be enjoyed outside that context is quite true, but irrelevant to my present point); current jazz expression belongs to here and now. This is not a value judgment: there is some inferior modern jazz, of course, but there was also some pretty bad music played in Chicago in the 1920s, too (you just don't bother to listen to those records any more, and let it go at that). There is also a lot that is wrong with the world of here and now, and a lot of that is in the music, too. But it is our time, so that at the very least it has immediacy on its side. I'll go so far as to say that I can't understand any serious listener, unless he is in love with archaism for its own sake, not finding something of value for him in some aspect of modern jazz.

As for the sameness, the major link lies in the aims of jazz musicians: roughly, in working from "popular" musical frameworks to create valid individual and group expression. There are some modernists, like Gerry Mulligan, whose innovations have fairly readily discernible traditional roots. There is the continuing important use of instrumental blues. Finally, there's even occasionally a tendency to think in the same way. I've recently been listening to the work of an extremely far-out musician whose trio is experimenting with something completely novel. He described it to me as "collective improvisation. "The term had a strangely familiar ring that had me puzzled for a minute. Then I remembered. The first time I had heard it used, quite a few years ago, was to describe the music of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band!”

Johnny Richards: Big, Brash and Bold Sounds

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

“There has been much talk in recent years about the close relationship between jazz and what is usually called classical music (or sometimes, "serious" music, as if jazz musicians were kidding). They're coming closer and closer together, this talk usually goes. It's getting so you can't tell where one leaves off and the other begins, somebody says — wistfully, as if it were sinful or something to be ashamed of. And then somebody else — me, if I'm part of this familiar conversation — asks what all the sad words are about; why such viewing with alarm; why the dissatisfaction; it's music, isn't it?

Johnny Richards doesn't do much talking about the relationship, close or distant, between jazz and the classical traditions in music. He just does. He composes and arranges, and when he can, conducts. The strongest arguments, one way or the other, are on music paper or in performance.”

- Barry Ulanov, Jazz author and critic

“The two characteristics of Johnny Richards that usually come first to my mind when his name is mentioned or his music is played is fervor and tenacity. … Johnny Richards is a writer who likes to challenge his men and himself through a wide range of sounds and colors and he usually finds the sidemen who can fulfill his designs.”

- Nat Hentoff, liner notes to Wide Range

“Richards always painted with bold strokes, applying his considerable training and knowledge to create a variety of orchestral pictures.”

- Burt Korall, liner notes to My Fair Lady [paraphrased]

Johnny Richards was one of the more progressive-minded arranger of the 1950s and '60s, turning out big, heavily orchestrated scores with a sometimes unabashed use of dissonance and a good feel for Latin rhythms.

Richards was born in Toluca, Mexico in 1911, as Juan Manuel Cascales, to a Spanish father (Juan Cascales y Valero) and a Mexican mother (Maria Celia Arrue AKA Marie Cascales), whose parents were Spanish immigrants to Mexico. He came to the United States with his parents and his three brothers in 1919.

The family lived first in Los Angeles, California and later in San Fernando, California where Johnny, and his brothers attended and graduated from San Fernando High School. In 1930 Richards enrolled at Fullerton College where he received formal training in music.

He started writing film scores, first in London in 1932-1933, and then in Hollywood for the remainder of the decade, as Victor Young’s assistant at Paramount while studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg.

Forming a big band in the 40s, he had trouble finding musicians who could cope with his involved scores, so he gave it up to write for Charlie Barnet and Boyd Raeburn's forward-looking band.

Oddly enough, considering the reputations of both men, Richards' contributions to the Raeburn library were pretty, romantic, woodwind scores such as "Prelude To The Dawn", "Love Tales" and "Man With The Horn".

Hardly a commercial success, Richards was nevertheless a musical, if sometimes misused asset to any employer.

He also arranged a string album for Dizzy Gillespie in 1950, along with recording dates with Sarah Vaughan, Helen Merrill, and Sonny Stitt. His most famous association was with Kenton, with whom he started arranging in 1952. His collaborations with Kenton on the albums Cuban Fire! and West Side Story are outstanding examples of Richards’ work. 

Richards continued to lead his own orchestras in 1956-1960 and 1964-1965, recording for Capitol, Coral, Roulette, and Bethlehem, and co-wrote one of Frank Sinatra’s signature songs, "Young at Heart."

He died in 1968 from complications arising from a brain tumor.

Of his time with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, Michael Sparke has written in his Stan Kenton: This Is An Orchestra!:

"Rendezvous at Sunset (originally titled Evening) reflects the romantic face of Johnny Richards, and is one of the loveliest original ballads in all of jazz. Whatever the mood, Richards' music post-Cuban Fire has substance and symmetry, and nobody wrote more effectively for the French horns within a jazz framework. Towards the end of Richards’ arrangement of I Con­centrate on You the horns rise out of the orchestral timbre in a truly gorgeous surge of sound. (A talent not lost on Kenton when it came time to forming the mellophonium orchestra in 1960.)”

Michael’s book also contains the following observations about Johnny’s writing by three members of the Kenton orchestra.

[Trombonist] Don Reed noted that "Stan liked Johnny Richards. I think he was Stan's favorite arranger, but those scores were so demanding physically on the band, because the trumpets were constantly screeching. Every­body was playing loud all the time, long sustained notes that blared, and the arrangements didn't swing.”

And Phil Gilbert [trumpet] is typically blunt: "Richards was a highly educated musician with great orchestrat­ing skills, but he was also very disturbed and drank heavily. Cuban Fire was his best, and he wrote some nice ballads like The Nearness of You' and The Way You Look Tonight' with no explosions or head-on colli­sions. We did not enjoy his Back to Balboa charts at all. I hated them. Too hard, and to what end? Uniting those tunes with Latin rhythms was no help at all."

On the other hand, Jim Amlotte [trombone] was unexpectedly positive: "I really liked those Latin charts on 'Begin the Beguine,’ 'Out of this World,' and so forth. Johnny Richards is one of my favorite composers, but his music taxed you to the end. To Johnny, nothing was unplayable, and his music was challenging: very, very challenging. Richards put his arrangements together so well. Some guys will say there's too much tension, but this is what I like. Some things are going to swing, and some things aren't, but as long as there's a pulsation, that's enough for me. They don't all have to be Basie-type swing."

There is a published biography on Johnny by Jack Hartley entitled Johnny Richards: The Definitive Bio-Discography [Balboa Books, 1998], although copies of it may be difficult to locate.

Thankfully, Michael Cuscuna and his team have made Johnny’s long-out-of-print recordings available on a three disc Mosaic Select set [MS-017].

The booklet that accompanies the Mosaic Select set has a good detail of information about Johnny and descriptions of his writing some of which is excerpted below.

© -Michael Cuscuna/Mosaic Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Recorded from 1955-1966, the Mosaic set is comprised of music from six albums recorded under Johnny’s name: Annotations of the Muses, Wide Range, Experiments in Sound, The Rites of Diablo, My Fair Lady - My Way, and Aqui Se Habla Espanol/English Spoken Here.

In his notes to Annotations of the Muses, John S. Wilson wrote:

“It might seem to be belaboring the obvious to say that what you hear on this record is music.

Yet an essential point of this composition by Johnny Richards is that it is just that — music, without qualifications: not jazz nor what is sometimes called "serious" music (as though this music were always unbearably solemn or no other music could be considered to have any intellectual merit) nor a violation of one by the other.

Annotations of the Muses is a composition which draws on several musical roots. There are jazz elements in it but they appear as natural developments, not the graftings of a desperate plastic surgeon. There is even more evidence of "serious" music but it is used purposefully, gracefully, to make a point rather than an impression.

The unique flavor of this work derives from the skill with which Richards has made use of both jazz and "serious" elements without seeming awkward or ostentatious in his treatment of either one. There is a homogeneity of conception whether the means by which it is expressed are tightly grouped, accented woodwinds with a flavor of Hindemith, or canons and rounds, or a solo trumpet with a steady 4/4 beat.

What Richards has achieved by this blending is a lighthearted vitality, a form of lyricism with guts which could scarcely be brought about by any other integration of instruments or styles. He has, to begin with, a woodwind quintet for which he has written with that mixture of merriment and brooding which seems inherent in woodwinds. But the quintet is simply a starting point for it soon expands into a nonet which plays with a pulsing beat.

That the quintet should provide a foundation and that the nonet should have a moving beat are factors which reflect, as any honest musical composition must, something of the composer. Johnny Richards has run a musical gamut from serious composition to movie music to jazz writing of the wildest stripe. If his past has any connection with his present, it must be assumed that Annotations of the Muses is a synthesis of the more vital elements of all the areas in which he has worked. In this suite he has stripped himself of any extreme attitudes which he may have felt forced or drawn to use in the past — the form for the sake of form which crops up in much serious composition, the emptiness that keeps movie music from intruding on plot-centered sensibilities, or the hair-raising appeal for attention with which he ventured into the jazz world.

But Richards has put this experience to advantageous use. For, in this case, there is certainly form but it is judiciously selected form, useful only insofar as it has pertinent meaning. There is flexibility, that sinewy feeling for modulation which is the essential tool of the composer of film music. And there is the organic appeal of the subtle jazz musician's attack.

This is quietly convincing music which is — in the best sense — unpretentious. It sets out, with directness and honesty, to charm the listener. Because it is counting on charm, any false note, any obvious reaching for effect, would be its undoing. And so it introduces itself politely but in familiar vein with genial five-art counterpoint and, in hostly fashion, settles the listener comfortably before leading him on into some animated, varied and occasionally adventurous musical exposition. There is revealed in this process warmth, logic and a notable absence of condescension in any direction. The charm shines resolutely through.

Burt Korall wrote the insert notes to Aqui Se Habla Espanol/English Spoken Here and offered the following comments about Johnny and his approach to music.

“Today, many streams of musical thought pour into the main flow. The world is smaller; a trip from the familiar to anywhere on the globe, a matter of hours. Because of this, our existence has become far less closeted than in times past. We are increasingly exposed in mass media to the people, pulse and melodies of other lands. The result is the mixing and mingling of diverse heritages, increasingly reflected in music composed and performed, here and abroad.”

The maker of music, Johnny Richards feels, should bring into play expressive structures, regardless of source. With jazz as his base, he has given this concept life, having created a library for his orchestra that is a true reflection of his stance, "...there are so many wonderful sounds and multiple rhythms elsewhere in the world that we...can make use of," he has said. "We can learn from them all. People in other areas swing in so many different ways. Swinging, after all, is not unique to jazz. I've been delighted, for example, to see jazz musicians in the past few years finally trying to swing in 3/4 and 6/8. So many meters, so many tone colors have been in existence for hundreds of years, and it's about time we got around to them."

For Richards, composing and arranging are continuing exploratory and illuminating processes; he moves more deeply into himself and the multiple materials available to him. An optimistic man, he retains great enthusiasm for his work. It remains at the center of his life. He writes as he feels he must, sometimes at great cost. This form of integrity has inspired his musicians; they stay with him, answering his call, whenever he can field an orchestra. Richards' music challenges, sometimes wilts them, but never bores them. Moreover, they are provided freedom to add something of themselves to his compositions.”

In his Postscript to the Mosaic set, Todd Selbert observed:

“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 — 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. …

Richards formed a new band in spring 1957 and the recordings herein cover the last and most fertile decade of his abbreviated career. They are a treasure. The music is at turns passionate and fiery, romantic and melancholic and, above all, majestic. One of its characteristics is its wonderfully deep and visceral bottom, achieved not only through the French horn, tuba and baritone saxophone that had been utilized by Evans and Rogers but extended by bass saxophone. Tympani and piccolo are rarely heard in the jazz orchestra, but Richards incorporated them and they added texture and color to his music. He introduced unusual time signatures and authentic Latin and African rhythms to big band jazz. But the key ingredients in Richards' orchestrations are his gorgeous voicings and development of melody through harmonically-sophisticated and sublime counter lines.”

Charlie Mariano: Jazz Saxophonist - A Career Overview [1923 - 2009]

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

“I don’t know any Jazzman who has as good a sense of melodic development in his solos as Charlie.  The lines he finds!  And he’s so warm.”

- Shelly Manne

I’ve always had a special fondness for combos with a trumpet and alto saxophone “front-line.” Perhaps this was because one of the first Jazz groups I ever worked with had this configuration.

I liked the brightness of the brass and crackling sound of the higher register alto saxophone, especially when paired with a trumpet.

The combination just sounds so hip.

But I had no idea how brilliant this pairing could sound until I encountered it in the form of Stu Williamson on trumpet and Charlie Mariano on alto saxophone.

Stu and Charlie were on the first Contemporary LP that I ever bought at my neighborhood record shop. The rhythm section was Russ Freeman on piano, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and, of course, Shelly on drums.

Entitled Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. 5: More Swingin’ Sound [Contemporary S-7519, OJCCD-320-2], it was recorded on July 16th and August 15-16, 1956 and, as I was to learn later, it was a sequel of sorts to Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. 4: Swingin’ Sounds [Contemporary S-3516, OJCCD-267-2] recorded on January 19, 26 and February 2, 1956..

Charlie, along with Stu Williamson, would also stay with Shelly’s quintet for Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. 7: The Gambit [Contemporary S-7557; OJCCD 1007-2], recorded on January 14, July 17, and 25, 1957 to which he contributed an extended, 4-part suite named after the chess move in the album title. Monty Budwig takes over for Leroy Vinnegar in the bass chair on Vol. 7.

In his masterful and definitive West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960, Ted Gioia had this to say about Charlie’s extended composition - The Gambit [paragraphing modified]:

“In January 1957, Manne's quintet returned to Contemporary's studio in Los Angeles to record another extended composition, this one written by group member Charles Mariano. The new piece, "The Gambit," was another four-movement work in the same vein as the earlier "Quartet."

The band was the same — except for the substitution of Monty Budwig for Leroy Vinnegar— as the one that had tackled the first Holman extended work. The similarity between the two works, however, stops there.

While Holman had used blues structures as the essential foundations of his work, Mariano's work is more harmonically and rhythmically complex — which perhaps explains why the group needed three recording sessions to tape the nineteen-minute composition — with more obvious ties to the European classical heritage.

The first movement, "Queen's Pawn," starts with a mock processional that moves through a series of shifting meters, finally settling into a relaxed 6/4 for the solos. The second movement, "En Passant," builds off a series of static harmonies, first basing Mariano's somewhat "outside" solo on a repeated vamp. The piece then shifts into a minor drone behind Williamson's trumpet solo. The third movement, "Castling," opens with an unaccompanied counterpoint duet between Mariano and Williamson, which evolves into another shifting meter pattern in which 4/ 4 alternates with a subdivided 8/8. The movement closes with a restatement of the coronation march that opened the work. The final section, "Checkmate," starts with Manne soloing on mallets in a slow 3/4 meter; Freeman, Mariano, Williamson, and Budwig gradually enter, setting up rhythmic variations in the still restrained tempo, until a sudden leap into a fast 4/4 underlines extended solos for each of the band members. This section ends as suddenly as it began with an unexpected and brief restatement of the opening processional.”

Shelly kept this version of The Men together for about two years until Charlie Mariano made the decision to move back to his native Boston, MA in 1958.

Nat Hentoff has described the music by this band as “ … lean, angular, rhythmically probing, and emotionally striking in a hard unsentimental way.”

The music on Vols. 4, 5 and 7 by Shelly group with Stu and Charlie in the front-line was fresh, crisp and clean as was much of Southern California in the 1950s. To use a friend’s favorite phrase: it was “happy, joyous and free.”

Richard Cook and Brian Morton writing in the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th edition reflected that the recording contained – “…excellent early material from a notably light and vibrant band fronted by the underrated Stu Williamson and the always inventive Charlie Mariano. … Shelly played as soft as he ever did, and with great control on the mallets.”

Three things about the music on Shelly Manne and His Men, Vol. 5: More Swingin’ Sound [Contemporary S-7519, OJCCD-320-2] and the other albums featuring the Williamson - Mariano front line struck me immediately and forcefully: [1] Shelly Manne’s use of timpani mallets, [2] the luminous trumpet work of Stu Williamson who also plays valve trombone surprisingly well and, most of all, the plaintive wail that was so much a part of Charlie Mariano’s alto saxophone tone.

“Soulful” would become a word that was used often in relationship to Jazz, but nothing I ever heard then or now is as soulful as Charlie’s playing on these recordings.

Working backwards, I also caught up to Charlie great solo on Stella by Starlight on Stan Kenton’s 1956 Contemporary Concepts [Capitol Jazz 7234 5 42310 2 5] and followed his career quite avidly when he and his then wife Toshiko Akiyoshi put a quartet together that lasted over 7 years.

Here’s an overview of Charlie’s career.

Charlie Mariano: Jazz saxophonist

The alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano had two distinctly different musical personalities. On the one hand he was an incisive bebop soloist who extended the ideas of Charlie Parker with skill and panache, contributing to many recordings with Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne and the bands of his former wife Toshiko Akiyoshi. On the other he was a restless musical explorer whose style was difficult to categorize, investigating Eastern music and learning to play the “nagasvaram”, fusing Indian music with jazz, playing free improvisations with the cream of the European avant-garde, and pioneering rock fusion, most famously in his own group Osmosis and in the multinational United Jazz and Rock Ensemble.

For the most part, Mariano’s musical identities were separated by the Atlantic Ocean. He made his initial reputation as a bebop player in his native United States, before settling in Europe at the start of the 1970s and using his home in Cologne as the launching pad for his travels and exploration. However, one aspect of his work transcended physical and musical boundaries, in that Mariano was a gifted and strong-minded teacher, passing on his wealth of knowledge to students worldwide after the success of his first teaching posts at the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

Born into an Italian-American family in Boston, Carmino Ugo Mariano soon had his name Anglicized to Charles Hugo, and before long, simply Charlie. Although he listened keenly to opera and jazz in roughly equal proportions at home, he did not begin to play music until he acquired his first saxophone at the age of 18. However, he soon made up for lost time, playing within months of starting the instrument in some of Boston’s roughest bars before being drafted into a military dance band.

Stationed in Los Angeles in 1945 he heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at Billy Berg’s Hollywood nightclub, and was immediately inspired to learn all he could about their style, transcribing Parker’s records and learning his solos by heart.

Back in Boston in 1946 he went through the standard musical apprenticeship of the era, paying his dues in the bands of Shorty Sherock, Larry Clinton and Nat Pierce, but simultaneously studying at Schillinger House, which was expanded into the Berklee School during his time there. In 1953 he was recruited for Stan Kenton’s band on the West Coast, and after two years in this high-profile job he joined the drummer Shelly Manne for a more settled work pattern involving less touring and more time in the Los Angeles area. This produced some of his most distinctive early records, such as his contributions to Manne’s album The Gambit.

Leaving the West in 1958 to return to Boston, Mariano started teaching at Berklee, and playing with the trumpet tutor there, Herb Pomeroy. He met and was married to the Japanese pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, forming a quartet with her that first recorded in December 1960. The group (and the marriage) lasted seven years, and during that time they traveled widely, making several records in Tokyo for RCA Japan with a mixture of Japanese and American jazz musicians. Mariano also arranged for Akiyoshi’s Japanese All Stars big band.

Back at Berklee for a time in the early 1960s, Mariano also played and recorded with Charles Mingus, most famously on the album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Mariano greatly liked Mingus’ workshop methods of developing new music, using experience as much as academic theory, and formed his own jazz workshop-cum-nightclub in Boston.

Mariano’s interest in fusion started when rock music was in its infancy. Osmosis was formed in 1967, and he went on to work with the European free jazz and rock fusion band Pork Pie with the guitarist Philip Catherine and keyboard player Jasper Van’t Hof.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s he also traveled widely in the Far East and India, absorbing local music and instrumental techniques.

In 1975 he was invited to join the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, originally formed for a German television chat show, but soon developed by the keyboard player Wolfgang Dauner into an independent band in its own right. Mariano played reeds alongside the English saxophonist Barbara Thompson, and also in the line-up were the trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Ian Carr (obituary, February 25, 2009), the bassist Eberhard Weber and the drummer Jon Hiseman. The group’s debut recording Live in Schützenhaus became Germany’s biggest selling jazz album of all time. The group continued to tour and record into the present century.

From the late 1980s until the present, Mariano had been an energetic freelance. He worked with the Swiss bandleader George Gruntz, in individual projects with several members of the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, and with the oud player Rabih Abu-Khalil. He also returned to his earlier American style of playing at occasional reunions of Kenton band colleagues, and in Al Porcino’s Big Band.

In 1995 Mariano was given a diagnosis of prostate cancer and warned that he might only survive another year. He threw himself into work with greater zeal than before, as well as undergoing alternative therapies, and brought his burly frame, shock of white hair and broad-toned saxophone sound to a characteristically wide range of musical projects, culminating last year in a final series of reunions with Catherine and Van’t Hof both in the recording studio and in a triumphant concert at the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart.

Charlie Mariano, jazz saxophonist, was born on November 12, 1923. He died on June 16, 2009, aged 85.

The following video features Charlie along with Jerry Dodgion, alto sax, Victor Feldman, vibes, Jimmy Rowles, piano, Monty Budwig, bass and Shelly Manne, drums performing When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.

Remembering Sheldon Meyer – Jazz Editor

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

“Sheldon Meyer, a distinguished editor of nonfiction books who was almost single-handedly responsible for the Americanization of Oxford University Press in his more than 40 years there, died on Oct. 9 [2006] at his home in Manhattan. He was 80….

Mr. Meyer … made Oxford a major publisher of books about American popular culture — notably jazz and musical theater — and in so doing helped democratize scholarly publishing in the United States….

In Mr. Meyer’s early years with Oxford, he sometimes had trouble persuading dusty dons across the Atlantic that baseball and Basie were fit subjects for a European publishing concern founded in 1478.

‘Now they’re tremendously supportive,” Mr. Meyer told The New York Times in 1988. “They’re delighted because the books do well and they reflect well on American culture. The whole field now has an aura of respectability about it.’”

- Margalit Fox, The New York Times, October 18, 2006

"I had an advantage in staying at one place for forty years. I never could have done the jazz list if I was moving around to three or four publishers during that period. It is kind of an extreme irony that the greatest university press in the world, with these high standards, should become the major publisher of jazz, broadcasting, popular music, all these areas. But I was there at the right time and I had a group of people at the press who had enough flexibility and understanding to let it go forward. Now everybody is enormously proud of this whole thing. I couldn't ask for a better career."

- Sheldon Meyer as told to Gary Giddins

“I have a huge library of books on jazz and popular music. Probably half of them were published by Sheldon and Oxford. To contemplate the condition in which the documentation of jazz and American popular culture would be in had Sheldon Meyer never lived is a gloomy act indeed. …

It is in this light that the great body of Sheldon Meyer's work must be seen. And no one has ever more fully embodied the dictum that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man than Sheldon Meyer. What the world of jazz owes him is beyond estimate, and most of its denizens don't even know his name.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author

It is tremendously limiting and very unfair of me to refer to the late, Sheldon Meyer solely as a “Jazz Editor,” but I like to think of him that way, that is when I’m not thinking of him as “Sheldon Meyer – Baseball Editor” [another of my favorite subjects].

While doing some research for an upcoming book review of Alyn Shipton’s “Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway” [published by Oxford University Press in 2010 and now available in paperback], I came across the following piece about Mr. Meyer which the late, author Gene Lees issued in the March, 1998 edition of his Jazzletter.

I thought perhaps that readers of the blog might be interested in the following excerpts from Gene’s view of Mr. Meyer’s significance to Jazz publications during the second half of the 20^th century.

Few have placed a larger footprint on the written documentation of and opinions about Jazz than Mr. Meyer.  Not surprisingly, it was he who suggested that Mr. Shipton write the biography of Cab Calloway for Oxford University Press.

If you stay with Gene’s essay to the end, not only will you have learned more about a great man – Mr. Sheldon Meyer – but you may also find yourself shedding a tear or two about the current and future state of Jazz research and documentation. 

© -  Gene Lees/Jazzletter, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

A Lengthened Shadow

“Something catastrophic for jazz has happened in New York. I refer to the retirement at the age of seventy of Sheldon Meyer.

Sheldon Meyer, until recently senior vice president of Oxford University Press, is one of the most important men in jazz history, and if in fifty years various persons are researching this music in this time, they will be deeply in debt to him; and probably they will never have heard of him. He is a tall, indeed imposing, man with a round face, remarkably smooth and youthful skin, and equally youthful manner and bearing. He has a droll sense of humor, a quick laugh, and a remarkable lack of pretension for one whose career has been so creative and important.

Gary Giddins recently wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "'Midlist' is an industry euphemism for those writers who do not scale best-seller charts.

"Until the recent spate of articles about the woes of publishing, it never would have occurred to me that I was a midlist author. I write books about jazz, and from where I sit, midlist sounds like a promotion. Yet, along with several colleagues, I have never felt professionally marginalized in the publishing world, and for that we have one man to thank. On the occasion of his retiring from Oxford University Press, Sheldon Meyer merits, at the very least, a flourish of saxophones, a melody by Jerome Kern and a high-kicking chorus line salute. Over the past forty years, Meyer turned the world's oldest and most staid publishing house into the leading chronicler of jazz, Broadway musicals, popular-song writers, broadcasting, and black cultural history. And he and his masters made money at it."

A small number of editors have achieved great prominence, among them Harold Ross of the New Yorker and Maxwell Perkins, who brought to the world Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and others of that stature in the time when fiction still held sway as the major literary act. I think Sheldon's name, in the non-fiction area, belongs at that level.

Sheldon spent the first few years of his career at Funk and Wagnall's, joining Oxford in 1956. Funk and Wagnall's had published Marshall Stearns' pioneering The Story of Jazz. Through Stearns, Sheldon met Martin Williams, who was to become a friend and adviser, as well as writing a number of books published by Oxford. At Oxford Sheldon published Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz, which, as Gary Giddins points out, "remains the most important musicological statement on jazz's infancy."

I came to know Sheldon through James Lincoln Collier, whom I also did not know at the time. Writers about jazz are often notable for an ill-concealed jealousy and a sullen conviction that they alone know anything about the subject, that it is or should be their exclusive domain. Collier proved to be an outstanding exception. He had read some of the Jazzletters and told Sheldon about me, saying, "You should be publishing this guy." Then he wrote me a letter saying he thought Sheldon Meyer at Oxford University Press would be receptive to a collection of my essays. It was an act of generosity that would change my life.

I wrote to Sheldon Meyer, who had published several collections of the exquisite word portraits of Whitney Balliett. Quite timidly, I began by saying, "I am well aware that collections of essays don't sell." And I got back a letter saying, somewhat testily, "Mine do." He said he would very much like to consider a collection of my pieces. After reading a number of them, he told me on the telephone, "You have a reputation as a songwriter and as an expert on singing. I think our first collection — " and I nearly choked on that word first " — should be about songwriting and singers." It became Singers and the Song (a title he gave it) and it would win the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. So would another collection of my work that Sheldon would publish, Waiting for Dizzy. (I've won it three times. Gary Giddins has the record: he's won it five times.)

In addition, Sheldon published my Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, Cats of Any Color, and Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman, and Singers and the Song II, due out in June — an expanded and altered version of the first book. He published Jim Collier's biographies of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. He published Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz and, more recently, The History of Jazz, and two books by bassist Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes and From Birdland to Broadway, after reading some of Bill's delightful pieces is the Jazzletter.

Sheldon published Reid Badger's A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe', King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era by Edward A. Berlin; Philip Furia's The Poets of Tin Pan Alley (the best book on lyrics and lyricists I've ever read) and Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist; Joseph P. Swain's The Broadway Musical; Mark Tucker's The Duke Ellington Reader, The Jazz Scene by W. Royal Stokes; Arnold Shaw's The Jazz Age; Gene Santoro's Dancing in Your Head and Stir It Up; The Frank Sinatra Reader by Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazz; Bebop by Thomas Owens; The Jazz Revolution by Kathy I. Ogren; Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum, by James Lester; Ira Gitler's Swing to Bop; Leslie Course's Contemporary Women Instrumentalists, and many more, including a new encyclo­pedia of jazz, on which Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler were working when Leonard died. Ira is completing it.

And Sheldon commissioned and published American Popular Song by Alec Wilder and James Maher, one of the most important books in American musical history.

I have a huge library of books on jazz and popular music. Probably half of them were published by Sheldon and Oxford. To contemplate the condition in which the documentation of jazz and American popular culture would be in had Sheldon Meyer never lived is a gloomy act indeed. Most of those books would not have found an outlet without him.

And aside from the jazz books, Sheldon published Lawrence W. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Albert J. Raboteau's Slave Religion, John Blassingame's Slave Community, Robert C. Toll's Blacking Up, Nathan Irvin Huggins' Harlem Renaissance, A. Leon Higginbotham' Jr.'s In the Matter of Color, Thomas Cripps' Slow Fade to Black, Richard C. Wade's Slavery in the Cities, and a two-volume biography of Booker T. Washing­ton by Louis R. Harlan's.

It is highly unlikely that the standard "commercial" publishing houses would have risked publishing such works, certainly the jazz books.

I once asked who actually headed Oxford, and was told that it was a group of anonymous dons at the university in England. I thought this was a joke; I learned that while the statement may have been hyperbolic, it was not exactly untrue. There is a certain amorphous quality about the upper level of Oxford University Press, but Sheldon Meyer lent to his division dignity, direction, and decision. When he started publishing books on jazz, his "masters," as Gary Giddins called them, questioned him. As Sheldon told Gary:

"I had some problems in the mid-60s. The head of the press in England said he had begun to notice some odd books appearing in the Oxford list, and I said, well, I'm responsible for them. Since he was a papyrologist — a guy working with old documents, old rolls of paper — he didn't have much connection with this world, to say the least. So I said to him, 'Well, look, as long as these books are authoritative and make money, it seems to me they're appropriate for the press to publish.' Fortunately for the future of my career, that turned out to be correct."

Read between the lines of that and you'll realize that Sheldon laid his career on the line to publish books about jazz. Thus it came to be that probably the oldest publishing house in England became the premiere publishing house on contemporary American culture.

As he told Gary Giddins, "I had an advantage in staying at one place for forty years. I never could have done the jazz list if I was moving around to three or four publishers during that period. It is kind of an extreme irony that the greatest university press in the world, with these high standards, should become the major publisher of jazz, broadcasting, popular music, all these areas. But I was there at the right time and I had a group of people at the press who had enough flexibility and understanding to let it go forward. Now everybody is enormously proud of this whole thing. I couldn't ask for a better career."

Sheldon Meyer has been an editor of brilliance, and if there is such a thing in editing, even of genius. I began to get a bad feeling a couple of years ago when his close friend and long-time professional associate, Leona Capeless, one of the finest copy editors I've ever known, retired from Oxford. And now that Sheldon too has retired, my unhappy capacity to reach conclusions I don't like tells me that much chronicling of American cultural history is never going to get done. The loss to America and to the world is inestimable.

In the past few years, I have been only too aware that primary sources of jazz history, and popular-music history, are being lost to us. The great masters, the men who were there, are slowly leaving us. I do not know who said, "Whenever anyone dies, a library burns." But it is true: almost anyone's experience is worth recording, even that of the most "ordinary" person. For the great unknown terrain of human history is not what the kings and famous men did — for much, though by no means all, of this was recorded, no matter how imperfectly — but how the "common" people lived.

When Leonard Feather first came to the United States from England in the late 1930s, he was able to know most of his musical heroes, including Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. By the end of the 1940s, Leonard knew everybody of significance in jazz from the founding figures to the young iconoclasts. And when I became actively involved in the jazz world in 1959, as editor of Down Beat, most of them were still there. I met most of them, and became friends with many, especially the young Turks more or less of my own age. I have lived to see them grow old (and sometimes not grow old), and die, their voices stilled forever. And so, in recent years, I have felt impelled to do what I can to get their memories down before they are lost, leading me to write what I think of as mini-biographies of these people. This has been the central task of the Jazzletter. And always underlying my efforts in the past ten years has been the quiet confidence that, thanks to Sheldon, these works would end up between hard covers on library shelves for the use of future music historians. That is no longer so.

When I wanted to know something about one aspect or another of music history in the 1960s, I could pick up the telephone and call these older mentors, such as Alec Wilder or my special friend Johnny Mercer, or Robert Offergeld, music editor of Stereo Review when I wrote for it and one of the greatest scholars I have ever known. If I wanted to know something about the history or the technique of film composition, I could telephone my dear, dear friend Hugo Friedhofer, who wrote his first film music in 1929. There was nothing worth knowing about film music that Hugo didn't know; and not much for that matter about the history of all music. I can't call Hugo any more. Or Dizzy. I can't call Glenn Gould either. Gerry Mulligan was ten months older than I. Shorty Rogers died while I was researching the Woody Herman biogra­phy; I was to interview him in a week or two.

Now, when my generation is gone, there will be no one much left who knew Duke Ellington and Woody Herman and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. All future writers will be depen­dent not on primary sources, which all of these people were for me, but on secondary sources, which is to say documents. And earlier writings. And I have found much of the earlier writing on jazz, such as that of John Hammond and Ralph J. Gleason, to be unreliable — sloppy in research, gullible in comprehension, and too often driven by personal and even political agendas. Errors — and lies — reproduce themselves in future writings.

It is in this light that the great body of Sheldon Meyer's work must be seen. And no one has ever more fully embodied the dictum that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man than Sheldon Meyer. What the world of jazz owes him is beyond estimate, and most of its denizens don't even know his name.

Sheldon continues as a consultant to Oxford, completing projects he initiated. But no writer who has dealt with him thinks Oxford will continue developing these hugely significant projects. And therefore much of jazz and popular-music history is going to go unrecorded, lost forever. We are fortunate, however, that Sheldon Meyer managed to get as much of it preserved as he did.

Salud, Sheldon. We all owe you.”

Salud, Gene, We all owe you, too.

[Mr. Lees passed away on April 22, 2010]