Archives for 2014

On his Jazz Northwest program this Sunday, Jim Wilke (pictured) will play highlights of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra’s recent concert of the music of Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan. Jim put on his beret of a skilled audio engineer and recorded the June 22 concert. From Jim’s Jazz Northwest announcement:

The concert includes music composed by Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan and played and recorded by both bands. Baritone saxophonist Bill Ramsay is featured prominently in Gerry Mulligan’s music, and pianist Randy Halberstadt takes on the role of Stan Kenton in the Kenton theme ‘Artistry in Rhythm.’ SRJO plays Music of Stan Kenton & Gerry Mulligan on Jazz NW on 88.5 KPLU, Sunday July 6 at 2 PM PDT.

To read the Rifftides review of the event, go here. Listeners not in the Seattle-Tacoma area may hear the program streamed live on the web at kplu.org. It will be archived as a podcast.

Today, the United States of America is celebrating the 238th anniversary of its independence. Rifftides observes the 4th of July with two versions of the song that many Americans wish was the national anthem. Pianist Clare Fischer arranged the first for his 1967 album Songs For Rainy Day Lovers. The second version is by tenor saxophonist Al Cohn with Barry Harris, piano; Sam Jones, bass; and Leroy Williams, drums.

footnote: Al Cohn recorded “America The Beautiful” in 1976 as part of his Xanadu LP Al Cohn’s America. Recently, the Spanish company Gambit reissued the album on CD under Harris’s name, with Cohn identified as a sideman. That doesn’t seem fair to the memory of a great musician, but sometimes the gambits of the reissue game are anything but fair. Whoever gets his name above the title, it’s a major item in Cohn’s discography. Cohn told Bob Blumenthal, who wrote the notes for the original LP, that his inspiration to play “America The Beautiful” came from pianist Jimmy Rowles. Rowles recorded it, also as a bossa nova, in 1968 for this album.

Best wishes for a fine 4th Of July weekend.

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Now that wilting temperatures are here—at least in much of the northern hemisphere—Rifftides reader Larry Peterson suggests that Sonny Clark’s “Cool Struttin’” can bring welcome relief. Clark was a pianist who in a tragically short career attracted a substantial audience. His command of the keyboard and personalization of the style that he developed with Bud Powell as his initial model also earned him the esteem of his peers. Bill Evans created an anagram of Clark’s name as the title one of the compositions in his album Conversations With Myself. “NYC’s No Lark,” recognized the struggle with drugs that led to Clark’s death in 1963 at the age of 32.

“Cool Sruttin’” is the title tune of a timeless album that is a monument to Clark’s talent. The other members of the band are Art Farmer, trumpet; Jackie McLean, alto saxophone; Paul Chambers, bass; and Philly Joe Jones, drums. They recorded this on January 5, 1958.

I hope that you find a way to have a cool summer.

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Joe Segal, who last week was named a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, has been at the heart of jazz in Chicago since the early bebop era. He began presenting jazz events following World War Two when he was attending Roosevelt College on the GI Bill. It was not unusual for name musicians, including Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, to join local players in Segal’s afternoon sessions. When the Roosevelt sessions ended in 1957, Segal moved his entrepreneurial activities from place to place in Chicago. He estimates that the sessions happened in more than 60 locations. The first one he called the Jazz Showcase opened in 1970 and for a long time was in the Blackstone Hotel. It now has space in the city’s landmark rail terminal, Dearborn Station. Segal’s award is in the Jazz Advocate category added by the NEA Jazz Masters program in 2004. Its previous winners have been festival impresario George Wein, journalist Nat Hentoff, producer Orrin Keepnews, Dan Morgenstern of the Institute for Jazz Studies, recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and Segal’s fellow club operator Lorraine Gordon of the Village Vanguard in New York.

A list of major musicians who have appeared under Segal’s auspices would amount to a who’s-who of jazz over the past 55 years. Along the way, he and his son Wayne, who now manages the club, have provided an outlet for some of the music’s daring adventurers, witness this 1981 performance by those intrepid outriders of the avant garde, the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

You heard, and most definitely saw, Lester Bowie, trumpet; Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, reeds; Malachi Favors, bass; and Famoudou Don Moye, percussion. Of course, they all played percussion.

One of Segal’s most significant contributions to the health of Chicago’s jazz community has been his encouragement of developing musicians. Over the past few years that has encompassed a relationship with Bob Lark, director of the jazz program at DePaul University. Here is the DePaul Jazz Ensemble last month with guest trumpeter Randy Brecker, and Lark conducting. They play Joe Clark’s arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t.” The soloists are alto saxophonist Brent Griffin, trombonist Brian Scarborough and Brecker.

Joe Segal, who has long helped to make that sort of thing possible, is being recognized for his long-running contributions to jazz. With the other new NEA Jazz Masters, he will receive his award, which carries a prize of $25,000, at a ceremony in New York City next April 20. Segal told Howard Reich of The Chicago Tribune what he’ll do with the money: “We’ll put it right in our kitty,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of bills.”

To see the NEA’s official biography of Segal, with a partial list of live albums recorded at the Jazz Showcase, go here.

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This is a good year for jazz saxophonists from Memphis, Tennessee. Like his fellow Memphian George Coleman, who is three years older, Charles Lloyd (born 1938) has been named a 2015 Jazz Master of the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with Coleman, pianist-composer-arranger Carla Bley and Chicago club owner and entrepreneur Joe Segal, Lloyd will receive his NEA Jazz Master award next April in a Jazz At Lincoln Center ceremony in New York.

Among Memphis musicians who mentored and encouraged Lloyd when he was a youngster were pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr., and Willie Mitchell, the musician and producer credited with shaping the Memphis rhythm and blues sound. Lloyd played as a teenager with Coleman, Harold Mabern, Booker Little, Hank Crawford and Frank Strozier, among other young Memphis jazzmen who went on to important careers. He did a stint with B.B. King—something else he has in common with Coleman—and one with Bobby Blue Bland. After high school, Lloyd moved to Los Angeles and majored in composition at USC. He got to know Buddy Collette, Harold Land, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman, sometimes jamming with them.

His professional experience included Gerald Wilson’s big band and club work with Dolphy, Billy Higgins, Scott LaFaro, Ornette Coleman and Bobby Hutcherson. He became music director and principal arranger for drummer Chico Hamilton’s popular Quintet, then spent several months with the Cannonball Adderley Sextet. Not long after he left Adderley to form his quartet in 1965, his album Forest Flower, with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette, sold more than a million copies. His album with Gabor Szabo, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, Of Course, Of Course, was a major critical achievement. Through the late sixties, the Lloyd group was a huge success with jazz listeners as well as fans of the rock music that was taking over popular music. They played frequently on college campuses. Ira Gitler wrote in The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz,

Related stylistically to Coltrane, Lloyd was one of the few who successfully reshaped many elements of the avant-garde music of the ‘60s into a more commercially palatable form of creative expression.

Then with his fame at its height, in 1969 Lloyd disbanded, moved to Big Sur on the northern California coast and concentrated on spiritual development. When he resumed performing in the early 1980s, it was frequently with the late pianist Michel Petrucciani. Spiritual matters and his long interest in forms of music from other cultures manifested themselves in several albums for the ECM label. His recent music has featured collaborations with drummer Billy Hart, Greek singer Maria Farantouri and pianists Bobo Stenson and Jason Moran.

Here is Lloyd with the quartet he has headed since 2007: Moran, piano; Reuben Rogers, bass; Eric Harland, drums. The piece is his “Sweet Georgia Bright,” written in 1964.

Next time: Joe Segal, winner of the 2015 NEA Jazz Master award for jazz advocacy.

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Tenor saxophonist George Coleman is one of four 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters named this week. He, Carla Bley, Charles Lloyd and Chicago’s Jazz Showcase impresario Joe Segal will be inducted in a ceremony next spring in New York. In our previous post, Rifftides presented Ms. Bley in performance.

As a 17-year-old alto saxophonist in 1952, Coleman launched his professional career impressively in his native Memphis, Tennessee, landing a gig with bluesman B.B. King. While with King, he converted to tenor sax. He moved to Chicago in 1956 and was soon playing with John Gilmore, Ira Sullivan and drummer Walter Perkins’s MJT+3. Before the end of the decade Coleman had moved to New York, toured with Max Roach’s quintet and gone to work for trombonist Slide Hampton. Following a couple of years with Hampton he spent time with the organist Wild Bill Davis, then joined Miles Davis in the quintet that also included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Formidable for his drive, imagination and capacious tone, Coleman became a jazz insiders’ favorite, though he never achieved the general popularity of John Coltrane, Stan Getz or Sonny Rollins. His recording career has included work with Lionel Hampton, Chet Baker, Elvin Jones and Charles Mingus and with his own octet. A dedicated educator, he teaches at The New School, New York University, Long Island University and other institutions in the New York area

Coleman’s latterday albums frequently find him in the company of pianist Harold Mabern, with whom he grew up in Memphis. Here are Coleman and Mabern, still together after all these years, featured earlier this month with drummer Joe Farnsworth’s Prime Time Band at a Linda’s Jazz Nights event at the An Beal Bocht Café in the Bronx, New York. Phil Palombi is the bassist. Tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander makes an impromptu guest appearance toward the end of a leisurely exploration of “I Cover the Waterfront.”

For an NEA biography of Coleman, go here.

The Rifftides survey of newly-named NEA Jazz Masters continues next time with Charles Lloyd.

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The National Endowment for the Arts has announced next year’s NEA Jazz Masters. They are composer, pianist, arranger and bandleader Carla Bley (pictured); saxophonists George Coleman and Charles Lloyd; and—for jazz advocacy—Joe Segal, whose Jazz Showcase in Chicago has presented the music for more than 60 years. They will receive their awards at Lincoln Center in New York City on April 20, 2015, during Jazz Appreciation Month.How better to recognize them now than to share memorable performances? Over the next few days, Rifftides will bring you videos of the honorees, beginning with Carla Bley.

Immersed in jazz since her teens, Ms. Bley quickly developed into a composer and arranger of striking originality, boldness and humor. She continues to write for groups ranging from duos to big bands. As leader, arranger, composer and pianist she has collaborated with or written for, among others, Paul Bley, Gary Burton, Art Farmer, George Russell, Tony Williams and, in dozens of projects over the years, electric bassist Steve Swallow. Here she is with Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard at the 2012 Cully Jazz Festival in the Normandy region of France, playing “Útviklingsaang,” first recorded on her Social Studies album.

For a biography of Carla Bley, go here. Since the program began in 1982, there have been 140 NEA Jazz Masters. The first three were Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Sun Ra. To see the complete list, go here.

Next time: George Coleman

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With considerable help from the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan packed two halls over the weekend. Yesterday the SRJO played at the Kirkland Performance Center across Lake Washington from Seattle, the night before at the Nordstrom Recital Hall in downtown Seattle. The band is co-led by drummer Clarence Acox and saxophonist Michael Brockman. With one exception, everything they played was associated with Kenton and Mulligan.

Although the SRJO’s Mulligan repertoire focused on arrangements that he wrote for the Kenton orchestra, it included a cross section of pieces he composed or arranged for his own Concert Jazz Band and for others. The earliest was “Joost at the Roost,” which Mulligan wrote in 1948 for the Claude Thornhill band and, in a pared-down version, for the Miles Davis “Birth of the Cool” nonet. Neither Thornhill nor Davis recorded the piece. Mulligan’s 1961 recording for Verve was never released. The SRJO worked from a score edited by Jeff Sultanof. In his comments on the piece on the e Jazz Lines website, Sultanof remarks,

…what is striking is that as early as 1948, Mulligan shows in this score that he had already formulated a concept to turn the big band into an extended small group, with linear give-and-take as in his small group with Chet Baker, and a lighter ensemble approach to orchestration.

The give-and-take included a robust extended tenor saxophone solo by Travis Ranney, with shorter tenor sax statements by Mark Taylor. Clarinetist Tobi Stone and pianist Randy Halberstadt also soloed on the piece. On Mulligan’s “Swing House,” the vigorous trombonist Bill Anthony initiated a string of solos that included Michael Brockman on alto saxophone, Taylor on tenor and trumpeter Jay Thomas, whose combination of daring and precision has been a feature of the band since its founding nearly two decades ago. Thomas went to the front of the stage for his feature, “All the Things You Are.” As successful as he was in mining the riches in Jerome Kern’s harmonies, he outdid himself in an extended improvised cadenza.

The one-chorus performance of “Where or When,” deliciously unhurried, had two highlights: the rhythm section’s delicacy as they introduced the piece, and the dynamics of the reeds performing the saxophone soli that Mulligan wrote as what amounts to an orchestrated improvisation. In a concert featuring Mulligan’s music, it was natural that the veteran baritone saxophonist Bill Ramsay drew solo assignments on several pieces. Ramsay shone in Mulligan’s celebrated arrangement of Django Reinhardt’s “Manoir de mes Rêves,” sometimes called “Django’s Castle.”

With a tone deeper and wider than Mulligan’s and a wit as dry, Ramsay poured himself into his solo on “Bweebida Bobbida.” The harmonic structure of “I Got Rhythm,” which Mulligan used for the tune, is important to the harmonic underpinnings of jazz, but musicians rarely play the song itself. The irony of Ramsay’s beginning his solo with the first eight notes of Gershwin’s melody struck some of his colleagues as such an amusingly absurd statement of the obvious that I wondered if they’d pull themselves together in time to play their next passages. Trombonist David Marriott recovered, and played a fine solo.
Mulligan’s “Apple Core,” based on the harmonies of “Love Me or Leave Me” was a feature for a long, successful tenor solo by Mark Taylor. “For Zoot,” he said, and though Zoot Sims’s influence was audible, Taylor’s individuality predominated.

The only arrangement chosen by the SRJO that Kenton wrote was one of the several versions of his theme that he put together over the years. “Artistry in Rhythm” opened, as Kenton often began it, with out-of-tempo piano, played with impressionistic overtones by Randy Halberstadt. As the piece progressed in intensity, Bill Anthony’s solo recalled such extrovert Kenton trombonists as Bob Burgess, Kent Larsen and Milt Bernhart. Trumpeter Thomas Marriott, played high and fast, with flurries of sixteenth notes, kicking the piece into full Kentonesque bravado that merged into a percussion fiesta by co-leader Acox and the band’s newest member, conga drummer Frank Francis Medina, Jr.

The co-leaders of the band are educators, Brockman at the University of Washington, Acox the award-winning director of the Garfield High School Band that has produced a number of graduates now prominent as professionals. Trombonist Scott Brown heads the band program at Roosevelt High School. Like Acox’s Garfield jazz band, Roosevelt’s consistently wins national competitions. Acox introduced six recent graduates from Garfield and Roosevelt, and one from Mt. Si High School. All are going on to university music programs and schools including Princeton, The New School and the University of Washington. With the SRJO, the youngsters played “A Little Minor Booze,” a classic b-flat blues written by the late Willie Maiden for the Kenton band. All soloed at a high level, but the one who particularly caught my ear was tenor saxophonist Isak Washburn-Gaines, a Garfield High graduate. It is unexpected and gratifying to hear a 17- or 18-year old boy who has absorbed Al Cohn’s way of playing. “He’s an old soul,” Acox said of Washburn-Gaines after the concert.

The exception to the Kenton/Mulligan rule was the concert’s opening number, the late Bob Florence’s “Carmelo’s by the Freeway.” Carmelo’s, a Los Angeles jazz club is gone and so is Florence. The spirit they represented survives in the work of the SRJO. From the quality of playing by those six youngsters, it looks as if the spirit has a future. To flourish, all it needs is an audience. There was a sprinkling of listeners under 40 in the hall yesterday afternoon, but no survey was necessary to conclude that the average age was well into AARP territory. I am told that the evening concert in Seattle on Saturday had a higher proportion of younger folks.

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It has been too long since we checked to see what Darcy James Argue and his band of young New Yorkers—The Secret Society—have been up to. When we first took notice of Argue and his crew, they were indeed still pretty much a secret. Since then, the band has won awards in several polls. Argue, a Canadian who transplanted from Vancouver to New York, has been singled out for his compositions and arrangements. College and high school jazz and stage bands interested in performing music of their own generation adopt many of his charts.

Of Argue’s and graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj’s ambitious multi-media project Brooklyn Bablyon, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times wrote,

It is heavily planned, built of thick shadows and big-band polyphony, and it took both composer and artist most of a year to create.

This trailer gives you an idea of the work’s complexity and scale.

As for Argue’s more “conventional” big band work, here is the Secrety Society’s performance of his “Transit” in a concert at Washington, DC’s, Kennedy Center. The trumpet soloist is David Smith. A list of the band members follows the video.

Winds: 
David DeJesus, 
Rob Wilkerson, 
Sam Sadigursky, 
Mark Small, 
Josh Sinton.


Trumpets:
 Seneca Black, 
Tom Goehring, 
Matt Holman
, Nadje Noordhuis, 
David Smith.


Trombones:
 Noah Bless, 
Tim Sessions, 
Kevin Moehringer, 
Jennifer Wharton.


Guitar: 
Sebastian Noelle.


Piano and keyboard: 
Red Wierenga.


Bass: 
Matt Clohesy.


Drums:
 Jon Wikan.

Those are members of what what not so long ago was thought of as the Brooklyn and downtown New York underground. They have surfaced as some of the most notable new jazz players of the decade.

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Horace Silver, whom we lost yesterday, believed that worthwhile music arises from feeling. He thought that to be true to himself, he had a responsibility not to let fashion or artifice deflect him from what his feelings dictated. Fortunately for him, and for us, he had the skill and the imagination to transmit his feelings through his pen and his fingers. By the early 1950s, the top flight of modern jazz musicians had absorbed the theories and methods of bebop. Many were at the outer limits of what their technique could accomplish in expressiveness.

Silver came along and helped to establish that bebop’s harmonic sophistication was not at odds with an old-fashioned love of melody or the inborn human need to connect with rhythm. That’s why the simplicity and honesty of “The Preacher” reached so many people in their hearts and their solar plexuses. Here’s that recording by the group that Silver co-led with Art Blakey, The Jazz Messengers.

That’s the first of two pieces by Horace Silver and the Messengers that you will hear in the course of this post. It brought to mind something I wrote for a 2000 compilation CD on the Savoy label. The two-disc album was called The Birth of Hard Bop. It was made up of music recorded in 1956 by groups under the leadership of Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley. Among the players are Horace Silver, Kenny Clarke, Arthur Taylor, Barry Harris, Doug Watkins and three people who could by no stretch be considered hard boppers — Hank Jones, Ronnie Ball and John LaPorta. The essay begins:

The urge to put ideas in boxes will not be denied. Accordingly, one day in the early 1950s someone, presumably a critic, dreamed up a box called “hard bop.” The inventor no doubt intended the term to be a synonym for “soul” and “funk.” He or she may also have meant it to distinguish jazz played primarily by black people on the East Coast from jazz played primarily by white people on the West Coast. It seemed important to critics in those days to make that distinction. To some, it still seems important. At any rate, “hard bop” came to signify jazz that had rhythmic drive, leaned on blues harmonies, drew inspiration from church gospel music and was hot, not cool.

Unfortunately for box theory, try as you will to contain music, it flows around, into and out of boxes. Strict hard bop constructionists cannot force this album’s lyrical “I Married An Angel” into the category with any greater justification than they can jawbone Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud” (the Pacific Jazz version) into the shape of West Coast Jazz. Nearly half a century later, the music in this collection swings on in the category that matters most: the one labeled “Good.”

The notes then discuss the musicians and the 21 tracks on the CDs.

…I join Doug Ramsey in not giving a damn about the legitimacy of the terminology, because what really matters is that the music itself was among the most legitimate and exciting jazz ever created. – O.K.

                                            This was several years ago. We’re still laughing.

Woke up this morning (no, that is not going to be the beginning of a blues lyric)…and decided on background music to preparations for the day.

I chose it because I wanted something that had solos I could sing, hum and whistle along with as I fixed breakfast. Every note of Horace Silver’s second Blue Note album, the first by the Jazz Messengers, has been embedded in my brain since shortly after it was released in 1955. My record collection then consisted of 10 or 12 LPs. This was one of them. I played it so often that Silver’s, Kenny Dorham’s and Hank Mobley’s solos and Art Blakey’s drum choruses became part of my mind’s musical furniture. Silver, Blakey and bassist Doug Watkins comprised a rhythm section that was the standard for what came to be called, for better or for worse, hard bop. Dorham and Mobley, with their deep knowledge of chord-based improvisation, constructed some of their most memorable solos. Silver’s compositions—and one by Mobley—are classics.

Having heard “Room 608,” “The Preacher,” “Doodlin’” and the other tunes on this indispensable album this morning, I’ll feel good all day. Listen, and you will, too.

Thank you, Horace.

Word has just come in that Horace Silver died today at the age of 85.

For details, see Peter Keepnews’ obituary of Silver in The New York Times. Tomorrow, we will have reflections on Silver’s career and importance to music.

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It is sad to hear of the recent deaths of Aaron Sachs and Jimmy Scott.

Sachs was a gifted clarinetist and tenor saxophonist who never became as well known as many of his contemporaries despite yeoman work in bands led by Van Alexander, Red Norvo, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Tom Talbert and Buddy Rich, among others. In the 1960she became a stalwart in Latin jazz, playing for Machito, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodriguez. Sachs would have been 91 on the 4th of July. I recently saw him described—dismissed, really—as a smooth clarinetist and a capable Al Cohn tenor saxophonist. He was far beyond capable and no mere imitator, as you will hear in his solo on “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me” in Talbert’s arrangement from his classic 1956 album Bix, Duke, Fats. Sachs’ tenor solo comes 4:50 into the track. Other soloists are Eddie Bert, trombone; Herb Geller, alto saxophone; and Joe Wilder, trumpet.

Singer Jimmy Scott died on June 12 at the age of 88. His high contralto resulted from a childhood hormonal condition that blocked normal vocal development. The voice made him an object of ridicule and abuse. He managed to wrap the anguish of that discrimination into his artistry as he adapted his unusual voice to a style that attracted a wide audience. His admirers included Ray Charles, Billie Holiday and the soul singer Marvin Gaye, who was heavily influenced by Scott. In this video, Scott sings “Time After Time” and speaks a little about his performance philosophy.

For Richard Williams’ obituary of Jimmy Scott in The Guardian newspaper, go here.

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Tired but not ready to go to bed, I wandered into the back yard at midnight, camera in hand, to see if the full moon was visible. Slipping in and out of cloud banks that looked hand-tinted, the moon gave the southeastern sky the look of an impressionist painting.

As I gazed moonstruck, a number of songs came to mind, none more powerfully than “Moon Love,” adapted in 1939 by Mack David, Mack Davis and Andre Kostelanetz from the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Glenn Miller had a bouncy hit record of the piece that year. In 1966, Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle made it a part of the Moonlight Sinatra album, one of their finest collaborations. The version I couldn’t get out of my mind, however, was Chet Baker’s 1953 quartet recording, made as Baker was beginning his sudden rise to fame. It is a masterly example of his ability to take ownership of a ballad.

This Baker compilation has two takes of “Moon Love” from the original quartet session with Russ Freeman, Carson Smith and Larry Bunker.

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One of Earl “Fatha” Hines’s greatest admirers, fellow pianist Dick Wellstood, wrote in the liner notes for Earl Hines: Quintessential Continued,

Behold Earl Hines, spinner of yarns, big handed virtuoso of the black dance, con man extraordinaire, purveyor of hot sauce.
Behold Earl Hines, Jive King, boss of the sloppy run, the dragged thumb, the uneven tremolo, Minstral of the Unworthy Emotion, King of Freedom.
Democratic Transcendent, his twitchy, spitting style uses every cheesy trick in the piano-bar catalog to create moving cathedrals, masterpieces of change, great trains of tension and relaxation, multi-dimensional solos that often seem to be about themselves or other solos—’See, here I might have played some boogie-woogie, or put this accent here, or put this accent there, or this run here, that chord there…or maybe a little stride for you beautiful people in the audience…’Earl Hines, Your Musical Host, serving up the hot sauce.

And

His is Freedom in Discipline, infinite choice in a limited sphere, the tension of Will vs. Material—his is human creativity. Behold Earl Hines, King of Beasts.

Here’s the King of Beasts at the piano workshop of the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1965. He plays Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You” with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Alan Dawson. This was during the early stages of what was widely described as Hines’s comeback or rediscovery, and he was feeling his oats.

That’s for all of you fathas out there. And you muthas, too.

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Lucky Thompson: New York City 1964-65 (Uptown)

Uptown’s two-CD Thompson set, released in 2009, inspired a brief flurry of comment and soon slipped under the radar. It deserves renewed attention. The album documents two live appearances of a musician who reached less fame than his ability and importance warranted. Thompson worked in the 1940s and ‘50s in Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet and with the big bands of Billy Eckstine, Tom Talbert and Count Basie. Hank Jones, Oscar Pettiford and Milt Jackson were among the colleagues who cherished their relationships with him. Thompson became bitter about the business part of the music business. His life began to unravel in the sixties. In the early seventies, he played little. He eventually all but dropped out of performing to raise two sons as a single father, developed dementia and in 2005 died all but forgotten. Kind strangers who admired his music looked after him in his last years.

I never knew Thompson, never saw him in live performance, but his work reached me from the first time I heard it on Charlie Parker’s 1946 Dial recordings. In “Moose The Mooche,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology” and “A Night in Tunisia,” Thompson’s solos suggested elements of Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas, but the surge and thrust of his invented lines and the swagger in his delivery—particularly on the master take of “Tunisia”—set him apart from other tenor players. He was not, strictly speaking, one of the early bebop artists, but his playing fit perfectly with theirs. Later, I went back a step to 1944 to listen to Thompson on Count Basie’s “Taps Miller” and “Avenue C” and found that he was a fully formed soloist at twenty, mixing smoothness and roughness in perfect balance.

If I were to recommend essential Thompson recordings to people unfamiliar with him, I would start with the Parker Dials, then refer them to the 1954 Miles Davis Walkin’ session on Prestige, which has some of Thompson’s greatest solos. Of his own albums, I suggest Tricotimsm (1956) on Impulse! and Lucky Strikes (1964) on Prestige. Tricotism includes bassist Oscar Pettiford and pianist Hank Jones, with both of whom Thompson had special rapport. The album has been reissued under a different title. Jones, with bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay, is also on Lucky Strikes. In it, Thompson plays soprano saxophone in addition to tenor, and the album may well be his masterpiece.
He made a notable impact on Benny Golson in the early 1950s as Golson formed his style. Half a century later, the young saxophonist Chris Byars adopted Thompson as his model. When Thompson gets attention, it is invariably emphasized that his tenor saxophone style descended from Ben Webster and Don Byas and was inherited by Golson. That is true, but so simple an analysis overlooks the individuality, the recognizability, of his work.

In the first disc of the Uptown album, recorded at a 1964 concert at the Little Theater in mid-town Manhattan, Thompson led an octet. The little-big-band format allowed him an outlet for his arranger’s skills as well as his distinctive playing on tenor and soprano saxophones. With the superb rhythm section of Hank Jones, piano; Richard Davis, bass; and Al Dreares, drums, Thompson’s fellow horns are trumpeter Dave Burns, alto saxophonist Danny Turner, baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne and trombonist Benny Powell—all among the elite of the post-bop New York scene. In Thompson’s writing, as in his playing, blues feeling predominates even when the composition’s form, as in “Firebug,” is that of a 32-bar song. “The World Awakes,” which in the sixties served Thompson as a sort of anthem, is a minor blues. His soprano solo combines intensity, light-heartedness and the penetrating tone that was an important element of his distinctiveness on the instrument. Jones (pictured left) solos, impeccably, of course, but Davis’s 12 choruses of walking bass practically steal the performance.

Still on soprano, Thompson eases into a relaxed solo, followed by Davis and Jones before the ensemble gives us the first passages of Thompson’s intriguing arrangement. The voicings reflect his accumulation of bebop wisdom as well as his admiration for the French impressionists. His first tenor saxophone feature on this disc is “’Twas Yesterday,” highlighting what the late critic John S. Wilson once described as Thompson’s “soft, furry, intimate tone.” “Firebug” brings spirited solos from Jones and Payne, a virtuosic and often very funny one from Powell, eight essential bebop choruses from the underrated Burns, then Thompson on tenor in a long solo in which each idea grows into the next; musical story-telling founded equally on logic and emotion. The ensemble accompanies Dreares, leaves him a few bars of solo space, then negotiates the intersecting contrapuntal lines of Thompson’s arrangement to an abrupt conclusion that triggers chuckles on the bandstand and in the audience.

The second CD contains a 1965 quartet date broadcast from the Half Note in lower Manhattan. Thompson’s accompanists are bassist George Tucker, drummer Oliver Jackson and the excellent little-known pianist Paul Neves (pictured right), who appears here in one of only two recordings I’m aware of his having made. The other was Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s Spellbound, which disappeared for a time but is again available. If anything, Thompson is even more fluid on soprano in this version of “The World Awakes,” spurred by Neves’ emphatic comping. The pianist’s solos and his supportive accompaniment throughout make the attentive listener aware that we lost a substantial musician when he died in Puerto Rico in the 1980s. He was in his early fifties. A native of Boston, Neves was the brother of bassist John Neves, who worked with Jaki Byard, Stan Getz and the big bands of Herb Pomeroy and Maynard Ferguson.

Thompson remains on soprano for a gentle exploration of “What’s New,” demonstrating the artistic strength to be found in restraint. Following the first chorus of Tadd Dameron’s “Lady Bird,” Neves drops out for a few choruses while Thompson indulges in one of his favorite tenor saxophone pursuits, strolling with bass and drums. When Neves reenters, the passion builds during a dozen more Thompson choruses and seven from Neves. Tucker makes the most of his only solo opportunity of the set. The last piece ends with a drum roll and Thompson’s “Paramount on Parade” intro on soprano. They set the stage for an incendiary “Strike Up the Band.” Thompson, on tenor, is the only soloist except for a sequence of power exchanges with Jackson, who is finally allowed to give full rein to his skills. It is a reminder of the versatility of a drummer who was equally effective in the range of jazz styles from traditional to modern.

The album recalls that, for all of the frustration he faced, the bitterness he felt and his sad end, Lucky Thompson’s music transmitted confidence and joy. In his brief conversations at the Half note with broadcast host Alan Grant, Thompson’s intelligence and gentlemanliness are apparent.

In the CD’s booklet, Noal Cohen’s comprehensive notes provide an extensive history of Thompson’s career. The 44-page booklet has several photos of Thompson, pictures and brief bios of the sidemen, and information about the Little Theater concert and the Half Note broadcast.

(Photo of Paul Neves by Katherine Hanna courtesy of Irene Kubota Neves)