The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (24 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Eckstine, whose early hits "Jelly, Jelly" and "Stormy Monday Blues," recorded with the Earl Hines orchestra, can be heard on
Piano Man: Earl Hines, His Piano and His Orchestra
(RCA/Bluebird 6750-2-RB), was popular enough soon thereafter to form his own short-lived band, which was a haven for the younger players, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, and Gene Ammons, to name just a few.
Mr. B. and the Band
(Savoy ZDS 4401) shows Eckstine's powerhouse band of 1945-1946 wailing on tunes like "Lonesome Lover Blues," "I Love the Rhythm in a Riff," and "The Jitney Man,'' all of which feature exuberant vocals by Eckstine along with exciting solos by Gordon, Ammons, and Navarro. At a party in the late 1980s, I heard drummer Roy Haynes sing Dexter Gordon the entire arrangement of "Rhythm in a Riff," including Gordon's solo, from memory, while Gordon sat on a kitchen chair grinning and keeping time by snapping his fingers; the band had a special meaning for the musicians who were around at the time. An equally good reason to buy
Mr. B. and the Band
is the presence of such ultra-romantic Eckstine ballads as "A Cottage for Sale," "Last Night," and "Prisoner of Love."
A truly great big band, with a style that took up where the Eckstine band's left off, was trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's band of the late 1940s. Some good tunes by the big band are included on
Dizzy Gillespie and His Sextets and Orchestra: "Shaw 'Nuff
" (Musicraft MVSCD-53), especially bassist Ray Brown's Blantonesque feature on "One Bass Hit" and the wild "Things to Come." But a better bet for the real excitement of the band are the sides they recorded for RCA a bit later. Some of the best are available on
The Bebop Revolution
(RCA/Bluebird 2177-2-RB), including Ray Brown's second at-bat, entitled "Two Bass Hit," the riffy "Ow!," and the Afro-Cuban specialties "Woody'n You," "Cubana Be," and "Manteca," which utilize the explosive talents of the Cuban conga drummer Chano Pozo.
Pozo's conga accents underlined the characteristic accents of the bebop rhythmic pattern and also gave a special seasoning to the forefront of the music that had been there since the early New Orleans days, as Jelly Roll Morton says in the Library of Congress recordings. Jazz and Afro-Spanish rhythms had always fed each other, but the relationship hadn't been stressed as much during the 1930s, when musicians were trying primarily to refine straight-ahead four-four swing. With that having been brought to a full boil, the Afro-Cuban element reintroduced an important rhythmic component into jazz. By the way, the tune titled "Cubano Be" on
The Bebop Revolution
is really another tune entirely, the excellent "Cool Breeze." The tune labeled "Cubano Bop" on the collection is really "Cubana Be."
Despite this mixup, the music is great. "Manteca" is the Latin equivalent of
 
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a riff tune, but Gillespie's good humor and spirit infuse the band, particularly the brass section, which will lift the top of your head off. The straight-ahead swinging tunes, especially "Cool Breeze" (titled "Cubano Be" on the set, don't forget) and "Jumpin' with Symphony Sid" (another riff tune), all contain stop-on-a-dime section work from the band and virtuoso trumpeting from Gillespie. An essential set.
A band that had been around for a while but which incorporated many of the devices of the new style was Woody Herman's. A good sampling of his band's mid-1940s work can be found on
Woody Herman
-
The Thundering Herds, 1945-1947
(Columbia CK 44108). The 1945 band, which takes up most of the set, was basically a swing band for whom the arrangers threw in a few bop clichés, mostly high-note work for the trumpets and a couple of characteristic rhythmic devices. The band's weakness was a penchant for corniness, but tunes like "Apple Honey" and "Your Father's Moustache" really surge along, powered by Chubby Jackson's bass. The lovely "Bijou," written by Ralph Burns, is a unique Latin-flavored mood piece. "The Goof and I" and ''Four Brothers," both by the thoroughly bop-oriented 1947 band, are still fresh-sounding and have fine solos by baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff and the young tenorists Zoot Sims and Stan Getz. The 1949 Herman band, with its Four Brothers saxophone section of Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, and baritonist Serge Chaloff, is heard on
Woody Herman
-
Keeper of the Flame: The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Four Brothers Band
(Capitol CDP 7 98453 2). This nice set includes the boppish "That's Right" and "Lemon Drop," Ralph Burns's beautiful "Early Autumn" (featuring Stan Getz), and "More Moon" (based on "How High the Moon"), on which tenorist Gene Ammons is featured.
Stan Kenton's band also came up around this time. Kenton was much beloved by his sidemen and had a solid, even fanatical following among a segment of jazz fans. Extremely serious and dedicated to the art form of jazz, he attracted many highly skilled musicians to his band. Sometimes - much of the time - he was solemn or ponderous instead of just serious, and his music could reflect that. His band, despite what some say, was able to swing sometimes, but swing wasn't uppermost in his or his arrangers' minds.
New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm
(Capitol CDP 7 92865 2) is a sampler of his band in 1952, with arrangements by stalwarts like Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman, and Bill Russo.
A collection entitled
The Bebop Era
(Columbia CK 40972) contains bop-flavored big-band efforts by Herman, Gene Krupa, Claude Thornhill, Elliot Lawrence, and, in one of the first recorded performances of a composition by Thelonious Monk ("Epistrophy," from 1942), ex-Ellington trumpeter Cootie
 
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Williams. There are also fine small-group performances here involving Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Fats Navarro, including a stunning "Ornithology," recorded live at Birdland in 1950 and featuring Parker, Powell, and Navarro in a real summit meeting.
Dameronia
A big-band arranger who became one of the greatest composers in jazz and whose small groups had an immediately distinguishable sound because of his arranging was Tadd Dameron. His mastery of harmony was absolute, and some of his melodies are among the most durable of the late 1940s.
The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Volume 1
(Blue Note 81531) and
Volume 2
(Blue Note 81532) contain material from several Dameron-led sessions featuring trumpeter Navarro, which show instantly what set Dameron's work apart. Among bebop dates, these were really something special, full of carefully worked-out ensembles, introductions, and codas, yet still with plenty of stretching room for the soloists.
Damerons' writing gives a strong framework to all the players, including not only Navarro but, variously, altoist Ernie Henry and tenorists Charlie Rouse, Dexter Gordon, Allen Eager, and Wardell Gray. Listen to how large an ensemble sound he gets on "Our Delight" (Gillespie's big band recorded this as well; it's on the Musicraft set listed earlier) and "Dameronia" (both on
Volume 1
), even though the ensemble includes only one more voice (the tenor sax) than Charlie Parker's Savoy quintet recordings. Drummer Shadow Wilson's work on these sides is not to be overlooked, either.
The same remarks apply to "Sid's Delight" and the gorgeous "Casbah," on both of which Dameron has a slightly larger ensemble to work with. He takes advantage of it, layering on a sound with a rich bottom to it due to the presence of a trombone and baritone saxophone. Both tunes have a Latin influence enhanced by the presence of bongo and conga drums; "Casbah" has a wordless vocal by singer Rae Pearl for an additional tone color. ''Jahbero," on
Volume 2
, also features the Spanish tinge via the conga drums of Chano Pozo; its sessionmate, "Lady Bird," is another richly voiced Dameron standard, with a beautiful introduction and an excellent arranged interlude preceding Dameron's piano solo. Such touches only add to the brilliant solo work by Navarro and the others and put these recordings in a class of their own for the period.
Dameron should have had a much higher profile in jazz than he did as time went on; he was plagued by drug problems and was never as widely known by the jazz public, let alone the general public, as he should have been. Two later
 
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albums show his arranging and composing talents to good advantage.
Fontainebleau
(Prestige/OJC 055) is well worth owning; recorded in 1956 with a band including trumpeter Kenny Dorham, three saxophones, and trombone, the album gives Dameron a chance to work out at greater length than he could on the previous decade's three-minute 78-rpm records. The title cut is a miniature suite, a through-composed mood piece with shifting textures and themes. "Delirium" is an up-tempo cooker, with plenty of solo space for Dorham and tenorist Joe Alexander; "The Scene Is Clean" is a walking-tempo thing with typically rich Dameron ensemble voicings.
Even better is
The Magic Touch
(Riverside/OJC-143), a 1962 set on which Dameron gets a chance to score for a full big band including trumpeter Clark Terry, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and pianist Bill Evans. The program consists of Dameron favorites like "On a Misty Night," "Our Delight," and his great ballad ''If You Could See Me Now," along with a good amount of new material and a reorchestrated version of "Fontainebleau." The writing here is as rich as fine cognac; the solos are set off by imaginative backgrounds and interludes. Dameron put his own stamp on everything he touched, and whatever he touched was made beautiful.
Boplicity
Bebop as such - the stripped-down small-group performances consisting of a unison head and a series of solo choruses - held the floor for a relatively short time before musicians began to look for ways to use bop's rhythmic and harmonic discoveries in the service of more supple, expressive, and complete aesthetic statements. Not long after the music arrived, the LP form came into being (up until then, performances had been limited by the time constraints of the 78-rpm record), and musicians began to use the longer forms that became available with increased recording time as part of the aesthetic.
To be sure, the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary developed by the boppers dominated the 1950s, but the form began to mutate almost as soon as it started. The elements of Parker's work, like Armstrong's in the 1920s, spread like a dandelion's seeds; both men's discoveries were so fundamental that players of many different personalities could express themselves in the language they developed. Of all the musicians who grew up around Bird, the ones who did the most to expand the possibilities of the bop-based ensemble were trumpeter Miles Davis and bassist-composer Charles Mingus.
Davis's career is treated in detail in the Soloists section, but certain ensemble projects he was involved in should be discussed here. The 1949-1950 recordings known collectively as the
Birth of the Cool
(Capitol CDP 7 92862 2)
 
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rank as some of the most interesting in jazz. Involved were such luminaries, or luminaries-to-be, as Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, Lee Konitz, Max Roach, and John Lewis; the instrumentation included baritone saxophone, French horn, and tuba, making for fascinating instrumental possibilities that were explored imaginatively, to say the least.
In many ways, the
Birth of the Cool
sides were to the rest of the modern movement what the 1927 Bix Beiderbecke/Frank Trumbauer sides were to the small-group jazz of their day: underplayed, lyrical, legato, and with worked-out ensemble sections existing in an ongoing give-and-take with the solo sections. All of the tunes, even the most bebop oriented, like "Move" and "Budo," are richly orchestrated and give a kind of air-cushioned effect, often achieved by doubling a melody line as played by trumpet or alto saxophone with a unison line played one or two octaves lower by tuba, baritone sax, or French horn, for the same kind of tonal effect Davis and Parker (in a rare appearance on tenor saxophone) achieved on the 1947 "Milestones'' session (available on
First Miles
[Savoy ZDS 1196]).
On "Boplicity," arranged by Gil Evans, with whom Davis would collaborate again later in the 1950s, the melody is orchestrated so that all the instruments play different notes but in rhythmic unison; the effect is contrapuntal, even though the various instruments' lines match each other rhythmically. John Carisi's "Israel" makes intriguing use of counterpoint as well, in a different way. "Moon Dreams," arranged by Evans, underscores by contrast the fact that much bebop had a frantic quality about it; this music peeled off the more apocalyptic aspects of the modernist temper. At a time when bop's emphasis on solo dexterity had led a lot of players into minimalist ensemble settings, this band, like Dameron's, came along and showed that a whole range of textures and emotions could be achieved within a small-band format.
Throughout the 1950s Davis also brought an important lyrical element to his small-band performances. He always had an ear for pretty and neglected popular tunes; he played the melodies of medium-tempo standards and slow ballads with an assured personal phrasing that, at its best, was the equal of Louis Armstrong's and Billie Holiday's rephrasing of popular material. He took this approach especially with his great quintet of the late 1950s, with John Coltrane, in which he would often use the Harmon mute to devastating emotional effect. An album he made just before forming the quintet,
The Musings of Miles
(Prestige/OJC-004), shows this approach on "I See Your Face Before Me" and "A Gal in Calico." This approach also pointed away from the strict bop approach and toward a more lyrical, accessible group sound.
Davis was one of the first jazz musicians to begin using the longer performance time available on LPs to offer extended solos from all the band

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