The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (26 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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employ shorter phrases in the melodies, which were used for their rhythmic, or percussive, effect (see Mobley's "Decifering the Message" or "Hank's Symphony" here, or "Stop Time," "Hippy," or, especially, ''The Preacher" on the Silver album). Compare these to such classic Parker lines as "Donna Lee" (on
The Complete Charlie Parker Savoy Studio Recordings
[Savoy ZDS 5500]) or "Quasimodo" (on
The Legendary Dial Masters, Volume 2
[Stash ST-CD-25]), which wind and twist, making an aesthetic point by their complexity. Silver's piano style, too, echoes this approach by relying mainly on arpeggios and melodic fragments used rhythmically.
This idea of setting up percussive melodic patterns becomes a principle of group interplay as well; Blakey or Silver would set up what was essentially a riff pattern in the background, and the soloist would incorporate the pattern into the solo, and vice versa, with the piano and drums sometimes answering a rhythmic pattern the soloist set up. This gave a motivic continuity and interest to performances which were essentially strings of solos and which could have become boring, since most of the time the solos didn't relate to the melody or to each other. For just one example of the technique, listen to Blakey and Mobley on "Sportin' Crowd," a blues riff once known as "Royal Roost" and later to become more famous as "Tenor Madness," as recorded by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane (
Tenor Madness
[Prestige/OJC-124]). Behind Dorham, on this same cut, the dialogue is primarily between Blakey and Silver. Drum fans will want to check out "Hank's Symphony," a virtual anthology of patented Blakey devices.
Blakey and Silver parted company after this session; Silver formed his own band, and Blakey went on to lead many different incarnations of the Jazz Messengers. It would be impossible to look in detail here at the complete work of both men, but we can trace the concerns that were laid out in these early records through the high points of their careers as their concepts developed. Blakey, in particular, made countless albums.
One Blakey album that is worth listening to even though it is hardly characteristic is
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk
(Atlantic 1278-2). Monk sits in with the 1957 Messengers in a program made up almost entirely of Monk compositions. Blakey was always one of the best accompanists to the unconventional pianist-composer; listening to this record after any of the records with Silver underscores the point that Monk, for all his supposed difficulty, was as much of a back-to-basics thinker as Blakey and Silver were.
In fact, Monk uses the piano in much the same way as Silver does, although the sound is different. Whereas Silver tended to play a lot behind a soloist, Monk would sometimes drop out altogether or just play his version of Basie/
 
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Powell surgical-strike trumpet-section punctuations. But, given that difference, both liked to use voicings with only two or three notes, both used repeated melodic fragments percussively, both were essentially riff-based players, and both liked to set up rhythmic patterns for the soloist to work off of; listen to Monk and Blakey behind trumpeter Bill Hardman on Monk's "I Mean You." But the album was recorded before the Messengers had really jelled into what Blakey was looking for.
Theory of Art
(RCA/Bluebird 6286-2-RB) also features this 1957 band, plus alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. Good as all the musicians involved are, this set never really lifts off.
Moanin'
(Blue Note 46516), recorded in October 1958, is a whole other story; Blakey had found the sound here and came up with one of the classic albums in jazz. The title tune, composed by the group's pianist, Bobby Timmons, is a call-and-response gospel number which switches into a heavily two-and-four accented, straight-ahead rhythm for the solos. Bassist Jymie Merritt goes back and forth between playing only on one and three and walking all four beats. Trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson both take impassioned, preaching solos.
The rest of the album is hardly a letdown; Benny Golson contributes four originals, including the almost cool-sounding "Along Came Betty" and the famous "Blues March," a full-dress blues performance over Blakey's relentlessly martial drums. There are also a ballad, ''Come Rain or Come Shine," recast as a medium-tempo blowing vehicle, "Are You Real," a bright-tempo Golson original with a beautiful harmonic progression and nice contrasts in dynamics, and Golson's "Drum Thunder Suite," a showcase for Blakey. Throughout, Golson, Morgan, and Timmons burst with ideas and energy, and the group approach has really jelled; this is an essential album.
Blakey recorded a number of other excellent albums for Blue Note.
The Big Beat
(Blue Note 46400) has tenor saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who would be one of the preeminent figures of the 1960s and 1970s, in place of Golson. The album is a collection mining the same veins as
Moanin'
: a gospel number (Bobby Timmons's "Dat Dere"), a back-beat, or shuffle rhythm, tune ("The Chess Players"), a standard recast as a blowing number ("It's Only a Paper Moon"), and two bright-tempo originals, both by Shorter. "Lester Left Town," especially, is a beautiful composition.
Indestructible
(Blue Note 46429) expands the Messengers' front line to include trombonist Curtis Fuller, and Cedar Walton replaces Bobby Timmons on piano. This album is mostly based on vamps, which are essentially riffs played by the bass. On "The Egyptian," a representative example, the horn melodies create a kind of counterpoint with the rhythm section's vamp. Vamps tend to undercut the forward-moving tendency of the music and point
 
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toward a more static time feel; the exploration of this technique would be one of the main events of the 1960s. Much New Orleans music was based on vamps.
Often such a rhythmic feel is accompanied by a harmonic vocabulary, based on suspended chords, that makes the harmonic destination ambiguous. The suspended chords can be centered in a number of tonalities, or modes, which are essentially single scales that musicians play in for a while until a new scale is designated. This is different from the chord-changes approach because that approach used transitional chords and scales to draw you into the next harmonic gravity, implying cause and effect. The new harmonic/rhythmic technique downplayed the role of cause and effect over time. "Calling Miss Khadija" is probably the most exciting track on the album. Another vamp tune, a blues in structure, it is cast in six-four time rather than the customary four-four, for a very refreshing, unexpected rhythmic vitality.
Mosaic
(Blue Note 46523) extends some of the same techniques of
Indestructible
but is perhaps an even more interesting album overall. It is essentially the same edition of the Messengers but with the significant replacement of Lee Morgan by the equally fiery Freddie Hubbard. Almost all the tunes here use vamps as a basis, but the variety and interest are deep. The title track is a fast swinger that goes through shifting rhythmic terrain - a fast Latin vamp, straight-ahead swing, and a repeated technique of playing a half-note triplet rhythmic figure against the four-four time for a feeling of superimposed meters. Freddie Hubbard's own composition "Crisis" is also first-rate, making use of a bass vamp that undergoes a number of mutations, along with a very effective use of dynamics. There is, of course, strong soloing from everyone concerned; all in all, this is one of the best Blakey albums.
This same group, with Reggie Workman on bass in place of Jymie Merritt, recorded several albums for Riverside, the best of which is probably
Caravan
(Riverside/OJC-038), with nice ballad features for Hubbard ("Skylark") and Fuller ("In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning") and two excellent Shorter originals, ''Sweet 'n' Sour," a waltz full of interesting arranged touches for the rhythm section, and "This Is for Albert," a personal favorite of mine, with its poignant theme, ingenious voicings, and fine use of dynamics.
Ugetsu
(Riverside/OJC-090), recorded live at Birdland, is very much Shorter's album; he contributes four originals and has a ballad feature to himself on "I Didn't Know What Time It Was." A fine set but not quite as focused as some of the studio efforts and not quite as fiery as some of the other live stuff.
Blakey went on to record countless albums and to introduce many important young players. In the 1980s Blakey gave early public exposure to Wynton and Branford Marsalis, altoist Bobby Watson, trumpeter Terence Blanchard,
 
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altoist Donald Harrison, pianist Geoff Keezer, and many others. His career ended only with his death in 1990, but his influence and spirit will be felt for many years to come.
More Messages
Art Blakey was hardly the only one affirming the values of blues tonality and cohesive group sound at the time. Blakey alumnus Benny Golson, the tenor saxophonist and composer who did so much to make
Moanin'
(Blue Note 46516) a classic album, formed a band with Art Farmer, one of the most talented and lyrical trumpeters of the 1950s, called the Jazztet, which paid close attention to routining, ensemble backgrounds to solos, original compositions, and mood pieces. Their album
Meet the Jazztet
(MCA/Chess-91550) is a perfect summation of their style. A mix of Golson originals ("Blues March," originally recorded on
Moanin'
, "I Remember Clifford," the beautiful ballad tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, the neglected but exquisite ballad "Park Avenue Petite,'' and a classic portrait of a hustler, "Killer Joe," with its unique shifting mood) and standards ("Avalon," "Easy Living," "It Ain't Necessarily So," and "It's All Right with Me"), with a Farmer original and an adaptation of Leroy Anderson's "Serenata" thrown in for good measure, it is a thoroughly satisfying set, with excellent solo work from both leaders as well as trombonist Curtis Fuller and the young McCoy Tyner on piano.
Blakey's cofounder of the Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, would go on to establish his own quintet as an even longer-lasting ensemble. Silver's groups always emphasized the same rhythmic and harmonic virtues that Blakey's did, in an even more elemental form, if that's possible. At his best, Silver could generate an absolutely irresistible rhythmic drive, and his were among the most popular jazz recordings of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Probably the two best and most characteristic are
Doin' the Thing. The Horace Silver Quintet at the Village Gate
(Blue Note 84076) and
Song for My Father
(Blue Note 84185). The former is a flat-out, take-no-prisoners cooker of an album, the latter a more varied program from several years later, with a more reflective cast to much of it. Together, they show the range of unique flavorings that Silver could cook up with his riff-based style.
Doin' the Thing
is comprised of two wild up-tempo pieces and two in a rocking medium tempo. Probably the most famous of these is the set's opener, "Filthy McNasty," on which the group (made up of Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor, Silver at the piano, Gene Taylor on bass, and the underappreciated Roy Brooks on drums) hits a groove, a rhythmic pocket, and doesn't let up for a moment. The track is a good place to notice the effect of this heavily accented rhythmic approach when used by skilled musicians.
 
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Just as Roy Eldridge and Chu Berry used the heavy four-to-the-bar beat of "Swing Is Here" (on
Swing Is Here: Small Band Swing 1935-1939
[RCA/Bluebird 2180-2-RB]) to set up expectations that they would then alternately fulfill and subvert, Mitchell and especially Cook constantly set up rhythmic patterns that lead you to expect them to play an accented note in a certain place but leave your ear to hear only the rhythm section at that point, giving an experience of surprise, much the same as a juggler will set up patterns that lead your eye to expect to see something in a certain place at a certain time, then vary the pattern, causing interest and excitement to build up.
Song for My Father
has some tracks by this same group and some by a later one, which included trumpeter Carmell Jones and the hugely talented tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. The title tune, with its undulating rhythm and Latin-flavored theme voiced simply in thirds, sets a languorous, tropical mood that heats up as it goes through a succession of solos. "The Natives Are Restless Tonight" is an up-tempo romp through a minor-key blues, with Silver and drummer Roger Humphries setting exciting rhythmic patterns behind the horn soloists. Henderson, in particular, is interested in using the building blocks of his phrases as rhythmic elements. The balance of the album consists mainly of tunes based, like "Calcutta Cutie" and ''Que Pasa," on simple melodies over rhythm section vamps; Henderson's up-tempo "The Kicker" and Silver's beautiful trio performance of his original ballad "Lonely Woman" (not to be confused with the Ornette Coleman tune of the same title) round out a great set.
Also excellent if not quite on the same level is
Blowin' the Blues Away
(Blue Note 46526), by the same group that recorded
Doin' the Thing
but with Louis Hayes replacing Roy Brooks at the drums - a mix of hot up-tempo things like the title track, "Break City," and "Baghdad Blues," the gospel-flavored "Sister Sadie" (a Silver classic), and the Silver ballad "Peace." Silver, it should be noted, was a composer of great ballads, which he would play in chords and which would all be good vehicles for lyrics; this side of his musical personality is often overlooked because of his ability at generating heat.
Six Pieces of Silver
(Blue Note 81539) is also a recommended set, recorded mostly in 1956 by the original Silver quintet, including tenorist Hank Mobley and bassist Doug Watkins from the Silver/Blakey Jazz Messengers, along with trumpeter Donald Byrd and drummer Louis Hayes. It contains the usual mix of cookers (including "Camouflage," which is especially tasty for its passages of stop-time playing, and the well-known "Senor Blues") and ballads, including "Shirl," a trio track, like "Peace," played by Silver mostly in chords, faintly reminiscent of Duke Ellington's unique "Melancholia" (available on
Duke Ellington: Piano Reflections
[Capitol Jazz CDP 7 92863 2]).

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