The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (52 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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ing four-bar exchanges between the saxophonists, and three sides by the 1940-1941 Carter big band are worthwhile for his playing and writing.
His playing and writing are shown in top form on
Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter in Paris
(DRG/Swing CDSW 8403), on which his justly famous reed orchestration of "Honeysuckle Rose" and his loose frameworks for "Crazy Rhythm," "Out of Nowhere," and "Sweet Georgia Brown" help inspire a group including Hawkins and guitarist Django Reinhardt to produce several classics. Carter's own solos are exemplary as well.
The Complete Benny Carter
(Mercury 830 965-2) presents the results of two April 1946 sessions featuring Carter on alto with only a rhythm section playing standards like ''Moonglow," "Stairway to the Stars," and "Lady, Be Good." If you like Carter, this set is essential. On the first eight sides, the pianist is the litle-known Arnold Ross, whose opening solo on "Lady, Be Good," recorded with Jazz At The Philharmonic in 1946, is a classic (it precedes an equally classic Charlie Parker solo and is available on the ten-CD box set
Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve
[Verve 837 141-2]).
Willie Smith
Another highly regarded alto saxophonist of the swing era was Willie Smith, whose major recognition came as a member of the 1930s Jimmie Lunceford orchestra. For most of the 1940s and 1950s he was featured in trumpeter Harry James's big band, with some time out to play in other bands, most notably Duke Ellington's (for part of Johnny Hodges's period of absence). He was a very good blues player and was at his best on slow and medium bounce tempos; he was also one of the best lead players in the music.
A good showcase for his abilities is Willie
Smith with the Harry James Orchestra - Snooty Fruity
(Columbia CK 45447), on which Smith is featured throughout, mostly in big-band readings of jazz standards like "Moten Swing," "Tuxedo Junction," "Stompin at the Savoy," and Ellington's "Cotton Tail." Fans of solid big-band jazz will enjoy this set, which also includes plenty of James's trumpet in a straight-ahead jazz setting.
The 1930s: Big Bands
(Columbia CK 40651) includes a Smith performance of the slow and haunting "Uptown Blues," recorded in 1939 with Lunceford's band, which suggests that Smith might have been able to give Johnny Hodges a run for his money on the blues.
Nat "King" Cole and His Trio - The Complete After Midnight Sessions
(Capitol CDP 7 48328) features Smith on four intimate, relaxed tracks with the pianist-singer and his trio from 1956.
An interesting coda to this discussion of Carter and Smith can be found on
 
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the Charlie Parker album
Yardbird in Lotus Land
(Spotlite SPJ 123, LP only). The three altoists appeared together in a 1946 radio broadcast, backed by the Nat Cole trio, with Buddy Rich on drums. Smith plays "Tea for Two" and Carter "Body and Soul" - both lovely renditions in their recognizable styles. After Carter's last note there is a brief moment of rest, the tempo suddenly shoots up under a Cole piano introduction, and Parker dives into a breakneck version of Ray Noble's ''Cherokee." Although Carter was a virtuoso, Parker threw down a new gauntlet for presence of mind, speed of articulation, and velocity of thought; he shifted the aesthetic in other words. Good as Carter and Smith are, there is no question about where the excitement was on that particular night.
Charlie Parker
Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, or Bird, as he is universally called, represented the culmination of one tendency in jazz and the beginning of another. In his playing you hear all the exhilaration and heat of the late-night Kansas City jam sessions, which he took part in and witnessed, the heroic swing and dance rhythms of the traveling big bands, and the romanticism and lyricism expressed in the popular songs of the 1930s. You also hear the blues, particularly the blues of the Southwest, in which a note both triumphal and ironic is usually sounded.
But there was also a quality inherent in Bird's playing that hadn't been heard before, although it had been hinted at. Bird was one of the first to find an adequate way of expressing a new mood in the post-World War II air, and his mixture of death-defying technical ability, exhilarating rhythmic drive, and poignant self-consciousness expressed the attitude of a more disillusioned audience after World War II. Eventually, it led to the attitude of the so-called cool players, foremost among whom was Miles Davis, who began as a protégé of Bird's.
The melodic forms, or building blocks, that Parker came up with constituted a new grammar for the music; a generation of musicians used that grammar to fashion their own individualized statements. Parker himself made up countless new melodies by combining and recombining these melodic building blocks over the new things he discovered about scales and chords, while keeping all the fire and the swing that had been part of his Kansas City background.
Parker was an almost endlessly inventive improviser; in the recording studio, when his groups did a number of takes of the same tune, Parker would more often than not use entirely different strategies on every take rather than
 
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following one outline and making variations on it. This kind of unrelenting creativity became part of the aesthetic of the music, for better and for worse.
The down side of it was that people were so spellbound by Parker's inventiveness that a disproportionate emphasis began to be put on the individual soloist. Ensemble concepts began to reflect this, with compositional frameworks too often amounting to nothing more than a frame for a string of solo improvisations. Every soloist was tacitly expected to be a virtuoso with an inexhaustible well of fresh ideas. But very few artists are blessed with Parker's creativity, and jazz spent thirty years trying to deal with that fact. Paradoxically, the musicians who heard Parker most deeply, perhaps - Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, for example - seemed to realize that the individual virtuoso aspect of Parker's style represented the end of something as much as it did the beginning, and they began to think more in terms of group sound and compositional frameworks.
Fans and musicians went to great lengths to record Bird in live appearances and off the radio because his well of inspiration was so deep that he created brilliant new melodies in almost all settings. One such fan, Dean Benedetti, followed Parker around the country with a tape recorder, showing up at Bird's engagements and recording only Bird's solos. (These recordings, only a legend for years, have recently been unearthed and issued by Mosaic as a seven-disc set,
The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker
[Mosaic MD7-129], a monumental work of scholarship and love.) There were enough people who wanted to preserve Bird's inventiveness on the wing that there is a tremendous amount of Parker's music currently available.
It wasn't always so. When I first started listening to jazz in the late 1960s, there were very few Charlie Parker records in print, and those in print were all but unavailable in stores. But the last ten years have seen a literal explosion in the amount of material that has been brought out, and the release of Clint Eastwood's movie
Bird
has certainly encouraged companies to issue any and all Parker material. Today just contemplating the Bird section in your local record store is enough to make you dizzy.
Early Bird
Bird's earliest recordings were made with the Jay McShann big band, a Kansas City outfit that toured the Midwest and eventually came to New York. The band's commercial recordings, made in 1940 and 1941, are available as
Jay McShann Orchestra: Blues from Kansas City
(Decca/GRP GRD-614). On them, Parker shows the influence of tenor saxophonist Lester Young; Parker had spent a summer in the Ozark Mountains not long before, memorizing all of Young's solos from his Count Basie records (much as a later generation would
 
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memorize Bird's solos), and the lessons he learned, of melodic inventiveness and cool grace, show up in his solos with McShann. You can also hear the influence of his teacher Buster Smith, a great Kansas City alto player who can be heard on "Cherry Red" and "Baby, Look at You" with Pete Johnson's Boogie Woogie Boys on the album
Swing Street
(Columbia Special Products JSN 6042). Some of the phrases Bird invented at this time still form part of musicians' basic vocabulary.
On "Hootie Blues," Bird plays a haunting, urbane blues solo at a slow medium tempo as the brass play comments behind him. His solo on "The Jumpin' Blues" was copied by every young saxophone player, and its opening phrase became the basis for Benny Harris's tune "Ornithology.'' "Swingmatism" and "Sepian Bounce" also have excellent solos, full of phrases that found their way into the vocabularies of younger players such as Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt.
Bird left McShann, joining first Earl Hines's, then Billy Eckstine's big bands, both of which were important gathering places for the modernists. No recordings seem to have survived of Bird with either band, but a fascinating record called
The Complete "Birth of the Bebop"
(Stash ST-CD-535) documents Bird playing in extremely informal situations during the period - in a hotel room with Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and playing along with a recording of pianist Hazel Scott. On the tracks with Gillespie, Bird plays tenor, which was his instrument in the Hines big band, and we can hear his style starting to turn into itself, stripping away the unneeded aspects and strengthening and exploring the implications of the most essential parts. There is also a great short rendition of "Cherokee" from 1942 on which Bird plays several ridiculously inventive choruses backed only by rhythm guitar and drums. Also not to be missed are some searing exchanges on a live version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" with Gillespie and tenor saxophonist Don Byas in front of a wildly responsive crowd.
Bird's next studio date was with a small group led by guitarist Tiny Grimes. On this 1944 date (available on
Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Master Takes) Volume 1
[Savoy ZDS 4402]), his sound is in place - strong, diamond hard - and he swings ardently on "Tiny's Tempo" and "Red Cross," but the last touches of rhythmic flexibility are still to come.
Now's the Time
Bird made some of his best-known recordings in 1945. The series of records he made with Dizzy Gillespie's small group (available on
Dizzy Gillespie and His Sextets and Orchestra: "Shaw' Nuff"
[Musicraft MVSCD-53]) established much of the core repertoire of the music that was already being called bebop.
 
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Recorded for the small labels Guild and Musicraft, performances such as "Salt Peanuts," "Shaw 'Nuff," and Tadd Dameron's "Hot House" (with Big Sid Catlett playing drums), "Groovin' High," and "Dizzy Atmosphere'' set the basic format for the recorded bop performance - a group reading of an intricate melody (also called a head), often at a fast tempo, usually based on the harmonic structure of an existing popular song or the blues (the first two are based on the harmonic structure of "I Got Rhythm"; "Hot House" is based on the chords of "What Is This Thing Called Love?" and "Groovin' High" on "Whispering"), then a string of solos.
These early recordings are actually routined more interestingly than the head-solos-head approach that quickly became standard; unison introductions for the horns, small fanfares to announce instrumental breaks, and countermelodies such as the one at the end of "Dizzy Atmosphere" are a holdover from the big-band approach, in which the arrangement was critical to maintaining interest and setting off the various solo statements. Bird plays brilliantly on all these tracks; his solos are anthologies of melodic statements that would become standard material for every young saxophonist.
By November Bird had it all together for a studio date under his own leadership (available on
Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Master Takes) Volume 1
[Savoy ZDS 4402]), with Miles Davis and Max Roach, both of whom would become regular members of his classic quartet of 1947. Here is Bird laying down a new language, a new standard for articulation, a new velocity of thought. His solos on "Now's the Time" and "Billie's Bounce" were memorized by hundreds of young players on every instrument. His two choruses on "Thriving on a Riff" (later called "Anthropology") are masterpieces of controlled drive. The ballad fragment "Meandering" shows a characteristic feeling, something close to the mood and weight of tragedy, expressed through extremely lyrical melody. But the session's masterpiece is "Ko Ko," a blazing excursion through the chords of the popular song "Cherokee." A convoluted head, played in unison with Gillespie on muted trumpet, a break by each of them, then Bird takes off and never looks back. No one had ever played like this; the effect on musicians was comparable to that of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" or the first recordings of Lester Young. It was incontrovertible evidence that there were new possibilities of playing and of feeling.
In 1945 Parker and Gillespie were
the
important new musicians on the scene, and they were often invited to participate as guests on other musicians' recordings. You can hear the results of several of these occasions on the possibly hard-to-find
Every Bit of It
(Spotlite SPJ 150D). Standout moments are to be found on "Seventh Avenue" and "Sorta Kinda," under trombonist Trummy Young's leadership, and on some tracks with the eccentric vocalist Rubberlegs

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