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Peter Coles and Ken Colyer

Posted in Biographical, Jazz with tags , , on January 5, 2017 by telescoper

My piece just before Christmas about Clem Avery prompted me to do a bit more searching on the internet for jazz-loving family friends and acquaintances. It didn’t take me long to find this (which I got from this website):

ken-colyer3-mid-1970s

The photograph was taken at the Lambton Arms in Chester-le-Street sometime during the 1970s. The gentleman on the left playing cornet is none other than “The Guvnor”, Ken Colyer. Next to him, on trombone, is Peter Coles. No, not me, but my uncle Peter!

Here’s another photo of him, taken from the same website. This also dates back to the 1970s but this one shows him with “Mighty” Joe Young’s band playing at The Honeysuckle in Gateshead. Joe Young is on bass.

mighty-joes-band

 

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The Young Charlie Parker plays Cherokee

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on December 22, 2016 by telescoper

I came across this rare treasure on Youtube and couldn’t resist sharing it here. It features a very young Charlie Parker, with the relatively unknown Efferge Ware on guitar and Little Phil Phillips on drums, playing the jazz standard Cherokee. This track was recorded in 1941 (when he was only 21 years old) in Bird’s home town of Kansas City. There is a gap in Charlie Parker’s discography between 1942 and 1944, which was when the American Musicians Union called a strike which led to a ban on all commercial recordings. When the ban game to an end Charlie Parker’s recordings with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others unleashed the new harmonic language of bebop on the general public from New York City where it had been incubating during the strike. Parker’s style had evolved greatly in the intervening two years which no doubt made his playing sound all the more revolutionary when the ban was lifted. Although this version of Cherokee is to some extent a pre-bebop recording, you can hear the originality and beauty of Bird’s improvisation (complete with cheeky quotation from the “Popeye” theme) and it’s clear where he was heading.

The sophisticated and complex chord sequence of Cherokee (with its trademark ii-7–V7–I progressions) made it a firm favourite with bop musicians who tended to play it even faster than this earlier version.
In 1945, during what was arguably the first ever bebop recording session, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie decided to play a variation of Cherokee using the same chords but a different head. During the first take the musicians absent-mindedly played the theme from Cherokee at which point there was a cry of anguish from the control room uttered by a producer, who obviously had hoped that if they stayed off the actual tune he wouldn’t have to pay composer’s royalties. They started again, made another take, called it Ko-Ko, and it became one of the classics.

The 1941 version is valuable from a historical perspective but you don’t have to be interested in that to enjoy the wonderful fluidity and invention of Bird’s playing. Happy Christmas!

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Sam Rivers – Zip!

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on December 20, 2016 by telescoper

And now for something completely different. About five years ago I wrote a post aftering reading of the death, at the age of 88, of the legendary jazz musician Sam Rivers who passed away on 26th December 2011. Sam Rivers was born in 1923 and started playing professionally during the bebop era of the early 1950s. Later he evolved a unique avant garde style that was nevertheless firmly based in the jazz traditions he had grown up with. He was probably best known as a tenor saxophonist, but could also play flute, clarinet, piano and viola.

I first heard Sam Rivers on Humphrey Lyttelton’s BBC Radio Show The Best of Jazz in 1979. Humph was clearly a great admirer of Sam Rivers, especially the superb trio he formed with the brilliant Thurman Barker (drums) and Dave Holland (bass). The energy and vitality of the track he played made a lasting impression on me. The album was called Contrasts, by the way, and the track in question called Zip. I bought the album straight away. At least almost straight away, because it wasn’t the sort of record you could buy in the shops; I had to send away for it.

Anyway, I’ve now discovered that someone has posted this track on Youtube, so here it is. Enjoy!

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Memories of Clem Avery

Posted in Biographical, Jazz with tags on December 19, 2016 by telescoper

All the talk about trumpets last week reminded me of an old family friend by the name of Clem Avery. There’s a very nice tribute to Clem on a website run by guitarist Roly Veitch (whence I got the photographs).

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Clem Avery (1933-2008)

Clem, who passed away in November 2008, was a very close friend of my father  who died just a year earlier in 2007.  They had known each other since at least the early 60s and had played music together on many occasions (Clem on trumpet and, in later years, bass and my father on drums). That they remained good friends for such a long time is a bit surprising since at one point Clem actually sacked my Dad from his band for being too heavy-handed on the cymbals. Having heard my father play on a few occasions I think Clem probably had a point. But Clem wasn’t the sort of person you could really fall out with for long, and their friendship survived this musical falling-out.

We did try to get Clem to come to my Dad’s funeral but he couldn’t make it. I think it was because he was already suffering from the cancer that would eventually take him.

Roly’s web tribute mentions a long-term residency at the Golden Lion pub in Winlaton during the 70s and 80s in which my Dad (real name Alan) is mentioned under his nickname “Chas”. I heard the band play there on a couple of occasions and they were really good, the presence of Roly Veitch’s (electric) jazz guitar giving them a refreshingly different sound to many other traditional bands.  

I can’t add much to Roly’s piece other than to endorse what he wrote about Clem. Firstly that he was a very accomplished musician who had a far better technique than many much more famous trumpeters. His style was very firmly based on that of Bunk Johnson, though he appreciated good music of many other kinds. As well as playing the jazz that he loved, he also worked as a music teacher and, from time to time, as a session musician. I even saw him on The Tube once (the TV programme, not the London Underground)! When he played trumpet his eyebrows had a tendency to move up and down in coordination. When they were at maximum elevation he looked a lot like Stan Laurel (at least in younger years before he grew a beard). Here is an old picture that makes that comparison a bit easier to imagine:

clem51

What I remember most about Clem, however, was just that he was an extraordinarily nice man. He was tall and rather thin with a thoughtful disposition, a  wonderfully laid back attitude to life and a fine dry sense of humour. He was very knowledgeable about many things besides music too. I often sat talking with him in my Dad’s shop in Benwell (where Clem worked on a part-time basis for a while). History (especially local history) was a speciality of his and he was never short of stories to tell.

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The Rocks – Jimmy Yancey

Posted in Jazz with tags on December 8, 2016 by telescoper

I recently posted a piece of music by the great blues and boogie-woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey. According to the blog stats page that post is proving quite popular so I thought I’d add another piece the same musician. This is Jimmy Yancey’s characteristically bluesy take on The Rocks, based on one of the more conventional left-hand patterns used in boogie-woogie that you will probably recognize from many other musical contexts.

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Yancey Special

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on November 30, 2016 by telescoper

Time for a bit of Boogie Woogie. This is by the great Jimmy Yancey who, despite having a strong claim to be regarded as the founding father of this style of piano playing, is nowhere near as well known as he should be. In fact he only began to make recordings relatively late in life and never earned enough money to give up his day job, which was as a groundsman for the Chicago White Sox baseball team. He was nevertheless a huge influence on people like Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons who made a great commercial success out of this  genre.

You may or may not know that Boogie Woogie encompasses quite a wide `library’ of left-hand bass patterns, many of which have their own names: the Rocks, the Trenches and the Fives to name but three. I’ve always felt that there was an interesting paper (or perhaps PhD thesis) to be written about the various permutations of notes involved in these figures, which mainly (but not exclusively)  involve the root, third, fifth and sixth notes of the relevant chord, which are usually themselves part of a standard 12-bar blues progression. Usually the little finger of the left hand picks out the root note and since the pattern played by the other fingers doesn’t change as the chords change remembering where your pinkie has to go more-or-less guarantees that the rest of the pattern ends up in the right place.

The simplest of all these Boogie Woogie figures to play is the Barrelhouse left-hand style that just involves a pair of two-note chords (root-fifth and root-sixth). Double up each of those chords and you get the left hand for Meade Lux Lewis’s classic Honky Tonk Train Blues, and so on. I mention that because if you follow the Youtube link you’ll see a photograph of Jimmy Yancey watching Meade Lux Lewis play.

Anyway, though most Boogie-Woogie left-hand bass figures have rather abstract names such as those listed above, this one – which you’ll recognize from a number of other tunes, such as Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill –  is always called the Yancey Special left hand as a tribute to its inventor. Apart from that lovely rolling bass line, what else is great about this track is the way Jimmy Yancey generates such a sense of forward momentum at a relatively slow tempo, e.g. by using the very effective technique (called a “pick-up”) of starting a right-hand phrase just before the bar line indicate by the left hand.

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Five – Tony Scott & Bill Evans

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on November 24, 2016 by telescoper

Just this morning finally submitted some documents for a couple of proposals that I’ve been stressing over for the past couple of months, so I thought I’d relax a little bit by posting some music.

Not long ago I shared a track on which Lester Young played clarinet as opposed to his usual tenor saxophone. I got to thinking afterwards that it’s quite interesting how the clarinet has become less prominent in Jazz as the music has evolved. The old `liquorice stick’ is one of the instruments that appears in the front line in `traditional’ New Orleans Jazz (alongside trumpet and trombone) and remained a key part of bands as different styles gradually developed until the Swing Era of the 1930s. Some of the greatest big bands of that period were led by clarinetists such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Woody Herman to name but three. However, when bebop arrived on the scene in the immediate post-War era the clarinet had been almost totally eclipsed by the saxophone. Perhaps that was because bebop was largely a reaction against swing music and musicians wanted to establish a radically different musical vocabulary. The alto saxophone in particular, championed by Charlie Parker, could – at least in the hands of a virtuoso like Parker – be played at breakneck speed but also had a much edgier sound and was capable of a different range of expression. The same comments apply to the tenor saxophone, as exemplified by John Coltrane. There were exceptions of course, notably Buddy Defranco, but as modern jazz developed the saxophone remained the dominant solo instrument.

Anyway, these thoughts popped into my head the other day when I was listening to Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 which featured the great Jazz pianist Bill Evans. One of the tracks played on the programme I listened to featured Evans together with clarinetist Tony Scott taken from the album A Day in New York which was recorded in 1957. A very large proportion of my very favorite recordings derive from the late 1950s, largely because so many new directions were being explored, and this is another track that seems to be looking ahead to something beyond the bebop era. Anyway, this is the track I heard the other day. It’s called Five, and I love the way the Scott constructs his solo from the jagged fragmentary theme, at first cautiously but gradually gathering momentum until it gets fully into its groove.

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Your Molecular Structure – R.I.P. Mose Allison

Posted in Jazz on November 16, 2016 by telescoper

R.I.P. Mose Allison (1927-2016)

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Midnight Blues

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on November 15, 2016 by telescoper

It’s amazing what you can find on Youtube…

This extraordinary recording of a slow blues was made in 1944. It’s extraordinary for two reasons.

One is that it is far longer than most discs of the time, and was recorded at 33 1/3 rpm rather than the 78 rpm that was usual for the time. The reason why that is extraordinary is that the long-playing record wasn’t introduced until 1948 so this track had to wait about five years until it was released commercially. The sound quality is unusually good for the period and it’s great to hear the musicians stretch out in a way that wasn’t possible on a 78rpm record. Notice also that it’s not just a string of solos, there are duets and ensemble passages , all very characteristic of authentic New Orleans music.

The other extraordinary thing is the band: Bunk Johnson (tpt) Jim Robinson (tmb); George Lewis (clt); Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavegaeu (bss); Lawrence Marrero (bjo); and Warren “Baby” Dodds (dms). Most of these musicians who had grown up in New Orleans but had not joined the mass exodus of great musicians (including  Louis Armstrong) who left for Chicago when Storyville was closed down in 1917. Most of the jazzmen who stayed behind fell into obscurity compared to those who left. Bandleader on this occasion,   Bunk Johnson was a case in point. He was born way back in 1879 and played with some of the legends of early New Orleans Jazz, a connection with history which was enough to make him a sort of “patron saint” of the revivalist movement when he was rediscovered in the 1940s.

One musician who had moved to Chicago (with his brother, clarinettist Johnny Dodds) was Baby Dodds, the first really great Jazz drummer, who had played alongside his brother and Louis Armstrong in  King Oliver’s Band as well as on the glorious Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. His playing is barely audible on most of those old records, but he is heard to good effect on this track.

Anyway, I think it’s a superb performance, dripping with nostalgia for an era of music that would have been lost had it not been for these priceless recordings…

 

 

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They Can’t Take That Away From Me

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , , , on November 10, 2016 by telescoper

This seems an appropriate piece of music for these days. It’s an unusual but deeply moving performance by the  legendary Lester Young who  was best known as a tenor saxophonist, but decided to play clarinet on two numbers that wound up on an album called Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’. I have the original vinyl LP, which was issued on the Verve label, but it’s still waiting for me to transfer it to digital. The other members of the band are Roy Eldridge and Harry Edison (trumpets), Herb Ellis (guitar), Hank Jones (piano), George Duvivier (bass) and Mickey Sheen (drums).There were lots of problems making the record, apparently, but it did produce some fine music including this devastatingly tragic version of the standard They Can’t Take That Away From Me which is among the very best recordings he ever made.

At the time of this recording, in February 1958, Lester Young was terminally ill with cancer – he died just a year later at the age of 49.  Despite being barely able to stand, struggling with his breath control, and playing almost in slow motion, he manages to cast his fading light over this tune in a way that’s heartbreaking as well as beautiful.

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