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Boogie Woogie Boogie – Errol Garner

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on February 3, 2017 by telescoper

I have lately posted a number of classic boogie woogie and blues performances by the great Jimmy Yancey. Here’s a piece that’s related but really very different, recorded in 1944 by a musician not usually associated with boogie woogie at all, Errol Garner, who was 23 when this track was made.  The story I heard about this is that the studio bosses leant on the young and impressionable pianist to do play some things that he wasn’t keen on, including a bit of boogie woogie. Eventually Garner acceded to their request, and produced what I think is a minor masterpiece called Boogie Woogie Boogie. Note the way he doesn’t stick to the same left-hand figures throughout the track which makes this much more varied than most recordings in this genre. I particularly like the transition at about 1:35 where it all goes a bit “Batman”!  It also has a distinctively dark minor-key feel to it, which is rather atmospheric.

Have a good weekend!

 

 

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Cotton Tail

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on January 16, 2017 by telescoper

It’s been a very busy and rather trying day so I’m in need of a bit of a pick-me-up. This will do nicely! It’s the great Duke Ellington band of 1940 playing Cotton Tail. This tune – yet another constructed on the chord changes to George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm – was written by Ben Webster and arranged by Duke Ellington for his orchestra in a characteristically imaginative and inventive way. Webster’s “heavy” tenor saxophone dominates the first half of the track, but the real star of the show (for me) is the superb brass section of the Ellington Orchestra whose tight discipline allows it to punch out a series of complicated riffs with a power and precision that would terrify most classical orchestras. And no wonder! The Ellington band of this era was jam-packed  with talent, including: Rex Stewart (cornet); Wallace Jones, Ray Nance, and Cootie Williams (trumpet); Juan Tizol,  Joe”Tricky Sam” Nanton, and Lawrence Brown (trombones). Listen particularly to the two sequences from 1.33-1.49 and 2.35-2.59, which are just brilliant! Enjoy!

P.S. The drummer is the great Sonny Greer.

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How Long Blues – Jimmy Yancey

Posted in Jazz with tags , on January 13, 2017 by telescoper

Over the past weeks I’ve been posting tracks by the legendary pianist Jimmy Yancey. They seem to have proved quite popular, so here’s another one. This differs from the others (which were in the boogie-woogie style) in being a slow blues rather than an up-tempo boogie-woogie romp. It’s quite an old song, dating back to 1928, of which many versions have been made over the years, but this is an atmospheric masterpiece that shows what a superb interpreter of the blues Jimmy Yancey was. That gently rocking left hand and the beautiful articulation of the right hand seem to underline the sense of loss conveyed in the lyrics to the song, which is about a man whose lover who has left him:

Heard the whistle blowin’, couldn’t see no train
Way down in my heart, I had an achin’ pain
How long, how long, baby how long

You won’t hear many better – or more haunting – performances the blues than this. And who cares if there’s a bit of surface noise on the record?

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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).

clem1

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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