I haven’t posted much Jazz recently, and was reminded of this fact when I listened to the following track on my iPod yesterday while travelling back from Cardiff to Brighton. Hat and Beard is an original composition by one of my favourite jazz artists, saxophonist Eric Dolphy and was written in honour of another of my favourite jazz artists, Thelonious Monk, who not only sported a splendid beard but also had a famously eccentric taste in headgear…
Anyway, Hat and Beard is taken from the pioneering free jazz album Out to Lunch. This album is without doubt one of the high points of 1960s avant-garde jazz, primarily because of Dolphy’s extraordinary playing (in this case on bass clarinet) but also because of the brilliance of the other musicians: Freddie Hubbard on trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson on vibes; Richard Davis on bass; and the superb Tony Williams on drums (who was only 18 when this track was recorded).
Well, it’s a sunny Friday afternoon here so I thought I’d wind down for the weekend by posting a nice bit of Jazz to end the week. This is a version of a famous composition (by Jelly Roll Morton) made by Humphrey Lyttelton with his Paseo Jazz Band. This consisted of the core of Humph’s band of the time – notably Humph himself on trumpet and Wally Fawkes on clarinet – with the addition of a large number of West Indian musicians whom Humph had met in London; the recordings they made together are an absolute blast, largely because of the fusion of traditional jazz with Caribbean rhythms. The sound contrasts with a lot of the “trad” jazz at the time, but is if anything more authentic than that of many revivalist bands of the period because it echoes the astonishing blend of cultures that was characteristic of New Orleans at the time Jazz was born. This tune in particular gets a rhythmic backdrop of congas, bongos, claves and maracas that gives it a lovely lilting feel. And on top of all the extra percussion there is Fitzroy Coleman’s guitar which was then, is now, and forever shall be, a joy. It’s a very original version indeed of the Original Jelly Roll Blues…
Well, the British Summer has arrived at last. It’s raining. The weather reminded me of little number I posted some time ago by Tommy Flanagan, one of the most consistently enjoyable but underrated Jazz pianists of all time. So naturally I decided to post it again. Tommy Flanagan (who died in 2001) was probably best known as the long-time accompanist of Ella Fitzgerald but he also played on a number of really important Jazz albums with Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, to name just two. He also loved to play within the classic Jazz piano trio format with George Mraz (bass) and Kenny Washington (drums). Here they are playing a nice tune by the great Billy Strayhorn, called Raincheck…
I haven’t posted any Jazz for a while and given the apparently controversial nature of one of my recent posts, what could be better than a track called I’m Prayin’ Humble?
This Gospel-influenced Swing Era classic was recorded in 1938 by Bob Crosby’s Orchestra and it features the red hot plunger-muted trumpet of Sterling Bose. For those of you who weren’t aware Bob Crosby had a brother called Harry who went by the nickname of Bing. Anyway, his band (Bob’s not Bing’s) had a very distinctive sound all of its own, and some fine soloists.
I just heard the news that Ornette Coleman has passed away at the age of 85. He was one of the true innovators of Jazz and his influence on the development of this music over the last 50 years has been absolutely immense. I don’t have the words to pay adequate tribute to the either the man or his music, so I’ll just highlight two tracks from my favourite album of his, which was recorded Live at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm in 1965, and was proclaimed “Record of the Year” the following summer in Downbeat magazine. This features a trio of Coleman on alto sax, David Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffit on bass. By the mid-60s Ornette Coleman had already established his reputation as leading light of avant-garde saxophonists and, in his own way, was as great an influence on jazz as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane had been just a few years earlier, but this album is, for me, when Ornette Coleman underwent the transition to greatness.
The track European Echoes starts in a deceptively simple manner, with Ornette’s little two-note statements over a fast waltzy 3/4 foundation provided by Izenzon and Moffitt. It then eases into a passage marked by freer improvisations by Ornette, the meter changing at the same time to 4/4. Ornette plays for more than half the track, after which Izenzon and Moffitt take over for all but the final minute, at which point Izenzon drops out and Moffitt plays an intricate percussion solo.
Although most people I know recognize the virtuosity of modern jazz musicians they don’t really like the music very much. On the other hand fell in love with this track as soon as I heard it, partly because it begins simply enough for a beginning saxophonist to play along with, but also because it’s highly original without being at all self-indulgent. In fact, at one level, everything Ornette Coleman does on this track is quite simple; he plays the saxophone here like he’d just discovered the instrument and was in the process of finding out what it could do; at least in his early years, he didn’t have much of a technique at all in the conventional sense but nevertheless managed to produce amazing music. This a view echoed by the great Charles Mingus in quote I got from another blog about Ornette Coleman:
Now aside from the fact that I doubt he can even play a C scale in whole notes—tied whole notes, a couple of bars apiece—in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh. So when [the jazz dj] Symphony Sid played his record, it made everything else he was playing, even my own record that he played, sound terrible.
I did learn to enjoy and admire Ornette Coleman’s more “difficult” music later on, but European Echoes was the track that convinced me that Ornette Coleman was a genius.
Though from the same album, Faces and Places is quite a different kettle of fish. It goes like the clappers right from the start, with some terrific work on the drums by Moffit, skittering along on the cymbals with interludes of powerful rapid-fire accents on the skins. Fantastic stuff.
I’ve decided that I’m going to spend this evening listening to Ornette Coleman records and drinking to his memory.
As regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will know, among the various things I write about apart from The Universe and Stuff is my love of Jazz. I don’t often get the chance to combine music with physics in a post so I’m indebted to George Ellis for drawing my attention to this fascinating little video showing a visualisation of the effects of quantum entanglement:
The experiment shown involves pairs of entangled photons. Here is an excerpt from the blurb on Youtube:
The video shows images of single photon patterns, recorded with a triggered intensified CCD camera, where the influence of a measurement of one photon on its entangled partner photon is imaged in real time. In our experiment the immediate change of the monitored mode pattern is a result of the polarization measurement on the distant partner photon.
You can find out more by clicking through to the Youtube page.
While most of my colleagues were completely absorbed by the pictures, I was fascinated by the choice of musical accompaniment. It is in fact Blue Piano Stomp, a wonderful example of classic Jazz from the 1920s featuring the great Johnny Dodds on clarinet (who also wrote the tune) and the great Lil Armstrong (née Hardin) on piano, who just happened to be the first wife of a trumpet player by the name of Louis Armstrong.
So at last I’ve found an example of Jazz entangled with Physics!
P.S. We often bemoan the shortage of female physicists, but Jazz is another field in which women are under-represented and insufficiently celebrated. Lil Hardin was a great piano player and deserves to be much more widely appreciated for her contribution to Jazz history.
I stumbled across this on Youtube and just had to share it. I’ve got this track on an old vinyl LP of Charlie Parker performances recorded live at Birdland, the famous New York jazz club named in his (Bird’s) honour. I don’t think any of the tracks on that album have ever been reissued on CD or for download so I was both surprised and delighted to find this. It was recorded live in 1953, so it’s a bit lo-fi, but what’s particularly interesting is the unusual collection of instruments. Bird is alto sax as usual, but the rest of the band consists of Cornelius Thomas on drums, Bernie McKay on guitar and Milt Buckner on the Hammand Organ. That’s very far from a typical bebop band. Milt Buckner’s organ accompaniment is perhaps an acquired taste but Charlie Parker clearly enjoyed this setting. He plays beautifully throughout, especially during the exciting chase sequence with the drummer near the end. The tune was written by Parker’s old sparring partner Dizzy Gillespie and is based on the chords of Whispering, an old ballad written in 1920. I’m not sure why Dizzy Gillespie decided to hang his tune on that particular harmonic progression, but it’s a thrill to hear Bird racing through the changes in such exhilarating style.
Over thirty years ago I wandered into Windows shop in Newcastle and found an LP called Blues Pour Flirter. It was recorded in Paris in 1962 and features Don Byas on tenor saxophone. I didn’t care much for the title, especially when I looked at the listing to find that there wasn’t a single blues among the tracks – they’re all ballads. I bought the album anyway and am glad I did because Don Byas plays beautifully throughout, and one of the tracks has been a particular favourite of mine ever since.
Some of the tracks involve a big studio orchestra including strings and woodwinds but my favourite has Don Byas on tenor saxophone accompanied by a rhythm section of Christian Garros on drums, Pierre Sim on bass and George Arvanitas on piano. They play a ravishing version of the Jerome Kern standard Smoke Gets InYour Eyes, which someone has had the good grace to put on YouTube. It seems this and some of the other tracks on the album I bought way back when have been reissued on another album.
I love the huge sound Don Byas produces as he plays this tune, like a lion playing with a cub. At one point it seems like he’s going to tear it apart but it all ends peacefully. How I wish I could play like this!
I’m not sure it’s possible for any record to be perfect, but there are definitely some that I couldn’t be improved in any way that I can imagine. I can think of a number of Jazz records that fall into that category, including this version of When You’re Smiling made in 1938. It features Billie Holliday and Lester Young along a number of other members of the Count Basie Orchestra (apart from the Count himself, who is replaced by Teddy Wilson on piano).
That this is a favourite record of mine is a bit of a paradox, because I don’t really like the song very much. However, in jazz the tune is just the starting point. In her early recording career, Billie Holliday wasn’t very well known so she was often given relatively unpromising songs to sing. She turned out to be brilliant at turning this base metal into gold and becamse the best singer of a bad song there has ever been.
It’s not just the way Billie Holliday’s voice floats ethereally across the beat as she takes outrageous liberties with both melody and rhythm. Nor is the way she manages to express everything there is about life and love and hearteache through the rather banal lyrics, investing the song with a deep sense of tragic irony. Nor is it Lester Young’s superbly constructed tenor saxophone solo near the end, which one of the very greatest by one of the very greatest. Nor is it that lightly swinging rhythm section of Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jo Jones who push the whole thing along on gossamer wings, making most of their rivals sound like clodhoppers; the drummer Jones,for example, adds punctuation in the form of accents to the poetry of Lester Young’s solo. All the component parts are magnificent, but the whole is even greater than their sum. It’s a timeless jazz masterpiece.
I don’t know why I haven’t posted this track before, but better late than never. I hope you can take 3 minutes to enjoy it!
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In the Dark 