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The Giant Steps of Buddy DeFranco

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , , on January 11, 2015 by telescoper

Christmas Eve saw the passing of another great Jazz artist, the clarinettist Buddy DeFranco , at the grand old age of 91. Not surprisingly, glowing tributes to him have appeared in all the mainstream media as well as in specialist jazz sources as he was an absolutely superb musician as well as a distinctive stylist. Alongside countless other measures of his greatness and popularity, he won no less than twenty Downbeat Magazine Awards and nine Metronome Magazine Awards as the number one jazz clarinettist in the world.

It’s an interesting facet of jazz history that the clarinet, a mainstay of jazz styles from the New Orleans roots through to the Swing Era, fell into disfavour in the post-war era with the advent of bebop when it was largely eclipsed by the saxophone. Very few musicians persisted with the clarinet into the era of modern jazz, but Buddy DeFranco was one who did. That’s not to say that he disliked swing music though. In fact he began his career playing with big bands of that era, such as those led by Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey. One of the most famous bands of that era, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, formed in 1935 and saw its greatest popularity during the Second World War. It was disbanded in 1944 on the death of its leader, but it started again in 1956 and, although it has had a number of changes of personnel, it is still going strong. So strong that there’s a minimum two year waiting list if you want to book the Glenn Miller Orchestra for a gig! With the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two coming up this year, I’ve no doubt that there’ll be a great deal of nostalgia evoked by renditions of Moonlight Serenade..

The distinctive sound of the original Glenn Miller Orchestra largely derived from the unusual arrangement of its reed section: usually four saxophones playing in harmony, topped by a high clarinet lead. Many jazz fans found that blend a bit too honeyed compared with the likes of, e.g., the Count Basie Orchestra but there’s no question that it gave the band an immediately recognisable sound. Despite his predilection for more modern jazz idioms, especially bebop, Buddy DeFranco obviously very much liked the idea of a big band with a clarinet playing such a prominent part and, in fact, he was the leader and musical director of the revived Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1966 until 1974, and also guested with them on a number of occasions after that.

Anyway, Buddy DeFranco was one of the most technically accomplished clarinettists in all of jazz. Very few have ever been able to match his control, particularly in the upper register. But what I admired most about him was his willingness to take on material not usually associated with his instrument. Here’s a great example, of him playing the John Coltrane classic Giant Steps together with Terry Gibbs on vibraphone. When I saw the relatively low quality reproduction of the film I assumed the sound quality would be similarly poor, but some superb remastering work has been done and this sounds terrific.

Rest In Peace, Buddy DeFranco (1923-2014).

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The Sidewinder

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , on January 3, 2015 by telescoper

I don’t really know why it has taken me so long to write a post about this track. After all it is one of the most played pieces of music on my iPod. Better late than never, though, so here goes.

Recorded in New York City in 1963, and released on the Blue Note label a year later, The Sidewinder was the title track of an album that expanded trumpeter Lee Morgan’s place in Jazz from that of a musically respected artist to a higher and broader platform as a hit maker. The tune, an original composition by Morgan, is basically a long-meter blues, with 24 measures to each chorus instead of the usual 12. The chord sequence is close to that of a standard blues, but with an unexpected and highly effective minor chord subsitution at bars 17-18. It’s such a clever composition that it’s no surprise it has become a jazz standard. It even entered Billboard magazine’s top 100 chart for a while, which is unusual for an uncompromising piece of hard bop.

When I first heard the track many moons ago, I expected the intriguing rhythmic figure established during the opening ensembles to give way to a standard 4/4 beat to free up the soloists but it is kept up throughout the piece, showing that these musicians didn’t need to be freed up at all!

Lee Morgan was an amazing trumpeter, but he sometimes had a tendency to over-elaborate. Not here, though. He mixes simple phrases with long runs in a solo that must rank among his absolute best; the repeated B-flat in the last of his three choruses is a particularly fine example of the virtue of keeping it simple. Joe Henderson also delivers a fine and very propulsive solo on tenor saxophone, full of melodic variety and demonstrating his characteristic use of unusual intervals as well as that wonderful leathery sound. To my ears Barry Harris on piano struggles to keep the momentum going until the horns pick up a riff behind him to spur him on. Billy Higgins on drums keeps that complex but infectious beat going in superb style.

But for me the real star of the show is Bob Cranshaw whose funky bass lines in accompaniment demonstrate his rock-solid sense of time  and his solo is one of the grooviest you’ll ever hear from a double-bass.

If this doesn’t rouse you from post New Year torpor then nothing will!

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Parisian Thoroughfare

Posted in Jazz with tags , on December 14, 2014 by telescoper

Ahead of my short trip to Paris tomorrow, of which more anon, I thought I’d post this wonderful performance by quintessential bebop pianist Bud Powell of his own composition, Parisian Thoroughfare. This track comes from the same B;ue Note album The Amazing Bud Powell as the version of Over The Rainbow I posted recently, which is one of the most played on my iPod. I hope you like this,

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Bud Powell: Over the Rainbow

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on December 6, 2014 by telescoper

There can  hardly be a tune ever written that some jazz musician somewhere hasn’t taken a fancy to and done their own original version, however unpromising the raw material. Louis Armstrong had a particularly amazing ability to turn base metal into solid gold, making glorious music out of tunes nobody else wanted to touch.

These thoughts came into my head when I was listening last night to this version of Over the Rainbow,  by the great Bud Powell, which I think is brilliant, despite the mawkish sentimentality of the original song. Bud Powell had serious mental illness to deal with – he suffered numerous breakdowns and was heavily medicated in an attempt treat his schizophrenia – and also had a long-term problem with narcotic abuse; the two issues were no doubt related.

Although he moved to Paris in 1959 to make a fresh start, his self-destructive tendencies caught up with him. The quality of his playing deteriorated, his behaviour became erratic and he eventually died in 1966. Before leaving the States, however, Powell had made a number of recordings in which he demonstrated the virtuosity and musical imagination that established him as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, and certainly the leading stylist of the bebop era.

Bud Powell’s version of Over the Rainbow is one of my all-time favourite pieces of music. Although clearly inspired by Art Tatum, Powell’s  treatment of the tune is startlingly original because he puts so much variation into the way he plays it, alternating a lush romantic style with jagged boppy lines and dark undertones introducing a strong element of parody juxtaposed with a more orthodox treatment of the melody.  By any standards, this is a masterpiece, and a vivid portrayal of the battle between light and darkness that mirrored his own experiences of life.

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R.I.P. Acker Bilk (1929-2014)

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on November 3, 2014 by telescoper

Yesterday evening I heard the sad news that “trad” jazz stalwart Acker Bilk had died, aged 85. With his trademark bowler hat and goatee beard, he was one of the leading figures of the post-war British jazz scene. He scored considerable commercial recording success with the Paramount Jazz Band, especially with Stranger on the Shore which was in the British Charts for 50 weeks in 1962, was the first record by a British artist to hit No. 1 in the American Billboard charts, and was greatly admired by no less a figure than Duke Ellington. There are tributes all over today’s newspapers (e.g. here) that do better justice to Acker Bilk than I could, so I’ll just post one track as a special tribute. This track, Train Song, the B-side of The Harem, was recorded in the year of my birth and I have loved it since I was a kid.

Rest in peace, Acker Bilk (1929-2014)

 

 

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Charlie Christian: Swing to Bop

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , , , on November 2, 2014 by telescoper

I was transferring some old CDs onto my iPod the other day, and in the process of doing that I realized that in all the six years I’ve been running this blog I haven’t posted a single item about the great guitarist Charlie Christian, who did more than any other individual to promote the use of the electrical guitar and thus had an enormous influence on the development of  20th century music. The only reason I can think of why his is not a household name is that he died so young, in 1942, of tuberculosis, at the age of just 25.

Born in 1916, Charlie Christian came to prominence with Benny Goodman‘s orchestra during the 1930s. That in itself merits a remark. Benny Goodman was one of the first white bandleaders in the Swing Era to have black musicians in his band at a time when both musicians and audiences were generally racially segregated in the United States of America. Goodman deserves great credit for picking the best musicians he could find, regardless of the colour of their skin; Lionel Hampton is another prominent example. Bringing the young Charlie Christian into his band also testifies not only to his refusal to pander to racism, but also his willingness to experiment with new musical ideas, not least taking the guitarist out of the rhythm section and placing him as front-line soloist.

Here’s an excellent example of Charlie Christian playing with Benny Goodman’s Orchestra in 1939. I remember that my Dad wasn’t all that keen on Benny Goodman’s clarinet playing, which he regarded as “too clinical”. In fact many jazz writers also tend to refer to Benny Goodman’s playing as “unemotional”. I can’t agree. I admit that the band is a bit “slick”, but the clarinet on this track is absolutely sensational to me, and I find it a joy to listen to over and over again.  There’s also fine Cootie Williams on trumpet on this version of Fats Waller’s composition Honeysuckle Rose:

Commercial records from the 1930s were strictly limited by the available technology to 3 minutes’ duration, so Charlie Christian’s solo on that track  is necessarily brief.  You can hear much more of him on the historically important amateur recordings made during the early 1940s of late-night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City. This is an excerpt from a piece called Swing to Bop recorded in 1941, which shows how far Charlie Christian had advanced in just a couple of years. His improvised solo is way ahead of its time in the way it develops through an effortless string of musical ideas into an exploration of the harmonic possibilities of the chord sequence that I find absolutely sensational to listen to.

Not many people knew it at the time, because tracks like this weren’t made commercially available, but a musical revolution was brewing. Charlie Christian changed the course of jazz history, helping to usher in the bebop era, but his influence on rock-and-roll guitar is also incalculable.

Incidentally, I think Swing to Bop is actually the Count Basie tune Topsy in disguise, or at least the chords thereof. Listen to Topsy here and see if you agree..

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I told you once, I told you twice..

Posted in Jazz with tags , on September 26, 2014 by telescoper

I thought I’d wind things down for the weekend by posting a little bit of British jazz history. It’s perhaps not very well known that the great Sidney Bechet came to England in 1949 and did a concert and a recording session with Humphrey Lyttelton’s band while he was here. What’s also not very well known is how controversial this was, as in the immediate post-war years the Musician’s Union had persuaded the UK government to ban American artists from performing over here. Humph was having none of it, thank goodness, and here we have the legacy. Here is the unmistakeable Sidney Bechet on soprano sax, playing a traditional blues called I told you once, I told you twice with Humph on trumpet, Wally Fawkes on clarinet and, stealing the show, the absolutely superb Keith Christie on trombone. The only problem is that the youtube version cuts out a bit early…

After the concert they played together, Bechet summoned Humph in order to deliver a kind of end-of-term report on the band in which he pointed out little criticisms of their playing and so on. Bechet was a forceful character and often a harsh critic but when he got to Keith Christie he expressed nothing but unqualified admiration. There’s not much higher praise than that in the world of jazz.

 

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September Song – the Django Reinhardt version

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on September 11, 2014 by telescoper

Summer’s drawing to a close and preparing for the imminent arrival of new intake of students is taking up a lot of my time this week, so I thought I’d just put up something I’ve posted before, in the form of a piece of music that celebrates the genius of Django Reinhardt, the great Belgian-born gypsy guitarist who overcame the terrible  injuries he suffered as a child (in a fire in his caravan) to become one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time.  He had a unique style of playing the guitar he invented himself to get around the fact that the third and fourth digits on his left hand were so badly burned he could effectively only use two fingers. He also had an unparalleled gift for melodic improvisation that won him admirers all around the world and across all styles of music. Add him to your list of famous Belgians right away, for he was most certainly a musical genius.

Here he’s playing the beautifully poignant September Song, by Kurt Weill:

Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September

 

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Copenhagen, Cosmology and Coleman Hawkins

Posted in Biographical, Jazz, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on August 18, 2014 by telescoper

Now that I’ve finally checked into my hotel in the wonderful city of Copenhagen I thought I’d briefly check in on the old blog as well. I’m here once again for a meeting, this time as an invited speaker at the 2nd NBIA-APCTP Workshop on Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics; NBIA being the Niels Bohr International Academy (based in Denmark) and APTCTP being the Asia Pacific Centre for Theoretical Physics (based in Korea). This is the kind of meeting I actually like, with relatively few participants and lots of time for discussion; as a welcome gesture for the first day there was also free beer!

I decided for some reason to try an experimental route getting here. There wasn’t a flight at a convenient date and  time from Gatwick, the nearest airport to my Brighton residence, so I decided to get an early morning flight from Heathrow instead. The departure time of 06:40, however, left me with the difficulty of getting there in time by public transport as the relevant trains don’t run overnight. I toyed with the idea of booking an airport hotel for the night, but decided that would be extravagant so instead opted to get a coach from Brighton; this was cheap and comfortable – only a handful of other passengers got on the bus – and got me there right on schedule. The downside was that I had to catch the 01:40 from Brighton Coach Station, which arrived at about 4am at Heathrow Terminal 3. It was quite interesting finding the normally busy terminal almost deserted but although I did a self-service check-in straight away the bag drops didn’t open until almost 5am. None of the cafes in the check-in area were open, so I had to hang around for an hour before finally getting rid of my luggage and passing through to the airside whereupon I nabbed some coffee and a bite to eat.

The flight was almost uneventful. Unfortunately, however, as we came in to land at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport, a young person sitting behind me vomited uncontrollably and at considerable length, producing a steady flow both of chunder and unpleasant noises. The aftermath was quite unpleasant, so I was quick out of the blocks when the plane finally came to a stop at the gate. An aisle seat turned out to have been a wise choice.

Assuming it would be too early to check into the hotel that had been booked for me, I decided to go straight to the meeting but got to the Niels Bohr Institute’s famous Auditorium A near the end of the first talk, about the Imprint of Radio Loops on the CMB (a subject I’ve blogged about), which is a shame because (a) its interesting and (b) some of my own work was apparently discussed. That happens so rarely these days I’m sorry I missed it.

I was a bit tetchy as a result of my sleepless night, though I limited the expression of this to a  couple of rants about frequentist statistics during the discussions.

After the free beer I finally made my way to the hotel and checked in. It’s not bad, actually. There can’t be that many hotel rooms that have a picture of the great tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins on the wall:

SAMSUNG DIGITAL CAMERA

Anyway, I was due to give the conference summary on Friday but I’ve been moved forward to Wednesday so I’d better think of something to say. Maybe in the morning though, I could do with an early night…

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Long Long Summer – Reprise

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on July 24, 2014 by telescoper

I know it’s tempting fate to post something with a title like Long Long Summer, as indeed it was last time I posted it, but we’ve had such lovely warm weather for the last week or so I couldn’t resist putting this up while the sun’s still shining. I particularly wanted to share this track (a) because it matches the weather perfectly and (b) because it’s by the great Dizzy Gillespie Quintet of 1962 with Lalo Schifrin on piano, best known as a prolific composer of film and TV scores. The band also featured Leo Wright, a very under-rated saxophonist and flautist. They all play terrifically on this original composition by Lalo Schifrin. There’s also a chance to see an interesting collection of photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, and his amazing cheeks!

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