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.
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.
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 Topsyhere and see if you agree..
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.
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
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:
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…
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!
I was saddened at the weekend to hear of the death, on Friday 11th July, at the age of 76, of the great jazz bassist, Charlie Haden. I always associate Charlie Haden with a series of great records he made with Ornett Coleman and Don Cherry during the late 50s and early 60s, including The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century, both of which I’ve blogged about already. I thought I’d pay a little tribute to Charlie Haden by writing about another of these masterpieces, a disc called This Is Our Music. As with the other two, this is also available in full on Youtube so you can listen to it here:
When he first arrived on the jazz scene the licence Coleman allowed himself in his improvisations drew criticism bordering on abuse from several prominent musicians. This a view echoed, for example, 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.
Although he clearly admired his originality, Mingus may have been right about the very young Ornette Coleman’s technical ability; but I don’t think any unbiased listener could argue that he lacked mastery of his instrument by the time this record was made, in 1960. His skill in sustaining notes (always difficult on alto sax, which he plays throughout this album) is especially evident on this album in the standard Embraceable You whilst the precision of his articulation at any temp makes it quite clear that he really had little to learn in any aspect of control of his instrument. The slurs and distortions that are so much a part of his style are beautifully managed, and combine with his daring tonal approach to give the impression of great freedom that he strove to convey in his music.
It used to be question whether the liberties in which Coleman indulged were not so as extreme as to preclude overall unity, yet for all his virtuosity in rhythmic and melodic invention, he displays a genuine continuity of line in everything he does on this record. On Blues Connation, for example, his solo evolves with impeccable logic, each phrase growing almost inexorably out of the one before, whilst the general melodic shape bears continuous affinity to the theme. Moreover, his music boasts an intensity of feeling that no charlatan could ever hope to achieve. As I hear it, the dominant emotion in his playing at fast tempo is not love, as some have claimed, so much as fear, although this mood is often relieved by flashes of lyrical sadness. In the slower pieces, such as Beauty is a Rare Thing and Embraceable You, and the medium-paced Humpty Dumpty, the latter sentiment comes through even more strongly.
Don Cherry was an ideal partner, for his work is cast in a similar mould, but at this stage in his own development he did tend to stand in Coleman’s shadow. Drummer Ed Blackwell is very good throughout, but Charlie Haden is nothing short of brilliant, which is why I chose this as a tribute piece for him.
The bassist Haden not only displays all the classic jazz virtues expected of him, but also possesses an amazing sense of anticipation that enables him to work hand in glove with the two hornmen. Blackwell is neither a loud nor an aggressive drummer, but he evinces genuine drive and the interweaving mobility he and Haden achieve together is truly remarkable in its own right as well as fitting well with the richness of the leader’s own work.
Had I the time, I could write a lot more about this album in particular and about Charlie Haden in general, but all I can do his suggest that you listen to the LP for yourself. Coleman was still refining his concept of how his Quartet should function, so it’s a little rough around the edges in places, and in any case I know many devout jazz fans who find this kind of music challenging. It is worth it, though. Charlie Haden was only 22 when This Is Our Music was recorded. He went on to many great things during his subsequent career. Sadly that spark has now gone out, but he will live on in our hearts through his music.
Rest in Peace, Charlie Haden, Jazz legend (1937-2014).
Very busy day today so just time for a quick post of a piece of music. No political interpretation is to be put on this choice; Maggie Thatcher and I were never young at the same time. I’m just proving that football isn’t the only field to have produced a famous John Barnes:
I was saddened last night to hear of the death at the age of 85 of the great Jazz pianist Horace Silver. BY way of a small tribute here’s the original composition Song for my Father as issued on Blue Note in 1964. Silver managed to fuse the forthright hard bop style he pioneered with the (then) trendy Bossa Nova beat to create a jazz classic. Listen out for a wonderful solo by the fabulous Joe Henderson on tenor sax too.
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In the Dark 