I haven’t posted anywhere near enough music by the great Dizzy Gillespie on here so I thought I’d put up this clip which shows him in 1968 leading a phenomenal big band. Things to Come was an original composition by Dizzy Gillespie but it was Gil Fuller who provided the complex, gyrating arrangement which broke new ground when it was first performed (in 1946) in terms of the technical demands it made on the musicians, especially the trumpet section, but also in the sheer excitement it generated when performed live. This clip features a later version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band which re-formed for a time in the 1960s after a fairly lengthy hiatus, but it does contain several musicians who played in its earlier manifestation, including James Moody on tenor, who sadly passed away last December, but it is Paul Jeffrey who plays the wild tenor solo on this track. Star of the show, however, is undoubtedly Dizzy Gillespie whose staggering pyrotechnics threaten to blow the roof off!
Another Thelonious Monk tune, this time I Mean You, played by the superb British pianist Stan Tracey, who will be 75 later this year. He’s not very well known outside the UK, but I think he’s as good as any living jazz piano player anywhere in the world. See if you agree. This is just a fragment of a performance, recorded in London about 5 years ago, in which he demonstrates the highly unusual technique he uses to make music that’s inspired by Monk and Duke Ellington but which nevertheless manages be always uniquely Stan Tracey…
I’m aware that I still haven’t posted a follow-up to my introductory article about Bayesian Evidence, so I apologize to those of you out there that thought this was going to be it! In fact I’m just a bit too easy with other writing tasks at the moment to tackle that, but will get around to it as soon as I can. Yesterday’s post was about a kind of Evidence too.
Today I thought I’d post about yet another form of Evidence, i.e. the number of the same name by the great Thelonious Monk. Here it’s played by the Jaki Byard quartet of the 1960s, starring the wondrous Roland Kirk (in pre-Rahsaan days) who plays tenor saxophone on this track. It’s a typically eccentric composition by Monk, with characteristically fractured melodic lines and stop-start rhythms, but integrating over the parameter space defined by the chord changes, I think the best explanatory model for it is that it’s a “variation” on the jazz standard Just You, Just Me, although “variation” in this case doesn’t really describe the drastic nature of the overhaul. Anyway, Roland Kirk certainly doesn’t get lost in Monk’s labyrinth – his playing on this track is simply phenomenal. Listen to the staggering speed and originality of his improvisation during the first couple of minutes and I’m sure you’ll be wondering, as I did, where and how he managed to breathe!
Before going to bed I couldn’t resist a late night post of this wonderful version of a Rodgers & Hart ballad called It Never Entered My Mindrecorded by Miles Davis for the Blue Note label in the early 50s. Listening to the later Miles Davis playing a standard tune such as this is a bit like trying to recognise an old friend from a photograph of his skeleton, but here he sticks quite closely to the original composition. With that hauntingly melancholic tone, however, it is pure Miles Davis all the way through.
The composition is a standard AABA form, but with interesting harmonic movements: the A sections (which aren’t identical) consist of repeated notes followed by descending scales whereas the B section – the middle eight – starts with a drop of a minor sixth followed by an ascending scale. It’s a simple device but wonderfully effective, especially in the hands of a genius. I think this track is an absolute gem.
The other musicians featured are Horace Silver (piano), Percy Heath (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). Bonus marks to those who can put names to the other jazz legends shown in the photographs, but don’t let the task of identifying them distract you from the beautiful music…
At the end of a very busy week (during which I haven’t had much time to post), I decided to relax a bit this morning by listening to some old favourite Jazz CDs. When I got to this one, Portrait in Jazz, by the Bill Evans Trio I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t played it for so long. Surely I can’t have forgotten such a masterpiece? Anyway, I decided to write a post about this wonderful album. If it helps just one person discover this timeless music then it will have been worth it.
Bill Evans was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Jazz pianists of all time. Among other things he practically created the modern piano trio, converting it from what it had been before – a pianist with bass and drum backing – to an equal partnership of these three very diverse instruments. To make the format work required partners of equal brilliance and compatibility and it was a while before Bill Evans found the right musicians to join him. Eventually he formed his first regular trio with the superb Scott La Faro on bass and Paul Motian on drums.
Innovations based on collective endeavour rarely succeed immediately, however. It took Evans and La Faro a long time, and two or three albums, before the latter was able to work out how his bass lines might comment on and blend with the piano improvisations instead of merely underpinning them. As their relationship changed and matured, Evans’ contributions actually became a bit more fragmented, so as to leave room for the bass to burst through, and increasingly their performances became like dialogues for piano and bass. Not that we should ignore the contribution of the drummer Paul Motian either; he does far more than just keep time in the way old-fashioned drummers when playing in a trio format.
But on Portrait in Jazz, their first album together, the accent was still predominantly on Evans the soloist and because his playing here is so entrancing one has to acknowledge that the eventual change of emphasis, however justified from an artistic point of view, was in some ways a mixed blessing.
What characterises this album is Evans’ lyricism and lightness of touch. He doesn’t try to overwhelm with virtuosic flourishes. Each phrase and indeed each note is finely shaded. Confidence in his timing enables him to make subtle use of the space between phrases and bring off the most dazzling rhythmic displacements, almost casually.
I’ve picked one track to give as an example. It wasn’t an easy choice but I think this – the standard Autumn Leaves – is the best track on the album. After the opening statement there’s a fine example of the interplay between the three members of the trio that was to become more prominent on later albums, but eventually (about two minutes) they kick into tempo and Evans launches into a stunningly beautiful solo improvisation in which every note sings with a sustained emotional intensity few, if any, pianists have ever achieved in any idiom. As Miles Davis once said of Bill Evans “He plays the piano the way it should be played.” Amen.
So a long and difficult week ends, with quite a few beers in the Poet’s Corner and me about to collapse into bed. I think this is a good time to wheel out something you hopefully find quite amusing, i.e. a Harlem Stride piano version, by Don Lambert, of the Pilgrims’ Chorus from the Opera Tannhauser by Richard Wagner. I think I can safely say that if Wagner was alive today he’d be turning in his grave to hear such a frontal assault on his music, but I think it’s a blast…
No particular reason for posting this unusual trio version of the Duke Ellington standard Take the A Train, except that I think it’s wonderful to see the great man playing the kind of extended solo that his big band rarely allowed him space to do.
Back to work tomorrow, and I’ve got quite a lot to sort out before we start back so I’ll be in the office this afternoon. No time for anything of any great consequence, therefore, so I thought I’d post this bit of music which some of you might find amusing and/or enjoyable.
I think I’ve written on this blog before that mathematical theorems and physical laws often have the wrong name associated with them. So it is with famous tunes. I’m in the mood to point this one out. The following track, called Tar Paper Stomp, was recorded by Wingy Manone and his Orchestra in 1930. The tune features a well-known riff that formed the basis of a much more famous and commercially successful recording made in 1939. In fact Glen Miller‘s hit was a second-order copy; he got the theme from a tune called Hot and Anxious recorded by Fletcher Henderson‘s Orchestra in 1931. There’s some debate who actually wrote it first – Fletcher Henderson’s brother Horace claimed to have done so – but Wingy Manone did receive an out-of-court cash settlement in return for not pursuing a copyright claim.
Anyway, in case you were wondering “Wingy” Manone’s nickname derived from the fact that he lost his right arm when he was run over by a streetcar as a child. Thereafter he wore a prosthetic limb, hence the name. It sounds a bit cruel, but he didn’t seem to object. In fact he was an extrovert showman, singer, comedian and all-round entertainer as well as a fine trumpeter. It can’t be that easy to play the trumpet with only one working hand – he seems to have used his prosthetic arm just for support, fingering the valves and holding the horn with his left. His style was firmly rooted in Dixieland; it may be a bit rough around the edges, occasionally downright raucous, but he certainly could play with a lot of gusto – his solo on this track is hugely enjoyable. In fact, I think this track makes Glen Miller’s In the Mood sound like a wet weekend in Stevenage.
I don’t have a personnel listing for this recording, but the tenor saxophonist sounds to me a lot like Bud Freeman. Although Benny Goodman played with Manone’s band around 1930 the clarinettist doesn’t sound like him to me. Could it have been Frank Teschmacher?
Pianist Jaki Byard was one of the most consistently original musicians of his jazz generation, but he was also consistently underrated. His eclectic style embraced the avant garde free jazz of the 60s and 70s as well as traditional gospel and folk music. Whatever he played, though, it definitely sounded exactly like Jaki Byard. Anyway, in 1968 he teamed up with the extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk to record a typically varied selection of music, including this one which has been a favourite of mine since I first heard it on the radio about 30 years ago. It’s one of the most played tracks on my iPod, and it never fails to bring a smile to my face even when I’m stuck on stationary train feeling miserable.
Shine on me is attributed to that most prolific of all composers, Trad. It’s a theme that turns up in a few very early jazz recordings, but I think it began life as a gospel song way back in the mists of time. In this version, though, it’s given a foot-tapping beat which is just so very nineteen-sixties. Roland Kirk’s decision to start the piece on clarinet was truly inspired, and you can tell that all four musicians had a blast playing this. I suppose it’s a sort of parody, but it’s an affectionate one.
Finally, let me mention the drummer Alan Dawson, whose playing is based around a sort of half-funk half-boogie, but with all kinds of polyrythmic stuff on on top; he drives this along like the clappers and makes it such a joy to listen to.
As regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know, I listen to quite a lot of jazz. In the course of doing that it has often struck me that there can hardly be a tune that’s ever been written – however unpromising – that some jazz musician somewhere hasn’t taken a fancy to and done their own version. Louis Armstrong turned any amount of base metal into gold during his long career, but here’s an example from a more modern legend, Sonny Rollins, who is still going strong at the age of 80. It’s a tune called How are thing in Glocca Morra? and it was written for the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow (which I hate). This version, though, recorded in the mid 50s by a band led by Sonny Rollins on tenor sax, is absolutely gorgeous. It doesn’t take much to inspire a genius…
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In the Dark 