Not much time to post today: I’ve got a full morning’s work finishing the drafts of two papers before flying home this afternoon….so here’s an appropriate piece of music from the late great Lionel Hampton.
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Whippin’ that Jelly
Posted in Jazz with tags State Street Swingers, Washboard Sam, Whippin' that Jelly on June 3, 2011 by telescoperSummer has most definitely arrived. It’s a gorgeous day and most of the students have finished most of their examinations, so I’m sure will be taking a well-deserved break and enjoying the sunshine. It’s also Friday, and time, I think, for a little frivolity.
I’m indebted to young Miss Liggins for drawing my attention to this old record via Facebook. It’s by a relatively obscure swing band called the State Street Swingers, which was based in Chicago during the mid-1930s. From a technical point of view the musicians weren’t anything like as proficient as the leading bands of the Swing Era, especially in the horn section, so they usually tried to make up for their relatively limited abilities by playing for laughs behind various vocalists. It doesn’t say who it is on Youtube, but the singer sounds to me like Washboard Sam. He made a lot of records with other bands for the Vocalion label, which is what this one came out on, so that’s at least consistent with my hypothesis.
The State Street Swingers only ever recorded 14 tracks, most of them involving euphemistically raunchy titles, like this one, Whippin’ that Jelly. It may not be the most sophisticated music, but I hope it at least brings a smile to your face, as it does to mine every time I listen to it!
Move
Posted in Jazz with tags bebop, Denzil Best, Jazz, Lou Donaldson, Move on May 23, 2011 by telescoperWell, it’s 1pm and my third-year students are just sitting down for two hours of fun with their Nuclear and Particle Physics examination. For my part I’m obliged to sit by the phone for the next two hours in case there’s a problem with the examination paper. Ideal excuse for a quick blog post while I eat my sandwich.
I also notice from my trusty wordpress dashboard that this is my 1000th post since I started blogging, way back in late 2008. Time to indulge myself, then. I haven’t posted much jazz recently so I thought I’d share this classic recording with you. It’s from my favourite era of jazz – the late 1950s – and my favourite kind of jazz, bebop, which by then had matured, ripened and hardened considerably since its birth in the 1940s.
This gives me the excuse to mention a nice article in Saturday’s Grauniad about the poet Philip Larkin, his love for “trad” and his hatred for the “modern” jazz exemplified by bebop. It’s entirely a matter of personal taste, of course, but speaking for myself I can say that I’ve never had any problem loving jazz of all ages. For me, though, it reached a peak in the late 50s with musicians of the calibre of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman.
This particular track features alto-saxophonist Lou Donaldson whom many jazz critics regarded as a pale imitation of the pioneering be-bop icon Charlie Parker but whose playing I’ve always admired. In my book, anyone brave enough to follow Charlie Parker deserves the highest esteem. In any case when Lou Donaldson walked into the Van Gelder studio in Hackensack, New Jersey on July 28th 2008 he clearly had fire in his belly.
The tune is entitled Move and it was written by drummer Denzil Best. It’s quite unusual for a drummer also to be a composer, but Best wrote a number of classic jazz tunes. I even managed to find the chords that make up this one’s 32 bar AABA structure…
Many bebop compositions are based on the chord progressions of standard tunes, such as How High the Moon or I Got Rhythm, but with the melody replaced by something much more intricate than the original tune. I don’t recognize the chords above from anywhere else so it may be an entirely original composition by Denzil Best. I’m sure there’s a jazz buff out there who will correct me if I’m wrong. In any case the jagged melody is archetypal bebop stuff – complex and angular, very difficult to play but intensely exciting to listen to.
Mr PC
Posted in Jazz with tags Dave Holland, Jazz, Mr PC on May 16, 2011 by telescoperI came across this just now and it completely blew me away so I thought I’d share it here. It’s a solo version of the John Coltrane tune Mr PC by the amazing (British-born) bassist Dave Holland. Words totally unnecessary. Wow will do.
Salty Dog
Posted in Jazz with tags Lizzie Miles, Salty Dog, Sharkey Bonano on April 16, 2011 by telescoperWell, that’s the end of term and I’m now free, from teaching at least, for three weeks. I thought I’d celebrate by posting a piece of bawdy good-time jazz. Here’s the fabulous Lizzie Miles singing with a band led by the shamefully underrated but wonderfully named New Orleans trumpeter Sharkey Bonano.
Just a gigolo
Posted in Jazz with tags Just a gigolo, Thelonious Monk on March 30, 2011 by telescoperMuch of Thelonious Monk‘s recorded output was based on his own original compositions, which include such classics as Bemsha Swing, ‘Round Midnight, Epistrophy, Brilliant Corners and Straight, No Chaser, but this is an exception to that rule. Just a gigolo is a little ballad that he took a bit of a shine to relatively early on in his career and performed impromptu versions of it on many subsequent occasions. Monk’s unique style is a joy to listen to, and this clip gives you a chance to see him too – watching him play the piano always makes me think of a kitten playing with a ball of string. For all the genius that he was, and all the problems he had with his own mental health, he never lost sight of the child within himself.
Now this is what I call awesome…
My Sweet Lovin’ Man
Posted in Jazz with tags Honore Dutrey, Johnny Dodds, King Oliver, Lil Hardin, Louis Armstrong, Warren "Baby" Dodds on March 21, 2011 by telescoperA high temperature and raging sore throat have confined me to the house today. I got up as usual at 7.30 but quickly realised I wasn’t going to be of much to anyone; trying to give a lecture when barely able to produce a whisper didn’t seem worth the effort. So off I went back to bed, after feeding the cat, and got up again about an hour ago.
I’ve been trying to cheer myself up by listening to – and transferring to digital using my USB turntable – some lovely old jazz records that I haven’t heard for ages. Not all of them came out well, but fortunately one of my all-time favourite records is actually on youtube anyway so I thought I’d put it up.
This is My Sweet Lovin’ Man recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on June 22nd 1923, in Chicago. It is a purely mechanical recording, meaning that the musicians stood shoulder-to-shoulder blowing into a horn causing a needle to cut the record directly onto a disk; copies would be pressed using this master which could be played back for the listener by a gramophone, usually amplified by another horn. Obviously the technology was very limited, but it’s good enough to reveal the superb musicianship involved in creating this wonderful piece of music.
I love jazz from all eras of its history, but there can’t have been many finer collections of musicians than this. It’s led by King Oliver, who plays cornet, with the young Louis Armstrong also playing cornet alongside him. Honoré Dutrey is the trombonist and the unmistakeable clarinet sound is supplied by the great Johnny Dodds. By the way, why is Johnny Dodds’ wikipedia article so brief? He was a colossal figure in the history of jazz! I must do something about that if nobody else does…
The piece was co-written by Lil Hardin, whose lovely piano playing is unusually well recorded on this track; pianos generally proved very difficult to record with the technology available in 1923. Lil Hardin, incidentally, became Lil Armstrong when she married Louis Armstrong in February 1924. The rhythm men are Bud Scott on banjo and Warren “Baby” Dodds (Johnny’s brother) on drums, who provide an insistent yet fluid pulse underneath the rest of the band.
King Oliver’s band never used written arrangements; the musicians worked out the ensemble segments together and then played them from memory. When Louis Armstrong joined the band, King Oliver at first led on cornet, with Armstrong providing decorative embellishments, but later on the two cornettists developed such an understanding that they were able to swap leads almost telepathically. Their playing together on this track is sublime. The improvised counterpoint provided by Johnny Dodds and Honoré Dutrey is also breathtakingly beautiful. Although it was recorded in Chicago, this is the classic form of New Orleans polyphony sustained throughout at the very highest level.
I think this is one of the greatest jazz records of all time, but it also reminds me that there was a move some time ago to refer to jazz as black classical music. It never caught on, but in this case the term seems to me to be perfectly apt. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Things to Come
Posted in Jazz with tags Big Band, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Fuller, James Moody, Paul Jeffrey, Things to Come on March 17, 2011 by telescoperI 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!
I Mean You
Posted in Jazz with tags I Mean You, Stan Tracey, Thelonious Monk on March 8, 2011 by telescoperAnother 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…
Evidence
Posted in Jazz with tags Evidence, Jaki Byard, Roland Kirk on March 6, 2011 by telescoperI’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!
In the Dark 