Contrary to popular myth, Greensleeves was not written by Henry VIII. It was actually composed by the person who seems to have written all the best tunes, Trad. Here’s my favourite version, in a jazz style that’s very far from “Trad”, by a superb band led by John Coltrane, as found on the brilliant album Africa/Brass recorded in 1961.
ps. I think it was the pianist McCoy Tyner who wrote the arrangement for this piece, but I’m not 100% certain of that.
It’s been a while since I posted anything from the outer reaches of the musical universe, so I thought I’d try this one out on you. It was recorded live in 1984 by the Art Ensemble of Chicago with the great Cecil Taylor as special guest on piano. Extrapolating from the comments on Youtube, I confidently predict that quite a lot of you will hate this but, for what it’s worth, I think the Art Ensemble of Chicago was one of the most consistently creative groups of musicians active in avant-garde Jazz from the 1960s, when it was formed, until the death in 1999 of their inspirational trumpeter Lester Bowie. Their music might be a bit too far “out there” for many tastes, but I love it. So there.
Well, the summer’s over and soon we’ll be welcoming the new academic year. I thought I’d mark the occasion of the First of September with 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 an unparalleled gift for melodic improvisation and 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. Add him to your list of famous Belgians right away!
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
It’s a grey gloomy and rainy August lunchtime here in Wales and so I thought I’d just try to brighten things up a little by posting this video of a lovely set by the quintet led in the early 60s by the great Dizzy Gillespie, clearly enjoying himself on the BBC TV program Jazz 625. This was the band that also featured the brilliant James Moody on saxophones and flute. As you can hear, they played music that was strongly flavoured by Dizzy’s lifelong interest in Cuban jazz. The programme was introduced by the late great Humphrey Lyttelton and it’s in several bits which you will have to click through if you want to see them all. I hope you at least go as far as Part 3, where there’s a big laugh waiting for you…
It’s been a tiring and frustrating day during which I accomplished very little, apart from becoming tired and frustrated. I think I’m going to have an early night, but before doing that I thought I’d share this old record with you. There’s not much information about it on Youtube, but I actually have it on an very battered vinyl LP. The sleevenote doesn’t give the exact date of the recording session, but it was somewhere around the middle of December 1945.
The band is dubbed Slim Gaillard and his Orchestra, but it’s just a seven-piece band. It is, however, notable for the presence on it of two giants of the bebop era, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I thought I’d put it on here primarily because it has such a relaxed atmosphere and is a lot of fun to listen to, as well as providing a fascinating window into this transitional period of American Jazz in which Charlie Parker was the leading figure.
Before 1945 Charlier Parker had worked mainly as a featured soloist in big bands of the swing era, including those of Jay McShann, Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine; after 1945 he almost exclusively performed and recorded in small groups. The year 1945 was also important for two other reasons: it was the first year he was able to record any of his own compositions and it was the first time he was able to record with Dizzy Gillespie in a band made entirely of like-minded musicians, rather than a mixed bag as on this track.
Another quite interesting thing I almost forgot to mention is that this particular 1945 track is – I think – the earliest known recording of Charlie Parker’s voice…
This period also marked the beginning of Parker’s acceptance as an important solo voice by music critics and by the “hipper” sections of the American public. This spreading awareness of his importance is why both he and Dizzy were invited to perform on the West Coast of America, specifically at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood. It was during a short residency there that Slim’s Jam was recorded.
Apart from Charlie Parker (alto sax) and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), the band also contained the relatively unknown swing-era musician Jack Mcvea (tenor sax) as well as young bebop devotee Dodo Marmarosa (piano). The drummer was the great Zutty Singleton, who in fact played on some of the Hot Five recordings with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, and the bass was “Bam” Brown. Slim Gaillard played guitar on this track as well as doing the intros in characteristic fashion.
Slim Gaillard was a truly remarkable character who led a remarkable life, as his wikipedia page makes clear. He was a talented musician in his own right, but also a wonderful comedian and storyteller. He’s most famous for the novelty jazz acts he formed with musicians such as Slam Stewart and, later, Bam Brown; their stream of consciousness vocals ranged far afield from the original lyrics along with wild interpolations of nonsense syllables such as MacVoutie and O-reeney; one such performance figures in the 1957 novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It’s also very much the style of the commentary he adds to this track.
In later life Slim Gaillard travelled a lot in Europe – he could speak 8 languages in addition to English – and spent long periods living in London. He died there, in fact, in 1991, aged 75. I saw him a few times myself when I used to go regularly to Ronnie Scott’s Club. A tall, gangly man with a straggly white beard and wonderful gleam in his eye, he cut an unmistakeable in the bars and streets of Soho. He rarely had to buy himself a drink as he was so well known and such an entertaining fellow that a group always formed around him whenever he went into a pub in order to enjoy his company. You never quite knew what he was going to do next, in fact. I once saw him sit down and play a piano with his palms facing upwards, striking the notes with the backs of his fingers. Other random things worth mentioning are that Slim Gaillard’s daughter was married to Marvin Gaye and it is generally accepted that the word “groovy” was coined by him (Slim). I know it’s a cliché, but he really was a larger-than-life character and a truly remarkable human being.
They don’t make ’em like Slim any more, but you can get a good idea of what a blast he was by listening to this record, which is bound to bring a smile to the most crabbed of faces. But alongside the offbeat humour there’s some terrific playing too. Charlie Parker’s virtuoso blues-inflected choruses and Dizzy Gillespie’s dissonant pyrotechnics form a strong stylistic contrast with Jack McVea’s earlier tenor sax solo which sounds positively old-fashioned by comparison.
Anyway, it’s time for bed-o-voutie so I’ll say goodbye-o-reenie with a little hot cocoa on it. I gotta get up early in the mornin’ myself…
This is something I found recently and couldn’t resist sharing. This track from Ornette Coleman has only been on Youtube a month or so and I just found it last night, but I’ve got it on a vinyl LP I bought about 30 years ago. I think the music is completely wonderful on its own, but the idea of accompanying it with examples of the art of Joan Miro was a brilliant one!
European Echoes was recorded live at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm in 1965, and is part of a famous album that was proclaimed “Record of the Year” the following summer in Downbeat magazine. 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 earlier.
The track features a trio of Coleman on alto sax, David Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffit on bass. It 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. I 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 invented the instrument. In fact, 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 amazingly fresh sounds. 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 this was the track that convinced me that Ornette Coleman was a genius. I hope to get the time over the summer to write a few more posts in appreciation of my favourite jazz artists, but for the time being I’ll just let this piece speak for itself…
It’s a boiling hot day – at least by British standards – so I think it’s time to chill out in the shade of my garden with some drinks. Here’s some appropriately smooth jazz sounds from a classic performance by the wonderful Anita O’Day recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 and used as part of the film Jazz on Summer’s Day. There are two numbers here: Sweet Georgia Brown, in three movements of contrasting style, followed by a scintillating up-tempo version of Tea for Two with its wry chase sequence that brought the house down.
And doesn’t she look fabulous in that hat?
It’s been a lovely sunny weekend and I’m feeling too lazy to blog properly, so I thought I’d resurrect and update an old post. The video clips in that older version were deleted a while ago, but have now been replaced by one long clip which gives me an excuse to replace this post about the wonderful film Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Not that I need an excuse…
At the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Mahalia Jackson (“The world’s greatest gospel singer”) played a lengthy set on the Sunday evening, and her whole concert was so good it was subsequently made available on CD. She wasn’t really a jazz singer, but she was born in New Orleans (in 1911) and her style developed in the shadow of both the jazz and blues traditions that had their origins in her home town.
Three tracks from her 1958 concert made it into the film. Two of them are the sort of exuberant up-tempo stompers typical of Southern gospel music; there’s something about that beat that sets your pulse racing and makes it almost impossible to resist clapping your hands on the off-beat. The fine example here are a jaunty finger-clicking Walk all over God’s Heaven and a highly locomotive rendition of Didn’t it Rain, a tune written by the world’s greatest composer “Trad”. Both of them have the crowd of jazz fans leaping about in the aisles.
As you can hear, Mahalia Jackson’s voice is simply phenomenal. She has so much power and emotional expressiveness that she is in a class on her own when it comes to this kind of music. In fact she gave singing lessons to the young Aretha Franklin, the one “soul “singer who came anywhere close to that quality of voice. But if you really want to hear music with from the soul, listen to Mahalia Jackson.
Although she had a number of hit records, Mahalia Jackson refused to sign for any major record label and performed throughout her life almost exclusively on gospel radio stations. I think she could easily have become a pop star if she had wanted to, but she saw her mission in life to communicate her faith to others through music. She also used a great deal of her earnings to help others by founding school bursaries and through other charitable works.
As in this concert, she usually performed with a backing band of piano, bass and organ but despite the lack of a drummer they build up a tremendous forward momentum.
Terrific though the first two tracks undoubtedly are, what comes next and last is truly sublime. The Lord’s Prayer is such a familiar piece of text to anyone brought up in the Christian tradition that it is difficult to imagine in advance of hearing this performance that it could be sung in such a way. The contrast between this and the previous track is immense, which makes it even more effective. This is no rumbustious rabble-rouser, just a simple and pure expression of her own deep religious faith.
Almost as moving as her singing are the cuts to the audience reaction – the same people who were leaping about a few minutes earlier sit in deep and respectful contemplation. And who wouldn’t.. I’m not a religious man but there is certainly religious music that moves me very deeply, and this is a prime example.
It’s a bit early to be officially Summertime, but the exams are over, the days are long and sunny, the World Cup’s on and … well who really needs an excuse to listen to Sidney Bechet’s all-time classic 1939 BlueNote version of George Gershwin’s great song?
In the Dark 