It’s thoroughly wet and miserably cold – especially considering it’s meant to be summer – so I’ve been looking around for something to brighten up the evening and chanced upon this piece of traditional jazz which did the trick for me. This is the kind of New Orleans style jazz band my Dad used to play the drums for, and the tune is one I actually learned to play on the clarinet so I could sit in with them once or twice so it brought back quite a few nice memories hearing it just now. It’s based on an interesting 16-bar blues theme (in contrast to the usual 12-bar variety) that was ubiquitous in early jazz, appearing in a number of different tunes. In this particular manifestation it’s called The Girls Go Crazy (About the Way I Walk).
It’s neither a famous band nor a famous recording, but I bet everyone who was there that sunny day last year in San Francisco thoroughly enjoyed the occasion, especially the band!
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.
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?
This is a recent discovery I just had to post. It was was made at a private recording session in 1943 in Kansas City, the home town of Charlie Parker. It was never released commercially and features Parker on alto saxophone with just a guitar and drum accompaniment. This recording must have been made during the musicians’ strike of 1942-44 that contributed to the fact the bebop movement (which Parker pioneered) was out of the public eye during its incubation period. Parker had moved to New York City in 1939 and was playing regularly in Harlem jazz clubs during the recording blackout, so I don’t know what he was doing back in Kansas City in 1943 to be making this track.
It’s a fascinating version of the tune calledCherokhee that Parker used as the basis of the bebop classic Ko-ko I discussed in a post last year, and which shows him already playing in a recognizably Parkeresque style, but only hinting at the harmonic adventurousness he was to develop just a year or two later; Ko-ko was first performed, I think, in 1945. Very few examples survive of his playing from this transitional period, so this is a fascinating bit of musical history as well as being a fine performance in its own right.
I couldn’t resist putting up this jaunty duet version of the old Hoagy Carmichael song “Up a Lazy River”, which I first heard over 30 years ago, not only because the (British-born) pianist George Shearing plays so wonderfully on it (listen to his little foray into Harlem Stride around 3.00), but also because it gives me a chance to pay homage to the bass player Brian Torff. Just listen to his solo (starting around 1.55) and you’ll immediately understand why he’s revered amongst jazz musicians for his incredible technique and musical imagination and why so many other double bass players are completely terrified of him!
I had the misfortune a few weeks ago to see a bit of a terrible BBC TV show called Over the Rainbow, the main aim of which seems to be to use TV License payers’ money to provide free advertising for a forthcoming West End production of the Wizard of Oz. Anyway, when I was thinking yesterday about cover versions of tunes that turned out better than the original, the tune Over the Rainbowsprang to mind. Since I’ve been on holiday today – studiously avoiding doing very much at all – I thought I’d put up some interesting jazz versions of that particular song.
There are hardly any tunes 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. I’ve picked three quite different versions of Over the Rainbow, all of which I think are brilliant despite the mawkish sentimentality of the original song.
The first is from a concert by Keith Jarrett in Tokyo in 1984. As well as being a brilliant jazz musician, Jarrett is an accomplished classical performer who, for example, made an exceptionally fine recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations a few years ago. Quite a few people seem to get put off by watching his antics at the keyboard. I can see why. I think he sometimes looks like the piano is playing him, rather than the other way around. But if his contortions bother you, just listen to the music, which is just gorgeous…
When I was still at school back in 1980 or 81 I had the good fortune to get to see the great alto saxophonist Art Pepper playing live with a band led by pianist Milcho Leviev. He played so beautifully on that concert that I became an immediate fan and tried to get hold of as many of his records as I could. I was devastated to hear just a couple of years later that he had died. Like many jazz musicians of his generation, Art Pepper had a serious drugs problem and he spent long periods in jail as a consequence. He joked that San Quentin Prison had better musicians than any establishment on Earth.
His tender, lyrical sound and graceful improvisations are beautifully represented on this track recorded with George Cables (piano) and – I think – Charlie Haden (bass) and Billy Higgins on drums.
The last one up is by the great Bud Powell. He was another musician who struggled with narcotics, but he also had serious mental illness to deal with – he suffered numerous breakdowns and was heavily medicated in an attempt treat his schizophrenia. 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 demostrated the virtuousity 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. 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. As much as I love the other two versions, this is my a favourite. By any standards, it is a masterpiece.
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In the Dark 