I just noticed that a few days ago someone posted this lovely old blues on Youtube. It’s by one of my all-time favourite blues piano players, Little Brother Montgomery, who died in 1985 aged 79. He was self-taught (as many of the great jazz and blues musicians were) and was such a quick learner that he was playing professionally by the time he was 11.
He toured the UK and Europe quite regularly in the 1960s and made many recordings here, including some wonderfully relaxed music recorded at the Sussex home of eccentric jazz enthusiast Francis Wilford Smith, a marvellous old character who passed away a few months ago in 2009. I mention this because I have an old LP that features Tremblin’ Blues by Little Brother Montgomery, recorded on the Magpie label. That one is much slower than the one here and is punctuated by chuckles from the pianist, suggesting that he might have been just a little bit inebriated at the time. This one’s a bit crisper, free of giggles, but still a lovely performance.
It’s been a pretty exhausting few weeks, but now we’ve reached the end of teaching term. Not that I’ve got nothing to do, but I should be able to concentrate on writing up a few papers that I’ve struggling with for many months.
Anyway by way of a celebration, and to correct for the fact that I haven’t posted much music recently, here are two totally different versions of a great tune by Herbie Hancock called Cantaloupe Island. The original recording of this came (made on June 17 1964) appeared on the album Empyrean Isles which came out on the Blue Note Records label. Its instantly catchy riff and fine solo playing turned it into a big hit, and it quickly became a standard.
The first video clip features the original personnel of Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums) and Freddie Hubbard (trumpet) but with the addition of the great tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. It was recorded during a special concert in 1985 to celebrate the Blue Note label. It’s got a similar groove to the original version, but the live performance allows the players to stretch out a lot more than on the original, so it’s about twice as long.
The second rendition also features Herbie Hancock on piano (and other keyboards), but it’s totally different. Taken at a faster tempo, and firmly in the style of Jazz-rock Fusion that Hancock gravitated towards later in his career, it features Pat Metheney (on electric guitar), Dave Holland (bass) and Jack de Johnette on drums. They’re all great, but the drummer on this track is sensational! I saw Jack de Johnette playing years ago – at the Jazz Cafe, I think – and I couldn’t believe the speed of his hands and the immense drive he generated even while playing complicated patterns. Awesome.
PS. I’ve used the spelling I believe to be correct, as that’s how it’s written on the original Blue Note record (of which I have a copy). I’ve seen many variants, though, including those on the youtube clips shown here.
Being a bit busy last week I didn’t have time to celebrate Mardi Gras or, as it’s known here in Britain, Shrove Tuesday. I was fresh out of shroves last Tuesday anyway.
Last year at this time I blogged a bit about Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, the home of Jazz and that came to mind again when I found the following clip on Youtube. It’s from an experimental film made in the 1950s called Cinerama Holiday which involved shooting the film using three cameras and projecting the results onto a curved screen to make the viewer feel in the middle of the action. There was also an early attempt at surround sound. Interesting though this is as a bit of film history, the thing that caught my eye was the little bit of Jazz history it captures.
Jazz began with the marching bands that performed in New Orleans but then largely moved into the bordellos of Storyville, the biggest (legal) red light district in the history of the United States. When Storyville was closed down in 1917 most professional jazz musicians lost their only source of regular income. However, a few years later, in 1919, the United States Senate proposed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol for human consumption and ushered in the era of Prohibition. This turned Chicago into a bootlegger’s paradise and jazz musicians flocked there to perform in the numerous speakeasies. That’s why the great New Orleans Jazz records of the 1920s were all made in Chicago and it also caused the music to evolve in new directions.
However, not all Jazz musicians left New Orleans. Many stayed there and kept the music going in authentic style. One of the characters who did so was the legendary Oscar “Papa” Celestin who led various bands through the 20s and 30s, including one called The Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra. Everything was an orchestra in those days, come to think of it. These bands kept going through the depression but never really achieved great commercial success until the traditional Jazz revival of the 1950s.
It must have been strange for Papa Celestin to have become a celebrity in his old age – he was born way back in 1884 – but that’s what happened in 1955 when he appeared in this film. I never knew that he’d appeared on the big screen and it’s great to see him in the flesh, even if the Cinerama format doesn’t lend itself to Youtube particularly well. He turns out to have been quite a showman and is clearly having a lot of fun in the “hold that tiger” chorus. I would love to have seen these guys play live. I bet they were a blast!
The tune they’re playing is another New Orleans flag-waver called Tiger Rag. This was first recorded in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and its composition is credited to Nick Larocca and Larry Shields who played with that band. There is a considerable argument about who actually wrote it, and the first section is definitely taken from a dance called the quadrille that was popular in New Orleans around the turn of the century, but it’s too ancient now to matter much anyway.
You can find countless renditions of Tiger Rag on record and on the net, but this is just a bit special. I hope you like it.
I awoke this morning to news of the death of Sir John Dankworth (on Saturday 6th February) at the age of 82. I won’t write a long post about him today as the newspapers and television have been filled with glowing detailed tributes that do greater justice to his many achievements than I could possibly do. However, there is a special place in my heart for Jazz musicians, do I couldn’t let this sad event pass without paying a small tribute here.
John Dankworth was born in 1927 and started playing Jazz clarinet as a teenager in the 1940s, largely inspired by Benny Goodman. However, he soon came under the spell of Charlie Parker who was leading the way towards a new, “modern” kind of Jazz called bebop. In the early 1950s, the British jazz scene was split in two hostile camps, the traditionalists (exemplified at that time by Humphrey Lyttelton‘s band) and the modernists (exemplified by the lovely band that John Dankworth put together in 1952). The mutual loathing of the fans of these two kinds of music often erupted in the form of pitched battles which prefigured the fights between “mods” and “rockers” in the 1960s. You can find a fine example of John Dankworth with his 7-piece band (vintage 1950) here, playing a Charlie Parker tune called Marmaduke and showing the Parker influence clearly during his alto sax solo.
As I’ve often mentioned on this blog, my Dad played the drums with various jazz bands over the years but was firmly rooted in the traditionalist camp. I remember him telling me how furious he and his friends were when Humphrey Lyttelton’s marvellous trombonist Keith Christie defected to John Dankworth’s band in the 50s. It was like a Newcastle player signing for Sunderland. However, despite this treason, even diehard traddies like my Dad never had personal animosity towards John Dankworth, who was universally admired for his technical playing ability, encyclopedic knowledge of music and, above all, kindly and warm personality. But then musicians rarely think the same way that their fans do. Humph was a great admirer of John Dankworth’s music as, incidentally, was Benny Goodman of Charlie Parker’s…
Everyone who got to meet John Dankworth – which I did only once, and only very briefly – immediately came to the conclusion that he was a class act. A few days ago I quipped about how few remaining National Treasures we have in Britain. How could I have forgotten John Dankworth? Now he’s gone too.
He broke up his small group around 1952 or so to concentrate on running a big band, which gave him the opportunity to develop his talents as an arranger. During the 60s and 70s he became a prolific writer of TV and film music, including the original theme tune for Tomorrow’s World. However, it’s his partnership with Cleo Laine that I guess people will remember best. He hired her as a singer for his small band in 1951. . They married in 1958 and remained together for over 50 years, until separated by John’s death. She was (and is) a feisty lady, but you could tell whenever you saw them together at any time that John loved her very much.
Anyway, let’s go out on a high note with this lovely version of George Gershwin’s great tune Lady be Good. John Dankworth takes a back seat – as he often did when Cleo was singing – but the band is in great form. And if you didn’t realise what a terrific vocalist Cleo Laine was, then pin back your lugholes around 2 minutes in where she demonstrates a range and level of control that would put many opera singers to shame.
Last Friday I went as usual with a bunch of Cardiff astronomers to the local pub, The Poet’s Corner, for a traditional end-of-the-week drink or two. This is by no means the most upmarket hostelry in the vicinity of the School of Physics & Astronomy, but it’s quite friendly and serves pretty good beer. The older generation have been finding their way there after work each Friday for some time now, but more recently we’ve found quite a few of our postgrads ending up there too, usually playing pool while the oldies indulge in a chinwag.
Last week, I was a bit surprised to bump into a fellow astro-blogger and Cardiff PhD student , Rob Simpson (orbitingfrog), in the pub. I’m one of the regulars, but he’s not usually there. It turned out it was a special occasion and he was celebrating, as he’d just been offered a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oxford starting in March. I mention this partly to offer my congratulations on here – well done Rob! – and partly to demonstrate that despite all the doom and gloom about STFC there are still opportunities for talented people to carve out a career in UK astronomy. As long as they finish writing up their thesis, that is…
It was interesting to chat with Rob about his blog, something I rarely get the chance to do. I don’t know many bloggers personally. His site has been around much longer than mine, he gets way more readers than me, and I also think our audiences are quite different.
The number of people reading my blog has been growing steadily since I started and I now average about 1000 unique hits a day, few compared with many sites, but many more than I would have anticipated when I started. However, on top of this trend there are large fluctuations depending on what I’m posting about. All the recent doom and gloom about STFC generated a lot of readers, no doubt in the same way that bad news sells newspapers, as did the ongoing story of Mark Brake of which more, perhaps, soon. Moreover, some of my referrals come from very peculiar places. A couple of my jazz and poetry pieces are now linked from wikipedia articles, although who put them there I don’t know. I’m flattered, of course, but just hope that nobody actually thinks I’m some kind of expert. Generally speaking I’m very surprised that people read this sort of post at all, but I guess it’s not the same people that read the more obviously science-based posts.
However, there is at least one astronomer that reads the jazz and poetry posts too, and that’s another blogger called Sarah Kendrew (her blog is here; she’s a postdoc in the Netherlands). We had a little electronic chat a few days ago, during which I discovered that she plays the oboe and was interested to know if there’s any jazz on that instrument. Jazz owes at least part of its origin to the marching bands of New Orleans which typically used army surplus musical instruments – trumpet, trombone, clarinet, etc. When jazz moved off the streets and into the bordellos of Storeyville, pianos were added, the portable brass bass or tuba replaced by a double string bass, and individual bass and snare drums were incorporated in a drum kit. Later on, saxophones became increasingly popular in jazz groups of various sizes, and so on. As the music developed and diversified I think pretty much every instrument there is has been used to play some form of Jazz. For some reason, though, the oboe never caught on as a jazz instrument. I don’t know why. Answers on a postcard.
This got my curiosity going, so I hunted around and found this video on Youtube of Yusef Lateef playing oboe in 1963 with the Adderley Brothers (Julian, also known as “Cannonball”, and Nat). I’d never seen it before, and although I don’t think Lateef sounds all that fluent, it’s a really interesting sound and I’m very grateful to Sarah for prodding me in it’s direction. The tune is called Brother John.
P.S. If anyone wants to challenge me to find a bit of jazz involving an instrument of their choice, please feel free!
Walking past a Jazz club during my recent trip to Copenhagen – sadly, I didn’t have time to go in – I remembered the many times I’d heard the great Danish bass player Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (known universally to Jazz fans as NHØP) playing there in the past. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2005, at the age of 58, bringing to a close a career that had started when he was only 17. He was an incredible virtuoso, playing his unwieldy instrument in an astonishingly nimble fashion. As a result he was number one choice as accompanist whenever leading jazz artists toured his native Denmark where he remained most of his life, despite frequent invitations to join big name bands abroad. Although he appeared quite frequently on TV in the United Kingdom with Oscar Peterson in the 1970s, he never really became as widely known as he should have been given what a great musician he was.
I looked around on youtube to find an appropriate example of his playing, and found this superlative performance which I’d never seen before and which also offers a fine helping of the great Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone. He will be 80 later this year and is still playing with the immense drive and imagination that he has shown since he began his career at the age of 11. He also wrote the tune, St Thomas, which has a strong caribbean feel to it, and which is based on a song from the Virgin Islands that his mother sang to him when he was a child. I’ve seen him play a number of times live, including at Ronnie Scott’s club in London and at the Royal Festival Hall, and wherever it was he always set the place on fire.
I hope the lilting calypso beat, infectiously happy tune and, most of all, superb playing by every member of the band here will give you as warm a feeling as it did me when I first heard it. The other members of the quartet alongside Sonny Rollins are Kenny Drew on piano and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums, but listen out for NHØP’s fantastic bass solo, starting around 4:41. Brilliant.
The title of this isn’t meant to reflect the state of science funding. It’s just that it’s a bleak and freezing January and I thought we could probably all do with a bit of an injection of happiness. If Louis Armstrong can’t do that for you, then nobody can. OK, so it’s a far cry from the exhilirating adventurousness of the trumpet playing on his early recordings, but he was an old man when this was recorded and had already more than paid his dues. Anyway he always saw himself as much as an entertainer as a musician, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I just love the infectiously swinging way he sings on this track, and I hope it brings a smile to your face as it does to mine every time I see it.
This is the great man, recorded in 1968, singing a tune from Walt Disney’s film The Jungle Book, which came out the year before. Take it away, Satchmo!
I used to have a wonderful old record of this tune by Louis Armstrong which I loved to bits (you can hear it here if you’re interested), and it’s actually one of the tunes on a CD my Dad recorded many years ago, but I found this spellbinding version by the great Ray Charles and it’s become my favourite rendition. If you like it half as much as I do, then I like it twice as much as you…
As you probably noticed, I’m studiously avoiding posting anything serious until the holidays are over so as to avoid spoiling anyone’s New Year with even more bad news. I’ll get back to the doom and gloom shortly, of course. However, in the meantime, here’s a clip of the man who taught me everything I know about Jazz, the great Louis Balfour. I didn’t manage to acquire his dress sense or hairstyle though.
Now, does anyone know how to buy a subscription to Wrong Note magazine?
Sun Ra, one of the most extraordinary composers and bandleaders of the 20th Century, was born Herman Poole Blount in Bimingham, Alabama, on 22nd May 1914. From the 1950s, until his death in 1993, he led various combinations of musician in bands with various permutations of names involving the word Arkestra, such as the Blue Universe Arkestra and the Solar Myth Arkestra. He himself played keyboards, sometimes solo and sometimes with huge bands of over 30 musicians; his music touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz. He was also one of the first musicians, in any genre to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.
He never achieved mainstream commercial success, but was a prolific recording artist with a cult following, partly fuelled by his outrageous claims to have been born not on Earth but on Saturn and the fact that much of his music was to do with space travel. Quoted in Jazziz magazine
They really thought I was some kind of kook with all my talk about outer space and the planets. I’m still talking about it, but governments are spending billions of dollars to go to Venus, Mars, and other planets, so it’s no longer kooky to talk about space
Quite. In fact, Sun Ra developed a complex performing identity based on his music, “cosmic” philosophy, and poetry. He abandoned his birth name, took on the persona of Sun Ra (Ra being the ancient Egyptian god of the sun), and often dressed in the style of an ancient Egyptian pharoah, as in the video clip. In other words, he was very odd.
At this point you’re probably thinking this is all a bit “New Age” and heading in the direction of Charlie Parker‘s Private Hell, one of my favourite Gary Larson cartoons:
However, although I admit Sun Ra’s music is eclectic, outrageous and sometimes downright mystifying, it also has a marvellous coherence to it maintained as his style evolved over four decades and is consistently imbued with a powerful sense of the Jazz tradition. In fact, I think Charlie Parker would have approved. I know I do! Anyway, whatever I think, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for generations and long may it continue to do so. The world needs more of his kind.
Here’s a typically psychedelic number, Calling Planet Earth.
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In the Dark 