And now for something completely different. About five years ago I wrote a post aftering reading of the death, at the age of 88, of the legendary jazz musician Sam Rivers who passed away on 26th December 2011. Sam Rivers was born in 1923 and started playing professionally during the bebop era of the early 1950s. Later he evolved a unique avant garde style that was nevertheless firmly based in the jazz traditions he had grown up with. He was probably best known as a tenor saxophonist, but could also play flute, clarinet, piano and viola.
I first heard Sam Rivers on Humphrey Lyttelton’s BBC Radio Show The Best of Jazz in 1979. Humph was clearly a great admirer of Sam Rivers, especially the superb trio he formed with the brilliant Thurman Barker (drums) and Dave Holland (bass). The energy and vitality of the track he played made a lasting impression on me. The album was called Contrasts, by the way, and the track in question called Zip. I bought the album straight away. At least almost straight away, because it wasn’t the sort of record you could buy in the shops; I had to send away for it.
Anyway, I’ve now discovered that someone has posted this track on Youtube, so here it is. Enjoy!
Just this morning finally submitted some documents for a couple of proposals that I’ve been stressing over for the past couple of months, so I thought I’d relax a little bit by posting some music.
Not long ago I shared a track on which Lester Young played clarinet as opposed to his usual tenor saxophone. I got to thinking afterwards that it’s quite interesting how the clarinet has become less prominent in Jazz as the music has evolved. The old `liquorice stick’ is one of the instruments that appears in the front line in `traditional’ New Orleans Jazz (alongside trumpet and trombone) and remained a key part of bands as different styles gradually developed until the Swing Era of the 1930s. Some of the greatest big bands of that period were led by clarinetists such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Woody Herman to name but three. However, when bebop arrived on the scene in the immediate post-War era the clarinet had been almost totally eclipsed by the saxophone. Perhaps that was because bebop was largely a reaction against swing music and musicians wanted to establish a radically different musical vocabulary. The alto saxophone in particular, championed by Charlie Parker, could – at least in the hands of a virtuoso like Parker – be played at breakneck speed but also had a much edgier sound and was capable of a different range of expression. The same comments apply to the tenor saxophone, as exemplified by John Coltrane. There were exceptions of course, notably Buddy Defranco, but as modern jazz developed the saxophone remained the dominant solo instrument.
Anyway, these thoughts popped into my head the other day when I was listening to Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 which featured the great Jazz pianist Bill Evans. One of the tracks played on the programme I listened to featured Evans together with clarinetist Tony Scott taken from the album A Day in New York which was recorded in 1957. A very large proportion of my very favorite recordings derive from the late 1950s, largely because so many new directions were being explored, and this is another track that seems to be looking ahead to something beyond the bebop era. Anyway, this is the track I heard the other day. It’s called Five, and I love the way the Scott constructs his solo from the jagged fragmentary theme, at first cautiously but gradually gathering momentum until it gets fully into its groove.
Back in Cardiff I was going through my collection of old LPs and found this track on a Blue Note collection. It’s standard written by Harold Arlen called Get Happy. I hadn’t listened to it for ages and I’d forgotten how great it is. It was recorded in 1953 by a six-piece band led by trombonist Jay Jay Johnson, with Clifford Brown (trumpet), Jimmy Heath (tenor saxophone), John Lewis (piano), Percy Heath (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). They’re all great musicians, and they make a wonderfully rich ensemble sound for a small band, but the star of the show is without doubt the great Clifford Brown , whose solo is absolutely sensational. Just listen to the way he plays the bridge on his first chorus. Superb!
Not far from the hotel in which I stayed during my visit to Ghent last week is a small but pleasant jazz bar called Minor Swing. I mentioned to some colleagues as we passed by the place that it was clearly named after the tune by Django Reinhardt (who was born in Belgium). In fact it was something of a signature tune for him. Anyway, Radio 3 reminded me this morning that today (21st July) is Belgian National Day so I thought I’d mark the occasion on this blog by posting a version of Minor Swing that demonstrates Django’s superlative gift for melodic improvisation, together with violinist Stephane Grappelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.
The late great Buddy DeFranco was the musician who finally convinced me that I’d never be any good at playing the clarinet, though I still make the occasional half-hearted attempt. He nevertheless remains a musical hero of mine, not least because he was one of the few people to play clarinet in a “modern” style. I found this transcription of one of his solos on Youtube a while ago and thought I’d share it here. Twelve choruses of rhythm changes at a brisk tempo provide the foundation for a great jazz musician who unleashes a flood of improvisation. Feel free to play along at home!
Bunk Johnson was born in New Orleans way back in 1879 and he made his name playing trumpet in the very early days of jazz, including – if his own account can be believed – a stint with the legendary Buddy Bolden. He was regarded by many, including Louis Armstrong no less, as one of the top trumpeters in New Orleans in the period between 1905 and 1915. Jazz had begun 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. Bunk Johnson did not join the mass exodus to Chicago and his career faded into obscurity, ending entirely in 1931 when he had his front teeth knocked out in a brawl and could no longer play the trumpet.
However, in 1942, Bunk Johnson was rediscovered as a very old man by some young jazz fans who travelled to New Orleans and recorded him playing with a band of local musicians in the basement of a house courtesy of a new set of dentures. Despite the poor sound quality of the recording, the resulting tracks proved incredibly popular, ushering in the New Orleans Revival that began in the United States and then propagated across to Europe after the war to the extent that many revivalist bands even sedulously acquired the “recorded-in-a-garage” sound. Bunk Johnson passed away in 1947 but George Lewis, who plays clarinet on this track, carried the flag for “authentic” New Orleans jazz for many years after that, visiting Europe on many occasions. My Dad played the drums with him a few times..
P.S. I’ve always felt particularly sorry for Walter Decou, who played piano on the famous Bunk Johnson records of 1942, because apparently he was pounding away like a good ‘un but you can barely hear a note from him on any of them!
After an even more stressful day than usual I decided to have a quick look at Youtube before going home. That’s how I found this rare and priceless gem. It’s a wonderful performance of All of Me featuring one of the greatest combinations of musical talent in Jazz history, Billie Holiday and Lester Young, but it’s a discarded track that was never released on record. “Why would anyone discard such a masterpiece?”, I hear you ask. Well, that’s simply because it ran over the three minutes that could fit onto an old-style 78rpm disk. The reason it is too long is that there’s more than the usual ration of Lester Young’s tenor saxophone, in the form of a superb extended solo that is so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. This is as perfect a performance as you could hope to hear, but it is brought back down to Earth at the end by the recording engineer whose only comment from the box when the exquisite music subsides is “It’s a bit long”…
Sometime in the late Seventies I bought a vinyl LP called Jazz at the Pawnshop, which featured live performances by four veterans of the Swedish Jazz scene; Arne Domnerus (alto saxophone), Bengt Hallberg (piano), Egil Johansen (drums) and George Riedel on bass. Sadly, three of the four musicians involved are no longer with us; only George Riedel is still alive, but at least their music lives on.
The content was recorded in Stockholm over two days in December 1976 at a Jazz club on a site where a pawnshop once stood, hence the name. The album was reissued on CD in 1996 and then, just last year, somebody posted it on Youtube. That gives me an excuse to share my favourite track, which features the band not playing one of the classic bebop tunes on which they cut their teeth when they were young, but the Lil Hardin composition from a much earlier era Struttin’ with some Barbecue which was something of a vehicle for her husband, Louis Armstrong. Not, ‘Strittin’ by the way as it says on the Youtube link.
I loved this track from the moment I first heard it, from the intriguing out-of-tempo opening through a jaunty bossa nova passage, and evolving into an extended improvised exploration by Domnerus set against typically bebop-inspired patterns from the rhythm section. Modern jazz treatments of tunes from the classic era don’t always turn out well, but this one surely did. Enjoy!
The Times Higher has given me yet another reason to be disgruntled this week, in the form of an article that talks about the possible effect of the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) on “creative” subjects. What bothers me about this piece is not that it criticises the TEF – I think that’s an unworkable idea that will cause untold damage to the University system if, as seems likely, it is railroaded through for political reasons – but that the author (Nigel Carrington, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Arts London), like so many others, lazily implies that STEM disciplines are not creative. I think some of the most intensively creative people in the world are to be found in science and engineering and creativity is something we try very hard to nurture in students at Sussex University regardless of discipline.
Anyway, while feeling grumpy about this article, I remembered this video of an interview with the great jazz pianist, Bill Evans. Jazz is undoubtedly an intensely creative form, not only because it requires spontaneous real-time conversion of ideas into sounds. Evans talks with great passion and insight about creativity in music-making, but the striking thing about what he says at the very beginning about the need to analyse your subject at a very elementary level before proceeding in order to create something that’s “real” applies equally well to, e.g. theoretical physics as it does to jazz.
In the following section he reiterates this point, but also stresses the discipline imposed by a particular form and why this does not limit creativity but makes it stronger.
It’s better to do something simple that is real. It’s something you can build on. because you know what you’re doing. Whereas, if you try to approximate something very advanced and don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t build on it.
No matter how far I might diverge or find freedom in this format, it only is free insofar that it has reference to the strictness of the original form. That’s what gives it its strength.
In much the same way, theoretical physics is not made less creative because it has to obey the strict rules of mathematics but more so. This is true also in the fine arts: the more limited the canvas the more creative the artist must be, but it also applies to, e.g. engineering design. Self-teaching is important in STEM subjects too: the only really effective way of learning, e.g. physics, is by devoting time to working through ideas in your own mind, not by sitting passively in lectures.
All subjects require technical skill, but there is more to being a great jazz musician than mastery of the instrument just as there’s more to being a research scientist than doing textbook problems. So here’s to creativity wherever it is found, and let’s have a bit more appreciation for the creative aspects of science and engineering!
By way of an interlude in this busy period as term gets back underway I thought I’d post this beautiful track by the great jazz pianist Bill Evans. I remember reading somewhere that Bill Evans recorded this right at the end of a session, in 1958. It was unrehearsed, entirely improvised and done in one take. It’s based on a simple two-chord progression that subsequently appeared in Flamenco Sketches, one of the tracks on the classic Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. To my ears, Peace Piece is more redolent of the composition style of Erik Satie than any other jazz musician I can think of. Although it starts out very simply it becomes more complex and fragmented as it develops, and makes effective use of dissonance in creating tension to contrast with the rather meditative atmosphere established at the beginning. Anyway, this is one of my all-time favourite tracks by one of my all-time favourite jazz musicians so I hope you don’t mind me sharing it on here.
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In the Dark 