After a long and very trying week I thought I’d sign off for the weekend with a lovely old bit of jazz. This is what I think was Humphrey Lyttelton’s band, vintage 1950, playing a tune, On Treasure Island, that Humph almost certainly got off a copy of the gorgeous record Louis Armstrong made of this song in the 1930s, although the Lyttelton version is very different in tempo and character.
The front line of this incarnation of the Lyttelton band was the best ever: Humphrey Lyttelton himself on trumpet, Wally Fawkes on clarinet and Keith Christie on trombone. The ensemble playing after Humph’s trumpet solo, from about 1.47, is an absolutely fantastic polyphonic blend of three great soloists. Enjoy!
Well, the British Summer has arrived at last. It’s raining. The weather reminded me of little number I posted some time ago by Tommy Flanagan, one of the most consistently enjoyable but underrated Jazz pianists of all time. So naturally I decided to post it again. Tommy Flanagan (who died in 2001) was probably best known as the long-time accompanist of Ella Fitzgerald but he also played on a number of really important Jazz albums with Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, to name just two. He also loved to play within the classic Jazz piano trio format with George Mraz (bass) and Kenny Washington (drums). Here they are playing a nice tune by the great Billy Strayhorn, called Raincheck…
I haven’t posted any Jazz for a while and given the apparently controversial nature of one of my recent posts, what could be better than a track called I’m Prayin’ Humble?
This Gospel-influenced Swing Era classic was recorded in 1938 by Bob Crosby’s Orchestra and it features the red hot plunger-muted trumpet of Sterling Bose. For those of you who weren’t aware Bob Crosby had a brother called Harry who went by the nickname of Bing. Anyway, his band (Bob’s not Bing’s) had a very distinctive sound all of its own, and some fine soloists.
I just heard the news that Ornette Coleman has passed away at the age of 85. He was one of the true innovators of Jazz and his influence on the development of this music over the last 50 years has been absolutely immense. I don’t have the words to pay adequate tribute to the either the man or his music, so I’ll just highlight two tracks from my favourite album of his, which was recorded Live at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm in 1965, and was proclaimed “Record of the Year” the following summer in Downbeat magazine. This features a trio of Coleman on alto sax, David Izenzon on bass, and Charles Moffit on bass. 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 just a few years earlier, but this album is, for me, when Ornette Coleman underwent the transition to greatness.
The track European Echoes 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. On the other hand 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 discovered the instrument and was in the process of finding out what it could do; 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 amazing music. 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 European Echoes was the track that convinced me that Ornette Coleman was a genius.
Though from the same album, Faces and Places is quite a different kettle of fish. It goes like the clappers right from the start, with some terrific work on the drums by Moffit, skittering along on the cymbals with interludes of powerful rapid-fire accents on the skins. Fantastic stuff.
I’ve decided that I’m going to spend this evening listening to Ornette Coleman records and drinking to his memory.
As regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will know, among the various things I write about apart from The Universe and Stuff is my love of Jazz. I don’t often get the chance to combine music with physics in a post so I’m indebted to George Ellis for drawing my attention to this fascinating little video showing a visualisation of the effects of quantum entanglement:
The experiment shown involves pairs of entangled photons. Here is an excerpt from the blurb on Youtube:
The video shows images of single photon patterns, recorded with a triggered intensified CCD camera, where the influence of a measurement of one photon on its entangled partner photon is imaged in real time. In our experiment the immediate change of the monitored mode pattern is a result of the polarization measurement on the distant partner photon.
You can find out more by clicking through to the Youtube page.
While most of my colleagues were completely absorbed by the pictures, I was fascinated by the choice of musical accompaniment. It is in fact Blue Piano Stomp, a wonderful example of classic Jazz from the 1920s featuring the great Johnny Dodds on clarinet (who also wrote the tune) and the great Lil Armstrong (née Hardin) on piano, who just happened to be the first wife of a trumpet player by the name of Louis Armstrong.
So at last I’ve found an example of Jazz entangled with Physics!
P.S. We often bemoan the shortage of female physicists, but Jazz is another field in which women are under-represented and insufficiently celebrated. Lil Hardin was a great piano player and deserves to be much more widely appreciated for her contribution to Jazz history.
Over thirty years ago I wandered into Windows shop in Newcastle and found an LP called Blues Pour Flirter. It was recorded in Paris in 1962 and features Don Byas on tenor saxophone. I didn’t care much for the title, especially when I looked at the listing to find that there wasn’t a single blues among the tracks – they’re all ballads. I bought the album anyway and am glad I did because Don Byas plays beautifully throughout, and one of the tracks has been a particular favourite of mine ever since.
Some of the tracks involve a big studio orchestra including strings and woodwinds but my favourite has Don Byas on tenor saxophone accompanied by a rhythm section of Christian Garros on drums, Pierre Sim on bass and George Arvanitas on piano. They play a ravishing version of the Jerome Kern standard Smoke Gets InYour Eyes, which someone has had the good grace to put on YouTube. It seems this and some of the other tracks on the album I bought way back when have been reissued on another album.
I love the huge sound Don Byas produces as he plays this tune, like a lion playing with a cub. At one point it seems like he’s going to tear it apart but it all ends peacefully. How I wish I could play like this!
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the death of the great saxophonist Charlie Parker (“Bird”) on 12th March 1955. I’ve written quite a few posts relating to Charlie Parker over the years but today has provided a good excuse to spend my lunchtime writing another one, this time featuring one of my favourite tracks from one of my favourite albums. First released in 1952 but in fact recorded in two separate sessions in 1949 and 1950, the album Bird and Diz was actually the last studio album made under the joint leadership of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the two main architects of the bebop revolution; the track I’ve picked has the added advantage of featuring another great musical genius on piano, Thelonious Monk.
The Charlie Parker composition Bloomdido is yet another of his variations on the blues, though this one is a bit less intricate than some of the others he wrote. Here are the chords for Bloomdido:
You can see that the progression is based around the standard three chords of a blues in B♭. The foundation is a “tonic” chord (T) based on the root note of whatever key it’s played in, in this case B♭. This sometimes a basic triad consisting of the first, third and five notes of a major scale starting on that note or, as in this example, including the dominant 7th so it’s B♭7. The next chord is the subdominant chord (S), shifting things up by a perfect fourth relative to the tonic, in this case an E♭7 and then finally we have the dominant (D) which brings us up by a fifth from the original root note, in this case F7.
The basic blues sequence in B♭ would be four bars of B♭7 (T), two of E♭7 (S), back to B♭7 (T) for two, then the characteristic bluesy cadence returning to two bars of B♭7 (T) via one bar each of F7 (D) and E♭7 (S). The sequence for Bloomdido has a few alterations, including a characteristic turnaround at the end instead of the tonic, but is otherwise fairly recognizable. I guess the first part of the title is a play on the blues origin too, though I wonder if the second part suggests that some of the alterations are inspired by the A-section of the Juan Tizol standard Perdido?
Some people tell me they find Charlie Parker’s music “too technical” and that somehow if music “needs to be explained” it’s not good music. I don’t understand that attitude at all. I find this music so fascinating and exciting to listen to that I want to try to dig a little bit into it and find out what’s going underneath the surface. It’s particularly striking what a difference a few substitutions and passing chords can make to the overall harmonic “feel” of a piece like this compared to a standard blues sequence, for example. But you don’t need to study the chords to appreciate the sheer beauty of the music that Charlie Parker built on these harmonic foundations; his solo on this track, as on so many others he recorded in his short life, is just sublime even if you don’t realise how hard it is to play! I guess it all depends whether your way of enjoying a thing is to sit back and let it wash over you, or for it to inspire you to find out more. Many of the physicists I know are deeply interested in music. Perhaps that’s because they’re the sort of people who don’t just think “wow that’s beautiful”, they tend to think “wow that’s beautiful – how does it work?”.
Charlie Parker and Albert Einstein died in the same year, just over a month apart, the former in March 1955 and the latter in April. They were two very different geniuses but it’s as difficult to imagine physics without Einstein as jazz without Bird.
I couldn’t resist reblogging this wonderful letter from one great saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, to another, Coleman Hawkins.
The letter was written in 1962. You can find here on Youtube a recording of the two of them playing the great Jerome Kern tune All The Things You Are at the Newport Jazz Festival just a few months later in summer 1963. The title seems to match the sentiments of the letter rather nicely!
Do read this, a touching letter from Sonny Rollins to Coleman Hawkins in 1962 (from the website www.jazzclef.com). The greatest players possess not only self-discipline and powers of concentration, but generally, great humility.
A very busy day back in Sussex meant that I had no time for a post until I finished lecturing at 6pm, so there’s just time for a bit of music before I head home. I thought I’d put up another track by Humphrey Lyttelton, from the same concert at the Royal Festival Hall in July 1951 sponsored by the National Federation of Jazz Organizations (NFJO) from which I posted The Dormouse some time ago. This is an excellent performance of a blues called It makes my love come down, which Humph probably transcribed from the classic original recording by the greatest female blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith. Again it shows the Lyttelton band’s front line in fine fettle, especially when they come together for the last couple of choruses.
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In the Dark 