With the end of the year stuff out of the way, it's time to get back to my little chronological jazz survey. I left off with two of the greatest icons of the bebop era, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I'll continue with some pianists and composers who began in that era.
Bud Powell
Bud Powell was to the piano what Parker and Gillespie were to their instruments, a player of incredible dexterity and speed who gobbled up time like nobody before him. Recurring health problems meant that he didn't always perform or record at his sharpest but he did leave a number of great recordings and fine compositions behind him. This is one of his finest, "Un Poco Loco", with Max Roach doing the amazing percussion work.
And this is a live clip of him playing "Get Happy" with Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke:
Thelonious Monk
Then there's Monk. He emerged in the bebop era but he didn't sound like any of the other players of the time. He is still one of the music's most unique figures. His music was off-centered and dissonant mixing tempos and working off its own peculiar logic. Many people in the 40's and 50's thought he was either crazy or a fraud. Even when they admitted there was something to the nooks and crannies of his compositions they thought his piano playing was amateurish. Today Monk's compositions are integral parts of the jazz repertoire. Several musicians have based projects, if not major parts of their careers, on exploring his music and Monk is regarded as one of the greatest composers this music ever produced and also a hell of a piano player.
His most popular composition is the ballad "Round Midnight". Here he is playing it in his own unique way:
This is his quartet live in Japan with Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, Butch Warren on bass and Frankie Dunlop on drums doing his composition "Epistrophy". Monk's piano playing may look odd but listen to how it sounds:
Herbie Nichols
Herbie Nichols was a pianist and composer who did not have the high profile of the previous two gentlemen. He went his own way in the New York scene, playing in all kinds of bands and writing music that worked in aspects of swing, Caribbean music, Dixieland and classical dissonance. He died at the age of 43 and only released a handful of records, all in a piano trio format. Later avant garde players picked up on what he did and kept his music alive with Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg and trombonist Roswell Rudd, one of Nichols' actual friends, being the biggest champions of his work. Rudd has even recorded several albums of compositions Nichols himself never got to record. This is just one example of the lively eccentricity of his music, "Step Tempest":
Showing posts with label The Jazz World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Jazz World. Show all posts
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
The Jazz World: Bird Words
Coleman Hawkins
In early dance bands, the saxophone was mainly used as a novelty instrument that made all sorts of squeaky, funny noises. That lasted until Coleman Hawkins came on the scene. Hawkins was the first man to tame the unwieldy tenor saxophone and turn it into a vehicle for melodic improvisation. His big, robust sound was the standard for the instrument. He was one of the two most influential of the great tenor players, continually refining his sound for over forty years even to the point of collaborating with younger stars like Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins.
The most famous example of what Hawkins' powers is his 1939 improvisation on his biggest commercial hit "Body And Soul", a textbook example of how to turn a familiar melody into something dazzlingly fresh:
Lester Young
I said there was another very influential early tenor player. That would be Lester Young whose singing, laid back sound was often the polar opposite of Hawkins' brawny serenading. He floated over rhythms with a relaxed, soulful grace made him a star in the Count Basie orchestra and a great compliment to the singing of Billie Holiday. He would also be an inspiration to later saxophonists like Stan Getz and Al Cohn who would refine his lighter sound into their own individual conceptions. Here he is in 1942 playing "Tea For Two":
In the 1940's a generation of musicians began to emerge with new ideas who experimented with chords, meter and time and created a newer, more cerebral sort of jazz that was often fast, complex and alienating to more traditional fans. This music came to be known as bebop and it produced some of the music's greatest figures.
Charlie Parker
First above all there was Charlie "Yardbird" or "Bird" Parker. Parker played alto sax but picked up a lot from Lester Young, putting that floating beauty through exponential increases in time and speed and creating a revolutionary sound. Here he is living up to his nickname, chirping like a madman on "Koko":
Parker fell into a cadre of like-minded musicians in New York like Dizzy Gillespie, Curly Russell, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and Max Roach who worked on their ideas on night club bandstands and developed a devoted following. Parker himself was subject to personal demons, especially heroin, but always tried to stretch himself and develop new concepts. He was fascinated by the music of Igor Stravinsky and recorded with a string orchestra, something jazz musicians rarely did back then. Fans have always been divided on this work but I've always thought that Parker's quicksilver alto really blossomed in these interesting arrangements./ Here is "April In Paris":
Dizzy Gillespie
Parker died in 1955 at the age of 34 but his colleagues kept the bop revolution going. The most important was trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie who was just as keen on intellectual experimentation of the music as Parker but had a more outgoing and humorous personality that helped make him a star with the general public. He could play with incendiary speed and power or blow the coolest of blues both in small groups or forceful big bands.
Here he is in 1965 with one of his small groups featuring James Moody on sax and flute and Kenny Barron on piano:
One of Dizzy's other achievements was to help create Afro-Cuban jazz in his 1940's big band when he added Cuban conga player Chano Pozo to his orchestra. This is one of the big songs that came out of that influence, "Manteca", performed by an international big band in 1970:
Next: The Cool
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
The Jazz World: Swing It!
The jazz musicians of New Orleans migrated north to other cities and began to influence players all over the country. Soon jazz scenes began to spring up in places like New York, Chicago and Kansas City. The musicians found work in speakeasies, night clubs and stage shows eventually coming together in large orchestras to play at places like Harlem's Cotton Club. There were any number of important bandleaders who emerged in the 1920's and 1930's like Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Cab Calloway but without question the most important was Duke Ellington.
Duke Ellington
Ellington is universally recognized as the finest composer jazz ever produced. He led his orchestra from 1923 until his death in 1974 and had a gift of producing memorable tunes that showcased the talents of all the great soloists he employed, men like Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Ben Webster, Jimmy Blanton and Paul Gonsalves. He was brilliant writing in shorter forms, coming up with classic works like "Black And Tan Fantasy", "Mood Indigo", "Satin Doll" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" but in later years he was able to expand his range, doing longer suites dedicated to Asia, Africa and the plays of Shakespeare among other subjects. In the last thirty years of his career he got to collaborate with another gifted composer, Billy Strayhorn. and to top it all off, he was an amazing piano player away from the band.
No one or two clips can do Ellington's music justice but here is a tiny sampling. First up is "It Don't Mean A Thing". Ray Nance is the first singer and violinist and Ben Webster takes the tenor solo:
And from the later days, perhaps the greatest soloist Duke ever employed, the magnificent alto player Johnny Hodges performing Strayhorn's "Isfahan" from the Far East Suite. (The holding the score bit was evidently an in joke within the band. Hodges didn't need to read the music.)
Benny Goodman
In the 1930's big band jazz, then known as Swing, became the most popular music in the country and the bandleader who led that surge was Benny Goodman, a deserving front man. Goodman's clarinet playing was superb, his band swung mightily and he had a lof of gifted soloists like trumpeter Harry James, pianist Jess Stacy and drummer Gene Krupa. Goodman also led one of the most successful small groups of the day in his trio with Lionel Hampton on vibraphone and Teddy Wilson on piano. In 1938 his band became the first jazz group to play Carnegie Hall helping legitimize the music as art.
This is the Goodman orchestra in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel doing "Sing Sing Sing" with James and Krupa featured then immediately cutting to some action by the trio with Krupa added.
Count Basie
The other great bandleader of this period I wanted to mention was Count Basie. Basie's group came out of Kansas City and was heavily steeped in the blues. His sound may have been simpler than Ellington's but it was a powerhouse, sporting a gifted blues singer named Jimmy Rushing who'll I'll discuss in a later post and one of the most influential tenor players of all time in Lester Young. Basie, like all the big band leaders, went through a fallow period after World War II as popular tastes shifted from large bands to singers but he rebounded strongly in the 1950's with a sleek but massive ensemble sound and a number of excellent tunes provided by arrangers like Frank Foster, Quincy Jones and Neal Hefti. However it was organist Wild Bill Davis, who did the arraignment of the tune that became one of the signatures of the latter day Basie band, "April In Paris":
Next Time: A couple of saxophone players and a revolution.
Duke Ellington
Ellington is universally recognized as the finest composer jazz ever produced. He led his orchestra from 1923 until his death in 1974 and had a gift of producing memorable tunes that showcased the talents of all the great soloists he employed, men like Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Ben Webster, Jimmy Blanton and Paul Gonsalves. He was brilliant writing in shorter forms, coming up with classic works like "Black And Tan Fantasy", "Mood Indigo", "Satin Doll" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" but in later years he was able to expand his range, doing longer suites dedicated to Asia, Africa and the plays of Shakespeare among other subjects. In the last thirty years of his career he got to collaborate with another gifted composer, Billy Strayhorn. and to top it all off, he was an amazing piano player away from the band.
No one or two clips can do Ellington's music justice but here is a tiny sampling. First up is "It Don't Mean A Thing". Ray Nance is the first singer and violinist and Ben Webster takes the tenor solo:
And from the later days, perhaps the greatest soloist Duke ever employed, the magnificent alto player Johnny Hodges performing Strayhorn's "Isfahan" from the Far East Suite. (The holding the score bit was evidently an in joke within the band. Hodges didn't need to read the music.)
Benny Goodman
In the 1930's big band jazz, then known as Swing, became the most popular music in the country and the bandleader who led that surge was Benny Goodman, a deserving front man. Goodman's clarinet playing was superb, his band swung mightily and he had a lof of gifted soloists like trumpeter Harry James, pianist Jess Stacy and drummer Gene Krupa. Goodman also led one of the most successful small groups of the day in his trio with Lionel Hampton on vibraphone and Teddy Wilson on piano. In 1938 his band became the first jazz group to play Carnegie Hall helping legitimize the music as art.
This is the Goodman orchestra in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel doing "Sing Sing Sing" with James and Krupa featured then immediately cutting to some action by the trio with Krupa added.
Count Basie
The other great bandleader of this period I wanted to mention was Count Basie. Basie's group came out of Kansas City and was heavily steeped in the blues. His sound may have been simpler than Ellington's but it was a powerhouse, sporting a gifted blues singer named Jimmy Rushing who'll I'll discuss in a later post and one of the most influential tenor players of all time in Lester Young. Basie, like all the big band leaders, went through a fallow period after World War II as popular tastes shifted from large bands to singers but he rebounded strongly in the 1950's with a sleek but massive ensemble sound and a number of excellent tunes provided by arrangers like Frank Foster, Quincy Jones and Neal Hefti. However it was organist Wild Bill Davis, who did the arraignment of the tune that became one of the signatures of the latter day Basie band, "April In Paris":
Next Time: A couple of saxophone players and a revolution.
Monday, November 25, 2013
The Jazz World: Beginnings
Louis Armstrong
The origins of American jazz are pretty clear cut. Coming out of the blues and dances passed down from West Africans who came to America as slaves, it began at the dawn of the 20th century as the party music played in the brothels of the Storyville district of New Orleans. There were important early figures like trumpeters Buddy Bolden, who left no surviving recordings, and Joe "King" Oliver but the music's undisputed first superstar was an Oliver protege, Louis Armstrong. The constant invention and power Armstrong showed in his playing was the high water mark of the music up to that point. He also sang in a gravelly, melodic voice that sounded as special as his pealing trumpet work. Legend has it that during one recording session he dropped his sheet music and starting making up sounds and words during his vocal break, inventing the art of scat singing. His greatest work came between 1925 and 1928 when he recorded with his small groups called the Hot Five or Hot Seven. Of those records the pinnacle is generally considered to be "West End Blues" which starts with an amazing solo trumpet cadenza and continues with some of his sweetest wordless singing.
Jelly Roll Morton
If Armstrong was the music's first great soloist, Jelly Roll Morton was its first great composer. At one time a pianist for the Storyville brothels, Morton's compositions and arrangements for his group, the Red Hot Peppers, kept the spontaneity and improvisational feel of jazz going in a written context. He wrote many tunes that became familiar in later years like "King Porter Stomp", "Wolverine Blues", "The Pearls" and "Black Bottom Stomp":
Bix Beiderbecke
From almost the exact moment that records of the New Orleans musicians began to appear, white musicians from other parts of the country listened and began to play their own takes on the sound. Almost immediately some grumbled that this music was just a pale imitation of the real thing, prettied up and diluted for a white audience. Going by the work of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, a case could be made for that but in the 1920's the first white musicians with undeniably original voices began to emerge from the Midwest and New York. That group included saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, guitarist Eddie Lang and epsciialy trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. Beiderbecke's horn had a different sound than Armstrong, sunnier and jauntier with its own sense of freedom and adventure. His most famous solo came on a recording with Trumbauer's orchestra, "Singin' The Blues:
Beiderbecke also did some composing and recorded a few piano solo pieces that were some of the first jazz works to try to pull the music away from traditional blues rhythms and into something influenced by the most progressive classical composers of the day like Ravel and Debussy. If he had continued in this vein he might have become an even more significant figure, but sadly he wouldn't live long enough to carry on. A heavy drinker, Beiderbecke died in 1931 at the age of 30. Here is one of his piano works, "In A Mist":
Fats Waller
I wanted to touch on one other big name from the 1920's, Fats Waller. Waller began working as a professional pianist at 15 and soon built a career for himself as a performer and songwriter, writing over 400 songs in some estimates, including future standards like "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Jitterbug Waltz". He was renowned as one of the great stride pianists of his day and had an outsized performing personality that made him as famous as his music. That's evident is the first actual film clip I get to put up for this series, a 1942 Soundie (a early form of music video) for "Honeysuckle Rose":
Next: The Swing Era
The origins of American jazz are pretty clear cut. Coming out of the blues and dances passed down from West Africans who came to America as slaves, it began at the dawn of the 20th century as the party music played in the brothels of the Storyville district of New Orleans. There were important early figures like trumpeters Buddy Bolden, who left no surviving recordings, and Joe "King" Oliver but the music's undisputed first superstar was an Oliver protege, Louis Armstrong. The constant invention and power Armstrong showed in his playing was the high water mark of the music up to that point. He also sang in a gravelly, melodic voice that sounded as special as his pealing trumpet work. Legend has it that during one recording session he dropped his sheet music and starting making up sounds and words during his vocal break, inventing the art of scat singing. His greatest work came between 1925 and 1928 when he recorded with his small groups called the Hot Five or Hot Seven. Of those records the pinnacle is generally considered to be "West End Blues" which starts with an amazing solo trumpet cadenza and continues with some of his sweetest wordless singing.
Jelly Roll Morton
If Armstrong was the music's first great soloist, Jelly Roll Morton was its first great composer. At one time a pianist for the Storyville brothels, Morton's compositions and arrangements for his group, the Red Hot Peppers, kept the spontaneity and improvisational feel of jazz going in a written context. He wrote many tunes that became familiar in later years like "King Porter Stomp", "Wolverine Blues", "The Pearls" and "Black Bottom Stomp":
Bix Beiderbecke
From almost the exact moment that records of the New Orleans musicians began to appear, white musicians from other parts of the country listened and began to play their own takes on the sound. Almost immediately some grumbled that this music was just a pale imitation of the real thing, prettied up and diluted for a white audience. Going by the work of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, a case could be made for that but in the 1920's the first white musicians with undeniably original voices began to emerge from the Midwest and New York. That group included saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, guitarist Eddie Lang and epsciialy trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. Beiderbecke's horn had a different sound than Armstrong, sunnier and jauntier with its own sense of freedom and adventure. His most famous solo came on a recording with Trumbauer's orchestra, "Singin' The Blues:
Beiderbecke also did some composing and recorded a few piano solo pieces that were some of the first jazz works to try to pull the music away from traditional blues rhythms and into something influenced by the most progressive classical composers of the day like Ravel and Debussy. If he had continued in this vein he might have become an even more significant figure, but sadly he wouldn't live long enough to carry on. A heavy drinker, Beiderbecke died in 1931 at the age of 30. Here is one of his piano works, "In A Mist":
Fats Waller
I wanted to touch on one other big name from the 1920's, Fats Waller. Waller began working as a professional pianist at 15 and soon built a career for himself as a performer and songwriter, writing over 400 songs in some estimates, including future standards like "Ain't Misbehavin'", "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Jitterbug Waltz". He was renowned as one of the great stride pianists of his day and had an outsized performing personality that made him as famous as his music. That's evident is the first actual film clip I get to put up for this series, a 1942 Soundie (a early form of music video) for "Honeysuckle Rose":
Next: The Swing Era
Sunday, November 17, 2013
The Jazz World: Introduction
A few people who know about my love of jazz have told me that I should put together some kind of list of Jazz artists or recordings I would recommend for someone who didn't know much about the music. In the next few days I'm going to start trying to do that but on a more ambitious scale. I'm going to start writing a series of posts about jazz artists I really love. This will cover a lot of ground so I'll posting sound clips and videos from other places on the Web, first in roughly chronological order, then branching out into some of the sub-groupings I really like such as vocalists, large ensembles and British jazz.
I want to make it clear from the beginning that this will all reflect my personal tastes and not be any attempt at a comprehensive history of the music. Professional writers like Gary Giddins and Ted Gioia have done far better books on that then I ever could. I'll be mentioning some of the bedrock figures who have to be dealt with in this music's history, but eventually it's going to come around to the people I know and enjoy the most. I know I'm going to pass over some crucial names simply because I'm not as familiar with their music as I should be or because I just plain forgot. What I do talk about should just be considered starting points. If you like some of what you hear, investigating that artist's work is invariably going to lead you to plenty of other great artists. That's the path I followed when I first really started digging into this music.
I hope to do the first post in the next few days and try to continue weekly from there (though I can barely say that with a straight face). I have enough material to do this for a while. Just looking around on YouTube I found several film clips by duos or groups I didn't dream had ever been filmed. If you read any of these posts hopefully you'll hear something that will give you a sense of the great variety in this music and make you want to seek out more..
And just as a sample, here's a 1989 clip from a Vienna concert of two people I should be returning to down the line, pianist Carla Bley and bassist Steve Swallow doing Bley's composition, "Sing Me Softly Of The Blues":
I want to make it clear from the beginning that this will all reflect my personal tastes and not be any attempt at a comprehensive history of the music. Professional writers like Gary Giddins and Ted Gioia have done far better books on that then I ever could. I'll be mentioning some of the bedrock figures who have to be dealt with in this music's history, but eventually it's going to come around to the people I know and enjoy the most. I know I'm going to pass over some crucial names simply because I'm not as familiar with their music as I should be or because I just plain forgot. What I do talk about should just be considered starting points. If you like some of what you hear, investigating that artist's work is invariably going to lead you to plenty of other great artists. That's the path I followed when I first really started digging into this music.
I hope to do the first post in the next few days and try to continue weekly from there (though I can barely say that with a straight face). I have enough material to do this for a while. Just looking around on YouTube I found several film clips by duos or groups I didn't dream had ever been filmed. If you read any of these posts hopefully you'll hear something that will give you a sense of the great variety in this music and make you want to seek out more..
And just as a sample, here's a 1989 clip from a Vienna concert of two people I should be returning to down the line, pianist Carla Bley and bassist Steve Swallow doing Bley's composition, "Sing Me Softly Of The Blues":
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