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The Best “Where Songs Come From” Story

11/23/2021

In the conclusion to my first book on happy musical accidents, I gathered statements by 20 songwriters about where their songs came from. To a person, they claimed they didn’t write their songs, but rather, someone or something else did: smoke, the ancients, spirits, ghosts, God, nightmares, whatever.

Some examples:

Carole King: “The song was written by something outside myself, through me.”

Hank Williams: “People don’t write music. It comes to you. You sit there and wait and it comes to you.”[1]

Then along comes Reverend Gary Davis, who adds to this consensus view in, well, the funniest of all such stories, courtesy of Dave Van Ronk in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Reverend Davis, a blues and gospel singer proficient on guitar from Durham, North Carolina, settled in New York City in the late 1940s and influenced numerous musicians in the Greenwich Village “folk” crowd in the 1950s and 1960s.

Up-and-coming folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, with ties to Greenwich Village, had selected one of Gary’s tunes “Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way)” for their first Warner Brothers album Peter, Paul, and Mary (1962).

To get his rights in order, Gary had to sign a contract with the Warner-associated publisher Harms-Whitmark, which decided to turn the signing into a media event. They invited reporters from all the trade papers, along with a handful of old-time songwriters on their roster.

They were all seated around this long table, and Rev. Davis was seated in the center, and the ceremonial signing was about to happen. The flash bulbs were popping and . . . just as they were about to hand Gary the golden pen to sign the contract, someone asked the formal question “Reverend Davis, are you the author of this song?”

Gary paused a dramatic pause, and in his preacher’s voice announced: “No, I did not write that song.” No one knew what to do. The reporters were scribbling madly, elderly executives were popping nitro pills all around the table. And then Gary spoke again: “It was revealed to me in a dream!”[2]

CODA
Paul McCartney for one would understand exactly where Reverend Davis was coming from. The former Beatle woke up one morning with a fully formed song in his head. It was so good, he hawked it around to all his friends, asking what it was: “Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”

BBC Radio named “Yesterday” the best song of the 20th century.

NOTES

Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents, Book One (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2017), 133–7.
Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2013), 139.

Photo credit: Adobe Stock / Yevhen

The Sinatra-Bowie Connection

10/25/2021

At dinner one night in 1968, singer-songwriter Paul Anka heard his pal Frank Sinatra announce, “I’m getting out of the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.”

Sinatra’s inestimable biographer James Kaplan continues the story:

A couple years earlier on vacation . . . Anka had heard a French pop song called “Comme d’habitude” (As usual) . . . Now he thought he could turn the melody into a Sinatra song:

I started metaphorically, “And now the end is near.” I read a lot of periodicals, and I noticed everything was “my this” and “my that” . . . And Frank became the guy for me to use to say that. I used words I never use. “I ate it up and spit it out.” But that’s the way he talked.

At least it was the way he talked when he was trying to sound tough . . . Anka thinking the new lyric was “all him,” phoned Frank: “I’ve got something really special for you.”

Sinatra had misgivings. The song “really had nothing to do with my life whatsoever,” he would later say . . . “Every time I get up to sing that song I grit my teeth, because I hate boastfulness in others. I hate immodesty, and that’s how I feel every time I sing the song.”

Still, his inner circle convinced him it could make a good single, and [on December 30, 1967], with Bill Miller conducting a forty-piece orchestra, Frank recorded “My Way” in one take.[1]

Meanwhile, across the pond in England, another singer-songwriter several years away from superstardom was putting songs together for his next album Hunky Dory. Ken Pitt, his manager at the time, asked young David Bowie to write English lyrics to—you guessed it—“Comme d’habitude” by Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux.

Bowie did as he was told and he titled it “Even a Fool Learns to Love,” but he was stopped dead in his tracks when Paul Anka’s English-language version by Frank Sinatra hit the airwaves.

As Bowie’s drummer Woody Woodmansey later recalled:

This had pissed David off, so he decided to write his own version, not ripping it off but using similar chord sequences. He said [his song] was about a young girl’s view of the modern world and how confusing it was. In the song she’s watching a film and unable to relate to either reality or the film. The film tells her there’s a better life somewhere—but she doesn’t have access to it.[2]

Bowie titled his version “Life on Mars” and it became side A, track 4, on Hunky Dory released in December 1971. Supported by the single “Changes”—the memorable “ch-ch-ch-changes”—the album sold reasonably well on its initial release, without being a major success.

Six months later, after the commercial breakthrough of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona, the Hunky Dory album became a hit, climbing to number three in the UK.

Moreover, the belatedly released June 1973 “Life on Mars” single shot to number three on the UK chart and stayed there 13 weeks. No matter how the “Life on Mars” single was thought of at the time, both public and critical opinion today is through the proverbial rock ’n’ roll roof, with some critics placing the song on all-time top 100 great lists.

Since it’s the Sinatra angle here that is of the most interest to me, one can only lament the missed opportunity by someone to have arranged a joint appearance of the two singers on a national TV show. Saturday Night Live? The Tonight Show?

Ziggy Stardust could have sung “My Way” and Ol’ Blue Eyes “Life on Mars.” Now that would have been something.

NOTES

James Kaplan, Sinatra: The Chairman (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), 779.
Woody Woodmansey with Joel Mciver, Spider from Mars: My Life With Bowie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 101–102.

Photo credits: Frank Sinatra, 1957, Capitol Records; David Bowie, 1974, ABC Television.

Another Happy Musical Accident from John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

9/16/2021

On the basis of the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album (Impulse!, 1963), music historian Will Friedwald concluded:

Hartman is a great singer, beloved of fans, critics, and, perhaps, more importantly, entire generations of singers, most of whom have never heard more than six tracks by him [from the Coltrane& Hartman masterpiece album].[1]

In Serendipity Doo-Dah Book One, I discussed how the “My One and Only Love” track from the above album came about as an accidental lapse by Hartman on the first run-through. The singer was so transfixed by Coltrane’s tenor sax solo that he completely forgot to come back in for his vocal at the close of the recording, which necessitated a do-over, resulting in the classic performance now known by everyone.[2]

Another happy accident took place on that date as well. On the ride out from Manhattan to Rudy Van Gelder’s studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to record the six planned selections, the driver turned the car radio on, and there was the voice of Nat King Cole singing Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”

Upon hearing the song, Hartman exclaimed, “Man! This is one of the great tunes of all time.”

Coltrane responded, “Do you know it?”

He did.

“Lush Life” was the second tune recorded that day, and not surprisingly, it was a classic, an archetypical reading that used the Cole version as a template in terms of tempo and overall format.[3]

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman became the one recording that exposed the most people to Strayhorn’s lovely song, all because the car radio was tuned to the right station.

CODA
Coltrane certainly knew “Lush Life”—he had recorded an instrumental version for Prestige in January, 1958, released on his album Lush Life three years later.

NOTES

Will Frieidwald, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 163.
Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2017), 75–6.
Will Friedwald, The Great Albums, 166–7.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 7

11/30/2020

JAZZ SCORES BIG
Ever since the 1930s, jazz has been a staple of the silver screen, spotlighted in countless nightclub scenes, musicals, and film biographies. However, jazz was not used to score feature films until the early 1950s. Two notable examples are Clash by Night (1952) and The Wild Ones (1954). In 1958, more feature films had integral jazz scores than ever.

Not surprisingly, West Coast jazz dominated such film soundtracks, as in Hot-Car Girl (Cal Tjader), I Want to Live (Gerry Mulligan), Kings Go Forth (Pete Condoli), Sweet Smell of Success (Chico Hamilton), T-Bird Gang (Shelly Manne), and Touch of Evil (Henry Mancini).

Two films produced and distributed in France in 1958 not only broke new ground but set the standard for jazz-scored feature films for years to come. And Miles Davis was the talent behind one of them, Elevator to the Gallows (known in the US as Frantic).

Miles and his small group improvised the score to Gallows while watching shots of the film, one of the few times in western cinema history since the silent era this had been done for a feature film. This was also the first time Miles recorded modal (or near-modal) music; the 10 musical segments produced were based neither on written themes nor harmonic patterns.

The other groundbreaking French film of 1958, No Sun in Venice (US title), contained an exquisite jazz score written by John Lewis and played by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Each tune, memorable in its own right, perfectly mirrored the screen visual, making it one of the finest motion picture jazz scores ever written.

Although the film was not widely seen in the US, the soundtrack album received five stars in DownBeat and sold well. The Venice tunes became a constant in the MJQ concert repertoire for the next three decades.

The following year West Coast jazzmen provided the score for the 12th remake of Tarzan, removing once and for all any doubt that jazz was suitable background music for feature films.

Finally, 1958 was the only year that the long-running Newport Jazz Festival was ever featured in a documentary, Jazz on a Hot Summer’s Day.

JAZZ HITS TV WITH A BANG
Of all media in the 1950s, television with its various biases was the least likely to present jazz. True, variety and game shows featured jazz-like show bands, and jazz players appeared occasionally on the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen shows or, perhaps, on Sunday morning, but that was about it. The TV picture began to change in 1958.

In the summer of that year, a national trial run was given to the West Coast-produced TV show Stars of Jazz, which headlined both West Coast (Stan Kenton) and East Coast (Billy Taylor) musicians.

That autumn, a big breakthrough came in the form of Peter Gunn, a jazz-fan detective who hung around a jazz club called Mother’s. Scored by Henry Mancini and played by West Coast musicians, Gunn was the first TV series in which jazz was fully integrated with the dramatic action.

The Peter Gunn theme even became a hit single! Not surprisingly (and fortunately for jazz fans) the show spawned imitations. Count Basie rushed into the studio to record a jazz theme for M-Squad, and a year later Duke Ellington did the same for Asphalt Jungle, another big-city crime TV series.

JAZZ ON THE ROAD . . . AND CAMPUS
This was the year of the Dharma Bums and the beatniks, the year Jack Kerouac eulogized the “raw wild joy” of jazz in On the Road. Thousands of teenagers sported sunglasses, wore black, toted bongos, and bought jazz albums for the first time.

Coffeehouses sprouted next to college campuses, where students sipped espresso and listened to poetry readings accompanied by jazz. The beatnik movement briefly legitimized the marriage between poetry and jazz. Chicago deejay Ken Nordine captured the passing fad on the best-selling LP Word Jazz for MCA (three stars, DownBeat).

For the first time since the 1920s (the flapper era) and the 1930s/1940s (the big band era), jazz was once again the music of a popular youth rebellion.

For all the above reasons, jazz was big business for the first time since the 1930s. More jazz records were sold than ever, club dates and concert tours were on the upswing, and jazz was on radio and TV and at the movies.

The stage was set for a general jazz revival in the early 1960s. Jazz had recovered from its late 1940s/early 1950s doldrums and survived the initial shock of rock and roll.

By any measure, 1958 was quite a year for jazz, one of its finest ever.

1958 CLASSIC RECORD ALBUMS

Relaxin’
Miles Ahead
Something else
Milestones
Soultrane
Brilliant Corners
Monk’s Music
Something Else!
You Get More Bounce
Way Out West
Meets the Rhythm Section
For Real!
Grooveyard
All Morning Long
Six Pieces of Silver
Sonny’s Crib
Blue Lights
K. Burrell with J. Coltrane
Freedom Suite
Sermon
Getz/Johnson-Operahouse
Roy, Dizzy and Sweets
My Fair Lady
West Side Story
Such Sweet Thunder
The Atomic Mr. Basie
Sing a Song of Basie
Come Fly with Me
Duke Ellington Songbook
Lady in Satin
Brubeck in Europe
Concert by the Sea
Muted Jazz
Burnished Brass
But Not for Me
I Want to Live
No Sun in Venice
Peter Gunn!
Word Jazz

Miles Davis
Miles Davis
Cannonball Adderley
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk
Ornette Coleman
Curtis Counce
Sonny Rollins
Art Pepper
Hampton Hawes
Harold Land
Red Garland
Horace Silver
Sonny Clark
Kenny Burrell
Kenny Burrell
Sonny Rollins
Jimmy Smith
Stan Getz/J. J. Johnson
Eldridge/Gillespie/Edison
Andre Previn/S. Manne
Manny Albam
Duke Ellington
Count Basie
Lambert-Hendricks-Ross
Frank Sinatra
Ella Fitzgerald
Billie Holiday
Dave Brubeck
Erroll Garner
Jonah Jones
George Shearing
Ahmad Jamal
Johnny Mandel
Modern Jazz Quartet
Henry Mancini
Ken Nordine

Prestige
Columbia
Blue Note
Columbia
Prestige
Riverside
Riverside
Contemporary
Contemporary
Contemporary
Contemporary
Contemporary
Contemporary
Prestige
Blue Note
Blue Note
Blue Note
Prestige
Riverside
Blue Note
Verve
Verve
Contemporary
Coral
Columbia
Roulette
ABC-Paramount
Capitol
Verve
Capitol
Columbia
Columbia
Capitol
Capitol
Argo
United Artists
Atlantic
RCA
MCA

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 6

10/19/2020

VOCALISTS LEAD THE WAY
At various times during its history, jazz has surfaced to broad public awareness. The late 1950s was such a time, especially for jazz vocalists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and the Four Freshmen.

It is difficult to imagine today that Frank Sinatra was the premier male jazz singer of the 1950s. The 1950s Sinatra is not to be compared with the later Sinatra of Las Vegas, “My Way,” and “New York, New York” fame, just as the 1960s Louis Armstrong of “Hello Dolly” fame is not to be compared with the 1920s Armstrong.

Between 1954 and 1961, Sinatra recorded a series of classic LPs for Capitol with orchestrations mostly by Nelson Riddle or Billy May.

These recordings, now collected on 15 CDs, rank among the great musical works of the American 20th century along with the Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens of the 1920s and the Miles Davis recordings of the 1950s. No male singer before or since has ever interpreted the classic Broadway and Hollywood tunes of the 1930s and 1940s—the so-called standards—with such sensitivity and swing.

Sinatra influenced jazzmen like no other singer before or since. When he recorded a song, it soon entered the jazz repertoire, that of Miles Davis, for example. During this period, Sinatra never compromised his musical integrity by playing down to the public, and he thereby brought jazz to a wider audience.

In 1958 Sinatra added the joyful Come Fly with Me and Come Dance with Me albums and the somber Only the Lonely to the classic Capitol series. Each record received rave reviews and sold very well.

Once again, DownBeat readers and critics voted Sinatra Top Male Jazz Vocalist, a position he held longer than any other male singer. Disc jockeys voted Sinatra’s singles “Witchcraft” and “All the Way” Best Songs of the Year.

No doubt about it, Sinatra was at his peak in 1958, as popular with the public as with the specialized jazz audience.

At the same time, Ella Fitzgerald had been recording a series of composer songbooks for the Verve label, interpreting the works of Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and Rodgers and Hart.

To many people, Fitzgerald’s songbooks are the equivalent of Sinatra’s Capitol series. Her 1958 offering, the Ellington Songbook, a four-LP collaboration with the Duke, earned five stars in DownBeat.

As usual, she won the Top Female Jazz vocalist in DownBeat, an honor she held for eighteen straight years. During her career, she also won eleven Grammys, more than any other female jazz singer.

Other female singers also were on the scene in 1958. Cool jazz singers Chris Conner, June Christy, and Julie London all had sizeable popular followings. Anita O’Day, with several mid-1950s recordings on Verve, was featured at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival—a sign of her successful comeback.

New jazz singers Nina Simone and Mose Allison were heard on jazz radio programs and some juke boxes but had not yet made their marks with the general public.

Significantly, 1958 was the year of Billie Holiday’s last two studio recordings, both with orchestrator Ray Ellis. The first, Lady in Satin, was reported to be one of Holiday’s favorites but received mixed reviews from critics. The DownBeat reviewer, struck by the album’s bittersweet qualities—the life-worn voice of Holiday against lush strings—awarded it five stars.

Others criticized the incongruity of the lush musical setting for her croaking voice. Whatever the ultimate judgment of the Holiday/Ellis recordings, they represent the last testament of one of the greatest singers jazz has ever known.

INSTRUMENTALISTS NOT FAR BEHIND
Jazz instrumentalists had broken through to the general public as well. Dave Brubeck’s name was almost synonymous with jazz in 1958. He rode the crest of the West Coast wave higher and farther than any other jazzman and, in the end, transcended the genre.

His rather unique quartet that contrasted his full, bombastic piano with the dry martini sound of Paul Desmond’s alto, along with his popularity on college campuses and the backing of Columbia, all contributed to his success.

A surprise success with the public was the Modern Jazz Quartet: John Lewis (piano), Milt Jackson (vibes), Percy Heath (bass), and Connie Kay (drums). They played formal arrangements of classical music forms—fugues, concertos, and the like—and dressed in concert-hall attire.

But when they wanted to, they swung harder than any other group around. Arrangements aside, they were a swinging bebop group that endeared themselves to fans and critics alike.

The MJQ won both the readers and critics DownBeat polls for Best Combo in 1958. Nonetheless, jazz purists roundly criticized them for taking on airs of classical musicians and pandering to concert hall audiences. This was mostly a matter of appearances, however. The MJQ swung!

And in time, the quartet became the longest-running musical group with no personnel changes in jazz history.

One issue the author may wish to address comes in part 8 regarding the Modern Jazz Quartet. He writes, "And in time, the quartet became the longest-running musical group with no personnel changes in jazz history." The group did have an early personnel change, from Kenny Clarke to Connie Kay on drums. I’m sure the author knows this and means that AFTER that change, they were the longest-running group with no changes, but he might want to make that clearer.

Three other artists—Erroll Garner, Jonah Jones, and George Shearing—all had albums at the top of the charts through 1958. Unique, rhythmic piano stylist Erroll Garner broke through on the strength of his Columbia recording Concert by the Sea, which remains a continuous seller even to this day.

Jonah Jones, a swing-era trumpeter and the Herb Alpert of his day, struck gold by playing a happy, easy-listening brand of jazz. George Shearing, an accomplished pianist, found public acceptance through his quintet’s smooth blend of piano, vibes, and guitar.

The sound was easy and melodious, with Shearing keeping his piano solos to a minimum. Both Jones and Shearing recorded for Capitol, a company with deep pockets to rival Columbia.

Towards the end of 1958, the small Chicago label Argo released But Not for Me, by pianist Ahmad Jamal, which became an instant hit with the public. Jamal, known to jazz musicians and revered by Miles Davis, had a spare brand of swinging jazz that the critics labeled “cocktail piano.”

The album received only two and half stars in DownBeat but the airwaves carried several tracks from the album, most notably “Poinciana.” Jamal’s version of this tune remains definitive.

There is not a piano player alive who doesn’t either quote from the Jamal treatment when playing the song or botches his own version because Jamal’s version is so overwhelming. Jamal went on to prove his jazz mettle to critics and enjoys a reputation today as a singular stylist in the mold of Erroll Garner.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 5

9/28/2020

As in any year, the jazz mainstream held steady as fads and trends ebbed and flowed (see part 3 and part 4 of this 1958 blog series). Swing-era stalwarts including Harry “Sweets” Edison and Roy Eldridge (trumpets), Louis Bellson (drums), Benny Carter (alto saxophone), and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster (tenor saxophones) released new recordings on the Verve label to a waiting jazz public.

So did the bebop masters of the 1940s: Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Stan Getz (tenor saxophone), J. J. Johnson (trombone), and Sonny Stitt (alto saxophone).

Of the several outstanding mainstream albums that year, two on the Verve label stand out. The first album brought swing-era trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Sweets Edison together with bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (four and a half stars, DownBeat), while the second paired bebop trombonist J. J. Johnson with the cool tenor saxophone of Stan Getz (five stars, DownBeat).

Beneath the mainstream and surface trends, other obscure musicians toiled according to their own lights to reinvigorate the music. In time, the jazz public would recognize musicians such as Charles Mingus (bass) and Cecil Taylor (piano).

JAZZ COVERS BROADWAY
In 1958, jazz players discovered Broadway and Hollywood musicals in a big way. More jazz versions of shows appeared in record stores that year than any other year before or since. To be sure, jazz musicians had plumbed show tunes since the very beginning of the Great White Way, but they had never devoted an entire album to the tunes from a single show until the late 1950s.

It all began with the surprise smash recording in late 1957 of a jazz version of My Fair Lady by Andre Previn (piano), Shelly Manne (drums), and Leroy Vinnegar (bass) on Contemporary. A classically trained and noted writer of film scores, Previn was a surprisingly good jazz pianist—Bud Powell (sort of) with a romantic tinge.

Previn later conducted the Pittsburgh and other symphony orchestras, but in 1958 he was the star of the best-selling jazz record in history, surpassing the previous top seller, Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College recorded in 1954. Previn’s My Fair Lady was at the top of the monthly jazz charts all through 1958, falling no lower than fourth.

Although it was eventually surpassed in sales by Miles Davis’s Columbia recordings, My Fair Lady astonished the recording industry. The tuneful score and the popularity of the stage play and movie helped, as did the tasteful drumming of Shelly Manne, but the album’s smash status was well deserved; a darn good jazz trio record (five stars, DownBeat).

Understandably, a rash of similar recordings followed. Previn/Manne released four other show tune albums--Li’l Abner and Gigi in 1958, followed by Pal Joey and West Side Story.

Then came the onslaught: Gigi again (Shorty Rogers), Kismet (Mastersounds), The Music Man (Jimmy Giuffre), Porgy and Bess (Miles Davis), South Pacific twice (Chico Hamilton and Tony Scott), West Side Story twice (Manny Album and Oscar Peterson), and a host of other Broadway albums recorded by the Australian Jazz Quartet, Dick Marx, and others.

Every year has its fads, and this one belonged to 1958.

THE ATOMIC MR. BASIE
On top of everything else that happened in 1958, after a near decade-long decline, big bands surged back to popularity on the brass of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras.

Duke’s resurrection (he almost disbanded his orchestra of three decades in 1955) occurred around midnight on July 7, 1956, at the Newport Jazz Festival when Paul Gonsalves (tenor saxophone) took twenty-seven driving choruses on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” causing a near rhythm riot among the 10,000 people in attendance.

Captured on vinyl by Columbia, the Newport recording received five stars in DownBeat.

The event was magical, almost mystical, a 1950s Woodstock that catapulted Duke and his band into the national limelight. Within weeks Duke was on the cover of Time, and whenever he was asked his age in later years, he would say only, “I was born in 1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival.”

In 1957, his compositional skills rejuvenated, Duke premiered A Drum Is a Woman on television and recorded Such Sweet Thunder, a series of musical vignettes based on Shakespearean plays (five stars, DownBeat), and a musical portrait of Ella Fitzgerald.

In 1958, in the midst of his revival, Duke and his band toured Europe for the first time in eight years. The following year saw several more Ellington compositions and his first major film score for Anatomy of a Murder.

Duke was back! And so was the Count!

Basie’s comeback, unlike Duke’s, was not mercurial. After reforming his big band in 1953, his popularity steadily grew on the strength of hits such as “April in Paris,” with its “one more once” tag ending; and also “Shiny Stockings,” “Corner Pocket,” “Everyday and Alright, Okay, You Win,” the latter two with vocals by blues singer Joe Williams.

America was ready when The Atomic Mister Basie exploded on the scene in 1958.

This album, the first of 20 on the Roulette label, and many say the best (DownBeat said four-and-a-half stars at the time), featured tunes written by a single arranger, Neal Hefti. Three of the tunes, “The Kid from Redbank,” “Whirly Bird,” and “Li’L Darlin’,” became staples in the Basie book for years after.

The Atomic band of 1958 was a powerhouse of talent to rival any band in jazz history, including Basie’s classic Kansas City band of the late 1930s.

His 1958 band had four trumpets: Joe Newman, Thad Jones, Snookie Young, and Wendall Culley; three trombones: Henry Coker, Benny Powell, and Al Grey; five saxes: Marshall Royal, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Charlie Fowlkes, and either Billy Mitchell or Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis; and the rhythm section of Basie (piano), Freddie Green (guitar), Eddie Jones (bass), and Sonny Payne (drums).

This band exhibited ensemble power, precision, discipline, and dynamic control rather than the freewheeling, barrier-breaking soloists of the classic late-1930s Basie band. The Count himself said, “I have never bragged on anything, but the band I had [in 1958] was one I could have bragged on.”

Basie followed the successful Atomic with an album entitled Basie plays Hefti. He also benefited by Sing a Song of Basie, the sleeper LP of the year by the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. LHR took scat singing to new heights by vocalizing meaningful lyrics to Basie tunes, ensemble passages and solos alike.

This record garnered a five-star DownBeat award and further heightened interest in the band. It came as no surprise, then, when DownBeat readers voted Count Basie and Miles Davis Jazz Personalities of the Year and elected Basie into the magazine’s Hall of Fame.

While other big bands languished in 1958—Stan Kenton’s, for example—the success of the two premier big bands paved the way for a general big band revival in the early 1960s.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 4

8/18/2020

In part 3 of this 1958 blog series, we saw that 1958 gave rise to the “cool” West Coast–style jazz, a response to the blues-oriented East Coast style. That led to a reaction from many East Coast musicians, who favored a harder approach.

FUNKY HARD BOP GAINS TOEHOLD
Hard bop was the very antithesis of the West Coast cool style. It emphasized solos, all but discarded arrangements, and adopted blues and gospel devices.

The small independent labels Blue Note and Prestige chronicled hard bop much the same way Contemporary and Pacific Jazz did the West Coast style. Blue Note had such contract artists as Art Blakey (drums), Kenny Burrel (guitar), Sonny Clark (piano), Lee Morgan (trumpet), Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Horace Silver (piano), and Jimmy Smith (organ).

Prestige had Donald Byrd (trumpet), John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Art Farmer (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone), Red Garland (piano), Jacky Mclean (alto saxophone), Art Taylor (drums), and Mal Waldron (piano).

Contracts were as loose as the music and allowed musicians to record on either label, which they often did.

Taken together, the Blue Note and Prestige recordings shared a common sound: a loose, rough-hewn, raw-edged, dark sound that celebrated individual over collective expression. While most of the musicians knew each other and often played together, they were not, for the most part, members of working bands.

Hence, many albums documented blowing sessions, where soloists improvised at length on the harmonic pattern of the theme. Typically, the musicians recorded only two or three tunes per 20-minute side; even one per side was not uncommon.

For all the hoopla in the trade press about hard bop rescuing the heart and soul of jazz, most of these albums received so-so three-star ratings in DownBeat.

Four- and five-star ratings were rare. Sonny Clarke’s albums on Blue Note--Sonny’s Crib, for example—always contained vital music but never received high marks, at least not from DownBeat reviewers.

Five albums in particular characterized the best of the hard bop movement in 1958. The first, All Morning Long on Prestige—led by Miles Davis pianist Red Garland, with John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Donald Byrd (trumpet), and Prestige house drummer Arthur Taylor—devoted one side to the title track and featured good solos all around (four stars, DownBeat).

Guitarist Kenny Burrell recorded two minor gems, Blue Lights, with a stable of hard-boppers on Blue Note (five stars, DownBeat), and another with John Coltrane on Prestige (five stars, DownBeat), and Horace Silver added Six Pieces of Silver to his gospel-tinged hard bop library on Blue Note (five stars, DownBeat).

Lastly, Sonny Rollins recorded Freedom Suite on Riverside (four stars, DownBeat) with Oscar Pettiford (bass) and Max Roach (drums), which surpassed his Way Out West album on Contemporary.

While the hard boppers found their jazz audience in 1958, they had not yet broken through to the general public, except perhaps for Horace Silver, who was the only hard bopper to appear at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. No hard bop album finished in the top 20 jazz album sales for that year.

The first bop organist, Jimmy Smith, recorded and released albums faster than any musician alive, stocking record bins with his sixth through ninth albums for Blue Note that year. In a few short years, he would be known nationally for his hit recording of the title song of the movie Walk on the Wild Side.

In 1958, the terms “funky” and “soul” appeared regularly in DownBeat articles to describe the R&B, gospel-tinged hard bop of musicians like Art Blakey and Horace Silver.

This music sowed the seeds of the funky, hard bop soul music of the early 1960s, which propelled hard bop musicians to prominence and made household names of Cannonball Adderly, Art Blakey, Ramsey Lewis, Lee Morgan, Les McCann, Bobby Timmons, and Jimmy Smith, among others.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 3

7/21/2020

By any measure, 1958 was no ordinary year in jazz. Controversy raged in the trade press over West Coast style, or “cool” jazz, at a time when it was never more popular with the public. As they had since 1955, critics lambasted the West Coast style as intellectual music fraught with overarranging, lame solos, and lifeless rhythm.

WEST COAST JAZZ FIGHTS BACK
Paradoxically, a new and aggressive brand of West Coast jazz, later labeled “California Hard,” emerged just prior to 1958 and resulted in some of the finest recordings by West Coast musicians ever. A 1958 DownBeat article—“West Coast Fights Back”— aptly summarized the situation: “If West Coast [jazz], with its arranging tricks, classical devices, generally constrained emotional content, is being slowly eclipsed by the tougher fibered, blues-oriented East Coast style—and there is a growing realization this is happening—the West Coast is fighting back.”

And indeed it was!

By the end of the year, record bins held three albums by the Curtis Counce Group—the strongest West Coast combo of the 1950s. This quintet featured the swinging rhythm section of Curtis Counce (bass), Frank Butler (drums), and the underrated Carl Perkins (piano), and a two-horn frontline of Harold Land (tenor saxophone) and Jack Sheldon (trumpet).

The group exhibited as much fire and cohesiveness as any quintet of the 1950s, including the classic Miles Davis quintet, the Max Roach–Clifford Brown quintet, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Recorded on the West Coast by the independent Contemporary label, all three albums were well received in DownBeat, two receiving four stars and one five.

The two Contemporary albums Way Out West, with Sonny Rollins (tenor saxophone), Ray Brown (bass), and Shelly Manne (drums), and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (the Miles Davis rhythm section) proved that West Coast jazzmen could play with East Coast jazzmen (as if there had been any doubt). The former album (five stars, DownBeat) reaffirmed Sonny Rollins as the premier tenor saxophone improviser of the day, while the latter (also five stars, DownBeat) confirmed Art Pepper as the premier improvising stylist on the West Coast.

Art Pepper Meets and subsequent albums also confirmed Pepper as one of the few unique voices on alto saxophone since Charlie Parker.

Contemporary also issued several trio albums by pianist Hampton Hawes, including the famous All Night Sessions, Vols. I–III, and a quartet session, For Real!, with Harold Land. These four- and five-star albums catapulted Hawes to national attention within the jazz community.

His churchy, neo-bop style influenced many East Coast pianists and extended the jazz piano lexicon beyond premier bop pianist Bud Powell.

Two more Contemporary albums--The Poll Winners, with Barney Kessel (guitar), Ray Brown (bass), and Shelly Manne (drums), and Grooveyard, with the Harold Land Quintet—also received five-star awards in DownBeat. Truly, 1958 was Contemporary’s year.

Other albums on the Pacific Jazz and World Pacific labels, featuring artists like Pepper Adams, Manny Album, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan, also received excellent reviews in DownBeat. West Coast jazz—cool or California Hard—was a fad that ceased to exist only in the minds of a few influential critics.

In the DownBeat Critics Poll that year, West Coast or cool school musicians still ranked highly—Jimmy Giuffre (#2 combo), Gerry Mulligan (#1 baritone saxophone), Stan Getz (#1 tenor saxophone), Lee Konitz (#1 alto saxophone), Shelly Manne (#1 drums), Barney Kessel (#1 guitar), and Tony Scott (#1 clarinet). The year-end Readers Poll showed little difference, except that cool-schooler Paul Desmond inched out Konitz on alto saxophone.

And it bears mentioning that the first Monterey Jazz Festival was held in 1958—the West Coast answer to the Newport Jazz Festival, which began in 1953.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 2

6/23/2020

In the first part of this blog series, we looked at two of the four jazz innovators who came to the fore in 1958—Miles Davis, John Coltrane. Here, we move on to the other two: Thelonius Monk and Ornette Coleman.

THELONIUS MONK
Thelonius Monk, a jazz icon dedicated to his art, finally received his long-overdue recognition in 1958. Monk, who today is regarded as a major composer almost on a par with Duke Ellington, languished in obscurity until 1957. This lack of recognition stemmed in part from the loss of his cabaret card in 1951 due to a questionable drug charge, which prevented him from working in New York City (the jazz capital of the world and his hometown). The neglect was also the result of his highly personal approach to the piano, misunderstood by many musicians and critics alike.

But his recordings didn’t go totally unrecognized. A handful of New York critics consistently championed his work. In 1957, after regaining his cabaret card, Monk played at the Five Spot Café in lower Manhattan six nights a week to capacity crowds. Musicians and critics began to spread the word.

Here was a pianist whose approach eschewed the modern and embraced the traditional, an unabashed melodist—albeit, a quirky one—who embellished and extended the melody like jazzmen of the past, yet sounded “far out,” more modern than modern. Here was a pianist not easily copied or understood at first hearing. As the jazz world soon learned, Monk’s music consisted of more than idiosyncratic, dissonant melodies.

The Five Spot gig was but a prelude to Monk’s discovery as a major jazzman. Some say “rediscovery” because of his early 1940s contributions to bebop, but the truth is that very few Americans had ever heard of him prior to 1958. Monk was profiled in DownBeat that year in an article headlined “Finally Discovered” and was awarded first place on piano—for the first time—in both the Critics and Readers Polls.

With Monk’s discovery, Riverside, his recording company since 1955, heavily promoted his early albums and recorded new ones, often with jazz greats, no doubt to confirm his newfound position within the jazz tradition. In 1959, Monk showcased his music in a big-band setting at a memorable Town Hall concert.

brilliant corners album

monk's music album

Three years and many club dates later, he signed with Columbia, where he recorded eight well-publicized albums over the next seven years. Monk’s transformation from underground genius to jazz icon was celebrated in 1964 when he appeared on the cover of Time, joining Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra as the only jazzmen to be so honored.

His 40-some composition legacy, which he essentially completed before his public discovery in 1958, equals that of any 20th-century composer.

ORNETTE!
Ornette Coleman also came to prominence in 1958 with an album on the small Contemporary label entitled Something Else! The LP sounded like some quirky brand of bebop and received neither general critical nor popular acclaim, although the DownBeat reviewer gave it four and a half stars.

something else album

Besides being the first recorded document of the “free jazz” movement that flourished in the 1960s, its historical significance may be in the album notes, where Ornette stated, “I think one day music will be a lot freer. Then the pattern of the tune, for instance, will be forgotten and the tune itself will be the pattern. . . . I believe music is really a free thing.”

Ornette based his improvisations on the atmosphere or mood of a piece, deemphasizing the melody, the underlying harmonic structure, and the key. His approach to improvisation, not at first really understood by anyone, was variously labeled as modal, thematic, or intuitive. Ornette would later describe it as “harmolodic,” which, he said, “has as to do with the melody, the harmony and the rhythm all equal.”

In 1959, Ornette recorded two more albums, Tomorrow Is the Question! and The Shape of Jazz to Come—considered pejorative titles by most jazzmen of the day—and took New York City by storm, gaining instant notoriety and turning a two-week gig at the Five Spot Café into a three-month stay.

While critics were labeling Coltrane’s music “anti-jazz,” they called Ornette’s “anti-music,” “chaos,” and worse. One critic said, “His is not musical freedom; disdain for principles and boundaries is synonymous not with freedom but with anarchy.” Ornette’s use of an occasional squawky white plastic alto saxophone didn’t help matters either.

While his detractors were legion, his supporters (who swore from the start he was a genius) were among the bigger lights in jazz music and criticism—Leonard Bernstein, Nat Hentoff, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, and Martin Williams, to name a few.

One of the most controversial of jazz icons to this day, Ornette has never received the public acclaim or the financial reward the others have, even belatedly. In time, he was grudgingly recognized as a major innovator in jazz for launching free jazz and influencing many musicians, including Coltrane.

LASTING CONTRIBUTIONS
The fact that four major innovators of jazz—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman--came to the fore in 1958 is quite astonishing. Each, it could be said, was a tonal innovator. No one before or since has sounded like Miles, Coltrane, Monk, or Ornette on their respective instruments. It could also be said that each had far-reaching influence—another mark of innovation. Each, in his own way, was a composer, with Monk the most unique; and they all pointed the way to more, not less, freedom in jazz.

More significant, however, are their lasting contributions to musical improvisation, the key ingredient in jazz. Miles blazed the way for improvisations on scales and modes; Monk, on melody; Coltrane, on harmonic structure and eventually modes; and Ornette, on atmosphere or mood of a piece.

While not one of them was the first or only musician to explore these concepts in jazz, they all developed them to the point of universal admiration and recognition in the context of later 20th-century music.

1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 1

5/26/2020

Has there ever been a year in jazz like 1958? Jazz was literally in the air—on radio, TV, and the silver screen.

Four jazz icons came to prominence that year. Record bins overflowed with numerous recordings that would become enduring jazz classics. Public awareness of jazz was near an all-time high due to the notoriety of the beatnik jazz subculture, the popularity of West Coast jazz, and the musicality of household-name jazz musicians like Basie, Brubeck, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Getz, Shearing, and Sinatra.

And jazz was big business for the first time since the 1930s.

Four icons—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman—came to the fore in 1958, each to a different degree of public recognition and critical acclaim. They not only changed the direction of jazz forever but now rank among the handful of true jazz innovators who preceded them: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Lester Young, to name the most prominent.

MILES AHEAD . . . WAY AHEAD
First and foremost, 1958 was the year of trumpeter Miles Davis. Record bins were filled by his prodigious output since his return to jazz in 1954, including his second full-scale masterpiece Walkin’. That album spawned the funky, hard bop jazz of the late 1950s and 1960s, much as his first masterpiece, Birth of the Cool, launched the “cool” West Coast jazz of the 1950s.

More importantly, record bins held the recorded work of his first great quintet: Paul Chambers (bass), John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Red Garland (piano), Philly Joe Jones (drums), and, of course, Miles himself (trumpet). In terms of impact, these recordings—five albums in all—can be compared to Louis Armstrong’s classic small-group Hot Five and Hot Seven performances of the late 1920s. Miles’s quintet defined anew the potential for small-group jazz and expanded the emotional range from unbridled joy (Judy Garland) to fierce drive (Coltrane) to alternating complex sorrow and crisp rapture (Miles), often in the course of a single tune.

Miles’s switch in 1957 from the small Prestige label to the international conglomerate Columbia reaped handsome dividends for him in 1958—not only in developing name recognition but in providing the means to produce Miles Ahead, an orchestral suite of 10 seamlessly linked concertos with Miles as the single improvising soloist. With its sustained mood of urbane melancholy, Miles Ahead is one of the first jazz instrumental concept albums. (Honors for the first jazz vocal concept album go to Frank Sinatra.)

A collaboration between Miles and arranger Gil Evans, Miles Ahead featured the gentle lyricism of Miles on flugelhorn supported by a symphonic brass and reed choir. Miles’s use of the flugelhorn not only introduced a new sound to jazz but also rescued that instrument from the relative obscurity of marching bands. The album received the equivalent of a Grammy Award in France and an excellent five-star rating in DownBeat, the premier US jazz magazine of the day.

In late 1958, Columbia released the second Davis/Evans collaboration: a magnificent orchestral version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Like Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess featured a sustained dialog between Miles and the orchestra. Unlike the previous album, it exhibited a wider emotional range with Miles more dominant, partly because of his use of trumpet. It, too, received a five-star award in DownBeat.

Miles and Gil joined forces again on Sketches of Spain and Quiet Nights, but only Spain would maintain the excellence of Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. The Davis/Evans collaborations stand out as major contributions to 20th-century music, almost on a par with the classic small-group performances of Miles's first great quintet. His place in the jazz pantheon would have been assured on the basis of the quintet recordings and the orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans. But Miles had just begun.

In early 1958, he appeared as a sideman on the album Somethin' Else, along with nominal leader Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (alto saxophone), Art Blakey (drums), Hank Jones (piano) and Sam Jones (bass). Miles soloed aggressively throughout and dominated the album, producing yet another small-group masterpiece on par with the classic quintet recordings. Somethin' Else received five stars in DownBeat at the time and is regarded today as one of the all-time great jazz albums.

In mid-1958, Miles formed his first great sextet by adding Adderley to his quintet lineup. The group recorded Milestones and again opened up new musical territory, basing certain tunes and improvisations on modes and scales instead of on the song-form harmonic sequences that had been the favored approach for most jazzmen in the 1940s and 1950s. This time, DownBeat awarded Milestones only four stars.

Soon after Milestones, Miles replaced Red Garland with the introspective Bill Evans on piano and Philly Joe Jones with Billy Cobb on drums and produced the second great sextet. This group played at clubs and concerts throughout 1958 and recorded Kind of Blue in early 1959—one of the most celebrated albums in jazz history. The album expanded on the modal approach first revealed on Milestones and emphasized melodic over harmonic variation. Blue received almost instant universal acclaim and once again brought Miles a five-star award in DownBeat.

Without doubt, 1958 was Miles’s year, creatively, critically, and publicly. He emerged from the jazz underground onto the national scene as the year began with a feature story in Time magazine, a clear sign that Miles had arrived.

In midyear, Life International listed Miles as one of the 14 Black people who had achieved a stature of greatness. At year’s end, he had won first place in the DownBeat Critics and Readers Polls on trumpet and shared Jazzman of the Year honors with Count Basie. With general public recognition came financial recognition as well. He commanded concert and club fees comparable to only a handful of jazzmen—Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, and Chico Hamilton—while his albums sold at five to 10 times the norm for jazz.

COLTRANE BREAKS THE SOUND BARRIER
The year 1958 was also good for another jazz icon, John Coltrane. While critical acclaim for Coltrane was not universal—there was even hostility in some quarters—and public recognition years off, Coltrane emerged that year as a new force on the tenor saxophone.

Some saw Coltrane, a key member of the great quintet and sextets, as riding Miles’s coattails to undeserved prominence. But others saw something new in his tenor playing: an extension of Coleman Hawkins, perhaps, but somehow different. Coltrane thought in sixteenth notes, while most players—and critics—thought in eighth notes.

In a DownBeat article in late 1958, Ira Gitler dubbed Coltrane’s multi-note, high-energy solos “sheets of sound,” a label that stuck to describe his playing into the early 1960s. Other than a five-star rating in DownBeat for Soultrane—Coltrane’s third outing on Prestige as a leader—most reviewers criticized his approach to jazz.

They typically said his playing on Miles’s albums flawed otherwise perfect recordings. One critic said of Milestones, “Coltrane records material best left in the practice room.” DownBeat’s reviewer of the Newport Jazz Festival that year claimed Miles was hampered by the “angry young tenor” of Coltrane, another label that stuck. The DownBeat Critics Poll at midyear placed him fifth, behind fellow tenorists Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Ben Webster.

The negative criticism continued into the 1960s, some reviewers arguing that his playing was “anti-jazz.” But after Coltrane picked up the soprano saxophone and recorded “My Favorite Things” in late 1960—rescuing that instrument from obscurity as Miles had rescued the flugelhorn—and recorded A Love Supreme in 1964, critical opinion turned mostly positive.

Coltrane’s playing continued to evolve amid controversy until his untimely death in 1967. As is so often the case, only after his death were his contributions to jazz seen as truly revolutionary. While never enjoying the same broad public acceptance as Miles, Coltrane was viewed as an inspirational leader for his uncompromising dedication to his art.