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

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.
​

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

​​

1958 CLASSIC RECORD ALBUMS 

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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.

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.
​

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.
​

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.
​

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.

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.
​

​

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.

Believe it or not, John Coltrane and Miles Davis inspired the hippie Summer of Love in 1967. Here's how.

JOHN COLTRANE
The lead guitarist of the Byrds folk rock group, Jim McGuinn (later known as Roger), transposed the short, choppy clusters of Indian classicist Ravi Shankar’s sitar sound to his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar and melded them to a phrase quoted directly from the intro to jazz tenor titan Coltrane’s 1961 composition “India.”

The result: the 1966 hit single “Eight Miles High,” which signposted a future for psychedelic music—variously labeled raga rock, acid rock, space rock—that would dominate American pop charts from 1967 to 1970.[1]

McGuinn was a fan of North Indian folk music, particularly that of Ravi Shankar, but so was John Coltrane. The latter’s interest, however, began several years earlier as he explored folk music from other countries, along with listening closely to the recordings of sitar virtuoso Shankar.[2]

Coltrane’s “India” was recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard in November 1961 and released on the Impressions album (Impulse!) in July 1963. This track, which also featured Eric Dolphy, was Coltrane’s attempt to incorporate everything he had recently learned from his folk studies.

The source of the melody line McGuinn borrowed for “Eight Miles High” was a Vedic chant (recitations from the Indian Vedas, religious scriptures dating back as far as 3,000 years) that Coltrane had heard on the 1952 Folkways LP Religious Music of India.[3]

So—from a 3,000-year-old Vedic chant to Coltrane’s tenor solo to McGuinn’s 12-string offering to God’s ears. How cool is that? Rock on!

Interestingly, “Eight Miles High” never climbed to the top of the charts during its release year, perhaps because it was too complex, too long, too fraught with controversy, and too tepidly promoted. But it had major influence on Laurel Canyon musicians Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Neil Young, and others during the 1967 Summer of Love.

The song has aged splendidly. In 1991, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it number 151 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and in March 2005, Q magazine ranked it number 50 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks Ever.

MILES DAVIS
Just as “Eight Miles High” was based on a venerable religious sound by way of a prominent jazz instrumentalist, so too was “White Rabbit.” This 1967 counterculture anthem was based on a centuries-old Spanish religious processional song by way of trumpeter Miles Davis and orchestra arranger Gil Evans from their album Sketches of Spain. In this instance, the interpreting rock composer was Jefferson Airplane lead singer Grace Slick.

A year before she joined Airplane, Slick wrote “White Rabbit” at home on an upright piano at the end of an LSD trip during which she listened to Sketches of Spain and its “Saeta” track for 24 hours straight.[4]

​“Saeta,” as described in the album’s liner notes, is:

Unaware of the above, Grace Slick set lyrics to “Saeta” around Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, aligning Alice’s dream world with the drug subculture Grace knew all too well—a hookah-smoking caterpillar, pills that make you smaller or bigger, and a mind-altering mushroom. 

She took her cleverly titled “White Rabbit” to her Great Society bandmates, and they quickly developed a six-minute version for their stage shows, replete with the Spanish march and echoes of Ravel’s crescendo-building bolero as implied in Sketches of Spain.

Grace soon left Great Society for Jefferson Airplane, taking her “White Rabbit” (and commanding siren voice) along with her, just in time for her new band to record a 2.7-minute version of the song on their second album, Surrealistic Pillow. 

Released in January 1967, the album climbed the charts, reaching number three in August—not bad, considering the year’s dominating album was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The “White Rabbit” single was released in May. According to Rob Hughes of Classic Rock magazine, the song was meaningful to the time:
​

Nonetheless, the song’s reception was somewhat lukewarm and it spent a limited time on the charts, peaking at number eight, perhaps because it was controversial and not a hot dance number (try boogieing to a bolero march). “White Rabbit” fell to the bottom of Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, landing at number 478, but like “Eight Miles High,” it too has enjoyed a profitable afterlife, largely due to its many uses on Hollywood film soundtracks[7] and its tie-in with one of the great literary works in the English language.

All of this makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, most would agree: Miles Davis as the “Saeta” singer in Sketches of Spain, and Grace Slick as the “White Rabbit” voice in Surrealistic Pillow.

CODA
For those interested in a transcription of Coltrane’s “India” improvisation from the Impressions album, please contact Coltrane expert Andrew White at Andrew’s Musical Enterprises Inc., 4830 S. Dakota Ave., NE, Washington, DC 20017. Ask for Coltrane transcription number 198.

1. Rob Chapman, Psychedelia and Other Colors (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 153.
2. Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 209.
3. Ibid; Chapman, Psychedelia and Other Colors, 154.
4. Rob Hughes, “The Story Behind the Song: White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane,” Classic Rock, March 5, 2019.
5. Liner Notes, Nat Hentoff, Miles Davis—Sketches of Spain, orchestra arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, Columbia Records, CD, CK 40578, 1960. 
6. Hughes, “Story Behind the Song.”
7. Ibid.

​

​In a previous blog, I discussed a jazz concert sponsored by the Kennedy White House that was held at the Sylvan Theater on the Washington Monument grounds on the night of August 28, 1962. A gathering of mostly government summer interns heard the classic Brubeck Quartet followed by singer Tony Bennett and his trio. Columbia Records, with prominent producer Teo Macero on hand, recorded the music and belatedly released Bennett/Brubeck: The White House Sessions, Live 1962, on Columbia CD in 2013. 

But surprise, surprise, there was another jazz group on the bill that night—the Newport All-Stars—led by jazz festival impresario and pianist George Wein. In fact, they opened the show, and Columbia recorded them as well but did not release the music. The sounds the interns heard that balmy summer night are now available to the public, thanks to the staff at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (more on this later). 

A swing Dixie outfit, the Newport All-Stars had been in existence since 1956 under the tutelage of George Wein. Over the years, numerous talented musicians have cycled on and off the roster. But during the 1958–1963 period, the core slots remained rather stable: George Wein (piano), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Ruby Braff (cornet), and Marshall Brown (valve trombone), supported by a pickup bassist and drummer, as was the case for the Kennedy-sponsored gig. 

At the time, according to New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett, Wein’s group represented a type of jazz that was rapidly disappearing—relaxed, emotional, unpretentious, and of no school, firming the heart and brightening the eye.[1]

Pianist Wein was a swing stylist somewhere between Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson (Balliett again), though still comfortable in a bebop setting. His playing always amazed and exceeded expectations, especially for one burdened with the managerial complexities associated with staging festivals.

Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell’s playing was, well, a poet’s delight. From Balliett: “hopefully eccentric, squeaks, coppery tone, querulousness, growls, and overall hesitancy—most original stylist in jazz.”[2] And from another, writer/pianist Dick Wellstood, “crabbed, chocked, knotted tangle of squawks with which he could create such woodsy freedoms, such an enormous roomy private universe.” Nonetheless, all would agree that Pee Wee Russell could also coax pure and gentle notes from his instrument when he wanted to.[3] 

Cornetist Braff took a pre-Bebop approach to improvisation, perhaps using more embellishment and vibrato than modernists, similar to his idol Louis Armstrong. Overall, he was a relaxed melodist, unique like his frontline companion, and should have been much better known.

Trombonist Brown had earned his festival wings with Wein back in 1958, when he worked his tail off to form the International Youth Band, which performed at Newport. The venture ultimately failed, done in by too many negative critical reviews. A later attempt at establishing a youth band made up of American high school kids succeeded, thereby reinforcing his exemplary leadership and teaching skills.[4]

As a trombonist, Brown never ranked at the top of the jazz polls, his reputation based on being a solid ensemble player. Wein once commented, “Marshall played decent valve trombone, although he never really had a trombone lip.”[5] 

The rhythm section for the Kennedy gig consisted of Washington, DC, natives Billy Taylor Jr. on bass—yes, the son of famous pianist Billy Taylor—and Eddie Phyfe on drums. 

The evening’s mostly youthful audience may not have been familiar with the Newport All-Stars and their brand of “rapidly disappearing” jazz. Their appearance occurred largely because three months prior, Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, a former Newport Jazz Festival board member, invited the All-Stars to play a concert in the rotunda of the old Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. 

The All-Stars played a lunch-hour show on Monday June 18 to some 500 senatorial staff members. It was the first such concert in the rotunda; the occasion was noteworthy enough to prompt the distribution of an AP Wire Service photo across the country. The next morning the All-Stars appeared on the NBC Today Show[6], and the Washington Post featured a front-page photo with the following caption:
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​Wein and the boys followed their historic rotunda rendezvous with a series of appearances leading up to the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, where Senator Claiborne Pell delivered the festival’s opening remarks on July 6. 

The remainder of July and early August, Wein busied himself with establishing the inaugural Ohio Valley Jazz Festival outside Cincinnati, and on the festival’s last day, August 26, he joined the All-Stars on stage.[8] Two days later, after opening remarks by Rhode Island’s tireless Senator Pell, the band mounted the Sylvan Theater stage to perform for hundreds of summer interns (some with their parents) gathered on the Washington Monument grounds.
​

​The band played six tunes, a well-paced mix of swing-era standards, four up tempo, one change of pace, and a Pee Wee special. Wein announced the title of each tune:
​

Solos were plentiful on the up tempos numbers with Kansas City style riffs backing the soloist.

Applause from the largely student audience was respectful—if not overly generous—after individual solos and at the conclusion of a song, and then at the close of “Pee Wee’s Blues,” it was lengthy and loud, no doubt helped along by George Wein’s initial setup that promised a historic moment: “Pee Wee’s going to play the blues on the Washington Monuments grounds!” Drummer Eddie Phyfe also drew a huge ovation at the finish of his drum break on “Saint Louis Blues.”[9]

Thanks to the splendid work of Library of Congress staff, especially Bryan Cordell of the Music Division (Recorded Sound), the Newport All-Stars segment once lost has now been found. The entire Kennedy White House 1962 Sylvan Theater concert can now be heard at the Library.
​

Take a listen if you can, and I’m sure you will agree that the All-Stars proved to be an excellent opening act for jazz headliners Brubeck and Bennett, whose hit tunes (“Take Five”) and (“I Left My Heart in San Francisco”) were well received by the youthful summer crowd.

As previously mentioned, fans can listen to the Bennett/Brubeck segments on a Columbia CD. Additionally, George Wein and the core group recorded in studio on October 12, 1962, which is available on George Wein & the Newport All-Stars LP/CD (Impulse).

​

CODA
There were only two Kennedy White House jazz events, the one described above and the other by the Paul Winter sextet for 10- to 19-year-old children of diplomats and government officials held in the East Room on November 19, 1962. 

Interestingly, we have the music for both concerts, the former on Columbia CD (Bennett/Brubeck) and at the Library of Congress (Newport All-Stars), and for the latter, on Living Music CD (Paul Winter Sextet, Count Me In, 1962 & 1963).

There was only one other White House jazz event for which we have the music: President Nixon’s birthday extravaganza for Duke Ellington in the East Room on Blue Note CD: 1969 All-Star Tribute to Duke Ellington. 

And that’s that! 

How about all the other jazz events? For Presidents Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and the others? Isn’t it about time the music at the People’s House (as George Washington called it) is released to the people?

1. Whitney Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954–2001 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 174.
2. Ibid., 76–77.
3. Robert Hilbert, Pee Wee Russell: The Life of a Jazzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xiii.
4. George Wein with Nate Chinnen, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 184–86; 194. 
5. Ibid., 183. 
6. Ibid., 233.
7. Photo caption “Joint’s Jumping on the ‘Hill,’” photographer Vic Casamento, Washington Post, Monday, June 18, 1962, page 1. 
8. George Wein, Myself Among Others, 432–35; Robert Hilbert, Pee Wee Russell, 241.
9. George Wein comments, tunes played, and crowd reaction transcribed by the author from the audio: White House Jazz Seminar, Sylvan Theater, White House, 1962-08-28 (digital ID: 2603586), Library of Congress, Washington, DC.​

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