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1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 4

8/18/2020

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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.

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​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).

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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.

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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. ​
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​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.

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1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 3

7/21/2020

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​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.
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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.
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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.

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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 part 4 of this blog series, we'll see how the East Coast jazz musicians respond to the new West Coast “cool.”
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1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 2

6/23/2020

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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.
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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.

Part 3: The West Coasts fights back with “cool” jazz.
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1958: The Best Year in Jazz, Part 1

5/26/2020

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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.

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​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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.

​Part 2: Thelonius Monk and Ornette Coleman

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Jazz and the Summer of Love

4/30/2020

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The junction of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco was the central location of the Summer of Love in 1967.

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:

One of the oldest religious types of music in Andalusa, [the“Saeta,” or “arrow of the song”] is usually sung without accompaniment during the Holy Week religious procession in Seville. It tells of the Passion of Christ and is usually addressed to the image of the crucified Christ that is carried in the march. . . . The singer is usually a woman, stands on a balcony overlooking the [stopped] procession . . . while the “Saeta” is being sung. A fanfare of trumpets gives the signal to move on.
 
Gil Evans has recreated the [music for] the street procession, and Miles has the role of the woman aiming the “arrow of the song.”[5]

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:
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​If one song came to define the Haight-Ashbury counter-culture itself, it was Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Released in the loved-up summer of ’67, its heavy allusions to the altered states in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, along with its exhortations to “feed your head,” seemed to invite a whole new generation to trip out on the pleasures of psychedelics. For those for whom love, peace, and LSD were inseparable, it became an anthem.[6]
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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.

NOTES

  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.
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President Carter’s White House Jazz Festival

3/31/2020

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Dexter Gordon and Herbie Hancock
Saxophonist Dexter Gordon and pianist Herbie Hancock on the South Lawn of the White House. June 18, 1978.
​In my opinion, the grandest assemblage of jazz musicians at the White House occurred on the night of Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday, April 29, 1969, when President Nixon awarded Duke the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor (as discussed in my book Ellington at the White House 1969).

​But others claim that President Carter’s South Lawn gathering some nine years later, billed as the first White House jazz festival, tops the Duke event by a country mile.

​​Frankly, it’s hard to disagree: Carter’s introductory speech and the gasping, jaw-dropping lineup of jazz stars were exemplary.

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The New Orleans Young Tuxedo Brass Band open the festivities.

On June 18, 1978, Carter stepped up on the specially erected stage on the South Lawn of the White House and—facing the 800 people gathered before him (musicians and their families and invited guests)—gave the most enlightened and heartfelt speech by any US president on America’s own music. And he did so extemporaneously:
 
You are welcome to the first White House jazz festival. I hope we have some more in the future. This is an honor for me—to walk through this crowd and meet famous jazz musicians and the families of those who are no longer with us, but whose work and whose spirit and whose beautiful music will live forever in our country.

If there ever was an indigenous art form, one that is special and peculiar to the United States and represents what we are as a country, I would say that it’s jazz. Starting late in the last century, there was a unique combination of two characteristics that have made America what it is: individuality and a free expression of one’s inner spirit.

​In an almost unconstrained way, vivid, alive, aggressive, innovative on the one hand, and the severest form of self-discipline on the other, never compromising quality as the human spirit bursts forward in an expression of song.

At first, this jazz form was not well accepted in respectable circles. I think there was an element of racism perhaps at the beginning, because most of the famous early performers were black. And particularly in the South to have black and white musicians playing together was not a normal thing. And I believe that this particular form of music—of art—has done as much as anything to break down those barriers and to let us live and work and play and make beautiful music together.

And the other thing that kind of separated jazz musicians from the upper levels of society was the reputation jazz musicians had. Some people thought they stayed up late at night, drank a lot, and did a lot of carousing around. And it took a few years for society to come together. I don’t know. I’m not going to say, as President, whether the jazz musicians became better behaved or the rest of society caught up with them in drinking, carousing around, and staying up late at night.

But the fact is that over a period of years the quality of jazz could not be constrained. It could not be unrecognized. And it swept not only our country, but is perhaps the favorite export product of the United States to Europe and in other parts of the world.

I began listening to jazz when I was quite young—on the radio, listening to performances broadcast from New Orleans. And later when I was a young officer in the navy, in the early ’40s, I would go to Greenwich Village to listen to the jazz performers who came there. And with my wife later on, we’d go down to New Orleans and listen to individual performances on Sunday afternoon on Royal Street, sit in on the jam sessions that lasted for hours and hours.

And then later, of course, we began to learn the individual performers through the phonograph records and also on the radio itself. This has had a very beneficial effect on my life. And I’m very grateful for what all these remarkable performers have done.
​
Twenty-five years ago, the first Newport Jazz Festival was held. So this is a celebration of an anniversary and a recognition of what it meant to bring together such a wide diversity of performers and different elements of jazz in its broader definition that collectively is even a much more profound accomplishment than the superb musicians and the individual types of jazz standing alone.

And it’s with a great deal of pleasure that I—as president of the United States—welcome tonight superb representatives of this music form. Having performers here who represent the history of music throughout this century, some quite old in years, still young at heart, others newcomers to jazz who have brought an increasing dynamism to it, and a constantly evolving, striving for perfection as the new elements of jazz are explored.

​George Wein has put together this program, and I’d like to welcome him and all the superb performers whom I met individually earlier today. And I know that we all have in store for us a wonderful treat as some of the best musicians of our country—of the world—show us what it means to be an American and to join in the pride that we feel for those who’ve made jazz such a wonderful part of our lives. Thank you very much.[1]
​
This enlightened, heartfelt speech electrified all who heard it that day, either on the South Lawn or on the radio, or read it the next day in a newspaper or a month later in a magazine. President Carter’s five-minute speech first touched on a cornerstone of jazz—the blurry line creative musicians walk between freedom and discipline and, by extension, between instinct and theory, individualism and collectivism, improvisation and composition, voice and technique.
 
He next touched on two of the several reasons that slowed acceptance of jazz as an art form in this country—namely, racism and a musical elitism that categorized jazz as roadhouse or speakeasy entertainment.

But it was Carter’s personal recollection of his early jazz experiences that piqued the most interest. In fact, to many, it came as a shock: Jimmy Carter?! The peanut farmer from Georgia known to be a classical devotee (by those in the know) or maybe a Southern rock enthusiast (by those not in the know)—was a jazz fan? And an avid one at that! Who knew?

And the lineup of talent on the South Lawn that memorable day was beyond “Wow!” From the daughter of bluesman W. C. Handy and 90-year-old pianist Eubie Blake to avant-gardists Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, and everyone in between. Here’s a full list:
Piano
Saxophone
Trumpet
Drums
Eubie Blake
Chick Corea
Gil Evans
Herbie Hancock
Dick Hyman
John Lewis
George Russell
Billy Taylor
Cecil Taylor
McCoy Tyner
Mary Lou Williams
Teddy Wilson
​Benny Carter
Ornette Coleman
Stan Getz
Dexter Gordon
Illinois Jacquet
Gerry Mulligan
Sam Rivers
Sonny Rollins
Zoot Sims
 
 
 
Doc Cheatham
Roy Eldridge
Dizzy Gillespie
Joe Newman
Clark Terry
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
Louis Bellson
Denardo Coleman
Jo Jones
Max Roach
Tony Williams






​

Bass
Guitar
Vibes
Singers
Ray Brown
Ron Carter
Milt Hinton
Charles Mingus
​​
​
George Benson
​

​​

​​
Lionel Hampton


​
​
​
​Pearl Bailey
Katharine Handy
​Lewis
​

​
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Saxophonist Dexter Gordon awaits his turn as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie states his case.
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President Carter speaks to Cecil Taylor after his performance. "I've never seen anyone play that way. Does Horowitz know about you?"
The country was denied the opportunity to learn just how much of a jazz fan Carter really was when he didn’t win a second term in office. His book White House Diary hit the shelves in 2010, and I quickly purchased a copy to see if he had expanded on his fascination with jazz. Sadly, the president from Plains had surprisingly little to say about the indigenous art form that best represented our country.
​

He acknowledges “the big event held on the South Lawn” as “the best party we’ve ever had—the Newport Jazz Festival twenty-fifth anniversary. About 800 people came, and we had a collection of jazz musicians that was really remarkable.”

​But that’s it, except for the anecdotes about himself and his daughter: “I went on stage with Dizzy Gillespie, and joined him in a rendition of ‘Salt Peanuts.’ It was a high point in my life when the New York Times complimented my singing,” and “Amy performed on the violin, which was a real hit.”[2]
​
​Regarding a jazz concert in the East Room featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, and Earl “Fatha” Hines, the president tells us: “It brought back old times when I was an avid jazz fan.”[3] Is it possible that the former chief executive was only a fan in his youth, his interest waning as he grew older, subsumed by his burgeoning love of opera and symphonic music?
 
The president’s ardor for the European import is abundantly clear in White House Diary as he rhapsodizes about classical performers who came to the White House—pianist Vladimer Horowitz, opera singers Roberta Peters and Leontyne Price, and cellist Slava Rostropovich—and takes forays with First Lady Rosalynn to hear classical expositions at the Kennedy Center and Metropolitan Opera.

​He also tells us (which many knew at the time): “In the inner White House office, we established a high-fidelity sound system, and for eight or ten hours a day I listened to classical music.”[4]
​
So which was the best jazz happening at the White House? The Ellington tribute in 1969? Or the Carter South Lawn jazz festival in 1978?

We have the music for the first event available from Blue Note Records in 1969 All-Star White House Tribute to Duke Ellington. Not so the latter. NPR recorded the music but has not released it. So what’s the hold up?

NOTES

  1. Recording courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
  2. Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 136, 202.
  3. Ibid., 136.
  4. Ibid., 12.
All photos courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

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Peggy Lee: “Is That All There Is?”

2/28/2020

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(Left to right): Pres. Pompidou of France, Mrs. Pompidou, Pres. Nixon, Peggy Lee, and Mrs. Nixon. 1970. Photo: Nixon Presidential Library.
Singer Peggy Lee appeared at the Nixon White House on February 29, 1970, to entertain French President Georges Pompidou and his wife in the East Room after a State Dinner. Halfway through her show, Peggy spoke at length about poetry as an introduction to her surprise hit song “Is That All There Is?”

Adapted from my book The Best Gig in Town:
​ 
Is “You know, more serious poetry isn’t that well accepted,” Peggy said. “In fact, to quote one writer, ‘To publish a book of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. . . . And I know. I wrote a book of verse and I dropped it into the Grand Canyon.’”

Peggy went on, “But then I couldn’t say that all poetry is not accepted because lyrics are poetry and they are accepted. Although, so many today are sentimental, sad, down. And I, for the most part, prefer the song of the optimist, because without the optimist, the pessimist would never know how happy he wasn’t, right? And then I couldn’t say that all lyrics are poetry because so many things they are writing today are little stories, little vignettes.”

Peggy’s rap on poetry was neither coquettish nor dilettantish; she genuinely loved the spoken word, as one would expect of a lyricist of her caliber. She read poetry regularly on her radio show way back in 1952, reciting William Butler Yeats before singing “These Foolish Things,” for example.  

Her emphasis on poetry—and especially contrasting the pessimist with the optimist—was no doubt her way of introducing her current surprise hit song written by chart-masters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. A most unusual pop number, “Is That All There Is?” intersperses morbid spoken verse with a catchy hook, a song that could easily be a turnoff for most on first hearing—as it was in fact for Peggy—but one that gathers meaning upon repeated hearing. 

After all, a song where the narrator’s memory is of her house burning down as a child (it happened to Peggy twice), a trip to a so-so circus, and lost love (Peggy knew only too well) but “let’s keep on dancing . . . and have a ball” is the stuff of an Oprah Winfrey book.

So it has a "keep smiling in the face of adversity" side, but on first hearing, it may not be too clear. One would have thought that most in the East Room audience had already heard it. It was the buzz song of the year, helped along by its mysterious quality and the controversy it generated.

The single version of “Is That All There Is?” had been out for a whole year—throughout 1969, Peggy had sung the song at her nightclub engagements and on national TV. An album of the same name had filled record store bins for the previous three months, and the trade press buzzed with speculation that Peggy would win a Grammy for the song (which she did two weeks after the Nixon event). 

Yet to the East Room glitterati, the song was a bummer; it received only polite applause. Maybe the spoken opening phrase turned them off. Peggy had uttered in a near whisper, “I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire—and it did, Mr. Nixon.” 

After the lukewarm response to the song, Peggy asked, “Well, I don’t want to sing good night right now, if you don’t mind. Do you?” 

Only a few in the audience answered no.[1]
​
Incomprehensible as the song itself was to some people, the songwriters were even more so. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote all those ’50s and early ’60s three-minute popular rhythm and blues hits “Hound Dog,” “Searchin’,” “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones,” had by the late ’60s become less and less interested in the sounds of Teen Pan Alley. 

Leiber, for one, found himself reading the likes of Thomas Mann—in particular, the short story Disillusionment. This literary work inspired him to write loosely connected verses of a disillusioned woman, to be spoken, not sung. 

The first verse is about a little girl watching her house go up in flames who asks, “Is that all there is to a fire?” The second verse centered on a day at the circus has the narrator asking, “Is that all there is to a circus?” The third verse about a love affair gone wrong and the fourth about a final disappointment elicit similar questions.

Leiber presented his four bittersweet, cabaret vignettes to Stoller, who immediately wrote music to capture the spirit of Kurt Weil and Bertold Brecht. The pair showed their work to English singer-actress Georgia Brown, who, in need of a song for a London TV special, suggested it needed a chorus, something for her to sing between verses. The two collaborated as usual and came up with the perfect song-saving chorus that included the lines: “Then let’s keep on dancing” and “Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.”

Georgia performed the song on TV, but the BBC didn’t record it. The boys wanted a single and began a search for someone who would be acceptable to a record company. They approached actress Marlene Dietrich, who, in their estimation, would be perfect for a cabaret song. She turned them down: “That song you just sang to me is what I am, not what I do.” They then sent the song to Barbra Streisand. No reply ever came.

Then they thought of Peggy Lee. She had recorded their “I’m a Woman,” which was an across-the-board hit. Jerry handed her a demo of the song at a party. A week later, she called: “I will kill you if you give this song to anyone but me. This is my song. This is the story of my life.”

In January 1969 the songwriters joined Peggy in the studio. “I’ll do three takes” she said, “and no more.” It was a struggle. She did 36 takes; the last one was heavenly perfect. But the engineer had forgotten to push the “record” button. One more take—number 37—is the one the world would come to know.

But then Capitol Records refused to release it. At that point in her career, Peggy wasn’t selling records, and this new one—this existential treatise, Stoller called it—was hardly what the company wanted to hear. 

But for Peggy, that wasn't the end of the story.

Capitol Records wanted to promote some of their new acts and hoped to get them on Joey Bishop’s late-night TV show. Joey wasn’t that interested in those artists, but agreed to host them if he could also get Peggy. 

Always cagey, Peggy saw her chance. “I’ll go on the Bishop show,” she said, “if you release ‘All There Is?’ because that’s the song I’m singing on the show!” Capitol capitulated.[2]

The question remains. If the East Room crowd at the Pompidou State dinner had known all this, would it have made a difference? Probably not. 

And if that British singer hadn’t suggested the pair’s existential treatise needed an upbeat chorus, would it ever have been a song? 

And if comic Joey Bishop hadn’t had a thing for Peggy, would Capitol Records have ever allowed her to record it? 

And if Peggy had thrown her hands in the air and walked out after learning the recording engineer had forgotten to push the record button after the perfect take, achieved after a grueling 36 takes in a row, would it ever have been a song? 

Probably not, all around. Still, it became a song, a most unusual hit song at that.

​Serendipity Doo-Dah!


NOTES

  1. Edward Allan Faine, The Best Gig In Town: Jazz Artists at the White House, 1969–1974 (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2015), 51–52.
  2. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz, Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 234–46.
​
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Newport All-Stars: Lost and Found

1/30/2020

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PictureNewport All-Stars play in the Old Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, on June 18, 1962. From left: Ruby Braff (trumpet), George Wein (piano), Billy Taylor (bass), Marshall Brown (trombone), Senator Claiborne Pell, Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), and Eddie Phyfe (drums). (AP Photo)

​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:
​

Joint’s Jumping on the “Hill.” Sen. Claiborne Pell yesterday was host to the Newport Jazz Festival All-Stars, who conducted a jam session in the rotunda of the Old Senate Office Building. The visit here, which also included a concert last night for the Senate Staff Club, was designed to call attention to the annual Newport Jazz Festival, scheduled for July 6, 7, and 8 at Newport, R.I. In this picture, drummer Eddie Phyfe and bass player Billie Taylor [Jr.] swing out on a hot Dixieland number.[7]
​
​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.
​
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George Wein and the Newport All-Stars performing at the Sylvan Theater on August 28, 1962. Photo: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

​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:
​
Up “Undecided” (1938): 5 min.
Up “Indiana” (1917): 6 min.
“Blue and Sentimental” (1938):3 min.
Up “Crazy About My Baby” (1929): 4 min.
“Pee Wee’s Blues” (1930): 4 min.
Up “Saint Louis Blues” (1914): 6 min.

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.
​
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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?

NOTES

  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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Looking Back 50 Years: Notable Jazz Events/Albums of 1969

1/20/2020

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The most notable jazz event of 1969—and one of the most notable in all of jazz history—was the Duke Ellington gala held at the White House on April 29. This six-hour event included a banquet, a 90-minute concert of 27 Ellington songs performed by an all-star jazz ensemble, and a jam session with dancing. Hundreds of guests attended the celebration, during which President Nixon awarded Duke the Medal of Freedom.
 
This was the first time the award was given to an African American and the first time it was given to a jazz musician. This gesture, at a time when jazz was not yet fully recognized as an art form, set the jazz arts community abuzz like never before. Not only did the medal go to the most respected, honored, and accomplished jazz musician in over four decades, but it was as if the award had gone to jazz itself, bestowed at the highest level of government. Greater recognition was bound to follow, and it did.
 
Jazz received its first federal grant in 1969, which grew tenfold over the next five years and also set the stage for jazz to receive significant grant money from reluctant foundations for the next ten years. Shortly thereafter, jazz was accepted as a fully recognized American art form.
 
And it all began at the Ellington tribute in the spring of 1969, well described by jazz critic Dan Morgenstern: “Though there were moments of appropriate solemnity, the tenor of the evening was one of cheerful warmth and friendly informality, set by the president himself.”

More in-depth information can be found in my book Ellington at the White House, 1969, and the recorded concert can be heard on All-Star White House Tribute to Duke Ellington, Blue Note (2002). 
​
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The “Year of Duke” continued. His orchestra came in first in DownBeat magazine’s critics and readers polls, and he topped those polls in the composer and arranger categories as well. Moreover, his album And His Mother Called Him Bill was voted the year’s best by critics and the year’s fourth best by readers.[1]
 
Mother Called Him Bill is the maestro’s homage to his long-term composer-companion, Billy Strayhorn, who passed in 1967. The record is notable for its celestial tracks by altoist Johnny Hodges, particularly in “Blood Count,” “After All,” and “Day Dream,” the latter a late-at-night, sob-in-year-beer favorite. Stray’s compositions brought out that special, sensuous Hodges sound. As singer Lillian Terry recently put it, “Heavens, when he blows those long, languid notes . . . it’s an actual caress.”
 
The flip side of the Hodges coin—the bluesy side—Billy also knew well, as illustrated by “Snibor,” “The Intimacy of the Blues,” and “Acht O’Clock Rock.”[2]
 
In the year 1969, DownBeat fairly embraced the avant-garde movement while also fully embracing rock. Regarding the former, reviews of new thing musician albums were well represented and, generally speaking, highly rated (there were exceptions, like altoist Lou Donaldson’s scorching article declaring it was a bunch of noise made by amateurs[3]).
  
For example, albums by Gunter Hamphill, John Carter and Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Simmons and Prince Lasha, Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman were all received. And, oh, the movement’s founding father, Ornette Coleman, was entered into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1969.
 
DownBeat had tippy-toed around rock in years past but dove deep into the music in 1969. Besides establishing a regular column for the first time (by Alan Heilnman), the magazine featured articles about the following rock musicians and groups, as well as reviews of their albums: Tim Hardin, Steve Miller Band, George Benson, Mike Bloomfield, Bob Dylan, Mothers of Invention, Blood, Sweat and Tears (BST), Ten Years After, and Chicago.[4]
 
The Newport Jazz Festival followed suit, inviting a slew of rockers to perform, including BST, Lighthouse (a BST clone), Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, Mothers of Invention, Sly and the Family Stone, and James Brown. In one respect it worked—the festival drew a larger crowd. But it wasn’t a jazz crowd; it included a sizable number of youthful, rowdier fans (think Woodstock), resulting in a host of security problems. Impresario George Wein concluded, “The kids destroyed the event and the experiment was a failure.” The Newport town council concluded, “No rock next year.”[5]
 
It was also the year of Miles Davis. DownBeat readers voted him jazzman of the year and best trumpeter and combo leader. They also voted his albums Filles de Killimanjaro (FDK) and In a Silent Way the year’s best and third best, respectively.[6]

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While not fully appreciated at the time, these two stepping-stone albums represented Miles’s first breakaway from the hard bop aesthetic (and his occasional romantic excursions) that had begun with Walkin and continued from the first great quintet (Round Midnight) and sextet (Milestones and Kind of Blue) to the second great quintet (Miles Smiles and E.S.P.). His breakaway sound would soon be labeled jazz fusion, jazz rock, or electric Miles (Bitches Brew).

Interestingly, neither FDK nor In a Silent Way stirred much controversy at the time of their release—that would come later.

Paul Tingen notes the following regarding the FDK tracks:
​ 
“Petits Machins” has its roots in the second great quintet’s hard bop origins, even as it features a lyrical folk melody. “Toot de Suite” also has a graceful, folk-like melody but is underpinned with a straight rock rhythm. The “Filles de Killimanjaro” track has an almost pastoral feel and a strong African influence on the rhythms and a gorgeous theme. The solos and the simple chord changes are to some degree idiomatic to rock music. On “Stuff,” the quintet sounds as if it’s having fun experimenting with funk and soul influences without adding anything new.[7]
​
“Filles de Killimanjaro” and, to a lesser extent, “Toot de Suite” indicate for the first time a real integration of folk and rock influences, and no one got upset—many people enjoyed it. DownBeat readers loved FDK and selected it as their favorite album of 1969.

The quintet that recorded FDK consisted of Miles on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on sax, Chick Corea on piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. (Replace Tony Williams with drummer Jack DeJohnette, and this group would have been called Miles’s “Lost Quintet,” a quintet that never made a studio recording). 

Cook and Morton describe In a Silent Way, the second stepping-stone album, as a collage using “found objects” put together with a view to the minimum details and coloration required to make an impact—the “found objects” being British guitarist John McLaughlin, Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul, whose “In a Silent Way” became a centerpiece of the album, and Columbia producer Teo Macero, who stitched repeats of certain recorded live studio passages back into the fabric of the music, giving it continuity and a certain hypnotic circularity. 

In effect, three new players of electric instruments (Chick Corea on piano, Joe Zawinul on piano and organ, and John McLaughlin on guitar) joined four members of the second classic quintet (Miles Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, and Tony Williams on drums) to give the band a sound completely unlike any previous incarnation.[8] 

Producer Teo Macero’s post-production role was crucial to the outcome (quite unusual for jazz at the time). Teo edited two hours of recorded music and trimmed it with Miles to 27 minutes of original music. He then expanded it to 38 minutes (to fit two sides of a 12” LP) by repeating certain sections.[9]

Cook and Morton praise In a Silent Way as a beautiful album, touching and centered. The title piece and “Shhh/Peaceful” are among the most atmospheric recordings in modern jazz.[10] 

In a Silent Way became an important forerunner of ambient music. Not certain what to make of the album, the DownBeat reviewer awarded it three and a half stars.[11]
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Another 1969 album of note featured the venerated Modern Jazz Quartet. Released on Beatles label Apple Records in 1968, Under the Jasmin Tree featured the lengthy three-part suite “Three Little Feelings” and “Exposure,” both poised structured fare with swinging elements, as well as two surprises: “The Blue Necklace” and “The Jasmin Tree,” both based on the Afro-Moorish rhythms of Morocco, with drummer Connie Kay and bassist Percy Heath front and center. 

On “The Blue Necklace,” a very active Kay rang his triangle, shook his jingle bells, and tappety-tapped his snare’s skin and rim alternately, and at times simultaneously, while Heath plucked a high-note, clave-like rhythm on his bass. 

On “The Jasmin Tree,” Heath held the bottom with a steady boom-boom-boom as Kay maintained a clack-clack-clack, sock cymbal clucking away underneath, a triangle keeping the pulse on top (instead of a ride cymbal), and—the coup de grâce—a tambourine gospel shaking that sounded like the quick one-two hand claps of a church choir.

​In the middle of this throbbing stew, John Lewis on piano and Milt Jackson on vibes twined their way through a folk-like ditty, stating the melody, comping, and soloing, first one then the other, back and forth. 

About three-quarters of the way through, the gospel-ish rhythm came to a halt, and a new but related melody (Moroccan folk song) was introduced, played in unison by piano, vibes, and bass. Following this interlude, it was back to the Moorish church, and the tune concluded as it began. 

DownBeat magazine awarded five stars to this welcome departure from a much-revered group, which, by the way, also played the White House in 1969.[12]


NOTES


  1. Critics Poll, DownBeat magazine, August 21, 1969; Readers Poll, DownBeat magazine, December 25, 1969.
  2. Edward Allan Faine, “Faine Favorites: Top 10 Alto Sax Albums,” Jazz Blog, August 31, 2018. 
  3. Lou Donaldson, scorching review of new thing music, DownBeat magazine, February 1969.
  4. All issue review of both avante-garde and rock music coverage, DownBeat magazine, January 9–December 25, 1969.
  5. Coverage of Newport Jazz Festival, DownBeat magazine, August 21, 1969.
  6. Readers Poll coverage of Miles Davis, DownBeat magazine, December 25, 1969.
  7. Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2001), 46. 
  8. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 7th ed. (NewYork: Penguin Books, 2004), 408–409. 
  9. Tingen, Miles Beyond, 60.
  10. Cook and Morton, Penguin Guide, 66.
  11. DownBeat magazine, October 1969.
  12. Edward Allan Faine, The Best Gig In Town: Jazz Artists at the White House, 1969–1974 (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2015), 27–32. ​
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That Anniversary Year 2019: Celebrating Four Jazz Centenarians

12/31/2019

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Left to right: Nat King Cole, George Shearing, Al McKibbon, and Herbie Nichols
The 100th anniversary jazz birthday calendar for 2019 has three fewer than for 2018—15 total centenarians, oldest to youngest as follows:

Herbie Nichols, Al McKibbon, Israel Crosby, Snooky Young, Buddy Morrow, Nat King Cole, Mercer Ellington, Lennie Tristano, Benny Harris, Ella Johnson, George Shearing, Art Blakey, Anita O’Day, Hall Singer, Babs Gonzales.[1]

Below, I spotlight four jazz legends from this group.
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​

Nat King Cole

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Of all Nat King Cole’s signature songs and classic albums, there is one album that is almost universally adored in the jazz community (sadly, less so with the general public), and that is, as Gene Rizzo characterized it, the eternally hip After Midnight (1957).

In the June 2004 issue of DownBeat magazine, a diverse group of 73 jazz singers (21 men, 52 women) were asked to name their top all-time favorite jazz vocal albums. The top 30 were listed; Midnight placed 12th. (Johnny Hartman and Frank Sinatra, the only higher-placed male singer albums, 2nd and 6th, respectively).[2]

In song historian Will Friedwald’s opinion, Midnight is a masterpiece, one of the great jazz vocal albums of all time, and I agree. Interestingly, and surprisingly, it is the only one of Cole’s original albums where he both sang and played piano all the way through. Moreover, his performance was never more free, or loose, like a man on a lark at a jam session with nothing to prove. Friedwald has told us how this gem came about:
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[Nat and [his pal, trumpeter Harry “Sweets“ Edison] were at a [Dodgers baseball] game in August 1956 and they were overjoyed when [their] team . . . won, so much so that they had to let off steam by playing. Four calls were then made, first to Cole’s producer Lee Gillette to arrange for studio time at the Capitol Tower, and then to three regular members of his working trio, guitarist John Collins, bassist Charlie Harris, and drummer Lee Young. Upon arrival at the tower, Cole, Edison, and the trio quickly and exuberantly laid down five masters on songs they already knew very well.[3]

The first session was completely spontaneous with Cole, his standard rhythm section and baseball buddy Edison, the most recognizable trumpet voice in jazz—only one note and you know it’s Sweets. Nat played and sang songs already in his repertoire “Sweet Loraine,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon, “Route 66,” and “You Can Depend on Me.” 

The songs had been previously recorded in other contexts, of course, and here they were expanded with more and longer solos—jam session style—exactly what Cole wanted. Nat and producer Gillette were delighted with the results and decided to turn the pianist’s impromptu jam into an album project—12 more songs over three more sessions, each with a different guest soloist.

Next up, Willie Smith, a swing era alto saxophonist second only to Duke’s Johnny Hodges. For this session, Cole edged off his jam session perch a touch and recorded newer material: “Don’t Let It Go to Your Head,” “You’re Lookin’ at Me,” and “I Was a Little Too Lonely (And You Were a Little Too Late),” the latter written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, the tuner pair responsible for Nat’s breakout hit “Mona Lisa.” The session ended on a jam session favorite with Nat and Willie stretching out on a finger-snapping “Just You, Just Me.”

For the third session, Cole wanted a Latin tinge and brought in Cuban percussionist Jack Constanzo and Ellington boneman Juan Tizol, composer of “Caravan,” which they dutifully played and followed it with the perfect companion piece “The Lonely One.”

Constanzo sat out while Cole and Tizol delivered the best slow ballads on the album: “Blame It on My Youth” and “What Is There to Say.” Freidwald rhapsodized: “Cole has never been more convincingly romantic, and he’s brilliantly supported by both Tizol and his own piano playing. As an interpreter of great love lyrics, the King takes a royal back seat to no one.”

The last session’s four tracks featured the “sainted collaboration” (Friedwald’s term) of Nat with grand swing era violinist Stuff Smith. They teamed up on a laid-back “Some-times I’m Happy,” “I Know That You Know” at race-horse tempo, with ripping piano-violin exchanges, a moderately swinging “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” and a relaxed treatment of “Two Loves Have I.”

At the time of its first release, Midnight was a one-of-a-kind album, and it has remained as such. Nat King Cole never worked with a small jazz combo of that variety again.

CODA
Comments accompanying the Midnight 12th-place finish:

Grady Tate: “We know he is a genius at the piano but what he does vocally is unbelievable. One can understand each and every word he sings and the phrasing is impeccable. Nat set such a high standard for male singers.”

Tuey Connell: “The juxtaposition of the bop-leaning piano playing and his conversational delivery entices and challenges the listener at the same time.”

John Pizzarelli: “An amazing combination of spontaneity and arrangement. Everybody’s contribution from Lee Young’s drumming and John Collin’s guitar to Sweet Edison’s trumpet and Stuff Smith’s swinging violin perfectly compliment Nat’s swinging ease.”
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George Shearing/Al McKibbon

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​Born blind in London, England, young George began pecking out tunes on the piano at age three. His handicap and precocious talent led to formal training in classical piano and theory. He rejected university scholarships in favor of working in neighborhood pubs that soon expanded to engagements at top London supper clubs, and guest spots on BBC radio. 

During WWII, Shearing met American jazz musicians (e.g., Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins) while they were touring. They assured him of great success in the US. George crossed the pond to New York City, where he began to attract attention on the beboppin’ 52nd Street. ​

​Gene Rizzo, author of The Fifty Greatest Jazz Pianists of All Time—who ranked Shearing ninth—continued the story from there:

In ’49, Shearing formed his famous quintet–a unique blend at the time of piano, vibes [Marjorie Hyams], guitar [Chuck Wayne], bass [John Levy], and drums [Denzil Best]. It became one of jazz’s biggest attractions. The quintet’s tight arrangements were based on the locked-hands style of Lionel Hampton’s pianist, Milt Buckner. Its formula, easily atomized, but less easily executed at fast tempos, featured the piano voiced in four-part chords. The right hand’s top, or melody voice, was doubled by the left hand within an octave. The vibes played in unison with the upper melody, the guitar with the lower.[4]

The initial lineup responsible for the unique “Shearing Sound” recorded for Discovery, Savoy, and MGM. The result—the nigh impossible—a hit jazz record: the immensely popular “September in the Rain,” which sold over 900,000 copies![5] Other not-as-popular singles followed, “I Remember April,” for example. 

George continued to soak up the sounds of bebop piano masters Bud Powell and Hank Jones, and the newly arrived Latin rhythms (Latin jazz). He got his first taste of Latin music at the Club Clique in midtown Manhattan when he played opposite the Machito orchestra. He later reminisced: “The sounds were incredible, the rhythm complex, the bass lines were so interesting. I wanted to record Latin music, but the opportunity did not appear until I met bassist Al McKibbon, who knew the roots of Afro-Cuban music.”[6]
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Detroit-born Al McKibbon—who shared the same birth year with Shearing—moved to New York in the 1940s. In 1947 he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and played with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo. Al learned the fundamentals of Afro-Cuban drumming from Pozo and played on the original recording of Dizzy’s “Manteca.”

Later he participated in the recording Birth of the Cool with Miles Davis. Particularly adept at blending Latin rhythms with straight jazz, McKibbon was at the heart of the Shearing Quintet from 1951 to 1958.[7]

In September 1953, the George Shearing Quintet, which now included Cal Tjader on vibes, Belgian-born ”Toots” Theilemann on guitar, Bill Clark on drums, Al McKibbon on bass, Catalino Rulon on maracas, and Candido Camero on bongos, recorded an album for MGM. Shearing was not pleased with his piano performance. McKibbon suggested he listen to the recordings of Noro Morales and Joe Loco so he could learn to ad-lib the Cuban montuno. 

Shearing later said, “My ears became attuned to the authentic Afro-Cuban music thanks to AL McKibbon, the Machito orchestra, and Armando Peraza and Willie Bobo.” It was the Afro-Cuban whisperer McKibbon who suggested Shearing hire Peraza, who was regarded as a true virtuoso, unequaled as a bongo player and capable of amazing solos on conga drums. 

Peraza joined the Shearing band in 1953, an association that would last eleven years.  McKibbon declared, “When Armando came into the band, that was a new day.”[8] 

​Indeed, as Peraza later recalled:
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I used to sit down with Shearing and sing melodies to him. He would play them on the piano and develop an arrangement. He was blind but he could see my ideas, my dream. Shearing said he loved my harmonic concepts. He allowed me to compose, to create.[9]
​
Shearing recorded a number of memorable albums of jazzed-up boleros and mambos. The first one with Peraza and McKibbon, Latin Escapade (1956), sold 80,000 copies, a milestone for Latin jazz! Other albums followed: Latin Affair (1958), Mood Latino (1961), and Latin Rendezvous (1962).[10]

These albums contributed to the general acceptance of the music, along with the quintet’s appearances at jazz clubs, supper clubs, college campuses, and spaces generally off-limits to other jazz groups.

​Between 1956 and 1963, I attended five shows: three in Cleveland, Ohio (two at the Modern Jazz Club, one at Public Hall) and two in Columbus, Ohio (one at the Kontiki Polynesian Restaurant, the other at a downtown hotel). Each set featured a Latin segment with Armando Peraza front and center. 

Besides being an outstanding classical and bebop-influenced jazz pianist and the leader of an instantly recognizable, one-of-a-kind jazz quintet, George Shearing deserves plaudits for his early contribution to, and promotion of, Latin jazz, a genre that would attain significant popular status in the 1960s and beyond.
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​

Herbie Nichols

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​A belated shout-out to a most deserving pianist-composer: Herbie Nichols. Jazz critic Gary Giddins writes:
​

[While] an incontestably modern and unique voice, and despite his own fabled persistence, he was only able to document four tunes for Savoy (1952), two albums for Blue Note (1955–56), and one for Bethlehem (1957) . . . He wrote over a hundred songs, but only 30 were recorded by himself, another three by Mary Lou Williams, and one by Billie Holiday.[11]
 
Pianist Frank Kimbrough marveled: “It’s bizarre. He wrote twice as many tunes as Thelonious Monk, yet he’s always been famous for being unknown.”
 
Well, perhaps not so much now. Nichols was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 2017, more than five decades after his death from leukemia.[12]

NOTES

  1. ​Jazz Birthday Calendar, 1919.​
  2. Frank-John Hadley, “30 All-Time Favorite Jazz Vocal Recordings,” DownBeat magazine, June 2004, 48.
  3. Will Friedwald, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 69–75.
  4. Gene Rizzo, The Fifty Greatest Jazz Pianists of All Time (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005), 35–36. See also additional confirming source: Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music (New York: Quill, 1983), 98–100.
  5. Raul Fernadez, Latin Jazz: The Perfect Combination (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 82.
  6. Ibid., 83.
  7. Ibid., 82–85.
  8. Ibid., 83, 77, 82.
  9. Ibid., 76.
  10. Ibid., 82.​​
  11. ​Liner Notes, Gary Giddins, Herbie Nichols--The Bethlehem Years, Bethlehem Records, LP, BCP 6026, 1976.
  12. Herbie Nichols, “Rightful Honor,” DownBeat Magazine, August 2017, 36.
​
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