The Penguin Jazz Guide (138 page)

The middle record,
Blame It On My Youth
, is a discreet masterpiece. The tunes are mostly obscurities, which is part of its radiant charm, and the only reasonably well-known themes are the title-track and Benny Carter’s ‘Summer Serenade’. Art’s reading of ‘Blame It On My Youth’ is a definitive ballad statement, good even by his high standard. Otherwise, it’s mostly middle-pace. Clifford Jordan is on hand for these tracks and plays with outstanding subtlety and guarded power, taking a memorable feature on the other slow ballad, the closing ‘I’ll Be Around’. Williams leads the rhythm section with consummate craft and decisiveness, steering the band through Pauer’s ‘Fairy Tale Countryside’ (how many of them had played it before?), but it’s Lewis, showing unsuspected versatility, who really makes the music fall together, finding an extra ounce of power and crispness in every rhythm he has to mark out.

& See also
Meet The Jazztet
(1960; p. 250)

STEVE TURRE

Born 12 September 1948, Omaha, Nebraska

Trombone, shells

Fire & Ice

Stash STCD 7

Turre; Cedar Walton (p); Buster Williams (b); Billy Higgins (d); Quartette Indigo/John Blake (strings). February 1988.

Steve Turre said (1989):
‘Things changed for the trombone with bebop, which was hard and challenging. The only man who could stand up with Bird and Diz was J. J. Johnson, and that sort of underlined the idea that the trombone wasn’t such a central instrument in new jazz. But that’s a short-term thing. As long as there has been jazz, there has been a trombone at the heart of it.’

Turre was an in-demand brassman throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and his occasional albums as leader have investigated a series of increasingly fanciful fusions of idiom, with his shell-playing often taking a strong role. They introduce a pleasantly alien tonality and timbre to the records, but they aren’t a novelty element. Turre played with Roland Kirk, briefly with the Messengers and in the Jones–Lewis orchestra, but struck off boldly on his own. He’s perhaps a difficult musician to sell (or plays an instrument that doesn’t at once appeal to modern audiences) for his recording history has been slightly chequered.

No recent thing stands up to the sheer aural delight of
Fire & Ice.
Turre’s use of a string quartet was a clever idea, and they’re left to their own devices on one number. Turre has
crafted a sequence of original compositions that foreground the trombone in a way that is both idiomatic and challenging, and standards that allow him to establish a foothold in tradition. The discipline of working in sections and for other leaders has given him an emphatic but never abrasive delivery. Every note seems to come out like a brazed sphere, but shimmering with heat, but he can also play with chilly reserve when the situation calls for it. Fire and ice, indeed.

MICHAEL JEFRY STEVENS

Born 13 March 1951, New York City

Piano

Mosaic Sextet

GM Recordings GM3045

Stevens; Dave Douglas (t); Michael Rabinowitz (bsn); Mark Feldman (vn); Joe Fonda (b); Harvey Sorgen (d). January 1988–March 1990.

Michael Jefry Stevens says:
‘When Joe Fonda and I created the band we wanted to explore different timbres. Mark and Dave met in my living room in Brooklyn and with Michael Rabinowitz on bassoon the sound of the sextet was immediately original and distinct. We rehearsed every week from 1988 through 2000. It was a very special project.’

A New Yorker of Italian and Russian-Jewish descent, Stevens is a remarkable musician and composer who, for reasons too embarrassingly trivial to reveal, has not featured much in previous volumes of the
Guide
, other than as a member of the long-standing Fonda–Stevens group, co-led with the bassist of the Mosaic Sextet.

The group title is worth glancing at twice, because Mosaic isn’t just a form of decorative tiling, but also the adjective from Moses, and a word that carries an unmistakable overtone of law. The music on this record pulls together a German release on Konnex called
Today, This Moment
after the impressive main track, together with other unreleased tracks. It is a special set in including not just the familiar, rock-solid but attentive and contentious partnership of Stevens and Joe Fonda, but also such distinguished contemporary improvisers as Dave Douglas, who contributes a good deal of the composed material and is already a powerful writer, and Mark Feldman.

Stevens spent – as opposed to mis-spent – some of his youth playing rock, much of it on organ, and a pulsing energy underlies many of these tracks, and notably ‘Anthem’, which one can readily imagine rescored for guitars and electric basses. That here it involves an ensemble one might just as easily find in a new-music context is a measure of Stevens’s range and adaptability as a composer. This is a very special record, one that seems to mark a cusp in the career of not just its principal, who lays down the law but has a magical touch of Aaron about him, too, but almost everyone involved, and it has real durability.

YANK LAWSON

Born John Rhea Lawson, 3 May 1911, Trenton, Missouri; died 18 February 1995, Indianapolis, Indiana

Trumpet

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Audiophile APCD-240

Lawson; George Masso (tb); Johnny Mince (cl); Lou Stein (p); Bucky Pizzarelli (g); Bob Haggart (b); Nick Fatool (d). March 1988.

Yank Lawson said (1985):
‘Sure, I enjoy myself now, and why not? It’s not like doing brain surgery, this music, and besides, I had my hungry times. There was a spell in the South when we were so broke we were setting mouse-traps with seed and catching sparrows to eat!’

After playing in local orchestras in Missouri, Lawson joined Ben Pollack’s band in 1933, then spent a period (interrupted by an argument) with Bob Crosby. In the ’50s and ’60s he often worked with Bob Haggart, and they formed the World’s Greatest Jazz Band together in 1968. A big man – at 6 feet 4 inches a giant for his generation – he was an imposing but genial presence and that was reflected too in his musicianship. Tommy Dorsey highlighted his skills in the Clambake Seven, and he had spells with Benny Goodman and (after making up) Bob Crosby before forging the alliance with bassist Bob Haggart that defined the rest of his career.

Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart (who died in 1998) played together for almost 60 years and the records for Audiophile and Jazzology maintained a formidable standard: Yank’s tough, growling solos have a bite and pungency which he retained, even into his 80s, and Haggart’s steady propulsion never faltered at all. They are a splendid group of discs and only the relatively tame repertoire on the later ones keep them out of the top bracket. The mostly recent material on
Something Old
is so fresh and is played so enjoyably that one wishes the group had stuck to originals over warhorses. A lovely ‘Blues For Louise’, a Spanish-sounding ‘Bumps’, played by a trio of Lawson, Stein and Fatool, and a swaggering ‘Come Back, Sweet Papa’ are the three highlights, but Yank’s own ‘Atlanta’ is a nice line and there’s a vigorous play-out in ‘Big Crash From China’, co-written by Haggart and Ray Bauduc. The blues is never far away, even when the structures point in another direction.

BOBBY HUTCHERSON
^&

Born 27 January 1941, Los Angeles, California

Vibraphone, marimba

Cruisin’ The ’Bird

Landmark LCD 1517

Hutcherson; Ralph Moore (ss, ts); Buddy Montgomery (p); Rufus Reid (b); Victor Lewis (d). April 1988.

Vibist Joe Locke says:
‘Bobby Hutcherson’s default setting is “search”. At this point in such an illustrious career, other artists would have rested on their laurels. Bobby still pushes the envelope.’

Hutcherson is the archetypal exponent of jazz as a long game, expecting no dramatic breakthrough, but not content to rest on a single style and play it out as a safe career position.
Cruisin’
is anything but a relaxed, straight-ahead session and not, as one American reviewer of the time assumed (did he
listen
to it?), a tribute to Charlie Parker. The second apostrophe gives it away. Hutcherson’s ’Bird is a 1964 convertible the size of a swimming pool and a fair image of the classic aerodynamics and effortless acceleration that had reappeared in the vibist’s playing two decades later. It might also stand for a certain nostalgia. It was harder to promulgate Bobby’s kind of adventure in the ’80s.

It’s nice to see him return to ‘All Or Nothing At All’ in the familiar headlong mood, but with a more reasoned argument running underneath. The originals are also cast in such a way that he has to work on several levels at once. Hometown associate Buddy Montgomery (himself normally a vibist) fulfils a solidly supportive role in what’s a footsure platform for the leader. English-born Moore plays some distinctive soprano on the ballad ‘Sierra’, and Hutcherson switches to marimba for the same track and in a curious way it’s the wooden instrument that now more often reflects his familiar, firmly struck but skatingly mobile style. It’s a
deceptively demanding record, whose immediate excitements give way to something deeper and more satisfying: there’s so much detail, incident, evidence of
thinking
, that it has remained a steady favourite of ours for more than 20 years.

& See also
The Kicker
(1963; p. 297)

TOOTS THIELEMANS

Born Jean-Baptiste Thielemans, 29 April 1922, Brussels, Belgium

Harmonica, guitar, whistling

Only Trust Your Heart

Concord CCD 4355

Thielemans; Fred Hersch (p); Marc Johnson, Harvie Swartz (b); Joey Baron (d). April–May 1988.

Fred Hersch says:
‘When I was playing with Toots in the mid-’80s, the last “real” jazz album he’d done was with Bill Evans. We’d worked a lot with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron and I thought he was really on top of his game. I had a recording studio and a relationship with Concord Records, who were keen on recording him. I chose a fair amount of new material along with what was unrecorded in the band book. I think it is one of his very strongest pure jazz recordings, played with great energy, imagination and swing.’

If you were a young Belgian jazz fanatic in the early ’40s, you took up guitar in emulation of Django. Thielemans recorded ‘Bluesette’ in 1961, after working with George Shearing; his first hit had him playing guitar and whistling, but he subsequently became the pre-eminent harmonica-player in jazz. He quickly found himself in the awkward and unsatisfactory position of coming first in a category of one or consigned to ‘miscellaneous instruments’. Though ubiquitous in the blues, the harmonica has made remarkably little impact in jazz, and there are no recognized critical standards for his extraordinary facility as a whistler. Thielemans’s pop and movie work has tended further to downgrade his very considerable jazz credentials. Surprisingly, to those who know him primarily as a performer of moodily atmospheric soundtrack pieces (
Midnight Cowboy
above all) or as composer of ‘Bluesette’, his roots are in bebop and in the kind of harmonically liberated improvisation associated with John Coltrane. That’s perhaps most obvious in the dark, Chicago-influenced sound of
Man Bites Harmonica
from 1957.

More recent years saw the romantic side win out.
Only Trust Your Heart
is his masterpiece. The harmonica-playing is superb. The choice of material and Fred Hersch’s arrangements are impeccable and the production first-rate, with Thielemans front and centre and the band spread out very evenly behind him. The set kicks off with a marvellous reading of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Speak No Evil’, and includes ‘Sophisticated Lady’, Monk’s ‘Little Rootie Tootie’ and Thad Jones’s ‘Three And One’, transposed unfamiliarly high to bring it within the range of Thielemans’s instrument, which takes on the slightly yodelling timbre of soprano saxophone. Throughout, Thielemans’s solo development merits the closest attention, particularly on the original ‘Sarabande’, the better of two duets with Hersch. The pianist’s other composition, ‘Rain Waltz’, deserves wider distribution. Apparently nearly all first takes, each of the dozen tracks represents Thielemans’s undervalued art at its finest.

UMO JAZZ ORCHESTRA

Formed 1975

Ensemble

UMO Plays The Music Of Muhal Richard Abrams

UMO CD 101

Anders Bergcrantz, Chuck Findley, Heiki Haimila, Esko Heikkinen, Simo Salminen (t); Juhani Aaltonen, Mikael Långbacka, Mircea Stan, Markku Veijonsuo (tb); Kari Heinilä, Eero Koivistoinen, Pentti Lahti, Pertti Päivinen, Teemu Salminen (sax); Seppo Kantonen (p); Kirmo Lintinen (syn); Lars Danielsson (b); Klaus Suonsaari (d); Mongo Aaltonen (perc). May 1988.

Trombonist George E. Lewis said (2007):
‘What UMO does is hugely impressive. It’s a tribute to what a little money, creatively and sensitively spent, can do for improvised music and jazz.’

To the envy of all, UMO receives state support in Finland, but does not fritter it away on makeweight projects. The orchestra is widely recognized for ambitious repertoire, inch-perfect section-work, some genuinely individual solo voices, and an intriguing leaven of guest musicians. The Muhal Richard Abrams disc is at the chewier and more adventurous side of UMO’s remit; they’ve ‘done’ Miles and Ellington since, much less successfully in our view. Since the composer himself supervised the sessions, we have to assume that he was relatively pleased with the results, but they are rather flat and mechanical and without the fire that a Chicago outfit might have brought to the proceedings. But then, the Windy City hasn’t been in any rush to offer Abrams recording opportunities of this sort. Among the pieces included are ‘Ritob’, ‘Fotex’, ‘Melancholia’ and ‘Symtre’ and there is a fine Abrams arrangement of Duke’s ‘Melancholy’ for contrast. As ever, the section-work is impeccable and there are some good solo spots from the likes of Lahti and Bergcrantz.