The Penguin Jazz Guide (26 page)

MUGGSY SPANIER

Born Francis Joseph Spanier, 9 November 1906, Chicago, Illinois; died 12 February 1967, Sausalito, California

Cornet

Muggsy Spanier 1939–1942

Classics 709

Spanier; Ruby Weinstein, Elmer O’Brien (t); Ford Leary, George Brunies (tb, v); Rod Kless (cl); Karl Kates, Joe Forchetti, Ed Caine (as); Ray McKinstrey, Bernie Billings, Nick Caizza (ts); George Zack, Charlie Queener, Joe Bushkin (p); Bob Casey (g, b); Pat Pattison (b); Marty Greenberg, Al Hammer, Don Carter, Al Sidell (d), Dottie Reid (v). July 1939–June 1942.

Humphrey Lyttelton said (1991):
‘He wasn’t the greatest technician. Some of the solos play around with just four or five notes, but he gets something across every time. It’s almost miraculous how he does that, like Picasso creating a recognizable likeness with just two strokes of his brush.’

Recording as a teenager, Muggsy was off to a quick start in his native Chicago. He worked with Ted Lewis and Ben Pollack in the ’20s and ’30s, before forming his Ragtime Band in 1939. The records are classics but the band was a commercial failure. He stuck with Dixieland through the ’40s and ’50s, before moving west to join Earl Hines in 1957 and leading modest small groups up until his death.

Spanier’s 1939 Ragtime Band recordings are among the classic statements in the traditional-jazz idiom. Bob Crosby’s Bob Cats had helped to initiate a modest vogue for small Dixieland bands in what was already a kind of revivalism at the height of the big-band era, and Spanier’s group had audiences flocking to Chicago clubs, although by December, with a move to New York, they were forced to break up for lack of work. Their recordings have been dubbed ‘The Great Sixteen’ ever since. While there are many fine solos scattered through the sides – mostly by Spanier and the little-remembered Rod Kless – it’s as an ensemble that the band impresses: allied to a boisterous rhythm section, the informal counterpoint among the four horns (the tenor sax perfectly integrated, just as Eddie Miller was in the Bob Cats) swings through every performance. The repertoire re-established the norm for Dixieland bands, and even though the material goes back to Oliver and the ODJB, there’s no hint of fustiness, even in the rollicking effects of ‘Barnyard Blues’. ‘Someday Sweetheart’, with its sequence of elegant solos, is a masterpiece of cumulative tension, and Spanier himself secures two finest hours in the storming finish to ‘Big Butter And Egg Man’ and the wah-wah blues-playing on ‘Relaxin’ At The Touro’, a poetic tribute to convalescence (he had been ill the previous year) the way Parker’s ‘Relaxin’ At Camarillo’ would subsequently be. His own playing is masterful throughout – the hot Chicago cornet sound refined and seared away to sometimes the simplest but most telling of phrases. This Classics CD adds eight tracks to the definitive 16 by Muggsy’s big band, none of them outstanding but all grist to the Spanier collector’s mill.

COLEMAN HAWKINS
^&

Known as ‘Bean’; born 21 November 1904, St Joseph, Missouri; died 19 May 1969, New York City

Tenor saxophone

Coleman Hawkins 1939–1940

Classics 634

Hawkins; Tommy Lindsay, Joe Guy, Tommy Stevenson, Nelson Bryant (t); Benny Carter (t, as); Earl Hardy, J. C. Higginbotham, William Cato, Sandy Williams, Claude Jones (tb); Danny Polo (cl); Eustis Moore, Jackie Fields, Ernie Powell (as); Kermit Scott (ts); Gene Rodgers, Joe Sullivan (p); Ulysses Livingston (g, v); Lawrence Lucie, Bernard Addison, Gene Fields (g); William Oscar Smith, Artie Shapiro, Johnny Williams, Billy Taylor (b); Arthur Herbert, George Wettling, Walter Johnson, Big Sid Catlett, J. C. Heard (d); Thelma Carpenter, Jeanne Burns, Joe Turner, Gladys Madden (v). October 1939–August 1940.

Stan Getz said (1983):
‘I guarantee you that everyone who has ever picked up a tenor saxophone has tried to reduplicate that performance, and every one of us wishes that one day we could do something like [“Body And Soul”]. Maybe that’s the motivation.’

The 11th of October 1939 marks an epoch in modern jazz. On that day, Coleman Hawkins recorded the version of ‘Body And Soul’ that became the template for a thousand thousand saxophone solos since. It sits, along with cuts by Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, as among the very finest performances in the whole history of jazz.

Hawkins had been recording in Europe. He didn’t exactly return to the USA in triumph, but his eminence was almost immediately re-established with the astounding ‘Body And Soul’, which still sounds like the most spontaneously perfect of all jazz records. Fitted into the session as an afterthought (they had already cut 12 previous takes of ‘Fine Dinner’ and eight of ‘Meet Doctor Foo’), this one-take, two-chorus improvisation is so completely realized, every note meaningful, the tempo ideal, the rhapsodic swing irresistible, and the sense of rising drama sustained to the final coda, that it still has the capacity to amaze new listeners, just like Armstrong’s ‘West End Blues’ or Parker’s ‘Bird Gets The Worm’. A later track on this Classics CD, the little-known ‘Dedication’, revisits the same setting; although masterful in its way, it points up how genuinely immediate the greatest jazz is: it can’t finally compare to the original. If the same holds good for the many later versions of the tune which Hawkins set down, his enduring variations on the structure (and it’s intriguing to note that he only refers to the original melody in the opening bars of the 1939 reading – which didn’t stop it from becoming a huge hit) say something about his own powers of renewal.

The CD is let down by dubbing from some very surfacey originals, even though it includes some strong material – two Varsity Seven sessions with Carter and Polo, the aforementioned ‘Dedication’ and a 1940 date for OKeh which features some excellent tenor on ‘Rocky Comfort’ and ‘Passin’ It Around’.

& See also
Coleman Hawkins 1929–1934
(1929–1934; p. 38),
The Stanley Dance Sessions
(1955–1958; p. 172)

BUD FREEMAN

Born Lawrence Freeman, 13 April 1906, Chicago, Illinois; died 15 March 1991, Chicago, Illinois

Tenor saxophone

Bud Freeman 1939–1940

Classics 811

Freeman; Max Kaminsky (t); Jack Teagarden (tb, v); Brad Gowans (vtb); Pee Wee Russell (cl); Dave Bowman (p); Eddie Condon (g); Clyde Newcomb, Pete Peterson, Mort Stuhlmaker (b); Danny Alvin, Morey Feld, Al Sidell, Dave Tough (d). July 1939–July 1940.

Bud Freeman said (1982):
‘I had ambitions to be a Shakespearean actor when I was a young man, but I’ve been strutting this stage ever since … You don’t have to learn swordplay to be a jazz musician, though it might help with promoters!’

Freeman was perhaps the first truly significant white tenor-player. If he looked, and chose to behave, like the secretary of some golf club in the Home Counties – episode one of his autobiography was called
You Don’t Look Like a Musician
– his saxophone walked all over the carpets in spikes, a rawer sound than Lester Young’s (to which it is often likened) and with a tougher articulation; it was for a time the only viable alternative to Coleman Hawkins’s sound.

He was a member of the famous Austin High School Gang and perhaps its most polished alumnus. He made records in the 1930s with other leaders – Tommy Dorsey, Muggsy Spanier, Eddie Condon – but became a star in his own right with ‘The Eel’, a sinuous tenor melody that became a signature hit. The first pieces on the 1939 Classics volume features Freeman’s Summa Cum Laude Orchestra, an octet with a starry line-up that swung with bullish ease, like a glee club at a gentlemen’s club. The material from later in the year and next features a slightly different band with Teagarden (effusively vocal on ‘Jack Hits the Road’) in place of Gowans and a body of material that suggests the ODJB and Bix Beiderbecke. Freeman was most comfortable with his repertoire and there are a few moments when his tenor resembles Trumbauer’s C-melody; Bud had started out on that horn and something of its quiet presence carried over into Bud’s tenor work.

He enjoyed a long life and was still playing in his 70s, always with the reluctant grace of a man who really didn’t want the spotlight but wouldn’t want to let anyone down.

ARTIE SHAW

Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, 23 May 1910, New Haven, Connecticut; died 30 December 2004, Newbury Park, California

Clarinet

Artie Shaw 1939

Classics 1007

Shaw; Chuck Peterson, John Best, Bernie Privin (t); George Arus, Harry Rodgers, Les Jenkins (tb); Les Robinson, Hank Freeman (as); Tony Pastor (ts, v); Ronnie Perry, Georgie Auld (ts); Bob Kitsis (p); Al Avola (g); Sid Weiss (b); Buddy Rich (d); Helen Forrest (v). January–March 1939.

Visiting London as a conductor (1984), Artie Shaw said:
‘Of course I still have a clarinet. I had it turned into a table lamp.’

Shaw’s amazing life makes his records seem tame. They form a unique part of the jazz literature, although his real successes were comparatively few and his ambitions always outran his achievements. He successively turned his back on each fresh phase in his life – much as he walked away from marriages to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, just two of his eight wives – and eventually, after 1949, gave up playing clarinet altogether, though he did occasionally come out of retirement to conduct, mostly classical arrangements.

Shaw started out in dance bands before forming his own ensemble in 1936. Though his orchestra became one of the major swing-era big bands, he resisted commercialism and disbanded several orchestras during the period, during the late ’30s and war years. As a clarinettist, he was as accomplished as Benny Goodman and the major soloist in his own band. Shaw was perhaps too rounded and curious a character to be bounded by the life of a jazz musician. As well as successive trips to City Hall and Reno, tying or untying various knots, he became a gifted writer of fiction and had a more than amateur interest in psychoanalysis.

Although ‘Begin The Beguine’ made him a success – Shaw switched the original beguine beat to a modified 4/4, and its lilting pulse was irresistible – euphoria turned to loathing when it dawned on him what it meant in terms of fawning fans and general notoriety. He never seemed satisfied with his bands, and most compilations paper across multiple break-ups and disbandments.

This, the second disc in the Classics series, picks up Shaw’s story at the zenith. It’s the gusto of the band and Shaw’s piercing solos one remembers, a quite astonishing advance on the music of only a little over a year earlier. This sounds like a swing master close to full command and presented in good-sounding transfers. One is impressed with how often
Shaw got a musical result of one sort or another. Listen to the way the band makes the melody-line of ‘The Man I Love’ sing, or how Shaw makes the most of even a bit of hokum like ‘The Donkey Serenade’. Only ten of the 22 tracks sport a vocal – a very low strike-rate compared to most other white bands of the day – and even then Shaw could boast the admirable Helen Forrest as his singer. It’s sometimes disappointing that there weren’t more interesting soloists, but Shaw by himself is always worth listening to. Track for track, this is a marvellous portrait of a swing band.

CHARLIE CHRISTIAN

Born 19 July 1916, Dallas, Texas; died 2 March 1942, New York City

Guitar

The Genius Of The Electric Guitar

Columbia CK 65564 4CD

Christian; Alec Fila, Irving Goodman, Cootie Williams (t); Cutty Cutshall, Lou McGarity (tb); Gus Bivona, Skippy Martin (as); Georgie Auld, Pete Mandello (ts); Bob Snyder (bs); Lionel Hampton (vib); Count Basie, Dudley Brooks, Johnny Guarnieri, Fletcher Henderson (p); Artie Bernstein (b); Nick Fatool, Harry Jaeger, Jo Jones, Dave Tough (d). 1939–1941.

Guitarist Jim Hall said (1992):
‘Whenever I hear Charlie Christian, I react the way I did when I heard him for the very first time: How did he do that? How … did … he … do … that? It was almost a spiritual awakening. Makes me realize I know next to nothing about the guitar.’

Who invented bebop? Parker and Gillespie seemed to arrive at near-identical solutions. Monk was never an orthodox bopper, but he had his two cents’ worth. Kenny Clarke made significant changes in the rhythm department. And then there was Charlie Christian, who in some accounts was the first to develop the long legato lines and ambitious harmonic progressions that defined bop. His appetite for booze and girls was only ever overtaken by his thirst for music. He once improvised ‘Rose Room’ for nearly an hour and a half, a feat which prompted Benny Goodman to hire him. Though his greatest contributions, in terms of musical history, were at Minton’s, his roles in the Goodman and Hampton bands represent the bulk of what is left to us from a strikingly foreshortened career. His first commercial outings were the September 1939 sides with Hampton. A single track from this time (‘One Sweet Letter From You’) and one from a month later (‘Haven’t Named It Yet’) give a sense of the excitement the bandleader obviously felt at this freshly discovered young voice.

Christian was the first to make completely convincing use of the electric instrument, and though his style blended Texas blues riffing with Lester Young’s long-limbed strolls, he was able to steer a path away from the usual saxophone-dominated idiom and towards something that established guitar as an improvising instrument in its own right. Goodman gave him considerable solo space in the sextet; amplification meant that the guitar could be heard clearly and Christian’s solos on ‘Rose Room’ and ‘Star Dust’ remain models for the instrument.