The Penguin Jazz Guide (44 page)

These Blue Note sessions are taut and well disciplined, though the trio tracks are better than the quintets, where the sequence of solos becomes mechanical and Hope progressively loses interest in varying his accompaniments. It’s quite dismaying to hear this, a palpable diminution of attention. Originals like ‘Freffie’ and ‘Hot Sauce’ come across well, and the sound stands up down the years. Like many of his piano generation, the work is only now being properly studied and appreciated.

J. J. JOHNSON
^&

Born James Louis Johnson, 22 January 1924, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 4 February 2001, Indianapolis, Indiana

Trombone

The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson: Volumes 1 & 2

Blue Note 32143-2 / 32144-2

Johnson; Clifford Brown (t); Hank Mobley (ts); Jimmy Heath (ts, bs); Wynton Kelly, John Lewis, Horace Silver (p); Paul Chambers, Percy Heath, Charles Mingus (b); Kenny Clarke (d); Sabu Martinez (perc). June 1953–June 1955.

Trombonist and composer Michael Gibbs says:
‘J.J. was always my idol – especially when I still harboured a desire to become a jazz trombonist. While I was at the Lenox School in 1960 (its last year), J.J. and group came through town to play a concert and John Lewis asked him to stay on for the remaining two weeks and teach, or just hang. I got to have a few lessons with him. We played the Jay & Kai two-trombone arrangements to get me to phrase and swing. Damn! I couldn’t have it any better!’

Trombonists found it hard to keep up in bebop, but J.J. developed an agile and pure-toned bop voice for the horn that was influenced by saxophone phrasing. He frequently hung an old beret over the bell of his horn to soften his tone and bring it into line with the sound of the reeds around him. He emerged in Benny Carter’s orchestra, for a short time with Basie, and as part of Jazz At The Philharmonic, but will always be remembered for being one half of Jay & Kai, with fellow trombonist Kai Winding. After a spell working in film music (just one of several periods away from full-time music), he left California and returned to Indianapolis, with his adored wife Vivian, whose death left him broken-hearted.

The first volume of the Blue Note set is one of the central documents of postwar jazz. Johnson – who was working as a blueprint checker at the time of the earliest sessions – sounds fleet and confident, and he has a marvellous band round him, including a young Clifford Brown. ‘Turnpike’ and ‘Capri’ exist in two versions each and show Johnson’s ability to rethink his phraseology, adjusting his attack on the original-release versions to accommodate Clarke’s powerful but unemphatic swing (swamped on the September 1954 sessions by Mingus’s chiming bass and the slap-happy Martinez); even on the slow-tempo ‘Turnpike’, Clarke provides an irresistible moving force underneath the melody. ‘Get Happy’ is appropriately upbeat and joyous, with notes picked off like clay pipes at a shooting gallery. In contrast, ‘Lover Man’ is given a mournful, drawn-out statement that squeezes out every drop of emotion the melody has to offer. The 1954 session yields some fine exchanges between Johnson and Kelly, notably on ‘It’s You Or No One’ and ‘Too Marvellous For Words’, where the leader’s tone and attack are almost as perfect as on ‘Turnpike’.
Volume 2
is filled out with a less than inspiring 1955 date featuring Hank Mobley and Horace Silver, neither of whom seems attuned to Johnson’s taxing idiom. In modern sound, these records come up fresh as paint.

& See also
Quintergy: Live At The Village Vanguard
(1988; p. 521)

VIC DICKENSON

Born 6 August 1906, Xenia, Ohio; died 16 November 1984, New York City

Trombone

The Essential Vic Dickenson

Vanguard VCD 79610

Dickenson; Ruby Braff, Shad Collins (t); Edmond Hall (cl); Sir Charles Thompson (p); Steve Jordan (g); Walter Page (b); Les Erskine, Jo Jones (d). December 1953, November 1954.

J. J. Johnson said (1985):
‘He had a beautiful, lyrical sound. Part of that came from the fact he pressed the mouthpiece to his lip, not the skin above. His chops wore out easily, so he got used to playing in the middle register, and sometimes more slowly and with less pressure.’

Dickenson had an attractively remote sound, as if playing behind a screen, but it was packed with wit and invention and his solos always leave a satisfied feeling. His early-’50s sessions for Vanguard are classics of the mainstream idiom. It’s terrific stuff, mostly nice long versions of relatively unfamiliar material (including originals by Vic and Sir Charles) but centred on stretched-out versions of ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Old Fashioned Love’ and ‘Everybody Loves My Baby’. It’s great that he’s working in such distinctive company. Braff is crisp and buoyant, Hall pootles along in his own sweet way and Thompson keeps it all very tight;
check his own ‘Sir Charles At Home’ for his quick wit and invention. This is happy music, with very few shadows. Its appeal is undentable.

BENGT HALLBERG

Born 13 September 1932, Gothenburg, Sweden

Piano

All-Star Sessions 1953–1954

Dragon DRCD 402

Hallberg; Ernie Englund (t); Åke Persson (tb); Åke Björkman (frhn); Arne Domnérus (cl, as); Carl-Henrik Norin (ts); Lars Gullin (bs); Putte Wickman (cl); Simon Brehm, Red Mitchell (b); Robert Edman, William Schiøpffe, Bobby White (d). November 1953, January & March 1954.

Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson says:
‘Together with Åke Persson, Jan Johansson and Lars Gullin, Hallberg was the epicentre of creative cool jazz in Sweden in the ’50s and onwards. And he’s still kicking ass … Check his early trio recordings out! Together with the trio of Johansson, the most influential pre-free stuff in Sweden. Detail and clarity!’

Hallberg played swing as a teenager, before adapting to bop and working with Stan Getz and other Americans. He has some reputation abroad, but his local status endures as one of the major figures in Swedish jazz. For overseas fans, it has always been a frustrating business tracking down his records, but the reissue of these early dates transformed the picture and delivered some of his best work in a single package.

At first glance, it may look padded, with multiple takes of some numbers (three of ‘Blues In Fourths’ with Gullin, Mitchell and White, two cuts each of ‘Red Wails In The Sunset’ and ‘Doe Eyes’) and brought up to respectable length with a number of cuts from March 1954, taken from a session organized by Leonard Feather on which Hallberg was merely a member of the band. However, his leadership and crisp arrangements are a strong feature on the rest of the set and the musicianship is of such high calibre that no one will protest at the attribution. With soloists of the quality of Wickman, Gullin and the pianist himself, it’s unalloyed pleasure and the perfect introduction to a musician who deserves to be more than a coterie taste.

LARS GULLIN

Born 4 May 1928, Visby, Sweden; died 17 May 1976, Vissefjärda, Sweden

Baritone saxophone

Danny’s Dream

Dragon DRCD 396

Gullin; Carl-Henrik Norin (ts); Rolf Berg (g); Georg Riedel (b); Alan Dawson, Robert Edman, Bosse Stoor (d). November 1953–January 1955.

Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson says:
‘The
single
voice, the
single
melody-line, the
single
smoothness. Simplicity and magic, pure
beauty
, not just “Scandinavian”. His compositions just kill me: “Danny’s Dream”, “Silhouette”, “Fedja”; these are DNA-changing themes. Listen to what was found in Lars’s typewriter after his death: “My heart is the seat of my musical ideas, and my brain their rhythmic laboratory.” Poetry.’

A major figure in Scandinavian modernism, Gullin is eminent in Europe but still shockingly little known beyond. His career tailed off somewhat in the ’70s and early death denied him the inevitable revival. A posthumous programme of reissue has, however, put his recordings
back into circulation. He worked for a time on the Swedish swing band scene but then joined Arne Domnérus’s group and started playing bebop. The postwar years saw a steady influx of American visitors and Gullin’s cool, stylish sound, reminiscent of Gerry Mulligan but with an almost folkish quality all his own, sat well with the sophisticated idiom of the time. Gullin played with Chet Baker and others and held his own. Sadly, he also emulated the Americans in drug use, and it shortened his career.

Some hear the saxophone tone as dry and the delivery as plain to the point of dullness, but in reality Gullin liked to articulate straightforwardly and while his harmonic sense was second to none, he often preferred to stay close to the main melody, often creating an alternative line rather than simply working the changes. He swung effortlessly. His peak of productivity came in the early to mid-50s, and it seemed that the more he played, the better he played. Almost none of the Dragons from this period will disappoint, but this one, as well as including the definitive version of ‘Danny’s Dream’ (his best-known composition) also includes all the quartet sessions for Metronome in which Gullin was supported only by Berg, Riedel, and either Edman or Stoor. As well as the title-track, there are fine performances of ‘Manchester Fog’, ‘Lars Meets Jeff’ (with Lars moving to piano) and ‘Igloo’, haunting masterpieces where Gullin’s even dynamics and controlled expression do little to mask the intense beauty of his improvising and the poignancy and yearning which characterize the best of his writing. Four tracks with Norin sharing the front line vary the sound nicely, but it doesn’t in any way mask Gullin’s pre-eminence.

ART TATUM
^&

Born 13 October 1909, Toledo, Ohio; died 5 November 1956, Los Angeles, California

Piano

The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces

Pablo 4404 7CD

Tatum (p solo). December 1953–January 1955.

The Tatum Group Masterpieces: Volume 1

Pablo 2405-424

Tatum; Benny Carter (as); Louie Bellson (d). June 1954.

Norman Granz said (1982):
‘Coming as close as they did to the end of his life, these are very special. I have a bias, but I don’t think there has ever been anything finer done on the piano in the name of jazz.’

Tatum’s extraordinary achievement was set down in no more than four separate sessions over the course of a little over a year. Twenty years after his first solo records, this abundance of music does in some ways show comparatively little in the way of ‘progression’: he had established a pattern for playing many of the tunes in his repertoire, and changes of inflection, nuance and touch may be the only telling differences between these and earlier variations on the theme. But there are countless small revisions of this kind, enough to make each solo a fresh experience, and mostly he is more expansive (freed from playing-time restrictions, he is still comparatively brief, but there can be a major difference between a 2½-minute and a four-minute solo) and more able to provide dynamic contrast and rhythmic variation. He still chooses Broadway tunes over any kind of jazz material and seems to care little for formal emotional commitments: a ballad is just as likely to be dismantled as it is to be made to evoke tenderness, while a feeble tune such as ‘Taboo’ (
Volume 7
) may be transformed into something that communicates with great power and urgency. Tatum’s genius (these records were originally known as
The Genius Of Art Tatum
) was a peculiar combination of carelessness – even at his most daring and virtuosic he can sometimes
suggest a throwaway manner – and searching commitment to his art, and those contradictory qualities (which in some ways exemplify something of the jazz artist’s lot) heighten the power of these superb solos.

It is tantalizing to conjecture what Tatum might have done in contemporary studios, for his whole discography is marred by inadequate recording – even these later solos are comparatively unrefined by the studio – but the CD versions are probably the best to date. Still, surely this is a moment to go back to the best original sources and give us a new overview of this profound body of work.

Having set down the astonishing solo sessions, Granz then embarked on a project to record Tatum in a variety of group situations. The overall quality isn’t so consistently intense, which is why this time we have picked just one volume and not the entire eight-volume set. On the other discs, Tatum’s partners are sometimes either relatively incompatible or simply looking another way: the cheery Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich, for instance, work well enough in their trio record, but it seems to lighten the music to an inappropriate degree. Yet some of this music is undervalued, particularly the trio session with Callender and Douglass, the group working in beautiful accord. The sextet date with Edison, Hampton and Kessel is comparatively slight, and the meeting with Eldridge, while it has moments of excitement, again sounds like two virtuosos of somewhat contrary methods in the same room.

The meetings with Benny Carter, Buddy DeFranco and Ben Webster, though, are unqualified masterpieces. The Carter session that we have chosen is worth having just for the astonishing ‘Blues In C’, and elsewhere Carter’s aristocratic elegance chimes perfectly with Tatum’s grand manner, their differing attitudes to jazz eloquence a rare match. As music to study, live with and simply enjoy, this is the most approachable of all of Tatum’s series of recordings: he finds the company stimulating and manages to vary his approach on each occasion without surrendering anything of himself.