The Penguin Jazz Guide (48 page)

The strings album for Contemporary was a logical follow-up and it is one of his best recordings of any period. Miraculously, the string-players – just three viola-players and a cellist, no violins – follow their parts without any hint of the stiffness classical players sometimes evince. Nor does Niehaus use them for slower material only. They are asked to negotiate some fairly difficult terrain. The only slight reservation is that so much of the material is generic, with not enough of Niehaus’s own writing. Seven of the 12 tracks are standards, but a fine opening ‘All The Things You Are’ does at least establish the methodo-logy of the group. ‘Crosswalk’ and ‘Full House’ are both outstanding ideas and the horns
move dexterously over the charts and the other three winds all solo effectively. It’s the strings’ day, however. This isn’t the kind of music one can readily imagine Dirty Harry listening to, but it’s smart, cool, effective jazz.

SARAH VAUGHAN
^&

Born 27 March 1924, Newark, New Jersey; died 3 April 1990, Los Angeles, California

Voice

Sarah Vaughan

Verve 543305-2

Vaughan; Clifford Brown (t); Paul Quinichette (ts); Herbie Mann (f); Jimmy Jones (p); Joe Benjamin (b); Roy Haynes (d). December 1954.

Sarah Vaughan said (1980):
‘I never planned to be in show business. I went in for the amateur hour at the Apollo because I wanted the $10, and I forgot that a week at the theatre went with the first prize. So it was kind of landed on me, this career!’

One of the very great jazz voices, and one who managed to combine emotion and musicality in a balance denied to other of the great divas. Vaughan studied piano as a child, then joined the Earl Hines band in 1943 as vocalist. She left with Billy Eckstine to sing in his new band and went solo in the late ’40s. Had many crossover hits during that decade but was always seen as a jazz vocalist, one of the most gifted, with a big range and variety of tone, a bopper’s way with scat – though she rarely used it – and the stage presence of a forbidding diva. Unaccountably, though, she never was as popular as Holiday or Fitzgerald.

Her vocal on the 1946 Dizzy Gillespie Sextet record of ‘Lover Man’ was Sarah Vaughan’s banner arrival. Yet she’d already cut several fine sides – four with a Dizzy Gillespie small group, including a fine vocal version of ‘Night In Tunisia’ – and there were several other scattered appearances, but it wasn’t until she hooked up with Norman Granz’s label that she began to make quality records with any consistency. The session with Clifford Brown was a glorious occasion, and the kind of date that occurred far too infrequently during the rest of Sarah’s career. A blue-chip band (even Mann doesn’t disgrace himself) on a slow-burning set of standards that Vaughan lingers over and details with all the finesse of her early-mature voice: ‘Lullaby Of Birdland’ (the master take is a composite, and there is a ‘partial alternative’ take here too) is taken at a pace that suspends time or lets it drift, and the very slow pace for ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘Jim’ doesn’t falter into a trudge. In the past we have wondered if the many slow tempos were perhaps too many, but in this superb new remastering it is very difficult to find any flaw in what should be recognized as one of the great jazz vocal records.

& See also
Crazy And Mixed Up
(1982; p. 468)

BARNEY KESSEL

Born 17 October 1923, Muskogee, Oklahoma; died 6 May 2004, San Diego, California

Guitar

To Swing Or Not To Swing

Original Jazz Classics OJC 317

Kessel; Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison (t); Georgie Auld, Bill Perkins (ts); Jimmy Rowles (p); Al Hendrickson (g); Red Mitchell (b); Irv Cottler (d). June 1955.

Barney Kessel said (1990):
‘Back where I come from, they used to call guitars “starvation boxes”. We’d have these hobos and itinerant preachers, playing old songs and hymns on them. I don’t think that ever left me, and it maybe explains why I had trouble at first playing bebop lines. “Play like a horn”, they’d say, but I was drawn back to that old sound.’

‘The blues he heard as a boy in Oklahoma, the swing he learned on his first band job and the modern sounds of the West Coast school’: Nesuhi Ertegun’s summary of Kessel, written in 1954, still holds good. Kessel has often been undervalued as a soloist: the smoothness and accuracy of his playing tend to disguise the underlying weight of the blues which informs his improvising, and his albums from the ’50s endure with surprising consistency. This one for Contemporary is the most durable of all. The music suggests a firm truce between Basie-like small-band swing and the classic West Coast appraisal of bop. The inclusion of such ancient themes as ‘Louisiana’, ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ and ‘Indiana’ suggests the breadth of Kessel’s interests, and although most of the tracks are short, nothing seems particularly rushed and the guitarist’s features are often movingly personal, as if he really is stepping forward into the firelight for a turn. Lester Koenig’s superb production has been faithfully maintained for the reissue and the sound flatters everyone. Interesting to hear the rest of the band adjust their delivery to suit what would have been an unfamiliar approach at the time. One craves to hear Kessel and Mitchell in duo for a couple of spots, but it’s good enough as is.

HAMPTON HAWES

Born 13 November 1928, Los Angeles, California; died 22 May 1977, Los Angeles, California

Piano

The Trios: Volumes 1 & 2

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 316

Hawes; Red Mitchell (b); Chuck Thompson (d). June & December 1955, January 1956.

Teddy Edwards said (1991):
‘Some people play the blues and talk about the “jazz life”. He lived them both. I never knew what he was going to do behind me, but I always knew he’d be waiting for me when I got to the end.’

Hawes is still something of a coterie taste. Given the sheer exhilaration and lyrical intensity of his music, even given the remarkable story told in his classic autobiography,
Raise Up Off Me
, it is surprising that he is not better known. Hawes worked with Charlie Parker and learned from him, not always to his advantage. His approach to bop always seemed to imply something beyond, and while he was never any kind of avant-gardist, he knew that anything new in jazz was always rooted in something older, so even his most straightforward blues playing always implied a step away into the unknown. His performances are mostly sunlit, remarkably so in view of the life he led, but with thunderclouds on the horizon.

These were Hawes’s first serious statements as leader and they are still hugely impressive, combining long, demanding passages of locked chording and fast, unpredictable melody-lines. The bebop idiom is still firmly in place, but already Hawes is demonstrating an ability to construct elaborate out-of-tempo solo statements which seem detached from the theme while still drawn entirely from its chord structure. Mitchell is a wonderful accompanist, already experimenting with his trademark tuning and getting a huge sound out of the bass. Thompson is a resolute and often sophisticated partner. Most of the pieces are familiar bop staples, but Hawes’s blues lines on the first volume are by far the most interesting pieces, skeletal in structure but elaborated with a sure hand. The material on
Volume 2
is more varied in tonality and the dynamics are more dramatic, but it’s Hawes’s reading of
‘Easy Living’ that most completely confirms his originality. He easily becomes a collector’s obsession, and anyone who enjoys this will also be drawn to
Four!
,
All Night Session
and
Everybody Likes Hampton Hawes
.

CHICO HAMILTON
^&

Born Foreststorn Hamilton, 21 September 1921, Los Angeles, California

Drums

Live At The Strollers

Fresh Sound FSRCD 2245

Hamilton; Buddy Collette (cl, as, ts, f); Jim Hall (g); Fred Katz (clo); Carson Smith (b). August & November 1955.

Chico Hamilton said (1982):
‘I play a pretty small kit. Even my bass drum is a floor tom flipped over on its side. And I like to have everything low down. It’s less tiring and I can get a softer, more exact sound. I don’t want to be waving my arms in the air.’

A less celebrated drum-led academy than Art Blakey’s, and yet Hamilton has always surrounded himself with gifted young musicians of the quality of Eric Dolphy, Gerry Mulligan, Larry Coryell, Charles Lloyd and later Eric Person, and not forgetting Paul Horn. A perfectly convincing version of the origin of Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless quartet was that it began in Hamilton’s apartment, where there was no piano. Hamilton has unfailingly taken an inventive and even idiosyncratic approach to the constitution of his groups, and often the only identifying mark is his own rolling lyricism and unceasing swing. Anyone who has seen the classic festival movie
Jazz On A Summer’s Day
will remember the almost hypnotic concentration of his mallet solo.

Recent years have seen early work slip out of copyright and, with predictable perversity, back into circulation. Mild as the early trios sound now, this was fairly unusual work at the time, with the drummer so foregrounded. A broadcast Strollers date from Long Beach helped bring the subsequent quintet to notice. An over-emphasis on later discs is explained by the presence of Dolphy, just emerging as a soloist and composer, but the earlier group with Collette (and the undervalued Hall) is just as good and Collette’s multi-instrumentalism brings a polish and variety to the tracks that even Eric couldn’t manage at this stage. The distinctive use of cello (later it was Nate Gershman) helps organize the sound round a warm middle register, and there is very little stratospheric playing. It’s a mixed disc of standards – including a lovely ‘Tea For Two’ – a few Collette originals, including ‘Fast Flute’, which is co-credited to the leader, and a free improvisation, which opens up the group language in ways that would become more important later. Others will favour
Gongs East/ Three Faces of Chico
or some other record from this period, but this decently recorded live date is the most accurate glimpse of the band at its most spontaneously creative, steered but not overmastered by Chico.

& See also
Arroyo
(1990; p. 544)

ERROLL GARNER
^&

Born 15 June 1921, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 7 January 1977, Los Angeles, California

Piano

Concert By The Sea

Columbia CK 40589

Garner; Eddie Calhoun (b); Denzil Best (d). September 1955.

Pianist and Garner scholar Dudley Moore said:
‘Poor old Eddie Calhoun got white hair and worry-lines from all that time staring at Erroll’s left hand wondering what the **** he was going to do next!’

Garner’s most famous album is one of the biggest-selling jazz records ever made.
Concert By The Sea
doesn’t advertise anything particularly special. It’s just a characteristic set by the trio in an amenable setting. It is full of typical Garner moments like the teasing introduction to ‘I’ll Remember April’ – Garner liked to keep audiences in suspense while he toyed with when to announce the melody – or the flippant blues of ‘Red Top’ and the pell-mell ‘Where Or When’. These find Garner at his most buoyant; but rather more interesting is his well-shaped treatment of ‘How Could You Do A Thing Like That To Me’. The recording was never outstanding, though the reissue serves it well enough, and its celebrity is still somewhat surprising, though Garner’s isn’t a body of work, any of it, that is distinguished by pristine hi-fi.

& See also
Erroll Garner 1944–1945
(1944–1945; p. 94)

JOE NEWMAN

Born 7 September 1922, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 4 July 1992, New York City

Trumpet

The Count’s Men

Fresh Sound FSRCD 135

Newman; Benny Powell (tb); Frank Foster (ts); Frank Wess (f, ts); Sir Charles Thompson (p); Eddie Jones (b); Shadow Wilson (d). September 1955.

Joe Newman said (1983):
‘My dad played piano in New Orleans during the Depression, so I kind of associated music with work and need, even though he worked as a driver, too. I wanted to play tenor saxophone and even made myself an instrument out of a piece of gas pipe. Got a tune from it it, too!’

A deep-thinking musician with a reflective sound and a passion for jazz education. Newman was the Johnny Hodges of the Basie band. He also had stints with Illinois Jacquet and with Benny Goodman and continued to record under his own name until quite late in life. Newman was never a whole-hearted modernist. His sharp attack and bright sound were derived almost entirely from Louis Armstrong and, though he was chief among the cadre of the ‘Basie Moderns’ in the ’50s, he maintained allegiance to the Count’s music over any other. His preference for the middle register meant he was never an excessively dramatic soloist.

The Basie-derived group on
The Count’s Men
share his values entirely and clearly relish the opportunity to record away from the Boss. ‘A.M. Romp’ reappeared later on
Good’n’Groovy
, and as always with Newman it’s interesting to compare his different versions of a song. It’s the tighter version with Sir Charles Thompson that really impresses, and newcomers to Newman’s entertaining sound would do well to begin with the mid-’50s stuff. He was eminently responsive to context, even softening his trumpet tone markedly when the surroundings seemed to call for it. Perhaps his most ambitious work is on the octet
I’m Still Swinging
, but any glimpse of Joe in a small-group setting is worthwhile and rewarding.