The Penguin Jazz Guide (51 page)

The tracks are relatively long by the standards then and there is some highly developed writing and improvising on many of the tracks, which have a decidedly modern air to them. Counce’s reputation has been undergoing a small revival recently. It’s worth making his acquaintance.

J. R. MONTEROSE

Born Frank Anthony Peter Vincent Monterose Jr, 19 January 1927, Detroit, Michigan; died 16 September 1993, Utica, New York

Tenor and soprano saxophones

J. R. Monterose

Blue Note 15387

Monterose; Ira Sullivan (t); Horace Silver (p); Wilbur Ware (b); Philly Joe Jones (d). October 1956.

J. R. Monterose said (1980):
‘I was obsessed with having my own voice. If someone else had made a sound, I didn’t want to make that sound. It led me into some strange places, and perhaps into obscurity, whatever that means. But it pleases me when anyone says I don’t sound like Trane or Rollins or Dexter Gordon. That was the idea.’

J.R. – as in ‘Junior’ – fell into none of the familiar tenor-playing niches and so fell out of jazz history, as he seemed to prefer. If there was a single strong influence, it was probably John Coltrane; but Monterose was anything but a slavish Trane copyist and forged his own odd but inimitable style: a slightly tight, almost strangled tone, delivered before and behind the beat, often in successive measures, thin but curiously intense and highly focused. He was also a rare exponent of electric sax, though Coltrane dabbled there, too.

Monterose’s solo Blue Note record boasts an enviable personnel, and a relatively unusual one. In future years, Monterose was to work with obscure rhythm sections, mostly in out of the way places, but here the label’s collegial approach delivers him a powerful rhythm section – one of Ware’s best showings of the period – and a strong front-line partner in Sullivan (who admittedly isn’t much associated with Alfred Lion’s label). The music is mostly in a sophisticated hard-bop vein. Two versions of ‘Wee-Jay’ give a measure of how tightly Monterose conceived and executed his music. He doesn’t sound like anyone else on this. Silver plays on insouciantly but makes it work, and Sullivan, who’s perhaps no clearer what’s going on some of the time, contents himself with tight, well thought-out solo statements that don’t go on too long. It’s an unusual set, though it isn’t always easy to put a finger on why, and it stands tall with Blue Note’s other progressive recordings of the day.

MEL TORMÉ

Born 13 September 1925, Chicago, Illinois; died 5 June 1999, Los Angeles, California

Voice

Sings Fred Astaire

Rhino 79847

Tormé; Pete Candoli (t); Bob Enevoldson (vtb); Vincent de Rosa (frhn); Albert Pollan (tba); Herb Geller (as); Jack Montrose (ts); Jack DuLong (bs); Marty Paich (p); Max Bennett (b); Alvin Stoller (d). November 1956.

Singer Eric Felten says:
‘It’s the Rosetta Stone of Tormé’s singing. As agile and virtuosic a vocalist as he was, it was Astaire whose singing he most admired. Fred didn’t have the facility with his voice that he did with his feet, but in introducing more standards than any other singer could ever hope to, he perfected a nonchalant, unfussy delivery that masks the precision of what he’s up to. Just about every jazz singer learned something from him, but it is Tormé who distilled the essence and decanted it into the modern-jazz context of West Coast cool.’

A child performer, Tormé graduated from radio work to touring, and his group, the Mel-Tones, were popular in the ’40s, when a disc jockey gave him the nickname ‘The Velvet Fog’, which for some unkind reason is often given as ‘The Velvet Frog’. A gifted and versatile songwriter, passable drummer and capable arranger, Tormé was enduringly popular and prolific until a stroke stopped him, surviving even the wilderness years when jazz singers were required to do pop songs; to his credit, Tormé always did his bit, even as he gave you to understand he shouldn’t be lowering himself with this stuff.

We have always given high marks to an earlier Tormé date with the Dek-Tette,
Swings Shubert Alley
, but this one has steadily overtaken it and, as Eric Felten points out, it affords a better understanding of Tormé’s generous, deceptively laid-back art. There is probably a thesis to be written on the respective impact of Astaire and Bing Crosby on jazz singing. What’s immediately obvious here is that Marty Paich’s brilliant arrangements are set up in such a way as to show off Tormé’s bop virtuosity. One cannot conceive of Astaire singing ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ like that, but for a single-track object lesson in how Fred affected Tormé’s art, one only has to go to ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’, a magnificently judged and highly sophisticated performance that sounds like falling off a log. The other obvious highlights are ‘Cheek To Cheek’ and ‘Top Hat, White Tie And Tails’. ‘The Piccolino’ is a curiosity and ‘A Foggy Day’, but for the obvious self-reference, a mistake.

TEDDY CHARLES

Born Theodore Charles Cohen, 13 April 1928, Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts

Vibraphone, marimba, piano, percussion

The Teddy Charles Tentet

Collectables COL 6161 / Fresh Sound FSRCD 2240

Charles; Art Farmer, Peter Urban (t); Gigi Gryce (as); J. R. Monterose (ts); George Barrow, Sol Schlinger (bs); Hall Overton, Mal Waldron (p); Jimmy Raney (g); Don Butterfield (tba); Teddy Kotick, Charles Mingus (b); Joe Harris, Ed Shaughnessy (d). January & November 1956.

Teddy Charles said (1991):
‘It was serious stuff, this music. If you recorded with those numbers you had to have a meeting with the label, it was such a big deal. But the thing I remember was that Don Butterfield brought three tubas to the session, just so he could cover different tonalities. That serious!’

Charles is usually respected as a harbinger of Ornette Coleman’s free music; his early records aim for an independence of bebop structure which still sounds remarkably fresh. The music on
New Directions
, gathered together from rare 10-inch LPs, was an indication of Charles’s ambitions but his masterpiece was the Tentet music.

It’s full of pungent music from various hands. The record is a showcase for some of the sharpest arranging minds of the day: Giuffre (who posted parts from the West Coast), Brookmeyer, Waldron, Evans and especially George Russell, whose ‘Lydian M-1’ makes an extraordinary climax to the date. Charles’s own ‘The Emperor’ and a transfigured ‘Nature Boy’ stand as tall as the rest. It all swings too hard to be dismissed as longhair music, but it was certainly out of the ordinary during the hard-bop/cool era. The playing is mostly quite restrained, but Monterose gets in some telling solos that act as a reminder of his under-appreciated talent, and Charles’s own playing is bang on centre. The CD includes some material recorded later in the year with Overton, Mingus and Shaughnessy; nothing revelatory, but a nice further glimpse of Charles in a small-group setting.

CHARLES MINGUS
^&

Born 22 April 1922, Nogales, Arizona; died 5 January 1979, Cuernavaca, Mexico

Double bass, piano

Pithecanthropus Erectus

Atlantic 81227 5357-2

Mingus; Jackie McLean (as); J. R. Monterose (ts); Mal Waldron (p); Willie Jones (d). January 1956.

Mal Waldron said (1991):
‘Mingus had this idea that you didn’t need to hit the note dead centre, like a bullseye, but you could place your notes round about it, inside the concentric rings but not bang bang bang in the middle. It was liberating, though not so easy for the piano-player!’

One of the truly great modern jazz albums. Underrated at the time,
Pithecanthropus Erectus
is now recognized as an important step in the direction of a new, freer synthesis in jazz. To some extent, the basic thematic conception (the story of humankind’s struggle out of chaos, up and down the Freytag’s Triangle of hubris and destruction, back to chaos) was the watered-down Spenglerism which was still fashionable at the time. Technically, though, the all-in ensemble work on the violent C section, which is really B, a modified version of the harmonically static second section, was absolutely crucial to the development of free collective improvisation in the following decade. The brief ‘Profile Of Jackie’ is altogether different. Fronted by McLean’s menthol-sharp alto, with Monterose (a late appointee who wasn’t altogether happy with the music) and Mingus working on a shadowy counter-melody, it’s one of the most appealing tracks Mingus ever committed to record, and the most generous of his ‘portraits’. McLean still carried a torch for orthodox bebop and soon came to (literal) blows with Mingus; the chemistry worked just long enough. ‘Love Chant’ is a more basic modal exploration, and ‘A Foggy Day’ – re-subtitled ‘In San Francisco’ – is an impressionistic reworking of the Gershwin standard, with Chandleresque sound-effects. Superficially jokey, it’s no less significant an effort to expand the available range of jazz performance, and the fact that it’s done via a standard rather than a long-form composition like ‘Pithecanthropus’ gives a sense of Mingus’s Janus-faced approach to the music.

& See also
The Complete Debut Recordings
(1951–1957; p. 131),
Mingus Dynasty
(1959; p. 247),
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
(1960; p. 259),
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
(1963; p. 291)

TAL FARLOW

Born 7 June 1921, Greensboro, North Carolina; died 24 July 1998, New York City

Guitar

The Swinging Guitar Of Tal Farlow

Verve 559515-2

Farlow; Eddie Costa (p); Vinnie Burke (b). May 1956.

Jimmy Raney said (1984):
‘Bebop demanded a different kind of picking and phrasing than had been the norm previously and Tal and I were among the first to do that. Chuck Wayne was another. That’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. You’re first in a field of one, or two, but there’s no real awareness of what you’re about, so it cancels itself. He was kind of reluctant, I think, but there were other pressures, from outside.’

Talmadge Farlow’s virtuosity and the quality of his thinking, even at top speed, inspired more than one generation of guitarists, and his neglect is mystifying. Perhaps, in the age of Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny, his plain-speaking is out of favour; unless, perversely, it stems from his early ‘retirement’ in 1958, when he took time away from music and worked as a sign-painter. Normally, premature absence from the scene triggers cult attention, but in Farlow’s case it may simply be that fans understood his unease with the business and simply respected his privacy. Whatever the case, his reticence as a performer belied his breathtaking delivery, melodic inventiveness and pleasingly gentle touch as a bop-orientated improviser.

He got his first break in 1949 with Red Norvo – Jimmy Raney replaced him in the Red Norvo trio – who inspired him to accelerate his own technique and work as a leader in his own right. He made some marvellous records for Verve in the mid-’50s before withdrawing somewhat from the scene – actually picking his gigs with great care and often in Europe – and despite the
Finest Hour
tag perversely applied by the label to a later set of off-cuts and unreleased material, the best record is
The Swinging Guitar.
Unassumingly as he plays, one never feels intimidated by Farlow’s virtuosity, even when he takes the trouble to reharmonize a sequence entirely or to blitz a melody with single-note flourishes. Burke maintains a steady pulse throughout, and Costa stays by the guitarist’s side through some tough passages of bebop. ‘Meteor’ is Farlow’s own reworking of some Parker changes; ‘Yardbird Suite’ is taken at a clip, and nicely varied on an alternative take; ‘Taking A Chance On Love’ likewise. On this showing, it’s hard at first to see why such a fluent musician should take a step away, but there’s a closed-off, introspective quality to him as well, almost reminiscent of an athlete or climber whose efforts are all inward-directed. The music communicates, even if the player doesn’t.

CHET BAKER
^&

Born 23 December 1929, Yale, Oklahoma; died 13 May 1988, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Trumpet, voice

Chet Baker And Crew

Pacific Jazz 82671

Baker; Phil Urso (ts); Bobby Timmons (p); Jimmy Bond (b); Peter Littman (d). Bill Loughborough (chromatic tymp). July 1956.

Gerry Mulligan said (1990):
‘I don’t think you can explain a talent like Chet’s or trace where it came from. It just arrived, full blown and entire.’

The archetypal ‘young man with the horn’, brilliant, inward, self-destructive. He grew up in Oklahoma but was in New York to witness the birth of bebop. He developed a sound similar
to Miles Davis’s: quiet, restricted in range, and melodic rather than virtuosic. The famous pianoless quartet with Gerry Mulligan and a keynote performance of ‘My Funny Valentine’ were important in the development of cool jazz. A heroin habit destroyed the film star looks, and replaced them with a sunken and haunted image. Even so, his technique was precise and his playing and singing remained touchingly effective to the end.

Richard Bock began recording Baker as a leader when the quartet with Mulligan started to attract rave notices and even a popular audience, and the records the trumpeter made for Pacific Jazz remain among his freshest and most appealing work. For a week at the end of July 1956, the group was intensively recorded and the material is scattered over various albums, including
The Route
and
Chet Baker Sings
. This is perhaps the best single representation. It opens with a first version of ‘To Mickey’s Memory’, one of two tracks that features Bill Loughborough on chromatic tympani, which adds an intriguing ‘island’ dimension. Mulligan’s ‘Line For Lyons’ and Urso’s ‘Lucius Lu’ are perfect for Timmons and put the lie to any suggestion that Chet didn’t understand the blues. ‘Worryin’ The Life Out Of Me’ has the two horns sparring nonchalantly, the equal of anything Chet did with the Mulligan group.