The Penguin Jazz Guide (57 page)

KEN COLYER

Born 18 April 1928, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England; died 8 March 1988, Les Isambres, France

Cornet

Club Session With Colyer

Lake LACD 6

Colyer; Mac Duncan (tb); Ian Wheeler (cl); Johnny Bastable (bj); Ron Ward (b); Colin Bowden (d). October–November 1956.

Ken Colyer said (1981):
‘Do I mind being called dogmatic or rigid? Not really. Someone has to be. And given that anything goes in music it was important that somebody stood up for what they believed was the right way to play jazz. I still think there’s a right way and a wrong way.’

Colyer has a unique place in British jazz. Nobody has ever been more revered in local circles and few were so righteously dogmatic about authenticity. As the trad boom got under way, he abjured such ‘modern’ style models as Armstrong and Morton and insisted on the earlier New Orleans methods of George Lewis and Bunk Johnson. Colyer’s records are an intriguing muddle of stiff British orthodoxy and something that finds a genuine accord with the music that obsessed him. The purist’s purist was self-taught, which is perhaps significant. He formed the Crane River Jazz Band, before joining the merchant marine and escaping to New Orleans, where he met idols like George Lewis, and famously spent some time in jail, passing as black. In 1953, he began bandleading in Britain with Chris Barber and also
played guitar in skiffle situations though never relaxing his principles. His Studio 51 Club was an important traditional venue.

Club Session
is the essential Colyer record and certainly his most famous single album, this live set from the Railway Hotel, West Hampstead (rather than Studio 51), catches the band at its most persuasive. The playing isn’t noticeably superior to other dates – consistency was the man’s long suit, after all – but in its balance of blues, gospel and standards, its driving rhythms and clipped solos, it is as close to perfect as Colyer would get at a recording. ‘Creole Blues’, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘The Thriller Rag’ are perennial favourites, but there isn’t a dud in the set.

BOB DOROUGH

Born 12 December 1923, Cherry Hill, Arkansas

Voice, piano

Devil May Care

JVC Victor 61464

Dorough; Warren Fitzgerald (t); Jack Hitchcock (vib); Bill Takas (b); Jerry Segal (d). October 1956.

Bob Dorough said (1991):
‘I got a call from Miles Davis one day, completely out of nowhere. This would be 1962. He wanted me to write a Christmas song for him! I think he’d heard me doing “Yardbird Suite”. So I wrote him “Blue Xmas” and we recorded it. It’s on that record [
Jingle Bell Jazz
]. I use it to impress young people sometimes. “Yes, I remember when I was in the studio with Miles Davis …” ’

Dorough has made only a modest number of records over his marathon career, and is mostly remembered as the author of ‘Devil May Care’ and other great songs. His own version is perhaps not the most exciting by today’s standards, but it’s brilliant singing and catches a moment in time almost perfectly. The album has been around in many different incarnations over the years, so it’s likely to be available under one flag or another (Bethlehem Archives, Avenue, Charly, Rhino/WEA or the above). Whatever its port of registration, get it and enjoy Bob’s ‘Yardbird Suite’ (two takes), ‘Baltimore Oriole’, ‘I Had The Craziest Dream’ and ten others, though at this stage only a couple of originals.

JIMMY GIUFFRE
^&

Born 26 April 1921, Dallas, Texas; died 24 April 2008, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Clarinet, tenor, baritone and soprano saxophones, flute, bass flute

The Jimmy Giuffre 3

Atlantic 90981

Giuffre; Jim Hall (g); Jim Atlas, Ralph Pena (b). December 1956.

Jimmy Giuffre said (1987):
‘Rhythm doesn’t interest me that much, which is a heretical thing for a “jazz” musician to say. I wanted to make a personal style and rhythm is a universal, so it actually prevents you developing a personal style. Also, I react against the idea that you can only swing hard. If it means anything at all, you ought to be able to do it softly, too.’

One of the most distinguished composer-arrangers on the ’50s West Coast scene. Giuffre’s long career observed a long, sometimes lonely arc that kept him apart from any bop or cool orthodoxy and along paths almost always of his own choosing. He played in an army band and then with a series of West Coast orchestras, valued for his musicianship – often
baritone in those early days – as well as for his writing skills. As author of ‘Four Brothers’, he was a signature composer of the era. Cultivating a brown chalumeau register on his clarinet and defending the aesthetic benefits of simple quietness, Giuffre later created what he liked to call ‘folk-jazz’. Later still, he went in a more abstract direction with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow.

The Jimmy Giuffre 3
contains essential early material: a fine version of ‘The Train And The River’, on which Giuffre moves between baritone and tenor saxophones and clarinet; and the long ‘Crawdad Suite’, which combines blues and folk materials. Giuffre’s out-of-tempo playing recalls the great jazz singers. Jim Hall was his longest-standing and most sympathetic confrère; they were partnered either by Brookmeyer or by a bassist, most successfully Pena (Clark or Buddy, and Atlas only plays on two bonus tracks on the Atlantic CD). With Giuffre’s early recordings now out of copyright, there is a confusing flurry of reissues. A Collectables option adds the 1958
The Music Man
featuring the nonet. Quality control varies. All that matters is that you get hold of the music.

& See also
Free Fall
(1962; p. 286)

THELONIOUS MONK
^&

Born 10 October 1917, Rocky Mount, North Carolina; died 17 February 1982, Weehawken, New Jersey

Piano

Brilliant Corners

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 026

Monk; Clark Terry (t); Ernie Henry (as); Sonny Rollins (ts); Oscar Pettiford (b); Max Roach (d). December 1956.

Saxophonist Steve Lacy said (1979):
‘They’re fiendish, those pieces, if you listen to them one by one. Once you start listening to them all, one after another, they start to reveal something. There isn’t a key to understanding them but they’re not so obscure and plain weird that they can’t be understood.’

A staggering record, imperfect and patched together after the sessions, but one of the most vivid insights into Monk’s music. After two previous records for Riverside, Monk was determined to showcase himself as a composer. So bold was he in this direction that the wheels nearly came off the wagon. The title-tune was so difficult that no single perfect take was finished (after 25 tries), and what we hear is a spliced-together piece of music. Full of tensions within the band, the record somehow delivers utterly compelling accounts of ‘Pannonica’, with its part for celeste, ‘Bemsha Swing’ and a long ‘Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues Are’. Miraculously, the group gets through the date pretty much intact. One hardly associates Clark Terry with music like this, but he’s solid in his lines. Rollins was coming into his own and once or twice seems to buck against the leader’s conception, but that only adds to the drama. Roach is quite simply amazing and his tymp additions to ‘Bemsha Swing’ add a faintly surreal note. After the rigours, Monk ties it up with a one-take unaccompanied reading of ‘I Surrender Dear’, which is as fresh as water.

& See also
Genius Of Modern Music
(1947–1948; p. 115),
Underground
(1967, 1968; p. 347)

KAI WINDING

Born 18 May 1922, Aarhus, Denmark; died 6 May 1983, New York City

Trombone

Trombone Panorama

Lone Hill Jazz LHJR CD 10315

Winding; Carl Fontana, Wayne Andre (tb, trombonium); Dick Lieb (btb, trombonium); Roy Frazee (p); Kenny O’Brien (b); Tom Montgomery (d). December 1956–August 1957.

Trombonist Mal Girvan says:
‘He didn’t always – this is heresy, I know – have the best tone, but the speed of his attack and the accuracy of his playing was revolutionary. Winding was what’s called an “upstream” player, with the mouthpiece set down so that the air column travels up instead of down as it goes into the tubing. It maybe doesn’t matter if you aren’t a player, but it makes a difference you can hear.’

J.J. brought a saxophone-like articulation to the trombone, but it was Winding who showed how it could follow the woodwind-players’ fast vibrato and percussive attack and still retain its distinctive character. While with the Kenton band, Winding worked out ways of producing a very tight vibrato with the lip rather than using the slide, and this had a marked impact on a younger generation of players. A lot of the surviving Winding material is on discs also featuring J.J., Bennie Green and others, and that may have depressed him. Early on, though, the balance of innovation seemed to fall to the Dane.

The December 1956 (originally Columbia) and 1957 records are under Winding’s sole leadership. His stint with Kenton had convinced him that massed trombones made the noise closest to the angels and he persisted with the choral approach. Here it works very well indeed; though some will be put off by what might be thought to be Kentonisms (an impression reinforced by the use of trombonium), they should be assured that the idiom and the arrangements are Winding’s own. ‘Nut Cracker’ is the only track where it really cuts loose. ‘Whistle While You Work’ had the capacity to be a novelty track but it establishes a sober and thoughtful mood for the record, best represented on ‘My Little Girl’. The pace is nicely modulated, though, and there’s no mistaking this for a Third Stream experiment. ‘Blue Room’ romps along nicely and the muted horns are just perfectly in sync.

ANITA O’DAY

Born Anita Belle Colton, 18 October 1919, Chicago, Illinois; died 23 November 2006, Los Angeles, California

Voice

Anita Sings The Most

Verve 829577

O’Day; Oscar Peterson (p); Herb Ellis (g); Ray Brown (b); John Poole (d). January 1957.

Anita O’Day said (1985):
‘If you have to get one of my old records, check if John Poole is on it. If he is, it’s OK. I need to hear the drummer and what he’s doing.’

Anita O’Day lived the jazz life. She tells about it in
High Times, Hard Times
(1983). As a young woman she worked as a singing waitress and in punishing dance-marathons. She suffered abuse and violence and shot heroin until her heart began to give out in the ’60s and she was forced to battle her demons cold. As is immediately obvious from her combative, sharply punctuated scatting and her line in stage patter, O’Day was nothing if not combative. As a ‘chirper’ with the Gene Krupa band in 1941, she refused to turn out in ballgown and gloves, and appeared instead in band jacket and short skirt, an unheard-of practice that underlined her instinctive feminism. With Stan Kenton, she gave a humane edge to a sometimes pretentiously modernist repertoire. O’Day’s demanding style had few successful imitators, but
she is the most immediate source for June Christy and Chris Connor, who followed her into the Kenton band.

Sings The Most
is O’Day’s best showing on record by a stretch. Her intonation – always suspect – was never as good again and her sparky personality comes through even on the ballads, including a strangely moving ‘Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered’ right at the end of the set. ‘Them There Eyes’ is taken ridiculously fast and is the kind of performance that used on occasions to trip up her groups. Here, though, Peterson is equal to anything she throws at him and it’s not hard to understand her attachment to the otherwise unvalued John Poole, who sets a time you could run a railway network to. In later years, O’Day became increasingly cranky and the voice went, but she retained a hypnotic authority to the very end.
Sings The Most
catches her at her sunniest.

ART PEPPER
^&

Born 1 September 1925, Gardenia, California; died 1 June 1982, Panorama City, California

Alto saxophone, clarinet

Meets The Rhythm Section

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 338

Pepper; Red Garland (p); Paul Chambers (b); Philly Joe Jones (d). January 1957.

Gerry Mulligan said (1990):
‘Art Pepper seems to have had the same gift as Chet [Baker], a musicality so fundamental that the external reality – or unreality – of his life hardly seemed to make any difference to his ability to play.’

If there is a jazz musician who best represents the Hemingway ideal of grace under pressure, it is probably Art Pepper. He was a premier name among California saxophonists in the ’50s, but the career was interrupted by addiction and prison sentences. His life story is told in the definitive jazz autobiography,
Straight Life
, co-written with his wife Laurie. Pepper’s career began with stints in the Benny Carter and Stan Kenton big bands. Devoted compilers have found all his solo breaks from the Kenton years and the 18-year-old can be heard, already distinctive, on surveys of the early years.

Pepper’s remains one of the most immediately identifiable alto sax styles in postwar jazz. If he was a Parker disciple, like every other modern saxophonist in the ’40s and ’50s, he tempered Bird’s slashing attack with a pointed elegance that recalled something of Benny Carter and Willie Smith. He was a passionate musician, having little of the studious intensity of a Lee Konitz, and his tone – which could come out as pinched and jittery as well as softly melodious – suggested something of the duplicitous, cursed romanticism which seems to lie at the heart of his music.