The Penguin Jazz Guide (58 page)

After some scrappy work for Blue Note against a background of personal tribulation Pepper’s records for Contemporary make up a superlative sequence.
The Way It Was
,
Modern Jazz Classics
,
Gettin’ Together
,
Smack Up
,
Intensity
are titles that tell their own story. There is, however, a subtext to
Meets The Rhythm Section.
The playing of the quartet beggars belief when the circumstances are considered: Pepper wasn’t even aware of the session till the morning of the date, hadn’t played in two weeks, was going through difficult times with his narcotics problem and didn’t know any of the material they played. Yet it emerges as a poetic, burning date, with all four men playing above themselves.

It opens with a bright, swinging ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’, then one of those back-of-envelope themes, ‘Red Pepper Blues’, scratched together by Pepper and Garland, that are one of the wonders of jazz to non-musicians. Conventional enough changes but exquisitely done. ‘Imagination’ is imaginatively recast. As if to disprove the hasty convention of the group, ‘Waltz Me Blues’ and the iconic ‘Straight Life’ are taken at a gallop, with
Chambers playing some of the best accompanying bass of his career. After that, it’s clear that the group was relying on familiar material. Pepper’s saxophone takes on a darker authority on the closing tracks, ‘Birks’ Works’, ‘Star Eyes’ and ‘Tin Tin Deo’. The quartet probably packed up and went their separate ways. Who knows what Art got up to and what need added to the urgency of those last cuts. Between them, they’d delivered a masterpiece.

& See also
Winter Moon
(1980; p. 460)

RED NORVO

Born Kenneth Norville, 31 March 1908, Beardstown, Illinois; died 6 April 1999, Santa Monica, California

Xylophone, vibraphone

Music To Listen To Red Norvo By

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1015

Norvo; Buddy Collette (f); Bill Smith (cl); Barney Kessel (g); Red Mitchell (b); Shelly Manne (d). January–February 1957.

Red Norvo said (1983):
‘The xylophone was considered a bit of a joke instrument. When I changed to vibraharp, it was obviously louder and more like a piano, but I never wanted to lose some element of vaudeville in my work, so I sometimes missed the xylophone.’

Norvo’s early recorded work, before he made the switch from xylophone to vibes, illustrates the problem of placing so self-effacing an instrument in a conventional jazz line-up: it’s sometimes difficult to separate technical limitations and compromises from conscious dynamic strategies. He’d actually started out playing marimba (and tap-dancing!) and graduated to vibes- and xylophone-playing without vibrato and with a light and almost delicate sound. Attracted by bebop, he managed to synthesize it with swing and Charles Mingus worked with him for a time. He was married to singer Mildred Bailey and his stage name arose when ‘Norville’ was apparently taken down wrongly in an interview.

There are large amounts of early Norvo on compilations and in poor sound. Moving into the LP era, his work was better represented. Sooner or later when dealing with so-called ‘chamber-jazz’, the question of its supposed pretentiousness comes into play. Norvo’s 1957 sextet with Buddy Collette on flute and Barney Kessel on guitar strongly recalls Chico Hamilton’s sophisticated chamber-jazz, with its soft, ‘classical’ textures and non-blues material. Titles like ‘Divertimento In Four Movements’ are apt to be seen as red rags by hard-nosed boppers. It’s clear, though, from the album title if not immediately from the music itself, that there is a hefty dose of humour in Norvo’s work. Structurally, the ‘Divertimento’ is unexceptionable, with a beautiful division of parts, and is as lightweight as the genre demands. Other tracks, like ‘Red Sails’ and the boppish thematic puns of ‘Rubricity’, suggest a different side to Norvo which is actually present throughout his work, even in his 60s.

GIGI GRYCE

Also known as Basheer Qu’hsim, 28 November 1927, Pensacola, Florida; died 17 March 1983, Pensacola, Florida

Alto saxophone, flute

And The Jazz Lab Quintet

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1774

Gryce; Donald Byrd (t); Wade Legge (p); Wendell Marshall (b); Art Taylor (d). February–March 1957.

Gunther Schuller said (1984):
‘He’s completely underrated now, but a very special musician. He liked the reeds to sound very light and quick, so the effect you get is almost like water flowing over pebbles.’

Gryce’s real talent was as a leader who catalysed talent in others. He studied in Boston and Paris (went back there with Lionel Hampton, too), and saw service with many of the leading players coming out of bop. His Jazz Lab Quintet was, however, his own finest moment, though his compositions are part of the landscape now. Of the many pieces he wrote for a variety of ambitious projects – big not in numbers but in conception – the only ones which have really entered the jazz mainstream are ‘Nica’s Tempo’ and, less so, ‘Speculation’ and ‘Minority’. Gryce was never virtuosic, but these sessions suggest that he was more interesting than is often supposed, and was certainly not a Bird copyist. His tone was darker and with a broader vibrato, the phrasing less supple but with an emphatic, vocal quality, carried over into his flute-playing. ‘Laboratory’ and ‘workshop’ have always been weasel terms, useful camouflage for the well-founded jazz tradition of rehearsing – or experimenting – at the public’s expense. Gryce, though, was a genuine experimenter, even if a relatively modest one. He never stopped trying to find new colourations and new ways of voicing chords, and this 1957 set is no exception. No great revelations, but Byrd is a responsive partner in the front line and the rhythm section is less hung-up on its own ideas, more aware, one suspects, of what Gryce himself is looking for.

ART TAYLOR

Born 6 April 1929, New York City; died 6 February 1995, New York City

Drums

Taylor’s Wailers

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 094

Taylor; Donald Byrd (t); Jackie McLean (as); John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse (ts); Ray Bryant, Red Garland (p); Wendell Marshall, Paul Chambers (b). February–March 1957.

Art Taylor said (1981):
‘We had this neighbourhood group, with Sonny Rollins and Kenny Drew, and we were doing Friday evening concerts at St Charles’s Church on 141st St, and that was the closest I ever got to catching the excitement of going with my dad to see Chick Webb and Big Sid [Catlett] and J. C. Heard all jamming. I think those first experiences stay with you. Everything has to match up to that standard.’

Born to a Jamaican family, Taylor began working on the New York scene in 1950 and became one of the most prolific drummers of the hard-bop movement. One of the most scholarly of modern drummers, he moved to Europe in 1963 and collected musician interviews for his book
Notes And Tones
. He returned to New York in the ’80s.

He was a prolific visitor to the studios in the ’50s, drumming for Red Garland, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and many others on countless sessions, most of them for Prestige. The company gave him a few shots at a leadership date, and they’re impressive in a plainly wrapped way. The album is actually compiled from two sessions, one with Coltrane, who works up his patented head of steam on ‘C.T.A.’, and another with Rouse, whose more circumspect passions are rather well caught in his solo on ‘Batland’. ‘Off Minor’ and ‘Well You Needn’t’ feature in Monk’s own arrangements, and the music is delivered with fairly nonchalant authority, with Byrd his usual blandly confident self. Taylor’s own playing is authoritative, although some of his mannerisms leave him a degree short of the single-minded drive of Art Blakey. Once he’s in ‘the crouch’, though, he swings as hard as anyone.

ART BLAKEY
^&

Also known as Abdullah ibn Buhaina; born 11 October 1919, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 16 October 1990, New York City

Drums

Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk

Atlantic 8122-73607

Blakey; Bill Hardman (t); Johnny Griffin (ts); Thelonious Monk (p); Spanky DeBrest (b). March 1957.

Drummer T. S. Monk, the great pianist’s son, said (2002):
‘The thing I notice is that there aren’t the great groups any more. There’s an obsession in the industry with finding star leaders, so those band relationships are neglected. You buy a record, you go see the guys play, and it’s different musicians in the club, probably the leader with a bunch of college kids. Art Blakey was maybe one of the last great
bandleaders
.’

Blakey appeared on several of Monk’s seminal Blue Note sessions, and had an intuitive understanding of what the pianist wanted from a drummer. Griffin, volatile but serene in his mastery of the horn, was an almost ideal yet very different interpreter of Monk’s music. The drummer was at an unequalled peak in the later ’50s. Later records were doughty and mostly streets ahead of anyone else in the field, but there wasn’t the same special chemistry. There are five Monk tunes and one by Griffin on this masterpiece. If Hardman wasn’t on the same exalted level, he does nothing to disgrace himself and DeBrest keeps calm, unobtrusive time. The continuous dialogue between piano and drums comes out most clearly in passages such as Monk’s solo on ‘In Walked Bud’, but almost any moment on the session illustrates their unique empathy. Both use simple materials, yet the inner complexities are astonishing and the music retains an uncanny freshness after fifty years; no passage is like any other and some of the tempos – for ‘Evidence’ and ‘I Mean You’ – are almost unique in the annals of Monk interpretation. (For those who enjoy bizarre juxtapositions, the LP is also available on Collectables, paired with the Modern Jazz Quartet at Carnegie Hall!)

& See also
A Night At Birdland
(1954; p. 150)

HERB GELLER

Born 2 November 1928, Los Angeles, California

Alto saxophone

That Geller Feller

Fresh Sound FSRCD 91

Geller; Kenny Dorham (t); Harold Land (ts); Lou Levy (p); Ray Brown (b); Lawrence Marable (d). March 1957.

Producer and friend Alastair Robertson says:
‘He is virtually the last alto saxophonist who can legitimately connect to Benny Carter and Charlie Parker. Herb has a vast knowledge and love of good tunes. Even past 80 he is always well prepared and ready to play anywhere with the enthusiasm of a man half his years.’

In 1995, Herb Geller told his own life story on a record called
Playing Jazz
, a gripping and often poignant account of nearly five decades spent in the service of jazz and swing. Remarkably, as his latter-day producer says, he is still active and very much the bright-toned player he was in 1957. Relatively untroubled by fashion, Geller set out as an orthodox, Parker-influenced bopper before turning towards a more broadly based and decidedly cooler style which incorporated elements of Desmond, Hodges and even Benny Goodman,
with whom he worked in the later ’50s.
That Geller Feller
is the best of the available sets. The originals – ‘S’Pacific View’, ‘Marable Eyes’, ‘An Air For The Heir’ and ‘Melrose And Sam’ – are tightly organized and demand considerable inventiveness from a group that frequently sounds much bigger than a sextet. Dorham plays a crackling solo on the opening track but is otherwise rather anonymous. Geller’s own introduction to ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ is wonderfully delicate, with more than a hint of Benny Carter in the tone and phrasing. He also does a fine version of the Arlen–Gershwin rarity ‘Here’s What I’m Here For’.

Amazingly, the following year’s
Stax Of Sax
was Geller’s last American release before 1993 and his last as a leader for 17 years. One is used to such drop-outs in jazz careers, but this one has a poignant twist, for in October 1958 his beloved wife and pianist, the former Lorraine Walsh, died suddenly. Herb’s grief drove him away from America and somewhat away from jazz for a time.

PHIL WOODS
^&

Born 2 November 1931, Springfield, Massachusetts

Alto saxophone

Phil & Quill

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 215

Woods; Gene Quill (as); George Syran (p); Teddy Kotick (b); Nick Stabulas (d). March 1957.

Phil Woods says:
‘That’s definitely my favourite record by that group.’

Phil Woods has never seemed like a beginner. He sprang into his recording career. Tone, speed of execution and ideas were all first-hand borrowings from bebop and, inevitably, Parker; but he sounded like a mature player from the first, and he has often suffered from a degree of neglect, both as a young musician and as a senior one. A well-educated musician, to an unusual degree for this generation, he studied with Tristano and at Juilliard, but it is his absolute, self-willed determination that sets him apart, even down to his insistence at some stages on no amplification in clubs, preferring his unadorned alto to cut through on its own. He started out touring with big bands before launching into small-group work (which may explain that easy power), but then spent a further period with the bands and in the studios before he formed his European Rhythm Machine while living in Paris. The Philology label was founded in Italy to put out Charlie Parker remnants and Woods’s own material. He returned to the US in the early ’70s and continues to tour tirelessly.