The Penguin Jazz Guide (60 page)

Miles had worked with Gil Evans before
Miles Ahead
, but this first full-length collaboration highlighted their like-mindedness and an illuminating reciprocity of vision. Curiously, given the reputation that these records have garnered, they aren’t always well played, with fluffs aplenty and shaky ensembles, though this first outing is pristine compared to the passage-work on
Porgy And Bess
, later.
Miles Ahead
was rightly identified as a concerto for Miles. Recorded over four sessions in May 1957, it has great internal consistency. It no longer makes much sense to talk about ‘tracks’, for the internal subdivisions here are effectively moments in a long, continuous work. Even so, certain things do stand out: ‘The Maids Of Cadiz’, ‘My Ship’, the title-track and a lovely version of Ahmad Jamal’s ‘New Rhumba’. Frailties of performance apart, Evans gave the music a great depth of focus, doubling up bass-lines and creating distance and tension between upper and lower lines in a way that was to affect Miles for the rest of his career. Though it is far from being expressively one-dimensional – there are moments of playful humour – the pervading tone is a melancholy lyricism. This was the first time Miles recorded with flugelhorn; every trumpeter subsequently copied him, though he himself seldom repeated the experiment. The flugelhorn’s sound
isn’t so very different from his trumpet soloing, though palpably softer-edged. Though he plays open all the time, as he was to do again on
Milestones
, some of the burnish seems to have been replaced by a more searching sound.
Sketches Of Spain
, with its glorious interpretation of Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
remains the favourite record of the Miles/Gil collaboration, but it is markedly inferior to this quiet masterpiece.

& See also
The Complete Birth Of The Cool
(1948–1950; p. 121),
Kind Of Blue
(1959; p. 232),
The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel
(1965; p. 331),
In A Silent Way
(1969; p. 361),
Agharta
(1975; p. 420)

RED GARLAND

Born William M. Garland, 12 May 1923, Dallas, Texas; died 23 May 1984, Dallas, Texas

Piano

Red Garland Revisited!

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 985

Garland; Kenny Burrell (g); Paul Chambers (b); Art Taylor (d). May 1957.

Trumpeter and Miles Davis biographer Ian Carr said (1990):
‘One thinks of him as a very smooth, almost unctuous player. His chording was always very smooth. But there was a real fire there. A proud man, and with a real musical intelligence.’

Graceful yet unaffectedly bluesy, Red Garland’s manner was flexible enough to accommodate the contrasting styles of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane in the Davis quintet of the mid-’50s. His many records as a leader, beginning at about the same period, display exactly the same qualities. His confessed influences of Tatum, Powell and Nat Cole seem less obvious than his debts to Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal, whose hit recording of ‘Billy Boy’ seems to sum up everything that Garland would later go on to explore.

All of the trio sessions feature the same virtues: deftly fingered left-hand runs over bouncy rhythms, coupled with block-chord phrasing which coloured melodies in such a way that Garland saw no need to depart from them. Medium/uptempo treatments alternate with stately ballads, and Chambers and Taylor are unfailingly swinging, if often constrained. The triumvirate was well established, but rarely remarked now that piano trios are in vogue again.
Revisited!
is the first choice for anyone who wants a single Garland set from the period. His own version of ‘Billy Boy’ is here, there are two classic slow-burners in ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ and ‘The Masquerade Is Over’, and Burrell shows up to spar on ‘Four’ and ‘Walkin’’. It’s effortless music, with a gnarly edge here and there, certainly not ignorable cocktail-hour jazz.

JOHNNY GRIFFIN
^&

Born 24 April 1928, Chicago, Illinois; died 25 July 2008, Availles-Limouzine, France

Tenor saxophone

A Blowing Session

Blue Note 99009

Griffin; Lee Morgan (t); John Coltrane, Hank Mobley (ts); Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Art Blakey (d). May 1957.

Johnny Griffin said (1989):
‘An interviewer said to me recently: “Some of those early records … they were just jam sessions, weren’t they?”
Just
jam sessions?! That was how you learned to play. Kids now go to Berklee or some other school and they learn all there is to know and then they have to learn how to play some personality out of their instrument, except they don’t think they need that any more.
Just
jam sessions! I don’t think so.’

The Little Giant had the reputation of being the fastest tenor-player on the block, which inevitably led sceptics to sniff that expression had been sacrificed to speed. Inevitably, the truth is somewhere round the middle. Griffin certainly had his metronome set unusually fast, but he could build an affecting solo when he chose and one rarely found him tripped up by technique.

In the mid-’50s Griffin established his fast-draw reputation with a group of records that majored on energy. One of us previously described
A Blowing Session
as ‘combative, but ultimately dull’. When the authors debated that same record on a radio programme we agreed that Griffin had bested the rising star of John Coltrane and that the dullness was perhaps an artefact of having listened to too many similar but inferior sessions over the years.

Griff’s first recordings, for Argo, find him more of a bebopper than was obvious later. He may have neglected ballad playing until middle age, but there are moments of surprising delicacy even this early, like ‘I Cried For You’ on
Johnny Griffin Tenor
, which also housed his first headlong masterpiece, ‘Satin Wrap’. The first Blue Note session was made some weeks later and released as
Introducing Johnny Griffin
(Griffin had already made a few sides for OKeh three years previously), and in Wynton Kelly he had a piano-player who knew how to play the blues. Again, there’s more than a sprinkle of bebop procedures and the album’s clinched with a vintage ‘Lover Man’, a truly great reading of the song.

In the company of Coltrane and Mobley, on this the second Blue Note session, he rattles through ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ like some love-on-the-run hustler. Only Trane seems inclined to serenade, and it’s interesting to speculate how the track might have sounded had they taken it at conventional ballad tempo. ‘All The Things You Are’ begins with what sounds like Reveille from Wynton Kelly and then lopes off with almost adolescent awkwardness. This was a typical Griffin strategy. For much of his most productive period he more or less bypassed ballad playing and only really adjusted his idiom to the medium and slower tempos as he aged. ‘It’s All Right With Me’ is way over the speed limit, as if Griffin is trying to erase all memory of Sonny Rollins’s magisterial reading of a deceptively difficult tune. But it’s not all callow grandstanding. There are subtleties here, too, and with the hugely underrated Mobley on the strength it’s a record that bears careful listening.

& See also
Return Of The Griffin
(1978; p. 447)

CONTE CANDOLI

Born Secondo Candoli, 12 July 1927, Mishawaka, Indiana; died 14 December 2001, Palm Desert, California

Trumpet

Conte Candoli Quartet

VSOP 43

Candoli; Vince Guaraldi (p); Monty Budwig (b); Stan Levey (d). June 1957.

Conte Candoli said (1982):
‘I admired Dizzy and Clifford Brown, most of the modern fellows, in fact. Miles Davis, not so much. There are times when his intonation wasn’t so good. Dizzy was always right on it … and such a sound!’

Elder brother and fellow trumpeter Pete Candoli was his main teacher but ‘The Count’ eventually trumped him. He worked with Kenton and Woody Herman before striking out on his own. For part of his career, he was in Doc Severinsen’s television band and a regular
on
The Tonight Show
, but the revival of interest in swing-to-modern jazz after the first cycle of pop brought him back into the limelight and he was a staple of Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars.

Coast To Coast
on Fresh Sound is the best compilation of the early ’50s work, but this 1957 VSOP quartet date is a small gem on its own. They crack off with Al Cohn’s delightful ‘Liza’, slot in a couple of good lines by the brothers and Osie Johnson’s intriguing ‘Meliodistic’. Guaraldi, who’s never been forgiven his crossover success, comps with authority and takes some nice solos, but it’s the trumpet that sits in the foreground, busy, confident and full-toned, the exact same, Dizzy-tinged voice that kept surfacing in jazz situations for the next three decades.

MARTY PAICH

Born 23 January 1925, Oakland, California; died 12 August 1995, Hidden Hills, California

Arranger

The Picasso Of Big Band Jazz

Candid CCD 79031

Paich; Buddy Childers, Jack Sheldon (t); Herbie Harper (tb); Bob Enevoldsen (tb, vtb); Vincent DeRosa (frhn); Herb Geller (as); Bob Cooper, Bill Perkins (ts); Joe Mondragon (b); Mel Lewis (d). June 1957.

Jimmy Giuffre said (1987):
‘Marty was the one who had the musical education, lessons with Castelnuovo-Tedesco and all that UCLA stuff. We were always a little leery of him, because he knew more than we did.’

It’s a nice conceit, Paich as a mural painter in bright, summery colours, and it goes some way towards defining the music. Paich had worked as a piano-player before the war, in a group with Pete Rugolo, and after demob he continued to perform, acting as Peggy Lee’s accompanist for a time. His interests, though, were varied and he managed – as was readily possible on the Coast – to combine jazz writing and arranging with work in the studios and in Hollywood. A couple of years before
The Picasso Of Big Band Jazz
he’d worked on the soundtrack for
The Lady and the Tramp.
Apart from ‘What’s New?’, all the charts are Paich’s and they’re given a respectable span to work themselves out. The music is sophisticated rather than difficult. ‘Black Rose’ and ‘New Soft Shoe’ follow intriguingly personal lines and, though keys and pace change through the set, it has a strong coherence round major/minor ambiguities. There’s perhaps just a touch of analytical cubism in the charts, a feeling that distortions to the familiar tonality are made because they can be, rather than for any obvious expressive reason. But there’s no point flogging a useful metaphor or dissecting music that’s cool and laid-back and thoroughly enjoyable, even after half a century.

HERB POMEROY

Born Irving Herbert Pomeroy III, 15 April 1930, Gloucester, Massachusetts; died 11 August 2007, Gloucester, Massachusetts

Trumpet

Life Is A Many-Splendored Gig

Fresh Sound FSRCD 84

Pomeroy; Augie Ferretti, Joe Gordon, Lennie Johnson, Everett Longstreth (t); Joe Ciavardone, Gene DiStachio, Bill Legan (tb); Dave Chapman, Boots Mussulli (as); Jaki Byard, Varty Haritounian, Zoot Sims (ts); Deane Haskins (bs); Ray Santisi (p); John Neves (b); Jimmy Zitano (d). June 1957.

Trombonist/bandleader Michael Gibbs remembers:
‘I met him first day I arrived at Berklee – January 9th, 1959! – and he invited me to witness a studio recording session. He became my teacher, mentor, friend – a sort of father-figure from then on. He always seemed so grand, ever-wise, it wasn’t till his death I realized he was only seven years my senior – so he was 28 when I met him … and he played with Charlie Parker!!’

Herb Pomeroy is perhaps something of an anomaly in a book devoted to recorded jazz, because he thought records were somehow beside the point, a pale representation of the real jazz experience, which relied on the physical presence of players and audience, ideally in close proximity. Consequently, far more jazz fans have heard Pomeroy praised as an influential teacher – guru, even – than heard him as a player; those few that have probably remember him from a couple of debutant recordings with Charlie Parker on the compilation
The Bird You Never Heard
, or perhaps on
The Fable Of Mabel
and
Boston Blow-Up
, made under the leadership of his associate, baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff. A pity: Pomeroy’s trumpet sound had a warm burnish and a nicely vocal authority. Once heard, it becomes addictive.

Chaloff also had a short recording career, but for more tragic reasons. Pomeroy simply redirected his energies towards teaching and developing young talent. He himself had studied at Schillinger House, which became the Berklee School, and after a period working with Stan Kenton, and with Chaloff, the equally ill-starred Richard Twardzik, Charlie Mariano and others as the Boston Jazz Workshop he started teaching at Berklee, where his distinguished students included Mariano’s then wife Toshiko Akiyoshi, vibist Gary Burton (himself now a very distinguished educator) and trombonist/composer Michael Gibbs. An indefatigable supporter of young talent – Pomeroy also took over and transformed the MIT jazz band – he only began playing again when he retired from full-time teaching in the ’90s.