The Penguin Jazz Guide (63 page)

Jazz Club 57

Dragon DRCD 326

Rosengren; Stig Söderqvist (vtb); Claes-Göran Fagerstedt (p); Torbjørn Hultcrantz (b); Sune Spångberg (d); Nannie Porres (v). 1957–1962.

Don Cherry said (1992):
‘Listening to Bernt, it’s possible to think that jazz maybe did come from somewhere other than America, that it had sprung up all over the world simultaneously. I’d know him in a crowd. It’s like old leather that sound, you know? Like a book in a library.’

Rosengren has been a force in Swedish jazz for some 50 years and is still undervalued on the world stage. He led Swedish hard bop as its premier young tenorman in the late ’50s. He acquired some international exposure in the ’60s with George Russell and others, and he plays in Krzysztof Komeda’s group on the soundtrack to Polanski’s
Knife in the Water
, but he has basically remained tied to his native scene as a player and bandleader. Wider availability of his earlier records would still be welcome, but the reappearance of
Jazz Club 57
was welcome. Rosengren is already in imperious form, clear-toned and logical in his development of a solo. Some profess to hear a likeness to Rollins here and there, and there is something of that logic of delivery, but he’s unmistakable and nobody’s obvious follower. The record also benefits from a strong and capable group. Söderqvist makes some arresting interventions on ‘I’ll Remember April’ and ‘Sputnik’ but only appears on one other track.

SONNY CLARK

Born Conrad Yeatis Clark, 21 July 1931, Herminie, Pennsylvania; died 13 January 1963, New York City

Piano

Cool Struttin’

Blue Note 95327-2

Clark; Art Farmer (t); Jackie McLean (as); Paul Chambers (b); Philly Joe Jones (d). January 1958.

Clarinettist Buddy DeFranco said (2001):
‘Sonny worshipped Tatum and he brought that positivity to the group. There was nothing downbeat about Sonny’s work, nothing of that shut-down feeling you get from some guys. He was warm and had a great sense of humour.’

Clark approached music with abandon. A pendulum dependence on either alcohol or narcotics never seems to have impinged on his ability to play; he worked in Buddy DeFranco’s group and enjoyed a steady if short-lived tenure as Blue Note’s house pianist, though being a junkie was never a disqualification in that set-up. Note-perfect, rhythmically bouncy and always ready with a quirky idea, he was an ideal group player, relatively uninterested in playing lots of solos, less convincing in a hornless group like the eponymous 1957 date. Chambers, then approaching his heyday, has a generous share of the spotlight, perhaps because Sonny’s interest in soloing was limited.

His Blue Note records are consistently good:
Dial ‘S’ For Sonny
,
Trio
,
Sonny’s Crib
; but
Cool Struttin’
is one of the key documents of hard bop. The title-piece is a long-form blues, with room for the horns to stretch out. Sonny’s own finest moment is his solo on ‘Blue Minor’, another original. His three-note trills are almost Monkian and the percussive, spacious attack is reminiscent of the bebop giant at his most capacious. Though Clark rarely strays far from the blues, one can hear Farmer itching to break through into other dimensions. The reissue contains two extra tracks unreleased on LP: Clark’s own ‘Royal Flush’ and a wayward interpretation of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Lover’. It’s buoyant music, smart, personal and confidently executed.

AHMAD JAMAL
^&

Born 2 July 1930, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Piano

At The Pershing / Complete Live At The Pershing Lounge

Chess MCD 09108 / Gambit 69624 2CD

Jamal; Israel Crosby (b); Vernell Fournier (d). January 1958.

Ahmad Jamal remembers:
‘For the historic Pershing session we used an 1890 Steinway with a cracked soundboard and it sparkled.’

As Brian Priestley has pointed out, pianists who achieve a modicum of commercial success tend to move closer to the entertainment mainstream than any other musicians, except possibly singers, who are often thought to belong there anyway. Jamal’s spare, spacious style was a reaction to the excesses of bebop, and it won him an audience. Even so, for many years, Jamal gave much of his attention to running a chi-chi club, the Alhambra, rather than to playing, but his influence on Miles Davis and the aura of his wildly successful 1958 trio kept him in prominence.

Jamal began recording at the turn of the ’50s, with a drummerless trio that consisted of first Eddie Calhoun then Israel Crosby on bass and with guitarist Ray Crawford’s distinctive tapped-out lines a particular feature. There were obvious affinities with Nat Cole, but Jamal seemed to be exploring other dimensions. An epic version of ‘Love For Sale’ and an original composition called ‘New Rhumba’, which caught the attention of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, suggested his originality.

From here on, though, Jamal’s live records always seem better than his studio sets, as if the presence of an audience conjured something extra. The Pershing record is something of an industry phenomenon, climbing to number three on the
Billboard
‘Hot 100’ on its release and staying in the chart for more than two years. Now remastered in modern sound,
it demonstrates how and why Jamal was able to negotiate mainstream success. ‘Poinciana’ was a single, edited from the live performance, and became a jukebox and radio favourite, its celebrity extending outside jazz circles. Jamal’s technique has scarcely changed over the years and remains closer to Erroll Garner than to anyone else, concentrating on fragile textures and calligraphic melodic statements (the qualities that attracted Miles) rather than the propulsive logic of bebop piano. His reinterpretations of ‘Woody’n’You’ and ‘There Is No Greater Love’ are cool and subtle, their excitements perhaps more intellectual than visceral, but Jamal does convey a very particular energy in his work.

These recordings are now out of copyright, so different versions exist. We would normally plump firmly for a favourite, but here there’s a dilemma. The Gambit option has 72 minutes of music compared to Chess’s 32, but in far less delightful sound: quality, width – the buyer’s choice.

& See also
À L’Olympia
(2000; p. 656)

VICTOR FELDMAN

Born 7 April 1934, London; died 12 May 1987, Los Angeles, California

Piano, vibraphone

The Arrival Of Victor Feldman

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 268

Feldman; Scott LaFaro (b); Stan Levey (d). January 1958.

Bassist and composer Gavin Bryars says of Scott LaFaro:
‘In a tragically short working life – dead at 25, he only started playing bass at 18 – he overturned then-current concepts of the jazz bass into an instrument that could soar effortlessly in solos through all registers, with a sublimely lyrical and singing tone, as well as maintaining a rich and sustained accompaniment, whether with Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman, Stan Getz or others.

Originally a child prodigy drummer – he played with Glenn Miller when he was ten – the Londoner switched to vibes and piano and worked with Ronnie Scott. His career took off in America and he gained his moment in jazz Valhalla when Miles Davis recorded his composition ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’. To some degree, Feldman is the kind of musician’s musician who is doomed to be remembered by association. He worked with Howard Rumsey at the Lighthouse, also with Woody Herman and Cannonball Adderley, and had a stint in Miles’s quintet. We’re guilty of the same thing by highlighting the role of his brilliant young bassist Scott LaFaro. In fact, Feldman brokered a long and varied career as a musician, making close to 30 records under his own name and surviving better than most through the fusion era with such clever sets as 1977’s
The Artful Dodger.

Arrival
is a marvellous record, completed just after Victor had settled in Los Angeles. The cover wittily dramatizes the Englishman’s arrival in the New World – by rowing boat and dressed as if for Ascot or the House of Lords, while LaFaro and Stan Levey help haul him ashore. Scott’s role in extending the vocabulary of the piano trio is well documented in his association with Bill Evans but, given how tragically foreshortened his career was, it’s surprising that these sides don’t receive more attention. His playing on the opening ‘Serpent’s Tooth’ is almost as remarkable as anything he played with Evans. As ever, the young bassist is firm-toned, melodic and endlessly inventive, and the interplay with the piano is stunning: long, highly wrought lines round a basic bop figuration. Levey’s accents are quietly insistent and the whole recording seems to have been mic’ed very close, as was the practice at the time. ‘Serpent’s Tooth’, ‘Satin Doll’ and ‘There Is No Greater Love’ are the
outstanding tracks, but a word, too, for Feldman’s own ‘Minor Lament’, a more workmanlike piece, but one that shows off this subtle craft to perfection.

PEE WEE RUSSELL

Born Charles Ellsworth Russell, 27 March 1902, St Louis, Missouri; died 15 February 1969, Alexandria, Virginia
,

Clarinet

Swingin’ With Pee Wee

Prestige 24213-2

Russell; Buck Clayton, Ruby Braff (t); Vic Dickenson (tb); Bud Freeman (ts); Tommy Flanagan, Nat Pierce (p); Wendell Marshall, Tommy Potter (b); Osie Johnson, Karl Kiffe (d). February 1958–March 1960.

Pianist Tommy Flanagan said (1987):
‘Someone said about Pee Wee that even his feet looked sad. He was a remarkable player, though, and he could have been as big as Benny Goodman, if it hadn’t been for the hooch.’

A jazz original, with a hangdog face and a lugubrious manner that disguised what was underneath, Russell came from Missouri and played in the New York school of hot music in the ’20s, with Nichols, Mole and the others. From the ’30s he was better known as a member of the Condon gang, but his later playing suggested his disaffection from that style of jazz, and in his final decade he played in increasingly mainstream-to-modern settings. Alcoholism, illness and depression thwarted him.

A valuable reissue of a classic Russell session,
Swingin’ With Pee Wee
is one of his best latter-day records. Clayton handled the arranging duties, and the rhythm section, with Flanagan, Marshall and Johnson, was about the most modernistic Russell had had behind him at this point. The result is a stylish and triumphant assimilation of his clarinet into a vibrant mainstream setting. His dissertation on his great blues, ‘Englewood’, is but one example of Pee Wee at his best – and Clayton matches him in the calibre of his playing. Even more of a bonus are the tracks from the 1958 date for Counterpoint,
Portrait Of Pee Wee
, with Braff and Dickenson – not quite as good, but it only adds to the merits of an excellent reissue.

CANNONBALL ADDERLEY

Born Julian Edwin Adderley, 15 September 1928, Tampa, Florida; died 8 August 1975, Gary, Indiana

Alto and soprano saxophones

Somethin’ Else

Blue Note 95392

Adderley; Miles Davis (t); Hank Jones (p); Sam Jones (b); Art Blakey (d). March 1958.

Former Adderley pianist Joe Zawinul said (1995):
‘I don’t think anyone gets him, man, even now. I worked with him nine, nine and a half years, and in that time he never played anything exactly the same way twice. A
real
genius, man.’

The long critically undervalued Adderley’s status as a master communicator has grown rapidly since his untimely death. The blues-soaked tone and hard, swinging alto-lines are as recognizable a sound as any in the aftermath of bebop.
Pace
Joe Zawinul, he did fall back on clichés, but just because he liked the sound of them. There’s a lean, hard-won quality to his best playing and much dedication to craft.

Some of the Adderley group’s best-known stuff came later, like Zawinul’s ‘Mercy, Mercy,
Mercy’, and the group aesthetic went in the direction of soul-jazz, but in earlier days the language was heterodox hard bop. Adderley’s cameo appearances on
Milestones
(five days earlier) and
Kind Of Blue
(the following year) were outclassed by the leader’s returning/anticipating the favour on this classic Blue Note, which is sometimes unfairly credited to the trumpeter. It’s very much Cannonball’s achievement. The long, sublimely relaxed lope through ‘Autumn Leaves’ is the track every listener remembers, but there isn’t a rote moment on the record and the rhythm section take much credit too. Take numbers steadily mount through the session and the released version of ‘Dancing In The Dark’ took 11 attempts to nail down. It’s not clear whether fatigue or perfectionism were to blame; the results are superb and the contrast between Adderley’s vitalism and Miles’s narrow-eyed lyricism is a treat. No one should be without this one.

MICHEL LEGRAND

Born 24 February 1932, Paris, France

Piano

Legrand Jazz

Philips 830074-2

Legrand; Miles Davis, Ernie Royal, Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Joe Wilder (t); Frank Rehak, Billy Byers, Jimmy Cleveland, Eddie Bert (tb); Jimmy Buffington (frhn); Gene Quill, Phil Woods (as); Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Seldon Powell (ts); Jerome Richardson (bs, bcl); Teo Macero (bs); Herbie Mann (f); Bill Evans, Hank Jones, Nat Pierce (p); Eddie Costa, Don Elliott (vib); Betty Glamann (hp); Major Holley (b, tba); Paul Chambers, George Duvivier, Milt Hinton (b); Don Lamond, Kenny Dennis, Osie Johnson (d). June 1958.