The Penguin Jazz Guide (74 page)

Founded at the end of the war by Peter Schilperoort, this jazz institution is still playing with undiminished enthusiasm, though inevitably with successive new personnels. There is some classic material from the late ’40s available on Lake, who preserve vast amounts of European Dixieland and trad, but the best of the DSCB comes from the year the chaps decided to turn in the day jobs and play jazz for a living. Originally an enthusiastic if uneventful trad group, the band matured into a unit which bridged the classic traditional style and a more swing-styled mainstream, although the former held sway. There were always good soloists on hand, some of the best including Morks, Klein and the very able Kaart, and the rhythm players avoided the mechanical thud of much trad. A regimen of constant touring kept their professionalism polished. The 1960 live set goes with a real punch and, with Morks and Klein in top form, is one of their liveliest records. There’s not much to say about this music, other than it is endlessly enjoyable, and far from unsubtle, and has a wonderful durability; the concept survived past Schilperoort’s death in 1990, more recently under the stewardship of Bob Kaper, whose battle-cry ‘Have a ball!’ still motivates and stirs.

CHARLIE BYRD

Born 16 September 1925, Chuckatuck, Virginia; died 2 December 1999, Annapolis, Maryland

Guitar

The Guitar Artistry of Charlie Byrd

JVC Victor 41576

Byrd; Keter Betts (b); Buddy Deppenschmidt (d). 1960.

Buddy Deppenschmidt says:
‘It was me and Betts who really put together the bossa nova thing. I don’t recall Charlie being that enthusiastic to begin with, but he and Getz – who did even less – got all the credit, and the money!’

The turning point in Byrd’s life was when he jammed with Django Reinhardt while still a teenager, on the great Belgian’s first visit to the US. Charlie had a relatively quiet time after that, until he moved to Washington in the ’50s. The release in 1962 of the evergreen
Jazz Samba
with Stan Getz, and the legal kerfuffle that followed, put Charlie Byrd firmly on the map. Like all hugely successful products, there was an element of ersatz about it, and Byrd’s Latin stylings have never sounded entirely authentic.

Working here with his regular trio, he shows clearly the values that sustained him through a long career: smooth melodic invention, a natural, easy rhythm, and a sufficiently varied and interesting programme (which includes a couple of Django classics and a more unexpected reading of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’) to hold the attention. After
Jazz Samba
altered the demographics, Byrd was expected to play in that style for the next ten or 15 years, but one hears him revert to this classic swing somewhat later in life: undeniably in better sound, but rarely with the same freshness of invention.

ERIC DOLPHY
^&

Born 20 June 1928, Los Angeles, California; died 29 June 1964, Berlin, Germany

Alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, clarinet

Far Cry

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 400

Dolphy; Booker Little (t); Jaki Byard (p); Ron Carter (b); Roy Haynes (d). December 1960.

Bassist Richard Davis, who recorded with Dolphy, says:
‘Eric was special, like the brother you never had.’

Like those of his friend Booker Little and of Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy’s career was strikingly and tragically foreshortened. He remains one of the music’s great might-have-beens. His recording debut in 1949, with Roy Porter’s bebop band in California, was something of a false start. Dolphy did not go into the studio again for nearly a decade, but in the meantime acquired an astonishing facility on alto saxophone. After joining the group of another drummer, Chico Hamilton, he began to develop a highly distinctive multi-instrumentalism, pioneering bass clarinet as a solo improvising instrument. His Parker-derived alto saxophone was strongly identified with advances in post-bop harmony, but he was also involved in the Third Stream. Much of his best work was in the company of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, with whom he toured Europe. Unable to find sufficient challenging work in the US he tried his luck as a ‘single’ there in 1964 but died in Berlin of diabetes complications.

Even before his passing, Dolphy had acquired an almost saintly reputation. His generous spirit is well attested by almost everyone who worked with him, but so too is admiration of
his remarkable musicianship. Dolphy’s mastery of alto saxophone is uncontested, a sound and idiom that marked a definite step forward from the prevailing Charlie Parker style, but combining elements of Ornette Coleman’s radicalism as well. It was to be more than a decade after his studio debut with Roy Porter before Dolphy made a record of his own.
Outward Bound
was the first in a group of records whose titles and surreal cover art emphasized his ‘out’ or ‘outside’ approach. The debut works interesting variations on bop and the blues, but Dolphy was at the same time dabbling in Third Stream and Indian-influenced projects, steadily widening his musical language and skills.

Out There
, recorded in August 1960, saw him replace a piano-player with Ron Carter’s cello, a decision perhaps influenced by Nathan Gershman’s role in the Hamilton group. Whatever the source, it gave Dolphy the confidence to experiment more freely with large intervallic leaps, whole-tone progressions and other advanced procedures only hinted at on the earlier record. That said, the E-flat blues ‘Serene’ is about as conventional as anything Dolphy committed to record, and entirely lacks the alienating wallop of his most characteristic work.

The week before Christmas 1960 was packed. On Tuesday, 20 December, Dolphy took part in Gunther Schuller’s
Jazz Abstractions
, taping two Third Stream pieces in the company of Ornette Coleman, Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans and Jim Hall. The following day he played in Ornette’s ambitious double quartet, the sessions that were to yield one of the definitive statements of the jazz avant-garde,
Free Jazz
. The very same day, he went over the river to Hackensack, New Jersey, and recorded
Far Cry
, his one studio recording with Booker Little.

Interestingly he decided to re-record two items from
Out There
. The title-piece of the August album is repeated, tougher and boppish in style, while ‘Serene’ remains essentially the same, which is perhaps why it was dropped from the original release. Byard brought in two pieces which helped turn side one of the LP into an extended tribute to Dolphy’s most obvious creative forerunner: ‘Mrs Parker Of K.C. (Bird’s Mother)’ and ‘Ode To Charlie Parker’.

Far Cry
also marks the first recorded appearance of Dolphy’s most celebrated composition, ‘Miss Ann’, a delightful 14-bar theme that he was to play until the end of his life; the title is black argot for a white woman of a certain type. Little drops out for ‘It’s Magic’, one of the first times one feels Dolphy is doing something special on bass clarinet, and the whole band sits out ‘Tenderly’, an astonishing, unaccompanied alto solo, a piece of work that bridges Coleman Hawkins’s pioneering ‘Picasso’ and Dolphy’s own later solo bass clarinet excursions on ‘God Bless The Child’, except that here the tune is still very much in evidence. Some have suggested that he was influenced by Sonny Rollins’s unaccompanied ‘Body And Soul’, recorded two years earlier.

There is a virtual consensus that
Out To Lunch!
, four years later, was Dolphy’s masterpiece. It’s a view that requires careful examination. Our growing conviction is that, while the later record has a profound iconic importance, coming so close to the end of Dolphy’s life, and on the gilt-edge jazz label of the time, it is in no fundamental way superior to
Far Cry
and in some respects unrepresentative of Dolphy’s output.

& See also
Out To Lunch!
(1964; p. 300)

THE ’60s

Thinking in decades is a neat, but usually meaningless, journalistic habit, and the kinds of consensus it throws up are nearly always wrong, or at best misleading. One might expect, given the usual rubrics of popular culture, to turn away from the ’50s with relief, confident that the new decade will deliver up a new optimism and spirit of adventure marked by bold creativity, political alertness and resistance to premature categorization. One only needs to dwell on the preceding 25 or 30 pages, or indeed the last 50, to be aware that the ’50s did represent some kind of golden age in jazz history. Almost every year seems to deliver a constellation of fine recordings. Some years seem almost impossibly rich, as if the only vital things going on at the time involved men with trumpets, saxophones, pianos and drums gathered in small New York studios. And it is true that for a time jazz did seem at the cutting edge of the creative culture in a way that it had not been before and would not be again.

It is not our intention to suggest that the ’60s represented a falling-away in terms of creative energy in jazz, and it is important to understand why the ’50s were, or seem, richer and more ‘important’. As always, there are positive and negative factors on both sides of the imaginary chronological line. The LP was still new in the ’50s and the LP as an object had an impact and resonance that 78rpm records did not. They were powerfully visible, as well as audible. By the following decade, the LP was extremely well entrenched, but was also being colonized by pop culture, which took up an increasingly large share of corporate investment in music. There was also the beginning of what later became an unstoppable trend of repackaging back-catalogue material rather than issuing new recordings. The eminent Commodore – whose leading new-issue imprint was Mainstream – started doing this in the ’60s, and it exerted a certain pressure both on the market and on the critical map, inviting a postwar generation of writers and fans to come to terms with music that had been made long before they reached the age of discretion. A 20-year-old fan in 1945 would have regarded most swing as
terra incognita
and while his own natural instincts might have leaned more towards tough hard bop or the new experimental music, he was still required to negotiate a music that had a clearly organized documentary history.

Arguably, the commercial presence of freshly packaged early jazz reinforced the battle lines, encouraging a young modernist to overstate his commitment to the new, but whatever the individual case the ’60s saw the emergence of the first self-conscious jazz avant-garde. Its origins can be dated to somewhere between Charles Mingus’s ‘Newport Rebels’ and Jazz Artists Guild in 1960 and trumpeter Bill Dixon’s 1964 ‘October Revolution’ in jazz. It remains an open question to what extent aesthetic radicalism was matched by a specific political agenda, and at the most cursory glance it can seem that the jazz music of the ’60s was less obviously motivated by political issues than the music of the previous decade, when most of the major initiatives – civil rights, anti-militarism, student democracy and oppositionism – became active in American culture. This is not to say that the ’60s were quietistic – though it’s fairly obvious that of the major younger figures of that decade (Coleman, Coltrane, Davis, Dolphy, Mingus, Shepp, Taylor …) only Mingus and Shepp seemed to have any
specific
political programme – but it seemed to represent special pleading in a way that rock, for instance, did not, and its racial agendas were complex and in some respects obstructive. Some avant-garde jazz allied itself to black nationalism (though just as much did not), and it was here that it met the most robust but usually passive resistance from the corporate economy, which simply neutralized such aims and directions by refusing to acknowledge them, or to deal with musicians who had abandoned ‘slave’ names in favour of new Muslim appellations: though a great many musicians of this generation changed their names, it would be a challenge to find many of those names at the top of an album sleeve.
The best and most representative work of the avant-garde may have gone undocumented, either because it was considered unmarketable, or subversive, or, as is sometimes forgotten, because its exponents held recording in some distrust.

And not just recording, for the very term ‘jazz’, which had always been questioned by such eminences as Duke Ellington, was also increasingly rejected by creative musicians. Miles Davis expressed disdain for it, and Charles Mingus attempted various alternatives – his classic Impulse! recording
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
was released under a ‘folk’ label, oddly – sparking an absurd attempt to cast jazz as the ‘classical’ music of African-Americans, a view which cannot be attributed to Mingus himself.

Nothing challenged the LP during the ’60s for supremacy in the marketplace. Eight-track recordings made a brief appearance and went the way of crushed velvet bell bottoms. However, recording techniques did make significant advances during the decade. Stereophonic recording became the norm, banishing monophonic recording to the dead letter office, though there were some disastrous attempts to ‘enhance’ mono recordings for stereo effect. Perhaps most important to creative musicians was the steady emergence of multi-track (initially two-track) recording, which allowed for a careful balancing of musical parts and a much clearer and more faithful representation again of bass and drums, as well as the kind of tape-editing practised by Teo Macero and by Bob Thiele on Mingus’s
The Black Saint.

Almost as important was the consolidation of a group of producers and engineers who for the first time matched great technical skill with innate musicality
and
a fundamental commitment to jazz. For Blue Note, but for many other labels, too, Rudy Van Gelder established a benchmark for recorded jazz, while others, like Orrin Keepnews and Bob Thiele, later Creed Taylor, professionalized jazz recording and gave it a distinct sonority that was faithful to the music’s nature rather than an adapted and compromised version of classical and pop recording. Blue Note’s practice of paid rehearsal and ample studio time was also influential. No longer was a jazz record merely a recorded jam session or taped rehearsal.