The Penguin Jazz Guide (76 page)

The opening ‘We Speak’ is a straightforward blowing theme, but the balance of tonalities and the use of abrasive dissonance evokes Ornette’s
Free Jazz
, recorded a bare four months before. Little and Roach are the axis of the music. The drummer adds timps and vibes to his armoury, and this makes up somewhat for the shortcomings in Friedman’s playing, which drifts between the routine and the uncomprehending, unless we do his subtlety an injustice. The extra percussion has the effect of blurring the beat in a most enticing way. The shifting signature of ‘Moods In Free Time’ stretches Little’s phrasing and ‘Hazy Hues’ explores his interest in tone-colour. ‘Strength And Sanity’ is a staggeringly good line, and so are ‘Man Of Words’ and the naggingly familiar ‘Quiet Please’. The closing ‘A New Day’, with its hints of freedom and its fanfare-like acclamations, is an ironic title in the circumstances.
Out Front
is one of the great records of its period.

HANK CRAWFORD

Born Bennie Ross Crawford, also known as ‘Splanky’, 31 December 1934, Memphis, Tennessee; died 29 January 2009, Memphis, Tennessee

Alto saxophone

From The Heart

Atlantic 8122 73709

Crawford; Phillip Guilbeau (t); John Hunt (t, flhn); David Newman (ts); Leroy Cooper (bs); Sonny Forrest (g); Edgar Willis (b); Bruno Carr (d). March 1961.

Alto saxophonist David Sanborn says:
‘This is some of the first music I responded to. I love the emotional directness in Hank’s playing.’

Crawford said that he tried ‘to keep the melody so far in front that you can almost sing along’, and that irresistibly vocal style lends his simple approach to the alto a deep-rooted conviction. His best records are swinging parties built on the blues, southern R&B and enough bebop to keep a more hardened jazz listener satisfied.

He came up with a forward-looking new generation in Memphis, with George Coleman, Booker Little and Phineas Newborn all near-contemporaries, but it was a longish tenure as member and musical director of Ray Charles’s band, for whom he originally played baritone, that shaped Hank Crawford as a jazz star whose roots remained firmly in soul and R&B. It was Ray who gave him his professional first name, because of a presumed resemblance to Hank O’Day. The first Atlantic date was
More Soul.
The result is sonorous and churchy in the Brother Ray mould, with Hank and Fathead Newman taking the solo honours.

Hank and the label never saw any reason to do things differently after that. He hit stride with
From The Heart
. It centres on ‘Sherri’, a song written for Charles, but also includes ‘The Peeper’ and ‘Stony Lonesome’, two of Hank’s best soul-jazz lines. Sonny Forrest is on hand for three tracks, filling out the harmony, but it’s recorded with a piano, with what was basically the Ray Charles unit, and with the horns used as a harmonic carpet. Following his long spell at Atlantic (the Rhino compilation
Heart And Soul
offers the best of it), he renewed his career at Milestone, where he was provided with consistently sympathetic settings that ended up sounding too consistent, though they’re still light years ahead of what passes for smooth jazz now.

JAKI BYARD
^&

Born 15 June 1922, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 11 February 1999, New York City

Piano, tenor saxophone

Out Front!

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1842

Byard; Richard Williams (t); Booker Ervin (ts); Ron Carter, Bob Cranshaw, Walter Perkins (b); Roy Haynes (d). March 1961.

Pianist Jason Moran, a pupil of Byard’s says:
‘I remember Jaki saying that he wrote the piece with Herbie Nichols’ “touch” in mind. There is a certain sparkle and lightness, yet profundity, that Nichols gets, and this is what I hear on this recording. I love the way he, Roy Haynes and Ron Carter play together on this one. Jaki has a rare way of making the piano yell mid-phrase, but making one or two notes stick really far out, startling the ear, in a good way.’

Jaki Byard’s murder in 1999 remains unsolved. It was a strange and ironic end for an artist who gave so generously to others during his long working life. His enormous power and versatility are grounded on a thorough knowledge of brass, reeds – he started out on trumpet but preferred to double on tenor saxophone – drums and guitar, as well as piano, and there are definite horn influences in his soloing. Later, Byard did play more pianistically, though the distinctive left- and right-hand articulation of themes – based on a highly personal synthesis of ragtime and stride, bop and free jazz – was still strongly evident in later years. He worked with Earl Bostic, with Maynard Ferguson and, later, with Charles Mingus, with whom he regularly had a solo spot that sounded like a summation of jazz piano history up to that point. With a powerful left hand and a free approach to harmony, Jaki was able to work in almost any context, from gospelly blues to the avant-garde.

Out Front!
shows off not only his own versatility as a keyboard artist, but his ability to shape a whole group sound round his own part. Where the horns are deployed – as on the
unusual ‘European Episode’ – the voicings are quite unique and given the distinctiveness of Ervin’s and Williams’s sound, there is an eerie, almost alien heft to the music, which seems to flit from one idea to the next, almost as if Byard is on tour in his head. The title-piece is, like his ‘Aluminum Baby’, a modern classic and ‘When Sunny Gets Blue’ is virtually rewritten in the solo sections. A great album by a modern master.

& See also
Phantasies
(1984, 1988; p. 489)

JOE HARRIOTT

Born 15 July 1928, Jamaica; died 2 January 1973, Southampton, Hampshire, England

Alto saxophone

Abstract

Redial 538 183 2

Harriott; Shake Keane (t); Pat Smythe (p); Bobby Orr, Phil Seamen (d); Frank Holder (perc). 1961.

Pianist and bandleader Michael Garrick remembers:
‘Bassist Dave Green once played Joe a Parker V-disc, borrowed from a BBC library man. “I know all dem Parker things. ‘Ornithology’? I heard it many times.” “But not this take, Joe” – Dave stuck to his guns – “it’s never been issued.” Cornered, Joe took his usual way out by pretending the last exchange hadn’t taken place. “Parker, he play a few aces, yes, but there’s dem over
here
can play a few aces, too. There’s dem over
here
that will surprise you.” These words immortalize him. They’re on his grave in Bitterne churchyard. God bless him for his peerless music. He wasn’t wrong.’

Anyone who’s only heard of Harriott as one of the mythical leaders of free jazz in Britain will be surprised by much of his recorded output, which doesn’t immediately suggest a revolutionary. Harriott came to England with the likes of Dizzy Reece, Coleridge Goode, Shake Keane and Wilton ‘Bogey’ Gaynair, and shook up British jazz with new energies and priorities. His foreshortened career embraced bop, the Indo-jazz experiments of John Mayer and his own essays in freedom.

Richard Cook’s reissue of
Abstract
allowed many who had only heard Harriott’s name and legend to experience the music for the first time. The obvious impression is that Joe’s brand of abstraction is still deeply grounded in blues, calypso and bop, but Harriott doesn’t do bop from the inside; rather he dresses up his own individual conception with a boppish costume and a few Bird feathers. His harmonic grasp isn’t conventional either, and it doesn’t take much cynicism to suggest that this was one of the things that pushed him towards freedom. That said, it’s a great record, and one that consistently belies its title. ‘Shadows’ might almost be a Parker line turned on its head and as with classic bebop it’s the interplay of saxophone and trumpet that counts. Originals like ‘Modal’ are more schematic but it’s Joe’s revision of ‘Oleo’ that reveals his method most clearly, a standard bop line put to idiosyncratic and unrepeatable use.

BUCK CLAYTON

Born Wilbur Dorsey Clayton, 12 November 1911, Dorsey, Kansas; died 8 December 1991, New York City

Trumpet

Buck Clayton All Stars 1961

Storyville STCD 8231

Clayton; Emmett Berry (t); Dicky Wells (tb); Earl Warren (as); Buddy Tate (ts); Sir Charles Thompson (p); Gene Ramey (b); Oliver Jackson (d). April 1961.

Trumpeter Dizzy Reece said (1985):
‘No one speaks of him this way, but I think Buck Clayton lay behind a lot of the modern movement: that very clear sound, very ringing, which was quite different from what had gone before in jazz. I think that had an effect on Miles Davis and others, but Miles especially.’

Responsible for no particular stylistic innovation, Buck managed to synthesize much of the history of jazz trumpet up to his time with a bright, brassy tone and an apparently limitless facility for melodic improvisation, which made him ideal for the kind of open-ended jam that all too often made its way onto record. Though he was leading a big band as early as 1934, it was his time with Basie which established him as a soloist of distinction, and one who later developed a warm, brass tone and softness of delivery that were best suited to ballad playing.

Over in Europe, Buck’s brand of swing didn’t seem old-fashioned in 1961, and this touring octet was applauded to the rafters right across the continent, as a couple of good live sets suggest. State-of-the-art swing from a band of past masters, anxious to demonstrate that, away from America at least, they weren’t past it. The Paris show finds the band in good heart and playing well, though the sound isn’t as good as a TCB recording of a later date in Basel. Despite the distracting volume of the drums – Jackson is hugely loud in places – and Sir Charles is often only glimpsed peeking through the cymbals and through horns that are sometimes here, sometimes there, the music is cracking and only a hi-fi perfectionist would baulk.

GEORGE RUSSELL
^&

Born 23 June 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio; died 27 July 2009, Boston, Massachusetts

Composer, bandleader, piano

Ezz-thetics

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 070

Russell; Don Ellis (t); Dave Baker (tb); Eric Dolphy (as, bcl); Steve Swallow (b); Joe Hunt (d). May 1961.

George Russell said (1984):
‘It isn’t for me to pronounce on the significance of the Lydian Concept, though I know it was the bible of modal jazz. The key thing about it was it gave musicians more freedom, which was what Miles Davis, for instance, was looking for. The technical aspects are important and there’s a lifetime of study in them, but it’s the freedom that matters.’

As a very good start to a Russell collection there’s a strong case to be made for
Ezz-thetics
, with its fine Dolphy contributions (coincidentally or not, the year of the saxophonist’s death also marked the beginning of Russell’s long exile in Europe and a mutual alienation from the American scene). But all the early Russells, with the exception of the slightly less achieved
The Outer View
, are indispensable.

It’s often assumed that these records are entirely dominated by Russell compositions. Not so: the two main events here are Miles’s ‘Nardis’, beautifully arranged, and with Ellis in excellent form, and Dolphy’s extraordinary excursus on ‘Round Midnight’. By comparison, Russell’s title-piece and the cleverly named ‘Lydiot’ – how many ‘lydiots’ tried to copy him over the years – are little more than torsos, albeit played with real grace and attention by a perfectly balanced group. A great record.

& See also
Jazz Workshop
(1956; p. 183),
Live In An American Time Spiral
(1982; p. 469)

DEXTER GORDON
^&

Born 27 February 1923, Los Angeles, California; died 25 April 1990, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tenor saxophone

Doin’ Alright

Blue Note 784077

Gordon; Freddie Hubbard (t); Horace Parlan (p); George Tucker (b); Al Harewood (d). May 1961.

Dexter Gordon said (1979):
‘I was never really “away” from jazz. Even when I wasn’t putting out records, even when I didn’t have a saxophone in my hand, I was running changes in my head, pretty much every waking hour.’

Gordon’s first recording after a long and painful break is one of his best. Critics divide on whether Gordon was influenced by Coltrane at this period or whether it was simply a case of the original being obscured by his followers. Gordon’s phrasing on
Doin’ Alright
certainly suggests a connection of some sort, but the opening statement of ‘I Was Doin’ Alright’ is completely individual and quite distinct, and Gordon’s solo development is nothing like the younger man’s. For all his later attempts to downplay his absences from the music, Gordon clearly regarded this recording as something of a breakthrough. ‘You’ve Changed’ never left his basic set-list and many times in years to come he alluded to the original May 1961 solo statement, never repeating himself, but somehow conjuring up the spirit of that first occasion. In addition, when he came to play ‘himself’ in Tavernier’s
Round Midnight
, ‘Society Red’ was one of the themes he chose. It’s a terrific record, intriguingly unplaceable as to time or style. Hubbard does his usual buoyant job and the rhythm section is sure-footed.