The Penguin Jazz Guide (77 page)

& See also
Dexter Gordon On Dial
(1947; p. 113),
More Than You Know
(1975; p. 423)

HOWARD MCGHEE

Born 16 March 1918, Tulsa, Oklahoma; died 17 July 1987, New York City

Trumpet

Maggie’s Back In Town!

Original Jazz Classics OJC 693

McGhee; Phineas Newborn (p); Leroy Vinnegar (b); Shelly Manne (d). June 1961.

Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt says:
‘To me, Howard McGhee was the trumpeter who bridged the gap between Diz and Miles. He was the consummate stylist.’

McGhee grew up in Detroit and won his spurs in territory bands, a background that gave him an easy facility in all forms, but may also have instilled a habit of personal neglect and abuse. He was less of an innovator than either Fats Navarro or Dizzy Gillespie, and his light, soft-edged tone and legato phrasing reflect an apprenticeship on clarinet. His recreational habits cost him dear, but he kept coming back and gigged until late in life. He was a prime mover in bebop on the West Coast, and Parker’s infamous ‘Loverman’ sides were originally released under McGhee’s name, an irony that must have resounded down the difficult years.

The late ’40s saw music taking a back seat to other pursuits, but there were sessions in Paris for Vogue and Blue Star, and there was the wonderful 1948 encounter with Fats Navarro, who perhaps more than anyone shaped his style. Here, Maggie is still inclined to mimic clarinet-lines, but he moved to a crisper attack and that signature sound wasn’t so much in evidence after the comeback. The ’50s were pretty much a blank for McGhee, but he returned in reasonable shape. On
Maggie’s Back In Town!
he sounds straightened-out and clear-headed, tackling ‘Softly As In A Morning Sunrise’ and ‘Summertime’ at a hurtling
pace that sounds good in the ensembles but flags a little when he is soloing. The opening ‘Demon Chase’, dedicated to Teddy Edwards’s son, is similarly hectic, but is good-natured enough. ‘Brownie Speaks’, included in homage to Clifford Brown, stretches him a little more convincingly, but by then the set is over. There is really only one ballad, and ‘Willow Weep For Me’ takes a slightly hysterical edge from Newborn’s very tensed-up accompaniment.

The other delicious record of 1961 was the Contemporary classic with Teddy Edwards,
Together Again!
, which runs this one close, but there’s a blitheness and sense of purpose to
Back In Town
that means it wins the day.

BILL EVANS
^&

Born 16 August 1929, Plainfield, New Jersey; died 15 September 1980, New York City

Piano

The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961

Riverside 3RCD 1961–2 3CD

Evans; Scott LaFaro (b); Paul Motian (d). June 1961.

Composer and bassist Gavin Bryars says:
‘There isn’t a single gratuitous or fluffed note in his entire output. He is the most poetic and refined pianist in jazz, who swings prodigiously at the fastest tempo and in the slowest ballad – and no one plays a ballad better. His recordings with LaFaro and Motian represent a form of perfection in the piano trio format.’

There may be a backlash in waiting, as once there was deep scepticism about Evans’s cool, classically tinged approach to jazz, but it is unlikely to appear any time soon. For the moment, he is the most influential figure in piano jazz, his harmonically complex, lyrically intense playing a direct influence on two whole generations of piano-players, his iconic trios the model for slews of similarly configured contemporary groups. His first notable gig was with the Tony Scott group, in 1956, and his most important early liaison was with Miles Davis, with whom he recorded
Kind Of Blue
, even though he had been officially replaced in the Davis group. Thereafter he worked in a trio format for the rest of his life, although there are solo sessions, records with singers and a few with horns or orchestral arrangements. He was prolific in the studio and much taped in concert, and his records were widely disseminated and listened to by musicians, who absorbed his handling of modality and followed him out of the dead-end of bebop changes. Evans’s personal difficulties were many, but may have been exaggerated to buttress the myth of isolated genius. Acute shyness did lead him to the shelter and motley of drugs, but he had wit and warmth, and one hears those qualities throughout his best recordings.

Best of the best is unquestionably the body of work recorded at the Village Vanguard in June 1961. He had been an active musician for a decade, after graduating from Southeastern Louisiana University and undergoing some sort of apprenticeship with Herbie Fields and then Tony Scott. Recordings of Evans as sideman have been reissued, showing him to be a comfortable bopper, though like his future boss Miles Davis, with his own delicate spin on what could be a brusque and even antagonistic form of jazz. When Evans began to record on his own account, with the 1956 record
New Jazz Conceptions
, it would have been hard to foresee the glories to come. By his own account, ‘When I started out, I worked very simply, but I always knew what I was doing’, a very typical Evans statement and a useful corrective to the romantic idea of him as a man out of control, a conduit for music rather than an active participant. There are, indeed, moments when he seems to be playing a state of grace, not least in the Village Vanguard sessions, but such epiphanies were the product of steady study and preparation. It’s worth noting that ‘Waltz For Debby’, his single best-known composition, had been in his book for almost a decade before these definitive performances.

Evans always asked his bassists and drummers to commit to a minimum of three years with the group. Paul Motian had worked with him on the first record, but Evans had trouble finding good bassists. The recruitment of 23-year-old Scott LaFaro precipitated one of the finest piano trios ever documented. The bassist’s melodic sensitivity and insinuating sound flowed between Evans and Motian like water and, while notions of group empathy have sometimes been exaggerated in discussion of this music – still very much directed by Evans himself – the playing of the three men is so sympathetic that it sets a standard which holds to this day. Both
Portrait In Jazz
and
Explorations
, also on OJC, have their small imperfections: there’s an occasional brittleness in the latter, possibly a result of a quarrel between LaFaro and Evans just before the session, and the recording of both does less justice to LaFaro’s tone. Yet the records culled from a day’s work at the Village Vanguard are even finer. Evans’s own playing is elevated by the immediacy of the occasion. His contributions seem all of a piece, lines spreading through and across the melodies and harmonies of the tune, pointing the way towards modality yet retaining the singing, rapturous qualities which the pianist heard in his material. All the Vanguard music is informed by an extra sense of discovery, as if the musicians were suddenly aware of what they were on to and were celebrating the achievement. They didn’t have much time. LaFaro was killed in a car accident ten days later.

We have generally avoided completist sets and compilations in this edition, but there is nothing in this handsome box that one wouldn’t wish to have. The first matinee set of 25 June 1961 begins with LaFaro’s own ‘Gloria’s Step’, briefly and simply introduced, but suddenly transfigured by the interplay between pianist and bassist over a delicate, inch-perfect snare accompaniment. LaFaro also contributes the luminous ‘Jade Visions’. The original LP
Sunday At The Village Vanguard
, issued after the young genius’s death, was so selected as to foreground the most prominent bass solos. Another reason for favouring the complete package is that it restores the democracy of a great group, but also the leadership and guiding spirit of its pianist. Greatest critical attention and respect has been paid to Evans’s successive readings of ‘Waltz For Debby’ during the evening sets, but there are other high-points. The pianist’s re-interpretation of Miles Davis’s ‘Solar’ has scarcely been equalled. What one would not give to have heard the trumpeter record with this trio, as was once mooted. Evans’s versions of ‘My Man’s Gone Now’ and ‘My Foolish Heart’ – the latter exerted a particular influence on Gavin Bryars – are searching and profound, and packed with sly wit.

This is music which continues to provoke marvel and endless study. It is hard to imagine anyone in love with music not responding to it.

& See also
Conversations With Myself
(1963; p. 293)

STAN GETZ
^&

Born 2 February 1927, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 6 June 1991, Malibu, California

Tenor saxophone

Focus

Verve 521419-2

Getz; orchestra led by Eddie Sauter. July–October 1961.

Stan Getz said (1983):
‘I love that band! As it happened, my mother died, so I wasn’t able to record when I was supposed to, except for one song. So I did it later, on headphones, and it worked out OK. More than OK, I think.’

Nobody ever arranged for Getz as well as this, and Sauter’s luminous and shimmering scores continue to bewitch. This isn’t art-jazz scoring: Sauter had little of Gil Evans’s
misterioso
power, and he was shameless about tugging at heartstrings. But within those parameters – and Getz, the most pragmatic of soloists, was only too happy to work within them – he made up the most emotive of frameworks. It doesn’t make much sense as a suite, or a concerto; just as a series of episodes with the tenor gliding over and across them. In ‘Her’, the tune dedicated to Getz’s mother, the soloist describes a pattern which is resolved in the most heartstopping of codas. This was surely Getz’s finest hour. The latest version is in Verve’s Master Edition series, though there’s still a degree of tape hiss.

& See also
The Complete Roost Recordings
(1950–1954; p. 127),
Nobody Else But Me
(1964; p. 304)

RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK
^&

Born Ronald T. Kirk, 7 August 1936, Columbus, Ohio; died 5 December 1977, Bloomington, Indiana

Tenor saxophone, manzello, stritch, flute, assorted instruments

We Free Kings

Mercury 826455

Kirk; Richard Wyands, Hank Jones (p); Art Davis, Wendell Marshall (b); Charli Persip (d). August 1961.

Saxophonist Ken Vandermark says:
‘He found a way to intersect jazz with more populist and experimental forms, often simultaneously.’

Kirk lost his sight as an infant, and learned music at a blind school. He learned to play three saxophones at once, and tinkered with hybrid instruments; he began recording under his own name at 20, and worked with Charles Mingus, but otherwise as a maverick soloist-leader, whose ‘eccentricities’ masked a profound musical learning and a technique that seemed to embrace every form of jazz from Dixieland to free, with few if any stops in between. Kirk’s sheer musicianship remains to be rediscovered, at which point his name might start to be cited among the first rank of jazz saxophonists rather than as a sideshow.

This is the first major Kirk record, and the opening ‘Three For The Festival’, a raucous blues, is already evidence for his greatness. Kirk’s playing is all over the place. He appears out of nowhere and stops just where you least expect him to. On ‘You Did It, You Did It’, he creates rhythmic patterns which defeat even Persip and moves across the chords with a bizarre crabwise motion. ‘My Delight’ suggests that he is listening to John Coltrane’s music. ‘Blues For Alice’ has him nail the Parker line not once, but twice, with the issue of an alternative take, quite different. The title-track is a wacky, but utterly logical version of the Christmas carol. The multi-instrumentalism is at this stage to a large degree subordinate to straightforward blowing, albeit in unfamiliar tonalities and timbres, but what one remembers about each of Kirk’s solos is how logical it sounds and how complete.

& See also
The Inflated Tear
(1968; p. 351);
AL HIBBLER, A Meeting Of The Times
(1966, 1972; p. 394)

LEE KONITZ
^&

Born 12 October 1927, Chicago, Illinois

Alto and soprano saxophones

Motion

Verve V6 8399

Konitz; Sonny Dallas (b); Elvin Jones (d). August 1961.

Lee Konitz said (1989):
‘Elvin Jones came in having worked with Coltrane the night before, in a situation with two tenors and two basses, but we just got right into it. There wasn’t much discussion, just new takes when they were needed.’

One of the great modern jazz records. Its unique chemistry is due in part to the unlikely pairing of the ‘cool’ Konitz with the hyperactive Jones, who was working with Coltrane at the time. The sessions were recorded pretty much straight down and some of the additional material was issued on a Verve triple set some years back; a 1990 reissue increased the track listing of the original LP to eight tunes. Nothing, though, matches the impact of the issued LP, which is now available again in digipack with original liner-notes. The trio starts off with ‘Foolin’ Myself’, and Konitz’s fleet, agile alto sound immediately gels with the surprisingly soft playing of Jones. ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’ is superb. Again, Konitz floats round the melody more than he disappears on the back of the chords. Dallas is firm-footed and precise. ‘I’ll Remember April’ is another of the highlights but anyone who has the three-CD set will know that ‘I Remember You’ caused the trio some grief and had to be retaken. The release take is quite brilliant, flowing, seamless and harmonically subtle. The set ends with ‘All Of Me’, Konitz rippling through the theme and embellishing the structure from beginning to end.