The Penguin Jazz Guide (80 page)

WALT DICKERSON

Born 1931, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 15 May 2008, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Vibraphone

To My Queen

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1880

Dickerson; Andrew Hill (p); George Tucker (b); Andrew Cyrille (d). September 1962.

Walt Dickerson said (1995):
‘To express her, my queen, and her many, many sides, I could only go through the dimension of music: her mind, her beauty, her ineffable joy and sadness. When I return to that music, I reassert our marriage.’

A deep thinker who managed to skirt the inherent prettiness of the vibes, Dickerson has never enjoyed the kind of critical praise heaped on Bobby Hutcherson’s head. Dickerson can’t claim quite the same level of innovation on the instrument, but his spare, rapt style, with something of Milt Jackson’s piano-based approach, is utterly distinctive and in ‘To My Queen’, he has one of the most beautiful of modern jazz compositions.

Written for his wife Elizabeth, it has a palpable gentleness and grace, and the group plays with exquisite control, just a few swelling rolls from Cyrille here and there, as if to express the tides of passing time. Tucker is to some extent the heart of it all, a steady,
unflustered beat. He comes back again strongly on side two of the original LP with a wonderful vibes/bass duet on ‘God Bless The Child’. There’s also a more conventionally jazzier interpretation of ‘How Deep Is The Ocean?’, which sparks one of Dickerson’s best extended statements, wrapping each fresh new idea round the core of the song. It is a brief record, not much more than half an hour in length, but we wouldn’t change a note and even a welcome extra track or two might disturb its balance.

SHEILA JORDAN

Born Sheila Jeanette Dawson, 8 November 1928, Detroit, Michigan

Voice

Portrait Of Sheila

Blue Note 789902-2

Jordan; Barry Galbraith (g); Steve Swallow (b); Denzil Best (d). September & October 1962.

Sheila Jordan says:
‘It was a great honour to record for the original Blue Note owners. George Russell had paid to have a demo tape made and Blue Note picked it up. Alfred [Lion]’s lovely wife Ruth also recommended me to Alfred. So between them I got my first record date on a respected label, and only the first or second singer they had ever recorded. Alfred and Francis [Wolff] believed in me, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.’

Jordan was turned on to modern jazz by hearing Charlie Parker – a moment she still recounts with great feeling – and began singing vocalese to Bird solos. She studied with Lennie Tristano and was married to Duke Jordan for a decade. In recent years, she has become, in no way by default, the senior female jazz singer, with a range embracing scat, ballads and art song. Arguably the Muse albums of the ’80s mark the high-point of her craft but there’s something wonderfully fresh and alert about
Portrait Of Sheila
, a quality heard in the strange and beautiful version of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ she made for George Russell.

She shows much of Duke Jordan’s concentration on the melodic progress of a song. Like the truly great instrumentalists, she is content to explore the potential of the middle register, where words are more likely to remain intact, rather than over-reach her range. At the end of phrases, she deploys a superbly controlled vibrato. On
Portrait
, she ranges between the rapid ‘Let’s Face The Music And Dance’, which anticipates the surrealism of her contributions to Roswell Rudd’s remarkable
Flexible Flyer
, and the fragile beauty of ‘I’m A Fool To Want You’ and ‘When The World Was Young’, with its extraordinary, ambiguous ending. Bobby Timmons’s ‘Dat Dere’ is given just to voice and bass (and Swallow is superb), and ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ to voice and guitar, while ‘Hum Drum Blues’ and ‘Baltimore Oriole’ are set against rhythm only, as if she were a horn.

KENNY BURRELL

Born 31 July 1931, Detroit, Michigan

Guitar

Bluesy Burrell

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 926

Burrell; Leo Wright (as); Coleman Hawkins (ts); Tommy Flanagan, Gildo Mahones (p); Major Holley, George Tucker (b); Eddie Locke, Jimmie Smith (d); Ray Barretto (perc). September 1962–August 1963.

Kenny Burrell said (1988):
‘I was playing a lot of pop sessions at that time, a
lot
of sessions. It was too artificial for me. I’d done those Prestige records, which were basically jam sessions, and recorded for Alfred Lion at Blue Note, where everything was rehearsed carefully. That was what I liked: something in the middle, professional but not too contrived. Jazz, basically.’

An enduring light in modern jazz, Burrell has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of licks and a tone as lulling as Joe Pass’s, though without Joe’s rococo extravagances. The career is very much of a piece, the early dates as securely formed as the later ones, and he seems to fit seamlessly into any context. In the ’50s he was popular on blowing dates and the early work for Prestige is mostly in that mould. He’s apt to be cast by modern jazz fans as a spear-carrier in John Coltrane’s restless drama, fronting
The Cats
, which some Trane disciples see as the saxophonist’s first glimmer of greatness, but it was in the company of another, perhaps greater still horn eminence that Burrell made his best record.

Inevitably, the tracks on
Bluesy Burrell
with Hawkins have an imperious quality that nothing else on the set can quite match. But, working with his regular group of Flanagan, Holley and Locke (who sound almost as urbanely professional as a firm of lawyers), Burrell himself is at his most seductive on ‘I Thought About You’ and his most suavely blue on ‘Montono Blues’. Playing with a very light touch and on some tracks with a nylon-strung guitar for extra delicacy of sound, he has to be recorded well, and there are no problems with that. The record was originally put out on Moodsville, a Prestige imprint that ostensibly traded in mood music; rarely of this quality, though. The record kicks off with ‘Tres Palabras’, a classic performance, given extra weight by Flanagan’s economical solo, though it’s the great tenorman who carries all before him. There’s an extra track, nominally led by Gilda Mahones, which makes up the weight and offers a nice glimpse of the sturdy Leo Wright, sounding like no one but himself. It’s maybe Burrell’s fate to be remembered for all the people he worked with, but it’s fair to say that he is still in the game, still not shouting from stage centre but always playing with impeccable grace and always for the group. There are less worthy avocations than that.

CECIL TAYLOR
^&

Born 15 March 1929 (some sources state 25 March and 1930), Long Island, New York

Piano, voice

Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come

Revenant 202 2CD

Taylor; Jimmy Lyons (as); Sunny Murray (d). November 1962.

Cecil Taylor said (1983):
‘It was singers, Ella Fitzgerald first, then Billie Holiday, who moved me first. When Billie sang, her body was always inside the rhythm of the song, the Nile queen. Rhythm starts in the body and the space it inhabits, so yes, the piano is a part of me, and the space around it, too.’

It took a long time for these recordings to appear on CD, and many newcomers to the music may wonder why they caused such fascination. The drawbacks are numerous: the original recording was never very effective; Taylor seems to be playing one of the poorest pianos Copenhagen had to offer; Murray’s drums sound thin and rattly a lot of the time. Nevertheless, these sessions from the Café Montmartre should be accounted among the greatest live recordings in jazz. Taylor is still working his way out of jazz tradition and, with Murray at his heels, the playing has an irresistible momentum that creates its own kind of rocking swing, the pulse indefinable but palpable, the rhythm moving in waves from the drummer’s kit. Lyons shapes his bebopper’s vocabulary into gritty flurries of notes, a man caught in a squall and fighting his way through it and over it. He would become Taylor’s most dedicated interpretative colleague, but here he is sharing in the discovery of a fierce new world. Melody has a part to play: the two versions of ‘Lena’ measure out a beleaguered lyricism, for instance. Group interaction is a matter, sometimes, of clinging tight and hanging on, but
this was a trio that had already done a lot of work together, and in the multiple layers of the monumental ‘D Trad, That’s What’ and ‘Call’ the musicians seem to touch on an inner calm to go with the outward intensity. The Revenant release runs to two discs and includes some previously unheard extra material (admittedly in even more terrible sound!).

& See also
Jazz Advance
(1956; p. 191),
Conquistador!
(1966; p. 339),
Celebrated Blazons
(1990; p. 541)

OSCAR PETERSON
^&

Born 15 August 1925, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; died 23 December 2007, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

Piano, organ, other keyboards

Night Train

Verve 521440-2

Peterson; Ray Brown (b); Ed Thigpen (d). December 1962.

Norman Granz said (1982):
‘Oscar’s father was a big influence on him, as a man if not musically, and I think that record has a special place in his heart. He sat for a long time staring at the cover, quite wistfully, when he first saw it.’

After 30 years,
Night Train
is well established as a hardy perennial and is certainly Peterson’s best-known record. Dedicated to his father, who was a sleeping-car attendant on Canadian Pacific Railways, it isn’t the dark and moody suite of nocturnal blues many listeners expect but a lively and varied programme of material covering ‘C-Jam Blues’, ‘Georgia On My Mind’, ‘Bags’ Groove’, ‘Honey Dripper’, ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’, ‘Band Call’, ‘Hymn To Freedom’ and a couple of others. Though by no means a ‘concept album’, it’s one of the best-constructed long-players of the period and its durability is testimony to that as much as to the quality of Peterson’s playing, which is tight and uncharacteristically emotional. The beautifully remastered reissue has six extra tracks, including a fascinating rehearsal take of ‘Moten Swing’ and an alternative of ‘Night Train’, which is called ‘Happy Go Lucky Local’.

& See also
At The Stratford Shakespearean Festival
(1956; p. 193),
My Favorite Instrument
(1968; p. 351),
The Legendary Live At The Blue Note
(1990; p. 539)

MONGO SANTAMARIA

Born Ramón Santamaria, 7 April 1922, Havana, Cuba; died 1 February 2003, Miami, Florida

Percussion

Watermelon Man

Milestone MCD 47075

Santamaria; Marty Sheller (t); Mauricio Smith (f); Bobby Capers, Pat Patrick (f, sax); Jose Chombo Silva (ts); Rodgers Grand (p); Felix Pupi Legarreta (vn); Victor Venegas (b); Frank Hernandez, Ray Lucas (d); Willie Bobo, Joseph Gorgas, Kako (perc); Rudy Calzado, La Lupe, Osvaldo ‘Chihuahua’ Martinez (v). December 1962, September 1963.

Mongo Santamaria said (1982):
‘There was jazz in Cuba, of course, always a jazz band at the Tropicana Club in Havana, but when I went to New York in 1950, there was a lot of Cuban music there already, and Dizzy Gillespie, he was in the middle, with “Tin Tin Deo”, “Manteca”, “Cubana Be [Cubana] Bop”, so I felt that I came to the right place.’

Born in a poor quarter of Havana, Santamaria moved to the USA in 1950, originally to work with Cal Tjader, and became a hugely influential force in hybridizing the rhythms of Latin American music with jazz. In his own groups he adapted the
charanga
line-up to accommodate saxophones and brasses. His composition ‘Afro Blue’, still occasionally credited in error to John Coltrane, is a modern classic.

By the first years of the ’60s, Santamaria was working in what was identifiably a jazz idiom, with strong Latin inflexions, rather than the other way round. Herbie Hancock’s ‘Watermelon Man’, played very much in the spirit of the original but rhythmically much looser and more elaborate, delivered the percussionist his first major hit. From this point on, his reputation was firmly established. The horn voicings are very jazz-orientated and the track lengths were carefully tailored to radio and jukebox requirements. It would be good to hear longer versions of almost all of these tunes, not least the Cannonball Adderley–Joe Zawinul collaboration ‘Cut That Cane’. The reissue includes six previously unissued tracks from a live Californian set recorded in 1962. These don’t add much to a record that is already classic Santamaria.

CHARLES MINGUS
^&

Born 22 April 1922, Nogales, Arizona; died 5 January 1979, Cuernavaca, Mexico

Double bass, piano

The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

Impulse! 051174-2

Mingus; Rolf Ericson, Richard Williams (t); Quentin Jackson, Don Butterfield (tba); Jerome Richardson (as, bs, f); Booker Ervin (ts); Dick Hafer (ts, f); Charlie Mariano (as); Jaki Byard (p); Dannie Richmond (d). January 1963.