The Penguin Jazz Guide (92 page)

& See also
Voice In The Night
(1998; p. 631)

ALEX WELSH

Born 9 July 1929, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland; died 25 June 1982, London

Cornet

Strike One

Lake LACD 107

Welsh; Roy Williams (tb); John Barnes (as, bs, cl, v); Fred Hunt (p); Jim Douglas (g, bj); Ron Mathewson (b); Lennie Hastings (d). June 1966.

Welsh’s friend Robert Morton said:
‘If you want a perfect example of the “Caledonian anti-szyzygy” it’s got to be Alex. Every note was a lament for joy unclaimed, and a celebration of the discipline of just keeping on.’

Despite the surname, he was a Scot. A fine cornetist, influenced by Wild Bill Davison (though he emphatically denied this). When Welsh died in 1982, Humphrey Lyttelton described the Welsh band’s impact as a combination of ‘romanticism and rage’. A small man with a gammy leg, he played like Tam O’Shanter outrunning Cutty Sark, with a playful fear in his tone and a headlong approach that always seemed to come out just right, if ultimately tailless.

Lake have brought back most of the ’50s recordings, which are often disconcertingly mixed: the
Live At The Royal Festival Hall 1954–1955
sets are crashingly enthusiastic and will rekindle some happy memories, but some of the studio sessions on the likes of
Dixieland To Duke
and
Music From The Mauve Decade
walk an awkward line between crude Dixieland, trad and a more personal, bluesy synthesis. A good best-of from the period would probably be a welcome solution, provided it included ‘New Orleans Masquerade’ and ‘You’ve Been A Good Old Wagon’ by the 1955–6 incarnation of the Dixielanders.

The band changed markedly in approach during the ’60s, a period during which the once teetotal Welsh acquired a famous thirst for vodka (the ‘Lemonade Kid’ no more), moving away from the ragged, Chicagoan ‘Condon style’ towards a more orthodox swing approach. On
Strike One
a long ‘Davenport Blues’ and ‘Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea’ confirm the change and these may be the very tracks that offend Primitive Methodists most, but Welsh’s musicianship was sharpened by the transition and, with fellow Scot Ron Mathewson driving the line, he is in commanding form.

DUKE PEARSON

Born Columbus Calvin Pearson Jr, 12 August 1932, Atlanta, Georgia; died 4 August 1980, Atlanta, Georgia

Piano, celeste

Prairie Dog

Collectables 6755

Pearson; Johnny Coles (t); James Spaulding (as, f); George Coleman (ts); Harold Vick (ss, ts); Gene Bertoncini (g); Bob Cranshaw (b); Mickey Roker (d). 1966.

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard said (1983):
‘Duke was a frustrated horn-player, which is why he wrote such good lines for trumpet: me, Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan – ask any trumpeter who they’d have liked to write for them and it would be Duke.’

Pearson’s stint at Blue Note has meant that his name has been scattered through every edition of our book, without his registering strongly as a leader. Pearson’s natural life was
uncomfortably fated. As a young man he was thwarted in his ambitions to become a trumpeter by dental problems, and his health failed while he was still in his 40s. Named after Ellington and sharing some of the great man’s piano chops and big-band sound, the Atlantan had a stint as MD and producer at Blue Note, but never entirely fulfilled his potential, and succumbed to progressive multiple sclerosis.

Pearson hit his stride by the mid-’60s. Surprisingly, his best record was made for Atlantic, not Blue Note. Perhaps he felt constricted as part of Alfred Lion’s operation.
Prairie Dog
opens with Spaulding’s flute, promising something evanescent and exotic but erupting into a danceable swinger. The title-track has Duke running rings round the horns, lassoing everything into shape. It closes with a glorious reading of ‘Angel Eyes’ which is a model of restraint and sophisticated part-writing. The piano-playing is firm and true, never virtuosic but always thought-provoking, and occasional touches of celeste are judged just right. Along with 1967’s
The Right Touch
, a later octet date for Blue Note, and a rare big-band date for the label from December of the same year, this is Pearson’s most accomplished work and a startling reminder of his great talent.

DUKE ELLINGTON
^&

Born Edward Kennedy Ellington, 29 April 1899, Washington DC; died 24 May 1974, New York City

Piano

The Far East Suite

Bluebird 82876-55614-2

Ellington; Cat Anderson, Mercer Ellington, Herbie Jones, Cootie Williams (t); Lawrence Brown, Chuck Connors, Buster Cooper (tb); Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Jimmy Hamilton, Johnny Hodges, Russell Procope (reeds); John Lamb (b); Rufus Jones (d). June 1966.

Saxophonist John Dankworth said (1989):
‘If you were looking for just one example, for the benefit of someone who had never heard one played, of what a saxophone could do, you wouldn’t go past Johnny Hodges playing “Isfahan”.’

It should really have been
The Near East Suite
. In 1963, the State Department sent the Ellington band on a tour that took in Ceylon, India and Pakistan, most of the Middle East, and Persia. The tour was eventually interrupted by the assassination of JFK, but Duke and co-writer Strayhorn slowly absorbed the sights and tone-colours of those weeks, and nearly three years later went into the studio to record the suite. Typical of Ellington’s interpretation of the genre, it is really little more than a well-balanced programme of individual songs but with a greater than usual degree of overall coherence, summed up at the end by ‘Amad’. ‘The Tourist Point Of View’ serves as an overture and a reminder of the Duke’s characteristic sound, and it introduces two of the most important solo voices, Anderson and Gonsalves. ‘Bluebird Of Delhi’ relates to a mynah that mocked Billy Strayhorn with a beautiful song (played by Jimmy Hamilton) and then brought him down with the resounding raspberry one hears at the end of the piece.

What follows is arguably the most beautiful single item in Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s entire output. Hodges’ solo on ‘Isfahan’ is like attar of roses, once smelt, impossible to forget. Critical attention has almost always focused on Hodges, but it’s important to be aware of the role of the backing arrangements, a line for the saxophones that seems as monumental as the place it celebrates. The other unquestionable masterpiece of the set is ‘Mount Harissa’, a soft, almost spiritual opening from Ellington, building up into a sinuous Gonsalves solo over a compulsive drum-and-cymbal pattern and huge orchestral interjections. An evocation of Agra, location of the Taj Mahal, is quite properly assigned to Harry Carney, in superb voice.

Ellington’s ability to communicate points of contact and conflict between cultures,
assimilating the blues to Eastern modes in tracks like ‘Blue Pepper (Far East Of The Blues)’, never sounds unduly self-conscious. Ellington lived on for eight years, still creating, still the dominant presence in jazz, but with diminishing powers. This was his great swan song.

& See also
Duke Ellington 1927–1929
(1927–1929; p. 28),
Duke Ellington 1937–1938
(1937–1938; p. 64),
Never No Lament
(1940–1942; p. 81),
The Duke At Fargo
(1940; p. 81),
Black, Brown And Beige
(1944–1946; p. 91),
Ellington At Newport
(1956; p. 189)

ROSCOE MITCHELL
^&

Born 3 August 1940, Chicago, Illinois

Reeds

Sound

Delmark DE 408

Mitchell; Lester Bowie (t, flhn, hca); Lester Lashley (tb, clo); Maurice McIntyre (ts); Malachi Favors (b); Alvin Fielder (d). June 1966.

Trombonist and AACM historian George E. Lewis says:
‘The asymmetrical compositional forms, the frequent interjections and intercutting of unusual material, the sudden and drastic shifts in texture and colour, all tended to confound expectation, placing tremendous pressure on practices of listening that demand comfortable predictability even in supposedly radical music-making.’

Roscoe Mitchell is one of the Titans of modern jazz music, but he remains a slightly elusive figure. This is partly because he has passed a large proportion of his career wearing the mask of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, but also because his work is of a surpassing thoughtfulness and almost forensic precision: one does not go to Mitchell for long, ‘expressive’ solos built on familiar themes. As the title of this important early record suggests, pure sound and the exact placement of tones are his main concerns.

The Art Ensemble began life as Mitchell’s group and was only renamed and repositioned as a total-performance group after the members left the US for France. Mitchell’s own recording career both predated that and continued in parallel, but as with fellow saxophonist Joseph Jarman and (until a more popular strain foreground his work) trumpeter Lester Bowie, the solo discs have never been as widely known.

What a vital, electrifying document
Sound
remains! It’s perhaps the first fully documented product of AACM thinking, delivering a rich multi-instrumentalism and an approach that eschews the familiar round of themes-and-solos in favour of a genuinely collective creative entity in which ‘band’ and ‘music’ are only pointlessly distinguished. Restored to an excellent CD edition (original Delmark vinyl was seldom very clean), with an alternative version of ‘Ornette’ and the title-track, originally a composite of two versions, heard as two separate takes, there is a lot more music and nothing to diminish the power of the occasion. The two key pieces, ‘Sound’ and ‘The Little Suite’, are a message of freedom quite different from that being communicated by the contemporaneous recordings of Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann. Mitchell organizes his group around the notion of sounds entering into – and interrelating with – silence. So there are tiny gestures and startling emptinesses alongside long lines and soliloquies. Bowie, Lashley and McIntyre work in overtones and distortions more than they do in ‘true’ tones, and in ‘The Little Suite’ the sound of toys and bells and other found instruments carries as much sensitivity as the horns do elsewhere. Both a manifesto and an unrepeatable event,
Sound
remains a marvel.

& See also
Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3
(2004; p. 697);
ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO, A Jackson In Your House / Message To Our Folks
(1969; p. 369)

STANLEY TURRENTINE

Born 5 April 1934, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 12 September 2000, New York City

Tenor saxophone

The Spoiler

Blue Note 74224

Turrentine; Blue Mitchell (t); Julian Priester (tb); James Spaulding (as, f); Pepper Adams (bs); McCoy Tyner (p); Bob Cranshaw (b); Mickey Roker (d). September 1966.

Stanley Turrentine said (1990):
‘You have to be an actor. Just playing a song is only the start of it. You could train a machine to do that. It only starts being jazz when you put your life experience through the horn.’

Father Thomas played with the Savoy Sultans, and brother Tommy was a hard-bop trumpeter. ‘Mr T’ worked in R&B bands in the ’50s before joining Max Roach and then cutting albums for Blue Note from 1960, and with Shirley Scott for Prestige. He had crossover success in the ’70s but moved back to more straight-ahead playing and latterly divided his time between both situations. Turrentine’s bluesy soul-jazz enjoyed considerable commercial success in the ’60s and after. His forte was the mid-tempo blues, often in minor keys, played with a vibrato as broad as his grin. A long sequence of Blue Note albums started as far back as 1960 (
Look Out!
) and ended in 1969 with
Ain’t No Way
, but their availability seems to confound expectation, and Stan the Man’s records seem to come and go from that catalogue with bemusing rapidity.

When
The Spoiler
reappeared it immediately went back to the top of the pile. Duke Pearson’s arrangements are spot on, and his opening chart on ‘The Magilla’ is rather special. The all-star band could be a bunch of by-the-hour pros for all the attention they get. It’s all about Stanley, who’s in expansive form. He breezes through ‘When The Sun Comes Out’ as if it just has. ‘La Fiesta’ is a different tune to the Chick Corea number, and it takes a solid, bouncing beat very well. ‘Sunny’, ‘Maybe September’ (from
The Oscar
) and ‘You’re Gonna Hear From Me’ are each like a mini-movie, packed with action and intrigue. The ensemble cast could perhaps be more generously provided for, but as a spotlight on one of the great tenors of the modern era it’s impossible to beat.

BUDDY RICH

Born Bernard Rich, 30 November 1917, Brooklyn, New York; died 2 April 1987, Los Angeles, California

Drums, voice

Swingin’ New Big Band

Pacific Jazz 835232-2

Rich; Bobby Shew, John Sottile, Yoshito Murakami, Walter Battagello (t); Jim Trimble, John Boice (tb); Dennis Good, Mike Waverley (btb); Gene Quill (as, cl); Pete Yellin (as, f); Jay Corre, Marty Flax (ts, cl, f); Steve Perlow (bs, bcl); John Bunch (p); Barry Zweig (g); Carson Smith (b). September–October 1966.