Posted in Jazz on Sep 27th, 2009 No Comments »
Wednesday evenings see me down the British Legion Club in Ilford for a jazz workshop with several other old fogies, all pretending we can play. Like most jazz players we are a pretty ill-disciplined bunch. It can take an age to settle on what number to play, whose choice it is and the order of solos. When frustration starts to set in with me (my tolerance level is lower than the others) I shout for this number - ‘I Can’t Get Started’ - in the hope that the others will get the irony and stir into action. Doesn’t always work.
We play in a vacant room at the back of the club, out of harm’s way. But a few Legion regulars come in and bring their drinks with them. Not so much, I think, for the music, but to witness the amusing real life spectacle of us getting on each other’s nerves.
Anyway, here’s the best version, by Bunny Berigan. He was a beautiful trumpet player. His heyday was in the 1930s - but his day didn’t last long. He was dead at 34. He was almost the equal of Armstrong in tone and invention - more tender too. He also could sing, which he does here, in an engaging offhand manner. When he plays the melody again at the end, in the higher register, it is spine tingling. Recorded in April 1936.
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Posted in Jazz, Popular Song on Jul 13th, 2009 No Comments »
I posted earlier Frank Sinatra’s recording of this great popular song, by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting. Sinatra’s version was recorded in 1956 for his classic ‘Songs for Swinging Lovers’. As I have said elsewhere, the song fits him like a glove. He presents the song with a suave mastery in a voice of cool velvet. Cool too in the deft, offhand manner he throws off the lyrics. But I have my reservations about Sinatra’s rendition, not for any lack of musicality on his part, but because he fails to do justice to the sentiments behind the words. The words are subservient to his masterly vocalisation. The words express love, but love doesn’t inhabit Sinatra’s calm command.
Here is another version, by Billie Holiday, recorded two years earlier. She cannot match Sinatra’s vocal command. Her voice is shot, its range restricted, her breath control poor, a voice, a rasp almost, at the end of its tether. She never had a shred of Sinatra’s discipline. But she sings it as if she means it, as if speaking directly to her lover, telling him what she feels about him, offering her feelings, how much he means to her. There are no false accents, as there are in Sinatra’s, done solely for musical effect. She pays the words respect and attention. She sings the words as she might speak them - and it works. It is a human confession of love.
Words matter.
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Posted in Jazz on May 2nd, 2009 No Comments »
This is a taste of one of Humphrey Lyttelton’s classic records, ‘Humph at the Conway’, recorded live at London’s Conway Hall on 2 September 1954. The band was in transition at the time. It was still fundamentally a traditional band but force of circumstances changed its line up. In place of the trombone, Bruce Turner came in on alto sax – to the fury of die-hard traditionalists who at a concert in Birmingham unfurled a banner “Go Home, Dirty Bopper”. In addition to Turner and Humph on trumpet, is Wally Fawkes on clarinet.
Good as Humph and Wally are, Bruce Turner is something else. Throughout his alto playing is magnificent – searching, allusive, firm and direct, by turns. The rhythm section chugs along as best it can.
Humph introduces this tune, written by Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington’s great alto player.
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Posted in Jazz on Mar 7th, 2009 No Comments »
Jelly Roll Morton and his Orchestra recorded ‘Deep Creek’ in New York on 6 December 1928. It is a slow twelve bar blues. It is simple, so artless that it could only have been created by a most artful musician. Such was Jelly Roll Morton. For some he belongs to the Old Testament period, before Charlie Parker, and is consequently hardly worth our notice. If he is, it is with an air of smug condescension for his naivety. But ‘Deep Creek’ is is not naive. It is balanced and composed, careful and subtle, if you listen for it. Some of the players may not be quite up to Jelly Roll’s demands, but we can look through them to the conception beyond.
The opening is a seven note downward phrase played by the whole band. The trumpet enters with the theme, Jelly Roll’s salon piano behind, brass bass on long, low notes. Three full piano chords fortissimo introduce a trombone solo. Trombone and trumpet are a bit ill at ease, not quite composed.
Things get into the groove with the entry of the soprano sax, a busy confident solo with the band playing chord notes behind, growing louder as the solo progresses, the brass bass farting like a polite elephant all the while.
Jelly Roll’s solo is composure personified, assured, dignified and gentle, as if he is playing just for himself. Its elegance takes us back to a polite French and Spanish Creole society at the turn of the century, the society Jelly Roll long dreamed of being a part of. And he is no crude blues player. His playing is distant, nostalgic and dreamy. Towards the close of his solo he turns upwards full chords in double time then grace notes his way back down.
Russell Procope’s clarinet enters with a six note blues bent phrase that he repeats twice, building up the tension with the band behind him till he signs off high up in the air. The whole band comes in with the last chorus on a four note riff, soprano sax weaving away up in front.
Last word is Jelly Roll’s – a single faint chord high up, like a ghost come back to haunt us from over eighty years ago.
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Posted in Jazz on Feb 14th, 2009 No Comments »
Recorded 50 years ago this week by a small band of Duke Ellington on piano, Johnny Hodges on alto sax, Harry Edison on trumpet, Les Spann guitar, Al Hall bass, Jo Jones on drums.
In an appreciation I wrote here, I summed it up as ‘excellent trumpet from Edison, good aggressive alto from Hodges, eccentric, hamfisted but engaging piano from the Duke, superb drumming from Jones.’ True, but it hardly catches the spirit of this classic performance, by musicians at the top of their game, playing with all the naturalness of players that have the idiom in their bones and nothing to prove to anyone.
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Posted in Jazz on Jan 11th, 2009 1 Comment »
A tune composed by Bix Beiderbecke and recorded by him, with his Rhythm Jugglers, in 1926 as a jaunty, medium tempo number originally in 3 sections. The first section, a verse, is a preliminary to the second, a 16 bar variation followed by a reprise of the verse theme. The third section is the chorus, and the most distinctive – a bitter sweet melody starting with two four note rising arpeggios, then descending to “blue” Aflat and a trill, followed by a repeat, a variation and a reprise. Bix’s recording, despite his tender cornet, seems to our ears stiff and inflexible - and archaic. Since then there have been many recordings of his tune.
At a memorial concert for Louis Armstrong at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 28 November 1971, Davenport Blues was played as a duet by Alex Welsh on cornet and Fred Hunt on piano. It is played slow. They omit the first two sections and focus on the third section, the chorus, the most memorable melody. I don’t want to repeat here what I have said elsewhere on this performance, other than to reinforce the opinion I expressed there that this version, by Welsh and Hunt, is the finest ever recorded.
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Posted in Jazz, Popular Song on Jan 4th, 2009 No Comments »
Ask any jazz buff who was the greatest black female vocalist of the 1920s and he will unhesitatingly say Bessie Smith. And listening to that majestic voice, and its raw power, over the three minutes of any one of her 78 rpm recordings, it’s hard not to agree. But after more than three or four of her records you may, as I do, find her unrelenting and unsubtle. The ear begins to tire. It’s hard to imagine Bessie Smith smiling.
I could listen to her contemporary, Ethel Waters, all day. Ethel sang in the same vaudeville theatres as Bessie Smith. But her voice was flexible and lighter. Her range was much wider. She could do the low down, dirty blues that Bessie Smith did - her ‘My Handy Man’ is full of smutty allusion and double entendres - but she could also do the sophisticated show tunes of Irving Berlin, Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen and Cole Porter. And, like Ella Fitzgerald after her, there was always a smile in her voice.
Here she is, at her best, in 1929 singing ‘Am I Blue?’, with Mannie Klein on trumpet and the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy, on trombone and clarinet respectively.
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Posted in Jazz on Nov 6th, 2008 No Comments »
In December 1956, following his tour of Europe, Louis Armstrong entered the recording studios and over a period of two months re-recorded (or rather re-created) some forty or so classics from throughout his career - from his days in Chicago with King Oliver in the early 20s, through his classic Hot Five period and into the 1930s when he reached the peak of his early fame. Now, though, he was a young man no longer; he was in his mid fifties. For some reason, this exercise of re-creating his early hits seems to have inspired him - to the extent that some of his re-creations equal, and even better, their originals. When these recordings came out as a boxed set of four LPs as his ‘Musical Autobiography’, they were hailed as classics of their kind - a new peak, in his long career. He introduced each track with a spoken reminiscence. For this track, That’s My Home, he pays touching tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton who played it for him as his departing train pulled out of the station, on his way home to America.
Louis wasn’t the man he was in his youth. His trumpet had no longer the breathtaking technique of thirty years earlier. Yet it has something else - a majesty and poise that only maturity brings. And that trumpet tone - the sound of a golden sunset.
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Posted in Jazz on Aug 29th, 2008 2 Comments »
One of my first posts on jazz here was about this classic recording of mainstream jazz. It was recorded in December 1953 as a jam session by a band led by trumpeter Buck Clayton. The other members of the band were trumpeter Joe Newman, trombonists Urbie Green and Henderson Chambers, Charlie Fowlkes on baritone sax. The rhythm section was Count Basie’s – without Count Basie – Freddie Green on guitar, Walter Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums. ‘Sir’ Charles Thompson was on piano and he composed the piece. You have to bear in mind what was happening in modern jazz at the time. That febrile, nervy and essentially neurotic music called bebop had swept the classic and swing jazz of Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Lester Young into the dustbin of history. That was the intention. Well, it hadn’t - any more than Wagner swept Mozart into oblivion. Classical values endure. And here it is - composed, relaxed, comfortable and at ease with itself. Not all art is revolutionary - and the best often isn’t.
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Posted in Jazz on Aug 25th, 2008 No Comments »
This is one of those odd jazz encounters between two men whom you wouldn’t ever expect to share the same stage - Ian Wheeler, traditional jazz clarinettist, and Joe Harriott, avant-garde alto sax player, England’s answer to Ornette Coleman. They are accompanied by a rhythm section of banjo, bass and drums. To try and get a sense of its oddity, imagine John Coltrane playing with Eddie Condon’s Dixieland Band or the Firehouse Five plus Two. But it works and it’s’wonderful. Listen to them chase each other round and round this Gershwin tune, Wheeler the more outgoing, Harriot more introspective. I wrote my original appreciation of this 1961 concert recording here.
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