The Penguin Jazz Guide (31 page)

Courtney (Mc)Pyne said, after appearing in Grimes-ish garb:
‘Well, he looks better in a kilt than I did!’

A four-string guitar-player, Grimes was a sensation in the Tatum trio and then elsewhere in New York clubs of the ’40s. Fame with Tatum spurred him into a solo career, first of all with a group featuring Charlie Parker, later with a full-regalia outfit called the Rocking Highlanders which featured another altoist, Red Prysock. This unvarnished compilation brings together all the material he recorded under his own name over the period, including
a date for Blue Note, still very much in its R&B phase. The tracks with Bird are obviously of interest, but ‘Red Cross’ is exceptional and some of the later cuts, including versions of ‘See See Rider’ and the notorious ‘Annie Laurie’, are worth having as well. One of the best of the early vocals is ‘Romance Without Finance’. A novelty act he may have been – certainly no great instrumentalist – but Grimes was part of the same style-switch that yielded up bebop, and it would be misleading to ignore him.

ERROLL GARNER
^&

Born 15 June 1921, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 7 January 1977, Los Angeles, California

Piano

Erroll Garner 1944–1945

Classics 873

Garner; Charlie Shavers (t); Vic Dickenson (tb); Hank D’Amico (cl); Lem Davis (as); Slam Stewart, Eddie Brown (b); Cliff Leeman, Harold ‘Doc’ West (d). December 1944–March 1945.

Pianist Dudley Moore said (1979):
‘He was one of the most important pianists ever, and he’s instantly recognizable with that slow, slow drag in the right hand, while chop-chop-chopping away with the left.’

Erroll Garner was one of a kind. He was as
outré
as the great beboppers, yet bop was alien to him, even though he recorded with Charlie Parker. He swung mightily, yet he stood outside the swing tradition; he played orchestrally, and his style was swooningly romantic, yet he could be as merciless on a tune as Fats Waller. He never read music, and often pianists would be hired to teach him songs, but he could play a piece in any key, and delighted in deceiving his rhythm sections from night to night. His tumbling, percussive, humorous style was entirely his own. Garner’s earliest recordings were done semi-privately, and though issued on Blue Note in the ’50s they’re in often atrocious sound. Most of his style is in place, and one can hear a debt to Tatum. The earlier Classics in this series include what there is of these survivals, and it’s a difficult listen, but
1944–1945
puts together a session which has been a collectors’ piece for many years: a jam with Shavers, Dickenson, D’Amico and Davis which includes extended versions of ‘Gaslight’ and some impromptu blues. Lovely stuff, with the principals all in good fettle, and a very rare glimpse of Garner with horns. A trio date with Brown and West (for Black And White) and a solo session for Signature fill up the disc. Garner gives an impression of being able to play anything you might throw at him, but not caring that much. ‘Effortless’ is overused as an honorific, but it sort of works here, and not always to the benefit of the music.

& See also
Concert By The Sea
(1955; p. 163)

DON BYAS

Born Carlos Wesley Byas, 21 October 1912, Muskogee, Oklahoma; died 24 August 1972, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Tenor saxophone

Don Byas 1944–1945

Classics 882

Byas; Charlie Shavers, Joe Thomas (t); Rudy Williams (as); Johnny Guarnieri, Kenny Watts (p); Clyde Hart (p, cel); John Levy, Slam Stewart, Billy Taylor (b); Cozy Cole, Slick Jones, Jack ‘The Bear’ Parker (d); Big Bill Broonzy (v). July 1944–March 1945.

Saxophonist Peter Brötzmann said (1992):
‘He sounds like the most modern of the swing guys, like Coleman Hawkins in his sound, but his solos are something else: quite strange in some ways, quite weird at times, but very interesting.’

Don Byas dominates the strip of turf between Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, combining the old man’s vibrato and grouchy tone with Bird’s limber solo style and fresh, open diction. Hard these days to recognize just how highly regarded Byas once was, until one actually hears him. Byas was a complex player, whose development of a theme often seemed to step outside the source material altogether, drifting in and out of remote keys, mixing up the rhythm, but always managing to keep in place and never sounding rushed or temporized when he finishes. Byas left the Basie band in 1943 and became one of the unsung heroes of early bebop, matched only by Lucky Thompson, but he moved permanently to Europe in 1946, which may partly be why his reputation is not as high as it should be. Before he left, he made a number of fine recordings and left behind a stone classic in his rapid run-through of the ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes at Town Hall in June 1945 with bassist Slam Stewart, a remarkable performance that so closely prefigures the emergence of bebop it has to be considered an
Ur
-text of the new jazz.

It can be found here and there, but this Classics volume and those that follow in the series do the usual sturdy job of assembling a chronological picture. They reveal Byas as a kind of instant composer, credited with a steady flow of lines – ‘Don’s Idea’, ‘Double Talk’, ‘Free and Easy’ – which work such rapid variations on orthodox changes that the whole harmonic trajectory seems to alter. Byas was always hugely flattered by the microphones of the time. The early material for Savoy captures a polished and vibrant stylist with a coherent solo approach. Shavers is abrupt and pugnacious. The July tracks are better than the later session, largely because they are simpler and concentrate on straight major-key exchanges between the two horns. In January 1945, Byas cut four sides for Jamboree, disappointing because they seem to slip back half a generation to the old jump and swing styles. ‘Jamboree Jump’ is also known as ‘Byas-A-Drink’, a neat feature for saxophone and Joe Thomas’s Eldridge-like trumpet. Later material for Hub is dominated by Broonzy vocals and officially credited to Little Sam And Orchestra. There were other good things through 1945, and the companion volumes are worth sampling, but Europe beckoned and with his passage Byas’s chances of going down as one of the major saxophone voices faded. A pity. He’s a revelation every time one listens to him.

SID CATLETT

Born 17 January 1910, Evansville, Indiana; died 25 March 1951, Chicago, Illinois

Drums

Sid Catlett 1944–1946

Classics 974

Catlett; Charlie Shavers, Joe Guy, Gerald Wilson (t); Barney Bigard, Edmond Hall (cl); Bull Moose Jackson, Willie Smith (as); Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Illinois Jacquet, Frank Socolow, Ben Webster (ts); Art Tatum, Marlowe Morris, Eddie Heywood, Horace Henderson, Pete Johnson (p); Bill Gooden (org); Al Casey, Jimmy Shirley (g); Oscar Pettiford, John Simmons, Gene Ramey (b). January 1944–1946.

Drummer Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath said (1999):
‘I played a drum solo one time and “Sweets” [Harry Edison] said: “You thought that was something! Shit, that was just a bunch of old Sid Catlett riffs.” I don’t think anyone else there knew who he was talking about.’

No one bridges the eras of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker so completely. ‘Big Sid’ collapsed at a concert in Chicago, at the end of the first flowering of bebop. Dead at 41, he left
a comparatively small legacy, but he was a complete master of drums and cymbals whose virtuoso technique was unflashy and seldom drew attention to itself, though he could dominate most group settings. This hotchpotch of small-group dates – for Commodore, Session, Delta, Regis, Capitol, Manor and V-Disc – is fascinating. The extraordinary opening ‘Rose Room’ is virtually a duet with Bigard. Six quarter-tracks with Webster and Morris are similarly electric, and five more with horns include some splendid moments, though indifferently recorded. The next five sessions have less of interest but for its first half the CD is close to indispensable. Sid’s mercurial style, with glistening cymbal work, unexpected rimshot fusillades and detailed snare rhythms, was among the very few swing-based methods that didn’t sound passé in the bop era.

CHARLIE PARKER
^&

Born 29 August 1920, Kansas City, Missouri; died 12 March 1955, New York City

Alto and tenor saxophones

The Complete Savoy And Dial Studio Recordings / Newly Discovered Sides

Savoy 92911-2 8CD / 17188

Parker; Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Howard McGhee (t); J. J. Johnson (tb); Flip Phillips, Lucky Thompson, Wardell Gray, Jack McVea (ts); Tiny Brown (bs); Slim Gaillard (p, g, v); Clyde Hart, Jimmy Bunn, Duke Jordan, Russ Freeman, Erroll Garner, George Handy, John Lewis, Sadik Hakim, Bud Powell, Dodo Marmarosa (p); Red Norvo (vib); Arvin Garrison, Barney Kessel, Tiny Grimes (g); Nelson Boyd, Ray Brown, Red Callender, Arnold Fishkind, Bob Kesterson, Vic McMillan, Jimmy Butts, Tommy Potter, Slam Stewart, Curley Russell (b); Max Roach, Harold ‘Doc’ West, Zutty Singleton, Don Lamond, Specs Powell, Jimmy Pratt, Stan Levey, Roy Porter (d); Earl Coleman (v). September 1944–December 1948.

Trombonist George E. Lewis said (2008):
‘It has become customary to say that Charlie Parker’s solos are “only” collages of found materials, bits and pieces of music from all over, classical music, songs, things off the radio, put together on the spot, but not original to him. The really interesting point, of course, is not that the solos are assembled like that, but where those materials come from and how they came to be in Parker’s possession. That has implications for all of jazz.’

For good or ill, the iconic jazz life. That Parker had genius is beyond doubt, but it was based on long, effortful study; similarly with drugs, which played a part, but are not the only story. Though he had periods of disturbance, his career, which began in local blues groups in Kansas City before he joined Jay McShann’s orchestra, was one of steady and concentrated work and a delivery that only seldom wavered, and only then
in extremis.
His role in the invention of bebop was critical, though he was certainly not the only begetter.

Parker’s innovation – improvising a new melody-line off the top, rather than from the middle, of the informing chord – was a logical extension of everything that had been happening in jazz over the previous decade. However, even though the simultaneous inscription of bebop by different hands – Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian and Thelonious Monk all have their propagandists – suggests that it was an evolutionary inevitability, any artistic innovation requires quite specific and usually conscious interventions. With its emphasis on extreme harmonic virtuosity, bop has become the dominant idiom of modern jazz and Parker’s genetic fingerprint is the clearest.

Even at his most dazzlingly virtuosic, Parker always sounds logical, making light of asymmetrical phrases, idiosyncratically translated bar-lines, surefooted alternation of whole-note passages and flurries of semiquavers, tampering with almost every other para-meter
of the music – dynamic, attack, timbre – with joyous arrogance. Dying at 35, he was spared the indignity of a middle age given over to formulaic repetition. The sides Parker cut on 26 November 1945 were billed by Savoy on the later microgroove release as ‘The greatest recording session made in modern jazz’. There’s some merit in that. The kitchen sink reproduction of fluffs, false starts and breakdowns gives a rather chaotic impression. Miles Davis, who never entirely came to terms with Parker’s harmonic or rhythmic requirements, doesn’t play particularly well (there is even a theory that some of the trumpet choruses – notably one on a third take of ‘Billie’s Bounce’ – were played by Dizzy Gillespie in imitation of Miles’s rather uncertain style), and some of the pianist’s intros and solos are positively bizarre; pianist Argonne Thornton remembers being at the sessions. Despite all that, and Parker’s continuing problems with a recalcitrant reed, the session includes ‘Billie’s Bounce’, ‘Now’s The Time’ and ‘Ko-Ko’. The last of these is perhaps the high-water mark of Parker’s improvisational genius.

Though this is undoubtedly the zenith of Parker’s compositional skill as well, it is noticeable that virtually all of the material on these sessions draws either on a basic 12-bar blues or on the chord sequence of ‘I Got Rhythm’, the
Ur
-text of bebop. ‘Ko-Ko’ is based on the chords of ‘Cherokee’, as is the generic ‘Warming Up A Riff’, which was intended only as a run-through after Parker had carried out running repairs on his squeaking horn. The remainder of Parker’s material was drawn from show tunes; ‘Meandering’, a one-off ballad performance on the November 1945 session, unaccountably elided after superb solos from Parker and Powell, bears some relationship to ‘Embraceable You’. What is striking about Parker’s playing, here and subsequently, is the emphasis on rhythmic invention, often at the expense of harmonic creativity (in that department, as he shows in miniature on ‘Ko-Ko’, Dizzy Gillespie was certainly his superior).

Availability on programmable CD means that listeners who find the staccato progression of incomplete takes disconcerting are able to ignore all but the final, released versions. Unfortunately, though these are usually the best band performances, they do not always reflect Bird’s best solo playing. A good example comes on ‘Now’s The Time’, which might have been an old KC blowing theme or a remembered solo by tenor saxophonist Rocky Boyd. There is no doubt that Parker’s solo on the third take is superior in its slashing self-confidence to that on the fourth, which is slightly duller; Miles Davis plays without conviction on both.

None of the other constituent sessions match up to the erratic brilliance of 26 November 1945. There are nine other dates represented, notably intermittent in quality. The sessions with Slim Gaillard, creator of ‘Vout’, an irritating hipster argot, are pretty corny and timebound; a bare month after ‘Ko-Ko’, Parker seems to have come down to earth. An early session with guitarist Tiny Grimes and an unusual August 1947 date (under Miles Davis’s control) on which Bird played tenor saxophone, excluded from previous Savoy CD reissues, have been restored. Of the remaining dates, that of 8 May 1947, a rather uneasy affair, nevertheless yielded ‘Donna Lee’ and ‘Chasing The Bird’; by contrast, on 21 December 1947, Parker seems utterly confident and lays down the ferocious ‘Bird Gets The Worm’ and ‘Klaunstance’; the sessions of 18 and 24 September 1948 yielded the classic ‘Parker’s Mood’ (original take 3 is suffused with incomparable blues feeling) and ‘Marmaduke’ respectively.