The Penguin Jazz Guide (38 page)

Born 26 May 1926, Alton, Illinois; died 28 September 1991, Santa Monica, California

Trumpet, flugelhorn, organ

The Complete Birth Of The Cool

Blue Note 94550

Davis; Kai Winding, J. J. Johnson, Mike Zwerin (tb); Junior Collins, Gunther Schuller, Sandy Siegelstein (frhn); John Barber (tba); Lee Konitz, Sahib Shihab (as); Benjamin Lundy (ts); Gerry Mulligan, Cecil Payne (bs); Al Haig, John Lewis, Tadd Dameron (p); John Collins (g); Nelson Boyd, Al McKibbon, Joe Shulman (b); Kenny Clarke, Max Roach (d); Carlos Vidal (perc); Kenny Hagood (v). September 1948–March 1950.

Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan said (1992):
‘There’s a little revisionism called for here. Miles booked the studio and called up the musicians, but he can’t really claim responsibility for the music. Does it leave a bad taste? Perhaps a little, but I don’t blame him. A few others might have spoken up before now.’

The history of jazz could just about be told in the life-stories and work of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. In some regards, Miles is the most complex and problematic of the four: attracting adulation and disdain in equal measure; endlessly changing yet never sounding like anyone other than himself; endlessly experimenting yet innately hostile to the self-conscious experimentalism of the avant-garde; an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum, expressed in music of dark anger, joyous abandon and fragile purity. Even after he had scoured his speaking voice down to its famous husky growl, his trumpet-playing was pristine.

Miles was not a virtuoso trumpeter. Even so, early bebop sets suggest that he knew his way round the complex harmonics and rapid metres of the time and could hold his own in demanding company. Definitive’s reattribution of this early material to Miles, on the
Complete Savoy And Dial Studio Recordings
, might seem sharp practice, but some of the dates were nominally his.

The same applies, in trumps, to
The Birth Of The Cool
, a collaborative project which has always been treated as a Miles Davis record, to the eventual irritation of some of the other participants. After Miles’s death, Gerry Mulligan went on record, without rancour but with unmistakable emphasis, to claim at least joint authorship of these astonishing performances. Whoever was the main creative force, Miles was the enabler, bringing together like-minded players in New York City, and, though the results (recorded at three sessions over the span of a year) were a commercial failure, these pioneering efforts by arrangers Mulligan, Gil Evans and John Carisi are allusive, magical scores that channelled the irresistible energy of bebop into surprising textures and piquant settings for improvisation.

Davis and Konitz play as if in sight of some new musical world. One can almost share in their delight and surprise as unexpected harmonic fragrances waft off the landscape in front of them. Airshot material by a different line-up has been available as
The Real Birth Of The Cool
on Bandstand. This was taped before the now classic studio sessions and shows the same music – ‘Jeru’, ‘Budo’, ‘Godchild’ – in evolution rather than finished and definitive. Nine of the same tracks appear on
Cool Boppin’
, which is valuable for some great early solos by the leader. The sound, recorded at the Royal Roost club, is no better than average, but there is sufficient of interest in the performances to make it a worthwhile buy, and there is some fine material under Tadd Dameron’s leadership on the same disc, including some glorious moments when Davis lifts Dameron’s wonky lyricism to new heights. The
Complete
brings together all the available material from this historic experiment, beautifully remastered and nicely packaged.

& See also
Miles Ahead
(1957; p. 208),
Kind Of Blue
(1959; p. 232),
The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel
(1965; p. 331),
In A Silent Way
(1969; p. 361),
Agharta
(1975; p. 420)

LU WATTERS

Born 19 December 1911, Santa Cruz, California; died 5 November 1989, Santa Rosa, California

Trumpet

Doing The Hambone At Kelly’s: Volumes 1 & 2

Jasmine JASMCD 2571 / 2590

Watters; Yerba Buena Jazz Band: Don Noakes, Warren Smith (tb); Wally Rose (p); Pat Patton (bj); Clancy Hayes (bj, v); Dick Lammi (tba); Bill Dart (d, wbd); Clancy Hayes’s Washboard Five (on Volume 2 only). December 1949–June 1950.

Actor/director and jazz fanatic Clint Eastwood said (1995):
‘My jazz education was getting into Hambone Kelly’s – lying about my age, of course – and listening to Lu Watters doing that revival stuff. It was huge at that time in North California.’

Lucious Watters was a true believer and his West Coast revivalists (Yerba Buena was the old Spanish name for San Francisco) purveyed an enthusiastic brand of Dixieland that achieved a remarkable level of authenticity as well as an enthusiastic following. Watters retired from music to work as a geologist and subsequently as a chef, but for a time he was the closest thing most Californians would have heard to a genuine New Orleans jazz group, and his historical importance outweighs the actual musical quality of these sides. A generous introduction to Yerba Buena (and to Hayes’s spin-off Washboard Five).

THE ’50s:
1951–1955

The ’40s were a Janus-faced decade, looking both back and forwards stylistically. With the coming of bebop, and then with the sophistication of the cool school, jazz laid claim to the status of an art form, instead of merely that of a vernacular entertainment. The intelligentsia embraced bop, and erected around it an existentialist mythology that established the image of the jazz musician as a tortured individual shaping a new kind of identity in his solos. For the first time, jazz musicians and the jazz public were asked to consider the history of the music so far. The great revival brought to light a generation of New Orleans and other players who had not previously been documented, and while revivalism made exaggerated and sometimes absurd claims to authenticity and created a certain rift in the jazz audience between traditionalists and modernists, it also kept alive the collective values of early jazz, with its emphasis on ensemble playing rather than solos. It was clear, though, that the future belonged to bop and its more straightforward descendant ‘hard bop’, which straightened out and simplified the rhythm and put ever greater emphasis on a theme-and-solos approach.

The geographical diffusion of jazz is a complex matter, but by the turn of the ’50s Chicago and particularly New York were established as the main centres of jazz activity. However, the war years and the early years of the new decade saw a rapid flowering of jazz in California. It already had deep roots there, but with the establishment of Lester Koenig’s Contemporary and Richard Bock’s Pacific labels, both in Los Angeles, in 1951 and 1952 respectively, there was at least some basis for talking about ‘West Coast jazz’ and for the elaboration of a mostly spurious rivalry – which often had more to do with styling and competition for media space than with music – between the two coasts.

These paired rivalries, if such they were, often extended no further than the pages of specialist music magazines, of which there were a growing number. The most influential was perhaps
Down Beat
, which had begun as a monthly in Chicago in 1934 and moved to fortnightly publication after the war, There was also a growing musicological interest in jazz, both its personal folklore and more technical study. The often repeated claim that present-day jazz musicians are the first to have come to the music by an academic route is justified only up to a point. In the ’50s, partly as a result of a rapidly expanding student population, largely as a result of ongoing research into the sources of American vernacular music, and more specifically through the efforts of a musician like Dave Brubeck to take jazz to college campuses, jazz was considered with high seriousness, and also as an expression of what would later be called the counter-culture, but for now representing the embattled vestige of the oppositional culture of the ’30s.

The ’50s are much misrepresented as a period of bland conformity and quietism in American culture, when consumer values replaced political commitment among the middle class. Postwar prosperity reinforced a trend away from collective entertainment and towards the private consumption of music and art. Though many middle-class homes still had upright pianos and other instruments, record players and television sets became the prestige items. Developments in recording technology also made a significant impact.

The advent of magnetic tape around 1947 ended what has always, confusingly, been called the ‘electrical’ era in music recording. Tape was far more reliable, far more flexible and easily manipulated than previous means. It ultimately provided for multi-tracking and editing of performances – particularly valuable when complex music was being recorded – as well as enhanced clarity of sound, but given the emphasis on spontaneity and on individual expression (rather than the faithful translation of a written score), editing was
slow to find a place in jazz recording and was still controversial when Miles Davis and Teo Macero constructed whole albums out of studio edits in the ’60s. Both Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus had utilized this capacity of the modern studio earlier but their editing and/or overdubbing was a technical adjunct and to some extent a restorative tool rather than part of the aesthetic.

Rapidly following the introduction of magnetic tape was the first appearance of the microgroove record, the modern LP, which eventually settled on the familiar 12-inch disc after some attempts to introduce the 10-inch disc as the industry norm. The favoured size was largely a matter of happenstance, but the capacity to include twenty minutes of music per side, either in a number of cuts or else, more radically, in a single continuous performance (again but only for the moment less valuable to jazz players and producers than their colleagues in classical music) set a standard that was to remain in place until the triumph of CD over other fresh rivals in the ’80s. The LP era is unmistakably the golden age of jazz recording, and the ’50s offer limitless riches to the collector. The period from 1951 to 1955 was marked by political unease, continuing overseas conflict in Asia and the ossification of the Cold War. It was also the last period in which jazz had no dominant market rival, as was to be the case after 1954, when Sun Records issued the first recordings by a young man called Elvis Presley …

GEORGE SHEARING

Born 13 August 1919, London; knighted 2007

Piano

Verve Jazz Masters: George Shearing

Verve 529900-2

Shearing; Marjorie Hyams, Cal Tjader, Joe Roland, Don Elliott (vib); Chuck Wayne, Dick Garcia (g); John Levy, Al McKibbon (b); Denzil Best, Marquis Foster, Bill Clark (d); Armando Peraza (perc). 1949–1954.

George Shearing said (1982):
‘Music is a form of communication, and jazz is one of the highest forms of communication. Because you improvise, you put more of yourself into the music than a classical player would, so you communicate more of yourself in jazz.’

The man Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise hail as ‘God’ in
On the Road
was a blind Englishman who had taken his piano style not from Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk but from Milt Buckner, locked hands on the chords, melody laid over the top without too much integration between the two. It’s a highly effective style and it stood George Shearing, who was blind from birth, in very good stead. From a poor London family, he trained as a classical pianist but turned to jazz. He played dance band gigs before settling in the USA in 1946. His quintet won a huge following in a light-music smooth-jazz mould.

These are the MGM recordings which established the Shearing quintet as a commercial force. Clever rather than profound, appealing rather than attention-grabbing or radical, the front line of piano, vibes and guitar was a refreshing sound which, when allied to memorable themes such as ‘Lullaby Of Birdland’, proved immensely popular. Shearing had been listening closely to bebop and synthesized what he needed from it to make a cool, modern sound. At this distance, away from any controversy about its standing, the results are smoothly enjoyable on any level. This compilation brings together the expected hits and the slightly more challenging material such as ‘Conception’, which was once covered by Miles Davis (although Shearing did complain that Miles got the bridge wrong!).

HUMPHREY LYTTELTON

Born 23 May 1921, Eton, Berkshire, England; died 25 April 2008, London

Trumpet, clarinet

The Parlophones: Volumes One–Four

Calligraph CLG CD 035-1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Lyttelton; Keith Christie, John Picard (tb); Wally Fawkes, Ian Christie (cl); Bruce Turner (ss, as, cl); Tony Coe (as, cl); Ade Monsborough (as); Jimmy Skidmore, Kathy Stobart (ts); Joe Temperley (bs); George Webb, Johnny Parker, Ian Armit (p); Freddy Legon (g, bj); Buddy Vallis (bj); Mickey Ashman, Brian Brocklehurst, Jim Bray (b); Bernard Saward, Stan Greig, Eddie Taylor, George Hopkinson (d); Iris Grimes, Neva Raphaello (v). November 1949–August 1959.

Humphrey Lyttelton said (1993):
‘The first of those things was recorded around the time John Lennon and Paul McCartney were going to primary school and released on the label that put out their hits later. So there, right in front of you, is part of the continuity of British popular music in this period.’