The Penguin Jazz Guide (52 page)

The cover image with Chet athletically bowed on a spar, his Triton’s horn gleaming in the sun, is an icon of the time and makes the sharpest possible contrast with the sunken, death’s head figure he became in later years.

& See also
Live At Nick’s
(1978; p. 447),
Blues For A Reason
(1984; p. 488)

BOB BROOKMEYER
^&

Born 19 December 1929, Kansas City, Missouri

Valve trombone, piano

Brookmeyer

RCA Victor 74321 59152 2

Brookmeyer; Al DeRisi, Joe Ferrante, Bernie Glow, Louis Oles, Nick Travis (t); Joe Singer (frhn); Don Butterfield (tba); Gene Quill (as); Al Cohn (as, ts, cl); Al Epstein, Eddie Wasserman (ts); Sol Schlinger (bs); Hank Jones (p); Milt Hinton, Buddy Jones (b); Osie Johnson (d). September & October 1956.

Bob Brookmeyer said (1990):
‘I started writing commercial compositions and arrangements for dance bands when I was 14. I was pretty much across harmony, but I still don’t quite know how I got away with it. “Genius” certainly doesn’t play a part. We just needed the $15.’

Brookmeyer was the first man since Juan Tizol to favour the valve trombone over the slide instrument. He replaced Chet Baker in the Gerry Mulligan quartet, was a member of the Jimmy Giuffre Trio (a folk-jazz style he explored again with Giuffre under his own leadership on
Traditionalism Revisited
) and subsequently spent many years as a studio musician and arranger. Valve trombone has a more clipped, drier sound than the slide variety, and Brookmeyer is probably its leading exponent, though Maynard Ferguson, Stu Williamson and Bob Enevoldsen have all made effective use of it.

Brookmeyer
was an attempt to showcase him in three rather different contexts, from large band down to octet. The big-band arrangements, like the opening ‘Oh, Jane Snavely’, are interestingly pared down, but arranged in the most intriguing way with four trumpets, three tenors, baritone and rhythm providing the background for the solitary trombone. The next session was very different, with a pair of trumpets, french horn and tuba, but just two reeds, alto doubling clarinet, and, once again supporting a roomy bottom end, Sol Schlinger’s baritone. The results are no less spare and undramatic, but the subtlety and control are equally striking, and these are more compelling performances than the two later octets, ‘Confusion Blues’ and ‘Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart’. These sessions
represented quite a substantial investment in Brookmeyer’s growing reputation. Even given the tastes of the time, they must have been quite difficult records to sell, but they come up to date very impressively.

& See also
New Works
(1997; p. 619)

CHARLIE SHAVERS

Born 3 August 1917, New York City; died 8 July 1971, New York City

Trumpet, voice

Horn O’Plenty

Lone Hill Jazz LHJR 10140

Shavers; Benny Morton, Urbie Green (tb); Buster Bailey, Sol Yaged (cl); Russell Procope (as); Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor (ts); Buddy Weed, Kenny Kersey, Billy Kyle (p); Barry Galbraith (g); Aaron Bell, Bob Haggart (b); Panama Francis, Specs Powell, Cozy Cole (d); Maxine Sullivan (v). October 1954–1958.

It’s an old story, and not ours to repeat, but is too good to pass by. When Charlie Shavers came to Britain he was intrigued by hotel electrical sockets bearing the legend ‘
FOR SHAVERS ONLY
’. Charlie’s reaction?
‘Just wait till Eldridge hears about
this
!’

Received wisdom always had it that Shavers was little more than a showbiz show-off. He could, indeed, be flashy and vulgar, but he was also an underrated stylist, an Armstrong man who could play with discretion and lyrical beauty. He started out playing ‘chamber jazz’ with John Kirby and developed an interesting muted sound. His 1955 work with arranger Sy Oliver drifts perilously close to easy listening. The ’50s sessions with pianist Ray Bryant aren’t much more agitated, but they do deserve to be reassessed now that they’re comprehensively available again. They’re mostly calm and collected. Charlie tends to amble through the music, rarely extending himself to a high C and the sort of thing he was required to do at JATP shows. Instead, there is a lot of pretty playing on projects dedicated to French tunes (
Charlie Digs Paree
), warhorses (
Charlie Digs Dixie
, though he does them with good grace) and a stack of standards. Bryant fills in and the rhythm team simply mark time. Inconsequential, but they’re a pleasing feature for his horn.

Horn O’Plenty
is probably the disc to get for a straightforward representation of Shavers in straight jazz contexts, and given the state of the discography there’s no alternative to a compilation. These choices at least put him in august Ellingtonian company. The 1954 sextet date which opens it includes a fairly outrageous ‘Dark Eyes’, which shows off the great man’s exuberance a treat, a fine ‘Moten Swing’ and ‘Story Of The Jazz Trumpet’, where Charlie coolly goes through Armstrong, Eldridge, Cootie Williams, Ziggy Elman, Harry James and Gillespie. There are five delightful tracks with Buster Bailey and two vocals by Maxine Sullivan, and the disc ends with a session of Cole Porter tunes, with some surprisingly fine work from Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor and Sol Yaged. He’ll never be up for Gabriel’s job, but Charlie was more than a journeyman and even at his sloppiest and most self-regarding he pulled off some terrific jazz.

HERBIE NICHOLS

Born 3 January 1919, New York City; died 12 April 1963, New York City

Piano

The Complete Blue Note Recordings

Blue Note 8 59355 2 3CD

Nichols; Teddy Kotick, Al McKibbon (b); Art Blakey, Max Roach (d). May 1955–April 1956.

Trombonist Roswell Rudd remembers:
‘Something I’ve remembered about the man that also carried over into his music was/is his very natural way of getting conversations started … you would be in it before you realized it. Herbie would get a conversation going and very gradually and gracefully prime it until the dynamic had drawn in another person at the table or in the car and it became three-way. At a certain point, Herbie would simply stop speaking and just let whatever he had started run its heated course, while he became the audience, holding back his pleasure at what he’d set in train.’

‘There is a kind of culpability in the discovery of dead artists’, and in Herbie Nichols there is an almost perfect example of an artist who was largely ignored during his lifetime, only to be canonized as soon as he was gone. When Nichols died, he had been working professionally for a quarter of a century, ever since joining the Royal Baron Orchestra in 1937. Yet in all those 26 years, by A. B. Spellman’s reckoning, there was not one during which he was able to earn a living making the music he loved. Nichols scuffled as a recording artist, doing R&B sides here and there, even accompanying lesbian shows, until Alfred Lion of Blue Note decided to sign him up.

Two 10-inch LPs were issued from the May 1955 sessions, both called
The Prophetic Herbie Nichols
. How forward-looking he was as a composer may be judged by his use in ‘The Third World’, the opening item on
The Complete
, of a chord progression that would still sound radical when John Coltrane experimented with it more than a decade later (nearer two decades from the date of composition, since it seems to have been written as early as 1947). Typically, Lion gave him generous rehearsal time, and neither McKibbon nor Blakey sounds as though he is running down unfamiliar material. The miracle of Nichols is his compositions never sound consciously ‘written’ but seem to emerge whole out of the nature of the piano itself. The playing is crisp and buoyant, and even alternative takes are worth hearing.

Nichols and McKibbon reconvened in August 1955 with Max Roach at the kit, and they recorded his best-known composition, ‘Lady Sings The Blues’, as well as the joyous ‘The Gig’; but it is tunes like ‘23 Skiddoo’ and ‘Shuffle Montgomery’ from the earlier sessions which have restored him to favour, largely thanks to the loyal stewardship of Roswell Rudd and a few others who recognize in him a distinguished forerunner.

This Blue Note set is perhaps his best testament, but there was also some fine material for Bethlehem, best sampled on the wonderfully titled
Love, Gloom, Cash, Love
, which just about sums it up.

CHRIS CONNOR

Born Mary Loutsenhizer, 8 November 1927, Kansas City, Missouri; died 29 August 2009, Toms River, New Jersey

Voice

Chris Connor

Atlantic 7567 80769

Connor; Nick Travis (t); Sam Marowitz, Ray Beckenstein (as); Zoot Sims (ts); Danny Bank (bs); John Lewis, Moe Wechsler (p); Barry Galbraith (g); Oscar Pettiford, Milt Hinton (b); Connie Kay, Osie Johnson (d). January–February 1956.

Chris Connor said (1985):
‘I would spend hours in a record store booth listening to Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, June Christy, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra phrased the best, and phrasing was important to me. I knew that was how you were distinctive as a singer. It was Peggy I wanted to emulate, though. She wrote the best songs, too.’

Connor grew up in the Midwest (and double-dated with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer when a teen). She started out with Claude Thornhill, then joined Stan Kenton in 1952. After that,
she worked mainly as a soloist, quietly in the ’60s and ’70s, more prominently again after a revival of interest in her brand of singing. The cool vocalist
par excellence
, and Connor’s records for Bethlehem and Atlantic showcased the ex-Kenton singer in a way that led to some definitive interpretations: here ‘Ev’ry Time’, ‘It’s All Right With Me’, ‘I Wonder What Became Of Me’ and several more are unlikely to be bettered. She has remained something of a cult figure, beatified by Ran Blake and other musicians, but in her prime she sold records to a wide audience and several of her Atlantics were considerable hits; this was revived as part of the label’s 50th-anniversary programme. Four tracks with the quartet of Lewis, Galbraith, Pettiford and Kay (who should have been recorded on their own as well) are a marvel, as is ‘When The Wind Was Green’. Her open vowel sounds have an oddly yearning quality, which is heightened by the way she can sing low notes very softly, yet make them emphatic.

BILL PERKINS
^&

Born 22 July 1924, San Francisco, California; died 9 August 2003, Sherman Oaks, California

Tenor, soprano and baritone saxophones, flute

Grand Encounter

Pacific 46859

Perkins; John Lewis (p); Jim Hall (g); Percy Heath (b); Chico Hamilton (d). February 1956.

Bill Perkins said (1990):
‘Working in the studios meant that you did work, and work in music, which was important, obviously, but it took you further away from jazz. It’s a different discipline, delivering an accurate chart by day and getting a salary cheque, playing a little jazz with a pick-up band at the weekend, and getting maybe $20. Who’d choose?’

Perkins had an interesting life. He grew up away from the US in Chile, and after his military service he studied music and engineering in California. For a substantial period, he was in the studios and working as a sound engineer, before taking a ‘day’ job as part of Doc Severinson’s band on the
Tonight Show
. There is, though, a surprisingly large discography, some 15 studio albums and a couple of good live dates, spread unevenly over the period from 1956, when the wonderful debut was put down, to not long before his death.

There was a carefully stoked ‘rivalry’ between East Coast and West Coast musicians in the mid-’50s and East-meets-West records form a tiny sub-genre in the music. Perkins’s best record is probably his very first, though in later years, when the Pres influence gave way somewhat to elements of John Coltrane harmony and a harder articulation, he created some wonderfully mature music.

Grand Encounter
, which is subtitled
Three Degrees East, Three Degrees West
, is a deliciously cool-toned set, on which Lewis is effectively co-leader, his more obviously intellectual approach a nice foil to Perks’s Californian nonchalance. However, there are – and always were – shadow-notes in Perkins’s playing at the time, a faintly melancholic tinge that comes through on ‘I Can’t Get Started’ and the closing ‘Almost Like Being In Love’. Lewis wrote the material for the long title-track, but Perkins’s deceptively languorous line is the key element. A largely forgotten record, this, but one of the best ‘cool’ sessions of the era and long overdue a revival.

& See also
JOHN LEWIS, The Golden Striker / Jazz Abstractions
(1956; p. 253)

ELLA FITZGERALD
^&

Born 25 April 1917, Newport News, Virginia; died 15 June 1996, Beverly Hills, California

Voice

Sings The Cole Porter Songbook

Verve 537257-2 2CD

Fitzgerald; Pete Candoli, Maynard Ferguson, Conrad Gozzo (t); Milt Bernhart, Joe Howard, Lloyd Ulyate (tb); George Roberts (btb, bari tb); Bob Cooper (cl, ob, ts); Herb Geller (cl, as); Chuck Gentry (bs, bcl); Ted Nash (cl, f, ts); Bud Shank (cl, f, as); Paul Smith (p, cel); Barney Kessel (g); Corky Hale (hp); Robert LaMarchina, Edgar Lustgarten (clo); Joe Mondragon (b); Alvin Stoller (d); Buddy Bregman (arr, cond). February 1956.