The Penguin Jazz Guide (53 page)

Ella’s manager Norman Granz said (1982):
‘It’s less of a challenge presenting her on record than it is managing her other public activities. Ella in the studio is money in the bank, both commercially and creatively. The other side of it is … interesting, but not the same.’

In January 1956, Fitzgerald began recording for Norman Granz’s Verve label, and the first release,
Sings The Cole Porter Songbook
, became the commercial rock on which Verve was built. It was so successful that Granz set Ella to work on all the great American songwriters, and her series of songbook albums are an unrivalled sequence of their kind. The records work consistently well for a number of reasons. Fitzgerald herself was at a vocal peak, strong yet flexible, and her position as a lyric interpreter was perfectly in tune with records dense with lyrical detail; each disc carefully programmes familiar with lesser-known material; the arrangers all work to their strengths, Bregman and May delivering hard-hitting big-band sounds, Riddle the suavest of grown-up orchestrations; and the quality of the studio recordings was and remains outstandingly lifelike and wide-ranging on most of the discs. The Porter set is a sentimental favourite of many, in the jazz audience and beyond, and it’s one of the records which typifies the first great era of the long-player and sets her most straightforwardly in the measure alongside some of the other vocal greats of the era. Granz apparently took a test pressing to Cole Porter in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. The composer listened intently to these interpretations of his work before commenting ‘My, what marvellous diction that girl has!’

& See also
The Enchanting Ella Fitzgerald
(1950–1955; p. 125),
Ella In London
(1974; p. 410)

SERGE CHALOFF

Born 24 November 1923, Boston, Massachusetts; died 16 July 1957, Boston, Massachusetts

Baritone saxophone

Blue Serge

Capitol 94505

Chaloff; Sonny Clark (p); Leroy Vinnegar (b); Philly Joe Jones (d). March 1956.

Baritone saxophonist John Surman says:
‘He was a highly underrated player, a man who brought such lyricism to the baritone horn and with an extraordinary dynamic range.’

Hugely talented, but the career was riven by personal problems, and the end was dreadful; Chaloff contracted spinal paralysis and it killed him while still in his mid-30s. His mother was the distinguished piano teacher Marge Chaloff and his grounding in music was both thorough and broad. Nevertheless, Chaloff’s approach to the baritone, which never sounded unwieldy in his hands, was restrained rather than virtuosic and concentrated on the distinctive timbre of the instrument and its under-utilized dynamics rather than outpacing all opposition. Nevertheless, he was an agile improviser who could transform a sleepy-sounding phrase with a single overblown note.

He has been significantly overlooked down the years and for long periods his few recordings have been unavailable. Fortunately,
The Fable of Mabel
and
Boston Blow-Up
(the latter with homeboy Herb Pomeroy) are now on CD, as well as the excellent
Blue Serge.
Chaloff’s masterpiece is both vigorous and moving, not for the knowledge that he was so near to his own death but for the unsentimental rigour of the playing. ‘Thanks For The Memory’
is overpoweringly beautiful as Chaloff creates a series of melodic variations which match the improviser’s ideal of fashioning an entirely new song. ‘Stairway To The Stars’ is almost as fine, and the thoughtful ‘The Goof And I’ and ‘Susie’s Blues’ show that Chaloff still had plenty of ideas about what could be done with a bebopper’s basic materials. This important session has retained all its power.

TADD DAMERON

Born Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron, 21 February 1917, Cleveland, Ohio; died 8 March 1965, New York City

Composer, piano

Fontainebleau

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 055

Dameron; Kenny Dorham (t); Henry Coker (tb); Sahib Shihab (as); Joe Alexander (ts); Cecil Payne (bs); John Simmons (b); Shadow Wilson (d). March 1956.

Trumpeter/arranger Don Sickler of Dameronia said (1989):
‘Someone called him the great romantic of jazz composition and I think that’s spot on. He wrote some of the best music of the bop era, and yet he’s barely known to younger musicians.’

Dameron’s remembered now for a couple of repertory compositions – ‘Lady Bird’, ‘Hot House’ – and not much else. He was an underrated performer who stands at the fulcrum of modern jazz, midway between swing and bop. He began writing arrangements in his late teens and worked with Harlan Leonard from 1939. Soon got caught up in bop and led small groups with Fats Navarro and Miles Davis. Drug and legal problems effectively ended his career. Combining the broad-brush arrangements of the big band and the new advanced harmonic language, his own recordings are difficult to date blind and a tune like ‘On A Misty Night’ seems to capture the evanescence that surrounds the man and the music.

The discography is spotty. Records with Fats Navarro are usually covered under the trumpeter’s name and
Mating Call
is often reviewed as a John Coltrane album, though it’s the pianist who’s in the driving seat, subtly directing the ensemble.
Fontainebleau
dates from Dameron’s last full year of freedom before the prison sentence that took him out of the jazz stream effectively for good. The title-piece is wholly written out, with no scope for improvising. It might seem similar in some respects to John Lewis’s similarly inspired music, but Dameron is more thoroughly a jazz composer, with little of Lewis’s classical bent. Though the title-piece is relatively formal, there is plenty of individual work elsewhere, notably from Dorham. ‘The Scene Is Clean’ is picked up sometimes by bop outfits, but mostly these charts are too lushly elegant for blowing purposes. Never a distinctive soloist, Dameron prefers to work within his own lush chord progressions, though he lets the group roam free on the long closing blues, ‘Bula-Beige’.

STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI
^&

Born 26 January 1908, Paris, France; died 1 December 1997, Paris, France

Violin

Jazz In Paris: Improvisations

Emarcy 549 242 2

Grappelli; Maurice Vander (p, hpd); Pierre Michelot (b); Jean-Baptiste ‘Mac Kac’ Reilles (d). February & April 1956.

Guitarist Martin Taylor says:
‘During the eleven years that I toured and recorded with Stéphane we rarely spoke about music, but I learned so much from just being around him. Sitting on stage with him or just chatting away in an airport lounge was a lesson in music and life. He knew the importance of communicating with the audience. People would be spellbound by him and even those who hated jazz loved him.’

Largely self-taught, Grappelli had an approach to jazz violin that was both idiomatic and idiosyncratic, but he became the most important exponent of the instrument since Joe Venuti, and while he clung to the mainstream, even some of the avant-garde players took note. The mythology has him down as his fellow Hot Club member Django Reinhardt’s temperamental opposite, but Stéphane is better regarded as a milder twin; his affability masked an iron will and sometimes torrid personality. A typical Grappelli line is fast, fleet and accurate, with a natural rhythm, but with darker overtones always lurking.

Obviously, many of the classic performances are those with the original Hot Club De France, which are covered under the first Django entry above,
Django Reinhardt 1935–1936
. It was Grappelli’s pleasure and burden to carry that legend forward into one decade after another, linked by a mystical bond to a man who, by all accounts, made his life extremely difficult; Stéphane talked often about Django’s ‘monkey business’. Stéphane enjoyed a long, creative life after that association ended and with more modern recording methods came through ever more richly and in fuller voice.

No one belongs more securely in Emarcy’s
Jazz In Paris
series than Stéphane, and this lively set, originally released on Barclay, is textbook Grappelli. Right from the opening ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ you suspect he’s going to stick very closely to the melody and show his stuff merely by playing it very fast. Once he’s into his solo, though, it’s a very different matter: daring harmonic modulations, whole countermelodies and endless grace notes – typical post-Hot Club stuff. He does the same thing on ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’. Michelot and Vander (who doubles harpsichord on ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’) keep the accompaniment from becoming too obvious, and a word for the colourful Mac Kac Reilles, not the greatest drummer in the world – or even Paris – but a character and practical joker who would have put even that arch-trickster violinist Joe Venuti in the shade.

& See also
Django Reinhardt 1935–1936
(1935–1936; p. 51),
Pêche À La Mouche
(1947–1953; p. 111).

GEORGE RUSSELL
^&

Born 23 June 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio; died 27 July 2009, Boston, Massachusetts

Composer, bandleader, piano

Jazz Workshop

Koch 7850

Russell; Art Farmer (t); Hal McKusick (as, f); Bill Evans (p); Barry Galbraith (g); Milt Hinton (b); Teddy Kotick (b); Joe Harris, Osie Johnson, Paul Motian (d). March–December 1956.

George Russell said (1984):
‘I have had a charmed life. If the army doctors hadn’t found I had TB, I could be telling you now how nice the sand was at Iwo Jima, but probably not much about jazz. I had a room of my own in the hospital, with a veranda, and I had the chance to study music with a brilliant young man. He died, I didn’t; that’s the history.’

After graduating in his native Cincinnati, Russell suffered a long bout of tuberculosis, during which he overturned much of what he and his teachers had thought about harmonics, and in the early ’50s wrote
The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
It was the direct source of the modal or scalar experiments of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Russell
spent most of the ’60s in Europe, reworking his treatise and writing little music, but in later years he enjoyed a steady resurgence and gained a hard-won recognition in his final decades.

However important Russell’s theories are, they are even now not securely understood. Sometimes falsely identified with the original Greek Lydian mode,
The Lydian Chromatic Concept
is not the same at all. In diatonic terms, it represents the progression F to F on the piano’s white keys; it also confronts the diabolic tritone, the
diabolus in musica
, which had haunted Western composers from Bach to Beethoven. Russell’s conception assimilated modal writing to the extreme chromaticism of modern music. By converting chords into scales and overlaying one scale on another, it allowed improvisers to work in the hard-to-define area between non-tonality and polytonality. Like all great theoreticians, Russell worked analytically rather than synthetically, basing his ideas on how jazz
actually was
, not on how it could be made to conform with traditional principles of Western harmony. Working from within jazz’s often tacit organizational principles, Russell’s fundamental concern was the relationship between formal scoring and improvisation, giving the first the freedom of the second, freeing the second from being literally esoteric, ‘outside’ some supposed norm. Russell’s theories also influenced his own composition. ‘A Bird In Igor’s Yard’, a celebrated early piece, was a (rather too) self-conscious attempt to ally bebop and Stravinsky – it was also a young and slightly immature work – but it pointed the way forward.

‘Ezz-thetic’, which first appeared on these classic 1956
Jazz Workshop
sessions, is one of the key pieces in an astonishing collection, including several that stand as almost unique avenues of thought in the jazz language: ‘Night Sound’, ‘Round Johnny Rondo’, ‘Knights Of The Steamtable’ and ‘Concerto For Billy The Kid’, the latter including one of Bill Evans’s most remarkable solos on record.

& See also
Ezz-thetics
(1961; p. 274),
Live In An American Time Spiral
(1982; p. 469)

KENNY DORHAM

Born McKinley Howard Dorham (also known as ‘Kinny’) 30 August 1924, Fairfield, Texas; died 5 December 1972, New York City

Trumpet

’Round About Midnight At The Café Bohemia

Blue Note 33775 2CD

Dorham; J. R. Monterose (ts); Kenny Burrell (g); Bobby Timmons (p); Sam Jones (b); Arthur Edgehill (d). May 1956.

Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt says:
‘There are four architects of bebop as it pertains to trumpet: Dizzy, obviously, but also Fats Navarro and Thad Jones, and Kenny Dorham belongs in there as well.’

Somewhat like Freddie Hubbard in a later generation, Dorham had the ability to play in just about any situation that was thrown at him, which is why he turns up in so many bebop situations, Latin-tinged dates (including some south-of-the-border sessions of his own), but is also on hand on Andrew Hill’s
Point of Departure.
He’s self-evidently a Dizzy disciple, particularly as on
Afro-Cuban
when there are extra beats and half-beats to the measure, but Dorham had a nicely rounded tone and even attack which make him more distinctive than is usually thought.