The Penguin Jazz Guide (56 page)

Trumpeter John Vallence remembers:
‘Forget Dizzy’s bullfrog cheeks. I stood behind Maynard in a club once and when he hit the first high note, his whole neck seemed to quadruple in size. The guy must have worn a horse collar.’

There were few sights in nature more impressive than Maynard Ferguson in full flight. No one in jazz had ever hit so many stratospheric notes with such consistent accuracy. Unfortunately, perhaps, the results often lacked grace of sophistication, but the Canadian’s bands were configured for excitement rather than profound expression. After running his own outfit at home, in 1950 he became a key member of Kenton’s notorious Innovations Orchestra. In the mid-’50s, after experience with Boyd Raeburn and others, Ferguson formed his Birdland Dreamband and managed, against the economic current, to keep a sizeable personnel together for the better part of a decade. At a bad time for big bands, an outsize sound and a willingness to go for the populist throat were bankable assets.

Working to arrangements by some of the best in the business (Manny Albam, Al Cohn,
Herb Geller, Willie Maiden, Ernie Wilkins, Jimmy Giuffre, Bill Holman, Bob Brookmeyer and Marty Paich), he could hardly go wrong, but nor could the music ever be entirely unsubtle. Writing for MF’s swollen trumpet sections was a challenge, but even though these were still essentially swing charts, they were imaginatively steered into polychordal sophistication on things like Brookmeyer’s ‘Still Water Stomp’ and Giuffre’s ‘Say It With Trumpets’. On ‘You Said It’ and ‘Everybody Moan’, the leader’s high notes reach absurd levels, but for sheer excitement, they’re hard to beat. He was probably best encountered in a club, but it’s still worth jacking up the volume and listening to these boisterous classics once in a while.

PHINEAS NEWBORN JR

Born 14 December 1931, Whiteville, Tennessee; died 26 May 1989, Memphis, Tennessee

Piano

Here Is Phineas

Koch International 8505

Newborn; Calvin Newborn (g); Oscar Pettiford (b); Kenny Clarke (d). May 1956.

Harold Mabern said (1991), two years after Newborn’s death:
‘They crucified him, you know, a man who had more music in his left hand than most piano-players have in two. He was fragile, and they broke him down.’

A player of tremendous technical ability, often likened to Oscar Peterson, the younger Newborn was flashy, hyped-up and explosive, eating up themes like Clifford Brown’s ‘Daahoud’ and Bud Powell’s ‘Celia’ as if they were buttered toast. Underneath the super-confident exterior, though, there was a troubled young man who was acutely sensitive to criticism, particularly the charge that he was no more than a cold technician. Racked by negative criticism, which undermined an already frail constitution, Newborn suffered a serious nervous collapse from which he only partially recovered, and the remainder of his career was interspersed with periods of ill-health. His later recording output is spasmodic to say the least, marked by a chastened blues sound which contrasts sharply – in style and quality – with the early work. This debut record, made for Atlantic with Pettiford and Clarke, with brother Calvin in for a couple of numbers, is such a startling and vivid one that it’s hard to pass over. Newborn shows his mettle at once with one of Charlie Parker’s less well-known lines, ‘Barbados’, races through the bop changes on the Brownie and Bud themes, and seems to want to take everything at double time, even the ballad features. If that profligacy is a fault, then it’s a record that will dismay some listeners. There is a brittle, hectic quality that in retrospect points to incipient problems, but for the moment at least ‘the piano artistry of Phineas Newborn’ is dazzling.

OSCAR PETERSON
^&

Born 15 August 1925, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; died 23 December 2007, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

Piano, organ, other keyboards

At The Stratford Shakespearean Festival

Verve 513752-2

Peterson; Herb Ellis (g); Ray Brown (b). August 1956.

Norman Granz said (1982):
‘In his early 20s Oscar seemed fully formed as a player. Technically, you couldn’t have asked any more of him, but he was open to any situation that came along and that sometimes stretched him in unfamiliar directions.’

According to Lalo Schifrin, Oscar Peterson is the Liszt of modern jazz, Bill Evans its Chopin; this refers back to the much-quoted assertion that the Hungarian conquered the piano, while the Pole seduced it. All through his career Peterson has seemed to have all the technical bases covered, working in styles from Tatum-derived swing to bebop, stride to near-classical ideas. What is extraordinary is how quickly and completely he matured as a stylist, barely changing thereafter. When Peterson left Canada in 1949 at Norman Granz’s behest, he already had behind him a successful recording career with RCA Victor in Montreal. Peterson was known round the city as the Brown Bomber Of Boogie Woogie, and it is that style which dominates the earliest discs.

Unlike the Ahmad Jamal and Nat Cole trios, which also dispensed with drummers in favour of piano, guitar and bass, the Peterson group never sounded spacious or open-textured – the pianist’s hyperactive fingers saw to that. Here, though, for once Peterson seemed able to lie back a little and let the music flow under its own weight, rather than constantly pushing it along. Peterson has described how during the daytime Brown and Ellis sat and practised all the harmonic variables that might come up during a performance. A sensible precaution, one might have thought, given a player with Peterson’s hand-speed. The irony is that his vertical mobility, in and out of key, was never as rapid as all that, and there are occasions here, as on ‘How High The Moon’ and the closing ‘Daisy’s Dream’, where it appears that Ellis and Brown manage to anticipate his moves and push him into configurations he hadn’t apparently thought of.

& See also
Night Train
(1962; p. 290),
My Favorite Instrument
(1968; p. 351),
The Legendary Live At The Blue Note
(1990; p. 539)

SANDY BROWN

Born Izatnagar, Bareilly, India, 25 February 1929; died 15 March 1975, London

Clarinet

McJazz And Friends

Lake LACD 58

Brown; Al Fairweather (t); Jeremy French (tb); Dick Heckstall-Smith (ss); Ian Armit, Dill Jones, Dave Stephens, Harry Smith (p); Diz Disley (g, bj); Cedric West, Bill Bramwell (g); Tim Mahn, Major Holley, Brian Brocklehurst, Arthur Watts (b); Graham Burbridge, Stan Grein, Don Lawson, Eddie Taylor (d). May 1956–November 1958.

During an unforgettable ‘lesson’ in 1972, Sandy Brown said:
‘If you want to sound better, and **** knows, you couldn’t sound worse, the thing to do is to have all your teeth taken out. I could help you with that, and if you play that way again … I will!’

Brown enjoys legendary status among British musicians and fans of a certain age, but as memories fade there isn’t much of a recorded legacy to keep him before the jazz public. He was born in India, where his father was a traffic manager with Indian Railways, but he grew up and learned to play in Edinburgh, part of the Royal High School crowd. He formed a band with Al Fairweather and went to London, moving from simple trad beginnings to a more sophisticated style, though he recorded little.

Brown’s technique was dismissed by some as crude, but he had devised a way of playing clarinet that utilized freak high notes and other accidentals, and was considerably influenced by African highlife music, so he seldom fits easily into the British trad line.
McJazz And Friends
consists of the
McJazz
album, together with a selection of material from EPs and various trad compilations from the Nixa/Pye shelves. Opening on ‘Go Ghana’, it immediately establishes the sound and sensibility that made Sandy one of Britain’s most distinctive and distinguished improvisers. There is nothing crude about ‘Go Ghana’ or the later ‘Ognoliya’, though neither of them sounds quite part of the run of things coming out of
London at the time. ‘Scales’ and ‘The Card’ are also strikingly original in tonality and delivery. There’s a bonus in the material with saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, a significant jazz player who was later diverted in progressive rock situations.

Any latter-day enthusiast has to be resigned to meeting Sandy Brown only in fragmentary form and minus the formidable presence. Enough of his buoyant and abrasive personality comes across on these tracks, though.

QUINCY JONES

Born 14 March 1933, Chicago, Illinois

Trumpet, composer, arranger

This Is How I Feel About Jazz

ABC Music 9569

Jones; Art Farmer, Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow, Joe Wilder (t); Jimmy Cleveland, Urbie Green, Frank Rehak (tb); Gene Quill, Phil Woods (as); Jerome Richardson (as, ts, f); Herbie Mann (ts, f); Zoot Sims, Lucky Thompson, Bunny Bardach (ts); Jack Nimitz (bs); Milt Jackson (vib); Hank Jones, Billy Taylor (p); Paul Chambers, Charles Mingus (b); Charli Persip (d); Father John Crawley (handclaps). September 1956.

Freddie Hubbard played on Jones’s
Quintessence
. He said (1982):
‘He hears what you can do for him and he gets it from you. With Quincy, you play things you don’t necessarily want to do and don’t necessarily like. But it all fits into place and it all works.’

Jones played trumpet with Lionel Hampton, then did freelance arranging, including a stint in Europe, where he recorded with Harry Arnold. After that he toured with his own big band for a couple of years at the end of the ’50s, did arrangements for Count Basie and a couple of singers, and then took an industry job at Mercury Records, the first time that an African-American had been taken on by one of the corporations at vice-president level. That, as far as most jazz fans were concerned, was that. Jones has continued to work in film music and pop (Michael Jackson!), written books and run a foundation that does substantial good in the community. But he has never quite given up on his original love. He produced a Miles Davis spectacular at Montreux shortly before the trumpeter’s death and made his own kind of jazz-fusion in the ’80s with
Back On The Block
, which was studded with top-drawer guest spots, including Miles.

It’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about Quincy Delight Jones Jr, but it’s equally hard to find many younger jazz fans who’ll admit to a fondness for the work. That’s why the release in 2008 of a Mosaic box of early big-band sessions was such an important one. Apart from the Harry Arnold material, the tracks that went to
This Is How I Feel About Jazz
were his first major jazz statement. These are classic cuts. They leap out of the speakers with a freshness and alertness that banish the intervening years. Who couldn’t stir to the brasses, perfectly weighted on ‘Stockholm Sweetnin’’ (perhaps
the
quintessential Quincy track), or the gospelly edge of ‘Sermonette’. The charts were by Jimmy Giuffre, Lennie Niehaus and Herb Geller, top-of-the-range work from the hottest talents of the moment.

RANDY WESTON

Born 6 April 1926, Brooklyn, New York

Piano

Jazz À La Bohemia

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1747

Weston; Cecil Payne (bs); Sam Gill (b); Al Dreares (d). October 1956.

Randy Weston said (1982):
‘Monk was a magician. He restored magic to jazz and I guess that is a very ancient thing. I learned so much from him, but my first model was Basie: that sense of space as part of music, where you don’t have to play so many notes to make a statement.’

Strongly influenced by lessons with Monk, the impressively proportioned Weston – he is 6 feet 5 inches, hence ‘Hi-Fly’ – spent the late ’60s and early ’70s in Morocco, an experience that coloured his playing from then on. He cuts such an unignorable figure that his marginal critical standing remains an enigma. Though dozens of players every year turn to the joyous ‘Hi-Fly’ theme or possibly ‘Little Niles’, few of them probe any deeper into Weston’s output. There is no doubt that his sojourn in Africa, which followed an earlier visit to Nigeria, made a strong impact but the inescapable truth is that Weston plays American music, not African music, and his studies there did little more (not to belittle their impact in any way) than to bring elements that were instinct in his writing and playing from the beginning.

His identification of Basie as a source confirms our instincts about him. The calypso ‘Hold ’Em Joe’ on
Jazz À La Bohemia
is a nice example of how much of that African/African-Cuban pulse inhabited Weston long before the ‘epiphany’ of Africa, which was only an epiphany for the critics who hitherto hadn’t got a handle on his music. It isn’t the case that Weston passively ‘discovered’ African rhythms and tonalities on one of his early-’60s study trips. As one can clearly hear from the Africanized inflexions of the Riverside sessions, Weston went in search of confirmation for what he was already doing. The set opens with a ‘Solemn Meditation’ that gives what follows an almost ritual significance. Gill, who wrote the intro piece, had a turn of phrase that was very different from anyone else of the time and Payne’s solemn baritone here and on the other 1956 recordings suggests a Central African drone. Dreares, though not required to do anything out of the ordinary, keeps his lines long and loose, but always under control. ‘You Go To My Head’ has a quality quite unlike the average standards performance of the time, and Weston’s own ‘Chessman’s Delight’ stands outside the bop orthodoxy of the day.