The Penguin Jazz Guide (65 page)

Not everyone could make a whole programme of blues – even leavened with a gospelly ‘Rockin’ Chair’ and ‘Loverman’ – sound appealing, but Bryant is such a devoted exponent that these five original lines, given ‘opus numbers’ from his workbook, are genuine contributions to the form. Bryant isn’t a radical. He doesn’t dabble in 13-bar forms or 11/8 time signatures. He keeps a strong left hand chiming and works variations on the melody even as he downshifts through the changes. His coming out as a solo recording artist was a genuine classic.

GERRY MULLIGAN
^&

Born 6 April 1927, New York City; died 20 January 1996, Darien, Connecticut

Baritone and soprano saxophones, clarinet

What Is There To Say?

Columbia CK 52978

Mulligan; Art Farmer (t); Bill Crow (b); Dave Bailey (d). December 1958.

Gerry Mulligan said (1990):
‘Anyone who came into that group was either going to be a substitute trumpet-player – like Bobby Brookmeyer, and I think he found that hard – or, worse still, a substitute Chet. Art didn’t concern himself with that. He just came in, brought his own things, and played as he played. It wouldn’t have worked any other way.’

There were to be reunions with Chet Baker down the line. A fiery personality, Mulligan had had his own scrapes with narcotics – including one prison sentence – and perhaps he was inclined to be forgiving of Chet’s peccadilloes. Replacing the trumpeter was not an easy task. Bob Brookmeyer became a member of the group at one stage, but Art Farmer’s tenure was perhaps even happier, bringing a small-group sound that strikingly resembles some of the stacked-up brass and woodwind sound Mulligan was to develop with orchestras later.

Farmer doesn’t quite have the lyrical poignancy of Chet Baker in this setting, but he has a full, deep-chested tone (soon to be transferred to flugelhorn) which combines well with Mulligan’s baritone.
What Is There To Say?
was Mulligan’s first recording for Columbia. It’s very direct, very unfussy, very focused on the leader, but with the same skills in evidence as on the earlier
The Arranger
, which was a dry run for the label. The first album proper is a small masterpiece of controlled invention. Mulligan’s solos fit into the structure of ‘As Catch Can’ and ‘Festive Minor’ as if they were machine-tooled. Farmer responds in kind, with smooth legato solos and delicate fills. There’s also a live disc,
News From Blueport
, from the same group a month later that shows how well Farmer was bedded in and following his own unflurried course.

& See also
The Original Quartet
(1952–1953; p. 137),
The Age Of Steam
(1971; p. 383)

FRANK ROSOLINO

Born 20 August 1926, Detroit, Michigan; died 26 November 1978, Los Angeles, California

Trombone

Free For All

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1763

Rosolino; Harold Land (ts); Victor Feldman (p); Leroy Vinnegar (b); Stan Levey (d). December 1958.

Trombonist Eric Felten says:
’I long thought the bold declarative solo on “23 Degrees North 82 Degrees West” by the Kenton band was the definitive Rosolino moment. Then I heard “Stardust” on
Free For All
. The simple phrases of the verse are played with tense energy and clipped impatience. And then he’s off: melismatic embouchure-gymnastics, intricate chromatic lines alternating with staccato arpeggios, soaring up to those trademark high Fs, played – trombonists, please note – with his slide in 3rd position, not 1st). After all the pyrotechnics he slips seamlessly into the most powerful of simple melodic statements.’

In November 1978, suffering from depression, Frank Rosolino shot his sons, wounding them both grievously, then took his own life. It seemed an utterly untypical ending for a lively, almost hyperactive man with some reputation (unearned, in our view) as a comic vocalist. Valued for fast, responsive trombone-playing, he worked in an array of big bands, including Gene Krupa’s, before joining Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars in the later ’50s. Rosolino developed a style that seemed to combine elements of bop harmony with the more durable virtues of swing. A wonderfully agile player with a tone that could be broad and humane, almost vocalized one moment, thinly abstract the next, Rosolino brings a twist of humour to almost everything he plays. The 1961 album
Turn Me Loose!
was an attempt at a comic jazz album, which mostly works, though his singing is affected and tiresome.

Though an earlier quintet album for VSOP has some enthusiastic takers,
Free For All
remains his best record. The reissue rounds out a fine session done for the Specialty label with some valuable alternative takes (‘There Is No Greater Love’, ‘Chrisdee’ and ‘Don’t Take Your Love From Me’; they don’t add anything dramatic, but they show Rosolino’s improvisational skill at work) and some great performances from the band that belie the undisciplined
mood suggested by the title. ‘Sneakyoso’ offers a glimpse of Rosolino as a composer, a line with some comic potential, but played fairly straight here. ‘Stardust’ is simply inspired, a recording whose technical mastery has a superadded element of expressive magic. Land is a muscular soloist, but is none the less responsive to the mood of the session, and is capable of some extremely delicate and detailed passage-work. It’s a happy, flowing session, with no storm clouds lurking. What happened 20 years later was an appalling aberration, and tragic for those involved, but it shouldn’t cloud perception of his best work.

IRA SULLIVAN

Born 1 May 1931, Washington DC

Trumpet, flugelhorn, peckhorn, saxophones

Nicky’s Tune

Delmark DD 422

Sullivan; Nicky Hill (sax); Jodie Christian (p); Vic Sproles (b); Wilbur Campbell (d). 1958.

Ira Sullivan said (1999):
‘There were all these great horn-players round Chicago when I was there – Dexter, Stitt, Jug, Griff – and what did I do? I moved to Florida, which I’d always seen as a place people retired to. I never expected to work and didn’t even take a horn, but it shaped up different to that, and I’ve even played at Lake Buena Vista in Disneyland.’

A fascinating enigma, Sullivan is an important transitional figure between bop and free music, whose restless style and intriguing multi-instrumentalism may well have had an impact on the nascent AACM generation in Chicago, where he was based in his youth, a focal figure for many of the young players coming through.

Sullivan started out as a bopper, but one who assiduously avoided the basic, standards-based repertoire in favour of new material; this, it seems, was the condition he imposed when he went on the road with Red Rodney and it became his principle later, too. For a long time, Sullivan was only represented in the catalogue by two ’50s albums from Delmark. There’s a little more around now, but he’s still not much documented. This disc, the earlier of the pair, is dedicated to the equally enigmatic Nicky Hill, one of those catalytic players who remained little known outside a small circle. Like all of Ira’s output, it’s a slightly puzzling and forbidding experience if you approach it expecting basic changes and contrafacts on ‘I Got Rhythm’, ‘Cherokee’ and ‘How High The Moon’. Ira’s harmonic sense is unimpeachable and his understanding with the excellent Christian is intuitive and sympathetic. Trumpet is the dominant voice on both records, but the saxophones and peckhorn are deployed to excellent effect. This was the period when Ira was losing patience with the formulae of bebop, even his own individual brand, and was striking out in the direction of free jazz. There are atonal and polytonal episodes on
Nicky’s Tune
, fewer on the second set,
Blue Stroll
, with Johnny Griffin, who barges and blusters his way through his solos, tossing out tags and quotes as if to remind the others what else was going on in the world.

Sullivan went to Florida in the early ’60s and has remained there, apparently out of the swim, but still making powerful jazz and still acting as an influence on a new generation.

SUN RA
^&

Born Herman Sonny Blount (also known as Sonny Bourke, Le Sony’r Ra) 22 May 1914, Birmingham, Alabama; died 30 May 1993, Birmingham, Alabama

Piano, space organ, keyboards

Jazz In Silhouette

Evidence ECD 22012

Sun Ra; Hobart Dotson (t); Julian Priester (tb); Marshall Allen, James Spaulding (as, f); John Gilmore (ts); Charles Davis (bs); Pat Patrick (bs, f); Ronnie Boykins (b); William ‘Bugs’ Cochran (d). 1958.

Norman Mailer said (1993):
‘I remember walking down through Harlem one night in the ’60s, no cabs around, freezing slush in the streets, with a bellyful of booze, a pain behind one eye, spoiling for trouble, and coming across Sun Ra and the band playing in an abandoned store. Gold costumes, masks, headdresses, lights. It was as if the Wise Ones had landed on our cold planet with a message of peace and a cure for cancer.’

Sun Ra was either a fearsome avant-gardist or a traditionalist in the line of Fletcher Henderson, for whom he arranged early in his career. The truth about Sun Ra was that he was both those things. He grew up steeped in the blues, worked an orthodox apprenticeship with the big bands, and even when he founded his famous Arkestra, with its theatrical approach to jazz, and became a leading presence on the Chicago improvisation scene, his work was always grounded in melody and in blues changes. Sun Ra’s claim to come from Saturn was one of the great metaphors of Black American music. If you are a black man from Birmingham, Alabama, how much more ‘alien’ does this planet need to be?

Uncertainty about Sun Ra’s seriousness (and sanity) tended to divert attention from a considerable three-decade output, which included well over 100 LPs. Because much of it remained inaccessible during his lifetime, critical responses were apt to concentrate on the paraphernalia associated with his Arkestra big band, rather than on the music. Nevertheless, he was one of the most significant bandleaders of the postwar period. He drew on Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, but also on the bop-derived avant-garde, and was a pioneer of collective improvisation.

Above all, Sun Ra maintained a solitary independence from the music industry, a principled stance that certainly cost him dear in critical and commercial terms. The El Saturn discs were reissued
in toto
by Evidence, a colossal project. Sound quality is remarkably good, given the often shaky balance of the original masters and the fact that they’ve been subjected to uncertain storage conditions. The original titles have been preserved wherever possible, even when this has led to rather cumbersome doubling up. One of the drawbacks of Evidence’s programme is the out-of-sequence pairing of sessions, rendering a strictly chronological review impossible.

The ’50s were in many respects a golden age for Sun Ra and the Arkestra. The music is frankly experimental and the sci-fi apparatus was already part and parcel of American culture through the latter half of the decade. Chants like ‘We Travel The Spaceways’ began to sound more artful and mannered as the years went by, but for now they manage to sound almost spontaneous. There was always a suspicion that titles like ‘Rocket Number Nine Take Off For The Planet Venus’ were simply a diversionary addition to a fairly conventional jazz tune.

The marvellous
Jazz In Silhouette
will surely some day be recognized as one of the most important jazz records since the war. The closing ‘Blues At Midnight’ is sheer excitement. The baritone solo on the short ‘Saturn’, most probably Patrick, is an extension of Sun Ra’s brilliantly individual voicings. The great surprise of this recording (though presumably no surprise to those who have taken the Saturnian aesthetic fully on board) is its
timelessness
. Listening to ‘Enlightenment’, given an uncharacteristically straightforward reading, it’s very difficult to guess a date for the performance. As Francis Davis suggests in a useful liner-note, it is ideal ‘blindfold test’ material that might have been recorded at any point from the ’40s to the late ’80s. Only the long drum passage on ‘Ancient Aiethopia’ and the astonishing Dotson solo and chants that follow sound unequivocally ‘modern’. Inevitably, the next track, ‘Hours After’, is orthodox swing.

& See also
The Magic City
(1965; p. 328),
Mayan Temples
(1990; p. 541)

BARNEY WILEN

Born 4 March 1937, Nice, France; died 25 May 1996, Paris, France

Tenor, alto and soprano saxophones

Jazz Sur Seine

Emarcy 548317-2

Wilen; Milt Jackson (p); Percy Heath (b); Kenny Clarke (d); Gana M’Bow (perc). 1958.

Barney Wilen said (1988):
‘
Miles m’a dit
: “Why do you play all those awful notes?” It sounded for a moment like my father speaking. He wanted me to practise law, but [Blaise] Cendrars told me to follow my instincts and my dream. Same story as every jazz guy,
hein
?’

The poet Blaise Cendrars, a family friend, can take the credit for persuading Wilen to become a musician. Wilen’s father was American and well-to-do and the family spent the war years away from France, not that the experience can have had any particular musical impact on young Bernard, who was only eight when VE Day came round. Basically a tenor-player, he made his name when Miles Davis chose him to play in a group he was fronting in Europe in 1957 and he was part of the ensemble that made the retrospectively important
L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
soundtrack music, which is credited with starting Miles’s move towards abstraction. But Wilen had already garnered a reputation with visiting Americans for a considerably accomplished technique and a real mastery of hard-bop forms.