The Penguin Jazz Guide (66 page)

The Universal stable has a considerable imprint devoted to reissue of classic Parisian sessions made for Verve and it’s wonderful to have some of this music back in circulation. The rhythm section is familiar, but Milt Jackson plays piano. There’s some beautiful playing by the saxophonist, his tone veiled but wonderfully singing, on the blues ‘Nuages’ and ‘Epistrophy’.

Wilen’s subsequent visit to play at Newport in 1959 is commemorated by a Fresh Sound CD, although there’s only 20 minutes of music from that occasion. He had an interesting later career, working in film, hopping on the punk bandwagon, pursuing music with promiscuous delight. In jazz terms, he remains of his moment, but like Bobby Jaspar a consistently underrated European.

MILES DAVIS
^&

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

Trumpet, flugelhorn, organ

Kind Of Blue

Columbia CK 64935

Davis; Cannonball Adderley (as); John Coltrane (ts); Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb (d). March–April 1959.

Jimmy Cobb said (1986):
‘We didn’t think we were doing anything special on that record. It felt like another date – a good one, but I never recognized it from some of the things that are said about it now.’

No other jazz record enjoys quite the same reputation as
Kind Of Blue.
Its story has been told over and again in books and articles. The album turns up in the collections of people who otherwise don’t listen to jazz, and profess to dislike it. Its music echoes across wine bars and jeans shops. The present authors were mischievously inclined to dismiss it as highbrow mood music and to propose a moratorium on playing it until its marvellous freshness and intimacy could be appreciated in full again.
Kind Of Blue
came at an interesting time in Miles’s creative life. In contrast to many other of his recordings, it hadn’t around it
the area of creative crisis, struggle, abnegation that usually signalled his most important transitions.

A year before, in April 1958, Miles hadn’t recorded a small-group date for more than a year. A lot of thinking, woodshedding, a lot of hard conceptual work had been done in the interim. On
Milestones
he worked out ideas that had been adumbrated on the deceptively casual movie soundtrack
L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
, and delivered a wonderfully coherent and organic performance. There are no standards, and all the material is challenging, sometimes simply by suspending conventional harmony and by constraining complex ideas within a deceptively simple 4/4. One of the profound differences between Miles and the saxophonists is that, while they tend to play on the beat, he is almost always across it, almost always escaping the gravitational pull of the chords entirely.

Kind Of Blue
marked a momentary caesura in that creative restlessness. The reason may well be the presence of another artist in the group of almost equal stature to Miles himself: not Coltrane, who always sounds like the music’s special pleader, but Bill Evans. His allusive, almost impressionistic accompaniments provide the ideal platform for the spacious solos created by the horns. This was the first widely acknowledged ‘modal jazz’ date, and it is interesting how thoroughly it has now been absorbed into mainstream language. Tension is consistently established within the ensembles, only for Davis and Coltrane especially to resolve it in songful, declamatory solos. The steady mid-tempos and the now familiar plaintive voicings on ‘So What’ and ‘All Blues’ reinforce the weightless, haunting qualities Miles was bringing to his music. ‘Flamenco Sketches’ is the one track that points outward into more uncertain territory, though its ‘Spanish tinge’ is also an anchor point, suggesting continuity. If you will, the clinching quality of
Kind Of Blue
is that its energies are centripetal; map the harmonies and this becomes clearer. It seems – with that tiny exception – entire of itself and without the troubling restlessness of almost all Miles Davis’s other records. That is not to belittle it, but to offer one clue to its almost universal appeal.

& See also
The Complete Birth Of The Cool
(1948–1950; p. 121),
Miles Ahead
(1957; p. 208),
The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel
(1965; p. 331),
In A Silent Way
(1969; p. 361),
Agharta
(1975; p. 420)

WYNTON KELLY

Born 2 December 1931, Jamaica; died 12 April 1971, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Piano

Kelly Blue

Original Jazz Classics OJC 033

Kelly; Nat Adderley (c); Bobby Jaspar (f); Benny Golson (ts); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb (d). February & March 1959.

Drummer Jimmy Cobb said (1986):
‘Miles always knew what he wanted from a piano-player and sometimes had two of them around. With Wynton – though he didn’t use him much on
Kind Of Blue
(paid him though!) – he had two in one, he had Bill Evans and Red Garland in one man.’

Kelly wasn’t in some listeners’ opinion the most obvious replacement for Bill Evans and Red Garland in the Miles Davis group, but he had a lyrical simplicity and uncomplicated touch that appealed enormously to the trumpeter, who hired him in 1959; Kelly played on only one track on the classic
Kind Of Blue
, but ‘Freddie Freeloader’ is enough to show what distinguished him from Evans’s more earnestly romantic style. His first attempts at recording on his own account were callow and undistinguished but
Kelly Blue
is almost exactly contemporaneous with Miles’s classic and the magic rubs off.

The gentle but dynamic bounce of Kelly’s chording comes to the fore (which also reunites the
Kind Of Blue
rhythm section). On the title-track and ‘Keep It Moving’, the addition of Adderley, who also admired Kelly, and the intriguing Jaspar, always more interesting on flute than when he played Pres-and-water saxophone, makes perfect sense. Golson lends the date some much needed weight in the middle but he does sometimes overbalance the delicate strength of Kelly’s arrangements. The trio cuts are far superior.

ABBEY LINCOLN

Born Anna Marie Wooldridge, 6 August 1930, Chicago, Illinois; died 14 August 2010, New York City

Voice

Abbey Is Blue

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 069

Lincoln; Kenny Dorham, Tommy Turrentine (t); Julian Priester (tb); Stanley Turrentine (ts); Les Spann (g, f); Wynton Kelly, Cedar Walton, Les Wright (p); Bobby Boswell, Sam Jones (b); Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach (d). March 1959.

Abbey Lincoln said (1990):
‘Back then [in the ’50s] people in the business told you what to wear, what to sing, how to stand, what expression to use on your face and when to use it, when to laugh and speak and not speak. It was like being a prostitute. You were paid for and
owned
.’

Lincoln’s own emancipation proclamation turned her from a conventional club singer into one of the most dramatic and distinctive voices of the day, whose work touches on matters of gender and female self-determination as much as it does on matters of ethnicity and colour. As she concedes, she owes her creative emancipation to one-time husband Max Roach, with whom she worked on
We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
, but she had recorded under her own name before that. She worked in California under the name Anna Marie, Gaby Wooldridge and Gaby Lee and then began recording on her own account. She and Roach were married from 1962 to 1970, after which her career faded until a revival of interest in the ’80s led to a Verve contract.

Never a conventional standards singer, Lincoln indicated her individuality and occasionally her disaffection in subtle ironies, subliminal variations and occasional hot blasts of fury. She was both respectful of her material and inclined to manipulate it without mercy or apology. ‘Afro Blue’, here with the Max Roach Sextet, is one of her strongest performances at any period, though slightly hectoring in tone. Her reading of Duke’s ‘Come Sunday’ is beautiful, plaintive and proud in equal measure. ‘Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise’ and ‘Lost In The Stars’ were probably studio musts. Though she adds an edge to both, the set is stronger on the more original material and arrangements. Her own ‘Let Up’ is a foretaste of the strong songwriting that was to come.

TERRY GIBBS

Born Julius Gubenko, 13 October 1924, New York City

Vibraphone, xylophone, drums

One More Time

Contemporary 7658

Gibbs; Johnny Audino, Conte Candoli, Frank Huggins, Al Porcino, Ray Triscari, Stu Williamson (t); Bob Enevoldsen (vtb); Bob Burgess, Vernon Friley (tb); Joe Cadena, Med Flory, Bill Holman (ts); Joe Maini, Charlie Kennedy (as); Jack Schwartz (bs); Pete Jolly, Lou Levy (p); Max Bennett, Buddy Clark (b); Mel Lewis (d); Irene Kral (v). March–November 1959.

Terry Gibbs said (1992):
‘The MCA agency didn’t like my name [Julius Gubenko], so when I was with Judy Kayne, I was billed as “Terry Gibbs on drums and xylophone”. I saw the flyer and thought I’d been canned. My mother was furious. How would anyone know her son was performing?’

The wonderfully durable Gibbs was still performing in his 70s. He had a relatively uneventful time in swing bands before settling in LA in 1957 and running a part-time big band there. The Gibbs bands combined the high-energy swing of Lionel Hampton with the sophistication of the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis outfits. The arrangements, by Marty Paich, Lennie Niehaus and others, are all good, but with a sometimes uneasy emphasis on the higher horns. Gibbs’s playing is closer to Hampton’s percussive bounce than to any of the competing influences, and he solos with verve. It’s a style that draws a great deal from bop and it’s no less well-adapted to the small-group performances which he has been focusing on more recently, at least on record (he still runs editions of The Dream Band today, but says he won’t record them, in order not to spoil the memory of this great outfit).

One More Time
arrived as the result of Terry finding another box of tapes at home, and what a fine discovery. While it’s more of a ragbag than some of his records on Contemporary, it’s as loaded with atmosphere as anything in the series, and for sheer zing it sounds like the pick of the sequence to us. Irene Kral takes a couple of vocals, Conte Candoli has a couple of lovely features, and Gibbs himself has the audacity to out-Hamp the master on an 11-minute ‘Flying Home’. The sound is amazingly good.

EDDIE ‘LOCKJAW’ DAVIS

Born 2 March 1922, New York City; died 3 November 1986, Las Vegas, Nevada

Tenor saxophone

Very Saxy

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 458

Davis; Coleman Hawkins, Arnett Cobb, Buddy Tate (ts); Shirley Scott (org); George Duvivier (b); Arthur Edgehill (d). April 1959.

Johnny Griffin said (1989):
‘Did you know he had corks under some of the keys?! I asked him about that. He said: “I don’t need them, so I just cover them up”!’

‘Jaws’ had a somewhat brutish power that was often best deployed in the kind of brawling, competitive jam situations the labels used to favour. He wasn’t without a measure of subtlety, though, and it was obvious that he knew more than he played, with a lot of musical information lurking below the waterline. He made his name with Cootie Williams, before joining Basie in 1952, and was with him off and on till the end of the decade. After that, he was frequently paired with Shirley Scott or Johnny Griffin, before spending a further seven years with the Count and then working mainly as a solo artist. He died unexpectedly in Las Vegas, still apparently at the height of his considerable powers.

It doesn’t belittle Davis’s skill or presence to select a record on which he shares the billing with three other distinguished tenormen on the Prestige books, called to sit in with the Davis–Scott combo. The results are barnstorming. The programme is all simple blues, but the flat-out exuberance of the playing is exhilarating, particularly in the excellent remastered sound, and it’s interesting to listen to Davis in close proximity to the others, already exploring areas of harmony and intonation perhaps more obviously associated with the younger John Coltrane. As competitive as it might appear, nobody is bested, and the clout of Davis and Cobb is matched by the suaver Tate and the grandiloquent Hawkins. Their ‘Lester Leaps In’ is a peerless display of saxophone sound.

CAL TJADER

Born 16 July 1925, St Louis, Missouri; died 5 May 1982, Manila, Philippines

Vibraphone

Monterey Concerts

Prestige P24026

Tjader; Paul Horn (f); Lonnie Hewitt (p); Al McKibbon (b); Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria (perc). April 1959.

Latin rock guitar legend Carlos Santana said (1985):
‘I don’t think the young people know his name now, but Cal Tjader was hugely influential in making Latin music part of the pop mainstream.’

Though originally from the Midwest, Tjader based himself in California and, after high-profile stints with Dave Brubeck and George Shearing, led his own groups from 1954. His essentially lightweight blend of Latin, Cuban and bebop styles became popular in the late ’50s and ’60s, and he helped pioneer the salsa idiom, at least from a jazz perspective, a remarkable achievement for a musician with no Latin roots.