The Penguin Jazz Guide (70 page)

& See also
The Complete Debut Recordings
(1951–1957; p. 131),
Pithecanthropus Erectus
(1956; p. 175),
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
(1960; p. 259),
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
(1963; p. 291)

JOHN COLTRANE
^&

Born 23 September 1926, Hamlet, North Carolina; died 17 July 1967, Huntington, New York

Tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, flute

Giant Steps

Atlantic 781337

Coltrane; Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly, Cedar Walton (p); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb, Lex Humphries, Art Taylor (d). March, May & December 1959.

Pianist Tommy Flanagan said (1996):
‘People chided me, and the others, for making mistakes, but Coltrane was making them too. Writers sometimes like to make all that music sound like some big spiritual journey and musicians like to say it was just a job, just a gig, and just about getting the charts down. I think I realized later that the two things were the same, that for Coltrane getting the music exactly right and making those mistakes was the spiritual journey.’

Just ten years separate John Coltrane’s first records as leader and the sombre curtain-call of
Expression
, made weeks before his death in 1967. The work he made in that period and the personal influence he exerted are still being felt in jazz today, perhaps to a degree that has stifled other, even more radical approaches to the music. One might argue that Coltrane was not a radical at all, merely a musician who pushed the existing logic of jazz harmony to its utmost, and then beyond that. By the end of his life, what had begun as subtly detoured standards performances – ‘My Favorite Things’ most famously – had turned into hour-long improvisations of implacably alien aspect. The political and wider cultural implications of Coltrane’s subversion of American popular song haven’t yet been fully worked out at a conscious level but their impact runs through the counter-culture.

Had Coltrane recorded no more than his Prestige records, his solitary Blue Note recording
Blue Train
and his appearances with Miles Davis and others, he would probably be regarded as a substantial soloist of considerable promise, but no more. It was when he began recording for Atlantic, and with what evolved into the ‘classic’ quartet, that he started to create a more individual and stylistically adventurous body of work.

The first album is the product of time and preparation, and it cements its status as Trane’s first genuinely iconic record, with no fewer than seven original compositions, most of them now squarely established in the repertory. The big stylistic shift is the move away from chordal jazz, and a seemingly obsessive need to cross-hatch every feasible subdivision before moving on to the next in the sequence. In its place, a faster-moving, scalar approach that was to achieve its (in the event) brief apotheosis in the title-track. That this was a technically exacting theme is underlined by the false starts and alternative takes included on the expensive and atrociously titled
The Heavyweight Champion
Rhino box set, but there is a chance to sample an earlier version of the tune on this CD reissue, performed with another group a month and a half before the issued recording (which featured Flanagan, Chambers and Taylor). Cedar Walton just about goes through the motions at the 26 March session. He finds the beautiful ballad ‘Naima’ a more approachable proposition, though this time the released version was actually from a later session still, with Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb.
It remains one of Trane’s best-loved themes, a million miles away from the pitiless drive of many of his solos. Dedicated to the bassist, ‘Mr P.C.’ is a delightful original blues which has become part of most contemporary horn-players’ repertoire. ‘Syeeda’s Song Flute’ is a long, spun-out melody for Trane’s daughter. The remaining tracks are ‘Spiral’, ‘Countdown’ and the funky, homely ‘Cousin Mary’.
Giant Steps
was released on the cusp of a new decade, in January 1960. It threw down a quiet, unaggressive challenge. Once again, it is difficult to see it as anything other than a transitional record. Flanagan doesn’t sound much more confident with the new idiom than Walton had been on the dry run, though he is a more intuitively lyrical player. The ‘deluxe edition’ includes alternates of most of the tunes; these variants have been available before, of course, but they still help to build a picture of what was going on during this remarkable session. Having them isolated in the context of the issued album is of some merit, though perhaps only newcomers to the Coltrane diaspora will be unaware of the extraordinary enterprise that had such seasoned and intelligent players wrestling with a new conception in jazz.

& See also
A Love Supreme
(1964; p. 314),
Ascension
(1965; p. 321)

NAT ADDERLEY

Born 25 November 1931, Tampa, Florida; died 2 January 2000, Lakeland, Florida

Cornet

Work Song

Original Jazz Classics OJC 363

Adderley; Bobby Timmons (p); Wes Montgomery (g); Keter Betts, Sam Jones (b); Louis Hayes, Percy Heath (d). January 1960.

Nat Adderley said (1985):
‘Pop got Cannonball a little Sears Roebuck trumpet but Cannonball’s teeth weren’t right for it, and though he could
fiddle
, he didn’t have much of a range on it so he put it aside and got himself an alto without pop knowing and started teaching me to play trumpet so at least one of us was playing Pop’s instrument. He was a cornet-player. I guess that’s where that comes from because almost everyone else was changing to trumpet back then.’

The Adderley brothers helped keep a light burning for jazz when rock’n’roll was dominating the industry ‘demographics’. Neither was ever particularly revolutionary or adventurous in style, but saxophonist Cannonball’s enormous personality and untimely death, together with his participation in such legendary dates as Miles’s
Kind Of Blue
, have sanctified his memory with young fans who would have found his live performances rather predictable. Younger brother Nat was often the more incisive soloist, with a bright, ringing tone that most obviously drew on the example of Dizzy Gillespie but in which could be heard a whole range of influences from Clark Terry to Henry ‘Red’ Allen to the pre-post-modern Miles of the ’50s.

Nat came to the cornet almost by default when a school trumpet was lost or stolen and he discovered that in band music it’s the cornet that gets the lead-lines. The rest, as they say, is history. By the late ’50s, he was playing at his peak, with a tight, strong sound.
Work Song
is the classic, laced with a funky blues feel but marked by some unexpectedly lyrical playing (on ‘Violets For Your Furs’ and ‘My Heart Stood Still’) from the leader. Cannonball’s ‘Sack O’ Woe’ was also to become a classic, but the title-tune became something of a signature for Nat, and this version now sounds like the rhizome from which later, perhaps more inflected versions sprang. Montgomery manages to produce something more enterprising than his trademark octave-runs and hits a tense, almost threatening groove. Timmons is more predictable, but just right for this sort of set.

Unlike Cannonball, Nat enjoyed a renaissance when jazz came back into wider currency
after the rock/fusion years. He’d never quite gone away and approached his final decades with the same warm enthusiasm that had suffused his work from the start.

WES MONTGOMERY

Born John Leslie Montgomery, 6 March 1925, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 15 June 1968, Indianapolis, Indiana

Guitar, bass guitar

Incredible Jazz Guitar

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 036

Montgomery; Tommy Flanagan (p); Percy Heath (b); Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath (d). January 1960.

Kenny Burrell remembered (1988):
‘He’d drive over to Indianapolis sometimes, to hang out and hear me play. Then he got the chance to record for Riverside, but Wes was afraid to fly and he wouldn’t put his guitar on a plane, so when he came to make the record he borrowed my guitar and amplifier. He was a sweet guy, died far too young.’

Wes had been making records for Pacific in California with brothers Monk (on vibes and piano) and Buddy (on bass) when the call came from Riverside. In fact, just four days before going into Reeves Sound in New York for the organ trio sessions with Melvin Rhyne and drummer Paul Parker, he’d recorded ‘Summertime’ in LA for Pacific, the flipside of the ‘Finger Pickin’’ single. The early Riverside material is available on an OJC called
A Dynamic New Sound
, originally
’Round Midnight
and
Trio.

He was 24 rather than a precocious kid. In career terms, Montgomery really did seem to prefer his back porch. During the ’50s, which should have been his big decade, he hung around his native Indianapolis, playing part-time. When his recording career got going again, he was still capable of great things and the huge Riverside box that documents the first New York period is packed with calm invention.

He’d been working with Nat Adderley (including the classic
Work Song
) when the
Incredible Jazz Guitar
sessions were done. It remains, perhaps, his best session and his last in New York for a year. His solo on ‘West Coast Blues’ is very nearly incredible, and the band subtly acknowledges it. There are already hints of banality even here, in the trademark octave runs, borrowed from Django. Flanagan may have slipped the engineer a sawbuck, for he’s caught beautifully, nicely forward in the mix. His lines on Sonny Rollins’s buoyant ‘Airegin’ are exactly complementary to the guitarist’s. There’s a ‘D-Natural Blues’ and covers of ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’ and ‘Polka Dots And Moonbeams’ which further hint at Montgomery’s eventual artistic inertia, but for the moment he sounds like a master.

Nothing that followed was ever quite as good. Verve tried to balance him between a jazz and a pop audience. Only Wes could have pulled that trick off with such grace, but even then, with all the polish Norman Granz gave him, one longs for the quiet artistry of these Riverside dates.

ART FARMER
^&

Born 21 August 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa; died 4 October 1999, New York City

Trumpet, flugelhorn

Meet The Jazztet

Universal 5053

Farmer; Curtis Fuller (tb); Benny Golson (ts); McCoy Tyner (p); Addison Farmer (b); Lex Humphries (d). February 1960.

Art Farmer said:
‘I don’t think I knew how good the Jazztet was until we got back together a few years later. The music was the same. We were pretty much the same, just a bit more experienced, but I remember thinking: “Hey, this is something special.” ’

Farmer was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and settled in LA in the late ’40s, but didn’t make the inevitable move to New York until the mid-’50s. Once east, he associated with Gigi Gryce, Horace Silver and Gerry Mulligan (where he effectively stood in for Chet Baker), recording a number of fine sets under his own name before the formation of the famous Jazztet. One of the great bands of hard bop, its eminence has as much to do with co-founder Benny Golson’s writing as with Art’s cool mastery as main soloist.

There was a knot of fine records around this period,
Portrait Of Art
and
Modern Art
in 1958, the latter with Golson and Bill Evans, and, concurrently with the Jazztet, relatively ambitious projects like
Brass Shout
and
Aztec Suite
. Though the group got back together again some years later, Farmer – or the market – seemed to favour small combos over the next half-decade;
Sing Me Softly Of The Blues
in 1965 with Steve Kuhn, Steve Swallow and Pete LaRoca was the next high-point, though it’s hard to find a truly indifferent Farmer record of this vintage.

The first Jazztet record was McCoy Tyner’s recording debut, and the young pianist makes an immediate impact, harmonically full, able in his few prominent solos, and solidly across Golson’s charts. ‘Killer Joe’ put in a first appearance, along with a near definitive reading of ‘I Remember Clifford’. The other well-known Golson chart is ‘Blues March’, but it’s a more raggedy line here than elsewhere. Farmer’s only composition is ‘Mox Nix’, but its virtues are those of his playing, ostensibly soft-edged but with a ripple of muscle just under the surface. The peerless ballad improviser of later years still isn’t in evidence. He plays fast and strong, still on trumpet, and packs a lot of notes into a phrase. Yet each one has an absolutely distinct cast, and a weight of its own. One never feels that Farmer thinks too far ahead. He is as ‘in the moment’ as any free improviser, but with the song tracking almost subconsciously as he plays. With twin brother Addison (who died just three years later) in the line-up, there’s an audibly solid axis to the group, more evident in modern sound than before, but it’s Art’s date as far as solos are concerned. His statement on the elegy for Brownie is exquisitely shaped. A great record, but the others of the period ought to be sampled, too.

& See also
Blame It On My Youth
(1988; p. 516)

HANK MOBLEY

Born 7 July 1930, Eastman, Georgia; died 30 May 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania