Medium tempo blues practically play themselves especially when the rhythm section just lays it down and stays out of the way, which is exactly what bassist Peter Washington and drummer Joe Farnsworth do on the audio track to the following video. The tune is entitled Systems Blue. Trombonist Steve Davis wrote it and performs on it along with Mike DiRubbo on alto saxophone, David Hazeltine on piano and, of course, Peter and Joe.
Jazz musicians like to open the first set of club dates or concerts with a medium tempo blues. The easy tempo, simplified song structure [usually 12 bars which repeats once] and the groove generated all serve to get the juices flowing.
Smiles all round after listening to "the kids" making it happen on this one.
Jazz is in good hands.
Click on the direction arrows in the lower right hand corner to play the video at full screen and, should they appear, ads can be eliminated by clicking on the "X."
“Moore was a terrific, but
star-crossed tenor player, at his best as good as Getz and Sims, but never able
to get a career together as they did. He left only a small number of records
behind him ….”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
If, as Louis
Armstrong’s states – “Jazz is only who you are” – then the inventiveness and
spontaneous nature of tenor saxophone Brew Moore’s music was certainly
reflective of his wandering and constantly searching lifestyle.
Mark Gardner, the
distinguished Jazz author offered these insights about Brew in the liner notes
to Brothers
and Other Mothers [Savoy Records SJL2210].
“Milton A. Moore
Jr. was a drifter, a born loser, a hero of the beat generation and a brilliant
saxophonist. Yes, he once remarked that any tenorman who did not play like Pres
was playing wrong-that was the extent of his admiration.
Moore was born in Indianola, Mississippi, on March 26, 1924, and his first musical instrument was a
harmonica given to him by his mother as a seventh birthday present. He played
in his high school band and at 18 got a job with Fred Ford's dixieland band. He
arrived in New York during 1943 and heard what bebop was all about. He would
return to New York several times in the late forties to lead his own quartet,
work with Claude Thornhill (an unlikely environment), swing his tail off in
front of Machito's Afro-Cubans, gig with Gerry Mulligan and Kai Winding at the
Royal Roost and BopCity.
Moore was never around one place for too long. He would take off for Memphis or New Orleans, playing all kinds of weird jobs ("I
go where the work is"). Around 1953-54 he was on the Greenwich Village
scene, a frequent jammer at Bob Reisner's Open Door where other cats playing
mostly for kicks and little bread included Thelonious Monk. Charlie Parker,
Charlie Mingus and Roy Haynes. It was at the Open Door that Bird and Brew once
serenaded a piece of chewing gum stuck to the floor. Recently discovered
recordings also found Parker and Moore together on 1953 sessions in Montreal, Canada.
One day in the
'fifties Brew casually took off for California. As Moore told it, "Billy Faier had a 1949
Buick and somebody wanted him to drive it out to California and he rode through Washington Square shouting 'anyone for the Coast?' And I was
just sitting there on a bench and there wasn't s*** shaking in New York so I-said 'hell, yes,' and when we started
off there was Rambling Jack Elliot and Woody Guthrie." After Woody heard
Brew play at the roadside en route he refused to speak again to the
saxophonist.
Guthrie didn't dig
jazz. "But we were the only juice heads in the car so Woody would say to
Jack or Billy, 'Would you ask Brew if he'd like to split a bottle of port with
me, and I'd say, 'You tell Woody that's cool with me.' Then they let me off in L.A. and I took a bus up to San Francisco."
Before that
fantastic journey. Brew had worked around with his buddy Tony Fruscella, a
beautiful trumpeter who was also over-fond of the juice. Allen Eager was also a
regular playing partner of Fruscella's. Brew stayed in Frisco for about five
years, played all over town, made a couple of albums under his own name, recorded
with Cal Tjader and drank a lot of wine. He was seriously ill in 1959 but
recovered and in 1961 moved to Europe
and for three years drifted around the Continent.
Twice in the
1960's he returned to the States but there was still no s*** shaking and nobody
bothered to record him properly (a date as a sideman with Ray Nance was the
only evidence of the final, unhappy return). His parents were very old and his
mother sick. Brew was far from well and didn't look after himself. Friends kept
an eye on him and tried to ensure that he ate regularly but Moore was almost past caring.
When he decided to
split back to Scandinavia via the Canary Islands where he played at Jimmy Gourley's Half
Note Club in Las Palmas, some of his admirers in New York produced a four-page newspaper called
"Brew Moore News," in which Brew wrote a touching little verse:
Love I feel, but longing much;
Thy face I see, but cannot touch.
Your presence in heart is good, I know,
but hand in hand-it's greater so.
Time was running
out for Brew. There was one more album - a great set made at a Stockholm club [Stampen] where Moore really grooved. Then came the news that he
had died after falling down a flight of steps in a restaurant.
The final irony: Brew,
who had scuffled and scraped for cash almost all his life, had just been left a
substantial sum of money, to give him genuine security, by a relative who had
died. It happened too late.”
“Scuffling” is
very much the byword when talking about Brew as one has to jump here and there
to find the few scraps of information and opinion that has been written about
him in that Jazz literature.
Jazz author and
critic, Ralph J, Gleason, had this to say about him in the insert notes to one
of Brew’s best recordings – The Brew Moore Quintet [Fantasy 3-2222
–OJCCD 100-2]:
Mainly main idea
is to get back to simplicity.' says Brew Moore of his work these days. "I
like a small group—such as the quintet we have on this album—where there is no
other front line and I can let myself go. The biggest kick to me in playing is
swinging-freedom and movement. And with a small group, I can do this more
easily.
"Music must
be a personal expression of one's own world and way of life. When everything
else gets to be a drag there is music for forgetfulness and also for memory and
or a reminder that there is more good than bad in most things. The idea of
playing for me is to compose a different, not always better I'm afraid, melody
on the tune and basis of the original song, rather than construct a series of
chord progressions around the original chords. I feel that in several spots in
this group of tunes we attain the rapport necessary for good jazz. I hope
so."
And when you
listen to these numbers, you will agree that Brew … has done what he set out to
do. These all swing and even Brew, who is most critical of his own work
("I guess I never have been happy with anything I did") had to say of
this album, "It swings. You can say that."
Brew has two
absolutely golden gifts. He swings like mad and he has soul. These are things
you cannot learn by wood-shedding [practicing], or in any conservatory. You
have to be born with them or learn them by living. Brew had them and he also
has a priceless gift for phrasing.
"Everything
he plays lays just right," one musician put it. It certainly does. … When Brew says it, he says it simply, but it
rings true. That's the best way there is.”
Ted
Gioia, in
his definitive West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960 encapsulates the essence of Brew and his
career when he writes:
“After high school
Moore began a peripatetic career that brought
him little fame but gave him a heady taste for life on the move. …
By the time he
moved to San
Francisco [1954], Moore had achieved a reputation for excellence among Jazz insiders …. Jack
Kerouac depicts a Moore performance in Desolation Angels, where Brew (or
Brue, as Kerouac spells it) starts his solo with, the beat prosodist tells us,
"a perfect beautiful new idea that announces the glory of the future
world.”
This future glory
eluded Moore to the end. His quartet and quintet albums
on Fantasy, made during his California years, were his last commercial recordings
in the United States. These along with his sideman recordings
with Tjader, find the tenorist at absolutely top form, stretching out over
standards with an impressive melodic and rhythmic inventiveness. In 1961, he
moved to Europe, where, except for intermittent
appearances in the United States, he lived until his death in 1973 as the
result of a fall.”
To give you a
sampling of what’s on offer in Brew Moore’s music, with the help of the
crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD, we put together the following video
tribute to Brew on which he performs You
Stepped Out of a Dream with Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin [who also
did the arrangement], Bent Axen [p], Niels-Henning Orsted-Pedersen [b] and
William Schioppfe [d]. The music was recorded in Copenhagen in 1962.
Alto saxophonist
Paul Desmond died on Memorial Day, 1977.
On this Memorial
Day weekend, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be
appropriate to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Paul’s passing
with the following videos that feature his superbly unique alto playing in
different musical contexts.
To ours ears,
Paul’s sound is associated with everything that we find beautiful in the
music. His was a masterful command of
the alto saxophone and his conception took the instrument to new heights, both
figuratively and literally.
Paul’s music was
like a good book: you could put it down and pick it up again anytime the mood
suited you or you could stay up all night reading it. It was full of melodic
“stories,” humor, and great depth of feeling.
Listening to Paul
play was always a satisfying experience; and like the reading of that good
book, one generally came away wanting more.
Stardust – Paul with pianist Dave Brubeck, bassist Ron Crotty and drummer
Joe Dodge.
You Go To My Head – Paul with Don Elliott on trumpet and
mellophonium, Norman Bates on bass and Joe Dodge on drums.
Chorale – Paul with Dave van Kriedt on tenor saxophone, Dave Brubeck on piano, Norman Bates on bass and
Joe Morello on drums.
I’ve Got You Under My Skin – Paul with Jim Hall on guitar, Milt Hinton
on bass, Robert Thomas on drums and strings and horns arranged by Bob Prince.
[Click on the “X” to close out of the ads when these appear on the video].
Tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh's composition Background Music as performed by alto saxophonist Joris Roelofs' quartet and set to Tim Flach's photographs on the theme of Intelligent Life. Also performing are Aaron Goldberg on piano, Matt Penman on bass and drummer Ari Hoenig.
“Pete Rugolo was a
soft-spoken, self-effacing man, which may be one of the reasons he has not been
given his due as the pioneering jazz composer he was. Kenton managed to be a
controversial figure for the scope of what he attempted, which was often
denounced as pompous. And it could be, particularly in its later
manifestations. But the band for which Pete first wrote had a blazing quality,
particularly in its slow pieces, which a lot of young people found moody,
almost mystical, and melancholy, an emotion appropriate to the fragile years of
adolescence.”
- Gene Lees
Every so often,
the editorial staff at JazzProfiles enjoys revisiting with
one of its heroes.
It is our way of
saying “Thank You” to those who helped make our entrance into the joys of Jazz
possible.
Such
reconsiderations are especially pleasurable when we can do so through the
perspective of the late Gene Lees, whose writings on Jazz collectively form one of the great gifts
to the music and its makers.
Imagine our
delight, then, when we uncovered the following essay by Gene on
arranger-composer Pete Rugolo whose sensibilities brought us the brilliant
music he wrote for both Stan Kenton’s and his own orchestra, Miles Davis
Nontet’s Birth of the Cool when he
served as the head of Jazz artist and repertoire forCapitol Records and a
whole host of marvelous movie and television music.
“I've told this
before, but this is how I met the man. If you have reached "a certain
age," as the French delicately put it, sufficient to remember the big
bands in all their brassy glory, you will recall how the true believers would
cluster close to the bandstand, listening to soloists whose names we knew,
while the mere fans — some distance behind us — did their jitterbug gyrations.
Since I was always one of these ardent listeners, I never learned to dance
worth a hoot. But I heard a lot of good music. …
Yet another of the
bands I admired came through, playing in the red-brick Armory on north James Street [in Hamilton, Ontario where Gene began his career as a newspaper
reporter on the Hamilton Spectator]. As usual I was standing in the crowd of
listeners near the bandstand. I was startled to find that the young man (older
than I, but about thirty-three at the time) standing next to me was the band's
chief arranger, whose bespectacled face I recognized from magazine photographs.
I got up the courage to tell him how much I admired his writing; which had
grandeur. He was polite to me, and suggested we go up to the balcony to listen.
We sat through a long evening looking down at the band and discussing the
music. Maybe I don't even know how much I learned that night.
A few years ago, I
was at a party given by Henry Mancini. I found myself in conversation with one
of Hank's closest friends, Pete Rugolo. I told him the story about the arranger
and said, "Do you know who the arranger was, Pete?"
And he said,
"No."
And I said,
"You."
"Pete Rugolo
was the architect of the Stan Kenton band," said one of Pete's friends of
many years, composer Allyn Ferguson, who also wrote for Kenton. Among other
things, he wrote Passacaglia and Fugue for the Neophonic Orcherstra. "Pete
had the academic background that Stan lacked."
And of course it
was the Kenton band I was hearing the night I met Pete. That had to be in 1948
or '49, because Stan broke up the band in '49 and Pete went out on his own, at
first as an a&r man with Capitol Records. He would have a place in jazz
history if only because he is the man who signed the Miles Davis group that
featured writing by John Lewis, Johnny Carisi and most of all Gerry Mulligan to
record a series of "sides" for Capitol.
It occurs to me
that I already had met Kenton when I met Pete. That must have been in 1947.1
held my first writing job at a broadcasting magazine in Toronto, and for some
reason of union politics, Kenton was not allowed to make a certain radio
broadcast. I was sent to his hotel to get his side of the story, and I imagine
that I was. as a serious fan of that band in its main Artistry in Rhythm
period, rather in awe at the idea of meeting him.
I knocked on his
door, and he answered, fresh out of the shower, naked but for a towel around
his waist, still drying his hair. Since he was about six-foot five, with a
long, handsome, craggy face, a semi-nude soaking wet Stan Kenton was a figure
to conjure with. He invited me in, I did my interview, and left. I think I was
nineteen. It was about twelve years later, when I was editor of Down
Beat, when I met him again. He said, "Hello, Gene, nice to see to
see you again." So help me.
"Stan could
do that," Pete said.
"The only
other person I ever knew with a memory for names like that," I told Pete,
"was Liberace."
Stan Kenton was an
enormously nice man. I mentioned this to arranger and composer Bill Kirchner,
who said, "Everyone I've ever known who played in that band said the same
thing. Even Mel Lewis, who was, as you know, a man not easily pleased."
The relationship
between Rugolo and Kenton has been compared to that between Duke Ellington and
Billy Strayhorn ."That's what they all say, "Pete said. "I
really don't know how close Strayhorn was with Ellington. But I think it was
similar because Stan never had time to write any more. Every time we'd get to a
hotel for a few days, we'd find a piano and discuss different arrangements.
We'd call it making menus. He'd say, 'Well, we'll start off with eight bars,
and then we'll do this or that.'
We wrote a few
tunes together. Collaboration was one. Most of the time he just let me alone.
He said, 'You know what to do.'"
On Christmas Day,
2001, Pete Rugolo turned 86, though he looked far younger than that. He is a
soft-spoken, self-effacing man, which may be one of the reasons he has not been
given his due as the pioneering jazz composer he was. Kenton managed to be a
controversial figure for the scope of what he attempted, which was often
denounced as pompous. And it could be, particularly in its later
manifestations. But the band for which Pete first wrote had a blazing quality,
particularly in its slow pieces, which a lot of young people found moody,
almost mystical, and melancholy, an emotion appropriate to the fragile years of
adolescence.
Pete was born in Sicily in a little mountaintop town near Messina called San Piero.
Another pioneering
jazz writer of the 1940s, when the music was expanding its harmonic and
rhythmic language, George Wallington, was also born in Sicily. He first studied piano with his father,
who was an opera singer. His name was Giacinto Figlia, and the family moved to New York from Palermo when he was a year old.
Pete's family made
the move when he was five.
"The only
thing I remember about it is seeing the Statue of Liberty from the boat,"
Pete said. "We didn't stop in New York. We went right on by tram to Santa Rosa, California, where my grandfather was, my mother's
father. He came years before we did. And he bought, like, a country store up by
the RussianRiver, Santa Rosa, SonomaCounty. When he had enough money, he sent for his
children, two sons and a daughter, my mother. My dad had a degree as a stone
mason, but when he came here he couldn't get work as a mason. My uncle was a
shoemaker, and he taught my father the shoe business. He had a little store in Santa Rosa, and when he repaired shoes, they were
like new. It was just a little business. We were very poor people. My dad
finally bought a little house. My mother worked in a cannery. We all worked. I
remember picking hops in the fields. And apples. There were a lot of Italian
people in Santa
Rosa.
"I walked a
couple of miles to school every day, and then started playing all the
instruments. My dad would fix people's shoes and if they couldn't pay him, they
would bring him things. Someone brought him a mandolin, and I started playing
the mandolin. One time I got a banjo, and I started playing that. And then
somebody, who must have owed my dad a few hundred dollars, brought a beautiful
grand piano. I learned to play by ear. I would play these Italian tunes, O Sole
Mio and things like that.
"There was a
little town near Santa Rosa called Petaluma. Later on I would hitch-hike to a teacher
there for piano lessons. She taught more or less from the jazz books.
"I went to high
school and junior college in Santa Rosa. From there I went to San Francisco State
College to be a teacher. I never thought I'd make a living in music. I studied
classical piano for the first time. I had to play some Beethoven for my
graduation. I went for four years, got my B.A. I played in dance bands in San Francisco. My favorite piano players were Teddy
Wilson and Art Tatum. I played at Sweets Ballroom, where every week they would
have a name band. Benny Goodman came in with Harry James playing the trumpet.
Sinatra came in singing with Tommy Dorsey. We would play the first couple of
hours and then we'd hear Duke Ellington or Jimmie Lunceford or Gene Krupa. I
remember giving Gene a couple of arrangements.
"I learned
the hard way, and I got to be pretty good, I must say. Everybody wanted to use
me to play piano in dance bands. In those days in San Francisco, what they called tenor bands were quite
popular. I had to play like Eddie Duchin and people like that. I didn't go for
the Freddy Martin type things. Gil Evans was my favorite band."
Gil Evans had a
highly regarded regional band that played in a Benny Goodman style. It was
heard on the radio.
"I liked
Fletcher Henderson," Pete said. "Eddie Sauter was one of my favorite
arrangers. And Bill Finegan. They were to
One of the best
things on the band that I have read is in a liner note by Pete Welding for a
reissue CD that he produced, Kenton:New Concepts in Artistry in
Rhythm. Acknowledging the later criticisms of Kenton, Welding wrote:
"But the 1940s
and most of the '50s belonged to Kenton. His was one of the most vital new
bands to have emerged during the war years and, as the decade advanced and put
behind it the hit-oriented vocals and novelty fare that initially had enabled
it to sustain itself, its music became ever more venturesome in character as
its approach was more clearly defined. This stemmed almost solely from Kenton,
through the many attractive themes and striking arrangements he fashioned for
the band and . . . through supervising . . . the other orchestrators who from
the late '40s contributed to its book."
"A lot of the
things in the book I did not write," Rugolo said. "Stan wrote Artistry in Rhythm, although I did
different arrangements of it. He'd been using it as a theme, the slow version.
I did Artistry Jumps. Stan wrote Concerto
to End All Concertos and Opus in
Pastels." Indeed, Kenton wrote and arranged a lot of the material that
defined the band by the mid-1940s, including Eager Beaver, Painted Rhythm, Collaboration, Theme to the West, Minor
Riff, and Southern Scandal. 'They
were all things he wrote before I joined the band," Pete said. "I
wrote Elegy for Alto and a lot of
things. I wrote most of the original tunes for the band.
"We were
supposed to record Ravel's Bolero.
But we couldn't get a copyright clearance. Stan said, 'Can you write a new
bolero?' So I wrote Artistry in Bolero.
Ten out of twelve things in those albums are mine."
One of the things
he wrote was an arrangement of Benny Carter's Lonely Woman, featuring a trombone solo by Milt Bernhart. He also
wrote an arrangement on All the Things
You Are for June Christy. The tune itself is beyond the scope of her chops,
and the boodly-oo-debe-bop scat solo in the up-tempo second chorus is
particularly inept. But then my views on scat singing are by now a matter of
record. He also wrote a piece called Three
Mothers, a sort of homage to Woody Herman's Four Brothers. The players were Art Pepper, Conte Candoli, and Bob
Cooper. Bebop was in full flower, and Pete sounded very much at home in it.
Kenton had an
acute ear not only for arrangers, Bill Russo and Bill Holman among the most
important, but for players. The alumni included, as well as those already
mentioned, Stan Getz, Eddie Safranski, Kai Winding, Shelly Manne, Laurindo
Almeida, Conte and Pete Candoli, Maynard Ferguson, Shorty Rogers, Lennie Niehaus, Frank Rosolino, Sal
Salvador, Bill Perkins, Lee Konitz, Richie Kamuca, Herb Geller, Zoot Sims, Stan
Levey, Bill Perkins, Charlie Mariano, Carl Fontana, Pepper Adams, Red Mitchell,
Jack Sheldon, Bud Shank, Rolf Ericsson, Jimmy Knepper, Al Porcino, and Red
Kelly. A lot of these men also played in the Woody Herman band
There was no great
love between Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. Because I liked both men, and Woody
was almost a father to me, I tried to soothe things, telling each of them (I
lied) something nice the other supposedly had said about him. It didn't work;
they either knew each other too well, or they knew me too well. Bassist Red
Kelly, one of those who worked in both bands, proposed a theory. "They
didn't trust each other," Red said. "Woody didn't trust anything that
didn't swing. Stan didn't trust anything that did."
Shelly Manne was
quoted in Down Beat as saying that playing drums with Kenton was like
chopping wood. Al Porcino, one of the greatest of lead trumpet players, was yet
another of those who had played in both bands. A legend has grown up around a
remark attributed to Porcino. Stan would sometimes give pep talks to the band.
In one of them Stan said (and he had a wonderfully sonorous voice), "We've
had the Artistry in Rhythm orchestra, we've had the Innovations in Modern Music
orchestra, we've had the Neophonic Orchestra. We've got to try something
new."
From the back of
the band came the slow bored voice of Al Porcino, "We could try swinging,
Stan."
Bud Shank told me
a few years ago:
"I had and
still have a lot of respect for Stan. He really encouraged the guys in the band
to do whatever their thing was. I was hired to be lead alto player, not to be a
soloist. That was Art Pepper's job. Whatever your position in that band, Stan
encouraged you to do your thing.
"But that
band was too clumsy to swing — because of the instrumentation and the voicings.
On the other hand, the sounds that came out of it were big noises, really
impressive. That's what that band was all about, making those really big
noises. As far as swinging, it never did swing. Maybe it wasn't supposed to. I
don't know. There sure were some players in it who swung.
"The Contemporary
Concepts album, with those Bill Holman arrangements — that's one of the
best big-band albums I've ever heard."
And, with Mel
Lewis driving the rhythm section, it assuredly swung.
Confirming Bud's
statement that Stan let the musicians do their thing, Pete said: "We
played a lot of theaters in those days. Stan needed a fast opener. He'd tell me
things like that. He changed hardly a note of what I did. He paid me so much a
week. At first it was fifty dollars a week, or something like that, but he
never said, 'You have to write so many arrangements.' When we traveled I never
had time to write. But when we'd get to L.A. I'd write five arrangements. I learned to
write pretty fast in those days. One tune a day.
"I traveled on the bus.
We had to pay for our own room and board. We were on
the bus a lot, playing one-nighters. We'd play one place and the next night
we'd be two hundred miles away. I loved playing Canada."
"Yeah, that's
where I met you. You were so kind to me."
"I'm glad. I
think all the people I met were nice to me. I met Duke Ellington. He would talk
to me. In fact he'd call me at four o'clock in the morning and say, 'When are you
going to write something for me?' I couldn't write for him. He was my favorite,
and I'd think, 'What if I write something and he doesn't like it?' The other
guy I did the same thing to was Frank Sinatra. I got to be a buddy of his. I
kept company with him, especially during his bad years when he couldn't sing.
He was always after me to do an arrangement for him. And I could never do it.
He was my favorite singer, and I thought 'Suppose I do something and he doesn't
like it?' So those two, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, I could never write
for them. Anybody else asked me, and I would do it. Charlie Barnet. Whatever
they wanted. But those two, I never could force myself to write for them.
"After Stan
broke up the band in '49,1 stayed two years in New York. I went to work for Capitol records,
producing. I recorded all the Capitol people that came to town. In those days, New York was wonderful. It had 52nd Street and all the jazz. I did some arrangements.
I wrote for Billy Eckstine. All the good singers liked my work. A lot of
artists were coming into New York to record. Capitol had an office there. I
did Mel Torme's first things, Blue Moon. I found Harry Belafonte singing some
place, and signed him. He could sing jazz, but he didn't sell and Capitol let
him go. He became famous singing calypso. We've remained friends.
"I produced
the Miles Davis sessions they later called Birth of the Cool. I didn't make
that name up. I heard them rehearsing down in the Village one day. I liked the
idea of this band, so I signed them. We made some dates. Nobody knew it was
going to be that popular until Capitol released it as The Birth of the Cool.
"It was a
thing we all loved doing. We had all those good players, like Gerry Mulligan
and Lee Konitz. Capitol put the records out, and the musicians started
collecting them. I produced them all. I stayed in the booth and I really was
tough with them. I made them do things over and over until they were just
right. Stan taught me that. Stan would take a half hour tuning, making sure
everything was just right. We really spent time on things, and that's why those
records are so good."
"What is
remarkable about that Miles Davis band," I said, "is that it only
ever played two public engagements, a week at the Royal Roost and a one-nighter
at Birdland, and made what was collected into one ten-inch LP, and it has had this immense
influence on American music."
'That's
right," Pete said. 'The musicians bought the records. It was word of
mouth."
It is a more than
likely that without Pete Rugolo, those records would never have been made.
He also produced —
and wrote — a considerable number of the Nat Cole records, including one of the
most famous of them all. "I did about forty things for Nat. For a couple
of years, I did all his things. One of the things I was proud of was Lush
Life. When it first came out, Capitol didn't like it. They didn't
release it for a whole year. They finally put it out as a B side on a real
commercial tune. And people started really liking it. That was the first
recording of the tune. Billy Strayhorn gave it to me. He said, 'I've got a tune
here. I wish you'd show it to Nat.' I loved the tune. I made like a tone poem
out of it. I made it about twice as long. But for a long time I got criticized
for it.
“Nat was so nice
to work for. He never told me what to do. He would give me a list of songs. I
knew his keys. And then we'd do a record date two or three times a year. We'd
do something here or something in New York. He let me write nice things. I wrote some
pretty string stuff. "
Pete wrote for a
dizzying variety of singers during his Capitol years, including the Four
Freshmen.
"They came to
my office in New York," he said, "and they sang Laura for me and a few tunes and I loved them. I talked Capitol
into signing them. When I came back out here, I got together with them. They
liked the sound of Stan's trombones. So I talked them into recording with five
trombones. I wrote the arrangements, I conducted, I produced it. We called it Four
Freshmen and Five Trombones. It made a big hit. Later on we tried it
again, but it wasn't as successful. I was close friends with them. They were
all wonderful guys.
"When I moved
here to L.A. from New York, I went through a divorce. She took every
cent out of the bank. When I arrived, I didn't have a nickel. I stayed at June
Christy's place for a while. I got a call from a publisher, Mickey Goldsen. He
said, 'Pete, you know, your royalties are really good. If you want, I can give
you so much a month until you get settled.' I was looking for work. I was
ghosting, I was writing things for Les Baxter for fifty dollars an arrangement.
I did a whole album with Yma Sumac. I was doing a lot of things for Ray
Anthony. So when Mickey Goldsen called me, he said he could give me $200 a
month to live on. Many years later he told me, 'Pete, I have to tell you. That
was Stan's money. He was supporting you.'
"Stan
published my songs, and he got the money back in time, but Stan did things like
that. Stan had a couple of publishing companies with Mickey. Mickey said, 'Stan
was the one. He wanted me to take care of you.'"
(Mickey Goldsen
headed Capitol's publishing division during Johnny Mercer's presidency of the
company. Later he set up his own publishing companies, under the general head
of Criterion Music. He has a considerable jazz catalogue, including many works
of Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan. He is probably, along with Howie
Richmond, the most respected publisher in this business. Howie is now
semi-retired, but Mickey is still very active, working ever day and playing
tennis every morning. And he is eighty-six.)
"For a while
I was an a&r man with Mercury," Pete said. "Stereo was just
coming out. I did an album with ten trombones and two pianos. Then I did ten
trumpets. I took all the famous trumpet tunes and made arrangements. Then I did
one with two basses. I was allowed to do anything I wanted to. I produced Billy
Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington.
"I got a call
from Johnny Green, who was head of music at MGM in those days. They were making a movie
with Mickey Rooney playing the drums, called The Strip. I wrote sort
of a jazz score. That was my first movie. I got to meet Joe Pasternak, who was
producing all the musicals, and I did all the Esther Williams pictures. I
stayed almost five years at MGM.
"Then one day
I got a call from Stanley Wilson at Universal. They said they were doing a TV
series with Boris Karloff called Thriller and they thought I'd be
good for that kind of score. They wanted a real kind of modern score. So I went
to Universal and I did the pilot and they really liked it a lot. I met Roy
Huggins, who became a very dear friend, and he used me in everything. I did The
Fugitive theme and the music and everything Roy Huggins did. And I did
other things at Universal. I stayed at Universal for fifteen years. I did one
show after another. I wrote, like, forty minutes of music every week. I don't
know how I ever did it. I learned to write real fast! And I never had an
orchestrator. I orchestrated all my own music. I did a lot of those
movies-of-the-week, as they called them. I did some of the Hitchcock TV
shows."
"Were you and
Mancini at Universal at the same time?"
'Yeah. By then
Hank was doing movies. He didn't do any television then. He'd already done Peter
Gunn. We were very dear friends. We had dinner together, we liked to
cook together. For a long time he never got the credit he deserved. It went to
Joseph Gershenson at Universal. Hank would get an orchestration credit.
Gershenson would take the music credit. That was going on a lot in those
days."
I said, "Hank
did things like Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the royalties are still coming
in. As Hank said, 'Movies are forever.'"
"Oh sure. I
was griping all the time because Roy Huggins wanted music under everything,
fires, machine guns, wrecks. And I was saying, 'I don't have time to write all
that music!' But now I'm so glad I did, because the residuals are by the
minute. And they
took time to do, automobile races, and all that. Now I'm glad I did it"
I asked Pete, who
retired some time ago, if he could, in so storied a career, cite high points in
his life and work. He said:
"I wrote a
lot of television shows. I did movies. I did some jazz albums for Columbia
Records. I'm very proud of all the things I did with June Christy, Something
Cool.
"And the
years with Stan. They were wonderful. Stan was wonderful. We were very close
friends, almost like brothers."
Some years ago,
Henry Mancini went to the mountain village where his father was born. The road
was rough and dangerous. There was no hotel in the village, and he and his
wife turned around and went back down the mountain. Now, Hank told me, a
freeway ran to the village, and it had evolved into a ski resort. He said it's
where the Italians go to ski.
Pete made a
similar pilgrimage, but in his case to the village in which not his father but he
was born. Again, the road up the mountain was dangerous. And again, there was
no hotel, and he never did find the house in which he was born. He and his wife
Edie told their driver to turn around, and they went back down the mountain.
They went on to Messina.
Sicily was far in Pete's past."
You can listen to
an example of Pete’s writing for television on the audio track to the following
video. The tune is entitled The Teaser and
it would be played for the short “teaser” action you see first at the beginning
of each Richard Diamond Private Detective television show starring
actor David Janssen.
“The Teaser is a stirring example of
Rugolo’s thrilling Latin Jazz. Larry Bunker plays both bongos and (later)
vibraphone. The irrepressible Bud Shank plays the Jazz alto solo. Buddy
Collette and Bob Cooper are briefly heard on flute and oboe respectively.”
From a concert performed by the orchestra on April 28, 2011 at The Bimhuis in Amsterdam, the composition is entitled Black, Whiter and Brown and featuresPeter Beetson piano, Joris Roelofs on bass clarinet, and Jan van Duikeren on trumpet with Martijn Vink booting things along in the drum chair.
“I was playing with Sonny
Criss and Hampton Hawes – a great Jazz pianist. … Sonny had such a great ear that
he could hear something once and play it. …
Sonny Criss and I played together quite a
while until I went to study with Joseph Cadaly [a first chair saxophonist at RKO Studies
who taught reeds, harmony and solfège]. That’s
when Sonny and I split up. He continued into progressive Jazz, and I went and
studied.
When we split, he started
going all up and down the Coast playing and going to Europe.
But I don't know, it just didn't happen. He'd get records. People said he was
great. They played his stuff. But it just didn't happen for him, and I think
that kind of disturbed him. Especially when you put your whole soul and your
whole life and just wrap up everything into something and it doesn't happen.
He was pioneering and when
you're pioneering, it's kind of more difficult to get recognition …. You have
to suffer when you're a pioneer. So that's what happened, really, I think,
with Sonny. He was just early.
- Cecil “Big Jay” McNeely, tenor
saxophonist
Criss was a bop saxophonist,
strongly influenced at first by Charlie Parker. But his mature style was more
distinctive: he produced a warm, rich tone and a prominent vibrato that Parker
lacked. He was capable of playing dazzling runs with such effortless grace that
they never sounded ostentatious. An excellent jazz musician, through lack of
opportunities Criss never gained the recognition he deserved.
- Barry Kernfeld [ed.], The
New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
“Criss’ style is marked by
super-fast runs, soaring, high register figures and a pure urgent tone and
delivery. His ballad renderings are often characterized by sorrowful solos,
spoken with manly regret and without a wasted gesture. At times Criss’ soling
bears comparison with Parker’s on the “With Strings” session.”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin
Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. [paraphrased]
“Sonny’s was a talent too big
to be denied. For me, he comes immediately after Bird as an alto saxophonist. …
I don’t know anyone who was exposed to his playing who didn’t enjoy him.”
- Bob Porter, Jazz Historian
How do you
overlook a giant?
This is not a
trick question, as somehow, the mainstream Jazz world managed to overlook alto
saxophonist Sonny Criss for thirty years: from 1947, when he first came on the scene, until his death in 1977.
Although Sonny was
a player of extraordinary power and brilliance, outside of a small coterie on
admirers, primarily in Los Angeles, he was largely unnoticed in Jazz circles in terms of his significance and
importance.
Why? The guy was a
monster player.
As is usually the
case, if one is looking for information and explanations about modern Jazz in
California between 1945-1960, a good starting point is Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz [Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: The University of California Press, 1992].
And as usual, Ted
doesn’t disappoint offering over nine pages on Sonny’s career in his marvelous
retrospective of Jazz on the West Coast [pp. 121-129].
Picking up where
Jazz historian Bob Porter left off, Ted comments:
“Perhaps, the
problem was, as Porter hints, that so few people were exposed to Criss’s music.
Sonny’s career took place in Los Angeles (except for a short time in Europe). He never made the East Coast move, which
benefited other talents such as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Dexter
Gordon.”
Ted goes on to
explain: “ Although Criss's sound and conception stayed true to the model set by
Bird, several differences are striking. Criss tends more toward even streams of
notes, only occasionally matching Parker's masterful start-and-stop rhythmic
phrasing. And even more than Parker, Criss maintained a strong gospel-ish blues
bent in his playing. … Electricity is in the air every time Criss solos.”
Most, if not all,
suicides are shocking, and the reason for Sonny’s remained obscure for many
years until Ted discovered while interviewing Criss’s mother, Lucy, for his
book on West Coast Jazz, that Sonny had been suffering from stomach cancer.
If you are new to
Sonny’s music, you can explore his style and approach with a 2 CD set re-issued
on Blue Note [7243 5 24564 2 0] entitled The Complete Imperial Sessions which
is a compilation of three albums that Criss made in the 1950s: Jazz USA, Go Man! and Sonny Criss Plays Cole Porter.
“IT didn't make
any sense. Sonny Criss took his own life shortly after his 50th birthday just
as things were finally breaking for him. After a hiatus of several years, he
had resumed recording in 1975. An album for Xanadu, two for Muse and a pair for
Impulse had brought his name back before the public once again. He was
preparing to make his first Japanese tour. He had toured Europe in 1973 and '74 and found that his
popularity, especially in France, was still strong. Everything was finally
falling into place. Again, it didn't make any sense.
His entry in the Biographical
Encyclopedia of Jazz details a career of fits and starts. He had the
ability to play with major leaguers right from the beginning. Concerts for Gene
Norman, tours (and records) with Norman Granz, associations with Billy
Eckstine, Jazz at the Philharmonic and Buddy Rich were a part of his first ten
years as a professional. Apart from a period in the early 1960s when he lived
and worked in France, he was associated with the Los Angeles jazz scene. But in order to understand
Sonny Criss, you must start in his hometown of Memphis.
W. C. Handy put BluffCity on the map musically early in the 20th
century. Handy songs such as "Memphis Blues" and "Beale Street
Blues" detailed some of the virtues of the community. Then and now, the
blues is an ongoing part of life in Memphis but the flip side of the coin is
the strength of gospel music in the same area. Memphis has produced some fine jazz musicians
through the years, yet each of these players has had to leave town in order to
build a career. The local music lovers appreciated the jazz played there, but
there were few opportunities to make a full-time living. The best band of the
pre-bop era was that of Al Jackson Sr. His son, Al Jr., would be a charter
member of Booker T and the MGs. Jackson Sr/s drummer for much of his band's
existence was Phineas Newborn, whose sons Calvin and Phineas Jr., went on to
international fame. The first alto player in Al Jackson Sr/s band was Hank
O'Day. Hank O'Day was the original inspiration for Sonny Criss.
O'Day had a big
sound in the manner of Willie Smith or Hilton Jefferson. There are no
recordings of him so there is no way to hear exactly what it was that attracted
Sonny Criss. Yet O'Day's reputation lingered long in Memphis: many years later, his bandmaster gave
Bennie Crawford the nickname "little Hank.” The "little" tag
soon disappeared but Bennie has been Hank Crawford his entire professional
career.
Sonny Criss also
heard Charlie Parker before he left Memphis. Parker's solo on Jay McShann's
"Hootie Blues" was of keen interest to the young saxophonist before
he knew the name of its player. "It was clear to me, right away," he
once remarked, "that someone had found a new way to solo on a twelve-bar
blues." The final influence on Criss was Eddie Vinson, primarily for his
feeling. On blues at certain tempos, Criss and Vinson can sound very much
alike. Benny Carter has also been cited as an influence on Sonny Criss; while
there is no question that Sonny Criss had great respect and admiration for
Carter, the evidence of influence is scant.
The Criss family
moved to Los
Angeles in 1942. By the time he had graduated from High School, Sonny was
working the Central Avenue territory with a variety of small groups.
In 1947 things really picked up for Criss: He played some gigs with Howard
McGhee and appeared with McGhee at Gene Norman's Just Jazz concert in April. He
worked at Billy Berg's, backing Billy Eckstine, in a group led by Al Killian.
That group (which also included Wardell Gray) worked up the coast with Eckstine
and at the conclusion of the tour continued to appear under Killian's
leadership. They were back in Los Angeles for the show Ralph Bass promoted at the
Central Avenue Elks' Hall in early July. The band then played Seattle, San Francisco and spent several months in Portland. Acetates were cut in Portland and the Killian group appeared on the
Armed Forces Radio series, Jubilee.
In 1948, Criss
began working with Jazz at the Philharmonic [JATP]. At the conclusion of the
spring 1949 JATP tour, he worked up and down the eastern seaboard with a group
led by Flip Phillips. He made his first recordings for Granz in September and
gigged with The Lighthouse All-Stars. Things continued along similar lines until
1952 when the bottom of the scene began to drop out. By this time Criss was
known as a soloist and a small group specialist which would be his role for his
entire career. He rarely got any studio gigs (although he popped up on a Jimmy
Witherspoon Modern session) and while he gradually built up a reputation as a
leader around Los Angeles, he never worked enough out of town to establish himself as
a draw on the road. In late 1955, he began a three-year association with Buddy
Rich.
West Coast jazz
was not something that held any interest for Sonny Criss and the record labels
operating around town such as Pacific Jazz, Contemporary, GNP or Jazz West
weren't interested in what Sonny was playing. Then, all of a sudden, things
changed. During 1956, despite the fact that he had recorded only four single
sides as a leader and had never made an album, Sonny Criss recorded three LPs
for Imperial Records.
On the surface
this looks crazy. Lew Chudd had founded Imperial Records in 1945, and initially
its recordings were of Mexican artists. But it had shown a penchant for
developing country acts (Slim Whitman) and rhythm & blues performers (a
host of fine artists, mostly from New Orleans, headed by Fats Domino). They had dabbled
in modern jazz during the 10"- LP era with a pair of fine recordings by
Charlie Mariano, but since that time had done almost nothing. Imperial was a
singles label and until 1956 had no 12" IPs. Apart from Sonny Criss,
Imperial issued two albums by Wild Bill Davis and one by Warne Marsh (reissued
on Intuition
by Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh — Capitol Jazz 52771) and that constituted
their attempts at jazz recording for quite a while. Those albums had a very
short shelf life and by the end of the decade had been deleted. A compilation
taken from all three Criss albums was issued in 1962 and quickly disappeared.
The albums have been reissued on several occasions in Japan.
The music on these
albums is uniformly excellent. There has never been any individual credited
with producing these albums but whoever it was they did a fine job. Criss had
chosen his accompanists well, the material is a thoughtful blend of standards
and originals and the performances are absolutely masterful. Highlights would
include the four titles with Barney Kessel, the ballad "More Than You
Know" (especially the verse) and the Criss masterpiece, "West Coast
Blues” from the Jazz USA album; all of Sonny Clark's playing and the blazing
"The Man I Love" from Go Man and "What Is This Thing
Called Love" from Sonny Criss Plays Cole Porter. These
recordings are every bit as good as the more celebrated Criss records from the
60s and 70s.
Sonny is
remembered fondly by almost everyone who ever heard him play. He had an innate
ability to communicate. His passion for a beautiful ballad or a funky blues was
equal to his lightning quick articulation at fast tempos. The music here is the
last major Sonny Criss material to come to CD and if you have not encountered
this artist before, one listen will make you want more. There is other Sonny Criss
material on CD but for many of us there could never be enough.
— BOB PORTER March,
2000”
The following
video tribute to Sonny was developed in conjunction with the ace graphics team
at CerraJazz LTD and features his version of Summertime with Sonny Clark on piano,
Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Lawrence Marable on drums.