The Penguin Jazz Guide (107 page)

Television executive Chuck Dimarco says:
‘I remember seeing Kirk on
Ed Sullivan
, maybe the last
Ed Sullivan
of all, and he turned into this strange circus act, and me thinking how odd it was that this man who was so insistent on the dignity of jazz should use – throw away? – such an opportunity. It was like living in the days of Dada and surrealism. An action, an
acte gratuit
. He even invited along Archie Shepp, and he
hated
Archie Shepp.’

Born blind, Hibbler became a star with the Ellington orchestra during the war years. He modelled his early singing on Bing Crosby, but increasingly adopted a strange Cockney accent and an exaggerated melisma that is often taken to quite extraordinary lengths. A
Meeting Of The Times
– perhaps more strictly a Roland Kirk album, recorded under his contract with Atlantic but jointly credited – is a small masterpiece. It’s all the better for Kirk’s decision to set aside his usual multi-instrumentalism and concentrate on single horns for this deeply felt but by no means pious tribute to Ellington. By 1972, Hibbler was almost forgotten, but here his rich baritone and bizarre diction are the perfect complement. Just as nobody ever sounded quite like Kirk, nobody sang a lyric quite like Al. He slides into ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me’ as if giving dictation, and never quite lets go the speech-song until he starts to syncopate phrases in the middle. On ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More’, he stretches weird triphthongs on phrases like
‘moy moy-und’s
never at ease’. Not since Dick Van Dyke has English been put through the mincer quite so thoroughly. Al also turns ‘This Love Of Mine’ into a thing of almost operatic splendour, before Kirk picks up and doubles the time on his beautifully simple solo. ‘Daybreak’ features Kirk on clarinet before he switches to flute for a tremulous out passage. On ‘Lover, Come Back To Me’, the harmonization of horns is so bizarre that it sounds as though the saxophonist is playing fiddle. Roland takes ‘Carney And Bigard Place’ as an instrumental, which is a welcome respite from the surrealism. The other Ellington tunes are ‘Something ’Bout Believing’ and ‘I Didn’t Know About You’ and the Hammerstein–Romberg classic ‘Lover, Come Back To Me’ is a wonderful version, managing to sound deeply threatening underneath the romance. There’s also a stray track from another session, with Leon Thomas reprising Kirk’s autobiographical ‘Dream’, but it’s very much Hibbler’s moment back in the spotlight. The accompaniments are simple, funky and straightforwardly loyal to the song at hand. Perhaps because it’s largely the singer’s album, it’s one that’s rarely cited by Kirk fans, but it’s a classic.

& See also
RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK, We Free Kings
(1961; p. 278),
The Inflated Tear
(1968; p. 351)

DONALD BYRD
^&

Born 9 December 1932, Detroit, Michigan

Trumpet

Black Byrd

Blue Note 84466

Byrd; Fonce Mizell (t, v); Allan Curtis Barnes (as, f, ob); Roger Glenn (saxes, f); Joe Sample (p, ky); Fred Perren (ky, v); David T. Walker (g); Wilton Felder, Chuck Rainey (b); Harvey Mason (d); Bobbye Porter Hall, Stephanie Spruill (perc); Larry Mizell (v, arr). April & November 1972.

Donald Byrd said (1974):
‘I never thought of them [hard bop and fusion] as two different kinds of music. I played pretty much the same things myself. It’s just that one way I played like
this
’
– horn straight out and orthodox –
‘and the other way, I played like
this
’
– bell pointing to the floor, Miles Davis-style.

Hard-bop strict-constructionists cried foul when this came out, convinced that Byrd had sold out to Mammon. The Larry Mizell arrangements, vocal parts, electric keyboards and bass all pointed in the direction of fusion, but Byrd was a savvy enough musician to keep the jazz component sufficiently high to hold on to much of his original audience, who were in any case fighting a rearguard against the post-
Bitches Brew
evolution. Byrd and Mizell assembled the musicians in the Sound Factory in LA, usually a haven for rock and soul bands, and the recording proceeded slowly, with much attention to layering a detailed sound that has more substance in it than the sometimes lumpy rhythm suggests. The presence of Sample and Felder from The Crusaders was some guarantee of quality, though the other horns rarely rise above the professional. Byrd’s own competence is evident in every cut, though he sounds less polished on the make-up tracks from November, which had a different (and frankly inferior) line-up.

Does it still qualify as a jazz record? In our view, yes, though clearly it’s a very different sonority from the Blue Notes of the ’50s. However, it was far from a sudden change of direction. Byrd had been signalling something new from the turn of the ’70s, bringing in electric instruments on a string of albums from 1969’s
Fancy Free
to such underrated records as
Electric Byrd
,
Kofi
and
Ethiopian Nights
. By the time of
Black Byrd
, he had a purchase on a new, younger audience, and has been an honoured figure in acid jazz circles ever since.

& See also
Byrd In Hand
(1959; p. 239)

SONNY STITT
^&

Born Edward Boattner Stitt, 2 February 1924, Boston, Massachusetts; died 22 July 1982, Washington DC

Alto and tenor saxophones

Constellation

Gambit GCD 69269 (with
Tune Up!
)

Stitt; Barry Harris (p); Sam Jones (b); Alan Dawson, Roy Brooks (d). June 1972.

Club owner Ronnie Scott said (1989):
‘He told me: “I’m like a lone wolf, but I like to fit in. I turn up to play with some guys I never met before, I don’t play what I want to play. I play what they know how to play.” ’

Stitt’s tireless touring and drop-of-a-hat recording regimen undoubtedly diluted his recorded legacy, but ‘going single’ was his avocation rather than a burden and every now and then there was an opportunity to play with his peers and in more ideal circumstances. At the start of his final decade, Stitt put down a small masterpiece in
Constellation.
He’d made
Tune Up!
with essentially the same group – Alan Dawson on drums – and also for Muse a few months earlier and they are available together now as a Gambit reissue, jointly credited to Barry Harris.

It’s an ideal pairing: two (almost) first-generation boppers still in love with the music’s by-ways and still able to give one of Charlie Parker’s less celebrated lines a fresh-minted quality. Unlike the usual club date where he would probably have to play a bag of familiar show tunes, Stitt here leans on a shared familiarity with Tadd Dameron (‘Casbah’), with the deceptive line of ‘Topsy’ and his own ‘By Accident’. Harris is in sparkling form and Brooks brings a distinctive touch; the drummer, who formed his Artistic Truth group this same year, was to drift into mental illness in succeeding years, a sorry end for one of the music’s deceptive journeymen. Stitt’s alto-playing is crisp and incisive, with little of the throwaway
insouciance he brought to more casual sessions. It’s a reminder of what a powerful presence he was for three decades, and incidentally what a vital source of strong bop the Muse label was in its heyday. It’s a catalogue that has enjoyed a chequered history, but at least there is now a conservation programme.

& See also
New York Jazz
(1956; p. 190)

GEORGE MELLY

Born 17 August 1926, Liverpool, Lancashire, England; died 5 July 2007, London

Voice

Nuts / Son Of Nuts

Warner Jazz 8122-73747-2 2CD

Melly; John Chilton (t); Wally Fawkes (cl); Bruce Turner (as, cl); Colin Bates (p); Steve Fagg (b); Chuck Smith (d). June 1972–September 1973.

George Melly said (1998):
‘Hearing Bessie Smith, I guess that’s where a lot of it came from. That’s me: Bessie Smith in a tweed suit.’

Writer, art critic, surrealist and singer, Melly was perhaps the greatest maverick in British jazz, and widely known even outside jazz circles. His cartoon strip
Flook
, illustrated by ‘Trog’, clarinettist Wally Fawkes, was a staple of the
Daily Mail
for many years, and Melly was a stalwart of television variety programmes, chat shows and quiz games. An habitué of Soho, he became its most vivid raconteur, telling the story of his own life in successful volumes of hysterical autobiography:
Scouse Mouse
,
Rum, Bum and Concertina
(about the navy from which he was allegedly canned for distributing anarchist tracts) and the superb
Owning Up
, which contains just about everything anyone needs to know about British trad.

It would be disingenuous to say that Melly’s artistry was complex and subtle. He was as raucous as a costermonger, but there was a musicianship there as well, and he surrounded himself with fine players: Mick Mulligan, John Chilton, latterly Digby Fairweather. Melly belted out classic jazz and blues with leather-lunged intensity and without finessing the lyric. In a club it was impossible not to be distracted by the man. On record, it stands up remarkably well. Some of the early Pye things, made when he had hooked up with Mulligan’s band, have a rootsy authenticity and he kept that going into his last few years, when he gargled a few more lines but still commanded the floor. The performances of the early ’70s are as arch as Broxburn viaduct, but these ancient songs aren’t prettified or turned into ‘art’ and Melly’s renderings are far closer, surely, to the black vernacular originals and music hall descendants than most latter-day approximations. Melly was a practising Surrealist, not a dilettante. Now that he’s gone, the records seem that little bit more precious.

CHARLES TOLLIVER

Born 6 March 1942, Jacksonville, Florida

Trumpet

Grand Max

Black Lion DA Music 760145

Tolliver; John Hicks (p); Reggie Workman (b); Alvin Queen (d). August 1972.

Pianist Andrew Hill said (2005):
‘He has a sound that just flows out of the horn, like a molten liquid. I don’t know anyone else who sounds quite like that, or who can sustain that kind of movement for so long.’

Tolliver studied at Howard and served an apprenticeship with Gerald Wilson. He was later part of Music Inc. with Stanley Cowell and founded Strata East records with the pianist. Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm of other musicians – including Dizzy Gillespie – Tolliver never seemed to break through to wider appreciation and was out of public circulation for quite some time, before Andrew Hill got him involved again shortly before the pianist’s death. Verdicts on Tolliver’s performance then varied quite sharply, but there is no mistaking the quality or daring of his earlier work.

For economic reasons, a lot of the released work on Strata East was recorded in concert.
Grand Max
was taped live at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival and originally released under that name, before Black Lion licensed it from the ailing imprint. The title-track is a tiny prelude to a subtle and involving set that includes Tolliver’s own powerful ‘Our Second Father’, as well as Stanley Cowell’s ‘Prayer For Peace’ and an unexpected but effective reading of Neal Hefti’s ‘Repetition’. Tolliver’s lead is always big and assertive, with a timbre that occasionally recalls Freddie Hubbard’s, but edgier than that in delivery, and in some aspects more saxophonic in its phrasing, which perhaps reflects the influence of John Coltrane.

JACKIE MCLEAN
^&

Born 17 May 1932, New York City; died 31 May 2006, Hartford, Connecticut

Alto saxophone

Live At Montmartre

Steeplechase SCCD 31001

McLean; Kenny Drew (p); Bo Stief (b); Alex Riel (d). August 1972.

McLean’s student, saxophonist Steve Lehman, says:
‘Jackie used to tell us that we weren’t playing African music and we weren’t playing European music; we were playing
American
music.’

A live record from Europe might seem a perverse choice, given the run of exceptional albums McLean made for Blue Note between
New Soil
and 1966, including
A Fickle Sonance, Bluesnik, Old And New Gospel, Let Freedom Ring
and
Destination … Out!
To some degree, though, all of these simply worked out the further implications of what was adumbrated on that first release for the label. In later years, and particularly when touring, McLean seemed able to re-incorporate some of the lessons of freedom into his basic bop/blues language – later still there were elements of ‘world music’ and a new mythology/cosmology to take account of – and the results were exhilarating.

Listening to McLean in Europe in 1972 (and one of the authors was present at the Jazzhus Montmartre recording on 5 August) was an affirmation of American music and the freedoms it still offered at a time when America was an easy imperial bogey. For sheer
joie de vivre
,
Live At Montmartre
is hard to beat. Full-voiced and endlessly inventive, McLean romps through ‘Smile’, adding the ‘shave-and-a-haircut-bay–rum’ cadence to the end of his first statement with an almost arrogant flourish. ‘Das Dat’ follows, but already here, there is a plangent, almost chastened edge to the saxophone sound; it’s a record that has its mournful, elegiac, homesick tinge as well as upbeat swing. ‘Parker’s Mood’ is perhaps the best of his later bebop essays, shifting out of synch with Drew’s excellent chording for a couple of measures.