The Penguin Jazz Guide (36 page)

Teddy Edwards said (1991):
‘Dexter and I were each supposed to play solo. His took so long I only had five minutes left to record mine, and no time to prepare, so I had to figure out a plain blues. He moved slow, Dexter, and didn’t make time for anyone else, but I got a hit [“Blues In Teddy’s Flat”] out of it!’

Gordon attained mythical proportions when he appeared as ‘Dale Turner’ in Bernard Tavernier’s
Round Midnight
, playing a hybrid of himself and Bud Powell. Originally influenced by Lester Young, Long Tall Dexter favoured easy, behind-the-beat phrasing which could be turned to more confrontational use when required. In 1962, after drug-related problems, he moved to Europe and stayed for the next decade and a half.

Gordon’s on–off partnership with fellow tenorist Wardell Gray was consistently
productive, pairing him for much of the late ’40s with another Lester Young disciple who had taken on board most of the modernist idiom without abandoning Young’s mellifluously extended solo style. The Dial sessions – with Gray and, at Christmas 1947, Teddy Edwards – are definitive of West Coast idiom of the time. Spotlite brings together all the material, including a track with just Edwards up front. ‘The Chase’ was a studio version of the saxophone contests that Dexter and Gray had been conducting night after night in LA’s Little Harlem. The earliest session features Melba Liston, who was presumably recruited for her arranging. The charts to ‘Mischievous Lady’ and ‘Lullaby In Rhythm’ sound tight and well-organized, more coherent than the tiresome ‘Chase’. On the same day, Gordon also laid down three tracks with just rhythm, of which ‘Chromatic Aberration’ is perhaps the most interesting vis-à-vis the development of bebop, but ‘It’s The Talk Of The Town’ is the occasion for one of his most expressive ballad solos of these years. The final Dial session, with Rowles at the piano, was made just before the AFM recording ban.

& See also
Doin’ Alright
(1961; p. 275),
More Than You Know
(1975; p. 423)

FATS NAVARRO

Born Theodore Navarro, 24 September 1923, Key West, Florida; died 7 July 1950, New York City

Trumpet

The Complete Fats Navarro On Blue Note And Capitol

Blue Note 33373 2CD

Navarro; Howard McGhee (t); Ernie Henry (as); Allen Eager, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Rouse (ts); Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell (p); Milt Jackson (p, vib); Nelson Boyd, Tommy Potter, Curley Russell (b); Kenny Clarke, Roy Haynes, Shadow Wilson (d); Chano Pozo (perc). September 1947–August 1949.

Cornetist Nat Adderley said (1985):
‘There’s maybe something in the water in Florida that produces good trumpet-players. There’s Blue Mitchell, Idrees Sulieman, and there’s Fats Navarro, of course. He was one of the greatest of all on the instrument, but called back in a hurry, so we’ll never really know …’

Brilliant, but unfortunate, ‘Fat Girl’ worked with Andy Kirk and in Billy Eckstine’s legendary band, where he replaced Dizzy Gillespie. Fats was a more lyrical player and sounded easier in the middle register. His career was foreshortened by narcotics and tuberculosis, but he recorded some of the finest brass solos of the bebop era, many with bandleader Tadd Dameron.

These sessions are one of the peaks of the bebop movement and one of the essential modern-jazz records. Navarro’s tone and solo approach were honed in big-band settings and he has the remarkable ability to maintain a graceful poise even when playing loudly and at speed. The contrast with McGhee (it seems extraordinary that some of their performances together have been misattributed) is very striking. Their duelling choruses on ‘Double Talk’ from a marvellous October 1948 session are some of the high-points of the record; there is, as with several other tracks, an alternative take which shows how thoughtful and self-critical an improviser the young trumpeter was, constantly refining, occasionally wholly rethinking his approach to a chord progression, but more frequently taking over whole segments of his solo and reordering them into a more satisfying outline. Navarro is rhythmically quite conservative, but he plays with great containment and manages to create an illusion, most obvious on ‘Boperation’, from the same session, that he is floating just above the beat; by contrast, McGhee sounds hasty and anxious. One hears the same effect rather more subtly on both takes of ‘Symphonette’ and on an alternative take of ‘The Squirrel’.

THELONIOUS MONK
^&

Born 10 October 1917, Rocky Mount, North Carolina; died 17 February 1982, Weehawken, New Jersey

Piano

Genius Of Modern Music: Volumes 1 & 2

Blue Note 32137 / 32138

Monk; Kenny Dorham, Idrees Sulieman, George Taitt (t); Lou Donaldson, Sahib Shihab, Danny Quebec West (as); Billy Smith, Lucky Thompson, John Coltrane (ts); Milt Jackson (vib); Nelson Boyd, Al McKibbon, Bob Paige, Gene Ramey, John Simmons (b); Art Blakey, Max Roach, Shadow Wilson (d). October 1947–July 1948.

Saxophonist Steve Lacy said (1979):
‘With Monk, everything fitted together. A song he’d written ten years ago and only played once or twice was somehow connected to something he was doing today. There was a system. It had structure.’

Monk is one of the giants of modern American music whose output ranks with that of Morton and Ellington, as composition of the highest order. Though no one questions his skills as a pianist (they were compounded of stride, blues and a more romantic strain derived from Teddy Wilson and filtered through Monk’s wonderfully lateral intelligence), it is as a composer that he has made the greatest impact on subsequent jazz music. Even so, it is vital to recognize that the music and the playing style are necessary to each other and precisely complementary. Though he has attracted more dedicated interpreters since his death than almost any musician, the originals are unsurpassed. Frequently misunderstood by critics and even some less-discerning musicians, he received due public recognition only quite late in his career, by which time younger pianists originally encouraged by him and his example (Bud Powell is the foremost) had recorded and died and been canonized. Far from being unrecognized in his lifetime, he was a major star who retired early, recording nothing in the last few years of his life. Present at the birth of bebop at Minton’s Playhouse, he always roots his angular, asymmetrical themes in the blues and they have been a key element of modern jazz repertoire ever since, an object of almost obsessive attention by some musicians.

Though some of his work, like ‘In Walked Bud’ on
Genius Of Modern Music
, utilized a straightforward chord sequence, and though ‘Eronel’, one of the additional tracks from the critical July 1951 session with Milt Jackson, is relatively orthodox bop, Monk’s interest in tough, pianistic melody, displaced rhythm and often extreme harmonic distortion (as in his treatment of ‘Carolina Moon’) sets him apart from the bop mainstream.

Monk recorded only intermittently in the years after the Minton’s sessions. Thwarted first by an American Federation Of Musicians recording ban and later by a prison sentence and a blacklisting, Monk took time to regain the highs of these remarkable sides. The earliest of the sessions, with Sulieman, Danny Quebec West and Billy Smith, is not particularly inspired, though the pianist’s contribution is instantly identifiable; his solo on ‘Thelonious’, built up out of minimal thematic potential, is emotionally powerful and restlessly allusive. A month later he was working with a more enterprising group (the difference in Blakey between the two sessions is remarkable) and producing his first classic recordings – of ‘In Walked Bud’ and ‘Round About Midnight’.

The addition of Milt Jackson exactly a year later for the session that yielded ‘Epistrophy’ and ‘Misterioso’ was a turning-point in Monk’s music, enormously extending its rhythmic potential and harmonic complexity. Jackson makes an incalculable contribution to the music, here and on the session of July 1951 which yielded the classic ‘Straight, No Chaser’. The later recordings are more conventionally arranged and lack the excitement and sheer imaginative power of the earlier cuts, but they do help overturn the received image of Monk as a man who wrote one beautiful ballad and then dedicated the rest of his career to intractable dissonance. Between 1952 and 1955, when he contracted to Riverside Records, Monk’s
career was relatively in the doldrums. However, he had already recorded enough material to guarantee him a place in any significant canon.

& See also
Brilliant Corners
(1956; p. 198),
Underground
(1967–1968; p. 347)

TONY PARENTI

Born 6 August 1900, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 17 April 1972, New York City

Clarinet

Tony Parenti & His New Orleanians

Jazzology JCD-1

Parenti; Wild Bill Davison (c); Jimmy Archey (tb); Art Hodes (p); George ‘Pops’ Foster (b); Arthur Trappier (d). August 1949.

Wild Bill Davison said (1983):
‘Nowadays, any kid who can actually play gets called a prodigy or a genius. Tony Parenti really was a genius, though, and he should have been the most famous guy in the music.’

A prodigy in his native New Orleans, Parenti was offered a job by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band – he was too young to go, and he regretted it. He went to New York and played non-jazz sessions for CBS. From the mid-’40s onwards he worked in a sort of merger of Dixieland with more faithful New Orleans music, and he remained fascinated with the possibilities of ragtime. A New Orleans man who left the city in 1927, Parenti made many records but has frequently been overlooked. Never an original, he could still play with a ferocious intensity; though he approached the gaspipe manner at times, there was no little sophistication in an approach that seldom strayed far from Dixieland ideology. Jazzology JCD-1 was the one that started the Jazzology operation in 1949, and it still sounds hard-nosed and terrific: Davison was at his most vituperative-sounding, Parenti weaves his way round the front line with much invention, Hodes stomps through everything, and Foster slaps his strings harder than ever. Rough old recording, though that doesn’t matter, and rather unnecessarily padded out with extra takes.

CHARLIE BARNET

Born 26 October 1913, New York City; died 4 September 1991, San Diego, California

Tenor, alto and soprano saxophones

The Capitol Big Band Sessions

Capitol 21258

Barnet; Jack Hansen, Irv Lewis, Dave Nichols, Lamar Wright Jr, Dave Burns, Tony DiNardi, John Howell, Doc Severinsen, Rolf Ericson, Ray Wetzel, Maynard Ferguson, John Coppola, Carlton McBeath, Al Del Simone, Marvin Rosen (t); Karle De Karske, Herbie Harper, Phil Washburne, Dick Kenney, Obie Massingill, Kenny Martlock, Bob Burgess, Harry Betts, Dave Wells (tb); Frank Pappalardo, Walt Weidler, Vinnie Dean, Art Raboy, Ruben Leon, Dick Meldonian (as); Al Curtis, Bud Shank, Kurt Bloom, Dave Matthews, Dick Hafer, Bill Holman, Jack Laird (ts); Bob Dawes, Danny Bank, Manny Albam (bs); Claude Williamson, Don Trenner (p); Iggy Shevak, Eddie Safranski, Ed Mihelich (b); Dick Shanahan, Cliff Leeman, Tiny Kahn, John Markham (d); Carlos Vidal (perc, v); Francisco Alvarez, Diego Ibarra, Ivar Jaminez (perc); Trudy Richards (v); strings. August 1948–December 1950.

Trumpeter Maynard Ferguson said (1992):
‘Charlie had a temper, a drinking man’s temper, I guess. He’d have a bottle beside him in the car, even driving through the city. When he got riled, he got this bright red blotch, pyramid-shaped, right in the centre of his forehead. We used to see it and whisper, “It’s
The Mark
!” ’

Barnet was born into a wealthy New York family and with characteristic self-confidence broke the colour bar playing in Harlem in the mid-’30s. He struggled until 1939, when a Bluebird contract broke the band in a big way. He carried on against the current until 1949, when he quit to run hotels and play when he pleased. A bit of a playboy in his way, he enjoyed a good life and was married more often than Artie Shaw and Dinah Washington. Though Barnet’s ‘Cherokee’ and ‘Skyliner’ are staples of the big-band era, he’s never been highly regarded by the critics. His own playing, influenced by Johnny Hodges, is usually restricted to a few telling bars, but he was an enthusiastic advocate of other, greater players and he was one of the few bandleaders of the time to have virtually ignored racial distinctions, which may have cost him dear, though he doesn’t seem to have cared much.

This was Barnet’s ‘bebop’ band. He knew he couldn’t play the new jazz but he was shrewd enough to hire players who were adept enough to handle a really tough score like ‘Cu-Ba’, the sort of thing that was coming out of Dizzy Gillespie’s book. Arrangers such as Manny Albam and Pete Rugolo posed plenty of challenges for the band, and here and there are pieces which pointed the Barnet men in the direction of Stan Kenton, which was the last thing the leader wanted. After he famously broke up the band in 1949, there came a new version, which recorded the last four 1950 tracks with strings.

CHARLIE VENTURA

Born Charles Venturo, 2 December 1916, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 17 January 1992, Pleasantville, New Jersey

Tenor saxophone

Complete 1949 Pasadena Concert

Fresh Sound FSRCD 314

Ventura; Conte Candoli (t); Bennie Green (tb); Boots Mussulli (as, bs); Roy Kral (p); Kenny O’Brien (b); Ed Shaughnessy (d); Jackie Cain (v). May 1949.