The Penguin Jazz Guide (68 page)

& See also
Black Byrd
(1972; p. 394)

DAVE BRUBECK
^&

Born 6 December 1920, Concord, California

Piano

Time Out

Columbia CK 65122

Brubeck; Paul Desmond (as); Eugene Wright (b); Joe Morello (d). June–August 1959.

Dave Brubeck said (1991):
‘I was in traction after a foolish accident at Waikiki [Brubeck was almost paralysed after diving through a wave and colliding violently with a sandbar] and I knew that when I got back to work I’d need a second voice to help lighten the load. So I wrote to Paul [Desmond] and said: “Here’s the chance to form that quartet you’ve been talking about. [Wife] Iola said from the first time she heard us that we ought to work together.” ’

This is the music everyone associates with Brubeck: cool, sophisticated and swinging, and even people with little stake in jazz are eager to show off their knowledge by pointing out that ‘Take Five’ itself was actually a Paul Desmond composition. So familiar is it that no one actually hears what’s going on any more. As the title suggests, Brubeck wanted to explore ways of playing jazz that went a step beyond the basic 4/4 that had remained the norm long after jazz threw off the relentless predictability of B flat. The opening ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’ (with its Mozart echoes) opens in an oddly distributed 9/8, with the count rearranged as 2-2-2-3. It’s a relatively conventional classical
rondo
but with an almost raucous blues interior. ‘Take Five’ is in the most awkward of all metres, but what is remarkable about this iconic slice of modern jazz is the extent to which it constantly escapes the 5/4 count and swings effortlessly; it is possible to dance to it. Morello’s drum solo is perhaps his best work on record (though his brief ‘Everybody’s Jumpin’’ solo is also excellent) and Brubeck’s heavy vamp has tremendous force. Most of the other material is in waltz and double-waltz time. Max Roach had explored the idea thoroughly on
Jazz In 3/4 Time
, but not even Roach had attempted anything as daring and sophisticated as the alternations of beat on ‘Three To Get Ready’ and ‘Kathy’s Waltz’, which is perhaps the finest single thing on the album. Desmond tends to normalize the count in his solo line, and it’s easy to miss what is going on in the rhythm section if one concentrates too exclusively on the saxophone. The Desmond cult may be fading slightly and as it does it may be possible to re-establish the Brubeck
Quartet’s claim
as a unit
to be considered among the most innovative and adventurous of modern-jazz groups.

& See also
The Dave Brubeck Octet
(1946–1950; p. 106),
London Sharp, London Flat
(2004; p. 690)

KENNY BALL

Born 22 May 1930, Ilford, Essex, England

Trumpet

Back At The Start

Lake LACD 114

Ball; John Bennett (tb); Dave Jones (cl); Colin Bates, Ron Weatherburn (p); Dickie Bishop, Diz Disley, Paddy Lightfoot (bj); Vic Pitt (b); Tony Budd, Ron Bowden (d). June 1959–March 1962.

Kenny Ball says:
‘You might think this is a bit nutty, but when I’m out there with my trumpet in one hand and mute in another, it is like holding a new baby for the first time. You think: what do I do with this to make it right? And you think that every time. It’s part of me that’s going on there.’

Ball’s early records will surprise anyone who just knows him as a cabaret or TV star, or who has only ever heard ‘Midnight In Moscow’, his banker hit. He led a tough, hard-hitting outfit which he directed with great skill. Bennett, one of the longest-serving sidemen in jazz, played urbane but gutsy trombone and the rhythm section was taut and emphatic. Ball’s signing to Pye, engineered by Lonnie Donegan, was the commercial making of the band and Ball was ruthless in pursuing a style of Dixieland that was disciplined enough to attract a popular audience. This and another Lake volume bring together all of his early recordings, and they’re an impressive lot.

Back At The Start
opens with three obscure tracks made for the Collector label and then proceeds through the early Pyes. It’s breezy, outwardly uncomplicated trad. Ball’s own playing is what stands out, unfussy but surprisingly risk-taking at points. If his chops later bothered him, there’s no sign of it here and he remains a model for those who want to grow up and grow old in the business: taking care of business, for a start, but pacing yourself, keeping it fresh and interesting, never losing touch with the audience. A genuine national treasure, but beyond the sentiment a genuine artist.

ALBERT NICHOLAS

Born 27 May 1900, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 3 September 1973, Basel, Switzerland

Clarinet

The New Orleans–Chicago Connection

Delmark DE 207

Nicholas; Art Hodes (p); Earl Murphy (b); Fred Kohlman (d). July 1959.

Art Hodes said (1981):
‘That clarinet sound is like a fingerprint. Isn’t anyone else on the planet who ever made a clarinet sound like that. It’s like ripping silk.’

Nicholas is one of the least exposed of the New Orleans clarinet masters on record, and his surviving discs are mostly delightful. For a man who played with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, he seemed quite at ease in the company of musicians generations younger
than himself. Art Hodes at least was a contemporary, and their Delmark album is a spirited ramble through some of the old tunes, Hodes’s Chicagoan blues meshing easily with Nick’s pithy solos. He has an odd way of mixing a circumspect, behind-the-hand manner with a piercing attack: a diffident statement of the melody may suddenly blossom on a sudden high note with a fast vibrato, before the line drops back into the depths of his horn. ‘He could always get you with that tone,’ Barney Bigard remembered, and something of the young Bechet survives in Nicholas’s most sprightly playing. The original Delmark album has been fleshed out with a stack of alternative takes – ‘Rose Room’, ‘Lover, Come Back To Me’, ‘Digga Digga Do’ – none of them especially meaningful, but the body of the music is fine.

HAROLD LAND

Born 18 December 1928, Houston, Texas; died 27 July 2001, Los Angeles, California

Tenor saxophone, flute, oboe

The Fox

Original Jazz Classics OJC 343

Land; Dupree Bolton (t); Elmo Hope (p); Herbie Lewis (b); Frank Butler (d). August 1959.

Harold Land said (1979):
‘I think it began to change for me after [
The Fox
]. I had started heeding what Coltrane was doing and I went in that direction. But that record got down what I wanted to say up to that point.’

Land was raised in San Diego and quickly became a fixture on the West Coast scene of the late ’50s and ’60s. He worked with Curtis Counce and Max Roach and got round to making some records under his own name. An underrated player, hampered by a rather dour tone which masks the originality of his thinking, he made two records that belong in the top flight, this one and the slightly earlier
Harold In The Land Of Jazz.

Any apparent resemblance at this point to Sonny Rollins (who’d also worked with Roach) is incidental. Land’s delivery was less effusive, not so much spilling out notes and dealing them deftly. One senses that the compositions are always more important than their potential for soloing, and on his own lines, ‘The Fox’ and ‘Little Chris’, he seems quite content to stay close to the material. The remainder of the record was written by Hope, and there’s a gnarly grace to his five compositions.

Jazz history drew a veil over Dupree Bolton’s subsequent career, though he has become a somewhat cultish figure. Here, he plays with confidence and some fire, at ease with the accelerated tempo of ‘The Fox’ and the easier flow of ‘Mirror-Mind Rose’. If Carl Perkins on the previous record recalls a crab, then Elmo Hope has to be a butterfly. His touch was as light as his ideas and colours were fleeting. One of the least dynamic of players (and singularly dependent on drummers of Butler’s kidney), he was nevertheless able to keep track with a rhythm-line he wasn’t actually playing, laying out astonishing melody figures on ‘One Down’ in what is probably his best recorded performance.

BENNY GOLSON

Born 25 January 1929, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tenor saxophone

Groovin’ With Golson

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 226

Golson; Curtis Fuller (tb); Ray Bryant (p); Paul Chambers (b); Art Blakey (d). August 1959.

Benny Golson says:
‘I remember it so well because Art Farmer and I were putting the Jazztet together just around that time, and Curtis Fuller was to be our trombone-player. I was so into writing material for the coming Jazztet that I had almost no time for the Prestige session. In fact, when Curtis came by my house so that we could go over to Rudy Van Gelder’s together, I didn’t have the last tune together, so while he sat there I quickly scratched out “The Stroller”. We decided at the last minute to record “Yesterdays” because everybody knew this one. We could play this one in our sleep.’

Golson will always be considered, primarily, as a composer and arranger, producing such standards as ‘I Remember Clifford’, ‘Whisper Not’ and ‘Stablemates’. His composition book is one of the most enduring of its kind. His powers as a saxophonist have tended to be overshadowed, although his still-growing discography has reasserted the stature of his own playing. Despite contributing several hard-bop staples, his own playing style originally owed rather more to such swing masters as Hawkins, Don Byas and Lucky Thompson; a big, crusty tone and a fierce momentum sustain his solos, and they can take surprising and exciting turns, even if the unpredictability sometimes leads to a loss of focus. Golson went from jazz and R&B combos in the early ’50s to arranging for Dizzy Gillespie in 1956. He had a stint in the Jazz Messengers, but then formed the Jazztet with Art Farmer in 1959. In the ’60s and ’70s, he worked in film and TV, but has returned to jazz since then and is still going strong.

The late-’50s groups already carried the seeds of the celebrated Jazztet.
Groovin’ With Golson
hasn’t always been the most admired of them but it is a record of extraordinary durability for one that was apparently put together quite casually. Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa’s ‘Drum Boogie’ is the first obvious throwback of the set, but Golson knows how to work the contours of a good melody and what emerges sounds like naturalized hard bop of a high order. ‘Yesterdays’ was also thrown in for familiarity, as was ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was’, which leaves the sketchy but powerful ‘The Stroller’ as the only new original of the date. That might seem to put this in the second order of Golson records, but it remains true that the best versions of his compositions are by other hands and that his own records were usually best when he was there to blow, as he does here with focus and enthusiasm.

HORACE SILVER
^&

Born Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva, 2 September 1928, Norwalk, Connecticut

Piano

Blowin’ The Blues Away

Blue Note 95342-2

Silver; Blue Mitchell (t); Junior Cook (ts); Gene Taylor (b); Louis Hayes (d). August 1959.

Horace Silver said (1987):
‘Blue Note in the ’50s was a pretty special situation, being able to make records where the music was the important thing, not some business transaction. I was lucky in that I had pretty much a free hand. That’s a blessing it’s hard to imagine today.’

Horace Silver’s records present the quintessence of hard bop. He not only defined the first steps in the style but also wrote several of its most durable staples, ran bands that both embodied and transcended the idiom, and perfected a piano manner which summed up hard bop’s wit and trenchancy and popular appeal. It was under Silver’s name that the Jazz Messengers marquee was first used, on a 1954 Blue Note album which featured his ‘The Preacher’, one of the iconic hard-bop compositions.

Picking even a couple of favourites out of Silver’s run of Blue Notes is an invidious task.
This one seems more than any other to exemplify all his virtues as pianist, composer and leader. The title-track goes off like a typhoon. The ten-bar ballad ‘Peace’ is one of his most haunting and most covered themes. ‘Sister Sadie’ is a soul-jazz classic which other bandleaders were quick to cover. ‘The Baghdad Blues’ finds him guying various kinds of jazz exoticism. And he ends the record with another version of one of his most durable pieces, ‘Melancholy Mood’. It’s a typical Blue Note, a characteristic Silver session, but every part of it is powerful enough to transcend what would become clichés of the idiom; and the band all play superbly. Silver’s influence is hard to calculate but his immediate descendants include everyone from Chick Corea to Monty Alexander.

& See also
Song For My Father
(1964; p. 308)

JIMMY HEATH

Born 25 October 1926, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tenor saxophone

The Thumper

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1828

Heath; Nat Adderley (c); Curtis Fuller (tb); Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath (d). September 1959.