The Penguin Jazz Guide (71 page)

Tenor saxophone

Soul Station

Blue Note 95343-2

Mobley; Wynton Kelly (p); Paul Chambers (b); Art Blakey (d). February 1960.

Saxophonist Jim Weir says:
‘I never understood why Mobley was thought to be a strange or inappropriate choice for the Miles Davis group. They’re so alike in so many ways: no wasted notes, no hectoring of the listener but a subtle persuasion, and above all that little regretful murmur or sigh at the end of a phrase.’

It’s not clear how much Leonard Feather knew about boxing but when he dubbed Hank Mobley the ‘middleweight champion’ of tenor saxophone, he surely knew that the only thing that separates a middleweight from a heavyweight is avoirdupois. Mobley was pre-eminent in his division and to imply that it was in any way inferior or less taxing is a disservice.
Hank was playing in R&B bands before joining Max Roach in 1951. He came to prominence in the Jazz Messengers three years later and then worked on numerous Blue Note record dates, many of which he led. He spent a short time with Miles Davis and then toured in other hard-bop situations, but eventually left music in the late ’70s because of ill-health. There was a brief attempt at a comeback in 1986 but he died of pneumonia shortly after.

Mobley’s music was documented to almost unreasonable lengths by Blue Note, with a whole array of albums granted to him as a leader, and countless sideman appearances to go with them; a collectors’ favourite. His assertive and swinging delivery was undercut by a seemingly reticent tone and lightness of touch: next to his peers in the hard-bop tenor gang, he could sound almost pallid and rarely delivered a killer punch in solos But it shouldn’t detract from appreciating a thinker and a solidly reliable player, who despite frequent personal problems rarely gave less than his best in front of the microphones and created some of the best music of the hard-bop period.

There is an approximate consensus that
Soul Station
is his best work. Good as the other drummers on his records are, Blakey brings a degree more finesse, and their interplay on ‘This I Dig Of You’ is superb. Hank seldom took ballads at a crawl, preferring a kind of lazy mid-tempo, and ‘If I Should Lose You’ is one of his best. ‘Dig Dis’ is a top example of how tough he could sound without falling into bluster; here, and on the title-track, another original, one can follow closely how much he took from the masters of the swing generation, almost as if he prefers not to phrase like a bopper at all, even as he inhabits that idiom. It’s a terrific record, and a virtually perfect example of a routine date made immortal by master craftsmen.

FREDDIE REDD

Born 29 May 1928, New York City

Piano

The Music From
The Connection

Blue Note 63836

Redd; Jackie McLean (as); Michael Mattos (b); Larry Ritchie (d). February 1960.

Novelist Norman Mailer said (1995):
‘
The Connection
wasn’t perfumed, drawing-room theatre. It had piss and dirt and balls, and the music was what made it immediate, an existential unfolding of desperate lives, lived in some remnant of hope.’

Easily dismissed as a mere honest journeyman, Redd had an extraordinary gift for melody and it is strange that so little of his work survives in the melody. Who nowadays calls for ‘Olé’ or ‘Just A Ballad For My Baby’ on the stand? He made some highly effective records in the later ’50s, including
San Francisco Suite.
Redd’s amiable West Coast bop soundtracked an unscripted (but you’ve seen it) Bay Area movie: bustling streetcars, pretty girls flashing their legs, sudden fogs and alarms, an apology for a narrative. His most famous music, though, was for a real stage play, and was conceived as part of the onstage action. Jack Gelber’s gritty drugs drama was one of the great successes at the Living Theater, and music and play have sustained one another intermittently down the years. Arguably, Redd’s best record was
Shades Of Redd
, made right after this in the summer of 1960, but the
Connection
music isn’t just a set of incidental cues; instead it’s a rigorously conceived suite of tunes that mark the steps to a familiar dance of death. When ‘O.D.’ comes along, it strikes with tragic inevitability, but the opening ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ has a strutting
faux-
confidence and ‘(Theme for) Sister Salvation’ is worthy of Horace Silver. For all sorts of reasons, good and bad, Jackie McLean was the only possible casting for the alto part and his bop wail carries much of the music. Redd lived on, but is only discussed by bop stalwarts. Amid so much generic hard-bop writing of the period, his work merits fuller attention.

JOHN LEWIS
^&

Born 3 May 1920, LaGrange, Illinois; died 29 March 2001, New York City

Piano

Golden Striker / Jazz Abstractions

Collectables 6252

Lewis; Melvyn Broiles, Bernie Glow, Alan Kiger, Joe Wilder (t); Dick Hixson, David Baker (tb); Gunther Schuller, Albert Richman, Ray Alonge, John Barrows (frhn); Eric Dolphy (as, bcl, f); Ornette Coleman (as); Bill Evans (p); Eddie Costa (vib); Joe Hall (g); Harvey Phillips, Jay McAllister (tba); George Duvivier, Scott LaFaro, Alvin Brehm (b); Sticks Evans, Connie Kay (d); Contemporary String Quartet. February–December 1960.

John Lewis said (1982):
‘The exciting thing about jazz for me is the way a young music has evolved its own language in contact with so many other forms, styles and traditions, and in turn has given something of itself to them.’

Though much of his energy was poured into the Modern Jazz Quartet over its long and distinguished history, Lewis also worked extensively under his own name. He is one of the music’s finest composers, and his ‘Django’ is one of the few instantly recognizable jazz compositions (as opposed to standards) that pops up regularly on the stand. As is well known, the MJQ evolved out of the Dizzy Gillespie band. Lewis was also around for the
Birth Of The Cool
dates, arranging a couple of pieces for those iconic sessions. He co-led an album with Bill Perkins in 1956 after the creation of the MJQ (which was originally under vibist Milt Jackson’s leadership).

Lewis was fascinated by baroque music, by the
commedia dell’arte
and by modern innovations in musical language. All of these interests surfaced regularly in his work and this, coupled with his involvement in the Third Stream, persuaded some negative observers to dismiss him as a stiff, conservatory player, when in fact Lewis is one of the most melodic and rhythmic of pianists, always riding a steady, self-sustaining groove and always sticking close to blues harmony no matter what the context.

In one of Collectables’ more logical juxtapositions – they can sometimes be breathtakingly perverse – two of Lewis’s most interesting records are brought together.
Golden Striker
indulges his baroque leanings with a set of tunes arranged for piano and a large brass ensemble: the tone-colours are delightful, and ‘Piazza Navona’ and the reworked ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ are gravely beautiful. It’s not a much admired set, often dismissed because a good deal of the music is through-composed and therefore ‘not jazz’. It’s certainly a thoughtful set and a resolutely undramatic one. But the point of the Collectables disc is the reissued
Jazz Abstractions
. Lewis doesn’t play on this set (he is credited as ‘presenter’) but it does offer Third Stream scores by Jim Hall and Gunther Schuller. Ornette Coleman is set to wail over the four minutes of ‘Abstraction’ for strings, and there are variations on Lewis’s ‘Django’ and Monk’s ‘Criss Cross’, as well as Hall’s ‘Piece For Guitar And Strings’. In the past the music was criticized as pretentious fusion, but any chance to hear Coleman, Dolphy and Scott LaFaro playing on the same sessions is precious. To hear Lewis the pianist, one ought to turn to the Modern Jazz Quartet and to his later work, as reviewed elsewhere here, but this was important and controversial music in its day: catalytic, pointlessly maligned as cerebral, undeniably a crucible of future talent.

& See also
Evolution
(1999; p. 638);
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET, Dedicated to Connie
(1960; p. 254),
The Complete Last Concert
(1974; p. 417)

MODERN JAZZ QUARTET
^&

Formed 1954

Group

Dedicated To Connie

Atlantic 82763 2CD

John Lewis (p); Milt Jackson (vib); Percy Heath (b); Connie Kay (d). May 1960.

Percy Heath said (1990):
‘We’d play quiet, then we’d play really quiet, and maybe then someone in the club would realize they were being noisier than we were, and they’d shut up.’

The MJQ – as it’s universally known – was originally the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s postwar band, initially with Ray Brown on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. After 1955, Connie Kay became a permanent member, joining pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and bassist Percy Heath in one of the most enduring jazz groups of all time.

Atlantic did some strange things with the MJQ, the most egregious being the sex-doll cover for
Plastic Dreams
, but they also pushed the group strongly and brought in guest artists like Sonny Rollins to stiffen the sound and broaden the appeal on occasion. The Erteguns were market-shrewd and knew good music when they heard it and the albums kept coming.

Lewis’s first exploration of characters from the
commedia dell’arte
was
Fontessa
, an appropriately chill and stately record that can seem a little enigmatic, even off-putting. The themes of
commedia
are remarkably appropriate to a group who have always presented themselves in sharply etched silhouette, playing a music that is deceptively smooth and untroubled but which harbours considerable jazz feeling.

Connie Kay had slipped into the band without a ripple; his ill-health and death were the only circumstances in the next 40 years of activity necessitating a personnel change. His cooler approach, less overwhelming than Clarke’s could be, was ideal, and he sounds right from the word ‘go’. His debut was on the fine
Concorde
, which sees Lewis trying to blend jazz improvisation with European counterpoint. It combines some superb fugal writing with a bright swing.

After Kay’s death in December 1994, the MJQ issued a 1960 concert from Yugoslavia in his memory. As John Lewis discovered when he auditioned these old tapes, it was one of the truly great MJQ performances. Jackson’s playing is almost transcendentally wonderful on ‘Bags’ Groove’ and ‘I Remember Clifford’, and the conception of Lewis’s opening
commedia
sequence could hardly be clearer or more satisfying.
Dedicated To Connie
is a very special record and has always been our favourite of the bunch.

& See also
The Complete Last Concert
(1974; p. 417);
JOHN LEWIS, Golden Striker / Jazz Abstractions
(1960; p. 253),
Evolution
(1999; p. 638)

JIMMY HAMILTON

Born 25 May 1917, Dillon, South Carolina; died 20 September 1994, St Croix, Virgin Islands

Clarinet

Swing Low Sweet Clarinet

Fresh Sound FSRCD 351

Hamilton; John Anderson (t); Britt Woodman, Dave Wells, Booty Wood (bhn); Paul Gonsalves (ts); Jimmy Rowles (p); Aaron Bell (b); Sam Woodyard (d). 1960.

Jimmy Hamilton said (1981):
‘Being one of Duke’s men was a privilege, like being in a very chi-chi club, but I think we also saw ourselves as knights of the realm, riding out to each other’s defence or help. You could always get guys together for a date, no matter what.’

The best of Jimmy Hamilton is with Ellington, of course, whom he joined in 1943, after some time around Philadelphia and with Teddy Wilson, but his own occasional sessions are always worth listening to and belong in the front rank of small-group Ellingtonia.
Can’t Help Swinging
– a pair of dates for Prestige originally issued as
It’s About Time
and
Can’t Help Swinging
– are gently appealing, but even more so in some regards is
Swing Low Sweet Clarinet
. The players are nearly all Ellingtonians, and the interesting twist is that Woodman, Wood and incomer Wells are playing baritone horns instead of their familiar trombones (and not baritone saxophones as noted in some sources). It’s a rich and capacious sound, which Hamilton exploits to the full on a set that’s pretty well stocked with Duke’s compositions: ‘In A Sentimental Mood’, ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me’ and ‘The Nearness Of You’. Jimmy contributes two ideas of his own, ‘Tempo De Brazilia’ and the fun ‘Taj Mahal’. Gonsalves is in fine voice, though slightly restrained on a couple of his spots as if trying not to shade the leader.

FRANK WESS

Born 4 January 1922, Kansas City, Missouri

Flute, tenor saxophone

The Frank Wess Quartet

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 11032

Wess; Tommy Flanagan (p); Eddie Jones (b); Bobby Donaldson (d). May 1960.

Frank Wess said (1990):
‘My teachers at the Modern School of Music in Washington DC, pretty much laughed when I said I wanted to develop the flute in jazz. They just didn’t understand it. Me, I don’t understand the clarinet. I don’t see the satisfactions of playing that in a jazz context.’