The Penguin Jazz Guide (79 page)

AL GREY

Born 6 June 1925, Aldie, Virginia; died 24 May 2000, Phoenix, Arizona

Trombone

Snap Your Fingers

Verve 0602498603079

Grey; David Burns, Donald Byrd (t); Billy Mitchell (ts); Floyd Morris, Herbie Hancock (p); Bobby Hutcherson (vib); Herman Wright (b); Eddie Williams (d). January–February 1962.

Al Grey said (1981):
‘This guy was bugging me about jazz musicians being stupid and illiterate, so I puffed myself up and told him that I was the author of a book, called
Plunger Techniques
. He looked hard at me. “You’re in sanitation? I thought you said you were a musician.” ’

Grey will always be remembered as a Basie sideman, even though he spent more years away from the Count’s band. His humorous, fierce style of improvising is more in the tradition of such colleagues as saxophonist Lockjaw Davis than in the more restrained trombone lineage, though he did rather assume Vic Dickenson’s mantle as the great trombone individualist, and he was especially accomplished with the plunger mute, though perhaps too often for comfort with comic intentions.

This brings back a little-known Argo album made just after he left Basie. The first five tracks are a studio sextet date, tightly arranged around gospel and blues themes; the next three are from a live date at Birdland, where Byrd and Hancock came in for Burns and Morris, although neither is featured much. The surprise presence here is Hutcherson, in a
very early appearance, who gets quite a bit of space. There’s a nice atmospheric ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ but the CD saves the best for last with a long romp through Randy Weston’s ‘Hi-Fly’. Grey’s solos are in a rather more modern line than his Basie work would have suggested. It’s not a great record, but it’s more than a satisfying time-waster, and it grows with familiarity.

JUNIOR MANCE

Born Julian Clifford Mance Jr, 10 October 1928, Evanston, Illinois

Piano, harpsichord

Junior’s Blues

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1000

Mance; Bob Cranshaw (b); Mickey Roker (d). February 1962.

Junior Mance said (1991):
‘Playing in Dizzy’s group was a lot of fun, but you also learned. It was the right kind of schooling, where you don’t know you’re at school. You just take it in.’

Junior Mance has been playing professionally for almost 60 years. His first lessons with Julian Mance Sr and his grounding in blues, stride and boogie woogie have stood him in good stead ever since. He did club work in Chicago, toured with Dinah Washington and with Cannonball Adderley, and spent some important time with Dizzy Gillespie. Unmistakable from a random sample of half a dozen bars as a Chicago man, Mance can sometimes be maddeningly predictable, resorting to exactly the figure one expects him to play, though that’s relatively rare and stands out as a dead spot in an otherwise remarkable performance.

Recorded on Valentine’s Day 1962,
Junior’s Blues
is a love letter to jazz itself, as direct and uncomplicated a declaration as you’ll find in the whole history of the music. Junior covers themes by Monk (with a few embellishments of his own), Ellington (‘Creole Love Call’) and the Jay McShann/Charlie Parker swinger ‘The Jumpin’ Blues’. He kicks off with his own ‘Down The Line’, which is as orthodox and full-hearted a 12-bar as you’ll ever hear. The slightly later
Happy Time
, with Ron Carter in for Cranshaw, is almost as good.

PERRY ROBINSON

Born 17 September 1938, New York City

Clarinet

Funk Dumpling

Savoy Jazz 255

Robinson; Kenny Barron (p); Henry Grimes (b); Paul Motian (d). 1962.

Perry Robinson said (1996):
‘What I tried to do back then was get a bebop sound, a saxophonic sound, on clarinet; not swing clarinet like Buddy DeFranco still did but something new, an evolution.’

It is difficult to judge now whether the clarinet fell into disuse during the bop era because clarinettists found it difficult to play with the speed and power required for the new medium or whether the clarinet was merely so associated with swing that it seemed an anachronism, however it was played. Perry Robinson is what was once an almost absurd rarity, a modernistic – even avant-garde – jazz clarinet-player. His has been a strikingly varied
career, working with Gunter Hampel and Dave Brubeck, but this first record, something of a rarity and still not much known even to modern-jazz fans, established Robinson, and with him Henry Grimes, as one of the most innovative new player/composers in New York. The pity is that the cue wasn’t taken up and Robinson’s subsequent discography remains just as marginal.

It looks like a supergroup, but largely in retrospect. Motian had been playing with Bill Evans, Barron was on one of his very first recordings, while Robinson and Grimes (who’d worked with Sonny Rollins) were helping each other find a way into the new music. Compositions are divided equally between the two friends, apart from the brazenly lovely opening version of ‘Moon Over Moscow’. Grimes’s tunes – ‘Sprites Delight’, ‘Farmer Alfalfa’ and the title-tune – seem rooted in song and dance forms, even when the armatures of those forms have been taken away. Robinson is more obviously free-form in conception, but interestingly his compositions, and particularly ‘Margareta’, the single best track, have a centripetal quality; they may seem harmonically chaotic, or at best unconventional, but he pulls them together in the middle, so that each one has a memorable structure; one of us could even whistle parts of ‘Wahayla’, not having heard it for years. A time-capsule record, to be sure, but one that fully merits inclusion here.

BABS GONZALES

Born Lee Brown, 27 October 1919, Newark, New Jersey; died 23 January 1980, Newark, New Jersey

Voice

Sunday Afternoon At Small’s Paradise

Dauntless DC 6005

Gonzales; Clark Terry (t, flhn); Johnny Griffin (ts); Horace Parlan (p); Buddy Catlett (b); Ben Riley (d). 1962.

Organist Jimmy Smith said (1989):
‘He’d come in with this cape round his shoulders like Batman or Superman or some shit like that. Cat went round telling everyone he had discovered me and that he was my manager. Well, no mother****er discovered me. I discovered myself, so I had to put him down. Alfred Lion [of Blue Note records] thought I’d near to killed him.’

‘Larger than life’ doesn’t begin to express Babs Gonzales’s personality, but its outsize nature has probably eclipsed his fine musicianship. Irrepressibly hip and a fine musician, the man from Newark was among the first to give bebop a vocal dimension. His colourful autobiographies made him a cult figure.

Corny as some of his work doubtless now seems, what Babs did was colonize the rapid transitions and complex harmonies of bebop for singers. The sessions are variable in quality, but there are some delightful cuts and some intriguing experiments as well. The early work with Three Bips And A Bop is probably among the best. ‘Oop-Pop-A-Da’ and ‘Professor Bop’ are both good representations of Babs’s vocalese. ‘Weird Lullaby’ was another of his hits and became a kind of signature tune after its Capitol release.

The material from Small’s includes such delightful hokum as ‘Bebop Santa Claus’ and the non-PC ‘Keep An Ugly Woman’, but it also reunites him with Griffin, who made his debut with Babs. ‘Le Moody Mood Pour Amour’ is a nod to James Moody’s part in the development of vocalese, but on this showing Babs is still a shade ahead of the better attested King Pleasure and Eddie Jefferson, and still pushing vocalese forward after its faddish quality had faded. The group is absolutely terrific, but it’s clear that this isn’t just a novelty act with accompaniment but a firmly musical band. Even ‘Round About Midnight’ finds something new to say.

JIMMY GIUFFRE
^&

Born 26 April 1921, Dallas, Texas; died 24 April 2008, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophones, flute, bass flute

Free Fall

Columbia CK 65446

Giuffre; Paul Bley (p); Steve Swallow (b). 1962.

Steve Swallow remembers:
‘
Free Fall
was the last, and I think the best, of the albums this trio made until it reconvened in the ’90s. It was recorded without fuss or fanfare (and, happily, without headphones as well) in the beautiful-sounding church Columbia used as its “classical” studio in those days. Jimmy clowned around a lot that day, maybe to dispel tension. His wife Juanita sat calmly in the room with us as we worked, dispensing vodka. The trio disbanded shortly after, for lack of gainful employment.’

Giuffre’s drummerless trios and cool, almost abstract tonality created nearly as much controversy as Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless groups and probably with more reason. Nothing that had come along before quite prepares us for the astonishing work that Giuffre created with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow in two 1961 albums called
Fusion
(a term which hadn’t yet taken on its ’70s associations) and
Thesis
. Paired and remastered as
1961
, they were ECM’s first-ever reissue, still sounding ‘modern’ after 40 years. Herb Snitzer’s session photographs are in deeply shadowed black-and-white. It’s arguable that Giuffre’s playing is equally monochrome and its basic orientation uncomfortably abstract; but it’s also often driven by an urgent swing.
Fusion
is perhaps the more daring of the two sets, balancing starkly simple ideas, as on ‘Jesus Maria’ and ‘Scootin’ About’, with some complex harmonic conceptions.
Thesis
is tighter and more fully realized, and tunes like ‘Ictus’ and ‘Carla’ have been an inexhaustible element of the pianist’s concert improvisations ever since. There is some live material from Stuttgart and Bremen, released on hatOLOGY as
Emphasis & Flight.

Free Fall
is a trickier and more insidious sound altogether. A mixture of Giuffre solos with duos and trios, it catches the group late on in its brief initial history. (They reconvened in the ’80s.) Remarkable to think of Columbia taking on a project like this in 1962, but, whatever the exact intention of the title, it was clear that the studiousness and philosophical calm which overlaid the previous discs was no longer to be expected. What you’re hearing is something that has almost run its course in practical terms but which creatively is far from exhausted. Swallow’s fiery scrabbles and sharply plucked single-note runs lend the music a new momentum and the sort of energy to be found in free jazz. Bley may be the least comfortable of the three by this stage, but he has always been a restless experimenter and by 1962 his eye was probably on the next step. Giuffre often sounds as if he is in a world of his own, intensely focused, totally aware, but communicating ideas for which there was no ready-made language or critical rhetoric.

& See also
The Jimmy Giuffre 3
(1956; p. 197)

DIZZY REECE

Born Alphonso Son Reece, 5 January 1931, Kingston, Jamaica

Trumpet

Asia Minor

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1806

Reece; Joe Farrell (ts, f); Cecil Payne (bs); Hank Jones (p); Ron Carter (b); Charli Persip (d). March 1962.

Dizzy Reece said (1985):
‘I spent a bit of time in North Africa and Asia Minor. I used to think I’d had a previous life there! Because some of those sounds were surfacing in me, even before I visited the places.’

In 1949, Reece moved his base of operations to Europe and from 1954 to the end of the decade was established in London, where he made a number of fine but not yet distinguished recordings on which he tended to be upstaged by Tubby Hayes and Victor Feldman. Some of these have now been revived on Jasmine and are worth having. Reece started recording for Blue Note while still living in England. The best of these are his first record for the label,
Blues In Trinity
, and the subsequent
Soundin’ Off.

His most successful record of all, though, was made for New Jazz (now an OJC) and its quality is given added lustre by being his last session as leader until 1970, after which his studio appearances tailed off further. Reece was (is) a man of considerable integrity, to the point of stubbornness. Unswayed by fashion or ideology, he insisted on playing as he pleased rather than following anyone else’s lead. On
Asia Minor
that was still a virtue, but it’s a record that is already suffused with a certain indefinable sadness, as if autumn is coming on. Given that Reece was only 31, it was a prematurely elegiac stance but it certainly isn’t the result of backward projection. It’s a genuine quality of the music.

‘Yamask’ and ‘Ackmet’ reflect an interest in African and Levantine music, and while they’re not particularly advanced lines they do anticipate what some more heralded Blue Note stars were doing with greater fanfare a few years later. ‘The Shadow Of Khan’ is similarly conceived. Payne contributes a line dedicated to Charlie Parker, and there are a couple of standards, including one of the more unusual ‘Summertime’ readings of that period. The marvellous band is a trump card. Farrell was just beginning to explore the kind of quartal harmony that became a calling card in an all too brief career. Payne gives the sound a lot of weight (and it often sounds like a larger outfit), but it’s Dizzy’s clarion delivery and simply, unaffected approach to the harmony that make it memorable, a clear case of less is more. There was a longish silence after
Asia Minor
, and we continue to wait for some fresh wisdom from a dedicated practitioner who’s been unjustly neglected in recent years.