Listening to Prestige 458: Don Ellis

You can't necessarily count on it that an album that calls itself "new ideas" will actually deliver new ideas, but this one does. Don Ellis not only presents a departure from anything Prestige has been doing in this new jazz era, each track of the album is a departure from the track before.

Ellis came from very nearly out of nowhere. He had played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He had played with the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, which was a good deal more progressive, but still a dance band. Then suddenly he was in the center of the avant garde, working with George Russell, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow. He made one album in 1959

with Charles Mingus (Mingus Dynasty) and a couple in 1961 with George Russell. One was with Russell and Eric Dolphy for Riverside, but that one wasn't released until years later.

Even the photos of him follow the same out of nowhere pattern. The earliest shows him crew cut, chubby faced and whiter than Wonder Bread. A photo taken around the time of New Ideas shows him gaunt, still white, but looking more like Andre Gregory than Glenn Miller.

His first album as leader in 1960 was How Time Passes, for the Candid label, with Jaki Byard, Ron Carter and Charlie Persip. A second album for Candid, featuring Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, was recorded in April of 1961, just three weeks before New Ideas, but it would not see the light of day until 1988. Time Passes was all Ellis originals. The second album came to be called Out of Nowhere, and in 1988 it must have really seemed to be coming out of nowhere. And it came out of nowhere considering the direction Ellis's music was taken, because this was an album of standards, and ones that were so standard they were virtually chestnuts -- "My Funny Valentine," "I'll Remember April," "Just One of Those Things." Perhaps Candid didn't release the album because they were expecting something more like How Time Passes, a real Don Ellis album, not a bunch of standards. Or perhaps they decided not to release it because they  were expecting an album of standards, and they got...certainly not something Glenn Miller or even Maynard Ferguson would have recorded. In other words, a real Don Ellis album.

Whatever that nay be. Ellis's muse was forever dancing on ahead. This was his only album for Prestige, and as he moved through record labels (pausing for a few years and several albums on Columbia), he moved through ideas and formats. Much of his later and best-known work was for larger ensembles.

At this point in his career. the George Russell influence is certainly there. There are suggestions of Tristano, still a powerful influence on the jazz avant garde. Suggestions of Gil Mellé, though he's more of a musician than Mellé was. Like Mellé, he would go on to film scoring, The French Connection being his best known. He was known for his experiments with time signatures, but he's nothing like Dave Brubeck. For one thing, he had a sense of humor. One of his compositions is called "Beat Me, Daddy, 7 to the Bar;" one of his time signatures is 3½ / 4 and another is 15/16. One can hear in his work suggestions of avant garde composers like Moondog (he somehow manages to suggest some of Moondog's ambient street noises on the trumpet). How Time Passes was subtitled Third Stream Jazz, and no less an authority on the third stream than Gunther Schuller said of him, when Ellis was his student in 1960 at the Lenox, MA, School of Jazz:

[Ellis] represents one of the few true syntheses of jazz and classical elements, without the slightest self‐consciousness and without any loss of excitement and raw spontaneity that the best of jazz has always had.

By the time of New Ideas, the Third Stream was no longer a dominant force in Ellis's development, but you can hear it.

We've heard Jaki Byard on three earlier Prestige sessions, one with a trio and two with Eric Dolphy. Equally at home in mainstream or avant garde settings, he was also one of the first to bring jazz to the world of higher education, creating the Jazz Studies program at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Ron Carter and Charlie Persip are more associated with mainstream than avant garde, but they both make important contributions. Persip is inventive and unexpected. So is Carter, but he's also the pulse of the ensemble, keeping it on track through time signature changes.

New Ideas features a remarkable vibes player named Al Francis, and his entire recorded output seems to have been this album and a trio session from 1986 called Jazz Bohemia Revisited. Why there's not more, or why Ellis didn't go on working with him, it's impossible to say, but the jazz world lost a distinctive and original voice when they passed over Francis. It's painful to think of all the music he made between 1961 and 1986 that we'll never hear.

Ellis would go on working with small groups for a couple of years, often with Paul Bley.  In 1963, he was trumpet soloist for the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and again with Gunther Schuller conducting, for Schuller's composition Journey into Jazz.

In 1965 he put together his first orchestra, and the work with large ensembles became his best known.  He's also known for an instrumental innovation, the four-valve trumpet, which was more than just a gimmick: it allowed him to play quarter-tones.

Ellis died young, at 44, leaving behind him several lifetimes worth of experimentation.

Esmond Edwards produced the session, and New Ideas was released on New Jazz.

I'm making a Listen to Two for this Ellis session, because it's the only album he made for Prestige, and since one track is not enough to do justice to his range. Neither are two, actually.