Listening to Prestige 702: Charles McPerson

LISTEN TO ONE: Hot House

 You look at an album, and you see that the tunes on it are by Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, and you start to get the feeling that this guy is serious about his bebop. That the two remaning tunes are by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein will do nothing to dissuade you from that opinion. And then if you notice that the album is titled Bebop Revisited, even if you've never heard of the guy, you've got reason enough to pick up the album.

Of course, this is 2023, so you already know that Charles McPherson is one of the revered elder statesmen of jazz, with a career that few can match. But if it were 1964, and you were standing in Sam Goody's looking over the new jazz releases, you might not be so familiar with the name.

You might. McPherson had been playing and recording with Charles Mingus for three years by then. But this was his first recording as a leader. So you look at the names of the composers, and the names of the tunes: "Hot House," "Variations on a Blues by Bird," and if you're an old timer of, say 27 or 28, and you're already regretting the passing of the bebop era, you're definitely starting to be intrigued.

And if you start reading the liner notes by Ira Gitler, a real old timer in his thirties, you discover that Ira, too, misses the bebop era, and is saddened by the fact that younger musicians who play "hard bop" are not really challenging themselves -- they play the "simpler [bebop] tunes like 'Now's the Time' rather than 'Billie's Bounce,' 'Relaxin' at Camarillo' or 'Shaw 'Nuff.'"

And you'll certainly, as you plunk down your $3.98 for the album, be intrigued by the presence of Barry Harris, an uncompromising bebopper still playing in the new era and still making great music.

And in fact, McPherson had been a protégé of Harris's for quite some time, going back to when he was 14, newly moved to Detroit from Joplin, Missouri,  and living on the same block as Harris and Lonnie Hillyer, another young teenager in love with music. McPherson and Hillyer used to sit outside the local club--also on the same street--where Harris played, and talk to the musicians when they stepped outside to take a break and grab a smoke or some fresh air.

McPherson started taking music lessons from Harris, but he soon found out that the pianist had a lot more to teach him than that. In a videotaped interview, he remembered showing Harris his report card, which was all C's, 

And I thought that was fine...I was focused on other things than homework. As long as I'm not the dumbest guy in the room...he said, "I see you got a bunch of C's. You're quite ordinary, aren't you?" And I said -- I was proud of it -- "Yes, I am." And he said, "Well, I'm going to tell you. The kind of guys you like -- your musical heroes -- are anything but ordinary. If you want to learn to play this music, you can't be a C anything." And the moment he said that, it changed my whole way of thinking. He said, "Do you ever read?" I said no. "Do you ever do puzzles?" No. He said, "OK, let's start by doing the puzzles," and he brought out a newspaper -- the New York Times -- and I noticed that he could read the whole New York Times, the editorials, so he knew about...and I had not a clue. So I started reading, and I started doing the puzzles.

And Barry Harris had friends, people like Pepper Adams, who would come to his house, and I would listen to these guys talk, and quite often they would talk about things that had nothing to do with music. They would be talking about de Maupassant, Nietszche,  Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, they'd talk about Henry Miller and this book, Tropic of Capricorn, and I had not a clue that this was what jazz people...and I learned that, at least in Detroit, in order to be considered hip, not only did you have to know about Bird, and this kind of music, you had to know about painting, you had to know about philosophy, and if you could talk, and you had something to say, then you were considered hip.

Well, I've talked about Detroit before, and how it was one of the greatest schools of music in those days, but clearly with guys like Barry Harris and Pepper Adams around, it was a lot more than that, 

And they would say, "Hey man, do you know that Charlie Parker can go to a museum and identify Marc Chagall, or Matisse, or Miro -- he could just look at a painting and say 'Oh, this is cubism' -- these people are great thinkers, as well as wonderful musicians, and if you want to be like that, you have to read.

Barry Harris gave young Charles a lesson that stayed with him for life. Harris, and Pepper Adams -- he doesn't mention Wardell Gray, but Gray was around Detroit in those days too, and he was another who valued learning. And Charlie Parker -- in another interview, given just this year, he recalled, “Bird could sit down and talk about quantum mechanics. Our notion of hip was a broad thing, and Bird’s the guy who started to make it that way.”  

And McPherson paid it forward. The interviewer, Andrew Gilbert, mentions Rob Schneiderman, a fine young pianist who worked with McPherson, listened to McPherson, and went on to get a Ph. D. in mathematics at the University of California:

He credits his early conversations with McPherson about Einstein’s theory of spacetime with setting him on the path that led to his love of math (and his current position as a professor of mathematics at City University of New York’s Lehman College).  

“Charles McPherson loves talking about Einstein’s theories,” Schneiderman said. “You look at all these books for the lay person on Einstein and you realize you’ve got to learn calculus in order to understand physics and why time stands still at the speed of light.”

 

All of this is completely irrelevant to a discussion of the music.

All of this is crucial to a discussion of the music.

Both of the above statements are true. But at any rate, we're back in 1964, and Charles McPherson, with Barry Harris, is in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, making an album of bebop, the music to which Charlie Parker brought his love of Marc Chagall, and Igor Stravinsky, and the blues. As did Barry Harris. As did young Charles McPherson.

It is ridiculous to suggest that in just a few years, bebop had exhausted everything it was possible to say within its framework, any more than it makes sense to say that the English language sonnet had run its course as a viable form after a couple of hot decades in the 16th century. Charles McPherson finds plenty to discover and build on in its complex use of chording, rapid tempi, and deconstruction of melody. His tone has a sweet lyricism to it, and it can reach to intellectually challenging improvisational passages or emotional immediacy in the Illinois Jacquet mode.

He is joined by Barry Harris, with whom he had of course had a long association, and Carmell Jones, with whom he had never worked before. Jones had spent time in California, where he had worked in movie studio orchestras and recorded with Bud Shank, Harold Land and Teddy Edwards. Coming east, he had been on Horace Silver's Song for My Father. He did not record again with McPherson, which is too bad, because they meshed well together; but he basically didn't stick around New York for too long. He did a couple of Prestige sessions with Booker Ervin, but then headed to Europe, where he spent the rest of his career as an expatriate, gaining less name recognition but more respect.

Barry Harris leads an outstanding rhythm section of Albert "Tootie" Heath and Nelson Boyd. Boyd came from Philadelphia, perhaps second only to Detroit for gestation of jazz talent, and he came by his bebop credentials honestly, having played with Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro. This session seems to have marked the end of his recording career, although he lived until 1985.

And of course, Harris's solos are invaluable.

Charles McPherson With Carmell Jones And Barry Harris - Bebop Revisited! was produced by Don Schlitten.

 

Listening to Prestige 692: Bobby Timmons

LISTEN TO ONE: Gettin' it Togetha'

 This is Bobby Timnons's third album for Prestige, with as many rhythm sections, a trend whichy was to continue throughout his tenure with the label -- and beyond, for that matter. This time around, it's Keter Betts and the artist known here as Al Heath, but surely better known by the nickname that followed him through his life -- Tootie.

Betts was, in mid-1964, best known for his work with Charlie Byrd, the Washington, DC-based guitarist who introduced the bossa nova to north-of-the-border audiences in a collaboration with Stan Getz, Jazz Samba, two years before Getz/Gilberto made a major jazz star out of housewife Astrud Gilberto, whose recent passing was much mourned. Betts was the bass player on Jazz Samba, but his work with Byrd would be eclipsed in 1964

by the start of a long association with a major jazz luminary, and I don't mean Bobby Timmons (although he would make one more album with Timmons). He was hired by Ella Fitzgerald, and remained with her, with some side trips for other gigs, until her retirement in 1993.

Albert "Tootie" Heath had done two earlier sessions with Prestige. The first, with John Coltrane in 1957, is a session of historical importance because it marked the beginning of Trane's career as an independent artist. He had been fired by Miles Davis earlier in the year, along with other members of the quintet, for heroin abuse. He had gone back to Philadelphia, pulled his life together, and returned to New York to make this album.

It was Heath's only collaboration with Coltrane, but Mal Waldron, who had played piano on the same date, called him back to Englewood Cliffs for a trio session. And over a long and storied career, he played with pretty much everyone, including his brothers.

Timmons, with the huge success of "Moanin'" and "Dat Dere," had developed a considerable following, as "soul jazz pianist," and even more as "soul jazz composer." It was a mixed blessing, as success often is. 

Certainly the success was real. "Moanin'" is, according to secondhandsongs.com, the 11th-most covered song of 1958, with 199 versions to date. That places it behind such memorable songs as "Desafinado" (number one, with 416 covers), "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," "Volare," and Johnny B. Goode--and ahead of "Summertime Blues," "Peter Gunn" and "The Chipmunk Song." "Dat Dere" has been recorded 109 times. Each of these songs was helped by lyrics written by two of the most talented jazz-inspired lyricists. Jon Hendricks for "Moanin'" and Oscar Brown Jr. for "Dat Dere," but the lyrics would be nothing without the melodies, and in fact both songs have been even more widely covered in their instrumental forms.

It can be tough to be pigeonholed, and some blame it for Timmons's heroin addiction and early death, but addiction has complex causes. In any case, Timmons set out prove he was more than just a writer and performer of simple, catchy tunes, and if he would ultimately be remembered as the guy who wrote "Moanin'," he left a recorded legacy much more varied, and very much worth listening to. This session was made up of two originals, two Brazilian bossa novas, and two standards.

The session begins with a song written by Betts and Charlie Byrd, "Chun King," which Byrd would also record a couple of times. It's an interesting choice. The jazz samba sound of Charlie Byrd, of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, is a whispery gossamer, not something you'd associate with the hard-driving block chords and gutbucket blues approach of soul jazz disciple Bobby Timmons. And indeed, Timmons doesn't neglect his funky roots--but at the same time, he respects the delicacy of the composition. And this is even more true with the second bossa nova, one of Antonio Carlos Jobim's best-known compositions, and probably second only to "The Girl from Ipanema" on the Getz/Gilberto album, "O Grande Amor" (culturally transmogrified into "O Grand Amour" for the Prestige album). Timmons does a sensitive take on it, block chords mostly left behind, to a propulsive beat by "Tootie" Heath. When Timmons does let go and make the improvisation his own, it still feels in keeping with the spirit of the piece.

He also does two ballads from the Great American Songbook, "I Could Have Danced All Night" and "Someone to Watch Over Me." These are clearly chosen because Timmons loves the melodies, and you can feel that love from all three musicians. At the same time, they're uniquely Timmons -- you can't imagine Red Garland taking this approach to standards.

And there are two Timmons originals, and why not? He was one of the significant composers of his age, and wanting to branch out did not mean completely rejecting soul jazz. Certainly, if you title a piece "Gettin' it Togetha'," that should be a clue that you're not turning your back on soul jazz. And if "Gettin' it Togetha'" did not become the standard that "Moanin'," "Dis Here" and "Dat Dere" did, it's still a solid effort, right in the Timmons wheelhouse. And if "Walking Death" isn't quite as catchy, it's still a good tune.

Chun King is an excellent showcase of Timmons's range and talent for the album buyer, but Prestige knew where his appeal to the jukebox crowd lay. The first 45 RPM single from the session had "Chun King" on the A side, because bossa nova was still riding high, with Prestige hedging its bet by backing it with a soul number, "A Little Barefoot Soul" on the flip side. The followup single was all soul jazz--  "Gettin' It Togetha' / Walkin', Wadin', Sittin', Ridin'."

Ozzie Cadena produced.  

Listening to Prestige 303: Mal Waldron

Left Alone (Bethehem) and Impressions were the two albums that Mal Waldron made in 1959 to commemorate his two-year association with Billie Holiday, who would enter the hospital for her final illness on May 31, and die on July 17. Left Alone was recorded on February 24, Impressions on March 20.

Holiday's death was famously chronicled in Frank O'Hara's poem, "The Day Lady Died," in which O'Hara recalls a moment at the Five Spot when:

She whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The memory of the song, and the moment that took O'Hara's breath away comes back to him the news of Holiday's literal last breath. But in the poem, that transcendent moment reaches Mal Waldron first, before it spreads to everyone else in the club and finally to O'Hara, leaning on the door to the john. An perhaps more than that. To Waldron, her closest collaborator in art at that moment, and through him to Lester Young, her soulmate in art, dead just a handful of weeks earlier, and to all artists touched by art as perhaps no one else can be, and then to everyone in the club, and then to everyone, touched and moved and changed by art being in the world whether they know it or not, whether they care or not, whether they've heard of Billie Holiday or not, and finally to Frank O'Hara, who can only record that she stopped breathing on an ordinary day, and stopped breathing because for a moment her artistry made the universe stand still.

In O'Hara's poem, Mal Waldron is the conduit, and as his two-year-association with Billie Holiday drew to a close, Waldron was thinking, musically, about that that meant.

Both Left Alone and Impressions are unique as tribute albums in that they don't, on the surface, have very much to with the artist they're paying tribute to. Left Alone has one song, "You Don;t Know What Love Is," associated with Holiday. Impressions has three songs that were written for vocalists, but only one of them, "All the Way," was recorded by her, on her strings album with Ry Ellis, but surely that song would fit more comfortably onto a Frank Sinatra tribute album.

Trumpeter Webster Young recorded a Holiday tribute album that was all songs she had made famous,  but Waldron's approach really makes as much sense. Jazz is jazz. Once Young has played the melody of "Don't Explain," he's off into his own improvisation, and the version quickly becomes his.

Waldron is thinking about what he's learned from his two years with Holiday, and in fact one track of Left Alone is Teddy Charles interviewing Waldron about precisely that.

One thing, Waldron stresses in the interview, is that he learned from Holiday to listen to the words. This is advice passed down to the younger musician from an older one, with Holiday as the conduit: Lester Young said that he always had the words to a song in his mind when he played. I've always wondered if this could also be retrofitted--did Lester think of King Pleasure's lyrics to "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid," written to his solo, when he played it?

A bit of transient whimsy, but interesting to consider in that Waldron was one of the best composers of his era, and as such played a lot of original material that had no words. But I have to believe that Holiday's influence was strong here, too: the way that she listened to, and sang, and created musical patterns for words.

Three of the pieces on Impressions are a suite: "Les Champs Elysées," "C'est Formidable," and "Ciao," inspired by a European tour that he and Holiday took together. You can actually hear the spectre of lyrics in "Ciao," the frenzied conversations, trying to get everything in before departing for America. Waldron would return to Europe to live, after losing a few years to a heroin overdose triggering a near-total mental breakdown, and he would often say in interviews that if Holiday had been able to make the break to expatriate living, it could have added years to her life.

The other non-original songs that Waldron includes on Impressions are "With a Song in Heart" by Rodgers and Hart, and "You Stepped Out of a Dream" by Nacio Herb Brown and Gus Kahn. "All About Us" is credited to Elaine Waldron, Mal's wife. She's received composer credit on his work before, and it may be some sort of publishing thing.

When John Coltrane came back to New York from Philadelphia, clean and sober and ready to record again, one of the players he brought with him was drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath, who stayed in the Big Apple and returns to Prestige here.

As of this blog entry, "Tootie" is still with us, and he talked about jazz then and now in a recent interview:

 I come from an era where...“jazz” was not considered a music that was sophisticated. It was always happening in some place where everybody was drunk, the room was full of smoke, and it wasn’t on the concert stage.

Once jazz was presented on the concert stage and introduced to festivals all over the world, the people that play it don’t necessarily represent people from my era anymore because we’ve died out.

I consider myself one of those people who came from the area where the blues was important and the RnB was important, and church gospel music was important. It’s not a part of what people call “jazz” anymore. People ignore that, they are not intellectual forms of music. That is not taught at the universities, they don’t teach you nothing about no blues. How to play an 8 bar or 12 bar blues, they don’t teach you that at the universities.

They teach you about sequences and how to go from this kind of change to that kind of change. We didn’t even know what that was, most of us.

Duke Ellington said, “one foot in the future, and one foot in blues would make the music unique.”

I started this project partly on a whim, partly out of the realization that this was an important era in American culture, and the idea that I could maybe get a sense of the totality of it through looking at one record label. Prestige because I thought it had been a little overlooked in jazz history, and because it was such an important part of my early jazz record collecting.

Bob Weinstock said that he sold the label in 1971 in part because the jazz he loved was no longer the jazz that was being made. Choosing Prestige meant starting to look at jazz in 1949, which is good because there's no right date, and this way the choice was made for me.

The music of these two decades was made by musicians born in the teens, in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s--musicians who matured and made their mark in the heart of the American Century in Music, that unparalleled artistic flourishing that came from the blues and developed in so many astounding ways. Maybe jazz, building from " the area where the blues was important and the RnB was important, and church gospel music was important," is the fullest expression of that music. Not the best, because there is no best, but the fullest, and the music that so many who started in more basic forms aspired to.

There are lots of reasons why the American Century wound down, or maybe just one reason. Because things do. No one is composing baroque music any more, or writing Elizabethan drama. That doesn't make the interpretive art of a Yo-Yo Ma or an Ian McKellen any less wonderful. But maybe "Tootie" has his finger on it.

There's another explanation, and that is that I'm wrong. That the Duke is right, and we still have one foot in the blues, and the other in the future. That "Tootie" got old, and I got old, and it's natural for us to live in the past.

Impressions was released on New Jazz. In spite of being hailed at the time as Waldron's best work to date, it seems to have never made it over, in whole or part, to a Prestige release.

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad
Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                                             
--Dave Grusin

An
important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell

Listening to Prestige 241: John Coltrane

This was a pivotal time for John Coltrane. He had been plucked from obscurity in Philadelphia by Miles Davis in late 1955. He had "started with a style imitating Eddie Lockjaw Davis," Miles later reminisced, but he saw something in the young saxophone player that others missed. Coltrane was searching for a new way of approaching, and Miles heard that search.

According to an article in Jazzwise magazine,

Coltrane was searching for something original, and that search was part of his sound. He repeated phrases as if he was wringing every possibility out of note combinations. He was determined never to play predictable melodic lines; instead, unusual flourishes and rhythmic fanfares cut through the structure of the tune. Many writers would puzzle over – some actively denounce – this new, 'exposed' style. They were familiar with polish, not process. Was he practising or performing? Was that harsh rasp intentional, or just a loose mouthpiece?

And we're back to the discussion of perfection versus the capturing of the creative process.

Coltrane was working a lot. He had a heavy touring schedule with the Miles Davis Quintet, and he was also on call in the studio, especially for Prestige. From October of 1955 and his debut with Miles up until this first session as a leader, he was a sideman on eleven different gigs for Prestige, and four more for Blue Note.

And he was doing a lot of self-medicating during this period, with alcohol and especially with heroin. In April of 1957, Miles Davis fired both him and Philly Joe Jones for heroin abuse.

Coltrane went back to Philadelphia, and went cold turkey, helped by friends, by his wife, Naima, who had converted to Islam, and by his own spiritual awakening. It worked. By the end of May, he was back in New York, clean, and with a contract to make three albums a year for Prestige. this being the first one, and his first album as a leader.

He brought some of Philadephia with him, including Johnny Splawn, who played on the first four tunes. This was his only recording date, and I couldn't find anything about him, except that he may have come from a musical family. Clyde Barnhardt, in his memoir 80 Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues, recalls playing during the 1920s in Charlie Grear's Midnite Ramblers with a trumpeter named John F. Splawn.

Also from Philadelphia, also making his New York recording debut, was a drummer who stayed around for a good long time, Albert Heath, better known as "Tootie." Tootie Heath would play with pretty nearly everybody, most notably his brothers Jimmy and Percy. And he is still playing.

Curiously, Trane employed two piano players: Mal Waldron on the first three cuts, Red Garland on the last four. He must have planned it that way. It doesn't seem likely that Garland was just wandering through Hackensack and decided to pop in during the middle of the session, and Trane just decided to fire Waldron and take him on. Coltrane and Garland did work together a lot, both with Miles and together on Prestige sessions.

The Waldron cuts include two Coltrane originals (one of the few Waldron sessions where they didn't use any of his compositions). These are tunes he must have brought with him from Philadelphia, composed as part of his therapy: "Straight Street" and "Chronic Blues." The other, and the second tune of the day, is "While My Lady Sleeps," by Bronislaw Kaper, a Polish emigre film composer whose credits include another jazz standard, "Green Dolphin Street." "While My Lady Sleeps" is particularly noteworthy because near the end, Coltrane employs, for the first time, a technique he would use extensively in some of his most famous later recordings: multiphonics. This involves playing more than one melody or sequence of notes at the same time, and it's done by a combination of false fingering and embouchure adjustment, sometimes by humming one tune inside your mouth while you're playing another through the saxophone. This is another thing Coltrane brought with him from Philadelphia: he credits local saxophonist John Glenn with teaching him.

Waldron has a particularly vivid solo on "Straight Street."

These three and "Bakai," the first Garland song, employ Splawn on trumpet, and all but "While My  Lady Sleeps" also include Sahib Shihab on baritone, and the three-horn front line is powerful and complex, especially on "Bakai," which is the Arabic word for "cry," and has an Arabic flavor to it. "Bakai" was written by Calvin Massey, and the cry is for Emmett Till, the black teenager who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi (everyone knew who had done it, but his white killers were never brought to justice). Massey was an esteemed jazz composer, and he was also very political. He worked closely with the Black Panthers, writing The Black Liberation Movement Suite for them, and his outspoken political stances led to blacklisting by most white-owned record companies.

"Violets for Your Furs," "Time Was" and "I Hear a Rhapsody" were all in the quartet with Red Garland that was to be the format for the rest of his tenure with Prestige.

"I Hear a Rhapsody" didn't make the album that came from this date, presumably for reasons of space. It would come out on a later package thrown together after Coltrane had left the label, Lush Life. This album would be called simply Coltrane, and later The First Trane. Prestige released one 45 RPM single, "Time Was," parts one and two. This was from the pen of a Mexican composer, Paz Miguel Prado, from San Miguel de Allende, where I am as I write this, and it had a brief splash as an American pop tune, with recordings by Bob Eberle and Kate Smith.

 



 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.