Listening to Prestige 556: Clark Terry

LISTEN TO ONE: Nightlife

 Was the world really panting for a jazz version of All American? They hadn't exactly been panting for the original version of All American. The musical by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who had hit it big with Bye Bye Birdie, ran for 80 performances on Broadway, panned by critics and unloved by audiences. An account of the show's history in Wikipedia is a compendium of wrong moves. 

First, the show's producers hired Mel Brooks  to write the book, which doesn't sound like a bad idea, except that Brooks was then young and inexperienced. He'd had some success as a TV gag

writer, but didn't know much about writing a play. For one thing, he discovered, plays are longer than sketches for Your Show of Shows, and you had to sustain momentum all the way through them. This proved too much for Brooks to handle, and he gave up when he discovered that after you'd finished the first act, you had to write a second act. So the producers brought in Joshua Logan, who had lots of experience as a successful Broadway director and script doctor, but not so much with the kind of broad sketch comedy favored by Brooks, so the second act ended up not exactly meshing with the first act. Then the producers, sensing trouble, brought in a star--Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and a veteran Broadway star. So the script was rewritten around Bolger, which might have been a good idea except for two things: the story wasn't much of a fit for Bolger, and in 1962 no one cared about Bolger any more. Nothing good came out of all of this for the producers of All American, but something eventually did for Brooks: The Producers, inspired in part by this experience.

For all that, a musical can at least sort of succeed if it produces a few hit songs, though by 1962, that was also pretty much an idea whose time had passed. And the score of All American was not the most memorable. The website secondhandsongs.com lists cover versions of over 100,000 songs -- it's not complete by any means, but it's pretty comprehensive and a good resource. Only two of the songs from All American are listed at all on the site, so if there are any covers of the others, they are slim and scattered. "Once Upon a Time." first recorded by Tony Bennett, has had a good run of action among crooners, both pop and country, although not even the Bennett version cracked the Billboard Top 100. Instrumentally, it has mostly been picked up by orchestras like Lester Lanin's and Percy Faith's, with very little jazz interest. Charlie Byrd has recorded it, and Kenny Barron. 

The only other song from the score to get any cover action at all is "I've Just Seen Her," which has ten recordings, per secondhandsongs...and all by jazz performers. Terry, followed by Gary Burton, Pepper Adams, Scott Hamilton, Bill Charlap, Scott Hamilton with Bill Charlap. 

Nothing for any of the others. Perhaps they weren't very good songs. Certainly, they weren't the hippest of the hip. Nat Hentoff, in the album's liner notes, says rather charitably of Strouse and Adams:

Both are knowledgeable writers for the current state of the Broadway musical, but no one would claim that either or both has more than a peripheral acquaintance with jazz. 

One wonders who thought this was a good idea in the first place. Esmond Edwards? Bob Weinstock? Did Weinstock get such a cut rate deal on the score that he couldn't refuse? In any event, a silk purse had to be made out of a sow's ear.

The history of sow's ears into silk purses, in American culture, is an interesting one, and there have been some notable successes. Louis Armstrong turned a fairly pedestrian tune, "Sweethearts on Parade," by square's square Carmen Lombardo, into one of the most sublime jazz vocals of all time. Some would argue that history repeated itself, if not quite as sublimely, with "Hello, Dolly."

There's that great story of film director Howard Hawks trying to convince Ernest Hemingway to write for the movies. Hemingway said he didn't like movies, and every time he saw a movie based on a good book he hated it. "That's because good books don't make good movies," Hawks told him. "But sometimes a bad book can make a great movie. I'll prove it to you. I'll take the worst piece of garbage you ever wrote and turn it into a great movie." 

"What's the worst piece of garbage I ever wrote?" Hemingway demanded.

"No question about it. To Have and Have Not."

Hawks, like virtually everyone else, shortchanged To Have and Have Not, which is a pretty interesting novel. But he did make a great film of it.

The poet and classicist David R. Slavitt, who has been praised for his translations of Seneca and Ovid, also published a collection of a little-known Roman author, The Fables of Avianus. Because Avianus was an undiscovered gem? "Heavens, no," Slavitt told me. "Avianus was a terrible writer. This way, all the credit for quality is mine alone."

And it's been reported that Clint Eastwood wanted the challenge of making a quality film out of a perfectly awful novel. Hence, The Bridges of Madison County.

"It was clear to me," Oliver Nelson told Hentoff,

...that without the action on state, Ray Bolger's dancing, and the comedy, the music by itself needed quite special treatment to stand up on a jazz date.

In short, Nelson was nearly as accomplished a diplomat as he was an arranger.

So, did he do it? Did he make the silk purse?

Oh, my yes. It was silk, it was silk and satin and linen that shows, rings and things and buttons and bows. "I've Just Seen Her," the one tune from the show that intrigued some jazz musicians, may be the weakest track here. Nelson has crafted a pure delight, and unexpected delight. Probably no one much took this album seriously. The contemporary website AllMusic.com gave it three stars; there are no listener reviews at all on Amazon, no comments on the cuts on YouTube. So this is one of those gems of a golden age of American that's just waiting there for you to discover it. And it may not be the equivalent of David R. Slavitt and Avianus, because Strouse is certainly an adequate tunesmith, but this is Nelson's music. 

Clark Terry must have been scratching his head when Prestige contacted him about this gig. Also the diplomat, he describes, not his first reaction, but his second:

I was surprised at how much Oliver had been able to do with the tunes, not only with regard to making them more interesting harmonically, but also in terms of the naturally flowing rhythm patterns he set them in. And once we all got into it, it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable date. As I think the recording shows, we all had a ball.

It does. There's no guarantee that a bunch of performers having a ball will translate into a good time for the audience--look at the Rat Pack's version of Ocean's Eleven -- but in this case, you can hear them having a ball, and you can also hear them digging into miraculous arrangements, and doing right by them.

The band was quite likely a Nelson-Terry collaboration. Les Robinson was a veteran section man with a number of big bands, and was probably known to both men--certainly to Terry, who had played with him on the West Coast. George Barrow was frequently called upon by Nelson, both on baritone, as here, and tenor. He played on Nelson's Prestige sessions, and on The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

Of Budd Johnson, Terry told Nat Hentoff:

It was a great help, of course, to have Budd Johnson along. First of all, no matter what you give him, Budd will swing it. And he has such a solid knowledge of chords that you can't lose him. He always knows what's happening and what can be done to make the proceedings more interesting. You listen to him here. He's like an old pitcher -- he's got so much "stuff" going for him, not only a fast ball, but curves and twisters and changes-of-pace. And always there's that big tone.

This comes back to Nelson again. Not to put down the excellent musicians, including some jazz greats tired of the road, who play in the pit orchestras of Broadway musicals, but the score of a show like All American isn't going to have chord changes so unexpected that they might lose a lesser musician than Budd Johnson.

Eddie Costa played on a couple of Prestige sessions in 1957. Terry singles him out for much-deserved praise as well. 

The man simply can't go wrong rhythmically. Eddie also contributed a lot to the good feeling that pervaded the session.

Costa's rhythmic brilliance, especially on the vibes, and his good camaraderie were both approaching a tragic end. In July of that year, just two months later, he would die in an auto accident at age 32. 

Esmond Edwards produced. The album was recorded over two sessions. It was released on Moodsville, although it was far from being a Moodsville album. The title, and I appreciate the gentle irony, is Clark Terry Plays the Jazz Version of All American.

 

Listening to Prestige 261: Hal McKusick

Hal McKusick wasn't ignored by the jazz record labels during the fifties. He recorded as a leader on Bethlehem and Jubilee, two labels on the periphery, but doing good stuff. He even led a few sessions on majors -- RCA Victor and Decca. And he played with Gil Mellé and Art Farmer for Prestige, and he played with Al Cohn, Benny Golson, Lee Konitz and Jimmy Giuffre, even with Charlie Parker. Most notably, he worked with pianist-composer-theorist George Russell, recording twice with him. If he's not remembered as vividly as he should be, it's certainly not due to any deficiencies in his music,

McKusick's recording career is mostly bounded by the fifties, although he did appear as a sideman on a few sessions in the early sixties. This album for Prestige was his second to last, and perhaps his most atypical. His music is known for theory and advanced arrangement. He worked closely with George Russell when Russell was developing his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, an important precursor to the modal jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Probably more typical of his approach to jazz was the album he made the following year for Decca, featuring five, six and seven-piece ensembles and the work of four very different arrangers: Russell, George Handy, Jimmy Giuffre and Ernie Wilkins, each of whom was asked, McKusick said in a later interview, for "their most advanced thinking."

So how did Bob Weinstock's casual, unrehearsed jam session approach fit with McKusick's talents? Very well indeed, and we're lucky to have this album, and this side of McKusick, just as we're lucky to have the Decca Cross Section--Saxes. Everyone likes to just cut loose and blow every now and then, and the bebop improv approach of head-solo-solo-solo-head, with some casual but intricate duets and dialogs thrown in, can yield some wonderful music, especially with musicians like these.

Billy Byers, like McKusick, came out of the swing era, and worked as a section man in bands featuring the best arrangers. He later would become Quincy Jones's assistant at Mercury Records. So he wasn't exactly the typical Prestige guy either--this was his first session for the label, and he would only do one other, in 1963--but like McKusick, he finds that sweet spot, and the stuff they do together is especially rewarding.

Charlie Persip had done only one previous session for Prestige, but he'd been in the studio on at least one other memorable occasion, as a witness to the strange and thorny afternoon with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. He would be back several more times, in the course of a long and distinguished career. Eddie Costa was also making his second appearance on Prestige. The first had been on the vibes, accompanying Bobby Jaspar and Tommy Flanagan. He looked to be at the dawn of a major career. In 1957, he would be named Down Beat's new star on both piano and vibes, the first time a musician had gained that honor on two different instruments. But an auto accident would take his life a few years later.

Paul Chambers was, by this time, one of Prestige's stars, and with good reason. His solos, both plucked and bowed (on "The Settlers and the Indians") are musical gems, and that's not by chance. Chambers, as we know, hit New York as a 19-year-old wunderkind, already a master of his instrument. After all, he had started in the jazz cauldron of Detroit, where musicians matured early. His friend, drummer Hindal Butts, remembers (again from Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert's indispensable Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit 1920-1960):

Paul was determined to make the bass a solo instrument and he practiced, hour upon hour. I waited on Paul to take a couple of girls out, and he wouldn't stop practicing! He loved to bow and he mastered the bow.

Butts was a member of a quartet led by Kenny Burrell and Chambers, called the Four Sharps. And, given that this is the early 50s, that would almost sound like a doo-wop group, wouldn't it?

Well, yeah. This was Detroit, where music was music. The group played modern jazz, and they also sang four-part harmonies. We can't exactly know how good the Four Sharps (who also, at various times, included Tommy Flanagan, Frank Foster, Yusef Lateef and Pepper Adams) were as a vocal group, because no records of their music have survived, but we sort of can. Again, from Hindal Butts:

We recorded "The Nearness of You" ... Kenny sang the lead, we sang the backup and we did the bridge in unison ... Kenny called me one day and said, "Turn the radio on." He was mad ... I turned the radio on and the Four Freshmen were singing [our arrangement of] "The Nearness of You" almost note for note.

Butts recalled that the Four Freshmen, when they were playing Detroit, used to stop in at Klein's Show Bar when the Sharps were playing there, and request the number over and over.

McKusick composed three of the tunes for this session. He turned to some top composers for a couple of others: Dizzy Gillespie's much-recorded "Con Alma" and Jimmy Dorsey's "I'm Glad There is You."

And some more surprising choices. "The Settlers and the Indians" was written by Bobby Scott, who was, at just about the same time, climbing the Top Forty charts with a rock 'n roll song called "Chain Gang." He would later write "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" for British rockers The Hollies, and win a Grammy for "A Taste of Honey." Incidentally, I've lauded Wikipedia for their excellent entries on jazz albums, but that doesn't mean you can count on the Internet across the board. There are a whole bunch of sites devoted to lyrics, and I don't know who's ripping off who, but if there's a mistake in one, the same mistake will be in all of them. Take, for instance, the lyrics to "The Settlers and the Indians." Every one of these sites features lyrics to "The Settlers and the Indians," and every one of gives what are actually the lyrics to "Don't Worry 'bout Me." Maybe someone was listening to this album, because McKusick also does "Don't Worry 'bout Me," a song by Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler that's a standard for jazz vocalists, my favorite version being King Pleasure's.

"Something New" is credited to Albert Gamse and Ricardo Lopez Mendes, both of whom were lyricists, but someone must have chipped in a melody. And "Saturday Night" is the really interesting one. It was the title song for a musical with a book by Julius and Philip Epstein, who had co-written the screenplay for Casablanca, and had turned the composer job over to an unknown, who remained unknown, as Saturday Night never made it to Broadway, and lord knows where McKusick found it, especially since the young unknown was being told at that point to stick to lyrics, because his melodies weren't quite good enough. And in fact, while McKusick was recording "Saturday Night,"  Steven Sondheim's lyrics were making their mark on Broadway to Leonard Bernstein's music for West Side Story.

The album was called Triple Exposure. McKusick's "Interim" and "Don't Worry 'bout Me" didn't make the cut, but were later included in the New Jazz compilation album, Bird Feathers.

McKusick lived a long and productive life, dying in 2012 at the age of 87. He composed music for two plays by his friend Edward Albee, "The Sandbox" and "The Death of Bessie Smith." He taught for a number of years at the exclusive Ross School on Long Island, where he moved in the early 1970s. Of his years on the jazz scene of the 1950s, he said this, in an interview with the AllAboutJazz website. He was talking about Cross Section--Saxes, but he could have been talking about Triple Exposure, or indeed, any album by any of the New York jazz musicians:

The sound was a reflection of our lives in New York--the intensity, the art, the optimism all squeezed together.

Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

 

Listening to Prestige 215: Bobby Jaspar

A star-crossed session, with two wonderful players destined to die far too young. Vibraphonist Eddie Costa would die in an auto accident in 1962, leader Bobby Jaspar of a heart attack in 1963.

This was Jaspar's recording debut, and the American debut for the Belgian-born musician. He was probably better known as a saxophonist in Europe, but most of his American recording, and therefore most of his reputation, was on the flute.

Jaspar came to the US in 1956. The Swedes like Lars Gullin and Bengt Hallberg had paved the way for acceptance of European jazz musicians, and Jaspar arrived with a reputation as a cat who could play.

He also arrived with an American wife. He had married semi-expatriate Blosssom Dearie in Paris in 1955 (they would divorce in 1957, around the time he was making these Prestige sides).

Eddie Costa, also making his Prestige debut with this session, was really hitting his stride in 1957, the year that he was named the Down Beat new star of the year on both piano and vibes, the first time a musician had ever won two categories in the same year. He first hit New York in 1949, with his older brother Bill. It wasn't a long drive from his home town in central Pennsylvania--only 150 miles--but culturally, it might as well have been a moon shot. Atlas, PA, was a coal mining town, and not much modern jazz made it there. But brother Bill played piano, and had a taste for swing, which he passed on to Eddie. The two of them hit the big city together, where Eddie first heard Bud Powell, and found his true musical love. He recorded with Sal Salvador in 1954, and made his first recording as a leader in 1956, a trio session with Vinnie Burke and Nick Stabulas that was released by two primarily rhythm and blues labels, Jubilee and its subsidiary Josie.

Bobby Donaldson was also new to Prestige, but hardly new to the music business. He went back to the swing and jump blues days in the 1940s, but by this time he was a sought-after session drummer in virtually any genre you'd care to name.

If you were going to assign signs of the zodiac to musical instruments, flute would be an air sign, vibes and piano water signs. Bass and drums, of course, would be earth signs. So minus the fire sign of a saxophone, this session is earth, wind and water, and a very cool combination it is. I was particularly struck by the compositions, which I guessed might be all Bobby Jaspar tunes, but I was wrong. "Flute Bob" is Jaspar's, but "Flute Bass Blues" is by Doug Watkins and "Solacium" by Tommy Flanagan. Which says something about how many talented composers there were in the jazz world of the 1950s, even though many of these compositions were caught in flight at the one session they were brought to, and then soared on into the jazz ionosphere. "Flute Bass Blues" was recorded in a very different era as a duet for Jeremy Steig and Eddie Gomez, where it becomes much more a vehicle for bass virtuosity, although Watkins does have a short and effective solo on this cut; and "Solacium" became best known as a vehicle for John Coltrane, on album that showcased Tommy Flanagan's compositions.

Interestingly, "Solacium" is the cut that has the least of Flanagan for this session. It's very much a flute-vibes duet. It's the first cut of the session (although the last of the subsequent album) and establishes the chemistry between the two soloists.

These three tunes became part of an album called Flute Flight, with a second session that featured Herbie Mann and Joe Puma taking Costa's place, and Mann and Jaspar sharing leader billing.