Listening to Prestige part 152: James Moody

I had not known that James Moody was partially deaf--and that as a child, he was put in a school for retarded children because school administrators didn't believe he was deaf. Fortunately, his mother moved him to a different school district, and fortunately, he didn't let hearing loss stand in the way of his love for music, or his desire to play it. It also wasn't enough to keep him out of the Air Force, in which he served during World War II. The Air Force had a band, but it was whites only. Moody has spoken in a video interview of his experiences in the segregated Air Force.

He found the unauthorized "Negro Air Force Band" led by trumpeter Dave Burns, with whom he remained close, first in the postwar Dizzy Gillespie band and then in the septet he organized, which played these Prestige dates among others. Burns is heard to good effect in these two sessions.

I've written a lot about James Moody, first in relation to his Swedish sessions for Metronome/Prestige, then in these septet sessions in Hackensack at the Van Gelder studio, and I'm not sure I have much more to say, which is one of the reasons I've held off writing a blog entry for a couple of weeks--the other being that I've gotten caught up gathering my first five years' worth of entries into book form, and that's almost ready.

But I was struck by this quote from Jimmy Heath, about a somewhat older Moody:

Over the years, Moody has become so free--not in a random fashion, but a scientific freedom--that he can do anything he wants with the saxophone.... He has true knowledge. He is in complete control.

I think this is a great distinction...scientific freedom vs. random freedom. I remember hearing Steve

Allen introducing Miles Davis on his tv show, and saying that Miles was not, as your grandmother might say, "just blowin' a lot of notes." Steve's grandmother must have had a somewhat different vocabulary than mine did, but we'll pass over that. Steve went on to say that "every note has a precise musical meaning and, uh, you could prove it with mathematics if need be." Well, I suppose you could, although mathematics might not be the best proof. But for sure, there's freedom and there's freedom. The scientific freedom, the kind that you could prove with mathematics if you needed to, is the kind of freedom that allowed Shakespeare to probe every shading and subtlety of human emotion, within the confines of iambic pentameter. The geniuses of free jazz, like Coleman and Coltrane and Dolphy, found their own kind of scientific freedom, even though Allen's mother might have said they were just blowin' a lot of notes. But as for random freedom...

There's a story abut Buck Clayton playing a Jazzmobile concert in New York. A young guy hopped up on the stage next to him, said he'd like to jam with him. Clayton said OK, let's play a little blues in B-flat. He started playing, the kid started screeching and caterwauling, blowin' a bunch of notes all over the map, never mind the scale.

"What's that?" Clayton demanded.

"Man, I'm just playing what I feel."

"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

In 1955, Moody is already a master of scientific freedom, and he and his septet of Gillespie alumni feel plenty, and they feel it all in the same key. Eddie Jefferson joins them again for one number -- "Disappointed" -- and he meshes brilliantly. He doesn't make it a band backing up a vocalist, he adds one more instrument to a brilliant ensemble.

Listening to Prestige Part 136: James Moody

Seeing James Moody later in his career, after his seven-year stint in Vegas, was a show and a half. He was slick, his patter was hip and glib, he told jokes, he would have fit right in with Frank and Dean and Sammy. And did his musicianship suffer? You had better believe it did not.

What's the place of showmanship in art? In jazz? In modern jazz? The greatest showman (perhaps) in American show business history was also the greatest artist (beyond debate) in the history of American culture. By the time the beboppers came along, no one questioned the greatness of Armstrong, although they thought it was time for further explorations of the possibilities of jazz, but they did question his showmanship. Black entertainers in the first part of the last century played to cultural stereotypes. That doesn't mean they weren't good, or very good. Tim ("Kingfish") Moore was a comic genius, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson a gifted comic, but they're known for their iconic--and stereotypic--roles as a grifter and a butler. Tim Moore, in 1908, did a one-man show adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, for which he

painted one side of his face white and the other black, and turned one profile or the other to the audience depending on whether he was portraying Uncle Tom or Simon Legree. I would have paid to see that--certainly I would have paid the nickel that it probably cost then, especially because the bill would probably also have included Bill "Bojangles" Robinson or Eubie Blake or Bert Williams or even Bessie Smith.

Bill Robinson, still a legend among dancers, played a shuffling butler in Shirley Temple movies. Ethel Waters always played a maid. And Louis Armstrong, to some extent, played the smiling, always ingratiating stage Negro.

And by itself, there's nothing wrong with being ingratiating, or making people feel good. Billie Holiday recognized this, when she said of Armstrong, "Sure Pops Toms, but he Toms from the heart."

But it wasn't what the be boppers were about. They were intellectuals, they were serious artists, and they wanted their music to be recognized for the important art form that it was. 

They succeeded. Jazz is taught and studied at conservatories and universities, theory, appreciation and practice.

And they succeeded in another way. Serious artists are never going to be as entertaining as popular artists, on as broad a stage. Jazz has, by this juncture in the 21st century, taken its place alongside grand opera as the least listened-to music in America. 

But grand opera is not bad company.

Through all of this, showmanship never completely disappeared. Dizzy Gillespie knew its value. He created the stereotypical image of the 1940s hipster, with the bop beret, goatee and shades, which raised the visibility, and therefore the audience, of jazz. And it didn't hurt that he was one of the greatest artists of his or any other generation.

Showmanship in jazz takes many forms. Monk getting up and dancing around his piano bench was a great show, but it wasn't showmanship, it wasn't consciously playing to the audience. It was just Monk being Monk. Miles Davis, playing the role of the anti-showman, displaying his contempt for the audience by turning his back to them when he soloed...that was showmanship. And you can bet that Miles knew it.

And one went to see James Moody for the music, because he was one of the all time jazz greats, and one went away loving the Rat Pack stage patter, as well. And it was equally easy to love his vocal interpretation of King Pleasure/Blossom Dearie's interpretation of his "Moody's Mood for Love," in which he sang both parts ("and then the chick say..."). Or "Bennie's from Heaven."

Moody caught on quickly to the entertainment value of really good vocalese. He might have resented this messing around with his improvisation, but he was too musically hip and too show-biz savvy to do that. I'm reminded of the story Tito Puente told about how for a while he used to get irritated when people requested "Oye Como Va" by saying, "Hey, can you play that Santana tune?" His irritation, he said, lasted until the day he walked down to his mailbox and found his first royalty check for Santana's version. After that, it was "Hey, can you play 'Oye Como Va'?" "Oh, you mean that Santana tune!"

Which is why Moody has Eddie Jefferson singing on this early session. And why it sounds so good, as does the rest of the session.

Listening to Prestige Part 128: King Pleasure/Quincy Jones

Every King Pleasure session leaves me with more questions. How exactly did he fit into Prestige's world? How did he fit into anyone's? He has to have been one of Prestige's bestselling artists, but he seems to have been recorded as an afterthought, generally with a rhythm and blues band. This session is unusual in that he has a fantastic array of A-list musicians backing him up, but it also doesn't seem that it was exactly his session.

And we've seen this before, too. In 1952 there's a session by the Charlie Ferguson Quintet. Ferguson didn't exactly become a household word, even in jazz households, although he put together a fine group, including bassist Peck Morrison. And of the eight songs recorded that day, six of them instrumentals, Prestige only released four, and only two of them were Ferguson instrumentals. The other two that did get released featured a vocalist. Yes, it was King Pleasure, and yes, these two have become jazz classics: "Red Top" (also featuring Betty Carter) and "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid."

So here, again. That session is listed in the Prestige discography as "The Charlie Ferguson Quintet" with King Pleasure. For this one, at least Pleasure gets top billing: King Pleasure with Quincy Jones Band. But again, two cuts with vocals, two without.

This is the fifth of five sessions Pleasure would do for Prestige. They'd be collected in the now-legendary King Pleasure Sings/Annie Ross Sings LP in 1957. By then Pleasure had gone on to record a couple of singles for Aladdin (including a remake of "Moody's Mood for Love"), then Jubilee, HiFi Jazz, and United Artists ("Moody's Mood" again). Then nothing. He died in 1981, pretty much forgotten. I was only able to find one obituary, on a blog called The People vs. Dr. Chilledair, a reprint of a piece the author had written in 1981 for the LA Jazz Dispatch, and it doesn't add much to what we know about his life, which is close to nothing. But he adds this:

Postscript: Years later, after writing this, I encountered the singer’s last drummer, John Gilbert, on the internet. Here is what he wrote on his website: “This picture of me was taken in 1965 by King Pleasure at a service club in North Carolina. He was traveling through that part of the country using local rhythm sections. [Singer] Earl Coleman recommended me to King Pleasure for the gig, and it turned out to be a lasting friendship. I came to California in 1969 and we played some in L.A. until his health failed badly (emphysema). Pleasure stayed with my wife and I for a while in Sherman Oaks, Ca. My son was an infant and he would serenade him to sleep. I was also associated with Earl Coleman at the time. King Pleasure was initially impressed with the fact that I knew all of the words to 'Moody's Mood For Love' and other tunes that he had recorded. He was a sweet man and very helpful to me. Pleasure related to me that the greatest moment in his musical career came in New England. He was at a low point in his life, sitting at the back of a bus when a group of school children boarded the bus and one was chirping out 'Moody's Mood' which was a hit at the time. They had no idea that the figure in the back of the bus was the man himself. He got a big kick out of this and often happily reflected on that moment in time.”

I had wondered if Pleasure was particularly difficult, and maybe no one could stand to have him around for more than two songs at a time. When one thinks about jazz musicians of this era, one can't help but be aware that addiction is a possibility, but I'll never assume that.

Another possibility: maybe he only had so much material. Vocalese isn't exactly like instrumental improvisation. You're basically not improvising at all. You're following someone else's improvisation, so it has to be learned, and it's a little more complicated than learning a couple of verses and a bridge to standard. Plus, you have to write lyrics to that complex and often labyrinthine musical structure. Which also means finding the solo that'll work, and exposure to too much bad vocalese over the years has certainly shown us all that that's not a guarantee. Annie Ross went home one night and came back in the morning with"Twisted," but it's not that easy. Pleasure was a great singer, but he got his start performing an Eddie Jefferson lyric, and maybe putting together a successful vocalese piece didn't come easy to him.

In this case, he had some pretty serious support-- one of the hottest arrangers in the business, and two backup vocalists who were the royal court of the kingdom of vocalese, in Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks. More backing vocals were provided by the Three Riffs, who weren't a group that went on to  stardom, but they were very good (one of them, Joe Seneca, actually did go on to a distinguished career as an actor).

He also had a powerful group of musicians working under Quincy Jones's direction. J. J. and Kai were really hitting their stride as a trombone team. Lucky Thompson probably never quite the recognition he deserved. This may have been 19-year-old Paul Chambers's first recording session.

The resulting songs may never have quite gotten the recognition of Moody's or Parker's moods, but they should have. "Don't Get Scared" is a Stan Getz solo, from a recording made in Sweden with Bengt Halberg and Lars Gullin. The Getz solo is sung by pleasure, the Gullin solo sung (and written) by Jon Hendricks, whose clever vocalese lyrics once earned him the nickname "the James Joyce of Jive."

"I'm Gone" is a Quincy Jones original, and the lyrics are credited to making Pleasure, but the arranged vocal ensemble parts, to the repeated phrase "I'm gone, I'm gone I'm gone I'm gone" are as important as the solo part.

So maybe this was essentially a Quincy Jones session. Jones wasn't exactly a regular in the Prestige stable, though he had done a couple of other arrangements, and he was a rising star, and maybe he brought the vocalists in as part of it, but the vocal tracks weren't all he wanted to do.

Maybe...but the vocal tracks are the ones that are remembered from this session. King Pleasure really was that good, with the right material, and he didn't record all that much.

But the instrumental tracks are worthwhile too. There's some masterful writing and masterful playing. "Funk Junction," which is sort of a continuation of the ideas in "I'm Gone," shows what happens when this same ideas are given to a bunch of talented improvisers. Of particular note is a solo by young Paul Chambers.

"I'm Gone" came out on 78 b/w "You're Crying." "Don't Get Scared" had two different releases--on 78, b/w "Funk Junction," and on 45, b/w "Red Top."

Listening to Prestige Records Part 81: Eddie Jefferson and Irv Taylor

What was it with Prestige and King Pleasure? Was he really difficult to work with? Did Bob Weinstock just not like him very much? Maybe it was the former. He never had the success that a singer of his caliber should have. He had given Prestige its biggest hit, but there seemed to be no hurry to get him back into the studio to record more, or to surround him with A-list musicians. The King Pleasure Sings / Annie Ross Sings album is a jewel of my collection, and I wouldn't change a song on it, but it exists because Prestige didn't have enough Pleasure, or enough Ross, to fill awhole 12-inch album.

Instead, they brought in singers like Billy Valentine, who was good in the Charles Brown, although not quite Charles Brown (and the demand for Brown's style of music was fading by 1953). Valentine's records, like so many of Prestige's vocal blues albums, faded into obscurity.

Then, this session with Eddie Jefferson. Jefferson is by any measure a giant of modern jazz. He invented vocalese. He wrote many songs that have become classics, including "Moody's Mood for Love."

This session of duets with otherwise unknown vocalist Irv Taylor yielded one single -- "Stop Talkin', Start Walkin' / Strictly Instrumental" on both 78 and 45. The other songs weren't released till much later, on a compilation album called The Bebop Singers.

Jefferson would record more for Prestige, but this one wouldn't make much of a mark. I was only able to listen to "Strictly Instrumental," which shows Jefferson's brilliance in all sorts of ways. First, how about his choice of material? There's a certain sauciness, not to say chutzpah, in choosing to put lyrics to a song called "Strictly Instrumental." And what an interesting choice! Instead of going with Miles, or Bird, or Kenton, or whoever had the hot modern jazz record out at the time, he chose a swing-era tune by Jimmie Lunceford, vocalesed it, bebopped it, and turned into what certainly should be a bebop vocal classic. Second, who's Irv Taylor? I don't know. Google doesn't know. Probably not many people around today do know. But Eddie Jefferson knew, and he was right. Their voices mesh wonderfully in what has to be a two-voice arrangement.

Again, the vocalist is given less than A-list musicians, but as we know, New York has never lacked for talent. I once interviewed Valery Pomonarev, and asked him what surprised him most when he first came to New York. He said that of course he knew about the greats like Art Blakey and Bobby Timmons, but he was absolutely floored by the number of brilliant, talented, dedicated musicians that no one had ever heard of. There's a sax solo on this number by Seldon Powell, primarily an R&B player who'd worked with Tab Smth and Lucky Millinder,. Later, in the 60s, when soul jazz became a hot sound, he worked with jazz leaders like Clark Terry and Lou Donaldson. He's given solo space here, and is completely satisfying.