LISTEN TO ONE: Something We've Got
Next up in the Prestige chronology we have the debut album by a pianist-composer who has fashioned one of the more impressive careers in American music, who has recorded over 250 albums, worked with "everyone from Ellington to Elvis, Joni Mitchell to Barbra Streisand, and Quincy Jones to Yo-Yo Ma" (from the bio on his web page), garnered a Grammy and an Oscar nomination, who has written the scores for 20 movies including the Streisand remake of A Star is Born; and a mid-career album (fourth out of a total of six) by a performer whose career is mostly bounded by the town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey,
where he and his trio were local favorites for over five decades, including a 22-year stint at one local club. The former's debut album was not long ago rereleased on CD; none of the albums by the latter seem to have been rereleased.
Unfortunately, I was only able to locate and listen to one of these albums on a streaming service--and it wasn't the guy with the truckloadfull of credentials. The Roger Kellaway Trio was actually Kellaway's second album, but the first was done for a tiny local label, so this was his debut on the national stage, produced by Jack McDuff's guiding hand Lew Futterman. I can't give you a first-hand response to the music by this "lean, bearded, intent young jazz musician" of 26 (from the liner notes; I was able to find them, but no music), but I wish I could have. It sounds fascinating, from "one of the good tunes penned by Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney" to a four-note melody written for "prepared piano," the adaptation of a traditional piano pioneered by John Cage.
No jazz musicians were recording Lennon-McCartney tunes in 1965--in Arthur Taylor's seminal interviews with his peers a few years later, collected as Notes and Tones, the interview subjects are unanimous in dismissing the musical value of the two Beatles' compositions. And certainly none were experimenting with Cage's prepared piano, although Dave Brubeck did record one tune with a modestly prepared instrument, laying copper strips across the strings. Bizarrely, the easy listening piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher did try a number of these experiments during the course of their careers.
Kellaway prepared his piano by "fastening objects to the strings, including washers, nuts, bolts, and wooden pegs. 'The choice of which notes to prepare was purely individual,' Kellaway noted. 'Besides the melody notes I prepared mostly the lower level of the piano.'"
But for now, for me, these experiments remain tantalizingly out of reach. So I turn my attention, instead, to the May and June sessions which comprised Morris Nanton's second of three Prestige albums. and which I was able to listen to.
First, I can't resist quoting a little from Jack McKinney's album cover notes, starting with the "many forces" which shape the identity of the trio: "It is music that evolves from Art Tatum through Oscar Peterson; it has ties to the 'space movement' of Ahmad Jamal ('freedom within form'); in its more reflective moments it becomes an extension of Bill Evans' introspective analysis." But where McKinney really gets going is his of all the things the Nanton trio is not: "These are not cocktail sounds for lifeless zombies pouring more Manhattans into bored executives. They are not forays into obscurity in which erudition becomes an end and confusion a means. They are not essays on the psychotic by the introvert who is playing to magnify his egomania."
Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. The May 13 session consisted of four songs, two of which did not survive the cutting room. Of the two that did, the first is "Mood Indigo," a 6:34 treatment that doesn't exactly follow the melody line or the arrangement suggested by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard, but which, as it extends further in time and further into its own improvisational world, paradoxically starts to feel more and more Ellingtonian.
"Mood Indigo" is one of the lovelier jazz melodies, and "Taboo" one of the cornier, but Nanton and his guys defy expectations again by giving us a good deal more of melody of "Taboo," also stretched out to six and a half minutes. To what end? It's hard to say. They're certainly not playing to its cocktail-exotica strengths, although there's some of that. They're not hipster-satirizing it either, although there's humor in their version. On one of their Perth Amboy club dates, this would have been a delight--having some fun with a tune you're perhaps a little embarrassed to admit that you recognize so readily, and at the same time giving some real musical depth of exploration to it. On an album--and it's the last tune on side B--it's still a delight.
The June 16 session begins with a blues, "Something We've Got," the only Nanton original, the longest track of the two sessions, the title cut and the leadoff cut for side A of the album. What to say about a blues? One could go with McKinney, once again, and say what it's not: "a listless and hopeless essay on futility." Well, thank goodness for that, I guess. It is a pleasure all the way through, a workout in different moods and tempi by musicians attuned to each other.
Three shorter pieces finish out the session, and the album. "Any Number Can Win" is a moody number by French film composer Michel Magne for the Jean Gabin/Alain Delon gangster flick of the same name. Jimmy Smith had also recorded it. Two songs from the 1930s, Allie Wrubel's "The Masquerade is Over" and George Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now" (from Porgy and Bess) are also of an appropriate length for a 45 RPM single, but that honor went--and appropriately--to "Something We've Got," split into a part one and part two.
Cal Lampley produced both sessions. The rest of the trio is Norman Edge (bass), who was Nanton's musical partner for over 50 years, and Al Beldini, drummer and vocalist (not here) probably best known for his work with Don Elliott.
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