Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972, my history of Prestige Records, can be ordered from Amazon or through your local independent bookstore.
LISTEN TO ONE: Carmell's Black Forest Waltz
Carmell Jones had taken up residency in Germany when this recording was made, where he would remain until 1980. There he made the acquaintance of Nathan Davis, a Kansas City musician who had played with Jay McShann and, remarkably, with the great all-woman band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, during their later year when they would, very occasionally, hire a man to fill out a section.
Davis came to Germany not with a touring "ambassadors of jazz" group like the Lionel Hampton big band, but by the same route as another young musician -- a guitar player named Elvis Presley. Like Elvis, Nathan was drafted, and shipped overseas to Berlin. Unlike Elvis, he stayed.
He had more reason too -- no Hollywood/Vegas superstardom awaiting him back home, plenty of racial prejudice awaiting him back home, and an international cultural life that was burgeoning in Berlin, including a jazz scene and the kind of appreciation for jazz that its practitioners would not always find in their home country. So after he mustered out in 1962, Davis stayed in Europe.
It was most likely in Berlin that he first met fellow expatriate Kenny Clarke and his musical partner, the Belgian pianist Francy Boland, with whom he struck up a musical fellowship, although he does not appear to have been a part of their big band. But when he connected in 1965 with newcomer Carmell Jones, an old schoolyard pal and early bandmate from Kansas City, it was Clarke, Boland, and their bass player, expatriate Jimmy Woode, whom he brought in for a recording session deep in the Black Forest.
That Black Forest studio, SABA-Tonstudio, had already begun to develop a reputation, one that would only grow through decade. It was most famous for the legendary solo and trio recordings by Oscar Peterson released as Exclusively for my Friends. The studio, built by Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, a gifted engineer who was also an audiophile and jazz lover, was widely acclaimed for the excellence of its sound reproduction, and it certainly did right by this quintet.
The session is considered a high point in the careers of both. Their Kansas City background shows (and don't forget a Kansas City/Jay McShann background includes an early exposure to Charlie Parker). They are both soulful and modern, as demonstrated in the aptly titled "That Kaycee Thing." It's a Davis composition, as are most of the tunes from the session. One exception is a Jones tribute to Herr Brnner-Schwer's studio and its exotic location, "Carmell's Black Forest Waltz."
The quintet recorded seven tunes that day, all of which appear on the German release, The Hip Walk, credited to the Nathan Davis Quintet Featuring Carmell Jones. Prestige licensed four of them for its 1969 release, Carmell Jones In Europe; 1965-66. The other two tracks were recorded at a jazz festival in Frankfurt the following year with a group including Jimmy Woode and featuring Pony Poindexter and Annie Ross, singing her hit composition "Twisted."
Nathan Davis, who held a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. returned to the United States in 1916 to become professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was also was also founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual
Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in
the United States.
Another one of those definitely worthy figures who made a brief name for himself and faded into oblivion. You won't find him on any of the various internet lists of the 50 greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Where will you find him? I dug a little deeper, starting with the forum section of organissino.com, where no one is so obscure that some coterie of fans haven't gathered to discuss him or her. I found one discussion of Jones, with all the entries dated 2003, when Mosaic released a box set of all his recordings. The reviews were there were all glowing, with several comparing him to Clifford Brown, and one mentioning that the set had been reviewed on Fresh Air. Nothing since 2003;
I found a really neat jazz blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe, which has, among other treasures, profiles of "Obscure Trumpet Masters." Jones is number four -- they're not ranked; he's number four in alphabetical order, and blogger Curtjazz (I can't find any other name for him) introduces him with:
He plays on one of the most famous straight-ahead jazz songs ever recorded, yet today people are more likely to confuse him with a film character played by Dorothy Dandridge, than they are to know the titles of any of his six albums.
The "most famous" is Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." Jones had come east from Los Angeles, where he had recorded three well-received albums for Pacific Jazz, to join Silver's group. He played on two albums with Silver, and did quite a lot more sideman work with excellent musicians (incuding Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson for Prestige), and made this one Pretige album as leader, for which he received Down Beat's "New Star Trumpeter" award.
But as was the case with so many black artists of his era, the racism -- and the lack of appreciation for jazz as an art form -- in the United States weighed too heavily on him, and he moved to Germany, where he would spend the next fifteen years, and would disappear from view as far as the American jazz public was concerned.
This would be his USA swan song, at least for the time being. He would return in the 1980, and make one more album for the West Coast label Revelation. It was titled Carmell Jones Returns, although by that time the reaction would have been not so much "Wow, he's back!" and more "Who's Carmell Jones?"
His later years were spent in his almost-home town of Kansas City, Missouri. His actual home town was Kansas City, Kansas, but the Missouri side of the state line was more hospitable to music.
For those who remembered him and those who happened on him for the first time with the Mosaic box set, his work was a welcomed pleasure, as well it should have been. What this session captures is a man who loved what he did, even if he didn't love the country he was doing it in. That love comes through in every note he plays.
New to Prestige is Horace Silver veteran Roger Humphries. Don Schlitten produced, and the album was entitled Jay Hawk Talk, a tip of the hat to Jones's home state. The title cut was also released as a two-sided 45 RPM single.
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.
