Listening to Prestige Records Part 92: Americans in Sweden

Was anyone left in New York or LA in the summer of 1953. It seems as though a goodly portion of the talents of both cities had relocated to Sweden, and it also seems that they were all drawn there by Lars Gullin, the only musician all these sessions have in common. Gullin is one of the most highly regarded of European jazz musicians, and another musician whose career was cut short by heroin. Although he lived until 1976, he was almost completely finished as a musician by the end of the 50s.

The first of these sessions, under Gullin's name, was on August 25, the others on a very busy September 15 and 16. Gullin led--I was going to say a mixed group of East and West Coast musicians, but actually most of the individual musicians are mixed groups in themselves. Conte Candoli is pretty solidly identified with the LA scene, and Konitz, through his close association with Lennie Tristano, surely represents New York. Don Bagley is also a through and through West Coaster. But Frank Rosolino was a Midwesterner from the jazz hotbed of Detroit before he found his way to 52nd Street, and from there to the LA jazz and studio world with which he is most closely associated, and Zoot Sims a native Californian whose jazz life was mostly in New York. I would have associated Stan Levey entirely with 52nd Street and the bebop scene, but actually within months of this session he had relocated to California. Perhaps Candoli and Rosolino bent his ear.

Peter Jones, who listened to this with me, through Spotify, from the hinterlands of northern Louisiana, aptly described this session as "sounds midway between Birth of the Cool and Oliver Nelson," which I thought captured it pretty well.

Most of these musicians had big band experience, and specifically, most of them had played with Stan Kenton, and I think a lot of them may have been on a European tour with Kenton in August of 1953. I know that the September sessions featured musicians from Lionel Hampton's touring band - Hampton didn't pay all that much, and his sidemen had to pick up extra work where they could. Checking further -- they all were on Kenton's tour.

So you have a bunch of musicians who've been playing Kenton arrangements, and they take a day off and go to dear old Stockholm -- well, they're probably in Stockholm already -- to make a record with a talented instrumentalist whose life had been changed in 1949 when he first heard the 78s of the nonet sessions and was so powerfully influenced by Gerry Mulligan that he took up the baritone saxophone, then changed again in 1951 by meeting Lee Konitz -- which is, in a way, more of the same change. So what would the Mulligan arrangements for Birth of the Cool sound like if they were played by the Kenton orchestra? And isn't that one of the things we love about jazz...about American music? It's so cross-pollinated. Musicians talk to each other, dance with each other, copulate with each other in combinations that would make a swingers' club pale with envy. And it keeps coming up new.

So all of the musicians from the August session were from the Kenton band. And were all of the September musicians from the Hampton orchestra? It turns out yes -- including Annie Ross. Who knew that she had toured with Hampton? Thanks to Mario Schneeburger, we have the complete personnel of the band, and its complete itinerary. I'll give an excerpt:

    1953/09/05
    Arrival at Fornebu Airport after flight from NYC with SAS.
    These musicians are willing to undertake the adventure of a tour across a foreign continent: Lionel Hampton(ld,vb,p,dr,vcl), Walter Williams(tp), Art Farmer(tp), Quincy Jones(tp), Clifford Brown(tp), Al Hayse(tb), Jimmy Cleveland(tb), George "Buster" Cooper(tb), Gigi Gryce(as), Anthony Ortega(as,fl), Clifford Solomon(ts), Clifford Scott(ts), Oscar Estelle(bs), George Wallington(p), Billy Mackel(g), Monk Montgomery(b), Alan Dawson(dr), Curley Hamner(dr,dancing,vcl), Annie Ross(vcl), Sonny Parker(vcl,dancing). Gladys Hampton, Lionel's wife and band manager, is with them.
    New to the band are Clifford Brown replacing Eddie Mullens, Gigi Gryce replacing Bobby Plater, George Wallington replacing Elmer Gill, and Annie Ross.
    All of them except for Annie Ross and George Wallington stay in the band until the end of the tour.
    The tour is originally planned to last six weeks. Its success leads to a substantial expansion. Lionel Hampton recalls in 1954: "We went over in September for six weeks and we stayed 12."

...

1953/09/07 The band arrives in Stockholm "..directly after successful concert in Oslo", Orkester Journalen. At Stockholm main station the band is bid welcome by Simon Brehm's band. A press conference is held. A welcome party takes place at Hotel Malmen. Hampton and Wallington play a piano duet, Annie Ross sings "Twisted", band members and local musicians jam together. Later on they move to 'Bal Palais' where the party continues until dawn.


[From Sept 8-13: concerts in Helsinki, Finland, then in Sweden's Falun, Hofors, Uppsala,Västerås, Linköping, Norrköping, Örebro, Eskilstuna, so if anyone ever tries to sucker you into a bar bet that no jazz great has ever played Linköping and Norrköping on the same day, don't take it. And finally back to Stockholm, for a]

concert at Konserthuset, starting at 21:15. The concert is recorded and partly issued. The Tom Lord discography gives a wrong date: 1953/09/15. Most other sources give only vague dates such as fall, Sept., Oct. Some days earlier, between September 9 and 12, Lionel Hampton and George Wallington are interviewed at the Swedish radio. In the studio they play a fine How High The Moon at the piano with four hands. Hampton says twice to the radio reporter: "See you on Monday". Coming Monday is September 14. The radio obviously plans to record the concert of September 14 in Stockholm. Recording session in Sweden: Annie Ross and George Wallington (2 titles each).

1953/09/15,  Gothenburg. Concert at the Concert Hall. After the concert a jam session takes place at Lorensberg restaurant. Among the participants are Anthony Ortega, Clifford Brown, George Wallington and Jimmy Cleveland with pianist Bengt Hallberg, drummers Kenneth Fagerlund and Arne Milefors among the "locals". "One night we had a recording session [in fact it was a jam session] after the concert in Gothenburg (Sweden). Brownie and Bengt Hallberg played 'Yesterdays' as if the tune would become, by some way, forbidden to be played anymore", remembers Art Farmer. Clifford Brown, Art Farmer and Quincy Jones find the time for a recording session in Stockholm with Bengt Hallberg and other Swedish musicians. This session probably takes place in the morning or early afternoon, before the band's departure from Stockholm to Gothenburg. Recording session in Stockholm on 1953/09/15: Clifford Brown-Art Farmer (4 titles with alternate takes)

Yes, I know I have a tendency to go way, way off on tangents sometimes, but I wouldn't be doing this blog at all if I weren't a little too much in love with jazz history. Anyway, the tour continues. More

highlights include two concerts on the same evening in the Netherlands, fortunately a small country, the first one in Scheveningen at 8 pm, the second in Amsterdam, a "concert at Concertgebouw, starting at 24:00. Hampton is suffering from fever. Nevertheless '..Hampton began to dance with a girl in the audience, and the rest of the hall took up the dance till the whole Concertgebouw seemed to be jumping.'" And trouble the next day in Brussels,  at a

concert at Palais des Beaux Arts. It is Annie Ross' last appearance with the band.
“Annie  Ross  is  fired  by  Hamp  in  Brussels  after  a  few  unruly  hecklers  had  booed  her  performance  there”,  says George Wallington. On the same day or thereafter George Wallington quits the band, either as a gesture of sympathy for Annie Ross, or because he is fired as well.

 Anyway, back to the Stockholm recording sessions. Annie does the Kern/Hammerstein standard (her version omitted from the Wiki discography for this song; I added it), and "Jackie," another from the Wardell Gray/Art Farmer sessions that yielded "Twisted" and "Farmer's Market," this one a Hampton Hawes composition that Annie turns into a history of bebop. Here's Billboard's review:

Jackie: The hip cats should flip for this cool item. The gal delivers a fast-talking story about a wild mouse on her blouse. It's fine for kicks.

 The Song is You: Here Miss Ross, a hip singer, tackles the standard for a reading which the jazz collectors should go for to some extent. She's much better, tho, in handling the [unintelligible] stuff.

The Billboard reviewer isn't entirely wrong. Annie is great on standards, but her vocalese is in a class by itself.

Ross appears with her soon-to-be-ex-bandmates from the Hampton orchestra; Wallington is with a group of Swedish musicians. It's a testament to the growing importance of both Quincy Jones and Gigi Gryce as arrangers that they're credited on these sessions. And although Jones was the one who went on to a megastar career, Gryce more than once arranges sessions on which Jones plays piano.

The piece de resistance, however, of this fine group of Swedish sessions, is the Clifford Brown/Art Farmer set. Both in amazing form, each spurring the other on.

All these were originally issued on the Swedish Metronome label; most also came out on the British Esquire label. Prestige put the Lars/American All-Stars on an EP, Americans in Sweden, as Zoot Sims/Lars Gullin/Kenton All-Stars, along with an earlier Zoot/Lars session from 1950.

The two Annie Ross songs came out on a Prestige 78. The Wallington session was an EP, George Wallington And The Swedish All Stars. Clifford Brown and Art Farmer seem to have been on EP, were definitely on a 10-inch LP with cover art that's credited to David X. Young, although it doesn't look like his work. It's certainly not his best work.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 48: Gerry Mulligan New Stars

What do you do when it's 1951, and you've already made the most important record of the decade, but no one knows it yet, and in fact you made it last decade with a group that's since been disbanded, and no one paid it much attention at the time?

For some of the key members of the Birth of the Cool nonet, it seems to have meant taking a step backward, and that's not meant as a criticism.

An important part of the impetus to forming the nonet was a dissatisfaction, especially on the part of Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, to the overemphasis on the flamboyant virtuoso soloist that was bebop. They came from big bands, particularly the Claude Thornhill band, which played dance music but encouraged some experimentation, and brought from some important jazz musicians...and arrangers.

And in fact the Miles Davis nonet, in its historic Royal Roost engagement, included its arrangers on the marquee -- Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis. Mulligan and Lewis were also featured musicians, but giving marquee prominence to Evans may have been a first -- and was certainly deserved.

So what do you do? Lewis would move in a new direction with the Modern Jazz Quartet, but not for a couple of years. During this period, he continued to work as a sideman with boppers. Davis was to retrench, sort of, in his Prestige and Columbia albums of the 50s, playing bebop with a difference, creating the style called hard bop that became the most significant jazz style of the 50s. Konitz stayed out in left field, but then he really had no mainstream to go back to -- he'd come from left field, with Tristano.

Mulligan, in this session for Prestige, goes a certain way toward the bebop mainstream -- there are some powerful improvisatory and virtuoso solos -- but his retrenchment is more in a Thornhill direction, with some big band arrangements and full sound that touches back to swing in the way Thornhill and Herman did, while still staying decidedly modern.

Mulligan's New Stars didn't quite manage to become stars. Allan Eager and George Wallington are the only two whose names have remained with some resonance in jazz history.

I found this mention of two of Mulligan's men in an online essay called "Names of the Forgotten":

Where are Jerry' Lloyd, George Syran, and Phil Raphael and Phil Leshin? Jerry Lloyd was around in the 1940s and 1950s and recorded with Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington, though he never became well-known and worked as a cab-driver even when he was featured on records with such artists... [Phil Leshin] worked with Red Rodney in 1951, but what else?

Nick Travis, according to this essay, played on 350 jazz recording sessions, so if he never quite broke through to serious name recognition, he clearly made a name as a guy you could count on. Here's Hal McKusick on Travis:

"Nick was a great player and a great  guy. He was so busy in the 1950s. He'd get done with work at 2 a.m., head off to his home in New Jersey and be back the next day in a New York studio at 8 a.m. Zoot told me a funny story. Nick was so tired one day that he slept in. His phone rang early that morning. Nick sleepily answered: "Hello?" "Hi Nick, it's Zoot." Nick paused and said, groggily, "Zoot who?"
"I remember Nick as being quiet and intelligent. He spent a lot of time with his instrument. When you’re working the way we did, you didn't have a lot of time to practice, so work was practice. He was a great lead horn player and quite a soloist. Nick was always there on a date in every way. Efficient, on time and he never hit a bad note.
"Ultimately, Nick probably had too much work. We all did. Nick was in such great demand by so many different orchestrators and contractors at the time that he probably had a hard time handling the stress internally. He kept a lot of it bottled up, I guess. I didn't realize he had passed from ulcer troubles.
"As sounds go, Nick's was down the middle. You'd hear his horn and if you didn't know who was playing you'd say, 'Wow, who is that? That sure sounds good.' He caught your attention. Nick also was a wonderful reader, which was why he was in such demand. Nick played caringly."

There's less on Ollie Wilson and Mac McElroy. Wilson was in Woody Herman's Second Herd, and highly regarded. Mulligan used McElroy on at least one other recording.

I found this on Gail Madden, from a reminiscence by Bill Crow in a book called Fifties Jazz Talk: An Oral Retrospective by Jack Gordon.

I began by asking him if he knew a lady named Gail Madden, who had been a pianist and a model in California before becoming active in New York jazz circles in the early fifties. She appeared on Mulligan’s first album as a leader in September 1951, playing maracas on some numbers, and Gerry has credited her with suggesting the idea of a pianoless rhythm section to him before they left New York for California later that year.  When they arrived in Los Angeles, it was thanks to Gail and her previous relationship with Bob Graettinger that Mulligan was introduced to Stan Kenton, who very soon bought some of Gerry’s arrangements. She also suggested hiring Chico Hamilton for Mulligan’s first quartet, so Gail Madden was clearly a significant, if unseen, influence on his early career.

"I met Gail before I knew Gerry very well, thanks to a drummer friend of mine by the name of Buzzy Bridgford. He introduced us at an apartment in Greenwich Village owned by a lady named Margo, who was apparently a $100 a night hooker and was bankrolling Gail, who wanted to be a therapist and save all the junky jazz musicians in New York. Charlie Parker had agreed to go along with all this and was first on her list. Gail’s plan was that, with Margo’s money, she would buy a brownstone and start a clinic and all the guys would come and live there so she could straighten them out and get them off junk. Buzzy, who knew all the inside jazz gossip, claimed that Joe Albany, Serge Chaloff, J. J. Johnson, Stan Levey, and Gerry were also going to be involved, but unfortunately for Gail, she had an argument with Margo over money and the whole idea collapsed. Soon after, she and Gerry became a “couple,” so we figured that if she couldn’t save everyone on her list, she would concentrate on him. She started turning up on his gigs out at Queens, playing maracas, and I remember her being there when Gerry was rehearsing a band in Central Park on the shore of the 72nd Street lake. Around that time they both disappeared from the New York scene, and the next thing we heard was that they were on the road, hitching to California, and we all laughed because that was exactly the sort of wild thing they would do. They made it, all right, and then those wonderful records that Gerry made with Chet Baker started coming out."  

So this was Mulligan's first session as a leader. One other interesting thing about this recording

session, The first six songs are standard song length, about three minutes, and all of them were released on 78 and 45 -- "Mullenium" is pushing it at 4:05, but they managed to get it onto one side of a single. "Mulligan's Too" is over 17 and a half minutes long -- who recorded anything that long in those days? And it's Mulligan's first session as a leader, but he was able to talk Weinstock into it. It became a 10-inch LP, which you can now buy on eBay for $250.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 43b: Lee Konitz

Finishing up the March Lee Konitz session, Konitz was back in the Prestige studios five days later, this time with only Billy Bauer.

Specialized listeners may have different experiences, but for the jazz generalist and all-purpose fan, listening to a jazz ensemble primarily means listening to the soloist. There'll be exceptions -- you'll here a punctuating note from the second horn, an arpeggio from the piano, a sudden distinctive riff from the bass or a succession of paradiddles from the drums. And as you listen to a piece over and over, as I've been doing on my Prestige Odyssey, you'll start to hear more and more of these. But essentially, you're listening to the soloist, and there's a reason for that. He's the soloist, and the rest of the ensemble is there to provide support for him, not to compete with him.

A duo is a whole different story, especially when the duo is two Lennie Tristano acolytes, each a master of his instrument, each coming from one of the most advanced musical schools of the day. Then you listen to both. You listen to how they play around each other, with each other, moving apart and coming together like two strands in a double helix, making up a new and unique DNA molecule.

"Duet for Saxophone and Guitar" is a Konitz composition, and Konitz was one of the best composers in his idiom. "Indian Summer" is by Victor Herbert.

It's not unusual that the bebop masters went so often to the Great American Songbook. Composers from Kern and Gershwin on were influenced by jazz, and really became part of that distinctive American patchwork of music that all goes back to the blues and ragtime. It's a little more surprising that they were able to craft jazz masterpieces out of the work of operetta composers whose roots are solidly European, like Sigmund Romberg ("Lover Come Back"). Or, in this case, Victor Herbert. "Indian Summer" was composed in 1919, and was a staple of village orchestras and the like. In 1939 Glenn Miller picked it up, but it really entered the jazz canon in 1940, when Sidney Bechet made it swing harder than anyone could have imagined. Duke Ellington's recorded it, Dave Brubeck's recorded it (and Paul Desmond recorded it on his own, in one of the definitive versions). And it works. And here, Konitz and Bauer. Delicious.

On the subject of what we hear when we listen to music, no one ever captured it better than Marcel Proust:

At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. (I,294)
Then they were silent; beneath the restless tremolos of the violin part which protected it with their throbbing sostenuto two octaves above it–and as in a mountainous country, behind the seeming immobility of a vertigious waterfall, one descries, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley–the little phrase had just appeared, distant, graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of it transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. (I,374-375)
When, after that first evening at the Verdurins’, he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but in reality he know that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party when for the first time he had heard the sonata played. He knew that the very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vase, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. (I,496-497)
How beautiful the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the beginning of the last passage! The suppression of human speech, so far from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether; never was spoken language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the beginning of th world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never by any but themselves: the world of this sonata. (I,499-500)

 This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Proust says about listening to music, as inspired by the "little phrase" of the fictional Vinteuil - perhaps its real-life counterpart was Camille Saint-Saens' Sonata #1, perhaps Cesar Franck's Sonata in A Major, or some combination of the two. No one wrote about the experience of listening to music -- or, indeed, anything -- like Proust.

The two Konitz-Bauer cuts were released on both New Jazz and Prestige 78s, each with cuts from the March 8 session on the other side. Interestingly, the two standards -- "Indian Summer" and Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" -- are paired with two challenging originals -- "Duet" and "Odjenar." They also came out on the Konitz 1o-inch mentioned in the last blog entry, and on an EP combined with two Stan Getz tunes.

Just for a change, and to highlight the assertion that jazz, like Vinteuil and his little phrase, has entered the serious repertory of classical music, here's a version of "Duet For Saxophone and Guitar" by a contemporary duo, Anastasiya Dumma and Jessi Lee. They're very good, and they make us understand what a good piece of music "Duet" is. But they don't play like Konitz and Bauer. The originals are avaliable from Spotify.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 43a: Lee Konitz with Miles Davis

The guy in the bar in Harlem, or 18th and Vine in Kansas City, putting his nickels into a jukebox, was most likely going to be playing Amos Milburn or Louis Jordan – or the Ink Spots or Nat “King” Cole or Mr. B. if his tastes ran smoother – but there’d be nickels for Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, too.  Jazz was no longer America’s popular music, but it was hip, and it was hot, and once you got used to the rapid tempi and counterintuitive melodic twists (as Chuck Berry was to put it a few years later, “I have no kick against modern jazz / Except they try to play it too darn fast / And change the beauty of the melody / Until it sounds just like a symphony”), it sounded good. And today, to the jazz lover at least, that music is mainstream. It remains fresh and inventive, but it’s familiar, just like home.

On those same jukeboxes, very  few nickels would summon up Lee Konitz and Miles Davis. Over sixty years later, this music still presents a challenge to the ears.

Don’t forget, while the Birth of the Cool recordings had been made two years earlier, they didn’t get widely heard until Capitol released the album in 1958, and even then the music sounded advanced. Don’t forget that Miles was not able to keep his nonet together, to get more club dates or recording sessions, because their gig at the Royal Roost was not a big draw.

And this session, with Lee Konitz and the Lennie Tristano gang (Sal Mosca playing the Tristano role), is actually even harder to listen to than Birth of the Cool, which itself sounds mainstream these days. Possibly the difference is no Gerry Mulligan arrangements. Possibly Davis and Konitz, stung by the rejection of what is now generally regarded as their masterpiece, decided to go for an even more intensely challenging experience.

In any case, one has to be fairly certain that Bob Weinstock knew he was not getting a Gene Ammons jukebox toe-tapper when he brought these guys into the studio, so more credit to him. Anyway, if Weinstock had been looking to make money more than he was looking to make jazz, he would have been out signing up the next Amos Milburn, or maybe some of these new vocal harmony groups like the Orioles or the Clovers.Or maybe it came to him in a dream that Miles was shortly to form a quintet with John Coltrane and make music that was advanced and intoxicatingly listenable all at the same time.

Digressing once again, and back to the jazz and race topic I’d been addressing in a couple of these blog entries, I was thinking about my first experience hearing jazz in a club – the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet at Small’s Paradise in Harlem --  and I started wondering how many other jazz ensembles had been co-led interracially. J. J. and Kai were the first that came to mind. The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. The Clarke-Boland Big Band, if one extends the search to France. And those were all I could think of. Certainly there has never been a shortage, at least since Benny Goodman broke the color barrier, of groups made up of both black and white musicians, but not many, that I could come up with at least, with a black-white co-leadership.*

This one is under the nominal label of Lee Konitz Sextet, so maybe it shouldn’t count either, but certainly Miles is a coequal partner. The tracks from this session have also been released, at varying times, under the Davis name, and allmusic.com lists it as the Miles Davis / Lee Konitz Sextet. In fact, Konitz and Davis collaborated a lot -- the 1948 nonet sessions are sometimes listed as the Miles Davis/Lee Konitz Nonet, and they also recorded some sides in '48 as the Lee Konitz/Miles Davis Quintet. 

Anyway, the music. On my blog entry for the January 17 Miles Davis Sextet, I noted that it seemed to me that Miles, although playing on an essentially bebop-oriented session, he was introducing something different, something more from the “Birth of the Cool” tonality. I wasn’t exactly sure how to describe that, and I’m still not, but I found this master’s thesis  online, from Leonardo Camacho Bernal, a student at the University of North Texas (noted for its jazz program). I learned a lot from reading it, and I  plan to go back and read more of it. It’s called MilesDavis: The Road to Modal Jazz, and it traces the development of the sound that would come to fruition on the Kind of Blue album. Here’s what Bernal has to say about Birth of the Cool:

 At the end of the 1940s, the Miles Davis nonet unified all the experimental approaches in the 1949-50 recording sessions that later became the album Birth of the Cool (1954). Davis brought together some of the most talented and vanguard jazz musicians, such as Gil Evans,Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Lee Konitz, to create the new style.

Most of the bases of the cool style were not common in jazz small ensembles: the

classical Western music influence; the instrumentation and orchestration; the fusing of variedtones of the instruments. The influence of classical composers such as Stravinsky and Debussy helped Evans, Mulligan and Lewis, arrangers on this project, to create that sound density and color richness in their arrangements that started to be identified as the sound of the cool style.

Moreover, all the musicians who performed in this project had their particular and personalfeatures, which were extremely important to the creation of a new jazz style. Each had his own tone color, articulation, rhythm, and an individual approach to improvisation. Their playing also featured the plain sound with no vibrato, smoother timbre, and dry tone. Most of the players had been formed by Thornhill’s and Herman’s bands, and had been influenced by musicians like Young and Tristano, which gave them the perfect tools to start a new style.

On the other hand, Miles Davis came from the best of the bebop school. After being in

New York for a while, he started working with Parker’s quintet where he was playing trumpetwith some of the masterminds that created and developed bebop: the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. They taught him how to approach the virtuosic features of the style. At the same time, Davis was jamming and hanging out with musicians such as Evans, Mulligan, and George Russell, a theorist and composer who started introducing Davis to classical Western music. At that time, Davis’s project was the best approximation of cool style. “Davis’s nonet was originally seen as the smallest unit capable of reproducing the flavor of Thornhill’s big band of the mid-1940s,” according to Mark Gridley. This was the starting point for Davis to pull together musicians and concepts to create a new way to play jazz in his quest for new colors, textures, and a new sound.

So, we're not at the modal point yet -- that's still a few years away -- but we're starting out on the road to it, with a way of combining sounds that's new and groundbreaking, with Miles's unique and visionary approach to music -- he's not quite 25 at this point, but that's well past prodigy age and into his mature period as a jazzman -- and the influence of Gil Evans, of Lennie Tristano, and of the composer of two of the tunes recorded on this session, George Russell.

Russell composed "Odjenar" and "Ezz-Thetic," the latter of which became one of Konitz/s signature
pieces. Konitz composed "Hi-Beck," and the fourth song, "Yesterdays" (Max Roach sitting this one out) is a Jerome Kern standard.

The interplay between Konitz and Davis is intense, intricate and in a way simple, with one of them taking the sort-of-boppish melody line, and the other playing a somewhat discordant and always compelling harmony. The contributions of Tristano protege Sal Mosca and Billy Bauer are also notable.

They may not have been prime jukebox fodder, but they were released on 78 under both the Prestige and New Jazz labels, mixed in with Konitz/Bauer duo sides. Also on a 10-inch (as Lee Konitz with Miles Davis), and as part of a Prestige 7000 / New Jazz 8000-series LP (as Lee Konitz and Miles Davis).

* Afterthought -- you'd probably have to include the "Mulligan meets..." sessions - Monk. Ben Webster.

Listening to Prestige Records Part 37: Wrapping up 1950

This winds up the second year of Prestige's prestigious history. Only 20 more to go, and I'm already starting to get the feeling they're going too fast -- that's the grandparent syndrome.

 The last two albums of the year are Sonny Stitt (December 17) with Junior Mance, Gene Wright and Art Blakey, and Jimmy McPartland (December 21) with a sextet including Vic Dickenson and Marian McPartland, so they closed out the year with a rising bebop star and a tip of the hat back to an older jazz style. The McPartland sides were issued on 78 as part of Prestige's 300 series, which appears to consist entirely of four 78 RPM records, all of them by Jimmy McPartland, one session in early 1949 and the other at the end of 1950 -- apparently Bob Weinstock's entire foray into trad jazz. Neither the Stitt nor the McPartland sessions can be found on Spotify, but you can get the Stitt session on Grooveshark --"Nevertheless" and "Jeepers Creepers here  and "Cherokee" here. "Nevertheless" is not exactly a bebop staple -- this is the only recording of it by a modern jazz group that I've found -- but listening to Stitt's version, one can't help but think that maybe it should be.

Prestige was certainly starting to make its mark in 1950. The scorecard: recording sessions with Stan Getz (2), Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons (9), Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis,  Al Haig, Chubby Jackson, Lee Konitz,  Zoot Sims (4), Wardell Gray (2, one with Dexter Gordon), Leo Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody (recorded in France, released later as a 7000-series LP), and Jimmy McPartland. 

The major labels actually had the two most important jazz releases of 1950 -- one looking ahead, the other backward. Capitol put out eight songs from the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions on 78. The LP wouldn't be released until 1957, although some songs from it came out on various Capitol 10 inch LPs. Nobody realized quite how important these sessions were at the time -- Miles wasn't able to make a commercial success of his nonet, and had to disband it. However, pretty much everyone knew how important the other recording was -- the recently rediscovered originals of the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, released by Columbia as a 12-inch LP -- in fact, their first double LP set.

Charlie Parker recorded with strings.

Fats Navarro died in 1950. Thelonious Monk was arrested on drug charges, lost his cabaret card, and couldn't play again in New York for six years.

Birdland, which actually opened its doors in late December of 1949, was in its first full year of operation.

On to 1951.

Listening to Prestige Records, part 25: Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz back in the Prestige studios again, April 7, 1950, seven months after the first session. still in the Tristano circle, this time without Warne Marsh or Denzil Best. In Best's place, Jeff Morton, about whom I can find no information whatsoever, which seems strange, given that he played on quite a number of sessions within the Tristano circle, and you had to be pretty advanced musically to play in that circle. Sal Mosca, in an interview, says that he was usually the drummer at Tristano's Saturday night jam sessions. His presence is felt here, especially on the uptempo numbers, and it's a strong one.

And on guitar, Billy Bauer. And he is a treat to listen to, whether playing the guitar like a percussion instrument, chording, or playing single-string runs.

The tunes today are two ballads, "Rebecca" and "You Go to My Head," and two uptempo numbers, "Ice Cream Konitz" and "Palo Alto." The ballads are demanding, but far from emotionally barren. The uptempo numbers are virtuoso performances from all concerned. "Ice Cream Konitz" is a good argument for why modern jazz players should maybe have retired the fad of punning on their own names; "Palo Alto" is a subtler pun, more befitting a Tristano acolyte. Either way, they swing both subtly and forcefully, and interplay between guitar, piano and alto is more than satisfying,
 

 I had a friend who took lessons from Bauer many years ago. He said that for the first half-hour, Bauer had him do nothing but play the same note on the same string, over and over, while he kept saying, "Swing...swing." "And when it was over," my friend said, "I was swinging!"

I linked above to an interview with Sal Mosca. Here are a couple of excerpts from it.

 At first, I did not like Charlie Parker. Lennie Tristano had me sing a solo of Parker’s. It was Scrapple From the Apple. It took me one and ½ years to learn to sing it, and another six months to play it on the piano. When I was able to play it, I began to love Charlie Parker and my love of his playing grew and continued after that.

[On classical pianists]  I prefer Horowitz. He is more romantic. He’s the closest to jazz of all the classical pianists. I heard a recording of Horowitz playing Mozart, it sounded like stride piano. Did you know that he went often to hear Tatum?

 These sessions were released on both Prestige and New Jazz 78s, on an EP called Lee Konitz with Billy Bauer, on a 10-inch called Stan Getz/Lee Konitz - The New Sounds, and on 7000-series LP called Lee Konitz With Tristano, Marsh And Bauer.

Listening to Prestige Records project - Part 10: Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz took a quintet into the studio on June 28, 1949, and recorded four sides, but only two of them were ever released. Of the other two, jazzdisco.org only says Untitled...rejected.

The quintet was Konitz (alto saxophone), Warne Marsh (tenor saxophone), Sal Mosca (piano), Arnold Fishkin (bass), Denzil Best (drums). All but Best were members of Lennie Tristano's inner circle, and Best, who could and did play with artists of nearly every jazz genre, had recorded with Tristano.

Of Tristano's two horn players, Konitz is the one who made the more significant name for himself in jazz, and maybe there's a reason for that. I've had a Warne Marsh LP for a long time, and every now and then I used to take it out and try to listen to it, but I never made it all the way through. 

But he understood what Tristano was doing, and here, he understands what Konitz is doing. The pianist on the date is Sal Mosca, Tristano's most notable student and disciple, but he doesn't take the lead. This is Konitz's session, and he is very much the dominant figure, but Marsh supports him throughout. The opening chorus on "Marshmallow," a Marsh composition (those bebop-era composers did love their puns, didn't they?) is a heady, pretzel-like interplay between the two saxes that's breathtaking. Here it is on YouTube:


And you can find both tunes (the other is "Fishin' Around") on Spotify.

Prestige released the two cuts they accepted as a 78 RPM single, and they later became part of the labels very first 10-inch LP, Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz (PRLP 101), along with two more cuts recorded on September 27th with the same lineup, but with Jeff Morton replacing Denzil Best.

I recommend listening along with me on this journey through a particular slice of jazz. I can't begin to express how rewarding it's turning out to be. And I wouldn't at all mind seeing a few comments.

Listening to Prestige Records project -- part 2

I've decided to take this by recording date, because with reissues, partial issues, compilations, anything else is too complicated. The major Prestige album series, the 7000 series, begins in 1955, but Prestige was around since 1949, first as New Jazz, then very soon after as Prestige. The Bill Coleman - Don Byas date was recordedon January 5, 1949, but the first to be actually recorded in Prestige's studios was a Lennie Tristano session,  on January 11 . I haven't been able to find out where those first sessions were recorded - the Rudy Van Gelder era came later. The company's offices were located on W. 50th Street, and grew from a record store Bob Weinstock owned next to the Metropole Cafe (my Wikipedia entry).

The date is listed as the Lennie Tristano Quintet, but Warne Marsh wasn't there for the January ll session -- it's Lee Konitz on alto and Billy Bauer on guitar, two Tristano mainstays. Shelley Manne is the drummer, but he'll be taking off for the West Coast shortly. Arnold Fishkind, here known as Arnold Fishkin, is on bass.

It's interesting to note where these guys came from. Billy Bauer had a swing and big band background, having played with Jerry Wald, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden -- as did most of the beboppers, really. That was their apprenticeship. Shelley Manne started in a big band, then played and recorded with a number of Ellington sidemen, as well as with Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas. Arnold Fishkind played with Jack Teagarden, Bunny Berigan, even Les Brown, who was more dance music than jazz. And even during the years of his association with Tristano, he was also playing with Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman.

Tristano and Konitz came to modern jazz pretty much straight on. Konitz grew up admiring Benny Goodman, but his first big band job, as a temporary replacement for Charlie Barnet in the Teddy Powell orchestra, reportedly made Barnet bang his head against a wall in anguish when Konitz started playing. He was not cut out to be a swing musician. And Tristano really was always the cerebral, difficult modernist he's famous for being.

So in a way Bauer, Fishkind and Manne had to learn not to swing, or not to rely on swinging.

This session isn't as far out as Tristano's famous next session, in May of 1949, when the group was joined by Warne Marsh, and they recorded :"Intuition," arguably the first free jazz piece, played with no charts at all -- no prearranged melody, harmony, or rhythm.  But that came out on Capitol.

The Prestige session is represented on YouTube by "Subconscious-Lee," by its title a vehicle for Konitz, but it would be hard to explain that to a Billy Bauer fan. Bauer, whose ideas are as advanced as anyone's, still swings hard on his solo. Konitz has that cool sound that he would bring to the more famous Miles Davis nonet sessions.

Tristano has a reputation for being unapproachably difficult, that he's never really shaken. I'm only the 22nd person to like this cut on YouTube. Perhaps that comes from playing free jazz over a decade before Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, brought it into the mainstream. I've never felt he got the acclaim he deserved, and he's not remembered as much as some of his contemporaries, though he's good enough to be.

Birth of the Cool: Godchild

Birth of the Cool 7: Godchild. I'm doing this in the order they appear on the CD, not the order they appeared on the original album.The reason for this choice...actually it wasn't a choice. This happened to be the first track listing I ran across online, not having the album in front of me. If I were to start over, I'd use the original listing. Actually, "Godchild" is the third track on the album. The first four were "Jeru," "Move," "Godchild" and "Budo." They were the first four songs recorded, and the two singles released, someone at Capitol having decided they were the best melodies, and likely to be the catchiest. A good decision, I think -- it's really those first four melodies that hooked me in thinking about the album, and made me want to pursue this. Certinly "Godchild" is a wonderful melody. It was written by George Wallington, an outstanding bebop pianist, and it's probably been recorded in more different version that any other piece except possibly Budo/Hallucinations. In at least one YouTube uploading, the composition is credited to Gerry Mulligan, and certainly his arranger's hand is here, but it's Wallington's tune. Starting with the Birth of the Cool track:

Here's a beautiful version by Wallington with a trio, featuring Nick Stabulas on drums, and Teddy Kotick, who I had the pleasure to meet when he played at Opus 40 with J. R. Monterose, on bass.







AllMusic lists a version several of the Birth of the Cool tracks by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and I've dug deep, trying to find them, and have finally come to the conclusion that they don't exist. Apparently there's an LP of Charlie Parker - Miles Davis - Lee Konitz, but it's a teaser. Some of the tracks are by Bird, some by Miles and Konitz.



Here's a beautiful version by a Mulligan tentet featuring Art Farmer and Lee Konitz. Great ensemble work, wonderful opening statement of the melody by Mulligan, lots of room for solos, the Farmer and Mulligan solos neatly resolving in an ensemble restatement of the melody.





Versions you can find on Spotify but not YouTube -- Bill Charlap, Tal Farlow/Charles Mingus/Red Norvo, Howard Roberts. Here's one YouTube does have, from Kai Winding:


 And from the classic Mulligan-Chet Baker quartet:




And finally, Terry Gibbs with a big band: