Trane, Lee & Helen

September 12, 2016September 12, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

It seems that nowadays every three months or so a jazz movie is released. What’s happening? Must be something in the Kentucky Bourbon. First Whiplash, then Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, Robert Budreau’s Chet Baker movie Born To Be Blue, and documentaries on both John Coltrane and Lee Morgan. For decades we had to make do with Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Round Midnight (starring Dexter Gordon, who’s largely responsible for making it the best jazz movie ever) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird, now jazz pictures roll off the assembly line like chocolate letters during Santa Claus season.

Lots of talking heads crowd the Coltrane biopic, John Scheinfeld’s Chasing Trane, including the former saxophone colossus of the White House, Bill “Slightly Drawling Behind The Beat” Clinton:

Chasing Trane

A lot of unreleased studio photography and footage seems to appear in Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan, tickling the senses of hard bop aficionados around the globe:

I Called Him Morgan

To this day, the story of how Lee Morgan took a slug at Slugs’ from his common-law wife Helen in 1972 has remained a dramatic, horrible and hyper-real slice of classic jazz history. Let’s go back to a revealing, detailed account from drummer Billy Hart in his interview with Ethan Iverson of 2006. (The interview itself is one of many truly fascinating, long Iverson interviews on his Do The Math blog) Scroll to about three/fourths of the page:

Billy Hart about the death of Lee Morgan

Below are listed three albums from the Flophouse vault: Coltrane and Morgan’s sole cooperation on wax, Blue Train (Blue Note 1577, 1957); Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder (Blue Note/United Artists 84157, 1972-75, France); Coltrane Time (Solid State 7013, 1970; previously issued on United Artists in 1963 and as Cecil Taylor’s Hard Driving Jazz (United Artists, 1959)

Tonesmith

August 29, 2016October 26, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

Trumpeter Louis Smith passed away on August 20 at the age of 85. Memphis-born Smith, who finally settled in Ann-Arbor, Michigan, was in the limelight very shortly, when Blue Note released Here Comes Louis Smith in 1958. Originally, that session was recorded for Transition. As the story goes, when Transition folded, Cannonball Adderley recommended the session to Blue Note boss Alfred Lion. Adderley, under contract to Mercury, appeared on the album as ‘Buckshot La Funke’. The album showcases a crackerjack trumpeter who played in the Clifford Brown/Fats Navarro tradition and added steaming, sizzling blues phrases, a style best likened, perhaps, to Blue Mitchell. Smith’s second album, Smithville, included pianist Sonny Clark.

Smith recorded for Steeplechase throughout his career but stayed under the radar mostly, concentrating on teaching instead. Dutch pianist Rein de Graaff, always eager to lure unsung heroes out of hiding, invited Smith to The Netherlands for a series of acclaimed performances in the eighties. Recently, De Graaff recounted to me a sojourn in Detroit, when Louis Smith took De Graaff to a gig, ‘deep in the bowels of the Afro-American community. The kind of place where white people usually do not dare thread. There was this big hall, and I was the only white person around. Honestly, I was a bit scared, there were more than a few hostile glances from the audience, you know. But once I’d sat in, the hostility disappeared. Louis was great. Jazz is the shared language, you know.”

More Than Meets The ‘Ear’

August 28, 2016September 4, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

Engineer Rudy van Gelder passed away this week on Thursday, August the 25th. Mr. Van Gelder, not surprisingly, is a trending topic. Already during the pioneering engineer’s lifetime, Van Gelder acquired a mythic status among jazz lovers around the globe. Serious jazz collectors discuss ‘original’ pressings of Van Gelder’s Blue Note albums and the famous ‘ear’ mark in the dead wax on the world wide web on a daily basis. Van Gelder isn’t the only audio legend (For instance, Roy DuNann and Tom Dowd enjoy a dedicated following) but certainly has been the most widely revered in jazz history. Besides his brilliant, revolutionary engineering, RvG’s association with Blue Note is responsible for his status. There was a certain mystique as to how Van Gelder created the label’s poignantly warm, transparent and spacious sound. Occasional criticism – through the overuse of reverb Van Gelder recordings sometimes seem personal soundscapes instead of palettes attuned to the special features of the involved artistic personalities – seems, if justifiable serious audio geek-critique, a bit presumptuous to me in the light of Van Gelder’s countless gifts to the jazz world. It is evident that Rudy van Gelder’s role in shaping modern jazz is everlasting and paramount.

Naturally, Van Gelder didn’t work exclusively for Blue Note in his legendary Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studios, but also for Prestige, Impulse, Atlantic, Verve, CTI and a few other labels. The list of albums that Van Gelder is associated with is endless. A peek through DG Mono‘s helpful Van Gelder jazz discography up to 1966 – the classic years – has a dizzying effect. To name but a few classic Van Gelder albums: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder, Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch and Miles Davis’ Walkin’.

Below, I have listed a few lesser-known albums that were engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. Exceptions to the RvG rule for a number of, hardly shocking but evident, reasons:

Signal 1206, 1957

Portrait Of Sheila, Blue Note 9002

Impulse, A25, 1962

Van Gelder rarely recorded for Signal. Figures, the label was short-lived and the catalogue was taken over by Savoy in the late fifties. RvG engineered Gigi Gryce, Duke Jordan, Red Rodney… And?; Blue Note eschewed singers but made an exception for Sheila Jordan. Van Gelder rarely worked with singers – Johnny Hartman for Impulse, Etta Jones for Prestige – but captures Jordan at her spine-shivering best; Van Gelder is synonymous with quintet line-ups, the classic hard bop format. However, his job with swing giant Count Basie turned out pretty swell.

Prestige 8321, 1965

Blue Note 8297, 1963

Prestige PR 7800, 1963

Latin Soul is one of the few latin jazz recordings that Van Gelder did for Prestige. Commercial but swinging stuff; African High Life was characteristic West-African dance music, the album’s an odd Blue Note release; Must’ve been somethin’ else for RvG to check in folk singer Dave van Ronk after a few days with the front-liners of Blue Note like Andrew Hill and Grachan Monchur III! However well-prepared, it’s like eating kidney stew after a long-awaited evening at El Bulli.

God’s a kind of a less-is-more kind of guy. In fact, the penultimate silence is His trade. Which may be the best music after all. But I know RvG is gonna change that scene.

A View From The Stage

May 28, 2016September 24, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

Bass player Henk Haverhoek put up pictures of his gigs with classic jazz men on his website. Check it out: snapshots of Dutch jazz history.

(From left clockwise: Johnny Griffin and Henk Haverhoek; guitarist Rene Thomas, Eric Ineke and Henk Haverhoek; portrait of Henk Haverhoek)

American jazz musicians have traveled and lived in Europe since the thirties. The migration was at its peak in the sixties and musicians concentrated predominantly in Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam: visitors without rhythm sections, which made them dependent on local musicians. Not everyone was up to it, but talented journeymen or pros succeeded in combining a deep passion for the music of their American heroes with versatility and studiousness, maturing greatly from playing with these iron-willed jazz individuals.

Among them was bassist Henk Haverhoek, who has been active both in the Dutch jazz scene and internationally, as well as a studio/theatre/radio show musician and teacher since the mid-sixties. In 1968, Haverhoek joined pianist Rein de Graaff and saxophonist Dick Vennik’s hard bop/modal jazz quartet, which recorded and performed prolifically and succesfully in the late sixties and seventies. Haverhoek and the quartet supported, among others, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Rouse, Clifford Jordan, Freddie Hubbard, Junior Cook, Woody Shaw and Lee Konitz. Haverhoek also played with Ben Webster, Duke Jordan, Mal Waldron, Horace Parlan, Thad Jones, Slide Hampton and Joe Henderson. Could’ve done worse.

Horace Parlan – At The Beeb

May 6, 2016May 12, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

A lot of American musicians migrated to Europe onwards from the fifties, looking for work, recognition and a relief from the harsh conditions of American life and the stress of racial prejudice: Bud Powell, Art Taylor, Johnny Griffin, Kenny Clarke, Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Slide Hampton, Lucky Thompson… Most of them, eventually, returned to the US. Few settled in Europe for the rest of their lives, like Don Byas, Kenny Drew and Art Farmer.

And pianist Horace Parlan. Parlan settled down in Denmark in 1972 and still lives in the village of Rude near Copenhagen. Not only that, Parlan has been a Danish citizen for years now.

Horace Parlan suffered from polio as a child. His right hand is crippled. As a consequence, Parlan’s playing style was a rare combination of sparse, rollicking left hand lines and inventive, three-fingered right hand voicings. Check out Parlan’s singular style on a 1986 concert in Köln, Germany. (with – the typically good-natured! – Dizzy Gillespie and a particularly eloquent Clifford Jordan)

Parlan is heard on a number of classic hard and post-bop recordings, notably on tunes as Charles Mingus’ Better Git It In Your Soul and Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. And everybody digs Us Three, one of the essential Blue Note rhythm sections consisting of Parlan, bassist George Tucker and drummer Al Harewood. Some of their best work is on Parlan’s Us Three and Speakin’ My Piece, Stanley Turrentine’s Up At Minton’s and Dexter Gordon’s Doin’ Alright.

BBC World Service visited the 84-years old pianist in 2015 for their radio broadcast series The Documentary. A widower in a nursing home, the blind, fragile and shaky-voiced Parlan has retired and talks us through his career. It’s a touching portrait.

At one time, Archie Shepp is on the phone. Checking on his pal. The conversation soon turns to music. “Did you hear any cool cats lately?”

Old friends, sticking together like book ends.

True Grit

April 6, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

A while ago, a friend sent me this fantastic footage on YouTube of organist Brother Jack McDuff at the Antibes Festival in France in 1964. At the time, Jack McDuff’s quartet consisted of tenor saxophonist Red Holloway, guitarist George Benson and drummer Joe Dukes. (Read the recent review of The Soulful Drums Of Joe Dukes here)

The popular organists of the sixties, like Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff were both true entertainers and true musicians. They entertained but not with cheap tricks. If you played with cats like that, you had to have game. In his autobiography, George Benson tells a number of exciting and insightful stories about his time with McDuff.

Benson joined McDuff in 1963. It was his first break. Benson was still basically an r&b guitarist, dreaming of the high standard of his predecessors in McDuff’s group, Grant Green, Eddie Diehl and Kenny Burrell, but as McDuff would soon acknowledge, a ‘baaaaaad’ picker. Benson slowly but surely developed into a jazz player, absorbing the music of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers on the road, who traveled the same circuit. Plenty time to learn, because McDuff’s quartet was playing nightly for two years time around the East Coast and Mid-West.

By 1964, the group fired on all cylinders. McDuff and Joe Dukes were excellent teachers but tough customers. McDuff regularly shouted obscenities to Benson on stage, ‘if he had just the right (or wrong) amount of booze or weed.’ Joe Dukes, ‘such a magnificent drummer that there were times I thought he was one of the greatest things that ever happened to mankind’ was especially hard on the 19-year old prodigy, who alledgedly picked up too many girls for the taste of the envious drummer.

“Finally, after a particularly nasty rant, I snapped: ‘If y’all don’t lay off, I’m gonna take y’all outside and beat y’all old men up! I’m nineteen years old! Y’all can’t take me! We’re going out in the alley, right now! McDuff and Dukes just stared at me for a second, then they both pulled out switchblades. But that didn’t stop me: “I don’t care! Y’all don’t scare me! Bring your switchblades into the alley! I’ll beat y’all up anyhow!” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed: nobody went into the alley, and nobody got beaten up. But it got them off my back.”

“In retrospect, I’m glad they stayed on my back; granted, their methods were barbaric, but for the most part, it was about making me a better musician so we’d be a better band.”

Nice story. Great music.

Larry Young – In Paris

March 14, 2016 - Francois Leave a comment

Great news! On March 11, Resonance Records released a goldmine for fans of organist Larry Young. Larry Young – In Paris: The ORTF Recordings features live material and studio sessions that were recorded for radio broadcasting during the periods that Young lived in Paris in 1964/65. Larry Young took Hammond organ jazz beyond its church roots and the bop ethos of Jimmy Smith, adding whole tone scales and the modal inventions of John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner to a clean, articulate sound and restrained, meaningful phrasing. The result was a new and amazingly free-flowing kind of organ jazz. Young’s Blue Note albums and cooperations with guitarist Grant Green and drummer Elvin Jones are classic. The organist is best-known for his role on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Back in the USA at the end of 1965, Young released his masterpiece Unity.

Read about Larry Young in Paris on Resonance’s website here.
And check out the trailer here.

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