The Penguin Jazz Guide (32 page)

The other key figures on these recordings are Max Roach, barely out of his teens but already playing in the kind of advanced rhythmic count that Parker required, and Dizzy Gillespie. Miles Davis was demonstrably unhappy with some of the faster themes and lacked Parker’s ability to think afresh take after take; by the time of the ‘Parker’s Mood’ date, though, he had matured significantly (he was, after all, only 19 when ‘Ko-Ko’ and ‘Now’s The Time’ were recorded). A word, too, for Curley Russell and Tommy Potter, whose contribution to this music was until CD transfer often inaudible.

A point of frustration for many in the past has been the scattered nature of these sessions, spread across numerous LP and CD editions. But with Tony Williams’s agreement, the Savoys and the Dials were finally brought within a single set for the first time in this ring-bound eight-disc collection. The master tracks for each date are programmed first, followed by the various alternative takes. There is full documentation in a handsome booklet, and the harsh sound of the Savoys and Dials has been made as hi-fi as the originals will probably ever allow.

The ‘newly discovered sides’ include an interesting enough ‘Out Of Nowhere’, ‘Oop-Bop-Sh’bam’, ‘Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid’/‘Bebop’ and a more unexpected ‘East Of The Sun (And West Of The Moon)’, which is not a number one associates with Parker. The rest of the tracks are familiar Savoys.

& See also
Charlie Parker With Strings
(1947–1952; p. 106),
The Quintet
(1953; p. 141)

TRUMMY YOUNG

Born James Osborne Young, 12 January 1912, Savannah, Georgia; died 10 September 1984, San Jose, California

Trombone

Trummy Young 1944–1946

Classics 1037

Young; Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge (t); Harry Curtis, Bill Stegmeyer, Willie Smith, Ray Eckstrand (as); Nick Caiazza, Stan Webb, Herbie Fields, Ike Quebec, Leo Williams, Don Byas (ts); John Malachi, Kenny Kersey, Billy Rowland, Jimmy Jones (p); Mike Bryan, Allan Hanlon, Bill DeArango (g); Slam Stewart, Tommy Potter, Bob Haggart, Trigger Alpert, John Levy (b); Eddie Byrd, Jimmy Crawford, Specs Powell, Cozy Cole (d); Martha Tilton, Jack Leonard, The Holidays (v). February 1944–July 1946.

Trombonist J. J. Johnson said (1985):
‘It wasn’t the speed or the slide positions that made him distinctive. You just knew it was him from the very first note. He had that
thing
where he stood out, as himself, in any situation.’

Young’s major affiliation was with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, with whom he remained for 12 years, extending a career that might otherwise have stalled. He always deferred to Louis in those situations and it takes some understanding of what he was capable of when there were no such constraints to appreciate just how generously reticent some of those foreshortened spots were. Young had also played for Lunceford and Benny Goodman, but he was also active on the fringes of the bebop scene, where his terrific technique meant he could tackle some elements of the new music without strain.

Young is scarcely remembered as a leader, but he did manage to get his name on a few record labels in the ’40s, and this disc neatly rounds up six such dates, variously released by Session, Duke, V-Disc, GI and HRS. The pick of them are probably the four titles made for Duke, which feature a crackling seven-piece band starring the elegant Buck Clayton and the huge-sounding Ike Quebec, whose tenor booms out of the speakers. Young is a bit of a bystander here, but he does get to take a vocal on ‘I’m Living For Today’. Clayton is also on the first of the V-Disc titles and Eldridge takes over from him on the next date, which offers a storming ‘Tea For Two’. Mostly, though, these are features for Tilton and Leonard. The GI session is rather ordinary but the final four titles, cut for HRS by Trummy’s Big Seven, have some decent late-swing music, with Clayton and Buster Bailey and Young’s own vociferous solo style in evidence.

SIDNEY BECHET
^&

Born 14 May 1897, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 May 1959, Paris, France

Soprano saxophone, clarinet

King Jazz: Volume 1

GHB BCD 501/502 2CD

Bechet; Hot Lips Page (t); Mezz Mezzrow (cl); Sammy Price, Fritz Weston (p); Danny Barker (g); George ‘Pops’ Foster (b); Big Sid Catlett, Kaiser Marshall (d); Douglas Daniels, Pleasant Joseph (v). March–August 1945.

Steve Lacy said (1983):
‘The great strength of Sidney Bechet’s saxophone-playing was that it was an old sound put in a modern context. He wasn’t a revolutionary in saxophone terms, but what he did was like what Bach did: he took something that had been around for a long time, and he made it perfect.’

The Bechet centenary came and went in 1997 with little more than a mild flurry of interest. Perhaps because there is no ‘problematic’ about Bechet, no need to rescue him from obscurity or debunk his undentable popularity, there was no real leverage for a reassessment. The one big event of the year, record-wise, was the appearance of the legendary King Jazz catalogue on CD. By rights, the label was the brainchild of Mezz Mezzrow, an extraordinary booster and self-promoter who managed to raise enough cash from a man who had made his pile in the war selling radar equipment to get the label under way. But Mezzrow was no better as a businessman than he was as a clarinettist, and he quickly got distracted into writing his (fictionalized) autobiography,
Really the Blues
, with the help of journalist Bernard Wolfe. However, the label’s policy of recording much more than could be issued pays dividends now. The first sessions on the disc are of pianist Sammy Price with and without vocalist Pleasant Joseph. There follow, though, sessions from July and August with the Bechet–Mezzrow group. Some of these tracks – ‘Revolutionary Blues’, ‘Perdido Street Stomp’, ‘The Sheik Of Araby’ and ‘Minor Swoon’ – are classics of postwar Dixieland and, though Mezzrow’s technical insufficiencies are in no way glossed over in the transfer, the brightness and unselfconscious ease of these performances warm the heart. For once Pops Foster and Danny Barker can be heard clearly, and the balance of the sound is as good as it is likely to get. Sammy Price plays on all the
Volume 1
sides except those from the August sessions. He’s a decent player, slightly florid and overcooked as a soloist, but he comes into his own as a group accompanist, bettered only by Art Hodes. Fritz Weston comes in for the later dates and isn’t remotely as idiomatic or as good.

& See also
Sidney Bechet 1940–1941
(1940–1941; p. 79),
The Fabulous Sidney Bechet
(1951–1953; p. 132)

BUNK JOHNSON

Born William Geary (or Gary) Johnson, 27 December 1889, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 7 July 1949, New Orleans, Louisiana

Trumpet

Bunk’s Brass Band And Dance Band 1945

American Music AMCD-6

Johnson; Louis ‘Kid Shots’ Madison (t); Jim Robinson (tb); George Lewis (cl); Isidore Barbarin (ahn); Adolphe Alexander (bhn); Joe Clark (bass hn); Lawrence Marrero (bj, d); Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau (b); Baby Dodds (d). May 1945.

Trombonist and broadcaster Campbell Burnap said (1985):
‘Bunk’s like a figure out of a western or some mafia novel. He had to skip town because he let down one of the marching band, and the krewe came after him in New Iberia and relieved him of his front teeth. So it goes. But then he claimed to be a decade older than he was. I guess he was pitching for “inventor of jazz” status.’

A difficult and contentious man, Bunk Johnson remains mysterious and fascinating, still the figurehead of ‘revivalist’ jazz even though his records remain relatively difficult to find, and even marginalized where those by, say, George Lewis have kept their reputation. Deceitful about his age – he claimed to have been born in 1879, older even than Buddy Bolden, with whom he’d played – Johnson was rediscovered in 1942 and fitted out with new teeth. He had never recorded before, but many records came out of the next five years. They are, inevitably, of variable quality and one frequently wonders listening to them how much Bunk relied on his almost legendary status: it was somehow assumed that anything he cared to do was ‘authentic’. However, when one listens to him, it’s clear that he is a more sophisticated and lyrical player than the raw-boned curmudgeon of reputation.

This is a fine introduction to Johnson’s music, since it features what would have been a regular parade band line-up on 11 tracks and a further nine by a typical Johnson dance group (recorded at George Lewis’s home). Lewis sounds a little shrill on the
Brass Band
tracks, which makes one wonder about the credit for ‘pitch rectification’ on the CD. It is a pioneering record nevertheless, as the first authentic, New Orleans brass band session. The ‘dance’ tracks are very sprightly and feature some fine Lewis, as well as some of Johnson’s firmest lead and even some respectable solos. The sound is quite clean as these sessions go, though some of the
Brass Band
acetates are in less than perfect shape.

Johnson’s farewell,
Last Testament
, was reportedly the only session in which he really got his own way, choosing both sidemen and material; and New Orleans purists must have been surprised on both counts: he lined up a team of players quite different from the American Music cronies, and he chose rags and pop tunes to perform: ‘The Entertainer’, ‘Kinklets’ and ‘The Minstrel Man’. He was for a time a living connection to the past, but one suspects that his past was made for him, and it’s one of the paradoxes of the revival that the obvious cues were overlooked.

MARY LOU WILLIAMS
^&

Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs (later Burley), 8 May 1910, Atlanta, Georgia; died 28 May 1981, Durham, North Carolina

Piano

The Zodiac Suite

Smithsonian Folkways SF CD 40810

Williams; unidentified big band, featuring Ben Webster (ts); New York Philharmonic Orchestra. December 1945.

Mary Lou Williams said (1975):
‘I couldn’t get the money I wanted and thought I deserved from Norman Granz, so eventually took scale [payment] just in order to get some of the
Zodiac
things played by legitimate musicians from the New York Philharmonic.’

Duke Ellington described her as ‘perpetually contemporary’. After she grew up in Pittsburgh, Mary Lou Williams’s career encompassed weary days of travel with Andy Kirk’s Clouds Of Joy band (she began as a part-time arranger and only grudgingly won recognition as a piano-player), staff arranging for Ellington, and bandleading. Along with her husband,
John Williams, she joined Terrence Holder’s Clouds Of Joy orchestra, shortly to be taken over by Kirk. After divorcing Williams, she married trumpeter Harold Baker and co-led a group with him. Her later style shows a deep understanding of jazz history and a profound spiritual dimension.

The early work is best sampled from her work with the Clouds Of Joy, though there are a number of Classics volumes covering her own output from 1927 to the end of the war, when she was completing work on the ambitious
Zodiac Suite.

On New Year’s Eve 1945/6, Williams gave a remarkable performance of her
Zodiac Suite
with the New York Philharmonic at Town Hall. It’s a sequence of dedications to fellow musicians (identified by their astrological characteristics) and combines straight orchestral writing of a slightly bland, film soundtrack sort with jazz interpolations and occasional sections (‘Taurus’ and ‘Gemini’, significantly) where the two seem to coincide. Williams had been profoundly dissatisfied with a partial reading of the music, recorded in 1957 for Norman Granz’s Verve label, and the rediscovery of the ‘lost’ tapes from the Town Hall concert is a significant addition to the discography. The sound isn’t always very reliable, with occasional crackles and some loss of resolution in the string parts, but Williams is caught in close-up and the piece remains a key moment in the recognition of jazz as an important 20th-century music, not ‘classical’, but with its own history and logic.

& See also
Free Spirits
(1975; p. 426)

BOYD RAEBURN

Born 27 October 1913, Faith, South Dakota; died 2 August 1966, Lafayette, Louisiana

Bass saxophone, leader

Jubilee Performances 1946

Hep CD 1

Raeburn; Gordon Boswell, Pete Candoli, Norman Faye, Conrad Gozzo, Wes Hensel (t); Eddie Bert, Dick Noel, Hal Smith, Britt Woodman, Ollie Wilson, Freddie Zito (tb); Lloyd Oto, Al Richman, Evan Vail (frhn); Harvey Estrin, Allen Fields (as); Harvey Klee (as, f); Wilbur Schwartz (as, cl); Frank Socolow (as, ts); Ralph Lee, Lucky Thompson, Shirley Thompson (ts); Hy Mandel (bs); Harry Babasin, Clyde Lombardi (bsx); Gus McReynolds (sax); Jules Jacob (eng hn, ob, ts); Dodo Marmarosa, Dale Pierce (p); Sam Herman, Tony Rizzi (g); Gail Laughton (hp); Tiny Kahn, Irv Kluger, Jackie Mills (d); Doug Jones (perc); David Allyn (v). 1945–1946.

Hep boss Alastair Robertson says:
‘Raeburn broke the mould. George Handy’s arrangements took the band away from the dance floor and into a concert jazz format. Young America was not ready for such innovation and within a year the band folded, but many years later I talked to Raeburn soloists Harry Klee and Britt Woodman, who spoke warmly of the experience.’