Good Old LaFaro And Previn

The past couple of days I have been listening to two CDs containing fresh old music and enjoying it as much as if hearing it for the first time.

LaFaro

Scott LaFaro had a rich musical life before he joined the Bill Evans Trio in 1959 and helped change the role of the bass in interactive improvisation. In 1957 when he was twenty-one, LaFaro was playing in Chicago with Pat Moran, a young pianist from Oklahoma who had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and been infuenced by Bud Powell and Horace Silver. During the short time LaFaro was with her trio, Moran recorded a trio album and another adding the singer Bev Kelly. They have been combined in a CD just issued by Fresh Sound. LaFaro has often been quoted about his dissatisfaction with most of his early recordings:

I don't like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. I don't even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.

We can hear why he made that exception. The strength, authority, swing and harmonic ingenuity in LaFaro's bass lines are gripping. Moran, drummer Johnny Whited and Kelly are fine, but LaFaro--beautifully recorded and dominating the right stereo channel--demands the listener's attention, particularly on the trio session. When Evans found LaFaro and combined him with drummer Paul Motian, he was able to put into operation the trio concept he had been hearing in his head for years. These recordings make it easy to understand how excited Evans must have been the first time he heard LaFaro.

Previn

In 1960 MGM released a feature motion picture more or less based on the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans. The movie about a bunch of San Francisco beatniks was so-so, maybe not quite that good, but it had a superb Andre Previn orchestral score, Previn's compositions for small jazz groups and wonderful playing by a bakers dozen of the best musicians of the period. Gerry Mulligan had a part as a priest who played the baritone saxophone. Art Farmer, Art Pepper and Shelly Manne played themselves, as did Previn, Red Mitchell, Dave Bailey, Russ Freeman, Bob Enevoldsen, Bill Perkins and Buddy Clark. Jack Sheldon is heard in solo with the orchestra and in a quintet with Pepper, Freeman, Mitchell and Manne.

The film has all but disappeared and is apparently impossible to find on DVD or VHS. The sound track, fortunately not only has survived but is expanded for a CD reissue that includes twice as much music as the original release. This increases the small available number of recordings Mulligan's group made when Art Farmer was his trumpet player and adds a few tracks to the legacy of Previn's trio with Manne and Mitchell. Previn's main theme, "Why Are We Afraid," made its way into the repertoires of a few musicians in the sixties. It is puzzling why so memorable a melody failed to become a standard.