Correspondence: Sheldon, Tjader And Others

Re: Alan Broadbent. I get the idea. They're all black musicians past and present on the West Coast. Any jazz buff knows that there have always been black musicians in California and the whole Pacific Coast to be exact. But their numbers are not nearly as big as in midwestern cities like St. Louis or particularly New York City. What's your point ?

Not to stir up the pot, but re: a recent article in Rifftides I began to think of some West Coast (born or residing-resided) jazz musicians. Beginning with..... Lester Young, Hamp Hawes, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ray Brown, Horace Silver, JJ Johnson, Sweets Edison, Dexter Gordon..... you get the idea.

I once heard Jack Sheldon say that the reason musicians (I think he was referring specifically to Chet Baker) started playing with a quiet, "cool" sound was so as not to compete with conversations in supper clubs. For what it's worth.

I thought it was too bad that Ken Burns didn't find room for Errol Garner in his film. I understand there was plenty of footage, but they just couldn't find a spot for it. Errol was a unique voice, and was the first jazz performer to move exclusively to the concert arena, managed by Martha Glaser, presented by Sol Hurok.

This is vis a vis the black/white West Coast discussion. Many years ago when Mike Davis and I were compiling our Hampton Hawes Discography(self published and still around), iIhad several conversations with Red Mitchell. This is one story he told me. He had met the pianist Elmo Hope and got to know him well. Elmo had a Trio recording date in the offing for Hi Fi Records, I believe. They rehearsed for a couple of weeks prior to the date. Red said that Elmo's songs were tricky. However, a couple days prior to the recording date he got a phone call from Elmo, telling him that he would have to replace him with a Black player because he was getting too much hassle from the community.

Red was, of course, Hamp Hawes' bassist of choice.

(Hope's only album for HI Fi, reissued on a Contemporary CD as "Elmo Hope Trio", has Jimmy Bond on bass. -- DR

At a tribute to Cal Tjader was held at the College of San Mateo. It was sponsored by local radio station KCSM. Former club owner and current deejay Sonny Buxton said in his monologue that West Coast jazz was "light, fluffy and didn't swing hard." I'd really like to know who first put that misconception of West Coast jazz out there. Even poster Michael Owen has to defend the West Coast by saying that California blacks were just as gritty as their East Coast counterparts. California white guys could swing hard and play gritty with the best of them. The difference is that they weren't limited to swing or bop as it was played on the East Coast.

Leading lights of the post war era such as Kenton, Brubeck, Desmond, Cal Tjader, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Paul Horn, Vince Guaraldi and Shorty Rogers, were interested in expanding the boundaries of jazz. The music they made didn't have an easy label so it was all called West Coast jazz. Just as anything Ellington, Miles or Monk did, it stands the test of time. Great jazz is not simply defined as music that swings hard. Experimenting with different time signatures, harmonies, rhythms and fusing jazz with other musical forms helped create the foundation of what we listen to now.

Thanks to all for the West Coast jazz discussion. Yes, the reality is that the phrase "west coast jazz" has come to mean white guys playing their instruments on a beach (see the famous William Claxton photo of the Lighthouse All-Stars). But Contemporary & Pacific Jazz (the leading California record labels of the period) released any number of albums by black musicians, some just as gritty as their counterparts on the East Coast.

I find it interesting that Nat Hentoff was quite willing to take Lester Koenig's money to write liner notes for Contemporary in the 1950s but has changed his perception over the years.

I hope no one still thinks that Ken Burns' documentary was anything but useless. Get ahold of Ken Koenig's film on the Lighthouse, the Stan Levey doc, or various bits and pieces from the tv shows Jazz Scene USA and Bobby Troup's Stars of Jazz to get an idea of what the sound was like.

There's an interesting exhibition currently at the Orange County Museum of Art ("Birth of the Cool") which features some of the period's best jazz musicians in the context of the modern movements in art, architecture and design. Check out www. ocma.net.

And it was the novelist John O'Hara, not Robert Benchley, who wrote that he didn't have to believe George Gershwin was dead.

(Of course it was O'Hara. I trusted my faulty memory instead of looking it up. Thanks for the correction .
Mr. Owen is the archivist for the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts in San Francisco-- DR)

I would like to further clarify that I was mistaken in using the present tense when discussing certain West Coast musicians in my response to Jack Sheldon's lack of recognition. Having the fifties in mind was not enough in and of itself.

Secondly, Thank you, Charlton Price, for your eloquent post on Ken Burns "Jazz." In his letter to me, Burns said he consulted writer Gary Giddins more than Marsalis. The finished film, "Jazz," however, mainly reflects Marsalis' point of view. Mr. Price you are right to point out the lack of attention given to white big bands other than Shaw and Goodman. Particularly glaring is the omission of the brilliant Stan Kenton. Not only was his music revolutionary but a list of his former sidemen reads like a who's who in jazz. All in all, "Jazz" could have been a film about a music that was initially invented by black people, using both African and European influences. Then, over the years, was repeatedly reinvented by both black and white musicians. A truly multi-racial American music. Instead, it was about black people claiming sole ownership of jazz; whites were just along for the ride. It is sad indeed. Anyone interested in West Coast jazz can rent the DVD of Ken Koenig's history of "The Lighthouse." I highly recommend it.

My view of Ken Burns' JAZZ is not as charitable as Doug's. The sad thing about that 18 ½ hour series was that it could have been so much better.

Ken Burns was on solid ground in contending that one cannot understand America without understanding the essences of and the interplay of the Civil War + jazz+ baseball in the American experience. A pervasive theme in those three aspects of America, of course, is negritude/black history/white racism. But by the time Ken got to JAZZ, the third series, that theme had become, IMO, the total message. Further, Burns seems to have allowed the form and content of the Jazz series to be dictated by Albert Murray, Wynton Marsalis, and Stanley Crouch --particularly Wynton, who apparently told Burns how to understand the music, what to include, what to exclude. Wynton also seemed to have given Ken Burns to understand that were it not for Wynton, the legacy of jazz (particularly reflecting its black genius and genesis) would not have been and won't be preserved.

These commentators, and therefore Burns, were not, IMO, equal-opportunity excluders. Notable exclusions were most of the white big bands of the thirties through the seventies, most of so-called West Coast jazz, and the rich history in Richard Sudhalter's book "Lost Chords."

When I was referring to Guaraldi, Candoli, Hall..etc, I had the fifties era in mind. I am aware of their current circumstances. In fact, Paul Horn and I have become friends as a result of my Tjader biography. I referred to that era because it was such an amazingly creative time. In my opinion, it was the height of the modern jazz. But the West Coast was often unfairly maligned.

Secondly, I am also aware that some great black musicians were not given their proper due by Burns. But said musicians were small in number by comparison and were not evaluated properly because Mr. Burns either didn't think highly enough of them or due to lack of time. But that was not the case with most of the white musicians he ignored. To illustrate, Ken Burns angrily responded to a letter I wrote by saying that it wasn't that white musicians couldn't play but that, with a few exceptions, they just didn't figure in the jazz pantheon. He then arrogantly claimed, "...I find absolute agreement from all sides of the debate."

Lastly, on Leonard Feather, that statement was from the fifties, I know Mr. Feather later changed his tune on Cal. He called him "the Latin Swede" and wrote the liners to Tjader's last LP "Heat Wave," which was posthumously released in mid-1982. I hope you print this response online. I don't want readers to think that I am not fully aware of the circumstances of the musicians and critics that I referred to. And the Burns letter is important as well.

In the Burns series, the omission of Carter was particularly egregious. They should have had him on for hours and hours. Artie Shaw too. Here are two guys who knew a huge amount and were capable of talking eloquently about it, but Burns passed them over in favor of Gerald Early?