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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

THAT John Williams

April 18, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

During long stretches of 1953 and ‘54, John Williams was the pianist in Stan Getz’s quintet and quartet. Wiliams is often described in biographies as a disciple of Bud Powell who was also influenced by Horace Silver. That is true. It is also true that oxygen influences flame, a fact that tells us nothing about the differences among flames. In the population of pianists influenced by Powell and Silver, Williams was identifiable by a keyboard touch that produced a spikey, percussive, rollicking forward motion, an infectious swing. Almost in contradiction, at the same time he somehow achieved a smoothness of phrasing that invested his improvised lines with the logic of inevitability. He managed to make his listeners anticipate what was coming in a solo and yet surprise them when he got there.
Williams’ first album under his own name was John Williams, a ten-inch LP on the Emarcy label, recorded in 1954. His trio had Bill Anthony on bass and the unique Detroit drummer Frank Isola, fellow members of the Stan Getz group. Williams jokes today that he often wonders who got the third copy of the album after he and his mother each bought one. It may not have been a big seller, but it quickly became a favorite of musicians and, after Emarcy pulled it, of collectors. In the 1990s, a broker of rare LPs who sold to Japanese LP zealots told me that a mint copy of John Williams was going in Japan for upwards of $300. I blush to confess that I sold him my beat-up copy for considerably less than that, making him wait while I first copied it to tape. As we listened, I hummed along to Wiliams’ solos, so embedded in my brain had they become over four decades of nearly wearing out the album.
It was a puzzle, given the LP’s iconic status, why Emarcy did not reissue it on CD, and why Verve did not bring it out after the company acquired the Emarcy catalog. A good guess is that the decision was made by accountants. Time has cured that ill. Copyright laws in Spain declare that after fifty years, recorded material is fair game (I’m not sure that’s the exact wording of the law). So, the resourceful Fresh Sound label has put on one CD John Williams and the pianist’s second Emarcy album, a twelve-inch LP called John Williams Trio, recorded in 1955. This belated event probably doesn’t do much for the inflated price of the original LPs, but it is a boon to the substantial number of Williams fans who have been clamoring for a reissue. It may also gain him new fans.
The second album, done in three sessions with shifting personnel among bassists and drummers, doesn’t have quite the concentrated charm of the ten-inch 1954 session. That is in part, I suspect, because Frank Isola is on only one track. Nonetheless, it has wonderful moments. Taken together, the twenty tracks capture John Williams when his playing was full of freshness, vigor and peppery lyricism. By all accounts, including the evidence of an appearance with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, it still is. He has never stopped playing, but he took a few decades off to become a banker and, for twenty years, a city commissioner of Hollywood, Florida. In conversation, Williams tends to deprecate his playing in the 1950s as inadequate, an evaluation that flies in the face of the wisdom of his employers—StanGetz, Bob Brookmeyer, Cannonball Adderley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims among them—and of listeners who have been stimulated by his work for half a century.
I should point out, although by now it may be obvious, that this John Williams is not the Star Wars John Williams.

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Comments

  1. Jim Harrod says

    April 18, 2006 at 5:39 pm

    A few years back Nippon Phonogram issued a two LP set of the complete John Williams on EmArcy which was researched and compiled by Kiyoshi Koyama with new liner notes by Ira Gitler. This splendid set includes six previously unissued alternate takes and one previously unissued track, SWINGIN’ THE BLUES. Like all such reverent projects produced by the Japanese this set is the ultimate tribute to Williams’ artistry. Koyama’s research notes also include a complete discography of John Williams on other dates for EmArcy with Med Flory, Bill DeArango, Paul Quinichette, Art Mardigan, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Cleveland, Buddy Collette, and Pete Rugolo.

  2. Richar Prosapio says

    April 29, 2006 at 8:44 am

    I’m looking for the John Williams who led a big band in the recording of “Mr.Smoke” an incredible piece of music I came across a few years ago. Anybody know him and/or the story of this recording?

  3. Fredric Koeppel says

    September 4, 2006 at 8:18 am

    I owned that 10-inch LP when I was 15 and 16 years old (now 61) and it disappeared many decades ago, I have been searching for it ever since and by coincidence came across your blog, read this essay on Williams and went immediately to Amazon and ordered the CD. I can’t thank you enough!

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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