Floyd Standifer was an essential member of the Seattle jazz scene in the 1950s when the city had dozens of superior players who banded together in a close-knit community. I hadn’t seen him more than two or three times since those Northwest Jazz Workshop days, but recently I was pleased to encounter him twice. In late November, Standifer joined drummer Don Kinney’s trio for a concert at The Seasons. A fine trumpeter from time he was a teenager, Floyd later took up the tenor saxophone and became an impressive singer. He has been a revered performer and teacher in the Pacific Northwest ever since he returned from Europe and New York in the early 1960s. He filled all three of his roles splendidly in the Kinney concert, captivating his audience, as he does on this CD.
A week or so earlier, I saw and heard Standifer as a member of the 1960 Quincy Jones band. The Jones outfit was so good, Floyd told me the other night, that after Quincy opened for Count Basie’s band at the Olympia Theater in Paris, Basie said to him, “You’re not planning to take this band back to the States, are you?”
On the Quincy Jones DVD in the new Jazz Icons series, Standifer solos in the trumpet section with Clark Terry, Benny Bailey and Lennie Johnson. When Jones formed the band, he hired Floyd along with two more of Quincy’s Seattle pals, bassist Buddy Catlett and pianist Patti Bown.
Trombonist Melba Liston was the other woman in this ground-breaking band, which also boasted saxophonists Phil Woods, Porter Kilbert, Sahib Shihab, Budd Johnson and Jerome Richardson; trombonists Quentin Jackson, Ake Persson and Jimmy Cleveland; drummer Joe Harris; Les Spann on flute and guitar; and the incredible French horn player Julius Watkins. The DVD catches the band in a television concert in Belgium and another a couple of months later in Switzerland with Roger Guerin replacing Terry. Hearing the Jones band on records has been impressive enough over the years. Witnessing the visual dimension of the precision, musicality and camaraderie of this legendary group is a revelation.
Jones did take the band back to the States, but the European sojourn was a fiscal disaster for him and any threat to Basie was short-lived. By the mid-sixties Jones was recovering by broadening his efforts into the more lucrative areas of show business in which he has thrived. During the short life of his big band, he wrote an important paragraph in the history of jazz. If the economics of his situation had worked out differently, the paragraph might have grown into a chapter.
Because it is so revealing and powerful, the Jones DVD is first on my list of the nine Jazz Icons DVDs in the series’ initial release by Reelin’ In The Years Productions, but they are all impressive and valuable. Made from films and videotapes produced by noncommercial state television stations in Europe, even those from the late 1950s are of exceptional quality. We see Lee Morgan blaze into his famous trumpet solo on “Moanin'” with the classic 1958 edition of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers–Chet Baker in 1964 and again fifteen years later, playing beautifully on both occasions–Dizzy Gillespie in 1958 burning through the blues, with Sonny Stitt on tenor saxophone giving no quarter.
Buddy Rich’s drum solo on “Channel One Suite” in Holland in 1978 is a prodigy of musicality and control, evidence for liner note writer Dean Pratt’s argument that Rich was a genius. Ella Fitzgerald has an electrifying moment in a 1957 concert in Belgium when for one number Oscar Peterson sits in on piano and Roy Eldridge on trumpet. With guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Jo Jones, it’s Peterson’s powerhouse trio augmented. Fitzgerald is inspired to a level of rhythmic intensity unusual even for her on “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing”.
What else? Count Basie in 1962 with his New Testament band that included Thad Jones and the two Franks, Foster and Wess; Thelonious Monk in 1966, fascinating in his concentration and eccentricity, with his quartet featuring Charlie Rouse; and Louis Armstrong with his 1959 All-Stars in a typical performance…that is, exhilirating. If you want proof that in his late fifties Armstrong could make other trumpeters shake their heads in disbelief, you’ll find it here.
This project demonstrates the quality that DVD reissues can achieve when they are produced with dedication, skill and the understanding that jazz listeners want not just music, but also information. Far too many DVDs provide auxiliary material only as extras on the disc. Each Jazz Icons box contains an illustrated booklet with carefully researched notes by experts of the caliber of Ira Gitler, Don Sickler, Chris Sheridan, Will Friedwald and Michael Cuscuna.
David Peck and Phillip Galloway, the Jazz Icons producers at Reelin’ in The Years, plan further releases if there is demand. Possibilities include performances new to DVD by John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy and Duke Elllington with Ella Fitzgerald. I wonder what other treasures are resting in the vaults of those European TV stations.
Here’s a longish review of the Jazz Icons series that I wrote for the Jazz Record Mart’s December catalogue.
Larry Kart
Why not dream? The ideal jazz DVD would have topnotch performances by great artists in topnotch sound, shot in a relaxed, unobtrusive manner, and with the visuals revealing something interesting, important, perhaps even essential, about the artist at hand.
The new nine-DVD Jazz Icons series meets that ideal at least twice and doesn’t go far below it, with one or two possible exceptions. But before talking about what each DVD contains, a little background. What we have here – carefully produced, nicely packaged with 16- to 24-page illustrated booklets that include thorough notes by the likes of Ira Gitler, Michael Cuscuna, Chris Sheridan and Don Sickler – are European TV broadcasts (mostly of concerts, plus a few audience-less studio performances) shot from 1957 to 1979 by government controlled and subsidized stations in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway. (Not dependent on advertising revenues, these stations were able and willing to present jazz more appropriately than American television networks did — when American commercial networks did so at all, the glorious exception being “The Sound of Jazz” — and more often than National Educational Television or PBS were able to do.)
How one of these tapes was unearthed is interesting; the 1958 Art Blakey Jazz Messengers concert, taped in Belgium but never aired and then incorrectly catalogued, was discovered by accident when it was sent to the producers of Jazz Icons instead of a 1965 Jazz Messengers show that they had requested. But the music is the main thing, and “Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, Live in ’58” (55 minutes) is a good place to start.
This is the version of the Messengers (Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, Jymie Merritt, and Blakey) that made only one studio recording, “Moanin,'” plus four live albums recorded later in the European tour that this Belgium concert was part of. I would say that these DVD performances, captured in very good sound, certainly equal and may well surpass anything else from this great but rather short-lived band (Golson left after six months to form a quintet with Curtis Fuller, which eventually would evolve into the Jazztet). In particular, Golson – the Messenger’s music director – is in inspired, explosive form here, and the visuals naturally highlight the nature and quality of everyone’s playing. To see Morgan digging Golson’s fierce solo on “Moanin,'” Golson responding in kind to Morgan’s brilliant outing on “Just By Myself, ” the galvanic, locked-hands, two-chorus climax to Timmons’ “Moanin'” solo, the perfect match between Blakey’s drumming and his radiant, masterly physical presence, the rhyme between Timmons’ sly, seemingly vulnerable hipness as a man and the hair-trigger sensitivity of his comping – these are the kind of things a jazz DVD can clearly convey and that no recording can quite reveal.
Equally important, but in a somewhat different way, is “Thelonious Monk, Live in ’66,” (62 minutes) , two performances shot two days apart in Norway (in a concert hall without an audience) and in Denmark (in an audience-less studio) by Monk’s regular quartet of the time – Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, and Ben Riley. Sound quality is again very good, the program will be familiar to anyone who knows Monk’s repertoire of the time (two versions of “Lulu’s Back in Town,” “Blue Monk,” “‘Round Midnight,” an unaccompanied version of “Don’t Blame Me,” and “Epistrophy”), and some of Rouse’s solo moves will be familiar as well. But Monk’s level of inspiration is quite high, and the band is with him. What ought to make this DVD a cornerstone of any collection is the extended opportunity it gives us to watch Monk’s hands on the keyboard (and, at times, his feet on the pedals, too). As Don Sickler explains in the booklet: “In person, I saw that [Monk] played the piano very differently than I had ever seen it played before. He attacked practically every note, mostly with an unorthodox flat finger approach…. Sometimes he would even cross hands (left over right) attacking his melody notes usually with either a stiff first or second finger of his left hand, while his right hand fingers comped the sparse harmonic elements. Now I could see why his piano playing sounded so different. The way he approached the piano allowed him to give a different weight to each note, whether in a single line melodic passage or in a chord voicing.” Actually seeing what Sickler describes here – and he adds further shrewd musical insights to what has been quoted – is both enlightening and thrilling; if you have never before seen Monk’s hands at work on the keyboard for an extended stretch of time, you owe it to yourself to take in what’s on this DVD.
On now to one of Monk’s bebop colleagues, “Dizzy Gillespie, Live in ’58 and ’70” (85 minutes). The first concert here, shot in Belgium in rather airless sound, pairs Gillespie with Sonny Stitt and Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanists of the time – Lou Levy, Ray Brown, and Gus Johnson. It’s a promising lineup, and everyone seems to be in a mellow mood, but while Gillespie is in very good form (his ballad feature “Cocktails for Two,” of all things, is full of striking harmonic wit), Stitt tends to run through his Rolodex of licks more than one would wish, and the aforementioned lack of sonic presence tends to dampen the impact of what might have been nice or better than nice to hear. It’s particularly frustrating to see Johnson dig in behind Dizzy on a swift “Blues Walk” and not be able to hear that much of what the drummer is doing. The 1970 segment, shot in Denmark in front of a good-sized studio audience, finds Gillespie backed by the vaunted Clarke-Boland Band. Sound quality here is very good, but initially the band is in surprisingly ragged form – probably because the first two pieces, Gillespie’s “Con Alma” (in a strident Lalo Schifrin arrangement) and “The Brother K” (dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.), are new to the band and have not been rehearsed enough, perhaps because there’s an odd vibe or two in the studio, as though the camera crew, the director, and Dizzy are not on the same page. Whatever, Gillespie himself is in top form – as with Monk’s hands on the keyboard, it’s enlightening to see the relationship between his unique bulging-cheeks, slow-release-of-air technique and the way that enables him to phrase – and “The Brother K” is a noble long-lined melody that he decorates with deep feeling and typical harmonic inventiveness. Eventually, on “Manteca,” the band pulls up its socks, perhaps because Dizzy is now galvanically conducting them, and from there to the end, “Things Are Here” (a re-titled version of “Things To Come”), we hear much intense communal music-making, with Dizzy to the fore. Not quite the experience it could have been, this DVD still ends up on the plus side.
Sticking with big bands, we come to a welcome surprise in the Jazz Icons series, “Quincy Jones, Live in ’60” (80 minutes), which preserves two concerts, one in Belgium, one in Switzerland, by the band that Jones formed to perform in the Harold Arlen musical “Free and Easy” and that he kept going in Europe for almost a year after the musical folded during its debut run in Paris. Much better represented here than on its few commercial recordings, this was a very hip, well-rehearsed ensemble with its own warm sound, somewhat reminiscent of the band that Oscar Pettiford led in the late 1950s. It was filled with fine players – Clark Terry, Benny Bailey, Phil Woods, Budd Johnson, Jerome Richardson, Jimmy Cleveland, Melba Liston, Julius Watkins et al. – and brimming with esprit de corps. Here, as on the Blakey/Jazz Messengers DVD, it’s a kick to see band members really digging each other’s solos; during the first concert, Terry, Woods, and Johnson are especially inspired. The second concert is slightly below that level, as though three months of further touring through Europe on a shoestring had worn everyone down a bit. Also, Johnson had returned to the U.S. in the interim, and one misses his take-no-prisoners solo presence. On balance, though, this set is a definite winner.
Esprit de corps also is a hallmark of “Buddy Rich Live in ’78,” recorded at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands (75 minutes and in color – except for the second half of the Chet Baker DVD, all the rest of the Jazz Icons series is in black and white). Rich dubbed this edition (1976-78) of his big band the Killer Force, and with good reason. Intensity and a considerable amount of nervous tension were among Rich’s key traits, both as a drummer and bandleader, and the mostly young players of the Killer Force look and sound as though they have bought into Buddy’s ethos completely. Even when Rich is doing some some relatively light, laid-back time-keeping, one feels as though the lid were about to blow off and that every member of the band knows this. On the other hand, even those who have little taste for Rich’s technically awesome solo displays (on parade here most notably in the long “Channel One Suite”) ought to pay attention to how musically (albeit fiercely) he can interact with a strong, rhythmically gutty soloist. Captured here in very good, nicely balanced sound (after electric bassist Tom Warrington adjusts his amp), such passages are among the highlights of this disc – especially Rich’s byplay with altoist Andy Fusco during the latter’s blistering ten-chorus solo on “Grand Concourse” (Fusco plays with the strength of an NFL lineman, which is what he once was), and Rich’s multiple similar encounters with stalwart tenormen Steve Marcus and Gary Pribeck. (By the way, this set’s liner notes, by former Killer Force trumpeter Dean Pratt, are full of interesting inside information about Rich the man and what it was like to be in his band.) To my mind, only two of the charts the band plays here, the late Herbie Phillips’ original composition “Little Train” and Mike Abene’s arrangment of Joe Zawinul’s “Birdland,” are interesting, coherent examples of big-band writing – but Rich’s music seems intended to be largely a matter of showpieces and thrills, and this DVD provides those things with genuine zest.
The liner notes for the Rich DVD mention his great admiration for the Basie band, but the contrast between Rich’s tense-intense music and what can be heard on “Count Basie Live in ’62” (56 minutes) could hardly be greater. Captured at a concert in Sweden in perhaps the best sound of any of the Jazz Icon series, this edition of the Basie band was an ensemble of gorgeously relaxed timbral warmth and unanimity, with each section perfectly in balance with the others. This is particularly evident on the opening number, Frank Foster’s “Easin’ It,” which features a series of short solo exchanges among the trombone section (Henry Coker, Quentin Jackson, and Benny Powell) and then the trumpets (Al Aarons, Thad Jones, Sonny Cohn, and Snooky Young). The mature, mellow, family circle intimacy of this is something to hear and, thanks to the DVD, behold. And the same could be said of the fine Basie sax section of that time, led by altoist Marshal Royal. Phrasing of that order may be a lost art. Up to a point in this DVD, everything proceeds quite handsomely – a tasty ballad feature for tenorman Eric Dixon (“You Are Too Beautiful”), “Corner Pocket” (with a brilliant Jones solo), a lovely, pure-toned reading of “Stella By Starlight” by Chicago-native Cohn, Foster’s “Back to the Apple,” and Quincy Jones’ slow-blues setting for Basie’s piano, “I Needs To Be Bee’d With.” But then it’s time for vocalist Irene Reid, who is in rather detached, blaring form on three tunes, though the band play wells behind her — after which we are treated to a ridiculously fast “Old Man River” (a showcase for flashy drummer Sonny Payne), a perfunctory “One O’Clock Jump” and out. Having had the table set the way this DVD does, one can’t help but feel a bit frustrated that things couldn’t have continued in that vein, but on balance one comes out well ahead.
A mixed impression also is left by “Chet Baker Live in ’64 & ’79” (71 minutes). The first part is an audience-less studio performance shot in Belgium with altoist-flutist Jacques Pelzer, pianist Rene Urtreger, bassist Luigi Trussardi, drummer Franco Nanzecchi, and Baker on flugelhorn. Pelzer, a pharmicist who owned his own drug store, was one of Baker’s close friends (fill in your own punch line) but not a very talented player; while Urtreger, who was a fine soloist, seems rather under wraps here, perhaps because the bass-drum team is tepid. But Baker is his unfailingly lyrical, logical self on every track and contributes a remarkable vocal on “Time After Time” – shaping the tune into one continous thought – after which he plays a solo in which suspended melodic ideas tread off eerily into darkness. After a brief interview with Baker comes the 1979 segment, shot at a concert in Norway. It finds Baker in vigorous form on trumpet, with vibraharpist Wolfgang Lackerschmid, pianist Michel Graillier, and bassist Jean Louis Rasinfosse. The problem here is that Lackerschmid’s stiff, clangy playing more or less dominates things, even when he isn’t soloing, and Baker understandably seems unhappy about this, though he does persevere. Rob Bowman’s liner notes claim that the second group’s final performance, a 15-minute version of “Love For Sale,” is the highlight of the DVD. I’ll take “Time After Time.”
Oddly enough, some might think, the Baker DVD leads logically to “Louis Armstrong Live in ’59” (55 minutes), shot at a concert in Belgium. In one sense this is just Armstrong’s standard show of the time, but it also may be, according to Bowman’s notes, “the only complete performance by Armstrong that exists on film,” which gives it obvious importance. Oh, yes – the Baker connection. Well, if you can listen through some of the perhaps familiar routines, and the noisy, plodding drumming of Danny Barcelona, and focus on Armstrong, one hears every time he picks up the trumpet an unfailing flow of logical, swinging melodic-rhythmic invention. Of course, the tone of Armstrong’s proud, bold musical voice differs from Baker’s introspective melancholy, but the clarity and commitment of thought, the drive to play on through in accord with the dictates of one’s inner ear – these things they have in common. Armstrong’s band here is Trummy Young, Peanuts Hucko, Billy Kyle, and Mort Herbert, with Velma Middleton on vocals. Everyone seems to be in a happy mood, and Armstrong is particularly brilliant on “Indiana” and works meaningful variations on “Basin Street Blues,” while his vocals, at least in my experience, seldom if ever fail. Check out, for one, the way he manages to fully inhabit the familiar “Mack the Knife.”
“Mack the Knife” also crops up on what for me is the disappointment of Jazz Icons series (though it does have its virtues), “Ella Fitzgerald Live in ’57 & ’63” (56 minutes). Fitzgerald, in my view, was not a gifted interpreter-dramatizer of the lyrics she sang until the late stages of her career; rather, her forte was crafting deeply swinging, at best subtly shaded variations on the melodic material at hand – as though she were the vocal equivalent of, say, Benny Carter. A certain centeredness – rhythmic, melodic, and emotional – was of the essence here, while her vaunted scat singing was more work than fun and not that inventive. Having laid my cards on the table, I can leave committed Fitzgerald fans to sort out the opinions that follow. The 1957 concert in Belgium, in front of an audience that fills the large hall and much of the stage, finds her backed by pianist Don Abney, Herb Ellis, her ex-husband Ray Brown, and Jo Jones. It’s an ideal rhythm section for Fitzgerald – she and Brown agree wholly on where “one” is, and Jones’ feather-light drumming is magical – but the story of “Love For Sale” is non-existent in her hands (better perhaps if she had handled it as an uptempo exercise in swinging virtuosity). “Tenderly,” a dramatically static song, fares much better and has a lovely coda, and “Just One of Those Things” finds a nice groove – Ella’s long-lined rhythmic “centeredness” is particularly evident here. But when the same tune crops up in Sweden in 1963, something seems to be awry, as is the case throughout this shot in the studio set (again in my view). Fitzgerald pushes hard on every tune, backed by Tommy Flanagan, Jim Hughart, and Gus Johnson, and increased effort brings diminishing returns. No Fitzgerald fan should be deterred; others may want to sample or think twice.
Run (do not walk) to your local Costco, which now has about 10 DVDs (video and audio) in a series called “Jazz Icons.” It includes videos of live performances by Count Basie, Art Blakey, Chet Baker, and several other “icons.” I bought the Count Basie item, which is one hour taped at a concert in Sweden in 1962. I don’t think it was ever released in audio only. The Basie Band was then at the absolute peak of its “Atomic” powers and this DVD is ample evidencethat the Basie Band was the best ever.