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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

The Art Of Art Farmer

October 27, 2009 by Doug Ramsey

Reviewing the Art Farmer Jazz Icons DVD the other day stimulated thoughts of his unique place in the pantheon of major jazz soloists. I started to write them, then realized that I already had. Here is an excerpt from the Farmer chapter of my book Jazz Matters.

Even on some of Farmer’s first recordings in the early 1950s it was clear that he was a first-rank soloist in the making. By 1956 Farmer’s work showed a combination of incisiveness and lyricism that added elegance and style to the bands of leaders as disparate as George Russell, Gerry Mulligan and Horace Silver. Such versatility has long been a matter of inconvenience for writers who need categories like “hard bop” or “cool.”
Shortly thereafter, Farmer became one of the few contemporaries of John Coltrane who absorbed, understood, and had the technical and artistic gifts to put to personal use the Coltrane innovations of the “Giant Steps” period of the early 1960s. He is virtually the only trumpeter who did so. Many players were swamped by the Coltrane influence. Farmer integrated it into his style and his lyrical range grew because of it.
At about the same time he took up the flugelhorn, that lovely and demanding instrument. When he added the new horn, and eventually set the trumpet aside, the Art Farmer.jpglovely muted work he had done on trumpet was lost. But the change of instruments accented what critic Richard B. Hadlock called Farmer’s “soft edge,” the quality that allowed listeners to accept his masterfully played but audacious ideas, passages they would reject as too far out if performed by most other players. He had found the voice that would carry all the impact of his remarkable invention and plumb all the depths of his feeling. And, happily, in a recent collaboration with Jim Hall, Farmer’s Harmon mute materialized again after more than fifteen years.
Farmer is a great melodist. He loves and observes the melodies of the songs he plays. They are often surpassed by the melodies he creates. I have rarely heard a Farmer solo sound like the product of reflect processes. In times of flagging inspiration, or in uncongenial circumstances, even the most inventive players fall back on a sort of universal phrase book. But in a recent jazz festival jam session (hardly his preferred context), the clarity and beauty of Farmer’s solos remained in memory long after the dissipation of scene-stealing clichés generated by most of the other players. That is artistry.

The chapter from which that came expands on program notes I wrote for a Farmer concert in the Jazz at the Smithsonian series in the early 1980s. Trolling the internet the other day, to my surprise I came upon several pieces of video from that concert. Three of them follow. In the first, he uses a trombone mute that he had a technician alter for use with his flugelhorn. His band has young Fred Hersch on piano, Dennis Irwin on bass and Billy Hart on drums.

“Cherokee Sketches” is faster than fast, with ample evidence of Farmer’s absorption of Coltrane harmonic principles into the flugelhornist’s bebop foundation. Watch and listen to Hart during Farmer’s solo for a living demonstration of what is meant by the term “listening drummer.”

Finally, here’s Art in brief conversation with the Voice of America’s Willis Conover, then playing a classic Duke Pearson ballad. The video is cut before Hersch or Irwin solos, but I’m not sure what they or anyone could have effectively added following Farmer’s chorus.

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Comments

  1. Duncan Hines says

    October 27, 2009 at 8:42 pm

    Thank you for this fine appreciation of Art Farmer. It is especially rewarding to see him credited for continually growing and innovating over what was also a long and successful career. Holding his own alongside the likes of Clifford Brown and Edgard Varese, he has, as you note, a “unique place in the pantheon of major jazz soloists.”

  2. Matt Pace says

    November 2, 2009 at 1:26 pm

    This is a very informative blog. Art Farmer is one of the all-time greats. His solos are so original and melodic. I think all jazz players and musicians should listen to him if they haven’t.

  3. Ian Carey says

    November 2, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    In my opinion he will always be The Man for melodic trumpet & flugel playing. It was a stroke of good luck for me that I stumbled on a $2 LP of “Live at the Half Note” when I was in high school–at a time when I was into bombastic, hit-you-over-the-head playing, he pointed me to a totally different way. Fortunately he recorded so much that I’m still finding records of his that are new to me, and they rarely disappoint.

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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