Have I mentioned that Dave Frishberg has a web site? He has. I am putting a link to it high on the Other Places list in the center column. The site has a discography, lots of photographs and a catalog of the songs he’s written, from “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue” (1963) to “Who Do You Think You Are, Jack Dempsey?” (2004). It also has a Written Word section that includes a page called Colleagues And Characters, who include the unlikely–George Maharis, Scatman Crouthers, Malcolm X, Ava Gardner–and the likely, Carmen McRae, Benny Goodman, Kenny Davern, Ben Webster.

Ben was very emotional and his feelings were close to the surface. I knew that Ben was famous for unpredictable outbursts of anger and violence, but I never saw him pull any of those stunts,
perhaps because he was trying to abstain from hard liquor at that time. He did drink beer–Rheingold. When he drank he was quick to weep. He would ask Richard (Davis) to play solos with the bow, and then he would stand listening with tears rolling down his cheeks. He would get tearful when he spoke of his mother. Once he told me that he missed Jimmy Rowles, who was back in California, and as he told me about his friendship with Rowles he began to cry. One night at the Half Note we heard radio reports of rioting in Harlem, and Ben wept openly as he listened.

To reach Colleagues and Characters, click here, but take my advice: if you have an appointment soon or were thinking of getting some Z’s, wait a while. Frishberg is hard to put down.

After he saw the Al and Zoot post (two exhibits down the page), the fine singer Bob Stewart suggested that we watch another video of Al Cohn performing with him. It captures a moment of spontaneity that creates a surprise and a big smile from Cohn. The rhythm section is Hank Jones, George Mraz and Ronnie Bedford. To see the clip, click here.

From the same engagement, Stewart sings “Caravan,” which contains a typical Al Cohn solo: perfect.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.

–Billie Holiday, born on this date in 1915, died July 17, 1959

Paul Desmond was fond of saying that an evening listening to Zoot Sims and Al Cohn at the old Half Note in downtown Manhattan was “like going to get your back scratched.” There is a piece of video that helps explain what he meant. It’s not from the Half Note, but from a 1968 British television program called In The Cool Of The Evening. They play Burt Bacharach’s “What The World Needs Now,” then a short version of Cohn’s “Doodleoodle.” The rhythm section is Stan Tracey, piano; Dave Green, bass; Phil Seamen, drums. To watch Al, Zoot and their British friends, click here.

There is lots of Sims on video but, evidently, very little of Cohn. An exception contributed by the singer Bob Stewart is his performance of “Laura” with Cohn sitting in. An anonymous YouTube commentator felt moved to remark on a rarity, Cohn making a mistake–but instantly recovering.

I actually enjoyed that clam at 2:04 where he plays the I-II-major III then quickly goes back and plays the I-II-minor III that fit in the chord.

To see and hear “Laura,” click here.

The late pianist Lou Levy liked to tell of the time Stan Getz came off a solo with which he was particularly pleased, turned to Levy and said, “Who’s your favorite tenor player now?”

“Al Cohn,” Levy said. “Isn’t he yours?”

And he was. Levy told me that when he visited Getz in his friend’s final days, he usually found him listening to Cohn’s recordings.

If you are too young or too old to be a part of the Muppets generation, you may have missed Zoot’s alter-ego. Here’s your chance to catch up.

Have a good weekend.

Allen Ganley, who died last week at the age of seventy-seven, was the preferred drummer not only of many of his fellow British musicians, but also of visiting Americans. He backed Stan Getz, Peggy Lee, Mary Lou Williams, Jim Hall, Art Farmer, Blossom Dearie, Roland Kirk and Freddie Hubbard, among many others.

For years, Ganley was in the quintet and big band led by the volatile tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes. There is in this video clip from 1965 a prime instance of Ganley driving a band and soloing. The piece is “Killers of W1”. (W1 is London’s West End). The trumpeter is Jimmy Deuchar. In the same YouTube neighborhood you’ll find several other clips of Ganley with Hayes. He is also prominent on the Hayes CD Tubbs.

For a review of Ganley’s career, see his obituary from the Telegraph newspaper. The three men in the obit photograph are (l to r) Ganley, Victor Feldman and Ronnie Scott.

Gene Puerling, the leader and primary arranger for the Hi-Los, died March 25 in the San Francisco Bay area, where he had lived for decades. In his writing for the group, Puerling crafted complex arrangement that took them beyond anything previously heard from vocal quartets in American popular music.

He formed the Hi-Lo’s in 1953. Their source material came from the classic era of great American song writing, their harmonic inspiration from the riches of bebop, the perfection of their musicianship from studying Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford and vocal groups like the Modernaires and Mel Torme’s
Mel-Tones. In the shadow of rock’s burgeoning popularity, the group never hit the tops of the charts despite respectable sales for some of their best efforts, including the remarkable 1958 album The Hi-Lo’s And All That Jazz, a masterpiece that is rapidly disappearing. Many of their other albums are still available on CD. Here’s a paragraph about the Hi-Lo’s from Puerling’s obituary in The Los Angeles Times:

Their rich sound sprang from Puerling arrangements that could make other performers swoon. Jazz pianist and TV host Steve Allen is said to have called the Hi-Lo’s “the best vocal group of all time.” Singer Bing Crosby reportedly said: “These guys are so good they can whisper in harmony.”

To read the Times obituary, go here.

Jon Hendricks, whose Lambert, Hendricks and Ross vocal group drew inspiration from the Hi-Los, is quoted in an article by Jesse Hamlin in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

“Gene broadened the harmonies, like Bird did with bebop,” said Hendricks, comparing Mr. Puerling to pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker. “The sound of the Hi-Lo’s was choral, even though there were only four of them. The way the chords were spread out, they sounded like a choir.”

To read all of Hamlin’s piece, go here.

After the Hi-Lo’s disbanded in 1964, Puerling founded The Singers Unlimited, arranged for groups including The Manhattan Transfer, and conducted vocal workshops. The Hi-Lo’s reunited in 1970 for a performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

The charms and opportunities in bands of six to eleven pieces attracted jazz composers and arrangers eight decades ago, as they do to this day. For an overview and links to recordings of early mid-sized groups, go to the first installment of Medium But Well Done.

Separated by the width of the United States, in the second half of the 1940s two medium-sized bands working with different inspirations and source materials arrived at strikingly similar results. In New York, Miles Davis became the leader of a nine-piece band with arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis. In 1948, it wasn’t called anything. Now, it’s known as the Birth Of The Cool.

Davis and his confreres were interested in encapsulating the harmonic palette of the Claude Thornhill Orchestra for which Evans had created memorable arrangements. They wanted the freshness and improvisatory feel of Evans masterpieces for Thornhill like “Anthropology” and “Donna Lee.” They were after more tonal subtlety and a less intense rhythmic approach than that of bebop, then in its heyday. In a typical bop performance, there was a group melodic statement, a succession of solos, and a repeat of the melody. In pieces by the Davis nonet, written and improvised sections of the music flowed together more or less seamlessly, without strain, in the vibratoless image of the Thornhill band. How well it succeeded in pieces like “Move,” “Moon Dreams” and “Budo” is reflected in the enormous influence of the Birth Of The Cool band in the ensuing six decades.

In northern California, Dave Brubeck and a few other chosen young men were studying at Mills College with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud. As early as 1946, Brubeck, Dave Van Kriedt and Jack Weeks began working out solutions to problems raised in their studies in an ensemble they called, simply, The Eight. Later, it became the Dave Brubeck Octet.

Milhaud approved their efforts.

“He liked our music,” Brubeck told me. “He loved Kriedt’s “Fugue on Bop Themes. ” He said it was a wonderful example of a real fugue, written in a jazz style. He was as strict as could be about counterpoint. You had to follow his rules, which were Bach’s rules. Kriedt just had a natural gift for writing fugues. How else could this young jazz player absorb that so fast and translate it into the jazz idiom? It’s a classic piece.” Here is more from the essay I wrote in 1992 for the retrospective Brubeck CD box Time Signatures.

There are interesting parallels between the Brubeck and Davis bands. Both were experimental, although in pieces like “Schizophrenic Scherzo” and “Rondo” the Brubeck Octet demonstrated more audacity with its polytonality and polyrhythms. Both bands were ahead of their time. Both had three paying jobs. On records made in the same year, 1949, both sound fresh and undated more than forty years later, still models for inventive uses of textures, counterpoint, moving harmonies and time signatures. (This remains true fifty-nine years later.) “Curtain Music” is in 6. Schizophrenic Scherzo and the bridge of “What Is This Thing Called Love” were in 7. Brubeck’s adventures in time began long before “Blue Rondo a la Turk” and “Take Five.”

There are similarities in phrasings of melody lines and in voicings, right down to the ways in which the alto leads of Paul Desmond and Lee Konitz were employed in the two bands. Classical influences and currents of musical thought in post-war jazz were informing composers and arrangers working 3000 miles apart. Gerry Mulligan, with Evans and John Lewis a key arranger for the Davis band, went on to form his own quartet, which became, like Brubeck’s, one of the most successful of the 1950s.

In 1954, Mulligan formed a tentet modeled on the Birth Of The Cool Band and, later, put together his thirteen-piece Concert Jazz Band. The CJB, because of its size, was technically a big band, but in philosophy, spirit and execution it hewed to the principles he, Evans and Lewis developed with Davis in the late forties.

The gloriously testicular Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons led a succession of sextets more concerned with the basic emotions than with the refinements that occupied Davis and Brubeck. The arrangements were designed not to explore the possibilities of harmony or texture but to set off Ammons’s heartfelt solos. They do that most effectively in “Pennies From Heaven,” a witty pastiche of Christmas songs, the chugging “Jug Head Ramble” and a reduction of Ammons’s “More Moon” feature from his days with Woody Herman. Those pieces and more from 1948 and ’49 are in the fine reissue CD called Young Jug.

One arranger and leader whose work shows profound effects of the Birth Of The Cool recordings was an Ammons colleague from the Herman band, Shorty Rogers. At twenty-six, the trumpeter and arranger was also a veteran of the Red Norvo, and Stan Kenton bands. He took a nine-piece group into Capitol’s Hollywood studio in 1951. The six pieces they recorded featured Art Pepper, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Milt Bernhart Hampton Hawes and

Rogers’s writing full of zest and just enough complexity to be intriguing. “Popo,” “Didi,” “Four Mothers” and perhaps especially “Over The Rainbow” with its moving alto sax solo by Pepper get a large part of the credit–or blame–for establishing west coast jazz as a category, not just a geographic descriptor. It quickly became West Coast Jazz, typecasting that was good for commerce but stereotyped its musicians and has dogged them ever since.

This CD includes those initial Rogers nonet tracks, along with the Mulligan Tentette pieces. This one, with the same musicians, has eight tracks recorded by Rogers and his Giants for Victor in 1953. Among them are the remarkable intertwining lines and swooping backgrounds of “Indian Club,” “Diablo’s Dance” with its great piano work by Hawes, and the amusing “Mambo del Crow,” an early example of Rogers’s effective use of Latin elements.

We haven’t reached the mid-fifties, and there’s much more to report in this survey of medium-sized bands. Next time–maybe even tomorrow–more from California with Don Faguerquist, Lennie Niehaus, Clifford Brown and Chet Baker. In the offing: Tadd Dameron, Al Cohn, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Kirchner, Anthony Wilson, Bill Holman and Charles Mingus, among others.

Among the hundreds, possibly thousands, of spoofs appearing on the internet today is one in a column by Jack Bowers on the All About Jazz site.

Using words such as “unprecedented,” “mind-boggling,” “preposterous” and “what the s–t is going on here,” the editors of BummedOut magazine, the country’s leading Jazz periodical since the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded “Livery Stable Blues,” expressed their utter shock and disbelief this week when ballots submitted in the magazine’s umpteenth Annual Critics’ Poll listed not a single American-born musician among the winners or also-rans. What made the unparalleled result even more implausible is the fact that 98.6 percent of BummedOut‘s critics and reviewers live either in or around New York City and had never before voted for any musician west of the Ohio River.

Bowers nicely carries off the April Foolish conceit of the piece, which beneath its playfulness conceals a truth about the global maturity of jazz. The “poll” amounts to an interesting list of thoroughly accomplished musicians–and there’s not an American on it. To read the whole thing, click here.

Rifftides reader Jay Thomas, a star of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, alerts us to a broadcast of the SRJO’s concert of Benny Carter’s Kansas City Suite.

If you missed our Kansas City Suite concerts on March 15-16, the entire 10-movement suite will be re-broadcast over KPLU FM 88.5 on Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest show this coming Sunday, April 6 at 1:00 PM PDT.

You can also hear the broadcast online at KPLU.org from anywhere in the world. This was a very popular concert, so we hope you can tune in.

Kansas City Suite is one of Carter’s middle period masterpieces. Count Basie recorded it for Roulette in 1960 with his “new testament” band that included Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Marshall Royal, Benny Powell, Al Grey and the great latterday Basie rhythm section. Capitol reissued it as a compact disc in 1990, but the LP and the CD fell out of circulation long ago. An internet search discloses that the Basie version is available only as a used LP or an MP3 download. So Jim Wilke’s KPLU broadcast of the SRJO may be the only chance for many people to hear an important Carter work.

At the Berlin Jazz Fest in 1989, Carter and the WDR Big Band played the opening movement of the suite, with John Clayton conducting. To see and hear video of that performance, click here. Notice Clayton looking boyish and Carter, who was eighty-two, only slightly older. The WDR-ites should have eliminated any shred of doubt that Europeans can swing.

In all honesty, I think I just played what I felt was right for me. And I think I would have done the same thing, even if I’d been born later, when Charlie Parker was influencing everybody. The truth is, I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

At my age, I realize that my most precious possession is time, and I’ve got too much unfinished work to do to spend even a minute talking about myself.

      –Benny Carter, 1907-2003

Four times a year, Mr. JazzWax, Marc Myers, posts ten select items from his blogs of the previous quarter. This time, two of the ten are excerpts from the discussion he and I had about Paul Desmond. To see the winners in the JazzWax sweepstakes, click here.

It was a lucky break that The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Dan DeLuca did a column about a new CD in tribute to the pioneering guitarist Lonnie Johnson. Here is some of the piece:

“I honestly do not think there was anyone else who crossed the line between being an idiomatic blues musician who was able to master the vocabulary of jazz like Lonnie Johnson did,” says Aaron Luis Levinson, the Grammy-winning Philadelphia producer who helmed Rediscovering Lonnie Johnson (Range Records). “He was a unique figure in that he was able to live in two different worlds. Here’s a guy who was playing rural blues music in the 1920s, who also played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.”

….But that’s getting ahead of our story. Before Johnson could be rediscovered in time for the 1960s blues revival, he had been famous – and forgotten – more than once in a career that, as Levinson puts it, qualifies him as a sort of “musical Zelig.”

To read all of DeLuca’s column about Johnson’s several comebacks and rediscoveries, go here.

Why did I call finding the column a lucky break? Because it is a reason to give you links to complete performances by Johnson, beginning with “Hotter Than That”, from 1927. In Johnson’s exchanges with Louis Armstrong’s horn and voice, you’ll hear some of the first single-string guitar improvisation in recorded jazz.

Johnson made several records with Eddie Lang, another guitar hero; a black man and a white man blazing trails in music and in interracial recording. Listen to them play “Deep Rhythm Minor Stomp.” This is 1929. 

For a third sample of Johson’s riveting acoustic guitar playing, this time with one of the blues vocals that made him a hit with the record-buying public, click here and listen to “Cat You Been Messin’ Around” from 1932. His guitar solos are as gripping as the song’s story.  You can hear more of Lonnie Johnson’s recordings if you visit his page at the Red Hot Jazz Archive. You will find several CD collections of his recordings at this site.

There was linear jazz improvisation on the guitar before Charlie Christian, and Johnson was its early master.

Rifftides reader Debra Kinzler writes:

I would like to let you know about a concert to take place at New York’s Manhattan School of Music. On April 1 Bobby Sanabria, the MSM Afro-Cuban Jazz orchestra and Candido Camero will be giving the first-ever live performance of Machito & The Afro-Cubans Kenya. Bobby has recreated this historic recording that was made fifty years ago in New York City.

For an interesting account of the history of Kenya and Sanabria’s preparation for the concert, see Marc Myers’ JazzWax. For details about the free concert, go to the Manhattan School web site.

Sam McManis, The Sacramento Bee‘s arts blogger, recently posted an item about an interview with violinist Regina Carter. His piece is a tip of the hat to public radio producer Paul Conley, who frequently does stories about jazz musicians. To read a lovely story about Carter’s reaction to winning a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and for a link to audio of Conley’s interview, go here.

Patti Bown died last Friday in a Pennsylvania nursing home, little known not only to the general public but also to many jazz listeners. Despite her talent as a pianist, Miss Bown never became celebrated to the degree that she might have. That was for reasons at least partly to do with her uncompromising individualism.
Good breaks, good management and good advice–if she had been willing to take it–could have made a difference. There is strong evidence of her talent on recordings she made as a member of the remarkable Quincy Jones big band and with Gene Ammons, Jimmy Rushing, Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington and Oliver Nelson, among others.

In Patti’s obituary in Monday’s Seattle Times, Paul de Barros described her as “idiosyncratic, outspoken, versatile.” He might have added brilliant, well-read and argumentative. I knew her for a time in Seattle before she moved to New York. One night we were at a small party in honor of Dave Brubeck following a concert by his quartet. It was shortly after Brubeck was the subject of a TIME magazine cover story and was becoming famous. Brubeck, Patti and I sat talking at length about the part of the article that dealt with his forthright attitude on racial matters as expressed in a verse sung years later by Louis Armstrong in Brubeck’s musical The Real Ambassadors.

‘They say I look like God,

Could God be black my God!

If both are made in the image of thee,

Could thou perchance a zebra be?’

How I wish that I had a recording of that conversation, which I remember only as alternating between intensity and laughter.

Patti was a vital and unfailingly interesting part of a Seattle jazz community that also included trumpeter Floyd Standifer and bassist Buddy Catlett. They were all childhood friends of Jones. When he formed the big band he took to Europe in 1959, they were in it, along with others including Phil Woods, Quentin Jackson, Budd Johnson, Melba Liston, Clark Terry and Joe Harris–a cross-section of veterans and emerging stars. Patti is in the rhythm section of that remarkable band on the Quincy Jones DVD in the Jazz Icons series.

Recently, from Holland emerged video clips of a small unit from the Jones band in which Patti was the pianist. The others are Woods, Jackson, Harris (misidentified on the videos as Joe Morris), Catlett and Sahib Shihab. Each of the musicians solos on all three tunes. Patti’s chorus on “Straight No Chaser” comes closest to what I remember of the daring, even quirky, aspects of her improvisational style, but she is also eloquent on “Undecided” and “Ornithology.” No one takes more than one solo chorus in these clips that run in the neighborhood of three minutes apiece. It is striking how expressive the players are in the forced economy of the time limit. In the post-Coltrane era, that kind of self-editing is all but a lost art.

You may also hear Patti Bown on these CDs:

Quincy Jones: Pure Delight

Oliver Nelson: Afro/American Sketches

Oliver Nelson Verve Jazz Masters (on four tracks)

Gene Ammons: Late Hour Special

Patti Bown, whom I wish I had known longer and better; gone at seventy-six.

The virtuoso percussionist Paoli Mejias and his quintet erupted Saturday night in the sedate surroundings of The Seasons. No one was hurt in the explosion; quite the opposite, we all left feeling better. Most of the repertoire was from Mejias’s CD Transcend, which features Latin stars Miguel Zenón, Luis Perdomo, Hans Glawinschnig and Antonio Sánchez. The sidemen in Mejias’ road band are less well known outside the hard-core Latin jazz community, but the authority of their work in the pre-Easter concert indicates that their relative obscurity cannot last.

On congas, timbales, bongos and the West African drum called djembe, Mejias was a whirlwind of speed, intensity, tonal subtlety and rhythmic precision. His bongos-piano duet with Yan Carlos Artime on “Hello Nany” exhibited even more concentrated power than on the version in this video, captured at the Heineken Festival in Puerto Rico. With technique and control reflecting years of classical training in his native Cuba, Artime generated excitement throughout the concert. Alto saxophonist Richard Pons matched it, drawing on Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, Ornette Coleman and touches of Bud Shank’s Brazilliance wrapped into a style incorporating lyricism, freedom and structural logic.

Bass guitarist Gabriel Rodriguez and drummer Efraín Martinez provided nonstop energy in the rhythm section and in solo. Martinez’s collaboration with Mejias when the leader moved to timbales was a high point of the evening’s excitement (and volume) and an object lesson of how in the right four hands, drum set and timbales can equal more than the sum of their parts. Here is video of Martinez sharing a solo with Mejias playing the djembe. In the clip, you see the same group that played The Seasons on Saturday night. This disciplined, strenuously rehearsed band of fiery young Puerto Ricans can raise your blood temperature.

ROD LEVITT, in Solid Ground (RCA Victor), toots his trombone at the head of a lively seven-man band in a parade of his own compositions…The band irreverently slices “Rio Rita” into a jazzy jigsaw puzzle.–TIME, June 3, 1966

I liked his playing and his writing, and always appreciated his sunny disposition.–Bill Crow, 2007

Rifftides reader Charles Landy wrote:

 Enjoy your blog immensely. Bought 3 Rod Levitt LPs on e-bay recently and found them (especially Insight) just as rewarding as you suggested. Have some Billy Byers and some other perhaps (to many jazz fans of recent vintage) lesser known musicians like Pete Rugolo, Tom Talbert, Ralph Burns, Marty Paich, Frank Capp, Nat Pierce, Carl Fontana, Jimmy Gourley, Don Fagerquist and Bob Florence. But would appreciate it if you could devote a blog day or small series to recommending other somewhat obscure but highly enjoyable artists and arrangers like Levitt.

Much of what makes Levitt interesting, of course, is that there is no one like him. Mr. Landy’s list covers arrangers, leaders and soloists, but I take it that “like Levitt” means he is asking about medium-sized groups. Six to eleven pieces allow arrangers freedom that the conventions and sheer size of sixteen-piece bands tend to limit. Medium-sized groups have been important since the beginnings of jazz. For Charles Landy and anyone else interested, I’ll mention a few recordings from various eras and styles, with brief comments, and links to recordings where possible.

“Go ‘Long, Mule” is a logical place to start in a survey of medium-sized groups, an investigation that could lead into dozens of interesting nooks and crannies. Fletcher Henderson organized the prototype of the big bands of the swing era. He eventually had fourteen pieces, but his first recording in the fall of 1923 was with six.
Eight months passed before he expanded to ten men. They included the young avant garde players Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman and Louis Armstrong. All of them and trombonist Charlie Green solo on Redman’s arrangement of “Go ‘Long, Mule” from October, 1924. To hear it, click here. Remastering is far from perfect in the three-CD box set A Study In Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story, but it’s the most Henderson available under one roof.

Red Norvo’s all-star nonet date of 1935 established no arranging landmarks, but it brought together a remarkable collection of players–Norvo, Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Chu Berry, Jack Jenney, Teddy Wilson, George Van Eps, Artie Bernstein and Gene Krupa. Among the four pieces from the session is the remarkable “Blues in E-flat” with its masterpiece Norvo xylophone solo and very good choruses from Wilson and Berigan. The Norvo tracks are included in this CD.

In his series of combo recordings for RCA Victor in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Lionel
Hampton never had fewer than six pieces. He frequently had ten or eleven, and the players were the finest he could attract. Harry James, Dave Matthews, Babe Russin, Jess Stacy and Ziggy Elman–Hampton’s white colleagues from the Benny Goodman band–were likely to team up in the studio with Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Herschel Evans, John Kirby and Billy Kyle.
 Hampton’s goal was to produce the best music possible, and he succeeded in dozens of superior examples of small band swing. In the process, like Goodman and Norvo, he pioneered in bringing black and white musicians together. All of the Hampton Victor sessions are in an indispensable new Mosaic box set.

On a scale of orderliness, recordings by Hampton’s medium-sized groups were a degree or two above jam sessions. Duke Ellington’s were another matter. They were almost always led in name by members of his orchestra but, with few exceptions, Ellington did the “writing,” even if it was last-minute studio inventions for the ensembles.
Whether the putative leader was Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Cootie Williams or Rex Stewart, the small group sessions had Ellington’s creative earmarks; plenty of opportunities for the soloists in arrangements notable for Ellington’s genius at tonal organization, even in impromptu situations. A pair of two-CD boxes called The Duke’s Men contains ninety-eight recordings made from 1934 to 1939 by medium-sized Ellington units. Some of them were lightweight, aimed at the pop market, but none is less than enjoyable, and they include classics like “Clouds In My Heart,” “The Jeep Is Jumpin’,” “Dooji Wooji” and “Stompy Jones.”

The first nine tracks on Johnny Hodges: Passion Flower are by a seven-piece Ellington group from 1940 and ’41. They are essential to any reasonably serious jazz collection. The players are
Hodges, Ellington Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Jimmy Blanton and Sonny Greer. The pieces are triumphs of small-group Ellingtonia: “Day Dream,” “Good Queen Bess,” “That’s The Blues Old Man,” Junior Hop,” Squatty Roo,” “Passion Flower,” “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” and “Going Out The Back Way.” I can sing along with every note of “Going Out The Back Way.” It was the theme of my first radio program, Teen Talent Time, when I was seventeen. The engineer called it Teen Torture Time. But the theme song was terrific.

In 1946, Woody Herman and his Woodchoppers recorded nine tracks that are glories of the medium-sized oeuvre (I’ve always wanted to use that word). The
Woodchoppers were a ten-piece unit from Herman’s First Herd: Herman, clarinet and alto sax; Sonny Berman and Shorty Rogers, trumpet; Bill Harris, trombone; Flip Phillips, tenor sax; Red Norvo, vibes; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Billy Bauer, guitar; Chubby Jackson, bass; Don Lamond,drums; arrangements by Ralph Burns, Rogers and Bauer. Because of the popularity of Herman’s band, the horn soloists and Norvo were among the most famous in jazz. Their solos are at a high level on the Woodchoppers tracks, the swing and spirit of the band irresistible, the arrangements ingenious, the execution full of harmonic and rhythmic daring. Rowles solos little, but his profoundly individual approach to accompaniment is vital to the success of these recordings.

“Igor,” “Fan It” and “Lost Weekend” are on a two-disc First Herd set called Blowin’ Up A Storm,” but the only CD collection I can find that has all of the studio Woodchoppers tracks is Mosaic’s The Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945-1947). The other pieces are “Steps,” “Four Men On A Horse,” “Nero’s Conception,” “Pam,” “I Surrender Dear” and “Someday Sweetheart.” The Mosaic box includes alternate takes that allow the listener to hear how the pieces developed as the musicians achieved artistic and sonic balance. This is exquisite music. 

In the next installment, we’ll enter the bebop era and, possibly, get through the 1950s.