Friend Dave Cohler sent me a few puns recently and reminded me of one I sent him long before it became a part of my Paul Desmond biography. Desmond and Jim Hall (pictured) concocted what I described in the book as the most elaborate pun I’ve ever encountered. He loved to recite it:

A boy of Italian descent named Carbaggio is born in Germany. With his swarthy looks and dark curly hair, he grows up feeling a bit of a misfit among the blond Teutons. He tries to compensate by being more German than the Germans, but he’s only boring, and is not accepted. When he’s a young man, he escapes to Paris. Shortly after he arrives there, he visits a gift shop and is caught stealing a brass miniature of the Eiffel Tower. The police arrest him and give him the choice of going to jail or immediately leaving the country. He chooses freedom and buys passage on the first ship outbound from Marseilles. It takes him to New York. Thinking he’d like a career as a broadcaster, he goes the RCA Building and walks into the office of General David Sarnoff. Sarnoff says there are no air positions open, but he offers the boy a job as a strikebreaker. Carbaggio takes it. When the strike is over, he finds himself on a union blacklist. He moves out to Long Island and gets a job at the sonar equipment company owned by a man named Harris. He studies English, and after several years has improved to the point where he gets a job as a disc jockey on a radio station, doing a program called Rock Time.

He has realized his dream. He’s a routine Teuton Eiffel-lootin’ Sarnoff goon from Harris Sonar, Rock-Time Carbaggio.

Culturally deprived Rifftides readers mystified by the payoff line should click here and let Jo Stafford bring them up to date.

Here’s another Desmond-Hall collaboration, with Gene Cherico, bass, and Connie Kay, drums. 1963.

All my musical foundations go back to the age of 3. My family tell me that I used to listen to the old crystal set, then go to the piano and pick out the tune that I just heard.

I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it, but not of collecting the royalties.

You know, when you’ve established a certain thing, what can you do? You’re stuck with it.

Not yet.

Shortly after Pete Rugolo died this week, Jeff Sultanof offered to contribute a piece putting Rugolo’s work in perspective. I was delighted to accept and flattered that he considered Rifftides the proper place for his essay.

Jeff is a native of New York City, where he lives and works. He is a composer, orchestrator, editor, educator and researcher greatly admired in the community of professional musicians, critics and academics. He has analyzed, studied, edited and taught the music of Gerald Wilson, Robert Farnon, Harry Warren and Miles Davis, among others. The Rifftides staff is honored to present Mr. Sultanof’s thoughts about the importance of Pete Rugolo.

The career of Pete Rugolo as a film and television composer has been covered elsewhere in great detail. As good as his work in that world was, Rugolo’s importance is far greater elsewhere. And that is what I wish to celebrate here.

The musical medium delivering popular music in the twenties through the mid-40s has been called a lot of things in retrospect– an orchestra, a big band, a jazz ensemble and a stage band. Back in that period, its primary function was providing music for dancing. Songs made their way to bandleaders and were assigned to writers who loved arranging the good ones and tried to do something at least interesting with the duds. Singers interpreted the lyrics, and the groups made records to promote the songs and the bands.

It was Paul Whiteman who liberated the ensemble to play concert music, later followed by Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw. But such ensembles and the opportunities to play such music were few. Agents wanted their clients to make money, and the way to do that was feature a unique sound and come up with a hit record so that you could break into the big time and make some real money at ballrooms, hotels and movie theatres.

Things changed after World War Two and the time was right for a new ensemble that could concertize as well as play for dancing. Luckily, an excellent musician named Stan Kenton was not only a good arranger and bandleader, but also an excellent salesman. Stanley liked the music of a soldier he’d met sometime in 1944. When the soldier got out of the army, Pete Rugolo had a job. He would become one of the world’s great composers, helping to change the world of the big band and showing composers around the world that the resources of saxes, brass and rhythm had barely been explored. He certainly wasn’t the only one to do this at the time (one thinks of George Handy, Gerald Wilson, Johnny Richards, Paul Villepigue and Ralph Burns, who were also expanding the vocabulary of the dance band), but thanks to the success of the Kenton orchestra, he was able to explore, experiment and have his music recorded and heard by millions. No less than Leonard Bernstein was an admirer and fan of Rugolo’s music, and said so publicly; Rugolo would discover that many composers of concert music knew his work and were influenced by it. Some of his pieces were published in score format at a time when this simply was not done. For a couple of bucks, you could buy the score of a Rugolo composition to study. Even though he would achieve great success as a composer for television and film, it is the music he wrote during 1945 through 1948 which may be the most lasting and innovative.

After earning a B.A in music, Rugolo became one of the first male students at Mills College because he wanted to study with the eminent French composer, Darius Milhaud (pictured), who later taught Dave Brubeck. When he joined Kenton, Stanley gave Rugolo pop tunes to arrange. Later, he let Pete write what he wanted. Many band members hated his writing because it didn’t swing, but Kenton couldn’t have cared less. It was new, interesting, often highly dissonant and uncompromising, and it created for the band a commercial niche called “Progressive Jazz.” Even though Kenton had had his fill of dance dates, playing such music he was able to sell out major concert halls. Rugolo was one of the first composers for big band to write in meters other than 2, 3 or 4 (his “Elegy for Alto” is in 5/4 time). Desiring different tone colors and combinations, he wrote sections of pieces with brass in different mutes (five trumpets would be divided into one open, two in straight mutes, two in cup mutes). For many listeners, the musical vocabularies of Bartok, Stravinsky and Berg were first experienced with Kenton’s orchestra, and yet the stamp was uniquely Rugolo.

When Kenton disbanded, Rugolo moved to New York and became a staff arranger/producer for Capitol Records. He was responsible for signing and producing recordings of such artists as the Dave Lambert Singers, the Miles Davis Nonet (the famous “Birth of the Cool” recordings), Tadd Dameron, and Bill Harris. He arranged for Harry Belafonte, Nat Cole, Mel Torme and June Christy; he later wrote many wonderful albums for Christy during the fifties. He moved back to California to work at MGM Studios, often uncredited.

In 1954, he was signed to Columbia Records to record his own orchestra, but because of harassment by Mitch Miller, his tenure there was unpleasant even though the music was excellent. In 1956, he signed with Mercury Records and made a series of albums with all-star studio ensembles that are still fresh, exciting and beautifully recorded at the Capitol Tower. Happily, most of them have been reissued on CD and are available, but it wasn’t easy to get these recordings for many years. Some time ago, I met Rugolo and told him how much I loved these albums and hoped they’d be reissued. Rugolo agreed, saying “Have the guys at these labels even seen who’s playing on them? They should be available just because of all those great musicians.” This was typical of Pete; forget the music, reissue them because of who’s on them. Talk about humble!

He lived to the age of 95, long enough to be celebrated for his considerable contribution to music. Happily, YouTube has several clips of Pete conducting his music, so future generations will be able to see him in action.

Pete was a wine collector, along with Henry Mancini. I raise a glass to Pete Rugolo for the many ways in which he touched us and left his considerable mark in music. He left so much of it that his spirit will always be with us. That’s what is special about being an artist.

(©Jeff Sultanof 2011)

Here’s an example of Rugolo’s ingenuity with unusual instrumentation. From the 1961 Mercury album 10 Saxophones and 2 Basses, it’s the Charlie Barnet staple “Skyliner.”This was at the height of record companies’ exhiliration over early stereo. Rugolo knew how to take advantage of the possiblities of the new technology’s capacity for sonic range and depth without beating it to death.

Marcus Strickland, Triumph of the Heavy (SMK).

In the liner notes, saxophonist Strickland writes, “Playing for a live audience heightens the adrenaline; you don’t have the luxury of correcting mistakes. It puts you on a high wire.” The second of the album’s two CDs, a club recording, captures his trio’s risk-taking and underlines the influence of an audience that truly listens. Strickland, his twin brother E.J. on drums and Ben Williams on bass hold the crowd’s attention and seem to thrive on its approval. In his work with Roy Haynes, Dave Douglas and Charles Tolliver, and on his own, Strickland has steadily developed as a creator of articulate solos. On tenor sax in the trio setting, it may be inevitable that he invites comparisons with Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, but there is little here to suggest that he is imitating them. Indeed, to single out two tenor performances, on “Mudbone” and “Prime” his brawny solos are free of quotes and of clichés, his own or anyone else’s. If the Stricklands’ tight interaction arises from their life as twins, it is enchanced by their musicianship. With his brother comping on saxophone, E.J. has a taut drum solo on the lengthy “Prime,” following an impressive Williams bass solo. In Jaco Pastorius’s “Portrait of Tracy,” Marcus Strickland takes a stabbing, pointillist approach on soprano as he spars with E.J.’s drums. It is one of only two pieces in the album that he didn’t write.

The first CD, made in a studio, adds David Bryant, a pianist who knows his McCoy Tyner but is most interesting when he works his own sparser harmonic ground. Bryant’s fleet solo on “’Lectronic,” strictly acoustic despite its name, is a highlight of his work here. In addition to soprano and tenor, Strickland plays alto saxophone and bass clarinet. Overdubbed, he uses all of them in the imaginative ensemble he wrote for Karriem Riggins’ “Virgo,” but solos—forcefully—only on tenor. On alto sax in five of this CD’s 10 pieces, Strickland has a tone notable for its depth and butteriness. In the pieces playing alto and soprano, he frequently achieves heaviness, in the sense of density and profundity. Yet, it is on tenor, the larger horn, that he is most often triumphant, weightless and free.

A note about the package: Strickland designed it and did the art work. He chose for the liner notes what appears to be 6-point type. Get out your magnifying glass.

Pete Rugolo has died in Los Angeles at the age of 95. Rugolo’s composing and arranging, particularly for the Stan Kenton Orchestra, had much to do in the 1940s and ‘50s with the creation of what came to be called progressive jazz. As a discoverer of talent and as a producer, he was responsible for recording a number of artists including Peggy Lee and Mel Tormé. He produced the seminally influential Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949 and ’50. Later, Rugolo led a band of his own and composed theme music for several successful television series, among them The Thin Man, The Fugitive and Run For Your Life. For today’s Los Angeles Times obituary, go here.

Rugolo’s 1951 arrangement of “Love For Sale” for demonstrates the craftsmanship and sense of drama that underlay his work for Kenton.

Here is Rugolo’s theme for The Fugitive, the series starring Richard Janssen that aired on ABC television from 1963 to 1967.

Composer, arranger, historian and big band scholar Jeff Sultanof is preparing for Rifftides an essay putting in perspective Rugolo’s career and contributions.

A friend writes:

Getting home, our plane had to stop in Sacramento to get gas. The jet stream was so strong last night, we flew north over parts of Canada to avoid it. Flying through the jet stream is NOT a good idea, so we did not.

I put some cottage cheese in a plastic container and into my carry-on, planned to eat it on the way. Evidently it looked suspicious—It took a while until the inspector asked me what it was. I told him. He threw it away and returned the container. Evidently, I was going to blow up the plane with cottage cheese.

I hope he confiscated that dangerous plastic spoon.

Cecilia Coleman Big Band, Oh Boy! (PandaKat).

Before she moved to New York 13 years ago, Coleman established a solid reputation as a pianist and arranger in her native southern California. Studies with Charlie Shoemake and Tom Kubis provided a solid theoretical foundation for imaginative charts that she wrote for a variety of small groups she fronted or played with in Los Angeles. With New York’s pool of accomplished jazz players to choose from, she expanded her arranging scope and palette.

Coleman’s first big band album is replete with examples of the imagination of a craftsman whose freshness balances her writing influences. There are intimations, but not imitations, of Thad Jones, Bill Holman and Tadd Dameron, among others. Her voicings across the band’s sections in the pensive “Until Then” and the counter-punching movement between reeds, percussion and brass in the energetic title tune demonstrate her originality. There are plenty of other instances, among them the swell and ripple of brass figures in the waltz “Princess,” the keening quality she gives the reeds leading into Stan Killian’s tenor sax solo in “Liar, Liar,” and a hymn-like brass choir that sets up the improvised complexities of the ensemble behind alto saxophonist Peter Brainin in “Walk Away” before the piece melds with an arranged section that dissolves into a simple piano statement.

Coleman’s band is made up of a cross-section of veteran and newer players. It includes trombonists Sam Burtis and Mike Fahn, saxophonists Bobby Porcelli and Geoff Vidal, and trumpeters Kerry MacKillof and John Eckert. The rhythm team is Coleman, bassist Tim Givens and drummer Jeff Brillinger. Don Sickler guests on trumpet on one piece. All of the soloists are excellent, but Coleman’s arrangements—resourceful and free of clichés—are the stars of the album.

Tony Fruscella & Brew Moore, The 1954 Unissued Atlantic Session (Fresh Sound).

Fruscella was an enigmatic trumpeter with a deeply personal style, Moore a tenor saxophonist who once said that anyone who didn’t play like Lester Young was wrong. At a time when Dizzy Gillespie’s fiery playing was the general model, Fruscella was one of a few young trumpeters who concentrated on tone, lyricism and quiet melodic invention. Others were Don Joseph, Phil Sunkel, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. The Atlantic recordings that Fruscella and Moore made together in March of 1954 have never been released until now. Fruscella died in 1969, Moore in 1973.

The pieces are all blues except for one composition by pianist Bill Triglia. The CD contains nothing as captivating as Fruscella’s solo on “I’ll Be Seeing You” from the self-titled album he recorded for Atlantic the next year. Nonetheless, the trumpeter’s flowing lines and deep sound combine with Moore’s relaxation and swing in performances whose inventiveness surmounts the simplicity of the material. The rhythm section—Triglia, piano; Teddy Kotick, bass; Bill Heine, drums— is excellent in support. The underrated Triglia solos briefly and well. Fresh Sound rounds out the album with “Blue Bells” and “Roundup Time,” pieces that Fruscella recorded with Stan Getz in 1955 when he was in Getz’s quintet.

This is a valuable find. The album, all but a rumor for decades, was widely anticipated. Reports are that its first pressing sold out within weeks of release. Presumably, there will be another.

It occurred to me as I was writing the review above that I have linked to Tony Fruscella’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” but never actually put it on Rifftides. Let’s remedy that.

Fruscella, trumpet; Bill Triglia, piano; Bill Anthony, bass; Will Bradley, Jr., drums.