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.