Classical Editor: Rob Barnett                               Founder Len Mullenger

Chapter 13

Music for Grown-ups

From the early 1950s the popular music business was fragmented in a new way. Rhythm and blues, country music and modern jazz were never in the minority so far as musical values were concerned; they were large and profitable markets, and with more lasting worth than hit pop singles. Yet the hits appeared to most people to represent the centre of the business, which was dislocated. At a time when technology and increasing prosperity should have made things easier, it became more difficult for the so-called minority musics to recruit new fans, and for hard-core fans to find something to listen to.

Of course, the music business as a whole continued to think of ways of cheating itself. Neal Hefti recorded a successful arrangement called ‘Coral Reef’ (on the Coral label) in 1951 which sold about 400,000 copies (though Hefti’s publicity described it as a millionseller). Hefti later said:

You heard it all over. Disc jockeys used it for themes . . . Billy May was asking for it; Ralph Flanagan asked for it, Ralph Marterie: some of the bands that were sprouting up in those days, they wanted it. And we all thought, ‘If you play "Coral Reef", I’ll play, whatever.’ And we could, sort of, maybe, between the four of us, instigate some interest in bands.

But the publisher, Jack Bregman, would not print it, not even an onion skin (a kind of cheap lead-sheet for information purposes only). Hefti had to print his own onion skin so that he could pass out copies, and after that he started keeping his own copyrights.

Then the union decided it did not like touring bands, after decades in which bands had toured the country and only fifteen years after Benny Goodman had touched off the Swing Era itself on a tour. Local 802 (the New York City branch of the AFM) made a rule that only local bands could play at the Paramount, which touring big bands had made into a shrine. And when DJs wanted to interview Hefti, he could be fined $500 by the union if he did it on a station that did not employ any musicians. ‘And so the jockeys would get very salty and say, "Well, my God, Patti Page was here last week, and she couldn’t have been nicer." So when I added all this up, I wasn’t making any money, got two little kids, I decided to forget about it, very frankly.’ And of course Patti Page did not have to belong to the AFM. So another good band bit the dust, and the music industry thus shot off the fragmented parts of itself.

One of the most evident genres throughout the 1950s was the first instance of revivalism, which several decades later has innumerable forms. In 1939 Muggsy Spanier’s Ragtime Band had made sixteen sides which represented a tribute to the music that these Chicagoans had grown up with and loved. The New Orleans and Chicago styles had never really gone away, but there had been a quietly simmering attitude during the Swing Era that the only true jazz was the earliest kind, and in 1939 a self-conscious revival got under way, almost unnoticed at the time. In San Francisco, Lu Watters began a residency at the Dawn Club with his Yerba Buena Jazz Band, the line-up of which was identical to that of the King Oliver band of 1923: two cornets (Watters and Bob Scobey), trombone (Turk Murphy), piano (Wally Rose), clarinet, drums, tuba (which the acoustic Oliver recordings did not allow) and banjo and vocalist (Clancy Hayes). Revivalism simmered for a while, then exploded into a vicious war of words among jazz fans and journalists at the advent of bop, which gave the traditionalists apoplexy. The word ‘ragtime’ had finally been dropped, and the music of the revival, along with the remnants of Chicago style, began to be called dixieland, and the word ‘jazz’ lost more of its usefulness.

Spanier, trumpeter Wild Bill Davison and others recorded for Commodore in the mid-1940s in New York, where they worked in clubs like Nick’s and Jimmy Ryan’s; Eddie Condon was a spark-plug for the music to the end of his days. Their music, unfairly or not, came to be heard as dixieland by the American public; they had been struggling to make a living in music all their lives, and were slowly relegated to the sidelines. Any recording with clarinettist Pee Wee Russell had at least that to recommend it; he recorded four titles at a quartet date for Commodore which are priceless, and towards the end of his life had opportunities to work in less tradition-bound surroundings.

Some of the dixie was dire. The Firehouse Five Plus Two were a group of amateurs led by trombonist Ward Kimball, who worked during the day at the Disney studios; they started recording in 1949, and their music was never intended to be anything but a jolly noise. The Dukes of Dixieland also began playing in 1949. A second-rate band formed by the New Orleans Assunto family, it achieved its greatest fame by making some of the first stereo recordings in excellent sound in the late 1950s. Trombonist Wilbur De Paris and his brother Sidney also recorded for Commodore, and later for Atlantic; Wilbur was the leader, and his imagination was stuck in the 1920s; the band had a certain following mainly because of Sidney, who did not say much but was a fine trumpet player.

There was nothing defensive at all about the albums made by Paul Wesley ‘Doc’ Evans, a cornet player from Minnesota, who was extremely well recorded on the Audiophile label; they are pretty, affectionate and cherishable. They often included pianist John ‘Knocky’ Parker, who had begun in western swing. The Rampart Street Paraders, Hollywood studio musicians, made albums for Columbia: clarinettist Matty Matlock, trumpeter Clyde Hurley and tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller, all of whom had once played for Ben Pollack. Their albums were loose and lovely: they were playing for anyone who wanted to listen, and had no axe to grind, but although the music was essentially Chicago style, it was heard as dixieland- hence Rampart Street Paraders, a name which helped to sell the albums.

Cornertist Bobby Hackett was a musicians’ musician. Neither he nor Jack Teagarden was recorded often enough, but they made an album together for Capitol called Coast Concert! in the mid-1950s which was absolute magic; as if to thumb their noses at those who would pigeon-hole good music, they used banjo and tuba on one track, guitar and string bass on the next. Drummer Nick Fatool, who had worked with Shaw and Goodman, played with both the Rampart Street Paraders and Hackett and Teagarden. Don Ewell, a swinging pianist who loved to play Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller tunes, made a delightful two-piano album with Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith. Joe Sullivan and Ralph Sutton were fine traditional pianists, Sutton two-fisted and Sullivan more of a composer. Trumpeter Al Hirt and clarinettist Pete Fountain were very good white New Orleans musicians who did well in the marketplace; Hirt in particular was a fine technician, but he stuck to the safe route of entertaining tourists, and is said to have presented young Wynton Marsalis with his first trumpet.

Watters’s band broke up in the early 1950s, and Turk Murphy led a revival band for the rest of his life. He always used banjo and brass bass, but was not out to score any points: privately also admiring more modern music, he played the music he loved best well enough to make many fans happy. Bob Scobey changed from cornet to trumpet, and his Frisco Band entertained crowds in the 1950s with a sort of good-old-days, let’s-pretend-it’s-the-turn-of-the-century saloon music. The genial but powerful baritone of Clancy Hayes was ideal on tunes like ‘Silver Dollar’ (1950, Clarke Van Ness and Jack Palmer), ‘Ace in the Hole’ (not the Cole Porter song, but another item by James Dempsey and George Mitchell), Irving Berlin’s revived ‘I Want to Go Back to Michigan’ and a very good version of Ma Rainey’s ‘See See Rider’. (Hayes was also a songwriter; his ‘Huggin’ and Chalkin’’ was a number one hit by Hoagy Carmichael in 1946.)

Back in the mainstream music business, Woody Herman made a long series of live recordings in various locations in 1948, which were issued years later on ‘nostalgia’ labels. It was more than a year before Herman’s Second Herd recorded again in the studio, and for a new label, Capitol; a year after that, the personnel had almost completely changed. Not only was the band business a rocky one, but the Second Herd was full of drug addicts, which disgusted Herman and was too much trouble. Baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff was a superb musician, but wrecked his health on heroin; he was also a proselytiser, and set up shop behind a curtain in the back of the band’s bus to sell drugs to the others.

Herman continued leading big bands almost until the end of his life. He was a great talent scout, hiring many a fine young musician, and a natural editor; he would touch up an arrangement while the band tried it out until it was just right. Some of the men in the Second Herd thought he was old-fashioned, but when he played a solo on a Gerry Mulligan arrangement, Mulligan said that Herman’s solo was the only one that had anything to do with the music. Somewhere along the way a manager disappeared with money that had been withheld from the band’s salaries to pay income taxes; Herman was left holding the bill and never caught up. He was a forgiving man, generous in spirit and loved by everyone who knew him. He died owing the government a large amount of money, which, as someone said, was either a tragedy or a masterpiece of forward planning.

At the other end of the absurd controversy over what was jazz and what was not was Thelonious Monk. By the late 1940s, after much furious activity, there were often cliches in bop, but never in Monk’s music: it displayed only daring, boldness and the unexpected. Monk has long been described as a great composer, yet all he did was write beautifully organized and truly original themes. His idiosyncratic rhythm and harmony meant that few musicians were able to improvise on them properly, but they have now been studied for decades and a great many younger musicians have taken up the challenge. Monk’s keyboard style was technically unorthodox, and some said he could not play very well, but, as Paul Bacon wrote in a record review in 1948, ‘his style and approach cost him 50 per cent of his technique. He relies so much on absolute musical reflex that Horowitz’s technique might get in the way.’ Monk was sitting with several other men in a car in which drugs were discovered; he was arrested and (like Billie Holiday) lost his cabaret card, so that he could not play in clubs in New York. He remained almost unknown to the general public.

In 1948 Miles Davis had put together an unusual nine-piece band, which contained a French horn and a tuba. It gave one performance and recorded for Capitol; the studio tracks have been almost continuously in print on an album called Birth of the Cool. The style required a high degree of musicianship, and was highly arranged by Mulligan, Gil Evans, John Lewis and Johnny Carisi; the sound was an outgrowth of Evans’s and Mulligan’s work for the Claude Thornhill band, and set the tone for what came to be called cool jazz. Many of the players and arrangers in Herman’s Second Herd were leading lights in what became West Coast jazz, often considered much the same thing as cool jazz. The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, with handsome young Chet Baker on trumpet and, unusually, with no piano, began recording in California in 1952. When Mulligan received a ninety-day jail sentence for a drug-related offence and Baker went off on his own, his quartet had the excellent Russ Freeman on piano, and Baker began to sing, in a little-boy voice with minimal vibrato - cool, like his trumpet playing. The girls liked it (the ones who listened to jazz) but the critics did not.

West Coast jazz, largely a media invention which had the important side-effect of ignoring its black participants, had plenty of fans at the time, but jazz critics (most of whom are really only commentators) had doubts about it, because it was not pretentious or dramatic; what it was about was beauty. Perhaps there was something in the Californian climate that contributed to the laid-back quality of much of the music. It swung and it was often lovely, but the frenetic quality of bop was largely gone, which may be why the white brand was more popular with the public: they did not have to listen as hard. Yet Baker’s playing and singing on ‘My Buddy’ (1922, Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson), for example, has just as much integrity now as it did then; his notes were always chosen in the service of beauty. Mulligan has constantly been a spark-plug (the Eddie Condon of modern jazz), ready to jam at any time, and writing many a fine tune. Freeman retired from the road, but years later provided an interesting comment:

[T]hree or four times in my life, while playing, I have suddenly become disembodied - in the sense that I seem to be ... watching myself play ... you’re just creating music and it’s like pouring water out of a pitcher ... That’s what you’re after, that high. There are a lot of layers, though, that go with it. It’s a zig-zag existence and it’s one of the reasons I stopped ... It became very painful to go through those periods where you get on a bandstand and you try something and it’s not happening.

Freeman’s retirement was our loss for, as Mulligan told him, he was a composer: such well-known Baker tunes as ‘Bea’s Flat’, ‘Fan Tan’ and ‘Summer Sketch’ were his. Jazz groups did not make much money recording for small labels and had no hope of jukebox hits; they had to make a living on the road, just as the big bands had a generation earlier. This was no doubt good for the music, but it was a hard life, and by this time the heroin plague had hit jazz.

Black and white musicians on both coasts were playing contemporary music which was beautiful, important and is still selling. Yet they were treated like dirt by the music business. Coleman Hawkins had had a middle-class upbringing, or at least a secure one, as African-American lives went in those days; when he was still a teenager, touring with Mamie Smith in 1922, a theatre manager absconded with box office receipts and for the first time in his life he was hungry. He later had a reputation for being fussy about money, no doubt because he never forgot that early lesson. The risks were there for everybody touring in vaudeville and in music, in every decade. But the risks were always worse for blacks, and as bad as ever in the early 1950s for those who were playing some of the best music.

It is difficult to say to what extent the heroin plague was the result of organized crime’s finding a new source of income and a new supply of victims in Harlem. Charlie Parker had become addicted to heroin as a teenager in Kansas City, and some people (such as trumpeter Red Rodney) were imitating their idol, though he did everything possible to warn them off it: ‘Any musician who says he is playing better on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar.’ Parker did a remarkable job of keeping his own habit under control for a long time, but in his later years even he was affected by his own dissipation. Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis had enough sense not to become involved at the time; Parker took heroin in front of Mulligan on one occasion: ‘And he did it in the most horrendous way possible, with blood all over the place - it was just dreadful. So he made his point ...’ Yet both Davis and Mulligan Later became addicted.

It was Parker who said to Davis, ‘You better watch out. There’s a little white cat out on the West Coast who’s gonna eat you up.’ Freeman claims that in the early 1950s almost all the jazz musicians were addicted, which would mean, among other things, that most of them managed to kick the habit; he also says that Baker became an addict after most others had given it up. Contrary to popular belief, Baker was not at first influenced by Miles Davis; yet it is more than a coincidence that they both made a speciality of ‘My Funny Valentine’, emphasizing the minor-key aspects of the tune and making it into a ‘feel sorry for yourself’ anthem. They contributed to the invention of a new intimate and lyrical trumpet style, different from the shouting brass instrument that it often was (though the intimate side was part of the art of Roy Eldridge, Harry Edison, Gillespie and many others, to say nothing of Oliver, Bix and Rex Stewart, who all played cornet). Joe Goldberg has mentioned the ‘feminine principle’ of ‘Attis-Adonis’ adumbrated by literary critic Edmund Wilson when writing about his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic who died relatively young: ‘the fair youth, untimely slain, who is ritually bewailed by women, then resuscitates ... when his legend has become full-fledged and beyond his own power to shatter it’. Only ‘such a poet’, not necessarily effeminate, but capable of ‘a kind of feminine ventriloquism’, can ‘represent life’s renewal’. Baker, like Bix, was supposed to die young, and for some fans he did. Drugs cost him time, money, favour in the music business and ultimately his life, when he fell out of a hotel-room window in Amsterdam in 1988; but he had played beautifully most of the time.

The death in 1947 of Woody Herman’s trumpeter Sonny Berman was one of the first drug-related deaths. (In Berman’s case we again meet the Jewish influence in jazz: fans have even been advised to listen to a good cantor, and then listen once more to his recorded solos.) Vocalist David Allyn sang with Jack Teagarden, becoming moderately famous (and highly regarded among musicians) while still a teenager; his introduction to drugs came through morphine, which he took after being wounded during the war, and later it wrecked his career. The trombonist Earl Swope was an athlete; in every town he went to he would find the local gym and work out. But then he became addicted. Pianist Joe Albany suffered from poor health for many years; trumpeter Fats Navarro died of tuberculosis, but his heroin addiction could not have done him any good. (Navarro had replaced Gillespie in Eckstine’s band, recorded once with Goodman and had pieces written for him by Tadd Dameron, an important arranger. Navarro’s playing was sculptural, perfectly under control yet magnificently impetuous.) Chaloff, Dameron, Ike Quebec and John Coltrane were all at one time narcotics addicts who later died of cancer: no one knows how much drugs predispose the victim to an early death. Parker, Billie Holiday and pianist Sonny Clark are among those who damaged their health by attempting to wean themselves off drugs with alcohol.

It was not as if the life was not dangerous enough. Another great unfinished career was that of Navarro’s disciple, Clifford Brown (known as Brownie), a clean-living man who was already becoming much better known than most jazz musicians when, like Frank Teschemacher, Bessie Smith, Chu Berry and many others, he was killed in a car crash. The excellent pianist and composer Richie Powell, Bud’s younger brother, and Powell’s wife were killed in the same crash that took Brownie; Doug Watkins, one of the finest bass players of the post-war decades, also died in a crash, and his contribution is now almost forgotten. An excellent pianist who died in 1984 had contracted Aids from a needle. Why have so many chosen to add to the dangers of the road?

Red Rodney was one of those in the Herman band who did not succumb to the allure of drugs, but later, with Parker, ‘standing next to that giant every day, I probably said to myself, "I wonder if I jumped over ..."’

The issue of the effect of drugs on music has not often been discussed. Ira Gitler bravely approached it in his Jazz Masters of the ’40s (1966), then in his oral history collection Swing to Bop (1985). In the earlier book he wrote: ‘In spite (or because?) of [heroin] a great music was made.’ Some critics questioned that, but he confesses in the later book that he would take out the question mark. The music would not have been what it was without everything that went into it; and it was hard enough being different. There is a story about a bunch of musicians on the road who got lost, driving around in Shaker Heights, the affluent Cleveland suburb, in the middle of the night. They gawked at the big moonlit houses of the relatively rich, until somebody said, ‘Yeah, but what do they know? What do they know about Charlie Parker, about Dizzy Gillespie?’ And everybody laughed. In fact, some of the residents of Shaker Heights must have had their stashes of Parker records, but drugs were part of what enabled musicians to say, ‘We know; they don’t.’

If it is dangerous to ‘operate heavy machinery’ under the influence of an intoxicating substance, then it is not possible to be a better musician, from a mechanical standpoint, while stoned. Music depends above all on execution, the ability to play. But a professional musician’s muscles are highly trained, and the conception, the ideas, are also important. Drugs seemed to facilitate concentration, to the extent that they shut out noise and worries and allowed the musician to get on with the work. Mulligan said that for years he could write for eighteen hours at a stretch.

Gitler quoted Red Rodney: ‘I think that a lot of the good things in the music were because of drug use. The tempos where guys really played on them ... The tunes with the great changes in it ... When a guy is loaded and at peace, he ... could tune out the honking of the world. And, "Hey man, I just figured this out," and we’d try it that night, and it was great.’ Charlie Rouse: ‘When you’re improvising, when you’re playing jazz, you play what you hear. So the rhythm or whatever is behind you, you hear something, and you go ahead and make it. And you may do it when you wouldn’t do it sober.’ Dexter Gordon: ‘I think it can arouse you; it makes you concentrate very well.’ But Gordon goes on to define the concentration more specifically: ‘It really activates the mind to secure money and to find connections ... and play your games, do your little movements and all that shit.’ And avoid getting arrested. David Allyn: ‘You’re also blocking a lot of other things out, too, like real feelings. You’re numb. A goddam wall.’ Rodney: ‘... a lot of sad things happened from the drugs, and showed in the music ... Hostility, pettiness, a lot of us became thieves, even though we didn’t want to ... being ashamed that people we liked knew we were hooked.’

Mulligan revealed that he had avoided having relationships with women who wanted to get married; marriage at his age would have been a mistake, but he was avoiding stability: ‘I think I managed to not be an adult in just about every imaginable area.’ Art Pepper said that he started on drugs because he was lonely. His first wife stopped travelling with him on the road, and he felt horribly guilty if he had anything to do with another woman, and in the morality of the early 1950s he could not deal with that. And some people just have personalities that are prone to addiction.

Many musicians were surprisingly rigid in their attitudes: Herman’s men, for example, thought he was corny, which angered Mulligan; it was all right to play like Bird on alto, but not on tenor; Ellington’s band was trite, Basie’s was the one. White musicians thought they could fight the Crow Jim attitude by aping the habits of black addicts. For blacks, being stoned, especially in such an illegal, exotic and dangerous way, helped in coping with racism, allowing the metaphorical genuflection to white society to be made with some other part of the mind, so that the profound insult could be ignored and only the music mattered.

In any case, and despite everything, contemporary jazz recordings were being made during the 1950s which forty years later are selling much better than Patti Page. Commodore, Keynote and Blue Note were followed by other new labels in the post-war years. Recordings were now made on master tape and released on long-playing records, and more records were being sold to a grown-up audience. On the West Coast, Ross Russell had formed Dial in 1946, Lester Koenig formed Good Time Jazz to record the revivalists and between 1949 and 1952 Koenig started Contemporary, Saul Zaentz formed Fantasy and Richard Bock formed Pacific Jazz (later called World Pacific after it was sold to Liberty Records). In the east Bob Weinstock started Prestige in 1949, while Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer formed Riverside in 1953. Keepnews later formed Milestone and Landmark. Norman Granz, who worked as a film editor, began producing jazz concerts at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944. (The first concert was a benefit for twenty-one Chicanos who were arrested during the ‘Zoot Suit Riots’, convicted of murder and sent to San Quentin.) When he took Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) on tour, he refused to accept an engagement unless the audience was integrated, and JATP became an institution. He recorded the concerts from the beginning, leasing the first volume (which helped to make a jazz standard of ‘How High the Moon’) to Moses Asch. This was a hit (but Asch went broke, and later formed the Folkways label). In 1947 Granz formed Clef (distributed by Mercury), then Norgran, and Verve in 1956. He made more jazz available in public and on record than any other individual. He sold Verve to MGM in 1961, but retained some of his masters and stayed on for a while as an adviser; then he started all over again in the 1970s with Pablo. Today almost all these legendary independent jazz labels belong to the Fantasy group in Berkeley, California, making it easily the most valuable vault of American music still owned by Americans.

A West Coast pianist and composer, Dave Brubeck, who had studied with composer Darius Milhaud, began recording for Fantasy, first with larger groups, then in a quartet featuring the alto saxophone of Paul Desmond. The quartet was well received on college campuses, Brubeck later said, because he had played for free in high schools, and when those kids went to college, Brubeck was the only jazz musician they had heard of. He signed with Columbia in 1954, and the quartet had far more commercial success than any other jazz group of the era. From 1956 the tasteful Joe Morello played drums.

It is impossible to fault Brubeck’s success. The various albums recorded live on college campuses hold up well (a version of ‘Stardust’ on Fantasy wonderfully explores the spirit of the tune), and a 1954 Columbia album called Jazz: Red Hot and Cool, recorded live at a club in New York and designed as part of a cosmetics promotion, had a horrible title and cover, but excellent, often hard-swinging music, as well as the wistful original ‘Audrey’. Brubeck’s tunes ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’ and ‘The Duke’ were not to be sneered at. Yet for some his music was cerebral at the expense of emotional content. The tremendous popularity of the gimmicky Time Out, a number two album in the USA in 1960 on which each track has a different time signature, at a time when Charles Mingus was hitting his stride on the same label but had nothing like Brubeck’s sales, raises the irrefutable point that a great many black artists deserved the kind of acclaim that Brubeck had. But that was not his fault; he maintained a higher profile for jazz than it would have had otherwise, the way Paul Whiteman had done thirty years earlier, and many a fan must have gone on to stronger stuff. Besides, Brubeck himself was a fine musician, underrated by a lot of snooty critics, and anyway one could always listen to Desmond, whose playing was never other than beautiful, and often witty with it. (His memoirs, to be called ‘How Many of You are There in the Quartet?’, remained unfinished.)

The white cool jazz West Coast phenomenon was neither as revolutionary as its fans thought nor as reactionary as its critics claimed. Parker and Gillespie had come to California bringing the latest thing, but there was not a large audience for it; yet as soon as Ross Russell had formed his Dial label he began recording Charlie Parker, who thus made some of his best recordings on the West Coast. Jimmy Giuffre’s ‘Four Brothers’ was recorded by Woody Herman’s band in 1947 for Columbia, at the same session as the fourth part of Ralph Burns’s ‘Summer Sequence’, which was recorded again at the end of the following year for Capitol as ‘Early Autumn’. The sound of both the ‘Four Brothers’ reed section and Stan Getz’s solo on ‘Early Autumn’ (recorded in Los Angeles) were very influential; but equally influential were the New York recordings of the Miles Davis ‘Birth of the Cool’ sessions (with Mulligan’s ‘Godchild’ and ‘Peru’) and of the arrangements of Tadd Dameron. The Davis nonet sessions were a commercial failure at the time - the name ‘Birth of the Cool’ was applied to them in retrospect; they were arrangements, with not much accent on solos. Dameron had failed music at school, but was later described as ‘the Romanticist of the whole movement’; tracks on Blue Note long marketed as Fats Navarro’s were actually Dameron’s, and such tunes as his ‘Good Bait’ and ‘Our Delight’ became jazz standards.

The West Coast cool jazz movement focused on arrangements for combos, performed by first-class white jazzmen who played lovely solos on them. Howard Rumsey, a pianist, drummer and bass player who had been a founder member of Stan Kenton’s band in 1942, began presenting live music at a club called the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1949. In 1951 he formed the Lighthouse All Stars, who recorded for Contemporary (with a Lighthouse logo at first), and the famous Sunday sessions started: the house band, augmented with various guests, played from two in the afternoon until two the next morning. Musicians and fans remembered the hard work and the great music for the rest of their lives; the music would sometimes begin for people in their bathing-suits who had wandered in off the street, and who would still be there twelve hours later. It was here that many of the West Coast luminaries jammed and formed their friendships and recording groups. Drummer Shelly Manne seemed to play on nearly all the recordings. Shelly Manne and his Friends, a trio, had Leroy Vinnegar on bass and talented Hollywood wunderkind André Previn on piano. The trio’s second album for Contemporary was a jazz treatment of the songs from My Fair Lady in 1956; being reasonably successful, it started a fad for such albums (though it did not make the lower reaches of the pop album chart until Previn did it again under his own name, for Columbia in 1964). Reedmen Jimmy Giuffre, Art Pepper, Lennie Niehaus, Bob Cooper, Bob Morgan, Bud Shank, Bill Perkins, Buddy Collette and Frank Morgan, trombonist Frank Rosolino, pianist and arranger Marty Paich and trumpeters Maynard Ferguson and Shorty Rogers, among many others, played at the Lighthouse and made albums in each other’s groups and as leaders; visitors included Max Roach, Wardell Gray, Conte Candoli, Miles Davis and pianist Hampton Hawes. Most of the regulars were veterans of Kenton’s line-ups, especially his Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra of 1950, but Kenton himself became less and less influential as his ideas became more grandiose.

Composer Giuffre led combos; his fetching, rhythmic tone poem ‘The Train and the River’ was filmed for television’s The Sound of Jazz in 1957 and at the Newport Jazz Festival the following year (as Jazz on a Summer’s Day, released 1960). Paich became a studio arranger, best known for albums with singer Mel Tormé. Canadian-born Maynard Ferguson was a high-note specialist and a brass technician who has led bands almost continuously, and at the time of writing had survived a phase of playing jazz-rock fusion.

One of the most successful and prolific of these men was Shorty Rogers, who came from the East Coast. He was a professional musician at the age of eighteen; after military service he joined Woody Herman’s band, and stayed behind when it left Hollywood in 1946. He was playing in baritone saxophonist Butch Stone’s band when Herman formed the ‘Four Brothers’ band in 1947, wiping out Stone’s band by hiring most of its members. By this time Rogers had matured as a soloist and a composer; he wrote or co-wrote ‘Keen and Peachy’, ‘Lemon Drop’, ‘Keeper of the Flame’ and others for Herman, and scored part of a Charlie Parker solo for the reed section on a Herman track called ‘I’ve Got News For You’. He left Herman in late 1948 to join Kenton, and did his best to help the Innovations band swing. (It was a losing battle: there were forty musicians, including strings.) In 1951 Rogers led his first recording session with an octet: Pepper, Giuffre, Manne, John Graas (French horn), Gene Englund (tuba), Don Bagley (bass) and Hawes (piano). A series of 10-inch and 12-inch Lps on Capitol, Pacific Jazz, Atlantic and RCA followed, on which the groups ranged from a quintet and octet to a big band.

The first track recorded, Rogers’s ‘Popo’, is a memorably rhythmic riff; Art Pepper’s alto on ‘Over the Rainbow’ was recorded at the same date. The music was not particularly ‘cool’, containing plenty of high-spirited soloing, and (at the first session especially) spontaneous vocal sounds of encouragement from various sidemen. At the time the music sounded distinctly hot, yet boppish; for ‘modern jazz’, it had a considerable success. A quintet date in 1955 included ‘Martians Go Home’, which is nearly eight minutes long: a low-key Rogers composition, it features muted trumpet and Giuffre playing chalumeau (low-register) clarinet throughout; the excellent young Pete Jolly plays piano and Curtis Counce bass. There was plenty of solo space for everyone (especially Giuffre) and duet passages for the two horns; the whole thing is delicately punctuated by Manne, who at one point tuned his snare upwards while playing a soft roll (presumably with one hand). It was the nearest thing to a hit for a jazz record, and must have sold quite a few copies as an Atlantic 45 EP. Among the big-band tracks were a tribute to Basie album and four tunes written by Leith Stevens for the Marlon Brando film The Wild One (not the soundtrack recordings, which were played by an octet and released on Decca). In a repeat on ‘Infinity Promenade’ Ferguson plays a trumpet part an octave higher than the first time round, which was a pleasant shock at the time, but soon threatened to become a cliché.

Not all of the music was equally successful. From the first session, Giuffre’s ‘Four Mothers’ is a riff that quickly becomes irritating and is repeated too often: unison riffs were one of the things that many people did not like about modern jazz. The pastel harmonies could become a kind of hip mood music, if played at similar tempos and without any hot solos, as reedman Dave Pell proved: he formed an octet out of the Les Brown band in 1955 and was frank about playing mortgage-paying music.

Rogers’s experience as a composer and arranger soon earned him a good living in the studios. Indeed, nearly all these people recorded prolifically on film soundtracks. Bob Cooper played all the reeds including cor anglais and oboe; he married Kenton’s singer June Christy and was also busy in the studios. Bill Perkins was an engineer for World Pacific and later in the studios. Years later Lennie Niehaus often worked with director Clint Eastwood; Niehaus and Bud Shank did their best work in the early 1950s, and then decided to make a living instead. Shank played on albums with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida in 1954, the first influence of bossa nova on the US scene; his later pop-song album Michelle, with Chet Baker on flugelhorn, made the Billboard chart.

Art Pepper played on many fine albums and always had as many fans as any jazzman, but he paid for his drug addiction with frequent arrests, and only survived as long as he did by spending several years of his life in the restrictive routine of the Synanon Foundation. His autobiography Straight Life, written with his wife Laurie and published in 1979,is a harrowing book. His best-known album is Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, made in 1957 for Contemporary: he was strung out at the time and had not played for weeks, but it was a successful session. (The ‘Rhythm Section’ was that of the Miles Davis Quintet.)

The tragedy of West Coast jazz was that it was dominated by white musicians to the extent that those excellent black musicians who stayed there were almost ignored. The jazz scene in California was never big, perhaps because the climate keeps people outdoors rather than in clubs and concert halls. Even so, people who were never jazz fans heard of Brubeck, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, maybe even Shorty Rogers. Tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards went to the West Coast from Mississippi as a young man and made a series of albums on Pacific Jazz, Contemporary and Prestige, but the albums are underrated and most people have never heard of him.

Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus were two West Coast musicians of great influence who went east to make their reputations; Dexter Gordon went to Europe. There were other black musicians on the West Coast who never achieved the reputations they deserved. Alto saxophonist Sonny Criss was born in Tennessee, and spent some of the 1960s in Europe; he recorded for Imperial in the 1950s (with West Coast drummer Lawrence Marable) and on Prestige in the 1960s. Curtis Amy, who was born in 1929 in Houston, played tenor, soprano and flute; he went to Los Angeles in 1955 and recorded for Pacific Jazz, and later played on pop and rock albums.

Born in Los Angeles, the son of a doctor, Dexter Gordon was one of the first modernists on tenor saxophone. When Coleman Hawkins listed his favourite tenor saxophonists, he included Gordon, a teenager at the time, who was playing in Lionel Hampton’s band. He also played with Louis Armstrong, and in the renowned Billy Eckstine band in 1945, then recorded for Dial: in 1947 ‘The Chase’ (with Wardell Gray) and ‘The Duel’ (with Teddy Edwards), both two-sided 10" 78s, were among Dial’s best-sellers. An eighteen-minute live version of ‘The Hunt’ with Gray was recorded the same year by Ralph Bass at the Elks Club in Los Angeles. Gordon recorded for several labels, such as Blue Note, but lived in Europe from 1962 until 1976, and only occasionally visited the USA; he made many albums in Paris and Copenhagen, with associates such as Kenny Drew and Spanish-born Tete Montoliu on piano. Having been addicted to various substances all his life, his health was poor in later years, but he left a great many recordings of his unique tone and endless ideas: while listening, one feels, at least until the record is over, that it will never be necessary to listen to another tenor, so strong, delightful and deceptively laconic is his musical personality. Producer Michael Cuscuna lured him back to the USA for recording dates in his later career. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of a character based on Bud Powell in the film Round Midnight (1986, directed by Bertrand Tavernier); like many another American actor, he was effectively playing himself.

Howard McGhee, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, became one of the most highly regarded bop trumpeters and worked for Hampton, Andy Kirk, Charlie Barnet and Georgie Auld. He was a member of Coleman Hawkins’s small group when it recorded its famous Hollywood sessions in 1945, and made his first recording as a leader that year on Modern, with Mingus on bass. A 1946 Dial date became McGhee’s when Charlie Parker was too messed up to play. McGhee recorded in Copenhagen in 1979 with Teddy Edwards.

Hampton Hawes was based all his life in Los Angeles; good-looking enough to be a movie star, he was an excellent modern keyboard player of the Bud Powell school. He was also a drug addict. His most famous recordings are on Contemporary: three trio sets made in 1955 and the All Night Session (1956), with Jim Hall (guitar), Red Mitchell (bass) and Bruz Freeman (drums), three more albums of bop classics and standards laid down with unflagging joyous energy, the sixteen selections issued with no editing of any kind. He also made a trio album with Mingus and Dannie Richmond in 1957. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1958 for possession of narcotics (as opposed to Mulligan’s ninety days a few years earlier - did it make a difference that Mulligan was white?), but was released in 1964 after he wrote a personal letter to President Kennedy (after which everybody else in the jail was writing to Washington).

Carl Perkins, from Indianapolis, became an unusual and influential keyboard stylist. He too was a drug addict; his left hand was deformed by polio, which perhaps led to his adopting a more bluesy style than Hawes, for example. He played with R&B bands; as a leader he made trio tracks for Savoy (1949), DooTone (1956) and Pacific Jazz (1957, with guitar and bass, but no drums). He worked as a sideman with Harold Land and Art Pepper, among others. Perkins was a founder member of the Max Roach Quintet, but did not stay with it long; he is best known for his membership of the Curtis Counce Quintet. His tune ‘Grooveyard’, recorded with Land in 1958, became something of a standard.

Bass player and leader Curtis Counce was originally from Kansas City. After working for a few months with Shorty Rogers, he formed a quintet which recorded four albums (1956-8), all with Frank Butler on drums (once described by Jo Jones as the best drummer in the world) and Harold Land on tenor. Three albums on Contemporary had Carl Perkins on piano: his introduction and accompaniment of Jack Sheldon on ‘I Can’t Get Started’ display bluesy harmonic ideas, which are other-worldly yet exactly right. On the last album (for DooTone) Elmo Hope replaced Perkins. The trumpet players were Jack Sheldon and Rolf Erickson (both white) and Gerald Wilson.

Wilson has rarely performed as a soloist, but repeatedly (and against the odds) formed big bands on the West Coast, for which he wrote and in which all the best musicians wanted to play. Sheldon (born in 1931 in Florida) has also been a singer, actor and comedian. Erickson (born in 1927 in Sweden) has been a highly regarded modernist since moving to the USA in 1947, was frequently heard at the Lighthouse and played in many of the remaining big bands, such as those of Goodman, Herman and Ellington.

Tenor saxophonist Harold Land said many years later, ‘We were making progress in Los Angeles, even if nobody was aware of it. There wasn’t much money, but we were having a lot of beautiful musical moments.’ This survey of West Coast jazz may as well end with a remarkable Land album: if the best post-war jazz required unison playing of searing and exciting precision by musicians who could also tear the notes off the page in their solos, and furious swinging on original compositions of great quality, then The Fox should have been continuously in print and achieving considerable sales over the years. But it was extremely well recorded in 1959 in Los Angeles for the obscure Hifi-jazz label, and disappeared for a decade until it was reissued by Contemporary. It had Butler on drums, Elmo Hope on piano, Herbie Lewis on bass and the mysterious Dupree Bolton on trumpet. Bolton played on The Fox and on Curtis Amy’s Katanga! in 1963 (the title track of which he wrote) and on almost nothing else; he was a trumpeter who should have entered the polls of history with Navarro and Brownie. Elmo Hope was an excellent player from New York, a childhood friend of Bud Powell; his Elmo Hope Trio was also made for Hifi-jazz and later reissued on Contemporary. He made other albums for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and other labels, but never achieved the fame he deserved.

One of the few groups that made it back and forth across the USA, and among the best jazz bands of all time for its integration of intelligence and musical powers, was the Max Roach Quintet. Roach was one of the finest drummers in the new music, destined to be one of those who demonstrated that the best jazz drummers are percussionists and all-round musicians, not just time-keepers. He grew up in New York, but in 1953 he worked for six months in the Lighthouse All Stars, proof enough that this was a straight-ahead blowing outfit rather than a laid-back bunch of beach boys. Promoter Gene Norman offered Roach a concert tour if he would form a band, and Roach offered Clifford Brown a job as co-leader. Brown had been out of action for a year after a car crash in 1950, but then recorded with Tadd Dameron. He was recommended by Charlie Parker for a band that Art Blakey was forming, which recorded in 1954, and it was from this group that Roach plucked him.

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt was hired, but shortly after Teddy Edwards took his place. (Stitt changed back to alto after Charlie Parker died, and was probably more at home on that instrument.) Carl Perkins played piano and George Bledsoe bass. One of their early gigs was recorded by Norman. Before their first studio session Edwards was replaced by 25-year-old Harold Land, and bass player George Morrow joined. Land was a close friend of Eric Dolphy; Roach and Brownie had heard about the all-day jamming sessions at young Dolphy’s house, dropped by to listen and hired both Land and Morrow. Richie Powell had wanted to be a drummer, but took Roach’s advice and changed to piano; when he replaced Perkins, the classic edition of the quintet was in place. Land’s big tenor sound was a perfect foil for Brownie’s trumpet. Brownie also recorded for Pacific Jazz with a septet of West Coasters and for Emarcy, Mercury’s jazz subsidiary, as the Max Roach / Clifford Brown Quintet made its first recordings for Emarcy: he made seven recording dates in less than two weeks in mid-1954, and in September there was another Gene Norman concert recording.

Then the quintet went back east, where it recorded again for Emarcy. In November 1955 Land was called back to Los Angeles because of illness in the family. His place was taken by Sonny Rollins, who was almost the same age, but already a giant. He had been influenced by Stitt, then by Dexter Gordon. He began recording in 1948, and by 1955 his powers were such that, like Coleman Hawkins, he almost never had to repeat himself; each time he played a tune it was as if for the first time, and he was never at a loss for ideas. The band was even stronger, but lasted for less than a year: in June 1956 Brownie, Powell and Powell’s wife skidded off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and were killed.

The Roach-Brown Quintet, and, for that matter, Curtis Counce’s group and the Harold Land band that recorded The Fox, all with the same instrumentation, were fine examples of what came to be called post-bop or hard bop. Roach / Brown played standards beloved of the boppers, such as ‘I’ll Remember April’ and ‘What is This Thing Called Love’, and originals like Dameron’s ‘The Scene is Clean’, and Powell’s ‘Time’ (on which he played celesta) and ‘Gertrude’s Bounce’. (Powell too had been on the way to becoming a major talent.) But the arrangements never depended on riffs or endless unison playing; they were themselves compositions, tone poems, exquisitely well performed by men who breathed together. In reaction perhaps to cool jazz, it was aggressive music with muscular joy, never frenetic for its own sake, and black music had taken a step beyond bop. Roach carried on for a while; Brownie was succeeded by Kenny Dorham, then by talented newcomer Booker Little. But the grief of the jazz world at the loss of Brownie was nearly unbearable.

In 1948-9 the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours included new young stars as well as familiar faces. Ella Fitzgerald, who also became a Granz recording artist, joined in 1949. Granz began recording Oscar Peterson in New York in 1950. He had played on the radio and recorded for RCA in Canada before Granz persuaded him to move south; he became an extremely popular jazz musician because of his powerful swing and outstanding technique. He mostly led trios, first with Ray Brown on bass and guitarist Irving Ashby, then Barney Kessel, then Herb Ellis; in 1958 he replaced the guitar with drummer Ed Thigpen.

Peterson has been controversial, paradoxically because he is not controversial. His two-handed style is muscular and inventive, but not formally innovative, though he has brought a very high degree of formal excellence to his playing: he has been described as the Liszt of jazz piano. His knowledge of music and his technique are so facile that at his best the phrasing and ornamentation become part of the music. Some have said that he does not swing. This foolish canard is based partly on what is perceived as his ‘whiteness’: his father worked all his life as a railway porter, and his very talented older sister Daisy worked as a domestic; but he did not come from a tenement slum in Harlem. Apparently being black in a white society is not handicap enough; you have to be seen to suffer, which Peterson simply refused to do. He was recorded too much by Granz; so many albums could not all be first-rate. Some of the finest were made at the London House in Chicago with the original trio, but among the best of all, including his only solo albums, were those made for MPS in Germany in the 1960s, when Granz was between labels.

When Count Basie led a small group in 1950, it contained Wardell Gray and clarinettist Buddy DeFranco. In 1953-4 DeFranco toured with an excellent quartet in which Sonny Clark played piano. Granz recorded it, but the clarinet had been considered unfashionable since the end of the Swing Era. Perhaps it was viewed as an instrument of the New Orleans style, while after its domination by Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw during the Swing Era, suddenly there were a great many very fine tenor saxophonists; perhaps the fingering of the clarinet’s registers, which are divided into twelve rather than octaves, like the saxophone, make it more difficult to play fluently. At any rate, DeFranco did it, but was underrated then and has been since.

Continued in Part 2

 

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