Entries from October 2017 ↓

How lucky it was for the world-at-large that John Birks Gillespie came to decide at an early age that staying in Cheraw, South Carolina would be stultifying at best, hazardous at most to the health and fulfillment of a quick-witted, smart-alecky young African American. (“Probably I’d have been lynched,” he told me many decades hence.) When one thinks of what the Artist Known Forever as Dizzy did for both his country’s musical and intellectual life as well as for the sounds of Latin and South America, you recognize how irreplaceable he was to the 20th century.

And yet…there doesn’t seem to be as much hype for Dizzy Gillespie’s 100th birthday (Oct. 21) as there was for Ella, Billie, Monk and others whose centennials have been duly, even conspicuously observed. The modernist energies he seized and came to embody in the middle of the last century seem to have been either taken for granted, if not dismissed altogether at the start of this one. Maybe it’s also because Gillespie, for all his myriad accomplishments and innovations, carried throughout his 75 years (he died in 1993) a warm and accessible persona so widely known that it left behind relatively little in the way of mystery or mystique. It could also be that his legacy was so variegated as to make it difficult for those in its wake to properly apprehend its range. “How do you hug a mountain?” the late great jazz columnist Nels Nelson rhetorically asked in his Philadelphia Daily News eulogy.

Approaching the mountain at whatever angle is the obvious way to begin. And that means sifting through a half-century of recordings now scattered to the four winds of the digi-verse. Bebop, which Gillespie helped create and then coordinate to an aesthetic capable of speaking many languages, still has a lot to teach Hip Hop, as the brightest of artists in both camps well know. And Dizzy’s vast corpus of recoded output still speaks, rhymes, cracks wise and inspires those unfamiliar with, or hesitant to sample its glories.

So without further ado, here’s an informal and, yes, highly subjective starter set accessing some of more rewarding landmarks along the great wide Dizzy-Verse. And why waste your time, or mine, getting to the purest, richest lode of all?

THE INDISPENSIBLE

The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (2 CDs) (Bluebird) – Look no further than these as a place to start. The earliest tracks go as far back as 1939 when Gillespie, somewhere between 21 and 22, was flashing his nascent chops for bands led by Teddy Hill and Lionel Hampton. But the molten core of this collection comprises the 1947-1949 sessions of his 16-piece orchestra. People arch their eyebrows when you used the “force of nature” to describe anything or anybody (as they should). But as I’ve written once before of these sessions: “It is still possible to listen to the powerful recordings made by Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra in the late 1940s and feel everything around you transformed. What Orson Welles did for movies in Citizen Kane, Gillespie did for big band jazz.” (Do I overstate? I didn’t then, and I don’t now.) It was here that Gillespie’s lifelong inquiries into the force and applications of the Latin beat took hold with the gifted and ill-fated singer and percussionist Chano Pozo (1915-1948), who brought his congas to a pair of especially auspicious recording sessions in late December, 1947 that yielded, among other glories, George Russell’s “Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” tandem, Tadd Dameron’s “Good Bait” and the timeless “Manteca.” It was also here that the three-fourths of what would become known as the Modern Jazz Quartet with pianist-arranger John Lewis, drummer Kenny Clarke and vibraphonist Milt Jackson pooled their resources. Fans of traditional swing bands complained that this music was more difficult to dance to than what they were accustomed. And you may not move right away, mostly because you’re absorbing the hard, galvanic impact of what you’re hearing. But this music moves as surely as the Earth, the clouds and the fastest combustible vehicle you can imagine. The vinyl edition of these sessions is harder to find than this, but if that’s what you happen to value, it’s worth the effort.

And speaking of hard-to-find vinyl:

Dizzy Gillespie: The Development of an American Artist, 1940-1946 (2 LPs) (Smithsonian Collection) – Released in 1976, when the Smithsonian Institution’s jazz division, then curated by Martin Williams, was compiling and releasing intelligent and comprehensive archival recordings deep into the next decade. This one was especially revelatory for the steady-rolling insight it provided into Gillespie’s growth from callow swing insurgent to ringleader of the bebop cabal. The very first track, “Pickin’ the Cabbage” from 1940, was recorded when Gillespie was a member of the Cab Calloway Orchestra’s trumpet section and you can hear in its chord changes and fundamental design the genesis of what would later become in its first incarnation, “Interlude” (also included here in a track featuring a young Sarah Vaughan) and then, “A Night in Tunisia.” There’s a lot of ingenious connection-of-dots here: Two takes of the “Kerouac” tracks spun into thin air and fired into the din of Minton’s Playhouse in 1942 — and yes, it’s named for THAT Kerouac, who was an habitué of those groundbreaking sessions also memorialized by Ralph Ellison in his 1959 essay, “The Golden Age, Time Past.” You also hear what’s been called Gillespie’s first truly “modern” solo on 1942’s “Jersey Bounce,” with Les Hite’s and, from that same year, a track from the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, “Little John Special,” written by Gillespie and containing a horn-section riff that sounds like the spark for what became “Salt Peanuts.” All these important and still-sweet-swinging tracks have been scattered on several discs since this went out of print and never received the digital-transfer treatment. Ken Burns Jazz: Dizzy Gillespie (Verve) is as easily available a default option as any other you’ll come across.

DIONYSUS & APOLLO

Or, if you will, Bird and Diz (Verve), who some might consider the Janus headed progenitor of modern jazz music. The partnership of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker was transformative. The friendship was, saying the least, fraught. Yet they were able to subdue personal differences for this 1950 session, where they were joined by the comparably incomparable Thelonious Monk and backed by bassist Curley Russell and the (seemingly incongruous, but not as much as you’d expect) drummer Buddy Rich. If you prefer downloads, then “Bloomdido” is the only track you really need from this session, though the rest is pretty good, too. If you want to hear them at their mutually-assured best together, then seek out Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker: Town Hall, New York City, 1945 (Uptown), which wasn’t released until sixty years later and yet somehow sounds as fresh and up-to-the-minute as last month’s GNP report.

GEMS FROM HIS GILDED AGE

Jon Faddis, Gillespie’s protégé and still the most authoritative keeper of his mentor’s flame, has said that the recordings Gillespie made in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented his peak as a performer and a bandleader. I’ve always thought so, too, though The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings  begs to differ with both of us, calling Dizzy’s Verve output from that period spotty at best.

Nevertheless, it’s now hard to find anybody who doesn’t like Birks Works: The Verve Big-Band Sessions (2 CDs, Verve), composed of sessions from 1956 and 1957. The orchestrations here may not be as explosive as they were about a decade before. But his roster was even more star-studded with Benny Golson, Lee Morgan. Phil Woods, Melba Liston, Wynton Kelly, Al Grey, Ernie Wilkins and many others passing through these portals and bringing joy, wit and verve to audiences throughout the world as most of these folks also were with Gillespie on his global good-will tours of the mid-fifties. Lately, I’ve been hearing more tracks from this collection circulating through what broadcasters market as “Real Jazz” or “Classic Jazz” stations on satellite or FM radio. So I suppose this is where most novices now start with Gillespie. I still favor the RCA sessions, but this may be the orchestra’s most purely enjoyable set from start to finish – which is saying something.

Gillespiana (Verve) – At the dawn of the New Frontier (literally the week after JFK was elected), the Gillespie orchestra seemed irradiated by a jolt of energy provided by a 28-year-old Argentine pianist-arranger named Boris Claudio Schifrin, who went by the name, “Lalo.” Previously an arranger for Xavier Cugat’s dance bands (many of whose albums were in Ralph Ellison’s record library), Schifrin sat in Gillespie’s piano chair as the band recorded a five-part suite, “Gillespiana” that he’d written four years before. Once again, a Gillespie orchestra summons fearsome power and breathtaking propulsion. The music on “Gillespiana” starts at a peak and somehow manages to go higher and faster  from there. How could we not want to go the moon after hearing something like this? On the CD version, there’s also a Carnegie Hall Concert by the same band recorded six months later (in March, 1961) and even with luminaries as Clark Terry, Ray Baretto and Gunther Schuller (!) on stage, the star of the show, besides the leader, was saxophonist Leo Wright whose solo on “This Is The Way” is one of the more extraordinary live recitals of an era where Carnegie Hall seemed to make history every week.

DIZZY AT PLAY

I concede that the scale on this list is heavily tipped towards the big bands over the small groups. But you really can’t go wrong with any of them. An Electrifying Evening with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (Verve), for instance, was recorded in February, 1961 (that same “dawn-of-the-New-Frontier” streak) and benefits mightily from having both the aforementioned Schifrin and Wright in the combo, though the leader doesn’t engage in too many of the on-stage hijinks for which he was famous. (“Let me introduce the band,” he’d say and all the guys on stage would shake hands with each other. You think that didn’t get a laugh every time? Think again.) If I have a guilty pleasure among the chamber Dizzys, it’s Dizzy Gillespie & the Mitchell-Ruff Duo (Mainstream/Sony Legacy), a 1971 live concert at Dartmouth College in which Inspector Diz matched wits with pianist Dwike Mitchell and bassist-French horn-ist Willie Ruff. With no trap set or congas pushing him from behind, Gillespie’s horn seems ever more emboldened as it probes and tugs along the edges of “Con Alma” and “Woodyn’ You” to release fresh, lucid inventions into the atmosphere.

Finally to send you happily on your way (as Gillespie never failed to do), I leave you with this reminder of how popular, how familiar a figure he was in the popular culture firmament. Bebop lived even in places you didn’t expect. Maybe someday it will live like that again.

At the top of this man-made hill you will find the first poem I’ve finished in several years. It is also the shortest poem I’ve ever written. Because pride is a sin I will say only that I am happier with it than I expected. It may not have the Whitman-esque oomph of Muhammad Ali’s immortal “Me!/Whee!” It is also not entirely original since I borrowed the “Clonk!” from Jack Kerouac’s verbal approximation of a Thelonious Monk chord: “the clonk of [Monk’s] millennial piano like anvils in Petrograd.” The sounds of both “onk” words seem exotic on first encounter, but make perfect, even logical sense when joined together.

Much like the music Thelonious Monk made: The direct statement augmented by something you may not have expected.

Today (Oct. 10) is Monk’s 100th birthday and, though he’s been dead for 35 years, the “clonk” of fresh discovery abides in his life’s work. You can still trip over things you didn’t know before and, once you recover your balance, find yourself dancing along with its ramifications. Just as he did.

For example: I’m embarrassed to ask this out loud, but how did I manage to live this long and NOT get caught up, until now, in the whirlwind of Monk’s 1958 Five Spot sessions with Johnny Griffin? Some would-be smart-alecks think of Griffin as little more than the answer to a trivia question: Who was Monk’s tenor saxophonist between John Coltrane and Charlie Rouse? But the “Little Giant,” who died in 2008 at age 80, was hardly a footnote in anybody’s history.

Griffin was both paradigm and paragon of the hard-blowing Chicago saxophonists who roared through mid-to-late-20th century jazz music. Once Griffin reached peak intensity in his tone (bottom-heavy, reflecting his apprenticeship with rhythm-and-blues bands), he could spin chorus after breathtaking chorus of thick, fluid phrases, bulging with allusions to Italian arias, arcane folk melodies and Tin Pan Alley ditties as well as his own startling, vertically driven inventions. He may not have had Coltrane’s commanding austerity and fearsome range or Rouse’s dry wit and leathery brio. But what Griffin did have put the mercurial maestro of time and space in his comfort zone. And you can hear its overall effect resound happily in the performances compiled on the two-disc Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin: Complete Live at the Five Spot (2012, Phoenix Records). For those who now only have ears for vinyl, Thelonious In Action is apparently easily available and while Mysterioso, the other original Riverside LP covering these sessions, appears to be only available on CD.

I’d be happy to dwell on the specifics of Monk-Griffin, believing that I’d uncovered a whole expanse of untilled territory to cultivate. But I found out that none other than Dean Robert Christgau got there a good while before me and I am more than happy to yield my remaining time on this topic to him. And also to this.

Meanwhile, the Monk Century is getting its proper due from many precincts, the most attention by far going to the homage submitted to the marketplace only a few days ago by Joey Alexander, the preeminent jazz prodigy of the post-Millennium. He’s 14, they tell me, though I often wonder watching performances like this one how ANY 14-year-old carries himself with as much composure as he stretches the parameters of Monk’s “Evidence,” while respecting, even enhancing the piece’s spacious design. There’s a whole album of this stuff, Joey Live Monk (Motema) ready for downloading and it’s enough to for me to admit that whatever qualms I may have entertained about this kid beforehand have now gone away and hidden under an abandoned back porch. He is, as we sportscasters like to say, For Real.

At the other end of the spectrum, in more ways than one, is Wadada Leo Smith’s Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk (TUM). At age 75, Smith is enjoying a bountiful winter of recognition for his life’s work as trumpeter, composer and bandleader, creating fresh contexts for orchestrated jazz and delivering plaintive, ruminative yet remarkably agile narratives on his horn. His liner notes acknowledge his considerable debt to Monk, “an inspiration that arcs straight across the structured invisible world.” Smith’s own art, whether alone or in groups, uses intervals as nimbly as the master. In his own renditions of “Ruby, My Dear,” “Reflections,” “Crepuscule with Nellie” and “Round Midnight” (all of which dare the bold and the thoughtful to bring their “A” Game), Smith seems to know precisely how to sustain spaces between phrases and, more important, when to come in hard, when to use stealth – and, in the case with “Nellie,” when to let its essential form do most of the work. He rounds out the album with original pieces, a couple of them stimulated by visual depictions of the pianist at work (“Monk and his Five-Point Ring at the Five Spot Café,” “Adagio Monk, the Composer in Sepia – A Second Vision”) and another, intriguingly speculative narrative (“Monk and Bud Powell at Shea Stadium – A Mystery”). Generations of jazz musicians have brought their adorations of Monk to his legacy’s front door. I doubt there is any other musician alive who could have presented anything as austere, adventurous and cordially challenging as Smith’s recital.

But perhaps the centennial year’s brightest jewel was unearthed earlier this year and, properly, it comes from Monk’s own archives. Les liasons dangereuses 1960 (Sam Records/Sag) delivers a substantial, previously unreleased account of a July, 1959 session of Monk’s quartet providing soundtrack material for Roger Vadim’s, modern-dress adaptation of the salacious 18th-century saga of seduction and betrayal among the French elite. Professional and psychological travails prevented Monk from providing original compositions for Vadim’s movie. (The liner notes by Robin D.G. Kelley, author of the definitive 2009 biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, are lucid and comprehensive.) Thus most of Monk’s contributions to the soundtrack are renditions of “Rhythm-a-Ning,” “Pannonica,” “Six in One” and his other familiar standards. The vogue for modern jazz being what it was in the late 1950s, most of the movie’s patrons found these songs to be properly hip ornaments to the spicy on-screen actions. Independent of the film, they present Monk in one of his happier, friskier states-of-being that overcame an especially arduous time in his life. The aforementioned Charlie Rouse and the then 22-year-old French tenor player Barney Wilen either traded off solos or fronted together on saxophone on these sessions while bassist Sam Jones and drummer Art Taylor provided backup. In this work-for-hire, one hears the stirrings of Monk’s 1960s period of wider popularity and greater opportunity. He plays here as though he knows that better times (relatively speaking) were around the corner.