Thursday, June 30, 2016

Jessica Williams Revisited

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.


I first “met” Jessica around 1980. This was back in the days when one could kill a few minutes waiting for a business appointment or a luncheon while perusing the local record store.

Usually privately-owned and operated, every community in southern California seem to have one and some of these Mom-and-Pop stores even had a Jazz section.

It was during one such diversions that I noticed an LP in the cut-out bin by Jessica Jennifer Williams entitled Orgonomic Music [Clean Cuts CC703]. On the back of the album sleeve was the following quotation by Wilhelm Reich:

"Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.”

I didn’t know who Reich was, nor did I know anything about “Jessica Jennifer Williams” and the only musician in the sextet featured on the album that I was [barely] familiar with was trumpet player Eddie Henderson.

But what the heck, Philip Elwood of The San Francisco Examiner said of Jessica that she was a devotee of Reich’s whose sentiments I agreed with, the LP was only a buck, so I gave it a shot.

Boy, am I glad I did. I’ve been listening to everything I can get my hands on by Jessica ever since.

However, it wasn’t until 1992, thanks to a fortuitous business trip to San Francisco, that I had the opportunity to hear Jessica in person as a part of pianist Dick Whittington’s on-going Maybeck Recital Hall series.

I “stayed close” to Jessica’s music in the 1990’s thanks to my association with Philip Barker, the owner of Jazz Focus Records for whom Jessica made a number of recordings including her Arrival CD which has the distinction of being the very first disc issued by Philip’s label [JFCD001].


Thanks to a tip from Gene Lees in one of his JazzLetters, I was also able to score one of the limited edition [1,000] Joyful Sorrow compact discs that Blackhawk Records issued as her solo piano tribute to the late, Bill Evans.

It was recorded at The Jazz Station, CarmelCA on September 15, 1996 on the 16th anniversary of Bill’s death.

Sadly, too, The Jazz Station in Carmel is no more, but Joyful Sorrow endures as just about my all-time favorite Jessica recording.


Thankfully, Jessica has subsequently released quite a number of solo piano and trio Jazz recordings, many of which are available as audio CD’s and Mp3 downloads.

Jessica is a powerful and pulsating pianist.  He music literally “pops” out at the listener it’s so full of energy and enthusiasm.

She records many solo piano albums, a format which can sometimes be a recipe for self-indulgence and excessive displays of technique.  But Jessica’s music is always tasteful and informed. You can hear the influences from the Jazz tradition in her playing, but you also hear innovative probing and forays into her unique conception of what she is trying to say about herself and how she hears the music.

Her touch on the instrument is such that she makes the piano SOUND! It rings clear and resonates as it only can in the hands of a masterful pianist.

As Grover Sales, the distinguish author and lecturer on Jazz has commented:

“Jessica Williams belongs to that exclusive group Count Basie dubbed "the poets of the piano" that includes Roger Kellaway, Sir Roland Hanna, Ellis Larkins, Jaki Byard, Bill Mays, Alan Broadbent, Cedar Walton, the late Jimmy Rowles and of course, Bill Evans. All share in common a thorough working knowledge of classic piano literature from pre-Bach to contemporary avant garde as well as the classic jazz tradition from Scott Joplin to the present.

All developed an astonishing and seemingly effortless technique that enabled them to venture anywhere their fertile imaginations wished to take them. All take to heart the dictum of Jelly Roll Morton in his epic 1938 interview for the Library of Congress: ‘No pianist can play jazz unless they try to give the imitation of a band.’

 And for all of their varied influences from Earl Hines to Bill Evans and beyond, all are instantly identifiable—unique in the literal sense of this often misused word.”


Writing in the insert booklet to Jessica’s Maybeck Hall CD [Concord CCD-4525], Jeff Kaliss notes:

“It's all there in the first track. Within a few choruses, Jessica Williams shows her hand, or hands: the harmonies in seconds (hit way off to the side of the piano), the punchy attack, the dust-devils in the upper octaves, the nutty quotes. It's familiar Jessica, but she's got plenty up her sleeve for the rest of this remarkable entry in the Maybeck menagerie. …

She came to my awareness as a word-of-mouth legend, a Baltimore-bred genius whose history and personality were said to be as mysterious and unpredictable as her keyboard inventions. As soon as I got to hear her, I was into the reality of her spontaneous magic and not much concerned with the legend. …

[She] has remained a best-kept secret … commanding awe and quiet in the clubs she visited … [her playing] filled with energy and imagination.”

One gets more about her sense of “energy and imagination” when one reads the following notes that Jessica wrote about herself and her music for her Intuition CD [Jazz Focus JFCD 010]:

“I'm occasionally asked where I studied to learn to do what I do; who taught me, what "tricks" are involved, what secrets enable me, how does the process occur... how does one "distill magic out of the air?" The truth is that there are no practice techniques, no miracle drugs, no mantras, no short-cuts to creativity. I tell them that I've played piano since I was four, that I've played jazz since I was twelve, that I've never taken another job doing anything except what I've always known I should be doing in this life: playing music. And maybe that's a part of the answer, if indeed there is one. It's about Castenada's PATHCampbell's BLISS; you follow it no matter where it leads, and over many years you learn to control it, channel it, allow it to happen.

You become the bow; the arrow is the gift. You never fully own it, just as you can never explore all of its depths, because it springs from the infinite possibilities within you. In this realm, your only ally, your only guide, is intuition. It is seeing instead of looking, knowing instead of believing, being instead of doing. It is Coltrane on the saxophone, Magic Johnson on the court, Alice Walker on the printed page; it is the primary intuition of "right-brained" activity, the birthing of idea into existence.

Perhaps it cannot be taught, but it certainly can be shared...and it is in the sharing that we all experience the best parts of ourselves. We instinctively intuit our organic truth; when we learn to live it, our planet could be paradise.

Your dreams are your sacred truth. …”

You can listen to Jessica’s quite stunning pianism on the following from the Joyful Sorrow Bill Evans tribute CD.





Wednesday, June 29, 2016

The Organ in Jazz - Part 2

© -  Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.


“WHILE BILL DAVIS, Doggett, and Jackie  Davis were slowly but irrevocably organizing the bars and grills of America, the whole process was repeated in a new cycle.

A young pianist in Philadelphia, inspired in 1953 by Bill Davis, decided to change over to organ. It took Jimmy Smith a year or two of constant practice to build a technique and style that were as far removed from Bill Davis' as Davis' had been from Waller's. Smith formed a trio in September, 1955, and was heard a few months later on a gig at the Cafe Bohemia in New York City.

If the first exposure to Davis had turned some musicians around, the reaction to Smith had them upside down. Because so many albums have gone over the counter since 1956, and because electronic organs of late have suffered from the overexposure that invariably leads to boredom among the critics, it is difficult to realize just how fantastic Smith sounded and how incredible his command of the instrument was and still remains.

Part of Smith's success lay in his extraordinary selection of stops. Not being an organist I can't go into technical details, but a comparison of his sounds with those of any on records made before 1956 will reveal that Smith had indeed developed new combinations that gave the instrument unheard-of tonal variety and color, greater rhythmic impact, and a broader range of dynamics and moods.

One of Smith's most effective devices was the extensive use of what would normally be called pedal-points, though manual-points would be a more appropriate term. One hand may hold a note or chord while the other embarks on a wild series of eighths or a jagged row of rhythmic punctuations of the kind that have led to the comparison of his lines with the urgency of a Morse code transmission.

The Morse-code analogy having been used to his detriment by some Smith detractors, it is important to point out that the harmonic and melodic value of Smith's work is at least as important and that the open secret of his phenomenal success has been a blend of accomplishments on all four levels —  tonal, rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic.

The number of Smith-inspired organists probably runs into the hundreds. Yet the pattern established by admirers of Bill Davis has been repeated: the original excitement and enthusiasm shown by fellow musicians and critics has abated, to be replaced by a far broader, though less analytical, audience of listeners who, in essence, are rhythm-and-blues fans, night-club or bar-and-grill patrons in search of a little excitement as a background for libation.

The post-Smith artists being too numerous to list in full, space permits only the singling out of a couple others who, in one way or another, have made a meaningful contribution to the history of jazz organ.


Outstanding among these is Shirley Scott, not only because she was the first girl to conquer the instrument, but because her work combines some of the most valuable elements of both the Bill Davis and Smith schools. Her early recordings with Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis in 1958 led critic John Tynan to hail her as "an outstanding jazz organist, modern yet rooted deep in the blues, and with ample technique to implement her wide-ranging imagination." Miss Scott's recordings with her own trio in the last couple of years have confirmed this early impression.

Duke Ellington, George Shearing, and many others who have heard him in Chicago swear by the gifts of Les Strand. Strand made an LP some years ago (no longer available) but has had little exposure in proportion to the degree of ability with which his patrons have credited him.

THE PRESENT STATE of the organ in jazz is anomalous. It is almost the only instrument that has suffered from being associated with a particular school of jazz. The reason for the qualifying "almost" is that just as the organ lately has been identified with rhythm-and-blues, the clarinet has suffered through its almost-exclusively psychological link with the swing era.

There is no logical reason for this situation. The strictly organ-ic quality of the early Waller and Basic efforts ultimately was shown to be replaceable by a harder-swinging, more vital sound. Similarly, there is no need to assume that the rhythm-and-blues funk of the present-day organist flanked by guitar and drums (frequently with a tenor saxophone replacing or supplementing the guitar) represents the last and only context for the organ.

What has been accomplished to date, despite the staggering impression made not so long ago when Jimmy Smith arrived on the scene, is only a small segment of what could and probably will be achieved in due course. There is no reason why all organists should play in the currently accepted styles, no reason why so many organists should be former not-very-successful pianists who took up the instrument for strictly commercial purposes, no reason why the potential of the organ should not be drawn out to its fullest extent through its adoption by musicians in the "new thing" or atonal movement.

Greater overall musicianship — that is to say, complete and correct technical command of the organ's seemingly insuperable difficulties, combined with a thorough harmonic sense and a feeling for the newer movements in contemporary jazz—can lift the organ to a plateau on which it will no longer be rejected by critics as a novelty or condemned as a funk machine.

There is also, it seems, no reason why a conflict should exist between organists and bass players. It would be fascinating to conduct a survey of how many bassists have lost work in the past seven years as a result of the organ craze. (On the other hand, an even larger number of guitarists and tenor saxophonists should be thankful for its arrival, since a tremendous amount of employment was created for them.) The theory seems to be that the bassist's notes at best will merely duplicate or at worst conflict with what the organist's left foot is doing.

If the organist has not developed an adequate pedal technique, it is possible to play the bass notes on the keyboard, though this has the effect of confining the soloist to one hand. On the other hand—or rather on the other foot—if a bass player Is present, it is possible to use the foot pedals in a different way, for punctuations or the bottoms of chords, much the way a tuba is sometimes incorporated nowadays into a band that already has a string bass player to take care of the normal bass role.

The situation concerning the relationship between bassist and organist was brought sharply into focus for some a few months ago during the taping of a Vi Redd album for Atlantic. The LP was cut in two sessions, one in New York, the other in Hollywood. On the first session, Ben Tucker was provided with bass parts by organist Hyman; the bassist seemed perfectly at ease, and the rhythm section benefited from it, On the other date, Leroy Vinnegar was on bass, and the organ was played by a very talented young woman named Jennell Hawkins; but this was a more informal session with little or no written music, and at one point Vinnegar complained of feeling redundant.

The solution was simple: if the organist and bassist understand and follow each other, they can complement rather than interfere.

The future of jazz organ may well lie not only in its use by musicians of the most avant-garde inclinations but also by its incorporation into larger units in which it will not have such an overpowering effect. As the dominant voice in a trio or quartet, it can easily get to be a bore. As a comparatively little fish in a big orchestral pond, it can be used with greater discretion. Even though there was nothing startlingly different in what Richard Holmes played on his LP with the Gerald Wilson Band the album is important just for this reason.

Instead of its present status as a sound that is merely pleasing, or at best stimulating, but without much musical food for serious thought, the organ eventually can develop into one of the major voices in modern jazz.

Musicians will enter the scene who have played organ, and nothing else, from childhood. Serious composers will arise whose ideas have been created and expressed through this extraordinarily capacious medium. Critical apathy or opposition will subside as young organists, quite possibly taking advantage of new models' glissandos and other innovations, begin to show the new directions opening up.

It may not happen in the next couple of years, but there should be a better than 50-50 chance of such developments before another generation rolls around. One need only examine the enormous strides made from Waller to Smith. If all this could happen between the early 1940s and the late 1950s, the big wave of the future may be closer than we think.”

 

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

The Organ in Jazz - Part 1

© -  Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.


Other than a comprehensive retrospective in Barry Kernfeld’s The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz which was edited and reprinted in 1995 and Christopher Washburne’s two page reference as part of his essay entitled Miscellaneous Instruments in Jazz which is included in Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz [2000], the following history of Jazz organ by Leonard Feather is the best overview of the organ’s history that I’ve yet to come across although it is limited by the fact that it was published in the October 24, 1963 edition of Down Beat and therefore couldn’t include references to current masters such as Larry Goldings, Barbara Dennerlein and the sublime Joey DeFrancesco.


Like the harmonica and the accordion, there is a great deal of controversy surrounding the appropriateness of the instrument in a Jazz setting: usually Jazz fans either love it or hate it.


I am a big fan of the organ in Jazz, and have been ever since I heard Jimmy Smith’s  Hammond B-3 performances on his Blue Note recordings from the 1950’s and 60’s.


Because of its length, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles is offering this feature in two-parts.


“ON Nov. 17, 1926, at the Victor studios in Camden, N.J., a 22-year-old pianist named Fats Waller changed his name, for a couple of hours, back to Thomas Waller. There was reason for more dignified billing on the record label when St. Louis Blues and Lenox Avenue Blues were released: on this unprecedented occasion Waller had reverted to an instrument he often referred to as his first love, the pipe organ.


This was the beginning of the long, slowly developed first chapter in the history of jazz organ. The second, which was not to begin for a full decade, stemmed from the first use on records of the modern electronic organ. The third chapter was launched in 1950 when two tunes were cut for a single 78-rpm release by Bill Davis, who brought a comparatively modern sound to the electronic organ. The fourth and most productive chapter began, of course, with the arrival in 1956 of Jimmy Smith and the subsequent mass organization of ex-pianists (and of bars and grills) from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me.


To view this sequence of developments in correct perspective, one must admit a priori that the organ at first had no basic relationship to jazz and seemed like a complete outsider, a freak novelty. The fact of its extensive church use had less bearing on the matter than might have been expected, though Waller once tried to imply a link by recording pipe organ solo versions (in a predominantly reverent, only occasionally jazz-tinged manner) of a half-dozen Negro spirituals. (There was occasional use of organs on early Negro religious records, but the organ attributed to Fred Longshaw on some Bessie Smith 1925 sides was merely a harmonium.)

The lack of any strong association between the organ and traditional jazz does not seem as relevant when one takes into account the fact that at one time even the saxophones were regarded as outsiders, maverick horns brought in from the world of brass bands, and that just about every instrument introduced to jazz was a seemingly irrelevant innovation at one stage or another.


The real reasons for the delay in the organ's acceptance were, first, the lack of accessibility of the instrument and the unusual expense involved in buying or renting one (this remained true even after the invention of the electronic version); second, the extraordinary demands placed on the performer.


Although virtually all jazz organists today are former pianists, the piano is a limited proving ground. Switching to organ, of course, involves many new elements: the use of multiple keyboards; of a vast variety of stops, endless combinations of which must be employed; and of the left foot, not merely to pay out the time, but also to play walking single-note lines on pedals that are arranged like the black and white notes on the keyboard, i.e. chromatically.


The use of the foot gives the most trouble. As Dick Hyman says(“I am indebted to Dick Hyman for his assistance in the writing of the technical passages. L.G.F.), "I know of no jazz or pop organist who can do the unbelievable things that Bach organ pieces call for. Playing foot pedals is the beginner's chief problem; continual practice and co-ordination are needed, akin to that between drummer's hand-and-foot relationship."


Obviously there is a great difference in technique involved in playing the various organ models now available to the beginner.


Pipe organs were originally just that, with air resonating in pipes, some open and some stopped, some with reeds, etc., and in the early days using bellows operated by a second person, until electrification arrived. After the early church use, pipe organs were adapted to theaters. They had many percussive instruments actually built in: xylophones, drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, celestes, even pianos, as well as a variety of sound effects.


The electronic organ changed all this. It was claimed that the electric models could synthesize any tone from nine drawbars, individually manipulating and controlling the primary tone (eight feet), and the octave below (16 feet), the octave above (four feet), the octave above that (two feet), harmonics (5 1/3, 2 2/3, and others) that produce various fifth or third overtones. The sum total was a virtually infinite variety of tonal combinations. (The lengths listed in feet refer to the proportionate length of the pipes; these terms are still in use even though the actual pipes are not.)

The tones can be modified also by a built-in vibrato with several degrees of rapidity and waver, and there is now a universally used speaker, the Leslie, that rotates in separate woofer and tweeter units.


One new model of organ is, quite literally, something else. It has two speakers, one for each manual (keyboard), used separately or together, one a Leslie and one not, so that both types of speaker effect can be obtained together or alternately. In addition to a built-in reverberation, this new model has a "glide-pedal" that gives the player the fascinating and unique facilities for actually dipping into a tone or bending a note.


The only jazz musician who has experimented extensively with this model is Hyman, but further work with it may well lead, it seems, to the first major post-Smith step in jazz organ.


The organ touch has to differ from the piano's, because the tone stops instantly on release of the key and furthermore is not affected by the strength with which the key is struck. The loud-soft pedal must be used, a more legato style must be developed, and there is no equivalent of the way a pianist uses the sustaining pedal, though some models can approximate the piano sustaining-pedal effect through optional use of reverberation.



UNFORTUNATELY THE TIME has not yet come when jazz can claim to have developed musicians who started as organists rather than as pianists. When that day arrives, a whole new perspective may open up; meanwhile, the field is crowded with organists many of whom have an adequate but imperfect technique, most of whom studied piano but were self-taught as organists. Certainly Waller could have done much more for the organ had he been given the opportunity to study and play more often. On eight of the dozen tracks in the album Fats Waller in London [Capitol T 10258], Waller played a Compton pipe organ. "I'll never forget sitting down at the console of that magnificent organ in the HMV studio on the outskirts of London," he said later. "It reminded me of that Wurlitzer grand I played at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem when I was a kid 16 years old. I had myself a ball that afternoon, and the records really came easy." In addition to the six spirituals, which he did as organ solos, Fats played organ on two other tracks (Ain't Misbehavin' and Don't Try Your Jive on Me) with a British combo. These tracks are possibly the only examples now extant of an organ teaming successfully with an improvising swing-era combo. (The 1935 I Believe in Miracles, cut with a sextet in this country, may still be obtainable in The Real Fats Waller, Camden 473.)


Waller, though he rarely played organ in public, was no novice, of course; he had an organ in his home and often sat at it for many hours playing spirituals, hymns, and Bach fugues. It is said that he once named the three greatest men in history as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Johann Sebastian Bach, in that order.


Despite the problem of being weighed down by the somewhat bloated, diffuse sound so often produced on pipe organ — the   kind   that   used  to  be  boasted about in movie theater ads as "mighty" — Waller managed to make the monster swing. He had, as they say, the right touch, the light touch.

Nevertheless, when he first tried out the electronic organ a couple of years later at a Chicago session waxed in January, 1940. the less  cumbersome sound and the possibility of swinging  more  naturally were immediately apparent. The electronic organ obviously tended to facilitate an attack and genuine rhythmic pulsation such as could rarely be obtained from the mighty ones.


Waller recorded a number of tunes on the electronic model during the last four years of his life (he died in December, 1943), but almost all the best items have been cut out of the RCA Victor catalog; most, in fact, were never issued on LP at all. An album of electronic organ tracks featuring Waller and his 1940-42 groups (including, of course, Jitterbug Waltz) would be an appropriate release in these organ-oriented days. There were even one or two numbers on which he managed to swing a big band from the organ.


Aside from his own performances, the only organ records of any moment during Waller's lifetime were a solitary 1939 side on pipe organ by Count Basie with his band, Nobody Knows, now unavailable; a remarkable session on which Lester Young played as a side-man with a pseudo-jazz organist, Glenn Hardman; and a series of Decca 78s that were more notable for the piano of Willie (The Lion) Smith than for the pioneering but corny electronic organ work of Milt Herth.


Basie's status as an admirer and informal student of Waller did not lead to any substantial use of the big box. Basie's organ records have been so infrequent that a Joe Williams set is listed in the discography, simply because it is the only available LP on which Basie plays organ (electronic) throughout. His style is so close to Waller's that the source of inspiration is immediately evident.


THOUGH THERE may have been a few obscure, nonrecording exceptions to the rule, the organ in jazz lay virtually dormant for several years after Waller's death. Among the few men to observe this situation, and to do something about it, was William Strethen Davis.



It was while he was working with Louis Jordan's Tympany Five as pianist (1945-8) that Bill Davis felt the urge to fill the gap left by the then complete lack of jazz organists. He woodshedded, spending much of 1949 perfecting a modern technique capable of bringing to the organ some of the then prevailing new ideas in jazz. He experimented with the recorded sound of the electronic instrument in two trial sides with Jordan's group, Tamburitza Boogie and Lemonade Blues, in 1949.


At that time Mercer Ellington was my partner in a company, Mercer records. Ellington's father was so enthusiastic when he first heard Davis that he took him to a recording studio where, with Johnny Collins on guitar and Jo Jones on drums, two tunes were recorded, Make No Mistake and Things Ain't What They Used to Be. Duke himself sat in on piano for Things Ain't. The record was released on a single 78 and later incorporated into a 10-inch LP, New Stars, New Sounds, which has long since been cut out.


The reaction to the initial release was unprecedented. Musicians were gassed by Make No Mistake, which combined all the elements of single-line bop improvisation with full-blooded chord effects and a surging beat. Not only was this the beginning of the modern era in jazz organ, it was also the start of an instrumentation that was to become standard in hundreds of combos: organ, guitar, and drums.


(To give the sides a little added impetus that would stress the startling nature of the sounds, "Wild" was added to Davis' name. Before long Wild Bill Davis had become a major name, too firmly established to change.)


At first there was considerable skepticism when Davis took his organ into night clubs and bars. "What are you trying to do, make a church out of this place?" was the usual question asked.


The impact of Davis enabled many others who for years had been dabbling with the organ to take it up as a full-time profession. Milt Buckner, known for years as pianist with Lionel Hampton, then as pianist and vibraharpist with his own big band in 1949-50. spent a couple more years back with Hampton and then organized his own trio in 1952, playing organ exclusively. The locked-hand or block-chord piano style, which he had played a major role in establishing during the early 1940s, could be transferred very logically to organ.


Bill Doggett, who succeeded Davis as pianist with Louis Jordan, ultimately followed the pattern of his predecessor, switching to organ and forming a trio. He was first heard as organist on some records with Ella Fitzgerald not long after he had taken up the instrument in 1951.


A still later Jordan sideman, Jackie Davis, has been established for several years as one of the more popular organ trio leaders.


Credit should also be given to three musicians who were probably a little ahead of Bill Davis & Co. chronologically, though their particular styles did not have a comparatively massive impact and therefore passed relatively unnoticed. One was Bob Wyatt, who around 1948 was heard at the Royal Roost on Broadway working in a duo with pianist Billy Taylor. Wyatt impressed most listeners as a fine musician but not essentially a jazzman. He has recorded on the Forum label. Another was Doug Duke, best known for his home-built organ-cum-piano. Duke played with Lionel Hampton's band in 1950 and was heard in a few since-deleted Decca sides by Hampton and a quintet and in an LP on Regent records. Charlie Stewart, another organist who was ahead of his time, played at Wells' in New York about 15 years ago.


Although there were, as noted, unmistakable traces of the Gillespie-Parker influence in some of the improvisations of Bill Davis and his followers, the primary value of the new electronic organ sound they developed was in its ability to swing loud and long, with a tendency toward full, heavy-chorded passages and a feeling for strongly syncopated, extended riffing on the blues. Because of this, after the first shock had worn off, the purist jazz fans began to bypass the organists or to dismiss them as rhythm-and-blues performers. (The term rock and roll had not yet come into currency.) Doggett even won a Cash Box award later on as top r&b soloist.”


To be continued in Part 2.


Monday, June 27, 2016

"Introducing Scott LaFaro" by Martin Williams

© -  Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.


“The Jazz Review was founded by Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams and Hsio Wen Shih in New York in 1958. The Jazz Review was the premier journal of Jazz in the United States. Short-lived as it was [1958-1961], it set an enduring standard for criticism.

Thanks to Nat Hentoff’s generosity, the entire run of The Jazz Review is available online and you can visit it via this link.

The following piece is drawn from the August, 1960 edition.

"It's quite a wonderful thing to work with the Bill Evans trio," said bassist Scott LaFaro. "We are really just beginning to find our way. You won't hear much of that on our first record together, except a little on Blue In Green where no one was playing time as such, Bill was .improvising lines, I was playing musical phrases behind him, and Paul Motian played in free rhythmic drum phrases."

LaFaro is dissatisfied with a great deal of what he hears in jazz, but what he says about it isn't mere carping. He thinks he knows what to do about it, at least in his own playing. "My ideas are so different from what is generally acceptable nowadays that i sometimes wonder if I am a jazz musician. I remember that Bill and I used to reassure each other some nights kiddingly that we really were jazz musicians. I have such respect for so many modern classical composers, and I learn so much from them. Things are so contrived nowadays in jazz, and harmonically it has been so saccharine since Bird."

Charlie Parker was already dead before Scott LaFaro was aware of him, even on records. In fact Scott LaFaro was not really much aware of jazz at all until 1955.

He was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey, but his family moved to Geneva, New York, when he was five. "There was always the countryside. I miss it now. I am not a city man. Maybe that is why Miles Davis touches me so deeply. He grew up near the countryside too, I believe. I hear that in his playing anyway. I've never been through that 'blues' thing either." LaFaro started on clarinet at fourteen and studied music in high school. He took up bass on a kind of dare. "My father played violin with a small 'society' trio in town. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I had finished school, and my father said — half-joking, I think — that if I learned bass, I could play with them. When I did, I knew that I wanted to be a musician. It's strange: playing clarinet and sax didn't do it, but when I started on bass, I knew it was music."

He went to Ithaca Conservatory and then to Syracuse; it was there, through fellow students, that he began to listen to jazz. He got a job in Syracuse at a place called the Embassy Club. "The leader was a drummer who played sort of like Sidney Catlett and Kenny Clarke. He formed my ideas of what jazz was about. He, and the jukebox in the place — it had Miles Davis records. And I first heard Percy Heath and Paul Chambers on that jukebox. They taught me my first jazz bass lessons. There was also a Lee Konitz record with Stan Kenton called Prologue."

In late 1955, LaFaro joined Buddy Morrow's band. "We toured all over the country until I left the band in Los Angeles in September 1956. I didn't hear any jazz or improve at all during that whole time." But a few weeks after he left Morrow, he joined a Chet Baker group that included Bobby Timmons and Lawrence Marable. "I found out so much from Lawrence, a lot of it just from playing with him. I have trouble with getting with people rhythmically and I learned a lot about it from him. I learned more about rhythm when I played with Monk last fall; a great experience. With Monk, rhythmically, it's just there, always."

LaFaro remembers two other important experiences in California. The first was hearing Ray Brown, whose swing and perfection in his style impressed him. The other came when he lived for almost a year in the mountain-top house of Herb Geller and his late wife, Lorraine. "I practiced and listened to records. I had — I still have — a feeling that if I don't practice I will never be able to play. And Herb had all the jazz records; I heard a lot of music, many people for the first time, on his records."

In September 1958 LaFaro played with Sonny Rollins in San Francisco, and later he worked with the same rhythm section behind Harold Land. "I think horn players and pianists have probably influenced me the most, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Sonny perhaps deepest of all. Sonny is technically good, harmonically imaginative, and really creative. He uses all he knows to make finished music when he improvises.

"I found out playing with Bill that I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns, and form. I think a lot more imaginative work could be done within them than most people are doing, but I can't abandon them. That's why 1 don't think I could play with Ornette Coleman. I used to in California; we would go looking all over town for some place to play, I respect the way he overrides forms. It's all right for him, but I don't think I could do it myself. "Bill gives the bass harmonic freedom because of the way he voices, and he is practically the only pianist who does. It's because of his classical studies. Many drummers know too little rhythmically, and many pianists know too little harmonically. In the trio we were each contributing something and really improvising together, each playing melodic and rhythmic phrases. The harmony would be improvised; we would often begin only with something thematic and not a chord sequence.

"I don't like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. (I don't even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.) There are too many things to learn and too many things you can do, to keep doing the same things over and over. My main problem now is to get that instrument under my fingers so I can play more music."