JazzWax

Surf Club (Followup)

After my post on Art Pepper's The Complete Surf Club Sessions, I received the following e-mail from Don Frese:

"Thanks for the kind appreciation of Art Pepper, probably my favorite musician.  I bought the Capitol Shorty Rogers/Gerry Mulligan 12 inch LP in 1956 and fell in love with his playing about one chorus into Over the Rainbow.

The Bob Andrews material on Norma [Art Pepper Live at the Lighthouse '52, NOCD 5630] may still be available, but Japanese issues tend to go in and out of print. I have found that if it is available, a good source is Early Records in Japan (www.earlyrecords.com).

And don't we owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Andrews for all the wonderful live material from LA in the early 50s? The West Coast's Jerry Newman."

Surf Club Sessions

Art Pepper always sounds like a guy trying to scale the wall of a dam before they let the water out. There's an edgy, vulnerable feel to much of his work on the alto sax, and he played as though his time was limited. No album better captures Pepper in all his desperate glory than the Complete Surf Club Sessions (originally known as The Late Show and The Early Show).

Pepper was a West Coast musician who, like Dexter Gorden and Wardell Grey, came of age in the gritty clubs of Los Angeles' Central Avenue—before the arrival of cool jazz. With its mannered contrapuntal instrumentals and young photogenic players, cool transformed the West Coast's jazz scene. By the mid-1950s, cool jazz turned jazz into something of a fashion statement. In short order, the movie studios started snapping up the best jazz readers and players for film-score arranging and session work.

But before all that, there was West Coast bop. Like most alto players of the mid-1940s, Pepper was heavily  influenced by Charlie Parker and other East Coast bebop pioneers. But unlike most West Coast jazz musicians of the period, Pepper burned with a sweet intensity. You can hear the artistic passion in Pepper's early playing and his struggle to survive and thrive. There's also a certain sensitivity to his tone, which is rare among bop players of the time, who tended to use prowess and speed to mask tenderness and self-doubt. 

Pepper started his professional career in 1943 in Stan Kenton's band. Kenton—like Boyd Raeburn, Claude Thornhill and Woody Herman—favored intricate, brassy arrangements and high-powered musicianship. From its earliest days, Kenton's band was hell-bent on shifting audience attention away from the banality of dancing and focusing it on the more intensive art of listening.

Kenton turned the spotlight on his band's young instrumentalists and arrangers, many of whom were born and bred on the West Coast. The musicians were the stars, and they looked good, too.

After a brief stint in the army and playing as a sideman, Pepper rejoined Kenton in 1947 and remained until late 1951—a four-year period many consider to be Kenton's heyday.

Here's Pepper on his last days with the Kenton orchestra, from his autobiography, Straight Life (1979):

"At the end of 1951 I quit Kenton's band. It was too hard being on the road, being away from Patti, and I grew tired of the band. I knew all the arrangements by memory and it was really boring. I didn't get a chance to stretch out and play the solos I wanted to play or the tunes. I kept thinking how nice it would be to play with just a rhythm section in a jazz club where I could be the whole thing and do all the creating myself...

Also, the traveling got to be unbearable. At first I enjoyed it, but after a while, being nine months out of the year on the road, one-nighters every night... Sometimes we'd finish a job, change clothes, get on the bus, travel all night long, get to the next town in the daytime, check in and try to get some sleep, and then go and play the job...

Also I became more and more hooked and I went through some unbelievable scenes—running out of stuff on the road and not being able to score, having to play, sick, sitting on the stand spitting up bile into a big rage I kept under the music stand. I guess I looked sort of messed up. People started talking. Kenton became more and more suspicious. I imagined he knew I was doing more than drinking and smoking pot. So it seemed best that I leave the band and try to do something on my own, and I gave my notice. A lot of us quit at the same time. Shelly Manne quit. Shorty Rogers quit."

In truth, Pepper had to leave Kenton to serve a sentence of several months in prison for drug use. When he got out, Pepper played with Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne at the Lighthouse Club in Hermosa Beach in December  1951 and again in January 1952. In early February, Pepper put together his first group, the Art Pepper 4":

"I formed a group of my own. I got Joe Mondragon [on bass], and on drums Larry Bunker, who also played vibes. We worked out some things which we could do without the drums while he played vibes, or if he did a ballad I'd sit in on the drums and play a slow beat with the brushes. I got Hampton Hawes, an exceptional pianist. It was just a quartet, but it was very versatile."

On February 7,the group was booked for an extended stay at the Surf Club in Hollywood. On February 12, the early and late sets were recorded by a jazz fan. The result is the Complete Surf Club Sessions.

These sessions have always been my favorite Pepper recordings. You hear so many emotions at once in his playing. You hear Pepper's anxiety about being out on his own, you hear the pain of his drug habit, you hear the happiness about leading a group, you hear competitive tension among the players, you hear Pepper's fears about having to make ends meet, you hear his self-doubt, and you hear his rush to make a mark and be recognized by fans and critics. It's all there, in one CD.

Art Pepper made many great albums in the 1950s (Modern Art, in particular). But for me, none can touch the sweet heat of the Complete Surf Club Sessions. There are quite a few Pepper originals  here, including Easy Steppin', one of my favorite Pepper compositions that for some reason he never recorded in the studio. Easy Steppin' has such a pretty, early-1950s West Coast sound—a spirited bop melody line mellowed by long Pacific sunsets and steady weather.

The Surf Club Sessions also is one of the great live jazz recording dates. There's a mood here that doesn't exist on many live albums.

Hampton Hawes is relentless on the upright piano, Larry Bunker drives hard on drums and vibes, Joe Mondragon pounds away on the bass—and we even hear Pepper play clarinet on a handful of tracks, sounding more Benny Goodman than Buddy DeFranco.

This CD is a delight from start to finish and a must for anyone who wants to know what the West Coast scene sounded like before Chet Baker's popularity changed the matrix.

Wax tracks: Pepper's outstanding Kenton period is available on a terrific collection here. For a copy of Pepper's recording with Shorty Rogers in December 1951, go here.

The Complete Surf Club Sessions of February 1952 is available here. I warn you, the fidelity is a tiny bit raw (it's a live date), but I promise that the sound isn't really a factor given the art presented and the historic nature of the date. A month later, in March 1952, Pepper was in the studio for his first date as a leader. Surf Ride—also a must—is available here.

The only recording discussed above that's not in print in the US is the January 1952 Lighthouse session with Shorty Rogers. It includes a stunning Over the Rainbow that put Pepper on the map with critics. It's currently available as a CD only on the Japanese Norma label (Early Days, Vol. 1). Sadly, I haven't come across it here, which is a shame given its significance.

Wax clip: To see Art Pepper and Shelly Manne in Kenton's 1947 band, go here. Pepper is seated second from the left in the sax section. Manne, of course, is on drums. Listen to how challenging Kenton's arrangements were and how skilled and smooth the musicianship had to be. Kenton's sax section—and all of his sections, in fact—were tremendous. Kenton's theatrical conducting wasn't bad, either.

Milestones (1947)

Bebop's lifespan was relatively short as a radical movement. Despite the style's tremendous influence on jazz and jazz musicians (which continues to this day), bop in its purest form dominated the music scene for about only five years—from 1942 to 1947.

Bop's beginning can be dated roughly from Charlie Parker's recording of Cherokee in September 1941 to Miles Davis's Milestones of August 14, 1947.

Milestones is a critical jazz recording for two primary reasons:

First, Milestones was one of four tunes recorded by Miles Davis during his first outing as a leader at age 21 for Savoy Records. The Miles Davis All Stars, as the group was billed for the session, also featured Parker playing tenor for the first time in a studio.

Second, Milestones was radically different from other small-group bop arrangements and recordings up until that time. It's even different than the other three originals Miles composed and recorded that day (though Half Nelson is close). What makes Milestones significant is that it contains distinct traces of a new modal jazz style that was emerging and would soon become known as "cool."

Of course, when Milestones was recorded in August 1947, the Birth of the Cool band was a year away from appearing at the Royal Roost nightclub to showcase the new music and a year and half away from a studio date in January 1949.

Yet Milestones signals a change in the musical weather. Bop—with its flatted fifths, complex riffs and staccato runs—was a showcase for speed and agility. Cool, by contrast, would promote longer musical lines and a more relaxed pacing. Milestones' sound was new—even if it wasn't recognized as such at the time.

Miles decided to use John Lewis on piano for the Milestones session in 1947 instead of Duke Jordan, the pianist in Parker's quintet. This was significant. Miles felt Lewis had a more progressive sound and believed he was a better musician. Lewis is also rumored to have been the composer of Milestones with the breakthrough arrangement by Miles.

After this date, Miles pushed Parker to replace Jordan with Lewis. Here's Duke Jordan's take from a sour-grapes interview in Brian Priestley's book, Chasin' the Bird (2005):

"Miles was tight with John Lewis, and he wanted Bird to substitute John for me in the group. But Bird silenced him quietly, firmly saying that he chose the guys and Miles could form his own outfit if anything displeased him. That was all that was heard from Miles."

If Jordan sounded bitter about Miles, he was. Miles and Jordan didn't get along. Miles explains why in Miles: The Autobiography (with Quincy Troupe/1989):

"Nobody could keep up with Bird back in those days except maybe Dizzy [Gillespie]. Every time [Bird would solo], Max [Roach] would scream at Duke [Jordan] not to try to follow Bird [on piano]. He wanted Duke to stay where he was because he wouldn't have been able to keep up with Bird and he would have fucked up the rhythm. Duke did this a lot when he didn't listen. See, when Bird went off like that on one of his incredible solos, all the rhythm section had to do was stay where they were and play some straight shit. Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time. It was like he had planned it in his mind. The only thing about this is that he couldn't explain it to nobody. You just had to ride the music out. Because anything might happen musically when you were playing with Bird. So I learned to play what I knew and extend it upwards—a little above what I knew. You had to be ready for anything."

By the summer of 1947, Miles was also a step ahead of the boppers, musically. While the Birth of the Cool ensemble wouldn't start playing publicly until September 1948, the musicians who would form that band were already meeting regularly at arranger Gil Evans' New York apartment.

Evans was arranging for Claude Thornhill's progressive band and was at the vanguard of a new wave of advanced musical theories. Tiring of the pat formulas and relatively simple arrangements played by small bop groups, Miles was eager to weave Evans' complex theories into his own playing. Miles would do this for the first time on Milestones.

If you listen to Milestones of 1947 (not to be confused with Milestones from 1958), you can hear that it is a considerable break from what was being played at the time and served as something of a salvo across bop's bow. Cool was coming.

By the end of 1948, Miles was out of Charlie Parker's group after a dispute over money, differences over the group's pianist and tensions that typically arise when great musicians have different visions. Miles was replaced by Kenny Dorham, and Duke Jordan was replaced by pianist Al Haig.

Miles would go on to lead and record Birth of the Cool (with John Lewis on piano on most of the dates). The rest, as they say, is history.

Wax tracks: Birth of the Cool (1948-1950) formally introduced jazz listeners to a new, more sensitive approach, but Milestones documents where cool was conceived.

One of the best ways to listen to Milestones is on Miles Davis: Complete Savoy & Dial Recordings. It's available here at Amazon (or download the tracks mentioned on various albums at iTunes).

I love listening to Milestones on this CD because it's preceded by Bird's Buzzy (May 1947). When you hear Buzzy and then Milestones, the departure is instantly clear. You can really hear the end of one musical era and the start of another.

Listen how pretty Miles is playing. Not frantic or rushed. Just long and smooth, hanging on notes and drawing large arcs. Interestingly, Bird's tenor playing on Milestones is a hot and slippery—his solo sounds eerily like Lucky Thompson—and he isn't quite in sync artistically with what Miles is trying to achieve.

With Milestones, you can hear the music change—and listen as one great jazz musician breaks artistically from his mentor.

Wax clip: While there's no footage that I'm aware of the Birth of the Cool band, check out this clip of Jeru by the CAPA High School Saxophone Ensemble. Jeru (baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan's nickname) was one of the songs performed on the Birth of the Cool album.

Not bad for kids. The point being that this music was written in 1947 and 1948, and clearly was way ahead of its time when you consider what was mainstream in jazz then.

Like the glass and steel architecture, and abstract expressionist painting of the same period, cool was a celebration of sensual simplicity and space.

Gentle Bill

Many jazz listeners are unaware that Bill Evans' How My Heart Sings! and Moonbeams for Riverside Records were recorded on the exact same date and with the same personnel—Evans on piano, Chuck Israels on bass and Paul Motian on drums.

The session—recorded on May 17, May 29 and June 5, 1962—came less than a year after the death of bassist Scott LaFaro in an auto accident. LaFaro had been Evans' perfectly matched pulse on the upright, and Bill took LaFaro's death very hard.

Evans' eight known recording sessions between July 1961 and May 1962 are largely scatter-shot. Without a steady bass player with whom he was comfortable, Evans kept busy as a sideman on most of the recording dates. There's a solo outing during this period and a duet album with Jim Hall (Undercurrent), which to my ear doesn't quite gel.

By early 1962, Evans was reunited with Chuck Israels. Peter Pettinger, in his book Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (1998), picks up the story:

"After several months working with Chuck Israels in his group, Evans felt ready to record a new trio album. Three days after finishing Undercurrent for United Artists, he was back in the studio with Riverside. Orrin Keepnews tells how he planned the session: 'I had a special challenge for them: for some time I had wanted Bill to do a totally laid-back, all-ballads album, but feared that a steady dose of slower tempos might perhaps over-relax the group to the point of lethargy. My solution was to make a second, somewhat livelier record at the same time, literally alternating the two repertoires to provide enough variation to keep everyone alert. The ballads eventually formed the album Moonbeams and the more up-tempo numbers went to make How my Heart Sings!"

So which album is better? I listened to both yesterday and the winner to me is clear: How My Heart Sings! While Moonbeams may have made sense in concept, Keepnews' original fear proves correct—and is evident throughout the album. It has the pace of a funeral march. All of the ballads are taken way too slow, and its plodding, over-thought feel leaves Evans cold. Bill is best when the pace rollicks and he's able to surf the bass lines and brushed beat—and he's always a sure thing on a waltz—any waltz.

By contrast, How My Heart Sings! is sterling. The two standouts (and there are many on this disc) are I Should Care and 34 Skidoo, an Evans original. This album is Bill at his gentlest and most delicate. Given the tidal wave of Evans recordings in recent years from 1970-1980, you forget his soft, pensive period of the early 1960s. By contrast, during the last 10 years of his life, when he faced increased health problems, Evans seems to have exchanged grace and lyricism for anger and repetition, hammering out the same songs over and over again at volumes too loud and tempos too fast.

How My Heart Sings! is perhaps Evans' high point of his Riverside period. For a comparison of his approach on I Should Care, I compared this album's version with the one on Bill Evans at Town Hall (1966). The live version of the song by Sammy Cahn, Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston is a beaut. But the one on How My Heart Sings! comes out ahead for pure punch. Bill lingers wonderfully on chords, holding them for the briefest second with a touch of pedal before releasing and moving on. The sound is incredible.

Listen as I Should Care builds with rolling chords and melodies, and Motian's brushwork becomes firmer and firmer as the song progresses. Listen as Bill takes complete control of the song with a soft touch, leaving plenty of space between chord runs.

In fact, after yesterday's listen, How My Heart Sings! has become my favorite Bill Evans album, which is saying something. It's warm, sensual and rich with emotion. Not only is Evans moving at a splendid pace, but Chuck Israels runs alongside Evans pefectly while Paul Motian's brushwork is spectacular—like the sound of pine bough brushing against a window pane.

This is the Bill Evans album to beat!

Wax tracks: Treat yourself to an import here. Avoid the $7.97 US version, which sadly is from 1991. The richness of this album will be lost on such a dated release. Instead, spring for the import. Go here—but instead of paying $22, pay around $17 for a new version sold by another seller (I bought mine from MusicJapan_JP). Just scroll down and click on the "used & new" link.

Wax clip: Evans' playing was so feathery and bright in the early to mid 1960s. Go here for an example of How My Heart Sings from 1965 (the song begins after Bill's opening theme and Humphrey Lyttelton's intro). Compare Bill's sound then with the boredom and bombast that set in here with 34 Skidoo. Then compare the 1979 34 Skidoo with the one on the album How My Heart Sings!  What a shame. While the 1979 clip, to be fair, was recorded a year before his death—Bill's interest and playing in my estimation had checked out some time earlier, probably around 1970 or 1971.

Kid From Detroit

Over the weekend, while going through the transcription of my most recent conversation with baritone saxophonist Danny Bank, I found this almost-overlooked anecdote:

"I bought my first sax when I was in high school, in Brooklyn. I had been looking in pawn shop windows and came across what appeared to be an alto sax. When I went in and asked the guy how much it was, he asked if I was sure I wanted to buy it. I said yes. He said $35— which is how much I had in my pocket. So I paid the guy and took the horn home.

But when I brought the sax to school, the music teacher told me it wasn't an alto sax. It was a C melody sax  with a straight neck, which looks like an alto. I took the sax back to the pawn shop, but the guy wouldn't give me my money back. So I had to learn to play on the C melody sax, which is quite different than the alto.

For one, the sound of a C melody is a little harder than a E-flat alto. But the big difference is that the instrument is in the key of C, which meant I could read piano music right over my teacher's shoulder and play along. With a E-flat alto, piano music has to be transposed up a major 6th before you can play along. No transposing of music is necessary with a C melody.

I learned so much about music playing that instrument. I wound up being able to play the flute, oboe and every other instrument in the symphony orchestra.

When I joined Charlie Barnet in 1942, I was playing a wide range of reed instruments. Then Charlie taught me how to play big like Harry Carney, the great baritone saxophonist in Duke [Ellington]'s band. Harry was a god to all baritone saxophonists. His tone was huge. You can hear him on every record.

I joined Charlie Barnet in Minneapolis. I had to take the train from New York to Chicago and change trains. When I got there, he didn't talk to me for a few weeks. When he did finally come over to me, I thought he was going to fire me. Instead, he said, 'Listen kid, you know Harry Carney?'

Of course I knew Harry. He was my hero.

Charlie told me to change my horn, to get the same one Harry was playing—a Conn. He said: 'Get the same mouthpiece, too, and the same reeds. I want you to play the same thing as Harry.'

By that time, the band had traveled from Minneapolis to Detroit. So I called a local instrument repairman and asked him if he knew anyone with a Conn baritone for sale. He said he knew a kid who had just bought a new horn and was selling his Conn. I told him to send the kid over to where we were rehearsing.

So this kid shows up and sells me his Conn for I think around $150. The kid's name was Pepper Adams, who of course went on to become a terrific bari player. That was done all the time—selling horns. Years later I sold my Selmer to Serge Chaloff.

After buying Adams' bari, I bought the mouthpiece Carney was using—an over-sized one made by the Woodwind and Company—and the same reeds in a music store.

The next time I played on that Conn, Charlie shot me a look on the way to the dressing room and gave me the OK sign with his fingers—rubbing the thumb and the forefinger together for emphasis. Man, that made me feel great . When Charlie gave me that sign, he made me a bari player. Before that I was a good alto and tenor player. But after that, I knew that I would always be a baritone saxophonist. I just fell in love with that horn."

Wax clip: To see what happened to the kid who sold Danny Bank his baritone sax go here. The song is Dylan's Delight. The tune appears on Adams Effect (1995) and features Frank Foster on tenor, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Billy Hart on drums. What a sound!

More Than You Know

I spent a few hours re-listening to six great sax solos on Friday. Here's the historic list, followed by some thoughts...

Charlie Parker's Parker's Mood
Coleman Hawkins' Body and Soul
Lester Young's Oh, Lady Be Good
Paul Gonsalves' Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue
Wardell Gray's Twisted
Sonny Rollins' More Than You Know

Parker's Mood (1948) remains a powerful blues, filled with trepidation, melancholy and confidence. Just when you think Bird is about to lose his way on the melody line, he surprises again and again.

Body and Soul (1939) is as pretty as ever, with Hawk sliding forward and backward seamlessly through the changes, pausing here and there for dramatic effect while double-timing the entire way. I forgot just how delightfully oily Hawk's sound is on this recording.

Oh, Lady Be Good! (1936) was even more amazing than I recalled. There's a special energy to Prez on this recording as he runs idea after idea through that tenor sewing machine of his. His solo is both relaxed and impatient, with Basie leaving plenty of space for you to think about what you just heard.

Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue (1956) is from the famed Ellington at Newport 1956 album. It features a nine-minute-plus solo by Paul Gonsalves and is breathtaking for its marathon drive and build. It's a bit too much of a great thing, in retrospect, one of those "you had to be there" moments. Still great, to be sure.

Twisted (1949) has Wardell Gray weaving in and out of the tune with a  bop-infused Prez-like tone. There's always a wonderful carefree spirit to Wardell's playing, and this solo is one long stream of wiggles and hairpin turns. It's as bouncy as can be, with Wardell dropping down to the bottom of his horn and springing back up to the top in signature fashion a number of times.

More Than You Know (1954) features Sonny Rollins playing with Thelonious Monk, and it's a tour de force of ideas, a departure of tone and a completely new sax sound that breaks free from swing and bop. The pace is beautiful—almost like inhaling and exhaling—and Sonny, even on a ballad like this, is spring-loaded for action.

And the winner is...(I know I'm going to take heat for this)...More Than You Know. Sonny's solo is so fresh, so alive and so different than anything else that came before it. It's not Prez, it's not Hawk, it's not Bird, it's not Ben Webster—it's Sonny, distinct and in charge.

The song even ends wonderfully offbeat. Listen as Monk tries to mess with Sonny's head and have the last musical word, squeezing off a series of stumbling notes—like a drunk purposefully bumping into someone who has artfully made it across the room flawlessly with a pair of overfilled drinks. But Sonny won't have it, and with his absolute last breath, pushes his last bit of air to get the last note out, shoving Monk back into his seat. Lovely! This is exactly what makes great jazz such a delight.

So, until someone convinces me otherwise, my vote is for More Than You Know as the best sax solo of the historic lot. Yes, they all were significant. And yes, of course, they all broke new ground when recorded. But there's a freshness about Sonny's solo that for me stands out. It's pure, liberated from the trappings of its era, and different from an intellectual standpoint. Sonny adds smarts to the prowess and passion, which makes the solo a tad more interesting and special for me. Take a listen to them all and see what you think.

Wax tracks: You can find More Than You Know at iTunes on The Best of Sonny Rollins. Unfortunately you'll have to download the entire album to get the 11-minute recording.

My suggestion is to go here and buy an import of Moving Out or  here and spend $8 on Prestige Profiles: Sonny Rollins, which features all remastered gems (plus a second CD of samplers of other artists from the same series).

Wax clip: Go here to see Sonny in all his glory playing Weaver of Dreams (1959). To fully absorb his genius, watch it once and then let it play a few times in the background as you write or work on your computer. Sonny sounds so darn good during this 1954-1959 period. He's also magnificent to see. (Be sure to listen carefully as Newk sneaks in a quote from the Dorsey-Sinatra ballad hit of 1940, All This and Heaven Too.)

Garner Followup

When asked why he never bothered to read music, Erroll Garner responded: "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read."

If you want to buy the eight-minute version of Garner playing The Man I Love, which I referred to last weekend (many have been asking), you need to buy Gershwin Jazz, a Sony sampler.

Sadly, Sony has still not been able to come to terms with the Garner estate for the rights to his complete 1950s Columbia recordings. Hence, much of Garner's best output for the label continues to be disgracefully out of print or available only on CDs with poor fidelity from the early 1990s.

On a positive note, I'm still enjoying the 10-CD Erroll Garner box from Germany ($24) that I mentioned on September 4. I find I wind up listening to them in reverse order—starting in the early 1950s and winding back to the mid-1940s. The evolution in Erroll's attack and comfort level is evident and exciting as you move back in time.

Wax clip: To see Garner's cocktail-shaker approach to a My Fair Lady medley, go here. 

October 21, 1959

Glenn Boornazian dropped by Tuesday night for a bite. Glenn and I were born on the exact same day and grew up together in the same neighborhood in New York City in the 1960s. Talk about an old friend.

At any rate, Glenn is now head of Integrated Conservation Resources,  a company that's the principal conservator for the restoration of New York's Guggenheim Museum. He was quoted in an article on the building's restoration in The New York Times on Monday, and we were celebrating.

Glenn's specialty is removing coatings from historic buildings and monuments, scientifically evaluating the condition of the materials underneath, and using techniques to restore the structure to its original state without harming the stonework.

In jazz terms, he's like the guy who remasters and improves the fidelity of recordings without distorting the sound.

The Guggenheim Museum is one of my favorite New York buildings, probably because it looks so hip and was completed in one of my favorite years for jazz recordings—1959. It's like a giant Miles solo. I also hear Bill Evans  whenever I see it—usually Peri's Scope. In fact, a couple of years ago I loaded my iPod with Bill and Miles and sat across the street listening and looking. On Green Dolphin Street from Columbia's '58 Miles was perfect, too.

Simple yet radical—the Guggenheim is pure circular joy. I feel terrific whenever I see it coming down 5th Ave. on a bus or walking up from the Metropolitan Museum, experiencing a kid's tingly excitement, which is sort of what Frank Lloyd Wright had hoped for, I suppose.

I also love the museum because it looks like a giant stack of records waiting to drop down a phonograph spindle. Coincidentally, October 21st—the day the museum first opened in 1959—is Dizzy Gillespie's birthday, and you can see his sky-pointing horn in that structure, too.

In addition to knowing a ton about rock (stonework, that is), Glenn is developing an appreciation for jazz. He mentioned earlier in the week that it would be fun to hear a selection of jazz recordings from October 1959—the month and year Frank Lloyd Wright's structure finally opened to the general public.

Finding a good October 1959 mix was a challenge, given the narrow window. But I pulled together a bunch of albums, and we listened to tracks over dinner. Below are the first five—in order—but each album is so good we just mixed them all up and they sounded terrific (many are available at iTunes; all at Amazon):

It's a Blue World (October 2, 1959)
Red Garland, Live at the Prelude (Prestige)

Jingles (October 6, 1959)
Wes Montgomery, The Wes Montgomery Trio (OJC)

116th and Lenox (October 20, 1959)
Jackie McLean: Swing, Swang, Swingin' (Blue Note)

There's Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie (October 20, 1959)
Thelonious Monk: Alone in San Francisco (JVC Victor)

I Didn't Know About You (October 29, 1959)
Lee Konitz, You and Lee (Verve)

A fitting tribute to Wright's Guggenheim Museum—a windowless, sprayed-contrete masterpiece that went up in the glass age but used gravity and circuity as interactive forces to lure us inside. Here's to the artist's message—be it jazz musician, architect, painter, photographer or sculptor!

Cherokee

Ray Noble was a British composer and songwriter who also led a popular but mannered society band in England in the 1930s.

Why bother talking about Noble here? Because in 1938 he wrote Cherokee, which quickly became one of jazz's greatest standards and a musical drag strip of sorts for jazz artists eager to show off their chops at breakneck speeds.

Cherokee was first a big band hit in the US for Count Basie, whose band recorded it in February 1939. Jimmy Mundy's arrangement for the Count was so catchy that Decca decided to release part one on the first side of the 78 rpm and part two on the flip.

Five months later, in July 1939, Charlie Barnet's band took a crack at Cherokee with a rain-dance chart by his new trumpter Billy May. (May, of course, would go on to arrange for all the top singers at Capitol Records, including Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.)

Barnet's recording for RCA Victor's Bluebird label raced up the charts—thanks largely to the aggressive launch of national radio remotes from hotel ballrooms and roof gardens. Barnet's recording climbed to number 15 by October and stayed on the charts for three weeks. The song became so identified with Barnet that he made it his band's theme song.

As the Basie and Barnet recordings of Cherokee surged in popularity, the song's jaunty theme and smooth transitional bridge made it a hot standard of choice for many swing bands of the early 1940s.

One of those bands was Jay McShann's. On Friday, February 13, 1942, McShann's band began a run at New York's Savoy Ballroom. Gene Ramey, the bass player, relates what happened next in Stanley Dance's The World of Count Basie (1980):

"That Sunday, we had to do a matinee at four o'clock. In fifteen minutes we played only two tunes, Moten's Swing, I think, and Cherokee. Bird started blowing on Cherokee at that extremely fast tempo. It was way up there. The program was going out on the radio and somebody in the studio called the man with the ear set and said, 'Let them go ahead. Don't stop them!' We played about forty-five minutes more, just the rhythm section and Bird, with the horns setting riffs from time to time. That night you couldn't get near the bandstand for musicians who had hear the broadcast. 'Who was that saxophone player?' they all wanted to know."

Parker's seminal solo on Cherokee in 1942 and his subsequent pioneering of bebop in 1944 encouraged emerging bop musicians to emulate his approach on this song during mid-1940s. Cherokee was perfect for jam sessions, as bop musicians were able to show how fast they could play while producing new ideas off the cuff, chorus after chorus.

Weary of the traditional approach to the song, Parker recorded Ko Ko in 1946, inventing a completely new minor melody using Cherokee's chord changes.

Interestingly, no other jazz artist of the period that I can think of recorded Ko Ko—as if the song were reserved exclusively for Bird, while Cherokee was for anyone else willing to give it a shot.

In addition to writing Cherokee, Ray Noble composed The Very Thought of You, which became a vocal staple of pop singers in the late 1940s and 1950s. Despite its popularity, the song would never surpass Cherokee in popularity with jazz artists.

Ironically, Ornette Coleman's first performance outside the US was in Ray Noble's England, the birthplace of Cherokee. His free jazz set during that 1965 performance divided the audience—so much so that one heckler shouted, "Now play Cherokee."

So Coleman proceeded to tear  through the changes of the standard, reinterpreting and folding Parker's lines into, creating a new interpretation.

"I just wanted to know that I knew Cherokee," he remembers, in an interview with The Guardian of London back in June, "not because of what he thought it meant." Ornette recalls receiving a standing ovation.

After almost 70 years, Cherokee remains jazz's national anthem and the standard chosen when artists decide to climb out on the musical ledge and risk everything trying to top the ghosts of Cherokees past.

Wax tracks: Here are my favorite versions of Cherokee, in order. Many are available as individual downloads at iTunes:

Charlie Parker (1941)
A Studio Chronicle 1940-1948 (JSP Records)

Count Basie (1939)
Complete Decca Recordings (Definitive Records)

Bud Powell (1949)
The Complete Bud Powell (Verve)

Dexter Gordon/Wardell Gray (1947)
Bopland: Legendary Elks Club Concert (Savoy)

Max Roach/Clifford Brown (1955)
Study in Brown (Emarcy)

Charlie Barnet (1949)
Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra: Cherokee (Living Era)

Wax clips: For a taste of the speed needed for a solid Cherokee, here's a version by the alto master Lou Donaldson.  To hear Sarah Vaughan sing the words, go here.

Joe Zawinul

Doug Ramsey—the jazz critic, Paul Desmond biographer, novelist (Poodie James) and Rifftides blogger—has a touching and up-close look at pianist Joe Zawinul, who died yesterday at age 75. Go here to read it.

Zawinul represents the history of electric jazz keyboards from the early 1960s to 2007. But I still can't believe that the guy who played keyboards on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1969) is the same guy 10 years earlier playing piano on Dinah Washington's adult pop album, What a Difference a Day Makes. But that's what made Joe special.

Also at Rifftides, be sure to scroll for a terrific listing of Sonny Rollins video clips. Scroll down to "Rollins at 77."