Bebop's fast tempo and complex rhythms were embraced by modern-jazz fans when the jazz style emerged in the mid-1940s. But bop also provided jump blues with an opening. Bebop was spectacular and electrifying, but it wasn't for dancing. It was mostly for sitting and listening. As a result, the big-beat, horn-driven dance music made major inroads in Black neighborhoods and in the record market. By 1949, R&B was so popular that Billboard started an official R&B chart. Hundreds of R&B artists on small independent labels began having major hits. [Photo above, of Blue Note founders, from left, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff (c) Mosaic Images]
During the late 1940s, Blue Note began to feature modern jazz artists such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. But to remain in business, Blue Note's founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, also needed to remain competitive. By 1952, they began recording groups fronted by jazz horn players who were backed by a bigger beat. The music became known as hard bop.
Among the earliest 10-inch Blue Note hard bop recordings were Lou Donaldson Quintet (1952), Lou Donaldson/Clifford Brown Quintet (1952) and Horace Silver Quintet with Lou Donaldson (1953). Prestige quickly got into the act, starting with Miles Davis Sextet'sWalkin' in 1954.
What's interesting about the artists who pioneered hard bop is that many came up through R&B. For example, Lou Donaldson began recording with Charlie Singleton, Blue Mitchell started with Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams, and Clifford Brown first recorded with Chris Powell and the Five Blue Flames. As noted in my post yesterday, Elmo Hope began in the Joe Morris Orchestra. The same goes for Johnny Griffin, Percy Heath and Philly Joe Jones.
Morris was a jazz trumpeter who came up in Lionel Hampton's band in the 1940s as a player and arranger, and recorded with both jazz and blues players. In 1946, he left Hampton's band to form his own orchestra, which leaned heavily on the blues with a beat. In 1949, he had top R&B hits with Wynonie Harris on Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee; Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere; and Don't Take Your Love Away From Me. What they all had in common was Hope on piano.
What's fascinating is that as horn-centric hard-bop groups became R&B flavored, R&B became more jazzy. Morris is a prime example of a crossover artist who played jazz in a jump-blues band only leave and form an R&B band that became jazzier over time. Many of these blues bands also swished back and forth between genres, with jazz influencing the blues and blues artists folding int jazz groups. Nothing in music is pure, especially jazz.
Joe Morris died in 1958 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 36.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find collections of Joe Morris here and here.
JazzWax clips: Here are clips of the Joe Morris Orchestra with Elmo Hope on piano:
Here'sLowdown Baby (1949), with Morris on trumpet and vocal...
Here'sJump Everybody Jump (1951), with Jimmy "Baby Face" Lewis on vocal...
Here's That's What Makes My Baby Fat (1952), with the great Faye Adams on vocal...
In 1957, pianist Elmo Hope moved from New York to Los Angeles. He had little choice. His cabaret license had been suspended following a drug conviction, and the only place where he had musician friends and the prospect of work playing was on the West Coast. As Leonard Feather remarks in his 1970 liner notes for a reissue one of Hope's finest recordings, Elmo Hope Trio (Contemporary): "Black musicians [in L.A.] in the late 1950s and early '60s constituted a jazz underground; they surfaced occasionally on a record date at Contemporary or Pacific Jazz, or at one of the small jazz clubs. But mostly it was a period of scuffling."
Recorded in L.A. in February 1959, Hope was joined by Jimmy Bond on bass and Frank Butler on drums. Seven of the eight tracks were originals: B's a-Plenty, Barfly, Eejah, Boa, Something for Kenny, Minor Bertha and Tranquility. The sole standard was Like Someone in Love. In the notes, West Coast tenor saxophonist Harold Land reflected on Hope: "Each Elmo Hope composition seems to reveal a new aspect of the man's personality."
How true. Hope clearly was influenced by Bud Powell, but he wasn't a clone. While he exhibited long ribbons of spirited bop lines, there's a complexity to his playing that's all his own. Hope's improvisation didn't travel in straight lines but swirled and snapped like a mixing-bowl whisk. His improvisation was more fractured and jagged than Powell's, but with a less fierce hammering attack than Thelonious Monk's. Yet he has a Monkian flavor.
Hope spent four years in segregated L.A. and recorded with top Black musicians, including Land and Curtis Counce. Then he returned to record in New York. By then, he was married to Bertha Hope, and the couple had a daughter.
Hope started out as an R&B player in the late 1940s with trumpeter Joe Morris's band, a background that came in handy for hard bop. In 1953, Hope was on one of very earliest hard-bop recordings, for Blue Note—New Faces, New Sounds: Lou Donaldson/Clifford BrownQuintet, featuring Brown (tp), Donaldson (as), Percy Heath (b) and Philly Jo Jones (d). Three of the songs on the date were written by Hope.
A long-time heroin user, Hope in New York was unable to gain jazz visibility as the music changed and opportunities dried up. His health declined and in 1967, he was hospitalized with pneumonia, suffering a fatal heart attack that May. He was 43.
This week in The Wall Street Journal, I interviewed guitarist-songwriter Peter Frampton for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). Peter saw David Bowie perform in London on the steps of his school—when Bowie was 16 and Peter was 13. Bowie was in the Konrads at the time. Peter's dad was an art teacher at the school, and Bowie looked out for Peter over the years, resurrecting his career in 1987 when he invited him on his Glass Spider tour.
Here's Bowie and Peter looking for a beer in Madrid in 1987...
This song and album, Frampton Comes Alive!, was massive in 1976...
The album was one of the best selling live albums of all time. It went to No. 1 on Billboard's album chart in April 1976 and held the top spot for 10 weeks. The album sold over 8 million copies in the U.S., roughly 11 million worldwide.
Spotted on top of a desk at the Last Vestige Music Shop in Albany, N.Y. If you don't have my book, Anatomy of a Song, you can order it for the holidays here. Bill McCann snapped the image above. My next book from Grove is coming Fall 2021. I just finished it, and I'll be providing details soon.
Barcelona meets Rio. In 2013, I was over in Barcelona for the U.S. State Department to give a series of jazz talks at the Barcelona Jazz Festival. There, I had the good fortune to meet Joan Chamorro (above), the music director of the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, trumpeter-singer Andrea Motis and other local young jazz stars. Two years later, Joan, Andrea and the rest of the band recorded Waters of March. Alba Armengou and Rita Payes were on vocals and Joel Frahm played the tenor saxophone solo. And if I'm not mistaken, the concert was held at the Palau de la Música Catalana (my WSJ essay here). [Photo above of Joan Chamorro courtesy of Joan Chamorro]
Horace Parlan. Following my post last week on pianist Horace Parlan, saxophonist Bill Kirchner sent along a link to a 2017 post on Parlan by bassist Steve Wallace. Go here.
Chuck Israels on Tommy Williams, Stan Getz. Following my post last week on Art Farmer's 1961 Perception album, bassist Chuck Israels (above) sent along the following:
Hi Marc, just a little more information about the wonderful bassist Tommy Williams. Tommy, Jimmy Raney and Al Harewood were playing with Stan Getz sometime in the early '60s at New York's Basin Street East when Tommy quit and Stan called me.
Stan was beyond difficult—impossible, in fact, for most of us. Few people remained on good enough terms with him to continue working with him for long. The other two guys got fed up with Stan’s behavior and quit at the end of that gig. Stan wasn't big on sharing what he earned with his sidemen. I was between gigs with Bill Evans (Bill was trying out Gary Peacock), and Stan wanted me to put together a band for him. I brought in Gary Burton and Joe Hunt, and that band lasted a while until I went back to work for Bill.
That gig with Stan was the last time I heard Tommy play. I’d heard Tommy a few times with various Brooklyn musicians. Ronnie Mathews always spoke highly of him, and Tommy was among the handful of my very favorites. In many fields, there are often one or two outstanding people—people of great accomplishments who, for one reason or another, are largely overlooked. Tommy was surely one of those.
As for Stan, the biggest problem was his insurmountable insecurity and paranoia. Couple that with substance abuse and unrelenting womanizing, and they all made things difficult. It’s not easy to describe Stan’s behavior without going into fairly long stories, but one characteristic was his ability to sense other people’s weaknesses and attack them after having seduced them into letting down their guard. He’d show some neediness and pretense of vulnerability, and some (me, included) would fall for it, only to be mercilessly attacked later.
He also lacked any sense of decorum. President Johnson fell asleep at a table directly in front of the bandstand at a SEATO dinner in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1965, an event where we had been invited to play. Johnson was sitting with King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit. The king was a saxophone player and had requested Stan.
Stan, drunk to stave off the pressure, was offended and insulted by Johnson's nap. Stan said, “OK Mr. President, now we’ll play something you’ll understand—a hoedown.” We played Oliver Nelson’s Hoedown—a perfectly good piece, but the damage was done. If Stan thought for a moment there was possibility you might be even slightly critical of him, he’d attack you first with devastating insults.
Benny Goodman was socially uncomfortable and strange but didn’t seem to be purposefully evil. Stan was. I know some who escaped his worst behavior—Roy Haynes, for example—but none who liked him.
Dublin. Oliver in Dublin sent along a photo of the city taken yesterday by Richard Green, a friend of his. Dublin is on lockdown to cap the city's surging number of Covid-19 cases. What should have been the weekend of the Cork Jazz Festival has been cancelled, along with everything else. Our hearts go out to the beautiful city and its people. And here's the normally bustling Grafton Street moments ago...
Chet Baker. Last week, following my post on YouTubers who dig Chet Baker, I heard from Artt Frank, who played with the trumpeter:
Hello, Marc. I first met Chet in 1954, at the height of his career. I wouldn't see him again for a few years because I had my own quartet. The next time I saw him in 1966, he wasn't able to play a single note. When I asked him what had happened, he said he had suffered a brutal beating at the hands of five hoodlums and lost four upper front teeth. He also had permanent trigeminal nerve damage to both sides of cheeks and jawline. He said he was told by two doctors that in all probability he'd never play again. I want to thank you and others for honoring his memory with the different young men and women playing his favorite tunes. God bless you.
Dave Thompson, a wonderful pianist who plays in the Bill Evans style, sent along a SoundCloud of him playing The Touch of Your Lips....
Rudy Van Gelder. Richard Capless, an author, blogger (Deep Groove Mono) and college math instructor, has unveiled RVG Legacy, a lush, informational site devoted to Rudy Van Gelder, the late jazz engineer. To explore the site, go here. [Photo above of Rudy Van Gelder by Hank O'Neal]
Summer Stock (1950) is perhaps best known for Judy Garland's finale, singing and dancing Get Happy. But a far superior scene is Gene Kelly's newspaper dance number here...
Four Tops. Early on, many of Motown's acts sang Las Vegas standards when they went on the Ed Sullivan Show. Many were dreadful while others were quite good. Here, from the latter category, are the Four Tops in 1966 singing Nice 'n' Easy...
Chad Lefkowitz-Brown.Here's Chad LB playing Mack the Knife, which will be included on his eighth album, Quartet Sessions, due from La Reserve in February...
Laurel & Hardy. Last week, director Raymond De Felitta sent along a link to a terrific, silent Laurel & Hardy short from 1929. And, of course, we went back and forth on email about various things related to the film—how it was shot, the stunts and so on. By the way, that's James Finlayson in the scene outside the record store. First, watch it here...
According to Raymond, "an article online says that three stories of scaffolding were added to the Western Costume Building (go here) for the filming." More info here.
Raymond continues: "I’m not sure these are all the answers. There was no zoom lens yet, and a very long lens would have shaken in the wind. So not sure about the beam stuff. True ingenuity nonetheless. The proof is that 90 years later, we’re still sitting here trying to figure out how they did it!"
Clifford Brown radio. WKCR-FM in New York will present its annual "Clifford Brown Birthday Broadcast" next Friday, October 30, playing his music for 24 hours on the radio. Tune in from anywhere in the world on your computer, phone or iPad by going here.
Spencer Davis died on October 19. He was 81. His mid-'60s Brit band had a string of rock-soul hits in the U.S. and was notable for two things: He looked like he could have been Paul McCartney's older brother, if Paul had an older brother. And vocals were sung by Steve Winwood. Here'sGimme Some Lovin' in Germany in 1966...
Marc Myers writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and is author of "Anatomy of a Song" (Grove) and "Why Jazz Happened." Founded in 2007, JazzWax is a three-time winner of the Jazz Journalists Association's best blog award.
