JazzWax

Interview: Bill Holman (Part 3)

Once Bill Holman began composing and arranging in earnest for Stan Kenton's orchestra in late 1952, he quickly grew comfortable taking risks with his music. The band was made up of enormously skilled technicians and fiery soloists, allowing Bill to experiment with different sections of the orchestra, develop conversational harmonies, and retain the tap-dancey swing he favored since childhood. [Pictured, Conte Candoli and Bill Holman. Photo: Ray Avery Collection]

By the time Bill's music was featured on a 10-inch Capitol album called Kenton Showcase: The Music of Bill Holman (1954), much of his style was in place. A signature Bill Holman arrangement often opened with a simple clarion theme, quickly followed by the band crowding in and swaggering on the theme toward a series of towel-snap crescendos. Bill's work on Stan Kenton: Contemporary Concepts, recorded in July 1955, reflects the high point of this period with the Kenton band.

In Part 3 of my four-part conversation on Bill's 1950s career, the legendary composer, arranger and tenor saxophonist talks about his fondness for trumpeter Conte Candoli's sound, using the Kenton band bus to think through arrangements, the characteristics of the Bill Holman sound, and his favorite Kenton chart:

JazzWax: Bags on the Kenton Showcase album, is a fabulous piece of writing.
Bill Holman: I wrote that for bassist Don Bagley. It was a feature for him. That was the first composition I wrote and arranged after I my writing style began to evolve. I was very happy with Bags, and the band liked playing it. They liked pretty much everything I did. It was a very good period. I still had innocence about my writing, you know?

JW: What do you mean?
BH: The writing on Bags and other songs from that period, I’ll never be able to recapture that feel. In the early 1950s, I didn’t have the technique yet to be a showoff. All that music came straight from the heart. As you get older, you get wiser and along the way you lose your innocence. When you're young, you don’t have the smarts to get cute. You're just being inspirational. Also, back then, I was playing every night. I think being a steady jazz player had a big influence on my writing. It made me give the music an improvised feel, unless I was writing a dramatic piece, which is obviously not improvised.

JW: Without the technique, as you put it, how did you view such a monster band when writing?
BH: I used to think of it as a large quintet. I wanted the horns to sound like they were playing together, as if reading written music. But I also wanted them at times to sound like they were improvising over the rhythm section. That’s what I did with the band all the time. Being a player is immensely helpful in understanding that feel and how to write so it actually happens.

JW: Were you a fast writer?
BH: I wrote the Kenton arrangements fairly quickly. I remember when we were on the road, I would sit on the bus and, you know, if there was no conversation that involved me and no one was playing any music or anything, I’d think about charts and make notes. When I’d get to the hotel, I’d write them out. When we'd get to a gig, I’d check them out on the piano. There wasn't too much agonizing going on there.

JW: So you were pretty quick.
BH: Yeah, at times. Once the score was done, I would send everything back to L.A., where Stan had a copyist who transcribed what I wrote for the individual musicians' parts. Then he'd send the parts back to the band, wherever we were.

JW: Who was your favorite in the trumpet section?
BH: For jazz, Conte Candoli. His overall approach to jazz from early on was very mature. He wasn’t the most original player, but he could get the right feeling in practically any situation. [Pictured: Conte Candoli and guitarist Sal Salvador in the early 1950s]

JW: What about Maynard Ferguson?
BH: I didn’t really think of him as a jazz player, in the purest sense. Jazz is about ideas, and Maynard at times was more technical in his approach. He did a lot of improvising with his various bands, but he rarely played warm solos the way Conte did. He had a different style. He was a fabulous player and a great guy.

JW: Did your confidence grow as a writer in 1952 and 1953? Did you feel like you had a magic pen?
BH: No I never did feel that way, thank god. That’s a very dangerous way to feel. Writing music and arranging never gets easy. I’ve had students ask me, "How long does it take before it gets easy?" I tell them, "Never." As soon as you get to one point in your development, you’re looking at the next level.

JW: Your arrangements for Stan Kenton Presents: Frank Rosolino in 1954 and 1955 are some of the most fabulous small-group charts.
BH: [Laughs] Those were fun. That was a great group to write for. Frank was a terrific trombonist.

JW: Which of your Kenton arrangements are you most happy with?
BH: For a long time it was What's New?, off the Contemporary Concepts album. I’m not so sure about that now. I like Stella by Starlight, with Charlie Mariano [pictured, on alto sax]. There was another one I liked a lot, from the Kenton Showcase album...

JW: Solo for Buddy?
BH: No, I hated that one. [Bill hums a few bars of the song he has in mind.]

JW: Kingfish?
BH: Yes, that's the one. I was very happy with how the blues line came out on there.

JW: Did your workload for the Kenton band increase in the mid-1950s?
BH: A bit. I was the chief arranger for the band by 1955 and part of 1956, so I was writing a lot then.

JW: How did you wind up leaving the band?
BH: Almost overnight Stan [pictured] had some kind of weird shift in his outlook, and he fired trumpeter Al Porcino and me. I don’t know why. He possibly felt the music was getting away from him. Al was a die-hard fan of swinging music, as was I. I think Stan thought that his conception for the band was going out the window. That's just my idea of what happened.

JW: When he let you go, were you anxious about suddenly being out on your own?
BH: Not really. By that time I started doing a lot of writing for different bands.

JW: Right around this time you arranged Around the Horn with Maynard Ferguson, an album with a glorious swinging feel.
BH: When we made that record, it was kind of a studio band made up of a lot of Maynard's friends. It wasn’t until Maynard went to New York that he came up with that young, energetic band he used steadily. My things for Around the Horn were kind of laid back, in the Basie groove.

JW: If there's a Bill Holman sound around this period, what is it?
BH: The lines, I think, would be the big tipoff. But there are some melodic things that are distinctive. Same with my overall style. I didn’t realize that my music was recognizable until probably the 1960s, when enough people told me they could recognize pieces of mine. That’s when I started paying attention and realized maybe there are some things that sound like me.

JW: To me, you're always building toward a punch.
BH: That's true. I became very aware early on of the form that an arrangement needed to take to be exciting. I also learned what to leave out. Russ Garcia [pictured] was the first hint I got of that. I took an arrangement to him one time and he looked it over and said, "You have enough music here for 10 charts. You have to learn how to be more economical and reuse your material."

JW: What did he mean?
BH: I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what you just played. Then you go on to the next thing and never repeat yourself. This was before I realized that jazz solos actually had form, too. After a few years it finally dawned on me that the ear wants to hear something it recognizes, so I started concentrating on the shape of an entire piece, the form, and how it builds to a climax. As a writer, you also want to avoid getting to the climax too soon. If you do, you’ll kill yourself trying to top it in the arrangement. And the result is monotony. So what you just said about building to a punch is a conscious effort on my part.

JW: It’s almost as if you're shifting gears in a car.
BH: [Laughs] Well, I’ve always been aware of the audience, in that respect. I think that doing a lot of commercial writing since the late 1950s may have made me too overly conscious of the audience.

JW: What do you mean?
BH: As a composer and arranger, there’s always a natural tendency to make things attractive, and music doesn’t always need to be attractive. You have to pull yourself back.

Tomorrow, in the final part of my interview series, Bill talks about playing on Johnny Richards' Something Else, his compositions for The Gerry Mulligan Songbook, his big band album In a Jazz Orbit, writing for Anita O'Day, his crush on Peggy Lee, and the upcoming Tony Bennett Christmas album.

JazzWax tracks: In 1954, Stan Kenton gave Bill Holman an opportunity to record an album devoted entirely to his compositions and arrangements. The album was called Kenton Showcase: The Music of Bill Holman. Today, the album has been coupled on CD with Kenton Showcase: The Music of Bill Russo, another Kenton arranger. The Holman material is fabulous and can be downloaded at iTunes or Amazon. The Holman tracks are Nos. 9 through 12.

Kenton's Contemporary Concepts, is available at Amazon as a download. Bill's arrangements are Stella by Starlight, Yesterdays, Cherokee, I've Got You Under My Skin, What's New?, Stompin' at the Savoy, Black Coffee and The Thrill Is Gone. To hear how magnificent and advanced Bill's arranging was at this point, listen to Stompin' at the Savoy carefully and dig how it keeps building, with Mel Lewis delivering a powerhouse beat and crescendo solo. What a bounce! And catch the counterpoint and harmonies. It's a perfect chart.

Bill's arrangements for Frank Rosolino's small groups in 1954 and 1955 were released originally on 10-inch albums and then on 12-inch LPs as Kenton Presents: Frank Rosolino and Kenton Presents: Frankly Speaking. If you don't own these, do yourself a favor and grab one of the six out-of-print Mosaic CD boxes of the entire Presents series being sold by independent sellers for about $50 here.

Around the Horn With Maynard Ferguson also is a favorite of mine. I own two copies of the EmArcy LP. One day soon, hopefully, Verve will re-issue the recording. Until then, you can download a handful of the Bill Holman tracks—Dreamboat, Pork Pie, Never You Mind, Dancing Nightly and Wildman—at iTunes off Maynard Ferguson: Verve Jazz Masters 52.

Interview: Bill Holman (Part 2)

When Stan Kenton assembled his 39-piece Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra in 1950, the band was heavy on stars and light on music. Listeners found compositions like Halls of Brass and House of Strings ponderous and pretentious. By the end of 1951, instrumentalists such as Shorty Rogers, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank and Art Pepper had had enough and began leaving to form their own groups. So Kenton scrapped his Wagnerian-jazz experiment and formed a new, swinging band in January 1952. Among this orchestra's most exciting arrangers was Bill Holman, who joined the band in March.

This new band of Kenton's recorded its first studio album, New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, in September 1952. The album's opener was Prologue (This Is an Orchestra!), an odd, 10-minute track narrated by Kenton showcasing the musical personalities of the different band members. When it was Bill's turn, he blew a few bars on the tenor sax and Kenton thundered: "That announced the tenor saxophone of Bill Holman, playing now. He represents a talent that is discontent with the music of the present. He's anxious over the future. He writes. He orchestrates, too." When I asked Bill yesterday whether he had been truly anxious about the future, he laughed. "No. They just wrote a bunch of stuff for Stan [pictured] that would sound good. We all laughed later over the lines, like the one he said about Richie [Kamuca]: 'Willing to be happy and swing at the drop of a hat.' "

In Part 2 of my four-part conversation with the arranger who changed the direction of big band jazz, Bill recalls his passion for writing and scoring, how he came to the attention of Stan Kenton, the importance of Gerry Mulligan, and how he feels about his Invention for Guitar and Trumpet:

JazzWax: When you were at L.A.'s Westlake College of Music in the late 1940s, you also played in local bands, yes?
Bill Holman: Oh, sure. My first break was with pianist Ike Carpenter in 1948. Carpenter's orchestra had started out as a jazz band and had some Ellington-style charts written by a guy named Paul Villepigue, a wonderful arranger, teacher and a sweet man. But shortly before I arrived, Carpenter bought the complete book of arrangements from of a hotel band that played sweet dance music. That’s the stuff we played. I was with Carpenter for about a year and a half.

JW: During this time you were learning the basics of arranging in college?
BH: Yes. I had all this material stored up in my head, from when I was a kid listening to the radio. As soon as I learned a few technical things about writing and orchestrating, I was writing arrangements right away.

JW: Just like that?
BH: Pretty much. After a couple of weeks of school I was writing charts. I had a passion for it. I had been interested in arranging in high school. But growing up in Santa Ana, there were no arrangers, and no one I could ask what to do in certain situations.

JW: But why arranging? Because you had ideas in your head that you wanted to hear played by a band?
BH: You make it sound more exciting than it was. [laughs] I just liked the idea of doing it and wondered whether I could. So when I was at Westlake, I met saxophonists Bill Perkins [pictured] and Dave Madden and other guys who were making a living writing, arranging and playing music. That encouraged me enormously.

JW: Which band had the most influence on you?
BW: When I was listening to the radio all those years growing up? I loved Count Basie’s band, with Lester Young and Jo Jones. That swing rhythm got to me, more so than Duke's band. Duke was so different from everyone else that I didn’t think what he was doing applied to me or that I could ever do what he did. Duke had some magic going that I could never touch. But Basie's rhythm was different.

JW: What was your big breakthrough in college?
BH: Reading Russ Garcia’s book, which he eventually published in 1954 as Professional Arranger and Composer. It's still available today. Russ taught at the school, and his workbook for class had practically everything you needed to be a commercial arranger. I studied arranging with him for about a year at Westlake and liked him so much I studied with him privately. We went over the same stuff that was in his book, but in a little more depth.

JW: You graduated from Westlake in 1950. Then what?
BH: I joined Charlie Barnet's band. During my time with Ike Carpenter and Barnet, I also played in local rehearsal bands and associated with a lot of arrangers, including Gene Roland [pictured], who played and arranged for Kenton. We became good friends. Gene always had a rehearsal band wherever he’d go. He had four trumpets and four tenors, and I got to sit in with a couple of those bands. That rehearsal orchestra known as the Band That Never Was [in 1950] was his. Gene's writing was very simple. He'd write everything in four-part block harmony. By having tenors and trumpets, he'd only have to write four parts for the trumpets and the same four parts would do for the tenors, except they'd be an octave lower. This gave him an automatic ensemble.

JW: What was Gene Roland like?
BH: He was a talented guy. Very energetic. But his talent got spread out in a lot of areas, and never really got it together in a single area. He was a substantial contributor to the Kenton band and had a couple of big hits, like Tampico and Easy Street in 1945 and Jump for Joe in 1951. He had a meat-and-potatoes writing style using four-part harmony. He was an inspiration to me, and he showed me what could be done using a limited palette of harmony. He epitomized what it meant to be a jazz arranger. He was friendly and never tried to hide anything. He could be funny and serious, and his emotions always showed.

JW: Did he like your work?
BH: Yes. One night in 1951, Gene was at my house, and I played him a recording I had made when I was still going to Westlake. It was a 12-tone blues piece for a rehearsal band. Gene got very excited when he heard it and said, “I think this is what Stan is looking for.” Apparently, Stan had been talking to Gene about working a more linear approach into the band's music instead of that vertical harmonic thing he was doing with the Innovations orchestra. Stan was thinking about lines, and this 12-tone tune I played for Gene was full of lines. I don’t remember the name of it.

JW: What exactly is a 12-tone tune?
BH: It’s a technique devised by Arnold Scheonberg where you use all 12 tones of the chromatic scale in a preconceived order, and you use them all before you repeat them. It’s also called "serial writing." When students are first exposed to that concept, they're apt to write a 12-tone blues. It was the thing to do in avant-garde classical music back then. Since then it has lost favor.

JW: Did Kenton hear your 12-tone tune?
BH: Yes. After playing the recording for Gene, I went out on the road with Barnet [pictured]. Gene took the recording to Stan in the fall of 1951. When I came back off the road, I met with Stan, and he told me he was very interested in my writing. He told me about his idea for a new band that would have a more linear approach and that my writing style would be perfect. He asked me to write a couple of things for the band, which I did in late 1951. Meanwhile, Stan was re-forming the band and was looking for a tenor saxophonist. My friend Dick Meldonian, who played alto sax in the band, recommended me. I replaced Bob Cooper, who had left.

JW: Were the compositions you wrote good?
BH: They were awful. [laughs] I was trying too hard. I didn’t have the intellectual equipment to do what I was trying to do. So we rehearsed them once, and they were never heard of again.

JW: How were things left with Kenton?
BH: It was decided in March 1952 that I'd join Kenton strictly as a tenor player. After my two arranging failures, we didn’t talk any more about writing. So I was the tenor player. Eventually, he said I should write something. But I didn’t know what to write because I didn’t know how to write the kind of progressive jazz he favored. I also knew he didn't want Count Basie-type arrangements. So I just kind of cooled it and played the book.

JW: What was the turning point?
BH: Gerry Mulligan [pictured] wrote 8 or 10 charts for the band at around the time I joined. So we played those, and I got to listen to them every night. As I'd play them, I'd listen to the harmony and the form to see how a big-time writer goes about crafting a chart. It kind of helped me get my own conception going. By late 1952 I started writing again. Stan liked what I was doing. I liked what I was doing, too. So I figured I had found a direction in which to go with my composing and arranging.

JW: In September 1952, the Kenton band recorded This Is an Orchestra! How was that done?
BH: We just did it live in the studio. We did what’s on the record. There was no editing or retakes. That’s the way we made all our records back then. We played them all the way through and hoped no one goofed. [Pictured: Kenton and Capitol engineer Bill Putnam, center]

JW: Perhaps the strongest and most cutting-edge track recorded during the September Capitol session was your Invention for Guitar and Trumpet.
BH: That was an assignment. Stan asked me to do that featuring Maynard [Ferguson] and Sal [Salvador, pictured]. An invention is a song with lots of counterpoint between two instruments. I knew how to write an invention from my studies. I just jumped in and did it.

JW: What do you think of it?
BH: It’s not one of my favorite pieces.

JW: You've got to be kidding. Why?
BH: It’s disjointed. Nothing ever gets said. It’s a hodge-podge of different things. But it filled the bill, and I think it was re-released more than any other chart I wrote for him.

JW: Were you surprised to hear it pop up in the movie, The Blackboard Jungle in 1955?
BH: I was surprised when I got paid for it. [laughs] I hadn't seen the picture, so I didn’t know. I only knew about it when I saw the royalty statement. So I went to see the film. The composition is OK. It's not my favorite piece.

Tomorrow, Bill talks about his favorite trumpet player in the band, the writing and arranging of Bags and his other Kenton Showcase pieces, writing for trombonist Frank Rosolino, rising to become Kenton's chief arranger in 1955, and the reason he left the band in 1956.

JazzWax tracks: You can sample Kenton's 1950-1951 Innovations Orchestra at iTunes on Carnegie Hall: October '51. Or you'll find much of the band's recorded works on CD here. The band's European-influenced, string-heavy arrangements were exercises in tedium for Kenton fans and many of the band's Young Turks, who were itching to break out on their own by the end of 1951.

New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, the first album showcasing Kenton's new brassy sound, can be downloaded at iTunes and Amazon. Prologue (This Is an Orchestra!) remains a fascinating mood-setter for me and an interesting audio document. The narrated track comes off almost as a Kenton apology for the brooding Innovations material. It has always struck me as a slate-cleaning announcement that a new, hot-blooded orchestra with charts to match was in place. As you click around on the album's other tracks, you'll notice that many are pretty mundane works—until you hit Bill's only composition and arrangement for the session, Invention for Guitar and Trumpet.

Even on the sample snippet, you hear instantly that this song is different. It virtually explodes with risk-taking and biting energy, signaling an entire new era in big-band writing and arranging. Despite Bill's misgivings about the song's quality, it is the start of the West Coast's modern big-band sound and marks a significant shift away from the formulaic arranging styles that had preceded it.

Interestingly, four years later, in the film The Blackboard Jungle, the record was not used as an example of hot new music but a symbol of square, adult jazz—a relic being edged out by rock 'n' roll favored by the film's rude and angry teens.

Interview: Bill Holman (Part 1)

Captivated by Count Basie's swing and Gerry Mulligan's cool orchestral intensity, Bill Holman began arranging in the early 1950s and quickly became one of the most exciting and significant big band arrangers of the decade. Deciding on music as a profession relatively late (at age 20), Bill's charts for Kenton were highly influential, combining a Pacific Coast sunset feel with a brassy urgency that other arrangers and West Coast movie and television studios rapidly adapted. Bill's numerous arrangements for Kenton's band (including Bags, Kingfish, Stella by Starlight and Invention for Guitar and Trumpet) to this day retain their electrifying punch and rakish simplicity. Each is a work that rises incrementally and excites at each landing. In the decades that followed, Bill's orchestral technique would continue to develop, and he remains in high demand today. His bold 1997 album, Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk won a Grammy, and he just finished scoring a Christmas album for Tony Bennett to be released later this year.

When you speak with Bill for a while, what you notice is his mischievous wit. Bill isn't a joke teller, and much of his humor comes at his own expense. But what makes Bill so funny is his timing. He doesn't wind up. He just slips the funny stuff in, matter-of-factly. When I asked if he was a good saxophonist in high school, he paused and said, "No." When I said that was hard to believe, he replied, "It happens [beat], and it has happened a few times since." The more we spoke, the more I came to realize that Bill's humor and writing have a lot in common. Both are crafted unconsciously for impact, leaving dramatic space before and after crescendos, which in turn results in maximum delight for the listener.

In Part 1 of my four-part conversation with the legendary composer, arranger and tenor saxophonist, Bill talks about growing up in a California home without records, his close call with engineering, and the turning point that led to his enrollment at a Los Angeles music school:

JazzWax: Where were you born?
Bill Holman: In Olive, California. But we moved very early on to Orange, near Anaheim. When I was in the third grade, we moved again to Santa Ana, near the orange groves, where we remained. I had a typical kid life growing up. There was no supervision. And I could do whatever I felt like doing.

JW: What did your dad do?
BH: He owned a bunch of failing businesses. He tried produce departments in grocery stores, gas stations, and a bunch of other things. Then he took a course in accounting, and it turned out he was a whiz. He got a job right away in the Navy as an accountant, and later became an auditor. He kind of finished up with a bang and got great gigs out of that. I didn’t get to reap any of the benefit though [laughing].

JW: Brothers or sisters?
BH: I have one sister who is eight years older than me. Eight years is quite a big gap. She was into her stuff, and I was into mine. When she had to take care of me, the term "babysitter" hadn't been invented yet [laughs]. I think she resented having to look out for me, and we didn’t get along too well. My mom was supportive, but she could have done more to build my confidence. Then again, I suppose all children have complaints about their parents.

JW: Did you grow up in a musical household?
BH: No. My family didn't care much for music. We didn't own a record player, and there were no records. I only heard music on the radio. I listened to big bands day after day, hour after hour, and absorbed all the music. Back then, listening to the bands was just part of everyday life. It’s comparable today to people listening to iPods all day. It becomes so common you lose track of the magic of the thing and it becomes part of your unconscious mind. That’s kind of the way it was listening to the radio. It was there and you absorbed it. I thought radio and big bands were magical. There were some bands I liked much more than others. So music coming over the radio probably had much more of an effect on me as a composer and arranger than I realize.

JW: How did you wind up choosing the tenor saxophone?
BH: When I went into junior high school, all students had to take a musical aptitude test. I did well. A few weeks later the school's bandleader came around and asked if I wanted to play the clarinet. So I started on clarinet and that led right into the saxophone a few years later.

JW: Were you good?
BH: No [pause]. I thought I was. [laughs] Santa Ana then was a small town [pictured]. There were no professional musicians that I knew of. The only person I had to rely on was the teacher I was going to, who actually was a trumpet player and taught everything. I think he gave me a couple of bum steers on the saxophone. [laughs] I had no one in music to associate with, to listen to, or to talk to. So I bumbled along and dealt with things as they came up. I played what I thought was jazz, running down the harmonies on stock arrangements.

JW: Did you practice a lot?
BH: No. I never did.

JW: What happened after high school?
BH: I went straight into the Navy in July 1944. I was stationed in Boulder, Colorado. The war started winding down that year. I was in this training program studying engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a year and a half. Meantime the war had ended. Somehow my friends and I got the impression that if we finished our courses and got our commissions, we’d have to stay on active duty for four more years. So we all stopped going to classes and washed out of school. In January 1946 they shipped us off to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois, just north of Chicago. It was cold there for a native Californian. After boot camp, I was assigned to a ship and served out my time until July 1946.

JW: When you were discharged from the Navy, did you go home?
BH: Yes. I tried to get into the music program at Los Angeles City College [pictured]. My mother had seen an article in the paper that there was a program there. So I registered and finally got to interview with the head of the jazz program. At that time there quite a few players from name bands that were working out their union cards by going to school on the GI Bill. Musicians who had just arrived in California had to show the union they lived there for six months before being allowed to take studio jobs. So the college band was perfect for them. Unfortunately for me it was bulging with all these pros.

JW: What happened?
BH: The guy wouldn’t let me in the program. So I went back home and enrolled in UCLA to finish my engineering studies. But after one semester there, I realized that engineering wasn’t for me. This was the fall of 1947.

JW: You must have felt despondent.
BH: I did. I felt adrift. Back when I was 11 or 12 years old, my parents used to ask me what I was going to do when I grew up. At that time I didn’t think about being a musician. To get peace and quiet, I told them I wanted to be an engineer. They loved that and got off my back. So engineering was always in the back of my head, but it was a construct of my own imagination, not reality. In the fall of 1947, I was unsettled about what I was going to do, but I knew it wasn't going to be engineering.

JW: Music wasn't your clear choice?
BH: I was thinking about music, but I knew that becoming a pro would be difficult and that I would be taking a big chance going in that direction. While I was being disillusioned in UCLA's engineering program, I was going down to Central Avenue, where all the jazz clubs were. I caught the tail end of the scene there and met some great players. At this point in early 1948, I still didn’t know any musicians in Los Angeles personally. To get jobs, I befriended some of the guys I met at these sessions.

JW: What was the big turning point for you?
BH: One night I told a guy I was looking for a music school. He said to talk to trombonist Britt Woodman [pictured]. The guy said Britt was going to a school where they teach you how to read music. When I asked Britt, he told me about the Westlake College of Music in L.A. He said the school had several bands and courses in harmony and arranging. Westlake was like a vocational school, no humanities or history or anything. Strictly commercial music courses. Once I made up my mind to study music, that was it. There was no looking back.

Tomorrow, Bill talks about his first job with Ike Carpenter, the arrangement that caught Stan Kenton's attention, the band that had the most influence on his writing, and the story behind Invention for Guitar and Trumpet.

Johnny Griffin (1928-2008)

Johnny Griffin, a swaggering tenor saxophonist with eel-like agility whose deep r&b roots remained with him during his bebop years in the late 1940s and hard bop period in the 1950s and beyond, died on Friday in France. He was 80.

From his earliest recordings, Griffin was a triple threat. In addition to being a lightning-quick sight-reader, Griffin added a big, strong sound to every sax section he was in. And his muscular solos could always be counted on to amaze and entertain.

Griffin first recorded at age 17 with Lionel Hampton's band in 1945. But when trumpeter Joe Morris left Hampton in 1946 to start his own r&b band, Griffin followed. For the next three years, Griffin built a reputation as Morris' tough-tenor soloist. Known as "The Little Giant," Griffin stood five-foot, five-inches tall, but his slight height only made him more assertive as a player.

Like many bands of the period, Joe Morris chose to fuse swing and blues rather than play straight-up bebop. As bop grew more complex in the late 1940s, arrangers who could score the new jazz for big bands dwindled, forcing many bands into r&b. With jazz focused on instrumental prowess and new musical concepts, the simplicity of jump boogie grew in popularity as a younger audience sought music they could dance to. 

In 1956, with the advent of the 12-inch LP, Griffin, 28, recorded Introducing Johnny Griffin for Blue Note, his first pure jazz album. It showcased a range of styles, from blues and ballads to cookers like Cherokee, which demonstrated Griffin's ability to play blazingly fast and produce a steady stream of original ideas. Recording dates with Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley and many others followed.

In 1958, Griffin joined Thelonious Monk [pictured] for an extended stay at New York's Five Spot club and recorded two Riverside albums. These albums remain Griffin's most significant and penetrating recordings. The tenor saxophonist's blues attack and musical intellect were perfectly suited to Monk's percussive style, with Griffin adding just enough velvety yin to Monk's dissonant yang.

Between 1960 and 1962, Griffin recorded for Riverside Records, where he was paired with tenor titan Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis [pictured]. But where Davis' style tended to dwell on a taut blowing technique and ferocious speed, Griffin could match both but also develop nuanced ideas that went beyond the tricks of 1940s tenor cutting sessions.

Griffin moved to Europe in 1963 and recorded extensively with the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band as well as with a range of European musicians and American expatriates, returning to the U.S. periodically over the years to visit family and perform.

JazzWax tracks: Here are my favorite Griffin tracks and albums. All are available as downloads at iTunes or Amazon, unless otherwise noted:

Slide, Hamp, Slide—Lionel Hampton (1945). This baseball-themed swing number was Griffin's very first recording. The personnel included Joe Morris, Wendell Culley, Dave Page, Jimmy Nottingham and Lammar Wright, Jr. (trumpets), Jimmy Wormick, Mitchell "Booty" Wood, Andrew Penn and Al Hayse (trombones), Bobby Plater and Ben Kynard (alto saxes), Arnett Cobb and Griffin (tenor saxes), Charlie Fowlkes (baritone sax), Milt Buckner (piano), Billy Mackel (guitar), Charlie Harris and Ted Sinclair (bass), George Jenkins (drums) and Hampton (vibes). 

Pinetop's Boogie Woogie—Lionel Hampton (1946). Yes, Griffin recorded with Bing Crosby. This track and Sunny Side of the Street featured Der Bingle on vocals. This single finds Crosby offering "soulful" instructions to an imaginary Jitterbug line dance. To my ear, the track's concept was likely the inspiration for Madison Time, recorded by Ray Bryant in 1960. Both tracks are at iTunes.

Wilma's Idea—Joe Morris (1947). Likely written by band pianist Wilmus Reeves, this is a pure bop arrangement. Griffin's playing and ideas are strong and forceful, with shades of Sonny Stitt. Unfortunately, the track isn't available as a download. It can be found on the CD pictured, which is available at Amazon.

Blu-Binksy—A.K. Salim (1957). This track is on arranger A.K. Salim's fabulous Pretty for the People album. Not only is Salim's writing here beautiful, but the musicians on this little-known date say it all: Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Buster Cooper (trombone), Griffin (tenor sax), Pepper Adams (baritone sax), Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Max Roach (drums), Chino Pozo (Chano's cousin, conga) and A.K. Salim (conductor, arranger and composer).

The Congregation—Johnny Griffin (1957). This entire Blue Note recording is terrific and features Griffin with Sonny Clark (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Kenny Dennis (drums). In particular, Latin Quarter is a clever Latinized version of Tangerine with a bop spin, showing off Griffin's medium-tempo chops. And dig that rundown at the end! The same goes for I'm Glad There Is You. If you don't own this album, download the whole thing. You won't be disappointed. It's Griffin at his best.

Thelonious in Action and Misterioso—Thelonious Monk (1958). Both of these Riverside albums recorded at the Five Spot are a must. In addition to Griffin and Monk, Ahmed Abdul-Malik is on bass and Roy Haynes is on drums. This was Monk's greatest quartet, in my estimation, and Griffin's brightest moments as a sideman. His tone and idea choices are on par with Monk's, which makes for some exciting listening.

Save Your Love for Me—Griffin and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (1960). This track is off their Tough Tenors album for Riverside, and it swings the whole way through. The entire album is strong, with smoky rich ballads and all-out blowing duets.

The Magic Touch—Tadd Dameron (1962). There's no way to pick a favorite track off this beauty. The entire album is a classic, and it features Griffin throughout. The personnel is Joe Wilder, Clark Terry and Ernie Royal (trumpets), Jimmy Cleveland and Britt Woodman (trombones), Julius Watkins (French horn), Leo Wright and Jerry Dodgion (alto saxes and flutes), Jerome Richardson (tenor sax and flute), Griffin (tenor sax), Tate Houston (baritone sax), Bill Evans (piano), George Duvivier (bass), Philly Joe Jones (drums) and Tadd Dameron (arranger and leader).

Saxology—Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band (1968). This track is off an album called More: Plays Famous Themes From Great Motion Pictures. The tune appears to be modeled after Four Brothers, and the swinger tears out of the gate and doesn't stop. Griff's solo is the second one. And dig the drumming by Kenny Clarke and Kenny Clare (the band used two drummers).

JazzWax video clip: Griffin and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis were among the toughest tenor duos—not just for their powerful sound but also their endless stream of brilliant blues ideas. In the 1980s they were captured live on For Ge-Ge. Part 1 is here. and Part 2 is here. Want speed? Here's Griff blowing on a blues. Want a big band? Here's Griff with the sax section of the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band. And here's Part 1 of a European documentary on the band (there are five parts). By the way, that's Griff coming through the airport doors at 2:20 into Part 1 [pictured]. Dig that walk!

Interview: George Wein (Part 3)

When George Wein's Storyville opened in Boston in 1950, it attracted mostly professors from local colleges. In the fall of 1953, one of those professors brought socialite Elaine Lorillard into the jazz club and introduced her to George. Over drinks, Lorillard told George that months earlier she and her husband had attracted the New York Philharmonic to Newport, Rhode Island, for a concert series. But the symphony drew too few listeners, and the benefactors lost much of their $30,000.

Wondering aloud, Lorillard asked George whether Newport could do something with live jazz the following summer. George said he thought so and asked for a little time to put a few ideas together. A short time later, George traveled to Newport to visit with Elaine and her husband, Louis. Basing his concept on the nearby Tanglewood Music Festival, George outlined his vision for a series of jazz concerts. Intrigued, the Lorillards loved his idea and agreed to finance it. Now it was up to George to put together the acts, schedule and logistics. [Pictured, from left, Louis and Elaine Lorillard with George]

In Part 3 of my conversation with George, the legendary club owner and concert promoter reflects on the festival, his week playing piano behind a skeptical Lester Young at Storyville, and the only career decision he would have done differently:

JazzWax: When you launched the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, did it do what you wanted it to do instantly?
George Wein: Immediately. Because I knew two things: I knew what artists would sell tickets based on how they did at Storyville, and I knew going in what I wanted to do with the festival. I saw it as an opportunity to promote jazz on a large scale and expose people of all ages to this great music. For the first time, people who didn't go to clubs or couldn't get in because they were too young now could see and hear the music and musicians live, outside, in a relaxed, laid-back setting.

JW: What was the secret ingredient to the festival's success?
GW: The most important thing about the first Newport Jazz Festival and probably one of my greatest contributions, was not sticking with one kind of jazz. I had Eddie Condon there and Lennie Tristano in between Billie Holiday and Lester Young on the same program. Whether it was traditional jazz with Bobby Hackett and Wild Bill Davison, or swing with Lester and Billie and Teddy Wilson, or bebop with Dizzy Gillespie, or modern jazz with Tristano and Lee Konitz—everyone's taste was covered. And you could see whether jazz you had not heard before or didn't care too much for appealed to you, too. We put musicians together who played very different types of jazz. This had never been done before. [Photo: Billie Holiday at the 1957 festival]

JW: Would you say the height of the festival was in 1958?
GW: The highpoint? Who knows? Miles Davis in 1955 was remarkable, Duke in 1956—I mean there are so many high points as you go along.

JW: One would think that as a musician with a heart, you might have been too sympathetic to succeed as a businessman and festival promoter.
GW: Well, first of all, I don’t think I am a good businessman. I had a feeling in those days for the public. I still have a slight feeling for the public but it’s a little different now. The music I love no longer sells tickets. What sells tickets now is contemporary rock and things like that. Today, jazz festivals have to feature crossover music. If you feature just pure jazz, you’ll only have a few people in the seats. Economics has to come first today. Back then, love could play a role.

JW: You sound like a pretty good businessman to me.
GW: When I said I could only add and subtract, I was talking at a level where I could have success as an individual and the reputation that goes with it. But I never knew how to take business to another level. The next level is using other people’s money and getting investors and coming up with ideas that might have made me a very rich man.

JW: How so?
GW: I stayed in business for as long as I did because I knew that if I spent $10, I had to take in $11. But that’s not how you get rich in business. If you spend $10, you may take in only $8. But if you get people thinking that next year there's a good chance you'll take in $20, then you’ll get them to invest with you. When they do, you wind up building a bigger company. I never could think like that. I thought purely on what I was doing. I still think like that.

JW: What do you think when you see the film, Jazz on a Summer's Day, which was filmed during the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival?
GW: I think it was a rather great festival. I always get a little upset when my name isn’t mentioned in the film as the festival's creator. But that's life. You learn your lessons. If you want your name protected, you had better protect it yourself. No one’s going to protect it for you.

JW: Of all the artists you’ve known, who did you bond with most?
GW: I got very close with Duke [Ellington]. I think Duke realized two things: That I was a businessman to a degree and could help his career, and that I really loved his music and loved him. He respected both of those qualities. There were a lot of people who loved Duke who weren’t contributing to his career so much. But I was giving Duke as much work as I could. [Pictured: Duke and Elaine Lorillard]

JW: Did he appreciate what you did?
GW: Yes, and he appreciated the success he had at Newport. Whenever he introduced me afterward to musicians and friends, he'd say, “My career began at Newport in 1956.” Then he’d introduce me and give me the biggest plug. That felt so good, coming from Duke. He felt I was a major part of his success during that period in the 1950s and beyond. The festival gave many musicians a huge popular platform they never had before. Even when jazz artists were popular on the radio and on records, and even with Jazz at the Philharmonic, it was still considered nighttime music. Newport changed all that. Newport brought jazz into the daylight, made it family music, and put it on par with classical music. After Duke's performances there, whenever I’d call him, he'd get me whatever I needed for concerts and events. There was never any hesitation or a problem on his part.

JW: What was it about Duke you admired so much?
GW: His generous spirit. And that he was very protective of his music. He wanted to make sure his acknowledgments were there. When we did his Sacred Concerts, he wanted to make sure everything was the way he wanted it. And we did that for him. Whatever Duke asked us for, we saw that it was done.

JW: What about on a personal level?
GW: I could hang out with Duke, have ice cream with him, for example, while he was writing with Billy Strayhorn on the phone. [Pictured: Duke and Billy Strayhorn]

JW: What were they writing?
GW: Some of their larger works. He would say, “Billy, I have the first movement, you get the second movement and we’ll discuss that third movement later.” Stuff like that.

JW: Lester Young played at Newport, but did he ever play Storyville?
GW: Yes. Back in 1953, he played a swing date with a local rhythm section I put together. On the first night, before the first set, Pres asked me who would be playing with him that week. I told him Buck Clayton was coming up from New York and that I had a great local bass player and drummer. He asked who was playing piano. I told him I was. He gave me that look, but I told him I knew all his songs.

JW: What did he say?
GW: He said, "OK, if you say so, Pres." Lester called the person in charge "Pres," and at the club, that was me. He also let me call the first tune—Pennies from Heaven. So when it was time for us to start, he told me to go up and take the first chorus. So I went up with the bass player and drummer. But after the first chorus, Pres still hadn't come up on stage. When I looked at him, he waved me on to take another. And another. Not until the end of the fourth chorus did he come up to play.

JW: Was he happy with you?
GW: Just before he put his horn in his mouth, he said, "You and me are going to be all right, Pres." That felt great. We had a ball the whole week. Lester was so happy playing swing. I think he was tired of playing bebop. When I put Buck Clayton with him, that sort of brought him back to his greatest days.

JW: When you look back on your career, are you satisfied?
GW: Oh, I wouldn’t change a thing. It has been a great adventure. I'm only sorry that my wife, Joyce, died too young in 2005 at age 76. [Pictured: Joyce Wein]

JW: Anything you’d do differently?
GW: My only regret is not making more records. I should have scraped together more money on my tours and recorded my sidemen. You could record very cheaply in those days. I recorded the Giants of Jazz in Switzerland and live concerts in London. But that was toward the very end. All the years before that I could have made 100 albums. That was the only thing I would have done differently.

JW: What about with the festival?
GW: I wouldn't change a thing. Look, I could have been the biggest rock producer in New England. In 1969, I had all the rock groups at Newport. At the time there was no Don Law, the big rock concert promoter up there now. All the agents were selling me their rock groups. After the festival, I said to myself, "This isn't the life I want." I was too proud of my jazz festivals. And I had no control over the rock concerts. I couldn’t program them. I couldn’t use my own creative talents, whatever they were. [Pictured: Anita O'Day at Newport in 1958]

JW: Why not?
GW: With rock, you had no control. Your taste and mix meant little. You put a group on, and they owned the festival. No one else could be playing someplace else. A rock group's popularity was so great that the audience resisted any deviation. See, I liked to put on different groups on different stages at the same time. That was the beauty of the festival. Rock audiences were different. They were uni-dimensional and uni-directional. Young people didn't want anything other than the main attraction. I didn’t want that. I wanted a range of groups that someone age 16 and 60 could go to see and enjoy.

JW: Looking back, were the 1950s as romantic a time as they seem?
GW: Oh yeah. It was that good. I mean there were problems, always. Some clubs did more business, some jazz groups were more popular than others. Even the good ones faced constant challenges from rivals. Then a Dave Brubeck would come along, for example, and completely change the scene. But even when someone had a hot album, it helped all of jazz.

JazzWax video clips: This clip of Dinah Washington singing All of Me remains my favorite clip from Jazz on a Summer's Day. You hear Dinah in all her glory, but you also get to see the effect her voice and her swing had on the young fans who were there in 1958.

Interview: George Wein (Part 2)

Returning to Boston after World War II, George Wein was torn. Enrolled at Boston University on the GI Bill, his growing passion for jazz was overtaking his pre-med and history studies. The more gigs George played around town, the more the pianist realized his heart wasn't in medicine or the past. By the late 1940s, George not only was playing jazz but also organizing dates for his groups and ensuring that bandmembers were paid. [Pictured: George with Sarah Vaughan in 1987]

So after graduation in 1950, George scraped together enough cash and charm to open a jazz club in the centrally located Copley Square Hotel [pictured]. Naming the club Storyville, George began booking his favorite musicians, many of whom he already knew from professional encounters at other Boston clubs.

In Part 2 of my series of conversations with George, the legendary club owner and founder of the Newport Jazz Festival talks about starting Storyville and the many jazz greats who played there:

JazzWax: Where was Storyville exactly?
George Wein: Storyville, in its heyday, from 1953 to 1959, was on the street level of the Copley Square Hotel, on the corner of Exeter St. and Huntington Ave.

JW: How much did it cost to open the club in 1950?
GW: When I opened Storyville, I had $5,000. I bought 40 to 50 tables at $10 a table and 200 chairs at $3 a chair. I bought a sound system for $600 that consisted of a little amplifier with two speakers that I hung next to the bandstand. I bought a cash register for $300, spent $700 to have the club painted, and hired a kid to put a mural on the wall. And I was in business. You can’t do that now. You can’t walk across the street for $5,000.

JW: Did you get pressure from mobsters on which acts to book?
GW: No never. I never had that. The pressure I faced was having to get a different attraction every week. That was very tough. There just weren’t that many great groups. Remember, I needed 40 different attractions because we were open 40 weeks a year. We were closed in the summer. If I was lucky, I could get 15 or 20 good attractions. The rest were great musicians who played wonderful music, but they wouldn't sell tickets. They weren't as popular with fans.

JW: What was your original goal with the club?
GW: I was interested in playing as many of the jazz greats as possible. I didn’t look at the box office results, really. When I played George Shearing [pictured] early on, the place was full. I said to myself, "Boy this is going to be great." Going forward, I said, I only want to play Art Tatum, Billie Holiday and all the people I loved. But while all the people I loved were great musicians, some had small publics and didn’t have hit recordings.

JW: What did hit records have to do with it?
GW: Plenty. I didn’t realize at the time that hit records were the things that sold tickets. I thought that reputations and what other musicians thought of artists sold ticks. Then I learned that if a radio station played a record people liked, people came to hear the music played by the artist. But booking artists with hit records wasn't the basis of what Storyville was. I had a love for what I was doing. I wanted to do things that people would be proud of. I didn’t want a joint. I wanted them to have a nice place to play and hear jazz.

JW: How many times did Charlie Parker play Storyville?
GW: Two or three times. He never played the Newport Jazz Festival.

JW: Was he invited to the first festival?
GW: No. I was planning on having him up to the second one in 1955, but, of course, he died in March of that year.

JW: Did Parker ever try to con you as a club owner?
GW: No. He was always very professional. He never missed a set. He didn’t have his own working band, so I had to hire local musicians. He was supposed to play for me the week he died. He didn’t show up, so we figured Bird goofed, which he never did when he played for me. Then we found out what happened in the newspapers.

JW: How did Bird sound?
GW: He played beautifully. I got his message. I was not a big Charlie Parker fan. But when he played the club, and I heard him every night, I understood why he was the daddy of all the contemporary players.

JW: Did you play with him?
GW: Yes. When he came up to Boston, we'd have  jam sessions on Sunday afternoons. After 1953, I had a second club downstairs in the Copley Square Hotel called Mahogany Hall. It featured mostly traditional jazz. I had Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson and me downstairs along with the other Mahogany Hall All Stars while Bird was playing upstairs with his quartet. I asked Bird to play with us, he said sure, so we came up and played Royal Garden Blues with him.

JW: What was that like?
GW: When he played his blues chorus, our jaws dropped open. The strength of what he could do and the strength of his playing was just amazing. Playing behind him wasn't a problem, since we were playing what we had always played, but with Charlie Parker's bop style. Bebop is really swing with a little inflection in the beat. Bebop wasn't the first real departure in jazz. The first real departure came with John Coltrane [pictured]. Up until then, most everything had some type of 32-bar format.

JW: Did Mahogany Hall eat into Storyville's business?
GW: Not at all. Mahogany Hall featured more traditional jazz. It was a completely different audience. We had some classic jam sessions down there. One afternoon I had Art Tatum playing with Sidney Bechet [pictured]. That was incredible. What the two clubs did have in common is that both were losing money [laughs]. But it didn't matter. People always wonder how you manage to stay in business so many years when you lose money. I don’t know how but somehow or other you do. I was earning money outside the clubs, you know, with the Newport Jazz Festival and tours and things like that. Everything I earned went back into the club. But in the mid-1950s, losing money was different than today. Maybe you lost $10,000 at the end of the year. It wasn’t a big financial thing. Today, when you lose money, you’re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

JW: Some great jazz performances were recorded at Storyville. 
GW: Most were recorded by radio stations, which broadcast from the club.

JW: Did you ever want to install recording equipment at Storyville?
GW: No. We could have if we asked permission of the musicians and paid them. It was too expensive and wasn’t part of our budget. Nowadays kids have TVs in their clubs or whatever. It’s a different world.

JW: Tell me about the Stan Getz Quintet at Storyville in 1951.
GW: That year Stan [pictured] led one of the greatest bands he ever had. He had Al Haig on piano, Jimmy Raney on guitar, Teddy Kotick on bass and Tiny Kahn on drums. That was an exciting band. I loved Stan's music and always had. But as an individual, that was a different matter. In 1951, I hadn’t yet encountered too much of his idiocies. That would come later.

JW: What do you mean?
GW: You couldn’t predict what Stan was going to do. From my perspective, it wasn’t that he was nasty. He might not show up or might not care. I remember I had him in Europe once. We had a date in Belfast, Ireland. He got on a plane and flew to Belfast. When he got there, he got on another plane and flew to London and never played the job. He was unpredictable like that.

JW: Do you think he knew what he was doing when he did that stuff?
GW: He didn’t have it together. He didn’t know what he was doing.

JW: Gerry Mulligan at Storyville in 1956 also gave a legendary performance.
GW: There always was an excitement about Gerry. That group he had was terrific: Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone, Bill Crow on bass and Dave Bailey on drums. Gerry was a big part of the jazz explosion of the 1950s. In those days you had so many great players and groups. When I did a festival, I had Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, the Modern Jazz Quartet. Never mind veteran artists like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. It went on and on and on with the different groups making records and each artist establishing an identity. It was an extraordinary time.

JW: Did Mulligan have a different temperament than Getz?
GW: Gerry off stage was the sweetest guy you’d want to meet. But when you had to deal with him on business, he was so concerned with excellence that he could be a pain in the neck. He was so worried about every little thing as a performer. Then you’d have him over the house for dinner and he’d be the greatest person you’d ever meet socially.

JW: What was he a pain in the neck about?
GW: Sound, position on show, length of set, every little detail. He never ran out of things.

JW: Lee Konitz in 1954 also delivered a great Storyville performance that was captured on record.
GW: Lee and I became very close. I had a little record company then. At the time Paul Desmond was so popular. We felt Lee could have been another Paul. So I recorded him and Ronnie Ball on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Al Levitt on drums. At the time, his modern jazz records didn't sell well. Now, of course, Lee is as popular as ever and, it turns out, historically a more important alto saxophonist.

JW: Were you filling the club with Lee's music back then?
GW: No

JW: Did Boston club-goers get what Lee was trying to do?
GW: No.

JW: Did you get it?
GW: I got it. I made two of the records in the studio myself. If you listen to the music a lot, you get it.

JW: Billie’s last performance was at Storyville in April 1959...
GW: It wasn’t Billie’s last performance. It was her last good performance. She sang at the Blue Moon Café in Lowell, Massachusetts a short time later. I wanted to go up and see her. Father [Norman] O'Connor, who was a big jazz fan and on my Newport Jazz Festival board, said, "George, don’t go up there, you’ll be devastated, don’t do it." So I didn't. Billie died that July.

JW: Do you remember her run at your club that week in April?
GW: I had been away most of the week and came back on Sunday. I sat through all her afternoon and evening shows that day. At the end of the night, I went up to her and said, "Billie, what is it with you? You sound fantastic. You sound as great as ever." Billie said, "I'm straight now, George, you gotta help me, I’m straight.” I said, “Great, I’ll call [manager] Joe Glaser, and we'll set up a date for you at Newport.” Then she took my hand and put it on her heart so I could feel her heart bumping up and down. After she did that I cried. It was so tragic. [Photo by Milt Hinton]

Tomorrow, in the third and final part of my conversation with George, the jazz legend talks about Lester Young, the Newport Jazz Festival, the musician he connected with most, and his sole regret.

JazzWax tracks: Charlie Parker's appearance at Storyville on March 10, 1953 was broadcast by Boston's WHDH radio, which recorded the performance. Parker appeared with Red Garland on piano, Bernie Griggs on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. The album can be downloaded here.

Stan Getz recorded with his famed Jimmy Raney quintet at Storyville in October 1951. The complete Storyville sessions can be found here.

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet at Storyville was recorded in December 1956. The album can be downloaded here.

Jazz at Storyville: The Lee Konitz Quartet was recorded in January 1954. The album can be downloaded at iTunes.

For more live Storyville recordings, go to the search engine at a CD retail site and type in "Jazz at Storyville."

Interview: George Wein (Part 1)

Only one figure in jazz history has played piano behind dozens of major jazz artists, recorded as a singer, owned a major jazz club, produced jazz albums, and started a festival that gave people of all ages daytime access to the greatest jazz musicians of the 1950s and beyond.

That person is George Wein, 82, founder of both Boston's Storyville jazz club and the Newport Jazz Festival. Starting in the 1950s, George was a champion, colleague and employer of virtually every major swing, bop and modern jazz artist. All played at his club and many performed at his famed annual concert series in Newport, Rhode Island. In January 2007, George sold his company, Festival Productions Inc., to Festival Network LLC, which now produces the JVC-sponsored jazz festivals. [Photo above by Jim Cooper]

In the first installment of my three-part conversation with the jazz legend, George talks about growing up in Boston, piano lessons with Serge Chaloff's mom, and how he started his nightclub career:

JazzWax: How many jazz club owners can say they played with Bobby Hackett?
George Wein: [Laughs] We played together several times. Bobby [pictured] was a good friend. He meant a great deal to me. When Bobby was alive, I utilized him a lot. Whenever I had jam sessions, Bobby was in charge of them. When he died in 1976, I said to Dizzy, another dear friend who worked often for me, "You're going to have to be my Bobby Hackett."

JW: What did Dizzy say?
GW: Dizzy said, "Um, Bobby Hackett, yeah, um, yeah, OK." [Laughs]

JW: What was Bobby like?
GW: He was the nicest guy. In the early days of his career, when he was drinking, I didn't know him. When I knew him, in the last 20-odd years of his life, Bobby was one of the sweetest guys I worked with. Never a problem.

JW: Who came up with the name for your Boston club, Storyville?
GW: Nat Hentoff. We were sitting around talking before I opened in 1950, and he came up with it. But then he took the name back, saying it wasn't that good. I said, "No no, it is the name. We don't have to go any further." I wanted a name that eliminated the word "the," which only loaded down the sound. This way, people would say, "Let's go to Storyville." [Pictured: Nat Hentoff in 1955 presenting Miles Davis with a Down Beat award]

JW: Storyville moved a few times during its history, yes?
GW: We opened downstairs in the Copley Square Hotel [pictured] in 1950, closed six months later, moved to the Hotel Buckminster in Kenmore Square in February 1951, and moved back to the Copley Square Hotel in 1953, where we went into prestigious street-level space. We re-opened there with Charlie Parker. At the very end, in 1959, we did a year at the Bradford Hotel on Tremont St. I was going to close the club but the Bradford wanted to keep it open for a year. By then, organizing and promoting the Newport Jazz Festival was a full-time enterprise.

JW: How did you pull off the Copley Square Hotel deal?
GW: People in hotels have space. If the space isn't earning them money, they want to do things with it. In Boston in the '50s, hotels had space that wasn't necessarily producing income. I went to the Copley with the idea, and they said, "OK, let's do it." That's basically what it was. Everything in life is being in the right place at the right time. If I went to a hotel now that's busy, they'd say they don't lease out space, that they're making money with what they're doing with it.

JW: Was the Copley Square Hotel the first place you went to?
GW: Yes. Things were easy back then in one respect: There wasn't much business in Boston. Boston wasn't completely dead, and on Saturday nights it was OK. But during the week, no one was around. You have to understand, Boston is a much busier town now. Today the Copley Square area is packed. I go up there and I can't believe it. The area was very different in the 1950s. Our move to Kenmore Square and then back to Copley Square had to do with costs.

JW: Who did you attract to Storyville if Boston was dead during the week?
GW: Once we caught on, our audience was mostly made up of professors from the different local colleges. We didn't draw many kids because they didn't drink and most were under 21, the legal age limit then. If Boston had allowed drinking starting at age 18, I might still be in business up there [laughs]. The club attracted blacks when I had certain artists booked, but for the most part the audience was white and middle class.

JW: How did you like growing up in the Boston area?
GW: Well, I had a rather a nice time. My father was a doctor, and we lived in Newton, a Boston suburb. We weren't rich by any means, but I never lacked for anything. My father always made a living. I enjoyed Boston and Newton High School [pictured] very much. But I missed a lot of years that would have been important when I went into to the army at age 18. Between age 18 and 21, those are your growing-up years, as a young man. I was growing up much faster in the army. By the time I attended Boston University, from 1946 to 1950, I wasn't a kid going to college. I was a man getting my degree on the GI Bill.

JW: Did you have brothers and sisters?
GW: I had one brother. We got along very well. He was a little older. He introduced me to jazz when I was 11 years old. He brought home a record player with 13 free records that came with it. I remember hearing Louis Armstrong's When the Saints Go Marching In; Benny Goodman and Sing, Sing, Sing; and Jimmie Lunceford's White Heat. I loved what I heard. Slowly but surely I got involved with jazz.

JW: Where did you learn to play piano?
GW: I was playing classical music on the piano when I was 7 or 8 years old. I switched to popular music because I used to sing as a kid and wanted to accompany myself. When I heard jazz and improvisation on my brother's records, I said to myself, "This is interesting, I have to get into this." Next thing I knew I was playing jazz.

JW: With whom did you study?
GW: I studied classical music with Madame Chaloff, who was baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff's mother. Serge and I were friends as kids. She taught me how to play the piano. At age 14, I switched to Sam Saxe, a jazz pianist. He taught me about chording and improvisation and playing on changes and things like that. I was with him for about 2 1/2 years. I played and sang at school events and eventually wanted to become a jazz musician.

JW: When did you start playing professionally?
GW: In college. I was studying pre-med and history, but in my spare time I played regularly with groups like the Edmond Hall Quartet. Edmond [pictured] played clarinet, and our group played Dixieland jazz. We performed regularly at the Savoy Club on Massachusetts Ave. in Boston.

JW: At what point did you develop a head for business?
GW: I never was, quote, business minded. But I could always add and subtract [laughs]. And I found I was a pretty good organizer. I had always been an organizer when I was growing up. If I wanted to play baseball, I'd call all the other kids and we'd start a team. If it was football, I'd call the kids and we'd get uniforms and start a team. I was always organizing. When I played the Savoy with Edmond Hall, he'd say, "Would you please go speak to the boss to see if we can get a raise?" Everyone turned to me to keep things together. I finally said to Edmond, "Let's do our own concert." So we got a Saturday night offer, I rented a hall and that was my first concert. The next thing I knew I was a producer and then a club owner.

JW: Storyville opened in September 1950. Who was the first group booked?
GW: Bob Wilber, who played soprano sax at the time. His original group was a pure Jelly Roll Morton band. He had played the Savoy when I was there with Edmond Hall. He was the other band. I knew that Bob had a following in Boston. But he changed his style at Storyville when he added drummer Big Sid Catlett. Bob wanted to get more into swing. I was all for that, and Bob having Big Sid was very important. Big Sid was an extraordinary swing drummer. That's how we opened the club. It was very exciting. [Pictured from left, Big Sid Catlett, George Wein and Hoagy Carmichael at Storyville in 1950. Photo by Bob Parent.]

JW: Do you think your ability to play jazz helped you as a club owner?
GW: Well, it certainly helped me enjoy life [laughs]. I listen to music from a different point of view than most people. Being a musician myself, I have different feelings. I'm either more tolerant or more intolerant depending on how you look at it. A guy may not play the way I like, but if he can play, I relate to it. Or he may play music that I like but if he doesn't play well, then I'm not a good critic for him. It has nothing to do with style. It has to do with artistry. I respect artistry because I know how hard it is to be a good musician. So when I booked musicians into Storyville, it was always about the artistry, whether I liked the music or not. Looking back, my musical ability certainly influenced my taste and choices. [Pictured: Frankie Newton, George and Joe Palermino. Photo by Bob Parent.]

Tomorrow, George talks about the artists who played at Storyville, including Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz and Billie Holiday.

JazzWax tracks: George recorded on many albums as part of larger ensembles, including the Newport All-Stars. One of his prettiest small-group albums is Wein, Women and Song, recorded in 1955 for Atlantic. It features Ruby Braff and Bobby Hackett on trumpets and Jo Jones on drums among other fine musicians. The album can be purchased or downloaded here.

JazzWax pages: George's autobiography, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, written with Nate Chinen, is available here in paperback.

Interview: Creed Taylor (Part 9)

In the early spring of 1961, Creed Taylor faced a dilemma. Just months after launching Impulse Records, the legendary producer received a phone call that forced him to make a hard decision. Tilting back in his chair, Creed looked out his office window in New York's Paramount Building and weighed his options. He could continue running Impulse with complete freedom and control. Or he could accept the job he was just offered—producing jazz records for Verve. [Photo by Chuck Stewart]

In 1961, Verve was an established label newly acquired by MGM. Dozens of great jazz artists were already in place there, including tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, who had been on Creed's mind since the late 1940s. The more Creed thought about recording Getz and that incredible sound, the more his decision was already made for him. Creed went next door to his mentor, Harry Levine, to tell him the news.

In the final installment of my interview with Creed on his ABC-Paramount years and Impulse months, the legendary producer talks about what he did in the booth to ensure sonic and artistic quality, the recording of John Coltrane's Africa/Brass, and his move to Verve:

JazzWax: Up until now, we've talked about your role in album concepts, talent selection and LP packaging. For readers who aren't aware of the technical side, what were you doing exactly in the booth?
Creed Taylor: [Laughs] As a producer, I am listening. Hard. There was no book of rules. Every producer has his or her own way to record a particular artist. The key is to stay as flexible as you possibly can, so you can make changes when necessary but also remaining open to interesting solutions. Of course, my approach and level of engagement would change with the artist.

JW: How did you follow what was going on? And how did you interact with a date's leader or arranger and conductor?
CT: After the arranger turned his score over to the copyist, who writes out all the parts for the musicians, I had the copyist extract what's called a "booth part." I read music, so a booth part let me follow along and know where the musicians were at any given point. Then I was able to point to a specific place in the arrangement where an adjustment needed to be made.

JW: How did you let the session's leader or conductor know if there was a problem?
CT: Over a private line. I would pick up the phone and call the studio. He'd pick up his phone, and I'd tell him. For example, if there was a problem in third bar of a trumpet part, the conductor/arranger and I could take care of it without disturbing other artists or members of the ensemble.

JW: How did the phone ring without disturbing anyone?
CT: It had a light that flashed. 

JW: Did you talk just to the session leader or conductor?
CT: In the case of a string section, I would call the arranger, say, Don Sebesky, and David Nadien, the concertmaster, into the control booth to discuss it. David was Leonard Bernstein's concertmaster and kept the quality of string sections on my recording sessions very high. 

JW: Weren't string sections made up of classically trained violinists who were consistent in quality?
CT: As in any part of an orchestra, there are good string players and great ones. It was generally accepted among some jazz and pop producers that string parts weren't that demanding and there was no need to choose the musicians with the same care as a reed section, for example. This was not the case with my sessions.  David Nadien knew what I wanted and who to call for all of my dates. Intonation, execution and precision were the bywords. We needed superb string players even in the second row to handle the footballs.

JW: Footballs?
CT: The second row typically played parts with the sustained notes. Those notes are called footballs because they're drawn out and consistent, like the spiral of a football tossed downfield. It takes a long time for the spinning ball to get down there. In my back rows, I insisted on using top guys. I can't say whether other producers did the same or had these standards.

JW: So as a producer, you had to have a reputation as someone who was big on detail and insistent on high standards throughout?
CT: Absolutely. If there was a problem in the back row of the string section, I would call it to David's attention. A great record is the sum of its parts, and details like that could be heard by all Verve fans.

JW: Speaking of Verve, in early 1961 you decided to leave Impulse, a label you had started only months earlier, to take a job at Verve. Why?
CT: Because I got a terrific offer to take over a label with an enormous list of great jazz artists. A guy named Arnold Maxim was president of MGM/Verve at the time, and the company was across the street from ABC-Paramount on 44th St. Maxim had just bought Norman Granz's label, but without Granz, who wasn't part of the deal.

JW: Why did Maxim call you?
CT: Maxim knew what I had been doing with Impulse and decided I'd be perfect with his new acquisition. I hated leaving ABC, Harry and Impulse. But when I told Harry, he said, "You gotta do what comes along. Don't forget, we're right across the street in case you ever want to come back."

JW: What was your responsibility when you arrived at Verve?
CT: I wasn't responsible for re-packaging Verve's existing catalog. My job was to record new albums and sign new talent to the label. I also wasn't interested in letting MGM's ad agency design the covers. I was going to do that with my art director and Pete Turner, a color photographer who I was already using for covers at ABC and Impulse.

JW: Before you left Impulse for Verve, you recorded your sixth and final album: John Coltrane's Africa/Brass.
CT: Yes. In fact, I finished editing it with John [pictured] after I arrived at Verve. We were in my office there talking about how it should sound and the things he wanted in there. Eric [Dolphy] had a different view, though. So there were two versions. One had more of the tribal sound effects on Africa. Eric thought it should be the other way around. He thought Coltrane had gone too far with the effects.

JW: What did you think?
CT: I agreed with Coltrane, that all the African  percussive effects were really great. I don't remember if Eric had anything specific he wanted other than a cleaner version.

JW: Who signed Coltrane to Impulse?
CT: Larry Newton did, with Harry Levine. Larry knew Coltrane's manager, and I encouraged them to do it. I wanted Coltrane on Impulse. I needed Coltrane to give added impetus to the Impulse catalog and show retailers and the market that Impulse was a serious new jazz label.

JW: Did you know Coltrane?
CT: Sure. I had met him many times at the Village Vanguard. I told him early on that a deal with us was imminent, and he ran with it. As soon as he signed, we went over to Rudy Van Gelder's new, larger studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The recording of Africa/Brass was pretty much a Coltrane show.

JW: If you had weighed in, what would you have urged Coltrane to do differently?
CT: I would have liked to have heard more of Eric Dolphy's bass-clarinet solos. But the date didn't require much of my input. What was I going to say? "John, don't play any more of those long solos." That was what he was about. There was a religious quality about him, and you either recorded John that way or you didn't.

JW: What was he like then, at the dawn of his Impulse years?
CT: He was a direct, honest person who knew exactly what he wanted to do. When I was finished editing Africa/Brass at Verve, we went out for coffee, and I told him how much I enjoyed working with him and wished him the best of luck.

JW: Did you want to steal him away from Impulse for Verve?
CT: I had just started at Verve and had my hands full. I had Stan Getz and didn't want to have Coltrane and Stan Getz there together. They were two very different artists who needed the same level of big billing. I also was going in new artistic directions. I always felt Coltrane was a towering figure and knew there was very little I could do to help him on his journey. His talent was so unique. I was honored to have worked on Africa/Brass.

JW: Wasn't Coltrane and his extended-solo format on Africa/Brass in direct contrast with your vision of tighter solo time?
CT: Coltrane had enormous energy and could play the same song for an hour and a half without stopping. That was Coltrane. Coltrane was Coltrane. This was no different from what I had to go through to get Gil Evans to get the job done on Out of the Cool. You had to be patient, provided the artist was focused on the task at hand. Look, I wasn't going to be so presumptuous as to adjust Einstein's theory. Coltrane knew what he was doing.

JW: Did you get a sense that the album would be special and the start of something big?
CT: I knew it before going in. I had gone to enough of his Village Vanguard performances to know what he was about. I knew that Coltrane was an exception to every rule.

In September, Creed and I will pick up the story of his astonishing career in 1961, with a focus on his critical years at Verve Records producing records for Stan Getz, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans and other jazz legends.

JazzWax tracks: Most of Africa/Brass was recorded on May 23, 1961. But the composition Africa needed work. So additional tracks of the 16-minute composition were recorded on June 7. The master of Africa was spliced from the different alternate takes.

The orchestra featured Booker Little and Freddie Hubbard (trumpets), Julian Priester and Charles "Majeed" Greenlee (euphonium) Julius Watkins, Donald Corrado, Bob Northern, Jimmy Buffington and Robert Swisshelm (French horn), Bill Barber (tuba), John Coltrane (soprano and tenor saxes), Eric Dolphy (alto sax, bass clarinet and flute), Garvin Bushell (reeds, woodwinds), Pat Patrick (baritone sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Reggie Workman and Paul Chambers (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums). Arrangements were by Cal Massey, McCoy Tyner, Coltrane and Dolphy [pictured].

The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions is available here.

Interview: Creed Taylor (Part 8)

In 1960, When Creed Taylor pitched his idea for a new jazz label to Harry Levine at ABC-Paramount, he knew exactly what he wanted. The new Impulse label would use a dramatic black-and-orange color scheme, spines would be thicker to command attention, and jackets would open as gatefolds. What's more, the covers would be as glossy as wet seals, adding a luxurious feel and visual to superbly recorded jazz.

When Levine asked about the label's launch, Creed said he wanted to go big and wide. Rather than release just one album in early 1961, Creed pushed to roll out four albums at once. The goal, he said, was to establish a big marketplace footprint needed to commit record dealers, distributors and retailers. A master of the corporate pitch, Creed also said he wanted to use Ray Charles, who was handled on the pop side of the label. After winning everything he wanted, Creed set to work recording his first four Impulse albums and planning a marketing strategy.

In today's installment of my interview series with Creed, the jazz producer reminisces about Ray Charles' Genius + Soul = Jazz, the last of the four Impulse albums to be recorded in advance of an early 1961 release, as well as Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth:

JazzWax: Whose idea was it to frame One Mint Julep as a funky cha-cha-cha?
Creed Taylor: Quincy's. He was the album's architect.

JW: One Mint Julep's riff was and remains pretty addictive to the ear.
CT: I know. It became a hit 45-rpm. During recording sessions back then, producers rarely went out into the studio while the musicians were there. Everything was worked out with the date's leader, conductor or arranger in advance, and that person was in charge of that turf. But when I heard One Mint Julep's break, I had an idea and had to come in.

JW: What did you do?
CT: I went over to Ray and whispered in his ear, “On the break, try adding 'Just a little bit of so-da,' " because a mint julep has soda in it. It felt natural, and we needed something there. But when tape rolled, at the break Ray said instead, “Just a little bit of soul, now.” Which was fine with me. It certainly fit better than “soda.”

JW: What made you think of adding that?
CT: I guess I was thinking about hooks.

JW: Did you decide that One Mint Julep was going to be a single before the session or while you were hearing it in the booth?
CT: While I was hearing it in the booth. The single entered the Billboard pop chart in March 1961 and rose to #8. It was huge. It was on the chart for 13 weeks.

JW: Did you know right away it was going to be hot?
CT: Yep.

JW: How so?
CT: The nature of the rhythm pattern and the feeling it had. I just knew it was going to be the kind of repetitious hook, a groove that would catch people’s ear.

JW: A hook was pretty important for a single?
CT: Oh, yeah, you want that repetitious groove. That’s what I was looking for. That’s what radio was looking for. And that’s what listeners were looking for. A hook is a direct communication with the audience, letting them know that “this is it, now.”

JW: So you'd know going into a session that a single needed a hook?
CT: Hooks were really forced on the record industry by radio. Back then, a single had to say its piece and get out. If you didn’t have something that sounded like “Wow, what is that?” you didn’t have a hit record. The market wanted simplicity. If you have a groove going, you don’t mess around with it until it has made a statement.

JW: Who came up with the album’s title?
CT: I did. Ray’s nickname was The Genius. Since I was going to release four albums at the same time to inaugurate Impulse, what better way to propel the launch than to have Ray Charles’ nickname on there on one of them. Genius was Ray, soul was what Ray was all about, and jazz was what Impulse was selling. The word jazz and Impulse put the whole package together. The title seemed so obvious at the time.

JW: Did you talk to Ray about the date beforehand?
CT: Not at all. We didn’t have any lengthy conversations. We spoke briefly in the control room about what we were going to do before we started recording. Ray knew exactly what all of those musicians sounded like, even though he was predominantly an r&b artist and they were big band pros. Quincy [Jones, pictured] did most of the arrangements, with Ralph Burns writing a couple.

JW: How did the organ Ray played wind up with such a punchy sound?
CT: Rudy [Van Gelder] did some adjusting on the inside so the keys had a more percussive effect than a normal one. It was a Hammond B3 doctored by Rudy. He had done this on organs before for other recording dates. The result was a more definite attack than a normal organ.

JW: What was Ray like to work with?
CT: He was a very friendly guy and very smart. There were no problems even though he had a habit when he was there. But it didn’t affect his playing at all. All of the guys on the date were swinging players, but they all were savvy about r&b and they dug Ray Charles. Music was music. It wasn’t like a bunch of musicians had come in who hadn’t a clue about the style Ray wanted. These guys were well versed in all the genres. Ray loved making that session. He told me so after the date.

JW: The fifth album you released in 1961 was Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth.
CT: We recorded it in February. Oliver was so smart. He was like a university professor who just happened to be able to play, compose and arrange. He and I had the same hobby, HO-scale model trains. In my basement I had built a prototype of the Norfolk and Western Railroad from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Ohio coalfields. Oliver built a prototype of a lumber camp, with the trains taking the logs from the mountains to the mills at the bottom. We were both detail oriented. [Photo of Oliver Nelson with Creed by Chuck Stewart]

JW: Did you realize at the time that Blues and the Abstract Truth was going to be a classic?
CT: Sure. The album was an epic in my life. Freddie Hubbard had the most magnificent solos on there, Eric Dolphy and Bill Evans also were tremendous. [Photo of Creed with Freddie Hubbard by Chuck Stewart]

JW: Did you know Bill Evans?
CT: Yes, I knew him very well. When I first moved to New York in 1954, I rented a place in a brownstone on West 86th St. One night there was a party in the parlor room downstairs and Bill was playing piano there. I grabbed my trumpet and went down to jam with the group. Someone later told me that the pianist was Bill Evans. I mentioned this to Bill sometime later. He had a big laugh. He remembered it clearly. He had a memory that wouldn’t stop. I avoided asking him what he thought about my solo, though [laughs]. [Photo of Creed, Gary McFarland and Bill Evans by Chuck Stewart]

JW: How did the Blues and the Abstract Truth session go?
CT: There were only seven musicians on the date, yet Oliver’s band sounded 10 times larger. Everything fell right into place. One run through and one take on most tracks. The whole album was recorded in one session. If you look at the personnel, you can see why. And none of the players had any personal problems.

JW: Who came up with the title?
CT: I did. I thought we should make a statement about the music. It was the blues, but it was an abstract blues that you hadn’t heard before. It was Oliver Nelson’s impression of the blues. Given the music, we had to package the record in a different way. The blues is supposed to be 12 bars and down and dirty. Here we had something like an architectural structure of something that existed in 12 bars but surely was abstract. And the music wasn’t trying to put anyone on. There was nothing contrived. It was the truth. Oliver meant every note he wrote. I’ve always liked that title.

JW: Was More Blues and the Abstract Truth outtakes from this session?
CT: No. That album was recorded in 1964 with a different personnel. I had nothing to do with it. I was at Verve by then.

Tomorrow, Creed takes us inside the recording booth, providing detail about what he was listening for and how he ensured standards would be high. He also talks about John Coltrane's arrival at Impulse, his decision to leave ABC-Paramount for Verve in 1961 and editing Africa/Brass with Coltrane at his Verve office.

JazzWax tracks: Genius + Soul = Jazz was recorded on December 26 and 27, 1960. One Mint Julep is a critical recording in that it combined four different genres in one song. Julep was modeled after Perez Prado's Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White and Patricia, both of which hit No. 1 on Billboard's pop chart in 1955 and 1958, respectively.

One Mint Julep also was one of the first jazz-funk-soul-Latin crossover singles and went on to influence Mongo Santamaria's seminal recording of Watermelon Man in 1962 and other boogaloo pop hits to follow.

The all-star cast of musicians on the December 26th session were:  Ray Charles (organ), Phil Guilbeau, Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Clark Terry and Snooky Young (trumpets), Henry Coker, Urbie Green, Al Grey and Benny Powell (trombones), Marshal Royal and Frank Wess (alto saxes), Frank Foster and Billy Mitchell (tenor sax), Charlie Fowlkes (baritone sax), Freddie Green (guitar), Eddie Jones (bass) and Sonny Payne (drums).

The following day, a different personnel was used to record four tracks that included One Mint Julep. Joining Ray Charles were John Frosk, Phil Guilbeau, Jimmy Nottingham, Clark Terry and Joe Wilder (trumpets) Jimmy Cleveland, Urbie Green, Keg Johnson and George Matthews (trombones), George Dorsey and Earle Warren (alto saxes), Budd Johnson and Seldon Powell (tenor saxes), Haywood Henry (baritone sax), Sam Herman (guitar), Joe Benjamin (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums). The CD is available here.

Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth was recorded in one day on February 23, 1961. The album featured Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), Oliver Nelson (alto and tenor saxes), Eric Dolphy (alto sax and flute), George Barrow (baritone sax), Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums). The CD is available here.

JazzWax clips: The influence that one hit has had on another fascinates me, as long-time readers of this blog know. So let's connect the dots: Listen to Perez Prado's Patricia here. Then dig One Mint Julep here. And now hear how the baton was passed to Mongo Santamaria's Watermelon Man here. After Watermelon Man, the dots connect to Lee Morgan (The Sidewinder), James Brown (Papa's Got a Brand New Bag) and Joe Cuba (Bang Bang). You can spend hours drawing lines from these artists to all those who followed.

Clearly, Ray Charles' One Mint Julep was more significant than most people realize and highly under-appreciated as a fusion hit.

Interview: Creed Taylor (Part 7)

By the late 1950s, producer Creed Taylor was growing restless. As ABC-Paramount's jazz producer since 1956, Creed had created a distinct sound for the label that projected optimism without robbing the music's intensity. Jazz albums produced by Creed combined his urbane taste and high musical standards with the artists' passion and creative energy. The results were sophisticated and savvy, not treacly or trite. [Photo of Quincy Jones with Creed by Chuck Stewart]

But while Creed's success at ABC-Paramount came with enormous say and freedom, his albums still had to conform to the company's outdated and rigid packaging model. Dissatisfied with the square way ABC's jazz albums looked and felt, Creed pushed for the creation of a new jazz label that would reflect his personal vision and design sensibilities. What he had in mind were bold colors, lamination and a gatefold so buyers could swing open the records, like a picture book or magazine.

In today's installment, Creed talks about the birth of Impulse Records, the problem that inadvertently led to the label's name, and the four-pronged strategy he used to launch the label and make it instantly significant in record stores:

JazzWax: If things were going so well at ABC-Paramount, why did you decide to start Impulse Records?
Creed Taylor: Many of the records I had produced for ABC were decent moneymakers. Albums like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’ Sing a Song of Basie and Billy Taylor’s My Fair Lady Loves Jazz did well. But they didn't look like jazz albums. They were stiff and lacked a mood, a feeling. By 1959, I had become engrossed with album-packaging. I decided that the way to take producing jazz to the next level was to have my own label. ABC was a pop label, primarily. Jazz needed its own home.

JW: How did you get the ABC brass to greenlight your idea?
CT: It was easy. Remember, you didn’t have the office politics in companies back then that you have today. I just went to [company vice president] Harry Levine and told him I wanted to put together a label, and I wanted to call it Pulse. I told him which artists I was going to use to kick off the label and that I wanted each album to be packaged as a gatefold with glossy sheet lamination.

JW: Was Harry still standing after you told him all that?
CT: [Laughing] He loved the idea. My office was right next to his, and we talked every day. We were close. I told him specifically what I wanted to do. Harry asked me just one question: Did I think the label was going to be successful? I said yes, and Harry said he’d take care of the rest. Harry got Larry Newton to agree, and Sam Clark said OK. Remember, cost wasn’t that big a deal. ABC had a strong cash flow from Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, Paul Anka [pictured], Steve and Eydie, Johnny Nash, Lloyd Price and other pop artists. ABC also had enormous cash flow from the company’s vast theater chain.

JW: What exactly did you tell Harry to get him excited?
CT: I said I had been looking carefully at different ways to move records out of retail. I told him we had to put out jazz records that looked great and stood out from the other records in the store. I also told him that Fran Scott, my designer, and I had been talking about stand-out color combinations and that we were set on orange and black for the new label. I also wanted the jacket spines to be wider and bolder, so they would look good on the shelf and jump right out at you in stores and at home.

JW: What was the next step?
CT: I put through a trademark and copyright request for the Pulse name in New York State. But Pulse was taken. Some electronics company had it. As I was trying to figure out an alternative to Pulse in a meeting, I said, “My impulse is to…wait, hold it a second...Impulse, that’s even better than Pulse!” The Impulse name cleared in New York. If I had waited much longer, though, Impulse would have been taken, too, by a urinal valve company. [laughs]

JW: Did Sam or Harry make you do double duty on both labels or did they let you do what you wanted?
CT: They didn’t “let” me do anything. I just did it. You have to understand, the office scene back then wasn’t like it is today. Back then, you got out there, you hustled, you went to record distributorships and record dealers. So long as the dealers paid their bills, everything was great. If you had an idea and had proven yourself, you tried it. The people who made decisions were tough guys who rolled up their sleeves and operated on their gut. They knew the value of trying new things and taking risks, especially when the odds of it working out were pretty good.

JW: Which album did you decide to issue first on the Impulse label?
CT: One? I issued four records simultaneously. This was the only way to make a statement with the dealers and stores, to signal that our commitment was as strong as the look of the albums. We had to show that we were making a big, bold push.

JW: Which were the first four Impulse albums?
CT: The Great Kai and J.J., Ray Charles’ Genius + Soul = Jazz, The Incredible Kai Winding Trombones and Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool.

JW: Did you record them all around the same time?
CT: They were recorded in a tight time frame between October and December. I’d mix one with Rudy [Van Gelder, pictured] and put it in the can and move on to the next one. When I got to the last one, we released all four in early 1961.

JW: What’s the back-story to Out of the Cool? The rumor has always been that the album, recorded in November and December of 1960, took a ton of time.
CT: It was Gil. You’d have to know Gil to understand. Deadlines never entered his mind. The track, La Nevada, for example, took forever. Gil and I drove out three different times to Rudy’s studio with the entire 15-piece band to try different arrangements, and nothing would happen. Finally, Gil was sitting at the piano playing this repetitive figure that became the song's theme. As the rhythm players vamped on the idea, Gil wrote chord changes on the inside of a book of matches. He went over to bass trombonist Tony Studd and whispered something in his ear. Then he pointed to the rest of the horn players for them to do something. It was made up along the way.

JW: That must have been murder on you.
CT: Stuff like that is tough on the producer because the clock is money. But I wasn’t going to rock the boat with Gil. It wasn’t that he was fooling around. He was waiting for the right creative moment. And when it happened, man, it was worth the wait.  I had no problem with patience on that. This guy had written stuff like that for Claude Thornhill. He could take his time, however long it took.

Tomorrow, Creed talks in detail about Genius + Soul = Jazz, how Ray Charles wound up adding, "Just a little bit of soul, now" on One Mint Julep, what Rudy Van Gelder did to the organ Ray played to give it extra punch, and the recording of Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth.

JazzWax tracks: The Great Kai and J.J. featured just trombonists Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson backed by Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums) on four tracks, with Tommy Williams (bass) and Art Taylor (drums) replacing Chambers and Haynes on the other seven. It was recorded October 3 and November 2, 4 and 9, 1960. The CD and download are available here.

The Incredible Kai Winding Trombones was recorded on November 17,  21, 23, and December 13, 1960. The first date featured Kai Winding and Eph Resnick (trombones), Tony Studd and Paul Faulise (bass trombones) Ross Tompkins (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass) and Al Bendini (drums). On the second date, John Messner replaced Eph Resnick on trombone. In December most of the personnel was swapped out: Kai Winding and Jimmy Knepper (trombones), Dick Lieb and Paul Faulise (bass trombone), Bill Evans (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Sticks Evans (drums). The album can be downloaded here.

Gil Evans Out of the Cool was recorded on November 18, 30 and December 10 and 15, 1960. The Gil Evans Orchestra featured Johnny Coles and Phil Sunkel (trumpets), Jimmy Knepper and Keg Johnson (trombones), Tony Studd (bass trombone), Bill Barber (tuba), Budd Johnson (tenor and soprano saxes), Eddie Caine (flute and alto sax), Bob Tricarico (bassoon, flute and piccolo), Gil Evans (piano), Ray Crawford (guitar), Ron Carter (bass) and Charlie Persip and Elvin Jones (drums). On the December dates, Ray Beckenstein replaced Eddie Caine on reeds. The CD is available from Creed Taylor's site here.

For more on Creed Taylor and to buy the albums he produced during his lengthy career at multiple jazz labels, go here.