Filling the Instrument with the Breath of Life

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Scott K Fish

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SKF NOTE: Here is a favorite universal description of the relationship of living musicians to their lifeless musical instruments.

In James Baldwin‘s story, Sonny’s Blues, Mr. Baldwin’s character, Sonny, is an aspiring jazz pianist. Baldwin’s musician/instrument description is written through the eyes of  Sonny’s unamed older brother — a non-musician math teacher:

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

— end —

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Harvey Mason on ‘Chameleon’

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Listening to Chameleon by Herbie Hancock‘s Headhunters when the song was first released in 1973 was an experience today’s listeners missed. Cutting edge music in 1973, the best of Chameleon — the music, the sounds, the rhythm — are part of today’s music vocabulary.

The Headhunters’ Chameleon was the first time I heard Harvey Mason playing drums. It’s fair to say the Headhunters album put Harvey Mason on the map.

In 1976, Harvey Mason sat with one of the great jazz writers, Leonard Feather, for one of Feather’s signature Down Beat Blindfold Tests. Mr. Feather plays album cuts and his guest reacts to the cuts.

Mr. Mason’s response to Louis Bellson‘s 1975 version of Chameleon caught my eye for a few reasons. First, Harvey Mason tells us how Chameleon — a “group effort” — was written. Second, in a case of double irony, Mason singles out Headhunters percussionist Bill Summers — who plays Chameleon’s signature beer bottle into — as an equal partner in the song’s creation. Yet instead of Bill Summers, Harvey Mason in this Blindfold Test credits Bill Simmons.

Getting Bill Summers’s last name wrong could have happened for many reasons: Harvey Mason could have misspoken. Leonard Feather, or Feather’s tape transcriber, could have heard and transcribed the name wrong. The name might have been botched at Down Beat or at the magazine printer’s. It was nice of Harvey Mason to give Bill Summers credit where credit is due.

Leonard Feather plays Louis Bellson’s 1975 version of Chameleon, and Harvey believes he, Mason, is hearing Maynard Ferguson’s 1974 arrangement of Chameleon — which has drummer Dan D’Imperio. Reading this Blindfold Test in 2016, I was expecting Harvey Mason to identify Louis Bellson. I don’t know if my expectations would have been different in 1976.

At any rate, I enjoyed Mason’s response to Bellson’s Chameleon both before and after Mason knows he has just heard Louis Bellson on drums. And for good measure I am including all three Chameleon versions in chronological order in this post.

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LOUIS BELLSON, Chameleon (from Explosion, Pablo). Louis Bellson, drums; Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Bill Holman, arranger.

Harvey Mason: That’s very familiar. I think that was the first cover of that tune. That was interesting, the way that tune came about. When I was playing with Herbie [Hancock] we were rehearsing for the album and trying to get tunes together. It was really a cohesive unit; we really felt good when we played together. We always carried tape recorders and just started playing and editing the things that we played in rehearsals. We came up with a great tune and put it together and it turn out to be … wow! Unbelievable success.

It was a group effort. Unfortunately, Bill Simmons [sic] was left off a lot of the credit, but he contributed as much as anyone else.

On the version we just listened to, the arrangement is good. I’d give it four stars. It was performed very well. I believe it was Maynard. I hope it was anyway. The drummer I don’t know. It was interesting to hear him play the same pattern that I played on the record. Fine. I really enjoyed it.

Leonard Feather: Did you know it was recorded by Louis Bellson?

HM: If it was Louis Bellson, then it was Blue Mitchell on trumpet, not Maynard Ferguson. It was interesting to hear Louis. Beautiful, Louis!

Source: Blindfold Test: Harvey Mason, by Leonard Feather, Down Beat, February 12, 1976

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Syncopation: What if You Can’t Hear It?

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Robert Palmer was a writer I could always count on for insightful interviews with musicians. Mr. Palmer knew his subjects, asked great questions, and always — from where I stood — treated his interviews as peer-to-peer musician conversations.

So last week, while revisiting a Down Beat magazine I’ve had for 40 years, I read — for the first time, I think — Palmer’s interview with New England Conservatory President Gunther Schuller. A musician, writes Palmer, whose biography has “too many honors and accomplishments listed.”

I knew of Gunther Schuller as a proponent of fusing jazz and classical musics to create Third Stream music, and of Mr. Schuller’s collaborations with the Modern Jazz Quartet, his early praise of Ornette Coleman‘s music, his Symphony For Brass And Percussion, and as the author of Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development.

Today, I find in this interview many, many interesting points — especially discussions on how musicians from different countries have unique ways of hearing rhythm. For example, Schuller tells Palmer, “I practically grew up in the New York Philharmonic, and I learned very early that for Mengelberg and Toscanni and all those great conductors of the ’30s, one of their main jobs was taking all these national traits, say within the string section, and try to bring them all into one common denominator. It was a heck of a job.”

Which, in my life experience, is the same “heck of a job” team builders of all stripes experience.

Robert Palmer, at one point, moves the topic to Gunther Schuller’s book, Early Jazz. Palmer says of Schuller’s theory on the African origin of syncopation he, Palmer, wishes Schuller had used more examples in reaching his conclusion. Schuller replies, he used the examples available to him at the time, and even with more examples, Schuller thinks his African/syncopation theory would hold true.

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Gunther Schuller: I think the main point of my chapter was the explanation of what we call syncopation, which, I am convinced, comes out of the polyrhythmic structuring of African ensemble music.

Look, if I face students who are classically trained and I want to get them to play a swinging syncopation, what do I do? I write it down. Of course I can’t write it down exactly. If I write it the way jazz musicians write it, they’ll play it like this. (Schuller sings a choppy, stiff version of a swing riff.)

If I try to write it more or less exactly, it will be terribly complex, sextuplets over quintuplets, all this sort of thing — irrational rhythms — and they still won’t be able to play it.

The obvious answer is that all they have to do is hear it. But, and this is the fantastic thing, they often cannot hear it! My father, who is a German trained musician, cannot play jazz rhythms.

So I asked myself, “Where did that particular type of syncopation, which you do not find in Brahms, in Wagner, where did it come from?”

Source: Gunther Schuller: On the American Musical Melting Pot, by Robert Palmer, Down Beat, February 12, 1976

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Coltrane on Playing, Steadily, Steadily, Every Night

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Scott K Fish

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SKF NOTE: Black Giants is a 1970 book collection of interviews and essays with/about some of the “New Jazz” prime movers, i.e. Elvin Jones, Archie Shepp, and John Coltrane.

Contributor Frank Kofsky‘s Septermber 1967 interview with John Coltrane has Coltrane’s view on his great quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones vs the group Coltrane had after Elvin’s departure with Rashied Ali on drums and Emmanuel Rahim on percussion.

Also, John Coltrane’s thoughts on the benefits of musicians “playing, steadily, steadily, every night,” are worth highlighting. Coltrane using the examples of Elvin Jones with the Coltrane Quartet, and his, John Coltrane’s, own learning curve with Miles Davis’s First Great Quartet are worth remembering.

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black_giants

Black Giants Book Cover

Frank Kofsky: When I talked to you a couple of years ago…and I asked you if you would ever consider adding another horn to the group, you said probably the thing you would do is…you would add drums.

John Coltrane: I still feel so strongly about drums, I really do. I feel very strong about these drums. I experimented in it, but we didn’t have too much success. I believe it would have worked, but Elvin and McCoy [unintelligible]

FK: It doesn’t necessarily have to be two drums. It coud be drums and another rhythm instrument.

JC: I think so, too. I could come in different forms, shapes; I just don’t know how to do it, though.

FK: After all, the things that you’re using in the group now — shakers, bells, maracas — are rhythm instruments too. Not all rhythm instruments are drums.

JC: Oh, that’s true.

FK: …Sun Ra said…you hired Rashied Ali as a means of driving Elvin and McCoy out of the band….

JC: There was a thing I wanted to do in music, see, and I figured I could do two things: I could have a band that played like the way we used to play, and a band that was going in the direction the the one I have now is going in — I could combine these two, with these two concepts going. And it could have been done.

FK: How do you feel about having another horn in the group, another saxophone? Do you feel that it in any way competes with you or that it enhances what you’re doing?

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Elvin Jones

JC: Well, it helps me. It helps me stay alive physically, man[.] [T]he pace I’ve been leading has been so hard, and I’ve gained so much weight, that sometimes it’s been a little hard physically. I feel that I like to have somebody there in case I can’t get that strength.

[T]here’s always got to be somebody with a lot of power. In the old band, Elvin had this power. I always have to have to have somebody there with it, you know?

Rashied has it, but it hasn’t quite unfolded completely; all he needs to is play.

FK: That was my impression too, that he really was feeling his way ahead in the music and didn’t have the confidence Elvin had. But then, of course, look how long Elvin was with you before….

JC: Elvin was there for a couple of years[.] [A]lthough Elvin was ready from the first time I heard him[.] [Y]ou know, I could hear genius there[.] [B]ut he had to start playing, steadily, steadily, every night….

With Miles [Davis] it took me around two and a half years, I think, before it started developing, taking the shape that it was going to take.

Source: John Coltrane Interview, by Frank Kofsky, The Black Giants, The World Publishing Company (1970)

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Clifford Brown: You’ve Got to Hear Things Before You Can Do Them

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Scott K Fish

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SKF NOTE: At some point, serious music students — jazz students, at least — will meet Clifford Brown. A brilliant trumpet player, the world is blessed to have Clifford Brown’s impressive recorded legacy to listen to. Clifford Brown was 26-years old when he died in an automobile accident. He was also, at that time, part of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet.

The Brown/Roach group is where I first heard Clifford Brown AND Max Roach. I still love the Brown/Roach group and the music both men recorded in other settings.

In 2005 I bought and read Nick Catalano‘s biography, Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter. This segment on how learning to hear played such an important part in Clifford Brown’s early studies makes sense to me, so I pass it along to you.

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Clifford Brown was a junior high school student when he was brought to Boysie Lowery. He had advanced considerably beyond his initial fascination with the shiny trumpet and had developed a serious musical interest “through experience with the junior high school band.”

“I didn’t start him in a book,” Boysie Lowery recalled years later. “I taught him how to hear. The most important thing is to be able to hear. I know a lot of guys that have been to college, but they don’t have what it takes to improvise. They can’t hear. You’ve got to be able to hear things before you can do them.”

Lowery’s system has now become legendary. He calls it “the classes.” Briefly, it teaches the student how to hear chord changes and then to improvise on the basis of what is heard.

“The classes gave you the freedom to execute and develop a style,” [Lowery] said. “It gives you a chance to know what you want to do.”

Improvisation? Chord changes? Certainly not the stereotyped exercise books and uninspiring classical practice pieces that comprise the bill of fare for most young music students.

Lowery’s approach cut to the chase. It gave great motivation to youngsters who wanted to play jazz, which was where Clifford Brown’s aspirations lay.

“He really knew what he wanted to do as far as music was concerned,” Boysie Lowery later told jazz scholar Phil Schaap. “All he needed was the right person, and I think I was the one at the time.”

Source: Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter, by Nick Catalano, Oxford University Press (2000)

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