Dave Frishberg is a deceptive kind of artist –– by turns witty, scathing, tender and ironic andfrequently displaying all these qualities within the same catchy,well-crafted tune. In addition to being a fine composer and a lyricist whose work can be judged alongside the best that Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin had to offer, he is also a fine pianist whose style seems perfectly matched to female vocalists likeConnie Evingson and his fellow Portland resident, the supremely gifted but grossly underrated Rebecca Kilgore.
It will be a sad day when Dave Frishberg finally leaves us. He remains the last living example of the jazz-focused, self-accompanied balladeer whose roots stretch back to the heady days of Fats Waller and the cabaret tradition exemplified by such groundbreaking artists asSophie Tucker and Mabel Mercer. The 1991 compilation Classics (which contains Blizzard of Lies and many of his other most iconic songs) is an excellent place to startexploring his work.
Use the link below to visit the website of North American pianist, composer, lyricist, arranger, vocalist and writer DAVE FRISHBERG:
I am constantly practicing in my head… I'm always thinking rhythms, drums. When I was very young I used to practice a lot; not any special thing, but just practice playing. Now I'm like a doctor. When he's operating on you, he's practicing. When I go to my gigs, that's my practice. I may play something that I never heard before or maybe that you never heard before. It's all a challenge. I deal with sounds. I'm full of rhythm, man. I feel it. I think summer, winter, fall, spring, hot, cold, fast and slow –– colors. But I don't analyze it. I've been playing professionally over 50 years, and that's the way I do it. I always surprise myself. The worst surprise is when I can't get it to happen. But it usually comes out. I don't play for a long period, and then I'm like an animal, a lion or tiger locked in its cage, and when I get out I try to restrain myself. I don't want to overplay. I like the guys to trade, and I just keep it moving, and spread the rhythm, as Coltrane said. Keep it moving, keep it crisp.
ROY HAYNES
From the liner notes for Praise (1998)
Some jazz musicians burst on the scene in a blaze of glory, instantly capturing the public's attention as though this, and this alone, was what they were put on earth to do. Others can take much longer to receive the recognition they deserve, their genius eclipsed –– at least temporarily –– by musicians who, while no less brilliant or inspiring in their way, are more representative of the prevailing fashion for this or that sound, this or that 'school' or method of interpretation. The problem can be compounded to some extent if the undervalued musician in question happens to be a drummer. In jazz the rhythmic element is often something the listener takes for granted, without fully appreciating that a drumkit can be every bit as expressive as a trumpet, a saxophone, a piano or a guitar in the right hands. Drummers drive the sound. Without them, jazz as we know it would not and could not exist.
In a career spanning more than six decades, Roy Haynes has proven time and time again what a gifted and irreplaceable musician he is and how he fully he deserves his fondly bestowed nickname 'Snap Crackle.' Even a cursory glance at his resumé reads like a Who's Who of modern jazz, with names like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Sarah Vaughan appearing alongside those of the next generation of iconoclasts including John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, Andrew Hill, Chick Corea and Roy Hargrove. With his idiosyncratic approach to melody, focusing on creating new cymbal patterns over a consistently crisp and driving snare, his playing has become the yardstick by which all other drummers –– jazz and rock alike –– are frequently measured. As his grandson and fellow drummer Marcus Gilmore explained it in a 2013 interview recorded for National Public Radio: 'What people don't realize, when they talk about people like Roy Haynes as one of the great jazz drummers, is that really he is one of the original drummers creating the language for everybody. But people don't think about it like that; they think of him as a jazz great. But the thing is really the drum –– the trap set –– is pretty new, maybe like 100 years. If you're playing that much drums in 1945, that means you're one of the pioneers of the instrument.'
REFLECTION
PHINEAS NEWBORN JR [piano]; PAUL CHAMBERS [bass]
ROY HAYNES [drums]
Recorded 14 November 1958
From the New Jazz Records LP
We Three
Roy Owen Haynes was born on 13 March 1925 in Roxbury, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the Massachusetts city of Boston. His parents had come to the United States from the Caribbean island of Barbados and Haynes and his elder brother grew up surrounded by people of other races and cultures. 'We had an Irish family on one side of our home,' he remembered in a 2008 interview he gave to jazz journalist Marc Myers, 'French-Canadians on the other and a synagogue in front of our house. It was great growing up with all different kinds of kids.' His earliest musical influence was 'Papa' Jo Jones, drummer for the Count Basie Band and someone he actually met –– by telling the doorman at the venue he snuck into that he was his hero's son –– when the Basie orchestra passed through Boston in the late 1930s. It was through his brother, however, that Haynes obtained his first pair of drumsticks which, he explained, had been lying '…around the house' for some time.
Largely self-taught, Haynes was playing semi-professionally by his mid-teens and was famous enough in and around the Boston area to receive an offer to join the eighteen piece big band of pianist and arranger Luis Russell –– an offer made on the recommendation of a mutual friend because, at the time it was made, Russell had not yet heard him play. One of his first gigs with the bandleader, whose organization he joined full-time in 1945, was at New York's legendary Savoy Ballroom. 'You learn a lot keeping time for a big band people are dancing to,' he told Myers, 'especially one that had to be on top of its game at the Savoy. I found out after I got back to Boston that I had changed the sound of that band after playing with them for more than a year. Luis didn’t tell me. Musicians had told my brother.'Being based in New York also allowed him to explore the emerging be-bop sound being explored at that time in Fifty-Second Street nightclubs like Minton's and Small's Paradise and to participate in some of the after-hours jam sessions that would prove crucial not only to its development but to the development of what, by the end of the 1940s, was being defined as 'modern jazz.'
By 1947 Haynes was a member of saxophonist Lester Young's band –– a position he would relinquish in 1949 to work briefly with pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Miles Davis before joining the Charlie Parker Quintet. He recorded with all these artists on several occasions and also played on recordings by saxophonists Wardell Gray and Stan Getz. In 1953 he joined the band of vocalist Sarah Vaughan, touring with her for the next five years and appearing on many of her most outstanding 1950s EmArcy LPs including Images (1954), Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi (1955) and the breathtaking Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown (1955). In 1954, the Emarcy label also released Busman's Holiday, the drummer's first album as a leader featuring pianist Adrian Acia, saxophonists Sahib Shihab and Bjarne Nerem, trombonist Ake Persson and bassist Joe Benjamin. This was followed later in the year by The Roy Haynes Sextet on the Vogue label, another 10 inch LP featuring the French pianist Henri Renaud and his guitarist countryman Jimmy Gourley.
The late 1950s saw Haynes consolidate his position as one of the most influential and in demand drummers in jazz, his 1959-1960 work as a member of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk's band leading to a two year stint with groundbreaking saxophonist Eric Dolphy which in turn saw him work again extensively with Stan Getz and then with improvisational saxophone giant John Coltrane between 1961 and 1965. The 1960s also saw him contribute as a sideman to many of the most memorable jazz LPs of the decade, including The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961) by saxophonist/arranger Oliver Nelson, Domino (1962) by saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and Black Fire (1963) and Smokestack (1963) by underrated pianist/composer Andrew Hill. Nor did his own work as a leader fall by the wayside, seeing him release four albums under his own name including 1962's Out For The Afternoon featuring the stellar playing of Roland Kirk, pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist Henry Grimes.
In 1968 Haynes began what was to become a long, fruitful but intermittent working relationship with Chick Corea, with the release of the LP Now He Sings, Now He Sobs ––an album which also featured the solid bass playing of Czech musician Miroslav Vitous –– in March of that year marking a watershed in the development of trio jazz and a major leap forward in the pianist's compositional technique. This session also marked the first appearance on record of the flat ride cymbal created by the Paiste cymbal company, offering drummers a 'tighter, brighter sound' that seemed tailormade for Haynes's fluid and by now legendary snappy style of playing.
The final two years of the decade were busy ones for Haynes, seeing him tour extensively with Stan Getz and as a member of the working band of vibraphonist (and former Getz alumnus) Gary Burton. The 1970s saw him release nine more albums as a leader and appear as a sideman on recordings by pianists Dave Brubeck and Tommy Flanagan, Jamaican born trumpeter Dizzy Reece and many other artists. In 1983 he reunited with Chick Corea, appearing on three different albums and remaining a member of the pianist's working trio until 1987. Two years later he performed on Question and Answer, an LP by Pat Metheny which marked the beginning of another important collaboration that was to endure well into the 1990s and eventually see the guitarist appear as a sideman on Haynes's 1996 LP Té Vou. That year also saw Haynes win the Best Drummer category in the annual DownBeat Readers' Poll Awards and receive a prestigious Chevalier des Ordres des Artes et des Lettres decoration from French President Jacques Chirac.
SCRAPPLE FROM THE APPLE
STAN GETZ [tenor saxophone]; GARY BURTON [vibes]
STEVE SWALLOW [bass]; ROY HAYNES [drums]
Recorded live for BBC TV UK, 1966
Other awards were to follow as the new millennium saw Haynes formally recognized as the artistic giant he is in his native land, with his 2004 induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame followed by a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award presented to him by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (better known as the people who hand out Grammy Awards each year). This was followed in September by the release of Roy-Alty, his first LP as a leader since the 2006 release of Whereas and the 3 CD/1 DVD career retrospective A Life in Time: The Roy Haynes Story 1946-2006. Haynes, who turned ninety in March 2015, was still performing as recently as 2013 as a member of Fountain of Youth, the new band he formed in 2004.
Thankfully, the legacy of Roy Haynes will not die with him when he's eventually forced to leave us. His son, trumpeter Graham Haynes, still plays and records regularly, as does his twenty-seven year old grandson–– a no less formidable drummer who has played on albums by trumpeter Clark Terry, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and, for a time, filled the drum chair in the Chick Corea Trio. When asked to provide a reason for his grandfather's incredible longevity, Gilmore was quick to point out that it is his musical open-mindedness that has allowed Roy Haynes to remain at the forefront of jazz for more than sixty years. 'Another reason,' he added, 'is that it was just something he was born with, because in some ways, his playing hasn't changed that much. It's evolved, but in some ways he was playing all that same bad shit in the 40s. I don't know where he got it from. To have him is a treasure. A treasure to the family, but also as a national treasure, too, actually.' While no one who has heard him play would argue with this, it is no exaggeration to say that Roy Haynes personifies jazz in many respects –– a trailblazer whose recorded works will remain the yardstick by which drummers will be measured for as long as human beings continue to compose, perform and record music together.
ROY HAYNES 2005
To read the full 2008 ROY HAYNES interview conducted by jazz journalist MARC MYERS visit his website JazzWax.
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
Although it's a word often used to describe jazz musicians, only a handful truly deserve the title 'pioneer.'
Texas-born Ornette Coleman, who died today from a heart attack at the age of eighty-five, was one such musician –– a musical rebel who redefined not only the playing of his primary instrument, the alto saxophone, but also redefined jazz in a way comparable to what Louis Armstrong achieved during his heyday in the mid-1920s. No one sounded like Coleman before Coleman and no one has ever really succeeded in sounding like him since. Heavily influenced by the blues, he used and transcended that influence to inject the sound of the human voice into much of his playing, creating a style that could soar, wail and moan as the situation demanded while remaining uniquely avant garde and, in a true sense, beyond definition.
Coleman and Armstrong shared another connection through their use of collective improvisation –– something that was the norm in the early years of jazz but had more or less died out by the time Coleman singlehandedly revived the concept with his radical, game-changing 1960 LP Free Jazz featuring his core quartet consisting of himself on alto saxophone, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins and a guest quartet featuring saxophonist Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bassist Scott La Faro and drummer Ed Blackwell. Like it or loathe it, the wild, seemingly directionless music this 'double quartet' created made Coleman a controversial and divisive figure –– one whose apparently 'free' or 'naïve' style of playing saw some of his fellow musicians ridicule him as someone who 'couldn't play at all' –– but he nevertheless went on to transform the idea of what jazz could and, more tellingly, should be for generations of musicians and fans alike. 'I don’t think that sound has a style,' Coleman told jazz journalist Don Snowden in 1984. 'The human voice doesn’t have a style, it has a language, and sound is the same way. We make the style once we find the sound that takes the form of the idea.'
Few musicians have ever had ideas as profound and at the same time provoking as Ornette Coleman or, for that matter, the courage and intelligence required to successfully pursue them, in spite of what was sometimes fierce opposition, for close to sixty years. He inspired legions of musicians –– including Lou Reed and Jerry Garcia –– and is now widely recognized, along with his contemporary Charles Mingus, as being one of the most innovative composers of the twentieth century.
RAMBLIN'
ORNETTE COLEMAN [alto saxophone]; DON CHERRY [pocket trumpet]
CHARLIE HADEN [bass]; BILLY HIGGINS [drums]
From the 1960 Atlantic LP
Change of the Century
Use the link below to read the obituary of jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer ORNETTE COLEMAN posted in the online archive of the LA Times:
Of all the many and varied excitements of jazz, surely none is more dramatic and stimulating than one of those rare occasions when a new star of major importance suddenly bursts through from nowhere, to full-scale recognition. In the even rarer instances when such a newcomer also offers a startlingly different and revitalizing approach to his instrument, the impact is of course all the greater. Such is the case with the lightning-swift emergence of Wes Montgomery.
ORRIN KEEPNEWS
from the liner notes for Movin' Along (1960)
The sound is unmistakable. Warm but powerful, low key and at the same time inviting and supremely, almost magically supple. Note follows note with a kind of graceful fluidity born of the combination of astounding virtuosity and the ability to capture the emotional essence of a tune in a way that remains a benchmark of jazz improvisation to this very day. It's a sound that has influenced literally dozens of guitarists –– Grant Green, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lee Ritenour and Emily Remler to name but a few –– and will continue to do so for as long as anybody continues to play and seriously study the instrument. The fact that it was created by a musician who was almost entirely self-taught, who developed and honed his technique in obscure mid-west nightclubs while holding down a physically demanding day job as a machine operator, only makes what he accomplished in just eight, immensely productive years that much more impressive.
John Leslie 'Wes' Montgomery was born in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana, on 6 March 1923. Little is known about his early life except that he grew up in that city, attended school and married his wife Serene there in 1942, and that he was one of four siblings –– Thomas (who died at sixteen), Monk (born 1921), Buddy (born 1930) and a younger sister named Ervena. All four Montgomery children were blessed with musical ability –– Thomas had been a drummer prior to his death, and Ervena would eventually go on to perform as a singer under the name 'Lena Montgomery' –– and it was with his brothers Monk (bass) and Buddy (vibraphone and piano) that the future guitar virtuoso would make his earliest recordings including Fingerpickin', his hastily assembled debut LP, released by Pacific Jazz in 1957.
FULL HOUSE
WES MONTGOMERY [guitar]; WYNTON KELLY [piano]
PAUL CHAMBERS [bass]; JIMMY COBB [drums]
JOHNNY GRIFFIN [tenor saxophone] Recorded live 1962
Montgomery first began to 'mess around with music' at the age of twelve, teaching himself to play a four-stringed instrument known as the tenor guitar before falling under the spell of Charlie Christian –– at that time the most famous and most widely imitated guitarist in North America (and many other parts of the world) thanks to the handful of soon-to-be legendary recordings he was making as a member of the Benny Goodman Orchestra and with the various small groups the white clarinettist and bandleader liked to record with on the side.
Despite having received no formal training as a guitarist and allegedly never having played the six-stringed version of the instrument before (a claim which has yet to be verified), the newly married Montgomery bought himself a secondhand guitar and amplifier (paying for them with money borrowed from his brother Buddy) and dedicated himself to learning all of Christian's solos note for note, developing an unorthodox fingering technique along the way which, according to jazz critic Scott Yanow, allowed him to play what he was hearing by 'plucking the strings with the fleshy part of his thumb, using downstrokes for single notes and a combination of upstrokes and downstrokes for chords and octaves.' Playing in this 'quieter' fashion also made him more popular with his neighbors, some of whom had objected to the all-night practice sessions he regularly conducted after working his eight hour factory shift each day.
Within a year he was good enough to start playing professionally, gaining a reputation as a kind of human jukebox for his ability to reproduce Christian's solos with such unerring accuracy.It was this encyclopedic knowledge of Christian's music that earned Montgomery his first full-time professional job as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, which he joined in 1948 and would tour and occasionally record with until 1950, when the stress of being away from his young and growing family saw him return more or less permanently to Indianapolis.
The father of eight children, Montgomery found another full-time job as a welder for a company that manufactured radio parts, sleeping for six hours after his shift ended at 3pm before going off to his 'other' job as a musician, routinely playing in the city's jazz clubs until the early hours of the following morning. While this punishing schedule did not make him famous, it did grant him the opportunity to further refine and develop his unique, thumb-dominated 'strum and pluck' technique –– a technique which had become that of a genuine virtuoso by the time he was heard by visiting tenor saxophonist Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley at an Indianapolis venue called The Missile Club in 1958. Adderley immediately recommended him to Orrin Keepnews, A&R Director of the New York label Riverside Records, who signed him in 1959 and would go on to produce many of the albums –– including The Wes Montgomery Trio (1959), The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (1960), Movin' Along (1960) and So Much Guitar! (1961) –– that would establish his as the most exciting name to emerge in jazz guitar since the untimely death of Charlie Christian at the age of twenty-five.
Judged an overnight success by those who had no idea how long he'd been playing nor under what circumstances he'd been obliged to work at perfecting his sound, Montgomery soon became an in-demand studio musician and a headlining live act in his own right, appearing in clubs across the country with his own trio as well as in a trio featuring his brothers Buddy and Monk whose previous band, a quintet called The Mastersounds, he had occasionally recorded with throughout the 1950s. He was also invited to join the band of saxophone giant John Coltrane –– an invitation he turned down –– and appeared as a featured sideman with the Wynton Kelly Trio, Kelly himself being another well-known admirer of his immediately recognizable guitar style.
The early 1960s saw the guitarist appear frequently as a sideman on record dates by, among others, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, trumpeter Nat Adderley (brother of 'Cannonball' Adderley) and soul-jazz organist extraordinaire Jimmy Smith. In April 1963 he entered the studio to record what would be released as Fusion, his penultimate LP for Riverside and one that, unusually for the time, featured him performing beautifully arranged ballads with full orchestral accompaniment. Although no one predicted it at the time, the relative success of this LP established a formula that would be exploited with even greater commercial success by his new record label Verve, with whom he signed in 1964 following the death of Riverside founder Bill Grauer and that label's subsequent slide into bankruptcy.
HERE'S THAT RAINY DAY
STAN TRACEY (piano); WES MONTGOMERY (guitar);
RICK LAIRD (bass); JACKIE DOUGAN (drums)
Tempo, ABC TV
London, 7 May 1965
From 1964 until his death four years later Montgomery would record a series of highly successful 'crossover' LPs for Verve and then for A&M Records which saw him increasingly eschew jazz material in favor of cover versions –– lushly orchestrated by arranger/conductor Don Sebesky –– of the sometimes less-than-memorable pop hits of the day. His fifth Verve LP Goin' Out of My Head went gold and would go on to win him a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance of 1965 –– a nomination thought to be undeserved by some who had followed his career since his Riverside days and saw his new direction as being a cynical betrayal of the 'pure' jazz upon which his reputation as an improviser had originally been built.
The move from Verve to A&M Records, another pop-oriented label co-founded by the guitarist's one-time collaborator Herb Alpert, saw this process confirmed by the 1967 release of A Day in the Life, the title track of which –– a Lennon and McCartney tune which had recently appeared on The Beatles' LP Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band –– became a hit on AM radio and saw the album itself go on to become one of the biggest-selling 'jazz' LPs of all time. Montgomery, a shy and diffident man who had never learned to read music and played everything by ear and instinct, publicly sought to distinguish his later commercial music from his earlier work and the alienating impact his runaway success was having on both disappointed jazz fans and on his own artistic integrity. 'There is a jazz concept to what I'm doing,' he explained to journalist Gary Giddins shortly after the release of A Day in the Life, 'but I'm playing popular music [now] and it should be regarded as such.'
The controversy did not harm his record sales in either his native land or in Britain and Europe, both of which he successfully toured in 1965, performing a largely jazz-based programme to festival audiences who, by all accounts, could not get enough of him. In time, however, it became obvious that he felt trapped by the conventions of the easy listening format and longed to return to his former, more improvisational style of playing –– something he was consistently able to do on stage even if he was not able, or willing, to do so in the studio.
Wes Montgomery died at his home in Indianapolis on 15 June 1968 during what was a rare break from touring and recording. He told his wife he felt unwell when he woke up that morning and fifteen minutes later he was gone, victim of a massive coronary which killed him almost instantly. While it's tempting to speculate on the direction his music might have taken had he lived, there's no evidence to suggest that he would have abandoned what had become a highly lucrative commercial formula to return, at least in the short term, to recording so-called 'pure' jazz –– a style of music that was in serious decline by the late 1960s thanks to the worldwide dominance of rock music and one that would soon face a new threat as the emerging fusion movement began to gain momentum.
The point is not what the guitarist would or might have done had he lived, but what he actually achieved during the eight years which saw him rise from obscurity to become one of the world's most genuinely admired and beloved musicians. Compromises may have made between art and commerce, with jazz being the loser in many respects, but as DownBeat critic Pete Welding once put it:'He couldn't play uninterestingly if he wanted to.'
HOW INSENSITIVE
WES MONTGOMERY [guitar]; RON CARTER [bass]
GEORGE DEVENS [vibraphone]; RAY BARRETTO [congas]
Arranged by CLAUS OGERMAN
From the 1966 Verve LP
Tequila
Use the link below to visit the website of WES MONTGOMERY sponsored by Resonance Records.
