“Giant Steps” is one of John Coltrane's best known tunes. He recorded it in 1960 on an album of the same name, which has become a jazz classic. When played properly it is played fast, very insanely fast. That's one thing. The other is that the chord changes are complex and challenging, covering all keys, and they fly by fast as well. It is thus a technically challenging piece to play.
I regard myself as a semi-virtuoso trumpeter. I spent hours working on this tune when I was in graduate school. I even wrote some technical exercises based on the chord changes. I was getting a degree in English Lit. at SUNY Buffalo, but I spent time in an improvisation workshop run by Frank Foster, who'd played, arranged, and composed for Count Basie and was a virtuoso on the tenor sax. He brought it in to the workshop one day. We hacked our way through the tune, but Frank, Frank played the shit out of it. The rhythm section finally gave up – which included Nasar Abadey, who went on to being a pro and now teaches at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore – and Frank continued on alone. He nailed it! Compared to Frank, all I ever managed to do was play at the tune. But to inhabit it, fully, and really play it, that's something else.
To have a big band play this tune, at the proper tempo, that's just insane. But that's what the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band does. Frank Foster wrote the arrangement. The band is directed by Jon Faddis. I'm guessing that Lew Soloff played the trumpet solo. I haven't seen anything to that effect, but he was on the band for that recording and he could certainly have played the solo.
Though I’ve written quite a bit here and there about my general experience as an improviser I’ve also written more specifically about learning to improvise in three previous posts:
Though Dave Dysert is one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had – he’s one of the five fathers to whom I dedicated my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil – and he laid some of the foundations on which my improvisational skills rest, he never actually worked with me on improvisation. This seems strange in retrospect, but at the time it’s just how things were, as I remark in this recent post, High School jazz [it wasn’t done]. The Part 1 post covers what I learned up though my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins and a couple of years beyond, which my major experience was in playing with a jazz-rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion. This post picks up with the dissolution of that band in the spring of 1971 or 1972 when the founders of the band – Jon, Mal, and Steve – graduated from Johns Hopkins.
I continued practicing the trumpet, which would have included improvising along with records. I don’t recall whether or not I had purchased any of the Jamey Aebersold play-along records at that time. These are records of jazz tunes played by a rhythm section, but without any horns. A horn player could then practice improvising along with the record. Whether or not I’d started working with such records, I eventually would and, in time, built up a modest collection.
In the Spring of 1973 I signed up for trumpet lessons in the adult preparatory division of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. My teacher was Harold Rehrig, who had spent most of his career playing with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Though he had some familiarity with jazz – he knew of Dizzy Gillespie – he wasn't an improvisor. That's not why I was studying with him. I wanted to improve my technique. He helped me with that; in particular, he worked on my breathing. We also worked on the Haydn Trumpet Concerto, for which I composed two cadenzas.
Then it was off to Buffalo. I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo for the Fall of 1973. As I also wanted to continue working on jazz improvisation I checked the catalog and discovered that the music department listed a jazz improvisation workshop led by Frank Foster. I’d never heard of him, but looked him up in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz and discovered that he’d spent a decade with Count Basie and then worked with Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan and others. He was free-lancing in New York and flew out to Buffalo to conduct the workshop (and, I assume, teach other courses).
At first I was very self-conscious in the workshop. (I didn’t take it for academic credit, but simply audited it.) To be sure, I’d had a lot of experience improvising solos in The Saint Matthew Passion. But that had been a jazz-inflected rock band. None of the tunes had complex chord changes; I was mostly improvising over one- and two-chord vamps. I assumed most of the players in the workshop would be music-majors. Could I hang with them?
Yes, after a bit. The workshop met for a single two- or three-hour session a week. There were, I don’t know, 20 or so players in the workshop at any one time, which was a bit crowded. It meant that no one got much playing time. We’d do two, maybe three, tunes in each session, with each person taking a solo. Frank would write a tune on the chalk board, melody and chord changes, explain important features of the tune, including how to relate scales to chords – “harmonic relevance” was Frank’s term – and we’d run it down.
I remember that in an early session, perhaps the first, we did Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage.” I thought I’d acquitted myself reasonably well. But another player in the workshop, a tenor sax playing, pointed out to me that another trumpet player was hitting the changes. Implying, of course, that I hadn’t been. Whoops! And double-whoops, because that tune doesn’t have complicated changes. I felt intimidated by another trumpet player in the workshop, Billy Skinner, because he was so good. I don’t know whether or not he was formally enrolled in the workshop or was just one of the local musicians who’d show up every now and then.
I’d write each tune down in a music notebook and then work on them. I often wrote out exercises based on the chord changes for a tune. We must have gone through I don’t know how many tunes in a semester; I believe I hung out in the workshop for at least two, if not three, semesters. At this point I don’t remember which tunes we covered, but there was “Blue Bossa,” “St. Thomas,” “Dexterity,” “Giant Steps,” and several of Frank’s tunes, including “Simone” and “Who’s That Rockin’ My Jazz Boat.”
I’m sure I hung out in that workshop my first two years at Buffalo (73-74, 74-75) and perhaps my third year as well. That workshop was perhaps my central educational experience in learning jazz improvisation. That’s where I came to terms with chord changes and with bebop, which in many ways remains the central jazz idiom, though it has long been eclipsed by other styles. I spent as much time working on tunes I picked up in that workshop as I spent on the courses I was taking the English Department, where I was getting my degree. Of course I also continued playing along with records. I did that a lot, and have done so most of my adult life. I pretty much assume that anyone with a serious interest in jazz does it.
The school also started a big band, which I played in, sharing the lead and second trumpet parts with others. This was led by Milton Marsh. We played standard professional charts, some tunes arranged by Marsh, and maybe even a Frank Foster tune or so, I don’t remember.
Independently of the school I played in a quintet organized by Simon Salz, a guitar player I’d met at the workshop. We only had a handful of gigs, one a New Year’s gig at St. George’s Table, a fairly well-known Buffalo club and restaurant. We were fronted by a female vocalist and the band more or less existed to support her.
I also played in a Saturday afternoon jam session at the home of Mike Fuda, a physics professor at SUNY Buffalo. Mike played drums and there were a handful of other musicians including Ed Wood on bass, a tenor player named, I believe, Sammy Calveteri, and his friend, Angelo Briandi, on trumpet. We played a lot of bebop. Sammy was excellent – he'd been a full-time pro at one time – while Angelo was not so good. He played the heads very well, but couldn’t improvise. However, he did have good weed.
These were very informal sessions. We’d show up at Mike’s house in the early afternoon. When enough musicians had shown up, we’d start jamming. If Sammy was there, he’d call the tune. If I didn’t know the melody I’d sit out for the first few choruses and then, when I’d had time to absorb the tune, I’d play a couple of choruses. After we’d played three or four tunes or so we’d stop playing and gather around the dining room table to chat (and smoke weed). Then we’d play some more tunes, break to chat and get high, and so forth.
We did this for fun. We weren’t getting ready for some performance. And, while there were generally others around who weren’t playing in the jam session, we weren’t performing for them. We were just making music and hanging out. I figure that this is the basic, the most fundamental, music-making arrangement. A situation that is clearly divided into performers and audience, that’s a secondary, a derived social arrangement. To the extent that this secondary arrangement predominates in our society, to that extent we have lost our way.
How do we recover that basic situation?
* * * * *
One final note. Late in the Spring of my last year at Buffalo one of my musical compatriots heard of a big party where there’d be a jam session.
“Charlie Keil will be there.”
“Charlie Keil, the Charlie Keil, the man who wrote Urban Blues?”
“Yes.”
“He’s here at UB?”
“Yes.”
I’m not reporting the exact words of the conversation. I’m just making them up. But something like that conversation took place. I was rather taken-aback that I’d spent five years at UB and didn’t even know that Charlie Keil was on the faculty there. I’d read Urban Blues sometime late in the 1960s and, like many others, had been bowled over with it. And now I would be jamming with him. Little did I suspect how closely we’d be working together in the 21st century.
While cruising the web yesterday I came across this video of an incredible high school jazz band. It’s not at all clear to me that there were any high school bands playing at this level back in the early and mid-1960s.
This video is from the Essentially Ellington festival and competition in 2018. Essentially Ellington was started in 1995 by Jazz at Lincoln Center and directed initially at New York City schools but quickly expanded nationally and to Canada.
Anyhow, I decided to send a link to Tyler Cowen, who has wide-ranging interests and is particularly interested in the cultivation of talent. Here’s a slightly revised version of that letter:
Tyler,
It is entirely plausible to me that when I was in high school in the early-mid 1960s that there was no high school in the nation that could mount a jazz band like this. Back in those days they were called “stage bands,” or “dance bands,” presumably to avoid the word “jazz.” Nor would any band have had as many young women in it, much less the trumpet star (the Dizzy Gillespie role on Dizzy’s best-known tune). Maybe there was a band here and there, though I’d be surprised. In any case, there are a greater number of good high school bands now than there were then.
What’s happened between then and now? Lots. On the one hand, jazz is not as popular as it was then, and jazz was on the downslope in the 1960s. But it was easy to find jazz LPs in the record bins at the local discount department store, and not just ‘jazz lite’, but the real hard core stuff.
However, there’s more jazz in the colleges now than there was then, and I suspect that, in turn, the level of jazz sophistication among secondary school music teachers and band leaders is higher. To be sure, I’m led to believe that music and the arts in primary and secondary school have suffered in the last few decades. If so, what’s left seems to be more sophisticated about jazz. Moreover, there are more jazz-band competitions at the high school level now than there were then. As far as I know there weren’t any then. This is a yearly competition sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center. I don’t know what other competitions there are. But even if this is the only one, there wasn’t anything like this back in the 60s.
On net, then, jazz is less popular in the culture now than it was then, but a high level of jazz instruction exists for a relatively small stratum of schools that didn’t exist then. It is quite possible that today’s average is better than 1965’s average. [And I won’t go in to the good high school jazz bands from Japan that post videos to YouTube.]
Now, about that young woman. I couldn’t play like that at her age. I had the technical skill and the fire, but not the experience with improvisation. By the time I’d reached my late 20s, however, I’d accumulated the experience – partially from playing in a jazz-rock band after graduating from college, and partially as a result of an improvisation workshop I audited in graduate school (taught by Frank Foster, who used to play with Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones, and who knows who else). Now, since I eventually reached that level, why’d it take me so long?
My primary music teacher during my high school years was a man named Dave Dysert. He was primarily a pianist and arranger, and primarily interested in jazz. He taught in one of the local high schools and had the kind of all-around musical training given to music-ed folks. When he found out that I was interested in jazz, we worked on it. I had a book of Louis Armstrong solo transcriptions and those were part of my lessons. He wrote out special exercises in swing interpretation. He urged me to take piano lessons (I was primarily a trumpet player) so I could pick up the basics of harmony. I did that for two years. If I was going to improvise, I’d need that kind of knowledge.
But do you know what we never did? Never once in a lesson did I improvise while he accompanied me on the piano. Why not? I’d been making up my own tunes since I was 10 years old. I’m sure I’d have taken to it like a duck to water, as the saying goes. I don’t really know why he didn’t do that. But my best guess is simple: It wasn’t done. It never occurred to me to ask him for that. Why not? I suppose because it wasn’t done. I was the student and he was the teacher.
It wasn’t done. How much talent has been thwarted, if not outright wasted, for such a stupid reason.
Somehow between then and now, a bunch of educators figured out: Hey! We can do this. And it’s changed secondary school music for at least some kids.
Best,
BB
I note in passing that I graduate from high school in June of 1965. Four years and two months later Bethel, New York, was home to the legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair. I wasn’t there, but I certainly knew about it. And though I had turned on and tuned in, I never really dropped out. Could it be that the counter-culture that gave birth to Woodstock was, at least in part, a reaction against It-wasn’t-done?
The kids finally figured that, Hey, we can do this. But they had to drop out to do it, or at least look in another direction. And the music they chose was rock and roll, not jazz. Jazz had already had its age of rebellion, back in the 1920s and 1930s.
Now we have hip hop. And while there is such a thing as hip hop culture, well, it’s not like jazz was early in the century and rock and roll at mid-century. It’s a different and not necessarily better world. Though the kids do play better jazz.
* * * * *
BTW, that trumpet player is Summer Camargo. Here's her solo with a transcription superimposed.
I'm thinking a lot about basics these days. So it's time to bump this to the top of the queue. It's about how I got started improvising.
* * * * *
I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about it, as it does for many. After all, the norm in Western musical practice has been to read music that someone else, the composer, had written. The composer is the authority; you are a mere conduit; and improvising, where you (shudder) make it up yourself, that’s VERY mysterious.
* * * * *
You mean, no notes in front of you. Just make it up?
Yes.
And it comes out OK?
Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends.
Isn’t that very brave and dangerous?
No. Do you speak from a script?
No.
Well then, there you have it. Don't need a script for music either.
* * * * *
I started taking music lessons when I was ten years old. I was taught to read music, and only to read music. So that’s what I did. But at some point, I forget just when, I decided I wanted to play simple tunes that weren’t in lessons. And so I decided, well, I’ll just have to figure out how to do it. I do remember that, when I was in sixth grade, I was particularly taken with the theme song to a series that played on Walt Disney’s Sunday night TV show. I forget the name of the series, but it was about mountain men and the song had wistful lyrics about living in the mountains.
I decided to figure it out. I had a spiral-bound book of music paper and used that to write out the tune. I didn’t bother with the rhythm, just the pitches. I picked a pitch to start with and wrote it down. And then I figured out each subsequent pitch in the melody. How’d I do that? Trial and error. I’d play what I’d figured out so far and then make a guess at the next note or two or three, whatever. If it sounded OK, I wrote the pitch down. If not, I tried other notes until I found the right one.
I have no specific recollection of the process, nor of how long it took me. Half an hour, and hour? Did I do it in one session, two, three? Don’t recall. All I recall is that I did it and that I remember that tune to this day, almost six decades later.
A couple of years later, after I’d joined the marching band (see Leapin’ Lizards: Three Lessons from Marching Band), I’d make up my own march tunes while practicing. Well, maybe yes, maybe no. I would place march-like melodies that I made up myself. Just how long they were, or how they were structures, I have no recollection. Nor do I know whether or not I would continue one line of musical thought from one practice session to another. Nor, for that matter, do I know how much time I devoted to this activity, as opposed to practicing the assigned lesson material. All I know is that I did it. I was playing music based on what I thought up, on what I heard in my mind’s ear, not based on written notes in front of me.
At the same time I had begun to work on Rafael Mendez trumpet solos. What he played on the recording was sometimes different from what was written in sheet music. So I figured out what I heard on the recording and played that, noting specifically how it differed from what was written down.
The point is simply that I was learning to rely on my ear. Which makes sense, when you think about it, because music is for the ear, no? Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all improvised, didn’t they? So why did improvisation disappear from classical music during the 19th century?
I digress.
When I was in high school I played in the stage band – that’s what they called a big band, just why that name was used, I don’t know. I played the second trumpet part; Jerry Horner played first. One of the tunes in our repertoire was Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme”. There was a trumpet solo in the 2nd trumpet part. I had a choice: 1) I could play the solo that was written into the part or, 2) I could improvise a solo over the chord changes, which were also written into the part. I chose a third alternative: I composed my own solo. Just how I went about that, I do not recall. But I had enough skill on the piano that I could pick out the chord progression. Who knows, maybe I played chords with the left hand, trumpet with the right; and wrote the notes down.
All that’s just detail and it doesn’t matter. I was now making up my own music, if only in small ways. I’m sure I spent time making up my own little tunes and I certainly worked out tunes that I heard and liked. But it would be several years before I got serious about improvisation.
I played in both marching band and concert band in my first year at Johns Hopkins, but then I put the trumpet away for two or three years. Why? Don’t know. I forget whether it was in my senior year or my first year of graduate school (still at Hopkins) that I got the trumpet out, got back in shape, and joined the concert band. Whenever it was, 1969 or 70, one day after rehearsal a couple of guys approached me about playing in a rock-and-roll band they had performed. The band was modeled after Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago (aka Chicago Transit Authority) and they needed a trumpeter.
I have no idea just why they approached me. I certainly didn’t have any kind of reputation that I was aware of. I mean, what kind of reputation could I have possibly had? But sure, why not? They had songs by both BS&T and Chicago in the repertoire; the horn parts had been written out. All I needed to do was play the parts. But I didn’t have any intention of becoming a soloist, like BS&T’s Lew Soloff.
Then, one day in rehearsal, before we’d ever played a gig, we were working on “For What It’s Worth” (as I recall), not a horn-band tune, but one of the guys had likely written some simple horn lines. We’d played through the vocal part and were just riffing at the end, maybe the guitarist was soloing, I don’t recall. I started playing simple trumpet riffs that I intended as back-up figures. The guys liked it and maybe I started going beyond just back-up riffs. And so I’d slipped into playing a trumpet solo. Through the back door as it were. On the sly.
For all I can remember, we decided that, yes, there’d be a trumpet solo at the end of “For What It’s Worth.” And we made room for trumpet solos in other tunes as well. It turns out that I was pretty good. It was a rock and roll band, so of course the guitarist had his solos, as did the keyboard player, and the two other horn players as well, a trombonist and a sax player who doubled on flute. I played with the band, St. Matthew Passion, for about two years before the band broke up, as most of the guys were leaving Hopkins.
It was a great experience. Our first gig was at a party thrown by one of the political science faculty. He had a row house near campus and we played in his basement.
The gig was glorious. I still have vague visual and even kinetic memories of it. But mostly what I remember is how very much fun it was. We had a great time playing and the people had a great time dancing to our music – the two things go together, of course.
You want to know what life’s about? Well life’s about many things and I’m not going to say it’s a party. But a good party, a GREAT party, that’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s something you remember for a long long time. I don’t remember most of the gigs we played, but that one I remember, not in specific detail, just the glorious fun.
I also wrote some arrangements for the band, “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (Procul Harum), “Something” and “Hey Jude” (The Beatles). But mostly I worked on playing kick-ass solos. Since we were a ‘cover band’–that is, we covered music by other bands rather than writing our own–I had records of all the tunes where I had solos. I’d practice soloing along with those tunes. But I’d also play along with anything I liked, and certainly along with jazz records. I believe this is when I bought some Jamey Aeberold play-along-records. The record had rhythm section parts for jazz tunes. You would then play the melody at the beginning and the end and improvise solos to the rest.
But perhaps the single most valuable thing I did was to play wild. I’d become interested in avant-garde jazz, where there were no set melodies, no chord progressions, and often no set pulse either. You just played whatever you felt like playing. No rules.
It’s harder to do than you’d think. You’d think that, with no rules, with anything goes, it would be easy-peasy. In the abstract, yes. Concretely, no. You’ve got to remember that you’re playing the instrument with your body. And the easiest thing to do is to play patterns you’ve already got under your fingers. That tends toward boredom pretty quickly. The fact of the matter is that in order to play wildass shit that sounds weird and perhaps even wonderful, you have to think.
The fact that there are no preset rules doesn’t mean that there are no rules. It’s just that the rules arise in the context of playing. You have to discover them, and go with them.
If you do it right, if you really work at blowing wildass shit, and listen to what comes out of the horn – that’s so important, listen listen listen – what you’ll discover is that this wildass stuff begins to make sense. It no longer sounds so wild. You’re working the territory, discovering the order. As the noise begins to make sense, you have to work outward to the nonsense, thereby expanding your reach. The nonsense will, in time, make sense. Then it’s time for more nonsense.
Perhaps it isn’t quite like that. That makes the process sound a bit too pat. But something like that is definitely true. Go wild, and listen.
At the same time, of course, you’re working on chord progressions and scales and all that standard stuff. But always work at keeping something wild happening. It’s the growing tip.
Anyhow, that’s what I was doing while playing with St. Matthew Passion. Our last gig was particularly memorable. One of the tunes we played was “She’s Not There”, originally recorded by The Zombies, but we likely were more influenced by Vanilla Fudge, a psychedelic band:
We were not even remotely like Vanilla Fudge. But we had our devices. In our arrangement the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out (the wildass shit I was just talking about) and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player. The trombonist couldn't make it. The sax and I started our improv. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. Cosmic consciousness? Who knows, but that’s just words. The experience itself was beyond, words, beyond BEYOND.
It felt good.
I tensed up.
It was over.
After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it — “that was nice” — enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been. Did he know what had happened? Or, if not ‘know’ exactly, did he sense a special magic in the performance? I ask because performers and audience often have a very different ‘sense’ of the same performance. Perhaps the guy was just complimenting us on our ‘freak-out’ chops, not on any magic in the music.
And that was it, St. Matthew Passion’s last gig. Our first gig had been a joy forever and our last, for me it was something else forever. I had glimpsed a truth. A profound truth? Maybe yes, maybe no. Who knows. But a truth.
I was in my middle twenties, still at Johns Hopkins. I was now confident in my ability to improvise, to make up compelling music on the spot. But it wasn’t until I went to SUNY Buffalo (State University of New York at Buffalo) that I really came to terms with jazz improvisation. But that story will have to wait, though I’ve already told much of it in this post about Frank Foster. Frank had played and arranged with Count Basie in the late 1950s and then went on to work with the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones. He was a superb jazz musician, one who’d worked with the acknowledged masters, the prime inventors of the music.
I started taking trumpet lessons in the fourth grade. These were group lessons, taught at school. As I recall, I was grouped with two clarinetists; I even think they were my good friends, Jackie Barto and Billy Cover, but I’m not sure of that. Why with two clarinetists? Because the clarinet, like the trumpet, is a B-flat instrument. At some point, after weeks, more likely months, I began to get behind. Don’t know why; didn’t practice, most likely.
And then my parents decided I should take private lessons, likely prompted by the teacher at school. So some guy came to house for my lessons. Don’t remember a thing about him except that he was blind. Nor do I recall how long I took lessons with him, but by the time I was in the sixth grade, I believe, I was taking lessons with Dave Dysert.
His principle instrument was the piano, but he was trained in lots of instruments, as was the norm. He gave lessons out of a studio in his basement, Saturday mornings I believe. But it doesn’t matter much.
The lessons lasted a half hour and followed the same format. At the beginning of the lesson I’d play through the material I’d been practicing for the last week. This was usually a page of exercises of one kind or another and some little tune–to make things interesting. Mr. Dysert would comment as appropriate and then he’d select the material I was to practice the following week and I’d play through it. He’d make helpful comments as I hacked my way through the material.
I was supposed to practice half-an-hour a day. And I did so, but reluctantly, very reluctantly. I forget just how my parents got me to do this, but they did. And I did, sorta.
Then one day when I was 13, I believe, Mr. Dysert couldn’t take it anymore and read me the riot act. I was stunned. I’ve long since forgotten just what he said, but not his anger. I was wasting my time and his, he told me. I had talent, more than most of his students. When I read through the material for the next week’s lesson, I played it better than most students did after they’d been practicing for a week. That surprised me–must’ve been a whole lotta’ hacking going on in the studio is all I can say.
It’s back to my early jazz education. For one thing I just got a new pair of speakers for my computer and I want to listen to them. Mind you, these are small desktop speakers, so we’re not talking about “like real” fidelity or a room shaking sound, but still, they’re nice. I like them.
Also, I’d realized I’d forgotten Al Hirt in my second post, which was all trumpet: Maynard, Miles, and Diz. And to fill things out, I’ll add a bit more Maynard. I realize that neither Maynard nor Hirt are as important in jazz history as Miles or Diz, or, for that matter, Thelonius Monk or Dave Brubeck. But these posts aren’t about jazz history. They’re about my personal history with jazz, and Al Hirt and Maynard Ferguson loomed large in my early years. I still listen to them with pleasure.
Here’s Al Hirt playing a tune that was written by a trumpet player, Ziggy Elman, and is associated with him. “And the Angels Sing” was a number one hit for Benny Goodman back in 1939. This is on Hirt’s album, Al Hirt – Swingin’ Dixie! (At Dan’s Pier 600 in New Orleans):
To appreciate how this hit me in my early teens you have to understand that the trumpet is a beast of an instrument. Just getting a sound out of it is difficult. And to get a sound like this, nice clean and round, that’s impressive. And the playing is so relaxed. Where’s the effort?
But what really got me, it starts at about 1:01 with the just the drums, tom-toms, and then Hirt enters otherwise unaccompanied with some really sexy snaky swirly licks. What the heck is that? thought I to myself. The album notes said something about Ziggy Elman and “frailach licks.” Whatever they are, that must be them. And, wham! at 1:41 we’re back to classic swing, but still snaky and sexy. The rest of the ensemble enters at 2:02 and we go to the out chorus.
Well, Ziggy Elman was Jewish, as you might guess from his name. And he knew klezmer quite well. That’s where those frailach licks come from. Here’s the original, with the snaky licks starting at 1:53:
And he breaks into swing at 2:25, just like Al Hirt did. Except that it’s the other way around of course. And if you listen closely to the two you realize that Hirt wasn’t just playing something like Elman did, he was quoting him note for note. So what we’ve got in Hirt’s performance then is a trip from New Orleans to the shtetls of Eastern Europe by way of New York City. Such is the way of jazz, the way of music, the way of the world.
And it doesn’t end there. Lee Morgan, who became an important influence on me in the mid-1970s, recorded a tune, “Soulita” in which he quotes/paraphrases Elman, at 2:01 to 2:20:
Finally, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s I heard a performance by tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom. Griffin played Morgan’s “Soulita” and he quoted Morgan’s Elman quote in his solo.
I didn’t know any of that back in the early 1960s. The internet net did not exist, dear children, so I couldn’t look any of that up. And just where, in a small city in Western Pennsylvania, would I have been able to find out about a trumpet solo played by a Jewish trumpeter back in the 1930s? Oh, I’m sure there were people who knew, but I didn’t know how to find them nor what books to consult in what library. So Elman and frailach licks were just tantalizing mysteries on my path through jazz.
And then there’s Thelonius Sphere Monk. The album was Thelonious Monk Big Band and Quartet in Concert. I don’t know how I came across that album, but it stunned me, though it took some getting used to. At that point Maynard Ferguson’s early 1960s band was my idea of a big band. Monk’s band, not his usual performance context, wasn’t at all like that. Not that big, nor that brassy. And, of course it was Monk. Here’s the personnel:
Arranger: Hall Overton
Bass: Butch Warren
Alto Saxophone, Clarinet: Phil Woods
Tenor Saxophone: Charlie Rouse
Baritone Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, Clarinet: Gene Allen
Soprano Saxophone: Steve Lacy
Trumpet: Nick Travis
Trombone: Eddie Bert
Cornet: Thad Jones
Let’s listen to “Bye-Ya,” a Monk original:
Notice that the cut is 11:24, longer than anything I’d heard. The length is in the solos. The tune is a standard AABA tune. But, upon closer listening, not so standard. To a first approximation the harmony’s pretty static, with little excursions at the end of each 8 bar phrase. We don’t have a strong sense of tonal center, which makes this pretty advanced for its time.
Which Monk was. Advanced. Monk is generally classed with bebop. He worked with a lot of boppers, and he emerged when bop did. But he was halfway to 1960s modal music and mid-1960s “out” music.
Here's Monk's “Epistrophy” in a quartet version:
It too is AABA. The A section used a simple 2-bar riff repeated four times, with subtle variations. The B section (aka the bridge) has a more developed melody. So, melodically, it’s riffs in the A section against an actual melody in the B.
Harmonically, like “Bye-Ya,” the tonal center is weak. Now, listen closely to the A section, which is two closely related 2-chord vamps. We’ve got D-flat 7 to D7 for four bars, and then E-flat 7 to E7 for four bars. Like so:
So, do whatever makes sense over Db D7 for four bars, and then take it up half a step for the next four. That’s the structure you’ve got work with. It’s either little or nothing, or very subtle, depending on your skill.
Of course, it wasn’t all trumpet music that I listened to, just mostly.
Really, mostly?
Yeah, pretty near.
Somehow I found my way to Herbie Mann. Don’t know exactly how. Perhaps just flipping through the bins. You can see how a young teenaged boy would be attracted to an album with that cover. Plus: four trumpets! And congas.
The album's title tune, “The Common Ground” is an up-tempo burner that opens with percussion. Mann states the melody on flute, doubled with the vibes, and then the trumpets enter on backing figures, a two bars phrases alternating with punctuations. A percussion break at 1:04 sets things up for Mann’s solo (and, again, the trumpets in the background). Exciting stuff.
This is certainly a different sound from what I’d been used to. Flute? There haven’t been too many jazz flautists. Sax players doubling on flute, yes, but with the flute as the main instrument, no. Hubert Laws played flute as his main instrument, and James Newton. Then there’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who was mainly a saxophonist, though that hardly characterizes what he did. He’d frequently play the flute and cut at least one album on flute music–I Talk with the Spirits–and would often hum while playing flute (a trick Ian Anderson took from him).
Just why the flute is not more widely used in jazz, I don’t know. Is it mostly a matter of historical accident, as jazz instrumentation descended from military band instrumentation and flutes aren’t all that prominent there (but then we have the piccolo obbligato in “Stars and Stripes”)? Perhaps it simply wasn’t loud enough to hold its own against brass and sax in the early days (when amplification was poor on non-existent), though the clarinet isn’t that loud either. Maybe it’s just a matter of timbre in the total range. Who knows?
Anyhow, here we have a front line of Herbie Man on flute and Johnny Rae on vibes, an exotic sound in the jazz context (itself exotic in the context of classical strings). I loved it. Talk about exotic, on “Baghdad/Asia Minor” we have another percussion opening – the drums are fundamental, get it? – with Mann on some kind of flute (not the standard transverse flute of European classical tradition) doubled by the arco bass, which is a little different jazz as the double-bass was usually plucked.
In my post about Rafael Mendez I mentioned how he directed my attention to jazz. I loved the material he did with the “Spanish tinge,” as Jelly Roll Morton called, so I went looking for more. What would you think if you saw this record sitting in a bin at the local discount store just waiting your greedy ears?
The man’s wearing a serape and “Si! Si!”, that’s Spanish, no? And he’s obviously a trumpet player, even if he’s surrounded by the “lesser” brass instruments.
So I bought it. The title track (that’s it above) was indeed Spanish tinged, though quite not what I was expecting. But that’s OK. It was very good. And the arrangement, I’d never heard anything like it–dig the close harmonies in the trumpets on the shout chorus. Not to mention Maynard himself.
But then it had this, “Early Hours,” a very different kind of tune, lazy and relaxed:
Notice that Maynard gave his sidemen generous solo time. Check the lead trumpet starting at 2:19, and then 2:52. Dig the shakes, the top notes–not super loud, just what taste dictates. And the closing phrase for the sax.
I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven.
Walt Disney part of the story. Not Uncle Walt himself, but a Dixieland jazz band consisting of personnel from his animation studio, The Firehouse Five Plus Two. They’d show up regularly on “The Mickey Mouse Club” TV program, and I’m sure I heard them there. Here’s a clip where they play “Muskrat Ramble”:
I have no recollection of having seen any particular performance of theirs, but I could well have seen this one. I’d have loved it, both because “Red River Valley” was one of my favorite tunes and because it was jazz.
I have vague memories of discussing the The Firehouse Five with friends. I have a slightly less vague memory of the first time I head Louis Armstrong. I think.
I was down the street visiting my friend David Leffler. Somehow or other his mother asked whether or not I’d heard Louis Armstrong. I’d never heard of him. So she put a record on and I listened. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that it sounded a bit thin. But – and here’s the thing – I remembered it.
When my father joined a record club – you know, one of those deals where you could by records and they’d be mailed to you – I was allowed a selection in the first buy. I read through the little pamphlet and picked something called A Rare Batch of Satch. Again, lots of tinny sound. And a lot of what I’d come to see as standard repertoire: “Basin Street Blues,” “High Society,” “St. James Infirmary” (which I loved), “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (Armstrong’s theme song), and others.
But the standout number is a little gem tucked away in a cut called “Laughin’ Louie.” “Laugin’ Louie” was a silly novelty tune that isn’t worth much. It broke down during recording and Satch decided to treat his band mates to some a capella gold: “…you must listen at this beautiful number, one of those old time good ones.”
The magic starts at about 2:16, just Armstrong’s trumpet, no accompaniment. The rhythmic virtuosity at the end of the first phrase is astounding. The highest note is G above the staff, which was quite high for trumpet playing at the time.
By this time I was earning enough money mowing lawns that I could afford to walk a mile or so to the local discount department store and flip through the record bins looking for trumpet records. Of course I found mostly jazz because classical music didn’t have much of a solo repertoire for trumpet. But trumpet is second only to the saxophone in jazz – at least that's how saxophone players see it. I'm not so sure.
One of the first albums I bought was Louie and the Dukes of Dixieland. Dixieland was popular at the time, the tail end of the so-called Dixieland revival. Dixieland was basically traditional New Orleans jazz played by white folks. The Dukes of Dixieland played it well. Here’s a cut from the traditional repertoire, “Bourbon Street Parade”:
It opens with an Armstrong vocal. Then one of the Dukes does a vocal. I likely wasn’t too enthusiastic about all this singing. We want trumpet! Still, listen to Armstrong’s scat singing behind the second chorus, and the way he joins in on harmony for the last line. We have a clarinet solo then the drummer does a parade roll-off – you know, the riffs played by the drums of a marching band to bring in the band on the beginning of a tune – to introduce the final chorus of collective improvisation. That's the key to the traditional style, collective improv, no one strutting it above and before the others.
The stand-out cut on the album, though, was the closer, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” a tune traditionally played at New Orleans funerals as they walked the guest of honor to his or her grave:
Louis starts it off by playing the tune on his Selmer balanced action trumpet (if you know trumpets you call tell from the picture on the album cover). His playing is stately and dignified over a dirt-simple background of sustained horn harmonies with a simple drum beat. Stunning. Then he sings the tune over the same background with the addition of a simple trumpet obbligato from Frank Assunto. Armstrong returns to the trumpet for a simple statement of the melody to close, with trumpet obbligato and harmonies.
Wipes me out every time I hear it.
At about that time I found a book of Armstrong trumpet transcriptions and started working out on them – which I’ve been doing ever since then. When I looked at the copyright dates on the individual transcriptions it became obvious that they must have been transcribed within weeks or months after they’d first been recorded. These were all from his landmark Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s. My music teacher, Dave Dysert, included these transcriptions in my trumpet lessons, along with my Mendez solos.
Here’s “Gully Low Blues”:
The format was typical: fast opening, slow it down for a clarinet solo followed by Armstrong vocal, then back to clarinet. Armstrong enters at 2:16 with an astonishing solo chorus. As you know, the blues is typically a twelve bar form. Armstrong’s chorus consists of six two-bar phrases, with the first five cut from the same cloth and then a contrasting 2-bar closer. Then it’s collective improv to the end.
Let’s look at Armstrong’s chorus. The first five phrases start exactly the same way, a rip to a half-note B-flat (trumpet key, A-flat concert) which Armstrong colors with a shake – you have no idea how long it took me to get a convincing shake. The first time Armstrong simply does a line of triplet figures descending to a low E-flat. Second time it’s much the same through for the first half of the phrase – shake on a high B-flat, triplets coming down – but he changes the second bar. The triplets are faster and the phrase goes up a bit before coming back down, this time to D-flat, a step lower than the end point of the first phrase. So, the phrase has a slightly larger range and a more complex melodic shape.
How’s Armstrong going to change it up for the third time through? Opening’s the same – by this time we’ve got the point, same old same old with a little spice on the end. He starts down but then, suddenly he leaps up above that opening B-flat to a high C and finishes the phrase on a fourth space E-flat, a full octave above the point where he ended up the first time through. The spread of the phrase is more compressed than the first two versions. The fourth time through, same opening, but he descends much more rapidly and ends up in the basement, a below-the-staff G, on the second half of the first beat. This version spans two octaves and a third, top to bottom, while the first two times it was less than two octaves and the span was less than an octave on the third.
Armstrong is working variations on this one idea with a systematic deftness and economy that would have brought tears to the eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach himself. And it’s still different the fifth time, spanning just over an octave and leading into the final phrase starting in the second half of bar 10. Five times in a row each two-bar phase starts on the first beat of the bar. The last time through, what does he do? He starts the phrase half-bar ahead of time, in bar 10, rather than waiting for the 11th bar. I’m telling you, those Bach boys must have been laughing themselves silly with joy when they heard Pops lay this one on them as he showed up at the pearly gates. What chutzpah to announce himself to St. Peter with the “Gully Low Blues.”
Now we have his performance on King Oliver’s “West End Blues” with Earl Hines on Piano.
This cut is noted for Armstrong’s opening cadenza, a capella of course (remember that gem buried in the middle of “Laughin’ Louie”?). Armstrong played pretty much the same cadenza for years and decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This, like everything Pops does, is worth serious analytical attention. But he wore me out with those “Gully Low Variations,” so you’re going to have to take care of the analysis yourself. I will only note that it starts straight out on an A above the staff. For a trumpet player to start out cold on an exposed high A, that’s danger Will Robinson, danger! When I’m feelin’ feisty I’ll pick my horn up and, without any warm up, see if I can nail that cadenza. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. The thing is, sitting here in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, I figure there must be a 100 or more trumpet players – black white yellow red purple green male female tall short wide thin young old middle-aged all kind of trumpeters – within a 10-mile radius who can play that cadenza sharp as a tack. It’s something we work on.
Let’s end on a lighter note. This is a duet Armstrong cut with Bing Crosby in 1951. No trumpeting, just singing. “Gone Fishin,” was a hit for them:
Listen to Bing scat behind Armstrong. He learned that from Louis, and he got half his style, the relaxed half, from Louis.
Here’s a version that Crosby did with Pearl Bailey in 1977 (Armstrong had died in 1972):
You’ll hear some of the same business that Crosby and Armstrong did in 1951. At one point Bailey breaks into an Armstrong gravel-tone. Listen to the very end. She hits her final note almost a half step flat, holds on to it for a while and, just when you can’t take it any more (Bing’s getting worried), she comes up on pitch.
Rafael Mendez was my first musical hero. I don’t know when I first learned about him, probably when I was 11, maybe 12. In the next half dozen years or so I bought eight or nine of his albums and the sheet music for perhaps 40 of his trumpet solos. Over the years I’ve spent hours and hours working out on those solos. Many of them I can play quite well. And many of them are just beyond my technical reach, though I can hack my way through them. If I devoted a year or so to working up my technique, mostly double and triple tonguing, I might be able to play them all. But that’s not likely to happen.
As his name suggests, Mendez was from Mexico. When he was 11 he spent half a year as cornetist for Pancho Villa. He later immigrated to the United States where he ended up playing in the Hollywood studios. When he wasn’t playing in the studios he would tour the country giving concerts and clinics. He was billed as “The Heifetz of the Trumpet,” and he was. This video gives you a short rundown of his history:
The soundtrack music is one of Mendez’s own compositions, the “Tre-Mendez Polka,” performed with his two sons, hence “Tre-Mendez.”
Here’s Mendez’s performance of Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.”
This performance has it all, passion, variety, and technical skill. Without the passion nothing else much matters. Mendez obviously loved music and loved to perform.
The variety is there in the music itself and what Mendez did with it. It was composed by a 19th century German, Johannes Brahms, and it was based on a csárdás by the Hungarian composer Béla Kéler. The csárdás, in turn, is a Romani (aka Gypsy) dance. So far we’ve got German, Hungarian/Romani, and Mexican American, Mendez himself. At about 1:54 it becomes all American. Brahms never heard or played anything like that, nor did the 19th century Hungarian Romani. That’s 20th century American swing, marked “Tempo di blues” in the sheet music, whatever the heck that is. It lasts until about 2:26, at which point we return to the 19th century for a few seconds (except for the brass figures in the accompaniment) and then, at 2:44, back to tempo di blues until 2:56, when we return to those 19th century fiddle parts.
And Mendez! His tone is clean and pure. It glows in the bottom register, which is difficult to do, and sparkles up high. The technical stuff is crisp and light; the blues licks are fluid and supple. They aren’t quite idiomatic jazz, Mendez wasn’t a jazz man, but they’re wonderful in this context.
All in four minutes. It set my middle school imagination on fire. My heart soared. Oh to play like that!
Here’s a Mendez original, “Samba Gitana.” The samba, of course, is Brazilian, with heavy West African influence in the rhythm.
Listen to the accompaniment; you’ll hear figures that could have been heard in any number of the Latin bands playing swanky nightclubs.
The overall form is one Mendez used often. It opens with a cadenza in free time. There’s a quick run to a high note to get your attention, and then some technical flash to drop your jaw down around your ankles. As Mendez holds his last note a series of harp arpeggios leads us into the first section, which is slow and lyrical. What Mendez plays on the recording is a bit different from what’s in the sheet music; I listened and figured out what he played. Then we have the samba section to close. It’s wicked quick; Mendez plays it with ease. If you listen closely you’ll realize that the samba melody has pretty much the same line as the lyrical section, but much faster.
So, three-part form: opening cadenza, lyrical section, up-tempo close. When I first heard this tune I figured I would be able to play it in two years. Dream on.
Now we have a popular ballad, “Laura,” theme song from a movie of the same name:
This is pretty much a straight ballad performance, with relatively little technical flash. It all depends on Mendez’s tone and delivery.
Finally, another lyrical performance, “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s La Boheme:
This performance, too, mostly depends on Mendez’s tone, fluidity and passion. But also his breath control, though you wouldn't notice unless you listen with trumpet player's lungs. Those long slurred phrases are difficult to pull of smoothly. You’ll notice swing inflections in the accompaniment and in much of Mendez’s phrasing.
That’s pretty much the range of material in Mendez’s repertoire: light classic instrumentals, original compositions (many of them in a Hispanic idiom), popular ballads, and operatic arias. It’s a range that was typical of the brass bands that became popular in the middle and late 19th century and continued well into the 20th century. And it’s the range of music that showed up on the soundtracks of Hollywood movies.
So my musical education through Mendez was pretty broad and various. And it fed directly into my growing interest in jazz, not so much through the swing-inflected arrangements on many of the tunes, but through the strong Hispanic repertoire. Jazz has always been partial to what Jelly Roll Morton called that “Spanish tinge.” When I went looking for records that seemed likely to exhibit a Spanish tinge I found Si Si MF, big band jazz (MF=Maynard Ferguson) and Miles Ahead, with “Maids of Cadiz,” “Blues for Pablo,” and “New Rhumba.” But that’s another story.
I headed off to the State University of NY at Buffalo (aka UB) in the Fall of 1973. While I was going for my Ph.D. in English Literature, I was also interested in their music offerings—the school’s, not the English Department’s. I’d just gotten my trumpet out of “storage” as it were, a year or so ago, and I decided I wanted to sharpen my jazz chops. So, I looked through the UB catalogue and noticed they had some guy named Frank Foster teaching jazz improv. I’d never heard of him. But, hey, I looked him up anyhow, you never know—played and arranged with Basie, Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan, “hmmm,” says I to my little-too-smart self, “maybe he’ll do.”
He did.
I forget just how I made my way into his improv workshop. While I was registered in the English Department and took courses there, there was no problem about showing up in Frank’s class and just hanging out. I didn’t even register for credit. Just showed up. (Maybe I officially audited the course, as it’s called, but I don’t really remember the arrangement.)
Frank had no problem with that. Neither did anyone else.
So, anyhow, I show up in the room. Other folks came in. We got out our horns and warmed up in that “checkin’ everyone out” way that musicians have. Then Frank comes in—he must’ve, because that’s how it had to be, no? But I don’t actually remember that first day. I remember other days, but not that one. So I’m just makin’ it up about that first day.
Improvising, you might say.
Frank comes in, says ‘hi’ to folks he recognizes. Does some administrative crap, and gets down to business. He goes to the chalk board, writes out the head and changes to a tune, say, “Blue Bossa,” explains a thing or two about “harmonic relevance” (his term) and we’re blowing. The rhythm section has it, we all play the head with Frank. Frank takes a chorus or two and then sends it around the room. Everyone took a turn.
But maybe I didn’t play, not that first day. Now that I heard these cats, I wasn’t feeling so cocky with my Blood, Sweat and Tears Chicago Transit Authority jazz-rock solo chops. Eventually I got up there, though with Billy Skinner in the room it was a little scary, and I blew some. Probably sucked, too. But that was OK.
I took notes, practiced, wrote out exercises. Compared this and that with the cats. And got better. One day we were playin’ one of Frank’s tunes, “Who’s That Rockin’ My Jazz Boat.” Funkier ‘n shit. And I got off a good one. When I was done, Frank looked at me, then looked at the rest of the group. He pointed at me and smiled.
Made my day, man. Made my day. My week. I got the nod from Frank.
I was not, of course, the only one. Lots of folks got the nod from Frank. And by the by I figured out that I wasn’t the only non-enrollee in the course. There were others. Heck, some of those others weren’t even students at UB. They were just local jazz musicians who dropped in to hang out and jam with The Master.
And Master he was.
One day we were jamming on “Giant Steps.” For those of you who don’t know, the name says what the tune is, giant freakin’ steps. Fast furious and more changes than a chameleon on speed. You had to be damn good just to keep up, and to make actual music on that tune, few managed.
And Frank was one of those few. Things were movin’ along and the piano player lost it. Dropped out. And then the bass player. So it was just Frank and the drummer. He killed it! Killed it dead! A capella, all in his head, Frank hit every change right on, and made music out of it.
Astounding.
Then there’s the day he broke out singing “Hello Dolly,” sounding just like Louis Armstrong. Who’d have thought this bad-ass post-bop-fierce Basie arranger had a world-class Pops imitation in him. But he did.
And then, and then, then there’s the day he was kind enough to be embarrassed on my behalf. The school decided they wanted to have a big band. So they held auditions. And of course I auditioned. While mostly a soloist, I really wanted to play in the big band.
I got in there. They put a chart in front of me. Lead trumpet on “Central Park North.” I sucked. I knew I would. My sight-reading chops just were not anywhere near my jazz-improv chops. This was, maybe, three years from when I’d first showed up in Frank’s improv workshop and I’d gotten to be a pretty good soloist. And, in Frank’s world, the world of professional jazz musicians, good soloists can also read any music put in front of them. So Frank, I’m sure, expected me to kill the audition. Which I did, but not it the good sense of kill. In the bad sense (but not, you know, the good sense of baad). As I said, I sucked.
I was disappointed and embarrassed. And the thing is, so was Frank, on both counts. Disappointed, yes, because maybe I wasn’t going to be the lead trumpet player he was looking for. But also embarrassed, like it was his failure too.
Of course it wasn’t. The failure was all mine. But it was kind and sweet of him to be embarrassed on my behalf. He was that kind of man.
Oh yes he was.
Bye Frank. “Cecelia is Love”—one of his tunes. So is Frank.