CD Review: Buddy DeFranco * Mr. Clarinet * Verve * 1953

As with many recordings from the early 1950s, the tunes collected on Buddy DeFranco's Mr. Clarinet album were released in many packages, on several Norman Granz created labels, including Clef, Norgran, and Verve. The advantage of Mr. Clarinet is simply that it is still commercially available and that it contains all the tunes from the January and April 15, 1953 recording sessions of the Buddy DeFranco Quartet.

If a man can be known by the company he keeps, there is little to say beyond listing the sidemen for these dates: Kenny Drew, Milt Hinton, and Art Blakey should be enough to convince anyone to check this album out.

Among the most important recordings in jazz clarinet history are a few sides cut by the Buddy DeFranco Sextet in 1949 for Capitol (available on Buddy DeFranco/Lennie Tristano Crosscurrents). Tunes like "Extrovert" and "Good for Nothing Joe" were the beginning of something big: in many ways they are the fulfillment of what Stan Hasselgard hinted at when he began applying bop ideas to the clarinet around the same time. Buddy did more than hint: those Capitol sessions contain bop clarinet that stands up well over half a century later. Instead of pursuing this sextet concept, however, DeFranco was to keep plugging away at the Big Band business for a a few more years. He was late quoted dismissing the early sextet as too much like the George Shearing Quintet "with a clarinet."

A couple of points ought to be made here. First, the timbres essential to the early DeFranco quintet, while influenced in musical execution by Shearing, were developed by Goodman and Shaw a decade earlier: in an orchestrational sense, the Shearing Quintet was the Benny Goodman Sextet without clarinet. Five years after DeFranco's breakthrough session, Artie Shaw's last Gramercy 5 was also derided by certain critics as "Shearing with clarinet", but these critics only betrayed their ignorance: Shearing himself told Shaw that his quintet was modeled after the mid-40s Gramercy 5. (See Tom Nolan's Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinet, Norton 2010, page 280). So much for "Shearing with a clarinet" then: the model orchestration of clarinet, vibes, guitar, piano, bass, drums was developed by clarinetists and is as uniquely effective a line-up as the old New Orleans combo or the standard bop quintet.

This aside, Buddy was probably thinking in terms of financial viability rather than artistic provenance when he abandoned the early sextet project. By 1953, however, he was back in the small group business. Because it is so stripped down, and focuses so clearly on Buddy's horn, it's my pick for the the perfect introduction to Buddy's playing.

The album opens up with "Buddy's Blues", representing an entirely different approach to clarinet blues than one might hear with Goodman, Shaw, or Fountain. DeFranco was by this point a fully formed bop musician, and his soloing is unique among clarinetists to this point. Listen carefully to his finger technique: he has a 'hard' approach to fingers that is reminiscent of Leon Russianoff's classical method, but put to distinctly jazz usage in his "falls" at the ends of blues phrases. Because Buddy opted for a more locked-in tone, without as much use of scoops and pitch bend, he found different ways of expanding jazz timbral vocabulary with his finger technique--the blues "falls" are one example.

Buddy's precision is well known, as are his Hanon exercises transcribed for clarinet. But too often overlooked is the fact that all of this technique and precision was consciously developed to serve a distinctly musical purpose. Listening carefully to his lines on every tune of Mr. Clarinet  I'm particularly impressed with the naturally nuanced quality of it all--that each line seems to contribute towards the organic flow of a greater whole.

Also unique, though not without precedent, is his use of that reedy, almost classical sound with a distinctively tasteful vibrato. Johnny Mince, too often neglected in jazz clarinet histories, was an acknowledged influence on Buddy, and it shows well here, transformed though the influence be in Buddy's own voice.

Buddy DeFranco remains one of the few truly great masters of the jazz clarinet--one who had both a unique and comprehensive approach to the horn, developing it to mastery. Mr. Clarinet is a great starting point for anyone wanting to check out his art.

Five Good Reeds.

Review: Pete Fountain * I Love Paris * Coral Records (CRL 757378) * 1963

Side A

I Love Paris
Comme Ci, Comme Ca
Frere Jazz
Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles Mortes)
La Vie en Rose
April in Paris

Side B

C'est Magnifique
Two Loves Have I (J'ai Deux Amours)
C'est Si Bon (It's So Good)
The Song from Moulin Rouge (Where Is Your Heart)
Tout de Suite
My Man (Mon Homme)

Pete Fountain, Clarinet
with Charles 'Bud' Dant and His Orchestra

Can a real jazz musician record an "easy listening" album? Louis Armstrong did, so the answer must be yes. With this irrelevant question out of the way, once and for all, let's get on with the music.

There are quite a few high quality easy listening clarinet albums out there, not all of them from jazz musicians. Both Reginald Kell and Artie Shaw dabbled in the "light classical" genre beginning in the 1940s. The best results of these can be found on Reginal Kell and his Quiet Music, fortunately still available on CD, and Modern Music for Clarinet, a rare Columbia LP of Shaw's. The Shaw disc tends to sell for rather high prices these days, owing to both its rarity and the rumor that the cover art might be an example of early Warhol. It's also one of the more interesting in the genre, for its blending of both jazz and classical repertoire.

Yet even with these efforts in mind, my favorite in the Jazz Clarinet Easy Listening category is Pete Fountain's I Love Paris. This is music with absolutely no pretense: no throwing in Debussy's "Petite Piece" to "legitimize" the album, no busting out a virtuosic Django Reinhardt number to save face... this is straight up "turn-on-the-A/C-and-mix-your-martini-after-a-hard-day-at-the-office-to-unwind-with-the-missus" bourgeois relaxation. This is Rob and Laura Petrie chilling to some "jazz." This is suburban America trying to unwind (and that's no easy task--trust me, suburban America can be a bizarro world of reality denial).

The arrangements by Bud Dant are brilliant--lush strings, but spare in their lines, uncluttered. So many jazz "with strings" albums are ruined by arrangers bent on proving they can make a Hoagy Carmichael tune sound like Schoenberg. Bud Dant is much better than that.

Pete's playing is great--probably better than on any of his many Easy Listening projects. His tone takes over and he sells every tune well. I'm not a big fan of tunes like "La Vie en Rose" or "Autumn Leaves", but Pete's playing of them, his use of subtone, and his spare but tasteful solos transform them. He has a lightness of touch and intimacy that keeps these songs from slobbering over-emotion.

If you ask me in the winter time how many reeds I rate this, I'll probably answer "three." But as soon as the A/C has to be turned on, and summer heat rolls in, this album is Five Good Reeds. It's just the best in the genre for me.

If you're lucky enough to get an LP in good condition, be sure to check the right hand corner of the cover: just above the blue I LOVE PARIS lettering, it should be marked STEREO in white block letters. If it's unmarked, it's likely one of the mono versions. I highly recommend the STEREO version: one of the great joys of this album is to hear the ride cymbal and trombones on the left channel answered by the accordion and bongos [sic] on the right! So don't gyp yourself! Turn that A/C on full blast, in stereo!

Autographed Portrait of Pete (Eric Seddon Collection)

   

CD Review: Benny Goodman * The Complete 1937 Madhattan Room Broadcasts

 

Once upon a time, there was a six disc box set of Benny Goodman's 1937 broadcasts from the Madhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, available at your local Borders Books & Music. Now Borders is defunct, and the old boxes (put out by Viper's Nest Records in 1995) have been scattered to the winds--the only way to get your hands on them is to piece the set together one volume at a time. For those willing to hunt through Amazon or eBay, though, it's worth it.

These recordings give a rare glimpse of Benny's greatest band after hours. Unlike the prime time "Camel Caravan" broadcasts, with their carefully timed numbers, commercial plugs, and shtick (entertaining though much of it was), these broadcasts were unsponsored ("sustaining" radio) and the arrangements didn't need to be clipped for commercials. They routinely broadcast around midnight and give the feel of the band stretching out and winding down for the night. It can be difficult for contemporary musicians to imagine, especially in this day and age when gigs barely exist, but bands like Goodman and Shaw routinely worked six or seven days a week, with five to seven shows per day. To reach the midnight hour, with one last whirl through the arrangement book, was a nightly achievement.

This set documents twelve complete half-hour broadcasts that ran from October 13, 1937 through December--the lead up to the 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert. Harry James, Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy, and Martha Tilton are all here, with the usual high quality results.

Of particular interest are the many charts played over the airwaves that never made it into the recording studio. A partial list:

Caravan
Whispers in the Dark
I'd Like to See Some Mo' of Samoa
Roses in December (Trio Version)
So Many Memories
Moonlight on the Highway
Stardust on the Moon
Am I Blue?
In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree
Everybody Loves My Baby
In the Still of the Night
All of Me

But for me the star of the show is the relaxed, after hours vibe. Unlike the heady, raucous BG-mania that rocks so many live recordings of the band in this era, there is minimal crowd noise. There are some special moments of audience involvement too, that wouldn't likely have happened on a Camel Caravan Broadcast. During the October 23 broadcast, for instance, there were a bunch of college students on the dance floor during a trio version of "Where or When." The young men began spontaneously singing the words to their dates. Benny kept playing the melody along with them, the chorus swelling slightly, until we can hear the young ladies gently joining in by the end, an octave higher. The tenderness, spontaneity, and warm enthusiasm of the applause that bursts out afterwards is for me the epitome of what this music is about, and why it is so important to preserve.

Because of the relaxed nature of these air checks, there are several fade outs of closing numbers, and a good deal of repeated material (a forty second "Let's Dance", for example, leads off most broadcasts). While the band lacks the pinpoint precision and some of the killer attitude that it displays on other live sets of this era, these stand out for their contrast. The liner notes by David Weiner are informative and detailed. As of this writing, these might very well be out of print. Get 'em while you can.  Four Good Reeds.    

Pete Fountain's French Quarter * Coral Records (CRL 757359) * 1961

Side A

Summertime
Dear Old Southland
Oh, Didn't He Ramble
Bye Bye Blackbird
Lazy Bones
Someday, Sweetheart

Side B

Is It True What They Say About Dixie?
Shrimp Boats
That Da Da Strain
Theme from the French Quarter
Dixie
Birth of the Blues

Pete Fountain * Clarinet
Godfrey Hirsch * Vibes
Stan Wrightsman * Piano
Morty Corb * Bass
Jack Sperling * Drums


Rumor has it that the clarinet was an important early jazz instrument which rose to dominance in the Swing Era and has been in decline ever since the late 1940s. Without putting too fine a point on it, the more one knows about jazz history, the more bogus this rumor becomes. In actuality, the clarinet's fortunes in jazz have remained far more healthy than most instruments, both in a serious artistic sense and in a broader sense of cultural impact.

Consider for a moment the accomplishment of clarinetists on the scene during the 1950s and 60s (the era that supposedly witnessed the loss of the clarinet's stature). Though they are hardly remembered now, four LPs of Artie Shaw's final Gramercy 5 recordings were released on Clef Records in the 1950s. That they went virtually unnoticed by critics, dropped out of print, and weren't recognized as masterpieces until the early 1990s is not Artie's fault. Like William Butler Yeats, Shaw proved himself to be that rarest of artists: the romantic who could translate his art seamlessly into a modernist romanticism, without losing his essence or pandering to mere stylistic trends.

Shaw's accomplishment was enough to prove the clarinet an exceptional vehicle for modern jazz expression, but if any doubt remained, Buddy DeFranco's virtuosic bop should have erased it. In addition to these, Bill Smith's and Tony Scott's work from the period seems to evade historical surveys, yet remains there for anyone to listen to.

A healthy culture depends upon more than innovators, however: it needs a firm foundation to stand on. During the '50s and '60s there were many other excellent jazz clarinetists keeping earlier playing styles alive: Benny Goodman, Barney Bigard, Jimmy Hamilton, and Edmond Hall were still performing regularly. In terms of traditional New Orleans jazz, Albert Nicolas, George Lewis, Willie Humphrey, and Raymond Burke were active. In retrospect, there are few instruments in the jazz of the era which could boast such a list of players.

To this milieu we should add another very important figure who emerged in the late 1950s: Pete Fountain. Not only did he demonstrate, on a nightly basis, a rare command of the clarinet, Pete was for decades one of the most visible and prominent symbols of jazz to the larger American public. More importantly than this, and of considerable frustration to the collector of great jazz clarinet recordings, he also might be the record holder for having the largest number of excellent jazz clarinet albums to have fallen out of print. One of them, released in 1961 by Coral Records, is the subject of this review.

Pete Fountain's French Quarter was made shortly after Pete moved from the Bateau Lounge to his own club: "Pete Fountain's French Quarter Inn" on Bourbon Street. The instrumentation for the album takes it's cue from the classic Goodman quartet of the 30s and the last Gramercy 5: the sidemen are Godfrey Hirsch on vibes, Stan Wrightsman on piano, Morty Corb on bass, and Jack Sperling on drums.

From the outset, this album grips and never lets go. Gershwin's "Summertime" is the lead number: a war horse among standards, but rarely done well enough to be considered a permanent part of the song's legacy, as it is here. Even considering Sidney Bechet's version on soprano sax and the Artie Shaw Orchestra's reading of Eddie Sauter's arrangement, Pete's remains my favorite jazz rendition of the tune. That it was recorded in 1961 adds to the historical significance, setting up a useful comparison with John Coltrane's version, released the same year on  his classic My Favorite Things album. Trane's art was reaching it's zenith around this time, and the string of albums before and after 1961 are deservedly famous. But of the two versions of "Summertime", Pete's is arguably more profound.

The poetic heart of "Summertime" is paradoxical: it's a lullaby sung to a baby, filled with reassurance and love, but surrounded in it's original operatic context by poverty and violence. Redemptive suffering is inherent to the tune, and any good interpretation of it has to touch, on some level, this spiritual aspect--it comforts and unsettles, simultaneously.

Trane uses the song as a howling modal cry--an obvious, confrontationally ironic reading akin to dramatically yelling at a baby--a lullaby sung by an angry madman. This reading isn't to be flippantly rejected, as it does say something disturbingly important. There is a sad truth to Trane's symbolism in our cultural history: monumental decisions were made in that era to legally devalue babies and their human right to live. Yet even with this firmly considered, there is always a musical price to pay for such confrontational, repurposed interpretation, and Trane's execution of the tune sounds more of an extra-musical "statement" than an investigation of inherent musical depth.

The original operatic version of "Summertime" features many emotional subtleties difficult to explain, or to translate into other orchestrations. For example, how can the effect of the "cold" violin counterpoint to the vocal line be reproduced except by playing it as Gershwin scored it? This is where Pete Fountain's version meets the challenge. Pete opens the album with Jack Sperling's bitter drum hits, which are like firm punches to the gut--ringing harbingers of danger. Sperling uses sticks (rare on jazz clarinet albums before this) and the simmering tension threatens to boil over at any moment. When Pete comes in, his tone is cool: he states the melody plainly, almost without adornment, drawing and maintaining a struggle between his mood and Sperling's dire portents. It's a real lullaby, and has real hope, but takes note of the danger. Pete's solo, seemingly simple, almost sounds like a parental attempt to ward off that danger. This is the very paradox the original tune sets up lyrically, and the tension of swing itself as hinted at when Artie Shaw suggested "maybe what we're talking about is life verses death."

The star of the first tune is undoubtedly Sperling--his rhythmic variations continue relentlessly as Fountain holds the lyrical line. Simple in conceptual brilliance, executed to perfection, this lead number grips the listener and delivers the promised result. What follows is assuredly less intense, and more conducive to a great nightclub act, but the basic mood, emphasizing the serious jazz nature of the disc, has been set. Tune after tune of balanced, relaxed fusing of cool west coast jazz with an earlier New Orleans style inherited from Irving Fazola rounds out the album. Classic interpretations are offered of "Dear Old Southland," "Oh, Didn't He Ramble," "Shrimp Boats" and others.

I find it both difficult and frustrating to think this masterpiece of jazz clarinet has been out of print for decades. There are still some LPs available for purchase on the web, and I recommend those interested in jazz clarinet get their hands on a copy. Many of Pete Fountain's serious jazz albums have suffered the fate of Pete Fountain's French Quarter. Hopefully this situation is temporary, and they will all be made available for download soon. This album gets an obvious Five Good Reeds.

Autograph from a copy of Pete Fountain's Autobiography
(Eric Seddon Collection)

Bill Smith with the Dave Brubeck Quartet * The Riddle * Columbia (CL 1454) * 1960

Side A

Hey, Ho, Nobody at Home
The Twig
Blue Ground
Offshoot

Side B

Swingin' Round
Quiet Mood
The Riddle
Yet We Shall Be Merry

Bill Smith, clarinet
Dave Brubeck, piano
Gene Wright, bass
Joe Morello, drums



What constitutes successful long form jazz? The answer might mean anything from a suite of tunes related by extra-musical titles, to a highly integrated work that stretches for an hour or more, with interdependent thematic, harmonic, and metric schemes. Over the course of jazz history, the elusive concept of a self-consistent long form has proven an irresistible challenge, enticing musicians as varied as Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Eddie Sauter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, and many others. The results have sometimes been hailed as masterpieces, other times derided as hubris.

Initially the Big Bands took the decisive lead in producing meaningful long form jazz. Jimmy Mundy's 1937 arrangement of "Sing Sing Sing" for the Benny Goodman Band still stands as a model of success. In it, whether deliberately or not, Mundy gave solutions for two great quandaries: how to integrate solos into the form in a meaningful sense beyond mere variations, while hinting as to the type of thematic material needed to sustain the form.  Thematically, Mundy used two highly motivic tunes--interpolating "Christopher Columbus" into the original, to expand and sustain interest, while the solos functioned dynamically within the form.

The shift to more motivic melodic material was to become important, proving pivotal in allowing smaller groups to take the lead. Rather than sprawling melodies, demanding intricate pre-written arrangements to be expanded well, such as Ralph Burns's Summer Sequence (recorded by Woody Herman), small groups could create loosely understood head arrangements, using highly flexible motives as the building blocks for longer, integrated "movements." The beginnings of this are seen in Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, which can be heard as a fusion of Dave Brubeck's "Calcutta Blues" with the Freedom Suite, showed further possibilities for this motivic style. Miles Davis's In a Silent Way shifted the emphasis again, demonstrating how groove itself could play a larger formal role. Two decades later found Wynton Marsalis experimenting with the suite style of Duke Ellington, refining and expanding it until In This House, On This Morning, which, while a septet piece, is symphonic in scope, with all thematic materials related to the opening. All of these ideas, modified through various developments in the jazz and classical avant garde, combined in Pat Metheny's The Way Up.

The current of history isn't a straight line, however--no brief timeline or "history of heroes" can adequately outline the true means by which an art as complex and multifaceted as jazz is developed. Sometimes there are highly significant advances made which are overlooked for decades. Bill Smith's The Riddle, the first of three studio albums devoted to his tunes, recorded in rapid succession with Dave Brubeck, represents just such a moment.

Bill Smith has lead a double life, musically, since the outset of his career. Straddling, with exceptional success, the worlds of classical and jazz music, he has substantially contributed to both artforms without gimmickry. His investigations of clarinet multiphonics in the 1950s, for example, have proven a permanent addition to our knowledge of the instrument, while his jazz has provided not just a path forward for clarinetists, but of formal compositional significance to all jazz musicians regardless of instrument.1960's The Riddle is exceptional in this regard.

Smith's goals with the album were clear from the outset:

My main interest in the album was to make 3/4s of an hour of well integrated jazz, unified by relating each tune to the English folk song, "Heigh, Ho, Anybody Home." [sic] In some of the tunes, the relationship is quite apparent as in "Hey, ho, Nobody at Home" or "Blue Ground, Swingin' 'Round" where it is used in the bass or where it is treated as a round. The relationship to the original in the others is more subtle (like a cousin whose only family resemblance is the eyes or a dimple or some other detail). "The Twig" is an out-growth of the last two measures of the original. "Offshoot" uses the tune in major considerably altered and expanded. "Quiet Mood" takes the second two-measure segment of the original and uses it as a point of departure. "The Riddle" [title tune] contains the original melodic shape but is played in shorted note values, while in "Yet We Shall Be Merry," the main tones of the original are lengthened and combined with a new thematic idea. [From the original album liner notes.]

The Riddle is poetically unique in both an aural and verbal sense. Aurally speaking, the original folk song "Hey Ho Nobody's Home" is usually sung as a round, with a melody bearing strong resemblance (call it a distant cousin) to the opening of "Sing Sing Sing". Whether Smith intended to highlight this connection to Benny (his boyhood hero), enjoyed it coincidentally, or couldn't have cared less is perhaps an added riddle. For me, this melodic similarity serves the overall aural poetic of jazz clarinet history, tying Smith to Goodman subtly. 

The lyrics to the original folk song, only partially referenced through the title of the last track--"Yet We Shall Be Merry"-- are poetically linked to the project as well:

Hey, Ho, Nobody at home,  

Meat nor drink nor money have I none,  

Yet we shall be merry, very merry,  

Hey, Ho, Nobody at home!

The lyric is a paradoxical knot, suggesting joy in either poverty or a bit of musical thievery, or both. This poetic is applied musically by Smith, taking this sparse communal round and making it the basis for a jazz album of original compositions.

Taken as a whole, Smith has given a blueprint for extended form jazz. The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (also known for pinching folk songs) quietly revolutionized the symphony in a similar manner. Taking his cue from modal English folk song and fantasia, he developed a symphonic style that eschewed the obvious development of sonata form, in favor of a new style wherein thematic cells were used in different ways, blossoming throughout works in expanding, original manner (the best example, perhaps, being his Pastoral Symphony of 1922). By 1959, when the individual tunes for The Riddle were being written, modal jazz was in vogue, yet successful long form usage of it was still to come. Just as Vaughan Williams's accomplishment has been often overlooked for it's subtlety, so has Smith's.

In the liner notes, Dave Brubeck added some thoughts:

The idea of unity in an LP should intrigue jazzmen, and Bill has given us one solution to the problem by relating all the themes. This is the first riddle of the album: to discover the thematic relationship of each of the tunes. The second riddle is to detect which parts of the music are written, and which are improvised. Almost everyone who has heard this album (including Joe [Morello] and Gene [Wright], our own rhythm section) has had difficulty separating the composed from the improvised sections. I take this as a real compliment, because good jazz composition sounds as though it were really improvised and good improvisation should sound as though it was as well thought out as a composition.

Since The Riddle, thematic integration has become common and essential elements in long form jazz--Trane, Miles, Wynton, and Pat's albums all bear witness to this--but few have matched the unity, and continuously fresh feeling still evident in this album from 1960. There remains much to be said about Smith's unique and important mastery of the clarinet, along with his jazz application of that mastery. Those will certainly be discussed more fully in future reviews.

For the present, though it's ridiculous to rate anything this great, this album obviously gets The Jazz Clarinet's top rating of Five Good Reeds. The most frustrating riddle left is why this album hasn't been reissued, and why jazz history has neglected it for so long. Whatever the irrelevant answers to that quandary, those of us who have finally stumbled upon it will undoubtedly say "Yet We Shall Be Merry"!

CD Review: Benny Goodman 10-Disc Box * "I Had To Do It" * Membran

There are many box sets of Benny Goodman's recordings from the 1930s, and nearly all of them are worthwhile. The 3-Disc Complete RCA Victor Small Groups recordings, reviewed here last week, are among the essentials for any jazz clarinet enthusiast, as are many sets of live recordings which give us the chance to hear the band and small groups at their absolute best. Few offer anything approaching the scope of this box, though, with its 200 studio recordings of the Benny Goodman Orchestra dating from as early as 1934, through its years of peak popularity and artistry in 1935-38, to the first three recording sessions of 1939.

Like the 10-Disc set of Artie Shaw also offered by Membran, this box is admirably comprehensive for the era it covers, and with only one or two very minor and irrelevant slips, sets the recordings in clear chronological order. Also like the Shaw set, the presentation is minimal: 10 cardboard sleeves in a glossy cardboard wallet, without anything but titles listed.

This said, the selection of materials seems uniquely thoughtful and cognizant of history. As Connor & Hicks point out in B.G. on the Record: a Bio-Discography of Benny Goodman (Arlington House, 1978), there is a tendency to think of the April 4, 1945 recording session for Victor as the start of Benny's recording career, so linked is it to the Let's Dance program and the beginning of the Swing Era. Overlooked are the eight years of recordings made by Benny prior to the Victor recordings. This, say Connor & Hicks, is a shame, elaborating thus:

[If] the authors may suggest a general guidepost to excellence in pre-1935 Goodman recordings, it is this: Pay attention to those on which Benny and Jack Teagarden both play. There was a musical rapport, a physiochemical reaction almost, between those two, a philosopher's stone that often turned banal dross into musical gold. [p.135]

Whoever compiled this set for Membran seems to have taken this suggestion to heart. There are no less than 28 titles predating the Victor recording session here, focusing on the dates featuring Jack Teagarden. Equally thoughtful is the completion of the set, which runs all the way through Harry James's tenure as lead trumpet for the Goodman band. The last eight tracks on CD 10 seem to be there simply to include "And the Angels Sing" and to provide contrast as the band, and Goodman's zenith, came to a close.

The transfers are of generally excellent quality, and there are few sets out there to challenge them. Those who prefer brighter quality and alternate takes of the 1935-36 band will want to own RCA's 3-Disc reissue entitled "The Birth of Swing." Some inner parts are more audible on this RCA set, but to my ear the sound gets distortedly bright--almost like an attempt at "updating" to the sound quality of Capitol's BG in Hi-Fi of the 1950s. By contrast, these Membran transfers are more subdued, which can lead to "sax section mumbling", but the overall tone quality of the band sounds better to my ear--especially Goodman's clarinet.

A tremendous amount of material that is rarely or never issued on "best of" discs is here. Some highlights, for me, were to finally hear some neglected Martha Tilton numbers--a vocalist who, if she didn't exhibit the genius of an Ella Fitzgerald or Helen Forrest, had a charm and character to her sound that was as inimitable as Goodman's own. Many of these cuts demonstrate what a perfect fit she was for this orchestra at its height. There is a sincerity and lightness to her approach that balanced the band and arrangements perfectly. Rather than judging her by an imposed history of jazz singers, her art is best appreciated in the context of the band itself. When we consider the blending of personalities and sounds--Goodman, Harry James, Ziggy Elman, and Jess Stacy--Martha Tilton's sound was as big a part of the band as any of the instrumental soloists--and her concept arguably fit the band better than any vocalist before of afterwards.

The Goodman band was never as creative as Duke Ellington's or Artie Shaw's, and despite his commanding place in Swing histories--largely due to the Let's Dance Broadcast success, the Carnegie Hall concert, and his brilliance as a soloist--it can be surprising to learn that Goodman didn't score as many top hits as several other bands did. The Fletcher Henderson and Jimmy Mundy charts are usually exceptionally clear and straight forward; vehicles for the rhythm section propelled by Gene Krupa, the trumpet section, and Benny's clarinet to gain prominence--but many aren't particularly exciting in an innovative sense. The studio recordings are clear and always well executed, with a precision that was virtually matchless--but they are not generally the finest versions the band produced. Goodman's ultimate achievement was in live performance. His bands from 1937-38, in particular, seemed to feed off crowds like no other, and were the epitome of the era's hardest swinging "killer-diller" style ensembles. For that to be a success demanded charts, rehearsals, and talent such as Goodman insisted on and achieved. The studio recordings, contrasted to live sets, can seem subdued and less than spectacular.

Because of this, I toyed with the idea of giving this box a rating of Four Good Reeds, just shy of The Jazz Clarinet's top rating. But then I thought "Get a hold of yourself, man! This is nearly all of the Benny Goodman band's studio recordings from 1934-1939!" Five Reeds it is, then, for the comprehensive nature of the set, the transfers, and the affordable price. Only one caveat remains: there are even better performances available of many numbers--the live recordings from the era are perhaps even more essential.

    

CD Review: Artie Shaw and His Orchestra * Hollywood Palladium * 1941

It's been said of Lord Byron's Don Juan, "No matter where you are in it, you've already read the best part." Most jazz careers read similarly, and because of this, Artie Shaw's is an anomaly--no matter where you jump into his discography, so long as you're not listening to the very last recording sessions, there's usually something even better ahead. This is far more rare than it might initially seem. The idea of a constantly developing and evolving jazz artist is really more myth than fact. Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, for instance, never developed beyond styles that were fully formed by the 1920s, and Benny Goodman, when he tried, learned very quickly that to stray from his late-30s bread and butter was a bad idea. The list of artists who resist the trend of solidifying one basic style and re-asserting it in various guises is exceedingly short, and debatable.

Shaw is one who stands out. Up until 1954 he seemed to actually embody the myth of the continuously developing jazz musician. It's difficult to say which of his ensembles were the finest. For its day, the 1939 band might have been the best. Then again, the 1949 band, while largely ignored by fans and critics alike, can be argued for, in a musical sense. After the orchestras, there are the chamber groups, especially the last Gramercy 5. Few would assert, as most readily do regarding Goodman's 1937 band, that Shaw ever had a single ensemble or era that served as the epitome of his art. Yet even with all of this in mind, the orchestra of 1940, assembled by Shaw after his self-imposed Mexican exile, stands out in critical and popular memory. This is the group which recorded "Frenesi"--a tune Artie had heard in cantinas south of the border--and "Stardust", giving the latter a solo so impressive that this group has been known as the "Stardust Band" ever since.

The subject of this review features this band, as reproduced on a CD issued in 1997 by HEP records, also available as a download, entitled: Artie Shaw and His Orchestra: Hollywood Palladium 1941. The title is a bit misleading, suggesting a single gig or series of gigs at the Palladium. As the liner notes detail, though, most of the dates represented on the disc are from 1940, and were broadcast from NBC's Hollywood studio. This technicality doesn't really matter--the content is exceptional, and give us some of the best live renditions currently available for tunes like "Frenesi." Three live performances of it are here, all of them well performed by an expanded orchestra (including strings), with contrasting improvised solos by Shaw.

An abbreviated version of his "Concerto for Clarinet" is also presented, from an August 1940 broadcast. This version is particularly interesting for the comparison it suggests between the Concerto and Shaw's December 1938 performance of "The Blues" with Paul Whiteman at Carnegie Hall. In this live performance, as in the Whiteman concert performance, the klezmer roots of the piece are highlighted, setting it apart from both the movie and studio versions recorded months later. We'll never know how wide the stylistic scope of the Concerto's improvised sections--Shaw used it as a closing number for a tremendous number of gigs that went unrecorded. But this early version suggests the improvised sections had considerable flexibility and stylistic diversity--making the propensity of contemporary classical players to rigidly stick to the studio solo transcription all the more disappointing (along with the Mickey Mouse swing, prim conservatory tone, and pinched altissimo we're usually tortured with during such performances).

This disc is loaded with great and rare performances. Shaw's arrangement of "Sweet Sue (Just You)", his original composition "Prelude in C Sharp", and a live version of "Blues in the Night" featuring the vocal and trumpet of Oran 'Hot Lips' Page are highlights. Others are Shaw's brilliant solo on "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" and an extended chorus on a live version of "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume" while restating, almost identically, the klezmer-tinged coda from the studio version.

The audio quality is often less than perfect--it can give a "bubble" sound similar to that of old tape, and the fuzz is noticeable in spots. But the chance to hear the Shaw band in top form, with real gig situations impacting the performance, is great. One example: members of the crowd were rowdy enough to knock 'Lips' Page off the lyric to Blues in the Night at the Palladium gig on January 22, 1941. It's priceless to hear him sing:

Now, the rain is falling,
Hear the train are calling hoo-wee!
(my mama done told me)

....he-yeeeah der roomin' foolin'
....haaaallin' dullin' fooling hoo-wee!
(my mama done told me)

The band and Page soldier on perfectly, and the crowd eats it up.

As with so many others, Shaw was to disband this group almost as quickly as he'd assembled it; this time to enlist in the U.S. Navy, where he would serve in the South Pacific during World War II. Like the live recordings of the 1939 band from the Cafe Rouge, then, this disc is a document of a particular high point in Shaw's career as an orchestra leader, with some significant historical recordings that help us better understand his musical mind.

Three Good Reeds.