Chema Peñalver’s Tribute to Benny Goodman

GOODMAN-TODD: Tattletale. CHRISTIAN-GOODMAN: Seven Come Eleven, A Smo-o-oth One. SHAVERS: Undecided. LAYTON-CREAMER: After You’ve Gone. CHRISTIAN-MUNDY-GOODMAN: Air Mail Special. McHUGH-FIELDS: Exactly Like You. G. & I. GERSHWIN: Fascinating Rhythm. GREEN-HEYMAN-SOUR-EYTON: Body and Soul. GOODMAN-CHRISTIAN: Benny’s Bugle. DeSYLVA-ROSE: Avalon / Chema Peñalver, cl; Fabian Barraza, gt; Julio Fuster, bs; Jeff Jerolamon, dm / available for purchase or free streaming at Bandcamp

Chema Peñalver is an accomplished clarinetist who specializes in pre-modern jazz styles as well as a professor of music in his native Spain. In addition to his concerts with the Nova Dizieland Band and Sedajazz Big Band, he releases self-produced albums every two to three years. I haven’t heard his most recent, Sophisticated Clarinet, but I ran across this one on YouTube and was immediately captivated.

The reason is not just because Peñalver is a superb clarinetist or because he made a tribute album to Goodman—many clarinetists past and present, including Buddy DeFranco, have made Goodman tribute albums—but because he is the only clarinetist I’ve ever heard who actually sounds like Benny Goodman. This is not as easy as it sounds. Fairly early in his career, during the 1920s to be exact, Goodman became attracted to two particular black clarinetists, Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone, and fused elements of their style together. This, in itself, was not easy to do, since Dodds played with a bright, acerbic, almost acidic timbre while the Creole Noone was the master of the instrument’s rich low range, wbhat they call the chalemeau register. Some jazz clarinetists favored Noone’s style, particularly Irving Fazola but also, to a point, Joe Marsala, but as jazz moved into the swing era the brighter, more aggressive-sounding clarinetists took center stage. Only Fazola and Artie Shaw produced what is considered to be a more “classical” sound on the instrument.

Moreover, Goodman’s improvisational style was based on a combination melodic-rhythmic variation of the principal melody. Although he had a thorough knowledge of music and in fact dove into the classical repertoire even when at the height of his popularity as a “swing” musician, Goodman never quite jumped wholeheartedly into the changes in jazz that began after World War II, although he did lead a bebop band (and small group) in 1948-49 and did surprisingly well in that style. Like to many musicians of his generation, however, he eventually stopped evolving and reverted to the swing style that had made his name.

I bring all of this up in order to put Peñalver’s accomplishment into perspective. What he has done here was to combine Goodman’s timbral qualities and strong sense of swing with both his aggressive attack during his great years and his interesting, if temporary, interest in more modern chord positions in his solos. Yet even more interestingly, he managed to combine all of these features in his improvised solos while adding several ideas of his own. The result is quite startling: an almost perfect copy of Goodman’s personal sound and rhythmic drive with the more advanced harmonic sensibilities of the bop era. This is, then, a sort of “idealized” Benny Goodman, combining the best of all possible worlds while leaving room for Peñalver’s own musical imagination.

His accomplishment is even more stunning when you consider that of the various pieces he chose for this recital, only Tattletale dates from the post-war era (1947), and this is, I’ve discovered, the one Goodman piece that seems to be aped by several amateur and professional clarinetists on YouTube. Indeed, it seems to be Goodman’s equivalent to Artie Shaw’s Concerto for Clarinet,a rather pretentious piece that Shaw wrote at the producer’s request for one of his Hollywood films but which he only considered to be worthy music after others started playing it. Goodman never got into that sort of musical cross-breed. He was content to leave the more complex forms to the classical music he played, sticking to short pieces when he played jazz, despite the fact that Tattletale was written by him in conjunction with one Tommy Todd. (Goodman’s original recording of this piece is frustratingly mangled on YouTube by two or three morons who think it’s cool to play a fairly modern-sounding electrical 78 on wind-up phonographs of the acoustic era. Apparently they don’t know that an acoustical reproduction does not capture the full dynamic range of an electrical recording. There is a version of this record available at the Internet Archive, but here the uploader did nothing to clean up the sound of the original recording with its incessant surface hiss, pops and crackles.)

In choosing his backup musicians for this set, Peñalver has created a quartet similar to the classic Goodman Sextet and Septet of the early 1940s with Charlie Christian on electric guitar. Fabian Barraza lacks Christian’s great imagination and endless fund of ideas (he’s also not as bluesy), but he was clearly good enough to hold his own with Peñalver (his solo on Seven Come Eleven is particularly good). Bassist Julio Fuster and drummer Jeff Jerolamon are just fine in their roles, producing a crisp sound and fitting into Pealver’s improvisations beautifully. Jerolamon manages to channel Gene Krupa’s style, particularly in the opener, which is interesting in itself since Krupa only played on one Goodman recording session after he left to start his own band in the spring of 1938, before Christian came into the Goodman camp.

There are even a few moments on this CD where Peñalver reaches into Goodman’s pre-1941 style to produce a few gritty tones here and there. This was something he picked up from Dodds but dropped a few years after he began playing classical music. It’s the one sure way you can tell an early Benny Goodman recording from a later one. If there’s no grit or “dirt” in the tone, it’s post-1941.

Some readers are probably asking themselves, “OK, so he does a good Goodman imitation. Why should I listen to this recording if I have the Goodman originals?” It’s becaue of all the little differences in his solos, his way of combining the Swing Goodman with the Bop Goodman to produce a fuller picture of how the clarinetist might have played had he evolved just a bit further. Listen, for instance, to the extraordinary a cappella intro to A Smo-o-oth One, in which he plays some nice tongue flutters that Goodman never attempted (not to mention some nice upward portamenti in the main theme of the tune). Those unfamiliar with the John Kirby Sextet’s original recording of Undecided may wonder where Peñalver got that opening section on his recording. It’s part of the last chorus on the original disc that is rarely if ever played. (Interesting fun fact: both Goodman and the Kirby band’s clarinetist, Buster Bailey, studied with Franz Schoepp, first clarinet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, back in the late 1910s. Bailey had much of Goodman’s fluent technique but sometimes played clams, which Benny almost never did.)

In After You’ve Gone, taken at a relaxed medium tempo, Pesalver indulges in some nifty tempo doubling in several passages, one bop device that Goodman never used but which makes sense in exploring his later style. Of course, Pesalver has nearly 70 years’ experience with modern jazz and the musical techniques that came along with it that Goodman lived through but never explored, but the truth is that he’s actually a greater technician on his instrument than Goodman was. I know that will sound like heresy to the millions who love Benny’s playing, but it’s true.

The programming on this disc could have been a little better; the interesting but rather slow Body and Soul should have come earlier in this set, and a real barn-burner like Tattletale later, but that is just my personal preference. Thankfully, he exits on a real barn-burning performance of Avalon tha Benny would have been proud to sign his name to. Otherwise, there’s nothing to complain of and a lot to admire and enjoy. I heartily recommend this disc, not only to Goodman fans but anyone who misses the clarinet in modern jazz. I’ve sampled three of Piñalver’s other albums—Early Swing Years, Sophisticated Clarinet and Old & New Gypsy Jazz—and although he plays splendidly on them, this is the one on which he let his musical imagination run the freest and least inhibited.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Mary Lou, Mary Lou, Umlaut Big Band Loves You!

WILLIAMS: History of Jazz for Wind Symphony: Introduction – Suffering; Spirituals #1 & #2.* Chunka Lunk. New Musical Express. Just an Idea [Mary’s Idea]. Medi No. 2. Truth. Aries. Mary’s Idea (2 vers). Mary Steps Out. Gjon Mili’s Jam Session. Lonely Moments (2 vers.). Sleepy Valley. Kool. Scorpio. Untitled Incidental Music (excerpts).* Fill the Cup. O.W. Fifth Dimension. Earl’s Boogie. Roll ‘Em.* Zodiac Suite: Taurus.* Aquarius.* Virgo.* Fandangle (pno solo). Zoning Fungus II. Chief Natoma from Tacoma. T. GORDON: The Count. MOTEN: Harmony Blues. CREAMER-LAYTON: After You’ve Gone. GREEN-HEYMAN-SOUR-EYTON: Body and Soul. BERNIE-CASEY-PINKARD: Sweet Georgia Brown. CARMICHAEL-PARISH: Stardust (2 vers.). FEATHER: Conversation. BERLIN: Blue Skies. ORENT-WILLIAMS: Joe. LAWRENCE-WILLIAMS: Ghost of Love. HADI-WILLIAMS: Shafi. G. GLASSMAN-WILLIAMS: Rosa Mae / Umlaut Big Band: Brice Pichard, Pauline Leblond, Gabriel Levasseur, Emil Strandberg, tp; Michael Ballue, Alexis Persigan, Robinson Khoury, tb; Judith Wekstein, bs-tb; Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, a-sax/dir. Antonin-Tri Hoang, cl/a-sax; Geoffroy Gesser, cl/bs-cl/t-sax; Benjamin Dousteyssier, bar-sax/a-sax/bs-sax; Matthieu Naulleau, pno; Romain Vuilleman, gt/bj; Sebastien Beliah, bs; Antonin Gerbal, dm. *Umlaut Chamber Orch.: Pichard, tp; Ballue, tb; Gesser, cl/bs-cl; Hoang, cl; Pierre Borel, t-sax; Hugo Boulanger, Aliona Jacquet, Clémence Meriaux, Stéphanie Padel, Manon Philippe, Lucie Pierrard, Emilie Sauzeau, Léo Ullman, vln; Issey Nadaud, Elsa Seger, vla; Félicie Bazelaire, Elsa Guiet, cel; Liselotte Schricke, fl; Sylvain Devaux, oboe; Ricardo Rapoport, bsn; Nicolas Josa, Fr-hn; Naulleau, pno;Beliah, bs; Gerbal, dm / personally issued CD, no number; also available for free streaming on YouTube beginning HERE

After recently reading Tammy L. Kernodle’s 2004 biography of Mary Lou Williams, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Northeastern University Press, reissued in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press), I learned several things I hadn’t previously known about her. On the personal side, I learned how much prejudice and flak she suffered as the first bona-fide great jazz woman in history, not only from white musicians and critics but also from inside the jazz community which is perennially male-dominated, how well she handled it for the most part, but also what a chaotic and disorganized personal life she led, much of it due to her own failings. Mary Lou, used to being the center of attention from the time she was a child because of her phenomenal musical skills, had so much music going through her head that she literally couldn’t think straight in handling the day-to-day issues of life. She was a procrastinator, a pot-smoker, drinker, gambler and “binge spender” who constantly drove herself into debt over and over again, then leaned on wealthy and/or powerful friends to constantly bail her out. Worse, when managers got her good-paying gigs in high-class hotels and supper clubs, she often walked out before completing even the first set because she didn’t like the “vibes.” (On one job, in between sets, she literally hid out in the cloak room rather than allow herself to be seen by patrons!) She came close to a nervous breakdown after the deaths of a close personal pianist-friend and Charlie Parker in 1955 and stopped performing for two years. After converting to the Catholic Church, she stopped the weed and gambling, became an ascetic and devoted herself to taking in heroin and cocaine addicts who predictably took advantage of her and robbed her blind when she wasn’t at home. Thus much of her career from the mid-1940s on was wasted in the pursuit of expensive gowns and jewelry, gambling away what little she made, and squandering her energy trying to help people who simply took more than she had to give and went right on shooting up dope.

But from a musical standpoint, there was just as much if not more to learn. My prior exposure to her post-Andy Kirk music consisted of a few wonderful pieces and arrangements recorded by Benny Goodman (Roll ‘Em, Lonely Moments and Whistler’s Blues), her Zodiac Suite (the original version for piano trio), her hit bebop ballad In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee, and her 1960s religious music, the latter of which doesn’t interest me in the least (not just because it’s religious, but mostly because it’s insipid and pretentious). I hadn’t known about some of her recordings for Moe Asch’s label or the many fine compositions and arrangements she made of her own work and sometimes the work of others. Much of her post-1945 output covered an astonishing range of jazz styles, including not only bop but cool jazz, Latin-tinged pieces and several works that clearly fit into the “third stream” category.

In the process of catching up on Mary Lou’s last 30 years, I happened to chance upon this album made by the French-based Umlaut Big Band, a group dedicated to reviving the work of forgotten past jazz composer-arrangers like Don Redman (The King of Bungle Bar, 2018). I’ve sampled that album, too, and although it’s very good, even excellent in spots, it doesn’t match the scope and range of this one simply because it can’t. Redman, clearly one of the great pioneer big-band arrangers—he was better than his employer, Fletcher Henderson, and even more subtle in his use of moving “inner” parts of his scores than Bill Challis—stopped evolving musically by 1938. The only things he wrote of consequence after that year was his arrangement with strings of Cherry for Harry James, a few arrangements for the 1948-52 Count Basie band, and a nice arrangement of See No Evil, Hear No Evil in 1957.

But Mary Lou was different. Even as far back as the early 1930s, when she first emerged from the TOBA vaudeville circuit to play piano, write and arrange charts for Andy Kirk’s wonderful band, the 12 Clouds of Joy, Williams had an entirely different conception of jazz from everyone else. Her solos, and orchestral arrangements, were not “linear” like everyone else’s, but rather had all sorts of harmonic-melodic-rhythmic movement within them like the elements of a fine Swiss watch. Mary Lou Williams didn’t just attempt to improvise on the melody like everyone else. She brought harmonic and rhythmic improvisation into the picture as well, with all the parts moving together in a elegant but not metronomically perfect integration. It was for this reason that Jelly Roll Morton disliked her performance of his famous piece, The Pearls. Morton’s music was almost mathematically balanced in terms of its introductions, sequence of themes and interspersed improvisations. It was not only linear, it was structured. Williams often bypassed structure in the pursuit of “hearing everything” within a phrase or a chorus, which was antithetical to Morton’s concepts. If you listen carefully to her piano solos, they sound like somewhat slowed-down versions of Art Tatum’s. The only thing Williams did not throw into her solos that Tatum did were those keyboard runs and rapid-fire key changes that transformed the music like a lightning flash into another realm.

Williams had another strength in her writing and arranging that nearly all of her competitors lacked, and that was an almost encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation of all styles of jazz except New Orleans style. She vacillated between stomps and swing, ragtime, the blues, boogie woogie and modern idioms. She was there at Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s mentoring Thelonious Monk, she encouraged Dizzy Gillespie and made the switch from swing to bop. She even played some cool jazz before the idiom became established. and recommended that Miles Davis use the tuba as a melodic instrument in his “Birth of the Cool” band. Unfortunately, this extraordinary versatility kept her from being appreciated by the wider jazz public. By moving around so much stylistically, she failed to establish a personal style based on just one type of jazz, and unfortunately the majority of jazz listeners liked their artists to be pegged into one school or another. By moving around so much and defying convention, Mary Lou could never establish a set musical identity after her 12-year stint with the Andy Kirk band.

Alto saxist Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, leader of the Umlaut Big Band, understood all this even before digging into Williams’ legacy of jazz scores, but his horizons were greatly expanded when he learned that 170 boxes of Williams’ scores and other memorabilia were donated to the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies in 1999. He and baritone and alto saxist Benjamin Dousteyssier were finally able to pay a visit to the Institute in 2019 to examine this treasure trove for themselves, learning that there were many scores there that had never been recorded and some, mostly fragmentary, that had never even been played. They made copies of the ones they wanted to work with and took them back to France, made some decisions as to which ones to include and in what order, and then proceeded to record them using not only the Umlaut band but also an orchestra including strings, winds and French horns for those that required an expanded sound palette.

This album is the result of their hard work. Badaroux chose to present the pieces in groups with the titles “Variations in the Blues,” “Kaycee,” “63 Hamilton Terrace,” “Prelude to Duke,” “New Bottle, Old Wine,” “Boogies,” “Zodiac Suite” and “Eternal Youth.”  Although he managed to cover the full spectrum of Williams’ work, there is a stronger focus on her early years, possibly to emphasize just how different her musical concept was from the others even in this period. And clearly there are some surprises that will make even the veteran Mary Lou Williams listener perk their ears up.

In fact, this happens right at the start with an excerpt from Williams’ unfinished History of Jazz, her last (and unfinished) work, written for and played by the wind orchestra, before swinging into the medium-tempoed boogie piece Chunka Lunk, and a greater contrast could not be imagined. Like so many European bands nowadays that recreate the past, the Umlaut group relaly knows how to swing, and on this number one hears tenor saxist Geoffroy Gesser give us a pretty good Ben Webster imitation. (Webster was one of the musicians who Williams had an affair with while still married to John Williams; she eventually dropped him when she discovered that he wasn’t the marrying kind and loved his tenor sax more than he loved her.) Right after this is New Musical Express, a piece I had never heard or heard of before. It straddles the line between swing and bop but definitely leans more towards the latter, and the Umlaut orchestra manages to switch gears in trueh chameleon-like fashion.

Indeed, as the album progresses, you come to appreciate the wonderful qualities of this orchestra. Ironically, their pianist, Matthieu Naulleau, is just OK. He swings and has some good ideas, but he doesn’t play with half the force that Mary Lou did, and is thus a rather generic-sounding substitute for a master. It is interesting, however, to hear a somewhat modern-ish arrangement of Mary’s Idea, here retitled Just an Idea, before the band plays her original version (written for Kirk) six tracks later. Interestingly, Badaroux throws in two pieces from the Zodiac Suite, Aries and Scorpio, much earlier than when he presents the other three he chose to play with the concert orchestra on the second CD.  (My feeling of the Zodiac Suite has always been, and remains, that four of the 12 pieces—Aries, Gemini, Virgo and Scorpio—are very good, but the others just fall flat and fail to develop.) But no matter, because Badaroux has programmed this disc wisely. One such surprise comes in her arrangement of Truth, where the band suddenly moves into 3/4 time for a few bars.

Even though the appearance of Williams’ earlier Kirk-era pieces suddenly throw you back in time stylistically, by that point you have a fairly good idea of how Williams operated within each arrangement of each tune. This helps you appreciate the good thing in these otherwise dated dance-band charts: you listen for what’s there and don’t worry too much about what isn’t. One thing that may surprise you if you haven’t heard her 1930s scores before is that, like her piano solos, they are more intricate than most of her time, with more interesting scoring and even moving bass lines with less of the “call-and-response” style that eventually became a Swing-era cliché. Naturally, one must accept the fact that during the 1930s jazz was inextricably tied to popular music, thus any jazz composer-arranger’s work was often dictated by what would sell and not necessarily by what they wanted to do. It was often a matter, as Artie Shaw put it, of playing “three to pay the rent and one for beauty’s sake.”

When one eventually reaches her earlier arrangements from the 1930s for the Kirk band, one immediately notes a lighter touch and more joyous sense of swing. These were among the charts that made her name as a major force in jazz circles, and there were many listeners who wished she had simply stayed in this style, but any true artist must evolve or shrivel up inside, and Williams simply had much more to give the world than her happy, lightweight arrangements from the 1930s. Even so, one can readily appreciate the way she rewrote such standards as After You’ve Gone, Sweet Georgia Brown, and Body and Soul. This segment of the album also presents her earliest version of Mary’s Idea; except for a nice clarinet solo, it’s really just a cute, peppy dance piece, though it does contain some elements that one hears developed more fully in her later work. More typical of her approach to jazz composition is the lesser-known Mary Steps Out, which is followed by her mid-1940s piece, Gjon Mili’s Jam Session which, appropriately, channels her earlier Kansas City style. In Stardust, there’s a nice moment when the trumpet soloist plays a downward chromatic motif that is mirrored in the arrangement; then, later in the same arrangement, a sudden, unexpected key shift.

I had no idea, until I heard this recording, that Lonely Moments, her famous bop arrangement for Benny Goodman, originally started out in 1943 as a swing piece. It’s nice, but the bop transformation makes it twice as interesting. In this swing original, however, there’s a trumpet-solo-over-tom toms that sounds like all the world like something out of the Artie Shaw book. Kool is an entirely new type of piece for her, but in this case it was a few years ahead of its time, not contemporary or behind the times. Conversation is her arrangement of a nice bop piece by Leonard Feather, Scorpio a piece from her Zodiac Suite. The latter was not really one of her finest compositions, but in this orchestrated version it had a greater impact than the original piano trio recording because she was able to create an interesting if repetitive ground bass with the piano beneath some nicely shifting orchestral colors. The excerpts from her untitled incidental music are also cool jazz, slow and moody but also quite interesting.

Fill the Cup is in the style I like to refer to as “progressive swing,” the style adopted by most of the hip bands at the end of World War II, somewhere between mid-‘40s Basie and Woody Herman. Blue Skies, like Fill the Cup, was a piece written for Duke Ellington’s band which he later changed to feature all of his trumpet players going up into the stratosphere at the end (none higher than Willie ”Cat” Anderson) and retitled Trumpets No End. This is one of the few times in the album where I felt that the Umlaut band’s beat was a little too heavy, but otherwise they play it very well. Joe, a piece written by Williams with her gifted musical friend Milton Orent, sounds very much like a showcase for Johnny Hodges, but it wasn’t recorded until 1965 (more on that later). Just about the only quality piece of her “jazz Mass” was the prelude, titled O.W. This was originally written in 1954 and dedicated to one of her friends, bassist Orlando Wright, and it is the 1954 version that is presented here.

The updated versions of Mary’s Idea and Stardust show how she was reworking some of her older material I a somewhat more modern style. The latter, though just played by a trio of trumpet, piano and bass, sounds for all the world like one of Artie Shaw’s mid-1940s Gramercy Five performances. She should have been offering her charts to Artie instead of Benny, but Benny was a personal friend and Artie wasn’t. Another case of just a bad business decision. This 1946 version of Stolen Moments is closer to the version that Goodman recorded a while later, but quite the same—more of a piece in transition.

Fifth Dimension is a fascinating piece from the ‘40s that vacillates between bop and Kansas City-styled swing. Badaroux lists it among her “boogies,” but the eight-to-the-bar feel is relatively mild here, more a suggestion than a demand. Earl’s Boogie and Roll ‘Em are bona fide boogie woogie pieces, but here the band has a surprise in store for us: not the arrangement she wrote for Goodman, but one using a mixture of winds and brass played by the concert band. This segment is followed by three pieces from the Zodiac Suite, arranged for the same kind of forces—very different arrangements from the ones that Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra played with her at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. Even in this new incarnation, I don’t think very much of Taurus, but the first two pieces sound more like light classical music (more in a popular vein, however, like Leroy Anderson’s pieces). Only in Virgo do we get a real “third stream” feel to the music.

This survey ends with a group of six pieces under the title “Eternal Youth.” These include her ragtime piece Fandangle, which she used to tell audiences was a tune she heard as a youngster, but there is no such ragtime piece except the one under this title that she herself played. Zoning Fungus is an extraordinarily modern, complex piece, similar to her famous piano solo A Fungus Amungus except that the second half features bass and drums with the piano and is played in 7/4. (These performances by Naulleau are excellent.) Chief Natoma From Tacoma, like Joe, come from jazz singles (45s) that she recorded for Moe Asch in 1965. As usual, Mary was out of touch with the music scene and didn’t realize that jazz singles no longer became hits in the era of rock music. Shafi opens as a fast, boppish piece in 4, but has a strange middle section in a slower 3 before moving back to the fast 4 for the solos.

Mary Lou Williams finally got the personal manager she had needed for decades in 1970: Peter O’Brien, a Jesuit novitiate who was soon to become a priest. He received special permission from the Church to act as her manager (how, I’d love to know…the Catholic Church and especially the Jesuits do not normally allow such things), and wonder of wonders, he completely revived her career. She recorded real jazz albums that received rave reviews, one of which also got a Grammy nomination in 1975 (though it didn’t win–big surprise, since the Grammys are controlled by big-money special interests) plus performances in major jazz venues (including the Newport Jazz Festival) and more money than she had ever made in her life. Yet, sadly, she ended her recording career with an album of mostly piano blues for Norman Granz’ Pablo label in 1980. She did everything the wrong way in her career in addition to continually making poor life decisions, but the one thing she left us was all this wonderful music. Had she only possessed half of Carla Bley’s or Toshiko Akiyoshi’s sharp business and marketing sense, she’d surely be better remembered today as the major jazz genius she was. Except for Naulleau’s occasionally timid performances at the keyboard, these recordings present Williams in her best light as a major jazz composer-arranger of astonishing skills. If this album doesn’t restore her good name within jazz education and performance, nothing will.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Jonas Frølund’s Excellent Adventure

C. NIELSEN: Clarinet Concerto: Cadenza. STRAVINSKY: 3 Pieces for Clarinet Solo. SØRENSEN: Lontanamente – Fragments of a Waltz. M. NIELSEN: Alone for Bassoon Clarinet. MESSIAEN: Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps: Abime des oiseaux. G. BERG: Pour clarinette seule. RUDERS: Tattoo for One. WAGNER: Tristan und Isolde: Cor anglais solo from Act III, arr. for bass clarinet. STEEN-ANDERSEN: De Profundis / Jonas Frølund, cl/bs-cl/bsn-cl / OUR Recordings SACD 6.220681

Jonas Lyskjær Frølund is a young Danish clarinetist, born in 1996. who studied with John Kruse before moving on to the Royal Danish Academy of Music and, later, the Paris Conservatoire. All avenues in the classical world are open to you when you have the money to pursue your dream, and Frølund has done so.

To his credit, however, Frølund is one of those rare adventurous souls who does not stop with the standard repertoire, but includes a generous amount of 20th and 21st-century works as this recital so amply proves. In fact, the Mette Nielsen piece for bassoon clarinet was composed for him. My sole caveat is that I think it a bit gimmicky to play the English horn solo of the shepherd from Tristan und Isolde on bass clarinet—no one asked him to, and the music really doesn/t cry out for a bass clarinet treatment—but otherwise, it’s an interesting and adventurous showcase of his talents.

And Frølund, in addition to being a virtuoso on his instrument, also has something that most classical clarinetists do not have, and that is an interesting timbre. He seems to combine the biting, acerbic upper range of, say, Benny Goodman with the rich middle range of Artie Shaw and the rich low range of Jimmie Noone. If the classical reader is left scratching his or her head wondering why I am comparing him to jazz clarinetists, it is because jazz clarinetists have done far more to expand the tonal and emotional range of their instrument than most classical clarinetists, past and present, all rolled into one. (I would go so far as to say that the same is true of the trombone.) Indeed, Frølund’s performance of Stravinsky’s 3 Pieces for Clarinet Solo reminded me strongly of Goodman’s recording of the same composer’s Ebony Concerto. Indeed, the way he plays the third of these pieces has some of that Yiddish “fralich” sound that Goodman often employed in both his jazz and classical performances. I loved it!

Moreover, he is a master of not only shifting dynamics but actually changing the timbre of his instrument for coloristic purposes, as is evident in his extraordinary performance of the slow but interesting Lontanamente – Fragments of a Waltz by Bent Sørensen. This is a performance that, as we used to say in the old days, reveals “art that conceals art.” He makes playing this piece in this manner sound easy, but it is anything but. He just has such perfect control of his instrument that you think it’s not hard to play. He similarly overcomes the tricky chromatic passages, reed buzzes, and humming along with his own playing written into Mette Nielsen’s Alone for solo clarinet. The music of Alone, the interesting effects aside, is somewhat simple on the surface, consisting of a slow melody that goes in and out of tonality. It is not the kind of piece that “speaks for itself,” however; it requires the kind of virtuosity that Frølund possesses to make it work, and this he does. He is, quite simply, a wizard of his instrument; I’ve not heard his like in the 58 years I’ve been listening to classical music, and I’ve heard a lot of clarinetists, including Benny Goodman, in person.

Yet as much as his technical virtuosity dazzles, one is always brought deep into the music he plays because he imbues everything with tremendous feeling. A perfect example is the extended clarinet solo from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Not even the great Richard Stoltzman played it with as much feeling, not to mention such an extraordinary range of instrumental color, as Frølund plays it here.

The only pieces I didn’t much like were Gunnar Berg’s Pour clarinette seule, which wasn’t very original and didn’t say much of anything to me, and Steen-Andersen’s noisy, obnoxious “noise” piece De Profundis, which wasn’t the least bit profound. Tattoo for One, though also rather gimmicky, holds together better as a composition.

Well worth hearing. This young man really has the chops, as they say!

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Terfel’s Interesting but Flawed “Boris”

MUSSORGSKY: Boris Godunov (orig. 1869 version) / Bryn Terfel, bs-bar (Boris Godunov); Kostas Smoriginas, bar (Shchelkalov); Jeremy White, bs (Nikitich); Adrian Clarke, bs (Mityukha); John Graham-Hall, ten (Prince Shuisky); Aln Anger, bs (Pimen); David Butt Philip, ten (Grigory Otropiev); Rebecca De Pont Davies, mez (Inn Hostess); John Tomlinson, bs (Varlaam); Harry Nicoll, ten (Missail); James Platt, bs (Frontier Guard); Vlada Borovko, sop (Xenia); Sarah Prino, sop (Nurse); Ben Knight, bar (Fyodor); Nicholas Sales, ten (Boyar); Andrew Tortise, ten (Idiot (Yurodivy); Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Chorus & Orch.; Antonio Pappano, cond / Opus Arte OA1376D, DVD (Live: London, 2016)

Bryn Terfel, once one of the greatest bass-baritones in the world, has seen his stock and his voice decline in recent years. At only age 57, there is really no reason why this is so except for what I noticed the first time I heard him in the early 1990s, that his technique was never really secure. After a quarter-century of fairly heavy singing, it simply started to fall apart. His singing during King Charles’ recent coronation ceremonies was so awful that one cringed to hear it.

This compilation of two (or perhaps three; they’re not saying) 2016 performances of Boris Godunov in its rare original form, however, caught Terfel at the very beginning of his decline. The once-rock solid voice is unsteady. showing a slow vibrato that has since degenerated into wobble, but at this stage of his career (he was then only 51) it was not continually unpleasant to listen to, and his always-outstanding histrionic gifts are on perfect display.

Also on display is a stage production which, although stylized, is not insulting to one’s intelligence. In fact, it works fairly well because director Richard Jones, in cooperation with his set designer Miriam Buether, managed to put the principal characters into focus first and foremost. I am happy to report that the characters’ costumes are traditional, which is important in the case of an historical drama like Boris. This is not really a story that translates well into the modern era. It is solely a reflection of its time and place.

I was also happy to hear it performed in the 1869 version, which is about an hour shorter than the more familiar 1872 revision. It does not contain the Polish Scene, which takes up a good half-hour or so, and the Idiot (whose name, I now discover, is Yurodivy) does not appear in the final scene set in the Kromy Forest because it is not in this version, but rather in the St. Basil’s Cathedral scene which precedes the death of Boris.

As is usual for Pappano, he conducts cleanly, phrases well, pays attention to the orchestral color, yet never really gets under the skin of the music. I can’t quite put my finger on why this is so, but he just never does. Go ahead and listen to any of his recorded or filmed opera performances. It’s like the old joke they used to make about “Chinese” dinners (actually, Chinese-American cuisine, like chop suey or egg foo yung): an hour later, you’re hungry—or, in this case you simply forget what he did with the music.

The Coronation Scene takes place on a sort of upper-level patio or walkway above the crowd. Boris sits in a chair while he is crowned, then stands up to sing his famous monologue. I’m not sure why Pimen’s cell is lined with wall pictures in pencil of some crowned figure (not Boris, I have no idea who it’s supposed to be). As the scene goes on, however, we learn that this is what Pimen is writing on, putting Russian script (but in Western letters, not Cyrillic) under the pictures on his wall instead of writing in a book as he is supposed to be doing. It’s a little odd; I can just see the head monk having a fit (“Hey! Stop defacing the walls!”). Basso Ain Anger, as Pimen, has an OK voice, not very resonant and a shade unsteady, but he gets by and the unsteadiness clears up about halfway through the scene. Tenor David Butt Philip, as Grigory-the-false-Dmitri (and he suddenly has a last name, Otropiev), has a good voice, a bit fluttery but not unsteady and with a bright top that suits the character. I don’t know if Butt Philip is a natural redhead or not, but he’s a redhead in this production, which is historically correct. (In neither of the two live performances of Boris that I saw was the Grigory-Dmitri a redhead as he’s supposed to be.) His acting is exceptionally good. Jones gives the characters a bit more movement than is usual in this scene, which helps to hold one’s attention, but let’s be honest. It’s set in a dark monk’s cell. There’s nothing much to see other than Pimen and Grigory singing, and later arguing.

John Tomlinson has had a somewhat unsteady voice for years, but it’s a really rich, resonant bass and his acting is also exceptional. In fact, this may be the best-acted “Town of Kazan” aria I’ve ever heard. The inn scene is set to a long sort of table that suggested the “Last Supper” painting to me. In the next scene, where Boris interacts with his children, I noted that in addition to his unsteadiness Terfel had also lost his bottom range by this point in his career; the voice sounds entirely baritonal with no trace of the “bass” part he once had, but again, his incisive interpretation is commanding, and he still sounds more impressive than the vastly overrated Alexander Vedernikov on the old Philips recording of the original 1872 version. As the performance progressed, I also noted that the Shuisky also had a wobble. Apparently, to the modern-day Brits, effective dramatic singing means wobbles, and this is a shame. What happened to operatic casts in which all of the singers had firm voices? Have we really come to this as a norm nowadays? Enquiring minds what to know.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the chorus just sounds generic. they sing well, don’t get me wrong, but in Boris the chorus. representing the Russian people, is the most important “character” in the opera, and they just don’t have the drama necessary for the role because they don’t have the right sound. Even if one is using Western singers, as in this case, the sopranos should sound properly edgy and the basses rich and resonant, like Buddhist monks chanting their “Om” in unison. In addition, Andrew Tortise as the Idiot shows absolutely nothing in the way of interpretation. He should have listened to the greatest Idiot on record, Ivan Kozlovsky, in the old Mark Riezen recording, but alas, modern-day singers don’t want to learn how to interpret their roles from past masters. The just don’t give a damn. Thus between the pallid chorus and the under-interpreted Idiot, the St. Basil’s Cathedral scene falls flat, and that is a shame since it is really the most powerful scene in the entire 1869 version of the opera. By contrast, the head Boyar in the last scene is absolutely superb, clearly the best of the subsidiary roles in this production.

Taken as a whole, the stage production is quite good and very interesting despite an inconsistent performance. Butt Philip is good, Terfel and Tomlinson are excellent interpreters, but somewhere along the way the sheer guts of this opera was replaced by a smooth, even sound. If you’d like to sample the performance before buying the DVD, it’s available HERE on YouTube.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Claudio Santoro’s Fascinating Music

SANTORO: Cello Concerto.* Symphony No. 8.^# Três Abstrações. Interações Assintóticas. One Minute Play / *<arins Martins, cel; ^#Denise de Freitas, mezzo; Goiás Philharmonic Orch.; Neil Thomson, cond / Naxos 8.574410

As a follow-up to the brilliant album of music by José de Almeida Prado, Naxos’ “Music of Brazil” series gives us here equally fascinating music, in a different style, by composer Carlos Santoro (1919-1989). Thus while American orchestras waste their time playing the conventional, featureless music of such composers as Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon, we can at least hear some modern music of real substance on recordings. Be grateful for small favors.

One can immediately hear Santoro’s ingenuity from the opening of his Cello Concerto: pizzicato string figures, followed by sustained notes on the violins while the basses play a short motif which later evolves into the theme. Yes, Santoro’s music is tonal, like Montgomery’s, but it is much more interesting because he knew how to space things out, break them into small pieces, and then stitch them together. Indeed, much of this opening section features the violin section and a clarinet solo played in the instrument’s lower register, creating a feeling of mystery and tension. The feeling one gets is of a curious amble through the composer’s mind, picking up the various threads of the score as he brought them into being, thus despite its being relatively melodic it is not “easy” music but, rather, challenges the listener to keep following his train of thought. The solo cello, in fact, does not enter the picture until 5:45 into the first movement, and here too Santoro meanders somewhat, reluctant to give the listener an “easy,” attractive “tune” to follow. The harmony in the cello’s music is rather modal, making it sound less solidly grounded in the tonality but still related to it. Even when the cello part becomes faster and more complex in the second half of the movement, there is still a feeling that the music lacks grounding, forcing the listener to follow its progress closely rather than just “sit back and relax.”

And oddly, the second movement is even slower than the first, a “Largo” that defies one’s expectations. Here, the diffuse and somewhat episodic quality of the first movement is even more pronounced, almost as if Santoro were “deconstructing” his musical ideas—yet the movement is exceptionally short, less than five minutes long. When we move into the fast final movement, there is still not much in the way of thematic cohesion, but at this rapid pace the ruminating playing of the solo cello is set to short, rapid figures played, not very loudly, bu various members of the wind and string sections. This creates a slight feeling of chaos; the somewhat uneasy feeling of the first two movements is here thrown into sharper relief. The cello seems determined to escape its narrow “alley” of sound, playing fast bowed figures, but is forced to resign itself to its fate, falling back on the ruminating quality of earlier passages.

After this somewhat massive (31:37) concerto from 1961, we hear Santoro’s terse (14:56) Symphony No. 8 from 1963. The method of writing is much the same, working in short motifs welded together or simply juxtaposed, but here his harmonic language is much denser, working in an atonal (but not serial) idiom in which there are no root chords at all. This makes the entire symphony sound “suspended,” as it were, hanging its “unfinished” chords in the air. Only when one hears a brief, slow passage played by the basses does one get any feeling of harmonic resolution. And the second movement is even weirder, using a wordless vocal by a mezzo-soprano as the principal “instrument” in it. Here Santoro provides a melodic line for the singer, but again throws the listener off by his use of “ungrounded” chords. Although this second movement is only 12 seconds longer than the first (5:37), it sounds longer because of the greater continuity provided by the long, arching notes of the vocal line. In the brief (3:38) third movement, Santoro finally uses a steady, ostinato rhythm, but breaks up the metric patterns as it goes along and subverts one’s expectations with further breaking up of the already-short themes.

Santoro wends his way through the even more abstract (and atonal) Trés Abstrações which are the closest thing I’ve ever heard to the music of Anton Webern that wasn’t written by him. This little suite and the following works, composed in 1969 and 1966-67 (One Minute Play), clearly show Santoro moving into an even more modern—and fragmented—style of writing, which as I mentioned was already present in embryonic form in the Cello Concerto.

Indeed, it’s difficult for me to even think of another composer of this time or later who was able to fuse abstract construction with musical form so successfully. Even at his most modern, Ginastera was always careful to at least use recognizable musical forms for his music, but Santoro sounded “modern” even in his most tonal pieces like the Cello Concerto because he was already thinking in terms of short phrases knitted together, sometimes smoothly but often uneasily. He clearly expected his listening audience to come up to him, not to have them fall back on recognizable forms or patterns, and in this respect his music is still head and shoulders above most of the “contemporary music” I hear nowadays, which seems to go out of its way to keep the listener “zeroed in” on recognizable if asymmetric rhythms and musical patterns.If all this seems a bit confusing to the listener, I assure you that you’ll understand what I’m talking about once you hear this music. The only “contemporary” composer who comes close to this is Nancy Van de Vate in her more adventurous, atonal pieces. Perhaps the coming of the “space age” was an inspiration for him, but in any case he clearly found his own way of doing things that worked for him and yet had absolutely no connection with his “native” music, either rhythmically or thematically.

An utterly fascinating and unique disc.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Gatti’s Great “Oedipus Rex”

PIZZETTI: 3 Orchestral Preludes for Oedipus Rex. STRAVINSKY: Oedipus Rex . AJ Glueckert, ten (Oedipus); Ekaterina Semenchuk, mezzo (Jocasta); Alex Esposito, bs-bar (Creon); Adolfo Corrado, bs (Tiresias); Luca Bernard, ten (Shepherd); Sebastian Geyer, bs (Messenger); Massimo Popolizio, spkr / Forence May Festival Chorus & Orch.; Daniele Gatti, cond / Dynamic DVD 37981 (also available on CD) (live: Florence, June 30, 2022)

For a work as powerful as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, it is not performed nearly as often as it should be, although during the Joseph Volpe era at the Metropolitan Opera it was occasionally revived as a staged work, generally paired with the composer’s earlier short opera, The Nightingale. In those performances, the narration was always in English, which was Stravinsky’s preference. Although the narration on his first issued recording in the early 1950s was in French, when the actual performance was given it was in German because it was broadcast in Germany. That was his rule: the narration always in the vernacular of the country in which it is given, the sung portions always in Latin because it was a dead language.

The real surprise of this DVD release, however, is the inclusion of the 3 Orchestral Preludes for Oedipus Rex by Ildebrando Pizzetti, one of the finest composers Italy has ever produced. His lifelong fascination with Greek tragedy produced a trilogy of excellent operas based on their stories, the early Fedra, Ifigenia from the early 1950s, and the crowning achievement of his career, the late Clittenestra written when he was 80 years old. These preludes were among his very earliest surviving works, written in 1904. The only other recording I could find online is one by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra. so it is indeed a rarity although not a first recording.

Not surprisingly, Pizzetti’s musical style is not yet fully formed, but considering that this was 1904 it is not nearly as “Romantic”-sounding as the early works of his contemporaries. The harmony is restless and moody, which befits the subject matter, and eerily resembles early Stravinsky—years before there was an early Stravinsky—blended with touches of late Wagner, although the melodic contours are more Italianate. The rhythmic base of the opening “Largo” is rather amorphous in the beginning, using some shifting meter; only in the second half of the piece does it become Italianate in the melodic line, but again Pizzetti plays with tempo and shifting stress beats within each bar. Perhaps a touch of Richard Strauss is heard in this section as he uses rich orchestration, a gradual increase in volume and feverish string tremolos to project a feeling of tragedy. And as usual, Gatti, who is my favorite living Italian conductor, imbues the music with an almost electric emotion. The second piece, “Con impeto,” opens with fast bowed passages by the basses, answered by high strings and winds. This is in a fairly steady but edgy-sounding 6/8, and Pizzetti audaciously uses quickly-shifting key changes to reinforce the edginess. I tell you, this man was a truly great composer, and even though I am not too fond of his most famous opera, Murder in the Cathedral, it is only because of the subject matter and not the music. The middle section of this prelude falls back to a slow tempo, featuring a forlorn oboe solo. Although I am not normally a fan of concert videos, watching Gatti conduct is an object lesson in good podium manners—he cues not only individual instruments but also whole sections for their entrances in key passages, and cups his left hand to shape and mold dynamics—which makes watching him as fascinating as watching such past masters as Toscanini, Munch and Karajan. You can almost see the music you’re hearing through his manner of leading the orchestra. In terms of his ability to bring drama out of an orchestra, I would, in fact, rate him above Karajan, who only achieved such moments intermittently. The last piece in the Pizzetti trilogy is also fascinating, and written in an even different style than the first two, including a strange yet passionate violin solo and very original voicing of the winds as they play against the strings, occasionally departing from them in tonality. I only hope that this moving and very original music spurs listeners to examine Pizzetti more in depth. He is a composer who clearly deserves a major revival.

Referring to what I said in the first paragraph, I was happy to hear the narration in Italian. Those who don’t speak the language can turn on their subtitles if you don’t already know the text (I remember most but not all of it) but, once again, it is the power and tautness of Gatti’s performance that imbues the whole enterprise with an almost electrifying feeling of doom and despair. And what exceptional clarity he brings out of the orchestra! You hear everything in each and every bar of this masterful score, powerfully presented. Gatti, being Italian, has a very Mediterranean feeling for rhythm, but in Oedipus this works splendidly without undue exaggeration. The Florence May Festival chorus sounds appropriately lean and bright, as does the wonderful—and, in America, sadly underrated—tenor AJ Glueckert, whose performance of Lionel in Flotow’s Martha I praised a few years ago. If anything, his voice has gained in size and power since then without losing the almost Italianate brightness up top, and his extraordinarily dramatic interpretation equals that of Peter Pears (with Stravinsky) and surpasses that of Ronald Dowd (in the scarce but very fine recording conducted by a young Colin Davis). Incidentally, I really should praise Massimo Popolizio’s delivery of the narration. Too many narrators of this text tend to sound laid-back, almost too relaxed; Popolizio is suitably dramatic. As th camera panned around to the chorus, I understood how they made such a good effect. Rather than standing behind the orchestra, as is usually done, they were spaced out across the back of the auditorium on an upper level, which gave them an almost 3-D sound.

Bass-baritone Alex Esposito (Creon) has a powerful, bright and quite dramatic voice, but also a bit of an uneven flutter in sustained notes, not quite enough to make a sensitive listener cringe though a bit of a problem. Yet he’s such an excellent interpreter that I would urge him to seek a good voice teacher to work this flaw out. Alex Corrado (Tiresias) has an astoundingly powerful and black-sounding bass that might someday develop into a first-rate Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos (he doesn’t quite have the lowest notes needed for that role). As one watches and listens to this performance, one is continually struck by Gatti’s calm but secure control of all aspects of the performance: the proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove. Every note, phrase and gesture in this performance rings true and makes a suitable impression. As the chorus, orchestra and tympani roll into the powerful passage following one of Oedipus’ solos, I was forcibly struck by its resemblance to the Coronation Scene in Boris Godunov, at least the way Gatti phrases it.

Ekaterina Semenchuk has a typical Slavic mezzo-soprano, dark-toned, powerful and a bit fluttery (although her tone becomes a bit firmer as the voice warms up), but is the most emotional and exciting Jocasta I’ve heard since the legendary Martha Mödl in the early Stravinsky recording. In fact, Semenchuk has an even more powerful and secure low range than Mödl had in 1951. Despite the inherent flutter in the voice, Semenchuk appears to have an otherwise perfect control over her instrument, shading the music with the instincts of a master dramatist. She is also the only character who really “acts out” the role as if she were giving a fully staged performance…one might say, a female Chaliapin. Glueckert also acts out his scene in which he suddenly believes that it was he who killed her husband (his father), and he’s quite good here, but trust me, not quite on Semenchuk’s level. He is acting Oedipus; she is Jocasta. The insistent ostinato rhythm the orchestra uses to accompany the brief but powerful Jocasta-Oesipus duet that follows is conducted with inexorable power by Gatti. At every turn in this performance, one is sucked in by the power of both the music and its performance. As a final cherry atop this perfect musical sundae, listen to the extraordinary tenor voice of Luca Bernard as the Shepherd. He sounds like a mini-Franco Corelli without Corelli’s bad habit of distorting music.

I have no hesitation in declaring this the greatest performance of Oedipus Rex I’ve ever heard, even better than those conducted at the Volpe-era Metropolitan by the earlier, more vital Valery Gergiev. It will leave you emotionally drained, which is what great Greek drama should do. No one, and I mean no one—not even Stravinsky himself—has ever brought out so much emotion in this music previously. And please note: this is just one performance, not two or three in which the engineers spliced out the bad sections and replaced them with good ones from another. At the end of the performance, a moment of almost stunned silence as its almost overwhelming power sank in—then the audience explodes with a torrent of well-deserved applause for one and all.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Who Was Slim Gaillard, Really?

Even within the jazz community, noted for its eccentric and even bizarre characters, Bulee “Slim” Gaillard was unquestionably the most eccentric. Compared to him, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson was just somewhat hyper and Dizzy Gillespie was a choir boy. Slim Gaillard combined music, comedy and surrealism in a way that no one else ever quite achieved; only Gibson and Fats Waller come close. In addition to being able to play the guitar in four different styles—classical, jazz, blues and rock—he was also an  excellent pianist who, at times, played credible solos with his hands upside-down as well as organ, vibes, saxophone (occasionally) and bongo drums. And of course he was also a fine jazz vocalist with a unique style as well as the inventor of his own hip language, which he called “Vout-O-Reenie.” But who was he and where did he come from? In the days before the internet and social tracking, Slim was able to so obscure his real history as well as embellish it and bullshit people about it, that even today it’s difficult to put all the pieces together.

His personal history is so mixed-up, in fact, that even Wikipedia, normally the arbiter of truth, justice, and the American way, can’t even sort out the facts from the lies and BS. At the top of their article on Slim they give his birth date as January 9, 1911, but a few paragraphs later they start questioning their own information:

Along with Gaillard’s date of birth, his lineage and place of birth are disputed. Many sources state that he was born in Detroit, Michigan, though he said that he was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, of an Afro-Cuban mother called Maria (Mary Gaillard) and a German-Jewish father called Theophilus (Theophilus Rothschild) who worked as a ship’s steward.

During an interview in 1989, Gaillard added: “They all think I was born in Detroit because that was the first place I got into when I got to America.” However, the 1920 census lists one “Beuler Gillard” [sic] as living in Pensacola, Florida, having been born in April 1918 in Alabama. Researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc have concluded that he was born in June 1918 in Claiborne, Alabama, where a “Theophilus Rothchild” [sic] had been raised the son of a successful merchant in the small town of Burnt Corn; other documents give his name as Wilson, Bulee, or Beuler Gillard or Gaillard.

And it just gets more confusing from there on. One of the most famous stories about Gaillard—told, of course, by himself—was that when he was 12 years old he went with his father on a “world voyage” and was “accidentally” left behind on the island of Crete. During a 1989 TV documentary he claimed that “When I was stranded in Crete, I was only twelve years old. I stayed there for four years. I traveled on the boats to Beirut and Syria and I learned to speak the language and the people’s way of life.” After learning a few words of Greek, he worked on the island “making shoes and hats.” Again according to Wikipedia, “He then joined a ship working the eastern Mediterranean ports, mainly Beirut, where he picked up some knowledge of Arabic. When he was about 15, he re-crossed the Atlantic, hoping the ship would take him home to Cuba, but it was bound for the U.S. and he ended up in Detroit. He never saw either of his parents again.”

Yet if one just stops and thinks about this for a minute, it doesn’t rung true. Either his father was so stupid that he didn’t notice that his son was not with him on the boat, which I seriously doubt if he was indeed an international merchant as Bulee claimed, or he was deliberately abandoned. Why? The only thing I can think of is that he was already eccentric and lost in his own world, and thus was a burden to his family. But since Bulee did speak Arabic and Greek, the story is at least marginally plausible if not probable.

And we also have to consider what year this occurred in. If he was indeed born in 1911, this would have been 1922, but if he was born in 1918 it would have been 1930. This eight-year difference is significant because the world was a much more dangerous place in 1930. Wikipedia then goes on to claim that after he was able to return to America, he was “unable to speak English.”  But why, since he was already speaking English before he was supposedly abandoned accidentally? And why couldn’t he relocate his parents? Clearly they had to be somewhere. Even if he had to rely solely on the black community for help, there must surely have been someone with a brain in their head who could have sent out some feelers.

But if you believe the Wikipedia narrative, “he tried to get a job at Ford Motor Company but was rejected because of his age. He worked at a general store owned by an Armenian family, with whom he lived for some time, then tried to become a boxer.” Now, try to follow this line of bullshit and tell me how much you believe: “During Prohibition in 1931 or 1932, he drove a hearse with a coffin that was packed with whiskey for the Purple Gang.” But both the Ford plant and the Purple Gang, a predominantly Jewish gangster mob that ran bootlegging and hijacking, were in Detroit. How on earth could a young black man with no family, money or connections get to Detroit in the first place??

And the story becomes even more colorful from there on but, oddly, more believable. He purportedly took evening music classes and taught himself to play guitar and piano. Wikipedia goes on: “When Duke Ellington came to Detroit, Gaillard went backstage and met his hero. Determined to become a musical entertainer, he moved to New York City and entered the world of show business as a ‘professional amateur’.” Gaillard later explained this by saying that if you looked too polished when you auditioned, the MC would suspect that you were a professional pretending to be an amateur and would be disqualified, thus he always tried to appear a little “rough around the edges” in order to keep winning amateur night prizes.

It’s really only from 1938 onward, when he teamed up with the great jazz bassist Sla, Stewart to form the duo “Slim and Slam,” that we can actually track his life with certainty. Slim and Slam became so popular so quickly, in fact, that they were signed by Decca, for whom they immediately scored four hit records: a cover version of the song from Walt Disney’s short Ferdinand, the Bull With the Delicate Ego, Cement Mixer (Put-ti Put-ti), Tutti Frutti (a song about ice cream, not to be confused with the Little Richard hit of the same title) and their biggest smash hit, Flat Foot Floogie (With the Floy Floy). On the original recording, they accidentally sing it in the first chorus as “Flat floot floogie.” Considering the fact that Gaillard was on the brink of creating his own hipster language called “Vout-O-Reenie,” many people still mistakenly believe that this song’s title is simply made up of nonsense words, but it’s not. Im black Harlem slang, a “floogie” was a “floozie” or prostitute, and the “floy floy” was syphilis. Thus Slim and Slam got the whole nation, including white folk, happily singing a song about a hooker with the clap. A great little inside joke that Gaillard never forgot.

Although, as usual, Jack Kapp of Decca Records refused to pay royalties to the duo (the only Decca artists who were getting royalties were Bing Crosby, his biggest cash cow, the Casa Loma, Jimmy Dorsey and Bob Crosby orchestras, and Louis Armstrong, the latter because Joe Glaser insisted on it), their records made them famous. In 1941, they appeared in an exciting music and dance scene in the movie Hellzapoppin’, but work for them became scarce.

Slim Gaillard & Bam Brown, 1946

In early 1943 the act ended when Gaillard was drafted into the Army Air Force and sent to the South Pacific as a fighter pilot. Incredulous as it seems, he served with distinction for a year and a half before being allowed to return to civilian life, but by then jazz piano master Art Tatum hired Stewart to be the bassist in his Nat King Cole-styled trio. At this point, Gaillard started working with drummer Zutty Singleton and a bassist named Tiny Bam Brown. Although there are plenty of recordings featuring Brown with Gaillard, nothing is known of him personally. We don’t even know what his real first name was, since both Tiny and Bam were nicknames.

Yet it was this edition of the Slim Gaillard trio-quartet-sextet etc. that really made his name. He appeared in two film shorts, met Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker when they came out to the West Coast in 1945 and even started recording with them. Their funniest and most infamous recording is a thing called Slim’s Jam on which Parker, Gillespie and other famous jazz musicians wander in and out of the studio to play solos while Gaillard just talks, but it’s not their most musically interesting record together. That honor goes to the coupling of Dizzy Boogie and Popity Pop (Goes the Motorsickle), made on December 29, 1945 for Bel-Tone. On this record and, in fact, on most of these made in 1945 and ’46, Gaillard also had the services of one of the best but most eccentric jazz pianists of the day, Michael “Dodo” Marmarosa. These records were made at a time when Parker and Gillespie were playing at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood, and the famous bebop duo was so impressed by Gaillard’s exceptional musical skills that they invited him to be their opening act at Berg’s. Parker, in fact, would continue to use Gaillard as his opening act into the early 1950s when he played at Birdland in New York.

This was the time when all of this exposure on records, radio and film shorts finally made Gaillard a mini-star on a national level, but his songs were so weird and his jive talk so bizarre that they proved an impediment to his being fully accepted as a major jazz name. He would continue to sell records, but for several different labels instead of just one or two, into the early 1950s until rock ‘m’ roll overtook rhythm ‘n’ blues as the nation’s most popular music.

It was also during this time that Gaillard invented his own rich, colorful hipster language, “Vout-O-Reenie.” Of course he was just making things up as he went along, but jazz-oriented radio DJs like Los Angeles-based Al Jarvis, whose name was used in a Lionel Hampton record from that time (Jivin’ With Jarvis), encouraged Gaillard to produce a “Vout-O-Reenie Dictionary,” which was printed up and given away for free in jazz record stores (some of which advertised in it). I’ve attached a copy of this gem HERE for your entertainment. I doubt that Gaillard ever used more than six or seven terms from this “dictionary” in his performances when he did jive talk. Like his own past, he just made a lot of things up and stuck them in the “dictionary.”

Gaillard’s discography contains a number of odd items that either no one else or very few others ever recorded. Among the most eccentric are his recordings of Atomic Cocktail, recorded at the tail end of 1945 after President Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, a tune called Arabian Boogie that used some Middle Eastern musical ideas, a jazz version of a Greek folk song, Tee Say Mallee (Why Do You Care?), at least one song using Arabic (Yep Roc Heresy), two songs referencing Jewish culture (Dunkin’ Bagel and Matzoh Balls), a bizarre cover version of Desi Arnaz’s hit record Babalu, and two strange songs which he did not write himself (a rarity for him) but which surely sound like something he would have come up with, The Bartender’s Just Like a Mother and When Banana Skins Are Falling (I’ll Come Sliding Back to You). He also wrote and recorded what became known as the hipster anthem, The Groove Juice Symphony (Opera in Vout).

Gaillard’s exceptional musicianship plus his tacit endorsement by Charlie Parker gave him a high profile in the hip jazz community if nowhere else. Producer Norman Granz featured him in his popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and, when the big commercial labels like Mercury and M-G-M gave up on Gaillard, Granz signed him to his Clef and Norgran labels. His Norgran 45s and LPs bore the legend, “Slim Gaillard and his Musical Aggregations, Wherever He May Be.” He eventually made enough recordings for Granz that a full album was released on LP.

Gaillard was able to find enough work to keep body and soul together, unlike Harry The Hipster who was pretty much blackballed after he recorded his controversial drug song, Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine? He appeared occasionally on TV in cameo roles on Marcus Welby, M.D., Charlie’s Angels, Mission: Impossible, Medical Center, The Flip Wilson Show, and Then Came Bronson. He also appeared in the 1970s TV series Roots: The Next Generation and reprised some of his old hits on the NBC prime-time variety program The Chuck Barris Rah Rah Show.

Like so many other black jazz musicians of his generation, Gaillard was much more appreciated in Europe than in America, touring in various jazz festivals with Arnett Cobb and playing in London with George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Thus when Dizzy Gillespie recommended that Slim move to Europe for good, he settled in England. In addition to occasionally deputizing for Melly when he was ill, he occasionally appearing on BBC television programs such as the late-night music series Night Music hosted by David Sanborn, but his behavior had become even more erratic than before which caused his fellow musicians to feel uncomfortable and nervous. Slim appeared in the 1986 musical film Absolute Beginners singing Selling Out, and in 1989 the BBC ran director Anthony Wall’s four-part documentary on Gaillard titled Slim Gaillard’s Civilisation. He died of cancer in London on February 26, 1991, ostensibly aged 80.

Slim Gaillard was one of the very few jazz musicians to continually straddle the pop market without losing his reputation as a master improviser and first-class talent. As a result, he was able to keep chugging along while many of is peers fell by the wayside and were forgotten, but it’s open to question how much he is remembered by American jazz fans today. His status as something of an outsider and very much a comedic oddball has, I think, tended to diminish his stature, but the records remain and several of them are awfully good. Here is my list of favorites, given not in chronological order but in a sequence that makes for good programming:

1. Dunkin’ Bagel (Slim Gaillard)
2. Bongo Cito (Slim Gaillard)
3. Atomic Cocktail (Slim Gaillard)
4. Popity Pop [Poppity Pop] (Slim Gaillard)
5. When Banana Skins Are Falling (I’ll Come Sliding Back to You) (Frazzini-DeFrank-Mills)
6. Groove Juice Symphony (Opera in Vout) (Slim Gaillard) w/Meade Lux Lewis, pno
7. Arabian Boogie (Slim Gaillard)
8. Chicken Rhythm (Squires-Gaillard)
9. Chile & Beans O-Voutie (Slim Gaillard)
10. Gaillard plays piano & guitar – includes Cement Mixer (Put-ti Put-ti) (Gaillard)
11. Dizzy Boogie (Slim Gaillard)
12. Babalu (Orooney) (Margarita Lecouna, arr. Gaillard)
13. Communications (Slim Gaillard)
14. Federation Blues (Slim Gaillard)
15. Organ-Oreenee (Slim Gaillard)
16. Yep Roc Heresy (Slim Gaillard)
17. Tutti Frutti (Slim Gaillard) – THIS is the one to hear from 1946 with Howard McGhee, Lucky Thompson and Dodo Marmarosa.
18. Tee Say Mallee (Greek folk song, arr. Gaillard)
19. The Bartender’s Just Like a Mother (Ricks-Clarke-Spencer)
20. Little Red Riding Woods (Manning-Kaye-Gaillard)
21. Eatin’ With the Boogie (Slim Gaillard)
22. The Jam Man (Lyle Griffin)
23. The Hip Cowboy (Slim Gaillard)
24. Matzoh Balls (Slim Gaillard)

Enjoy!

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Mahler “Pioneers” in Rare Recordings

MAHLER: Das Klagende Lied / Joan Sutherland, sop; Norma Procter, mezzo; Peter Pears, ten; Goldsmiths’ Choral Union; London Symphony Orch.; Walter Goehr, cond / Symphony No. 10: Adagio / BBC Symphony Orch.; Hermann Scherchen, cond / Symphony No. 4 / Teresa Stich-Randall, sop; London Symphony Orch,; Goehr, cond / Leopold Stokowski, Alfred Friese recall their impressions of Mahler conducting / Somm Recordings ARIADNE 5022-2

Leave it to the Brits to tell the world who the real “Mahler pioneers” were. Of course they were musicians who conducted his works in Great Britain. even if the performance dates were decades later than the performances by Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer or the truly pioneering recordings by Oskar Fried, Hidemaro Konoye and Eugene Ormandy. But always remember: if it didn’t happen in England, it wasn’t “really” pioneering at all.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, this album is indeed valuable for several things. There are the fascinating first-hand accounts of a musician who played under Mahler in the New York Philharmonic, Alfred Friese, as well as Leopold Stokowski’s recollection of seeing Mahler rehearse his Symphony No. 8 in 1910. These are invaluable items not included in Gilbert Kaplan’s excellent CD of Mahler recollections. Then we have the first known recordings of the “Adagio” from the Symphony No. 10, dating from 1948 and directed by the always-fascinating Hermann Scherchen, whose Mahler symphony recordings I discussed along with those of Hans Rosbaud in an earlier review. We also get a 1960 performance of the Fourth Symphony from 1960, a couple of years later than Leonard Bernstein’s performances, thus although it is an interesting performance it was only “pioneering” in Great Britain. The real gem, however, is the utterly fascinating performance—and first recording, albeit a radio transcript—of Mahler’s massive Der Klagende Lied in 1956.

This work is difficult enough to perform due to the massive forces required, an offstage orchestra of brass, winds, tympani and percussion in addition to a full chorus and Mahler’s usual massive principal orchestra; and, as usual, it demands first-rate singers. This particular performance is flawed due to the omission of the opening “Waldmarchen” movement. According to the liner notes, this was omitted because, at the time, it was not included in the published edition of the score. It’s a shame, but what we do have, the final two movements, is brilliantly performed but, since the baritone only appears in the “Waldmarchen” there is no baritone soloist in this performance.

Nonetheless, Goehr does a fine job on what is here, and at least he satisfied one demand that Mahler’s music makes which is the presence of first-class vocal soloists. In many recordings of the complete work, it is usually the sopranos that suffer, their voices often sounding shrill and edgy, lacking the soaring sound that Germanic sopranos of Mahler’s time possessed in abundance. For this reason alone, I most highly prize the live recording by Michael Gielen. Tenor David Randall had a serviceable voice—no unsteadiness, and he had secure high notes—although it is not a glamorous sound, but soprano Brigitte Poschner-Klebel and mezzo-soprano Marjana Lipovšek were simply wonderful.

The problem with the Goehr performance is the sound quality. It is absolutely horrendous for a 1956 British broadcast; not only too much surface noise, but also a cross-current of radio static and swish that crop up from time to time. The orchestra also sounds tubby and two-dimensional with almost no high end response. The sound restoration editor, one Paul Bally, really ought to be ashamed of himself. This is a semi-amateur job that, in this day and age, If you compare this to the astonishing job that Holger Siedler did on Profil’s set of early Schumann lieder recordings, it is simply unacceptable. I spent about an hour re-equalizing the recording and cleaning up the surface noise, using my inexpensive little GoldWave sound editor, and achieved much better results. If I could make this recording sound more palatable, why couldn’t Bally? Oh yes,I forgot. The Brits firmly believe that “the music is in the surface noise” and so refuse to clean things up to a listenable level. That’s poppycock. The only thing I couldn’t do was to restore what were undoubtedly Goehr’s dynamic contrasts. Since the performance was recorded by the BBC using a “flat” response, the soft sections of the music sound just as loud as the forte sections. Again, a little intelligence in simply following the score and making adjustments here and there yields far better results.

And all of this is really a shame because, as I say, the performance is a good one. Goehr exhibits a fine grasp of the pacing and shaping of the score and, although one could never accuse Joan Sutherland of being a probing, dramatic singer, her vocalism is superb. Peter Pears, who went through a pretty bad vocal crisis around 1953-54, apparently recovered his voice in time for this performance; he sounds to be at or near his best vocal shape, and the sadly underrated mezzo-soprano Norma Procter is simply glorious. The ironic thing is that Goehr was actually far too young to have had any recollection of the performance practices of Mahler’s era; he was born in 1903 and died suddenly at age 57 in December 1960, 10 months after this performance of the Fourth Symphony., but he did study with Arnold Schoenberg who knew Mahler personally and was on friendly terms with him. (Interestingly, Goehr worked for several years as a staff conductor for EMI, accompanying the famous tenors Beniamino Gigli, Richard Tauber and Joseph Schmidt on their recordings but not using his real name; he was credited as “G. Water” or “Georg Walter.”)

Typically of Scherchen, his performance of the “Adagio” from the Symphony No. 10 is brisk and taut. He was not a conductor who liked to linger or wallow in “pretty” music. Yet although this particular piece is, I think, a little too fast, it does pull the structure together, which is something that a lot of conductors don’t do. Again, the “flat” response of the BBC microphones often erase the dynamic contrasts and there is surface noise galore, but it’s an interesting curio and has the right Mahlerian intensity.

Stokowski’s memories of Mahler rehearsing his Eighth Symphony are fascinating; he talks of how Mahler constantly stopped the orchestra and made changes in the score which, of course, hadn’t yet been published. “Some of those changes were in the score,” he said, recalling how he tried to memorize as much of them as he could. One statement by Stokie puzzled me. He said that the violin was his instrument when everyone knows that he had originally been an organist. Perhaps he also played the violin, but I had never heard that before. He also said there were changes in “relief,” as in sculpture: “higher and lower relief…placing the instruments differently so that they stood out…in the final rehearsals he brought out certain instrument and suppressed others…I’ve heard many performances of Mahler in which everything sounds alike a misch-masch of sound where nothing is definite, so that the themes, the important melodies, are not clear.”

Goehr’s recorded performance of the Fourth Symphony has an unusually “tubby” sound (too much resonance) and is also too tubby in the low range and too covered up top. Worse yet, the performance sounds stodgy and lackluster, lacking not only the innumerable details that Mahler put into the score but just plain yukky. There’s no forward momentum in the playing of the orchestra; they sound as if they hate the music and can’t wait for the performance to be over so they can go out and have a meal and a few drinks. (Maybe more than a few drinks, especially the horn players.) This is a real on-one-ear-and-out-the-other performance that does not reflect well on Goehr, whatever his state of health at the time. (I’ve heard performances by Stokowki in his late 80s and early 90s that had much more energy than this and performances by Artur Rodziński just a few weeks before his death that have all the fire and drive of old.) As suggested above, it could be that the London Symphony hated either the work, the conductor or both, but in my gut I just think that Goehr was too ill to do a good job. Here, one can’t even blame the BBC engineers for “flattening out” the dynamics because the orchestra doesn’t play any. It just plain sucks.

Alfred Friese was 86 at the time of this interview, but he sounds surprisingly spry for a geezer. His memories of details in performances conducted by Mahler are also remarkably clear and detailed. I can, however, understand why so many conductors, from Toscanini to Furtwängler, despised Mahler’s symphonies (and why some didn’t care for his conducting of standard repertoire). He took the same loose-rhythmed approach to Beethoven, Brahms etc. that he did to his own music, fluctuating tempi and changing orchestral voicing to suit himself. Sometimes the results were excellent, sometimes just good, and other times…oh, brother! But at least he always kept an open mind on his approach to different pieces. He never got locked into one way of doing anything.

My suggestion is to buy this album as a download, skip the Fourth Symphony, and spend a pleasant (hah!) couple of hours cleaning up Das Klagende Lied and the Tenth Symphony. If you don’t already have it, insert the 1960 recording of the Fourth by Leonard Bernstein, a real Mahler pioneer, with Reri Grist, or Jascha Horenstein with Jennifer Vyvyan in place of the Goehr, and you’ll have an interesting album.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Classical Music is in Trouble

“As far as I’m concerned, gentlemen, this marks the end of the Schwarzwalder String Quartet.”

Those readers of mine who read most of what I post here must be well aware of the fact that I’m far from happy with the state of the classical music world. Even though the battle began before World War I with the emergence of Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the battle really began in earnest after the end of World War II when things began to return to normal and audiences suddenly woke up to realize that classical composers were changing and they didn’t like the change. Of course the Dinosaur Listeners, as I refer to them, dug their heels in and stubbornly refused to give any music that struck them at first listening as “difficult” a fighting chance, the result being that by the late 1960s the modernists were at war with the reactionaries, a war similar to but on a much larger scale than the war between the Trad Jazz fans and the Beboppers in the late 1940s-early ‘50s.

And unfortunately, classical music performances are a costly enterprise, thus any concert promoter or opera company hoping to put fannies in the seats for “difficult” music automatically run the risk of losing money at the box office. This is one reason why I always try to promote new composers who I think are really good (and yes, quite a few of them are not good at all) as well as performers who specialize in music outside the mainstream.

Unfortunately, it’s gotten to the point where classical record labels, even the indies who supposedly try to work outside the box, are giving in to the musically ignorant reactionaries who don’t want to hear any music that forces them to think about what they’re listening to. I don’t know what the situation is like in England or the European continent, but here in America I put the blame squarely on the removal of music appreciation as at least an optional course in high schools. If you are going to reply on the public taste as it is, you have to realize that this taste is based solely on popular music, which includes musicals and film music as well as what is currently on the pop charts, and that is not music to uplift the spirit or educate the mind. I’m well aware that many people think this position of mine is snobbish, but it’s really not. When I was growing up, I of course listened to a great deal of pop music—how could I not? It was all around me, but I suppose that I was lucky in that in those days, the late 1950s-early 1960s, real jazz recordings still occasionally broke into the Billboard Hot 100, and I would listen to classical music wherever and whenever it was presented to me. By the late 1960s this exposure included some very advanced pieces, thanks in part to Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” which sometimes included outré fare.

The point is that I just kept my ears open and continued to learn. If there was something that intrigued me that I didn’t understand, such as George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, I just kept at it until I did understand it. On a parallel track, the same thing was true of my exposure to jazz. I absorbed both John Coltrane and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, early Louis Armstrong and Sonny Rollins as I simply learned how to listen. I judged no older music as archaic even though it was foreign to my ears, but neither did I reject anything modern until I had explored it deeply enough to determine whether it said something to me or not.

Unfortunately, we’ve finally reached the point where the entrenchment of the Dinosaurs has come to dominate the scene. Granted, the promoters of modern music don’t filter out the mediocre talents from the great ones, but let’s be honest, a huge amount of older music being revived and regurgitated to the public in concerts and on recordings isn’t very good, either. It just sounds more pleasant to them, thus it is accented.

While perusing the Naxos New Release Catalog for July 21-28 of this year, and finding only one album in the entire catalog that looked interesting enough to review. I started collecting album covers to illustrate the failings of the classical record industry which I believe accurately reflect the tastes of the average concertgoer, so I thought I’d present these to you with my comments. Before I begin, however, I want to say that some of these do not reflect the very WORST examples I’ve seen over the past couple of years, even though they are TYPICAL of the bad ones I see on a monthly (or bi-monthly) basis. Also please be aware that I haven’t actually listened to any of these albums, but am passing judgment based on years of prior experience.

1. Beating the Baroque to Death. I have nothing personal against François Couperin. I’m, sure he was a swell guy, was kind to women, dogs, and poor people, and really thought his music was the bees’ knees. But let’s face it: this music is just pretty and has a nice form. It has very little substance, but just creates a nice Sunday brunch ambience for folks who like Baroque musical wallpaper while they ingest their omelets. Oh, would you please pahss me the creamy white wine sauce? Ooohh, isn’t that music just too divine? And get this. This set is FIVE CDs long. Well, at least whoever buys it will have enough music to play for five Sunday brunches…provided that the participants woule be able to tell one record from the other. Somehow I doubt it.

2. Young artists who only play the standard repertoire but have nothing to say. Although I haven’t listen to this particular record, I have listened to Sunwook Kim. He plays the piano very nicely. He articulates his notes clearly. But he has a tendency to detach each note from the one preceding and following, which I don’t like. Thus he has no continuity in phrasing. But he makes a lot of pained faces when he performs, like the one on this album cover, and this really impresses the audience. But please don’t think I’m specifically targeting Kim personally. He just happens to be the Hip Young Artist of the Month.

3. Too Much Gershwin. George Gershwin wrote a few nice classical pieces with a ragtime or jazz connection, my personal favorites being An American in Paris, the Piano Prelude and Second Rhapsody, the Cuban Overture and parts of the Piano Concerto. But they weren’t transcendent masterpieces, and I don’t want to hear them more than once every two years. And we surely don’t need all that many recordings of them, whether reissues like this one or brand-new ones.

4. Pop composers like Piazzolla. Ever since the classical music industry realized that Astor Piazzolla’s “classical tangos” were audience favorites, we get Piazzola recordings every other month. He really wasn’t a very good composer. In fact, even his fellow-Argentineans didn’t think very juch of him which is why he had to come to America to get established, which he just barely did before he died. But since the music of truly great South American composers like Alberto Ginastera and Almeida Prado are too difficult for most audiences, hey look! We got another Piazzolla album for you!

5. Reissues of “forgotten” artists most people haven’t even heard of. Una Bourne may very well have been a nice person, although she looks like someone who sucked on lemons. Listening to her records, she clearly knew now to play the piano. But most of what she recorded were trifles by such composers as Chaminade and Bourne. Who cares besides her descendants, if she had any?

6. Regietheater opera productions. This one is a tricky subject because, for some God-forsaken reason, these things are popular, but as I pointed out in my book, Opera as Drama II, the only reason they are popular is that they desecrate established tonal operas that are part of the standard repertoire. Thus they are, you might say, “psychological substitutes” for really deep, probing modern operas whose music is thorny and not tuneful or aurally attractive. Somehow I just can’t seem to get through to the average opera-lover that their art form is supposed to be musical DRAMA, and drama is not pretty, pre-packaged tunes and high notes. So we keep getting the plots of these older operas transported to eras and situations they were never meant to express, filled with bizarre and overdone visuals that seem more closely related to video games or pop movies than anything resembling the actual plot.

7. So-and-So Reimagined. This particular turkey gives us Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 as an orchestral piece and A Fidelio Symphony, taking music from Beethoven’s opera and rearranging it to form a phony symphonic work. And there are others in which other composers’ music is ruined in a feeble attempt to repackage genius as classical schlock. Incidentally, the Beethoven9 Symphonic Remix was arranged by Gabriel Prokofiev, the grandson of composer Sergei who is also a DJ and nightclub owner. Nice, huh? (This album, alas, didn’t actually come from the Naxos July catalog but has been around for a while.)

8. Crappy new operas that say nothing and do so in a noisy way. This particular example is absolutely perfect; I couldn’t have picked a better catalog to find an example of, as Dan Aykroyd once called it on Saturday Night Live back in the late 1970s, “Bad Opera.” How bad? Well, it’s dismal, poorly-written rock music that makes The Who’s Tommy sound like Salome. Go ahead; listen to the samples that are uploaded on YouTube, then you tell me how awful this music is. And the plot? Get this: “Set in a nightmare Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making in search of escape.” The libretto, by the way, is written by Anne Waldman, another whiny Millennial who wallows in self-pity. Oh boo hoo hoo. Poor writer boy has demons in his head. Well, snap out of it. Go to the park and enjoy looking at nature. Try eating something new, like honey on fried clams. Get in a car and go visit someplace nice and relaxing you’ve never seen before. But please stop playing this awful rock music!

9. Bizarre “theme” albums. This one’s a little weirder than most—does the music represent dogs, big pretzels, large bow ties, or dogs in large bow ties who eat big pretzels?—but there are a lot of these nowadays, and none of them interest me in the least. But someone must be buying them, because they keep getting issued. (I wonder if there are any people out there who purposely collect bizarre theme albums? I think that would be pretty scary, psychologically.)

10. Really bad modern music marketed along with the good. This is exactly the kind of album I referred to much earlier in this article, Nina Deuse’s string quartet on this album is so awful that I’m surprised that her composition teacher didn’t just flunk her. But hey, she’s a woman composer and she’s “edgy,” two things that sell nowadays. Beware Trojan Horses in the modern music business; they help to poison it for the really good composers. This album is the classical equivalent of techno-rock.

11. Classical music for kids. I couldn’t find an actual CD cover to illustrate this point so I made one up, but there are way too many of these kinds of discs out there and none of them really hook kids on classical music. Why? Because you don’t have an enthusiastic, knowledgeable presenter like Leonard Bernstein who knew how to present classical music to children without talking down to them or boring them. If you’d like your young ones to get to appreciate classical music, ignore all these kinds of albums and just buy them the DVDs of Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. His lectures are timeless, and he did occasionally sneak in a difficult or modern work. Those particular lecture-demonstrations probably only got to perhaps 5% of his audience, but considering that only about 60% of them really “got” classical music anyway, that’s not such a bad ratio.

So there you have it in a nutshell. What we’ve come down to can be summed up as a paraphrase of the old “Addams Family” theme song:

It’s played in a museum
Where people come to hear ‘em;
They really are a scre-am,
The classics family!

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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The Parker Set No One Has Noticed

BIRD IN L.A. / Intro dialogue: Slim Gaillard, Harry Gibson. GIBSON: Handsome Harry the Hipster / Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, voc/pno / Medley: GILLESPIE-FULLER: I Waited for You/LEWIS-HAMILTON: How High the Moon. GAILLARD: Cement Mixer (Putti Putti).* TRADITIONAL: Blues. GILLESPIE: Dizzy Atmosphere (Parker out). MONK: Fifty-Second Street Theme. GILLESPIE: Groovin’ High. Dizzy Atmosphere (2nd vers, w/Parker). PARKER-GILLESPIE: Shaw ‘Nuff.  / Dizzy Gillespie, tp; Charlie Parker, a-sax; Milt Jackson, vib; Al Haig, pno; Ray Brown, bs; Stan Levey, dm. *Slim Gaillard, voc/gt / Intro dialogue; GILLESPIE-CLARKE: Salt Peanuts / add Lucky Thompson, t-sax / PARKER: Billie’s Bounce. Ornithology. Anthropology. KERN-HAMMERSTEIN: All the Things You Are. GILLESPIE=PAPARELLI: Blue ‘n’ Boogie / Parker, a-sax; Miles Davis, tp; Joe Albany, pno; Addison Farmer, bs; Chuck Thompson, dm. / Introduction; NOBLE: Cherokee / Parker, Benny Carter, Willie Smith, a-sax; Nat “King” Cole, pno; Oscar Moore, gt; Johnny Miller, bs; Buddy Rich, dm; Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, emcee / PARKER: Ornithology. GILLESPIE: Dizzy Atmosphere. GREEN-HEYMAN: Out of Nowhere / Parker, a-sax; Haig, pno; Tommy Potter, bs; J.C. Heard, dm / PARKER: Scrapple From the Apple. Medley: PARKER: Au Privave/POWELL: Dance of the Infidels. GILLESPIE-PAPARELL: A Night in Tunisia. Medley: LEWIS-HAMILTON: Hoe High the Moon/ PARKER: Ornithology. G. & I. GERSHWIN: Embraceable You. DAMERON: Hot House. PARKER: Cool Blues. March noodling into EMMETT: Dixie. PSARKER: Scrapple From the Apple⁺ / Parker, Frank Morgan, a-sax; Don Wilkerson, t-sax; Amos Trice, pno; David Bailey, bs; Larance Marable, dm. ⁺Chet Baker, tp / PARKER: Au Privave / same but Baker & Wilkerson out / Verve B0032479-02, available as 2 CDs or 4 LPs; also available for free streaming on YouTube starting HERE.

Before I get into a review of this set, one of the most exhilarating and fascinating Bird sets ever released (with caveats regarding the sound quality and presentation), I felt that I should share with you, my readers, the online labyrinth I had to go through in order to give you a fully informed review.

Let’s start at the beginning and walk you through the various landmines I had to negotiate. If you think Alice Liddell had trouble in Wonderland trying to get out of that cramped little hallway she was in, to paraphrase Al Jolson, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

I first learned of this set’s existence thanks to a Tweet from someone on Twitter back on June 18 of this year. Fascinated, I began searching online for a professional review by anyone, or at least a promo blurb that might give me some indication as to who I could contact for a promo copy, but the only review I could find was by Jon M. Young on a website called The Big Takeover (dating from 2001, which indicates to me that this is a reissue) with no suggestion who to contact. But thanks to Discogs, a not-always-detailed but incredibly thorough listing of virtually every CD or LP released in the past 50 years (also including many, many rare jazz and blues 78s, with images of the original labels, believe it or not), I was fortunate enough to find the track listing, composer credits for each tune, and a personnel listing of who was playing on which track (VERY important). I then went to YouTube to poke around and, lo and behold, I discovered that the entire set has been uploaded online in the proper track sequence. The link to this is provided at the end of the header above.

Discogs also informed me that this set was released in both “vinyl” (LP) and CD formats in November 2021, a year and a half before I knew about it. This made me even more curious as to why there was no professional review online. Braving the elements, I went to the website that was apparently promoting this set, Perryscope Productions in New York’s Greenwich Village, clicked on “Contacts” and copied the email address for the Publicity department.

To make a long story short, my first request for a digital copy of the booklet was met by a reply saying that he understood that I wanted an artist’s autograph but they couldn’t help me and suggested that I try to get close to the Roadies for that particular artist. (I kid you not.) I replied that either he mixed up my request with someone else’s but didn’t read it carefully, but in actual fact I already had Charlie Parker’s autograph, which I do, on the cardboard frame of one of those fold-out souvenir photo things from Birdland around 1950-51, also signed by Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, Kenny Drew and Percy Heath. And here’s the image to prove it (bids welcome starting at $5,000):

I repeated my request for a digital booklet. The same guy wrote me back three days later saying that they cannot provide copies of out-of-print recordings. I again replied, this time reiterating that I didn’t need the actual recordings but also reminding him that the set had only been out since November 2021 so it couldn’t be out of print.

That email got no reply at all.

So, after two more weeks, I thought I’d try something different. On July 8, I went back to the Perryscore website. This time I found a link to the “Official Site,” which turned out to be https://charlieparkermusic.com/. I clicked on “Contact,” which gave me an email address of support@musictoday.com. Feeling confident, I emailed them about my request for a digital booklet for the set.

My message was rejected. Twice. Email address not found.

So I went back to charlieparker.com and clicked “Contact” once more. This time, it directed me to the Microsoft home page. But when I went back a third time, I just moused over the contact link, and another email address appeared in the lower left-hand corner.

Not feeling the least bit confident, I sent my request to that address on Saturday afternoon, July 8. I didn’t expect a reply, if I were to get one at all, until after the weekend, but lo and behold, within an hour and a half I received a curt but helpful reply and—THE BOOKLET, ATTACHED TO THE EMAIL!!!

Lordy sweet Jesus. I found the magic key that opened that little, tiny door in the Wonderland hallway so I could get out. My sincere thanks to Kenny Nemes, President of Jam Inc., who sent me this precious document…a gentleman, a scholar, and a good judge of bad craft beers. I salaam in your general direction, Kenny!

So if you’re wondering why I’m the only one who has reviewed this set online, now you know. And I would be remiss if I did not give a big shout-out to Kevin Lewandowski, the creator of Discogs, as well as to the company that maintains the database, Zink Media, for being there for me when I really needed them—and not just this one time. Although they sometimes frustrate me by not having all the info on the musicians who made the record or composer credits, more often than not they do a bang-up job and I also salaam in their general direction.

And now, here is the main event of this article—the review.

This crazy-quilt set which, as you can see from some of the extra performers listed above, includes some artists who don’t actually play with Parker, a few tracks on which Parker doesn’t even play, inferior radio broadcast and live early-1950s tape recorder sound, and—not noted in the above header—radio emcees Rudy Vallee (yes, that Rudy Vallee! He actually liked jazz!) and the bane of all collectors of 1940s jazz broadcasts, Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman. Whitman was a black actor who had a very small role in Gone With the Wind (he was one of the carpetbaggers riding on a horse-drawn cart in Part 2…if you blinked, you missed him), a representative of an older generation of loudmouthed “Yowza! Yowza!” types, a real Uncle Tom who didn’t have a hip bone in his body and stuck out on these jazz broadcasts like a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. Why on earth both Armed Forces Radio and NBC thought this guy was a great radio host for African-American jazz (although his shows did occasionally feature white musicians as well) is utterly beyond me. I could say that the more you hear Whitman the more you hate him, but that’s not true. You hate him from the first moment he opens his big, fat mouth and starts “Yowza”-ing into the microphone. (In his on-air interactions with the musicians, I always got the feeling that every single one of them would have liked to stuff a pillow in his mouth just to shut him up.)

But the upside is that this set gives you a real “You Are There” feeling as Bird and his various supporting musicians—and quite an all-star lineup it is—regale you for more than two hours. Everyone who has heard Parker “live” knows how mesmerizing he was, particularly during this period when he was at his peak.

The liner notes, as it turns out, are not quite as specific regarding these particular broadcasts as I had hoped, but there is fascinating information nonetheless. First and foremost is that the legendary Dean Benedetti recordings of Parker solos from the Hi-De-Ho Club when he was part of Howard McGhee’s small band, shortly after he was released from Camarillo State Hospital in early 1947, were released by Mosaic Records in 1990, a set I somehow missed. The good news  is that many of these are available for free streaming on YouTube. The bad news is that 1) they are only Bird’s solos, so you don’t hear his playing in context and also don’t get to hear McGhee, one of the least-remembered bop pioneers, and 2) in many of the videos the selections played are not identified. But they exist and are for the most part a fascinating document.

Bird went back to Los Angeles three times after that: in November 1948 with “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” an extended three-month stay in the summer of 1952, and then for short visits in 1953 and 1954. The present set is taken from his first three trips. First there are the broadcast recordings of him playing at Billy Berg’s before he went into Camarillo, then three previously unknown JATP recordings from the Shrine Auditorium in November 1948, and the complete recordings made at a party hosted by Jirayr Zorthian at his Altadena ranch in July 1952. This latter set includes the young and then-still-unknown trumpeter Chet Baker, who Bird raved about to Dizzy Gillespie (“There’s this little white cat out here who can tear you up”). But for the most part, the liner notes by one John Burton are his personal memories of his exposure to Parker and a brief description of what you are about to hear: interesting, but not as informative as I thought they would be. He does, however, point to the session with Slim Gaillard as the highlight of the entire set.

For a guy who was on the verge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, Bird’s playing in this first set with Slim Gaillard is simply phenomenal. So many “avant-garde” jazz musicians today can give you overblown upper-register overtones and be considered hip, but only some of their playing has any musical cohesion to it. Bird was literally a composer; his solos are not just improvisations. He took the chord sequence of each tune he played as simply a blueprint for his imagination, like some kind of psychic. He looked at the chords and “saw” musical designs in his mind that he then tried to convert into concrete sound. That he succeeded as often as he did, especially when one takes his heavy heroin abuse at this period into account, is almost inconceivable. Of course, most of the tunes Parker played had standard chord changes, but not all. Dizzy Atmosphere was clearly unusual in this respect, as were some others, particularly some of his own compositions like 52nd Street Theme. Granted, they weren’t as advanced as contemporary classical music of the time, but they were head and shoulders above the predictable and often banal pop tune construction of the Swing Era. What you are hearing on these recordings is the “live” sound of jazz finally starting to grow into something more complex. Some jazz writers have speculated whether or not Parker would have been able to accept or even understand the “rootless” chord changes of the late 1950s-early 1960s and particularly the kind of musical style that Ornette Coleman created. But why not? With a musical mind as frighteningly creative and harmonically advanced as his. I think that Bird would he easily able to absorb a style of jazz in which the harmony changed from note to note. After all, he did once call Charles Mingus up in the middle of the night and improvised over a recording of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird. Ornette was just a couple of steps beyond that.

Some of these off-the-air recordings have distortion that was probably not correctable, but for the most part the sound is surprisingly clear and well-focused, and any residual hiss, crackle or other extraneous noises on the original tapes or acetates have been expertly removed without harming the quality of the instruments’ sounds.  Listening to Parker and Gillespie tear the roof off on Shaw ‘Nuff is a graduate course in how to play this music. Does anybody nowadays play jazz with this kind of excitement? Even pianist Al

Larance Marable

Haig, one of Bird’s favorite players, is on fire in this session, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear that Stan Leveyh’s drums fit the musical style perfectly, although the much less-well-known Larance Marable plays even more uplifting drums on the 1952 set. In fact, Marable’s playing sounds remarkably like that of Art Blakey. Looking him up online, I learned that he was considered one of the first “hard bop” drummers. Since Blakey never recorded with Parker (except, perhaps, when they were briefly together in Billy Eckstine’s bop band), this is about as close as you’re going to come to the fantasy of “hearing” Bird play with the Jazz Messengers.

Parker’s solo on Billie’s Bounce is a perfect little composition in itself, a complete statement that, one would think, could not have been improved on in any way. Parker must have played Ray Noble’s Cherokee at least 100 times in his life, but each and every time he played it, he found something new to say. That’s incredible for a tune that, though the changes have always interested jazzmen, really only has a handful of chord changes in the entire tune, most of them in the bridge.

Relistening to Au Privave, I was struck by how relatively simple it is; really just a skeleton of a tune that allowed him to indulge in his own, unique style of “bop-blues.” That was one aspect of his playing that none of his followers, not even Sonny Stitt or Phil Woods who came as close as anyone, ever really projected. The blues were just inbred into Parker’s DNA; even when he played “pretty,” as on his studio recording with strings of Stella by Starlight, that blues influence always came through. yet because of how complex his musical mind worked, he found nothing of interest in the many R&B and early rock sax players because they were too simple and repetitive. But was Parker an influence on R&B? The jury is still out on that. Just because they simplified what he did doesn’t mean that they didn’t take some ideas from him. True, Louis Jordan was probably a more accessible role model, but not even Jordan had such a subtle and fully-ingrained blues feeling as did Parker. It’s part of what made him unique and difficult for others to copy. You had all that melodic-harmonic complexity plus an almost constant blues feeling and his acolytes could do one or the other but not both at the same time.

On the 1952 tracks he plays with alto saxist Frank Morgan and tenor man Don Wilkerson. Perhaps because he was right there with his idol, Morgan does manage to capture that elusive combination of bop and blues, but even so you can tell when it’s Bird soloing and when it’s Morgan. But also on this session is tenor saxist Don Wilkerson, and he captures a bit of the right feeling as well. (And I still can’t get over how good Marable’s drumming was. Why isn’t he better known?) The opening section of Ornithology, which starts with a snippet of How High the Moon, has the worst sound on the set, so badly distorted, in fact, that it sounds like a bad electric guitar. Happily, it quickly clears up. There’s also quite a bit of distortion on the “party chatter” that leads into Embraceable You, and this doesn’t clear up until the music starts playing, but you do what you can with old tapes that have been deteriorating for more than a half-century.

Parker and Chet Baker, 1952

For me, personally, the highlight of the set was the 1952 performance of Hot House. Here Parker plays alone—no other saxists to confuse the listener—and the way Marable interacts with Bird produces a performance that has the eerie quality of Middle Eastern music, only played with a bop beat and at a quick tempo. In the first half of this performance, Bird is on a wavelength I’ve never quite heard from him anywhere else, and his solo is so remarkable that you’ll probably want to play it a few times. We only hear Chet Baker in the second, longer, complete performance of Scrapple From the Apple, but it’s surely a treat to hear him playing with Bird. In the last stage of his career, after his return to Europe in the 1980s, Baker became a sort of cult figure in jazz, but from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s he was surely a mainstream artist and one of the most fascinating. The fact that he eventually threw away both his talent and good looks for a life on heroin does not detract from what he could play on the trumpet, most of which during his glory days (the 1950s through about 1967) was exemplary and usually fascinating, as it is here. Unfortunately, this is one track on which the recording balance was bad, the bass and drums sometimes overwhelming both Parker and Baker.

By the way, if you’re wondering, as I did, who Jirayr Zorthian was, he was an Armenian-American artist born in Anatolia in the Ottoman Empire who escaped through Europe with the remnants of his family to get away from the Armenian genocide of the 1920s, settlingin New Haven, Connecticut. He was one of the lucky few who benefited from the WPA, creating several massive murals during the 1930s, including 11 for the Tennessee State Capitol. His artwork combined the fluid surrealism of Salvador Dali with the skewed perspective of M.C. Escher, and apparently he was also a fan of bebop jazz. So there you have Mr. Zorthian in a nutshell.

I must give high praise to Doug Benson of the Commodore Recording Studio in Thurmont, Maryland for his exceptional remastering of these tracks. He removed all of the background hiss and crackle of the original acetates/tapes without distorting the musical signal. As an amateur who works on vintage recordings myself, I know for a fact how difficult this is to do, although to be fair I only have a cheap $50 audio editor (GoldWave) whereas I’m sure that Benson has thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. Still, he did a great job and needs to be complimented.

As long as you understand that, no matter how much it is cleared up, this is the vintage sound of old radio broadcasts and live party material, this set is quite valuable to any Parker collector. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes, but you can smooth it out a bit and produce some nice leather if you have the right tools, and that’s what was done here. Personally, I recommend the CD version of this set. No matter what they claim, CDs last a surprisingly long time. I have some from the 1980s that still play just fine, although a few have deteriorated and had to be replaced, but “vinyl” has more serious problems like warping, chronic surface swish that gets worse with age, and God forbid you get a skip in the record—you’re done. No man-made sound carrier is perfect except for digital storage in the “cloud,” but you don’t know how much longer these tracks will be available for free streaming online so you have a decision to make. In any case, this is exceptional Parker in places and needs to be heard.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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