Count Basie Photos

Count Basie with Freddie Green behind him

Count in late 1970s

A picture taken from one of his 1950s LPs

With Frank Sinatra

In Newport Jazz Festival, probably 1962.

Captain Basie

Basie and Ella Fitzgerald in a news conference
*

Smokin' with the Chet Baker Quintet (1965)

یکی از پنج آلبومی که چت بیکر در دوره بازگشت (اعتیاد و زندان و بقیه دردسرها که عملاً تا لحظه آخر زندگی اش ادامه پیدا کرد) در فرمت کوئینتت – با همراهی جورج کولمن که ساکسفون تنور می زند – برای کمپانی پرستیژ ضبط کرد. آلبوم هایی اگرچه نه خیلی عالی، اما بسیار مهم و کلیدی برای درک سیر تحولات موسیقی چت. ضبط شده از 23 تا 25 ماه اوت سال 1965 و منتشر شده، حدود دو سال بعد از ضبط. پیانیست، کرک لایتسی، باس، هرمان رایت و درام یا همان طبل روی بروکز. خود آلبوم هم که این جاست.

Martin Williams on Bill Evans

"I think Evans was the most important and influential white jazz musician after Bix Beiderbecke, and that statement is no reflection on the contribution or the importance of Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Dave Tough, Pee Wee Russell, Stan Getz — does Django Reinhardt belong on such a list? — or any other. Partly my statement seems valid to me because of Evans's intrinsic merit, and partly because his effect on the music has been so general—technically, in ways I have commented on, and emotionally in its uncompromising lyricism. At the same time, I think that in the future his work may come to seem somewhat isolated from the mainstream — as Bix's now does — but no less valuable and no less authentic and no less beautiful.

Bill Evans's contributions included, as I say, an abiding lyricism. Such a remark is an observation and a description; it also may seem a limitation. But would one complain that Lester Young was always playful? Coleman Hawkins dramatic? Or, for that matter, Beethoven humorless?

No, it would be as foolish to deny that lyricism pervades all aspects of Evans's work as to deny the element of privacy in some of it. There were times when I heard Bill Evans and thought that this music—so exposed and so vulnerable emotionally,so unprotected by the spirited ironies of the blues, so naked in its feeling—if you took it into the real world, that world would crush it and crush the man who made it. Perhaps after all that is what happened." -- Martin Williams

The Sidewinder (Lee Morgan, 1963)

یکی از مشهورترین، محبوب ترین و پرفروش ترین صفحه های تاریخ موسیقی جاز که تلفیق درخشانی از موسیقی ریتم و بلوز، موسیقی لاتین و هاردباپ توسط ترومپتیست فیلادلفیایی لی مورگان است. نمونه ای از رویکردهای تازه کمپانی صفحه پرکنی بلونُت برای کشاندن موسیقی جاز به مسیرهای تازه و پر مخاطب. بقیه همراهان لی عبارتند از: بری هریس (پیانو)، باب کرن شاو (باس)، بیلی هیگینز (درام). آلبوم این جاست.

Al Sears Photos

Al Sears (1910-90) had that heavy, full-blowing sound like Coleman Hawkins.His first major gig came in 1928 when he replaced Johnny Hodges in Chick Webb's ensemble. In the early 1940s he was with Andy Kirk (1941-42) and Lionel Hampton (1943-44) before he became a member of Duke Ellington's Orchestra in 1944, replacing Ben Webster. He became one of Ellington's best-known soloists, and remained in his employ until 1949, when Paul Gonsalves took over his chair. He played with Johnny Hodges in 1951-52. These days I'm diggin' his finest solo LP, Swing's the Thing (1960).

Ellington Days, mid 1940s, Harry Carney in the background

Ellington Days, mid 1940s, Johnny Hodges in the foreground

Ellington Days, mid 1940s

R&B days, Al in the middle
*

Heavy Soul (Ike Quebec, 1961)

آیک کیوبِک این روزها دوباره ما را گرفتار کرده است. همیشه نیمه اول زمستان زمان خوبی برای گوش دادن به کوارتت ها و کوئینتت های جاز همراه با ارگ هاموند است. ارگ هاموند صدای تمام زمستان هاست و چه بهتر اگر نوازنده ای مثل فردی روچ پشت این ساز نشسته باشد. آیک کبک متولد نیوجرسی و یکی از ادامه دهندگان مکتب کولمن هاوکینز بود، در واقع می شود گفت کولمن روحش را در جسم این جوان خوش صدا و با استعداد دمیده، اما از آن طرف شیطان هم معامله خودش را با آیک داشت. برای همین اعتیاد به مواد مخدر او را یک دهه (سال های 1950) از صحنه موسیقی دور نگه داشت. آن زمانی که همه خودی نشان دادند و در دنیای جاز جایشان را معلوم کردند آیک غایب بود و دیگر امیدی به بازگشتش نمی رفت، اما ناگهان از آغاز دهه 1960 به میدان بازگشت و چند آلبوم برای کمپانی Blue Note ضبط کرد که آلبوم دوشنبه امروز (Heavy Soul) یکی از آنهاست. این دوران درخشان فقط سه سال دوام آورد و در 1963 سرطان گرفت و بعد از مدتی کوتاه مرد، چنان که گویی هرگز نبوده است. امروز صدای آیک کیوبک در این جا می پیچد و روحش باز می گردد تا لذتی که خودش در این دنیای مصیبت زده نبرد را به ما ارزانی بدارد.

از میان نُه قطعه ای که در این آلبوم (و این جا) خواهید شنید، Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? برق از سر من پراند. ببینید با شما چه می کند.

مشخصات آلبوم: آیک کیوبک (ساکسفون تنور)، فردی روچ (ارگ)، میلت هینتون (باس)، ال هیروود (درامز). ضبط شده در 26 نوامبر 1961 در استودیوهای بلونُت.

*

Comments on a Phoenix Called Hawk!

He is not only his own soloist, but his own harmonist and his own rhythm section as well. He is Coleman Hawkins!

--> -->

-->

Jazz is a vast kingdom (though it is essentially a democratic republic) with many entrance gates, one of them, adorned with tenderness of brass is Coleman Hawkins' gate, and it's not a secret that it is my favorite gate indeed. Like many people from too-late-born generation, I started "diggin’" jazz by listening to modern

masters like Miles or Trane, but my guide to the true spirit of this music was no one but Coleman Hawkins. Hawk reminds me of that Mowlana (or as some says, Rumi, the Persian mystical poet - 1207-73) conception, that we all have been Adam’s children and we all have heard these tunes that mesmerize us, some times before we were born in Eden. And that’s the truth about Coleman Hawkins and his heavenly sounds. It's quite familiar in every note, like we have heard them before, long before birth, and at the same time it has the pleasure of discovering a totally new thing. So everybody in the jazz world must sooner or later come to Hawk. And everybody his his or her own way of discovering his sound. He was musician’s musician. Every new jazz fad came, Hawk was standing there like a tower. Even during the time of major changes in the mid-forties, the avid bebop partisan accepted Hawkins as a part of their world. "One might call Hawkins a thorough professional, but he was also a major performer and he belonged to a generation in which these two things might go together as a matter of course. Periodically Hawkins also seemed to rediscover himself. He listened to everyone, but however much his own playing reflected what he heard around him, Hawkins remained Hawkins," says Martin Williams about the first decades of Hawk's musical life.

Someone to watch over me
Howard McGhee (tp)/Coleman Hawkins (ts)/Sir Charles Thompson (p)/Allen Reuss (g)/John Simmons (b)/Denzil Best (d); Los Angeles, March 9, 1945

A couple of months ago we talked about Hawk’s homecoming from Europe and how Herschel Evans’ death hit him pretty hard. Mr. Williams also talks about this critical period when Hawk became the tenor saxophonist we know today: “When Coleman Hawkins returned from Europe in 1939, he entered his great period as a jazz soloist. He had continued to expand his basic harmonic techniques. He had come to terms with his own lush and sentimental temptations, which means that he had learned to sustain a true lyric mood and therefore no longer needed the sometimes forced and usually brittle edge to his tone that he had apparently found necessary before. The sharpness of vibrato heard on One Hour cannot be heard on Body and Soul.

Body & Soul

Body and Soul (1939) is the accepted Hawkins masterpiece. The record reveals not only Hawkins's knowing use of increasingly sophisticated techniques but his brilliant use of pacing, structure, and rhythmic belief. He saves his showiest arpeggios, opening melodiously and introducing implied double-time along the way. He uses arpeggios and cyclical patterns of harmony, much as they were J. S. Bach's in certain moods.

From mid to late career of Hawk, he succeed in combining the robustness of his early work with a sophisticated melodic sense and a touching, almost nostalgic lyricism. The choruses seem also to have been highly influential: they outline the essentials of the style used by Herschel Evans and his associates and successors, Buddy Tate and Illinois Jacquet. It is possible that this so-called Southwest tenor style was first expounded by Coleman Hawkins in a New York recording studio!

Hawkins in the fifties is my Hawk. During that period he seems to me at the pick of his artistic creativity. Straight masterpieces like I Never Knew and La Rosita from Hawk Eyes (1959); September Song from The Hawk Returns (1954) are few among so many. His Hawk flies high LP with Idrees Sulieman is one of the most lasting musical companions I ever had. Every moment of Night Hawk (1960) is a revelation, if we don't talk about his majestic encounter with Sonny Rollins in 1963. Not long ago listening to a live recording from 1962 [Bandstand 18003] changed my life once more. There was a 14-minute long Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho who made me cry and another 21-min mind-blowing jam, Disorder at the Border. His right arm on this live session was Roy Eldridge who Martin Williams identifies his sound as a synthesis of Hawkins and Louis Armstrong, plus the youthful challenges of Beiderbecke and Red Nichols.

I'm absolutely in tune with Williams when he says: "probably everyone who knows Hawkins' work has a favorite, relatively late recording on which he feels the saxophonist played particularly well. My own is the Shelly Manne-Hawkins LP called 2 3 4. Coleman Hawkins' contribution has been so comprehensive that it is impossible for any tenor saxophonist to avoid some reflection of his influence unless that player were to do a fairly direct imitation of Lester Young or perhaps Bud Freeman.”

In Martin Williams' view, and after a not so favorable (or even fair) examination of Hawk’s musical career, he names the maestro a “dramatic player”:

“The standard term for Hawkins's sensibility is romantic. Terry Martin has suggested, however, that, if Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster were romantic saxophonists, then Hawkins's work was by comparison both too ornate and too detached to be called romantic, and that it would be better to describe his talent as dramatic. I am inclined to agree, and I further suggest that the best critical touchstones and analogies for Hawkins's kind of drama lie outside jazz. His sense of drama was like that of the great aria and lieder singers, the special declamatory drama of the concert singer and the concert stage, a tradition which Hawkins himself deeply admired. One might call Ben Webster a player of great natural musical instincts, and Hawkins a player of great, natural musical curiosity making use of the techniques that his innate curiosity led him to acquire and assimilate. Thus Hawkins survived more than four decades, a player whose commitment to improvisation was essential.”

Maestro's 106th birthday special update, November 21, 2010.

All Martin Williams' quotations from Comments on a Phoenix, Jazz Tradition, published by Oxford University Press.