Ken Young Art and Design

Clark Terry

“Mumbles” was a distinctive voice in a crowded room. Mostly emphatic, riposte staccato lines counterpointing the melody, self-assured acclamations of protest, often ribald and mischievous, but what a trumpet player who occasionally mellowed on flugelhorn. A master of ziggurat climaxes, piquant blues, wholeheartedly a Jazz of the soul. With inexhaustible energy he could hold a conversation with himself on his horn and win both sides of the argument. Duke and Basie loved him to set their bands alight and he, likewise was forever indelibly inked by them.

Latterly he was at his best with the more modern company of Mulligan and Brookmeyer.

Like many he was a great teacher of young musically inclined minds and a great positive force in the annals of Jazz.

Buddy Tate

A supremo like the academy of Texas tenors. A preacher from the pulpit of swing. Renowned for swashbuckling entrances and imperious choruses that drive at, into and through the heart of an arrangement.

Long-serving as the leader of a frontline of saxophones, in the most classic of Basie brigades of the 40’s and 50’s. This cockerel roosted for many years with his own band in the Celebrity Club, roaming the up-lands of swing with other Basie alumni.

Touring and recording in a ‘play as I please’ diaspora of collective pleasure with hismany fellow travellers, always illuminating the stage with his elegant but brazen toned tenor, a gentlemanly sophisticate of swing.

Edmond Hall

Instantly recognizable notes of quicksilver brightness, coruscating choruses that penetrate your sternum, all flowing from a deceptively mild mannered countenance – a Jesuit priest of swing if ever there was one. Massively influential in a body of work without disruption, his presence in many swinging ensembles turbo-charged the in-mates, reminding all, that clarinet aristocracy was in the house. He could rouse the oldest backbone to crack and the most grandiose to shimmy like Kate.

Lawrence Brown

If ‘Duke’ wanted burnished gold, he’d turn to the sublime tone of this elegant trombonist. When acknowledging his origins, he would turn to an impromptu rendering of ‘Rose of the Rio Grande’ that Duke would often call for in concerts and dances. He takes the last entrance and chorus on a considered Ducal masterpiece – ‘Main Stem’. Inspired by the manic reverie, he closes the final bridge of an already magnificent arrangement, his ‘bone soaring and searing into the stratosphere conjoining what must be some of the most compact series of inspired consecutive choruses in Jazz. A stalwart in many Hodges and Ellington small group recordings, he was an even bet for bringing sonority and sophistication to many a session.

Barney Bigard

Bigard was the root and branch of Creole soul and as such brought to the great Ellington band of the 40’s the definitive liquid amber and ornamental brocade of the ante-bellum Delta. A mainstay in Ellington’s great orchestral chemistry, a landscape for his ever-gliding, seemingly effortless coloratu performances constantly increasing the philosophical tone of the reed section already buttressed by Hodges and Carney, before Duke let the dogs out with Webster and Paul Gonzales. A master of the older Albert key configurations under Lorenzo Tio, he was characteristically his own man of silvery trails. An enterprising tune- smith, he cherished the many opportunities to lead and play in small unit sessions, liking to heft close to the legends of Jazz royalty and returning to his Alma Mater ways with Satchmo in his famous 50’s All-Star band alongside Teagarden and Hines.    

Art Hodes

One of the ‘Mystic Megs’ of the piano players who knew the mesmeric qualities of repeated patterns in the Blues. There was also a touch of Russo melancholy in the background of his playing. He was a formidable accompanist with a coterie of luminaries from the diasporo of Crescent City emigres to Chicago. Contemplative and droll, his commentaries and lectures on this art form were a model for subsequent writings. Always at home in a bar room with a piano a la South side, combined with gravitas of a travelling professor of Blues, he contributed greatly to the familiarizing of this music while featuring many of his peers on recordings that would define an era – the Blue Note ‘Blues Session’ being an outstanding example.

Muggsy Spanier 

With the countenance of a stevedore, Muggsy was the inspiration for one of the most toe-tapping sessions ever recorded by Victor. He and his band feel as comfortable as your favourite pair of slippers, briar pipe or blended whisky from a sherry barrel.

As one track proclaims after another, this is a serious bout of golden chestnuts rejuvenated from head to tail, with Muggsy’s 18 carat cornet, open or muted churning us into an advanced state of buttery bliss. The entire band should be praised with special distinction for Rod Cless, clarinet and George Brunis, trombone.

Muggsy was the maestro of this session that came to be hailed as ‘The Great Sixteen’, definitive of the Chicago Style both lyrical and bustling, it appealed to that part of the brain that’s in charge of happy feet. His pugilistic look belied a sweet nature, his apprentice days of membership in the Chicago School culminated in migration to 42nd Street, New York under the auspices of Eddie Condon.

Jay McShann

Blues and Hootie were inseparably linked from the tender age of 12. An early baptism in territory bands throughout the West, inevitably docking in Kansas City for protracted band calls, mostly his own package of swaggering swing, aided and abetted by Gus Johnson and Gene Ramey with an eager young Charlie Parker. A piano player of remarkable stamina and verve, with a propellant sermonizing voice to match.

Bobby Hackett – Henry ‘Red’ Allen

The diminutive giant, Bobby Hackett, the consummate ‘gent’, incapable of playing a bad thought or note, belied a hardened pro. Resolute and loyal to the light fandango of swing – one of the gang but not of the gang, much like Bix.

‘Big Red’ was an ever-present challenger to Louis, forever in the ranks of leading trumpets in the great bands of 30’s New York. More academic than Louis’s persona, he nevertheless shared with Hawkins the mantle of ‘warhorse warriors’ on two memorable dual sessions of recordings spanning over 50 years of regal monarchy.

Wild Bill Davison 

The original Billy Goat Gruff of the cornet, slashingly melodic, sucrosely sentimental, growlingly rambunctious, it was forever front foot forward, march and damn the torpedoes. Wild Bill’s fiery engine gunned him through decades of clubs and bars always staying true to the origins of Condon’s code of loose-limbed ensemble, the forever 42nd Street Jazz.

Wellman Braud – Jimmy Blanton

Both celebrated bass players from different Ellington eras. These alumni formed the DNA treasury of bass lines for the finest compositions and arrangements in Duke’s exemplary era of the 30’s and 40’s. Both provided a distinctive pulse, each in their own way, Braud with an early devotion to bowing the bass lines, added an evocative mood to gems like ‘Misty Morning’ and ‘Mood Indigo’, while Blanton’s pizzicato pattern-making gave enhanced dynamics to the magic of ‘Jack the Bear’, ‘Harlem Airshaft’, ‘Cotton Tail’ and ‘Perdido’. Braud was the mahogany wardrobe in the room, while Blanton revved up the ears of a phalanx of new bass players to the joys of being more than just a time-keeper. Blanton was called too early, while the other hung around to make some lovely music well into the 60’s.

Eddie Lang 

Both cornerstones of a revolutionary talent that transformed accompanists into formidable front line soloists, both changing the course and purpose of their instruments, Lang acoustically and Christian electrically. Both held an ethereal presence within the company they kept and enhanced the complex web of band-call arrangements. They were separated by the merest of times but enough to see new stylings in Jazz, while each changed the way the guitar was seen to function and sound. Both in their own way awakened its potential as a complex solo instrument. Both cruelly short-changed by health issues, bizarrely in Lang’s case by complications after a tonsillectomy on the advice of A&R to alter the pitch of his singing voice, when his hands were doing all the magic work. Christian was a victim of TB that stalked many hard living musicians. Both went far too soon but left their mark in the forefront of the progression of Jazz as an art-form.

Charlie Christian

Both cornerstones of a revolutionary talent that transformed accompanists into formidable front line soloists, both changing the course and purpose of their instruments, Lang acoustically and Christian electrically. Both held an ethereal presence within the company they kept and enhanced the complex web of band-call arrangements. They were separated by the merest of times but enough to see new stylings in Jazz, while each changed the way the guitar was seen to function and sound. Both in their own way awakened its potential as a complex solo instrument. Both cruelly short-changed by health issues, bizarrely in Lang’s case by complications after a tonsillectomy on the advice of A&R to alter the pitch of his singing voice, when his hands were doing all the magic work. Christian was a victim of TB that stalked many hard living musicians. Both went far too soon but left their mark in the forefront of the progression of Jazz as an art-form.

Joe Turner

An original Viceroy of the Blues who started as a hooting, hollering bar-tender with chops that any drill sergeant would envy. Thus corralled with ‘fatigues’, you weren’t going anywhere until he said it was all over. Joe’s version of the Blues irresistibly commands attention, full of lilting admonishments and beautifully rendered choruses of longing and redemption. When at full throttle he could power a freight train, when he called for you across the tracks to join him at Hollywood and Vine, resistance was futile. His record ‘Boss of the Blues’ is the ultimate in musicianship.

A giant of a man and an irreplaceable monument to hollerin’ the Blues.

Sidney de Paris – Jonah Jones

Rocket fuel and cordite drove these two very hot horns, capable of taking proceedings by the scruff of the neck and propelling them into fusion whilst there lurked the  other persona of a honey-toned balladeer. Either sweet and light or strong and sassy, both liked their mutes, but rung out the changes on equally round-toned, bellicose open horn. Sidney had some wonderful choruses with his brother Wilbur on trombone, while Jonah stoked The Embers for many moons.

Bob Brookmeyer – Urbie Green

Born in the same decade and played in the same decades, but like brothers, not of the same inclinations where their instruments were concerned. Brookmeyer’s valve trombone cut an instantly recognized patrician articulation of notes, Urbie Green’s slide-work slips every note with disarming ease through guttural to high register ranging. Brookmeyer favouring the Getz, Mulligan clan, while Green cut his teeth on Krupa and Herman, finally settling into some Goodman, Dorsey and Clayton years of text-book beguiling swing. These two formed an interesting frontier of bone-manship in an era of the super-kool tribe led by J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding.

Blossom Dearie – Mose Allison

Piano players can be an eccentric breed and none more so than these two, whose spontaneous wit and styling when singing, were immediately recognizable for leaving the audience dangling on the wires of their unique timbre and phrasing. Both were miners of the essence of a song, one tiptoeingly crystalline, the other ruminatingly down-home in the Bayou, with bullfrog vocal accompaniment to his piano playing. Blossom made ‘peel me a grape’ into provocative layers of meaning, while Mose could ‘hit the road Jack and never comeback’ to the City, even with his elementally modern piano phrasing. They definitively captured the two opposite   cultures of the Big City and Rural Rambling.

Woody Herman – Charlie Barnet

Two more marshals from the epic saga of running a big band in years of plenty, then the paucity of an ice-age in the post war demise of swing, as the ballroom favourites of jive and lindy hoppers started to wane. Still, these never say die cats continued their love affair with symphonic swing. Woody’s clarinet and alto, sawed through a number of his ‘Herds’, while Barnet bruised his tenor around the echo chambers of Ellington’s ‘diminuendo and crescendo’ playbook. Both bands were inoculated with the Blues and played for fun in the face of economic adversity.

They reached out to millions until they became thousands but being inveterate romantics both, they never gave up living the dream, irrepressible in their dedication and commitment for making musical whoopee. The world would have been a sadder place without the tribal rites of these two pied pipers of swing who attracted in their careers the most eclectic band of brothers and mothers over two eras that included John Kirby, Frankie Newton, Billy May, Lena Horne, Marmarosa, Hefti, Trummy Young, Kessel, Clark Terry and DeFranco from the Barnet ensembles and Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Serge Chaloff from the Herds of Herman.

Illinois Jacquet

A beautiful contradiction of passive aggressive tenor playing, here is the bull in a china shop combined with the ever-lilting soul of Louisiana. With his heady days of ‘Flying Home’ escapades with Hampton, Calloway, Basie and endless nights with the JATP behind him, he fronted his big band in Montreal in a silk satin suit of powder blue in contrast to similarly suited band members in magenta. He proceeded to lay his racket down, ‘tooting thro’ the roof’ with monumental authority – a chieftain of swing via Delta origins prefaced on mike so eloquently before launching the band.

Harry James – Artie Shaw

A duet of independent minds and fiscal means, both with supernatural skills over their instruments. James increased the quicksilver range of the trumpet with arrogant ease, Shaw the consummate master of tone and articulation on a blackstick of fluid precision. Both sensitive and susceptible to criticism and weddings, as they sought the elusive grail in the chemistry of big band orchestration to fit their egos. Both sought smaller groups to further express and test their technical brilliance. Always the alpha dogs of the pack, they ‘lived the life’ and left a legacy of memorable arrangements, enhanced by their many talented companions and collaborators.

Earle Warren 

Both vastly overlooked alto players for different reasons – the former as a highly valued section leader for Basie throughout his best years, whose undoubted solo skills were pre-empted by the equal prominence of Herschel, Lester and Buddy Tate, Basie’s heralded tenor stars of that era. Finding his own equilibrium between playing in his own bands and managing a producing career, his course was finally settled as a solo artist when playing with his peers away from Basie.

Lem Davis

Lem Davis, re-discovered as an outstanding soloist on Clayton’s Jam Sessions and Mel Powell at Carnegie Hall, but earlier, a featured presence with Eddie Heywood and magnificently frothy with a Hawkin’s Septet in 1943, while fully engaged in the 40’s just playing around. In total he was blighted by an extended ‘under the radar’ career with little recording, which is unfortunate for this will’ o ’the wisp alto, who excelled in elliptical bop.

Mary Lou Williams – Dorothy Donegan

Two ‘grande dames’ of the keyboard, exhibiting uber-present, strong personalities.

One lauded for her substantial work composing, arranging and performing within a variety of august company. The other is a virtuoso classicist and self- propelled prospector of jazz lines and idiomatic streams of consciousness. Neither was a wise choice to vie in a cutting contest. Williams was a walking lexicon of Jazz history, inspiring many leaders with her knowledge and aptitude to convert these lessons into new grounds of composition and teaching.

Sought and favored by Andy Kirk, Goodman, Ellington and the Bop maestros, she went onto a latter day involvement in religious works of praise, even influencing Ellington in his Sacred Concerts period.

Donegan played under the radar all her life, an effervescent example of how the piano can take on the presence of a whole orchestra. When in full flow there is a sense of ethereal majesty, complimented often by biographical musings on her life. She loved to talk and she loved to ride out on her keyboard. The result created a powerful synthesis of her memories and her undeniable authenticity as a preacher of Jazz. Her own club in LA and The Embers/NY are blest to be her local roosts after rousting about the globe for many years molding her into a universal treasure.

‘Cannonball’ Adderley and Nat Adderley

Probably the inheritors and best examples of the breakout years of modern jazz.

A mixture of influences drove them into the fusion of soul and funk Jazz. Both brothers took and adapted from the styles of their peers before forging a path of their own. Cannonball gruff and Nat mellifluous both aware of the new ground they were contributing to and consummating some now memorable standards – “Sermonette”, “Sack o’ Woe”, “Work Song” and “Jive Samba”.