Jazzahead or behind the beat: dilemmas of a horn

[Serial_Apologist]

Sat 17 Sept
4.00 Jazz Record Requests
Alyn Shipton introduces another selection of listeners' requests, today featuring the classic 1937 recording of The Prisoner's Song by trumpeter Bunny Berigan and his Orchestra.

Never heard of it.....

http://www.alynshipton.co.uk/blog

5.00 Jazz Line-Up
Claire Martin presents a performance by genre-straddling jazz trio Mammal Hands. Plus she introduces a profile on jazz and nature, featuring Norwegian musician Karl Seglem, whose music combines the sound of saxophone, electronics and goat horn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwdnf

12.00 Geoffrey Smith's Jazz
Geoffrey Smith explores the many varied styles of what was known as West Coast jazz in the 1950s. Recognised as light, bright and witty, this distinctive sub-genre also boasted a more impactful, intense side, as demonstrated by artists including Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwg4s

Mon 19 Sept
11.00 Jazz Now
Soweto Kinch presents highlights of concert performances by three contrasting pianists and their groups Aaron Diehl, Kevin Hays and Nick Bartsch [with unlaut], recorded in April at this year's Jazzahead event in Bremen, Germany

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwmtz

Not forgetting Moira Stuart on Sunday on R2 at 11.00 pm, while for guitar buffs drawing attention to Jools Holland at 11.00 on Monday, where Chris Spedding gets us listening to some of his fave recordings - same time, Radio 2. Spedding was with Ian Carr's Nucleus and the Mike Gibbs Big Band ar the turn of the 1970s, before slipping away from the scene and joining forces with Rod [no longer] the Mod, if my memory serves me correctly.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Sat 17 Sept
4.00 Jazz Record Requests
Alyn Shipton introduces another selection of listeners' requests, today featuring the classic 1937 recording of The Prisoner's Song by trumpeter Bunny Berigan and his Orchestra.

Never heard of it.....

http://www.alynshipton.co.uk/blog

5.00 Jazz Line-Up
Claire Martin presents a performance by genre-straddling jazz trio Mammal Hands. Plus she introduces a profile on jazz and nature, featuring Norwegian musician Karl Seglem, whose music combines the sound of saxophone, electronics and goat horn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwdnf

12.00 Geoffrey Smith's Jazz
Geoffrey Smith explores the many varied styles of what was known as West Coast jazz in the 1950s. Recognised as light, bright and witty, this distinctive sub-genre also boasted a more impactful, intense side, as demonstrated by artists including Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwg4s

Mon 19 Sept
11.00 Jazz Now
Soweto Kinch presents highlights of concert performances by three contrasting pianists and their groups Aaron Diehl, Kevin Hays and Nick Bartsch [with unlaut], recorded in April at this year's Jazzahead event in Bremen, Germany

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwmtz

Not forgetting Moira Stuart on Sunday on R2 at 11.00 pm, while for guitar buffs drawing attention to Jools Holland at 11.00 on Monday, where Chris Spedding gets us listening to some of his fave recordings - same time, Radio 2. Spedding was with Ian Carr's Nucleus and the Mike Gibbs Big Band ar the turn of the 1970s, before slipping away from the scene and joining forces with Rod [no longer] the Mod, if my memory serves me correctly.

Excellent JRR! Not least because it has MY request for Bud Powell's "You go to my head". Many thanks Alyn and Nancy, and to appropriately kick that off, the Jackie/Bill addition Messengers with "Cranky Spanky", another early fav album of mine. And a hip tribute to its amusingly? named bassist.

I shall be inserting a virgin top quality TDK C90 (still in its pristine wrapper) into a welcoming Sony deck. Enough, Matron.

BN.

* I seem to remember Chris Spedding being a bit disparaging about Nucleus..."they all got too bloody serious".

[Alyn_Shipton]

Spedding's a great guy - recently with Bryan Ferry. Helped me with my Harry Nilsson book and - so Mike Gibbs told me - played gigs with Mike's big band in a pink suit cos they (too) got a bit 'serious'! He was a key part of Nucleus' evolution from Rendell-Carr. If I remember rightly he's the lynch-pin of Persephone's Jive on Ardley's Greek Variations.

[Ian Thumwood]

Coincidence to hear George Russell's "African Game " requested as this was an LP I recently dug out having struggled for bout two months to get my new turntable working. I had imagined thatit might have dated but the funky rhythms seem more overshadowed by Russell's music language which never ceases to seem to be radical.

Picking up on SA's comment about the Bunny Berigan track, I am not sure if this is an honest comment or poking fun. One of the things that I think is depressing about jazz is that with the passage of time some really great and important players seem to be marginalised , neglected or even totally forgotten. It would be a shame if this fate befell a musician as great as Bunny Berigan. Getting in to jazz as a teenager in the early 1980s, Berigan still enjoyed reputation as probably the greatest white jazz trumpeter of the late 1930's. "The Prisoner's Song" is his most celebrated record after the over-familiar "I can't get started" as is something of a tour-de-force. Although he flitted around the personnel of bands belonging to Tommy Dorsey (at a time when it was a credible jazz orchestra) and Benny Goodman, Berigan's own records are surprisingly good and the small group's homage to Bix are central to the development of chamber jazz. Berigan's big band seemed to be pitched between the currently fashionable style of Goodman's of that era and the more Dixieland inspired work of Bob Crosby. There is something of the aggression of the Chicagoan's approach to small group jazz in his performances and the records often have a pugnacious feel about them, the leader throwing out memorable solos on the records with a casual abandon. However, Berigan was very much a "hot" player whose syntax came out of Armstrong but with a tone which had a distinct burr. If you had to use one word to sum up his playing it would be "rumbustious." If I am honest, it is the qualities within Berigan's playing that are missing from many modern players and , if the stories of excessive alcohol consumption are discounted as having no significance to the actual music he produced, Berigan's bands probably had a more "purist" jazz policy than many of his contemporaries not only by way of repertoire but also how the music manifested itself in the arrangements. If you look at players of a similar ilk such as Ruby Braff, Bobby Hackett or Yank Lawson , Berigan easily trumps them all. It is easy to dismiss a lot of white trumpet players of the late 1930's where the likes of Ziggy Elman, Harry James or Charlie Spivak only infrequently had anything to do with jazz (after his tenure with Goodman, James' music is no little jazz interest, I feel.) In the case of Berigan, he was a much sought after soloist by other leaders as a genuine jazz soloist. I am not sure how he would have faired in the 1940s but he would have easily have found a home in much of the mainstream jazz produced in the 1950s. At the point when Berigan was most prolific he may have been a consolidator of Armstrong's maturing style of that era yet he remains easily recognisable amongst the Eldridges, Allens, Claytons, Edisons and Wiliams's who may have had a greater claim to pushing jazz trumpet further . For me, the demise of Beiderbecke sums of the culmination of jazz on the 1920's and I feel that Berigan has the same effect for me when it comes to the jazz of the next decade.

If you want an idea of how original Berigan's bands could be, this is an excellent example and demonstrative of the clever arrangements the band played - often written by Joe Lippman or Ray Conniff: -

[Serial_Apologist]

Picking up on SA's comment about the Bunny Berigan track, I am not sure if this is an honest comment or poking fun.

Tongue in cheek, Ian - as always when I hear what to me sound like excessively aggrandizing claims on behalf of this or that. There was an example of it on today's JRR when the person requesting the Louis Stewart track claimed him as the greatest jazz guitarist.

How anyone can be the greatest this, that, or the other in jazz is beyond my understanding. I remember a reviewer's claim that Stan Tracey's big band outbid even Duke Ellington's in the greatness stakes, because the settings, although Ellingtonish, were better played and the front line soloists better because more usually sober, was countered by someone else saying that Ellington in the 1940s was as good as it got, at the time, and that that "at the time" was the clinching factor in making judgements of such a kind.

I guess coming as I do from the generation that nailed itself to the Trad or Modernist masthead, since coming seriously into jazz in the early 1960s I've only ever taken glancing looks back to pre-bebop styles and examples that with the benefit of hindsight "look to the future". I did think I had some Bunny Berigan somewhere in my collection, but now see that the "K.K.Boogie" track from '41 I have on a transcribed 10" barrelhouse and boogie-woogie compilation had Red Allen on trumpet with pianist Kenny Kersey. I can only think I must have registered Bunny and Red as similar stylists at some point.

Listening to the snippet of the Mammal Hands trio played on JLU by Claire Martin just now reminds me of why it is that originality trumps "greatness" in what I find most valuable in listening. Where had I heard something almost exactly like that, I wondered? It was the famous Widor "Toccata" beloved of wedding services as newly sanctified bride and groom proceed along the nave to the gathering point for confetti and photos. One composer who was an expert at this sort of memory jogging was the Frenchman Francis Poulenc, except that he did it very subtly and deliberately, and I can't help wondering if there was a time - which was quite possibly most of the time - when one wasn't immediately disappointed by hearing something so obviously a contrafact of something even quite famous composed long ago. You didn't get that happening before, because the evolving language of music made such issues secondary - an example being Tadd Dameron's "Hot House": you don't think, Ah, but those changes are "All the Things You Are" because the adaptation is so original and unforseeable; but this seems to happen more and more as people pick up the idiomatic reins from earlier times, and the result just illustrates that they were outworn at the time they were abandoned in favour of something genuinely fresh.

Perhaps in my case this is just a facet of advancing years - that "heard it all before"/"emperor's clothes" syndrome that disinclines one from buying recordings of new stuff, because, bless me if it hasn't just happened again with an Alex Garnett track just played sounding like a copy of Toots Thielmann's "Bluesette", played earlier in JRR - and I'm sure it wasn't down to it being in 3/4!

[Ian Thumwood]

Just got back in from football so didn't listen to JLU. However I must admit that I find contra-facts a bit tiring these days and are more often a sign of laziness these days. It is interesting to think back to earlier times and appreciate that the contrafact had a heritage which was already pretty old when Dameron composed "Hot House." Some of the be-bop lines are quite clever and I can admire the re-workings of Charlie Parker as they are often better than the original melodies. This week I have been playing a lot of Bennie Moten tracks and it is interesting to hear that a number of originals were actually re-working of "Tiger Rag." The tune "Boot it" does crop up in a few band's charts and it is readily identifiable as the ODJB number.

Poulenc wrote a suite of 15 improvisations which are re-workings of themes by other composers, the last being "Autumn Leaves." I quite like Poulenc even if he isn't rated too highly in France.

[Quarky]

Tongue in cheek, Ian - as always when I hear what to me sound like excessively aggrandizing claims on behalf of this or that. There was an example of it on today's JRR when the person requesting the Louis Stewart track claimed him as the greatest jazz guitarist.

How anyone can be the greatest this, that, or the other in jazz is beyond my understanding. I remember a reviewer's claim that Stan Tracey's big band outbid even Duke Ellington's in the greatness stakes, because the settings, although Ellingtonish, were better played and the front line soloists better because more usually sober, was countered by someone else saying that Ellington in the 1940s was as good as it got, at the time, and that that "at the time" was the clinching factor in making judgements of such a kind.

Jazz critics and commentators are particularly prone to this, but critics in other forms of music can be just as bad. For example some of the claims for Bach's B minor mass e.g. as being the greatest work ever produced by mankind, etc.

It no longer offends me, but as a teenager, I would take white paint to my record sleeves and blot out all excessive aggrandisements - there wasn't much print left on the sleeves!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Slightly different but of the same hype, I remember as a teenager buying an early Lightning Hopkins album on Bluesville (Prestige). The sleeve note writer, Joe Goldberg, picked up on two lines of Lightning's, "Tell you baby what we going do/just get together and live as two" and enthused that Hopkins thereby perfectly understood, more concisely than TS Eliot, the impossibility of totally submerging one's identity even in a passionate or sexual relationship. I always hoped that Hopkins read that as he cut yet another album in just 45 minutes over a gin bottle.

BN.