flat5

Old joke about the WW2 Nazi dentist. "Vee halfv vays to make you shwving".

Thought I'd bump this thread because I'm collecting all the pics and relevent text and putting it in a html document. Just starting page 2.

My favorite is S. Sid wasting Bird's airtime and finally asking him the name of the next tune. Bird says "Who Needs Ya". (A Night In Tunisa)

"Swing is...nature making love with time." Poetic...and kinky.

The effect should be a forward momentum. The time should keep moving. Not start stop. I sometimes think of Elvin Jones playing as someone walking who is falling forward but never hits the ground :-)

Thank you, fellas. I'll pass on the information to Tony Heimer. A good hard working piano player from the US who now lives in Spain. I know the line you mean, JS. C up to E in repeated half notes, except the E. Coleman Hawkins plays it on the Riverside recording. (Genius of Modern Music?) Sometimes I do too :-)

A friend emailed me to help him find the lyrics to the old song 'Idaho'. We found nothing useful using Google or the tune books I have. He would also like to know if there are jazz tunes built from the changes (chords) of this tune. Anyone want to help? please.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070077/ was one of my favorite Peter Boyle movies. I read the book first, in about 1973. Both are good.

Yes. Back in the early 70's San Francisco's jazz station, (KJAZZ ?) asked people to guess who the two clarinet players were on the next two records played. I called and guessed Pee Wee Russell & Phil Woods. I won tickets to two black-explotation movies and did not bother to go :-)

thank you for checking, EKE BBB (wonder who I'm thinking of) Joe Dodge I guess...

I'll vote for Booker & Curtis. Singer is very musical. I give it a 7. You can dance to it :-)

Did Dave Black also record with Dave Brubeck?

I hope they are also working to improve basses. I myself am waiting for the perfect reed. :-)

This was sent to me today by Jay Corre. Thought it was quite interesting and this MIGHT be the place to put it. --- For us Maynard fans-forwarded from Bill Lichtenour (sorry Bill if I mispelled your name) In April of 1972, I interviewed Willie Maiden for a book I was planning on Maynard Ferguson. The book deal never materialized, but I kept the tapes all these years. After Maynard’s death in August—about 30 years after Willie’s—I went through the tapes and have extracted the material I thought would be of greatest interest to Kentonia folks. -- Jim Szantor MAIDEN ON MAYNARD: I first became aware of Maynard when a good friend of mine from New Jersey, a guy I had known since the 6th grade, brought in a record of “All the Things You Are,” a 78 rpm recording with Charlie Barnet. This was around my 20th birthday. And I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, I believed the record; I just couldn’t believe anyone could play that way. I became an automatic fan. Coincidentally, this was during the whole complete year that I played nothing but trumpet. I was a tenor saxophone and clarinet player, so I had more than a passing acquaintance with that, but I felt I should learn to play the trumpet, just so I could learn to write for the instrument. And that’s what I was doing, the very same year I first heard Maynard! I mean, you can’t learn to play all the instruments for writing purposes, because you’d run out of years, but I thought the trumpet was so important that I had to learn to feel how it meant to be a trumpet player. And I didn’t play saxophone one note that year that I was playing the trumpet! I learned the capabilities as well as the responsibilities of being a trumpet player--as well as the difficulties, the breathing and so on. And I learned what it was like to play in the back row as well as the front row—that was part of it, too. MAIDEN WITH MAYNARD: I first met Maynard in April of 1952—two months after he left Stan’s band—through a Latin trumpet player named Pepe. We were working in a Latin band together on Friday nights in a Mexican neighborhood in LA. And this one night Pepe told me that “Maynard Ferguson needs some arrangements” and gave me his phone number. So I called Maynard, and he said, “Rehearsal’s at 1 o’clock tomorrow.” At a place that turned out to be a half a block from where I was living at the time. Now I had nothing to give Maynard; I had been writing for a band in New Jersey and sending them the charts. I had just sent a chart off to this band that very day, but it was a bigger band than what Maynard was using. So I sat up all night and rewrote this chart for Maynard’s instrumentation. Now I almost didn’t go that half a block to the rehearsal that day, even though I had the chart under my arm. I was, if you’ll excuse the expression, scared shitless. Because I had seen Maynard with Stan in 1950 at the Palladium, with Shorty and Ray Wetzel and Art Pepper and Fitz . . . . So I sat there in my car, wondering if I should go in there, or just forget the whole thing . . . and pretend I was big time the rest of my life. But I said to myself, “If you don’t find out now, you’ll never know. You’ve got to go in there.” How did it turn out? I ended up eating dinner at Maynard’s house that night; that’s how well we got along. There were a bunch of other arrangers there, with the charts they had brought in, but I was the only one invited to eat with Maynard. And Kay [brown, then Maynard’s wife] had to drive; Maynard didn’t know how. The name of the chart was “V8.” We never recorded it. It was a rehearsal band, not working hardly at all. Bob Gordon was in it, Fitz. Guys that just wanted to play. Bill Perkins was there, plus a kid drummer. But the band was excellent, and we rehearsed once a week. I wasn’t good enough to play with the band; I just wrote. I had been working with a band (Will Osborne) on alto and with the Johnny Pineapple band on tenor. Society bands; anybody could play those saxophone parts. Then the rehearsal band played a few gigs. See, Maynard had rejoined Stan in August of ’52, then went with Paramount in January of ’53, which takes us up to 1954. But he wouldn’t re-sign with the studio; he refused. He said he’d stay if they tripled his salary, but they wouldn’t, so that was it. We started with 7 pieces, then it was 8, then 9, then 10, then 11. We never had 12 for some reason; we ended up with the 13 everybody knows. “Around the Horn,” that was with 11 pieces. I was there at the recording. MAIDEN AND MONEY: “Maiden Voyage” on the “Dimensions” album was my first recorded chart with Maynard; August of 1954. Bobby Shad wouldn’t credit me because I was “an unknown.” He wanted a big star like Billy May. He complained to Maynard: “Why are you bringing in this kid?” but Maynard insisted. I wrote eight things in nine days and never got a mention, because of a disagreement over money. Shad would only pay me for three of the charts. But I was credited in a way, because the titles were “Maiden Voyage” and “Willie Nillie,” so Shad couldn’t help it! No writer’s credit! So Bobby Shad and I had it out over that. Later we were reunited at Mainstream, but he couldn’t mess with me then because I was established. But back then Maynard insisted on my doing the album, and he really stuck up for me. He said, “He’s my man; he knows how to do what I want it to sound like.” I got through Westlake (College of Music), parked cars for the cafeteria at Hollywood and Vine. Then I worked in the post office, then I got a playing gig for a week in Texas. Then my mother told me that Stan was working Jan. 3 at a place near where we lived, Pomona Grove. MF had just given notice at Paramount, and meanwhile I had written something for him. I lived across the street from him for over a year, in the Hollywood Hills. Flo [later Maynard’s wife] was living nearby with a chick named Patty, who married Herb Ellis. Then Maynard got called by Morris Levy to do the Birdland Dream Band in September of 1956, and he took one cat east with him, Herb Geller. Between the end of Paramount and the Dream Band, Maynard just worked casuals around town. Meanwhile, I was on the road with Perez Prado and Tommy Alexander. Scuffling? Lanny Morgan and I were stranded in New York with Tommy Alexander’s band, with no money! To save money, I lived with Jay Hill for two years in the early 1950s; we had the same teachers at Westlake College of Music—Russ Garcia and Dave Robertson [sp?]. We were friends from the start. I didn’t have a penny to my name, so at one point I had to go back to living with my folks. ON THE ROAD AGAIN: When Maynard got back in LA in October of ‘56 from the Dream Band, and he got a band together that was even better than the NY band. This was a contract he had signed with Joe Glaser of Associated Booking Corp. We had Mel Lewis; Herb Geller again, Fitz and Burgess on trombones, Ed Leddy and Joe Burnett on trumpet. Red Kelly, Paul Smith on piano . . . I was the only unknown. We played two weeks, then nothing for a month. Then they wanted us back at the same joint over Christmas until Jan. 6 of 57. We wrote the Christmas medley then, after conversations I had with Maynard. Then nothing! I went to NY for a month to write some songs, get my teeth fixed, and meanwhile they were working out bookings—three months’ worth. We left on that three-month tour on March 17 of 1957—and stayed out for nine years. That was the beginning of the road band. MAIDEN ON THE ORIGINAL CONCEPTION OF THE MF BAND: Maynard had come out of Stan’s band, but he didn’t want a band that large. He wanted something smaller. He said that in a smaller band he could get everything that Stan got if everyone worked a little harder. But he wanted a swing band, a band that swung more than was profound, with jazz for everybody. And with the exception of the lead trumpet player, everybody did. And every [personnel] change was made on the basis of the ability to play jazz, not on technical ability. And what I know now but didn’t realize then, when the ensemble parts are played by all jazz players, you could tell the results. It swung more. Do a lot of guys know their horns? Yes. Can they play their parts? Yes. But you shouldn’t have to explain how to play something; either you know how or you don’t. And jazz players know how to play something; legit players play it technically correct, but it won’t swing. That’s what makes the difference. If everybody plays their section parts like they play their choruses, that’s what makes it swing. It only takes 2 or 3 out of a whole band to mess up the thing, even if they’re playing it “correctly.” If you have to ask when to cut off a note. . . . Jazz players know that inherently. That’s what Maynard wanted—guys who didn’t need anything explained. Maynard wanted less bombast, more happiness, as far as swing goes. It would add to the freedom as far as stretch-outs; and everybody stretched out in that band. . . . THE LOWDOWN ON MAYNARD: The Ferguson band was still a Kenton-oriented kind of thing, with Maynard’s high-note ability. But Maynard, to me, is the greatest low-note trumpet player! Because the other high-note people couldn’t play the low notes that Maynard played. And Maynard realized the importance of low notes. And the screech players couldn’t play low notes. And Maynard’s sound was so good on low F-sharp! So after all the writers got hung up on high notes, he finally said, “This has got to stop. Just because I can do it doesn’t mean I have to do it all the time. Let’s play some music.” And that’s when he put in “Lazy Afternoon” and those things. And he’s the only one who can play the low notes right and the high notes too. Because he is a complete trumpet player. And when you add in the euphonium parts that he played, the French horn part on “Goodbye”. . . And the low notes are right in tune, too! It’s right, and it’s fat! I don’t care who you name; no one else can do it! The end of “Danny Boy.” That’s why he’s the greatest low-note trumpet player. ALL AROUND THE HORNS: I remember one night at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. I took a nap this one day, left a call at the motel. They didn’t call! Suddenly the band boy calls from backstage, and the band is playing. Jesus! I overslept. And it’s like a 15-minute walk to the end of the ballroom to the bandstand. The band’s playing “Give Me the Simple Life,” my arrangement. And as I’m walking up there, Maynard plays MY solo on MY arrangement on MY tenor! Better than I could! So I picked up Maynard’s horn and cut off the band at the end. I mean, I had to do something! Maynard also played lead alto once in a while when someone was late. He could play slide as well as valve trombone. I hate to use the word “freak” because he wasn’t one! He just worked harder than anyone else did; he had more dedication and commitment. I will never consider him a freak. I hate when people call him that. Maynard and I . . . . We could talk to each other without any problem. About anything. We disagreed on who we should hire once in a while—like, Lynn Halliday or Don Menza. I preferred Menza, though I dug them both quite a bit. But Maynard wanted to hire Linn, so he got the gig. But when that didn’t work out, we got Don, and everyone knows how great that worked out. MR. CHOPS: The more we worked, the better Maynard’s chops were. He never practiced. In fact, most of the time he didn’t even know where his horn was. He took his mouthpiece with him, but the band boy packed up the horn. After a layoff, the first night back for him was kind of rough; it still sounded good, but he had to work harder to get it. But as the week went on, it got better and better.

"Are saying that Jimmy Giuffre is dead?" Yes I was. It seems I was wrong. Good!

Gosh... I just sent the article to some musician friends. That guy can write.

I'll bore you some more. On this early spring day in April, (2003 - JG is no longer with us) artist Juanita Giuffre, Jimmy's wife of 42 years, graciously agreed to take time out from her role as caregiver to the ailing innovator, and chat with me about her husband's many milestones. Parkinson's disease has silenced and stilled the once boundless creativity and expression. Music remains his great pleasure, if only as a listener. This link is still good so... http://www.jazzhouse.org/library/?read=butters1

I'll let Jimmy speak for himself. Sorry, I don't have a link to this so am posting it. Hope many of you (who have not seen this) find it interesting. --- -edited from "Jimmy Giuffre Talks and Plays" on CELP Musiques- EARLY YEARS I was born in `21 and I started playing in 1930. And I started with Mr. Holman. He was my teacher. He had a kind of a band at the YMCA and I took up the clarinet because my mother had been told by all her friends that a young boy should be able to play an instrument. And I decided on clarinet. I was so small that I couldn't close the holes on the E-flat clarinet and I changed over to B-flat very quickly, then I switched over to tenor. I remember the first tenor I got out of a hock shop. This was an old Conn tenor and it was probably a great horn. And I played tenor and doubling clarinet in some of the bands that I played with around Dallas. We played country clubs, weddings and things like that. It came a time where we were all looking forward to going into service, 'cause the war was on. But if you volunteered you could choose what you wanted to do and I wanted to play in a band so that got me into a band. Later on they came looking around for some clarinet players to send to the Battle of the Bulge and I didn't have to go because I'd volunteered. But anyway I was there and we played reveille in the morning, we played taps at night, and practiced... But we had a lot of groups, probably had some effect on me. We had a small group with xylophone, not vibraphone but xylophone, and guitar, tenor, bass and snare drum with brushes. And we played for officers' lunch every day. But it was a swinging little group. I wrote quite a bit and practiced a lot and the music was pretty easy, pretty soft. Later on when I was with Woody Herman's band, he was asked by the college to have his arranger write a march or a football song for them to sing. So I did that and they played it, l don't know if they kept it or not. I had a lot of experience marching. I was four years in high school four years in college, four years in the army. So if I haven't got a beat yet, I guess I won't ever get one. I went to school at North Texas State in Texas and we played in a band called stage band. There was a stage show every Saturday night with somebody who would be a tap dancer and another one a musician, and it caught on with the colleges to have these bands as part of their curriculum, and it built up and built up and now it's very big. Like it's visited the White House and Moscow and all kinds or different things. But it came from the band that we had there. A bunch of us all lived in the same house: Herbie Ellis, the guitar player, Harry Babasin, the bass player, and three or four others. I had one room and an enclosed porch belonged to me, and I had a stove and a refrigerator and I tried to cook for myself once in a while. But I lived out in that little room, studied and... We played in the front room, we played constantly, had sessions. Then we had some small groups that we went out to play for dancing. And we used to go hear all the great bands that came through, at Dallas: Basie, Lunceford, Lunceford was my favorite. And Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton. He had Dexter [Gordon] and all these different people. We'd go there and stand for hours watching them. It was in a big place called Automobile Show and you could look as far into the distance and you couldn't see the end of it. And it was a black dance and there were hundreds of people and they were all wearing zoot suits and dancing a particular dance. I think it had a big influence on us. MUSICAL CONSTRUCTION I met Dr. Wesley La Violette, he was there in Los Angeles in late forties and I studied with him fourteen years. I was in the army and there was first this one guy named Scott Sealy. I noticed he used to write arrangements for the band and it always sounded different and I asked him how he voiced his chords. He says. "I don't voice, I write my line". And it was hard for me to understand because I hadn't been given any training in college in North Texas. In North Texas State, we were given one semester of counterpoint and form analysis and that was the strict counterpoint, coming from the classical side. In fact, there were very, very few people who were into... care about counterpoint in jazz. Some people were beginning to be interested in it whenever I captured them [and] explained it. But counterpoint, I think the official definition is that the melody forms the harmony, and the harmony fits to the melody. I was arranging long before I took up counterpoint. It should have been the other way around, but most people consider counterpoint just a device to use when you can't think of anything. But I see counterpoint as organic, the whole piece is lines, that... there are many ways they can work together but they are horizontally conceived. You can't just write two lines. You can't write line by line until you have gone a certain pattern, with a guide, and you start with very simple phrases and you go ahead. And go through this step by step. You get to a certain place, it doesn't take too long, you get to a certain place and you're able to play all right two-part counterpoint which is the basis of everything. The way my teacher taught and the way I teach is, there are two paths. One path is melody writing and you study how to write a good melody. The first step is to write four-bar phrases and they have to be complete within themselves. That is to say that... it just fulfills you. If you can learn that skill, then you can put it into larger things. The second lesson, you study extension: how to turn a four-bar phrase into a five-bar phrase, naturally, with nobody realizing it, or a six-bar phrase. It's the art of extending, like taffy. It's candy, and you can pull it and it goes into different shapes. So that's what you have, that ability. First, you begin by being very clear [about] the obviously balanced form: a question, an answer, a question, an answer, very simple. The next step is to extend and make it sound odd and strange instead of very obviously straight, now you go and learn how to pull it apart and make it a little unusual and that provides you with the basis of melody writing. And you also begin to use orchestration. You choose... maybe the first few things you write are just for nothing, not for a particular instrument, but very early in the game I start the students to write for a specific instrument, to study encyclopedias about it, and what it can do with range, its sound, listen to it on records. I like to have records that give you the sound of every instrument in the orchestra. And so, you're studying orchestrations at the same time, and you move along, you go to 8-bar phrases and so on, till you get to 32 bars. This is all single notes, no harmonies, no other line. At the same time you get counterpoint in the other path, [and the other] counterpoint is to write two lines together. So, in counterpoint you have short little motifs, one or two bars, maybe three, and that starts, and you imitate it, from time to time, and then in between you have what they call episode in which you use parts of the theme and develop them. And at times you come back and you write the theme, and everybody can hear there's a theme 'cause a lot of flags go out and everything, there's the theme, 'cause the rest of the piece is all little pieces of the theme, chopped up. And you go from there, you start writing eighth notes against quarter notes, one line is eighth notes, the other quarter, and you learn how to do that, and you move along, you take up syncopation and modulation, that's the one that's tough, And you keep expanding, three notes, two notes, four notes, two notes and you arrive at the end of that and you start writing inventions, which is a very simple form that Bach invented, where you have a motif and repeat, an episode of development, and then again the theme, but maybe in another key, or upside down, or whatever, I have given the students all kinds of tables of ideas, like the devices of imitation, where you have a motif and then you imitate it, repeat it or you turn it upside down, or you write a sequence to it which is the same thing on a different note, starting on a different note. And by the time you have reached the two-part invention, you have also in the other path reached the 32-bar song, which most of our popular songs are 32 bars. Counterpoint creates the new harmonies and you don't even know what they are, you don't need to bother if you want to forget that there is harmony after you write the piece. But if you write counterpointedIy you don't think of chords, you actually really think of intervals. Some intervals are peaceful and resolved, some are unresolved and you have to work with those two things and you can put together the whole orchestra. But the arrangers, GiI Evans, for instance, and Gerry Mulligan and George Russell, I feel they use their own style of counterpoint which I would say is possibly harmonic counterpoint or counterpoint harmony because they mix the two together, and as I must say if you want to write an arrangement for a standard there are certain places in most standards, they're written harmonically and there are certain places where there is a harmony change there. So what you have to do in that case if you are a counterpoint writer, you have to adapt yourself to those changes. You have to, but you can do it horizontally in between those changes and you have the unknown and then you hit this one place where everybody expects it and that's the way the tune goes. If you don't hit that there it sounds wrong. So you do it, but in between those, perpendiculars we call them, you learn to lead into those places in a surprising way, unusual way, as long as you hit those changes that they call for. It embodies all the music, and if it is a standard it calls for those things. That's all you can do, to work to them but conceive horizontally in between. COMPOSITIONS Well, the [Four Brothers] thing came about at Nola studio, which was a place on Broadway, in New York, where everybody hung out and exchanged jokes, got gigs and rehearsed and recorded and whatever. Everybody was always there and Gene Roland was the first one there. And there were a whole bunch of Lester Young influenced tenor players: Brew Moore, Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Allen Eager. it just went on. So he got this idea of writing for four tenor saxophones. So he wrote some arrangements and they played them and it worked out to his satisfaction and he told me about it and I was in Los Angeles. And he came out to Los Angeles and we got a band together with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward and myself. And we rehearsed a lot and recorded on a wire recorder, there must be some place out there with wire recordings of our rehearsals. And we got this job down at Pontrelli's ballroom and poor Gene he was sort of ushered out and this guy Tommy DeCarlo, a trumpet player, he got the job, so he played the job. But in the meantime Woody Herman's band had just reunited into the Second Herd and he hired Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Herbie Steward and instead of four tenors, three tenors and a bari `cause they used a regular five-man sax section. So Herbie Steward switched to alto for most of the music and then I went to rehearsal and they had told Woody about this sound and he asked me if I'd write a piece featuring it and I did. And in writing the Four Brothers I was trying to write a combination of Charlie Parker and Lester Young. I wrote it and gave it to Shorty Rogers who took it in and they rehearsed it. They seemed to instantly like it, but it didn't get by that easy `cause Woody was really in tune with Caldonia and real fast killers and this was a relaxed piece. As a matter of fact the band still plays it now which is some 40 odd years [after] and they seem to try to play it fast every time they play it. And most bands that do play it play it too fast. The original feeling was, you know [he sings Four Brothers]. It's easy to play but it's. Everything was just right with that band. It [was] a great band and all the soloists were major. So they started playing the piece but not very often. But the band liked it and Woody sometimes the last set of the night would visit with people and turn the band over to his straw boss and the band requested Four Brothers. And they finally worked it out to where it started sounding real good and they could stand up and belt it out. And Woody started hearing it and he was telling Shorty about the fact that they did all these recordings because the union strike was coming up and there was no recorded music for two years. So they recorded everything in the book. It took 18 takes to get the ending on Four Brothers. So anyway, he began to play it and for some odd reason, people seemed to go for it. It would be hard put to find something that would give me as much mileage as I've got on that one piece. Lots of back slaps and congratulations and stuff like that. It didn't pay me that much for arranging but the royalties have been there. At the beginning of The Train and the River was the fact that it was originally called Finale 'cause it was written to be a piece which had fast moving [pedal] notes and could serve as a last piece on a concert. But I cannot tell you how The Train and the River came about in the title. I just listened to the music and it just sounded like that. I'm sure a lot of people identified with that. It sort of was a hit, or a minor hit, and people seemed to like it. It has that quality that you want to "get aboard," like a train, everything is smooth. It had this twang and this sound of the South which maybe comes from my background, I don't know. But the good thing about it is that it just sets up this music that is not intended to be, but it turned out to be, kind of folk music. There's a certain style of composing that Beethoven used a lot. He used it usually on his scherzandos or scherzos. At the third part of his four-part symphonies he would have this piece that. it would be written in three-quarter time and it moved along fast. It moved fast but the music didn't look fast, it looked slow. It took up twice as much score paper to write it. But as a composer you could grab a hold of it and sort of move along with it, it developed out into something more than it was. And Jim Hall he was attracted by the style of the piece. Ralph [Pe¤a] he was of Mexican heritage and he played his bass like a big guitar and it just got this groove. I guess people can just ride in a train, everybody's experienced it. I went through a period where I thought I would like to become a so-called "avant-garde" classical composer, using all the major seconds, major seventh, minor seconds and all the effects in the sometimes strange weirdness of this music. I thought I wanted to be one of those: "Stockhausen #2." But something happened that made me feel I really didn't speak that same language. I could, but it really wasn't me. If anything was me, it was jazz music. Even though I love to hear some beautiful classical things. The Quiet Time, one of my earlier pieces. Well, that was one with the vibraphone player, Teddy Charles. I wrote a piece for an album along with George Russell and several other different arrangers. The one I wrote was Quiet Time, and that's definitely a minor piece, maybe in the bridge we've got a little major. That was a good example of counterpoint writing. Now the Pharaoh is definitely a minor piece. I came about writing that piece when John Lewis and Gunther Schuller got this organization together in which they were going to try to blend classical and jazz music activities. So they commissioned me to write a piece for eighteen brass and timpani. So I wrote [the] Pharaoh. It was another good example of counterpoint. Piece for Clarinet and String Orchestra: one side was all written and the other side was all improvised, except for the accompaniment. My part was all improvised. I love to write for strings: this was forty strings. I was in Baden Baden, Germany, we had a good time working these things out. It was [released] on Verve Records. I just sat down and started writing and I guess that idea came to me of having a lot of little spaces, clarinet being free to play or not play. [The] strings had their designated things to play. I wrote two string quintets. It's a clarinet and string quartet. One is Orb and the other one is Clarinet Quintet #1. That was commissioned by the jazz festival in 1962 in Washington, and [it] premiered at the Library of Congress. The other one was played at the Whitney Museum along with a piece by Cecil [Taylor] and his own group and Sonny Rollins solo, which I talked him into. He had mentioned before in articles that he would like to play just by himself. So they originally thought this program up with Ornette [Coleman], probably writing a piece, and myself, and Cecil Taylor. Ornette couldn't play, or he didn't get a piece done. Sonny hadn't got a piece done and they were trying to have him play [along] with Debussy or Ravel. I told him, "I read that you wanted to play by yourself, why don't you take this opportunity?" And he did. I don't know if it ever got recorded, I have a copy of it. But I don't know if it came on the market. That's the first time he played a solo concert. I'm very good at titles. One of them I remember I wrote years ago was Deep People, for "Deep Purple," obviously. I always like them, natural things, especially something that comes across space and enters your inner ear. Dragonfly, just to look at the bug itself is a beautiful thing. I tried to find titles that relate to the music but also have some attraction. Quasar, it was fairly easy to title this because it had an outer space quality and it brought us into that area. [Juanita, my wife] would like to encourage me to write faster. I tend to stay around the quiet brook and lay upon the stones, and I forget about the movement, which I shouldn't do. Four Brothers is about as fast as I went (he laughs). I seem to have a special liking for minor, pieces in minor. Even if I write, and I try to write, in major, I end up some way making it sound half way minor. It just drifts that way. To me, it has more depth. It doesn't seem possible to write a piece in major. After a while it becomes "just major," just "everything is nice." Minor suggests hardships, pain and other emotions. I don't know how that happened but just I have that nature, definitely. INSTRUMENTS Ah! I had my share of commercial bands and stuff. But they usually used clarinet just on second. You know, mostly saxophone but certain places they switched to clarinet. And then I got with Buddy Rich's band and they didn't use clarinet so I put it on a shelf, in the closet. And a little later on, Woody Herman. he didn't use clarinet except himself. And then the next thing was the Lighthouse All-Stars, that I can remember. I was with Boyd Raeburn's band for a week and I wrote some arrangements for him. I think it was a great great band and George Handy was very underrated. I think he's one of the most creative and talented composers. Then [i was with] Jimmy Dorsey. I brought out the clarinet in early fifties. I don't know where I picked up the baritone. It got me a lot of work because nobody liked to play baritone. So I got the baritone and several records that I am on I think probably I got the job because I played baritone. And I played that with my trio with Jim Hall and Ralph Pe¤a. I played clarinet, tenor and baritone. Dates lead me about where I went further into the flute. ... I notice that l made a decision to focus on composition instead of the flute. So I hadn't taken up the flute for a long time. So I think in the sixties, some place in there, I got a flute and l started trying to be a flute player. George Opperman, who is a flute maker, told me that he had a bass flute and I said, "What's that?" and he sent it to me and I liked it. I didn't focus on building a technique on it, there are too many other things, but I played it in a nice moody situation, that's the way I played it. Recently, I wasn't feeling so good on the tenor and I got this idea of picking up an alto for getting an old real choice instrument. I had played the alto on my first recording and my first solo, with Red Norvo. Red Norvo played a few pieces, two pieces, I think, one of them was my arrangement and Dexter Gordon was there and we had a question and answer duet, and Shorty Rogers was on the date, [barney] Kessel too, the guitar player, Dodo Marmarosa, Red Callender on bass. Anyway it was a nice little date and I got my first solo, period. So [for] that one concert we did in California I picked up an alto at a repairman's shop and took it out and played one piece on the concert. But other than that I never touched alto sax. I just decided to try and I'm having some fun with that. I don't think there are any other instruments I can think of that I used. I've always liked a low register [of the clarinet] because I can't find a sound that I like in the middle or upper register. I do play some of it, but I focus more on the bottom. I'm doing the same thing with alto sax. It produces a different quality and as usual I want to try and be original if I can. But it definitely is an old friend. The thing about it is, when I took up soprano, a few years back, that provided something different. You can drive right along with that. A clarinet, you have to find a way of making it sound right and you can't just play a bebop piece on it. You can, and Buddy DeFranco does a great job of it, but my style just didn't fit the high volume thing on the clarinet. But now with this soprano you can go right ahead and straight out. INSTRUMENTAL STYLE Rhythm, I've never been very interested in rhythm. One of the most important things to me that I'm striving for is personal music. My own style, if it's possible. And the interest in rhythm puts it in another area. When you focus on rhythm it keeps you from having an original style. It gives you a style that's more common. You see Latin American rhythms in all kinds of music and I don't reject it. I just don't use it because it would lead me into a more common area and I'm trying to find a special area for myself. Some people think you can't play swing softly, and I never accepted that. One of the reasons I, at the present time, have a drum less group (and I had several of them) was that I really wanted to hear the tone of these instruments. And I still think it can be done with the drums but there has to be extreme work on it to find the way to do it. I think I learned a lot from Debussy and Delius and Ravel. In classical music, it has lots of dynamics. Something put me in touch with that. I like to play with varying dynamics and I also like to hear the great ones play the way they play. And it might be Bird playing on a level that stays on that level because he's got it there and he's driving it home his particular way. I think if you listen to the great ones like him and Dizzy, Miles, Bill Evans, many others, you hear the variations, you hear the dynamics change. Many time when you hear people that are playing in that style but they haven't achieved the grandness of those great ones, then it can sound kind of boring if it just stays there and these people haven't found a way to give it breath, and give it give and take. I was playing with Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne at a club in Hollywood and it was pretty crowded. As I remember I can see people dancing. There was quite a lot going on and I couldn't hear myself. And right in the middle of the solo I just went down and started playing just the rhythm and it turned everybody round, they just didn't know what to do, and then pretty soon I just fell in. I only played a little bit but I played enough to say, "Listen to us!" Then I started using it regularly, you know, in this Martians Go Home, and we used a lot of space. As soon as I started playing the clarinet with the band these things came along. had to play very soft, I hadn't played it [the clarinet] for a long time, and I noticed it in the closet and I got it out to try and see how it was and [it] felt real good. I didn't have much chops because I hadn't been playing it. But anyway, I just sort of played it like it felt good, down the lower register. And I brought it in and we had to find a way to play so that it worked. So it turned out that the bass's playing softly, the piano's playing like Count Basie, very, very sparse, and the drums with brushes and the trumpet, usually with a mute. That's the way it worked out and then we added these silent wind solos and lots of breaks where we played without rhythm. And sometimes a whole solo without rhythm and then we'd go back into rhythm. ENSEMBLES The Tangents in Jazz was the first group that I had, but it didn't last because I didn't find any gigs. That group played a couple of jobs, that's about all. We got such [a] good critical reaction on it we were going to try to move it. I finally got a manager, an agent, and we were gonna try and bring it East. I looked around and Jack Sheldon, who was the trumpet star on it, he had joined another group and he couldn't go with us. So we had to start from scratch and that takes us to Claude Debussy. I heard this piece for flute, viola and harp, and I fell in love with that piece. Some way I got to know Jim Hall. I tried writing some things for that combination and it worked. I started experimenting with things that came away from that period when I wanted to be an avant-garde composer. I went into breaking jazz down into more unusual situations, tonally. I did this piece called Fugue for Shelly and it was all written, classical jazz feeling. But there was a jazz feeling and the rest was all lines but smooth. As we went along I tried to do something different and finally we got to those Shelly Manne and Jimmy Giuffre and Shorty Rogers record that was called The Three. We called them "Abstracts" because they seemed at an angle to everything else. But it was a far cry from what we're doing now. It should be [after] thirty, almost forty years! As we went along, I met, I guess Paul [bley] was one of the earliest people I met that was into that world, and then Ornette [Coleman], and Cecil Taylor and [Charles] Mingus. We just gradually moved into things from hearing musicians and working on it yourself, bringing out whatever it is that's inside you. And so we got the group together with Steve Swallow and Paul BIey. Time goes by and we made our final record, Free Fall. This group found out how to go and play free, in our own way. Then when we broke up, I was trying to find other musicians that were interested in this, and it ended up with Don Friedman on piano and the bass was Barre Phillips. He was with me for a little while. We did this tour, Paris and London, doing concerts and we were still playing the same music I had played with Paul and Steve. Then I jumped back into a more accessible style, with bebop and standards and all things like that. A couple of years ago Paul Bley shows up with a French record maker, Jean- Jacques [Pussiau] and he had the idea of bringing this group back together. And it worked. Each one of us has expanded and we're playing some favorite standards of ours that we... sort of instant arranging. We have no plan on how to play it, how we're going to play it, just that we are going to play this piece. Everything is delegated, brought out for each musician to play a part. In the meantime we're improvising a lot. The music is leveling out and the public seems to be a hundred per cent more interested than it was in 1961 or `63. And the producers and promoters and critics seem very interested. My recent quartet, with Pete Levin on synthesizer, Bob Nieske on bass and Randy Kaye on drums, they've been with me for many years. I had a dislike for electric instruments or electronic instruments and whenever I heard electric bass it always turned me off, the synthesizer. But I heard some records by Weather Report and it turned me back on. So I figured if they could do it, so could I. So I set out to try to find first an electric piano, or electronic piano or synthesizer or whatever you call it and I remembered that I'd heard synthesizer playing with Gil Evans. Turned out to be Pete. And so I got Pete, he came aboard and we made three albums and a couple of tours to Europe. Electronic bass, or electric bass, I couldn't stand it but I managed to find Bob Nieske in Boston and he was able to play the instrument more or less the way he plays stand-up bass, because he was a stand-up bass player too. And it gives you certain kinds of dimensions, both those instruments do, that you can't get any other way. And that's what drew me to it, so I could have more dimension in the music. We more or less went on our way playing the same way we were playing. We just happened to have electric bass and synthesizer playing. The music has changed gradually, but I never used any language from rock, because it never was me. The basic thing was like with the Latin music, it was always there, in Rock, the drum beat is always there, pretty strong. I found Randy Kaye after many years and he's been with me now about twenty years. I might not have had any drum less groups if I had met him earlier. He's very, very tasty. and listens. There are a lot of good drummers that I like, like Don Lamond. He made Four Brothers really sound swinging. Of course there's Jo Jones. Andr‚... Jaume! I [had] received his albums, and he had written to me and said he would like to study with me, which is quite something for someone to do who is a professional. It struck me very well that someone [would] take a challenge like Andr‚ Jaume did. [People] think because they're professional they can't learn anymore. He took it upon himself to do that and then we went ahead and he came over and we had about a week of lessons. And we happened to have a performance at the same time. He came up to school, the New England Conservatory, he joined us and we've gotten things together. We play similar styles and we have found out how to play with two instead of one. He has turned out to be my partner in a duet. We've made two albums and we've made numerous tours. Andr‚, people that he knows all through France are interested in what he's interested in, and I noticed that a lot of people are. There are a lot of organizations, and overall organizations, networks. I wish I could do this in the U.S. [so] at this time I have the duo with Andr‚ Jaume and I have the quartet and recently the trio I had in 1961 is back with me. Paul Bley, Steve Swallow and myself, we've been playing and doing some recording, and touring and it seems to be working out very nice. An Artist's Life I do know that an artist needs help but he has to go ahead without it if he doesn't have it. Quite often people are behind artists and help them do what they have to do. Quite often too they're taken advantage of. But that's something we all hear about while we don't have any clear cut instances in our mind. They have strange ways of appearing honest but also appearing [as a] mysterious devil, penetrates your body and controls you. At least that's the way it seems to me. There have been people that come along and help. These are the ones to concentrate on. I'll do a bit of a ceremony about the man that was the head of Atlantic records, Nesuhi Ertegun, who died recently. He and his brother Ahmet worked hard to help jazz in a very tasty way. Everything was done with taste. Norman Granz is a very important part of jazz. He decided from hearing my music that he thought he could do something with me. It didn't work all right. Whatever happened happened. In the middle of it he sold his record, after we were with him, he sold the record company to someone else so we didn't have the close operation as we did with him. It's a multiple job. You're supposed to get someone do the cover, and you've got to do the notes or you get someone else to do them. He just [gave the label] an artist and [said], "Do an album". Producing and doing the recording, he sure did work hard to try to build jazz up. Took all the great stars, put them together. Then there's all the numerous little small labels and the writers who have dedicated and spent the time and the effort to help us along. Means a lot!

I have a CD of what I believe to be 15 inch V-Disks. Music made to be broadcast to the US troups still "overseas" after World War 2. (a big war many years ago) These recording are VERY interesting. James had a band that was playing music with a very heavy Dizzy Gillespie influence. The band played many bop charts and James played somewhat in a Gillespie style. I have to disagree that H J did not play much jazz after leaving Goodman.

Mr. Ra's quote is deep and true. However there is much so-called music that I really don't want to listen to. I don't care about "their" hopes and dreams (anymore than they care about mine).

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Harry Howell Carney (1910 - 1974) was a jazz baritone saxophone player best known for his 45- year tenure in Duke Ellington's band. Carney started off in Ellington's band playing alto, but soon switched to the baritone. His strong, steady saxophone often serves as the anchor of Duke's music. He also played bass clarinet on occasion. Harry Howell Carney was born in 1910 in Boston, Massachusetts. At seventeen he ran off to join Duke Ellington's orchestra starting first on clarinet and eventually moving on to Baritone Saxophone. Even at that age he was the "master of the deep-voiced baritone saxophone". Carney was the longest lasting player in Duke Ellington's band. He was always there and on occasions when Ellington was missing he took over as conductor, particularly when Ellington wished to make a stage entrance after the band had begun playing the first piece of a performance. Ellington and Carney were close friends. The majority of their careers they rode together in Carney's car to concerts, allowing Ellington to come up with new ideas. Fictionalised accounts of these road trips are documented in Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful. Ellington wrote a number of 'show-piece' features for Carney throughout their time together, such as “Frustration” circa 1944/45. This was typical of Ellington's ability to exploit the voices of his most treasured soloists by creating works that were tailored specifically to the individual rather than being for a generic baritone saxophonist. In addition, Ellington would sometimes feature Carney's robust renditions of the melodies of such hits as "Sophisticated Lady" and "In A Mellow Tone." It has to be said, however, that in later years Carney's voice was heard a little less as a soloist than it was in the 1930s. This is perhaps owing to the presence from late 1939 onwards of an additional tenor saxophonist (the most important of these being Ben Webster and later Paul Gonsalves), further increasing the pool of star soloists in the orchestra. It was also in the early 1940s, after this increase to five reed players in the Ellington orchestra, that Carney ceased using the alto saxophone and Johnny Hodges ceased playing the soprano saxophone. Carney's clarinet continued to be deployed in the well-known composition “Rockin' in Rhythm” for which he is also credited as a co-composer. This was one of the 'work-horses' of the Ellington orchestra that remained in the band books throughout its life on the road. While not the first baritone saxophonist in jazz, Carney was certainly the first major performer on the instrument, and his sound influenced several generations of musicians. Throughout his career Carney played saxophones by the manufacturer C.G. Conn, and like other jazz musicians was known to offer endorsements of his preferred brand. Photographic evidence suggests that the mouthpieces he used were predominantly those of the Woodwind Company of New York. The combination of such a large-chambered mouthpiece and the Conn brand of baritone saxophone was certainly a factor in the production of his enormous, rich tone. He was an early jazz proponent of circular breathing. He was also Hamiet Bluiett's favourite Baritone Saxophone player because he "never saw anybody else stop time"[1] in reference to a concert Bluiett attended where Carney held a note during which all else went silent. Carney made a few recordings as a bandleader, and also recorded with Lionel Hampton.

Chauffeur?

Joke from Scoop (2006) Woody Allen's character walks into a music room and picks up a french horn. He says "This reminds me of an old dirty joke about the french horn player who could only sleep one way with his wife". It took me a second but a day later I still find it very funny. The movie has a few good lines :-)

I really like Stan Getz - Gary Burton - Steve Swallow - Pete Laroca (?) version of Summertime on the Getz Au Go Go album. Getz's solo is so great. Now, almost every time I solo on it I use a lot of polytonality. I mean playing a whole step up or a forth up or a fifth up, etc. It works so good on that tune. Working with a motif, like the first phrase. What I don't care to play is: Girl From Ipanna, or where ever. In The Mood Tuxedo Junction All Blues You Don't Know What Love Is (because of the bands I had to play it with)

Vic may have invented the hi hat and other drum stuff. I think I read this in Ralph's book many years ago.