Canonball & Trane

[medjuck]

Is it just me but I find Cannonball's playing with the Miles Davis Sextet to be very influenced by Trane and IMHO more exciting than anything he played before or after. I was just re-listening to The Cannonball Adderly Quintet in Chicago and on The Sleeper I can barely tell them apart. OK to be honest I'm not a 100% sure that it's Trane on the first solo. He's playing at the top of his register and Cannonball keeps using the bottom of his.

And The Sleeper sounds like it could have been on KOB. I think In Chicago was recorded just a couple of days before KOB's first session.

Edited January 13, 2006 by medjuck

[jazzbo]

I think you're right that Cannon was influenced by Trane during his tenure in the band. . ..

I don't agree that this is the most exciting playing from him EVER. I've been equally excited by his playing before and after Miles. . . .

But yeah, this was a band (or two or three, there were some different players in there during its run) for the AGES.

Edited January 13, 2006 by jazzbo

[Larry Kart]

I think that the Trane-ish things that Cannonball picked up when they were working side-by-side usually didn't sit that well with rest of/the core (IMO) Cannonball's style, though I admit that it does come together for him by and large on "In Chicago." Cannonball at his best -- again IMO -- was primarily a soulful, melodic player (at his best on albums like "Cannonball Takes Charge" and "Something Else" (esp. "Autumn Leaves"). When he leaned heavily on Trane-ish upper extensions of the chords, the results sounded to me like dill pickles with chocolate sauce.

[Guy Berger]

I think that the Trane-ish things that Cannonball picked up when they were working side-by-side usually didn't sit that well with rest of/the core (IMO) Cannonball's style, though I admit that it does come together for him by and large on "In Chicago." Cannonball at his best -- again IMO -- was primarily a soulful, melodic player (at his best on albums like "Cannonball Takes Charge" and "Something Else" (esp. "Autumn Leaves"). When he leaned heavily on Trane-ish upper extensions of the chords, the results sounded to me like dill pickles with chocolate sauce.

I disagree. Some of his more Trane-ish playing from the mid and late 60s is superb.

Guy

[Shawn]

My personal preference is the period of time that Cannonball was sharing the frontline with Yusef Lateef in the sextet. Having 'teef on hand seemed to really "push" Cannonball, you have to be on your toes to not get buried by what Yusef was laying down... Check out any live recording of the period, especially Cannonball Adderley Sextet In New York.

My 2 cents.

[Morganized]

My personal preference is the period of time that Cannonball was sharing the frontline with Yusef Lateef in the sextet. Having 'teef on hand seemed to really "push" Cannonball, you have to be on your toes to not get buried by what Yusef was laying down... Check out any live recording of the period, especially Cannonball Adderley Sextet In New York.

My 2 cents.

I agree. My favorite Cannonball is the Live in Japan, Dizzy Business, cd's. Beautiful stuff.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I think that the Trane-ish things that Cannonball picked up when they were working side-by-side usually didn't sit that well with rest of/the core (IMO) Cannonball's style, though I admit that it does come together for him by and large on "In Chicago." Cannonball at his best -- again IMO -- was primarily a soulful, melodic player (at his best on albums like "Cannonball Takes Charge" and "Something Else" (esp. "Autumn Leaves"). When he leaned heavily on Trane-ish upper extensions of the chords, the results sounded to me like dill pickles with chocolate sauce.

I'm with Larry on this one. Cannonball was really raising the crowds on his band with Nat. Commercial music at its very best.

MG

[medjuck]

I sw him with Lateef (that's how old I am) and liked it but must admit I don't remember much else about it.

Something Else is, of course, a record made after he'd joined Miles and had played with Trane. I originally thought of calling this thread Cannon and Miles but the cd that brought it to mind didn't include Miles. BTW no one so far has mentioned his playing on KOB

[JSngry]

I think that Ball was profoundly affected by Trane during their time together. Hell, who woudn't be?

I also think that it took him quite a while to fully and comfortably assimilate Trane's vocabulary and to find a way for it to fit within his personal tonal and rhythmic character. We all listen to Milestones and Kind Of Blue like they're "perfect" records, maybe because in the end they are, but if you want to look at it really objectively and put yourself inside the mindsof the players instead of "receiving" the music as a listener, I think that you can hear Cannonball "scuffling" in a sense on these albums. Not in a "lost" kind of way, far from it. But you hear his normally fluid rhythmic pulse being broken up/down as he attempts, in my mind consciously, to get inside what Trane was doing. I don't hear it so much (hardly at all, infact) on the non-modal material, but on things like "So What", it's like he's wondering "Where's the goddam changes? When's the next one coming? What am I going to do until it does? How does Trane do this shit? Help me, John, HELP ME!"

And really, there's no shame in that. There would have been shame if he'd just did like a lot of players in the immediate post-KOB time did and string together cliches that fit and offer up a winkingly faux version of Modal Jazz Ain't It Hip Y'All!?!?!?!!!!!!

But he didn't do that. He was trying to deal with it, and he didn't seem to be afraid to step on his dick more than a few time in the process. And in the end, he did deal with it, although by the time that he seemed to have fully gotten a personal grip on it - mid-60s is what seems right to my ears - he was making the type of records that didn't have as their main goal showing that he had.

But good lord, listen to something like "Chocolate Nuisance" off of Black Messiah, or any other one of those Capitol cuts where the music gets out unfiltered, and you're hearing a guy who had gotten it all under control. It took him a while, and he did it sort of "on the sly" career-wise, but bygod, he got it done. And that's why I love Cannonball Adderley.

[Cali]

Cannon had, indeed, been influenced by Trane during their association in Miles' band. But, on the '58 MILES album, on "Straight No Chaser" Cannon upstages Trane, IMO. That solo is just plain nasty!

[marcello]

The 1958 Newport concert was given a nasty review in Down Beat at that time and states that Coltrane is a bad influence on Cannonball!

[Morganized]

I think that Ball was profoundly affected by Trane during their time together. Hell, who woudn't be?

I also think that it took him quite a while to fully and comfortably assimilate Trane's vocabulary and to find a way for it to fit within his personal tonal and rhythmic character. We all listen to Milestones and Kind Of Blue like they're "perfect" records, maybe because in the end they are, but if you want to look at it really objectively and put yourself inside the mindsof the players instead of "receiving" the music as a listener, I think that you can hear Cannonball "scuffling" in a sense on these albums. Not in a "lost" kind of way, far from it. But you hear his normally fluid rhythmic pulse being broken up/down as he attempts, in my mind consciously, to get inside what Trane was doing. I don't hear it so much (hardly at all, infact) on the non-modal material, but on things like "So What", it's like he's wondering "Where's the goddam changes? When's the next one coming? What am I going to do until it does? How does Trane do this shit? Help me, John, HELP ME!"

And really, there's no shame in that. There would have been shame if he'd just did like a lot of players in the immediate post-KOB time did and string together cliches that fit and offer up a winkingly faux version of Modal Jazz Ain't It Hip Y'All!?!?!?!!!!!!

But he didn't do that. He was trying to deal with it, and he didn't seem to be afraid to step on his dick more than a few time in the process. And in the end, he did deal with it, although by the time that he seemed to have fully gotten a personal grip on it - mid-60s is what seems right to my ears - he was making the type of records that didn't have as their main goal showing that he had.

But good lord, listen to something like "Chocolate Nuisance" off of Black Messiah, or any other one of those Capitol cuts where the music gets out unfiltered, and you're hearing a guy who had gotten it all under control. It took him a while, and he did it sort of "on the sly" career-wise, but bygod, he got it done. And that's why I love Cannonball Adderley.

Excellent post Jim. I will have to give Cannonball a closer listen.

Thanks

[Larry Kart]

What Morganized said and what Jim said. My preference for Cannonball where he's not trying to assimilate Trane's influence (or at least not trying in ways that I can detect) is admittedly based on incomplete evidence. I wasn't listening to him much after the early Riversides, don't think I've heard any of the Capitols except in passing.

Again, BTW, it's probably a project so vast as to seem impossible to execute, but a "Best of Sangrey" collection would be something else. I hereby volunteer to pitch in, if Jim is willing. Seriously.

[Larry Kart]

Sorry. That first sentence should have been: "What Morganized said about what Jim said."

[AllenLowe]

Something Else is, indeed, a monumental work; what has always surprised me is how few people seem to realize that it's basically, for Miles, a warmup to Kind of Blue (listen to the way he plays the blues on it, and the arrangements); as for further Cannonball, one of my favorties has always been Know What I Mean with Bill Evans -

as for Trane's influence, let's not forget that Miles commented in some later interviews that he was always on Cannonball to get further into the chords, that his early playing swung but was too harmonically simple. Certainly Trane was a major catalyst in changing this -

[JSngry]

What Morganized said and what Jim said. My preference for Cannonball where he's not trying to assimilate Trane's influence (or at least not trying in ways that I can detect) is admittedly based on incomplete evidence. I wasn't listening to him much after the early Riversides, don't think I've heard any of the Capitols except in passing.

Again, BTW, it's probably a project so vast as to seem impossible to execute, but a "Best of Sangrey" collection would be something else. I hereby volunteer to pitch in, if Jim is willing. Seriously.

The Capitols are in serious need of re-evaluation, not for what they present on the surface, but for what they provide by implication, which is glimpses, sometimes fleeting, sometimes fully exposed - but never at album's length - of Cannonball's evolution. I included the title cut from The Happy People on my last BFT, and judging by the response, if I hadn't have left in the spoken introduction of the band, not that many people would've guessed that it was Cannonball. That's how much he evolved. And then you got the even later "Stars Fell On Alabama" from Phoenix - try that one on somebody who stopped listening after the Riversides and see what the reaction is! The version from the album that prompted this discussion is a stone classic, but this one is a whole 'nother thing!

The thing is, none (or very few) of the post-Riverside albums have as their goal Showcasing The Evolution & Musical Growth Of Cannonball Adderley. They're coming from someplace else, which is totally cool and all that. There's some really fine stuff in there (the best stuff on Black Messiah is a total motherfucker), but the're geared towards the "total presentation" bag, and that was (and is) a beautiful thing in that it gets the vibe out to a much broader audience. But if you're listening, you can hear it anyway. It's in there.

As for that other thing, I really don't know what purpose it would serve, or what would be done with it after it was compiled, but if there's a genuine demand (and that's a huge if, I think), far be it from me to get in the way of that demand being met.

Edited January 14, 2006 by JSngry

[jazzbo]

I really love the Capitol stuff from the last three years or so especially. As Jim says, "total presentation," there's a bit of it all in these stews. . . . But man, Cannon plays some shit that just floors me: ideas, swing, groove, penetration of the psyche. . . it's all there. There are moments on them that are hardly surpassed by any other sax player (just for me, my tastes and bent).

[Peter Friedman]

The influence of a dominant innovative musican can have have either a positive or negative impact on many other established musicians. In my personal opinion, Coltrane had a negative impact on some players I particularly enjoyed - before - they got , to some degree, "on the Trane".

The most glaring example to me is with Harold Land. I suspect that many will not agree, but I much preferred Land's playing on his earlier recordings, such as the things he did on Contemporary, before Trane.

Art Pepper is another example, though here I find it more of a mixed result. Some of Pepper's later recordings come off well with the emotional impact of the music reaching lofty heights. However, there are others where his lengthy Trane influenced modal playing bores me.

I don't care much for most of Cannonball's later recordings. There are a few exceptions on Capitol, but it is his Riverside period with Yusef Lateef as well as the things like "Cannonball Takes Off" and "Things Are Getting Better" that say the most to me. Wynton Kelly was a great fit with Cannonball, and anything they did together turned out to be top quality.

For my taste, much of Cannonball's later recordings saw a change toward a more commercially oriented style that I no longer found interesting. The frequent use of electric piano in Cannonball's groups was a symptom of a trend during that period that I found unfortunate.

[Guest akanalog]

there is some live stuff out there from 1972 with george duke that is pretty exploratory and great. long versions of black messiah and doctor honoris causa among other things. i love george duke and think he was a master of electric pianos and synthesizers though i know others dont feel this way.

[jazzbo]

Yeah, I think Duke did great things in this band. Shoot, I even remember some of the "Dukey-Stick" stuff fondly!

[AllenLowe]

I tend to agree with Peter, though there are some good moments on the Capitols; when I saw Cannonball, must have been early 1970s, I had been listening to his stuff with Miles and the Riversides, and his appearance was a big disappointment. Too much bad funky music of the kind that jazz musicians were trying back in those days in desperation at rock and roll's hegemony. We were hoping he would just PLAY, but everything fell into a monotonous groove. I've slways tried to avoid this kind of jazz, as jazz musicians don't do it half as well as people like James Brown - I don't begrude him his financial success at it, more power to him; it's just if you had to sit and listen to it, that was another story -

as for Pepper/Coltrane, a different problem - very few musicians of Pepper's generation truly understood Coltrane and post-Coltrane styles. Pepper thought if he broke a few notes, or overblew, he was being hip to the sound; unfrotunately not true. Same with Frank Morgan, who plays great bebop but than flails around aimlessly on Wayne Shorter tunes. I've even heard Jackie Mclean trying not-too-successfully to play "outside," and just fall back on endless cycles of fifths. This is not to say that some have not done it successfully (Bill Dearango is a great example), but mannerisms by themselves don't capture the style, just as a jazz musician endlessly repeating a flat third don't make funk (witness OP) -

Edited January 14, 2006 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

when I saw Cannonball, must have been early 1970s, I had been listening to his stuff with Miles and the Riversides, and his appearance was a big disappointment. Too much bad funky music of the kind that jazz musicians were trying back in those days in desperation at rock and roll's hegemony.

Nothing faux about Cannonball's funk, imo. If anything, that was more who he was at root than anything else - a fat, bass fishing, unhealthy food eatin' (check pout Nat's recipe for Souse in Jazz Cooks and marvel that he lived as long as he did...) Southern cat who just happened to have really big ears and phemominal chops. A true "man of the people" in a way that few post-bebop jazz musicians have been.

Although there's certainly been (and continues to be) plenty of posing going on in the jazz-funk field (which is fundamentaly a different beast than the jazzz-rock thing, and in more ways than one), I never got even a hint that Cannonball was faking it. Ask youself this: which was more of a construct - "Fiddler On the Roof" or "Why Am I Treated So Bad"? On which one do you think that he had to "come to from the outside" more? Where was he from first - New York or Florida?

I'm hip to all the "sophisticated" (and often enough, justified) complaints about funk-jazz, but jeez, these cats didn't live in a vaccum, and I don't for one second doubt that in at least some instances, some people played it because they enjoyed connecting with the people - their people. In fact, on Black Messiah, when Cannonball introduces the horrid (to my ears anyway) rock stylings of Mike Deasy, he makes it clear that going this far into a rock bag was not what him and his band were usually about. So the blanket assumption that it was all done to compete in some form or fashion with "rock" is not necessarily an astute assessment of the situation.

No doubt, some cats went the way they went for the money (if only just the extent of being able to keep working). But I don't think that Cannonball was one of them. I think that he was a truly hip cat who dug playing for people. "Populism" always seems to cause problems of one sort or another amngst the cognoscenti, but good god, what the hell is wrong with giving "the masses" some good, honest, soulful "simple" music, especially if you can bring the other stuff along with it? Seems like a win/win to me - the musicians get to work, the people get sastified, the musicians get a little somthin-somthiin for themselves here and there, the people get their ears stretched a little bit here and there, and a good time is had by all. Everybody goes home happy. If that's totally alien to who you are, well then yeah, don't try to go there. To thine ownself and all that. But if you dig people, and dig playing for people, hey...

That might not be "art", probably isn't in fact, but if it's not a valid, organic way to make music of at least some intrinsic merit, if it's all bullshit all the time, then fuck art. Art will have done got too big for its britches.

[jazzbo]

I have heard the sermon and it resonates within.

Up with people!

I love Cannon.

[AllenLowe]

well, Jim, I tend to think it sounds better on paper and in theory than in practice - and I saw/heard lots of it in those fallow days of jazz in its between years, especially around NYC which was really suffering jazz-wise between, say, 1968-1975. I don't question Cannonball's sincerity or authenticity, it's just that the music was largely a bore, and I always wished that jazz musicians like himself might use those root forms and make something just a bit more interesting out it - like Albert Ayler, for instance. Or Crawford, to use another example of a musician that I liked a bit better at it. Or, of course, Mingus, who truly applied his jazz life to it. Or Ornette, or Hemphill, etc etc. Of course, funk is a bit different than the ways those guys were working, but I honestly think a later generation of musicians was better equipped to liberate funk, as they understood it better, grew up with it. With Cannonball, as with lots of other jazz players, it was just a bit too genteel.

I loved Cannonball, great player, and, as I said, I think he was doing what had to be done with sincerity and a nice appreciation for his audience. It just, as I've said, at least to me, sounds better in sociological theory than in practice -

[JSngry]

I always wished that jazz musicians like himself might use those root forms and make something just a bit more interesting out it

More interesting to whom?

but I honestly think a later generation of musicians was better equipped to liberate funk

Liberate it from what?

With Cannonball, as with lots of other jazz players, it was just a bit too genteel.

Gentility has no place in funk/jazz?

I know that it's damn near impossible not to bring our own perspectives/wants/needs/expectations/etc into our evaluations, but aren't these the doppelganger equivalents of the criticisms that Anthony Braxton's music isn't "black enough" to be "real jazz"? It's like "funk(y)" only comes in one form. I can't buy that. Funk(y) is people, not a theory or a formula (in spite of industry attempts and rewards to make it otherwise).