Ezz-thetics

Ezz-thetics

a column by
Stuart Broomer

Mosaic Records have done more than any other American company to document jazz history judiciously, setting the highest standards for material selection, historical background, and sound quality. Now they have applied themselves to a particularly daunting task: creating Classic Black & White Jazz Sessions (Mosaic MD11-273), a fitting edition of the pioneering New York independent label that produced records between 1943 and 1949. Absorbing the material is a challenge, imagining the gathering of records, the data and circumstances of their recording is far more daunting. None of the original masters has apparently survived, requiring seeking out the best examples of the label’s releases available. The result is an 11-CD set, running to some 243 tracks, most running between three and four minutes, in keeping with the 78 rpm formats. The total playing time is 13 hours.

The booklet accompanying the set runs to 44 LP-sized pages, including extensive discographical data, the label’s history and the individual musical highlights of each of 61 recording sessions, as well as detailing industry and social conditions, the rise of the independents, and the history of the Black & White founders and management. The chronicle is the work of Dan Morgenstern, Billy Vera, and Scott Wenzel, and the combination of research, insight and sheer assembly is remarkable. The material has some chronological shape but some sessions are grouped together to present an individual artist’s work or to collect artists stylistically, hence there are complete discs of R & B-flavored saxophonist Jack McVea and “progressive” bandleader Earl Spencer, as well as CDs that compile the label’s vocalists, beboppers, and traditional pianists. The account begins with the problems faced by Black & White label founder Len Schriber. A keen record collector, Schriber set out to record the jazz he loved in an environment shaped by war-time shellac shortages (he was driven to buy up old records for the raw materials to make new ones) and the American Federation of Musicians’ 1940s’ recording bans over negotiations with record companies (the same circumstances that left much of the early history of bebop relatively undocumented).

Depending on one’s perspective, jazz in the 1940s could mean many things, from the putative war between “moldy figs,” dedicated to the music’s past, and “be-boppers,” dedicated to its future (their respective “spokesmen,” pianist Art Hodes and pianist-arranger-composer-critic Leonard Feather are both represented here) to the emergence of the “progressive” school, merging jazz and classical orchestration, usually typified by Stan Kenton, but here by Earle Spencer, a young Los Angeles trombonist and big band leader. There is also the heady amalgam of swing and jump blues transmuting into rhythm ‘n’ blues, en route to rock and roll. Schriber apparently favored earlier jazz and eventually sold the label to distributor Paul Reiner who would employ Ralph Bass Jr. to take on most A & R duties with Norman Granz also supervising some sessions.

It is all here, in part indicative of a label both struggling to document what it loved and searching for an audience. It is a compound image, increasingly driven by market forces as much as enthusiasm, and while it misses the era’s highest moments, it is an expansive image of the multi-dimensional world from which the era’s works of transformative power, by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell, emerged. Here it’s Charlie Venturo’s (sic) sextet, Gerald Wilson’s early big band, and Howard McGhee playing re-named Charlie Parker compositions in Los Angeles. It’s also a motherlode of music that ranges from the great to the very good to the entertaining to the ... well ... occasionally bizarre.

If our historical image of the 1940s focuses on its most forward-looking performances, the Black & White set presents a different view, but it also provides a context. The word “boogie” is far more common than the word “bop,” and boogie-woogie music is too, though Dizzy Gillespie arrives to electrify a Joe Marsala session. Historical eras tend to be remembered more for their vanguards than their business as usual, but there is a certain significant relationship. Revolutions in the arts may testify as much to the health of the mainstream as to its stultification. It may be the vigor, grace, and wit of much of this music that stimulates change, something heard here mostly as a trace rather than a presence.

It is music that takes time to get to know and it takes a while to follow the organization of the set, from the assemblage of an individual artist’s work to the stylistic shifts of both the era and the ownership, from the movement of the label from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. At the very least, the music is so wondrously period specific and novel that it can feel like one is picking up a radio broadcast from a time warp in space.

An example: some of the best music (brilliant and lively) here is produced by clarinetist Barney Bigard, who spent years with both Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, here heard at three New York sessions recorded between December 29, 1944 and January 5, 1945, near the end of Schriber’s New York term, yet placed, for reasons of length, after a collection of vocalists recorded afterwards in Chicago and Los Angeles. The sessions were all produced by Leonard Feather who functions as producer, composer (more compulsion, than skill) and, for the first two sessions, as pianist. The first session features singer Etta Jones, then a teenager, working her way through a series of Feather’s blues and near-blues (later hits for Dinah Washington), bringing a style that is at once laconic and laid-back, drenched in Billie Holiday’s diction yet with a certain undercurrent of youthful anticipation. The second set, from the same date, gives freer rein o the band with excellent performances from trumpeter Joe Thomas, saxophonist Georgie Auld, guitarist Chuck Wayne, and Bigard, who is superb on the set. Feather again plays piano with his composing (or at least his titling) becoming increasingly daring with “Poon-Tang” here and, on the next session (sung by a tenor saxophonist also named Joe Thomas), “Sweet Marijuana Brown.” Feather’s song writing is what it is, someone trying too hard or not trying at all, but the final session, still produced by him, has possibly the greatest upgrade in jazz history, with Feather replaced at the piano by Art Tatum.

At times the Black & White label became a full-range record label, but the set is restricted to its jazz and jazz-related recordings It also omits the extensive recordings of the jazz-suffused blues of T-Bone Walker, previously collected in its own Mosaic box set.

The Music:

The eleven CDs might represent the arc of jazz history from 1915 to 1949, beginning with a solo pianist playing blues and concluding with orchestral progressive jazz. The following survey is here to point out highlights; the bands and compositions are far too numerous and too diverse to discuss here, but all is of interest to listeners who appreciate the multiple textures of jazz at any given moment. Mosaic’s discography is available on their site.

New York:

The first two CDs are largely devoted to traditional jazz forms, featuring pianists from Art Hodes to Willie “The Lion” Smith, and the material is largely superb. Hodes, born in present-day Ukraine in 1904, was transported to Chicago in his infancy and might as well have been born there. He plays seven solos, setting the mood with an account of James P Johnson’s “Snowy Mountain Blues,” here purified to a clarity that suggests Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress recordings from just a few years previous.

Pianist Cliff Jackson is heard in three sessions, all excellent. The first is a quartet with the eccentric genius of early jazz clarinet, Pee Wee Russell, mining a million original inflections as he traverses early blues and pop songs. Jackson’s solo treatment of works like “Royal Garden Blues” and “Limehouse Blues” suggests how 1920s jazz had reached its own notion of the classic by the early 1940s. Jackson’s Village Cats, however, contribute four tracks that stretch to, or exceed, the four-minute mark, and seem at times prepared to stretch the limits of liveliness, with a traditional New Orleans front-line that includes the DeParis brothers, Sidney on trumpet and Wilbur on trombone, then doubles the traditional clarinet role by sharing it with Sidney Bechet (soprano saxophone), further adding Gene Sedric playing tenor (and occasionally singing). When Everett Barksdale come to the fore, he's playing an electric guitar in a way close to the idiom recently developed by Charlie Christian. It is jazz, played by its own rules, before the rules were ever codified.

CD II includes a few sessions in which immortals share space with regular folk. Mezz Mezzrow plays quizzically slippery clarinet with pianist George Wettling’s trio at a time when he might have been working on his memoir, Really the Blues. The Lion and His Cubs and The Lion’s Jazz Band are a single band at a single session with different names for each record released. Here Willie “The Lion” Smith sings and plays well in a band in which trumpeter Max Kaminsky provides focus. Elsewhere James P. Johnson brings rare virtuosity and vitality to a quartet led by the fine clarinetist Rod Cless and anchored by bassist Pops Foster.

The late ‘44-early ‘45 New York sessions recordings also include sessions by clarinetist Joe Marsala and his Orchestra (a period convention – there are seven musicians present) that speak definitively to the transitional nature of the era. At an extended session from November 1944, the band includes Marsala’s wife harpist Adele Girard, trumpeter Joe Thomas, and Chuck Wayne on electric guitar, the mixed textures suggesting something of Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five with harpsichord and electric guitar. The quality of the session drops off with the entry of singer Linda Keene to sing a couple of blues (composed by the producer and substitute pianist Leonard Feather), but the best of Marsala’s contributions is yet to come. In a January 1945 session, no supervisor apparent, his band covers all the bases with his rhythm section regulars, bassist Irving Land and drummer Buddy Christian, supporting traditional pianist Cliff Jackson, the electrified Wayne on guitar, and an electrifying Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet playing such period favorites as “Perdido,” “On the Alamo,” and “Cherokee” with sometimes startling élan.

While Les Schriber favored early jazz, the market for music was shifting. In 1945, he sold the company Reiner. First Chicago became the centre of the label’s activity and then operations were moved to Los Angeles. The music immediately becomes more diverse in style, with CDs in the set following genre organization more than a chronological one.

Chicago:

On CD III, Lil Armstrong, here saddled with the appended stage name “Brown Gal,” appears with a fine band that mixes boogie-woogie with the energy of swing, highlighted by playing of the first rank by trombonist J.C. Higginbotham, trumpeter Jonah Jones and drummer Baby Dodds, with clarinetist Al Gibson doubling on baritone saxophone to add further ensemble forces.

Los Angeles:

CD IV has seven sessions recorded in Los Angeles between November 1945 and December 1947. All the sessions feature singers and those at which supervision is noted credit Bass or Norman Granz. The personnel signal a generational change. Estelle Edson appears with Oscar Pettiford and the All Stars, among whom is Lucky Thompson, joining Pettiford as a featured soloist. Ivie Anderson, formerly featured singer with Duke Ellington, has saxophonists Willie Smith and Buddy Collette and bassist Charles Mingus among her All-Stars, as she ranges from Ellington’s “I Got it Bad...” to the evidently Slim Gaillard-inspired “The Voot Is Here to Stay” to J.C. Johnson’s “Empty Bed Blues,” associated with Bessie Smith. Helen Humes’ various 1946 All-Stars include trumpeters Buck Clayton and Teddy Buckner, tenor saxophonist Wild Bill Moore, guitarist Barney Kessel, pianist Meade Lux Lewis, bassist Red Callender, and drummers Chico Hamilton and Shadow Wilson. Even when the occasional dud turns up among the songs, the bands are energized and brilliant.

While there is a host of bands, many of them trios, that contribute a few tunes each, there is substantial documentation of a few musicians from Black & White’s West Coast period (a complete discography is available at mosaicrecords.com).

Next to T-Bone Walker, Jack McVea was, unquestionably, Black & White’s most successful artist, so successful in the case of “Open the Door, Richard,” that unpaid bills to distributors eventually bankrupted the company. A tenor saxophonist who stretched swing and jump blues to rhythm and blues and whose band played raucous music with hard-edged accuracy, McVea’s success rivalled the idiom’s principal architect, Louis Jordan. His six sessions here, spread over 15 months, testify to the band’s stability. All feature bassist Frank Clarke and drummer Rabon Tarrant, while pianists Jimmy Shacklton and Crow Kahn show up regularly. Musicians who appear incidentally testify to the talent poll, including tenor saxophonist Wild Bill Moore, alto saxophonist Marshall Royal, trombonist Melba Liston, and pianist Call Cobbs.

Charlie Ventura and his Sextet play eight pieces from two sessions on CD IX that largely stretch to the four minutes plus limit of a 12” 78. Driven forward by Ventura’s aggressive tenor saxophone, the music borders on swing and bop with fine bands that include trumpeter Red Rodney, alto saxophonist Willie Smith (a near-perfect stand-in for Johnny Hodges), guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Red Callender, and drummer Nick Fatool. The band plays familiar songs (some already enshrined, others later standards) like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “’S Wonderful,” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” further feeding an almost casual energy.

The very best of the West Coast material appears on CD X, beginning with something called Junior Jazz a half-hour recording of a loose jam session at Compton Junior College that features trumpeter Howard McGhee and tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson playing a series of re-christened bop anthems. Apparently, the label’s A&R man, Ralph Bass worked with “school and city officials to help reduce juvenile delinquency,” but legal concerns didn’t extend to copyright infringement: the credits here restore “Oodie Coo Bop” to “Ornithology” and other re-named compositions to their original titles and composers. The band also includes guitarist Irving Ashby and Jack McVea and a backing trio of pianist Teddy Bunn, Red Callender, and drummer Jackie Mills. The band reduces to a quartet supporting alto saxophonist Les Robinson, one-time lead altoist in Artie Shaw’s band whose lyricism and virtuosity shine on “Body and Soul,” then Lucky Thompson joins them for a roaring version of “Lover.”

Pianist and arranger Wilbert Baranco appears as leader of a quartet and a trio, but his most notable achievements here come as leader of his Rhythm Bombardiers, a big band that includes McGhee, Thompson, Vic Dickenson, Willie Smith, trumpeter Snooky Young, and Charles Mingus.

The same kind of sectional skills with even more focussed energy grace two big band dates by Gerald Wilson, already an accomplished arranger with a keen ear for harmonies and sectional counterpoint. Trumpeter Al Killian adds a special edge, his lead parts written higher than an arranger might expect to have on hand, notably on Count Basie’s “One O’clock Jump.” Melba Liston acts as arranger/composer here as well as trombonist, imbuing her “Warm Moon” with an Ellington-like lustre, while Wilson’s own “The Moors” is lush, keening, and pensive.

Earle Spencer and his Orchestra:

The final disc in the set is devoted to shifting incarnations of a single, genuinely obscure yet certainly worthwhile band, Earle Spencer and his Orchestra, a Los Angeles big band started in 1946 by a 20-year-old trombonist and which recorded for Black & White from 1946 to 1949. It is also another dimension of Black & White’s broad purview of the jazz of the era, an example of the progressive jazz school embodied in the Stan Kenton Orchestra. The connection is initially emphasized with a piece called “Earle Meets Stan” and continues to the final 1949 edition in which the personnel included a substantial number of Kenton associates, among them trombonist Jimmy Knepper, alto saxophonists Herb Geller and Art Pepper, and guitarist Laurindo Almeida. The similarity consists in a large orchestra playing tightly arranged, sometimes complex compositions that stretched the harmonic language at least as far as Ravel, heard here in the subtle voicings of Paul Nelson’s “Jazzbo,” and often included complex rhythmic exchanges and layering among sections, as in Nelson’s “Box Lunch.” The work is both elevated and insistently current, with a “Concerto for Guitar” that features Jack Marshall’s electric guitar, while “Five Guitars in Flight” adds five electric guitarists to the band. Heard here in close proximity to “Oh You Beautiful Doll” with ensemble vocals and a traditional jazz band within a big band, the qualities stand out in even higher relief, but that is very much a part of the 78 medium and the era, music delivered in three-minute jolts, most often on juke boxes. Occasionally the music struggles with those temporal restrictions, with two-part suites like “E.S. Boogie,” “Rhapsody in Boogie,” and even “Spencerian Theory,” the only composition in the annals of jazz, to my knowledge, to flirt, hopefully unconsciously, with social Darwinism. Now that’s a time capsule moment.

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