The Jazz Column

BY MICHAEL ULLMAN

At least since the 1938 publication of Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn , which was based on the short, miserable life of Bix Beiderbecke, jazz has been considered a young man’s game. Those young men were expected to shoot like a rocket and then fizzle like a Roman candle. Many of them, including Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Blanton, Fats Navarro, and Dick Twardzik, obliged by their premature demises. (Oscar Wilde would have said they followed the critic’s ideas rather too obsequiously.) The fans aren’t totally wrong: Youth does have its glamour, even when it isn’t doomed, and there is a visceral excitement in hearing a young musician discover himself or herself. And, as anyone who has heard a sputtering veteran horn player knows, old age presents instrumentalists with physical problems that are often insurmountable, or at least seem so. I remember talking in the late 70s or early 80s to the once wonderful trumpet player Buck Clayton when he was trying to make a comeback. Clayton had been a mainstay of the 30s Count Basie big band. A lyrical player more dependent on his sound and poise and perfect choice of notes than on any virtuosic phrasing, Clayton was the man who stated the melodies of I Want a Little Girl and Way Down Yonder in New Orleans for the Kansas City Six sessions featuring Lester Young. Those were perfection indeed. But when he ran into physical problems he turned to arranging to eke out a living. Now he was trying to play trumpet again. Performing with a small group in a now defunct club in Boston’s South End, he sounded out-of-sorts. He didn’t hit his notes squarely, nor move between them with assurance. He told me that he’d get back in shape if only he could get six weeks work in a row. When I suggested practicing as an alternative, he looked surprised. Then he shook his head and said he just couldn’t do it. He was used to playing for people. Perhaps he couldn’t. He had plenty of musical ideas, but the difficulties with execution made them hard to perceive. I left him in his hotel room scribbling on a half-completed score. He went back to writing music. Like older pitchers who have to learn a curve ball to supplement their waning money pitch, some players adapt to their lessening power or mobility and spend their old age repeating the effects that are still within their power. A few manage to keep the discoveries happening, or make what they’ve already done repeatedly sound continually fresh. I’d like to celebrate the longevity of some of those.

As I write, Sonny Rollins, born on September 7, 1930, is a few months from his 80th birthday. Recently named the Edward MacDowell Medalist for 2010, he’s on what they are calling his 80th-birthday tour. A star since the early 50s, and in his last few decades a near-certain winner of the DownBeat awards for best tenor saxophonist, Rollins has regularly been called the greatest jazz improviser since Charlie Parker. He doesn’t need, or perhaps even want, more honors. Nonetheless, I was once instrumental in presenting him with one he must already have forgotten: Before a concert in Medford several decades ago, Tufts University gave him a lifetime achievement award. After the ensuing concert, my son, then around 10 and a budding tenor saxophonist, gave a fine tribute to the saxophone colossus when he told me that that was not only the best music he had ever heard, but probably the best music he ever would hear.

I know what he meant. I heard Sonny Rollins play calypso one night in Boston’s Paul’s Mall. He was on fire during the first set, which meant that with his big roiling tone he could barely stop himself from playing. When he thought he had finished a solo, he would let his guitarist start to take a chorus, or most of it. But then as if he couldn’t stand holding back the music that was pent up inside him, Rollins interrupted mid-chorus and started up where he left off. One of his compositions, recorded with Clifford Brown, is Pent-up House. Perhaps it was a metaphor for the man himself. He was a sight. A tall, erect man in a loose white shirt, with a carefully trimmed goatee and moustache, he blew harder than any saxophonist I had heard. I wasn’t alone in my appreciation of his sheer power. When in the early 60s pianist Paul Bley played with Rollins, he was shocked at the sheer volume of the saxophonist’s sound. Wagging his horn up and down like an elongated tongue, he eventually wandered through the audience, which was soon on its feet. I was standing, too, and had that feeling that musicians often talk about, but rarely experience. I didn’t feel as if I were listening to music: I felt that it was somehow coming through me.

What was coming was a flood of powerful music, a series of surprises perhaps, in craggy, unevenly spaced phrases, yet played with a vivid intensity of sound and a rhythmic thrust that made everything cohere. His art is, I am tempted to say, one of joyous excess. In the last decades his tone has been so vibrant it seems to shake, rattle, and roll on its own, no matter what Rollins plays. When pianist Tommy Flanagan heard this latest version of the saxophonist, he said he burst out laughing. Others have as well. Rollins has the most blatant sound since Sidney Bechet, and yet it does what he wants: Rollins’s playing can be sensual, ironic; he can dance or act goofy. He is also orderly; many of his solos, including that on the 1956 Pent-up House with Clifford Brown, begin with a simple two- or three-note phrase that he repeats and then, gradually or precipitously according to his mood, begins to unpack. On Pent-up House, Rollins imitates Brown’s final, unpromising phrase, elongating the last note until he releases it to paraphrase the written melody. The solo unfolds in a series of short phrases with an occasional long scale passage that unwinds like a whip. What is most striking is the lyricism of the whole. You feel like singing it.

When after making his first record in six years, his Next Album (Milestone, 1972), it was announced that he’d appear at the Newport in New York Jazz Festival, I went to the city a week in advance, and for three nights in a row to the Village Gate, where Rollins was appearing, seemingly as a warmup for his big return gig at Carnegie Hall. Each night, he appeared with a slightly different rhythm section—I particularly remember bassist Bob Crenshaw—and Rollins seemed virtually to be teasing each new member. He’d stride on stage, often already playing solo, and play a series of dramatic statements that seemed to lead into a recognizable ballad. The previously worried bassist would look up somewhat relieved, and then Rollins would move without a hitch in a different direction. It was fun to watch: Every turn brought an appreciative sigh, smile, or laugh from the audience. At one point, a drunken youth approached the stage and seemed to be making a request in the general direction of the bandstand. Without breaking his stride, or losing continuity, Rollins moved over to him and played a mocking figure that, remarkably, got the guy flapping his wings in self-satisfaction. Miles, I thought, might have killed him. Every night at the Gate was a joy, but at the Carnegie Hall appearance, Rollins was out of sorts. He let his guitarist Masuo take long solos. The man would play a couple of choruses and look around desperately for Rollins to return. Rollins mostly hung out in the wings looking disconsolate. When he played he would approach the melody, restate it, come to the point where on a good night he would take flight, and then seemingly balk, like a recalcitrant horse. Then he’d play the melody again. I’ve seen this repeatedly. Playing well, he seems an endless fountain of ideas so rich they seem to spill over each other. On a bad night, he seems almost paralyzed.

Rollins is a quirky musician. Twice he retired, or as he prefers to put it, took a sabbatical. He grew up in New York City down the street from the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club, where he heard Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, and Basie. He watched the movies between sets, and began a lifelong obsession with what he calls “older standards.” Later he would record material few other modernists would approach, songs such as The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody, In the Chapel in the Moonlight, When You Wish upon a Star , as well as (for his wonderful trio album Way Out West ) I’m an Old Cowhand . ( Way Out West is available on Contemporary and also as part of the five-disc set Sonny Rollins: The Freelance Years , Riverside 4427-2. I recommend the set, which has Monk’s Brilliant Corners and dates led by Kenny Dorham, and Abbey Lincoln as well as Rollins’s The Sound of Sonny, Freedom Suite, Sonny Rollins Plays and Way Out West. ) Rollins’s mother, who was from the Virgin Islands, took him to calypso dances; some of his most endearing and enduring pieces are calypsos such as St. Thomas and The Everywhere Calypso. He says he became fixated on saxophone when he heard Louis Jordan and when he saw a beautiful alto in a musician’s case. He grew up in the same neighborhood as Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor, and played in pickup bands. He met Charlie Parker, heard Parker’s early masterpiece Koko and tried to combine the influence of bebop with his love of Coleman Hawkins. (He also admired the often forgotten Don Byas; nor did he neglect Lester Young.) By 1949, he was rehearsing on tenor saxophone with Thelonious Monk.

Rollins made his first recordings behind the bebop novelty singer Babs Gonzales more than 60 years ago, on January 29, 1949. In May, he recorded twice with an all-star bebop group led by trombonist J. J. Johnson. These were almost “cool” jazz sessions; Rollins’s gruff contributions provided contrast. Then in August, Rollins appeared with Bud Powell’s Modernists, which included the great trumpeter Fats Navarro. They made four three-minute masterpieces: Bouncing with Bud, Wail, Dance of the Infidels, and 52nd Street Theme. Rollins, still a few month shy of his 19th birthday, had arrived. By 1951 he was working with Miles Davis. Davis had heard the saxophonist at a jam session. In his autobiography Miles remembers hearing Rollins at a slightly later session with John Coltrane: “Sonny was awesome that night, scared the shit out of Trane.” He must have been formidable indeed. Coltrane didn’t scare easily.

There were problems. Like many of his generation, Rollins was using heroin, a problem that would plague him into the mid 50s. He was inconsistent in those years, but always forceful and sometimes brilliant. In 1951, he made his debut with Miles Davis on Dig (Prestige/OJC 005-2). This must have been a trying session for Rollins, who had a bad reed that squeaked repeatedly. Yet his playing was fascinating, hard-sounding and impulsive on the blues, more sweetly reflective on the ballads, such as My Old Flame. His apprenticeship, and what a series of accomplishments for a newcomer, was over by the mid 50s. In 1956 he made with pianist Tommy Flanagan and drummer Max Roach what is still my favorite Sonny Rollins record: Saxophone Colossus (Prestige/OJC 291-2. Again, I recommend the complete set: Sonny Rollins: The Complete Prestige Recordings , Prestige 7PCD-44-7-2). Gunther Schuller wrote about Rollins’s solo in Blue Seven , calling what he did “thematic improvising.” To Schuller, Rollins was playing in an orderly way based (as is much classical music) on repeated motifs that may be restated and varied. This method seemed to Schuller both admirable and new to jazz. Rollins evidently read the article and found it disturbing. Nonetheless, as the 50s came to an end, the future of the tenor saxophone and of much in jazz seemed to be split between Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, Rollins working increasingly complicated rhythmic and lyrical devices on standard material, and Coltrane expanding the sound of the tenor while investigating modal music. Rollins often seemed ironic, deconstructive; Coltrane, spiritual, even entranced.

Rollins blinked first. After making two new masterpieces, Way Out West (1957) and Freedom Suite (1958), he stopped playing in public. Two years later, he came back leading a quartet with the wonderful guitarist Jim Hall. They seemed opposites: Rollins with his big tone and jagged rhythmic devices would, one thought, inevitably overpower Hall, whose quiet playing, though melodically beautiful, often seemed to concentrate on harmonic variation. Their recorded collaborations, which began with God Bless the Child on January 30, 1962, were nonetheless a repeated joy, as we can hear on numbers such as Without a Song, where Hall answers every theme statement with a kind of exuberance that counters Rollins’s gruffness. When Rollins begins his solo with a short phrase that becomes the material of much of the ensuing chorus, Hall doesn’t flinch. They were now recording for RCA Victor, making brilliant music on The Bridge. (This set is available on another inevitable set on The Complete Sonny Rollins RCA Victor Recordings , RCA Victor 68675-32.)

Still, Rollins was unsettled. In 1959 and 1960, Ornette Coleman and his free jazz had burst upon and splintered the often compact jazz world. Like Coltrane, Sonny Rollins didn’t seem to know what to do about it. (Though perhaps bothered by no longer seeming at the outer edge of the jazz world, Miles Davis thought Ornette’s music was frankly ugly, and left it alone.) Both saxophonists made records with Coleman’s trumpeter, Don Cherry, before going back to what they did best. Rollins still flirted with the avant-garde; when he made his RCA Victor recording with Coleman Hawkins, he followed one of Hawkins’s hefty melodic improvisations with a prolonged squeak, and tried a whole record in a freer style in East Broadway Rundown . Live he played calypsos, ballads, and tried the occasional unaccompanied solo, as in his Body and Soul (Verve Records.) He must not have been content: Again he retired, this time from 1969 to 1971. He came back with a renewed zest for playing and a broader tone. He’s been with us ever since.

Marian McPartland has never left, not since 1946 when, the bride of cornetist Jimmy McPartland, she moved to the United States as a 28-year-old. She is now 92, and is the grande dame of jazz, a technically accomplished pianist who has moved with the times. (She has her own page on Facebook. There she sometimes posts recent solos. That’s keeping with the times. ) She established herself as a modernist pianist in the 50s in long residencies at first the Embers Club and then the Hickory House, where she played with two near-stars, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Joe Morello. Morello would become world famous at the end of the decade as the drummer for the Dave Brubeck Quartet. McPartland recorded for Savoy Records ( Marian McPartland in Concert has been reissued as Savoy 0202). She not only played jazz; she wrote about it for American magazines and newspapers and for Melody Maker in England. To my ears, she came fully into an even richer period of music-making in the 70s when she was recording first for her own Halcyon Records, and then for Concord Records. (One of my favorite McPartland records, Interplay , on Halcyon, has a bluesy version of Hoagy Carmichael’s New Orleans , as well as Miles Davis’s Milestones and her own Twilight. This record is regrettably out of print.) Sonny Rollins was at least nonplussed by free jazz. McPartland, who had already moved without an audible tremor from vaudeville and Dixieland into the language of bop, found the technique intriguing, as we can hear on her Ambiance (Concord 90029-2). She showed that she could play free, and then largely stopped.

It must have been in the 80s that I heard Marian McPartland repeatedly at the Merry-Go-Round Room, a small club with a sometimes moveable stage in the Copley Square Hotel in Boston. One night, her friend composer Alec Wilder was in attendance. Perhaps as a result she played a succession of Wilder songs, including, if my memory is correct, It’s So Peaceful in the Country and Moon and Sand . She’s loyal to her friends. She made a whole record of Wilder tunes: Marian McPartland Plays the Music of Alec Wilder (Halcyon 109). But this night everything seemed to glow, including Wilder’s face as he listened to her play what seemed like increasingly inventive substitute harmonies and intriguing melodic twists that reinvented Wilder’s work, to his evident delight. Afterwards I talked to Wilder, who was still astonished, he said, at McPartland’s inventiveness and her ability to execute her every spontaneous idea. Wilder’s Moon and Sand is on In My Life , Concord 4561. Marian McPartland can also be heard on a series of Concord discs, including her wonderful solo recital with a Duke Ellington flavor, Live at Maybeck Hall , Concord 4460. She has also made a disc of the music of another piano giant: Marian McPartland Plays the Music of Mary Lou Williams , Concord 1605. I’ll Be Around , Wilder wrote. So far in my lifetime, Marian McPartland always has been.

So has a lesser-known giant, violinist Svend Asmussen, who was born in Copenhagen in 1916. Asmussen’s first jazz heroes were exemplary: Stuff Smith and another violinist who first became famous in the 20s, Joe Venuti. Venuti’s Blue Four was the model for Asmussen’s first group. He’s a gentler violinist than was Venuti. His phrases, especially on ballads, can tail off gracefully. Where Venuti used to throw out a high note like a spear, Asmussen lets one escape like a sigh. He’s a sophisticated musician, who has had several important American encounters. Benny Goodman wanted him in his band in the 50s. In 1963, he recorded Jazz Violin Session with Duke Ellington (Atlantic 1688). In 1962, he made European Encounter (Atlantic 90533) with pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. They focused on Lewis’s compositions with one exception: They also played Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman. (The critic who wrote the notes to the original album evidently objected to the Coleman, though he noted that in Asmussen’s hands “the desperation of Coleman’s own recording has given way to a more submerged and controlled melancholy.”) The Lewis-Asmussen collaboration begins in dulcet tones, with Lewis playing one of his spare, bluesy introductions to his own If I Were Eve. Asmussen’s stylistic reticence undercuts the seemingly melodramatic gestures of Lewis’s Winter Tale ; elsewhere, as in the jumpy Slater’s Theme, Lewis and Asmussen make a perfect team. Now, 48 years later, Asmussen’s latest disc, Makin’ Whoopee—and Jazz ( Arbors Records 9390), swings so gently it’s almost a sway. The session is warmly recorded: It’s like a hug. Asmussen plays the title cut, of course, and other songs as well known as Danny Boy and Things Ain’t What They Used to Be. He also brings back the Django Reinhardt classic Nuages ; here the plangent acoustic guitar of Jacob Fischer is key. He ventures into Sonny Rollins territory with Skylark. Then there’s music new to me, at least, Olle Adolphson’s Trobbel. To my ears, Asmussen has lost little of what has made him one of Europe’s most important jazz musicians. Anyone who likes jazz violin, or swing music, should hear Makin’ Whoopee.

I imagine that I have had as long a relationship with Miles Davis’s most famous record, Kind of Blue , as almost any listener. I was 14 and a fledging jazz listener and player when it was recorded. I liked blues. On that principle, I bought one by one Ellington’s famous Newport album and his Back to Back , Mingus’s Blues and Roots , a Monk record with Blue Monk, the Jimmy Guiffre album with Two Kinds of Blue, and Kind of Blue . I could have done a lot worse. I listened to Kind of Blue obsessively. I was troubled by one thing. I went back and forth between Bill Evans’s descriptions of the music on the back cover and the actual music, but I couldn’t hear the series of scales in Flamenco Sketches that the pianist described. I began to believe I heard the Spanish element, though. Years later I discovered I had one of the rare early copies of the record that was mislabeled: It confused Flamenco Sketches and All Blues. (Really: All Blues can begin to seem Spanish if you try hard enough.) I therefore wasn’t displeased when the first CD version of Kind of Blue came out, nor the gold compact disc that corrected the pitch on one side of the record, which was, until then, a trifle sharp. (I couldn’t tell at first: I used to play along with my records, and my turntable played everything a little sharp.) Though I appreciate the proper pitch and bright, immediate sound of the gold CD, I have always been drawn to the sound of the original LP. I therefore was a little dismayed to read the notes accompanying the latest reworking of Kind of Blue , this time by Andrew Rose for Pristine Audio (PAJZ 009). Rose has electronically sharpened the stereo imaging, an effect that doesn’t interest me at all. He has also worked on what seemed to him “the biggest problem” with the original issue. As he puts it, “The sound of the piano, my own instrument, was lifeless, flat, and entirely unlike a piano. … The more I listened, the more I realized this was not the only problem, and that it centered around the lower midranges of the instruments, producing a blurred and at times harsh sound in this register.” He has brought out that midrange. That seems like a good idea, and yet the final product makes me uneasy. I noted immediately the way bassist Paul Chambers seems to come out and recede almost note by note. Why does he seem to be in my lap at times and (more properly) behind the band in others? The piano is more up front, but Bill Evans’s held notes on So What seem to dangle in the air uncomfortably. That’s hardly an audiophile’s term for it. I offer a little of my relationship to this record to show that I might be uncommonly biased toward earlier versions. But I’ll stick with my LP and with the gold compact disc. Audiophiles might, however, be interested in the manipulated sound of the Pristine Audio disc.

The drummer on Kind of Blue , Jimmy Cobb, has proven that there is life after Miles Davis. His latest, Jazz in the Key of Blue (Chesky SACD 344) was made by a distinguished audiophile company that advertises that it uses: “No overdubs; No compressors in the signal path; No multitracking; No large mixing consoles.” That of course allows for the possibility of small mixing consoles, but no matter. What they have produced is a beautiful, natural-sounding set of intimate jazz featuring Cobb with trumpeter Roy Hargrove, guitarist Russell Malone, and bassist John Webber. Hargrove has rarely sounded so good, and Russell Malone is one of my favorite guitarists playing today. Malone begins Every Time We Say Goodbye by quoting the chords from the Benny Goodman vehicle Goodbye. Swing fans will appreciate the link. They play Johnny Mandel’s Emily , also a favorite of Marian McPartland which Bill Evans brought into jazz, and also a tune new to me, With You I’m Born Again. This is a ballad album, sensuous, intimate, and perfectly accomplished. The whole floats over Jimmy Cobb’s brushes: He has a way of making whatever is played in front of him sound inevitable.