Gerry Mulligan TenTette, “Westwood Walk.” GM, bari sx; Pete Candoli, tpt (1953)
I had my own radio show that first year and every year after that too. It was jazz of course and only jazz. It aired over the campus radio station, with a broadcast range of a tenth of a mile, barely enough to reach the dorms. I named it “Westward Walk,” after a Gerry Mulligan tune I used as theme music. I stayed with the show all the way through college, save for one semester my senior year when my friend Gary Barnard and I tried our hands at a comedy show instead. (We called it “Nothing.” This is how we advertised it: “When you’re back in the dorm after the movie Sunday night, turn on your radio and listen to an Hour of Nothing with Dave Keymer and Gary Barnard!” We wrote the show fresh every week, an hour long script –jokes, comedy routines, silly songs. We lasted seven or eight shows before giving up in exhaustion. The show was my idea. I had a lot of good ideas at the time. Execution was the problem.)
With limited broadcast range and a minuscule listening audience, the Hiram station didn’t get freebies from record suppliers like bigger campus radio stations did. Our deejays were expected to provide their own music. I ransacked my slowly growing jazz collection and borrowed freely from friends like Eustace “Cool Breeze” Smith, who hailed from Ethiopia and not only liked jazz but owned the only Coleman Hawkins album on campus and possibly the only recording of Dizzy Gillespie as well. My junior year, I changed the title of the show to “Open Country,” another Gerry Mulligan tune. I was heavily into Mulligan then.
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My musical tastes were pretty well set by college. I didn’t listen to –at least, no longer bought- any kind of pop music. I wasn’t into C&W, rock and roll, or the emergent Motown music just beginning to make its way onto white playlists. I wasn’t into classical music either, largely because I’d never been exposed to it in any systematic way. For the moment, which in my case lasted all the way through college, I was a jazzophile 100%.
Not only did I listen almost totally to jazz, I listened to only a few kinds of jazz. My enthusiasms were parochial. Although I listened to the great swing giants like Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, and Coleman Hawkins, I judged their music out of date, and thus not as inherently interesting as the newer jazz I liked. As to jazz before the thirties, forget it. It might as well not have existed for me.
My reservations and exclusions didn’t stop me, however, from traveling twenty miles to Kent State University my sophomore year to hear the Ellington orchestra play live. The band played in the athletic complex, which was the only building on campus big enough to house both band and audience. To make a stage for the band, they placed thick wood planks across the top of the swimming pool. The band played on top of the planks. I stood up front all through the concert, maybe ten feet from the band. All around, people were dancing but I just listened and watched. I knew the evening was special: I wanted to soak up as much of it as I could.
Later, I learned that 1956 was a make or break year for Ellington. Costs were high for bands and fewer people were coming out to listen or dance to them. A few months later, on July 7, 1956, Ellington played the Newport Jazz Festival, where his tenor player Paul Gonsalves let loose with a twenty-seven chorus solo on “Diminuendo in Blue,” backed mostly by bass and drums: Ellington stomped out chords on piano, band members egged him on but basically it was Paul Gonsalves Night. The release of the recording of that concert, Ellington at Newport, gave the band a new life. They played “Diminuendo” at Kent State. I don’t know how many choruses Gonsalves played that night but it was a lot: he went on and on and the excitement kept building. By the time he was through, the planks beneath the band were bouncing in time to the drums. It gobsmacked me.
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I mostly dug West Coast musicians my four years at Hiram. “West Coast jazz” was a convenient label for a more complicated phenomenon than that. Not everybody who played West Coast jazz was a West Coaster and not all West Coast jazz sounded like West Coast jazz supposedly sounded like. The players who epitomized the music were artists like Brubeck and Russ Freeman (piano), Desmond and Bud Shank (alto sax), Mulligan (bari sax), Shorty Rogers (trumpet, flugelhorn), Chet Baker (trumpet, vocals), Shelly Manne (drums). Clifford Brown recorded on the West Coast one time but was clearly an East Coaster, not just in locale but style. Tenor saxist Zoot Sims recorded a lot on the West Coast before moving east: he was pretty much uncategorizable, hot and cool all at once. Jim Hall stayed on the West Coast for a long time but he was neither a West nor an East Coast musician. Some West Coasters played hard —Art Pepper (alto), Sims, Hampton Hawes (piano) for instance—but for the most part, West Coast jazz was softer and cooler than its East Coast counterpart. At least then (but not later), it wasn’t as soul-influenced as, say, the Horace Silver quintet and I’d never apply the term “funky” to it because it wasn’t sweaty or transparently gospel-influenced as the epithet implied.
The West Coast players I dug were fluent in bop but molded by Basie’s laid-back, ball-bearing swing sense. The groups leaned toward arranged ensembles –sometimes over-arranged– rather than the straight ahead, hard charging riff-based ensembles and blowing that was characteristic of East Coast music of the day.
All of this was subject to exception. On the East Coast, the Donald Byrd-Gigi Gryce Jazz Lab quintet did fascinating things with arranged ensemble, as did Les Jazz Modes, the short-lived combo led by tenor saxist Charlie Rouse and French horn player Julius Watkins. And then there was Mingus, whose music and ensembles broke every rule there was.
As to sound and attack, West Coaster Zoot Sims played as unmediated a music as anyone anywhere. But his sound was closer to Lester Young’s than that of the harder sounding East Coast players, who were more influenced by Dexter Gordon and Hawkins than by Lester. And there was no question that Roach’s, Blakey’s and Silver’s ensembles didn’t sound at all like Shorty Rogers and His Giants.
(All were good. But they sounded different.)
The best West Coast music was as good a music as has ever been. For proof, listen to Grand Encounter (1956: full title, 2 Degrees East 3 Degrees West: Grand Encounter) which features West Coasters Bill Perkins (tenor), Jim Hall (guitar) and Chico Hamilton (drums) playing with East Coasters John Lewis (piano) and Percy Heath (bass). Sixty years on, I’m on my third copy of the album. I’m on my second copy each of my two favorite Shorty Rogers albums: Martians, Go Home and Wherever the Five Winds Blow. It’s good music. But it’t cool music, not hot.
***
West Coast jazz wasn’t the only kind of jazz around, but fixated on it, I pretty much missed out on the other kinds of jazz I might have heard while I was at Hiram.
Fortunately, life doesn’t end at college.
We keep growing and listening.
Or at least I did.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Duke Ellington Orch.: “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” (1956)
John Lewis-Bill Perkins-Jim Hall-Percy Heath-Chico Hamilton, “Almost Like Being in Love” (1956)
MUSIC & ME 