The Modern Jazz Tuba Project: “Georgia on My Mind”
Let’s hear it for the tuba, which has a checkered history in jazz. It’s a big horn –I mean BIG– and you need lots of air to play it. But that’s just the start of your problems. Because its mouthpiece is so big, embouchure is a problem too.
The OED defines embouchure as “the manner in which a player’s mouth or lips are placed when playing [an] instrument.” Embouchure becomes more and more a problem the larger the wind chamber of the instrument being played. Thus, playing the flugelhorn (a large bored trumpet), as Miles Davis did on the albums with Gil Evans and Art Farmer did on numerous albums from the sixties on, is technically harder than playing the tighter bored trumpet. It’s harder to control pitch on it and thus the exact placement of notes. French horn is even more difficult, which is probably one reason why there aren’t a large number of jazz soloists on this lovely but refractory instrument.
(Vide Julius Watkins’s playing and soloing in Les Jazz Modes, the quintet he co-led with tenor player Charlie Rouse in the late fifties. Watkins also soloed in the great Quincy Jones band that toured Europe in 1958 and recorded two albums. Here’s Watkins soloing on “Everybody’s Blues” from The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones. [1959])
Les Jazz Modes, “When the Blues Come In” (1957)
Quincy Jones, “Everybody’s Blues” (1958) w/ Julius Watkins–I was a year out of college then!
The tuba is the most problematic of all. It’s hard to move from note to note on it, whether because of fingering problems or the amount of air you have to draw in to power it, and jazz music since the emergence of bop is about speed and fluency. The tuba’s sound is equally iffy. All too often, especially on slow ballads, the sound coming out of the belled end of this oversized instrument resembles nothing so much as a fart –the tone center is fuzzy and indistinct. It’s fatally easy to produce a gargling sound if your embouchure isn’t tight enough or your lips fold over your teeth by accident while you’re playing.
The list of correctives for playing tuba is long and menacing. Here’s one part of a long list of caveats and correctives.
In short, “crisp” is not a term you easily apply to playing tuba. Listen to the Modern Jazz Tuba Project, “Georgia on My Mind,” on the cut up above, or below, bopper tubaist Ray Draper’s solo on “Angel Eyes.” (The Draper cut has a lovely solo by a fairly young John Coltrane —he solos after Draper.)
Ray Draper, “Angel Eyes,” from A Tuba Jazz
Whatever tubas are good for, ballads are not it. Tuba ballad work tends toward the lugubrious if not the laughable.
In the early days of jazz, there was a good reason to employ a tuba in a band. First off, New Orleans music was often marching band music. Sousaphones, wraparound tubas, gave the bass beat that drove the music. (Can you imagine trying to carry a string bass while you marched?)
The sousaphone is easier to carry than the standard tuba in a band. (Think about this for a moment and you’ll see why there aren’t many pianos in marching bands.)
Secondly, the recording technology of the day was primitive. Well into the thirties, the recording devices in use couldn’t pick up the softer sounds of the string bass. (In the groundbreaking Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1927-28, drummer Baby Dodds had to play wood blocks instead of drums because otherwise, the recording couldn’t pick up his sound.)
Want to hear what the tuba sounds like in trad jazz? Here’s a revival band, out of New Orleans, called Skinny Tuba. The tune is “Oriental Strut.” The tuba takes a break at 2:07 minutes for any tuba aficionados in the listening audience.
(You will also get a sense from this music video of how much fun jazz used to be for the spectators. I remember the feeling listening live to the Ellington band in 1956 or 1957. As many people danced to the band as were standing. Up through the thirties, jazz was still a participatory sport.)
Skinny Tuba: “Oriental Strut” –a short tuba break at 2:07 minutes
I’ve included samples of other tuba players below to show you what the tuba can do. To whit:
- Howard Johnson in the great Gil Evans orchestrataking the lead on Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.”
Bob Stewart playing something between bass line and second melody line in a killer trio recording with modernist alto sax player Arthur Blythe. The tune is probably “Lenox Avenue Breakdown,” the title song of Blythe’s album of the same name. (On that same album, “Odessa” offers the first extended solo on record by a tuba.) Blythe used tuba over and again in groups, sometimes trio (alto, tuba, percussion), other times quintet (adding guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer and cellist Abdul Wadud.)- Bob Stewart again, with his own group, a killer cut, “Rambler.” Stewart probably stretches the tuba as far as it can go.
- Lastly, Ray Draper with the Max Roach quintet –Booker Little on trumpet, George Coleman tenor sax– from Deeds, Not Words (1958). I bought this album when it came out but disliked the tuba solos on it so much that I threw the album away. What an idiot I was!
Sonny Rollins and Rufus Harley
So you will not think the tuba is jazz’s only step-child, let me mention two other odd children of jazz. I know of one jazz bagpiper, Rufus Harley. I didn’t, still don’t, like his playing but he played with two greats, saxophonists John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Go figure!
I know of three bass saxophonists of note. One is modernist Anthony Braxton, who has recorded well over a hundred albums and plays anything that comes with a reed. Ersatz bopper Charlie Ventura played a playful, though not terribly boppish bass sax solo on Dizzy Gillespie’s New Wave. That seems to have been a one time thing for him.
The third player was one of the treasures of 1920s Chicago-style jazz. Adrian Roll ini played bass saxophone, vibes (one of the first to record on it), goofus and fountain pen (please don’t ask what they were). With the demise of Chicago-style jazz in the ’20s, Rollini’s agitated and heavily syncopated sound demised too. But the music he created before then was unabashedly great. He’s one of my favorites among older musicians, a proof that old doesn’t have to mean out-dated.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Arthur Blythe-Bob Stewart, poss. “Lenox Ave. Breakdown,” concert in Bruges, 2005
Bob Stewart: “Rambler,” from Then & Now
Max Roach, “Filide,” from Deeds, Not Words (1958)
Rufus Harley, “Chim Chim Cheree” (1965)
Adrian Rollini, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” (1927)
MUSIC & ME 