Randy Weston: “Little Niles” (1956)
ART BLAKEY College ended. I graduated and went back on the Showboat for my last summer. We started our season going up the Kanawha River to Charleston, WV, then came back down the Kanawha hitting small towns –Nitro, Leon– and then headed up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh. We spent four to six weeks docked at Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, the point where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet the Ohio. Playing in one town instead of preparing every evening for a jump to a new town the next morning, left us invigorated after shows. The night life of Pittsburgh beckoned. We said, “Yes!”
There was a posh night club close by the Triangle. I don’t remember its name or where it was located, nor how we connected with it or to the deejay who hosted a nightly talk and music show out of the club. But it was a good gig for us. The deejay needed interesting and talkative guests to keep his radio audience engaged and there we were, articulate, even funny sometimes, attractive young men and women ready to sit and talk with him as long and on any topics as he wanted, in return for a free bar tab. Dickie Miller and Rachel Lewis were his favorite interviewees from the Boat, Dickie because he was our comic, Rachel … because she was Rachel. Rachel did a good Dodie Goodman imitation. Goodman was a celebrity of the time. Her schtick was responding to questions with left-field answers: she was a sort of updated Gracie Allen to George Burns’s straight man. The deejay dug Rachel’s schtick so much that though we didn’t know it at the time, he tried to talk her into staying behind after the Boat left as a regular on his show. Who played the club while we were there and seeing the shows free? Joni James. (I couldn’t stand her.) I think, Tony Bennett. (Who must have been great, though I don’t remember.)
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There was also a jazz club in Pittsburgh. (Gary Barnard remembers the name, The Crawford Grill.) Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers played there for a week and we went. This particular group was one of the best versions of the Messengers. Benny Golson played tenor sax and more important, as musical director, imposed order on the semi-chaos that Blakey’s own example encouraged. Several of Golson’s compositions were staples of the group –“Whisper Not,” “Along Came Betty,” “Blues March” (the latter became the de facto theme for the Messengers) and his arrangements imposed order without stifling energy, leaving Blakey free to do what he did better than any drummer in the world, which was drive the group with his drums. The trumpeter was Bill Hardman. A month or two later, we would have heard Lee Morgan, who was by any standard a standout. Hartman, by contrast, was exciting but erratic. His solos sometimes embarrassed. The pianist was Bobby Timmons, exciting to hear but if you listened closely, more fluff than substance. Jymie Merritt played bass. The group sizzled. Hardman and Timmons generated heat, Golson order and meaning, and Blakey drummed away like a Force of Life.
Howie Taylor was on that Boat that year. He was our drummer. Howie Taylor, later professor in sociology at Princeton, dug Blakey as what drummer would not. Blakey dug Howie back. As a result, we got to spend time at our table with Blakey between sets. He was nice but I idolized him so much that I doubt I said one sensible thing all the time he was there. That happened to me another time when I was at a club and Max Roach sat in front of me and I couldn’t get up the nerve even to say ‘hello.’
Here’s a longish (14 minutes plus) cut from the Messengers, recorded that fall in Paris. They’re playing Timmons’s “Moaning’.” Lee Morgan is on trumpet, not Hardman. Notice how Blakey varies his kit to bring in the different soloists –a drum press shoves Morgan into the heat, Blakey pulls back to usher in the cooler toned Golson.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: “Moaning'” (1958)
HORACE SILVER At the end of 1959 or early in 1960, I heard the Horace Silver quintet in Cleveland at a club whose name I no longer recall. Blue Mitchell was on trumpet, Junior Brooks tenor, Gene Taylor on bass, and the young, electric Louis Hayes was the drummer. Silver had made his name as the house pianist on countless albums for Blue Note and Prestige Records. He played and recorded with the first version of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
His playing and composing were notoriously funky but more than that, he wrote interesting songs and his arrangements took interesting twists and turns. The group played more than knee-jerk riff/solo compositions. The same song might alternate two contrasting melody lines. A theme statement might stretch beyond the conventional sixteen bars, shift in midstream from straight ahead 4/4 to a Latin beat. The horn voicings were interesting and Silver’s comping behind the horns far more than just chording. In solo, he eschewed long line melodies for a riff-based approach, his solos composed of fragments of melody, shifting from one riff to the next with more rhythmic or chordal consistency then development of melody, or he’d play the same riff over again but change the attack. He was a killer accompanist, a piano player analog to Blakey in his effect on the person playing in front of him. With him, horns sounded better.
Here’s one of his better known tunes, “Sister Sadie,” played by the same group, in 1959. One more thing about listening to Silver — he’s fun.
Horace Silver, “Sister Sadie” (1959)
RANDY WESTON I saw Randy Weston in 1962. It was at an oddly structured concert at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. The show was billed as “A History of Jazz Dancing with the Randy Weston Quartet Accompanying…”. The first half of the show was three dancers, all of them pretty old –Honey Coles was one. They demonstrated various styles of jazz and tap jazz dancing from the early years of the century through the Twenties on to linty, the Charleston and jitterbug, backed by Weston on piano, Booker Ervin on tenor sax, and bass and drums. After the intermission, Weston’s quartet took over and played a set of its own, most of it devoted to Weston’s own compositions, which, even then, were legion. It was a great evening from start to finish.
My favorite tune by Weston was (and still is) his delightful “Hi-Fly.” The melody captures the feeling of a little child taking his (her) first steps. It’s an affecting tune which brings out the best in whoever plays it.
Weston was imposing. He’s 6′ 4″ or 5″, possessed of huge hands and a humungous finger span. He used to be described as a mixture of bop piano a la Bud Powell with a heavy dusting of Thelonious Monk. After many decades living in Africa, I suppose that’d have to be modified now to include liberal lashings of African themes and sounds. In my head, I put him next to Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly Dollar Brand, not because I connect them both to Africa but because I hear the same influences in them –Powell, Monk, and in Ibrahim, Ellington. I might put Don Pullen next to them but Pullen is something else, with a technique and approach uniquely his own.
Weston is in his nineties now. He’s still playing, still composing. Ervin, who played in one of the more famous Mingus ensembles, is gone now. He was a front-runner “Texas tenor,” which means that for all the modernism in his lines, he played high on energy, with conspicuous verbosity.
Randy Weston: “Hi Fly” (1959): with Coleman Hawkins on ten sx.
OTHER MUSIC I HEARD I heard other music during this time span. Some was good. Some was not.
The “Not” includes the Belafonte Singers, the twelve–voice male chorus that backed Harry Belafonte in concert and went on a tour of its own in 1961-62 .I caught the concert tour and bought an album of theirs afterwards but quickly jettisoned it.
Close to a “Not” would be the Limelighters as well. They’re the only folk trio I ever heard live. It was a diverting evening but I found the music dull and derivative.
No better was a flamenco concert with Jose Greco, featuring tons of guitarists, singers and castanets.
What was “Good” was the time I danced in an elementary school classroom with my sometime-close-to-it–but-never-quite girlfriend Gloria Taylor, who taught music there. We jitterbugged to Shorty Rogers’s “Martians Go Home,” Jimmy Giuffre on clarinet and Shelly Manne drums, and it was so cool!
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Belafonte Singers: “Didn’t It Rain” (1960s)
MUSIC & ME 