Richard Twardzik Trio: “A Crutch for the Crab” (1954)
They don’t all survive. Richard Twardzik is an example of that.
Twardzik recorded this song, “A Crutch for the Crab,” and several others, all around three minutes long, to make half of one 12-inch long play record, Trio (1954). Pianist Russ Freeman’s trio plays on the other side.
Twardzik was trained as a classical pianist but drifted over to jazz and at the age of 14 was playing in jazz bands in Boston. His teacher was Margaret Chaloff, mother of noted baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff. (Chaloff, a druggie of note, died in his early forties of spinal cancer. If he had survived, he would have rivaled Gerry Mulligan and Pepper Adams as the dominant baritone saxophonist of his era. Listen to Blue Serge [1956], recorded a year before his death, an album that should be in any serious jazz lover’s library.)
Not yet 21, Twardzik recorded with alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano and trumpeter Herb Pomeroy in 1951. (Released in 1953 as Boston All Stars.) The next year, he’s heard on cuts on two obscure Charlie Parker records (The Happy Bird, 1952, and Boston 1952).
Richard Bock, who owned Pacific Records, signed him up for a trio session with bassist Carson Smith, formerly of the Gerry Mulligan groups, and drummer Peter Littman. Neither Smith nor Littman added much to the session, which was all Twardzik’s. Twardzik recorded three standards and three of his own compositions, “A Crutch for the Crab,” “Albuquerque Social Swim,” and “Yellow Tango” (not to be confused with 1952’s “Blue Tango,” by composer Leroy Anderson, which is a turkey of the first order.)
Twardzik was 24 then. The following year, trumpeter Chet Baker recruited him for his quartet, set to embark on an arduous tour of western Europe. The pianist had been recommended by the trumpeter’s regular pianist, Russ Freeman, who wasn’t up to the rigors of the tour and had been impressed by Twardzik’s talent.
It was a bad choice for Twardzik, who was already an addict. Baker wasn’t yet the major drug user he later became but he was a user and notoriously undisciplined. During the tour, Twardzik overdosed on heroin more than once, including at least once on stage. On October 11, the quartet –Baker on trumpet, Twardzik piano, Jimmy Bond bass, Littman drums– laid down half an album of music in Paris (released as Chet Baker in Paris, 1955). The group played a club date on the 20th. Twardzik was there. But the next day, he didn’t show up for rehearsal. Baker went to his hotel to get him.
From here on, it gets murky. The most likely scenario is that Baker found him dead and fled, not wanting to get caught in a drug death. When the gendarmes found Twardzik, he was long dead, the needle still sticking out of his arm. He was 25.
Baker in the ’80s
Richard Twardzik: “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (1954)
A year or two later, Pacific Records issued a jazz sampler. The LP only cost 99 cents or maybe $1.99. It was cheap! I loved jazz and this was an easy way to sample new artists so I bought it. One of the dozen cuts on the sampler was Twardzik, playing “A Crutch for the Crab.” After I heard him, I ordered the Trio album. I played the Twardzik side of the record until it almost wore out. The trio side wasn’t bad: Freeman was an energetic, fluent bop pianist. But the cuts by Twardzik were something else!
They weren’t all good. “Yellow Tango” was klutzy and not helped by Littman’s drumming, which was anything but inspired. “I’ll Remember April” was an adequate boppish vehicle and “Round About Midnight” was harmonically interesting but much too static. But the other three cuts –“Crab” and “Albuquerque Social Swim,” both by Twardzik, and an inspired reading of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” were dynamite. No, more than that –unique! I hadn’t heard any pianist play like that before and I’m not sure I have since. Twardzik’s The Complete Recordings came out in 2004. It cost less than the out of print original album but I would have bought it anyways. I t consisted of all six cuts from the original Pacific Jazz LP plus an alternate cut of “I’ll Remember April,” along with twelve out of tune, wonky-rhythm home tape recordings of Twardzik practicing –interesting stuff but hard to listen to for long.
English pianist Alex Hawkins hears a presage of Mischa Mengelberg in Twardzik. That makes sense. Perhaps Martial Solal as well –bop through a European spectrum? His debt to Powell is obvious, not only in the boppish “I’ll Remember April” but on the slow ballads, where Twardzik plays in the slightly off center way that Powell played on ballads –slow, heavily chorded, on the edge of florid. The Boston pianist’s debt to Bartok and maybe Hindemith has been noted. But still, you listen to him and wonder, where on earth did his music come from? In the field of contemporary jazz from the 1950s, he was sui generis.
What would his playing have been like if he hadn’t flamed out at 25?
Richard Twardzik: “Albuquerque Social Swim” (1954)
This is what I wrote when I reviewed Twardzik’s Complete Recordings a few years ago:
TWARDZIK, Dick. Dick Twardzik Trio: Complete Recordings.Lonehill Jazz. 2004. DT, p; Carson Smith, b; Peter Littman, dr. This album by Richard Twardzik was his first and last as leader. He died within a year of a heroin over-dose in Paris with the Chet Baker quartet. (Given Baker’s own propensity for drug use, he wasn’t the healthiest choice of bosses for Twardzik, who’d been an addict since his teens.)
The history of the Twardzik album is interesting. West Coast pianist Russ Freeman, who played in Baker’s combo at the time, heard him and recommended him to Pacific Jazz’s Rudy Van Gelder. Twardzik recorded six songs, one side of an album, for Van Gelder. The other side of the album featured the Russ Freeman trio, with, if I remember correctly, Shelley Manne on drums. I bought the album when it first appeared, mostly because I liked Freeman’s piano playing. (I still do.)
When I played the Twardzik side, it blew me away, it was so fresh and original. The cuts are short –the longest was Twardzik’s “Yellow Tango”, which runs 5 minutes and 22 seconds; the rest of the cuts run two to three and a half minutes in length. Nor are the performances even in quality: “I’ll Remember April” sounds like a standard bop rendition –it could have been played this way by any of a dozen pianists. “Yellow Tango” has interesting touches but it’s basically a show case for drummer Peter Littman (who plays with more originality here than anywhere else on the session). But Twardzik plays around with the melodies for “Bess, You Are My Woman Now” and “’Round Midnight” in interesting ways and his compositions “Albuquerque Social Swim” and “A Crutch for the Crab” are positively brilliant.
What makes them brilliant? To start with, Twardzik clearly knew his instrument: when he had ideas he executed them without flubbing. He had a predilection for alternative voicings –“Bess” starts with almost off-key chords: it’s oddly affecting, it picks up on the melancholy inherent in the song. He also wasn’t afraid to play melody and play it slowly. “Bess” is basically block chord melody, played that way until toward the end when he plays more or less rubato, rumbling chords and relaxing the rhythmic pulse. Then, in the last twenty seconds of the song (which runs 3:28 in toto), he kicks off into an uptempo jazz-y riff, and then … he just … shuts it down. “Midnight” too is mostly melody, but with a jazz feel. He doesn’t sound at all like Bill Evans on it but listening to him, I think Evans and he would have enjoyed tinkering around on the piano together –both are concerned with voicings and harmonies and both use mute well and both have basically romantic conceptions of the piano. “Albuquerque” illustrates another virtue of Twardzik’s approach: he plays with rhythm, turning the piece’s rhythm on a dime for drama: it shows especially well on “Albuquerque” because it is a satiric piece –the pompous Albuquerque socialites moving staidly around, sudden stops and starts, jolting them out of the comfort zone. “A Crutch for the Crab” is the genius piece of the collection. I can’t understand why it isn’t better known –yes, I do understand: an obscure pianist died before he could be recorded again and marketed as a jazz commodity –and Pacific Jazz did use this cut on a sampler album in the 60s. But “Crutch”, which features crab-like chording, like Twardzik’s keys are scuttling in odd jumps across the keyboard, and abrupt tempo changes, is a phenomenon. Twardzik’s playing on this cut is almost a history of jazz piano playing, spanning the distance from stride to bop and beyond.
At the time, Twardzik’s playing sounded revolutionary. But around the same time, another young pianist started recording. His name was Cecil Taylor and with him the revolution really began. That’s the up side to this important recording. The down side? In the absence of other recorded material by Twardzik, the album has been filled out with rehearsal tapes. The playing is hit and miss, though interesting, and the sound quality is dreadful. As flawed as the album is, with all the dud cuts taken from the rehearsal tapes, though, it’s worth owning because th good cuts are so arresting.
***
There is a book by Jack Chambers, entitled Bouncing with Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik (2008).
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Serge Chaloff: “The Fable of Mabel,” from The Fable of Mabel (1954) w/ Twardzik, Charlie Mariano
Chet Baker: “Sad Walk,” from Chet Baker in Europe (1955) w/ Twarzik
MUSIC & ME 