2017 anniversaries, 3. Jazz

While classical music underwent its modernist transformations in the twentieth century, jazz emerged as a whole new and independent genre with roots in West African and African-American traditions and European military band music. It was characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. ⁽¹⁾

Following is a brief survey of artists and composers, all born in 1917, whom we didn't get a chance to review earlier in the year, mostly dedicated jazz artists, be it blues or bebop, but also some classically trained ones who appreciated the genre.

   - American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and singer Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) built on the virtuoso trumpet style of Roy Eldridge (1911-1989), adding a harmonic complexity previously not heard in jazz. Together with Charlie Parker (1920-1955) he was one of the most influential bebop and modern jazz artists, creating complexity and rhythm beyond jazz's danceable swing style.

        He is also one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. In 1953 his trumpet was accidentally bent during a party, and liking the sound it produced, he started playing trumpets with a bell bent upward at a 45-degree angle. ⁽²⁾

        Gillespie was born in South Carolina, the youngest of nine children. His father was a local bandleader. Gillespie started playing piano at age four and was self-taught on the trombone and the trumpet. His father died when he was only ten. When he heard Roy Eldridge play on the radio, he knew he wanted to become a jazz musician. He studied music on a scholarship at the Laurinburg Institute prep school for two years before moving to Philadelphia with his family.

        Gillespie's first professional job came in 1935 with the Frank Fairfax (1899-1972) orchestra. He also played with Edgar Hayes' (1902-1979) and Teddy Hill's (1909-1978) bands later in the 1930s and freelanced for other orchestras.

        From 1939 he played in Cab Calloway's (1907-1994) orchestra until he got fired in 1941 due to an altercation, memorialized in the film The Spitball Story (1997). ⁽³⁾ Apparently, Calloway didn't think too highly of Gillespie's playing which he found too adventuresome. During his time in Calloway's band Gillespie started writing music for big band leaders like Woody Herman (1913-1987) and Jimmy Dorsey (1904-1957).

        He then freelanced again, a.o. with Ella Fitzgerald's (1917-1996) orchestra which was composed of members of Chick Webb's (1905-1939) old band.

        He was disqualified from war service with a 4-F classification, having asked during a Selective Service interview:

"in this stage of my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass?"⁽²⁾

        In 1943 he joined the Earl Hines (1903-1983) band which began to play bebop--never recorded but witnessed by composer Gunther Schuller (1925-2015) as the beginnings of modern jazz. Gillespie was reunited with Charlie Parker in Billy Eckstine's (1914-1993) band. He left that band in 1945 to play in small combos. He jammed with Parker at famous jazz clubs like Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem and Billy Berg's club in Hollywood and led several small combos before mounting his own big band.

        Gillespie was also a influential in the Afro-Cuban music movement, championing Afro-Cuban jazz which was bebop oriented. He worked with Mario Bauzá (1911-1993), Chano Pozo (1915-1948),  commissioned George Russell (1923-2009) and mentored Arturo Sandoval (b. 1949).

        In 1964 Gillespie was a write-in candidate for the presidential election. He promised the White House would be renamed the Blues House and to have jazz musicians and comedians on his team and in his future cabinet. The campaign buttons became a collector's item. In 1968 he joined the global religious community of the Bahá'í Faith. During three years in the 1980s he led the United Nations Orchestra. In the late 1980s he was still recording and giving concerts, but by the end of 1992 he was unable to due to pancreatic cancer.

        Salt Peanuts (1942) was created with the collaboration of bebop drummer Kenny Clarke (1914-1985) probably from a musical motif first recorded by Count Basie (1904-1984) on the piano in 1941 and by Glenn Miller (1904-1944) as the song Wham Re-Bop-Boom-Boom in the same year with credits to Eddie Durham (1906-1987) for music and to Taps Miller (1915-?) for the lyrics. ⁽⁴⁾ It is here performed live in New York in 1946/47 by Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra.



   - American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist John Lee Hooker ("The Hook") (1912 or 1917 ⁽⁵⁾-2001) was born in Mississippi, in a family of eleven children. The young John Lee was exposed to very different types of music:

• His father was a sharecropper and Baptist preacher who home-schooled his kids and only let them listen to religious music.
• His mother remarried a local blues singer William Moore who taught John Lee his unique guitar style--a droning, one-chord blues, different from the usual Delta blues.
• One of his sisters dated American blues singer, skilled guitarist, songwriter and daytime barber Tony Hollins (1909-1957). During visits in the 1920s Hollins gave Hooker his first guitar and taught him how to play. Hooker would later sing several of Hollins' songs.

        At age fourteen Hooker ran away from home, never to see his mother and stepfather again. There is also a story that he joined the army "because ... a young man in uniform would attract attention from women," but was kicked out after three months because it was discovered that he was underage. ⁽⁶⁾ In the mid-30s he was a musician in Memphis, TN working day jobs such as movie theater usher. He later spent some time in Dayton, OH and in 1943 got a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, MI. In Detroit he frequented blues clubs and bars on Hastings Street, then the center of Detroit's black culture. The city needed skilled guitarists like Hooker. Desiring a louder sound, he purchased an electric guitar.

        Hooker began to record in 1948 with Bernard Besman who adapted to Hooker's singular style. Hooker seldom played to a regular beat, changing tempo according to the needs of the song. This made playing with backing musicians difficult. Besman made up for this by creating other sound effects and produced a couple of huge hits for Hooker.

        Hooker proved to be a skilled lyricist despite his illiteracy. He adapted lyrics from traditional blues and wrote songs. The recording studios paid very little to black musicians in those days, and to avoid copyright issues, Hooker recorded under a creative list of pseudonyms, a.o. John Lee Booker, Johnny Lee, John Lee, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, and the Boogie Man. He often toured and recorded with Eddie Kirkland (1923-2011). Later in Chicago he would have backing musicians, a.o. Eddie Taylor (1923-1985) who was very good at following Hooker's musical idiosyncrasies.

        In the 1960s Hooker toured in Europe with the annual American Folk Blues Festival and in 1964 hit the UK singles charts with his song Dimples. He also started to perform and record with rock musicians, a.o. the British blues rock band The Groundhogs (1963-present), the American blues and boogie rock group Canned Heat (1965-present)--reaching the Billboard Charts with one of the albums, Americans Steve Miller (b. 1943) and Elvin Bishop (b. 1942), and the Northern Irish Van Morrison (b. 1945).

        He appeared as a street singer in the film The Blues Brothers (1980).

        From 1989 he collaborated on several albums, a.o. with Mexican-American musician Carlos Santana (b. 1947), American blues singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949), American rock band Los Lobos (1973-present), and American blues rock guitarist and singer Jimmie Vaughan (b. 1951).

        Hooker died in Los Altos, CA, survived by eight children, 19 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren.

        In the video below we hear and see Hooker as an already aged street singer in One bourbon, one scotch, one beer,  a video from Point Blank Records. Kids and adults in the neighborhood, passers-by, other musicians, and even a couple of dogs and a mouse all have a great time.

           The song was written in 1953 by Rudy Toombs (1914-1962) and first recorded by Amos Milburn (1927-1980). Hooker recorded it in 1966 after making considerable changes.

It tells the story of a man who is "in a bar at closing time trying to get enough booze down his neck to forget that his girlfriend's gone AWOL, harassing a tired, bored bartender who simply wants to close up and go home, into serving just one more round".⁽⁷⁾

   - French classical pianist, composer and pedagogue Jean Hubeau (1917-1992) is best known for his benchmark interpretations of Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and Paul Dukas (1865-1935).

        Hubeau entered the Paris Conservatoire at age nine. He studied composition with Paul Dukas, piano with Lazare Lévy (1882-1964), harmony with Jean Gallon (1878-1959), and counterpoint with Noël Gallon (1891-1966), receiving first prizes in piano and in harmony at age thirteen and first prize for accompanists a year later. He was awarded a second Prix de Rome prize in 1934 and received the triennial Louis Diémer (1843-1919) piano prize the following year.

        In 1941 he became head of the Music Academy in Versailles. From 1957 to 1982 he was professor of chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire.

        Hubeau's compositions, although simple and without radical tendencies, nevertheless display invention in the thematic material, their rhythm and timbres. ⁽⁸⁾ Because of his activities as pianist and educator, his compositions have remained in the background. In addition to works for piano and the above-mentioned cantata, Hubeau composed orchestral works, ballets and chamber music.

        Chanson Américaine (American Song) (1940s) is a charming piece in ragtime which appeared in the 1946 38-piece piano collection Jardins d'Enfants (Children's Garden). It is still a popular piece with young French piano students, as can be seen and heard in this engaging interpretation:



   - American jazz drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich (1917-1987) was born in Brooklyn, NY. At age one he was already able to sustain a steady beat with spoons. At eighteen months he played drums in vaudeville, billed as "Baby Traps the Drum Wonder." At one point he was the 'second-highest paid child entertainer in the world after Jackie Coogan (1914-1984),' the child actor who played in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921). ⁽⁹⁾ At age eleven he led a band.

        Despite being one of the world's greatest drummers during his lifetime, Rich claimed he couldn't read music, never received drum lessons, and never practiced. He did mention influences from Gene Krupa (1909-1973), Jo Jones (1911-1985), Chick Webb (1905-1939), Ray McKinley (1910-1995), Ray Bauduc (1906-1988) and Sid Catlett (1910-1951). After Rich already acquired his own drumming technique, he did receive some lessons from Henry Adler (1915-2008), very intermittently and mostly to teach Rich how to read. In 1942 the two co-authored a popular snare-drum instructional book. Bobby Shew (b. 1941), lead trumpeter in Rich's mid-1960s band, later confirmed that Rich always needed a drummer during rehearsals to read and play new arrangements.

        In the late 1930s and early 1940s Rich collaborated with many other musicians, a.o. in a group with clarinetist and songwriter Joe Marsala (1907-1978) and guitarist Jack LeMaire (1911-2010), with trumpeter Bunny Berigan (1908-1942), clarinetist Artie Shaw (1910-2004), with the Vic Schoen (1916-2000) Orchestra which backed a.o. The Andrews Sisters (1925-1967), in Tommy Dorsey's (1905-1966) orchestra where he met and performed with Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), and with Benny Carter (1907-2003). In 1942 he joined the United States Marine Corps as a judo instructor.

        He went back to Dorsey's band in 1945 and again in 1954-1955. In 1946 he formed his own band with financial support from Sinatra and on and off led other groups until the early 1950s.

        During his long career he also collaborated with trumpeter Harry James (1916-1983), Les Brown (1912-2001), Charlie Ventura (1916-1992), with Norman Granz's (1918-2001) Jazz at the Philharmonic, and performed with Charlie Parker (1920-1955) and his Orchestra which also featured Thelonious Monk (1917-1982).

        In 1966, Rich developed a new big band and continued to lead for most of time until his death successful big bands in clubs, but mostly at high schools, colleges, and universities. Rich also played as the session drummer for many recordings, a.o. for Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), and worked with pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) and his trio featuring bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002) and guitarist Herb Ellis (1921-2010). In 1968 Rich collaborated with Indian tabla player Alla Rakha (1919-2000) on a studio album.

        Let's watch Rich in a legendary 1966 drum battle with Gene Krupa. There were other battles like it, a.o. with Louie Bellson (1924-2009), Neil Peart (b. 1952), Ed Shaughnessy (1929-2013), actor-comedian Jerry Lewis (1926-2017) (1965), and with Animal (1975-present) of the Muppets. There are even clever videos of 1941 and 1948 Buddy Rich solos where Eric Fischertranscribed the drum parts and filmed himself as playing the solos.



   - American jump blues, jazz, bebop and R&B alto saxophonist and blues shouter Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (1917-1988) was born in Houston, TX. He became bald after using a hair straightening product laced with lye.

This is scooting, rollicking, good-time shuffle-blues spiced with bebop's harmonic sophistication.⁽¹⁰⁾

        Written for a review of Vinson's CD Kidney Stew Is Fine, the above quote applies to Vinson's work in general and describes the musician's unique blend of blues and jazz.

        From the late 1930s until 1941 Vinson played in the horn section of Milton Larkin's (1910-1996) orchestra. In 1941 he toured with bluesman Big Bill Broonzy (1893-1958), 'picking up some vocal tricks.'⁽¹¹⁾ He then moved to New York and played in Cootie Williams' (1911-1985) orchestra from 1942 to 1945.

        In 1945 he formed his own band which in 1952-1953 included a young John Coltrane (1926-1967). In the early 1960s Vinson moved to L.A. and worked in the Johnny Otis (1921-2012) revue. In the late 1960s he toured with jazz pianist and bandleader Jay McShann (1916-2006). During the 1970s he collaborated in blues and jazz sessions with Count Basie, Otis, Roomful of Blues (1967-present), with "Wild Man of the Tenor Sax"Arnett Cobb (1918-1989), and Buddy Tate (1913-2001).

        Vinson composed steadily and continued to record and perform in the U.S. and in Europe. Let's listen to Boogie Woogie Holiday, a lively number he recorded during 1945 - 1947 sessions in New York. ⁽¹²⁾



   - Swiss pianist and composer Julien-François Zbinden (b. 1917) studied keyboard in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland. Largely self-taught in composition, he did study for a while with René Gerber (1908-2006).

        In 1938 he started playing in a jazz band. He worked at Radio Suisse Romande from 1947 and was President of SUISA, the Swiss Cooperative Society for Authors and Publishers during the 1970s until 1991.

        Zbinden composer over 100 works, a.o. works for the stage, five symphonies, and concertante, chamber and vocal works. His style is tonal with influences from jazz, neoclassicism and Arthur Honegger (1892-1955).

        Here is the centenarian playing Ain't She Sweet in a direct Swiss radio broadcast, one day before his 100th birthday! The song was written in 1927 by Milton Ager (1893-1979) (music) and Jack Yellen (1892-1991) (lyrics) and came to typify the roaring twenties. It has since become a Tin Pan Alley standard.


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⁽¹⁾"Jazz." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz (12/28/2017))
⁽²⁾"Dizzy Gillespie." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizzy_Gillespie (12/28/2017)).
⁽³⁾ Calloway was hit with spitballs after an onstage fracas erupted. Calloway wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife. ("Cab Calloway." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab_Calloway (12/29/2017)))
⁽⁴⁾ "Salt Peanuts." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Peanuts (12/28/2017))
⁽⁵⁾ 1917 is most often mentioned. The 1920 and 1930 censuses mention 1912. Hooker himself said it was 1920. Some sources mention John Lee was the fourth child, others that he was the youngest. The dates of the parents' separation and subsequent divorce, and of the mother's second marriage are equally confusing.
⁽⁶⁾ Encyclopedia.com mentions this happened during World War II before he went to Memphis, TN. If he indeed was kicked out because he was underage and before he went to Memphis, this could not have taken place during World War II. "John Lee Hooker." Encyclopedia.com entry. (https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/music-popular-and-jazz-biographies/john-lee-hooker (12/29/2017))
⁽⁷⁾"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bourbon,_One_Scotch,_One_Beer (12/29/2017))
⁽⁸⁾ Landormy P., La Musique Française après Debussy. Gallimard, Paris, 1943, pp. 369-70, as mentioned in "Jean Hubeau." Wikipedia entry.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hubeau#cite_note-Landormy-1 (12/29/2017))
⁽⁹⁾"Buddy Rich." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Rich (12/29/2017))
⁽¹⁰⁾ Tom Moon, "Blues and Jazz Get Rollicking Together." NPR Music, Shadow Classics, CD review of Kidney Stew Is Fine (Black And Blue, 1969 (reissued Delmark, 2007)), 04/18/2007. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9624214 (12/29/2017))
⁽¹¹⁾"Eddie Vinson." Wikipedia entry. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Vinson (12/29/2017))
⁽¹²⁾ arwulf arwulf, "Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - 1945-1947." CD review, AllMusic.com website. (https://www.allmusic.com/album/1945-1947-mw0000215204 (12/29/2017))