Lew Soloff, 1944-2015

On the heels of the death of Clark Terry, we now mourn the passing of another trumpet legend. Lew Soloff passed away on Sunday, March 8, at the too early age of 71. I was enrolled in the music program at SUNY Fredonia in the late 1960s, and Blood Sweat & Tears LPs were constantly on our turntables. For us it was a musical triumph to have trumpets, saxophones and trombones share equal space with electric guitars. Lew Soloff was responsible for the virtuosic solos that helped BS&T score number one hits.

Lew was a jazz man at heart, and while he enjoyed the notoriety of playing in a band that celebrated rock, his tenure with BS&T was a small part of his career. He was a member of an elite group of instrumentalists who could excel in any musical situation. Although his resume included playing behind Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Sting, and Billy Joel, his driving passion was to improvise. One of his proudest accomplishments was his recordings with the Manhattan Jazz Quintet, which he co-founded.

Frank Foster

Unsolicited praise is the best kind, and in 1998 Frank Foster addressed the subject of race and jazz and when he wanted to cite a white musician at the top of his game, he spoke about Lew.

FF:    Are you familiar with Lew Soloff? Lew Soloff can play anything, can play jazz, can play lead trumpet, he can play in a section, you know, he can just do anything that’s necessary for a jazz trumpeter to do. Big band, small group, whatever.

Lew described the difference between being very good at what you do, and exceptional.

LS:    It takes a lot to concentrate and to be a master, a real master, or to try to be a master of one thing. It’s basically a different thing of being a working trumpet player, which means hello, sure, sub over here tonight, yeah? Wedding tomorrow night? Sure. Okay, a block party? Fine. A jingle here, you know, a recording date. There’s one thing to being a working trumpet player, and it’s great and it feels really good to be called for that kind of work. But it’s another thing to be a working musical personality, where people hire you because of the way you play, not because of the way you play the trumpet, but because of the way you play. Because of the way you can play a song. Because they like your style. The first person who made me aware of it very clearly was Warren Vaché actually, who I’m a great admirer of. And I was telling him — this was years ago and I was doing a lot of studio work — and I said, “gee I really want to get better at playing jazz” and this and that. “Well, look,” he says, “it’s kind of hard to do when you play the way everybody else wants you to all the time.” Gil Evans of course would state it as it’s basically hard to be creative when you have to be professional.

Having music as your main source of income is a dicey affair. Frank Foster described it as “freelance starving.” Nonetheless, my classmates and I aspired to it, and Lew Soloff was one of the best examples of where we wanted to be. He spoke eloquently about the passion and the strong sense of direction that aspiring musicians had to have:

MR:    Have any words of advice for young trumpet players or musicians trying to break into the business these days?

LS:    Yeah. I do. First of all you have to decide what you want to do, whether you want to be an instrumentalist, a trumpet player per se, or whether or not you have a love of jazz to the point where you want to be a stylist. You have to decide what you want to do. If you want to be an in-demand cat, and I include women in that, to play any kind of job for anybody, the key is versatility and very fast sight reading ability. There are people that learn to read lines ahead of where they’re playing. Very few people have this ability but some people do, culminating in maybe a whole page ahead, almost like photographing the page with your mind. But most people that can do that learn it when they were very small. But it’s a good thing to learn to read, if possible, a bar or two ahead, or even more if possible, then where you’re playing. It’s a skill that’s hard to develop, I don’t have it, I read maybe a couple of beats ahead of where I’m playing. But if you can do that, if you can become a superb sight reader, if you want to become a horn for hire or a musician for hire, that’s one of the prime things you need to do. And there’s another kind of musician who could be a for-hire musician as a sideman, and I think this combines with being a stylist, where you may not have to read as well but you still have to be a good reader if you’re going to play in somebody else’s band. Because somebody else wants to do new material, and if the whole band can learn the material in two hours and you need to spend four days learning it because you can’t read, if there’s another person plays as well as you they’re going to get the job. On the other hand if you’re such a super excellent player that somebody wants your feeling on it, you’ll get the job even if you’re a slow reader. But that’s rare. It exists, but rare. And then, if you’re hooked on music and you want to really express yourself playing your music you should start getting bands together, ensembles together, whatever it is you like to play and you should start assuming the role of leadership at a young age and learn how to play your own music, in your own group, and how to get a whole concept of what you like. Develop your whole concept of what you like and go for it. Don’t have any doubts about it. And the final piece of advice is that it’s a very competitive field, everybody would like to have a good time rather than go to work and do a job they don’t like from nine to five. So if you love it enough and you really want to do it, work really, really hard at it. And if you don’t have the ability to work hard at it, it’s going to be a very dangerous field for you to make a living. There’s no guarantee of making a good living anyway in it, because it fluctuates. But, in other words, the passion has to overcome all the possible problems. It’s very possible to make a great living at it also. But the passion has to overcome all these problems. It has to become more important than a comfortable (meaning rich) lifestyle. It has to be more important to you than that, and then you might get the rich lifestyle from it.

MR:    That’s great advice.

LS:     Otherwise don’t go into it.

For two additional Jazz Backstory blog entries that featured Lew with Blood, Sweat & Tears, you might enjoy Spinning Notes from 6/19/14, and Inside the Studios Part IV from 9/1/14.

Spinning Notes

Our next arrangement is another Grammy-award-winning chart, this time written by saxophonist/keyboardist Fred Lipsius, and recorded by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. Unlike “Ode to Billie Joe,” which starts serenely with solo acoustic guitar, “Spinning Wheel” announces itself majestically. Fred Lipsius writes an ear-catching brass fanfare that rips up to what musicians call a sharp 9 chord.

It certainly gets our attention.

Blood, Sweat & Tears goes on my short list of favorite bands. Their second and third albums produced multiple hits and are considered to be the highpoint of the band’s career. In 1969, as a saxophonist/keyboardist and budding arranger, not only did I want to play in Blood, Sweat & Tears, I wanted to be Fred Lipsius. I wanted to do what he did, but I had to remain content (along with my college roommates) to play “air horn” while listening to the LP’s.

In April of 2000 I was pleased to interview trumpeter Lew Soloff, a BS&T member featured prominently on albums two and three. He spoke about the popularity of the band, his admiration for Fred Lipsius’ creativity, and the differences of opinion that arose:

Lew Soloff

LS:    Blood, Sweat & Tears of course was in a class by itself. You know how big that band was at the time? That was a real trip. We were the second biggest band in the world to the Beatles.

LS:    The real creative force in that band was a particular arranger named Lipsius. I mean [Dick] Halligan also, but Lipsius was the prime creative arranger in the band. And he is kind of a shy, laid back sort. And oh man, he would bring in this chart or that chart and instead of saying okay we’ll do this, okay we’ll record this, it was like naaa that’s no good, naaa that’s no good. And finally he just stopped.

MR:    Yeah, he had less arrangements on those records than he should have.

LS:    Near the end, yeah. Of course. Because he didn’t want to bring something in and have it put down. And he was the real, amazing creative energy in that band. Actually so was Al Kooper, before I was there. I loved his songs. But it doesn’t matter. I’m always of the mind that if a band is allowed to just continuously try to be creative they’re better off than if they have a hit and they try to keep following that formula.

Lipsius got the assignment to make something special out of the song “Spinning Wheel” written by the band’s vocalist, David Clayton Thomas. The song had been recorded in one of David’s previous bands, but I’m sure it sounded nothing like the BS&T rendition.

After the brass pronouncement, the song builds from almost nothing. In verse one, Clayton sings two bars with only unison bass and piano; two measures with cowbell; then two bars with drums; providing a perfect setup for a “whap!” from the brass section. Clayton sings by himself “ride a painted pony, let the spinning wheel ride.” In the second verse, our arranger adds horn hits on beats two and four, and a very bluesy riff that climbs up to the flat 3^rd blue note.

The bridge of the song reflects the psychadelia that found its way into pop music in the late ‘60’s. The feel is smoothed out with long and rather dreamy notes, a touch of phase-shifting, and a reverb-drenched echo on the word “real.” Horns build up with a catchy triplet figure and lead to a restatement of the opening riff.

In the third verse Lipsius writes two of the most distinctive beats in any BS&T song. It’s a wonderful solo spot for the trombonist, climbing from a basement pitch and landing on its target note with the word “drop” sung by David Clayton Thomas.

When I write arrangements I always arrive at a spot that I describe as “okay what now?” At this point in “Spinning Wheel” we’ve had a terrific intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, a third verse, and I can picture Fred Lipsius at this “what now” moment. What “now” becomes is classic BS&T. A number of the players in the band were jazz guys, so Fred writes the jazz part. At the 2:00 mark, for 37 seconds, the rhythm section becomes a swinging jazz piano trio, backing up a solo from Lew Soloff that had all my trumpet friends green with envy. At the 2:21 mark, brass chords set up what I can only describe as a demented bugle call that ends on a lip-busting high G.

The final verse has it all, brass hits with “shakes” worthy of the Count Basie Orchestra, the blues riff and the sliding trombone.

Time to end the song. Again, Lipsius is faced with a decision. Rather than a standard fade out or a dynamic last chord, Blood, Sweat & Tears engages in a bit of self-indulgence, which we happily encouraged them to do via our support of their records. As the song reaches its climax, an unexpected switch to a 3/4 occurs. If people were dancing they would have fallen down. This merry-go-round waltz quickly gives way to a duet of recorders that transport us from a merry-go-round to a steam calliope. There is a brief battle with the brass, trading their measures back and forth. Eventually the brass give up and fade out, leaving the recorders to play a vaguely familiar tune. In fact, it’s a melody that’s been around for many years, known by two titles: “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie Go This Way and That Way,” or “The More We Get Together.”

The music grows more chaotic and at 3:56 Fred Lipsius adds a wry opinion on the whole affair with a few sarcastic notes on his alto sax. Drummer Bobby Colomby sums it up with his tongue-in-cheek comment, “that wasn’t too good.” The jovial response by the rest of the band seems to say, “you’re right, let’s keep it.”

One of the most significant bygone technologies in the recording business is the use of magnetic recording tape. The state-of-the-art in 1969 was two-inch multi-track tape, which allowed the band to record multiple parts and overdubs, and mix down to half inch master tape. Every studio had a ridiculously low tech tool that was kept within reach. If the record company needed a shorter 45 rpm version, out came the razor blade. In the case of Blood, Sweat & Tears, their most creative middle sections often were literally sliced out of the mix. If you have the 45, a greatest hits compilation version, or if you listen to the song on YouTube, you may hear the edited version. The Lew Soloff solo is sadly left on the studio floor, replaced by a few measures of Steve Katz’s guitar. Not bad, but if you’re used to the long version it’s jarring when you hear the song without the jazz section.

Fred Lipsius can be counted among the arrangers who were indispensable contributors in creating a unique sound for a band. Lipsius won a Grammy for “Best Instrumental Arrangement” for his contribution to “Spinning Wheel.”

On a personal note, I was thrilled when brass player Steve Guttman became the musical director for the resurrected BS&T in 1985. Steve was my best friend in high school and my first musical collaborator.

In our third and final arrangement spotlight, we’ll look at the perfect combination of song, singer, band and arranger.