Buster Cooper, 1929-2016

“Being in a band” usually means you’re part of a four, five, or six piece group. But during the Swing Era a band meant an organization of up to 20 people — saxophone, trumpet, and trombone sections supported by a rhythm section. The best of the bands, such as Basie, Ellington and Miller lasted beyond the big band years and provided employment for a significant number of musicians. Among them was George “Buster” Cooper, trombonist.

Buster was born in St. Petersburg, Florida on April 4, 1929 and passed on May 13, 2016. Like many working jazz musicians, he made a life on the bandstand and in the studios. He rose to the top of the big band world during his seven year stint with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Buster was interviewed along with fellow Ellington alum Bill Berry in a 1995 interview for the Fillius Jazz Archive. They spoke about Duke Ellington, his persona and his special relationship with co-composer Billy Strayhorn:

Buster Cooper, in 1995

BC:  Well it seems to me like a perfect collaboration. And okay, Duke and Strayhorn was fantastic. I’ve seen Duke, he started tunes, he’d say, “Here, Stray, I can’t turn the corner now on this one. Fix this for me.” You can tell.

Bill Berry, in 1995

BB:  Or over the phone, “Strayhorn, I’m stuck here, you know with this, do something with it,” and the way the stories go I’m sure it’s true, is Strayhorn would send something out that was like perfect, like as though they were reading each other’s minds.

BC:  Exactly. Fantastic.

BB:  The perfect solution, you know. Also, Duke Ellington was the smartest, brightest person I’ve ever met. Period.

BC:  Exactly. I used to sit and watch him man and I’d try and figure him out, you know. I used to be looking at him and he wasn’t aware of watching or nothing like that because he didn’t even know what the time was. That didn’t mean nothing. Obviously he thought maybe that’d make you rush through the day, you understand what I’m saying? And I used to sit up on the bandstand and I’d just watch him you know. And I finally came to the conclusion one night. I said Duke Ellington knows who Duke is. Period. Believe me.

BB:  He’s the only one that knew.

BC:  Believe me. He knew what Duke was all about. Fantastic man. I’ve just seen people come into a room you know, after Duke would walk into this room right now, and it would be something like a halo right around him.

BB:  Yeah. The room lights up.

BC:  Really. It does.

BB:  There’s very few people like that. He was one of them.

BC:  He’d walk in this room and — boom — the whole room would go up.

BB:  Yes. I was at the White House for his 70th birthday. And there were like not only a bunch of great, world famous jazz musicians, but there was the President, the Vice President, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court and heaven knows who else. And the spotlight was on Ellington at all times. I mean you’d have sworn there was somebody following him around with a light, and there wasn’t. You know I mean this is in very fast company. You know the most powerful people in the country, in the world.

After Buster’s tenure with Ellington, he followed the familiar path for big band players and entered studio work in Los Angeles. As a sideline, he played with big bands led by Bill Berry, Frank Capp, and Nat Pierce. His nickname, “the bumble bee” apparently was derived from his ability to play at a furious tempo.

If you’ve read my blog in the past you may know that I’m an ardent fan of Cannonball and Nat Adderley. In Chris Sheridan’s book Dis Here, a Bio-Discography of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Buster has a brief but significant mention. According to Sheridan, in June of 1955 the Adderley brothers drove to New York City from Florida to test the waters with a professional career in jazz in mind. On their first night in the Big Apple, Nat’s friend and former band mate from the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, Buster Cooper, took them to the Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village. A band led by bassist Oscar Pettiford was in residence. Saxophonist Jerome Richardson was missing from the bandstand and Cannonball was invited to play a few tunes. For the Adderleys, the rest is history. So thank you Buster for your role in that fortuitous meeting.

Throughout Buster’s life he remained humble and acknowledged where he felt his talent came from:

BC:  Actually I don’t play the trombone. Okay, a supreme being plays the trombone through me. I am the instrument. You understand what I’m saying? So I mean I just put that clearly now, you understand what I’m saying?

Clark Terry, 1920-2015

Clark Terry and Monk Rowe, October 1996

Jazz trumpeter and educator Clark Terry passed away on Saturday February 21, at the age of 94. I had been prepared for this news knowing that this jazz legend had been in ill health for many years, and having just viewed the touching documentary Keep On Keepin’ On.

I think of Clark as a member of the second generation of jazz musicians. He was born in St. Louis in 1920, three years after the first jazz recording by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. His mentors and teachers were of the first generation, and the music of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington all played a formative role in Clark’s development. While his music education came predominantly from outside the classroom, one of Clark’s contributions was to help move that knowledge into an educational setting. But even in the codified world of academia, he was able to impart the importance of learning the music by ear, feel, and intuition. Clark would just as soon expound on the beauty of the three blue notes as he would on the whole step/half step scales that might be applied to a specific ii-V-I chord progression.

I am one of the fortunate ones who spent time with Clark through my position at Hamilton College. He received an honorary degree from Hamilton in 1995, and performed numerous times at our annual Fallcoming jazz event. One memory that will remain is an evening gig in our on-campus pub [pictured above]. I was joined by Bob Cesari, a fellow saxophonist, and we were consistently amazed and amused by Clark’s ability to conjure up the absolutely perfect background riff to insert behind soloists. This may seem like an expected ancillary skill for a jazz musician, but I assure you it is not. You won’t find it in textbooks, and most academically-trained jazz musicians do not learn the technique. It comes from learning on the job, balancing theory with spontaneity, and, in Clark’s case, a wry sense of humor.

In 1999 I released a CD of compositions dedicated to artists that I had met through the jazz archive oral history project. The tune I wrote for Clark Terry was named “Beyond Category,” a phrase I borrowed from the Duke Ellington legacy. Duke used the term to describe Clark, a musician who could rise above definitions and provide exactly what was needed at any time. The flugelhorn of Wendell Brunious came about as close as you can get to capturing Clark’s unique sound.

Nutcracker Swing

Among the numerous annual holiday events in your neighborhood, it’s a good bet that at least one production of “The Nutcracker Suite” ballet will be taking place. It’s produced by the finest  ballet companies — as in the American Ballet Theater — as well as your local dance school. The “Sleeping Beauty” ballet premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1890 with the now famous music score composed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky was a master orchestrator, assigning his distinctive melodies to exactly the right instrument. If Russia can claim Tchaikovsky as one of its premier composers, America certainly can put Duke Ellington on the same pedestal.

Ellington, composer of approximately two thousand compositions, rarely arranged music that was not of his own creation. Fortunately for holiday listeners, he teamed with co-composer Billy Strayhorn for an intriguing version of “The Nutcracker Suite” performed by The Ellington Orchestra and recorded on a 1960 LP titled “Three Suites.”

Ellington and Strayhorn managed to make Tchaikovsky swing. Their take on each movement of the suite retained the flavor of the dance and added swinging ensemble parts and sparkling solos. The Duke was an equally skilled orchestrator, but he wrote for individuals rather than specific instruments. Veteran members Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Hamilton and Laurence Brown shine throughout the recasting of this holiday classic.

Ellington did not lack for a sense of humor, reflected in his tweaked titles. Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Reed-Pipes” was renamed “Toot Toot Tootsie Toot” and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” became “Sugar Rum Cherry.”

A search on the Internet will yield multiple versions of the Ellington/ Strayhorn/ Tchaikovsky collaboration, including live performances by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. I highly recommend purchasing the CD. It will provide pleasurable holiday listening, and will surely inspire delight for those who have not heard it before.

Seasonal music plays a significant role in end-of-the-year gigs for musicians. You can read my previous musing from 2009 entitled Christmas Time is Here.

Ironic Iconic Hits

So how do you write a hit song? You can find books and blogs that profess to have the secret. There have been songwriting teams called “hit makers,” and it’s safe to say there are certain formulas that increase the chance of a song becoming a hit. In the jazz world some of the most successful recordings have come about through a combination of serendipity and a large dose of irony. One reason I call them “ironic hits” is that the musicians who made them famous were not the writers of the tune, although they were composers themselves. Let’s take a look at three.

Duke Ellington, arguably America’s greatest composer, was a well-established bandleader and hit maker in 1940. Ellington was a member of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and when the organization raised its licensing fees, Duke found he could no longer perform his own compositions during live radio broadcasts. This happened shortly after he had hired composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn brought an arrangement to the band called “Take the A Train.” Jazz lore has it that the title came from the first line of Ellington’s directions that would lead Strayhorn from his Pittsburgh home to Ellington’s apartment in Harlem. Take the A Train. Duke’s son Mercer Ellington, also an arranger, stated that he found Strayhorn’s original draft for the song in the trash. Strayhorn stated that it was too similar to a Fletcher Henderson arrangement, and so had discarded it. Whether or not that is true, it’s fascinating to realize that one of Ellington’s most enduring songs was not his composition at all. Ellington had the good sense to embrace talent when he found it, and he replaced his then current band theme, “Sepia Panorama” with Strayhorn’s first effort. The fact that Duke’s new collaborator was not an ASCAP member solved the licensing issue for a time.

A measure of a hit is not only the impact it first makes, but how long it lasts. “Take the A Train” is now a standard at jam sessions and any swing affair. Like most instrumental hits, lyrics were added later, in this case by vocalist Joya Sherrill, who later became a singer with Ellington. Joya’s lyrics hold up fairly well and are essentially an early Google Map: “You must take the A train/To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem.”

Amongst Ellington’s most ardent admirers was composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. When Brubeck was chosen to be on the cover of Time magazine, he unequivocally stated “it should have been Ellington.” The song “Take Five” has somehow entered the consciousness of the general population and provides another fascinating story of odd circumstances and irony. One of the first things I noticed after being hooked on the song and purchasing the LP was that the composer was the group’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond. As a devourer of liner notes and music trivia, this fact was not lost on me. Brubeck, whose success was tied to his writing, was not credited for what became the band’s biggest hit, and indeed went on to become the largest selling jazz single in history. The story is slightly more complicated. Apparently drummer Joe Morello was often given an extended solo feature at the end of their concerts in the early sixties. Often he would transition into the rarely-played time signature of 5/4, and eventually suggested to Dave that perhaps a song should be written over this groove. Paul Desmond stepped up and said “I’ll write something.” According to an NPR interview, Brubeck stated that Paul came back with two seemingly unrelated saxophone melodies to fit over the 5/4 time signature. Brubeck formed them into an A-A-B-A structure and provided the ear-catching vamp. The irony continues. It is a Brubeck hit without a hint of a piano solo, and features two other members of the group. Desmond thought the song was a throwaway and joked that his royalties would allow him to buy a new electric shaver. He also didn’t like the title “Take Five” suggested by Brubeck. In addition, Columbia Records was not pleased with the album as a whole. In her interview in 2011, Iola Brubeck reminisced about the attitude of the record company:

MR:    Were you surprised at the success of “Time Out?”

IB:     Of “Time Out?” Well yes. There was no anticipation that it was going to be a hit of any kind. And in fact, it’s an old story now that Dave has often told of having to fight at Columbia to even have it released and Goddard Lieberson liked the concept and he said he thought he could sell it to the people on the west coast maybe, and he took “Take Five” and went out to sales meeting on the west coast, saying this is something new and I think we can really push this, and the sales people saying “no way.” So it really was a result of — God bless ‘em — disc jockeys who were looking for something different to play and saying well this sounds different and then putting it on and then it got a public reaction, and then it started taking off. So it was really the public deciding that this is what they wanted to hear. It broke the mold and that’s always a little challenging to a lot of people who don’t know how to handle it. And of course by this time — it’s notorious in jazz history lore — that terrible review that Downbeat gave “Time Out.” I think it got a star and a half or something.

Thanks to the unique quirkiness of the song and those DJ’s, “Take Five” took its place in music history. The record company put out a 45 RPM single which required some snipping of the drum solo to fit into the three minute format. “Take Five,” has certainly stood the test of time and has since been lyricized by Al Jarreau, “Won’t you stop and take a little time out with me/Just take five, just take five.”

When Billboard released their 1961 Top 100 chart, “Take Five” stood at #95, preceded at #94 by Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” and followed by Elvis Pressley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” at #96. You’ll never see that in this day and age. Imagine a Wynton Marsalis recording on the charts, sandwiched between Justin Bieber and Adele.

I’ve stated numerous times that Cannonball Adderley was my musical hero. Not only was he the quintessential alto saxophonist, but also a savvy bandleader and major contributor to the soul jazz movement. In February of 1967, the Cannonball Adderley Quintet landed at #11 on the Billboard charts with the song “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” Cannonball wrote the occasional tune, but it was brother Nat who had penned some of the previous successes. In this case the liner notes conveyed that this Gospel-tinged song, steeped in American soul, was written by an Austrian. Pianist Joe Zawinul was born in Vienna and spent ten years as a member of Adderley’s quintet, contributing many compositions to the band’s repertoire, none bigger than “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Musicians don’t usually know when they have a hit on their hands, but Cannonball’s drummer Roy McCurdy stated in his interview that they thought they had something with potential.

MR:    With tunes like “Mercy, Mercy” and stuff, when you read them in rehearsal, did you get a sense that this tune is going to sell a lot of records?

RM:    Yeah. You know we were hoping, we were always experimenting. That band was experimenting all the time. And we played straight ahead jazz, we played all kinds of stuff. So when Joe [Zawinul] brought that tune in I think we were rehearsing in Teaneck, New Jersey. We rehearsed in Nat Adderley’s basement out there. When he brought that tune in he says “listen to this,” and he started playing it. And we were just starting to get into the electronics you know, where we were using electric piano. And we had a Wurlitzer that we wanted to use. And he played this tune and we says, “yeah, let’s try it.” We rehearsed it and got it together. We went and tried it and people loved it.

Perhaps the atypical characteristics of “Mercy, Mercy” are what propelled it to that unlikely spot on the charts. The song is unlike a hard-swinging Adderley performance. The slow groove is intimate but not overwhelming. The melody is simple but builds powerfully to its climax. There are no solos by Cannonball on saxophone nor brother Nat on cornet anywhere in the song. The only improvising was provided by Joe Zawinul on the Wurlitzer, and even this solo relies mostly on spare Gospel-flavored fills, as if to say the groove is sufficient. The song clocked in at close to five minutes, but as they did in “Take Five,” the record company needed to edit it for the 45 RPM. The engaging verbal introduction offered by Cannonball (“sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity”) was snipped out for the short version. Listen to the LP version to enjoy Cannonball’s eloquence.

Even the recording of the song had some jazz lore to it. The album is titled “Live at ‘The Club,’” when in reality “the club” was actually a recording studio. Invited guests sat at tables around the band recreating the atmosphere of a live performance. You can hear it and feel it on the record.

“Mercy, Mercy” lives on, although not as “Take Five” or “Take the A Train” did. The song was recorded by various artists in a number of settings, including the Buddy Rich Big Band. Somehow “Mercy” did not lend itself to memorable lyrics. The pop group The Buckinghams put out a cover version almost immediately, singing, “My baby she’s made out of love/Like one of the those bunnies in a Playboy Club.” Years later a set of lyrics that was only slightly better was penned, oddly credited to both Curtis Mayfield and songwriters Gail and Vincent Levy, “My love has turned her back on me/Heartache, why won’t you let me be?” Personally, I’ll stick with the instrumental version.

Joe Zawinul’s hit writing was not a onetime event. He penned memorable follow-ups for the Adderley band with “Walk Tall” and “Country Preacher,” and years later wrote the marvelous ear-catching composition “Birdland” as leader of the band Weather Report.

Regarding hit songs, Fats Waller’s famous phrase applies: “One never knows, do one.”