Musical Time Travel

I’ve stated before that my performing repertoire and listening habits can hardly be considered current or up to date. My role as Jazz Archive Director at Hamilton has strengthened my enjoyment of jazz music and personalities from the past — the swing era and the soloists from the 30’s and 40’s. My “songs for gigs” list reflects this obsession and my “current tunes” are now mostly from the 50’s and 60’s.

My passion for this music was reinforced and well-satisfied during the last three weekends. The annual Fallcoming concert at Hamilton for the last five years has featured a group led by pianist Dick Hyman. This year’s members included guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, trumpeter Randy Sandke, drummer Jackie Williams, and bassist Jay Leonhart. Jazz fans will raise their eyebrows at such an impressive cast of characters.

For Fallcoming Jazz ‘13 we tried something different than the normal organized jam session format. A number of years ago, a Dick Hyman CD entitled “From the Age of Swing” came to my attention. I fell in love with the creative arrangements for a four-piece rhythm section and four horns, consisting of alto and baritone saxes, trumpet and trombone. Mr. Hyman’s charts captured the feel of the early big band era, and his imaginative writing was a joy to hear and play. The quintet was augmented by Syracuse trombonist Greg McCrea, Hamilton student Deanna Nappi on baritone sax, and myself on alto sax. Here’s a YouTube link of the first tune we played on this concert.

We played the Hyman charts on September 27, and I found myself immersed in musical heaven. Randy on trumpet faithfully reproduced the approach and sound of Joe Wilder, the trumpeter on the original recording. The rhythm section provided an indescribable bed of swing, demonstrating the power of organized simplicity, and it wouldn’t have happened without the 4/4 chordal strumming of Bucky Pizzarelli, who also was on the 1999 recording. Guitarists describe this as “Freddie Green,” the style of strumming that Mr. Green provided for the Count Basie Orchestra for nearly 50 years.

Here’s a description of that style from Bucky, taken from his 2003 interview:

Bucky Pizzarelli

MR:    Is there some distinguishing thing about what Freddie Green did that’s possible to verbalize?

BP:    It’s very hard to describe what he did but he played a 4/4 beat with an accent on two and four, and he just kept chunking away. And if you study the music of Count Basie, the rhythm section never played figures with the band. When they played eighth-quarter-eighth, you know, they just kept chunking away through the whole thing. And it works better that way. The minute everybody’s doing the same thing it doesn’t work. It’s like a drummer hitting figures with the brass section. It’s terrible.

Jay Leonhart, Bucky’s rhythm section-mate at Fallcoming, described the specifics that make it work:

Jay Leonhart

JL:    I’ve heard Bucky, and who else, James Chirillo … the two of them, they’ll take the third and the seventh, right in the middle of the strings, right in that nice middle range around middle C, which on the piano would be — and they’ll just sit and play the third and the seventh. It’s either a minor third or a major seventh. Or maybe a sixth if they want to get adventurous. And they can just sit there and play like that. And the only notes coming out of the guitar are the relevant ones. And they’re not doubling the third, like making Bach turn over in his grave ... It’s so defined and clear. And as a result their chops are good because they’re not making a lot of moves and they’re not trying to play six notes with every … they can concentrate on the time, and they do. And that’s the way Bucky plays. Yet he’s a grand soloist when he plays songs by himself, he can really play the guitar. He’s not just a two, three and seven guy. He can really play the guitar.

This steady pulse allows everyone in the band to play less, and we know less equals more. It was a memorable moment, transporting me back to the time when this style was the popular music of the day. Mr. Hyman skillfully led the 8-piece ensemble, which had only engaged in a run through of the charts. As an added bonus, Deanna, one of my students, acquitted herself with great skill on the baritone saxophone. The biggest difference from actually performing this music during its original lifespan was the setting. If we had been performing in 1937 in a dance hall, the success of the band would have been determined by the number of dancers on the dance floor. This music has now been elevated to an art form worthy of a seated audience in a concert hall setting.

The next weekend I traveled to SUNY Fredonia, for another round of nostalgia. The annual Fredonia Jazz Ensemble reunion concert took place on Friday evening. In similar fashion, an all-too-brief rehearsal preceded a concert by members of the original members of the Fredonia Jazz Ensemble from the classes of the 1970’s. This weekend is always a mix of music and camaraderie, reconnecting with musicians from those brief college years who shared a love for big band music. At the time, we took pride in the fact that we were operating outside the conventions of the music program. In the mid-70’s jazz had not been embraced by the majority of music schools, and the jazz ensemble was a student-directed affair. Our repertoire this night consisted of familiar big band fare, but from the bands that thrived after the swing era. Material from Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis bands provided plenty of challenge. Most of us playing that night had harbored fantasies of getting a call to join one of these groups and abruptly leaving our studies in avid response.

As an incentive for my own writing, I always compose a new work for this weekend, and I can be confident that it will be played well and with great spirit. My new piece, “Angelica,” was received a good deal of praise, making it worth the time and effort.

The last step on my time travel took me back even further. I got a call to play a dinner dance entitled “A 1920’s Jazz Gala.” While my musical tastes have traveled backwards, the 1920’s was pushing it even for me. A fair amount of research was required for this Great Gatsby-era gig. It was an authentic recreation of a 1920’s speakeasy with period clothing encouraged for all attendees; a non-alcohol event in the spirit of prohibition. This time the songs included tunes you would find in dusty sheet music archives: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “The Charleston,” and “3 O’clock in the Morning.” My current quartet rose to the occasion. The drummer brought vintage drums and the required whistles, woodblocks and cowbells that were so much a part of this upbeat small-band jazz. I was happy to see a number of college and high school students among the attendees, illustrating the fact that some eras carry a magical aura all their own. Here’s a photo of our group from this nostalgic evening.

(L-R) Monk Rowe, Tom McGrath,
John Hutson, and Sean Peters

The three consecutive weekends provided a welcomed musical challenge and a personal sentimental journey.

The Right Notes

In the last blog entry the subject of “wrong notes” was addressed by quotes from players from what is best described as the hard bop school. This post-bop style places them squarely in the modern jazz era and helps us understand their comments and opinions more clearly.

An annual duty of mine at Hamilton College deals with an earlier style of jazz. Once a year at Fallcoming we host a group of hand-picked musicians who perform an evening concert of traditional and mainstream jazz. This year our group proved wildly successful. It was comprised of a sextet covering several generations, but one that was able to perform as if they were a seasoned road band. The sextet was: Bucky Pizzarelli (guitar), Nicki Parrott (bass), Evan Christopher (clarinet), Randy Sandke (trumpet), Jackie Williams (drums) and leader Dick Hyman (piano).

Thanks to John Herr for providing the excellent photographs of the Fallcoming event.

Above, Dick Hyman and this writer after the concert.

I know for a fact that the last time these six artists performed as a band was one year ago during Fallcoming 2009. They were so well received that we invited them back as a unit. This group of musicians can function as a working ensemble because they know the repertoire that Dick Hyman is likely to call, a mix of standards from the golden era of songwriting (the 30’s and 40’s), and jazz classics that predate those decades, what we can call New Orleans/Dixieland music.

These musicians would address the question of wrong notes from a different viewpoint. There is much less of the “anything works” approach. The musicians create improvisation in a well-defined playing field where wrong notes sound less like hip choices and more like mistakes. Nonetheless, their playing is highly inventive, and arguably harder. Their note choices may be more constrained by the theory behind the music, but if you had heard this concert you’d have been astounded by the inventiveness of the improvised melodies and rhythms.

A big part of the success of this event has to be attributed to Mr. Hyman, who has had an amazing career as a pianist, composer, arranger, film scorer, and concert organizer. Aside from my admiration for his playing, I am jealous of his experiences throughout his career, including the years of steady work in New York City’s studios. His day-to-day schedule included everything from jazz to semi-classical music. He also was called upon to provide incidental music for soap operas and game shows, and he played keyboards on many pop hits during the emergence of Rock & Roll.

I asked Dick Hyman about this time in his life during his first interview, in March of 1995:

MR: What kind of people did you play behind?

DH: Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, whom I’m working with now, Laverne Baker, The Coasters, The Drifters. I remember that terrible record “White Christmas” that was so popular.

MR: Did you play on that?

DH: I did. But we did all that stuff. And if you asked me what we thought of it, we always —we said to each other can you imagine we said to each other, in twenty years, this was in 1955 or so, in twenty years people will be saying to each other, “listen darling, they’re playing our song.” And you know that’s exactly what happened. All of that funny music that we laughed at became classic in Rock. And go figure it out.

MR: Well people, even musicians who’ve never done studio work, may not realize that you don’t have to like everything you play on in a studio. It’s not possible.

DH: No, no. What you have to like is being able to play it well.

That last statement ought to be written inside the instrument cases of young musicians. Dick was also called upon to do things which he might never have anticipated. He played mallet percussion, he whistled on a number of hit records, and was one of the first musicians to employ the Moog synthesizer.

Mr. Hyman is a pianist who seemingly can play anything that he can think of, in any style. He once recorded an LP with twelve different versions of the song “A Child is Born” as if played by twelve different and contrasting piano players. It’s interesting to watch him spin out his melodic and improvised phrases. His facial expression may not change at all, but the thought process behind his creations is magical.

I asked him about that thought process in our second interview, from March of 2001.

MR: I had a question also about trying to define hard things — and that is the concept of what you choose to play when you’re improvising.

DH: Oh. You mean what piece or what ideas?

MR: No. Where does improvising come from?

DH: It comes from your background and from the ideas of whomever you may be playing with, and also your technical capability. The ideas of — I’ve used this analogy before — the ideas are rather like a kaleidoscope which you shake up so that it produces different images each time but they’re made up of the same colored jewels and bits of paper. They are liable to be the same ideas in a different form every time you shake it up unless you keep adding to the kaleidoscope and put in different jewels, different colored pieces of paper, and then when you shake it up the next time it’s going to be a bit different. But there is very little, I think, of improvisation that hasn’t been thought of before or that you haven’t somehow used. The point is to keep replenishing the supply and keep on mixing it up differently. And a way that you can — certainly the tool that you use is just technique. If I’m in good shape technically I will try things that I wouldn’t otherwise. If I’m not in shape technically I won’t try to do certain things, I’ll stay where it’s safe and I know that I’ve been before. But if I feel very loose and in good shape and I’ve played a lot then I really can stretch out and try things that maybe I’ve heard other people do and see if I can get my version of, try things, just let the fingers go where they may, and pose certain problems for myself and see how I can get out of them, and just sometimes there are, too, moments where you don’t quite know where an idea comes from. Those are precious and they’re rare. If you’re lucky you’re recording them or you can write them down and they become compositions. But you watch for those. Sometimes you can chase them. If you have to compose something on a deadline of course, you really go out and you try to grab the muse and bring her back. Sometimes you can be successful. Some people use drugs and liquor to get to that stage. I’m not sure that works. I do think that, in my case, in the first part of the day might be the most creative part, and that possibly is because I’ve been thinking about the things through the night that I want to get to the next day.

It was a thrill to watch Dick Hyman in action as well as hear him. At times on this jazz concert he would employ the Basie technique, a simple raise of the eyebrow or the point of a finger indicating where the music should be sent. On a number of occasions he got up from the piano and walked over to the horn players while the drummer or bassist was soloing, had a slight word with them about something he wanted them to do, then walked back to the piano to hear the results.

I was invited to sit in on a tune at this latest Fallcoming event, and I wished I had the adjectives to describe the feeling. Let's just say being surrounded by that assemblage of talent makes it much easier to find the right notes.

Dick Hyman has recently put all of his skills into a huge project entitled Dick Hyman: A Century of Jazz Piano released on the Arbors jazz label in 2009. This is a serious collection of piano music performed by Dick Hyman, spanning the era from pre-Ragtime all the way to free improvisation. It includes five CD’s and a DVD, and Dick is currently working on an accompanying method book. It is well worth checking out.