More Holiday Gifts

Here are some gift suggestions for the Jazz Drumming fans on your holiday list.

Each is available as a paperback and an eBook exclusively on Amazon.com.

Just search my name under books on the Amazon site.

Rob McConnell and The Boss Brass - "Peace/Blue Silver"

Here’s a video tribute to Rob and The Boss Brass that uses as its audio track one of Rob’s arrangement in which he combines Horace Silver’s Peace into a medley with trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s Blue Silver.


The soloists are Kevin Turcotte and Steve McDade on trumpet and Ted Warren on drums. Listen to how Rob takes Blue Mitchell’s improvisations from the Horace Silver quintet recording and orchestrates them as a shout chorus beginning at 6:38 minutes.


As Rob explained: “Blue’s original choruses are hard enough to play when you can practice them, let alone create them instantly on a record date, as Blue did … whew!”


In the Boss Brass, our Canadian friends created one of the most magnificent big bands that ever existed - anywhere.

In Walked Horace - JJ Johnson Sextet [Johnson's composition]

I remembering listening to this album when it first game out with my dear friend, guitarist Barry Zweig, who jumped up at 1:38 minutes and declared: "He's finishing his solo; he's finishing his solo!" A rather novel ideas in those days. Come to think of it, it still is!! Also quite unique at the time was the way in which JJ follows with a solo which is made up of trades with drummer "Tootie" Heath that go from 8's to 4's to 2's to 1's. What a band. JJ on trombone with Freddie Hubbard [tpt] and Clifford Jordan [ts] joining him on the front line with a rhythm section of Cedar Walton [p], Arthur Harper [b] and Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums. When JJ disbanded the group, Freddie and Cedar went on Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

[They Call It] Stormy Monday with the Les McCann Trio

As Ted Gioia described it:

“Jazz was like one of those newspaper chess problems: move from bop to free in ten moves. Change was the byword.”

As is often the case with change, some of it had a positive effect on Jazz, but there were also disastrous consequences as well.

In a way, the soul and funk movement was a step to the side for Jazz or, if you will, a look backward at its rhythm and blues roots."

Jazz with a rhythm and blues feeling retained some degree of popularity especially when it was performed with a talented vocalist such as Lou Rawls accompanied by Les McCann's soulful piano which could often be heard with his trio at a Hollywood Jazz Club called The Bit.

The club was not in Hollywood per se, nor was it quite on The Sunset Strip. It was between the two as you exited Hollywood to the west along Sunset Blvd. You had to know exactly where it was located [along a short curving pathway off of Sunset at the corner of Gardner], because when it first opened, there was no signage directing you to the club.

Les' soulful, bluesy and funky style of playing really appealed to the younger Jazz audience who were becoming especially put off by the rapid changes going on in mainstream Jazz at that time.

More Holiday Gifts

Here are some suggested holiday gifts for the Jazz saxophone fans among your family and friends.

Each is available in paperback and eBook formats exclusively from Amazon.com.

Just search for my name while on the Amazon site under books.

Remembering Frankie Dunlop (December 6, 1928 – July 7, 2014)

Frankie Dunlop's half-century in the music business resulted in an accumulation of musical wealth, a concept that does not always revolve around bank accounts.

Frankie Dunlop (December 6, 1928 – July 7, 2014) was a jazz drummer, one of the greats, whose performances have been raved about by critics and jazz fans alike, sometimes even described so passionately it would seem like he was participating in some kind of psychedelic music event. (From a web log: "...Dunlop has this falling-down-the-stairs melodic, sloppy-droppy sh*t going on that's like fireworks going off in my head.") Drummers with a sense of history, which ought to be all of them, prefer a simple anecdote when summing up the glory of Dunlop. Gene Krupa, the great swing star and one of the most popular drummers in music history, heard Dunlop for a set and promptly made arrangements for him to get free equipment from the Slingerland company.

A return to extravagant imagery is suitable, especially considering that Dunlop's lengthy drum solos during the normal course of a Thelonious Monk combo set have been described as "extravaganzas." The following image involving the drummer's discography will probably also come in handy if extra storage space is required for the largesse, in terms of free drum sets, resulting from Krupa doing Dunlop "a solid." Dunlop's solid contribution to jazz, in terms of recorded sides amounting to nearly 100 albums by the time he retired in 1984, can be compared to vast underground caves full of treasure. Amid steep, shimmering piles of gold such as the sides with Monk from a nearly four-year stay beginning in 1960, meltdowns with Sonny Rollins, or brilliant later live recordings with Lionel Hampton's touring band, are trinkets of incredible charm, adding another dimension to the understanding of this artist -- such as a track with silly castanets accompaniment or another in which Dunlop steps forward to deliver an amusing bebop vocal.

Dunlop's shuffle was imported from Buffalo, where he grew up in a family ripe not only for music but a drummer. His brother was a pianist, his father a guitarist, the drummer-to-be actually starting on the former instrument himself when his musical life began at the age of nine. At ten, however, Dunlop became a drummer, putting down musical roots that will come as no surprise to those aware of his skill with the complex yet bluesy music of Monk. Already a professional musician at 16, Dunlop began with classical percussion training, then went on to touring with rhythm and blues bandleaders such as Big Jay McNeely. Inevitably, this would result in the solid backbeat that made Monk performances of tunes such as "Rhythm-a-Ning" seem somehow akin to good rock & roll.

Most of this drummer's experiences were as a sideman, but he did lead his own group when he came out of the Army in the early '50s. By 1954 he was working with jazz giants such as Sonny Stitt, Charles Mingus, and Rollins. Prior to Dunlop's aforementioned stint with Monk, the drummer provided the required rhythmic push for piercing trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's big band, then in 1960 joined up briefly with Duke Ellington. Live recordings of the Hampton band from venues such as the Dutch De Muzeval in 1978 provide examples of Dunlop's craft in his later years.

Source: Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide

Jess Stacy - Sing sing sing (Piano Solo)

"Stacy did take a famous solo. It came about accidentally, during Goodman's bellwether 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. The band was nearing the closing ensemble of its elephantine showpiece, "Sing, Sing, Sing," when, after a Goodman-Gene Krupa duet, there was a treading-water pause, and Stacy, suddenly given the nod by Goodman, took off. The solo lasted over two minutes, which was remarkable at a time when most solos were measured in seconds. One wonders how many people understood what they were hearing that night, for no one had ever played a piano solo like it. From the opening measures, it had an exalted, almost ecstatic quality, as if it were playing Stacy. It didn't, with its Debussy glints and ghosts, seem of its time and place. It was also revolutionary in that it was more of a cadenza than a series of improvised choruses. There were no divisions or seams, and it had a spiralling structure, an organic structure, in which each phrase evolved from its predecessor. Seesawing middle-register chords gave way to double-time runs, which gave way to dreaming rests, which gave way to singsong chords, which gave way to oblique runs.

A climax would be reached only to recede before a still stronger one. Piling grace upon grace, the solo moved gradually but inexorably up the keyboard, at last ending in a superbly restrained cluster of upper-register single notes. There was an instant of stunned silence before Krupa came thundering back, and those who realized that they had just heard something magnificent believed that what they had heard was already in that Valhalla where all great unrecorded jazz solos go.

"Well, that 1938 solo was a funny thing," he said, in his soft Southern voice. "Benny generally hogged the solo space, and why he let me go on that way I still don't know. But I've thought about it, and there are two things that might explain it. I think he liked what I'd been doing behind him during his solo, and I think he was mad at Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton, because they had all told him they were leaving to form their own bands.

When I started to play, I figured, Good Lord, what with all the circus-band trumpet playing we've heard tonight and all the Krupa banging, I might as well change the mood and come on real quiet. So I took the A-minor chord 'Sing, Sing, Sing' is built around and turned it this way and that. I'd been listening to Edward MacDowell and Debussy, and I think some of their things got in there, too. I didn't know what else to do, and I guess it worked out pretty well." - Whitney Balliett

The Art Blakey Percussion Ensemble - Oscalypso [Oscar Pettiford Cello and Ray Bryant Piano]