From every perspective - the quality of the playing by each musician, the superb audio and what Whitney Balliett describes as "the sound of surprise" - too good not to share.
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Wynton Kelly - "A Happy Feeling"
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Of the late pianist Wynton Kelly [1931-1971], Richard Cook and Brian Morton in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed. have written: “His chording [comping or accompaniment] behind a soloist has a gentle but dynamic bounce. He never does anything to startle a listener, but he has a bright, swinging, communicative style that always appeals. He deserves wider recognition.”
And so the following piece about Wynton by Gene Lees in an effort to promote this wider recognition.
“If they gave awards for unpretentiousness, Wynton Kelly would win a large loving cup. The stocky pianist, just entering his fourth year in the rhythm section of the Miles Davis quintet-turned-sextet, has the distinction of being about the most unobtrusive pianist in jazz, while at the same time inspiring an enormous professional admiration.
If being imitated is the mark of having arrived, Kelly has arrived. His ebullient approach to solos has seeped into the playing of a wide variety of pianists, and he has written the very definition of good comping.
"Wynton," said Voice of America jazz commentator Willis Conover, one of the many persons who has tried (with middling success) to pin down verbally the nature of Kelly and his music, "has a marvelous go-to-hell attitude. Like the Miles Davis attitude turned active, and with humor added."
Not that there is a hint of antagonism in Kelly or his playing. "He always projects a happy feeling, regardless of the tempo," said trombonist J. J. Johnson, currently a co-worker of Kelly's in the Davis group. But there is a disinclination to overwhelm the listener. Kelly seems content to let the listener come to him.
"Wynton has by no means shown all the things he can do," commented Bill Evans, a forerunner of Kelly's with Miles. (First there was Red Garland, then Evans, who in turn was succeeded by Kelly.)
"For one thing," Evans continued, "Wynton is a fine accompanist. I heard him first with Dinah Washington, and immediately I felt an affinity for his playing.
"He has a wonderful technique, and he gets a true piano sound out of the instrument. He approaches the instrument legitimately and, although I don't know his training background, I know that if someone else hasn't disciplined him, he has disciplined himself.
"I can hear in his mind that he's broad enough to be able to play solo — that is, unaccompanied by rhythm section — but I like him in a rhythm section so much that I'm not sure I'd want him to do it."
After a moment's reflection, Evans added, "Wynton and I approach jazz essentially the same way.
"Wynton is an eclectic, not in the cheap way, but in the sense of copying the spirit and not the letter of the things he has liked."
The man who elicits this musicianly admiration was born in Brooklyn in 1931. Like his friend Oscar Peterson, Kelly has West Indian parents. When the two meet, they will sometimes slip into a West Indian patois that leaves them laughing and other musicians staring in confusion.
Kelly started playing piano at the age of 4. "I didn't have much formal study," he said.
"I went to Music and Art High School and Metropolitan Vocational. They wouldn't give us piano, so I fooled around with the bass and studied theory.
"I used to work around Brooklyn with Ray Abrams, the tenor player, and his brother Lee, the drummer, and also Cecil Payne, Ahmad Abdul-Malik, and Ernie Henry. We all came up together.
"One of the first bands I worked with was Hot Lips Page's. Then I went with Lockjaw Davis for about a year. After that I did a stint with the Three Blazes. Then Dinah Washington. I worked for Dizzy Gillespie too. I was between Dinah and Dizzy for years."
Kelly joined the Miles Davis group in the early part of 1959. It was then that the public really began to be aware of him, not only as a soloist but as a pulsing rhythm-section player. Though he has recorded six albums on his own —"three for Vee Jay, two for Riverside, and one I made in 1950 when I was 19 that doesn't even count" — it is nonetheless for his work in the Davis unit that he is best known.
If the Kelly style is not an obtrusive one — not a style that one hears once and ever afterwards recognizes — it has its curious distinctiveness. There is in it a highly personal ease and lightness, an infectious, casually bouncing quality to which one rapidly becomes attached.
"He never," J. J. Johnson said, "lets his technical facility, which he has plenty of, dominate. The swing is the thing with Wynton."
As an accompanist for horns, Kelly is the ne plus ultra of skilled, meaningful, and yet non interfering comping. "He does all the right things at the right times," Johnson said.
Kelly loves to comp. "In fact," he said, "at one time I didn't like to solo. I'd just like to get a groove going and never solo.
"The first pianist I admired for comping was Clyde Hart, and later Bud Powell.
"The way you comp varies from group to group. Some guys will leave a lot of space open for you to fill, like Miles. Others won't. And so you have to use your discretion. In general, I like to stay out of a man's way. But you have to judge it by the situation. I did some things with Dizzy I wouldn't do with Dinah, and things I did with them that I wouldn't do with Miles.
"It's good to sit down and hear how other guys comp and then learn to do it yourself."
Kelly's tastes among pianists are predictably broad. An incomplete list of his preferences includes:
Oscar Peterson —"First of all, he's tasty. And he knows the instrument very well."
Erroll Garner —"He's a hell of a stylist, and he's very versatile."
Bud Powell —"I respect Bud as one of the main figures in starting modern jazz piano."
Bill Evans — "For beauty. That's all I can say. He also knows the instrument very well. He's one of the prettiest piano players I've heard in a long time."
Phineas Newborn—"We were in the Army together, bunk to bunk. He's a genius."
Walter Bishop Jr.—"I've liked him since I was a kid."
McCoy Tyner — "He's a serious-minded musician. I like his style, and he fits well with the other instruments in Coltrane's group."
Unlike most pianists who come to prominence in someone else's group, Kelly has no pressing urge to form a group of his own.
"It's in the back of my mind," he said. "But not now.”
Source - January 3, 1963 edition of Downbeat Magazine.
Monday, December 1, 2025
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Cal Tjader - The 1957 Downbeat Interview
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Lately, I’ve been on a vibraphonist and percussionist Cal Tjader “jag” - [for those who may not be aware, the “T” is silent in his last name and it's pronounced “Jader”].
The dictionary definition of “jag” that I am referring to is “to be completely unrestrained” in the sense of listening to all the music I can lay my hands on regarding certain artists and checking the Jazz literature to see what I can find to form a piece about him/her that I can put up on my page - these include insert notes.
Here’s one of the earliest features in the Jazz literature on Cal in which he discusses his approach to Jazz and how it developed. It took place a few years after he took on the leadership of his own quintet following stints with Dave Brubeck and George Shearing,
The interview was published in the September 5, 1957 edition of Downbeat by John Tynan who its West Coast editor.
“So far as Cal Tjader is concerned he hopes “they never take Jazz out of the saloons.”
Not that he overindulges. But he doesn't believe the same mood and unfettered spirit for the music can prevail in a more formal environment.
"Not too long ago," explained the 32-year-old Missourian, "the quintet played a couple of weeks in the Los Angeles Jazz Concert hall. Now this was a formal, concert-type presentation of jazz. But you know something? I wouldn't care for it as a steady diet. It just wouldn't make it for me. You get a little lazy, and the groove isn't there when you play to an audience of sitters and listeners. Of course, I do want people to listen to us—but relaxed, not too deliberate. In a club, the audience and the band can let their hair down."
ONE POSSIBLE reason Tjader places so much stock in a thoroughly relaxed audience could be that his group plays a lot of dances, principally in the Los Angeles area, in Spanish-speaking communities.
"I like people to dance to the Latin stuff," he said emphatically. "At one of our dances in the Sombrero ballroom, for example, you can play a montuna, and everybody is responsive to it. Of course, in clubs you have to gear it more to the listener; but to me this is much more rewarding than playing to row-upon-row of concert listeners.
"And when you feel that you can just play to a dancing audience, there's an emotional kick - the pressure's off. It gives me a real boot when one of the dancers will come to the stand and say with real sincerity, 'Ey, I sure like your progressive mambo, man.’” Tjader's fresh face brightened in one of his frequent grins.
Leader of his own quintet for the last 3 ½ years, since he left the George Shearing group early in 1954, the vibist-drummer was born Callen Radcliffe Tjader Jr. in St. Louis, Mo., 1925.
COMING FROM A musical show business family (his father was a dancer with the Duncan Sisters, playing the Orpheum vaudeville circuit when Cal was born; his mother a student concert pianist), it was a small surprise that at 2 Cal already was a piano pupil of his mother. This was in 1927 when the family moved to San Mateo, Calif., where his parents opened a dance studio.
After an introduction to drums in high school, Cal joined the navy in 1943. Upon discharge three years later, he enrolled in San Francisco State college, majoring in music and education. Latching onto an old set of vibes, he began teaching himself to play the instrument and was shortly sitting in with local groups around the bay area.
In 1948, while still a student, Tjader met Dave Brubeck, who then was studying at Mills college. With bassist Ron Crotty, he joined Brubeck to form the original trio led by the piano man.
Three years later, in 1951, he left to form his own quartet in San Francisco.
In 1953, Cal disbanded to join Shearing on vibes.
"One of the chief compensations of being with Shearing," he said, "was that back east I got to hear a lot of Machito, Tito Puente, and Noro Morales.
Those bands had a tremendous effect on me. Immediately I wanted to reorganize a small combo along the same lines, only with more jazz feeling incorporated in the Latin format."
THE FRUITION OF this desire was in the formation of his first so-called mambo quintet in 1954. A booking at San Francisco's Macumba got the group off to a good start.
In addition to its six-month stint at the club, the first albums on Fantasy quickly established the quintet as a new unit to be reckoned with in concerts and clubs on the west coast. Today, according to Fantasy's Sol Weiss, Tjader is the label's biggest seller. In 1955, after a nationwide tour, Cal won new star laurels in Down Beat's Jazz Critics poll for his performance on vibes.
In June,1956,he radically reorganized his "mambo quintet." In effect, this entailed his dropping the mambo tag and placing the emphasis on jazz appeal.
It took about a month before he crystallized a new concept for the group; when he began taking bookings again, it was a predominantly jazz quintet that hit the road.
THE PRIMARY REASON for this change, according to Tjader, is that "Latin has its definite limitations, especially from the standpoint of improvisation. It's like a hypnotic groove. First you set the rhythmic pattern, then the melodic formulae follow — until pretty soon you realize there's not much real music invention happening.
"See, the Latin percussionist's conception of time is very straight, rigid," he elaborated. "It's not really loose like it has to be for jazz. That's why there's nothing more of a drag than having Latin percussionists sit in with a jazz group. Generally they seem to lack that loose, free rhythmic way of blowing. But on the other hand, you can take a jazz number like Bernie's Tune, for instance, and adapt it to Latin treatment, still preserving the flavor of both styles of music."
These days, Cal is not so much concerned with preserving Jazz feeling within a Latin context as he is with blowing straight Jazz in an identifying manner.
As collaborators to this end, he can count on Vince Guaraldi, former Woody Herman piano man; Eugene Wright, bassist who played with many varieties of groups from Count Basie to Sarah Vaughan; and his steady versatile drummer, Al Torre. Then, to widen the appeal of every set, Latin percussionist Louis Kant contributes to several numbers in the Ritmo Caliente vein.
On the subject of an identifying sound, Cal is a stickler. “If you can get a real sound of your own, it’s half the battle,” he insists. “In fact, I believe a group sound is more important to make a band go over than the individual improvising talents of its members.”
“Of course, I realize that most groups starting out today will have to sound like some other existing units. This can’t be helped, but it doesn’t mean they still can’t play worthwhile Jazz.”
“It takes time to evolve a sound of your own. Look at the Modern Jazz Quartet: they were working for perhaps three years before they caught on and really got their identifying sound. For us the Latin thing worked. But there’s no law that says we had to stick to it. I think we’ve proved by now that we can make it with straight Jazz.”
With his breakthrough into chi chi haunt [stylish setting] of Hollywoodiana, Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip, Cal sees no reason why the quintet shouldn’t play similar rooms throughout the nation. As he views it, it boils down to living up to your responsibilities to an audience.
“You don’t necessarily have to be smiling all the time,” he explains. “You’re trying to sell Jazz right? Then you have to have a responsible presentation.The MJQ appeals admirably there. They’ve got a freedom in their individual playing, but as a group they’re disciplined. This is the most important thing, I believe.”
The vibist drummer, a well-scrubbed Joe-College type in a searsucker, has much to say regarding Jazz rooms. While a lot of this is unprintable, much of it is praise for happy rooms that are conducive to playing.
He rates San Francisco’s Blackhawk as one of these. Another of these he considers as an ideal room is Zucca’s Cottage in Pasadena, CA.
“One more thing,” he added emphatically. In every contract that a band signs when it takes a club engagement, there should be a specific clause that the piano should be tuned to A440 [440 Hz, which serves as a tuning standard for the musical note of A above middle C].”
“Well,” he said with a wistful smile, “club owners being what they are, maybe that’s a lot to expect.”
Thursday, November 27, 2025
LATIN ESCAPADE - George Shearing
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Sometimes I wonder if fans of Jazz who grew-up listening to the music in the analog era realize how fortunate we are that so much of it has been reissued in digital CD and Mp3 formats.
Since Jazz, in general, accounts for less than 3% of all recordings sold, it is amazing how much of it has been subsequently released in digital configurations.
Although not all of my favorite LPs have been included in this transition, fortunately, over time, most have and I for one am very grateful for the convenience of having some of the more obscure among these in a digital conversion.
One such album is Latin Escapade [Capitol T737] which features pianist George Shearing and his quintet. In addition to George, the quintet is made up of a guitarist, vibraphonist, bassist and drummer. Although these are all instruments that must be struck or plucked, George’s group has managed to achieve one of the more beautiful and easily identifiable sounds in Jazz.
The uniqueness of “the Shearing Sound” comes from the way the group states the melody of each tune. This is formed by Shearing playing blocked chords around the notes of the melody with each hand an octave apart and the vibes playing in unison up an octave from the piano’s right hand and the guitar playing in unison down and octave from the piano’s left hand.
When hearing "The Shearing Sound," essentially the listener is experiencing a melody that is harmonized into four-parts in which Shearing's upper melody note is doubled on vibes and the lower note is doubled on guitar.
You can hear this four octave span quite distinctly on every track of Latin Escapade. Each of the album’s twelve [12] tracks is less than 3.30 minutes.
Here are some YouTube videos that will provide you with a Shearing Sound sampling of the music from the album.
Along with vibraphonist Cal Tjader, who had occupied the vibes chair in George’s quintet before forming his own combo, Shearing was one of the earliest adapters of Latin rhythms in a small group setting. Many of his 1950’s album contained Latin Jazz tracks or were thematically based on Latin Jazz themes as was the case with Latin Escapade.
George developed such a deep interest in Latin rhythms that he went so far as to insert a segment in his club sets or concert performances that highlighted tunes with a Latin-flavor. During these Latin features, Shearing would augment his quintet with conga drums and timbales with the Jazz drummer in the group playing various Latin percussion instruments, thus creating the instrumentation for authentic Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Of course, George was always a very commercial-minded musician [in other words, he liked to eat regularly and pay his rent on time] and it certainly didn’t escape his attention that dancing to the [then, newly-introduced] Mambo rhythm was a craze that swept the US in the 1950’s.
Hence, the following Mambo with Me cut from Latin Escapade:
The long-playing record provided Jazz groups with room to “stretch-out” take longer solos] and it was not uncommon for Jazz LP’s to have 2 or 3 tracks per side that produced 18-20 minutes of music per side.
During his career [1919-2011], Shearing did make some LP’s with fewer cuts per side, especially with the quintet in performance, but he made many more with the more commercial or popular music format of 12 tracks per LP.
Although Latin Escapade belongs in the latter category, its finely crafted and well-executed arrangements, while easy on the ear, are anything but commercial.
With none lasting longer than 3:35 minutes, each of the album’s twelve tracks is a miniature musical masterpiece.
George is the only soloist and during his solos he reveals a thorough familiarity with Latin Jazz piano stylings; particularly the heavy use of riffs and “montuno” [repetitive refrain.
All of these qualities are reflected in this YouTube which uses vintage postcards of Cuba from the University of Miami’s collection and Mi Musica Es Para Ti [“My Music is For You”] from the from the album as its audio track.
George has always had an ear for pretty melodies. He can swing hard, too, but his affinity for appealing airs results in a healthy variety of ballads on all of his recordings. He always arranges his treatment of such tunes very artfully so as to further enhance their beauty and, in many cases, their romantic or alluring aura.
At a time in the 1950’s and 60’s when AM radio in Southern California still offered programs that specialized in “mood music,” it was not uncommon to hear a Shearing Sound ballad treatment during one of these late night broadcasts.
One such example of Shearing charming way with a ballad can be found on his Latin Escapade interpretation of Ray Gilbert and Osvaldo Farres’ haunting Without You that serves as the audio track to this You Tube commemorating The Shearing Sound.
Over the years, in addition to leading his marvelous quintet, George performed with Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme and a host of other vocalists. including, toward the end of his career, guitarist and vocalist, John Pizzarelli.
In addition to the recordings that he has made with these artists, George has a substantial discography under his own name – none better than Latin Escapade [1956].
After sampling the music on this album, we hope you will agree.
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