Oscar Peterson with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums - Some Selections from the The Canadiana Suite

 

Line for Lyons - The Three Baritone Band

The Three Baritone Saxophone Band

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Sometimes the music on a recording is so engrossing and engaging that I just want you to listen to it rather than have you read about it.

I mean, at some basic level, the music always speaks for itself.

In a larger artistic sense, there is something artificial about trying to describe music in words.

Gerry Mulligan died in 1996 and baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber put together The Three Baritone Saxophone Band Plays The Music of Gerry Mulligan as a sort of tribute to him.

Enlisting the assistance of fellow bari sax players Nick Brignola and Gary Smulyan, the band toured briefly and recorded the Dreyfus Jazz CD in 1997.

Ronnie wrote all of the arrangements and selected Andy McKee on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums to create the rhythmic pulse in a piano-less atmosphere that Mulligan often preferred.

Gerry Mulligan left a huge footprint on the baritone saxophone and I doubt that any player of that instrument in the modern Jazz era has escaped his influence.

Of course, the magnitude of his contributions to Jazz as a composer, arranger and bandleader have few parallels in the history of the music.

I continue to be amazed by the fact that Gerry Mulligan has yet to be the subject of a major biography.

In order to rectify this omission I have published an anthology of articles, interviews and commentaries which you can find on Amazon.com as both a paperback and an eBook - A Gerry Mulligan Reader: Writings on a Jazz Original by Steven A. Cerra.

Django - The Modern Jazz Quartet - Composed by John Lewis

These extracts are from an article which appeared in the February 2, 1957 edition of Downbeat.

Entitled John Lewis and written by Nat Hentoff, it carried the following subtitle - The Modern Jazz Quartet’s Music Director Answers Complaints About the Group, And Also Delivers His Musical Philosophy.

With regard to the subtitle, John, like Dave Brubeck, could have called it - “The Story of My Life in Jazz.”

"Criticisms of the Quartet: Do I feel Milt Jackson is being held down as a member of the quartet? You’ll have to ask Milt about that. I don’t think he is any more restricted—or that I am—any more than if he or I were working for anyone else. Milt also has the opportunity to play for other people and to make records for himself. He’s a big soloist in his own right, and he can do whatever he likes outside the quartet if it doesn’t interfere with his major work— the quartet —which has helped, I think, to make him more widely known. 

"We have a very unique and wonderful situation. We get to do mostly what we want to do. I say ‘mostly’ because each of us can’t do everything he wants to do. We all have to consider each other. None of us even plays the same when we don’t play together. 

“Our music, the quartet’s, is made to listen to. And it was not made for musicians only. When somebody comes to listen to our music, we try to give as much as we’re capable of. The listeners don’t have to guess what’s going on. There’s no mystery on the stand. I mean we try to have our ideas as well made as we can. There’s another kind of mystery that music keeps, that all art has, because you can’t figure it out.” 

John was given a list of criticisms made of the MJQ by some musicians and by some laymen—that, aside from Milt, the MJQ isn’t ‘funky’ enough, has too limited a range of expression and particularly of tempo, that it relies too much on fugal structures, etc. 

“FIRST OF ALL,” said Lewis in reaction to the “funky” question, “I don’t want to be in a position of defending us in terms of any words. All I care about is how well we’re communicating with the means we have. We must first obviously communicate to ourselves. Then the test is to communicate to somebody else. I don’t care about the terms, words, or anything else like that. 

"I listen to what we’re doing; I enjoy it; and listen as much as I can. If what I hear isn’t pleasant to me; if all the numbers were in the same tempo and in the same key, let’s say, that would be dull to me, and I’d know something was wrong. Now, I would agree that sometimes the tempos in the course of a set are quite the same, but there are other considerations. We sometimes sacrifice tempo changes for character. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and D & E, for example, are similar in tempo, but different in key and in character, so we can play them in sequence. And sometimes we achieve the character we want by playing ballads faster as the Basie band used to which made them sound wonderful and which gave them a more live quality. 

“Have we played out our use of fugal structures? We only play three — Concorde, Versailles, and Vendome. We don’t use Fugue for Music Inn in the book. Not yet, anyway. So that’s only three things. How can it be said that that aspect of what we do has been played out? 

“My writing is going to change, in any case. There are other things we want to do, and have wanted to do from the beginning. By now we know how to do some things fairly well. The counterpoint thing between the three pitch instruments, and even Connie, nas been developed to a fair degree. But I don’t want to set it so that it gets so perfect that we can’t use it for something else in another direction. 

“And we have to keep going back into the gold mine. I mean the folk music. The blues, and things that are related to it. Even things that may not have been folk to start with but have become kind of folk-like material that somebody writes but that has been worked on until it doesn’t belong to the composer any more. Like some of Gershwin’s music and James P. Johnson’s. Music that serves as a point of departure for us and for me.” 

When it’s not moving every day, the MJQ rehearses two or three times a week, sometimes more. During its August stay at the Music Inn [Stockbridge, MA] last summer the quartet rehearsed everyday. At rehearsal, Lewis makes the final decisions.

There has to be some kind of leader,” he emphasized. “It just can’t work without somebody setting the tempo, etc. Milt often makes suggestions, however.” 

As for record sessions, rehearsals alone usually aren’t enough from Lewis’ viewpoint. Whenever possible, the MJQ will play a piece in clubs and at concerts for several months before recording it. “That’s why,” Lewis explains, “we couldn’t possibly make more than the two LPs a year we do. Those two eat up everything. Two a year are enough!”

Jazz Journalist Association - Special Citation - Steven A. Cerra

 

Special Citations

February 19, 2025

Our nomination process is focused on the current efforts of individual authors/journalists. In 2024, however, projects collecting historic and more recent writings by a variety of authors made important contributions to the jazz library, and were found to be worthy of special acknowledgement.

STEVEN A. CERRA:  For years, Cerra has focused on historic articles and interviews on his JazzProfiles blog.  Beginning last year, he added self-published paperback and e-book compendiums of historic writings, including individual volumes on Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, three volumes on West Coast Jazz, two volumes on Jazz Drumming, three volumes on Jazz Saxophone and the first volume on Jazz Piano. Each is an invaluable research tool, providing a sense of how important artists and trends were viewed at the time by the music’s leading commentators.

In Salah - The George Wallington Quintet

"New York does not relinquish its position as center of the arts in the United States when it comes to the one native American art form, jazz. Through the years, the New York scene has been rich in jazz of all different types and styles. Most of the important jazz recording is done here and countless musicians, neophytes and the more established, mark it as a personal triumph when they have appeared in clubs like the Half Note, Five Spot, Vanguard or Birdland. Harlem, while not the fertile territory it was in the Thirties and Forties, still is an active force with clubs like Basie's and Smalls' and the Apollo Theatre is once again featuring jazz shows between the weeks of rock n roll.

Although, as stated before, New York houses all types of jazz, one particular variety seems to be more representative of "the Apple" in the last fifteen years. In the mid-Forties, when it had really become a force in modern jazz, I was discussing the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie with a friend from Chicago. Jim said to me, "You know, when I got out of the Army and Come home, my friends had those records that Hawk (Coleman Hawkins) and Dizzy made together (Bu-Dee-Daht, Disorder At The Border, Woody 'n You) and we didn't call it Bop, we called it New York jazz."

Of course, Bop was not formed solely in New York but it was here that its main exponents gathered, played and developed the style. The name New York jazz has never been applied in the sense that New Orleans, Chicago or Kansas City were to the music that emerged from their .environs during the course of jazz history but I feel it fits the playing which has been called Bop.

The bright, hard swing of the musicians carrying on the Parker-Gillespie tradition has been a strong contributing factor to the jazz of the New York area during the Fifties too. Among those playing in this general style are several cliques of musicians which, although they interchange at times, usually exist as separate, related entities.

During 1955, George Wallington led two different quintets in engagements at the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village. The first of the two had Donald Byrd. Jackie McLean, Teddy Kotick and Arthur Taylor. Byrd and Kotick, also in the second group, were joined by Phil Woods. They can be heard in Jazz For The Carriage Trade (Prestige 70329). In the mid-Fifties, these musicians worked together quite a bit. Woods, Stabulas and Kotick made many gigs in the metropolitan area and for a time the latter two comprised the rhythm section for the George Wallington trio. In 1958, Phil, Nick and George were reunited in Wellington's quartet at the New Orchid in Jackson Heights. Nick is still with the trio in 1959.

In Salah is a Mose Allison original which was originally recorded by its pianist-composer in a trio version on Prestige 7091. Its minor-keyed, neo Eastern flavor is vigorously swung with fluent solos by Woods, Byrd and Wallington. Chases between the horns and Stabulas lead back to the North African town which bears the title name.

" - Ira Gitler [written in 1957].

In Salah - Tubby Hayes / Ronnie Scott (The Jazz Couriers)

Ronnie Scott - tenor sax, Tubby Hayes - tenor sax, Terry Shannon - piano, Jeff Clyne - bass, Bill Eyden - drums. 1958

Al Haig - All The Things You Are

“To fully describe the significance, influence, individuality and great beauty of Al Haig’s piano style would require a book rather than an album liner. Very few artists in any creative field attain perfection but Haig is a man who comes incredibly close to that ideal during a career that goes back to the early days of modern Jazz. Where great music was happening in New York in the 1940s, Al Haig was to be found. He played piano in two of Charlie Parker’s best groups, figured in some of the earliest recordings by Parker and Gillespie in 1945-46 and was recognized by the leading players of the new idiom as its most gifted and sensitive accompanist.”

• Mark Gardner, liner notes to Al Haig Trio and Quintet [Prestige 7841]

“I feel at a loss when Al is not around.”

• Charlie Parker