Affecting Albums - Snappy Too - James Morrison

Snappy Too - James Morrison

(Links on tracks take you to Spotify to have a listen)

For those of you who are musicians, you have no doubt had the experience of playing in a band and not enjoying how one of the other players has played a part - be it that they can't nail it, or their feel is all wrong. You privately seethe, or you might have a chat to them about it, but that's about all you can do - unless you're James Morrison. Then you can have a 17 piece big band that plays exactly how you want it, because (apart from the drummer) all the musicians are you!

James Morrison will need no introduction to many readers - an Australian Jazz musician of wonderful proficiency across a wide range of styles and instruments, who plays gigs ranging from concerts with Brass Bands through to bop in smokey basements, there is almost nothing he hasn't done since his first professional gig in his teens.

In 1990, with the help of three friends Jeff Hamilton (drums), Ray Brown (bass), and Herb Ellis (guitar), he recorded an album of big band pieces, where he (Morrison) played all the piano, brass and woodwind parts - this album was entitled Snappy Doo. As he writes on the liner notes of the album under review, he always had in his mind that he would one day record another album along the same lines - and with Brown and Ellis now unfortunately no longer with us, Morrison himself has taken up guitar and bass, and, along with Jeff on drums, Snappy Too is now with us.

The album is a collection of original pieces (written by Morrison) and standards such as All of me, Up a Lazy River, and Someday my Prince Will Come. This last piece is played on a Bass Trumpet designed by Morrison and built by the craftsmen at Schagerl brass instruments. Morrison also plays another of his designs, a rotary-valved trumpet with a piston-trumpet length lead pipe called The Raven, in Zog's Jog, which is a wonderful high energy big-band showpiece. This makes Morrison the Jack Brabham of musicians in my opinion (and with Morrison being an absolute motor-head, I'm sure he'd understand the allusion).

The initial "wow" factor of Morrison playing 16 instruments soon wears off as the album gets going. Morrison is such an exciting and energetic player that you find yourself relishing the music and forgetting how it's made, which is as it should be. High trumpet playing is what Morrison is known for, and there is plenty of top-notch screaming, but what is noticeable in a few of the pieces here, such as my personal favourite The Call, is his fine sense of building a solo, from a sometimes low and soft start, building the energy and excitement to a fever pitch before the rest of the "band" kicks in with a killer riff.

As expected, the trombone playing is top notch, but another highlight for me is No Regret, a slower moodier piece, where Morrison solos on tenor sax and sounds very Stan Getz-ish. Nice.

For a change from the classic big band style Sad Blues uses a trad-jazz line up of trumpet, trom, clarinet, banjo and washboard, with plenty of flutter-tongued and plunger-muted trumpet to add to the trad feel.

If you like Jazz, if you like exciting playing, if you like Big Band music, and if you like music that SWINGS, then Snappy Too is well worth checking out.

Snappy Too is available via iTunes, or direct from www.jamesmorrison.com (where he also has a clever video clip of Zog's Jog)

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Blowing my own trumpet by James Morrison

Blowing my own trumpet by James Morrison
Sydney: Pier 9, 2006               ISBN 9781740458788

James Morrison would definitely be Australia's best-known home-grown Jazz musician. He is also well known as a raconteur and sometime TV presenter. Blowing my own trumpet is not really an autobiography as such, more a collection of vignettes recalling moments of a life.

As such, this book is a very easy read, and good for a laugh or two at the crazy adventures of James and his brother John (with Christian names like that, it's no surprise to find that their father was a preacher). The stories of trumpet and trombone playing are almost upstaged by the stories of boating - including living on boats both in Sydney Harbour and in New York, and nearly dying sailing across the Tasman Sea.

The stories of gigs around the world mostly focus on the mistakes, like turning up and playing with the wrong band, or hearing your own band live on the radio playing a gig while you're driving over the Harbour Bridge.

If you are looking for a description of the musical life, or a technical insight into trumpet playing or jazz music, this is not the book for you. If you like an amusing read for a sunny afternoon, you could do worse.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Affecting Albums - What Makes Sammy Swing! - Clark Terry Septet

(Click on the links in the song titles to be taken to Spotify for a listen)

If you are in any way a serious trumpet player, you will have heard of Clark Terry, even if it's only because the well known trumpet maker Olds released both a Clark Terry trumpet and Clark Terry flugelhorn, both of which are now highly prized by collectors.

Of course, to get to a stage where you get a horn named after you means that you are a pretty good player, and Clark certainly was that - after an apprenticeship with the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, he moved out under his own name and has been a big name in the world jazz scene for more than 60 years.

What makes Sammy swing! was recorded in 1963 and features, apart from Clark, Phil Woods and Seldon Powell on reeds (including sax, flute and clarinet), Urbie Green on trom, and a rhythm section composing Dave McKenna on piano, George Duvivier on bass and Mel Lewis on drums.

The tunes were arranged by Pat Williams, and they are all from a Broadway musical called What makes Sammy run?, which opened in 1964. According to Terry (in the original liner notes of the album), the group had not seen the arrangements before heading into the studio - and the freshness with which the septet approaches the music shows through.

When I first heard this album, I had to check that it was only a septet, as the orchestration sounds very full, which I guess is courtesy of the Broadway roots of all the songs - there is plenty of great ensemble playing here.

Stand-out tracks are the first, A room without windows, with it's driving trom - bass clarinet lines, and great plunger trumpet tune over the top, with excellent piano filling in the spaces (a feature of the whole album). There are some slightly Broadway-esque (read cheesy), bits in here, but because the group swings so hard, they make it good - Terry's absolutely wailing solo to take out this tune is fantastic.

A new pair of shoes begins with a Miles Davis like muted trumpet/trom line, which morphs into a neat little muted line with the piano lifting it with swinging fills. The whole tune opens out as it moves along, with a nice sax solo taking it out at less than three minutes. In fact all the tunes here are pretty much less than four minutes, so the band has to make the most of what they've got in short time - the fact that they managed to do that is testament to their individual skills.

The best track on the album for mine is Humble, with it's merry falling melody line, packing in a few musical cliches, that bring even more smiles. The middle of the tune is filled with a fine swinging tenor sax solo and some great flugel work by Terry. Just a magnificent foot-tapper.

This album is certainly not a profound musical statement, nor is it ground-breaking in any way, but for some excellent jazz, I'd recommend you suss it out.

What makes Sammy swing! is available on iTunes and from Amazon. If you snag the LoneHillJazz version (which is on iTunes), it comes with 12 bonus tracks, some of which are live recordings of Clark Terry small group sessions in Paris, and others which come from the soundtrack of a French film Si le vent te fait peur.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Affecting Albums - Endangered Species - Galapagos Duck

Galapagos Duck would be counted as one of Australia's best-known jazz bands (which may not be saying that much, in truth). With a constantly changing personnel, they have been in existence since 1969, when the original members got together to play some gigs in the NSW snowfields during ski season.

Since then the band has travelled a long musical road through most spectra of the jazz idiom, owing to the eclectic strengths of various members of the band. Their sound is unique, partly owing to their wide-ranging use of idiom, and the fact that over time most members of the band have been multi-instrumentalists, which means that in any one night or recording the line-up of instruments can change from tune to tune.

Endangered Species was released in 1985, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund. I suppose in some ways it could be termed a concept album, in that the songs are about specific endangered species, or wildlife in general, with one song about the Greenpeace organisation.

As with most albums created around a concept, there are high points and low points in this recording. In fact quite often it is the grooves that stand out, rather than the tunes as a whole. The riff in Hindsight is very catchy, the groove in China Bear is good, (the lyrics aren't!), Living Planet has a great funk feel, and Grizzly Bear is a classic R'n'B type groove.

There are also some tunes here that hark back to traditional jazz, Wombat Walk being one of them. All the instrumentalists are top notch, with especially good trombone playing - in fact a few of the tunes feature a frontline of trombone and tenor sax, which perhaps shouldn't work as well as it does, given they are playing in the same voice.

The album is let down by it's lyrics - four tunes are sung, and the lyrics are trite, which is a shame, as they make this album less than the sum of it's parts.

The reason I've included this album is here is that it is a great introduction to jazz - many styles are here, the improvisation is good and easy to follow, and the grooves get into your head.

Unfortunately at the time of writing this post Endangered Species is not available except on the second-hand market, which is a shame, as it is an interesting document of Australian Jazz.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Louis Armstrong Special

Pops : a life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout

Published in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 9780151010899

Louis Armstrong, in his own words : Selected Writings by Louis Armstrong

Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press ISBN 0195119584

My Dad is a Moldy Fig - that is, a traditional jazz purist. As I grew up and began learning to play the trumpet, I had access to Dad's great record collection, which was a comprehensive one covering New Orleans, Chicago and Dixieland Jazz. To my Father, that was all there was to Jazz, and the King of them all, Louis Armstrong, took pride of place in his collection, with a "book" of LP's chronicling his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings from the 1920s. For quite some years I don't think I even realised that Armstrong had a performing and recording career that extended almost to his death in 1970, because according to my father's purist tastes, anything Armstrong did after the Hot Five/Seven era was not "real jazz".

So now, many years later, I am filling in the gaps in my Jazz education, and have used my Christmas break to settle down with a couple of books about (and by) the great man. Pops is billed as the first biography of Armstrong written by a musician - Terry Teachout is the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal,sometime Jazz Bassist and Librettist for Operas. A musician he may be, an Armstrong disciple he certainly is, which has both good and bad effects on his book.

(Pops was one of Armstrong's many nicknames, given to him because he struggled to remember people's names and often called people Pops. Other nicknames were mainly inspired by his mouth - Gate, Satchmo, short for Satchel Mouth and Dipper Mouth being just a few . A famous tune played by Armstrong is entitled Dippermouth Blues).

Pops is a comprehensive life of the great man, leavened by much recent research on Armstrong, and by newly accessible material created by him, both on tape and paper. The famous birthdate of July 4th 1900 is shown to be more than a year out of date, and the story of him getting his first cornet at the colored waifs home is also shown to be probably not true. Probably, because there remains the problem of Armstrong's own stories, which have created several versions of major events in his life, so tracking the true path can be tricky.

Teachout provides a good overview of Louis' early years, and throughout the book he is at pains to place Louis' story into the greater milieu of what was happening in US popular music and politics at the time. He also gives us an insight into just how incredible Louis' playing was at that time - we are used to bravura playing with lots of fast runs and high notes these days, but you only need to listen to some of the really early Jazz recordings, or to the playing of someone such as Bunk Johnson, to imagine what an effect Armstrong must have had when he burst onto the scene in the 20s.

Armstrong was famously seen to be somewhat of an Uncle Tom by some of the post-war Jazz players - Teachout tries to make the case that Armstrong was fighting for civil rights in his own way, but what comes out for this reader is of someone trying to make their own way in the world while not trying to bring trouble down on their backs. For a black man, especially before the war, that meant having a white man in your corner, and Joe Glaser, Louis' manager for many years, was his white man. Teachout shows that Glaser certainly was a pretty unsavoury character, with mob connections, but also manages to give us some idea of why they stayed together and formed such a successful partnership. One reason was certainly that Louis didn't like to change things in his life, so if something was working he left it alone. His deal with Glaser (a 50\50 split of earnings) seems horrifying now, but if Louis could be left alone to play, have enough money for some reefer and a Cadillac, he was happy.

He was happiest when playing and singing, and it seems he didn't mind too much what he played and sang. From the 30s on, he was happy to be guided by managers, producers and recording engineers to the songs he should record and play. This never seemed to worry Louis too much, but certainly exasperated many of his fans, who despaired at some of the saccharine he put out later in his career. Teachout tries to make the best of this era, and this is the weakest part of his book, as dross is dross, even when played by a genius.

Armstrong's battle with his lip is also fairly well documented - after first having trouble with his embouchure in the 1930's, Louis never fully regained his earlier power on the horn, and played less and sang more as his career moved on. As a fellow trumpet player, I'm sure that these problems would have weighed heavily on Louis' mind, and perhaps this, ironically, is why he'd set himself such punishing playing schedules, trying to make the most of what he had while it lasted, however short a time that might be. There is a revealing quote in the book, which I paraphrase here, where Louis says he never played at parties, because if someone banged into his horn you never knew how much damage you can do to yourself. Playing the trumpet can be likened to walking a tightrope - when you fall off, everybody knows about it.

An added value to Pops is all the apparatus at the end of the book - comprehensive notes, bibliography and a list of 30 "must listen" Armstrong recordings (all available on iTunes).

Teachout mentions on more than one occasion in his book that Armtrong is rare among major Jazz figures in that he has left a rich legacy of written and spoken word material in addition to his music. He often spent hours a day in correspondence, wrote two autobiographies and several other long autobiographical pieces.

Louis Armstrong in his own words is a fascinating insight into this material. It can at times be a little difficult to decipher the meaning in Armstrong's idiosyncratic writing style, which is wonderfully like hearing him speak.  His piece about his childhood years working for the Jewish Karnofsky family is reproduced here in full, and is a great insight into turn-of-the-century New Orleans, quite apart from the biographical information it provides (it is in this piece where Louis explains it was the Karnofskys who helped him buy his first cornet).

There is an interesting piece of autobiographical writing that expounds on Armstrong's love for Marijuana, as well as a very revealing letter to Joe Glaser talking about his regular paymets to his mistresses.

This book is well worth a look for anyone interested in Armstrong, and indeed anyone who has an interest in the American music scene in the 1920s, as it related to Jazz. The way it brings you closer to the man makes it a fine companion work to Pops.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Affecting albums - Night Train - Oscar Peterson

(Click on the links in the song titles to be taken to Spotify for a listen)

Oscar Peterson will need no introduction to jazz fans - one of the greatest jazz pianists to have ever lived, he was born in Canada, but soon came to the attention of music fans all over the world, through his brilliant and expressive playing. He played with almost everyone who was anyone in the jazz world, and surely deserves the epithet "jazz royalty".

The Oscar Peterson Trio, although the personnel changed over time, remains one of the best small combos in jazz, with the members having a high degree of understanding and empathy.

Night Train was a 1962 release from the Trio, which at that stage consisted of Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. It was in fact one of the most successful album releases of Peterson's career, in terms of record sales.

Only one tune on the album - Hymn to Freedom - was written by Peterson himself, most of the other tunes are from other well known composers, such as Duke Ellington (Night Train), Hoagy Carmichael (Georgia on my mind) and Barney Bigard (C Jam Blues). No tune is much longer than five minutes, so this is not one of those jazz albums that has multi-chorus solos. It's tight and to the point.

This works well for Peterson, as he says so much with so few notes. The trio as a whole is seriously swinging on every track, with Thigpen nicely complementing Peterson's playing. In fact one of the highlights of this album is the rhythmic sensibilities of all three players - even on the slower numbers they manage to drive the song forward in a way that's sensitive to the mood of the tune, but still gets your feet tapping.

Peterson's mastery of his instrument is obvious. There is no "grandstanding", just excellent ideas performed with ultimate skill, and tied together in a very musical fashion. Given the trio format, Peterson is doing the lion's share of the work on the album, but that never gets in the way of what he's trying to say musically.

Highlights are the opening tune Night Train, Georgia on my mind (one of the best recorded version of this tune), and The Honeydripper, which really highlights Peterson's virtuosity and inventiveness, and the way he worked so well with the rest of the group.

I keep coming back to this album - once you hear it, I'm sure you will too.

Night Train is available via iTunes, or at Amazon.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Affecting albums - Takin' Off - Herbie Hancock

(Click on the links in the song titles to be taken to Spotify for a listen)

Albums can be great for many reasons - some create a magnificent statement as a whole, some can have one or two great tunes that will live forever, and some have a collection of great moments.

Takin' Off, Herbie Hancock's debut album, is great for all three reasons. As a whole, it is a magnificent showcase of jazz, with a front line that swings hard and blends perfectly together, playing some classic tunes. Both Watermelon Man and Driftin' are classic 60s jazz tunes, so cool and bluesy in their construction. And as for moments - Freddie Hubbard's solo on Watermelon Man has to be close to the most perfect solo ever captured on tape. From the opening moments of half-valve action, building to a magnificent crescendo and fall off at the end - a minute and a half of magic. Hancock's solo on Driftin' is also a masterpiece.

What makes this album so special is that none of the lead players seem out to prove anything. They are assured in their work, happy to let the music speak for itself without them imposing themselves on it. In particular, Dexter Gordon on tenor sax is very sparing with his notation, hardly any long quick runs, which helps to give the album it's assured laid back feel.

The sound of Freddie Hubbard's trumpet is simply mesmerizing for most of the album - in turns velvety, hard, ringing, and honey-like, you just can't will yourself away from it.

Even people who aren't necessarily jazz aficionados will enjoy this magnificent recording. I'm still trying to get Freddie's sound to come out of my horn - a noble but fruitless task.

Takin' Off is available on iTunes, or from Amazon.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Delightfulee : the life and music of Lee Morgan

Delightfulee : the life and music of Lee Morgan by Jeffery S. McMillan

Published in 2008 by The University of Michigan Press    ISBN 9780472032815

For those who don't know, Lee Morgan was a modern jazz trumpet player who recorded prolifically, was a friend of jazz trumpet great Clifford Brown, and played with other jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey. He played as a sideman on one of the greatest ever modern jazz records, Blue Train, and wrote and played another modern jazz classic The Sidewinder, which reached number 35 in the Billboard charts in 1964.

Jeffery McMillan's biography of Morgan can be slotted pretty much into the genre of hagiography. According to McMillan, Morgan never really did any wrong by anyone, or any bad things. The truth, which can be read between the lines, is that for a lot of his tragically short life Morgan was a junkie, along with all that entails.

What does come out from the book is how remarkable it was that he managed to produce as much good jazz as he did - along with the what if question - if he hadn't become a junkie, or had he managed to somehow control his addiction, how much better would he have been?

Despite McMillan's claim that Morgan was pretty much straight at the time of his death, other reports, and even statements in McMillan's book itself, suggest that Morgan was still struggling with his demons right up until the time he was shot dead by his de-facto wife between sets at Slug's nightclub in Manhattan.

It is clear that initially, it was Art Blakey who got Morgan "turned on", as he did to many other members of the jazz fraternity at one time or another - for all that one can admire Blakey for his contribution to music, it has to be balanced against the destruction of lives that he was involved in by passing on the heroin habit.

In fact, where he can McMillan chooses to avoid the bad parts of Morgan's life, and focus on the music. This book is partly a very detailed list of  recording sessions and gigs - obviously a lot of legwork was undertaken by McMillan to get this information, and for that we must thank him. He also goes into quite a bit of descriptive detail of most of Morgan's recording sessions, which may or may not be interesting to a reader, depending on how much of an appoggiatura geek they might be - and I'm still not sure what a "splatty" sound is....

While not what I would call a balanced biography, this book does give an overview of Morgan's life, and for the recordings completists out there, this will be about as good a guide as you can get to hunt down every last pressing for your collection.

As a hack trumpet player myself, reading this has taken me back to my relatively limited number of Morgan albums with a new insight, a new appreciation for his talent, and with a list of one or two more records I must get.

Worth a look if you're interested - check out your local library, or Amazon.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - "Do you know...?" : the Jazz repertoire in action

"Do you know...?" : the Jazz repertoire in action by Robert R. Faulkner & Howard S. Becker

Published in 2009 by The University of Chicago Press     ISBN 9780226239217

This fascinating book is actually a work of sociology, although you might also find it in the music section of your local academic library.

The authors, both semi-professional jazz musicians (Faulkner on trumpet, Becker on piano), set out to answer the question - how do musicians work out what to play together, when the may only play together as a group on one occasion?

Their research, both personal (making records of performances over a period of three years) and observational (interviewing about 60 performers), reveals how sets of music are constructed, and how that process has changed in recent years.

The book describes how bandstand activity takes place, the negotiations that occur to reach a mutally agreed playlist, the to-and-fro of suggesting, accepting or rejecting songs, and the fakery that can take place if one person in the band doesn't know a song that the group plays regardless.

A large portion of the book deals with how musicians learn their repertoire, be it on the bandstand itself, from records or radio, or from sheet music. Faulkner and Becker go on to describe the changes that have occurred in this process from about the '60s on - before that time there were a large group of tunes that "everybody" knew, known as the Great American Songbook. However, in the post-bop age, and with the fragmentation of radio stations and music in general (no hit parade that all musicians would listen to), the idea of a common pool of tunes has diminished, consequently it becomes much harder for a group of players to have tunes in common. This has made the negotiation of a set between musicians that don't know each other that much more difficult.

The change in the amount of playing also has had an effect - Becker explains that in the '40s, he played on bandstands in bars for approximately 43 hours per week - something which is almost impossible to do today. This amount of time playing, and the conditions in which it was played (background music in a bar), enabled the players of that era to experiment more, and learn songs "on the job". That has become harder now.

As a hack musician myself, I found this book fascinating, if somewhat academic (why do sociological books have to be written in such a plodding style?). If you've ever wondered how musicians can get up and play something without having necessarily rehearsed, read this book. 

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell