by John Lawrence
Jazz 101 can be found here. Jazz 102: here.
11. Horace Silver: Silver 'N Voices
Horace Silver along with Art Blakey was the most important small group bandleader of the 50s and 60s. He employed the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. His group was the training grounds for young players who went on to be major artists. In addition Horace was a prolific composer. All the compositions - words and music - on this album are by Horace. Horace had a very uplifting message, not found too often in the jazz world. It is well represented on this album. In addition there are some classic trumpet solos by Tom Harrell. Great solos by saxophonist Bob Berg also. This album is very accessible for the neophyte jazz listener.
His most successful album and well worth listening to in addition to this one was Song for My Father. He recorded frequently on Blue Note records which became the most successful jazz label of that era and is still going today. Horace's comping behind his soloists was fantastic and added energy to the solo. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including "Doodlin'", "Peace", and "Sister Sadie", became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.
12. Art Blakey: Moanin'
Art Blakey's group along with Horace Silver's became the training grounds for young jazz players many of who went on to record under their own names and create great careers. Unfortunately, Art was also the one who got many of them hooked on heroin including Bobby Timmons, the pianist on this album who composed Moanin', and Lee Morgan who is the trumpeter on this album. His band served as a developmental stage for future bandleaders including Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, Wynton Marsalis, Benny Golson, and Bobby Timmons.
The rest of the tunes on the album were composed by Benny Golson, one of the most prolific jazz composers. In his autobiography, Whisper Not: The Autobiography of Benny Golson, Benny relates how his composition Killer Joe was always played by Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band every night when they went to commercial. This resulted in a check for $100. sent to Benny each time the tune was played. Benny is one of the most important figures in the jazz having composed numerous standards and played sax in some great groups. Later he gave up jazz for a career in Hollywood, but came back to it in later years. He currently is still playing.
13. Art Farmer - Modern Art
One of the best and most underrated trumpet players in jazz was Art Farmer. Together with Benny Golson he formed the Jazztet in 1959, the high water mark for jazz and influential and popular jazz albums like Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out." and John Coltrane's "Giant Steps. Art was the most tasteful and musically literate of all the trumpet players of the 50s and 60s. The arrangements and consistency on this album are first rate. His playing is known for its lyricism, warmth of tone and sensitivity. Bill Evans, also know for these same qualities, accompanies Art and Benny on this album. The combined quality of professionalism and musicianship is outstanding.
Art came from a musical family. His mother played piano in the AME church. His identical twin, Addison, who is also on this album was a professional jazz bassist. Art grew up in Phoenix, AZ when the schools were segregated and no music lessons were available. He taught himself to read music and play the trumpet. In later years he used the more mellow sounding flugelhorn.
His first composition, "Farmer's Market," brought him some attention. From the middle of the 1950s, Farmer featured in recordings by leading arrangers of the day, including George Russell, Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson, being in demand because of his reputation for being able to play anything. Farmer's playing around this time is summarized by critic Whitney Balliett who wrote, "Farmer has become one of the few genuinely individual modern trumpeters. (Nine out of ten modern trumpeters are true copies of Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis.)"
Farmer moved to Europe in 1968 as did many other jazz players who had a difficult time finding work in the US as rock music became more popular. He settled in Vienna, where he performed with The Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band and joined the Austrian Radio Orchestra. In later years he traveled extensively playing gigs all over the world.
In the early 1980s, Farmer had also made some changes to his lifestyle. Interviewed for a 1985 article in The New Yorker, he reported losing 30 pounds in weight a couple of years earlier, and stopping smoking and drinking a couple of years before that. Farmer "used to think he couldn't play without drinking; now he couldn't play and drink", was the interviewer's summary of Farmer's habits. Despite these earlier habits Farmer avoided the drug-related problems of many of his contemporaries such as Miles Davis.
In 1999 Farmer was selected as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. A few months later Farmer died of a heart attack at home in Manhattan at age 71.
14. Duke Ellington - And His Mother Called Him Bill
This album is dedicated to Duke Ellington's alter ego Billy Strayhorn who was an extraordinary composer of beautiful tunes. Ellington recorded the album in the wake of Billy's death featuring Billy's compositions and arrangements. It won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 1969. In their long musical association and partnership, Billy, who was gay, stayed in the background.
Billy first attracted Duke's attention when as a high school student from the Pittsburgh ghetto he wrote a tune called "Lush Life" which has the most sophisticated music and lyrics of any popular music of that day or any day. Duke then asked Billy to meet him at his pad in Harlem and gave him the directions, "When you get to New York, take the "A" train to Sugar Hill in Harlem." Billy then wrote a song for the occasion which later became Duke's theme song, "Take the A Train." For many songs co-written by the two it is hard to tell where Billy left off and Duke began. As Ellington described him, "Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine." Though Duke Ellington took credit for much of Strayhorn’s work, he did not maliciously drown out his partner. Ellington would make jokes onstage like, "Strayhorn does a lot of the work but I get to take the bows!" Strayhorn stayed in Duke's shadow most of the time.
While Duke was an important bandleader in the history of jazz, Billy is even more important in my opinion for his musical legacy of compositions which will be sung and recorded for the ret os time, compositions such as "Something to Live For," "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing," "Day Dream," "Perdido," "Raincheck," "Passion Flower," "Chelsea Bridge," "Don't Take Your Love From Me," and many more.
In his autobiography and in a spoken word passage in his Second Sacred Concert, Duke Ellington listed what he considered Strayhorn's "four major moral freedoms": "freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even through all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might possibly help another more than it might himself and freedom from the kind of pride that might make a man think that he was better than his brother or his neighbor."
15. Billie Holiday - The Unforgettable Lady Day
No one can appreciate jazz history without listening to Billie Holiday. She had such a unique voice and such an intimate acquaintance with and knowledge of jazz that she was a major force in the jazz world. She sang with all the jazz greats of the 30s, 40s and 50s. She sang the melodies straight except for the natural lilt of her voice. She didn't improvise or scat sing as did Ella Fitzgerald, but she always had jazz players in her backup band, and that's what makes a singer a jazz singer more than anything else. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were the same way. They sang the melodies more or less straight, but they had jazz inflected arrangements and/or jazz players as their backup group.
In her autobiography, "Lady Sings the Blues," Holiday comments, "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three." She had a rough childhood. Her father left the family and her mother farmed her out to relatives much of the time. By the age of 11, Holiday had dropped out of school. After an attempted rape, officials placed Billie in the House of the Good Shepherd under protective custody. Holiday was released in February 1927, nearly twelve. She found a job running errands in a brothel. By early 1929, Holiday had joined her mother in Harlem. Their landlady was a sharply dressed woman named Florence Williams, who ran a brothel at 151 West 140th Street. Holiday's mother became a prostitute, and within a matter of days of arriving in New York, Holiday, who was not yet fourteen, also became a prostitute at $5 a client. On May 2, 1929, the house was raided, and Holiday and her mother were sent to prison. After spending some time in a workhouse, her mother was released in July, and Holiday was released in October.
As a young teenager Billie started singing in Harlem clubs after hearing the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. The producer John Hammond heard her, liked her and arranged for her first recording date at 18 with Benny Goodman's orchestra. Holiday struck up a friendship with tenor saxophonist Lester Young. The two of them had a special rapport. He said, "I think you can hear that on some of the old records, you know. Some time I'd sit down and listen to 'em myself, and it sound like two of the same voices, if you don't be careful, you know, or the same mind, or something like that." Young nicknamed her "Lady Day", and she called him "Prez".
Touring in the south with Count Basie, Holiday was outraged by the Jim Crow racism which insisted that she not come in the front door of clubs and hotels she was playing at. Instead she had to use the servants' entrance. She had several hits from this era including "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." However, she was always paid a flat fee instead of royalties so always made money for the record company and not herself.
Holiday was hired by Artie Shaw a month after being fired from the Count Basie Band. This association placed her among the first black women to work with a white orchestra, an unusual arrangement at that time. This was also the first time a black female singer employed full-time toured the segregated U.S. South with a white bandleader. In situations where there was a lot of racial tension, Shaw was known to stick up for his vocalist. In her autobiography, Holiday describes an incident in which she was not permitted to sit on the bandstand with other vocalists because she was black. When touring the South, Holiday would sometimes be heckled by members of the audience. In Louisville, Kentucky, a man called her a "nigger wench" and requested she sing another song. Holiday lost her temper and had to be escorted off the stage.
In November 1938 Holiday was asked to use the service elevator at the Lincoln Hotel, instead of the passenger elevator, because white patrons of the hotel complained. This may have been the last straw for her. She left the band shortly after. Holiday spoke about the incident weeks later, saying, "I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room as did other members of the band ... [and] I was made to leave and enter through the kitchen."
Holiday wrote and recorded a song called "Strange Fruit" about a lynching in the south. She performed it at Cafe Society, the first integrated night club in New York City. For her performance of "Strange Fruit" at the Café Society, she had waiters silence the crowd when the song began. During the song's long introduction, the lights dimmed and all movement had to cease. As Holiday began singing, only a small spotlight illuminated her face. On the final note, all lights went out, and when they came back on, Holiday was gone.
She also wrote the song "God Bless the Child." "God Bless the Child" became Holiday's most popular and most covered record. It reached number 25 on the charts in 1941 and was third in Billboard's songs of the year, selling over a million records. In 1976, the song was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Despite her commercial success, Billie's health deteriorated in the 1950s due in large part to drug and alcohol abuse and abusive relationships with men. Holiday's New York City Cabaret Card was revoked because of her 1947 drug conviction, preventing her working anywhere that sold alcohol for the remaining 12 years of her life.
On November 10, 1956, Holiday performed two concerts before packed audiences at Carnegie Hall. Live recordings of the second Carnegie Hall concert were released on a Verve/HMV album in the UK in late 1961 called The Essential Billie Holiday. The 13 tracks included on this album featured her own songs "I Love My Man", "Don't Explain" and "Fine and Mellow", together with other songs closely associated with her, including "Body and Soul", "My Man", and "Lady Sings the Blues".
On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York for treatment of liver disease and heart disease. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been targeting Holiday since at least 1939. She was arrested and handcuffed for drug possession as she lay dying, her hospital room was raided and she was placed under police guard. On July 15, she received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church and died two days later of pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver. In her final years, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 strapped to her leg. Her funeral Mass was on July 21, 1959, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan. She was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx.