The Music That Defined A Century, 2022
In 2022, I edited/co-authored about thirty of the biographical entries in my dad’s book, The Music That Defined A Century, twenty of which appear below. For three of the profiles (marked with * in the list below) I also produced an audio version, weaving together the narrative and pieces of music referenced therein.
Synopsis: Twentieth century America was shaped as much by its music as anything else. Starting with the African-American influence of ragtime and blues, music morphed into gospel, jazz, swing, bebop, and rhythm & blues. From these genres came rock ‘n’ roll, leading to the distinctive sounds of today’s rap and hip hop.
Michael Frank Miles’ The Music That Defined A Century contains biographical profiles of seventy-five of the most revered singers, instrumentalists, and songwriters of the twentieth century, allowing readers to better understand where it all came from.
P R O F I L E S
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Louis Armstrong (1898-1971) literally took New Orleans music from its raw origins and introduced it to the world as a refined art form. In the process, his unrivaled genius, his “gift,” as he called it, helped turn jazz into a soloist’s art and, in so doing, influenced every singer and instrumentalist who came after him. For almost fifty years, Armstrong dominated first the jazz world, then the wider entertainment business as the most well known of all jazz musicians. Richard Havers in his book Verve: The Sound of America, states it clearly: “Armstrong always knew he was there to please the people. An ambassador for joy and happiness, his trumpet, his smiles, his laugh, and willingness to ‘live for that audience’ all helped to make him a twentieth century icon.”
Raised mostly on the turbulent streets of black Storyville in New Orleans, Louis grew up in the “cradle of jazz.” The son of a domestic servant and part-time prostitute, he grew up with a whole neighborhood of women looking after him after his father took off at the time of his birth. Misdemeanor activities led to Armstrong’s arrest and placement in the Colored Waif’s Home. While in confinement he was given a cornet that he learned to play after diligent practice.
With no formal musical education, he developed an uncanny ear for improvised harmony. Placed into the home’s brass band, within a short period of time he became the group’s leader. Because the boys loved to march, they were often asked to parade up and down the streets, and Louis, in his fancy band uniform, proudly led the procession.
Released from the home at age fourteen, he returned to his mother and two sisters, taking on the added responsibility of breadwinner, delivering coal, milk, newspapers, and unloading bananas off the boats. He also became a replacement player when bands were short-handed. Once he began regular engagements for a dollar a night, he made more in tips from appreciative customers, who shouted, “Our Little Louis, he’s the best.”
“Little Louis” was on his way, next joining the Fate Marable brass band, one of the more popular bands touring up and down the Mississippi River. Describing his time with Marable as “going to the university,” Louis learned to read music. Up to then, he had to listen to others play a song before he could duplicate the tune. Now he could take off on his own and delve into written arrangements, also new to him.
While still in his teens, Armstrong met Joe “King” Oliver, considered to be New Orleans’ finest cornetist; he would serve as surrogate father and mentor to Louis. When Oliver left Kid Ory’s band in 1918 to seek his fortune, Armstrong replaced him. In 1922, Oliver was working a Chicago dance hall called Lincoln Gardens, in which he and his Creole Band were causing a stir. He sent word to Armstrong to join him. Louis packed his bags to team up with his idol, but it soon became apparent the twenty-two-year-old was outplaying his mentor.
Armstrong was already doubling the number of notes he could squeeze into a bar, while building his improvisations over longer stretches. Less bound to the chugging ragtime beat that Oliver favored, customers were enthralled with his technique, creating capacity crowds every evening of the week. Among those who came to listen and learn were Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke.
Another person quite impressed with Armstrong’s playing was Oliver’s pianist, the multi-talented Lil Hardin. A romance developed between the two, and while striving to improve Armstrong’s appearance and attire, she also voiced her strong opinion that he was wasting his time as second cornetist. In 1924, they married, and that same year, Louis was invited to join Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City. Lil remained in Chicago to form her own band.
Henderson, a brilliant arranger and composer, was leading the finest band of the time. When Armstrong arrived for his first rehearsal, he mused: “Wow! Everything here is down on paper, all arranged ahead of time. Man, how am I going to read all this stuff and still blow free and easy?” Henderson preferred the sound quality of a trumpet over the harsher cornet, and encouraged Armstrong to switch instruments. Almost immediately Armstrong’s power and warmth broke through, as he introduced the concept of swing music to the band.
But his stay in New York was cut short after a year, when he returned to Chicago to form his own band. His success prompted Okeh Records to arrange for Armstrong to make his first recordings with a band, using the name Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five. With his wife at the piano, Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, the group held its first recording session late in 1925. Over the next four years, Armstrong cut more than sixty records with the Hot Five and, later, the Hot Seven. The two recording bands laid the foundation of jazz improvisation.
John Fordham, writing for the Guardian in 2009, observed: “More than eighty years later, it’s easy to hear how Armstrong’s three-octave range, phrase construction, and storytelling momentum stunned audiences and musicians alike — because they had never heard it before.” Among the many highlights of the sessions was Armstrong’s 1926 song “Heebie Jeebies,” in which his gravelly voice was more intent on matching the sound of his instrument than singing the lyrics from a song. He, in effect, popularized wordless “scat” singing. The tune became the first hit recording of Armstrong’s illustrious career.
In 1927, Armstrong expanded the ensemble, becoming the Hot Seven. The addition of a tuba player and drummer resulted in a full-bodied sound. John Fordham singles out “Potato Head Blues,” calling Armstrong’s second trumpet solo on the track “one of the most acclaimed episodes in twentieth century music.”
In 1928, Armstrong and Hardin grew apart, prompting Armstrong to replace Hardin with Earl Hines on piano. “West End Blues,” cut in 1928, opened with an imaginative unaccompanied introduction that established Armstrong’s virtuoso brilliance. In “Weather Bird,” Armstrong and Hines performed a very competitive duet, each trying to top the other. This was improvisation at its best, something that had never occurred before in a recording session.
The year the Great Depression began, 1929, was another landmark for Armstrong. The Hot Seven broke up, and The Louis Armstrong Orchestra was born, with five white players joining the band. The racial integration was unprecedented. Armstrong’s trumpet playing on “Knockin’ a Jug” makes the record a classic.
Establishing jazz as a soloist’s music, Armstrong became one of the first celebrity musicians during the radio era, spreading his fame as an international celebrity and earning a couple enduring nicknames: “Pops” and “Satchmo.” In the book Giants of Jazz Studs Terkel describes Armstrong’s reception in London at the Palladium: “As soon as he poked his head around the curtain, the staid British audience let loose a tremendous roar. It was an ovation greater than any he had ever received in his own land.”
In time, though, Armstrong’s originality began to wear thin. By the end of the Thirties, his successes were few and came mostly from remakes of his classics — “West End Blues” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” among them. During the 1940s, his Decca recordings sold but not well. It was the repackaged Hot Fives and Hot Sevens that were of interest to jazz fans. At the end of World War II, many younger people, particularly musicians of the bebop generation, were viewing his stage persona as old-fashioned; his ever-smiling demeanor seemed more from a bygone era. His view of bebop reflected his values: “You get all them weird chords, which don’t mean nothing. You got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to.”
In response, Armstrong clung tenaciously to what brought him fame, making few concessions to changing times. His reply to a journalist after being asked about changes afoot in jazz: “I just live what I play, and I can’t vouch for the other fellow. As long as I feel and hit the notes and I’ve got my own audience, then no critic in the world can tell me how I should play my horn.”
Armstrong did make one notable concession, moving away from an orchestra to a six-piece band, Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars. The first live document of the group was the 1947 recording “Satchmo At Symphony Hall.” The sextet included Jack Teagarden on trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, and Sid Catlett on drums. Nat Hentoff gave the album five stars in Downbeat, calling it “one of the greatest recordings in jazz history.”
As LPs became the standard way of recording in the Fifties, Armstrong stuck to short pieces, showcasing songs as before, such as “Basin Street Blues,” “Tiger Rag,” “Muskrat Ramble,” and “Gut Bucket Blues.” But it’s from this point forward that today’s listeners most remember the unusual voice, the handkerchief in one hand absorbing sweat pouring down his face, and the virtuoso trumpet playing. It starts with the 1956 hit film “High Society.” One highlight: Crosby and Pops singing “Now You Has Jazz,” backed by Armstrong’s All-Stars.
In 1963 Armstrong was asked to record a song called “Hello, Dolly!” for a Broadway show that hadn’t yet opened. His recording earned him a Grammy for Best Vocalist Performance. When the movie version came out six years later, he was brought in to duet with Barbra Streisand.
In between came the 1967 classic “What A Wonderful World,” which placed a gravelly voice in the middle of a bed of strings and angelic voices, capturing Pops in the bittersweet final days of his career. The song was not initially a hit in the United States, because ABC Records head Larry Newton did not like the song and refused to promote it. In the U.K., however, it immediately went to the top of the charts. Re-released in the States a decade later, it became a charted hit song.
“Wonderful World” may have come to exemplify Armstrong’s world. Toward the end of his life, he wrote: “My whole life has been happiness. Through all the misfortunes, I did not plan anything. Life was there for me, and I accepted it.” Of his travels, usually taken with wife Lucille (whom he married in 1942), he said: “We’ve seen nearly all of the world and been wined and dined by all kinds of royalty. But regardless of all that kind of stuff, I’ve got sense enough to know that I’m still Louis Armstrong, colored.”
With a net worth of ten million dollars, he and Lucille lived a modest life in Queens, New York, with Armstrong frequently seen playing the horn on the front porch for the kids in the neighborhood. He died in his sleep on July 6, 1971; his death was attributed to a heart attack. He had been home resting following discharge from a hospital after ten weeks of treatment for heart, liver, and kidney disorders. He was seventy-three-years-old.
Louis Armstrong’s legacy will endure as long as American music is played. Ken Burns, who produced the epic 2000 documentary “Jazz,” elaborates on the iconic figure in the introduction to the book that accompanied the TV series: “I knew from the outset that Armstrong was important to the history, but I had no inkling of the truth, borne out in interview after interview. Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. First, he transformed instrumental playing, liberating jazz, cutting it loose from nearly all constraints, essentially inventing what we call swinging; then he brought an equally great revolution to singing. Each time we did an interview for the film, each would in the end shake his head and say that Louis Armstrong was a ‘gift from God.’”
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
CHET BAKER
Chet Baker gained fame in the early 1950s, first as a trumpet player, then as a singer. Melancholy was his style, both with instrument and his voice. By the late ’50s, Baker had also become known for the heroin addiction that afflicted him till the day of his tragic death thirty years later.
“His gorgeous trumpet playing displayed a passion and energy that was fueled by a tragic life filled with bad luck, jail sentences, and heroin abuse,” Bradley Torreano wrote in a review of a Baker reissue. “Despite all of his problems, he still maintained an incredible sound, giving his music the emotional punch it needed to rise above simple pop music.”
Chesney "Chet" Henry Baker Jr. was born into a musical family in Yale, Oklahoma, a town of fewer than two thousand residents. Both of his parents were musicians, his father a one-time professional guitarist, his mother a talented pianist. As a boy Chet sang in the church choir; he wouldn’t pick up the trumpet until his early teens, and that happened only after the trombone his father had given him proved too unwieldy.
By then the family had moved to suburban Los Angeles where Chet received some musical instruction in the Glendale, California, school system. But in 1946, at age sixteen, he dropped out of school and his parents signed papers that allowed him to enlist in the Army. While stationed in Berlin, Germany, he played in the 298th Army Band. Two years later, he was discharged and came home to enroll at El Camino College in Los Angeles, where he studied music theory. After a couple years of college, he re-enlisted in the Army where he was stationed in San Francisco and played trumpet in the Sixth Army Band. By this time, “cool” jazz had made its mark on the jazz world and its leading exponent, trumpeter Miles Davis, had made his mark on Chet Baker, who began performing in San Francisco nightclubs just as “West Coast” jazz was taking hold. After his second (and final) discharge from the Army, Baker set out to become a professional jazz musician.
Like the music he would come to be known for playing, Baker’s approach to his instrument was relaxed and insouciant; you could even say undisciplined. A fellow trumpet player reportedly said of him: “It was real easy for [Chet]. [He] knew every song and he always knew where he was. He couldn’t really understand how you had to work at music.” He was also improvisationally inclined, “putting in things . . . little riffs” that, according to his mother, unnerved his college bandmaster, who predicted that Baker would never make it as a musician.
His breakthrough came at a 1952 audition to join Charlie Parker’s band on a West Coast tour. By 1952 Parker was a towering figure in jazz, having revolutionized the music a few years earlier with the fast-moving, harmonically complex improvisation that came to be known as bebop. The laid-back restraint of Baker’s technique on the trumpet was intrinsically at odds with Parker’s daring agility on the alto saxophone, but Baker had barely made it through a handful of tunes at the audition when Parker hired the unknown 22-year-old on the spot.
Later that year Baker joined The Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Mulligan had recently helped Miles Davis popularize the “cool” style of jazz with a series of chamber recordings that were later packaged as “Birth of the Cool,” arranging, composing, and playing the baritone sax in the nine-piece ensemble Davis had put together. Just as the music was migrating from New York City to the West Coast, Mulligan moved to Los Angeles and made a name for himself as a leader in the burgeoning West Coast Jazz scene. With the addition of Baker on trumpet, the famously piano-less Gerry Mulligan Quartet secured a place in the pantheon of jazz. The group’s gigs attracted huge attention, leading to a recording session on the Pacific Jazz label, where they scored a hit with an instrumental rendition of the jazz standard “My Funny Valentine.” With a series of sold-out performances, best-selling records, and the unique chemistry of Mulligan and Baker, Mulligan would later recall, "I had never experienced anything like that before and not really since." Sadly, the Mulligan group disbanded eleven months after its formation when Mulligan was arrested and incarcerated for six month on narcotics charges.
Baker capitalized on the fame he had found with the Mulligan Quartet (which had eventually billed itself as The Gerry Mulligan Quartet featuring Chet Baker) and formed his own group, continuing to show little interest in playing bebop riffs. He remained with the Pacific Jazz label and a series of records released over the next several years cemented Baker’s status as one of the most popular jazz musicians in America, winning him top honors in jazz magazine readers’ polls as trumpeter, and then, with the 1954 release of “Chet Baker Sings,” as vocalist.
That album’s producer (and Pacific Jazz co-founder), Richard Bock, invited photographer William Claxton to shoot the cover photo, just as Claxton had successfully done the year before for the cover of “Chet Baker Quartet featuring Russ Freeman.” Claxton later recalled having met Baker in 1951.
He was on a small bandstand at the Tiffany Club in Los Angeles with Charlie Parker and a group of mostly black musicians [Claxton said] . Chet was pale white and yet had an athletic stance. He looked like an angelic boxer, a tough guy with a pretty face topped with a slick '50s pompadour. The truly odd thing about him was a missing front tooth which he tried to conceal. Later, when I got to know him better, he told me he did not want to have the tooth replaced because he was afraid that might change the sound of his trumpet playing.
Claxton would go on to photograph Baker “during his rehearsals, recording sessions, and live performances and at early morning parties and jam sessions,” remembering that “it was Chet's image that came through in the developing tray as a spectacular young face. A lightbulb turned on above my head: So that's what being ‘photogenic’ means.”
Seemingly overnight, Baker became the prince charming of “cool jazz.” His lullaby vocal style was even more restrained than his trumpet. The whispering sound of his androgynous voice had girls swooning over him, and photographers began following him wherever he went. Defined by his chiseled looks and slick shock of hair, he conveyed the same rebellious nature as the era’s other heartthrob, James Dean; in fact, Baker is often called the James Dean of jazz.
Thanks to his matinee-idol looks, Baker was sought after by Hollywood and accepted a role as an ill-fated Air Force trumpeter in the 1955 Korean War drama “Hell’s Horizon.” He had never acted before; nevertheless, his ex-wife, Carol, said Baker “was actually offered a seven-year contract and he turned it down. He told me this when I first met him. I looked at him and said, ‘Are you crazy? There are people out there that would kill for a seven-year contract; why didn’t you want to do it?’ ‘Oh honey,’ he said, ‘making movies is the most boring business there is. I had two weeks of that standing around.’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do that for a living; it would drive me crazy.’”
What Baker preferred to do was tour his band, and in late 1955 he and the quartet left for the first of many tours through Europe. They recorded a pair of live shows in Paris in October; “Chet Baker in Europe” was the result. Returning home the following summer, Baker took a new group to L.A.’s Forum Theatre and recorded a week’s worth of sessions in late July 1956; the resulting tracks found their way onto a number of Baker releases, including “Chet Baker and Crew” and “The Route,” which featured alto saxophonist Art Pepper.
Baker was at the top of his game, but his heroin habit – which he said began around 1957 – would lead him to betray his talent. “Chet had the world at his feet,” said John Burr, one of his bassists. “He consciously turned his back on it, and used drugs as a means of doing it.” Gerry Mulligan was more revealing: “All the attempts to get him off heroin — he didn’t want to get off heroin. That, of course, is heresy in the modern world. . . . Chet didn’t give a damn.’”
When Baker returned to Europe at the end of the decade, hoping “to get away from my many junkie friends in the States for a while,” his heroin use had become increasingly disruptive to his professional endeavors. But his 1959 arrest in Lucca, Italy, sidelined him altogether when he was given – and subsequently served – a prison sentence of more than a year. In a letter he wrote from his jail cell, Baker said he hated heroin and had been trying to break the habit by taking Palfium, but by mid-decade he had been arrested in and expelled from countries all over Western Europe, finally being deported back to America in 1964.
He found gigs in California and continued to record — including three prolific sessions in the summer of 1965 whose tracks were compiled on a series of album releases for the Prestige label, and collaborations with the Mariachi Brass and the Carmel Strings that reunited him with producer Richard Bock — but his need for money to support his habit only intensified, and so did his debt. Not only was he buying drugs on credit but he was borrowing money too. He paid the price. Following a gig outside a club in Sausalito, California, he was savagely beaten in the face, suffering severe cuts on the mouth and broken teeth. The assault left him physically unable to play the trumpet. With few options available to him, Baker took a job as a gas station attendant, working brutal sixteen-hour shifts. (Music journalist Richard Williams has noted that Baker told him that he retreated to his mother’s home in San Jose, where he and his family lived on welfare payments and food stamps for several years until he finally decided to give music another go.) Baker was eventually fitted for dentures and learned to play the trumpet with a strange new positioning of his lips and false teeth.
In 1969, he was back in the studio recording a set of songs by comedian and musician Steve Allen, who reportedly organized the session to help Baker stage a comeback. Neither that album, “Albert’s House,” nor its successor, 1970’s “Blood, Chet and Tears,” gained enough notice to be called a comeback, but in 1973, one-time trumpet rival Dizzy Gillespie helped Baker secure a short engagement at the Half Note club in New York City which attracted a fair amount of attention (and curiosity).
Baker, a man who always seemed to be leaving, had three wives, four children, and countless romantic adventures with other women. One later relationship was with the singer Ruth Young, who saw his performance at the Half Note and was taken aback by his appearance. “He looked absolutely terrible,” she said. “He was gaunt. He sounded like shit, but he was trying so hard. He appeared unhealthy, but also so vulnerable. That’s what was so endearing.”
The following year Baker joined Gerry Mulligan for a successful Carnegie Hall reunion and in 1975 returned to Europe for recording and performance dates. Except for occasional trips to the U.S. and Japan, he remained there until his death. His devotion to Europe was understandable. Feted there as a returning hero, Baker was embraced by European audiences as “a fragile and delicate soul, rather than a junkie,” said writer Valerie Simadis. Geoff Dyer adds: “In Europe people hung on his every note, flocking to see him because every performance was potentially his last, hearing in his music the scars of everything he’d been through.”
On Friday, the 13th of May, 1988, the body of Chet Baker was found “crumpled and bloodied on an Amsterdam pavement, beneath the third floor window of the hotel where he was staying,” according to writer Charles Waring. At first, nobody recognized him. The chiseled good looks he’d been known for had long been obscured by the “road-map of wrinkles on his sorry face,” the decades of hard living having rendered him a “wretched, drug-addled husk,” in Richard Saint’s words.
Heroin and cocaine were found in the room and an autopsy detected these drugs in his body. There was no evidence of a struggle. Death was ruled to be an accident, but many took it to be a suicide, a theory that has long been questioned, since nothing suggested him to be suicidal. Another has since arisen, with support of a witness who was at the same hotel and said that “Chet was chatting up a woman in the lobby, went upstairs to get some cigarettes or keys, and found he had locked himself out of his hotel room. The door to the room next door was open. He entered, went out onto the balcony and tried to get over to his own balcony. He lost his footing, fell and died.”
Pulp fiction could hardly make believable the events that occurred in Baker’s life, but his life story has been portrayed in books, in films, and on stage. The Academy Award-nominated 1988 documentary “Let’s Get Lost” portrays Baker as a cultural icon of the 1950s but juxtaposes this with the story of his wrenching deterioration and tangled family dysfunction. The film was shot in black and white the very year of his death. In feature films, Baker was portrayed by Ethan Hawke in “Born to be Blue” (2015), and decades earlier had been the inspiration for the lead male character (portrayed by Robert Wagner) in the 1960 movie “All The Fine Young Cannibals.”
In 1997, Baker’s unfinished autobiography, As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir, was published, followed five years later by James Gavin's groundbreaking biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. In 2001 came the stage drama “Time After Time: The Chet Baker Project” and in 2007 the acclaimed musical “Chet Baker: Speedball.”
Baker’s story also inspired songwriter David Wilcox to pen “Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song,” whose opening lyrics acknowledge the trumpeter’s troubled life:
My old addiction
Changed the wiring in my brain
So that when it turns the switches
Then I am not the same
David Patrick Wilcox, “Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song” © Universal Music Publishing Group
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
IRVING BERLIN
“Come on and hear, come on and hear Alexander's Ragtime Band
Come on and hear, come on and hear 'bout the best band in the land
They can play a bugle call like you never heard before
So natural that you want to go to war
Come on along, come on along, let me take you by the hand
Up to the man, up to the man who's the leader of the band
And if you care to hear the Swanee River played in ragtime
Come on and hear, come on and hear Alexander's Ragtime Band”
In 1911, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” launched the phenomenon known as American popular song. The first of Irving Berlin’s many million-seller hits, it set off a dance craze, enabling Berlin to be known worldwide. Variety magazine called “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” the musical sensation of the decade; it sold a million and a half copies of sheet music in its first year alone. When Al Jolson, America’s first superstar entertainer, sang it, the song became forever famous.
Perhaps no other songwriter has had as much influence on the development and performance of American song during the twentieth century. Consider the time span: Berlin’s first published song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” appeared in 1907. His final production was to write the lyrics and music for the 1962 stage production “Mr. President.” In between, his name appeared on more than fifteen hundred songs that included dozens of stage musicals and films.
Born Israel Beilin in Russian Siberia, he was the youngest of eight children to Moses, a cantor (one who leads prayer songs), and Lena Beilin. Berlin’s earliest memory was of lying by the side of the road and watching his house and village burn in a pogrom. The family left Russia for the U.S. when Israel was five and took residence on New York’s Lower East Side, the poverty-stricken ghetto of immigrant families. To better assimilate, Israel began calling himself Izzy.
His earliest musical education came from his father, but that ended when Moses died of chronic bronchitis when Izzy was thirteen. To lessen the burden on his struggling mother, Izzy dropped out of school. He took to the streets selling newspapers, soon finding that if he sang some of the popular tunes of the day, people would toss coins in appreciation.
Realizing that music was a good means of income, he found work as a singing waiter in rough downtown saloons. Improvising parodies of popular songs led to composing his own. At twenty-one, he wrote his first national hit, “My Wife’s Gone to the Country! Hurrah! Hurrah!” The sheet music sold an astounding 300,000 copies. Around this time, Beilin adopted his more American-sounding name.
Irving Berlin wrote lyrics in the American vernacular — simple, uncomplicated, and direct. He also created songs out of his own sadness. In 1912, he married Dorothy Goetz, but his new wife caught typhoid fever on their honeymoon in Cuba and died five months later. To express his grief, he wrote his first ballad, “When I Lost You.” The song was another million seller.
In 1914, he was contracted to write a Broadway stage show starring Vernon and Irene Castle, famous dancers of the period. Variety hailed the show, entitled “Watch Your Step,” as a “terrific hit,” calling it “the first syncopated musical.” The show ran for seven months and 175 performances, outstanding numbers for the time.
In 1916, Berlin became a U.S. citizen and a year later was drafted into the U.S. Army. At age thirty, he was not there for the fighting but to write patriotic songs to lift the morale of the folks at home. Stationed at nearby Camp Upton in Yaphank, New York, he composed an all-soldier musical revue titled “Yip, Yip, Yaphank.” The following summer the show was taken to Broadway, its popularity assured by a number of hit songs that included “Mandy” and “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” which Berlin performed himself. One song he wrote for the show but decided not to use finally debuted more than twenty years later: “God Bless America.”
Berlin, an intuitive business man, took his songwriting to new levels in the years following the war, earning as much as half a million dollars a year during the 1920s, even though he could not read or write music. According to biographer Laurence Bergreen: “He only knew how to play the piano in F sharp. His many secretaries played a vital role, notating and transcribing his music.”
In 1925, Berlin became engaged to Ellin Mackay, a Comstock Lode heiress, prolific short-story writer, and contributor to The New Yorker magazine. Her father, a devout conservative and Roman Catholic Irishman, was appalled that she was marrying a Jewish immigrant from Russia and a widower fifteen years her senior. Berlin, despite fame as a songwriter, was far outside the Mackay family social circle.
At the start of 1926, the press keenly reported the sequence of events that included the couple’s quick wedding at the municipal court building, their honeymoon in Atlantic City, their return to New York, and departure for Europe on an ocean liner, where the Berlins remained for several months while Irving worked on theatrical productions. It was some of the most sensational social reporting of the 1920s. The storyline was aided by Ellin’s father disinheriting his daughter. As a wedding present, Berlin assigned the copyright of the song “Always” over to Ellin in perpetuity. It became a number one hit and yielded handsome royalties.
When the couple returned from Europe, Ellin was pregnant. The baby’s birth on Thanksgiving Day 1926 made the front pages. Ellin gave birth three more times, in 1928, 1932, and 1936. When the Great Depression hit in late 1929, Berlin lost his fortune but suffered no loss in his confidence to write songs. He packed up the family and departed for Hollywood, where he was associated with a string of big hits.
One of the biggest of these, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” was introduced in the 1930 film musical of the same name. His music highlighted a long-running string of films starring Fred Astaire, including “Top Hat” (1935), “Follow the Fleet” (1936), “Carefree” (1938), 1942’s “Holiday Inn” (with Bing Crosby singing his classic rendition of “White Christmas”), and the postwar musical “Blue Skies” (1946).
During World War II, Berlin wrote “This Is The Army,” which became a Broadway musical and a 1943 film starring Ronald Reagan. Berlin chose not to personally profit from the score — he gave all the earnings, nearly ten million dollars, to the U.S. Army Emergency Relief Fund. His generosity also showed itself with the top-charted song “God Bless America,” released shortly before U.S. entry into the war. He gave one hundred percent of the royalties to the Boy and Girl Scouts.
Berlin’s most popular stage production, “Annie Get Your Gun,” starring Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley, had long runs both in New York (1,147 performances) and London, and was followed four years later by its adaptation to the big screen. Again, Berlin provided both music and lyrics, including popular favorites like “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” “I Got the Sun in the Morning,” “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” In 1948, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire starred in Berlin’s blockbuster film hit “Easter Parade.” Notable songs included “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” and “We’re a Couple of Swells.” Berlin’s string of Broadway blockbusters continued through the 1950s, including “Call Me Madam,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and “Sayonara.”
Then came the rather abbreviated eight-month run of “Mr. President” in 1962. Given lukewarm reviews, critics regarded it as old-fashioned and “missing the magic of earlier Berlin works.” Afterwards, the songwriter announced his official retirement and retreated to his Catskills home to live out the remaining twenty-seven years of his life. His daughter said of his self-imposed retirement: “Daddy kept writing songs to the end, but in the Sixties he turned more to painting. Mother wrote her novels and stories, and Daddy was always her number one supporter.” (They died one year apart, she in 1988, he in 1989.)
With a life that spanned more than a hundred years and a catalog that boasted well over a thousand songs, Berlin’s music has a timeless quality.
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” © Imagem U.S. LLC (Songwriters: F. Karlin / I. Berlin)
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
JOHN COLTRANE
The great innovators in jazz during the years following World War II were not especially concerned with popular appeal. They were artistic pioneers searching for new means of expression. There was no one who did more searching than saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967). Coltrane—or Trane, as he was often called—was meticulous to the core. Quite frequently during recording sessions, he asked record producers to let him record take after take until he felt it right.
A master of improvisation, he could stretch out a tune for an hour or more, all the time searching for that elusive feeling. “I'm [not] sure of what I'm looking for, except that it'll be something that hasn't been played before,” he told Nat Hentoff. “I don't know what it is. I know I'll have that feeling when I get it.”
As one profile of Coltrane succinctly put it, “He first came to notice as a sideman at age twenty-nine in 1955, formally launched a solo career at thirty-three in 1960, and was dead at forty in 1967.” Despite the relatively short run of his career, Coltrane’s recorded output was prodigious, and his unconventional music remains just as vital and influential today as when he was alive. “He is one of the five or so major figures of jazz whose playing you still routinely hear through the instruments of younger musicians,” said jazz critic Ben Ratliff in a New York Times appreciation marking the 75th anniversary of the saxophonist’s birth.
Coltrane’s personality, Ratliff said, made him an unlikely star: “He was quiet, generous, even-tempered, honest, unjudgmental . . . earnest, self-possessed,” adding: “There are no published reports of his flying off the handle, and he had no apparent gift for public relations.” What he had was an all-consuming, almost spiritual devotion to his craft. Nat Hentoff: “He was willing to practice more, to do all the things that somebody has to do to excel. The real value in what John Coltrane did was that what he accomplished, he did as a human.”
Coltrane’s complex journey began in Hamlet, North Carolina, but he grew up in High Point, close to Greensboro. His grandfather served as a presiding elder in High Point’s A.M.E. Zion Church. His father, a tailor, part-time preacher, and amateur multi-instrumentalist, encouraged John to play clarinet and alto horn. He died in late 1938, when his son was just twelve. Within a short period of time, Coltrane’s grandparents and aunt also died. Left in the care of his mother, Alice, John found solace playing his instruments in a community band. When he was in high school, his mother bought him an alto saxophone, which he played in the school band.
When the war began, Alice left her son with family friends to find work in New Jersey (and later Philadelphia). In 1943, John himself headed north, to Philadelphia, and began playing with various groups there. Within a year of becoming eligible for the wartime draft, he enlisted in the Navy—the same day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. With the war having come to its decisive end, he was nonetheless shipped off to Hawaii, where he saw no combat but joined the Melody Masters, the otherwise all-white base swing band. It was in the Navy that Coltrane played his first recording date, as part of a small combo of Navy musicians that laid down a handful of tracks, including the bebop standard “Hot House.”
Discharged from the Navy after a year of his two-year enlistment, Coltrane returned home in the summer of 1946. Philadelphia’s jazz scene embraced the bebop revolution that had developed during the war but which only became widely known when Charlie Parker’s Ri Bop Boys went into a Savoy recording studio in November 1945 and forever changed the course of jazz. (Those “boys” were Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Curley Russell, and Max Roach; the delay was a consequence of a wartime recording ban). “When I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes,” Coltrane said of Charlie Parker. He then dedicated himself to mastering the newly formed bebop language that Parker and Gillespie had created.
“I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird,” Coltrane later recalled. “It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.” Assisted by the G.I. Bill, Coltrane enrolled in music theory classes and took his studies seriously, constantly practicing after gigs late at night as other band members partied. "He was into the mission of practicing . . . every day, all day," saxophonist Jimmy Heath recalled decades later. Coltrane played whenever and wherever he could, and his journeyman talent was soon recognized well beyond Philadelphia. He joined groups led by Heath and Gillespie, who persuaded him to switch from alto to tenor saxophone. It was with the Gillespie band that Coltrane took his first recorded solo, during a 1951 recording session (the track was “We Love To Boogie”). That same year, Gillespie broke up the group, and Coltrane began hopscotching from band to band, developing a heroin addiction in the process. In 1954, he was fired from a band led by Johnny Hodges and returned to Philadelphia.
Up to this time, Coltrane’s greatness was not visible; he was just another player, barely heard in recording sessions. Not content to play that role, he spent the greater part of a year in seclusion, working obsessively on developing his own style, in search of the distinctive sound percolating in his head. In 1955 he was playing behind Jimmy Smith, the organist, when a call came from New York City, inviting Coltrane to audition with Miles Davis, then recovering from his own heroin addiction. Davis said he recognized that Coltrane “was just the voice I needed on tenor,” and made the twenty-nine-year-old the saxophonist in his new quintet. They played a handful of sessions that resulted in five Miles Davis records for the Prestige label, as well as his Columbia Records debut, “’Round About Midnight.” But Coltrane’s continued heroin use got him kicked out of the band. Once more, he returned to Philadelphia to regroup, and kick the heroin habit for good. He reportedly locked himself in a bedroom and quit “cold turkey,” in the process having a religious epiphany. “I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life,” he later wrote.
Returning to New York in 1957, Coltrane signed a record contract with Prestige and in May cut his eponymously titled debut record. That summer he landed a long-running gig with the Thelonious Monk Quartet at New York’s Five Spot, which was drawing jam-packed crowds every night. “He gave me complete freedom in my playing, and no one ever did that before,” Coltrane said of Monk. Blue Note Records took note of Coltrane’s liberated playing and brought him into the studio in September as lead player; the result was “Blue Train,” released in January 1958. “The title track, a haunting 10-minute blues, establishes Coltrane as one of the great interpreters of the form in jazz,” said one review.
By the end of the year, Coltrane had rejoined the Davis group and participated in the sessions that produced the classic “Milestones.” The following year, they reconvened and produced the best-selling jazz record of all time: “Kind of Blue.”
While continuing to record under his own name for Prestige, Coltrane signed a new contract with Atlantic Records and, two weeks after the “Kind of Blue” sessions concluded, went to work on a consequential new album. Consisting entirely of Coltrane compositions, “Giant Steps” was released in early 1960. AllMusic’s Lindsay Planer called it a “watershed,” saying that the “resolute intensity” of “Countdown,” one of the album’s seven tracks, “does more to modernize jazz in 141 seconds than many artists do in their entire careers.” Coltrane’s follow-up releases with Atlantic, including the major commercial success “My Favorite Things” (1961), only added to his popularity, the title track becoming the first jazz cut since Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” to receive wide play on the radio.
Coltrane performed the tune one evening at the Apollo Theater when Lionel Hampton was in attendance. Hampton described the scene: “The place was packed when he went in there. When he left, there wasn’t but a handful of people in there. He was playing his piece ‘My Favorite Things’ and he played that piece for about half an hour.” That setback aside, the popularity of the record helped persuade Impulse! Records to buy out his Atlantic contract, making Coltrane the new label’s first signing, and giving him creative control of his work.
A few months after recording “My Favorite Things,” Coltrane made his band a quintet by adding the adventurous multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, pushing the group away from the jazz mainstream. With Coltrane taking the lead, his bandmates followed him through intricate improvisations with split-second responsiveness. Reactions were mixed. Down Beat magazine’s John Tynan called the music “anti-jazz,” and Ira Gitler said the “yawps, squawks, and countless repetitive runs . . . should be confined to the woodshed.” Nat Hentoff disagreed, writing about the 1962 release “Live at the Village Vanguard”: “If you can open yourself emotionally to so relentless a self-exploration, you can gain considerable insight into the marrow of the jazz experience and into Coltrane's own indomitably resourceful musicianship through this whirlpool of blues.” Ben Ratliff described one track, “Chasin’ the Trane,” as a “fearsome 15-minute blues in F that had no written melody, or anything else; some heard it as a scream of confusion.”
Not to be pegged as being part of any particular movement, Coltrane teamed up with the long-established piano institution Duke Ellington. At the time of the 1962 recording, Ellington was sixty-three and Coltrane thirty-six. They meshed well; Coltrane brought his musicians and Ellington supplied most of the material. Noteworthy was their reworking of Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood,” along with Ellington’s new take on an old classic, “Take the Coltrane.” “I was really honored to have the opportunity of working with Duke,” Coltrane said. “It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I haven't caught up with yet.”
The following year, Coltrane satisfied his affection for ballad phrasing by pairing with Johnny Hartman, whose voice was arguably the lushest and richest of all jazz singers. “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman” was composed entirely of ballads and torch songs. AllMusic’s Scott Yanow gave it five stars, saying, “Coltrane’s playing throughout the session is beautiful, sympathetic, and still exploratory. . . . [W]hat is here is classic, essential for all jazz collections.”
That same year, Coltrane met Alice McCloud while she was performing with the Terry Gibbs Quartet. A skilled harpist, pianist and organist, she, like John, was imbued with spirituality and mysticism. They moved in together and had two sons together before Coltrane divorced his first wife. They then got married and had another son. Alice would become his bandmate and collaborator, a driving force who influenced the direction his music took in the remaining years of his life.
At the end of 1964, Coltrane made his most personal statement, “A Love Supreme,” a “musical offering in gratitude for his spiritual re-awakening in ’57, the year he rid himself of his drug habit,” said Ashley Kahn. Said Coltrane: “My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being.” “A Love Supreme” garnered a pair of Grammy nominations and remains Coltrane’s best-selling record.
As critics were praising “A Love Supreme,” Coltrane was back in the studio preparing “Ascension,” which was given a release in early 1966. With its eleven-man roster (which included five saxophones and two basses), the album was a departure from the small-ensemble work Coltrane had largely been associated with. He described the album as a “big band thing,” but with its avant-garde stylings, the results were unlike any big band record that had come before it: “The single most vexatious work in jazz history,” said Gary Giddins; "the “torch that lit the free jazz thing,” in saxophonist Dave Liebman’s view. Down Beat, cool to Coltrane’s free jazz inclinations earlier in the decade, called “Ascension” “possibly the most powerful human sound ever recorded.”
Himself no fan of free jazz, Geoff Dyer, in his book But Beautiful, described the path Coltrane was on: “His music became a landscape filled with chaos and shrieks. It is as if he was attempting to absorb all the violence of his times into his music in order to leave the world more peaceful.”
Recorded five months before Coltrane’s death (but not released until 1974), the album “Interstellar Spaces” is exactly what Geoff Dyer’s observation had in mind. With tracks titled “Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” and “Saturn,” “Interstellar Spaces” is a series of duets between Coltrane and his new drummer, Rashied Ali (who’s even wilder than Elvin Jones). Ben Ratliff: “I have found it impossible to keep pace with this album's headlong outpouring. Still, what a place for a consummate, deeply educated musician to end his travels: in a wild garden of sound, a kind of natural state.”
Days after recording the planetary duets, Coltrane was back in the studio to finish cutting the album “Expressions”; it was released in late September 1967, barely two months after he had died of liver disease and complications arising from years of alcohol and drug abuse. “We are left with the artifacts of a brilliant career, of a journey into music’s darker realm,” writes Gary Giddins in his book Visions of Jazz. “He didn’t force a retooling of the music, as Armstrong and Parker did, but he instigated a reimagining of possibilities and brought back a solemnity of purpose that shook up the old order.”
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
MILES DAVIS
Possessing one of the sweetest tones ever heard on trumpet, Miles Davis (1926-1991) indeed had a gift. A pivotal figure in jazz, he reshaped the form in his own image multiple times. His career can be summed up in two phases: the acoustic phase that lasted until the late 1960s, and the electric phase that followed him to the end of his career.
It is arguably Davis’s first phase that he is most remembered for. Releasing some of the most successful jazz albums ever recorded, his remarkable, crowd-pleasing achievements are considered to be among his best works. But it was Davis’s restlessness, the need to move, change, and grow that fueled his musical explorations, leading him to depart from his roots into “jazz fusion,” aligning him with rock and funk.
Born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Miles Davis was the son of an affluent dental surgeon and gentleman farmer. His mother, a music teacher, encouraged him to play the violin, in keeping with the genteel lifestyle she envisioned for him, while his contrarian father gave the boy a trumpet at age thirteen and arranged for lessons. In little over a year, young Miles got jobs playing the horn in local restaurants and bars and started gigging out of town on weekends. His talent with the instrument became so pronounced that when Billy Eckstine and His Orchestra came to St. Louis in 1944, the eighteen-year-old, just out of high school, was asked to sit in for a week when the group’s third trumpeter fell ill. The Eckstine orchestra included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the architects of the emerging bebop style of jazz, a sound “characterized by fast, inventive soloing and dynamic rhythm variations,” to quote William Ruhlmann in a profile on Davis. The young trumpeter felt bound to follow this exciting new sound. “I decided right then and there that I had to leave St. Louis and live in New York City where all these bad musicians were,” Davis later said.
His mother preferred he go to Nashville to attend Fisk University for classical studies. To appease her, Davis promised to attend classes at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Taking classes during the day, he spent nights jamming at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. In his autobiography, Davis criticized the Juilliard classes for their excessive focus on the classical European — in other words, “white” — repertoire; with his father’s permission, he dropped out after just three semesters. Alex Ross’s book Listen To This expands on Davis’s harsh appraisal of Juilliard, quoting him as saying, “No white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black mother[expletive] like me.” But Davis admitted that the school improved his playing and gave him an understanding of music theory, tools that no doubt proved valuable when he began performing on stage alongside the established journeyman Coleman Hawkins and young trailblazer Charlie Parker, whose band Davis joined in 1945.
The now legendary first recording session Davis did with Parker in late November 1945 produced “Koko,” which jazz writers Gary Giddins & Scott DeVeaux call a “bellwether jazz masterpiece – bop’s equivalent of Louis Armstrong’s ‘West End Blues.’” But Davis, then just nineteen years old, was not up to the frenetic demands of the intricate tune — a case of nerves, it’s long been said — and Dizzy Gillespie (who was otherwise credited as pianist on the session) had to step in. “Diz and Bird [Parker] played a lot of real fast notes and chord changes because that’s the way they heard everything,” Davis later wrote in his autobiography (published in 1989 and written in collaboration with Quincy Troupe). “Their concept of music was more rather than less. I personally wanted to cut the notes down.” He also eschewed the upper-register runs that made Gillespie famous. Consequently, Davis had a difficult time meshing with what Bird and his bandmates were doing; nonetheless, the two men played multiple studio sessions and live dates together before Davis had finally had enough of Parker’s chronic drug and money problems, parting ways with the saxophonist in late 1948.
By then Davis had hooked up with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (just 22 years old at the time) and arranger-composer Gil Evans, and spent more than a year creating a new jazz template. A nine-member band (a “nonet”) was formed, complete with tuba and French horns, producing a relaxed sound that served as a rebuttal to bop’s frantic excesses. Playing richly styled ensemble music without the big band swing tempo, the Davis nonet came to define “cool” jazz. Over the next fourteen months the group recorded twelve songs for Capitol Records, which only released a handful of the tracks as 78 RPM singles, to no great acclaim. By 1957 the legend of these sessions (and Davis himself) had grown and Capitol put out a twelve-inch LP with the title “Birth of the Cool,” and a jazz classic was born.
Davis, meanwhile, had moved on to co-lead a band with Tadd Dameron, considered the “romanticist of bebop.” When they played the Paris International Jazz Festival in May of 1949, Davis was elated by the warm welcome and critical acclaim he received. Indeed, the trip, Davis later said, “changed the way I looked at things forever. I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was treated.” He added: “The only other times that I felt that good was when I first head Bird and Diz. . . . But that was just about music. This was different. . . . It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being, like someone important.” And he fell in love. Juliette Gréco, a young French singer, was Davis’s constant companion during his brief stay in Paris, and encouraged him to stay. “But I didn’t,” Davis later wrote. “I stayed a week or two, fell in love with Juliette and with Paris and then left. . . . I was so depressed when I got back [to the States] that before I knew it, I had a heroin habit that took me four years to kick.”
During those years Davis did what he could to fund his habit, freelancing wherever he could find work, even pimping. He said that being a “professional junkie” changed his “whole personality from being a nice, quiet, honest, caring person into someone who was the complete opposite. It was the drive to get the heroin that made me that way. I’d do anything not to be sick, which meant getting and shooting heroin all the time.”
Finally, in 1953, Davis called his father and asked for bus fare to come home to East St. Louis, determined to kick his drug habit. He went to his father’s farm in nearby Millstadt, Illinois, and locked himself in a room and got off heroin cold turkey. The agonizing process took more than a week, but “one day it was over, just like that,” Davis wrote. “I walked outside into the clean, sweet air over to my father’s house . . . and we just hugged each other and cried. He knew that I had finally beat it.”
But Davis struggled to see his way entirely clear of the addiction and settled in Detroit for a time in an effort to avoid New York City, with its relative abundance of drugs and addicts. Using boxer Sugar Ray Robinson as his “hero-image” inspiration, Davis eventually returned to New York City and recorded a string of important small-group sessions for the Prestige label. The recordings often adapted popular tunes from the American songbook as starting points for improvisation. He regularly played with drummers Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke, pianists Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk, and saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Davis’s prolific output for the Prestige label brought him widespread fame for the first time.
His image was further enhanced by a pivotal appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, where he performed Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” with muted trumpet, to wide acclaim. Not only did the appearance help him tie Dizzy Gillespie for best trumpeter in DownBeat magazine’s 1955 Readers’ Poll, it made him the object of major-label interest; he signed a lucrative recording contract with Columbia Records soon after.
A few months after the Newport appearance, Davis had a throat operation to remove polyps from his vocal cords. Two days later he engaged in a shouting match with another musician, and his voice was permanently damaged, reduced it to a raspy whisper. The same month he took his new quintet, which included John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, into the studio and recorded their first tracks for Columbia. Due to contractual constraints imposed by Prestige, the resulting album, “‘Round About Midnight,” a Davis classic, would not be released until 1957. Meanwhile, Davis reconnected with Gil Evans, and the two collaborated on some of Davis’s most successful LPs. In 1957 it was “Miles Ahead,” in 1959 “Porgy and Bess” and the following year “Sketches of Spain.”
1959 was also significant for the release of “Kind of Blue,” one of the landmarks of modern music. The album went on to (arguably) become the biggest-selling jazz album of all time, still selling several thousand copies each month. In 2006 the British magazine Jazzwise placed “Kind of Blue” at the top of its list of the 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World. Its feature story calls the album’s success “all the more remarkable” considering “that it was made on the cheap — a few thousand dollars contractual advance to Davis, union scale payment to six sidemen – Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums — nine hours studio time, four reels of tape and a piano tuner’s fee.” Following the album’s release, the fame and accolades Davis received put him on par with movie stars, according him a status never before enjoyed by a jazz musician. But for Davis, the euphoria was short-lived. The same month that the album came out, August of 1959, he was jailed for resisting arrest and assault of a police officer, charges he was later acquitted of. In his autobiography, Davis calls the incident “some real jive bullshit that changed my whole life and my whole attitude again . . . when I was really starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country.” “If you’re black,” he wrote 30 years later, “there is no justice. None.”
By year’s end, Davis married the black dancer Frances Taylor. The two were a striking couple, exuding photogenic glamor wherever they were seen together. “For me,” Davis reportedly said, “music and life are about style.” That style took a hit in 1965 when he underwent repeated hip surgeries, culminating with an August 4 tumble down the staircase of his New York City apartment that left him with a broken leg and required a hip prosthesis. By January 1966 Davis was back in the hospital with a liver infection. That same year Taylor filed for divorce, ending his first marriage. His second marriage, to singer Betty Mabry, lasted only a few months, but her influence on him personally and musically endured for years. She introduced Davis to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and changed the way he dressed. “She was just ahead of her time,” Davis later wrote of Mabry, saying she “helped point the way I was to go.” Indeed, the forever restless Davis would famously say, “If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”
In 1969, Davis recorded two albums, “In a Silent Way” and “Bitches Brew,” a pair of commercially successful electric “fusion” records that jazz critics mostly assailed and rock critics mostly praised. Both have earned a place among Davis’s best releases. The newfound popularity that this stylistic (and sartorial) shift brought to Davis gave him a distinction only one other jazz musician can claim: a Rolling Stone cover (Sun Ra, who preceded Davis on the cover by eight months, is the other). AllMusic gives “Bitches Brew” its highest five-star rating, with reviewer Thom Jurek calling the record “so forward-thinking that it retains its freshness and mystery in the 21st century.”
Undoubtedly, the album was ahead of its time, but in 1970 Davis had many detractors. Criticism often had as much to do with the man as with his music. His volatile, sometimes violent temperament was well-known. He told one club owner: “I’m a musician, not a comedian. . . . The white man always wants you to bow. I don’t smile and I don’t bow. I’m here to play music.” Dizzy Gillespie respected those qualities about Davis, saying: “He was the first one that came along in our business and figured he didn’t have to smile at everyone, didn’t have to tell no jokes or make no announcements, didn’t have to say thank you or even bow.” But jazz enthusiast Byron Wilson, who saw Davis perform numerous times in Chicago, thought that “Miles was very arrogant. He’d turn his back to the audience while playing and walk off the stage when other soloists were performing, projecting this image that he was God’s gift to jazz.”
Some of Davis’s irascibility stemmed from the multiple health issues that his fast-lane lifestyle had incurred, often through personal recklessness, and the self-medication he engaged in to quell the resulting pain. One of the more dramatic examples of this came in 1972 when, as reported by Pitchfork’s Andy Beta, “the most famous jazz musician in the world tried to take a right turn at 60 mph off the West Side Highway and totaled his Lamborghini Miura. A bystander found Miles Davis with both legs broken, covered in blood and cocaine.” Davis later wrote: “Everything started to blur after that car accident.” Indeed it did; after an extraordinarily productive first half of the decade, he was largely AWOL for the last five years of the ’70s, admitting: “Sex and drugs took the place that music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.” (Don Cheadle’s 2015 biopic “Miles Ahead” examines this period in Davis’s life). The pause provided something of a reset as his music had increasingly polarized fans and critics, “Get Up with It” being an example. The 124-minute double album, released in 1974, brought together studio recordings Davis made over the three previous years, with two of the tracks clocking in at 32 minutes. “‘Get Up with It’ is perhaps the major work from this period that has been slowest to receive its due,” Brendan Nagle wrote in a recent review. AllMusic’s Thom Jurek concedes that while “critics — let alone fans — had a tough time with it” in 1974, “this may be the most ‘commercial’ sounding of all of Miles' electric records from the ’70s, but it still sounds out there, alien, and futuristic in all the best ways, and ‘Get Up with It’ is perhaps just coming into its own here in the 21st century.”
In 1979, Miles rekindled a relationship with actress Cicely Tyson, who helped him overcome his cocaine addiction (when they had first met in the late ‘60s, she is said to have helped him manage his alcohol abuse). They married in 1981 and remained together until 1989. In 1980 Davis was back in the recording studio, releasing the poorly received “The Man With the Horn” a year later, thus beginning a run of slickly produced, electronic-driven albums that included the Grammy-award-winning releases “Tutu” (1986) and “Aura” (1989), intended to win over younger fans. Davis’s last studio album, the widely panned “Doo-Bop,” was released posthumously in 1992. Hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee served as collaborator, receiving credits as both producer and co-author of all of the album’s nine tracks. Despite its poor reception, the album garnered a Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance (Davis was a nine-time Grammy winner).
By 1990, Davis was in poor health and he knew it. Too many years of excessive living had worn his body out. In September 1991 he died in a California hospital of heart failure and pneumonia. He was sixty-six years old. Writer William Ruhlmann brilliantly sums up Davis’s impact: “To examine his career is to examine the history of jazz from the mid-’40s to the early ’90s, since he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes. . . . It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn’t there to push it forward.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
BOB DYLAN
“How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone”
“Like A Rolling Stone” is a monumental piece of pop music, placed as the number one song on Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the Five Hundred Greatest Songs of All Time. Serving as the opening track to Bob Dylan’s 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited,” it completed the transformation of Dylan from folk singer to rock star.
Five days after the song’s release, Dylan and his band (Al Kooper, organ; Paul Griffin, piano; Bobby Gregg, drums; Michael Bloomfield, electric guitar) appeared at the 1965 Newport Summer Folk Festival, where the folk purists booed relentlessly at Dylan’s betrayal. Shortly after, he began his first “electric” tour of the United States and commented that “I like what I’m doing now. They can boo me until the end of time. I know that the music is real, more real than the boos.”
Over seven decades he’s explored nearly every tradition in American song — folk, blues, gospel, and rock ‘n’ roll — making it hard to categorize Dylan. “It’s hard to pin down what Dylan does,” said Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker. “He is a composer and performer at once. Sometimes he writes new melodies for old songs and sometimes transposes one set of lyrics into the tune of another. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances over many decades.” Dylan’s own response is more simplistic: “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.”
When Dylan became the first rock musician to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, The New York Times called it “perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901,” noting that it had “set off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.” The Nobel committee commended its 2016 recipient for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Others agree, seeing nothing but artistic value in Dylan’s lyrics. One writer observed that “Dylan is to word and voice like Picasso was to picture and form.”
Dylan has been described as a constantly changing, deliberately elusive, and often prophetic man. He has been deified and denounced for every shift of interest, but musicians from every genre have taken to his ideas. Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson chooses praise, saying: “Dylan is the high priest for many of the singers and songwriters of what can be called the Sixties sound. If you look at The Beatles before Dylan and after their exposure to him, it’s a whole different ballgame. He elevated pop songs to an art form.”
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, the first of two sons to Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone. They lived in a small but close-knit Jewish community. When Robert was six, his father was stricken with polio, and the family returned to his mother’s hometown, Hibbing, on the Mesabi Range, west of Lake Superior. Describing his youth, he reminisced in typical poetic expression: “Where I grew up I was as far from the cultural center as you could get. It was way out of the beaten path. You had the whole town to roam around in and there didn’t seem to be any sadness or fear or insecurity. It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter, summer, spring, and autumn. The culture was mainly circuses and carnivals, preachers and barnstorming pilots, hillbilly shows, big bands, comedians, and whatnot.”
Such sentimental remembrances seem a bit contrary, considering Dylan’s lust for wandering. He ran away from home seven times, beginning at age ten. His travels brought him to the two Dakotas, Kansas, New Mexico, and California. His flights from home may have been motivated by his native minstrel tendency, hence the need for a guitar, which he began playing at age ten. At fifteen, he wrote his first song, a ballad dedicated to the French film star Brigitte Bardot.
Dylan’s singing was heavily influenced by listening to the radio late in the evening. Black bluesmen like Big Joe Williams, Lead Belly, and Bo Diddley cast a spell over him. He was also drawn to rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry and country singers Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers.
In his freshman year at Hibbing High School, he organized a band called The Golden Chords, performing cover songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. In 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. There he became absorbed in the recordings of Woody Guthrie and began performing folk and country songs at a coffeehouse a few blocks from campus, introducing himself as Bob Dylan. His Guthrie attraction was such that he left school halfway through his first year. With guitar and suitcase in hand, he hitched rides to New York to see Guthrie, who was then a patient at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Morris Plains, New Jersey.
Dylan paid numerous visits to the legendary folk singer, hoping to absorb whatever he could. He picked up on Guthrie’s vocal color, diction, and inflection, and within a mere half year “had learned to churn up exciting, bluesy, and hard-driving guitar music.” The year was 1961, and he was soon writing songs almost nonstop. A typical day included reading a story in the newspaper, then writing a song about it. Soon Dylan was stirring up the Greenwich Village folk scene with poetic verse.
He became the opening act for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City, earning a rave review from The New York Times. John Hammond, the impresario record producer at Columbia Records, took notice, signing Dylan to a five-year Columbia contract. He was called a folk singer, but in the way he embodied the term, folk was more city-bred, with songs stemming from personal concerns. For Dylan and other prominent folk singers of the time, like Joan Baez, those concerns included racial prejudice, environmental matters, and militarism. Baez started performing Dylan’s songs, explaining: “Bobby is expressing what I and many other young people feel, what we want to say. Bobby’s songs are powerful as poetry and powerful as music.”
With John Hammond serving as producer, Dylan’s self-titled first album, consisting mainly of old folk songs, attracted little attention; it sold only a few thousand copies. Five months later, work started on his next LP, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (released in 1963). For this album, Dylan wrote twelve of the thirteen tracks, turning towards social justice causes. The album includes classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” Peter, Paul and Mary covered “Blowin’ in the Wind,” selling 300,000 copies in the first week of release. Upon hearing “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” poet Allen Ginsberg wept with joy because “it seemed that the torch had been passed to another generation,” he recalled at the end of his life. When The Beatles were given the album, they could listen to little else. “For three weeks, we didn’t stop playing it,” said John Lennon. “We all went potty about Dylan.”
The ultimate success of the album made Dylan a pop cultural phenom. By changing pop singing, velvety and lush voices became passé. After hearing Dylan, Sam Cooke said that, going forward, “It’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is; it’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.”
Being so young and committed, Dylan wanted to do everything, including make a shift in genre. With the release of his fifth album, “Bringin’ It All Back Home” (1965), he parted ways with some of his folk-based fans, switching from acoustic to electric guitar and putting together a nine-piece rock band. That same year came the release of an album that revolutionized rock: “Highway 61 Revisited.” The opening track, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became Dylan’s first major hit, climbing to number two on the Billboard chart.
In 1966, the album “Blonde on Blonde” was released. The opening track, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” soared to number two on the Billboard pop chart. Worldwide sales of the album topped ten million. By now, Bob Dylan was perhaps the central player in the Sixties cultural revolution. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll describes his ascension: “The intensity of his performances and his live-in-the studio albums were a revelation. His lyrics were analyzed, debated, and quoted like no one before.”
Dylan had difficulty with his new status. When asked if he accepted being called the voice of his generation, he responded: “That was just a term that could create problems, especially if someone just wants to keep it simple, write songs, and play them. Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.”
Dylan was indeed keeping it simple. He had few possessions, the weightiest of them being a motorcycle. He immersed himself in songs, poetry, plays, and novels. “I do read Hemingway,” he asserted in a 1964 New Yorker magazine interview with Nat Hentoff. “Hemingway didn’t have to use adjectives. He didn’t really have to define what he was saying. He just said it. I can’t do that yet, but that’s what I want to be able to do.”
But if Dylan wished to keep things “simple,” he was going about it the wrong way. He frequently described himself as exhausted and acting as if on a death trip. A television show was in the works, he had a deadline to meet for his publisher, and his manager had already scheduled an extensive tour. The pressure served to increase his drug use.
On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his 500cc Triumph Tiger motorcycle riding near his Woodstock, New York home. With several broken neck vertebrae, a concussion and lacerations of the face and scalp, he was in critical condition for a week and bedridden for a month. He spent nine months in seclusion while dealing with amnesia and mild paralysis. As he recovered, he gathered his touring musicians and began writing new material. What came out of these sessions were “The Basement Tapes,” not to be released until 1975.
Recovery from a near-death experience at age twenty-five certainly is pause for reflection. That seemed to be the case with his 1968 return from exile. The album, “John Wesley Harding,” was described by Rolling Stone as a “hard pivot away from the revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll masterpieces that preceded it.” AllMusic calls it a calm, reflective album, that isn’t a return to his folk roots; instead, “it’s his first serious foray into country, providing a touchstone for the country rock revolution that swept through rock in the late Sixties.” The album went to the top of the charts in both the U.S. and U.K., and marked his return to acoustic guitar.
A year later, another album of all-Dylan compositions, “Nashville Skyline,” also reached the top of the charts. One song, “Lay Lady Lay,” was a top ten single and later ranked twenty-fourth on Rolling Stone’s list of the Top 500 Greatest Songs. Another highly lauded song from the album was “Girl From the North Country,” a duet he sang with Johnny Cash. Departing from his normally gravelly sound, his voice was considered warm and pleasing to critics and listeners alike. The vocal change was attributed to Dylan’s decision to stop smoking during his seclusion. As a way of promoting the album, Dylan agreed to a rare TV appearance on “The Johnny Cash Show,” where the two of them sang “North Country” before a national audience.
With Dylan’s manic past behind him, he continued to proceed in his own unconventional way. In 1972, he wrote the score for the film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” which produced the top ten hit “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” In 1975 came the album “Blood on the Tracks.” One song, “Tangled Up in Blue,” was released as a single. The Telegraph described it as having “the most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships that is filled with a painfully desperate longing.” Dylan later explained that he wrote the song after spending a weekend immersed in Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album “Blue.”
In 1976, Dylan’s wife, Sara, filed for divorce, ending an eleven-year marriage and receiving custody of their five children. He then embarked on his most extensive tour, taking him to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Europe, and back to the U.S. In 1979, Dylan declared himself a born-again Christian. All the songs on his 1980 album “Slow Train Coming” express his strong personal faith and the importance of Christian teachings. The evangelical nature of the record alienated many of his existing fans; at the same time, many Evangelicals were drawn into his base. One track from the album, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” earned Dylan a Grammy.
Since 1988, Dylan has maintained a performance schedule so relentless it’s known as the Never Ending Tour; during this time he’s played roughly a hundred dates a year, totaling over 2,500 shows. In the last twenty years, Dylan has published six books of drawings and paintings, with his work being exhibited in major art galleries. He’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and was chosen for the Pulitzer Prize Jury Special Citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture by lyrical compositions of extraordinary power.”
In 2015, Dylan came full-circle in the recording studio, releasing the album “Shadows in the Night.” It features ten songs from the 1920s to the 1960s, including standards like “Autumn Leaves,” “That Lucky Old Sun,” and “Some Enchanted Evening.” To promote the album he actually consented to be interviewed, giving the honor to AARP. To explain his move toward sentimentality, he said: “Look, you get older. Passion is a young man’s game. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you’re around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don’t try to act like you’re young. You could really hurt yourself.”
There’s no telling what Dylan’s next tour de force will be, but he is clearly the twenty-first century’s oldest rock performer still making interesting and popular albums. Considered by many to be the best lyricist of all time, his voice, even more raspy, still delivers. It can be said there have been no more truthful singers than Bob Dylan.
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
DUKE ELLINGTON
Jazz music listeners today are quite familiar with the recordings of Duke Ellington (1899-1974). His stature is immense. Among the twentieth century’s greatest composers, he wrote more than three thousand musical compositions of varying length. His most revered works of the 1930s — “Mood Indigo” (1930), “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), “Solitude” (1934), “In A Sentimental Mood” (1935), and “Caravan” (1936) — gave jazz its modern framework.
The writer Studs Terkel once summed up his legacy: “Due to Ellington’s inventive use of the big band and thanks to his eloquence and charisma, he brought new colors, shadings, and subtleties to jazz. Duke more than any other man elevated this native American music from a primitive art to a rich and fully satisfying means of expression.”
Ellington is richly presented in Duke: A Life of Ellington, Terry Teachout’s 2013 biography, where the author writes: “As a black jazz titan in a racist age, he took on a weighty double role: to lift jazz to the level of concert music and to win respect for his race. He triumphed on both counts. Ellington played piano, but his real instrument was the orchestra. He led the band with a majesty that seemed royal. Dressed in tails, he stayed ever suave and impeccable. He knew that a black man in his position had to seem superhuman.”
Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899-1974) was a lone child born to James and Daisy, in Washington, D.C. Young Edward was influenced by the elegance and etiquette his father learned as a butler and caterer to some of Washington’s most prominent families, including stints at the White House. His parents were solid middle class, well-off enough to afford a comfortable row house apartment and to possess an upright piano. Middle-class blacks of the time, like his parents, knew that upward mobility depended upon adopting the whitest mannerisms possible. Ellington’s childhood friends noticed that his “dapper dress and easy grace gave him the bearing of a young nobleman,” and began calling him Duke. “As though I were some very special child,” Ellington wrote, “my mother would say, ‘Edward, you are blessed’.”
Edward’s mother encouraged her son to play piano, focusing on classical music. Rigorous study did not interest the lad; he favored ragtime, the most popular music of the day. His indoctrination came from poolroom pianists, employed to belt out the tunes. From there he went into clubs to hear stride pianists perform, particularly Fats Waller. If there was a piano at a gathering place, friends would encourage him to play ragtime so the kids could dance. Ellington later reminisced: “ I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.”
At age fifteen, working as a soda “jerk,” he composed “Soda Fountain Rag.” A year later, he played the song at a club while filling in for a musician. Playing an entire set, he performed the song as a waltz, foxtrot, and tango. “They never knew it was the same number,” he later recalled. “I was established. Not only did I write the music, but I had a repertory.”
After high school graduation, Duke gave up an arts scholarship to play professional piano gigs for parties, dances, and clubs. Before turning twenty, he had his own four-piece combo, Duke’s Washingtonians, which soon became one of the top dance bands in D.C. In 1918, he proposed marriage to high school sweetheart Edna Thompson. A year later, a son, Mercer, was born. (The marriage ended a decade later.)
One night Duke heard Sidney Bechet play the saxophone. “It was my first encounter with the New Orleans idiom,” he would later recall. “I had never heard anything like it.” That experience convinced Ellington to depart for New York, leaving behind his wife and four-year-old son. He arrived at age twenty-four, with members of his Washington group. It was 1923 and the Jazz Age had commenced. But Ellington’s quartet initially only found work at a high-class club where they were were given the instruction to not disturb cocktail drinkers. This is not what brought Duke to New York.
As he lingered about the streets, he was forming a concept, expressed through street rhythms, using high-squealing trumpets and sultry saxophone harmonies. His concept for expression was provided by the Kentucky Club on Broadway. Given a full orchestra, Duke began working on more complicated arrangements, taking a couple of years to find what he was striving for.
During that time, agent-publisher Irving Mills saw genius in the young bandleader and composer. Taking a fifty percent cut in Ellington’s future, he handled the business side, while polishing the band’s image for white audiences. On top of that, Mills was prominent as Ellington’s lyricist on many of the songs that made Duke famous.
Mills arranged an audition at Harlem’s most famous night spot, the Cotton Club, leading to the Ellington group’s 1927 hire as the house band, a position they held for four years. The orchestra grew to ten with the hiring of clarinetist Barney Bigard, trumpeter Cootie Williams, and saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney. That firepower set Ellington apart from other bands.
Pivotal to Ellington’s success were the radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club that spread his name and music to much of the country. Teachout writes in Duke: A Life of Ellington: “The room’s brilliantly staged variety shows gave a nearly all-white clientele an illusion of untamed Africa. Ellington’s sound — dubbed ‘jungle music’ — thrilled audiences with its raw vivacity. The band’s dark, moaning horns held the essence of the blues; to Ellington, they evoked ‘the mass singing of slaves.’”
A tremendous burden was placed on Ellington to compose and arrange prolific amounts of music, a task he shared with band members. Ellington himself was better at rhythm and harmony than with melody. He’d come up with an idea for a song based on words he was constantly scribbling on paper, then worked with the band to create an arrangement built around a soloist, enabling a musician to innovate as he played. That formula proved successful with a few hit songs, beginning with “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a 1927 tune he co-wrote with trumpeter Bubber Miley. That same year, “Jungle Nights in Harlem” reflected the bizarre happenings at the Cotton Club. A year later, he and Irving Mills co-wrote “The Mooche.”
Included in Duke’s orchestra were five or six talented composers, one being Barney Bigard, who submitted “Mood Indigo” to Duke and shared co-writing honors. The 1930 composition proved to be the band’s first international hit. Indeed, “Mood Indigo” would become the band’s most requested number for the next forty years.
Duke also knew that to succeed he had to be inventive. In 1931, “Creole Rhapsody” took both sides of a 78 rpm record, something completely new for a jazz band. A year later he collaborated with Irving Mills on an upbeat tune, in which Duke did the music and Mills wrote the lyrics. From it came “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” And did it swing! The band’s vocalist, Ivie Anderson, opened with “wah dot doo, wah dot doo, dot dot doo, dah dah doo,” followed by, “It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot, just keep that rhythm, give it everything you’ve got.” Those words set the tempo for a chorus of growling saxophones interspersed with Johnny Hodges’ meandering solo.
This was Afro-musicianship that swung so splendidly that it served as a precursor to the Swing Era. Ellington energized young whites who took to the dance floors. A youth phenomena was created, driving record sales to new highs as bookings multiplied. So too did the star power of white bandleaders, especially Benny Goodman.
Ellington, however, was determined to set himself apart from his peers. Having little desire to compete with swing era bands, he presented his first extended work in 1935, “Reminiscing in Tempo,” a thirteen-minute piece that served as a tribute to his mother, who had just passed away. He called it a “soliloquy,” adding: “I am playing what I feel deep down inside.” Covering four 78 rpm record sides, it gave extended minutes to practically all his soloists.
In 1939, Ellington made a strategic hire for his orchestra: Billy Strayhorn. The gifted twenty-four-year-old composer had been meticulously schooled and was much more harmonically advanced than Ellington. The first piece Strayhorn wrote for Ellington came as a result of the directions Duke gave to get to his Harlem apartment. Strayhorn presented it upon arrival, another of Ellington’s most recognized pieces — “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Their collaboration lasted twenty-five years. At about this time, Ellington severed his relationship with Irving Mills and set out to do more of what he intended.
On the evening of January 23, 1943, Ellington and his orchestra made their first appearance at Carnegie Hall. The early part of the performance was devoted to past hits; then Ellington debuted the forty-four-minute composition “Black, Brown and Beige.” Presented in three parts, it was a composite portrait of black American life throughout the history of this country. The audience responded favorably, but some jazz critics accused him of abandoning the music that made him famous. Ellington discovered that when you get out of your niche, criticism follows. He never presented “Black, Brown and Beige” in its entirety again, but he would introduce five more extended works at Carnegie Hall during the 1940s.
By the late Forties, the Swing Era was in decline and Ellington suffered; his prestige and record sales sagged, while key musicians left the band. But he persevered, becoming an early convert to the long-playing 12-inch record, a format introduced in 1948. “Masterpieces by Ellington,” recorded in 1950 and released the following year, exemplified this transition. The album allowed Ellington and Strayhorn to be at the top of their game over a span of forty-seven minutes. One sterling example is their remake of “Mood Indigo,” expanded to fifteen minutes. The arrangement geared the work to the individual styles and strengths of band members. Jazz analysts consider this album to be an Ellington benchmark.
By 1956, jazz had once again changed direction. “Cool” jazz was in fashion. Ellington, though, was too self-respecting as leader of a jazz orchestra to cave to prevailing trends. He booked a date at Newport, Rhode Island’s inaugural summer jazz festival, seeing this as an opportunity to re-establish the band’s reputation. Ellington’s orchestra was placed as the closing act of the four-day run, appearing on stage just before midnight. Ellington opened with a couple tunes he composed for the occasion, “Festival Junction” and “Newport Up.” The crowd heartily approved, but many in the audience were leaving for the parking lot. To get them back, Ellington reverted to a piece written in 1937, “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” The band hit so hard, the rhythm section rocked so powerfully, that people hurried back to their seats. The fourteen-minute selection featured tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves delivering a succession of “rockin’” blues choruses (twenty-seven in all), each one becoming more furious. The crowd, whipped into a frenzy, began screaming “go, go, go,” and started dancing in the aisles. In the wake of four further tunes, Ellington’s set concluded at one in the morning.
The Duke was back. Three weeks later Ellington was on the cover of TIME magazine. A major career revival followed that included extensive world tours. In 1957, Ella Fitzgerald and Ellington collaborated on her song book series, producing the landmark two-volume set “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book.” Then he and Strayhorn scored the soundtracks for the films “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) and “Paris Blues” (1961). In 1967, Ellington teamed with Frank Sinatra for the album “Francis A. & Edward K.”
The year 1967 also marked the death of Billy Strayhorn from cancer. Three months later, the album “And His Mother Called Him Bill” was released. Considered a masterpiece, it’s perhaps the greatest tribute album ever recorded. Two tracks capture the loss two artists are feeling: first, Ellington’s solo rendition of “Lotus Blossom” and then Johnny Hodges’ “Day Dream.”
In the last decade of his life, Ellington often put out works that had little appeal to either the masses or jazz critics. Even the Pulitzer Prize board members rejected a proposal to give the then sixty-seven-year-old composer its prestigious lifetime achievement award. He denounced their snobbery toward non-classical forms, and hinted at racism. “Fate is being kind to me,” he quipped at the time. “Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”
Ellington wrote and his big band performed three sacred concerts in 1965, ’68 and ’73. Referring to the project as “the most important thing I have ever done,” he said: “One may be accustomed to speaking to people, but suddenly attempt to speak, sing, and play directly to God — that puts one in an entirely new and different position.” The first of these concerts (and subsequently released recording) was received enthusiastically, but diminishing levels of enthusiasm and interest greeted the second and third.
Indeed, by the early Seventies, Ellington’s music was considered passé. Consequently, he found himself supporting a band he couldn’t afford to pay, as he continued touring right up to his seventy-fifth birthday, the year of his passing. Death was attributed to lung cancer and pneumonia. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
The 12,000 mourners who turned out for his 1974 funeral testify to Duke Ellington’s towering contribution to music, and his significance will probably never be forgotten. The sound of his big band, as well as his piano playing, were completely unique. He didn’t invent the big band, but he arranged and composed in a way that anyone could recognize the Ellington sound. It’s hard to imagine a jazz musician born in the last ninety years who would have not been influenced by Ellington in some way. As Miles Davis said, “At least one day in every year, all musicians should put their instruments down and give thanks to Duke Ellington.”
With a dedication to music that was all-consuming, Ellington once declared: “Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
GEORGE GERSHWIN
When George Gershwin (1898-1937) stepped onto the stage at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, with The Paul Whiteman Orchestra behind him, and played the sixteen-minute composition “Rhapsody In Blue,” the twenty-five-year-old left an indelible mark on an era known as the Jazz Age.
Jazz was in its infancy, having emerged with that title around 1915. By the 1920s it had become synonymous with New York City’s urban modernity.
On the evening of Gershwin’s performance, Whiteman had made arrangements to present a “symphonic jazz” concert, intended to open a conversation between jazz and classical music. Gershwin’s intention was to create an image of America that embraced the “melting pot” quality of the country. Concentrating on blues-based harmonies, syncopation, energetic rhythm, and call-and-response gestures of African-American music, the audience afterwards responded with astonishment, roaring its approval with several curtain calls.
A sudden superstar, Gershwin was besieged by the media to explain himself. He credited his unlikely achievement to the “the combination of New York, where I was born, and the rising, exhilarating rhythm of it, with centuries of hereditary feeling back of me.” On his interpretation of jazz, he responded: “Jazz is the plantation song improved and transferred into finer, bigger harmonies. It is American music made of all souls and colors unified; it is black and white.”
A question to consider is, how is it that a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants was capable of representing the American voice?
George Gershwin (1898-1937) was born in Brooklyn with the name Jacob Gershvitz. As a child growing up, there was little to indicate what lay ahead. Although his father introduced a phonograph into the Gershvitz household to play his beloved opera recordings, and older brother Ira listened extensively to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, young Jacob showed no interest in music. Indeed, his parents had given up on their youngest son, who skipped school, ran in the streets, got into fights, and pilfered from pushcarts.
When his parents brought a piano into the apartment, for the purpose of Ira taking lessons, the twelve-year-old Jacob astonished everyone when he sat at the piano and played a popular song. It turned out that he had been spending time outside penny arcades, when he was supposed to be in school, listening to the chords of an automatic piano. “Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad one,” he told an interviewer in 1924. “I was a changed person after I took it up.”
To the dismay of both parents, he dropped out of school at fifteen. The rest of his education was left to what he called “intensive listening” in the concert halls, at Broadway revues, in the Yiddish theaters, and in the clubs of Harlem. The year he dropped out of school, he became the youngest “song plugger” in Tin Pan Alley. His job was to demonstrate the latest sheet music for prospective buyers, which enabled him to absorb both the writing and performing styles of his time. He proved so adept a performer and composer of popular songs that he was swept into that world in his mid-teens.
He began using a more appropriate name for his fledgling career. At age seventeen, George Gershwin’s first published song earned him fifty cents. The song’s title was wickedly long: “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em; When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ’Em” (1916).
From that inauspicious start, he began to get a few songs set into current musical shows, a common practice of the day. In 1918, he was hired as a songwriter at a weekly salary and two years later gained further acclaim with “Swanee,” a megahit for Al Jolson. Also in 1920, he composed his first complete score, “La, La, Lucille.” The successful Broadway show had a run of one hundred and four performances.
In 1922, Gershwin composed a one-act “jazz opera” titled “Blue Monday,” billed as “a colored tragedy enacted in operatic style.” The effort was harshly reviewed — in one case being called “the most dismal, stupid, and blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated” — and cancelled after a single performance.
Not at all dismayed, Gershwin kept churning out tunes. He wrote the music for a couple of heartily acclaimed songs (“Somebody Loves Me” and “Stairway to Paradise”) used in a Broadway revue show. Of greater consequence, the tunes signaled the collaboration of George and Ira — George the writer of music and Ira the lyricist.
Then came Gershwin’s breakout year, 1924. In addition to the acclaim he would garner from “Rhapsody in Blue,” a composition he hastily put together in five weeks, there also was the smash-hit musical comedy “Lady Be Good.” Running 656 performances, the hit songs to come from the show were the title tune and “Fascinating Rhythm,” sung by the brother/sister act Fred and Adele Astaire.
Gershwin followed up the success of “Rhapsody in Blue” a year later with “Concerto in F for Piano and Concerto,” a three-movement concert that was traditional in form, with elements of the blues, jazz, and ragtime. For this effort, Joseph Stevenson of AllMusic explains, “He delved into the textbooks to learn orchestration and even to discover what the form of a concerto might be.” The thirty-one-minute piece he created proved an entirely successful work.
Gershwin handled his celebrity well. He was elegant, athletic, a good dancer, friendly, but also a bit shy and insecure. At parties he would head straight for the piano, play for long stretches, letting the keyboard speak for himself. He dated many women, proposed to one, but never married.
In the spring of 1928, Gershwin himself was an American in Paris. During his four-month stay, his intention was to study with the great classical composers of the time, Ravel and Stravinsky. Despite a continual schedule of social events to attend, he completed the orchestration of the score for “An American in Paris.”
The work received its premiere performance at a Carnegie Hall concert later that year. “This new piece,” he explained, “is the most modern music I’ve yet attempted. My purpose is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.” In response to criticism that the piece did not belong in a program with classical composers, Gershwin responded: “It’s not a Beethoven symphony. It’s a humorous piece, not intended to draw tears. If it pleases symphony audiences as a light, jolly piece, it succeeds.”
In the late Twenties and early Thirties, the Gershwins experimented with some innovative works dealing with social issues of the time, including the musicals “Strike Up The Band,” “Let ‘Em Eat Cake,” and “Of Thee I Sing.” The latter was a major hit and the first comedy ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. Then came an all-consuming task, two years in preparation. Having read the 1926 best-selling novel “Porgy,” concerning the lives of African-Americans on a Charleston tenement street called Catfish Row, he was impressed with the musicality of the prose, and saw it as true operatic potential. Gershwin and the South Carolinian author-poet Dubose Heyward teamed up to begin a collaboration that Gershwin would refer to as his “labor of love.”
Heyward insisted Gershwin come to Charleston and do fieldwork to learn the customs of the Gullah, the African-Americans of the region. Gershwin spent weeks there studying the culture, attending church services, listening to spirituals, and soaking up local dialect. He returned home and worked eleven months on composition and another nine on orchestration.
Launched in 1935 as grand opera, “Porgy and Bess” certainly was not emblematic of operatic tradition. But for a first opera score, music historian Steven Blier said, “Gershwin wrote something that ranks with Puccini in terms of crafting great melodies and great theater.” Among the melodies are “Summertime,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “I Loves you Porgy,” and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin.’”
Instead of using white actors in blackface, which was still relatively common, Gershwin cast African-Americans in all of the black roles at a time black opera singers were almost unheard of. A daring move, but there were those who believed that George, Ira, and Heyward, all being white, had created characters that were nothing more than white-concocted stereotypes — poor, superstitious, while speaking in an uneducated dialect; the hero is a cripple and the heroine an addict.
Now recognized as Gershwin’s masterpiece, “Porgy and Bess” in 1935 was not so highly acclaimed. After making several cuts to shorten the running time, his “labor of love” closed in just three months, losing its entire investment. Perceiving “Porgy” to have been a failure, George left for Hollywood with Ira. The brothers wrote the score for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical “Shall We Dance,” which included the songs ”Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Next came “A Damsel in Distress,” which included a number of songs destined for the Great American songbook, including “A Foggy Day” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”
Gershwin had made a smooth transition to composing songs for Hollywood musicals, but his personal life left much concern. Beginning in 1936, he complained of headaches and stomach pain, along with worries over losing his hair, and outright depression. He saw doctors to find out what was ailing him; they failed to find anything wrong with him, declaring the problem to be “in his head.”
On February 11, 1937, Gershwin lost consciousness for a matter of ten to twenty seconds while performing his brilliant “Concerto in F” with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. Now referred to as an “absence seizure,” he was sitting erect at the piano and missed playing several bars. Two months later he experienced a similar loss of consciousness, which this time was followed by a debilitating headache. He was again misdiagnosed as suffering from the stresses of overwork brought on by composing and writing scores for Hollywood films. He was discharged, this time with a diagnosis of “hysteria.”
Then, on July 9, 1937, he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors saw a comatose Gershwin who was paralyzed on his left side and had swelling of the optic nerve, a sign of brain swelling. A brain tumor was found and emergency surgery was performed. That night, George Gershwin tragically died at age thirty-eight.
The music of George and Ira Gershwin has long been part of the American consciousness. The opening clarinet glissando from “Rhapsody in Blue,” the taxi horn theme from “An American in Paris,” and the songs immortalized by recordings of hundreds of artists enhance his legacy. Of the known recordings, Gershwin produced about 275 songs, a good many of which have been obscured by history, but others, so easily recognizable, include “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “Someone To Watch Over Me,” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Then there is “Summertime.” Few songs have ever been recorded more (an estimated 25,000 times). Billie Holiday’s version was the first to be released in 1936, and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s 1956 cover is often referred to as one of the best.
The Gershwin songbook has perhaps never been presented so comprehensively as in the 1979 Woody Allen masterpiece film “Manhattan,” in which the entire soundtrack is made up of Gershwin compositions setting up the themes of the movie.
In 2007 the Library of Congress paid a lasting tribute to the Gershwin name by naming their Prize for Popular Song after George and Ira Gershwin. The annual award is given to a composer or singer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence associated with the two brothers.
Has Ella Fitzgerald benefited from the Gershwin legacy? Oh yes, she’s in fine form on the 1959 five-album set “Ella Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book,” in which Nelson Riddle conducted and arranged fifty-seven compositions. Ira assisted in this huge undertaking, lending assistance to some songs never recorded before. Ira’s involvement led to his now-famous quote: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella sing them.”
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
Dizzy Gillespie
The legendary trumpeter, bandleader, and skilled composer Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) wrote one of the most popular jazz standards ever written, “A Night in Tunisia.” The 1942 song became the signature piece of his bebop big band, appeared as the title track on dozens of albums, and eventually made it into the Grammy Hall of Fame. “A Night in Tunisia” introduced Gillespie’s two musical trademarks: first, his unique blending of Afro-Cuban rhythms with American jazz, and second, his layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown to jazz.
Not long after Gillespie’s 1937 arrival in New York City, a fellow bandmate, Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauza, took Gillespie to hear music in Spanish Harlem. “Diz” immediately took to the beat, and years later mentioned that he always had that Latin feeling.
Known as the “Crown Prince of Jazz,” Gillespie has reverently been called a bit crazy, brash, extroverted, and stylish. Above all else, he was a trumpet virtuoso, a jazz icon, and inspiration to many young trumpeters. Probably the first thing people associate with Gillespie is his cheeks, inflated to bursting, blowing on a horn with an upward bend. No other trumpeter before or after has ever played the instrument that way. For the upward bend, he said: “I hear the sound quicker and am better able to hear what is coming out of my horn with the bell up and not straight out.” As for the bursting cheeks, he thought the puffed cheeks gave him a reserve source of air.
John Birks Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children. His father, a bricklayer and amateur pianist, died when John was ten, leaving his wife, Lottie, in dire financial straits. She took in washing to keep food on the table, and young John, when he wasn’t in school, worked the cotton fields. In 1929, a cache of instruments turned up at his school. Diz told The Chicago Tribune’s Howard Reich in a 1990 interview: “The bigger guys got the horns they wanted; all that was left was the trombone, so I took it. The boy next door got the trumpet, and when I heard that sound, I said, ‘That’s what I want.’”
He got the trumpet and also the music teacher, Alice V. Wilson, whom he credited for introducing him to music. Following Gillespie’s 1993 death, Alice talked to Reich: “I always played by ear and when I wanted John Birks to play something, I would give him the tune on the piano with one finger and let him catch it like that, and he would turn right around and play it back to me just like I played it. Then I would tell him to put a little jazz in it, and that’s what he would do. After a semester and a half he was way ahead of me.”
The trumpet prodigy won a scholarship to Laurinburg Institute, a private high school in North Carolina. During his time there he taught himself to read music, began playing piano, and learned theory and harmony. “Every day I’d spend hours picking out those notes one at a time,” he recalled. “It was a slow job.” At age fifteen he developed a fascination for the radio broadcast of The Teddy Hill Orchestra on Saturday nights, featuring trumpet player Roy Eldridge, well known for his competitive spirit, brashness, and speed-playing, all traits that Gillespie would emulate. He recalled that the sound “knocked me out.” He began reproducing Eldridge’s flashy runs of eighth and sixteenth notes and his use of the high register. Once he had a technique down, he dropped out of Laurinburg to take his music on the road.
Gillespie’s first professional jobs were with Philadelphia bands, playing Eldridge-style solos but faster. Fellow trumpet player Charlie Shavers said to him: “Roy’s great, but you don’t have to imitate him. Why don’t you develop a style of your own?” Another trumpeter, Doc Cheatham, said of Gillespie’s style: “He wasn’t playing that corny music the rest of us were all doing. Here was a guy who played so accurately, so creatively, and so fast that he left all the other trumpeters scuffling like hell.”
When Gillespie, now calling himself Dizzy, arrived in New York in 1937, the city was bustling with jazz activity. His arrival coincided with Eldridge’s departure from The Teddy Hill Orchestra. Diz auditioned and got the open trumpet chair because Hill was so taken with how much Diz sounded like Roy.
Gillespie was thought to be something of a prankster by bandmates, but he was dead serious about mastering his instrument. He rarely drank or gambled and earnestly saved money to send to his mother in Philadelphia. In 1938, he married Lorraine Willis, a chorus girl at the Apollo Theater.
In 1939, he was working for Edgar Hayes at the New York World’s Fair. There he got a sense of the style he was searching for. In the book Giants of Jazz, author Studs Terkel explained what followed: “Clarinet player Rudy Powell was playing a riff, a repeated phrase of changing chords. Dizzy rushed to the piano and played the arrangement over and over. An idea was forming in his mind. ‘I realized there could be so much more in music than what everybody else was playing.’”
From then on Diz was looking for new ways to express himself. But he needed the money and joined other bands hoping to find that freedom. That was not going to happen with The Cab Calloway Orchestra, one of the top black bands of the day. Gillespie soon found himself bored by the arrangements and the discipline Calloway insisted upon. While with the band he gained a reputation for his quick temper and penchant for advanced chord changes and offbeat rhythms. In 1939, he broke away and cut “Hot Mallets” in a session that included future jazz legends Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Webster.
Calloway kept his band on the road throughout much of the year, and it was in Kansas City in 1940 that the trumpet player met the saxophonist. Diz told Howard Reich: “When I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, man, I had never heard anybody play like that.” In what may have been the starting point for bebop, the two locked the door to a hotel room and played the entire day. By year’s end, they were in New York, experimenting at an after-hours small jazz club called Minton’s Playhouse, which over the next few years became a musical laboratory.
From those sessions emerged bebop, and Gillespie led the way as trailblazer. First was “Jersey Bounce,” a song recorded in 1942 by numerous bands. The Les Hite band’s recording featured a driving solo improvisation by Gillespie on trumpet. It didn’t generate sales, but the moment Diz wailed on the horn, he secured his place in jazz history. He then joined the band of Jay McShann, where he began to develop his fierce original style. In 1944, teaming up with saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, the two together recorded “Woody n’ You,” praised by some as the first recorded example of modern jazz. That same year Diz and Parker joined The Billy Eckstine Orchestra. Gillespie served as music director and arranger for what is considered to be the first full bebop orchestra.
Then in 1945 Diz and Bird startled the jazz world with works they collaborated on in the recording studio. AllMusic’s Scott Yanow explains: “To hear two virtuosos play unison on such new songs as ‘KoKo,’ ‘Groovin’ High,’ ‘Salt Peanuts,’ ‘Dizzy Atmosphere,’ ‘Shaw Nuff,’ and ‘Hot House’ and then launch into fiery and unpredictable solos could be an unsettling experience for listeners more familiar with Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.”
Gillespie did what he could to nurture bop along, even coining the phrase “be hip, be sharp, be bop.” By virtue of his talent, both in composing and orchestration, together with his patient coaching of fellow musicians, he organized the principal ideas of the be-boppers into an intellectual framework. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis later proclaimed: “His playing showcases the importance of intelligence. His rhythmic sophistication was unequaled. He was a master of harmony and fascinated with studying it.”
Despite his unrelenting effort, the general public was accustomed to dancing, not pulling up a chair and listening to music. The verdict from Billboard magazine expressed the discontent brought on by the change in direction for jazz. The music was “different only in that its purpose seems to be to create as uninhibited and unorthodox a product as the human ear can tolerate. Melody, as such, is totally eliminated, with full emphasis falling to awkward harmonic combinations and soloists favoring unconventional intervals in jumping from one note to the next that is worked against a background of untamed rhythmic torrents.”
For Diz it was the showmanship that the public responded to more than the music; the bop style likewise aroused interest — the berets, horn-rimmed glasses, goatees, and wool caps. Jazz critic Leonard Feather noted: “There was no serious attention paid to Bird and Diz as great creative musicians, in any of the media. It was horrifying how really miserable they were treated.”
But Diz’s character did not call for suffering. With charismatic style, sense of comedy, flashy rhythms, and scat-singing improvisations, he was a personable crowd-pleaser who easily connected with his audience. He also knew what connected with listeners and began to eliminate aspects of bebop that were hardest for audiences to understand or appreciate. With an orchestra of his own, Gillespie became the first to infuse Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and Brazilian rhythms into jazz. He brought Cuban congo player Chano Pozo into the band, and in 1947 the two wrote “Manteca,” prompting Gillespie to boast, “They’d never seen a marriage of Cuban music and American music like that before.” Jazz writer Gary Giddins said the tune was “one of the most important records ever made. In a sense, the salsa movement of the Seventies can be traced back to that performance.”
However, all was not well. The band broke up for financial reasons in 1950. Gillespie then organized a bop quintet alongside the undependable Parker who, a year later, would lose his cabaret card, keeping him out of the clubs. By 1955, the year of Bird’s death, bebop could no longer surprise and had become passé. Miles Davis, by this time, was far removed from the bop sound, and the next big leap in “modern” would wait a few years for Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane.
Gillespie also was not a prime star. He never had a hit record, and though he could pack nightclubs, he was never much of a draw in larger venues. Having recorded nearly nine hundred songs and over fifty albums, he had few charted records. From the viewpoint of the U.S. government, however, Gillespie was a colossal star. In order to culturally contain Communism during the height of the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration turned to an unconventional weapon: jazz. It was thought Diz spoke the language of freedom, the freedom to think, to innovate, and to speak in one’s own voice. What resulted was the State Department-funded world tour of 1955. Well received wherever he and the band went, Gillespie was given the title The Ambassador of Jazz.
In 1957, Gillespie drew accolades at the Newport Jazz Festival. The live recording wins praise from AllMusic as “one of the high points of Gillespie’s remarkable career.” Mention is made of the “rapid and truly blazing” renditions of “Cool Breeze,” featuring extraordinary solos. Also included were newer renditions of “Manteca,” “A Night in Tunesia,” and Benny Golson’s composition “I Remember Clifford.”
Throughout the Sixties and into the Eighties, Gillespie’s career recharged. On the road much of the time, he played up to three hundred shows a year. In 1974, he signed with Pablo Records and began recording prolifically again, winning Grammy awards in 1975 and 1980. In 1979, his autobiography, To Be Or Not to Bop, came out to critical acclaim.
During the 1980s, he organized a Latin big band that performed with Paquito D’Rivera, among others. Diz’s energy never seemed to abate. In 1989 alone he performed in twenty-seven countries and one hundred American cities, while headlining three TV specials, teaming up with two symphonies, and recording four albums. In addition, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
But time was about to expire. He had been battling pancreatic cancer and in 1993 died at age seventy-six in his Englewood, New Jersey, home, his wife, Lorraine, beside him. “I’m playing the same notes, but it comes out different,” he once said. “You can’t teach the soul. You got to bring out your soul on those valves.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
BENNY GOODMAN
His passion was music and his big band sound quickened the pulse of a generation ready to shrug off the Depression and get on dance floors across America. Dubbed the “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman (1909-1986) was greeted with pandemonium wherever his band played, leading jazz into the commercial mainstream. Music transformed Goodman from a child in Chicago’s impoverished Jewish ghetto into stardom and ever-lasting fame.
That stardom was never more recognized than on the night of January 16, 1938, when his orchestra played a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. It was the most important concert in jazz history, said Phil Schaap, who produced the reissued album of the concert. He claimed the “event” elevated jazz to an art form. The concert also included more than half a dozen African-American musicians. Goodman explained: “We need the white keys and the black keys to play together to make good harmony, and that’s what we did.”
Scheduling the concert was full of uncertainty, particularly in regard to filling the hall. As it turned out, the event exceeded all expectations, drawing a capacity crowd. The audience was fully into it, acting quite “undignified” in America’s temple to classical music. From start to finish the crowd was howling with pleasure. The concert was recorded, with no plans to release it. When “The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert” finally came out in 1950, it became the first LP to sell more than a million copies.
Born Benjamin David Goodman, the ninth of David and Dora Goodman’s twelve children, his father came from Warsaw, Poland, and his mother from Lithuania. David struggled to raise the family on sweatshop wages and believed music might be a ticket out of poverty for his three sons. Enrolling them in free music classes at Jane Addams Hull-House when Benjamin was ten, his older brothers were given a tuba and trombone, while Benny got a clarinet. Soon, David was informed by the teacher that “your kid’s really good; boy’s got a flair for playing, no question about it.” David then sought out the best teacher he could find for Ben, no matter the cost. Franz Schoepp, a clarinetist with the Chicago Symphony, provided classical training and the music of Mozart, Brahms, and Haydn for two years to the twelve-year-old prodigy. Goodman later said of his teacher: “Franz was a strict disciplinarian and did more for me musically than anyone I ever knew.”
A new sound was then emerging that people were calling jazz. There was an excitement in the pulsating beat of the music that began to turn Benny away from his studies. He did an audition at the nearby Central Park Theater and was accepted. At Hull House he played with a neighborhood band four nights a week and made forty-eight dollars weekly, quite a sum for someone not yet in high school. More importantly, he could contribute money to his large family.
On one occasion, while working an excursion boat on Lake Michigan, he encountered Bix Beirderbecke. When Bix was told “that kid’s playin’ with us tonight,” he replied: “That little kid in knee pants? Are you kidding?” Then he heard Benny play, and gushed, “That kid’s great!”
In high school Benny became part of a clique of teenage jazz musicians known as the Austin High Gang. He’d go with the group to Lincoln Gardens on the South Side and watch the sets of Joe “King” Oliver, paying particular attention to Johnny Dodds’s clarinet improvisations. At the Friar’s Inn, a downtown club, he listened intently to the soaring clarinet of Leon Roppolo of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.
While listening to mentors, Goodman was developing his own fluid, free, and graceful style. His playing caught the attention of drummer Ben Pollack, who was searching for the best Midwestern jazzmen to join a band he was forming in California. While the seventeen-year-old Goodman was making plans for departure, his dad was struck by a speeding vehicle while walking across the street and died instantly. Goodman joined Pollack later in the year and remained until 1929, at which time he informed the bandleader, “I’ve got to pick up more money. I’m contributing to a large family.”
At the onset of the Great Depression he headed for New York and began freelancing at the worst possible time. Jobs were of short duration. He worked in a pit band, led small groups during recording sessions, and frequented Harlem clubs to hear the music of black musicians.
A turning point in Goodman’s career came in 1934, when he met jazz talent scout and activist John Hammond, who encouraged him to form a band. At the time Goodman was making forty dollars a week and agreed to give it a try. “There were practically no hot bands using white musicians at the time,” Goodman later recalled, “and there was a lot of talent around town that hadn’t gotten the break.” So Goodman rounded up some young musicians who read well, played in time, and could perform as soloists.
Later that year, Hammond persuaded the NBC radio network to offer Goodman the final hour of a three-hour Saturday night dance program they were about to launch. The network agreed to feature the twenty-five-year-old’s band in hopes that it might appeal to the kids. The program’s budget included funds for new arrangements, enabling Goodman to secure the services of Fletcher Henderson, who that year had disbanded his own band. Henderson provided arrangements of traditional jazz numbers such as “King Porter’s Stomp” and popular songs like “Sometimes I’m Happy,” which helped establish the band’s musical character and spread Goodman’s reputation westward. The live radio broadcast from New York began at 10:30 in the evening, just the time West Coast listeners began tuning in.
Meanwhile, the band was booked at the Roosevelt Grill as a summer replacement for the Guy Lombardo Orchestra. They were filling in for the smoothest-playing band in existence. Following the first night’s performance, Goodman was given his two week’s notice for not playing “sweet” enough. The band then embarked on a coast-to-coast tour. Playing a mix of pop tunes with soft dance music left most audiences unimpressed. When they arrived at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, Goodman was dismayed. “I thought we’d finish the engagement in California and take the band back to New York, and that would be it. I’d just be a clarinetist again.”
The performance on August 21, 1935, is remembered as the date the Swing Era began. The evening began inauspiciously. The huge crowd that showed up was expecting to get out on the dance floor for the fast-paced jitterbug beat they’d been listening to so excitedly on Goodman’s radio broadcasts. Instead, the band started the evening slow-paced, much to the crowd’s dismay. Between sets, drummer Gene Krupa told Goodman, “Benny, if we’re going to die, let’s die playing our own thing.” When the band took the stage again, Goodman pulled out the arrangement for “King Porter’s Stomp.” As he beat out the tempo, Bunny Berrigan rose up in the trumpet section. As the sound of his horn exploded across the ballroom, a responsive roar went up, and the audience surged around the bandstand, cheering. Goodman looked around in amazement. He said later that roar “was one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard in my life.”
That roar would sustain itself in much the same form for the next four years. Following the Palomar, the band had a six-month run at the Congress Hotel in Chicago and was billed for the first time as a “swing” band, leading to his designation as the “King of Swing.” The Goodman model was smoothly driven, flawlessly played, and tightly disciplined, filling ballrooms across the country. “Swing” would catch on like nothing else had till then, becoming the defining music for a whole generation of Americans, both black and white.
As a jazz clarinetist, Goodman had no peer. He demanded perfection of his band and even more of himself. “He practiced his clarinet,” Harry James once said, “fifteen times more than the whole band combined.” His pianist, Jess Stacy, claimed that with Goodman “perfection was just around the corner. I figure Benny will die in bed with that damn clarinet.”
Goodman’s playing went beyond jazz, as he distinguished himself as the first jazz musician to achieve success in the classical repertory. In 1935, he performed Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and recorded the work with the Budapest String Quartet. He gave his first public recital at Town Hall in New York, and over the years appeared with all the leading symphonic orchestras.
The clarinetist was to also have an impact on American culture that went beyond music. In 1936, he hired Teddy Wilson as his pianist. It’s widely believed to be the first time a black musician appeared on stage with a white band. A year later, Lionel Hampton was brought on board. Goodman was then inspired to form a quartet, the four being Goodman on clarinet, Wilson on piano, Hampton on vibraphone, and Gene Krupa on drums. The innovation created a style of “chamber jazz” that emphasized highly developed ensemble playing and technically brilliant solos. The result was a number of groundbreaking hit records that created a popular sensation for their small ensemble.
In 1936 alone, fifteen of Goodman’s recordings were top ten hits. His new radio show, CBS’s “Camel Caravan,” drew eager listeners. When it was announced that the band would perform at New York’s Paramount Theater, young people lined up around the block at six o’clock in the morning, eager to purchase a thirty-five-cent ticket for the morning show. That day, more than 21,000 people jammed inside, in one of the first examples of delirious and screaming mobs of teenagers. Bewildered onlookers dubbed the day the “Paramount Theater Riot.” The young people were seen dancing wildly in the aisles or battling ushers to make desperate lunges toward the stage.
In rehearsal or performances, Goodman’s musicians dreaded “the ray” — a long, accusatory glance over the top of his glasses at anyone who had committed a false musical move. “If you’re interested in music,” Goodman once said, “you can’t slop around. I expected things and they had to be done.”
In 1941, Benny married John Hammond’s sister, Alice Duckworth, and became a devoted father to his stepchildren. In 1944, he broke up the band, continuing as a guest star with classical orchestras and playing jazz with a smaller septet. Even though big bands were vanishing in the early Fifties, the rise of the high-fidelity twelve-inch LP enabled Goodman to re-record hits from the past, racking up a series of best-selling albums. In 1955, he recorded the soundtrack for the film about his life, “The Benny Goodman Story.” He began overseas touring for the U.S. State Department between 1950 and 1965, taking his band to Europe, South America, the Far East, and the Soviet Union.
Despite failing health, he performed into the 1980s. Jess Stacy’s prophecy proved correct. In June of 1986, Benny Goodman died while playing a Brahms sonata in his New York home, clarinet in hand. The cause was heart failure. He was eighty-five years old. Today, popular Israeli female jazz clarinetist Anat Cohen says of Goodman: “The amount of admiration he got from all ages, young and old — people were just crazy for him, and his music was exciting, proving how jazz can really be exciting.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
COLEMAN HAWKINS
Until tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969) appeared on the scene in the 1920s, the saxophone was considered a novelty, used mostly in vaudeville, quite often to imitate the sounds of barnyard animals. Hawkins, the twentieth century’s first truly gifted sax musician, proved it otherwise. Jazz authority Gary Giddins said that “Hawkins gave the tenor sax character and sensibility. With a smooth, flowing manner without breaks between notes, no one thought the tenor sax was capable of passion.”
In a 1950 Downbeat magazine article Michael Levin observed that “the most fascinating thing about Coleman Hawkins as a musician is the way he changed with the times and never allowed himself to be dated.”
He was also one of the most competitive of all jazz musicians, and a braggart, always searching for someone he could best in jam sessions. He once said: “I made the tenor sax. There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.” In Visions of Jazz, Giddins refers to the story that Cannonball Adderley liked to tell of a young saxophonist who complained to him that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. “I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years.”
Coleman Hawkins was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri. His parents took an active role in developing his musical skills. His mother, who played the organ for her church, taught her son to read music. His father, a factory worker, had two jobs to pay for Coleman’s lessons. He studied piano and cello, then on his ninth birthday was given a saxophone and took an instant liking to it. By fourteen he was playing professionally. He attended high school in Topeka, Kansas, and later said that he studied harmony and composition for two years at Washburn College while still attending high school.
At seventeen, Hawkins joined Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds. Smith, the first black woman to make a record, hired Coleman after hearing him in a Kansas City theater pit band in 1921. Hawkins was with the blues singer in a background role during many of her recording sessions.
When the Jazz Hounds went to New York City in 1923, Hawkins left the band. He began freelancing, and made his first recordings with Fletcher Henderson. A year later Henderson formed a permanent orchestra to play at the Roseland Ballroom. Hawkins joined the band and months later Louis Armstrong came on board. Armstrong’s presence transformed the Henderson orchestra, the musicians awestruck by what came out of his horn. Hawkins was one of his admirers.
In the book Jazz: A History of America’s Music, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns explain that until Armstrong’s arrival, “Hawkins had been best known as a master of comedy effects on his instrument — clucking and slap-tonguing in the vaudeville tradition — but afterward he devoted himself to finding a way to incorporate Armstrong into his own playing, and in the process transformed the role of the tenor saxophone in jazz.”
Giddins said that in 1926 Hawkins “unveiled the fruits of his discovery in Henderson’s recording of ‘Stampede.’ For the first time the tenor sax leaps out of the band and jabs and punches with the dynamism of a trumpet. As a featured soloist, he was displaying a sound that was surging, impassioned and loud.” Other musicians were mesmerized, including tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. Roy Eldridge transposed Coleman’s “tenor style” to his trumpet.
Another benchmark song, the 1929 hit “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” is considered to be the first ballad improvisation in jazz.
In 1933, “Hawk” went into the studio with his own orchestra for the first time. His band was due to tour through England, but the deal fell through, leading Hawkins to make contact with British bandleader Jack Hylton to arrange a visit for himself. He joined Hylton on their 1934 European tour with the expectation of staying a few months. Instead, he found the rarefied air of racial equality and enthusiasm from crowds so appealing that he prolonged his visit to five years. Being treated like a concert artist, he sometimes appeared on stage with symphony orchestras. Hawkins’ most famous European recordings came in 1937 when he teamed up with Benny Carter, Django Reinhardt, and Stéphane Grappelli for classic renditions of “Stardust,” “Crazy Rhythm,” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”
With World War II closing in, Hawkins returned to the United States in 1939. Once home, he immediately set out to see for himself whether he could still outplay the younger musicians who had risen to prominence while he was away. He recalled in a 1956 interview how surprised he was to discover that most of his peers were still playing the same repetitive swing band phrases. He boasted, “It was just like when I left; they’re not going to cut me playing that.”
Hawkins then went into the studio to prove his mettle. In 1939, with a nine-piece group, he recorded “Body and Soul,” which shook the musical world in a way that Louis Armstrong had eleven years earlier with “West End Blues.” Gary Giddins describes the recording session: “He moves in on the melody, his tone smooth, his tempo brisk. After two measures, ‘Body and Soul’ all but disappears. Lifted on a surge of inspiration, he extends the song into his own invention, and becomes an improvised rhapsody.” The recording reasserted his dominance, becoming one of the most acclaimed improvisations in jazz history and foreshadowed the harmonies that would later be so important to bebop.
Although he was a twenty-year veteran of the jazz world by then, Hawkins actively supported the modernism that was emerging. He arranged two sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach for a fresh take on “Body and Soul,” called “Rainbow Mist.” He then gave Thelonious Monk his first record exposure in 1944. Following the war, Norman Granz organized Jazz at the Philharmonic, a series of jazz concerts and tours, promoting bebop. Hawkins joined the troupe in the late Forties.
In 1948, Hawkins recorded the first unaccompanied saxophone solo, “Picasso,” which came as close as he could to incorporating some of the melodic ideas from “Body and Soul.”
By the early Fifties, changes that “Hawk” himself helped bring about caused him to not be as sought after as he once was. But he was too implacably talented to fade away. Orrin Keepnews, who created some of the most celebrated recordings in jazz history, put together the leading musicians of the day in early 1957 for a mainstream jazz studio session, “The Hawk Flies High.” The success from that album led to a summer appearance for Hawkins at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he teamed up with Swing Era jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge in an exciting quartet. Their appearance drew rave notices.
“The older he gets, the better he gets,” said Johnny Hodges, the alto saxophonist in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. “If you ever think he’s through, you find he’s just gone right on ahead again.”
In the early Sixties, Hawkins teamed with Ellington, worked with Sonny Rollins, and did a bossa nova album. By 1965, he was even showing the influence of John Coltrane. As it turned out, 1965 proved to be his last good year. According to AllMusic’s Scott Yanow, Hawkins “began to lose interest in life, practically quit eating, increased his drinking, and began to waste away.” Hawkins continued to perform, if sporadically. He died in 1969 from pneumonia, brought on by a liver ailment. He was sixty-five years old.
To Orrin Keepnews “Hawkins was clearly the starting point for the tenor saxophone as a jazz instrument and very probably second only to Louis Armstrong as an originator of the basic concepts of jazz improvisation.
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
JELLY ROLL MORTON
“I stood on the corner, my feet was dripping wet
I asked every man I met
Can't give me a dollar, give me a lousy dime
Just to feed that hungry man of mine”
“Jelly Roll Blues,” quoted above, was composed by Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941) in 1902. But another thirteen years would pass before it became the first jazz composition ever published. It is fitting that this chronicle of profiles begins with an African-American. With the genres this book covers, it is of vital importance to recognize the contributions from black musicians — the creators of ragtime, the blues, jazz, gospel, and even rock 'n' roll.
A product of New Orleans, Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, professionally known as Jelly Roll Morton, was a braggart. “It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” Morton wrote in 1938, “and I, myself, happened to be its creator in the year 1902.” His kind of music was long out of fashion when he made this pronouncement, and to many of those who knew Morton, it seemed just the latest in a lifelong series of outrageous boasts.
Jazz had no single creator, of course, but Morton was in fact among the first to play jazz, its first theorist and composer, the first to write it down and, by doing so, among the first to help spread New Orleans music across the country.
A colorful and opinionated egocentric, Morton was also a genius. He brought all brands of music to everything he played — ragtime and blues, French and Italian operatic airs, Spanish popular songs and dances — and a new kind of syncopation that he inherited from his New Orleans upbringing. The son of racially mixed Creole parents, he was part African, French, and Spanish (eventually adopting the last name of his stepfather, Morton). He said about his city: “We had all nations in New Orleans, but with the music we could creep in close to other people.”
Among Morton’s most popular songs were “King Porter Stomp,” “Grandpa’s Spells,” “Wolverine Blues,” “The Pearls,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” and “Wild Man Blues.” During the time of his greatest success, however, he felt that he never received his just reward, saying: “I’ve been robbed of three million dollars, all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don’t even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style — hell, they’re all playing Jelly Roll style” (during his lifetime there was no such thing as royalty checks).
To best understand Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans music need be understood. Music was everywhere, the city teeming with musical instruments and players, including an array of concert, dance, and funeral bands parading up and down city streets. There was also Storyville, the wide-open vice district, where musicians were black, as were the crowds who flocked into the area.
Within this atmosphere, Morton later recalled: “We always had some kind of musical instrument in the house, including guitar, drums, piano and trombone.” At the age of seven, he was already good enough at guitar to play for dances in a string trio. A few years later, he was singing in a quartet that specialized in performing spirituals at wakes. By this time his trombone-playing father disappeared. At age fourteen, his mother died, and he and his two sisters moved in with relatives. He began venturing into Storyville, finding work in the brothels as a pianist, where he earned the nickname Jelly Roll.
Morton’s talent as a musician quickly became apparent, enabling him to earn twenty dollars a night. When he bought a showy new suit and hat, his true source of income was discovered, prompting his grandmother to throw him out of the house. His banishment placed him on the road, thereby jump-starting his career. Everywhere Morton went, New Orleans went with him, even though he often played with musicians who knew nothing about the music he brought. He was continually writing down on paper the parts that pick-up bands needed to follow in order to play with him. “I found most of them had to be taught,” he said, “so I began writing down this peculiar form of harmonics and mathematics that was strange to all the world.”
He arrived in Los Angeles in 1917, where he remained for five years, before departing for the hot-bed of jazz, Chicago. This would prove to be another five-year tenure, but this time his high-flying compositions put him at his productive peak. His 1923-24 recordings of piano solos established his style and brilliance.
It was his work with the Red Hot Peppers that set him apart. Bringing on board a wide array of Chicago’s top sidemen, Jelly Roll’s work was comparable to the innovations by Louis Armstrong with his Hot 5 and Hot 7 bands. Music historian David McGee said: “What Elvis Presley’s Sun recordings are to rock ‘n’ roll, the Red Hot Peppers’ canon is to jazz.” Morton said that his songs, now considered to be among the great classics of jazz, are “to be played sweet, soft, plenty of rhythm.”
But with success came belligerence. His confidence, or “cockiness,” was ever-present. On a personal level, he’s been described as “just about the most colorful, flamboyant, and exasperating personality imaginable.” He had running feuds with W.C. Handy and Paul Whiteman, the former credited with being the “Father of the Blues,” the latter’s title being “The King of Jazz.” Morton vigorously claimed both distinctions.
In 1928, Morton left Chicago for New York City, the Jazz Age’s new mecca. His move this time seemed to hurt him. While remaining true to his New Orleans roots, his music came to be regarded as old-fashioned within the industry. His RCA Victor contract ended in 1930, and not having the temperament to work as a sideman, he struggled to earn a living during the bleak years of the Depression.
In 1935, he headed for Washington, D.C., where he became the main attraction at the Jungle Inn Nightclub. Then came posterity. AllMusic’s Scott Yanow elaborates: “In 1938, Alan Lomax recorded him in an extensive series of musical interviews for the Library of Congress. His storytelling was colorful and his piano playing in generally fine form as he reminisced about old New Orleans and his travels. A decade later the results would be released in album form.”
A year following the interviews, an attacker stabbed Morton two times during an incident at the Jungle Inn. Never fully recovered from the stabbing, he moved back to California where he hoped to find some relief in the warmer climate. He died in 1941 at age fifty-six. At his funeral, no music was played, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave. The name Jelly Roll Morton was largely forgotten, ignored, or even mocked in the jazz world.
As happens, following death comes fame. With the introduction in 1950 of long-playing twelve-inch records, his music once again became popular. Beginning with “New Orleans Memories” (1950), there have been nearly two hundred remastered LPs, including numerous box-set editions of his classic works. Nearly every major record company, including Sony, Verve, RCA, Time/Life Music and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, have put forth versions of his masterworks. This outpouring continues to this day.
Now considered to be a cornerstone of jazz and a giant of African-American music, Morton’s legacy is enduring. Full of personality, his life and musical career became the topic of a Broadway production in the 1990s called “Jelly’s Last Jam,” featuring Gregory Hines. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, underscoring the far-ranging impact of his influence as a musician.
Jelly Roll Morton may have died a pauper, but his legacy is rich.
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
CAROLE KING
Carole King (1942- ) seems destined to have become a songwriter. By the age of seventeen she had met and collaborated musically with Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka, and Gerry Goffin, all of whom would go on to become renowned songwriters. She met Goffin at Queens College; the two spent time together during the evenings cranking out songs. As a lyricist Goffin had a delicate way of expressing female emotions. Those emotions spilled out in other ways as well. A hastily planned marriage came about after he got King pregnant when she was seventeen. (He was just twenty-one.)
Undeterred, in the year of her pregnancy, 1960, they scored the smash hit “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” With lyrics that were quite provocative for the time, Goffin deftly handled the long-term concerns of a young woman involved in a physical consummation of love, with conversational language. The song gained distinction for The Shirelles as the first all-girl group to record a number one hit.
Following that success, the couple were employed at the fabled Brill Building in New York City, and their boss, Don Kirshner, wanted to expand on the all-girl sound. He provided Goffin and King the added responsibility of production and arranging, while also creating a spin-off record division, Dimension Records, as a vehicle for their songs. Churning out top-of-the-chart hits, the duo established themselves as music-writing legends by the mid-1960s, with such classics as “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “Run to Him,” “Crying in the Rain,” “The Loco Motion,” “Up on the Roof,” “One Fine Day,” “Hey Girl,” and “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.” The range of artists covered everyone from The Everly Brothers to Aretha Franklin.
Their meteoric rise, however, could not be sustained. In the late Sixties, pop music began to change to a more aggressive rock sound, and Goffin and King lost their listening audience, leading to the downfall of both their musical partnership and marriage (which produced four children).
Born Carol Klein to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, her mother, Eugenia, was a school teacher and her father, Sidney, a firefighter. Eugenia loved music and theater and made sure her daughter was exposed to both. By the age of three, Carol (the “e” came later) was showing enthusiasm for music, displaying a highly accurate sense of pitch. By four, her mother was teaching her the rudiments of piano technique, music theory, and harmony.
Carol listened constantly to pop songs on the radio and began writing her own melodies while still in grammar school. Later in life she explained her proclivity toward music: “I didn’t feel beautiful when I was growing up. I couldn’t compete with girls who were thought of as beautiful, so I found my niche in music, and that is where I found my beauty.”
At age fifteen she possessed enough confidence to walk unannounced into the Times Square offices of ABC Paramount with sheet music, where she was given the opportunity to sing the song she had written, “The Right Girl.” Singing in a raspy and rather annoying monotone, she repeated time after time: “I am the right girl for you and you are the right boy for me.”
A precocious student, Klein graduated high school at sixteen, changed her name to Carole King, and enrolled at Queens College, where she met the aspiring lyricist Gerry Goffin. As she later explained: “I was so young when we met. I was sixteen. When we married, I was seventeen. By the time I was twenty, we already had two children.” Goffin’s numerous affairs and use of LSD brought about the dissolution of the marriage. After their 1968 divorce, King, along with two of her daughters, moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles to join the bohemian singer-songwriter set that included James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. King soon formed a music trio called The City, which included bassist Charles Larkey, who she married in 1970. The City produced one album, “Now That Everything’s Been Said.”
King’s reluctance to perform live contributed to slow sales. The group disbanded a year later. King makes it clear in her autobiography, A Natural Woman, that while she was driven to succeed, she didn’t want to be in the spotlight, never considering herself a great singer. Her intention was to stay in the background by creating good songs that others could sing. Best friend James Taylor gave King the confidence to sing and play piano in front of live audiences. When King went into the recording studio to record her second studio album, “Tapestry,” Taylor and Joni Mitchell provided a reassuring presence by assisting with backing vocals. The hit songs from the album, “It’s Too Late,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” gave King little choice but to get on stage. “Tapestry” would become one of the best-selling albums of all time, with over twenty-five million copies sold worldwide. Rolling Stone places the 1971 album number thirty-six on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums, referring to it as “a blockbuster pop record of enduring artistic quality.”
On a homecoming concert in New York’s Ckingentral Park, she drew a crowd of 75,000. The New York Times reported on its front page that “people tossed bouquets, pushed at the stage fencing, and had to be chased down from some of the scaffolding frames that held the speakers aloft.” Fame caused great discomfort for King, so much so that she turned down Life magazine’s request to be placed on the cover. More to the point, her second marriage was suffering. A close friend said that she loved Charlie Larkey deeply, but her fame was a tremendous burden and challenge for their marriage.
“Tapestry” was also haunting King. She put out four albums during the Seventies, including “Fantasy,” which went gold, but the critics were out in full force. The Los Angeles Times observed that the four post-”Tapestry” albums “sounded so much alike they could hardly suppress the yawns when talking about them.” The Chicago Tribune’s critic pronounced Carole’s voice “thin” and “whiny” and her lyrics “often cliché.” Rolling Stone said she was “forced to live in ‘Tapestry’’s oppressive shadow.”
1976 was a year of big change for King. She left Ode Records to sign with Capitol and dropped long-time producer Lou Adler. That same year, after two kids and six years of marriage, she left Larkey, explaining the split to be a result of “disparate schedules.”
When soon afterwards King met Rick Evers, a close witness to their relationship said the two “fell madly in love.” Evers, a former cowboy, hippie, and ex-con with shoulder-length hair, also fancied himself a songwriter. Carole’s friends couldn’t stand him, mainly because he could get angry for no reason. Evers moved in with Carole and her four children, and within months, she left for Idaho with him, taking her three youngest children. With King’s financial backing, their plan was to build a dream home. They were also determined to co-write songs together, with Evers playing guitar while overseeing production.
That aspiration could never be achieved by Evers. He was a downright loser, but King couldn’t see it. With the money Evers was taking from Carole, he used that to fuel his addiction to cocaine. When Carole found out, she was furious. Screaming matches ensued, and for Evers, that meant retaliation by beating King physically. In her autobiography, King recounted being slugged in the jaw without any warning, saying that it became a pattern. While she was lying on the ground, he’d cry and apologize, she recalled.
Within months he was snorting and shooting every drug he could get his hands on. In one incident, a drugged-up Rick grabbed Carole and tried to hurl her through the glass door of their home. A friend, fearing for her safety, put her on a plane for Hawaii. The next day Rick went to a Beverly Hills apartment and shot up. He was found dead. Their marriage lasted one year.
Grief-stricken, stunned and confused, King returned to Idaho to “winter in.” She chose to be snowbound during the cold months of 1978-’79 in a primitive cabin, home-schooling her children, milking her goat, and using the outhouse in the freezing cold. Under these conditions, she met Rick Sorenson, known to everyone as Teepee Rick. With long, stringy hair, he had been living in a teepee for seven years in the mountains. They married in 1982 and divorced in 1989.
Rick would lead Carole further into the wilds of Idaho. They also became embroiled in a protracted us-against-them fight with the state and forest service. Her devotion to wilderness preservation became a lifelong passion, so much so that in 1999 she was honored at a star-studded event: Carole King — A Concert for Our Children, Our Health, and Our Planet.
While her singing career was diminished by her “second life’s work,” she wasn’t forgotten by the music industry. In 1993, the off-Broadway revue “Tapestry: The Music of Carol King” featured the songwriter’s biggest hits. A tribute album, 1995’s “Tapestry Revisited,” featured contemporary singers performing the music from the 1971 classic.
In recent years King has been more active than perhaps any other time in her life. In 2007 she made a return engagement at the Troubadour, the famed West Hollywood venue, with James Taylor. The three-night, six-run show inspired a feature-length documentary, “Troubadours: Carole King/James Taylor & The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter,” which made its TV premiere in 2011 on PBS’s “American Masters” series.
In 2012, A Natural Woman: A Memoir was released. On publication, the book instantly cracked the Top Ten of The New York Times best-seller list, prompting Vanity Fair to say, “America is having a Carole King moment.”
That moment has continued to this day. In 2013, she became the first (and so far the only) woman chosen as recipient of the George and Ira Gershwin Prize. She responded to the honor by saying: “It is yet another of the many important messages to young women that women matter, women make a difference.”
On October 27, 2019, the Broadway production “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” had its closing performance, following a successful four-year run and, in so doing, became the twenty-seventh longest-running musical in Broadway history. With so much of her lifelong achievement associated with songs that she wrote for others during the Sixties and unending kickback from “Tapestry,” King has a career spanning five decades to reflect upon. She’s a member of the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. More than four hundred of her compositions have been recorded by over a thousand artists, resulting in a hundred hit singles. Now in her seventies, she still lives on an Idaho ranch. When shown the sleeve of “Tapestry,” King was asked if she could go back in time and tell her younger self anything, what it would it be. “You’re going to have a very rich and wonderful life,” she responded.
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
THELONIUS MONK
It’s not known for sure what year Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) wrote “Round Midnight,” but it probably was 1938. Recorded by other artists approximately two thousand times, it has since become his most famous hit. Tom Moon of NPR Music says of the enduring classic: “Jazz is often romanticized as the sound of the city at night when the bustle has died down and there’s time for introspection. Few composers ever managed to capture that feeling as did Thelonious Monk.”
Herbie Hancock developed the soundtrack for the 1986 jazz film that used “Round Midnight” as its title. He said: “There’s a lot of pieces musicians don’t like playing anymore, ’cause they’ve played it over and over, and they get tired of it, but not so with ‘Round Midnight.’ That is the best measure of a jazz standard, a theme whose essence endures through decades of different interpretations.”
Monk went on to write about seventy songs. His uptempo pieces were known for their lunging, angular melodies and jigsaw puzzle structures. Robin Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, considers Monk the “most innovative, if not the greatest composer in the music we call jazz.”
Thelonious Monk came to New York City at the age of four with his mother, Barbara, and two siblings, leaving behind their North Carolina home and a father who was showing signs of mental illness. Thelonious started reading music when he was ten, recalling later in life: “I learned to read music before I took lessons, watching my sister practice over her shoulder.” Barbara discovered Thelonious to be a prodigy and arranged lessons, first from a classically trained teacher and then a stride pianist. At thirteen, he won the weekly amateur competition at the Apollo Theater, which was followed by playing jobs in local dance halls and cafes where he insisted on applying his already unorthodox harmonies.
Monk’s obsession with the piano was such that in his junior year at Stuyvesant High School he appeared in class only sixteen of ninety-two days, finally dropping out to begin his piano career. He went on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing sanctified rhythm and blues piano in the employ of a traveling woman evangelist and faith healer. The group disbanded in Kansas City, whereupon Monk found work in local dives. On one occasion, jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams heard him. “He was playing the same chords then as now,” she remarked years later, “only then most people called it ‘zombie music.’”
In 1939, Monk returned to New York City, finding work in a small Harlem jazz club, Minton’s Playhouse, an after-hours spot where he became the resident piano player. Writing in the Guardian, Candace Allen elaborates on that fertile period: “For countless hours, weeks and months, Monk and Dizzy Gillespie played, studied, and innovated together, along with Charlie Parker, drummer Kenny Clarke, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and guitarist Charlie Christian.” They were dedicated to changing the shape of the existing swing music prevalent at the time, doing what Monk called “playing modern.” To the others, they were setting the table for bebop.
When the new sound spread beyond Harlem, Monk was not part of the movement. While Gillespie and Parker soared to success, Monk went his own way. Even with Monk’s recording of “Round Midnight,” he remained on the fringes of the jazz world, which almost fully converted to bebop at this time. If the public found the “boppers” to be somewhat strange, Monk was even stranger. The goatee, the beret, the glasses with gleaming gold sidepieces were all part of his mystique.
Nearly penniless, he struggled to support his family. His strong opinions and stubborn defense of his unusual point of view undermined his search for paying jobs. Established booking agencies refused to deal with him. He found the demands of the entertainment world bewildering. “I don’t imitate anybody,” he said. “I have my own way of performing. They want me to smile at the audience or play every forty minutes, like a train schedule or something, but I can’t be grinning at somebody’s face for nothing. Man, I’m thinking how to play, and I ain’t got time for that foolish stuff.”
His antics on the bandstand also kept him from being taken seriously. In the book But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, author Geoff Dyer explains: “Monks’ body was his instrument as much as his piano, enabling him to get the sound out of his body. When someone else was soloing, he got up and began an intense shuffling dance.” One of Monk’s musicians explained: “This was his way of conducting. When he dances, that means he’s satisfied with what he hears. He used to say to me, ‘If the groove is really driving, then feet will move.’” Lewis Lapham, writing for The Saturday Evening Post, said Monk was “an emotional and intuitive man, possessing a child’s vision of the world. He talks, sleeps, eats, laughs, walks, and dances as the spirit moves him. Sometimes he neglects to go to bed for days, at other times he will speak to no one.”
In the late Forties, Nellie Smith, the inspiration for “Round Midnight,” became the stabilizing force Monk badly needed. They married in 1947 and had two children, Thelonious Jr. and Barbara, with Nellie watching over her husband as if he were one of the children. “We don’t talk much,” she said. She took pride in making it possible for him to create music. Much of that was done on the ground floor of their three-room apartment on 63rd Street, where he lived nearly all his life, first with his mother and two siblings, then with his wife and children. It was where he felt most comfortable.
Monk continued only getting occasional work in the late Forties and into the Fifties, and in 1951 all work was cut off. Arrested for holding a bag of heroin for the drug-addled pianist Bud Powell, he chose not to “rat” on his friend and accepted a jail sentence of sixty days. After his release, the police took away the cabaret card that allowed him to perform in New York City. He refused to leave town to play elsewhere or to take a day job. Instead, for six years, he stayed at home in his crowded apartment, spending much of his time composing songs that became the core of his repertory. Nellie found work as a seamstress during this period of seclusion.
In 1953, record producer Orrin Keepnews launched the jazz reissue label Riverside Records. Seeing potential in issuing the music of contemporary artists, he signed the pianist Randy Weston in 1954 and a year later had his sights on Thelonious Monk. But first he had to dispel the notion that Monk was a “mad genius.” Seeking to expose Monk to a broader audience by incorporating standard tunes, the result was “Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington.” The 1955 album displayed a firm, swinging beat, and a flair for unexpected improvisation.
The success of that initial album was vital to Monk, still without his cabaret card. A year later, Keepnews produced “Brilliant Corners,” a five-song album comprised mostly of Monk’s own compositions. Keepnews lined up the very best sidemen who could adapt to Monk’s unorthodox methods. Considered Monk’s first true masterpiece, the title track’s theme was so treacherous in its lurching phrases and abrupt time changes that the band spent twenty-five takes on it. On another track, “Pannonica,” Monk used a celesta, a small keyboard instrument in which felted hammers strike a row of steel plates suspended over wooden resonators, producing an ethereal bell-like sound. He set it up at right angles to the piano in order to play celesta with the right hand and piano with the left.
“Pannonica” is a story in itself. Pannonica de Koenigswarter, known as the “Jazz Baroness,” was a Rothschild heiress who dedicated her life and massive inheritance to jazz musicians. Upon hearing Monk’s recording of “Round Midnight,” she was so moved that she burst into tears. From then on, Monk was one of her many patrons. Nica, as she was known, used her clout to convince authorities he was drug-free, enabling his cabaret card to be reinstated.
Able to perform again, The Thelonious Monk Quartet, including John Coltrane, began a six-month stint at the Five Spot in New York’s East Village. A year later Monk returned to the Five Spot, drawing record-breaking crowds for another six-month stay, this time without Coltrane. The acclaim placed him as the top-rated pianist in the 1958 DownBeat Critics Poll.
Monk then worked with arranger Hall Overton and producer Orrin Keepnews on a “tentet” concert recording to promote a fuller presentation of his rhythmic and harmonic ideas. A solid unit of musicians was gathered, including Donald Byrd, Charlie Rouse, Phil Woods, and Pepper Adams. The live and highly praised album was “The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall.” "You go back to that period,” Keepnews said many years later, “and just that whole thing of putting together a 10-piece band for a live performance by Monk was about as far-out of an idea as you could come up with.”
No longer the eccentric of small merit who played the piano “incorrectly,” he came to accept his success but remained suspicious of attention, once saying, “I was playing the same stuff twenty years ago, man, and nobody was painting any portraits.” On that matter he also said: “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up what you’re doing, even if it takes twenty years.”
On February 28, 1964, Monk became the fourth jazz musician to be chosen for the cover of TIME magazine. Barry Farrell wrote the profile on the forty-six-year-old pianist, composer, and bandleader. In the issue’s Letter from the Publisher, Bernhard M. Auer wrote: “While preparing the cover story, Farrell found that you ‘can't really interview Monk.’ He had about 30 chats with him, spread over two or three months, mostly walking around outside the Five Spot, Monk's Manhattan base, or sitting in some dark bar at 2 a.m. — ‘just like Cosa Nostra.’”
In the piece, Farrell described Monk’s residency at Minton’s: “Rhythms scrambled forward at his touch; the oblique boldness of his harmonies forced the horn players into flights the likes of which had never been heard before. . . . When bop drifted out of Harlem and into wider popularity after the war, Monk was already embarked on his long and lonely scuffle. Straight bop — which still determines the rhythm sense of most jazzmen — was only a passing phase for Monk. He was outside the mainstream, playing a lean dissonant, unresolved jazz that most players found perilously difficult to accompany.”
In the article Farrell makes a number allusions to what Monk’s loved ones knew to be a longstanding but unnamed mental illness. There were ever-present signs, but most figured he was going the route of so many jazz musicians addicted to booze and drugs. Monk was known to drink heavily and smoke marijuana, but the pattern that emerged included showing up late to gigs, falling asleep at the piano, endless pacing, and not speaking for long stretches. Detractors called him temperamental and eccentric. Writers obsessed over his proclivity to dance on stage.
Even though his name had spread globally, he felt most secure close to home, where Nellie was never too far. Geoff Dyer: “Most of the times he got into difficulties was when he was apart from Nellie or in unfamiliar surroundings. If something went wrong and he felt threatened he’d disconnect suddenly and shut himself off. If Nellie was around when he got lost in himself, she waited for him to find his way out; that could take four or five days without saying a word. On most days she’d tell him what to wear or help him into his clothes when he was too bewildered to help himself.” Barry Farrell added: “Monk had always been unusually devoted to his mother; Nellie simply moved into his room so he could stay home with mom.”
Monk’s fame lasted barely a dozen years. His downward spiral shut him down in 1970. He spent another six years at home secluded with his family. The manic and erratic behavior he was displaying turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar illness that would over time become immobilizing. Monk inherited his father’s illness. Gone from his life since age four, his father was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in 1941 and never left.
Monk spent the last ten years of his life in isolation with Nellie and the kids at the home of Nica Koenigswarter (Farrrell reported in the TIME article that Monk “cheerfully took her on as another mother”). There was a piano in his room but he never once played it because he didn’t feel like it. He hardly saw other people, rarely spoke, or got out of bed. He died, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of Nellie.
Despite a shortened career, Monk’s legacy has endured. In 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2006, a special Pulitzer Prize citing “a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring input on the evolution of jazz.”
The late jazz aficionado Byron Wilson recalled hearing Monk for the first time, circa 1950: “It was a bit above our comprehension. At first I didn’t like it. I thought Monk needed to go back to school and learn to play like others. I turned him off but eventually fell in love with the unique way he played. I then knew other piano players had to learn to play like him.”
And that they have done.
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
CHARLIE PARKER
One of the great alto saxophonists of all time, Charlie Parker (1920-1955), also known as “Bird,” represents one of the most tragic stories in the history of American music. In Giants of Jazz, Studs Terkel refers to Parker’s story as “the classic one of the flawed genius, endowed with remarkable gifts, a pioneering spirit, and an impulse toward self-destruction and death at an early age.” Ted Fox’s book Showtime at the Apollo describes Charlie Parker as “living day to day, hustle to hustle, bed to bed, fix to fix.”
Even though Parker was a titan among jazz musicians and considered a founder of bebop, PBS’s presentation of his life said, “It would take the country at large years to learn that one of the most profoundly of American musicians had walked among them virtually unrecognized.” As happens when a virtuoso has a short and tragic life, the legend evolves after he is gone.
There are two phases to Parker’s life: his early years in the Midwest and the final fifteen in New York City. The phases are distinguished by his search for playing his instrument in a way nobody else had before and his eventual discovery that ultimately revolutionized jazz.
Charles Parker Jr. (1920-1955) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Charles, an African American, and Addie, a Native American. His father was a singer and dancer in black vaudeville, but his fondness for booze caused him to drift in and out of jobs, which in time led him to desert wife and son before the boy was ten. It was Parker’s determined mother who worked tirelessly as a domestic servant in hopes that her son could go to college and perhaps become a doctor.
In public school Charlie was drawn to music, particularly the saxophone. Addie bought one to help cheer him up after his father’s abandonment. He began practicing up to fifteen hours a day, exploring all forms of music; he was essentially self-taught. When his mother left the house for an evening job, Charlie hung around the doorways of bars and nightclubs. At fourteen, he joined the Black Local of the Musicians Union, passing himself off as eighteen, the minimum age.
Enamored by the rich Kansas City music scene, he dropped out of school at fifteen and started playing with local bands. His opportunity was provided by those derailed by their addictions. Parker, too, got caught up in this. Starting with Benzedrine dissolved in wine or cups of black coffee, he found that he could play and play without sleep. He later reflected: “It all came from being introduced to night life too early. When you’re not mature enough to know what’s happening, well, you goof.” His musicianship at such an early age also was questionable, producing humiliations.
On one occasion he lost the beat playing with Kansas City’s best orchestra, that of Count Basie’s. Drummer Jo Jones dropped his cymbal to the floor to single him out for not playing well enough. Laughter and catcalls rang out from the audience. Parker later explained he was doing all right until he tried doing double tempo on “Body and Soul.” “I went home and cried and didn’t play in public for three months,” he recalled. During Parker’s seclusion he began a period of obsessive practice.
He then left Kansas City to begin working a holiday resort in the Ozarks, where he was taught harmony from the band’s pianist, while at the same time spending endless hours listening to records to dissect the solos and learn them by heart.
In 1936, the teenager got married (his first of three marriages) and became the father of a son. That same year the car in which he and two other musicians were riding skidded on a patch of ice and turned over. One passenger was killed. Parker’s ribs were broken and his spine fractured. He spent two months recuperating in bed, easing his pain with regular doses of morphine, which fed his addictions.
During this time, Kansas City was fast declining as a center for jazz. Parker caught a train for New York City and found work as a dishwasher in Harlem’s famed Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where he could observe jazz pianist Art Tatum night after night. Charlie was overwhelmed by what he was hearing. The blind man’s finesse, mastery of harmonics, and uninterrupted flow of ideas, as well as the ease and speed with which he played the piano gave Parker his epiphany. The young musician wanted to explore the saxophone in like manner, even though it had never been tried before on that instrument.
With the death of his father in 1938, Parker returned to Kansas City. Flat broke, he found work with Jay McShann’s Orchestra. Reunited temporarily with his mother, wife and son, Charlie was away most of the time, disappearing for days, getting high and performing at the clubs. At age nineteen, after his wife and mother kicked him out of the house, he returned to New York City and quietly began laying the foundation of a revolution in jazz. He said of the period: “I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes being used and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. One night I was working over ‘Cherokee,’ and as I did I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.”
He began frequenting Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse, where younger musicians also were searching for new ideas. To the young modernists, music wasn’t intended for dance. The pace was considerably faster, the form of expression improvisation, with variations added to melodies in such a way that solos couldn’t be copied or done over again. It took the name bebop.
When word got around about Parker’s virtuosity, musicians hurried out of their clubs to catch him playing. The trumpet player Howard McGee commented: “We all stood there with our mouths open because we hadn’t heard anybody play a horn like that.” Drummer Kenny Clarke said: “Bird was playing stuff we never heard before. He was twice as fast as Lester Young (the premier saxophonist of the time) and into harmony Lester hadn’t even touched. Bird was running the same way we were, but he was way ahead of us.”
Little, if anything, of this experimentation was recorded for posterity, due to a 1942 strike by the American Federation of Musicians that resulted in a ban of all commercial recordings. During the two-year strike Parker found work with The Earl Hines Orchestra. But the creativity inside him intersected with his addiction demons, causing him to miss sessions, show up late, or appear in awful shape. Even though he was often fined by Hines, the bandleader was astonished by Parker’s amazing memory. In his Parker biography Bird Lives, Ross Russell said that “Charlie could commit the sax part to memory of new arrangements and play it a day later without mistake.” Bird would exclaim: “Knew it backwards and forward, note perfect!”
In 1945, bebop broke out of the box. Charlie Parker led what became known as the “greatest jazz session ever” for Savoy Records, teaming up with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, bassist Curly Russell, and drummer Max Roach. Tracks included “Ko-Ko,” “Billie’s Bounce,” and “Now’s the Time.” Shortly afterward, Parker and Gillespie took their new style of music to Hollywood and began recording sessions with Dial Records. From six albums of phenomenal improvisation came some of Parker’s most momentous pieces, including “Yardbird Suite” and “Lover Man.”
But the more success Bird found, the more alcohol and drugs he absorbed. Hopelessly hooked, he reflected with bitterness: “Any musician who say’s he’s playing better when on the needle or when juiced is a plain straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can’t even finger well, let alone play decent ideas.”
Another excerpt from the Russell biography: “Many musicians revered Bird. If you want to play like Bird, you must live like him, so went the fool’s legend. They tried to follow his self-destructive path: drugs, late hours, heavy drinking, and Parker’s other problem, the women who threw themselves at him. There is no evidence that he resisted them.”
On another trip to California, in 1949, Bird again accompanied Gillespie. On this occasion they were met with a mixture of hostility and indifference to their fast-paced bebop sounds. Discouraged by negative reviews, Gillespie returned to New York. Parker, on the other hand, cashed in his plane ticket to buy heroin and remained in California. There it all began to fall apart. By missing many of his gigs, he became unemployable. He was committed to Camarillo State Hospital following one of his breakdowns. In this instance, it was after setting fire to his hotel room bed.
Upon discharge seven months later, he was declared clean and healthy and returned to New York looking and sounding as good as ever. He played with his own small ensemble and Afro-Cuban bands, began recording the songs that became the cornerstone of his legend, and toured Europe in 1949 and 1950. In 1949, Bird began recording for the Mercury label, teaming up with record producer Norman Granz. That association enabled Parker to act upon a longstanding desire to perform with a string section. He was familiar with modernist classical music and often did solos over classical recordings, most notably Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” Granz arranged an album of ballads with a mixed group of jazz and chamber orchestra musicians, resulting in the studio recording “Charlie Parker and Strings.”
The following month, on December 15, 1949, a new jazz club opened on the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway: Birdland, named in the saxophonist’s honor, an acknowledgement of his genius as a musician. His life was getting under control, even though the drugs and booze were never entirely absent.
In 1950, he began living with a dancer named Chan Richardson, despite having married his long-term girlfriend, Doris, only two years earlier. Charlie and Chan had a daughter in 1951 and a son in 1952. Though Parker had entered this period of domesticity, his drug record and celebrity status came with a price, namely the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, always on the prowl for drug offenders. And in New York a jazz artist’s career could easily be damaged by the Cabaret Act, which required that anyone performing in a club selling liquor be fingerprinted, mugged, and quizzed about past conduct. In 1951, his cabaret card was revoked. The card, issued by the New York State Liquor Authority, effectively banned Parker from nightclub employment in the city (including his namesake club).
During Parker’s banishment, there was work to be found elsewhere. He recorded with Gillespie, drummer Buddy Rich, pianist Thelonious Monk, and bassist Curly Russell, resulting in the 1952 classic recording “Bird and Diz.” Another landmark release, “Jazz at Massey Hall: The Quintet,” has been hailed as one of the great jazz recordings of all time.
Massey Hall proved to be one of Parker’s final accomplishments. Sporadically employed, badly in debt, and in failing physical and mental health, he was further devastated with the 1954 death of his three-year-old daughter, Pree. He made little effort to pull himself together. After twice attempting suicide, he voluntarily committed himself to Bellevue Hospital in 1954.
On March 9, 1955, Parker stopped at the Stanhope Hotel on 5th Avenue across from Central Park to visit a friend he was first introduced to by Thelonious Monk, the jazz patron, Baroness Nica de Koenigwarter. He was near death, having spent nights riding the subway alone. He was described as “zigzagging through the streets of New York, drinking port wine behind abandoned buildings.” For the next few days, the Baroness would try her best to nurse him back to health, soliciting the help of her physician, who warned Charlie that he should be hospitalized or risk death, but Parker refused. Three days later, he was dead. He was thirty-four years old. The official causes of death were pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis of the liver and had suffered a heart attack. The attending physician, not knowing his age, estimated him to be between fifty and sixty.
Bird earned legendary status among fellow musicians while he was alive, with his stature growing immeasurably since his death. In 1988, Clint Eastwood directed and produced the biopic “Bird.” Countless records and box sets have been issued and reissued. Miles Davis appreciated Bird’s significance, having once said: “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
COLE PORTER
By the time Cole Porter, at age forty-one, wrote “Night and Day,” he had overcome a series of Broadway flops and had hit his stride. The song, an international sensation, was recorded by more than thirty artists within three months of its 1932 stage debut. Porter said the song was written specifically for Fred Astaire. It was sung by Astaire in both the Broadway musical “Gay Divorce” (1932) and the Hollywood film version, “The Gay Divorcee” (1934). Astaire made the first recording of “Night and Day” and it became a number one hit, topping the charts for ten weeks. Frank Sinatra made five studio recordings of it during his career, starting in 1942. “Night and Day” is perhaps Porter’s most popular contribution to the Great American Songbook.
Porter has often been called the sexiest of songwriters, his songs infused with sexual passion and longing few other songwriters captured. Cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short said that Porter is better than any other lyricist in exploring the “wonderings and wanderings” of love.
Jazz musicians love Cole Porter for his elegant melodies and song structure. Singers love his lyrics, which contain great wit, sophistication, and clever rhymes. Having composed more than twelve hundred songs for the stage and screen, his songs made stars of Ethel Merman and Fred Astaire and contributed to the success of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and many others.
Cole Porter (1891-1964) was a trim, slight man of five foot six, groomed in subdued and elegant taste, usually with a boutonniere in the lapel of his well-tailored suits. He also was very wealthy and gay.
Born in Peru, Indiana, on a seven hundred-fifty-acre farm, he was the son of a fruit farmer and grandson of an Indiana multimillionaire, J.O. Porter. His name derives from the surnames of his parents, Kate Cole and Sam Porter. Cole started riding horses and playing the violin at age six, the piano at eight, and by age ten was writing songs. His doting mother was there every step of the way. To sustain her son through two-hour piano lessons, the two would parody popular songs. For guarantees of her son’s violin solos at school, she financed the school’s student orchestra.
Despite his musical leanings, his grandfather wanted him to be a lawyer. To this end, young Porter was sent to Worcester Academy, an elite private school in Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1909 as class valedictorian. From there he went to Yale, and wrote two famous college songs, “Bingo Eli Yale” and the “Yale Bulldog Song.” He found that his witty songs made him as popular as any athlete, and he liked the attention. Despite being under the pressure of an Ivy League academic workload, he composed several full stage musicals, as well as nearly three hundred songs.
It was J.O. who paid all bills, insisting that his grandson continue studies at Harvard Law School. Porter had no liking for law and eventually abandoned his studies and took up residence at the Yale Club in New York City, a swank private club restricted to Yale alumni and faculty, to pursue his music career.
In 1916, Porter wrote music and lyrics for his first Broadway play, “See America First.” The show was a total disaster, closing ten days later after fifteen performances. The press described it as a “high-class college show.” With his spirit somewhat deflated, Porter left for Europe the following year, taking up residence in Paris where he engaged in an active Parisian social life. The parties he attended were marked by much gay and bisexual activity, cross-dressing, and a large cache of recreational drugs.
During this time Porter met Linda Lee Thomas, whose personal fortune even surpassed his own. One of the most celebrated hostesses in Europe, they married in 1919 when he was twenty-eight and she thirty-six. In exchange for his witty companionship and a share in his glamorous life, Thomas was willing to overlook Porter’s sexuality. He in turn found in her a sophisticated and protective partner, enabling him the freedom to maneuver within the boundaries of his “illicit” activities. They had a close and loving marriage that lasted thirty-five years until her death in 1954.
The couple made their home in Paris before moving to Venice, living in great extravagance. NPR’s Melissa Block elaborates: “Life with Porter meant summers bronzing on the Riviera, costume balls and grand Venetian palaces they rented, private trains and around-the-world cruises. It was the highest society, and Cole Porter songs glittering with references to Whitneys and Rockefellers, champagne and oysters reflected his world.”
Porter indeed had the financial resources but had yet to make his mark on the music industry. In 1921, he wrote tunes for a Broadway musical comedy revue, since obscured by history. In 1924, he wrote most of the original score for “Greenwich Village Follies,” but his songs were gradually dropped during the Broadway run. After these failures, he came close to giving up songwriting as a career.
Whatever was missing he found in 1928. Linda took the initiative to arrange a meeting with songwriter Irving Berlin while Berlin was vacationing in Venice. Upon returning to New York, Berlin gave a hearty endorsement of Porter’s songwriting skills to the director of a new musical called “Paris.”
Commissioned to write words and lyrics, two of Porter’s renowned songs, “Let’s Misbehave” and “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In Love),” gave him long-awaited recognition. Also in 1928, Porter contributed music to “Wake Up and Dream,” resulting in the song “What Is This Thing Called Love?” His Paris producer, Ray Goetz, invited Porter to write a musical about New York called “The New Yorker.” The show acquired instant notoriety for including a song about a streetwalker, “Love For Sale.” That was followed by Astaire’s last stage show in 1932, “Gay Divorce.” Following Porter’s highly successful 1934 musical “Anything Goes,” The New Yorker magazine proclaimed, “Mr. Porter is in a class by himself.”
The stylish songs he was putting out certainly defined him, with their rhythm, elegance, and wit. But the magic didn’t always work. Two musicals had only modest success. “Jubilee” (1935) was written while Porter was on a worldwide cruise. Its limited run of 169 performances featured two songs that have since become standards, “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things.” The 1936 musical “Red, Hot and Blue,” featuring Bob Hope and Ethel Merman, was criticized by critics, resulting in a limited run. The relative failure of these shows convinced Porter that his songs did not appeal to a broad enough audience. In an interview he said: “Sophisticated illusions are good for about six weeks. Polished, urbane, and adult play-writing is strictly a creative luxury.”
The lure of Hollywood and the slew of musicals being put out in the movie capital was enough for Cole and Linda to relocate to California in 1935. “Born to Dance” (1936) featured “(You’d Be So) Easy to Love” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” For the musical “Rosalie,” he wrote “In the Still of the Night.” Linda, however, could not tolerate California and after a while left Cole behind, claiming that she couldn’t breathe the polluted air.
She rejoined him following a transforming event not long after Porter’s return to New York. On October 24, 1937, Porter had gone for a horseback ride at a swank Long Island country club. In the woods, the skittish horse fell to the ground, landed on Porter, and crushed both his legs. The medical staff recommended amputation, but Linda preferred that Cole go through surgeries to keep both his legs and his pride. Hospitalized for two years, Porter was determined not to let these injuries diminish his creative or social life. For public appearances, scores of photographs show him formally attired, literally being carried by his valet to events. Otherwise, it was canes, crutches, and the wheelchair. His presence was such that very few people were aware of the excruciating pain he was enduring.
He kept positive through much of the next twenty years while forced to endure thirty operations. The Steinway piano was placed on blocks, enabling Porter access to the keyboard in his wheelchair. Now more than ever, writing songs was his lifeline. He was considered somewhat washed up at the time he wrote what would become one of his biggest artistic and commercial successes, “Kiss Me Kate,” a 1948 musical treatment of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” More rousing successes followed: the Broadway musicals “Can-Can” in 1953 and “Silk Stockings” in '55, both of them later adapted for the screen. In 1955 Porter also wrote several new tunes for the movie “High Society”; the one most remembered, the duet “True Love,” sung by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, was his final best-selling hit.
In 1958, after a valiant struggle, mostly from staph infection in the poorly healing bones and severe pain from scar tissue, his right leg was amputated at mid-thigh. He told his closest friends, “I am only half a man now.” The horrible pain and loneliness he was experiencing from Linda’s death in 1954 gave him increasing dependence on alcohol and narcotic painkillers. From this point forward, he would never write again. After what appeared to be a successful kidney stone operation in 1964, he died unexpectedly at age seventy-three.
Porter’s funeral instructions were that he have no funeral or memorial service and that he be buried adjacent to his mother and wife in Peru, Indiana. He also bequeathed his 350-acre property holdings to Williams College. His estate still earns revenue in excess of three million dollars per year, which is disbursed among numerous relatives. The revenue source can be attributed to the continued popularity of his songs.
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
MAX ROACH
Jazz drummer Max Roach (1924-2007) was “a founding architect of bebop,” who helped “elevate jazz from dance-hall entertainment to concert-stage art.” That’s how Washington Post obituary writer Matt Schudel summed up Roach’s contribution to jazz when the drummer died in 2007. “Roach’s most significant innovations,” Schudel continued, “came in the 1940s, when he and another jazz drummer, Kenny Clarke, devised a new concept of musical time. By playing the beat-by-beat pulse on the ‘ride’ cymbal instead of on the thudding bass drum, Roach and Clarke developed a flexible, flowing rhythmic pattern that allowed soloists to play freely.”
When this “revolutionary musical advance” was released in the form of Roach’s first recordings with Charlie Parker, “drummers experienced awe and puzzlement and even fear,” according to Burt Korall, author of Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz. One of those, Stan Levy, commented: “I came to realize that drumming no longer was just time; it was music.” Roach created the rhythmic template that virtually every jazz drummer uses to this day.
Born in Newland, North Carolina, Max moved with his family to Brooklyn at age four. He sang in a children’s church choir, played in a drum and bugle corps, and by age ten was playing drums in a gospel band. During his senior year at Boys High in Brooklyn, Roach was showing up at Monroe’s Uptown House to work the after-hours slot as house drummer. “These after-hour clubs would open up at four in the morning and go until eight [a.m.], so we could work those places and still go to school,” Roach told NPR’s Terry Gross in a 1987 radio interview.
One day Duke Ellington was playing New York’s Paramount Theater and needed a last-minute fill-in for drummer Sonny Greer, who was ill. Ellington called the proprietor of Monroe’s, who recommended the seventeen-year-old Roach. The drummer told Gross that he “got on the stage and looked [for] Mr. Greer's music stand. There was no music stand and no music. And I couldn't play by ear at that time. . . everything was by ear. So Mr. Ellington . . . before the curtain came up, he looked at me and saw the fright of fear in my face and said keep one eye on me and one eye on the acts on the stage. And I made it through. But then I made up my mind I wanted to be in this area of music because Duke had — all the theater and the drama and the pageantry was just surrounding him when he presented a show. And that's when I really decided that that was what I wanted to do.”
On another night at Monroe’s, Dizzy Gillespie heard Roach on a jam session. He later explained the talent of the young phenom: “Aside from being a good drummer, he's a good musician. One thing, he didn't say boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom with a bass drum. The bass drum didn't have a strict four-four beat. It had beats in between, and it's more of a feeling. . . . He had it. He was just unique.”
With his reputation established in the New York clubs, Roach was invited to do a recording in early 1944 with Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra; the February 16 session also included Gillespie on trumpet and is widely acknowledged as the first recorded bebop. Roach’s challenge was to keep pace in the fast and furious sessions being played. “When they played fast, they played very fast,” Roach told Gross in 1987. “Instrumental virtuosity prevailed because during . . . the Second World War we had an extra 20 percent cabaret taxes. . . . This really heralded the demise of big bands during that time. . . . So the people who really got the jobs were the virtuoso instrumentalists. And everybody went home and practiced, practiced, practiced. . . . Everybody began to sit and listen to the music rather than get up and dance to it. That was the beginning of it.” He added: “[W]hen you play in a smaller context, everybody has to do more to fill up the sound. So this was required of us.”
As bebop took the jazz world by storm in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Roach gained renown for being on most of the landmark recordings of the era. He backed Charlie Parker on his most important records, played behind Miles Davis on the groundbreaking “Birth of the Cool” sessions, sat in with Thelonious Monk on the album “Brilliant Corners” and the dates that produced the collection “Genius of Modern Music: Volume 2,” and was part of the legendary quintet that played what many regard as the greatest jazz concert ever held, the Toronto date that became known as “Jazz at Massey Hall”; it featured Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Roach at their peak.
In 1954, Roach made the transition from sideman to co-leader when he formed The Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet (also known as The Max Roach All Stars featuring Clifford Brown). Their work reverberated around the jazz universe, but it was a short eruption: At the height of the group’s success, the trumpeter Brown was killed in a car crash along with the quintet’s pianist, Richie Powell, and Powell’s wife. The event plunged Roach into alcoholic depression. It took until the end of the decade before he got it together again.
By then Roach had met the singer Abbey Lincoln, who helped him to overcome his struggle with drugs and alcohol. Roach introduced Lincoln to producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records and helped launch her career, serving as drummer on her debut record “That’s Him” (1957), as well as the influential “Straight Ahead,” released in 1961. A year later they married (for Roach it was the second of three marriages; his first marriage had produced the first two of his five children, Daryl and Maxine).
Roach and Lincoln had an important bond — their dedication to the civil rights struggle. It was 1960 and protest rallies, marches, and lunch counter sit-ins were spreading across the country. Commissioned by the youth movement of the NAACP, Roach had begun a collaboration with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., with the coming centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in mind. But the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-ins that summer gave their project new focus and urgency; the result was “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Lincoln sang on all of the album’s five tracks, winning plaudits for her “thespian-based wordless vocals.” AllMusic gives the album its highest rating, five stars, saying: “Every modern man, woman, and child could learn exponentially listening to this recording — a hallmark for living life.”
Following the album’s release, Roach told Downbeat magazine: “I will never again play anything that does not have social significance.” Indeed, throughout the ’60s, Roach was a committed political crusader, reducing his musical visibility. When asked in the Terry Gross interview how he became an activist, Roach replied: “Well, I guess we always have been, you know? . . . I go back to Bessie Smith with ‘Black Mountain Blues’ and then to Duke Ellington with his ‘Black, Brown And Beige.’ It's always been there.”
Roach carried his role as activist onto the college campus through teaching. In 1972, he was appointed professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, becoming a pioneer of jazz education, lecturing widely on African-American music.
In the ’80s, he organized the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his jazz quartet and the classical Uptown String Quartet, founded by daughter Maxine. The two groups together provided an opportunity for string players to improvise. One reviewer wrote: “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any drummer or saxophonist.”
Roach also appeared with gospel choirs, symphony orchestras, brass quintets, and Japanese taiko drummers. He composed music for dancer-choreographer Alvin Ailey, created music for plays by actor-writer Sam Shepard, provided musical accompaniment for writer Toni Morrison at her spoken-word concerts, collaborated with hip-hop artist Fab Five Freddy, and teamed up with avant-garde instrumentalists Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton. “You can’t write the same book twice,” he explained to The New York Times in 1990. “Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again.”
In 1984 Roach was selected as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1988 became the first jazz musician to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. He toured with his quartet into the 2000s, and continued to record and compose. He died in 2007 at age eighty-three, after suffering from a neurological disorder over an extended period of time. A year after his death, he received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2013, Roach’s five children and third wife, Janus Adams Roach, turned over to the Library of Congress a vast collection of 100,000 items, including manuscripts, compositions, and hundreds of sound and video recordings. “As a drummer, composer, bandleader, educator and activist, Max Roach had a profound impact on American music,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “His collection will have high research value not just for musicians and jazz scholars, but for anyone exploring the rise of political consciousness among African-Americans in the post-World War II period. His collection will now be preserved in the nation’s library so that his legacy and works might inspire generations to come.”
By Michael Frank Miles with Andy Miles
RICHARD RODGERS
In 1925, New York’s most prestigious production company, the Theater Guild, was putting on a low-cost revue, to be called “The Garrick Gaieties.” Intended to be a fundraising event, only two performances were scheduled. The songwriting team of Richard Rodgers, age twenty-three, and Lorenz (Larry) Hart, age thirty, had been peddling their wares for six years, mostly in amateur productions, and had yet to earn wages for anything they had done. Auditioning before the Theater Guild’s director, they presented a recently written song, “Manhattan.” Upon hearing it, she recalled: “I sat up in delight. These lads have ability, wit, and a flair for a light, sophisticated kind of song!”
She agreed to give them a five-thousand-dollar budget and a month to prepare. Rodgers, the composer, and Hart, the lyricist, took full responsibility for the production. Not only was the material original and witty, but the form and subject were distinctly unusual, it being a musical play with a narrative progression in which the songs fit and furthered the plot. Serving as the orchestra’s conductor, Rodgers turned to the audience after the singing of “Manhattan”; he was astonished to see the crowd standing, clapping, yelling, stomping, and whistling.
Rodgers directed the orchestra to play it again and, his biographer Meryle Seacrest recounts, “the cast sang it, the musicians sang it, and the audience sang it. When the revue ended nobody wanted to leave.” Extended to twenty-five weeks, the show continued for 211 performances. Rodgers and Hart finally realized a payday, each receiving fifty dollars a week from their percentage of the gross. One New York reviewer called it “absolutely fresh in word, song, dance, and skits.” A smash hit, the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart were on their way.
Born in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) was the second son of a well-to-do Jewish physician. Both parents encouraged their son’s musical interests. Richard heard music at home from earliest childhood and was taken regularly to the theater. Delighted by the operettas of Victor Herbert and greatly inspired by the musicals of Jerome Kern, by age nine Richard was composing melodies at the family piano. At fifteen he composed his first full score for an amateur show called “One Minute Please.” Writing the lyrics became a joint effort between Richard, his father, brother, and a friend. The single performance, a fundraiser in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, took place before a packed house of friends and relatives.
Two years later, in 1919, another one-performance amateur show was staged at the Grand Ballroom in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Rodgers recalled in his 1975 autobiography Musical Stages: “I was obliged to write most of the lyrics myself. My brother not only helped but secured a friend, Oscar Hammerstein, whom I had seen occasionally since our first meeting three years before.” The show was a success, prompting Rodgers to quip: “I saw no reason why the world should experience any further delay in appreciating my talents.” But he realized he could not do it alone. “I knew what I wanted to do and I knew where I was heading, but I also knew every song needs words,” he said.
Informed by friend Philip Leavitt that there was a very good lyric writer named Lorenz Hart, a Columbia graduate who was looking for a composer, the two went to the Hart home to meet the lyricist. Rodgers describes in his autobiography the outcome of their meeting: “I played some of my tunes and Larry responded to my music with extravagant enthusiasm. Then we talked. Actually, Larry did most of the talking while I listened with all the reverence due a man of twenty-three from a boy of seventeen.”
He heard Hart express his disdain for the childishness of the lyrics brought to the stage, fully devoid of wit and overly cautious. From their first day together, Rodgers said he discovered “a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.” Rodgers soon found out that even though Hart was a warm and sweet guy, he would go through bouts of deep depression that he would battle by drinking, tendencies that only increased with time.
They wrote their first show together in 1919, publishing their first song, “Any Old Place With You.” After working on a few unsuccessful musicals, the opportunity for Garrick Gaieties came about in 1925. With their credentials in place, the team went on to write over a dozen Broadway shows in the following ten years, along with Hollywood musicals that starred such legendary performers as Al Jolson, Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, and Bing Crosby. In all, their twenty-four-year collaboration includes many of the most cherished songs of the twentieth century, including “My Funny Valentine,” “Thou Swell,” “Blue Moon,” “The Lady Is A Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “I Could Write A Book,” “Where or When,” and “This Can’t Be Love.”
Following a string of hit musicals in the mid- to late Thirties — “Jumbo,” “The Boys From Syracuse,” and “Pal Joey” — Rodgers and Hart were celebrated figures, featured on the cover of Time magazine, and subjects of a two-part profile in The New Yorker.
As the years went by, Larry was falling more and more into acute alcoholism. Robert Gottlieb, writing for The Atlantic magazine, said: “Larry was out drinking and partying every night and never out of bed till midday. Dick was always ready and eager to work hours earlier, continually frustrated by Larry’s no-shows. In addition, Larry broke promises about delivery of lyrics or dialogue.” Gottlieb continued: “One of Rodgers’ strongest characteristics was his lifelong need to control, while Hart was as uncontrollable in his work habits as his partner was disciplined.” Rodgers’ continual quest for perfection led to furious fights over content, and increased over the years.
Their last big hit together, “By Jupiter,” came in 1942. Larry was essentially gone and a year later died at age forty-eight. Even before Hart’s passing, Rodgers was working in collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist for the groundbreaking 1927 musical “Show Boat.” The pair meshed perfectly from the get-go. Oscar was disciplined, made appointments and kept them, was available for morning sessions.
Despite Rodgers and Hart being the top songwriting duo throughout the Thirties, they never had a blockbuster stage hit. “Pal Joey” proved to be their most successful Broadway musical. Today, it is rarely seen in revival, in part due to a collection of songs few people remember, such as “The Flower Of My Heart” and “Plant You Now, Dig You Later.”
With Hammerstein, Rodgers gained renown for one blockbuster after another. They began in 1943 with “Oklahoma!” the most popular musical ever conceived for the stage. For years after its closing, “Oklahoma!” held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical, at 2,248 performances. The innovative play was the first to fully integrate music and dance into the plot. Several of the songs became popular hits, especially “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “People Will Say We’re In Love.” These songs characterized the songwriting duo — music that wears its heart on its sleeve and is true Americana.
All their productions carry out a romantically inclined theme, providing such songs as “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” and “If I Loved You” from “Carousel”; “I Enjoy Being A Girl” from “Flower Drum Song”; “Getting To Know You” from “The King And I”; “Some Enchanted Evening” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” from “South Pacific”; and “My Favorite Things” and “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music.”
In 1960, after spending over forty years in the theater with two brilliant partners, Rodgers lost the sixty-five-year-old Hammerstein to stomach cancer. That crushing blow came when Rodgers was fifty-eight. Drawing again from his autobiography: “With Oscar gone it was simply too much to expect that I could adjust to anyone else without a lengthy interval in between, nor could I imagine spending the rest of my days reliving past glories. For me, work is simply a matter of survival. As I saw it, I had to try to write my own lyrics.”
A daunting task: only a few songwriters had written both music and lyrics. As Rodgers explained: “Music is created with broad strokes on a large canvas, whereas lyrics are tiny mosaics that must be painstakingly cut and fitted into a frame. A composer can provide only half the finished product; without a lyricist, he simply cannot function.” Rodgers soon discovered the “major benefit of writing one’s own lyrics is that I was always there when I wanted me, and I was stimulated by being able to do the entire job myself.” His effort resulted in the 1962 production of “No Strings” starring Diahann Carroll. Rodgers described the production: “The reviewers raved about Diahann, were complimentary about the music and lyrics, and had reservations about the book.” No smash hit, “No Strings” had a successful run of seventeen months.
Rodgers’ last great triumph came in 1965 with the opening of the film version of “Sound Of Music,” starring Julie Andrews. It became the highest grossing motion picture up to that time, while the soundtrack hit number one, selling seven million copies worldwide. He continued to work on musicals, both for Broadway and television, with other lyricists, including Stephen Sondheim, up to the time of death in 1979. His final musical, “I Remember Mama,” ran for 108 performances, concluding four weeks before Rodgers died of heart failure.
Richard Rodgers’ career spanned more than six decades and in that time he received countless awards — a Pulitzer citation, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys. He wrote more than nine hundred published songs and forty Broadway musicals (twenty-six with Hart, nine with Hammerstein). His work enriched and broadened a genre once regarded as little more than frivolous entertainment, helping to make it into an authentic art form. His songs with Hart today are most often performed by jazz musicians and traditional pop singers, while his musicals with Hammerstein are revived frequently, from Broadway to community productions. It’s been said that somewhere in the world the sound of his music is heard on stage every night of the year.
Biographer Sheridan Morley said: “He was a carpenter who believed in craftsmanship above all else, and frequently drew his musical inspiration from deep in the soul of his native America.” Rodgers’ own words hint at his mastery: the “exhilaration of helping to conceive, plan, and create something that has no purpose other than to give people pleasure” — that is true Americana.
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
SARAH VAUGHAN
Musicians loved to play behind the “Divine Sarah” because she had perfect pitch, a strong sense of rhythm, an ear for chord changes, and could use her four-octave voice like an instrument, with the ability to sing everything from soprano to female baritone. Gary Giddins wrote of her in his book Visions of Jazz: The First Century: “Her voice had wings: luscious and tensile, disciplined and nuanced, it was thick as cognac yet soared off the beaten path like an instrumental solo, delivering on ideas other singers don’t permit themselves to contemplate because even if they can pull off the improvisational gambits that were her trademark, the risks would be too great and the cost of failure humiliation.” James Gavin, writing for The New York Times, said that “her voice had the textures and colors of an orchestra.” Music critic Scott Yanow described Vaughan as “having one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century.”
Among the other wondrous voices of the past century were Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan is rightfully part of this female triumvirate that laid the foundation for jazz and pop singing. But Sarah, born in 1924 and seven years younger than Ella and eleven years Billie’s junior, operated in the shadows of the two women, who had already set the standard for excellence. Still, Jeff Carter, jazz critic for Pop Matters, places Vaughan at the vanguard of the trio, calling Vaughan’s voice “an exceptionally flexible instrument, twenty times more versatile than Billie Holiday’s voice, and capable of emotional expression that Ella didn’t dream of.”
The late jazz enthusiast Byron Wilson adds further insight. “Between her and Ella, it was a toss-up,” he said in a 2016 interview. “Sarah Vaughan was just as good, period. Sarah had better use of scales, could go up and down the register, and had more voice control — nobody compares to her.”
As with so many great jazz musicians, gospel music played a part in Sarah Vaughan’s upbringing. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she was the only child of Jack and Ada Vaughan, who made sure that music and the church shaped her young life. Her deeply religious father, a carpenter by trade, played piano and guitar. Her mother was a laundress and sang in the church choir. Sarah, too, sang in the choir and had extensive piano lessons from age seven to fifteen. Before she was a teenager she was an organist and choir soloist at Mount Zion Baptist Church.
Even at that young age, it was apparent that Sarah possessed a remarkable singing voice. She attended the Newark Arts High School and began venturing into downtown Newark’s night clubs, picking up jobs on occasion as pianist and singer. Her nocturnal adventures began to overwhelm her academic pursuits and Vaughan dropped out of school during her junior year to concentrate on music. About this time she and her friends were crossing the Hudson River to hear big bands at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
In 1941, the awkward and shy teenager entered Apollo’s famed Wednesday night amateur contest and won the ten-dollar top prize. Her song selection, “Body and Soul,” was surprising. The song had become famous just two years earlier by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Up to this time not even Billie and Ella had recorded it. Billy Eckstine, out in the audience that night, described the moment: “She was a little, nondescript-looking girl. It was a voice I hadn’t heard before. Hard to describe. Same way an instrument that you hear, like Bird, when you hear them the first time.”
Eckstine, then a singer for The Earl Hines Grand Terrace Orchestra, told the bandleader of his discovery and Vaughan soon joined Hines’ band as vocalist, sharing singing duties with Eckstine and doubling as a second pianist. With Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker as band members, the experience became her musical indoctrination into the nascent bebop movement. Even though Diz and Bird would later be acclaimed as founders of the new sound, they both thought so highly of Sarah Vaughan that they considered her the “new development in jazz.” They teamed up with her as sidemen in a 1945 recording date, out of which came “Lover Man,” done in full-blown bop style.
After short stints with both the Hines and Eckstine bands, Vaughan pursued a solo career as a jazz singer. She started inauspiciously at a club on 52nd Street, doing intermission stints, playing piano and singing. Then things started happening. First off, record producer Albert Marx heard her sing and signed her to New York’s Musicraft Records. She then became headliner at a club down the street, Café Society Downtown. Here her reputation as a jazz singer would become fully established. At Musicraft, she did vocals for the George Treadwell Orchestra, resulting in a couple ten-inch vinyl recordings under the name Sarah Vaughan and the George Treadwell Orchestra. They recorded standards from the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
But, according to biographer Elaine M. Hayes, author of Queen of Bebop, Vaughan was lacking something that was spelled out in a review at the time: “She is not exactly handsome to look at.” Treadwell, now serving as her musical director (and from 1946 to 1958, her husband), invested in a complete makeover — coiffure, teeth straightening, and gowns — to build up her image. But more than anything, it was the music that built up her image. Singles released by Musicraft included “Tenderly,” “It’s Magic,” “If You Could See Me Now,” and “Mean To Me,” bringing her bop-oriented phrasing to popular song and steadily reaching a wider fan base (that included white listeners). “Tenderly” and “It’s Magic” enjoyed runs on the pop charts, as did her a cappella choir recording of “Nature Boy,” a top ten hit in 1948.
Columbia Records signed Vaughan in 1949 and assigned producer Mitch Miller to work with her. Miller, attempting to stay in tune with the whims and whimsy of white, postwar America, favored novelty. One song, “Whippa Whippa Woo,” recorded by Vaughan in 1950, put her in the same unenviable position as other singers of the time, abandoning art and better instincts for what might sell. Her stint with Columbia was not only creatively stifling but commercially disappointing, producing a sporadic run of chart hits and leading to her release in 1953.
The following year she signed with Mercury Records. Vaughan’s contract there allowed for pop recordings to be issued on Mercury and her jazz material to be released on the subsidiary EmArcy. Her six years with Mercury were her finest and most successful. Her pop music had a distinct jazz tinge, and some of her recordings were top ten hits, including the biggest hit of her career, “Broken Hearted Melody,” a song she hated and refused all requests for during performances.
Vaughan’s legacy is greatly enhanced by the albums she put out during her Mercury/EmArcy years. By this time Vaughan’s use of vocal sounds as instruments and her bending of syllables to fit musical phrasing matured and flowered. She began with the LP “Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown,” released by EmArcy in 1955. Her recording with the esteemed septet is considered by many to be Vaughan’s best-ever album. One song from the album is the George Shearing standard “Lullaby of Birdland,” probably the most recognizable song from Vaughan’s catalog. It is truly her song, and nobody has matched her on this rendition, including Ella Fitzgerald, whose popular recording of it was released around the same time. The highly valued “Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi” followed, and “Swingin’ Easy” came two years later, in 1957.
It should be mentioned that Vaughan was in the studio in 1958 with arranger and conductor Hal Mooney to record “Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin,” a two-volume set. A year later Ella did the more-remembered four-disc Gershwin songbook. Vaughan’s collection reportedly outsold Fitzgerald’s.
Vaughan’s winning streak of hit records, however, could not sustain itself. The approaching decade signaled a downturn in jazz interest. All attention was on rock ‘n’ roll, and Vaughan didn’t have the feel for that. After her contract with Mercury ended in 1959, she signed with Roulette Records, where she would remain for four years. The producers at Roulette brought in top arrangers and bandleaders, including Billy May and Count Basie, to fully access the many dimensions of the “Divine One.” In a relatively short space of time she released fifteen albums, which covered jazz, bop, and swing, all centered around large ensembles.
Finding that Roulette had little in financial assets to pay its artists, she returned to Mercury in 1963. Her only distinguished mark with Mercury in these years was a live recording, “Sassy Swings the Tivoli.” Vaughan must have started to realize that too many people were pulling the strings on her career and not taking into consideration her wishes. At the conclusion of her Mercury deal in 1967, she made no effort to sign another contract.
In fact, she stayed out of recording sessions for the next four years to begin nurturing a new following in concert halls, with the lucrative financial potential of concerts lasting no more than two hours. Just as importantly, her “sassy” personality and sense of humor allowed her to bond with audiences. On trips to Chicago, Vaughan often performed at the 3,000-seat Civic Opera House. Byron Wilson was there: “She performed with a top-notch group of Chicago musicians for a two-hour show, and always before a packed house. The audience was fascinated with her voice. There would be absolute silence; like my father said, ‘You could hear a rat piss on cotton.’ Then her devoted fans would bring the house down with sustained applause following her performance.”
In the early 1970s, Vaughan recorded a Stephen Sondheim song from the Broadway musical “A Little Night Music.” The tune, “Send in the Clowns,” covers an actress’s view of her failed love life in terms of a play that ends tragically. James Gavin commented that “it so moved Vaughan that she gave it the sweep of grand opera.” The song became her ultimate vocal showpiece, and invariably drew standing ovations.
In 1977, she joined Norman Granz’s new record label, Pablo. Granz helped Sarah put together albums featuring the Ellington songbook, Beatles’ songs, Brazilian music, and the jazz masterpiece, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” On another occasion, Granz loaned Vaughan out to CBS Records, allowing her to team up with Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for a live album of Gershwin tunes, for which she earned the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.
In 1988, Vaughan was inducted into the American Jazz Hall of Fame but learned a year later that she had lung cancer. Having spent years working off nervous energy by developing a habit for cocaine and smoking too much, she sang for the last time at New York’s Blue Note jazz club. It was observed that “her voice sounded magically untouched.” Those final months were spent in California in and out of the hospital while undergoing chemotherapy. She died in 1990 at age sixty-six.
Her death was keenly felt. A tribute was held for her at Carnegie Hall: “Friends of Sassy: A Tribute to the Divine Sarah Vaughan.” Singers came on stage to emulate her most famous works. The luminaries included Joe Williams (who performed “Misty”), Dizzy Gillespie (“Lover Man”), Roberta Flack, (“Prelude To a Kiss”), Shirley Horne (“I’m Glad There is You”) and Billy Eckstine, singing in a quavering voice “You’re My Baby.”
As the tribute confirmed to the greatness of her fifty-year career, Vaughan’s own words certainly expressed the feeling: “There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.” The liner notes to one of her albums confirm Vaughan’s thought: “The most amazing thing about Sarah Vaughan’s almost-fifty-year career was that there was no limit to the things she could do or the ways she found to do them.”
By Michael Frank Miles and Andy Miles
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) was a cornerstone of twentieth century American music. She composed more than 350 songs and made recordings of over one hundred 78s, 45s, and LPs. One of her songs, “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory,” was just one of many that New York bandleaders commissioned her to write. For this 1938 composition, she prepared the tune for Jimmie Lunceford, one of the swing era’s top black bandleaders. The song has since been covered by numerous artists, including vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day, and pianist Marian McPartland.
Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981) lived and played through all the eras in the history of jazz. She was a major force in the development of Kansas City swing in the 1930s and deeply involved in the bebop revolution of the Forties. Her output included ragtime, swing, bebop, boogie-woogie, blues, and sacred music. Williams never ceased to astound those who heard her play and attained unwavering respect from male colleagues, who regarded her as a musical equal.
Doing what she did in the early days of jazz is quite astounding, considering that, except for female vocalists, women were nonexistent in the field of jazz. An ambitious artist who dared to be different, she responded to her situation by saying: “They don’t think of you as a woman if you can really play. No musician ever refused to play with me. No one ever refused to play my music or my arrangements.”
Mary Scruggs, the second of eleven children, was born in Atlanta and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Her mother, Virginia, played an old-fashioned pump organ, often holding Mary on her lap to keep her out of mischief. One day, while her mother was pumping up the organ, Mary’s fingers picked out a melody, and she was soon playing spirituals, still sitting on her mother’s lap. A prodigy in the making, she later recalled that “by the time I was six or seven, I was playing the piano in neighbors’ houses all afternoon and evening, and sometimes I’d come home with twenty or thirty dollars wrapped in a handkerchief.” Her public appearances earned her the title “The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty.” “I also played for many wealthy white families, the Mellon’s in particular,” she remembered. “They’d send a chauffeur out for me and I’d play for their private parties. Once they gave me one hundred dollars.”
Mary’s rising talent enabled her to become one of very few black students permitted to attend Pittsburgh’s prestigious Westinghouse High School. But she found it necessary to leave school in her sophomore year to support her family. When Mary turned fourteen, she joined the Orpheum Circuit with other black performers, playing rundown vaudeville houses owned by whites catering to blacks. A year later she was in Washington, D.C., and played with Duke Ellington and his early band. When she arrived in New York City, she became the darling of older pianists, soaking in everything that Fats Waller and Art Tatum could tell her.
Back on the circuit, she joined a band called John Williams and the Syncopators. At age seventeen, she married the bandleader, establishing her name as Mary Lou Williams. When John joined Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy Orchestra, she came along. Her start with Kirk was inauspicious. Initially, she drove one of the cars in which the Kirk band traveled. “I’d wait outside ballrooms in the car,” she said, “and if things went bad and people weren’t dancing, somebody would come get me and I’d go in and play one of the songs I wrote, like ‘Froggy Bottom’ or some other boogie-woogie number, and things would jump.” She began as the band’s arranger and then, in 1931, joined the group on the bandstand as pianist. She explained: “Women during that era were not really allowed to be in with a group of men. That made the people scream and carry on because they saw a woman that weighed about ninety pounds; to hear me play so heavy, like a man, that was something else.”
She was with Kirk from 1929 to 1942, during most of the Swing Era. She appeared on more than 180 recordings with Kirk’s orchestra, in addition to composing and arranging the music for many of those sessions. When her husband left the Kirk band and the marriage in 1942, she returned to Pittsburgh.
When bebop arrived in the 1940s, Mary Lou Williams was in Manhattan, and immediately grasped the complex new music, with its “millions of notes,” as she put it. She became mentor to the young modernists, particularly Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. After finishing her nightly gig at Café Society in Greenwich Village, the two boppers would show up at her apartment and stay for hours, excitedly demonstrating their new discoveries. She wrote a Gillespie hit, “In The Land of Oo-Bla-Dee.”
In 1944, she found a patron in Moses Asch, owner of Asch Records. For the next three years, she recorded more than fifty tunes for his label. All arrangements were her own, as were most of the compositions. In 1945, she composed the “Zodiac Suite,” writing harmonically advanced music not formally associated with jazz. She recorded the suite on piano, with backing from bass and drums. A year later she did an orchestral rendition with the New York Philharmonic. Along with Ellington, the “Zodiac Suite” made her a pioneer among jazz composers in producing extended works.
In 1946, her celebrity status was confirmed when she began hosting “Mary Lou Williams’ Piano Workshop,” a weekly radio show. In 1952, she left for Europe for the first time. A nine-day engagement stretched out to two years. During her stay in Europe she became distressed at what she saw as the “greed, selfishness, and envy” that impinged on her music. One night in 1954, while playing a Paris nightclub, she got up from the piano and walked out of the club, leaving the music world. “I got a sign that everybody should pray every day,” she said, to explain her departure. “I had never felt a conscious desire to get close to God, but it seemed that night that everything came to a head. I couldn’t take it any longer. I left the piano, the money, all of it”.
For three years, she spent most of her time praying and meditating in a Catholic church near her home in New York, converting to Catholicism in 1957. “There’s a period when you have to stop and take care of yourself,” she said. “That’s the only way you can help others.” She founded the Bel Canto Foundation to assist drug- and alcohol-dependent musicians.
That same year, 1957, two priests and Dizzy Gillespie convinced her to resume playing, which she did at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with Dizzy’s band. She began to do club work, going way beyond to college concerts, formed her own record label and a publishing company, founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, and made television appearances.
Given her newfound Catholic faith (she’d been raised a Baptist), she began working on sacred pieces, composing several masses. One, “Music for Peace,” was choreographed and performed by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as “Mary Lou’s Mass.” She also wrote and performed religious jazz music; one piece was “Black Christ of the Andes” (1963).
Williams also put much effort into working with youth choirs to perform her works, including “Mary Lou’s Mass,” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral before a gathering of three thousand. A 1964, a TIME magazine article described Williams as a “soul player.” “I am praying through my fingers when I play,” she said. “I get that good ‘soul sound’ and I try to touch people’s spirits.”
Throughout the 1970s, her career flourished, with several albums, a couple of appearances at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and a two-piano performance with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall in 1977. She accepted an appointment at Duke University as artist-in-residence (1977-1981), teaching a history of jazz class and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble. In 1978, she performed at the White House and that same year participated in Benny Goodman’s 40th Anniversary Carnegie Hall concert.
Williams’ final recording, “Solo Recital,” released three years before her death, had a medley that included spirituals, ragtime, blues, and swing. Her final work remained incomplete — a composition called “The History of Jazz,” a history she largely lived and helped create.
The cause of her 1981 death was bladder cancer.
Early in her career, Williams had said: “As for being a woman, I never thought about that one way or another. I never thought about anything but music.” So here she is today, remembered mostly by jazz aficionados, when instead she should be ranked among the greatest of all jazz musicians.