Illinois Jacquet

Although he became especially well known for his fiery work with Jazz At The Philharmonic, where his playing reflected his breakthrough with Lionel Hampton in the early 1940s and his solo on Flying Home in particular, Illinois Jacquet was a thoroughly accomplished tenor saxophonist with a richly varied repertoire.

He was born in Boussard, Louisiana, on 31 October 1922, but was raised from the age of one in Texas and would thus later be welcomed by those who established what became known as the ‘tough Texa’ style of playing the tenor saxophone. Jacquet was born into a very musical family, his father, Gilbert, leading a band that included Illinois’s brothers Julius, Linton and Russell; he boys’ sister and their mother were also accomplished musicians. While still at school, he danced as a member of the Jacquet Brothers dance team and also played drums. Later, he switched instruments, taking up alto and soprano saxophones. As early as 1938, while still at school, Jacquet sat in with various visiting bands, including that led by Milt Larkins. After graduating from high school, he left Texas to look for musical work in California. There, he worked with Floyd Ray and chanced to meet Nat Cole and was introduced to Lionel Hampton who was in the process of forming a band. Hampton happened to want a tenor player and offered Jacquet a job on the condition that he switch to tenor. Jacquet set out to master the instrument and in 1941 became a key figure in Hampton’s entourage. The recording session that produced the legendary Flying Home was on 26 May 1942. Jacquet’s solo was outstanding and became so inextricably intertwined with Hampton’s composition that it was later integrated into the number and Jacquet’s successors were expected to use it as the basis for their own solos. Deceptively simple, the riff-based solo set a standard and helped establish Jacquet as a major figure in jazz.

In 1943, Jacquet joined Cab Calloway, staying for about a year before moving on to play with various small bands and also to lead his own group in which brother Russell appeared as did Charles Mingus. A brief but telling appearance in the 1944 Gjon Mili-Norman Granz film, Jammin’ The Blues, was followed by regular dates with Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic and he was also with Count Basie’s band. Much of his mid-1940s to mid-1950s work is presented on The Illinois Jacquet Story on Properbox Records. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Jacquet toured with his own small groups and with JATP, becoming in the process a welcome figure on the international jazz club and jazz festival circuits. In some ways, his time with JATP, while valuable and lucrative, was somewhat limiting to his enormous talent. On the JATP bandstand he acquired a reputation as a wild man of the tenor, performing honks and high-note squeals on up-tempo rafter-raising numbers and while these demonstrations of his remarkable technical ability cannot be denied, they were always balanced with exquisite ballad performances as can be heard on many live and studio recording sessions, several on Verve Records, not only in these years but ever afterwards.

Meanwhile, Jacquet continued to form his own groups for club dates, tours and recording sessions, along the way working with many leading jazz instrumentalists and singers. His recordings included the very popular Robbins Nest and Black Velvet. He made a brief instrumental departure by playing bassoon in a jazz context and also from time to time he returned to the alto saxophone on which he displayed his admiration for Charlie Parker. For several years through the late 1960s and into the following decade, Jacquet fronted a trio with Milt Buckner and Jo Jones and worked also with Slam Stewart and Buddy Rich. From time to time he would return to Hampton for concert appearances, and he also worked in several all-star ensembles. His European tours with a Texas Tenors band, along with Arnett Cobb and Buddy Tate, was very well received by audiences and critics alike.

After having been artist-in-residence at Harvard in the early 1980s, Jacquet formed a big band for occasional concerts and recording sessions, including Atlantic Records’ Jacquet’s Got It!. He continued to form occasional big bands through the 1990s, a time when he was also a regular visitor to European jazz festivals. A fine example of the Texas tenor style, indeed one of the prototypes of the genre, Jacquet should not be overlooked by those who seek to delineate the history of the tenor saxophone in jazz. He was an important transitional figure in the development of the instrument, retaining a lifelong affinity for the blues while keeping himself attuned to the changes taking place in the bop and post-bop periods of jazz. An admirer of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, he successfully became his own man and set standards for others to follow. Late in life, Jacquet was a dignified on-stage presence as an elder statesman of jazz, while his playing always impressively combined the earthy swing of his Texan upbringing with the melodic grace of an impassioned balladeer. In all that he played, Jacquet sought and found the emotional heart of the material, playing solos that are intense in their fire and rhapsodic in their elemental command. And throughout his career, at the warm heart of his playing there was always the blues.

In 1991 came the release of Arthur Elgort’s documentary film, Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story, which captures all that was good about this exceptional musician.

Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet, died in New York City on 22 July 2004. Of his playing on that 1942 version of Flying Home, he would remark, ‘God bless my solo.’ To which his many fans might well chorus, ‘Yes indeed!’

The foregoing has been adapted from a piece written a few years ago for Jazz Journal.

Benny Carter - Part 2

Despite his deep involvement in writing for films and television, in the 1950s, and shrugging off a 1956 heart attack, Benny Carter still found time to play with Jazz At The Philharmonic and to form and lead bands for residencies, short tours, and recording sessions. Notable among these recording dates were Aspects, 1961’s influential Further Definitions album, on which he was joined by Coleman Hawkins, Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse, and 1966’s Additions To Further Definitions, with a band that included Mundell Lowe and Teddy Edwards. This music has can be found on a Decca Records release. The musicality and musicianship Carter possessed endeared him to singers and he wrote arrangements for a wide range of jazz and jazz-influenced pop singers, among them Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls, Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughan.

 

The 1970’s saw Carter’s re-emergence as a concert and touring artist and he made numerous national and international tours, playing jazz clubs and concert halls, and making many albums. In 1987, he teamed up with John Lewis and the occasionally-assembled All-American Jazz Orchestra for concerts dedicated to performing works written especially for big bands. To this repertoire, Carter contributed a major long work, Central City Sketches, rehearsing, conducting and playing solo alto at its premiere. Also in 1987, Ken Mathieson commissioned Carter to compose a suite for a big band for the Glasgow Jazz Festival. In 1989, his 82nd birthday was honored by a concert at New York's Lincoln Center at which some of his songs were sung by Sylvia Syms and Ernestine Anderson. He celebrated his 85th birthday with a concert at Rutgers University, premiering two new suites written especially for the occasion: Tales Of The Rising Sun Suite and Harlem Renaissance Suite. In 1997, a special concert was held in honor of his 90th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl at which a new composition by John Clayton was played. Dedicated to Carter, the three-part suite was entitled, very appropriately, Maestro. The concert could not, though, be held on Carter’s actual birth day; instead, it was held two days earlier because on his birthday the indefatigable maestro had a gig in Norway. In May 2000, the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra premiered two of Carter's new works, Time To Remember, memorializing President John F. Kennedy, and Again And Again, a ballad performed by alto saxophonist Jeff Clayton. The occasion was a concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, remembering the city’s Central Avenue jazz scene, at which Maestro was reprised.

As a soloist, Carter’s fluent playing on alto saxophone and the liquid sound he created made him kin to his near-contemporary, Johnny Hodges, and between them they effectively ruled the world on that instrument until the arrival of Charlie Parker. Although less well known, his clarinet playing was similarly rich and flowing. All these comments can be applied just as readily to his trumpet playing. Very few musicians double on reeds and brass; of those few that do, it is hard to think of any who achieve this with such apparent ease as Carter. Bill Berry recalled an appearance with Carter in Tokyo who was, as usual, playing alto that night. Someone in the audience requested that Carter play trumpet. Although he did not have his own trumpet, and as far as anyone knew had not picked one up in years, Carter borrowed Berry's cornet and played with the perfection of someone who was in daily practice. Carter’s playing skills never deserted him, as can be heard on many recordings from late in his life, among them a set at New York’s Iridium Club released by Nimbus.

Carter’s composing blended silky melodies with vibrant swing. Among his compositions are Blues In My Heart, which is one of the most recorded of his instrumentals, When Lights Are Low, also extensively recorded as an instrumental and as a vocal, with lyrics by Spencer Williams, Blue Star, Devil's Holiday, Dream Lullaby, Blue Interlude, Lonesome Nights, Doozy, which defies anyone not to swing when playing it, Symphony In Riffs, which was also the title of a 1995 video release, and he also wrote Kansas City Suite for Count Basie's band in the 1960s. As composer and arranger he ranks with Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Edgar Sampson, and a handful of others as an important architect of swing era big band concepts. His writing for the saxophone section was perhaps the most instantly recognizable element of his arranging talent. The gorgeous, flowing, seemingly simple yet decidedly complex sound he created was just one of the many joys that this remarkable man brought to jazz.

Fortunately, Carter attracted the biographer he merited and in 1982 Morroe Berger, brought out his two-volume biography, Benny Carter: A Life In American Music, written in collaboration with Ed Berger and James Patrick, which fully documents the life of this amazing musician. Except, of course, in 1982, Carter still had two decades of music making ahead of him.

The official Benny Carter web site, run by Ed and Laurence Berger, should not be missed by anyone interested in the life and career of this extraordinary man. Carter died on Saturday, 12 July 2003, leaving behind an incomparable musical legacy. We shall not see his like again.

In 2011, singer Deborah Pearl released, Souvenir Of You, an album of songs for which she wrote lyrics to compositions by Benny Carter. This very interesting CD is reviewed elsewhere on this Blog. Also in 2011, Ken Mathieson teamed up with Alan Barnes and Woodville Records to re-explore Carter’s Glasgow Suite, recording the work with Mathieson’s 8-piece Classic Jazz Orchestra, along with several other Carter compositions and arrangements. In so doing, they demonstrated not only their own musical skills but also the durability of the music of Benny Carter.

 

Regina Carter

Jazz violin has a long and wonderful tradition. It also has a history of misunderstanding and over the years there has been much wrong-headed criticism from those who believe that a musical instrument carries an in-built repertoire outside of which it should not be allowed to stray. Even a cursory glance at the reality of the violin in jazz shows otherwise. In the earliest days of jazz, when it vied for popularity with other musical forms, the violin was a commonplace sight on the bandstand. Indeed, dance bands in turn-of-the-century New Orleans were frequently led by the violin and it was chiefly a matter of the volume at which instruments such as the trumpet could be played that edged the violin’s softer sound onto the sidelines. The skill and sheer musicality of the players of the violin in those far-off days cannot be seriously questioned. After all, New Orleans was a major centre for classical music in the USA and few if any other cities could claim to have three opera houses, which provided work for numerous classical players of whom the violinists were logically the majority.

Despite the technical limitations on the violin in those pre-electric days, some musicians persisted with the instrument and through the years there have been several fine exponents, some of whom, had they played a more ‘acceptable’ instrument, must surely have found greater support from audiences and especially from critics who really should have known better. Consider some of these names and reflect for a moment on the extraordinary music they have left us: Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti, Claude Williams, Eddie South, Emilio Caceres, Stéphane Grappelli and Svend Asmussen. The latter two enjoyed careers of many decades (Asmussen still playing as he approaches his 95th birthday in 2012) and hence found themselves playing alongside violinists such as Jean-Luc Ponty and Billy Bang.

Continuing the tradition of these artists is Regina Carter, a musician of extraordinary skill who is thoroughly steeped in the history of jazz violin yet is simultaneously aware of and responds to all of the many changes that jazz has undergone in the past hundred years. Consider just three of her records:-

I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey

On this Verve Records album, Carter delves into the rich repertoire of the 1920s-1940s, playing popular and show tunes, among them the two songs that make up the album title, as well as Little Brown Jug, You Took Advantage Of Me, There’s A Small Hotel and St. Louis Blues. In so doing, Carter pays loving tribute to her mother, Grace Carter, who was the first important influence on in her career. The songs are played with a lively contemporary take on the small group style of jazz of the period they reflect. Carter’s musical companions here are Xavier Davis, piano, Matthew Parrish, bass, Alvester Garnett, drums, with guest vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater and Carla Cook, alongside Paquito D'Rivera, clarinet, and Gil Goldstein, accordion.

(Verve Records B0006226-02)

Freefall

On this album, also a Verve Records date, Regina Carter plays in a duo with pianist Kenny Barron and from the first phrases it is vividly apparent that this is a true meeting of minds attuned to all that is good in jazz. Carter observed of this date that she and Barron approached the music as though they were having conversations; in this case. The dialogue just happened to be played not spoken. The music here is drawn largely from the jazz palette, with pieces by Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter and Johnny Hodges as well as compositions by the duettists themselves. The result is music that is interesting, ingenious, and always beautifully played

(Verve Records 314 549 706-2)

Reverse Thread

For her 2010 album with E1 Records, Regina Carter turns to folk music from Africa, applying to tried and tested melodic themes a thoroughly contemporary jazz feel. With her inspired touch, Carter is able to blend the violin’s clear voice with some traditional instrumental sounds of Africa. In this she is aided in particular by Yacouba Sissoko, kora; also on hand are Will Holshouser and Gary Versace, accordion, Adam Rogers, guitar, Chris Lightcap and Mamadou Ba, bass, and Alvester Garnett, percussion. The music, while it might often be unusual to non-African ears, has about it an atmosphere that will be recognized by most of those who hear it. Among the titles are Hiwumbe Awumba, Juju Nani, Mwana Talitambula and Un Aguinaldo Pa Regina. This is a delightful record, filled with moments that prompt reflection and admiration and always underline Regina Carter’s astonishing musical skill.

(E1 Music 2090)