Al Jarreau & Kurt Elling - 'Take Five'

I was thinking that it was time for some ‘vocalese’ – that somewhat minority-appeal genre of jazz invented either by Leo Watson, King Pleasure or Eddie Jefferson or all three, whereby a jazz singer transforms a solo, often a sax solo, into a song by adding lyrics that usually sound improvised. Personally, I love it, but I remember giving my father a cassette recording of a double LP by Eddie Jefferson and he was bemused by the results. Like Lee Morgan incidentally, Eddie Jefferson was shot and killed (at age 60) when leaving a gig in the early hours of the morning. His assassin was said to have been a disgruntled dancer whom the singer once fired, but he was acquitted, so we have to believe in this day and age that it wasn’t him. Pointe finale.

Anyway… I was checking out live performances of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, the vocal trio par excellence who popularised vocalese around the end of the 1950s and early ‘60s following the success of their Sing a Song of Basie album, paving the way in the process for Manhattan Transfer (a guilty pleasure of mine). But I couldn’t find what I was looking for. The swinging eight-minute version of Sonny Rollins’ ‘Airegin’ (Nigeria backwards) boasted some fabulous scat-singing by Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert, but not by Annie Ross, and it all went on a little too long.

However… I keyed in Kurt Elling, one of the greatest contemporary male jazz singers, who never shied away from a bit of scatting or vocalese (witness, for example, his transformation of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Night Dreamer’ – and if you can overlook the dodgy mullet and the long flowing shirt, I would highly recommend this Newport performance). At which point, I should thank a guy named Chas from around here who lent me three early Kurt Elling albums when I was sweltering in a caravan during the heat wave of 2003, thus introducing me to the singer and his works while helping to alleviate my temporary domestic misery.

So anyway… I stumbled upon Elling’s performance of ‘Take Five’ in the company of Al Jarreau, a timely reminder that some of the latter’s rather hackneyed post-disco output shouldn’t obscure the fact that he had both a terrific voice and the ability to swing when singing jazz. Together they manage to transform into something errr quite remarkable Paul Desmond’s jazz standard. With its unusual 5/4 time signature, that infectious piano refrain, the airy tone of Desmond’s alto sax and Joe Morello’s elegant and educated drum solo, it vies with the likes of Miles Davis’ ‘So What’, John Coltrane’s ‘Impressions’ and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Maiden Voyage’ as the most instantly recognisable number of that epoch. I have heard so many versions of it in my time – from Tito Puente’s blistering version to the Sachal Studio Orchestra’s extraordinary sub-continental variation on a theme – but this one really stopped me in my tracks.  

What seems so remarkable about it is the way that two masters of their craft feed off each other, in the process creating something that’s intricate and highly textured while feeling totally spontaneous. Did they rehearse this in some way? I find it hard to believe, yet if they did they convey a remarkable feeling of it all being right off the cuff. It’s surely as hard to fake that as it is to simulate the sheer joy they seem to experience in each other’s company. Their voices are as complementary as Roland Kirk’s holy trinity of stritch, manzello and tenor sax, with Elling’s slightly Sinatra-like timbre hovering over the proceedings like a kestrel on the lookout for prey. Whether trading rhythmic motifs or singing the lyrics, presumably those of Al Jarreau from his 1970s pomp, the two of them seem made for each other. As for the band, I know notheeng, but the gentleman who emerges at the end does look a little like that soulful pianist, Ramsey Lewis, whose name is mentioned in the comments.

Time marches on of course and Kurt Elling is now one of the elder statesmen of vocal jazz, while the ‘acrobat of scat’, as Al Jarreau has been called, is now six feet under, dying in 2017 mere days after announcing his retirement – which suggests that it’s not a viable thing for lifelong entertainers to attempt. He left a fair old legacy, some of it like 1977’s Look To The Rainbow still as fresh as the day it was made, some of it that hasn’t worn too well over time; while Kurt Elling continues to compile his own. Their backgrounds weren’t unrecognisably different: the son of a preacher man and a mother who played piano in church, Jarreau sang with the Indigos, no doubt a doo-wop group, in the early ‘60s before singing with a piano trio led by George Duke and going professional at the end of the decade; while Elling was the son of a Lutheran choir master and grew up singing in choirs before developing his interest in jazz in general while at college and vocalese specifically courtesy of another male jazz singer whose vocal timbre is not that dissimilar, Mark Murphy. He sent a cassette demo to Blue Note – and got the gig! Fortune favours the brave.

Those overlapping influences gelled in these four minutes of sheer bravura. ‘Amazing’ is, as an observer comments, one of the most over-employed words in the English language – on a par these days with ‘massive’ and ‘awesome’ – but this performance of a tricky jazz standard is dazzling, delightful and truly amazing.

Cannonball Adderley Sextet - ‘Jive Samba’

Picking up for a mere song the other day a still-sealed copy of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet recorded live in concert by the Europe1 radio station in 1960 and 1961 reminded me that this was a band built more for the stage than the studio (c.f. its leader, built for comfort rather than speed.) The evidence is there in the plethora of live performances available on YouTube and the number of albums the Adderley band released that were recorded live. Not that the studio recordings were inferior, far from it, but concerts such as In San Francisco seem to capture Cannon’s band at its spontaneous best. Not only did his well-drilled small bands strut their simple soulful stuff with impeccable musicianship, but Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley was the most genial of hosts. A complete contrast to his former Kind Of Blue, late ‘50s sextet leader, Miles Davis, the burly alto saxophonist’s announcements are a delight: courteous, witty and informative, a little like Dizzy Gillespie’s but a little less tongue-in-cheek. Is there just a hint of arch amusement, as if poking fun at an outmoded tradition, or can he truly be that polite? I tried to find a video performance that included one such peroration, but the closest I got was a performance of brother Nat Adderley’s best-known number, ‘Work Song’, on Jazz Scene hosted by Oscar Brown jr., who wrote a set of celebrated lyrics that turned the song into a hip chain-gang anthem. Alas, the sound quality is fairly poor and the number itself so well known as to have become almost derivative.

While possibly better known as a quintet, I prefer the Adderleys’ sextet format, largely because of the musicians chosen to make up the number: latterly, the erudite and almost guru-like Charles Lloyd, whose career after a period of self-imposed exile was reborn in the company of Michel Petrucciani; and before that, William Evans, or Yusef Lateef as he found fame, who occupied the sixth seat between 1962-1964. Lateef’s use of flute and oboe lent his music the exotic Eastern quality that probably influenced John Coltrane among others. So… I focused my search on the sextet.

In the end, it was a toss-up between two numbers culled from a 1963 concert in Switzerland. As well as a nice sharp focus and sound quality, the fire and spontaneity of the performance are almost in inverse proportion to the stereotype of the Swiss national character. In the blue corner is a rendition of the lesser-known ‘Jessica’s Birthday’, in which the sextet manages to sound like a little big band, swinging with the gusto of Count Basie’s Orchestra in its pomp, with each soloist in turn urged on intermittently by the other two riffing members of the brass section, and Joe Zawinul comping for all he’s worth on the piano. Individuals in the audience spotted by the camera look curiously contemplative, even bored in a Swiss kind of way.

In the red corner, however, is a version of ‘(The) Jive Samba’, another stomper written by brother Nat and covered by everyone from Quincy Jones to Jack Costanzo and Gerry Woo, whose 1968 version would become a salsa classic. It finds the band positively on fire. Backed by the favoured rock-solid rhythm section of Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums, the players peel off one fantastic solo after another: first Cannonball, who shows that the influence of rhythm and blues alto saxophonists such as Louis Jordan and Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson was as potent as that of Charlie Parker and Benny Carter; then his younger brother, who might have preferred the more mellow cornet but who certainly doesn’t hold back during a spot that suggests the influence of Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry; then Yusef Lateef whose flute solo is worthy of Roland Kirk; and finally Joe Zawinul, still fairly fresh from his native Vienna and still at this point with hair, no doubt held in place by some sort of preparation, who shows less than a decade before he went electric and synthesised in Weather Report that he could be as funky a pianist as a predecessor in the outfit, Bobby Timmons. It’s as near to a complete small-group soul-jazz performance as you could wish for.

The big question remains: why Cannonball? Reputedly, it’s a corruption of ‘cannibal’, according to the liner notes of En Concert Avec Europe1, a name given to him by a friend back home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in recognition of his appetite. Although he died just shy of his 47^th birthday from a stroke, his girth probably didn’t help. Nevertheless, he packed a lot into his abbreviated life. During national service, he hooked up with the pianist Junior Mance and trombonist Curtis Fuller and led his first band, the 36^th Army Band. After leaving Florida to try his luck in New York at the urging of ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson and others, he quickly gained a reputation as the new Charlie Parker, forming his first quintet with Nat, with an alto sax and trumpet/cornet front line modelled on the Parker and Gillespie bebop combo. After serving time with Miles Davis and the blind British pianist George Shearing, his quintet and sextet became long-running fixtures on the scene. Latterly, George Duke took over the pianist’s chair and the outfit leaned more towards the kind of electric funk-jazz (that would evolve into a smoother jazz-funk} sound that Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Cannonball’s long-term sideman Joe Zawinul were pioneering.

As befits anyone with such a moniker, Cannonball never appeared to take himself too seriously, either as a musician or a compère. It’s jazz, Jim, but not the deep, serious permutation that tends to turn off the casual listener. He and his brother and their ever-excellent sidemen made the kind of jovial, optimistic music typified by the evergreen ‘Jive Samba’.

 

Wynton Marsalis with the Jazz at the Lincoln Centre Orchestra feat. Wayne Shorter - ‘Yes or No’

Opinions vary about Wynton Marsalis. For one who plays the trumpet so brilliantly and composes so prolifically, he attracts a lot of opprobrium. Perhaps that’s the problem: it might all seem to come too easily to him. Big band, small band, classical orchestra, suite, dance piece; he can do ‘em all. ‘I’m a jazz musician who can play classical music,’ he has described himself. Perhaps that’s what upset the notoriously truculent Miles Davis, who (in)famously cold-shouldered Young Wynton at a concert once in Vancouver. Miles was a lifelong innovator with a limited technique; maybe he was a trifle jealous. Maybe it’s the way that Wynton does ‘em all: Shouldn’t someone so gifted, with so much class and style and technique, be more of an original? Perhaps his respect for the jazz elders he venerates is a little too respectful. Who knows? It’s evident that his father, the pianist Ellis, and his brothers Branford the saxophonist, Delpheayo the trombonist and Jason the drummer never attract the detractors in such numbers.

I certainly like Wynton Marsalis. Very much. Apart from the fact that he spells it with an ‘i’ and not a ‘y’ (which is akin to ‘u’ for ‘you’), his Citi Movement is one of my favourite studio albums of the modern era and the (count ‘em) 7-CD Live at the Village Vanguard is a monumental live recording. And I like him, too, as a commentator. On documentaries, he talks eloquently and passionately from a genuine love for and knowledge of jazz heritage.

All of which suggests that it’s high time to spotlight him in some capacity. I thought about that extraordinary live concert in separate rooms that he stage-managed during COVID lockdown. To my technologically-challenged mind, the logistics of getting the Lincoln Centre Orchestra together-but-apart to play note-perfect versions of numbers like ‘Walkin’’ that still manage to swing are mind-boggling. Extraordinary as it is, however, it does lack the chemistry or whatever it is that makes a live performance so special. More a curio for a curious time.

This one, though, is something else again. It’s made with more or less the same musicians, gathered together under Marsalis’ direction as the Lincoln Centre Orchestra, but it features an octogenarian Wayne Shorter and his music. And since Shorter got slightly short shrift as one part of Weather Report in an earlier chapter, it kills more than one luminous bird with one stone. It’s a homage to one of the finest jazz composers of his or any time while that composer was still alive, always a consummation devoutly to be wished. Moreover, despite the advancing years, Shorter clearly hadn’t lost his chops. It’s lovely to see him once again on tenor rather than soprano sax on this sumptuous version of a number that appeared on his second solo album for Blue Note, 1964’s Juju. Shorter’s is the first of three very polished solos, with Marsalis and then pianist Dan Nimmer following suit. The saxophonist’s tone still bears some distant echo of the early influence of John Coltrane, but it’s the almost imperceptible quality of melancholy that made him such an individual stylist and characterised so many of his greatest compositions. Marsalis solos almost nonchalantly with the burnished tone and lyrical precision of earlier gods, Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown. Outside of this orchestra, I’ve never heard Dan Nimmer. There’s a distinct note in his solo of McCoy Tyner, who was Shorter’s pianist on his first two Blue Note albums. 

 

One reason why I like Wynton Marsalis the human being so much is that he’s always so loyal to and generous about his sidemen, whether cohorts in the Lincoln Centre Orchestra or protégés and ‘homeys’ from his native New Orleans in his small groups of an earlier time. While critics like the almost infatuated Stanley Crouch were busy lauding him as the great new classicist, the keeper of the flame and the heir apparent to Duke Ellington, Marsalis has never appeared to let his ego get the better of him. His principal impulses seem to be those of (proscribed) experimentation, education and entertainment. Now there’s an idea for a book: Wynton Marsalis and the Three Es. For all his remarkable technical prowess – he learned trumpet as a child, was playing his first concertos as a young teenager and was assessed by the famous classical trumpeter Maurice André as ‘potentially the greatest [classical] trumpeter of all time’ – Marsalis is essentially a child of the Crescent City, where they like nothing better than to strut their stuff on the streets with the marching bands on Mardi Gras. He has never lost, as this video illustrates in my belief and to employ the title of his 1993 album, that essential Resolution to Swing.

 

Madeleine Peyroux - 'Dance Me To The End Of Love'

I confess. I once owned a 7” single by Dean Martin: a slurred version of the bluegrass musician John Hartford’s song, ‘Gentle On My Mind’. The song won a number of Grammy awards, which justifies my purchase with the benefit of hindsight, but I sold all evidence of it at the time when I became a serious fan of prog-rock in my youth. In those days, it wasn’t even cool to own a 7” single, let alone one sung by a member of the Brat Pack.

What, you might ask, has all this got to do with Madeleine Peyroux? Well, she banishes all traces of any residual embarrassment by transforming the song into something lush and beautiful on her album, The Blue Room. Despite the presence of musicians of the calibre of Larry Goldings on organ and Dean Parks on electric guitar, for a Madeleine Peyroux release, it’s just a little too awash with strings for my taste and you could argue that it’s more quality pop (even veering into country territory at times) than it is jazz. But that would be to deny her legitimate jazz singer’s ability to transform material by the likes of Buddy Holly, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon – in a similar way to Cassandra Wilson – into something that takes on a new dimension – and to do it with a voice that reminds many punters of Billie Holiday.

So that’s by way of prefacing this wonderful example of a genuine jazz singer’s art: a live version of another Leonard Cohen, ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’, the first number on her breakout second album, Careless Love, and arguably the definitive interpretation of a Cohen song. In fact, there are two versions and it’s very hard to draw a line between the two. There’s her performance from 16 years ago, which is slightly shorter – and therefore suggestive that the instrumental introduction heard on the version I chose finally has been elided. The band play impeccably on both versions, with an electric organ and violin added on this more recent live-in-LA rendition, while the accordion from the older one has been dispensed with. But it’s her voice itself that finally clinched it. On the older version, she sounds ever so slightly more mannered, and one or two commentators even complained that she strayed off tune on occasions. In fact, the singer had to have a cyst surgically removed from her vocal chords back in 2004 and she revealed that it took so long to re-train her voice that she even considered giving up singing. So we should lend her a little compassion and understanding. Even so, I feel that on the later rendition the ‘distinctive, honeyed croon’ (as it’s described on her website) and the Billie-esque timbre are slightly more evident. Listen to both and see what you think…

When I first came across young Ms. Peyroux, I thought for some reason best known to myself that her fluency in French suggested she must be a French Canadian. Not a bit of it. She is as American as pumpkin pie, born it seems in the hip university city of Athens, Georgia, which spawned the B52s and R.E.M. among others. She was brought up in New York and California, then moved to Paris with her mother as a 12-year-old. That by now familiar cover of Careless Love, showing her as a barefoot street urchin, became synonymous in my mind with her time spent busking on the streets of Paris, playing apparently with street musicians in the Latin Quarter. Having done her time and learnt her trade, she was discovered by Atlantic Records, who released her debut album, Dreamland.

She recorded the best-selling follow-up on Rounder Records with Joni Mitchell’s ex, Larry Klein, in the production seat. And if all that failed to add up to someone seriously hip, she worked subsequently with the likes of Walter Becker, k.d. lang, Marc Ribot, Allen Toussaint and Meshell Ndegeocello. Enough to make you spit were it not for the fact that Madeleine Peyroux seems to be a seriously decent and thoughtful human being, who acknowledges Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone among her teachers and heroes, who cites the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson as a ‘spoken-word genius’ and who suggests that ‘African American music has been the one constant, true path in [her] life.’ Her recent, ninth album, Let’s Walk – featuring more of her original songs this time than covers – was selected as one of the albums of the year by Konstantin Rega on All About Jazz. 

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case: Madeleine Peyroux is a serious and seriously good jazz singer.

James Carter - 'I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone'

Although you could put up a very strong case in its favour, even if James Carter weren’t the finest saxophonist of his generation, he’s undeniably the snappiest dresser. I saw him perform at the little local annual jazz festival in Souillac on the Lot/Dordogne border back in the year 2000 or 2001, whenever he was pushing his tribute to Django Reinhardt, Chasin’ The Gypsy. He was on top form and looked the business that night in either the loud checked suit on the back cover of the album or something equally lurid. My friend, who wasn’t then and probably still isn’t really into jazz, was knocked out by the saxophonist. Admittedly, James treated his audience to some fiery rhythm & blues à la Big Jay McNeely in his encore, but it was a testimony to his ability as a jazzman to preach to the unconverted.

My introduction to James Carter came with a promotional cassette copy of his marvellous third solo album, The Real Quietstorm – one of the finest jazz albums of the 1990s in my ‘umble. He sports another million-dollar suit on its cover (as well as a tie that would give Cab Calloway a run for his money), but more to the point the nine numbers confirm how equally comfortable he was and is with ballads and with up-tempo numbers, and with the baritone, tenor, alto and soprano saxes as well as the bass flute and the wonderful velvety bass clarinet, an instrument that’s reputedly very difficult to play (as well as afford). It sounds like a recipe for a slightly annoying showcase for his considerable talents, but never comes over thus. It’s simply that he was young and spirited and just so darn good on whatever he picks up to play.

Living in an age where anyone in the audience can record a performance on their phone, you are spoilt for choice of ‘JC in The House’ on YouTube: JC in the context of an organ trio, showing himself to be the inheritor of Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis’s mantle; JC duelling tenors with his closest contemporary rival, Joshua Redman; JC with a big band; JC the lush balladeer. In the end, I plumped for the latter – and in particular two performances: one at the Marciac Jazz Festival in 2016 as part of an organ trio, which would have done quite nicely had it not been for the other: effectively a 7½-minute solo in which he turns his tenor into what Don Byas dubbed a ‘sexophone’. It’s lush rhapsodic stuff that makes your toes curl and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on edge. Not yet 30, it is a precocious and virtuoso performance. Commentators object to ‘all that popping and slapping crap,’ but what little there is could be put down to youthful exuberance. Without a certain element of show-boating, there wouldn’t be that magical moment just before the end when someone in the audience whistles and Carter responds instantaneously with a high note and a wry smirk.

It’s no accident that among the vintage saxophones Carter owns is one that once belonged to Don Byas. Even as a young tyro, Carter always respectfully acknowledged his debt to the elders. If he’s anyone’s heir apparent, it’s probably the man from Muskogee’s, although there’s more than a suggestion sometimes of Ben Webster, whom he played in Robert Altman’s 1996 film, Kansas City. Here he is then, performing with extraordinary élan ‘I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone’, written by the jump-blues pianist and band leader Buddy Johnson, who also wrote the immortal ‘Since I Fell For You’. Because the spotlight is so much on Carter himself, it’s very difficult to identify who’s with him in the band, but given that it’s 1997, it could well be his regular band of Craig Taborn on piano, Jaribu Shahid on bass and Tami Tabbal on drums.

The Detroit-born saxophonist has matured nicely since his more exuberant youth. He has brought out umpteen albums under his own name and contributed to umpteen more – playing majestically, for example, on pianist Cyrus Chestnut’s eponymous album and, somewhat surprisingly, Madeleine Peyroux’s Dreamland. Like Chick Corea, he’s always ready to form genre-specific bands to focus on the different aspects of music that he loves: his Elektric Outlet, for example, probably helps to satisfy his ‘frustrated guitarist’ urge. His organ trio has released a Live From Newport Jazz album on Blue Note, still the jazz musician’s stamp of approval. With so much talent to spare, it’s hardly surprising that he’s not content to sit still and blow permutations on the same theme. The New York Times has described him as ‘one of the most charismatic and powerful soloists in jazz’, and it’s the power allied to the loving finesse of this performance that makes it in my book so outstanding. Whether he’s playing the huge, cumbersome bass sax (as he does on Chasin’ The Gypsy) or the baritone, tenor, alto or soprano saxophones, he does it with such confidence and panache that it’s hard not to agree with the Washington Post’s verdict that ‘to hear saxophonist James Carter is to be blown away.’