Miles Davis & John Coltrane - So What

Any attempt to sketch the history of jazz in 50 videos is probably doomed to failure. Nevertheless, I've set out to try, so I'm looking for any opportunity to cheat. With a mere 25 million views, this choice picks itself while illustrating two giants of the pantheon in their prime at once, thus leaving me room for A.N. Other further on up the road. In terms of his influence on the evolution of the music, Miles Davis must be up there with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, while John Coltrane is bubbling just under that kind of level.

Coltrane, as most jazz fans know, was an integral part of Miles Davis' first great quintet during the second half of the Fifties, first with the Prestige label and then with the higher profile Columbia label. Their time together there culminated in Kind Of Blue, the apotheosis of jazz's annus mirabilis of 1959. And, as anyone with a passing interest in jazz appreciates, Kind Of Blue is generally quoted as the greatest jazz album ever made; the Citizen Kane of recorded music. It certainly leapt into my top 3 on hearing the five mellow moody melodies for the first time. And there it has stayed ever since, along with Sergeant Pepper and What's Going On, never to be displaced. I can't remember where or when I first heard it, unlike the other two, but I brought back my copy from New York on one of the first Virgin Atlantic flights, along with the later In A Silent Way, both with the American red label rather than the equivalent British orange CBS label. So I was a happy bunny. Surprisingly, I didn't sign and date the inner sleeve, which suggests that I must have grown up a little by then. Probably the early Eighties, when I discovered that there was much, much more to Miles Davis than his contemporary electrified racket (as I considered it then).

Since I have just finished reading an excellent analysis of the biggest selling jazz record of all time by Ashley Kahn (subtitled Miles Davis and the Making of a Masterpiece), what could be more suitable at this juncture than this interpretation of the luminous opening track, named for one of the famously surly trumpeter's throwaway put-downs of choice? (I had a surly friend at school who used to like subverting anything you might deem witty or urgent with his own brand of bathos, and those two little words certainly hurt. Instant deflation.)

This version of 'So What' was recorded during the hiatus between the album's two studio sessions for a TV programme entitled The Sound of Miles Davis. It's a fascinating if slightly erroneous glimpse into the methodology of those two single-day recording sessions. Erroneous because of the absence of Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley (with a migraine), whose alto sax had latterly turned the quintet into a sextet, and pianist Bill Evans, whose place was taken here by Wynton Kelly, who appeared only on the album's second track, 'Freddie Freeloader'. The stray trombonists, who wander about like lost souls with horns until they are called upon to add a little grist to the mill, belonged to the Gil Evans orchestra, which was waiting in the wings to perform extracts from the first Evans/Davis collaboration, Miles Ahead, during the second part of the programme. Otherwise, the line-up is as per the LP: Coltrane and Davis backed by the redoubtable Paul Chambers, Coltrane's 'Mr. P.C.', destined to die in his mid 30s, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, who made it to 91, the last surviving member of the sextet. I saw the distinguished Mr. J.C. at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1985 as part of a New York All Stars pick-up group and was almost overcome in the presence of such a giant.

Sharp-suited as he always was in those days, Miles leads things off after the initial statement of the two-note theme and sets the tone and pace (slightly faster than the languid recorded version) for the solos to follow. Handing the baton on to John Coltrane, he then wanders off to the wings for a crafty fag – a tendency of his that created its fair share of critical furore, inspiring in the process Eddie Jefferson, a pioneer of 'vocalese' (putting words to famous solos), to sing in his tribute: 'Miles Davis left the stage... So what!?' Coltrane then builds on the leader's outline in his habitual questing and rather-more-verbose fashion that sometimes infuriated his more elliptical leader. It's actually a remarkably restrained performance from the man they still call JC, and it's interesting to compare it to a version of his staple, 'Impressions', a few years later with his legendary quartet of the first half of the Sixties. You can hear the influence of 'So What' underlying the whole piece, so much so that Coltrane gave it this title until he hit upon something more permanent.

This, I suppose, was both the beauty and the limitations of the modal or scalar approach to jazz improvisation, which made Kind of Blue so groundbreaking at the time. The idea of improvising within a single scale (or two) rather than around a multitude of chord changes hardly seems a big deal now in the light of what was to follow, but the much simpler, even simplistic, modal idea pioneered by composer, band leader and theorist, George Russell, seemed radical in 1959. Herbie Hancock talked of never having conceived another way of playing jazz till Kind of Blue appeared. It was why Davis wanted the ex-Russell sideman, Bill Evans, to replace Wynton Kelly on this album, as together (although he subsequently short-changed the great romanticist by denying him at least two co-composition credits) they could orchestrate a sound that offered more freedom and space and melodic possibility. The proof of the pudding is in the end product's sense of space and beauty and the hypnotic hold it achieves, which no doubt explains its timelessness.

Meanwhile, back in the video, Wynton Kelly plays a somewhat more blues-based solo than Evans' light, impressionistic solo on the record, with Miles and Coltrane prodding him with the two-note refrain. Miles then takes a second solo as stand-in for the man with the migraine, this time helped along by the gang of three trombonists, before they all leave Paul Chambers to re-state the initial riff in the company of Jimmy Cobb's masterful cymbal work.

Kind of Blue has cast its spell on me for decades, but in all that time I never quite understood how modal improvisation differed from one based around chord changes. I guess you have to be a musician. However, Ashley Kahn quotes a friend in his book who likens the latter, and bebop in particular, to a house-party where you visit all the rooms in a fairly frenetic fashion and have fun chatting to everyone in them; whereas in a modal party you can have an equally good time just chilling in the living room with the occasional drink from the kitchen. At my stage of life I know which one appeals to me more.

And finally... lest anyone should question this video's quota of cool, let me draw your attention to Bailey Main's comment on YouTube: 'I don't own a refrigerator, I just play this song to my food.'

 

Wes Montgomery - Full House

While trying to keep cool in the ferocious heat of a record-breaking summer, I did a lot of listening to Wes Montgomery. No other jazz guitarist had quite such a relaxing way with a blocked-chord. He wasn't the first to earn fame – and, one hopes, a little fortune – playing the electric guitar in a jazz context, the likes of Charlie Christian and Jimmy Raney came before him, but he was surely the most influential: George Benson being the most obvious guitarist touched by his style; and Ronny Jordan, hip Brit of the 1990s' re-birth of the cool, being a virtual slave to his rhythm. B.B. King, no less, suggested that there was never a finer guitarist than Wes.

This clip comes from 'Jazz 625', a priceless resource of live performances recorded during the mid 1960s for the new BBC2, when it was a true channel of the arts. I captured whatever I could on video when they were shown again in the '90s just before moving to rural France and fearing that I might be devoid of culture in the middle of nowhere: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck and others. Of course, I don't need them anymore; now you can find them all on YouTube.

The guitarist and his quartet were filmed in 1965, a time when John Leslie 'Wes' Montgomery had supposedly taken the pieces of silver that Verve offered him to sell out his jazz soul by recording hummable numbers with big band backings – which garnered considerable commercial success. However, he did continue to record in a small-group context and 1965 was also the year of Smokin' At The Half Note with the Wynton Kelly trio, one of the finest live albums that a jazz guitarist ever consigned to vinyl – and Wes recorded a few. From Verve, he went to the truly middle of the road A&M label of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss for the final year of a career that was tragically truncated by a heart attack in 1968.

I didn't need to do much hunting for this video. There are other clips from the BBC2 broadcast, including a stunning version of Thelonious Monk's anthem, 'Round Midnight', the song that cast such a spell on the Baronness Pannonica de Koenigswarter that she abandoned five children and a husband back home to settle in New York and become Monk's patron. But Montgomery was equally adept at ballads (try also a lovely version of 'Here's That Rainy Day Again' with the Stan Tracey trio) and up-tempo numbers, and because he swung so effortlessly, so naturally and infectiously, I chose the title track of Full House, a fine album he made in 1962 with Wynton Kelly and saxophonist Johnny Griffin. There's another version of it available, but with a pick-up trio of Dutch jazz musicians and without the bonus of an awkward introduction by Humphrey Lyttleton and a snippet of another Montgomery staple, 'West Coast Blues'. At the risk of (justifiable) accusations of snobbery, I plumped for this one: it was his regular touring group of the time, after all; the same group with whom he recorded another splendid live album in 1965, this time in Paris. The quartet featured the rarely seen Harold 'Big Hands' Mabern on piano, long-term associate of trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist, George Coleman. 

 

Wes Montgomery clearly had big hands, too. Those rangy digits spread across the facia of his Gibson Super 400 like some exotic tarantula. Another reason why this particular video is so fascinating is that it shows, in close-up, the extraordinary technique that he taught himself growing up as a teenager in Indianopolis (how dey do dat, for heaven's sake?). As a non-musician, I don't profess to understand unison octaves and parallel blocked chords, but you can see and hear clearly how he assimilated Django Reinhardt in his technique and the innate ability to swing that he heard in his first inspiration, Charlie Christian. What defines Montgomery's sound more than anything, though, is the use of his thumb to pluck the strings rather than a plectrum or fingernails. Chris Albertson, who writes the liner notes to my copy of the Verve Small Group Recordings, quotes a pompous English critic who concluded in some essay that his use of the thumb 'reflects a repressed racial minority's eternal quest that which will make him stand apart from his former masters.' Good grief.

The truth was much more prosaic and probably typical of this modest, genial man. Unwilling to disturb his neighbours, Wes 'started using the fat part of [his] thumb to pluck the strings. Then, to make it even quieter, [he] began the octave thing, playing the melody line in two different registers at the same time.' Mmm, sometimes the greatest discoveries happen by accident.

A commentator by the handle of Thumping Thromnambular is amazed not just by Montgomery's playing, but also by his calm demeanour. 'He's playing that like he's writing a grocery list.' Mentally rather than actually, one supposes. But yes, he comes over as so laid back you wonder whether he can right himself again. It's his sheer enjoyment of what he, Mabern, bassist Arthur Harper and drummer Jimmy Lovelace are playing that is so endearing. One of the hardest working men in show business, he must have loved his work. He started off with Lionel Hampton's swinging-est of swing bands, then returned to Indianapolis to work in a day job throughout most of the 1950s, while playing in local bars virtually every night, often in the company of his brothers Monk on bass and Buddy on vibes, latterly as the Montgomery Brothers.

Whatever the critics think of his late period, Wes Montgomery fully earned his success. Too bad and too sad that his time in the sun was so short.  

Sun Ra Arkestra - Enlightenment/Love In Outer Space/King Porter Stomp

They came from outer space – and this video offers incontrovertible proof. It also carries a government health warning: Jazz can seriously flip your wig, daddyo.

It would have been nice and neat to have followed Duke Ellington's 'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue' with the Arkestra's take on 'Take the A-Train', that perennial classic written by Ellington's right-hand man, 'Swee' Pea' himself, Billy Strayhorn. You can tell from the leader's extraordinary helmet-headgear that it comes from the same appearance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. But I wouldn't wish to give a particular friend of mine yet more reason to tell people why he hates jazz. Our Mr. Ra, born to all intents and purposes Herman 'Sonny' Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, but actually deriving from Saturn, leads off with a hugely impressive solo-piano intro that sounds like a Cecil Taylor take on a meeting of Duke Ellington and Arnold Schoenberg. When the band kicks in, there's a long tenor solo by one of the Arkestra's mainstays, the legendary John Gilmore, that's liable to give the unwary a dose of the screaming ab-dabs. It's then followed, moreover, by that most tedious of jazz conventions: a drum solo. An overlong drum solo at that, by Clifford Jarvis. So I felt it best not to alienate unwary readers.

Sun Ra was given to branding his Arkestra with a bewildering array of weird permutations. On the album that celebrated their appearance at Montreux, they are labelled as the Intergalactic Cosmo Arkestra. They may have come from outer space, but it was definitely via Africa, as this selection illustrates so clearly in the joyfully rhythmic 'Love In Outer Space' section. For all its editing faults – and 'Love In Outer Space' isn't just cut off in its prime, it's positively amputated – this video is priceless in so many ways: singer June Tyson's introductory invitation to be of their space world, dressed in an extraordinary metallic costume that makes her look like some kind of medieval knight; the oompa-loompa dancers like urchins out of one of those weird Eastern European fairy tales they used to show on BBC television when I was a lad; the thrilling massed percussion and general musical mayhem that accompanies the dancers as Sun Ra picks out the outer space theme of one of the Arkestra's best-known numbers on a very lo-fi keyboard synthesiser; Sun Ra's somewhat reticent introduction to 'King Porter Stomp' in an Alabaman drawl that makes it sound like 'Cayn't Put a Stop'; the loose-limbed performance in the spirit of the Roaring Twenties of the Jelly Roll Morton chestnut when the band lays down its drums and takes up the brass once more.

Yes sirree Bob, this may not be perfect, but it seems best to capture what Sun Ra's extraordinary band – these days, you could probably use the trendy term 'collective' with some justification – was all about. On one hand, they're seemingly barking mad, the whole lot of them; on the other hand, they're an incredibly tight and well-drilled outfit, born of communal living and rigorous practice. Sun Ra, while still Sonny Blount, learnt his big-band trade as pianist for a year or so with one of the first great orchestras of the era, that of Fletcher Henderson, and he liked to include numbers from Henderson's repertoire, such as 'King Porter Stomp' and the glorious 'Queer Notions'. During the late 1950s, before they took off for the Planet Venus to spend the rest of their days travelling the space ways, his embryonic Arkestra produced brilliant but more jazz-classical albums like Jazz In Silhouette in which they sound not too many planets apart from Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.

A conscientious objector in World War 2, which for a black American man at the time must have been an incredibly brave and single-minded stance to take, Sun Ra wasn't just a band leader and showman, but more of an extraterrestrial philosopher and cosmic mystic. Following a kind of out-of-body mystical experience as a young man in the 1930s, when he found himself on the Planet Saturn, his apparently dotty pronouncements inspired both ridicule and devotion. Like James Brown, he was also quite a disciplinarian in his endeavour to manifest the music of the spheres that he heard in his helmeted head. 'I tell my Arkestra that all humanity is in some kind of restricted limitation, but they're in the Ra jail, and it's the best in the world.' Musicians of the calibre of John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen, to name but three, were happy enough to stay 'in the Ra jail' for as long as the likes of Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart and Paul Gonsalves were happy to stay in the Ellington jail. They may have gone off from time to time to do their own things, but the stalwarts always returned to stick by their 'master' through thick and thin.

At the time of writing, alto-saxophonist Marshall Allen is still marshalling new versions of the Arkestra at the age of 98. Here's a fantastic take on 'Love In Outer Space' recorded in 2014 for the BBC's Jazz On 3 series. Marshall Allen and Danny Ray Thompson (on baritone sax and percussion) are two hardy perennials from the Arkestra's heyday, and there are young tyros like Tara Middleton on vocals and violin and Shabaka Hutchings on that beautiful, melancholic instrument, the bass clarinet. It should disavow any lingering doubts that the Arkestra was just a collection of demented weirdos. Those cats – and these cats – sure can play.

A dear friend of mine who left the planet prematurely a few years ago described to me the out-of-mind, out-of-world experience of seeing Sun Ra and his acolytes live in concert. He drew parallels with two of his heroes, Captain Beefheart and the beatnik raconteur and comic monologist, Lord Buckley. All three could be described as off-the-wall, as well as geniuses in their own right. It's a shame he never explored the parallels in a book. Sun Ra's life and works no doubt filled the pages of several books. I don't know, though, whether any such tome could answer Gavin Vlietstra's YouTube question: 'Is Sun Ra's hat made out of soda can lids?'