Billie Holiday & All Star Band - 'Fine And Mellow'

Time for some blues, and who better than Billie Holiday at the end of her career, when she was a personification of the blues? The focus isn't sharp, but this lends the video a rather spectral quality that seems appropriate for such a legion of giants from the past, many of whom were already metaphorical ghosts from the bygone swing era. It's one of the most famous live broadcasts in jazz history, so even if the music weren't as fine and mellow as it certainly is, it would be impossible to overlook this one.

The performance was broadcast live from CBS Studio 58 on December 8^th, 1957 as part of the CBS TV series, The Seven Lively Arts. The Columbia arm of the mighty CBS corporation subsequently released an album based on the broadcast the following year (although it wasn't a direct transcript of this live performance). The assembly of musicians, which has been described as possibly the finest ever, included the three tenor saxophonists who were arguably the most important progenitors of their instrument in a jazz context. In order of their solos: Ben Webster, late of the Duke Ellington orchestra and sometimes nicknamed 'The Brute' even though he could melt the heart of the most diehard misanthrope with a single breathy note from his horn, who would move to Europe in 1964 and end his days in Copenhagen; Lester Young, late of the Count Basie orchestra, and Billie Holiday's confidante and 'Prez' (or 'Pres'), who wore his pork-pie hat and blew his light-as-a-feather tenor at the jauntiest of angles; and Coleman Hawkins, 'Bean', who developed his gruff reedy sound in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra as the very first star of the tenor saxophone.

Add to that list: star of the West Coast 'cool school' and pioneer with Chet Baker of the piano-less quartet, Gerry Mulligan on the big baritone horn, looking as preppy as a college boy – as he did in the '50s before the beard took over in the more hirsute '60s; the bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, Roy 'Little Jazz' Eldridge on trumpet, who gave Anita O'Day her first hit with 'Let Me Off Uptown' and whose solo features the kind of top-note theatrics that he employed as a regular for Norman Granz's barn-storming Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts; and, thoroughly 'good egg' and, like Lester Young, a great wearer of hats (although disappointingly both are bare-headed here), Vic Dickenson on trombone.

Virtually unseen, even as we pull back at the end are: house pianist for the Prestige label and Billie Holiday's accompanist for the last two years or so of her life, Mal Waldron on piano; Doc Cheatham on second trumpet; Danny Barker on guitar; Osie Johnson on drums; and Milt Hinton on bass, a keen photographer who recorded many such moments as these for posterity.

It is, though, Billie Holiday of course who's the real star of the show. She's the one who introduces the piece and the 'two kinds of blues: happy blues and sad blues' in a voice that by then was worn out by singing, drugs and her legendary life of abuse, neglect, a certain fame and probably ultimate disappointment. A lot of her late recordings are almost too tired and world-weary to listen to. If she sang 'happy blues' in her early days, skipping lightly through popular songs of the day in a voice that 'rang like a bell and went a mile', just behind the beat of big bands led by the likes of Teddy Wilson and Count Basie, by her early 40s she sounded like she was singing painfully 'sad blues'. The camera takes no prisoners. In close-up, she looks half-stoned and around 20 years older than someone in her early middle age, yet her face lights up as she listens to what these great musicians have to offer, most famously during Lester Young's brief and equally weary solo just past the two-minute marker. As ABC once sang, 'that's the look, the look of love.'

Lady Day and her President were supposedly never actually lovers, but they were soul-mates who shared a special bond and understood each other's pain and glory. Lester Young was scarred by his time in a white man's army at the tail end of the war, which he described as 'a nightmare – one mad nightmare.' He and Billie had just a couple of years to live after this performance was recorded. The great Canadian orchestrator, Gil Evans, was due to make an album with the saxophonist, but revealed that although 'he wanted to make the album, ... he wanted to die more.' Young died of a heart attack in a hotel room after getting back from Paris (his story is conflated with those of Bud Powell and Dexter Gordon in Bertrand Tavernier's film, Round Midnight). Billie followed him a few months later. She was refused permission to adopt a baby and supposedly would feed her pet Chihuahua from a baby's bottle. On her deathbed in hospital, she was arrested for possession of narcotics.

 

Pharoah Sanders Quartet - 'Doktor Pitt'

Is this, as one commenter asks, 'the complete jazz track'? It's certainly a 'fantastic, balanced line up, with some amazing individual performances.' Which is why I chose this amid some hot competition. Not without hesitation. If you thought Jessica Williams' 'Love And Hate' was a stretch at 13 minutes, this is double the running time. It is, however, quite astonishing. And, since the Pharoah left the earth a few short weeks ago at the end of September 2022 to find out whether the Creator does indeed have a master plan, his place in these fifty coolest is ordained.

There were two distinct sides to Pharoah Sanders, jazz musician. There was the raging bull with a tenor saxophone, who could produce the kind of sounds from his instrument more often associated with the labour pains of a water buffalo. And then there was the gentle, contemplative musician, who could caress some of the most lyrical arpeggios from his sax this side of Don Byas and Ben Webster. There's a beautiful duet with one of his favourite pianists, John Hicks, recorded in Frankfurt in 1982, in which he plays Hicks' 'After The Morning' with almost spiritual grace and elegance. And there's a notable version of Sanders' anthemic 'Creator Has A Master Plan' recorded 15 years later in Leverkusen with sumptuous sound – but he spends more time singing in his idiosyncratic, sub-Leon Thomas manner than playing the tenor, as well as taking a back seat in terms of solo time to his longest-serving pianist, William Henderson (who was with the white-bearded one one memorable night at the Leadmill in Sheffield in the 1990s when I learnt 'the secrets of the Pharoah'). Then, finally, there's another Sanders classic, 'Thembi', played on TV's short-lived Night Music show in the company of host David Sanborn on alto sax, with Sonny Sharrock on guitar and Omar Hakim on congas among others. Good as it is, though, it would have been a compromise.

Nothing in Sanders' prophetic appearance or the way he played the sax ever smacked of compromise. After all, he came from Little Rock, Arkansas like General Douglas MacArthur, and learnt his stuff at the side of John Coltrane as part of Coltrane's take-no-prisoners combo in the final phase of the leader's truncated career. In Richard Williams' Guardian's obituary, he quotes an American critic who witnessed the group in Philadelphia a year before Coltrane's premature death from liver cancer and reckoned that 'Pharoah Sanders stole the entire performance.' Another observer, this time in Chicago, described Sanders' urgent sound as a 'mad wind screeching through the root-cellars of Hell.' Roll over, Edgar Allen Poe.

So Doktor Pitt it simply had to be. It's another German live performance, this time recorded at a club that appears to be the Subway in Cologne. But it's rather harder to put a date on it. The line-up of John Hicks on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Idris Muhammad suggests either side of 1987, when the same combo recorded Sanders' Africa. Hicks and Muhammad recorded with Sanders the original 12-minute version of 'Doktor Pitt', whoever the good physician was, on the 1980 double album, Journey To The One, then followed it up a year later with the extraordinary live..., with Walter Booker on bass. 'Extraordinary' because it's – in my 'umble – one of the most exciting and intense live albums ever recorded for posterity, with 'Doktor Pitt' almost stealing the honours from the blazing opener, 'You've Got To Have Freedom'. It's five minutes shorter than this chosen video, which ramps up the passion to number 11 on the intensomometer. The sound is a little ragged, so you'll need to ensure that your volume is turned up. Otherwise, just strap yourself in...

After a brief opening statement of theme, Sanders removes the mouthpiece and hands over to John Hicks. Propelled by Curtis Lundy's insistent bass and Idris Muhammad's wonderful metronomic drumming, Hicks launches into the kind of solo that suggests that the spirit entered his soul that night and didn't leave until it was all over. Never mind the invention, the sheer energy he puts into his playing is superhuman. The Pharoah himself must have been used to it, because he stands casually around at first, looking out into the audience as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe only McCoy Tyner playing live with Coltrane on 'My Favourite Things' has generated this kind of ecstasy. Approaching the eight-minute mark, Sanders seems to wake up to the fact that something remarkable is going on here. After nine minutes, that keyboard should surely have been smoking. Finally, after ten minutes of soloing, Hicks hands over to Sanders for his turn. The stoic audience applauds, but how come they weren't yelling and hollering and ready to tear down the walls of the Subway? Hicks was a fabulous pianist. I saw him at the North Sea Jazz Festival in den Haag at around the time that this was recorded, in the company of the splendid Ray Drummond, as rotund as his double bass. Together they were so good, so symbiotically joined, that I had to catch them a second time during those three or four days.

Sanders then takes the baton and runs with it for another nine minutes or so, treating us to the full range of yells, squawks and bellows he was known for, without somehow ever quite losing sight of the melody. Look into his eyes around the 14-minute mark and you know that he, too, is high on the spirit. Or the weed. Or both. The rhythm section all this time is still playing with the same if not more intensity. Everyone's close to high-steria by 19½ minutes and there's only one thing for it: hand over to Idris Muhammad for a collective breather. As I've probably mentioned already, I'm not a fan of drum solos (other than Joe Morello's on 'Take Five'), but this one is pretty nifty because it's inventive without being self-indulgent. Besides, he doesn't outstay his welcome, so there's still enough time for the quartet take us back to infinity and beyond before setting us gently down on dry land. Remarkable! How could anyone gainsay that jazz has a strong spiritual element at its core?

Née Farrell Sanders but purportedly given the name 'Pharoah' by Sun Ra, the doyen of the spiritual brand of jazz that Sanders would espouse throughout his career, the saxophonist has always had a special place in my heart – ever since, in fact, a DJ 'saved my life' one night, or at least nudged my musical being a few points west of the moon. I must have been 15 or 16 at the time when I caught all 18 minutes of a piece played by Pete Drummond on his late-night show on Radio Luxembourg. It was 'Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord', a traditional spiritual adapted by Lonnie Liston Smith, Sanders' resident pianist at the time. Even on my dad's tinny transistor radio, it was utterly mesmerising. Proof of its power to stupefy came a few years later when a disreputable college friend stumbled into my bedroom early one morning when I was playing it on my first serious stereo; the B-side of Deaf Dumb Blind, which I tracked down in the very first Virgin Records store in London. His face and hands black with oil after another contretemps with his Arial motorbike, my friend, a heavy metal fan by looks and inclination, stopped dead in his tracks and asked me what in the name of all things glorious was this? Jazz can not only move, it can re-move.

Pharoah Sanders led me deep into jazz and thence into African music. I owe a debt of thanks to a man who bestrode this earth for over 80 years like a giant.