George Coleman Quartet - 'Amsterdam After Dark'

The number 89 has figured highly these last few days in my chunk of grey matter dedicated to jazz. The irreplaceable Wayne Shorter packed his tenor and soprano saxes for the ultimate trip on the 2^nd March, 2023. And 'Big George' Coleman is celebrating his 89^th birthday with a residence at the Smoke club in New York. My man in Manhattan tells me that he saw George's quartet not long ago at Smalls. It could have been this very concert. The great man apparently had to remain seated for most of the time, but he still sounded good. For such a big man, he has always had the kind of lightness and delicacy of tone that has long made him one of my favourite tenor saxophonists. In a short masterclass video, he talks of how you don't have to squawk and wail, 'you play something really crisp and clean', the hallmark of his long career.

I looked initially for a video from 1989, but that would have been just too darn neat. I was very tempted by a long video of Coleman's octet, especially as the pianist was his fellow Memphis musician, Harold Mabern, who was featured last time out in the company of Lee Morgan. But the tenor solo time is devoted to Sal Nistico rather than Big George. Besides, rather too much time is allocated to Billy Higgins' drum solo and, with the performance clocking in at 15 minutes, viewers might find their patience wearing thin.

For much of his career, though, George Coleman led his own quartet, so what more appropriate than this particular appearance in the last of four editions of Scottish Television's The Jazz Series? And who more appropriate to introduce it than Ronnie Scott, at whose club George Coleman played on several occasions, recording a 'damn fine' live album (Playing Changes) in 1979 with almost the same personnel as here in 1981? Herbie Lewis stands in for the rotund Ray Drummond. 'Smilin' Billy' Higgins is the drummer once more, this time treating us to a brief, educated solo. The pianist is one of the great Latin jazz keyboard masters, who was equally at home in a pure jazz context. Hilton Ruiz died freakishly and tragically prematurely when he fell on the street in New Orleans, having gone to the city to take part in a video to promote a recording in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I was lucky enough to see him play on three occasions, the first as part of the New York All Stars at the 1986 North Sea Jazz Festival in Den Haag, playing with such funky fire and graceful ease that he knocked me off my feet – even though I was seated. Alas, his is only an abbreviated solo, which is why this live version doesn't quite scale the heights of the recorded one, the title track of Coleman's splendid Amsterdam After Dark for Timeless in 1979. Nevertheless, the video's still a ripper and it provides a precious glimpse of the saxophonist playing probably his finest composition live.

George Coleman's career has been long and varied, without ever scaling the heights commensurate with his talent. It's probably typified by his brief time with Miles Davis as the bridge between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, gracing some live recordings and a kind of stop-gap studio album, Seven Steps To Heaven. He was briefly with Max Roach's famous group of the 1950s and, like many others, recorded with Lee Morgan. He may not be quite up at the same level as Sonny Rollins, 92 at time of writing and still going strong, in the pantheon of jazz tenor saxophonists, but few can boast a career of seventy-plus years, and few earned the approval of such a hard and demanding boss as Miles Davis, who said of him that 'George played almost everything perfectly.' He was indeed 'a hell of a musician.'

 

Lee Morgan - 'I Remember Britt'

It must have been something in the water, or 'just one of those crazy things.' American jazz trumpeters back in the day seemed to die tragically young. Yes, the three most influential – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis – managed an early old age, while the splendid Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell and Woody Shaw just about reached their middle years before ill health finished them off; but the list of greats or potential greats who never even saw middle age seems too long to be coincidental: Booker Little, terminated by uraemia at 23; Clifford Brown, golden 'Brownie', killed in a car accident at 25; Fats Navarro, carried off by a combination of hard drugs and ill health at 26; Freddie Webster, struck down by a heart attack at 31; Lee Morgan, shot by his common-law wife at Slugs, where he and his quintet were performing. There were others – Bix Beiderbecke and Bunny Berigan for two – but I hope not too many.

In some ways, Morgan's death was the most tragic. Not because he was the greatest trumpeter of the bunch – many who knew him seemed to think that Clifford Brown could have been the greatest of all – but because he was certainly the most prolific. Emcee John Robinson reels off the names of some of the many albums that Morgan recorded for Blue Note during the 1960s and early '70s in the reverential track 'The Lee Morgan Story' on bass player Ben Williams' album, State Of Art. So there's an element of 'young man gunned down in his prime' about his story. The fact that it was his wife who shot him might suggests that perhaps he had it coming to him, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about the trumpeter, and the fascinating 2016 documentary, I Called Him Morgan, offers an in-depth study of his relationship with Helen Morgan, his troubled wife, that defies stereotypes and intensifies the tragedy. Jymie Merritt, Morgan's former colleague in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his bassist at the time of the slaying, said 'I just couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to think, because they were always together.' Helen Morgan herself, whose tape recording just before her own death was the catalyst for the film, was heard to say 'I couldn't have did this; this must be a dream.'

Shades, perhaps, of another prolific artist, Joe Orton, who also died needlessly at the hands of a deranged lover. Further underscoring the needless aspect of the tragedy is the fact that the shooting coincided with one of the worst New York snowfalls of that era, which prevented an ambulance from reaching the trumpeter in time. Effectively, his wife fatally wounded him, and Lee Morgan slowly bled to death.

The trumpeter from Philadelphia with the trademark slicked-down hairstyle and the crisp, ringing timbre inspired a certain reverence. Quite apart from Ben Williams' 'The Lee Morgan Story', there's a short video in which his regular pianist Harold Mabern tells poignantly of how he witnessed Morgan's assassination, and how deeply the death of his friend and employer affected him. And I shall be forever grateful to a musician in Sheffield, a big fan of Lee Morgan, who relieved us of a very troublesome French live-in tenant (not, I hasten to add, by any such drastic means as murder, but by giving him a room in his own house).

The reverence derives not just from his instrumental technique and mastery, but surely from the man's driven, restless creativity. A bit of a child star on his instrument, he joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band at age 18 for two years and thence Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for three, as a key component of two of the unit's most celebrated combinations: with Wayne Shorter, pianist Bobby Timmons and bass player, Jymie Merritt; and then in an expanded sextet format with Curtis Fuller on trombone. At 'n-n-n-nineteen', he and Fuller were young guns together on John Coltrane's landmark Blue Train, my introduction to a subsequent hero. With a foot now in the Blue Note camp, he made countless solo albums for the label, as well as even more on which he was enlisted as lead trumpet.

Quintessential-lee – and he was given to using his first name for a raft of bad puns as titles – he was a post-bop trumpeter, usually appearing in a quintet setting playing a standard format of statement of theme, individual solos and re-statement of theme. But he was young and questing. Arguably, his finest album as leader bears the symbolic title Search For The New Land. It came just after he found brief popular fame as the darling of soul jazz when his funky, sinuous 'The Sidewinder' – composed off the cuff at the end of a recording session, again according to his fellow Philadelphian, Jymie Merritt – became a surprise smash. The first Lee Morgan in still-fairly-new-fangled CD form I found was the epic three-disc Live At The Lighthouse set – in an excellent second-hand record shop on Jersey, staffed by the most supercilious bunch I ever had the misfortune to encounter. Made in 1970, it shows clearly that the trumpeter was already breaking free of the post-bop chains that had bound him (very successfully, however) for over a decade.

That's mainly why I chose this particular performance. It's essentially the same group as the Lighthouse unit – but with another alumnus of the Jazz Messengers, Billy Harper, standing in for Bennie Maupin, who had gone off to seek fame and fortune as one of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters; and Freddy Waits instead of Mickey Roker on drums. It's two years on and it's now 'Brother Lee Morgan and the quintet' and poignantly it's less than a month before the fatal shooting. 'I Remember Britt' was written by pianist Harold Mabern (I thought at first that it might be some elegiac reference to Duke Ellington's trombonist, Britt Woodman, but he didn't die until the year 2000) and was also part of the Lighthouse repertoire. It's a lovely piece: unusually, it features Billy Harper on flute, and very unusually starts with a variation on 'Frère Jacques'. Morgan plays the mellower flugelhorn and stands back to let Billy Harper take the first solo. When Lee takes his solo next, I love the little, almost subliminal quote from 'Three Blind Mice' right at the beginning. Probably because he's on flugelhorn, you could shut your eyes and imagine that it's Hugh Masekela playing. It's then the turn of Harold Mabern, who reels off a lovely, lyrical and understated solo. We then get the restatement of theme, but it feels much more like composition than formula. It's nice to see a predominantly black audience for once and the loud fashions and Afro hairstyles on display are an added bonus. You can leave it there at 9 minutes 30 seconds, or stay on for Jymie Merritt's homage to Angela Davis, 'Angela', which appears on Lee Morgan's final, eponymous album.

When it comes to individual numbers, there's not a whole lot of choice on YouTube, but what's on offer is precious. Among those I checked out is a real curiosity: Lee Morgan playing the Bobby Timmons classic, 'Moanin'', a staple of the Messengers for many years, in the exalted company of the Oscar Peterson trio. There's nothing at all wrong with it, each individual plays his part well, but it just doesn't seem quite... right. Despite 'Night Train', Oscar Peterson doesn't seem built for this kind of jazz. A genuine contender was 'Theme For Stacey' from 1965, featuring a very short-lived version of the Jazz Messengers that numbered Lee Morgan with Sun Ra's trusty cohort, John Gilmore, on tenor sax and John Hicks on piano, long before he hitched up with Pharoah Sanders. It's one of several from the BBC's late-lamented Jazz 625 series.

If you scroll through the comments to this last one, indeed any of the videos that feature him, you'll appreciate how many people still revere Lee Morgan. I'm not sure, though, that I agree with Clowd Walker, who suggests that 'Lee Morgan played the trumpet the way Miles Davis wished he could have played.' I dare say that Lee would have envied Miles his longer life and his artistic immortality. Anyway, to quote RealBro: 'Lee Morgan, simply Brilliant!'

 

Ella Fitzgerald - 'C Jam Blues'

'Have mercy. The Queen.' 'The best of the best.' The commentators are probably not wrong. Here is the 'First Lady of Song', as she was known, in session with some big-hitting special guests to supplement her regular backing band. She looks and sounds – initially at least, while introducing Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis and Roy 'Little Jazz' Eldridge – like a kindly primary school teacher. She certainly confounds that impression, though, once she starts scatting her way through Duke Ellington's 'C Jam Blues'. There are scat singers and there are scat singers, and you only have to listen to some of the also-rans to appreciate just how incredibly fluent and inventive Ella Fitzgerald was.

There's no shortage of great live videos featuring Miss Ella in illustrious company – with the Count Basie Band, for example, at Montreux in 1979 and Duke Ellington in 1966, where she trades licks with Paul Gonsalves on Ben Webster's old showcase, 'Cottontail' – but, for all the razzmatazz, I had more or less plumped for a wonderful intimate duet with guitarist Joe Pass on Antonio Carlos Jobim's 'One Note Samba'. It seemed to illustrate just what's possible even in such a minimal context when you have someone of Ella's ability to transform something essentially very simple into something multi-layered and somewhat extraordinary. Her Ella Abraça Jobim double album of 1980, by the way, might appear to be an afterthought to the celebrated songbooks she recorded during her heyday, but it's well worth investigating.

I had plumped for the duet – until I stumbled upon this particular gem. I don't know where or when it takes place, but it's probably somewhere in Holland given the subtitles and the accent of the charming man who presents our diva with a single red rose at the end of her performance, and sometime during Tommy Flanagan's lengthy occupation of the piano seat. Sometime, too, when Ella's myopia did not yet require milk-bottle bottoms for lenses nor frames the size of Dennis Taylor's when he won the world snooker championship in 1985. Since she was with bass player Keter Betts and drummer Bobby Durham in London in 1974, let's settle for that year.

Roy Eldridge's glasses by contrast are rather snazzy for an old'un. I wouldn't say no. He, 'Lockjaw' and Ella were all by this time in their twilight of their great careers, but they blow up a storm and enjoy themselves so much in the process that you can't help but smile from start to finish. They start off in unison before Ella launches into one of her scat excursions that's pitch-perfect and right on the money as ever. Then 'Jaws' gets his turn after three and a half minutes, the swingin' tenor man whose gruff, tough Texan tone detonated the mushroom cloud on The Atomic Mr. Basie. 'Go Eddie!' the school mistress urges before she re-enters the fray to do battle in the way that Johnny Griffin did with him in the early Sixties. Then it's Roy Eldridge's turn at five and a half minutes, the trumpeter who bridged the swing and bebop eras. You can clearly hear during his solo how and why he influenced Dizzy Gillespie in particular. By now, things are simmering nicely and the interchange between Ella and 'Little Jazz' is delightful: I love the way that the trumpeter tries and fails to keep up and cracks up before 'Jaws' picks up the pieces. There's still time for Ella to throw in a quote from Lester Young's 'Jumpin' With Symphony Sid' just after eight minutes – and probably a few more besides – in a bravura climax that leaves no doubt about what an amazing performer she was. As the man with the rose says, 'Thank you vay much.'

With so much going on out front, there's not much room given to her regular band. We see Bobby Durham towards the end pounding away on the drums. He worked with Ella for more than a decade during her long tenure with her perennial champion Norman Granz's Pablo label. Keter Betts on bass was with her for even longer: from 1971 until her final live performances in the early Nineties. One of those shadowy sidemen who often get forgotten, he accompanied Charlie Byrd on the guitarist's ground-breaking One Note Samba, thus playing a seminal role in bringing bossa nova to the rest of the world. It's often forgotten that Detroit-born Tommy Flanagan, the 'jazz poet' with the delicate touch and subtle sense of swing, was the accompanist who pushed John Coltrane to the harmonic limits on the dazzling 'Giant Steps'. Finally, Joe Pass, the guitarist who seemed to pop up on every Pablo session at one point, is seen and heard strumming chords rather than coolly picking notes as he does on 'One Note Samba'. Like Bill Evans, he exuded such a modest and respectable aura (although he bears a passing resemblance to the John Cazale character in The Godfather) that it's hard to square the fact of heroin addiction. Pass talked of 'living in the dark corners of society' during his years as an addict in the Fifties, five of which he spent in a Texas prison. In 1960, he signed himself into the Synanon Foundation, a Californian drug therapy clinic, in an attempt to kick the habit. It took him three years, during which time he recorded a worthy album with other patients, Sounds Of Synanon, but he walked out of there a clean man.

Ella never had to go through that kind of stuff. Not that she had it easy: her childhood went off the rails when her mother died, and her stepfather certainly ill-treated her and quite possibly abused her. She spent time in an orphanage and a reformatory school, and got involved in the infamous numbers racket. But her wonderful voice saved her from ruin. After winning an Amateur Night at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, she came to the attention of Chick Webb, the miniature hunchback drummer behind the outsized drum kit, whose orchestra regularly blew the opposition off the stage of the Savoy ballroom. Webb hired her as the band's frontline vocalist and became Ella's legal guardian. She in turn gave him his biggest career smash with her childlike ditty, 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket'. Despite losing her 'little yellow basket' and then Webb himself (to spinal tuberculosis), Ella took over the band and the rest, as they say...

Later in life, though, worn out by endless tours and live shows, she was plagued by health problems that culminated in a brutal double amputation of her lower legs due to complications linked to diabetes. For all the accolades and 40 million plus albums sold and countless celebrated performances in concert and on TV, there was always the impression that underneath that genial exterior lurked a slightly sad soul, unhappy in love and undermined by constant racial discrimination, direct and subliminal. Gestures like that proffered Dutch rose must have helped, but only temporarily. Nevertheless, she kept on scatting and smiling. 'I used to wish I was pretty,' she once said. 'My cousin Georgia always taught me that if you smile, people will like you.' Millions certainly did.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk - 'Pedal Up'

Although I never saw the man in concert, one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life was listening to a cassette copy of The Inflated Tear on a Walkman early one misty morning in the grounds of a priory in Hertfordshire. It was the title track in particular that affected me, the beautiful melody pierced with haunting heartfelt cries that I took to represent the medical accident Kirk suffered as a young child that blinded him for the rest of his life. But perhaps they were cries of exaltation, because – good luck, bad luck, who knows? – maybe being blind was the making of him as a musician.

It certainly seemed to make him susceptible to what he saw in dreams. He dreamt his first name, Rahsaan, for example; and, the stuff now of legend, he dreamt how he would appear and sound playing three instruments at once. Reputedly, he went out the very next day to a music shop and tried every reed instrument in the place before being taken into the basement, where he found two outmoded members of the saxophone family once used in Spanish military bands: an elongated straight alto called (probably by Kirk himself) a stritch, and a kind of slightly bent version of a soprano called a manzello. However they got their names, Kirk somehow worked out a way of playing them both simultaneously in conjunction with his main instrument, the tenor sax. He created a unique and unforgettable sound resembling a one-man horn section playing descant ever-so-slightly discordantly: just one of the facets that made him on one hand a true original while laying himself open on the other to inevitable slights of gimmickry.

Here he is playing 'Pedal Up', his perennial rousing crowd-pleaser that I first heard on the coruscating live album, Bright Moments, the title that John Kruth would give to his biography of Kirk. One reviewer on Amazon described the album's impact as 'like eating your last pork chop in London England cause you ain't gonna get no mo'...' Well, perhaps. Kirk, like Thelonious Monk, was an inveterate wearer of remarkable hats and here he wears a top hat (and tails): a man who never did anything by halves (apart from the second disc of his three-sided double album, The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Colour, that is). It's a headlong, breathless rush of ideas from start to finish. 'Breathless' being the operative word, as another of Kirk's 'tricks' was circular breathing. Apparently, the business of taking air in as you blow is not quite so difficult as one might imagine, but the trick that Kirk mastered was to make it so seamless as to stretch the drama of the anticipated breath almost to breaking point.

The 'black master of black classical music' is introduced at the 1975 DownBeat magazine show of their poll winners of 1975 by Q himself, Quincy Jones, soon to make his remarkable transition from musician and arranger to producer of Michael Jackson et al. Après Q, le déluge. I even exhorted my wife to watch what follows, because it is so extraordinary: a blind man in top hat and tails playing a tenor and a stritch simultaneously and seemingly in one breath. She avowed that she'd never seen anything like it in all her born days. Note the way at just under the two-minute mark, Kirk removes the stritch to solo on the tenor without missing the slightest beat and then proceeds to emulate Coltrane's 'sheets of sound' technique, even throwing in the briefest of quotes from 'My Favourite Things' at around 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Again, without missing a beat, he pops the stritch back in for the conclusion of his solo before turning away and leaving the floor to McCoy Tyner. It's just a brief solo from the pianist, another torrential creative force, but it gives a good idea of how he paced and complemented Coltrane in his pomp for the five or so years he was with the master. Kirk then picks up the baton again and signals the band to slow things down around the four-minute mark for a final, solo performance during which he gives us another of his party pieces: playing two different tunes at once on different instruments – first with the stritch in a kind of Middle Eastern drone role as he solos on the tenor and then, briefly, as he appears to play two different tunes at different speeds. As his breath finally gives out, he turns to face drummer Lenny White – and it's all over. Next up, it seems, is Chick Corea, with whom White and bassist Stanley Clarke played for several years in Return To Forever.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was indeed a showman and a crowd pleaser, but he was far more than that. With his eyes wide shut, he could sit in with Charles Mingus, he could do Coltrane, he could do New Orleans classical jazz, he could do gospel and big ballads, and he could do pop tunes. An album like Blacknuss, for example, is full of radical transformations – of Motown (Marvin Gaye's 'What's Goin' On' and Smokey Robinson's 'My Girl'), disco ('Never Can Say Goodbye'), soft-rock (David Gates' 'Make It With You') and soul (his brilliant take on Bill Withers' 'Ain't No Sunshine', which typifies the breathy flute technique he developed that would influence Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull for one. There's a great performance of his 'Serenade To A Cuckoo' that also illustrates this technique while giving a glimpse of another innovation, his 'nose flute').

He had a particular affinity for Burt Bacharach and the only video that came close to my chosen one was this performance from 1969 of 'I Say A Little Prayer', a song more associated with Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin. It's another video that made me break out all over in goose bumps – for several reasons: for Kirk's and percussionist Joe Texidor's egregious hats; for Henry Pearson's hyperactive bass playing; for pianist Ron Burton's apparent calm among the musical mayhem; for the audience's sang froid in the face of the conflagration on stage (being 1969, maybe half of them were stoned). And was that an infinitesimal glimpse of Bill Wyman in the crowd when Kirk briefly plays all three of his saxes together?

One commentator suggests that Rahsaan Roland Kirk was the personification of the term 'life force'. Given the mistral of creativity that must have howled permanently through his cranium, it's maybe not so surprising that Kirk suffered a stroke in 1975 that paralysed half of his body. Given that it happened to a man who overcame childhood blindness to become such a one of a kind, it's maybe not so surprising that Kirk adapted his technique to play his instruments with one hand. He went on recording and touring until a second stroke carried him off in 1977. He was 41 years old, an age when many of us are just beginning to find our way in life. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the multi-instrumentalist, dreamer and musical explorer, was extra-ordinary and un-classifiable. God keep you, Roland Kirk.