Louis Armstrong - 'I Cover The Waterfront/Dinah/Tiger Rag'

The older I get, the more I've come to appreciate the genius of old Satchel Mouth. There was a time, I guess when I was discovering some of the hip jazz of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties – and I'm probably not alone here – when Louis Armstrong seemed a bit old hat, a bit too synonymous with clunky old 78rpm records of New Orleans jazz, all banjos and tooting horns and chugging rhythm, and a bit too close to entertainers like Bing Crosby et al. Even Frank Sinatra seemed hipper and Cab Calloway's jazz credentials more serious. To be fair, that old gravelly voice had become such a cliché, such a staple of amateur impressionists, that I forgot to pay attention to his trumpet playing.

How I was wrong! The many great musicians who followed in his wake and who quoted him as a prime influence knew a lot more than I did. When I found going for a song the two volumes of standards he made with Ella Fitzgerald in the Fifties for Norman Granz's Verve label, I snaffled them up – to find that they are two of the most delightful albums of that – or any – era. Unfortunately, there's little or no video evidence of the partnership. I certainly wanted to avoid 'What A Wonderful World' and 'When The Saints Go Marching In', and although there's a rare treat to behold in the form of Louis Armstrong playing with Duke Ellington and a small band on the Ed Sullivan Show (was the compeer related to Richard Nixon? I've wondered more than once), it's fairly insubstantial stuff.

So it's back to the Thirties for 'one of the good old good ones', as Satchmo puts it, a musical triptych of the great entertainer in his prime. If it seems like a little bit of post-production cleaning has taken part – the words almost but don't quite synch with the lip movements – it has been very well done and one has to remember that the year of this concert footage in Copenhagen is 1933 (or 1934 according to the on-screen legend), so you have to cut them a little slack. It's after the great Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings he made once he left his mentor King Oliver and well before his All Stars of the 1950s, but he numbered among his band of the time the likes of Teddy Wilson on piano, Chick Webb on drums and Edgar Sampson (a distant cousin from down the line?) on alto sax, although none of the three is readily identifiable in the video.

In any case, one doesn't watch the band; all eyes are on its leader. Not only does his trumpet ring out as bright and brassy as a bell, but his vocals would defy any would-be impersonator: memorable enough on 'I Cover The Waterfront', but quite astonishing on 'Dinah'. You realise that this was the man who invented not just scat-singing, but effectively jazz-singing: the way he slurs and elides the words, dices the rhythm, shifts the melody and always emerges from his pyrotechnic passages right on the beat. It's a remarkable performance, which can't be topped – so rightly he finishes on an instrumental showcase in the form of that old chestnut of the UK's 1950s Trad revival, 'Tiger Rag'. And don't the crowd just love it?

There's not much more to say about Louis Armstrong that hasn't already been said. From his early days on the streets of New Orleans, where he learnt to play the trumpet in the home for 'Colored Waifs' to his death in 1971 (in bed and supposedly still smiling), a global superstar and musical ambassador, his story is so well known that it's virtually the stuff of legend. He was the Father of Jazz and one of the greatest trumpet players and vocalists to be captured on shellac, vinyl and magnetic tape. Because he was, perhaps first and foremost, a great entertainer – someone who would never have countenanced turning his back on an audience as Miles Davis did – he has been occasionally branded as an Uncle Tom or accused of being more than met the eye. Best to let his fellow musicians counter such accusations and testify to his sincerity and his influence. Clarinettist Barney Bigard, who occupied a chair in Duke Ellington's orchestra for many years, states 'There never was any side to him. He came "as is".' Wynton Marsalis, whose trumpet playing must have been partly modelled on Armstrong's, suggested in his customarily academic fashion that 'he left an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time.'

Or, as Duke Ellington put it so simply and concisely: ' He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way.'

 

McCoy Tyner Trio with Ravi Coltrane - 'Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit'

Another piano player. That makes three in a row – but what a piano player! A figurative and verging-on-literal giant of a man, McCoy Tyner was the kind of man and musician who inspired reverence. Influenced in his youth by Thelonious Monk's highly rhythmic approach to the instrument and by Bud and Richie Powell, who happened to be neighbours in his native Philadelphia, Tyner would influence in his turn everyone from Chick Corea to 'Chucho' Valdés. Even before John Coltrane recruited him for his classic quartet of the first half of the Sixties, he recorded in 1958 the youthful pianist's hypnotic composition, 'The Believer'. He was one, I believe, all his life.

To mark the occasion of BMG releasing as the next volume in their Montreux Years series Tyner's appearances at the Swiss jazz festival between 1981 and 2009, here's one of many live treasures available. I was highly tempted by 'Mambo Inn' with George Benson, but decided that it was a distraction, being more about George than McCoy. This particular performance doesn't derive from Montreux, but comes from somewhere not too far away. A short drive down the autoroute du soleil from Lyon, Vienne is one of many French towns in the summer to host an annual jazz festival. It's one of the biggest and the best and, like Marciac's, it has helped to put a town that might easily be missed firmly on the map. It took place three years after his final Montreux appearance, at the Théâtre Antique in the company of his latest trio and, felicitously, on tenor saxophone Ravi Coltrane, the son of his long-time boss. Bass player Gerald Cannon and drummer Montez Coleman are both new names to me, but they perform admirably, stoking the fire and keeping the relentless beat of this long, long chunk of spiritual jazz that seems to echo the masterwork that Tyner recorded with John Coltrane a mere 48 years before this concert was recorded, A Love Supreme.

It's not the longest version available on YouTube. Tyner was in his seventies here, a gaunt, avuncular figure in his white cap, a far cry from the robust prime version witnessed in the classic performance of 'Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit' from 1973. It was recorded in the company of 20-year old saxophonist Azar Lawrence, who looks younger than Arsenal's boy-wonder, Bukayo Saka, seated bass player Joony Booth and the swashbuckling drummer, Alphonse Mouzon, whose unforgettable performance behind the kit is almost worth the whole price of admission. But at 19½ minutes, it's asking a lot of potential viewers. As for the original 24-minute track on Enlightenment, the double album recorded at Montreux that same year with the same outfit, better grab some kind of liquid or solid sustenance before embarking on that one.

Consider this, then, a potted version of the '73 epic. If it lacks a little of the fire, it rambles less. As befitting someone in glasses, Ravi Coltrane plays with a more polite sense of control than the coltish Azar Lawrence. He probably recognised from the moment he picked up a saxophone that there was little point in trying to emulate his ever-questing, never-resting father. He does all that could be asked of him and doesn't try to steal the show with any histrionics. The three main solos – by Coltrane, Cannon and Tyner – are all concise and all both anchored and propelled by that devilishly catchy ostinato that lets up noticeably only once, during Tyner's solo foray, and by the relentless metronomic click-clack of Coleman's rim-shots. Even though it was a comparatively new trio and the saxophonist appeared as a guest, this comes over as a true group performance, as tight as the proverbial gnat's chuff.

The publicity for the new Montreux collection describes the Philadelphian pianist as 'a force of nature in the maelstroms of jazz improvisation.' Tyner was a leftie and able to generate a thunderous rhythmic power from the bass notes of the piano. This was allied to a surprising delicacy in his melodic explorations along the treble keys, which created a palpable sense of tension and made him such a distinctive stylist. Coltrane talked of his 'exceptionally well developed sense of form, both as a soloist and an accompanist. Invariably in our group, he will take a tune and build his own structure for it.' The proof of the pudding is in Le Chant du Monde's 7-CD set of John Coltrane's European tour of 1961, which I pounced on with unbridled joy in a sale a few years back. There are (count 'em) nine versions of the evergreen 'My Favourite Things' and, as often as not, it's Tyner's even more than Coltrane's improvisations on a fairly facile theme that transport me into fresh astral realms.

Just as I find it impossible to listen to John Coltrane's late explorations, Tyner left the fold because all he could hear 'was a lot of noise. I didn't have any feeling for the music, and when I don't have feelings for music, I don't play.' One of the great things about McCoy Tyner was that he didn't dabble. He barely bothered with the electric piano, but kept to the acoustic instrument. While so many of his contemporaries were trying their hands at jazz-funk or fusion of some sort, Tyner's playing and albums of the era remain resolutely his own, always firmly rooted in rhythm, melody and feeling.

As giants go, he was a gentle one. It was only when I saw him live at the Nordsee Jazz Festival in the Eighties – with his regular trio of the time and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard as (somewhat awkward) special guest – that I appreciated how imposing a figure he was: not in an outsize Oscar Peterson way, but just a big powerful man with big hands. For such a modest, humble man who was capable of great tenderness, certainly in his music, he appeared larger than life – at least until his last years when his comparative frailty was rather shocking to behold and made you fear that he wasn't much longer for this world. In fact, he died eight years after this video, in 2020, at the age of 81, which is quite a respectable age for a hard-working jazz musician. As it is, he left three labels each with its own considerable recorded legacy: Blue Note, Impulse! and Milestone.

But he didn't dabble in drugs and he looked after himself, so he should by rights be with us still. I count it as a particular blessing that I managed to see this musical demigod even if only once live in concert. As writer and former leader of the fusion band Nucleus, Ian Carr wrote, 'His music is an affirmation, an exultation in being alive.'

Affirmative, Captain.

 

Ahmad Jamal - 'Poinciana'

Ahmad Jamal died of prostate cancer last week, poor man, at the grand old age of 92. He was so cool he taught Miles Davis how to be it – and do it. Less is more, in a nutshell. His lean approach to the keyboard was derided by certain members of the community as cocktail jazz, but Miles recognised, exploited and acknowledged the pianist's light touch and use of space and other techniques as stylistically ground-breaking. It wasn't coincidental that Red Garland, his regular pianist throughout the years of his first great quintet that recorded for Prestige and then Columbia in the second half of the '50s, sounded more than a little like Jamal: the bouncy left-hand, the spider-like runs across the keyboard with his right, the blocked chords – and a certain use of space, as per his leader. The rhythm section even covered Jamal's 'Billy Boy', a jazzed-up folk song that was an earlier hit for Jamal's drum-less trio, on Davis' Milestones. The quintet's drummer, 'Philly' Joe Jones, revealed how 'Miles used to study Jamal.' The trumpeter also covered much of Jamal's repertoire, including his composition 'New Rhumba', one of the stand-out moments on his first collaboration with Gil Evans, Miles Ahead. And... Jamal's version of 'Pavane', it could be argued, contained the seeds of Miles' game-changing 'So What'.

So Ahmad Jamal was a man of influence, who gained a degree of commercial success during the 1950s and the early '60s. His live At The Pershing album of 1958 was a million-seller – another reason, perhaps, why he fell out of favour with certain critics at the time. All of which was possibly not written in the stars when he was either christened Frederick Russell or (according to some) Fritz Jones in his birthplace of Pittsburgh, PA – whence came Earl Hines and Mary Lou Williams; and Errol Garner, whose florid style is echoed in Jamal's work, even in its more fragmentary version. Like his contemporary, Yusef Lateef, our Mr. Jones converted to Islam and took on the familiar Muslim version of his name. There's a nice video of the pair of them playing together at the Paris Olympia in 2012, unusual for the fact that Lateef, celebrated for his mastery of such difficult reed instruments as the oboe than for his voice, sings – movingly – 'Trouble in Mind'.

Another great who converted to Islam is the ubiquitous drummer, Idris Muhammed – who's here in the video I chose sporting his ubiquitous beret. it also features, very unusually for Jamal, the great Trinidadian 'pan-man', Othello Molineaux, much more likely to be found in the company of the Jamaican jazz pianist, Monty Alexander. But it works a treat: the ringing sound of the steel drum beautifully complements Jamal's treble-clef runs and, after a slightly hesitant start, it becomes a marriage made in heaven. Jamal's face is a picture when he recognises around the two-minute mark that the pair of them are beginning to gel.

The prime reason, though, why this particular video seemed to jump out of the screen at me is the song itself. Written in the 1940s and originally associated with the likes of Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra, I confess to falling secretly in love with it when I heard it on a Manhattan Transfer record. Ahmad Jamal was much less abashed about it than I am: it appeared on several of his albums and became effectively his theme tune. He took a somewhat saccharine popular song, similar to the way that John Coltrane did with 'My Favourite Things', and endlessly pulled it to pieces and put it back together again. This particular performance in Poland, with Jamal wearing what the authors of the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD describe so eloquently as the 'wise, thoughtful look of an African parliamentarian', seemed most eloquently to illustrate his unobtrusively influential take on modern jazz.

In the liner notes of my cassette copy of a CBS Portrait Masters compilation of Jamal's early work – entitled Poinciana – the fearsomely deep critic Stanley Crouch quotes former Jamal bass player Todd Coolman, who offers the best analysis of the pianist's approach to jazz that I've ever read. Coolman talks about Jamal's superior 'appreciation of the bass line.' '[Bass player Israel Crosby's] lines are so good they could be songs in themselves. Because Ahmad valued that, he was able to create trio music that had more levels of interaction than we are accustomed to hearing.' The video offers no sense of the customary scheme of jazz numbers of an earlier time: statement of theme, individual improvised solos, reprise of theme. Instead, the vamps, the sudden darting runs, the very light touches, the use of tension and silence, the recurring snippets of the main melody, modulations of tone and meter, the false climaxes, all combine to create something singular. Coolman goes on, brilliantly, to suggest that 'what he does not play allows the listener to be involved on a level that was unprecedented. He has such a very refined use of tension and release that he brings off a roller coaster effect by almost seeming to just let things slowly build to these high points of tension that are released just like they are on a roller coaster when you get to the top and the car suddenly plunges down.' Helter skelter!

Jamal was a student of classical music and a lover of Ravel and Debussy's musical impressionism in particular, and Stanley Crouch notes how 'Jamal sought orchestral effects and might turn an individual piece into an idiomatic symphonette.' See what you think as you watch this nine-minute 'idiomatic symphonette'.

Since Jamal continued playing well into his eighties, there are plenty more videos to illustrate an approach to jazz improvisation that influenced not only Miles Davis, but others of the stature of Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, to name but two. When I saw him at the Nord See Jazz Festival in Den Haag, it was the mid '80s. He was a younger man then. Dressed all in white, he came across as a wise sage, almost a mystic. Although I had little idea then that he was also a kind of modest Olympian god in the pantheon of jazz, it was a mesmerising trio performance and I recognised at least that I was in the presence of someone special.

In its recent obituary, the Guardian quoted Jamal's words to one of its journalists. 'You can exercise properly, eat properly – but the most important thing of all is thinking properly. Things are in a mess, and that's an understatement; so much is being lost because of greed.

'There are very few authentic, pure approaches to life now. But this music is one of them, and it continues to be.' A very wise sage, indeed. 

Thelonious Monk - 'Satin Doll'

Thelonious Sphere Monk is a household god here. A brilliant black-and-white photographic portrait of the man by Lee Tanner sits at eye level by my desk. It serves to remind me that tunes like 'Little Rootie Tootie', 'Nutty', 'Ruby My Dear', 'Coming On The Hudson', 'Ugly Beauty' or any number of his gloriously idiosyncratic compositions work faster on depression than any medication.

I first saw him in black and white on BBC television: watching with my dad this strange man in a strange hat, who shuffled around on his piano stool while striking the keys as if subjugating the notes he played. Bending the notes to his will. Neither of us understood him or his off-centred music, but his eccentricities made us chuckle and even at an early age I could see that there was something rather special about him.

Certainly, thus thought the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who heard Monk on record playing his masterpiece, 'Round Midnight', when she dropped in to see her friend, the pianist Teddy Wilson. She was en route for New York airport and her return trip home to her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, and their five children. Reputedly, she was so hypnotised that she listened to it time after time – missing her flight and never going home again. She became the legendary 'Jazz Baroness', patron of the artists. She was evicted from the Stanhope hotel when Charlie Parker died in her suite. When she finally met Monk, she thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She devoted nearly three decades of her life to him and Monk wrote 'Pannonica' in her honour, one of his most beautiful melodies. Nica, as she was known, took the rap for Monk when the police in Delaware found marijuana in her car because she feared that prison might finish him. And when his mental health disintegrated, Monk spent much of his last few years in her apartment – supposedly with three hundred or so of her cats.

Monk and his music have that kind of effect on people – well, maybe not quite so extreme, but an often profound one. As composers of jazz music, he and Duke Ellington are generally spoken of in the same breath. His music is immediately recognisable, utterly sui generis; it gets under your skin and stays there. It's quirky, angular, laconic and, to use the title of one of his own numbers, thoroughly 'off minor'. It can be dreamlike, unsettling, ominous, romantic and very beautiful. Fortunately, there's a whole heap of it available on YouTube because of his propensity to repeat himself in the later stages of his career. So intense was his creative flowering in the late '40s and throughout the '50s, that he had little more to say as a composer once he arrived at the 1960s – by which time his fame had spread around the world and the cameras were on call to capture it. Although he had plenty more to say as a jazz pianist, apart from the occasional masterpiece like 'Ugly Beauty', his regular working group of Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley tended to improvise around a repertoire of classics from Monk's pre-Columbia label past. That and the work of other composers, which Monk played with such idiosyncratic feeling that, if you didn't know otherwise, you might believe that he himself had written numbers like 'Lulu's Back In Town', 'Honeysuckle Rose' and 'Tea For Two'.

Duke Ellington's compositions were a case in point. Our loveable pianist recorded Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington for Orrin Keepnews' Riverside label in 1956 after his tenure with Blue Note and then Prestige and during a period of his career when he lost his cabaret card and was unable to perform regularly in the major jazz nightclubs. 'Sophisticated Lady' was among the numbers chosen for the LP; 'Satin Doll' was not – which was partly why I plumped for the latter over the former at the head of my list of most suitable videos to illustrate what Monk was about. With its memorable melody and slightly angular rhythm, it seems tailor-made for him. Both songs come from the same solo performance at the Berlin Jazzstage in 1969 and, being solo piano with close-up camera work, they illustrate his highly individual technique arguably more clearly than the videos of the quartet at work.

So 'Satin Doll' shaded it: it's not his tune, but Monk plays it in such a way that it almost becomes his, distorting and refracting the song's harmonics in a way that tickles your funny bone. Looking like some exotic sculpture you might find in a garden presiding over a fishpond, and wearing the self-same smoking hat or whatever it is that he wears in Lee Tanner's photo, he treats you to three and a half minutes of fun-packed brio. I can't watch it without smiling and feeling better about the world and its glaring imperfections.

There will always be those – musicians included – who never 'get' Monk. People complained that what he played was out of tune or plain wrong and that he couldn't play the piano for peanuts. If you leave his 'weird' musical sensibility out of the equation, he would have been a very gifted technician. You can see on the video the way his left hand mirrors the kind of stride-piano techniques of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith in which Monk was steeped. Like, say, Duke Jordan who backed Charlie Parker on some of his earliest Bebop recordings, he would have earned respect as a straight man, but not adulation. In any case, far from being simplistic, an enlightening five-minute analysis of Monk's 'Bemsha Swing' by Ron Drotos explains exactly why his music was actually very difficult to play.

There's a nice little story told by Orrin Keepnews, Monk's boss at Riverside Records, which I find very revealing about the way a true artist's mind works. Monk was driving them back from the legendary Rudy Van Gelder's recording studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, when the car went into a skid on an icy road and ended up an inch or two from a telephone pole. Monk turned to Keepnews and told him 'It's a good thing I was driving. If it had been someone else, we might be dead.' His passenger didn't share Monk's conviction and chose never to ride with him again. It must have been the same unshakeable conviction that kept Monk ploughing the same furrow throughout his career despite all the setbacks and nay-sayers who suggested that he was wrong. Like Pablo Picasso and others of his kidney, Monk's extraordinary self-belief must have fuelled the magnetism that made the 'High Priest of Bebop' so irresistible to the 'Jazz Baroness' and his long-suffering wife, Nellie.

I rejected the other video contenders, as I've said, because they focus on the other members of the band as much as the man himself and therefore fail to illustrate quite so transparently his singular genius. If you want to check out Monk with his quartet, I would suggest 'Round Midnight' (of course) from 1966, in Poland; 'Nutty' (the title says it all), which must date from the same era, but where and when exactly, I know not; and 'Hackensack' (presumably named for Van Gelder's studio) from a 1965 recording for the BBC. Each one features a different hat. The last named might have been one of the performances I watched with my father before I really appreciated what jazz was all about.

One of the commentators writes 'Monk is great. Weird but great!' Indeed. My life for one would have been much poorer without the loneliest monk.