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.

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!'