Betty Carter - 'Droppin' Things'

Judging by the comments beneath the videos, I'm not alone in thinking that Lillie Mae Jones, aka Betty Carter, aka 'Betty Bebop', a name given to her by Lionel Hampton's indomitable wife Gladys, was perhaps the purest jazz singer of them all. If that sounds contentious in the light of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and other big-hitters, then the estimable chan-toose, Carmen McRae, considered that 'there's really only one jazz singer – only one: Betty Carter.' Whatever, I can at least say that I'm not alone in nominating Betty Carter as my favourite jazz singer.

Even though she was often underrated, overlooked and disregarded, there are innumerable good short videos available on YouTube, most of them recorded on American TV. Such abundance made choosing the best a very close run thing. So close that I still keep changing my mind. If 'best' equals quality of backing band, then the technically incredible version of Coltrane's 'Giant Steps' with an A-list band of pianist Geri Allen, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette would take the Golden Biscuit, but it doesn't really show what she can do with a proper song. 'The Good Life', too, with alto saxophonist David Sanborn would otherwise take some beating if you could only see as well as hear the dark side of this video.

By the time my chosen video was shot, in 1990, Betty Carter's career was on the ascendance once more after her time in the wilderness following a three-year stint touring with Ray Charles. Although mainly known for a repertoire of re-imagined standards, it's significant that both 'Droppin' Things' and its very close contender, 'Tight' – one of her hard-swinging abstract signature songs, filmed on a 1992 edition of The Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno – are both self-penned numbers. To quote the title of the album that Leno refers to, It's Not About the Melody, both are much more about the serpentine twists and turns she takes around a conventional song (probably why some detractors call her mannered) using her marvellous husky voice like a reed instrument. As 'Themrpiggy6666' so acutely comments, Betty Carter was 'a dynamic swinger taking daring tonal and rhythmic liberties without losing the essential narrative flow.'

You can see it all here in this three-and-a-half minute theatrical performance. The picture quality is maybe not quite so crystal clear as it is on The Tonight Show clip, the outfit's not quite so funky and there's no illustrious saxophonist like Branford Marsalis with whom to trade licks, but this has a little bit of everything: the playfulness and sense of latent drama with which she approaches a song, her mesmerising scat-singing, her rarefied sense of timing, the ease and spontaneity of her improvisational instincts, and above all her ability to swing.

Perhaps my most prized trophy as a lifelong vinyl hunter is a double album, The Audience With Betty Carter, signed by the singer and on her own label before Verve signed her up and re-released her own Bet-Car label's back catalogue, in mint condition for a very competitive price, spotted at a record stall in a covered market in a scruffy suburb of Southampton. I shall bequeath it to the Jazz Nation when it's time to shuffle off to Buffalo – unless my daughter learns to appreciate this remarkable singer's talent in the meantime.

The fact that Betty Carter had to establish her own label, and thus finance the live recording herself back in 1979, in order to do things the way that she wanted to do them, not some commercially minded record company executive who probably knew doodly-squat about the art of jazz singing, is indicative of a fiercely independent personality and artistic spirit. Lionel Hampton, whose rather self-glorifying ghost-written autobiography I've just finished reading, was one of the first to hire the young singer from Detroit (who had already used a forged birth certificate in order to perform under the legal age in bars). During her three-year stay with Hamp, the leader fired her several times for not toeing his musical line.

As befitting the child of parents whose modus operandi was to encourage their children's independence, Betty Carter's immediate family often appeared to be the young musicians she nurtured and mentored. Her piano-based trios were a finishing school for drummers, bassists and keyboard artists like Benny Green, Stephen Scott, Cyrus Chestnut and Mulgrew Miller. The short film, New All The Time, offers an intimate glimpse into the way she worked with and tutored her bands. She comes over as a strong and singular individual, who knew her own mind. As she said elsewhere, 'If you want to hang in there for a long time, then you really have to be an individual, be something that someone will never forget.'

She delivers these words at one of the week-long intensive workshops for promising musicians that she sponsored. There's another revealing short film which shows Betty Carter the teacher at work, CBS Sunday Morning: Betty Carter – Jazz Ahead (1996). Among the pearls of wisdom that dispensed to her youthful hopefuls, she suggests that 'it's OK to make a mistake; it's what you do with that mistake.' If only teachers and theorists from the everyday world of children's education espoused such radical ideas.

Sadly, Michelle Parkerson's film, But then, She's Betty Carter, is not available. I saw it many, many moons ago on a Channel 4's Late Shift, hosted by writer, 'she-punk' and ex-Flying Lizard Vivien Goldman, and the late-lamented writer and DJ, Charlie Gillett. I knew nothing about Ms. Carter up to that point and probably hadn't consciously heard any of her music, but the film hooked me – line and sinker!

So why do I love her like I do? What makes her my favourite? Let me count the ways: she's daring and she takes risks (her version of 'My Favourite Things', for example, makes John Coltrane's sound positively family-friendly); her scat-singing is second only to Ella's; the way she fragments the lyrics and cuts up the rhythm makes me giggle with delight; she improvises like a saxophonist at play; her husky voice and 'smile to die for' make me feel un-nezzisary; she can both turn a ballad inside out and back again and swing like a baaad mother... (Shut your mouth!).

Betty Carter was an artist who remained totally true to herself throughout her career: an abstract artist, perhaps, but more in the mould of Kandinsky than Pollock in so far as she never wanders so far from the melody that you lose sight of the song. Listening to her and watching her perform with the grace of a lynx, it all seems so spontaneous – and by her estimation, 'that's the beauty of jazz.'

 

Les McCann and Eddie Harris - 'Compared To What'

My mother was a strange woman. As a child, she loved to listen to my grandfather playing (a little painstakingly) Chopin, Schumann and the like. But as an adult, she had little time for music. She professed to liking the Rolling Stones, perhaps because she yearned to paint Charlie Watts' portrait. She liked James Last, the bearded German master of all things musically anodyne. And although she had very little time for jazz in general, this stirring piece of funky jazz was her favourite piece of music. Ever. I never quite figured. Yes, it's one of the most exciting live jazz performances available on YouTube and yes, it's what you might call soul-jazz, so I guess it was the soulful element that made her come over in a quiver every time she heard it. Being an eager little beaver, I made her a C-90 cassette compilation of other soulful songs in a similar vein that I thought she might like – Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Bill Withers and others of that persuasion – but I don't think it really clicked. I gave up after that brief glimmer of a connection.

Was it, I wonder now, Eugene McDaniels' lyrics ('inspired by the right wing push towards globalisation,' he suggests, and written with Les McCann in mind, even though he and the pianist weren't speaking at the time) that struck such a chord? Was it last-minute guest Benny Bailey's thrilling trumpet playing? Or Eddie Harris' highly individual electrified tenor sax tone? Who knows? In any case, it became the number one jazz hit of the time and allowed McDaniels to hide away from the 'goddamn nation' in Maine and continue writing throughout his life.

It's a remarkable testimony to the symbiotic bond that musicians can experience when they're in the zone. Both Les McCann and Eddie Harris were Atlantic recording artists, and both had already appeared at that year's Montreux Jazz Festival under separate cover, but neither really knew the other. Les McCann, a soulful pianist in a similar mould to Bobby Timmons, Ramsey Lewis, Ray Bryant and others, 'didn't know Eddie that well but knew his reputation.' Saxophonist Eddie Harris, the more established Atlantic artist who had released some big-selling albums for the label, 'really didn't know who [McCann] was.'

Someone at the label had the idea of putting them together with a view to a live recording. Both artists thought it was a good enough idea, but the circumstances were far from propitious. Benny Bailey who was domiciled in Switzerland was invited along, but the music wasn't even his cup of jazz; too commercial. Scheduled to appear first on the final evening of this third edition of the festival, no one knew what numbers to play, let alone rehearse them. And just to put the old tin lid on it, the pianist was well and truly stoned after his first bout earlier of reefer madness. Yet, somehow, the creativity spontaneously combusted that evening in 1969 on the stage of the Montreux casino (the building that would burn down two years later and provide Deep Purple with all the smoke on the water they needed for a hit).

The creator and lifelong archivist of the festival, Claude Nobs, recorded every single performance during his tenure – which lasted right up until a late-night ski accident in 2012 – so we have this remarkable record of 'Compared To What', along with the other numbers that Atlantic released under the somewhat unfortunate title of Swiss Movement. Certainly, the casino moved that evening. Watching it now, it's apparent at the beginning that Les McCann is, shall we say, a little distracted. It could be the sound: there was a paucity of microphones and Eddie Harris had to share with Benny Bailey. Harris, who played the piano himself, also revealed that he had to stand near the leader in order to pick up the chords that McCann was laying down. Backed by Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Donald Dean on drums, the pianist – who was feeling happy and self-confident after recently shedding a lot of weight – settles into an infectiously funky vamp, then starts to shift through the keys and move up an octave, whereupon things really start to cook. Right after Harris' first of four solos, McCann sings the first verse with the kind of authority and gusto you might associate with a truly great soul singer like Ray Charles. Then Harris delivers a swaggering, raunchy solo before Benny Bailey almost explodes onto the scene. And so it goes for eight minutes or so, constituting the first track of what would become a classic live recording that would put both the festival and the musicians very much on the map. And didn't the Casino crowd just love it!

It's indicative of the artistic temperament's tendency towards perfectionism that right after the show McCann fretted that he had loused up. Had he played perfectly, then it's quite likely that the record wouldn't have been the smash it became. 'Compared To What' became his calling card; he admits that it 'had a very positive effect on my career – we had to play it up to four times a night everywhere we went after the record came out.' Benny Bailey, too, became inexorably linked with the number for his two blistering solos. On stage that evening, there's the hint of a wry grin on his face, as if he recognised that this commercial stuff actually wasn't half bad. He admitted many years later that people back home in the U.S. 'wouldn't have known me if it hadn't been for that album – so it proved very beneficial as far as my reputation was concerned.'

Despite my efforts, I don't think the rest of the album made much of an impression on my mother. But 'Compared To What' somehow ticked all the boxes. It's not perfect – you can hear a few hesitations and bum notes along the way – but the circumstances were far from perfect and, in any case, perfection can be as dull as ditch-water. Yet it remains one of the most soulful performances ever captured on audio and video tape in the category of jazz, soul or any other music. Ahmad Jamal, whose performance of 'Poinciana' I featured a while back, said 'Man, that is one of the greatest records I ever heard.' He should know.

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.