On Oscar Pettiford's centennial

 

Oscar Pettiford in Newport, 1958
(screenshot from Jazz on a Summer's Day)

While on April 22 we celebrated the 100th birthday of the very well-known Charles Mingus (article/podcast in Spanish), on Friday, September 30th, we did the same for the other great bassist/leader of the era, even though not as well-remembered as Mingus, but, back in the day—he passed away in 1960—as respected and admired: Oscar Pettiford.

Thus, the first salient point of Pettiford’s biography is that he was actually younger than Mingus, even though he may look otherwise to us, be it for musical reasons or others like his receding hairline or his early start on record: even if accidental, he made his first recording at age 17, at a jam session with Charlie Christian.

 

Christian would be an enormous influence on Pettiford, the first great melodic soloist on bass, except for the thunderbolt that was Jimmie Blanton (1918-1942). As Dizzy Gillespie put it, “Oscar was a great devotee of the guitarist Charlie Christian. He played a lot like Charlie Christian; his style was based on Charlie Christian’s. A lotta bass players, when they play a solo, are always thinking in terms of tonics … before he came to New York [Oscar] was [already] playing on the bass, like a soloist, like a trumpet, or any other melody instrument.”

This facet of Pettiford’s playing is particularly noticeable with the cello, which he played tuning it like a bass and which, as his regular collaborator and pianist Dick Katz explained, “he also had this weird thing about souping up the cello with an amplifier and adding some kind of theremin-sounding tremolo to it”. Sound issues aside, he was a solid soloist.

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Young Oscar

Pettiford was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, of African-American and Cherokee descent on his father’s side, and Choctaw on his mother’s. Like other musical families of the era (like Lester Young’s, for instance) the Pettifords, who got to have eleven kids, performed as a band. Oscar began dancing and singing, he switched to piano aged 12, and to bass at 14. He was 17 when he jammed with Christian and tenor saxophonist Jerry Jerome, with Benny Goodman’s orchestra in Minneapolis, where the Pettifords were based at the time.

However, the first serious salvo from Pettiford was waxed during a session led by Coleman Hawkins on December 23, 1943, with his solo on “The Man I Love”, where he can be heard breathing like a horn player would. Also at that time, he was part of a rare two-bassist team with Chubby Jackson in Charlie Barnet’s orchestra, from which he would go on to Duke Ellington’s—which left a deep mark in his musical outlook—and Woody Herman’s, where he would break one arm playing baseball and would have to take a break after which, according to his own account, got out playing better, not as fast as before, but with a better sound (this is the event Max Roach would mistakenly refer to, to explain Pettiford’s absence from the famous Massey Hall 1953 concert, where Mingus played).

Pettiford, aged 21, already among the greatest. 
(The lower image was flipped in the original.)

It was at this time, in the mid-forties, when Pettiford became renowned in the jazz scene, helped by the fact that he was favoured by both the previous generation (see images above) and the next, together with Dizzy Gillespie and the “modern” recordings waxed by Coleman Hawkins and Boyd Raeburn’s orchestra. Together with Dizzy, in 1944 he put together the first Bebop combo, with Max Roach on drums, George Wallington on piano and Don Byas on tenor sax (their idea was to have Charlie Parker as the other horn, but they couldn’t get hold of him).

About Pettiford’s importance in this band, Ira Gitler, the main historian of that movement, tells that the idea of having both horns playing in unison—an essential Bebop feature—was actually Pettiford’s; as for the band’s dynamics, pianist Billy Taylor, who would be replaced by Wallington, tells how during a gig the band played the tune “Bebop” at top speed, and Dizzy didn’t nod at Pettiford for a solo. When they finished, Pettiford went to Dizzy and, angrily, asked him why. Dizzy replied that he thought that the tempo was to fast for a bass solo, only for Pettiford to protest: “Well, you played it! If you can play it, I can play it!”

Max Roach, Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford,
George Wallington, Dizzy Gillespie. 1944.

Pettiford would leave the group in early 1945, after Dizzy accused him of being a “prima donna”, being as he was the main bassist on the scene at the time. The highlights of the remaining of the decade was, besides his sojourns in Duke Ellington’s and Woody Herman’s orchestras, his own short-lived big band, which left one instrumental recording, “Something for You” (later known as “Max Is Making Wax” or “Chance It”).

As relevant as he became in the 1940s, it was in the following decade when he reached his peak as a musician beyond his instrument. He left over 60 compositions, among the better-known ones “Bohemia After Dark” (which he claimed to be the inspiration for Miles Davis’s “So What”), “Blues in the Closet” and “Tricotism”, or the today forgotten, the title doesn’t help, “The Gentle Art of Love”. Posterity is fickle, and several reasons, like the fact that the labels he recorded for (namely Bethlehem and ABC-Paramount) have been poorly served by reissues, his musical approach and his trip to Europe in 1958—which would be final—, has clouded a substantial legacy.

Pettiford was prolific on record: he was a great bass player, with hardly any rivals in New York. As always, labels and producers had their preferred musicians, and Pettiford had a close working relationship with the recently deceased Creed Taylor, a producer especially loyal to certain musicians: Kai Winding, for instance, recorded as a leader for all the labels Taylor produced at (Bethlehem, ABC-Paramount/Impulse, Verve, A&M and CTI). Pettiford was keeping the same track when he left for Europe. Who knows if he’d have recorded with Taylor again, but, if he had, he would have been better known today.

About this musical approach in the fifties, Pettiford, for his age and long-standing relevance, was one of the main references in a movement derived from Miles Davis’s nonet, which included people like Kenny Clarke, Tadd Dameron, the early Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce, Lucky Thompson (these three arranged for Pettiford), Art Farmer, Benny Golson... African-Americans who opted for a softer music than Hard-Bop and whose place in the canon is smaller than would have been expected back then (or much smaller, in the case of someone close to them musically and hugely popular at the time, like Don Elliott), and certainly smaller than that of like-minded acts like Gerry Mulligan, the Modern Jazz Quartet or even the whole Third Stream movement.

The lack of relevance of this kind of jazz today cannot be explained in strictly musical terms. It doesn’t help that rock’n’roll was rising, but among the extramusical factors, besides the irregular reissues of this music, this may be explained by both Clarke’s and Pettiford’s move to Europe, the latter’s death, Lucky Thompson’s partial, and Gigi Gryce’s total, disappearance from the scene, Tadd Dameron’s erratic career or Quincy Jones’s change of tack.

Due to one or several of these reasons, when Pettiford is talked about, attention is regularly focused on the forties. However, his whole career covers 21 years, between 1939 and 1960, which, in terms of recordings, would amount to over four days of straight listening (see links at the end). And despite the emphasis on those early years, his track record in the fifties is overwhelming: besides his own recordings as a leader, he’s on records by Miles Davis (Volume 1, The Musings), Sonny Rollins (The Freedom Suite), Kenny Dorham (Afro-Cuban, Jazz Contrasts), Monk (Plays Duke Ellington among others), Gigi Gryce (Nica’s Tempo), Teddy Charles’s 3 for Ellington, Clark Terry’s and Helen Merrill’s on EmArcy (Merrill would call him back), Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh... and very many others. That said, it is particularly astonishing to hear the standard he kept in 1956 (Qobuz).

From that year we have recordings with guitar players, singers, pianists, small groups fronted by one horn, big bands… Kenny Burrell’s debut on Blue Note, an unissued (at the time) session with Tal Farlow (with Pettiford as a soloist on cello), records with pianists like Monk (bits of The Unique and Brilliant Corners), with Phineas Newborn, Jr., Ray Charles, Hank Jones (Charlie Smith’s trio) and Toshiko Akiyoshi, Thad Jones’s Detroit-New York Junction, Milt Jackson’s Ballads and Blues, Gil Mellé’s Patterns in Jazz, Nat Pierce’s Basie-like big band and Boyd Raeburn’s more commercial one in of this last recordings (nothing to do with his more adventurous efforts from the forties, sadly), Helen Merrill’s Dream of You, several sessions for Chris Connor on Atlantic…

That quiet approach I mentioned above is represented by records like accordionist Mat Matthews’s for the Dawn label (The Gentle Art of Love and, particularly, The Modern Art of Jazz, watch out for this duet of accordion and cello), the namesake The Manhattan Jazz Septette and, above all, the extraordinary and practically forgotten Bix Duke Fats by arranger and pianist Tom Talbert, and old acquaintance of Pettiford’s from their earlier days in Minneapolis.

Punchier are the tracks from a couple of sessions that shouldn’t be overlooked (for our own sake), Lionel Hampton’s as the leader of an all-star group for the Jazztone label, and the recently released jam sessions with pianist Joe Castro (February 4 and 5, listen to this and this).

But the masterworks from that year, and perhaps his whole career, are the three LPs he did for ABC-Paramount, with Creed Taylor as producer: two with Lucky Thompson (both volumes of Lucky Thompson Featuring Oscar Pettiford), recorded in January and December, and the first of two orchestral records for the label, In Hi-Fi (YouTube; compiled in one CD), where he features a modified big band (fewer brass, but including French horn and harp) and arranged mostly by Gigi Gryce or Lucky Thompson.

The two LPs he did with Thompson (reissued together on this CD), are two lost jewels of 1950s jazz. Both are shared in halfs by a quintet with trombone (Jimmy Cleveland, another kindred spirit) and a trio, with Skeeter Best on guitar, which is just sublime (YouTube).

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Oscar Pettiford & Attila Zoller: “The Gentle Art of Love” (June 15, 1959) 

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Links:

Oscar Pettiford's complete recordings on Qobuz:

• 1939-1954
• 1955-1960
• 1956

The great Oscar Pettiford website is the one put together by the late Hans-Joachim Schmidt. Although slightly out of date, it’s still essential. It’s now hosted at Archive.org.

Essay by Joan Mar Sauqué about the meeting, in the Summer of 1953, of Tadd Dameron, Art Farmer, Clifford Brown, Quincy Jones and Benny Golson, among others.

Noal Cohen has put together several definitive discographies (including those of Gigi Gryce and Lucky Thompson) in his website. He also has a series of essays about this school of jazz, under the title “The Birth of the Cool Legacy”.