80 years ago today: the Benny Goodman-Count Basie Octet

By the autumn of 1940, Benny Goodman had undergone his first back surgery and was already on the mend. He had put his orchestra on hold for the summer, with a few men on retainer, like electric guitar wonder Charlie Christian, who'd taken the opportunity to visit family and friends back in Oklahoma, his first chance since he'd hit the big time the previous summer.

While still a popular bandleader, Goodman had somewhat lost some of his spark after the departure of some key men in his big band, namely Harry James and Gene Krupa, and with his current band on hold, rumours were rife. A big one was a possible merger with Count Basie, himself having some problems with his booking agency. Besides mutual admiration and being signed to the same label, a common thread to both bands was producer John Hammond, who had championed both and in 1942 became Goodman's brother-in-law.

Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian sitting in with the Count Basie Orchestra,
Apollo Theatre, Harlem, October 24, 1940 (source)

Jazz pour tous! (1959-1969)

Jean-Marie Peterken and Nicolas Dor present Jazz pour Tous!

The wonders of European TV archives never cease. Besides the more recent footage which is being rescued weekly from the vaults of Spanish TV (see here), we have now a bunch of programmes from RTB (Belgian public broadcaster) show Jazz por tous!, "Jazz for everyone!", which was broadcast for ten years from 1959. The show had actually started as a radio programme by Belgian aficionados Nicolas Dor (correspondent for American rag Record Changer covering Belgium, France, and the Netherlands)  and Jean-Marie Peterken, and it had a spin-off in the short-lived festival in Comblain-la-Tour, where Cannonball Adderley recorded his LP Cannonball in Europe in 1962.

Nat "King" Cole, pianist

In this week of jazz centennials (Mercer Ellington on the 11th, George Avakian on the 15th, Lennie Tristano on the 19th), today we celebrate Nat "King" Cole's. He was a great singer, especially given his limited resources and a popular entertainer. He was also a terribly influential pianist—Lennie Tristano and Hank Jones certainly listened to him—who helped establish the piano trio, albeit with a guitar instead of drums, the format Oscar Peterson, another Cole fan, maintained until mid-1959.

Cole recorded a lot with his trio, both for commercial release (for Decca, and later Capitol) and for radio broadcast (or transcriptions). Among the latter, there is a recording called "Miss Thing", effectively a reduction to the trio of the Count Basie Orchestra side "Miss Thing (Part II)", which shows a lesser known aspect of Cole's musicianship.

Basie's "Miss Thing (Part II)" (early 1939)

Cole's "Miss Thing" (late 1943)

Notes on Charlie Christian's centennial

Today it's the 100th anniversary of Charlie Christian's birthday. For a special 2h30m programme we've done (in Spanish) in El Club de Jazz, I've spent the last few months re-visiting his complete output (except for a very few items, such as Bill Savory's airchecks housed at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem). My playlist tells me that it's 239 tracks long—about 13 hours straight—including the ones where Christian's presumed to play with Benny Goodman's orchestra. On top of that, I've listened to other guitar players (Bus Etri doing "Flying Home" in 1940, anyone?), plus a generous helping of string music from Texas and Oklahoma also known as Western Swing.

Charlie Christian at the Metronome All-Star session
February 7, 1940. Courtesy of Leo Valdés.

Because it is unavoidable that some of the same old stories will be regurgitated for the centennial, I've jotted down a few notes about CC:

Sinatra at the Sands, at 50

Sinatra at The Sands —  all pictures (except record covers) by John Dominis/Getty Images

“It was probably the most exciting engagement I have ever done in my life, since I started performing.”

Frank Sinatra about playing with Basie at the Sands in January 1966

Last December we celebrated the centennial of Frank Sinatra. I won’t go into why he was important as a crucial part of that moment when American popular music equaled top musicianship, not only from the interpreters, but also from the composers and songwriters; let’s just say that if you love music, you should have at least two or three of his albums at home.

Among his very prolific output, one of the most popular — not necessarily the “best”, however you gauge that — is Sinatra at the Sands, recorded in the last week of a month-long stay at the Copa Room in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, which ended on Thursday, February 1, 1966, fifty years ago, today.

“The Basie orchestra was a like juggernaut. When they came at you, after the downbeat and the orchestra started to play, you knew that you had to be part of that or you got lost […] We did things that were really jumping […] I tried to stay in the realm of what the orchestra was playing. I hang back just a little bit, in a sense.”

Frank Sinatra about playing with Basie at the Sands

Back row: Quincy Jones, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Grover Mitchell, Marshal Royal, Bobby Plater.
Front row: Teddy Reig, Al Grey, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Freddie Green, Bill Hughes,
Sonny Payne, Eric Dixon, Charlie Fowlkes, Al Aarons, Henderson Chambers, Sonny Cohn, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, Leon Thomas.

Sixteen bars of Brookmeyer...

If you’re a regular reader of these pages, you may know that Bob Brookmeyer is one of my favourite musicians in any style or instrument. I love the way he seems to disguise his intelligence behind a gutsy, swinging style of playing the rather cumbersome valve trombone. As an arranger he has walked many paths and explored many routes, but he never disappoints. Not me, anyway.

A very good example of the diversity of his talents as an arranger and as a soloist is his arrangement of “Body and Soul” for Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, and the contrast provided by his own 16-bar solo.

Although Brookmeyer was the driving force behind this band, here he only takes half a chorus. Where others drew arabesques on this ballad’s harmonic maze, Brookmeyer cuts through it with very little melodic variation and a very determined rhythmic delivery, with plenty of swing (as in syncopation in the first eight bars) and funk (on his second eight bars, ending his four-note motives on the downbeat, against a sort of rhumba background).

Since the solo is readily available to listen to, I won’t say more. Just that in an interview, asked about his influences he says that the first major influence, and almost the final one was Count Basie. Listening to this solo (starting in 2:37), I think it’s not difficult to imagine playing that solo on the piano.

More Brookmeyer here, and here.

Frank Wess (1922-2013)

Just a couple years younger than Charlie Parker, and also faring from Kansas City, Frank Wess was one of those excellent musicians poorly served by tags like "mainstream" or "bop". He was a member of the Basie orchestra for a long time. Apparently an unassuming man, it was our loss that he wasn't seen under the spotlight more often. Wess passed away on October 30, aged 91.

Jazz for Playboys (Savoy/Denon SV-0191)

Never mind the official hierarchies of jazz, Wess was one of the first tenor sax players I encountered in jazz (before Coltrane or Coleman Hawkins, for instance). He was also my first flutist, the only one I knew for some time, which may explain why I couldn't understand some of my colleagues' disliking the instrument. Guess I was just lucky.

It was by sheer coincidence that a local shop had bucketloads of Japanese Savoy/Denon CDs at discount price. At a time when I mulled over the purchase of one CD for a very long time, I don't know what made me choose this record without listening to it. Not the cover, obviously. It wasn't the title either (believe me).

Going to a summer jazz fest

Everybody's been doing it for over 60 years: The discreet charm of combining the summer resort with a feast of live jazz and other musics (Chuck Berry played Newport '58, so you might say that it's always been like that). Genteel, maybe. Exclusive, not at all.

In the coming days I'll be reporting the news from San Sebastian's Heineken Jazzaldia, where I got started as a newspaper reporter ages ago. Good memories, old friends, and some extraordinary food await. Check the programme here, and see if you can come along.

That is now. The following is back when: Newport 1962. A few good quality clips from Franz Hoffman, plus a longer one, in not so good quality (but we get to see some Roland Kirk and Pee Wee Russell, so no complaints).

See you!

Count Basie and His Orchestra

Review: Charlie Christian Genius boxed set

(This is a translation of my review for Cuadernos de Jazz)

Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar
(4-CD set, Sony/Legacy 88697930352; released in 2012)

Charlie Christian (el-g) with, among others, Benny Goodman (cl), Lionel Hampton (vib), Cootie Williams (tp), George Auld, Lester Young (ts); Johnny Guarnieri, Count Basie (p); Artie Bernstein (b), Nick Fatool, Dave Tough, Jo Jones (d).

Recorded in New York and Hollywood, between 1939 and 1941.

When it comes to jazz, the recording industry, whatever's left of it, lives on reissues. These are cheap to produce, whether for the legal owners of the masters, or whoever chooses to shield themselves behind EU law. Poor little us are left, in the meantime, with a mess of sets to be checked for price, sound quality and track titles to avoid duplication or just hoarding more stuff. A true nightmare.

Mixtapes and old friends

I come from a small town in Northern Spain, in the Basque Country. Although we had a good jazz festival nearby, in San Sebastián, music-wise there was not much going on. A neighbour ran the only bookshop in town, and I spent many idle hours at the best of two tiny record shops. This was a time before the internet, before mp3, before recordable CDs. Any music sharing was made through borrowing of actual records, or dubbing on cassettes.