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)

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:

BG at CH: 75 years and a complete recording still to come... soon

(L to R: Gene Krupa, Babe Russin, Allan Reuss, George Koenig, 
Red Ballard, BG, Vernon Bown, and Art Rollini
Carnegie Hall, January 16, 1938)

Next Wednesday, January 16th, will mark the 75th anniversary of Benny Goodman's famous concert at Carnegie Hall. It was a very cold Sunday evening in New York, Carnegie Hall sold out (they even had part of the audience on stage), the Hall's surroundings were crowded, supporters of Franco (this was during the Spanish Civil War) were protesting against Goodman, who had played a benefit for Spanish loyalists in December... It was a momentous occasion for many reasons and the actual music lived up to it.

CBS 450983

I've been a fan of this concert for over twenty years, since I bought the first CD reissue done by Columbia in my first visit to London. In those days I didn't own so many records, so this is one of those I spinned endless times. I didn't mind the not-so-good sound quality: this was history in the making (a "swing" band at Carnegie Hall!), and some of the music is excellent, like the surprisingly reflective piano solo by Jess Stacy on "Sing, Sing, Sing", Krupa's galvanizing break on "Don't Be That Way", Lester Young's tenor on "Honeysuckle Rose", Lionel Hampton's wild arpeggios at the end of "I Got Rhythm", or Ziggy Elman blasting trumpet at the end of "Swingtime in the Rockies".

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.

Did you ever see the Prez walking?

Saturday 27 was Lester Young's 102nd anniversary. The President is a cornerstone of jazz, the perfect blend of swing, blues, sound, and quirkiness. Thanks to recordings, anyone can appreciate his musical qualities, but we can only rely on our elders' stories about his quirks. There's much written about his mannerisms, the way he talked, even the kind of shoes he preferred.

Music in the air

One of the defining characteristics of jazz music, especially in the first 2/3 of the 20th century, is its mixture of oral and mechanical tradition, so to speak. Oral (aural?) because musicians learnt their craft by sheer listening, and mechanical because that learning was done primarily from records, playing them over and over again till they were worn down. In the case of simple, short phrases, like "Rhythm-A-Ning", records sometimes were not even needed for the music to live on through the years. Some time ago I wrote about Lester Young's pervading influence on subsequent generations of jazzmen. A few months ago, Doug Ramsey talked about the President's closing tenor solo on "Sometimes I'm Happy":

which immediately reminded me of Gerry Mulligan's "Jeru", premiered a few years later by Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" nonet

Mulligan was one of those staunch followers of Lester Young, and it's likely that Lester Young's solo was the inspiration for his composition. What's interesting is where this melody turns out again, practically untouched

I say practically untouched because both (the three melodies, actually) are in the same key, and the contour of "Jeru" and Bud Powell's "So Sorry, Please" are almost identical. The connection between Lester Young and Gerry Mulligan is quite clear, but the link between Mulligan and Powell is more unexpected, and can actually be narrowed down to quite some specific details: we'll be able to read the very likely explanation in the extraordinary biography of Powell by Peter Pullman.

As part of his comprehensive research, Pullman discovered that Powell had actually played on one gig by Miles Davis's Nonet. Given that their repertoire was rather limited, it is safe to assume that they must have played "Jeru". Days after that gig, Powell went into the studio and did a session where he recorded several standards and only one original, "So Sorry, Please". ¿Residual memory from the gig with the Nonet? Possibly.