 BUY NOW AmazonUK AmazonUS |
Wardell Gray Four Classic Albums Plus |
Avid
Jazz AMSC1403 [75:10; 76:26] Wardell Gray
Four Classic Albums Plus
Avid Jazz (AMSC1403) [75:10; 76:26]
CD1
The Chase & The Steeplechase1. The Chase (a)
2. The Steeplechase (b)(a) Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), Bobby Tucker (piano), Don Bagley (bass), Chico Hamilton (drums)
(b) add Conte Candoli (trumpet).
Both recorded at Civic Auditorium, Pasadena, February 2nd, 1952.
Way Out Wardell
3. Blue Lou (a)
4. Sweet Georgia Brown (b)
5. Tenderly (c)
6. Just You, Just Me (b)
7. One O’Clock JumpAll recorded live at Pasadena, April 29th, 1947.
(a)Wardell Gray (tenor sax), Errol Garner (piano), Jackie Mills (drums).
(b) Howard McGhee (trumpet), Gray, Vido Musso (tenor sax), Arnold Ross (piano), Barney Kessel
(guitar), Harry Babasin (bass), Don Lamond (drums).
(c) Errol Garner (piano).
(d) Howard McGhee (trumpet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Benny Carter (alto sax), Gray (tenor sax),
Errol Garner (piano), Irving Ashby (guitar), prob. Red Callender (bass), Jackie Mills (drums).
Bonus Tracks
8. Matter And Mind
9. The Troup
10. StonedAl Haig Quartet: Al Haig (piano), Gray (tenor sax), Clyde Lombardi (bass), Tiny Khan (drums).
Rec. New York, April 1948.
CD2
Memorial Album Volume 1
1. Twisted (a)
2. Easy Living (a)
3. Southside (a)4. Sweet Lorraine (a)
5. Blue Gray (b)
6. Grayhound (b)
7. So Long Broadway (c)
8. Paul’s Cause (c)
9. The Man I Love (c)
10. Lavonne (c)
11. A Sinner Kissed An Angel (b)
12. Treadin’ (b)(a) Gray (tenor sax), Al Haig (piano), Tommy Potter (bass), Roy Haynes (drums).
Rec. NYC, November 11, 1949.
(b) Gray (tenor sax), Phil Hill (piano), James ‘Beans’ Richardson (bass), Art Madigan (drums).
Rec. Detroit, April 25, 1950.
(c) Frank Morgan (alto sax), Gray (tenor sax), Teddy Charles (vibes), Sonny Clark (piano), Dick Nivison (bass), Larance Marable (drums). Rec. Los Angeles, 20th February, 1953.
Memorial Album Volume 2
13. April Skies (a)
14. Bright Boy (a)
15. Jackie (a)
16. Farmers Market (a)
17. Sweet And Lovely (a)
18. Lover Man(a)
19. Scrapple From The Apple (b)
20. Move(b1)(a) Art Farmer (trumpet), Gray (tenor sax), Hampton Hawes (piano), Harper Cosby (bass), Larance Marable (drums), Robert Collier (congas). Rec. Los Angeles, 21st January, 1952.
(b) Clark Terry (trumpet), Sonny Criss (alto sax), Gray (tenor sax), Jimmy Bunn (piano), Billy Hadnott (bass), Chuck Thomson (d). Rec ‘Hula Hut’, Los Angeles, August 27th, 1950.
(b1) as (b) with addition of Dexter Gordon (tenor sax).
Wardell Gray (1921-1955) was born in Oklahoma City. When he was 9 his family moved, in 1929, to Detroit. His earliest musical idol was Lester Young (who long remained one of his major influences) and in his teens Gray took up clarinet and tenor sax (not coincidentally, these were also Young’s instruments). He played with local bands in Detroit before, in 1943, the touring Earl Hines Orchesta was passing though Detroit. The band was short of an altoist and Hines was persuaded to give Gray (now 21) a chance. He stayed with Hines for some 3 to 4 years, playing tenor sax most of the time and establishing himself as a frequently used soloist. When Gray left the Hines band in 1946, he settled in Los Angeles.
Between then and his death in 1955, Gray worked and/or recorded with ensembles led by many major jazz musicians such as, amongst others, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Tadd Dameron and Charlie Parker, as well as Earl Hines. His earliest recording seems to have been made in New York in April 1944, when he was part of a band (called the ‘DeLuxe All Stars’) backing Billie Eckstine. Other members of the band included Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Clyde Hart, Oscar Pettiford and ‘Shadow’ Wilson: Gray was already keeping impressive company. What was perhaps his last recording was made in Los Angeles in March 1955, as part of a septet led by altoist Frank Morgan.
Aged just 34, Gray’s career came to an abrupt halt. On May 25th, 1955 his body was found in the desert outside Las Vegas. At the time Gray was in a band led by Benny Carter scheduled to play at the opening of the Moulin Rouge Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. On examination the body was found to have a broken neck and a fracture to the skull. The death was not properly investigated; the local coroner decided that Gray had died of a drug overdose (which would hardly explain his injuries!). Later speculation has suggested that drug dealers were involved in the killing (though a number of Gray’s friends insisted that he was not a drug user). Some have suggested that he had run into trouble over a gambling debt. Or perhaps he was ‘just’ the victim of a racially motivated murder.
In his short career, Gray made many recordings and even though they are well-filled, these two CDs can only be by way of a ‘sampler’. Of the four albums reissued here the best of Gray is to be heard on the two volumes of the Memorial Album on the second CS – which mix studio recordings and live performances. The two albums on the first CD are both live recordings made at concerts. Gene Norman was a DJ, based in Los Angeles, who also became a ‘promoter’ of concerts (under the titleJust Jazz) rather along the same lines as Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.
In June (12th) 1947, Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray were together in a Hollywood recording studio, with a rhythm section made up of pianist Jimmy Bunn, bassist Red Callender and drummer Chuck Thompson. Amongst the music recorded was a tenor ‘battle’ called ‘The Chase’, cut at a length that would fit on two sides of a 78. Five years later Gene Norman brought Gordon and Gray together to record ‘The Chase’ (credited to Gordon) again, with a different rhythm section. Changes in recording technology and the existence of the 10” LP allowed a longer performance. In his book,Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (1985), Ira Gitler writes (p.182), “Dexter and Wardell were prominent members of the active Los Angeles jamming scene” and then quotes Dexter Gordon: “There’d be a lot of cats on the stand but, by the end of the session, it would wind up with Wardell and myself. ‘The Chase’ grew out of this”. The recorded sound of the concert version of ‘The Chase’ is not great, but no worse than many other ‘live’ recordings from this period. The imperfection of the sound doesn’t distract from the excitement created in what is, in effect, a ‘public’ jam session. Urged on by the audience – and by the superb work of drummer Chico Hamilton – Gordon and Gray play with great intensity and sustain the momentum for more than eleven minutes. The two tenor saxophonists ‘chase’ one another as they exchange, first, 32 bar choruses (2 by Gordon, then 2 by Gray), this sequence is then repeated; then 1 32 bar chorus from each (Gordon again going first); then they exchange 16s, 8s and 4s, with Gordon always first in each exchange. Not content with this, trumpeter Conte Candoli joins Gray, Gordon, Tucker, Bagley and Hamilton for an even more extended jam on ‘Steeplechase’ (credited to Charlie Parker). Puzzlingly, the recorded sound is a little better here, so that one can hear more clearly the tonal differences between the two tenorists more clearly (Gray’s sound is generally lighter). Two-tenor sessions such as this were often billed as tenor ‘battles’ and no doubt there was a competitive element here, but on the whole there is a good-natured feel to the way Gordon and Grey exchange ideas. Taken together these two performances are among the best (though Candoli does little more than go through the motions) of the ‘staged’ jam sessions recorded in the years when ‘swing’ was coming to terms with bop, even if the JATP sessions often feature more big names.
Way out Wardell presents material from an earlier Just Jazz concert and is made up of music by various combinations of musicians. Gray’s performances are, it seems to me, a little inconsistent here. The performance of ‘Blue Lou’ has been said to be part of the rehearsal for this concert (which it may be, given that the audience noise is quieter and less vociferous than on the other tracks); some, however, have suggested that it might come from a different occasion altogether. Gray takes an assured solo on ‘Blue Lou’, and plays superbly on ‘Just You, Just Me’ but he is slow to develop ideas on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’. Overall, the 1947 Wardell Gray of Way out Wardell plays best when he stays largely in the swing idiom, with fewer bebop elements than can be heard in his work on the other three albums on this 2-CD set. On the tracks with two tenors they can be fairly easily distinguished – Gray is more fluent and has the lighter tone: Vido Musso’s phrasing is more abrupt and his tone is rougher. Of the other musicians Howard McGhee, often rather overlooked among the bebop trumpeters, makes some excellent contributions, his sound light and his lines agile. But perhaps the stand-out figure is Errol Garner, whether in his characteristically idiosyncratic intro to ‘Blue Lou’ or his beautiful unaccompanied reading of Walter Gross’s ‘Tenderly’, written in 1946 and recorded in June 1947 by one Dick Farney. Very much sui generis, Garner’s style involved a unique mixture of left-hand chords played in a version of stride piano, perhaps mediated by the example of Earl Hines, and adventurous ‘modern’ melodies in the right hand. Not for the only time, Garner comes close to stealing the show!
The three ‘bonus’ tracks which close the first CD were made a year later on in a group led by a very different pianist, Al Haig, a pianist who had a very different background from Garner. Where Garner was black, self-taught and unable to read music, Haig was white and studied piano at Oberlin College and Conservatory, from where he graduated in 1940. By the end of 1944 he had moved to New York, fascinated by what he had been able to hear of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker through radio broadcasts. Gravitating to 52nd Street he met both men and worked with Gillespie from 1944-1946, and Parker from 1948-1950. Haig’s work was very distinctive amongst the bebop pianists. His playing was less bluesily intense and percussive than that of Bud Powell and less idiosyncratically individual than that of Thelonious Monk. Even in the maelstrom of bebop, Haig showed himself to be a subtle, and even poetic, pianist. Alun Morgan, writing in the 1968 book Jazz on Record (p.129), summed up Haig’s qualities very well, “Haig’s work seems always to impart a feeling of comparative calm even at fast tempos; his solos are made ,up of neatly resolved phrases forming part of a larger overall idea”. To put it another way, if Teddy Wilson had gone on to play bebop the result might have sounded a lot like Al Haig. Haig and Gray proved very well suited to one another, as demonstrated on the three tracks which close the first of these two CDs and on the first four tracks on the second CD, from Volume 1 of the Wardell Gray – Memorial Album. One highlight from their collaboration which can be heard here is ‘Matter and Mind’ (CD1), where there are fine solos by both Haig and Gray and in which Haig’s accompaniment behind Gray is a model of its kind. Another highlight is ‘Twisted’ (CD2), written by Gray. This later achieved an odd kind of fame (a fame which, ironically, diverted attention from it) when Annie Ross added witty lyrics to it (recording the result in 1952). Her version attracted a lot of attention and other performances of it were later recorded by, amongst others, Mark Murphy, Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler and Manhattan Transfer. If you know and like any of those versions but don’t know this original instrumental recording from 1948, please make every effort to hear it – it is superb. Four other tracks on Volume 1 of the Memorial Album were recorded in Detroit by a quartet in which Gray is joined by pianist Phil Hill, drummer Art Madigan and a bassist named by Avid (and several other sources) as Johnny Richardson, but who was actually called James ‘Beans’ Richardson. Hill, Richardson and Madigan were all based in Detroit and would doubtless have been known to Gray when he was originally learning his craft in the city. Only Madigan seems to have worked much outside Detroit, but the fact that these were largely ‘local’ musicians doesn’t mean that they were not at least competent. Hill was house pianist at the Bluebird Inn in Detroit (where his band often included Richardson and Madigan) and frequently backed touring soloists. There apparently exists (I haven’t heard it) a live recording of ‘Now’s the Time’ made in October 1949 at the Bluebird Inn by Charlie Parker sitting in with a quintet led by Phil Hill. Still, on ‘Blue Gray’, Grayhound’, ‘Treadin’’ and ‘A Sinner Kissed an Angel’ Gray is undeniably of the greatest musical interest (though Hill has his moments on ‘Grayhound’. On ‘Blue Gray’ the rhythm section provides the kind of loping pace that suits Gray perfectly, while on the ballad ‘A Sinner Kissed an Angel’ – a song by Larry Shayne and Mack David, which Frank Sinatra recorded in 1941 – Gray plays with a weight of emotion which teeters (at least) on the sentimental and of the support he gets one cannot say more than that it is just about adequate. The remaining tracks (‘So Long Broadway’ ‘Paul’s Cause’, ‘The Man I Love’ and ‘Lavonne’) from Volume 1 of the Memorial Album, find Gray in more challenging surroundings alongside musicians such as Frank Morgan, Sonny Clark and Teddy Charles. Gray is, in terms of musical achievement, the most impressive presence; his playing on ‘The Man I Love’ is especially good – as so often, it is when he plays ballads that one hears most clearly Gray’s indebtedness to Lester Young. Alto player Frank Morgan, aged 20 at the time of the recording, offers a passable imitation of Charlie Parker, though he can’t play at Parkerian velocity. He was, sadly, to be one of jazz’s wasted talents; he lost around thirty years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s to heroin addiction and imprisonment. These recordings were made under the name of Teddy Charles (the group being called ‘Teddy Charles West Coasters’) and Charles, a fine player of the vibes, is heard to good effect on two of his own compositions, ‘So Long Broadway’ and ‘Paul’s Cause’, as well as in a vivacious contribution to ‘The Man I Love’. This was pianist Sonny Clark’s first recording session and he acquits himself well, his bright boppish piano being thoroughly attractive – not least on his own tune ‘Lavonne’.
This rewarding Avid set closes with Volume 2 of the Wardell Gray Memorial Album. (Some earlier reissues of the two volumes of the Memorial Album , e.g Original Jazz Classics OJC050 (volume 1) and Original Jazz Classics OJC051 (volume 2) include some alternative takes but these will, I suspect, be of interest primarily to those eager to collect every bar of music ever recorded by Wardell Gray).Volume 2, as we have it here, presents Gray in two contexts – six tracks recorded in a Los Angeles studio with a sextet which includes trumpeter Art Farmer and pianist Hampton Hawes, and two tracks recorded live at the Hula Hut Club in Los Angeles, on which the personnel includes Clark Terry (trumpet) and Sonny Criss (alto sax), plus (on one track only) Gray’s old friend and fellow tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. The general musical level is high on this second volume of the Memorial Album. Gray is on good form on the studio recordings – as, for example, in the solos he takes on ‘April Skies’ (a tune by Buddy Collette) and ‘Bright Boy’. Several of his fellow musicians impress too. Hampton Hawes has some excellent moments, both in his work as part of the rhythm section and a soloist. ‘Farmer’s Market’, which was to become one of Art farmer’s best-known compositions, gets a radiantly upbeat performance, with engaging work by Gray, Farmer and Hawes. Listening to ‘Lover Man’, it is hard not to think of Charlie Parker’s (in)famous 1946 recording of the tune for Dial. This is a far more controlled performance than that earlier version, but it feels as though haunted by thar disturbing flawed recording by Parker. Of the live club tracks, ‘Scrapple from the Apple’ gets the kind of hectic reading one expects, with Gray at his most boppish and Clark Terry making a virtuosic contribution and Sonny Clark playing with Parker-like intensity without sounding like a mere copyist. The addition of Dexter Gordon on Denzil Best’s ‘Move’ adds a further level of excitement, whipping up the audience’s involvement so much that one wonders of they shouldn’t be listed among the personnel.
All in all this is a valuable and rewarding compilation from Avid. Though Wardell Gray is the central figure and there is s good deal of fine work by him to be heard here, he is not the only attraction. We also get to hear a number of other interesting musicians, such as Sonny Clark, Art Farmer and Errol Garner in the relatively early stages of their careers. Taken as a whole these two CDs also give us a vivid picture of the state of modern jazz on the West Coast in the years either side of 1950.
This set is enthusiastically recommended
Please note: there is much that is uncertain about the dates and personnel of many of Gray’s recordings. Rather than following Avid’s suggestions, I have sought to use the information found in two recent well-sources: James Accardi’s ‘Wardell Gray – A Discography 1944-1955’( http://wardellgray.org/discography.html) and the ‘Solography’ of Gray compiled by Accardi and Jan Evesmo ( http://wardellgray.org/pdfdocuments/Wardell%20Gray%20Solography.pdf ).
Glyn Pursglove