Gryce, born in 1927 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, studied at that city's Julius Hart School of Music, then at Boston Conservatory with Alan Hovhaness, and finally in Paris, on a Fulbright fellowship, with Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger. An altoist and flutist as well as a composer and arranger, he attracted attention as early as 1951 through tunes like "Yvette," "Wildwood," and "Mosquito Knees," all recorded by Stan Getz. In the early fifties, Gryce also contributed originals to record dates led by J.J. Johnson ("Capri"), Howard McGhee ("Shabozz"), Max Roach ("Glowworm"), and Clifford Brown ("Brownskin" and "Hymn of the Orient"). Gryce's association with Farmer on records (like that with Brownie) dates from 1953: a session for Prestige featuring Quincy Jones originals but including a Gryce composition entitled "Up in Quincy's Room." Like the entire web of relationships and affinities we've been discussing (Jones-Brown; Brown-Gryce; Jones-Gryce; Gryce-Golson; Golson-Farmer; and to complicate things further, during that same 1953 European tour, Brown and Farmer co-led a record date, with scores by Jones, in Sweden!), the Gryce-Farmer connection was cemented in Hamp's orchestra. In the fall of 1953, after returning to Manhattan, Gryce and Farmer settled near each other: Farmer on West 55th Street and Gryce on West 52nd. In 1954 they co-led a band at the Tiajuana Club in Baltimore and also recorded for Prestige, but the Farmer-Gryce quintet didn't crystallize as a regular unit until 1955. At that time, Gryce outlined some of the ensemble's perspectives: "What we've done on records so far is just the nucleus. We want to experiment with different approaches. Above all, we intend to maintain a richness, a beauty of melodic line no matter how odd the harmonies underneath might be. We want our music to be understood."8 Later in the same interview, Gryce went on to say: "We're not restricting ourselves to the traditional 32-bar choruses. We'll write and play in the framework of any number of bars that will best express our ideas. Nor do we want to be stuck with the usual pattern whereby the piano opens with four or eight bars, then everybody states the theme, followed by each man blowing a chorus on a basic set of changes."9
Gryce's wish to produce a fresh sound, innovative but not aridly "experimental," was realized in three 1955 recording sessions: two with a quintet co-led by him and Farmer for Prestige {When Farmer Met Gryce and Art Farmer Quintet) and one with a nonet for the Signal label (reissued on Signals, Savoy). All three, of course, feature Gryce originals, many of which (for example, "Evening in Casablanca," a forty-six-bar theme, and "Nica's Tempo," which is forty-four bars long) do not fit standard Tin Pan Alley formulas. The harmonies are original and more impressionistic than had been habitual in bebop. Secondary themes, arranged accompanying figures, and motifs used to launch new solos abound, adding textural variety. On the nonet tracks, Gryce uses constantly shifting tonal colors and instrumental combinations to create dense orchestrations, yet his themes are so light and airy, so swinging and songlike, that they never bog down. Particularly notable are three ballads: "The Infant's Song," "Evening in Casablanca," and "In a Meditating Mood," among the most poignant compositions in modern jazz. Gryce's tunes are perfect foils for Farmer's solos, which highlight his slightly sour tone and his probing, off-center lines. These solos methodically explore each tune's harmonic interstices, yet their brooding air keeps them from sounding excessively deliberate. Together, they bear out both Farmer's statement that "I want each note to count"10 and bassist Sam Jones's description of him as "one of the most lyrical trumpet players in the world—I mean he really knows how to play a melody with feeling. If you don't have what's needed to project from the stage to the audience then I think you're just wasting your time."11
The Farmer-Gryce quintet stayed together until June 1956, when it disbanded, a casualty of sporadic gigs and consequent problems in maintaining a stable rhythm section familiar with Gryce's book. Gryce began free-lancing and eventually formed the Jazz Lab quintet with trumpeter Donald Byrd, while Farmer joined Horace Silver's combo (see Chapter 3).
Gryce continued to be an active presence on the New York jazz scene, often in tandem with Benny Golson, whose reputation as the author of memorable, dark-hued originals and Dameron-influenced arrangements increasingly paralleled Gryce's. The two collaborated on Lee Morgan's City Lights (Blue Note) and Dizzy Gillespie's The Greatest Trumpet of Them All (Verve), while Golson's recordings under his own name featured not only his own tunes but such Gryce originals as "You're Not the Kind," "Calgary," "Capri," and "Reunion." Golson has been explicit about Dameron's influence on his work: "Tadd's music really ignited the spark for me. After hearing things like "Our Delight" and "Lady Bird," I had more of a definite goal. I wanted to do more than play the tenor sax. I wanted to write."12 In addition, Golson's first professional gig, after completing his schooling at Howard University, was with Bullmoose Jackson's R B band, which included Philly Joe Jones, bassist Jymie Merritt, and Dameron as pianist and sometime arranger. A friendship between the two composers sprang up, and Golson decided to dedicate a tune to Tadd: "I didn't title it, because I didn't know if Tadd would approve. After the band played it a couple of times, Tadd said he liked it. Then I told him that I'd written it for him and asked him if it would be all right to call it 'Shades of Dameron.' He was pleased, and so was I."13
Later Golson played tenor in the Dameron band that included Gryce and Clifford Brown. His stately, dignified tribute to the trumpeter, "I Remember Clifford," has become a modern jazz classic. In the mid-fifties, Golson contributed charts to Lee Morgan's first three Blue Note record dates, played in and wrote for Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and co-starred with Morgan in the Jazz Messengers, to which he contributed such tunes as the sassy, light-tipping "Along Came Betty" and the hard-driving "Are You Real?" and "Blues March." At the same time, Golson's and Farmer's paths crossed on numerous occasions. Farmer, an excellent sight reader, was in constant demand for sessions ranging from jazz versions of Broadway musicals to George Russell's experiments with the Lydian mode. He played on Benny Golson's New York Scene, while Golson supplied the tunes "Stablemates" (previously recorded by Miles Davis) for Portrait of Art Farmer and "Fair Weather" for the trumpeter's Modern Art, on which he also played tenor.
In 1959, Farmer and Golson formed the Jazztet, a cooperative venture similar to the one with Gryce, featuring Golson's compositions with Farmer as the most accomplished soloist. Golson, however, is an excellent saxophonist whose warm, breathy style was influenced as much by Don Byas and Lucky Thompson as by hard-bop instrumentalists. He is one of the few modern jazz composers whose tunes—many unusual in their structures, like "Just By Myself," whose thirty-six bars divide into two eighteen-bar segments—have entered the repertoire as "standards." Like Gryce, Golson tended to start from harmonies. As he told Ralph J. Gleason: "I first get an interesting chord structure laid out. I feel that this is very important because the soloist will constantly use it for ad libbing after the theme. I try to get a melodic line that will interweave pleasantly with the chord structure. When composing a ballad, I usually create chord and melody bar by bar."14
Also like the Gryce-Farmer quintet, the Jazztet sought to balance improvisation with carefully developed charts that nonetheless would not impede swinging. But finally, like its predecessor, it had trouble finding enough lucrative work to hold onto a stable rhythm section and to keep the same trombonist, since the band was a sextet. It did make some splendid records, particularly The Jazztet and John Lewis, featuring Lewis's "Bel," "Milano," "Django," "New York 19," "2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West," and "Odds Against Tomorrow." Lewis, of course, was the Modern Jazz Quartet's musical director and as remarkable a jazz composer as Golson. Another LP, a live session entitled The Jazztet at Birdhouse, had a more relaxed, "jamming" feel than most Jazztet recordings and featured particularly authoritative solos by the leaders. After switching to the Mercury label, the group disbanded late in 1962.
Farmer co-led a quartet with guitarist Jim Hall for a couple of seasons, then gigged around with pianist Steve Kuhn, saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath, and others, and in 1968 moved to Vienna. For m
any years he performed more frequently in Europe than in the United States. Golson also visited Europe in the mid-sixties, but in 1967 he decided to settle in Los Angeles, where he began writing for television and virtually stopped playing. Commenting in 1978 on his then recent "comeback," he told Leonard Feather: "I've been desperately trying to be sure that I didn't slide behind—at least not too far behind. Because I never did get to the avant-garde thing . . . During the time when I wasn't playing—and this might sound crazy—I was doing a lot of thinking, you know, when I'd hear things. My heart was really in it and many times I wondered when those years were going by and I didn't even take the horn out of the case, how would I do what they're doing. How would I be functioning as part of what's going on. And I'd be humming and thinking what would I be playing.
"When I came back, it was very hard. I never realized it would be so hard. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in music, to pick that horn up after eight years. It took me months just to get a sound again. The lips were like tomatoes—I had no control. It hurt my horn, for it to rest there. Just everything. It was horrible!"15
Gryce dropped out of jazz in 1963 and never made a comeback. He died in 1983 in Pensacola, Florida. The Jazztet, however, was revived in 1984 with its original trombonist, Curtis Fuller, and a relatively constant rhythm section featuring pianist Mickey Tucker and bassist Ray Drummond. Today, the group plays with more distinction than ever. Farmer has matured, saying even more with fewer notes, honing his sound (now on fluegelhorn) and conception to produce solos of enormous compressed power. Golson still writes tunes that stick in the mind, arresting in their melodies and original in structure. Fuller's style has also ripened. Like Farmer, he has burnt away excess and sought to purify his lines. Today, all three musicians are respected elder statesmen, performing throughout the world and looked up to by an emerging generation of young traditionalists.
Detroit Pianists
If bands like Hampton's provided one opportunity for young jazzmen to grow together, other nuclei sprang up in towns like Detroit and Philadelphia. In an interview with Whitney Bal-liett, Tommy Flanagan remembered the Motown scene of his youth: "There were older Detroit guys like Milt Jackson and Hank Jones and Lucky Thompson, who left early and came back to play gigs, and there were local guys like Willie Anderson, who never left . . . And there was a whole bunch of us— some younger, some older—who didn't get away so fast: Roland Hanna, who went to school with me; Paul Chambers; Doug Watkins; Donald Byrd; Kenny Burrell (he loved Oscar Moore, and we put together a Nat Cole-type trio); Sonny Red Kyner; Barry Harris; Pepper Adams, who came from Rochester and played clarinet when I first knew him; Curtis Fuller,- Billy Mitchell; Yusef Lateef; Tate Houston; Frank Gant; Frank Rosolino; Parky Groat; Thad Jones and Elvin Jones, who are Hank Jones's brothers and came from Pontiac, a little way out; Art Mardigan; Oliver Jackson; Doug Mettome; Frank Foster, who's from Cincinnati; Joe Henderson; J. R. Monterose; Roy Brooks; Louis Hayes; Julius Watkins; Terry Pollard; Bess Bonnier,- Alice Coltrane; and the singers Betty Carter and Sheila Jordan.
"We gave weekly concerts at a musicians' collective—the World Stage Theatre. We worked at clubs like the Blue Bird and Klein's Showbar and the Crystal and the Twenty Grand. We played in the Rouge Lounge, and at El Sino, where Charlie Parker worked. As teen-agers, we'd stand outside the screen door by the bandstand, looking in at Bird. All this lasted into the mid-fifties. Then people began to leave—Billy Mitchell ended up with Dizzy Gillespie, Thad Jones with Count Basie, Paul Chambers with Paul Quinichette, Doug Watkins with Art Blakey, Louis Hayes with Horace Silver. I stayed around until 1956, when Kenny Burrell and I left for New York."16
The pianists in this crowd—Hank Jones (b. 1918), Barry Harris (b. 1929), and Flanagan himself (b. 1932)—have in recent years produced one brilliant record after another, establishing themselves (along with two others, Roland Hanna and Hugh Lawson) as the most solid modern-jazz keyboard corps around. All are superb accompanists, and all have cultivated styles that offer subtle pleasures. Chronologically, the first among them was Hank Jones, the eldest member of a family that includes brother Elvin, famous for his volcanic eruptions behind John Coltrane, and the now deceased trumpeter and arranger Thad.
While Hank Jones speaks respectfully of pianists as varied as Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Al Haig, his playing derives from the Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole school of the late 1930s and early 1940s. His light, harplike touch, as though he were plucking the piano's strings instead of striking its keys, and his gracefully restrained single-note style are a reformulation of their aesthetic in modern jazz terms. A pianist of great flexibility, he can not only "fit in" with but inspire and stimulate instrumentalists ranging from Artie Shaw to Jackie McLean, as well as singers of every variety, from Andy Williams to Ella Fitzgerald.
Jones played his first New York gig and made his record debut in 1944 with trumpeter and blues singer Hot Lips Page. Since then, he has worked with so many jazz musicians that it would take pages to list them all. Some of his more notable associations were with Fitzgerald (1948-1953), Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young. In addition, he was virtually Savoy Records' "house pianist" in the middle and late 1950s, though this didn't keep him from recording for at least a dozen other labels during the same period. His exquisite sensitivity, and the refinement of his musical thinking, placed him high on everyone's list of favorite pianists.
This refinement can be heard in Jones's solos on tunes like "Autumn Leaves" (from Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else, Blue Note) and "One for My Baby" (from Wes Montgomery's So Much Guitar, Riverside). Here—and on scores of other LPs—Jones achieves one of the most deeply relaxed grooves in jazz history. He provides a model of alert yet unintrusive accompaniment, while his solos combine ascending and descending runs of carefully modulated dynamics, deft funky touches, and a flexible rhythmic sense that constantly pushes and pulls at the beat. Jones also recorded under his own name in the late 1950s, perhaps most successfully on a solo album for Savoy and on another LP entitled simply The Trio (with bassist Wendell Marshall and Kenny Clarke) for the same label. This latter disc is one of jazz's secret after-hours classics. Marshall's velvety bass and Clarke's perfect wrist control on brushes lay down a cushion of sound as they mesh with Jones's dancing, skipping lines on medium tempos and his lushly strummed chords and bell-like octaves on ballads.
For a while, Jones's very discretion and "good taste," along with his fifteen years buried in the CBS staff orchestra, seemed to condemn him to an obscurity similar to but worse than Wynton Kelly's, since Kelly at least performed regularly in jazz clubs. During the last fifteen years, however, he has been rediscovered by a new generation of listeners (in 1979 alone he recorded at least six albums under his own name). Jones is now, like Farmer and Golson, in demand around the world and esteemed as an elder statesman of modern jazz.
One fellow Detroiter Jones influenced was Tommy Flanagan. The two have recorded a duet album {Our Delights on Galaxy), and many of the same adjectives have been applied to their playing: "gentle" and "delicate," for example. Reminiscing to Michael Ullman about his native city's profusion of keyboard artists, Flanagan commented: "There was a lot of playing in Detroit—a lot of pianos. It didn't matter what part of town. If anybody in the house played an instrument, they also had a piano. There was always a place to have a session, whether it was my house or not. We used to play with Kenny [Burrell], or at Barry Harris's."17 Like Jones, Flanagan admires Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson,- he has referred to Jones as "a more modern Wilson."16 Also like Jones, he has worked as Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist, first from 1963 to 1965 and again for a ten-year stint that began in 1968.
It was Flanagan's move to New York City in 1956 (along with guitarist Burrell, who has called him his "running buddy . . . we're the same age. We started out together—had our first gig together"19) that signaled the beginning of his recording career. Over the next few years, he appeared as a sideman on dates led by Burrell, John Coltrane (Gi
ant Steps, one of Trane's most intriguing discs, an experiment with ultra-dense, thick and fast chord changes), Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, J.J. Johnson, and Sonny Rollins. During a European tour with Johnson in 1957, Flanagan cut his first album as a leader: The Tommy Flanagan Trio Overseas, with bassist Wilbur Little and Elvin Jones.
The record contains at least one example of Flanagan's silky, caressing approach to ballads: "Chelsea Bridge," the beginning of a long love affair on wax with Billy Strayhorn tunes. But in general it is a rocking, kicking session booted along by Jones's busily interweaving, loose-jointed brushwork. Flanagan has always played longer, twistier melodic lines than Hank Jones, and his prickly, vigorous attack is more percussive. Though not every cut is a blues, the whole side has a bluesy feel and includes two walking, medium-tempo blues: "Skal Brothers" and "Little Rock." "Skal Brothers" relies on a call-and-response pattern for its down-home atmosphere, while "Little Rock" creates an intimate mood of ad hoc experimentation— of trying things out in a last set or after closing time, when so much of the best jazz gets created. The LP concludes with two slow numbers close both to Duke Ellington's compositions and to what used to be called "blues ballads," and Flanagan's solo on the last of these, "Willow Weep for Me," builds to an exultantly shouting climax.
Still another pianist with whom Flanagan has performed duets is Barry Harris. In fact, one of the most dramatic jazz performances I ever witnessed was the two of them playing beneath the stone arches at Manhattan's 79th Street boat basin while a storm approached from New Jersey and jagged lightning bolts rent the heavens. They had met early on in Detroit, shared an instructor (Gladys Dillard, whom Flanagan recalls as teaching "the correct pianistic attack—how to finger correctly and use the tips of my fingers"20), and often practiced together—along with other young musicians like Pepper Adams and Paul Chambers—at Harris's house. Despite The Tommy Flanagan Trio Overseas and other evidence to the contrary, Flanagan has always been considered a lyricist. Harris, on the other hand, though he also has a way with ballads, is known as a driving, smoking instrumentalist. He first ventured out of Detroit in 1956, replacing Richie Powell— who had perished in the same automobile accident that killed Clifford Brown—in Max Roach's quintet. Harris soon returned home, however, and stayed in Detroit until 1960 when, after a brief period with Cannonball Adderley, he settled in New York City. Like Jones and Flanagan, Harris has performed with Swing musicians—in particular, Coleman Hawkins—but he is more of a dyed-in-the-wool modernist than his two Motor City compatriots. Whereas Jones and Flanagan, even at their blues-iest, radiate sunshine and civility, Harris partakes somewhat of hard bop's darker energies, especially on medium-tempo tunes, where he can establish deeply hypnotic grooves.
Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965 Page 10