As the distressingly knowledgeable 20th century history-savvy gang here inhabits what appears to be a permanent state of worry, tension and fear these days, we note that autumn shall soon end and winter will be upon us soon. The month of September is ending shortly, so today, we pay tribute to "Fall."
We'll start celebrating the season change with a Warner Bros. cartoon, the first but not the last on the topic of gambling; the 1951 Merrie Melodie Early To Bet, directed by Robert McKimson, cleverly and literally visualizes the gambling bug. Don't know if Frank "Tish Tash" Tashlin was into gambling, but we do know that at the very least three of our all-time favorite comedians, Phil Silvers, Ernie Kovacs and Norm MacDonald, were.
NOW THAT SUMMER IS GONE would be a fantastic companion to the Twilight Zone episode THE FEVER featuring the great Everett Sloane as a super-strict and super insufferable Calvinist moralist who goes to Vegas on vacation and gets utterly obsessed with slot machines and casino gambling.
Next, we'll answer the question of how many versions of the minor-key tune Autumn Leaves we can post. We'll start with mighty guitar geniuses Jimmy Bruno and Frank Vignola!
Vocalists want equal time!
As do tenor saxophonists. . . I saw this guy, Johnny Griffin, play a slightly less uptempo version of this song as the opener of his first rip-roaring set at San Francisco's Keystone Korner (750 Vallejo Street) on Thanksgiving night, 1978.
As a scandal involving our idiot Empire State mayor ensues, it's as good an excuse as any to go through a slew of good renditions of the song Autumn In New York, composed by the formidabke Vernon Duke in 1934. The dynamic duo of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong kick off the explorations of Autumn in New York with their customary brilliance.
Bud Powell could play both classical and jazz music with ridiculous technical facility and a haunting soulfulness.
Chet Baker gives us cool school Autumn On New York.
Invariably, tenor saxophonists will have the last word. Looks like John "Blue Train" Coltrane and "Stan The Man" Getz are accompanied by the A-1 rhythm section of Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (acoustic bass) and Jimmy Cobb (drums). Everybody sounds great.
Here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we careen willy-nilly between animation, classic movies, comedy, music we like, film history/silent films and old school showbiz. Nobody was better at combining old school showbiz at its very best with the virtuosity of jazz than vocalist, pianist and bandleader Nat King Cole (1919-1965).
We'll start today's 100th birthday tribute with the following BBC-TV special, An Evening With Nat King Cole, which demonstrates Cole's blazing genius as entertainer and pianist.
Nat King Cole first made his name in the late 1930's as a swinging jazz pianist in the tradition of Earl "Fatha" Hines and Teddy Wilson.
Nat hired bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore to be his first group. Paraphrasing "Old King Cole was a merry old soul," they were first The King Cole Swingsters. After changing the group name to the King Cole Trio, they began making radio transcriptions and recordings. The trio performed on radio on The Chesterfield Supper Club, Kraft Music Hall, Old Gold, The Orson Welles Almanac and Swing Soiree - and headlined their own program, King Cole Trio Time.
The first record of Nat's as powerhouse jazz pianist this writer heard was the great album of the first (and historic) Jazz At The Philharmonic concert on July 2, 1944. The all-star lineup included r&b "Texas tenor" Illinois Jacquet of "Flying Home" fame (who enters at 3:31 and gets into high note pyrotechnics 20 years before Pharoah Sanders at 5:00), followed by guitarist and guitar inventor extraordinaire Les Paul. Nat and Les have a ball trading riffs with each other.
Equally amazing: a 1946 record led by Count Basie Orchestra saxophonist and swing king Lester Young, with his trio. . . Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich!
The King Cole Trio, with either Oscar Moore or Irving Ashby on guitar and Johnny Miller on the acoustic bass, would become a very popular act and recording a series of 78s for Capitol Records.
The trio appeared in Soundies and Snader Telescriptions in the 1940s and early 1950's.
Forgive the odd over-application of makeup on Mr. Cole in the following Snader Telescription, as the song's great and the trio, as usual, sounds fantastic.
For much of his career, Nat King Cole was a star who couldn't use the rest room or drinking fountain, stay at the same hotel, or live in the same neighborhood as his melanin-challenged Caucasian entertainment counterparts in the U.S.A. As Mr. Cole broke ground, he suffered physical attacks onstage and even the poisoning of the family dog by bigoted scumbags who didn't want his family as neighbors in Sunny California. While this was going on, he was (along with Hazel Scott) among the first African-Americans to host his own TV show.
On November 5, 1956, The Nat King Cole Show debuted on NBC. The shows are consistently outstanding and a high water mark for the musical variety format, and remain much sought after by music fans and it is tough to pick a single favorite episode from the series. Here's Nat, trading his signature tunes with those of that week's guest star, movie actress and musical comedy gal Betty Hutton.
Alas, affiliates in the Deep South states refused to show the series and NBC could not sell it to advertisers. The musical program began as a 15-minute series and at first had a sponsor (Carter Products, the makers of Arrid and Rise), but advertisers could not be found after it expanded in June, 1957 to a half hour format. The racism of the times (obvious in 1957 and, sadly, still all too evident in 2019) doomed The Nat King Cole Show. Nat's response: "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark" - and indeed it was.
NBC made a "take it or leave it" offer. For the show to stay on the air, it had to be moved from its Tuesday night time slot to Saturday evenings at 7:00 p.m. by January 1958. Cole and his agent said no and that was it. The last episode aired on December 17, 1957.
If one was forced to select one particularly exceptional example of the series, arguably that would be the episode that featured a lineup of jazz greats unseen on American television and aired on October 15, 1957. Wouldn't see anything remotely like this again until Edie Adams' jazz-oriented variety show in 1964.
Nat could do acting and comedy in addition to music, so we'll finish today's post with one of his last TV appearances as guest star on The Jack Benny Program, which aired on January 21, 1964.
Thanks and cheers to the unforgettable Nat King Cole!
Today, the jazz-crazed author of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog salutes The Sultans Of Swing. Let's start with this clip of Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa, tearing it up in the 1937 Warner Bros. musical Hollywood Hotel.
By the early 1930's, there were already tremendous swing bands led by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong (leading the Luis Russell Orchestra), Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Don Redman, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Walter Page, the Dorsey Brothers and legendary drummer Chick Webb, just to name a few.
Soon these mighty musical juggernauts of 1930 would be followed by Benny Goodman, Count Basie and, in Paris, a "little big band" known as The Hot Club Of France.
It remains a well kept secret to all but the most obsessed jazz buffs that the various Sultans Of Swing continued to record superb albums, and lots of them, long after the heydey of the genre was a dim speck in the rear view mirror. Had guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian, saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry, bassist Jimmy Blanton and drummer Chick Webb lived longer, they would have as well.
First and foremost, let us not forget the incredible Coleman Hawkins, the featured soloist in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (the one that rocked New York City in 1924) who continued performing and recording consistently great music in a distinguished five-decade career.
Hawkins does what he does brilliantly in this clip featuring swing trumpet ace and frequent bandmate Roy "Little Jazz" Eldridge.
Here's The Hawk, in top form, with none other than ubiquitous studio ace and music educator Mickey Baker on guitar, in 1962.
And then there's Ben Webster, who made his name as one of the featured soloists in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
And then, the flip side of the tenor saxophone coin, the wonderful Lester "Prez" Young, as light and airy in tone as Hawkins and Webster were gritty. Prez first swung the Walter Page and the Count Basie Orchestras and also made guest appearances on Benny Goodman recordings featuring guitarist Charlie Christian.
Along the way, Prez created numerous enduring musical masterpieces, with and without frequent collaborators Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Jo Jones. Late in his career, he recorded the most soulful and heartfelt albums of them all - any genre, any idiom.
Across the pond from Prez, but darn close to equally soulful, the incomparable guitar genius Django Reinhardt.
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Although Django passed away in 1953, his Hot Club Of France bandmate, Stephane Grappelli, would continue playing and touring into the 1990's.
Some of the greatest swing music was performed in the early 1940's and anticipates the swing-to-bop revolution in jazz.
This is no news flash. Among the stylistic and spiritual predecessors of Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Philly Joe Jones and Art Blakey were the guys who drove the Goodman and Basie bands, Gene Krupa and "Papa Jo" Jones, who continued rocking the house well into the 1960's.
Jones played frequently with the tenor saxophonist responsible for the wild solo (which anticipated both r&b and hard bop in one fell swoop) on the Lionel Hampton Orchestra's rocked-out 1941 recording of "Flying Home", Illinois Jacquet.
Jacquet and Hampton never got bored with playing Flying Home and neither did the audience, as this 1967 Newport Jazz Festival recording demonstrates.
Among those post-WW2 genre changing recordings would be those by the restlessly creative Artie Shaw, who got bored with being the second King Of Swing in the 1930's and quickly reached the point when he never, ever wanted to play "Begin The Beguine" again).
Shaw continued recording and kept experimenting with new ideas and different ensemble blends long after the big band era was over.
Woody Herman's riff-powered Second Herd, featuring the stalwart sax section of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims,Serge Chaloff, Herbie Steward and (after Steward left the band) the writer of the band's arrangements, Al Cohn, chose the sophisticated swing-to-bop Lester Young approach over the more "thundering" 1930's style of the First Herd.
Also closer in spirit to the next wave - Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano - than to the commercial pop-oriented big bands - would be three who died in 1941-1942, the aforemtioned Charlie Christian, the Duke Ellington Orchestra's Jimmy Blanton and saxophonist Chu Berry. In fact, it could be argued that Christian WAS the next wave, as he was playing at Minton's Playhouse with Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke, often joined by Parker and Gillespie.
Count Basie Orchestra tenor saxophonist Don Byas, who, as Coleman Hawkins did, always looked forward, unafraid of new ideas in music, would join Dizzy Gillespie's 1942 quintet, featuring Max Roach on drums.
Don Byas relocated to Europe in 1946, where he continued to play and record in a style that blended key elements of swing music and what would be called bebop. Byas would be sought out by younger musicians, as well as American bands on tour.
Among the very harmonically advanced pianists (in addition to Ellington and Hines): the under-recorded but influential Clyde Hart, Mary Lou Williams, Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson.
Mary Lou Williams, the innovative and groundbreaking pianist, had already been looking ahead towards that future in her 1930's recordings as music director/arranger of the Andy Kirk Mighty Clouds Of Joy big band and would continue blazing new frontiers for four decades.
Here's Art Tatum, playing beautifully on The Steve Allen Show (IIRC, the piano virtuoso's only TV appearance) in 1954.
Teddy Wilson would be an enormous influence on the next generation of piano trios - especially those of Bill Evans - and would collaborate with Lester Young, bassist Gene Ramey and Jo Jones on Prez' last great albums in 1956.
Jazz pianist and vocalist Nat "King" Cole, who began his career as a stylistic disciple of Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson, hosted his own TV show in the 1950's! The thought, after viewing the Tatum clip and Nat's shows, persists: imagine, just imagine, jazz on television!
In the corporate-dominated 21st century, with 500+ cable channels, even the once music-friendly PBS is largely a jazz-free zone! So we'll time travel back to 1963 and Nat King Cole's BBC special; even when Nat played and sang primarily in a pop vein, the jazz feeling and harmonic/melodic sophistication remains undeniable.
These musicians and their swinging alumni did us all an enormous favor by never jumping the shark or becoming "oldies" acts.
The Count, The Duke, The Earl Of Hines and their various royalty/alumni, disregarding the ever-ephemeral and shifting public tastes, just continued swinging like mad.
Satchmo, Duke, Mary Lou Williams and Teddy Wilson in particular continued to create masterpieces late in their lengthy musical careers.
Pianist-composers Ellington and Williams kept writing new material and experimenting with new arrangements right up to their last days.
Closing this tribute: two clips of Mary Lou Williams, summarizing decades of jazz and blues with her customary panache and originality.
