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Trio and Quintet
by C. Michael Bailey
Pianist and composer Elmo Hope has more in common with Tadd Dameron than most of his other jazz peers. Both men were primarily composers and arrangers who concentrated on their own music rather than standards. Both men spent their professional lives in New York City during the twilight of bebop and the flourishing of hard bop. Neither man boasted large discographies as leaders, but appeared on a significant number of recordings as sidemen. Their careers were both shortened dramatically by ...
Continue ReadingBen Webster: At The Renaissance
by Richard J Salvucci
When tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton first came up in the 1980s, his style was so, well, unusual, that a live audience would sometimes tentatively ask “Ben Webster?" Whether Hamilton regarded that as a compliment--it was--or the musicological equivalent of “Play Melancholy Baby for me" only Hamilton could have said. But the comment also acknowledged that the saxophone had gone through a convulsive period in which honks, shrieks, fragments and semitones had become the norm. Yes, there were melodic players, like ...
Continue ReadingHampton Hawes: For Real!
by Richard J Salvucci
There are, Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, no second acts in American life. For pianist Hampton Hawes, born in 1928, there was scarcely a first. No sooner was he established as an up-and-coming talent than he was drafted into the Army. When he got out, he tried to pick up where he left off. A heroin habit he had acquired prior to military service led to a harsh incarceration because he refused to become an informer. Only a grant of clemency ...
Continue ReadingThe Fox
by Richard J Salvucci
There was once a legendary trumpet player named Jack Purvis who was a disciple of Louis Armstrong. Purvis was an excellent player, but he was in and out of trouble for most of his life. So he spent some time in jail. In fact, so much time that Purvis once led (documented in the Fort-Worth Star Telegram, March 30, 1938) a broadcast from a Texas prison in Huntsville. Purvis led many lives, and was sometimes spotted in odd places like ...
Continue ReadingArt Pepper: Smack Up
by Richard J Salvucci
There are certain players and recordings that make an indelible first impression. The circumstances usually involve a degree of ignorance: Who is that? What is he (or she) doing? How did this recording escape notice when so many others did not? A very personal reaction to Art Pepper. Urgency. Intensity. Listen to me. Before the name, there was the sound and the piercing tone that can only come out of some dark emotional depth. A listener did not ...
Continue ReadingCurtis Counce: You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce!
by Richard J Salvucci
When bassist Curtis Counce died of a heart attack at the age of 37 in 1963, the jazz world was deprived of a major talent. Not that one would have known much, for his death, while noted, was not extensively covered. Counce, a Midwesterner, had come to California and to Los Angeles to learn his craft, where he played with such incubator orchestras at the Club Alabam as Johnny Otis (trumpeter Art Farmer started there too). He gigged in the ...
Continue ReadingFrank Butler on Curtis Counce's "Landslide"
by David A. Orthmann
“Man, I feel like cookin' this evening,"* Frank Butler proclaimed while setting up his drums in the Contemporary Records studio on October 6, 1956. Over a half-century later, his words still have the ring of absolute truth. The session, led by bassist Curtis Counce and released in 1957 as Landslide, was an incandescent beginning to Butler's recording career. The California-based trapster had previously amassed an impressive resume, including gigs with Dave Brubeck's combo and the big bands of Duke Ellington ...
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