AT NEWPORT is a
consequential addition to the prolific and
distinguished discographies of Julian "Cannonball"
Adderley and George Shearing, who play back to
back and briefly join forces on the concert
documented herein. The venue is the Newport Jazz
Festival, then in its fourth summer, and the bands
let their hair down, playing well-paced, tightly
arranged, improvisationally open sets before a
relaxed, enthusiastic audience under the stars.
Observers in 1957 might have found the matchup of
Shearing—38, white, English, an established
megastar—and Adderley—28, black, Southern,
struggling to ascend the jazz tree—to be
counterintuitive. But in retrospect, they were
complementary personalities. For one thing, they
shared a manager, John Levy, the black bassist and
road manager of Shearing's first quintet, who left
in 1951 to pursue a distinguished and pioneering
career in personal management. More to the point,
each was an instrumental virtuoso with a populist
sensibility, conversant with a full timeline of
jazz vocabulary, informed by the imperative to
present even the most esoteric music in an
unfailingly communicative manner.
One evening precisely two years earlier, Adderley
had famously exploded on the scene when he sat in
with bassist Oscar Pettiford before an enthralled
audience of musicians and hipsters at the Cafe
Bohemia in Greenwich Village. This happened months
after Charlie Parker's death, and such
contemporaneous young lions as Jackie McLean and
Phil Woods were on record in referring to
Adderley's style— he incorporated the harmonic and
rhythmic innovations and propulsive thrust of
Charlie Parker, with a big, fat Willie Smith lead
alto tone, ferocious execution reminiscent of Earl
Bostic, and an ability to conjure elegant melodic
lines à la Benny Carter—as the next step in
extending the vocabulary of the alto saxophone.
Adderley grounded his narratives in the tropes of
bebop, blues, and the black church, apportioned in
equal measure; after the band tears through
J.J. Johnson's 1947 composition "Wee Dot," his
patter provides a window to his thinking.
"That, of course, was a blues, which we like to
play very much," says the former high school band
director. "You'll find it obvious in our
performance here this afternoon, because we feel
that the blues reflects what jazz should be made
of."
Throughout their half-hour set the Adderley
Quintet (with Cannonball's cornetist sibling Nat)
manifest the trademark collective focus,
instrumental prowess, soulful intelligence, and
insouciant precision that sealed their popularity
with black audiences from the moment they convened
in early 1956. Those qualities were due in no
small part to the contributions of pianist Junior
Mance,
bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, a
seasoned young rhythm section that could go primal
or delicate at the drop of a hat. In particular,
Chicagoan Mance uncorks some big-time solos—think
Earl Hines and Albert Ammons mixed with Bud Powell
and Thelonious Monk—that show us why Lester Young,
Gene
Ammons, Sonny Stitt, and Dinah Washington had made
him their road pianist of choice in previous
years.
The repertoire—"A Foggy Day" (an insistent medium
groove, with telling key modulations),
"Ser-monette" (a Ray Charles-inspired
bop-shuffle), "Sam's Tune" (a train song), and
"Hurricane Connie" (ingenious, warp-speed rhythm
changes)—comes from Cannonball
Enroute, To the Ivy League with Nat, and
Introducing Cannonball Adderley, all recorded for
Mercury-EmArcy, a label that kept the brothers in
the studio, but backed their product
insufficiently. Indeed,
Cannonbal's bandstand optimism and ebullience
flies in the face of the dire circumstances that
already faced him. Owing back taxes, the brothers
were deep in debt and would disband temporarily in
the winter of 1958, when Cannonball joined forces
with Miles Davis and John
Coltrane.
By contrast, Shearing was at a popular peak. A
blind prodigy from a working-class family in
London, the pianist had carved out a successful
career in England before emigrating to the United
States in 1947. Under the sponsorship of
countryman Leonard Feather, he quickly made his
bones on 52nd Street, establishing props in a
popular trio with Oscar Pettiford and J.C. Heard,
and sharing bills with prestigious artists ranging
from Charlie Parker to
Machito. Influenced in formative years by Teddy
Wilson, Art Tatum, and Nat Cole, and fascinated
with the vocabulary of Romantic and Impressionist
European music, Shearing quickly transmuted the
vocabulary of bebop into his own voice.
Already a fixture in 1949, Shearing became a major
star that year when his recording of "September in
the Rain" (MGM) with a
vibraphone-guitar-piano-bass-drums configuration
sold 900,000 copies, imprinting the "Shearing
sound"—the vibraphone played the top register of
the octave, the guitarist played the bottom, and
the piano navigated between those registral
boundaries with block chord variations—on the
collective consciousness of jazz. In 1955, he
signed with Capitol Records, cementing his stature
with a series of
nuanced, well-promoted albums that showcased his
exquisite touch and harmonic ingenuity in a range
of contexts. With enviable panache and
sophistication, he tackled the fiery complexities
of bebop and Afro-Cuban music, intimate solo piano
recitals, dialogues with singers Nat Cole, Mel
Torme, and Peggy Lee, and plush concerti against
mellow backdrops of strings and woodwinds.
Here, Shearing's stylistic flexibility is on full
display. For his spread-out Newport audience, he
eschews, with one exception, the intimate,
tasteful arrangements "for very small rooms" that
comprised the bulk of his work in
1957. That exception is "It Never Entered My
Mind," on which he superimposes the melody of Erik
Satie's
"Gymnopedie." Otherwise, burning is the order of
the night, and the excellent band rises to the
task. On "Pawn Ticket"—a worthy entrant in the Ray
Bryant lexicon of catchy tunes with slick
changes—Shearing unleashes his bop chops on a
block chord solo. A stirring "There Will Never Be
Another You" features vibraphonist Emil
Richards—the multiple percussion maestro who
succeeded malleters Don Elliott, Joe Roland, and
Cal Tjader in Shearing's units—over sweet fills
from classy trapsetter Percy Brice. Shearing
learned clave from
Machito, and—with idiomatic support from bassist
Al McKibbon, himself a disciple of Chano Pozo with
Dizzy Gillespie, and from legendary Cuban hand
drummer Armando Peraza—customarily climaxed sets
with idiomatic Latin
flagwavers. McKibbon provides the vamp that
propels "Old Devil Moon," and Peraza puts
intriguing mambo beats on
"Nothin' But De Best," an engaging calypso
authored by former Shearing drummer Denzil Best.
A
stickler for playing charts just precisely so,
Shearing required sidemen to read immaculately and
to improvise and express their personality when
called upon to do so. "We are not usually in the
habit of inviting guests up to play with the
quintet, because normally we have things
completely set," he remarks before summoning the
Adderleys on stage. "But we are about at this time
to embark on a very special arrangement. As a
matter of fact, we are going to arrange it right
now." McKibbon and Brice set the tempo, and the
impromptu crew launches into "Soul Station," a
funky blues line with a Horace Silver connotation.
The Adderleys soar, Richards uncorks a cogently
jagged declamation, and Shearing lets it all hang
out with several intense choruses of block chords,
the way he might have done on a third set at
Birdland following, say, Bud or Bird or Machito or
the Ellington Orchestra. Catching his breath in
the aftermath, he briefly sheds his unflappable
stage persona, saying, "You don't mind us enjoying
ourselves for one night, do you? Whew!"
Neither Shearing nor Junior Mance can recall
whether this was the only musical encounter of the
two John Levy clients. But it was a special one,
and both giants honored themselves in the process.
Ted Panken
Down Beat, Jazziz, WKCR August 2002
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