Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, one of the best jazz composers, arrangers, and band-leaders around was Oliver Nelson; he wasn't a bad alto saxophonist either.
Sadly, Nelson died in 1977 of a heart attack, which is of little surprise when you listen to the tremendously energetic albums he recorded, most especially the iconic More Blues and the Abstract Truth, and the truly spectacular Swiss Suite featuring the Argentinian tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, and the much lamented alto saxist, Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in June 1971. It's truly hair-raising stuff!
Oliver Nelson was born in St Louis on June 4th 1932, and came from a very musical family, with his sister a singer and pianist, and his elder brother a sax player with the Cootie Williams band. When Nelson was six he started to study piano and by the age of eleven was also studying saxophone and composition - he was a natural.
By the late 1940s he was playing with many of the so called 'Territory Bands' around the St Louis area. These bands were so called because they were made up of local musicians who only played in the clubs, bars, and ballrooms within their own areas, which, if you think of the size of the US makes sense, although some, such as the Count Basie Orchestra (based in Kansas City) were able to move out onto the national stage (especially if someone like the A & R man John Hammond came across them) and make it big.
In 1950 Nelson joined the Louis Jordan band, and then, after a spell in the Marine Corps, returned to St Louis to study composition and theory at university. After graduating, in 1958, Nelson moved to New York where he played with the band led by trumpeter Erskine Hawkins ( who composed the tune Tuxedo Junction in 1939, which kept him supplied with mouthpieces and groceries for the rest of his life), and the band of Hammond organist William 'Wild Bill' Davis, and, perhaps more importantly, the orchestra of drummer Louis Bellson, where he did most of the arranging. In his spare time he also became the house arranger at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
Nelson began leading his own group in 1959, and by 1961 his septet, featuring Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, and Bill Evans, were in the Impulse studios recording Blues and the Abstract Truth, followed three years later by More Blues and the Abstract Truth, which has a line-up to die for, including Thad Jones trumpet, Phil Woods alto, Pepper Adams baritone, Grady Tate drums, and Ben Webster tenor. After that recording Nelson was seldom out of the recording studios.
In 1967 he moved to Los Angeles where he began a secondary - and very lucrative - career writing for films and TV, with many of his scores, for such shows as Ironside, Columbo, and The Six-Million Dollar Man, becoming huge hits.
There was nothing this musician couldn't do, including (when he wasn't playing alto in the Quincy Jones Orchestra) putting together a scratch international big band on a Thursday and making it sound as if it had been playing together for ten years by the Friday lunchtime, as British brass player Ron Simmonds remembers when he was called late to the first rehearsal of Nelson's Dream Band in Berlin and ,with bleary eyes, found, on his music stand, a drawing of a castle surrounded by houses, with mountains in the background. Ron couldn't work out what sort of musical notation it could possibly be, it was his worst musical nightmare come to life, especially as his fellow musicians obviously understood things as they were already playing it expertly. Eventually he realised the drawing was the title picture of the score, which brought a big smile from Nelson ( he apparently kept smiling throughout the rehearsal) who suggested Ron might like to turn the cover over to reveal the music. And when he did there were...
"...pages and pages of sixteenth notes [ a semi-quaver, which is a note played for a sixteenth duration of a whole note, in other words a lip-splitter] which would have put even the Arban Tutor [a notoriously difficult trumpet tutor] to shame. But even while we were spitting and spluttering through all of this the first time, the arrangement still sounded great. After we'd mastered it, it sounded fantastic. And Nelson knew it would - that's why he kept on smiling. In fact the band was so good on the concert that we quite probably stole some of the thunder of the two giants: Buddy Rich and the Clarke/Boland band with Dizzy Gillespie, who were due to appear the next night. Nelson himself, [who] was completely knocked out, arranged a recording session for us and stayed on an extra ten days to write the new scores for it. We strolled into the studio on the day, laughing and joking, fully expecting to be playing all the now familiar pieces, plus one or two little extras; but he'd written four new works - two of them, as before, absolutely black with sixteenth notes. Nowhere to breathe, or even think, and one total lip destroyer. Also, instead of the week we usually get for rehearsals, we had to get them right and record them all inside six hours. And he still kept smiling."
And smile Nelson does on the Flying Dutchman album cover of Swiss Suite because he knew he was good, and that only the best musicians wanted to play for him. Why shouldn't he smile when he had one of the most exciting bands he'd ever put together for that live recording session in the Montreux Grand Casino, an event Bob Palmer describes brilliantly in his liner notes for the original LP...
" The extraordinary Oliver Nelson performance preserved on this record opened Flying Dutchman Night, a special evening amid the general excellence of the 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival. The full throated roar of the Festival Big Band, a United Nations of jazz musicians from as far afield as Argentina, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Poland, England, and Scandinavia, provoked equally energetic roars of approval from the audience, and the evening was off to a soaring start.
"The tightness of the big band here assembled is amazing considering the diverse origins of the musicians and the rushed rehearsals..."
And no doubt a forest of sixteenth notes.
" The energy is another thing; this album burns, stomps, and runs and hollers along, especially in the sections of 'Swiss Suite' that has Gato and the band shouting back and forth at one another over the thundering four-man percussion section."
Oh, how right, how very right.
When this album was recorded Gato Barbieri was a young jazz tenor sax turk with more energy and playing ability than a dozen Coltranes on a good night, and his wild, almost undisciplined sound - which keeps breaking out of that sixteenth note forest - is still one of the most exhilarating sounds you are ever likely to hear in jazz - then, or now - and although his playing often verges on madness (highlighted, on the 'Swiss Suite' twenty-five minute track, by the preceding bluesy alto solo from Vinson) it always retains its fire and sense of pace and forward momentum, using dynamics superbly to bounce around all over the place, making the listener wonder where the devil he might be off to next - and will he ever get back? - with the brass and reed sections of the orchestra waiting and listening for a chance to have a say, as the drummers hammer themselves into tens of millions of shattering elements that seem to fly around Barbieri's fedora like an atomic explosion about to happen. Not since Paul Gonsalves' mammoth twenty-seven chorus solo with the Duke Ellington band at Newport in 1956 has there been a tenor sax solo like this one. It was one of the most exciting things I'd ever heard in 1971. It is even more exciting now.
Buy Swiss Suite
copright 2007 Steve Newman
0 comments:
Post a Comment