Craft Recording Release Art Farmer “Portrait”

Cover of the Craft Recordings reissue of Portrait of Art Farmer (courtesy of DL Media Music)

Regular readers probably know by now that I have been following, somewhat selectively, releases of remastered Contemporary jazz albums by Craft Recordings. The most recent of these is Portrait of Art Farmer, a quartet album released in 1958. The quartet that trumpeter Farmer led consisted of Farmer’s twin brother Addison on bass, pianist Hank Jones, and Roy Hanes on drums.

The album is a relatively modest one. It consists of eight tracks, the longest of which is six and a quarter minutes, with the shortest a little longer than four minutes. Three of the tracks are Farmer originals, “Back in the Cage,” “And Now …,” and “Earth.” The other contributing composers are (in order of appearance) Benny Golson (“Stablemates”), Ray Noble (“The Very Thought Of You”), George Russell (“Nita”), Arthur Schwartz (“By Myself”), and Burton Lane (“Too Late Now”).

Those familiar with my tastes in jazz can probably guess that I have enjoyed Jones’ keyboard work as much as I enjoyed Farmer’s stylizations, both as a composer and in his improvisations. The same can be said for some of Farmer’s exchanges with Hanes. Put another way, this album provides listening experiences involving some of my favorite jazz icons!

In reviewing my archives, I realize that my past encounters with recordings of Farmer have been relatively limited. My last encounter seems to have been about two years ago this month, when Farmer was one of the performers on Gerry Mulligan’s Night Lights album. At that time I described the album as one of “subdued understatement;” and Farmer had just the right chops for that style. Indeed, that description permeates the entirety of Portrait of Art Farmer, albeit from an engaging diversity of points of view.

At a time when the “news of the day” makes us want to hide under the bed, the eight tracks on Portrait of Art Farmer make a persuasive effort to lure us back into the “real world.”

Cool Born from Bebop

One of the more interesting side effects of my reading Ira Gitler's Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s was that it sent me back to giving a more serious listening to Birth of the Cool, the album that Miles Davis recorded for Capitol before going over to Blue Note. This was originally the title (apparently coined by Pete Rugolo) of a 12" LP of performances by what was called the Miles Davis Nonet. Eight of those recordings had been previously issued on a 10" LP in Capitol's Classics in Jazz series. The later release included three omitted instrumental tracks and one vocal ("Darn That Dream," sung by Kenny Hagood).

While there is no question that Miles was the leader for the three recording sessions (January 21, 1949, April 22, 1949, and March 9, 1950), I feel that the most important thing about the entire project was how much of a joint effort it was. Miles is sole composer of only one track, "Deception;" and he shares "Budo" with Bud Powell. Just "by the numbers," Gerry Mulligan would have to be counted as "principal composer," since he is responsible for three tracks ("Jeru," "Venus de Milo," and "Rocker"). Just as important is the contribution of John Lewis ("Rouge"); but the real sin of omission is the absence of Gil Evans' name from any of the basic credits. In the CD release one has to delve into the notes by Pete Welding to appreciate the role that Evans played, along with Miles, Mulligan, and Lewis in the birth of the Nonet and its subsequent recording sessions.

If we want to extend the birth metaphor to cool itself, then we might do well to consider it in terms of parentage. From this point of view one parent will be the small groups led by Charlie Parker and the other would be the characteristic big band sound from Claude Thornhill through the combination of his particular assembly of instruments and Evans' arrangements for that assembly. The Miles Davis Nonet thus inherited the genes of both the "Parker size" and the "Thornhill size." The CD also includes a "Special Note by Gerry Mulligan" that credits even more contributors. Most important in Mulligan's list is the presence of George Russell, described as one of the "more-or-less regulars at Gil's" and, in those early days, another arranger for Thornhill (not to mention Dizzy Gillespie's big band for which he arranged "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop"). Of those who appreciate just how many people were involved in the formation of the Nonet, Mulligan is definitely the most comprehensive and generous when it comes to giving credit where credit is due.

Beyond the fact that the ensemble is a nonet, the most interesting thing about it is its instrumentation. Mulligan's baritone sax shares responsibility for the bass line with a tuba played by John William (Bill) Barber, who, like Mulligan, came over from Thornhill's band. Then there was the decision to include a French horn, whose player changed in each of the three recording sessions (Junior Collins, Sandy Siegelstein, and Gunther Schuller, in the order of the recording dates). The result was a richness of sound that owed as much to Igor Stravinsky (whose name appears frequently in Gitler's oral history) as to the evolution of jazz in the forties.

The other side of the coin, however, is that, as those sounds were being explored, there was a certain sameness in how they established that "cool" mood from one track to the next. Diversity would emerge later, for Davis and Evans in their studio collaborations for Columbia. Birth of the Cool had more to do with accepting the nonet instrumentation as a premise and then homing in on its expressiveness with a very keen sense of refinement. Thus, as projects go, it was its own beginning and its own ending. After that all those who contributed would move on to other things, taking their experiences from the three recording sessions in different directions. From this point of view, that birth metaphor may be inappropriate; because what was "born" did not experience the sort of "maturation" that Gitler had documented in his oral history or that we would encounter in the subsequent period of the emergence and refinement of the free jazz movement (choosing that example because today happens to be Ornette Coleman's birthday, as well as Samuel Barber's). Birth of the Cool is a document of three splendid moments; but it did not declare the beginning of a "new era," as we might say, in classical music, of the opening measures of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or the riot that greeted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. We can listen to it appreciatively, but we should also listen with a sense of historical context.

Beethoven, Eliot, and Time

I have to be very careful about how many reviews I read through my New York Times RSS feeds (lest I end up spending the whole day with them); but this morning there was one by Anthony Tommasini that was impossible to resist. It involved a performance on Wednesday night at the Baryshnikov Arts Center under the auspices of Lincoln Center's New Visions series. In this case the "novelty of vision" had less to do with the content itself than with the approach to presenting that content, which was made clear by the headline for Tommasini's review:

Eliot’s and Beethoven’s Voices Yoked

My immediate reaction to this headline was that I would finally work out just what the relationship was between the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot and the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, including the question of specifically which quartets inspired which poems and how.

Tommasini's review began by establishing the current state of play over resolving that question:

In 1931, while listening to a gramophone recording of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor (Op. 132), T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to his friend Stephen Spender, the English poet and novelist. Eliot found the Beethoven piece “quite inexhaustible to study,” he wrote.

“There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human, gaiety about some of his later things,” Eliot continued, “which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruits of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

Eliot did so in “Four Quartets,” his series of four lengthy, connected poems written over six years and first published together in New York in 1943. Among Eliot scholars, it seems, there is debate about how, precisely, this effort was inspired by the Quartet in A minor, one of Beethoven’s astonishing late works.

Thus, it appears that all four of Eliot's poems were inspired by a single quartet; and, reviewing the texts I realized that each of those poems has the same "five-movement" structure, which Opus 132 does not share with any of the other late quartets. So the idea that one quartet served as the inspiring force behind four poems is certainly a plausible one, plausible enough to provide the foundation for the concert Tommasini was reviewing:

Staged in the 130-seat Howard Gilman Performance Space, the piece began [the actor] with Mr. [Stephen] Dillane reciting the Eliot poems from memory in a continuous, soft-spoken and mesmerizing monologue lasting 75 minutes. After a short intermission, members of the Miró Quartet, facing one another like four players in a card game, performed the Beethoven, giving a vibrant, probing and personal account of this mystical 45-minute work.

At this point I realized that this was very much a you-had-to-be-there event. If the heart of Eliot's "response" to (interpretation of?) Beethoven took the form of four poems, each with a five-movement structure, was that structure at all evident in Dillane's "continuous" delivery; and how important was the relationship between the formal structure of both the poems and the music and the "content" (whatever that might mean) of each?

Tommasini made it clear that he was not going to delve into such profound questions in the column space allotted to a music review:

I hesitate to try to summarize the themes of the Eliot poems, which deal with issues regarding man’s relationship with time. Time is described as claiming man, holding him to the material world and preventing him from knowing spiritual transcendence. The past cannot be changed, and the future is unknowable, Eliot argues.

For my part I know better than to dig too deep without spending more time with both Beethoven's score and Eliot's texts; but I have a personal history with Opus 132 that definitely resonates with Tommasini's surface-level impressions. It had to do with that period last spring when I was receiving radiation therapy from a technical staff that appreciated how listening to the right music would help me keep still while getting my dosage every day. My initial candidates for listening were both the third and fourth movements of Beethoven's Opus 106 (the "Hammerklavier" piano sonata); but one of the technicians had the box of the complete Beethoven string quartets performed by the Lindsay Quartet. I realized that there were any number of opportunities for my dealing with the "relationship with time" (as Tommasini put it) that would see me through each treatment.

Even before I had gone into this therapy, I had written about the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart movement of Opus 132, whose temporal scale is practically that of an entire composition, rather than a single movement. There is no question that this movement stands out in the time-flow of the entire quartet. Just in terms of the numbering, it is the central of the five movements, its duration is approximately that of the two movements that precede it combined, and the two movements that follow it when combined take less time than either of those preceding movements. However, in terms of duration, that centrality does not translate into the third "movement" of any of Eliot's four texts; so it is unclear whether or not this particular structural feature registered with Eliot.

On the other hand there is that Lydian mode, which I last wrote about when I prepared my own obituary for George Russell. It might be unfair to say that Russell was the man who brought the Lydian mode to jazz. However, he certainly gave it a lot of attention; and, if it was only coincidence that some of his attempts to put a "Lydian twist" on jazz classics by Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk took place in a concert that he gave at the Beethoven Hall in Stuttgart, then the coincidence is a happy one. The power of the Lydian mode lies in the prominent position of the tritone, and the power of the tritone resides in its harmonic ambiguity. That ambiguity is critical to any understanding of Beethoven's Opus 132, and it is equally important in understanding why the Lydian mode was so important to Russell.

What, if anything, does that ambiguity have to do with "man's relationship with time?" One answer is that ambiguity can only be resolved through an investment of time. The Heiliger Dankgesang occupies such an imposing duration because that duration is necessary to tease out and ultimately resolve the ambiguities that are inherent when one tries to compose in the Lydian mode; and it is clear from the overall architecture that this movement is one that is "about" seeking and finding resolution. That resolution cannot be found in any of Eliot's "third movement sections;" if anything those sections lead us into, rather than out of, the maze of ambiguity. However, the coda of the Heiliger Dankgesang does make an excellent setting for the words that begin the final stanza of "Little Gidding," the last of the Four Quartets poems:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I would be so bold as to suggest that these words resonate far more with the Heiliger Dankgesang than with the final measures of the fifth movement of Opus 132.

All these observations must now be subject to the obvious disclaimer. This is, after all, my "rehearsal studio." Whether or not these thoughts will hold up to further listenings to Opus 132 or subsequent readings of Four Quartets (or, for that matter, further listenings of the George Russell Sextet at the Stuttgart Beethoven Hall) can never be anything but unclear. Perhaps, however, the real "relationship with time" that Eliot was pursuing has to do with the extent to which all of our thoughts are as ambiguous as that Lydian tritone and that what we call "knowledge" has less to do with how we can account (to use Plato's language) for what we know (or believe) and more to do with how we invest our time in "exploring" (shifting from Plato to Eliot) paths to resolve those ambiguities. Put another way, our time in rehearsal is when we explore; and the performance that emerges from rehearsal is when we "arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Yet Another Loss

This may well be the most morbid week I have encountered since I started blogging. I just discovered (due to sluggishness on the part of The New York Times in releasing the story) that this past Monday, when I was writing up my reaction to reading Joshua Kosman's obituary for Michael Steinberg on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, was also the day on which George Russell died. Perhaps the delay reflected that fact that Russell was not that familiar to the general public. To this day he may still be best remembered for his collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie on the two-sided "suite" recorded on a single RCA Victor 78, "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop." This was one of Gillespie's earliest ventures into Afro-Cuban jazz. Russell was his arranger; and his most notable contribution was the introduction to "Cubana Be," one of his earliest departures from conventional scales in favor of the modal scales that could be traced back to Ancient Greece.

Ben Ratliff's Times obituary provides a telling anecdote about Russell's sense of self in his practice of jazz:

He later moved to New York to play drums with [Benny] Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”

Like Lennie Tristano, he had an intense drive to get at how things ticked; and, again like Tristano, his reputation was far stronger within the "brotherhood" of practitioners than in the "external" world of casual listeners. (That need to understand how things ticked, of course, meant that his approach to jazz was analogous to the one that Merce Cunningham took to dance and Michael Steinberg took to the art of writing about music, which makes this week's sense of loss all the greater.)

Looking over my own collection, I discovered that I have eight Russell CDs (as well as the 2-CD collection of the complete RCA Victor recordings made by Dizzy Gillespie). I honestly cannot remember how I accumulated those eight CDs, but I think the collection began with the Jazz Workshop recording by The George Russell Smalltet. I may have been drawn to this recording because Bill Evans was Russell's pianist. That CD gave me my first taste of Russell's own compositional voice, after which I would go after every opportunity to add another one to my collection. When I started taking my business to True Blue Music, I encountered The African Game, which I think was his only Blue Note session. My wife fell in love with that recording from its very first notes.

Regarding Russell's theoretical interest in modality, I have to confess that I am still trying to get my ears around it, particularly his focus on the Lydian mode. I suspect that this mode appealed to Russell because of the prominent position of the tritone, the notorious diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") in the history of Western music. The Wikipedia entry for this mode illustrates it with the song "Maria" from West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein, of course, never concealed his enthusiasm for the innovations taking place around him in jazz; and I would be surprised if Bernstein had not been aware of Russell's pursuits. (His interest in Tristano's work has been documented.) "Maria" may well have been a product of Bernstein taking some of Russell's ideas and putting his own twist on them.

Nevertheless, by the middle of the twentieth century, the devil had been exorcised from the tritone as much as the structural functions of harmony had been emancipated from dissonance. By the time "Maria" came along, the tritone was not the big deal it once was. Consequently, whether or not Russell should be remembered for his theories may be little more than an academic question; but his practices played a vital role in how jazz progressed, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century. Thus, the last word on Russell may parallel the epitaph for Christopher Wren:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice.

[Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.]

If you seek Russell's monument, listen to just about any jazz recording after 1947 (the year of the "Cubana Be"/"Cubana Bop" session)!