SWR JAZZHAUS Releases Oscar Pettiford CD

courtesy of Naxos of America

Almost exactly a month ago, SWR JAZZHAUS released a new recording of performances led by jazz bassist Oscar Pettiford based in studio recordings in Baden-Baden and a live performance in Karlsruhe. (SWR is the South-Western Broadcasting network in Germany, although, at the time these recordings were made, it was known as SWF for Südwestfunk.) All recordings were made in 1958 and 1959.

Pettiford’s Wikipedia biography concludes with the following sentence:

Along with his contemporary, Charles Mingus, Pettiford stands out as one of the most-recorded bass-playing bandleader/composers in jazz.

While there is definitely substance to that claim, the fact is that, although Mingus will probably be familiar to most readers, the same, sadly, cannot be said of Pettiford. One reason is that he died shortly before his 38th birthday in 1960, having contracted a virus closely related to polio. Another reason would be that, at the time of his death, like many of the major jazz musicians at that time, he was living in Europe (based in Copenhagen), which afforded far better opportunities for performance and recording than could be found in the United States.

According to my records, I have written about Pettiford only once, back in October of 2013 during my tenure with Examiner.com. The Verse label was in the process of reissuing the rich catalog of recordings released on the Bethlehem label, and I wrote a piece about an initial round of six recordings, one of which was Pettiford’s first Bethlehem album, called simply Oscar Pettiford. Sadly, this was first released as a ten-inch LP, meaning that the content is pretty skimpy. There are only six tracks, all of which are less than three minutes in duration.

The SWR JAZZHAUS release is decidedly more generous, but many of the tracks are still on the short side. The longest comes in just short of seven and one-half minutes. However, there are sixteen of them and they cover a generous amount of ground, combining standards with originals not only by Pettiford but also by members of his combo. Five of the tracks feature a fellow expatriate, the drummer Kenny Clarke, whose prodigious inventiveness in the Forties and Fifties may be better known to listeners than Pettiford’s discography. (Clarke was the drummer for the Mingus Jazz Composers Workshop session for Savoy in January of 1955; he would move to Paris in September of 1956.) However, other original tracks are composed by European members of the combo, Hans Koller (tenor saxophone), Rolf Kühn (clarinet), Hans Hammerschmid (piano), and Helmut Brandt (baritone saxophone).

One of the most interesting aspects of Pettiford’s work is his incorporation of the cello into his performances. This began as a sight gag when he was playing for Woody Herman in 1949. He walked on stage with a cello, rather than a bass, just to see how Herman would react. Later that year, however, he suffered a broken arm. He could not play the bass while his arm was healing, but he could manage the cello. He just had to retune the strings to duplicate those of the bass. All of this context should make the track of his “My Little Cello” particularly interesting to most readers.

Among the European composers Brandt probably made the deepest impression, since the instrumentation for “Atlantic” requires three baritone saxophones. The result amounts to polyphonic sonorities that put the “extra” into “extraordinary.” By all rights this tune deserves more exposure, but the sad truth is that I have lost count of the number of jazz tracks about which I have said the same thing! Suffice it to say that, for both traditional tunes and originals, the opportunities for journeys of discovery on this Pettiford album from SWR are more than abundant.