Jazz Style Icons

It’s all about jazz for me at the moment, in the run-up to the Glasgow Jazz Festival (June 29-July3) and I’ve had to neglect this blog a little  … However, I have – as always – been finding a great deal of style inspiration in jazz –  not so much from the current crop of jazz stars as from the greats of yesteryear. Here’s a selection of some of my favourite style icons, starting, above, with Chet Baker (1929-1988), the James Dean of the jazz world, who wins my style award for services to the white T-shirt .. And below is his one-time band-mate, baritone sax star Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996) who was rarely without a crew cut and Ray-Bans in the 1950s.

Another super-cool jazz musician whose music and style I love is the legendary Lester “Prez” Young (1909-1959), the ethereal-sounding tenor saxophonist who came to fame in Count Basie’s band in the 1930s and made a series of landmark recordings with his friend Billie Holiday. He became a much-feted solo star in the 1950s, and his signature pork-pie hat is as recognisable to jazz fans as Lady Day’s gardenia and Louis Armstrong’s white handkerchief – possibly moreso. So indelibly linked are the Prez and his pork pie hat that Herman Leonard famously took an evocative portrait of Lester Young without Young in it: the pork-pie hat plus the saxophone (and a swirl of cigarette smoke) were enough to suggest their owner’s presence.

As I mentioned, one of the most identifiable accessories in jazz history was Billie Holiday’s (1915-1959) gardenia – which, for a decade from the late 1930s, was a key part of her look. Legend has it that the first gardenia was pinned on her head to cover a patch of hair which had been singed by tongs. It quickly became her trademark..

I also love the hair style she sported for much of the 1950s – the sleeked-back ponytail. This was how she wore her hair in the landmark TV programme, The Sound of Jazz.

Perhaps more of an all-round style icon was the lovely Lena Horne (1917-2010), a woman with exquisite taste and a sense of elegant style that lasted her whole life.  She was known for her turbans and for her gorgeous evening gowns …

Not all of the great jazz style icons have left us: Annie Ross (born 1930), the 80-year-old pioneering jazz vocalist is still performing (she plays in London next week, at the Bluesfest, and in Glasgow’s Oran Mor on July 8). And I haven’t seen a photo of her looking less than stylish. Check out this beautiful portrait from the 1950s.

And I especially love this one: three of my favourite jazz style icons captured on photo as they record the wonderful album Annie Ross Sings a Song of Mulligan (that’s Chet Baker in the middle). Cool in every sense of the word..

Five Star CD Reviews Vol 2

Gerry Mulligan: Lonesome Boulevard (Verve 0602527068756)
Anyone who heard the great baritone saxophonist, composer and bandleader Gerry Mulligan when he played the 1988 Glasgow Jazz Festival will recall that he was a player of terrific elegance and lyricism. Those qualities shine through on every track of this superb 1990 quartet album. Highlights include the train-mad Mulligan’s only recording of the thrilling piece he wrote as composer-in-residence at Glasgow, The Flying Scotsman, which was played with a full big band and recorded by the BBC – though never yet released on CD…
Download: Lonesome Boulevard, The Flying Scotsman

Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet: Blues in Time (Verve 0602517995789)
So busy were the saxophonists Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan in the mid-1950s that it took three years to finally get together to make this classic 1957 recording. Accompanied by Mulligan’s regular, piano-less, rhythm section of bass and drums, the sweet-sounding altoist (Desmond) and the wonderfully lyrical baritone player (Mulligan) prove to be a great team, on the same wavelength yet able to keep the music spontaneous and exciting – as the title track, in particular, shows.
Download: Blues in Time, Standstill

Humphrey Lyttelton and His Band and The Paseo Jazz Band 1953-56 (Upbeat Jazz URCD223)
There’s a great deal of previously unissued material on this CD which features the late, great trumpeter and bandleader Humphrey Lyttelton at the peak of his powers. Among the 24 tracks included here are a trio of terrific recordings he made with London-based West Indian musicians under the name the Paseo Jazz Band, and a quartet of songs recorded with the American vocalist Marie Bryant, best remembered as having sung in the iconic short jazz film Jammin’ the Blues.
Download: Paseo Blues, Georgia On My Mind

Johnny Dodds: Definitive Dodds (Retrieval RTR79056)
Johnny Dodds was the definitive New Orleans-style clarinettist of the 1920s, and this superb new CD comprises the recordings he made over a 15-month period from 1926 – at the peak of his powers. Although the five groups featured have different names, the personnel is drawn from a mouth-watering list of Chicago-based jazz greats including, most notably, Louis Armstrong (trumpet), on whose Hot 5 recordings Dodd was well featured. It’s all great stuff, particularly the Black Bottom Stompers sides, with Barney Bigard on sax and Earl Hines on piano.
Download: Wild Man Blues, Melancholy

Billie Holiday: The Ben Webster/Harry Edison Sessions (Lonehill Jazz LHJ10355)
The recordings on this new double CD are essential listening for anyone with an interest in jazz: they represent the last blast of greatness of the greatest jazz singer of them all, Billie Holiday. Comprising three classic 1956/57 Verve albums (Body and Soul, All Or Nothing At All and the peerless Songs for Distingue Lovers), plus a set from the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, this swinging, soulful, and uplifting CD finds Holiday (who died in 1959) with one of her best line-ups – including Ben Webster (tenor sax), Harry Edison (trumpet), Jimmy Rowles (piano) and Barney Kessel (guitar).
Download: But Not  For Me, Stars Fell From Alabama

Mad About Mulligan

One of the main reasons I pray for a long life for my old cassette recorder is so I can go on reliving, ad infinitum, the first concert hall jazz gig I ever attended. Back in 1988, one of the biggest American stars at the Glasgow International Jazz Festival was Gerry Mulligan, a musician whose powerful, distinctive and lyrical playing immediately won me over and continues to seduce me every time I listen to his records.

I still can’t quite believe my luck in hearing the great baritone saxophonist, composer and bandleader Gerry Mulligan on what was undoubtedly his only visit to Glasgow – and I heard him not once, but twice. (I would have heard all three of his concerts had my dad not decided to be fair and take my brother to his gig with the Strathclyde Youth Jazz Orchestra.) I was so immediately smitten by Mulligan’s muscular baritone sound and charismatic leadership of his Concert Jazz Band that I joined the throngs of long-in-the-tooth fans at the stage door and secured my first-ever jazz autograph at the end of the evening.

Mulligan’s quartet gig may have been terrific but my memories of it were immediately swept aside by the tidal wave of excitement generated by the electrifying performance of his Concert Jazz Band on the last night of the festival. This amazing ensemble swung like crazy and played every number as if for the first time – tightly executed arrangements with red-hot solos by the likes of Seldon Powell (tenor sax), Bill Charlap (piano), Barry Ries (trumpet) and of course Mulligan himself, who barely rested. As Dave Brubeck points out in the fascinating documentary, Listen:Gerry Mulligan, made after Mulligan’s death, he was incapable of standing still and not playing.

Among the many gems played that night in Glasgow were such late-era Mulligan numbers as the joyful opener Sun on the Stairs, Walk on the Water (on which he played a serene soprano sax), Song For Strayhorn and 42nd and Broadway as well as a magnificent version of Georgia on My Mind.

But the piece that had everyone in that audience on the edge of their seats was the one which had been commissioned by the jazz festival. As with his K-4 Pacific, Mulligan drew on his love of trains (as well as on a theme from his Octet for Sea Cliff) to create a rollercoaster ride of a composition for Glasgow. The Flying Scotsman is breathtakingly evocative and exciting – a thrilling, dramatic piece that gathers momentum and builds to a spine-tingling climax.

It prompted a euphoric reaction from the audience (though I seem to remember there being some criticism the next day that it had been too short – the bean-counters clearly didn’t think it was value for money; never mind that it was a beautifully crafted composition with not a wasted or redundant note), and was one of the main reasons for my insistence, the following May, on setting up tape recorders all over the house to make sure we didn’t miss a note of the Concert Jazz Band gig when it was finally broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

To my knowledge, Mulligan only recorded The Flying Scotsman once: on the newly reissued quartet album Lonesome Boulevard, originally released in 1990. It certainly sounds great but it doesn’t have the excitement or the thrills of the full-band version. Which makes it all the more irritating that the recording of the 1988 Concert Jazz Band gig has never been released on CD (the following year’s Stan Getz concert, also recorded by the Beeb, has long been available on CD). Everyone should get to hear it.

Frankly, I would rather stay at home and listen to the still-electrifying Concert Jazz Band on the stage at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow in 1988 than endure a live performance by a second-rate band in 2009… Gerry Mulligan ruined us Glaswegians for anybody else.

CODA

I got to hear Gerry Mulligan again, four years after the Glasgow Jazz Festival, when I was a student in Paris and he was headlining the La Villette Jazz Festival with his Re-birth of the Cool Band. That occasion I don’t remember so well, possibly because I got distracted by the social side of things – namely the members of the Newport Jazz Festival All-Stars who had secured me my ticket!

When, a couple of years later, I was invited to make my debut on radio, on BBC Radio Scotland’s Bebop to Hiphop, my first track was my all-time favourite – the sublime Shady Side from the Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges album. It was only after playing it that I learned that it’s my dad’s favourite too.

Paris Blues & Highs

I was down in London yesterday to interview the mysterious jazz singer and guitarist Madeleine Peyroux whom I last interviewed by phone in 2005, just as her cultish CD Careless Love was on the verge of exploding into the mainstream (it topped the charts in August of that year).

One of the main subjects we chatted about was Peyroux’s time as a busker in Paris. Turns out she was there, singing and working as the “hat passer” for a group of street musicians in and around the Latin Quarter at exactly the same time as I was bunking off my 12-hour week as an English language “assistante” to go and watch old movies in the Latin Quarter – the cinemas in the rue des Ecoles, to be precise. (I do have a vague recollection of listening to a group of jazz-playing buskers at the St Michel fountain – and I may have bought a tape of them…)

I probably saw more old movies on the big screen during that year than in the rest of my life: they showed seasons devoted to the Marx Brothers (and you haven’t lived until you’ve watched Duck Soup in the company of like-minded strangers), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Astaire and Rogers, Frank Capra. This was where I saw Love in the Afternoon the one and only time ever, and ogled William Holden up close (in Sabrina) for the first time…

That year in France was one of abject poverty – until I got myself a summer job. But despite having no money, I did alright in the jazz stakes. During a trip back to Glasgow, I went to a concert at the late, lamented Glasgow Society of Musicians, a cavernous club, reeking with history (I think that’s what it was, anyway) behind an anonymous, speakeasy-style door on Berkeley Street. There I heard the American cornettist Warren Vache who struck up a conversation with my father and me. Upon learning of my imminent return to Paris, he told me to contact a pal of his, the trumpeter Alain Bouchet. And so I found myself at my first Parisian jazz club, nursing one Perrier (shared with my pal Siobhan) from 10pm-2am and then having to stay awake in the Pub St-Germain-des-Pres until the first RER train back to the suburbs at 6am. (Taxis were not an option – they cost money.) These were the lengths I had to go to back then to get my jazz fix.

I almost overdosed a couple of months later when, at the height of the Parisian summer, I crossed the city to attend the jazz festival at La Villette, the old abattoir, which, for one magical night, played host to the Newport All-Stars (with Warren, Scott Hamilton, etc) and the Re-birth of the Cool band, led by the great Gerry Mulligan – whose Glasgow concerts four years earlier had converted me from dabbler to devotee of this music….

* Madeleine Peyroux’s new CD, Bare Bones, is out now on Decca/Rounder – and my interview with her should be in The Herald Magazine on Saturday May 9th…