PRACTICE PORTAL

Here’s a great song by British multi-instrumentalist, Victor Feldman. “New Delhi” was featured on the record, CANNONBALL ADDERLEY QUINTET PLUS, with Cannonball and Nat Adderley on the front line, Louis Hayes on drums, Sam Jones on bass, guest pianist Wynton Kelly, and Feldman on piano and vibes. “New Delhi” is a 32 bar AABA song featuring an ostinato bass line under the melody. the background rhythm is repeated through the melody by everyone but the lead voice. Nat Adderley, on cornet, plays the melody on the A sections and Feldman takes over on vibes through the bridge. the band then starts in with the straight up swing for the solos, moving back to the ostinato figure in the bridge. the blowing progression is a little different from that of the melody. it keeps the AABA form but each A section is an eight bar blues progression. so here you go, enjoy. thanks to Bbebop at PostBop.com for the request…

VICTOR FELDMAN- NEW DELHI (mp3)

In an earlier post i talked about setting two soloists side by side, performing on the same song, in order to do a little comparison and contrast. Pepper and Adderley seemed like a good pair to begin with. but before getting into things, lemme throw this out there: perhaps the title of Pepper’s disc (ART PEPPER MEETS THE RHYTHM SECTION) suggests a little about his solo on “Star Eyes”. Pepper seems quite restrained on this cut. perhaps it’s due to the fact that this was a one-off recording. i’m not  sure if he’d ever played with, or even knew personally, Garland, Chambers or Jones, and from what i’ve read, this session came as a surprise to him. he was also caught up in his habits and hadn’t been musically active for several months up to that point. just imagine waking up one morning with no idea that later in the day you’d be in the studio playing with the legendary Miles Davis rhythm section, arguably the hottest trio of their day! more than a few musicians would absolutely freeze up. not to make excuses, but given the circumstances, Pepper provides a beautiful, although tentative, performance. but still, i can’t help feeling that he is a sideman rather than the leader. Adderley, on the other hand, recorded his version of “Star Eyes” on his record THE CANNONBALL ADDERLEY QUINTET PLUS with his working band featuring brother Nat on cornet, Sam Jones on bass, drummer Louis Hayes, special guest Wynton Kelly on piano, and Victor Feldman on vibes and piano. unlike Pepper, Cannonball sounds totally at ease with his bandmates- he brings off his two choruses with great style. but really, i can’t ever recall a time hearing Adderley when he didn’t sound incredibly poised and confident. in my opinion, Cannonball’s take is the better of the two but given the very different circumstances of these recordings, it’s rather unfair to compare them… and in another quick aside: being born in Los Angeles and raised in Northern California, i tend to wear my irritation on my sleeve concerning the narrow attitudes toward West Coast Jazz. it has with a few exceptions, been routinely stereotyped as commercial and blasé. when i listen to someone like Pepper for example, i hear a deep, emotional undercurrent hiding behind what can be referred to as a characteristically west coast sound and style… i’ll concede that quite a bit of music that’s come out of California has been forgettable- the same can easily be said for  some east coast stuff. but let’s never forget that the west coast, along with the easy-listening aesthetic, also spawned or nurtured musicians like Mingus, Dolphy, Don Cherry, Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Bobby Bradford, John Carter, Harold Land, Teddy Edwards,  Hampton Hawes,  Gerald Wilson, Sonny Simmons, Sonny Criss, Aurthur Blythe, James Newton, Billy Higgins, Horace Tapscott and David Murray, to name a very few. the west coast has never had one sound or style, and many of the above named musicians have left indelible fingerprints on the music. okay, i’m off the soapbox…

with all that said, the glaring fact is that these two artists interpret this music from unique cultural  and stylistic vantage points: Pepper, a young white saxophonist, coming up in Los Angeles, was affiliated with the likes of Chet Baker, Shelly Manne and Gerry Mulligan, all of whom were exponents of a “cool(er)” jazz style, while Adderley, a young Black saxophonist up in New York by way of the south, was aligned with many of the major hard bop’s leading exponents. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes at length about his opinions on the differences between hard bop and cool jazz in his great resource, BLUES PEOPLE. in a nutshell, he feels that the cool players tended to, intentionally or subconsciously,  supress the overtly Black elements of jazz style while the hard boppers tended to do the opposite.

the thing that jumps out at me first when listening to these recordings is how different Pepper and Adderley sound. Pepper’s sound, is for the most part, unadorned. very little vibrato with light articulation. his sound, to me has a delicate, brittle, acidic edge to it. Adderley’s sound, on the other hand,  has an unrestrained, romantic quality to it. he incorporates a generous vibrato, heavily articulates his phrases. his sound is sweet and syrupy, and has an overt blues orientation.

the feel of each soloist is also very different. Pepper’s understated lope is contrasted by Adderley’s deep bounce. Pepper’s solo, in this respect typifies what some dislike about the rhythmic concept of many “cool jazz” musicians. he doesn’t really dig in to the beat but rather seems to float slightly above it. he seems to keep himself at arm’s length.  Adderley grabs on and doesn’t let go. he rides the beat as well as reinforces  it with a hard articulation.

rhythmically, Pepper generally expresses his lines using eighth notes with occasional triplet figures. Adderley is more varied. he alternates his eighth note figures with sixteenth note runs, triplet patterns and lots of syncopation.

both improvisers approach “Star Eyes” with concepts rooted in the innovations of the previous generation of jazz musicians. much of their language is similar. i think the biggest difference is in their stylistic attitudes. although i dislike labels like “cool jazz” or “hard bop”, the adjectives in them do roughly describe the styles of Pepper and Adderley respectively. Pepper, in this recording, is more at a distance, more reserved in his blowing, while Adderley is much more blues-based, assertive and confrontational. hearing these two great players, who were only three years apart in age, side by side shows how varied personal styles can be….

ART PEPPER

SOLO FROM STAR EYES (mp3)

CANNONBALL ADDERLEY

SOLO FROM STAR EYES (mp3)

I first heard CANNONBALL ADDERLEY QUINTET IN CHICAGO sometime during my high school years, when i had just started to get into straight ahead jazz. up to that time, my tastes were a little more “contemporary”: Grover Washington Jr., David Sanborn, etc. i had just begun checking out Charlie Parker and trying to play some of his solos from the OMNIBOOK. well, i pulled this record out of my dad’s collection, attracted to the very cool cover, and put it on. if you’ve heard “Limehouse Blues”, you can imagine my shock when i experienced Adderley’s solo break. damn! no disrespect to Parker, who is one of Adderley’s stylistic fathers, but i never heard a saxophone swing so hard. his sound was so big and round and brilliant. his articulation was so precise. what an incredible technique, rifling out those 8th note runs at such a breakneck speed. i just had enough time to pick my jaw up off the floor when this OTHER guy comes in on tenor. while Adderley was playing a more or less conventional bop line, Coltrane was playing this other stuff, dealing with the harmonic material he was exploring on records like GIANTS STEPS and COLTRANE JAZZ. while Adderley blew over an F7 chord during the first four bars of his solo, Coltrane superimposed a high resolution harmonic sequence over those same four measures that eventually resolved to the next chord in the progression proper, D7. you could say that Adderley operated on the molecular level while Coltrane worked on a more rareified, atomic level. two very different sounds and approaches, set against each other, and on top of the fine rhythm section of Wynton Kelly (who is consistently incredible and funky), Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers, all of whom were members of the great Miles Davis Quintet at the time. this record was so eye opening to me. it really showed me how varied and personal improvisational styles could be. Adderley’s 8th note has a pronounced lope. he really digs into the beat with a very extroverted and jubilant swing. even on a song like “Grand Central”, which is in a minor key, and has a heavy feeling to it, the energy of his sound is very bright and (for lack of a better word) “happy”. Coltrane’s 8th note, on the other hand, is flatter and more streamlined. he often employs sweeping scalar runs and arpeggios that soar high above the rhythm section and move out of the regular 8th note pulse. he makes use of whole tone and harmonic minor scales that add a mysterious, almost atonal quality to his lines. his sound is at once an urgent wail, a cry or a roar. being an alto player and a jazz neophyte at the time, i naturally gravitated to Adderley, whose style was less cryptic than Coltrane’s. everything about the way Cannonball played appealed to me. he was a really well studied, hip, soulful sax player. Cannonball Adderley came off to me as a musician who found his groove pretty early in life and was content to remain there- now, don’t get me wrong, i don’t think there is anything wrong with that because he was an excellent player who could hold his own next to anyone (he was in the baddest band in the land when he made this recording fer chrissakes!) but Coltrane was different. i got the feeling that he was and would never be satisfied, that he was always trying to move forward. i started to revere Coltrane as i got deeper into music and started to understand what he was dealing with, and began to understand why he profoundly influenced so many, not only as a musician, but as a man trying to find something, attempting to transcend…

“Grand Central”, a song written by Coltrane, is 36 bars long with an AABA form. the form is a little peculiar because it begins at the end, the last measure of the song, which is used as a pick up bar. everything makes sense if you think of the song as beginning on the F min7 chord. the last A section is 12 bars long rather than eight bars, like the other A sections are. the melody is played over a progression of descending ii-Vs and lands on Bb minor:

one bar break… [| G min7(b5) C7(b9) |]

| F min7 | Bb min7 Eb7 | Ab min7 Db7 | F# min7 B7 |

| Bb min7 | B 7(b5) | Bb min7 | G min7(b5) C7(b9) |

the chord in the sixth measure bothers me a bit. sometimes i hear a Dominant sound and other times i hear a Major sound. even though the melody uses the natural 7th, i wrote it as a Dominant chord because of what i hear from the rhythm section and the soloists (actually, Cannonball and Coltrane utilize both the Major 7th and Dominant 7th at times)-(why does the Real Book list the chords in measures 5 through 7: F min7, Gb7, F min7?). the second A section is essentially the same as the first:

| F min7 | Bb min7 Eb7 | Ab min7 Db7 | F# min7 B7 |

| Bb min7 | B 7(b5) | Bb min7 | Bb min7 |

the first six bars of the bridge is a static 7th chord (perhaps, because of the melody, you could say that the progression moves between a 7sus4 and a 7 chord with the same root). this is followed by a four bar progression typical of Coltrane in that period. the saxophones have a little exchange over the bridge with Coltrane on a riff and Adderley playing another riff that has a more improvised feel to it. the horns don’t play the opening break coming out of the bridge into the last A section:

| B7 | B7 | B7 | B7 |

| B7 | B7 | Bb min7 E7 | A maj7 C7(b9) |

the final A section:

| F min7 | Bb min7 Eb7 | Ab min7 Db7 | F# min7 B7 |

| Bb min7 | B 7(b5) | Bb min7 | B 7(b5) |

| Bb min7 | B 7(b5) | Bb min7 | G min7(b5) C7(b9) |

the thing that’s a little confusing here is that unlike the one bar break that the begins the song, the solo breaks are two bars long. Cannonball is first up to bat… out of the park.

i can’t say enough about Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, two giants in the world of music. i’ll try to feature more material from both in coming posts…

CANNONBALL ADDERLEY AND JOHN COLTRANE- “GRAND CENTRAL” (mp3)

SOLO TRANSCRIPTION OF “GRAND CENTRAL“ (pdf)