Free Improvisation Series: Stuff Smith & Robert Crum (part two)

Part Two: Two Souls Touch - The Robert Crum / Stuff Smith Collaboration

(Read Part One here)

In October 1944 Robert Crum began an innovative collaboration with the violinist Stuff Smith. Smith (Sept. 14, 1909 – Sept. 25, 1967) was a popular jazz musician and would become of the most influential violinists in jazz history. By the 1940's he was well-known and respected, and something of a music industry darling. He played Alphonso Trent's territory band on-and-off from late 1927 until 1931.¹⁶ He played with Jelly Roll Morton for a brief period in 1928. After marrying, he settled for a time in Buffalo, NY. In 1936, he had a hit recording with I'se a Muggin', and worked steadily at the Onyx Club in New York City. Smith played with Fats Waller's band and travelled to Hollywood, CA for several months in 1943. Smith returned to New York in August 1944 for a stint at the Onyx Club.¹⁷
 

Prior to his move to New York, Smith had played a steady gig at Chicago's Garrick Stage Bar. Smith and Crum met during this period, and the two are known to have played together at the Hamilton Hotel's Sunday afternoon jam sessions in the summer of 1943. In a Billboard article, Crum and Smith are given mention in a long list of other participants, including Muggsy Spanier and Baby Dodds.¹⁸ (There is a photograph from the Otto Flückiger collection which shows Smith and Crum sharing the bandstand.¹⁹)

Crum on-stage (left) with Smith (right) at Chicago's Garrick Stage Bar. Photograph from the Otto Flückiger collection; used by permission of Robert Campbell and the Red Saunders Research Foundation.

Smith and Crum made at least three visits to the apartment of Timme Rosenkrantz and Inez Cavanaugh in 1944: one on October 21^st, and one each on December 16^th and 18^th.²⁰ Like the recordings that became Erroll Garner's Overture to Dawn, the music that Smith and Crum played at these visits was experimental and very different from publicly-performed jazz of that period. In the words of Dr. Billy Taylor, it was “exciting, adventurous jazz, but very much ahead of its time.”²¹ Most of the pieces from the October session do not appear to follow any repeating or linear structure at all. They begin with brief melodic or harmonic sketches, then trail off into improvised counterpoint. Crum and Smith's level of invention and empathy is impressive and engaging. Portions of harmonic commonality and beautiful lyricism give way to moments of abstract association, where the musical fabric threatens to unravel completely. But fear is always abated, as the Smith and Crum skillfully connect to another segment of music with taste, inevitability, and often humor.

Harmonica player Pete Pedersen.

Crum had experimented with this type of freely-associative playing before. During his Chicago years, Crum played regularly with Pete Pedersen, who would later become famous as a member of Jerry Murad's Harmonicats, who remembered their collaborations fondly: “We would make up songs together. We were never booked to do this … but we'd say 'Give us a story' and we'd make a song to it … He would play piano, I would play harmonica and we'd just improvise.”²² (Interestingly, Pederson also knew Smith in Chicago, and remembers that “[Smith] would show me licks and things, and that's how I got started. That was the first person I ever heard that really put an influence on me.”)²³

 The Crum/Smith collaboration would have been significant even if these Rosenkrantz apartment sessions were the end of the story. But as it happened, a major effort was undertaken to publicly present their musical innovations. In December 1944, Barry Ulanov organized the first of a series of concerts at New York's Times Hall, which were to present “The New Jazz”. This “First Series” featured headliners Pearl Bailey, Barney Bigard, Erroll Garner and Stuff Smith. Don Byas and Red Norvo were also featured. The concert was organized with assistance from Rosenkrantz, Cavanaugh, and Paul Rosen (about whom I know nothing).²⁴

An advertisement for the December 20th 1944 Times Hall concert.

The concert was arranged under the auspices of View: the Modern Magazine, a quarterly periodical, specializing in modern art, film and literature.²⁵ Ulanov, who was also the editor of Metronome magazine, contributed a column to each issue called “Jazz Of This Quarter”. (Ulanov would be a significant proponent of Lennie Tristano's career a few years later.) The impressive list of concert patrons and sponsors boasted many prominent artists and philanthropists, including millionaires Mary Cushing and Helena Rubenstein, ballet choreographer George de Cuevas, sculptor Alexander Calder, composer Aaron Copland, artist Marcel Duchamp, and many others.²⁶ By all accounts, it was a major undertaking: certainly the highest profile concert to date that Robert Crum had participated in.

In the evening's concert notes, Ulanov provided the following description of the duo pieces to be played by Smith and Crum: “Should [these] improvisations be confined to jazz? In a series of deliberations, first canonic, then less rigorously formal, the violinist with the jazz background, the pianist with a classical, offer a provocative answer, as they extend the resources of the improviser to those of all music.”²⁷ Rather than downplaying Smith and Crum's differing musical backgrounds, Ulanov drew attention to them, implying that “The New Jazz” may very well draw more explicitly from other styles of music.²⁸ A radical departure from traditional jazz, in terms of instrumentation, style, form, and the definitions of composition/improvisation, a performance of this music at this kind of event constituted a major statement about the present (and future) state of American music.
 

Although Ulanov wrote a predictably glowing review of the concert in the March 1945 issue of View,²⁹ most critics expressed skepticism, especially toward Crum. Leonard Feather wrote, that although “Stuff was superb, unpredictable, intensely rhythmic as ever … Crum, a frustrated classical pianist, seemed out of place.”³⁰ Downbeat writer Frank Stacy called the improvisations “plain disconcerting”, mentioning Crum's “disturbing nervous [on stage] mannerisms”. Somewhat in contrast, the Modern Music quarterly wrote a largely negative review, but noted that “The bright spot in the [Smith & Crum] improvisation was a bitonal clash of personalities … Neither would yield, and so the piece ended in a most peculiar way.”³¹ Smith's widow Arlene Smith illuminates Stacy's comments, remembering that Crum was “dressed in formal wear with white tennis shoes which was pretty strange in those days”.³²

The opinions of View magazine's staff and editors is perhaps evident in that for the May issue, Ulanov's column “Jazz of this Quarter” was taken over by Roger Pryor Dodge, another well-respected writer of jazz. The year's remaining two issues feature music articles, written by Lou Harrison (October 1945) and Wilfred Mellers (December 1945), but there is scarcely a mention of jazz in either. (Perhaps it's also worth noting that View printed an advertisement for Ulanov's biography of Duke Ellington in their December 1945 issue.)

Whether Ulanov's departure from View was amicable or not remains a matter of speculation. He is nearly silent about the concert in his future recollections, but years later, he would write that Crum's “curious combination of jazz and the classics never entirely convinced me.”³³ Though his own thoughts on the performance are presently unknown, Crum's discouragement at such negative reviews is palpable. By April 1945 he was back in Chicago working at the Hotel Sherman. Billboard writer John Sippel wrote that Crum, now using three mirrors instead of just one, was playing “symphonic jazz interpretations [that are] too intricate for the average hearer. Crum plays half a chorus straight and then goes into a wild malange [sic] of introductions and arpeggios that don't mean much. Crum has affected weird mannerisms and grimaces to accompany his 88-pounding (and the word is used literally), but the old Crum who played at Elmer's two years ago without these new additions was far more preferable.”³⁴ (The following month, Sippel would write that “Crum seems to have found himself and is doing a nice job of selling from the keyboard.”³⁵) 
 

An advertisement for Soundies. Image from Doctor Macro.

Crum returned to New York in November 1945 to film two Soundies called Adventure in Boogie Woogie and Our Waltz. These were released in April and August the following year.³⁶ But he continued to work in Chicago and around the midwest. In early 1946 he found some work at the Town House in Albany.³⁷ In June 1946 he was working at Chicago's Hotel Continental, where he was reported as going “all out to give his individual impressions of everything, from the classics to boogie-woogie. His playing is average or better, but his salemanship is nil.”³⁸ Later that summer he played for three weeks at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis³⁹ and also found work at Circus Snack Bar in St. Louis.⁴⁰ In mid-September 1946 he recorded six duets with the accomplished drummer Barrett Deems, which were released by the Chicago label Gold Seal.⁴¹ Crum appeared on WNEW radio in December 1946 in an organ/piano duo with fellow hotel circuit Bud Taylor (b. 1913, d. 1997)⁴².

In November 1947, Billboard reported that Crum was “in a hospital for observation”.⁴³ No more details are offered, and no further information on Crum's life is known. To the best of current knowledge, Crum seems to have made no further attempts at a public music career, living a private life and passing away in Joliet, IL in May 1981.⁴⁴

 
To date, Crum is scarcely even a footnote in jazz history. But while small, the legacy he has left behind is fascinating, and his influence was perhaps not negligible. In addition to the glowing description of their music as “ahead of its time”, Dr. Billy Taylor places Crum alongside Erroll Garner, Bud Powell, and Al Haig as being a notable pianist from the “Prebop and Bebop” style.⁴⁵ Garner himself was reportedly very impressed by Crum's playing at the Times Hall concert, telling him “You know, I never knew what I wanted to do until I heard you play.”⁴⁶

The recordings which were made of the Crum/Smith collaboration have entered the digital age thanks to Anthony Barnett's efforts, but Crum's Gold Seal recordings and some solo piano recordings from the Rosenkrantz apartment still remain largely inaccessible

Smith's career continued for twenty more years until his death in 1967. Today he is regarded as one of the most influential jazz violinists, working with some of the most progressive jazz musicians of the 40's, 50's and 60's, playing formally and informally with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Don Cherry⁴⁷, and Sun Ra. He was also a great influence on the contemporary improvising violinists Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang. From 1965 up to his death in 1967, he led a quartet which featured pianist Kenny Drew and bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson. A concert in Denmark was held after his death, in which major violinists Stephane Grappelli and Jean-Luc Ponty paid tribute to Smith.⁴⁸ 

The recordings of Smith and Crum's duo improvisations offer glimpses into the private world of jazz, where the creative process was free from the concerns and interests of studios and clubs. The music frolics in and out of tonality, seamlessly transitions from slow and fast sections, and at every moment shows off the masterful creativity of Smith and Crum, as they push their own and each other's technical and musical boundaries.

Footnotes

16 Barnett 1995, 57

17 The Billboard, “Music Grapevine”. July 8^th, 1944, p. 19

18 The Billboard, “Chi Jam Session Backer Hopes For Early Frost; Hot Jazz Finds Heat Tough Competish”. August 7^th, 1943, p. 15

19 Red Saunders Discography. Accessed January 4^th, 2013.

20 For more on Timme Rosenkrantz and his role in 1930's and 40's jazz, see my article about Erroll Garner.

21 Taylor, Billy. “Jazz Piano.” p. 189

22 Rodack, Jaine. “Be Of Good Cheer: Memories of Harmonica Legend Pete Pedersen.” Authorhouse: 2006. p. 56.

23 Ibid.

24 Barnett 1995, 123

25 “View: the Modern Magazine” published between 1940 and 1947. It was managed by Charles Henri Ford (editor) and Parker Tyler (assoc. editor). Each issue featured a different contemporary artist: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Rene Magritte to name a few.

26 Ford, Charles Henri. “View – Series IV 1944”. Klaus Reprint: New York. 1969. p. 107.

27 Quoted in Barnett 1995, 125-126

28 In doing so, he expresses a view which is prevalent in contemporary discourse of improvised music. For instance, an overview of the International Society for Improvised Music states that “today’s musical world is increasingly characterized by creative expressions that transcend conventional style categories.” Improvisation is, among other things, “spontaneous interaction between musicians from the most disparate backgrounds[.]”

29 “[The New Jazz] sounded rich and full and vital, serene and joyful, beyond my optimum optimism during the weeks of organizing the concert. This was the way they wanted a jazz concert to go, these jazzmen said … The Stuff Smith Trio, and individual artists, Erroll Garner, Pearl Bailey, Don Byas, Robert Crum, were at peak form.” Ulanov, in View, March 1945.

30  Quoted in Barnett 1998, 126

31 Mercure, in Modern Music, vol. 22 no. 2, Jan-Feb 1945, pp. 139-141

32 Barnett 1998, p. 29

33 Barnett 1995, p. 121

34 The Billboard, “Vaudeville Reviews”. April 28^th, 1945, p. 30

35 The Billboard, “Night Club Reviews”. May 19^th, 1945, p. 30

36 Barnett, 1998, p. 58. Soundies were short films of musical pieces, similar to modern music videos. Music and film were recorded separately, enabling choreography and cinematic techniques. They were shown in jukebox-type machines. The first ones were made in 1940. Soundies had seen a decline in popularity since 1941, and the company would cease production in late 1946. See MacGillivray and Okuna, 2007.

37 The Billboard, “Off the Cuff”. February 9^th, 1946, p. 36

38 The Billboard, “Night Club Reviews”. July 6^th, 1946, p. 44

39 The Billboard, “Music – As Written”. July 27^th, 1946, p. 22

40 The Billboard, “In Short”. September 28^th, 1946, p. 38

41 Campbell & Pruter. “Gold Seal” Available at http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/goldseal.html Accessed on 15 July 2012.

42 The Billboard, “WNEW Has Flock Of New Shows To Start After January”. December 21^st, 1946, p. 8

43 The Billboard, “Music – As Written”. November 8^th, 1947, p. 22

44 Barnett, 2002

45 Taylor, p. 228

46 Rosenkrantz, 178

47 Barnett 1998, 22

48 Barnett 1995, 273-274

Free Improvisation Series: Stuff Smith & Robert Crum (part one)

Well, it's been a while since I've posted an update. I've been hard at work, finishing a master's degree, planning various recording projects, and a whole mess of other business. Here's a two-part attempt at a more complete picture of Robert Crum, a boogie-woogie pianist.

Robert Crum (Nov. 29th, 1915 – May 1981) was born in Pittsburgh, PA. He studied classical piano there, as well as in Paris. In the 1930's lived in Chicago, IL where he took lessons from Meade Lux Lewis¹ and began playing at small clubs, where he made about $35 a week.² By January 1943 he was working as the afternoon pianist at Elmer's Cocktail Lounge, where Dorothy Donegan had also recently worked.³

Advertisement for the Hotel Sherman, ca. 1945

In July of that year he was hired to play at the Sherman Hotel's Panther Room for $300 per week.⁴ The Panther Room, along with the Malaya Room, formed the Hotel's College Inn restaurant, which served extravagant meals served on flaming swords by stereotyped waiters, and featured the day's top entertainment. The College Inn started booking swing music in March 1939; by that same time in 1942 they had booked major acts like Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Fats Waller, Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, and Woody Herman, often for repeat stints.⁵ As a major focal point in the Chicago music scene, the Sherman Hotel's entertainment was watched closely by the entertainment press. Crum was booked as the Panther Room's afternoon entertainment, and was reviewed often by writers for The Billboard magazine. A typical example is a review which appeared in August 1944, which noted that Crum had “fine keyboard work. It is mostly straight pounding, with little visual showmanship. Crum keeps close to the keyboard, seldom lifting his head to see if anyone is paying attention. Goes over, tho.”⁶

His playing went over very well, apparently. In September, Crum was given a pay raise to $400 per week.⁷ In January 1944, the Billboard reported that Crum, perhaps to increase his visual showmanship, was employing a long mirror on several pieces so that members of the audience would be able to see his hands as he played. This prompted Billboard's Carl Cons to comment that although Crum's “finger dexterity is excellent and very commercial … his playing at times leaves music lovers in a fog.” He continued,

“Neither a concert artist nor a good swing pianist, his semi-classical style of presenting numbers is often spoiled by corny tricks such as running his thumb across the keys and playing with the back of his hands. Has talent and could improve his performance by adding taste to his arrangements and eliminating some of the gingerbread that passes for showmanship.”⁸

In November 1943 Crum apparently had plans to move to New York in January 1944, following his stint at the Panther Room,⁹ but he decided to stay in Chicago for a few more months. In February 1944 he appeared in a variety show at the Chicago Theater, with singer Phil Regan as the headliner. Billed as “The Swing Piano Sensation of the Nation”, Crum was given a favorable review by Jack Baker, who wrote that,

“[Crum] shows remarkable skill with his rapid piano keying, and swings out in a fast tempo on the classical and pop tunes. Distinctly different, and draws plenty of mitting with his fine arrangements of Massanet's Elegy, boogie-woogie medleys and Humoresque, which is interspersed with a smart concert arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue.”¹⁰

New York City skyline, ca. 1940

Perhaps encouraged by the positive press and high-profile work, Crum made the move to New York City in April 1944.¹¹ In May he appeared on the Basin Street radio program alongside pianists Francis Carter, Arthur Bowie (who played as the duo Carter & Bowie) and Art Tatum.¹² In June, Paul Ross mentioned Crum in a long list called The Top Names, “prize winners in the jazz joints of 52d Street”, which included Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, the Nat King Cole Trio, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, Oscar Pettiford, and a host of other major names.

The article, entitled “Disks a Must for 52d Street Click” and subtitled “Musicianship Essential But Waxing Required, Too”, reports that 25-50% of club clientele are tourists, and that “by far the largest part of this group of customers comprises young people who read the hip magazines and who, above all, listen to phonograph records. They are disk educated to a high degree.” Ross concludes that “when they hit New York and are entertainment bound, they are always ready to go and hear – in person – the man or woman who turned out this or that big disk.” He continues by mentioning that another 25% of club clientele are musicians themselves. And nobody is more critical of musicians than other musicians.” This significant sector of club clientele, Ross says, helps keep novelty artists, “the trickster [and] the corn-dispenser” from dominating the bandstands.

One would not be amiss to question Ross' figures (did he conduct a survey?), but his overall point is rather plausible. Therefore it's rather puzzling that Crum would be included as a “Top Name”. He had only lived in New York City for two months at the time, had no recordings to his name, and did not have any work as a sideman. And less than a year prior, Crum had been criticized in the same magazine for his “gingerbread” showmanship. Ross adds that “an act without even one big record behind it can work in the jazz bistros and do all right, providing it has musicianship. If the turn gets by the other musicians it can build in anywhere from six months to a year – build to the point where it begins making disks and thus enhances its [box office] value. But the old musicianship must be there or no dice.”¹³

Ross' article appeared shortly before RCA/Victor and Columbia had conceded to the demands of the American Federation of Musicians, which was still on strike.¹⁴ There was also a major shortage of domestic shellac, imposed by the War Production Board, causing a drop in disk production.¹⁵ It was a time of great upheaval and change in the recording business, and breaking into the recording medium was likely to prove difficult for a relative newcomer like Crum.

A typical logo for The Billboard magazine

As a side note, it's worth remembering that the entertainment press's goal (in 1944, but it's not much better today) was not to document the change of musical styles and the artistic growth of its individual practitioners. This is just a historical side-effect. As a trade periodical, the Billboard's goal was to keep booking agents, business owners, and advertisers apprised of the goings-on in the major entertainment centers. The artistic goals of musicians were of far lesser concern to critics than was the musicians' level of business acumen. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that the musicians written about in these magazines were as single-minded as the articles may portray them. We take for granted that Fats Waller, Gene Krupa, Woody Herman and all of the acts booked at the Sherman Hotel were not just major entertainers but also major artists. There is no inherent inconsistency here, but we must avoid the temptation to think that more marginal musicians simply lacked this vision, and are therefore not worthy of study or consideration. The activities that make Crum especially notable today are coming up in part 2 of this blog post.

Footnotes

1 Barnett, 2002, "Complete 1944 Rosenkrantz Apartment Transcription Duets", ABFable CD 004/005.

2 The Billboard, “Shelley Signs Bob Crum, Chi Pianist”. August 21^st, 1943, p. 24

3 The Billboard, “Off the Cuff”. January 30^th, 1943, p. 19

4 The Billboard, “Open Field For Graduates”. July 17^th, 1943, p. 20

5 The Billboard, “Chi's Sherman Room Still Swings It”, March 28^th, 1942, p. 6

6 The Billboard, “Follow-Up Night Club Review”. August 28^th, 1943, p. 21

7 The Billboard, “Ivory Pounders in Chips”. October 2^nd, 1943, p. 24

8 The Billboard, “Night Club Reviews”. January 22^nd, 1944, p. 25

9 The Billboard, “Off the Cuff”. November 6^th, 1943, p. 23

10 The Billboard, “Vaudeville Reviews”. February 26^th, 1944, p. 22

11 The Billboard, “Chicago Air Execs Scouting Lounges for Talent 'Finds'”. April 15^th, 1944, p. 20

12 The Billboard, “Top Radio Stanzas Finding Place for Small-Club Acts”. May 27^th, 1944, p. 28

13 The Billboard, “Disks a Must for 52d Street Click”. June 24^th, 1944, pp. 23 & 27

14 The AFM had been on a no-recording strike since August 1^st, 1942 with the demand that recording labels pay a fee to license recordings for radio and jukebox play. This fee would be added to the AFM's Recording and Transcription Fund (RTF), which the AFM would use to offer work to underemployed musicians. Most smaller labels had capitulated by this time, but RCA/Victor and Columbia, the two largest, would not do so until November 1944.

15 See, for example, “Diskers Eye WPB Action”, (Billboard 6/27/42, p. 70) and “Financial Journal Features News Of Shellac Situation and Prices”, (Billboard, 10/31/42, p. 62)

Free Improvisation Series: Erroll Garner

Pianist Erroll Garner (June 15, 1921 – Jan. 2, 1977) is well-known for his dexterous piano playing and creative interpretations of standards. He is the author of the jazz standards “Gaslight” and “Misty”, and is also the first jazz pianist known to have recorded free-form improvisations.

Garner grew up in Pittsburgh, PA where he played solo piano on riverboats, silent movie theaters, and organ at churches. From 1938-1941 he played with the Leroy Brown Orchestra. In 1944, when Garner was 23 years old, he moved from Pittsburgh to New York City and found steady work on 52^nd Street.¹ While working as the intermission pianist at Tondaleyo's, he attracted the notice of Timme Rosenkrantz, a Danish baron who had been living in New York City since 1936. Rosenkrantz founded the Danish journal Jazzrevy (Jazz Review), becoming the first European journalist to write about Harlem jazz. Rosenkrantz also made forays into radio, hosting Rhythm is my Business on WNEW in 1944. He also operated the Mel-O-Dee Music Shop from 1940-1941. His involvement in the jazz community gained him respect from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other major figures.

Rosenkrantz with Louis Armstrong. Photo credit unknown.

In his memoirs, Rosenkrantz wrote that “quite often, after the clubs closed, musicians would come to my place and jam until sunrise. A lot of wonderful music was played and recorded in that old brownstone...”² Trumpeter Bobby Pratt remembers these afternoon sessions:

“[Rosenkrantz] used to invite musicians over to his house [an apartment at 7 West 46^th Street in New York]³ … He had a lot of very good musicians. And at the same time he would be recording these sessions that we had. And Stuff Smith always used to be there. And Bill Coleman, Al Hall, Erroll Garner was there quite a bit, Lucky Thompson, and George Wettling, and Barney Bigard … we used to do those things every Saturday for quite a while … I made quite a few sessions. And it was a lot of fun.”⁴

Rosenkrantz made dozens of recordings of these jam sessions with his home record cutter, in the mid-1940's. In addition to the musicians mentioned by Pratt, Stuff Smith, Don Byas, Billy Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Duke Ellington can also be heard on these recordings. Between October and December 1944, Garner recorded many pieces, mostly solo, including jazz standards like “I Hear A Rhapsody”, “I Got Rhythm” and “Yesterdays”.⁵ Not limited to three-and-a-half minutes, and not needing to “play the room” (a colloquial phrase for crowd-pleasing), Garner completely reconstructs these pieces in elaborate (and occassionally experimental) fantasias. Take for instance the musical passage beginning around 4:10 on “I Got Rhythm”: Garner leaves the form behind to develop a whole-tone motive over an altered F7 chord, returning to the form at 4:40. The section does not fit neatly into 4- or 8- bar phrases, and seems briefly to take on a life of its own.

During these sessions, Garner also recorded several pieces which were completely improvised. These pieces are generally quite long, and use many of the same formal techniques which Garner used when interpreting the standards and original tunes, except that there are no prefabricated themes to which Garner is bound; he makes them up on the spot, and is free to leave them when he wishes. Because of Garner's penchant for coming up with strong melodies, the free improvisations are at times not easily distinguishable from his original compositions. Indeed, at least one of the themes from the improvisations would later be “solidified” into the tune “Gaslight”. Because he did not read music, Garner used these recordings as a way of documenting his ideas, and played many of them as fully-formed jazz tunes at an important concert at Times Hall on December 20^th, 1944.⁶ There will be much more about this concert in my next post.

The fact remains that Garner improvised many of the pieces on the Rosenkrantz recordings, nearly from scratch. And while Garner's improvisations do not ever really embrace the new tonal explorations of 20^th century composers like Leo Ornstein, Anton Webern, or Igor Stravinsky,⁷ but this does not mean that Garner was using improvisation as a parlor trick to entertain the audience. It is just as likely that Garner simply did not like that kind of music, and so saw no reason to incorporate it into his playing style. Many of the recordings from the Rosenkrantz sessions were released by Blue Note in the early 1950’s as the five-volume Overture to Dawn. They featured liner notes by Leonard Feather, who described the improvised pieces:

The cover to Volume 1 of Overture to Dawn, Blue Note LP 500

“Night after night [Garner] came back [to the Rosenkrantz apartment], playing long, rambling ad lib concertos. On these discs they have titles […] but in fact they were being composed while they were played, and the next morning Erroll could not have repeated any of them. They had no titles, no set form, yet they have a greater variety and continuity of mood, a truer ring of artistry, than almost any of the commercially recorded sides of later years … Here is a man sitting down at a piano and, to all intents and purposes, playing to and for himself; quietly, contemplatively and with a serene beauty.”⁸

Within a year, Garner was featured on a radio program called the Twelve Eighty Club, where he was asked by the host to improvise a piece on the spot, called the “Twelve Eighty Club Blues”. Garner then plays a 32-bar piece which appears to have been completely improvised. Although the radio host is clearly putting him to the test, Garner is doing more than just a parlor trick. Putting a free improvisation into the container of a 32-bar popular song form poses a very different mental/musical challenge than interpreting a pre-composed tune, even as liberally as Garner does.

There is one interesting exception to either the pre-composed and the free improvised piece. Later on in the Twelve Eighty Club show, Garner states that he will play an excerpt of a “kind of a concerto” which he had written. The program's host suggests the Garner play the whole thing later in the show, and Garner responds that he “can't recollect the whole thing”, but that he calls it “The Mood”. The host suggests that Garner call it the “Forgotten Concerto”, and this is the title given to the piece on the 2002 CD release.⁹ The Rosenkrantz recordings contain a piece called “Erroll's Concerto” which begins in essentially the same way, (dissonant and angular melodic intervals over a brooding Db/C# minor tonic) but mostly follows a different course.

Without more recordings of or statements about “The Mood”, it's difficult to draw more precise conclusions. But given the uncanny similarities in how they start, I think it's appropriate to view these two tracks as different versions of the same “piece”, even if the piece was just an general idea based in C# minor tonality. Based on the two examples that we have, it makes sense to suppose that once this general idea was established, Garner allowed himself to be open to the influence of whatever “mood” he was in at the time.

This is certainly in keeping with the following characterization of Garner by his contemporary George Shearing:

"Erroll was so spontaneous in his playing that sometimes it would hamper him to have an orchestra behind him, because he may not necessarily remember what chord he'd been playing when the orchestrations were made or may not care to remember even. If we were describing it verbally he probably would be saying, 'What I'm saying today has no bearing on what I said last week.' Sometimes an orchestration behind him would be like fetters around his neck, because this would potentially limit the full degree of spontaneity that Erroll may have … He preferred to remain his good old free self, and as I say, it's not a critical comment. It is a comment of a different approach in that any time any orchestration is put behind somebody who craves that degree of freedom relentlessly, sometimes it's better that orchestration not be employed then, and keep the fetters away from him."¹⁰

Garner's Afternoon of an Elf. Mercury Records, 1955

After these early recordings, most of Garner's discography consists of performances of standards and original compositions. One exception is on 1955's Afternoon of an Elf, which features a free improvisation among many standards. The anonymous liner note author writes that “[The track 'All My Loves Are You'] is 'composed' only in the strict etymological sense of that word, i.e. put together; in the conventional sense of the word it was not composed at all, for Erroll improvised it casually in the course of the session, just as he ad libs most of his original work.”¹¹ Garner takes a simple melodic theme, and interprets it in a number of different keys, beginning in C, tonicizing E and Ab and others, eventually ending in Eb.

These recordings indicate that Erroll Garner was an improviser of unusual stature. These, along with the recordings of Stuff Smith and Robert Crum (which I will write about next) are among the earliest recorded examples of freely improvised music from the jazz idiom. As more and more recordings appear, I'm starting to think that this kind of completely improvised musicmaking was altogether common, not at the clubs, but in afterhours jam sessions like those at the Rosenkrantz apartment. The differences between these recordings and the early music of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor are many, and the next essay I'll write will shine some more light on the 1940's, a forgotten part of free jazz history.

Footnotes

1 Feather, Leonard and Ira Gitler. "The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz", pp. 245-246

2 Rosenkrantz, Timme and Fradley Garner. "Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron's Memoir, 1934-1969", p. 170

3 Barnett, Anthony. "Desert Sands: the Recordings & Performances of Stuff Smith", p. 121

4 Barnett, 127

5 Rosenkrantz, 177

6 Ibid.

7 As noted by a review of the Dec. 20^th, 1944 concert, Mercure wrote that “The New Jazz had apparently only caught up with Debussy, for that was as far as … Errol [sic] Garner, new piano “find”, went.” Modern Music,vol. 22 no. 2, Jan-Feb 1945, p. 139

8 Feather, Blue Note 5007-5008

9 Erroll Garner, Solo in New York 1944-45, Acrobat ACRCD 134

10 Shearing, interviewed by Clausen. Available online at http://errollgarner.com/testimonial_shearing.html Accessed July 7, 2012

11 Uncredited author, Mercury MG20090

Conversation with Mayo Thompson: Part One

On December 26th, 2011 I had a conversation with Mayo Thompson about the origins and early work of the Red Krayola. I was particularly interested in the musical "logic" used to record the album Coconut Hotel. I suspected that the Red Krayola was essentially exploring "free improvisation", contemporaneous with groups like AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva. I discussed the album in a presentation at the 2012 International Society for Improvised Music conference in Wayne, NJ, using information from this interview.

45 years ago today, the Red Crayola (Mayo Thompson, Fred Barthelme and Steve Cunningham) played at the Angry Arts Festival near Los Angeles, CA. On July 2nd, 3rd and 4th 1967 they played sets at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival in Berkeley, CA. (These performances were documented on the Drag City release Live 1967.) This seemed like an appropriate time of year to publish the interview. Mr. Thompson has agreed to this publication only; please do not distribute this interview without specific permission.

Special thanks to WCBN-FM Ann Arbor whose facilities I used. Thanks also to Alex Belhaj who
engineered the recording of the telephone interview.

Conversation with Mayo Thompson

Part One

What were some of the musical influences for the Red Crayola? The liner notes in the recent reissue of The Parable of Arable Land mentions the influence of modern art and philosophy.

Modern art and philosophy are large subjects. I'd like to know who isn't influenced by modern art in that sense. These guys – they write fluff, and it misleads people and there's nothing you can really do about it. There is no such thing as a straight-up story about what happened, because memory plays tricks on you; it's just not possible. All I can tell you is that, as far as influences, we listened to everything that was going on. If we got a whiff that they were ahead of us we ran to it to find out if it was true or not.

Can you give an example?

Albert Ayler, Bells, ESP-Disk 1010, 1965

Grateful Dead – the psychedelic band. We ran out and bought their album the minute it came out. Boy, were we disappointed. That was a trip to nowhere. We'd been there. We left there. Then, when we heard Hendrix on the other hand, that put [an end] to any question of our pursuing virtuosity as something we had to have in place in order to be able to exchange ideas with people. It was never an aim. One worked in relation to influences in various ways, that's the point I'm trying to get at. Albert Ayler was an influential figure. If you wanted to do something that had some intensity to it, you had to rise to the level of Bells. Or you had to rise to the level of [John Coltrane's] Ascension, where it starts out with like 9 of the heaviest tenor players in the whole wide world goin' [imitates Ascension]. So there were those kinds of influences.

If you're talking about music that one loved as a child, that's a different question; what shaped one in those kinds of ways. Can you narrow it down?

If someone listened to the first or second Red Crayola record, they may not immediately think of Albert Ayler or John Coltrane as an influence on it. They may however think of the 13^th Floor Elevators, for example.

The Elevators certainly would have come in for a look. We compared ourselves to the Elevators as far as innovation; we thought they were trying to innovate. We had no idea what they were really doing. We thought that everybody was innovating, and we were sadly mistaken. It turned out that very few people were innovating at all; that most people were interested in spilling their guts in terms that they were capable of, and that was the end of it.

So you saw yourselves as separate from most of what was going on?

We found that the concerns that we began with had little to do with the concerns that other people began with sometimes; in greater respect when it came to the form and stuff like that. We were certainly shaped by the “zeitgeist” or some crap like that, but we felt our difference, and we insisted on it in those days. I don't anymore, I'm looking for inclusion these days. [But] that was also going on at the time. That's how we “found each other”, shall we say. But we didn't run it like an elite, like make fun of other people and act like they were stupid or something. We were rather in pursuit of some stuff that it turned out not too many other people were in pursuit of. If any. We met those who understood. John Fahey understood that we were pushing it around and trying to find out what novelty there was left in the form, if any. He had gone back and gotten the very beginnings – he represented “American music”; we called him “the Master of the American rolls”. When we met him, there was agreement that the tradition played a role, and we saw ourselves as coming out of something, and on our way, taking material as we found it and trying to do something with it. The classic confrontation.

In a 1996 interview with Richie Unterberger, you describe Coconut Hotel as "the most extreme version of the logic that we could conceive of at that time". Could you say more about the "logic" of the Red Krayola?

We found that logic played a role in our thinking and in nobody else's. It was very simple to operate within parameters; to set up formal problems and work the logical parameters as they appear. Say you want to put some scrutiny on the idea of instruments. You find that on that record. So we start with, “This is a guitar. It has six strings. They are usually not tuned like this. They're played like this, but they usually don't sound like this.” [“Free Guitar”] is an exploration of the guitar as a set piece, as a trap, as an instrument: a thing that produces a certain kind of sound. There is no generic commitment to anything on that record. Idiom is deployed … not at all. There's no quotation in it, as such, there's merely instantiation. And so, expectation and anticipation become quite abstract. You don't sit there and wait for a chorus. If you're waiting for the chorus, you'll find out after so many minutes, "Doesn't look like there's gonna be a chorus here." That kind of stuff; that's what I mean by logic: creating a logical environment in which you set up a number of operators, you specify relations between them, and the results are what you might call facts. Where logic itself is turned into a kind of score.

I'm not claiming we were doing something no one else on Earth was doing. People were being more perspicuous about it. There was a bunch of stuff that came up called “process art”, where people focused on the art of blah blah blah. But we were not proceduralists in any strict sense. What we were interested in was the sounds that came out of those situations; the physical sensations that they generated. This stuff was played as music, it was not played as a technical notebook.

So these were not just manifestations of some concept or idea; you were consciously making music?

To me, those are one. I don't have to be holistic about my content part of it to recognize that that's just how that thing works. Even if I set out to be the most technical, dry-boned person in the whole wide world, someone's gonna say “Oh, a Beckett play.” Or something like that. Let's say I set out with some kind of concept in mind, that the work is an illustration; I might try to do that, [but] it's not illustration in the purest sense of the word. I'm not sure that that's even possible, because it's been my experience in music that the materials are resistant. You don't always find what you're listening for. What you find is what you hear. And then what you do about what you hear … is where it happens for me.

How does form play into that?

Say I've got a song in E. I know that the fifth is a B, and I know that every blues song in the whole wide world has been played this way, and I know that there's been a blues man who said “We don't flat our fifths, we drink them,” and that the Bb is “the Devil's chord”. I am fascinated by this effect, because it's against the grain. Precisely because everyone says “That's a cheap trick man, don't do that.” Me, I love a cheap trick. So I want to find it there's anything in a cheap trick. Because it sure as hell jazzes me. So I've got a problem: I've got something that jazzes me that everyone else says is against the rules. So that kind of stuff comes into it too. It's personal.

I don't have Mozart's problem; nobody's gonna sign off on my score. I don't have to modify it because I've got a temperamental soprano who wants some extra stuff in her Don Giovani aria. That's fun; I've clawed my way into that world where I've worked with that kind of stuff. But I don't have something that is a “sonata”. I don't have something that is an “etude” or a “prelude”. I'm not really familiar with the terms and where they come from. I know the music, I've been listening to it for a long time, but I don't really recognize forms as definite things. I could maybe say … hang on a second. [pause]

I don't really know how to answer your question. Form plays a role, I've seen that it makes a difference. But I've approached it rather by “structure”, let's put it that way. Where other people have form, I have structure. And in that structure might be something that's linked, acoustically, historically, with something that is formal; something that sounds like a blues. I've built my own structures.

Would you consider Coconut Hotel to be “free form” music?

It is formed, but it is free of historical form. It is not driven by an organized will to express something definite; something pre-existent; something scored; something notated; something that can be done again and again and again provided you have the means and the people. Free form means “this ain't never gonna happen again. We're about to have an experience that will not be [had] ever again. I'm not making any claims about form. It's an oxymoron at best. We didn't coin it, it was coined by Leland Rogers, [the producer for The Parable of Arable Land]. The guy was looking for an advertising slogan. That was his form; that was his description of what we did. I just clung to it because I'm a nominalist; kinda like Hobbes says to Aristotle, “That's very good professor, we can work on that when we come to the induction effect, but what I wanna know is, what are we gonna call it today?” So I'm just going on what we're calling it historically. What it winds up being called, I leave to posterity.

What is the relation of the Familiar Ugly to the Red Crayola?

The Familiar Ugly was an organization that accompanied, or enveloped, or just happened while we played. It was part of the phenomenon then. They were undirected. Open-numbered; any number above one. If you had the Red Crayola plus one person on stage, that person was the Familiar Ugly. If there were five, or fifty, up to an indefinitely large number. When we started the band, Barthelme and I and we looked around to see if we could put together a “band”, to take it to the level where we could actually see if it worked. Both of us could see that it had assonance – people liked it, liked the “noise” we made. When we met Cunningham, we also met Bonnie Emerson and Danny Schacht, and we played as a five-piece. It was alright, it could have gone on, but we were becoming a regular band: doing covers, the things driving the formal expressions were idiomatic, and genre-ridden. That was getting problematic. We were trying to write material, and felt that the only forward was to generate fresh material, which had some sort of novelty to it so that we would be satisfied and remain interested in the problem, in the hopes that there would be some popular assonance there and see what would happen. And eventually this conversation led to somebody else joining the band, and then somebody else joining the band on one night, and we looked at each other and thought, “Hm.” So when you start a conversation, people who can participate will.

And here they were, my goodness, what are we gonna do? this band could get to be … if you pursue a notion of culture along the lines of family resemblance, pretty soon everybody in the world will be in this band. That's … okay, but we want to be able to direct the thing to some extent. So we withdrew to a trio: Cunningham, Barthelme and I, and told the rest that it was over as a band. That we were gonna pursue this other line, which was that we were not gonna be bound by conventions. We didn't actively say this, but it turned out that we were not gonna be bound by conventions. We weren't gonna make the same record twice. With the first record, we felt that we had proven what point we felt there was to prove about chaos, organization within it, and its relation to chaos; how it demonstrates chaos, and at the same time can be counted at an interval as some … later we discovered the notion of “data”, and some data take the form of information, which is a better, easier way of explaining it.

So with the first record, we generated musical data; we made data under the premise of music, and asked the question, “Is it?” Then we put some stuff in there by convention, and traditionally we'd say “Yes, this is at least a try at music.”

Can you clarify the difference between “data” and “information”?

The Red Crayola, The Parable of Arable Land
International Artists, IA LP-2, 1967

“Data” is input, and what happens in the black box turns data into information. And that's the output. You process the world as it occurs to you, including unconsciously, and every other way, all the way up to the point of processing information like, “President Obama is on his way to Chicago.” At the same time you're also processing: “The sky is blue,” “I love you dear, I'm gonna be at lunch tomorrow”, millions of things are going on at the same time. Little differences make all the difference in the world, and those are the kinds of things that we would treat as forms. The tiny differences, the nuances between this and that. So the first album demonstrates that there is something that is song, and there is something that is organized “chaos”, and Free Form Freakout is put into the realm of “Freakout”, so that the people who are performing will know what it is that people will be listening to it under the rubric of; that it belongs to a cultural sort of thing so it gets a free pass, to some extent. You don't have to organize everything from the ground up, like they do in abstract art. There's a lot of money in that, and it's all a lot of fun, but we didn't really care to pursue that way of doing it. We liked the colloquial and the vulgar.

So the Parable takes care of that business. And then it was like, “Okay, what next?” And then we took what logical point had been made: sound as music, sounds of musical instruments, played not in musical ways; treated as instruments for expression. The only organizational principle is that people see what's happening and hear what's happening around them. It's always music minus r plus 1; you're listening to some phenomenon and you think “Listen to that. I wonder what I contributed to it.” Well there's one way to find out for sure: stop playing. That's the only way I know to find out. Stop playing. And that's demonstrated also in Parable: you make one sound, that's fine. You can isolate one sound, but you can't do like you can on a painting. On a painting, you put one mark here, and leave a little bit of space and you put another mark. In an acoustic space, if you put two sounds, those sounds are already interfering with each other if they're simultaneous. You can play one and turn it off; you play another one and then turn it off. Then you add those two sounds differentiated, then you play one and then you play the other one at the same time; then you have a different kind of relation. All of that stuff comes into play.

Then we go to a recording studio. Recording studios are kinds of museums in a way, technological museums. They have sound making devices and recording devices that go back to the beginnings of our ability to do these kinds of things. If they're a good recording studio. And we happened to be at a really good one, run by a first-class guy Walt Andrus. And he knew right away what was up with the acoustics of it, and put up 8 microphones. We only had mono capacity in those days, there was no possibility of multi-tracking. That's live, the sound of all that stuff on Parable.

The Red Krayola, Coconut Hotel. Drag City DC62, 1995

So when it came to Coconut, we had the idea, “Well, let's stop the drums. Let's get rid of the pulse, the beat, as such,” acknowledging all the while of course that there is a beat implicit to music, no matter whether somebody's pounding on it or not. Because the stuff happens in time, and duration naturally plays a role. Morton Feldman: you can sit there and put the stopwatch on and if you could figure out how he was counting the seconds, you could predict that piece eventually. Any one of those minimalist pieces you could work it out.

We were also constrained by what we saw had gone on. We saw Cage and Tudor and those people as having exhausted the potential of smartypants farting around with means of production. And we thought, “This is the end of it, there's nothing after this music-wise.”

Were you frustrated about this?

No, happy.

Why was that?

To us, we relished midnight because it meant the day was over; you never had to live that motherfuckin' day again.

So what came next?

There's also no singing. There's only two uses of the human voice on [Coconut Hotel]. I sing in there some nonsense metaphysical line about “There is no reason why not”, you know, pretentious stuff, and Frank Davis moans into the headphone, [imitates moaning], he's got on a pair of headphones, not over his ears – one of them it over his mouth, and as you know a headphone is a microphone. The speaker is a microphone. He was yelling down this headphone line, sending it to a tiny little Fender amp which he's got in his hand, and he's walking around between these to microphones, back and forth. And something is going on in his mind – I don't know, and it turned out to be some strange drama when you throw in the koto and the water pouring.

And then we confronted the issue of repetition. That piece [“Water Pour”] is just duplicated; it happens twice. That's Mozart: he writes you a section, and he plays it to you twice. Then he goes onto the next section and plays that one for you twice. So that the stuff is imprinted in some way, and the second time through, you have a different relation to the anticipations and expectations and so on, and what you have is very satisfying. That's at the level of … the brain's love of symmetry and pattern. He delivers it like nobody's business, synthesizing Bach and baroque with one hand, and with the other hand making himself a cheese sandwich or pouring himself a glass of champagne.

So all that stuff was done for us; all we had to do was just add to the sounds, which were built into the instruments; we didn't have to do much there either. There were a bunch of keyboards there, so we got going on them. There was a pump keyboard, an electric keyboard, an amplified keyboard, and so on, so all the permutation aspects were at work. The musical qualities of the sounds they produced are the overarching criteria of expression. Not monkey business. And where there is some figuration, it's not worked to thematic ends, merely [as] individual events. So you take the guitar going [sings steady quick rhythm], playing these 16^th notes. Then there's another guitar which is free, to play something that simulates a melodic relationship of something over a rhythmic ground. So it sounds like “guitar music”. Lo and behold, it is guitar music! It's as mundane as that.

So we thought that “Everybody's thinking about these kinds of problems. Everybody's thinking about the fact that everything has been done. Everybody's thinking about how the material that Schoenberg founded was handed off to Cage and Stockhausen and they handed it off to us, and here we are, and this is about all that's left.”

Do you feel like music is still at that state?

No, I don't think anybody cares about that kind of thinking. That's what I found. Endgame is an end in itself, and it only counts to the people who are prepared to play it. Otherwise, nobody gives a damn. We all know that life goes on. Ob-la-di oh-blah-blah. Bloody hell.

I think that these are still interesting structural facts. One can mediate one's production in more and less thoughtful ways and come up with stuff that has novelty to it; the novelty doesn't depend on “I am unique and nobody else can do this but me, and I did this and that's new. And that's genius because nobody else could do this.” It's not a dependency on the primitive. And that's the fly in the expressive ointment for me: the boring fact is that I can't do anything other than what I do. I wish I could. If I could be somebody else, boy I would have been. It's only projective, that's all. There's no escape. The aim in the 60's from my side was, “Is there any way other than having to do this the way that it's usually been done up 'till now?” Gee, no. There's no way out.

(in conversation with Matt Endahl on December 26th, 2011)

Part Two coming soon.