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: 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