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Duane Tatro: forgotten jazz composer

Roger Cotterrell remembers an unsung 50s modernist, ultimately eclipsed when avant-garde focus shifted from composition to improvisation

Duane who? Even highly knowledgeable jazz lovers might have missed this name. But Art Pepper knew it. One of Duane Tatro’s quirky compositions featured on Pepper’s 1960 Smack Up, which was among the best albums from the altoist’s early career. Smack Up was entirely made up of tunes by saxophonists, and Maybe Next Year – an odd, harmonically eccentric ballad by Tatro – is by far the most distinctive piece on the album. It has a chord structure that moves in uniquely unpredictable directions.

Pepper said of the composition “It’s a really strange tune. It wasn’t easy to play. But the more you hear it, the more logical and inevitable the chord structure sounds.” The other tunes on the album, by Benny Carter, Harold Land, Buddy Collette, Ornette Coleman and Pepper himself, are all excellent but sound relatively conservative (even Ornette’s Tears Inside) alongside Tatro’s piece.

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Today, Duane Tatro is almost entirely forgotten in jazz circles. No doubt Pepper would have heard Maybe Next Year on the only album issued under Tatro’s name. Titled Jazz For Moderns, it was released by Contemporary in 1956, four years before Pepper recorded his Smack Up album for the same label. On Jazz For Moderns an eight-piece group played 11 Tatro compositions. Did Contemporary encourage Pepper to use Tatro’s ballad to help promote a struggling fellow member of the label’s roster? My guess is no – Pepper just heard something special in the music.

Jazz For Moderns, strange and uncompromising, probably didn’t swell Contemporary’s profits when it first appeared. Yet, 40 years later, it was reissued on CD in the US and Europe. Perhaps that was because of its curiosity value (everything on it is at least as odd as the ballad that Pepper covered) and its word-of-mouth rarity buzz. Scott Yanow, reviewing the reissue, panned Tatro’s pieces as over-arranged, full of “humourless dissonance” and crowding out space for improvisation. But his judgment that the album was uninteresting is too harsh.

Jazz For Moderns was a determined, even defiant, attempt to use the full range of 20th century conservatory music techniques in a jazz context – and to still make the result clearly jazz

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It was a determined, even defiant, attempt to use the full range of 20th century conservatory music techniques in a jazz context – and to still make the result clearly jazz rather than anything else. Tatro’s jazz roots and honest musicality make the result much more than just a clever experiment. Yanow called the album dated, and it certainly reflects what extreme “modernity” was imagined to be at the time. Sometimes it evokes the aura of other West Coast jazz experiments of the period, and even of Dave Brubeck’s early octet. But the music sounds like no-one else’s. There are passages of dissonant ensemble counterpoint, complex overlays of sound like aural watercolours, and unpredictable silences. Most importantly, however, the music still swings. And it keeps a jazz feeling so often lost in other experiments. For anyone with an open mind and a sense of just how original Tatro’s ideas were in jazz, it is full of interest and has become in some quarters a secret classic.

Tatro wrote very few other jazz pieces (it’s hard to call them tunes) that found their way on to recordings. Rubricity, one of them, appeared on a 1957 Red Norvo album, Music To Listen To Red Norvo By. It has the same gentle harmonic weirdness as Maybe Next Year. But, after the 1950s, Tatro harnessed his ambition mainly to writing concert works. Being thoroughly schooled, he could turn his hand to many musical tasks. He spent his whole career in California and like so many top white West Coast musicians he found work in the Hollywood studios, providing music for nearly two dozen TV series.

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Jazz For Moderns was his only sustained attempt to push jazz in radical directions. It was a false trail. Soon after the album appeared, Ornette Coleman, also based in California, was pointing a different path. As always in jazz development, innovation in improvisation was the real way of the future, not Tatro’s kind of densely composed music, in which solos had to dart briefly in and out of fiendishly complex scores. But he did get top West Coast jazzmen, such as Lennie Niehaus, Jimmy Giuffre, Stu Williamson, Bill Holman and Shelly Manne to play with great effect on his album and to have their solo voices heard.

For many years, Pepper’s version of Maybe Next Year was my sole encounter with Tatro – just an unknown name on a composer credit. As might be expected, it is Pepper’s yearning, crying alto playing that really breathes life into Tatro’s composition. Similarly, it’s Red Norvo’s elegant vibes improvisation that animates Rubricity on Norvo’s album. On the other hand, the freshness of these compositions undoubtedly inspires the solo playing. Tatro was able to give top-class jazz musicians something new and stimulating to play. The dazzling instrumental contributions on Jazz For Moderns also confirm that.

It seems a shame that he apparently gave up on jazz after the 1950s. As his successful career as a TV and film composer for the Hollywood studios developed, he left his early life as a jazz saxophonist far behind. Born in Van Nuys, California, in 1927 he had played (aged 16) with Stan Kenton’s band on tour. Later he worked in various bands and then studied music in France and sporadically at the University of Southern California, right up to the time when he wrote the pieces for Jazz For Moderns. If jazz lost sight of him after that beginning, the world of TV and film soundtracks and concert works didn’t. He lectured on 20th century music and film composition and became influential and well respected in the tight community of American music composers and arrangers, right up to his death in 2020.

Ultimately, mid-20th century California was not a securely hospitable place for innovations that pushed jazz into radically strange forms. There were many attempts, but few had lasting effects. Coleman went to New York. Tatro’s case reminds me of flautist and saxophonist Paul Horn, who tried to forge a consciously unorthodox group concept with his quintet (with vibist Emil Richards) early in the 1960s, bankrolling it from his work in the Los Angeles studios. But Horn eventually left West Coast jazz to explore world music.

Partly because of the powerful pull of the studios, and the frenetic but prosperous life they provided for some of the best musicians, the radical edges of jazz innovation fared much better on America’s other coast, or else they were softened away by a sunnier, slower California life.  

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