It’s often convenient to gather together like-minded musicians under a collective banner. There was the Austin High School Gang of the twenties; the cool school of the fifties with Lennie Tristano as its focus and the free jazz of the sixties spearheaded by Ornette Coleman.
There are many such examples and I would like to coin one myself – the Dallas Four. The quartet of kindred spirits in question is Gene Roland, Jimmy Giuffre, Harry Babasin and guitarist Herb Ellis. Perhaps with Ellis it is stretching the geography a little as he was bom in Farmersville, Texas, some 40 miles east of Dallas. But in American terms, that’s just down the road.
To my knowledge, none of the four actually met up in Dallas – or Farmersville for that matter – but in the early forties, all three shared student accommodation at North Texas State University. Sadly, Gene Roland and Harry Babasin have passed on but Jimmy Giuffre and Herb Ellis are still with us.
Ellis was born on August 4, 1921, ‘out in the country’, as he puts it, and began his musical career at the age of four by playing the harmonica. Perhaps recognising future talent, his sister gave him a banjo and from that now much-maligned instrument he graduated to the guitar when he was seven and learnt to play it with the help of a tutor brought from Sears, Roebuck’s mail-order catalogue.
‘Where we lived was pretty remote, so most of the music I heard was on the radio,’ the guitarist recalled. ‘There were a couple of records in the house by a singer named Gene Austin on which there was a really good guitar player. I listened to a lot of them and country music in general and discovered I could pick up the tunes very quickly. I remember the first piece I learnt to play was My Blue Heaven, so I was playing good tunes right from the start.
‘In 1941, I went to North Texas State Teachers’ College, as it was then known, where I met Jimmy Giuffre, Gene Roland and Harry Babasin. They were already into jazz and between them had lots of records by Count Basie, Lester Young and Charlie Christian which made a big impression on me. This was really my first encounter with jazz and Charlie Christian and Lester Young influenced me a lot, as did Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie later on.’
After two years, Ellis left NTSU for financial reasons and went on the road with a big band led by trumpeter Charlie Fisk. Unfortunately for all concerned, the band wasn’t a success and after a matter of months it folded and Ellis and Fisk joined the Russ Morgan Orchestra.
Morgan, a former coalminer and cinema pianist turned bandleader, was noted for his authoritarian manner. At the time Ellis was with the band, blind accordionist Joe Mooney was also on the payroll but Ellis’s stay with Morgan was to be a brief one and, when the band’s itinerary brought it to Kansas City, the guitarist detached himself. While in KC, Ellis heard Charlie Parker for the first time, an experience which made a major impact on him.
It was in Kansas City that Ellis was hired by Glen Gray for his Casa Loma Orchestra but by now the band was in decline. In a review published in Metronome magazine in June, 1944, George Simon was generous with his compliments about Ellis but went on to say: ‘Gray’s band sounds very uninspired as it goes through an evening of some of the dullest, least modern-sounding arrangements played by a top band today. It lacks colour and imagination and, in general, exhibits too few moments of musical brilliance.’
With reviews like that, it was hardly surprising that Ellis quickly moved on. His next employer, reedman Jimmy Dorsey, led one of the most underrated of all the swing era bands and Ellis was to remain with the junior of the two Dorsey brothers for the next two years.
‘Jimmy Dorsey was a fine alto player and Charlie Parker idolised him. He was a great time player, too, and he really understood harmonies’
‘Jimmy was a fine alto player and Charlie Parker idolised him. He was a great time player, too, and he really understood harmonies. It was a nice band but didn’t have a lot of well-known names while I was there. Serge Chaloff, I remember, was on the band for a time. I liked being with it; Jimmy featured me and I got a lot of things to play.
‘In many ways it was quite an advanced band stylistically and some of the charts we had were written with the guitar playing lead. Jimmy used to feature me, too, with a small combo, so I had a lot to do. It was a good experience working with Jimmy but he was always in the shadow of his brother Tommy.’
Perhaps it was Jimmy Dorsey’s use of small groups drawn from the band that gave Ellis, pianist Lou Carter and bassist Johnny Frigo – who were all members of Dorsey’s band at that time – the idea to go their own way and form Soft Winds. As might be expected, the leader was unhappy about them all leaving at the same time because, by then, big bands were facing an uncertain future and finding suitable replacements for such key personnel was difficult.
From all accounts, Soft Winds was a very hip group, both vocally and instrumentally. It used well-constructed charts rather than ‘head’ arrangements and one of its many admirers was Oscar Peterson, who sat in and sang with the trio whenever it played in Buffalo, Ontario.
Sadly, Soft Winds left behind very little in the way of recordings. There was just one date in 1947 for the Majestic label when four 78 sides were cut, one of which was I Told You I Love You, Now Get Out. Composed jointly by the trio, it became a major hit for June Christy and the Stan Kenton Orchestra when they recorded it in the same year.
Soft Winds remained together for five years until John Frigo left and brought about the group’s demise. Ellis returned home to Texas and it was there that he received a call from Oscar Peterson inviting him to join his trio as a replacement for Barney Kessel.
‘It was a sensational group; a group which performed really tight. We had a lot of dynamite arrangements which were very good but some could be difficult to play. Ray Brown was the bass player and I had no trouble playing with him whatsoever. It was a group that broke new ground and being with it will always remain one the highlights of my career.’ Ellis spent six years with Peterson, leaving in 1958. During the latter part of his stay he developed a drink problem which, happily, he has managed to control. While with Peterson, he even found time to get married and put family roots down in California. In the late fifties he worked for a time with Ella Fitzgerald and then, with the arrival of two children, settled for the more regular life of a Hollywood studio musician from 1960 until well into the seventies.
‘Yes, for 17 years I did the lot. I worked on everything from Batman to the big shows that starred the likes of Steve Allen, Danny Kaye and Merv Griffin. There was so many that I can’t remember them all. You do so many and they are all much alike so that everything becomes faceless after a while.
‘In the studios you had to do whatever was put in front of you. It was mostly guitar work but sometimes they wanted a banjo or a ukelele – and I did that, too. I even played rock ’n’ roll dates but all the time I was doing studio work I continued to play jazz whenever I could. In fact, I never really stopped playing jazz and used to do at least one jazz date a week – or every two weeks – and then I decided to quit regular studio work and just take jobs as and when they came along. So from then on my jazz activities just increased.
‘In many ways this was a timely move because not too many years later the studio work in Hollywood dried up and now there is virtually none. None, that is, for the musicians: it is all machines and synthesizers and not many conventional musicians can make a living in this way anymore.’
Coinciding with Ellis’s return to fuller jazz activity was the formation of The Great Guitars. ‘This came about through a promoter in Australia. He had the idea for a three-guitar group built around Barney Kessel and Charlie Byrd and they asked me to complete the trio. So the three of us got together and went over to Australia and that’s where they first billed us as The Great Guitars.
‘We did the tour of Australia and things worked well. We had good arrangements which featured all three of us, as well as doing individual things. When we got back to the States we played sell-out concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Centre and we did well for several years.
‘To be frank, if we had had different management and different bookings we could have been a real sensation. It was wild at first but we were underbooked. The promoter did the best he could but he didn’t take advantage of the fact that we were a hot item. We could have done commercials for American Express; they were interested in us but the deal never went through. We missed out on a lot of things like that.
‘It was a good group and I was sorry when we went our separate ways. It was great from the listener’s point of view but not the best from the musicians’ angle because we had three soloists. We all wanted our space but it was fun.’
In 1989, Ellis rejoined Oscar Peterson after an interval of 35 years and continues to work with the pianist periodically whenever he takes to the road with a quartet rather than the trio. ‘Having a drummer makes it a lot easier,’ Ellis said. ‘At my age doing what I used to do 30 or so years ago would be awful hard now.’
Despite that last comment, Ellis remains a potent force on the jazz scene. Whether playing as a member of a group or in a solo environment, his inventive, swinging, blues-inflected performances single him out as truly one of the great guitars of all time.