This is one of a series of taped interviews with musicians who are asked to give a snap opinion on a set of records played to them. Although no previous information is given as to what they are going to hear, they are, during the actual playing, handed the appropriate record sleeve. Thus in no way is their judgement influenced by being unaware of what they are hearing. As far as possible the records played to them are currently available items procurable from any record shop.
Nat Pierce first joined Woody Herman in 1951, and has worked with him, and for him, off and on ever since. A most talented arranger, Pierce has written scores for Basie, Tony Scott, Quincy Jones and Ella Fitzgerald in addition to the immense amount he has contributed to the Herman book. As a stylist it is difficult to pin him down, for although he has deputised for Count Basie (with enormous success) and Claude Thornhill, he is a devoted admirer of the Harlem stride school – to add to the mystery his knowledgeable and most, attractive wife calls him ‘an old bop pianist’. But there, she may be kidding, who knows.
I did mean to play him more records than I did, in fact I had selected quite a few, but Nat talked so entrancingly that the night progressed into morning before we had played but four discs. Perhaps when he visits us again, we’ll get him in the net for a repeat. – Sinclair Traill
Thingamagig. Mel Powell Trio. Vanguard PPL 11000
Until this one here, Mel didn’t make any records for a long time. I heard him first when he was with Muggsy Spanier’s big band on Broadway. He was perhaps a little too advanced for that band at that time, it was a kind of Bob Crosby band, but he sounded wonderful to me. Then he went with Benny Goodman and somehow his style changed completely. He made some great records with Goodman – the sextets with vocals by Peggy Lee, and things like that. Limehouse Blues, I remember for one being very, very good. Then he joined the army, worked with the Glenn Miller Band until the end of the war. When he returned he just disappeared. But really he didn’t disappear at all. He started to study serious music, and now he is up at Yale writing classical scores. As a matter of fact I think he was doing that at the time this record was made, tho’ I must say it doesn’t sound like it! That’s wonderful jazz piano. Just before we left I was told that Bobby Hackett had been playing a date up in Connecticut, and that Mel had come across from Yale and had joined in the session, and had sounded just as beautiful as ever. All the band were raving about him when they got back to New York.
A pity a lot of people have tried to discount him, by calling him a Teddy Wilson imitator and things like that, but the guy can sure play a piano; and still sound like himself!
‘Fats could always play the piano wonderfully well, but there came a time in his life when he found he wasn’t making a good enough living just playing the piano. So he turned himself into an entertainer, sang a lot of very bad pop tunes and managed to make classics out of them’
Numb Fumbling. Fats Waller. HMV DLP 1111
No mistaking that! From the very first notes you know it’s Fats from the sound he gets from the piano. Being a piano player myself, I am always interested in the actual sound that comes out, quite apart from the time element and technique and ideas and all that. But there have been a few pianists who manage an individual sound from the keyboard and Fats was definitely one of them. Earl Hines is another who has a very individual sound at the keyboard. Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, both have their own sound. But to me the best sound ever produced from a keyboard came from Nat ‘King’ Cole. I know he doesn’t play much jazz piano anymore, but the sound he produced was just beautiful. And he could play the piano, make no mistake about that! He played just like Earl Hines in his early days, but without that harsh, that breaking-the-piano-apart sound that Hines gets.
Although Dizzy is called the Clown Prince of Jazz, Fats was the original man to have that title – he was a real humorist. Of course he could always play the piano wonderfully well, but there came a time in his life when he found he wasn’t making a good enough living just playing the piano. It happened to a lot of musicians in the ’twenties; so he turned himself into an entertainer, sang a lot of very bad pop tunes and managed to make classics out of them – with a lot of very good piano in the middle and some good jazz choruses by his swingy little band. It will be a long time before there is ever another Fats Waller.
A thing that happens in New York quite often, say once or twice a month when Ben Webster is around, is he grabs you and says you must come up to his room and listen to some music. Ben is a stride piano addict – he will have a tape machine in his room containing Fats Waller, Donald Lambert, Willie The Lion, and naturally Art Tatum and every possible guy who ever even attempted to play stride piano. And Ben will give his own and very individual dissertation on the performances as he plays the tape, and he makes you listen. He had Tommy Flanagan and myself up in his room not so long ago, and we didn’t get out until seven in the morning! He was very much in love with Fats’ work, and of course also James P. Johnson. I think Fats was an extention of James P., but Fats also has more of Willie The Lion Smith in him than most people recognise. The Lion also gets that very beautiful sound on the piano; more so than James P., I think.
Another great stride man is Mr. Basie, my ‘father’, who always calls me son, so I have to reciprocate and call him father. He can really turn on the heat when required- not often these days, sadly enough. He really should play more solo piano, for I have heard him in my house when he played wonderful stride – Handful Of Keys and some of those difficult tunes by The Lion. Perfectly played! In the days these tunes were written, like this Numb Fumblin’, each player played his own variation of any tune. There would be a kind of set format for the tune, but all the piano players had their own improvisations which they played and they were all a little different.
One of the great piano players of those days was someone I never heard. But I have heard so much about him, that he has become a kind of fable in my mind – the original Beetle! I have been told that this guy would show up, maybe two or three times a month, when they had these backroom situations for piano players up in Harlem in those days. They would play all night and all kinds of guys would come along and join in, trying to cut one another. But this Beetle guy, he would walk in off the street, sit down at the piano and smother everybody by the brilliance of his playing. Then up he’d get and disappear into the night once more. Danny Barker told me quite recently, that The Beetle never worked a professional job in his whole life. Danny said that there was an old blind lady who ran a news stand up in Harlem and she it was who kept The Beetle with her earnings from selling papers. He in return kept her happy by playing the piano. She kept him fed and clothed him, and gave him a roof over his head and so he didn’t need to work. He lived just like a playboy; went around, had himself a few tastes, smoked cigarettes, flashed a diamond ring, and then if he got the urge to play a piano, he just went and played. But Danny said no one ever was able to employ him. Ben Webster raves about him as well – places him on a plane with Willie The Lion Smith.
‘Ben always says the Duke Ellington Orchestra is nothing else but an orchestrated version of Willie The Lion Smith – untrue, but quite a statement to come from somebody like Ben’
Ben always says the Duke Ellington Orchestra is nothing else but an orchestrated version of Willie The Lion Smith – untrue, but quite a statement to come from somebody like Ben. When Ben was with Duke, he used to hang out nights with Art Tatum – he would disappear for days at a time, he and Art would just hide themselves and play music together at some of these after-hours spots. Tatum was another all-night man, and they’d play for ten, twelve, fourteen hours without a stop. Then Ben would come back in the band, and Duke would ask: ‘Where you been?’ And Ben would say ‘With Art’. And Duke would say ‘Okay, but you play this next one, man.’ You see Duke figured that something from Art would surely have rubbed off on Ben. So when Ben finished playing, Duke would evolve another tune or arrangement from what he heard. There are a lot of tales going around especially about Duke, like that. You know, how he hears a guy warming up back stage and this guy he plays a little riff, a little thing and two days later Duke will come with a whole chart on this thing. They tell these stories about him, because nobody could possibly be that prolific, and write all those things like he does through the years.
And most of it is really top grade music that he writes. Even those things which people say are bad, a few years later they turn out to be top flight – he’s a hard man to judge, ’cause everything he turns out is eventually good. I suppose it was probably the same thing with Bach, how much music did he write? Probably heard some poor old guys practising in the church one day – crabbed the whole thing and wrote it down. Who knows?
But back to Fats. What a pity he had to die so voung, with all that talent. These things were written when he was a very young man in his early twenties – amazing. He had a type of buoyant beat which always came through. It was very, very steady, yet never stiff, and amazingly accurate. This was recorded in 1929 and yet it doesn’t sound one little bit dated. If you were to enter a club tonight and hear a pianist playing just like this, you would be knocked out of your head! It sounds beautiful.
Lulu’s Back In Town. Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller. Blue Note 84100
Well, the great thing here is that Jimmy Smith sounds as if he actually listened to Fats Waller. He gets the feel of Fats’ music – it’s not the usual blast-you-out-of-the-room organ record. It’s quiet, subdued sounding – he makes sense out of the thing, rather than using the instrument for sound effects, as do so many organists. He has a very good touch and his choice of stops is just right; he knows the sound he wants, and is able to get what he wants from the organ. It takes a deal of practice to play like this, you can’t just sit down at an organ and play like this, without a lot of thought.
I remember when he first came to New York, Babs Gonsalves was the first person to tell me about Jimmy Smith. I was working at the Club Bohemia with Paul Quinichette and Buck Clayton, and in comes Babs Gonsalves with Jimmy Smith. They had a hearse outside and the organ was in the hearse, and that was the way they travelled it around. In fact, I am sure that is the way Jimmy Smith carried the organ to Alfred Lion of Blue Note and got his first record date. Babs was the man who did it for him, and you can say what you like about Babs Gonsalves, but he has done a lot of good things for a lot of people. He is a great talent spotter. A little later he brought Freddie Hubbard around and got him his first date – Babs has a good ear! I think I shall have to go around and buy this record, if all the tracks sound like that!
All Gods’ Children Got Rhythm. Bud Powell. Columbia 33C 9016
Well, my wife she called me ‘Be-bop Nat’, because when we were young, I used to play bop and one of my idols was Bud Powell. I learned every possible lick he ever played. One time when he came to Boston with a sextet that Dizzy put together, and played the Apollo Theatre, a little place like a 52nd Street dive, complete with a small stage and an old upright piano. It only held about 300 people. Sometimes an upright can be a bit of a drag, but Bud Powell got a beautiful sound from this little old machine – he was really wailing away. I went back every day and saw four or five shows a day, and that place was really rocking. Dizzy was there of course and a fine alto player Cecil Payne. I had heard Bud before when he came to Boston as part of Cootie Williams’ big band. Bud accompanied Ella, who was also in the show, but he didn’t suit Ella – he used to play his solos throughout her songs, and I think more people listened to him than they did Ella.
Bud was one of the first people who could change a chord right in the middle of it and find his way down through something else to another progression. In those days he played quite a lot like Earl Hines – not in the octave part, but in the single note part. He had those tremolo things going in those days, but he dropped much of that when he got into the single-note department later on. His drive and attack he always kept going was just fantastic. It was too bad that later on, owing to bad health, he could not evolve into what he would undoubtedly become, the greatest giant of them all. But I have no doubt that even today when you catch him on a good night, he can amaze you to death.
Recently a new record by Bud Powell was released back home on Reprise. Duke was A&R man on the date and Bud played some of those old things he used to play. Some people said, because he played those old things, that he hadn’t improved, that he had stood still. But what they don’t realise, or don’t bother to think really, is that these older players are continually exploring these old themes for something new. Monk is always doing it, and has been for some years. They try something different every day, and something new always comes out, when they play these old tunes. To put a guy down because he plays old tunes is just stupid. Even Coltrane plays My Favorite Things nearly every night. We have the same problem in our band, they say we play the same tunes, but if Woody didn’t play Woodchoppers Ball, then we probably wouldn’t get any work. Everyone has to play the same old things to a certain extent, the public demand it.
The young men these days are too impatient, they want to go into something else, look for something new all the time. But they should have something concrete in the background upon which to build. It happened to me when I was younger, but now I think one must have some kind of a background before one can attempt to try and take jazz a step forward. It seems to me that today too many of them are forcing jazz into some new revolution – new fads every six months. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon until it collapses beneath them, and then up comes another so called genius. But people like Bud Powell they have made their niche and will always be recognised as one of the true purveyors of modern jazz. I personally think that Bud had more to do with modern piano than Monk. When I first heard Monk in 1946 in the Savoy, Boston with Coleman Hawkins he was at that time playing very much like Teddy Wilson, but two years before that I had heard Bud and even then he was playing the so-called be-bop.
