If you tuned in to the show this past Sunday (YouTube playlist is up! HERE), you may have heard that we’re doing a series of posts this week on Texas Tenors.
What is a Texas Tenor?
There’s a brotherhood of tenor saxophone players from in and around the Lone Star State who, over time, have been grouped together for their similarity in sound – to a point – a style that over the years has become known plainly as the Texas Tenor.
“The Texas Tenor style” is defined by Ted Gioia in The History of Jazz as “a blues-drenched tenor sax style … characterized by honking’, shoutin’, riffin’, riding high on a single note or barking out a guttural howl.”
Cannonball Adderley once described the Texas sound as “a moan within the tone.”
This week we’ll be talking Texas Tenors and posting some tunes. Can you dig it?
(Illinois Jacquet)
We started Sunday’s show with a groover from Texas Tenor legend Illinois Jacquet. The cut, “Cool Bill” comes from a 1957 album on Verve Records called “Illinois Jacquet and His Orchestra,” featuring Gerry Wiggins on organ, Sweets Edison on trumpet, and Curtis Counce on bass, along with others:
“Jacquet was born to a Black Creole mother and father, named Marguerite Traham and Gilbert Jacquet, in Louisiana and moved to Houston, Texas, as an infant, and was raised there as one of six siblings. His father, was a part-time bandleader. As a child he performed in his father’s band…At 15, Jacquet began playing with the Milton Larkin Orchestra, a Houston-area dance band. In 1939, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he met Nat King Cole. Jacquet would sit in with the trio on occasion. In 1940, Cole introduced Jacquet to Lionel Hampton who had returned to California and was putting together a big band. Hampton wanted to hire Jacquet, but asked the young Jacquet to switch to tenor saxophone.”
“In 1942, at age 19, Jacquet soloed on the [Lionel] Hampton Orchestra’s recording of “Flying Home”, one of the very first times a honking tenor sax was heard on record. The record became a hit. The song immediately became the climax for the live shows and Jacquet became exhausted from having to “bring down the house” every night. The solo was built to weave in and out of the arrangement and continued to be played by every saxophone player who followed Jacquet in the band…It is one of the very few jazz solos to have been memorized and played very much the same way by everyone who played the song. He quit the Hampton band in 1943 and joined Cab Calloway’s Orchestra.”
An absolute classic of the American Jazz Canon, here’s the original 1942 recording of “Flying Home,” a massive hit. Dig Jacquet’s tenor solo (along with Ernie Royal’s screamin’ trumpet), which set the world on fire…an origin of the Texas Tenor Sound:
Jacquet continued to make great records for years to come. Here’s just a few to look for:
“The great Scottish jazz musician Joe Temperley has died at the age of 86.
One of the most respected jazz saxophonists in the world, Temperley, from Lochgelly in Fife, passed away on Wednesday.
He left Scotland for London in the 1950s and played in Humphrey Lyttelton’s band before moving to North America in the 1960s.
Temperley, who started playing the sax when he was 14, took the baritone chair in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
In recent years he had been a long-serving member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, under Wynton Marsalis.
He visited the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2009.
Speaking to BBC Scotland during that visit, he said: “I practise all the time.
“It is all about how you discipline yourself, it’s constant practice. If you haven’t practised for one day you know it, if you haven’t practised for two days some people notice it and if you haven’t practised for three days everybody knows it.”
About working past retirement age, he said: “As long as I can do it, I will do it. As Duke Ellington said: ‘Retire, to do what?’.
“I’m living my dream. It is hard work on stage but people see the good times and don’t take into consideration that you get exhausted, it is the adrenaline on stage which keeps me going.”
In 2009, as New Orleans recovered from the impact of Hurricane Gustav, Temperley said: “Jazz means a lot of different things. Two months ago I was in New Orleans and saw the devastation there and the will of the people and how they are overcoming it.
“Jazz is life.”
Roger Spence, Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival producer, said: “No other Scottish Jazz musician has gained such worldwide popularity as Joe Temperley.
“He is the giant of Scottish Jazz to date. And for good reason. His wonderful sound on the baritone saxophone, and the way he married gruff New York attitude with Scottish romance, created a unique voice in the jazz world.
“And all the time he was gracing the concert halls and top jazz clubs around the world, he was keeping in touch with all the comings and goings in Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath.
“A big man with a big sense of humour.””
You have to hear one of his last recordings – as lead for Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra’s Live In Cuba CD:
It’s Tuesday night and you need some good music to get you to Wednesday.
Harold Land was one of the great Tenor Saxophonists of his time, born right here in Houston but raised in L.A.- a player who thrived in the late 50s scene of Clifford Brown and Max Roach’s new Hard Bop, and stayed groundbreaking through the 70s, finding new paths to pave with Bobby Hutcherson. A player who arguably, never made a bad record. So for tonight, let’s dig on his 1959 classic LP, “The Fox” (Hi Fi Jazz).
A smokin’ hard-bop session that seemed, with the breakneck speed of the title track, out to prove that West Coast cats weren’t just laid-back, cool players, but could hang with anyone in the Easty-biased Jazz landscape. The band on the rekkid featured the great pianist Elmo Hope – a player worthy of a whole other post…(note to self, bring Elmo Hope rekkids to the show Sunday), West Coast drumming Legend Frank Butler and another player on the front line, trumpeter Dupree Bolton, who’s fireworks were recorded only a couple of times, but who’s left jazzheads mesmerized over time and in search of more.
Originally released with a gnarly and dark hand-painted cover by the small label Hi Fi Jazz, a copy of the original was up for sale at a local Houston record store recently for the modest price of $79.99. It’s the only time we’ve seen it in the wild. Popsike.com shows the record can go for nearly $400.00 in good shape. Here’s the cover:
Sunday was heavy stacks as usual for the Jazz Show. If you missed it, it is what it T-I-is.
No Room For Squares in the Circle, Jack.
Can you dig? If so, read on…
You can dig most of the set on YouTube by clicking right HERE.
We played the new Bill Evans on wax, some rare Blue Note and a 17 minute Buck Clayton jam session with Tommy Flanagan, Money Johnson, Vic Dickenson, Lee Konitz and like a dozen other cats. S’wonderful.
Plus new music from the Josh Berman Trio and Keefe Jackson – those Chicago cats are keeping a scene alive.
Dig some of it below.
KTRU Sunday Jazz starts every Sunday at 2pm CT on 96.1 FM Houston and online right here at ktru.org
We’re on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/mingus.sushi/
KTRU Sunday Jazz is still thinking about The Purple One.
While it’s still up, check out this video of Prince unplugged circa 2004 when he dropped “Musicology” (“Call My Name” from that LP is yet another entry to his list of all-time greats) – just in case you needed a reminder of his Purple Majesty:
We’re a little late with this one – but last week’s KTRU Sunday Jazz Show Playlist is up on Youtube. Check it HERE.
We kicked things off with a Heavy Hitter straight out of the KTRU archives – Eddie Lockjaw Davis’ quartet reading of the classic “Comin’ Home Baby,” kind of a funky take, with the skittering drums of Victor Lewis.
Later we busted out some more OG wax with Gabor Szabo’s nasty, latin-tinged modal and hypnotizing “Spellbinder,” with Ron Carter, Chico Hamilton and Willie Bobo. Dig a super sweet and crispy clip of us spinning it live RIGHT HERE!
We busted out some Monk, in the form of a rare Ernie Henry LP, The Last Chorus, on Riverside. The cut appears in full on Monk’s classic “Brilliant Corners” LP from the same label.
Later we proved that just coz the rekkid is “partied-on” as DJ Roy would say, doesn’t mean it can’t jam on ’em. We pulled our OG copy of Don Patterson’s “Satisfaction!” LP, masterfully engineered by the great Rudy Van Gelder. Just an organ trio record, but for the funk, you must go to Prestige Records. Our copy was wobbly, but it banged nicely. We spun Patterson doin’ Miles Davis’ “Walkin'” – a cut so rare we couldn’t find it on YouTube, so you gotta tune in to get the real!
Another JAM from the KTRU heavy archives was this one – Kenny Drew on Xanadu in 79 with Sam Noto, Charles McPherson, Leroy Vinnegar and Frank Butler. There’s a record label that’s been reissue classic sessions from the great Xanadu Records catalog on CD the last year or so, and they’re doing a fantastic job – it’s a label that’s long overdue for reissues – BUT, they haven’t reissued this one yet, and it is a CLASSIC. Luckily, the KTRU archives holds it down!
Tune in this Sunday, 4/24, to catch all the good stuff LIVE. We’ll be spinning some new Record Store Day wax by Bill Evans and the MJQ – plus new music from the Josh Berman Trio, classic and rare Bud Powell – all kinds of goodness you need for your Sunday.
We’re on at 2pm central – on 96.1 FM Houston and streaming live right here on KTRU.org.
Instagram: mingus.sushi
We Love it when you call – so call us and request – 713.348.KTRU
(One from the KTRU Archives: Gato’s stunner, “Chapter One: Latin America (Impulse!) )
This weekend’s Sunday Jazz Show had a rain cloud hanging over it, as we mourned the loss of Saxophone legend Gato Barbieri, who died Saturday at the age of 83.
Leandro Barbieri (November 28, 1932 – April 2, 2016), better known as Gato Barbieri (Spanish for “The Cat”), was an Argentine jazz tenor saxophonist and composer who rose to fame during the free jazz movement in the 1960s and is best known for his Latin jazz recordings of the 1970s.
He played the clarinet and later the alto saxophone while performing with the Argentinean pianist Lalo Schifrin in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, while playing in Rome, he also worked with the trumpeter Don Cherry. By now influenced by John Coltrane’s late recordings, as well as those from other free jazz saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, he began to develop the warm and gritty tone with which he is associated. In the late 1960s, he was fusing music from South America into his playing and contributed to multi-artist projects like Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill. His score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Last Tango in Paris earned him a Grammy Award and led to a record deal with Impulse! Records.
By the mid-70s, he was recording for A&M Records and moved his music towards soul-jazz and jazz-pop. Caliente! (1976) included his best known song, a rendition of Carlos Santana’s “Europa”. The follow-up album, Ruby Ruby (1977) were both produced by fellow musician and label co-founder, Herb Alpert.
Although he continued to record and perform well into the 1980s, the death of his wife Michelle led him to withdraw from the public arena. He returned to recording and performing in the late 1990s with the soundtrack for the film Seven Servants by Daryush Shokof (1996). The album Qué Pasa (1997) moved more into the style of smooth jazz.
Barbieri received the UNICEF Award at the Argentinian Consulate in November 2009.
In the second set, DJ Achim payed tribute to an artist he attributes to getting him into jazz himself, as a teenager in Germany, via Barbieri’s 1973 album “Under Fire” (Flying Dutchman).
He ended the Gato tribute for the day with a cut from Barbieri’s record named for his wife, “In Search Of The Mystery / Michelle,” from the ESP album “In Search of The Mystery.” LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1MljXoNxlQ
Barbieri was beloved around the world for his fiery playing and his soulful approach.
He was immortalized as very few have been before, when The Muppet Show fashioned their own saxophone player “Zoot,” in Barbieri’s own image.
