Richard Twardzik

[Alexander Hawkins]

Can anyone share anything with me about this pianist? I've heard him only twice, I think - once on a Chet Baker record a friend of mine played me, and once on the radio. He seems a pretty intriguing player, but I know nothing about him. AMG seems pretty brief on him.

Has anyone else been interested by what they've heard?

[jazzbo]

He is a very interesting pianist. Unfortunately a drug overdose took him away from the world very early in his recording career. It would be wonderful to have many more recordings from him.

I know that he was recorded live with Bird which is available on a Collectables reissue of a Charlie Parker Records lp called "The Happy Bird" (and is likely also available on Philology), and that there was a Pacific Jazz session released on an lp shared with Russ Freeman that is fantastic; recently this was reissued with alternates on a "Superbit" TOCJ lp facimile from Japan.

A great player!

[John Delaney]

The Pacific Jazz CD shared with Russ Freeman is the one to get if you can find it.

He's on many of the Chet Baker Paris recordings; these are also fine.

The New Artists CD has poor sound although interesting musically.

John Delaney

[brownie]

Twardzik was an innovative pianist who left his mark in a much too brief

career. He made a number of records with Chet Baker when he played in

Baker's quartet. A discography is available:

Twardzik

He is heard playing with Charlie Parker in the Uptown release 'Charlie Parker

Boston 1952' (with Charles Mingus on bass and Roy Haynes on drums!)

and on Serge Chaloff's album 'Fables of Mabel' that should still be available

on a Black Lion CD.

He appears also on the latest Uptown release by Allen Eager which I have not

gotten hold of yet.

He made only one date - excellent - under his name for Pacific Jazz.

This was coupled with a Russ Freeman trio date when it was reissued.

He died of heroin overdose in Paris in 1955. He was 24.

[Claude]

The first chapter of the book "The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik", by Jack Chambers, can be read online:

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~chambers/workstward.html

Another discography: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~chambers/twardzik2.html

Edited June 13, 2003 by Claude

[Dan Gould]

On a different track, if I recall correctly, James Gavin puts a lot of the weight of Chet Baker's addictions and behavior on Twardzik's overdose.

[Joe]

Poor as the sound is, the playing on the New Sound releases -- they are rehearsal tapes -- is really, really interesting.

And while we're on the subject of those Chet Baker Paris recordings, which is where I really noticed Twardzik, dos anyone have any more info on Bob Zieff, the composer of the majority of those tunes? Really fascinating work.

Finally, there's an interesting Twardzik "songbook" on the market:

BVHAAST 9912

Frank Van Bommel Quartet

A CRUTCH FOR THE CRAB

Sonata '98 Nº1, part 1 (F. van Bommel), The Girl from Greenland (R. Twardzik), Sa Lutte (F. van Bommel), Yellow Tango (R. Twardzik), Sonata '98 Nº1, part 2 'Nighthawks' (F. van Bommel), A Crutch for the Crab (R. Twardzik), Albuquerque Social Swim (R. Twardzik), Sonata '98 Nº2, part 2 'Vierhoogachter' (F. van Bommel), The Fable of Mabel (R. Twardzik), Requiem (F. van Bommel), Met Titel (F. van Bommel), Sonata '98 Nº3, part 2 'Solace' (F. van Bommel)

Frank van Bommel (p), Tobias Delius (ts, cl), Arjen Gorter (bass), Martin van Duynhoven (d)

Edited June 13, 2003 by Joe

[Alexander Hawkins]

Thanks for all this - sounds like this guy could really have gone places had he not OD'd so tragically.

[Late]

The Japanese version of Trios (Freeman/Twardzik) sounds amazing. A lot of love went into its remastering, including a surgical restoration of the intro from "A Crutch for the Crab," which I'm pretty sure is not included on the long out-of-print domestic version. The intro (for the Japanese version) was dubbed from an LP, and then seamlessly sewn on to the rest of track (remastered from tape). This one (in mini-LP) is still around, and well worth some important $. And ... you get 13 bonus tracks of Freeman material!

Yes, I still want to know about Bob Zieff too! Those compositions have a magnetic quality to them. They stick in your brain synapses, and fire all day long.

Another plug for Chaloff's The Fable of Mabel as well. It's one of the few instances where I really appreciate hearing alternates stacked up on top of each other. The LP on Storyville gives a sketch of "Mabel" in its liner notes that the Mosaic doesn't offer:

"In this legend, Mabel is depicted as a woman who loves men, music, and her silver saxophone that played counterpoint (her own invention which proved impractical). The work is divided into three movements: (1) New Orleans, (2) Classical?, and (3) Not Too Sad an Ending. The soulful baritone solo by Serge Chaloff traces Mabel's humble beginning working railroad cars in New Orleans to her emergence as a practicing crusader for the cause of jazz. During her Paris days on the Jazz Houseboat, her struggle for self-expression is symbolized by an unusual saxophone duet by Charlie Mariano and Vardi Haritounian. Mabel always said that she wanted to go out blowing. She did."

("Mabel" looks somewhat like Audrey Hepburn, in black dance gear, out of Funny Face. On the cover, multiple images of her dance over a baritone saxophone.)

Edited June 13, 2003 by Late

[Dave James]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Twardzik OD while he was in the midst of recording the Paris stuff with Chet Baker?

While we can all easily produce an inventory of jazz musicians who never realized their full potential, I think you absolutely must put Twardzik at the very top of any list. He is truly a one-off...no one has ever sounded quite like him. In that regard, I have no trouble placing him in the rarified atmosphere that's occupied by the likes of Thelonious Monk or Don Pullen.

For anyone who doesn't have the Freeman/Twardzik Pacific Jazz recording, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Up over and out.

[P.D.]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Twardzik OD while he was in the midst of recording the Paris stuff with Chet Baker? 

Perhaps not in the middle of the Paris recordings, but definitely during the European bookings of 55

The Jazz discographies show his last recording to be with Lars Gullin ( and Chet ) in Germany Oct 15th.

Twardzik died on the 21st

Baker's tour lasted longer and he used local piano players after that.

After Twardzik's death ( according to the Paris Cd notes ) Baker appeared in London on the 23rd, but union rules only allowed him to perform as a singer, he had Raymond Fol on piano.. the notes say he sang only four songs, before he was "overcome with emotion."

Baker's quartet recordings with Twardzik certainly rank high in his discography

Edited June 13, 2003 by P.D.

[Larry Kart]

Here's an excerpt from a 1985 interview with Baker (mostly about his relationship with Lars Gullin) that touches upon Twardzik and Bob Zieff.

"We made one album in Paris and we were supposed to do another album. This day we were all in the studio waiting and he didn't come, he didn't come, he didn't come. Peter [Littmann] went back to his hotel and they broke his door down and they found him in there. Nobody knows whether it was an accident or what, but Dick Twardzik was some kind of talent.

You can tell from the record with all those Bob Zieff tunes. That album was way ahead of its time, it didn't go anywhere. He wrote one tune on that album, I think it was The Girl from Greenland; it's such a nice tune (hums).

– I think that he and Lars influenced each other. They met briefly but they must have exchanged ideas and I think Lars learned from that. "He was unbelievable, I had never heard such things before", Lars said about him.

They can have influenced each other; anybody with any musical sense at all would have been influenced by either one of them.

Those Bob Zieff tunes were a real challenge to me, because they were so different from what I'd been doing up till that time. I was always sad because that album never received the recognition it should have.

Bob Zieff was, is, because he's still alive and lives in Hollywood, a wonderful composer. All those tunes were completely different from one other. They had a different mood and a different feel to them, and so original. Sad Walk, Rondette, Mid-Forte, Piece Caprice – a really wonderful album and I enjoyed it so much."

Zieff contributed several very knowledgable entries to "The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz," all about older players, most of them brassmen e.g. Mutt Carey, Charlie Green, Sandy Williams, Johnny Dunn, Tommy Ladnier. The contributors list locates him in Carlisle, Pa., not Hollywood, as of 1994. He used to contribute occasionally to another jazz-oriented list. I got the impression that jazz scholarship has been his chief interest for some time.

[Joe]

Thanks for that post Lawrence.

[grey]

and that there was a Pacific Jazz session released on an lp shared with Russ Freeman that is fantastic; recently this was reissued with alternates on a "Superbit" TOCJ lp facimile from Japan. 

Russ Freeman/Richard Twardzik - Trio

TOCJ 9347

Issued: 01-11-28

24 Bit Remaster by Ron McMaster

Excellent recording and remastering.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Speaking of another pianist whose life was tragically cut short, isn't Carl Perkins the "crab" in "A Crutch For the Crab"?

Later,

Kevin

[John L]

Speaking of another pianist whose life was tragically cut short, isn't Carl Perkins the "crab" in "A Crutch For the Crab"?

Later,

Kevin

Is that right? I never realized that.

[Larry Kart]

About Twardzik's "A Crutch For The Crab" referring to Carl Perkins, if you're going only on the crab-like way Perkins used his left hand, that seems thin evidence to me, especially when the title gives me the feeling that the "Crab" was someone Twardzik knew (if it was not the supposedly high-strung Twardzik's own nickname), and I don't think it's likely that the Boston-based Twardzik and the L.A.-based Perkins ever crossed paths. It's not impossible that they did, but I'd want some testimony. I assume we know or can guess what the "A Crutch For" part of the title refers to and/or plays off of.

[The Mule]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Twardzik OD while he was in the midst of recording the Paris stuff with Chet Baker?

As I recall from the latest Chet bio DEEP IN A DREAM, the author seems to suggest that Chet might have actually been with Twardzik when he overdosed and spent a lot of energy covering it up.

It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to remember several people quoted saying they suspected Chet had something to do with it. Don't have the book here with me to confirm this. Does anybody else remember this?

[Green Dolphin]

Being something of a piano nut Twardzik has always been lingering back there as someone I ought to check out but didn't know where to start(I'm not a big Baker fan)-good thread and next pay day....

[pryan]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Twardzik OD while he was in the midst of recording the Paris stuff with Chet Baker?

As I recall from the latest Chet bio DEEP IN A DREAM, the author seems to suggest that Chet might have actually been with Twardzik when he overdosed and spent a lot of energy covering it up.

It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to remember several people quoted saying they suspected Chet had something to do with it. Don't have the book here with me to confirm this. Does anybody else remember this?

I remember this as well; I'm going to check out my copy and report back later.

[Larry Kart]

Don't have the book at hand, but based on my reading of "Deep In A Dream," just about everything in that book needs to be taken with many grains of salt. While James Gavin certainly talked to a lot of the right people, it seems to me that his angle of approach is not that of a jazz person but of someone who came to Baker primarily through fashion photographer Bruce Weber's film about Baker, "Let's Get Lost," and who seems to have as much or more emotion invested in the figure of Weber as he does in Baker (this, it seems, having to do with a strain in contemporary gay politics -- Gavin believing that Weber, photog for the Calvin Klein underwear ads and the like, is a very bad guy because his entire body of work is homoerotic in content, even though Weber insists that he isn't gay). About Gavin not being a jazz person, I don't mean that you need to be steeped in the music to write such a book, but you need to know what you don't know, need not to adopt an "insider" tone when you can't back it up. I remember one odd, seemingly minor but I think telling instance in "Deep In a Dream" that stopped me in my tracks, and it involved Twardzik. Introducing him, Gavin says something about the 20-year-old Twardzik playing sessions in the Boston area in 1951 with Serge Chaloff -- the wording of the passage implying that Twardzik and Chaloff were two young pals on the much the same plane in the jazz world, when in fact Twardzik (a student of Chaloff's mother) was just getting started and Chaloff was a much-recorded, poll-winning player who had returned to the Boston area because of drug-related health problems. I don't think the passage could have been written by anyone who actually knew who Serge Chaloff was, and a similar lack of background, and/or unwillingness to acknowlege that lack of background and take steps to make up for it, handicaps Gavin when it comes time to assess all the various stories he's told by all the various figures who ran across Baker in the course of his turbulent life.

[The Mule]

I remember one odd, seemingly minor but I think telling instance in "Deep In a Dream" that stopped me in my tracks, and it involved Twardzik. Introducing him, Gavin says something about the 20-year-old Twardzik playing sessions in the Boston area in 1951 with Serge Chaloff -- the wording of the passage implying that Twardzik and Chaloff were two young pals on the much the same plane in the jazz world....

Well, I don't really agree with this assessment of the book. I didn't feel that the entire approach to Chet Baker was filtered through, or a reaction to, the Bruce Weber vision of Baker (frankly, I'm not even sure I really understand the point your making).

The passage about Twardzik you mention deals with heroin use more than gigging. Gavin says that they were in a "fraternal ritual of getting high, then playing jazz." Gavin does describe Chaloff as a "rising young saxophonist" but he also says that Twardzik's "career hadn't gone far."

In any case, ALL biographical works have to be taken with a grain of salt and while I found DEEP IN A DREAM a singularly depressing book mainly about the horrors of heroin addiction, I also found it one of the better researched and written jazz books that I've read in some time.

[pryan]

In the book, Gavin cites a couple of interviews where Baker comments on Twardzik's death. Gavin observes that "Baker's accounts of the tragedy and the events preceding it are so convoluted that they hint at deception." (p. 124)

Chet says in one interview from 1981 that he (Baker) was "... clean at that time, and very naive, and knew very little about what was happening" [with regards to Twardzik's and others' drug use]. (ibidem)

An earlier interview (1963), shows that Baker was once asked by Twardzik permission to "turn on" or shoot up.

Ruth Young, one of Baker's wives, tells of how one night Baker "invited a drug dealer to their into their Austrian hotel room to fix, and the guest OD'd. Young was stunned at her lover's hair-trigger response: to dump the body as fast as possible. 'It was just like - oh my God, we burned the eggs'. That's how matter-of-fact he was". (ibid)

Gavin also mentions a recording session done in Paris, the day after Twardzik's death, where Baker "... gave one of his coldest performances ever", on a Bobby Jasper tune entitled, "In Memory of Dick".

He takes all of these instances to try and connect Baker with Twardzik's OD'ing. I find his reasoning suspect for a number of reasons, but I'll let others comment first.

[The Mule]

In the book, Gavin cites a couple of interviews where Baker comments on Twardzik's death. Gavin observes that "Baker's accounts of the tragedy and the events preceding it are so convoluted that they hint at deception." (p. 124)

Chet says in one interview from 1981 that he (Baker) was "... clean at that time, and very naive, and knew very little about what was happening" [with regards to Twardzik's and others' drug use]. (ibidem)

I remember thinking that Baker was basically lying or, at the very least, being very disingenuous in this 1981 interview. There was no way Baker was "naive" about these things at this point in his life, especially after reading about how deep he'd gotten into the heroin scene by then. According to Russ Freeman, Chet had been an addict for over a year by the time Twardzik died.

Indeed, one of the things that becomes very clear in the book is that Baker lived up to the old joke: "How do you know when a junkie is lying? His lips are moving." Baker is shown to consistently lie, spin, obfuscate, and con whenever he felt the need.

As far as any of this being proof that he was with Twardzik when he died, well, it's far from that. I think Gavin makes the case that it was possible.

[Larry Kart]

Mule, thanks for finding and citing the passage I somewhat mis-remembered. The way it actually is strikes me as underlining Gavin's lack of expertise and his eagerness to sound like an insider even more than I'd thought was the case. That is, if you don't know who Serge Chaloff is, as Gavin apparently doesn't, don't describe him as "rising young saxophonist." That's not a tag for circa 1951 Chaloff that anyone who knows who he is would apply, and my guess is that Gavin came up with the phrase on his own hook because he wanted to sound like someone who was in the know and assumed that that a musician who was shooting up with Twardzik probably was one of his young running buddies. Again, nothing fatally wrong with not being in the know here; everybody's got to start someplace -- but just be aware when you aren't in the know, takes reasonable steps to correct that, and don't pretend.

As for Gavin's approach to Baker being filtered through Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost" and how Weber's own character and his work in general are seen through the lens of the "outing is good, concealment is bad" side of gay politics, again I don't have the book in front of me, but (1) I recall that Gavin says in the book, or has said elsewhere, that his interest in Baker essentially began when he saw Weber's film (2) Gavin spends a lot of time on Baker's physically and emotionally andrognynous aura (a la that of James Dean) and how it has had a potently romantic effect on young people who are at sea about their sexual identities (3) the passage in the book where Gavin discusses the way Weber allegedly mistreated the young woman (don't recall her name) who played a major role in the making of "Let's Get Lost" seemed to me to be the most emotionally intense piece of writing in "Deep In A Dream" by a good margain -- a virtual demonization of Weber and act of identification with his supposed victim -- which struck me as odd until I learned that (4) Gavin is something of a gay activist along "outing is good, concealment is bad" lines and that Weber's previously mentioned stance as a photographer whose work arguably has a homoerotic tone but who denies that and says that he himself is not gay is regarded by many such activists as a cause celebre. Now (2) is certainly a topic that belongs in a book about Chet Baker; the question is one of tone and emphasis, and we can disagree about whether Gavin goes overboard here. As for (3) and (4), while I wouldn't be surprised if Bruce Weber were, in fact, a total jerk, am I the only one who found that the passage in "Deep In A Dream" about Weber and that young woman who worked on "Let's Get Lost" stuck out like a sore thumb?