Papa Jo Jones corner

[mmilovan]

Well, I must say that this:

inspired me to open new corner for this great player. It is so nice to see Papa Jo performing - such elegance, and so much feeling for "body language", that even the most difficult details are just easy as ABC.

Not the fastest, even not most precise one, but clever and musically unmatched drummer, ever.

How about you? Any particular CD, solo... whatsoever...

(I still can remember our discussion about his influence on early development of bebop rhythm section)

Edited March 25, 2007 by mmilovan

[catesta]

Beautiful!

Did the man love to play, or what?

Jo Jones as been a key part of so many great groups, bands and recordings it would be impossible for a dude like me to single out his best work. However, this one is definitely a favorite of mine.

Check out "Stompy Jones".

Edited March 25, 2007 by catesta

[Larry Kart]

Another very nice one is his own album "The Essential Jo Jones" -- rec. 1955 for Vanguard -- especially "Shoe Shine Boy," which reunites the original Basie rhythm section behind Emmett Berry, Lucky Thompson, and Bennie Green. IIRC, it's Nat Pierce on the other tracks from that date.

[Big Al]

Check out "Stompy Jones".

Aw HECK YEAH!!!!

[Dan Gould]

Glad to see this thread started, Papa Jo truly was a master ... and maybe now someone will jump on my rare Papa Jo CD that's for sale here.

[JSngry]

Glad to see this thread started, Papa Jo truly was a master ... and maybe now someone will jump on my rare Papa Jo CD that's for sale here.

Dan - check your email.

[JSngry]

You know, you can't "learn" to be this much of a badass. You either are are you aren't.

Jo Jones was.

There was a lengthy interview with him in Modern Drummer about 25 years ago that still boggles my mind. Pure Truth.

The man was a freakin' force of nature, simple as that. "Music" was just the vehicle.

[mmilovan]

You know, you can't "learn" to be this much of a badass. You either are are you aren't.

Jo Jones was.

There was a lengthy interview with him in Modern Drummer about 25 years ago that still boggles my mind. Pure Truth.

The man was a freakin' force of nature, simple as that. "Music" was just the vehicle.

Agree. There are things that are spirit or nature of a man.

Look at him, he's like a cat...

BTW, I've heard about audio, even film or video tapes Jones recorded as his drum school, anyone saw it?

Another thing is some recording session with Jo Jones and Duke Elington in France, that was made for non commercial reasons? Any info about that?

There is one more clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGMgCVCyv0

Edited March 25, 2007 by mmilovan

[Noj]

You know, you can't "learn" to be this much of a badass. You either are are you aren't.

Jo Jones was.

There was a lengthy interview with him in Modern Drummer about 25 years ago that still boggles my mind. Pure Truth.

The man was a freakin' force of nature, simple as that. "Music" was just the vehicle.

Wow! Serious skills, too cool for school.

[Alexander Hawkins]

Possibly my favourite is the trio record with Tatum and Red Callender.

[Big Al]

You know, you can't "learn" to be this much of a badass. You either are are you aren't.

Jo Jones was.

There was a lengthy interview with him in Modern Drummer about 25 years ago that still boggles my mind. Pure Truth.

The man was a freakin' force of nature, simple as that. "Music" was just the vehicle.

That, and the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!

[catesta]

[JSngry]

That, and the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!

Dude, that's the kind of smile that's as much of a warning as it is anything...

[Big Al]

That, and the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!

Dude, that's the kind of smile that's as much of a warning as it is anything...

That's alright. As another infamous Texan once said, "Bring it on!"

[Larry Kart]

[

That, and the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!

I'm sorry, but I've heard from many sources that Jones, great player though he was, was just ----ing nuts and often a pain in the ass to work with.

[Big Al]

[

That, and the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!

I'm sorry, but I've heard from many sources that Jones, great player though he was, was just ----ing nuts and often a pain in the ass to work with.

I thought all drummers were like that.

[AllenLowe]

he WAS nuts - when I lived in NYC in the late 1970s he played occasionally at the West End Cafe. Musicians were always walking off the stand because of his insults; about once a month Sammy Price, my friend Judy, and assorted hangers-on took him to NYU Hospital (I think it was ) on Henry Street near Brooklyn Heights to dry out. He would come out and get juiced again almost immediately. He once pulled a knife on somebody, I remember hearing. Still played OK, but not really as well as he had, though he looked pretty good close up. He had one very nice quartet with Harold Ashby (a monster tenor, had to have heard him play Moose the Mooche in person!) and Peck Morrison on bass; Peck picked up his instrument and stalked off on the second night. When you looked into Jo Jones eyes it was like looking into a crazy mask. I asked Al Haig if he wanted to go down with me to listen and Haig said "not a chance; he'll make some kind of nasty remark about me."

Edited March 26, 2007 by AllenLowe

[Don Brown]

In the early early 1960s Buck Clayton brought a great little band into Toronto's Colonial Tavern for a week-long engagement backing Jimmy Rushing. Earle Warren was on alto, with Buddy Tate, tenor; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Gene Ramey, bass, and Jackie Williams, drums. At the end of the first evening's last set my wife and I had a pleasant conversation with Rushing. At one point I told Jimmy what a treat it was to hear such a great band. "All that's missing is Jo Jones," I commented, at which point Jimmy said, "If Jo was here I wouldn't be. Don't get me wrong, Jo's a dear friend, but I can no longer work with him. If he was on the bandstand he'd be telling Buck what tunes to play, what tempo to play them at, and me what to sing. He's absolutely impossible!"

A few years later, trombonist Marshall Brown, who was here with Pee Wee Russell, told me that Jones suffered from congenital syphilis and that in recent years had become totally unpredictable and unmanageable.

[AllenLowe]

if it was the clap I not sure he could have lived as long as he did (I saw him almost 15 years later) - don't know, but I always assumed it was alcoholism -

yes, Clem, Long Island Hospital - Schaap is a complicated case, neither one nor the other - knows his stuff - sometimes - and has known all these guys and helped a lot of them. Has his foibles; seems to make up some stuff but honestly thinks it's actual; knows the history but doesn't know what he doesn't know. Drove some musicians crazy by correcting them constantly on dates and places. But I like Phil, though I have not seem him in some 15 years -

Edited March 26, 2007 by AllenLowe

[mmilovan]

People,

These rememberings about Jo, as not so pleasant person to work with are interesting, and are some kind of a new light to his personality.

Anyway, if you tell me that Jo killed 1000 people he will remain the same great, among them greatest drummers anytime - musically and rhythmically pure pleasure to listen to.

[Larry Kart]

My remark was prompted not by any desire to knock Jo Jones as a musician but because several people had said things like "...the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!" And I'm not saying that his music wasn't full of happiness and joy -- for us and in some sense for him. I'm just saying that the relationship between beautiful, joyful music-making and beautiful, joyful personhood (for want of a better term) isn't always simple and is sometimes near impossible to disentangle. I've still never figured out how Artie Shaw could play like an angel and be such a pompous, egotistical jerk. By comparison, putting Art Pepper the man and the musician together is child's play.

[mmilovan]

My remark was prompted not by any desire to knock Jo Jones as a musician but because several people had said things like "...the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!" And I'm not saying that his music wasn't full of happiness and joy -- for us and in some sense for him. I'm just saying that the relationship between beautiful, joyful music-making and beautiful, joyful personhood (for want of a better term) isn't always simple and is sometimes near impossible to disentangle. I've still never figured out how Artie Shaw could play like an angel and be such a pompous, egotistical jerk. By comparison, putting Art Pepper the man and the musician together is child's play.

Totally understood the point, but...

Well, to my opinion we can go further, and notice that many (if not all) of jazz musicians we put nowadays in our imagined hall of fame were, from one time to another, shall we say, problematic persons. Benny Goodman, nice looking, quiet, elegant guy... not a chance - hear from Jimmy Rowels about Goodman...

Sidney Bechet? Terrible, arrogant person. Stan Getz? Also. Buddy Rich? The same as for Jo Jones. Billie Holiday? Unhappy woman, but with no scruple for those she didn't like (she even was capable of fighting with men that were abusing her). Chet Baker...? Today we know what he was doing with his girlfriend after recording sessions... Even Bird was unpleasant from time to time, but it was his way to struggle for life, more than to put his ego in outer space.

Still, I can't understand what did you mean about Pepper? To me, he was very unpleasant one, but his music is deeper than most of others ever produced - so, I can find no link between Pepper as a person and Pepper as a musician... IMHO, of course...

Edited March 26, 2007 by mmilovan

[Larry Kart]

Here, from my book, are two attempts to put the pieces of Art Pepper together. The second one is more to the point we're talking about, but the first adds some context:

ART PEPPER

The first of these two pieces about Art Pepper was written two years after the first; they appear here in reverse chronological order because, in effect, the obituary attempts to sum up Pepper’s life and artistic achievement, while the second piece, a response to Pepper’s autobiography, Straight Life, tries to explore the reasons why an artist who lived in such a turbulent, frequently self-destructive manner could produce music whose key trait was an often exquisite orderliness and grace.

[1982]

There will be no more of Art Pepper’s passionate, exquisitely structured music. One of jazz’s great alto saxophonists, Pepper died Tuesday morning of heart failure in a Los Angeles-area hospital, never having regained consciousness after he suffered a stroke six days before. He was fifty-six.

“A pioneer of progressive jazz” was the way one wire-service obituary spoke of him, and to the degree that there ever was such a music as “progressive jazz,” Pepper did bear some relation to it--but only because, having worked successfully within “progres¬sive” contexts he defined their limitations by effortlessly transcending them. An artist whose sense of musical order was seemingly innate, he was often stimulated by complex external structures, but in their absence his own form-giving qualities were rich. The “pioneer” tag is also dubious, for Pepper--unlike, say, Lester Young, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker--did not inaugurate a broadly influential style (though there were a few Pepper disciples). Nor was his attitude toward the jazz artists who preceded him in any sense iconoclastic. A trio of Swing-Era players--alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Willie Smith and tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas--were his initial inspirations, and the symmetry and warmth that characterized their music were qualities Pepper never relinquished. But his own symmetries, for all their grace and apparent ease, bore the marks of intense internal pressure, while his warmth and humanity were those of a man who had to define and test himself anew each time he picked up his horn.

From the first, self-expression was Pepper’s goal, and in that sense, aided by his natural ear and burgeoning instrumental facility, he was a jazz musician long before he became familiar with the music. The vital familiarizing process took place while Pepper was still in his teens, at jam sessions in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district. Joining Stan Kenton’s Orchestra after brief stints with the bands of Gus Arnheim and Carter, Pepper recorded his first solo, “Harlem Folk Dance,” in 1943 and, after Army service and work as a Los Angeles-based freelancer, he returned to Kenton in 1947. This was the period when Pepper became a star of sorts, and on “Art Pepper,” the piece that Kenton trumpeter Shorty Rogers wrote for him in 1950, and on the 1951 “Over the Rainbow,” recorded with Rogers’s octet, Pepper’s suave lyricism and knifelike rhythmic zeal already marked him as a special artist.

It was in this period that Pepper became a heroin addict, which led over the next two decades to long absences from the scene and several jail terms. But in the midst of this external chaos, Pepper was perfecting and deepening his music. From 1956 to 1960, his first stage of true maturity, he produced one masterly recorded performance after another: “Besame Mucho,” “I Surrender Dear,” “Pepper Pot,” “Old Croix,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” “ All the Things You Are,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Winter Moon”--the list is a long one. But eventually the authorities and Pepper’s personal demons had their way, and he was not to make another significant recording until 1975.

Pepper returned to jazz with all his skills intact and with his expressive range having increased under the weight of his long ordeal. On any given night until the very end--his last Chicago performance, which took place only two weeks before his stroke, was typical--Pepper challenged himself to the utmost. In his life, Art Pepper seemed to be skating at the edge of an abyss. And yet his music managed to encompass that sense of danger, seeking and finding a wholeness that was, so it seems, denied to its maker.

[1980]

Like most autobiographies that purport to tell all, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper is a tissue of genuine revelations and willful posing, in which the desire to speak the truth is at war with the author’s need to paint himself as a romantic victim. But because Straight Life was written by a major jazz musician, the book does tell us a great deal--about the so-called “jazz life” and also about the tensions that affect almost every artist who functions in the modern world.

There are any number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists whose lives and whose work expressed an inner emotional turmoil that bordered on self-destruction--Poe, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Scriabin, Hart Crane, the list could go on and on. But the hallmarks of Art Pepper’s music are lucidity, grace, and a meticulous sense of order. How, one wonders, can those qualities be reconciled with a life so internally chaotic that much of Straight Life reads like a suicide note?

The title of the book, borrowed from that of Pepper’s swift little melody on the changes of “After You’ve Gone,” is deliberately ironic, because “straight” is the one thing the alto saxophonist’s life has never been. Born on September 1, 1925, in Gardena, California, he was the byproduct of a brief, stormy romance. His teenaged mother wanted an abortion, his father married her only because he wanted the child to live, and much of Pepper’s youth was spent away from both parents, in the care of his stern paternal grandmother.

The account in Straight Life of those early years is grim, but it would have meaning only to Pepper’s friends if it were not for his great musical gifts. From the first he seems to have been a “natural,” with a drive toward self-expression that logically led him toward jazz, although the account of his youthful initiation into that world strikes a note of naïveté that echoes throughout the book. Told by a guitarist that “these are the chords to the blues . . . this is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America,” Pepper recalls that “I asked him if he thought I might have the right to play jazz.” Musically, the answer to Pepper’s question obviously was “yes,” as it was for Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and many other white jazzmen. But the fact that Pepper felt compelled to ask (or says that he did--the anecdote sounds a little too pat to be literally true) suggests that emotionally he would forever feel uncertain that his unquestioned ability to play jazz made him part of the jazz community.

While still in his teens Pepper worked in predominantly black bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter and hung out in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district, where a free and easy racial comradeship prevailed. “There,” Pepper recalls, “everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it.” Young, remembering that same era, says, “It wasn’t about ‘whitey’ this and ‘whitey’ that. It was about good musicianship and people respecting one another for the talents that they had.”

Pepper’s talents, which evolved further during a stint with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, required him to forge his own style, one that owed a debt to black jazzmen but was significantly different in that his music seemed increasingly to have uncertainty and isolation as its subject. Then, after a tour of Army duty that led to the disintegration of his first marriage, Pepper returned to Kenton and found, in 1950, what was for him to be the “answer”--heroin. At this point in Straight Life, Pepper makes no excuses. Having found “no peace at all except when I was playing,” he felt, under the influence of the drug, that “I loved myself…I loved my talent. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me…whatever dues I have to pay.’ I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. And that’s what I still am.”

If Straight Life were an exemplary tale, Pepper’s career from then until now would be an unbroken account of personal and artistic disintegration. But while he would spend more than a third of the following three decades in jail on various narcotics charges and would involve himself in a mutually self-destructive second marriage, these are also the years of Pepper’s greatest musical triumphs. One answer to this seeming paradox might be that Straight Life is a con job, an attempt by the author to paint himself as a larger-than-life-size rogue. But even if the grimmer anecdotes in the book are discounted, Pepper’s physical presence today is enough to confirm their essential truth. A strikingly handsome man at one time--reminiscent of Tyrone Power, according to a friend--Pepper is now someone whose haunted, ravaged face clearly proclaims that he has never needed to conjure up imaginary demons.

Straight Life finally does give us the information we need to resolve the split between Pepper’s willfully disordered life and his carefully ordered music. Indeed, the answer may be found in an aspect of the book that at first seems quite frustrating--in the author’s reluctance to talk about his music and in his corresponding eagerness to relate the lurid details of his sex life, drug addiction, and prison experiences.

That music is important to Pepper is believable only if we already know his music; otherwise Straight Life might be the story of any junkie. But soon we realize that, for Pepper, music, drugs, sex, and prison life are, in one sense, all of a piece--or rather, they all seem to be jumbled together in one area of his mind, a realm in which instinctual intelligence exists alongside childlike cunning, in which self-determined forms of order and expression blend into the trials of shame and pride that a lawbreaker’s life tends to bring. For example, Pepper states with special pride that he has never been an informer, never turned in a drug connection. From his point of view, that is an honorable, certain, and essentially private act, a matter between peers in a closed society. And in their various ways, both drug use and sex share similar qualities. One gets high or one does not, in the privacy of one’s own nervous system. One satisfies oneself and one’s partner or one does not, also in relatively private circumstances. And so Pepper feels free to boast about all these things.

But music is an exception for him because, like all forms of art, its ultimate meaning cannot be private, cannot be controlled by the artist; other people will take what the artist creates and make of it what they will. Of course, in the jazz world, particularly the world of the black jazz musician, communal agreements have often prevailed between the musicians and the audience , and almost almost always among the musicians themselves . But Pepper no longer seems to trust either of those communities, if he ever did. From his point of view, the comradeship of Central Avenue is gone forever. Instead, the isolated modern artist par excellence, he tries to create his own private world--striving for perfect, spontaneous order because only then will what he creates remain within his control. And, of course, every time he performs, he fails, for his music becomes more lucid and moving to us, and less private to him, the closer he comes to formal perfection.

So, for Art Pepper, the tensions remain; and as Straight Life demonstrates, they periodically become too great to be borne. But for us, one step removed from Pepper, the tensions are resolved. And that is the final paradox, that his music may do more for us than it can ever do for him.

[AllenLowe]

I spent one very interesting if strange afternoon with Pepper in Boston, maybe around 1977, 1978 - he played brilliantly, he was very smart and fun to talk to, but he was, as a personality, a case of classic arrested development. Like a 12 year old. Laurie, supposedly his rock, was not, in my opinion, much more mature than he.

Now I see it is a classic creative personality; not to start a big fight here like I once started on Jazz Research, but he fits the profile of a contemporary diagnosis of Pervasive Development Disorder, which is also on the Asperger's spectrum. But that's for another day -

Edited March 27, 2007 by AllenLowe

[BruceH]

Concentrating on just the drumming, Jo Jones is, and always will be, one of my favorite jazz drummers.