Jimmy Giuffre, R.I.P.

[garthsj]

How sad! Another of my boyhood heroes has left us .... I based my own limited clarinet playing abilities on Jimmy's style, and I still constantly play his music ... While I was not a big fan of his later "experimental" work, he will always occupy a major niche in my consciousness. I treasure a picture I had taken with him at one of Ken Poston's events several years ago.

Rest in peace Jimmy, your mark on the world is secure.

Garth.

[woofy]

To bad, Here is one of my favorites:

3 JPG

[Aggie87]

RIP Jimmy.

Will also spin "Emphasis" later, as well as "Free Fall".

Was "Conversations with a Goose" his last studio recording?

[jasonguthartz]

From 1964-'65 he played his "three sided music" with Don Friedman and Barre Phillips. As far as is known, no recordings exist of the trio.

But there is a recording -- not the best audio quality, but the music is astonishing:

details:

Jimmy Giuffre: Olympia, Fevrier 1960 - Fevrier 1965 Trema 710586 (France) [CD]

1. The Boy Next Door (Blane/Martin) 7:55

2. Mack The Knife (Brecht/Weill) 9:15

3. My Funny Valentine (Rodgers/Hart) 6:33

4. Two For Tumbuktoo 5:28

5. Drive 7:34

6. Cry, Want 8:22

7. Crossroads (Coleman) 7:27

8. Syncopate 7:01

9. Ictus (Carla Bley) 8:32

Note: CD issued 1999

composed by Giuffre except as noted

tracks 1-4 recorded live February 23, 1960, Olympia, Paris

tracks 5-9 recorded live February 27, 1965, Olympia, Paris

on tracks 1-4: Jimmy Giuffre, clarinet, tenor saxophone; Jim Hall, guitar; Wilford Middlebrooks, bass

on tracks 5-9: Jimmy Giuffre, clarinet, tenor saxophone; Don Friedman, piano; Barre Phillips, bass

[Soul Stream]

Wow...didn't know he went to North Texas State University. That's where I went....

[Peter Friedman]

Jimmy Giuffre made some important contributions to jazz. He will be missed.

R.I.P. Jimmy

[JSngry]

I can't be sad. Too much life came through the man and was preserved for anybody who wants it to be sad that the inevitable finally occurred.

I won't be sad. I've been uplifted more times than I can count by the man's music, and I see no reason for that to end now.

What I can & will be is grateful, grateful that at least some people in at least some points of time take advantage of their life to open it up and not be afraid and then share it with the rest of us. Not everybody is so courageous or so generous. But Jimmy Giuffre was.

God bless the child that's got his own? Jimmy Giuffre definitely had his own, and he let it be ours as well.

A well deserved rest in peace for this man.

[Guest Bill Barton]

R.I.P.

Yes, the large font and boldface sum it it up. He was a true original and will be missed. And he left a remarkable legacy of recorded music that we can all enjoy and learn from for years to come.

[AndrewHill]

Really sad news. Thought his work with Bley and Peacock was amazing! RIP.

[michel1969]

i've listen many times for "Fusion" and "Thesis" reissued by ECM.

Beautiful music. I also think about his good friend Andre Jaume. I've seen him playing many Jimmy's compositions.

Edited April 25, 2008 by Michel

[John Tapscott]

Jimmy Giuffre made some important contributions to jazz. He will be missed.

R.I.P. Jimmy

Absolutely to all of the above. Jimmy's Mosaic set is a real favorite of mine. My 13 year old daugther was in the cast of her school's production of "The Music Man" which my wife and I attended last night. As I listened to the music, I couldn't help but think of Jimmy's hip but respectful arrangements of those tunes which are on the Mosaic set. I also love his work with Brookmeyer and Hall, and of course "Four Brothers" for Herman which certainly broke some ground back in the day.

[7/4]

April 25, 2008

Jimmy Giuffre, Jazz Clarinetist and Composer, Is Dead

By BEN RATLIFF

Mr. Giuffre in 1959.

Jimmy Giuffre, the adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger whose 50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works, died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 86 and lived in West Stockbridge, Mass.

The cause was pneumonia, brought about by complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife of 46 years, Juanita, who is his only survivor.

Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late ’50s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them.

His first breakthrough album, “Tangents in Jazz” (1955), did away with chordal instruments like piano or guitar two years before Sonny Rollins famously did so; his trios from 1956 to 1961 were without a drummer, prefiguring the quieter, classical-timbred music of vangardist jazz circles in the 1980s.

Little of this impressed more traditional audiences, however. What made Mr. Giuffre important to big-band aficionados was one composition, “Four Brothers,” a big hit for Woody Herman’s Second Herd in 1947. It established the characteristic Herman frontline sound of three tenor saxophones and a baritone saxophone, played fast, in harmony and without vibrato.

Mr. Giuffre was born on April 26, 1921, in Dallas. He started on clarinet at the age of 9. He attended what was then North Texas State Teachers College, where he earned a degree in music in 1942; upon graduation he joined the Army for four years, playing with a quintet in mess halls at meal times, then moved to Los Angeles. After trying graduate work in music at U.C.L.A., he gave it up to study composition privately.

In the late 1940s, he became a freelance arranger and, in some cases, saxophonist, for a number of big bands. In the early 1950s, West Coast cool jazz began, and Mr. Giuffre took part. Usually playing tenor saxophone, he was in small groups led by Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Howard Rumsey.

Meanwhile, he was growing stronger as a composer. Mr. Giuffre’s teacher from 1947 to 1952, Wesley LaViolette, stressed the virtues of contrapuntal writing, and counterpoint became the structural glue for Mr. Giuffre’s art, making some of his most outré experiments hold together. LaViolette also taught Mr. Giuffre that jazz could accommodate any amount of composition, not just for the frontline instruments, but for all of them, and in the mid-50s, he began to write specific parts for bass and drums, sometimes winnowing their roles to providing color and accent.

The late-50s versions of the Jimmy Giuffre Three — with the guitarist Jim Hall and the bassist Ralph Pea, then Mr. Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer — gained him some commercial renown. (The Giuffre-Hall-Brookmeyer trio is immortalized in the opening sequence of the film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” playing its best-known tune, “The Train and the River.”)

If Mr. Giuffre was long on ideas, he was not a partisan in esthetic matters. Though he prized his even, smooth sound quality on clarinet, he did not disdain players who had a more fractured sound. He never saw an irreconcilable split between American and European influences He admitted that the instrumentation for his late-50s trios had a European inspiration, Claude Debussy’s “Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp”; at the same time, he used those trios to convey a sense of rustic, bluesy Americana.

From the mid-50s on, Mr. Giuffre taught music, initially at the Lenox School of Jazz, the late-summer educational conference in Lenox, Mass., which existed from 1957 to 1960. (A remark made the rounds at the time: when told that Mr. Giuffre would be there to teach clarinet, among other things, the writer André Hodeir quipped, “Who will be teaching the upper register?”)

It was at Lenox that Mr. Giuffre first encountered Ornette Coleman, a scholarship student at the school in 1959. Mr. Giuffre was knocked sideways by Mr. Coleman’s conviction and freedom and had a sort of ecstatic transformation.

In short order, Mr. Giuffre changed his music again. The result was the moody, overlapping improvisations with no fixed key or tempo that characterize the playing of his trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, heard on the ECM reissue “1961” and “Free Fall.” This trio lasted for less than two years, playing ever-more-uncompromising music; Mr. Swallow wrote that the group made its last stand at a Bleecker Street coffee house in New York, finally breaking up on a night when each musician earned 35 cents.

But “1961,” a pairing of trio albums reissued by ECM in 1992, was met with a sense of awe among some younger musicians and critics, as if Mr. Giuffre had had a key to the long-distance future, beyond free jazz and John Coltrane and the pastoral jazz-fusion of Jan Garbarek; it received a five-star rating in Downbeat.

A similar belated reception awaited “Free Fall,” which included some piercing, agitated solo improvisations. Though the album was a commercial failure upon its initial release in 1963, when Columbia brought it out again 25 years later, the “Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD” gave it the book’s highest rating, a crown.

After “Free Fall,” Mr. Giuffre’s momentum was broken: he made no albums for 10 years. He taught at the New School in and New York University in New York City, and in 1978 he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, teaching there until the early 1990s. He also created another version of the Jimmy Giuffre Three, which turned to sounds from Africa and Asia; in the 1980s, inspired by the electronic instruments of the band Weather Report, he made a series of quartet recordings for the Italian label Soul Note.

Also in the 1980s, he formed a productive association with the French saxophonist André Jaume, who recorded Mr. Giuffre several times on his own label, CELP; as a duo they made a live album, “Momentum” (Hatology). The 1961 edition of the Jimmy Giuffre trio, with Mr. Bley and Mr. Swallow, reunited sporadically for performances and recordings, including “The Life of a Trio” (Owl, 1990) and “Conversations with a Goose” (Soul Note, 1992).

Jimmy Giuffre about 1983. He was also a music teacher.

Edited April 27, 2008 by 7/4

[ghost of miles]

Every fan of this music has an album that "changed their life." For me, one of those life-changing albums was Giuffre's Fusion (reissued as 1961 on ECM). When I first heard "Jesus Maria," I thought to myself: This is what I've been waiting to hear. It seems like I held my breath throughout the entire track.

Last week I was listening to a lot of early-1960s Giuffre and used that version of "Jesus Maria" for an upcoming Night Lights show on Carla Bley's early compositions. Years ago Giuffre really opened my young jazz mind to what the music's possibilities could offer...this news is not unexpected, as his illness was common knowledge, but Sangrey's sentiments form a eulogy worthy of the man and musician to which they pay tribute.

[GregK]

Terrible news. I just recently began listening to a lot of his music; in the last 2 weeks I have gotten Free Fall, Easy Way and Momentum (with Jaume on Hat) and have been meaning to get 1961 ASAP. He will be missed.

[alocispepraluger102]

wkcr till 9pm eastern featuring jimmy guiffre

[JSngry]

There were two albums on Choice?

This I did not know....

[mjzee]

RIP.

IIRC, in the liner notes for 1961, Manfred Eicher stated that it was this music that inspired him to start ECM.

The Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Atlantic) is one of my favorite albums:

Free Fall, sadly, is not, but I acknowledge that it has moved a lot of people.

[sidewinder]

More bad news. But he left some great music for us. That Mosaic set will be coming out this weekend, RIP.

I'll also dig out 'Herb Ellis Meets Jimmy Giuffre' on Verve and the aforementioned 'Fusion' LP.

Edited April 26, 2008 by sidewinder

[Big Al]

Wish I had something constructive to add, but I'm only familiar with his music through the way it/he moved others. That's worth a lot more than any song that I know of.

RIP

[Tjazz]

I'll spin FREEFALL.

[Big Al]

Every fan of this music has an album that "changed their life." For me, one of those life-changing albums was Giuffre's Fusion (reissued as 1961 on ECM). When I first heard "Jesus Maria," I thought to myself: This is what I've been waiting to hear. It seems like I held my breath throughout the entire track.

Thanks for mentioning this album. I'd never heard it and am listening to it on Rhapsody right now. "Jesus Maria" makes me want to buy the CD right now. Wow, what a beautiful song!

[stevebop]

Friday, April 25, 8pm/­midnight, WGBH 89.7 Boston

JIMMY GIUFFRE (April 26, 1921 - April 24, 2008)

Listed by artist: selection, album (label)

8:05pm

Jimmy Giuffre: So Low, The Complete Jimmy Giuffre (Mosaic)

Jimmy Giuffre: The Easy Way, TheEasy Way (Verve)

Jimmy Giuffre: Jesus Maria, 1961 (ECM)

8:26am

Lee Konitz; Jimmy Giuffre: Palo Alto; When Your Lover Has Gone;

Sompin Outa Nothin; Uncharted,

Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre (Verve)

8:45pm

Modern Jazz Quartet; Jimmy Giuffre Trio: Da Capo; Fine,

Third Stream Music (Atlantic)

Jimmy Giuffre: The Song Is You, The Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Atlantic)

9:03pm

Jimmy Giuffre: A Jazz Portrait 1994 (ONLY ON 89.7)

A half hour radio documentary produced by Steve Schwartz

and Margot Stage for The The England Foundation for The Arts

9:33pm

Jimmy Giuffre: Do It!; All For You; I Only Have Eyes For You,

The Complete Jimmy Giuffre (Mosaic)

Chet Baker; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: There Will Never Be Another You,

Young Chet (Pacific Jazz)

9:54pm

Jimmy Giuffre: Suspensions, Modern Jazz Concert (Columbia)

Red Norvo; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: I'll Follow You,

Jimmy Giuffre Small Group Sessions Vol 1 (1947-1952) (Blue Moon)

Shorty Rogers Giants; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: Popo; Didi,

Jimmy Giuffre Small Group Sessions Vol 1 (1947-1952) (Blue Moon)

Shelly Manne; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: It Don't Mean A Thing; Deep Purple,

Jimmy Giuffre Small Group Sessions Vol 1 (1947-1952) (Blue Moon)

10:16pm

Jimmy Giuffre: Man Alone; Dichotomy; Threewe, Free Fall (Columbia)

10:28pm

Bob Brookmeyer; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: Sweet Like This; Slow Freight,

Mosaic Select: Bob Brookmeyer (Mosaic)

Stan Levey; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: Drum Sticks,

Stanley The Steamer (Bethleham)

10:49pm

Jimmy Giuffre; Pee Wee Russell: Blues in E Flat,

The Complete Jimmy Giuffre (Mosaic)

Herb Ellis; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: A Simple Tune,

Ellis in Wonderland (Norgran)

11:08pm

Jimmy Giuffre: Piece for Clarinet and Strings,

Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre (Verve)

11:29pm

Jimmy Giuffre: Quasar, Quasar (Soul Note)

John Graas; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: Egypt; Frappe,

Jimmy Giuffre Small Group Sessions Vol 3 (1953) (Blue Moon)

Teddy Charles; featuring Jimmy Giuffre: Free; Evolution,

Jimmy Giuffre Small Group Sessions Vol 3 (1953) (Blue Moon)

11:49pm

Jimmy Giuffre: In The Mornings Out There, 1961 (ECM)

11:56pm

Jimmy Giuffre: The Train and The River, The Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Atlantic)

Only on 89.7! performances and recordings are exclusive WGBH Radio

productions and are not commercially available.

[stevebop]

Those of you wanting to send condolences to Jimmy's wife can address them to:

Juanita Odjenar Giuffre

Stone Mill

46 Main Street

W. Stockbridge, MA 01266

[AllenLowe]

just curious - was the song Odjenar named after her?

[Chuck Nessa]

Yes, she was married to George Russell at the time.