Jack Sheldon

[Larry Kart]

5 hours ago, medjuck said:

it always bugged me that Peter Weldon's liner notes to the cd version of The Return of  Art Pepper are built around putting down Sheldon.  (And IIRC the mosaic select reprinted those notes.) I think his playing is just fine on those sessions. 

 

And does anyone remember his tv show "Run Buddy Run".  

You mean Pete Welding, right? I'll have to look again at those notes to see what the putdown was, but it might have been an offshoot of something snarky that Martin Williams  once said about Sheldon IIRC but without naming him I think -- a remark about a West Coast trumpeter who tried to emulate Miles but "put the climaxes in all the wrong places." Oddly enough, I think I know just what Martin meant by that; Jack of that era (especially on the first Curtis Counce album)  engaged in some fairly eccentric and unique phrasing (e.g. sudden climax-like brassy outbursts followed immediately by sotto voce lyricism)  that might have sounded to a sober-minded listener (and Martin was at once sober-minded and something of a finger-wagging Puritan) like it was based on Miles (which to some degree it was)  but with" the climaxes in the wrong places." But those eccentricities of phrasing on Jack's part were IMO quite deliberate, were meant to be more or less wryly/startlingly humorous, and were, it goes without saying, an offshoot of who Sheldon himself was as a human being. One may not like that side of Sheldon's playing, but there was nothing inept about it.

[JSngry]

Hell, the reason that Sheldon's voice works so well in any context is that it's based on not being a "correct" jazz voice. It's a correct Jack Sheldon voice, at home anywhere he finds a way to get invited in. The dude showed up on the Jack Webb shows of the 60s & 70s, and same thing there, he got invited in, he made his voice fit in and then stand out. The standing out part is easy, the getting invited in part, not so much.

And his stand-up album mentioned way up-thread really is a treat.

[medjuck]

I have a vague memory of him taking some nice solos on a Hi-Lo's album.  (Just realized how strange the spelling of their name is.  An early example of the misuse of apostrophes (or "apostrophe's" as people would write today).   While I lived in LA he often played around town and like a jerk I never went to see him. 

[Big Beat Steve]

1 hour ago, medjuck said:

I have a vague memory of him taking some nice solos on a Hi-Lo's album. 

That must be "The Hi-Lo's and All That Jazz" with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette (including Jack Sheldon).

1 hour ago, medjuck said:

  (Just realized how strange the spelling of their name is.  An early example of the misuse of apostrophes (or "apostrophe's" as people would write today).   

Maybe the HI-LOS would have read too much like the HI-LOSS to them and everybody else?

Apart from that, I agree with you and I cringe almost every time I see another word mutilated by a misplaced and abused "a'pos'tro'phe"

 

[JSngry]

 

[Deadman]

Was just listening to my favorite Jack Sheldon album, (The Quartet & The Quintet on Jazz West) when I caught this thread. Great version of "Mad About The Boy"!