From the Back Room: Two from Marty Paich

The cool fellow above is the distinguished pianist-arranger-composer Marty Paich (1925-95), who issued many fine albums under his own name and as music director for others. Today we have one LP where he shares the lead role with John Graas; and other that is devoted to the Marty Paich Octet. The former was recorded first, so we'll discuss it first.

This is another in a series of posts from Buster's Back Room, where I keep the many projects I have completed but never offered on this blog.

For these "From the Back Room" items, the transfers, etc., are prepared with the usual care, but my usual long-winded commentary may be abbreviated.

Jazz Studio 2 from Hollywood

For this 1954 LP, Decca assembled an octet of leading West Coast jazz musicians - Don Fagerquist (t), Milt Bernhart (tb), John Graas (frh), Herb Geller (as), Jimmy Giuffre (ts, bar, cl), Howard Roberts (g), Paich (p), Curtis Counce (b) and Larry Bunker (d),

Paich wrote one item - "Paicheck" (which it was) - and arranged two standards - Jimmy Van Heusen's "Darn that Dream" (a cool school specialty) and David Raksin's "Laura."

John Graas

Graas, one of the few jazz French horn players, wrote two numbers - "Graas Point" and "Here Come the Lions," while arranging Gershwin's "Do It Again."

Graas (1917-62) recorded fairly prolifically through the 1950s and until his early death, both as a leader and with the Stan Kenton band, among others.

Herb Geller

The LP starts out lyrically with Howard Roberts' guitar introducing "Laura," followed by graceful solos from Herb Geller on alto and Don Fagerquist on trumpet. Milt Bernhart follows with a more assertive break on trombone, before Graas' horn completes the slow tempo section, which is followed by a more swinging close.

Milt Bernhart

So it goes throughout the album. Graas' "Here Come the Lions" has a very catchy theme; Paich's "Paicheck" is an uptempo workout. The soloists for all items are identified in the included discography; note that the information there is in order of recording, not the order presented on the LP. 

LINK to Jazz Studio 2 from Hollywood

The Marty Paich Octet / Tenors West

The year 1955 was ground zero for the great LP switcheroo, where labels took their old 10-inch albums, added a few songs and reissued them as 12-inch albums.

Today we have a good example, starting with the 10-inch Marty Paich Octet LP, recorded for GNP in February 1955, relatively late in the 10-inch LP lifecycle. In a few paragraphs, we'll discuss how this turned into the 12-inch album Tenors West.

Jack Costanzo

For the February session, consisting entirely of Paich compositions, the musicians were: Harry Klee (f, as, ts), Bob Cooper (ts), Bob Enevoldsen (ts, vtb), Jack DuLong (bar), Conte Candoli (t), Paich (p), Joe Mondragon (b), Art Mardigan (d) and Jack Costanzo (bgo). The latter appeared on the two-part Caribbean-themed "Ballet du Bongo."

Harry Klee, Joe Mondragon

Also featured were flutist Harry Klee in "Paich-ence" (using the composer's name in the title was big back then) and bassist Joe Mondragon in "The Dragon."

In November of the same year, more or less the same crew assembled for another recording session, with Jimmy Giuffre taking the place of Bob Cooper and Frankie Capp the drum chair of Art Mardigan. This time there were no Paich compositions.

The added tunes were the Gerry Mulligan theme "Line for Lyons," Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train," Hal Hopper's "There's No You" and the Count Basie-Harry Edison "Shorty George."

When the 12-inch version came out in 1957, GNP downplayed the Marty Paich Octet, stressing the tenors of Giuffre, Cooper, Klee and Bob Enevoldsen (who also played valve trombone), and adopting the Tenors West title from one of Paich's compositions.

For this post, I've presented the 12 numbers as follows: first the 10-inch LP in its original order, followed by the songs added to the 12-inch Tenors West LP.

LINK to the Marty Paich Octet / Tenors West

The Jazz and Classical Music Society

The recent post of Rolf Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra was amazingly popular, so I've come up with a few more items that mix the two genres in some way - or more accurately, mix musicians from the two genres. 

Here is the first such item, a Columbia LP from 1956 from the Jazz and Classical Music Society, which was formed the previous year by Gunther Schuller and John Lewis - the former from the classical realm, the latter from jazz. The idea was (as the name suggests) to bring together composers and instrumentalists from both sides to form something new. This effort would later adopt the name "third-stream" music. 

In this, the earliest example of such music, we have several pieces for a large brass ensemble. Side one is a Schuller symphony that was not written for this ensemble. Here it is conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, who apparently also programmed it with the New York Philharmonic. 

The second side has compositions by three famous jazz artists - Lewis, J.J. Johnson and Jimmy Giuffre. None of these compositions are in any recognizable form jazz, nor are they what we would usually consider classical music. They are a form of concert music that many musicians were interested in pursuing at the time, perhaps concerned that jazz was not "serious" enough. 

This music does indeed sound very serious - it is at times attractive and at times impressive, and often both. What it is missing, however, is what made the Reiner-CSO performance of Liebermann's piece stand out - wit and swing. Even so, there is much here to enjoy - particularly the superior instrumentalism of the band and soloists Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Joe Wilder. 

This was one of those transfers from hell - two turntables, three cartridges and four styli later I have an acceptable product, although some restle remains in the Schuller. The next post in this line will be pianist Friedrich Gulda, who managed to straddle both the jazz and classical worlds successfully.