MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVALForty Legendary Yearsby William Minor |
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By Clint Eastwood
I've been a jazz fan as far back as I can remember. When I was twelve years old, living in Oakland, California, I discovered a radio program called Dixieland Jubilee, and that was the beginning. I started going to jazz concerts and clubs in the Bay Area even though I was too young to drink; it was the music that attracted me.
I came to Monterey for the first time in 1951, when I was in the military. It was a quiet place then, but I saw a few players at the old Blue Ox and the Casa Munras. On weekends I would go into San Francisco to hear Mulligan, Brubeck and all the guys playing there. It was a great time for jazz and the Bay Area influence was spreading.
When I got out of the service I kept coming back to the Monterey Peninsula, even when I was in college in southern California. And when I heard that there was going to be a jazz festival in Monterey I came up for it.
The first Monterey Jazz Festival was more like a fair than a series of planned concerts. It was a much smaller event than now, centered in the main arena of the fairgrounds. Typical of events of that era, the sound system didn't always work, and someone would always be coming out on stage tapping on the microphones or blowing into them. There was feedback, a lot of fog and old-time planes were flying in; but everyone had a good time. It was the beginning of something that kept on growing.
I came back to the Jazz Festival over the years and always enjoyed myself. Then, in 1970, I was directing my first film, Play Misty for Me, and I needed an event as a transition in the film. Since the Festival was happening in Monterey at the time, I thought we might be able to film in the middle of the fairgrounds, where lots of things were going on, to create the backdrop for a suspense turning point.
I went to talk to Jimmy Lyons who was the head of the Festival, about filming there. At that point I had known of Jimmy since the 1940s. He had a jazz radio program in San Francisco and he played some good stuff. That was the time of the introduction of Shearing and Brubeck and all that West Coast sound, and Jimmy was right there with it.
Jimmy was great about my request. He suggested the blues afternoon because of the colorful clothes that people wore and the fact that the audience usually got up and danced to that music. So that's what we filmed and, later that day, we shot Cannonball Adderley, one of my favorite alto sax players. In the end, jazz played a big part in that movie and in my subsequent films.
When I moved up to the Peninsula in the 1960s, the Monterey Jazz Festival was a big thing to look forward to each year. We liked the Bach Festival in Carmel and the Jazz Festival at the Monterey Fairgrounds; those were the key events during the year. My son Kyle was introduced to the Festival at an early age, and last year he made his second appearance there as a performer, which was a real thrill for both of us.
Today the Jazz Festival has grown to fill the whole fairgrounds; it's a world-famous gathering. Now you can wander from venue to venue and grab a bite to eat in between, which is nice, but sometimes it's frustrating to realize that there are so many great acts going on simultaneously that you can't possibly hear them all. Still, you do the best you can and hope that you'll catch the performances you missed when the players come back another year.
The Monterey Jazz Festival has had so much history that over time its bugs have been worked out and now it's a world-class festival. In the early days when jazz was less serious, there used to be many jam sessions late into the nights. In the Seventies and Eighties everyone got serious -- maybe too serious, because jazz is bluesy and forlorn, but also happy and upbeat. Today I'm glad to see that there seems to be a shift back to that feeling of celebration in jazz.
As you turn the pages of this book, I hope you'll feel the celebration in jazz at Monterey, those forty years of the shaping of Jimmy Lyons' dream into what is now a great festival. Many who are no longer with us have contributed to the success of the Monterey Jazz Festival and to the memories that so many of us carry. And in those ranks are countless legends of the jazz world whose contributions to music and to Monterey are unforgettable. The many photographs and recollections included here celebrate those first forty years and the promise of more to come.
-- Clint Eastwood
On a chilly Friday, October 3, 1958, Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars strolled on stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival to play the last set of opening night. The crowd watched eagerly, inquisitively, as the great fifty-seven-year-old classic jazz trumpeter was introduced by a zany, unpredictable forty-one-year-old emcee appropriately named "Dizzy." John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie got down on his knees, then rose and kissed Armstrong's hand. Many people in the audience thought he was clowning, but he wasn't. Gillespie worshiped the man he called "Pops." These two icons, leaders of their respective schools -- classic jazz, or Dixieland, and bebop -- merged in that magic moment, the kind people came to expect during the next forty years of the Monterey Jazz Festival.
That first night ended with Armstrong, the older master, but it began with Gillespie, the new. None of the jazz super stars invited to the Festival wanted to be first on the bill. Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, Billie Holiday, Harry James, Max Roach, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Armstrong all declined to serve as a warmup act. But not Gillespie, who said, "Hell, I'll open it." After muffing the first notes of "The Star-Spangled Banner," he recovered sufficiently to find his proper register, let those bombs burst in air, skipped his way through "the ramparts we watch," and ended on a stirring quaver.
As emcee, Gillespie took to his chores with great relish. First he thanked the crowd for coming. "It means money in our pockets," he admitted. He then went on to compare the Monterey event to its rival, the Newport Jazz Festival, which had started four years before. "Here artists have thirty to forty minutes to play; there you get thirty-two bars, twenty-six bars." Gillespie then cut his joking short, saying, "Before we can have an after-dinner speech, we've got to have some food," and introduced a Monterey-based band, Jake Stock and the Abalone Stompers. They swung into "Bourbon Street Parade," the first of several Dixieland jazz pieces the crowd would hear that night.
Billie Holiday appeared that first year, just nine months before she died. Wearing a fur to fend off the cold, she still looked like a lost little girl. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan put his arm around her and said, "It's all right, Billie; we're all here." And she started to sing "Good Morning Heartache." Not much was left of Lady Day's fine voice by this time, although it still gave you goose bumps, a voice that -- with its unique phrasing -- held the crowd enthralled. "Travelin' Light" ("free as the breeze, no one but meeee and my mem-o-ries") was childlike, plaintive, poignant. Throughout the performance Holiday slurred her words. Finally, she was propped up and eased offstage by a host of loyal sidemen.
Dave Brubeck was thirty-eight at the time of his Monterey Jazz Festival appearance in 1958; Max Roach was thirty-three; Gerry Mulligan was the baby at thirty-one. Each of these musicians brought in a fine combo. Brubeck's quartet, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, was at the height of its prowess, its popularity already established by its "Jazz Goes to College" series. The group included Joe Morello on drums and "Senator" Eugene Wright on bass. At Monterey, on Sunday afternoon, they performed "Summersong" and "G-Flat Theme" with the Monterey Jazz Festival Symphony, plus the pianist's brother, composer Howard Brubeck's "Dialogue for Quartet and Orchestra" and "Jazz Impressions of Eurasia." The latter piece employed the German, Polish and Turkish words for thank you as a rhythmic base: a compositional technique Brubeck still uses.
The Gerry Mulligan Quartet -- Art Farmer on trumpet, Bill Crow on bass, Dave Bailey drums -- offered "Festive Minor," a catchy light-tempo tune that successfully evoked the Festival's spirit. Gerry Mulligan, at thirty-one, was young and cocky and mildly sarcastic: characteristics he retained throughout his life. At Monterey, he said at the start, "I see we're practically assembled, for all practical purposes, yet I think we'll tune up first. By the way, Adrian Rollini is playing baritone for me tonight."
Not content with a handful of jazz aficionados, the Festival's organizers went out of their way to appeal to the public in general, even the uninitiated or "square." The 1958 program includes a definition of jazz taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an article on the relationship of classical music to jazz, and a glossary, "The Argot of Jazz," which contained explanations of such words as "ax" ("any musical instrument, even a piano"), "charts" ("musical arrangement. See also Maps"), "finger popper" ("a cat [musician or hipster] who is swinging") and "far out" ("extremely advanced; gone . . . In music, modern jazz").
To the novice, some of the music presented at the first Monterey Jazz Festival must have seemed demanding or even daunting -- as perhaps Mort Sahl's very topical humor did. The comedian was emcee on Sunday night. As popular in jazz clubs as the pianist he introduced, Sahl joked about Dave Brubeck's "wrought iron glasses." He made fun of an Ampex tape recorder that could actually answer the phone by itself. "Let the Russians top that!" Sahl exclaimed.
When Sahl introduced the Jimmy Giuffre Three (Giuffre plus Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer), he mentioned the fact that they traveled in a Volkswagen bus. Sahl mourned the decline of American cars with such names as the Chevy Agamemnon and Oldsmobile Oedipus. ("No headlights," he said of the latter.) The Giuffre group provided an original piece called the "Western Suite." The work was delightful in its artistry: an unusual blend of sound employing starts and cuts the way film does, with sudden shifts of tempo or mood.
The crowd responded resoundingly to the Max Roach Quintet with Booker Little on trumpet, George Coleman tenor sax, Ray Draper on tuba and Art Davis bass. On "La Villa," Coleman romped with rapid-fire lyricism. Roach's unaccompanied "Composition in Drums," just five minutes long, contained a history lesson in percussion, from initial rudiments to an explosive display of round-the-drum-kit pyrotechnics.
Looking back, the first Festival would seem to be a miracle of busy programming. That weekend also accommodated Rudy Salvini's Band from San Francisco, the Leroy Vinnegar Quartet, the Med Flory Band, the Mel Lewis-Bill Holman Quintet, Shelly Manne and His Men, Pete Rugolo conducting a combined Salvini-Flory band, Ernestine Anderson, the Cal Tjader Sextet with Mongo Santamaria, Dizzy Gillespie's Quintet, the Monterey Jazz Festival Symphony, with Gregory Millar conducting (presenting excerpts from Stravinsky, Hindemith and Milhaud), the Modern Jazz Quartet's premiere performance of Andre Hodier's "Around the Blues," John Lewis' "Midsommer," and Pete Phillips' "Toccata for Jazz Percussions and Orchestra," the latter featuring Max Roach.
On Sunday evening, closing night of the first Monterey Jazz Festival, the Dave Brubeck Quartet provided mostly jazz standards. "St. Louis Blues" contained classic Paul Desmond intervals, triplet stutters, and his overall fine tone. Brubeck offset this with percussive two-handed block chords and trills. Joe Morello had his day on "Sounds of the Loop," a riff tune that found the audience responding overtly to his smooth, no- nonsense, clean snare flutter and bass drum kicks. Harry James' orchestra appeared -- along with Billie Holiday and the Giuffre Three -- and that last evening ended with a jam session in which Benny Carter took just one solo chorus on the blues and the great Sonny Rollins sounded embarrassingly displeased and self-conscious on "I Want to Be Happy."
A miracle of programming that was largely slapdash and accidental, the first Monterey Jazz Festival had something special about it, something unique. The Festival had an international impact because it was part of an early movement -- along with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet, both of whom performed extensively on college campuses in the early Fifties -- to take jazz out of the bars and night clubs. Like them, the Monterey Jazz Festival introduced the music to a wider audience, one that regarded jazz musicians as legitimate artists. Original Board of Directors member Sam Karas admits he was not a jazz lover in 1958. Nurtured on his hometown Chicago stereotypes, he thought of jazz musicians as "cats" who played in smoke-filled sleazy clubs. At the first Festival he discovered they talked not only of music, but the eighty-four they'd shot on a golf course that day, their kids, or the new home they were finally able to purchase. They were fully human artists.
A musical first in the West, the Festival proved to be both serious
and convivial, providing a wide range of talent. A host of musical styles
existed side by side: the Dixieland or classic jazz revival, bebop, remnants
of the big band swing era labeled mainstream, Third Stream commissioned
works merging jazz with classical music, and cool or West Coast jazz. Who
could ask for more? The audience would. They would demand it. They would
ask for Festivals for decades.
Whereas the giants -- Monk, Miles and Mingus -- may have seemed to monopolize the Festival between 1963 and 1965, they were by no means all of it. The embarassment of riches that characterized the Monterey Jazz Festival from its start continued through 1965, the end of the event's Age of Gold. From 1963 through 1965 the event continued to reflect -- as John Lewis hoped it would -- all that happened to jazz throughout each year. A variety of styles continued to be represented: Classic jazz with the Teagarden family and Pee Wee Russell, mainstream music with Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, bebop with the ubiquitous Dizzy Gillespie, and fresh younger talent as displayed by Horace Silver, the Denny Zeitlin Trio (with Charlie Haden on bass), and John Handy. In 1964, the first all blues show was presented on Saturday afternoon -- a format that would prove so popular it's still in place today.
1963 is remembered as the year of the emotion-filled reunion of the Teagarden family. Brothers Jack on trombone, Charlie on trumpet and sister Norma on piano were joined by their mother, Helen, a ragtime pianist who jammed with her "children" on stage. "Considering the entire history of the Monterey Jazz Festival," jazz educator Herb Wong says, "that still stands as one of the most special events." An increasingly caustic Ralph Gleason remarked that the group occupied the stage for "an interminable length of time," but most writers and fans alike found the reunion to be the Festival's "most touching moment." Just months away from his own death, Jack Teagarden played and sang "A Hundred Years from Today."
1964: Based on the success of Jon Hendricks' "Evolution of the Blues Song," Jimmy Lyons invited the singer to put together a Saturday afternoon show featuring a full fare of that music called the mother of jazz. Hendricks responded with "The Blues -- Right Now!" This program called upon the services of a long list of artists including Joe Williams, Big Joe Turner, "Big Mama" Willie Mae Thornton, and Homesick James. On stage, these artists made poetry out of an art form too often dismissed as a primitive precursor of jazz. Their crowd-stirring performances took the blues well beyond its familiar three chord harmonic structure, twelve bars and three line stanzas.
The great big band singer Joe Williams joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1954, spent seven years there, and, with such songs as "Goin' to Chicago" and "Every Day I Have the Blues," acquired a reputation as a first-rate jazz singer. On "Every Day," although nobody loves him, Williams' powerful voice was not that of a victim but God answering Job out of the whirlwind: "Speaking of bad luck and trouble / Well you know I've had my share."
When he appeared, Big Joe Turner was a decade beyond his big hit, "Shake, Rattle and Roll," with its fine line: "I'm like a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store." Yet the audience responded as if no time had passed at all. Turner gargled his syllables, with their earthy content, lending them a guttural, down home sound.
Take me pretty mama, dump me in your big brass bed; Rock me till my face turns cherry red.
"Big Mama" Willie Mae Thornton would become a Festival favorite. In 1964 she cut loose on the song she made famous before Elvis Presley did, "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog." Signed to a five-year exclusive contract after Peacock Records' Don Robey heard her at the Eldorado Ballroom in Houston, Thornton recorded "Hound Dog," which quickly became number one for fourteen weeks on Billboard's rhythm and blues charts. Her version sold thousands, whereas Presley's cover version sold millions -- as would Janis Joplin's cover of "Big Mama's" other hit, "Ball and Chain." Yet the Monterey audience recognized her for what she was: the real thing, an authentic blues singer. On "Hound Dog" her voice remained playful even while wailing, growling, wagging her tail, barking, bitching -- all at the same time.
Homesick James had developed his unique bottleneck guitar style before he hoboed north from Tennessee to Chicago's South Side ghetto at the age of sixteen. A 1952 recording called "Homesick" earned him his name, along with a voice that ran words together like griefs, or was also capable of sudden full clear cries. On "Set a Date," he pleads, "Don't set it ta-ma-raw 'cause ta-ma-raw's too late!"
Evening Main Stage fare offered clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and an all-star group made up of such notables as Buck Clayton, Vic Dickenson, Bud Freeman and Red Callendar. Fine trumpeter Art Farmer made his first Festival appearance with his own group, as did Horace Silver. Jon Hendricks introduced the innovative pianist, claiming not many artists could play just their own compositions and "sound about as funky as you can get." Silver was ably assisted in this task by tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, who blazed a solo trail that combined swing, stomp, funk and control. The familiar big bands of Woody Herman and Duke Ellington kept large ensemble standards high. The Festival upheld its reputation -- one it had fought hard to establish -- for rich and well-balanced programming.
1965 returned the spotlight to Dizzy. First he let his idolaters down when he said he would not run for President after all. He said he just didn't have the time. To ease the disappointment, Gillespie assisted his favorite arranger Gil Fuller in two premiered pieces: "Angel City Suite" and the appropriately entitled "On the Road to Monterey." The latter's "Big Sur" segment matched that coastline's rocky extravagance, and "17-Mile Drive," with its densely orchestrated Latin twist, showcased Bobby Hutcherson's expert vibes. On Sunday afternoon, a special called "Trumpets" teamed Dizzy, Clark Terry, Henry "Red" Allen and Rex Stewart. Voice of America's Willis Conover introduced the set, saying, "Jazz is not a kind of music at all; it's a way of playing any type of music -- as many different ways as people playing it." The four men bore out this contention first with their varied tones, then their scat singing. That year, New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised Buddy Rich's drum solo with the Harry James Orchestra as "breathtaking . . . whirling, ceaseless inventiveness . . . a mad, magnificent performance." And Earl "Fatha" Hines retained his many Festival fans, sounding more quirky-crafted, quixotic and inventive than Thelonious Monk himself.
Yet in spite of these highlights, 1965 belonged to John Handy and the premiere of the highly respected Mary Lou Williams' liturgical jazz work, "Saint Martin de Porres." Handy, who had appeared as a sideman with Charles Mingus in 1964, brought his own group: Terry Clarke on drums; Donald Thompson, bass; Michael White, violin; Jerry Hahn, guitar. Handy's original tune "Spanish Lady" opened with the evocative loops and swirls of his pure sax tone, its snake-charming sonority. Suddenly, shrapnel fragments of sax and a guitar vamp converged over a constant drum barrage. Sweet and sour, Michael White's violin clashed handsomely with Hahn's guitar, providing just the right tension. A gradual crescendo reminiscent of Ravel's "Bolero" led back to interlaced sax and violin. Then all stops were pulled for a closeout reminiscent of Mingus' "Meditations," displacing, momentarily in people's memories, the proud bassist. And "Spanish Lady" received a standing ovation.
This spectacular performance might never have taken place had it not been for the cunning of Festival publicity director Ernie Beyl. "I tried like hell to get Jimmy to go out to The Both/And Club in San Francisco to hear John Handy's group," Beyl says today. Finally, he invited Lyons and his wife Laurel out on a dinner date, one that just happened to find them in the vicinity of the club. When they walked in Handy was in the middle of "Spanish Lady." To the shock of his sidemen, he called the tune to a sudden halt, asked them to go back and begin again and, twenty minutes later -- the audience erupting in applause -- sauntered over to Lyon's table. "All right, all right," Lyons said, "you're going to play Monterey this year!"
The 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival reached a serene close with Williams' "Saint Martin de Porres," a beautiful piece enlisting the aid of the Monterey Jazz Festival Singers. It commemorated the life of the seventeenth-century saint who was born, out of wedlock, to a Spanish father and an African mother. A brief blues piano vamp positioned the choir's intonations of St. Martin's attributes:
This man of love born of the flesh, yet of God . . . to help the starving homeless . . . black Christ of the Andes, come help us now we pray.
In his review, Balliett praised the work but pointed out a condition
that, unfortunately, would become a serious problem in succeeding years.
He said the music was overlaid by "a smog of talk and laughter" on the
part of a "chattering-guffawing audience." In spite of these intimations
of a troubled future, the Festival was almost too good to be true: eight
years of astute programming, a proliferation of exceptional talent, and
festive cohesiveness largely unperturbed by incidents that, by 1965, had
begun to plague the "outside" world. Yet a sense of foreboding tainted
its free and easy, indisputably successful "vibes." As early as 1963, Ralph
Gleason had noticed that the Festival's complacent or even dull moments
were "more frequent than usual, the exciting moments fewer." He quoted
Miles Davis' backstage remark: "You have to learn to close your ears and
wait for the good things." Some fans began to grumble about the rut of
familiarity, the mainstream cliquishness, the lack of fresh blood. Yet
if these charges were true, the situation was about to change.
About the Authors and Designer
William Minor was the unanimous choice to write the history of the first forty years of the Monterey Jazz Festival. A noted journalist, Minor writes for numerous jazz magazines and journals, including JazzTimes, Down Beat, Coda and Jazz Forum. His book, Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet Union (1995, Temple University Press) recounts his trip to Russia to study the country's jazz culture just before the collapse of the communist state. Minor is a professional musician, a poet and short fiction writer whose work has appeared in many national publications and visual artist who resides with his wife Betty on the Monterey Peninsula. He is currently at work on a book about jazz in Japan.
Bill Wishner, photography editor, has been a jazz photographer for more than a decade. He is the curator of his exhibit Visual Jazz . . . the Art of Jazz Photography, which has been shown in venues in southern California, Indiana and at the Monterey Jazz Festival. A member of the Jazz Photographers Association of Southern California, he was instrumental in the development of the Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography, the only international award in the field. A longtime resident of southern California, Dr. Wishner now lives in Indianapolis, where he is a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Jeff Darnall, designer, has worked on several book projects for Angel City Press. With his partner Mark Samuels, Darnall founded Samuels Darnall & Associates, a design/advertising agency on the oceanfront in Capistrano Beach, California. Having been art director of two high-profile sports magazines for five years, Darnall joined creative forces with Samuels to form an agency focusing on the active lifestyle and youth-driven markets. Sadly, Jeff passed away in 1999 from complications of a viral infection. While his work lives on in this book, we miss him very much.
