Dizzy Gillespie & the United Nation Orchestra - 'Tin Tin Deo'

For years I thought it was the United Nations (plural) Orchestra – and I can imagine that there are some who might have thought it was a musical venture of that well-intended organisation that fails to stop wars – but no, and even Wikipedia gets it wrong. It is indeed United Nation singular: searching for a name to call his conglomerate of international musicians, on scanning the diversity of stars Dizzy apparently exclaimed 'Man, this is a United Nation!'

I was intending to forego a video of the orchestra in action till I turned my attention to Latin jazz for a subsequent tome. But hey, it's high time that I turned the spotlight on big band jazz and who knows what the future holds. There's no time like the present, as the maxim teaches us. And anyway, if this ain't jazz, what is? 'Tin Tin Deo' was one of Dizzy's standards, going back to a time in the late '40s when he first experimented with the marriage of big band jazz, bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms as 'Cubop' in the company of the legendary percussionist and the song's composer, Chano Pozo. Here, a lovely simmering arrangement emphasises its latent drama.

The United Nation Orchestra was arguably the final flowering of a big band c.v. that began in the trumpet sections of Cab Calloway's and Earl Hines' orchestras and then Billy Eckstine's assembly of young proto-boppers, and blossomed in the many permutations of his own big band, which he managed to reassemble periodically during the subsequent decades when he spent most of his time gigging and recording with smaller but economically more viable outfits. When living in Sheffield, I very nearly got to see his mighty big band. They were scheduled to play on the other side of the Pennines, in Manchester. I might have died and gone to heaven had Dizzy not beaten me to it. The great trumpeter, he of the upturned trumpet and the improbable bullfrog neck and cheeks, died in January 1993, a few short months after the intended concert.  

I'm still not fully over the disappointment. Few things in life are more exciting than a big band in full swing – except maybe a big band with added Latin percussion. When Dizzy inaugurated his behemoth in 1946 under the musical direction of John Lewis, future founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he and Charlie Parker were still joined at the hip in the view of cognoscenti as the two prime bebop revolutionaries. As such, his big band tended to play in his image with the kind of slightly disjointed exuberance that comes with so many new ideas pressing to be heard. It could sound a little ragged and certainly wasn't slick like the Count Basie Band, but the joyful exaltation of numbers like the signature 'Things To Come', compressed into well under the three minutes allowed by the 78rpm format, probably prompted the critic Ralph Gleason to call Dizzy's outfit 'as exciting a musical group as anything I've ever heard.'

By 1990, when this performance was filmed, John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie was a father figure and mentor for the younger players who followed in his footsteps. His Afro-Latin jazz orchestra had lost none of its early visceral excitement, but was perhaps a little more drilled and disciplined in its approach. As a trumpeter, Dizzy tended to leave the theatrics latterly to his protégé Jon Faddis and the Cuban high-note maestro, Arturo Sandoval. Here he demonstrates clearly in his three brief, subtle solos that he was still a master musician. The spirit of Cuba still moves his ageing limbs and, as always, he exudes a boyish sense of fun and enthusiasm. His clowning got him fired by Cab Calloway, but he was more often a thinking person's clown – as is evident in the title and content of his memoir, To Be Or Not To Bop.

As you watch this, you can easily spot the Cuban percussionist in the flat cap, Giovanni Hidalgo; beside him (in a green shirt), the great Brazilian percussionist and former Miles Davis sideman, Airto Moreira; the alto-sax soloist in the Panama hat is Paquito d'Rivera, who took over as leader of the orchestra after its founder's death; there's the young Panamanian pianist, Danilo Perez; and a comment suggests that the trombone soloist is the Puerto Rican, William Cepeda, who has played with Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Donald Byrd and many other notables. The drummer is most likely Ignacio Berrao. And seated to d'Rivera's left is surely Mr. Gillespie's long-term 'worthy constituent', saxophonist and flautist, James Moody, whom I once saw play by candlelight at the Concord Club in Brighton, the day after the hurricane of 1987 shut down the electricity – and what a witty, droll fellow he was: a perfect foil in other words for his boss.

There are innumerable examples of Dizzy in action on YouTube, either in a small-group of big-band context. By way of complete contrast, for example, there's an unusual 1966 duet performance of 'Tin Tin Deo' with bass player Chris White, from the BBC's Jazz 625 series. Further back in time, there's the precious historic footage of Charlie Parker and Dizzy together (with its rather excruciating prelude) performing the bebop classic, 'Hot House'. Of all the big band footage, I'm drawn to Dizzy's 1970 guest appearance with the European big band co-led by the expatriate bebop master drummer, Kenny Clarke, and the Belgian pianist Francy Boland, whose USP in some respects was having two drummers, Kenny Clarke and Kenny Clare. You couldn't make it up! They perform a rousing version of the Afro-Cuban anthem that Dizzy co-wrote with Chano Pozo and Gil Fuller, 'Manteca'. It features Ronnie Scott on tenor sax and this one I am leaving for my Latin Jazz volume.

So how do you sum up Dizzy Gillespie? With difficulty. You could watch the film, A Night in Havana, which reveals more about the trumpeter's long-lasting love affair with the music of Cuba and shows why he was such an endearing and much-loved character. You could point to his role as a jazz ambassador throughout the world and official recognition in the form of gongs from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the U.S. President and France's Order of Arts and Letters. You could quote innumerable assessments like (Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University) Dan Morgenstern's that he was 'one of the true giants of 20^th Century American music'. Or you could fall back on a comment that a CAPITAL LETTER enthusiast who forgot his apostrophe left on YouTube: 'DIZZY! ONE OF GODS GREATEST CREATIONS EVER'. (The full-stop is mine.)

The Max Roach Group with Abbey Lincoln - 'Driva' Man'

I think the first revolutionary new compact disc that I ever bought was Max Roach's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. It was cut-price in some second-hand emporium staffed by supercilious young men on the claustrophobic isle of Jersey. I was working on some training project that was draining me of the will to live, so it could have been a reward for getting through the week. I knew that Max Roach was probably one of the five greatest drummers in the annals of jazz, that he soloed far too much for my liking, but that he co-led a marvellous hard-bop quintet with the ill-starred Clifford Brown. So it was a strange choice in some respects, but maybe the cover intrigued me: three black civil rights protesters sitting warily at a bar surveyed by a white barman in a bleached white outfit with a black bow tie and the chilling look of someone who would shop any uppity 'coloured boys' to the Ku Klux Klan. Or maybe he was simply scared of the inevitable fracas to come.

The album was made in 1960, a time when, in the words of A. Philip Randolph, a revolution 'is unfurling in lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools... Masses of Negroes are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom now!' Apart from being a musician who had served his apprenticeship in, among others, Charlie Parker's classic quintet of the late '40s, Max Roach was one of the most committed musicians of any genre to the cause of civil rights. This seemed to come as a surprise to Coleman Hawkins, who was recruited to play tenor sax on the album. Apparently, he was so intrigued by the suite that he would ask the leader, 'Did you really write this, Max?' Indeed he did, and in part with Oscar Brown jr., an archetypal politically active hipster of the time who was noted for putting (witty) words to such classic numbers as 'Afro Blue', 'Work Song', 'Watermelon Man' and Bobby Timmons' 'Dat Dere'.

Among the other notables featured on We Insist! were Michael Olatunji, the Nigerian percussionist, Booker Little, another brilliant but ill-starred trumpeter, and vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom Roach would marry two years after the album's release. She, too, had never been a favourite of mine. On the records she made pre-1960, she seemed to lack an identifiable personality as a jazz vocalist. But here she sings throughout with the righteous rage and fire of a Nina Simone. 'I feel this,' she said of Freedom Now Suite, 'and I've also learned a lot from Max Roach in recent months about being me when I sing.'

So here she is being very much her on Belgian TV in 1964. It's a different group, but she, the consistently elegant Chicago-born tenor saxophonist, Clifford Jordan, and husband Max in particular are electrifying. There's no piano on the album, but here a pianist with the improbable name of Coleridge Perkinson starts things off conventionally before being rudely undercut by Roach's uncompromising opening outburst and Eddie Khan's mournful bowed bass. The effect is as unsettling as the bitter irony of Abbey Lincoln's quote from Cole Porter's 'Love For Sale', which seems almost to deride Jordan's lyrical obbligato that precedes it. And then we're into the song itself, or maybe 'chant' is the better word, with Lincoln singing with angry clarity to the sole accompaniment of her tambourine. 'Ain't but two things on my mind/Driva' Man and quittin' time...' At which point the band, and particularly Roach, take up the staccato beat and you realise, if you haven't already done so, that it's the rhythm of both the 'field holler' and the vicious lash of the 'cat o' nine tails'. Clifford Jordan then solos brilliantly over the same lacerating rhythm before ceding to Roach himself for what must be one of the simplest but most integral drum solos ever laid down. In the context of the number's theme, it serves as a stunning and chilling conclusion to a truly visceral number.

Listening to 'Driva' Man' over the years, I've often thought of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke, overseen by the guard in Stetson hat and mirror shades. But his icy authority was nothing of course to the Driva' Man that Oscar Brown jr. wrote of: the brutal white overseer in slavery days, who would force women into sexual servitude and punish viciously any perceived indiscretion – and with double the ferocity in the case of an escapee brought back by one of the 'patrollers' that Abbey Lincoln sings of.

She and her husband stayed together until 1970, but both remained true to their artistic and political visions (even if Brown would leave the Communist party on deciding that he 'just to black to be red'). Abbey Lincoln managed to combine her civil rights activism and her music with an intermittent acting career (she had a role in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues, for example). She died in 2010 at 80, three years after her former husband, who married his lifelong pedagogic calling (he was professor of music for many years at the University of Massachusetts) to his ever-questing musical experimentations, including the writing of music for plays with the great American dramatist, Sam Shepard. One of the great elder statesmen of jazz, his career tailed off with the onset of dementia.  

Whether this example of their collaborative work is 'cool' in the sense that has guided my choices throughout, I don't know. It's hard to stay cool and detached in the face of so much barely contained anger and allied emotions. There's a remarkable version of 'Triptych' from the same album and the same Belgian TV broadcast, but it's almost too much to take, with Roach's rapid-fire drumming and Lincoln's agonised screaming suggesting the mayhem of the South African Sharpeville massacres. Cool or not, this live version of 'Driva' Man' is surely one of the most clever and compelling performances you're ever likely to find on the net.

Mélanie De Biasio - 'Afro Blue'

'Afro Blue' has become such a standard of modern jazz that there are scores of versions out there in the ether: from congalero Mongo Santamaria's original to John Coltrane's celebrated 1963 recording to a stunning version by the late Philadelphian guitarist Monnette Sudler on her album Meeting Of The Spirits. This version, though, live at the annual Marciac jazz festival in south-west France, is as cool as a cucumber in Ray-Bans and simply mesmerising.

I only caught up with Mélanie De Biasio a year or so ago. I thought she was French. She's actually the daughter of a Belgian mother and an Italian father, born in Charleroi, a former centre of Belgium's coal mining industry, but now seemingly a modern, progressive city (so it would be unfair of me to mention – if memory serves me well – that it was once the site of some notorious paedophile ring). Not exclusively a jazz singer, she has toured with the unclassifiable American singer Eels and is a fan of Portishead. There is indeed something about her vocal style that recalls Beth Gibbons, as well as that most minimal of vocalists, the late Mark Hollis, once lead singer of Talk Talk. In fact, her riveting and singular singing voice apparently evolved serendipitously from a pulmonary infection that affected her ability to sing for a year. Which just goes to show how a creative artist can overcome setbacks and turn defeat into victory.

With her flute and sylph-like physique, she comes across as a kind of Pan figure on stage. Her lightness of foot and sinuous arm movements are not affectations, but those of a trained dancer. She learnt ballet it seems from age 3. Her flute playing is a welcome addition to the backing of piano, keyboards and drums, and enhances the dreamlike quality of this performance. You don’t quite know where it’s going at first, as she wanders lonely as a cloud, almost searching for a melody on the flute. But then the keyboard drone and the beautiful brushed drumming lay down the sheet of sound which her breathy vocal cuts through. Then, imperceptibly and fabulously, the acoustic piano adds to the equation and things come to a more vigorous simmer. She adds quotes on the flute from Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favourite Things’ to the main theme, so that the two melodies cohere organically. And as it threatens to build to a climax, it all quietens down again, waking us gently from our reverie. I awoke from mine to mouth the word ‘wow’. And wow and wow again.

Mélanie De Biasio has sometimes been labelled the Belgian Billie Holiday. While there’s something reminiscent of the way the latter quietly explores the words and feeling of songs like ‘Good Morning Heartache’ and ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, there’s very little about the Belgian singer’s approach to a song that suggests any more than a passing influence. To my ears, her sound is informed far more by Talk Talk’s fragile and delicate Spirit Of Eden album, or Mark Hollis’ even more fragile solo work. It’s intimate, sensuous music that seems to be all about exploring the space between the notes. If it weren’t so straightforward and intelligible, it could be the musical equivalent perhaps of quantum physics.

Harriet Gibsone’s Guardian review of the singer’s 2014 album, No Deal, puts her finger on it when she writes of her ‘transcendent songs that seem to suspend time.’ In this wonderful performance, Mélanie De Biasio stretches the four and a half minutes of the recorded version of ‘Afro Blue’ on her album Lilies to almost double that length. I was so spellbound, so transfixed, I wouldn’t have quibbled if she and her band had spun it out to three times more.

Charlie Hunter & Leon Parker - 'Mean Streak'

How dey do dat? How do two such laid-back musicians sound at the very least like a trio? Well, I suppose it's what happens when the world's coolest jazz guitarist teams up with the coolest and most tasteful of drummers.

Part of the answer to the conundrum is Hunter's custom-made eight-string Novak guitar, which allows him to pick out his remarkably phat bass lines while playing the melody simultaneously. Apparently Ralph Novak's guitar has special frets and separate signals for the guitar and bass elements. But it still has to be played, and the video allows us to study Hunter's remarkable technique, playing the bass lines with his thumb and fretting with the index finger of his left hand, while he plays the single notes and chords with the other four fingers of his right hand and frets with the other three free fingers of his left hand. That's the literal description, but it doesn't quite explain how his brain copes with the two disciplines at the same time, something which I suppose piano players have to do all the time, but which my scrambled brain finds hard to comprehend. My daughter would call it a brain-fff... (Shut yo mouth!).

The other part of the answer lies with Leon Parker, who is a rare creature in that he is a drummer and percussionist at one and the same time – rather more like a Latin-jazz drummer in that respect, someone like the esteemed Horacio 'El Negro' Hernández. Here he starts off their communion on congas before switching seamlessly to the kit drum, which he plays as if wanting to tickle its tom-tom rather than bash the living hell out of it. The left-hand rimshots combined with the right-hand cymbal-work when they start to really take off at around the minute-and-a-half mark is discretion itself. Soon after four minutes, with the guitarist comping the bejayzus out of his Novax, Parker launches into one of the most musical drum solos you'll ever hear this side of... I must stop beating on about Joe Morello's solo in 'Take Five'.

This meeting of Charlie Hunter and Leon Parker dates from a live appearance in 1999 on Aqui y Ajazz, a bilingual English/Spanish web/TV magazine curated, if that's the appropriate word, by singer Chiqui Rodriguez and dedicated to promoting jazz and other genres all over the world.

The pair of them only made one album as a duo – in the same year as this performance was recorded – but my, it's a good one: the appropriately entitled Duo is a mini monument to good taste. Parker stayed with the guitarist for Hunter's eponymous follow-up with a bigger group (for most of the tracks). But two albums together is probably the limit for a restless musician like Hunter. A native of the San Francisco area, his mother repaired guitars for a living, which presumably had an effect on young Charlie. He studied at Berkeley and took guitar lessons from the semi-legendary Joe Satriani. After honing his technique by busking in Paris, Hunter teamed up back home with his friend Michael Franti, aka Spearhead, in Franti's polemic group, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, responsible for such gems as 'Television, The Drug of The Nation'.

He began his jazz career proper with Charlie Hunter Trio in 1993 before being snapped up by Blue Note for seven albums that concluded with Songs from the Analog Playground in 2001, which saw him collaborate with other Blue Note artists like Norah Jones and Kurt Elling. With more than 50 albums on his c.v., mainly under his own name and partly in joint ventures like T.J. Kirk, Groundtruther, Victoria Victoria, Hunter's latest project has seen him teaming up once more with the great jazz singer, Kurt Elling, as SuperBlue. Charlie Hunter certainly doesn't stand still.

By contrast, Leon Parker's discography is more like his drumming: less is more. He started playing the drums at age three, but unlike so many drummers he didn't seem to be bitten by the urge to make the kit bigger and better. Instead, he scaled things down to the extent of playing sets on just a bass drum, snare drum and cymbal. Had he been a prog-rocker, he'd have been laughed off stage. While Charlie Hunter was honing his craft on the streets of Paris, Leon Parker and his flautist wife spent 1989 playing throughout Spain and Portugal, so I guess you wouldn't want to carry around anything much more cumbersome than a cymbal.

Whatever the differences in approach, the two of them work beautifully together. Charlie Hunter said that what he looked for in a drummer was a 'perfect blend of the visceral and the intellectual,' and Leon Parker would seem to supply that in spades. It's a shame they only made two albums together, but perhaps they would have lost with over-familiarity that freshness and sparkle so evident here. The guitarist always quotes Joe Pass as his biggest influence on guitar, but what he and his drummer achieve on 'Mean Streak' and indeed the whole of Duo is something in the spirit of Kenny Burrell's after-hours masterpiece, Midnight Blue. When it comes to cool, you can't get much cooler than that.

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - 'A Night in Tunisia'

So far, I haven't shone my spotlight on a single drummer. It's not that I don't like drummers – they tend to be vital to the proceedings – but I don't like drum solos. Unlike children, a drummer should be seen and heard, yes, but not to the point where he or she dominates proceedings. The best drummers, in my book, are those who don't draw attention to themselves but just keep things ticking along unobtrusively: jazz drummers like Jack DeJohnette, Elvin Jones and Leon Parker; reggae-maestro Sly Dunbar, Afrobeat's co-creator Tony Allen, and the Brazilian stalwart of Azymuth, Ivan 'Mamao' Conti; funk-soul drummers Clyde Stubblefield, Earl Palmer and Al Jackson; Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts. All are ensconced in my own private Room of Fame. And the most musical drum solo in the whole wonderful world of jazz is still, I contend, Joe Morello's solo on Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five'.

You can't really say that Art Blakey was unobtrusive. He usually sat on a pedestal above the Jazz Messengers just to underline symbolically that they were his messengers. He also brought out an LP called The Big Beat, and his sure was big. There's no denying his importance, though. He was a great drummer and his Jazz Messengers were the equivalent of a Swiss finishing school for young ladies. So many future stars honed their skills under his direction that a list of alumni would go on forever. There's no denying either his ability to swing and to propel his quintets and sextets – or trios for that matter: he was one of Thelonious Monk's most sympathetic percussionists (perhaps because he started out as a self-taught pianist). Propel them he certainly did: with power and polyrhythm. I was lucky enough to catch him live at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1985, albeit with a permutation of the Messengers that wasn't the most star-studded. He wasn't a big man, but my oh my he could make that kit resonate and he could keep going like a Duracell bunny. Much of the Messengers' repertoire was mid-to-up-tempo. If they threw in the odd ballad, one got the feeling it was because it was expected.

Because he helmed the Messengers for so long – from 1954, when Horace Silver co-founded the Messengers as a kind of musical co-operative, to 1990, mere months before his death – there are lots of live performances captured on video, with a wide range of combos. Ultimately, it was a very close call between this wonderful version of Dizzy Gillespie's '(A) Night in Tunisia' (or Tooneezya, as its composer would call it) and 'The Summit', a beautifully compact, near perfect performance, with great solos from three of what was arguably Blakey's finest formation, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan and pianist Bobby Timmons. Recorded live in Tokyo in 1961, it encapsulates what the Messengers were all about: quintessential 'hard bop' that featured tight but elastic unison playing, sparkling solos and an impeccable rhythm section.

Even though this 1958 performance live in Belgium has (the eminently capable saxophonist and very fine composer) Benny Golson in place of Wayne Shorter, I opted for this one because it more clearly and obviously illustrates just what a great drummer Blakey was. Egged on by Morgan and Timmons on cowbells, Blakey positively punishes his kit, both drums and cymbals, to the point where right at the end his ride cymbal just buckles under the onslaught. But don't let that give you the wrong impression: this is a piece, like Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington's 'Caravan', where the rhythm is fundamental to its whole ambience and character. It's a complex polyrhythm that Blakey lays down right from the start and his extended solo is a natural extension of that pattern, not something like so many drum solos tacked on as a chance to demonstrate what you can do. But great goshamighty, what Art Blakey can do on a fairly basic kit is quite astonishing. At one point, as his sticks cross, his arms become a veritable blur.

Benny Golson's solo demonstrates the pleasing and distinctive tone he got from his tenor, while Lee Morgan's is living proof that he was one of the most agile and fluid of all premier trumpeters. He made it look so easy. Pianist Bobby Timmons just does what's necessary here. Critics tend to point out the limitations of his soul-jazz piano style, but I've always loved his overt gospel influence. He also composed what was arguably Blakey's best-known number, 'Moanin'' (as well as 'Dat Dere' and 'This Here' for Cannonball Adderley's group). There are several versions of this available, including a 14-minute one from the same concert in Belgium – but the length suggests a little too much time allocated to the drums and Jymie Merritt's double bass. Enough said.

The classic Shorter/Morgan/Timmons/Merritt permutation broke up in 1961, to be replaced by what I would suggest was his second-finest outfit, the sextet of Shorter, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Cedar Walton and Reggie Workman on bass. No one outstayed his welcome in Art Blakey's finishing school. Changing the line-up and keeping it young and fresh 'keeps the mind active,' the leader suggested. In any case, no doubt most Messengers were keen to get cracking on their own careers. No doubt, too, that Blakey – like so band leaders – could be a hard task-master and a committed penny-pincher.

All those years behind the drums certainly didn't help Art Blakey's hearing – as one can imagine after watching this particular performance. It seems that he was quite deaf by the end of his career, but refused to wear a hearing aid because it supposedly threw his timing off and so relied on instinct and good vibrations. Former band members, though, claimed that his deafness was somewhat selective: he could hear bum notes and mistakes quite well enough in the best draconian James Brown manner, but didn't tend to hear complaints about the money he paid his Messengers.