Rodney Whitaker, mastermind of the wonderful jazz program at Michigan State University for the last two decades, has been an important presence in jazz since 1988, when he joined the Donald Harrison-Terence Blanchard Quintet, followed by tours of duty with Roy Hargrove’s early bands and then in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (as it then was called). I’ve had the opportunity to write the program notes for three of Whitaker’s CDs, and I’ve posted them below, in chronological sequence.
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Rodney Whitaker Quintet (The Brooklyn Session: Ballads & Blues):
On the straightforwardly titled Ballads and Blues, Rodney Whitaker and an elite young quintet address a set underpinned by the sensibility people used to call Mainstream. “Before I made this date,” says Whitaker, 31, who holds the bass chair in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, “I was listening to Ben Webster’s ‘Soulville’ [1959] and Coleman Hawkins’ ‘Today and Now’ [1962] every morning while driving from Detroit to Michigan State University, where I teach. The tunes weren’t particularly fast, but the music cleared my mind, transported me to another place. It inspired me to do something in that vein. I realized that everything doesn’t have to be threatening or complex; some things just can help people relax.”
Don’t confuse the choice of material with a musty attitude or archival approach; the musicians follow the time-tested jazz aesthetic of piggybacking the tradition, finding contemporary iterations of timeless forms. “I wanted people who are very creative but can achieve a classic sound,” Whitaker explains. “Ron Blake developed musically in Chicago, playing under Von Freeman, so he has that Chicago tenor concept, though he can also play more modern. We met in Roy Hargrove’s band, and we’re like family. I’ve known Eric Reed since his early days with Wynton Marsalis; he’s well-rounded and can play any style you want. I met Stefon Harris on the J@LC ‘All Jazz Is Modern’ tour. We spent a lot of time on the bus listening to music, discussing principles and ideas, encouraging each other to read certain books. I have a strong affinity to his creativity. I met Carl Allen when I played with the Harrison-Blanchard Quintet; we play well together, and over the last ten years we’ve worked in numerous circumstances.
“I grew up listening to this music. My parents listened to Sam Cooke and Motown music, and my father liked the Blues — T-Bone Walker and B.B. King and Muddy Waters. I wanted to be a musician since my mother can remember; went to bed at night with the radio on, woke up with it on. I started playing violin when I was about 7. I went to camps, had good teachers, was in Honors Orchestra and so on, and had I stuck with it I probably would have become a classical violinist. But I switched to bass in junior high school, and one day when I was 13, a neighbor who was a big jazz fan saw me carrying the bass and let me borrow some recordings — that was it for me.
“In high school, I had a teacher named Herbie Williams, who taught me jazz harmony and so on. My friend Cassius Richmond, who plays with James Carter, brought me into a teenage group called Bird/Trane/Sco-Now which was led by Donald Washington, who had been my string instructor in sixth and seventh grade, and Mr. Williams urged me to join it. The group was based on Charles Mingus’ philosophy that jazz is the art of the moment. We played Bird’s music, Bebop, we played John Coltrane’s later music, and experimented with music by Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The AACM guys from Chicago were some of our heroes, but Donald Washington also stressed the tradition. It created a different sort of musician, I think, versed in the tradition but not afraid of allowing it to grow; you see how the music is all connected. He encouraged us to compose. At certain moments he’d point at you and you’d have to create something right off the top of your head. I like the music to go in and out, because that’s what I did my whole life, as did the guys I grew up with.”
Whitaker left Detroit in 1988 with Harrison-Blanchard, then replaced Christian McBride with Roy Hargrove’s Quintet in 1991. “That was the gig where I really got myself together,” he enthuses. “We toured so much, we played constantly, and the band had so much press as the new young guys on the scene that we had to deliver. Playing with a young drummer the caliber of Greg Hutchinson helped me, because we developed side by side. Roy could listen to a recording by anyone from Ornette Coleman to Miles just once, call the tune on the gig that night, and play it — I trained my ear to do that.”
After leaving Hargrove in 1995, Whitaker freelanced with Elvin Jones, Kenny Garrett and Diana Krall, practiced extensively, explored compositional ideas and concepts, and recorded his first two CDs [“Children Of the Light” and “Hidden Kingdom” (DIW)], both comprised primarily of original music. In 1996, Wynton Marsalis hired him to play with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
“When I met Wynton,” Whitaker remembers, “I was playing in the Detroit Civic Symphony Orchestra, and he was there to play the Hummel Trumpet Concerto with the Detroit Symphony. I still have the paper that he autographed for me, inscribed ‘Listen to Jimmy Blanton’ — which I did. Wynton always represented Tradition for me; he inspired a lot of guys my age and even younger. When we were growing up, we dreamed of being studio musicians. With the exception of the masters, no one was making money playing jazz. He made us believe that we actually could play jazz and make an impact, and that’s what we wanted to do.
“Coming up, it didn’t matter to me what style people were playing as long as it wasn’t commercial. I checked out everyone from Wynton and Branford to Steve Coleman and Greg Osby. Dave Holland’s group with Steve Coleman and Kevin and Robin Eubanks had a big impact after I heard them in the late ‘80s. The compositions were unconventional, but they grooved and swung at the same time in their own way. Plus Dave Holland has such command of the instrument. Of course, we all grew up with the masters to look up to, but he’s doing this right in your sightline.
“I took lessons for two weeks from George Duvivier at a jazz camp when I was 15. He was a great man, very humorous, very honest. I was very cocky, and he really calmed me down. He forced me to learn two- and three-octave scales on the instrument — that pretty much did it! He helped me learn how to bow in tune with a good sound. We didn’t work on jazz things, just basic technique, at which he was very skilled — it didn’t even look like his left hand was moving. I learned that people hire bass players because they can swing, not because they can play a lot of notes. Playing a lot of notes is like icing on the cake, but the cake can be good without the icing.”
You hear Whitaker’s plush arco sound on “Alone With Just My Dreams,” a Duvivier original which previously appeared only on a 1948 Joe Wilder recording. Don Sickler provided the score for this and three compositions by Paul Chambers, the Detroit bass legend who grafted the vocabulary of Charlie Parker to his solo conception of the instrument.
“Paul Chambers is one of my musical fathers,” Whitaker states definitively. “Detroiters are very proud of Detroit folk, and whenever I carried a bass, people who aren’t musicians would say, ‘You ever heard of Paul Chambers?’ The other name everyone mentioned was Ron Carter, who’s also from Detroit.”
“Ease It” is a 12-bar blues from Go (VJ), a Chambers session with Cannonball Adderley. “It’s the first song that I ever learned the melody off the recording,” Whitaker says, “and it’s always represented everything Paul Chambers was about. He played such a fluid solo, walking the bass with incredibly swinging notes throughout.
“I don’t think I know any professional bassist who doesn’t know ‘Whims of Chambers’ — if they don’t, they should,” he continues. Whereas on the 1956 original Kenny Burrell doubled the melody line with Chambers before the bassist’s opening solo, here tenorist Ron Blake and Whitaker play the melody in unison on the first 12, vibraphonist Stefon Harris chimes in for the next 12, then pianist Eric Reed leads off the solo sequence.
“The Hand Of Love,” from a 1957 Chambers Blue Note, Whitaker notes, “inspired me in the same way. People are less familiar with that side of his writing. Most of his pieces were bebop-sounding, but this is a pretty, melodic tune written on a 32-bar American song form.
Carly Simon’s “The Way They Always Said It Should Be,” taken arco, is the album’s “new standard.” “From when I was 8 to about 15 I listened to a station that played ‘60s-‘70s pop tunes, and I sat up every night waiting for this,” he recalls. “In fact, the man at the station got tired of me because I would call and request the song! I didn’t know what it was about, but something about it haunted me. My wife and I heard it again three years ago, while we were vacationing in the South with our kids. At this point in my life I could understand the lyrics — about marriage and wanting your relationship not to falter. My wife found the CD at a 24-hour grocery store, brought it back at midnight or 1 a.m., and said, ‘here, learn this tune’ — I think I learned it right then.”
Family is explicitly acknowledged on “For Rockelle” (recorded on Roy Hargrove’s Of Kindred Souls), for which Whitaker conjured the melody when his daughter, now 12, was an infant. “Wise Young Man” is Eric Reed’s customized ballad tribute to Whitaker, who played on the pianist’s pair of early ‘90s recordings for Mojazz.
J@LCO trombonist Wycliffe Gordon joins the mix on “Centerpiece,” an iconic blues fingerpopper since composer Harry Edison recorded it with Dizzy Gillespie in 1955, and on Charlie Parker’s “Big Foot,” both orchestra staples. “Jazz at Lincoln Center is almost like going to graduate school,” Whitaker marvels. “I get to play Duke Ellington’s music. I get access to scores. I get access to recordings that are obscure and difficult to find. It forces me to do research. I always tell younger musicians that in order to be a jazz musician, you need to be an historian — read the books, study the musicians and learn the stories. It’s like ethnomusicology.
“This experience has enabled me to work with people like Jimmy Heath, Jon Faddis, and Slide Hampton. They actually paid me to share the bass chair for a week with Percy Heath! It was amazing to listen to him walk those lines and swing the way he does. Probably he and Milt Hinton were the most encouraging of all the bass players I’ve met. They see this desire in you to play — which is what they want — and encourage you. I toured with Yusef Lateef a couple of years ago, playing music with an Arabic-Middle Eastern tinge; every now and then a certain rhythm or motif would give you an ancient feeling, something you never felt before. In Jazz at Lincoln Center, the sound, say, of Duke Ellington’s chord voicings, the sound and style of the song sort of forces you to play in the style of a particular person. It’s almost like an actor going into character. You can’t help it. It’s stronger than your willpower. It comes over you, and you feel like, ‘I’m Milt Hinton’ or ‘I’m Percy Heath’ or ‘I’m Paul Chambers.’ It is like acting. It’s drama. You have to get into those characters to bring the life out of that music.
“But you have to force yourself not to do that. Duke wouldn’t want you to play in the style of him. ‘A Train’ sounds totally in 1948 than in 1960. We played the Blanton-Webster Years with John Lewis, and one thing Mr. Lewis would say was, ‘Well, quote the solo, but then do your own thing.’ I think if you don’t do that, you’re not playing jazz. What killed European classical music from really being creative was the fact that people did not want to allow the tradition to grow. Any music has to be allowed to live.”
Jazz will, so long as Rodney Whitaker and his cohorts on Brooklyn Session: Ballads and Blues have anything to say about it.
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Rodney Whitaker (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Notes):
Recorded three weeks before the end of the millennium, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is Rodney Whitaker’s paean to coming of age, marking, as he puts it, “my transition from being a young lion to a grown man.” Now 32, the Detroit native known for his big sound and fat beat surrounds himself with a group of bandmates from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, where he’s held the bass chair since 1996. It’s a band of young veterans, creative spirits with classic sounds who carry personal voices nurtured through the J@LC experience of immersion in the lifeblood of jazz vocabulary from Jelly Roll Morton to John Coltrane. They play with the intuitive cohesion that only musicians who work and travel together 8-9 months a year can attain, and they articulate Whitaker’s music — redolent with insinuating melodies and intriguing harmonic formulations — with mature perspective and ebullient optimism tinged with bittersweet recognition of the unexpected curveballs life can hurl.
That’s the aura of the recently composed set-opener “Happier Times,”a 20-bar AAB form tune featuring the pure soprano saxophone sound of multi-reed wizard Victor Goines and the ringing chromaticism of pianist Farid Barron. “The tune has a very simple, sort of childlike melody,” Whitaker notes. “The idea behind it is that at the close of 1999, I had encountered at least ten couples I knew who had gotten divorced — people who were very close, the ideal couples. I was depressed, so I sat down and wrote a tune remembering the happier times and hoping for happier times to come. The tune has what I call a Rodney Whitaker form. Since I was in Roy Hargrove’s band at the beginning of the ‘90s, I’ve had a way of writing where I state the theme three times, and only after developing it like that, go into the release. I think if you hear something at least three times, it stays in your head.”
Whitaker conjures a memorable melody on the haunting “Visions of the Past,” featuring Wynton Marsalis’ vocalized trumpet sound at its most romantic over a medium-slow tempo controlled with exquisite tension by trapsetter Herlin Riley. “My wife likes Eric Satie’s music,” Whitaker remarks, “and I wrote this three years ago as a short piano piece in Satie’s style. In an earlier recording it had a different character, but Wynton makes everything he plays sound like the blues. That blues flavor is different than what I was thinking of, but I accept it because it’s honest — that’s his thing.”
LCJO alto saxophonist Wes Anderson adds his distinctive sopranino saxophone to the mix on Herlin Riley’s festive “Taylor Made,” which begins in a 6/4 groove and transitions into 5 at the end of the form. It evokes the sound of New Orleans drum master James Black, a master at swinging in odd tempos who had a huge influence on Riley’s playing. “They call Herlin the Groove Master, and this tune is just a groove,” Whitaker explains. “I always tell Herlin that his way of playing is tailor-made to fit mine. It transcends style or anything technical; we both come to groove and play every night, and we’ve played well together from the first day.”
Idiomatic performance of Duke Ellington’s repertoire is a staple of LCJO programs, and Whitaker has immersed himself in the maestro’s music in recent years. The arrangement of “Mood Indigo” evolved during a three-week Fall 1999 tour focusing on Ellington’s small group music with a handpicked ten-piece band that included state-of-the-art singer Dianne Reeves, whose poignant reading here stands with any in the lexicon. “I guess I’ve absorbed the Ellington sound, been affected by the bass tradition of Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton and Jimmy Woode, and the music they’ve created,” Whitaker observes. “At the same time, playing Ellington is really about education, trying to understand what they did with the music and letting some of it influence me, but also being mindful that I have to try to do something different.”
On the haunting “Ladies Vanity,” which first appeared on a 1956 date led by Oscar Pettiford, a Whitaker hero, Victor Goines uncannily nails the weary been-there/done-that sound of the composer, the legendary tenor saxophonist Eli “Lucky” Thompson, who spent his formative years in Detroit. “I like to pay homage to my hometown,” Whitaker states, “because you have to start with where you’re from. I listened to this tune hundreds of times. Victor transcribed this song for the record, and captured every nuance.”
Whitaker returns to themes of family on the celebratory “Woman Child,” written during a 1993 tour of France with Roy Hargrove on the occasion of the birth of drummer Greg Hutchinson’s daughter. Like many of Whitaker’s pieces, the 34-bar AABA theme with 8-bar A-sections and a 10-bar B-section falls slightly between the cracks of standard form. “I think I hear like that,” Whitaker reveals. “Most of my tunes are not worked out; they come from melodies I’ve heard in my head.” Following sprightly turns by Goines and Barron, Whitaker with thick cut spins a crisply executed, melodically inventive statement..
Whitaker’s chops get a workout on his opening solo on Goines’ “You and Me,” a 16-bar form repeated twice, featuring the reedman’s full-toned bass clarinet. “With the exception of Eric Dolphy, we’d never heard a melody featuring bass clarinet and bass,” Whitaker says. “Victor created a beautiful melody based on some things he heard me working on technically. I like to have all the musicians contribute to my records. There’s no way I can have all the ideas. If they feel I respect them enough to want their music or concepts, it always makes for a better record.”
It’s no accident that Whitaker’s Ellingtonian “Darrianne Niles” sounds like it might be the theme song for a ‘40s film noir by, say, Otto Preminger or Jacques Tourneur. “I wrote it at a time when I was reading novels by Raymond Chandler and in that style about romance and mystery, and I tried to capture the essence of romantic mystique,” Whitaker confesses. “It’s about my manager; she dresses and carries herself like a character out of a Bogart movie.” It’s a four-horn orchestration, with each voice stating the melody during the theme, structured as an AABA form with 5 bars in the A section and 16 in the extended B section. Marsalis’ gold-toned locution goes a long way towards establishing a sepia aura of contrast and shadow.
Alto saxophonist Andrew Speight, head of the Jazz Studies program at Michigan State University, where Whitaker has taught, wrote and orchestrated “Hurricane Andrew,” a brisk, exciting Mingusian burnout blues with a connotation not unlike John Coltrane’s “Take The Coltrane” on which all hands demonstrate their command of the idiom.
Whitaker displays his plush sound and romanticism on “Unconditional Love,” a bass feature on a 10-bar theme with two 3/4 bars displaced in the middle of the form. “During the time I wrote this, I was listening to people like Scott LaFaro and Chuck Israels, trying to get to the gentle side of playing the bass,” Whitaker comments. “My intention in music is to try to embody the whole tradition of jazz. My earliest sounds were groove-oriented music, from listening to Sam Cooke or T-Bone Walker in my house. Naturally, I was attracted to Paul Chambers or Sam Jones, people who had a strong groove, and I didn’t grow up interested in this style. But as I started to mature as a musician and as a man, I started to understand how valid every aspect of jazz is; I wanted to add some of these textures and colors to my playing, and I had to go to the people who do that best. Scott LaFaro was a genius who revolutionized the way we think about the bass. He expanded the register of the instrument, and he wasn’t just a timekeeper, but was able to play other rhythms. People like Charles Mingus did that, too. But Scott LaFaro was the first player bold enough to just play melody in the accompaniment role, instead of just four-on-the-floor quarter notes.”
A reprise of “Happier Times” and a blowout version of Motor City icon Joe Henderson’s “Tetragon” (a session warmup too good to discard) conclude “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” Affirmative and egalitarian, the album reaffirms Whitaker’s ever-growing reputation as a bandleader-composer of high aspiration and substance and an instrumentalist who resides in the elite echelons.
Has the J@LC experience enhanced the growing process? “We pretty much cover all the different genres you can think of in jazz, from Gerry Mulligan to Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus, back to Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,” Whitaker reflects. “It makes me more aware of the depth of these people. Growing up as a jazz player, you’re more attracted to certain styles. Here you’re forced to play something you may not be attracted to, and make it sound good. You start to learn how great Jelly Roll Morton was, how he composed the blues with a more complex intricate form than anything you hear at this time. You start to understand that the music’s intellectual ideas didn’t start in 1965, but in 1925! You learn that all this music, from Jelly Roll Morton to Ornette Coleman, is timeless.”
That’s not just idle chat; Whitaker can legitimately claim the full jazz timeline, from Wellman Braud to Malachi Favors, as his comfort zone. “Although I don’t have my own band yet, I have a strong sense of what music should sound like,” Whitaker concludes. “I think that’s the most important thing. I guess anything you put out, if it’s honest, is a documentation of where you are musically. In order for me to go to the next level of what I hear in music, I invariably have to start my own band, and I have to allow my sound concept to evolve within the sound of the musicians in the band, as every great bandleader has done, from Miles Davis to Duke Ellington. This record to me is a new beginning; I ushered out the Millennium in terms of what I’ve studied and learned to this point, and now it’s time for the next step.”
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Rodney Whitaker, Liner Notes for All Too Soon:
For the second installment of an ambitious five-CD project undertaken to observe his fiftieth birthday in 2018, Rodney Whitaker convenes a world-class sextet and singer Rockelle Fortin to pay swinging homage to the oeuvre of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. It’s a subject that the University Distinguished Professor of Jazz Bass and Director of Jazz Studies at Michigan State University came to know intimately when he played bass for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — as it then was called — between 1994 and 2002.
“Although people are fascinated by Ellington’s music and talk about it a lot, I feel most people don‘t know that much about it,” Whitaker says. “During my eight years with LCJO, I played every major work by Ellington, studied all the scores, and read every book about him I could find.” In the process, Whitaker channeled the sound of the pathbreaking 1940s Ellington bassists Jimmy Blanton and Oscar Pettiford on piano-bass duos like “Pitter Panther Patter” and orchestral bass concertos like “Jack The Bear.”
“I had my mind blown by Duke’s and Strayhorn’s brilliance by playing works like ‘The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse’ or ‘Such Sweet Thunder’ or ‘The Far East Suite,” he continues. “Before Lincoln Center, my scope was what I liked, what I’d been exposed to, and early on I was resistant, because I wanted to maintain my hardbop identity. But my experience gave me a thorough view of jazz. I looked at it as graduate school, getting my PhD in performance. I picked Wynton Marsalis’ brain — we had conversations and debates where sometimes my opinions were polar opposite to his on, let’s say, whether Ellington or Strayhorn had written parts of a particular tune. To be able to do that, I had to learn more about music.
“The sound of their chord voicings, the style of the song forces you to play in the style of a particular person, almost like an actor going into character, to bring out the life from that music. But you have to force yourself not to do that. Duke wouldn’t want you to play in his style — his ‘A Train’ sounds totally different in 1948 than in 1960. Once we played a ‘Blanton-Webster Years’ concert with John Lewis, who told us: ‘Quote the solo, but then do your own thing.’ If you don’t do that, you’re not playing jazz. Any music has to be allowed to live.”
Whitaker’s m.o. for applying that stated aesthetic principle to the task at hand was to model the session on Billie Holiday’s freewheeling mid-1950s small group dates for Verve with iconic Ellington tenor saxophonist Webster, trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassists Red Mitchell or Joe Mondragon, and drummers Alvin Stoller or Larry Bunker. “I was thinking about having a vocalist, but also making the recording more like a cutting session, where a lot of the music is not arranged,” says Whitaker. He adds that, as a precocious Detroit teenager, he thought swing music was “corny.”
“When I was younger, I didn’t like Ray Brown or Oscar Peterson or any of what I called ‘happy jazz,’” Whitaker recalls. “The Detroit musicians in my generation all came up playing free jazz, hardbop and bebop. But when I was 16, I got an album called Soulmates by Joe Zawinul and Ben Webster. I bought it because I was listening to Weather Report a lot; I wasn’t even hip to what Joe had done with Cannonball Adderley’s sextet until I was 18. Anyway, I fell in love with Ben Webster’s sound, and checking him out sent me to Ellington and Sweets and all the others.”
Swing is the only apt descriptor for the way Detroit-born drummer Karriem Riggins propels the first ten numbers. Now 43, Riggins played on Whitaker’s first two albums, Hidden Kingdom and Children of the Light, from 1994 and 1996, respectively. At the time, Riggins — who possesses a high Q-score in hip-hop circles as a producer and beatmaker — was lighting sparks with Roy Hargrove’s state-of-the-art quintet, prior to consequential tenures with Ray Brown and Mulgrew Miller.
“I mentored Karriem as a teenager,” Whitaker says. “He’s a curious soul, and has the ability to retain a lot of information. Before he got in Ray’s band, I remember watching him learn the music, and he ingested Ray’s entire career. I wanted a drummer I really knew, because if the bass and drums are together, we’re a band.”
Less widely known is Ann Arbor-based pianist Rick Roe, who retained Whitaker’s and Riggins’ services for his 1996 trio recording, Changeover, and recorded a “cult classic” called Monk’s Modern Music with Whitaker and drummer Greg Hutchinson, who played together with Roy Hargrove from 1991 to 1994. “Rick and I always played well together,” Whitaker says. “He’s one of the best compers in jazz.”
“He’s my first-call tenor saxophonist,” Whitaker says of Diego Rivera, the Associate Director of MSU’s jazz studies program. “He comes out of the Johnny Griffin hardbop school; he plays the way I like a tenor player to play.”
Also on board from the MSU faculty is trombonist Michael Dease, 36, a one-time student of Whitaker’s LCJO colleague Wycliffe Gordon who has established an international reputation by dint of ten leader recordings that showcase his efflorescent instrumental and compositional skills and endless will to swing.
The group’s elder is virtuoso trumpeter Brian Lynch, who functioned as a co-equal sideman with Phil Woods and Eddie Palmieri after serving consequential 1980s apprenticeships with Horace Silver and Art Blakey. Among his 20+ albums as a leader are the 2006 Grammy-winning Simpatico, and, more recently, the 2017 Grammy-nominated Madera Latino: A Latin Jazz Interpretation on the Music of Woody Shaw.
The proceedings open with “Cottontail,” a 1940 Ellington recording that pivots around a force-of-nature Webster solo. After Riggins uncorks a drum fanfare, Lynch, Dease and Rivera exchange five idea-rich rounds of choruses before an ebullient polyphonic section, and a crackling Riggins solo.
The tempo ratchets down to medium swing on the title track, a romantic blue ballad from 1940 on which Webster uncorked an iconic solo that still stands as a masterpiece of boudoir tenor saxophone. Rockelle Fortin, who is Whitaker’s oldest daughter, soulfully renders Carl Sigman’s lyric, signified upon by Dease’s voice-like trombone.
Whitaker refracts the essence of Oscar Pettiford on his melodic introduction to Strayhorn’s “Take The A Train,” which Ellington debuted in 1941. Rivera, Dease and Lynch provide obbligatos as Fortin sings the lyric, and solo in that order — followed by Roe — over Riggins’ big beat, which foreshadows a concluding drum solo over which the ensemble riffs.
Another resonant Whitaker solo opens “Just Squeeze Me,” which, in its initial incarnation, on a 1941 Rex Stewart-led date of Ellingtonians, featured an impassioned Webster solo and was titled “Subtle Slough.” Whitaker discovered the tune on a 1955 Prestige recording by the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. In his opening two-and-a-half minute solo, Whitaker shows us what Chambers might have done had he soloed on the source track; Lynch’s muted solo refracts the spirit of Miles into his own argot; after Roe says his piece, Whitaker engages Riggins and Lynch in triological conversation.
This arrangement of “Mood Indigo” emerged from his nightly duo feature with Dianne Reeves on a 1999 tour with a Nicholas Payton led tentet that included Joe Lovano and members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Whitaker and Reeves recorded it together on Whitaker’s 2000 album Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Sirocco). Whitaker describes Fortin’s performance as a tribute to Reeves, a consequential mentor; she does the great diva justice. Riggins’ variegated straight-eighth beats spur Rivera’s keening soprano sax solo and a pithy Whitaker declamation.
The ensemble introduction to “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” follows Thelonious Monk’s changes on his 1956 all-Ellington recital with Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. Lynch, Whitaker, Dease, and Rivera (tenor) uphold Ellington’s anthemic dictum.
Riggins projects a 21st century foxtrot feel on “Harlem Air Shaft,” from a June 1940 date that featured solos by Cootie Williams on trumpet and Barney Bigard on clarinet. “The original recording is referred to as a 3-minute masterpiece, because every element that exists in jazz happens in Ellington’s arrangement,” Professor Whitaker says. After fresh, swinging solos by Rivera, Roe, Dease and Lynch, and exchanges between bass and drums, Rivera’s variations end the tune.
“Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me” began life as “Concerto For Cootie,” a 1940 Ellington masterpiece. A few years later, after World War Two began, Don George wrote lyrics, transforming it into a feature for the blind baritone singer Al Hibbler. After Dease’s alligatory introduction, Fortin sings with relaxed phrasing and poignant tone, paving the way for Dease’s timbrally extravagant statement.
Composed by Ellington’s great Puerto Rican valve trombonist Juan Tizol, the oft-recorded “Perdido” was first documented at a December 1941 transcription session and a January 1942 RCA date by the Ellington orchestra. Both featured solos by Ray Nance and Webster, whose tonal identity Rivera signifies upon as the ensemble states the theme. Riggins lays down a medium-up magic carpet upon which Dease, Rivera, Lynch and Roe soar on their solo turns. Note the breathe-as-one, conceived-in-the-studio, three-horn soli from 3:23 to 4:40, setting up another strong Whitaker solo, and then exchanges between the horns and Riggins.
Ellington introduced his exotic tone poem, “Azure,”in 1937. He recontextualized it on various occasions, including a 1965 encounter with Ella Fitzgerald that Fortin references on her lovely interpretation. “We put the arrangement together in a few minutes, from specific chord changes that Rick Roe suggested,” Whitaker says. “Rockelle pushed us towards’s Ella’s thing when we played it.” Solos are by Rivera, Dease and Lynch.
For the final two selections, as if to signify on the perpetual forward gaze that defined Ellington’s attitude to his oeuvre at every stage of his career, Whitaker includes drummer Kayvon Gordon, a young Detroiter who played with his working quintet before moving to New York in the fall of 2018. On “Come Sunday,” from Ellington’s iconic 1943 “Black, Brown and Beige” suite. Gordon’s percolating backbeat variations complement Fortin’s spiritual reading of the lyrics, testifying solos by Rivera and Roe, and an elegant bass chorus. “We updated some of the harmonies, and it has a more contemporary gospel and feel than what Ellington did with it back in the day,” Whitaker remarks.
It’s the quintet again on a creative treatment of Tizol’s oft-covered “Caravan,” which debuted in 1936. Whitaker states the bassline of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Tin Tin Deo” over the melody and Fortin channels Ella Fitzgerald in interpreting Irving Mills’ lyrics.
Here, as on each track of this inspired tribute to the Maestro, Whitaker upholds the standards set by his “happy jazz” role models, leaving this listener wanting more. “I could release another volume,” Whitaker says. “There are 12 tunes — including some more obscure ones — that we didn’t use.” I can’t wait to hear them.
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