A few weeks ago, as her Question 31B, amylee asked for an instrumental song we love. I was thrilled at the clutch of warm responses to my choice of Sonny Criss playing I’ll Catch The Sun. The idea fermented to follow this up with a post celebrating the alto saxophonist, principally to give you a few more examples of his playing. This is what I’m doing here but it occurred to me that I’ve been trying off and on for 23 years to tell the world about Sonny Criss and thus the influence his voice has had on mine is also something I want to consider. As a result, I’m supersizing my blogging by twinning this post with one on my own blog, contemplating the literary issues that unspool from my Sonny Criss fandom.
This is a brief and not at all comprehensive primer, courtesy of YouTube, of my favourite instrumental voice in jazz. That’s an accolade that requires some clarification and contextualisation. There are, if we are to give these terms any meaning, ‘greater’ jazz musicians than Sonny Criss. Quite apart from anything else, Criss was one of the legion alto saxophonists who were turned onto a style of playing by Charlie Parker. There’s a reason we call the likes of Criss, Sonny Stitt, Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, Sahib Shibab and more post-Bird saxophonists – it’s not to their detriment that they stood in the conceptual shadow of someone who, to all intents and purposes, made the music new again. You don’t look to Sonny Criss for game-changing innovation. He wasn’t pulling the blues inside-out: he was playing them straight, sultry, smoky and spine-tingling, as here in Black Coffee:
I bow before Mingus, Monk, Ellington, Carla Bley, Sun Ra and plenty more jazz composers before I think of Sonny Criss. But just as I can hear most songs better when they’re sung by Ella, Sinatra or Sarah Vaughan, Sonny could play a song lyric to the same level of perfection of those vocalists. Here he is on Charlie Chaplin’s Smile and Jimmy Webb’s Up Up And Away (links via text to save screen space).
Nor did he move with the times in the manner of Miles Davis or, more recently, David Murray. Things funked up a little in the seventies but the sound that soared over the top of the groove was still that wondrously fluid, human heart-tugging voice, as here in Cool Struttin’ .
Sonny Criss works for me as instantly as the voices of those I love most in the world. I’ll rave about and dance to and revere and be inspired by countless others but Sonny’s notes trigger a thousand awakenings in my brain and across my body. I feel encapsulated by the sense of mortality and intoxicated by the desire for joy that I hear throughout the dozens of his recordings I own. I want to line up loads more for you to enjoy but I’ll leave you with just this, and embed it so it doesn’t get overlooked and by way of a birthday gift to steenbeck, a captivating God Bless The Child:
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What a lovely, thoughtful, intelligently written tribute, May. Just listening to “God Bless The Child” now. Lovely soothing sound.
Thanks for the kind words, bish
Dinesh; Thanks for this post, you’ve hit on my favorite instrument. All my collecting life I’ve been a sax obsessive and until relatively recently I thought it was the tenor that I loved, I bought anything I saw by Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims et. al. but in later years I realized that the alto was my real true love and luckily I’d collected and appreciated many of those artists also. If you asked me who my favorite alto player is I’d impulsively say Johnny Hodges but if I gave it a seconds thought I’d say I can’t answer that, it changes depending on who I’m listening to, I’d give you a top 10 who would include Cannonball, Bird, Stitt, Benny Carter, Paul Desmond, Willy Smith, Cleanhead Vinson, Art Pepper, Frank Morgan and Bud Shank but there’d be a B list right behind them. But I’ll stick with Hodges generally speaking, he played with Duke for over 40 years!
I enjoyed all the videos of Criss but specifically a couple that came up when your’s finished, specifically Blue Prelude which I thought was wonderful and Blues for Boppers which was from early in his career. As I listened to a couple of your posts I kept thinking that one word that described his style was ‘tentative’, he had a very gentle improvisational approach; Blue Prelude was very different, he really dug in and I liked it a lot. Second to Hodges I might say Sonny Stitt was my favorite and he is so similar in many ways to Sonny Criss but stylistically so different, he thinks differently and improvises differently. Both he and Hodges showed up after your youtube posts so I’ll include one from each for comparative purposes, I have both in my iTunes.
Brilliant stuff, gf – thanks for posting those. And you’re so right about ‘tentative’, though some of this could be down to the breathiness (like Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon on tenors). It does sometimes feel as though he had a horror of being seen with an ill-chosen note – again like Getz – and this translates into solos which tiptoe along until confident enough to flourish. As I’ve probably made clear, I find this very appealing and easy to relate to. But it’s a wonderful feature of jazz that we can find so many nuances of personality that vary from player to player.
I’ve had a good read of both this and the post on your own blog, and I’ve earmarked it for some time with the headphones very soon. I’m ready to come down from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” but still need something that satisfies, and these look just right ! Back in a day or two…
One more?
http://thespillblog.co.uk/2011/06/26/coming-across-criss/#comment-36998
I don’t know what happened there, it was supposed to be this:
a great read and listen May, thanks a lot.
Knowing very little, it wasn’t a name i’d come across even in my record rack flicking, but thoroughly enjoyed the tunes and will definitely keep an eye open in the future, I think I need a few more ‘tentative’ players in my collection, I can’t listen to noisy stuff all the time!
Well, I’m even more glad I wrote the posts now because it’s turned up these two clips from YouTube, courtesy of my mate Ian. It’s live footage and that’s a great band he’s with –
I’m holding it together at the moment but it’s exciting and pretty moving to get a chance finally to see footage of Sonny Criss playing. Seems somehow to liberate him from the myths I’ve built up around him and talked about in my companion post.
Let me know if you ever find out who the band members behind Joe Turner are plus if you ever get the name of the club, there was one called Marla’s Memory Lane in LA. By the look of Joe I’d guess it’s mid 60′s. Forget ‘tentative’, great solo on Down Memory Lane, plus the trumpet, tenor and piano! I’d bet that if they’re still in business they’d have a record of this, it’s a 3 camera professional shoot, I’ll bet there’s more.
I’ll do some digging. I do know that Hampton Hawes is on piano and Leroy Vinnegar on bass. The YouTube poster lists other names, though there’s some confusion about the drummer – but those two are recognisable. In the meantime, I thought I’d share what Ian, who posted me the link on Facebook, has said about the clip – what he says indicates it may possibly have been a BBC recording:
“I first saw the clip of Shake, Rattle and Roll on a BBC 2 special Blues Night in the mid 80s. I was so taken by it that I even took photographs of the telly screen to see if I could find out who the alto was. For years I thought it was Sonny Stitt…just going on appearances…but it was my art teacher who put me right.”
OK, it seems this is a 1973 recording. I’m not sure if it had a cinematic release or was just for broadcast (probably the latter as what we have on YouTube seems to be the majority of what was recorded). The line-up is credited as the L.A. All-Stars or Big Joe Turner with the Hampton Hawes All-Stars. Whatever they’re called, the “All-Star” part is spot-on: Turner’s on vocals, of course; and then we have Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison on trumpet, who did extraordinary work with Billie Holiday’s last sessions; Sonny Criss on alto; Teddy Edwards on tenor; Hawes piano; Vinnegar bass; and Bobby Thompson on drums (astonishing solo by him in the part two video). The next part of the quest would be to find a workable audio or visual recording of this to purchase but I’ll reiterate what an amazing dream this represents for me to see Sonny Criss in action.
Ha, i saw that pingback in my emails the other day and was wondering where it came from!! Looking forward to a listen to this post soon.
*sigh* that was me.
What a great blog (real Time Short Stories), May! Looking forward to reading through that in the future.
Bless you for that, amy. The blog is part of my high-risk strategy of working my way out of poverty with the sickle of creative writing academia and the hammer of non-commercial short fiction. The aim is to carve out new ways to theorise about reading and writing short stories that could provide the basis for a PhD. The only thing that can stop me is if Johnny Friendly wants to bet on the other guy.
So, anyway, it’s really helpful to have friends to bounce the ideas off!
I haven’t done a post on blogging on here in many months, maybe i’ll do another in 2 or 3 weeks, as i’m going to be starting a photography WordPress blog. Many of our situations have changed and more of us are un or under employed – me, you, Ali, Zala, i think, etc. (it’s been 3 months for me, but July is going to be too tight for comfort so i’ve got to probably find something part time if i can). Many of us have our own separate blogs too, (i didn’t realize that you had one) so maybe we can find a way to help each other out.
Yours looks great, it must help to be a writer! I hope it does well for you, and you get accepted for your PhD too!
Yes, you could definitely be describing my situation when you talk about your own. The blogging is, on the one hand, a system of deferral or denial – not meeting the problem head-on – but on the other, at least it’s something that feels good to do and that changes and grows so it’s currently winning out over more practical but more soulless solutions.
This is lovely music and new to me, and well worth being up past my bedtime – sorry if that sounds like faint praise, but bedtime is precious to me ! “Tentative” is one good way of putting it GF, the other perspective is to say he makes others sound brash, as if they’ve spent too much time bustling about in NY and not enough time in the sunshine. And I like what you say, May, about his playing a song lyric.
I’ve not got to the live clips yet, and I see there are recordings of All The Things You Are, The Way We Were and a couple of Stevie Wonder tunes to look into…
Dinesh: The audio from youtube is in the dropbox, copy & paste it.
The video is easy to snag if you want it but I’m not familiar with the PC software needed, ask around, plenty know what it is.
I was going to include some pics of Sweets and Teddy from a little later in their careers but I’m having a problem finding ‘em on my foolproof retrieval system, they’ll show up….T.