We Three – Roy Haynes – Phineas Newborn – Paul Chambers (New Jazz 1959) – Pure Desmond – Paul Desmond (Cti 1974)
For those who love jazz, surprises are always, fortunately, lurking, and even a week’s vacation on the shores of the French Riviera, on paper far from concerts or jazz events, can dispense some very welcome ones.
Browsing through the CD collection of the kind owner of the villa that was hosting me in Ramatuelle (site of an important jazz festival, it must be said, but it had passed about two months before), on a day not suitable for swimming, between a best of George Michael and one of Billie Holiday, a cover with familiar faces appears completely unexpectedly.
They are those of the drummer Roy Haynes, the pianist Phineas Newborn and the double bass player Paul Chambers and the album is “We three”, Haynes’ first studio effort as leader recorded in the autumn of 1958. I immediately switch to the CD player to discover one of those minor pearls that the jazz necklace of all time is studded with. A session in which the elegant and minimalist style of Haynes and the extroverted and pyrotechnic one of Newborn find an ideal synthesis, underlined by the walking of Chambers’ double bass.
Songs that breathe in relaxed atmospheres, conceived leaving aside any intent to amaze to forge a music that lives in the dialogue and exchange of intuitions between the three protagonists. A darting cover of “Reflection” by Ray Bryant to open the menu, “Sugar Ray” by Newborn dedicated to the famous boxer, two long songs “Solitaire” and “After hours” in which all the blues vapors that permeate the culture of musicians rise, the swinging “Sneaking around”, and a conclusive “Our delight” by Tadd Dameron, in which Phineas’ piano drags everyone towards his sprinter’s paces.
The trio did not have a long life, but “We Three” remains a beautiful testimony of that understanding, and still offers a good half hour of music. An ideal viaticum, perhaps, to wait for the sun to return on a rainy summer day.
But before returning to the usual occupations, including domestic listening, another surprise awaited me on the way back home at a flea market in Menton.
For the (French) price of a coffee I took away with me “Pure Desmond”, a 1974 Cti, Japanese edition, that the alto saxophonist and Dave Brubeck’s companion recorded with the Canadian guitarist Ed Bickert, the double bass player Ron Carter and Connie Kay on drums.
We are close to the final years of Desmond, who will pass away in 1977, but the album marks an important moment following the dissolution of Brubeck’s quartet and the consequent period of scarce activity of the saxophonist. In the fall of 1974, thanks to a tip from Jim Hall, Desmond accepted a two-week engagement in Toronto, Canada, alongside local guitarist Ed Bickert, for the first time in a club since the end of the quartet’s history.
Brickert was a self-taught musician well known in Canadian studios, who had developed a wonderful solo technique and a harmonic expertise learned from studying Stan Kenton’s arrangements. But he was an extremely taciturn and withdrawn man, just as Desmond was selective in choosing friends and work colleagues. “I think it took us four hours of rehearsals together to be able to say hello,” joked Gene Lees, author of the liner notes.
The fact is that the understanding between the two immediately worked very well, the elegant and sly alto sax paired very well with the harmonic bases of Beckert’s guitar and Desmond decided to bring his Canadian colleague to the US to record at the court of Creed Taylor in a quartet. At this point, given the producer’s shy nature, the oral lack of communication between the three risked becoming total and perhaps only the work of the sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder succeeded in the enterprise of making them speak.
The result of those sessions is “Pure Desmond”, an album that the owner considered to be attributed as a leader to the guitarist: the initial “Squeeze me”, timeless standards such as “I’m old fashioned” and “Till the clouds roll by”, a bewitching “Nuages” by Django Reinhard, a couple of compositions by Cole Porter, “Why shouldn’t I” and the swinging “Everything I love”, the ballad “Warm valley” by Ellington are examples of a way of playing that transcends eras and styles to dispense emotions in pills of formal elegance.
Bickert, who also appears on the album as a soloist with solid technique and versatile style, played with Desmond in what the saxophonist called the “Canadian group” (with Don Thompson and Jerry Fuller) until the year of his death, before embarking on a solo career and joining the Concord Jazz stable alongside Benny Carter and Elisabeth Clooney. He retired from music at 67 after a bad accident and losing his wife, and died in 2019.
The album ends with “Mean to Me,” a 1929 standard written by Fred Ahlert, yet another demonstration of that slightly detached and ironic elegance that Desmond, when asked how he developed his style, summed up with one of his famous sayings: “It’s as if I’ve always had it in my head to sound like a dry martini.”
