8 Cats Who Make it Look Easy

If you turn off the sound and just look at them, you'd never guess the intensity of the playing. How can they keep their bodies so relaxed and generate such energy?

Wes Montgomery. Not a care, brother.


Charlie Parker. Yes, he's dubbing, but that's how he looked when he played.


Freddie Hubbard. The trumpet is too hard to really make it look easy, but how hard he blows isn't reflected in how he looks.


Errol Garner. Elfin.


Big Sid Catlett. Big man dances with ease.


Johnny Hodges. Intensity in the eyes, but no tension in his body.


Art Tatum.Falling off a log (perched on a 100-story skyscraper)


Lester Young. Just. Cool.

1950's Trumpets, Pt. 2: Booker Little

Don Fagerquist was the first focus of our attention in this series about lesser-known brilliant trumpet players of the 1950's. If Fagerquist's playing was pretty much down-the-middle, Booker Little set up musical camp farther out on the edge. Fagerquist was anchored in jazz developments of the 40's and early 50's, while Booker looked ahead to the 60's.

Booker Little was born in 1938 in Memphis, a city where Phineas Newborn, Jr. was elder to a number of future jazz artists, such as Frank Strozier, trumpeter Louis Smith (Booker's cousin) and George Coleman, who got Booker moving seriously toward jazz. 

In 1954, after high school, Booker moved to Chicago and got a Bachelors degree in music at the Chicago Conservatory. For nine months of his stay, he roomed with Sonny Rollins, who was in Chicago preparing to join the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. Sonny introduced Booker to Max Roach, with whom Booker made his first recording and eventually gigged. The musicians in Roach's circle and those he knew from early Memphis days became many of the people he ran with during the short span of his career. His first recording was in June, 1956 and he died on October 5, 1961 of uraemic poisoning/kidney failure at the age of 23.

Booker articulated his views on music in a valuable Metronome magazine article by Robert Levin, an article used as the basis of this piece by Dan Miller. One way to introduce Booker's music is to quote his own words from that interview:

"Most of the guys who are thinking completely conventionally--they'd say 'Well maybe you've got a wrong note in there.' But I can't think in terms of wrong notes--in fact, I don't hear any notes as being wrong. It's a matter of knowing how to integrate the notes and, if you must, how to resolve them. Because if you insist that this note or that note is wrong I think you're thinking conventionally-technically, and forgetting about emotion. 

Fear and Confidence-The Jazz Tight Rope by Steve Provizer

If you're an improviser who completely lacks confidence, you'll never get out of the practice room, but if you have no fear, you won't find The Edge. Most of us struggle to find a balance between the two.

Some people have no fear in a studio, but freeze up in front of audiences. More commonly, people fear the trappings of the recording studio (much more true before technology allowed infinite edits). In both cases, the caution that seeps in can make you retreat into your bag of creaky riffs.

On the other hand, a complete dearth of fear can cause problems. A photographic memory and all the technique in the world can induce complacency and drain the life out of a performance.

I'm sure we've all heard this, or felt it. It's a phenomenon that often comes wrapped in a bundle of 32nd notes, in a long visit to stratospheric registers, or as rapid virtuosic register shifts. Despite all this musical artillery, something seems to be missing. The example that sticks out for me-because it was the biggest disappointment-was a Freddie Hubbard gig I heard at Boston's Jazz Workshop in the 70's. Freddie could play the crap out of the trumpet, but as I listened to a cascade of notes, played by a man whose early recordings I'd worn out, I was unmoved. He just didn't seem to be giving anything up, emotionally. Despite the financial sacrifice I'd made to get in, I didn't stay for the second set.

God knows it's tempting say you'd sell your soul for more chops. But, as in the Myth of Fame I talked about, the point is that we have to find our own points of calibration. This personal excavation is damned hard to do-and if there's any reason why artists should occasionally be cut some slack for selfishness and other loathsome behavior, this might be it.