Appreciating Thad Jones
by Fritz Byers
Here’s how I came to properly appreciate the trumpet- (and cornet- and flugelhorn-) playing of Thad Jones, who is featured this weekend on both nights of Jazz Spectrum. Friday night, the featured record is Thad’s 1984 date, Three and One. And Saturday night, the spotlight is on the fabled big band he co-led with the drummer Mel Lewis.
In an August 1996 review, the peerless New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett evaluates the CD compilation Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings with his customary precision, affection, discerning ears, immaculate taste, and comprehensive knowledge. And, of course, writing in his ridiculously graceful style. The inevitably favorable review is aptly titled “Love Match.”
Toward the end of the review, Whitney veers from the recordings at hand to consider Gil Evans’s other notable undertakings. There he mentions “New Bottle, Old Wine,” “Great Jazz Standards,” and, my favorite, “The Individualism of Gil Evans.” He concludes thus:
“There is a meandering blues on the CD — Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful.’ Thad Jones played a long, dancing, singing trumpet solo on it that makes one wonder what the Columbia albums should have been like with Jones, a masterly player, in place of Davis, who, in effect, was less an expert instrumentalist than a storyteller and an impressionist — a ‘sound,’ as Evans so often put it.”
If it’s not outright heresy, it’s nearly heretical to suggest that there is even a conceivable alteration that could be contemplated to the iconic Evans-Davis collaborations, which are among the most revered records in all of jazz. But I recall reading this review when it came out, and for a while I tried on its view of Miles, although in time I returned to the fold. But I embraced the implied elevation of Thad Jones, and I’ve stuck with that ever since. I’d known Thad more as a composer and had seen the Jones-Lewis orchestra several times at their standing Monday-night gig at the Village Vanguard. But Balliett’s imagining is what drove me to reconsider his trumpet playing.
I began, as one would, with Thad’s 1954 debut, the alluringly titled The Fabulous Thad Jones, on which Thad is joined by the bassist Charles Mingus, whose Debut label issued the record. That album, since reissued with added tracks as the eponymous Thad Jones, holds up against any trumpet record of the era.
Four years later came Keeping Up with the Joneses, which brought Thad together with his brothers — Hank on piano, Elvin on drums — plus the Basie bassist Eddie Jones, unrelated but conveniently surnamed. Thad’s original for the date, “Three and One,” nodded to the arithmetic of three Joneses and one non-family Jones. To my ears, Thad carries the date, and that’s worth sitting with for a beat or two. Hank was already on his way to becoming one of the defining pianists of his generation. Elvin, within a few years, would help remake the vocabulary of jazz drumming behind (really, I’d say, alongside) John Coltrane. And on the 1958 record, Thad is the one you can’t stop listening to.
Thad assayed the nuances of “Three and One” two more notable times, at least that I’m aware of: the Jones/Lewis Orchestra recorded a big-band arrangement of it in 1966 for one of the classic releases on the Solid State label; and Thad returned to it himself in 1984, on the quartet date we’re featuring this Friday. The tune thrived across three decades and three very different bands; it remained recognizably his.
Anyone who’s paid attention knows that Thad was a magnificent composer. We might quarrel about the correct ordering, but he’s in the lineup of the greatest ever.
I think he’s there as a trumpeter as well. And I’m not alone. You can find countless paeans to Thad. Here’s what Charles Mingus said after hearing Thad in Detroit: “I just heard the greatest trumpet player that I've ever heard in this life. He uses all the classical [compositional] techniques, and is the first man to make them swing.”
So, what was it, exactly, that Mingus and Balliett heard?
Not showiness — Thad was never the trumpeter chasing altissimo range or crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics.
Tone: Tom Harrell, another trumpeter well qualified to judge, described Thad’s tone as “Louis Armstrong on acid” — a way of saying that the warmth and vocal quality of the earliest trumpet style survived in Thad’s playing alongside a harmonic sophistication Armstrong never needed.
Note Selection and Timing: The sense, on record after record, of a musician who bends the rigid brass instrument of his choosing to his will, and also coaxes it to play, always, the right note at the right time in service of the beauties of the music.
That same discipline, of course, governs Thad’s writing, which is why, although I’ve separated them here, it’s a mistake to hear Thad’s writing and playing as separate arts. The charts he began bringing to the Basie band in the mid-‘50s — pieces the band initially found strange, before Count and the fellas found them essential — carry the same harmonic daring and the same instinct for surprise that mark his solos. And when he and Mel Lewis assembled their own orchestra in 1965, installing it in a Monday-night residency at the Village Vanguard that would run, in one form or another, for a quarter century, the charts became the main event: voicings spread wide across the horns; saxophone passages built on five distinct voices that Thad managed to integrate and make essential; shout choruses that arrive exactly when they are called for and not a beat sooner. It’s true orchestral writing that rewards close attention.
This weekend gives you both sides of Thad. Friday, the quartet date and a tune with three decades of history behind it. Saturday, the orchestra that, for the better part of twenty-five years, made Monday night at a Greenwich Village basement club the place American big-band jazz happened.
Whitney Balliett’s provocation — that the Columbia records might have gone differently with Thad in Miles’s chair — is just the sort of challenge to orthodoxy that we all need. And in this instance, it leads you to a horn player who deserves the reverence.
Give him some time this weekend. He earned it, with his horn and with his pen.