Provenance: Inherited
This record came to me from the collection of my Uncle T (short for Tom, but I only ever heard him called that a handful of times in my life). He was a fairly avid music fan who gave me my first Miles Davis records, but his taste in jazz was perhaps a little staid (he was not listening to Last Exit) and that’s where I — perhaps unfairly — have always slotted the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Anyone who’s matriculated through a college jazz program or sat through some jam sessions has played MJQ vibraphone player Milt Jackson’s signature tune “Bags’ Groove” at some point. But that is more or less the extent of my familiarity with the group, excepting drummer Connie Kay’s association with Van Morrison and the odd Miles stuff I heard bassist Percy Heath play on.
(Side note: The vibraphone has to be on a shortlist — along with the upright bass and the harp — of “prettiest instruments that are also inordinate pains in the ass.” Concert pianists and drummers can mostly rely on house equipment, however shitty, but anyone who’s ever lugged an upright bass through the subway or shlepped a set of vibes up a staircase has spent at least quadruple that amount of time questioning their life choices.)
So: Blues at Carnegie Hall is a live record, made during a benefit concert for the Manhattan School of Music scholarship fund. The group’s set consisted entirely of tunes based on the blues form, hence the title, though Alun Morgan’s liner notes specify that “Blues Milanese” “is not, strictly speaking, a blues.”
There’s a fundamental tension to the title and concept of this record that Morgan doesn’t address, which is the element of novelty (at best) and condescension (at worst) to the idea of “blues at Carnegie Hall” and its implied high/low distinction. Bear with me: This record came out in 1966, which made it contemporaneous with the Newport Folk Festival’s run of showcasing “rediscovered” Depression-era blues stars like Skip James and Son House. But there’s a vast remove between the blues from that group of musicians and this record. For one thing, I highly doubt there were any vibraphones in rural Mississippi, and for another, rural blues are unrecognizable from a jazz combo’s version of the same. Where John Lee Hooker might play a 13- or 14-bar blues as he saw fit — adding or subtracting beats from a bar in the process — or spend an entire song playing one chord, by 1966, a “jazz blues” meant (mostly) a strict 12-bar form that added all kinds of extra chords imported from European music theory.
All of this which is to say that even though these were four black men playing Them Blues™, they were also urbane (literally, all four members grew up in cities), professional musicians making music for a well-off audience that presumably thought of themselves — unconsciously or not — as more suited to these blues than Son House doing “Death Letter Blues,” even if they acknowledged the two were branches of the same tree. Without getting too far down the rabbit hole of “authenticity,” there’s no denying that the edges are sanded so far off the MJQ’s blues as to render them frictionless for a white, middle-class audience.
Anyway, let’s spend some time with the music.
There’s an element of slow-build throat-clearing to opener “Pyramid (Blues for Junior),” with a call-and-response approach to the interplay between the instruments. This tune’s a great showcase for Kay’s somewhat unconventional approach to the drums: He spends the tune’s first chunk switching between a sort of march pattern and a press-roll on the snare before picking up a tambourine(!) for the first part of Jackson’s solo, eventually moving over to the ride cymbal; I don’t think he even hits the snare until Lewis’ solo. There’s some nice gospel-ish changes to this one, too.
Stray observation: As you might expect from Carnegie Hall, this is an extremely mannered crowd; they applaud strictly after the solos and when the tunes conclude. Also, the Spotify version of this record is notably not in mono, as my vinyl is. Lewis’ piano is panned hard to the left there, with Jackson’s vibes in the right channel. That seems to mirror the group’s stage orientation, at least from the admittedly limited research I just did.
I know I’m stating the obvious here, but Kay is a fantastic fit for this group. The man really knew how to hit a cymbal: where a heavier or more bombastic drummer might pulled the band earthwards, his playing seems to dance in the air alongside Jackson’s vibes. “The Cylinder” is the first appearance of what I would consider a “standard” jazz drumming pattern in the set, and he and Heath lock into a solid groove after the jittery intro.
“Really True Blues” lives up to its name: I’m not looking at a lead sheet, but it sounds like there aren’t any unusual substitutions or chord changes in the form. One pain point I’m noticing three songs into the set is that, since the two lead voices in the MJQ are both fixed-pitch instruments, only Heath’s upright bass is able to land in the microtonal no-man’s-land of “blue notes.” And, given that he spends most of his time in a support role, he can’t slide or slur into notes very much, which means there’s a paucity of the “in-between” notes a guitarist, vocalist, or horn player would use in typically bluesy playing. Lewis and Jackson get around this — as all fixed-pitch instrumentalists do — by “brushing” or trilling between notes to approximate a bend, which starts to grate on my ear after the umpteenth time. Shoulda played guitar, my dudes. (Kidding!)
I will say that the variation in the structure of these songs goes a long way towards helping to avoid the “blues fatigue” I feel after, for example, an hour of Crossroads festival performances. To wit: “Ralph’s New Blues,” which opens with a series of tumbling figures that sound like Lewis and Jackson racing to make it to the bottom of a hill first. Kay’s solo, which Morgan’s liner notes inform me is a “comparative rarity on record,” is… fine, I guess? It’s admirably restrained but doesn’t take enough time to really stretch out into anything show-stopping. And shut my mouth, Heath’s solo here opens with some of those slides and slurs I was just talking about! Lewis and Jackson drop out for it, and I’ve biffed enough bass spotlights in my life to know that you cannot short-sell anyone able to string together a coherent solo without any harmonic support.
Side two opens with “Monterey Twist,” which is a nice change of pace for both for its brisk tempo and the fact that it’s a minor blues that isn’t “Mr. P.C.” That tune, which was John Coltrane’s tribute to bassist Paul Chambers, appeared on Giant Steps in 1959 and has become probably the go-to minor blues for jazzers. Consequently, I never want to hear it again in my life.
With its jaunty opening groove, “Home” is immediately reminiscent of the kind of stuff Cannonball Adderley was doing around this time and that means I LOVE IT. One thing that isn’t apparent at faster tempos and in “riffy” tunes like this one is this next fact I just learned from Wikipedia. Jackson apparently set his vibraphone’s oscillator (the device that rotates over the soundholes of the vibraphone’s vertical pitch tubes to create its distinctive *Aaron Neville voice* wah-wah-wah effect) “to a low 3.3 revolutions per second,” which gives his held-out chords that lovely, gentle, shimmering quality.
“Blues Milanese,” the aforementioned “not a blues,” opens with a nice little Heath figure. Unfortunately, ya boy does not have a particularly sharp transcribing ear, and I wasn’t able to find a lead sheet for this song, so I won’t be elaborating on how exactly it deviates from the form. I can tell you that it slows to a stop for for a really nice and all-too-short unaccompanied Lewis solo with some churchy moves that segues into his solo. The group also winds to a stop at the end of his solo to allow Heath to close out the song with his own showcase for his chef’s-kiss vibrato and gorgeous tone. (This record was engineered by Tom Dowd, who, as a bassist himself, could record the shit out of an upright bass.)
The crowd recognizes the opening figure to “Bags’ Groove” and reacts at the top of the tune, which practically qualifies as a riot for a Carnegie Hall audience of this era. One thing that Lewis mentions in the liner notes is the influence of Count Basie on the MJQ, and you can really hear it in the insistent little riffs he plays on this tune. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a misspent life in music, it’s that if you play something cool, you should probably play it four to seven more times.
And just over 41 minutes later, we’re done! Without having listened to a ton of MJQ, I can’t really say whether or not this is a must-have record of theirs — and with the focus on such a limited repertoire, I can’t imagine it is; I really would have liked a slow ballad at some point — but it’s a great way to spend a relaxed two-thirds of an hour with an iconic set of musicians.