Sound Check - Jack Cortner Big Band
by Doug Ramsey
Sound Check is the second big band recording in which Jack Cortner features Marvin Stamm’s trumpet and flugelhorn playing, but it is only the most recent product of their decades of collaboration and friendship. Cortner and Stamm first encountered one another in the early 1960s at Jim & Andy’s, the storied West Side bar that was hangout, refuge and surrogate booking office for scores of New York’s professional musicians.
By the time they met, Cortner’s calling had evolved away from the trumpet playing that had taken the recent Oberlin Conservatory graduate to New York in 1960. His composing and arranging skills put him in heavy demand on Broadway and in recording and broadcast studios, so he shelved his horn. However, as an admirer of superior trumpet playing, he frequently saw to it that Stamm was in the brass section for his projects.
Stamm became one of the most respected trumpet players in town, admired not only for the power and consistency of his section work but also for his creativity as an improvising soloist. As the years went by, he became a leader, and a clinician sought after because of his ability to fine-tune professional and student bands. For his guest appearances with big bands and symphony orchestras in the United States and Europe, Stamm often asked Cortner to write arrangements. He has fifteen Cortner charts in his big band book and seven in his symphony book, including a celebrated fantasy for jazz quartet and orchestra on themes by Duke Ellington. For a detailed account of Cortner’s and Stamm’s history together, see the notes for Fast Track (Jazzed Media 1023).
Cortner did not intend to do a sequel to Fast Track. As arranger, leader, producer, disciplinarian and father confessor to 23 musicians, he was ready to rest on his laurels. However, reviewers of that album were enthusiastic, and so was Marvin Stamm.
“Before the first one came out,” Cortner recalled, “Marvin was saying, ‘What are you thinking about for the second album?’ It’s like that old Broadway thing. If you write a Broadway show, the night before it opens you start writing the next show. So, Marvin was sort of doing that to me. And I said, ‘You mean featuring Marvin Stamm,’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’”
Stamm was not alone in wanting more of the satisfaction of playing Cortner’s music. As on Fast Track, the Sound Check musicians are among the leading artists in New York’s intersecting jazz and studio communities. Indeed, for the most part, they are the same players as on the previous CD, testimony to their eagerness to again work with Cortner and Cortner’s to have them back.
“They love playing Jack’s music because his orchestrations line up so beautifully,” Stamm said. “The charts feel good and sound good. So, everybody always looks forward to it and comes in with a wonderful positive attitude and really plays, giving it their all every time. I feel that the music and the arrangements are even more exciting than Fast Track. The guys really rose to the occasion. The rhythm section is just extraordinary; Riley and Anderson and Bill—and Jeffrey or Jay whenever there is guitar.”
Drummer John Riley, bassist Jay Anderson, pianist Bill Mays and guitarist Jeffrey Miranov are returnees. Jay Berliner is on guitar on three tracks. Mays echoed Stamm’s praise for the rhythm section.
“It’s like butter playing with Riley and Anderson,” he said. “They are something special. It probably comes from having worked in a lot of situations together. It’s just effortless soloing with them behind you.”
With the addition of Jay Berliner’s rhythm guitar on the album’s title tune, I wonder what Mays’ simile would be; warm butter, perhaps. Berliner backs him with half-subliminal Freddie Green down-strokes as Anderson and Riley generate ball-bearing smoothness and Mays touches the piano with lightness worthy of Count Basie. “I wasn’t trying to reinvent the blues,” Cortner said. “It’s just something for the band to get a good feel for, start the rehearsal with, get a good groove going. A sound check.”
Cortner’s, Mays’ and Stamm’s comments in separate conversations about “Cantaloupe Island” give an indication of their mutual regard and professional respect. Considering its decades-long status as a jazz standard, it is surprising that there seems to be no previous big band recording of Herbie Hancock’s jazz-rock classic. Cortner thinks that the dominance of Hancock’s piano vamp in his 1964 quartet recording (Empyrean Isles, Blue Note) makes arrangers shy away from trying to orchestrate the tune.
Mays said, “I loved playing “Cantaloupe Island” because Jack really got that vamp that Herbie wrote and incorporated it and was adamant about wanting me to play it exactly that way through the piece. And it worked great.”
Yes, it worked great, but Mays did not play the vamp throughout. Stamm described what happened in the studio.
“When we started to record, it was hard to get away from just the tune because the pattern repeats so much. So I turned to Bill and said, ‘Take me somewhere else,’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ And the next time we did a take, he came up with that alternative harmonic approach to it, where we really just took it out of key at the beginning of the solo. It was simple as that. We didn’t talk about anything. We’re so attuned to each other that things like that are almost instantaneous response, second nature.”
“I was listening to that,” Cortner said, “and thinking there’s no way in the world I could ever write anything like that. So, Bill’s not only a piano player. He’s a wonderful arranger as well.”
Alto saxophonist Jon Gordon solos on “Cantaloupe Island” and trades phrases with Stamm before the island and the performance fade into the Empyrean mist. Tenor saxophonist Dave Tofani has featured spots on “Yesterdays” and “It’s All Right With Me.” Trombonist Jim Pugh is another horn soloist, in one of his appearances beautifully expressing the melody of “Sometime Ago.” “Man, what a sound he gets,” Mays said.
Mays makes exceptional use of his own solo time on several tracks, capturing the mood created by Cortner’s arrangement and Stamm’s poignant flugelhorn solo in Ennio Morricone’s achingly beautiful theme from the motion picture Cinema Paradiso. Aside from those tunes and Cortner’s two blues compositions, the pieces are classics by Gershwin, Weill, Kern, Dietz, Porter, and Duke Ellington with Juan Tizol.
What Cortner wrote to support and complement Stamm in Ellington and Tizol’s “Caravan” helps to inspire one of the trumpeter’s most dramatic performances on record. Never an exhibitionist performing stunts in the stratosphere, Stamm chooses his high notes for substance, not spectacle. At the end of his magnificent solo on “Caravan,” he shows that when the setting is right and the notes make musical sense, he will reach for the stars, or at least a high F-sharp.
His old pal Marvin sums up what Jack achieves in these arrangements.
“He writes things the way he wants to write them, to express what he feels about the music. Jack knows how to capture what he feels and put it on paper. The band immediately senses the direction he wants to go, so he elicits the feeling he wants. The band is very sensitive to what he writes.”
So, too, are we listeners.
—Doug Ramsey
Doug Ramsey, a winner of the Jazz Journalists Association Lifetime Achievement Award, is the author of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He blogs about jazz and other matters at www.dougramsey.com