Dizzy Gillespie and company perform Blue 'n Boogie, from 1945. “Company” includes Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), Frank Paparelli (piano), Chuck Wayne (guitar), Murray Shipinski (bass), and Irv Kluger (drums). Diz, as always, is great, but I found Paparelli's piano solo to be particularly intriguing.
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Yes Paparelli has that postwar light touch that Nat Cole & later Ahmad Jamal would make hits with, and a really fine solo. His comping is really distinctive too, a style so familiar now but must have sounded revolutionary then. He must have got it from his formal training in musical dynamics, and I wonder if he introduced it to jazz?
I see they also wrote Night in Tunisia together.
Frank is one of those missing links in jazz genealogy we rarely hear about:
http://www.frankpaparelli.com/bio.htm
It says by the 1960s he gave it away and became a Civil Servant, but had heart trouble and didn't live much longer. Reminds me of Bobby Darin, another genius and consumate master with a short life.
Ahmad Jamal's hugely influential 1950s recordings sounded so fresh and new:
https://youtu.be/ZmvwCTMO1Lg
but now I can hear how he extracted his sound from Frank Paparelli, although they say he was influenced by Nat Cole (Route 66).
Jamal's version of Old Devil Moon always reminds me of the 50s:
https://youtu.be/I9OdS0eO71c
Yet he added little except the opening chromatic figure and a a new 'cool' restraint. Mostly he stripped the music down to bare essentials. The public loved it, but the musicians must have hated it at first and many could not make the jump. Sinatra caught the new cool vibe though and rode the wave to new popularity.
Great info, Bruce, thanks!
Damn, I was going to say that 1945 piano sounded rather 60's ish but Bruce
sure covered that. Now I have to research Bobby Darin.
To me, one of the most interesting things about bop and proto-bop and modern jazz as it developed in the 1950s and early 1960s is that the ear, accustomed to follow a melodic line, anticipates a certain progression or note, but the soloist frequently does something completely unexpected. It can be a little jarring, at first, might even sound like the musician has hit a "clinker", but then you keep listening and you discover that that's exactly the way it should be, the sound is whole, the phrasing complete.
I think Thelonius Monk took that as far as it could go, and they had to put 'soul' back into it to not lose the public. 'Soul' which was really an infusion of church gospel music - Monk was kind of a dead end. 'Wrong notes' weren't the problem though - Monk was too aloof, people needed to feel it.
Even Coltrane at his wildest so called 'avant garde' was just blowing the kinds of sounds the singers make when they are singing 'in the Spirit' at a Gospel meeting. It's all variations on blues and gospel, as Jamal found when he stripped all the pretty stuff off 'Old Devil Moon' and gave it a driving beat (literally a beat for driving down the highway as everyone was doing by the 50s).
Bobby Darin really had soul in his singing too, a sense of how to make a song hit your emotions, and he had the technical ability to arrange and produce a song to maximum effect whether it was big band, pop, country or rock in his final years. He encouraged Roger McGuinn to stick to 12 string for example, which led to the Byrds; and I was not surprised that Darin was the one who introduced the song Danke Shein to Wayne Newton! He also helped Linda Ronstadt stand out as a star. Darin's song 'Things We Used to Do' was one of my favourites as a kid - which dates me.
There are jazz nerds who wish the music stayed intellectual, but I think they don't get it - jazz is for sharing.
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