Billboard : 11/11/1957
Spotlight on… selection

A beautifully conceived, superbly executed taste of “traditional” jazz with a world of inventive modern flourishes by the Brookmeyer Quintet. Latter’s skill and dexterity on piano and valve trombone, Jimmy Giuffre‘s clarinet and Jim Hall‘s guitar work make this an artistic gem. Truckin’ is especially pleasing while Don’t Be That Way sells on the first sound. Must listening for collectors and buffs alike, with excellent cover appeal, too.

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Cashbox : 01/11/1958

The famous valve trombonist is also featured here playing the piano. Brookmeyer receives the assistance of such jazz mainstays as Jimmy Giuffre (clarinet, baritone and tenor saxes), Jim Hall (guitar), Dave Bailey (drums), and Joe Benjamin or Ralph Peña (bass). Santa Claus Blues, Don’t Be That Way, Honeysuckle Rose, Don’t Be That Way, are among the folk-blues items recorded. Top name value plus stellar sessions should make the waxing a long standing favorite.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : January, 1958

This quintet is essentially The Jimmy Giuffre Three, with the addition of drummer Dave Bailey and Bob Brookmeyer on trombone and piano, on a fertile expedition with some pre-1940 tunes. Ralph Peña of the Giuffre trio and Joe Benjamin divide the bass chores. But the idea for the album comes from Brookmeyer and much of the credit for its success belongs to him, for he brings to it a fund of emotion and an intuitive sense of what is right. He is able to return to fundamentals and a fresh approach on either instrument. That Giuffre is still feeling this way in this idiom serves to stimulate him, adding greatly to the interest of his playing. All of the numbers are not in a strict sense traditional, but the blues-based guitar of Jim Hall gives even the oldest more of a folk flavor than it enjoyed in earlier versions. Though the usual clichés are avoided, they come up with a few of their own, including a winning “Good evening, friends” ending which deserves some permanence, to Some Sweet Day.

Giuffre’s clarinet introduction to Santa Claus Blues is proof that he is an original voice. Brookmeyer works like a Trojan, contributing sorely needed dynamics and switching from trombone to piano. The dual track recording of Honeysuckle Rose is well managed. Other numbers are Louisiana, Truckin’, Jada, and Don’t Be That Way. Now all this unit requires is a cornetist like Doc Evans. Both traditionalists and modernists may find it controversial to the point of displeasure but, as it is likely to be the most discussed jazz record of the year, they can scarcely afford to ignore it.

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Berkeley Gazette
Cathy Furniss : 11/16/1957

A kind of bridging of the gap between the jazz of the past and the jazz of the day is achieved by Brookmeyer with Jimmy Giuffre, clarinet, baritone sax and tenor, Jim Hall, guitar, Dave Bailey, drums and [Artist978291,Joe Benjamin and Ralph Peña bass as they play some of the famous tunes of the Red Onion Jazz Babies.

They play them not as Armstrong or Oliver would but more as their own impressions of these performances, though in one number Brookmeyer states the 16-bar solo intro is exactly as blown by Oliver and that he’ll give 12 free albums to anyone who can spot a discrepancy. (Okay, you Berkeley experts, here’s your chance to win some free records!)

“The idea of the album began because I was attracted to the tunes themselves and to the tremendous pride and fire and ‘lust for life’ in the original performances of these songs,” says Brookmeyer. The material is such that it was possible to have emotional variety in the album, including two or three shouting things. The way I’d sum it up, I guess, is that all of these songs have for me a highly satisfying simplicity and purity of emotion.”

There is a kind of elegance to Santa Claus Blues, a lovely song with a gentle quality, Jada, Don’t Be That Way, Truckin’ a tune which Brookmeyer calls “fat, dumb, and happy too!”

There is a kind of an elegance this set, almost as if the men in the quintet were paying their humble respects to those great gentlemen, King Oliver, Louis, and Jelly Roll.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 11/24/1957

An old shoe can take on a warm shine if you give it enough tender care.

That treatment has been given to eight jazz shoes in a World Pacific album called Traditionalism Revisited, music by the Bobby Brookmeyer quintet.

The label name is a new one taken by Pacific Jazz, a company that makes few sour notes. The new title is part of a move to spread out the confines of west coasting on the jazz hill.

Brookmeyer uses both valve trombone and the piano in his work with drummer Dave Bailey, guitarist Jim Hall and Jimmy Giuffre on baritone and tenor sax and the clarinet. Joe Benjamin is the bassist on six of the eight tracks with Ralph Peña filling out the role. Giuffre, Peña and Hall, incidentally make up the trio that scored earlier this year for Atlantic Recording Corp.

This Brookmeyer album should please those who complain that they like jazz “but why don’t these modern jazz men play something I can recognize.”

These tunes they will recognize. Everybody knows Jada and the Benny Goodman classic Don’t Be That Way. Coziest sound is produced on Santa Claus Blues as Brookmeyer goes to the piano and Giuffre picks up the clarinet.

The other five: Honeysuckle Rose, Louisiana, Truckin’, Some Sweet Day and Sweet Like This.

Brookmeyer says he isn’t going to make bathtub gin, but the group he is forming now will be doing modern versions of tunes like these. This is an exciting album. The promise of more like it is one I hope Brookmeyer keeps.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 11/07/1957

On another new LP, Traditionalism Revisited, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer with four other top-flight modernists, including Jimmy Giuffre, essays a modern treatment of a number of jazz tunes from an older era. These include Jada, Sweet Like This (a King Oliver number) and Santa Claus Blues. Brookmeyer has stuck closely to the original structure of the tune in most instances and deliberately so. Nevertheless, it is an interesting album, though it really does not have the excitement one looks for from soloists as Giuffre and Brookmeyer. I hope, though, that they go on with this sort of experimentation. Some of the old tunes are marvels of melodic invention.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 11/10/1957

There are three records out of the current flood of fall releases that are particularly linked in that they demonstrate, together and singly, two of the most important tendencies in contemporary jazz.

The first of these is the tendency to use rhythm instruments (vibes, guitar or even bass) to carry the excitement of the horn part; the second is the way in which the sense of “swinging” is achieved by subtle variations in the dynamic relationships of the three, or four, rhythm instruments.

The first of these is the long awaited Jazz Showcase Album – the first LP by the new Mastersounds Quartet which has stirred up so much musical excitement here in the last three months (and which is currently appearing at the Off Beat). It would be too much, I think, to expect the particular sort of excitement which the Mastersounds initiates to come through on vinylite – that particular excitement which often finds a staid audience on its feet applauding at the end of, for example, Un Poco Loco.

Delicacy of Nuance

And the fact is that it doesn’t come through; what does come through is an astonishing subtlety, a delicacy of nuance which is often missed in the club appearances (though if you listen for it, it is present) and which rivals that of the Modern Jazz Quartet itself.

It should be needless to list the personnel: Buddy Montgomery on vibes; Richie Crabtree on piano; Benny Barth on drums and Monk Montgomery on that curious instrument which looks like an oversized guitar but is actually an electric bass.

Each man is a master in his own right and they play together as though each man was all the men. But they do sound better at the Off Beat than on record.

Difference of Feeling

The second LP is the Atlantic album of the Modern Jazz Quartet referred to here recently. The MJQ is voiced exactly the same as the Mastersounds (except that Percy Heath uses a regular bass) and, like the Mastersounds, it leans heavily upon delicacy of nuance – the most careful shading of dynamic relationship between the four instruments (each of which is, essentially, rhythm).

Yet it is almost an education in jazz to play these two records (or selected tracks) one after the other and see how different is the “feeling” of each. It is this “feeling” which is jazz and it is these subtle differences which are responsible for the fact that every performance of an old tune results in a new composition.

Curious Division

There is a curious division within the MJQ album, also. The first side is very cool, colorful but abstract; on the second side the quartet swings like mad without either raising its voice of increasing its tempo. I suspect that this division is intended to prove something (the MJQ being the most cerebral of artists) but I am not sure what.

Or, on second thought, perhaps it is meant to prove that even the most modern jazz has its roots in the traditional feelings of the past. If so, it is ultimately connected with the third album: Traditionalism Revisited with the Bob Brookmeyer Quintet. Here Brookmeyer, who was one of the coolest of the cool school, goes back and plays some of the old warhorses of the Dixieland days, not as they sounded then, but as they sound now to very modern musicians (Giuffre, Jim Hall, Dave Bailey, Joe Benjamin, Ralph Peña).

Bridging Of Gap

The result is neither a “stunt” nor the sort of slavish imitation that Turk Murphy indulges in; it is, on the contrary, a complete bridging of the gap between the jazz of the past and the jazz of the future.

Every track in this set is memorable but particularly so is Truckin’ for Jim Hall’s wonderfully clean guitar work, for Brookmeyer’s real crazy piano (he was a pianist before he took up trombone) and for the startling “bass vibes” vibrato which Hall and Peña get. Nobody has ever done it quite like this before.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 11/30/1957

Several of us who write in this field have been anxious to have the more gifted modern jazz talents pay a lot more attention to the huge repertory of traditional American popular music. It seems paradoxical, although there is strictly no reason why it should be so, that young players now in their twenties or early thirties should have little or no idea of the wealth of popular composition which was produced before World War II. The valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, who has an acute sense of the past, has assembled a crack group for a venture called Traditionalism Revisited, the other men being Jimmy Giuffre, clarinet, baritone and tenor saxes; Jim Hall, guitar; Dave Bailey, drums; and Joe Benjamin or Ralph Peña, bass. They present, among other numbers, Louisiana, Truckin’, Jada, Don’t Be That Way, and Honeysuckle Rose. Their approach to these tunes should offer no difficulty whatsoever to traditionally adjusted ears; it is inventive, refined, thoroughly winning music.

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Down Beat : 12/12/1957
Ralph J. Gleason : 3.5 stars

This is a project dear to my heart, the taking of older jazz tunes and jazz-associated tunes and allowing them full scope in the hands of modern musicians. I have often wondered why this has not been done before, and it may be that it simply won’t work, for some arcane reason known only to jazz mystics.

This album, which is so very well played from start to finish that it beggars description, somehow misses in its attempt to make interesting modern performances from tunes dating back to the genesis of jazz. There is a marked lack of excitement for me here; a blandness that is relieved now and then by bright moments, such as Brookmeyer‘s inspired duet between trombone and piano (one hand on each, apparently) in the final track, and the lovely piano and guitar chorus in track 2. But by and large I have, in repeated playings, failed to be moved.

The selection of tunes, incidentally, includes ones at least which distinctly dates me when I am forced to report that to consider Don’t Be That Way a traditional tune shocks me.

I do think, incidentally, that Dick Bock, Brookmeyer, and everyone concerned with this album should be credited with courage and vision and urged to continue such experiments. It may even be that my own ears, which are conditioned to the sharper sounds of a trumpet and/or a more positive clarinet line in traditional tunes, have betrayed me here. But I don’t think so. Something either went wrong or wasn’t here in the first place.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

It appears to me that the title of this album more accurately refers to some of its likely listeners than to the participants. Bob Brookmeyer in particular has no need to “revisit” traditionalism since he has ben an empirical traditionalist from his beginnings as a jazz maker. He has been a traditionalist in the sense that he has absorbed, tested, and selected from the whole reservoir of autobiographies in sound that is the jazz language those elements he felt relevant to his own experience in living and in telling his story in jazz. He has listened and imagined farther back than Jelly Roll Morton and beyond Charlie Parker. He has not limited himself to any one era, “school,” or attitude, preferring to filter all of jazz through his emotions rather than remain a parochial hipster.

It is palpably true that he is revisiting several songs in this set that are associated with older players and previous decades. His interpretation of these secular jubilees – like Some Sweet Day and Sweet Like This – will also be a source of renewing affection to those collectors who suddenly will remember that they remember the original versions by the Red Onion Jazz Babies and King Oliver.

These collectors will indeed be “revisiting” traditionalism in that they will be hearing how a contemporary can make this vintage material personally, freshly meaningful without distorting or diluting the spirit of the originals and without pitifully trying to copy the letter of these originals.

There will, however, be a large (it is hoped) section of the younger jazz audience who will be visiting both the tunes and, in part, the echoes of the jazz heritage of twenty and thirty years ago for the first time through these recordings. It is a saddening fact that the majority of each new generation of jazz listeners begins with the present as if there had been no past. Most of the current, newly baptized congregation for Brubeck, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Stan Kenton, and J.J. Johnson are amiably ignorant of Freddie Keppard, Jimmy Harrison, Tommy Ladnier, Pete Brown and even the Louis Armstrong who created before Joe Glaser. It is as if – by their count – jazz began with bop, except perhaps for the footnote to timelessness that is Count Basie.

I hope that those of the unhistoried who enjoy this volume will be curiosity-led to some of the original records that influenced Brookmeyer in his choice of and approach to the repertoire of Traditionalism Revisited. I do not by any means advocate their expanding energy on those lapidary contemporary “revivalist” groups like Turk Murphy‘s who are honestly and stolidly and grotesquely trying to bring back to exact corporeal life a Lazarus whose soul has never died but whose body was, after all, his body and cannot be entered into again by Turk.

I cite Turk not for any ad hominem purposes, for he is a candid, altogether warm and honorable human being. I cite him in contrast to Brookmeyer because the latter’s traditionalism is viable and deeply helpful to his discovering and sustaining his own individual speech. Turk’s approach, because it ignores decades of actuality in jazz and in the life of this country since the days of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, is artificial, sterile, and leads to the deadening of the musical personalities of his acolytes. Brookmeyer, as noted before, has opened himself to jazz of all eras; and when he returns to the material of another time and place, he does so as a musician fully aware (however disapprovingly in several respects) of the working gestalt of the year in which he is presently functioning. He is not a jazz archeologist; he knows and uses the tradition of the jazz language to find and express more of the inside of himself as of now.

“Of course jazz is an art!” he told a reporter for the British Melody Maker while in England on a tour with Gerry Mulligan. “And I don’t just mean modern jazz. Guys like Sleepy John Estes, Sidney Bechet and those boys. Remember the Mezzrow-Bechet records? The feeling they had for each other’s playing? Well, that’s one of the timeless things in jazz. Gerry and I are doing the same thing in a different way.”

The sustained quality of reciprocal understanding and mutual feeling so important in Brookmeyer’s conception of the way jazz should be played exists in this recording. I feel, in deeper degree than in most new issues of the past few years. The other horn, Jimmy Giuffre, is also a musician who found more of himself as he learned more of where he came from. The same is true of guitarist Jim Hall, a regular member of The Jimmy Giuffre Three. The plays in the rhythm section are all familiar with the needs and beliefs of modern traditionalists. Joe Benjamin has been a colleague of Brookmeyer in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Dave Bailey is Mulligan’s present drummer (Mulligan thoroughly qualities as a modern personal traditionalist), and bassist Ralph Peña is the third member of the Giuffre Three.

Brookmeyer explained the genesis of the album one afternoon with an LP of Johnny Hodges reissues floating in the background. “I’d heard Jimmy’s trio, been attracted, and wondered how they would treat these songs. I played those of the original records I had for them – the Red Onion Jazz Babies, the Louis Armstrong and the King Oliver among them. They reacted enthusiastically to some and quizzically to others, but when we started working on the songs, they cam to feel them all. I think one factor in their delay is accepting some of them was that the old recordings have often to be listened to a number of times, since the tune and other things get covered up by the poor recording quality of the tune.

“The idea of the album,” Brookmeyer continued, “began because I was attracted to the tunes themselves and to the tremendous pride and fire and ‘lust for life’ in the original performances of these songs. I feel they all fit together because they have – let me find a phrase Bill Russo would use – a linear empathy. I’ll show I’m intellectual too. The material is also such that it was possible to have emotional variety in the album, including two or three shouting things. The way I’d sum it up, I guess, is that all of these songs have for me a highly satisfying simplicity and purity of emotion.”

On Sweet Like This, Brookmeyer couldn’t resist being a literalist of the imagination, although in a somewhat different sense than Marianne Moore‘s use of the term. In the original recording, after a four-bar introduction, the alto and trombone split a sixteen-bar chorus, playing around the melody. Dave Nelson, King Oliver’s nephew, then takes a twelve-bar trumpet solo on the blues. “It’s a perfect blues solo,” Brookmeyer adds, “a song in itself, like a lullaby.” Oliver follows “very proud and harsh” with a sixteen-bar solo exactly as blown by Oliver and he is followed by Giuffre playing the Nelson solo, also note-for-note. (The order, in short, is reversed.) “The solos are so exactly those of Oliver and Nelson,” Brookmeyer comments, “that we will give twelve free albums to anyone who can spot a discrepancy.” (He didn’t specify whether he was speaking for Dick Bock, or just for himself and Giuffre.) The track ends with improvised solos by Brookmeyer and Giuffre and an out chorus on which Giuffre states the melody directly for the first time in the performance and Brookmeyer plays around him.

“One other place,” Brookmeyer explains, “where I felt we had to follow part of the original was in Some Sweet Day. In the original, Louis played the last chorus above the band and that became the only thing possible for our first chorus.”

Of the other tracks, Brookmeyer’s comments are: Truckin – “the tune has an airy quality and yet is fat, dumb, and happy too;” Louisiana – “one of the shouters, it really became a rout; Don’t Be That Way – “it’s very simple and plain, a good time to freshen your drinks and talk about the two tracks that came before; Santa Claus Blues – “the original record was all ensemble. It’s a lovely song with a gentle quality. Jimmy plays the melody very simply and the treatment as a whole is as quiet and spare as possible.”

Brookmeyer, who was born in Kansas City in 1929, took up clarinet in school, then trombone, and studied piano at the Kansas City Conservatory. “At one time, when I was eighteen or nineteen, there was a weekly radio program in Kansas City that played a lot of old music, and I soaked it up. I came up too with Miff Mole as an influence around 1942-43 along with other Dixieland groups. Count Basie had been the first sound in jazz I had heard that was meaningful to me; that was around 1940. Well, along with Mole, an early influence was J.C. Higginbotham, Dicky Wells was another, and Jack Teagarden was very important.” (Annotator’s note: listen to the Brookmeyer introduction to Some Sweet Day.)

“Bill Harris has influenced me more than anyone,” Brookmeyer told the Melody Maker. “Then (in addition to the others named), Earl Swope. I’m very fond of Dickenson too. He’s sort of a shaggy dog trombonist. J.J. Johnson. Marvelous!”

Of Harris, he later told another interviewer: Harris is really an old time trombone player, tailgate-style, with a different emotion behind it.”

“My style,” Brookmeyer went on, “is composed of everything I’ve heard that I’ve liked, and even, I’m afraid, some things I haven’t liked. There’s also been a big folk song influence in what I’ve been doing, another reason I was so happy to play with Jimmy Giuffre. We’re mutual admirers. By folk song, I mean old blues and spirituals, including Homer Rodeheaver, and Jimmy Rushing. I’d call Rushing folk.”

“In the past two or three years especially,” Brookmeyer says, “now that I’ve settled down in my playing, all this interest in the past and in the folk influence has become reactivated.” In his new group, being formed as of this writing, Brookmeyer intends to make material like the songs in this album a basic part of his repertoire. “I’m going to start doing more research. I don’t mean I’m going to make bathtub gin, but I’m going to listen and find more sheet music. There are a few readily available sources like the Record Changer Press, which has folios of Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson music, and Riverside Records, which has a strong reissue catalog. In fact, at the present time, I’m not too interested in writing original material for the new group. I want to go more into tunes like these. They’re all current and attractive to me. I’m not afraid of being called retrogressive. Music can be like love and painting. Just because a song and spirit have been around a while doesn’t mean it’s diminished in value. The repertoire as a whole that the new band plays will be selected, as were the members for this album, on the basis of the empathy between the tunes. It will all have to belong together. We won’t be changing coats between sets and coming back a new band.”

A note may be necessary with regard to the background of the piano played by Brookmeyer on some of the tracks. His early jazz apprenticeship was more as a pianist than as a trombonist. After being released from the army in 1952, he played some piano with Tex Beneke, Ray McKinley and Claude Thornhill (second piano) before playing in Woody Herman‘s trombone section for a brief time in 1953 and then joining Stan Getz on the same instrument, at which point trombone became his primary horn. “In fact,” he looked back for Steve Voce of the Melody Maker, “I was pianist with Pee Wee Russell‘s band. Now he is a musician – a sort of prehistoric Lester Young.

He also told Voce why he had chosen valve horn: “I found the slide instrument lacked the passion of the valve. And it’s easier to say the things I want to say with trumpet fingering. The positions on the slide aren’t half so accurate, and this way I can play what I like without having doubts about finding the technique to say it. I can’t say I’m very fond of any of the jazz valve trombonists around today. Brad Gowans was great, but there’s so little of his recorded work available. Most of the contemporary guys sound too much like slide men trying to play valve, which is what they are. Whatever instrument you play, you must have a passion for it, and you must play it passionately. Even if you aren’t good and keep making mistakes, you must have that passion.”

And there is a further passion possessing the most indelible jazzmen that has been a corollary to their passion for their horns. It is the passion of conviction and pride in their roots as jazzmakers.