Audio : August, 1957
Charles A. Robertson

Jazz instrumentation has become so varied that there is little left in the way of surprises. Still, it may take considerable trial and error before a combination is found to suit the special talents of a musician. In the past few years, Jimmy Giuffre has developed a highly personal clarinet style, marked by a breathy tone and a subtlety of vibrato and dynamics, the values of which are easily obscured in the wrong framework. He seems to have found the right setting in this trio, where he has the good fortune to be complemented by a lyric guitarist in Jim Hall and a rhythmically secure bassist in Ralph Peña. All speak with an equal voice.

Further, thirty-six year-old Giuffre uses his growing talent as arranger-composer to aerate some murky corners of jazz. Seven of the nine selections are of his own composition, and are mostly a refreshing treatment of blues themes. The West Coast school is notable for the refinement of such materials into a bland, cerebral mixture. Giuffre reverses this trend by getting back and re-examining origins, allowing the springlike breeze of folk music and spirituals to blow an old-time flavor through his tunes.

The train theme is a recurrent one in folk music and jazz, from Meade Lux Lewis‘ Honky Tonk Train Blues, through Alabamy Round, to Nancy Whiskey‘s skiffle-group rendition of Freight Train. In his The Train and the River, he plays baritone, tenor and clarinet over the high-wheeling rhythms to make a lasting contribution to this literature. In Crawdad Suite and Two Kinds of Blues, he uses the device found in some spirituals of contrasting two different moods. In sum, the album is an appealing compilation of moods, arising from the fundamentals of jazz and permeating even the ballads This Is You, My All and That’s the Way It Is. Giuffre pencils a laconic set of liner notes, as direct to the point as one of his solos.

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Billboard : 05/20/1957
Spotlight on… selection

Most unusual, appealing jazz program, and it could sell up a storm. Trio is Giuffre (mostly clarinet, some tenor and bari), with Jim Hall, guitar, and Ralph Peña, bass. As leader says, it’s “folk-songy, bluesy, down-homey… natural.” It’s also soft, intimate and might easy to take. Could sell as mood music. Won’t blaze any new trails musically, but it won’t get anybody mad either. Try The Train and the River or Crawdad Suite

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 06/09/1957

Giuffre continues to mature in this new Atlantic set – the first he has made with his permanent group, consisting of Jim Hall on guitar and Ralph Peña on bass. To my mind, this is a much better album than even his last Atlantic release, Giuffre on Clarinet. Hall and Peña are just right for the Giuffre voicing and Giuffre himself provides variety of color by shifting from clarinet to baritone to tenor. Listen particularly to Two Kinds of Blues and Crawdad Suite to see how nicely contemporary jazz fits into the bluesy background from which it sprang.

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Saturday Review
Martin Williams : 06/15/1957

The group gets a remarkably dense and full texture, but Giuffre is still monotonously preoccupied with pianissimo. There is evidence of an unsuspected capacity for playing blues with an authenticity, but guitarist J. Hall‘s twangings at such times seem affected, as do some of the “lush” scorings.

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Saturday Review : 07/13/1957
“Jimmy Giuffre – Blues in Counterpoint” by Nat Hentoff

Jimmy Giuffre (pronounced “Jeu-free”) with characteristic lucid determination, is becoming a significant – though soft – individual jazz voice. He is also the freshest spirit to emerge thus far from the widely publicized but relatively conformist villages of modern jazz on the west coast.

At first survey, Giuffre is impressive in a protean sense, for he has established a reputation as a baritone and tenor saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger-composer, and leader; but his essential impact is as a writer and theorist.

As a player, Giuffre’s various instrumental skills are most communicative in his own compositions and as voices in his own unit. He is, however, an able jazzman in other situations, and is a particularly persuasive clarinetist. The Giuffre clarinet speaks almost entirely in the low and middle registers as he has not yet attained sufficient technical ease to move higher with swift assurance. (When the visiting French critic, André Hodeir, was informed that Giuffre would be teaching clarinet at the School of Jazz this August at Lenox, Massachusetts, Hodeir asked in mock innocense, “But who will teach the upper register?”)

The Giuffre clarinet, limited as it is in range, nevertheless represents the most intimate, pastoral sound the instrument has projected in jazz since the all too few times Lester Young played it in the late 1930s. But even on the clarinet, his best instrument, Giuffre is not a burning, plunging jazz improvisor of the stature of Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, or Zoot Sims.

Giuffre’s power is in his growing ability as a writer and group leader to create a strongly integrated original body of jazz material in which written and improvisatory lines are intertwined – nearly all of it suffused with a natural, folk-blues spirit quite unlike the approach of any of his contemporaries in the sophisticated modern jazz milieu. Giuffre’s folk-blues flavor is unique because within it, he has developed the most personal jazz language that is lyrically subtle, uniquely contrapuntal, oriented to contemporary harmonic developments, and propelled by rhythmic innovations of its own.

In appearance Giuffre is close to a prototype of a spare, laconic Texan. Born in Dallas thirty-six years ago, he was a clarinetist at nine and added tenor at fourteen. He was graduated with a Bachelor of Music Degree from North Texas State Teachers College in 1942. The school, directed by Gene Hall, is the only accredited college in the country to offer a four-year program of study in dance band music and jazz. Giuffre gained experience in the school orchestra and dance bands, and headed his own twelve-piece unit there in his senior year.

Upon being released form the service, Giuffre enrolled at the University of Southern California to obtain his master’s degree in music, but became strongly influenced instead by Dr. Wesley LaViollete, a classical composter and private teacher whose pupils have included other jazzmen, notably Shorty Rogers. Giuffre left USC and studied with LaViolette for many years.

His jazz career meanwhile was following familiar terrain. He arranged and played for Boyd Raeburn; worked and rehearsed with local bands in Los Angeles; played and wrote for Jimmy Dorsey; and in 1947, composed Four Brothers for Woody Herman. The work was written for three tenors and a baritone and helped more than any other piece to establish the influence among modern big bands of that particular reed section voicing. The piece itself, as French writer Guy Kopelowicz noted recently in Jazz-Hot, still sounds quite fresh and compelling ten years after its first appearance. (Ten years in jazz writing sometimes has a startling aging effect on material once thought perennially “modern.”) The original version of Four Brothers with Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, Stan Getz and baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff is contained in Woody Herman’s album, The Three Herds, Columbia CL 592.

For all their flowing, vigorous charm, Four Brothers, and further Giuffre arrangements and originals for Herman and other bands, were not especially distinctive. The works indicated that Giuffre was a considerably more than competent band scorer; but they also showed that he was not as personally inventive an arranger as, for example, Gerry Mulligan among his contemporaries. Giuffre was still finding his way.

After further experience with the bands of Buddy Rich, Woody Herman (playing as well as writing this time), Garwood Van and Spade Cooley, Giuffre settled in the Los Angeles area. He was with the dauntless Howard Rumsey All-Stars at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach from 1951-1953 during which time he began to appear frequently in the tiers of jazz albums being manufactured on the West Coast. From 1953 until he formed his present combo, Giuffre worked and recorded with Shorty Roger’s Giants and other units which were based in Los Angeles.

The slow, careful evolution of Giuffre as a markedly individualistic writer from this point on can, to some extent, be traced through a series of recordings that began in 1953. Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet recalls coming home from work near sunrise one night in 1953 to find Giuffre on his doorstep. Giuffre had just completed a fugue for jazz instrumentation and was so anxious to show it to a musician whom he respected that he had traded sleep for a reaction. This Fugue was recorded by Shelly Manne (Contemporary C2503) that year and underlines the linear preoccupation that continued to identify Giuffre’s writing. Also part of Giuffre’s maturation was his Evolution, recorded by him in 1953 with Teddy Charles (Prestige LP 7078); and an atonal Alternation contained in another Shelly Manne album (Contemporary C2511). “The composition,” Giuffre noted, “is contrapuntal, the harmonies being the result of the melodic lines… the bass, piano, and drums play melodies rather than a rhythmic beat.”

Giuffre’s first set as a leader was for Capitol in 1954 (Capitol T549); but it wasn’t until the second Giuffre Capitol collection, Tangents in Jazz, the next year that he began to be recognized as a strong, controversial musical personality whose ideas had begun to fuse into an unmistakable and newly challenging style. In the Tangents experiments, he was primarily concerned with making jazz “with a non-pulsating beat. The beat… is acknowledged but unsounded. The two horns are the dominant but not domineering voices. The bass usually functions somewhat like a baritone sax. The drums play an important but non-conflicting role.”

He had, for the time being, abandoned the “sounded beat”, he explained, “for clarity and freedom. I’ve come to feel increasingly inhibited and frustrated by the insistent pounding of the rhythm section. With it, it’s impossible for the listener or the soloist to hear the horn’s true sound, I’ve come to believe, or fully concentrate on the solo line. An imbalance of advances has moved the rhythm from a supporting to a competitive role… I think the essence of jazz is in the phrasing and notes, and these needn’t change when the beat is silent. Since the beat is implicit, this music retains traditional feeling; not having it explicit allows freer thinking…”

A conscious beginning in writing with a pronounced folk-blues quality can also be heard in the Tangents set in originals like Leprechaun (Capitol T634).

The next Giuffre album was on Atlantic, The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet (Atlantic 1238). It was more variegated in mood, richer in texture and more assured in attack than the previous two under his name. The first track, “a very slow blues, recorded in pitch dark with just clarinet and the sound of my foot tapping,” is succeeded by varying instrumentations and several moving studies in sonorities. There is a track on which the drummer only uses his fingers; several without drums at all; and more and more of the blues and folk feeling that has since come to dominate all his work.

This album also included further developments in Giuffre originals that were almost entirely written but which, when played by jazzmen, had an improvised feeling. Throughout the volume there is a pervasive softness that is surprisingly strong in retrospective effect. Giuffre notes in the liner essay: “It has been said that when jazz gets soft it loses its gusto and funkiness. It is my feeling that soft jazz can retain the basic flavor and intensity that it has at a louder volume and at the same time perhaps reveal some new dimensions of feeling that loudness obscures.”

Two further influences were to more directly shape Giuffre’s work. In September 1956 he heard vintage blues singer Joe Turner for the first time by means of Joe’s Boss of the Blues LP for Atlantic.

“What especially impressed me about Turner,” Giuffre continued, “is that he retained his personality through different kinds of material he sang. He wasn’t monotonous; I don’t mean that. But he was always himself. And I began to see that I, on the other hand, had been changing my personality all the time. If I were playing with a Basie-type group, I’d sound more like them, and the same with a bop unit. I was a little bit of Stan Getz and Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a thousand different things, depending on whom I was with. Now, the more I’ve come to absorb and develop this folk-blues feeling along with my own approach to counterpoint in playing and writing, I’m getting to be able to be myself nearly all the time, no matter whom I’m with. It’s been a revelation to me.

“My feeling about the blues and what I’m doing in jazz,” Jimmy explained, “is that there’s a way to make contact with the old blues and shake off thereby some of the clichés involved in being ‘modern’ and yet still have a modern sound to what you’re doing. I don’t know if modern is the exact word, but the world I mean is the opposite to ‘dated.’ I want to have the timeless quality of the blues and I want to use what has been learned in music since the blues began.”

“I can’t describe how I do it,” Jimmy went on, “but in a piece like Crawdad Suite (from Giuffre’s newest and most valuable album, The Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Atlantic 1254), I did make contact with the feeling of what I call the old blues. And in The Train and the River in the same album, I didn’t even know it was going to be called that. I actually started to write a three-part invention but it ended containing strong folk elements. In all my writing, what happens is that I get a figure, an idea, and I let it spin out as close to improvising as I can.

“The feeling of the blues,” Jimmy tried to clarify his terms, “is more than the music of the blues itself. It’s a personal thing that comes out of a man’s character. To be able to feel and play the blues, you have to have a straightforwardness, a down-to-earth way of being, and no pretentiousness. The blues, in essence, is a way of being. And for quite a while, those are the qualities of character that I’ve wanted to develop in myself. I think further that you can be that way and be from China. It’s not a way of being that’s limited to any one country or any one race.

“The blues,” Jimmy emphasized, “have a happy as well as a sad feeling, and they’re universal. There’s an equivalent of the blues everywhere in all folk music – Irish and Scotch and early English and Hebrew and Hungarian and Oriental. Toshiko Akiyoshi, the Japanese girl who came here to study jazz piano, said that my piece, The Quiet Time for Teddy Charles’ Tentet album (Atlantic 1229) sounds like Japanese traditional music and that the way I play clarinet sounds at times to her as if it had Japanese folk feeling.”

In addition to the rediscovery of the blues, another factor that has determined Giuffre’s present direction is the influence on him of chamber music. “Chamber music had appealed to me since college, but listening to several works in the past year or so suddenly showed me more of the way I wanted to go. There was the Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp and a set of Beethoven variations on an aria from Don Giovanni for two oboes and English horn. Also Hindemith‘s Kleine Kammermusik. I heard the possibilities of each instrument being so clear, of not material being wasted, of each instrumentalist being an individual and having an individual line to play. I also should say that I learned a lot from the linearly inclined jazz groups like Gerry Mulligan and the Modern Jazz Quartet although I had my ideas of how I wanted to write jazz before I heard them.”

The firmly identifying multilinear topography of all Giuffre’s work is based on a principle he learned from Dr. Wesley LaViolette that he terms “slow-motion counterpoint.” Giuffre defines the process: “I have found this technique, used to varying degrees, in the works of Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovitch, LaViolette, John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Jim Hall. The crux of this idea is the marked contrast of the melodies being used against each other. The result is a certain feeling of suspension, of dissonance if it’s handled right. In slow-motion counterpoint, for example, if one melody is an eight-note pattern that is changing notes often, the other melody changes notes much less often, perhaps one every four bars. And for rhythmic interest, the slow-changing line can be broken up by repeated notes and rests. A third line and possibly a fourth could be proceeding at other varying rates of speed simultaneously. In our present trio, while the clarinet is playing eighth notes, the bass might be playing whole notes and the guitar could be in between. They’re all coordinated so that you can hear every note each man plays.

“For the listener,” Giuffre feels, “the contrast between lines made possible by this approach provides the clarity that is necessary for him to be able to follow all the lines; and to a certain extent, the listener will have more time to absorb each harmonic feeling, because in my writing, the harmonies are the results of the lines rather than the lines being fitted to the harmonies.”

Giuffre’s approach also interweaves improvised with written lines. “We have sections where I write two lines and the third man improvises. I’m trying most of the time to avoid the soloistic jazz context in which each man blows freely and uses the background only as an impetus for his solo blowing. We do some of that, but we concentrate on each man listening to what everyone else is saying. If, for example, one of us has a solo, I may write a sort of pattern for the background men that sets a mood or a sound. The soloist begins to get into this pattern and the performance turns out to be a three-part sound. Or a pattern in the background may emerge so strongly that, let’s say, a bass line that was intended as background suddenly becomes the foreground line. Sometimes all the lines are ad lib, a more difficult challenge; but even in that case we try to retain the same collective approach.”

As Giuffre is devoted to writing as jazz expression, he was asked why he had decided to form a traveling group and open himself to the rigors and uncertainties of the road. He could probably support himself at home by writing and by studio and recording work. He has received commissions, one of which, Pharaoh, is contained in the Jazz and Classical Music Society’s Music for Brass (Columbia CL 941). Another, Suspensions, was one of six works commissioned by Brandeis University for two performances in June 1957 as part of the university’s Fourth Festival of Creative Arts, and recorded by Columbia.

Giuffre’s reason for continuing to play and travel is that “although I wanted to be just a writer, I began to see that the more I played jazz, the more I learned about writing jazz. I’m now certain that not only a jazz musician but a jazz writer has to play constantly. Maybe it was Confucius who said it, but there’s a line that applies to what I mean ‘Regularity is the secret of progress.’ And a jazz writer has to write out of his continuing experience as a jazz player.

“It seemed to me, then, that the closest to an ideal situation was to find a group with which I could play as I wanted, and as I wrote. I looked for the musician, not the instrument, in forming the trio. I mean that the idea of guitar and bass along with my own horns was not pre-set. I had already worked with Ralph Peña in the Tangents album. The trumpeter in that session, Jack Sheldon, couldn’t leave Los Angeles; and I couldn’t find many drummers who were interested in adapting to our use of the drum and who would travel. I had heard Jim Hall, and immediately liked what I heard, but was a first afraid of the electronic sound of the guitar. I could tell, however, from his playing and background that he’d fit, and he does manage to get less of an electronic sound than anybody I can think of.

“We’ve been together a few months now, and we’re beginning to develop an overall dynamics and sound. It’s the way we want to go. We don’t try to say that it’s the way everybody should go, because everybody has to go his own way.”

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Down Beat : 07/11/1957
Don Gold : 5 stars

The richly flowing imagination of Giuffre is demonstrated forcefully in this fine set. This is simple, direct, lucid jazz, presented with warmth, honesty, and a lack of pretentious devices. Here Giuffre’s lustrously unified trio presents the kind of music the group currently is presenting in person.

In Giuffre’s words, this LP is a “near equal mixture of writing and ad libbing… There is a folk-songy, bluesy, down-homey, old-timey, natural, funky air about all the tunes, especially the originals.” All the originals here are by Giuffre; he shared the writing of My All with Bob Russell.

Although there are no extended solos here (“we’ll reserve the extended solos for a future album”), there is a constantly profound, often charming, interaction within the group. Hall and Peña are first rate, in creating a meaningful ensemble sound or contributing a vital, appropriate solo, Giuffre continues to work expressively within certain technical limitations of each of the instruments. His writing and overall approach are more pertinent than the execution itself. In his own terms, he succeeds.

Giuffre plays clarinet on Blues, Crazy, All, and Crawdad; tenor on Song and That’s; baritone on Gotta and Voodoo, and all three instruments on Train. Gotta is a “short opener to set a happy note.” Blues illustrates the use of two interrelated moods, “slow and sad… fast and happy.” Voodoo is a minor mood developed by Peña. Hall leads through Crazy, taken medium-slow. All is delicate, melodic ballad. That’s is a series of solos, separated by a gospel-flavored theme. Crawdad, the longest selection, utilizes a blues theme and a folk song theme, climaxed by a combination of both. Train features Giuffre in clarinet, tenor, and baritone solos in a framework of spirited folk elements.

This is music of enduring value. As an indication of Giuffre’s constantly enlarging contribution to the growth of jazz, this LP is a valuable possession.

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Liner Notes by Jimmy Giuffre

THE TRIO
The instrumentation is the result of my forming a permanent working group. I consider the particular instruments of secondary importance to other factors, such as:

1. Our being able to communicate and live with each other personally and musically.
2. Our having respect for one another personally and musically.
3. All members desiring to play the same general type of material.

It is my opinion that any combination of instruments can make a complete musical expression. No instrument is non-expendable. There have been many groups without saxophone, clarinet, guitar, etc., and without piano, and without bass, and finally, without drums. This may be the first group to use a horn, guitar and bass with no drums.

In trying to secure a group, I found Jim Hall. I could tell by listening that he and I would agree musically. Ralph Peña and I had agreed long ago. Now, in my writing experience, and also playing, I have come to feel that three parts are perhaps ideal for spontaneous work, and also for balance and clarity. So, from all of this, I decided that this group just as is would be right.

THIS RECORDING SESSION
The main idea here is to present the trio doing the kind of material they are doing in person. My idea is to have a unified group rather than soloists with background. There is a lot of ensemble working and each man has abundant solo opportunity.

There is a near-equal mixture of writing and ad-libbing.

So as to present as much different material as possible, I limited the length of most of the ad-lib solos. The soloist gets a “nice helping,” as Pres would put it, but we’ll reserve the extended solos for a future album.

A certain mood seems to pervade the whole album. There is a folk-songy, bluesy, down-home, old-timey, natural, funky air about all the tunes, especially the originals. The Song Is You, My All, and Crazy seem to break this up a bit, but even there it can be found. This is the kind of mood and music that we find coming out of our minds and fingers at this time, so we’re doing our best to just let it get on to paper, and finally on to wax, as easily as possible, because this feels natural.

THE TUNES
Gotta Dance – a short opener to set a happy mood.
Two Kinds Of Blues – this tune has two different moods. One is slow and sad, the other is fast and happy. They both seem to be the blues, thus the title. The tune is quite free of tempo. We play this as we feel it, not necessarily sticking to a strict tempo, but somewhat like a folk-singer would sing.
The Song Is You – a bright tempo featuring tenor all the way. Some interesting background effects employing the tremolo.
Crazy She Calls Me – a medium-slow showcase for Jim Hall’s guitar. I’ve always liked the mood of this tune and it seems to fit the mood of this album. There are out-of-tempo sections here, too, featuring Jim’s gut-string style.
Voodoo – a medium tempo composition in minor spotlighting Ralph Peña’s bass. It opens with the three in unison, quite low. This is a powerful sound.
My All – a quiet, lyrical ballad featuring the clarinet. This is done in the out-of-tempo approach, much like a singer again.
That’s The Way It Is – a hand-clapping spiritual type of tune with a very happy mood. Each of the three gets a chance to speak. The theme is short and is brought back between each soloist.
Crawdad Suite – the longest composition of the album. It has two themes. One is pure blues, the other a folkish tune in a distant minor key. The contrast is interesting. The minor theme is quite free of tempo. In the coda, both themes are played together combining the two moods.
The Train And The River – I play baritone, tenor and clarinet on this. Each of the three solos in each of the three sections is in different keys. The material is a working of strong folk elements.

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Liner Notes by Gary Kramer

These comments by Jimmy Giuffre regarding the personnel and material in this LP were noted in pencil at random on a couple of sheets of ruled notebook paper, and forwarded to Nesuhi Ertegun to aid whomever was chosen to write the liner notes. As this LP goes into production, Jimmy has no idea that his “notes” have become the liner notes, and he won’t know until the first finished copy of the album reaches him. What has to be verbalized has been done by him with the kind of clarity, brevity and sincerity that is the trademark of his music.

If an outsider can be permitted some additional comment, it would only be to offer an appreciative word or two on the quality of Jimmy’s playing and writing in this LP. That is one thing he was too modest to do in his “notes.” Yet, Jimmy surely has one of his finest hours on records here. He does not measure his progress by a technical yardstick and does not strive for virtuostic flights. Jimmy is an innovator and much has been written about his contributions to clarinet playing style and to jazz composition, but this is secondary. It is the basic quality of his music, with its uncontrived simplicity and glowing inner feeling that sets Jimmy apart. To judge him by his own standards, he has succeeded here as in few other records, to present a world of psychological balance, proportion and deep-seated serenity in a highly personal and discriminating use of the vocabulary of modern music.