Billboard : 04/13/1957

Trigger Alpert, a fine swing-era bass man and all-around popular chap, has his first disk as leader, with support from such as Zoot Sims, Tony Scott, Joe Wilder, Al Cohn, Urbie Green and Ed Shaughnessy. Arrangements are by Scott, Marty Paich and Dick Hyman. With the exception of Scott’s warm, soulful chart on the ballad I Don’t Want to Be Alone Again, the sound is conventional West Coast, with more reading than blowing. Still it’s tasteful thruout, with some fine off-beat show tunes included for the “smart” set. Names will help sell it.

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Audio Magazine
Charles A. Robertson : May, 1957

The Glenn Miller bass from 1940 on through the Army band, Trigger Alpert has settled down to studio work in recent years. The virtues of allowing such a respected sideman to program and take charge of a session are evident in the pains taken to secure eminent personnel and arrangements of more than momentary value.

One of Alpert’s ideas was to use only bass and Ed Shaughnessy, drums, in the rhythm section. Arrangers Tony Scott, Dick Hyman, and Marty Paich have written to give him considerable solo room. Trigger Happy by Scott and his own Trigger Fantasy are showcases for the instrument.

The seven standards are all unhackneyed and are further enlivened by the doubling done by the reeds. Scott plays clarinet and tenor; Zoot Sims, tenor and alto; Al Cohn, tenor and baritone. Joe Wilder, trumpet, and Urbie Green, trombone, complete the smooth-working septet, sparked by the happy sound of Alpert’s walking, bottom bass. Recorded by Reeves Sound Studios.

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Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, IN)
Jane Allison – 07/28/1957
This Indianapolis-born bass fiddle player is the acknowledged tops in the purveying of “intellectual” jazz

For a fellow who started out to play violin, switched to trumpet, and now is a student of piano, Herman Trigger Alpert is a great success as a bass fiddle player.

Frank Sinatra thinks Trigger’s the best, insists on him for every record. The late Glenn Miller thought so, too, selected him for his famed Army Air Corps band after he’d received concurring opinions from such jazz connoisseurs as Woody Herman and Benny Goodman, and privately done a check on the Trigger past to be sure that here was no drunk, dope or libertine to be mistakenly incorporated into his star-spangled international performing group.

Aces he is, too, with Garry Moore, the “living doll of a man” for whom seven years ago Trigger gave up 20 other weekly shows such as Your Hit Parade, the Jack Benny Show, etc., in order to appear daily with the popular CBS television star.

And aces he obviously is with the thousands of jazz joy-hounds who collect Trigger Alpert recordings, the latest and possibly the best of which is Trigger Happy, a recent Riverside release featuring the Hoosier bass fiddle player in an all-star group of his own selection, including Tony Scott, Zoot Sims and Joe Wilder, performing such off-beat numbers as Tranquilizer, I Wish I Were In Love Again, and Trigger Fantasy.

In a word, Trigger Alpert, Indianapolis born and reared, is now, has been, and probably will go right on being, in the opinion of experts, just about the best bass fiddle purveyor of “intellectual jazz” around.

Incidentally, Trigger is this guy’s proper name not a nickname. Trigger was his mother’s surname. But it has been both lucky and handy to him as a musician’s moniker.

“Intellectual jazz” is, according to Trigger, the kind of jazz he both prefers to listen to and to play. It’s the jazz that comes from small “combos,” performed by musicians who are not static, who are neither fanatically devoted to the past, nor any other precise form of jazz. They are musicians who are possibly still studying ways to improve, and who are at least open-minded enough to remain protean through any fad or phase of music, and to go on changing and challenging the new from year to year.

Incidentally, that word “static” is no word to be used in connection with Trigger Alpert during any one of his past 38 years.

Indianapolis provided him an instrumental proving ground and he took full advantage: violin in Arsenal Technical High School orchestra, trumpet in the Shortridge High School band. But in the latter, he had a kind of no-hits, no-runs, no-errors score with Bob Schultz, band leader. “You’re just not a trumpet natural,” he told Trigger, and then, on hunch, strongly recommended him to the bass fiddle.

So, Trigger stopped going to Chicago for his trumpet lessons, and turned to bass fiddle study with the Siegel brothers, both members of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Here, the reverberations between Alpert and instrument seemed to be good, although they did nothing to quiet the anxieties of the young student’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Alpert of 2824 Park Avenue, who yearned for a classical violinist in the home, and viewed with horror the possible downward path a jazz musician might tread.

Within a year, however, the 17-year-old bass viol tyro became professional, signing on with a band in Edinburg, Ind., while he had but one semester to go in high school.

Cocky Robins, an Indiana University band leader heard him play, and signed him up for his own orchestra, arranging with Shortridge that Trigger could finish his credits at Bloomington High School, graduate from Shortridge, and matriculate at I.U., practically simultaneously.

He spent two years with Cocky and a summer or so with Harold Cork’s Indiana Roof Ballroom Band and then Frankie Trumbauer, having caught the Trigger bass on several trips through Indiana, invited him up to go to New York to make records. But he let Trigger, his vocalist, “Her Nibs, Miss Georgia Gibbs,” and the rest of the group sag into inactivity.

This was a blow. For one thing, coming to New York and thereby leaving college, had been in direct violation of the wishes of Trigger’s parents. And secondly, Trigger had no means of support. It took six months to get a musicians’ union card. Trigger solved the problem with disarming directness.

He wrote to his parents and told them the truth, but told them he also was resolved to stay in New York and get his union card. Gallantly, they responded with a small weekly maintenance sum. He moved into a veritable dump on West 52nd Street, with four or five other impoverished musicians, and by eating Spanish rice every night, managed somehow, to live through the next three months.

At that point in the waiting period, the union would allow him to play a job if he could get one. And he got one. A trumpet player with Ben Bernie told Alvino Ray, whose band was then playing at the Biltmore Hotel (featuring Buddy Cole on drums and Spike Jones on banjo) about him, and Trigger was soon added to the roster.

Three months later, just before he got his union card, he went back to Indianapolis to help his parents celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Upon his return (broke) to New York, he learned that Benny Goodman (whom he remembered seeing once at the Biltmore) had apparently told Glenn Miller that Trigger Alpert was a very fine bass fiddle player, and for the previous 10 days, Miller’s manager had been trying desperately to locate the Hoosier performer.

After Trigger successfully had passed the Miller morals check, he stayed with Glenn until the war caught up with them all. Following the making of the movie, Sun Valley Serenade, which starred the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Trigger returned to Fort Benjamin Harrison for Army induction. Subsequently he organized a service band that played over WIBC and all over town. In this manner, he ran across, on the arm of a friend, a tall, blonde Shortridge High School senior for whom he shortly forgave the Army for calling him out of New York. Her name was Constance Miller.

The next year, when Glenn Miller had formed his now legendary Army Air Corps band and arranged for Trigger’s transfer into it. Connie, then 18, joined him at Yale University (where they were preparing to go overseas) and they were married. But so abrupt had been their decision to wed and so injured were the feelings of both families about being left out of the proceedings, that a week later Connie and Trigger were remarried in the Yale Chapel in the presence of both families. For that wedding, Glenn Miller was best man, both Tony Martin and Johnny Desmond sang Dearly Beloved, and as the doubly married pair drove off on their second honeymoon in a car neatly decorated with “Is this trip necessary?” signs, the Glenn Miller Orchestra played Sunrise Serenade.

After the war, Trigger decided to turn down Woody Herman’s offer to join his band, in favor of settling near New York, thereby cutting out the musician’s grueling ordeal of travel and one-night stands. Currently, he and Connie reside in a vast, one-time artist’s studio of a house near Darien, Conn., which they share with their three instrument-playing children and a non-musical cat and dog.

Since Trigger’s parents long since have relaxed into pleasure over their son’s success, how does Trigger, himself, feel about his own youngsters? Billy, at 13, plays drums; Kippy, 10, plays trumpet, and Betsy, 6, has her eye on the bass fiddle.

“My advice to any aspiring musician, is this,” says Trigger Alpert one of the most phenomenally successful jazz musicians of our day, “be a surgeon!”

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Jazz Journal
Jack Maher : May, 1957

Starting from the bottom and working up, this date would seem to have been conceived as basically rhythmic; the pianoless type of section, with Eddie and Trigger centering within themselves the complete propulsion and foundation for all the blowing to come. The arrangements here are by Dick Hyman, Marty Paich and Tony Scott, and, as an entity in themselves, are pretty much the loosely swinging type of framework used so much today.

Starting from that bottom Trigger and Eddie form a solid base, although at times, as will happen, especially on up-tunes, like Trigger Happy, their enthusiasm destroys some of the hoped-for unity. Solowise, there’s good news from Zoot on both tenor, and, on the aforesaid Happy and Fantasy, that same sprawling, loose-limbed type of alto sound that distinguishes his tenor playing. Joe Wilder shows taste and fullness of tone, while Tony Scott skids and slides in that distinctive clarinet style that he has developed.

CODA: Primarily a blowing date, with appropriate and expected soloing from all those concerned and, for the most part, solid rhythmic support.

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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 04/21/1957

Some toe-tapping happy numbers from a septet led by Trigger Alpert, a bassist with a fine beat who spent years with Glenn Miller and briefer stays with Woody Herman and Benny Goodman. His LP associates are the superlative trumpeter, Joe Wilder; poll winning clarinetist Tony Scott, who also blows tenor on two tracks; Zoot Sims, on alto and tenor; Al Cohn, baritone and tenor; trombonist Urbie Green, and drummer Ed Shaughnessy. (There’s no piano.) The 10 selections include some seldom heard show tunes. Ex-Oaklander Marty Paich did four of the arrangements.

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Down Beat : 06/13/1957
Nat Hentoff : 3.5 stars

If this LP weren’t so chart-happy, it could be an outstanding addition to the catalog. The musicianship of all seven is superb with Trigger and Shaughnessy laying down a formidable, pianoless, big-sounding, firmly pulsing beat. The solos by all are consistently excellent. But it was Riverside’s—or someone’s—unwise idea, as it turned out, to commission four Dick Hyman and four Marty Paich arrangements. There are also two by Scott which are quite stimulating, both being more of an evolving whole and yet less in the way of the soloists than the others. His are the flying Trigger and the envelopingly relaxed Alone Again.

There are choice voicings and other skillful devices in several of the Hyman and Paich charts, but as wholes, they appear to me to be more cleverly factitious than deeply, freshly felt. I’d rather hear longer solos than this kind of writing that really doesn’t say anything much. This is not to question the thorough professionalism of both writers, who have written well elsewhere, but I don’t feel they’re particularly incandescent in their work here.

Trigger deserves this first LP-as-leader, but he would have been better served by more open spaces. The LP however, is recommended because of the solos and because Trigger is so fine a bass player.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

The most immediately noticeable reason for feeling excited about this LP is spelled out by the personnel listing above. For this is surely one of the most impressive collections of sheer jazz talent assembled in a recording studio in quite some time. More than that, all this talent fitted together into a smooth-working unit (which is not automatically the case with “all star” groups) and, supplied with material by three highly skilled modern jazz arrangers, has produced some remarkably happy music.

The man initially responsible for all this is Trigger Alpert, long recognized as a sure and sensitive bass player. Trigger’s idea was for an album that would avoid the rather self-conscious and somber aspects of some of current jazz. Emphasizing sturdy, unhackneyed standards, he wanted to create music that would be (to use a couple of overworked adjectives that still describe very basic functions) funky and swinging. And he wanted to achieve this by rounding up some of the best musicians and arrangers available.

It sounded promising, although we didn’t anticipate such a staggeringly first-class group. But Trigger had no trouble rounding up exactly the men he wanted. By the simple trick of being both a superior musician and a nice guy, he has made a lot of friends and also earned the respect of many (such as Zoot Sims and West Coast arranger Marty Paich) to whom he was only a name.

One of Trigger’s key ideas for this project involved using only bass and drums as the rhythm section. His feeling for pianoless jazz stems from the days when, playing theater dates with big bands, he would get together with some of the horns for dressing room jam sessions between shows. However, it wasn’t until he heard the first Gerry Mulligan Quartet sides (a “most profound musical experience”) that Alpert thought seriously of recording with such a set-up.

Trigger points out that he has no desire to work this way with regularity; it’s just that this is one offshoot jazz direction he finds interesting and important. Playing without guitar or piano, he feels freer, and able to add more to the overall band sound, to really lay down the strong, walking bass and long sound for which he has always aimed ever since first hearing Jimmy Blanton (whom he knew and admired deeply) back at the start of their careers.

Although the bass-drums set-up leaves him with more solo room, for Trigger the primary role of the bass remains accompaniment: “I dig lots of bass players as soloists, but my biggest charge is from hearing the bass as a happy, walking, bottom instrument.” And that’s exactly the sort of bass to be heard on this recording, for which we should all be happy.

Some Notes on the Personnel:

Trigger Alpert, born in Indianapolis in 1916, started on trumpet and claims he was so bad that the leader of his high school band suggested the switch to bass. Within a very short time he landed his first professional job. It was with Alvino Rey, whose band then included Davey Tough, a drummer Trigger has always held in high esteem (“he made you play”) and from whom, then and on many subsequent gigs, he learned much. Benny Goodman recommended Alpert to Glenn Miller, who hired him (without ever having heard him) in 1940. From then on he was the Miller bass, in both the civilian and Army bands. After the war he worked with “all sorts of groups,” including brief stands with Woody Herman and Goodman, but has since passed up the travelling-musician grind in favor of steady studio work: radio, TV and recording (for such good reasons as a wife and three children).

Tony Scott, a highly individual stylist and a Juilliard graduate, closed out 1956 in a blaze of glory by taking the top clarinet spot in both the Down Beat and Metronome readers’ polls, underlining the description of him by the Beat’s Nat Hentoff as “our finest contemporary clarinetist.” Tony also provides two rich-voiced arrangements, one an original.

Jack “Zoot” Sims’ free-swinging, inventive tenor style is currently being rewarded, in the various jazz magazine polls, by a rating just one small notch below Stan Getz and Lester Young. His solid background includes being part of Woody Herman’s famed “Four Brothers” sax section and working with Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan and Stan Kenton. Indicating that his is a still-expanding talent, Zoot has recently also turned himself into a man to be reckoned with on alto.

Al Cohn, a top modern tenor in the Lester Young vein, has recorded prolifically and worked with such as Herman, Georgie Auld, Elliot Lawrence. As one of this LP’s several off-trail attractions, Al is heard mostly on baritone sax, which, it turns out, he handles with very considerable skill and agility.

Urbie Green first established himself during a two-year stand with the Herman Herd (1950-52) in which, as Leonard Feather has put it, he “made a reputation comparable with that achieved by Bill Harris in an earlier Herman band.” Much outstanding work on records since then has helped solidify that reputation.

Joe Wilder is generally regarded by musicians as without peer in versatility, equally effective as lead trumpet or tasteful soloist. He has been with Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and in several Broadway musical pit bands (currently “The Most Happy Fella”).

Ed Shaughnessy is a stand-out modern drummer who adds greatly to his stature by the ease with which he handles his tough duties in the two-man rhythm section here. He worked on 52nd Street in the ’40s, was with Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Charlie Ventura, and has most recently concentrated on recording and studio work.

Marty Paich, a pianist (!) and among the West Coast’s busiest arrangers, has written for Shelly Manne, Chet Baker, Mel Tormé, etc. The four imaginative scores he has turned out specifically for this group ought to do much to tone down the myths about the wide gap between Eastern and Western jazz ‘schools.’

Dick Hyman is also a highly regarded pianist. He was with Sims and Shaughnessy on Benny Goodman’s 1950 European tour, and has played or arranged for, among others, Roy Eldridge, Tony Scott, Lester Young, Mundell Lowe. He has provided four warm scores that help bring out the best in this all-star septet.

Some Notes on Instrumentation:

Among the features of this album is considerable ‘doubling’ by the three star reed men, although the basic lineup is Scott on clarinet, Sims on tenor, Cohn on baritone. On Looking at You, Tony switches to tenor in the middle ensemble, with Urbie Green’s trombone joining in to produce a “Four Brothers” effect. On Love Me Tomorrow, the first tenor solo is by Zoot, the second by Cohn. On Trigger Happy, Zoot plays alto throughout. Tranquilizer has three tenor solos: Cohn, Sims and Scott, respectively. Finally, on Trigger Fantasy, the ensemble lineup has Sims on alto, Scott playing tenor.