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WRAP YOUR TROUBLES IN DREAMS

PERSONNEL: Jimmy Jones (arranger, piano, leader);

unknown (trumpet [possibly Harry “Sweets” Edison]);

unknown (baritone saxo-phone, tenor saxosaxo-phone, trombone, guitar, bass, drums); Sarah Vaughan (vocal) MUSIC: Harry Barris

LYRICS: Ted Koehler and Billy Moll RECORDED: Oc-tober 19, 1960, in New York

FIRST ISSUE: The Divine One, Roulette SR 52060.

Sarah Vaughan, 1950s.

Frank Driggs Collection

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JAZZ THE SMITHSONIAN ANTHOLOGY

The magnificent Sarah Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, to parents who were amateur musicians. By age seven Vaughan sang in the neighborhood church choir, whose leader gave her piano and organ lessons. In high school, Vaughan was less well known as a singer than as the girl who played organ and piano for the school’s glee club and dance orchestra, and in church.

Following a tradition in jazz singing, Vaughan entered the Apollo Theater’s amateur contest in 1942 and won a week’s engagement as an opening act for Ella Fitzgerald. Billy Eckstine, then with Earl Hines’s band, attended one of the shows, and young Vaughan took him by surprise, singing “Body and Soul” with a true jazz artist’s sense of timing and improvised line. Soon she was playing second piano opposite Hines and singing and playing in a band that featured the world’s leading bop pioneers-to-be, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Vaughan grew into a modern-ist singer whose major aesthetic challenge (like that of her counterparts in the bop idiom) was to harness her manifold musical capacities. In 1944 she joined Eckstine’s own decidedly experimental bebop band including Parker and Gillespie with Art Blakey in the drum chair. Then, after a stint with John Kirby, she began appearing as a soloist, usually with trios or quartets tailored to her special strengths.

Beginning in the 1950s, she released a stream of uncompromising jazz records (including two outstanding samba albums) along with the pop albums she made to pay the bills. At their best, even the pop records offered opportunities for her bebop-oriented, church-soulful virtuosity to shine through. But her greatest jazz sessions—

most of which teamed her with the masterful pianist/arranger Jimmy Jones and/or with units culled from the Count Basie band—represent her most enduring work.

Her “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” is a case in point. By 1960, when Vaughan made this recording, this song of the Depression was nearly thirty years old, and had been featured in two movies and on innumerable records. With Howard McGhee on trumpet and Oscar Pettiford on bass, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins had created a masterful recording of it in 1945—claiming it as territory for the jazz moderns. With that version in mind, Jimmy Jones wrote this arrangement of “Wrap”

that grants the song as well as Vaughan—by then in command of a four-octave range and the era’s most virtuosic jazz singer—an A-major key framework that is at once spare and full of musical tricks and turns that invite her out to play. The tasty intro-ductory figure, repeated later, features the drums and horns shifting slyly from 4/4 to 5/4, as Vaughan enters; the 4/4 feel returns and is maintained—for the most part—through the performance. Here is Vaughan, the artist of color, tone, and micro-tone—her luminous voice swooping through the melody’s descending chromatic lines and across other intervals, including quick, perfectly negotiated octave leaps.

In this polyrhythmic setting, Vaughan,―the virtuoso of harmony and invented melody,―

also shows a rhythm-section soloist’s ability to shift and play with the now sure-footed/

now slipped-on-the-ice nuances of bebop-tempered time and tempo. Her performance here, aided by Jones’s tasteful piano fills, and an excellent bassist, probably George Duvivier, transmutes the sentimental lyrics (with their fake promise to “just remem-ber that sunshine always follows the rain”) into an asymmetrically cut diamond of temporal and melodic changes, a model for the modernist improviser on any instru-ment. And her voice does capture a blues-hopeful dreaminess we can believe in, for here it is, in conversation with the other instruments, turning and gliding through the changes! Sarah Vaughan “let you know with sound and word and utter gorgeous-ness what hip is,” writes Amiri Baraka (1991, 568). No wonder the philosopher Cornel West uses Vaughan as his example of the disciplined, spirit-filled artist offer-ing, in her work, gestures toward perfection—Sarah “the divine one” indeed.

—Robert O’Meally

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In the spring of 1959, John Coltrane recorded two starkly contrasting masterpieces of jazz. With Miles Davis, he recorded the minimalist “So What.” At the other end of the spectrum, he recorded his ferociously complex ode to bop, “Giant Steps,” a race through many keys at once. He would need a different band and a different approach to combine the modal openness of “So What” with the passion and intensity of “Giant Steps.” So in 1960, he left Davis and started putting together what would become his

“classic” quartet. By July he had hired McCoy Tyner, a fiery pianist whose use of left-hand drones would provide the perfect home for Coltrane’s new modal explora-tions. Then in September, he added the powerful rhythmic complexity of Elvin Jones on drums. Tyner and Jones brought enough intensity and even physical stamina to provide Coltrane the energy he needed behind him. In October (over a year before Jimmy Garrison would finalize the classic lineup on bass), they spent a week record-ing what would become three albums, includrecord-ing My Favorite Threcord-ings.

The arrangement is masterful. While Coltrane leaves the basic structure and even the original (difficult) key intact, he transforms and subverts this delightful children’s song from the Broadway musical The Sound of Music into a vehicle for extensive improvisation. The original song has a structure of AAA^lB, where all of the A sections are about happy things, and B is the section “when the dog bites.” When earlier jazz musicians improvised over popular songs, they improvised over the en-tire form of the chorus; in other words, you can usually follow along with the melody during each solo if you wish. Here, however, the bass largely ignores the chord changes and stays on one note (a “pedal point” or “drone”), a fairly common musical setup in the Indian music that would come to fascinate Coltrane. Coltrane plays the A melody and then improvises over the drone (while Tyner oscillates between two chords), not allowing the song to move forward. Eventually he plays the melody

John Coltrane, soprano sax. Boston, 1965. © Lee Tanner / The Jazz Image. Elvin Jones, drums. Boston, 1965. © Lee Tanner / The Jazz Image

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JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET

MY FAVORITE THINGS

PERSONNEL: John Coltrane (soprano saxo-phone); McCoy Tyner (piano); Steve Davis (bass); Elvin Jones (drums) SOLOISTS:

Coltrane, Tyner (beginning/fade) MUSIC:

Richard Rodgers LYRICS: Oscar Hammer-stein II RECORDED: October 21, 1960, at Atlantic Recording Studios, in New York

FIRST ISSUE: Atlantic 45-5012 (45 rpm Extended Play, Side A). This two-sided single (Part 1/Side A 2:42 + Part 2/Side B 3:02) was edited from the longer version (13:41), released on My Favorite Things, Atlantic 1361, 1960.

Although Bill Evans had recorded a version of this composition on his 1956 debut album New Jazz Conceptions, the originally issued title track of the album drawn from his Village Vanguard recordings is justly celebrated as not only the finest recorded version of the piece—a musical portrait of the pianist’s niece—but also the pinnacle of achievement by his trio with LaFaro and Motian. LaFaro was killed ten days later in an automo-bile accident, but his perfect synergy with Evans and Motian, and particularly his elevation of the bass to an equal and opposite trio voice to the piano, displaying con-summate technique and extraordinary taste and emotive power, makes this a fitting memorial to his great talent.

The opening features a duet of more than a minute between Evans and LaFaro, the bass offering what amounts to a counterpoint to the piano theme and allowing a certain degree of ebb and flow in the tempo for this first run-through in 3/8 time.

Then Motian joins in, and the trio slides gently into 4/4 with a more defined sense of the beat; this in turn allows LaFaro to move effortlessly between providing a bass line and offering a solo commentary on Evans’s playing. Whereas the trios of Oscar Peterson had displayed combative jousting between the members, and Nat “King”

Cole’s had allowed the guitarist some solos, Evans’s 1961 trio was a colloquy, an even

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again, and then the vamp continues as the next solo commences. The length of the piece would vary widely, stretching to 13:40 on the original recording and often much longer in live versions. To signal that the piece was over, Coltrane would play the B melody.

Coltrane had been struggling to extend the range of the tenor saxophone, and he was delighted to discover the higher-ranging soprano saxophone. It had not been prominently used in jazz since Sidney Bechet, but Coltrane also liked its exotic sound, and this recording reintroduced it to the mainstream of jazz.

The piece became such a surprising hit that this single version was also re-leased. It is simply the first 2:42 of the original LP version with a fade at the begin-ning of Tyner’s piano solo. —José Bowen

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