Ruby Braff & George Barnes Salutes Rodgers And Hart

 

Lover

Ruby Braff/George Barnes Quartet 

Salutes Rodgers And Hart

Produced by Concord Jazz, Inc. - Carl E. Jefferson, President

Recorded for Concord Jazz at A&R Recording, Inc., New York

Recording Engineer: Richard Blakin

Mastering: Al Brown

Design: Richard Cross

Concord Jazz Classic CJ-7

Concord Jazz, Inc.

1975

From the back cover: The relationship between Ruby Braff and George Barnes since they formed their quartet in the spring of 1973 has become, in Barne's view, "very metaphysical".

"We're very likely to do the same thing at the same instant," George declares. "Ruby and I have a rapport that only comes from having the same musical thoughts."

"Sometimes we even play the very same riffs.' Ruby added.

It is this remarkable rapport that has enabled Ruby and George to develop an ensemble style for their quartet that is very tight, very precise and, at the same time, has the looseness and freedom to allow them to improvise at will.

"We trust each other," Ruby explained. "So we can make changes in what we do. When we decide to work up a tune, we just draft. Then we just play on it. We've been playing some tunes for a year and a half and we're still sculpting them. Certain ensemble phrases we'll leave alone. But everything else grows."

None of their arrangements are written down although, at first, they taped everything they played.

"We're so together now," said George, "that we don't need that."

The secret of their togetherness, if there is a secret, is their belief in rehearsal. They spend more time rehearsing, they insist, then doing anything else. They rehearsed for eight solid weeks to prepare 40 minutes of music for the quartet's first public appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Carnegie Hall in New York in June 1973. For a 40 minute program of Gershwin music at the Concord Festival in the summer of 1974, they began rehearsing in New York, rehearsed  through eight days of a jazz festival in Nice, France, returned to New York for more rehearsals and then flew to Concord, and rehearsed some more (the results of that performance are on Concord Jazz CJ-5)

The rehearsals for this album really began before George and Ruby knew when they were going to do it. They played a series of concerts with Tony Bennett for which they worked up accompaniments for 23 Rodgers and Hart songs. One concert was filmed at Alice Tully Hall and 20 of the Rodgers and Hart songs were recorded by Bennett as a double LP. It was a situation that both excited and depressed George and Ruby.

"Tony was having all the fun," George complained. "We felt frustrated at not being able to do any instrumentals." 

"George and I are singers," Ruby pointed out. "We want to sing the tunes on our instruments."

So, from their sense of frustration, came this album. The only problem was in boiling down the rich Rodgers and Hart repertory to ten songs.

"It was like being in a candy store." George admitted. "I'll take that and that and that and that. We wanted to include some songs that we didn't do with Tony. That's how we settled on "Blue Roon" and 'Thou Swell,' which I love.

Even the songs they did with Bennett have taken on a different feeling in this album. The Braff-Barnes "The Lady Is A Tramp" is taken at a brighter tempo than Tony used because, as Ruby observed, "he needed room for the words. "Ruby's use of very tightly squeezed notes and staccato bursts on "Lover" is, George said admiringly, a very unique thing for him. Ruby insists that he didn't know what he was doing. But he did know what he was doing when he played the introduction to "Isn't Romantic?"

"I lifted it from the Tony Bennett arrangement," he admitted. "But what we did with Tony was our own so we just wanted it back."

Once the program for the album had been settled – Ruby plans his concerts and George programs their records – they played the songs for two weeks in Boston and another week in Washington and then went tiny the studio.

"In the studio," said George, "it's just like a concert. It's a performance. It's extremely easy to record us. All you have to do is leave us alone."

"This one just rolled off and it felt so nice we did the whole album in three hours. I don't think you can do an album in three separate sessions because each session has a different feel."

"There were only a few false starts. Everything was done in one take except 'The Lady Is A Tramp'. We did three takes on it and then chose the first one, anyhow. That first take ended in a way we had never done it before and once we decided to put that take on the record, we had to learn the ending for our live performances.

Aside from providing the inspiration for this album, another result of their work with Tony Bennett was the loss of their bass player, John Giuffrida. Bennett took Giuffrida off to Las Vegas with him. In his place, George and Ruby got a brilliant young bassist, Michael Moore, who had come to prominence working with Marian McPartland and Stan Getz. The fact that Mike's father is a guitarist may influence George's estimate of him.

"Mike is one of the greatest," George insists. "He has tremendous technique and has the long, slim fingers a bass player needs. On top of that, he knows all the tunes we play."

Wayne Wright, the left-handed rhythm guitarist who has been with the quartet since it was formed in 1973, is still the other half of the accompaniment to George and Ruby.

"We lean on them for that nice comfortable feather bed, "declared Ruby. "They do for us what Walter Page, Jo Jones and Count Basie did for Lester Young."

Both George and Ruby say they can do things with this accompaniment that they could never do with anything else. When the full quartet gets into new tunes that Ruby and George have worked on without Wayne and Mike, the two accompanists are guided by signals that are so secret, according to George tha they are never discovered by their audiences.

"We have everything worked out that way." said George. "We believe we're entertainers. We're in show business. There is no obvious count-off or downbeat when we start. It gets in the way of the arrangement."

Rodgers and Hart were in show business, too. And that may be why the rapport that George and Ruby have for each other also apples to these classic Rodgers and Hart songs. – John S. Wilson, Jazz Critic

Mountain Greenery

Isn't It Romantic

Blue Room

Small Hotel

Thou Swell

I Wish I Were In Love Again

Lover 

You Took Advantage Of Me

Spring Is Here

The Lady Is A Tramp