Harp, Skip & Jump - Gene Bianco

Love For Sale

Harp, Skip & Jump
Gene Bianco And His Group
Featuring Mundell Lowe
RCA Camden CAL 452
1958

From Billboard - November 10, 1958: The introduction of a smoothly plucked harp as a jazz instrument comes off rather well in this interesting package. The blend of harp and studio man, Mundell Lowe's guitar, while still maintaining a jaz pattern, imparts an uncommon lightness and refinement to the medium. The combo of familiar items such as "Gigi" and "Stairway to the Stars."

From the back cover: A bright spotlight is turned on some relatively un- explored musical territory in this album as Gene Bianco, the brilliant young harpist who made an exciting and widely heralded recording debut on STRINGIN' THE STANDARDS (RCA Camden CAL-366), shows how thoroughly the harp can be integrated into a swinging small group.

Bianco demonstrated in his earlier set that the harp has a great deal more to offer than the customary glittering glissandos and arpeggios. When his hands are on the strings, its tone can remain angelic even while it takes a more assertive, less ethereal role than we are accustomed to hear.

The emphasis in that first set was on Bianco's virtuosity as a harpist. Now that that attribute has been well established, he moves on to new adventures here – placing the harp in the context of a brilliant small jazz group where it holds its own as both an ensemble and solo instrument; using the same kind of group as a vehicle for pop tunes, standards and original pieces of his own, and trimming the richly varied package with a pair of mood-evoking harp solos.

The single holdover from Bianco's earlier group is Mundell Lowe, a magnificent guitarist who is skilled in so many styles of music that he has been in constant demand in New York's television and recording studios for the last eight years. It was Lowe who inadvertently interested Bianco in using the harp in a small group when they were both working on Ernie Kovacs' television show, and Bianco discovered to his surprise that Lowe's guitar could blend with his harp and simultaneously provide a contrast.

Because he wanted more color and depth in these arrangements than the harp-guitar combination alone could provide, Bianco sought out Joe Venuto whose work on vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, celeste, drums, tuned water glasses, Chinese gong and a battery of instrumental oddities added so much color to the unusual arrangements played by the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra. At this session Venuto concentrated on vibraphone on most selections, switching to celeste on Gigi and In the Still of the Night, and turning to the brightly percussive xylophone for Bianco's delightfully strutting version of 12th Street Rag.

To round out his group, Gene reached into the very topmost drawer of rhythm section men: on drums he has Don Lamond, the driving spark behind Woody Herman's magnificent First Herd in the middle Forties and latterly considered one of the best studio men in New York; while the bassist is Wendell Marshall, long a Duke Ellington standby until he, too, settled down to the relative comfort and high recognition of studio work.

The selections, all arranged by Bianco, run a wide gamut. There are bright, pulsing standards from the jazz repertoire – From This Moment On and Oh Lady Be Good from a recent jazz genre, 12th Street Rag from an earlier one. On this last number Lowe switches. effectively to banjo and Bianco makes the fascinating discovery that the harp is an ideal instrument for playing the older, ragtime-touched tunes in a manner that keeps the old spirit even while dressing them in bright, new colors.

From This Moment On is a dazzling swinger which brought a sigh of relief from Mundy Lowe when it was finished.

"I'm glad we didn't goof on that," he said. "That's the best I've ever played."

He could be right, too.

In contrast, there is the moodier jazz feeling of Love for Sale, the darkly swinging style of Stairway to the Stars and I'll See You in My Dreams (both of which carry reflections of George Shearing, who has been one of the two main jazz influences in Bianco's work-the other is Bobby Hackett). And, moving away from jazz, there is the subtle simplicity of the recently arrived pop tune, Gigi, and the seasoned beauty of that standard of the pop repertoire, In the Still of the Night.

Bianco's facility for creating light and catchy melodies is brought out in his two originals, Harp, Skip & Jump and Cairo After Dark, both written with Norman Beatty, a trumpet player and pianist who joins the group on piano in Cairo After Dark. On this piece Lowe sets up such a driving background riff that he couldn't get out of it when he came to his solo spot. So he kept it up and later dubbed in his solo on top of it. And you have Bianco's word for it that when he wrote Harp, Skip & Jump, he handed himself a fantastically difficult harp assignment.

No harpist's program would be complete without at least one demonstration of the delightful mood music that can be drawn from the instrument. Gene Bianco has included two samples of his mood style-his unaccompanied solos of September Song and Stella by Starlight. That these are particularly mellow examples of the harpist's art is due, in part, to the fact that Bianco's instrument is completely equipped with gut strings instead of the sharper, more piercing nylon strings preferred by some harpists.

The problem of balancing the harp properly within a group of this type and in pieces like these was not one that concerned Bianco alone. It was also a matter of consideration for the rest of the musicians, for they had to modify their usual manner of playing to avoid drowning out the harp. They had to be subdued with- out losing any of their musical vitality.

"Push me, fellows," Bianco told them at the begin- ning of the session, "but softly."

And that may be one more significant contribution to our music that Gene Bianco makes in this album: the soft push.

Harp Skip & Jump
Gigi
In The Still Of The Night
12th Street Rag
September Song
From This Moment On
Love For Sale
Cairo After Dark
Stella By Starlight
Stairway To The Stars
Oh Lady Be Good
I'll See You In My Dreams