Porgy & Bess - Mundell Lowe

 

Porgy & Bess

Porgy & Bess

Mundell Lowe and His All Stars

Arranged by Mundell Lowe

Produced by Peter Delheim

Recorded in RCA Victor's Studios A and B, New York, July 16 and 17 and October 3, 1958

Recording Engineer: Ray Hall

RCA Camden CAL-490

1959

From the back cover: When George Gershwin turned from the sleek, sophisticated Broadway scores that had been his stock in trade during the 1920s and the early Thirties to compose "Porgy and Bess" he had to adopt an approach that was quite different from the attitude that had served him so well for such shows as "Lady Be Good," "Tip-toes," "Oh, Kay," "Funny Face" and "Girl Crazy." For these carefully calculated romps, a glib pattern had been evolved and if Gershwin managed to create more quality within the pattern than most of his contemporaries, still the pattern existed and he knew its outlines well.

But the people of Charleston's Catfish Row who had been created by DuBose Hayward in his novel, Porgy, could not be interpreted in the usual songwriting evocations of the South – the Tin Pan Alley concept of Mammy, Alabama, fields of cotton and Swanee, stereotypes to which Gershwin had already made his full contribution. This was a score that required contract with reality, so Gershwin went to Charleston to absorb the sounds and sights and smells and attitudes that would form the setting for "Porgy and Bess." He brought back some things which he transcribed literally – the flavorful street cries, for instance. But most of what he heard there served simply as the basis and guide for the composer's transudations, which retained the essential idiom of Catfish Row but expressed it in terms more suited to the high dramatic concept of "Porgy and Bess."

Something of the same process has been gone through by guitarist Mundell Lowe in adapting "Porgy and Bess" to a jazz interpretation. In writing his arrangements, he has first bone back to the basic idiom of Catfish Row, which is one of the contributory roots of jazz, and, whereas Gershwin adapted this idiom to the needs of the dramatic theater, Lowe has built on it in terms of present-day jazz.

"I wanted to get a modern jazz feeling," the guitarist has explained, "and yet maintain the flavor Gershwin had put into the score – the lonesome, empty feeling in the ballads, for instance."

He felt that this could be achieved partly through his won writing approach, partly through a choice of musicians who playing spanned jazz styles and jazz history from the raw earthiness represented by Catfish Row to is more cerebral modern equivalent. And that is why he put together the unusual group which plays all but three of these elections.

The key men are Ben Webster who, as Lowe says, "goes back to the Catfish Row days," who provided the magnificent Duke Ellington band of the early Forties with much of its rampant surge and whose playing has grown richer and more direct as the years have gone by; Tony Scott who was born, musically in the Benny Goodman era and has progressed from there; George Duvivier, a veteran of the Jimmie Lunceford band and a brilliant bassist with an unusually broad range of sympathetic interpretation; and Art Farmer, one of the new crop of jazz stars whose "lackadaisical way of phrasing," Lowe points out, provided him with just the type of modernist expression that he wanted.

And, of course, the key to this key men is Mundell Lowe himself, who plays from one of the most fabulously varied sets of jazz and folk roots that any current musician can boast of – a background that began in the jazz heartland of New Orleans and includes encounter with the Swing Era as a miner of Jan Savitt's orchestra, a pioneering modern jazz venture with Ray McKenley's brilliant but unappreciated big band of the late 1940s, emergence as a polished small-gourd performer with Red Norvo and Ellis Larkins, recognition as an unusually able all-around performer as an NBC studio musician from 1950 to 1958 and even, back in his early days, a fling with country music on "Grand Ole Opry."

For his septet, Lowe has written arrangements that have a loose swinging blues-tinged base. Summertime he viewed as the theme of the whole score. "I wanted to establish a loose feeling," he said, "so it starts very simply with the baritone (Scott) playing paraphrases of melody and gradually the whole band comes in."

Bess, You Is My Woman is taken at a tempo which, Lowe says, "most good singers use when they do this tune. We've just added a little swing and syncopation to it." Redheaded Woman, one of the less familiar tunes in the score, was chosen by Lowe because "it afforded a nice little blues for the band to play." The blues in this are recipes suggestions of a Basie interpretation. 

My Man's Gone Now is one of two pieces which Lowe felt required some basic changes for jazz treatment.

"It's such a beautifully mournful piece, "he asserts, "but it was a waltz in the original score and I felt that doing it in three-four didn't bring out the feeling I though it should have. So I rewrote it from a rhythmic point of view. And on It Takes A Long Pull To Get There, which is sung by a grouped men going out to the fishing grounds, it seemed to me that a twelve-eight rhythm portrayed this particular situation. As I've written it, it start in twelve-eight and shift to a four-four release in the middle."

The three trio selections were designed  by Lowe to achieve a change of sound and style – a shift to a light, carefree, small sound. His cohorts in the trio – Duvivier and drummer Ed Shaughnessy – are members of ta group which Lowe usually leads on weekends (pianist Bobby Pancoast is an added starter on these occasions). Shughnessy makes his first recorded appearance as a vibraphone soloist on I Love You, Porgy.

"Ed has been studying vibes for a few  years," Lowe related, "but he was very apprehensive about this little solo. You know, when you've always been a drummer it's a little hard to adjust yourself to playing a melody instrument. I think his solo is one of the tenderest things int he album."

An original Shaughnessy device – or, more accurately, an approximation of it – is heard on There's A Boat Dat's Leaving' Soon For New York. He has invented a small snare drum trimmed with little bells which he has with a foot pedal, giving off an effect something like rhythmic sleigh bells. Ed had to rush to the trio's recording session direct from a television show and he didn't have time to pick up his little bell drums. To replace it, he improvised an equivalent sound by setting a tambourine on top of a regular snare drum and hitting it with his fingers.

The flow and style in which the trio lays this number is based on Lowe's memories of working at Cafe Society with Avon Long, who played Sportin' Life and and this song in the first revival of "Pray And Bess."

"Avon did it in his night club act," Lowe recalls, "he did it very simply, dancing around and waving his cigaret. I've always felt that he was the best of all the Sportin' Lifes and I've tried to catch the wonderfully gay and seductive feeling he gave the song." – Frank Talmadge

Summertime

Bess, You Is My Woman

I Love You, Porgy

I Got Plenty Of Nuttin'

Where's My Bess

Redheaded Woman

My Man's Gone Now

It Takes A Long Pull To Get There

It Ain't Necessarily So

There's A Boat Dat's Leaving' Soon For New York