Red Norvo In Hi-Fi

 

(I've Been) Saving Myself For You

Red Norvo In Hi-Fi

Produced by Shorty Rogers and Fred Rynolds

Recorded in Hollywood, March 6 and 7, 1958

RCA Victor LPM-1711

1959

From the back cover: Oh my, but there is a lot of nonsense being written about jazz these days! I was among those provident enough to have spared myself the ordeal of the "festival" in suburban Providence in the summer of 1958, but I know how the critics there reacted to it. They reacted the same way as those who later attended a cocktail party given by another label, a party heralding a new batch of jazz sides. Stiff and bearded, they sat about frowning in a quibblingly rabbinical manner while a frail, timid man in a suit that appeared to have been constructed for him at the Lilliputian Bazaar blew marvelously between his scowls for silence. It must be the critics that make the new people take themselves as seriously as, say, Leopold Stokowski. All the joy is gone – all the drive and fun.

I remember a night in Paris in the spring of 1958, listening to one of the few authentic jazz talents Europe ever produced, when I glanced across the room and saw the pale, stony face of France's foremost critic. He was so miserable in his attempt to analyze the music that he obviously wished he were somewhere else. I wanted to go and ask him if it wouldn't be better for his immortal soul if he went into some other line of endeavor, possible an inquiry into the Freudian overtones of Monteverdi.

For the reason I hesitate to commend the enclosed album to the critics. It seems a shame to deprive them of their only pleasure, which is to remove, like heartless surgeons, the fun from the music, but when they hear these tracks, they are going to be in for a fearful shock. They are going to find their case wrinkling into unaccustomed smiles, their feet first tapping, then banging – and they are going to have one heck of a time analyzing why it is so good. I have the feeling that they are just going to say, My God, this music is wonderful, and then, furtive and guilty as usual – or more than usual, since a commitment is an extraordinary reaction – they are going to readjust their faces into their customary hard, dyspeptic expressions. This album may set modern American jazz criticism back twenty years. High time.

Which gets me at last to the music itself, back in the late Thirties there were those of us who felt that Goodman, while wonderful in his way, was pained as often as he was pleasured by the music he made. The crown was heavy on his head, a fact he communicated clearly to those of us who hitchhiked all over central Pennsylvania to hear him and his great band. It was the same with Shaw and both Dorseys – not Jimmy as much as Tommy, that' true – and with most of the others we liked. The circumstance for producing jazz just were not conducive to prolonging the exuberance that had prompted the men to take up this music in the first place.

The one exception was Red Norvo. Wherever he went he exuded a good humor that has grown, as indeed his body has, over the years. It many have been his diffident delight that kept him, in those days, from achieving the widespread acceptance that was rightly his. The Mr. and Mrs. Swing band – which he and his wife. Mildred Bailey, formed in 1936 and took on the road – was neither strident nor blatant nor flashy; it was a band with quiet voice that made holy comments of its on and always stayed a little ahead of all the acknowledged leaders. While Benny was playing Sing, Sing, Sing and waking off the stand in a state of exhaustion, loving yet hating those howling mobs, Red And Mildred were playin such small things as Always And Always and showing that there was room for subtlety and sensitiveness in jazz – but, more important, that there was a place for humor, too.

I don't know about Americans.  We are children. We prefer to be beaten rather than cajoled – we'll take Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis rather than Wally Cox. We didn't take Norvo back in those years. The band – soft, bouncy, above all musically – never got the recognition it deserved, and eventually Red and Mildred broke it up. Those of us who had loved it had to be contented with records and memories, and that as not so bad since the former evoked the later and vice versa. Mildred died; Red went on to a career that is an affirmation of man's ability to develop and mature.

For the past few years Red has been moving out small-group recordings that are both echoes of the past and glimpses into the future, light and delicate, as his music has always been, yet hard-swinging as well. But although the records have been very, very satisfying, some of us have hoped that he might some day return to the big-band music. Now he has done it, and the results are better than anyone could have dared hope. These arrangements are for the must port those that Eddie Sauter did for the Mr. and Mrs. Swing band, now stretched a little to accommodate fourteen pieces. (Red's original group numbered only eleven). The tunes are those associated with Red and Mildred, seldom heard pops that never became standards but should have. Somewhere Red found Helen Humes, who is as good a substitute for Mildred as I can imagine – but she is not simply a substitute, she is a first-class vocalist in her own right. Her voice is high-pitched  and little-girly, as Mildred's was, and she makes the lyrics some of which are inane, seem to make sense.

Listening to these numbers, admiring Sauter's incisive brass and rich saxophone figures, I was struck for the first time by the notion that he, in his early days, owed more to Fletcher Henderson that I realized then. I throw this out only to give the boys in the criticism dodge something to find fault with, for they're never going to be able to kick this music. – Richard Gehman

I Hadn't Anyone Till You

Says My Heart

You Leave Me Breathless

My Last Affair

Garden Of The Moon

They Can't Take That Away From Me

Why Do I Love You

It's Wonderful

I Was Doing All Right

(I've Been) Saving Myself For You

I See Your Face Before Me

Some Like It Hot