Herb Ellis Meets Jimmy Giuffre

 

People Will Say We're In Love

Herb Ellis Meets Jimmy Giuffre

Art Direction: Sheldon Marks

Cover Photo: Bill Rotsler

Verve Records MG V-8311

1959

Personnel:

Herb Ellis - Guitar

Bud Shank, Art Pepper - Alto Sax

Richie Kamuca, Jimmy Giuffre - Tenor Sax

Jim Hall - Rhythm Guitar

Joe Mondragon - Bass

Stan Levey - Drums

Lou Levy - Piano.

Art Pepper appears by arrangement with Contemporary Records. 

Bud Shank appears by arrangement with World Pacific Records.

From the back cover: The personal and musical association between Herb Ellis and Jimmy Giuffre goes back to their student days at North Texas State Teachers College in Denton and its courses in popular music and jazz. This collaboration nearly twenty years later – for which Jimmy did all the arranging as well as being part of the band took place in Hollywood on March 26, 1959.

Jim Hall, regular member of the Giuffre 3, played rhythm guitar on the date, and it is his report that serves as the basis for the rest of this introduction. "I think this album," says Jim, "has Herb playing just about as good as I've ever heard. As for Jimmy Giuffre's writing for the guitar, he has the guitar very well in his ears. If you asked him what chords were playable on the guitar and which weren't, he might not know them all by name, but he hears what the guitar can best do."

Jim was asked if Giuffre wrote differently for Ellis than he would for Jim himself. "Not consciously, but I do think his writing as a whole in this album is different. He was going through a stylistic change at the time. He had been to New York, stayed some time, and heard a lot of Monk, Coltrane, and especially Sonny Rollins. One night he heard Rollins and Monk together and was really overwhelmed. For a long time, he had sort of shut that sort of playing out, and then all of a sudden he was in contact with it. Jimmy has a way of then taking things he hears and really using them. He doesn't just say, "That's great, man!

"By the time we got back to California, he was hearing differently and starting to write with much more freedom. He also was writing with less economy. He used to, it seemed to me, cut out too many things from his writing because he thought they were extraneous. He became more venturesome harmonically and rhythmically. Those capacities had already been there – he can hear like mad. But the New York experience had let them out. It's not that he copied the men he'd heard there, but those players had freshened his ear."

As for Herb Ellis, fellow guitarist Hall notes: "He has fantastic fire and drive, and he never sounds dull to me. In this album, he was able, I feel, to play with more taste than he's usually had the context for on previous albums. He didn't, in short, play quite as many notes as he normally felt he had to play with the Oscar-Peterson trio. Herb has always been a wonderful rhythm player, and I think he's now in a position to develop more and more as a soloist.", Concerning Giuffre, Hall concluded: "He has a truly creative and exploratory mind. It sometimes leads him into areas that everybody doesn't dig, but he just has to go through that country to see for himself. I'm not worried about Giuffre. He's so interested in everything about him that he's just got to keep on growing."

Hall also made a point about giving credit to the engineer on the date, Bones Howe, whom several musicians who have recorded on the west coast have mentioned with respect and admiration.

All in all, this further meeting between Giuffre and Ellis happened at a particularly productive time for both. Ellis, having left the Peterson trio, was in the process of stretching himself as a soloist and searching to hear how much he had to say. Giuffre, shaken up by Monk and Rollins, was beginning to absorb what he could best use of their work, and his writing for this date does show a marked increase in freedom and in what could be called a strong, outgoing affirmation. – NAT HENTOFF, Co-Editor, The Jazz Review

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